Some summers we would arrive and there would be low tides, so that the banks blocking the inkpot were above water- level, and we could not go inside. We would only drive the boat up to the shore, and I would stand on my tiptoes to peer past the pines and shudder at the thought of the inkpot. “Not this year,” my dad would say, “and thank goodness. Now the spirits can’t come into the lake.”
The next summer the tide would be high enough to clear the banks with the boat. No doubt the water there was darker, from the wood of ship or the curse—I never did understand the specifics. We killed the motor. “Right below us,” said my dad, “here.” And it was the same feeling one gets when visiting the site of some great moment in history, where the traces can’t be seen but are felt. Later, I sat on the dock dangling my feet in our side of the lake and plunged a wooden paddle with all my might into the water, so that it would vanish briefly, and then pop up for me to catch. I threw it, and it vanished for good. The tides were high, and the spirits of the drowned sailors had made it across. I went inside and told no one.
***
For a couple generations now my family has owned a cabin in the Midwestern state that is north of the Midwestern state in which I grew up (Illinois, Wisconsin). ‘Cabin,’ here, is a somewhat loaded term. My family does call it that, but I think it’s in order to remove it from socio-economic implications of the other designation, ‘lake house.’ To be fair, what I’m talking about is a house, and it is on a lake, but a cabin takes longer to drive to (seven hours). It’s a place that requires a bit of work by the first visitor of the summer to kindly evacuate the spiders that have kept an eye on things during the winter; it’s a smaller, quieter affair; it’s what comes to mind when I hear the word ‘hearth.’
The cabin has occupied my mind of late. More and more spiders enjoy the vacancy as our visits to the cabin become more rare. There has been talk, therefore, of selling it, along with the miniature Mickey Mouse fishing poles and the old board games in the closet, which are included in the package, all-or-nothin’. That fizzled quickly; I think I should start again: Lately, in my mind, I have occupied the cabin. Just as moving Eeast did to my Midwestern roots, the prospect of selling the cabin has made me fiercely attached to it, and furious at the spiders and spider families who now regard us as visitors, and are right.
***
So we have the spirits and the inkpot. What other memories—can you guess them? I’m certain you could, and they are no doubt more worthwhile to me than to you, so I will try to keep them down as they spring up. It’s a difficult task, not to say how my dad, who is a camel, would insist on driving the whole way straight through without stopping. (In fact he would make phone calls from time to time along the way, and I knew he was ‘working,’ but he would never turn the radio off while he spoke, only down, so that I knew his ‘work’ was less important than the road to the cabin. That way I didn’t know, for surprisingly long, what his work actually was (corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, it turned out). My work, I have thought, will be like that.)
Or how when we fished the others would make a big show of standing up in the boat and flailing their poles about to cast the line as far away as possible, while I was content to just sit with mine straight down, patiently, with my worms and my wishes. It isn’t a good strategy, by the way, for catching big fish.
I have already confessed to feeling like a Midwesterner, which is not to say I know the first thing about agriculture; it merely happened that way, and in fact you would not have trouble finding better representatives than me. Still, I know about the air by the cabin that has the taste of newness and becoming, like everything along that road just grew out of the soil not long ago. And, from the window of the car, look: the open space there awaits the innovator who will shape it up. When we would slow down and pull off the highway onto gravel, my grandparents’ dog would know perfectly well what it meant, would stand up and bark at the window and wake me up, because I’ve got to look at this!
Or we would stop for gas, and at such times I’d wish we hadn’t kept the car so clean, or that we had one of the ones that sits three across the front and gives the dog more room to roam and growl in the back.
Another time, after a big storm, my siblings and I went out and found that a bunch of trees were broken or partially uprooted so we ran around pushing them all down. My mom and uncle came out to supervise, but no doubt realized what fun it is to push trees, so they joined us. We built a lean-to with the trees we timbered, which is still there, beside the cabin, a lean-to which I would just as reluctantly sell.
***
The down nearby has bars th dark as the inkpot – they call them ales –ales— and we would sometimes go there. I always thought the dress code of the place, old shirts, suited my dad best, and he talked more eagerly the vernacular of the cabin than the language of mergers and acquisitions.
“You getting out, even with all this rain?” he would engage the barman who was also a fisherman, as could be seen.
“A little, sure.” He’d put down potato skins.
“Yeah, us too, and we’ll be out early tomorrow if the storm goes south like I think it will. The weeds – a hula-popper, they seem to be goin’ for it.”
“I’m a spinner man myself.”
I knew that the weeds were where they were, and at the cabin there were plenty of hula-poppers and spinners lying around, and tackle-boxes with which one could wrangle in a marlin. It has occurred to me that I do not know what sort of man I am vis-à-vis fishing-lures.
“You here long?” the barman asked. The question always means we’d been found out, that the cover was blown; we might as well pack it up and forget the whole thing.
“About a week, but back in no time, you know how it goes.”
***
When I have set aside some days, when I have filled up and made the drive (past lake houses) to the cabin, and fumbled the keys and lit a fire and poured a bowl of Cheerios—what then? A book? A newspaper? Quick bits from abroad—“Catalonia Secedes”—something like that. On the dock, before I swim, it might occur to me that books are like lakes or waves or muck or something. But the waves aren’t so big in our lake, so it will be fine to swim.
“Well nobody goes,” he’s said. “Maybe we don’t want it.”
“Do you not want it? I’d go.”
“Sure, I want it.”
No, selling it wouldn’t do at all. There used to be a law in the United States, which said that you could stake out some land in certain parts of the west, live and work there for five years or so, and it then would became your property, your homestead. In, 1862, the decree was sent out: to qualify for a homestead you had to be 21, and you had to have not taken up arms against the U.S. government. I’m not 21, but I’ve never taken up arms against the U.S. government. After 1976 you could only homestead in Alaska; after 1986, you couldn’t at all.
Homestead is a term that’s even heavier than ‘cabin.’ The homesteaders were Oklahomans, these real rough types, they knew perfectly well what sort of men they were with regard to lures, and boots, or glasses of ale. And I am no homesteader, nor an Oklahoman.