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It’s a formidable opponent in summer, the wave heights won’t let you get to it, winter’s deep snow, forget it, it’s buried. In the autumn, I’m simply elsewhere so I wouldn’t know, but in the spring, before the ice goes out, I trod that island’s shores.
Some exposed rock, a safe underfoot Canadian shield, ancient, sorely lacking color, slippery sun-sided ice, careful, careful, but then there’s the treasure of last summer’s windswept driftwood.
It’s almost like it calls to me. “Don’t I look like a three-masted frigate’s sail?” Pretty sure it’s cedar, would love to haul it home.
Then a perfect walking staff, birch, a beaver chew, and I pluck it and use it and thank it for being there. Until two steps later, a most admirable hob knobbed cane, positive it’s a spruce, even has a bit of sappy tan to it. I lay the staff back down, and kinda apologize to it.
There is a flat open oval, that must have been scrubbed against a sandy beach on the south side of this lake before some errant wind hurled it back into the waves, adrift, until the summer crashers placed it in its final rest. It looks right there though.
Branches, bare roots, cedar bark, like the shore wanted contrast, birch bark shreds, tattered gull feathers, and pardon me pardons, not a piece of litter anywhere.
I hike back up the small slope, not before I put my day-use cane back. Who knows, maybe someone else will happen upon it. I bet the island would like that.
- The Trout Whisperer
