I finally grabbed some time on a piney Canadian island.
Totally alone. Just me and a few thousand unacquainted creatures around a lichen-covered rock with 40 or 50 wind-whipped trees.
You know the place. One of those untouched, lonely, delicious islands we always hurtle past while racing to another fishing spot.
For years and years on trips to the North Woods, I’ve yearned to tie the boat to a picturesque island and just hunker down. To effectively stop the world and get off. To sit still and maybe sense the immensity of where I was.
I’ve always been too pressed to feed that yen. There were fish to find, camp schedules to meet, partners to consider. You don’t find many fishing buddies willing to kill hours on a rock, just to indulge a fellow’s mind.
But now I’d borrowed a boat after supper and snooped around until I found the perfect landing. Five tiny islands formed a little midlake harbor just three miles from the dock at Tonapah Lodge. A deep reef hooked them to islands across the way. Now, at last, sighing with exquisite satisfaction, I lay upon a rounded dome of bedrock and lose myself within the cobalt sky.
I am overwhelmed by the infinite variety of colors in the clouds. If Eskimos have 26 words to describe distinctly different snows, I face the same challenge for wisps of crystallized moisture above this faraway lake amid the golden hours before sunset.
Penetrating cries of loons chortle all around. Out here, loons run the show. They barely tolerate passing boats, eyeing intruders suspiciously, diving if one drifts too near. Loons are magnificent divers, able to stay below as long as 18 minutes, processing oxygen from air stored in hollow bones. When they believe they are alone, inhibitions roll away. A community of five paired loons now converse hotly, unaware of my prying ears.
My rock hosts six kinds of lichen. Stare hard and they become lilliputian forests, colored confederate gray to duckbill orange to four hues of green.
The crassly commercial red and green of my boat ordinarily might seem foreign, save for the fact that the boat is old and battered like these time-worn slabs of rock-cracking, shifting, minutely eroding from each slap of waves.
The water is as alive as the rocks with plants and insects. A steady gaze from just the right angle reveals a skin of swarming microscopic plankton on the lake’s otherwise crystal surface. Creatures inch past the island, propelled by the steady current of an ancient river system that chains lake to lake.
Now and then a large insect floats past, benignly riding the current, unaware of its place in the food chain. Our lives briefly intertwine. Then I hear a splash off the reef and know a fish has ended our acquaintanceship forever. And then a gull drops low to scoop up a piscine morsel. Thus life goes on.
I lie back again, immersed in the depths of space beyond the clouds. Last night the Northern Lights flamed above. I think how nice it would be to camp upon this rock the very night those Lights appear.
A raven calls from the peak of a pine, intelligent enough to mimic human sounds. If I lived here, we might tame each other.
A boat ambles by, its people pretending not to notice me. The ravens are friendlier.
I find a bathtub-sized recess in rocks against the shore. Too bad the evening has become chilly or I’d be naked and neck-deep in water.
It’s jacket time. The sun pulsates in gleaming ripples off a rocky shelf that slides into the deep. The eastern sky erupts in salmon and raspberry.
A swift boat creates a mini-surf that washes my sneakers and scours and cleanses my island. Half a mile across the water, waves pound another shore, producing the illusive roar of distant rapids. The imagination soars.
Another boat breaks my reverie. Now I know how those loons must feel.
The airhorn of a train reverberates through the distance. That, too, is the stuff of dreams, the storied mixed train to Lynn Lake, cutting through muskeg and forest, snaking past wilderness lakes. Someday I’ll just stop the world again and see where it goes.
Civilization has beckoned. An ash tumbles from my fine cigar, rolling intact down the rock, sizzling when it hits the water. Another human desecration.
A row of thunderheads rises in the distance, and one bears the formidable warning shape of an anvil. Even romantics must leave the water.
I hope I’ll soon “waste” another evening on an island again.
