|
|
It seems to me there are three types of cabin-goers. Allow me some latitude here. This is an essay, and like our old essays in school, it follows a pattern. Remember ‘compare and contrast,’ or ‘descriptive,’ or ‘rhetorical,’ or ‘satirical’? Here I’ll do a typology, a categorization. So, to repeat the thesis, it seems to me there are three types of cabin-goers.
There are those who go north to the lake or to the cabin in order to do things. To have – No, not have, but to create – fun. To be active, to engage in the out-of-doors adventurously, to experience the things of the earth and the sky and the water.
Too, there are those who endeavor to do nothing. Carried from the daily life of the cities and suburbs to a place of calm and peace. Sitting in a chair, by the fire, on the porch, along the lake. Sitting tranquilly. Drinking or reading or smoking or eating. Talking with their intimate relations. Chatting. Chewing the fat.
I built a smudge in the fire ring with punky wood and birch rinds in the warm afternoon to keep the mosquitoes at bay and sitting at the windward side of the fire in the smoke I prepared my fly-fishing setup. Filled a very small fly box with some flies I had tied: Mayfly nymphs (imitations of the immature, underwater phase of the insect), and mayfly emerge’s (which imitate the mayfly as it transforms on the surface of the water from the nymph to the winged adult). Spliced together my lines and assembled my rod.
Foxy the orange and white Spaniel just came out of the undergrowth of the big woods, the undergrowth of wild sarsaparilla and big-leafed aster, and she enters the clearing lame. She’s come up lame in her left hind leg again. She seems to pull a lot of muscles. I don’t know, really. I’m not a veterinarian. I didn’t examine her leg. I guess I should have. She’ll be getting around on three legs or three-and-a-half for a while.
Early on in the 1984 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, Bill Murray (as the hero, Larry Darryl) has recently returned to upper-class, suburban Chicago after serving as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. His longtime fiancé Isabel (Catherine Hicks) is worried (and irked) by his recent dissoluteness, his lack of ambition, his mood. She urges him to take up the family business (which is business). And she wants to fix their wedding plans
Bill Murray – poolside, wet, smoking, drinking martinis – thinks.
“I need time to think,” he says flat. “I just wanna think.”
Then, squinting up at her shining in the sun: “I haven’t done very much of that up to now.”
Throughout my adult life (which I measure from the age of 22 for rather personal, intimate reasons), I have been of the third type of cabin-goer. To the cabins, alone most of these 30 years, and to the woods and waters and lakes, to exercise my mind, and to exorcise my homunculi. To think clearly. To work the metaphorical soil and sow new ideas and weed out old ones. To find, and never to find, a muse – the Holy Spirit of words and evocation and poor poetry.
At the dénouement – or one of the dénouements – of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Edward and the Plantagenets (the Yorks, or White Roses) have won the battle of the woods near Tewksbury.
Queen Margaret (wife to the long-imprisoned King Henry VI) and their son, Prince Ned, are brought as prisoners before Edward of York and his brothers George and Richard the Hunched-back. Young Ned glares at Richard and taunts him famously with “misshapen Dick.”
Richard stabs Ned in the heart and slits his throat to boot.
Margaret wails then for the brothers three to kill her, too. Edward, however, offers her reprieve.
Richard erupts: “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”
I fill the world with words written on the page. But for days up at the cabin, I go without speaking to anyone, save a few dozen times to the pups of the dozen or so words they know, and excepting the volumes of words whispered to myself.
Richard, by contrast, was a man of action. An active type. His horse, his horse… His kingdom for a horse.
Leave a Reply