Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
After a long hot week in the city, my wife and I took a trip up to our place in the great Northwoods, a family cottage that we’ve owned for over fifty years. The original cabin was a tiny summer cottage with no basement, heat (except a tiny gas heater), or phone. Of course, over the time my family has owned it, we’ve instituted plenty of changes. We rebuilt in the late eighties and then my brother recently did a complete remodel. It’s not just a summer place anymore. It’s a lot bigger and a lot nicer now. We did save furniture, china, and other items from the old place—mostly as keepsakes.
The cabin is located on a beautiful spring-fed lake with water so clear you can see the bottom even when it’s twenty feet deep. The water is colder than you might expect, cold enough to literally take your breath away. Most of the land around the lake has—thankfully—remained undeveloped. Other than a couple dozen cottages and an American Legion camp, it’s all protected state-owned property that’s left wild. Over the years, owners have come and gone, other cabins have undergone renovations, but the woods and lake—with some exceptions—have remained pretty much the same.
Some of the venerable old northern pines have toppled, falling victim to violent storms. Fish populations have changed or diminished; some have moved. Some are gone. Our old walleye fishing hole has been abandoned by those wily old fish; we’re still looking for them. While never residing there until about ten years ago, largemouth bass now lurk in abundance near the shorelines. We used to have a thriving population of American bullfrogs, but over the course of a year, they suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. But by and large, not much has changed. It’s reassuring to return and see the massive white pines guarding the place or to see the beautiful virgin shoreline. The loons are always here to greet us.
At the right time of the year, when the jet-skis, ATVs, and cigarette boats have been put away, the woods and water provide a beautifully serene setting. Except for the sound of distant traffic or the occasional chainsaw, the silence of the forest engulfs you, interrupted only by occasional loon calls or tap-tap-taps of woodpeckers. In a silence like that, free from the static of white noise and other distractions, it seems easier to hear your own thoughts. It also seems as if the environment begins to flow into you on a river of serenity.
Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, a place somewhat like ours—without any companionship of any sort—in order to achieve a deeper understanding of himself through communion with the natural world. He stayed in a small unadorned one-room house he built for over two years, chronicling precise scientific observations of the natural world around him. Thoreau believed solitude was key to self-discovery, and that a communion with the natural world was the ultimate font of self-knowledge about man’s place in the universe.
Thoreau wrote in Walden that solitude did not necessarily involve the absence of others. He argued that solitude, self-reflection, and self-awareness could be found anywhere, even at a crowded room. This is a key tenet in Thoreau’s principle of self-reflection, that fulfillment comes from within and that seeking approval and vindication from others was simply superfluous distractions. He also believed—with the rest of the New England transcendentalists—that enlightenment comes from observing and understanding the natural world.
As I sat in the living room of our remodeled cabin last week (with my glass of Scotch), I happened to spy one of the artifacts that my family had kept from our old cottage, a small chest of drawers. I remembered that when I was probably about twelve, my family had come up north on the first day of summer (as we always did) and started settling in. As I was putting away some clothes into that old chest, I pulled open one of the drawers and saw an abandoned mouse nest tucked away into the corner. We cleaned it out of course, but just last night, sitting on the sofa and staring at the old dresser, I suddenly—out of nowhere—remembered finding the mouse nest.
I tried to imagine the experience of that tiny rodent as it entered our cottage (although it might have—and probably had—been living there all summer). She would have had to (while pregnant) climb up what would have been the human equivalent of a four-story building, crawl into a dark and cold space, make a nest, and then give birth to her litter. Alone. She would have had to survive sub-zero temperatures with her babies. She would have had to leave her children to forage for food, braving attacks by hungry predators. And all she had to work with were her animal instincts. There were no other mice there to help her. There was no safety net for her and her family. Like Thoreau, she—necessarily—believed in self-reliance.
I don’t know what finally happened to that mouse. I do know that she and her children are long dead and that their short time on this Earth was not spent on distractions and toys and silly pastimes. She lived for her children and their well-being; there was nothing else in her existence. And she never considered her actions heroic or thought about her sacrifice. She never felt sorry for herself. She never sought aid from others or solace from a higher being. She knew nothing but self-reliance.
Sitting in the family cabin, contemplating that antique chest of drawers and its long-dead inhabitants, I had to wonder what the bare bones of our human experiences on Earth will truly be. What will cross our minds in those final moments before death? Our families? Our net worth? Our impact on the greater good? Maybe nothing so profound.
Maybe I’ll be thinking of a mouse.