My wife and I had just moved into the Forest Service cabin and perpetual motion sent me to the lake where there were fish to catch. A creek dumped into this lake and there had to be salmon. First, a paddle. Nearly two miles of monotony.
When my family arrived on Prince of Wales Island in 1986, we immediately took advantage of the cabins. I was still pretty young when Dad packed up the station wagon and drove the family to a cabin that necessitated a row to access. All the cabin adventures blend together, but one of the enduring memories is thanks to a picture of my brother and me sitting on stumps next to a fire being reduced to cooking coals in front of the same cabin Abby and I were visiting.
Looking back, I probably complained about the row as impatience seemed to be a defining characteristic of my youth. Maybe that’s why we only went once. It could very well have been that the cratered gravel road was a risky proposition for the station wagon, or simply that we liked one on a river better.
Regardless, the row would have been an obstacle. Even into my 20s I would have said the destination is the point and paddling, hiking, driving or whatever else is just something you have to endure to get there. You talk about trout, breakfast burritos, or epic sunsets, not the third of six hours of driving. The Open Road was romantic nonsense. Adversity. But a lot of people did talk about it. A lot of older people who weren’t slowed by age, and seemed to know what they were talking about, even if I was too naive to fully take their words to heart.
My attitude has improved markedly over the years. I appreciate the promise of embarking, not just the results, and though I’m not eager to drive from Laramie to Casper, Tucson to Albuquerque or even Williams Lake to Prince George, I’m glad I’ve done it if only because that level of staggering monotony makes paddling in a lake for over an hour a highlight.
It reeks of ancient man who stops and smells the roses because he is too old to do anything at the speed he used to, but I stopped when I wasn’t tired. I stopped just to note the quiet. My brain switched stations and picked up the chorus of Nature. It wasn’t quiet at all. It was loud and inevitable but didn’t involve humans.
“No floatplanes or helicopters,” I said to my wife.
“Yeah, weird.”
It was weird. Even remote hikes in Southeast often put you in the flight path of some internal combustion engine. Not here. The scars of logging on some of the distant hills prevented a feeling of being truly back in time, but it sure did feel nice to feel a little drag, a little slowness to the pace of things.
I got some of the most restful sleep I had all summer which makes no sense comfortwise, but certainly speaks to the power of a peaceful mind.
The next morning I sat in the camping chair by the fire and drank coffee. There was no urgency. We cooked bacon in a cast iron pan at a low temperature on the Coleman stove. Luxury.
The outhouse didn’t have a door, nor hinges. It was just wide open and there were blueberry bushes close enough to pick though I didn’t. There were others that were, well, further from the structure.
In the end we did catch a bunch of trout, but we’d both go back just for the peace.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
