This summer, I had the privilege to spend time on two lakes — both cold, both clear, both surrounded by stunning mountains. One, not far from multiple major metropolitan centers of the northeastern US, is a summer destination for thousands. Its shores are dotted with motels and cabins, its waters stirred by hundreds of motor boats each day. The other, at the heart of a 2.2 million-acre park with nearly 5 million visitors a year, reaches into some of the most remote areas in the continental states and remains, for the most part, truly wild. One, I grew up visiting for a week each summer. The other is part of my new “backyard.” One experience was lively. The other was filled with solitude. Both were magical.

LAKE GEORGE

American white cedar trunks, straight and true, break the view of the shimmering silver water. The mountains, tinted blue with haze, hang in the distance. The thrum of boat engines is on repeat, as is the sound of children’s giggles, their small voices echoing off the cabin’s walls. Islands, rimmed with granite and roofed with tree canopy, dot the cove; a perfect foreground.

It feels much like camping in many ways. Life is distilled down to the simple needs and pleasures: warm air, cool water, porch sitting, guitar strumming. Meals are eaten at a long table on a covered porch, the busiest “room” in the house. The day’s schedule is governed by body temperature and water temperature, sun and rain. Bathing is almost irrelevant; snacks are abundant. I hover between the lake, the dock, the porch, the canoe, the guitar; between playing cards with the nephews, playing “school” with the nieces, long talks with my siblings, nature walks with Mike, songwriting with Adam. Peter runs up the full flight of stairs from the dock to tell me about each fish he had caught. Henry asks me to count his 200 “dock pull-ups.” I teach Abby and Susie (likely to my sister’s chagrin) that it is ok to pee in the lake and drink water from the spring.

These moments are rich and joyful. This place is beautiful, and in a way, sacred — full of love and tradition. I have long suspected my love of nature and my desire to feel connected to the natural world were seeded here, at Lake George. Spending this week here with family seems to confirm that notion. The simple rhythms of life at the lake are the drumbeat of my heart, where I feel most at home and in sync with the world around me.

Waves lap on rocks, voices ring across the water, a burst of sound followed by laughter. It is time to return from this slim moment of solitude and reintegrate myself into the fray — Susie reaching out to hold my finger; Abby wiggling in my lap; sitting on the dock late into the night as the moon rises over the mountains, glowing orange between layers of clouds, the boys gathered around talking about their lives… I am grateful for this place, this family, this moment.

YELLOWSTONE LAKE

Yesterday, sitting under these pines, the west wind was unrelenting. Today, the lake in front of us is glass. In the same stillness, last night and this morning, the calls of dozens of sandhill cranes echoed off the mountains, mingling with the cry of loons across the lake. At one point, I heard a solitary elk bugle. There are grizzly tracks on the beach, almost certainly laid down the night or morning before our arrival here. All of the trees in camp, including the ones our food pole is attached to, have been clawed repeatedly.

Songbirds are abundant, including a friendly brown creeper who seems fascinated by the many places for prey to hide in the folds of my hammock straps. And chipmunks and red squirrels use our log “shelf” and “footrest” as a highway. Back in the shallow waters at the inlet of Chipmunk Creek tons of ducks are resting, including multiple families trailing ten or more babies — buffleheads, gadwall, teal.

Pelicans are abundant here as well — eighteen spiral in thermals, two cruise overhead on their way out into the lake, one solitary individual flew just past our canoe scant inches above the water. There is something magical about a white pelican — their white glint in the sunlight, their slowly-beating massive wings, their elegance and simplicity.

My skin is dry and brown. I haven’t worn shoes in days, only sandals. My hair is tangled, my pants are stained. There is a patch of pine resin on my left bicep. But I don’t feel dirty… daily swims in a crystal clear lake are cleansing enough.

Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire, my reading for the trip: “Out [here] is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours… The shock is real. For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels… And our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of adventures.”

I think this captures well the reason I seek experiences in wilderness like this 11-day journey on Yellowstone Lake. We have seen or heard little evidence of our human mark on the Earth; instead, we’ve immersed ourselves in the stillness of the natural world. Of course, even out in the wild, the sentiments Abbey describes can be fleeting when I become flustered with the burden of managing our canoe-load of stuff, or when I bring along a novel and let the real moments slip away while I am lost in its pages. But when I slow down, take things in, put pen to paper… then, I am recentered and can find that elusive sense of my minuscule place in this world which, to me, is actually a reminder that I am a part of something much bigger than myself. I can feel the grand adventure that my life can be.

Did you know that pelican wings whistle with each beat?
That long-horned beetles buzz like hummingbirds?
That the feet of brown creepers scritch the bark of lodgepole pines as they climb and search?
That furious wind through evergreen needles sounds like a storm,
and the same wind in meadow-grass sounds like a sigh?
That the cry of a loon can carry miles across still water
and echo like a second voice off of distant hills?
That waves rolling on obsidian sand sound like the huff of a bison’s breath?

LAKE TIME

“This is the most beautiful place on earth.

“There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home.”

~Edward Abbey