The Pattern of Life Indelible

The Paito Robert Root A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. —Henry David Thoreau, Waiden ?. Great Pond 2002 I am surprised when I reach the end of the road. Strolling casually through Bear Springs Camp, gazing at the backs of cabins and glimpsing Great Pond beyond them, I expected to find a footpath through the woods, some way to keep following the shoreline. But I see only thick woods and dense undergrowth straight ahead. Knowing I have to retrace my steps, I glance longingly towards the shoreline, but the cabins are close together and I'm reluctant to walk between them to reach it, timid about blundering into someone's privacy. Two cars with New Jersey plates are parked under the trees behind the last cabin. Where I find cars I will likely find people in the cabin or on the porch or at the water's edge. Boats tied up to the docks in front of each cabin also suggest that people are still around and even earlier, when I passed a cabin without cars, I heard a baby fussing inside. Finding no trail into the woods and no unobtrusive path to the shoreline, I turn back the way I came. A dozen yards ahead a woman is standing in the middle of the dirt road, looking at me. We passed each other only a moment or two earlier , her brief "Guh mawning" linking her to the Jersey plates and the last cabin. She waits as I amble toward her and before I am very near asks if Tm looking for someone. I say no, just wandering. She asks if Tm staying here, at Bear Springs Camp. This is inland Maine, where folks are relaxed and friendly, but she's from New Jersey and prudently curious about strangers in the neighborhood with no apparent reason for being there. I say, "No, Tm not, but Tm trying to decide if Td like to stay here next year." This is true but not the whole truth—I don't want to explain that I want to write about the place and that Tm here 152 Robert Root now because sixty years earlier E. B. White wrote about his own summers on this lake—and I hope my genuine desire to one day be a renter reassures her. During this exchange, I come almost even with her. She turns and we start walking slowly together, back toward the center of camp. She is a soft, auburn-haired, pale-skinned woman in a striped short-sleeve pullover and dark blue shorts and sandals; I guess that she is somewhere in her late forties, maybe early fifties. She encourages me to rent a cabin—"This is a great place and you would love it." I ask if she's stayed at the camp before. It turns out that she has been coming every year for two decades. Her daughter is twenty-five and "we've been coming since she's five." Many of the other families here this week are people she has known for years, including friends ofher children whom they see only at the camp when these far-flung families turn up once a year to stay for the same week in the same cabins. She tells me it's nice to go up to meals (they're on the "American Plan" here, three communal meals a day) and sit at a big table with other campers—"It's like a big family gathering. You get to know people." She says, "At the end of the week, when we leave, we book the cabin for the next year." I wonder aloud if that's why it's so hard to reserve a cabin. She explains that some people she's met here have been coming for thirty or forty years. The kids keep coming even after they grow up, and when one generation stops coming the family still reserves a cabin and the next generation shows up with children of their own. "There's death, you know, and people divorce, and...