It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before-I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. But although it wasn't wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral.
The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot -the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. We returned summer after summer-always on August 1st for one month. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August.
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