In the evening, after watching bats swoop about,
picking off insects rising from an inlet off the lake, we
assemble for the feast that’s supposed to be the week-
end’s centerpiece. The Traeger grill on our porch strug-
gles to reach the levels of heat we need, and all of us,
pretty good entertainers and host+s in our own spaces,
try to give each other enough leeway to do our respec-
tive things.
The resulting meal—par-grilled vegetables, mealy
corn, steaks that are raw within—is just okay, so, sitting
around the cabin’s round table, we largely ignore the
food and instead trade wildlife sightings from the day
past. I speak of the otters we saw—an adult otter help-
ing to push sleek pups up onto a log, the better, it
seemed, to watch the water-skiers cavorting around the
lake. The friends who walked around the lake show pho-
tos of a pair of bald eagles they spotted. Something
about the day on the lake—or perhaps the Oregon whis-
key one of us sourced—looses old memories from my
friends also, of camping trips past, of the first fish
caught, and the brother who perfidiously threw it back
in, before it could be paraded about.
We go for a fishing lesson the next day on a river, theMetolius, that draws some of its water from our lake. As
well as giving us clear instructions on how to cast, our
guide, Chris Martin, a longtime coach of local baseball
and wrestling teams, shares his knowledge of the area,
past and present, and its geology, in short, matter-of-
fact sentences.
After a couple of hours without fish rising to our col-
orful, insect-mimicking bait, we give up, fishless, and
get sandwiches from Camp Sherman Store and Fly
Shop, a 101-year-old classic along the river. We eat on
benches surrounded by tall Douglas firs and slender
birch, with crested blue-black Steller’s Jays squawking
from a tree above us, the river burbling away.
Thus cued, Martin says he remembers a woman in a
floppy hat, from distant and exotic Los Angeles, coming
to the step of that store, in the 1950s, looking around
her and declaring it the most beautiful place she’d ever
seen. “I hadn’t traveled much then, I was just a kid, but
I have now, and I think she just might be right.” We all
look around us differently, seeing it through his eyes—
and hers.
Our last supper comes together in near silence. This
improvised meal is as big a success as the sweated-over,
planned-out one was a flop. Someone makes succotash
from the leftover corn, some tomatoes and bread be-
come a panzanella, and the last of the marionberries get
used in a crumble and infused into a whiskey cocktail.
The cabin has acquired that lived-in feeling that cabins
do, with towels and swimsuits drying on rails, with
books and maga+zines splayed on the arms of the Ad-
irondack chairs on the deck, a card from a trivia game
we played one night lying face up on a counter in the
kitchen: “‘If music be the food of love, play on’ is from
which Shakespeare play?”
We’re getting our groove at last; of course, just in
time for us to leave. For me, my family was with me the
whole weekend—lakes conjure them up. My father was
in me as I paddled, my grandmother when I swam
(though I dunked my head, not having a hairdo to pro-
tect), my mother when I read a book on the beach.
There’s something about a lake that resuscitates them,
the sunniest hours of my youth. It is a lucky thing to
have had a childhood you (mainly) enjoyed, a family you
miss (still), together with a partner and friends who are
not genetic family but are dear, familiar. For all this
trip’s mishaps and miscues, I’ll remember our group,
faces turned upward, watching the bats fly overhead,
chatting away about this and that, as the stars became
visible in a darkening sky. The Suttle Lodge & Boathouse:
from $240; thesuttlelodge.com.The day on
the lake, or
perhaps the
whiskey,
looses old
memories of
camping
trips past.
SUNSET JULY/AUGUST 2019 49 --