I knew it would be a good weekend when I arrived at the campsite to see it empty but for the open trunk of my friend’s car.
After parking my dad’s old truck with the half-rigged camper strapped in the bed, I stepped into the rain and the heavy clunk that only Old Blue’s door can make resonated throughout the empty campsites beyond and sealed away anything more pressing than the river for four days.
Among things that tug at men’s hearts are dogs, dads and a lone man on a river in cold weather. I didn’t make a sound for a moment because the place was pure before we came and it was still that way, standing on a bluff watching the rhythmic casts into gunmetal water and waiting for a line to go taut.
The smoke of the camp rose and fell over the days with meat, eggs frying in skillets and wood haze marinating our clothing, the days having been filled with knots tied and conjecture of trout habits and water’s nature. We said things and we didn’t say anything at all, we didn’t have to.
What wells are filled and for whom? All of us various trades but descending on one place and making none of them matter because trade is not life, only an expression of it. Out of community we’re still gathered, huddled, all of us, but it’s different where there are no more actions to define our symbols other than waking for the sunlight and fire. Potential progress but knowing we are frozen in time in a place where there is no time.
Now that I’m back from camping in the valleys of Southeast Minnesota I’m only changed in the ways that happened when I was gone. It’s no more easier to write, work, than it was before and it seems even harder. The only thing that can fill the well of what we aspire to be is that elusive element time, not what we do in it when we have it.
Inspiration not for itself or in itself or by anything that brings it because it doesn’t – only a life being, not a life lived, makes it worthwhile, and I try every day to find what “it” is.
We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers! – Walt Whitman
