Ah, this is the life

RSS: small edits at 7:15p. Really, I shouldn't read these after I post!

In winter my in-laws’ house in Camp Sherman is like a den. Snow calves off the roof into piles before the picture windows, foreshortening the view and blocking the light. It’s a wooden house, made not of logs but of rough-hewn lumber, unpainted: so one might also say it’s like the inside of a tree, if the tree had a stone fireplace in its center.

For a day or two in winter, maybe as long as a week, the house feels safe. It is the cozy center of the world. Then it becomes both claustrophobic and lonely, like a cage. The internet says 250 people live in Camp Sherman, but I can’t imagine where they all are. Hidden among the trees, I guess. To borrow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of her little house: “The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods.” Woods and mountains.

So my husband and I only visit the Camp Sherman house in winter when we know there’ll be a crowd, a noisy and boistrous group generating its own light. We made an exception this past weekend for some friends of ours – a couple and their 4-year-old son – who requested some time out there. OK, we said; let’s embrace the idea. We’ll ski at Hoodoo! We’ll snowshoe! We’ll sled! Then we’ll come home to soup and a blazing fire!

It was 65 degrees on Saturday.

We adults basked in the sun on the deck, coatless, shoeless, slurping cans of PBR. So content we barely spoke at all. Ah! This is the life! The children did no basking, of course; they ran playing with sticks and rocks and boxes and (yes) plastic dinosaurs. All three ended up in Lake Creek, the boys up to their waists. This distressed the other mother (her son had a cough). Her husband kept exclaiming, “They’re boys!” in a way that suggested the inevitability of their dunking; I think he meant to say that it was fun. The kids certainly enjoyed it – right up to the moment at which they were abruptly, unbearably cold. Then we adults laughed to hear their boots squish as they walked. “Catch any salmon in those boots?”

The kids threw rocks. Sasha chased the geese. Blake lost a shoe to the mud. I built a catapult for them but Blake had recently seen “Pippi Longstocking” and wanted instead an airplane that can be pedalled; he and Talkative Boy devised a plan to fly to Mexico and dive for treasure. We drove to the fish hatchery, nearly losing a car to the mud; then we walked to the Metolius (where I took yesterday's picture). We brought entirely too much food and ate it all.

We woke Sunday morning to snow squalls.

Homeward! Escape homeward!