(HOST) A couple weeks ago, commentator Willem Lange spent a few days at camp. And he took the time to jot down a few thoughts about being there.
(LANGE) A mist hangs above Hellgate Pond. There’s not a breath of wind. Yet the surface of the pond shimmers, as if with life just beneath its surface. Could anything lively still be moving around down there? I know there are brook trout. There are dozens of tiny ones hovering in the inlet, and a friend of mine says he once caught a pair of 11-inchers here. A couple of battered aluminum boats upside down in the mud beside a corduroy landing suggest that fishermen come here once in a while to try their luck.
I’ve seen the pond from space on Google Earth. It’s almost perfectly circular: a tiny tarn scooped out and dammed by the last ice sheet about 10,000 years ago. It might long ago have become a quaking bog, but for its location on a north-facing slope, the constant trickle of an inlet, and occasional beaver activity.
It’s been a wet week – raining off and on all across northern New England, and alternately fogging over or drumming on the metal cabin roof. Still, the young hunters in camp are out of bed shortly after four and out the door before daylight.
We older ones, our hunting fires banked a bit by time, have washed up the breakfast dishes and settled down to days of snoozing, reading, writing, and occasional walks between the rain showers. The cabin has been as quiet as if we were all studying for our board exams. The big cast-iron box stove, designed by and made for the old Brown Company logging camps, ticks softly. Intermittent showers drum loudly on the metal roof and die slowly away.
I’m sitting on the upturned bottom of an aluminum scow, my feet resting on the corduroy ramp just above the muck. Instead of my rifle, I’m carrying my cane, which, given the absence of the deer and the slippery, soggy footing, is far more practical. I have a few things with me in a little pack – just in case – knife, butane lighter, compass, small flashlight, space blanket, and a big Snickers bar. I’ve just decided that the moment calls for the Snickers bar, which I discovered years ago, at the 200-mile Alaska Ski Marathon, doesn’t freeze hard, even at thirty below. Here, late in the November afternoon, it’s ambrosial.
Robert Frost has said it best, as usual: "Not yesterday I learned to know the love of bare November days before the coming of the snow." But today, as I sit and watch a lens of mist form about eight feet above the little pond, I’m thinking more of Longfellow : "A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." What about the thoughts of old guys? I wonder. They’re pretty long, too. And I wonder if theirs, like mine, reflect that regrets over things that should not have been done are far less painful now than those about things not done.
This is Willem Lange in northern New Hampshire, and I oughtta get back to work.