Maine Outdoor Journal

Fall arrives with mixed feelings. The weather is superb and we get to revel in the out of doors under bluebird blue skies and warm sun. The forest splashes brilliant color all about us. Nights are cool and sleeping is easy and deep, comfortably snugged up in blankets.

All this signals change, however, and we know it. At least our bodies do while our minds are in denial. Summer can't be over, can it? Winter can't be just weeks away, can it? It's true. This most excellent season of autumn is all too terribly short, and while we grasp for all it's worth, it toys with us and then is gone for another year.

Closing up camp for the season is one of those tasks that must be done. It's always a joy to go there, especially this time of year. But the going this time means those particular chores, chores that say summer is through, time to prepare for winter.

The dock must come out of the pond and be stowed on shore. The water line must be hauled in, disassembled and stored under the camp. The privy needs attention after a summer of use. The wood pile needs to be restocked. Food stuffs that won't winter over well, like cans of beans and such, need to come back home.

We do these things, but at a leisurely pace, all the while knowing. Knowing that the next time we arrive here it may well be on foot, or snowshoes or skis. Almost certainly not by boat or canoe.

Between chores there are glorious periods for doing what I love most at camp: nothing. Nothing, of course, equates to stretching out on the couch with a pile of books and reading, reading, reading. Sometimes there's a cold beer nearby, or a glass of red.

This weekend I got to finish up following my friend Thoreau on his travels through the Maine Woods, as recounted by J. Parker Huber in the updated edition of The Wildest Country. It's a brilliant read as Huber and friends retrace Thoreau's routes (he made three trips to the north woods), a guidebook of sorts for those who would follow.

It's as pleasing a book as any I have read in recent memory, one that has brought hours of peace and joy and serenity; one that has me aching to launch a loaded canoe into the northern waters and go for weeks on end; one that has me smelling the intoxicating fragrances of of the deep woods of our north Maine woods.

Thoreau complete, I turn to Seabiscuit, a book that has escaped me since its introduction a decade or so ago. With time to spare I devoured at least a third of it. Between several naps of course.

Simple meals sustain us during our stay. A pot of chili and good peasant bread and butter. Eggs and sausage, toast and strong coffee. Fuel for a favorite hike above the pond, across the mountain, to the RR tracks and beyond.

So closing up camp really isn't about closing up camp after all. Camp, at least for us anyway, never really closes. Because we're here throughout the year. But it's change I guess, and that makes us stop and take note. The cool weather, the leaves falling, the fleece that's needed now to make a nighttime trip 'out back.'

It's another summer season. Another year. You do what you need to do. But you take stock, conciously or not. A happy time, but with a twinge of melancholy for sure. But camp is now 'closed' for the season, ready for the next. The snowy, cold winter months. It will look different (las will we), but the same, next time we arrive...