Several years ago I found myself driving around Lake Crescent on highway 101 in Washington state, heading towards Port Angeles with my friend Sabine sleeping next to me in the rental car. The evening was falling fast and it was late September; the lake was still and deep blue and the tourists were absent. As the tires slapped the pavement and the lake dipped in and out of view behind the ever-present towering trees and the million-mystery shadows that seem to invade the Pacific Northwest the moment the sun tips permanently west in the sky, I figured I couldn’t find anything better than that moment and, consequently, that place.
Later, in our hotel room just a few blocks from the harbor, I wrote in my travel journal that I wanted to live there someday. “Someday” is a safe place; it never materializes.
Lake Crescent isn’t Lake Crescent; I saw it in the best view and not as it fully is at all times. It was still and darkening and the water intense blue and the trees frightening. There was silence and no clamoring boats or RV’s clogging the road, no tacky resort residents. The drive around its southern curve was a perfect slice, a moving promotional brochure. In another time, a different season, a future moment, Lake Crescent probably would seem like yet another beautiful natural wonder that was cluttered with other people vying for its favor, or the wealthy who are granted the privilege of permanently living at beauty’s edge and consuming it at their leisure.
In moments, such as when the college guys in the apartment building next door shoot off fireworks at 2:30 a.m. and yell at each other with a 85 percent “f**k you!” rate, I think of Lake Crescent. When I’m in line at WalMart to buy toilet paper and sunblock and try to understand all of the bizarre humanity around me, and their attempts to dress themselves, I think of Lake Crescent. When I think of a place I’d like to be in an attempt to block out the daily-ness of the day, I think of Lake Crescent. When I realize I can’t be part of something big and want to exchange it and get out of the futility and be part of something far removed and tiny and private and mine, I think of Lake Crescent. I imagine a small cabin for just me, filled with books, waiting to be read to the lapping of the water. There would likely be a cup of tea somewhere in there, too, and the quilt my mother made for me.
This is all strange, for I only know the lake from the window of the rental car one late-autumn evening.
Lake Crescent is a kind of metaphor for my attempt to lock time, or a manageable part of it, into something I can reuse when I need a “someday what-if eventually I can always have that dream” pick-me-up. But I know, because of how time is and how it progresses, that I can’t go back.
Just drove around the most beautiful lake I’ve seen, I had written in that journal that night. A hint of fog, a thundering silence. The surrounding forest terrified me. All perfect. I want to go back.
Going back never works. Memory never serves correctly. The moment is already past. Going back is the ruiner of all fond memories.
I can think of places like that…….a peaceful evening outdoors right there on the farm. No one else can understand my joy at being out in the flower bed, probably picking that ‘pesky’ weed, but it is so peaceful, my thoughts can relax, my mind can become uncluttered, I often say, I would like to sleep outside, if only I had some protection from the elements. I like the sounds, the birds songs are never off tune, they are happy peaceful sounds. For most who read your blog they might not understand the part about peaceful sounds because they don’t live in a place where there are no sounds of driving vehicles or trains or whatever else makes noise. I also can experience the same here at camp especially in the morning because no one else is up to make noise or spoil the landscape, and sometimes there is a mist or fog that arises from this little lake. God’s creation is awesome and a joy, when we focus on upon it.
[...] beach was empty except for Sabine and I, that mid-September day back in 2004. Our three-week vacation in Washington state was nearing an end and we’d headed to the ocean for a few days. She [...]
[...] draws it out of me like a wick. Instead of trying to describe how the fog engulfed the trees while driving through Washington, I might simply try to capture how I felt when I saw it by literally drawing it out on [...]