The radio crackles with Carl Yastrzemski's latest at-bat as I push away from camp, my bicycle wheels crunching over pine needles that carpet the freshly raked gravel driveway. The commentator's voice from WHDH radio fades in and out—the reception this far north is temperamental at best.
Yaz, the Red Sox left fielder and the heart of the team since replacing Ted Williams in 1961, is having another solid season, though not quite matching his 1967 Triple Crown year. Dad isn't renting this place in northern Vermont where our entire family spends August; it's been in our family since the 1760s, with only a 35-year gap when his father lost it during the Great Depression. Dad bought it back himself after he'd become successful as a petroleum geologist, piecemeal, parcel by parcel, in consultation with Mom. They'd made the decision to acquire the land after numerous trips visiting relatives who still lived in Bloomfield, Vermont.
The two-story cabin they designed and had built—always called "camp" by everyone in the family—sits a mile down a gravel road from the highway. Despite having no electricity, they engineered an impressive setup: propane gas lamps with gas lines hidden in the walls, a gas-fired stove and oven, and running water from a spring up on the side of the tall hill nearby. There's even a basement beneath the two floors. Dad loves to remind me of all this history, even as he spends more time traveling for work, searching for new oil and gas prospects and raising money for drilling ventures. Meanwhile, Mom finds refuge from her depression in the tiny library at Bethel Baptist Church back in Norman, Oklahoma, processing donated books when Dad is traveling.
Here in Vermont, she transforms—becoming an obsessive berry-picker, spending hours collecting raspberries and blueberries, her fingers stained purple-red. It's only when the migraines hit that she retreats to her room with Ben-Gay-soaked cloths wrapped around her throat, silence her only companion for days at a time. I note that this only happens when Dad is out of town.
I make the right turn from our cabin onto Smith Road, the wheels of my Schwinn Breeze crunching over the gravel Dad spent three weekends hauling in and shoveling into potholes and spring-melt channels. "Character building," he called it, as if I needed more character and not more friends. The mile-long road exists in its current state only because of his dogged maintenance—a labor of love he insists is "relaxing." The morning light filters through a canopy of white pine and spruce, casting dappled shadows that make the road look like it's covered in lace. Nothing like the open plains of Oklahoma, where the sun is an oppressive constant, beating down on endless stretches of wheat and prairie grass. Here, the light plays hide-and-seek.
Boethius wrote that evil is nothing because only that which preserves its place in the natural order retains its existence. I wonder, as I navigate around a pothole, whether my parents' marriage struggles because it strayed from its natural order—or if a psychological divide was always part of some cosmic syllogism I couldn't yet understand.
The radio station switches to "American Pie," Don McLean's voice unnaturally clear for a moment. The day the music died. I turn the dial, seeking something else—perhaps WBCN from Boston if the ionosphere is cooperative. I catch fragments of "School's Out" by Alice Cooper before static reclaims the airwaves.
As the road winds downward, I can see glimpses of our cabin's position—perched on a bluff overlooking Paul Stream, with the Connecticut River Valley and Sugarloaf Mountain visible in the distance. A view Dad calls "pastoral perfection" and which I find only reasonable if one has a view from on high. If you’re in the shady pathways, narrow roads, and pathways, each twist in the road is a step back into multiple dimensions of time. Past the family cemetery where acid rain has erased the names of ancestors I'll never know, I continue riding. The cabins start appearing on my right as I approach the intersection with the highway. "Pair-o-Dice" with its faded red trim and weather-vaned roof. Next, "Loon's Call" with canoes upturned beside a ramshackle dock. Then "Pine Away" with smoke curling from its chimney despite the July heat. Each with its dock extending into the stream like hesitant fingers testing cool water.
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates speaks beside a stream under the shade of a plane tree. He describes the soul as a charioteer with two horses—one noble and one wicked. I feel those opposing forces within me as I pedal: one drawing me back to the safety of our cabin, one urging me forward to the lake where I might see him again.
The turn onto the highway brings a shift in landscape. The trees recede, allowing the sky to assert its dominance—a cerulean expanse interrupted by cumulus clouds that remind me of the Constable paintings in my art history book. The shoulder is narrow, and I hug the edge as cars occasionally pass, most with out-of-state plates. Tourists fleeing cities for Vermont's verdant embrace.
I consider Zhuangzi's butterfly dream as I watch a monarch flit across my path. Am I a girl dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a girl? In Oklahoma, I knew who I was—member of the swim team, honor student, pianist, a success geologist’s nerdy daughter. Here, I'm untethered from those identities, floating between definitions like the monarch.
The turnoff to Maidstone Lake Road appears, and I shift gears for the incline. My legs, strengthened by countless hours of butterfly strokes and freestyle sprints, respond without complaint. The radio catches a news segment—something about Nixon and China, then more static.
I think of Dante's letter to Can Grande, explaining the four levels of meaning in his Divine Comedy. The literal: a girl riding her bike to a lake. The allegorical: a journey from isolation toward connection. The moral: the struggle between responsibility and desire. The anagogical: the soul's journey toward something greater than itself. I wonder which level I'm currently living in.
The lake appears through the trees, a sapphire set in emerald. Maidstone Lake State Park welcomes me with its wooden sign and empty parking lot. It's early enough that the day-trippers haven't arrived yet. I chain my bike to a rack and follow the path to the beach, my radio now silent, out of respect for the moment.
The sand is cool beneath my feet, not yet warmed by the day's heat. The water stretches before me—dark blue in the center, shifting to aquamarine near the shore. Different from the red-clay waters of Lake Thunderbird back home. I scan the shoreline, pretending not to look for him—the boy from the cabin across the lake. The one with the Boston University t-shirt and the paperback copy of Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery."
I set my towel on the sand and arrange my things—radio, water bottle, dog-eared copy of the Confucian Analects. "The noble-minded are calm and steady," Confucius wrote. I try to embody this as I remove my t-shirt to reveal my swimsuit underneath, acutely aware that he might appear at any moment.
The water accepts me without judgment, its cool embrace a benediction. I push off from the sandy bottom and begin my strokes, each one a meditation in movement. In Oklahoma, swimming was about competition—beating times, winning medals. Here, it becomes something else—a conversation between my body and the water, between the self I was and the self I might become.
I float on my back, gazing at the sky, and think about connection. Dad shoveling gravel and sand, filling up holes that will only wash out again next spring when the snow melts. Mom in the library of Bethel Baptist Church, encouraging someone to check out a pictorial history of the book of Joshua. My mind returns to imagining the boy across the lake whose name I don't yet know. I’m floating. I’m thinking. I’m experiencing. The fish beneath me, the clouds above, the trees surrounding. Confucius said that benevolence is found in connection, and wisdom in understanding one's place in the natural order.
I wonder if this is what Dad cherishes about this place—this sense of being simultaneously alone and connected to everything. He and Mom designed the cabin together years ago. He speaks of it with reverence, this sanctuary they built on land his ancestors cleared. For him, isolation is freedom. For me, it's a vast labyrinth of green and blue, beautiful but with twists and loops into time. A stranger in a strange land, yes, but perhaps that's the only position from which true observation is possible. The charioteer balanced between two opposing forces, seeing clearly for the first time.
The radio, when I return to shore, offers fragments of Carole King's "It's Too Late." I turn it off and sit on my towel, letting the sun dry my skin. Waiting, though I won't admit it to myself, for a boy who may or may not appear. Contemplating the dialectic between solitude and connection, between Oklahoma's horizontal expanse and Vermont's vertical reach, between childhood and whatever comes next.
The day stretches before me like the lake—full of depth and possibility. I open my book and begin to read, one eye on the path from the parking lot, wondering if today will be the day when strangeness gives way to belonging.
