With winter storm warnings blaring from the radio and mixed rain and sleet hammering at the windshield, I raced up to the Swan a few weeks back to drain the water system at the family cabin.It was a Friday afternoon. The Griz had a football game on Saturday. Sparky and I had some elk hunting planned for Sunday. If I waited much longer to attend to this necessary bit of preventive maintenance, I could have been making a pretty good mess for myself. More than once in the past, I have let things go too long and paid a price.
That price usually includes hours spent on my back in a cold muddy crawlspace, sometime in April, with a flashlight clenched between my teeth and an unwieldy pipe wrench in my mitts as I replace broken elbows in water pipes. The older I get, the less of an adventure that kind of plumbing work seems to be. So, at the first real sign of winter, I try to get the job done.
By the time I got to the cabin, I had left the weather somewhere behind me, and little shards of sunlight actually poked down through the naked branches of the big old birch trees that surround the house. The yard was an ankle-deep carpet of crackling dry leaves. The place was silent. No annoying whine from other people's outboard motors out on the lake. No chain saws roaring to life. No lights, sounds, or signs of activity at any of the neighboring cabins. Before I set to work, I took a little walk.
Standing in the front yard looking westward out over the lake, I imagined the Mission Mountains as I first saw them from that spot, with no clearcuts, no road scars, and no sign of humans from this distance except for the rickety fire lookout that used to twinkle at us like a low star on summer evenings. On this day, the tamaracks lit up the mountainside like swaths of flame.
My grandfather must have been one of the first in his crowd to make home movies. In one of those ancient films that flickered on the wall of the dining room to his granchildren's delight, he must have been filming from the very spot where I stood that afternoon.
What you see in that movie is the flat glimmer of a mirror-like lake and the washed-out gold of tamaracks streaking the mountains. The giant birch trees that frame the picture today were just saplings then. The world looked young and fresh.
In that old movie, the camera lens rests on the scene until a tiny dot begins to emerge from the distance, far out on the lake. It becomes larger and larger until it takes shape as a boat with a red-shirted man in the stern and a white-tailed buck draped over the bow, antlered head to one side, fore legs to the other.
The man is my grandfather's pal Pete, the guy who built one of the cabins next door. The boat slides to a stop on the beach with Pete tilting up the ancient outboard motor just in time to avoid dragging the propeller through the rocks. Grinning, Pete clambers out of the boat and holds up the deer's head by the antler for the photographer.
That recent day at the lake, I was reminded of those old, yellowed and flickery movies my grandfather made. While I waited for the hot water tank to drain, I wandered through the thin swath of woods to Pete's cabin. It isn't his cabin now, of course. He never had children or grandchildren to pass the place on to. The folks who own it now have been there for three decades or more. They never knew Pete. They don't know the spot where he fell over in his flower garden that spring day when he drew his last breath. The garden isn't even there anymore.
On the other side of our cabin is the place Cedar Bloom used to own. No, his real name was not Cedar, but that's what everybody called him. He wasn't a wheat farmer like Pete. He was a storekeeper, a bait fisherman and the brunt of countless jokes. Whenever we kids had a boatload of perch to clean and filet, Cedar was the guy who would help us clean them. Maybe it was his way of atoning for fishing with bait. Cedar and his dear wife Sidney are both long gone, too.
Time was when there seemed to be an unspoken competition between what my grandfather called the “Petes” and the “Cedars” to see who could have the most immaculate, flower-studded place. Ours was always filled with too many uncles, aunts, kids of all ages and assorted dogs, cats and hangers-on for my grandparents to join in the competition.
The little cabin that was home to the “Cedars” for much of the year back in those long gone days has been a summer home to another family for 40 years or more.
In the old movies, Cedar is always the one with the biggest fish. His broad Alfred E. Newman grin doesn't suggest the least bit of self-consciousness about the fact that he was the only one who wasn't fly-fishing. He knew it didn't really matter.
In the silence of that late fall day with winter nipping at its edges, I was visited by that parade of gentle memories.
For those of us lucky enough to have such a place in our lives, there is balm in knowing that the logs and stones and nails and mortar that went into these places retain the spirit of those who built them and lived and laughed and cried within them. It can provide a rare constant in a world that is not as simple as it once was.
Change is coming faster and faster every day to our world in western Montana. Once in a while, it is nice to escape, if just for a moment or a few hours. And in those few hours, one can summon the wherewithal to again face the difficult and sometimes brutal world in which we live.
I shut off the water, cranked up a compressor to blow out the pipes, and drained the water heater and toilet tank that recent day, but I didn't board up the windows for the winter.
Now that hunting season and Griz football are both history, that gives me a reason to head back up to the lake one of these days, as if I really need a reason.
I think I'll take my skis this time.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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