It’s late September, and for several weeks now, the hoists have been dwindling.
I’ve watched them disappear, like I’ve watched so many changes this summer, from the wooden dock at the end of a path we share with our neighbors.
The dock is beautiful, in an old-fashioned way. Only three lengths long, it juts from a canopy of aspens into the clear water of a shallow, sandy cove. The first time I saw it, it reminded me of the “Wild Strawberries” film.
I’m there almost every day, often just long enough to launch a paddleboard or to wade into the lake after a run.
But once a week, I’ll pack a book and a drink. I swim, then perch on the wooden boards, letting my feet dangle in the water. The sun dries me as I read. I look up to watch the boats go by, and I listen for the shrieks of kids jumping in the water or getting towed on a tube.
Other days, there are no voices, just the sound of successive waves hitting the rocky shore.
The neighbor who owns the dock also owns one of the first homes built here. When she texted me permission to put the dock in, she warned me.
“It is very heavy! When Grampa built it, he built it to last!”
Grampa, it turns out, was her father-in-law. By my count, that makes the dock three generations older than I am.
It is, in fact, heavy. We worked with another group of neighbors to put it in, and those neighbors have continued to make improvements through the summer — adding a board, donating a ladder, trimming back branches.
This dock belongs to one person, was built by another, and is maintained by different people entirely. Dozens more have enjoyed these same boards in this same spot over the years.
So I’m sitting on a shared project, one that started before me and doesn’t belong to me, even though I belong to it. And I feel the same way about what I see as I look across the water.
There are more houses now, but the hills beyond the far shore are still forested, and their shapes haven’t changed since the glaciers.
The lake is higher than it used to be, ever since the dam, but you can still see the remnants of the old banks five feet under the water, in rock piles and enormous fallen timber, running in curves roughly parallel to the modern shore.
Some of the old resorts are still here too, dating from the time when trains brought people up north. Ferries met the tourists in the station towns, then carried them across the lake to their destinations. I can see one of those old resorts from the dock, and without trying too hard, I can see the ferries.
The people who lived here just after the glaciers, who walked the old banks, and stood on the ferry decks — they too heard the shrieks of kids playing in the water. They too witnessed the changes.
The wildflowers along the path to the dock bloom in sequence, from orange butterfly weed, to pink joe pye, to yellow goldenrod and purple aster.
The fish move from the shallows to the deep, then back to the shallows again.
Mayflies carouse in clouds overhead, then litter the lake surface when spent.
And I sit on the dock, and count the shades of blue in the lake and the sky and the hills, while sailboats tack back and forth, and the waves meet the shore behind me, again and again and again.