I’d take my father’s fishing boat across the lake, down a creek, to other lakes, a chain of lakes. Then I’d cut the motor and drift to study cabins, most of them owned by people with year-round houses like the one in a nearby small town where I lived in winter. Lush grass extended to shorelines. Lake weeds swayed. For two months, the sun shone, intricate bugs shimmered, and my body felt interchangeable with air. I’d dip my hand in water and watch fish investigate its white flickering at the lake’s surface, the fish’s ceiling. I’d ignore a gaudy boathouse or striped beach umbrella – incongruous in that landscape of green trees, gray stones, opalescent water, and silver piers that seemed like sidewalks leading to doors. Some cabins had names. Tanglewood. Shangri-la. Cloud Nine.

Our cabin was filled with curious old furniture, bed linens, oddball kitchenware. We’d bought it furnished when its owner died. Mauve – for chairs, lamps, vases – had been a popular color. In the shed, I found paint cans with labels that read “Rugosa Rose.” Our lake had taverns with docks where my parents tethered their boat and went inside to drink while I ran to swings in big trees or wandered the edges of forest as fireflies blinked. 

Some days, motoring across wide water, I turned on my dad’s gadget, The Depth Finder, to learn the lake. In one spot, the depth plunged to 80 feet. In the middle of the lake, I found a plateau, and I’d get out of the boat to wade, waving at people on shore, hoping to startle them by almost walking on water. Once, in a cove fringed by tall pines, I dove out of the boat to swim, and a fish as big as I was, a muskellunge, flashed by in the deep.

By day I wanted to go far and wide, at least across the lake and down the creek. But at night, wrapped in a mauve blanket, dropping off to sleep, I’d scare myself awake. Maybe I’d steered the boat into brisk waves at steep angles, the hull making choppy warning noises as I hit surges that, mismanaged, would have flipped the boat and I’d have floated or sunk. Or maybe I’d trod unknowable water. I was a daredevil in the daytime.

 At night, the lakebed seemed like my deathbed.

Still, every morning I’d want back outside: wilderness rising up around me, my own.

Strictly speaking, it’s not nature if I’ve arranged it with my perspective, finding landmarks, placing rocks and branches in sand or soil, making outdoor rooms. Or, after I grew up, planting borders and trellises to mark the edges of lots I owned. But when I was a girl, I thought lakes and trees and birds and fish and sky were mine and I was theirs. Then I’d come back inside to civilizing conversations at the family dinner table and, in the autumn, when geese headed south, when grownups put on waders to dismantle piers and move them ashore so winter ice wouldn’t crush them, back into town, back to school with its complicated strictures and fiefdoms. Contentment – whether sunlit or misty or magisterially somber under cloud cover, every familiar color deepening and lustrous – lasted for single moments or hours or, when I was perfectly unscheduled and lucky, entire days.

Debra Monroe is the author of two story collections, The Source of Trouble (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award) and A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education; and a collection of essays, It Takes a Worried Woman. She spent her childhood in northwest Wisconsin and currently lives in Austin, Texas. For more by and about Debra, follow this link.