Moments of Perfect Being

Today we head home after having spent a delicious week in our Maine cottage with our sons Darien and Toby, along with our daughter-in-law Betsy and Toby’s girlfriend Candice.  We immersed ourselves in memory and tradition while we were here.  Portraits of my great-great grandparents John and Remember Berry Swett, are on the wall, as are the portraits of their daughter Sarah Berry Swett, who married Albion Ricker.  Sarah Ricker married Thomas Bates and they gave birth to my grandfather Albert who married Eleanor Fulcher, and they in turn gave birth to my father and two uncles.  There are also large group shots of family reunions, including the eleven first cousins and their 18 children (most no longer children).  The cottage, built by my great grandmother Sarah Ricker, stands atop Ricker Hill Orchards, which is still an active apple farm run by the Rickers, my third cousins.

When we come to Maine there are certain rituals that we follow.  One is a hike up Streaked Mountain to pick blueberries.  Another is a five-hour hike up and down Tumbledown Mountain, complete with hiking sticks carved by my grandfather and uncles (one of them over a hundred years old).  The latter hike, strenuous but satisfying, is what I want to focus on today.  It is special because, in addition to spectacular vistas, it has a pristine lake on top in which we sometimes swim.  Only those who hike up Tumbledown can enjoy it as there is no road.  The route we take, the Loop Trail, involves at one point clambering up four metal rungs set in the rock, shimmying through a crevice, and then crossing over a peak that looks down upon the lake, which mirrors the surrounding peaks.  It is as though we have been presented with a shining emerald for our labors.

Thinking about the moment that way brings to mind a passage from a Vladimir Nabokov short story.  “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (you can read it here) is, for the most part, a 1941 Kafkaesque allegory about a man forced to go on a “pleasure trip” and bullied into having “fun” with the rest of the passengers rather than follow his own private reveries. And yet, in the midst of the trip, he comes across a moment of startling beauty that promises to redeem his life.  Here’s the passage I remember:

Upstairs was a room for travelers. ‘You know, I shall take it for the rest of my life,’ Vasili Ivanovich is reported to have said as soon as he had entered it. The room itself had nothing remarkable about it. On the contrary, it was a most ordinary room, with a red floor, daisies daubed on the white walls, and a small mirror half filled with the yellow infusion of the reflected flowers – but from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength which he had never experienced before, Vasili Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be. What exactly it would be like, what would take place here, that of course he did not know, but all around him were help, promise, and consolation – so that there could not be any doubt that he must live here. In a moment he figured out how he would manage it so as not to have to return to Berlin again, how to get the few possessions that he had – books, the blue suit, her photograph. How simple it was turning out!

Of course he is not allowed to stay but is hustled off.  It is up to the reader to determine whether the villains of the piece are Stalinist communism, Hitlerian fascism, American consumer capitalism or some other “ism.”  But in that magical moment, everything comes together.

The lake atop Tumbledown offers me a momentary glimpse into some other reality, some other life.