Last night I was jogging down the Trans-Canada Expressway, or whatever they call it. It runs right through the park. I jog for transport since I still can’t drive, and I was heading over to see Ranger Tim’s evening naturalist program, ‘Canoeing at Lake Superior’, in the hope there might be National Film Board of Canada cartoons. That’s how media-starved I am. I will run four miles down a highway roaring with 18-wheelers on the rumour of an educational Canadian cartoon from the 1960s, shown in an outdoor amphitheatre with wet seats and shouting six-year-olds.

(Canadians seem to have real affection for these cartoon shorts. Maybe they are like those weird kids who have never tasted sweets: ‘Mum, can I have a raw carrot? Ple-ease?’
Maybe they didn’t suffer the psy-ops tactics employed by our national television station in the seventies. ‘…and now, children, after the Núacht, there will be cartoons.’ Cartoons! We would sit through twenty minutes of dandruffed bumpkins reading the news in phlegmy, unintelligible Gaelic, waiting for some Chuck Jones relief. Instead, often as not we got The Story of Caves, or worse, the fecking Log Driver’s Waltz. For my baited-and-switched generation, The National Film Board of Canada opening titles inspired as much love as the nine times tables. Educational cartoons? If I were Elvis, I would have shot the telly out.)

Back to the highway. A few seconds after a truck passes, my baseball hat is grabbed by displaced air. I play a little game: I guess when it will happen and try to grab my hat just in time. I lose my hat and retrieve it from the middle lane, fast as a squirrel. Many of whom are now squirrel pancakes.

These days, truckers schedules are so tight that they make no stops at all. The shoulder of the highway is littered with what look like half-full bottles of dark iced tea. It turns out these are the pee-breaks of dehydrated men. Annick the maintenance ranger drives around to pick up them up, which is more than I would do for six bucks an hour and a beige uniform. There are dark rumours among the rangers who hitch-hike that some truckers can lift their seat cushion to reveal a hole right through the floor, an inhouse outhouse.

Truckers are too busy even to honk at sweaty women, so the endless caravan of bikers picks up the slack. The bikers are chunky middle-aged men on two-wheeled SUVs, and I like watching them when it rains. I save my sympathy for the real bikers, pedaling a foot-wide shoulder through the endless drizzle of Superior. They are the only ones lower on the highway hierarchy than me: I can see where I’m going, at least when I stop veering towards wild raspberries.

A woman in an SUV stops and rolls down the window.
   ‘Watch out,’ she says, ‘There’s a bear just over there by the side of the road.’ She points about 20 yards ahead and drives off.

I am two miles from home and two miles from the campground, and naturally the road is now completely empty. I jog a little more slowly, which is very slowly indeed. My brain, never one to say nothing when it has nothing useful to say, is humming.

I try to calculate the odds that I will be the first person ever mauled by a bear on the side of the Trans-Canada Expressway. Then I realise I’m innumerate, and therefore incapable of assessing this probability. (When I report this later to Adam Stein, he says: ‘My mother’s advice in this scenario would be, “Someone’s got to be first.” ‘)

I remember Tim’s bear from a few weeks back. That story ended up on the CBC radio news. I don’t want to end up on the news unless I am telling the story myself. A wry, self-deprecating anecdote that nevertheless reveals me as both sensitive and heroic.

(Perhaps I save a toddler from the bear. The child has wandered out from the campground, and is lost on the side of the highway, crying for her mother. The bear is maddened by her cries. He snorts and stamps. He charges the child, swiping a huge paw to scoop her up. He holds her close to his face, examining the morsel before he gobbles her up.

I…jog over and make special bear noises. I win him over with my easy charm and gentle wit. Or something. Anyway, the creature is transfixed. He begins to croon, perhaps to weep. Gently, he sets the little girl down and ambles towards me. The little girl follows; she is no longer crying. The bear lays his head on my shoulder and snuffles. The little girl clings to my leg. We have a moment. A crowd gathers. Then the TV crews arrive. I am feted: a humble immigrant with a touch of greatness, like Wayne Gretzky. Soon afterwards, Chrétien calls, offering to make me an honorary Canadian citizen in recognition of my ‘eroism. No paperwork.)

It is more likely I will win a Darwin Award. I am still running cautiously towards the unseen bear. The road is still empty. A year ago I was so terrified of domestic dogs that I didn’t like to walk by myself in the suburbs, let alone the countryside. I decide it will be a good progress milestone if I can now jog past a black bear. I have no mop to defend myself, but not to worry. Bears are smart, I tell myself. I like bears. It’s berry season, I tell myself. They don’t want no trouble.

Cut to Adam Stein’s instant messenger commentary again:

Well, I’m sorry. This story is going nowhere. I’ve wasted your time again. I wasn’t mauled by a bear. The bear didn’t even appear. I made it all the way to the campground, pumped up. Tim showed two National Film Board of Canada cartoons and a slideshow, a media feast that left me as buzzed as the first Matrix. We sat on very wet benches, which the Michigan kids next to me found a great source of wit.
   ‘AN-drew! Did you PEE your PANTS?’
   ‘Andrew, you shoulda gone to the BATHROOM instead of wetting your pants. You are so disgusting and gross.’
   ‘Ew, Andrew, do you need DIAPERS?’
I leaned over and told them what was really in the soda bottles on the highway. For future emergencies.

Postscript: My young bear, most likely the brother of the fellow shot last month, has been wandering the campground and the rangers’ work centre. The junior rangers laid a trap, but the park superintendent told them to take it down. He is just acting like a bear, not bothering anybody. When last spotted, he was sitting in a patch of grass outside the work center, happily eating a bunch of daisies.

I don’t get back to Ireland much more than once a year. I rely on my sister to keep me up-to-date, and on occasional chats with old friends who are mostly busy with babas these days. But to really get a fix on the place, I read World Weary, a national advice column written by Quentin Fottrell. Quentin was of the same UCD vintage as me, and waltzed around our Sixties Brutalist campus in a maroon velvet smoking jacket, a pocket-sized Oscar Wilde. Now his terrifying task is to bring light to Ireland’s gothic dating culture:

I am listening to Elvis Costello cover Van Morrison’s ‘Full Force Gale’. We were neighbours, briefly. For four years I lived at 55th Street and 5th Avenue. If you drew a cross through a tourist map of Manhattan, my building would be roughly at the centre. It was a terrible place to live, though it took me a while to realise this. I was a couple of blocks from Tiffany’s and directly upstairs from the Manolo Blahnik store, but I had to schlep to Ninth to buy groceries. There was no such thing as a neighbourhood restaurant, though L’Espinasse and La Caravelle were just steps away, as the brochures say. Every subway stopped near my apartment, which was just as well since I had to take one to get to almost anywhere I wanted to be.

   ‘But the park!’ I used to witter. ‘We’re right by Central Park! And people love it when they come to stay; we’re smack in midtown.’ Except they didn’t, really. They thought we were weird for living in Touristland in an apartment with no natural light. With no daylight, I could barely get out of bed before 10 am.

It had its compensations. Sharing a block with Prada meant excellent celebrity spotting opportunities. Nicole Kidman is astonishingly beautiful. So is Salma Hayek, though she’s about 12 inches high. Heather Locklear has a lollipop head on a child’s body and looks too cheesy for New York. Goldie is raddled in the flesh; not holding up as well as Warren (very tall). Edward Norton wears grey sweats and runs a lot faster than me. Quentin Tarantino’s chin needs its own zip code. Claire Danes doesn’t wash her hair much. Et cetera.

For several months, when he was making Painted From Memory with Burt Bachrach, Elvis Costello lived on my block. He may have lived at the Shoreham hotel, which is not a bad choice if you can’t live in Brooklyn. I used to see him regularly in the dingy little liquor store on 55th. Two customers could just about fit in at once. Elvis always wore his hat and glasses, and usually stuttered a request for a bottle of Veuve. They didn’t sell anything better than the Orange Label stuff, but I was pleased he had a champagne lifestyle all the same.

I was careful not to look at him. I had just moved to New York, and was more or less a shut-in while waiting for a work permit. That might be why I was too shy to say hello. These days I’d buttonhole him, back him into the corner by the cooler full of cheap wine.
   ‘Elvis,’ I’d say smoothly, ‘Or should I call you Declan, since you’re as Irish as meself?’ (Too much? Lay off the brogue? After all, he sounds more South London than anything else these days.) ‘I’m a great fan of your music. The Brodsky Quartet effort was dodgy, but otherwise a splendid collection. And I loved your list of essential albums.’ Though I can’t remember any just now.

I’d drop a few obscure track names, just to make sure he knew I wasn’t some fly-by-night who recognized him from Austin Powers. I’d tell him about the better liquor store that delivers, over on 57th. He’d be shy and embarrassed, but flattered too. He’d invite me over to the Shoreham for a glass of champagne. We’d chat about Burt Bachrach: did Dusty Springfield do the definitive Bachrach interpretations, or was it Dionne Warwick? (Dus-ty! Dus-ty!) We’d debate William Blake and Patrick Kavanagh. As we finish the second bottle, I’d assure him he was well rid of Cáit O’Ríordáin.

(At this point in the original daydream, Elvis would confide that he and Diana Krall had just broken up. Shortly afterwards, he writes a Grammy-winning song called ‘Dervala’, favourably compared to the earlier ‘Veronica’. I play tambourine and sing backing vocals and the roadies are forbidden from sneering in my presence. He gets his teeth fixed and we toast our wedding with crates of Veuve Clicquot.

Then I Googled him to look for that list of 500 essential albums and realized that, well, he’s not my type. So we remain friends. I am glad he has found love with Diana. But Elvis, you can still write songs about me if you like. As long as I get to play the tambourine.)

Once we were buried with provisions for the journey. Now we are freighted with very little stuff at the end of our lives.

I knew a man whose hospital room held a change of pyjamas, a dressing-gown, leather slippers, a cane, and some books. An impersonal jug, flowers picked by someone else, fruit and bottled drinks he didn’t choose. In an old folks’ home, (we don’t say ‘seniors’ in Ireland) my grand-aunts had a few nighties and cardigans, a shawl, a hairnet, rosary beads, a grandchild’s drawing, the Nenagh Guardian, tweezers for the weekly pluck, and jar of Ponds.

What happens to all the stuff we spend our lives gathering so hungrily? All the lipsticks bought to salve our feelings after the meeting that went badly? The granite countertops, the shoes, the toys, the flashlights, the cutlery? The bags for laptops, ski-gear, schoolbooks, gym kit, camping equipment, and the bags that go inside other bags, holding rolled-up underwear or toiletries? At the end of our lives, where is the pre-fab toolshed, the cocktail shaker, the lawnmower, the mousetraps, the tins of housepaint?

We pull this stuff towards us. It is work. Even here, living in Lake Superior Provincial Park, I spend a whole day every three weeks as a hunter-gatherer. I travel an hour and a half to Sault Sainte Marie (‘the Soo’), and traipse around RadioShack, the government liquor store, the supermarket, Staples, Shoppers Drugmart, and the bookshop. By the time I unload the car by flashlight, I am too tired to make dinner.

I was weaned off stuff by a year carrying a backpack. It was painful. My stuff is scattered around the world as if I had spun it over my head and let go. My furniture and books are in paid-for storage in Brooklyn. Paul Ford looks after my red meditation cushions, though I don’t know if he has ever used them. An old co-worker rides my bike around Carroll Gardens. Elly keeps a suitcase of mine in her attic in London. I posted a large box of clothes from Vietnam to my parents’ house in Limerick. I left a stack of books and journals in Ottawa. My best friend might have brought my hold-all with her to Tehran when she moved; I don’t know.

Somewhere there was a bug in my shopping code. I was progressing correctly, pumping the US economy, adding belongings geometrically if not exponentially. I was diligent about sample sales and stoop sales, online shopping and Otto Tootsi Plohound. Then one day I found myself splitting a book collection with a man I loved, and everything changed. Possessions fell away from me. I slacked off on shopping. I have dribbled a trail of articles for 18 months or more, always ending up with less.

Now I live in a one-room log cabin, not much bigger than a potting shed, not much smaller a New York City rental. My two pairs of khakis (borrowed from Claire, who has taken over the big sister job from me) live in a cedar trunk with a few borrowed tops and socks. I have a neat shelf of books, a computer, and a basket of toiletries and makeup I hardly use. A yoga mat, a towel, a kettle, wineglasses, and a corkscrew. And my Three Essential Pens. Everything else is borrowed or shared, and I have everything I need (including the use of a professional stove and walk-in cooler—bliss). There’s an outhouse, and I shower in the lake, very quickly, squealing with the cold.

It’s elegant to live this way, and it calms me. I have shucked the dreck. Except it still burdens me, of course. I carry my stuff on an invisible yoke when I worry about where it is, how to get it back, how to pay for storage. I hardly remember the individual things, but now that I’m in one spot long enough to scavenge old coffee tins for my teabags, I fret about the existence of this amorphous blob of belongings. It would be easier if I had simply given it all away (and probably cheaper than buying storage). Instead I try to remember if I got custody of the posh Calphalon pots, and feel discontented that they are not here.

I remember the narcotic haze of The Zone, in which I picked over the racks in Loehmans with an intensity I couldn’t muster anywhere else. I remember the anxious satisfaction of dumping a pile of carrier bags on the bed. Now I’ve lost my shopping mojo. When Jason tried to explain the latest wireless gadget trends, I kept saying stupidly, irrelevantly, ‘But people don’t need that.’
    ‘People don’t need a lot of things they want,’ he explained patiently. It is his business to believe in want, not need, and it may soon be mine.

We gather stuff towards us to assert our place in the world, and sometimes to fend off life. Eventually we walk alone towards death, and as we get closer we start emptying our packs. I have a brief preview of that simplicity. I didn’t look for it, but it’s welcome enough.

The ghosts of proto-hippies from the Baronial Age drift along the north shore of Lake Superior.

In 1921, four Coutu brothers squatted on the beach at MacGregor Cove. They had plans to build a tourist lodge and had taken out advertisements in the American papers, but they were trappers by trade and had no idea how to handle the responses. They were also ill-prepared for winter. When Earl Devlin arrived that summer, he had little trouble persuading them to take a hundred-dollar bill each in return for their claim to the cove and the shack they had built.

The Devlins were from Detroit. Catherine was a banking heiress. Earl was a First World War veteran whose recurring shellshock led them to leave the city and seek a homestead in the Canadian wilderness.
   ‘It’s a very simple story,’ Earl said later. ‘I think it had its genesis in our honeymoon on the south shore of Lake Superior. The fascination of these waters and of the bush kept lurking in the backs of both our heads until the opportunity arrived to make a break.’
They moved to MacGregor Cove the night Russel, their younger son, turned seven. George was a year older. They hired Finns from Sault Sainte Marie to build a lodge and a camp, and settled in at the trappers’ shack for their first winter.

Catherine was more stout-hearted pioneer than simpering debutante. She quickly learned to feed eight hungry men from a lean-to kitchen with shelves made from wooden packing cases. Her reminiscences still carry the tang of a city girl’s shock. She had to knead 36 loaves of bread a week, and split the wood to bake it in the oven too small to hold more than two loaves at a time. She lists with wonder the breakfasts these woodsmen required every single day: eggs, bacon, pancakes, porridge, as much toast as she could feed them, syrup, and fruit. Then there was butter to be churned, water to be fetched from the lake, and boys to be schooled. Sometimes she was so tired she would set her alarm clock for a twenty-minute nap while the bread rose. Eventually Fanny the Finnish cook was hired, and was so indispensable that Catherine chose to overlook her tendency to get very drunk on beer and run off with strange men on the Algoma Central Railway.

Their supplies came in on the same railway that regularly claimed Fanny. The Bussineau family lived at Agawa Bay and at first Dave Bussineau brought Devlin goods over by boat from the Mile 104 rail station. But weather, or Bussineau’s fear of the weather, made supply runs infrequent and finally Earl cut his own four-mile trail to the Frater station over a hill that was said to be impassable. (The car-chewing Frater Road runs parallel to it today, and the settlement there, scene of legendary park-staff parties, is hardly less remote.)

At the time, the Canadian government sold 50-acre parcels of land along the coast very cheaply. The only requirement was that the buyers had to put up a building worth more than $500 within a year. The Devlins bought several plots in the names of family members. Over two winters, they built a camp in a clearing at MacGregor Cove. Nobody calls it by that name: it’s called Beaver Rock after the unmistakable shape of one granite arm of the cove. Their camp was the Beaver Rock Club—not that it was really a club, explained Catherine, who retained some of the instincts of her Detroit days. The name was picked to dissuade people from thinking just anyone could come to stay.

They named the main lodge Pawatiniki, Ojibway for ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’. There was a gravity feed from a nearby stream, and Catherine even managed to get an upstairs flush-toilet. There were several cabins for family and guests, a workshop, a bunkhouse for the boys and another for the staff, a boathouse down on the shore where they held summer parties, and a sauna. The Finns asked permission to use lumber that floated up on the beach to build the sauna on their own time. Though Catherine had no idea what a sauna was, she agreed, and the Saturday night steam bath turned out to be a great hit with guests (who did not, she reports, flog themselves with birch twigs like the hired hands). On Sunday nights they walked the trail to the Laughing Brook cabin for fishing and picnics.

Earl liked to think of the camp as a ship, and everyone called him Skipper. The Skipper’s office was the Pilot Cabin, and he surveyed operations from a broad window with a view of the shore. It’s one of the two buildings in the Beaver Rock Club still standing, and it’s where I’m typing now to the sound of waves and carpenter beetles.

T. Morris Longstreth, an American adventurer who churned out lively travel books in the twenties, visited Pawatiniki in 1924. He hiked down from the Frater railway station on the trail that Earl had cut. The lodge was empty when he arrived, and he was nervous that the Devlins would not live up to the heroic image he had built.
    ‘Then I looked through the open window and saw, ye shades of Mozart! a Steinway grand.’ Shipped in pieces from Sault Sainte Marie, apparently.

Longstreth was fully taken by the regal, rustic glamour of the Devlins.

The Devlins spent six winters here before they moved back to Detroit so the boys could go to boarding school when George turned 14. Earl died of pneumonia shortly afterwards. Doughty Catherine went back to Beaver Rock and turned the camp into a summer tourist operation to survive, reducing rates for guests who pitched in with chores. In the 1940s she sold it to the Elliot family. Lake Superior Provincial Park eventually bought the property. The Laughing Brook cabin stands just outside the park boundaries, and is now owned it by the Seiberling family.

George visited Beaver Rock a few weeks ago to celebrate his 90th birthday. He is frail now, was thrilled to find the Pilot’s Cabin restored and lived in. His childhood is fresh to him:
    ‘Russel and I built a sugar shack in a stand of maples back in the woods when we were nine and ten. It was on stilts to keep the firewood dry beneath, and we had a ladder up to it, but just for fun we built a ramp to slide down. One day I’m tending the pots when Russel slides down the ramp. Next thing I hear him shrieking ‘I’m on fire!’ He had a pack of strike-anywhere matches in his back pocket, and the friction had lit ‘em. The only liquid I had to hand was a five-quart pan of maple syrup, and I poured it right down his pants.’

(Catherine described the sugar shack in her diaries: a model operation, she said, and profitable enough to give them a lasting taste for business schemes. But no one over eleven could stand up under the child-sized roof.)

These days I pore over the literary scraps of the Devlin family in between immigration forms, job-hunting, cooking feasts, and walks on the beach. They appear in Longstreth’s book, in oral histories of Superior, in the transcribed memories that Catherine’s grandson kindly sends. They are present in the folklore that the park guardians collect and pass on. I hear Catherine Devlin in the no-nonsense Midwestern tone of Megan, a fortysomething great-granddaughter up for a camping trip.

And I look out from the Pilot Cabin and imagine Catherine’s first snowy Christmas, in 1921, when the jays took all the discarded orange halves from the kitchen dump and decorated the birch tree outside her window, this window.

Subsistence fishing with a twig and string is not as easy as you might think. And there’s not much meat on the deer mice. I need a job. A real, grown-up, sit-at-a-desk-and-type-and-go-to-meetings job. Can you help? Do you know anyone who might know anyone who can help?

I am a software product development manager. A fairly good one. I like working with engineers, and I also like making things clear to non-technical customers like myself. I’ve worked on some award-winning applications that people actually use. (One of the minor joys of my recent travels was chatting with fellow gringos in darkest Peru, or Cambodia, or even Burma, and hearing them say ‘You worked for Vindigo? Everyone I know has it!’)

I’d work happily in any English-speaking country and could probably manage a Spanish-speaking one, too. If you would like to matchmake my résumé/CV with some dashing organization in need of a product person, please let me know. It’s dervala at dervala dot net.

The baby hare was a brown powderpuff, completely round except for paws and twitchy little ears. The young rangers rescued it from a dog’s jaws, drooled upon and petrified. At that age, all they know how to do is freeze when danger swoops. It didn’t move when they set up home for it in the staff kitchen: a brown box with wadded newspaper, some wilted lettuce and, bizarrely, a dish of Brazil nuts. Next morning it was still there, and still motionless.

Tim disapproved of this pet-keeping trend. Last week there was the Squirrel Incident: an injured baby squirrel adopted by a camper had become so habituated to human handouts that it had twice hiked back several kilometers to the source of treats when the rangers had released it in the wild. So he brought the hunger-striking ball of fluff up to the woods outside the Pilot Cabin, where several families of snowshoe hares live, including a bigger leveret that has the same white spot on her forehead. A sister, maybe. She is a fearless one, climbing on the porch to sniff around for goodies on the picnic table, standing on her hind legs to nibble low pine branches just inches from humans.

The tiny leveret liked to be cradled firmly. It didn’t like to be released, though it was perfectly healthy. Instead, it hopped back to the porch and snuffled around Tim’s boots. It followed him inside, now firmly imprinted on this unharelike, unmotherly mother figure. He calmed it by cupping it in his hands. It drank a little milk, its round eyes bright, and then fell asleep.

It might have lived if it had stayed asleep that evening. But it woke up restive and wriggly, and finally he put it outside in the woods again. It was dark, and the hare looked very tiny in the trees. A vigilant owl was glad to find such a naïve and tender morsel, I’m sure, since it hasn’t been seen again. Or perhaps the newly-fledged, shrieking peregrines got some practice with an easy mark. All is fair in the woods, and nothing is wasted.

A storm came in over Lake Superior. Rumbles shook the little cabin until the logs shivered. Crack! Blue. Crack! Blue.

I ran to the staff kitchen to make lunch, a newspaper over my head, watched by sodden hares. Cold noodles with Vietnamese dipping sauce. The kitchen window framed the lake, hills and sky, all in shades of pearl grey like a Japanese painting, and the rain was too heavy to go home. I made baked beans on toast for dessert and settled in with the police blotter from the Sault Star. Eventually the drumming on the porch grew fainter.

The path back to the cabin was now a small stream. On the desk where I’d left it, my laptop sat in a puddle. A new laptop, new to me at any rate. A sleek, elegant ThinkPad, bought for $950 loonies from eBay Canada four weeks ago. I loved it already, fussing around the desktop like a Fifties bride in a tract house. I’d dragged the toolbar up to the right hand side, where I like it and nobody else seems able to bear it. I’d downloaded CuteFTP, CD-burning software, overrated Mozilla, other bits and pixels. I’d restored all the photos and documents that have languished in storage on my server for a year. I made neat manila folders and filed my new life. For a vagrant who forever leans a backpack against a borrowed couch, it was home.

And then the roof leaked.

The screen flickered bravely. Feck. Feck. Feck. I turned it off, and shook the keyboard out. A cupful of water dribbled onto the desk, followed by some gunge. There was a smell of something that shouldn’t have been fried. I turned it on again, foolishly, cooking the motherboard. The hard drive cranked painfully. The résumé I’d been working on appeared, then slowly faded out as the screen went dark. No credits.

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have an audience. So I turned it upside down and left it to dry. I paced around the one-room cabin, unable to think of something to do without my ThinkPad. It was the middle of the day, too early to knock off with a novel, too wet to go out, too phoneless to call someone. I was out of wine. I didn’t feel like studying the Ontario Driver’s Handbook. Bitterly, I tallied all the work I’d lost, all the software I’d patiently downloaded on a glacial connection, the $950 just forked out. I shook the laptop, and drops hit the wall.

Tim called IBM from the office because I was too deep in sullen mourning to be what the Americans call ‘proactive’. Stupid woods. Stupid cabin. Stupid rain. They answered immediately, as if his call really was important to them.
It stopped working, he said, lying by omission as smoothly as a Jesuit. I turn it on, I hear some hard drive activity, the three green buttons light up, but the screen is dead. He did not say, the owner lives in a condemned log cabin from the 1920s and didn’t realise there was a hole in the roof until five gallons of rainwater almost washed Model T409773 into Lake Superior. The nice man offered to send somebody out to pick it up. Tim explained that the service agent would have to paddle across the bay to reach me. They agreed that I would drop it off in town, an hour and a half south down the highway.

That was Wednesday. It showed some signs of life on Thursday morning, but was still gravely ill. It’s in Sault Sainte Marie now, wearing a paper gown, and might be discharged by the end of next week if I’m lucky. Today I finally finagled the loan of a nine-year-old Tecra. The keyboard has to be bashed as if I were spewing an Ann Coulter fembot rant, and my wrists hurt already. Stupid cabin. Stupid rain.