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I was working at a wilderness park on the wild east shore of Lake Superior. Six of us staffers spread ourselves across bunkhouses at the site of an old tourist lodge called Beaver Rock. We had the fine sand beach all to ourselves.
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Me, I took over a tiny cedar log cabin that had been derelict for decades. The original lodge people had dubbed it the Pilot House. Evicting the varmint squatters, patching holes, painting and varnishing ate up all my off hours for two straight weeks.
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In the 1930s, the Pilot House was the office and quiet hideaway of the Beaver Rock's founder, Earl Devlin. Served much the same purpose for me. One small concession to modernity was internet connectivity via flaky 14.4 kbps dialup.
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The cabin's centerpiece was a big fireplace constructed from fieldstones of 2-billion-year-old Canadian Shield granite. The mantel was a simple hand-planed white pine log.
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As the summer wore on, I built a deck out of salvaged amphitheater benches. It served as kitchen, dining room, parlour, and in a pinch, dancefloor (I had the only decent stereo for miles around).
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On weekends, to get away from it all, I'd paddle my canoe two coves down to another little cabin, off the grid and inaccessible by road, where the scene was even more heartbreakingly pretty than the Beaver Rock.
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But our home bay had a certain aesthetic staying power. Something about the sweep of craggy shoreline it presented, and the big sky over the broad beach.
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Lake Superior skies are kinetic, you can lie on your back and watch them like television. Good thing, cause we had no television.
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It made for this ephemeral play of light on the rock and trees, filtered sunbeams searching and pulsing and occasionally stretching the gamut of natural color to spectral neighborhoods you thought it couldn't go.
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I can't think of too many places that reward solitude like those last unspoiled bits of the Lake Superior coastline. It'll bring out monastic impulses in people who never knew they had them.
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So the summer passed, and the birches and maples turned. Then on the last day of September, snow fell from a gunmetal sky, and the lake steamed like a soup pot.
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I did trek back north once that December to see Beaver Rock as it hunkered down cold and alone (but not forlorn).