That Cabin on the Lake

Here's what I want: a room with a nice-sized window, a window that looks out on something interesting. My first preference is for that "something interesting" to be a lake. I'd settle for trees, a mountain... pretty much anything other than what I have now, which is the side of our garage and a large, ungainly structure that most visitors ask about. (I'll save you the trouble. It's a cheese press, a fairly old wooden contraption that was used to press the water out of curds.) Since I'm still pretty sure I'm not going to hit the lottery, it's a good bet that it will not happen, and the "writing room of my dreams" will remain in my dreams.

I did stay in a room just like that once, and the last time I was there coincided with a nasty throat infection, which is probably why I'm thinking about it now. It was a house on lake Cayuga, on the eastern shore, so it got the sunsets on the lake. The picture window in the living room was vast, and the view was panoramic. Unfortunately, in those days I was a musician, a bass player, a composer. But not a writer. So it never even occurred to me to sit down and write something, although I'm not sure what I would have come up with. As far as I can tell, my fever spiked around 102, which is pretty high for me. It was accompanied by these weird hallucinations I tend to have when my temperature goes up, something involving textures and sizes.

Then, of course, there was the fact that the friend I was staying with had informed me that she did not want to marry me, which turned out to be the final nail in our relationship. Bad trip, but lovely view. I think life is a little like that, sometimes, but there are other times when the trip is just as lousy as the view. But if you really want to know how bad life can be, you need to live with (or be) a teenager. Things seem to be either utterly bleak or absolutely wonderful for the particular teenager who lives here, and it seems to me that things were like that for me, as well, back in the dark ages of my youth.

But I digress, and as much as digression is the entire point of this post, I wanted to mention the train tracks in front of the house on the lake that my friend was renting lo those many years ago. They were almost like typical train tracks in that they stretched off into the distance, but the fascinating part was the fact that the tracks were not, at any point the eye could detect, parallel. Each track twisted and curved according to some bizarre internal plan, but each track twisted and turned independently of the other. And when the train came along -- freight trains, with a hundred or so cars -- each car would bob and weave and lean so far in either direction that you were certain it would tumble off the tracks. This would have been a Bad Thing, since the front porch of the house was within spitting distance of the tracks. Fresh produce, anyone?