The weekend I went back to the lake

I wrote about a cabin by the lake last September. I almost didn't write that post — it felt almost too precious to put into words, the kind of experience you're not sure you want to give language to in case the language diminishes it. But I did write it, and something I said in it was that I wanted to go back. That the particular silence that lives by that water wasn't something I could replicate anywhere else and I wasn't ready to let it be a one-off.

In April, I went back.

I want to write about what I found there. What was different and what was exactly the same and what the interval between visits turned out to contain.

What I remembered and what I expected

I've thought about that first trip a lot over the winter months. Not obsessively — not every day — but it would surface on certain kinds of evenings. When it was grey and dark at four in the afternoon and the flat felt small, I'd think about the lake and the cabin and the specific quality of the silence there. A silence that isn't actually silent — it's full of water sounds and wind and birds — but that is entirely free of human noise. No traffic. No neighbour's television through the wall. No notifications.

I expected to recapture the feeling. This is, I've learned, always a risky expectation to bring to a return visit. Places don't hold still for you. They carry on being themselves without reference to your memory of them, and sometimes that's disappointing. I tried not to expect too much. I tried to come with a kind of openness — let's see what this is, now, in this season — rather than a template I needed the experience to fit.

I brought more intention this time. A slightly different camp setup — a better sleeping mat, the small camp lamp I'd regretted not having in September, my art journal and the watercolours because I thought the light by the water might be worth trying to put down. A longer playlist. The small birdwatching guide. A better thermos. The accumulated minor wisdom of one previous visit.

What was different

Everything seasonal. In September the trees had still been mostly in leaf but just beginning to turn — that early amber-edged quality, green going warm. In April they were doing the opposite journey: not yet in full leaf, the branches still showing, but with this particular spring quality of new growth that looks almost translucent against the sky. Young leaves are a different green to established ones. Lighter. More luminous. They let the sky through in a way that summer leaves won't.

The water was higher. Spring rain and snowmelt — the lake was fuller and slightly wilder at the edges, where the September version had been still and mirror-flat. This version moved. Small waves that caught the light differently. The whole quality of the place was slightly more awake, less contained.

And I was different. That's the thing about return visits that I hadn't quite accounted for: you're measuring yourself against your previous self as much as the place against your memory of it. September-me was a few months into posting things on the internet and quietly terrified. She had come to the lake alone partly because she needed a reset and partly because the silence was a kind of proof that she could do things by herself. This April-me has nearly a year in. More settled. Less needing to prove. I came to the lake because I wanted to come, not because I needed to run away. That difference — between coming from depletion and coming from choice — is not a small one.

The thing that stayed exactly the same

The silence. That particular silence I wrote about in September. Still there. Still exactly itself.

I arrived in the early afternoon, got set up, made tea in the thermos, and went and sat by the water. And within about twenty minutes the noise in my head — the low-level hum of tasks and plans and the things I'm supposed to be doing — just stopped. Not gradually. More like a tap being turned off. The lake doesn't ask anything of you. It doesn't care what you post or how many people watched it. The water at the edge makes its small sounds. The birds do what they're doing. You are simply a person sitting by water, and that is enough of a thing to be.

I wrote in the art journal that evening by the lamp light. Not a good page — watercolour in near-dark doesn't go well, everything was muddy — but a true one. I wrote the date and the sound of the water and the smell of the air and the fact that I was there and glad.

Standing at the overlook

On the second morning I did the walk to the overlook. In September I'd done it in late afternoon and the valley had been hazy with that early autumn quality, everything still green but slightly dusty. In April, a clear morning — the kind where the light is sharp and the air has an edge to it and everything is very precisely itself.

I stood at the canyon edge in my teal fleece — the one I'd brought as my warm layer, worn open over a thermal, the hood up because there was wind at that height — and looked down at the valley. Fully green now. The kind of green that April makes before May deepens it. The lake visible from up here, catching the morning light. A few clouds moving quickly over the hills across from me.

The sensation I had standing there is hard to name exactly. Small and whole at the same time — those two things simultaneously. Small against the scale of it, the valley and the water and the sky doing their enormous work below and above me. And whole in a way I hadn't expected. Like something that had been slightly scattered had oriented itself while I wasn't paying attention. Standing on a ridge in the wind will do that.

I stood there for probably ten minutes without taking a photograph, which for me is significant. Just looking. Then I took one photograph, one, turned around, and walked back down to the cabin and the thermos and the morning.

What I've decided about solo travel

This is something I keep coming back to and I think I've finally sorted out what I believe. Solo travel — solo anything, really, but travel particularly — is not lonely. It can feel lonely in the run-up to it, in the planning stages, when you tell people you're going somewhere by yourself and watch their faces do the thing where they're deciding whether to express concern. But the thing itself is not lonely. It's something else.

It's the particular company of yourself. Your own rhythms, at their own pace. Stopping to look at things for as long as you want. Eating at a time that makes sense to you. Not having to explain why you want to sit quietly by the water for another hour. The accumulation of small decisions that are entirely yours — the walk you take, the path you choose at the fork, the moment you decide to go back. Those decisions start to tell you things about yourself, which is perhaps the main thing solo travel is for.

I know myself better for having done this twice. The September version of the trip and the April version. Returning somewhere tells you who you've become in the interval. And I liked meeting the April version of myself by that lake. She was doing all right.

The night and the dark

One more thing about the lake I want to put down, because I wrote about it in my paper journal that night and I keep rereading it. The dark out there is different from the dark in the city. It's total. No orange glow on the cloud ceiling, no streetlight seeping under the curtain. Just actual darkness, and inside it the sound of water and occasional wind and once, very late, some animal moving in the trees nearby that I identified as either completely harmless or something I was choosing not to identify.

I lay in my sleeping bag with the lamp off and the small gap in the curtain showing a piece of sky with actual stars in it and felt something I don't often feel in my flat: the sense of being genuinely held by the world. Not separate from it and observing it, but inside it, part of its nighttime machinery. The water, the wind, the animal in the trees, me in the sleeping bag — all of it part of the same system, all of it going about its business in the dark.

I slept better than I have in months. I woke up at five-thirty because the birds started before sunrise and I lay there listening to them before getting up to make tea and watch the light come back over the water. If I could have that every morning I would. I can't, so I hold the memory of it carefully.

The camp setup, the thermos, the journal, the overlook. I'll be back in September. I already know what I want to find when I get there — not the same experience, because you can't step into the same river twice and I don't want to. I want to find out who I am by then and what the lake shows me about her.