Gus’s place. Lake Megunticook, Maine. 1969.

I grew up in Center City Philadelphia for the first dozen years of my life. Row homes. Concrete sidewalks with London Plane trees neatly planted. My wilderness was a small urban backyard, and the nearby 5-acre public park, Washington Square. 

Nature came in small, contained doses until the summer when I was nine. My parents packed us into the station wagon – my brother Peter, two years older; my sister Rebecca, just three, still a toddler. We headed north, up the Eastern seaboard, the car loaded with a month’s worth of clothing.

I don’t remember much of the drive, but I remember the arrival. We left paved roads for gravel, following a driveway that wound through actual woods. At the end: a rustic cabin, lakeside, with its own canoe and a small motorboat. Somewhere in a place called “Maine.”

In the mornings, spiderwebs hung under the eaves, large enough – it seemed – to capture a small child. My brother and I, bundled in life jackets, feeling like urban astronauts, learned to paddle that canoe. We fished from the rocks along the shore with worms we dug from the dirt, applying the only woods skill we city boys possessed. 

One day, maybe a week in, my brother claimed he knew a shortcut to the canoe dock. We headed into the trees, confident. Within minutes, we were lost. We couldn’t see the cabin. Couldn’t see the lake. The forest had swallowed us whole.

Then, we heard a rustling nearby. “Bears?” one of us whispered. “Mom!!!???” the other yelled.

“Yes?” came my mother’s voice from the clothesline, not fifty yards away. “What is it?”

 

Another day, we were all walking along paths in the woods, looking for mushrooms that sprouted after an evening’s rain. I spied a fallen log, decomposing back into the forest floor. I kicked it to help it along. Out came hornets, and one flew under my shirt collar and found my chest. My mother took me, trying my best to be brave, back to the cabin, applied ice, and, if I recall correctly, baking soda paste.

 

There was a garbage pit for organic waste not too far from the cabin. Morning chores included dumping the eggshells and orange peels from breakfast. My brother and I spied footprints. “Raccoons,” my dad informed us. One evening, we tried to rig a wildlife camera – this was the film era, mind you. Dad tied one end of a string to orange peels, the other to some sort of shutter trigger.

We never caught anything on film. But in our imagination? We saw them all.

 

Earlier this year, before he shuffled off his mortal coil, I spent time with my father. 98 years old, his memory slipping – doesn’t remember I visited a few days before, can’t recall what was for breakfast. But on his wall hung photos from that summer: me with a frog, my brother with a magnifying glass, and my sister sitting against a rock.

“Dad, where was that cabin in the woods?” I asked.

“You mean Gus’s place?” he said immediately.

“Who was Gus? How’d you find him… There was no VRBO back in 1969!?”

My dad just grimaced, “I have no idea.”

“Where was it?”

Without a pause, he replied, “The cabin was on Lake Megunticook.”

I grabbed my phone, searched. There it was: Camden, Maine. And more memories came up… a day on the beach of nearby Penobscot Bay. A sailing lesson in a Sunfish. A trip to town.

 

It’s interesting what memories remained long after my Dad’s ability to form new ones had faded. The ones from way back. Gus’s place. Lake Megunticook. He remembered my first wasp sting with a hearty chuckle. “The surprised look on your face…”

These days, when I walk in the woods, I steer clear of fallen logs, and when I see a fungus blooming, I’m brought back to that month in Maine. To my first Indian Pipes, ghostly white, emerging after an evening rain. My first real encounter with the intelligence of the forest.

Those raccoons we never photographed? They taught me that some things are better imagined than captured. And the woods shared that the best discoveries happen in the space between getting lost and finding my way.