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557愛的鼓勵 1訂閱站台

倏忽來去，心中的文字不是我的，是 E. B. White 的 ”Once More to the Lake.”

http://www.moonstar.com/~acpjr/Blackboard/Common/Essays/OnceLake.html

E.B. White
Once More to the Lake (1941)

One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in
Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got
ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms
and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe
with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a
success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place
in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after
summer--always on August 1st for one month. I have since become a
salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the
restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and
the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the
evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few
weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of
bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to
go, for a week’s fishing and to revisit old haunts.

I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose
and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey
over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered
how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot--the coves
and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the
paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have
found it out and I wondered in what other ways it would be
desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places like
that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead
back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of
another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early
mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the
bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods
whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp
were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I
was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the
others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the
canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the
pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle
against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the
cathedral.

The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were
cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming although
the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the
cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the
shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That’s what our family
did. But although it wasn’t wild, it was a fairly large and
undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at
least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.


I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the
shore. But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a
camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I
could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had
been before--I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the
bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the
shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and
therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This
sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It
was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much
stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the
middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or
laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and
suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or
making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss
covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on
the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the
water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any
doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were
a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same,
chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the
boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in
the same places, and under the floor-boards the same freshwater
leavings and debris--the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the
rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday’s catch. We
stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that
came and wells. I lowered the tip of mine into the water,
tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet
away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little
farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of
this dragonfly and the other one--the one that was part of memory. I
looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my
hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t
know which rod I was at the end of.

We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were
mackerel, pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike
manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the
back of the head. When we got back for a swim before lunch, the lake
was exactly where we had left it, the same number of inches from the
dock, and there was only the merest suggestion of a breeze. This
seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its
own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had
not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water. In the
shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old,
were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed
sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school of minnows
swam by, each minnow with its small, individual shadow, doubling the
attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight. Some of the other
campers were in swimming, along the shore, one of them with a cake
of soap, and the water felt thin and clear and insubstantial. Over
the years there had been this person with the cake of soap, this
cultist, and here he was. There had been no years.

Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the
road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track
was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches
of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose
from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed
down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative.
But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way
it lay there in the sun reassured me; the tape had loosened along
the backline, the alleys were green with plantains and other weeds,
and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in
the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and
hunger and emptiness. There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one
was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same
country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the
illusion of it as in a dropped curtain--the waitresses were still
fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference--
they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean
hair.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof
lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and
the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the
background, and the life along the shore was the design, the
cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks
with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white
clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees
leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the
outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir
counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post
cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.
This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat,
wondering whether the newcomers at the camp at the head of the cove
were ”common” or ”nice,” wondering whether it was true that the
people who drove up for Sunday dinner at the farmhouse were turned
away because there wasn’t enough chicken.

It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times
and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving.
There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the
beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the
railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-
laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great
importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in
such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-
mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first
view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished
body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they
saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich
burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in
your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the
bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, no loud wonderful
fuss about trunks.)

Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong now,
really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of
the outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing
that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. In
those other summertimes, all motors were inboard; and when they were
at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an
ingredient of summer sleep. They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder
engines, and some were make-and-break and some were jump-spark, but
they all made a sleepy sound across the lake. The one-lungers
throbbed and fluttered, and the twin-cylinder ones purred and
purred, and that was a quiet sound too. But now the campers all had
outboards. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a
petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the
afterglow lit the water, they whined about one’s ears like
mosquitoes. My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire
was to achieve single-handed mastery over it, and authority, and he
soon learned the trick of choking it a little (but not too much),
and the adjustment of the needle valve. Watching him I would
remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine
with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your
hand if you got really close to it spiritually. Motor boats in those
days didn’t have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting
off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rudder.
But there was a way of reversing them, if you learned the trick, by
cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on the final
dying revolution of the flywheel, so that it would kick back against
compression and begin reversing. Approaching a dock in a strong
following breeze, it was difficult to slow up sufficiently by the
ordinary coasting method, and if a boy felt he had complete mastery
over his motor, he was tempted to keep it running beyond its time
and then reverse it a few feet from the dock. It took a cool nerve,
because if you threw the switch a twentieth of a second too soon you
would catch the flywheel when it still had speed enough to go up
past center, and the boat would leap ahead, charging bull-fashion at
the dock.

We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the
sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and
lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the
long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside
and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep
would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on
the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering
everything, lying in bed in the mornings--the small steamboat that
had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly
she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their
mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar,
and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and
what it had felt like to think about girls then. After breakfast we
would go up to the store and the things were in the same place--the
minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed
over by the youngsters from the boys’ camp, the fig newtons and the
Beeman’s gum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front
of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except
there was more Coca Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and
birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with a bottle of pop
apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt.
We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the
sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the
town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had
trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one
walking in my pants.

One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came
up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long
ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the
electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any
important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene. The
whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and
heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far
away. In mid-afternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of
the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then
the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings
with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the
premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the
bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and
the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward
the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of
light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and
relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating
the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and
the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing
in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the
generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who
waded in carrying an umbrella.

When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He
pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all
through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no
thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and
bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the
small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly
my groin felt the chill of death.