It's a bit chilly here today, if only by virtue of a stiff wind coming in off the lake. The sky is clear, though, and, as this is my last planned day here (although probably not my last, all told, but I'll get to that), I'm going to take a very long walk. There are small groups of birds I haven't seen before around today, but they haven't gotten close enough for me to make a positive identification. They're a mottled brown, very big, with sort of a striated brown-and-white underside. I want to posit a guess that they're hawks of some kind (maybe chicken hawks?) but I have no idea.
I don't want to leave. Sure, I do want to, because I miss my wife and my house and Colorado and my friends, but I just love it up here: the expanse, the stillness, the fact that I actually need to use my eyes and ears and hands here. It's so trite, the whole "getting back to the land" thing, but this is something I needed to do. The Smiths are up again this weekend, which has made for some needed company, but I'm again looking forward to having the whole lake to myself when they leave today, to go for a night walk and have the only lights I see be the ones at the cabin.
Two chapters in two days, and I'm writing the climax of the book now. One of them needs serious reworking, but if I've learned something about writing up here, it's that the work is never, ever going to suffer from rewrite. And ha. Just writing this blog post, I figured out how I'm going to do it. The book is almost done; I've got my climax, my denouement, and then the no-doubt long process of revising the whole damn thing, to say nothing of selling it.
I did here what I came to do, and although I don't really want to rid myself of my solitude and the Zen-Master-with-Schmidt's-novelist thing I've got doing for me, it's time to go home. It occurred to me that being up here did the exact opposite of what everyone was warning me about; instead of becoming a crazy shut-in, I think I'm a lot saner than I was before. And instead of this shredding my relationships, I think it's actually strengthened them. I'm a lot nicer than I used to be, I think, if only by necessity (you never know if someone you're addressing might be a bear in disguise). So I'll pack up and go either tomorrow or the day after, and devote a full day to cleaning this place to a point where my mother won't flay me alive upon seeing it.
I've still got about six pounds of meat to eat. Today, if the wind dies down, I'll fire up the grill and make burgers with the rest of my ground beef and my bacon, and maybe, just maybe, I can put together one last batch of jerky to bring home with me—although I'll need to hide it somewhere in my luggage to stop myself from eating it all on the way home.
I'll post again before I go, and again when I get home, but this is it: Day 30.
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