We had already spent two nights at camp, each morning of which I had vowed to get up and get out on the lake, but late-night card games and the woods' intoxicatingly organic nighttime air conspired to keep me in bed way too long. This morning was our last morning to be had, so I broke through the particularly strong bonds of slumber with which Maine nights always entrap me, dressed silently and gathered my camera. It was 5:00am. Stacy had told me to wake her if I ever succeeded in getting up and going, but a gentle nudge and whisper and the vague grumble and swat that I got in return informed me that she too had the same weakness for Maine night air. I quietly opened the door of the cabin and at first thought all was lost before starting. It was foggy. Not just a little misty, a slight bout of haze; it was pea-soup foggy. As I looked out the cabin door I could see the porch around me, but it was as if the cabin beyond the porch had been wrapped in cold, shimmering gauze. I would be able to see nothing. But knowing it was my last day and my last chance, I decided I'd have to live with it and headed out into the grey/white silence. I'm glad I did; it ended up being a truly sublime experience.
I walked carefully down to the lakeshore, convinced I'd step on twenty snakes before I got there. (Didn't see any.) The fog was palpable; as it swirled I could feel its cold wetness on my cheek and my eyebrows and eyelashes began to gather dew; the upper edge of my field of vision was almost frosty. The lake when I got there was surreal. The dock opened out onto a wall of grey and looked like something out of a Tolkien novel. How many elves and nymphs and dryads were watching me from the fog? How many things more ominous? At any moment I knew a shadow would form out of the unworldly abyss and slowly a huge sailing ship would materialize, or maybe the raised head and neck of the Loch Ness monster. The line between fascination and terror is surprisingly thin.
I set out the kayak and stowed my gear and managed to shove off the beach without getting to drenched. The shore around me dissolved in three feet. It was incredible. I sat there perfectly still, not more the five or ten feet from the beach and dock and could see only absolute whiteness. After a while my eyes adjusted somewhat and I could begin to make out shadowy hits of the nearest trees, but I was in another world and it was transcendental. I must have just sat there for fifteen, twenty minutes, not paddling or moving, just coasting slowly from my initial push-off. I swear I could feel my heart rate slow to a misty crawl and I knew if I were to flail my arms around they would move as though underwater. Everything was white and motionless and deadly silent. 
The Maine woods are peaceful, but they are rarely silent. You might at first think they are, but if you stop and force your ears to truthfully report everything they take it but don't bother letting you know about (ears are deceitful things, making a lot of assumptions on what you do or don't want to pay attention to), you will hear all kinds of background bustle. There are breezes and brushings, black flies are incredibly loud once you hear them, and there are always these sudden loud cracks that no matter how quickly you whip around to see, have no immediate or obvious source, implying something bigger than you might like is sitting off somewhere not too far away, just behind the trees. But this morning, on the lake, there was silence. There had been the initial gurgle of water lapping my kayak bow when I pushed off, but that quickly died away leaving nothing for my ears to latch on to. It was like the difference between turning the sound down on a TV and turning the TV off altogether; you didn't even get the white, electronic background hiss. Until the loon called. 
It was so sudden and so loud that I started and nearly tossed my camera overboard. I had no idea which direction it came from, but it was so loud I figured it had to be sitting on my kayak. I waited for it to call again and it did, and from that call I could tell it wasn't really anywhere close, though I would have been hard-pressed to pin-point its direction of origin. I began to realize how quiet the rest of the world really had been. The loon was a good ways away, I could tell, but the sound echoed and reverberated and carried; it was almost amplified. The world, apart from the loon, was quiet indeed.
I listened to the loon for a while and enjoyed the cold chill on my face and lost my ability to focus on the wall of white whenever I'd look toward the lake center. Eventually I put in the paddle and began to move down the lake, keeping close enough to the shore so that I could make out the trees and rocks. Having something to focus on, my eyes gradually became more adept and I could see a lot further than I thought, but everything was hidden, blue/grey/white. For a half hour or so I followed the coast, when slowly off the opposite side a shape began to materialize and soon, fifty feet away, my friend the loon was looking back at me. (He may have been watching me a lot longer than I was watching him.) We contemplated each other for a few minutes, he never came very close, and soon he melted back into the wall and I didn't see him again. He must have been shy because he didn't call out much more the rest of the time I was on the lake.
I continued around the edge of the lake and eventually found myself at the far end. At the southwest end there is a little island off the shore. The little strait between the island and mainland is fairly shallow, pebbled with occasional granite boulders and dressed with reeds and sticks at funny angles. Beyond the island and the strait the lake opens out again for a little patch that is isolated from the main part of the lake and is especially quiet and tucked away. It was the most beautiful part of the lake by day, and was especially mysterious before daybreak. I paddled about quietly, enjoying the suspense as the boulders unfaded into view and then dissolved again behind me. As I got to the strait I could now see both the island on my left and the shore on my right and I had a feeling of being slightly more established in time and space. It was so mystic that I paused again and let the kayak coast in the strait, relaxed and content, for another five minutes. 
Then, suddenly I heard a crack. It came from just ahead, apparently from the shore side. I quietly put the paddle back in and reoriented the kayak, not moving, but stopping, so I could listen and get my bearings. It wasn't a fluke, again I heard a crack and a rustle and another crack. Something was moving through the brush up ahead. Having a pretty good idea where the sound was coming from I began to slowly make my way in that direction. The crackings and rustlings occasionally stirred up again. Whatever was there was moving, but slowly, with great pauses, as if he too were admiring the fog and the quiet. I was looking at it for a while before I realized it, for it materialized in front of me so slowly that at first it could have been some forest clump or shadow, but it wasn't. It was a good sized moose, complete with rack and beard, and like the loon, he had found me long before I found him. 
He placidly watched me approach, occasionally taking a pace or two. I was afraid he would decide I'd come to close and bolt, so I got as close as I dared, and stopped the kayak and waited. We had a staring contest of sorts. For I don't know how many minutes, the moose and I keep eyes on each other, trying to figure out what the fog had offered us. Eventually the moose concluded I was no threat, but also that I was fairly uninteresting. He slowly and heavily turned around and began to make his way back into the woods. He took his time, occasionally stopping and looking back over his shoulder at me. I couldn't tell if he was inviting me to follow him or warning me not to. I had no intention. He eventually disappeared into the mist with the cracks and rustles echoing across the strait and back from the island. If I hadn't seen him I'd have had a really hard time figuring out where he was. I continued my journey through the strait and into the little southern enclave down to the outlet stream. A couple of times I'd look back at the shore on my right and I'd see glimpses of the moose; he was walking the shoreline roughly in my direction, coming in and out of the trees. Eventually he turned inland and made his way up into the forest, and though I heard him for a while, never saw him again.
The woods looking rather Jurassic,
along with one of L's branch alligators.
Expecting that my kayak adventure had hit its high point I eventually turned around and made my way back up the lake. The sun comes up early in Maine in the summer, and I could tell things were starting to change. While it was still dark and wonderfully dreary down on the water, the upper regions were definitely getting brighter. The tops of the trees were getting much more distinct against the fog and up there the fog was pure white, all hints of grey and blue evaporating. The trees were often fantastic - dragons and dinosaurs that stuck their long necks out from the forest to survey the lake. On one of our day trips L had mentioned that some of the long, spiky sticks poking out from the water at sharp angles looked like alligators, the reflections forming lower jaws to go with the above-water heads. Here, with a benefit of an imaginative mist, they looked all the more so and I appreciated a little better my daughter's penchant for fantasy.
I had circled the lake and returned up the other shore, hearing my loon again, but making no further contact. As I got closer to the camp site I decided to cut through the center of the lake rather than keep to the coast, so I pointed to where I was pretty sure the camp lay and struck out. Soon I was immersed again in the white and figured this must be what pilots feel like when flying through a storm, or what the predestined captain of the Titanic felt like just before feeling that fateful thud. Fortunately in my case the dock, rather than a towering block of ice, emerged from the fog, and my thud was a fully intended beaching.
I walked back to the cabin and found everyone still sound asleep. It was 7:00am, I'd been out for two hours. Stacy woke when I came into our room and I told her about my adventures. She was mournful that she hadn't been able to get up and go with me, and wanted to know if I wanted to go back out. Knowing that magic doesn't take kindly to greediness, I said no, but I agreed to go down with her and set her out on her own expedition. She must have found it as mesmerizing as I did. She was gone for two hours as well.
But the day eventually broke and the fogs miraculously wisped away and by 10:00 everyone was up and about. We had packed up as much as we could the night before, so this morning involved really only dressing the kids, throwing the last things in the suitcases and doing the mandatory top-to-bottom cabin inspection. (They never fail to reveal something that we'd have been kicking ourselves to have lost.) The kids merrily played on the beds and undid our packing as we tried to get organized and loaded up.
Soon we said our goodbyes to our "cabinette" and to the Shepards and hit the road for home. But our immediate destination was not Mimi and Grampy's house. Grampy had made arrangements for a special treat that has become a must-do now anytime we come to Patten - a visit to Mr. Charlie Keeney's pig farm! But that tale will have to wait for another telling.
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