Maine summer vacation

You sit in a boat on a smoky evening 16 miles from the Quebec border and across from you is your 12-year-old daughter and in the stillness – in the deep, unfathomable stillness of dusk – the strongest urge you have ever felt is to shake her by the shoulders and say:

“Remember, always, that you once wore a blue windbreaker on an uninhabited lake in the northern reaches of the State of Maine, and the water was blue and the mountains were blue and the sky itself was four shades of blue, yes, four shades of blue.”

For 200 years – no, longer than that – the tales told from Attean Lake have been of trees so plentiful that the log drives clogged the rivers; of moose so common that its meat was exchanged for flour; and of a sense of isolation so profound that a settler in 1820 could write of living “53 miles from any inhabitant.”

A lot of that has changed, of course, but the trees, the moose and the isolation are still here, and so is the feeling that this is a special place, set apart, left alone. And because it is so different – so different a pace and so different a place – we took to the woods here this summer.

I’ve always thought the question people ask each other when they meet for the first time back in the city – “What do you do?” – ends two words early. Try the question this way instead, and you will learn a great deal more: “What do you do on vacation?”

Our answer is always simple, always the same. We seek the smell of bug spray and chamois. And so from the frosty lakes of the northern frontier of Maine to the storied mountain peaks of New Hampshire we hiked, and paddled, and swam, and had too many ice cream cones and too many cups of chowder, and of course returned to the office too soon, far too soon.

Far too soon, because Elizabeth is 12 already and Nattie is 8, and they won’t be kids forever and we won’t have the pleasure – no, the privilege, for that is what it is – of showing them the things we love and finding that they have come, either from habit or habit of mind, to love them, too.

One of the things we love – all of us – is the feeling we have when, though sore from strain, though weighed down by a pack, though weary with fatigue, we stride across a White Mountains ridgeline only a few feet, or so it feels, from the roof of the world. In the middle of a dense paragraph in the middle of a dense travel account written in 1863 by Theodore Winthrop, a friend of the painter Frederick E. Church, there appears a single sentence about the New England hills and a simple truth: “No one who has not seen mountains knows how far the eye can reach.”

But that isn’t the only appeal of trails that lead to the high-altitude huts maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club. There you find it thoroughly unremarkable when two people with bandannas on their heads and gashes on their legs ask, “Did you happen to see a tall, smelly guy with a beard on this trail?” As a matter of fact, we did. Then again, you do not get startled when, in the middle of a 7.1-mile leg of a three-day hike, your youngest daughter offers this aside: “This is a very enjoyable walk.”

It is indeed a very enjoyable walk, both for the setting and for the company. Years ago, when they were tiny hikers, we gave the girls trail names: One was Pathfinder. The other was Rockclimber. They have remained true to their names. And they have learned the lessons of the trail – lessons, of course, that do not apply only to the trail:

Lean only on trees with deep roots. Rocks that look secure sometimes shift under pressure. The forecasts of experts often are wrong.

Plus they also learned some specialized knowledge, like the fact that if you are going to eat a snowshoe hare in winter, it will very likely taste like pine bark.

But most of all they will come back from the lake and from the hills with tales of walking above the treeline in 65 mph gusts and howling as loud as the wind itself; and with stories about the man who shared the bunk room with us overlooking the Pemigewasset Wilderness and snored so loudly that he kept 17 other people awake all night; and with memories of the huts and hills like the one I found scrawled in the old 1963 guest book tucked away on the shelves of the Galehead Hut, left anonymously but unforgettably: “Careless and timeless, this roomful of old echoes.”

And so I have an answer this year when, back at the office, someone asks: What did you do on your summer vacation? I walked the hills. I held the hand of a scared little hiker on a blowy summit. I wondered where the time went. I sat in a boat on a smoky evening 16 miles from the Quebec border and there, on an uninhabited lake in the northern reaches of the State of Maine, the water was blue and the mountains were blue and the sky itself was four shades of blue, yes, four shades of blue.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.