An
Adventurer’s Soul
By Brenna Raffe
The first time I read The Boxcar
Children I was in 1st grade. While everyone else was reading Henry
and Mudge and swinging on the tire swing, I was falling madly in love with the
idea of living in the woods; of using a nook behind a waterfall as a
refrigerator and of cooking dinner on the open fire. And now here I am; living
in a city, surrounded by cars and people, where the closest thing to ‘getting
back to nature’ I can come is walking the unattended, overgrown pathway that
cuts between some apartment buildings. This is where I’ve found myself.
Sometimes I feel trapped and sometimes I think if I got any happier my heart
might burst. Everything is fleeting.
This, I think, is the burden of longing for adventure.
I’ve never been sure if an
adventurer’s soul is born or made, but either way, I’ve always know I have one.
Having been born and raised in the same not-that-small-but-small-enough
suburban hometown, I never doubted for a moment that there was something
greater beyond those town lines, state lines, or even country borders. I crave
discovery. But it never used to be for anything overly grand like it is now. It
used to be for the simple discovery of the island in the middle of the lake
that seemed impossibly far away or the desire to save an earthworm from its
impeding doom on the asphalt road; to climb a boulder twice my height and see
for miles or to walk out to where the water drops off all by myself.
As far back
as I can remember my family has spent time each summer at Uncle Joe and Aunt
Sue’s lake house. It’s more of a cabin, really. Forest colored and lined in
full with wood paneling that reverberates the joyous noise of reunion, of
family, of summer, of lives being lived. It’s got a bona fide residential attic
that stored most of our duffle bags, complete with guest rooms separated by
hanging sheets. We ate most of our meals on the screened in porch, listening to
the loons call to each other and taking in the view. Inside, there’s a chill that the fireplace
can never quite beat, and a hammock stung up between two pines paralleling the
drive. It sits on hill that once seemed
like a mountain and if you let your legs succumb to gravity when you ran down
it, there’s just enough lawn to stop before the road. My sister and I used to
race down it.* We used to do a lot of things together at the lake. We still do
a lot of things together. But as all the kids got older, our time became
limited. Weekends were spent on basketball courts and in hotel rooms rather
than in the water and around a campfire.
In those
weekends, before time became a commodity highly sought after, I discovered my
adventurer’s soul. I found her in the dirt we used to play in and the holes we
used to dig in the sand; I found her while we watched the night become
illuminated by the ring of bon fires on the 4th. She was there as I fell asleep in my dad’s
arms watching the fireworks, willing myself not to be scared by the loud booms,
but to take comfort in the arms wrapped around me and the way the
reverberations kind of made my ribs tickle instead. I found her at the camp
store under the lift lid freezer right next to the ice cream and on the road
next to me the first time I got to walk down the road and over the bridge
without the adults. I found her rocking me in the hammock so hard it flipped
over and pushing me the final way on our hike up to the fire tower, straining
for the view and the sense of accomplishment. I found her on the boat ride to
the island, giddy to explore something new. She hid in between the sparse pines
and all around the moss-covered boulders I so boldly used as my playground. She
became the voice inside me that, even when my mother told me to be careful,
that what I was doing was dangerous, let’s me know I’ll be ok in the end. She
taught me to trust myself more than anyone else. In my short 19 years, she’s
become my best friend, my most trusted advisor, and often times the one who
pushes me to go for whatever crazy plan I’ve conjured up. She’s the reason I’ve written this, the
reason I write at all.
So I just
wanted to say thank you. Thank you Canada Lake for giving the loons a place to
live and me a place to wander. Thank you for being a community of adventurer’s
souls and fostering one in me. Thank you for giving me somewhere to run wild
and free and giving me a sense of what coming together really looks like. Thank
you for being the backdrop to reunions that proved strong friendships can’t be
broken and for teaching me thunderstorms are breathtakingly beautiful rather
than ferocious and frightening. Thank you for the inspiration for the setting
of the novel I may never write. Thank you for the ice cream. But most importantly,
thank you for the memories. If I ever get so fed up with the world enough to
fulfill my childhood fantasy of living in an abandoned boxcar, look for me
first on the island. There’s no place I’d rather be.
* At least I think we did. She says I make up most of my
memories. I think my soul knew I wanted to be a writer before my mind did, and
it did me a favor and filed away the small, seemingly inconsequential moments
so I would have them to write about later.
