The Wind in the Pines, Part I 3 comments

By Brian Volck

As I write this, I’m wrapping up two weeks of work on the Navajo Reservation, the place I once lived, where my sons where born, where my love for the desert is rooted like a cottonwood on a riverbank. The time has been a liturgy of remembrance: catching up with old friends as I walk the hospital hallways, revisiting places I haven’t seen in years, and walking a friend’s dog on the abandoned town airstrip while I take in the familiar and—for my heart—endlessly nurturing landscape.

Just before I traveled here from Cincinnati, a friend emailed about her recent trip to Finland where, among other things, she and her husband enjoyed a sauna. Her short account was funny and spot-on in detail, down to the intense, wood-fired heat punctuated by headlong leaps into frigid lake water. She had other wonderful things to say about her travels, but I stopped short at her sauna story, which conjured unexpectedly vivid memories of another landscape. The pixels and characters before me dissolved in my mind into images of Canadian lakeshores, the feel of a canoe on dark water, the slap of waves on a rocky spit.

The summer between my first and second years of medical school, I needed to get as far from the medical-industrial complex’s madness as possible, and an island camp in western Ontario worked for me. Like so many others since, this was a working vacation. I’d landed a volunteer position as counselor for a Jesuit-affiliated program for "abandoned, abused and neglected boys." These were ten-to-fourteen-year-olds from various US cities, living most of the year in “non-institutional, family-like homes,” with adult counselors, and gathering each summer for a wilderness adventure.

My job was to be a steadying influence—for which I had little talent or training—while leading week-long canoe trips in a labyrinth of interconnected lakes or guiding kids through a ropes course on the back half of the island. The goal was to peel away some of the emotional armor most of the boys acquired through years of unhappy, sometimes brutal, experience and to help them learn to work as a team, perhaps even to trust one another in common pursuits. Days were full and delightfully exhausting, and the boys had an early bedtime, affording the counselors enough peace to read, write in journals, shiver in the mystery of the Northern Lights or listen for wolves singing on the mainland.

When I wasn’t doing something which qualified as “counseling,” there was plenty of other work to keep me occupied. Among other tasks, I helped construct a wooden diving dock. Planks were nailed to 2x6 boards strung between supporting log cribs, the bottoms of which rested on the lake bed. While filling the cribs with stones, two split near the base, setting everything askew. To repair the damage, I and a few others dove to the rocky lake bed, down where the light flickered, and shored up the crib bottoms with flat, heavy stones. We wore swim masks without snorkels, but no other diving equipment. The water was tea-brown and painfully cold, the winter ice that covered the lake having held until May. In the watery twilight, fingers stiffened and muscles ached. We worked for ten minutes or so at a time before pausing to warm up in the July sun, then set again to our underwater task.

What made those chilling days tolerable was the sauna waiting at the end of the workday. We stoked the oven with logs till the metal pinged and creaked, then sat naked in the close, baking air, soaking up heat. When ready, we dashed to the end of a short nearby pier and leap into the very same water we’d shivered in that afternoon. Then we ran back to the sauna and do it all over again. The extremes were exhilarating, certain evidence we were alive in the moment.

In the time between sauna and supper, I dressed and found an isolated stretch of shoreline. The pleasurable ache from physical labor and a bone-warming sauna afterglow enlarged my senses. I sat without speaking, fully attentive to the wind in the pines. The wind’s voice was omnipresent that summer, if not in fact, then at least in my memory. Often it was quiet, rising and falling like a sleeping lover’s breath. Sometimes it grew ominous, announcing an approaching storm; or demanding, as the night I awoke while camping on a tiny island, gusts flapping the tent sides like pennants, and I rushed barefoot to the shore, securing our beached canoes from being blown away and lost.

Those panicked moments ought to have left psychic scars, but when I remember the wind that summer, I feel peace, not terror. I’ve canoed in Ontario lakes since, each visit a return to that sublimity. “Every angel is terrible,” Rilke warns, though scriptural angels generally announce their arrival with words of peace and admonitions against fear. So does the risen Christ. So, I take it, does the Spirit, albeit wordlessly.

I learned many lasting things in that summer during medical school, including how to portage a canoe alone and how to properly stoke a wood-fired sauna. Before I fell in love with desert silence, I learned to love the wind stirring dark green pines on a rocky Canadian lakeshore. I still do.