MY FATHER came of age in 1947, that unusual year, when he was a very young bandleader in a small Iowa town. That year he began collecting the books he has come to call, by convention, “the library,” as if it were a Turkish-carpeted chamber with a dinner gong and a superannuated attendant instead of a wall in the hall where we keep the books. “The library” was and still is a ragtag collection. It includes my mother’s nursing texts, limp and alarming, an enormous variety of do-it-yourself volumes, and a few books, circa 1947, which must have been acquired by my father and mother with the trepidation all young bookbuyers feel. If you are not accustomed to spending money on books, the weight of choosing just one from the whole world of letters—especially in a time before paperbacks became popular—is almost too much to bear.
Cache Lake Country, which was published in that year 1947, may have been the first real book my dad ever bought. By real I mean that it was not an assigned college text but had been purchased out of simple desire to own a book for itself. By real I also mean that it cost four dollars, plenty at the time, and came with a dust jacket and illustrations. But if Cache Lake Country was the first real book my dad every bought, it was an amazing choice because it is also the best book ever written. So I thought when I first found it in “the library” and read it as a boy. So I have thought upon re-reading it every year since. So I think now, having just closed its covers again.
Cache Lake Country is one of two books (Spindrift is the other) written by John J. Rowlands. Nothing in Cache Lake Country will tell you that when he wrote it (it began as a “Cache Lake Letter” distributed to friends), Rowlands was the public relations officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You would never guess that he had been a widely respected journalist with the United Press Association in New York and Boston or that he had been “the first person to reach Vice President Calvin Coolidge in Vermont with the news that President Warren G. Harding had died.” What you learn about Rowlands in Cache Lake Country is far more vital and concerns an earlier era—the years in the early part of this century when Rowlands worked as a miner, prospector, surveyor, and timber cruiser in northern Ontario, just south of Hudson Bay.
It is as a timber scout that he chooses to appear in Cache Lake Country. One September dawn, working his canoe up “a chain of lakes and streams,” he paddled into the middle of an unknown lake and stopped to rest “like a fellow will when he sees new water for the first time.” But this was old water too, for as he sat there motionless in his canoe, Rowlands felt it all come back to him: “as the sun cleared the hills and turned the black water into shining gold, I remembered. This was the lake of my boyhood dreams!” Though time was pressing him upstream, Rowlands paddled ashore and brewed a pail of tea under a tall white pine that reminded him, as everything about this lake did, of a millpond he had camped beside as a child. “I knew then,” he says, “that I had found the place I had always wanted to be.”
To have found the place you always wanted to be: that is the secret of this book. Rowlands tells us how he happened to get to Cache Lake, but he wisely never tells us how he happened to leave. (We have only MIT’s word that he did.) And it is the perfect glory of Cache Lake Country that reading it for the first time (or for the first time in a year) is like paddling out of the narrows onto a small, open lake bordered by white pines and hemlock—moose at browse in the weedbeds along one shore, a loon calling across the ripples—and pausing “like a fellow will,” pausing for an entire year. In Cache Lake Country the months pass slowly one by one, beginning in the snows of January and ending in the snows of December, while with his two good friends—Chief Tibeash, an aging Cree Indian, and Henry B. Kane, the book’s illustrator, both living on nearby lakes—Rowlands guides the reader through a year in the life of the north woods.
Let me tell you what I learned from this. I learned that nature works with reason, and though its reasons are often harsh, they are just as often beneficent. “In January,” Rowlands writes, “we generally have a thaw that reminds us of a spell of April weather, which is to make sure that the water is spread around fairly” (29). I learned that real danger, the source of real fear, can be understated without minimizing it. “If you get snow blindness when you’re alone on the trail you’re in a fix and no mistake” (38). I learned that it is delicate business comparing what is easy with what is hard. “If you have common sense . . .” Rowlands says, “you don’t often get into trouble, and every time you do get into trouble you learn something about common sense the hard way” (47). I learned that if you lived in the north woods you would want to be able to cook and sew and garden as well as fish and hunt and sharpen an axe.
And in this book I also had what I consider my first real contact with a culture not my own—that is, with the Cree. In Chief Tibeash, Rowlands found a sagacious northwoods tutor, and he passes along to his reader every lesson that he can. From Tibeash I learned that in most of the matters that were important to me as a boy (if only in imagination)—the way you paddle a canoe, for instance, the track your footsteps make, the respect you show for game, your ability to read “the real meaning of a newly bent blade of grass, a broken twig, or water slowly oozing into a hoofprint in the mud”—there was no higher praise than to be taken for an Indian. The Boy Scouts had tried to teach me all of this, but Rowlands and Tibeash did it without the condescension or the treacle.
As you will be able to tell at a glance from Henry Kane’s illustrations, this is a work brimming with woodcraft. With patience you can learn from its pages how to make a rabbitskin robe or an Indian drum, build an iceboat or smoke a fish, pack for a week’s canoe trip or weather a blizzard in the open. But there is a catch to all this. Those two young men, Jim Rowlands and Hank Kane (not to mention Tibeash), were possessed by a demonic ingenuity. What they couldn’t do with a length of quarter-inch brass pipe and a long winter can’t be done. And they lived in an era of canvas and wood. Goods were shipped in barrels that could be turned into reading chairs. Friends came to fish and left behind fencing foils, which could be filed into bait rods. Theirs is a strange old-fashioned world filled with unfamiliar things they just happen to have on hand, substances like “sugar of lead,” for instance. Theirs is a place where time stretched out far enough on all sides that a man, for that is how Rowlands puts it, could turn himself to good use in just about every direction. As for women in Cache Lake Country, they come in the form of sisters and grandmothers. “Wherever men boil water” is how Rowlands begins some talk about the sound of teakettles.
You will not have read this book properly unless you mess up the house trying some of the projects Rowlands describes. Start easy. Fry up some leftover oatmeal. The recipe is on page 30. Sew yourself some moccasins out of an old blanket (page 34). Make a bird’s Christmas tree, the way Rowlands does on page 255. When summer comes and the grass is high, go out early one morning, twist a grassblade into a tiny loop, and capture a drop of dew with it. Use it as a microscope, like the illustration on page 121. Dig a bean hole in the backyard (188). Work your way up to the iceboat and the outdoor bake oven. Work your way up to a life in the woods.
Everyone who reads this book will eventually wonder where Cache Lake really lies. There is only one good hint. It comes on page 140. To make a permanent magnet you first have to poke a steel bar into the earth at an angle that matches your latitude. To make a permanent magnet at Cache Lake you use 47 degrees. That knowledge is as close as I want to get to looking for that quiet lake with a solitary white pine on its edge and a small log cabin on a knoll. Instead, I will go on reading this book every year until the years are taken from me, grateful that by some strange quirk my father came upon it when he was twenty-one and decided that of all the books a man might buy in this world, this was the one he would start with. Cache Lake lies before you right this minute in Rowlands’ beautiful, unassuming prose, in Henry Kane’s exquisite illustrations. If you want to search for its actual vicinity, just walk across Canada on the 47th parallel. Take this book along. You will appreciate the advice it has to offer.
—Verlyn Klinkenborg