Dear Emily,

I went up north this last week, up to the boundary country, and I wanted to write to you about it.

It hasn’t changed much, even in thirty years. It was cool (doubtless outright cold at night) and there was some snow in the forest, though it was scarcely November. But I remember the water being almost warm in September, swimming naked with you.

What the hell were we—was I, I suppose, really—thinking, that we could live there?

There’s a blacktop road to the lake now and I canoed out to the island. The island’s even smaller than I remembered and I didn’t have much trouble finding the site. There isn’t much evidence we were ever there, and I don’t think anyone’s been there since. I could just make out the fire pit, not much more than a depression in the rock with some rusted metal in it, which I suppose we left there. I looked for some of the caches we made. I remember that I lined those things with a ton of rocks, but I couldn’t find even one of them. I suppose the ground just swallowed them up.

You’d be glad to know the tree’s still there, half rotted away and fallen in on itself where the hollow was. I don’t suppose anything larger than a squirrel could sleep there now. But that’s what thirty years of snow and decay will do, I suppose.

After that, I canoed back to the car and tried to find the place where the house was, and by dumb luck I found it. There’s a nice road in there now, but the cabin is the same. The name on the driveway is the same too—Jorgensen. I suppose it’s the same family, but a different generation. I think we figured the owners must have been in their fifties when we were there, which makes them eighty-plus now, in nursing homes or dead. So it must be their children that have the place now. I suppose they must all be about fifty now too. I’ve only got two years left until I’m there myself.

I like to imagine you happy and prosperous out in California. I imagine you married to somebody, too, and maybe playing tennis all day, or maybe designing computer chips. But I imagine you with children, pretty much grown.

My dad is still living out there. My mom’s just the same, living in the apartment. I’ve got two children, Mark and Jenny, aged twenty and eighteen and both in college. Their mother and I split up some years ago, and I haven’t remarried.

I love my children very much, but I guess the great discovery of my middle age is how inadequately I do so. I always feel that I have failed them, but I can’t put my finger on how I have failed them, and that vague sense of omission, of dereliction, haunts me these days. To look at and listen to my kids, you wouldn’t think they felt that way. They are cool as cucumbers, and I suppose are resigned to my inadequacies. But then I almost think they—and all their friends—were born to disappointment, to resignation at everything this world could throw at them, incapable of surprise.

Everyone I know feels this way about their kids, faults them for their lack of idealism, of engagement with everything. They don’t feel that imperative to make a better world; they are content to take life as it comes and make do. But maybe that is their only option. Maybe when we were young, we, their parents, took history and idealism and used them up, sucked them dry. Or just somehow sullied them. And maybe what I feel bad about is having stolen those things from them. Then blamed them for not having the stuff we spent up in our “misspent” youth. Does that make any sense?

But what we did—I suppose it was a crazy thing, though it seemed so necessary at the time. Now I can’t put my finger on the feeling anymore. The fear of the draft and the cops and some sort of impending totalitarian state, kind of shaggy and half-formed, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Maybe to understand it you just had to be there. I guess in a way you’re still there, where I left you.

I wish you could write me back. Even now, after all this time, I find myself still wanting to know everything about you.

All my best wishes and, yes, even now, love,

Bill