The Hack family arrived yesterday. We met them after our hiking swimming & canoeing were over, to end the day in playing. Today we took the shore trail out to Indian Point— named for the Native Americans mentioned in yesterday’s post— where there’s supposed to be a foundation for their building somewhere, but by the time we got there we’d spent so much time picking blueberries that no one had the energy to look for an old foundation. It was beautiful the whole way, with fog rolling over land, loons looning in the lake, and blueberries hiding in the bushes.

At Indian Point, Iris found a painted stone against a red pine. The front reads “Just Breathe” and the back is tagged #smileforpaigey. Heather and her friend Laura, who had phones and phone service and whatnot (out of Canada I am out of service, so it was truly a vacation!) looked up the tag. It is sad. Here at home, looking again, had I known that 14-year-old Paige died only just over two months ago, I would not have let Iris move the stone. But I did let her move it, on the condition that we would bring it to other beautiful places. Someday, Iris will leave it somewhere for someone else to find and carry on.

After returning home loaded with blueberries, we ate lunch and headed back out on the lake in a canoe. The lake was mirror-flat. It was just beautiful. Akiva paddled at the prow of the canoe for nearly two hours of floating and playing on a tiny almost-island in the middle of the lake. Iris was still tired from paddling yesterday & didn’t feel the need to share. I didn’t take any photos, tho. I didn’t want my camera in a canoe, no matter how flat the lake. Then the kids played volleyball-soccer, we all ate dinner, the kids roasted their first-ever marshmallow on a campfire, and we all crawled happily into our big, sandy bed.

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Here’s an article explaining why I don’t take a camera on a canoe, published on August 13th, 2001 in the Fairbanks News Miner. This is from the Sitka Sentinel, which has a better archive. Silly us! The people told us they weren’t going to tell the press, but they must have chatted about it to enough friends for it to finally come out nearly two weeks later. I wonder who told them that we’d headed down to Haines.