TYPE: REFLECTION / FIELD NOTE

DATE / LOCATION:
Saturday, May 23, 2026 — 6:20 PM. Memorial Day weekend. The Upper Watch, The Place.

This page belongs to the COLUMN record because the thought began in weather: a cloudy day, a southeast wind, and the sense that change was coming before anything else had arrived.

It had been cloudy all day at the Upper Watch.

By early evening the wind was still coming out of the southeast, and that usually means something is changing. Not here yet, maybe, but on its way. The water knew it. The trees knew it. The sky had that held-breath feeling.

A guide boat slipped across the opening below the Upper Watch while I sat there watching. He was fly casting as he went, and the southeast breeze seemed to carry him more than he carried himself. It was a clean little scene — the kind that passes quickly and then stays longer than it should.

Sitting there, I started thinking about past, present, future, and home.

I have often thought of my life as a pendulum. One extreme, then back through center, then another extreme somewhere off to the other side. Back and forth. Hard swing, return, correction, overcorrection. But where I am now feels different.

It feels like the pendulum is hanging straight down.

Six o’clock.

Not stopped exactly. Just vertical. The weight is still there. The history is still there. The motion that brought it here is still there. But for the moment, it hangs.

And I know enough now to understand that I will likely be gone before it swings hard toward another extreme.

A pendulum never swings in empty air. Other lives stand near it.

That thought led me outward, away from my own little lifespan and into geologic time. The land has been swinging far longer than I have. Ice, water, forest, fire, flood, beaver, drought, people, cutting, drowning, recovery. The pendulum was moving long before I had a name for it.

There was Indigenous presence here before us. Use of the land. Knowledge of the land. Change, but not the kind we brought later. Then the swing widened. Settlement, extraction, roads, dams, camps, machines, population, appetite. Human pressure accelerated the motion.

We did not start change.

But we sped it up.

Now I look at the place and wonder if it is returning from one of those extremes. Maybe not to what it was. Maybe never that. But toward some quieter center. Some temporary vertical. Some brief six o’clock position before the next force takes hold.

Recovery is not peace. It is only another part of the swing.

There will be another disruption. It might be natural. It might be human-made. It might already be forming somewhere beyond the trees, like weather moving in on a southeast wind.

But for a while, this evening, the pond held still enough for the thought to land.

Clouds overhead.

Wind from the southeast.

A guide boat crossing the opening.

The pendulum hanging at six.