October 2, 2026

For many reasons I always try to make an autumn paddle. In October, Lindbergh Lake called to me more than Flathead Lake. I drove north from Missoula, rolled quietly into the campground at the end of the gravel road and parked under an old fir tree.

It is my habit to look at the water before launching Bluebird. As I assessed the lake from its north shore, I immediately sensed the stillness. I could paddle the length of this lake without a trace of anxiety. I would not have to contend with rolling crests, erratic winds, or the fear of drowning. My mind relaxed into something approaching pure awareness. Energy spent on fear felt available for anything attention might reveal.

As I paddled south along the west shore, I did not hear a single engine, an RV generator, a shed door slamming shut, or a chain saw, only the whir of eight mergansers taking off, two ravens, the squeak of the paddle loom rubbing my left thumb, and the soft clack of the skeg swinging side to side. Ferns in the forest blazed orange; alders stood out against the background of nearly black spruce. Close to shore red-twig dogwoods had already turned bright red. In the shade of a big tree, I found a beaver lodge. I approached slowly, stopped, and sat utterly still until I noticed a line of bubbles coming to the surface––a beaver leaving the lodge. A few minutes later I saw another line rising to the surface and a swirl of sediment as a second beaver swam into the depths away from the massive mound and its underwater litter of pealed alder stems.

Places I love always awaken memories. I remembered first coming to Lindbergh in 1988, not long after an intense fire burned a huge swath of forest; the slope was now covered in bright green larch trees nearly forty years old, a few tips turning into candle flames. I remembered another time this quiet when I paddled with my friend Jeff in the rain. And then there was a night paddle in rough water with Jeanne and Glenn. In a dream-like state I remembered a moonset at dawn, a paddle with my friend John not long before kidney cancer washed him out of the world. I followed this same path with my friend Lee who taught me how to hang food beyond the reach of bears. On the return we stopped to study a miniature garden along a log.

The silent glide of an eagle broke my reverie. The closer I came to the south end of the lake the more eagles I saw. A concentration of these birds, both adult and juvenile, suggested that something very interesting might be happening in the area where the Swan River slides into the lake. I pulled into the mouth of the river, dragged my boat into the meadow grass,

and studied an eagle on a stump about a hundred yards upstream. Suddenly it dawned on me that they were fishing. After a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a swig from my blue bottle, I began to wade upstream. Soon I found the first of a few hundred kokanee salmon, Oncorhynchus nerka, the landlocked version of sockeye salmon. Wherever I found the cleanest gravel I saw lines of fish, males chasing competitors away from smaller females, all with greenish heads and bright red bodies.

In a deeper pool obscured like a flawed telescope lens, I found a densely packed school, impossible to photograph. Aware that I was keeping eagles from their feast, and on the lookout for bears, I walked back downstream to the rest of my lunch and my return paddle into the wind of an approaching high-pressure system.

Well into my eighth decade I thought there is no shame in choosing a calmer body of water. I have nothing left to prove and know better than to brag. As Wendell Berry said in one of his Sabbath poems (1998, VII):

            There is a place you can go

            where you are quiet,

            a place of water and the light

            on the water…

I am wealthy beyond all accounting to know such a place.