Share Your Remembrances of the Lake

 Jim Howard of Jim's Bay  by Marsha Haigh Arend

Jim was a loner, a hermit. He lived in the little bay down the hill from our camp for a long time, fishing, trapping, and just eking by. I just knew him as Jim and his home was the bay the bore his name.

The land he lived on was not his own. My father found out it was going up for sale for back taxes and made a small bid. He got the land but never told Jim. Jim’s world was a one room cabin, and he existed oblivious to regulations, taxation assessments, and pretty much everything else that had anything to do with civilization. He lived off the land in his solitary way and looked forward to a little red fox who used to come visit occasionally.

He had a distant relative named Minnie who lived up Fish Creek. I remember visiting her once with my father, and recall the old wallpaper with soot stained on it.  All the adults sat at the kitchen table. Nobody said a lot. Everybody had Jim in common, and that seemed enough.

I would walk down the path from our camp to see Jim in the summer. He told my father when I was small, that I was the first baby he had seen in well over 20 years. Jim and I hung out but I don’t remember talking. The quiet seemed to work for both of us.

Dad told me that he knew Jim had no money. He literally lived off the land by selling what he caught and trapped, so my dad decided one day to order him a pair of L.L. Bean boots. He said he never saw him wear them. Oh well. It’s hard to decide what is important to a man.

When I was about eight, we went up for the summer and Dad told me Jim had died. He had late-stage colon cancer and the small rowboat he used to tie to the doorknob of his cabin during high water in the spring was the only way he could get off the point. We learned from Minnie that when he was too sick to take care of himself, he launched his rowboat and rowed across the water to Minnie’s house. It’s about two miles by water. Minnie said it took Jim eight hours to get there and he died shortly after his arrival.

Dad has always talked about Jim not so much with regrets, as with sadness. He has told me a great number of stories about Jim who apparently speared a Muskie out of season, knew it was a world record at the time at 105 pounds, but knew he had to keep silent with his exciting secret. He lived his whole life under the radar in that one room cabin in his bay. I still call it Jim’s Bay and so does my daughter who also knows the stories from Dad that I have passed down to her. I think a part of him is there mingling with the water, and the earth and the hillside that encloses his little cabin. The walls have been replaced, but the foundation is still there and when I walk down the path I feel his imprint on the land remains.  At some point it becomes impossible to separate the people from the land they love - they just belong together.

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