I took a long weekend on a lake without a plan. This is something I had not done in a year or two and it turned out to be exactly what I needed and I want to recommend it carefully, because the trip works best when you take certain things off the table in advance and most of those things are not obvious.

The lake was a moderately large one in the northern part of the state, the kind of lake that has a cluster of small resorts on its south end, a state park on its north end, and a band of private cabins around the rest of it. I had not been to this particular lake before. I picked it on a Wednesday by drawing a circle of three hours around my house and reading the descriptions of about a dozen possible destinations until one of them sounded right. The cabin I rented was at the smallest of the resorts, a place that had been there since the 1950s and had not been updated except for plumbing, which suited me fine.

How to Pick a Lake Without a Plan

The resort had a small casino attached to the main lodge. This is, as I have noted in earlier entries, increasingly common in this part of the country. The land is held by a tribal authority and the casino is part of how the resort funds its non-gaming operations. The casino itself was modest, a couple of dozen machines and a small room off the lobby, and I walked through it once on the way to the dining hall and did not return. The lake was on the other side of the building and that was the side I was on for the rest of the weekend.

What it means to take a trip without a plan is mostly about what you do not bring. I did not bring a list of things to see. I did not bring a target species list, even mentally. I did not bring an agenda for the dining room or the trails or the boat dock. I brought a book, a notebook, a pair of binoculars, and three days. Whatever the days asked for was what I would do.

What the Days Asked For

What they asked for, as it turned out, was mostly sitting. I sat on the dock on Friday afternoon for two hours and read. I sat on the cabin porch on Friday evening with a glass of something and watched the light fade across the bay. I sat in a chair at the edge of the trail Saturday morning for forty minutes because a pair of loons were calling close enough to where I had been walking that it seemed wrong to keep moving. Loons have a vocal repertoire of about four distinct calls, and during the breeding season pairs use the calls to coordinate movements, to defend territory, and to communicate over considerable distances of water. To listen to a pair work through several minutes of vocalization at close range is one of the better experiences in this region in May.

I went out on the lake once, in a rented canoe, on Saturday afternoon. The water was flat. The breeze was light and warm. I paddled along the shoreline for about an hour, not toward anything, not away from anything, and turned around when the bay opened up and I could see the open water of the main lake stretching north. I did not need to see the main lake. The bay was what I had come for.

A Trip That Resists Telling

I drove home on Sunday and the only thing I had to report was that I had been somewhere for three days and had nothing in particular to report. A trip like this is hard to recommend because the value of it does not show up in the telling. The telling is the wrong instrument. The trip is the thing.

The loons on the bay called every evening from somewhere I could not see, and that, more than anything else, was the part of the trip I will remember longest.