Snow brings a stillness to the world. Life hides away, burrowed under, tucked in. Sound is muted, lost in the hush of falling flakes. Only the soft brush of wind through the pines. I would like to say that Winter's first snow dumped a substantive number of feet, but it did not. It dumped a few inches. Not much, but it is something. An imitation of winter. It may well be that that's all winter is anymore, an imitation of what once was. Things are always changing, not always in the way we want. Only the future knows for sure, but I do feel a certain foreboding of doom for the person I saw driving the car with the bumper sticker "F**k Summer." For the most part, this is why we are here, to experience the winter, which in my family was supposed to be a synonym for snow. Alas Wisconsin winter is also a synonym for gray, sunless, and cold, with or without snow. This is part of why this world needs snow. Snow bathes the world in white, reflecting and multiplying the scant light on gray days. You need the snow to overcome the gray skies. Light or no, the kids have done their best to get out and enjoy what little snow we've had. Snow is also a buffer against the wind and cold for plants and animals. And us. Plenty more pipes freezing without a blanket of snow to insulate the ground from the worst of the cold. The frost here can reach many feet down into the soil by midwinter. More snow on the ground lingers longer in spring, insulating the soil, keeping it warmer longer through march freezes. Without it, it takes longer for seeds to germinate, roots to come to life, sap to thaw. There have been a couple of sunny days. One of them saw flocks of swans swimming by our beach. Further up the bay things get shallower and the water is already covered in ice and snow, but water still flows free in front of our cabin, which brings the bird life to us. Swans, Goldeneyes, Ravens, and Bald Eagles are all frequently around on the lake, along with Chickadees in the woods. The ice on the shore in the photo above lasted a few days, but as of this writing, the lake in front of us remains ice-free. A few days after the first snow it warmed up again and a hard rain washed it all away. Around Christmas it turned cold again and dropped a few more inches of snow, but once again it warmed up and the snow disappeared. As I write this winter is well underway and there is still little more than a light dusting of snow on the ground, about the same amount of snow we got a few years ago in South Carolina. I am still hoping for one good blizzard, but we'll see.

Fall is the slow exhale of the earth. The sun's rays grow ever scarcer as the frosts arrive. Long shadows cut the cold honey sunlight of afternoons that begin to fade at three, turning to a blue-pink twilight over the lake before darkness descends at five. Then four-thirty. Then four. A slow exhale of light. Not long after we returned from California, Corrinne and the kids left to visit her family in Dallas. Jasper and I spent the evenings wandering the lake shore, waiting on the snow. There's a trail that runs the length of the property here, about a quarter mile I'd guess, with a couple of beaches in hidden coves and a picnic table. The first time I walked down here and saw the table I thought of something one of my editor said to me years ago, "you have a nack for finding tables in the middle of nowhere." I suppose I do. I hate working indoors. I hate being indoors. Perhaps I find these tables because I'm always looking for places to be outdoors. My favorite spot is still a huge rock in the middle of the Oconee river where I did most of my writing in college. Not sure I'd have graduated without that rock. These days I write with a laptop, at least for work, so tables are nice (though I do avoid the laptop when possible). Soon it will be far too cold to work out here, but for now it's perfect. I write, the dog wanders the woods. Periodically we both look up and stare out at the lake. It's hard not too, it dominates the skyline like an ocean. Even when you can see a shore opposite, as you can where we are in the Chequamegon Bay, you can still feel something vast about Superior, even in these shallow waters here. In early November at these latitudes dawn happens to be right around the time I get up (roughly 6 AM, though I am fortunate enough to not have to set an alarm, so it varies). I started taking the dog down to the seashore every morning to watch the sunrise. This is when I began to really notice the many moods of Superior. It is a different lake every day. I like stormy days the best. I've always loved storms. It might sound odd, but one of my favorite things is to get caught out in a storm, pitching a tent in a hurry, or taking shelter under a rock overhang, a tree, a large leaf, as the rain pours down, the wind whips, the thunder cracks all around. Everything feels more alive at those moments. I feel more alive. Something about a storm sharpens the edges of perception, hones your body to an awareness that's difficult to achieve otherwise. Everything comes alive in a storm. Get out in one if you can. Or just before one, when the lightning is still a ways off, flashing out there on the horizon, the wind picking up, that preternatural darkness of storm, thunderheads obscuring the light of day. It feels as if the world is just waking up, coming alive, with something urgent to say. The air tingles with that potent mix of electricity and ozone, it smells like infinite possibility, life expanding boundlessly. Storms like that are rare here. That's more out west, or down south. The best storms here are sudden, generated by the lake. They call them lake effect storms. They come on incredibly fast, without any warning. It is both scary and energizing. It is unlike anywhere else I've ever been, any other storms I've been in. And they disappear just as fast. That's the summer though. Winter storms are perhaps something else, I don't know yet. I'm waiting. Walking the lake's edge, waiting. Come on storms. Come on winter. Come on.

For a long time I had the idea that one day I would write a book about this trip and call it The End of the Road. It was an incomplete idea, but it seems to me we are, culturally, at the end of a metaphor when it comes to The Road. I had the idea that you could trace a thread from tales of the road when it was a trail (Journals of Lewis and Clark, etc), to when it was a dirt road (Laura Ingalls Wilder all the way through to the Air Conditioned Nightmare), to when the highways appeared (Kerouac), to avoiding the highways and going back to the two lane road (Blue Highways, et al), and then finally I could close it out somehow with my own tales of life of the road (waves hands vaguely). The end of the road. The kind of sweeping generalizations I've sketched out sound good if you don't bother to think critically about them. In the end the only thing I salvaged from the idea was the title. It hung around in my head. A metaphor waiting to happen. I knew there would be an end. Everything has an end. Then a few days ago I was watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain's television show. He went out to the high desert of California to hang out with the musician Josh Homme. Homme takes Bourdain out to what Homme calls the end of the road, but then Homme says something I thought was perhaps the most road-worthy thing I've heard: "Here we are at the end of the road... which, it turns out, isn't a bad place, it's just where they stopped building road." This prosaic statement feels apropos for our own end of the road moment here. A few weeks ago we packed the bus away and have no plans to travel in it again. We bought and have been building out a school bus, which will replace the Travco for us. The Travco finally got too small. It was time for something else and we all felt it. We were ready to move on, end of the road or no. Sometimes the end of the road is just where the road stops. The past and the future, side-by-side in the present. And, no, I don't know what we're going to do with it. Most likely we'll sell it. I have no time frame for that, but if you're interested, email me. We had originally planned to leave here this fall in the school bus, which I have been working to build out as a comfortable home since we bought it back in April.Unfortunately Lyme disease derailed that plan a little, which is part of the reason we rented the cabin (the other being that we wanted to experience a northern Wisconsin winter). We moved into the cabin with only the bare essentials. Clothes for the winter. Cast iron skillets. Kitchen knives. Pillows. Camera. Notebooks. It was kind of a larger scale version of that thing they tell you to do to see if you should get rid of your stuff: put it in a box and seal it up and if you haven't opened it in six months you don't need it. We're using the bus as a giant box. When we've needed something, we've gone to get it, but honestly we haven't needed much. We settled into the cabin pretty quickly. The kids took the upstairs loft area for themselves, there's a big open area below and then a bedroom and bathroom down the hall. In that sense it's very similar to the bus, mostly one big open space. These cabins are quite popular in the summer, but relatively few people come around in the fall. The first weekend we moved in there were some people in the other cabins around us, but that traffic tapered off quickly and we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We're still right beside the lake, with an even bigger beach now. And I won't lie, the view of Long island and the tip of Madeline Island is much nicer than Ashland (which is the view from Memorial Park). It's very quiet here. I can hear the road sometimes when I'm around the cabin, but down by the lake there's nothing but the lapping of water on the shore. The dog and I go down to the lake shore and watch the sunrise in the mornings. Although sunrise is quickly receding to later and later in the morning. Soon we will be walking to the lake shore in the dark if we keep getting up at 6AM. There is a certain full circle feeling for me, being back in the cold, the long nights, it reminds me of when I lived in Massachusetts years ago, which is where I first started publishing this website (the first entry is dated September 12, 2003). Memories come back as the leaves tumble down out of the trees. I remember the way the world would turn to a kaleidoscope and then it all would bleed away and be replaced with a colorless world of snow. Black and white, shades of gray. Midday sunshine that does nothing to warm you. Long winter nights. I think most of all of sitting at the small table by the window in the kitchen, drinking coffee in the mornings, watching the snow drift down, knowing I would soon be walking across town in that cold stillness, the magical quiet of the world in snow. As my head chef and mentor used to say, "there is no bad weather, just bad clothes."

Every year for the past couple of years, when September rolls around we start getting ready to hit the road, packing away the paddle boards, washing the bus, and burning through the last of the firewood. Sometime around the middle of the month we say goodbye to friends and head for the plains. The drive out of the trees always feels good to me, the long vistas of the midwest are like drawing a breath after being under water. It's some small recapitulation of humanity's movement out of the forest, on to the prairie. As William Least Heat Moon points out in PrairyErth, it was leaving the trees that made us human. In some way we are all children of the prairie and plain. This year we did none of those things. This year we stayed put. We stayed in the trees. Evolutionary recapitulation be damned. We watched the chlorophyll fade from the world, leaving behind impossibly yellow birch and iridescent orange sugar maples, brilliant against the unchanging pines overhead, swirling colors of leaves littering the green carpet of moss below, until the forest in the morning was like walking inside a stained glass window. This year we left the paddle boards out and enjoyed one of the warmest, driest autumns anyone in these parts can remember. It wasn't until early October that the evenings took on a chill enough to keep us on the shoreline, and the mornings turned a softer purple as the sun swung south. The familiar turned foreign. Gaps in understand were filled in. Paths we've walked daily became new and golden. When I was younger, living in southern California, I had to go and find Autumn. I would try every year to make the long drive up 395 to the Sierra foothills, where a smattering of aspens and cottonwood trees that grow in the washes would turn various shades of amber and apricot. There are no mountains like that here, but this area beats the Sierra foothills for fall colors, and that's part of why we're here -- to see new things. We move around to explore the world, discovering what we do not know and getting to know it in some fashion. This manifests in all sorts of things, from the mundane (I can give you street by street directions around a surprising number of places) to the more profound experiences and friendships we've formed around the world. Sometimes it also means not moving. There are certain things that must be experienced first hand. Can you really know Georgia if you haven't spent a summer there without air conditioning? Can you really know Charleston if you haven't been there for a hurricane? Can you really know New England without passing a fall? Can you really know northern Wisconsin without spending the winter? You cannot. You also cannot pass a northern Wisconsin winter in an RV. Or at least it isn't much fun. I know someone who did it and he suggested we rent a cabin. So we did. Like most in the area, the campground where we spend our summers closes October 15 (which last year saw the first snow storm, this year it was 55 and sunny). This year we said goodbye to our fellow travelers and friends, and drove the bus over to the cabin, unloaded the very least amount of stuff we could, and moved it to the storage area where it will spend the winter. Not much changed really. We're still in the woods. We still have to fill propane. We still have to dump the holding tank system. There's a few extra feet of counter space, a bedroom with a door, just one though, the other is a loft, open to the rest of the house, not unlike the back of the bus. We're on a property that's roughly the size of Memorial Park. The paths have changed, but they look much the same. The trees look about the same and the sunrise hasn't changed much either. We'll be here until the campground opens again next spring. We'll be here watching the world change, waiting on the snow, and getting to know a northern Wisconsin winter.