IDYLL

The second summer I went back to Minnesota, after tenth grade, my dad rallied briefly—and told Doug and me we could each invite a friend along on a trip to the northern lakes.

So I asked Kathy, expecting her to turn me down. To my surprise, she accepted. And for the space of a couple of days, it felt like old times. (If memory serves, this was the only time we got together during my two summers in Minnesota.) We had a cabin and lumpy bed to ourselves and talked till all hours, arguing great subjects like the existence of God. We found a little dock that was beached on the shore and dragged it into the water, alternately floating on it and shoving it through the shallows around the lake.

Eventually we came to a stream with a small rapids that cascaded among boulders and over a slippery bank of fine white clay. We hopped aboard, and, though the dock sank several inches under our weight, it carried us, pleasantly bumped and jostled, to where the streambed broadened and the water flowed slow and shallow. Giant red dragonflies darted overhead—and dainty blues. When we stretched out flat on our makeshift raft, schools of perch flickered around us, and occasionally the gold belly of a sunfish flashed under our noses. On the way back upstream, we dug fistfuls of clay out of the bank above the rapids, and later, on our own beach, we fashioned miniature pots that we studded with colorful pebbles.

I remember trying that night to take a picture of Kathy, her dark profile against the textured glass of the outhouse door, which, seen from inside, fractured the moonlight. I labored mightily to get the perfect shot, a hand-held time exposure, the two of us squeezed awkwardly into that tight spot—I even snapped her from several angles. But when we got back home to the Twin Cities, I discovered to my dismay that my ingenuity had been wasted. The whole time I’d been out of film.