Father Superior

I was born on the northern shore of Lake Superior in a small wooden cabin with a green shingle roof and a tin-can chimney. More than thirty miles away from our nearest neighbor, my father and I we were truly secluded. “The way it should be,” he always said. Just a couple of men, living off the earth, and not relying on others for things that God had put so easily within our reach. “God doesn't have neighbors” he would say, “so we don’t need ‘em either.”

Living on the Lake, the winters seemed to last forever. Most years that I can remember it started snowing in September and didn't let up until the first or second week of May. When we spotted the first flock of Herring Gulls or Wood Warblers, we knew that spring was on its way, but until we saw the birds there was nothing but ice and snow. It snowed every day. Whether just a light dusting of seven or eight inches, or a white-out blizzard, every single day, at some point in the day, there were snowflakes falling down from the endless milk-glass sky.

Living on the Lake, we got something called “lake-effect snow.” That’s when a cold air mass moves in over a lake and pushes the warmer air down toward the water. The lower layer of warm air then sucks up water vapor from the lake, rises back up into the colder air above, and freezes instantly. The lake-effect usually resulted in us getting double or even triple the amount of snowfall that the inlanders would receive from the same snowstorm. My father used to say that this was God’s way of blessing us more than those who chose to live in towns and cities, farther from the lake, and farther away from God. “He gives snow like wool; he scatters the frost like ashes,” he would say.

We both slept on the floor of the cabin, inches from the fireplace. My father had a red sleeping bag with a big brown burn mark on the foot from one time he had gotten too close to the fire. My sleeping bag was made out of burlap sacks that we found floating in the lake one summer while we were fishing. My father said the sacks were most likely from a cargo ship that had either sunk in the lake or had just thrown them overboard. I preferred to think they had been thrown overboard because the thought of a ship sinking made me feel nervous. Every night as I lay there, next to the crackling fire, trying to fall asleep, I thought about the old ship captain throwing the burlap sacks into the lake. In my mind he had a long white beard, just like my father, and a patch covering his left eye. A little corncob pipe dangled from the corner of his mouth and bounced up and down when he shouted orders at his crew. I decided that when I got older I would have a beard and smoke a corncob pipe. Maybe I would even be a ship-captain. But if I was, I would want to keep both of my eyes. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. Matthew 6:22.”