Watersong wrote:
WoodNCanvas wrote:
Interesting thread....and theories of where Cache Lake might be....but I always understood that it was a fictional lake....possibly based on actual places....but a fictional location all the same
Based on .....???
Dave
I understood from reading the book that it was not an actual place....likely based on actual places....but most likely a "composite" of several places....here's what I found further online:
From Outdoors Magazine’s review of Cache Lake Country comes this,
http://www.oldjimbo.com/Outdoors-Magazi ... wlands.pdf:
Here is how Rowlands found Cache Lake in Portage to Contentment:
"After I cleared the thoroughfare and came out on the small lake, I stopped paddling like a fellow will when he sees new water for the first time. The sun had come up and mist hung motionless like a big cobweb just above the surface. "Ghosts breath" we called it when we were young. Over to my right, to the eastward, the shore was lined with jack pines and in one place close down by the water I could see a natural clearing. On the west was part of the great swamp I had passed coming up from Snow Goose Lake, but going north on that side the land lifted up and the white boles of big canoe birches showed on the low ridge.
I have seen maybe a thousand northern lakes, and they all look alike in many ways, but there was something different about that little lake that held me hard. I had sat there perhaps half an hour, like a man under a spell, just looking it over......
This was the lake of my boyhood dreams! This was the lake I used to picture when I camped with my chum by a little millpond near a meadow on a farm...
Then for no reason that I understood, I paddled ashore, built a fire and made myself a pail of tea. And there was the big tree, not the elm that stood by the old millpond, but a tall white pine just where it ought to be. I knew then I had found the place I had always wanted to be."
He names this place Cache Lake, as in this cache, the best of the North was stored. Rowlands, in a piece of incredible fortune, is able to live on this lake at the behest of his timber company. He builds a lakeside cabin, finds Chief Tibeash, a Cree who he had known as a child living nearby and begins living the life of his dreams. From January, Long Nights and Deep Snows through December, Blizzards and Wailing Winds, Rowlands entertains and educates the reader with small essays and innumerable projects related to living in the North Woods. From logging camp stories to canoe camping with the Chief and Hank (the illustrator), from building an outdoor clay oven, making bean hole beans and long-tailed pie, we have pieces of daily life on this lake in the woods.
Cache Lake, as a physical entity, is never actually defined by Rowlands, but is used as a metaphor of finding the ideal place to live your chosen life. Many have speculated as to where Rowlands actual Cache Lake is, but in reality this book is more about making or finding your own Cache Lake, rather than finding his. In his opening chapter, Rowlands defines Cache Lake this way:
"On most maps Cache Lake is only a speck hidden among other blue patches big enough to have names, and unless you know where to look you will never find it. But a place like Cache Lake is seldom discovered on a map. You just come on it---that is if you are lucky. Most men who travel the north woods sooner or later happen on a lake or stream that somehow they cannot forget and always want to go back to. Generally they never do go back."
From the Amazon book review,
http://www.amazon.com/Cache-Lake-Countr ... B0006AW4VM:
"
He named the place Cache Lake because there was stored the best that the north had to offer--timber for a cabin; fish, game and berries to live on; and the peace and contentment he felt he could not live without. Cache Lake Country exemplifies the classic American notion that what is most worth finding lies far from the tracks of civilization, and that what is most worth doing demands resourcefulness and wit."
Don't know if that really answers anything or just complicates it further.