The trail gave out about a half-mile back, traded for a mess of mossy granite shelves and black spruce roots waiting to snap an unwary ankle.
My calf muscles were burning, my canvas pack was biting into my collarbones, and the woods had dropped down into that sudden, breathless twilight hush. When the sun started bleeding rust orange across the waterline, I kicked off my boots and took a seat on the rotted flank of a fallen white pine.
The bark was cool and damp through my denim, and just stared out over the lake.
Water so black and flat it looked like a sheet of poured asphalt.
No hum of highway traffic. Just cold, clear northern air and the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring like a dead TV channel.
Sitting there, watching the shore turn into a razor-sharp silhouette, the designs came on all at once: heavy woodcut pines stacked against a faded copper sun, clean geometric waterlines carved with negative space, and block typography stripped of every ounce of modern fluff.
I didn't sketch a thing right then. You don't insult a sunset like that by burying your nose in a notebook. I just logged the shapes into memory, laced my boots back up, and walked back in the dim.
Where the water cuts the line. Wear the cold.
