A call when out in recent days to write about sanctuary.  For me, sanctuary has always been as much about state of mind as place, but in this case, it's assuredly a place:

There's a light rain now where wise ones stood, generations before, centuries before, on hallowed ground, facing west.  Whether they're burial mounds or burrows for woodland creatures now is an even proposition, amid the resplendence once considered the finest stand of forest in what the early French explorers called the 'Ouisconsin.'

Eventually those footsteps faded, council fires above the waters gone, and the secrets stayed, hidden deep in the hemlock.  Algonquin.  Ojibwa.  

At the turn of a new century a couple who spotted the island from their own fire across the lake acquired it from a homesteader, and it became known as the Enchanted Isle of Dreams.  The thick stand of forest in the center was sacrificed to lumbermen to save the threat of fire to the rest, leaving cleared land that became a farm, eggs and milk, vegetables and strawberries, to feed those who made the island their home, the handful of people on the ground hallowed by the disappeared ancients.

A cottage sprung up, and then another, along the periphery in the forest, and the farm in the center flourished, feeding others on the lakes that chained to their own.   The family that loved the island held it close, parting with pieces only occasionally to those who begged for homesites.

The strawberries and dairy made way for deer, a reserve in the center of the island, tall timber still ringing the island from every view, hundreds of trees, thousands, pine near the water, birch and oak further in, trillium in the spring and jack-in-the-pulpit, wild berries and mayapples.

Those who loved and lived in the island shade picknicked back and forth in summertime, paddled in canoes like generations past, found faster boats to ripple the waters they shared with the northern loon.

Hammocks were hung, totems sprung, raccoons visited house to house, eagles nested over a glassy lake at sunset.

A cottage stands on the bay in the forest, log and stone hidden in the trees that shelter the owl, chipmunk and deer, overlooking waters filled with musky and northern pike, framing the sunset.  A log is burning, a loon calling. 

The rain has stopped.  This is my island, my home.  

All photos Kathy Riordan.  Top photo originally appeared in  "Base Camp at Muddy Bottom."

For further reading, see:

The Pine, the plow and the pioneer.  A history of Three Lakes and Clearwater Lake, Wisconsin, 1881-1984.

Wheeler, Adele G.  The Enchanted Isle O'Dreams