Artist’s Conk - CALEB SEYFRIED

Artist’s Conk

We carry platters out of the kitchen and begin setting them along the length of the gray ledge on the porch overlooking the northern side of the lake. Two eastern white pine trees frame the scene; their long skinny limbs, sparsely clothed and far from one another, stretch out towards the light blue water. I furnish warm tortillas on my indestructible plate with meats, vegetables, and sauce, taking my fill and racing, but not racing my brother to secure the coveted rocking chair. I vie for this chair because this year, it has become difficult to maneuver between the bench and ledge where in the past I would voluntarily sit. I have grown while the island has waited. The week of living barefoot has blackened my feet, and with each push against the deck to rock my chair, I stamp dull gray splotches on the wooden planks. I fall into a rhythm, and a pepper slice from my fajita drops to the ground; I throw it over the ledge into the plump shrubs lining the space between the two trees. These green hedges are small enough not to hinder the landscape ahead yet are too small to guard the porch from the fisherman’s gaze as they float in their rowboat in the island’s cove, casting until we tell them off for interrupting this rare and constant view.

Through the magnetic bug door, my mom parades out of the kitchen coddling a large semicircle in both hands whose half-moon figure is immediately recognizable as the artist’s conk - a name reporting on the fungi’s properties. The conk, scientifically known as Ganoderma Applanatum, is a rarity of the island, a hidden treasure whose natural perfection evades our hopeful and desperate pursuit nearly every year. But this year, my Mom obtained one thanks to her experience from fifty years of mushroom hunting. She takes her seat next to my rocking chair e at the bench of the picnic table with her body open towards the lake, resting the conk on the glossy table cloth.

Mom begins to outline the scene before our eyes, working first on the shrubs near the mushroom’s corklike base. I watch her intensity as she conducts each stroke of her twig upon the faultless, pillowy material of the truffle’s skin. It is far too delicate to use a knife, and she is cautious as she wields the wooden blade, making each engraving purposefully and with care as if she were operating on a patient with a scalpel. She traces the slim shore that hugs the front of the brush from where the waving limbs emerge. It’s currently encumbered with kayaks, paddleboards, driftwood, and the shadow of darkness cast from the framing trees. From my periphery develops forested mountains, sloping down towards the head of Long Lake, where they converge to a point at the bow of the canoe-shaped lake. To the right of the island, the earth resembles a woman lying on her side with a distinct outline of pointed toes, wide hips, broad shoulders, and a resting head facing those on the sundeck on the far side of the island, who, upon meeting her gaze, obey her command of relaxation. In a final display, the 25

waning sun illuminates the head and chest of the sleeping lady a verdant prairie green, and from afar, she looks to be solid, a static hill rather than millions of individual swaying trees.

Now, with the sun straining to hold its eyes above the rugged horizon, protesting the forfeit of its lake-view to the stars, I am similarly caught between night and day as I yearn for the sun to lighten the day’s games, but am enlivened in anticipation of the revelrous night. The rose and tiger orange sunset that strikes the sleeping lady with a great stroke of its brush disregards the landscape beneath, shadowing its underbelly in a dark seaweed green, void of the brilliance of dusk. While watching Mom outline the trees on the darkened side of the lake, I notice that the print is lacking in the personality of its creator, and so I ask, “Can you put us in the scene.” Accordingly, Mom includes a kayak pointed away from the island’s cove. It encapsulates three small faceless stick figures within its contour, and she details a single two-sided paddle across its center. She is recreating our journey from earlier today when we ventured off the island to the private beach postered with no trespassing signs across the thin stretch of the lake. The island as a closed-off sanctuary offers three forms of exercise: swimming around its perimeter, circling the border by foot time after time, or paddling to the shore of the mainland to hike. Going with the last option on the sixth day, we had traversed along the hidden path parallel to the water for several hours, following it deep into the woods. Now, Mom traces the mountainous trail that we took earlier today, moving her hand only a centimeter for the length we had walked and extending further up the mushroom to areas we have yet to explore.

Many miles down this path, past where the slightly smaller island cuts the lake in half like an anchored boat, past the ripples of water escaping through streams and thin outlets taking itself as far as the descent will allow, the mountains begin to rise. Standing tall on the horizon like titans endure the mighty Algonquin peak and the infamous Mount Marcy advancing from behind and unwilling to be looked down upon by any. My mother captures in her picture their overall upward climb of numerous ups and downs towards the ultimate prominence at the snowy summit of Marcy, which she details with heavier hand pressure. The hundred-mile expanse separating these two towering peaks is obscured from this distance as the mountains meld collectively into one.

Sitting in my rocking chair with my plate in my lap, my attention is split between Marcy overtowering the lake before me and heading the mushroom, and the words of Uncle Malcolm. “Do you always have to ski right when dinner’s ready?” Malcolm questions me. “Of course I do. It’s when the water is glass,” I respond, rummaging my hand through my still wet hair, “My food can always wait, but the water won’t.” His vexation at my insistence on waterskiing between 7 and 7:15 is a daily, no yearly occurrence during this week’s vaca-

tion. Every day I predictably carve around the anchored-boat island in a 15-minute loop, and every day since I was 8, Malcolm and I have shared the same rebuke. The Island stagnates in the rapidly changing world, and we capture its continuity through irregular stampings upon the artist’s conk. The indentations of each impression are permanent, and after Mom’s final illustration, the memorializing painting is stamped with ‘Scragg’ for the original name of the camp from my Mom’s youth; and, written in small block letters, as every mushroom has been branded with for the past 14 years, near its base where the island meets the lake is scribed “Ethan.” Here my uncle’s ashes were sprinkled, and where he too became eternal, everlasting through the undulation of the water and the world, forever synonymous with Long Lake.

-Caleb Seyfried