I had not told her that returning frightened me a little. My wife, Helen, had died six years earlier, and the cabin contained more of our life together than any other place on earth. Her rain jacket still hung near the mudroom. Her chipped blue coffee mug sat beside mine in the kitchen cupboard. Being useful to Emma had given me something to do with my hands and a reason not to listen to the silence. I was ready for that silence again, or thought I was, until I discovered the other side of the lake had been turned into a vacation resort.
I put down my bag, took the binoculars from the shelf near the porch door, and brought the eastern shore into focus. The buildings were not temporary. They were modern cabins with cedar siding, dark standing-seam roofs, wraparound decks, and the kind of glass walls people pay extra money to rent for a weekend. Between them were landscaped gravel beds, young aspens held upright by wooden stakes, decorative lights, and little signs pointing toward something I could not see. There were so many roofs that I lost count twice before deciding I needed to drive over there.
I knew that shore. Before the lake was created, it had been the eastern wall of a creek valley, and my grandfather had bought the slope all the way to the ridge above it. Every spring I inspected the old boundary monuments with a surveyor because snow, runoff, and falling trees could make an honest fence look crooked. My deed included two hundred feet of upland beyond much of the eastern high-water line. Whatever those buildings were, they looked close enough to the water to be on my ground.
The rough perimeter road took me around the northern inlet and across a stand of lodgepole pines before bending toward Mountain Vista Estates, the expensive housing development on the neighboring upland property. I had allowed its residents occasional access to a section of the lakeside trail years earlier, by personal permission and with posted conditions, but I had never given permission to build anything. The gates and signs had been maintained by my caretaker while I was in Oregon. I trusted him to keep the roads clear, not to police the construction activity occurring beyond the trees.
As I rounded the last bend, the buildings appeared one after another. I counted aloud, starting with the cabins beside a new wooden footbridge and ending near a polished welcome center at the southern end of the development. There were 109 of them. I checked by driving the loop a second time because I could hardly believe the number. One hundred and nine vacation cabins on a slope where I used to watch elk graze in September.
The place had been designed by someone who knew exactly how to make a visitor feel wealthy. Gravel paths had been replaced with smooth pavement. Electric carts carried luggage between cabins. A floating dock complex extended into the water, with slips for several dozen boats and paddleboards stacked beside a kiosk. Through the open doors of a cabin I saw a stone fireplace, leather furniture, and a wall-mounted television large enough to serve as a billboard. Nothing about it suggested a mistake that could be corrected by moving a fence post.