Beautiful places are beautiful places. Beautiful places shared become good memories. We have good memories of beautiful places shared with others. Every August long weekend, we picnic at Alice Lake with our good friends, Morrie and Em. The lake is an hour's drive north of Vancouver, just outside the burgeoning town of Squamish. We forget how many years we've been part of this. None of us knows for sure - maybe 8 years now - that's probably a good guess. Alice Lake has special memories for us because, once a year, it is part of the ritual of our life.
Our friend, Morrie is a character. He's the character you invite to dinner parties to help break the ice, entertain others and keep the conversation going at a good clip. He loves being with people and a room of strangers appeals to him rather than causing him to slink surreptitiously to the food table. But Morrie loves to start the day quietly, away from superfluous bodies.
Morrie's zest for life is evident in his ritual on Alice Lake day. He awakes with the same glee as a young child on Christmas day. "Emmie, let's go!" He likes to hit the road by 7am at the latest. A quick stop in Squamish to buy coffee, timbits (mini donuts) and the paper means that they are the first at the lake just after 8.
This early start has a twofold importance. One, to dab the best spot at the lake - right under a large tree. This spot ensures morning sun and increasing shade with the encroaching heat of the day. Second, Morrie gets to enjoy his quiet start to the day. In his wife's company, he enjoys the peace and stillness of the morning. He sits back in his chair, alternating between reading the paper and watching the sun languidly warm the lake. The serenity of the geese on the lake eventually entices him to break the stillness of the surface with the ripples of a swim. "Morris, don't swim too far into the lake," his wife warns.
As friends, we know to not arrive too early. "Morrie won't mind if you come at 8," says Em. "If you do, I'll just get there at 6," is his reply. That's how precious that time is to him. We arrive after 10:30 thinking we may be a little late but we are the first to arrive, just ahead of the others.
My first ritual every year is to sit in the morning sun and read Morrie's paper. I whip through the various sections, fighting with the wind all the while - "there's nothing to read!" Disgruntled, I pass it to M who reads the paper with care and passes articles on to me he knows would interest me. "We should read the paper together like this all the time," I suggest.
The ritual of Alice Lake is to do whatever you want to do. We chat, read, swim, sleep, do Sudoku, play a game, take a walk or only some of the above. It's seldom that any of us take a day just to be and let the day unfold and the busyness unravel. The savouring of downtime is second to the laughs we share throughout the day.
Morrie is a great source of good laughs. In the quiet moment when our group of ten is at rest, reading, dozing or pondering thoughts, Morrie seriously states, "I hate sitting in a wet bathing suit; it gives you an itchy rear!" Or when he wasn't getting enough sympathy with the wasp sting on his leg, he upgraded the calamity to "I think I was stung by a jelly fish!". His insight of the day was "the more I drink, the more I've got to go for a swim." This likely contributed to Tim's landlockness, "Do you see how many kids there are? Do you think they go to the washroom?"
Our Alice Lake day is a day of doing mostly nothing. As Jean said, "I don't realise how much I like to do nothing." Our ritual of relaxation and doing nothing winds slowly and quietly to a close.
