A golden path into the future

Let me tell you about Isaac. He is 11 and on his way to tall with a mouthful of braces, and a hint of red in his hair (but it's mostly hidden beneath a baseball cap.)

I have just spent a week camping with him. We invited him to stay on after his mother and siblings left — mainly so he could do more fishing. In the order of grand, he is our sixteenth. By the time he has grown old enough for outdoor adventures, his grandpa has grown old enough for indispensable crutches from all those back surgeries.

So it was a gift to offer Isaac the sofa bed in our travel trailer — and be able to share the beauty of Priest Lake as we could. He wasted no time. Jumping in a kayak he paddled off each day around the point until he found an inviting fishing spot. Usually, he was gone a couple of hours, returning almost every time with a nice bass.

I won't forget the sunrise sight of watching his kayak cross the golden path on the peaceful water. My photo held him in the center of the glow. I longed for it to be his life's metaphor.

He's big on earning his own money — and buying thoughtful gifts. Mostly it's shoveling snow in winter to purchase Christmas gifts for his parents and eight siblings. He doesn't forget us either — I received a journal last year — a perfect present.

However, there is also the lemonade stand moneymaker. I couldn't imagine how he netted $50 in his quiet neighborhood — until he informed me he goes “to the graveyard.” He loads his supplies in his wagon and heads for more promising streets, setting up outside the cemetery fence. This is also the boy who plants an annual corn crop in his front yard — strategically placed around the fire hydrant.

We got onto the Hardy Boys books this campout. Any spare minute found me reading aloud their detective adventures, set in the days before cellphones. We laughed ourselves to tears over one particular scene in "The Secret of the Old Mill". It was my favorite part of that day — 60 years between us and shared humor erasing the gap.

Isaac spent some of every day on the beach skipping rocks. We looked up the record for the number of skips with a single rock — and learned one man had a documented 88 skips! Isaac — suitably impressed — has a ways to go with 11 being his highest, but he's not giving up.

He is very interested in outdoor survival — and has kept a go-pack at the ready ever since discovering the fiction story "Hatchet" — a young boy's survival alone in the Canadian wilderness. He found a flip book for his go-pack on edible plants in our area at Priest Lake's library. Lo and behold, we had snowberries right in our camp.

Perhaps my top moment of conversation with Isaac last week was a beach confession of something he hopes might happen. He has a crush. I guessed the girl and told him he'd made a good choice. He replied, “Well, you don't really have a choice in a crush.”

Another Isaac-ism — he didn't want the scrambled eggs I fixed for breakfast, as they don't settle well with him — and I cautioned he needed to have more than just a cinnamon roll. In a flash, he said, “Then I'll have two.”

This boy is a beacon for me. There's a sense when I'm around him that I've crossed that golden path.