Dreams & False Alarms

This is a gnome dwelling.

There is a path on the Island that we call Spook Trail, and it’s really tranquil and beautiful: all moss, and sunlight-through-trees, and glimpses of sparkling water, and grandfather’s beard hanging from spruce branches. When I was 10 or so, and my brother was 8, we started a game of building gnome houses all along the trail. We made it up for my sister and our younger cousins, and spun elaborate narratives about what the gnomes did, how they built the houses, and how they came to be on Bear Island.

The houses started out in trees hollow, or natural dips and nooks in the moss, and we would make beds out of mussel shells, tables from crabshells, and other things out of twigs, seaglass, sea urchin shells, etcetera. Before long, the game had escalated, the little sister and younger cousins were old enough to be in on the whole thing, and we were building increasingly detailed houses for our even younger cousins.

The little ones, who are now racing towards 10 years old themselves, still believe in the gnomes and more often call Spook Trail “Gnome Trail”. The nice thing about the evolution of the gnome houses game, aside from how good of a tradition it has become, is that the little ones now build gnome houses too, and not because they have stopped believing. No, they build the houses because they think that they are building houses for real gnomes to just up and move into.

Anyway. On my walk of the trail this past week, I noticed this hammock right away. There was a treehouse one that I wish I had seen earlier, because that was really worth taking a picture of. I think my 7 year old cousin Solal built it, and it was really a masterpiece. He placed wide pieces of bark on a low tree, and had them staggered at different levels, with little ladders connecting all of them. There was also a rope ladder, made of a piece of fishing net that had washed ashore, so that the gnomes could climb up into the tree.