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    Last Exit to Pine Lake
    Last Exit to Pine Lake
    Last Exit to Pine Lake
    Ebook151 pages2 hours

    Last Exit to Pine Lake

    By Lenny Everson

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    About this ebook

    You'd think if a guy wanted to die in peace on the shores of some isolated lake, people would just let him do it. No such luck.

    The poor schnook is followed by a student looking for an interview, a reporter looking for a really good story, and the local nut case.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLenny Everson
    Release dateMay 3, 2011
    ISBN9781458047878
    Last Exit to Pine Lake
    Author

    Lenny Everson

    List of Completed Works by Lenny Everson (As of November, 2014, over 36,000 copies of Lenny's works have been downloaded.) Novels •Death On a Small, Dark Lake. 67,700 words. Our hero snags a body in a remote lake. •Death on a Rocky Little Island 71,500 words. Our hero convinces a friend to take a canoeing trip to the 30,000 islands. •Mount Moriah 50,000 words. A strange sequence events involves a priest, a poet, a CSIS agent, a space alien, four horny teens, among others. My most fun fiction. •Last Exit to Pine Lake. 45,000 words. A dying writer goes back into the bush to off himself. Grimly literary. My best fiction. •Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees. As much fun as Mount Moriah! •Marley Was Dead: A Christmas Carol Mystery Novelettes •Granite and Dry Blood. 9,700 words. Our hero wants to write a book on Massassauga Park. Various people would prefer that he didn’t. •Death on a Foggy Spring Portage. 11,800 words. One member of a paddling group is found dead on a muddy portage. Screenplays •Murder on a Foggy Spring Portage. One member of a paddling group is found dead on a muddy portage. Plays •Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont. Ghosts of the two Métis leaders meet in today’s world to remember their lives. A short (20-minute) play for two actors. Full-Length Poetry Books •The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer. A middle-aged woman tries to connect with her aboriginal ancestry. •In The Tavern of Lost Souls. Four poets meet at a grungy bar once a month to give their poetic answers to random questions. •Love in a Canoe. A set of five chapbooks and a songbook about the love of canoeing. With illustrations. •Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont are Dead. Ghosts of the two Métis leaders meet in today’s world to remember their lives. Includes the play. Poetry Chapbooks •Encounter in a Small, Old Cemetery. Autumn. Midnight. Poet visits a small, old private graveyard. Best poem I ever wrote. •Fire and Ashes. Poems about life’s flames and regrets. •The Empty Tarmac of a Long-Abandoned Airport. Poems about having a midlife crisis. •Love Poems A compilation •Pray for Me: 22 Poems Probably Slandering God and Jesus •Ballads from an Unlucky Fisherman: Poems from a fisherman •Tweetable Limericks. 60 limericks small enough to be tweets •Hiking Poems. Co-Authored Poetry Chapbooks •Who Would Be a God? Susan Ioannou and Lenny debate the merits of being a god. •How to Dance Naked in the Moonlight. Katherine L. Gordon (Celtic pagan) and Lenny (skeptic) confront the ceremony. •Cats and Dogs. With I. B. Iskov •For Ko Aye Aung: A Plea for His Release from Prison. For Amnesty International, with other poets. Non-Fiction Chapbooks •If You Condemn Gays: The Bible on Homosexuality and Other Items. •The Architecture of Suburban West Kitchener. A light look at house styles. •The Architecture of The University of Waterloo. A light look at the campus buildings. •Making Tourist Attractions for Towns and Small Cities. Advice. •Technological Solutions to Global Warming. •Hyphens: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century. •Colons and Semicolons: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century. •How to Review Draft Technical Writings •Rebecca’s Trail (Grand River Trail) in Winter •7 Temples to Bill Gates: a modern mystery •The Great God Pan - or Not •Two in a Tent: Camping Humor. •Why Haven't Aliens Contacted us? Songbooks •Dance Songs for Weddings Available on Smashwords •Canoe Songs. part of a set of six chapbooks about the love of canoeing. With illustrations.. Available on Smashwords •18 Dingbat Songs for Kids Available on Smashwords I’d like to thank all the people who downloaded my writings. And I’d like to thank Smashwords for making them available to the world. I started out as a poet, and spent most of my life producing poems. Some of them are really fine poems, but, of course, the monetary value of poetry in this world isn’t much. Actually, I once calculated poetry has a negative monetary value; poets are lucky if they don’t have to pay people to listen to them. But I always admired people who told me they were “writing a novel.” I don’t know why, but I did. So eventually, I sat down and wrote a novel, just to show I could actually do it. The result was Death on a Small, Dark Lake, more than two thousand copies of which have been downloaded. It wasn’t really very good, but at least I could say, “I wrote a novel!” I stuck to what I knew best, canoeing and the lake country north of Peterborough, Ontario, the edge of Canada’s lake country. I wrote Death on a Rocky Little Island in an effort to make some more believable characters, but I can’t really say I succeeded. People have downloaded a few more copies of that, so maybe it was a bit better constructed than the first novel. It included canoes, of course. Then one of my friends taunted me into doing something for NaNoWriMo, the endeavor in which a person tries to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I was, er, a few days over, but I got it done. It turned out to be a bit incoherent in spots, but in general, a lot of fun; I recommend it, if your standards aren’t too high. And there are no canoes in it. By that time, I figured I could write something “literary.” The result – with more canoes of course – was Last Exit to Pine Lake. If it’s less fun, well, it’s meant to be. If most people don’t like it, well, that’s normal for literary novels, so it doesn’t bother me. My literary bent done, I wrote Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees. It was intended to be fun, and it’s lots better than the first two novels I wrote. I even put myself, in a canoe, as a minor character. Then I thought I’d just write a novel that would sell. For money, like. Smashwords said romance generally sold well, so I wrote Fire and Spark, under the name, “Laura Singer.” (You can search for it.) It wasn’t all that bad, for a guy’s first romance novel. Really, it is, although my wife said it should be subtitled, Five Canoes; No Sex. I again added myself as a minor character. But it didn’t sell, so I added it to my list of free books on Smashwords. You’re welcome. Last fall, I finished another book that I thought would actually sell, Marley Was Dead: A Christmas Carol Mystery. My wife thought it was really good, mostly because of the historical details of social life. It didn’t sell, of course, so it’s free now. You’re welcome, again. As for the poetry, the most popular are Hiking Poems and 21 Poems for Love, Weddings, and Anniversaries. And then there’s the rest. The opinion pieces are just my explorations of things that I wanted to know more about. I studied the subject, briefly, and published my findings. They’re not scholarly, but well worth what you’ll pay for them. A few are getting outdated, but nobody’s written to me to ask for updates. If you want to learn more about any of my writings, email me at lennypoet@hotmail.ca. Like Lenny’s poems? Just type in (or copy) the YouTube address) from any item on the list below into your search engine. You should get a YouTube video of Lenny reading a poem. https://youtu.be/SfHAKSgn7lc https://youtu.be/29dmESWIgrg https://youtu.be/hyYqYhDl35E https://youtu.be/x8ufRDD65_s https://youtu.be/u0Bw6xUcEFM n https://youtu.be/g3PxjmjRl1g https://youtu.be/WCmoGGdLrTw https://youtu.be/IIL7e2cWWVA https://youtu.be/SfbwWwgd5Yo https://youtu.be/ZAuuYEUsMh0y https://youtu.be/Hw4v7RmZqk4 https://youtu.be/BmTywRZwe1o https://youtu.be/lYGmMyxgKGQd https://youtu.be/I8tA3dwv-WA https://youtu.be/yaX9WYb2y3o https://youtu.be/Y1Saq1UZ0kE https://youtu.be/FDBlHLuBmcw https://youtu.be/yTiSQLzU4nM https://youtu.be/On8ClcmNWsw https://youtu.be/L3IwGhkqIKMd https://youtu.be/KhOxMvR4wGE https://youtu.be/R6ybqmVUUCA https://youtu.be/BiiYKsR8YaE https://youtu.be/Y9a6pNuEoX0 https://youtu.be/ZyOn3Smu8ZY https://youtu.be/5U0zTnAw7X4

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      Book preview

      Last Exit to Pine Lake - Lenny Everson

      Last Exit to Pine Lake

      By Lenny Everson

      rev 1

      Copyright Lenny Everson 2011

      Smashwords Edition License Notes:

      This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.

      Cover design by Lenny Everson

      Published at Smashwords:

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

      ****

      CHAPTER ONE

      ****

      The Cottage, Long Lake. Fire Day. October 2.

      Paul put the cat out about three in the morning, after stroking her gently under the chin. Then he blocked the cat doorway so she couldn’t get back into the cabin.

      There was no point in the cat dying in the fire.

      He staggered a bit once, as he shifted some wood around. The cabin was stuffed with wood, mostly dry tree branches. Near the middle, under the big oak table, dry grass was tied in bundles. Moving space was getting tight. He sat down and looked around, rubbing his face, then gripping his the sides of his head for a moment.

      It no longer looked much like the place in which he’d spent the last twelve years.

      Above the cabin, silvered in the moonlight, the Wounded Woodpecker slept in the tree that had provided shade in summer. Its bill was tucked under its one good wing and perhaps it dreamed little woodpecker dreams of thick insects hidden under the oak bark.

      Paul’s cat had caught the woodpecker last spring when it had landed on the ground to catch a cricket. Paul had saved the bird, and had since made sure the feeder contained a block of suet even in summer. The bird also ate seeds and berries – downy woodpeckers are not exclusively insect eaters – and so had stayed alive. But it did not wander far from the oak, whose branches offered some protection from owls and hawks. A bird that could barely fly and had only one good eye needed protection by those still strong.

      Paul thought of the woodpecker when he lit the match. His hand was steady, but one leg shook.

      Over a couple of hills, in the deeper waters of Pine Lake, a large burbot tasted a perch that had been sleeping near the shore, then moved slowly back and down towards the dark heart of the lake.

      ****

      Paul Gottsen. Fire Day. October 2.

      Paul took a voice recorder with him on what he meant to be his last day. These note are transcripts from that recorder. I caution you that they are what he wanted the world to know, and may or may not be factual truth.

      Call me Ishmael.

      Call me anything you want. The world will go on. I won’t.

      Or call me the old bastard who lives by the lake. Once the highway went by my house but twenty-two years ago they rerouted it and now I live and die on a dead-end road.

      It suits. I’m a dead-end man on that dead-end road, in a falling-down house on the shallow end of a filling-in bay. The traffic that goes by is far enough away that I can’t hear anything but the trucks, and the bay is shallow enough that motorboats don’t get too close.

      I’ve got a five-gallon can of kerosene, a candle, and a box of good wooden matches. Unless my hands shake, I should only need one match.

      People turn around in my yard when they’ve come to the end of the road. If they see me, they wave an apology. For years, I didn’t wave back, but now I find myself doing so. There are no more reasons not to, I guess.

      But at least the kids that come here in summer will see the ashes and for years they can point out the place where the old guy burned his house.

      One last trip. I guess I owe it to the trees I know out there. God knows I don’t owe it to myself.

      Okay, so it’s not a rational thing, to take a final canoe trip before dying. As if dying were itself a rational thing.

      Dying makes all things irrelevant, including reason and hope and life.

      [pause]

      When I was very young I once saw four angels. They were sitting on branches, among the leaves of the old pine on my uncle’s farm. They said nothing, did not smile. Large wings fanned in the August heat.

      I ran, of course (we were taught to mistrust strangers).

      ****

      Peter Finer, Journalist

      Almost one year after the fire, Peter Finer’s book, Dark Waters: A Life of Paul Gottsen, came out. That critical biography placed special emphasis on the last few days and Peter’s own part in the events of those days. This is excerpted from that book .

      Again, I caution you that the writer’s view of the events and the truth are, for reasons unknown, sometimes at variance. His prose, as well, tends toward the overly dramatic, although a few people claim to like it.

      It was dawn and the canoe was waiting for him. It was dawn and death was waiting for him.

      He had his final odyssey awaiting, and he must have paused after spreading the inflammables around the house he’d lived in for so many years.

      We can speculate about what materials he assembled to create the fire and to make sure it would be complete. His last written but unpublished novel, Dark Lake, for sure. He’d have torn the manuscript apart sheet by sheet, crumpled the papers into bundles, and placed carefully them around. Even in preparation for death, he was never a ragged personality.

      There would have been a supply of gasoline – he bought some at the store the week before, in a tank normally used by the small outboard motor for his aluminum fishing boat. He put the motor itself onto the table.

      There was only one table in the house. It was a small table, and much prose had been written on it. It was on that table that he may have read the bad reviews of his last work, Stolen Rain .

      It’s one thing to think the critics have missed the point of your work, missed the reach of it, and will someday regret what nasty things they wrote. It’s another to think they’re right in their disappointment.

      So he filled the cabin with combustibles and got the canoe ready.

      He may have even kept notes, of course. Egotistical as always, maybe as he always had to be, he may have penned his final writing, the words he wanted to survive him. If so, they’re gone, now, except for his last words into his voice recorder.

      He lit the candle wick that would start the fire after he was gone, calmly set the box of matches on the table, and walked to the canoe. Dawn was not quite there yet. Death had an appointment with Paul Gottsen on Pine Lake.

      ****

      Notes from Kimberley Molley, Student

      Kimberley plays an important part in this narrative, so pay attention. With apologies: The notes from Kimberley are an edited version, compiled from text messages to herself and others, email messages, and phone conversations (as remembered). The originals are no longer available.

      I started taking these notes in hopes they would be an accompaniment for a requirement for Contemporary Writers 1209, January assignment. Assuming contemporary to mean poets that are currently alive, I decided that Paul Gottsen was a contemporary writer when I started this assignment. What the heck.

      By accompaniment, I wanted to indicate that this document would be secondary to my essay, Paul Gottsen: Misogyny and Redemption, which was due in a month or so. Maybe I was so unsure of my essay-writing skills I thought it needed backup.

      In the end, I decided not to submit this narrative to the prof.

      Instead, this story describes my attempts to meet with, and talk with, Paul Gottsen, in what were to be the last days of his life.

      How It Started

      Early in October of last year, my friend, Cindy, and I were discussing the year’s assignments, and which contemporary writer we’d choose for January’s work. Cindy, like, I suppose, many of the students taking the Contemporary Writers 1209 course, writes poetry herself, as did Harvey, with whom she was living at the time. I declined her offer to do a dissertation her, and refused to do one on Harvey, even if he’d had a couple of poems published in American literary magazines and dozens published on various Web sites. I felt that any criticism might not be taken as constructive and praise might be viewed suspiciously. Besides, Harvey’s still stuck in a Leonard Cohen milieu (don’t tell him I said so).

      In the Commons Cafeteria we were sharing our disappointment that so few of the poets we studied, while still alive, were able to come personally to the university to lecture, or even to read their poetry and meet with the students.

      I guess we should go find one ourselves, she said, laughing, as she put her hand on my arm. [Note: conversations within this paper are approximately correct – I have a good memory for such verbal interplay – but I’ve learned to my chagrin that my memory sometimes edits. So don’t assume the words are exact.]

      That’s an idea, I said. My life at the time was a bit mixed up and a distraction promised to be a good remedy.

      ****

      Mad Tom’s Diary

      Mad Tom took to living in the woods around Long Lake a couple of years before the fire. The first winter was pretty much a disaster and he had to return to civilization, but he made it through his second winter without major damage. This is from his diary, which he started a year before and continued sporadically.

      Tom was institutionalized more than once, and lived on the streets quite a bit; you should take his observations with a great deal of skepticism, but he is an important player in this drama, and you will want to be aware of his thoughts and feelings.

      When I was born there were ten of me, No, there were ten of us. Nine were me. The tenth, last born, was not.

      All our life we’ve been hungry for life and love and laughter, but we sat quietly, waiting at the table for the tenth to begin.

      The eyes of those I meet grow small when they see me coming. They can see Mr. 10th where I cannot, so I should forgive them.

      Too many empty streets, too few stranger’s coins in the hat. Too many small rooms with peeling paint. So many that talked to us only when they had to.

      Teresa, Mother Teresa of the Lost Street Folk was always glad to see us. Another form filled out, another folder in some gray cabinet with a name on it. She came and she left, smiling anyway.

      When I die, nine of us will be buried, fading screams within this circus skull. The tenth will not, I think.

      Nine of us are clowns, like all the other people I’ve met. Not the tenth. The Dark Ringmaster of Angels and Clowns demands more respect.

      Winter is coming. Nine of us are cold. I will build a new shelter, this time beside Pine Lake. Pine Lake is where I met Paul three times before, and I think of it as Paul’s Lake. Today I move my few possessions there. Maybe Paul will come visit.

      I think I been diddled

      Rousted and fiddled

      When I took a jump for the moon.

      The people all laughed to see such a sport

      And no dish was found in the ruin.

      ****

      Paul Gottsen. Fire Day. October 2.

      Notes into an Voice Recorder

      I thought I’d have a lot to say right now. Words, it turns out are not only a pale shadow of life, but totally inadequate against death.

      The lake is like

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