Lowell Lake

I visited Lowell Lake on my drive east out of Manchester, Vermont. It was just how I imagined it sitting at a desk writing in rural Georgia. Somehow I had found the perfect spot for Jake’s encounter with the Abenaki using Google maps.

Seeing it in person was special. I stopped at 9am on a Wednesday morning and was the only one there in an empty dirt parking lot. It’s a big lake, but in an accessible kind of way. The loop around the perimeter is about three and a half miles. I didn’t walk it. I was too busy taking photos and videos and marveling at the scene.

Just like my Boston visit, it was obvious I needed to make some edits to the chapter. The Abenaki boys do not take Jake up to a rise but instead out on a promontory. The wigwam village is not along the near shoreline but on the shoreline across the water. I did, however, get a lot of things right in my original telling. There are warnings to keep dogs on-leash and to clean up after them. The little dirt road leading out to the lake is the perfect spot for Jake to suddenly park the van and it’s very plausible that he would have been woken up by a brown-uniformed ranger banging on his door.

I sat at a lakeside picnic table for a while and closed my eyes. The air was cool. I could hear geese in the distance across the open water and a woodpecker busily loud behind me. I breathed softly and tried to empty my mind of any other thoughts other than the Abenaki people. I didn’t find the void or have any visions, but I did feel a swell of gratitude for having the lake and the beautiful setting all to myself, uninterrupted by the outside world. And I said a prayer of thanks to the Abenaki people for inspiring my story. I hope readers enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Note: as soon as I catch up on social media, I’ll post more photos and a cool video from my Lowell Lake visit.