Tuesday, Nov. 3 —
Before the sun clears the ridge, the lake lies perfectly still. Nothing disturbs it: no wind, no wake, only a long held breath of cold air that has settled between the mountains overnight. The water is a deep, mineral turquoise, the colour that glacier meltwater takes when it carries fine rock flour down from the high ice, and it holds the whole range upside down in its surface.
The peaks are painted in broad, confident planks of colour, slate blue and dusty violet in the shadows, warm rose and cream where the first light touches them. A fresh dusting of snow has settled in the gullies and along the ledges, just enough to trace the structure of the rock without hiding it. The brushwork is thick and rhythmic, as if the painter worked fast and outdoors, trusting the shapes rather than the detail.
On the right shore the larches have turned. In this one season they are the only conifers that surrender their needles, and they do it in gold, so that the dark forest around them is lit as though by small lamps. Their colour reaches down into the water in soft, wavering strokes, a second forest growing beneath the first.
At the centre of it all is the canoe, a single stroke of red, no bigger than a fingernail against the scale of the mountains. It gives the picture its pulse. Everything else is cool and quiet and enormous, and this small warm shape says that someone has been here, or is about to be. Perhaps the paddler has stepped ashore for a moment. Perhaps the boat has simply been left to rest, the way one leaves a cup on a table in a sunlit room.
The mood is one of patient stillness, the pause between night and day, between autumn and winter. It is a morning to stand and look at, without hurry, until the light finally reaches the water and the mirror begins to break into ripples of gold.