Gaudet Lake

Gaudet Lake is a deep, glacial lake in northern New Hampshire, a handful of miles from the Canadian border. Its remote shoreline and surrounding forest make it both a striking natural setting and an enclosing presence around the small cabin where Andrew, Eric, and Wen spend time together. Fishing, swimming, and searching the grass for insects unfold against a landscape that feels far removed from their urban lives.

Setting and Landscape

The cabin stands as a small red mark on the lake’s southern shore. On a cloudless summer day, sunlight shimmers across the leaves above it, while Wen searches the grass nearby. From the elevated back deck, the lake appears deep and dark, its basin gouged out by glaciers fifteen thousand years ago. Pine, fir, and birch form an extensive ring around the water; beyond them, the White Mountains rise to the south, seeming at once like a natural fortress and a barrier with no easy way through.

The lake’s spaciousness also produces solitude. Although a handful of cabins and camps are scattered around its shores, none can be seen from the family’s deck. The only boat Eric, Andrew, and Wen spot is a yellow canoe gliding along the far shore until it disappears from view. The surrounding New England landscape seems spectacularly unlike the family’s ordinary urban environment, making the lakeside feel almost like a world apart.

Life at the Cabin

The shore and its structures become part of the family’s everyday routines. The cabin’s dock is functional but dilapidated: metal pipe posts support bleached, warped wooden slats beside the rocky shoreline. Eric worries about its condition, but Andrew has promised to teach Wen to fish for perch from its edge. Eric imagines that she may be put off by baiting a hook or removing a barbed hook from a fish, yet he also recognizes that she may insist on doing every part herself. Her fierce independence reminds him of Andrew and deepens his concern for her safety.

Andrew’s approach to the lake is more impulsive. The previous afternoon, while Wen was changing into her bathing suit, he answered Eric’s attempt to discuss the rickety dock by sprinting across it, making the structure shake beneath his feet, and cannonballing into the water. The episode sets Eric’s caution against Andrew’s physical confidence, with the unstable dock making that contrast concrete.

The nearby grass offers another small adventure. Andrew, who grew up on a farm in Vermont, teaches Wen to sweep her foot through the grass as if it were a scythe, without cutting the plants down. When there is no cell service at the cabin, he draws the tool on a napkin instead, explaining its curved blade and long handle. Wen enjoys imagining her leg as the handle and her foot as the blade. A brown grasshopper, large enough to span her hand, then flies up from beneath her foot, strikes her chest, and sends her stumbling backward, nearly falling.

Narrative Significance

Gaudet Lake’s calm surface and ample space do not erase the limits of the family’s setting. The unseen camps, distant canoe, forest ring, and mountains make the place beautiful but difficult to read as an open, connected world. At the same time, the lake is not merely scenery: its rough dock elicits a disagreement about safety, while its grass and shoreline give Andrew and Wen room to share practical knowledge and play. The same remoteness that makes these ordinary moments feel self-contained also lends the cabin and its surroundings a quiet sense of isolation.