Galena House Publishing.The Hour Lake Dillon Turns to Glass
Before the wind comes up the valley, the reservoir goes still enough to hold the mountains twice. Most people sleep through it.
There is an hour on Lake Dillon that belongs to no one. It comes before the wind, before the first boat, before the road along the shore wakes up, and it lasts about as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee slowly. In that hour the water stops moving. It goes so still that the Tenmile Range stands in it upside down, every ridge and gully copied exactly, and you can no longer tell where the mountain ends and the lake begins.
I go down to meet it when I can. Not every morning. The hour does not ask for devotion, only for attention, and attention is harder to give at six in the morning than devotion ever is.
A town beneath the water
Lake Dillon is not a lake in the old sense. It is a reservoir, made when the Blue River was dammed in the early 1960s to carry water under the Divide to Denver. Before the water rose, the town of Dillon was picked up and moved to higher ground. What could not be moved was left. People here still speak of the old town lying under the surface, its streets somewhere below the boats, and on the stillest mornings it is easy to believe you could look down through the glass and see a roofline.
I like knowing that. It makes the stillness feel less like an absence and more like something being kept.
What the water holds at nine thousand feet
At this altitude the light arrives before the sun does. The sky goes from ink to a thin blue, then the highest peaks catch first, Peak One above Frisco and the long spine of the range behind it, lit pink at the summits while the shore is still in shadow. The lake takes the color a minute later, as if it had to be told. For a while there are two sunrises, one above and one below, perfect copies of each other.
Then a fish rises somewhere in the middle distance and a single ring goes out across the water, slow and wide, and the reflected mountains shiver and come back. That ring is the most beautiful thing I see most days. It is the proof that the stillness was real.
In October the aspens on the far hills have mostly let go, and the slopes turn from gold to a quiet grey-brown, the color of a good wool coat. The first snow sits on the high ground and nowhere else. The water is very cold and very clear. Geese go over in long uneven lines, talking the whole way, and then the sky is empty again.
Why I keep going back
I write about rooms, mostly: rooms that hold people, and the people who keep them. The lake at first light is the largest room I know, and the quietest, and nobody keeps it at all. It keeps itself. I go down to it the way you might go and sit in a church you do not belong to, for the stillness, and for the sense that something older than you is being cared for.
The wind comes up the valley around the time the sun clears the ridge. You can watch it arrive: a dark patch on the far water, spreading, roughening the surface into ten thousand small blue blades. The mountains in the lake break apart and are gone. The hour is over. The day, with all its ordinary demands, has begun.
Stillness is not the absence of motion. It is the moment just before, held long enough to be seen.
If you come to Summit County, come early. Walk down to the shore before the town wakes. Bring nothing to do. Stand where the water meets the stones and wait for the mountains to appear twice.
The novel I wrote about a house at the foot of these mountains, Still, by Design., is at averylanemaxwell.com, and my letters, which come when there is something worth saying, are at averylanemaxwell.com/letters. The press that publishes them, Galena House Publishing, still takes its letters by post.