But they loved having guests, he said, or they used to, and most of the bungalows were set up as live/work spaces—the living rooms had the ceilings pulled out to reveal the rafters, so there was a fifteen-foot-high space in each one. Many of the bungalows had been renovated with the help of friends and guests, and in general, anyone who’d done the bulk of the work on a bungalow laid claim to the space in a long-term way. Tyler thought it was important for everyone who came through to see the creation of their work as something that was only in tandem with the reconstruction and resurrection of this aging, creaking, overgrown bygone paradise. He thought that it produced work that could only be specific to this place.

I asked if they were cataloging everything that came out of here, if all of this was a long-term real estate game—buy the property where x, y, and z were made! He shook his head. It’s not a game, he told me. This is our life. We built our own universe. I asked if they’d ever worked on anything collectively, even though I knew the answer—they were, after all, the only collective in the world that had never once created a work of art together, only worked side by side—and he said, after a minute, no. Pine City was a way to stay together, to feel like they had a family. That they were a family.

*  *  *

We popped out of the woods and came to a hill above the black lake. A narrow dock, sturdy and new, jutted from across the other side of the water, but I was certain it didn’t come from Pine City; no, this was an aspect of the enormous lake I hadn’t yet seen, a finger-shaped outlet that must have peeled away from the larger palm.

The hill sloped down to a grassy beach, where a rickety cedar dock stretched a dozen yards toward the newer dock on the other side. We bounded down a set of dirt stairs, risers made from chunks of four-by-four, and stepped carefully onto the planks. I was afraid that it would collapse under our weight. Tyler shook his head at my reticence.

“It’s okay,” he said. I nodded, but stayed behind him anyway. When we were halfway out, looking across the silent black lake, a cluster of storm clouds rolled in, bloated purple and gray specters, pregnant with rain.

The sky changed in an instant—from a bright, daffy blue to a sinister yellow-green, that sickly sweet color, like the edge of a bruise, that comes before a summer storm.

“I’m not looking to work en plein air,” I said as a chilled gust of wind bit my bare skin.