Although that cabin was left standing for another six-plus years, the newlyweds were the old Camp’s glorious last hurrah, just as it was their set up and send off and an emblem of what brought them back. Between that summer of 1957 and their return in 1964 to settle in a house just up the road, they lived on the West Coast, in Italy, and in New York City, where they got to know artists and intellectuals of reputation. Some of those new worldly friends would visit them there on the river bank in the coming years; many others, along with the growing number of Wendell’s readers, kept track of the now famous story unfolding there through poems, stories & essays. Salvage from the original Camp was used in the construction of the new one, which was well-insulated & lined inside with six inch tongue-and-groove, and had the look and feel not of a weekend, like its predecessor, but of a life. No, a way of life. Wendell was out to prove that the received opinion of the day about not being able to go home again was seriously wrong-headed, confused, short-sighted. The Long Legged House was the new cabin’s literary name, bestowed in his magnificent essay by that title, but no one has ever called his writing place anything but the Camp. The makeshift cardtable from the old cabin was replaced by a long, deep work counter fastened to the wall and floor, and the vacation view from the old porch was framed before eternity in the grand window above it, the ‘wind’s eye’ in these elegant and wise meditations. The old Camp, where you were among the river gods, embraced by a simpler, freer way of life, it wasn’t gone: trusting birds at the feeder a hand-reach away testified to that, the same wildflowers around the door entrance and down the slope, the same ever-changing muddy river rising and falling and swirling and going quiet on the surface as the same blue heron, or his progeny, lifted off upstream and disappeared. The old Camp was very much still in the air, but things were considerably more complicated & momentous now for the still-very-young writer-man no longer on his honeymoon. A sprawling vulnerability came close to being his base condition, as his conversation & writings testified. There were children in the picture now, history was tightening the ecological and political screws, more people were paying attention to him, more causes needed his voice. In 1957 he’d been a camper on that river bank, now he was an outspoken citizen of the endangered world. He shook his head in despair often, and stared off into space as though he did not want to talk any more about what he saw. His trot lines had grown heavy, I find myself saying, and the dark in which he worked them no longer a thrilling challenge, a source of juice, more like a fear now, a dread, a terrible drain. The delightful twenty-seven pound catfish had been replaced during the intervening years with two-ton tar-babies like agri-business and world population and the fossil-fuel culture.