So, hitting the pause button for the 154th time in 43 years — there, in the river that is effectively a moat, making the swim to the cabin beyond — I pondered global cooling: It just might be getting worse.

Never, in August, has the river been so cold. And rarely have the temperatures been so cool — lower 70s over upper 40s, meaning crackly fires every a.m. to ease the morning out of the night.

This is our cabin, distantly north, “exempt from public haunt,” and purchased for peanuts the first summer out of college with money earned working ore boats plying the Great Lakes.

Made of cedar logs harvested on site, it hardly is a shack but hardly the Plaza either: no electricity, no running water, no TV, no turn-down service, but propane lights, stove, refrigerators, and — to avoid late-evening encounters with the wolves or bears – toilette. (Without venturing into theology or epistemology, let’s just stipulate that propane toilets apparently are hot items with the Amish.) The nearest neighbor dwells, oh, 10 miles away.

She loves the cabin, but she sort of has to because she married it when she linked up with him. Yes, she is a very good sport.

Given the fugitive quality of man and his enterprises, we repair at least annually to this refuge — this sanctuary, this wilderness sepulcher — to reacquaint with family, with ourselves, and with the values central to man’s tentative planetary tenancy.

Time out. Down time. The mute or pause button pushed during noisome ads. None of the stress that wreaks havoc on our well-being. No brooking of the bogus. Instead of the laid-on cacophony and complexity of contemporary life, instead of too much deceit and too many over-stuffed egos, instead of frantic channel-surfing or frenetic trips around the Internet highway — a pace unhurried, unflustered, old-shoe.

It takes 22 rolling hours to drive there; recorded books and conversation, actual conversation, make the trip zip along. But once settled in, life reduces to simplicity, elemental truths, hammock lazing, slow moonlit paddles, fireside fantasies, and prowling woodlands and streams.

Overhead, the season’s first flocks. In the birches and aspens, the first dapples of yellow; in the maples, the first screams of red.

Coyotes yapping in their pre-adolescent voices, far but seemingly ever closer. Pileated woodpeckers and cedar waxwings. Bald eagles soaring on updrafts, eyes locked on the river’s surface for flaring trout.

Along the riverbank, gentians, goldenrod, lupine, cornflowers, cardinal flowers, grass of Parnassus. On the forest floor, maiden-hair ferns, vagrant trilliums, tracks of deer, porcupines, and timber wolves. Continued...