Contentment

The first chapter of Cache Lake Country is called "Portage to Contentment", and so from the beginning, the reader will be able to tell that Jim Rowlands finds in Cache Lake Country his spiritual home. It reminds him of the mountains and forests of his youth. When he came upon Cache Lake, it struck him at the ideal lake, a place that no other place could better represent his sense of beauty and peace in the world.

The reader knows nothing of Jim Rowlands before the book, what his life consisted of, save that he worked for a timber company that asked him to live in the North Country to supervise logging operations. Thus Rowlands, while giving a sort of autobiography, focuses entirely on the world of the North Country and his little pocket of life within it, filled with arts and crafts, fishing and hunting, preparing for...