Sunday ☕ : The Last Boat Ride

Our stuff is stacked in the little white fiberglass boat like the Beverly Hillbillies, every bag, cooler, and box we want to take back to Austin piled around our feet, as we motor away from the dock. This is the fifth and last trip and the car is overpacked.

The shoreline is getting smaller behind us, and there’s a lump in my throat. Some part of me is always wondering: what if this is the last time?

That’s the thing about saying goodbye to a place, not just a person. For over 30 years, the Adirondack Mountains have been my muse. And every fall, watching that dock shrink in the wake, I feel it a little more deeply.

Four Generations Deep

Perhaps you’ve heard this story, but it bears repeating. I grew up going to Lake Wawasee in Indiana, the fourth generation in my family to fish those waters. I fished with my grandfather in his little metal boat, the same way my dad fished with his grandfather in a wooden one before him.

My grandparents were the first to get a place on the lake, a little blue bungalow so small you had to step outside to change your mind. When I was about 16, Dad and Mom started doing well. They bought a place across the lake from my grandparents, and I saw them almost every day, all summer, every summer. The lake was filled with activities, visitors, and memories of music on the boat, waterfront romance, dancing, playing volleyball, going to the local movie theater, eating frog’s legs at the local restaurant, barbecues with cousins, sailboat races, hanging out at the sandbar with friends up and down the shoreline. I fell in love there for the first time. That lake held my whole childhood.

Finding Golden Pond

Then one day, Dad told us the place was for sale. I remember feeling distraught. How could we leave Grandma and Grandpa, our friends, our cousins? But Dad’s reasoning made sense. Wawasee had gotten crowded and noisy, smelling of boat exhaust, always choppy from traffic on the water. It wasn’t the calm lake he’d grown up on anymore.

On Golden Pond had just come out, and Dad told us, "I want to live on Golden Pond. I want that quiet life. This is no longer the lake my grandfather and father wanted to be on." He found his Golden Pond in the Adirondacks: old homes, old traditions, the sense that nothing there had changed in a hundred years. We went reluctantly. We fell for it almost immediately.

Our Own Place

Dad remodeled his old place and turned it into more than a funky old cottage, and we visited every summer we could get time off. Once our kids were born, we stayed at his place all summer, every summer.
This, he said, was the place he wanted to pass down for future generations. But eventually something changed, and there came another announcement, when the kids were about 15. Dad was selling again. He’d fallen for somewhere new and wanted us to follow. But it didn’t have the same magic as the Adirondacks. And I did not want to leave the Adirondacks. The prospect of a generational home seemed wonderful, especially since my parents and grandparents sold the homes we grew up in. But there was only one way, I thought, to preserve that life … buy it from my dad.

I remember that several times I prayed that I’d be able to buy his place before it sold. I had fantasies of telling my dad I was going to give him his asking price. But in reality, I couldn’t afford it, and no matter how hard I tried to build my business for years, I did not have the kind of money I needed.

The house sat on the market for almost 10 years, frankly because I don’t think my dad really wanted to sell it. But as he started aging, the time came when we needed our own place without the threat of a sudden sale. So we put the word out on the lake and hoped for a place close enough that our kids could visit Grandpa the way I once visited my own grandparents.

My prayer did get answered, just not how I’d asked for it. Four minutes away by boat, we found something better suited to us: smaller, more manageable, built in 1848 and barely touched since then except the plumbing. Rustic, full of character. No road in. You get there by boat, or you don’t get there. More our style.

A Different Person

I’m a different person up at the lake. I walk for hours in the deep woods. I paint from my own dock with views I couldn’t buy anywhere else, or I paint in my little wooden boat. I relax in a way I can’t seem to manage anywhere else on earth. My dad used to say the same thing: he could unwind faster here than anyplace he’d ever been. Something about the fresh mountain air, the thousands of protected acres around us, the total absence of hurry.

Driving Toward Home

So yesterday, loading that boat and pulling away from the dock, I had tears in my eyes, because some part of me always wonders if it’s the last summer I’ll be here. If I get to choose, this is where I’d want to take my last breath of clean mountain air with my family around me.

Today reality set in when I woke up in a highwayside hotel in Pennsylvania, about eight hours south, making the drive without our dogs for the first time in years, which felt both sad and strangely light. With no dogs to worry about in the car, we’re stopping at a couple of museums I’ve always wanted to see along the way, and soon we’ll be home in Austin, with the whole family together again. I’m grateful. I’ve also learned that gratitude and grief can share the same morning without canceling each other out.

Prayers Get Answered

Someone once told me you always get an answer to prayer. It just might not be the answer you wanted. Sometimes it’s better.
Sometimes it isn’t what you asked for at all, but exactly what you needed.

Looking back, I can remember things I was once convinced mattered enormously, things I prayed hard over, that don’t even register anymore. For years, I treated God more like Santa Claus than anything else: pray hard enough, get the stuff, get the money, get the success. That approach got my teeth kicked in more than once. I lost things I thought I couldn’t live without. I went broke a couple of times. I got fired from my own company.

Today, I’m thankful for every one of those losses. They made me who I am.

Protection in Disguise

My prayers always start the same way, just behind grateful for our life, our breath, and then protection for my family. Looking back, I can see how that protection showed up a lot, even inside the disappointments. I had prayed to be able to buy my dad’s place and didn’t get it, and what I got instead was a life in these mountains that fits us a hundred times better than nostalgia ever would have. I’ve prayed for relationships I wanted that I’m grateful I never got, prayed for businesses I wanted and didn’t get, that I now know would have wrecked me. I’ve prayed over businesses I built that failed anyway, grieved them hard, and realized years later how much better off I was once they were gone.

Somewhere along the way, "Why me?" turned into "Why not me?" Scripture says it plainer than I can: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). Who am I to argue with a plan I can’t see the whole of? I’m trying to be more focused on His purpose than my own, but my ego tends to get in the way.

Giving Up Control

Control is usually the first thing we have to let go of. When we got the call that our son had had a heart attack and might not survive, I wanted to control that more than I’ve ever wanted to control anything in my life. There was nothing I could do. My only real option was to pray for God’s will instead of mine. Our son survived. We’ve had a stack of hard things since, but I know there’s a plan I can’t see, and I know I can’t rewrite it. That’s what maturity of trust actually looks like.
If there’s something heavy on your mind this morning, something running the show behind your thoughts, I’ll tell you what I keep having to relearn myself: there’s usually nothing you can do about it except hand it over. It might not come out your way. It will come out His way. It might not look better at first. It usually is, eventually. He always has a better plan.

The Harder Question

A reader asked me something recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about: "Eric, how can you pray to a God who allows people to suffer?"
It’s a fair question, and I don’t think there’s a tidy answer, but here’s where I’ve landed. People suffer with or without a God in the picture. Most of it comes from man. Suffering isn’t proof He’s absent; if anything, it’s one of the things He seems to use most to get our attention. Some of it comes from other people making choices that hurt us. Some of it is just the cost of living in bodies that age and break, in a world that isn’t finished being made right. And some of it, if I’m honest, is the exact thing that built the parts of me I’m proudest of now.

I didn’t ask to leave the lake I loved as a kid. I didn’t ask for the businesses that failed. I didn’t ask for that phone call about our son. If I had been offered a version of my life with none of it, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat. But I wouldn’t be the man writing to you this morning. I wouldn’t know what actually matters, or how small my own plans really are next to whatever’s being worked out.

I don’t believe God causes every hard thing that happens to us. I believe He’s present in the middle of it, aware of it, and sometimes lets if happen, and that He can use almost anything, even the things that gut us, for something we can’t see yet. That’s not an answer that erases the pain. It’s just the one that’s carried me through mine. And as a parent, I can totally relate to allowing my kids to make foolish mistakes, knowing they won’t listen anyway, and understanding that they will learn important lessons.

Grateful and Grieving

So that’s where I am this morning: driving south, grateful for a full house waiting in Austin, still a little heartbroken watching that dock shrink in the mirror. Both things are true at once. I’ve stopped trying to pick one.

Over to You

What are you still gripping so tightly that you’ve forgotten it was never yours to control? What would it actually look like to let go of it this week, instead of just saying you will? What if you turn it over?

P.S. Did you know that art is so powerful that it captured the spirit of America and made legislators create many of our national parks so they would be forever preserved? That’s exactly what happened at Acadia National Park.

Soon after I get home, I’ll board a plane to Maine for my Fall Color Week artists’ retreat, starting exactly two weeks from today. If you’re adventurous, you can take one of the last 15 seats for a week of painting the Maine coast in full autumn blaze, based at the Schoodic Institute inside Acadia National Park.

No competition, no judging, just painting alongside people who’d rather paint than just about anything else. Registration closes tonight at midnight. If you’ve been telling yourself "next year," this is the time, because we’re not doing Maine next year and probably not for another few years. fallcolorweek.com

Your Turn Now

Which is it for you this week: chase the thing you’ve been putting off, or stay in the chair and let it pass you by again? I already know which one I’m choosing.

Who Is This Guy Eric Rhoads?

Eric Rhoads is the founder and publisher of PleinAir Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine (both on newsstands nationally), author and host of six Art Marketing instruction videos, writes a blog on Art Marketing, and is the author of the Amazon bestseller Make More Money Selling Your Art. Additionally, he produces the weekly e-newsletters American Watercolor, Fine Art Today, Inside Art, PaintTube ArtNotes, Pastel Today, Plein Air Today, and Realism Today. Eric hosts the in-person Plein Air Convention & Expo, the Fine Art Trip for art collectors, and painting retreats including Paint Adirondacks, Fall Color Week, and the Winter Art Escape, as well as online virtual events Acrylic Live, Pastel Live, PleinAir Live, Realism Live, Watercolor Live Digital Painting Live, Gouache Live, and Art Business Mastery Day. He is also the producer of the PleinAir Salon Online Art Competition and art instructional courses through PaintTube.tv. Each weekday Eric hosts Art School Live, a YouTube show featuring free demos from a variety of artists, and he is host of the PleinAir Podcast and Art Marketing Minute Podcast. Eric is a plein air, landscape, and portrait painter with works at Castle Gallery. He is heavily involved in the radio industry as founder of Radio Ink Magazine as well as Radio + Television Business Report, the Radio Forecast Conference, and the Hispanic Radio Conference. He is the author of the bestselling book Blast from the Past: A Pictorial History of Radio’s First 75 Years. Eric lives in Austin, Texas, with his bride, Laurie, and they are the parents of triplets. Learn more at EricRhoads.com, or see Everything We Do.