I live on a million-acre island in northern Montana. A cold, wide, deep mountain river bounds me to the south, as do Idaho's castles of mountains to the west and Canada's clearcuts to the north. I am bounded on the east by a vast lake, like a moat. My valley is an island, and within the cold and snowy year, here in Canada's shadow, June is its own island within the island. It's not quite as if you've been sleeping in all the previous months—neither after June passes so quickly, like a flame, will you immediately close down your year and begin preparing for hibernation—but it is not until June arrives that you realize, without having understood it earlier, that this is what some relatively huge part of the winter-ravaged husk of your body and soul has been waiting for: the long reach of days, the barefootedness, and the extravagance of warmth in the north country. Every cell in your body drinks in, absorbs, that new long light, clamors for it, as if you are sipping champagne from some tall fluted glass.
