Gill Finn

Gill Finn

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor; vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud, and the rain . . --Henry David Thoreau

The sun is rising over the small, distant town of Batooka, Maine. A young boy pulls a writhing earthworm from the confines of a rusty coffee can and attaches it to a shiny fishhook. Granite bluffs rise from the black water of the lake as a natural barrier. 

The sky is yielding to the encroaching light in great chunks by now, and the surrounding town begins to awaken.

Virgin light consumes the remaining mist suspended over the glasslike surface of an enormous, prehistoric lake. Blackbirds roosting in the uppermost branches of an old birch tree, preen and groom. 

One by one, they observe the activity below of the little fisherman named Gill Finn. 

The water within the lake yawns as though taking its own massive breath. Stone, old as the earth itself litters the edge, framing the lake in glints of quartz.