I've been on a Thoreauvian track this year. On January 1, 1852, Thoreau used the word "dazzlingly" in his journal. And he did so again exactly a year later. 
"Few, if any, leave the beaten paths."
--Henry David Thoreau (January 13, 1852)
By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now." (January 5, 1860)
"I was on the verge of seeing something, but I did not." (January 25, 1852)
"Thank God, [humans] cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." (January 3, 1861)
Why do I think so many boreal thoughts? I enjoy autumn changes as I walk along the Minnesota River and elsewhere, but part of me is always drawn north like the needle of a compass.
Is it possible to be happy wherever I am, and still to yearn?
We need to listen to our own complaints, heed them, and act.
I chafe in the city. This place I love lacks something. For an urbanite who likes having Mexican bakeries and grocery stores nearby, a choice of Middle Eastern delis, and neighbors from all over the world, I'm drawn to rural places. I like to go where the silence tells me what I need to hear. Where I feel fully part of the natural world, instead of an alien plunked down somehow in an environment more suited for cars than humans.
I'm moving to Freesia.
In the city there is such a clamor of competing voices. In the city, I'm at the intersection of This Way and That Way. Cross traffic impedes me, makes me cross. In the city I'm surrounded by trash. It blows around my neighborhood, and each day I pick it up. Where does it come from, ultimately? Imagine what it would be like to live someplace really crowded and polluted. I don't want to.
Where there's a weal, there's a way.
Continually it is so: I breathe most deeply and refreshingly, am most inspired, out of doors in the presence of birds and trees, away from straight lines and cement, away from human hubris, kindness, meetings, frivolity, and so-called "news".
What's new is that a tree in Loring Park has changed its clothes for the season, from solid green to a green, yellow, and red ensemble.
What's new is the moon.
Everything timeless, eternal, and old, oddly, is new. New because it's always changing.
Slow down, sit still and watch, and changes will appear. Are you ready?
Prepare to meet thy mood.
Human observations make a chain, wrote Thoreau. "The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest" we do not observe. We track ourselves through life, in all our "hearing and reading and observation and traveling."
I've been on a Thoreauvian track this year. On January 1, 1852, Thoreau used the word "dazzlingly" in his journal. And he did so again exactly a year later.
Everything new is dazzling. Each new year. Each new day. Each new moment.
Every day is Ardor Day.
I feel more love in the woods for an hour than all day long indoors.
My love is bundled like a cattail, densely packaged, but light, waiting to spill over and spread.
On a foray away from the city lately, I saw a sign for Nowthen, Minnesota, and wondered, "Is there no Herenow?"
No matter the ailment or conundrum, when in doubt, my self-prescription is silence, space, and rest.
I'm heading north again.
Day 1 -- Baptism River
On the drive from Minneapolis to Hinckley, I spot three hawks perched in trees beside the highway.
Oak leaves float down from an empty sky. (Are there trees up there in the heavens?)
A few dirty snow piles decorate the parking lot at Toby's. (Pit stop.)
Hey, is that Chris Babcock? Yes, it is. My cross country relay partner from August is here with his parents and girlfriend, on their way to Duluth to visit his new niece.
Restaurants are feeding stations.
It's foggy and drizzly north of Hinckley. More and bigger snow piles appear.
And where is Duluth? From a hill top which usually offers a vista of harbor, bridges, city, and lake, today there is nothing but gray, and a road immediately in front of me. I hadn't even realized I'd been driving uphill. Welcome to the invisible city.
North of Duluth the fog lifts, but there is still no visible line beyond the water of the shore. Above the big lake, gray sky and fog obscure the horizon. Gray gauze. A blur.
I remember Edmund Fitzgerald 100K relay legs that I ran along here fifteen years ago and more, anchoring the Green Wave to a win in 1987, having just come down with a cold. (Today I've come down with nostalgia, it seems.)
The road narrows from four lanes to two. Just think, the phrase "two-lane highway" didn't used to be necessary, any more than "snail mail" or "acoustic music."
Two-lane highways are only as fast as the slowest vehicle. What if human society was like that?
To pace ourselves with computers and other engines is folly. Tried and true technologies match our heartbeats, strides, and the pace of careful thinking.
I'm thankful for everyone who slows me.
In Two Harbors I stop for groceries, a week's worth of food. When I return to the car, I see that I've left its headlights on.
Pay attention, Dodge.
(Do you ever talk with yourself? If so, who are the two people talking?)
Another stop in Beaver Bay to gas up. ("Gas up." Fill it up to the top of the tank with gasoline, please.)
On the shore near Silver Bay, dark gray plumes billow into light gray sky from smoke stacks. Northside Mining taconite plant.
Drivers in pick-up trucks are wearing orange. It's deer hunting season. So far I've seen one deer alive and one dead today.
Imagine if deer were armed.
Onward and upward, I drive away from the lake to Finland, Minnesota, and beyond, cross the Baptism River again and again, turn off, then arrive at a gate near the end of a bridge. Marked with a NO TRESPASSING sign, it looks locked but isn't.
I gun the car through ice and snow, in first gear, up and down a rutted drive, two tracks through the woods, about a quarter mile long. I'll make it out okay. If it snows, it snows. The forecast is for low 40s the next few days, around freezing overnight.
My next car will be a truck. With 4-wheel drive. Maybe.
I'm here!
At the cabin on the Baptism River I plug in the toilet (that's right), unpack my bags, make a cup of coffee, eat an apple, load the bird feeders with sunflower seeds. There's snow on the ground. It looks like six or seven inches.
Having heated water for coffee, I pour a ladybug from the kettle.
I'm greeted by the Grok! of a raven, the scolding of a red squirrel, and nearly tame chickadees who come to within a couple of feet of me. Human feet, that is.
What birds will show up next? I'm guessing blue jays at dawn.
The silence is a balm.
Red-breasted nuthatches appear on the feeders.
The smaller the bird, the faster the wing beat.
There's no water running, so it's a good thing I brought my own. Has the well run dry? I call the cabin's owner, and ask her about this. From two thousand miles away I hear sounds of an infant, gurgling and cooing.
It is not literally silent and still here, but blissfully quiet. I can hear the sound of the river flowing.
Feeder activity picks up. Three chickadees, two nuthatches. It's like an avian airport here.
The red-breasted nuthatch has a black stripe through its eye.
Here's a topsy turvy bird who prefers to be upside down. It grabs a sunflower seed, takes it to the side of the feeder, then--upside down--whacks it against the wood.
I walk for 45 minutes or so at dusk, and return just as it's getting dark. Heard a raven on my way: "Rok! Rahwk!" Then eight of them flew over.
Deer tracks in the drive.
I break off a weed stem and poke it into a pile of snow as far as it will go. Measure it with my hand. Nine inches, one span.
Candle light time now. Outside: dark and still. Overcast: no stars or moon in sight. But they're up there. Right?
I read entries from "The Cabin Book," jottings about visitors' experiences here. Such as this, dated July 5, 2003: "The Big Woods in July can be a swampy, bug-infested, fly-blown hell hole."
And thumb through some guide books about the area. According to the second edition of Nina Simonowicz's Nina's North Shore Guide (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Beaver Bay is the oldest community along the North Shore (1856).
Here's a book for me: A Dreamer's Log Cabin, by Laurie Shepherd (Dembner Books, 1981). At head of title: "A Woman's Walden." It's a year-long journal (spanning October 1978-1979) written by an intrepid 28-year-old woman, describing her building of a log cabin from scratch near the headwaters of the Mississippi on eight acres she purchased after quitting her jobs as insurance agent and dishwasher. Acquaintances were skeptical. Shepherd was single-minded. On April 16, 1979, a phone line was strung to "my little phone booth," a box on a tree. (Shepherd was living in a tent with a dog and two cats while she worked on the cabin.) April 19: dug a latrine. May 9: outhouse completed (a two-day project). May 15: "The cats are getting well settled in their pen and cathouse."
No flies buzzing here now, unlike in late March. I've only encountered one or two live ladybugs. A while ago I emptied a light fixture of insect carcasses and now I already see seven or eight more motionless bodies in it.
Dark, dark, dark. A darkness that accentuates the least sound. I hear a slight clinking. From outside? Stop. Listen. Look. It's two flies trapped in the light fixture overhead. And now they're still.
Darkness also affects the perception of time. The silent darkness is seemingly timeless.
Inside myself I'm still on city time. Still wound up.
No one deserves less than my best. But many get it, I'm sorry to say.
Tired again? Time to retire.
Day 2 -- Tettegouche and Manitou
Awake at dawn. Gray sky. No jays--or other birds--heard.
First feeder visitors: Chickadees and nuthatches, their breasts colored like lightly toasted marshmallows.
Nuthatch: Hatched from a nut?
A previous visitor left an open sack of "Marshmallow Mateys"-- oat and parti-colored marshmallow breakfast cereal. I'll try anything once.
Still no running water in the cabin. Plenty of running water in the river outside.
I may take a shower at Tettegouche State Park later today, so will take a towel, washcloth, soap, clean socks and underwear with me.
Jewel-like drops of water appear on the bare branches of saplings. Reality's banality is balanced by its stunning beauty.
The Spanish for jeweler is joyería. Imagine a store that sells joy.
Hymns resound in my head, for some reason. (Yesterday I heard someone playing "Hark the Herald Angels" on church chimes near Loring Park.)
I've had enough music for a lifetime. I'm full.
"Silence alone is worthy to be heard." (Thoreau, January 21, 1852)
Speculation: Applause at concerts is often for something other than what the musicians think. We clap because the music has stopped.
Two red squirrels on the feeders now. Watch squirrels for long and "squirrelly" takes on full meaning.
Glad to be alive.
"Viva!" The best of all possible words.
"[T]he stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too. When I took up a walnut this morning, I saw by its grain and composition, its form and color... that it was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects... suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction. They are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould... exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill, and round Hunt's Island, if it had not been happy, if it had been miserable in its channel, and cursing its maker and the hour when it sprang[?]" (Thoreau, January 6, 1857)
One mosquito tries to break through a pane of glass. Is it trying to get in or out? Yes.
Well, I've now learned that Tettegouche is closed for a week-long deer hunt, except for the part east of the highway, along the shore. There goes my idea for a shower at the campgrounds.
I hike down to the shore, listen to the percussion of water on rocks, a drummer with brushes. The sun shines barely through clouds as I sit on lichen-covered rocks just south of Shovel Point. The lake appears gun-metal blue and chandeliers of water droplets hang in the air after each wave collision with rock.
Gurgling underneath me. Infant? Troll? Water.
Jagged, sharp-edged red rocks.
Shovel Point looks like a long bird bill, a fossilized snout.
Now the sun is masked. A raven speaks. Gulls pass by. A bald eagle hovers at twelve o'clock high, watching me, providentially.
I inhale deeply.
Atop Shovel Point, standing on rhyolite, basalt, and gabbro, I see two more "Shovel Points" slope into the lake to the north.
This is hairy woodpecker and red squirrel habitat. The hairy uses its tail feathers as a brace, balancing against a tree trunk.
Overhead: juvenile bald eagle. Then a white-headed adult again, soaring without wing beat.
At my feet: lichen, pale green circles and bright orange-gold splotches.
These red rock cliffs are lashed by waves, similar to the sea caves along the south shore of Superior near Red Cliff, Wisconsin. And also topped with pines.
A curious chickadee comes up to me, so wild it's tame.
Friend, or faux friend?
Why go anywhere else? It's time to move.
In the parking lot: white-bellied birds are feeding. White with rusty brown on the their heads and chests, and white on wings. Snow buntings! A couple of weeks ago I thought, "I would like to see a snow bunting." And now I've seen them.
Just as one sees what one is predisposed to see, one receives only what one is ready to receive, says Thoreau. "We hear and apprehend only what we half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, I hear it not, if it is written, I read it not, or if I read it, it does not detain me....By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now." (January 5, 1860)
I feel as though I've taken to preaching the gospel according to Thoreau.
"As if seeing were all in the eyes... [S]eeing depends ever on the being." (January 12, 1852)
All my life has been a getting ready.
Midday, I've come to Crosby Manitou State Park. One other car is pulled over in a spot that's as far as you can go before a snow pile blocks the road.
The park isn't posted for hunting, so I head north on the Superior Hiking Trail, beneath darkening sky, just like last time I was here. Then it was prelude to a snow storm. Now it starts to rain as I sit in a lean-to about a mile from the trail head.
"Take long walks in stormy weather, or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up," Thoreau writes in his journal entry on Christmas Day in 1856. "Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."
Amen.
I've followed heart-shaped deer tracks in snow to get here. Is it always winter in this park? Snow and ice don't melt rapidly here, it seems.
I didn't pack a poncho, but have an umbrella, so onward I go. It's wet on the trail, rain upon snow.
Picture me: umbrella in left hand, walking stick in right, clambering down steep snow-covered paths, on stones, to the Manitou. There I watch rain fall on ice on the river and listen to a waterfall as blood courses through my veins.
The cascades sound like a huge turbine, which they are. Yellow water pours through rocks. Clay-colored froth at the base looks like the top of an ice cream soda. About forty yards of ice covers the river before open water appears.
The rain makes me decide not to prolong my hiking today.
Driving back toward town, I find County Road 7 red and muddy. I turn off on Air Base Road, then go uphill two miles, curious about a decommissioned air base located there, something I saw from a distant promontory last spring. Due to the fog up here today I can't see anything but what's right in front of me, a no trespassing sign on a closed gate, a sign with an arrow and the word "CHURCH," and a dozen or so 4-digit address signs, white on blue.
Suburban Finland. I sing a song of signs.
There's no snow along the highway near the lake. None.
Situated a little bit south of the mouth of the Baptism River: the Palisade Baptist Church.
At just after four, it's getting dark already, only about a month till solstice.
Tea hour. I speak to my heart: "O you heart!" I address my ear: "Thou ear!"
There are deep tire ruts in the drive, a sign that someone has been here. Scrawled on a paper bag by the kitchen sink: WATER IS ON. I feel giddy. The cabin has running water again! Not expecting this, I'd taken a sponge bath in the restroom of the Silver Bay Public Library. And washed out the socks and underwear I'd been wearing.
To celebrate I make a cup of coffee, my first of the day.
Laurie Shepherd writes: "I love being along, living alone, and working alone. It makes life very special. God is always close because there's no one closer, friends are never taken for granted, and an off-the-cuff sentence at the end of a letter can be a treasure." An off the cuff comment might also be deflating, I'd say.
"I guess we tend to acquire a taste for our inadequacies," Shepherd concludes. In her finished cabin, she had neither electricity nor running water. For heat: a wood stove. For night light: a kerosene lamp. For water: a well and pump.
Her first stove, a relic that had been her great-grandparents', didn't effectively heat her space. On coldest nights she'd get up every two hours to stoke the fire in order to keep the house in the mid 20s. Otherwise it would get colder. ("Thoreau's cabin was warm at night, wasn't it?," she asks.)
In a short epilogue, Shepherd mentions plans for a canoe trip to Hudson Bay. "So, I'm off in pursuit of a new dream, and as others occur to me, I'll pursue them too." That northern urge, she felt it.
A lone raven's voice is thrilling, awesome, and primal. The sound of a stream in the dark is restful, reassuring, peaceful, and continual.
"I hope to see everything in this world before I die," Mary Oliver writes, in "May," from her book White Pine. Oliver's favorite word may be "thumb." She's called an owl "God's thumb," referred to "the sticky thumbs" of snails' bodies, and asserted "When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive."
The English language mystifies me. A dumpling is a little dumple, yes?
Medium, tedium. Thus: media, tedia. No?
Smitten, smote. Bitten, bote?
"It's an old novel." Oh, really?
Is there a word or phrase for "tendency to look for palindromes"? (Aloof fool?) I see them everywhere. In beer. (Regal lager.) On promontories. (Top spot.) In hypothetical queries. ("Apollo, Pa?" "Composition? No, it is 'opmoc.'")
"I exult in stark inanity." (Thoreau, January 24, 1841)
Good night.
Day 3 -- The Temperance and the Cross
Another morning. I've loaded feeders and made coffee. It's foggy and mild outside again.
The red squirrel has a white circle around its eye. It takes a seed in both paws and quickly opens it by nibbling, dispatching each one in a few seconds.
A nuthatch buzzes. A blue jay jeers. The river rushes to the sea.
There is no one I wish were here with me. (Who isn't here?) And no need to go anywhere today.
Eight months ago I donned snowshoes. Today: Rainshoes? Fogshoes?
Stillness has permeated my core. Slowness has overtaken me. It takes about twenty-four hours to extricate myself from urban rhythms.
"Twenty-four" is slower than "24".
I would like a season here. A year.
A life.
A single fly buzzes past. I hear a slight flapping. Death throes. Death row.
Civilization isn't going to hell, it's already there. Noise pollution clutters the city: pushy church chimes, obtrusive sirens, boomboxes, motorcycles, outdoor concerts, neighbors' televisions. A hellish din.
How can anyone think with television, radio, CD player, and computer always turned on? How can anyone experience an original thought with a dozen conversations going on at once, about last night's game, tomorrow's concert, today's weather?
Don't say it, just smile at me and walk on by.
"The gods delight in stillness," Thoreau wrote.
So do I. Silence suits me fine. I could far more easily be deaf than blind. I have a jukebox in my mind.
At last, a jay sighting: One flies in distant tree tops.
Winter is the quiet season, a time for slowing down and reflection, literal hibernation.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year: their trappings belong better to mid-summer. Each year I participate happily less in the holiday rush, and now forget where today's date stands in relation to them. Today is simply today.
Watching chickadees appear from the pine trees 75 yards distant, arcing in flight toward me and the row of saplings outside this window, onto the feeder, for a second or two I'm a cat sitting at this window, not a human.
Chickadees, nuthatches, goldfinches, and small woodpeckers all appear to bounce as they fly, to move up and down like waves even as they go to a point straight ahead, evasive behavior evolved to avoid predatory birds.
First jay at a feeder now.
Just before I head out for the day, four evening grosbeaks appear on a feeder, then perch there and stuff themselves. Goldfinches on steroids, someone has described them. None of this "one seed and then fly away" business for them. (Why are my morning visitors called evening grosbeaks? Were they out carousing all night?)
Outside by my car a ruffed grouse is neither fearful nor in any hurry to leave.
The driveway is all muddy ruts and ice.
Two historical names from the North Shore: Father Baraga and John Beargrease. Don't tell me they're not related.
The Temperance River, about a mile up from its mouth, belies its name. It roils over red rocks intemperately. A few of the flatter rocks are drilled with circular potholes, some a foot deep or more. Others, shallower, are topped with disks of ice. I lift out three of different sizes and stack them. Their diameters vary, from just four inches or so to a foot and a half or more.
Fog and mist hover over the yellow river. The Ojibwe name for the Temperance is "Kawimbash" or "Kawimbush", depending on which of the sources I've consulted is correct. Meaning "Deep Hollow." Jocular voyageurs, it's said, called it "Temperance" because there was no sand bar at its mouth.
On the Superior Hiking Trail, climbing up a ridge on my way to the Cross River, I stop for a while, set down my things, having overheated. Shortly afterward, on my way again, a raven tells me I've left my binoculars behind, so I go back for them. They're on the right hand side of the path as I head back.
The difference between left and right depends on which direction one faces. Face the opposite direction, and left and right change places.
A heavy fog permeates these damp woods, illuminated by bright green moss and ghostly birches with lichen beards.
Obviously this area was once logged. Now it is the ruins of a forest, like ruins of a temple.
Near noon, the sun makes its way through clouds, or the clouds part. Blue sky appears through haze where seconds ago it was entirely murky.
There's some snow up here in the highlands. I hear goldfinches and read squiggly worm graffiti on downed and barkless trees.
Ahoy! A squeaky spruce. What do you make of that? (Red squirrel.)
Standing on a ridge above the Cross River, I watch at eye level as an eagle flies above the river toward its mouth.
The Cross is not exactly angry today, but I can easily imagine it raging in spring.
Another eagle, this one immature, flies down river.
I wish I had a sleeping bag and tent with me. (Drum roll: Rent-a-tent!)
Today feels autumnal, like early autumn. Birch bark weeps wet tears.
Mid-afternoon, atop a prospect looking east from rocks, I see tall birches below, then smoky fog, behind which... more fog. But warm sunshine floods the top of this ridge, with blue sky overhead.
Thrush on the trail, what are you still doing here in late November?
Dee-dee-dee. The chickadee sounds almost like a katydid.
Grok of a raven. Two insects dancing on air.
Hey! A pileated woodpecker there. I watch it fly, now listen to it laugh.
A deer, safe from hunters here. Another grouse. (I've seen grice twice.) And an owl, flying off overhead as I concentrate my gaze downward with a camera in hand.
Some birds seem curious about humans. Chickadees often fly close, just out of reach. "Hello. Who are you?" All friendly curiosity. Eagles gawk, do double takes, turn their heads. Others shy away or could care less.
Even in winter there is color and light. Colors today: Orange fungus, gold-orange lichen on rock, orange at the end of a twig. Red branches (dogwood osier). Green moss. Yellow of one dandelion seen near the trail head, near the settlement called Schroeder; cone-shaped yellowish-white fungus, four or five inches high. Salmon: inside of birch bark. White: outside of birch bark, snow, ice. Blue sky.
Late afternoon: Back at home with a chill. First shower in nearly three and a half days. Nice.
A tiny moth, not 3/4" from wing tip to wing tip, just fluttered over the kitchen table and alighted on my camera where it now rests, motionless. I take a mental snapshot. "The world is never the less beautiful, though viewed through a chink or a knot-hole." (Thoreau, January 16, 1838)
No one on the trail with me today. Hooray! I want to go north, norther, northest. Why not?
Beauty and pain, together, simultaneously. How can it be possible?
To live is to face unending, often unanswerable questions.
What is the minimum daily requirement for joy?
Is childhood experience with religion sometimes a sort of inoculation? (A colleague of mine so theorizes.)
Is there such a thing as too much equanimity?
What is responsibility, exactly? To whom (and to what) am I ultimately responsible?
I've been confronted with ultimatum after ultimatum. Endless ends. Infinite ultimata.
What is frivolous? What is essential? Why do I feel a striving skyward, into the blue? To stand atop mountains? A feeling of "there is more"? Why do I feel a movement downward, gravity, pull of the earth, wanting less and less?
Trees reach upward, higher, visible, at the same time they extend downward, deeper, hidden. Rooted and growing. Humans and trees are alike this way. I want to live closer to the ground, and to the sky. Farther from dense human society, from human noise. More elementally.
I've been down paths that ended badly. I've been disappointed, roughed up, learned some lessons. Now each day is a little lifetime of its own. I've been scared sacred.
"Disappointment will make us conversant with the nobler part of our nature. It will chasten us and prepare us to meet accident on higher ground next time." (Thoreau, January 20, 1841)
Is it possible to know ecstasy and sobriety at once? It is.
In my urban neighborhood I've seen a sign on a window:
COMRADE
SOBRIETY
RULES
Dear Comrade Sobriety, I have soberly and amicably separated from fear.
I'm disgruntled by those who cause harm as a matter of policy. I'm concerned about the safety of my neighborhood and of the planet. I seek to understand, overstand, and stand aside.
Each step, each word is a risk. We'd be paralyzed if we dared not.
"My every breath is a compromise with injustice," wrote Karen Lebacz.
In the woods, who knows what life I tread upon? And with my words, what risk?
Self, beware.
Strong-willed people don't always know what they're doing. Teachers make mistakes. Spiritual advisors, elders, and steadfast friends aren't exempted from knowing turmoil and confusion.
Figure it out for yourself.
"The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks." (Thoreau, January 7, 1857)
Mid-evening, I step outside to look at the sky. Woo hoo! I can see a jillion stars, and the swath of the Milky Way which is obscured in the city. It's hard to make out constellations here because so many more stars are visible than I am accustomed to seeing. The Seven Sisters, those seven stars, shining for so long that my father knew them too, look like seventeen.
Northern lights to the south? What's that? Ebbing and fading gold and green lights.
After fifteen minutes of stargazing, the sky has turned hazy, as if I'm back in the urbs again.
A dog barks.
"I listen... to hear the hounds of silence baying the moon.... The silence sings." (Thoreau, January 21, 1852)
Day 4 -- The Cross and the Temperance
"There is still life in America that is little observed and dreamed of..." (Thoreau, January 15, 1857, writing in his journal about mouse tracks)
It's colder this morning. The sky is overcast again, but minus fog, and plus a light dusting of overnight snow. Clouds blow from the west, with some pale blue sky visible through their spaces.
Indoor temperature: fifty-eight degrees. I turned the thermostat to 60 overnight.
Laurie Shepherd's bannock recipe: 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour, some powdered milk, a scoop of oatmeal, a tablespoon of baking powder, a little maple syrup, a lump of shortening, water to make a thick paste. Fry in a cast iron pan. Serve with butter.
Survival food. How many more days before yellow and gray skies become permanent? What animals and plants will then live on earth? I don't want to be around to see it.
Bawk! Bawk! Bawk! A raven, far off.
By the time I hit the trail, the sun is out, but it's still cool and breezy on a spur trail up the Cross River. Here are two low, broad stone cairns, one about fifteen feet across, on both sides of the trail in a clearing. Who built them, and why?
Uphill warm. I stop and stow my wool cardigan. But it's windy and downright cold atop the ridge above the river where the spur meets the Superior Hiking Trail.
My companions: Sun, ice, running water, sparking reflections, green spruces, shadows, blue sky. For which I am grateful.
Ice over a river. At the cusp of freezing and melting, both conditions exist at once. The frontier where they meet, that's what I wish to explore.
Order in disorder: the anarchy of wildflowers. There's a model. And anarchy in language, where strict adherence to rules can choke the life from whatever feeling, image, or idea compelled someone to try to convey it.
"When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules, --Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham's rule,--I see they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute, or an interjection; first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially, your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat." (Thoreau, January 2, 1859)
Anarchy of the land. As if it were a good idea to to try to govern it.
"New Hampshire courts have lately been deciding, as if it were for them to decide, whether the top of Mt. Washington belonged to A. or to B., and it being decided in favor of B., I hear, he went up one winter with the proper officers and took formal possession. But I think that the top of Mt. Washington should not be private property; it should be but an opportunity for modesty and reverence... (Thoreau, January 3, 1861)
I've been following deer tracks that lead, unsurprisingly, to deer. I startle one that dashes across the fast-running, rocky river.
Rocks and peeling birches are blazed with pale green lichen circles.
"Nature has a day for each of her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall..." (Thoreau, December 31, 1851)
Large branches rub together. Their squeaking sounds like someone speaking.
I don't know the lichens' names. I'm an amateur, which is to say a lover.
More yellow water over rocks. I sit and eat lunch beside the Cross River bridge, looking at carved snow along the bank and foam accruing at the base of cascades.
On my way back to the trail head, a white ermine with a mouse in its mouth dashes across the wet brown path.
Up the road a mile or so, the mouth of the Temperance is deep and dark, with cool, narrow gorges. Water sluices through curvy chasms. "The Cauldron": Smooth rock from which mist rises. The lovely sound of rock music.
Sunset: golden light from behind clouds. To the east: pink haze over the horizon where sky mates with dark blue lake. Celebratory clouds: changing, changing. Gone.
I've lost a new mitten, darn it.
Evening: another sky full of nameless stars. Living in a city, I'd temporarily forgotten why the galaxy is called the Milky Way.
Humans: Those Who Name. Today I've visited a lovely falls, unnamed (far as I know) and pointed to by no signs.
A convention here in the naming of rivers is not directional (North Fork, South Branch, and the like), but size-based: Little Manitou, Little Devil Track, and Little Brule, as distinguished from the Manitou, Devil Track, and Brule.
Maps interest me. Lately I've spent some time examining Katharine Harmon's book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), a colorful compendium of maps by artists, visual poets, cartoonists, hikers, children, and others. This volume has opened the borders of how I've previously thought of cartography. Its maps of concepts, the human body, fictional places; maps from a canine point of view or "upside down;" maps made of sticks or carved in stone; all make sense in a different and wonderful way, rendering "up north" and "down south" thoroughly passé.
I'm curious about Maine, seeing on a state map such intriguing place names as Meddybumps, Mars Hill, and New Sweden.
Here's a list for you: Havana, Verona, Lisbon, Nome, Buffalo, Cleveland, Davenport, Cooperstown, Portland, Ypsilanti. What do these names have in common? (They're small towns in southeastern North Dakota.)
I have a topographical map on which gates are marked. I'd never noticed this before. How about a map which shows places to view the night sky, wild strawberry patches, keepers of Anna Akhmatova's flame?
Some nonpareil things: Song of a wood thrush, owl wings heard overhead before the bird itself is seen, blue sky after ten days of gray, the season's first snow, scarlet berries, pileated woodpecker's flamboyant crest, sound of breakers, rush of a waterfall, profound absence of human noise, sunset light shows, re-engagement with long-missing friends, mystery of those who disappear, the mystery of how the dead still live, balm of knowing society's fashions can be safely spurned, boundless optimism of morning refreshed by sleep, smile from a stranger, jokes of nature, cool breezes after a hot spell, full bladder emptied, poem written, broken item repaired, new metaphor met, dirt cleaned from shoes, surfeit realized and heeded.
Dept. of Thoreauvian Error: "The history of the white man is a history of improvement."
Thoreau was right, though, that human forenames are mostly nonsensical.
My wild name--my original, true, unchanging permanent name, if there is one, is recorded nowhere, and unpronounceable.
Utah Phillips' given name is Bruce. I'm thinking about changing my name to Ned. As in Ned Ludd. As in NED, my father's initials. As in Ed Abbey's family's nickname for him. Ned as in nada + zed. Then I'll live happily ever after in my little Ned den.
Some names are particularly absurd. "Anne Peterson," for example. And "Marian Anderson." To wit, say "Roger Tory Petersdottir" and "Hans Christian Andersdottir."
Today I encountered a sign in the middle of the woods: YOU ARE HERE.
Was I?
Jim Lowe writes in his zine Time Is the Problem #1 about a theater company too poor to buy a doll as a prop, so the actress playing a new mother carried on stage the 10-week-old infant of another cast member. Quips Lowe, "They had to make do with the real thing."
Viva la any culture that exists outside of capitalism and government.
Day 5 -- The Pigeon, The Brule, and The Kadunce
"I am under an awful necessity to be what I am." (Thoreau, December 21, 1851)
I've been a fool. And lived.
Up at dawn. It's foggy again. I drive up the shore about 85 miles to Grand Portage.
On my way, I pull over at a parking area near the mouth of the Temperance, looking at the ground on the chance that my mitten might be found. Yes, there it is.
Reunion!
Intuition is not so much a sign of intelligence as a manifestation of it.
On the side of the road ravens feed on a deer carcass. Life is precious, and sometimes short.
A Leavenworth Jackson rubber stamp advises, "Procrastinate tomorrow."
Thoreau urges himself, "Improve each occasion when the soul is reached. Drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs. Fear no intemperance in that..." (January 24, 1852)
Grahnd Por-TAZH. The Canadian border.
I take the last possible turn off, about 75 yards from the border, a checkpoint that makes me think of war and fascism. From the parking lot of tiny Grand Portage State Park, I walk up a curving asphalt path to the Pigeon River high falls. On the way I hear a bird voice: bald eagle perching above the Pigeon.
Here on the reservation, I could throw a rock across the river into another country, but I don't.
Yee ha! I'm right across the border from Canadia! Did that raven check in with the Border Patrol?
I've not been much of an international traveler. Countries I'm especially avoiding: Hungry, Chilly, Acerbia, Vulgaria. But Sweeten and Spritzerland sound pretty good to me.
So many boundaries and borders, containing things that belong inside, keeping the world outside at bay. Skin--of fruits and animals, walls of a house, garden fences, countries, prisons. Where do you draw the line?
This isn't the place for me today. If I cross I might not come back. Instead I drive back south a ways, and hike up the Brule River. (How many Brules are there? There's one in northern Wisconsin, I know.)
On a ridge, two white-tails bound away. I've stopped counting deer.
Below Brule Falls, mist freezes onto rocks and weeds. The latter are fragile glass pipes.
One rock, about three feet high, is completely pocked with three-inch hemispherical indentations. Some are half filled with ice, which, when removed and turned upside down, look like eyes.
I balance ice chunks on paired branches of a small dead-looking tree, then a second and smaller set of chunks atop those. And then a third set, playfully.
One tumbles down at last. I lose myself, full of energy with no sense of time. If this is illegal, I plead guilty.
I place a large chunk of ice on the end of a long, low branch. Then balance a big rock upon this. Joyful gravity.
A thought: wedge sharp rocks into tree bark or balance rocks on knots.
Further upriver, I stop and eat a snack. There I'm startled by the sudden appearance of an orange-clad woman, marching as if she's on a mission --or on amphetamines. "Sorry ta scare ya," says she, without slowing.
Lichen: green tinsel draped on a tree.
What becomes of my afternoon? Like all water here, I find my way to the nearest Great Lake.
According to a map I've consulted, Superior has the largest surface area of any lake in the world. Its circumference, 1826 miles--would stretch from Duluth to Miami. Furthermore, it holds ten percent of the world's standing fresh water. Average temperature: 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Deepest point measured: 1279 feet.
From where I stand, the North Shore runs east-west more than north-south, thus giving birth to the sun in morning and receiving it at the close of day.
And now the sun sets over Red Cliff Point. I stand on the shore and watch a light show at the bar where the Kadunce River trickles into the lake, listen to the sound of waves, feel cool wind on my face.
This is ecstasy and sobriety at once. I'm not on drugs, but the sunset is positively psychedelic, changing each second like a kaleidoscope. One shape grows, changes color, moves, fades, even as another rises to take its place. Golds turn orange, then pink, reflected in a pool at the river's mouth. Silent fireworks, on and on.
A tip of red juts from the cape, like a serpent's tongue. I get down on my knees, my stomach. Hallelujah!
I've spent the day amid green mosses, lichens, spruces, and pines, and now watch a sunset with every color in it except green.
My trip to Portage was really for this.
As if the sun really sets.
Suddenly I'm chilled to the bone.
In Grand Marais, I stop at Drury Lane Books, buy a copy of Joanne Hart and Hazel Belvo's Witch Tree as a gift, and talk with Joan Drury who moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth some years ago, and subsequently still further north to Lutsen. Among other things, I learn there's a film theater in Grand Marais that hasn't been open for years, that the owner lives upstairs, and that Joan is waiting for the owner to die so that she can buy the place and open it again, showing international films during the week and Hollywood stuff on weekends.
"All my members and nerves and sinews petition thought for a recess, and my very thigh bones itch to slip away from me..." (Thoreau, January 24, 1841)
Back at home I prepare soup without taking off my jacket, eat two bowls of it before I begin to warm.
When winter arrives, it's time to close some shuttlecocks. More than once, I've had to do this with my own feelings. The water still flows, but to different places.
I look around, noticing how, without a sound, more fly corpses have massed in a light fixture high overhead in this A-frame. And watching at my feet as a fly I thought was dead walks on the floor. I touch it with the tip of my pen. Sluggish, it flops on its back, struggles. I flip it over. Now it's walking toward me. Can it not fly? It cannot. Poor fly, soon to die. Not yet, though. It walks away.
"To sigh under the cold, cold moon for a love unrequited is to put a slight upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and to find our love requited." (Thoreau, January 19, 1841)
Nightcap: a shot of creme de nepenthe.
There's mosquito netting hung up over the bed here. I wonder what drink would one order at a mosquito bar. A Bloody Mary, I guess, or a stinger.
Speaking of beverages, let me serve you some of my homemade wine from this little Klein bottle.
Day 6 -- The Manitou
"Be resolutely and faithfully what you are, be humbly what you aspire to be." (Thoreau, January 24, 1841)
This morning the sky is clear. A few thin pink clouds hang in the southwest sky, like sheets on a line.
If I'm at home everywhere, I'm equally a visitor. "Just visiting."
Last March blue jays flocked around the cabin here. Now there's only one, it seems.
At home I treasure a tiny blue feather, a gift to me. (Somewhere a miniature blue jay is missing a plume.)
Based on my breakfast preference, you might call me L'Raisin Bran Librarian.
I'm in no hurry. The clouds have dissipated. Sunlight strikes tree tops, making them brighter green.
I can see clearly now.
Another day, another eagle welcoming me to the trail. I'm back at Crosby Manitou. My past two times here have entailed inclement weather.
A junco appears in the woods as I hike to Manitou Falls. Above the falls, the river seems downright placid, but the water meanders toward a plummet line where small ice floes crunch, sounding like records skipping.
Water the color of tea shoots over a rock. Droplets fly upwards... into mist. In the morning sunlight, the mist makes a waterfallbow. Frozen froth at the base of the falls looks like meringue. Holy foam.
Thin windowpanes of ice break when I try to balance them like a house of cards.
On the north side of Manitou bridge, mist rises like a swarm of gnats.
Atop a steep ridge to the north it's mild, sunny, almost a different season. Lake Superior is visible from here, a straight, dark blue line, above which curves a faded blue line of hills, Wisconsin, 35 miles or so away.
All I hear is the sound of cascades below, and now a breeze shooshing through the spruce, a distant raven, and something twittering, goldfinches, by the sound of it.
Looking up at an azure sky. Gazing up into clear blue eyes.
I place a feather on a tree, wedge its quill into bark. The tree stands patiently.
For trail climbing, prefer large rocks to small, flat ones to cambered, dry to wet, short steps to tall. Prudence matters.
On my hike out I run into two guys dressed like bright orange deer. "We didn't think we'd see anyone today," one says. "We're testing some new equipment." (Such as a device that trails a single wheel behind him.)
After I've returned to my car, a female black-backed woodpecker taps on a nearby tree, calls, then flies off.
These woods are a haven for woodpeckers, a woodpecker heaven. (Carpenter birds, in Spanish.)
Late afternoon at Silver Bay Public Library, crowded with children and women, I overhear talk of a snow storm on the way. It's supposed to start here tomorrow afternoon and continue through the next day.
The idea of being snowed in appeals to me, but I'll depart tomorrow.
In Silver Bay, public Christmas decorations have appeared in the past couple of days, lights above the road.
North of Finland, driveway weeds scrape the chassis of my car. I'd rather not drive so much.
Other than the fact that I walk and run about nine miles a day, my lifestyle is fairly sedentary.
To walk is to know.
"Children study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety-five millions of miles distant and the like, a statement of which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe. But the sun shines nevertheless." (Thoreau, January 21, 1853)
"Observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars," wrote Thoreau. "What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure, in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe."
Barry Lopez says in his book Arctic Dreams: "I watched closely the ivory gull, a small bird with a high, whistly voice. It has a remarkable ability to appear suddenly in the landscape, seemingly from nowhere. I have scanned tens of square miles of open blue sky, determined it was empty of birds, and then thrown a scrap of seal meat into a lead, where it would float. In a few minutes an ivory gull would be overhead. It is hard to say even from what direction it has come. It is just suddenly there."
So do some people appear in my thoughts.
Rational thinking is only partial thinking.
Day 7 -- The Road
"Why did I change? Why did I leave the woods? I do not think that I can tell." (Thoreau, January 22, 1852)
I'm up pre-dawn to an overcast sky again. It will snow today.
I clean out the composter and use the outhouse, after warming the seat by sitting on it with my jeans still on.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep! Good morning, nuthatch.
Coniferous trees: tall, dark triangles against the bruised sky.
My breakfast today: tomato and Swiss cheese on a tortilla, cafe au lait.
Second gunshot of the morning. I'm out of here.
If nothing else this week I've avoided being shot by deer hunters. With the deer, I fled north into no-hunt zone, spurning the blaze orange cap and vest routine. My theory was that a significant minority of deer hunters will shoot on impulse at anything that catches their attention, so preferred to be invisible.
Invisibility has never seemed so sane. Back in city I struggle to meet my responsibilities and protect a little free time, a bit of breathing room, so that I may write as I am inclined, and walk, and read, and contemplate. It's come to this, that I spend significant time composing "no, thank you" letters, as gracefully as possible, from people who beseech me.
I never thought it would be a burden to be "Chris Dodge".
With me, what you don't see is what you don't get.
I can now vouch for the charms of the Brule, the Temperance, and the Cross rivers. This region is a colder, wetter, mossier southern Utah on a more intimate scale.
As I walked to work one cold morning this fall, I heard a clattering, then looked ahead and saw green leaves falling by the hundreds. A blanket of green covered one section of sidewalk. The just-risen sun illuminated a robin's breast. I reached down to pick up a red maple leaf through which light shined, and a breeze blew it away from me. In Loring Park, a single gull floated in the middle of the pond, above which white vapor swirled. Under the pedestrian bridge and on the lagoon, a thin layer of ice had formed overnight. White frost tinged the compost pile. My visible breath was carried away.
Never a more beautiful dawn.
Loring Park is my daily salvation. Here, watching a bird feed on the ground, oblivious to the feet of humans walking nearby, I wonder what passes humans without our noticing.
The deep dark months of winter lie ahead.
Rough sandpaper my heart a little more, life.
We can never give or receive too much encouragement.
I want to be present. To tend connections. To love widely. To enjoy without inhibition. To give generously. And to express freely, without self-censoring. To continue.
Not only do I not have all the answers, I'm still figuring out which questions need to be asked.
When does a groove become a rut?
On the road again, southbound.
Thoreau wrote of snowflakes: "How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.... As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six.... [T]hey all sing, melting as they sing of the mysteries of the number six,--six, six, six."
As I pull into my parking lot at home, the first flakes start to fall.
Porcupine Mountains, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, May 2003
Baptism River, northern Minnesota, March 2003
Cairn Free, southern Utah, November 2002
Red Cliff, south shore of Lake Superior, May 2002