A Walk in the Woods

Kag-Wadjiw
(Porcupine Mountains)

Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light--to see its perfect success, but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market and deem that its true success!"    --Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods

We’re all space walkers, untethered and adrift. Our umbilici have been severed, yet somehow we make our way. Steering ourselves as best we can, we move outward in the world. A world of people. A world of desert, ocean, woods, and weeds. A world of violence and peace. Of love and responsibility. An ever-changing world, endlessly complex.

One world, our home.

I keep walking, pulled by gravity to the earth, my imagination overshadowed by the magnitude, beauty, and oddity of the natural world. My creations are paltry, insipid, and utterly insufficient. My capacity to understand, ridiculously small. In this state, how can I do anything other than describe what I feel, think, hope, and wonder?

How to work with nature?

Something in me rises. I hear the sound of a ricochet: Zazen!

Walking is my sitting.

First Day

Driving north, I see a red-tailed hawk perched in a tree beyond Hinckley, a town whose motto might be: "Halfway Between the Twin Cities and Duluth." Conveniently located for pit stops.

Fog (or smog) obscures Lake Superior from view as I head across a bridge from Duluth to Wisconsin. The horizon is hazy as I continue east from there, with blue sky directly overhead.

Chequamegon Bay appears the color of an old penny. The land here on the south shore of Lake Superior contains copper, and northern Michigan and Wisconsin experienced a mining boom in the late 1800s. According to a brochure I picked up, the town of Calumet, Michigan--once known as Red Jacket--was home to "60,000 to 70,000 people of every nationality" from 1890 to 1910. (Its population in the 2000 census: 879.)

This is also Indian country. The Ojibwe name for this place, "shagawamikong," means "long island," I’ve learned from A Little History of My Forest Life: An Indian-White Autobiography, a collection of letters written in 1894 by Eliza Morrison, a metís woman who grew up on the island now known as Madeline, and lived all her life in the region.

In 1854, the La Pointe Treaty established small reservations at Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac du Flambeau, and Lac Courte Oreilles. Ojibwe who refused to move into reservations lost governmental recognition and the possibility of receiving payment. Others capitulated, signing the treaty in hopes of putting an end to efforts to push them further west.

Driving east from Ashland, my windshield is smeared with insect parts.

Then I steer north to a place Ojibwe named "kag-wadjiw" (Porcupine Mountains), an area of wilderness spanning two counties and two time zones--60,000 acres home to countless stands of old trees, among other living things.

I’m bunking in Silver City, Michigan, situated on the south shore of Lake Superior. ("Kechegumme," sometimes spelled "Gitchee Gumee"--"Great Water.") The unincorporated burg’s human inhabitants must number less than a hundred. Its few businesses serve skiers in the winter and people in the summer who come, presumably, to fish, camp, hike, or just enjoy a cool breeze off the lake. At this in-between season, most of these places are closed, awaiting the next tide of vacationers.

There’s a language here besides Ojibwe and English. "Anna meille tänä päivänä meidän jok a päiväinen lei pämme." This framed inscription hangs in the kitchen of Kelpakka Lodge, a house built by Finnish stone mason Einar Koski and now rented to travelers by his son, Dale.

"There is no song like the sweet song of the apple."

I made that up, not knowing Finnish. Pardon me.

Sitting on the shore at dusk, I see the sun a blinding torch on the lake’s surface, and listen to the sound of water lapping on rocks. Three gulls fly east. Wisps of cirrus clouds barely move overhead, while above the horizon haze grows rosy as the sun approaches its bath.

My brain’s still chattering. How long will it take for my body to slow down from its inadvertently revved-up urban mode?

What to do with our energy?

Practice, performance, and postpartum all matter. Spring is dress rehearsal and summer the season in which the play is produced. But I want to know a fifth season. And a sixth.

Weather me more weather.

The sun sinks into heavier clouds and now I can look directly at the orange shimmering column of light on the water. The lake’s surface is metal that’s been worked, like copper foil crumpled and then smoothed.

One rock about forty yards out is alternately submerged and uncovered.

Cool breeze. Behind me, trees lean all directions, many of them dead. I’m sitting on one that’s been bleached by sun and smoothed by waves. A dead tree can be a chair.

There are supposed to be black bears in the woods here. So far I can only verify that there are black flies. It was warmer than I expected upon my arrival today, in the 70s, and flies were swarming. I got here late afternoon, in time to purchase a park pass and scout two trails. On a path that led down through woods to Big Water, dropping about 500 feet in elevation, I saw two species of wild strawberry in bloom, as well as trillium grandiflorum. And listened to the plaintive panpipe of a thrush.

I also heard other birds I couldn’t see. I’d stop, and then flies would land on me as I peered through binoculars.

Now I can look directly at the sun for a second or two, through its veil. It slips into a bank of clouds like a new penny. The horizon seems other than horizontal, slightly tilted.

Imagine the sun going down and then reversing itself.

Just because there are no flies here on the beach at dusk, and no other humans but two dots on a distant boat, just because of the frooshing glunking gurgling goonking whooshing shooshing of waves on red rocks at my feet, I am happy.

I’d rather eat bear than be eaten by flies.

Is human flesh gamy?

Now I can gaze at the sun through binoculars. Above it a jet plane streaks downward, a bright light trailing two short, intensely white contrails.

In his autobiography, Mohandas Gandhi wrote about a traveling companion who was fond of binoculars. "I tried to impress on him that this possession was not in keeping with the ideal of simplicity that we aspired to reach." Gandhi challenged, "Why not throw them into the sea and be done with them?" The dare was taken, and "forthwith I flung them into the sea," Gandhi remembers.

How about that?

Now the sun, dying ember, sinks into the sea without a hiss.

Now red rocks turn blue.

Second Day

This is a grandma kind of house where I’m sleeping: very clean, but it has that smell to it. Plastic houseplants (an oxymoron). Wreath made of driftwood. Framed print of rabbits and black-eyed Susans (copyright Bernard Picture Co., Stamford, CT, 1989). Calendar on the wall courtesy of Houghton, Michigan, insurance agent Phil Kolehmainen, another Finn.

I just located a clock I’d heard ticking, and moved it upstairs, during which time it stopped.

It’s warm: 60 degrees already at 8:30 in the morning. I’m not going along with the time zone change.

Today Lost Lake Trail could be called Boggy Bottom Trail. In some stretches it’s a stream in which marsh marigolds bloom.

The forest is full of yellow trout lilies and frosted with spring beauties. Trillium blooms for about a mile from the trailhead and Dutchman’s breeches appear throughout, little white pantaloons dangling from ferny leaves.

I hear drumming of a ruffed grouse and a stream rushing below the trail.

It’s hard to focus long enough to spot warblers. I look up at the crowns of tall trees and all I see is flies and the sun. Fecundity envelops me. The air holds extra oxygen. Water flows like blood. Maple seedlings spring up everywhere, with red-green leaves.

Bee bee bee BEEZ. What is that? Then another bird sings a more elaborate song: Rose-breasted grosbeak?

In some places a mat of decayed oak leaves covers the forest floor, like papier-mâché. Flowers and saplings grow through it.

Lost Lake, maybe a mile around, surrounded by woods, is quiet but for wind shushing through trees. Nearly idyllic.

One long deep breath. And another.

The trail hasn’t been used much this season. It’s covered with spring beauties in spots, a flower whose tuber is edible, I’ve read.

I’m surrounded. I give up!

Do all these fungal ears on trees listen to my passage?

Deadfall litters the woods, some large, some small, little of it cleared from the path. I use some downed trees to go across swampy places. Dead trees can be bridges.

A white-throated sparrow sings clearly. And at my feet I hear, "Kerplunk." A frog sits motionless, head just out of a pool in a stream, waiting for me to pass, looking like a rock with eyes, the same color as decayed leaves in the water.

I see a palm warbler, I think. (Brown cap.) And tracks in the mud. Possum? Possibly.

"Really not much" someone wrote about Lost Lake and Lost Creek along which I travel. Which is why I came here. I’ve expected no company on the trail, but suddenly I come upon two beekeepers, at least that’s what they look like. Two people draped with netting, so busy fussing with their dress they don’t hear me bushwhacking past. I look at them several times, expecting to greet them, then ford the Upper Carp River and go on my way.

Tee tee tee tee TEE! What is it? (A black-throated green warbler, I later learn.)

I’ve seen purple and yellow violets, but just a few.

Over, under, around, and through. You’d think I was knotting myself. But I’m not. Just the opposite.

Bright red fungus, smooth and small, appears on a log. Touch it: Smoke.

Spores.

Those who specialize in spores—and pollens—are palynologists. Aldo Leopold’s daughter Estella is such a creature. Leopold’s other children also study natural sciences: Nina (plant ecology), Starker (wildlife ecology), Carl (plant physiology), and Luna (geomorphology).

Luna, man with a woman’s name: I like his specialty. Studying the shape of the earth is part of what I’m up to here, aided by a walking stick picked up on the beach last evening. Choosing a stick involves looking for one the right size, that feels good in one’s hand, and is sturdy enough not only to aid locomotion, brake downhill slides, and maintain balance while walking over tree trunk bridges, but also for vaulting.

Over another stream, under a tree, the ground is covered with fresh wood chips. Up above: deep woodpecker holes, some bored to the core.

For a while I watch a chipmunk watch me watch it. Who’s more curious? And spot a yellow-rumped warbler. "Butterbutt," I think. (Learned that moniker from birder librarian Peter McDonald years ago on Payne’s Prairie in Gainesville, Florida.)

Maybe the best question for a traveler to answer isn’t "Where are you going?" but "Where did you come from?"

From farmers, glovers, and shoemakers. From my mother’s womb. From Dubuque. From Minneapolis. From Silver City. From the Lost Lake Trailhead.

These thoughts dissipate as I pass four young men half my age tramping down from Government Peak with backpacks. Upstarts.

Sweet sweet sweet SWEET sue! What is it? Chestnut-sided warbler?

Government Peak isn’t a mountaintop really, but--at 1,850 feet above sea level--it’s the second highest spot in the Porkies. Field note: "Bugs, peed, looked, came down."

Unnamed Lake lies just east of the peak. (If it has a name, I don’t know it.) Flies swarm and many warblers are about. I sit and eat a bite. And am eaten. Then I see and hear a bird clearly: "White belly, black throat, blue back, mottled wing."

Black-throated blue warbler. Now I know its song: Beer beer beer BEE!

Rivulets, brooks, rills, freshets. The trail mimics a stream, meandering sinuously.

That was a rose-breasted grosbeak I heard earlier. Now I spot it briefly, identifying it as it flies away. What does it mean to only know something when it departs?

I march through the marsh, back to my car, the only vehicle at the trailhead, then drive past Silver City, onward about fifteen miles to Ontonagon, a depressed-looking town of about 2,000 people. There, on a main street lined with more U.S. flags than I’ve seen in one place since the bicentennial, I buy gas, bug dope, and sun screen, then return across a drawbridge past an apparently bored young woman attendant, over the Ontonagon River.

Today I’ve also crossed Carp River, Mud Creek, Ash Creek, Union River, Little Iron River, Big Iron River, Mineral River, and so on.

The overcast sky and Big Water look like a Mark Rothko painting, two fields of muted blue that meet in a straight line. What does it say about me that I compare a natural scene to a work by a human artist? What does it say about Rothko?

Today I mucked through mud, swatted flies, watched warblers, examined flowers, and hiked about ten and a half miles.

Third Day

The house in which I am staying seems to have been made by a do-it-youselfer. Its only bathroom is directly off the kitchen, straight through from the house’s entryway. Linoleum covers part of the floor near the shower, applied directly over thin carpeting and affixed with screws.

Going outside, I see and hear a song sparrow on a wire. The sound of breakers is fainter from here than it was last night.

Mid-morning: At 1,958 feet elevation, the redundantly named Summit Peak is the highest spot in the Porkies.

As I walk to the top, just half a mile from a parking lot: Come drink your TEA!

A black-throated blue. At the end of a boardwalk and about 150 stairs up, a chickadee welcomes me to an observation tower built atop the peak. Beyond and below: soft green hills. Haze to the north and west obscures Gitchee Gumee from view.

An hour later, I depart from the Little Carp River trailhead which follows white water five and a half miles to Lake Superior.

Trees with large spherical swellings, twice or more the diameter of the trunks. What causes this? And when?

Teacher, teacher, teacher, TEACHER!, an ovenbird calls.

I happen upon a dead shrew on the path, a corpse in a copse. Then another nearby.

Large deadfall trees cross the stream below a ridge. The red earth is soft and the eroded cliff obviously unstable. Trees must fall here frequently, uprooted. A peril of camping. Watch where you pitch the tent.

"Once, when...we were listening for moose," Henry David Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods, "we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, ‘Tree fall.’ There is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa constrictor..."

Speaking of snakes, I haven’t seen any yet. Not sunny and warm enough yet?

When I started out this morning: sixty degrees. It’s now gone gray and cooler.

In a flood plain, I come across a moss-covered boulder, four feet high and ten feet long, above which a tree grows, roots snaking down over the rock, like three fingers and a thumb gripping a baseball. It’s mystifying, at first, like a painting by Magritte, seeming as if the rock has grown with time. It must once have been covered with soil, and the level of the ground at least four feet higher than it is now; as soil washed away each year, the rock was unearthed while the tree’s roots kept growing.

Below me: fire circles flooded. Here the trail has dropped into the river and elsewhere swaths of bare cobblestones curve along beds where the stream no longer runs.

Old rivers are straighter. Each has a mind of its own.

I lunch on pemmican ("meatless"), surrounded by old hemlocks and the sound of a river rushing over rocks. Why does my brain play a Beethoven symphony? (And which one? The 3rd? 6th?) Is that a black-and-white warbler, I hear? Probably not.

Below, a big dark bird with a white tail flies off from the stream. ("At first I thought it was an eagle," says my field note.)

The Peterson guidebook says of at least one bird: "accidental wanderer north to… Great Lakes." Sounds like me.

Stands of huge trees here, cool, dark, and quiet. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau speaks of "grim untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen, and decaying trees, only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf can penetrate." I’ve seen tracks but no deer yet.

Back home my office is like an old growth forest, messy and fertile.

I stop and soak my bare feet in cold water for a spell, sitting on a smooth slanted slab that diverts the river. Red rock aggregates around it. The rush of water over rocks drowns out other sounds.

Cool breeze. Why leave this spot?

A black ant moseys along.

Field note: "Sky looking like rain later--tonight?"

Mid-afternoon, light rain begins. I don a poncho and stand for a while in the shelter of trees, looking at a dirt cliff eaten away by the river. Plant life clings to its top like a bad toupee. Holding on near the rim: a giant tree that will make a tremendous sound when it falls.

I think of my father, alive in spirit. In my memory, a photo exists of him wearing a dark waterproof hat and rain coat, smoking a pipe upside down, and smiling happily.

The rain stops. I doff the poncho and move on.

I’m glad I’ve decided to continue. I ford the river on a tree trunk high over the water, and soon afterward come to big falls slanting down red rock. These I’m able to traverse without leaving the riverbed. Alongside, thin sedimentary layers appear. There are straight lines in nature.

I pass through a sawn-through deadfall trunk and measure its size with my hand--31 inches diameter.

Joke of Nature: Wood anemone blossoms appear amid maple sapling leaves.

Four and a half miles or so along the trail, I encounter two campers. No great surprise. Thoreau from The Maine Woods again: "I suspect that if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going further, as if just starting for home at sundown."

Midstream, one bark-stripped tree trunk balances in white water, hung up on a rock, pointed the direction of the current.

It’s time to turn back. Bird song accompanies me. This is the way, upward. Exposed hemlock roots are stairs.

I see a duck with a brown-cockaded head, gray body, white speculum, in the falls: Female merganser. And one jack-in-the-pulpit blooming.

"EAGLE!" shouts my field note. "Goose bumps. Yow." This was so unexpected before that I refused to believe my eyes, but now I see it fly past, below me, on my return.

A small white butterfly imitates a white flower. Now two white butterflies: chaser and chased.

I see a woodchuck who’s no doubt spotted me first. It runs under exposed roots at the top of a cliff, and peers out. I’m intruding.

Then, no kidding, a UFO sighting--unidentified fungal object (black, red and white). And more fungi: tree scallops.

Old-growth hemlock. Its needles are new, about a third of an inch long, lined up on either side of branch tips like incomplete bottle brushes. I hug one tree, ostensibly to measure its girth, eleven feet around.

Now I know where wood comes from. And paper, most of it.

Calm before a storm: No birds sing, unusually. Time for the poncho again.

I smell smoke--more campers--as I cross a bridge built atop a deadfall tree. Earlier when I went over this ravine I didn’t recognize what provided the structural support.

I reach the trailhead after eight hours of lollygagging. It’s getting dark. There’s only one vehicle parked here beside mine on a rutted dirt road. Standing on a bridge at the confluence of streams, I feel a drop of rain on my neck. And one on my arm. Good timing. As I climb into my metallic shelter on wheels, rain starts falling hard.

Evening: a deluge of rain falls for a while. I could have showered more effectively than I did indoors by going naked outside with my tiny bar of soap.

And now the rain is letting up. Another Rothko: lake and sky two shades of gray.

Fourth Day

It’s downright cold out. Good. Sunshine and a chill breeze. The temperature dropped to 42 overnight after the rain. I came for this.

Not far from the head of the Lake Superior Trail, I’m serenaded by a thrush, double-syrinxed piper of clear liquid notes, ethereal and timeless, my siren call. Onward I go, with no wax in my ears and no mast to which I am bound.

Underfoot, tiny yellow blossoms: Indian strawberry.

Suddenly, on the path not six feet from me: brown scurrying. Not a mammal, as first I assumed, but a bird. It hops toward me and then makes an end run, stopping fifteen feet on my other side. I note its reddish tail: hermit thrush. "You don’t need to go looking for me, here I am."

Water flows along the downhill path, over stones, sudden rills formed during last night’s downpour.

The trail is a stream. A tree is a bridge. Everything’s topsy-turvy.

Spruce and maple trees grow on the hill, and some birches. So many trees, so few prospects.

All trees are beautiful.

Eyes front. Scarlet berries grow singly on a plant with small paired ovoid leaves. Bearberry, I think. Where are the bears?

At last, through the trees: Big Water appears, and rocks. Breaker, breaker!

A tiny white gull feather, impaled on a stick, waving in the wind, is my flag.

White spume explodes upward as it crashes into dark red boulders. Whitecaps roll over a line of barely submerged rock thirty yards from shore. The water comes roiling, teeming, seething, relentlessly. It’s also effervescent, seemingly playful, jumping up again and again. For a fraction of a second, hundreds of crystal droplets hang suspended in the sunlight against blue sky, a chandelier.

It’s happening now. Beautiful collisions, never in the same place twice in succession. Booming, hissing.

It wakes me. It slowly wears the rock.

Three gulls fly over, high above. A cool wind blows. One must have imagination--or faith--to sense anything at all beyond the line where sky meets sea.

This anti-desert invigorates me. Wind, sun, rocks, waves. Marsh marigolds blooming in backwater as if at port for a while before returning to sea. A lone tree growing from a prow of stone.

O captain! Time to move on.

Joke of Nature #2: Dandelion leaves from which marsh marigold blossoms spring.

A piece of dark driftwood forms an arch over a placid slough in which its image is mirrored. Pale horsetails grow from rocks, one of which contains a circular indentation the diameter of a marble, as if it was meant to showcase just such a thing. Another has a perfect longitudinal groove.

A patch of bright orange lichen grows on a big rusty rock, and on selective small ones.

At first I thought a spot on the map was labeled "Love Rock." Actually it says "Lone Rock", but the misreading will do. Now I count thirty-four gulls and eight cormorants basking out there, 150 yards or so from shore.

There are at least two damp but useable campgrounds here directly opposite the rock.

Mid-afternoon. The sky is entirely blue. I’m happy. Sitting. Snacking. Drinking water. It’s cool, but warmer than where I was mid-day. Sitting back from the shore, I’m stripped down to two shirts again.

People have erected totemic cairns here, offerings to the Love Rock. I build one too, but unlike the others it’s entirely of white stones and constructed as far out as possible. I’m testing waterproofness of my boots.

Love Rock has some gold lichen growing on it. And green moss.

Prescription for humans: potable water, shelter from extreme weather, nutritious food, freedom to move and to express ourselves, love for ourselves and others, wild places, measures of solitude, synchronicity with the earth’s clock. Otherwise: slack, curiosity, and some mystery.

We don’t need much, and so many of us have a cornucopia. Our senses are dulled by things we don’t need, things of dubious or limited value. Mass media, for example. Or any medium. Or anything massive, for that matter.

Binoculars?

Also of dubious value: one person, one book, one religion. The only "one" that counts is e pluribus unum. The Big One: All. In That I trust.

Unmediated life is here right now. What’s new? A slightly sore left foot. Sunshine after rain. Water rushing, and then pooling on a path. Puddles and mud.

The sea’s waves are eternally new.

Love Rock? Lone Rock? Lowe Rock? Whatever. Here it is, having presented itself like the hermit thrush did.

Joke of Nature #3: I see a little brown bird and hear a gull cry.

Now looking at a thrasher. Thanks to binocs I can see it’s yellow eye and its wing bars.

Round-lobed hepatica blooms in one spot, some white and some pale violet, the first I’ve seen of it here.

Green things: Do we all need them, even Kalahari dwellers and those who call the Arctic home? Leaves or the blood of animals, the green and the red.

I step onto a long wooden walkway that submerges when I’m a third of the way across. Water spills over my shoes. So what?

I see what at first I think is a thrush, but its unmistakably reddish head marking says "ovenbird."

The shadow of a small plant’s leaves is cast upon a smooth gray stone, like a floral print.

I see another black-throated blue (because I stopped to watch a chickadee) and hear mysterious bird songs, one long and involved, with trills and tweets, in sequences too complex to analyze and describe on the fly.

Grouse drumming: boombox of the woods. Not that I’m complaining.

I pick up a hank of long white hair from a big pile of it that lies on the ground at alternating angles as if it’s been woven systematically. In death, order? How did this arrangement come to pass? What animal did this once keep warm? I don’t know. The hairs have the slightest brown at the tips.

"Is the lake that way?" Two young men pass me on the trail. And now two more. "How you doin’, sir?," one asks. I don’t recall being knighted. Late afternoon, they’re just now headed out, in sneakers, with no gear, and with a way to go. It seems they’ve obeyed the sign I didn’t. (I walked to the shore by way of a spur trail to a cabin the park has for rent. How do I know if I want to rent if I haven’t checked it in person?)

Smoke wafts from the cabin now. Smells good.

Mucking through, around, and over pools and mud, I make my way to the base of the trail’s uphill climb. A long way up. My church’s spires are tall white birches. Their pale green leaves wave against blue sky.

White belly, mottled back, long bill, noodling up a trunk: brown creeper.

I pull an insect from my mouth, a black fly. Am I becoming bird?

Sitting on an outcrop, looking at the distant lake through a veil of slender trees. There’s a spot of mud above my left knee. I remember a Rimbaud sonnet I once translated:

Young Runaway [from "Le Dormeur du val"]

Within a green hollow where a river plays,
Madly catching on silvery shorelines,
And where, from a proud mountain, warm light shines
Into a small valley which bubbles over with rays,

A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,
The nape of his neck bathing in watercress,
Sleeps. He is sprawled on the grass without a care
And, as the light rains down on his green mattress,

He smiles as if dreaming of the sparkling river.
The cool odors do not make his nostrils quiver.
Nature, he is only a boy: let him hide.

His feet in the gladiolas, he is taking a rest.
He naps in the sun, one hand on his breast,
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.

This could be rural France in the nineteenth century. In my mind, for a few seconds, it is.

This place is good medicine.

Twin yellow streams fork down a lichen-encrusted rock.

Early evening, sun lowering. The horizon blurs where two blues meet.

Here near the trailhead, where the way looms wide and evident, blazes mark the path. Further from here, where the trail is often less distinct, signs go missing. So too in life.

I hear a voice, and quicken my tempo for a while. I’d slowed to listen to a thrush again, near the same spot I encountered it earlier. Amazing flute work: tranquil and hypnotic.

Minutes later: the four young man charge up the path. They can’t have made it to the lake. I step aside and let them pass. One admires my walking stick and one says, "How you doin’, sir?" again.

Flies attack me as the thrush sings some more and I listen, fully enamored, forgetting flies.

As the sun sets I stand in virgin hemlock forest that is still but for the chirping of a distant robin. For a time I forget everything. When I start walking again, the trail has disappeared. But I hike on out anyway.

Much later, after a shower and dinner, I find a fly pasted on the bridge of my glasses frames, struggling to come unstuck.

Fifth Day

Inside the car, two black flies. Free them.

Mid-morning, alone at Government Peak Trail’s northern access point, I set out, then take the first junction west and climb through the woods on Escarpment Trail. There a butterfly flits on mud clumped on the roots of a big downed tree, robins chirrup, and an ovenbird calls.

These wooded hills bloom colorfully. I get down on my knees to see more closely yellow violets and trout lilies, Dutchman’s breeches, and cut-leafed toothwort, whose blossoms--before they open fully-- look like teeth. A few dandelions appear, their seeds perhaps carried here from afar on someone’s clothes, and large-flowered bellwort, which some know as wild oats, not many of which must have been sown here.

Climbing toward the skyline. Bright white faces of wood anemone blossoms open in the morning sun, ardent worshipers.

After a time, I reach a crest through which I can see two horizons. To the south, through trees, another distant wooded ridge meets sky, while to the north, through trees, sky meets the big blue water of Lake Superior. Today its surface appears deep blue, mirroring what’s above.

Most of Escarpment Trail runs along the porcupine’s spine, so to speak, atop a rolling ridge above Lake of the Clouds. From here one can look down at flying birds. Or over at them.

Six big black marauders soar past silently. (Later I’ll see a single turkey vulture; that’s what these birds must have been.)

At last I match a song I’ve been hearing all week with a face, getting a good look at a black-throated green warbler. The "green" in its name is misleading. The male’s face is bright yellow, and from below it’s impossible to see any green coloring on the bird’s back or top of its head.

Tee tee tee tee TEE.

One sings now on an open branch, twenty-five feet above me.

This place is for the birds.

Big Water--the sea--is just over a mile north of here as the vulture flies, but nearly 900 feet down. To the south, it’s a steep drop of a hundred feet or more to Lake of the Clouds.

Vultures are elegant birds, I think. In flight.

Trees up here: pine, oak, maple, birch. No black flies at the moment. It’s relatively windy, dry, and cool.

A lone eagle flies over the curvy Carp River inlet below (from its markings, apparently an immature bald eagle). Far to the west it suddenly plummets straight downward and disappears.

A jay asserts itself: Yank! Yank!

A butterbutt sings, Sweetsweetsweetsweet.

Downhill a bit: a trillion flowers bloom, or so it seems.Trillium grandiflorum.

Tee tee tee DEE.

So Beethoven’s 5th begins.

Brawk! Brawk! Ravens, two of them. I see one high overhead. Hello again, friend.

Field note: "Little puffy white flower clusters low to ground on Indian pipe-like stems, pale whitish-green leaves, like little pussy willow catkins." A fair enough description. They’re pussytoes, I later learn.

Early afternoon, the first person I’ve seen all day appears, a tiny white dot on the lake below, fly fishing. Lake of the Clouds is five miles round, give or take a bit. A startled jackrabbit stands motionless where I can see reddish sunlight through its ears.

Nearby a chipmunk sits five feet from me, watching. And another black-throated green warbler sings. This one’s turntable seems a little wobbly.

I hike from the escarpment to the lake. Eetsy beetsy beetsy. Reetsy reetsy reetsy. A male redstart, red-orange on black, flits above, like a butterfly.

It’s buggier down here, which may account for so much bird activity. The surface of the lake is nearly unruffled.

Now I climb up again. Dappled light camouflages the forest. Thrush or thrasher? I’m slow with the binocs. A river meanders into the lake below and sounds rise from it. Oon-ka, Oon-ka, Oon-ka, Oon-ka. Bullfrog boasting.

Up here near the sky, a hermit thrush calls me the direction I’m going. And now a raven joins in. Like a flute and timpani duet.

This is so sane. How, how, how can I go back to the rush of cars, carbon monoxide, and obnoxious human noise?

I inhale. And exhale deeply. Inhale again. The world’s best perfume: fresh air.

Trees grow atop the ridge like spiky hair.

Looking east along the Superior shore, the town of Ontanagon is visible. Twenty miles away?

A large raptor flies off in the woods, silently. Great horned owl?

I hear a tiny rustling around me, patter of dry leaves as if it’s raining. Sound of plants growing?

Olive bird, pale yellow underneath. Orange-crowned warbler? Tennessee? I didn’t get a good enough look.

So many questions.

Now I begin my descent again. Flight attendants prepare for landing.

Air conditioning kicks in as I walk on the Superior side of the ridge. It feels at least ten degrees cooler here, thanks partly to shade. I stop and put on a shirt. And the raven-thrush duet resumes. For a while I listen, completely losing track of who I am.

Who am I?

Brawk brawk. Tootle-ootle-oo oo!

Now an owl joins in: Hoo hoo, hoo HOO. Hoo hoo, hoo HOO. And now I’m self-conscious again, an audience amazed and amused at this unique bird trio, thinking about this moment, and laughing, instead of simply sensing it. File this as Exhibit A in the Department of What it Means to Be Human.

For a while I was transported. (An out of body experience? I must be out of my mind.)

Darkness and light in the forest. My shadow appears briefly on a tree trunk on Owl-Raven-Thrush Hill. Then it passes.

Ten hours on the trail. I go so slowly, sitting occasionally, standing and gaping, poking on the ground, that I’ve only traveled something like eight and half miles.

Things picked up and packed out today:

* Black plastic sock hanger
* Red bead (which at first I thought was a berry)
* Wrapper for Jolly Rancher ® Grape candy ("Jolly Rancher"? Those are words I wouldn’t be surprised to see emblazoned on a T-shirt in Japan.)

The sky is totally clear as the bright sun lowers.

And always it lowers somewhere. And somewhere it rises at this very instant.

Back home, I see that the temperature is in the mid 50s outside. I shower, eat, build and light a fire, watch the flames dance upward, feel the radiant warmth. Somewhere out in the darkness, breakers roll in. Somewhere…

Human bodies and souls are conflagrations. Some burn brightly, fiercely, hot, reaching skyward constantly. Others smolder, coals. What is the fuel? And who is consumed?

What is the character of our fires? Warm? Enlightening? Destructive? Beautiful? All these and more.

I stare and stare into the fireplace. Never had one of these when I was a boy. Which is probably a good thing.

Burn on.

Sixth Day

I wish, I wish, I wish. I wish to be wishless.

The shore isn’t the edge. It’s middle ground.

As a slender ridge of land can separate two climates, two habitats, so can thin partitions divide our lives, internal and external, solitary and social, contemplative and active. I want to travel on the ridge, foray up and down either side.

Be careful what you wish for, it’s said. I wish to identify that bird perched high in the tree, a murky shape now as the sun rises on its other side.

Idle wish or deep yearning? Want or need? So much depends upon our own volition. And so little.

The wishes of a teenage boy. Mine involved Raquel Welch.

I wish for more weather. And dry matches.

What can we do to fulfill the yearning of others?

I embrace snow, cold, rain, blistering heat. No, I don’t. I accept it and deal with it. To some degree I’ve avoided it by moving to Minnesota.

Wishing can be absurd. It suggests something other than what is, rejecting reality. Is it always other than wise to imagine what may be?

I happen to find a particular battered old chair perfectly acceptable. Gandhi found life without binoculars not simply acceptable but preferable. Where is the ridge between living fully in the present, with day-to-day struggles and joys, accepting the world and our place in it, fully satisfied with our lives as they are, here and now--even if to another it may look as though we’re imprisoned somehow--and the awareness of potential change, imminent change that wants to happen?

It’s valuable to seek and listen to others’ perspectives on our own lives.

When to give in? When to begin?

Human institutions and systems need changing. But in order for change to liberate, it’s necessary for people to act in accordance with their whole hearts, brains, and souls, with imagination and wisdom, connected to the world, and aware of vast unseen connections.

We share ecology.

I wish to live a more contemplative life than I do in the city, to think and write more clearly, coherently, insightfully. And to act likewise.

I’m a mental activist. Slowly hiking over the ridge toward a more rural life.

I wish for the continued availability of pen and paper. And for continued light.

Department of What it Means to Be Human, Exhibit B: Someone planted rows of daffodils to flank a driveway, though the roadside adjacent is blanketed with marsh marigolds at least as bright a shade of yellow and more profuse.

Exhibit C: To have a hand in things. The ancient human urge to make hand prints. The building of cairns.

Prepare for all contingencies. The unforeseen will still occur, thank gawd.

I’ve awakened with a headache this morning and something painful--a sty?--in my left eye.

The fire in the fireplace, extinguished. Where did it go? Its fuel was depleted.

Searching for fuel is a primary human drive.

Fire is quenched. Sculpture crumbles. All of us are temporary laborers.

Upper Peninsula--Alaska of the south? I’ve learned that the town I passed through a few days ago, Wakefield, was founded by an ancestor of Evil Twin Publications sister duo Stacy Wakefield and Amber Gayle. The latter reports that her great great grandfather George Mix Wakefield moved from there to Alaska.

"Old adits" still exist here, vertical access points to mines. Mining ventures in the area here circa 1846-1928: "none successful". Eighty-two years, a long time to fail.

I hear what must be a pileated woodpecker knocking below, toward the big lake. And more grouse drumming. Bird percussionists. A couple of apple trees by the roadside are budded, a couple in the early stages of bloom.

It’s time to enter virgin forest again.

Rose-breasted grosbeak: I heard it, identified its song just now, then got a good look at it for two seconds before it flew.

Fresh deer tracks appear on the spur trail I’ve decided to hike this morning. No one else has set foot here for a while. Overlook Trail, which may as well be called Overlooked Trail, is not so much a trail any longer as a faint path in spots. But it’s still the way, despite an uprooted tree here and there.

The way is uplifted. The way has certainly been wet. The way has been muddy. Today the way entails trampling on living things, spring beauties on the path.

The way involves periods of no flowers. And of silence. The way requires uphill travel and travail, demands rest--and persistence.

The way that can be mapped, described, or named is not the true way, because the way is forever changing.

Besides, there are countless ways, and they’re all changing. Always.

What is the way of today? And what’s that bird? It sounds like someone beating a paradiddle on a small hollow log, or smacking claves together quickly. A deep loud trilling. Rail?

Joke of Nature #4: I see a big sluggish bumblebee on the ground and convince it to crawl on a stick, then lift it and examine it closely. My, what big stingers you have. All of a sudden it buzzes loudly and flies, causing me to jump, nearly falling backward on a deadfall tree.

Fungus on a living tree trunk, at eye level: Venus of Willendorf of the Woods.

Beer beer beer BEE!

Joke of Nature #5: As I watch an ovenbird, another ovenbird calls.

It just occurred to me, after six days, to wonder about news from the outside world. I’ve been reading the local paper, so to speak.

Sudden realization. I am an anarchist. (Something I’ve been asked.) Immediately I think about the implications of what I’m doing, hiking on state land. It’s a public trust--and that’s a good thing. But it’s administered by the same government that brought us the Gulf War and The Empire Strikes Again. What if nature conservation were to be done elsehow, collectively? Wilderness areas don’t need "visitors’ services" buildings, parking lots, and trail maintenance. For people unable to tramp on foot, there are plenty of parks with those amenities now.

Mank mank mank mank mank! A red-breasted nuthatch makes a large sound for such a small bird.

Churk churk churk churk churk! A call that sounds like a small cork being pulled from a bottle over and over. What is it?

And what is that I see over there? It looks like a camp chair. Noticing orange blazes tied around a couple of tree trunks, I bushwhack into a grove of hemlocks where I find what I imagine is a seed collection experiment gone bad. Spaced about a hundred feet apart are three contraptions rigged from plastic piping and black rip-stop nylon affixed to frames with jumbo paper clips. All are knocked on their sides. What in blazes?

There are people behind me coming up the path. No talking in church, please.

On Government Peak Trail now, I walk through a marsh. The sound of a stream grows louder with each step. A rushing sound: cascades and falls.

Trap Falls: a series of twisting elevation drops through which the Carp River plummets.

I clamber down a tall bank, using hemlock roots as hand- and footholds, then climb up the falls, along the rocks, into the water, feeling its energy, listening to its message.

Shimmying back up the crumbly wall of earth, I walk further above the falls. The sun comes out and here in tree tops flit a frenzy of warblers, so many my head spins. Tossing down knapsack and stick, I sit and look up through binoculars, resisting the urge to jerk them back and forth. It’s like attending a 27-ring circus. Here are more black-throated greens, but also the "fire throat", a Blackburnian warbler--orange, black, and white-- a species I’ve never seen before.

My neck is sore from craning upward, looking back and forth.

Time passes. And a quiet calm comes.

It’s become cloudy again. I’m heading back, but wish to keep with me the sound of these falls. Water washes through grooves in red rock, a brownish yellow stream flows under massed white droplets, and as I walk down a steep path, the falls actually appear to go uphill.

Upward trill. Northern parula?

The Carp River becomes placid soon after the falls.

On the path back to the trailhead, I encounter another frog. This one’s full length is visible, from its underwater torso to protruding eyes.

A red squirrel is out on a limb now, acting crazy and fierce. Oh, the strange noises it makes. Acting this way is a defense mechanism. Some humans do it.

Takes one to know one.

If this were a twenty-minute world, I’ve lived a happy life.

After a shower and dinner, I drive up the road to the beach--braking as a deer crosses--mostly intending to watch the sunset. Instead of sitting I build seven cairns of two stones each, white ones upon large red rocks in shallow water, seven sentinels washed by the waves, as a ring-billed gull watches from a boulder in the water beyond my reach.

I also construct a totem, inserting into the ground one human-height, three-pronged piece of driftwood that has what look like horns on top. Anchoring it with large stones, I top it with birch bark and hemlock sprigs.

Four of the small cairn stones are already toppled from where I placed them. Three adhere, despite the waves. One shapely cairn in particular catches my eye.

A duck flies past--male merganser, I think--and the sun sets pink and orange where it disappears amid clouds of lavender and shades of periwinkle, with robin’s egg sky above.

My pigmentary vocabulary warrants improvement.

Back home, I wander into the backyard, using the lawn to wipe my sandy boots. Poking behind a storage shed I discover fencing, lumber, a realtor’s sign, and other detritus. A bird flies into my range and instinctively I reach for binoculars hanging around my neck. They’ve become a part of me. In the crepuscular light, I make out a hermit thrush. It watches me watch it.

What happens when hermits meet? In this case, nothing.

Seventh Day

I awaken to the sound of a warbler. Teeteeteetee TEE tee. As I’m packing my car, I spot a redstart. Later to arise, I’ve allowed it a head start.

There’ll be no hiking on the seventh day, only thinking as I drive away from the good place I’ve just begun to know.

The temperature is 38 degrees a little after dawn. A school bus passes, heading west. The nearest town in that direction: nearly thirty miles.

Departing the mostly curvy world again, toward the world of straight lines, I stop briefly on the beach to look at Big Water one more time. The cairns are toppled, with only two of seven medium-sized stones in place where I set them last night. The driftwood totem remains in place, for now.

In a "Peanuts" strip, Linus once said, "I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand." I feel just the opposite. I like people--amusing, beautiful, wise, sweet, bumbling, complex, simple, kind, warm, prickly people--especially one at a time, but as a whole, humans appall me. Home sapiens has wreaked havoc on the planet, upon its countless forms of life and upon the earth itself, leveling mountaintops and fouling water.

Stopping in Odanah on the reservation, I purchase two pounds of fragrant green wild rice at a gift shop run by the Bad River Ojibwe band. It smells like grass, which it is.

In a hall outside the casino there, a "Wall of Veterans" displays black-and-white photo portraits of 122 local war veterans, dating from World War I. A few surnames repeat: Whitebird. Marksman. Cloud. Arbuckle. Lemieux. Bigboy. Crowe.

The earth here is rosy and so are the roads. While driving the red road today I see tall slender birches wearing pale green spring foliage and maples the brightest red.

A billboard advertises a nearby attraction, the Bong Museum. With a name like that, I can only imagine the clientele it mistakenly attracts.

Then there’s "The Leather & Gift Shop" in Bessemer, Michigan. What are people thinking? That one reminds me of the "Coffee & Beverages" sign I’ve seen outside a cafe in Minneapolis.

Recently a correspondent challenged me to examine city life with the same that I’ve given to mud puddles and cloud formations. But the thing about my vacation writing is that I have all day, for days on end, to leisurely attend to hardly anything other than my thoughts, the sky, and whatever compels me. My focus is not simply close, but sustained in a way my ordinary days are not, when I cope with interruption after interruption.

Rush, rush, rush, wait, wait wait. That’s city life, according to a barn-dweller with whom I conversed recently. Negotiating urban white water. Will I be able to imagine the throbbing bass line in a neighbor’s music to be the sound of a ruffed grouse?

Imagination fails me.

On the road south of Duluth, I drive seventy miles in the time it would take me to walk three, voluntary insanity. When bees exhibit this sort of behavior, they make the front page of the local paper.

Hello, hello.

I’m back in my neighborhood where little girls appear on the sidewalk wearing colorful handmade paper hats. Where orioles sing lusty orange songs, and cottonwood fluff piles like snow. Where I can enjoy spicy Indian food, and see a camper painted a patchwork of primary colors, covered with textual assertions like "All Sunday religions are a lie."

Have I gone astray?

Andy Goldsworthy says, "Discomfort is a sign of change. Every so often I feel as birds must before their first migration--a gut instinct that something is wrong where they are, a strong sense they must now go where they have never been before."

What about my peregrination to and fro?

I’m beginning to know.

More Street Librarian travel accounts

Baptism River, northern Minnesota, March 2003

Cairn Free, southern Utah, November 2002

Red Cliff, south shore of Lake Superior, May 2002

Utah Solo, southern Utah, September 2001

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