![[Baptism High Falls Bridge]](baptismfallsbridge.jpg)
"The future is a spirit... heading my way.
It is north." --Annie Dillard
The way is not always a visible way.
The river itself is a bridge that flows to the sea.
The portal to heaven is at our feet.
March 22, 2003
I’ve arrived in Finland. Ensconced in a cabin now, early afternoon, two or three miles northwest of town.
Finland: population 200 or so.
Gray sky. It’s drizzled most of the way from Duluth.
To get here I’ve crossed a bridge with its own numerical name, like a prisoner:
MINNESOTA
HIGHWAY DEPT
BRIDGE No 3293
1921
The only sound: Feeble buzzing of a few flies crawling on a window, quiet hum of a composting toilet.
Outside, the Baptism River flows left to right, the color of pea soup, through the backyard, below a deck. Small lichen-covered trees emerge from the water.
Flood season. Wet snow covers much of the ground. It looks as though five inches or so fell recently, followed by melting.
Chickadees are first to visit feeders after I put out seeds.
I feel a slowing.
Fine drizzle falls again.
A blue jay has discovered the loaded feeders. And now a spindle-shaped red-breasted nuthatch.
This morning, north of Hinckley: long rolling hills with birch and pine. A sign by the road: "CHRISTMAS TREE & DEER FARM." And billboards, one for "Joe Jitters" coffeeshop. (Why would someone name it that? Isn’t that like naming a candy store "Sugar Blues" or a liquor store "Drunken Sam’s"?)
Then Duluth appears from the crest of Thompson Hill, like a big Dubuque, industrial and gray, with bridges, harbor, smoke billowing from stacks.
Before noon I’m on the north shore of Lake Superior, where big ice crunches ashore, some of it pale blue, some pink as if it’s been bled upon.
Taking the old lakeshore road, instead of the expressway to Two Harbors, I encounter a brief traffic jam, due to an auction, it seems.
I count about fourteen "No WAR Against Iraq" signs between the north side of Duluth and Two Harbors, a distance of thirty miles or so, compared to maybe five that read "Liberate Iraq."
Yet another sign: Dodge’s Log Lodges.
Heading onward, toward Canada, I see a red Tercel wagon with bumper stickers. Does my doppelganger always travel nearby?
In Silver Bay, the apparition of North Shore Mining turns my vision of Highway 1 and Half Moon Bay into Pittsburgh.
I know I’m in Finnish country, passing a sign for "Salakka Rd."
The unincorporated town of Finland has a co-op that’s been running since 1913, a cafe (busy at two on a Saturday afternoon), and a tiny post office. The co-op sells not just groceries but gas (CENEX) and tools (Hardware Hank).
The posted speed limit lowers from 50 to 40-- and there are no stop signs.
Late afternoon: I’ve showered, made some spinach salad, and it’s starting to get dark outside. Hiss of gas burners under rice and beans, scratching of pen on paper.
Flies are drawn to the kitchen lights. One alights briefly on my copy of The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Re-Visioning the Insect-Human Connection.
A trail sign "may have chew marks from bears," reports Guide to the Superior Hiking Trail (1998 edition).
Bedtime. I ascend to the loft.
March 23 (Day 2)
"Sunday" means nothing to me today.
Jays woke me up at dawn. Now flies buzz at windows as the sun rises through fog.
First "fecal use" of the composting toilet. I shit, therefore I am. With a composting toilet I feel like I’m doing something productive, shitting usefully.
Electric toilet, two words I haven’t used together before.
Driving to the quarry where I parked my car, I see two more "No War Against Iraq" signs outside Finland.
Later, as I walk toward a trailhead, I hear loud tapping and then the laughter of a pileated woodpecker. After spotting it and watching it for a while, I head back to my car for binoculars that I’d at first decided not to carry.
Good move. Seems I’d left the headlights on.
Mid-morning: Warm sun on my neck as I sit on top of a lichen-encrusted rock up near the sky. I’ve been hiking a section of the Superior Hiking Trail that has changed since the map I’m using was made.
The lichen: some of it leafy and the color of green olives, some pale green scaly blobs. Parmelia?
I like lichen. One kind is called "rock tripe", I read. Add water and boil, and it expands.
In the distance a raven croaks. A finch and chickadees sing.
A woodpecker whirs.
An insect flies below me. Further down, there’s a snow-covered lake. Snow covers some of the trail too, but I’ve removed my sweater. I was sweating.
Watching the raven circle.
![[view with fog]](fog2.jpg)
To the west: a decommissioned air force installation. Five miles away? I haven’t got the sense of distance here yet.
Move on? But why?
First eat some of Anders Nilsen’s magic fruitcake. And mark my territory.
Late morning: Trail register at Saw Mill Bog. The last entry, ten days ago, noted six inches of new snow.
A raven croaks again, mystical, guttural, godlike, reptilian. Oh, the inhumanity of this place.
Actually it’s a little too human for me. As I continue westward I can hear a power saw--and shotgun blasts--from that direction. And so I turn around and retrace my steps.
At least I have the trail to myself. Correction: inhabitants of these woods put up with my intrusion: chickadees (by far the most cavalier and trusting), woodpeckers, and small red squirrels.
It’s late March and there’s snow on the ground in the valleys, as much as 5 or 6 inches of wet stuff. Some ice. Some pond-sized puddles.
No one has come here to ski. There’s no one gawking at autumn leaves or here to watch migratory warblers. It’s a littoral season and I like it. Pre-biting-flies. Pre-mosquito-hatch.
A finch sings hundreds of feet below, somewhere.
As the trail comes to a spur, I take the fork with no human footprints, just one fresh set of deer tracks in the snow. And a canine. (Wolf? Coyote? Following?)
I walk down to the applause of a stream, and cross it, silently giving thanks to rubber. In the morning one of the streams had been covered with ice crystals, but by mid-afternoon water rushes over timbers there, and frothy esses slither toward me, slowing as they go around a corner, speeding up as they pass through narrows. A miniature Cataract Canyon.
Late afternoon: I’ve showered and now wear longjohns, having discovered that I forgot to pack a second pair of jeans. 
Seven hours on foot today. How far along the trail? Eight miles? Probably more, with the investigation of at least one spur. And with a stop, before heading back to the cabin, to poke around the shore near the headquarters of Tettegouche State Park.
Looking out there at the lake, along a craggy arm of rock, I could see the curve of the world.
What is it that draws me to red rocks, I wonder? A sort of magnetism? Maybe so.
And what is it that causes me to draw breath?
Overcast again at dusk.
Perusing a map to see the context of where I was earlier today. Looksism Lake? Lesbian Lake? Here’s Leskinen Road. Is it Leskinen Lake, then? Probably so. I’ll need bifocals before long.
Things I saw today:
* Bubbles coming up from two small holes in the ice on a trail.
* Tiny bright orange fungus dots on a piece of timber.
* Bright green moss at the base of birches (which also had two kinds of green lichen growing in spots on their trunks, one something like escarole, verdant mustaches).
* A drop of water glistening like a jewel, hanging from a branch twenty-five feet away from me.
I climbed big rocks and looked down at birches and bogs--and across at more hills. What kind of rocks are they? I don’t know, but it’s not gneiss.
I’ll take it for granted that it’s granite.
I’ve come to the edge of the deep north and I like what I see. Lots of space between people.
About the "war": I’m feeling ill, unhappy, distraught, disgusted, perturbed, shaken, disgruntled, appalled, disturbed, sick. On this beautiful day in a wild place, I have not forgotten that my taxes are being used to kill people.
Blood quantum. It’s an obscenity, an outrage. It’s miserable. Pestilent. I abhor it.
Time to begin researching tax resistance.
The War Resisters League has published a new edition of War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military.
March 24 (Day 3)
The white noise of a waterfall is barely audible as I trek south on the Superior Hiking Trail toward the Baptism again. It grows as I approach.
And on my way to the place I find the place. Not a scenic overlook, not a spot with a name, on top of a cliff, amidst mossy rocks, bare branches, and blue sky, but a puddle reclaimed from ice, with twigs, decaying leaves, and seed casings in it, and bits of scum floating on top.
Lovely. This is it right here. Dig deeply below this humble spot. Someone--or something--great lies buried here. A fly, perhaps.
A chickadee bounces in the air. One just flew straight toward me, so close I shut my eyes reflexively. 
The Baptism High Falls, highest within the state of Minnesota--70 feet, it’s reported--sound like a rushing train.
Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, "The woodpecker [is] eating into my sound world and I make a salutary image of him for my own use. In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I ‘naturalize’ the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything quite natural, I say to myself, ‘That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.’ This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me."
I’d like to use the waterfall this way in the city, to let the sound of traffic soothe me.
A great pile of foam at the base of the falls skids over ice, soothing in its own skittery way.
Fractals surround me: spume of water over rocks, small ectoplasmic explosions; breaks in a red cliff; crystals on a creek.
Time for another bite of Anders.
The Baptismal waters are iron red above the yellow-white falls.
Wasted energy, these turbineless falls? I think not.
And walk away into silence.
Later: Tettegouche Overlook. Sweet smell of dried grass. A raven (grok!) alerts me to the presence of a red-tailed hawk. Which leads my eye to four bald eagles soaring. Which leads me to... slow, slow down, and slow down even more.
"Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace," wrote a sapling Thoreau in his journal at age 22. "The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. Why, then, should [one] hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed?"
In Japanese the verb ‘to wait’ and the noun ‘pine tree’ are both pronounced ‘matsu,’" says Matsu Ogata in Rowing the Eternal Sea.
Hundreds of feet down through bare birches, the mouth of the Baptism empties into the vast saltless sea. The south shore of the big lake (northernmost Wisconsin) is visible beyond the white ice, a ribbon of dark blue on the horizon. Thirty-five miles? Thirty?
Is that Red Cliff over there? Red is blue at this distance.
There’s me across the miles, last May. Forty-four or forty-five, what’s the difference?
"Taking this trail you go down the ‘Drainpipe,’ which follows rock steps down a narrow crack in the rocks, dropping 150 feet," writes John Pukite (Hiking Minnesota) who forgot to mention the up part.
Today the rocks, steep themselves, are wet and muddy. 
Late morning: overlooking Lake Superior, sitting in the warm sun on rocks, with perhaps an 80-foot drop below my dangling feet. A pileated woodpecker laughs and one orange maple leaf floats down from above, then catches a current and heads north, rising up into the blue.
Still rising.
Three miles away, waves like corn rows move right to left on the water. White ice floes are mirrored by a few white clouds.
It feels like summer. Immensely calm. Intensely bright.
I don’t wanna live in no city no more.
Same colors here as southern Utah: blue (sky), white (birch and snow), red (dead maple leaves), and green (pine and moss).
I sit contentedly for a while, but I’ve heard a command ("Mount Trudee") so I must go.
You have to go downhill to get to the top of Trudee.
Hiking through Hansel and Gretel woods without breadcrumbs, I wonder, "Didn’t the birds eat them?"
Given my predilection for losing pens and nail clippers, maybe I unintentionally left a trail of those to find my way home.
Early afternoon, it’s wildly gusty on top of Trudee. There’s snow up here, and it’s cold, but I’ve worked up a sweat.
On top of the world again. Uphill on ice. Slow going.
I listen to a private concert of wind roaring and leaves rustling.
Deer tracks here and a pile of scat like a hundred behemoth black olives. (Yesterday I picked up a hair from the trail-- and wondered, "Deer?")
Below: pale red paintbrush tops of birches where I was walking.
No birds in sight or singing now. And no human has been here since last it snowed, whenever that was.
I’m not lost, I’m found.
Now icy wind picks up and howls. The sky is blue.
Uphill hard, downhill easy (if unsafe).
A map from the state park headquarters shows an "easy" symbol on the key, but none on the map itself, only "more difficult" and "most difficult."
Difficult can be good, though, including difficult people.
I’m practicing getting old, thanks to wet ice on trails. Appreciating the little details. Fungi on a birch like clarinet keys. Blinding sunlight reflected in the water held by one tiny dead leaf. Tree with another’s limb scraping it: a sound like a squeaky gate.
Through the woods again.
After nearly seven hours, I meet two humans on the trail. Odd ducks.
I’d like a book on how to identify animal scat. Who Did That?, it might be called. A visitor outside the cabin early today--or last night--left jumbo marshmallow-shaped pale green pellets. A grass eater? I’ll examine more carefully.
I purchased a sack of "Wild Bird Food" --sunflower seeds--at the Finland Co-op. It ought to be called "Red Squirrel Food."
There are birds all around, especially downy woodpeckers, typists of the woods (pecking away and occasionally hitting the power space bar).
Outside a grocery store in Silver Bay I buy a chocolate bar from a girl raising funds to go to camp. The old story, Camp Candy.
In Silver Bay I see war headlines that sicken me.
"Love and resist maximally," a friend advised. Yes, but how? Where is my moral courage to refuse to pay taxes?
I hiked ten miles today, much of it vertically. Many of the trails in the Finland area have elevation gains of 700-1000 feet. Mount Trudee (1,400 feet) rises about 800 feet from Lake Superior. According to Guide to the Superior Hiking Trail, the trail rises from 602 feet above sea level at its lowest point, along the lakeshore, to 1,829 feet at its highest.
A web site of note: Superior Hiking Trail Association
Now my day reaches a sort of sea level.
My pair of jeans muddy already, after two days. Longjohns make nice eveningwear.
March 25 (Day 4)
I’ve been waking up every morning under a ceiling of knotty pine, having spent the night mulling over problems in my dreams.
This morning a male downy woodpecker appears at a feeder briefly. 
Now a chickadee clings to a weed upside down, its back parallel to the ground.
Gray sky. Sore muscles. I’m in no hurry to go out, so I read for a while.
In the afternoon I go for hike up the Caribou River, bushwhacking for a while to bypass a flooded trail. A mile from the trailhead are falls which snake through rock and then drop many feet.
I cross a bridge and hike down the other side. Slowly.
The sun appears.
Sign above the falls:
HAZARDOUS KEEP
CHILDREN IN HAND
That line break rubs me the wrong way, but there’s something delicious about it too, like sour lemon sorbet which if you eat too fast gives you a headache.
More poetry appears in the trailhead register. Here’s the seventh from last entry, dated a little over a month ago, verbatim:
Peace
Charbie &
Now I’m getting the funk out of here too, walking stick in hand.
It’s called the Caribou River, but caribou have long ago gone missing from this watershed.
The boreal forest here includes paper birch, balsam fir, white spruce, white cedar, and mountain maple.
Pussywillow budded. Red osier dogwood.
I’m full of eff words. Forest, falls, Finns, firs, fractals.
Furthermore: floods.
How can I forget: flies.
The trail to the falls is a spur that connects to the Superior Hiking Trail. Its signs look like this:
Modeled on the Appalachian Trail, the SHT snakes along the ridgeline above Lake Superior in Minnesota. As of April 2001, 235 miles of trail had been completed, most between Two Harbors and the Canadian border where only a few gaps remain to be connected.
In three days on the trail, I’ve mucked in mud, slogged through snow, and climbed some cliffs.
This place is a colder, wetter Utah, with spouts and gushes, puddles, bogs, and mad-rushing rivers. Not to mention what’s generally considered to be the largest lake on the planet.
The town of Silver Bay was created to serve the Reserve Mining taconite plant which opened in 1955 and "grew into a city almost overnight," writes Dave Lund in The North Shore of Lake Superior Yesterday and Today. "Nearly 6,000 moved in," Lund reports.
Today is already yesterday in Silver Bay. Its population recorded in the 2000 census: 2,068.
I wonder if the local tavern has a taco night.
Late afternoon, I acquire a six-pack of Superior Oatmeal Stout here. (Oatmeal: not just for breakfast.)
Urho, legendary patron saint of the Finnish homeland, said to have driven grasshoppers from the country just as St. Patrick allegedly herded snakes out of Ireland, is infantile, as legends go. Conceived with tongue-in-cheek by fertile Minnesota minds in the 1950s, he’s now celebrated with mid-March festivals in Iron Range towns and other communities with Finnish heritage.
Don’t say UR-hoe. I’d profess it rhymes with "Thoreau", more or less, accent on the first syllable, but my friend Nancy Kangas pronounces it gutturally, with an ancient, troll-like roll of the arr, closer to "burro." It’s possible my previous mal-pronunciations have gotten me reported to the Urho Bureau.
There are forty "Kangas" entries, by the way, in the Duluth area phone directory, the range of which extends north to here, including Aarre, Marti, Sulo Jr., and Mrs. Waino Kangas.
I’m not finished here. Tomorrow: further north.
Further and deeper. And then?
Who knows?
If you drive north at dawn on Highway 1 toward the settlement of Isabella, it is said that one’s chances of seeing a moose on the road are good. Otherwise, "Look for a brown boulder moving among the lily pads" in bogs, says the Guide to the Superior Hiking Trail.
Sun just over the horizon. Jays at the feeders. A dark-eyed junco lurking, and a pine siskin.
The river continues to disregard the banks.
Northward, into the woods, Superior National Forest, the largest national forest outside of Alaska.
It’s a frosty morning.
A white-tailed deer bounds away from the road.
At the Eagle Mountain trailhead, blissfully alone after traversing twenty-five miles of gravel and dirt highway from Lutsen, I put one foot after the other in succession.
Here, there, and everywhere a trailhead. Where are all the trailfeet?
On the trail not twenty feet from me: a ruffed grouse.
On July 4, 1999, a storm leveled 25,000,000 trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and I see evidence of this devastation as I go along.
At ten, I start uphill from the trail fork on Whale Lake where I hear reports of ice breaking. Sharp snaps and cracks.
I walk up atop rocks that project from the icy trail, as if picking my way across a stream.
Less than an hour later, I sit on top of Minnesota, next to a tattered U.S. flag, beside a weather-battered plaque on a rock, at 2,301 feet. Mountainous or not, I’m looking down my nose at everyone in the state today. Me above all.
Reader, think about this and you will feel pretty weird. (Daniil Kharms wrote something like that.)
I’ve half a notion to burn the flag and put it out of its misery.
The sun reflects brightly on snow at my feet. I’ve hiked here through crusted snow a foot or two deep.
What’s up here? Steadfast wind. Clouds. Sky. A couple of scrubby birches. Red rocks covered with green lichen. Spruces: 25-30’ tall. Some brush.
A while ago: a finch singing. Nearing the peak, a hawk flew off below me.
I want to go higher.
Is this it? Obviously not.
The plaque says that the igneous rock on which I’m parking my rear is venerable, an estimated billion years old. Give or take a hundred million or two.
The apex is nothing special; it’s the views along the way that are lovely.
I gaze out upon supplicating naked birches, green spruces, snow-covered lakes, and blue shadows, and bask in the silence that is everything.
No dogs, no cars, no planes. Just the sound of a ruffed grouse beating its tail wings, speeding up at the end like a basketball that’s left to bounce on its own till it stops. (The golden mean?)
What makes the apogee special is learning that it isn’t special.
Is that a gray jay I hear yacking now? It sounds kind of like a handsaw: AH-eh-Ah-eh-Ah-eh.
The way back to the trailhead is twice as long as the way to the peak.
After a nearly interminable walk, I reward myself by driving back to civilization a different way than I came, through Grand Marais. A town of 1300, Grand Marais has an independent book shop open this Wednesday afternoon in March, Drury Lane Bookstore, which has a copy of Hemschemeyer’s complete Akhmatova translations, to its credit; an outfitter where I buy a map; and the Cook County Whole Foods Co-op, where I discover Joanne Hart’s 1986 book I Walk On the River at Dawn, "for Joseph who was the last to leave the children’s cabin." Connection with my friends Joanne and Joe.
I ask women working at the co-op if they know Joanne. Oh, yes. It turns out she’d been down from Grand Portage a few days before. (How far for groceries? 35 miles?)
The books are being given away in exchange for a donation. While I must have one somewhere that I haven’t read for years, I spring for another copy to read in the next couple of days-- and leave a message for Joanne to read the next time she comes to shop.
I like this little town. But I shouldn’t call it little. It’s the Cook County seat and has a weekly paper and a nightly peace vigil, according to a sign posted at the co-op. In my brief incursion here I’ve spotted a "No War" bumper sticker and a similar sign in the window of a jewelry store.
I’ve also picked up the catalog of the North House Folk School, which offers classes in rosemaling, nalbinding, and how to make soap, ice chisels, "Thoreau’s cabin", a Norse pram, a Swedish boiled wool jacket, and moosehide mukluks. My favorite: "Make Your Own Casket."
Bumper stickers in the co-op publicize the existence of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, and the place I buy gas has a stuffed moose head inside the front door.
There are also live animals here besides humankind. I spot (and hear) glaucous and ring-billed gulls, and some mallards.
A cartoon idea: Several cross-country skiers are Z-ing downhill, wearing headsets. Caption: Telemarketers.
There’s a big sign on highway 61 between mileposts 75 and 76: DODGE. It made me swerve.
Late afternoon, dusk, back at the cabin. A small speckled boulder outside the kitchen window moves ever so slightly.
I get out the binoculars and identify what kind of rock it is: a spruce grouse. Chestnut-colored at the end of its tail feathers.
Grand Marais is an orange-flavored liqueur, no?
Maybe not.
By candlelight, I read some of Joanne Hart’s poems, including this one:
"ART IS ONLY A TANGENT"
The wolf track from the lower meadow east
Daylight, I find her body near his cabin
a dozen feet from here the doe lies, head
and white world like a photograph, the doe
the body fiercely dragged, we speculate,
signaled to a wolf her role as prey.
More snow. Nothing but a white mound. Sun,
the stink, the final look of her, the grave.
their tracks a web through trees to feeding sites.
I’ve never previously experienced aurora borealis. The effect is like the first time I smoked marijuana: "Is this it?" Must be.
A day of firsts and furthests.
(I’ve never been so far north along the North Shore.)
It’s a day like any other day and it’s snowing. Birds are taking turns at the feeders, first juncoes, now blue jays.
It just dawned on me again: nature rules.
I await fresh tracks.
Hiking will be dicey today. Ice and mud, studiously avoided on hills yesterday, will be hidden. Something beautiful and pristine can cover something treacherous.
I hear a sound from the screened-in porch. At first I think it’s just the wind, but hearing it again, I get up and look out to see small footprints in the snow on a tabletop and on the top of the plastic container holding birdseed. I peer through the deck doors, see that the porch door is closed, and guess that an animal--red squirrel, no doubt--has gotten trapped on the porch.
Putting on boots, I go out to the porch, where--leaving door ajar-- I try to find and flush the interloper.
It’s not to be found. Tracks everywhere: in the snow on windowsills inside screens and on top of a tool cabinet. No squirrel. I look for a hole big enough for entry and for escape, but find none. Another small mystery.
Divining mysteries takes time.
Give yourself some. Let your eyes adjust to the dim light of shadows. Lift stones and logs. Kneel. Examine the contents of nature’s closets, drawers, and medicine chests.
The way is not always a visible way. Flora of these northern woodlands--arboreal borealis--close upon the trail narrowly.
I’m on the Superior Hiking Trail again, in Crosby-Manitou State Park, having returned from a little way down the trail to don a jacket over a wool sweater and vest.
I like a place where a cryometer makes more sense than a thermometer.
The snow has stopped and the sky grows a bit brighter.
Hairy woodpeckers inhabit these woods.
The Manitou River gorge is gorgeous, one of the most powerfully striking places I’ve been at any time.
It was a precipitous icy rock climb downward to get here, taking over two hours. I slipped on ice and slid down it on my front.
Skirting more ice, I divine access to the bridge across the Manitou where I sit and sit, watching the white water cascade over rocks.
A mound of foam, like froth atop a root beer float, circles endlessly in a backwater behind a boulder.
Mid-bridge thought: The spirit that courses through this river also runs through the blood in George Bush’s veins and Saddam Hussein’s. And mine.
Acknowledging my own complicity.
I hike up atop the north side of the gorge for a look at the view from there. Lake, mountains, forest, river, all at once. (The river a distant yellow-brown curve.)
A surge of energy enters me in the middle of icy woods. I see pink birch bark peeling from one of countless trees and feel totally alive, happy, and privileged.
Noticing the heavy gray-white of the sky, I suddenly sense that it will start snowing again soon.
The hike out takes half as long as the hike in.
The radicalism of trees along the Manitou River: exposed roots snaking above the thin soil amidst rocks. More fractals.
On my way back to the cabin I visit the Silver Bay Public Library where the Cook County News-Herald reports that fifty people attended the March 16 peace vigil in Grand Marais. That’s like 90,000 or more attending one in the Twin Cities.
"Manito" is Algonquian for "magic or unseen force," says John Stoutenburgh Jr. in Dictionary of the American Indian. Another source I’ve encountered this week says "Manitou" means spirit in Ojibwe.
Mani-two? Mani-toe? Mani-tao? It’s the first, according to the standard gazetteer I consulted. The green-jacketed one. (New Geographical Dictionary.)
Black fungus with eight lobes, low to the ground.
By late afternoon it’s snowing again. And it snows into the night.
God said, "Make thee an ark of gopher wood..."
I will cause it to snow upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
"And all the high hills... and the mountains were covered."
What was Noah’s wife’s name? "Noah’s Wife."
A junco outside my window does not take a seed without immediately afterward looking left-right-left, watchful for predators.
Dawn. Birds at feeders in the falling snow. Pine siskin, goldfinch, chickadee together.
Juncoes, jays, tree sparrow.
It was a real snow job.
Kurt Vonnegut seems fond of the phrase "pure as driven snow." Which reminds me that I could use a concordance. Is there snow in the Bible?
Fly, flew, flown.
Why is it thus? Why not "It has snown"? and "The finch flyed away"?
I’m still learning English.
If I knew now that this were to be my last day, I don’t think I’d hike three and a half miles to make phone calls. I’d watch the birds and listen to them.
I’d build a fire, jot notes, sip coffee, sweep up dead flies. I’d do the dishes and put out more seed.
The junco’s beak is pale pink against its charcoal gray head and snowy belly.
A tree sparrow struggles with a kernel of corn, dropping it a few times, chomping on it, and breaking it into pieces. (The tree sparrow is the brown-capped one with the tattooed sternum.)
In this snowstorm, the spruce’s green has blackened.
The ledge inside the screened-in porch has two inches of snow on it. Fine snow, sifted like that.
I’m not housebound. I’ll foray out, but for now a warm dry place is a good place to be.
I could try these snowshoes hanging here decoratively.
"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." Thus sayeth Genesis 8.
And thus transcribeth Annie Dillard. Less than an hour after I read this sentence and transcribe it from my old leathery book, I encounter it in one of her essays.
The falling flakes grow larger.
If necessary I’ll hike to town tomorrow, hire someone to plow the road here.
For a while: no birds at the feeder. Stillness, but for the buzz of a fly. The sound of the river is muffled by snow.
"Their faces were backward." (Genesis 9.) They saw not the horrors of war.
Among the twenty or so books I’ve hauled along with me is an 1868 leather-bound bible. A four-leaf clover falls from its pages. Picking it up, one leaf separates from the others.
I am that leaf.
Among other books, I’ve been walking slowly through Gandhi’s interesting autobiography. (Slow is good.)
The rivers I’ve crossed--the Baptism, Manitou, and Caribou--all flow into Lake Superior.
Toward what great lake do the river of my thoughts flow?
My role this week is to feed the birds so that one or two of them might survive that would otherwise perish. Perhaps.
"Are you a bird watcher?," someone asked me recently in the city. "I’m watching one now," I replied.
Are we always to be looking through windows, gazing out, peering in? Windows suggest yearning, or at least separation. I want to be a human-sized window that connects instead of separating, a space that is a bridge between outside and in.
Connections hold our world together. To be cognizant of connections and attend to them-- mend them, weave them, build them, see and share their beauty-- is something in which I fervidly believe.
A pine siskin’s head is covered with snow.
I discovered a 12-gauge shotgun behind the bed last night.
On the wall here, along with the snowshoes:
* a bodhran (inscribed "O chlan, ó cellais")
* a poster in which intersecting circles contain images of Leonard Peltier and an Irish woman (next to the woman, masked and black-beret-wearing men carry a coffin)
* a photo of seventeen Irish-looking humans (mostly children) and two dogs in front of a FREE LEONARD PELTIER mural
* a photo of several men in front of a mural depicting a sword-wielding figure circled by Irish words
* a poster proclaiming "Poblacht na h Eireann" ("The provisional government of the Irish Republic to the people of Ireland"), surrounded by the images and names of seven male patriots; clockwise from the lower left: Eamonn Ceannt, Thomas MacDonagh, Thomas J. Clarke, P.M. Pearse, James Connolly, Sean Mac Diarmadda, and Joseph Plunkett.
The latter poster piques my curiosity. Dapper Ceannt looks to be about eighteen and sports a twirled mustache that extends beyond his cheeks like feelers. Clean-shaven, red-haired MacDonagh, seen in profile looking guileless and poetic, was perhaps nineteen or twenty when his image was graven. Clarke looks like a dour headmaster with bald pate, protruding (though small) ears, spectacles, and a full mustache reminiscent of paired maple seeds pointed downward. Pugnacious looking Pearse, in bare-faced profile, looks like a teacher who tolerates no horseplay. Connolly, good cop with a widow’s peak and walrus mustache, a ringer for G. Gordon Liddy at fifty, faces neither straight ahead nor left, but somewhere in between. Mac Diarmadda, a clean-shaven young man, faces forward with apparently innocent blue eyes. Plunkett, seemingly the youngest-- fifteen? sixteen?--also looks straight ahead, blue eyes shining from behind pince nez.
Who were these men? Revolutionaries. Who are their ancestors, and where?
Their proclamation is both nationalist call to arms against "an alien government" and a sort of charter or promise for equal opportunity, civil rights, and suffrage.
"In the name of God," it begins, "and of the dead generations from which she receives her old traditions of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom."
I like the way that sentence, upon first blush, refers to the muliebrity of God.
A little research will later reveal that all seven were executed (as were seven of their fellow rebels) after the Easter Uprising of 1916.
I’m reminded of John Brown and his tiny band.
Mac Diarmadda is otherwhere known as "MacDermott."
Freedom. It’s something to think about.
The individual urge to grow and blossom freely.
Some forms of freedom are better understood than others. They’ve been legislated (in some instances), written about, and fought over. But other freedoms, perhaps smaller somehow, are as important as vitamins and minerals in a diet.
Is freedom to be ourselves the most basic freedom?
Believing something one knows not to be true: This isn’t freedom, but license. Yet this is entirely human: to believe things one knows are not true, to know something is wrong and do it anyway.
The freedom to choose what not to read, what not to watch, what not to say, what not to do: These are as important as the freedom to read, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement. The freedom to abstain --whether from voting, drinking, speaking, eating something, or going to somewhere particular--is an integral freedom. But "failure to act" is licentious in cases when dire harm is being done and one chooses to avert one’s eyes.
The freedom to laugh at any time: This is another basic freedom.
The freedom to love everyone.
The freedom to take one’s time. The freedom to ponder. The freedom to dream. All of these are basic to dignity and sanity.
As is the freedom to impeach. Any society that claims to be based on freedom, yet puts people to death judicially is not free.
And what about freedoms from? Freedom from coercion and tyranny. Freedom from pollution.
I’m temporarily and relatively free, here and now.
Outside, the snow tapers and the sky brightens.
I just startled an evening grosbeak that looked like a jumbo goldfinch.
Feeder activity is picking up again. The wind blows new snow, the sun drops hints about maybe coming out.
It’s the Greatest Show on Earth.
A bright, rose-pink, inaptly named purple finch just showed up.
Now a tiff occurs with two juncoes, a cat fight between birds. They half hop and half fly up, flapping wings.
A goldfinch and blue jay cross paths briefly. A finch perches for a second on a hummingbird feeder.
Disconcertingly, I hear a jay as I watch a junco. Bird ventriloquism.
Snow blows wildly now from the limbs of a spruce.
I’m viewing works in the permanent collection. Life for humans strings together baubles such as these.
The brown river appears motionless from here.
Melting snow slowly slides down a window, from where it was blown and now warms, like soap suds. Fractals again.
Lichen targets. Branches pointing the way. Rivers relentlessly, flexuously, heading somewhere in particular. All these natural signs direct us explicitly: Here!
Life is an adjustment from the start. We’re all born without fingers on one hand in some sense. What do we transcend? What do we lose as we go along?
I hear the distant sound of a snowplow. At first I thought it was a jet rumbling overhead.
Four juncos at the feeder. Now three below it. Their numbers ever changing. One could gamble upon this, take bets on the next species to appear.
Past noon, it’s snowing again. About twenty hours of snowfall now.
A junco hops on the ground, only its head visible now behind a drift.
Mid-afternoon. The snow has tapered to flurries.
Last day? I’ll do something I’ve never done. The snowshoes on the wall aren’t simply decorative, they’re to be used.
I go out, shovel around my car, re-fill the feeders, strap on the snowshoes, and then hike down to the bridge and gate. Actually I walk down and back twice, making a rough track for the car. If it doesn’t snow much more, I can probably drive out tomorrow.
Wind socks, but no wind shoes. Snowshoes, but no snowsocks. Explain why not.
At one of the feeders, a chickadee flew to about two feet from my hand. (Odd phrase, that.)
Snowing again. And blowing.
A few Cook County toponyms: Fishbox Island, Footsteps Lake, Red Cliff, Devil Track Lake, Brule Mountain, Temperance River, Grand Marais, Kadunce River.
In Lake County: Castle Danger, Finland, Little Marais, Sawmill Dome, Mount Baldy.
"Marais" is French for "marsh", but Pukite writes that some people, "including Cook County historian Bill Ruff," assert that the word actually meant harbor or "place of refuge."
Area gemstones: thomsonite and lintonite. Does a balanced diet require these minerals?
The sky is a heavy white-gray blanket.
I’m alive!
A nuthatch was just clinging upside down to the bottom of a feeder that has a crack in it where snow and food are wedged.
Another feeder is full of goldfinches and purple finches. The latter have such large bills they can open sunflower seeds without banging them on something, the way chickadees do.
Too often my focus is tested in the city. Not just tested, but diffused. Distracted. Here: I focus on the shapes of blowing snow, the curve of its drifts.
I’m in love.
Here: I watch a blue jay’s head like a hammer, tap, tap, tap, twenty times against a branch until the seed breaks.
To be fully present, with mind and senses alive, awake and aware, leads to empathetic feeling.
And then what? Then one watches out for the well-being of others, including birds, without analyzing why.
All the birds I’ve seen today are beautiful, each species special, differently wonderful.
Wonderfully different.
My cabin reading this week has also included the new issue of Finnish-American zine Snowbound.
If our instincts are good, and we are well trained, we can be thoughtless and unintentionally filled with spirit, reflecting clearly any light that comes our way.
The white tails of juncoes scissor the air.
I’m tuning in and out to an ornithological television show, with the sound muted. There are no commercials.
"I’m in the market for some present tense," Annie Dillard writes.
I’m happy here, relaxed. Certainly other people experience this, which is why, if they can afford to, they buy rural property and build cabins, or at least take vacations away from cities.
What about a permanent vacation?
Sense of awe and wonder. Sense of shape. Sense of distance and physical positioning. Sense of apprehension. Sense of humor. Sense of relief. Of whimsy. Sense of relationships, patterns, how things are--or might otherwise be--connected. Memory. Hunger. Sense of continuity, history (another kind of connectivity). Sense of ancestry. Of home. Sense of what matters. What is real. What is necessary. What’s enough.
Who said that there are five senses?
"The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, can make you feel loud as a child," writes Dillard again.
How can we remain elastic? Children are fresh rubber bands. Old people eventually become the kind holding together a deck of cards that hasn’t been used for years.
Keep moving, keep stretching.
Outside the window now: snow floats upward like ashes from a fire.
What’s burning?
Getting dark now outside, wind whips snow from east to west, past triangles of spruce.
Birds have retired to their drawing rooms. I’ve gone out and shoveled more of the road, filled feeders again. Now I sit inside, warm and dry, mug of beer in hand, illuminated by the light of candles reflected in opposite windows. (I can see three flames reflected on glass in front of me.)
I poke my head outside. The river is whispering something I don’t understand, but feel no need to.
Is that snowmobiles I hear roaring? Or is it the wind?
I think of baptism as being the symbolic marking of a voyager, an introduction to Manitou as one heads out into the world, prior to any knowing. The first splash as one dives into deep water.
Beginning, launch, initiation.
What lies ahead, now that I’ve met Manitou? More mysteries, of course. Endless enigmas, boundless wonders, reassuring faces, unspeakable terrors.
The river flows on. Night deepens.
Seeds await.
My stomach feels that leaving feeling.
It’s after dawn, the snow has stopped, and there are no birds are in sight. What’s wrong?
I was up at first light to pee, then awoke for good as the sun rose. Now a jay calls from above a feeder. A breakfast call.
Another jay arrives. Day begins.
My breakfast: the last leftovers of what I’ve been eating all week, brown rice and black beans.
Juncoes appear. But where are the goldfinches and purple finches? Putting on their make-up, maybe.
A nuthatch drills a tree trunk, head pointed up for a change. Now it repositions, going upside down, just because it can.
Now a junco totally disappears into one of my footprints in the snow.
Inside the cabin, a fly basks and buzzes in the morning sunlight.
I don’t want to leave, but my ice is breaking. It’s time for me to flow.
Purple finches, three males and two females, now appear in a bush together.
I’ve been atop the highest peak in the state this week, crossed the highest falls, and beheld the earth’s biggest lake. So what?
I want to know more than surfaces. Not just connect the dots from branch tip to root end, but to know from without to within, animal, vegetable, mineral.
My curiosity is inexhaustible.
I want to gnaw at the marrow of people, delve into their earth.
What of this desire to know? We all have a private heart that remains unknowable to others, but I think it behooves us to give deeper of our kernels.
We hold ourselves in so tightly we’re strait jacketed.
Unfurl! I say. Love yourself as you love others: with patience, attentiveness, and curiosity, aware that you are changing.
"An injury to one is an injury to all" isn’t just a slogan. Mutual aid is imperative.
Much as I appreciate solitude, it won’t plow the snow, so deeply accumulated that my little car can’t clear it. If necessary I could shovel the quarter mile or so to the gate, or tramp it down with snowshoes. Instead I call the Finland Co-op and ask someone there if she can recommend a person I can hire to plow the road.
Two calls later I connect with Dick Krech.
And then I’m driving along County Road 1, heading through Finland, going home to the city where it’s a different season.
My old shovel is still there by the side of the road.
In a week’s time I shot four rolls of film. Out of nearly a hundred prints, all but two have trees in them (and one of those is a close-up of a leaf in the snow).
Cairn Free, southern Utah, November 2002
Red Cliff, south shore of Lake Superior, May 2002
just the dog & me & my thoughts. It amazingly A beautiful day for a hike in the
middle of Feb. Enjoy the day Ive got to get the funk out of hear.
Lexie Dogg![[SHTA logo]](big-shta.gif)
Passing through the settlement of Finland again. Where County Road 7 branches north from Highway 1, a carved wooded statue of St. Urho stands, with mouth agape.
March 26 (Day 5)
-- Beatrice Wood, sculptor
meets the trail of the white-tailed deer and follows.
I can find no nervous step the deer makes.
Calmly she has crossed the road and leaped
the snowbank, calmly takes the lead to death.
Suddenly awake just after midnight,
Joseph hears coals drop, a fire sough
and settle in a giant stove, then three
long bursts of snarling, growling loud and close,
scary to a startled boy alone.
door, and we begin translating signs
to story, what has happened here and how
we who create will tell it: blood and hair,
the body-shape inside a little thicket;
arched to her back, belly open, heart gone;
there’s the wolf track, after the hunting miles
and kill, continuing up-river west;
no struggle. When the moon laid out the grey
collapsed exhausted from her flight through drifts.
Or. Snugly in the thicket, safely near
our cabin door, the doe slept unaware
of stalking death. Falling coals, the snarls:
the tearing open of the kill. Wolf
steps its track next night to feed, moves on.
What’s left is carcass where the warden spots
the half-healed bullet wound that slowed her range,
Chickadees a few days peck at flesh.
There is a maze of marten prints. Some small
night creatures, maybe ermine, pygmy shrew,
run tunnels under February snow.
reasserting power, makes the drift
a honeycomb with water drops that turn
glass beads at night. Dawn pulls toward equinox,
and I anticipate corpse decay,
But equinox brings blooming on the snow
mauve bouquets of ribs, the carcass gone,
signs drawing me again. I take up
the thread where wolves take up the thawing meat,
Wolf hunger decimates the deer at last,
reduces her to spine, skull, teeth, hooves, scattered
cage, a winter’s tale. Snow melts, and Bloodroot,
Spring Beauty push up through the bones.
After reading this I go outside and watch two-toned lights dance in the dark sky, black moiré fractals that swirl like smoke and flames. 
March 27 (Day 6)
March 28 (Day 7)
I’m really snowed under.
My whiskers are getting snowier.
The scandal with the Smith boy sullied Susan’s snowy reputation.
Flow, flowed, flowed.
Flee, fled, fled.
Snow, snowed, snowed. 
March 29 (Day 8) 
Epilog
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