Of Woods and Words

Airdate: November 24, 2010 

 I may wax poetic about grouse hunting, but when it comes to deer season, I have to admit, I don’t quite get the allure. It seems like a lot of blaze orange, a lot of camouflage, and a lot of sitting very still in not very warm weather. And I just haven’t heard great things about the general tastiness of venison. 

 I have Halloween memories prior to the Halloween Blizzard of 1991, but they are hazy, half memories. I know my mother dressed my brother and me up as hobos the Halloween before I started school. I know my mom sewed me a homemade dairy cow costume for kindergarten. But when I really think about Halloween, it seems all my memories start with the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. I was in first grade and dressed up as a puppy dog. My little brother got to be the dairy cow that year.

 I’m prone to seasonal amnesia. In the dark, coldest bits of winter, I become convinced that spring will never come. Likewise, in the midst of summer, when I’m splashing in the lake on hot afternoons or taking advantage of the abundance of daylight by spending evenings out in the fishing boat until the sun dips behind the horizon, it’s hard to believe that someday not too far off, winter will come and the world will freeze.

 Maybe all kids from the country go through this, but almost as soon as I became aware of a larger world around me, big city grocery stores began to fascinate me. As soon as I stepped through the automatic doors into the fluorescent glow of overhead lights reflected in the polished floor tiles, I felt I’d emerged into a new world. Before me I found laid out more produce than I knew was possible to gather in one place, endless aisles of cereal, cheese, and even whole sections of the big box stores devoted to items that weren’t even groceries. Who knew you could pick up Christmas ornaments and a gallon of milk not only on the same trip, but in the same store? From an early age I was hooked on big grocery stores and I clamored to help my grandmother run errands when we visited her in the Chicago suburbs.

 While growing up, my brother and I ate far more tofu-dogs than we ate actual hot dogs. Our vegetarian upbringing directly influenced our outdoor experiences. While other kids spent their time outside fishing or hunting, the experiences my brother and I had outdoors were far more ‘Transcendentalist’ than ‘sportsman’. Our parents had no greater purpose beyond a belief that “it was good for us” when they took us on hikes, paddles, and camping trips.  

One night in late June, a pair of loons in the bay outside the cabin took to caterwauling. They whooped, yodeled, and called all night long.

The next morning the loons still swam in the bay, calling out occasionally. An inky, fluffy blob popped out from under the wing of one of the adult loons. Suddenly all of the loons’ noise from the night before made perfect sense. They’d had a chick hatch.

You’d have thought no one had ever seen a baby loon before. Within a couple hours, everyone living around the bay had spotted the little guy swimming about in the bay with his parents and had made a point of pointing out the chick to other neighbors. After a couple summers without any loon chick sightings, everyone saw the little guy as a hopeful sign of natural normality.

We’ve kept tabs on the loon family. They’re hardly pets, but we feel a certain responsibility for the world they live in. We pointed out when we spotted the family swimming in the distance. We pulled out binoculars and spotting scopes to watch the loon family feed. We took countless blurry pictures of the family when they swim into the bay. And more than anything we worried about them.

We worried when the loon chick was tiny and his parents would leave him bobbing on the lake’s surface when they dove underwater for supper. We worried if the tiny little guy would grow big enough to be able to make his first winter migration. Now, as the summer grows old, the loon chick has grown into a sleek grey shadow of his parents. He’s big enough to ward off most predators and we’ve begun to worry about what sort of world our loon baby will find when he makes his first winter journey south.

When the loons first arrived in the bay this spring, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was just unfolding. We welcomed the sight of the loons with a sigh of relief. Somehow, it felt as though we were keeping the loons safe from harm. As the disaster of the oil spill morphed out of comprehension and the baby loon emerged, it became apparent that the loons were just experiencing a temporary safe haven from an environmental disaster that would no doubt affect a significant number of loons. We won’t know if our loon family

Lately the chick has been practicing his dive. He hasn’t quite mastered his technique. He comes popping up to the surface long before his parents reemerge. Soon he’ll have to practice flying so he can make the long autumn flight to an ocean coast.

In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes about monarch butterflies who make a wild jog in their migration course when they cross Lake Superior. It’s believed the butterflies are remembering where a large mountain once stood. "I’d like to be it," says Dillard. "To feel where to turn." We can’t tell the baby loon to fly somewhere, anywhere besides the Gulf of Mexico this fall when he senses it’s time to leave this original home place of his. But we can hope as he flaps across the great Lake Superior that he’ll feel where to turn.

Airdate: August 18, 2010

When I stand on our deck, I can look always way across the lake to spy the sign for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on a tiny island way out in the distance. The storied wilderness that plays a central role in so many people’s summer vacations is literally a very looong stone’s throw off. In fact, there’s a canoe outfitters on the next bay over, and every morning I watch troops of canoeists paddle past our bay, either heading out or returning from canoe trips.

Lately we’ve gotten into a habit of heading out in the motor boat each evening to do a few minutes of lake trout fishing. We motor right in front of the Boundary Waters sign and kill the motor. We hook the ciscoes on, throw down our lines and sinkers, and wait for a nibble. One night as we bobbed about in the boat last month, I realized it had actually been over a year since we’ve gotten to see the other side of that Boundary Waters sign. Luckily that embarrassing little fact was quickly put right with an evening paddle down the lake.

Still, there’s an assumption that people who live here year-round must spend their free time out in the woods or on the water, enjoying the vast plethora of outdoor activities this area offers. But in this summer-driven economy, I find my dog days of summer are more frequently spent behind a desk than lazing about on rock outcropping in the Boundary Waters. Days off are devoted to laundry, groceries, errands, and other to-do list items that have slipped through the cracks of the work week. The Minnesota land of summer vacations lies within eyesight from my front door, yet it often seems very far away.

They say youth is wasted on the young. Wilderness cabins might be wasted on the young too. It always worries me that the visitors here might actually know the land better than I do. But maybe that’s a worry that plagues a lot of people, no matter where they live.

When I worked in London, my coworkers were consistently amazed by all the things the Yanks did on their days off. Inevitably the group of temporary American workers that I belonged to spent their weekends doing all sorts of touristy things like visiting historic buildings, going to the theatre, or taking weekend trips to the countryside and the continent. "We never do anything like that," the Brits would say whenever we Yanks reported on our weekends at work each Monday. My British co-workers, on the other hand, spent their weekend doing the mundane things that I now do at the cabin on my days off. Not participating in the activities that supposedly personify your home might very much be part of being, well, home.

But please don’t assume that means we locals don’t realize the beauty of our home. We don’t mean to have our lives swallowed by work and routine. There’s always part of me that longs to be part of the group that does all the fun stuff in the woods.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay beautifully summed up the urge for travel and change when she wrote: "Yet there isn’t a train I’d rather take, no matter where it’s going." Sometimes, as I watch the canoes pass from left to right across the bay, I think, there’s no canoe I’d rather take, no matter where it’s going.

Airdate: August 11, 2010