Category Archives: post bucket

I took my kayak out on the lake this morning. It was a beautiful blue sky day with big puffball clouds and a little bit of wind. As I was paddling the shoreline, the wind started to pick up some but I didn’t think much of it. Halfway through my route, I rounded to the far end of the lake where the increasingly stiffening breeze had the entire surface to play with and I was confronted by suddenly bigger waves with growing white caps on their edges. The waves started breaking over the deck of my boat, and the now stiff wind was shimmying me off course. Before I’d made it back to the little boat ramp, my arms were aching and my legs were numb from bracing against the roll of the water. I’ve been out in weather much worse than these little windy riffles, before. But not in years.

I realized recently that it has been ten years this summer since I packed up my Subaru and drove to Alaska. No single decision I’ve made, I think, has set the trajectory of my life so solidly before or since, even though there have been a million little ones that have had their own ripple effects. Back in 2004, I certainly never would have imagined ending up where I am now. Although this place is hardly an ending. My dreams have changed a lot since then, in some ways. And in some ways they haven’t changed at all. I still want to make a go of writing, and I’m trying to now, with a little more concerted effort and a little more success than previously. Some of my dreams are on hold; running sled dogs, living on the edge of endless wilderness and traveling those trails instead of endless agriculture and asphalt, having the space for a sprawling garden, for goats and chickens. But those dreams are the same. I was reminded of this, rereading a post from four years ago. The fact that there is some consistency of trajectory despite what seem like impossibly constant twists and turns is comforting in its own way.

In the mean time, I’m in an odd bind physically and emotionally.  We are in a new town, and I’m without work, yet. I’m waiting to hear back from graduate schools, for programs I’m not entirely sure I want to pursue. We have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant for two years. With no medical explanation presenting itself, we are left circling through that monthly holding pattern as well. We have five years to go, still, before we can move back to the place we’ve decided to call home and make it so. I’ve found myself sinking into a shell of silent waiting, but also of discontent and anxiety about what is coming around the corner of the next weeks and months and years.

When I started paddling today, and every day I take the boat out, I still begin the first few strokes deep in the mindset that the course is a work out to be paced through and finished as quickly and efficiently as possible. Every time, I have to stop and remind myself that the goal of these mornings is not to complete the loop and return to the dock a little faster, a little more tired than the day before. The goal is to paddle. To feel every stroke. To get my arms used to the swing and heft of the shaft, my hips accustomed to the rock of the boat between waves. The goal is to see the drops of water silvering lily pads and the flash of wing from an unknown bird in the reeds. The goal is not to finish, because finishing is an end to the one activity I have to look forward to for the day.

And that’s the thing. I have stopped trying to convince myself to be content here, because I won’t be. I’ve stopped trying to force positivity, because despite being able to see little positives here and there, I am have never been a Pollyanna and I won’t start now. But in the midst of what feels so much like floundering, I need to at least embrace the flounder. To feel it, and to learn to live in it and move with it,  to see what it can teach me about being in the world even if it doesn’t feel like I’m moving towards anything at all besides this interminable circling.

After fighting the wind and getting a little freaked out by the white caps soaking my deck and spray skirt, I paddled into a small cove that was more protected to gather myself for the open water crossing back to the little state park boat ramp. I saw the tiny head of some water mammal, probably a muskrat, paddling itself through the downed branches of a huge cottonwood that fell far out into the water in the last big storm.  A huge turkey vulture banked far above the lake, circling. I gathered myself in the shallow reeds, and took up the chant I had started along the rocky shore with each stroke: “Trust Yourself. Trust your boat.” Trust that you have been in worse wind and wave than this before, and that if you have to bail out you know exactly what to do. Trust your boat, in its seaworthiness despite its patched hull and abraded surfaces, trust in its innate ability to ride these little white capped waves and slicing wind. It was built for much worse weather than this, as were you.

Settling into a new town, a new house, trying to piece together what my life will look like for the next few months if not years, has seemed lately like staring into a vortex. There is something in there, but the motion is dizzying and there’s not much that can be made out in the swirl.

So, being in a new place with minimal other commitments and plenty of time, I am making my first attempt in a long time at sustained narrative fiction. And it has brought out the voices of uncertainty. It is hard to turn down the volume and just write. Harder than I thought it would be. The seeds of an idea seemed plausible and easy when I traced them out. Turning them into sentences and paragraphs and pages is another beast altogether. Once I get started, things seem to flow alright. But it is the getting started that is the trick, turning down the volume and just writing. Blogging has helped shake off the spiderwebs some. Being on an unusually even keel, given all the recent upheaval, helps, too. But I still haven’t found a good space to work and distractions are easy to come by. It will be interesting to see where this discipline takes me, writing every day for once, seeing where the story goes.

Pete and I were talking yesterday about what attracts us to wild, empty places. What is it about that aesthetic that draws us over and over to the woods, the mountains, the edge of the ocean, to communities perched on the cusps of these things? Being back in the Northwoods, I recalled driving up here ten years ago with Liz on an somewhat ill-fated camping trip to Isle Royale. I had vastly underestimated the time it would take to drive from Chicago the border of Canada on the north shore of Lake Superior, and we ended up, after an excruciatingly long day in the car barreling through the midwest, driving up the coast of the lake near sunset. I was struck by the Northwoods for the first time then, although I did not know that this landscape had a name. My breath was taken away by the thick stands of spruce and aspen and birch, by the vast stretches (they seemed vast, after five years in the tightly packed world of Chicagoland) between tiny enclaves of a few homes and a small convenience store without even a gas station, by the lack of roads and the smallness of the ones we navigated. Back then, I had no context for the north country, for her people, her trees, her trails. The most I had done was a two week backpacking trip in the UP and some time working at a retreat center in northern California as a teenager. I knew I loved and was drawn to the woods, but this was a whole new landscape for me. Yet driving into the gathering darkness on this tiny road towards the ferry to our island backpacking trip, all I wanted in the world was to move here forever. To make this my place, and put my roots down here among the birch. It is no surprise, I suppose, that the siren song of Alaska drew me even further north not a year later.

Liz & I after three days on Isle Royale. Summer 2003.

But we come back to that question; What is it about places empty of people that draws us to them? I wondered at first if it is the idea of a blank page, the way I used to accumulate empty journals and notebooks for the possibility what they might hold. But that seems wrong, because in coming into the wild and empty places, I am not looking to fill them with anything new. I think, instead, I am hoping to get lost in them or to get away from the places that are already full of too much. The conversation came around to how we have both, from early ages, felt alienated and apart from our own cultures and places. I have always felt awkward among people, in school as a kid I was on the edges of things, never cool, often laughed at. Shielded from pop-culture by an overprotective mother and scooped into the enclave of a religious youth, I never understood or engaged with the references and enthusiasms of my peers. Beyond this, I have always been horrified by the facsimile of suburban sprawl, by the blind consumption of both goods and media that seems to drive the engine of culture and economy. Maybe I am drawn to places of escape from a world and culture that never seemed to fit. In the woods, I can simply be in a way that is not possible on the asphalt and among buildings and the press of people. The only judge is the wilderness herself, if I can let go of my own self-criticism for a moment. And she is both fair and brutal, but honest, in the end.

In all this discussion, I was reminded of something I penned two years ago (has it been so long, already?) just after we’d moved to Iowa and I took my first trip back to Chicago after so many years away.

Driving into the city, when I came around the corner on 290 and caught my first glimpse of the skyline my breath caught in my throat and all I could think about was Jess and how we used to talk so much about this particular view and how it always made us feel this way.

And I wanted, for the first time in a long time, to write about it. Not just write about it but write a poem. I have not written poetry in a decade. It was swelling up in my chest like a panic attack, everything was tight and giddy, I needed to pull off the road and get down what was screaming up into my mind, what I was seeing, what I was feeling, how I could barely breathe through it. How the skyline was like a mountain range on the horizon, backlit like peaks in the sunset but by its own light instead, they reflecting off the storm clouds hovering just over the tower’s high reaches. How it made me want to be with her like it was in those giddy first days of college, going into a place that was so powerful. It made me remember that you can feel the power of the city like you can feel the power of the mountains, churning up from their roots in the earth, silent but with a presence you can feel to the deep core of self than science has yet been unable to pinpoint. The monoliths, unable to move, but able to elicit such responses from the humans scrambling over their jagged slopes and sidewalks that the entire trajectory of a life can be changed.

And then, walking on the lake shore with Aubrey the next morning, with the storm sky still broiling black in the east but the lake painted in strips of turquoise and blue under the bright fall sun and whitecaps across the margin of the sky like so many million seagulls ridding the churn. And the lakeshore beaches and paths with only a scattering of Saturday morning city dwellers willing to brave the first truly cold wind of the season with their dogs or their ipods and running shoes. I wanted to cry with the weight of it. Because the emotions I was feeling were the same emotions I felt in Seward, kayaking under the stone cliffs of the fjord, eagles perched above, black depths sweeping past under my paddle, eternal summer sun painting the high snows just out of reach. The screaming ache of something, something bigger. But unlike my early years in the city, still steeped in childhood and Wheaton, I no longer think that this powerful grip of emotion is God.

I remember struggling with this when I lived in Seward. Up to that point, I would have attributed this tumult of emotion to some powerful, divinely propelled awareness of the presence of a greater power, a power that made all this just for the joy and creativity of it, or to give the humans he’d created in the bargain some kind of pleasure and awareness of his immense power and spur them to worship, to compel awe. But in Seward, while still struggling to shake that context of being in the world like a bad dream, the kind that that keeps bothering you well into the day when you have moved past the early confusion waking, I was beginning to believe, instead, that this feeling was the essence of being in touch with – of being aware in some metaphysical sense – of one’s place as a human in the world in all its improbability and inevitability, that knowing one’s context as a tiny breathing speck under the mountains, no more or less significant than the eagle watching the channels for salmon, or the starfish clinging to the low-tide rocks slick with kelp, or the huge costal spruce towering on the edges of the sea cliffs, and no more or less fragile, is the thing. This kind of awe, the awe of being so small and vulnerable, yet part of such an immense, living, breathing earth, of being both an aware piece of it yet so irrelevant to its continuation as a bigger system of breathing, changing, swirling life; that is how I began experiencing awe in Seward in those early days apart from the church.

And it is the exact same feeling of awe that struck me that first night, driving into the city. But I realized then that they are the same feeling. Just interpreted in very different ways, with, I believe, very different ends in some ways. And I don’t know, still, if my old understanding of that feeling or the new one is right or true. I only know that I have that feeling still, churning away somewhere behind my ribs, making it a little hard to breathe through the sunset painted under the clouds last night above the endless horizon of shops and sidewalks and asphalt and humans and graveyards and weeds and blowing trash and taxis all rolling out before us as we cruised to dinner.

It is that disparity in thought, I think, brought to bear for the first time since I’ve come to terms with leaving the church and my history there that has left me feeling so settled and rootless at once.

So maybe that is part of it, too.

The great irony of solstice, of course, is that the day we celebrate as the first of summer, the longest of the year, actually marks the beginning of the slow march towards winter and darkness, short days and colder nights. As much as I love and relish the cold seasons, changing leaves, ice and snow, I find this a relief. I look forward to knowing that even though the days are just starting to heat themselves into unbearably hot and soggy states and we have months of oven temperatures yet to bear, the earth, at least, is already beginning to tilt away from the sun just a little bit each day, that relief is out there in the dark spin. Up north, running dogs, I always saw winter solstice as a threat on the horizon. We were at the halfway point, and in a few months time the trails would thaw and melt back into intractable marsh, the dogs would blow their coats and sleds would be tarped over for the long, smoke-tinged summer ahead. Learning to ride the cycles and celebrate both seasonal markers is a state I could do better to embrace. I do love the summer with her sunscreen tinged t-shirts, burnt shoulders and warm cheeks, long sunset evenings and silver-moon starlight nights that you can lay out in.

We head to the north shore of Lake Superior tomorrow for a cooler taste of northern summer near the Canadian border where both the heat and humidity will be mitigated by the latitude and the breeze off the chilly mass of water. I’m taking my new boat and our hammock, books and knitting, firewood and sweaters and cozy wool hats pieced together last fall. We’ll be camped out in a yurt not far from the shore, with oil lamps, a propane camp stove and piles of blankets, miles from the nearest cell signal’s reach. It’s a good marker, I think, both for the ineluctable swing into a new season, anticipated and dreaded, and into a new geography, unasked for but showing her own silver linings on the edges of the clouds.

On the water, the breeze picked up and did away with the sticky summer heat left in the wake of last night’s storms and the bugs clinging to the shoreline and dried my sweat slick skin. I circumnavigated the tail end of the lake over about an hour, nosing around endless boat lifts and skinny docks, past construction sites and early morning fisherman perched on the rip-rap along the road, sliding through thick mazes of reeds where I lost sight of the shore on all sides and found myself serenaded by an invisible choir of birds hidden in the thick green tangle. My arms cramped up after a while, but then loosened and I found my rhythm and was startled by the quick progress my little boat made around the shoreline.

This afternoon, Pete and I went exploring up north a ways, trying to find a little state park surrounded by cornfields with a much less developed looking lake nestled in the middle. It was so undeveloped that there were no signs, and we circled around for ages on unmarked gravel roads trying to find the water. When we finally did, it was past the flat grass strip advertizing itself as the local municipal airport. The narrow, overgrown cement-paved road to the boat ramp looked like something from the set of a post apocalyptic b-movie. We found most of the shoreline we could see clear of houses and docks, and the boat ramp looks like it hasn’t been used all season. We didn’t see a single boat on the lake itself. Driving through the endless maze of cornfield grid, I had begun to despair that this would be worth the drive up from town. But with the green of shoreline, diving birds and empty flat water beckoning, I think it might be after all.