I saw the origins of survival in the ready friendship of birch bark and flame

Preface

Where does our relationship to nature live?  Does it live outdoors?  I have gone to the trouble of spending so much time indoors, writing, to say a few words about this.  Why?

It matters to me.

This may seem like a trivial reason, but many of us are unaware we have taken this relationship for granted.  Some people in our past thought we could divorce this relationship.  Some people now don’t want to work on their failing marriage to it- that takes a lot of effort.  Some have never known the emotions that relationship can offer.

But to many of us it matters. 

It matters to me and it probably matters to you too.  However, the road is not paved just because we care.  The path is overgrown in barriers, and sometimes it feels like experiences I have had lost in a bug-infested tag alder swamp.  Bedrock, the solid ground in many places far below the surface of our shoes, is closest to the surface under such swamps.  And in places it juts skyward, and provides perspective on the paths we travel.  As I look north from one such spot, the landscape breathes on my neck the way a lover sighs, and I love it back.

Tree Scout

We started camping in the Tract untold millennia ago as a warming post-glacial Lake Algonquin lapped Huron peninsula’s bare basalt, newly revealed by the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the main character of North America’s most recent Ice Age.  Perhaps thousands of years passed Upper Michigan’s surfacing from below the persuasive weight of frozen water before we tread above its rich mineral cellars in forests of Jack Pine, Red Pine, Spruce, Fir, and Larch.  Perhaps the first of us to look north from Crow’s Nest were traveling light in search of survival 7000 years ago, when global warming vanquished those trees save the Pines, and we could see the glacier damming up the lake on a clear day’s horizon.  Perhaps the first of us to look north from the small bluff, a protruding survivor of the glacial till, were in the pagoda roof-nest of a White Pine, a newcomer that was rooted like a rock climber’s fingertip to this hilltop’s rock crevices. 

I imagine scouting for ungulates through the evergreen’s needles, shy and earth colored, moving between the wind-shook yellowing birch leaves which nourished the soil beneath their new groves.  I imagine that very day, a browning pale-green hemlock cone mature and sew its tiny seed to the dry windy fall day, settling far from its southern home on the partially shaded slope beneath my lookout’s eastern flanks, unknown to my eyes.  The seed that would sow these northland glades, groves that invoke some people to unspeakable happiness, shaded in mystery and a Kalevala thought.    

I imagine surveying clouds over the Yellow Dog Plains, a tundra-like community of sage, hudsonia, sedge, and ragweed to the northeast.  The plains were being heavily colonized by the stabilizing grasses, jack pines, and red pines that came to stay.  I heard below the lilting of the Yellow Dog River, which straddles Crow’s Nest on its tumbling path to the plains.  My imagination felt an ancestral emotion, one that was tied with craftsmanship to all things rooted here.  My imagination is rooted here. 

For the next 6000 years wind, fire, water, and subtle tectonics played in the Yellow Dog’s song.  To this tune the present day Tract was reared and it saw migrating tree species come to root, like Black Cherry, Basswood, Elm, Red and Sugar Maples, White Spruce, and Yellow Birch.  It’s unclear to me now when exactly we first rambled across this forest’s promontory- this watershed hillock- but to these luckless lands no one has ever made a steady home, a place to be at length, save for imagination.  

Water

Maybe we weren’t wrong when we cut those white pines on Baraga, or sluiced the tall ones from just beyond the Yellow Dog’s headwaters.  We built this country with White Pine.  I voiced this sentiment against my conscious, thinking about 19th century cultural notions and left the clearing.

“Why do you suppose no trees grow here?” Adita said.

It’s strange indeed no sun loving birch or adventurous maple could sprout from this soil.  Not beaked hazel, blueberries, nor ash stepped foot beyond the old camp’s clearing.  For 150 years no brave plant sprung from this spot. 

“This was a logging camp mid 1800’s, they built a dam McCormick made use of over there” I said and gauged my arm west by northwest.  “Guess that has something to do with it,” I covered.  I was as confused as her.  

We stood on the dam and felt the history pool up in our thoughts and spill over into the sluggish and swampy headwaters of the Yellow Dog River.  I had been there before, six months earlier, and under the spell of the crescent moon as it added light to the dying heat of a cold clear winter day.  As I watched the new river seep though the rusty hinges and worn boards of the old dam beneath Adita’s feet, I thought about the same Black Spruce and bark-bald Pine-snagged valley under the sound cushion of snow, and looked down the valley to compare the winter image.  I remembered the wool sock Marv wore as a hat because he forgot his toboggan in Ishpeming.  I remembered how my Grandpa’s Fisher skis had felt catching and gliding in the crunchy snow accumulating on Bulldog Lake’s ice lid.  I heard the rhythmic sound of Marv’s tightly laced Black Ash snowshoes beside me.  I remembered how I felt when I reclined below an Eastern White Cedar, a weasel jump from where I stand now, looking down the origins of a watershed.  It was sacred- it’s sourcing a ceremony- and I had a chance to dialogue with that.  It was one of many spirit fountains we have come to find in a full day’s spontaneous rambling.

“We should get the water purifier,” Adita said, knowing it was 3 miles away.

My thoughts humidified from the winter spell to the 90 degree afternoon, and the newly raised skin where female mosquitoes had just satiated their need for iron from my neck.  I saw one lumber off to go lay hundreds of eggs; a piercing sunbeam illuminated the globule of my blood as it stumbled drunk under load, its swollen gut triggering a nerve that starts egg-developing hormonal secretions. 

“That’s a good idea,” I said, but I didn’t want to go back for it.  Adita could see that I was dehydrated.  I had been drinking from the Yellow dog’s clear fast water beneath Pinnacle Rock further downstream for the last 7 days.  I had been stubborn to use the filter, trying to throw off my crutches of civilization.  However, in a desperate moment, I had slurped the stagnant poolings between tag alder swamp mounds in-between Island and Bulldog Lake an hour earlier, and was less sure of my wilderness ways.

“You stay here.  I’ll be back,” And she was off.  Adita had chosen to drink filtered water to avoid the infamous beaver fever, the anaerobic flagellated protozoan parasite festering in these bathtub lakes and warm wetland ponds, the infective cyst responsible for explosive diarrhea in humans.  I had grown up drinking from rivers and lakes of the northwoods and did not fret the threat of a corn kernel microorganism the way a reasonably minded person should.  But I had just drunk from its birthplace, from its swampy beaver pond origins, and the little cysts were probably settling en masse in my infected gut to feed and replicate right now.  Walking back to our gear in the clearing I did not think those thoughts, for I had more important business to attend to.  As Adita ran the trail Cyrus McCormick and Cyrus Bently had cut 101 years earlier, through the present day border lines of this Wilderness Area’s experimental zoning, she too met with that tiny resident of these lands, giradia lamblia.  In desperation, and turned around in the northland’s hill country, just past the flat ambiguated topography north of Bulldog Lake, Adita bushwhacked down the Yellow Dog’s west branch to the sharp valley bend that snaked from the west to north, 1 ½ miles from each camp.  There, she found the obstructive tag alder, a soggy slope of wetlands, and the giardia infested water that satisfied her basic need to survive. 

Tracking

We were headed to the Marten’s domain to prospect campsites and paused at the creek’s edge in sight of camp- the river carried more water with the warm day and the golden drip of Yellow Birch perspiration was in that song.  We were headed to the Marten’s domain and paused at the lake when Ravens spoke from the rocky shoulder of Upper Baraga, and something unidentifiable croaked a moan in the swamps to the north. 

We traveled and paused on ridgelines thick with White Pine, foggy dendritic drainage systems lined with rock and ice, and through poorly drained acidic Black Spruce swamp glades. 

We came upon a glacier-borne erratic, spoken from the tip of a deep blue ice tongue, and covered with winter’s tale of snows.  Two of some 180 lichen genres native to this area were magnified in the refrozen snow’s drool along the exposed pink-grey surface of Quartz, a rock not native to this area.  Rock Tripe’s grey ear met with the neon chlorophyll bracketing digits of the Reindeer Lichen.  Lacking “skin,” like the epidermis of plants or humans, the lichen’s fragile arms were steadfast for now in the stalactites of ice.  We looked for the Marten’s domain through the canopy from the rock’s 9000 year old homestead, and approached the mature Sugar Maples like deer. 

In the hardwood clearing we saw plain the topography of the Marten’s domain, a promontory at the heart of a deranged drainage system.  We ascended its tele-glades, and filled out water jugs at the cascading groundwater spout which flowed west and north in the direction of the wild moan, then south through the Baraga’s to the Peshekee, into Lake Michigamme, and after a curious interval of time, joined Lake Michigan’s holdings from Lake Huron, Ontario, Erie, and the Fleuvre St. Laurent.

A weasel scamper below us laid a division of common appearance, yet just beyond that twisted hillside col, another fountain spot gurgled crystal water to the January sky, and it traveled altogether a different path:

Around one side or the other of a red pine island on Island Lake, then

Through a giardia infested tag alder swamp I drank from in-between Island and Bulldog, Over the crest of worn boards and concrete cracks in the Yellow Dog’s headwater dam,

Across a rainbow trout’s pink banded belly in waterfall pools tumbling to the plains,

Past the sacred views of Eagle Rock vision quests,

In the water and blood of Marquette city’s residents,

Flowing through the hearts of anyone at a Save the Yellow Dog River benefit, and

Poured easily into the largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Superior.

I considered the significance of this image as I drank from the watershed divide in the Martin’s domain.

We bore straight south and a Pileated Woodpecker slammed its head to a snag.  Whack. Whack. Wahck Whack.  We crossed the tracks of Beaver, Martin, Deer, Vole, Fisher, Hare, and emerged on a highly vegetated shore of White Deer Lake.  We saw the ghosts of cabins Cyrus McCormick constructed a century ago, and the blank spots they left, like poorly erased mistakes.  We traveled down the easy causeway of the only marked trail in the Tract, as it led us past the abandoned foundations, but we veered off into the pathless lands after a short trot.  The route we pursued re-attained the watershed’s spine on its divided journey west to Upper Baraga.

Near the headwater rift, we stopped at the half eaten flank of a mature Sugar Maple, stood very still, and listened.  On the day old snow, fresh tracks of a battle strewed the embankment, quills and blood splotched the tracked drama, and a tough depression trough led over the bank from our vantage.  We followed it up and saw the sleepy snow cave a Fisher camped in, the inside out coat of a porcupine’s hide, an entrails pile, and a mound of scat it doorsteped in the torpor of its gluttony. 

We tracked out onto the lake and it started to drizzle.  We slid into camp, which was in a windless nook to the north-west, hugging the rock bluff that we blouched upon, where, like the raven pair scouting to nest nearby, we gazed out, and studied the sleeping soils under an ambiguating blanket of trees and snow.  That night we made a venison stir-fry, drank tea, and listened to the Bard Owl speak, and the Coyotes on the lake respond. 

The Bard Owl knew about the Wolf slain Deer at the Clear and Gordon Lake drainage meadow, those marshlands below the Martin’s domain, the confluencing swamp that drained into Upper, the juncture of four swamps.  The Bard Owl called out to Coyote’s spree.  At dusk their time began, after the Wolves, the Fisher, the Ravens, and the Owl had all left their tracks on the meadow.  They approached from distant hills last night when their keen ears heard the food-language of a squaking Raven.

The next day we passed the Deer carcass banquet on our way to the Acropolis, and I saw but could not interpret the complex story imprinted snow revealed, yet strained to see with a minds eye only humans possess.  I saw the Raven fly from the White Pine at dawn as it gave a good yodel, followed by another 15.  It took to shooting a loop to White Deer and Bulldog, then back across to the breakfast table at the swampy juncture.  I saw the Fisher, darkly running up and down a tree near the kill, vying for some meat from the wolves, who chased him off.  Desperate and hungry, she croaked a wild moan.  On her way home she attempted what no other animal in the forest dared, and boldly engaged a porcupine, flailing at its face, attempting to flip it over and tear its soft belly flesh.  I saw the Ravens hopping about, caching meat bits in memorized locations, as the Wolves grew sluggish and fell asleep haphazardly by the Spruce tree.  I saw the Bard Owl jerking its head as it filled the swampland with a reverberating hoot when the Coyotes arrived, leaving an indigestible pellet of cartilage and fur below the branch of the same Spruce the Wolves left their weighted body prints beneath. 

I saw the weather change over these events, the wet warm and foggy air softening the sound and the sight of approaching Wolves.  The snow sloughed on hillsides and dripped from branch roosts, and filtered through Old Man’s Beard to color the ground snow yellow.  The heat died with the night when the Owl arrived, but was born again the next day, only now under the clear blue sky of a fading atmospheric pressure and the kiln heat of the sun.  I saw the Coyotes running across Baraga Lake that night under a waxing moon.

I saw the brightly lit and well tracked meadow before me.  I turned and saw the look on my Brother’s face, and we skied on, the only humans in the Tract’s vibrant wilderness community.

Marvin and the Marten

“I’m going to stay,” Marv said.  Time slowed down, ski tracks appeared and disappeared in the wind and snow, and he settled in for the day.  First he climbed a ridge above camp and sought the hardest hard wood of Northwood’s forests.  The bluff’s snowy downslope made easy the task of dragging those rare standing dead Ironwood poles from the hilltop back to camp.  He was in no hurry and stopped frequently this day to watch the intermittent chirp of a chickadee soundboard from a nearby balsam-fir, and thought about the crisp resin smell of camp filtering from its fresh boughs he wove beneath the shelter’s wollen floors. 

At camp, he took a rusty sawblade from the broken branch of a nearby Maple and fixed it on an old camp saw with a twig and some twine in the broken rivet hole.  He made quick work of the Ironwood into woodstove sized rounds, and stacked it near the remnant stove heat inside the shelter.  Marv then placed a summer sausage on the doorstep.  He took off his boots and reclined, drinking tea, listening. 

After some hours that passed like this, he heard the wheezing grunt of an American Marten approaching camp.  As he reached for the hatchets handle at his side the sudden guest seized the sausage bait, and without hesitation Marv dove towards the unzipped shelter door.  The Marten’s eye gleaned this flanking assault through the faded interior light of the canvas-walled tent, saw the glimmer of iron wrought from sub-surface bellows on the hatchet’s cheek, spotted the furious and general attack of a partially suspended blade-wielding human, and his tightened leg muscles dug shocked weight into the snow.  As the flying Marvin crashed askew through the shelter door’s adjacent fabric, as he surges from the tent’s interior through both the door and the sliced tent wall, the Pine Martin skillfully bounded clear, yet chose poorly to climb the nearest mature tree.  From this Sugar Maple’s crown the weasel regained his senses so recently flooded in sudden fear, and looked down at the human predator regrouping below.  Before he could run down the Maple’s trunk, as weasels proficiently do, the general attacked continued with sticks, snowballs, cuss words, and loose camp gear.  It was at this point I returned to camp along the lake path, and saw the present scene.

“Looks like he weaseled out of that one” I said, and stood beside Marv at the base of the Maple.  We stood in the dying light and examined the fluid movements of the Marten as he explored different branches for possibilities of escape. 

“What are you going to do?” I asked, after some time passed.  Then suddenly the Marten dropped 30 feet from a distant branch like a fur covered brick and disappeared beneath the powdery surface

“There he goes!” exclaimed Marv, and we both ran clumsily in the deep snow after him as he skillfully bounded across its surface, landing first with his front feet then followed by well landed hind legs ready to propel his fluid accordion gallop without pause.  We were surprised to overtake him, as he easily could have outdistanced us on foot.  Cautiously we approached a dark recess of lichened till we had observed the weasel-one retreat to. 

“What are you going to do?” I asked again, catching my breath.  Marv stared silently at the hole in the ground. He had already come to terms with his urge to lay this weasel low.  We poked sticks in the hole and caved in the snow around its opening and the Marten squeak-snorted from below the hillside.  After some time he dug his way out and the reflective lens of his retina glared in a moment of eye contact, and he retreated once again below the snow. 

Marv realized right then we were only visitors in the Weasel’s home, and came to peace with an American history of displacing its native residents.  It did not matter how many food items this weasel had stole from us, nor did it seem wrong he had summoned us from our sleep inside the tent’s walls with a blood curdling hiss from his rounded fanged mouth.  It did not matter that he had shaken our safety when he rose on hind legs and cocked his raised head hairs in defiance of our headlamps, staring us down with his green fire eyes.  It was neither right nor wrong, and our judgments disappeared like the daylight, slow yet complete.