My green Old Town canoe slowly glides north, along the east side of Low Lake, heading for the Range River in northern Minnesota. Although I have just returned from an eight-day canoe trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, this is the first time in over a year I have been paddling a canoe solo. For company I have nothing but my backpack with a lunch, two water bottles, and a life preserver--plus granite rocks in the bow for ballast. I lean back, relax, and try to find a smooth, comfortable rhythm as the paddle slips through the water. My J-strokes are not perfect, but fortunately there is no wind today, the lake a smooth skin with minimal resistance.
My original plans for the day had focused on doing laundry, finishing off an old NY Times, reading something appropriately rustic, and resting in my cabin after eight days traveling in the Boundary Waters. It had rained last night, and at daybreak, the sky was still a gray, heavy-looking shield, suggesting more rain was not far away. But by mid-morning the July sun's authority was re-established. It would be my last weekend in the north woods. Definitely not a day for staying inside. So I grabbed my gear, picked up plastic bags for storing blueberries, and was soon on the water, heading for a hillside of blueberries along a Range River portage.
Despite my marginal paddling skills, it feels good to be in the canoe by myself. My hearing is not much good these days, and it's often difficult for me to carry on a canoe conversation. But my difficulty with hearing is just a rationalization. I've always been a private person, my early years on a Kansas farm spent primarily by myself. A boy's habits of freedom and hunger for self-sufficiency, nurtured on open grasslands, have never left me. Thus the pleasure of this Sunday trip in search of blueberries.
As I paddle toward the north end of the lake, I watch a young woman in black spandex emerge from the woods and walk onto an old wooden dock. There are only two cabins on the lake, both protected by long-term leases. I seldom see anyone at either site, but today--apparently oblivious to my presence--this young woman begins a series of yoga exercises, silently stretching her body in the morning sun. We're sufficiently separated so there is no need to exchange "good mornings," but I do sharpen my concentration on my paddling to eliminate any disruptive splashes. There is a quiet satisfaction in feeling the ash paddle silently enter the water, pass by the side of the canoe, and twist slightly as it leaves the water, exiting without sound. My canoe is no powerboat, but I want to minimize my unforeseen intrusion into her morning ritual.
Several years ago, when my wife and I were in northern China, I recall looking out the window of the guest room at the music conservatory where she was teaching. In the fresh sunshine of the September morning, well before breakfast, I observed a rocky garden constructed in the middle of the conservatory's campus. At the top of a small hill, above a small waterfall, was a wide dirt path, compacted and polished by the many visitors who walked through the garden each day. On this morning there were four older Chinese, two men and two women, doing their Tai Chi exercises. I quickly took out my camera, hoping to capture a brief moment in their ritual. Despite the clarity of the photo, it does not begin to render the resilient power of those early morning rites, the recollection of what these elderly Chinese have endured in their long lives: Japanese invasion, Communist Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the economic and social revolutions of recent decades. The quiet grace of the Tai Chi does suggest their resourceful endurance. I yearn to stop and watch the young woman progress through her private ritual. I wonder if her exercises will help her endure future revolutions and invasions, the loss of loved ones, the loss of youth, the loss of a cabin in the north woods. Perhaps that's what I'm looking for on this canoe trip, seeking a way to walk into my own garden, to celebrate the arrival of each morning.
Well beyond the dock, I glance to the right and see among a small grove of red pine trees a pink granite shelf, the campsite where the Ely naturalist Sigurd Olson would occasionally stop on his own canoe trips. In his book Listening Point he describes the cleft in the rocks where he stored his food and cooking equipment and the grassy area, then sheltered by jack pines, for sleeping. Olson's recollection of this spot is deepened by memories of previous trips when he and a friend would camp there. Despite the death of his young companion, Olson's imagination continues to relive those moments of energy and laughter. Earlier this summer, visiting the old camp site, we found a dozen Old Milwaukee beer cans, fish carcasses thrown to the side after being gutted, and unburied human feces hastily covered by a red bandana. Perhaps they had not read Olson's memoir.
I continue paddling north, moving through a wide plane of water lilies, sedges, and snake grass. To my left is a small island where earlier this summer we set up a scope to watch two young bald eagles in the top of a white pine, the fledglings flexing their wings in preparation for their first flight. Yesterday, as we were coming home from the Boundary Waters, paddling through this same area, we were welcomed by a bald eagle, flashing his white tail feathers as he cruised to a distant pine tree along the shore. Today I see no movement, I hear no songs. My passage through this terrain is surely being observed, but the systems of intelligence and communication remain well hidden, beyond my ken.
Just a few feet from my canoe I pass a much smaller island, too inconsequential for even the most detailed maps, nothing but a small table of dirt surrounded by rushes. Two summers past this was the nesting site for a loon family--the parents and their single summer offspring. When I arrived at Low Lake in early July, I watched the youngster riding on the back of a parent. But within a week the young loon had disappeared. In the evenings we would hear the two adults calling, perhaps to each other, perhaps to the lost child. I was reminded of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking," the poet recalling when he listened to the bird from Alabama call for his lost mate, recognizing the bird's melody as a message of love and death. The deal is that apparently we cannot have one without the other. This year the lake again has a loon family with two youngsters, now approaching adolescence. Their nest is somewhere on the south end of the lake, at an unknown location I have not sought to uncover. I wish them well.
Despite my desire to keep moving, I stop paddling long enough to reach over and smell a white water lily. Nymphaea odorata, a nymph of fragrance what has in recent centuries gone by many names: toad lily, pond lily, water queen, alligator bonnet, beaver root, cow cabbage, fairy boat. Thoreau called them sweet water, the country's lotus queen, characteristically noting in his Journal that the innocent, wholesome fragrance came from a plant rooted in mud. I've read that the roots of the water-lily were used in various potions by Ojibway men to "cure" baldness. An inheritor of my father's receding hairline, I ponder harvesting a few roots in search of an ancient formula. But my common sense convinces me to keep moving, relying on my hat for protection from the sun. I'll let the shorelines of my hair retain their natural contours.
Mixed in with the fragrant white water lilies are the bullhead lilies with their yellow flowers firmly closed in fists resting on thin arms, just above the surface of the water. Earlier this summer, while walking though the Lake District in northwestern England, we discovered these same water lilies along the shores, though that neighborhood they might be known as flatterdock. While paddling I occasionally encounter the bullhead lilies' thick root-stalks, which can be boiled and eaten like potatoes. The roots can also be a favorite food of local moose. I scan the surrounding marshes, hoping to glimpse a large, brown quadraped feeding on local flora. At this hour of the day, my father hoped to see the cattle on our farm resting in the pasture, perhaps under the shade of osage orange trees, chewing their cuds. Perhaps the same time table applies to moose. Having finished with their foraging as the sun nears its zenith, they relax in the forest shade, ruminating on the pleasures of a good breakfast. Is it true that if you give a moose a muffin, he will want jam to go with it?
I continue paddling north and enter the Range River, a slow-moving, tannin-colored stream, bordered on both sides by a variety of grasses, sedges, spirea, and sweet gale. Navigating the Range River makes me feel as though I have magically ended up at the verge of a dense and impenetrable swamp in Georgia or Florida. Around any bend I expect to meet an alligator or a vigilant water moccasin cruising down the river. Despite the many alligator-shaped logs resting along the river, rational thought prevails. No dangerous amphibians or reptiles are encountered. In fact, this Range River world, on the last day of July, seems dominated by a conspiracy of stillness. Except for the faint whooshing sound of the canoe bow sliding across the river's surface, there are no notable sounds. The air is frozen in the mid-day heat. The only evidence of vigor are the myriads of tiny insects on the surface of the water--all lumped together in my mind as "water spiders." Since I have no moose to converse with, perhaps I should stop and become more acquainted with these hosts to the Range River. I'm certain they have tales to tell, if I but knew their language.
I have been intrigued by how each northern Minnesota river I have encountered these past two weeks is so different. A high point of our trip into the Boundary Waters was paddling up the Horse River after two nights camping just west of the Basswood River falls. Immediately after our first portage, we were greeted by long stretches of pickerelweed in full bloom. The individual spikes, full of vertical clusters of small bluish purple flowers, may not be eye-catching, but it was thrilling to see the river margins lined with thousands of these flowers standing above their long, dark green, triangular leaves. Only later did I discover that Pontederia cordata, the pickerel weed (can such a source of peaceful beauty justly be castigated as a weed?), is a member of the water hyacinth family. I immediate think of a small flower garden in my backyard and my one lone purple hyacinth. Each April, its lovely perfume draws me to fall down on my knees and for a brief moment become an animal of smells, reawakening the most ancient recesses of my reptilian brain. Ojibway call the pickerel weed kinozhaeguhnsh, though I am at a loss to know how to sound out the phonetically rendered "guhnsh." I suspect I've seen pickerel weed in Iowa, but I have no memories of these blossoms, and certainly I've not had a chance to enjoy their power when massed together in such a large chorus. In The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton writes that some people believed the pickerel weed was the source for the pike--a tale of regeneration that Walton wisely leaves to his readers' own assessment.
The other river flower that catches my eye is the common arrowhead of the water plantain family, resplendent along the "river with no name" that took us into Moosecamp Lake. At or near the top of the flower stem are the whorls of three or more flowers, three white petals per flower, surrounding the small clump of yellow stamens. Apparently the stem's upper flowers are male, the lower flowers female. While I'm delighted by the flowers, it's the unique arrow-shape thrust of the green leaves that always attracts my initial attention. Along a railroad bed not far from my home, there is a small marshy area full of arrowheads, also known as wapato or duck potatoes. Various Indian tribes harvested the roots as an important food source. In their journals Lewis and Clark lament how sick they became from eating plant roots provided them by the Indians of the Columbia River Valley. I keep paddling, deciding to keep my focus on blueberries.
Eventually, after 45 minutes following the Range River's twists and turns, I arrive at the 30-rod portage. Along the first 15 rods of the trail are the blueberries. As far as I can discern, no blueberry lovers, human or otherwise, have been here harvesting. No blueberried scat along the trail. I quickly open my backpack, take out the peanut butter jar I use for picking, go down on one knee, and begin harvesting. For the next three hours, interrupted only by a 15-minute break for lunch, I do nothing but pick berries. Many poisonous blue-bead lilies are mixed among the blueberry bushes, so I do maintain a minimal concentration, but most of my time is free for daydreaming while singing sotto voce an unnamed melody that has been running through my head the past week. The flies--both deer flies and common house flies--soon locate me on their internal radars, and I periodically seek relief by repositioning myself or exerting some personal pest control. I brought no insect repellent, so this is mostly bare-handed combat. It's only when squadrons gang up on me that I lose my patience.
On the family farm, the cream separator room was adjacent to the door used for entering or leaving the farm house. In the summer months the flies were enamored with that back porch, much to my mother's disgust. In later years my father would resort to spraying an insecticide to control these invasions, but when I was living at home the only pest control was the fly swatter. Occasionally I would decide it was time to wipe these beasts from the face of our farm. While listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio, I would pursue and smash every fly within the field of play. And there would come those occasional July afternoons when the flies were all gone. But the next day, everything had returned to "normal"--with hundreds of flies in search of the cows' sweet cream. I could not fathom the source of all these fresh flies. How did they know how to find our back porch?
Richard Nelson, an essayist I would be reading if I had decided not to come on this blueberry expedition, once noted in an interview that when you arrive in a new place, you often discover that the old rules for living no longer apply. Nelson suggests that learning to live successfully in a place requires--to borrow an image from Wendell Berry--a commitment comparable to marriage. "When you commit yourself to a place and you draw your livelihood from that place, you're more likely to develop a sense that there are rules that impinge upon you." My commitment to this place--to the Range River this world in the Superior National Forest along the edge of the Boundary Waters--is not, nor will it ever be, a commitment of marriage. I will never live here year around; I will never draw my livelihood from this land. Perhaps in future summers I will visit for a few weeks in June or July or August. But then I will return to my urbanized, semi-pastoral life style in a moderate-sized city in eastern Iowa. While I'm here, however, I do feel the need to try and make a small effort to feel as though I am gaining my "livelihood" from this place. Gary Snyder has written about the value of entering the wilderness for practical purposes, to make sure that when you return from your trip, you come back with something. The value of foraging appeals to me. I suppose that's why I enjoy picking blueberries or service berries or raspberries or wild strawberries. This Mother Nature goddess has provided a bounty of food; it would be foolish not to do some harvesting. Of course, I have chosen to paddle past the wapato, but this affair is just a one-night stand, not a marriage.
As I'm thinking about this harvest, I push aside a small sumac growing amongst the blueberries. From encounters with other blueberry patches on other hillsides, it's my impression the short blueberry bushes will eventually be dominated by the taller sumac and sweet fern and alder trees and then birch and aspen. The blueberry bushes may hang on for many years, but with the loss of sunlight will be a loss of fruit. To help protect a couple blueberry bushes for a few more years, I yank the sumac from the ground and toss it into the portage path. The death of the lone sumac has momentarily transformed me from a hunter-gatherer to a gardener. It's hard to resist this need to intervene, to help nature along, to make this blueberry field a more bountiful landscape for my purposes.
As a displaced gardener, picking blueberries on this Range River portage, less than three miles from the college's field station, I have not immersed myself very deeply in the wilderness. Within an hour I can be back in my comfortable cabin, waiting for the ram's horn that will call me to the dining hall and Karla's marvelous cooking. Even when we paddled into the Boundary Waters, we brought with us hundreds of amenities: tents and tarps, Goretex boots and Goretex rain wear, maps and compasses, pans and cook kits, boxes and bags of dried and processed and "just-mix-with-water" meals. This afternoon, alone on a rarely used portage, with minimal equipment, I feel more vulnerable, a bit further into the foreignness of this foreign landscape. But this is no Thoreau journey to the peak of Mount Ktaadn, searching for Nature stripped bare. I'm not that brave a warrior. Still, it's important to push my personal envelope, to enter an alien landscape where I know I could not survive for long on my own--and to try and sense, just for a few hours, how much has been lost. We all must struggle with the personal losses. Those are unavoidable. But we also need to sense how impoverished and incomplete our lives have become because of the enormous gaps in our cultural education. In our schools, we can learn so much from books--from the learned astronomers--and yet learn so little about the world immediately outside the classroom window. Three hours of blueberry picking will not provide me with the wisdom I seek, with the native wisdom our culture needs, but all journeys of a thousand miles begin with a first step. Or in this case, a simple decision to place one's paddle into the water.