Ben’s birthday is today. He’s now in an Old Towne, paddling around by himself, fishing. Piper came down to the shore a few minutes ago, sat in a cross-legged yoga position, and washed her long black hair, wringing it out with her hands, no towel. Josh is probably still asleep.
A beautiful black and white-striped butterfly just landed next to me. A jagged white stripe runs through the center of each wing, two tiny white dots at the tip of each wing. I wonder what the dots do. What caused that additional touch of ornamentation? Just an accident of jewelry?
The sun is to my back--a little breeze from the west, temperature in upper 50s, a perfect morning. Any more breeze and I would want my fleece. Light rain for a few minutes during the night, still a bunch of thin, whispy cumulus clouds, but they will evaporate as the air heats up.
Last night was a spectacular sunset. The four of us sat on a granite outcropping, facing west. The sun’s reflection off the water was, in Josh’s words, “like a giant exclamation point,” too bright to look at directly. Piper remembered an aunt had told her she should always see the green in a sunset. We decided that was caused by the yellow imprint on the retina, creating a green after image.
I have decided to call the small peninsula where I’m sitting “Five Pines Point” because of the row of five Jack Pines, evenly spaced along a fissure that slices through the granite. Two of the pines are twins, right next to each other. The other three are spaced 15 feet apart, each covered with hundreds of curved cocoons, waiting for the next fire.
A male bald eagle just flew over, flaunting his white tail patch, heading toward the north end of Four-Town Lake. Earlier I heard an opinionated gull (not a “seagull,” as Josh reminds us) upset over something in the neighborhood, and now I see a ruby-throated hummingbird, perhaps the same one that visited our camp last night. In the evening we also had a fleet of large dragonflies overhead, darting back and forth with an incredible quickness. We shouted encouragement as they gave us a few more minutes of respite before the mosquitoes laid claim to our camp site.
Last night I turned out my reading headlamp at 9:30 and slept for over nine hours–with just one short break to water some nearby woodland shrubs. As usual I’ve been an avid dreamer while on a BWCAW trip. During the night I watched my mother driving a large city bus. It wasn’t clear she had her hands on the wheel as the bus swerved around a corner and crashed into a building–but my mother, unhurt, stepped out of the bus, apparently unconcerned by what had just happened. I wonder how to interpret such a dream. What is my subconscious doing? Is it all just random, a chaos of people and images?
Yesterday the four of us were discussing a published interview with James Hillman, who claims that animals appearing in our dreams carry a powerful symbolic significance. Although unconvinced by his Jungian approach, I can appreciate the appeal of such an interpretive strategy when trying to fathom why I see my mother driving a bus 14 years after her death.
This morning was the first day since coming to the north woods that I woke up and immediately began thinking about the Alum Garden, wondering what was in bloom, what has died, what needs trimming or deadheading. After three weeks away from the garden, I’m ready to get back. For me a typical pattern. I enjoy these periods of separation, but three weeks is my limit. I’m ready to return to the garden’s routines.
My father never had such breaks in his life. Shortly after he died, my Mom and I figured out that during a 25-year period when we had milk cows on the farm, there was perhaps a total of twelve days when he didn’t do the milking–three short family vacations and a couple of days when he was too sick to get out of bed. While growing up, I never appreciated the quiet steadiness of his work ethic. He rose every morning at 4:30 and milked 10-15 holsteins and guernseys (and “Brownie”–our wonderful brown swiss) in an unheated shed with no lights, no electricity. His primary source of illumination in those pre-dawn mornings would have been the faint glow from his Chesterfield and Raleigh cigarettes.
Several years ago I jotted down a list of what I learned from my father–who did drive a school bus for several years but never had an accident. Having no clue what happened to that list, this seems a good time to create a new list.
• Keeping score at a baseball game. In August of 1955 I attended my first major league baseball game to see that Kansas City A’s play the Washington Senators in the old Metropolitan stadium. Dad purchased a score card (which came with a small white pencil) and showed me how to record what happens in a game. In later years I would teach four different college classes focusing on baseball. One essential course requirement: everyone had to keep score during the games.
• Reading. Every evening after he had finished supper, Dad would sit at the kitchen table, under the small lamp on the kitchen wall, and read the Bible. He was a vertical reader, dedicating a half century to an in-depth re-reading of one book, the King James Bible. I became, on the other hand, a horizontal reader, wandering from one text to another, driven by a restlessness my Dad appears to have successively resisted. Despite our differences, the image of my Dad reading in our small farmhouse kitchen remains for me the ideal to which I yearn, inspired by his commitment to the power and beauty of an enduring conversation with the written word, for both of us a conversation essential in a life well-lived.
• Eating a watermelon. We purchased our watermelons from the local ice house. The owner would cut out a plug to make sure the round, dark-green, ice-cold melon was just right for eating. At home, Dad would slice open the watermelon with our butcher knife and serve us each a section. Before eating his own serving, Dad would remove the seedless heart and set it aside, saving the sweetest portion for the end of the meal. He would do the same with a pie, always eating the outer crust first, saving the best for last.
• Independent thinking. Dad spent a lot of time pondering a wide range of political, cultural, social, educational, and religious topics, but I don’t believe he ever worried about whether his ideas matched with what other people thought. Although I’m not aware he ever read Thoreau, I suspect he would have agreed with Thoreau’s contention in “Resistance to Civil Government” that when God is on your side, you are always in the majority.
• First science lesson. The land my Dad farmed was a combination of two properties. The “Out North” farm was mostly pasture with about ten acres of good bottomland that–if rains came at the right time–could produce a good sorghum crop. In the decade following World War II, Dad farmed this land with a team of work horses–Bert and Jim. The “Out North” farm was five miles north of our home, which meant the Bert and Jim trips would usually last all day. On summer days when Dad hitched up the farm wagon for the hour-long trip, I would sometimes come along. These excursions would include a lunch prepared by Mom, typically fried chicken and fresh whole tomatoes. Our drinking water was always carried in a gallon glass jug wrapped in a soaking wet “gunny” sack. During our lunch one day I asked Dad why the wet gunny sack. He carefully explained how water evaporating from the burlap caused a heat exchange, cooling the water in the jug. My first glimpse into the mechanics of the universe.
• Bucking a hay bale. I spent five summers working on hay crews, bucking alfalfa and prairie hay bales. Dad showed me how to use my legs to hoist and carry the bales with minimum strain on my back and arms. It’s a lesson I use every day when working in the garden, reminding myself to rely on the strength of my legs, not my back.
• Voting. For many years Dad, as the Township Trustee, was responsible for organizing the township’s voting precinct, recruiting the poll watchers, setting up and taking down the voting booths in the Legion Hall, and ensuring the township’s vote totals and ballots were delivered to the Elk County courthouse. As souvenirs of those exciting nights tabulating votes, I have in my office desk several of the purple, soft-leaded pencils (without erasures) used in those voting booths. And I always vote.
• Stoicism. When he graduated from high school in 1929, my Dad wanted to be a civil engineer, and he began his studies as a Boilermaker at Purdue University. Two months later the ‘29 Crash arrived, and the American economy had no use for more civil engineers. Dad returned to the family farm, and except for three years in the Army during World War II, never left that farm until the day before he died. Although I don’t think Dad ever wanted to be a farmer, this was his fate and he played it out. I never heard him complain. For six decades, he worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Whatever his regrets, he kept them to himself.
• Know the odds. My Mom once told me that during the War, Dad would often send her money he won playing poker with his Army buddies. When I was about ten, I asked Dad if he would teach me how to “play cards.” He said I was too young for poker, but he would teach me how to play blackjack. He quickly shuffled my deck of cards, and we started playing 21. As we were beginning our third hand, he asked me what cards had already been played. When I told him I had no idea, he listed by suit every card that had been played. “Never play for money if you don’t know the odds.”
• Gardening. When I was six years old, I was given my first garden plot, a small rectangle in the northeast corner of the family garden. Dad prepared the soil, and after a stretch of sunny days, he helped me plant a row of radishes and a row of black-seeded simpson lettuce. Later that night southeast Kansas experienced a tremendous thunderstorm, Rock Creek flooded a corner of our farm, and all my garden seeds were washed away. My first garden lesson: there is a lot that happens in gardening you can’t control. After a couple of days we replanted the radish and lettuce. Five years later I was responsible for the entire garden, a primary source of food for us through the year: sweet corn, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, cucumbers, sweet peppers (which we always called “mangoes”), onions, radishes, and what remains my personal favorite, black-seeded simpson lettuce.
The clouds are all gone, nothing but a blue Minnesota sky, from horizon to horizon. It’s time to wake Josh up, get a camp fire going, and prepare some breakfast.
~Bob