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HOLDFAST -- AT HOME IN THE NATURAL WORLD |
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CANOEING ON THE LINE OF A SONG It's an unsettling thing, to come so suddenly into a new landscape. Jackfish, Beartrap. Snowbank, Basswood. Moose River. The kitchen table is a chaos of yellow-tabbed guidebooks, forest service pamphlets, canoe route maps. I scan the names of lakes, matching them with their descriptions, trying to figure out where to go. On the Superior-Quetico canoe map, the blue lakes look like storm clouds bucking northeasterly winds. I can read the shapes of the lakes from the contour lines on the McKenzie maps, but there are no symbols marking the smell of the hillsides or the slant of light in the forest. For all I can tell, the water could reflect thick stands of balsam fir, sweet and dark, or open hillsides layered with hardwoods in blazing color, or bare rock ledges ringing under heavy waves. I try not to let the unfamiliarity bother me. After all, we've gone to a great deal of trouble to get to a new place, driving all the way from Oregon to Minnesota to spend the fall near the Boundary Waters. I'm sure that after I get my bearings I'll come to know and love these lakes, as I came to love my Oregon rivers. But I'm uneasy now, and I wish I knew one landmark or lake. Everything else could be measured by that. Layers of maps. Portages measured in rods -- a sixteen-and-a-half-foot distance I understand in my mind, but can't feel in my feet. Pickerel Lake and Rock Island Lake and Prairie Portage. I'm grateful for these place-names; at least they give me a hint of what the land is like. Entry points. Permits. I flip pages. Paddle to the west end of Knife Lake where the river flows one and one-quarter miles west to Carp Lake. Big Knife Portage bypasses a nasty stretch of rapids on the Knife River. Does the description refer to the sort of nasty I'm used to in Oregon, or is there a special kind of Minnesota nasty? How will I learn about the degrees of not-quite-nasty that I will have to navigate in my narrow canoe? How will I predict the direction of the wind? I pull out the map on the bottom of the pile and lay it over the rest. Map H, Saganaga and Seagull Lakes Area. More blue lakes, more dotted lines. I pull out another map, Mountain-Pine Lakes. A string of lakes abruptly stops my eye, and I lean over to look more closely. Here is a canoe route from Lake Duncan to Clearwater to the Bearskin, up along the Border Trail. I trace the route with my finger. Can it be? I know this place as well as I know the house I grew up in. This canoe route is a line from a song my mother used to sing. I try to remember the words to the song. It's the flash of paddle blades agleaming in the sun. A canoe softly slipping by the shore. I fumble with the next line, but I don't think my mother would mind; she was a great one for la-la-ing through a song. It's the smell of pine and bracken coming on the wind. I'm missing a couple of lines here. But now, the chorus, the canoe route, laid out lake to lake: By Lake Duncan to Clearwater to the Bearskin I will go, where you see the loon and hear its plaintive wail. This canoe route is the background music of my childhood. My mother sang the song softly, a lullaby, as she sat at the foot of the bed and my sisters and I drifted off to sleep. She hummed it as she dusted shelves and thought of other things. She sang it as she drove downtown, her elbow sticking out the car window, her purse on the seat beside her. When we were sick, or lonely, or homesick, this is the song she would sing to comfort us. And now this music has become a dotted line on my map, a place I can find. For her, I think it was all a dream, a song about a fantasy world of clear lakes and sweet pines. Standing at the stove in Cleveland, stirring the tuna fish into the noodles, singing songs she learned when she was a Girl Scout, my mother had no way of knowing that this was a real place etched by glaciers in granite. She never knew -- I'm sure she didn't -- that this was a place with real loons, genuine plaintive wails. I will go there. I will go there tomorrow. I will canoe along the line of the song. Then sitting on the edge of Bearskin Lake, I'll sing all the verses I can bring to mind. Quietly, in a voice as uncertain as memory, I will sing to the tuna fish casserole, to the loons, to the white pines, to a woman whose songs had to be enough. I circle the Bearskin on my map. I have a fixed point, and I can go from here.
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