Grasse River

Leaves crunch underfoot as Peter and I walk across campus. Entering the wooded path just south of town, flecks of light surprise the damp ground and startle the dark canoe shack, our destination. With empty pockets (no cash, no bothersome phone) we push off into the river. Burnt maples and yellow birches hug the way, dropping leaves onto the still surface of the water.

Woodpecker, muskrat. They see us too, and they suspend activity to watch us glide by.

Water-logged leaves find their way to the easy current in the middle of the river. Pulled like sinew, they move together. Are they migrating, looking for a winter home like the five Canada Geese honking above us? I think their intentions are more like ours. Enjoying one last ride in the Grasse, absorbing the sun, hoarding the warmth of autumn.

Five on October First

Last weekend we celebrated our fifth anniversary. Here's what we did and saw...

Mapping

September has found me back in Minnesota... and with some time to spare. Yesterday, I headed north for my family's cabin. The cabin at Lake Inguadona is still new to us, so I'm still learning the area, its shapes, its contours.

"Mapping" the lake seemed like a step in recognizing and familiarizing, so I unfolded a regional map and made a little woodcut of Inguadona. Taking time to carve away its shoreline was an intentional gesture to pay attention to this new landscape. It was also repetitive, quiet, even meditative. A good activity for this rainy day.

Then while out on a walk I found this piece of bark in the very same shape as Inguadona. A perfect mate for the woodcut.

Harpers Falls

From an afternoon on the river...

My focus is interrupted by a visitor. A wiley and mischeivous insect, six legs, a slender body, antennae. She lands just inches from my left hand (she's about the size of my thumbnail bed) and observes the river with me. I stop to watch and she seems to notice my intrigue. Dramatically, even theatrically, she rubs her front legs together slowly as if plotting her next move. The fine hairs on her legs scratch like stubble. Then, with a quick and precisely articulated movement she lifts off and zips downstream into the afternoon glare on the river. I lift up, too, and find a slightly different perch, pulling my legs closer to my body and settling my bare feet into the rocks and small pebbles of the creek. As I lean back a hand lightly brushes my neck where my pigtails are pulled away. The fingers belong to a mass of foliage with arching, lanky copper stems topped with flat green phalanges. If I were ever to learn the names of these riverside plants, I think I would do best to memorize their silhouettes.

Internal Landscape

I just read Barry Lopez's "Story at Anaktuvuk Pass" and his description of two types of landscape (internal and external) made my imagination run wild.

"The [internal landscape] is a kind of projection within a person... deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature, the intricate history of one's life in the land, even a life in the city..."

If our interior is a reflection of our place, is there an aesthetic quality to this internal landscape? Even if it's deeply subconscious, I like to think that our homes - past and present - leave an imprint on our internal landscape.

I take pleasure

There's a crevice in my oak desk that catches my pencil when I draw. Rubbed with graphite it makes a long, tidy row.










I take pleasure in orderly crop rows, lines of young peas arching lyrically over a hill, tasseled corn tops like sentinels prepared for march. These patterns are marked deeply in me. They’re the aesthetic of my first 22 years.

Home was south-central Minnesota. At 19 I spent three months employed by the agricultural superhero of the Midwest. The Jolly Green Giant handed me a set of keys to a pick-up truck and a map of colossal proportions. I was sent out to collect writhing, fluttering specimens from a patchwork of fields that blanket the lower third of the state.

My job title was Pest Control Technician. On less aggrandizing terms, I was a lowly bug collector. I hunted corn borers, stink bugs and cutworms, then plucked them from their homes on the underside of cornstalks and pea shoots. With the glass jar beside me in the passenger seat, I rattled back over gravel roads, through sleepy townships and back to headquarters in Le Seuer, MN.

Bark-eaters

Before we left Seattle Stef gave us guidebook to the Adirondack Park. It made good reading during all the long hours in the moving truck. We learned that Adirondack takes its name from the Iroquois word ha-de-ron-dah which translates as bark-eater. It was an insult; a name for the Algonquins who lived in the region where the Iroquois travelled to hunt, fish and gather plants. So, our new local wilderness area was named after a late prehistoric slam. But you've got to give those Algonquins some credit; they were resourceful.

Today we took our first hike in the park. We started out in Wanakena and walked the flat path (a former railroad bed) to High Rock. We picnic-ed on the river and saw five canoes during our short lunch break. To our dismay, the wild blueberries we'd read about had already been found by some other resourceful hikers.