“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”
(Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man)
If it is true that we are an accumulation of place, then I am at least in part this sharp scent of a balsam fir needle crushed in a hand. Enhancing my vision is the swirling, dizzied view of the whirligig beetle I’ve watched skim this lake’s surface in summer, riding the interface of water and sky with two pair of eyes so that it might see at the same time what is below and what is above. When I rest, it is as the tadpole rests in spring on the branches of submerged trees at the water’s edge. My shoulders have learned from these white pines how to gather in the moon. In the unspoken voice of my sometime sadness is every loon I’ve heard cry into the spine-circled dusk of these lakes. As does the granite, I count among the lines of my face the etchings of boulder grit carried in glaciers. And whatever part of mine it is that welcomes a bright, bitter cold, that quickens at silences too profound to break—that part, I know, came from here.
“I think I saw a wolf last night.” I crack a salted peanut, drop the shells into an ashtray. Peanuts and coffee are the closest thing to breakfast that Gladys, the owner of this small roadside northern Minnesota bar, has to offer. Gladys nods in response. It’s mostly wolves around here, she says, and where you find wolves you won’t find many coyotes. She goes into a back room and comes out with a wildlife book. She opens it to a page that compares the two, sets the book in front of me, tops off my coffee. Coyotes, according to the text, are a quarter to half the size of wolves; their ears are larger relative to their body size, their noses are more pointed, and they tend to carry their tails curled downward as they run. I look up. “It was broad across the chest. Big. Held its tail high.” Gladys nods again. Smooths the page. Says she likes to look at the book when things are slow. The pages of the book are worn soft as cloth.
Gladys grows distant, caught up in her own thoughts as she turns to put the book back in its place. Left alone, I return to the night before, to the white oval of a frozen lake illuminated by refracted starlight. It is plenty bright enough to make my way. My snowshoes break the snow into jagged plates, the kind that will shred the shins of a moose, ring its tracks with blood. A pine-hushed Arctic wind pours out of the Quetico. Beneath the snow, the lake ice makes sounds: booms, groans. Sometimes a high-pitched keening like the singing of whales. When I pause, my breath rises in a vapor cloud that stiffens my eyebrows with frost.
On satellite photographs of North America taken at night, in which all the city lights shine like constellations, this is one of the blessed black spaces. Sprawled in darkness before me are millions of acres of wild country, from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on into Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park. Red and white pine of the temperate forests are joined at this latitude by upland spruce, balsam fir, and jack pine in the first glimmers of the great boreal forest that will begin in earnest to the north.
Thousands of lakes lie here in the beds made for them in the Canadian Shield’s bedrock by the scouring of the last ice age. The shape of each body of water is a singular record of yielding. Long, thin lakes follow fault lines of the rock and lie in parallel valleys where glaciers raked out the ancient muds of the Rove Formation from between stronger blades of diabase. Lakes of wandering shores, irregular as Rorschach blots, fill depressions where glacial ice encountered instead more uniformly resistant rock such as gabbro and granite.
Low black hills surround the pool of light that is this lake. In silhouette, a monarch white pine lifts its arms up above the other trees, both gangly and graceful, the tall child in the school photograph.
I pick out the slight saddle in the the horizon that hints of a stream-carved passage to another lake. In spring, summer, or fall, it is a place I would paddle toward in a canoe, where I would find a narrow trail, the portage. Along it would be lady-slipper orchids, twinflowers, blue-bead lilies. A caution would ring in my thoughts as I crossed over patches of bare bedrock with a canoe on my shoulders: Watch out for the nighthawk cryptic on her eggs, feathers mottled gray like the rock, who would not move even as your boot descended on her. None of it matters now. Not the turn of the paddle blade on the recovery stroke to slice without resistance through the air, not the swing of the wind toward the east that would warn of a wave-kicking squall, or the distance kept to give a loon peace. These are all useless on this winter night, the foreign coins left over from a trip to another season.
I seek out Aldebaran in the sky overhead, the eye-star of Taurus grown big and red with old age. In the clarity of the bone-dry atmosphere, the stars seem to have drawn nearer to earth: descended, perhaps, to peer at the peerless irony of humans who would give the name “canoe area wilderness” to a land that more than half the year is locked in ice.
This border lakes landscape is closer to the North Pole than to the equator. Its climate is for the most part untempered by the Great Lakes and—historically, at least—zero has been a height that winter temperatures often observed only at a distance. But more than cold, the region would better be thought of as lean compared to other lands at more southerly latitudes. Begun with little till atop bedrock, the soils have had less time to develop since the departure of glacial ice, and have been slow to build under the conifer-dominated forest that came to establish here. Plants experience essentially drought conditions while surface waters are frozen from late September through April. The lakes are clear and beautiful but low in fertility. And the oblique angle of the sun’s rays means a lessening of energy coming into the natural system. From these finite accounts must life be drawn.
Accordingly, many species of wildlife enter a period of dormancy for part of the year. Those that can—including 80 percent of the summer population of breeding birds—migrate during the months when there is a decline in the availability of their traditional foods: in particular, insects.
What hearts, I wonder, can the snowy owl hear beating on this mid-winter night? It would be quiet compared to the cacophony of the growing season. There would be those of moose, lynx, woodpeckers, beaver, and otter, of shrews and voles in their snow tunnels, and fish making slow turns beneath the lake ice.
I smile to think how good are the odds that I share the passing minute with a black bear somewhere nearby in her den with newborn cubs. She will be curled into a sandy bank overlooking a cedar swamp, or snugged up against a fan of roots in a hollow she has dug at the base of a downed tree. The callouses on the pads of her feet will have begun to wear off during her dormancy, revealing smooth new skin beneath. She will be smaller, and will likely have one or two rather than the three to five cubs of the sows fattened on the acorns of richer habitats to the south. But hopefully the mature forests that comprise much of the wilderness will have provided her with enough dogwood, beetles, blueberries and wild sarsaparilla to sustain her, just as they have provided the boreal owl with a nesting cavity in an old aspen, and the pine marten with woody debris on the forest floor where it may rest under the snow and hunt its rodent prey. These animals are among the living, breathing products of what some would call an “unproductive” forest.
I have stood still too long. The cold presses down like a weight. Not prepared to spend the night, I flip first one, then the other snowshoe around, until I am headed back toward where I began. The trail of shallow craters made by my snowshoes has begun to drift in with fine snow that skates across the lake’s wind-packed surface.
The time would have been somewhere past midnight when I made my way out. The wolf emerged from a curtain of trees, crossing over a narrow road that dead-ends into the wilderness. It looked back—once—over its shoulder to the place where I stood. Then it slipped again into the forest. Only seconds after it had gone, I knelt beside the line of tracks, touched my hand to its footprint, as if there would be some lingering warmth.
I leave a stack of quarters on the pine planks of the table for Gladys. Downing the last swallow of coffee, I step outside into a morning just about bright enough to shatter an eye. A raven atop a spruce lets loose with a string of quorks, trills, yells, knocks, pops, and bells. I nod in agreement with whatever it meant to say.
—————
With thanks to Jason Busch for permission to use his stunning BWCA photograph, and to David Meier from Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness for his assistance. This essay is excerpted from the book, Far from Tame: Reflections from the Heart of a Continent, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. © Laurie Allmann, all rights reserved.
