The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

The Windward Shore

also by jerry dennis

The Living Great Lakes Leelanau: A Portrait of Place in Photographs and Text From a Wooden Canoe The River Home The Bird in the Waterfall A Place on the Water It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes Canoeing Michigan Rivers

The Windward Shore a w i n t e r o n t h e g r e at l a k e s

Jerry Dennis

The University of Michigan Press

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Ann Arbor

Copyright © by Jerry Dennis 2011 Illustrations copyright © Glenn Wolff All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2014 2013 2012 2011

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dennis, Jerry. The windward shore : a winter on the Great Lakes / Jerry Dennis. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-472-11816-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Dennis, Jerry—Travel—Great Lakes (North America) 2. Great Lakes (North America)—Description and travel. 3. Great Lakes (North America)—Environmental conditions. 4. Natural history—Great Lakes (North America) I. Title. F551.D393 2011 917.704—dc23 2011023784 ISBN 978-0-472-02825-2 (electronic)

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Contents

Prologue: This Land, This Water

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Introduction: On Cathead Point

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1. Winter Comes to the Keweenaw 2. On Cathead Point 3. Beachwalking 4. Home Place

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5. A Good Winter Storm

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6. Reading Nature at Pine Hollow 7. Fugue and Storm 8. Winter Walks

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9. Scent of Spring Field Notes Acknowledgments

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prologue

This Land, This Water

This land, surrounded and surmounted by waters; this underappreciated and overexploited provincial backwater deep in the belly of North America; this quilt-work landscape of woodlots and corn‹elds, of cutover forests and vestigial prairies, of industrial parks and subdivisions and bunched-up cities on the shore, of bedrock and dunes and glacial hills and limestone scarps and so many ecologically sensitive rivers, lakes, swamps, bogs, fens, marshes, sloughs, and frog ponds that frustrated shopping-mall developers from Minneapolis to Montreal are tearing out their hair and stomping on kittens; just ›yover country for the power elite until they want something from it; once hailed as the Great Northwest Territory and now a geographically amorphous swath across the Upper Midwest and Lower Canada, reaching not quite to New England and the Maritimes in the east and not quite to the Heartland in the west, though Heartland virtues persist here even as the farms and factories that cultivated them wither; where the trees, trout, beaver, iron, copper, oil, topsoil, water views, and labor pool have always been ripe for plundering but are damn near depleted now; where sacri‹ces that fueled the rise of empires while draining most of the pro‹ts away have rarely been acknowledged and never recompensed; where ‹ve astonishing seas of fresh water that once were as secure as

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money in the bank remain our epicenter, our capital, our strength, and our delight but are no longer secure; this land that is as sprawling and messy, gorgeous and ugly, dynamic, diverse, complex, perplexing, heartening, and heartbreaking as the two nations that encircle it—this is my home. It is not an easy place to know. Nor is any place. Many explorers of the near-at-hand have discovered that one lifetime isn’t enough to learn a county, a town, even a backyard. Walk a trail a dozen times, and you remain a stranger to it. A hundred times, and you might earn a nodding acquaintance. Walk it in snow, in rain, alone and in company with kids and dogs and friends, under a full moon and a new moon, in the fog, in a blizzard, with your eyes shut and your feet seeking the way by touch, and maybe you’ll become familiar enough to call it by name. But do you know it? When children memorize a song or a poem they say they have “learned it by heart.” I’m trying to learn this land, my home, by heart. But I don’t know if my heart is big enough. And I don’t know if I’m writing a love song or a lament. Both, probably. Both and more. For a complex subject requires a complex song.

5 Here are some of the most beautiful places in North America, and the ugliest. Some of the cleanest, and the most fouled. Some of the richest, and the poorest. Here are the Rust Belt, the Corn Belt, and the Sweetwater Coast. Here are legislative suckholes and key battlegrounds of presidential elections. Here is the neck of the funnel of the economic outpourings of two great nations, but the money seldom stays here. Here is Cornucopia, spewer of soybeans and taconite; of ethanol and Buffalo wings; of steel and wheat and Wheaties; of sugar beets and cherries and crushed stone and birds-eye maple and Ford trucks and ginseng; of Labatt and Miller Lite; of copy paper and deep-dish pizza; of corn ›akes, Vernors, disposable diapers, butter, blueberries, yellow perch, and Christmas trees.

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Here is energy ›ow—the hub of airlines and pipelines, of steel rails, interstates, and freshwater freeways—and the terminus of orphan trains, the Underground Railroad, and the Hillbilly Highway. Here is a place so large that it’s overlooked, so familiar that it’s invisible, so beloved that it’s despised, so precious that we’re intent upon ransacking it. It is shot through with stunning natural beauty, but the world notices mostly the sullied and degraded. It’s home to tens of millions of people divided, as everywhere, between those who care and those who don’t give a rat’s ass, and most of whom dream of moving south in the winter. If it were smaller, it would be more appreciated. If it were under the aegis of a single state, province, or tribal nation, it would be better safeguarded. If it had a primary identity—swampy, like the Everglades; estuarial, like the Chesapeake; alpine, like the Sierra Nevada—it would be understood. But it sprawls across borders. It has a hundred identities. It lacks a dominant mythology. It is too immense to grasp, too varied to brand, too tarnished to romanticize. It is land held together by water. That is one feature shared throughout. An ocean of freshwater. A rolling, rushing, surging, gushing, lapping abundance of water, enough to slake the thirst of nations, enough to ›oat a civilization, enough to be the envy of the world. It’s a motherlode—the motherlode—and we cherish it, ignore it, hoard it, waste it, guzzle it, cleanse our sins in it, and use it as a toilet. Let this be a celebration, then, and a grieving. Both a love song and a lament. A tribute to what was and a plea for what remains.

introduction

On Cathead Point

Lake Michigan is calm this morning. It spreads before me like a vast desert or plain to a horizon line so ‹ne it could have been scored with a knife. You can sense the curve of the earth across that Mojave distance, can imagine Pleistocene currents coursing through its black canyon depths. Even here, seven hundred miles from salt wind and tide surge, you can feel the ocean’s pull. It’s dawn on the ‹rst day of January, and I’m staying in a borrowed house on Cathead Point, ‹ve miles from the village of Northport, Michigan, and nearly at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula. People in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula orient one another by holding up a hand and pointing to a spot on the mitten. I’m at the end of the little ‹nger. For months I’ve planned to begin this book here, on this day, in this house overlooking the lake, even at this very hour, dawn on our traditional day of new beginnings. But who can say when anything begins? I could as truthfully claim this book began last fall in a log cabin on the shore of Lake Superior. And it would be true as well to say it began in January three years ago when I cleared my desk of everything but a few books and started thinking about time and transience, abundance and diversity, fugues, storms, waves, and wind. That winter I became interested in the an4

Introduction

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cient Japanese prose genre called zuihitsu, or “follow the brush,” a literary form and a way of life practiced by Buddhist hermit-poets like Chõmei, who at age ‹fty retreated into the mountains and wrote An Account of My Hut, a Japanese Walden six hundred years before Thoreau. I’m not a Buddhist and am only intermittently a hermit, but every morning for three months I followed the brush down the page in a mood of receptivity so acute that it stayed with me all day, during walks across the snow-covered ‹elds and on the shore ice along the bay, while plowing the driveway, during evenings with my family and friends, and even into sleep. I was not distracted—just the opposite. Everything I saw was in ‹ner focus, and every incident seemed signi‹cant. Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was ‹lled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snow›ake and cedar frond, every fox and gold‹nch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. Everything was equally wondrous. I would examine any ordinary object—a pencil, a stone, a feather, my hand resting on my desk—and be struck by how strange it seemed. It was literally too strange for words: a unique, ›uid, miraculous, thing-in-the-universe with no name, that could not be named. I saw that every paperclip, shirt button, ‹ngernail, and coffee cup in some form or other had been spinning, drifting, hurtling, or ›owing through the universe since the beginning of time. Matter was not solid, but was a loose assemblage of sparks spinning in space. It was encapsulated energy. Objects were not even objects, they were momentary events that at this moment and at every other moment of their existence were in the process of becoming something else. Coins and pebbles were in ›ux as surely as rivers and snow›akes. Everywhere I looked were atoms and molecules shifting from one mysteriously adhering form into another. What made them adhere? Why should one cluster of atoms become a snow›ake and another a redhaired girl? What prevents our bodies from disintegrating to their com-

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ponent atoms? What keeps the earth from crumbling beneath our feet? Our situation is so precarious that I was amazed that anyone can get out of bed in the morning, let alone drive a car or cook a meal. I studied the people around me and was awestruck. I had never appreciated how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life. As the days warmed in the spring I became restless. Already I was looking back on the winter as an idyll and wanted another like it. But not yet. Three months at a desk is too long; I had to get outside and do something. I ‹shed, canoed, played basketball with my sons and friends, searched the woods for morel mushrooms, kept a record of migratory birds. On May 10, for the third year running, the ‹rst oriole arrived in our yard. Two days later a pair of phoebes constructed an exquisite nest of green moss on the light ‹xture over our front door. Trees burst into leaf, and summer arrived. One morning in July I set out walking along the shore of Lake Michigan near my home, in this land of dunes and wooded hills where I have lived most of my life, just to see what I could see. That walk was so enjoyable that I returned the next morning to continue where I’d left off, then returned the morning after that to continue where I’d left off again, and, before I had thought much about it, I had walked sixty miles and could see my way ahead to hundreds more, down the coast to Indiana and Chicago, and up the Wisconsin coast as well. Then a ‹t of grandeur came over me, and I imagined walking around all ‹ve of the Great Lakes—ten thousand miles!—joined along the way by insightful people who would share their thoughts about the lakes, their lives, the world, the universe. I would listen intently while keeping pace, my head up and eyes open, growing smarter and leaner with every mile, and report back with what I had learned. That reverie ended one evening at my neighborhood gym when a young man and I leaped at the same time for a basketball and came down tangled in each other’s legs. While I lay on the ›oor clutching my knee one of my friends said, “I heard it pop all the way across the court! I bet it’s his ACLU!” A doctor informed me that surgery to replace the snapped ligament would restore mobility, but my days of competitive basketball were over. “Satisfy my curiosity,” he said. “What made you

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think that ‹fty-year-old knees could compete with twenty-year-old knees?” Fifty years! Doctor, I had no idea. In the following weeks I was startled to learn that slowing down can have some advantages. That realization arrived while I was still on crutches, in a motel in Manistique, Michigan, where my wife, after patient coaxing, convinced me to sit with her in a bubbling tub of hot water with a cold drink in my hand, and watch the sun go down over Lake Michigan. Stationary, I realized, is not necessarily the same as passive. Going slower, I saw with sudden clarity, doesn’t mean stopping. The insight was so unexpected that I might have shouted in surprise. Gail was pleased. She kissed me on the cheek and promised that as soon as that troublesome right knee was healed she was going after the left one with a baseball bat. The concept of living at a slower pace dovetailed with some ideas I’d begun exploring that bountiful winter of zuihitsu—the one, for instance, about trying to be more attentive to what’s going on around me. I was starting to see the bene‹ts. And I admit I was getting a little tired of headlong plunges and furious sprints. Living slowly, deliberately, with greater awareness, has been recommended by wise people for thousands of years. Apparently I’d been ignoring their advice at my peril. So I decided to stay close to home for a while. Instead of walking all those miles around the Great Lakes, I would live in a few houses on the shore and explore the near-at-hand. It occurred to me that looking at the world through someone else’s windows might be like seeing through their eyes. Maybe walking the trails they made, reading the books on their shelves, getting to know the places where they lived would expand my own view and lead to a better understanding of our relationship with the Great Lakes and our relationship with nature in the larger sense as well. I wanted to present a true picture of a complex region, part of my continuing project to learn at least one place on earth reasonably well, and trusted that it would appear gradually and accumulatively—and not as a conventional portrait, but as a mosaic with depth, breadth, and range that included the sounds and scents

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and textures of the place and its inhabitants. (And if, along the way, a picture of the author appeared also, so be it. That was not my intention, but you are welcome to it.) Bolstered by the notion that a book is a journey that author and reader walk together, I would search for promising trails and follow them as far as my reconstructed knee would allow. I would try to live a zuihitsu life.

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Winter Comes to the Keweenaw

We drove north in the season of falling—aspen leaves and stock prices, rain, sleet, the earth in its orbit (that perpetual plunge), the mercury in the thermometer, the spirits of those who are seasonally affected. A ›ock of snow buntings tumbled from the sky and scurried across the highway ahead of us. Soon snow would fall, too. Cam’s Jeep showed its brake lights and turned into the drive of what must be our cabin. Tim jumped out to unhook the chain blocking the way, grinned at us in the headlights, climbed back into the truck. We followed the two-track through an evergreen tunnel and pulled to a stop. I doused the lights, and we sat for a moment in darkness. Then Gail and Aaron threw open their doors, and from somewhere nearby came the booming of surf. The air ‹lled with the cold aromas of balsam and big water. Lake Superior is so large that it exhales immensity. We had arranged to meet Tim Schulz and Cam Williams here, near the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Tim’s a ‹shing friend of mine who teaches electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. Cam runs the physical therapy program at Houghton’s other college, Finlandia University. His family owns the cabin where my wife, Gail, son Aaron, and I would stay for the next two weeks. 9

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The Upper Peninsula is less densely populated with people than almost any place east of the Great Plains. It is a land of boreal forest and tamarack bogs bounded by the rocky shores of three of the ‹ve Great Lakes—Superior, Michigan, and Huron. At its northern reach, like a sixty-mile-long thumb jabbing the belly of Lake Superior, is the Keweenaw Peninsula. “Keweenaw” is Ojibwa for “place of the crossing,” in reference to the ancient portage route across the base of the peninsula, now a shipping canal that separates the twin cities of Houghton and Hancock. The tip of the Keweenaw is more than six hundred miles from Detroit, about the same distance as Detroit is from Alabama, causing many Detroiters to think of it as the Yukon of Michigan, if they think of it at all. Summers there are brief, and winters last more than six months, an imbalance that makes it necessary for a motel in downtown Houghton to keep signs posted in its rooms reading, “Please Don’t Use Bathtowels to Wipe Down Your Snowmobiles.” North of Houghton, in the village of Kearsarge, about halfway up the peninsula, is a curiosity-and-collectibles shop named “The Last Place on Earth,” which seems about right. Not far up the highway is a forty-foot pole marking historic snowfall amounts. At neck-ache height is the record, set in the winter of 1978–79, of thirty-two and a half feet. For the past half century the average has been twenty feet. Tim and Cam, with their ›ashlights bobbing, led the way up a series of stairs to the cabin. Two cabins, actually. The main one is constructed of chinked log walls containing a small pine-paneled bedroom, a bathroom just big enough for one person, and a snug kitchen/living area with a large window facing the lake. A few paces across a stone patio is a slightly larger cabin built in the 1930s by a Calumet banker for his daughter, who aspired to be an artist. It is octagonal, built with natural light in mind, with windows on seven sides open to the water, and the eighth dominated by a stone ‹replace. The single room was encircled by couches and easy chairs and a few shelves piled with books and board games. We returned to the main cabin, where Cam switched on an electric heater and showed us how to operate the appliances. Water was piped directly from Lake Superior for the shower and sinks, but for drinking water we would have to ‹ll jugs at the little grocery in Copper Harbor

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or from a pump at a public park down the road. You can drink safely from much of Lake Superior, but here, in a bay, with houses along the shore, it was inadvisable. One other task remained. As the cabin warmed dozens of house›ies crawled from gaps in the woodwork, found use of their wings, and began bumping sluggishly against the picture window. Cam pulled a vacuum cleaner from beneath the table, removed a wad of paper towel that had been stuffed in the snout of the hose, tapped the starter button, and began hoovering ›ies from the glass. The nozzle inhaled each with a satisfactory thup. He replaced the plug of paper towel and pushed the vacuum back under the table. Finally we broke open a bottle of scotch and toasted one another’s health, then the generosity of Cam and his family for allowing us to stay in the cabin, then the generosity of Lake Superior for allowing the cabin to stay on the shore. Later I walked with Tim and Cam to their truck and watched them pull out of the driveway and set off on the forty-mile drive to Houghton. When they were gone I stood in the darkness and listened to the waves thumping on the shore. The lake remained hidden, but its presence was unmistakable, as if it were a living thing, with a pulse and lungs, and as big as the sky.

5 Is any place in North America as poorly understood as the Great Lakes? I’m no longer surprised to meet people who have no idea of the size of the lakes or of their signi‹cance to the history and geography of North America or even much of an idea of their location. A magazine editor in New York called to discuss a story I was writing and asked, “You’re from Iowa or Ohio or one of those places, aren’t you?” He thought both were Great Lakes states. About the ‹ve lakes themselves he had no clue. He would have been shocked to learn that they are too large to see across. Or that they and the St. Lawrence River are bounded by eight states, two provinces, and nearly two hundred tribal governments. Or that they are encircled by as many miles of shoreline as the combined Paci‹c and Atlantic coasts of the United States. Or that pollution has not reduced them to toxic cesspools. A few years ago the editors of a Utah-based magazine for elementary-

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school students decided to pro‹le the Great Lakes. Their research directed them to a Web site devoted to whale-watching in Lake Michigan, an activity so compelling that they decided to make it the subject of a feature story titled, “‘Thar She Blows!’ In Michigan?” They wrote: “Every spring, the freshwater whales and freshwater dolphins begin their 1,300-mile migration from Hudson Bay to the warmer waters of Lake Michigan.” They explained that although there are several locks at Sault Ste. Marie, the whales and dolphins prefer to forge a faster route through Canadian rivers, until, by mid-June, they reach their breeding grounds in southern Lake Michigan. There they feed on abundant populations of Coho salmon, lake trout, and zebra mussels, while sporting happily in the fresh water, where, ‹nally free of salt residue, they can swim 40 percent faster than in the ocean. Local residents welcome the returning migrants, they wrote, as they have since the Navajo ‹rst settled the shores of Lake Michigan many centuries ago. A fourth-grade teacher in Muskegon, Michigan, named Deb Harris had begun reading the story aloud to her students when she realized that something was ‹shy. She halted in midsentence and exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness! There are no whales in Michigan!” And the Navajo? She called the editorial of‹ces of Studies Weekly Inc. and informed them that they had made some mistakes. A staff member replied snif‹ly that the magazine stood behind the story. Deb Harris was quite certain the story was wrong. The staff member insisted it was right. Deb Harris said, “I’ve lived here all my life—there are no whales in Lake Michigan.” Later the magazine printed a retraction, revealing that the Web site from which they had gathered their information was a hoax. “We at Studies Weekly want this to be a lesson to you as well,” the retraction read. “Not all Web sites are true, and you cannot always believe them.” The Great Lakes region is so large and complex that it can be geographically confusing. An acquaintance told me about a conversation he had with a coworker in his of‹ce, a young woman who had lived for the ‹rst eighteen years of her life in Escanaba, Michigan, a small city on the southern coast of the Upper Peninsula. He asked what it was like growing up there. “It was great,” she said. “Such a pretty town, and it was wonderful having Lake Superior right outside my door.”

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“Lake Michigan, you mean,” he said. “No, Lake Superior,” she said. “Escanaba is on Lake Michigan,” he said. “No it isn’t,” she said. “It’s on Lake Superior.” He found a map and showed her. She had lived in Escanaba for eighteen years without, apparently, looking at one. “Well dang,” she said. “You learn something new every day.” Superior might be the one Great Lake that comes closest to being understood. Some credit for that must go to Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot for his haunting ballad about the 1975 loss with all hands of the ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald. Because of that song, even those who don’t realize that the Great Lakes are too large to see across understand that the largest of them at least can muster storms powerful enough to swallow ships 729 feet in length. (For the record, all ‹ve can.) Early cartographers named it “Lac Superieur,” not because it was the largest of the Great Lakes but because it was the northernmost of them and therefore located at the top of the map. But the name is appropriate in every sense. At 350 miles long and 160 miles wide, the lake exceeds all of the earth’s freshwater lakes in surface area. It is the largest, coldest, clearest, and deepest of the Great Lakes and is surrounded by the wildest and most spectacular shores. At 31,699 square miles it is almost as big as Maine, and is bigger than Scotland. Only Russia’s Lake Baikal and Africa’s Lake Tanganyika, because of their immense depths, have greater volume. Not that Superior is shallow. With a maximum depth of 1,333 feet and an average of nearly 500 feet, it contains 2,935 cubic miles of water, as much as the other four Great Lakes combined (plus enough for three more Eries), or about 10 percent of the unfrozen fresh water on the surface of the planet. The volume of water is so great, and the energy it stores so potent, that Superior generates its own weather systems. Storms sweeping across from the Canadian plains intensify when they pass over the lake, cranking minor winds into gales and squalls into blizzards, often in winter burying the windward shores with hefts of lake-effect snow that can overwhelm houses. The lake is a wilderness in the full sense, untamed and untamable, where people who lose their way can lose their lives, and is

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so immense that it casts a wilderness shadow beyond its shores. None of its shoreline cities are large, but even the largest of them—Duluth, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Marquette—feel like frontier outposts. Just outside (and frequently within) their borders live many of the North American animals we associate with the untamed North, including moose, wolf, black bear, and loons. In the spruce forests along the north shore are lynx and woodland caribou. Only two roads and a railroad track stand between that shore and the iceberg-clogged waters of Hudson Bay. On the Keweenaw nothing stands between Michigan and the Canadian North but a hundred miles of Lake Superior.

5 In the morning the cabins were new to us. It was as if we had awakened in a different place altogether. Rain streamed down the windows, and the waters of Agate Harbor were gray and wind-streaked and bordered by rock formations capped with golden tamarack and black spruce. Beyond the mouth of the bay, in the open lake, rollers broke white against reefs. Farther out, and as far as we could see to the horizon, the lake ›ashed with whitecaps. We stood before the window sipping from mugs of coffee and watching the weather change: Now it was spitting sleet. Now wet ›akes hurled silently against the glass, melted, and slid to the sill. Now the sun came out, and the drenched earth gleamed. Now clouds cut across the sun, and snow pellets rattled on the ground. It was volatile out there, and we were glad to be inside, next to a heater, with a coffeepot on the stove and a stack of books on the table. Later we put on our rain gear and went outside to explore. Sunlight sprayed through cracks in the clouds, and the cold air tasted like iron. We followed a path from the front of the cabin around outcroppings of rock and between cushions of ankle-deep moss to a natural stone patio overlooking the lake. There a wooden bench, weathered to gray and covered with a scruff of lichen, was well along on its journey back to the earth. We could see no other cabins and no other evidence of humans whatsoever, so it was easy to imagine that this rock-cleft shoreline had changed little since the glaciers departed. For ten thousand years these

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same waves had broken against these same rocks. This same icy rain had fallen. Here and everywhere else we went on the Keweenaw, we became engrossed in rocks. Most of the beaches around the peninsula are in coves scalloped between headlands of bedrock and are heaped with stones of every dimension, from pebbles to boulders. Waves have sorted them by size, the smallest near the water and the largest shoved farther up the beach. They have been water-shaped into every variety of round: plates, saucers, biscuits, buns, softballs, bowling balls, and cobbles. Some are oval and some nearly but never perfectly spherical, and many are ›at enough to stack unsteadily until they topple. If we found a stone we liked that was nearly round or egg-shaped and ‹t comfortably in our hands, we carried it with us as we walked. At ‹rst we would be reluctant to give it up, but eventually it became a burden. We would heave it toward the lake and watch it plunge into the water with almost no splash and a sound like a gulp. If the waves were small we collected skippers and whipped them across the surface. Aaron found a good one and skipped it, counting, “One, two, twenty, ninety-nine, two hundred—a new world record!” And we looked for agates, but our luck was poor. Lake Superior agates, with their translucent red banding, are famous among rock collectors around the world. The ‹rst day, in three hours of searching, Aaron found a single peasized specimen with one side chipped off to reveal a vivid patch of redand-white bands. Gail and I found none. We consulted geological ‹eld guides and a locally published guide to agate hunting, but for the ‹rst few days we were not really sure what we were looking for. The days soon blended together. Mornings we usually stayed inside, reading, writing, and sketching. When we grew restless we would split pine boards into kindling and haul ‹rewood from the outside rick to the ‹replace. For lunch we drove to the Pines Restaurant in Copper Harbor, where we took advantage of a wireless Internet connection to answer email on our laptops while we ate white‹sh sandwiches and chili. Often it was raining or snowing, low clouds scudding over the lake, so we lingered over coffee in the restaurant then ducked into the few stores open in the tiny downtown.

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Because it is located on a natural harbor along one of the most dangerous coasts on the Great Lakes, Copper Harbor is automatically welcoming. For boaters it is a haven—it must frequently seem a godsend— and for landlocked visitors it provides easy access to the water. The harbor is the economic heart of the town, drawing commercial and recreational ‹shermen, scuba-diving charters, and the small ferry that in summer makes daily trips to Isle Royale National Park, forty-‹ve miles out on the lake. Tourists come looking for a view of the water or to walk the beach and in warm summers might ‹nd the water tolerable for swimming. An aura of red-cheeked good health hangs over the town. Maybe it’s something in the water. Or the air. The facade of the Harbor Haus Restaurant near the marina reads, “You are now breathing the purest most vitalizing air on earth.” But with winter bearing down, a Melvillean November of the soul seemed to have infected the town. At a rock shop we asked the proprietor for advice in identifying agates, and he blew an impatient sigh and pointed toward a tray of stones on the counter. He returned to the phone conversation we had interrupted and said, “I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.” We received a similar welcome from an elderly woman who ran a gas station and grocery store on the highway. Her business seemed more precarious than most. Cans of pork-and-beans, SpaghettiOs, and Spam were widely spaced on dusty shelves, and just outside, a single gas pump of 1970s vintage seemed to be the primary source of income. The proprietress sat on a chair behind the counter watching a portable television and always managed to accept our money and make change without taking her eyes off the screen. Finally, after half a dozen visits, during which we were always the only customers in the store, we chirped in succession, “Good afternoon! How’s business? How about them Packers?” and she looked up from her television, blinked at us, and raised a corner of her mouth into something like a smile. We met a warmer soul in Laurel Rooks, who runs Laughing Loon, a nature-themed gift and book shop downtown, where we passed a half hour one rainy afternoon. She had lived in Copper Harbor for twentyfour years, she said, and was still considered an outsider by those who were born there. We asked why so many of the folks we’d encountered

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were grumpy, and she answered, “Some of them are probably real tired after a summer of tourists, and some are just crabby people.” When we told her that we were interested in ‹nding agates but weren’t sure what we were looking for she gave us a raw agate the size of an acorn to take along as a visual aid. For the ‹rst time, we saw what the books meant by a “pitted, waxy exterior.” The banding is usually visible only in rocks that have been broken open or cut, so the exterior is often the only reliable identi‹er. Polishing makes the colors and textures jump out but is optional. I bought an arti‹cially polished stone from Laurel and in time concluded that most of its worth had been scrubbed away. Probably if I had done the polishing I would feel differently. The value of agates is proportionate to the effort that goes into acquiring them. Those we found ourselves, which we now keep arranged in trays on our coffee table at home, continue to give pleasure. We pick them up and examine them with magni‹ers or palm them to reacquaint ourselves with their heft and smoothness. Each has become bound to the place where we found it and has acquired layers of remembrance. Many afternoons we drove inland, climbing ranges of hills toward the spine of high ground that runs the length of the peninsula. Along the way we passed the slag piles and crumbling buildings of played-out copper mines. In the 1840s geologists discovered that the Keweenaw contained rich deposits of raw copper—more of it than any place in the world. The result, ‹ve years before the California gold rush, was the Keweenaw copper rush, the ‹rst mining boom in America. Thousands of prospectors traveled the length of Lake Superior by canoe, bateau, and schooner to reach a land previously inhabited by only a few native and white ‹shermen and trappers. Once they reached the shore of the Keweenaw the prospectors must have been bewildered by the rugged country. It was so heavily forested that they sometimes had to crawl on their hands and knees to reach the interior of the peninsula, where the richest claims were found. Native Americans had begun collecting copper here and on Isle Royale more than six thousand years earlier, hacking it from raw copper they found on the surface or dug from shallow mines and fashioning it into tools that were traded along routes that extended as far as Central America. The prospectors who followed in the 1840s and

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1850s found masses of native copper weighing tons lying on the ground where they had been dropped by glaciers. When this “›oat” copper was gone, miners burrowed underground, following veins that had been deposited in lava ‹ssures four billion years ago. Some of the wealthiest mines ultimately reached two miles beneath the surface. After the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, Keweenaw mines supplied most of America’s copper needs, from telegraph, telephone, and electric lines, to brass and bronze alloys required for countless industrial applications. Thousands of immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany, Finland, Italy, and elsewhere labored under conditions so hazardous that for decades the owners and managers of the mines considered a fatality a week an acceptable average. Miners who sought to improve conditions and increase their wages through union representation were targeted for beatings by company henchmen and quickly ‹red. The land suffered as well. As the lodes of native copper played out, miners turned to ore, which had to be separated from its parent rocks by steam-driven crushers and stampers, and run through smelting furnaces that melted the copper so it could be formed into ingots. Mountains of slag and “poor rock” that were left over after the copper was removed grew up beside the mines and became wastelands where even now little grows. Stamp sand was dumped into bays and rivers, staining the waters red and releasing asbestos, mercury, and other toxic byproducts in such quantities that a century later one Keweenaw town and its waterfront would require cleanup as an EPA Superfund site. At the same time, the forests that had been too dense to walk through were being cleared to make room for roads and towns, milled into lumber for new buildings, and burned to power mine equipment and the hundreds of steam vessels that carried passengers and supplies across Superior. In the 1920s, a glut of copper on the world market caused prices to collapse, and the mines began shutting down. Miners deserted the Keweenaw to work in the burgeoning auto plants in Detroit. Although a few mines kept skeleton crews working as late as 1970, the Great Depression of the 1930s was the ‹nal blow to the Copper Country’s name-

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sake industry. Mines closed, communities became ghost towns, and much of the Keweenaw reverted to the wild.

5 Every day we searched the shore for agates. Sometimes we hunted them in the snow. Often we pawed through frozen gravel while wearing mittens. But one afternoon the wind calmed and the sun came out, and the day became so warm that we threw off our hats and parkas. Near the mouth of a small river on the west ›ank of the peninsula, Gail and Aaron sprawled on the beach on their bellies and began sifting layer by layer through the gravel, alert for the soft glow an agate gives off in sunlight. I walked south a half mile, around a low point, to where sandstone slabs descended from the high beach into the water. Waves and wind had sculpted the sandstone into graceful, vaguely human shapes, so that with a little imagination you could see an arm twenty feet long, its biceps taut, its wrist resting upon a fat belly, and next to it the swerve of a thigh emerging from the lake and reclining relaxed in the sand. I wondered how this place would appear to an Ojibwa whose canoe had swamped in the surf or to a sailor whose boat had smashed against an offshore reef. To them it wouldn’t matter if the rocks were sculpted into graceful shapes or the birches on the bluff above them formed painterly patterns against the forest. They saw land, and land meant salvation if they could reach it, and questions of aesthetics would be so irrelevant as to be inconceivable. It has often been argued that before the Enlightenment of the 1700s few people in Western cultures had the luxury or inclination to see beauty in wild nature. Scholars can wheel out cartloads of letters, texts, and paintings to demonstrate that the natural world was perceived as a terrifying domain that had to be avoided or conquered. Forests were dark, threatening, and perilous. Mountains were godforsaken netherworlds of rock and ice that no one dreamed of climbing for pleasure. The oceans were vast embodiments of the primal chaos, swirling cauldrons of malignant energy churning with poisonous waters, and were wracked by waves that threatened at every moment to

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engulf the land and swallow humanity. Odes to nature were almost exclusively pastoral, celebrating shepherds in their ‹elds and the rustic life of gardens and other rural places that had been tamed. Uncivilized wild nature was abysmal, nightmarish, godless, the “hideous & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts & wild men” that the Pilgrim William Bradford saw when he dared to face the forest beyond Plymouth Harbor. Many writers and artists in antiquity clearly thought this way— probably even the majority of them—but why do we assume they spoke for everyone? It’s as dif‹cult to imagine ordinary people being unmoved by nature’s beauty as it is to imagine that everyone today is in perpetual rapture over it. But those men in the water would have seen another side to wild nature. When you’re on the sea in a storm you know why people have always feared wilderness: not because, as in the fairy tales, it is evil, but because it is coldly, profoundly, cosmically indifferent. As we explored the beach that day we collected the rocks we found most attractive. Even the ordinary stones of Superior are stunning. This basin of the Canadian Shield, its lava ›oor gouged deep by glaciers and eroded by ancient rivers, is a jumble of volcanic and igneous basalt, gabbro, granite, porphyry, and rhyolite; metamorphic gneiss and slate; sedimentary sandstone, shale, limestone, and conglomerate; minerals such as quartz, chert, calcite, jasper, and epidote. When wet their colors jump to vivid reds, pinks, oranges, greens, yellows, and grays, with many that gleam black or marble white or translucent—a carnival palette unique to the place. The shore stones have been polished smooth by centuries of wave-tumble. Those we found irresistible we kept, because they’re pleasing to the eye and soothing to the hand, but also because they suggest permanence—islets in the swirling riverrush. Carry them away, and they become the tangible equivalent of the one shining moment you might remember from an otherwise forgotten day. Finding a rare stone creates its own extraordinary moment, so it becomes a double glitter—a mnemonic of the instant and place of its discovery; and the stone itself, a colorful, gleaming, and enduring fragment of the congealed universe. Such fragments can lift us above our everyday lives. Even the most commonplace objects occasionally reveal themselves to be unique and

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inexplicable wonders. We grow numb to wonder—nobody can remain constantly astonished, even in the face of what should be constantly astonishing—but we are so hungry for awareness, for any spark of signi‹cance, that we remain alert to ›ashes of color in the background drabness, just as we’re alert to snatches of music in the monotone. Our eyes slide across a thousand ordinary pebbles until—wham!—they bang up against something extraordinary. One veteran agate hunter told us, “You don’t ‹nd agates, they ‹nd you.” All we had to do was go forth with open eyes and no expectations, an approach that works for discoveries of many sorts. May Sarton might have had something like that in mind when she made her famous distinction between prose and poetry: one is earned, the other given. My friend the poet Keith Taylor, who is an accomplished birder, says that there is always at least one moment that stays with him after every birding expedition. One such moment occurred in March in the Lake Erie marshes, when we raised our binoculars and watched a bluewinged teal suddenly lift from a pond and take ›ight low and fast across the water. Keith later said that he will never forget the wing coverts ›ashing their sudden, exquisite, gemlike blue. That teal’s wing markings—not the color “teal,” which is suffused with green, but the purest blue of the sky—has remained with me as well. As the duck’s wings ›ashed and the hidden blue leaped free, I thought of Matisse’s ‹rst glimpse of the vibrant blue wings of a Morpho butter›y—“It pierced my heart,” he wrote. My next thought was of sky blue Superior and its beach stones. Their colors were heart-piercing, too. Many people have noticed that appreciation of beauty increases with the intensity of observation. When we look at a tree, from a distance and up close, at its crevassed bark and the veins in its leaves, while circling it on foot or surveying it from a neighboring tree or while lying on our backs watching its swaying topmast—when we engage all our powers in seeing this thing alive and growing and changing, we realize it. We literally make it real. Usually we assume we are making it real to ourselves alone. But what if we are making it real in a larger sense as well? In bringing our full awareness to bear on the tree do we somehow raise it to a state of fuller being? The poet Rilke

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thought so. He was so convinced of it that he believed our purpose on earth was to do precisely that. He wrote: “Often a star / was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you / out of the distant past . . .” Can a star be waiting for us to see it? Usually when we think of ourselves as observers of the world, we place ourselves at a distance from what we observe. To be objective we must transform the thing we observe into an object, isolating it from the rest of the world so that it will remain unaffected by our presence. But quantum physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle demonstrated that the “observer effect” changes the thing viewed, and makes the observer and the observed partners in the act of seeing. Rilke anticipated that idea (or maybe he caught the zeitgeist: he died in 1926, just as Heisenberg was developing his principle), then took it a step further. In the poems he called Ding-Gedichte, or “thing-poems,” he seems to argue that everything in the physical universe—every child and fox, every maple and goldenrod, every snow›ake, pebble, and marble sculpture—is dependent upon our awareness for its existence. A starling or a star waits for years, for a lifetime, for billions of years, until we notice it. When we do, when we give it our full attention, we realize it into being. This is our gift to the things of the universe. In return, and in gratitude, the star, the tree, or the pebble rewards us with its only gift: its beauty.

5 After just a few days of searching we became maniacs for agates. Ortega de‹ned a maniac as one whose attention is abnormally acute. That was us, exactly. We shuf›ed along the beach, bent at the waist, our attention focused on the gravel in the swash zone, a multicolored aggregate two feet deep (or twenty feet or two hundred: we were tormented by the unreachable stones beneath us), straining our eyes for a glimpse of an agate’s concentric bands or waxy exterior luster. We learned from our geology books that agates formed slowly, at the pace of drifting continents, as dissolved minerals leached into the air pockets, called vesicles, that were left after gas bubbles formed in cooling lava when the earth was in its adolescence, a couple billion years ago. In the eons since, wherever basaltic bedrock has crumbled before waves, ice, wind, and time, the trapped agates have rolled free. The most spectacular of them

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look somewhat like cat’s-eye marbles, and are banded with bright reds and browns if they contain iron, which they usually do in Superior country. They can also be opaquely white, or delicate blue with white banding, or almost translucent with streaking as subtle as the dusty rings of Saturn. When agates ‹nd their way into Superior, as they do with some frequency, waves roll them in the everyday gravel, rounding and polishing them. The largest, most spectacular specimens are prized by collectors and can occasionally be worth a few hundred dollars, but the value of the smaller, more common ones is in their discovery. We had collected only a few small agates and a couple fragments from larger ones when Aaron wandered off by himself one morning and returned a few hours later with a bucket ‹lled with treasure: a cluster of purple amethyst the size of a grapefruit, a red-banded agate as big as his ‹st, and a splendid blue-and-white agate sliced off cleanly in a bed of black basalt. At the bottom of the bucket was his best ‹nd, an agate shaped like a sandwich and nearly as large. Its top and bottom were a sort of petri‹ed pastry, deeply pitted and clay colored and looking very much like ancient clay tablets engraved with Babylonian cuneiforms. In the middle, like the ‹lling in a sandwich, was the agate, in horizontal layers of reds and browns. I returned with Aaron to a grove of cedars and alders a short distance from the shore, and he led me to a sheet of banded agate four feet long and a foot high emerging from the ground at an angle, like a section of upturned sidewalk. We decided the formation should be left undisturbed and resisted breaking any more of it away, though we were happy to liberate a few fragments from the sand nearby. Eventually we learned that Aaron’s ‹nd was rare indeed, and was known by geologists as “vein” agate. It formed when the same minerals that seeped into vesicles to form round agates found their way instead into ‹ssures in the basalt.* *I came across this information a few months later in a private library, in a 26-page monograph published in 1962 by the Michigan Department of Conservation titled “Collecting Minerals in Michigan” and written by geologists R. W. Kelley and H. J. Hardenberg. In a section titled “Copper Country,” the authors wrote: “Remember, too, it takes a really practiced eye to consistently spot agates along a beach. With experience you will learn the slight difference in luster and translucency that distinguish them from the other stones. With a little luck and perseverance you’ll ‹nd them. In the summer, you won’t be alone, for many others are combing our beaches

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5 Aaron was born not many miles east of the Keweenaw, in the Upper Peninsula’s largest city, Marquette, in February 1979, the winter that set the Keweenaw snowfall record. He’s a documentary ‹lmmaker now, and that fall was preparing to embark on an eight-month journey through India, Tibet, and Nepal to shoot a ‹lm about the children of Tibetan exiles. During our days on the Keweenaw he ‹lmed waves breaking against rocks, braced his camera on a tripod against the wind to capture snow squalls sweeping magisterially across the lake, ‹lmed ›ocks of snow buntings, soaring eagles, deer swimming across the bay in front of our cabin, a fearless young fox trotting along the road as we idled beside it in our truck. One morning we woke to ‹nd fresh snow had fallen in the night. It was the ‹rst substantial snowfall of the season, and it gave the land an exotic coat, the early-winter monochrome, a startling white transforin quest of lasting mementoes of a vacation on Lake Superior. There are the serious collectors, too, who ‘dig’ vein agate from source formations occurring far inland from the shore.” When I described Aaron’s ‹nd to a rock-shop owner in Beaver Bay, Minnesota, he said it was “seam” agate.

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mation that made the world seem newborn. Winter would grow old soon enough, but for now it was new and fresh and magical. Aaron was excited. He wanted to ‹lm some of the decrepit mine structures and thought the snow would make them even more interesting, so we set out for the south and southeast portions of the Keweenaw, where the greatest number of abandoned copper mines are concentrated. On the way, we pulled over beside the road, and Aaron carried his camera into a ‹eld of tailings, a desolate and otherworldly barrens where a few stunted cedars and birches struggle to take root in a wasteland of grit, but which was made eerily pristine by the snow. Across the road, in what remains of the old mining village of Central, where a dozen unpainted and weathered houses serve now as summer residences, three inches of wet snow clung to every surface. Aaron photographed an apple tree, its few remaining fruit brilliant red against the snow, and the morning light streaming through aspens. Early in our stay on the Keweenaw Gail had stood on the shore watching waves breaking against rocks and said, “This place hasn’t been ruined yet.” It was a beautiful sentiment but less true than we wished. At Torch Lake Aaron ‹lmed an EPA Superfund site where a smelting operation once extracted copper ore from the tailings of other mines. The pulverized stone was discarded in vast heaps that ‹lled much of the west side of the lake and contaminated the water with heavy metals and the sulfuric acid used to dissolve impurities from the ore. Torch Lake is a deep bay on the north side of Portage Lake, the largest body of water in the Portage Ship Canal. In recent years the contaminated soil on its shore has been removed or capped, and the waterfronts of the towns of Hubbell and Lake Linden that were once tailing dumps are now manicured parks. Aaron’s photographic eye was drawn instantly to the ruined mine structures around the lake and especially to an immense dredging machine that sat tilted and decaying in the shallows. While he ‹lmed, I walked up a slope to the brick-and-stone ruins of a few buildings that seemed so thoughtfully situated among the aspens on the hillside that they could have been designed by a nature-loving architect. From a concrete tunnel at the base of the hill, near the foundation of one of the brick buildings, issued a small, clear stream that

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tumbled into a crystalline pool. I leaned and looked into the water and saw brook trout, six or eight inches long, their white ‹ns brilliant against the rocks on the bottom. What once was ugly had become beautiful again. We drove on to Calumet and explored that strange and interesting town. Calumet was ‹rst settled in 1864 and named Red Jacket for a Seneca chief (it was not renamed Calumet until 1929), and by the 1880s and 1890s its mines were producing half of all the copper in the United States. As a result, Red Jacket became the metropolitan and cultural capital of the Upper Lakes region, with a township-wide population of twenty-six thousand residents served by thirty-three churches and sixty saloons. Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for president there. The keystone attraction was an opera house that opened in 1900 and attracted such stars of the era as Sarah Bernhardt, John Phillip Sousa, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Lon Chaney. Today the Calumet Theatre still hosts musical concerts and local stage productions. Red Jacket suffered a double blow in 1913, ‹rst a labor strike that brought copper production to a halt, followed soon after by a horri‹c Christmas Eve disaster. That evening hundreds of striking miners and their families, who had gathered in the Italian Hall to celebrate the holiday, panicked when someone in the crowd cried “‹re.” Seventy-‹ve people, mostly children, were trampled to death. Although the perpetrator of the panic was never identi‹ed, many were convinced that a company stooge was responsible, a notion picked up by folk singer Woody Guthrie, who commemorated the event in his song “1913 Massacre.” The mines and the community never recovered, and after the demand for copper declined following World War I, miners ›owed south from Copper Country to work in the automobile plants in Detroit. Although a small resurgence in the mines occurred during World War II, a labor strike in 1968 shut them down for good. Fewer than a thousand people live in Calumet now. The town’s houses are separated by empty lots and the striking architecture of abandoned mine structures, making every neighborhood spacious, as if home owners had strolled across ‹elds and selected widely spaced building sites by whim. The downtown area covers several blocks and two main streets, an area much larger than the population requires.

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Many businesses are closed, and many buildings sit empty, but there are pockets of prosperity, and artists are moving in.

5 At ‹ve o’clock that afternoon, as on most afternoons, when dusk was starting to settle into the woods, we drove up the steep and sinuous road to the summit of Brockway Mountain to try for a glimpse of sunset and a cell-phone connection. Brockway is a mountain in name only, barely a thousand feet above Lake Superior, and only about sixteen hundred feet above sea level. But it is the highest point on the peninsula and so exposed to the weather that the oak, aspen, birch, and spruce trees ringing its summit are stunted, their gnarled branches arthritic, their trunks stubby and twisted. At the prospect, where the road circles a weather station and the parking lot is lined with a crenellated wall of quarried stone, we stood and looked inland at mountainous ridges where the earth’s crust tilts toward the center of the Keweenaw. The woods on the hillsides, stripped of their leaves, appeared faintly purple, with veins of green conifers running through them and a few patches of aspens unfurling down the slopes like strips of gold carpeting. Donut-shaped Bailey Lake, with a wooded island at its center, lay cupped in the valley below. We turned and saw the woods drop below us in an accelerating arc past the bay where our cabin sat, to the lighthouse at Eagle Harbor, blinking white then red then white. Everywhere else was open lake. Fifty miles away we could see Isle Royale and its archipelago rising in hazy bumps just above the horizon. We got a few bars and separated—Aaron to the wall at the crest, Gail and I to the lee side of the car, all of us with our backs to the wind—and listened to our messages and returned calls. We shouted into the air and felt ourselves part of a continuum. At various times people must have stood on this same mountaintop and signaled with smoke, ›ags, beacons, and bon‹res. Snow squalls crept across the lake. Each was shaped like an inverted thunderhead, or like a giant boot about to stomp the water. Even from twenty miles away we could see the snow-streaks beneath them, bending with the wind. Overhead, a few southbound birds shot past, trying

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to keep ahead of winter. The Keweenaw is a bird funnel, especially in the spring, when thousands of raptors concentrate above Brockway, circling on thermals as they wait for a south wind to carry them across the lake to Canada. Grains of snow ›ung past in the wind, and gusts made the wind generator on top of the boarded-up gift shop accelerate into furious storms of kinetic energy. We could see the wind ›urrying the lake many miles out. The lid of clouds cracked open low in the west, and a burst of sunlight streamed through. For a minute or two everything around us ›ared in brilliant rose and scarlet, then the sun dropped beyond the horizon and darkness fell. That was the moment, the very moment, when the season of falling fell into winter.

5 On our last day on the Keweenaw Aaron and I stood among the pines on a bluff overlooking Superior, and watched waves pummel the shore.

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Snow blew in blinding ›urries across the water and plastered white over the face of every rock and tree. We were in a beautiful place but a hard one. I thought about hard winds, hard stones, hard winters, water so cold that it was only a degree or two from turning to hard ice, the solid rock foundation of this perilous ‹nger of land where it is hard to keep warm and harder yet to make a living, and wondered if all that hardness rises through the feet of the people who live here and spreads into their hearts. Probably not. Of course not. We are strong and resilient, and get along ‹ne in harder places than this. But you have to be hardy to live here. On cars and trucks throughout the Upper Peninsula you often see bumper stickers printed with the Finnish word sisu. Derived from a cognate meaning “inner” or “interior,” and pronounced “SEE-sue,” it is usually translated into something like stubborn determination, perseverance, or strength of will in the face of adversity, though it suggests more nuanced qualities as well. In English it is most closely approximated by “guts,” but that familiar slang swaggers with masculine valor and battle‹eld heroics, whereas sisu transcends gender and ignores momentary courage to honor the more dif‹cult valor of enduring without complaint a lifetime of ordinary hardships. It is the Yoopers’ humble anthem, adopted by those who have survived a single winter as readily as those whose ancestors immigrated to work in the copper and iron mines. It is stoicism stripped of its philosopher’s robe and dressed in a Woolrich hunting coat and a Packers cap, with a chainsaw in the back of the pickup and a snowmobile rusting all summer in the yard. It means sticking to a job until it is ‹nished, no matter how dif‹cult it is or how long it takes, and one of those jobs, the one that requires the greatest endurance and the most courage, is life itself. In a harsh climate and inhospitable land, sisu helps a person get by with dignity. We followed a trail down the hill to a steep, gravel-piled beach in a cove between headlands. The waves on the open lake were furious and black, their whitecaps streaming. They funneled into the cove and charged shoreward, rising higher and growing steeper as they approached the shallows. Each wave stood up, curled, paused, then fell, breaking with a booming, shuddering impact we felt through our feet,

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and rushed foaming up the strand. Every backwash dragged a few tons of gravel back into the lake. Superior had never seemed more beautiful or brutal. It roared with despairing shipwreck solitude, and blew bitter cold without mercy. Did the lake match my mood, or generate it? I don’t know; the knot is too tight. I began to imagine that the wind was scrubbing my perceptions clean, allowing me for a moment to see more clearly. It was a whimsical idea with philosophy in it. What if the wind could blow away everything we know, all our words, all our theories and arguments and superstitions and prejudices, all our fears and bravado, all our politics and ethics, everything our education has taught us, leaving us scoured and empty, clear and clear-headed, and able, at last, to see the world, not as a screen upon which we project ourselves, but as it is? What would such a world look like? Would we know it? Would we be at home in it? How would we make our way through it? The waves came, one after another, beating against the bedrock foundation of the world. It was the pounding bass rhythm of music from the time before language, before even heartbeats. With each impact, I knew less. Every thump subtracted from my knowledge. Goodbye school years. Good-bye books I’ve read. Good-bye names of things. Good-bye, good-bye. The wind passed right through me. For a moment, just a heartbeat, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing—and the exhilaration of that moment stayed with me for days.

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On Cathead Point

This has been a strange winter. Snow began falling on Thanksgiving Day and didn’t stop for two weeks. By December we were deep into it, with waist-high drifts and treacherous roads and school closings. It was all anyone talked about. We became sort of drunk on the subject. An old-fashioned winter, we bragged, slapping each other on the shoulders and pounding our chests. We plowed our driveways in the mornings, then again in the afternoons. At the supermarket we stocked up as if for a siege. Then came a thaw and a week of rain. The ‹elds that had been deep with snow became bare again, their brown grasses crushed ›at, as if stepped on, and a layer of mist settled on the ground. The day before Christmas, with the temperature in Traverse City at 45 degrees, I watched a speedboat pull a water skier across West Bay. It was a stunt, just young men showing off, and I laughed, remembering a morning many years ago when three young men in a similar mood took turns skiing across Bowers Harbor after it had frozen in the night. We skied in the channel the boat sheared through the skim-ice. Whatever happened to those boys? When you live in a place for many years you frequently run into your old selves. That’s one of the pleasures. One of the perils, too. 31

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Before I could move into the Cathead Point house on the Leelanau Peninsula, I had to pick up the key from the caretaker, who lives on a cherry farm outside Northport. He was not pleased to see me. He stood blocking the door to his house, as if to prevent me from making a rush for the silverware. “Who the hell are you,” he said. I told him my name and said that I was an acquaintance of the owner’s. “Didn’t she call you?” I asked. “She was supposed to call you and tell you I’d be staying in her house.” “She called me,” he said. “She called a week ago, and I told her then it’s a bad idea and I’ll say it again. It’s a bad idea.” “Why?” I asked, and his answer exploded from him. “It’s a goddamned summer house, that’s why! And this is the goddamn winter!” “She told me the house is winterized,” I said, “with a good furnace and a snowblower in the garage. I don’t see the problem.” “And who the hell are you again?” I told him, again. “And what the hell are you going to do there?” “Try to ‹nd some solitude.” “Solitude! Jesus Christ. You’ll ‹nd solitude all right, plenty of it, but it’s your ass if the pipes freeze.” The house sat at the end of a network of narrow roads winding through orchards and hardwoods: a beautiful house, only a few years old, two stories with multiple porches, the work of architects and builders embracing a challenge. The challenge was to anchor the structure securely in sand on a ridge curving in a swan’s neck from the woods into the open dunes. I’m not sure how they did it—drove concrete pillars through the sand to the clay and gravel beneath? Neighboring houses on the same range of dunes had succeeded as well. Each was surrounded by a wooden deck suspended over back dunes, and each had a view of the lake. I followed a boardwalk around to the front of the house. Before me Lake Michigan spread to the horizon, a clean blue mirror image of the sky but two or three shades deeper in color. The Fox Islands were out there, low and hazy at this distance, but otherwise there was only blue sky and blue water and the khaki-colored sand of the shore. Small

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waves broke silently on the beach. Down the shore a few houses perched on the dunes, and the dark wooded hills came down to them. I returned to the house, let myself in, and walked through the rooms, turning up thermostats and opening curtains. Windows and sliding-glass doors extended from ›oor to ceiling across the full front of the house, from dining room to living room, and wrapped around both sidewalls. In the living room the glass rose to a cathedral peak perhaps eighteen feet from the ›oor, providing a grand panorama of the open lake and the rolling dunes along the shore. The table in the dining room was a good place to work and still see the lake, so I arranged my books and laptop there. Then I carried my suitcase into the master bedroom and put a few things away. With those practical matters settled, I began to snoop.

5 Am I nosier than other people? I doubt it. Who, alone in an unfamiliar house, can resist opening cupboards and drawers? Everyone is curious about how others live. Enter another’s house and you enter a secret chamber, private and sacrosanct, as foreign as another mind. Even a little snooping can reveal a lot about the owners. What items do they collect? Are they accumulators or winnowers? What music do they listen to? In which kitchen drawer do they keep their miscellanea, its contents as random as a Victorian cabinet of wonder? Do they hang their pots and pans from pot racks or pitch them into the storage bin beneath the oven? What games do they play on rainy days? Do they bring home beach stones, fossils, and driftwood, and how do they display them? Finally—and this is always the primary object of my snooping—what do they read? Exploring other people’s bookshelves can feel so intimate that it becomes nearly erotic. Each book is a piece in a biographical puzzle; each has a history; each gives a glimpse into its owner’s private life. Was it placed on the shelf with intention or left behind without a thought? Was it a gift or a purchase? Is it signi‹cant to the house, or was it picked up on impulse at a secondhand shop or a library sale? People scatter their books behind like bones on the ›oors of caves. Digging among them you become both archaeologist and voyeur.

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The Cathead Point house contained only a few small shelves of books. Tucked among the best-sellers, Oprah picks, and local history was a treasure: a much-worn, nineteenth-century edition of Emerson’s essays, which I pulled down immediately and carried to the couch. As I have many times, I dipped into a few of the essays, and, as always before, failed to read them to their ends. The parts of Emerson always interest me more than the whole. The plainspoken promise in his titles— “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “Experience”—is obscured behind so many screens of language that I lose patience. Still, in every paragraph are sentences that leap from the page: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the ›ux of all things?” “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds . . .” Do you have questions? Emerson has answers. Of what is the universe composed? “. . . of Nature and the Soul.” What is nature? “. . . all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art.” And in what ways do nature and art differ? “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.” On other days I would ‹nd much to re›ect upon in Emerson, but for now I was more interested in the inscription penciled on the inside cover of the book: Rode bicycle to Northport from Traverse City on 5 cents worth of business. Had 25 cents in pocket. Paid 20 cents for book. F. [or perhaps “T”] Davis Traverse City Sept. 3, 1897

From Traverse City to Northport is thirty miles, on a road that in 1897 was unpaved and probably rutted and mud-holed. By bike it

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would have been an adventure. A day to remember, and a book to cherish, at a good price.

5 The caretaker was right about the house: plenty of solitude. No phone and no Internet and too remote on the back of the Leelanau Peninsula to receive a cell-phone signal. On my second morning I drove into Northport to check messages and call Gail. “Why don’t you join me for a few days?” I asked. She laughed. “You’re buckling,” she said. “It’d be more fun with you here,” I said. “Maybe in a couple of days.” Northport is home to about six hundred year-round residents and has a supermarket, a bar and restaurant, a bakery, a public library, several art galleries, and a fully equipped and accommodating marina. It’s also home to Dog Ears Books, a new-and-used book shop owned by Pamela Grath, a writer and photographer with a PhD in philosophy who is married to the landscape artist David Grath. Pamela and David would be the ‹rst to tell you that Leelanau County is a sanctuary for book lovers. With its slow pace (one traf‹c light in the entire county, no four-lane highways, no cities), its gorgeous blue-water lakes and rolling wooded hills, the secluded beaches of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and with very little nightlife, there is more time here for reading than in most places. While bookstores across America are failing at a disheartening rate, the many small, independent shops in Leelanau and its surrounding communities—and, in fact, in every community of any size up and down the coast of Lake Michigan—are buzzing hives of literacy. Surrounded by orchards and vineyards and tastefully hidden summer homes, Northport serves as the commercial and social center of the tip of Leelanau and can be a little busy in summer. In winter it seems to slip back in time. The town got its start in the 1850s selling cordwood to passing steamships, and soon attracted farmers, orchardists, and commercial ‹shermen. Its natural harbor made it the ‹rst and for a long time the most important port of entry to the peninsula and the natural choice to be the ‹rst county seat. Commercial and recreational ‹shing thrived for a century, until the invasive sea lamprey

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wiped out most of the lake trout and white‹sh in the 1950s. Recreational ‹shing returned after the lamprey were brought under control in the late ’60s, but it has never been as economically signi‹cant as commercial ‹shing was in its heyday. I stopped at the bakery downtown and stood at the counter looking over the rows of pastries. A woman came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel and asked if I knew what I wanted. A question worth pondering. I ordered coffee and a cherry turnover and carried them to a table in a corner. Everyone else in the dining area was a local. Most of them sat in chairs pulled up around one big table in the center of the room. The conversation had halted when I walked in, then picked up again. Now they talked about the weather—it was supposed to reach 50 degrees that day, unheard of for January—about the price of gas, about somebody they knew who was in the hospital for a triple bypass. Later I stocked up on groceries at the supermarket, then returned to the lake house and spent some time on the deck with binoculars, scanning the view. The sky was pale blue, the water a cold and gemlike blue. No boats out there, no birds. No sailors or ‹shermen, no waterfowl, no whales, no ›oating castles with crenelated towers streaming banners down the wind. Just blue and blue meeting at the razor-clean rim of the world. Just nature. Just winter. Nothing to do with you or me.

5 What do we mean when we talk about nature? How can we understand a word that accommodates so many meanings? Study it brie›y, and it ›ings open like a chest over›owing with treasures and junk. The ‹rst offering of the Oxford English Dictionary is a de‹nition as lucid as a raindrop: “The material world, or its collective objects and phenomena . . .” But the water becomes muddied in page after page of descriptions of the essential qualities or properties of things, human nature, both good and ill (and second), the nature of the beast, nature versus nurture, the laws of nature, the balance of nature, nature’s call, Mother Nature—and Empress, Dame, Lady, and Bitch Nature—and much, much more besides. Some usages are baf›ingly arcane. In artillery science, it once designated classes of guns, as in, “He had an immense quantity of ordnance, of twelve-

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pounders, and larger natures.” Other applications make oblique sense, of the sort that lurks in the dark corners of consciousness, where our urge to howl crouches. In Chaucer and Joyce it is a euphemism for menstruation (Ulysses: “Frightened she was when her nature came on her ‹rst”), and from ancient times to the present it has signi‹ed hunger and all the other animal appetites, as well as defecation and urination, genitalia, nudity, semen, and coitus. But the dictionary confuses the point. Everyone knows nature: the place outside our cities and homes, outside our of‹ces and automobiles and the Web, outside ourselves. It is where insects buzz and ›owers bloom and lions hunt and the Milky Way lights the night sky with its spray of stars. It is where wildness dwells, some safe distance from us. Sometimes it’s so distant from our daily concerns that we wonder if it has become irrelevant. How can the song of a hermit thrush compete with an iPod? How can the view from a hill compete with movies and the Internet? With arena concerts and the Super Bowl and celebrity scandals? We’ve decided that nature is an appropriate subject for children’s books and animated ‹lms, in which the world is as innocent as Eden, where bears are friendly and foxes are crafty and birds sing for our pleasure. And it’s convenient for conveying certain kinds of moral instruction, as in Aesop and the medieval bestiaries and Disney and DreamWorks. Entertaining, yes, but frivolous. Of course we know that nature is anything but frivolous. We know it’s every physical thing and the laws they’re subject to—that it is the pith, not the ›uff. It’s the ground we stand on. It’s the force that breaches the strongest city walls, and the unruliness that overwhelms our gardens. It’s the night that terri‹es, the stars that mystify, the moon that bewitches. It’s the horrendous chasm and the sublime vista. It’s the green fuse burning at our core—and the red coal glowing in the secret dark center of our animal selves. It’s the state we’ve risen above and long to return to. It’s what made us and will one day kill us. Nature is our reservoir of shared experiences and our stock of collective references. Without that shared ground could we even speak to one another? Listen to words, and you can hear the wind blowing inside them and see the glitter of stars between them. When we say we have “stormy” relationships, or “storm” from a room in anger, or are

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“gloomy” or “sunny” by temperament, everyone knows what we mean because everyone lives beneath the same sky and has experienced the outside world as the mirror or echo of what we feel inside. King Lear rages beneath a raging sky—“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!”—and catharsis sweeps through the audience. Understanding “dawns” on us in a manner so reminiscent of the rising sun dispelling darkness that it is an easy leap to equate light with knowledge and to recognize the perfect sense in a word such as “enlightenment.” Ideas “spring” to us, as if from April’s fertile loam; we ‹ght like cats and dogs, and designate the most celebrated among us as “stars.” Leaves and burrs cling to words, and wild vines twine into the language centers of our brains. Do they grow into other parts of our lives as well? Of course they do. How could they not? When we look frankly at ourselves we know that we are made of the same stuff as orioles and oak trees, lightning bolts and beach stones, and that any separation is an illusion. We are in nature, and of it, and it is absurd to think that we are ever above, below, or outside it. We can’t exist without it. But it gets along ‹ne without us. How we have encountered it is a constant theme in human history, exceeded in signi‹cance only by how we have encountered one another. And yet we never know quite what to do with it. We treat it simultaneously as a warehouse to be plundered and a museum to be treasured. As both unsolvable riddle and decipherable text. As cathedral, playground, workplace, and laboratory. We alternate between fearing it and glorifying it, loving it and hating it, worshipping it and de‹ling it. We retreat into it and, just as often, ›ee from it. We try to tame it and are furious when it proves untamable. We expect it to be useful, pro‹table, and inexhaustible, and when it’s not, we ignore, deny, or despise it. We destroy it wholesale, and in our nostalgia for what we have destroyed, rally to save it. Everywhere we look, it grows like kudzu. Its roots feed art and science; its tendrils in‹ltrate philosophy, religion, politics, and economics; its leaves sprout from psychology, mythology, and linguistics. It coils around the trellises of commerce, crawls up the towers of academia, clings to the walls of jurisprudence. Its seeds are everywhere. Some have said that it is everything that is not culture. What, then,

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is culture, besides an idea that grew from the same source as “cult,” branched into “agriculture,” and applies equally to opera houses and petri dishes? But never mind. We know culture: It is the collective highest achievements of humanity. It is art, literature, music, dance, architecture, science, law. We have every right to be proud. Culture is how we have bootstrapped ourselves above the other animals. It is our bulwark against barbarism. It is the boundary we have drawn between us and nature. Yet the boundary is a membrane, and porous. Nature wends through every human achievement. Art is a mirror, interpretation, response, glimpse, or rejection of nature. Literature is language in blossom, constructed with letters inspired by heron tracks in clay and inscribed on papyrus, animal skins, cotton, and pulpwood. Music is birdsong and ‹eld chants, children’s laughter, rain, rivers, stamping feet, the beating of our hearts. Dance is swaying reeds, the wheeling stars, avian courtship ballets. Architecture is the study of the structures of mountains and trees, the wise applications of wood and stone, an arti‹cial interior harmonizing with its exterior environment, all conceptualized in manifestoes that, as often as not, read like a literature of nature. Nature is an intricate, living tapestry, and we are woven into it as inextricably as are blades of grass and grains of sand. We go to it naively, or in fear, or in desperation, or seeking a more acute awareness of the mysteries. It can awaken us to the stunning strangeness of existence, an awareness of a condition so astonishing that it can stop us speechless in our tracks, and so ordinary that for weeks or months we can forget it altogether. It doesn’t notice us, so why should we notice it? Maybe it deserves our indifference—yet we’re unable to remain indifferent for long. It is boring—except when it is fascinating. Whether we pay attention or not is irrelevant. It charges through our cities, ›attens our buildings, ›oods our streets, and of course it will drag us into the earth in the end. Just when we think we’ve made it unnecessary or surpassed it with our inventions or organized it neatly on a shelf, it leaps up and knocks us on our asses in the mud. And every now and then a hermit thrush will surprise us with its song and knock us on our asses in that way, too.

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5 The lake changes every moment. It is a thousand lakes, changing faces with every shift in wind and light—›urried by offshore wind, whitecapped in squalls, colored ›annel gray or pearl white or stormy black beneath the winter clouds, a dozen blues when the sky is blue. Yesterday the north wind shoved breakers to the beach and low clouds blocked the sky, but the temperature remained mild, in the upper forties. This morning the breeze blew offshore from the southwest, and the temperature fell into the teens. The dawn light was cold and tinted bluish. Sunlight crept orange over the dunes. Where it touched the deck the glittering frost turned liquid. There’s a contemporary Japanese poet who writes a diary on a slab of stone instead of paper, with water instead of ink. He writes a word, and a moment later it evaporates. This, he suggests, is the true record of a life.

5 We go to the shore in search of elemental things. Probably it is just coincidence that the elemental things we ‹nd there—sand, sun, wind, and waves—correspond exactly to the four elements of the ancient Greeks and Hindus—earth, ‹re, air, and water. More to the point is that we need elemental things to keep our primitive senses in working condition. We need periodically to look, listen, scent, taste, and feel our way through the world, if only for the relief of not having to think our way through. It’s not always an easy task. Time coats us in natural increase, accruing layers as if we were snowballs rolling down a hill. Jobs, families, friends, houses, cars, dogs, our health—just maintaining it all is fulltime work. Add the bulging ‹les of information, the gunnysacks of mistakes and the duffels of misjudgments and the barrow-loads of memories, habits, regrets, opinions, prejudices, principles, laws, and codes collected in a lifetime, and you can see the problem. We carry as much as we can, and the rest we stack around us until all our routes to the outside are blocked. Even when we ‹nd our way out we’re wearing too many layers of tuxedos and zoot suits and cardigans, Icelandic woolens,

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parkas, long johns, thermal socks, etc. We’re strong, but we grow weary of lugging that Collyer-brothers’ accumulation everywhere we go. We bend beneath the load, our backs about to break, groaning as we push our heaped-up grocery carts through the streets. It’s too much. Now and then we need to strip down to the naked ›ame at our core so we can remember what it feels like to be alive. Most of what we carry is baggage anyway—just adornment and vanity, ballast and deadweight. It’s the crap the pioneers threw out along the Oregon Trail.

5 After lunch I walked to the crest of the dune and looked out at the lake. Even from that small elevation, maybe ‹fty feet, the water’s clarity was startling. From a boat, on a day like this, with the sun overhead, you can lean over the side and see boulders on the bottom thirty feet down. The pale shallows stepped into blue depths. The offshore sandbars were there, a hundred yards apart, each deeper than the one before, with bands of increasingly darker blue between them. Beyond the last bar a steep drop-off into hundred-foot depths turned the water midnight blue. Lake Michigan. My lake, I often think, because I grew up near it and because so many of my family settled along its shores. So much water, in a body so large they say that the Netherlands could ‹t inside, with enough room left over for several New England states. It is the second largest of the Great Lakes in volume, and third, after Superior and Huron, in surface area. It is the only one of the ‹ve to be contained entirely within the United States. Most of the 1,640 miles of shore is sandy. Some of that shore, especially around the southern end, through Indiana and Illinois, is lined with industry. Around the top of the lake in Wisconsin and Michigan are limestone bluffs and rocky strands. But most of the rest is blond sand beaches that are among the loveliest in North America. Wind, waves, and ice have shoved that sand into the most extensive network of freshwater dunes on the planet. They reach their apogee about thirty miles south of Cathead Point at Sleeping Bear Dunes, but they extend nearly unbroken for three hundred miles along the eastern

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and southern shores of the lake, from northern Michigan nearly to Chicago. A few scattered dunes are found also along the Wisconsin shore and at the top of the lake, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but they lack the dimensions of those facing west, into the prevailing winds. A friend who lives part of every year in the West once told me that Lake Michigan plays the same role in the Midwest that the mountains do in Montana. That’s true for all ‹ve lakes. Like the Rockies, you can see them from miles away, forming a backdrop that is also a felt presence, always there, looming in our lives. They are depositories of geological and historical power that shape the land and the culture to themselves. We orient to them and are drawn to them and take for granted that their presence and the weather they create will affect our travels and alter our daily plans. The lakes have always been the most prominent shaper of the character or “spirit” of the Great Lakes region. The stronger the spirit of a place, the farther it resonates beyond its borders. Alaska, Texas, Vermont, and Maine all have it in abundance. So do large geographical regions such as Appalachia, the Canadian Maritimes, and the swamplands of Louisiana. A mythological portrait of a place needs to be only approximately accurate to give outsiders an idea of what it is like, or enough of an idea, anyway, to inspire interest in it. That might explain in part why people who have never visited the Everglades or the Arctic Wildlife Refuge are willing to write letters to congressmen and donate money to protect them. The Great Lakes have not had that advantage. Their mythology is not clearly de‹ned. It was once very clear, a living mythology, inhabited by people, wolf, moose, and bear, but the stories that passed around camp‹res for thousands of years were drowned out by European invaders wielding their own stories of Jesuit martyrs, French voyageurs, Paul Bunyans of the logging camps, mariners of the inland seas, and up-by-the-bootstraps giants of industry. Most of those stories have now, in turn, lost their power and have not been replaced. Enduring mythologies tend to accrue to dominant features of a landscape. Louisiana has swamps; New England hardscrabble hills; Montana big sky. But the Great Lakes are too varied. No representative image ‹ts.

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The water and dunes and rocks and cities on the shore are lost in a haze of homogeneity. Surely that is why those who have never stood beside the big lakes ‹nd it so dif‹cult to imagine them. I walked south, toward the point. The thaw had stripped the snow and ice from the beach, allowing me to walk on bare sand, a novelty this deep into winter. Usually in January the lake is battered by storms, and the beach is stacked with ›oe ice and corduroyed with snowdrifts. A breeze ›urried the water, and sunlight sparked in the wavelets. It seemed more like May or September than the dark of winter. Half a mile down the shore I turned my back to the water and hiked inland, over a range of low dunes, to the woods, where I struck the gravel lane leading back to the house. There the trees were mostly mature maples and beech bare of foliage, but an occasional oak still held enough brown leaves to rattle in the breeze. A few oak leaves will still be rattling even in March. It was nearly dark by the time I got back to the house. I switched on lights, put on some music, opened a bottle of wine, and though it was barely ‹ve o’clock, prepared dinner. The kitchen was equipped with restaurant-grade appliances and was large enough for a dozen cooks. I worked barefoot on the heated tiles, sautéing chicken and vegetables, and ate while reading at the dining room table. Then I loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the counters, poured another glass of wine, and investigated the upstairs for a while. The kids’ bedrooms each had bookshelves tailored to their ages and interests. The room with science books also contained a very good telescope. It was on a tripod, set next to a door leading to an outside deck. When I returned downstairs to the living room the windows had turned black. The clock showed six o’clock. I settled onto the couch and tried to read Emerson but couldn’t concentrate. The evening stretched ahead. The weeks stretched ahead as well. Already time was becoming beastly. It could turn on me at any moment. Boredom always catches me off guard. Where were my inner resources? Wasn’t this what I wanted—to be alone in a beautiful place, without the distractions of television, telephone, and Internet, and with all the time I needed to think, read, explore? Alone for a month in a house on the Lake Michigan shore—I should have been thrilled.

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During periods in my life when I had little or no time to myself I used to dream of opportunities such as this. That we sometimes have too much time on our hands and not enough ways to ‹ll it is dif‹cult to understand. I’ve never been able to decide which is more strange, the ways of time or our ways of dealing with it. We have so little to spare, yet we have plenty to waste. Depending on our moods and recent experience we can declare with equal conviction that life is brutally short or exhaustingly long. We’re drenched in time, but there are droughts. When I was in my thirties and burning through the days I assumed middle age would be a leisurely succession of free hours, a summer vacation that went on for decades. I imagined every day would be as bountiful as the single hour my wife and I looked forward to at the end of every day when our children were ‹nally in bed. We sank into that hour as if it were a hot bath. We could read a book if we wanted to, or make love, or watch television, or just lie in bed thinking our own thoughts. It was the most luxurious hour of the day. But of course we savored it because our lives were so full. Everyone ‹gures out sooner or later that when we stay busy the hours ‹rm up. When we think we have all the time in the world, time grows slack, and so do we. We know that every moment is precious, just as we know that we’re surrounded by in‹nite wonders and that life is a brief and all but incomprehensible interval between mysteries. So why do our days become tedious? Why aren’t we astonished every moment of our lives? Why aren’t we driven to our knees by scalloped snow drifts, by cats’ paws of wind on the water, by every word a child speaks? We grow immune to those things because time is both precious and a burden. We are easily bored and intolerant of boredom—a dangerous combination. It drives us to drink as surely as it drives us to cut down forests and invade nations. Ordinariness is the enemy. The resolute march of hours, long afternoons that dull our senses, the numbing repetitiveness of everyday routines and duties—anything that robs us of enchantment and drains the ›avor from life. The feeling of wonder abandons us, and on many days we don’t feel much of anything.

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5 I expected this winter to be a kind of sanctuary. But from what? Not my family, whom I missed already. From troubles? But I had so few. From society? Then why did I want a mob of friends to appear at the door? I had set out with the vague idea that I might ‹nd relief from the world, by which I meant, as we usually do, the world of war and environmental crises and suffering children and corrupt politicians and ranting media monsters—the world E. B. White had in mind when he wrote: “When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.” But the sanctuary I was seeking had little to do with houses on the water, or with physical places of any sort. I wanted to get away from distractions for a while, but distractions are everywhere. Of course. What was I thinking? New places are guaranteed to be more distracting. The sanctuary I had in mind—a quiet and spacious place in which to dwell—is with me wherever I go. How could I have forgotten? And why did I keep losing the key to the door? Traf‹c snarls and airport delays and the roaring electronic blather say, “You don’t matter,” while our every instinct, bone, muscle, and organ cries, “I do!” Is it any wonder we seek places that are simpler and quieter, more elemental, where we can be alone to face what Saul Bellow called “the main injustice”? Suffering is everywhere, oblivion is imminent, and our perplexity only deepens as we get older. Those of us who go frequently to nature ‹nd that it sometimes makes those stark facts more clear, reminding us of our ignorance and our perilous situation and somehow, paradoxical as it seems, restoring some of our certainty and strength. Seeking sanctuary in nature is such a common motif in the world’s literature that the impulse must be rooted deeply in our being. It is virtually a genre of its own. Whenever poets and prophets have announced that they were retreating from the world they have always meant that they were retreating from the world of humans. And it is almost always a solitary retreat. Religious hermits seek shelter in caves in

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the desert, Japanese and Chinese poets move into huts in the mountains, Thoreau and his imitators go to their cabins in the woods. Most have found sanctuary elusive, the human world persistent. The implication is that only when we get away from the noise of other people are we able to hear God or his proxy, nature, an idea that nurtures the common piety that such experiences are necessarily spiritual. But even those of us who are more secular minded, and are simply looking for a place where we can hear our own thoughts, recognize that something happens out there in the woods and the desert. William James took the trouble to note that most of the hundreds of cases of mystical experience he studied during his years of research for The Varieties of Religious Experience had occurred in solitude, outside, in nature. A consistent theme is the dif‹culty of the endeavor. We spend most of our lives in a world of people, and ‹nd much joy and purpose there, but it is always also a world of troubles. Italo Calvino dissects this problem in his short novel Mr. Palomar, in which the thoughtful and tormented protagonist sets out to imitate those enviable people who appear to be at ease with both humanity and nature. Mr. Palomar seeks harmony ‹rst with the physical universe, because it seems easiest, because “he has too many problems with his neighbor,” and eventually, after great effort, manages to light his pipe while simultaneously remaining aware of a supernova exploding at that moment (“that is to say, a few million years ago”) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. His effort at mindfulness pays off with a revelation: “The idea that everything in the universe is connected and corresponds never leaves him.” Convinced that he has found his place in nature, Mr. Palomar next turns his attention to humans, expecting to discover in society a landscape of friendships and business relations as clarifying as the luminous landscapes of deep space. Instead, he becomes immediately “embroiled in a muddle of misunderstandings, hesitations, compromises, blunders.” Everything he does and every word he speaks causes him so much anguish that the serenity he experienced while contemplating the universe is lost in morasses of interpersonal actions, reactions, and counterreactions. Soon he retreats to safer ground, where he resumes with relief his study of waves breaking against the shore. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau sought refuge, it was from lawyers,

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vindictive political enemies, caustic literary critics, and the agonies of his paranoia. In Confessions he recalls that he had grown sickened by “salons, waterfalls, groves, ›ower-gardens,” and was weary of “stitching, pianos, sorting wool, making bows, foolish witticisms, insipid affectations, tri›ing story-tellers, and big suppers . . .” In desperation he traveled alone to the island of Sainte-Pierre, in Switzerland’s Lake Bienne, where he immersed himself in a feverish study of botany. After two months of attempting to catalog every plant on the island—“in the happy condition,” he wrote, “of knowing little enough for everything to appear new to me, and yet enough to make everything intelligible to me”—he was rousted by local of‹cials who had grown alarmed by his notoriety (or were incited, as Rousseau himself believed, by his enemies). He would look back upon those eight weeks on the island as the happiest period of his life: “I could have spent two years, two centuries and all of eternity there without a moment’s boredom.” To ‹nd deep sanctuary of that sort we must enter into a mood of enchantment—or reenchantment, for it is the default condition of childhood. The German political economist Max Weber asserted that the modern era, which he de‹ned as beginning with the Industrial Revolution, is characterized by the loss of wonder and the “progressive disenchantment of the world,” suggesting that enchantment was once the default condition of adults as well. That romantic idea is usually associated with the Romantic Era, but other scholars have argued that enchantment began disappearing from the Western world about four thousand years ago, when the teachings of Greek philosophy and Judaism began replacing instinct and animism with reason and monotheism. But our sense of enchantment has never entirely left us. It comes back at chance moments and very often during unusual and powerful experiences. Witnessing a birth or a death slams us inside its spell. Tornadoes, waterfalls, meteor showers, and other natural spectacles can have a similar effect. So can arti‹cial spectacles such as circuses, stage productions, concerts, sporting events, and ‹reworks. Enchantment occurs whenever the gap between us and what we encounter closes, making us forget ourselves and enter a connection with something or somebody else. It is the participating consciousness of the creative person, arrived at through involvement, engagement, the absorbed state,

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and to which the sense of wonder is a consequence that feels like a reward. Rousseau discovered it incidentally during his study of botany, Thoreau achieved it intentionally through focused examination of plants, animals, land forms, and weather during his daily walks. Nick Adams, in the Hemingway story “Big Two-Hearted River,” is so absorbed in setting up his tent, building a ‹re, cooking a meal, and baiting a hook with a grasshopper that every action takes on the signi‹cance of sacred ritual. Performing ordinary acts with extraordinary attention bestows grace upon everyday actions. Merely being in nature is not enough. What we do there and how we do it are the keys that open the gates to sanctuary. On his thirty-eighth birthday the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne retired from the duties of public of‹ce to spend the rest of his life in solitude, devoting himself, he wrote, to “freedom, tranquility, and leisure.” He moved into a study on the top ›oor of a stone tower, encircled himself with books, and hung on the wall a painting that depicted the amorous encounter between Mars and Venus, an image that in his era was understood to be symbolic of the active life abandoned for the contemplative one. From our point of view, it was only in his tower, surrounded by his thousand books, recording everything he knew in the new literary form he called the essai, that the active portion of his life began. Few writers have been so well rewarded by refuge. Montaigne argued in one essay that the true solitary seeks solitude for its own sake: “The greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be his own.” And there is an excellent reason to do this: because one day family, friends, health, and every other thing we cherish will be stripped from us, leaving only what we carry in our hearts. Learn self-suf‹ciency, he advised, as a way to prepare for the ‹nal solitude. If solitude is sel‹shness, then so be it: “We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves.” After all, he wrote, “The world runs all on wheels. All things therein move without intermission, yea, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both with the public and their own motion. Constancy itself is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance.” But the human world intrudes. It always does. Strangers knock on

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the door of your tower, the phone rings, the king orders you back to court. The spell breaks. Sanctuary can only be temporary.

5 A common and frequently inadequate response to the loneliness problem is to surround oneself with what is familiar. When I moved into the Cathead Point house I arranged on the dining room table some pens and pencils, a college-ruled notebook partially ‹lled with notes and observations, a deck of playing cards for solitaire, a small box of paper clips, a package of Post-it Notes, the leather briefcase in which I had transported those items from my of‹ce. Around them like a bulwark I stacked some favorite books. There, I thought. Not a solution, but a comfort. When you’ve done all you can to keep loneliness away you have no choice but to face it. Examine it objectively, weigh it, explore its surface on all sides, scale its heights and take its depths, and ‹nally you can enter it and let it enter you. There’s comfort in knowing that sometimes, in the process of taking measure of a problem, it disappears.

5 In the morning I was working at the table when I heard footsteps on the deck outside. I opened the door and found my wife standing before me. Gail! A surprise, a delight. Solitude postponed! The world seemed suddenly brighter and the house more alive. Fine art hung on the walls. The bookshelves were stacked with literary masterpieces. I made coffee, and we sat on the couch and talked, then took a walk on the beach. Down the shore we met a woman about our age carrying a tote bag. I had seen the same woman two or three times on previous days, but we had only nodded to one another. The cold distances of winter make people a little cold and distant, too. Or maybe we respect each other’s relationship with the lake in this season when it is possible to imagine it is ours alone. In summer we might be friendlier, but the summer people bring a different kind of distance with them, so maybe not. Gail dismissed these mighty deliberations by simply stopping the woman to ask what she was collecting in her tote bag. The woman

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brightened and said, “Lots of things but mostly Petoskey stones. I get just a few good ones every day, but they add up. Over the years I’ve sold enough to pay for my daughter’s college education.” Or I think that’s what she said. She spoke very quietly, and the wind carried away some of her words.

The “Petoskey” stones she spoke of are fossil remnants of an era a few hundred million years ago that geologists call Paleozoic—the time of “ancient life.” Most of North America was covered then by a shallow, warm, and fertile ocean inhabited by corals, mollusks, trilobites, brachiopods—a profusion of plants and animals so rich that when they died and sank to the bottom they formed limestone beds hundreds of feet thick. (The ocean left thick beds of crystallized salt, as well. Today that nearly pure salt is extracted from mines such as those in Manistee, Michigan, and Mount Morris, New York. The Detroit Salt Company has excavated a ‹fteen-hundred-acre complex more than a thousand feet beneath Detroit. One of the largest salt mines in the world—measuring one and a half miles wide and two miles long—is found beneath the eastern shore of Lake Huron at the town of Goderich, Ontario.) Paleozoic fossils are everywhere around Lake Michigan, but those found along the northeast coast are among the most treasured. These fragments of ancient coral formations, shattered by glaciers and other

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forces, can be dug up in many places in North America, but only in the northern portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, with the city of Petoskey at the epicenter, are they found in abundance on the surface. By general agreement, the best Petoskey stones are found along the Lake Michigan beach, where for thousands of years they have been rounded and polished by waves. Most are small enough to pocket, though specimens up to many feet in diameter are occasionally unearthed. When dry they’re a dusty gray, unremarkable and easy to overlook. But generations of beachwalkers have learned that splashing water on dry stones makes the fossils among them jump into view. When wet or lacquered, and especially when arti‹cially polished, their hexagonal cells turn bright, revealing that each is bordered with a band of white and ‹lled with ‹nely etched rays pointing to an eyelike polyp at the center. At a glance they resemble a honeycomb, or the eraser-end view of a closely packed bundle of pencils. They are grayish, black, or nearly white in color, with sometimes a blush of pink.

5 The shore offers the opportunity, rare in this densely wooded part of the world, to see wide swaths of open sky. Around Chicago the Great Plains creep nearly to the edge of Lake Michigan, as they do not far west of Lake Superior, and open farmlands line the shores of Lake Erie and southern Lake Huron and much of Lake Ontario. But forests crowd most of the rest of the Great Lakes shoreline—boreal forests in the north, mixed deciduous and evergreen woods in the central part of the region, and mixed deciduous in the south. Much of the region is so overgrown with trees and so lush with undergrowth that visitors who have not grown up in similar country ‹nd it alarming. My brother-inlaw Tim Roth tells the story of a friend of his, a South Dakota farmer who after many years of urging ‹nally agreed to visit northern Michigan. The farmer had never been outside the three or four counties surrounding his farm on the plains, had never been in a city larger than Fargo, had never stood beneath a forest canopy or in the womblike closeness of a cedar swamp. Every moment of his life he had lived beneath the open sky, a dome of unobstructed blue in daytime, and at

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night a universe of stars from horizon to horizon. He was barely past the border of the Upper Peninsula, driving east on US-2, when the walls of forest closed in on the highway. Suddenly he could not breathe. He felt like he was drowning. In panic he pulled to the side of the road, made a U-turn, and sped back to open space and big sky, where a man could ‹nd enough air to breathe. Many of us who grew up in the woods are intrigued by open spaces. In places where the sky is immense we can become like yokels among skyscrapers. For us it’s a rare luxury to see in 360 degrees, to stand beneath an unobstructed dome of sky, to observe weather approaching from ten or twenty or maybe a hundred miles away and watch the parade of snow squalls in winter and rainstorms in summer. It reminds us that most creatures who have ever lived on the earth have spent their lives beneath the same sky. On an evening when my sons Nick and Aaron and Aaron’s friend Alison visited the house at Cathead we carried the telescope outside onto the second-›oor deck and took turns looking at the full moon and marveling at its bright, deeply cratered surface. As always while looking through telescopes I was struck by a powerful and palpable sense of distance. I could feel the vastness of the space I was looking through. It had substance. It was cold. It seemed possible to know viscerally the unimaginable distances separating every body in the universe, and it became apparent that all we know for certain about the universe is that it is big. And we are small and temporary. Once you perceive this salient fact you can feel its truth, as if there is nothing standing between you and space. I thought of the strange comfort we are given by the moon. Life, so changing and unreliable, can be lost in a moment, but the moon, through all its phases, is predictable. So is the sun, of course, but its rhythms seem commonplace compared to the moon’s complex changes. What does it reveal of our psyches that the sun, which we associate with male reason, can destroy our eyes if we stare at it, while the moon, which we celebrate for her lusty Dionysian dance, invites our full gaze? Life is brief, but the heavens seem never to change. No wonder we’re so interested in the sky; no wonder we sustain its myths and legends; no wonder most people in most cultures through the ages have

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been amazed and terri‹ed at any deviation from the ordinary courses of the moon, sun, and stars. Eclipses and comets for most of the history of humanity created panic and inspired wild conjecture. They were the astronomical equivalents of earthquakes. Suddenly everything we assumed was stable, reliable, and permanent was unstable, unreliable, and temporary. Rugs get pulled from under us.

5 After my family left the house was larger and more empty than ever. In the morning I took a walk around the point to Christmas Cove. The sun was rising, and its red light crawled across the beach. My feet broke through the surface sand, which in the night had frozen into a crust. The wind was down, and small waves broke rhythmically on the gravel. For thousands of years, Native Americans and, later, explorers, missionaries, and voyageurs who traveled this shore paused at Northport Point to look across the ten miles of open lake facing them at the mouth of the bay they called Grand Traverse. They had a choice to make the crossing in their fragile canoes and bateaux or turn east and hug the safe shores of the bay. But the bay extends thirty miles and is divided in half by the twenty-mile-long landspur of Old Mission Peninsula, and would add more than a hundred miles to their journey. Many risked the open crossing, though it was treacherous, exposed to the predominate winds and with the big lake stretching to the horizon in three of the four cardinal directions. It was wise to wait until evening, when the wind often falls, and cross in the night. But the wind didn’t always cease at night, and many travelers were forced to make camp on the shore and wait for favorable weather. I looked at the bay before me. Here the shore was low and sandy, arcing gracefully to a point of fragmented limestone. If I were windbound, waiting for a chance to dash across dangerous open water toward the distant shoreline near what is now the town of Charlevoix, I would stay here, in the sandy bay, not on that jumbled point. Countless travelers must have camped here over the centuries. We are the same people who ten thousand years ago camped on barren tundra beneath the shadows of glaciers. The very same. At night we look up at the same sky and shout the same questions at the stars. We feel the same fears,

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cling to the same desperate hopes, feel the same emotions. We love the same, grieve the same, rejoice the same. We have many of the same dreams as we sleep. I was walking along, imagining ancient campsites, when I came upon the carcass of a large bird half buried in the sand. I toed its head free for a better look, to con‹rm what I already knew: a common loon. The evening before I had found two others on the other side of Cathead Point. All had died months before, to judge by the bones showing through their feathers. I remembered reading last fall that two hundred loons and nearly three thousand other birds had been found dead along the shores of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, just south of here, all killed by an outbreak of Type E avian botulism. The species affected included common and red-throated loons, bald eagles, Caspian terns, ring-billed gulls, pied-billed grebes—all ‹sh eaters, a crucial clue to the event. When the birds start to die, we’re in trouble. We think of canaries in the mine, but there’s a deeper association. Birds are our most ready emblem of the soul. When they tumble from the sky an end-of-days feeling comes over us. What have we done? Is some creeping systemic illness killing birds, souls, the earth itself? Researchers looking into the event discovered that several invasive species were to blame. At the center of the issue are the zebra mussel and its larger cousin the quagga mussel, ‹ngernail-sized invaders from the Caspian Sea and other waters in Asia. They were ‹rst discovered in 1988 in Lake St. Clair, between Lakes Erie and Huron, where they had been discharged from the ballast tanks of oceangoing ships. They’ve since spread through all ‹ve Great Lakes and are steadily colonizing other lakes and rivers throughout North America. The hardy and proli‹c mussels (the females can produce a million eggs a year) use “byssal threads” to adhere to rocks, docks, boat hulls, water pipes, and virtually any other stationary surface, and regularly clog the water systems of power plants, factories, and water-treatment facilities, resulting in cleanup costs of millions of dollars a year. Also involved is Cladophora, a spindly aquatic alga, ubiquitous around the world, that was introduced to the Great Lakes by accident in the nineteenth century and has recently begun to bloom in alarm-

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ing numbers. A toxic food chain occurs when Cladophora and other algae die, settle to the bottom, and decompose. The bacteria that cause botulism (which are always present in minute concentrations) thrive in the decomposing matter, and are incidentally ingested by any mussels growing nearby. The mussels are unaffected, but the round gobie, another invader, feeds on the mussels, becomes partially paralyzed with infection, and swims to the surface, where it is easy prey for ‹sh-eating birds. The birds become infected, grow paralyzed, and drown. The same bacterium has on occasion sickened and even killed humans who ate improperly cooked ‹sh that had been infected, but it is a threat primarily to ‹sh-eating birds. This has happened before. From the 1960s through the 1980s, avian botulism killed an estimated sixteen thousand birds in Lakes Huron and Michigan. The most likely culprit in those outbreaks was the alewife, the invasive ‹sh that had colonized the lakes starting in the 1950s and dominated them once the sea lamprey—another and much more destructive invader—had decimated the native ‹sh populations that kept alewife numbers in check. By the 1960s, when the alewife accounted for 90 percent of the biomass of the Great Lakes, millions upon millions of the small ‹sh died every summer, fouling beaches all around the lakes with heaps of rotting, stinking carcasses that created breeding grounds for the bacteria, which had probably always been present but usually lay dormant on the lake bottom. The introduction of Paci‹c salmon into the lakes starting in the late 1960s reduced alewife populations, halted the massive die-offs, and seemed to solve the botulism problem. The reemergence of the botulism in 2007 coincided with increasing and widespread growth of Cladophora. In the 1960s and ’70s a stinking yellow-green stew produced as various algae decomposed was the most obvious symptom of the poor health of the Great Lakes. It also inspired a generation of citizens to take action. Researchers discovered that algae blooms were caused by phosphate pollution, which led to legislation reducing the amount of phosphates in household detergents and putting restrictions on the use of fertilizers. Since then Cladophora has been relatively scarce—or it was until a few years ago, when blooms began occurring again in all the lakes ex-

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cept Superior. A panoply of causes is probably to blame, led by nutrient surges from agricultural runoff and municipal sewage discharges. Another likely culprit is dishwasher detergent, which was not in wide use in the 1970s and thus not included in the legislation banning phosphates. Mysteriously, algae blooms are increasing even in those parts of the lakes where phosphate levels have held steady or declined, leading some to suspect that warming water temperatures are to blame. It’s also likely that there has been system-wide impact from zebra and quagga mussels. Researchers theorize that the mussels are ‹ltering dissolved phosphorous from the water and depositing it on the lake bottom in their droppings and thus offering a steady supply of concentrated nutrients to algae. That would explain why Cladophora is often found in dense concentrations around mussels. The mussels also ‹lter the water of plankton, which increases the distance that sunlight penetrates and thus allows the algae to thrive at greater depths. In summary, then: the invasive mussels support the invasive alga. The alga supports bacteria. The bacteria infects invasive gobies. Birds eat the gobies. Birds die.

5 Winter again. Whitecaps and rolling breakers and snow squalls charging the shore. Now and then the clouds shred and a brighter light breaks through—not sunshine, for there are higher layers of clouds above—but enough light to illuminate the water and the snow-covered dunes. The water is turquoise over sand bottom, steel gray in the deep. In the house I hear, not individual waves breaking, but a continuous consolidation of noise like steady traf‹c on a highway, or a train in the distance. Beyond North and South Fox the slow curve of the horizon wraps the globe. Open views make the horizon a circle and put the observer at the center of the universe. As Emerson noted. Here on the shore, with woods at my back, we get half a circle, like a drawn bow.

5 Many go to nature looking for a cure, but they rarely ‹nd it. The cure they seek is probably not there. Perhaps there is no cure. Water and

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woods, the night sky, the dawn chorus of songbirds, a loping coyote— such things are not a cure, but a salve. Can we ‹nd consolation in them? Of course. They replenish us after the gorings of daily life. They provide relief from rude clerks and petty coworkers, from the relentless goosestep of fashion, from the piling-on of responsibilities, from the burden of having constantly to maintain oneself, stay in shape, make progress, be good, be mature, be an example to one’s children, and never just coast because if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. In nature, temporarily, we can coast. It’s the appeal of canoes and sailboats, of lawn chairs and tree houses and walks on the beach. In nature we can catch our breath. Without it, we’re lost. If the day ever comes when the last parcel of wild nature is conquered, annihilated, isolated in a cage, preserved under glass in a cabinet, the planet will be swept by an epidemic of despair. People who will almost certainly never visit the Arctic or a tropical rainforest become incensed at the prospect of their destruction because they need to know that such places exist. Wild nature is crucial to our well-being. It is our universal reservoir of hope. It is the raw material for our daydreams and night dreams. It sustains us even when our other hopes languish—hope in technology, for instance, or effective government, or wise leaders. An afterlife is the hope for many, of course, but for now, for life on earth, the only life we know, we turn to the remaining unspoiled deserts, forests, mountains, and seas, even if only in imagination and art, for relief from the turmoil of everyday life. Our connection with the earth provides con‹rmation of how we view ourselves: as self-reliant, strong, capable, as hewers and shapers who can feed our families on what we grow and harvest. It is also solace and community, a blood connection before and beneath language, in which the earth, the moon, and the matriarchal sea rise amniotically, menstrually, intuitively. For all of us, nature is the essential background, the uncontrollable force that gives us perspective on how small we are, how insigni‹cant, how short-lived. The healthy-minded have always maintained that the key to health is found in balance. Go to nature, but as an element in ordinary life, not as a quest for salvation. When we go seeking to improve ourselves we’re perpetuating an urge to acquire that differs only in degree from

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the urge to dominate, subjugate, and pro‹t. Better to go forth with open eyes and open minds, expecting nothing.

5 I woke in the dark early this morning and lay in bed listening to waves breaking on the beach. I could sense the cold out there—it had slipped inside the house in the night and huddled in the corners of the bedroom—but the forecast had promised that the day would be sunny, with wind from the southwest and temperatures reaching the mid-forties by afternoon. Disorienting to have such weather in January. It should be 15 degrees and overcast, the north wind shoving ice to the shore. I dressed in jacket and gloves and stepped outside in the darkness and walked the sand path through the dunes to the beach and stood beside the water. In the east, beyond the woods, the sky was growing lighter, and to the west the moon, full and ‹ery orange, was sinking almost to the lake. I stood and watched. As it neared the water it began to droop, as if it were melting, and a vitreous trail of orange light poured across the lake and stopped at my feet. Suddenly, on the horizon, a shaft rose from the lake to meet the moon, forming a luminous pedestal. In a moment the moon merged with its re›ection, then slipped into the water and disappeared. In any observation, the long view is a good place to start. So is the short view, and the side view, and the overview—and so too are your view and my view and our crazy drunken neighbor’s view. In questions about our place in the universe the more views we can hold in mind, the better our chances of glimpsing anything like a clear picture. As I watched the moon I was fascinated by that trail of orange light blazing across the water to my eyes. There is only one moon, but a separate trail for every set of eyes. On any moonlit night are six billion moons, if we’re willing to look. We all live on the shore. Every scrap of land on our scrap of a planet is licked at its edges by water. From the familiar, solid, safe shore we face the mystifying, uncertain, and perilous sea. Stand on the margin, and you are straddling a conjunction of boundaries. One is the strand.

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Another, if you are there at dawn or dusk, is the boundary between night and the day. Yet another is the boundary between the lake or river or sea as it is and as it once was and as it will be in the future. And between nature and culture, and the known and the unknown, and the visible and the invisible. We stand, too, on a shore in the cosmos, with the earth as the beach and the universe as the sea we gaze upon. Taken altogether these conjunctions are a tangle of shifting borders, like stacks of overlaid transparencies forming a multidimensional map of the landscape. Some cultures have considered the shore the boundary between the earthly and heavenly worlds. It is a threshold where worlds overlap, where time washes between the solid earth and the running sea. In those cosmologies, the sea is eternity, and time breaks on the temporal beach. Walk there, and you thread the line between life and death, between this world and whatever might wait beyond it.

5 On my last day at Cathead Point it began to snow. Wind horses ran down the lake, their white manes tossing, and the sky closed on a horizon only a mile or two offshore. As the weather changed, so did I. I missed my wife and sons and our old dog. I missed our drafty farmhouse with its clattering heat ducts and groaning pipes. I missed the books on my own bookshelves. The familiar world, the one I had become accustomed to seeing and thought I knew quite well, became strange again. The Fox Islands, which had been visible a moment before, disappeared in a snow squall, and the waves that had seemed orderly all morning churned chaotically against that background of obliterating white. I walked the beach for the last time, but it felt like the ‹rst time. Everything was new and strange. A strong north wind brought raucous breakers crashing to the beach, and clouds that seemed about ‹fty feet above the ground scudded across the sky. The half-frozen gravel crunched beneath my boots. Sea smoke hung above the whitecaps, and shafts of light speared from the clouds to the water, spotlighting regions of turmoil as wild as the primordial chaos. All is change. Colder

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weather was coming, you could see it in the clouds and smell it in the wind. The clouds roiled darkly. Snow fell in blinding squalls. In a few days the shore would be engulfed by ice and snow, erasing every sign that we had been here. All is change.

th re e

Beachwalking

It’s different every day. Yesterday’s tracks are gone, the swash is clean, the lake has carried a new miscellany to shore. You could walk this beach every morning of your life, and it would never be the same. If it began to seem monotonous, you would only have to wait for the next storm to make it new again. If still it seemed the same, you are not a beachwalker. For a few weeks one winter about ten years ago I stayed in a house on Good Harbor Bay, on the Leelanau Peninsula, with the Manitou Islands in the distance and the unbroken horizon beyond them. Every day I walked a sandy path through the snow, then stood at the edge of the bluff and surveyed the long arc of the open beach below. To the south was Pyramid Point; to the north was Whaleback Mountain. Some days both promontories were obscured by snow squalls. Other days they stood sharp against the sky. Always I walked south, into the national park, where there are no houses. I would walk a mile or two, past the pilings where the Good Harbor docks once supplied steamships with ‹rewood. Ice clogged the shore, extending in plates into the lake, their edges tilted above the water. A wave would run under the ice, and a moment later a spout of water would burst from blowholes standing six or eight feet above the ice. 61

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Everywhere were jumbles of rounded ice the size of golf balls and softballs, translucent and spangled with sand. One afternoon the temperature eased into the sixties, smashing century-old records, and the ice began to rot. In a few days only a few crumbling fragments lay half-buried in the sand, and a single slab the size of a ‹shing tug remained stranded on the dock pilings. It was thirty feet long and ten feet wide and must have weighed many tons. After a night of warmish wind, it was gone. Nothing stays long on the beach. Property owners impertinent enough to build their houses too close to the water have sometimes watched them tumble into the lake. A storm comes up and banks fall, bluffs collapse, trees and buildings disappear.

5 On the dry sand of the backshore: Desiccated alewives the size of willow leaves—›at, curled twists of silver skin with empty eye sockets. They weigh nothing. They have no odor whatsoever. They crumble between my ‹ngers like leaf duff. The wing feather of a cormorant, large and black, bedraggled by water, its hollow stem translucent. A pink hairbrush. A plastic straw, white with red stripes, the tip dented with teeth marks. The carapace of a cray‹sh, pink and weightless.

5 Some days I returned to the house carrying driftwood or with pockets bulging with stones and beach glass, and always with my cuffs full of sand. Years from now I might remember that I also brought home the mingling odors of big water, approaching snow, winter’s arctic bluster. I might remember the conch-shell roar of wind in my ears, sunlight diamonding the water, the way the gulls kited in silence then banked downwind and laughed. If I’m lucky I might remember a thousand details. But probably not. We miss so much, and forget most of the rest. It’s easy to overlook the little things. The attentiveness required to notice panic grass among the poverty grass or to know the difference between a Johnny darter and a ninespine stickleback is a rare quality,

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and growing rarer, even among those of us who value such differences. A botanist sees the butterwort in the swale and the aphids half-digested on its slimy leaf, but you and I will probably miss it. An ornithologist recognizes the particular bird—the piping plover, say, Charadrius melodus, our rare bird of the shore—while most of us notice only a small shorebird the color of gravel, if we notice it at all.

On a morning when the sun was penetrating I noticed that I could look deeply into the center of each wave as it neared the shore. It was like looking inside a moving hill of glass. As each wave broke, its froth threw a shadow that ran along the bottom, as if it were an obedient pet hurrying to keep up. Funny what you notice once you start paying attention. From the berm-crest dripped a steady slurry of water and sand. Beneath was a line of miniature stalagmites an inch or two high, columnar and bulbous, khaki colored, with spare tires around their waists. They looked like a row of fat little soldiers marching down the shore. Higher on the beach, on the backshore, all the rocks stood on pedestals of sand. There were thousands of them, teed up like golf balls, with all their shadows leaning westward. Why had I never noticed this?

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I got down on my knees and saw that the wind carried a constant stream of sand a few inches above the beach. Within that stream individual grains rolled and bounced, going airborne and falling, bumping one another and bounding away, dropping into eddies behind pebbles, lifting again and tumbling downwind. They ›owed around stones like river water around boulders. I stood and saw that the aggregate grains formed a glittering white drift, racing with the wind.

5 On the wet sand of the swash zone: Zebra mussel shells, each the size and shape of a pistachio shell, their dark stripes faded by the sun to pale white; others are wadded in clusters as big as ‹sts. Raccoon tracks wandering from wet sand to dry sand. You can see where the animal paused to nibble mussels, then cray‹sh for breakfast and a neat pile of legs left behind. Swash marks, the tracks left by departing waves, patterned like relief lines on a contour map or strips of paper torn to represent receding hills.

5 Thunderstorms are rare in winter. It takes rising heat to make them, and snow doesn’t give off much of it. But the temperature that day reached 65 degrees at noon, the highest ever recorded for February 24, and winter thunder rumbled around the shore of Good Harbor Bay. Because the sky was gray and the air damp it was impossible to tell where the thunder originated. It rolled from one end of the sky to the other. A moment later it was rumbling everywhere at once. Then a ›ash showed to the west, in the hills behind Pyramid Point. As I watched, a freshening wind approached, ruf›ing the surface of the bay and bringing color to the water, subtle shades of green close to shore and, farther out, a gray that was nearly blue. The breeze reached me; it was cold, refrigerated from its passage over the water. Against the western shore of the bay a light rain drifted down, washing the bluffs white. It was the slowest storm I have ever watched. A stroke of lightning lanced from the sky, stabbing at the hills. I counted one-Mississippi,

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two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, until, at the count of ‹fteen, thunder sounded. Three miles. A minute later there was another ›ash. I counted again, heard thunder—and again it was three miles. The storm was advancing, but at a stroll. A wall of rain walked up the beach toward me. Heavy drops plummeted, raised spouts of sand half an inch in the air, and left tiny craters. The intervals between lightning and thunder became brief, so I retreated to the house. Inside, I stood at the window and watched. Rain streaked the glass, then fell so hard I could no longer see the lake. Pellets of hail hopped on the boards of the deck like drops of water on a skillet. Lightning ›ashed high in the clouds, and thunder unfurled across miles of air. The storm rumbled slowly onward, its intentions serious, but the machinery rusty.

5 Nature helps us recognize our lives for what they are: small and temporary. That’s good. It’s a good place to start. We’re small, but not insigni‹cant. We’re temporary, but we have enough time. We walk the beach, and look, and walk farther and look harder, and sometimes the effort is rewarded and sometimes it is not. Thoreau did not just walk, he said, he sauntered, like a medieval pilgrim, à la Sainte Terre, walking a path to the Holy Land. We are pilgrims, too, he insisted; wherever we ‹nd ourselves is holy. We place every step ‹rmly on the earth, upon a thousand earthly particulars, and within the atoms and molecules of those particulars—every grain of sand, every pebble and mussel shell, every lapping wave—is light, if our eyes are open to it. Walking, sometimes, if we are receptive and persistent or simply lucky, opens our eyes. To what? The real world, of course. The world as it is, apart from our ideas of it, stripped of our opinions, convictions, prejudices, political agendas. The raw, whirling, boundless reality of it. Seeing it we become enveloped in it, enwrapped in it, rapt in it. The experience is transcendent, not because we can see beyond the world or above it, but because we can at last see into it. Nature does not make good diversion. If we go expecting to be en-

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tertained we’re usually disappointed. Hour after hour, day after day, not much happens. Often it is boring. Hopeful tourists line the roads of Yellowstone with their cameras and phones ready, waiting for bison or bear or elk to do something memorable. I’ve paid my way, they seem to say, now amuse me. They want deadly storms and bear attacks, and slow-motion replays. They would be more satis‹ed in front of a television or a movie screen. Movies and television can make us forget for a few hours that we have problems and will one day die. I’m all for it. Save me a place in line. But movies and television aren’t enough. They don’t satisfy. They always require more. We travel thousands of miles to places like Yellowstone and Niagara Falls and endure traf‹c jams and wait in queues so that we might have the privilege of dutifully taking snapshots of a natural wonder. Why? In part because we forget to step outside our own doors and watch raindrops falling on a leaf. We keep forgetting how to see. Our capacity for wonder is vast—it encompasses the entire universe—but we keep underestimating it. We think we need a serious jolt to awaken it—a tornado, a waterfall, a geyser. But they aren’t nearly diversion enough. It doesn’t work for everyone, and it isn’t foolproof for anyone, but if we step outside, without expectation or desire, into the actual world of wind and light, we sometimes ‹nd some perspective. It can help us see ourselves and our complex age more clearly. We might even see that we are not apart from nature, that regardless of our history of solipsism, arrogance, indifference, and destruction, we somehow ‹t into the puzzle. Everyone is an expert on nature. Everyone knows the ways of time and space; everyone earns a doctorate in growth and decay. The stars belong to us, not to the astronomers. We own the sky and the seas. In the face of the great mysteries the poorest of us are equal to the richest; dullards share the stage with geniuses; bums huddle in conversation with philosophers. We’re all royalty in the everyday kingdom. Nature demands encounter and requires engagement. It’s the opposite of escapism. Once we’ve met its terms it reminds us that one day

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we will die, and that, of course, is the surest way to remember that today we must live.

5 A winkle shell—the tiny spiral snail of the Great Lakes—colored the deep maroon of storm clouds, with a needle-thin white stripe tracing the spiral from base to tip. A piece of driftwood shaped like a heron, woodgrain rounding its belly in zebra stripes. Swash marks again (they’re worth a second look): pale lines drawn with a stylus, accented with stipples of minutiae—bits of weeds and wood; drowned insects and their assorted legs, antennae, and wing-cases; pebbles the size of birdshot. They meander like the lines on a seismic graph or a trail of beetles on the march or a sentence a thousand miles long, with letters and words so tiny that you have to get down on your knees to read them.

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Home Place

Get to know a place well enough, and it becomes part of you and you become part of it. But places reveal themselves grudgingly. For nearly twenty years my family and I have lived in a farmhouse a few hundred yards from the shore of Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, on a long and narrow peninsula which is named for the mission established near its point in 1839. We’ve been told that our house was built around 1880, though the record is uncertain. A neighbor claims that the man who built it was a ship’s captain who earned his living on the lakes, an idea that appeals to me, though I have found no evidence to support it. When we moved into the house in 1991 an aerial photo of the neighborhood taken in the 1950s was stapled to a wall of the stone outbuilding where I would eventually have my of‹ce. The photo shows our house surrounded by acre after acre of cherry orchards, the rows as straight as the teeth of a comb. By the time we bought it, the property had been whittled down from its original one hundred acres to a single acre shaded by large maples, black walnuts, spruces, cedar, and white pine, with six cherry trees in the backyard. Still, it is a ‹ne piece of property, with many gardens and a lawn, and most of it wooded over. On moonlit winter nights I sometimes go outside and stand in the front yard beneath the branches of the giant 68

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maple at its center and notice the jagged shadows of branches on the snow and feel the age of the tree. It was old when the previous owners lived here and those previous to them, and so on, back through many generations of owners, most of them dead now. Of those people I know little. Some in the neighborhood still refer to our house as the Carroll Place or the Gilmore Place, though no Gilmores or Carrolls have lived here for nearly half a century. Terry Carroll lived with his family in our house for seven or eight years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and we still occasionally receive junk mail addressed to him. Terry’s brother Tim lives on Center Road, just at the end of Blue Water, in the same house where his Irish immigrant greatgrandparents raised six children and his grandparents raised eight (Tim has in his possession the original deed to the land, signed by Abraham Lincoln). Next door are his sister Colleen and her husband, who crewed together for years on Great Lakes freighters—speci‹cally lake carriers, the vessels that transport bulk cargoes only within the Great Lakes and thus are known as “lakers,” to differentiate them from the oceangoing vessels that reach the lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway and are called “salties.” Tim and Colleen attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse that was located a half mile up Center Road. Tim recalls as life-changing the day at age eight when he was awarded the privilege of standing on a chair in the classroom and pulling a chain that lowered a globe of the earth to face level so he could examine it closely. He was thrilled to discover that Old Mission Peninsula was visible on Michigan’s mitten. For the ‹rst time he realized that the world was not so large after all, and that no matter where he went on the planet he could ‹nd his way home. He has returned home now after retiring from a distinguished career in the diplomatic corps, with postings in nine nations, including Haiti, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union, and visits to at least 120 other nations. His last job was in Washington, as special assistant for international programs for Attorney General Janet Reno. Another neighbor, Alice Lardie, who is a Gilmore, grew up in our house in the 1950s and worked every summer in the family orchards, where neighbors’ houses now stand. Under the ‹rst dusting of snow every winter it is still possible to see the remains of the terraces where

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the rows of cherry trees grew on the hillsides—they undulate like fossil waves beneath the manicured lawns. Alice is not sure now if our house was built by her grandparents Andrew and Stella Gilmore or by her great-grandfather Gilmore, but she was always told that it was a Gilmore ancestor who homesteaded the property and planted the ‹rst cherries there. She is quite certain that none of them was ever a ship’s captain. Alice lives with her husband, Jack, kitty-corner from us, in a house her parents built in the late 1950s. It sits at the center of a large yard shaded by maples and decorated with a fascinating assemblage of found items. People often pull to the side of the road to photograph Alice and Jack’s yard. It is adorned with decorative birdhouses, windmills and weather vanes, old doors and windows set up between trees as if they are entrances to hidden rooms, brightly painted sections of picket fence that enclose nothing, and a corncrib hung with a plywood cutout of Santa Claus. On a tree is a sign reading, “Fine Food & Cabins ½ mile.” There’s an abstract sculpture constructed from what appears to be an aluminum TV antenna painted pink. A wooden boat leans against one tree, and wooden ladders lean against others. There are at least a dozen antique steel headboards from beds standing about. At the center of everything is a weather-beaten outhouse hung with washtubs. My favorite installation changes but is currently composed of two groups of demurely gesturing manikins dressed in formal evening wear and ›oppy hillbilly hats. One group is dancing. Another is standing before them on a low stage, holding sticks and broom handles as if they were guitars and ‹ddles. Behind them is a handwritten sign reading “Hoe-Down tonite.”

5 I work in the loft of an outbuilding that the previous owners called the “stone hut.” It is constructed of ‹eldstones, with a wood-framed loft beneath the rafters. The lower level is built partially into the side of a hill, with two wide doors opening at ground level in front. The loft has windows running along its sides, one facing the house and the backyard, the other facing East Bay. When we moved here the loft was in disre-

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pair, the roof shot through with leaks, the ›oorboards rotten, the walls shedding sheetrock spoiled by water damage. The lower level with its concrete ›oor had apparently been used to store farm equipment, the upper level as housing for the workers from Texas or Mexico who migrated north every summer for the cherry harvest. Gail’s father, Arden Johnson, spent a summer remodeling the loft and making it into my of‹ce. He reshingled the roof, braced the ›oor joists, ‹nished the interior in knotty pine. The gently arched ceiling and the golden shine of the pine make it seem like the cabin of a wooden schooner. The yard has always been a bit of a challenge. Years ago we cleared away some of the jungle out back, hacking away the ancient grapevines that wound as thick as forearms around the steel legs of a sixty-foothigh windmill tower, then pulled down the tower itself, watching breathlessly as it fell slowly at ‹rst then faster, crumpling when it struck the earth. And we felled three large maples, to allow more light in, and burned them for three winters in the ‹replace. Finally—and this was our wisest improvement—we poured a concrete slab over a portion of the driveway and made it into a small basketball court. Of course the work around an old house never ends. Long ago—even after removing carpets and re‹nishing wooden ›oors, insulating and rewiring, installing new drywall—we gave up hope of ever ‹nishing the interior. In the process we have made the place our own. One day not long ago a late-model Lincoln pulled into the driveway, and a man stepped out and came to the house. He was middle aged, Hispanic, a little nervous. The ‹rst thing he said when I opened the door was, “I picked cherries here when I was a little boy.” He was now a lawyer living in Minneapolis and was on vacation. On impulse he had stopped to see the old place. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid,” he said. “So many new houses now. I almost couldn’t ‹nd you.” I showed him around the house, then took him out to my of‹ce, in the loft where he and his family had once slept. We went downstairs and examined graf‹ti written on the stone walls and on the double wooden doors. He remembered writing on those same surfaces himself, forty years ago, though he was unable to ‹nd any of the words he

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had written. But the graf‹ti was familiar to him, and he remembered many of the names: “Robert Martinez” “Pete Martinez slept here 1964” “Lily Mendez lived here 1960” “Come on girls” “Gilbert Martinez 1964” “Fidel loves M” “Don’t right on my wall” “Who ever reads this is DUMB” “Los Diaz” “Juanita Diaz” “Recuerdoes de Jesse Diaz” “Two in a car Two little kisses Two weeks later Mr. and Mrs.”

We also found scribbled tallies of the work in the orchard. Cherries were picked by hand in those days, into buckets hung from canvas shoulder harnesses. When we were kids, my brother and I did the same work every summer at our grandfather’s orchard in Leelanau County. Pickers climbed stepladders twelve and fourteen feet high and coaxed the ripe fruit loose with their ‹ngers and let the cherries rain into the buckets. Once a bucket was ‹lled the picker descended to the ground and poured it into a rectangular wooden box called a lug. Three buckets would ‹ll a lug, and an industrious worker—in a good year, when fruit hung heavy on the branches—could ‹ll twenty-‹ve or thirty lugs in a day. Payment varied from year to year, depending upon the market, from as little as twenty-‹ve cents per lug to as much as a dollar. Years when the crop was abundant and the picking easy, payment went down; when the crop was light, decimated by late frost or hail storms, payment per lug increased. A tabulation written in pencil on a wall and dated July 27, 1957, shows one worker’s output in lugs and his earnings for a six-day week (with a small math error in his favor):

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9 17 10½ 25 23 22 106½ ⫻.50

$53.50

The harvest lasted four or ‹ve weeks. Families often worked side-byside in the orchard, sometimes three generations of pickers proceeding together from tree to tree down the rows, with the very young children asleep on blankets in the shade. The elderly women watched the infants or prepared lunch or stayed back at the house cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry. The elderly men worked if they wanted or sat on chairs in the shade. The man said he never enjoyed picking cherries, that he much preferred teasing girls and playing with his friends. He recalled that on Sundays after church his family would spread blankets beneath the maple in the front yard and have picnics of sandwiches made of sliced chicken and thick slices of tomatoes fresh from the garden. The men would drink beer, and the children would make daisy rings of their linked arms around the trunk of the big tree. Near that maple is a massive boulder rising a couple feet above the lawn. It is large enough for several people to stand on, but the sides slope outward, suggesting a much greater mass beneath the ground. It’s an unusual rock, probably a glacial erratic carried down from the far north. It’s the largest rock I’ve seen on Old Mission Peninsula. The man stepped onto its sun-warmed top. He struck a king-of-themountain pose. “I used to stand right here,” he said. He glanced at me to see if I understood, then shook his head and grinned because he didn’t understand it himself. “This rock is the same,” he said. “But everything else has changed.”

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Nearly every day for two decades I’ve walked with my dogs—‹rst Emily and now Toby—along the cobble-and-sand beach on East Bay or down Bluff Road, which runs along the edge of the bay. Or we’ve gone the other way, across the ‹elds behind our house to a large tract of orchards and woods owned by Martha Jamison, who runs one of the longest-established cherry farms on the peninsula and is rumored to be considering offers from land developers. Since my childhood perhaps half the orchards that once gave Traverse City reason to proclaim itself the Cherry Capital of the World have been replaced by housing developments. In recent years a signi‹cant number of the farmers who have remained in business (many of them are third- or fourth-generation owners) have replaced their cherries with wine grapes and hops, either of which can yield more income per acre than cherries. You often see uprooted cherry trees bulldozed into heaps the size of barns. On winter days the farmers drench them with fuel oil and set them ablaze. Usually I walk after lunch or at the end of the workday, sometimes with Gail, more often alone with the dog, in all seasons and all weather. By now we have gone out a few thousand times and have quite thoroughly explored the one or two square miles of shoreline, woodlots, meadows, orchards, and vineyards surrounding our home. In spring, summer, and fall I ‹sh the shore of the bay, gather mushrooms and berries in the woods, keep casual track of birds, trees, and wild›owers. Often I climb Nick’s Hill to get a better view of this twenty-mile-long landspur that divides the two bays, and to examine the graceful terminal moraines that are the most striking elements of the topography. If the walk takes me down Bluff Road I’ll greet a few neighbors—our great friends Jim and Mary Ann Linsell, whose three sons grew up with our sons and are virtually family; or Rex and Bonnie Hite, whose boys also grew up with ours and are family also; or Warren Wills, who played goalie on a hockey team until he was past eighty and grows the best vegetable garden in the neighborhood; or the woman at the corner with her shy adult son, neither of whom I’ve exchanged more than a few words with and whose names I don’t know, though somehow I know their high-spirited terrier is Daisy. There are days when I’m convinced that I know this place well. But of course I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

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Getting to know a place is a lot like getting to know a person. As we become acquainted with someone we discover their quiddity, the totality of qualities that de‹ne them. Personality is never revealed in just one characteristic, but in their entire being, from the words they say and the way they say them (“Speak so that I might see thee,” said old Ben Jonson), to the scent of their body, to their manner of walking, to that indescribable but palpable spirit or aura that becomes apparent only when you know someone intimately. Many have wondered if this package of qualities is what we mean when we talk about the soul. A place, too, has quiddity, or what the ancients called genius loci. It is what people usually have in mind when they talk about the spirit of a place. Many cultures have legends of genii, animated spirits that inhabit speci‹c hills, creeks, and valleys. We’re familiar with the word as the root of “congeniality”—that sense of well-being and welcome we feel when we arrive in a place that seems convivial to us. Find enough congeniality there, and you’re likely to say it feels like home. The spirit is in the details. In language, meaning builds gradually, letter by letter, word by word, but no word exists in isolation. Each is an organism surrounded by communities of association, memory, rootstock. Likewise with a place. Taken alone, every snow›ake, cloud, goldenrod, and meadow vole is just itself. Together, in their entwined relationship, they add up to a greater meaning: the ‹ngerprint of the place, its character, its spirit. Every house, stone, tree, the wind, signature scents and colors, the angle and intensity of sunlight, the rain and snow, the songs of birds and insects, the hum of automobile traf‹c and roar of surf—all add up to make a place itself, unlike any other. They create its ‹ngerprint. To borrow a word from my vintner neighbors: a place has terroir. Another word applies: “autochthony,” from the Greek for “of the land” or “emerging from the soil,” and suggesting deep involvement of the sort that results only after we have lived and worked in a place long enough to know it profoundly. Its history entwines with our own until they’re inseparable. When you walk the land, you see stories from your own life blended with it. There is the yard maple I pruned too late one fall, so that the sap poured from it in February. There is the low ground in Martha’s ‹eld, where one wet spring a ‹ve-acre pond formed, inspiring

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twelve-year-old Nick and his buddy Dan Linsell to haul the red canoe down from the rafters in our garage, portage it across the driveway, and set off paddling downwind on the new lake. When we become involved in a place we feel rooted to it and connected to the other people who live there and who lived there previously and will live there after we are gone. We care about it. We will defend it. Once you recognize what makes a place unique, it is unmistakable. You could be blindfolded, spun around, and led to the backyard of a home you have not seen in years, and the moment the blindfold is removed you would know where you were. You would know it by a conjoining of sensory perceptions too subtle for language, all working together to give the “feeling” of the place. But intuiting what is unique about a place and describing it are very different challenges. How can you ‹t an entire topography in a book? How can you cram that much between covers? William Least-Heat Moon made a valiant effort in PrairyErth, his exhaustive, 600-page study of Chase County, Kansas. He subtitled the book a “deep map” and stirred into it a slumgullion of everything he could ‹nd, including pioneers’ letters, interviews with current residents, catalogs of indigenous plants and animals, and lists of artifacts. In the end he despairs of capturing the truth of any place until someone ‹gures out how to put the actual place inside a book. It’s a despair I know at this moment, while looking over my own feeble efforts. To see a place clearly—to identify its essence, to see it with nothing between you and it, to truly know it—you have to note every color and texture and scent; inventory every bird, plant, mammal, insect, arachnid, microorganism; know all previous inhabitants and their impact on the place; excavate the surface layers until you’ve uncovered the bedrock. If I could I would seed these pages with beachstones, maple leaves, blue jay feathers, Petoskey stones, cherry pits, and arrowheads. Open the cover, and out would rush starlings and wood smoke and a cold wind off the lake.

5 I begin many winter days by ‹lling the bird feeders. At dawn, which in January comes at a civilized eight o’clock, the air is very cold, and the

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snow crunches underfoot. On the bay, wreathes of sea smoke hang above the water like curtains, blocking the far shore from sight. I put my boots on over my bare feet and a down coat over my bathrobe and walk outside with a bucket ‹lled with sun›ower seeds. In the few minutes it takes to funnel the seeds into the hanging feeders the black-capped chickadees arrive, ›itting fearlessly among the bare branches of the forsythia a few feet from me and making their impertinent low “chik-chik” and “dee-dee-dee” calls. Finches, redpolls, cardinals, and blue jays watch from the arborvitaes, their feathers plumped for insulation, but they won’t come to the feeders until I’ve gone inside. Winter’s austere chores are always a relief. It must be a residue of our agricultural past, when the season was a break from most of the labors of the farm. Despite marketers’ efforts to make every day of the week and every season of the year as much as possible like every other day and season, winter still brings respite. There’s relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to ‹ll with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds. My explorations of the neighborhood were enriched a few years ago when I read some books about winter ecology, a ‹eld of study that I was surprised to learn is relatively young. There was minor interest in it during the nineteenth century, and it earned some credibility during the 1940s, but it was not until a 1960 article in Scienti‹c American by William Pruitt, titled “Animals in the Snow,” that the subject began to gain acceptance among scientists. Pruitt pointed out that temperatures can be as much as 40 degrees warmer beneath a layer of snow than in the air above it, explaining why snow is so critical to the survival of many species. A winter without snow means death to many. Rodents that live under the snow are suddenly forced into the open. Whitephase hares are easily spotted by predators, and white-phase weasels have greater dif‹culty stalking their prey. Winter ecologists divide a snow-covered landscape into what they’ve named “nivean” zones (from the Latin niveus, for snow). The supranivean is the zone on and slightly above the surface of the snow.

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The intranivean is within the snow itself. The subnivean is where the snow and the ground meet. Deer that yard up in winter in cedar swamps live in the supranivean environment. Because deer, with their sharp hooves, are poorly suited for walking in deep snow, yarding is an essential behavioral adaptation. Other mammals, like the Canada lynx and its primary prey, the snowshoe hare, have large feet that enable them to run on top of the snow. There too, are snow ›eas, those tiny-as-pepper springtails that spend most of their lives in leaf litter and topsoil but appear on the snow’s surface on warmish, sunny days to feed on pollen and other organic materials. Springtails are among the most ancient of insects and almost certainly the most abundant, with thousands of species on every continent (and new ones being discovered all the time) and populations as high as several hundred thousand individuals in a square meter of soil. They are among the few insects that remain wingless their entire lives. Instead of ›ying they leap. Their jumps extend many times the length of their bodies—up to about three inches, by my measure—thanks to an organ known as a furcula that is folded forward when not in use, but when released has all the spring-loaded power of a triggered mousetrap. When there is not much snow on the ground, voles, mice, and other small mammals are forced to live part of the time in the open, a costly adjustment because it exposes them to cold and makes them vulnerable to predators. Once the snowpack exceeds six or eight inches, however, they burrow into the much safer subnivean world. It’s surprisingly hospitable there, at the interface between the snow and the ground. Insulated by the snow and protected from the eyes of predators, small animals establish well-used runways that connect the areas where they forage for seeds and dormant insects. Weasels and shrews patrol those runways as well, but rodent survival remains high as long as the snow is deep. The more you explore the barren “desert” of a winter landscape, the more abundant it proves to be. The seemingly barren white cover of the meadow—with a foot of new snow on top of another foot of crust—disguises a subnivean jungle of trodden clover and wild strawberry and crushed Queen Anne’s lace. Among them are runways made by voles, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands in a ‹ve-acre meadow.

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(I know because my neighbors complain that the voles girdle their cherry and apple trees.) All winter they scurry with purpose through tunnels they build in the zone where soil and snow meet, their ›oors packed, their roofs the granular hard snow that fell during the ‹rst storms in November. During a winter not long ago we were invaded by northern goshawks. Goshawks migrate to the Northern United States in unusually high numbers only during winters when populations of hares have collapsed in Canada. The hares are subject to a ten-year population cycle. When their numbers are on the increase, life is good for goshawks, lynx, and other subarctic predators, which then produce more offspring and suffer less mortality than usual. But when the hare population peaks there are more of them than the forage base can support, and they begin to die off, eventually forcing predators to go elsewhere. Goshawks migrate south, often in numbers suf‹cient to cause a stir among birders at crossing spots like Hawk Mountain in Minnesota and White‹sh Point on the Michigan shore of Lake Superior. They sometimes invade in numbers so great that they can decimate the resident population of ruffed grouse, prompting the downswing of that bird’s own ten-year population cycle. Population dynamics work that way: one cycle leads to another until they overlap, like rings on a pond. One day my neighbor Jack Olson called to invite me to join him for a few hours in his deer blind. Jack is a school guidance counselor with a ‹erce commitment to his students and an equally ‹erce passion for hunting and ‹shing. His blind was a wooden bench he had placed against a maple tree on the fringe of a cedar swamp. Hunting season had ended six weeks before, but Jack still went there often at sunset to sit in his blind, just to watch and listen. “Maybe it’s a waste of time,” he said, shrugging as if in apology. “But it’s something I like to do.” It was one of those cold still winter afternoons when the light turns blue as the sun goes down and your breath lingers in the air. We were dressed so heavily and the snow was so deep that by the time we slogged through a half mile of woods to get to the blind we were overheated. We sat on the bench and waited for our breathing to slow. The snow in front of us was trampled by deer that had come to the blind in the night to feed on boughs that Jack had hacked from nearby evergreens.

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We could see where one had bedded in the snow a hundred feet away. We inhaled the balsam-scented air and waited. It took about half an hour to start seeing things. First we saw chickadees. They bounded from branch to branch around us, almost close enough to touch, and seemed to be indifferent to our presence. When they hopped into ›ight the sudden brisk ›utter of their wings sounded like decks of cards being thumbed. One landed on a cedar bough a foot and a half from my face, and tilted its head as if trying to make eye contact. Its audacity made me laugh, and I remembered Aldo Leopold’s observation about chickadees: “Everyone laughs at so small a bundle of large enthusiasms.” A pileated woodpecker fell from the trunk of a tree a few hundred feet from us and soared, its head a startling red arrow. The bird was large and bold and seemed too heavy for ›ight, as if its bones were made of iron. It rose with every upbeat of its wings and fell a little between them. If it had missed a stroke it would have plunged to the ground like a hatchet. Big ›akes of snow began to fall. They disengaged from the sky and drifted down to settle on our coats like ashes or shavings. I tipped my head back and opened my mouth and caught a few as they fell, each a spot of cold expanding brightly on my tongue. Winter is never as leisurely as we imagine. Much of it is consumed, as is every season, by the obligations and chores of everyday life, and every job is a little more dif‹cult then. But winter hours are longer. It’s easier then to pay attention to birds, to read long books, to take up water-coloring and guitar and ›y-tying. There’s enough time to follow the trails of fox and ‹eld mice. There’s enough time to sit with a friend on a bench and notice the world. In a quiet voice, Jack said, “If you stay real still, sometimes the chickadees will land on your arm.” I did as he said. He was right. And if that’s wasting time, I’ll gladly waste a bunch of it.

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A Good Winter Storm

Once we would have been alerted by the throbbing of an arthritic knee or by the restless lowing of cows in the barn, but now the ‹rst warning comes from a fast-talking television meteorologist who can’t hide his excitement. In the storm I’m remembering (it was when our children were very young, our ‹rst winter in the house on Old Mission) Wisconsin is getting hit hard, and we are next in line. The meteorologist rubs his hands together with something very much like glee and rattles off a string of catchphrases, explaining that the Alberta Clipper, Saskatchewan Screamer, and Manitoba Mama are bearing down on us as a shift in the jet stream forces arctic air to curve south from Canada. Behind the cold front, like a streamer of smoke behind a train, comes the snow. We step outside and notice signs: the way the day is held in pincers by a calm that is perhaps the calm before the storm, the sky low and shifting in a general sluggishness shaded the gray of a bad mood, the air heavy, the mercury in the thermometer hovering a little below freezing and about to plunge. There are sure signs as well up at the market in Mapleton, where our neighbors are stocking up on bread, milk, microwave popcorn, and movies, and are so talkative and friendly they are nearly giddy. 82

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Something in us loves a good storm. We’re always a little hungry for it. Sometimes we get more than we want, but a storm in moderation is good for us. It forces our attention away from ourselves, and reminds us that there’s a big world out there. We get to wrestle brie›y with nature and be reminded (and we periodically need to be reminded) that we’re milquetoasts compared to that muscular lady. On the meteorologist’s radar the storm looks like the shadow of a giant bird. He tells us it will gain velocity as it crosses Lake Michigan, where it will pick up moisture and energy from the relatively warm water. By the time the storm reaches our shore the clouds will be black with freight and driven by winds of forty miles per hour. Late in the afternoon the ‹rst pellets of snow begin to fall. They are ›ung by gusts and rattle against the window glass like thrown rice. All the birds have disappeared from the feeders and are hunkering inside the clumps of arborvitae, their stomachs ‹lled with sun›ower and thistle seeds. If the storm lasts more than a day or two, some of the birds will never leave the shrubs. We’ll ‹nd their desiccated carcasses on the ground in the spring. We’re as ready as we can be, snug inside our bunkered house with a ‹re in the ‹replace. The cupboards and refrigerator are stocked, and candles and ›ashlights stand ready. We have novels to read, and Gail has knitting, and I have trout ›ies to tie. This is the hour when Aaron and Nick come to us wearing sweaters over their pajamas and ask if we think school will be canceled in the morning. Yes, we think so, but we’re reluctant to admit it, because we want no arguments at bedtime. The storm is slow to arrive. When we go to bed the air is thick with latency, and only a few snow›akes are falling. But they are big, the size of bottle caps, and the wind is picking up. In the morning we awaken to an unrecognizable world. Snowdrifts ‹ll the yard and driveway, and the north side of every tree is coated with snow. We turn on the radio and learn that schools are closed (and the kids bound cheering through the house), but the storm has fallen short of the intensity and fury that make a storm a blizzard—that apt word borrowed from early German settlers on the Great Plains, who after their ‹rst winters came away hollow eyed and muttering about the blitzartig, or “lightning-like” wind and snow that had struck their home-

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steads. Our storm brings holiday, not hardship. When the sun appears I put on heavy clothes, clear the driveway with the snowblower, and join the boys in digging tunnels through the drifts. By noon the county plow has cleared the road. Storms of that magnitude occur half a dozen times each winter here in northern Michigan. A few a year might be considered blizzards (meteorologists de‹ne them as storms that have low temperatures, driving snow, and gale-force winds, thirty-nine to forty-six miles per hour), and one or two are beasts. Once every decade or so comes a blizzard so notable it serves, like a death in the family or a move to a new city, as a milestone in our lives. One such milestone stands ‹rm in my memory. Before our children were born, when Gail and I were still students, we lived in the Upper Peninsula while I attended Northern Michigan University. We drove into Marquette for the ‹rst time on a bright January day in 1977 when fog had slipped in from Lake Superior and left everything it touched covered with a furry coat of rime. Snowbanks stood so high along the streets that pedestrians walking on them could have reached up and touched the telephone lines. Although Marquette is the largest city in the Upper Peninsula, it is a small and compact town built on hills that drop abruptly to the shore of Superior. In a typical winter it receives eighteen or twenty feet of snow. When the wind is up and from the north it charges from Ontario across 150 miles of open lake, throwing plumes of spray hundreds of feet inland and laminating every surface with ice. It is a place shaped and colored by weather. Our second winter there we rented an apartment a few blocks from downtown in an aging house we shared with three young men, a student and two lapsed students, who quickly became friends and began sharing our meals, music, books, and enthusiasm for the outdoors. The Boys, as Gail called them, were veterans of several Marquette winters. They took us cross-country skiing in the Yellow Dog Plains and snowshoeing to frozen Laughing White‹sh Falls and drove us to a local ski resort after it had closed for the night, and we hurtled down the slopes on dinner trays we had stolen from the university cafeteria. “Wait until it storms,” they said. “You’ve never seen a blizzard until you’ve seen a Lake Superior blizzard.”

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We woke one January morning to ‹nd the temperature outside had fallen to 35 degrees below zero. A few miles inland it was 50 below. When I stepped outside, I saw people up and down the street trying without success to start their cars, their hoods in the air like arms thrown up in surrender. Our ten-year-old van started without dif‹culty, and I passed a neighborly hour giving jump starts. In the few minutes it took to step outside and attach the jumper cables to a battery, my ears, ‹ngers, and toes would go numb, and my nostrils would swell with what felt like cotton bolls the size of walnuts. Most of the neighbors were students from southern Michigan, who had never experienced such cold. We exchanged wondering comments, watching as the breath that hung around our heads crystallized and fell to the ground as ‹ne snow. The storm came a few weeks later. Clouds moved in that morning, and the temperature climbed to the upper twenties, warmer than it had been in a month. The streets were coated with ice formed by snow that had been packed by traf‹c and frozen until it was as hard as concrete. All day the light was soft and strange. On television the weatherman grinned and said, “Get ready, folks. It looks like we’re in for a blinger.” It was reason, of course, for a party. We telephoned friends and told them to bring food and sleeping bags, then laced on our ice skates and sashayed down the middle of the street to the Red Owl supermarket, where we were met at the door by a weary manager who put up his hands and said, “Hey, hey, this ain’t Skate World.” Inside we slid around the aisles in our stocking feet, loading a grocery cart with beer, chips, and frozen dinners, greeting everyone we met. Young people were animated and talkative, their eyes bright. Old folks acted the way they always acted. We had noticed already that the people who boasted loudest about the dif‹culties of winters in the Upper Peninsula were usually recent immigrants, many of them from Detroit, a 450-mile drive south of Marquette, where winters are cold and damp but often free of measurable snowfall. Natives of the UP, many of them descended from Finns, Swedes, and Italians who moved to the region in the nineteenth century to work in the iron and copper mines, were apparently too accli-

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mated to the weather to give it much thought. To them winter was not a romantic adventure or a Currier and Ives abstraction, but a fact of life, like unemployment, taxes, and backaches. Their stoicism could be extreme. Our second autumn in Marquette I worked for six weeks repairing railroad tracks on the Chicago-Northwestern line near Ishpeming, a town ‹fteen miles inland from Marquette. Our crew of three included two native Yoopers, career railroaders who dreamed of being promoted to brakemen so they could spend their days riding in a heated caboose. I was taking a semester off from college to work and was grateful for the job, but I have never been so uncomfortable. It was a frigid, snowy November, and the wind was relentless. In the cold the steel tracks cracked under the pressure of cars loaded with iron-ore pellets. Our job was to remove the broken sections and replace them with lengths of new rail. We did this by hand, unbolting existing track with four-foot-long wrenches, cutting broken sections away with a gasoline-powered hacksaw, driving new spikes with sledgehammers. On a day when the wind was particularly brutal and a harsh sleet lashed our faces, I groaned and muttered something like, “Man, this is miserable.” I sensed immediate disapproval from the others. Nothing was said, but it was clear that I had violated a code. But for the Boys and Gail and me, no such codes applied, and we allowed ourselves to be awed by the weather. Outside the supermarket it had begun snowing—hard pellets that sheered at angles when the wind gusted, then dropped straight down and bounced along the street like excited molecules. By the time we got home, the wind blew with so much force that our house swayed, causing the water in the toilet bowl to rise and fall. The plastic sheeting our landlord had nailed over the windows bucked and snapped. We turned up the music, made dinner, drank beer, laughed, and danced. Friends arrived, loaded with groceries and talking in disbelief about the rising storm. Everyone took turns going to the door to watch the city become erased by whiteness. Gusts lifted snow into marauding clouds that swirled down the street and eddied into the openings between the houses, building drifts that by morning would reach to the eaves. Then stronger winds funneled in from the lake, carrying snow in streamers so blinding we couldn’t see the houses across the street.

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One friend came late, red faced and huf‹ng, stomping his feet on the ›oor to get circulation back in his toes. He had abandoned his car in a drift blocks away. No way, he said, is anybody going anywhere tonight. We made up the couches into beds and spread sleeping bags on the ›oor. The moment we switched off the lights, the wind came up louder than ever. It seemed to bellow with triumph. In the morning the windows were covered with elaborate, ‹nely patterned frost shaped like ferns. We scraped it with our ‹ngernails, and it fell in curls to the carpet. Breathing on the glass opened face-size holes that allowed us to look outside. The wind continued to blow, whipping storms of loose snow down the street. All the trees were bent with their backs to the wind and looked naked and shocked. Even the telephone poles appeared to be bent over in misery. Our neighbors’ houses seemed deserted, their driveways ‹lled with drifts that covered cars to their roofs. Someone turned on the radio, and an announcer said in a cheerful voice that classes at the university were canceled and that the state police had blocked all highways out of the city. It was perfect. It was why we had come to Marquette: to be tested by extremes of nature, to watch the world throw tantrums. Staying warm in the midst of all that cold and wind made us feel capable and self-reliant and mildly heroic. We turned up the music and danced around the living room cheering for ourselves. We were brewing coffee and scrambling eggs when someone walked onto our porch and knocked. We opened the inner door, then pushed hard on the storm door to break through the drift that had built in front of it. A swirl of snow and cold came inside. Standing before us were two middle-aged women in bulky, snowplastered coats, head scarves knotted tightly beneath their chins. They looked like Russian peasants dressed to go to the market. Behind them clouds of snow roared down the street. The ladies smiled shyly. In the lilting Finnish accent of a native, one of them said, “We’re collecting for da United Way.” My friends and I were ›abbergasted. “Did you walk here?” we asked. “Ya. Down da street. It’s our day for collecting.” It was unthinkable to turn them away. We invited them inside and ‹lled their donation envelopes with our pocket change. We offered

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them coffee and breakfast, but they couldn’t stay. They had many houses to visit, they said, and because of the condition of the streets they would have to do all their visiting on foot. They wanted to be ‹nished in time to have supper ready when their husbands came home from work.

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Reading Nature at Pine Hollow

February stayed cold, every day. In the mornings I doubted the day could be as cold as the one before, so I put on my insulated boots and goose-down coat and wool hat and mittens and stepped outside to see what progress the ice had made. And every morning I discovered again how cold it was. That month Gail and I lived in a house built to last a thousand years. Or so the owner said, and we believed her. The house called Pine Hollow was built in the woods above the shore of northern Lake Michigan on a foundation of boulders and glacier-scored ›agstones, supported by tree trunks for pillars and massive oak beams, and capped with a copper roof—enduring materials of bedrock density, harvested mostly from nearby. Here were mass and gravity stacked against time. There were twelve bedrooms and ‹fteen bathrooms. That’s just a guess. I kept losing count. By the time you walked from one end of the house to the other, then up the stairs and back across the second ›oor, then up to the third-›oor lofts with their additional bedrooms and baths and then climbed the circular stairs to the solitary stone turret that rose above the third ›oor, you, too, would have lost track of where you’d been and how many rooms you had visited. You would have been distracted along the way by the library with its sliding ladder and 89

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leather chairs; and by the main hall with its vast ‹replace fed by upright logs the length of fence posts; and by the movie-screening room with its reclining theater chairs; and by the wine cellar below the kitchen; and by the living room and its Steinway; and especially perhaps by the Olympic-size indoor swimming pool with its polished-steel footbridge arching over the water and the waterfall gurgling beneath; and probably by the two bars, well stocked and cheery, with clinking ice machines. Too much! the ‹rst-time visitor exclaims. And soon after: I’m not leaving until the police drag me away. One bathroom was decorated in white Italian marble—›oor, walls, shower, and countertops, even ceiling. Another was ‹nished in polished black granite with a faucet that activated a pool of water on the back of the countertop to silently rise until it over›owed as a gurgling stream rushed down a trough and became a waterfall cascading into the sink. This could get out of hand. The bath in the master bedroom in the second-›oor suite where Gail and I stayed contained a shower large enough for a basketball team; next to it was a stainless-steel whirlpool bath shaped like an enormous cream pitcher. All the bathrooms had heated ›oors. Also, their towel bars were heated, a luxury I wasn’t aware existed. Each bedroom was named for one of the world’s great lakes. We slept in the Lake Malawi room. It was the master bedroom of our suite, which included also the Lake Michigan and Lake Huron rooms, as well as a living room and a kitchenette. I worked in the Lake Baikal room, a studio with a ‹replace and an oak desk at a window looking over Lake Michigan. Secret passages connected the children’s rooms. One was accessed through a small port with an oval door just large enough to squeeze through; it connected a small bedroom designed like the stateroom in a sailboat to the loft of a larger bedroom with ceiling fans shaped like mechanical butter›ies. Another led to a hidden loft containing a small library with its walls lined with classic and contemporary children’s books around a child-scale table and chairs. Another led to a ladder that descended to the hallway adjacent to the pool.

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I spent much of every day in the main library, working at a sturdy wooden table, with the ‹replace at my back. Around the walls the bookshelves reached to the ceiling, the upper shelves made accessible by a wheeled ladder of the sort familiar to readers of Victorian novels. There was a section of bookshelves ‹lled with such novels. And other sections for contemporary novels. And poetry. And biographies. And nature books. And science, philosophy, and theology. Next to the ‹replace was a staircase leading to a loft where the art books were kept. But you get the idea. Quality and beauty, built to last. Would it last a thousand years? It seemed possible. We settled in and soon felt quite at home.

5 Every night the ice grew a few feet farther into the lake. Waves washed over it and receded and left accruing layers of ice that grew into miniature mountains and volcanoes. As the ice proceeded it left those structures behind in a broad arctic landscape of slabs and ice hills and drifted snow. Most days remained overcast, but when the sun came out it was transformative. The fresh snow glared a blinding white. Plates of ice, tilted and jumbled like sections of broken sidewalk, glowed with a penetrating blue light, as if lit from within. The open water steamed. Approaching as near as I dared I watched sluggish waves rise from the lake and heave against the ice, drum-gulping in secret hollows beneath. A moment after every wave, cone-shaped blowholes six or eight feet high expelled fountains of spray into the air. They wheezed like exhaling whales. The wind stunned my face until my eyebrows ached and my white breath streamed behind. It surprised me to realize that the water in the lake, so cold that it could kill a person in ‹ve minutes, was the warmest element here. I bent and examined the forward edge of the ice. It was white with trapped air and appeared molten, like candle wax after it has lique‹ed and congealed. It was a polished, milk-colored jumble, smoothed by wave slap. Balls of ice as small as marbles and as large as baseballs had been tossed up by the waves and were cemented to every surface.

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Shoved together and heaving in the swells were pancakes of ice the size of giant South American lily pads. Constant jostling had ground rings of slush around their perimeters, like the raised edges of ashtrays. Our senses are not passive. They reach into the world and seize sensations. They are hungry for them—and deprivation is one of the cruelest tortures. I shut my eyes and listened. After a moment I could hear the pinging of ice crystals in the water.

5 “Frazil” is the daiquiri-like slush that forms when the waves are too persistent to allow surface ice to form. Waves shape frazil into “pancake ice” or roll it into spheres of “ball ice.” “Black ice” (which we hadn’t seen yet that year) forms when the temperature is very cold and the water calm, allowing it to freeze with few air bubbles inside. Surface ice connected to land is called “shorefast” or simply “fast.” Where it touches the land is the “ice foot.” Should a large section of shorefast ice break free and go adrift it is called “pack ice,” though if it is smaller than about a third of a mile in diameter it is a “›oe.” Arctic explorers decided that an area of pack ice so large that its perimeter could not be seen from the masthead of a ship should be called an “ice ‹eld.” This lexicon brings to mind the famously exaggerated number of Eskimo words for snow. That the Inuit possess hundreds of those words has been a persistent ‹ction for nearly a century, and one that I have had a small part in perpetuating. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has demonstrated convincingly that Eskimo languages—speci‹cally the Inuit and Yupik language families spoken from Siberia to Greenland— use only about a dozen words for snow. The myth that there are hundreds originated when anthropologist Franz Boas mentioned casually in print in 1911 that Eskimos had four separate word roots for snow. Soon after, in a widely reprinted article, the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf exaggerated the count to seven, and after that the number multiplied. Countless magazine articles, scienti‹c papers, op-ed pieces, newspaper columns, textbooks, and popular books con›ated the ‹gure to dozens, then scores, and ultimately to as many as four hundred. Glenn Wolff and I were relatively conservative in our book, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of

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the Sky, where we wrote, “Dozens of variations—as many as 200, by some accounts—make it possible for Inuits and Eskimos to speak more precisely about snow than anyone on earth.” In 1986 anthropologist Laura Martin documented the myth’s pathway in an article in the journal American Anthropologist. Geoffrey Pullum shortly afterward wielded his own debunking ax in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, taking the trouble, as few have, to consult C. W. SchultzLorentzen’s Dictionary of the West Greenland Eskimo Language (1927), in which are listed only two root words for snow: qanik, for “snow›ake” or “snow in the air,” and aput, for “snow on the ground.” Variations of those roots add up to about twelve separate words for types of snow. How many do we use in English? A quick review of the literature of downhill skiing uncovers a long list, including powder, crud, crust, slush, pack, hard pack, packed powder, ballroom, boilerplate, and buffed. A complete lexicon needs also to include chowder, cold smoke, corduroy, corn, mashed potatoes, and the borrowed Russian sastrugi (for windblown drifts shaped like waves in water). Also windslab, glop, ›uff, neve, and sugar. And don’t forget Sierra cement, kitty litter, blue ice, and death cookies. Leave it to people who play in the snow to invent the best words for it. They help us understand why the Eskimo vocabulary hoax was believable in the ‹rst place: whether in play or at work, the more involved we become in something, the more complex is the language we invent for it.

5 It used to be common by late winter most years for ice to cover much of the northern third of Lakes Michigan and Huron, much of Lake Erie, and many of the bays of Ontario and Superior. On Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, where I live, freeze-up is the de‹ning event of each winter. West Bay is considered of‹cially frozen over when shorefast ice extends from the foot of the bay seven miles north to Power Island. For many years ice on the bay meant that ships carrying coal and other supplies could not reach Traverse City unless channels were ‹rst broken through the ice, a dif‹cult and dangerous job in the

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days before specialized ice-breakers. Thus a record of ice-up was kept every year. Because ice prevents water from evaporating, it is a vital factor in the ›uctuation of Great Lakes water levels. Whether the falling levels of the ‹rst decade of the twenty-‹rst century were a consequence of global climate change or a downswing in a natural cycle (many experts argue for a combination of both), it is undisputable that when the lakes fail to freeze over, evaporation continues year-round, and more water leaves the basin. Like long-term studies that have demonstrated that ›owering plants are blossoming earlier every year and animals such as the opossum are ranging farther north, ice-cover records are convincing evidence of an accelerating rate of “season creep.” One ‹eld of study is located right outside my own door. Michigan State University horticulturalist James E. Nugent has studied Grand Traverse Bay’s ice-cover records going back to 1851, the year they began being kept, and has concluded that the data indicates “a long-term gradual decline with a signi‹cant decline in the past 25 to 35 years.” For 150 years the bay froze over an average of 7 out of every 10 years. Since the 1970s, however, that average has declined sharply. In the last twenty years, it froze over only ‹ve times. Of course there are anomalies—during the winter of 1996, for example, the bay remained frozen for seventy-six consecutive days, the longest duration in 70 years—but the winters have clearly become warmer, ice and snow are less frequent, and evaporation from the lakes has increased. The century and a half of records kept for Grand Traverse Bay are among the most comprehensive in North America, but they are just a blip on the data screen compared to some elsewhere in the world. One of the most thorough collections of observable climate data was assembled recently by a team of University of Wisconsin limnologists. They gathered records of freeze and break-up dates on thirty-nine lakes, bays, and rivers in Canada, Russia, Japan, and several European countries and found that virtually all those sites indicate a consistent warming pattern over the past 150 years. Their study, “Historical Trends in Lake and River Ice Cover in the Northern Hemisphere” (Science, September 2000), concluded that those study sites were freezing an average of 8.7 days later in the fall or winter, and breaking up 9.8 days ear-

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lier in the spring than they did a century and a half ago. Since a temperature change of only .2 of a degree Centigrade in a year translates to a one-day change in freeze-up or breakup, the trend corresponds to a 1.8 degree C increase in average temperature during those 150 years. That ‹gure is consistent with computer models that predict that a relatively small temperature increase in the atmosphere will have profound physical effects on the earth’s surface. In two cases, records have been kept for extraordinarily long periods. On Lake Constance, which straddles the border between Germany and Switzerland, two churches, one on each side of the lake, have maintained a tradition since the ninth century of carrying a Madonna ‹gure across the ice to the church on the opposite shore. The churches have maintained a thousand years’ worth of ice-cover data in ledgers. A similar religious motive is behind records kept since 1443 on Japan’s Lake Suwa. That lake is the site of two Shinto shrines facing each other from opposite shores. Followers of Shinto believe that when the lake is frozen over, a female deity that dwells on one shore and a male deity on the opposite shore can venture onto the ice and meet in the middle of the lake. The freeze records of Lakes Constance and Suwa are consistent with Grand Traverse Bay: less frequent freeze-up in the past few decades corresponds exactly with rising atmospheric temperatures around the globe.

5 During an afternoon of roaring winds and ‹erce snow squalls I went outside and shoveled the snow off the hot tub and pried its cover loose. When I lifted it the hot water kettled clouds of steam in my face. I waved to Gail, and she ran out of the house and joined me. We kicked off our boots, dropped our bathrobes in the snow, and slid naked into the water. The steam rose around us and tore away downwind. Snow›akes streaked past or leaped in sudden updrafts to the sky. Around the tub and very close to the ground ›owed a silent, silken stream of drift, like smoke over a test car in a wind tunnel. We knew we couldn’t stay out for long. The water was as hot as we could bear it and still not hot enough. We kept lowering ourselves un-

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til we were submerged to our nostrils. Gail raised her head and shouted, “This is crazy!” I looked at her and laughed. Every hair on her head, on her eyebrows, even every eyelash, was white with frost. She appeared to be made up to play an elderly woman in a theater production. I touched my own hair: frozen. My eyebrows: frozen. We laughed every time we looked at each other. The windchill was twenty below zero, we were naked in a blizzard, and our eyelashes clicked when we blinked. We laughed and laughed. Then I thought of something. I asked Gail if she had doublechecked the door to the house to make sure it was unlocked before she closed it behind her. We both grew suddenly quiet.

5 Days when it was too cold to go outside I took sanctuary in the library, where I could pull a chair close to the ‹replace and read. What better time than winter, the most private of seasons, to lose oneself in books? In the same way that we go indoors to ‹nd refuge from winter storms, we go inward to seek sanctuary from ‹gurative storms. In the safe haven of a house, we ‹nd that books, our most intimate art form, are sanctuaries within a sanctuary. All day I raided the bookshelves in the library, climbing the ladder until I reached the top shelf near the ceiling, then climbing down, one step for every shelf, selecting books as I progressed. I added them to the stack on the table at the center of the room, slid the ladder a couple feet farther down the wall, and collected another armful. At my leisure I winnowed the books on the table to a manageable stack, returning those that did not interest me after all back to their places on the shelves, reading from the others, and taking notes as the urge struck. When the ‹re burned down to coals I added chunks of split hardwood from a rack that was magically ‹lled beside the ‹replace every morning. (It was odd how quickly I took this for granted, just as I soon took for granted that the dishes were magically washed and replaced in the cupboards and that the driveway and outside walks were magically cleared of snow every day. Nothing about it was magical, of course. The manager of the house, Fred, and the housekeeper, Susan,

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performed those and many other tasks ef‹ciently and cheerfully, and were good company, as well.) By the end of the ‹rst week I had circled the library and was back at my starting place. I began another circuit, and of course found many books I had missed the ‹rst time around. Any library inspires expectation, anticipation, the excitement of discovery. But this brought to life my childhood fantasy of being locked alone in the old Carnegie Library at night, with all the stacks waiting to be explored, and with a month of nights ahead.

5 Books are epitomes of nature. If we think of words as organisms—vital, evolving, living within a community—then a book is the ecosystem in which they live, and a library is a world for books. Or, to take a larger measure: a book is a world, a library is a galaxy, and all the libraries together are a universe. Nature and books have so many similarities that they can serve as correlatives. Both invite inspection, discussion, evaluation. Both are meticulously cataloged. They can be monotonous or varied, mindnumbing or exhilarating, sluggish or quick. They connect in unexpected ways. Their boundaries shift. They are endlessly diverse. They embrace or freeze out—are open to us or closed—depending upon whether we are open or closed. They excite the sense of wonder and satisfy the itch of curiosity, and in the end leave us both satiated and hungry for more. They are ordinary until, upon closer examination, they become astonishing. Reading has always seemed mysterious, even holy, to those untrained in the art of reading, though it’s useful to remember that we’ve been reading nature much longer than we’ve been reading words on pages. In many cultures the ability to decipher meaning in tea leaves, the entrails of animals, meteorological and astronomical phenomena, and other natural “texts” is a gift of the highest esteem. The conceit of nature as a book was easy to accept when almost everyone accepted that the book had an Author, and when “reading” nature was seen as a way to glimpse the mind of God. But what if nature’s book turns out to

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have been written by chance? Does it matter to the reader? We are quite capable, after all, of reading, learning from, and enjoying books without knowing anything about their authors. Even if the universe turns out to be ultimately unintelligible, we constantly decipher signs and read texts of every sort as we make our way through our lives. Navigators ancient and contemporary read the stars to guide them over the sea—and sometimes read also the mythological stories in the constellations. When hunters study tracks, scat, antler rubs, and other evidence left behind by animals they say they are “reading sign.” Reading the weather is an everyday augury. We learn as much about other people from reading their body “language,” facial expressions, and tones of voice as we do from the words they speak. Anglers and canoeists and river pilots read rivers, as Mark Twain noted in Life on the Mississippi: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book— a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” The act of reading always addresses the question of whether there is more to the world than surface. Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar identi‹ed an essential problem with that idea: “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things . . . that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.” Some days we see the surface in ‹ne focus and are happy to lose ourselves in it. Some days we see nothing because we are lost in our inward view. Some days we see everything, or want to, and rage against the limitations of our imperfect senses and pathetically insuf‹cient knowledge. We intuit that if we could see a little fuller and hear a little deeper and touch more than just a few rough pebbles, we would ‹nally know not just the surface of the world, but what lies beneath it. One reason we read books is to connect with other minds and ‹nd a universality of experience. They are lifelines we throw to one another so we can pull close enough to shout our amazement at the size of the ocean.

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5 Gail commuted to work every weekday, while I stayed at Pine Hollow. One morning she left as I was making breakfast in the kitchen in my bathrobe. When she returned in the evening I was in the library, still in my bathrobe. “You’re very comfortable here,” she said. “Right at home.” “It’s possible you were some sort of aristocrat in a former life,” she said. “I was thinking maybe a prince in an Italian city-state.” “Or a rich industrialist’s lazy son.” “Why not the rich industrialist himself?” “Not industrious enough.” Zing!

5 Reading the stars, reading the strata in a bluff, reading the entrails of a cat are efforts to learn, through signs in the physical world, where we’ve been, where we’re going, and perhaps how best to live our lives. In the Pine Hollow library I read a book about phrenology, the nineteenth-century science of reading bumps on the skull. Phrenology operated on the assumption that surface bumps correspond to folds and contours on the brain beneath, allowing a trained reader to determine the character, temperament, abilities, morality, and personality of a subject. Charles Darwin’s father, a physician, believed passionately in phrenology, as did Robert Fitz-Roy, the captain of the Beagle, who at ‹rst refused to allow Darwin to join the expedition because of the suspicious shape of his nose. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, a founder of the discipline, brought phrenology to North America in 1832 with a series of lectures in Boston and was welcomed as if he were a messiah. Not only was it now possible to learn one’s own tendencies and predilections, but one could manipulate the bumps in order to enhance admirable qualities and diminish contemptible ones. For a people already drunk on independence and self-reliance this promise of

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personal improvement was, in the words of literary biographer Justin Kaplan, “like drinks on the house.” The trend swept the country. Not even Spurzheim’s death of typhus not long after he arrived in Boston (called “a calamity to mankind” by the Massachusetts Medical Association) could cool the phrenological fever infecting America. For more than thirty years it was considered valid science. Emerson, Daniel Webster, Henry Ward Beecher, and Oliver Wendell Holmes had their bumps read. Of those luminaries, only Holmes remained skeptical. Afterward he said that reading bumps on a skull was like trying to determine how much money was in a safe by feeling the knob on the door. Holmes was equally dismissive of his contemporary Walt Whitman, who was a convert to phrenology. Asked his opinion of Leaves of Grass, Holmes said the poems reminded him of “fugues played upon a big organ which has been struck by lightning.” Whitman threw himself into phrenology with enthusiasm. During a session with Orson Fowler, the leading American practitioner, Whitman was proud to learn, and for the rest of his life would take pains to con‹rm, that his character traits included such tendencies as “Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self-Esteem,” as well as the less ›attering trait of “Indolence” (which he celebrated also). He was diagnosed as well with a potentially dangerous leaning toward “the pleasure of Voluptuousness and Alimentiveness, and a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others.”

5 Reading of every sort makes us guardians of the collective memory. A reader is always on a quest to understand words and clouds, the songs of language and the laughter of children, the stories on the page as well as the stories in the woods and on a stranger’s face. The subtext of all that reading is that life is damned strange, but the world, or parts of it at least, can be deciphered. Rooting around in that private library on the lake, with snow drifts outside the windows cresting like waves ›ash frozen in place, I became aware of how lavishly entwined every book is with nature. In her mesmerizing book of photos Bookworm, the photographer Rosamond Purcell has collected strange and strangely beautiful images of lost or

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abandoned books captured in the process of returning to the earth. Ferns grow from their spines, their pages curl and brown like autumn leaves, and moss creeps across their covers, reminding us that every physical book grows literally from nature. In China the ‹rst books were written on strips of bamboo sewn together, in Egypt on papyrus made from the pith of reeds, in the Middle East on slabs of clay hardened in the sun, in Europe on the skins of animals. Purcell’s photographs demonstrate that books abandoned to paper-eating worms, termites, weather, water, mice, and time soon fall into ruin and decay, crumbling into their constituent molecules. Maybe Purcell was inspired by Thoreau, who wrote in his journals: “I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature’s primitive wildernesses . . . Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”

5 The shore remained locked by drift ice. Time itself seemed to have frozen. When I walked outside the cold air bored through my nostrils and settled in my lungs. The wind blew a constant ground blizzard that circled behind trees and buildings in the same way that a river eddies around rocks. The snow was like ›ung dough, plastering the north side of every tree. The sky stayed low and dark, and the temperature never climbed above 12 degrees. People liked it, or they didn’t. In town, at the grocery store and restaurants, you could tell at a glance which camp they fell into: the aroused bright eyes and red cheeks of the af‹rmatives, the defeated demeanor of the naysayers.

5 Few books have been written with a greater awareness of their place in nature, both human and wild, than Leaves of Grass. Whitman left it to

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readers to unravel the pun in the title. We leaf through a book, we read a summary on the ›yleaf. The reeds from which ancient papyrus was made are a type of grass. Grass is the most ubiquitous of all plants, found on every land, in variations so numerous that they have never been completely cataloged by taxonomists. It is essential food for our domestic animals and therefore for us as well. When Whitman cried, “I spring from the pages into your arms,” he gave voice to every book that has ever been read—and to every river that has been ridden upon, every mountain that has been climbed, every wild›ower or trout or wild fruit that has ever been gathered, examined, consumed. The world springs into the arms of every good reader. Like a living plant, Leaves of Grass was vital and organic. It was rooted in the physical world. And it proliferated. Whitman continued revising it virtually his entire adult life, adding poems the way a tree adds growth rings. The ‹rst edition, in 1855, contained 12 untitled poems in 95 pages. By the sixth edition, in 1881, it had grown to 293 poems in 382 pages. For Whitman, the act of reading interlocked the reader with the book, its author, the earth, and the universe. He shared with Shakespeare the ability to draw strikingly fresh correlations between emotions and the objective world, or between “Me” and “Not-Me,” a relationship Whitman called “the most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man.” Not many people today believe that clouds and rain and the song of the hermit thrush are texts written for our edi‹cation or that we can ›ip the pages of meadows, woods, mountains, and oceans to read the universe’s secret text, but those ideas linger in our vocabularies. Even the least weather savvy of us recognizes the mood suggested by a black cloud. We know about roaring wind and crashing thunder and the melancholy of a rainy day. We understand intuitively that the outside world often seems a re›ection of our inner, personal ones, and thus recognize the emotional content of natural images. It’s understood. It’s a base upon which language is constructed.

5 One morning when the wind was calm, six inches of new snow covered every surface. Near the shore I found the strike marks of large

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wings imprinted in the snow. The imprint was as detailed as a fossil in shale. Every barb of every feather was visible. And drama was revealed. Coinciding with the wings were the tiny dash-mark tracks of a mouse or vole running in a line across snow that was otherwise as untracked as an empty page. Here were signs telling a story that could be read: in the darkness, a mouse caught in the open and scurrying to ‹nd cover; the sudden silent swoop of the owl, its wings ›aring the moment before it struck; the stab of talons; the bird pushing off from the snow with its wings and rising into the air, the limp rodent hanging beneath.

5 The lake was dark most days, colored gray, pewter, silver, or lead. The sky stayed dark, too, and low and faintly ominous. In the evenings, after the wind stilled, you could stand outside in the darkness and hear the snow fall steadily with a faint rustling sound like caterpillars chew-

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ing leaves. By morning all the evergreen boughs and fence posts and benches in the garden were topped with fresh caps of snow. Every ›ake of lake-effect snow is a piece of the lake migrating inland. The idea that the lakes are there and we are here is mistaken. The lakes constantly in‹ltrate the land as snow, rain, ice, lake-cooled wind, and as slowly ›owing aquifers deep in the gravel and sand beneath us. Stay here just a few days, and you already carry the lake in your veins. When the ‹rst thaws swell rivers in March, the big rainbow trout called steelhead are overcome with the procreative urge and leave the depths of the Great Lakes to swim up tributaries in search of gravel. They carry the colors of the big lakes with them—silver and blue, with pink blushes on their ›anks and gill-plates. They live most of their lives in cobalt depths, miles from shore, charging through schools of emerald shiners. When they enter a river they drag a portion of the big lake’s power inland. If we catch one and eat it we make its ›esh our ›esh and thus are eating the lake as surely as we drink it and breathe it. The more closely we look the less clear is the distinction between “here” and “there,” between Whitman’s “Me” and “Not-Me.”

5 Just as water can be made into a more interesting beverage by ‹ltering it through grapes, nature can be altered in interesting ways by ‹ltering it through a consciousness. Photographs, paintings, and other artistic representations of nature reveal as much about the artist as they do about the world, doubling or tripling their complexity. For many of us, human interpretations of the world have more to say than the world itself. No wonder we ‹nd artistic responses to nature so fascinating. To read words that capture some hidden essence of a moment in the world can be as satisfying as the experience itself. Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Housekeeping, transforms an ordinary winter moment into an extraordinary one when she writes: “Sometimes the sun would be warm enough to send a thick sheet of snow sliding off the roof, and sometimes the ‹r trees would shrug, and the snow would fall with surprisingly loud and earthy thuds . . .” It’s that “shrug” that electri‹es us. We’ve watched sun-loosened snow fall from conifers, have noticed the

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way boughs spring free from the released weight, but might never recognize its similarity to the human gesture if not alerted by Robinson. The image is not quite anthropomorphic, because we understand that it is a trope veri‹ed by observation. The human element in the image excites us. It transforms words into experience. Few events in nature have inspired more ecstatic poetry and music than the songs of birds. Thoreau’s journals are ‹lled with examples. He writes that the wood thrush’s “cool bars of melody” make him think of “. . . the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs.” The hermit thrush, says John Burroughs, “. . . suggests a serene religious beatitude as no other sound in nature . . . ‘O spheral, spheral!’ . . . ‘O holy, holy! O clear away, clear away! O clear up, clear up!’ interspersed with the ‹nest trills and the most delicate preludes. It . . . seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains in his best moments.” John Muir heard in the song of the American dipper the mountain rivers it inhabits: “. . . his music is that of the streams re‹ned and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the ends of mosses and falling into tranquil pools.” Here is Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher on the same bird: “. . . a burst of rippling notes . . . a clear, sweet song . . . crystal tinkles, which matched so perfectly the icy purity of the winter night.” And Roger Tory Peterson on the song of another Western species, the canyon wren: “A gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down a scale . . .” And Donald Culross Peattie on the white-throated sparrow: “. . . the white-throat’s touching chromatic pierces the heart; it blends sadness and happiness . . . a song like a cry, a song that speaks of the antiquity of time, the briefness of life.” And Thoreau, again, on the winter wren: “It was surprising for its steady and uninterrupted ›ow . . . It reminded me of a ‹ne corkscrew stream issuing with incessant lisping tinkle from a cork, ›owing rapidly.”

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5 The early twentieth-century ornithologist F. Schuyler Mathews was a passionate musician who became dissatis‹ed with all previous efforts to transcribe birdsong phonetically. For example, he considered “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody” an inadequate representation of the song of the white-throated sparrow, though it was so commonly accepted in his day that many people knew the sparrow by the name “Peabody-bird.” He argued that the song could just as easily be articulated as “Sow wheat Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ley,” or “All day whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’.” The same was true, he said, for every phonetic interpretation of every bird’s song. Such imprecision was intolerable to him. To correct it he labored for twenty years on an elegant solution: he transposed the songs of 127 species into dots on staves, and published them in one of the earliest identi‹cation guides to birdsong, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, A Description of the Character and Music of Birds, Intended to Assist in the Identi‹cation of Species Common in the United States East of the Rocky Mountains (1904; expanded and reprinted in 1921). Although Mathews’s scores can be played on a piano, he insisted that to perform them accurately they must be whistled. It would take a whistling prodigy, however, to do justice to some of those songs. They include dazzlingly complex chords made by birds equipped with twin vocal mechanisms that make it possible for them to sing two notes simultaneously. Also represented are songs composed of cascades of notes—virtual waterfalls of notes—as dense as sixty-four to the bar. And there are songs to be whistled that we would probably never hear, such as the “strident and insectlike” song of the grasshopper sparrow, which Mathews admits is pitched “so high that 9 out of 10 people can’t hear it singing 30 feet away.” When Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Ravel, and other classical composers incorporated birdsong into their music, it usually played a minor role and amounted to little more than (to borrow a phrase from music historian Christopher Dingle) “stylized babbling.” Birds had a far more profound effect on the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose life with birds was a true artistic partnership.

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Dingle notes in The Life of Messiaen that bird song forms a “sonic aviary” in the composer’s work, and was an ingredient in virtually everything he composed for forty years. His long and complex suites were based upon a lifetime of careful observations, audio recordings, and notations of avian songs he collected during much of his life, in many locations around the world. Among his major works, “Reveil des oiseaux” (Dawn Chorus, 1953), “Oiseaux exotiques” (Exotic Birds, 1955–56) and “Catalog d’oseaux” (Bird Catalog, 1956–58) are notable for making bird songs prominent templates for his piano and orchestral ›ights. But don’t assume that this is bluebird music. There is nothing sweet or innocent about it. Unlike the pastoral, lyrical melodies of his birdinspired predecessors, Messiaen’s bird songs are the foundation of a powerful, dissonant, and deeply affecting response to the brutalities of the twentieth century. As a soldier in World War II Messiaen was captured and held in a German prison camp and witnessed ‹rsthand appalling violence and suffering. His music is bold, original, and unsentimental, modeled upon the structures of birdsong, but more reminiscent of the industrial clamor of steel mills and armament factories than of wood thrushes and nightingales. It is as if an army of Nietzschean warrior birds were on the march, keeping cadence by slamming their swords against their shields. Many of the compositions are for piano, but could be performed with hammers on trash cans. It jars us out of any lingering romance about songbirds and sunsets, and demonstrates that our usual emotional responses to nature are painfully limited. Once and forever it obliterates the self-›attering ‹ction that birds sing for our enjoyment. Birds sing for their own reasons—as did Messiaen.

5 One night near the end of the month I stepped outside into bitter cold and listened to the wind roaring in the treetops and the waves pounding against the ice. The night was very dark, but it was easy to imagine the scene on the lake. The tops of the waves being shredded to spray. The white tracers streaming behind. The lethal breakers. Only a fool would be out in that howl. The wind would lacerate. It would strip you

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of your hat and coat, then your sweater and jeans, and the rings from your ‹ngers, and the ‹llings from your teeth, and your memories and prejudices and learned lessons and acquired habits. It would shred the ›esh from your bones and toss your naked skeleton on the beach. What if a stronger wind were to blow? What if a storm rose over the Paci‹c, swept through the northwest forests, mounted the Rockies, hurtled down the granite heights and the snow-smothered foothills, and rushed across a thousand miles of chaparral and wheat ‹elds, sucking energy from the land, a land hurricane, growing to a gale in Alberta, a tempest in Saskatchewan, cracking its cheeks over the Dakota Badlands and the Minnesota plains, until it burst upon the waters of Superior and Michigan, where it plowed up waves as big as warehouses? What if it swept the lakes clean? What if it carried off every dock, pier, wharf, and jetty? Leveled every skyscraper and condominium? Washed away the oil derricks and chemical factories? What if it swept away the fur traders with their jugs of rum intended to despoil? The ocean freighters and their ballast tanks teeming with biological pollutants? The rusting re‹neries spewing intestinal waste-gas ›ames? The mercury-tainted sediments at the bottoms of harbors? The PCBs and dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons? The gas substations and oozing land‹lls and aquifer injection wastedisposal schemes? The liquid manure and nitrogen fertilizers that clog our waters with rotting algae? The bulldozers and front-end loaders? The coal-burning power plants? The enriched uranium? The sweetheart deals and back-room agreements, the fat contracts for brothers-in-law? The politicians with outstretched palms? The bureaucrats and spin doctors and slick CEOs who claim they

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are creating jobs for a working class they secretly despise while earning twenty million dollars a year to drive corporations into the ground? The lumber companies and mining companies and petroleum companies and every other locust industry that attacks, harvests, destroys, and moves on? What if it erased every human folly? Would we be left with the lakes as they were before? Can they ever be the way they were? And where would we be? I returned inside the house, to the library of this mansion that would be swept away as well. Pulled a chair close to the ‹replace, sat watching the ›ames. Later I stood at the window and tried to look outside. But I could see only snow›akes, streaking across the glass like a storm of meteors.

5 In the sanctuary of the house, while waves rushed down the lake and snow drifted against the sides of the house, I wondered if our enchantment with literary and artistic interpretations of nature is just biological chauvinism. Are we like dogs, interested in a juniper only if another dog has pissed on it? Surely there is more to us than that. We’re as fascinated with scent signatures as any dog, but we want to know the juniper as well. Being in the world requires so much of our attention, and is shot through with so many perplexities, that we look to the observations of others for con‹rmation and elaboration. We require insights, not just bare statements of fact. Saying “the waves came, one after another,” isn’t enough; it doesn’t satisfy. The statement is too vague, and could as easily refer to the idea of waves, and though we can recognize in the words something suggestive of our own experience, they are too far removed from the actual noisy, muscular waves we watch collapsing against the shore. We turn to artists—we require them, we crave them—because in words, music, paint, clay, and photographic images they distill some of the power and mystery we have perceived, ›eetingly, in our own glancing encounters with the world. Which must be why sentences in Ulysses, for example, can seem as vivid as the waves they describe. Read the words aloud, and you can see

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the whitecaps, feel the impact of the breakers, hear the backrush: “They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled . . . In cups of rocks it slops: ›ow, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It ›ows purling, widely ›owing, ›oating foampool, ›ower unfurling.” Words are not static and lifeless substitutes for reality, they are living examples of it. They are not only representations of objects, they are objects themselves. We might never witness the ocean, but we can see the Atlantic in Thoreau’s Cape Cod—and see a singular mind at work as well: “The waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.” And we can sense water’s weight in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, “. . . the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muf›ed thuds, like logs falling, on the shore . . . The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors . . .” And ‹nd, in Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, his memoir of a year on the beach at Cape Cod, the waves and the sensations they evoke not merely verbalized, but ampli‹ed: “Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great water tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, ri›e-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea.” And when he writes of the breakers charging the coast—“the wind meets them in a shock of war, the chargers rear but go on, and the wind blows back their manes . . . Sea horses do men call such waves on every coast of the world”—we will always afterward think of warhorses when we see wind-stripped waves, and the image augments the sight and presses it deeper into memory and imagination. The encounter adds depth to our vocabulary and heightens our experience of the world. The more names we have for things, the more things there are to name. The more we see, the more there is to see. Words can seize us and shake our sensibilities awake. Hearing them we know instantly, with a synaptic snap of recognition, that this is what

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waves look like, sound like, feel like, even as we know that words are nothing like waves, that phrases like “sea horses” and “turbaned warriors” are only approximate, that ‹gurative language, even at its most splendid, always falls short. We’re electri‹ed because, against all odds, we’ve discovered glimpses of reality in the words, are reminded how it feels to be alive, and have con‹rmed that our perceptions are shared, that the world is real and tangible, in some ways describable, and that we are not alone. Read the signs. They are clear. They say everything passes, nothing is permanent. They tell us we must pay attention. They say: live while you live, damn it. They say: you have plenty of time. They say: you have almost no time at all. Meanwhile, the waves keep coming. I watched them those cold days in February rise and batter the ramparts and parapets of ice along the shore and felt the centuries behind them. The waves arrived metronomically, ten seconds apart. Time was beating against the shore. It had rounded stones one wave-tumble every ten seconds for ten thousand years, buried them in ice for a hundred centuries, then rounded them for another ten thousand years. And the work has just begun. If you aren’t afraid of feeling small, go to the sea. If you don’t mind feeling brief, watch waves.

seven

Fugue and Storm

My neighbor John Wunsch, who is a gifted classical guitarist and composer, told me in passing one day that the fugue is the musical form that most closely approximates the interconnectedness of things in nature. The idea was new to me.* I could think of many ways in which music and nature correspond, from the songs of birds to the melodies in mountain streams, from the mythical chiming of the spheres to the structural symmetries of the Golden Section as seen in musical octaves, pinecones, and the shell of the chambered nautilus. And how can we forget the drumbeating of our own hearts? Or the notion that we are the only primate that sings and thus share a spirit-bond with whales *It was new also to Dr. Peter Webster, the John Beattie Professor of Music Education and Technology at Northwestern University School of Music. I wrote to Dr. Webster and asked, “Might it be valid to argue that the fugue is the musical form that most closely approximates systems in nature?” His response: “YES, you may be really on to something there! The fugue is one of the most complex forms there is because of the vertical and horizontal relationships that must be worked out so carefully—while, in the end, sounding so natural! Indeed like the mysterious nature of nature itself. Bach’s music lends itself to such things.” I was proud of myself, as if I were a student who had raised his hand and blurted a profound insight. For the moment, at least, I forgot that I had poached that particular insight from John Wunsch.

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and songbirds? But the fugue? For me it brought to mind only solemn organ chords echoing in Gothic cathedrals. So I collected a stack of CDs from the library and made my way through them, resolutely at ‹rst, then with growing excitement. In the counterpoint of voices, the contrapuntal melodies, the complex structures built around themes, even in the word fugue itself, from Italian cognates for “›eeing” and “chasing,” were analogues with the natural world. An ecosystem is composed of air, soil, water, and organisms existing in concert with one another and their environment, every element essential to the health of the system. Likewise, a fugue is composed of notes, chords, and phrases that are linked and interrelated, making each essential to the architecture of the whole. If we can think of a musical composition as an ecosystem, and surely we can, then it should be possible to investigate its natural history. Inevitably I was drawn to Bach. Most of the organ and vocal fugues left me cold—too evocative of cheerless Sunday services during my childhood*—but “The Art of Fugue” and “Goldberg Variations” electri‹ed me. Every morning that winter I entered my of‹ce, switched on the electric heaters, and cranked up the music. Snow had fallen abundantly that year, until the stone hut was nearly buried beneath it, its roof rounded over and drooping, the windows half obscured by drifts. It had become a hobbit house. I would stand inside at the window looking across the snow-covered meadow to the frozen shore of Lake Michigan, and listen to the opening variations of Vladimir Feltsman’s “Goldberg,” or, alternately, the Emerson String Quartet’s performance of “The Art of Fugue.” I continued to listen as I organized the papers on my desk, then left the music playing all morning as I worked. After a few weeks of this routine the words I wrote seemed to grow out of the

*I am of that tribe who, at an early age, was frightened away from classical music by wooden pews, droning sermons, and a parent’s hand clenched on the back of one’s neck. While ‹dgeting in those pews we learned the truth about time: it is not our friend. The frozen clock freezes the spirit; every interval of enforced silence strangles a unit of vigor. Thus we exited childhood convinced that violins and pipe organs are instruments of internment performing anthems of sanctimony. No wonder we turned so ardently at age twelve to electric guitars and secular humanism.

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music, as if it were the soil in a garden. Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to suggest that my work that winter had some of Bach’s energy in it, and some fugal qualities.

Sometimes I would turn the music very loud, lie on my couch with the lights out, close my eyes, and allow my imagination to ›ow. I thought “Goldberg Variations” was made of winter sounds. As the episodes unfurled I imagined sitting on a bench in a city on a cold winter afternoon—it was Central Park, on the terrace above the Wollman skating rink—watching processions of people walking past. Their faces revealed variations on the themes of Joy, Longing, Loneliness, Hope, Sorrow—the major and minor emotions of the human symphony. From within one of the slower variations stepped an elderly man, disappointed in life, yet discovering in a series of slow astonishments a compensating grace. A faster variation brought forward a woman in her forties, in love with someone but savvy to love and already preparing for heartache. Another conjured a young man, hopeful but uncertain, agonizing over a woman he feared was beyond his reach. From another stepped a beautiful young woman (could it be the woman the young man agonized over?), walking briskly across the terrace and unaware of the waves of longing she left in her wake. In those wind›ushed faces I saw a sort of Russian stoicism, an impression that might have been suggested by pianist Vladimir Feltsman, whose performance

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of “Goldberg Variations” had been recorded live at the Moscow Conservancy, which may also be why my imagined parade seemed to be peopled from the stories of Chekhov and the novels of Turgenev. In their faces I saw brightness or dullness, eyes alive and intelligent or deadened and thoughtless, a head raised in de‹ance or lowered in dejection, eyebrows disdainful or alert or ›irtatious or skeptical. Even the slightest gestures revealed the shapes of lives. I realized that such subtleties, revealed so deftly in the music, were too intricate for words. Not for the ‹rst time, I envied music’s supple vocabulary. But nature’s language is supple as well, and, inspired by Bach, I began collecting variations on natural themes and noting fugal structures in the world around me. My catalog grew to include dune grasses and goldenrods, warblers and ‹nches, Lake Malawi’s cichlids and Appalachia’s stream darters, varieties of apples and vintages of wine, the shapes of snow›akes and crystals, and the hexagonal structures of beehives and soap bubbles. And I revisited a fascination with the fractal similarities among dendritic systems: rivers and their complex branching into ever-smaller tributaries; the branches and roots of trees and the veins in their leaves; tree-shaped genealogies in heirloom Bibles; the human circulatory, nervous, and lymphatic systems (and illustrations of them on transparencies that when overlaid produce a multilayered composite of the body)—branched and interlinked systems inhabiting the earth with such abundance that they can make the planet itself seem like a living organism. During walks along the bay, watching waves strike the ice-lined shore, I thought of things that come in waves. Sound. The electromagnetic range of gamma, X-rays, UV light, visible light, microwaves, radio waves. Barbarian invaders. The gravitational harmonies of deep space, which send whorls of dust and gases spiraling between the stars. An aurora’s beams. Weather fronts. Wind on wheat ‹elds and trees (my son Aaron, at age nine, on a hilltop, watching the waves roll across the forest canopy beneath us: “So that’s what the wind looks like”). Labor contractions. Remorse. Applause. The spasms of orgasm (May Sarton: “a spasmodic wave of union with the whole universe”). Fever. The electrochemical surges pulsing through our brains in sleep, like rollers on an ocean. Trouble in our lives.

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The lexicon of the fugue, I realized, could help describe systems in nature in the same way that the lexicon of nature can describe fugues. The pianist Feltsman relied on that natural lexicon in his liner notes to “Goldberg Variations,” where he writes that performing the variations was, for him, like “bringing together light that is re›ected in 30 different ways. The piece at the beginning is a vast ocean; by the end the ocean has receded to a single drop of living water.” Violinist Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quartet relies also on the language of nature to describe the oceanic power of Bach: “When I play any of these fugues, and especially when I play the whole cycle, I ‹nd that I become somewhat mesmerized . . . There is de‹nitely some kind of power that pulls me along in its wake. Or am I riding the crest of the wave? In my quasi-hypnotized state I feel a warmth and very human glow re›ecting off the surface of these most perfect, intricate, multi-jeweled fugue-machines.” Nature in‹ltrates music, and music is everywhere in nature. So much wild diversity swirls through our musical and verbal languages that it seems to argue against any separation between nature and culture. For the composer and conductor Pablo Casals, Bach inspires a deep understanding and appreciation of nature. In his autobiography he says: “For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It ‹lls me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day it is something new, fantastic and unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!”* *In Joys and Sorrows: Re›ections by Pablo Casals, as told to Albert Kahn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). All his life, Casals was acutely aware of the music in nature and the nature in music. Here is a boyhood memory from the same book: “Sometimes I awakened in the morning to the sound of folk songs, the villagers—‹shermen and men who worked in the vineyards—singing as they went to work. Sometimes in the evening there were dances in the plaza and sometimes festivals at which the gralla was played. The gralla is a reed instrument which, I think, is probably of Moorish origin— it resembles an oboe and has a very strident sound. Every day I would hear my father playing the piano or the organ. There were his songs and church music and compo-

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Many commentators have noted that Bach celebrates a majestic order in the universe, but the order my untrained and unsophisticated ear detected those winter days in my of‹ce, though majestic, was also tentative, fragile, and threatening at any moment to ›y apart. I thought I detected in the music both a search for order and a resigned acceptance of disorder. Bach seems at times to anticipate the modern idea that order in the universe might not be designed by a Designer or be the inevitable result of physical laws, but is only an idea superimposed by the perceiver, and that beneath and around and in‹ltrating every organization we try to ‹nd in the universe is an underlying chaos. But the tranquility of the music also suggests the alternative and more hopeful idea that what appears to us as chaos is—like similitudes in fractal geometry—only the fractured view of a more complex form of order. Perhaps any experience of nature, compressed into legible form, is shaped like a fugue. Often our insights into the structures and mechanisms around us arrive as ›ashes of intuition—the feeling that there is an interrelatedness of all things and that the universe is perfect and complete. To “know” nature does not necessarily require an education in physics, biology, or ecology, just as an education in theology is not required to live a spiritually rich life. We know nature because we live it every moment of our lives, and living it makes us experts. Our perceptions, imperfect as they are, allow us to now and then “feel the organic web passing through our guts.”* But the problem with intuited insight is that “feelings” soon pass and insight fades from memory. One purpose of music, art, and literature, of course, is to aid us in remembering. John Berger’s de‹nition of art as “an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally” seems especially relevant here. Nature allows us only occasional glimpses because it is too vast, sitions of the masters. He took me to all the services at the church—the Gregorian chant, the chorals and the organ voluntaries became part of my daily life. And then, too, there were always the wonderful sounds of nature, the sound of the sea, the sound of the wind moving through the trees, the delicate singing of the birds, the in‹nitely varied melody of the human voice, not only in song but in speech. What a wealth of music! It sustained and nourished me.” *“For most of us, most of the time, nature appears framed in a window or a video screen or inside the borders of a photograph. We do not feel the organic web passing through our guts. While our theories of nature have become wiser, our experience of nature has become shallower.” Scott Russell Sanders, “Speaking a Word for Nature,” from Secrets of the Universe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

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too encompassing, and our perceptions are too limited. We’re trying to describe a whale from inside its belly. The more I listened to the fugues, the more convinced I became that Bach had glimpsed nature in the largest sense and had set out to weave the multiplicity of all things into a life’s work that was itself a grand fugue. In such a scheme, the mystery of life could be balanced only by its counterpoint, the mystery of death. One of the most poignant moments I know in any music occurs near the conclusion of the Emerson String Quartet’s rendition of “The Art of Fugue,” when, without warning, the mournful section titled “Contrapunctus XIV” ends abruptly, shockingly, in midphrase. According to his son, this was Bach’s ‹nal composition, left un‹nished six months before he died. The ending is so sudden and unexpected that it resonates with signi‹cance. In the aftermath the silence swells, leaving us like the listener in the barren winter landscape of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” who “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Nothing stands between us and that silence. Literally, nothing. We are engulfed in the nothing, swallowed by it. The last note lingers almost longer than we can bear, then recedes until it seems to blend into the eternal silence, and we are left knowing devastation and exaltation in equal measures.

5 The next time I saw John Wunsch was at a gathering of friends one evening at a restaurant near our homes on Old Mission. I sat between John and his wife, Laura Wig‹eld. Stories ›ew around the table. We drank a lot of wine. I intended to raise the subject of fugues, but didn’t get around to it. Over dessert John and Laura recalled an incident that occurred shortly after they moved from Manhattan to northern Michigan. John’s family has farmed cherries for four generations on the Peninsula, so for him it was a homecoming. Laura, who grew up in Minneapolis, had no previous experience with farming. I should add that John and Laura are animated and expressive storytellers. Laura is a redhead who frequently bursts into robust laughter as she talks. John uses his hands a great deal for emphasis and that

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evening often seemed about to leap onto the table in the grandest oratorical style. As he and Laura talked, other people in the restaurant poked their heads around corners to watch. Here, recorded as faithfully as I could from memory later that evening, is the story as they told it in concert. Only afterward did it occur to me that it was a kind of fugue. “So after we bought our farm,” Laura began, “one weekend my parents came to visit from Minneapolis.” “They hadn’t been to Michigan before,” John said. “It was their ‹rst visit here—” “And the ‹rst we’d seen them since leaving New York—” “They came to the farm and looked around and said we need to talk—” “We need to have a little talk.” “I was raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, the real Lake Wobegon—” “Garrison Keillor—” “The true heartland. And I mean the worst sin imaginable in our church would have been to convert to Catholicism.” “Even worse than atheism—” “Much worse than atheism—” “They said to her, we need to have a little talk.” “So we ‹nished dinner, and I said okay Mom, okay Dad, let’s talk, and we took our coffee outside to the porch.” “It was one of those really humid summer evenings—” “Hot all day, very windy—” “You can’t believe you’re in northern Michigan, the air is so sticky and dense. You can feel the storms out over Lake Michigan, miles away, beyond the horizon, building—” “Hot and sticky, very windy—” “It sucks the air right out of your lungs.” “Mom and Dad are sitting in their chairs, trying to get comfortable, sipping their coffee, and ‹nally Mom says, so, now you’re married—” “Married—” “Got a nice house—” “Got jobs—” “A bunch of cats—”

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“Cats all over the place—” “Building yourselves a nice life in Michigan—” “House, jobs, cats.” “And meanwhile the storm is building—” “Building and building—” “You can feel it long before the clouds come, rising above the trees—” “And this dense feeling is growing in the air around us, like the way anger runs through a crowd—” “Big black clouds peeking above the trees—” “Towering—” “Leaning forward and towering—” “Anvil shaped—” “Growing, building, towering—” “Towering over the trees—” “I’m thinking, the Old Testament—” “Biblical intensity—” “I’m thinking, a vengeful God—” “The yard is lit with this strange greenish-yellow light—” “Bizarre light—” “And above, higher and higher, these black clouds towering, roiling, building, bearing down on us—” “Like illustrations in a children’s Bible—” “An angry god—” “Menacing—” “Very, very menacing—” “You’ve got a life now—” “House, jobs, cats—” “They said it’s time—” “Long past time—” “It’s time you joined a church—” “We raised you to go to church—” “You need to join a church.” “And by now the storm—” “The wind—” “The thunder rumbling—”

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“The cats long gone, hiding under the beds—” “All the trees in the yard whipping in the wind, leaves and branches hurtling past—” “Then the light suddenly gone—” “So sudden you can’t believe it, like somebody switched a switch—” “Dark as night—” “Dark as midnight—” “And then the lightning—” “Oh man, the lightning—” “You should have seen the lightning—” “Blasting across the sky, blinding us, and a second later thunder so loud it rattles the cups in their saucers—” “I said Mom—and I can see in the lightning ›ash that her eyes are big—I’m sure you feel compelled to tell us this—” “Flash-›ash, boom-boom—” “Compelled? It’s our mandate, she says, her eyes as big as saucers. By now she’s really scared. We’re commanded, she says—” “I’m thinking, that’s it, we won’t see the cats again for six months—” “Mom, I said, great, it’s your mandate, thanks, that’s great, you’ve done your duty—” “Boom, boom, adios cats—” “Satis‹ed your mandate—” “Ful‹lled your obligation—” “That’s good—” “Good, good, very good, thanks—” “So now we don’t have to talk about it ever again—” “Never again—” “And you know what?” “We haven’t!”

eight

Winter Walks

In the cold middle of winter, time slows. It’s true. Every child knows that the hours adjust to our velocity, accelerating as we get busier, slowing when we slow. But how often do we slow? Monday through Friday is an eyeblink, the twelve months a dash across the road, a decade a toboggan rush down an icy slope. Time marches or ›ows like a river or soars like a bird on the wing, its path unpredictable, its velocity intermittent, and we’re just carried along. I remember lying awake at night when I was a kid, imagining time as a ride through space on a carpet that unfurls before us, sometimes billowing, sometimes gathering into folds, sometimes stretching taut and snapping, as if in a wind. For a few weeks every winter, the carpet settles softly into folds. It slows then, and so can we. Winter is long at this latitude, the 45th degree north, near the tip of Michigan’s mitten, about equal distances from the Windy City and the Great Canadian North, but in the past it was longer, just as this place was once much farther north. When my father was in high school in southern Michigan, in the late 1940s, he and his friends would load a car with their ri›es and sleeping bags and drive up north to hunt deer in the forest-and-hill country where he would one day raise his family. The trip took most of a day, on roads that in November were potholed 122

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and haphazardly plowed. Now you can cover the same distance in a few hours. And of course many people have noticed that the snow that once made November a treacherous time to be on the road rarely arrives now until December. The January thaw in recent winters has expanded from days to weeks, eating most of the snow and raising daytime temperatures into the ‹fties and occasionally into the sixties. So far, winter has always returned, often with fury. But bare ground is more common, and the Great Lakes rarely freeze over. Even inland lakes, which when I was a kid were usually capped with ice by the ‹rst week of December and by January could be crossed in pickups and cars, some winters are never safe to walk on. This year ‹nally settled into a winter like those I remember from childhood. A few weeks into January the temperature dropped to 20 degrees, then 15, then 10. Snow fell every night, a few inches or a foot at a time, accumulating until it seemed to swallow every color and muf›e every sound. Clocks ran slower. I rose in the dark every day, ate breakfast, walked through the snow to my of‹ce, turned on the lights and heat, and worked through the morning. At noon I got the mail, ate lunch, plowed the driveway, then worked again until dinner. In the evenings I built a ‹re in the ‹replace, watched a movie with Gail, read, went to bed early. The days were so similar that they seemed to blend into one day. It was possible to imagine that time was not passing at all. Not that I would make it stop. I don’t fear change or grieve for my lost youth, nor do I believe in a distant golden age when grace descended upon us because we lived closer to the earth. I just now and then need time to take stock. I’m not alone in this. It’s a fundamental requirement. We’re like the ancient navigators, who had to wait for a moment of calm seas and a glimpse of the pole star before they could determine their position. Certainly it must explain why so many cultures have celebrated the solstices, those two days each year when the sun halts in its northward and southward marches. Solstice—“sun stands still”—promises peace, stasis, rest, a few hours’ respite. Little wonder, then, that we long ago fused the winter solstice, that sacred moment in pagan traditions, with the most sacred day in the Christian calendar. We complain about the pace and complexity of our lives, but can we

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hope for a simpler one? The tendency of all organisms and societies is to become more complex, not less. Not only is simplicity unlikely, we don’t even want it. Not really. We’re too complicated, too restless, too excited by challenge and hungry for gain, too enamored with the results of our industriousness to enjoy for long the luxury of quiet hours and modest pleasures. We get bored. Pascal suggested that all our troubles arise from not knowing how to sit still. But few of us are willing to sit for long. Why should we? The moment we stop, we doubt. Besides, everyone knows that the rewards go to the industrious. Sit, and you get left behind. Rest, and you rust. And if you’re discontented with your life, at least you can say you got a lot done. “So passes the whole of life,” whispers Pascal.

5 Funny how quickly we acclimate. I was sitting by the ‹replace reading when the dog went to the door and groaned to be let out. I pulled boots over my slippers and stepped outside, into the night, and followed the dog across the driveway. The snow chirped beneath my boots. In the sky the stars shone so brightly that they seemed to hum. Jupiter and Mars were there, too, bolder than the stars and twice as bright. They didn’t hum—they shouted. They were braggarts standing bare-chested on hilltops, spreading their arms wide and hollering for people to notice them. Toby nosed through the snow. He was in no hurry. He’s a big animal, a hundred pounds, mixed breed, hardheaded, savvy. I said, “Hurry up, Yellow Dog. Come on, Fat Boy.” He ignored me. He knew that when he ‹nished he’d be shut inside for the night, so he took his time, ‹nding much that interested him in the snow. Finally he raised his leg and pissed. I stood beside him and pissed also, drilling holes in the snow and taking absurd satisfaction from it, as does every boy of every age. Hey, look what I can do. Later, after I’d returned inside, I glanced at the outside thermometer. Fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. By morning, it would be zero. It occurred to me that I had stood outside all that time without a coat, hat, or gloves and hardly noticed the cold.

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5 In winter we have time to consider time itself. Is it a fundamental measure of duration, as in the time it takes an electron to orbit its nucleus or a planet its star? Is it a clock set ticking by a Clockmaker? Is it a substance, a sort of ›uid, that ›ows through the universe? Or is it just an abstraction we invented for utility? It’s lineal, say rationalists, a one-way march from oblivion to oblivion. It’s an arc, say Christians, from Beginning Time to End Time. It’s cyclical, say the Buddhists, and what appears to be a lineal progression masks incarnations repeated until after suf‹cient effort a soul can break free of its sorrowful circles. It’s a pendulum swing, say Chinese cosmologists, the alternating rhythms of Yin and Yang, of Love and Strife, each checking the other in a dance of oppositions. It is both phenomenally real and noumenally unreal, said Kant. It’s absolute, said Newton. Relative, said Einstein. An illusion, said the Greek philosophers Parmenides and Zeno. Money, say bankers and insurance executives. The stuff delay is made of, said Thoreau. The faucet, according to the old hippie joke, that keeps everything from happening at once. People everywhere agree that it ›ows. Universal time ›ows in all directions simultaneously—the historical, the present, the yet-to-be-realized spilling across the universe like paint over a table. But our time, yours and mine, has us poised in an elusive present bearing us on our journey from birth to death, from the known to the unknown, from the remembered to the anticipated. River metaphors always come to mind. If we regret the past and dread the future, time is turbulent, ‹lled with undertows and whirlpools, and is sweeping us toward a waterfall. But if we give ourselves to it, without resisting, we can learn to swim with grace.

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A foot and a half of snow fell during the night, ‹lling the driveway, obscuring every track, making the world pristine again. The snow was so deep on the roof that it had begun to droop below the eaves like eyelids. It had softened all the lines in the yard, making curves of right angles and covering every surface with pillows and quilts of ›uff. The car in the driveway was covered; even the tip of the aerial wore a white cap. In the trees, all the twigs and branches balanced lines of snow as delicate as feathers. Winter starves the senses until they grow famished. Snow mutes sound, and cold air smells of nothing. The nose and ears begin to atrophy, but eyesight remains acute, perhaps more acute than ever now that less can be seen. A ‹eld covered with snow becomes a background against which a single desiccated weed stands in a minimalist’s slash of line and shadow. With so little color in the world, we become greedy for it. We scan the woods for the scarlet splash of a cardinal, our eyes going to it for the same reason our tongues go to sugar. I waded down the driveway to the road. The plow had not yet been through, and no cars had broken trail. The road, where it ›owed down the hill toward me, was as white and unmarred as a frozen river. I walked halfway across, knee-deep in snow that was mostly air. When I leaned and blew into it, my breath raised a spout as insubstantial as smoke. Movement caught my eye. I looked up. Coming at me was a compact car. It rode so low that a wave of snow purled over the hood, blinding the driver. The trail it left behind might have been plowed by a boat. And it made no sound. None. It was as silent as an owl. But I was too quick for it. I stepped aside, a matador of the snow, and bowed to the passing beast.

5 We’re too busy, we work too much, we squander our days rushing to catch up and waste our nights worrying because we can’t. Already it’s an old story. But just because it’s an old story doesn’t mean we’re condemned to it. We know that we live in a ›ux of impermanence, swept along by forces we can’t control. Everything changes, nothing lasts. And the

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more stubbornly we cling to handholds and the more desperately we throw out lines and anchors, the more battered we are by the current. We cherish our anchors nonetheless. Much of the work of a hundred centuries has been the construction of physical bulwarks against time and philosophical watchtowers against bewilderment. They are our solace and our anchors. But the anchors move along with us.

5 Last night, at midnight, I walked with the dog across the meadow. He broke trail ahead of me, bounding through the snow, pausing occasionally to thrust his snout deep inside it. The moon hung high and full but was diffused behind a veil of cirrus, making it glow weakly, like a ›ashlight at the bottom of a river. It lit the ‹eld with dusky light. I thought how strange it is that though the moon and sun in their daily rounds are constant reminders of time passing, we consider them emblems of permanence. That we are temporary is our great sorrow, but we take comfort knowing that the heavens always revolve, rivers always ›ow, plants always die in the fall and sprout again in the spring. In most origin myths, the universe began in chaos. The sun and moon wandered aimlessly, rivers ran upstream as well as down, night and day were indistinguishable. At some point we struck a bargain with the gods and traded our submission for order. For the certainty of a sun that rises every morning and green plants that emerge every spring, for menstrual cycles, predictable phases of the moon, daily tides, seasonal bird migrations, and annual inundations of the Nile, we forfeited our freedom, our gold, a goat, or a child. The cyclical paths of nature are a consolation, in part, I think, because cyclicality gives the illusion of timelessness. Lineal time runs along the straightforward path of mortality, with which we are so well acquainted, but a cycle gives promise and comfort. It embraces itself. It encapsulates content. It concludes but never ends. Premodern societies are sometimes de‹ned as those in which human life is understood to proceed from parent to child, generation after generation, in a scrolling cycle as dependable as the seasons. According to some historians the modern age began the moment we became lineal: fencing the wild off, building cities on grids, conceiving

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of progress as a force that always moves forward and expecting children to abandon the paths of their parents and strike off on new paths of their own. Whether this detour down straight paths is folly has been much debated. Maybe the premise is ›awed, and any line we assume is straight is just a segment of a larger circle. And we can’t forget that the same qualities we ‹nd soothing in a circle can make it seem vicious. It allows no escape. It is the shape of the rat race. Philosophers of the Enlightenment argued that straight lines of reason would lead us out of nature’s con‹nements. But cultures with an intimate knowledge of nature have usually honored circularity, and many thinkers have been convinced that a sense of ful‹llment and purpose is the reward of those who live in harmony with cycles. For civilizations that ›ourished along the shores of seas and great rivers, cycles such as the twice-daily rise and fall of the tides, annual ›oods, and the rains that resurrected plants in spring became analogous with the rhythms of death and rebirth, the cycle of the seasons, the circulation of the blood, the structure of time itself. To the ancient Egyptians, the meandering Nile, whose regular ›oods vitalized the land inside every bend, was the very shape of benevolence. The American Transcendentalists were convinced that there was something to it. Thoreau reminds us that “the year is a circle” and scolds us in case we forget to be mindful of its passing. Emerson notes that the eye is a circle, as is the horizon it perceives, and that this “primary ‹gure” is repeated endlessly throughout nature. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth,” he writes, “that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.” Perhaps it’s only Romanticism to think that we are better suited to a circular than a lineal life. Probably it is. But why should we presume that the Romantics are wrong? As I was beginning to see some truth in these thoughts, my dog began running in circles that grew progressively tighter and quicker, his nose plowing through the snow as he snuf›ed for scent. I caught up to him. There, visible even in moonlight: fox tracks.

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A belligerent wind today. The house rocks slightly with it. The gusts rise and diminish, then rise again louder, until they make an ocean-roar of noise in the trees outside. Waves are thumping on the shore. I go to the window and see snow ›inging past in horizontal streaks. The barometer is falling, the temperature is falling, the wind is rising. Is it coincidence that Gail and I have headaches and are sluggish and irritable? Are we suffering that vague malaise people have in mind when they say they are feeling “under the weather”? I don’t always appreciate the natural world, nor do I always want to. Some days it’s impossible. My attention freezes up, or falls asleep, or stomps away in a sulk. The land seems forsaken then, ripped by bitter winds, the snow dirty, the trees lifeless. Winter becomes a desolation and a hebetude, a Siberia of the soul, an Antarctica of the spirit from which every sensible and mobile being must retreat. Half my neighbors are snowbirds who migrate south for the winter. I envy their escape. I crave relief of any kind, but know that there is no relief, and the only escapes are temporary. I watch television until I’m stupe‹ed. Or I drink too much, searching not for oblivion but for any shard of light. I sleep ten hours and in the morning stumble to the bathroom, bend the curtain back to look through the frost-obscured glass to the world outside, and see only what I expect to see. When I open my shirt I discover my chest is being pecked by blackbirds. What do I know? That I am fortunate to love and be loved. That chaos threatens any order we try to impose upon the world. That we are foolish and nearly blind. That we age and grow frail and die, so must celebrate every moment of our vitality. We need to believe that we’re civilized, safe, in command. But we’re kidding ourselves. One more slapped child, one more bomb hurtled into a crowd of innocents, and surely the earth will crumble away beneath us, and we’ll be cast into the void. It’s no good. Some days are nothing but lost days. More in stubbornness than hope, I dress and go outside. It requires stupendous effort. I stand exhausted in the snow in the front yard, unable to take another step, and look out across the gray lake ›ecked with whitecaps. I tip my head back and watch snow›akes spiraling down from clouds the color of dread. The sky is breaking up, spalling, disintegrating, and the

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dust and ashes are falling to the Pompeii earth. I’m being buried alive. Run!

5 We’re still getting accustomed to the idea that the stars will one day burn out, that the heavens are ‹nite and temporary, that God might be asleep or indifferent or a human invention, that this, this life, this planet, this touch of wind on face, small hand held in our hand, splash of waves, truck shifting gears on the highway, toothache, bird, might be all there is. The idea has been sinking in for centuries. It took a long time to get around to it, and it’s taking a long time to face it squarely. When we ‹nally accept it, maybe we can begin to live as if this is the only life we have.

5 Why should we value nature? Isn’t it nature, after all, that torments us with heat and cold, makes us thirsty and hungry, infects us with illness, strips us of our youth, tears our loved ones from us? Why shouldn’t we be as indifferent to it as it is to us? Maybe there’s no reason at all. On my dark days I wouldn’t care if every river was drained and every forest was bulldozed into parking lots. It’s what we deserve, I ‹gure. We’ve created this mess, and maybe the time has come to ›ush the whole shitheap away. But I’ve noticed something. The other days, the days when I care, the days when the physical world and everything that inhabits it are astonishing in their complexity and variety, those are my best days. That’s when I am most alive. It’s when I am con‹dent of my strength. It’s when I am most likely to experience a state of inde‹nite, unformed excitement, of expectancy, a creative or procreative readiness that is like an itch. I become curious about other people. I wonder how things work. I want to explore, to create, to unite ideas, to uncover hidden webs of connection. On my best days I’m convinced that I can reach beneath the surface of the world and pull out a rabbit, and maybe the rabbit will speak. In our efforts to perceive the things of the world, we bring those

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things inside us. When we peel back the veil of what we already know, step aside from the diversions of language and the stacks of information we’ve been busily stowing in place all our lives, we can ‹nally see a thing for what it is. The idea is simple, but it’s not easy to achieve. Many assume it is a kind of salvation, and maybe it is, but it seems to me that it is more elemental than that. It might be an ordinary way of being. In his old age, Whitman liked to roll nude in the mud as a way to touch the earth, an impulse that Thoreau had already explored when he wrote, “Think of our life in nature. Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!” Whitman wrestled saplings to the ground, embracing their slender trunks with his naked limbs, absorbing their “young sap and virtue” until it ‹lled him tingling “from crown to toe, like health’s wine.” Only then could he remember what a tree was. When we reach deeply into the world, the world reaches back. Is this sanctity? Or science? Does it explain why mystics and physicists agree that the observer and the observed are always locked, like a hand and a handle, in the process of becoming one another? Union, even a near approach to it, makes every moment while it lasts and the hours and days of its afterglow seem charged with signi‹cance. It infuses ideas and relationships with meaning and explains why moments can feel magical and why powerful memories come drenched in something like ›avor. When we are present in the world we don’t feel lonely, no matter how alone we might be, and are never bored. A word for all this, of course, is love. Maybe some of the ups and downs of our daily lives are just us falling in and out of love with the world.

5 By ‹ve o’clock in the afternoon the sun was already slipping beyond the hills to the southwest. The light around me had turned a faint blue, and the air was growing colder. The dog surged ahead, his nose deep in the snow, seeking the animals that run in burrows beneath it.

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Around us the meadow lay covered in white, with only a few bare weeds showing. Thinking of nothing much at all, I looked up and saw a red fox trotting across the snow. Why are we fascinated with predators? Is it the novelty of the encounter? Shared habitation? Gratitude for companionship in an otherwise lifeless universe? Or is the connection deeper? Do we intuit a blood bond? Are ancient memories activated of being the hunter and the hunted? We scan a landscape, idly, by habit, without expectation, and suddenly, there! A fox! Our attention leaps, and the world clicks into sharper focus, its teeth and claws exposed. What was benign is now slightly dangerous, what was common has become extraordinary. And of course we are creatures that hunger for the extraordinary. Although we were a hundred yards apart, I could see that the fox’s winter coat was lush and healthy, so thick that it bunched at the neck, and was colored the deep orange of autumn leaves. It seemed to ›ame against the snow. Behind ›oated the brush, as luxurious and full as a feather boa, settling when the fox stopped to examine something in the snow. Abruptly it raised its head and looked at me. It had sensed movement or caught scent or heard the jangle of my dog’s collar. For a moment we stood motionless, our eyes locked, the connection between us faintly charged. Then the fox broke away and ›owed across the snow. It disappeared into the spruces at the base of the hill. I walked on until I found its trail. The tracks were as large as a medium-sized dog’s. I saw where each paw slid a bit as it penetrated the surface of the snow, then punched deep. Most of the way across the meadow the trail meandered, the path of an opportunist on a stroll. But at the spot where the fox and I locked eyes, it changed. From there the trail proceeded in a straight and purposeful line. It was the footprint of intention, and was, perhaps, as near as we can come to knowing the mind of a fox. Near the woods the tracks revealed what I had somehow failed to see: that the animal took three bounding leaps, each nearly six feet long, before it reached the trees. My dog ran excitedly across the trail and shoved his nose into a track. The scent must have seemed both strange and familiar and prob-

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ably carried a hint of menace. His scruff rose. He spun to another track, plunged his face in, inhaled deeply again, emerged with snow piled on his muzzle. He raised his leg and peed, as I knew he would. Important business, peeing. And all he could do, really. Abruptly he lost interest and set off again in search of voles. I turned and looked across the meadow at the trail my dog and I had left. It meandered, much like the fox’s. We too are opportunists.

5 Are we animals? Of course. Savages? Clearly. The rules of civilization are as super‹cial as ‹ne clothes and fall away in an instant when our animal selves are released. Witness a mob. Witness the rush of greedy motorists when a bag of money spills on the freeway. Witness the raping of the conquered by the conquerors. Do we imagine that we can remain untouched for long by the world outside our walls? One scholar argues that a civilization’s success can be measured by how far it has separated itself from nature, and the further the better. Another claims that it is precisely this separation that marks the decline of every civilization. But separation can never be complete. Our strongest walls are no match for the wily barbarians. The wind slips around windows and doors, wild things hide in our hair and burrow into our dreams and in‹ltrate the words we speak. Sometimes we manage to push nature away, but it always returns. It’s in the air we breathe, in the brine that ‹lls our cells, in the rods and cones through which light enters our consciousness. Within even our most arti‹cial structures—in the museums, concert halls, and government of‹ces of the greatest cities, on television and movie sets, in the most meticulously sterilized laboratories—nature is a constant presence, the standard of measure, the background upon which all else is projected. Civilization is a superstructure built on the wild: skyscrapers balanced on the back of a leaf ›oating down a stream. When we give all our attention to the skyscraper, forgetting the leaf, we risk toppling. Splash!

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5 We don’t see when our minds are elsewhere. Most of the time, of course, they’re elsewhere. The attention required to notice the world is precisely the same required to listen to music or read a poem. To enter them we must clear our thoughts and enter a state of receptivity like that achieved through prayer or meditation. When no thoughts intrude, our senses pull us into the moment, that vastness empty of associations where nothing exists beyond what is immediately perceived. I know I am not alone in discovering that I am less often in this state. Is it because we allow ourselves to become inattentive? Or because we live in an era of unprecedented distractions? Philosophers and scientists have noticed that the more we look, the more there is to see. The invention of microscopes and telescopes made this jarringly evident, but it is true as well of the naked eye in familiar places. Yeats’s idea that language compressed, expands, applies also to attention.

5 From my bed I could hear waves breaking on Lake Michigan. I dressed warmly, for the wind off the water would be bitter, and walked down Blue Water Road to the shore. The surface of the lake billowed with sluggish waves. Snow›akes struck my face and burned like sparks. It had been ten years since Lake Michigan froze across to Wisconsin, but every winter the shores are lined with shelf ice. Now the shelf was a hundred yards wide. Along its outer edge, where the waves struck, the ice had grown into ramparts as high as my head. I walked to the edge. Dark swells rose and broke. Under the wind I heard the subtle sounds of the lake: the thump and slap of waves, pancakes knocking in the wash, ice needles chiming. Silently across the water came snow squalls, obliterating sections of lake as big as towns. Mariners are wise to fear those creeping whiteouts. The crew, blinded, battles to avoid reefs and converging vessels, while ice crawls across the deck until the vessel turtles beneath the weight. These were the same snow squalls, the same white chop and gray

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storm wrack, seen by the ‹rst people. Large bodies of water change slowly enough to bond the past with the present. Our lives are short— can we say it strongly enough?—but big places stretch them out, offering a glimpse of time extending beyond our few years.

5 Most of us, most of the time, skate over the surface, and time runs away from us. A full life, we are told, requires engagement. Engagement is attention, and absolute attention, says Simone Weil, is prayer. This idea interests me, though I don’t pray, at least not in the conventional sense. But absolute attention—that I aspire to, and grow from, and practice. In the ‹eld only a few weeds rise above the snow. With so little to see, knowledge should seem attainable. But even here there is too much to accommodate. There is too much to see, too much to touch, too much to hear and scent. I’m struck by the realization that no matter how passionately I embrace the world, my capacity is too limited, that no matter how ravenous my appetite for life, I have scarcely begun to live, I have hardly lived, I will never fully live. I bend and touch a stalk of goldenrod, three withered leaves clinging to a brittle stem, and wonder, “What is this?” Stuff. Matter. A cunning assemblage of atoms unique in the universe. Take away the name we give it, and all we have left is . . . what? The “it.” The thing itself. And our amazement that we never before saw it as it really is. The illusion that we are separate from the world, that our minds are distinct from our bodies, that we are composed of an “I” isolated from other “I’s” is supposed to be a recent development. Many claim that it dates from the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution, when technology began partitioning society from nature. But surely a sense of separation is fundamental to being human, beginning with the desolation we feel in earliest childhood when we are separated from our mothers, and reinforced all our lives by the awareness that we are born alone and will die alone and on most days and in most places are strangers to one another. But are we condemned to isolation? Is it our “natural” state? Our own experience and the testimony of countless people tell us that we

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can pierce the walls of separateness and know, ›eetingly, a union. That we long for it is beyond dispute. It’s why we make love. It’s why we join clubs and cults and cheer for the home team and post our thoughts on Web sites. It’s why we seek God. Surely this longing has built our cities and ‹lled our museums and libraries. If we are happiest when we are absorbed in union, then we should ask ourselves why we seek absorption and what we give up when we achieve it and why it makes us happy. We are temporary. Everyone knows that, just as everyone knows that mountains disintegrate to sand, that in time our sun will consume its fuel, ›are a billion times hotter, and explode, scattering our atoms across the universe, erasing all evidence of our existence. We know that every embrace is temporary. Which is why, of course, we embrace. Across the meadow a crow stands in the snow. It is the only dark object in a plain of white. I take a step toward it, and it bounces once and is in the air, its black rag wings ›apping. Time starts again.

nine

Scent of Spring

One morning in March the weather changes. For days we had been feeling headachy and dull, sluggish in body and restless in mind. Clouds sagged low and colorless and could have carried either snow or rain but delivered neither. Lassitude crept across the land like a virus. The temperature never rose above freezing and never dropped much below it, and the snow on the ground settled into a crumbling pack of crust, crud, and corn. The earth ground to a halt on its axis. We needed change. We needed cataclysm and uproar, arti‹ce and chaos. Bring on the barbarians! Bring on the tornados! Bring on the Chinook winds hurtling down the Rockies and over the plains, roaring across Lake Michigan and heating the wind 50 degrees in ‹ve minutes! Flatten the trees on the shore! Flood the valleys with snowmelt! I step outside, and it is cold, but not as cold as it has been, and I notice a softening in the air, the slightest suggestion of warm days to come. The clouds have lifted a little higher since yesterday and are allowing more light through. Now comes a breeze carrying a hint of warmth and fragrance. Then a stronger gust, a snow eater, bringing with it a patchwork of winds: land breeze smelling of freshly turned soil; lake wind, refrigerated by big water; microgusts trailing the scent of something like sweet-fern. 139

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With the change comes movement deep within our sugar maples. The temperature has to rise only a few degrees to make the sap start climbing from the roots. It rises by capillary action, crawling up the trunks, branches, and twigs to the tight-‹sted buds, triggering the mechanism that in a few weeks will unclench them into leaf. Wherever there is a fracture in a branch, a dagger of ice forms, with a drop of clear sap hanging from its tip. I watch a gray squirrel dangle upside down by its hind feet from one of those branches and lap the drops as they form. Another gray squirrel charges down the same branch and chases the trapeze artist away. This one attacks life straight on. It reaches down and breaks the icicle off, then squats on the branch, holds the ice between both front paws, and licks it as if it were a Popsicle.

Little bastards. We’re overrun by them. The red squirrels, especially, are a nuisance. Last fall they chewed the plastic gas caps off both the snowblower and the lawn mower, and for several years they’ve been nesting between the rafters in my of‹ce. As I work they scramble against the boards above my head, gnaw gratingly on walnuts, and burst into epic bitching sessions. I pound on the ceiling and shout at them to shut up, but they’re used to me by now and pay no attention, and I laugh at their cheekiness. I know I should do something about them. If they start chewing the wiring they could set the place on ‹re.

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Last summer I live-trapped two red squirrels and one gray and relocated them to woods on public land ten miles away, where, according to a wildlife biologist I consulted too late, they were almost certainly killed by predators or by the squirrels already in residence. The word must have spread through the neighborhood about my live-traps, because soon no squirrel would go near them. I tried baiting them with a concoction of peanut butter, oatmeal, and honey, which I was assured was irresistible. It’s not. Feeling pressure to take charge of the situation, I shopped online for a pellet gun. “You need one that ‹res a pellet at a thousand feet per second—that’ll do the job,” said a grizzled veteran of many squirrel wars. But I know I won’t follow through. I’m not that mad at them. By afternoon the big maple in our front yard is leaking from a dozen branches. I stand beneath it, head tipped back, watching a drop swell from a pencil-sized twig thirty feet up until it grows heavy enough to break free and fall. I try to catch it in my mouth, but it plummets past my ear. This was a game my sons and I played when they were young. I move half a step to the left, wait, and miss again. The third drop swells and grows plump and falls straight into my mouth and explodes against my tongue. It is like catching a grape in your mouth. There is sweetness in it, ›avored faintly with maple. Later, near sunset, the breeze shifts to the south and brings with it the complex, loamy scent of spring.

5 Calm today. On the shore of the bay, where slabs of ice were piled just a week ago, the stones seem brighter and the water clearer than I have ever seen them. Remnants of last fall’s Cladophora bloom, the one that killed so many loons and mergansers, are drying on the beach, slopped in heaps like papier-mâché. The beautiful and the ugly have washed up side-by-side, as they always do. Winkle shells mixed with rotting quagga mussels. Beer cans beside the driftwood. I once asked Frank Ettawageshik how the Odawa view the Great Lakes. He is a leader of his people, as were his father and grandfather, and a gentle and thoughtful man. It was foolish of me to ask such a serious question so idly, but he was too kind to say so. He paused and

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‹nally said, “It would take many years to understand it, I guess.” He was a little embarrassed for me, and I became embarrassed, too. But then he said, in a quiet voice, “We think the lakes are alive.” “Pantheism!” cry the monotheists. “Romantic claptrap!” sneer the empiricists. But why is it such a dif‹cult idea to accept? If we treated the lakes—and the land, the forests, and the earth itself—as living things, and made our decisions as the Odawa do, with consideration for the seven generations of people to come, would we be in the mess we’re in? I pick up a rock. Round and plum colored, a fragment of the ancient foundation of the earth. What is it? Atoms from stars, ›ung across space ‹ve billion years ago until they rained to the earth in its birth struggle. Isn’t it wildly, electrically alive, a community of spinning, dancing atoms? The ancients believed that rock was living stone, but that it died when it was removed from the earth or could be killed by being crushed. Thus the “mort” in “mortar.” Yes, but not only that. What is this thing? Rock, pebble, stone? Earth’s bone, nature’s brick, building block of civilization, walking path across the river? That’s not it, or not it alone. What is it? Sand grain, dust speck, atom, quark, spark-of-being? Hell if I know. If I can’t understand a simple rock what hope is there of understanding the rest of it? I’m so sickened by my ignorance that I throw the rock as far as I can over the lake. I have a good arm, played ball all my life, I can really ‹re a rock. I throw it so far I expect it to disappear over the horizon, circle the globe, and bean me on the back of my skull. Or it could blast through the atmosphere and puff up a new crater on the moon. Or shoot across space and return to the stars it came from. But it is just another terrestrial throw. They all are. The rock ›ies a parabolic trajectory and falls to the surface of the lake with a splash. But the sound it makes when it strikes; the spout standing erect for a moment, like an exclamation mark; the blooming celery-top of splash; the rings spreading in widening waves across the surface until they lap the sand on every shore; the impact on the world: is that a rock?

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If so, then what of me? I too am a column of water, an exclamation mark, a spark-of-being in parabolic trajectory, making momentary impact on the world. That spout, that splash, those spreading rings: maybe that is me, as well.

5 Day and night by the water—it insinuates. Seeing it in all hours and in all seasons, hearing it even in your sleep, it changes you. You’re reminded that everything is ›uid, that time ›ows and carries us along from a springlike source to an oceanlike eternity. And although I know these inland seas are not oceans, I have followed them to an ocean and know the connectedness of waters—and the connectedness of every other thing as well. And I know the lakes are treasures worth more than all the world’s gold. When it is calm, the water seems to breathe. It swells and recedes, nudging the land, smoothing it, lifting individual grains of sand and tapping them against one another, patiently whittling them into spheres. The sand alone is worth a lifetime of study. It migrates down the shore, gets thrown by waves onto the beach, and forms elegant cusps and wave shapes. When it is dry it ›ows in a ›axen drift a few inches above the beach, settling in crescents around every rock and pebble. Scoop a handful, and let it pour through your ‹ngers as if through an hourglass. Hold a single grain close to your eye. Do you see the world in it? Is it as mighty as a planet? I can never get over it: every grain is a cluster of atoms as old as the universe that was spewed during an ancient star’s death gasp. Each of those atoms is composed of an electron orbiting a nucleus that if extended to the scale of a solar system would be a planet the size of a pea spinning in orbit hundreds or thousands of miles around a sun the size of a pumpkin. Which means that the greatest part of every atom is emptiness, and therefore the greatest part of all matter, even the densest rock, is nothing. Which makes solid earth an illusion. So what is it, exactly, that we stand upon all our lives? In certain moods I have claimed (and in certain moods it is true) that I would be content to spend the rest of my life considering the

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mysteries of sand and atoms. Once I expressed this to a friend, and she threw her hands in the air in frustration. “But you’re hiding from life!” she said. “You’re losing yourself in nature to avoid the struggles of people!” I admitted that was part of it. But am I hiding from life, or seeking a richer one? Is “losing” oneself merely escapism—or its opposite: the way to a more fully realized life? What if getting lost in the physical world—and lost in work, play, love, music, books—allows us to live twice, three times, four times as much? Maybe those moments of immersion and abandonment clarify our thinking enough to ask why there is struggle in the ‹rst place, why there is sorrow, why there is anything at all. Probably there are no answers to those questions. But isn’t it crucial that we keep asking them? We construct our lives with every act we perform and every word we speak, and those acts and words are as various and abundant as nature, which spreads its seeds lavishly. That our lives are baf›ing and complicated and messy and magni‹cent and plagued with failures seems, at times, to make sense, to be right and ‹tting and perfect. For of course those same qualities describe the universe itself.

5 I wanted sanctuary from the human world, so I went outside to be alone with the wind and water and sand and snow. I found clarity, myself, obscurity, nothing, and returned to my life a new man, an old man, a man of nature, a man of culture, a seasoned man, a sadder man. We love the earth but cannot stay. Every moment counts. So why are we so careless? Why do we squander our days? Why do we foul the places where we live? I’m trying not to lose heart. Nobody champions ‹lth. Nobody wants the planet to grow ill, to puke away its rare creatures, to breed abominations. Nobody wants the water and air poisoned or the climate altered. And nobody believes their actions cause much damage. What’s a little oil in the water? What harm is a bit more carbon in the air? We pollute and destroy, and no arguments are suf‹cient to make us stop. We have plenty of arguments, after all, and to any reasonable mind they’re indisputable, but we keep repeating our follies.

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Go to Gary, Indiana, to see how we’ve used this place we claim to value. Go to Ontario’s Thunder Bay and Sarnia and Hamilton Harbor. Go to Rochester, Toledo, East Chicago. Go to Detroit to see the abandoned factories and bombed-out neighborhoods of a city that sacri‹ced itself to make America great. Go to the shore of Michipicoten Bay, at the center of one of the longest stretches of wild shoreline on Lake Superior, where the stunning basalt cliffs are in danger of being dynamited and crushed into road gravel. Go to the Yellow Dog Plains near Marquette, Michigan, where a mining company would extract sul‹des from beneath a trout stream ›owing into Superior, though everyone knows it will kill the stream and poison the land for decades. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. If we had any sense we would have long ago declared these largest bodies of fresh water on the planet an international preserve too precious to put at risk and would have protected them forever. Instead we made them into highways, built our ‹lthiest factories on their shores, dumped our garbage into them, emptied our toilets into the very water we drink, opened channels for foreign plants and animals to enter and devastate communities that had been thriving since the Ice Age. We’re not malicious, merely human, by which we mean shortsighted and fallible. And greedy, sel‹sh, and destructive. And capable of colossal and recurring blunders. But we are capable also of redemptions. We rally when we need to. We’re good in a crisis. A tornado strikes an elementary school, and we rush to help. A child falls in a river, and a dozen strangers sprint to the bank and dive in. Rilke thought that if we look hard enough at a star or a ›ower we realize it into existence, and it will present its beauty to us as a reward. But what if we look too hard at ugliness? “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” said Aldo Leopold, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Nietzsche warned ominously that if we spend too much time battling monsters, we risk becoming monsters ourselves. He warned also—the dark side of Rilke’s realization—that if we stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back. Live alone in a world of wounds, become a monster, fall into the abyss—what stops us from tumbling into hopelessness?

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For of course it is hopeless. There will be no end to wounds. We will never be entirely healthy. We can’t stop pain, injustice will persist, we will continue repeating our mistakes, and eventually all evidence that we were here will be wiped away. But do we quit? No. Do we give up because we know we will one day die and be forgotten? Of course not. We push on, we pick ourselves up when we fall, we try again when we fail. We do what we must moment by moment, day after day, year after year. How? The Yoopers know: determination, perseverance, guts: sisu.

5 And now the season is changing, so I’ll end this little book with a daring proposition. Go forth. Make tracks, throw stones. Assume this is the only life we have. Gather the people you love, and embrace them until your bones crack. Laugh, cry, get pissed off, howl. Stand tall beneath the stars. Sing your heart out. Here is Creation, right before our eyes.

Field Notes

[December] First snow, barely an inch of ›uff, and suddenly the world is pristine again. Climbed the hill out back and looked down on the land rolling beneath its new white coat and could see what lay beneath it. Like seeing muscles under the pelt of an animal. Could see the bones too, and the tendons and sinews.

. Storm watch for tonight. First one of the season. About three inches on the ground already and heavy ›akes falling. The monochromatic world seems ripe for storm. I’m ripe for it too.

. It’s only December 6, but full winter already: bitter cold, a wind so strong it burrows through the walls. The furnace runs nonstop and the house won’t warm beyond 64 degrees, and my of‹ce so cold I’m working in a winter coat and wool hat—already a bitter black-and-white world. Shocked by all I’ve relearned so quickly: the penetrating cold, the burning touch of driven snow, the animal sounds of the wind.

. Glenn says his house was so cold last night that he felt like he was being prepped for an organ transplant. 147

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. Last night I walked in the ‹eld in the moonlight (waxing, two days till full) and was surprised to see that every weed standing above the snow cast a shadow. I felt exposed and vulnerable, prey for owls.

. This is the opposite of spring rain: winter drizzle, a degree or two short of freezing, the small drops driven on the wind and stinging my face. The road sheens dangerously. Glitter of sleet on the gravel shoulders; trees dark with wet limbs; sky the color of nothing. Should be a perfect day for discouragement, but my spirit soars.

. A white Christmas after all. Five inches, light and ›uffy. Very cold. This morning a sun pillar shot up ahead of the rising sun and lit the hill behind Carolus’s in pink alpenglow. As I watched, it crept downhill until everything around me was brilliant with pink then golden light.

. Saw a sharp-shinned hawk in the front yard standing on a mouse it had just caught. It ›ew off to the woods across the road with the mouse limp in its talons, dangling like a pouch of tobacco. I didn’t think until later—too late—after fresh snow had fallen, that I should have looked for plunge marks in the snow.

. Tonight the stars are close and bright, and bon‹res blaze on the hilltops. Cherry trees, bulldozed into piles as big as houses, doused with fuel oil, and ignited. I can see two of them from the front window. They blaze with the intensity of a furnace and trail streamers of sparks downwind. Even here, inside the house, I can smell the sweet smoke.

. The harsh, deep, hopeless cold of full winter. The wind—dry, incessant, merciless, from the north—pries around the door and claws its

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way inside. Two electric heaters burn full-time, and still my of‹ce is cold in every corner.

. Twenty degrees this morning and another six inches of snow. Wraiths of sea smoke on the bay.

. All night awake. Trying with some long ‹ngernail of the will to scratch some deep itch of the spirit.

[January] A new year, a new start. Snow›akes drift down from a perfect blue sky. Single-minded today, but a single mind is not enough. One set of eyes, ears, hands, one nose, ten ‹ngers, ten toes—not enough.

. Saw the fox again yesterday. It was frozen in concentration, staring into the snow. I watched from 150 yards away, frozen also. Then it pounced in that characteristic canine way: straight up and straight down, its snout stabbing deep into the snow. Toby does the same, exactly, when he thinks he hears a mouse beneath the snow. The fox came up empty, this time. Toby always does.

. Saying that winter is like death is too easy. Slumber, yes, and lethargy, and life’s blood withdrawing from the extremities to protect the vital core—but not death. Not yet.

. In our battle to hold back the darkness we’ve managed to build a few shelters lit by camp‹res. At night we sit around them and tell stories, and sometimes the stories become songs. We understand so little that we should be stunned to silence. Instead we sing. It’s the best thing about us.

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. I’ve always thought gray must be the color of indifference, and that the winter sky is the grayest of all. But I looked closer and was surprised to see that the sky is not gray at all. It is the exact same white as the snow in the ‹elds.

. Blue Water is a secondary road, so the plow won’t arrive until Center Road is cleared. Until then it stays covered with snow, and because school has been canceled and nobody seems to be in a hurry to go to work, it is still untracked, unmarred, pristine. It’s a snow day for adults, too.

. The evenings are long now, and the days are a few hours of weak light in which to plow the driveway and shovel the snow off the roof where the ice dams have been backing up. Nothing else is required except to split some pine into kindling, carry an armload of ‹rewood into the house, lift the lid off the kettle—fragrant steam rises in a gust—and stir the soup.

. Dug through a foot and a half of snow in the garden to the parsley bed, and found the parsley still green, fresh, delicious.

. The dull blue sky of winter afternoons. Trying to reach beneath the skin of the world.

. A thousand voices—what am I saying? a million voices! a billion!—crying out that you have to do what they do, nothing new, nothing daring, nothing that threatens, undermines, indicts, or diminishes the certain, familiar, safe. No wonder it’s so dif‹cult to make something new. It’s

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not enough to be bold. You have to be indomitable. You have to be a fucking warrior.

. When I was a kid, warm beneath quilts in the unheated upstairs bedroom of my grandparents’ house, I would hear the county snowplow coming. It made a sound like distant wind, growing gradually louder, and because the room was so cold I would wait until the last possible moment to jump out of bed and throw aside the curtain to watch it hurtle past on the highway. I wanted to see the blade making sparks against the pavement. They were a swarm of luminescent bees rushing through the night.

. Cold, clear, very still today—and I stand at the water’s edge hoping some of that stillness will enter me. A few times in the past it has.

. This morning zero degrees and windless, the rising sun brilliant and the snow blinding. On the bay sea smoke is so dense it’s like looking down on a deep valley ‹lled with cloud.

. All the moments that make up our lives. Any one of them could explode with signi‹cance. Maybe moments are to time as atoms are to matter. Einstein: “Every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of dust is a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy.”

. Walking in the woods, knee-deep in snow beneath the bare maples, thinking about the maple sap stored in the roots, safely beneath the frost line, waiting for spring’s uplift, and suddenly I was struck by the feeling that I had forgotten something. Something important. Crucial. The certainty of it stayed with me for a moment, just out of reach, then faded.

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. Today the wind is high, and waves are breaking on the shore. More snow tonight, they say, with a chance of apocalypse.

. At the twilight end of the afternoon, big ›akes of snow began to fall. “A lyrical snow,” a friend said years ago, and I have never forgotten. They disengaged from the sky and drifted slowly down and settled on my coat like shavings. I tipped my head back and opened my mouth and caught them in the air, each a spot of cold expanding brightly on my tongue.

. Watching squalls pass over the bay and glad I’m not out there. It’s a day to be on shore. I walk up the beach and step into a copse of aspens. Around me snow›akes fall gently. Beyond the aspens, where the wind off the lake is powerful, the ›akes race parallel to the ground, or dart and lunge, or spiral to the ground as if shot. A few reverse the natural order and rise.

. We’re so distracted that not only have we forgotten how to savor the moment, we’ve forgotten that every moment has savor.

. Full moon tonight and a clear sky. I snowshoed across the meadow, under a moon so bright that it made the sky almost blue. My shadow strode boldly beside me. The moonlight made a trail across the snow leading straight to my eye, exactly as it does on water, and it glittered with thousands of tiny spangled lights, like ›ecks of mica in bedrock. Around me the drifts lay fresh and untouched—a sea of white rollers, with a few weeds showing like sea wrack.

. Eight deer burst from the spruces at the foot of Nick’s Hill and ran into the meadow, where the snow was deep, their tails high and ›ashing

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white. They changed direction when they saw me and bounded away, all at once and at the same rate, but discordantly, the way waves bound off one another at a pier, in a disorder that I’ve often suspected is just another variety of order.

. It’s blowing a cutting wind tonight, and the stars bang around as if hung from wires.

[February] Heavy hoarfrost this morning. Every twig and frond covered with crystals as big as ‹ngernails, like congregations of pure white butter›ies and moths at rest.

. Every reason to be subdued, but just now, looking out the window of my of‹ce at a world made white with driven snow, I exulted. It’s wild out there and we are small and fragile and our problems are insigni‹cant.

. Nick so restless for spring he and I shoveled the basketball court clean—peeling the packed ice off the concrete and heaping it on the sides of the driveway. Under the snow the concrete gleamed with embedded frost, too slippery to play on. We thought enough sunlight might ‹lter through the clouds to defrost it, but two hours later it snowed again.

. In the stillness this morning the barking of a neighbor’s dog freezes in the air like splintered chrome. The owl I heard last night is gone, but its shadow is frozen in the snow. All the fences and telephone lines glitter with hoarfrost.

. Last night another heavy fall of snow. A few ›akes weigh almost nothing, but enough of them can make a roof collapse. It happens occa-

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sionally around here. The rafters in a garage or an old barn settle, groaning like mules under a load. Then one more ›ake lands, and the building trembles, shifts, leans, and collapses.

. Read today that Oswego, New York, has in the past eight days received ten feet of lake-effect snow.

. The earth seems old today. I know buds of renewal are there, somewhere deep in the frozen ground, but they’re buried beneath too much snow and have been out of sight for too many months. Today I don’t believe in spring, I don’t believe in wild›owers, I don’t believe in the scent of rain.

. Blue sky and the snow crusted over. The sun a little higher at midday. You can feel the earth tilting slightly toward the sun.

. Built a camp‹re on Jamison’s hill tonight and stood by it looking down at the valley and the hills beyond. The clouds opened and a half moon emerged, and I could see every tree for a mile. Hills like skulls, the rows of apple trees as neat as combed hair, the scalp showing through. Two barred owls called back and forth from one woods to another. Who cooks? Who cooks for you? At my back, the waves on the bay whispered like distant traf‹c.

. The dog swims through snow like it’s water.

. A ›ock of cedar waxwings in one of the yard maples this morning. For a moment, at ‹rst glance, I thought the tree had sprouted leaves— lush, fawn-colored leaves rustling in the wind.

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. The snow has grown packed and crusty, the remnants of old drifts crumbling like eroding sculpture. Winter is losing resolve.

. All the things of the earth, the things we lift, roll in our hands, pop in our mouths, slip in our pockets for later examination. I would spend my life identifying stones if I thought it would get me one step closer to knowing stones.

. 9:00 p.m., 10 degrees F—Standing at the edge of the bay watching the crescent moon and Venus low in the west, lights across the bay like stars. The lights of Elk Rapids like a nebula. Far down the bay Charlevoix glows beyond the horizon. The bay is freezing. Sounds of expanding ice: crack like thunder. Then continuous rumbling the length of the bay, as if an enormous bowling ball were rolling slowly along a wooden ›oor. A rumbling roll. Sometimes it sounds jagged, like the path of lightning. Sometimes random shots as piercing as artillery. Others intermittent stomps. One moment it sounds like distant jets. One loud peal thunders across the bay and reverberates up and down for ‹fteen seconds. This night so clear I can see twenty miles. So cold the ink in my pen is freezing.

. After a few days of 50 degrees and now 30, the snow has settled and frozen so hard you can walk across the top of it. Smelled spring for the ‹rst time on Feb. 18.

[March] Weather comes in waves—troughs and crests, in intervals. The unexpected warmth is cresting. A new record, 70 degrees, in March! Watch it peak, and curl, and break.

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. After three days of false spring, winter returns. Snow swirls in the glow beneath the porchlight. Flakes as big as coins fall, then rush away in gusts. I can hear waves breaking on the shore. Galloping winds tearing the lake to shreds.

. Ten below zero here, 30 below in Pelston—a lovely frigid morning with the cold sun bright on snow and frost—and for the ‹rst time that I can remember, school is canceled because of the cold alone.

. Snowing hard tonight—wet ›akes, wind-sheered, covering the undercoat of frozen rain. In the dark a violent ›ash, like a short-circuit in a transformer, followed three seconds later by a peal of thunder. Now another long rumble of thunder. A strobe of lightning, muted deep in the cloudcover, lights the yard in an eerie strobe: naked trees with branches like arms, snow›akes frozen in mid-descent.

. Birds are getting active—pairing off, singing, a few ›uttering dalliances. Saw a crow in ›ight carrying a single stick held crossways in its beak, totemically. In Carolus’s oak a male cardinal, a scarlet drop of blood in the dark tree, singing with great energy.

. Howling wind, waves with wind-swept tops crashing to shore, drifts block the driveway. Car won’t start.

. After weeks below freezing, the temperature reached 40 this morning, and birds sang lustily. The winter birds dream of an early spring.

. The snow on the ground is aging, turning to corn. East Bay, still frozen most of the way across, is obscured by mist the same color as the ice,

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making the sky and the lake inseparable. The fogbank at the edge of the earth, billowing into view as the planet tips.

. The magic of the ordinary—of leaf and stone, of breakers on the shore. It’s not the magic we usually mean by the word. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Just ordinary existence—one place in the universe, one moment in time, so ordinary that we’re shocked every time it visits us. So that’s what a wave looks like. This is how breeze feels on skin. This is how it feels to be alive.

. Across the ‹eld, through the falling snow, an evanescent landscape: the ›eeting, the barely discernible, the soon-to-vanish, the never-quitenoticed, the not-yet-named. Maybe there’s a whole world that we can glimpse only in the corners of our eyes.

. Woke this morning to an unfamiliar sound outside the bedroom window. It took a few moments to realize I was hearing water dripping from the eaves. I stepped outside, into warmer air than I expected, into sunlight and blue sky and a fragrant breeze. At the edge of the driveway I stood over a patch of bare ground, the ‹rst after months of snow. There, framed by crusty snow, was a still-life of pebbles, twigs, brittle leaves, and pinecones so rich with detail, texture, and color that I could have fallen into it for hours. Every year it’s the same, and every year I forget. Spring always slips in while we’re sleeping. —end—

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Wege Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Great Lakes Fishery Trust, the Frey Foundation, and the Great Lakes Water Studies Institute at Northwestern Michigan College for their generous support during the writing of this book. Many thanks to those who helped with advice, encouragement, good company, and the loan of their houses: Tim Ervin Becky Ewing Glenn Wolff Tim Schulz Cam Williams Barbara Stark-Nemon Leslie Lee Keith Taylor Richard VanderVeen Ken Scott Dave Dempsey Virginia Johnson Gail Dennis Nick Dennis Aaron Dennis Gerald and Eva Dennis 159

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Acknowledgments

A portion of “Beachwalking” ‹rst appeared in somewhat different form in Leelanau: A Portrait of Place in Photographs and Text, by Ken Scott and Jerry Dennis (Petunia Press, 2000). “A Good Winter Storm” appeared in slightly different form in The River Home, by Jerry Dennis (St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Copyright © 2000 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. “Winter Walks” was published as a limited-edition book, illustrated by Glenn Wolff and designed, printed, and bound by Chad Pastotnik at Deep Wood Press (www.deepwoodpress.com).