Up north the divisions separating woods, water, and sky are blurry indeed. Plants are not relegated to woods or field; more often they make their homes surrounded by water or bog, rooted into the remains of white pine suspended on the surface of the water. Plant villages crowd every available inch of wood. Grasses stand alongside sundew and bog rosemary, clumps of mosses cushion all. Spiders spend their entire lives hunting an eight foot long expanse, with only eighteen inches of width in which to make their life's work. Scores of dragon and damselflies alight; mating, eating, resting a moment in the sun or shade. Flies of all sort float to the surface and climb the waterbound oases as niads, emerging hours later winged, driven, and ephemeral. Clusters of mayfly shucks crowd the tiny gardens, whole and now hollow save the tear along their backs, space enough for them to escape months or years of their watery prisons. It is impossible for me to tell how long the lengths of seemingly unrotted wood have floated there--three years or thirty?
Cruising the banks and stopping at each log, I become so focused on the lives emerging and converging there that I frequently miss what's happening elsewhere on the water. One sunny afternoon, while paddling from one log to the next I looked straight ahead of me in the water and spied four brown 'somethings' on course to collide with my kayak. Odd looking duck asses, I thought. Suddenly, a hammer to the head, I realized they were not the upended forms of foraging waterfowl, but an otter family. Too late. Gone, probably swimming directly underneath my boat, headed somewhere else. I searched for them for over an hour to no avail. The intensity of attention I beam towards one thing makes me completely lost to the others. Time goes away completely; nothing but sun and wind in grass, ant caught in sundew, boatman resting in a water droplet on a lily leaf. Somewhere ahead of me, three otter swimming nearer and nearer. And I missed it. The three seconds I had to watch them before they submerged I spent fumbling for the camera on my lap rather than actually looking at what was happening. Completely stupid.
I was able to follow a merganser family (of fourteen) for what seemed like forever. They moved along the water, never straying more than ten feet from shore, unbothered by my follow. When they encountered an obstacle, out of the water they came, scurrying over the branches or rocks with no thought to going around. If I came too close to them, they flattened themselves to the surface and chattered away at me, but for the better part of two hours I was ignored completely.
When I was a child, the nighttime wailings of loons scared the hell out of me. I can't think of any sound more mournful than the loons calling to each other. In July loon parents are accompanying their young everywhere--teaching them to fish by catching and (I think) killing small fish which are dropped back into the water for the fledglings to catch up again on their own. Young loons lack the brilliant black plumage as well as the somewhat creepy and false looking red eyes of their parents. They appear to be far more habituated than the desolation of their surroundings indicate and often pop up to the surface again twenty feet from my kayak. The eagles, technically sky dwellers, spend a good amount of time near the water. From the air or roosting on a snag, their eyes always seem to be on the fishermen below and are not above diving for a blue gill tossed from a passing boat. Their propensity for roadkill and the leftovers of others diminishes them in my mind somehow. Majestic hunters they are not. They are harsh looking birds as adults; their white heads look as if they have been grafted from another creature entirely.
This is a landscape I have never seen in any season but summer. It is the gentlest place in the world in July; temperatures are mild and nights are nearly always cool. A local was complaining to me about the "terrible" weather they had had a few weeks into the summer wherein it was 90 degrees for two days. Here in the flatlands of cementville we have been subject to 75% humidity and temperatures over 85 degrees since late June. Right now, at 11pm, it is 77 degrees with 79% humidity. The temperatures in Gulf Breeze, Florida, where my poor midwestern friend Caragh has moved to, is currently only two degrees warmer. This somehow seems very wrong. Thus, my heart does not go out to the UP locals who reside in paradise yet must withstand hot weather a few times every summer.The hold that this place and these waters has over me is somehow fixed to my spirit. I conjure the banks and trees, the sun glowing on the pine needles, every time I have to go to the dentist. When I am having a hard time going to sleep, brain too messy with racing thoughts and lists for tomorrow, I steer my kayak through the rice beds and sneak up on the snapping turtles who think they are alone. I approach the portage where blueberries grow beside and the crows wheel overhead when I am stuck in my car. I save my favorite bay, the one my sister-in-law and I secretly own, for the dark days of February when the snow is pitted and black, the air is too cold for much of anything. She and I paddle on those days. We cruise, waterbound bums, in search of whatever the lake feels we're worthy of. Sometimes she gives us mergansers, sometimes blue flag iris, sometimes crayfish or mayflies. Sometimes she gives us nothing. Which is fine with us.
Below, Our children, incapable of remaining upright while kayaking
Frog toes, taking a rest on Greta
