Controlled by a Scruffy Little Animal:
Notes on the Rocks
We knew the rain was coming. Or, at least, we should have known.
When the canoe left our spacious campsite of towering red pines and old green tents on a peninsula on Fourtown Lake, we, four college students, noticed the western horizon. Bloated clouds like marshmallows expanding in heat were a stripe of impending precipitation. But the sun, and the blue sky it punched through to brown our shoulders, made rain seem unlikely. Having been rainless for five days, we were accustomed and expectant of Pleasantville weather. We were excited to have a picnic a lake away in the sun.
The paddle from Fourtown Lake to Moosecamp Lake in the BWCA involves a currentless mucky river with no name. It was like an aimless, bastard oil slick. There were more plants than water: Swamp buttercups, water lilies (both fragrant and bullhead), and Joe-Pye weed pulled at our paddles. The river bent back on itself in ninety degree turns, indecisive in its real direction. We ploughed into the shoreline grasses often during these sharp turns, the thick vegetation higher than our heads.
Small beaver dam segmented the river. Every hundred yards or so, a mound of mud and sticks met the nose of our canoe. All four of us had to get out, go knee-deep in hungry, sulfuric-smelling mud, and use push-grunts to the canoe over the fulcrum of packed earth. Reentering the canoe was equally exhilarating, for our collective shifting weight jostled the already unsteady craft. Our soggy footwear spooned in dark warm marsh water each time. That, coupled with the musk of four unwashed bodies, gave our journey an aromatic aura comparable to a sweaty toilet.
Hearing thunder under a blue sky was nearly charming, like seeing a young child in a scary mask at your door. We laughed out “uh-ohs” and continued, trying our best not to notice the drop in temperature and the shore grasses bent in a newly shifted wind.
Our instructor, known as Dr. Bob – a writing professor who often spoke of his home state of Kansas and his home boy of Wordsworth the way some speak of ancient landscapes and gods – had asked us before we left if we were going to bring our raingear. We, the young and fearless students, smirked and said, “No.” Dr. Bob also smirked, a more bemused and wise version, before saying, “Oh. Okay.” We figured if it did rain, it would feel great on our skin due to the recent hot weather.
I thought of this brief conversation after we ascended a four-foot by twenty-foot beaver dam when the first drops fell. We cheered like children playing in the rain with no grown-ups around. After all, our swimsuits were on, and we had Ziploc bags in which to put our belongings.
Five minutes later, it was pouring. Fat rain, frigid loogies, slapped the river. I sat in the duffer’s position (the non-paddler in the center of the canoe) and felt my prior exuberance wash away. I was cold. I was miserable. I was sitting in funky brown water. I had no raincoat to stay dry, no knife to cut firewood, no lighter to start a fire, no way to remedy my discomfort. The dark gray sky was throwing down all it had, and I had to take it. All of us were quiet; some of us shivered, then a few of us cursed. Moosecamp Lake was still a ways away – “a ways” being the accurate and universal unit of measure when the traveling is unpleasant – but we paddled on.
My lack of preparation was stupid, I knew, but somewhat thrilling in the powerlessness it created. I had written in my journal a few days prior about how I wanted Nature to debase me, to put in my place as a small struggling creature; to give me the fierce backhand of a storm, a twisted ankle from her gnarled roots. I wanted Nature to make me hate Her so I could understand Her enough to truly lover Her. These almost masochistic longings were received.
I could not better the situation, so I smiled at the violent weather – so tangible and biting – and took my dirty baptism of humbleness.
Letting go of the illusion of control is difficult, especially if the situation can me semi-controlled. For example, if hypothermia had set in on me, I sure as hell would have done all in my power to warm up and survive. I’d bind myself with the thick life jackets, find a granite nook to ball up in, and breathe dry my wet body. For to let go of control is not to let got of the struggling.
According to John Ayto, author of Dictionary of Word Origins, the word “control” comes from the Old English contra-rotating, which was a medieval method used in checking accounts where two people were registered in a dual account. So by its very nature, controlling is monitoring two separate things. This makes sense in terms of the inner landscape of humans. Contentment slow dances with frustration, tranquility flirts with turbulence. It’s like an open invitation party at the end of the year, and everyone’s trying to hook up, just for the hell of it, just because life can let such dichotomies play and propagate. What’s frightening isn’t the closeness of opposites but rather how little we can do to purify, safeguard, and control the ones we like.
I half remember an old Ghanan legend I once read about bickering siblings in heaven before light existed. One sibling wanted light for the world and its creatures. The other wanted the darkness to remain. So the siblings fought, and are still fighting today, alternating victories and losses with days and nights. I enjoy this story for its non-totality, of its beneficial balance through struggle. Day is day when night can’t fight and vice versa.
Three days prior to this trip to Moosecamp Lake, I was four miles west on Basswood Lake, strolling the rocky shore, skipping stones and thinking. I came upon an inhabited, pinkie knuckle-sized snail shell. I held it my hands like an aged coin and traced its contours with my wet fingers. My identification was touching another’s. I pressed the shell to test its hardness. It exploded. Two drops of snail blood – blood as red as my own – landed on my bare chest. The crushed thing in my hand was a new jagged ruin. I tossed the pieces of my victim back in the water, trying to tell myself it would be eaten by a loon, or would decay, or something ecological-sounding to mitigate my guilt. I let the two drops of blood on my chest mix with my sweat until it trickled in pink down my body, back into the lake.
Later, I watched a lengthy summer sunset. The clouds were wispy, spread sparsely in the rich, warm paints of dusk. These clouds could have been spirits, or paintings, or paintings of spirits. They were heaven smoke, I realized, a loose haze from the tired ember of the sun. The slivers of orange clouds nearest the horizon were lined like eyelashes or ribs.
As the sun approached the white pine horizon, it became swallowed in its own smoke. One sibling had lost so the other could win control of the sky. It was a graceful and easy defeat, like musical chairs with only one chair.
On the last beaver dam before Moosecamp Lake, I slipped on a wet log, took two or three backward steps in a frantic attempt to balance myself, and then fell into a piss-warm pond. My peers laughed at me.
“This water’s warmer than the air,” I said, as if my dive was of calculated, thermal purposes.
“But it smells horrible,” someone reasoned.
“Yeah, well…” I started, knowing I couldn’t argue.
The canoe made a scraping sound up the incline, and the leveled with a plop. The water from the sky was almost icy, resoaking my shirt with its coldness.
“I’m cold.”
“Me too.”
“Me three.”
“My nipples are like BBs.”
We complained and pushed on, hungry for lunch at Moosecamp.
My wet, mud-streaked legs reminded me of the pictographs near Lower Basswood Falls, those pinkish, burgundy-brown images on the canvas of granite cliffs towering the lake’s edge. More specifically, I recalled the one of the moose with accentuated male genitals. It smoked a pipe, too. No doubt this pictograph had significant meaning in terms of fertility. But a well-endowed moose puffing away is still worthy of a grin.
On the same panel of rocks, a couple of feet upwards to the right, was the image of a pelican sporting horns on its head. I later learned the horns were associated with Missepishu (The Great Lynx), an Ojibwa god known for his mischievous, disruptive pranks. When things went wrong on a hunt, when rain did not come, when canoes were tipped, it was said to be the work of Missepishu. However, the god was not seen in contempt. Missepishu was merely a jokester who controlled small misfortunes, and he was accepted as so. But why his horns would be on a pelican is unclear.
It’s also unclear when these pictographs were created. Most specialists believe they were done between 300 and 500 years ago. The mixture of fish oil, animal fats, and local iron oxides used to create these images has held up nearly perfectly with minimal fading. Of course, the Ojibwa did not think of them as “pictographs.” According to Michael Furtman, author of Magic on the Rocks, the drawings were called muzzinabikon, meaning “marks on the rocks.” However, in the Ojibwa language, the word gikinowin means “map, message, or record in picture.” I think gikinowin is the more suitable word for what I saw on those rocks, for such a word encompasses the larger scope of place and meaning. There are no myths, peoples, or animals without a place, a map of stories.
Most gikinowin stem from myths. These myths usually concern a struggle for control, and what transpired from that struggle, to explain why things are the way they are. Every culture has creation myths, but how nature casts those characters is intriguing. David Rains Wallace writes, “Older myths generally placed humans on a scale midway between animals and gods. This position had a comfortable stability. It gave people something to look down on and something to look up to.” Indeed, we are not rabbits or Allahs, and we often curse that we can’t step up or down on this ladder in order to become more oblivious or omniscient. So what do we do? We create. We create stories, songs, paintings, sculpture, things created to have control over something extracted from a world we cannot.
Many could argue God (of the many forms) was the only true creator. This I cannot prove or disprove. But going out into the wilderness certainly provokes spiritual thoughts. Being suddenly surrounded by beautiful land and sky is like opening a door to something. God is the ultimate knock-knock joke, really. I mean, who is there? We turn the knob and push only to find nothing but everything that was already there. It’s a deliciously funny mad-lib, a cruel fill-in-the-blank.
I agree with science fiction writer Ursula La Guin on her views on God: “Obviously, we need a trickster, a creator who made the world all wrong. We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes, gets into trouble, and who is identified with a scruffy little animal.” We need a Missepishu.
Days earlier on the Horse River, Dr. Bob had decided a portage around some rapids was “for sissies.” I was in the bow of his canoe, not steering, so I was at his mercy. The three students in the other canoe took the portage of about 70 rods.
“You sure?” I asked my gung-ho professor.
“Why not? We’re young,” he said.
Our combined age of 83 did not exactly sound puppyish, but the adventure was a departure from the paddle-portage-paddle-portage routine.
The first rapids came against us trickling – low water, several rocks – and it was easy to step out and gently guide the canoe upstream. We waded comfortably, cooling our ankles before jumping back in to paddle to deeper waters.
“I never was a wet-footer,” he said. “But I thought today was the day.” He nodded at his blue Keen water shoes, happy to put them to use.
The next set of rapids were a longer stretch but still weak. No footing was easy, for glacier-munched rocks shifted under weight. The current picked up near the end of these rapids. I could feel it on my shins, looking down to see overturned parentheses cupping my pant legs. Dr. Bob pushed from the back of the canoe, steadying it over the swiveling current. I took one last lunging step, hoping to give us some momentum, before jumping back on, and abruptly fell chest-deep in water.
“Does it get deep there?” He laughed.
“A little bit.”
I clutched a short length of rope that was tied to the bow, while my other hand stabilized the bow itself. I kept dragging, thinking of this self-inflicted struggle we were putting ourselves through for a few laughs.
These new rapids before me had something to prove; there was much more whitewater in them. They were not much to the eye unless that eye was in the head and body that had to go against the current, pulling a sixty pound canoe and a hundred pounds of gear. Dr. Bob jumped out again. Things got serious. It suddenly occurred to me we had no idea what we were doing. The current now hugged our hips, unseen sticks poked our shins, and river bottom rocks kept our stances unbalanced. We stumbled like drunkards.
With my back toward him, I was setting the pace. I tugged and kept tugging until I heard a moan. He was bent over favoring his left ankle, muttering under his breath.
“Ankle?”
“Yep.”
“You okay?”
“Um…yeah.”
I got the sense that it wasn’t okay. I thought this small injury would send us back, but Dr. Bob straightened himself and said, “Try to go to the right of that boulder up there. It’ll be easier.” He boosted the stern upstream with a full arm push. He was sweating and smiling like a child.
A part of me thought, What is this old man doing to himself? I hope he doesn’t think I’m gonna carry him back if he drops. One tends to believe, or wants to believe, that leaders, professors, people who teach things, have methods to their madnesses. I had supposed he had done this before, and I was growing unsure about this supposition.
The canoe became a creature unto itself in the faster waters. It was a green clumsy beast that insisted the river’s current was the right way to go, regardless of its master’s commands. Boulders turned from foe to friend as they became steady anchors to lean the beast against. On one such mid-river boulder, we ditched the Duluth bag to make the load lighter, and rested. I asked Dr. Bob if he had ever gone this way before. He said, “No,” and laughed. “No, I’ve never gone this way before.” And then he turned his face towards the sky to laugh some more. He looked suddenly young and playful, like an otter in the afternoon sun. I realized he was just a boy from Kansas playing in the river, no more a professor than any other curious creature doing curious things. Sweat dripped from the white hair on his chin, and river water dripped from his fingers.
Twenty yards ahead of us, the others were waiting, dry and unspent. They waved.
“What…what happened to you guys? Did you fall in?” They asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, we fell in.”
We emptied our canoe and carried the gear on a small, overgrown path near the shore to calmer waters. Then we carried the canoe together: I at the bow, Dr. Bob at the stern.
We had gone maybe a total of one hundred yards on those rapids, but when the surface one navigates is a treadmill of moving water, the energy expelled is the more important measurement. Before reboarding, I took a look back at the rapids. It was beautiful. Some green paint from our canoe had rubbed off on a string of rock corners, and these specks glittered in the sun, getting smaller in the distance.
The weather cleared up on Moosecamp Lake. A light mist moved between the leaves and needles of shoreline trees. There’s nothing like the quite lull after a rain in the middle of nowhere. The air seemed to wait for new whispers, but we waited for nothing, paddling quickly to shore to devour our lunch of wet tortilla flaps, wet cheese, wet sausage, semi-dry peanut butter, jam, wet chocolate, and dried fruit that wasn’t so dry. We chewed and grunted happily in the simple pleasure of eating outside when one in hungry:
“Mm. Hell yeah.”
A smacking of lips, some sipping of water.
“This is so friggin’ good.”
“Oh. I know. Just heaven.”
“Pass the peanut butter and tortillas. This party’s just getting started.”
We reclined on moist rocks and looked to a newly sunny sky. One would think such a quick transition from rain to shine would render a rainbow, but the sky was blue and empty. We talked. We laughed at the wildly unprepared voyage we had taken. We balled up our shirts and twisted out gray water. We ate our fill and rested, chocolate and jam drying on our palms.
Three-fourths of the way back, we realized we had left the map at our picnic spot. It was no bother. We knew the way. I love the image of that map, full of boundaries and miles, eventually being absorbed by the very landscape it claimed to convey.
