Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Something in those few perfect moments opened a faucet inside. All day long I’ve been running on joy, paddling some eighteen miles and making nine portages, at various times lost in a narrow maze of marsh channels, then portaging around falls and races flashing over slabs of granite, running down the big lakes with a light breeze at my back. Before I know it, I’m just two short miles from the takeout. Darkness is coming, but still I have to almost force myself to beach at this campsite on a shelf of rock overlooking Nina Moose Lake, back in the more heavily traveled reaches of the wilderness.

  Most people don’t have a clue to how well sound travels across water. I can hear almost every word being said by the family on that island campsite some two hundred yards away. A sixteen-year-old is being admonished for bugging his brother and then the two of them are sent off in opposite directions to gather wood. Mom discussing whether to have green beans or pork-and-beans, and Dad grumbling about having lost the lighter. During the pre-dinner game of movie charades, I find myself better than Dad but not nearly as good as Mom or the eldest son, and later, when Mom sees a snake, I can feel the hair go up on the back of my neck at the sheer terror in her scream.

  Yet all this is library whisper compared to the final arrivals of the day, a group of ten young people from a local church camp grunting up the lake in the last gray light, singing at the top of their lungs: “If you’re happy and you know it, say Amen.” Just offshore they give me a hearty wave and like other groups I’ve met, are thoroughly shocked to learn that I’m alone (to Midwesterners, people alone are either to be pitied or arrested), at which point I feel a flash of terror because I know that in thirty minutes they’ll be back here, trying to drag me to the revival. In truth, though, the faithful coming back to the wilderness, which a Presbyterian preacher friend says they’re doing more and more these days, is probably the best thing Christianity has done since it did it the last time, right after Joe Knowles came strutting out of the Maine wilderness. As darkness falls, I can hear the family across the lake singing (Mom has finally stopped saying how she wants to go home because of the snake), the members of the church camp next door talking low, praying for me, I suppose—me and one other chap who arrived alone by sea kayak. I lie low, happy when the rain finally comes and sends everyone to bed.

  At the final portage, on a gray morning hung with the promise of rain, I meet Mary, waiting for her husband and their two daughters to arrive with the rest of the gear. We strike up a conversation. She tells me that both her grandfather and father were canoe guides, and how when she was a little girl she was constantly pestering her father to teach her the skills, but that he always said women just didn’t do that sort of thing. I wonder to myself what he would have done had Kathleen Anderson been his daughter—the sled-dog musher, kayak trip leader, owner of Winter Moon. “Do you think things are different for girls today?” I ask. “Well, a couple of years back I went on an all-women’s group. We did get teased a couple of times—remarks were made. But we blew them off. Look, I’m a teacher, and I’d never be able to go back to work in the fall if I didn’t have at least one week up in these woods.”

  I’ve always had more trouble than most when it comes to switching gears from the wilderness back to civilization. It’s this slightly nauseating sensation of being overwhelmed by a lot of stuff—silly things like popcorn poppers and gel-filled bicycle seats; and at the stores, shelves full of cheddar pretzels and cherry ChapStick, angled toothbrushes and fake tattoos and porcelain figurines of mermaids and beagles. This particular coming out of the backcountry, though, ends up being easier than usual thanks to the fact that my first stop comes after a long walk from my takeout on the Little Nina Moose River down a dirt road through the woods and back to Charlie and Connie Cowden’s house, where I can sit on a bench at a pinewood table and drink tea and listen to Canada warblers calling through the open windows, trade a few stories, eat beaver and blueberries and wild rice. Clearly, this is the better way.

  “I remember when my folks first came up here from down south,” Charlie is saying. “Hell, I was living in a tiny cabin with an old privy out back, and Mom was scared to use it because of the bears and the wolves and anything else that moved. I always assumed they thought I was goofy, because the truth is, a lot of people did. But then in snatches of conversation, other people would tell me that Dad was bragging about his kid being up here in the woods living like a brush ape, going on and on about it, I guess experiencing an old dream of his own through me, maybe even wishing he’d have done the same.”

  Charlie and Connie say that if you find a partner who’ll stick it out with you for six months in this kind of life, as a couple you’ve got a chance. Charlie and his first wife, whom he met while he was guiding, never made it. “For her, it was a matter of leaving a place where she had material things—the car, the electricity, the sewing machine—and backing up fifty years. Taking a step backward when everyone else she knew was going forward. A lot of it was peer pressure, friends telling her she was nuts to be living like she was, with a little baby in a one-room cabin with no electricity and no running water. You know, I’ve been trapping ever since I was a teenager, and my goal was always to run the trap lines by dog team in some remote area where the snow was four feet deep. Really, this place was supposed to be just a stop on my way to Alaska. By the time I was seventeen I’d read every book on the subject I could get my hands on. That was the dream that drove me. But it’s not for everyone. It sure wasn’t for her.”

  By the time I walk out the door and down the steps, Charlie and Connie have loaded me with a Sigurd Olson book I somehow missed reading, two quarts of blueberries, and at least a pound of wild rice, all collected by hand, and this too makes it just a little bit easier to think of heading west, out of the woods and across a thousand miles of plains, toward home.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE LEAVING BEGINS NEAR MAHNOMEN, Minnesota, on the White Earth Indian Reservation, in a land tossed with a thousand ponds and kettle holes and flat, silent streams lined with strips of cattails. And between all that, long-reaching fields of sunflowers standing at attention, every plate-sized bloom turned back the way I came, facing into the rising sun. The trees don’t go all at once, of course. They scatter by degrees, pulling farther and farther back from the old concrete highway until by the town of Ada, on the Wild Rice River, the best of them are little more than green smudges in the rearview mirror. Out here on the prairie, uncrowded by woods, the small towns are trying to act like big ones, sprawling in every direction, squatting beside main streets big enough to funnel a decent rush hour and a good-sized marching band.

  Sitting beside me on the passenger seat is a birch basket given to me by Amelia Legarde, the Ojibwa storyteller, placed in my hands right as I was walking out the door of her house in Duluth. “This is for you,” was all she said. “I want you to have it.” It wasn’t made by weaving, the way we usually think of baskets, but rather from a single piece of bark fourteen inches tall and three feet wide, wrapped into a cylinder and then closed at the seam with strips of basswood. The top and bottom edges are trimmed with scalloped strips of winter bark, rust-red, with thin, ivory-colored blisters. Sort of like a log drum with no top. Looking at it reminds me of how in some cultures during certain rites of passage, an empty chalice was placed in a prominent location—one of those archetypal symbols meant to remind people of the empty space that lies between who they were and who they’ll be. A way of nudging them into being on the lookout for new beginnings.

  It’s a strange time to be coming into North Dakota. Last night, Michael Moore’s program TV Nation made big fun of the state, going for that whole icebox thing—the howling blizzards and the empty airports, how it’s the least-visited state in America. Today everyone is talking about it: old farmers in Portland, the gas-station attendant, the waitress in Mayville, members of the congregation from the Bruflat Lutheran Church. The Department of Tourism director and the governor are on the radio, sounding very sincere, telling everyone
how they tried to show Moore the highlights of the state, all to no avail. I say forget it. In fact, I’m not so sure they shouldn’t be thankful. If I were a North Dakotan I’d probably be on my knees giving thanks for these clean skies and kettle holes full of ducks, and blissful, quiet highways, even if they are drifted over half the year with snow. I like this state. It’s the kind of sprawling, windblasted place that builds humble, hopeful people—a whack on the side of the head for those lost in the cerebral, the brace on the back that helps straighten the spine. Besides, I’ve always had the most pleasant mental rambles while driving across North Dakota, as if the whole state was like that porch the woman who owned the lodge in Maine talked about, the one where she keeps trying to make her guests just sit for an hour and stop being distracted, get to know themselves again. Relax. This is even better because you don’t have any choice. Nobody has to be here coaching you to be in the moment, because early on, the land drives you right down into surrender. Only a fool would fight against North Dakota.

  West from Carrington it’s a sweet, lonely float across the golden rills of the prairie, under a platter of blue sky so big you can be looking straight down and still feel it. It’s less like driving than riding in a railroad club car, which may explain why two of the six drivers who passed me going in the other direction over the last thirty miles were reading newspapers. Swap shows are the local programming option of choice on AM radio—electronic garage sales. People are calling in to sell everything from Dalmatians to trash compactors to tractor tires (weather-checked and on the rim), looking to buy woodstoves and trailer hitches and babysitters.

  Ever so slowly the land is changing, increasingly cut by twisted coulees, agriculture turning from corn and beans to dry land crops and cattle. Haystacks are coming farther and farther apart now, the hay less likely to be baled than rolled into great rounded humps that from a distance look like nothing so much as giant pieces of shredded wheat. Modest trees stand beside the houses, doing their best to hang on, and here and there cottonwood groves can be seen huddling in ditch pockets and at the bottoms of the larger coulees. Old Aermotor windmills roll by, some with their blades torn off by the winds. The air gets clearer, more pungent-smelling, like the West.

  As I’ve said, I always end up doing a lot of thinking while driving across the open sprawls of this state, and today is no exception. Mostly I keep going back to the people I’ve left behind in the woods: Barry and Lori Dana, Garrett and Alexandra Conover, Lester Simpson and Henry Johnson and Amelia Legarde, Deb Sylvester and Charlie Cowden. It’s while lost in this reverie, rolling through a yawning patch of prairie the color of cornhusks, just west of Mercer and south of the turtle races at Turtle Lake, in a place where you can’t buy a tree, it suddenly hits me. What pushed the woods to the outside edges of my life eight years ago wasn’t that I lost my appreciation for them, but only that I stopped practicing them. I was fighting so hard, struggling like so many others against the careless polluting of rivers, the carving up of winter range, the plans for gold mines in high country that can never be reclaimed. Important battles, all of them. But it got to the point where there was nothing left but the fighting. I lost the mundane. I became less a lover to the woods than a bodyguard. No matter how my head might be exploding with good intentions toward the earth, unless my brand of nature advocacy is rooted in something palpable, concrete, common as dirt, I will always end up burned out in bad religion. It’s Garrett Conover’s decision to link himself to his surroundings with a draw knife and a canvas canoe, to wear wool sweaters in the rain. It’s Darla Simpson drinking half-gallons of catnip tea to beat a cold, or Charlie Cowden harvesting rice. It’s the relationship, stupid.

  I should have made the connection way back on the Hudson River, at Olana, home of that great American landscape painter Frederic Church. I remember the curator saying how Church was depressed almost beyond function when in the later 1800s the country began turning away from nature art and poetry, away from those precious sermons in the stones. He should’ve walked out of that fancy mansion of his, wandered down the hill and grabbed a couple of those oak saplings he kept the gardeners busy sticking in the ground, made it his new mission to scoop out a few holes in the earth with his bare hands and see if he could make one of them grow.

  Several years ago I heard this amazing story, told to me by a guy in his mid-sixties, a dear friend of mine, extremely well-educated and the most gifted, meticulous naturalist I’ve ever known. He grew up poor during the Depression on a farm back in one of the woodland states, hunting deer and squirrels, even making his own arrows, roaming the forests with something close to fever. One day we were having a quiet conversation at his home when he got up and shut the door to the room, came back and sat down, leaned forward in his chair and looked me right in the eye, said he was about to tell me something he’d never told anyone before. That he wanted to share this thing that happened to him fifty years earlier, that he still thought about almost every day of his life.

  “I was fifteen,” he said. “Still living with my folks on the farm. It was real late on a summer night, that time right in the middle from dusk to dawn—warm, with a full moon shining through my bedroom window. I’m not sure how to tell this…I mean, it felt like a dream, sounds like one. But it wasn’t. I’m laying there and all of a sudden I’m just overcome by this urge to head into the pasture. I crawl out of bed and go outside—buck-naked, mind you—and before I knew it, I was running through those fields, weaving along the edge of the woods. No, running’s not right. I was leaping, like a damned deer! Almost floating. It went on and on—I don’t know for how long, maybe a half-hour—running in lines and big circles, racing around barefoot without ever feeling tired. It was like the whole night—the moon and grass and deer and bugs—was in my blood, pumping through my veins, letting me do all manner of amazing things I’d never done before. And never since.”

  And then he stopped talking, and his eyes narrowed back to normal, he shook his head and gazed around the room, like somebody coming out of a trance.

  Whatever that epiphany was—a waking dream, or the gods coming down for a fast dance in the body of a country boy—I think it could have happened only to someone like him, someone who practiced the woods. A person for whom nature wasn’t mistress, but wife. Someone who knew the smell of bark and dry earth, who was likely as not to clock hours by the roll of shadows and the months by their blooms, someone who’d stumbled and fallen and left his blood lying on the rocks.

  “Like I say,” he told me, “nothing like it ever happened again. But then, one time is enough to change you. It’s not that I lived any different afterward. I just thought better of it. There was more life to hold on to.”

  “Chop wood and carry water,” the teacher tells the student. “And perhaps enlightenment will come.” “And after enlightenment?” the student asks.

  “Chop wood and carry water.”

  By the time my head floats back to the road, it’s past time for a break. And what better place than the tiny village of Zap, North Dakota—“The Little Town with a Big Heart,” as the welcome sign says? It was in Zap that in 1969 there occurred one of the most outrageous events in an otherwise fairly quiet twentieth century. A journalism student by the name of Kevin Carvell, bitten by spring fever but too poor to make the expedition south to warmer climates, decided to invite some of his fellow college students to snub the rush to Florida, the Gulf Coast, the Bahamas. Surely, he wrote in The Spectrum, North Dakota State’s college newspaper, there must be an equivalent to Fort Lauderdale right here in the far north.

  “We began to search and found the perfect spot, a truly idyllic setting, a Garden of Paradise, unspoiled and just asking for carefree students to rescue it from its oblivion.” It was a town of two hundred fifty in the western part of the state—one cafe, one grocery store, a lumberyard, two bars, and two gas stations. It was Zap. Carvell went on to promise those who arrived on Friday, May 9, such exciting adventures as watching school get out, eating Zap burger
s at the Zap Cafe, slipping coins into the jukebox and listening to the “Heartbreak Waltz” and the “Swinging Benny Polka.” On Saturday there was to be an “honest-to-God rock dance,” featuring the Outcasts from Minot, as well as “a full program of orgies, brawls, freakouts and arrests.”

  It was the last story Kevin Carvell would ever write as editor for The Spectrum. How could he have known that the Associated Press would pick up the piece, that his little party would end up being announced on all three network news broadcasts, The Today Show, in The Los Angeles Times, and The Denver Post? The zip to Zap was underway. Yet even with all this somewhat alarming publicity, the good mayor of Zap, Norman Fuchs, put on his best smile and prepared to welcome the crowds of young fun-seekers. After all, how bad could it be? He even sent a letter through The Spectrum welcoming the North Dakota State students, listing the special treats being planned for them. There would be “barbecued beef, styled a la chow line, fleisch kuechle (a kind of meat pie) with cow-belle sauce, hot dogs with or without bun, the Outcasts for your rhythm release, an ocean full of suds, plenty of rooms for the action, and Zip-Zap souvenirs.”