Frogs

I can see the flat surface of the lake is vibrating, puckering. The male frogs are singing/trilling/beeping with their puffed chins, erupting in spurts of sound that make the lake quiver. The females find this irresistible, I am told, arriving from the far reaches of the surrounding woods on their oversized toes. .

Even with a cross on their backs, marching from the leaf litter of the forest floor to the edges of the closest wetland, they are mostly impossible to see. There seem to be a million of them, and surely are a million, but I’ve never seen one. I really don’t even try. I accept their presence much like I accept galaxies--beyond my understanding. The loudest and most recognizable sound of spring is invisible to me, and that speaks to all sorts of metaphors about my relationship with my gods. 

The summer season is so short in the boreal forest. There’s no time to not be seeing to the task of reproduction. There’s a small window of opportunity before it’s winter again. The intensity of all this procreation creates a nameless energy that grabs all of my sensory faculty and plucks at a primitive consciousness in my chest.

My language calls this spring fever, and it does make me want to whoop and celebrate and go mad with delight. It feels more gripping than that, though. Living this far back in the boreal forest, with a cabin of windows and screens, we are in it. We are part of it. This is not a city spring of lilacs and nesting robins. This is thick clouds of black flies, bird feeders that empty as fast as we fill them, and myriad blooms that set and open on warm days. There's not a plant or an insect or a tree that's not working on creation.

Everywhere I look I find a curiosity. The red pines are candling, the sarsaparilla is sending up yellow blooms that look like little fireworks, the hummingbirds are swinging a mating dance. I'm unequipped to understand much more than generalities, despite my willing attention. I retreat to my books and words for taxonomy, but mostly this is a religious experience.

The frogs making my bog lake shimmy are an obvious gateway. Their singing literally reverberates in my body. No subtlety here. Spring peepers can be heard two miles away. Measured in decimals, standing one foot away from a peeping male is the same as standing 100 feet from a jet engine.

If you move silently along the path near the bog, you will find yourself at the center of a silence bubble: Every frog within 30 feet will quiet. If you walk toward the wall of frog sound just down the trail, your silence bubble goes with you. But if you hold still for some time, keeping your breathing slow, and you quit trying so hard, the frogs will begin to sing again.

In fact, the peepers are primarily done with their spring show. We are now hearing leopard frogs and gray tree frogs. I talk as if I know one from the other, but the fact is that there’s so many different species calling and so many individuals calling that spring evenings by the bog are just plain noisy. Which is not to say it’s unpleasant. It is not. It’s part of that spring energy I spoke of--intense and insistent and invisible. I want to bathe in it, drink it, sleep with my windows open to it, then rub it in my skin.. 

I strive to love all my frogs equally, as any bog witch should. But I confess that the spring peepers are my favorite. They are to the ears what robins are to the eyes. They announce that spring has finally, as promised, arrived. I have all sorts of human-made calendars, but I am waiting for confirmation from Mother Earth. I believe winter is over only when the peepers and robins tell me it’s so. 

I need this kind of reassurance. Something loud and obvious, because winter is just that hard for me. My relief matches the intensity of the frogs’ calls. 

My relationship with these woods is such that I flee to the cabin each April and May to welcome all those who are arriving or awakening. Me and the chickadees and the pine marten, we’ve been here all keeping company. The peepers have been here, too, and they crawl out of their bark hiding places and head to the water’s edge. Once they announce the beginning of ceremony, I am an initiate and a student. Class is in. 

The peepers have done their work, fulfilled their contract, and are returning their tiny selves to the deep woods where they spend all but one month of the year. Their eggs are fertilized and growing in the shallow edges of the bog. Tadpoles will swim in a few weeks, feeding the dragonfly nymphs and loons. I lose track there. Galaxies again. It’s too beautiful and complicated for me. 

One of my goals this year is to learn to discern one from another. That’s the scientific thing to do. Isolate, identify. Won’t I be the smart naturalist? 

But I fear that knowing too much does me a disservice. It makes me more aligned with my head than my heart. I start listening differently, and reasoning rather than experiencing. I’m not sure this is the wise way to pursue the knowledge I seek.

Of course, what I need is practice. It’s easy for me to identify calls and memorize life cycles. What I need to practice is allowing myself to shift from one way of knowing to the other. That’s the hard work.

Peepers are a good start. They are so numerous and loud and obvious, it’s hard NOT to experience their energy and essence. And the fact that they won’t let you see them? Seems about right.

Spring

The weather has finally given way, and as it's been in previous years, spring is like drinking out of a firehose. For those of us compelled to record everything, the list-making can be exhaustive. What arrives, what unfurls, what blows in.

For days, I recorded the same entry into the cabin journal: “Gray skies, biting wind, high near 40.” It’s disheartening to feed the woodstove in mid-May. We hung the hummingbird feeder with the anticipation of hanging a stocking, but no takers. Not even the chickadees were interested in our sunflower seeds. 

It wasn’t all so bleak. Our resident pine marten, who it seems we are unimaginatively calling “Marty,” came to the feeder a handful of times over two days. Marty first made an appearance last May, hissing from the screen porch beam before escaping through a flapping arm of screen, scaring both me and the dog half to death. I just remember flashing teeth. He returned in December, stealing the pieces of scrap meat we put out for the Canada jays. Now he comes at any old time of the day or night, climbs the cedar windowsill, then leaps to the feeder picking out the safflower. The guidebooks say they are quite shy and nocturnal. We have a defective pine marten. 

It’s been a few days since Marty visited, but the feeder has been hosting new creatures arriving by the hour. In fact, all hell is breaking loose. 

Yesterday spring began churning in earnest. Treetops of aspen developed a chartreuse haze, new bird songs came down from the canopy, and most tellingly, mosquitoes and blackflies flew like drunk airmen through the air. 

The bugs and the insectivore birds arrive together, of course. There was nothing to eat 48 hours ago, but now the air is like a grocery store. Even I could harvest protein with the proper net. For the last few days, I've been imagining what must be a weather front of birds moving north, returning to summer grounds, flying primarily at night. When I walk to the outhouse each morning, I’ll be greeting new overnight arrivals with my ears, listening for a veery thrush, my favorite. That short walk feels like a prayer of thanks, deliberate and grateful. Outhouse included.

It was only fitting that Nero and I take our first paddle of the year on Gunsten. The red Old Town was right where I left her, my favorite paddle tucked up in her belly. I bought her in 1993, as a college graduation gift to myself, and after many wonderful trips, she’s now retired to Gunsten. I don’t tell her about the lightweight canoes I’ve rented for recent BWCA trips, as I’m sure she would judge me weak and selfish for not carrying her across portages for adventures.

I have a relationship with a canoe, and I dare you--if you own a canoe for a long while--to tell me you don’t. 

Gunsten is just an irregular 17 acres in size, its shoreline dipping in and out of low-lying bogs, with one island as big as a porch. There are several rock and sandy bottom areas where one can launch for a swim. I simply don't do leeches, so I won’t step in bog muck without a damn good reason; I stick to the swim sites if I'm not in my canoe. Half the lake sits inside federal land, the other owned by just a few, like me, who prefer this strange little lake to the bigger, more recreational lakes.

I have no particular order in which I survey the lake, so can I let the sun’s angle and the wind’s direction tell me how to proceed once we’re on the water. I have no agenda, but nonetheless always bring a camera and a notebook, knowing a slow paddle will show me all sorts of things that will need to be recorded, studied, identified, integrated. 

This is how to approach a lake that’s your teacher. Stand on the shore with your paddle, and sing in your head like you’re at an festival concert with 4 Non Blondes: "I step outside and I take a deep breathe, and I get real high, and I scream from the top of my lungs, "What's going on?!" Then you hop in the canoe and get real quiet and wait for instruction. (If the song is not already in your mouth, you’re young and I’m sad you missed the music of the early 1990s. Catch up here.) 

I am happy to announce that we have a new beaver family on Gunsten. Last summer we were part of of a beaver real estate open house, with occasional visits and the removal of a few trees. Now there’s a substantial house, constructed sometime between late September and early May. I look forward to our late July swims in the evening. We’re gonna get beaver slapped. 

The loon couple are back, and have moved their quarters to the other side of the porch-sized island from where they’ve nested last few years. I have lots of questions about those red-eyed loons. They seem wilder and more unknowable than other water birds, which is ironic because they’re so endemic as to be common. I’m hoping to be a loon grandmother this season. I am usually the only person to paddle Gunsten in any given year, so I am most careful to share the lake around their nursery schedule. 

On the east shore, I paused the paddle, and let the wind push us along. Nero didn’t move. Out the side of my eye I caught a massive gray-brown object flying through the treetops. An owl, whose wings sound just like you think they would. I could hear the whooshing, but like all things wild, it moved without a sound. Later in the evening on the porch, the owl would pass again, like a missile through the canopy, accompanied by a squadron of unhappy ravens. I’m glad to have heard an owl’s wings, but I have to say I’m more interested in knowing what the ravens have to say. My witchiness shows.

Perhaps my favorite event on that glorious first day of our spring was seeing the leatherleaf in bloom. Sets of bell-shaped flowers that look much like a bog lily-of-the-valley hang over the water, attracting several species of bee. This is the first bloom of the season in the boreal forest, at least in my internal book. Leatherleaf set its flowers in the preceding fall, so that as soon as spring allows, it welcomes pollinators. It’s quite unique, creating flower buds that can withstand absurd winters.

If you’re not a resident of the bog in winter, you can still tell a bit about how the snow came down. A good bloom on the leatherleaf means the plants had good snow cover, protecting the blossoms. A winter with little snow leaves them exposed, and perhaps you’ll see just a spattering of flowers. The flowers are thick in some spots, absent in others. Winter seems to have left some areas more exposed than others, and we all know how that feels. 

Nero bailed from the canoe and took the trails home, so I finished the paddle with no ballast in the front. Slower, the red canoe insisted, "Don’t miss the yellow dock lilies being born. Look down. Red cabbages are giving birth underwater."

It reminds me of the babies I've lured to the surface of birth tubs, bringing things to the light and air. It's good not to be responsible for this birth, and I feel myself lean back into the profundity of nature. I can just let myself be midwifed for a change, let spring bring me to the surface.

Storm

There was an epic battle between winter and spring yesterday, and if I knew which Gods were responsible, I would tell you. Perhaps Old Man Winter and the Goddess of Spring? Maybe in disagreement about when one was to leave and the other to arrive? My vernacular is science-based. But what I experienced was full of impressive power and something ancient. I feel like those nameless Gods are surprised to hear me calling them to attention. Wake up!

It was a spectacular weather temper tantrum that lasted 30 minutes, arriving around 7:30pm. The westerly sun lights the tree trunks with Impressionist light every evening, so we religiously watch what we call "TV" out the picture window looking down to Gunsten Lake each night. Me in the wood rocker, he in the sliding rocker, our feet on the trunk that sits under the picture window. Wine in hand. That's our evening work schedule. 

I looked over my shoulder to the western windows to see the entire sky to the northwest filled with billowing, low clouds. Not the deep gray of thunderstorms, but the lighter gray of wall of snow approaching. Within just a few moments, the warm May sunshine we'd been admiring from our rocking chairs gave way. 

A gust hit our hill like ammunition going off, the wind shaking loose all sorts of debris in the pines above us. The cabin's metal roof pinged and banged. The pines leaned, then bent. I watched a 150-foot tree move more like a fluid than a solid. 

Strangely, just an hour earlier, I shared with Greg my anxiousness about the big storms that have hit the Arrowhead with increasing frequency. There was the floods of 2012, when we had 12-inches of never-ending rain and my friend Jane's house tried to float. I was in Ely during the 1999 Blowdown, and smack in the middle of a derecho that slammed Duluth in July 2016. I've experienced 10 minutes in hurricane force winds, and can't ever forget the the unending lightening of July 4, 1999. I'm a climate change believer, having been there for a few 1-in-1000 year storms now. 

Funny thing: During the Duluth derecho, I noticed deep booms amid the screaming storm. Later, I realized the booms to be our 100-year-old silver maples hitting the ground, ripped out with 8-foot tall root balls in tow. It took me weeks to chainsaw my way through that storm's leftovers. Nine days without electricity. The storm was terrifying, and the weeks of recovery surreal. That's me, below, on Day 2.

My son Charles was a BWCA canoe guide for two years, and I worried more about him there than when he lead packing trips in Yellowstone among the bears. Since the 1999 Blowdown, there have been more of these over-the-top storms with fatalities up here in the Border Country. The grizzlies of Yellowstone haven't been nearly as deadly.

Hence, I am storm-adverse these days. Which I am really struggling with, because I'm a person who historically LOVES thunderstorms. I don't like this new me, watching the summer weather systems with an unwelcome vigilance rather than giddy craving. I'm not a coward, but I might have some sort of severe weather PTSD. 

I no sooner I confide my fear to Greg than the trees bend spectacularly before my eyes. I watched anxiously, my eyes dashing between my favorite old trees to the west, the east and the south. I tried to enjoy it the way Greg did, because he had "an awesome National Geographic moment!" He was still talking about it this morning while we drank our coffee in front of the picture window. I enjoyed it the way I do rollercoasters these days--a necessary and thrilling event for which I am grateful when it ends. 

But let me tell you about the snow! I don't know the names of the snow any more than the names of the Gods, although I have been told the Inuit have many words for snow. I just have snow, and I feel a bit of resentment about that, because it robs me of the ability to describe what I know to be factual. I've been in northern Minnesota long enough to have some things to say about snow.

I can tell you that there were four distinct kinds of frozen precipitation, each with it's own density and sound, which I can speak to since I kept going outside to inspect the evidence. First there was a wet snow drop that fell like rain but whizzed through the air as a white dash. Then came balls of snow-ice that came pelting down from the sky like giant handfuls of frozen peas. This was followed by confetti snow that made it feel as if we were in a snow globe, and we both said it made us happy to see this snow, even in May. I suppose it reminds us of the wistfully of happy holiday feelings. Lastly, there were fat flake wads that fell like wet crepe paper, plopping into wet piles upon impact.   

The ground melted the snow in minutes, so we did not suffer any long-term snow punishment. In fact, the sky returned to blue and the lake became glass, all before dark. 

Spring holds the talking stick. But the loons and spring peepers do all the talking. 

Fire

I looked up from writing and noticed something creating a veil across the lake, softening the pines on the far shore. Rain? Mist? I stepped outside and instantly smelled smoke not of my own chimney. It’s cold here--not even getting out of the 40s--but it’s dry and windy and explosive. To our south, Duluth has a “severe fire conditions” warning.

Fire. 

In June of 2018, I called the Forest Service to report smoke. Fires were raging in Canada, and I’d been fooled by traveling smoke before. So I didn’t call until there was actual ash falling on me. The Forest Service sent up a Beaver scouting plane from the airbase on Shagawa Lake in Ely. I soon saw it buzz my horizon, and within minutes I was called and told to evacuate. 

It was a small fire that I discovered, but they didn’t name it after me. It is officially known as the Gunsten Lake Fire. Instead, I was questioned by an investigator. I didn’t realize I was a suspect until he told me it would cost nearly a quarter-million dollars to respond to this fire, all the while leaning hard on my hood. Of course, “firebugs” report their own fires--I get it. I was profiled. But there’s no way I would walk in the mid-June bush, lousy with black flies and mosquitoes. He must not be a very good detective. 

Today, the voice at the Forest Service told me the smoke is from a prescribed burn near Birch Lake. “Thanks for calling, though,” she said. “I’ll let the airbase know you called.” Sure enough, not much later the Beaver flew over to the south horizon of Gunsten Lake. It’s nice to feel safe, and to know the Beaver pilot has a high view of our forest. 

I have a mixed mind, however, about fire, about being part of a larger Forest Service Management Plan. The politics of prescribed burns mean that much of Superior National Forest and the adjacent Boundary Waters are a tinderbox, including Gunsten Lake. The planned fire at Birch Lake today is akin to peeing on a forest fire. However ambitious they may be, the most progressive minds at the Forest Service are constrained by our unfortunate relationship with fire. The public won’t have it.

The eastern spruce budworm, a native to North America, has decimated the spruce and balsam for miles in any direction here in Superior National Forest. It’s a natural part of the forest cycle, or at least it is for a second-growth forest where there’s lots of spruce and balsam rather than a mature forest of red and white pine. But that’s a different story for another time. 

By design and by accident, it is time for the forest to be reduced to its fire-hardy constituents. Time to be rebirthed, transformed, replenished.

My own neck of the woods is full of standing Roman candles; gray, dead standing trees as dry and crackly as newspaper, waiting for ignition. They frequently fall in windy weather, forcing me to carry the chainsaw along the trail to the swimming beach and even on trips to town. (Few people drive our roads, and we may be the first passerby after any storm. I learned this turn-around lesson on impassable roads more than once.) I have tried to cut and burn my dead spruce close to the cabin, but I can’t keep up with more than a careful perimeter.

We all know that Smokey the Bear has been quietly shushed from warning us off of forest fires. Smokey’s messaging is much more complicated these days. Fires are a necessary and difficult part of a healthy ecosystem, but we only tolerate a fire under certain conditions. A lot of smart people, such as the Ojibwe, who lived here for quite a while, knew fire differently than white colonizers. But then there was a Great Forgetting and those ways were forced into silence. A century or so later, some of us are willing to acknowledge that we’re either going to invite fire back to the forest and live with it as a companion, or fire will come for us like a ravenous manidoo. 

My presence here, sitting in my remote cabin, is an inconvenient fact. I’d like not to lose my cabin, of course. I don’t want a raging fire. But I think it inevitable. Not only is the forest a tinderbox, it’s explosivity is multiplied by the longer fire seasons and blowdowns that have arrived with global warming. It’s not if, it’s when. Those on the west coast know this sense of impending change.

So I prepare myself for this future. Of course, I have the insurance and the metal roof and so forth.

But I speak more of preparing myself for losing everything I think I love about this place.

When you love a place, you are finally forced to love it’s nature. For me, that means knowing much of what I love is impermanent. This forest is not mine to have and hold. It is a place, but it may change at any moment. I’m one lightning strike away from a conflagration. I try to learn to love everything about this forest, not just her postcard moments. I want to learn to love her fire. 

A few summers ago, I paddled a portion of the eastern BWCA that had been scoured by the hot Ham Lake Fire. Our long, deep lake ran at least a mile from west to east, a tall cliff on the north shore. The land--every ridge, every rock wall, every fold in the earth--showed itself as we paddled the length. The forest was already reclaiming the charred ground, and green was the dominant color. 

What I anticipated to be sad and unpleasant became fascinating. I realized I’d never seen such a thing. I had been so far removed that I didn’t know what this place looked like in its normal state of affairs. To see such bones and unexpected growth! 

I saw Yellowstone for the first time 1990, two years after the fires transformed the park. To my eyes, it was still superlative. It was all of Yellowstone I have ever known, and it’s still wondrous.

This gives me hope that I can love a place even after everything I thought I loved most is gone. I’m committed. I’m cultivating a willingness to accept fire, to accept change. Unlike the prairie, where fire can ravish in April and the grasses return by August, this forest regenerates in decades, even centuries. I’m living in a slower timescape. I will make way for the fire when she comes, as gracefully and gratefully as I can.

Maybe the cabin will survive a fire, and the tallest white pine where I leave offerings will stand, and those who come later will think, “Of course there was fire.” Because they will be wiser than us. 

Or maybe it will be all gone, and this journal will be left.

Maybe it will all still be here when it’s time for me to die, and my ashes will be the precursor.

Arrival

We have arrived, deep in the sprawling Superior National Forest, at the southern edge of the vast Canadian boreal forest biome, dead center in Minnesota’s Arrowhead. We left spring in the Twin Cities, where the most delicate greens danced in the trees. Here, the woods have not a thought of turning green yet. But there is no snow, which is unusual for late April.

So now you know where I am.

More specifically, however, I am on a high, thin isthmus between two lakes, aligned with a kettle lake named Gunsten to the south and riverine Swallow Lake to the north. Old growth red and white pine tower overhead, at their feet glacial erratic boulders dressed in lichen of many colors. With the leaves gone it’s easy to see the unreasonable ruggedness of this country. Anyone who wants to see the forest will travel in a canoe. 

The last 20 feet of the 5.5 mile logging trail that is our driveway rises sharply to the top of the hill, where there is a constantly shifting, shrinking woodpile and a path to the outhouse that cuts to the east. The cabin is weathered cedar, and the roof is brown metal. A deep and tall screen porch--the best part of the cabin--dangles over a steep drop to the south, then wraps around the side of the cabin, essentially doubling our living space in the warm months. An ancient white pine throws her feathery arms around the corner of the screenhouse, allowing us a view into the canopy from our rocking chairs.

The cabin is off-the-grid. We have a fine set up with a Honda generator that charges a long-life battery, which in turn keeps us in electricity for three to four days at a time. The cabin has light switches and outlets like a normal house. It does not, however, have a refrigerator. Instead, we have a high-performing cooler. An old white enamel cook stove is hooked to a propane tank, and a small wood stove keeps the 470-square-feet toasty and sometimes too roasty. If you’ve ever had a crappy wood stove, you’ll know what I mean. You can’t regulate the temperature in the cabin, but you try a lot. 

These things came out of the car: A man, a cat, a dog, four eight-gallon water jugs (No water, either, I forgot to tell you.), a gallon of gas for the generator, clothing for two seasons, new fishing poles, a new laptop, and two shoulder bags full of my writing and work. We are here for the “season,” as they say in the Hamptons. 

In the midst of unthinkable chaos, I am experiencing unspeakable delight. This is the second summer I will spend at the cabin. Last summer I was an anxious covid refugee, leaving my apartment just blocks away from ground zero riots stemming from George Floyd’s murder, my wide-eyed white shepherd mix in the back seat next to a new chainsaw. My best friend Val flew in from San Diego, joining me on the porch after the first month. We stayed until the leaves started to show early yellows. It was a gift I am still opening, so generous were the experiences and lessons that summer brought.

This summer Greg is my company. And my new partner. He and I rather plucked each other out of the ether last fall. We met online in September, met in person in October, and moved in together in November. After our first call, I hung up knowing it was him. As in, He who I have been waiting for. He felt similarly, and we have been together 24/7 since the day before Thanksgiving. I can’t do anything but expect this companion and this summer to be just as grand as last year. 

I am working remotely. I toggle my computer to my phone’s hotspot, and I am able to work two jobs from my small desk. I have attended meetings from my phone, from my kayak, from the flat water behind an island on Shallow Lake. I just didn’t turn on the camera because that would be rude, showing lily pads and maybe loons behind me, when I should be in a stuffy university office building. There should be a word to describe this secret Zoom behavior. It’s not cheating, I tell myself. I tell you, and so have revealed a dark truth. 

All this is to say that I am here, in the woods, with a red canoe on a small bog lake that shows herself to me for the eighth year. I came to these woods in 2013 armed with a fair bit of knowledge about that/those with whom I would be sharing space: I knew the names of most trees, a fair amount of shrubs, and had a sense of the order in which flowers and berries appear. 

Since then I have been studying. And I’ve learned quite a bit. Mostly, as these types of endeavors trend, I’ve learned how little I know. 

To love a bog lake, you have to love what most people don’t. Namely, bugs, muck, carnivorous plants, strange off-gassing. But also you have to be comfortable in a world of in-between. You have to love the ambiguity of margins. It’s not land, but it’s not water. It’s hard to know where the shoreline starts, where the boundaries exist. The bog is the transition area between water and woods, and is both and neither. We humans are hungry for tidy categories, but a bog isn’t interested. If you're a curious sort, like me, the bog will be a beautiful garden of ideas and curiosities. It is the margin between the known and the unknown.

But there is also this: I paddle with questions and willingness to be shown into the next phase of my life. I sit in my boat with the paddle across my lap, staring into the bog. Sometimes at the water finding its way through that beaver dam, or watching the underwater mud trail of a disappearing otter. I resume paddling. Slower this time.