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."
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