West Wind's Boy

Nanabosho, son of West Wind and Winona

Nanabosho, raised by grandmother Nokomis

Nanabosho, little white rabbit, protector of his people

Legend links the mischievous guardian of the Ojibwa to at least two landforms that bear his name on the Ontario shore of Lake Superior. Sleeping Giant in the eponymously named Provincial Park is said to be Nanabosho, turned to stone by the Great Spirit for creating a storm that killed two mining harbingers who had been tipped off about a silver deposit Nanabosho had hidden in the area. The giant is a towering plateau on the Sibley Peninsula in the northeastern corner of the lake. In places the cliffs soar to 700 feet above the water.

Across the lake is dark jagged island in the surf of Superior that is said to be where Nanabosho rested (photo) after jumping from one shore to another. There are two holes in the solid rock.

My first night out hiking the Coastal Trail in Lake Superior Provincial Park was spent camped in a tiny cove that gave view of the island. For a better view I crawled along the slabby littoral, swinging on cedars and leaping rock to rock, passed a point and walked easily into an even smaller harbor. My trip was young, but already sticky thoughts were snaking like spider’s webs across the trail. I asked Nanabosho to cure me from this anxious desolation.

Then I saw several cedar waxwings flitting from driftwood to shrub to stone. In between jumps they were glancing with small bird eyes at the sun as if it were a movie screen. Our star dropped behind the island and the water rippled blue splashing yellow; the sky ached pink. When the sun passed behind the second hole in the rock an orange star flashed and I made a before returning to camp.

On trail in the morning, instead of seeing a thimbleberry leaf and worrying about soreness in my ankle I saw its verdancy and thin straight veins. When two ravens cawed back and forth from fir perches, I thought not of uncertain future, but the oily black of their feathers and the great density of boreal forest. “CAAWwww,” I sounded throatily. One of them replied. I did it again and the same one responded. Unaware of the meaning, I kept going.

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Literary Landmarks in the Michigan Upper Peninsula

The remote pine forested northeastern corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has provided settings for at least a couple of well known stories. The most famous is Hemingway’s The Big Two Hearted River, detailing young Nick Adams back from World War I on a solo camping and trout fishing trip. In the story Adams takes the train to Seney, originally a rough and tumble logging town in the middle of the UP. He hops off the train to find the town completely burned. Seney had been burned, the country was burned over and changed. This never happened, but fictionally provides a metaphor for Adams, back from heavy battle, mental breakdown and a severe leg injury—burned over and changed.

He hikes into the sand hills, past the burn line, and strikes camp near the stream. He has a lovely time reacquainting himself to fishing and life without war. I hadn’t read this story before, picked up The Nick Adams Stories in a camp store at the end of a long sand road near the mouth of the Two Hearted River, just before it flows into Lake Superior. The river that Adams fishes out of Seney is actually the Fox River. The Fox is longer and runs south into Lake Michigan, but as Hemingway said, because Big Two Hearted River is poetry. It is named thus because of the similarly sized two branches by which it is formed. It’s undoubtedly a fantastic name, though there are some other good ones in the area: Tahquamenon, Yellow Dog, Manistique, Laughing Whitefish Falls, and oh yeah, Dead Sucker.

Hemingway maybe only visited the UP once, but another author who writes about the area and lived there for some time is Jim Harrison, who wrote Legends of the Fall and Revenge. I’m not a big Harrison fan, and Legends of the Fall is the only movie I can think of that is better than the book. Harrison’s characters are people with whom I rarely sympathize and have problems like having had an affair with their good friend’s, a Mexican Cartel boss’, wife (Revenge—in which the woman is tortured and killed by the cartel leader, but then two men become friends again) or being sheltered and having to get rid of too much money (The Man Who Gave up His Name). They are like bad Hemingway stories with self-serving fatalism that is not really fatalism but just the protagonist justifying himself. They are like Danielle Steel stories for men. But I still like parts of them. Harrison writes fantastically at times and his settings are awesome: By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks (Legends of the Fall). I’m going to read more of him. He’s still at it, over 70, just having published Returning to the Earth in 2007 (about man dying in middle age and his loved ones dealing with it, and sort of a map of the UP).

He’s settled some in old age—he doesn’t kill off any women in this book and the prevailing horniness has lessened a little. Plus it’s almost exclusively set in the UP. So when I pulled into Grand Marais, Michigan with a day to kill before four days hiking the Pictured Rocks and saw the Dunes Saloon (…with a new and peculiar itch in my brain that I figured could be dispelled only by the sight of the harbor of Lake Superior or, more likely, a cheeseburger and beer at the Dunes Saloon) of course I went in for a beer that they brew on the premises and wound up staying a few hours talking with a man getting a beer while his kids slept and a 70 year old who was hiking the North Country Trail through the UP. It is a very fine place, so fine that when I finished hiking a few days later in Munising I went looking for a similar pub at which to refuel, but found no such thing. The bartender at the Dunes said his mom used to clean house for Harrison. Shortly before reaching town while driving a maze of sand roads I passed a Harrison Trail. Although his jacket back biography says now he lives in Arizona and Montana. I guess those northern winters are probably pretty tough on an old timer from the Lower Peninsula.

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Adam G. at Large Up North

It was great seeing my old pal Adam again. Together we grew up, moved to the same town after high school and hiked a few hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail, since which I haven’t seen much of him. Him being a de-facto Luddite, I don’t have to worry about praising him online and having him ever see it. That would be strangely unbecoming in our friendship. After I decided to stay another day he said he was glad and then things were strange. He righted this with, “Rog you’re such an asshole, why won’t you leave?”

We had a fine time contemplating the bliss of a world completely under concrete and complaining about the arrogance of the wildflowers surrounding the camper to grow in such abundance, brightness and variety and as the night wore on, cursing the loons on Gitchi Gummi for their spine tingling elegies. Such grotesque liberties must only be possible with those known since before knowing one’s own self.

In the summer Mr. G. does Masonry. In winter he makes snow and runs the gondola at the local ski hill. His dad, older brother and uncle all transplanted from the Twin Cities to the North Shore as well. Papa G. mushes dogs, his bro is a carpenter and uncle manages a hotel. They are a wild bunch in pretty wild place. Full Post»