Never Alone, page 29
As the flavor washes over me, I feel more and more that I’m eating this not just for my ancestors, but as them. I’m what my ancestors turned into, their legacy here on earth.
With every passing week I’ve felt myself becoming more fully human—the product of countless millions of years of evolution. The choice to clothe myself in wool and leather stitched by hand—the very materials my ancestors wore—was another step closer to them.
I love that every day I spend in this place, I’m further from the modern life of schedules and devices, climate control and walls—all the ways we shut out the living world around us and keep ourselves from being part of it—and more rooted in a timeless way of being. It’s what I’ve longed for all my life.
This body was shaped by the need to find food, build shelter, and weave fiber into baskets and clothing. It didn’t evolve for keyboards, electric lights, or whizzing automobiles. As a matter of fact, those things slowly degrade its health and vitality. What’s more, my body evolved for famine. The level of deprivation I’m experiencing right now isn’t something new. It’s the human legacy. Feast and famine cycles are woven deep into our genetic memory—our insatiable hunger for fats and sweets is part of that. Our forebears rarely had them in abundance, and when they did, feasting on them when they could and building up their body fat meant they were more likely to make it through the lean times that were inevitably coming. Every winter my ancestors had to fight for enough food and warmth to make it through, and every winter some of them didn’t manage to survive. I’m the product of those who did, and who came out more resilient and resourceful on the other side. Those genes passed on down the line until they eventually landed in me.
In more than twenty-five years of running around in buckskin and furs, harvesting wild foods, and practicing the arts known as ancestral skills, I’ve always felt connected to my ancestors, but it’s been mostly intellectual. Out here it’s visceral, and while I’ve certainly spoken to them before, this is the first time they’ve answered back.
Is it my own voice or is it theirs? The distinction is fading. The line between us has blurred until it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not just living like my ancestors; I’m becoming an ancestor. I know it, I feel it. And they feel it too. I’ll still make the ancestor plate, but from now on, it will be with the knowledge that it is my own plate too. When I eat from it, the nourishment goes both ways, passing from me to them and back until that one small meal feels like a potent feast.
66
Five Thousand Sunsets
The next day, even with hurrying through my routine, it’s near sunset once I’ve got all my fishing things and safety equipment together and head down to the lake. Up until the storm I was keeping my little hole just offshore open, heaping spruce boughs on top of it for insulation. The storm scattered those boughs who knows how far across the ice, and all I can now see of them is a peppering of green needles here and there. The hole is iced up, but that’s okay. I don’t need to haul water now that I’ve got my pan to melt the snow around camp.
I stand on the rock ledge of the shore, incredulous that the time is finally here. It’s my moment of truth, the thing that could make or break my chances of staying longer—even winning, against all odds.
Here goes!
The surface is way more slippery than it was last time, and I have to fight to keep my feet under me. It’s a whole different world out here. The storm-driven snow must have been like a sand blaster, polishing the surface of the ice for all those days, because now it’s crystal clear and mirror smooth. I feel like I’m looking through the glass at an aquarium, except it’s beneath my feet instead of in front of me. I can see every stone, every pebble, and every nuance of the lakebed below in exquisite detail. It’s mesmerizing, and I keep having to remind myself I’m here for a purpose and don’t have a lot of daylight left for it.
We took kids out ice fishing when I taught outdoor education in the Adirondacks, but it was in a shallow pond and we never caught anything, so though I’ve done it many times, I basically have no experience ice fishing. I know I’m looking for deep water near a topographic feature like a drop-off or ledge, so I head straight out into the lake to find an area of sufficient depth.
I keep walking. And walking. Fifty feet out I’m still looking down at shallow rocks just under my feet. A hundred feet out it is hardly different. It’s both validating and frustrating to finally see for certain that, in fact, this location is every bit as bad for shore fishing as it seemed to be.
The bottom starts dropping off significantly once I am 150 feet out, and now it isn’t details of the bottom I’m seeing, it’s the cracks in the ice. It’s counterintuitive, but I know they aren’t a sign of a fragile surface, quite the opposite. What worries me isn’t that I might fall through, but that those cracks look like they’re at least twelve inches deep. That’s a lot of ice to get through with a totally insufficient tool.
I’m finally out where I can’t see the bottom anymore, just vast darkness below me in every direction. I’m well past the little island—which I now think of as Frying Pan Island—so I position myself where I think the bottom drops off from its shallows and get the tripod set up.
With my fishing gear and my last remaining rabbit stomach beside me, I kneel down and start chipping.
Since freeze-up I’ve been hacking my way through the ice near shore with the back end of my closed folding saw. It’s far from ideal, but without an axe it’s the only tool I’ve got for it. Before the storm I was able to chip my way through the four inches of ice to open my watering hole within five minutes or less.
Five minutes barely makes a dent in this surface. It’s now the harder, denser ice that forms in deep cold, not the opaque ice shot with bubbles that accompanies initial freeze-up. In ten more minutes, I’m about four inches down, but the saw is binding up in the narrow hole and each strike is less effective. Holy crap, I realize, my stomach sinking into my boots. This might not happen.
I have to stop every few seconds to swipe the chips out with my mitten, otherwise I’m making great shave ice but no downward progress. Dread creeps in like someone pouring ice water into my veins. The hole is getting deeper, but every half inch takes more and more effort and the edges of the cracks where the liquid water starts don’t seem any closer. Twelve inches thick was an optimistic estimate. I think I’m looking at something closer to eighteen. I’m warm with the work, but I’ve got a stitch in my side and my legs are cramped up from kneeling.
Not having an axe has been a minor inconvenience up until this point, but not a major handicap. Now it’s crippling. I can’t fault myself for my gear choices; I did the best I could with what I knew. Had I brought an axe and left something else, it might have meant going home sooner and not making it until freeze-up. But now there’s not much I wouldn’t trade for the axe I left behind.
My world shrinks and I’m aware of nothing but the small patch of ice in front of me. I go slower, taking more breaks to stretch, but it no longer feels like I’m making progress, and both the light and my hopes are plummeting.
There’s still nearly a foot of solid ice between the saw and open water. Maybe I could get through it with another several hours of chipping, but at that point, I’ll have burned up a good deal more calories than I can get from a good-sized fish or two, and I’d probably have to do the same thing every day to keep the hole open. That would be most of my daylight hours and mean giving up on trapping entirely.
This can’t be happening! I think. This was supposed to be my moment of triumph!
So many weeks of waiting for freeze-up, and now in one storm the lake ice went from finally safe to walk on to totally impenetrable. Even as it’s clear how futile my efforts are, I have a hard time registering it. I stand up to ease my aching back, then furiously beat at the surface again, flinging ice chips into my eyes, but not accomplishing much else.
Finally, I can no longer pretend I have any chance at success. It’s over. I’m through. I’ve been depending on getting through the ice to access the fish that are this area’s most abundant food resource and my best, and maybe only, hope of making it through the winter. Despair settles heavily onto me, and I can feel the descending dark and cold inside as well as out.
The crushing of the hope that has kept me going for so long is like a sock in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I’m bent over and a little woozy with it. I run through my options, trying to keep hopelessness at bay. I could build a fire on the lake to melt through the ice, but that would just create a water-filled pit—the fire would sink into it and put itself out. I could build it on a platform of green branches instead, heating rocks and then using them to melt through the ice, but the stones are all buried in ice and snow. Hauling rocks and firewood and keeping it all going would burn even more calories than the chipping, would still need to be repeated day after day, and would be a wet and sloppy process likely to produce both frostbite and hypothermia. It doesn’t make sense, and the calorie equation doesn’t pan out.
When I straighten up, the light has shifted, and the sky is lit with orange and red and every color in between—the first real sunset we’ve had since my waltz with the sun. I’ve been so focused on the work and my disappointment that I’ve barely been paying attention to the world above me. Now it’s impossible not to notice, because the sun has hit that angle where it isn’t just the sky it’s painting with color—the lake ice that was dark as steel moments ago is now catching and reflecting the light above. Every warm and brilliant color imaginable spreads out in all directions, engulfing everything I can see. I’m literally standing on the sunset, and it’s incredible. The sick feeling in my stomach fades and my chest swells with the wonder of it.
I want to get farther out into it. I turn around to see how far I am from shore, and there, just rising up over Frying Pan Island, is a perfect half-moon, enormous against the glowing sky, and perfectly framed by the trees of the island.
It’s spectacular, and just like the northern lights above the latrine that night, it’s hard not to feel a divine hand behind it, offering me the most incredible consolation prize imaginable. And it’s working. I get it. I feel it. Everything is going to be okay. In a world that offers up condolence of this magnitude, how could it not be?
I push the tripod out in front of me and slide-skate my way farther onto the lake, feeling more alive and energized than I have in weeks. If my time is winding down, let it go down in a blaze of brilliance. Let me absorb all the joy and wonder that I can hold.
Farther out into the lake, the cold and wind are stronger, but the nipping at my cheeks just adds to the exhilaration. I’m sliding and dancing and sailing through the sunset. The wind draws tears from my eyes that blur the distinction between ice and sky even further. Is this what it’s like for the birds, as they fly west into the setting sun?
I glide on in the frigid cold across a lake painted with liquid fire, until up ahead I can see a change of texture on the ice—jagged angles instead of mirror smooth. I slide right up to the edge, where laid out before me is a broken landscape of huge plates of ice. Out here the cracks haven’t just drawn lines in the ice, they’ve gone all the way through and split it into pieces that have been heaved up at different angles to release the pressure of the lake freezing so hard and fast. They are enormous, each one anywhere from five to twenty feet across. It looks like an enormous jigsaw puzzle that a toddler has gotten ahold of. It stretches on as far as I can see, barring my way completely.
Each slab is at a different orientation to the glowing sky and reflects its own individual color. Now, rather than engulfed in one enormous sunset, I’m staring out at a sea of them, each one unique. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I let out my loudest, rawest, wild woman yell and jump up and down. I turn in a circle with my arms thrown back, drawing in deep lungfuls of icy air. I’m weeping and laughing with joy and wonder and no longer care that I can’t get through the ice. I don’t care about any of it. They could sweep in with their helicopter tomorrow and scoop me up, and it would be okay because I got to experience this—this unparalleled beauty and unfathomably wild place that has cradled me so well and taught me so much. I feel that all my life has been building up to bringing me here, in this moment, and I can achieve no greater purpose than just to take it all in and let it unmake me. If my body gives out and my flesh melts away to become the soil that feeds the next generation of spruces and grouse and hares, that too will be beautiful and meant to be. I’ll still feel I’ve been given an incredible life and gotten exactly what I was supposed to from this, the most magical and generous place on earth.
I glide along the edge staring out at the sunset sea until the color fades and the cold brings me back into body awareness, but I’m so lit up with the excitement, and probably a good measure of adrenaline and dopamine, that I don’t even remember the journey home until I’m standing at the cabin, lifting the door into place.
67
Beaver Island
The next morning, I feel like I’ve been transported overnight to a whole new planet. Last night’s sunset saturated everything I could see with more color than I thought was possible all at once, but this morning, everything is socked in with heavy, low clouds, and the entire world—sky, snowy ground, forest, and lake—are all one misty shade of gray. It’s as if several days’ worth of color was used up in that one brilliant blast.
I’m still shaken to my core by the revelatory evening. While I maintain the same sense that, having had that pinnacle sunset experience I’m reconciled to whatever comes after it, I’m also not going to just roll over and give up.
The air is so thick I can’t see very far in front of me as I walk my trails and check my snares, all of which are empty. For some reason, I have a sense that they’re going to stay empty, that my trapline is winding down. Perhaps this intuitive knowing is real, or perhaps it’s that the climax of last night was so high that everything, trapline included, feels diminished after it. I do my best to disregard the feeling, determined to carry on.
I strategize about what I can do for food if neither ice fishing nor the trapline will provide it.
There’s one last possibility to explore—Beaver Island. With the ice more than thick enough for safe travel, there’s now nothing except the short days and minimal light to keep me from finding that lodge and trying for a beaver. As soon as I get back from walking my traps I pack up the cameras, my bow, and my big saw, and head across the ice toward it, judging I’ve got perhaps two hours of daylight left.
It took me about forty minutes to draw level with the island from the shore of the mainland all those weeks ago, but then I’d had to wind my way through forests and up and down the rocky cliffs of the peninsula to get to it. Now, once I scramble up and over the blocky chunks of the ice stockade that has barred the north shore since freeze-up, there’s nothing between me and the island but flat ice, and I close the distance quickly.
It’s all the same huge mass of water, but it feels like I’m walking on a whole different lake than the one I stood on yesterday. Unlike the clear, polished surface of the ice to the south, the surface here is dull white, and I can’t see two inches into it, much less to the bottom of the lake. I push on, my eyes fixed on the island. It’s eerily still out on the ice, with no wind and no movement besides my own, and the clouds are so thick I can barely see the mainland. There’s none of the beauty and wonder of last night, just my own determination pushing me forward.
With the rougher surface of the lake here, it’s a heavy-booted trudge to the island, rather than a slippery glide, but I’m still surprised at how soon I am heaving myself up onto the shore of its southern tip. I haven’t gone far inland before the rocks change to brushy undergrowth as tall as my hips. It grabs at the rough wool of my pants and dumps snow all over me. After less than ten minutes I stop, exhausted, to catch my breath. Damn, this isn’t what I was hoping for. At this rate, I won’t even make it to the lodge at the far end, much less there and home again, before dusk. As much as I’d hoped to explore the whole island, my main goal is to find the beaver lodge, and that is going to be on the shore itself. I decide to cut back toward the open ice and explore the shore from the lake instead of the land.
I’m nearing the water’s edge when I spot a dark speck flying toward me across the lake. Before it gets close enough to see clearly, I have a good guess what it is, and shortly the bold, black-and-white pattern of its head confirms it. Chickadees often fly in pairs, calling intermittently to one another and yelling at everything else with their sassy, scolding calls. Seeing this one on its own so far out in the middle of the lake gives me pause. It alights on a branch not ten feet from my face, cocks its head, and looks at me, as if it flew here for no other purpose. “Hi weensy,” I say, and it looks quizzically back. I’m blinking back tears, partly because I love these little fluff balls so damn much and it’s been a while since I’ve seen one, but also because I have a suspicion about why it’s here. I feel—from the same deep place that told me it was time to eat the ancestor plates myself and that my snares will remain empty from here on out—that it’s here to bid me goodbye. Feeling directly spoken to by a wild kindred spirit is usually a source of great joy to me, but now my heart shrinks in my ribcage and my throat swells up. I shake my head at it. No.
Even though last night I was reconciled to leaving if I had to, I don’t want to hear this message. I fight back my rising tears and work to convince myself that this time, I’m just making things up and that it’s here by coincidence—even though I watched it soar across the open lake making a beeline right for me.
