In autumn, the forested corridors of northern Michigan
transform into blazing canopies flaming with transcendent beauty. Vast swaths
of oak and aspen and yellow birch tracts transform into resplendent firework
displays of red, orange, and yellow. The insipid greens and browns of summer
which bespoke lush, vibrant growth, are gone, a distant memory of Junes long
past.
One can take 75 up past Bay City where the scenery
transforms quickly from one of urban and suburban sprawl to long stretches of
fields and forests. The oak and the beech come first, the pines later as the canopy
changes from the deciduous south to the predominantly mixed coniferous north.
By the time you reach Grayling, you can pick out the silhouettes of ancient
stands of white pine graciously (though not altruistically) spared the logger’s
blade.
From there, by taking 72 west, you will find yourself
passing through Michigan’s angling mecca. Spoken of in reverential tones are
the names Au Sable and Manistee whose rippling waters once trundled flotillas
of logs to waiting mills and now are known for their cold water streambeds
which provide habitat for rainbow, brook, and brown trout. Each year, millions
of sportsmen pay their pilgrimage to these aquatic gods standing waist-deep in 55
degree water; a baptism of sorts. The clockwork rhythm of casting lines becomes
the heartbeat of the land.
Sweeping westward, the freeway dwindles as the agrarian
landscape gives way to the lush passageway of the Huron-Manistee State Forest
as you near Kalkaska, becoming a highway divided by curtains of woodlands
rimmed with the dull amber of meadow grasses. On either side, two-tracks of
questionable integrity spur off into the dense, shadowy canopy crisscrossing in
an indeterminately large web which seems to wind its way across the entire
northern Lower Peninsula, an intricate patchwork of largely desolate shadows
frequented only by hearty hunters during the season. The road becomes a
beautifully monotonous stretch of grass and trees, grass and trees only broken
here and there by a desiccated deer carcass or perhaps a solitary passing car.
Lit by the rosy dream-light of the fading sun it causes one to ponder the
deeper things.
With the bright familiarity of memory, Kendra drove this
solitary, picturesque route as her father had before her. Two hours out from
her home in Ann Arbor she had stopped for a burger and a large Coke and so now
drove contentedly satiated yet with a certain unsettling amount of pressure on
her bladder. Stubbornly she drove on ignoring the increasingly violent nagging
of her body, focused instead upon the memories with seemed to flood over her.
It was impossible for her to not harken back her memories as
a child, to her recollections of visiting the Grayling Fish Hatchery each year.
Running (precariously) up and down the chilled raceways watching the multitudes
of trout jostling in the water beside she remembered as incredible fun but it
must have driven her parents to the edge of sanity as they no doubt foresaw
their pigtailed 5 year old tumbling down into the mass of fish. Kendra noted
the solemnity with which she inserted the dime her parents had given her into
the fish food dispenser and the joy with which she liberally distributed the
food into the open air ponds.
She wiped a stray tear from her face at the memory. The cool
air dried her cheek.
Though raw, these thoughts seemed to possess and indomitable
pull on her.
She gave an involuntary glance at the passenger seat.
The landscape, though a decade foreign, began to take shape
and possess an air of familiarity. Like old ghosts they prowled the shadows of
her mind demanding her attention. She made a left onto 131 and passed a herd of
bison lounging in the shade of an old oak copse amid a field of golden grasses.
Here and there a calf trailed gingerly behind its dutiful mother. The old
bulls, unconcerned by the frivolity of their offspring (and by the Chrysler 200
passing by at 55 miles an hour) viewed their surroundings stoically with the
indifference of a medieval monarch. She remembered tasting a Buffalo burger at
a Fourth of July celebration years ago and wondered with certain incredulity
about how many bison farms there were in northern Michigan.
In about seven miles she crossed over the Boardman river,
one of her father’s favorites and along whose banks she had ridden her first
horse at Ranch Rudolph, albeit much further west. This was the South Branch
which meandered, predictably, through South Boardman, a town she had never
spent any substantial time in but heard about as an anecdotal reference in her
father’s many stories, often as an example of northern Michigan absurdity. She
watched the parochial goings on of the small town, a mail truck coasting along
the dry gravel shoulder, the passing motorist offering a pleasant wave, an
elderly man wearing a battered Tiger’s hat opening the door to a restaurant, a
newspaper tucked resolutely under one arm. There was a level of small town life
that she had always desired. Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit she had known
many of the kids in her neighborhood as a child, but as time and economic
mobility shaped more and more the demographics, those kids her age had all
moved away by the time she was in high school. Her own two boys now would be
hard pressed to even point out one of their neighbors let alone go play with
them. These days, kids are more acquainted with figures on Netflix or in video
games than the couple next door. Kendra couldn’t be too self-righteous though,
she, through her own behavior had allowed many of the traits that her boys now
possessed. She chose looking at her phone over looking out at a sunset,
binge-watching a new sitcom rather than asking deep questions of her friends. In
a place like South Boardman she naively imagined that the old-fashioned life
still existed; that boys and girls still played baseball and tag and hide and
seek until dark. These were foolish thoughts indeed but she chose to believe
them because she wanted a town like
this to serve as some idyllic model, as a hope that all was not lost despite
all evidence to the contrary.
For years her father operated under a similar delusion. He
dutifully saved a percentage of his paycheck every month with the intention of
purchasing a cottage up north, likely somewhere around Grayling. It was his
dream; his obsession. Though never expressed, he too seemed to envy the
careless lifestyle of the north. It was only the realization that her college
expenses were going to cost far more than expected that drove him to abandon
the idea of a northern cottage. She had never taken lightly his sacrifice once
she was made aware of it. There was always a part of her that felt guilty that
her future had eclipsed his dreams. Yet, she wouldn’t think of hesitating if
she had to make the same decision about one of her boys.
About fifteen minutes later she flipped on her blinker and
turned down a surprisingly well-kept two-track. The trees had been cut back to
clear the way for a run of power lines so there was an open clear-cut area the
road disappeared off into the forest. From what she remembered, the logging
companies periodically came in and harvested these trees planting new saplings
in their stead. She had seen them working once when they had been up over
vacation. The huge cutting apparatus had startled her as a child and driven her
into her father’s arms. The trees here now had been planted nearly fifteen
years ago and were only now beginning to come to resemble an actual forested
area. They were, in a way, her trees since they grew parallel to her lifetime.
She noted where fire over the years had scarred (yet not burned) their trunks.
Her car bucked and rocked its way over the pock-marked sandy
road. She had a passing thought about what she would do if she got stuck. Her
cell phone was definitely in roaming and might not even get that great of
signal at all. She brushed the thought away however. Not now, she thought, it
won’t happen today.
In confidence she drove on into the forest.
There were some muddy puddles from a recent rain that
splashed up against her car. She brought her arm inside. Overhanging branches
thwapped against her window and antenna causing it to swing back and forth violently.
She paid no attention.
This was her cathedral, as close to holy ground as she had
in her life. For decades this is where her father had come when he wasn’t at
home. This was sacred. Many things had changed over the thirty or forty years
since he had first discovered the small, meandering creek that eventually fed
into the mighty Manistee. The fishing wasn’t nearly as good, he often
complained. People cut away the overhang to make it easier to cast but took
away the good hiding spots for the fish. Some people are keeping too many as
well. His last lecture from nearly a decade before still rang in her ears as
she bounced along the road.
He used to hunt here too before the intruding of agriculture
drove the deer elsewhere in their quest for survival. In recent years he had
ventured up near Baldwin to see any numbers. In truth, he hardly ever brought
home any venison and when he did it was the product of one of his hunting
buddies rather than his own. As he aged he seemed much more content taking
photos than taking racks. Kendra understood the sentiment.
The creek, though, was what brought him back throughout trout
season, the chill of April to the early evenings of September.
She pulled the car, now bedecked with grey muddy splatters
into a meadow clearing. Clearly this had been used as distributed camping
before and the charred remains of a fire ring bore evidence to this. A few
tissues and some burned cans of Miller Light lay strewn about. Several chewing
tobacco tins had been nailed into the bark of a gnarled maple. She had always
considered it a grievous offense to litter some pristine natural place with
human refuse. In her head the two were incongruous. There was purity to the
natural world (save the typhoons, hurricanes, and volcanos) that seemed to
exist on another plain from the world of crude, wasteful mankind. Thus it was
always jarring to see litter cast about it was as if someone had defaced the
Mona Lisa or some other incontrovertibly priceless artifact. She exited the
car. The slamming of her door seemed to resonate throughout the forest. Birds
gave calls of alarm. She wondered if anyone else was camped out here tonight.
Surely they were. There was a horse camp not a mile and a half down the road.
Still, the campground seemed abandoned as if she were the lone survivor of some
pervasive holocaust.
The sun sets quickly in the forest and already the orb had
begun to dip below the tree line bathing the meadow in mottled shadows. Yarrow
and blue-stem grass waved soothingly in the slight breeze. It was too late to
conduct her business today she decided, far too late. It would have to wait for
tomorrow and it would wait. She
considered walking down to the creek, a mere hundred yards eastward on a forest
path but thought better of herself. Instead she made off quickly into the woods
to relieve herself. Invigorated by the release, she went for a walk down the
road to see what had become of her home-away-from-home. Kendra found that she
had to actively work at avoiding the muddy puddles and more than once her foot
slipped sloshing a thick paste of mud onto her (relatively) new tennis shoes.
The shadows grew longer and she wished that she had grabbed
her sweater out of the car before she had left. Really, though, none of this
was planned. She hadn’t intended on even doing it and of course she had
proposed no plans to drive up to the camp tonight. This was, by her meticulous
standards, a monumental exercise in spontaneity
.
The funny thing about forests is how loud sounds are. The
smallest vole or hopping bird becomes amplified down there on the forest floor
until it sounds like a bear is lumbering toward you. Even now, as an adult, she
couldn’t help think that the sound of leaves rustling and sticks breaking were
the work of a herd of deer when in reality it was simply an ovenbird making one
last forage before heading back on its annual migration south. That was one of
the magical things about the forest, that it is existed inside of some mystical
sphere where reason and logic take a back seat to mystery, whimsy, and shadow.
She walked along in the dusky half-light immersed in the unmistakable
smells of fall, her feet shuffling across the carpet of decomposing leaves.
From the direction of the creek she heard a loud splash and froze instinctively
like a dog waiting to spring. For those seconds the world slowed. Each muscle
in her legs and arms tensed, coiled like a viper set to strike. Her hearing
heightened to its peak, yearning- searching for distress or danger. And into
the pregnant anticipatory alertness came … nothing. No further indication of
presence, no veiled attack or frantic chase, only the unnatural silence of the
night. Slowly the evening creatures rejoined their revelry, the crickets
gleefully chirping away the weather report, the jays and crows heartily jarring
their territorial disputes, the ever-present (and increasing) drone of
mosquitoes, those winged heathen.
She had probably walked three quarters of a mile down the
trail and judged the waning daylight with incredulity, not to mention the
influence of the October chill, and make the wise decision to return to the
car. Her return voyage was met with no further excitement but she did pass
another campsite only to see a pair of middle-aged hunters indulging in front
of a campfire. They offered a congenial wave, which she returned in kind and
reminded her that even in this place, which had always seemed to her so remote;
so isolated, that the reality of the world was not across the sea or sky but
rather less than a mile away. This did not disturb her as she thought it might.
In her mind she had imagined this trip as something sacred, a pilgrimage of
sorts where one might ascend to an unseen realm within the clouds. Even with
her mythos broken, she found herself relieved to be free of these unrealistic
expectations. What good was exaggeration now? Better to stand with feet firmly
planted in reality; in truth; in the history of what has been. Light shines
clearer that way. Memories become richer.
She walked the rest of the way at ease.
She made it back to her car just as it was becoming
difficult to see. It took time for her eyes to adjust. She had never had great
night vision and now it took squinting to make out the shape of the meadow. She
almost tripped over a weathered fencepost that looked to be older than she was.
A variety of grasses grew from its splintered rounded top.
She opened the door whose surface was beginning to cool in
the sun’s absence. Under the illumination cast by the car’s interior light she
put on her sweater, pulling it over first one shoulder and then the other. She
retrieved an old blanket from the trunk which she kept for emergencies. None
had ever precipitated the blanket. Thank God. She got in the back seat, pulling
the door shut behind her. As the light slowly faded she attempted to make
herself comfortable in the seat which was about ¾ as large as her body all the
while shifting to allow the blanket, thin with age yet still rough, fibrous,
and uncomfortable, to cover her. Nearly in the fetal position she rested her
head against the moderate padding on the car door. She closed her eyes and
tried to sleep.
Her night was cold and troubled.
It seemed as if she awoke every hour either to shiver
beneath the blanket or with a start at some noise on the other side of the
door. The proximity of fellow campers offered her little consolation as she
fought for warmth alone in the darkness. The nearest campsite might as well be
miles away and civilization far across the expanses of space. It was all she
could do to not bring her head to the door’s window as if even the safety of
the car wouldn’t stop the vile creatures clamoring for her head.
In her half-waking thought she remembered with a chill her
childhood fear of Whippoorwills and their haunting, repetitive call. Irrational
though it was her fear followed her year after year they camped. Huddled
beneath her sleeping bag she trembled and fought to control her breathing.
Silly to think that those innocent birds, such benign things, could cause such
panic. It was only in the warm, encompassing embrace of her father that she was
able to find peace. She longed for those arms to surround her now and block the
night-fears that stalked the darkness.
She awoke with the dawn kissing her eyelids, frosting them
lightly as if with the morning dew. Rubbing away the blurry vision she
uncovered herself. She lay awkwardly contorted in the car’s backseat. For most
of the night she had slept fetally but now found that she had spread herself
out wildly, arms and legs akimbo. She felt the unmistakable imprint of the
fabric upon her face and could not escape its chemical scent of formaldehyde.
She was glad to be alone, owing nothing to anyone.
Her phone was off but she suspected it to be around eight.
It was still chilly despite the sun and she pulled the blanket over her
shoulders as she sat up. She had never been able to sleep in on vacation
however exhausted she may be. Even as a child her circadian rhythms trumped the
natural relaxing qualities of solitude. She often found herself breakfasting
alone while her family slumbered away peacefully. Today she had only two
crunchy granola bars which she frugally packed away for later.
She reached up into the front seat and grabbed her bottle of
water. Carefully she unscrewed the cap and brought it to her lips. The water
was warm but she drank it greedily, having been unaware of just how thirsty she
was. She took one swallow, then another relishing the liquid coursing down her
throat seemingly filling every parched inch of her body.
She popped open the door and sat soaking in the sun’s
nourishing rays, her feet dangling an inch above the still dewy grass. Here and
there birds flitted about gathering the dried leavings of summer from atop the
meadow grasses. The gregarious twittering of chickadees echoed in the shadowy
stand of cedar that lay beyond the creek. Each one satisfied in its place in
community, a testament to joyful contentment of creation.
She sat breathing out
warm vapor.
A flash of white into the sky signaled the flight of a
flicker. A trio of crows barked aggressively from the skeletal tops of long
dead pines, the continuation of some ancient argument perhaps.
She had hoped for a warmer day. There are some things you
can’t plan. This, of course, was one of those.
The day grew. The dew burned.
She stood up, letting her feet down upon the firm ground.
Tightly packed by the years of abuse she wondered how often her father had
stood right here, camped right here, his strong arms swinging the ax sending
splinters across the clearing, standing confidently in the his long underwear
watching the mist rise off the creek.
He seemed to know every slight twist and curve of the creek
as if he had been graced by some Delphic oracle. Each undercut bank was etched
in his memory as well as the tale of every trout he had extracted from it. He
possessed an uncanny, almost unnatural understanding of the fish and would
often call his shot before a cast. Whether by experience, prophecy, or by sheer
luck his words often still hung in the air when the fish rose. He was like an
Anglo-Saxon hero of old standing as if born of the primal waters themselves,
arms held high gripping tightly the taut, bowed shaft of the rod, stripping
effortlessly, gracefully with his left hand, fighting, albeit confidently as the fish desperately sought refuge beneath
the bank or a fallen log. It may be that boys and girls dream gods from mortal
men, that beneath the veneer of onyx and carnelian there lays dirt and skin and
flesh and bone but Kendra’s memories of her father eclipsed mere reverence.
Forever he would glimmer with the sheen of childhood impressions. Though she
knew him to be a man flawed, broken, and short-tempered she clung even now to
the patina of heroism. Memories linger like ghosts and die slow deaths if ever
at all.
She opened the driver’s side door, tossed the empty water
bottle into the passenger foot well where it bounced about a few times with
plastic crinkling noises. She removed from the passenger seat a small wooden
box which she had inexplicably buckled in. She held it tenderly as one might
hold the hand of a child, trembling and frail.
So as not to disturb the solitude she slowly brought the door
to the car without shutting it fully, leaving an inch or so gap.
She walked barefoot and silent through the pines which rimmed
the stream, the balls of her feet falling rhythmically on the soft shed
needles. The air fell silent as the birds ceded their chatter deferentially.
She paused only a moment to pick the safest spot of the bank to descend. She
chose a spot obviously frequently used by fishermen for it was warn and the
grasses in the area crushed. The creek swung a dogleg slightly north and west.
About thirty feet downstream three trees had fallen across the water so long
ago that each had become its own ecosystem with an array of mosses,
wildflowers, and even small saplings springing from the decomposing bulk.
Dragonflies hovered effortlessly, now and then darting off in chase of unseen
quarry like elegant matadors.
Her breath stilled as her foot and then calf plunged into
the cold, clear water. A veil of fine mist rose.
She struggled to maintain her balance as the current,
neither swift nor altogether absent, pushed steadily against her. It was just
enough to throw off her equilibrium. She wobbled like a drunkard struggling
desperately to imitate sobriety. More than anything, she kept the box firmly
within her center of gravity. Dutifully she sought to protect the contents- her
father’s ashes, as she bore down waist-deep into the waters which had flowed by
him for so many years. She bit her lip as the water rose further, chilling her
to the bone.
She trembled.
Her feet sunk into the soft sand which, under the gentle
assault of the current, gave little by little burying her further. Gooseflesh
covered her skin. She bore him on still further reaching with some difficulty
the centermost waters. Here, her feet were met by algae covered stones worn smooth
by the creek’s slow, persistent attack. How firm a foundation, she thought. She
held him for a moment. She felt she should say something, utter some elegiac
word fit for the moment but none came, and her confidence escaped her, carried
off downstream perhaps to drift aimlessly through eddies and riffles endlessly
progressing toward a formless unknown. Hot tears rose unbidden. She let them
fall until they mingled with the clear waters.
Her thoughts imperceptibly turned to a story her father once
told her of a fishing trip years before. Beside these banks he sat enjoying the
cool shade after a summer’s morning on the river, a beer in one hand, a book in
the other, as he so often had. He came away empty handed. He never kept any
fish from the creek on principle. It was not so much that he was opposed to it;
he went ice fishing and kept all the perch and bluegill he caught there, but
rather that he simply shied away from it. He found himself morally unsettled at
the thought of killing or eating trout from his
creek. There seemed to be some mystical superlative quality swirling beneath
those waters. As he sat soaking in the warming sun, a jeep pulled up into the
campsite and two twentysomething men got out. They had been fishing somewhere
down the river and their rods still stretched precariously out the back. The
burlier of the two disappeared into the underbrush to relieve himself; the
other exited and pulled a large Ziploc bag from a cooler. Inside were three
nice browns, at least ten inches a piece. He walked off towards the creek with
a nod of acknowledgement to her father. He watched as the man knelt down facing
the water, presumably to refresh the water keeping the deceased fish from
spoiling.
“Hey,” the man yelled to his friend urinating in the bushes,
“three ain’t even good enough to keep,” and proceeded to dump the lifeless fish
back into the creek where they slowly drifted away in pitiable motion.
Her father became incised. The story that followed varied
based upon the audience and her father’s enthusiasm. What always remained
constant was that something within him exploded, some switch which had hitherto
been unexplored flipped. He sprung out of the folding chair and confronted the
man, who, for his part, was completely unprepared for what awaited him. The
truth of the moment may forever now remain unverified save for that young man,
should he ever come to grips with the indignity of the story enough to share,
but her father always maintained that he chased the men back to their vehicle
through a combination of physical intimidation and a proficient display of
vulgarity and watched as they made a speedy exit, bumping and jarring, back to
the main road while he stood watching in righteous victory.
All over a few fish.
She felt like she was fighting some epic struggle against
the tide by tarrying, as if she were holding mightily against a heavy weight.
She delayed no longer. She removed the lid of the simple pine box, held it
firmly between her arm and body, and was struck at the plainness of the pale
grey-colored ash. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting but the sight of
it struck her with a degree of indifference. Holding her arms slightly aloft,
she turned the box allowing a small stream of the contents to spill slowly into
the river in a gentle procession in front of her body where it met the current
and gave itself away.
“Catch-and-release, dad” she said with a chuckle. It was the
only thing she could think to say without choking on her own tears and
digressing into deep sobs.
With gentle taps she continued to pour. The ashes sank and
swirled as if caught in a surrealist painting. They swept past her body and off
forever downstream to eventually to meet the Manistee and Lake Michigan and in
time the vast swaths of open ocean. Such is progression. A blue jay cried
loudly. A breeze picked up and sent some of the ashes spinning in a tiny
cyclone out across the surface of the water, beyond that the creek was
becalmed. Strands of her hair drifted in and out of her vision.
The flow slackened. She gave the box a final tap and
evacuated the last of the contents which drifted sleepily down in half-speed
motion to the waiting water below and then were gone.
She returned the lid to the box and held it shut with her
thumb and forefinger. The mist was gone, burned off by the heat of the day. She
caught the scent of a distant campfire in the air and imagined the hearty
smells of scrambled eggs and sizzling sausage. Looking up to the treetops she
saw with amazement the array of tones and pigments in the leaves. Beautiful and
full, each tree wore its chic ballgown with haughty pride. Autumn was hard upon
the land.
Upstream a fish rose.
