Beneath The Cedar Stand

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.