Cold Water Odyssey

On a writer's toil

Photo by Matt Howard

North of Lake Superior, trees live baring their roots above ground, their intricate origins unburied and readable. I’ve stepped over their knots and threads into my canoe, wishing my makings could be this clear. I carry my late grandma’s Polish name meaning “armored.” I’m not certain what threats it stood guard against.

This is just one of the many questions I’m exploring in my chapbook project. Over the last six months, I’ve begun conceiving my own mythology, its hounding lessons and stray stories. I chisel away at stone with the prospect of one day turning to see it has a face.

When I imagine myself, I can barely see her green eyes. The story I’m trying to tell about her is mottled and opaque. Not knowing is fitful. Early in June, I paddled in a cold-water odyssey to Johnson Falls. I hiked downhill, uphill, swept past slender trees and dragonfly causeways. I expected transcendence and took a turn down a snarling swamp.

Back home, my poems, like band posters, were taped up on my wall. When company came, their gaze touched them and I didn’t know who I had put on display. I tore them all down. Author Alexander Chee has said that in writing a memoir, you act as a ghost haunting your own life. I am skulking about in my old mountain town, in my mother’s medicine cabinet, as I drink my morning coffee.

Bushwhacking along shores, climbing over toppled spruce, I felt the waterfall. Closer, down stones darkened from its spritz, my steps were unsure. I’ve never been a very good swimmer. I grasped on to the bare roots of the trees overhead as the rails of a bridge. Thousands of years ago, a fleet of glaciers ventured south from this region, stripping the land to crystalline rock. The trees, given little soil, anchored themselves anyway, defiant to this rock, so that I might one day hold steady from their roots, so that I might tell our story.

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This post was sparked by

Maaike

’s discussion of creative inspiration.

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