Inching Into Winter

Maybe we are inching into winter here in Frostbite Falls, but it’s no more noticeable than the coming of a predicted ice age. Today it’s raining, and the little ice around my doorstep is melting. I just drank more wine to feed the delusion and to stay in character. I came here to know cold and secondarily to know this land and its people. I said in my Pedaling East talk, “Let the bicycle represent some dream you have but have never had the courage to do.” I said it to entwine my audience into a story, to trap them. Now I am the one caught in a trap. I eat my words with a dream of winter in the far north. “It will come,” they say. “You don’t have long to wait.” Part of me wants to wait; another part wants to cross Rainy River and just keep on going across the wide continent and see what it offers or threatens day by day until I die or came to Hudson Bay and the eternally dark Arctic Circle.

I am up at the first hint of morning, around seven. I am soon walking in the town or in the woods, snapping scenes and noting impressions—listening. From the ground I gather brown leaves, soft and beginning to rot, frail as the summer flowers that flourished. My boots press almost silently into them—birch, oak and quaking aspen, which they call popple. I carry them back to my room, press them, and ask folks for their names. The conifers are still green with needles and they too come to my room—the aromatic balsam fir, spruce, and cedar.

I have one meal each day at a café, usually breakfast; today it was at Barney’s. No bright orange outfits grace the café today because hunting season ended yesterday. The yield of deer was low this year because last winter’s snowfall was so deep that many of the deer starved before giving fauns. At least that’s the consensus. I am no deer hunter; few women are—Sarah Palins excepted. I think of the deer that you glimpse in the summer and fall; they are survivors of winter when they have to dig through snow for meager browse, only the strongest. Still, in a normal year there are plenty of deer, and licenses are even given for does in the plentiful seasons. “They will eat the pumpkin off your porch,” one hunter muses. “And your garden is gone without an electric fence.” “I could shoot ‘em from the kitchen window, but for her sake I walk into the woods and wait in the cold hunt shack.” The table of men chuckles. They bring venison home for the Sunday roast like she brings tri-tip from Safeway. Kathabela would sketch the faces that stick in her mind. Then, in her jingle skirt and tinkle top, might present them to the hunters. I would do it too if I could, but only joined in the chuckle.

Unlike Manitoba to the northwest where I ended the bike ride in July, very little of the land is cultivated; the soil is too poor. Its best use, they say, is forest to feed the paper mills. But for a few, there is an old mountain of bark left from the environmentally insensitive days of Boise Cascade. Now, the bark is burned and converted into heat and power for the mill. But in the early decades, it was piled outside town where it has rotted and become black mulch, rich in nutrients. You can bring home truckloads for a fine garden. Thus a few residents attach themselves to the earth like Caltech students, each with a small plot of cool-weather crops in the mild Pasadena winters or short Minnesota summers. Immature vegetables seem impatient to be hoed. And they become hungry or thirsty. So you come to their rescue with hoe, manure and watering hose. And in the end they deliver gifts to poets, astrophysicists and mill workers—a long acquaintance cultivated with marigolds, cauliflowers and spinach.

Ten thousand years ago the ice was retreating back to the north. Rocks, grasped within the ice, cut like knives into the bedrock where their scratches remain, as shown in the close-up at the top of this post. The great weight of the ice made depressions that formed the Great Lakes and many smaller ones like Rainy Lake. Vegetation returned to the scoured landscape, then the caribou, then the Paleo Indians. They made canoes from hewn laths, bent with steam to form ribs, and covered the frames with birch bark. A four-person canoe weighed only thirty-five pounds, easily carried between highways—the rivers and lakes. They knocked wild rice off aquatic stalks, growing along these shores, and the rice fell into their canoes. They dried it over fires and winnowed away the chaff in birchbark trays. The Paleo wore skins of caribou, moose, and beaver, stitch with tendons of mammals. When the snow was deep, they wore shoes of laced twigs to distribute their weight. Their houses were constructed of sapling poles, made tight with birchbark. Thus the savages survived for thousands of years in these cold winters waiting for Europeans. Ed Oerichbauer at the Historical Museum was most helpful with this information; it seems his clientele is almost nil for the winter and he provided a personal tour.