Returning to Earth (14 page)

On the way out of town David stopped at a butcher shop and bought two extra-large porterhouses and some bacon saying two things he'd missed in Mexico were fatty steaks and fatty bacon.

“Anything else?” I teased.

“No. I mean I think I love my country but I don't miss white people, white food, white cars, that sort of thing. And I'm of no particular use here except maybe teaching in inner cities and I find big cities too disorienting. Down there I'm in demand and I feel of at least minimal value to others.”

David had written a pamphlet, in Spanish of course, about thirty-three things you need to know if you make it to the United States. Since many of the potential migrants were very poor and totally illiterate he traveled around a lot for a charity organization speaking in churches and town squares.

“How do you feel about your essay seven years later?” David had self-published a long essay on his family connection to economic predation in the history of the Upper Peninsula in a dozen newspapers up here.

“I don't think about it anymore. Donald's criticism was best. I connected my family's logging and mining to the land
but gave short shrift to the people. It was unbalanced. I have to ask you this because no one really explained it to me but why does Donald have to be buried in this exact spot in Canada?”

“It's near where he spent three days without food, shelter, or water. It's an Anishinabe thing and I didn't pry into it very far. He had some sort of vision about the true nature of life there and it's the location from which he wishes to leave the earth.”

“It would be good to know everything he saw. He wasn't clear!”

“That's not likely. You're supposed to have your own vision, which is more likely if you're in the right spot. Donald tried this several times before he made the whole three days. He told me he got scared out.”

We dropped the groceries off at the cabin and drove on a two-track to within a mile or so of the wolf den before we began walking. It was seven hours before we got back to the cabin and without the car. There's a local euphemism in the U.P. that you're not lost, you just can't find your vehicle. Throughout this improbably arduous and uncomfortable hike my brain delivered little snippets from a course I had taken in the history of theater, everything from the Lord of Misrule, comic relief, berserk Puck, the fortunate fall, to the surprise ending. Both David and I are very experienced in the woods but we broke all the rules because our minds were elsewhere. David figured the walk to the wolf den and back would require about an hour and a half at most so we
didn't think about taking a compass, matches, collapsible tin cups, water, halazone tablets, insect repellent, all of which are de rigueur in this area, where the nearest people are at least a dozen miles away.

Our first mistake was not figuring out a relatively new log road that wiped out a familiar old trail. The new log road was shaped like a horseshoe and only led to an eighty-acre pulped area and returned us near to where we began. The wind was still cool and strong from the north so we had to make a big half circle in order to approach the wolf den from downwind so if the animals were there they wouldn't scent us. Rather than making the half circle through an easy open area of dogwood and chokecherry we opted for the deep woods. Since the clouds were dense enough to thoroughly conceal the sun we ended up too far east, on the shore of one of the Barfield Lakes. This meant that we were nearly two miles off course. While David was resting his bad ankle, injured in his teens, I could hear above the wind a faint staccato roaring. I pointed to the west and David turned his head the better to hear out of the wind. He said the noise had to be two male bears in a quarrel about territory, or a female defending her cubs from a rogue male. Since the bears were in the direction of our intended shortcut to be back on course we decided it was prudent to backtrack and virtually start over. When we reached the open area we were three hours into our hike and upset when we saw that the sky was clearing to both the west and north. This meant the cool wind that drove the insects away would stop and the air become warm. We would become more thirsty than we already were. We thought of bagging the project as we sat under a dog-wood
on a bed of desiccated flower petals. When you're in this area in late May there's at least a thousand acres of blooming trees. David rubbed his ankle and said we shouldn't quit now because we would just go back to the cabin and talk and think about Donald or go to the Dunes Saloon and get drunk to avoid thinking about Donald.

We set out again in a half circle to the south with the sun warming us and swarms of noxious blackflies following us when we neared a creek to the west. I followed David to avoid walking too fast for his pace. He shambled rather than walked, tilting this way and that to angle his direction on the easiest route for his ankle across the lumpy ground. Every now and then he'd examine an enormous white pine stump as if it were a religious site. Finally from a half mile away we could see the lightning tree on a knoll from which David said we could see the wolf den in a clump of trees at the end of a long valley. Native peoples tend to think that lightning trees signal the approach of the gods, a place where their power directly touched earth. When I examined this charred and blasted white pine I was pleased I hadn't been there when the lightning had struck. Sitting on the knoll we couldn't see much because the binoculars had been left on the dashboard of the car. We stared at the end of the gulley until our eyes blurred, then walked slowly toward the den. It had been abandoned though there were a few deer bones in the grass and a slight sweet smell of decay in the now windless air. We sat down and laughed that our quest had ended this way. We examined the trackless dirt at the mouth of the den and David speculated that the den had probably been abandoned the previous November when deer hunters had come too close.

Now we were a good five hours into a stroll though with the sun slightly visible it was possible to use David's pocket watch as a vaguely accurate compass. We reached a long-unused log road and David said the car wasn't where it was supposed to be. This seemed funny as there weren't any car thieves in this spavined wilderness. He said we'd pick up the car in the morning and set out on a cross-country route toward the river and the cabin, pleased to reach the east end of the gulley that held his mother-of-all-stumps, which he'd shown me back in my early teens. I peeked through the roots at the roomy interior and when I looked up David was giving the stump a kiss.

In another half hour we stumbled into the cabin clearing and I ran toward the pump. We drank water until we were bilious. We slumped on the porch swing in the twilight. It was just after ten in the evening but still warmish and I took off my clothes, which were crusty with drying sweat, and took a dip in the cold river, floating south and swimming back in an eddy. David started a grill fire for the steaks out of oak kindling, which is best for meat because of the intense heat its coals generate. David mumbled that the lettuce for salad and the bread were still in the car. He retrieved a bottle of cloudy whiskey that his friend Mike, the saloon owner, had left behind. We had brought along two bottles of wine but they were also in the car as was a bag of ice in a cooler. In the cabin I put a dishpan of water on the propane stove so David could soak his wretched ankle and then mixed drinks with the whiskey and well water, which was full of tannin from an upstream swamp and iron from the ground. David drank his in three gulps
and I made him another. I went out and got some wood and cedar branches, which sweeten the odor of a musty cabin, and built a fire in the fireplace for the cold night that was surely coming. David dozed in an easy chair surrounded by stacks of books. He had given his research collection to Northern Michigan University but then got lonely for the books and built another collection of Upper Peninsula history out of a local store aptly called Snowbound Books. David was a bona fide book neurotic even shipping cartons of duplicates to Mexico.

I heated a can of beans of questionable age, a bit wary because in the cold June last year a garter snake had made its way through the logs and established a home coiled around the pilot light. Garter snakes are harmless but startling when they ooze out of the stove when you're putting on your morning coffee. I woke David before I put on the steaks.

“Why do I ever leave this place?” A question to which the answer could be obvious to most though I loved it myself.

We didn't realize how hungry we were until we began eating. It was the fastest job I had ever done on a big steak and the beans were made passable drenched in hot sauce. David was waving a steak bone and talking about local native history and how in the eighteenth century east of here the Ojibway had repelled the Iroquois invasion. I was only half listening reflecting on how a tribe that had lived on Grand Island off present-day Munising had been pressured into going to war against the Sioux. The island tribe was totally inexperienced in warfare and all of the men were wiped out, thus ending a small culture that had existed for
hundreds of years. David, now thoroughly boozed, read a passage from Charles Cleland that I already knew: “Michigan Indians, like other native people of the Great Lakes region, have withstood and survived a biological and cultural assault that has now lasted for eight generations. The scourge of smallpox, generations of intense warfare, the total disruption of communities, alcohol and drunkenness, poverty, and the loss of their land and many cultural traditions have come upon them without their choosing. It is almost beyond belief that they have endured at all . . .” and then more words about the miracle of survival.

“Remember when Donald carried me?” He dropped the book to the floor and his chin was now on his chest. He was referring to an evening when we had brook trout caught in a beaver pond to the south, near the empty wolf den. David was wading in his boots and had stepped into a beaver path under the surface and went in over his head, twisting his bad ankle on tree roots when he scrambled to shore. Donald had carried him piggyback through the woods a mile back to the car.

“Yes. We caught some nice fish,” I said. He was now fully asleep and I dragged him to his spartan single bed in the corner. On an end table were small framed photos of his poet girlfriend Vernice, and a youngish photo of the Mexican girl Vera. I mixed myself a nightcap not looking at the glass while I drank because the water turned the whiskey into a fecal brown. I went out and turned off the Yamaha generator letting my eyes adjust to the total dark so as not to stumble on my way to the cabin. The sky was nearly creamy with stars this far from ambient light. I thought I
heard a wolf far in the distance but maybe not. I had heard them there before.

I was awakened just before dawn by the first birds and David's resonant snoring, also a dream that verged on nightmare. My grandpa Ted used to like to tell woeful stories about his family while we looked through a pile of scrap-books. In the dream an old photo talked in a language I couldn't understand. It was Ted's great-uncle Alberto, who drowned in a mine when the Michigamme River poured into the Mansfield shaft over near Crystal Falls way back when. It happened in late September and Alberto, who hated the cold, had intended to return with his savings to his home ground in Emilia-Romagna in Italy to start a trattoria. Ted liked to end his stories with often inappropriate morals. “Alberto's story shows a man that if you want to do something you better get your ass in gear.” The dream made me wonder what language the dead speak. A local politician rejecting foreign languages in a school budget had said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough for our kids.”

I trotted the two miles or so down a log trail to fetch the car, pausing only for a baby skunk who came out of the ferns ahead of me. He stopped. I stopped. He sat down. I sat down. I was likely his first human. I described my recent life and he seemed to doze, then walked off under the mantle of the ferns.

When I reached David's car I realized I had forgotten to search his pockets for the keys but luckily they were in
the ignition. I chewed on a crust of bread and for a still moment I understood clearly what was happening to everyone I loved.

We had a morose breakfast in Grand Marais and David decided to take the back way to Munising, a matter of fifty miles of lumpy road. When we passed Au Sable Lake he pointed out a distant sandbar across the lake where he had “lost” his virginity to Laurie, a friend of Cynthia's who had died of breast cancer at what he described as “the unacceptable age of twenty-five.” I joined David on his obligatory midmorning nap, this one on a dock near Munising where boats departed for Grand Island, the scene of the disappeared tribe that had failed at war.

When we reached the house at midafternoon Cynthia and Clare were opening a big Fed Ex carton on the front porch. It was a Styrofoam cooler from Mississippi full of sweet corn, peas, and tomatoes. Both Cynthia and Clare are provident about money but there are certain indulgences.

“You guys look like shit,” Clare said with a broad smile. “You could shuck the corn. We'll do the peas inside.”

“We misplaced the car.” David picked up an ear of corn and studied its inherent mystery. “There are always an odd number of corn rows on the cob, never even.”

Cynthia stood up and looked down the steps at us. It was plain to see that she was struggling for the right words and looking up into the oak tree bordering the sidewalk for help.

“This morning Donald said that it's real good that you love me but it's time to let me go.” She turned to go into the
house and then paused to look in the dining room window where Donald was propped up in a chair staring blankly out at us. Herald stood there with a hand on Donald's shoulder to steady him. And that was that.

Polly came over for dinner after which she was driving to Iron Mountain to see her parents. We had a mid-August meal in June with a pot roast, corn, peas, and sliced tomatoes. Herald had moved Donald's electric hospital bed into the end of the dining room so he could be with us. Cynthia told me that this expensive bed had precipitated their last little quarrel two months before. She'd reassured him that the bed could be given to one of the hundreds of infirm locals who had no health insurance. Donald was always interested in value rather than mere cost. In the summer he wouldn't drink soda pop, which he said had gone up five hundred percent in his lifetime, packing along iced coffee in a thermos instead. When hamburgers went up a quarter at a local Soo diner he inquired and the owner, who was a friend, showed Donald his books and explained the price rise, but economics were a lacuna for him. I once tried to explain the nature of inflation but he thought it as pathetic as daylight savings time.