Today, August 11, it is warm and sunny along the south shore of Lake Ontario, but the ice is not far away. Just a drive to Ottawa and a flight of several hundred miles north into Nunuvut in the Canadian High Arctic. I'll be there by Friday. On board a ship, the Academik Ioffe, a former Russian reserch vessel that will take me on a vagabond poet's expedition of the polar regions and Greenland--the Far Country
I imagine it, difficult to do with my neighbor's garden awash in floral beauty within eyeshot and the hummingbirds nipping in and out of the lush white Rose of Sharon. Hard to imagine the white of Baffin Bay. Perhaps it will look much like the wonderland in the photo here, one taken from aboard ship in Antarctica, the nether antipode I visited almost two years ago. How will the poles differ? What ice remains? How is the Arctic changing? How will I be changed?
To be continued upon my return from the world that swallowed Sir John Franklin and his crew and his two ships and the dog and the monkey that voyaged with them on that doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.
As I've made my way eastward across Montana, through the badlands of North Dakota and into the verdant north woods of Minnesota, Wisconsin and now Michigan, I've spent considerably more time pondering the meaning of place.
Many years ago, in my first book, Midst, I mused on my vagabond life and observed:
"I hear voices. It's been happening over the past several years as I have traipsed up the backwaters & into the wilder regions of the North American continent. As I traveled, I left behind Ruskin's pathetic fallacy that had taught me to avoid imbuing the natural world with human feeling. I left behind the work of many modern poets who have used the pathetic fallacy to ironically emphasize the loss of communion between the individual & the natural world. But I stuffed into my backpack the belief that that communion could be regained & that the natural world could imbue me with its feelings. And it did."
By learning to speak cod and halibut, by learning the languages of mountain and glacier, I was able to immerse myself in place, whatever that place might be, whether badlands or Everglades or....
Recent discussions with backcountry ranger John Heiser in Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit), deepened my understanding of place and my place in it. He is a man who clearly knows his place, his home, having been born and raised in North Dakota and having served 26 years at the ND park where we met. "Where is your home?" he asked of me one day and again on a second day, along with a dozen fellow hikers, many of whom called that quarter of the state their "home." My answer to John came in the form of a poem (no surprise) with a refrain that hammers home my response:
I am where I am.
In the moment. In the place.
Somewhere in North America.
Since writing that poem, I've continued to ponder the meaning of place, realizing as I've returned to the Great Lakes region -- the Third Coast as it's often called -- that, while I'm at home wherever I roam, I'm most at home on North America's inland seas, if only from habit. After all, I've lived on the south coast of Lake Ontario going on 23 years -- half my life. No wonder it feels familiar, feels comfy.
I also realize now that not all places are equal. Lake Ontario is more home than other homes such as Teddy Roosevelt NP, which was my home this summer for five days for a return visit. The Everglades, where I was national park artist-in-residence last winter, is not so much a second home as it is my holy land, a place where I make an annual pilgrimage to refresh my spirit even while mourning the degradations it has suffered.
A place called Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is also a sacred place that beckons me. It is a place that gives birth naturally to poems as I describe in my essay, "Stanzas in the Stone," that was published this month in the Oregon Literary Review.
Having just spent several days on an island in Lake Superior (conveyed there by the ferry pictured above), today I'm a few miles from Lake Michigan; tomorrow I'll settle in to a campground on the shores of Lake Huron. In another week, I'll tent on an island in Lake Erie. In two weeks, I'll be back "home" on Lake Ontario, a Third Coaster at heart. But add to that tender heart a body and soul and I know I have many places, many homes. I am a creature of an entire continent; I am a being of North America.
Montana greetings from the Vagabond Poet who is just now resurfacing from immersion in mountains and valleys and more mountains and valleys in Glacier National Park. It's a spectacular corner of the country where grizzlies rule and campers are wise to be cautious. We didn't see any of the ursine family in our four days there, but reports came into the campground of encounters -- all of them ending happily for bear and hiker alike. Word from the rangers is that Ursus horribilis is doing well; it's the glaciers that are really suffering. You look out from an overlook at a glacier then down at the roadside exhibit showing what the glacier looked like 10 years ago, 30 years ago. Today's glacier is an icy ghost of its former self. It's in-your-face global warming. It's in-your-eyes cold tears.
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Still, beauty remains, sometimes in the smallest things that often go overlooked. I found my solace in Glacier National Park thus:
It's hard to believe that three weeks have passed since we left home on our pilgrimage to the western mountains via the Badlands of South Dakota where this photograph was taken along a trail through the rugged landscape where the Earth shows her bones. We've since left the Great Plains behind and have made it safely through the Black Hills of western South Dakota with a stopover in Deadwood to relive the wild-west late 1800s in that national historic town, and then over our first mountain range, the Bighorns of eastern Wyoming. Soon, into Yellowstone National Park where it's impossible to ignore that the Earth is alive--and gasping, gushing, bubbling and heaving beneath your feet or several safe feet away.
For now, I leave you with a short poem that I hope will give you a sense of what it felt like to cross over the Bighorn Mountains at 9,000 feet above sea level on a chilly June morning.
Amid the Bighorns
snow swale
fog drift
stream rush
raven glide
If I am not crushed by cliff slide I will become the summit
At last spring has come to the south shore of Lake Ontario and our lilac bush is in bloom, two weeks behind those that graced nearby Rochester's annual Lilac Festival. I picked two bouquets to enjoy on my desk, in the kitchen--which will travel with us across the U.S. towards Montana. A gathering of blooms and aroma to remind us of home, at least for the few days they last.
We depart tomorrow, May 24, for a nine-week expedition-by-trailer to the Badlands of South Dakota, Black Hills, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park in Montana and then our return trip via the Badlands of North Dakota and along the Great Lakes shores from Minnesota to Ohio and home again on August 1. I promise updates from the blue highways of the plains and Rockies. Meanwhile, a tiny poem to celebrate Spring-at-Last:
May Star Date #4: Lines Aligned in a Parallel Universe
Overhead after midnight, a shining through— new life.
Where did the winter go since my last posting? In Western New York, the answer is: “Not away.” It’s been unseasonably cold since I returned north from Florida two weeks ago. A late-February expedition into the Baja of Mexico to see whales seems eons ago and my Artist-in-Residency program in the Everglades even deeper in time. While winter continues to have its grip on the shores of Lake Ontario, I try to hold on to the warmth of the south and of Mexico.
Photographs and poems of the Baja trip help me hold onto the magic of being among the great cetaceans – five whale species, including mating humpbacks with the randy males ramming each other to win breeding rights to the evasive female. This photograph of a humpback’s flukes is a clear reminder of the majesty of these mammals, our cousins who also remind me of how insignificant is humankind. And how fleeting is our time here on Earth.
That must have been on my mind when I wrote this poem.
The Price of Souvenirs
We leave something of our souls in our footprints in foreign lands and take only these photographs:
The one where I left a flicker of myself reflected in a gray whale’s eye in Magdalena Bay in the Baja of Mexico.
One where I left a scrap of being in Los Islotes on those rocks of seals and pelicans in the Sea of Cortez.
You saw me amid cardon cactus and elephant trees leaving one last innocence aside on Espiritu Santo like skin drying in desert air.
You have seen how I leave a dream behind among Pacific turtle bones and sand dollars on a bleached beach by an ocean of death.
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Meanwhile, I’ve home and settling into a spring brightened by poetry readings and gatherings with friends. Snow may be yet on the ground, but the promise of spring’s renewal is kept by birds at the feeders and buds thick on the trees in the neighborhood. I feel the warmth within. I hope you do, too.
I have surfaced for a few days from my artist-in-residency in Everglades National Park...and will be heading soon to the Baja for a Lindblad expedition to see the gray whales in their nursing lagoons.
The Everglades residency experience was eye-opening in so many ways...through writing and editing poetry, a poetry reading, photography, botanizing, hiking, biking -- being. It will stay with me forever. That is the nature of the Everglades.
Among my accomplishments was a collection of 19 "cameos" -- miniature portraits of people in Everglades history dating from the 1500s to the present. Each one is 100 syllables long (or 200 if a double cameo) and is based on historical fact presented with mythic embellishments. The research for the poems was almost as fun doing as the poems themselves. So I will leave you with one in the series...about Guy Bradley, the future park's first game warden, one who was murdered by plume hunters at the beginning of the 20th century.
See you next time with tales and whales' tails from the Baja.
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1905, Guy Bradley Cameo: Dead or Alive?
To St. Bradley, patron of subtropical birds, our latter-day Assisi, our Everglades martyr to its causes, I pray.
How unceremoniously they took aim and shot you, those greedy hunters, those ravaging devils, that plague of egrets great and snowy, of hierophantic great blue herons, too. Those killers in the rookeries are dead. But you live on among the glossy ibis, a feather spirit, listening.
