Sabbath Sunrise

"The moon has a halo, there will be wind."

from Mei Yao Ch'en, "I Remember the Blue River"

















The ebb and flow of newcomers.
At Rendezvous they refresh the mood of celebration.
Old pines bunch together to seek stars.
The great lake a bed of sequins.
Somewhere a claim that across the bay
is where, at midnight, bears dance
to the chansons accompanied by fiddle.

As rum casks near their empty bottoms,
long trains of clouds coast overhead
like puffs of smoke from the mens' rosy pipes.
They sit now, alone, underneath
canoes considering the moon home.
The journey long; the night short.

Rendezvous

Grand Portage was a hubbub
of activity during the weeks of Rendezvous,
as hundreds of Voyageurs
from the interior and Montreal gathered.
There were buildings to repair,
wood to chop, canoes to mend.
What had been all a turmoil of constant water
now looked like, from the shore,
a vast blue celebration of work achieved.
Lake Superior, something of a nemesis,
was but a friend all the while,
feeding them the bottom coasting salmon
and the surprise find of gulls eggs.
Sunshine climbing over the tips
of waves was a natural artwork,
the kind that the men of men,
although they do not know it, well receive.
He took up a casked barrel of Canadian
whiskey, she a small glass of port.
Songs were sung over the glow of firelight.
The world hung in a haze of relief.

Rounding Hat Point

Out of the Sawtooth cliffs
the smoke and clap of cannons.
Men to paddle in unison
to an old chanson, an old song
sung to celebrate arrival
at the Grand Portage Stockade.
What had been the journey?
The thousand miles over as many horizons.
Hat Point under the moon
was a world onto itself,
the end of water, the cold dreams
of smudge fires flaring
from under the Montreal birchbarks.
Great lines of men
and native women stood to salute.
The greenhorn to the brigade
could feel an icy chill
up and down his back.
The old avant, hardened, but soft
to heart, might find a tear
crawling back upwards to ward
away the fear of the end.

Northshore Journal: A Tale from the Degrade

The Voyageurs knew what to do when they pulled into shore at storm (degrade) based on the conditions of the shoreline – or if indeed it were a false shoreline altogether.  Many times, with fog as thick as paste, shore would be called out, but the rocks were nothing more than a stone outcropping from some small desolate island, which would not hold the likes of a brigade in ten foot waves.  If it were the Superior shore, the men would in due order determine how best to secure the fur pack.  This time the squall had reached a fevered pitched quickly.  They tied down the sterns of the canoes and decided to leave the packs on board, for now, and would go back to retrieve them after the heaviest had fallen, then dry them out in the bushes.

One of the middle oarsman would take his sponge to the floor of his canoe and rid it of water.  There was always that time when, as the men congregated up at shore – hopefully accommodating enough to lay upon – when they found themselves having to quickly asses all of their work, all of their paddling to this point, even their entire coming careers, for if the load were to get swamped, or canoes ruined, there was little recourse at this point to regain the load.  The more experienced avants would try to put the new recruits to ease by gesturing to the pipe, singing a rollicking song, or telling a story by a smudge fire.  "It was my own first Montreal Express, many many moons ago, when this very same sort of flash squall came.  We thought that we might find refuge at Cascade Falls, back some range now, and decided to climb the stones of the falls thinking we might find a cave or maybe some blueberries upriver. "  The avant had a grisled but handsome face, maybe fifty-seven, but nobody knew age exactly, and was notorious for his own habit of pipe – he did not wait for the hour or two hour breaks, but perpetually kept his own pipe hanging from the side of his lip even on paddle.  Somehow, the men did not know, he kept it just barely puffing of smoke throughout any given day. "So, we climb up to the top portion of the Cascade Falls.  It is roaring loud, not like anything you have heard.  You could not hear a man yell in your ear if he was next to you, and as we look up, through the rising fog, what is it that we see, face to face?"

"Blueberries," one man cast out in a shout, his hides soaking, his hat sagging all around the brim.  "Blueberries, yes," the avant cried out.  "But also standing there, no farther than I stand to you," he gestured to one man a foot away, "the deepest darkest black bear you'd ever imagine.  I made eye contact with him as if it were a first kiss with a sweetheart," he leaned in and chuckled, holding his pipe to his chest.  "The bear, this is no kidding, opened up his eye lids as wide as gulls' wings, raised his nose in a pucker, and bolted off back into the safety of the woods."  The men, around in a half circle now, looked around in unison over their shoulders to the thick skirt of pine forest that rose up off the flat rocks into a vast jagged fog.

North Shore Journal: Brigade in the Fog

No sooner had the men imagined their coming feast at the sight of the flashing silver below them along the bottom, than a thin long mustache of fog had formed around the outcropping of the rushing gully of a creek at shore.  At their near manic pace of some 40-60 strokes per minute, they had outrun one brief storm only to find themselves entering a warm pocket slipping down the emerald mountains and piling up at shoreline which shortly disappeared.  "Whoa," the gouvernail whaled out loud.  They had great momentum, a plan that all agreed upon, to locate the gull island, all the while trailing a fishing line to snatch what they knew was a fleeting school of salmon.  All of the milieux (middle oarsman) lifted paddles unwillingly, unfazed by encroaching danger.  These men would oar through ten foot waves if they must – would leave it up to the avant, a more experienced Voyageur of these northern waters.

Yet all knew the true dangers of forcing a Montreal Brigade over waters at dawn hours.  Water already reached all but six inches from the top of the birchbark.  Hundreds of pounds of furs, all wrapped and sealed, would not take kindly to overexposure at this stage to water.  The mens' stomachs growled.  There had been no 'pipe' in hours.  What had been before them a great animated picture of shore and offshore islands, the horizon line in gray tones to the south and virtually every ironed out wave, had turned to a senseless panorama of monotonous fog.  As they drifted, the avant and gouvernail deliberated whether to degrade (rest at shore) or push forward.  The brigade held steady together, the men holding the sides of one another as the canoes tipped side to side in rolling waves, making a large raft.  "Hush, now," said the avant, a short, pesky man, but with a voice like a launching cannon, who no man crossed in argument of the ways of the wilderness or the natives that inhabited it.  They were alive this far, all the way from Montreal, through all sorts of weather and calamity, no reason to beg for change now.  "Listen for the shriek of the gulls."  A faint, mellow smell of wildflowers filled the air.  A sharp stick of lightning stabbed in through the gray sheets.  "We are near land.  Rocks dead ahead."  The men wondered what it was that he could see that they could not.  Sometimes predictions might lead to traveling in the precise opposite direction than what they intended. As if out of nowhere, enormous jagged stones moved in among them.  The oarsmen knocked themselves loose with the end of the their paddles, then pushing off.  Waves lapped up over smaller rocks and churned spray up over the bow.  "Degrade, Degrade," the avant called out.

North Shore Journal: Gull Eggs

The day of paddling had been long.  Hands of the men began to cramp in near unison.  Pipe bags, hanging off of the belts began to stir and all could feel the long of the pipe for they had decided to pass over the last session for the prospect of gull eggs for dinner.  The dried pemmican before noon hour tasted just the same as the rubbaboo they stewed only a few hours before.  They had been skirting the shore closely until they could see that the storm was following behind them and not to come ahead of

them.  This gave them some relief, for the paddle, if all clear, was nothing more than nightfall before they reached the Great Bay, at Duluth, and then overland to reach the fur machine north of Saint Anthony Falls.  One of the Canadians, a round shouldered fellow, larger than the rest, at least six foot three, had been the one who yelled out that they should wait for what he remembered as a gull island, a great rocky island which rose up from an easily landable shore.  There, he said, they could find the gull eggs and use them for his own concoction of galette, or bread, made by mixing the eggs with flour, then frying the dough in a pan.

From there, on a full belly, only another hour at a swift paddle until the great shore, where there would be rest of the arms for many days.  They drifted off the shoreline some and although the sawtooth mountains atop were clear in their crisp green jagged shapes, the shoreline had lined some with night's coming mist so that it looked like, if a paddler chose such distraction, as though the mountains were afloat, a sort of green roof to the world.  One sternman began to sing a common lyric to pass the time.  A small wind twirled behind them as if an accompanying whistle.  Afloat on a jewel, one of the men remarked that they could still see down to the bottom through the aqua green ripples where a flash of

 silver moved.  "Salmon,"  one man replied, not the large Canadian, but a metis, mixed blood, from the Montreal Lachine, and he held his hand up high in a motion to stop despite the rush to the gull egg island.  It dawned on the men that the salmon could be caught and smoked alongside the gull eggs on the pan in only a short while.  The fur packs loomed large on each man's mind.  The pipes nearly sung from their neck ropes.  Feast had not been a part of this life for many moons.  A third man, a quiet leader from out of the Grand Banks, the fishing shore of the Atlantic, pulled out his thread and a homemade spinner made of true hammered silver.  "There is one that will be mine," he said, with an arrogance that only a born fisherman can boast, and threw out his line as if by strong magic alongside of the birchbark...

A Gull Island off the North Shore near Lutsen

North Shore Journal

20 June

It had been a notorious north shore day of rain and lingering fog – Grand Marais, although quite bustling in attendance for the annual Summer Solstice Festival, was damp, and folks crowded more in small cafes than the Folk House for the boats or the shore for free schooner rides.  We trekked further north, toward Grand Portage, to see if the pictures of the famous Naniboujou Club at Arrowhead could

hold up to being there.  It certainly did: the old Ojibwe native colors lined the arch walls in celebration of native culture, as if entering into an enormous jeweled hut of sorts, overlooking the crashing north shore whose very rocks piled artfully to the largest handmade fireplace in the state.

We assumed hikes might be out of the question on this day and so passed the Judge Magney Forest across highway 61, back down through Grand Marais – a quick stop to see the Voyageur Brewing Company – and on back to Lutsen.  Yet something stopped us at Cascade Falls, maybe it was the easy access to the trail and a sign that said the falls itself was no more than 300 feet from the road…whatever it was, we stopped and began an hour long climb up one of the more majestic trails we've ever been on.

The roar of the Cascade River could be heard from the trail all the way up, small unofficial trails meandered down onto pine needle beds where rock birch climbed out of the rock standing, as if set on purpose, for the sake of holding onto to enjoy a better view of the dramatically stepped river roaring below.

The blurring of the fog and the near glow of the pine forest allowed for an imaginative step back in time, where one might be able to see the Voyageurs of old carrying the birchbark over the shoulder knowing that the violence of this patch of rapids would be too much for the nimble craft to handle, portaging along these same banks awaiting the ease of descent down to the shores of the great lake below.