On the way east on Route 28 along Lake Superior he turned off NPR in order to avoid the world’s plentiful bad news, and turned away from the state police building near the prison in order to enjoy the huge dark green Lake Superior where the swells from the storm were subsiding. Passing through Munising he had a sudden poignant memory of his mother’s best friend, their neighbor Mrs. Amarone, who had died in her fifties from breast cancer. She had taught his mother how to make a spaghetti sauce out of canned tomatoes and the local Italian sausage called cudighi. They had it every Saturday night and it was the family’s favorite meal. He would make the same sauce for camping trips with Diane, drenching a container of cooked pasta with olive oil so it wouldn’t stick. He and Diane would get out of work on a Friday summer afternoon, head out, and he would heat up the dish in a skillet over the campfire in the twilight. One summer they had camped a half dozen times near a small uninhabited lake, really a pond, near the west edge of the Kingston Plains between Melstrand and Grand Marais. The area wasn’t especially striking but they had counted at least a hundred sandhill cranes in the open field and if you were careful you could approach the young ones closely. On a warm evening they had listened to the raucous crane chorus and bathed nude in the pond. Diane had said, “We are naked apes,” and laughed. They made love without drying off, and drank a bottle of Barolo with dinner. She had always said the sauce with the pasta turned her on having grown up in a WASP family where the condiments tended to be limited to salt and pepper. They had made love again at first light when the cranes wakened them with their primitive yawp.
He pulled into the Township Park in Grand Marais and set off on his new snowshoes west down the shores of Lake Superior on the fairly hard-packed snow, stopping to stare at the latticed ice on the rocks at the water’s edge and the thirty-story precipitously high dunes in their light caramel color. He felt strangely blessed because the air was still and the mist was lifting off the lake, revealing blue water which had been greenish in Marquette and which he immediately gave up trying to figure out. He reached the mouth of the creek in a little more than an hour and headed up the trail along the creek floundering in the deep soft snow. Now the world was all blackish trees and white snow and it was much cooler in the shade of the deep gulley. He was sweating hard when he reached the waterfall and was amazed at the delight the thunderous falling water brought to his mind. He had always been aware how brutish his aesthetic sense was compared to his wife’s but at times rose to the occasion. He had admitted to her that when she played a certain Villa-Lobos composition on the stereo his skin invariably prickled.
He sat on a stump for a half hour watching the water until his sweat dried and he was chilled wondering idly how the Ojibway, or Anishinabe as they called themselves, the first citizens here, the aboriginals, the true natives, regarded the falls and decided it had to be a sacred place to them, an idea fairly alien to our own culture. He was startled when he arose from the stump to see that a group of a dozen or so northern ravens had gathered soundlessly high in the trees behind him. One of them squawked and he squawked back. The squawking back and forth continued on his way back down the creek gulley to the lake. His dad had taught him early on to talk to ravens because they enjoyed it and would keep him company on walks. Perhaps these avian creatures besides being themselves contained the ghost of his ancient predecessors. He shivered at the idea on his way back partly because the notion was untypical and partly because he had neglected to eat breakfast in Shingleton. Marion had insisted that religion tends to emerge from the landscape and given the austere nature of Anishinabe beliefs this appeared as a sound concept. Christianity could spruce up its message by including bears, ravens, and other animals, or so he thought, but then the desert country out of which Christianity emerged was without these glorious creatures. Maybe he should look up what religions came out of jungles.
By the time he reached his car his limbs were leaden and his breath short and gasping. This aging thing was a real pain in the ass, he thought, resolving to continue hiking every day of the week. Why not? He could read afternoons and evenings within the deep puzzlement of retirement. He stopped at the Dunes Saloon for a burger and a cup of chili and talked to a big man named Mike who once owned the bar and whom Sunderson had to bust twice for throwing men out through the window of the bar and also the hardware store. The judge liked Mike and the sentence had been a course in “anger management,” which Mike had said “pissed me off.” They talked about their mutual passion for brook trout fishing and grouse hunting.
