Canopy

September 19, 2014

            The white pines scatter dark along the ridge and stand guard above the islands. They are now the elders, the “old ones.” Their lives were somehow spared when loggers roamed the area and felled thousands of board feet for the sawmills at Bemidji. Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, and Germans followed the lumberjacks. These European families homesteaded small farms and nurtured cows, pigs, a few chickens, large gardens, along with “a bunch of kids!” Today, faded houses with fallen roofs, rusted barb wire fences buried under years of decayed leaves, and rock-strewn fields overrun with willow brush mark a past generation of broken dreams.

            The white pines have seen all this and more. They whisper stories for those who listen. The “old ones” know the Native American families who were first to settle around this lake sometime after the glacial ice melted – those people who fished, riced, and gathered maple syrup here and now are simply remembered on the map with a broken line labeled “Old Boundary, Red Lake Reservation.” 

            The birches and popple trees are fiercely clutching their green, perhaps anticipating permission to change color – this granted by “Mother Nature” maybe on the first day of fall – this day we call the equinox. A few maples, “the Sooners,” just could not wait and bravely paint across the tree line with orange and red. The ferns, brown and crisp, tower above the creek while the middle layer of sarsaparilla, in the span of four days, have turned first to lime green and now to a pastel yellow. The “little guys,” all those plants remembered not, except in guidebooks and in the minds of a few who have learned how to listen, hug the ground and seem oblivious to all the tumult above. 

            Sigurd Olson said,  “Everyone has a Listening Point somewhere.” Today I sit on a ridge in the middle of the sarsaparilla and wonder how many in the canopy of time have sat here in this same place and listened for the stories.