Jekyll2022-04-26T14:50:51-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/Chuck Masterson’s Actual Blog*“What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!”* —Thoreau
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Some Baby Pictures2022-04-26T00:00:00-05:002022-04-26T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2022/04/26/some-baby-pictures
<p>Hi everyone!</p>
<p>Most people who are likely to be reading this already know this bit of news, although I think there
may be one or two of you out there that this will be a surprise to: I’ve got a baby now.
<!--sep--></p>
<p>This is the first post here in over a year, so there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s happened in my
life that I haven’t written about. For now, we’re going to ignore all that stuff. I hope to be able
to put together at least a brief summary of it sometime soon, in the style of the old-fashioned
Christmas letter perhaps. Trust me, it’s been a heck of a year and there are some exciting stories
to tell.</p>
<p>But for now, I’m just reawakening this old blog as a place to put baby pictures. That way I don’t
have to keep filling up everyone’s inboxes with copies of all the pictures I have, and I can put
them up in higher resolution, too. Yes, I realize this sort of thing is exactly why Facebook was
invented, but I hope at this point we can all agree that Facebook turned out to be a bad idea and
it’s about time we scrapped it.</p>
<p>This post doesn’t include pictures all the way from the very start of Ivor’s life back on December
26, because I’ve already emailed those pictures to most people who’d be interested—soon I want to
put pictures here that go back to his birth, so this blog can be a more complete record, but for now
I’m just going to catch up on the month or so since my last proper email.</p>
<p>So without further ado, then, here are pictures!</p>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-807.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-807.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Misty hung up a string of bells that we had hanging on
the wall. It turns out that Ivor loves tugging on them, listening to their soft jingle, and watching
them wave around above him.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-812.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-812.jpg" />
</a>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-818.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-818.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Side-by-side with a picture from Misty’s old
scrapbook. He was almost 3 months old—we’ll get another side-by-side when he reaches the 5
months Misty was in the picture.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-828.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-828.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>With our neighbor Link (age 2). When asked if he
wants to hold Ivor, Link gets the biggest eyes and yells out the hammiest, “YEAaah!”</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-830.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-830.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Oh hi</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-837.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-837.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Drunk on milk and totally passed out</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-844.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-844.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy lunch this much?</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-856.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-856.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Practicing pushing himself up on his arms.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/Ivor-877.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/Ivor-877.jpg" />
</a>
<figcaption>
<p>Our racooon child dozing off.</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Hi everyone! Most people who are likely to be reading this already know this bit of news, although I think there may be one or two of you out there that this will be a surprise to: I’ve got a baby now.Where I Live2021-02-07T00:00:00-06:002021-02-07T00:00:00-06:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2021/02/07/where-i-live
<p><em>Note: this post is unfinished. I stopped working on it partway through, when I realized it substantially repeated things I’d written about already. But before I set aside the time to get out the redundancy, I accidentally published it… so here it is. The section “The Power” at the end was meant to be about solar electricity. Perhaps I’ll finish this in some form.</em></p>
<p>I’ve now lived in the same general area of the Chequamegon Bay for almost two years. I intend to
live here for many more years: I thought of Minneapolis, by comparison, as an extended stopover,
from the beginning of my time there, and I ended up living there only a little under three years
before moving on. Here is where I imagine I’ve settled down. But given my vagabond past, and because
I haven’t bought land or a house yet but instead keep changing addresses as I find different places
around here to rent on my gradual way to a more permanent situation, many people who know me seem to
suspect that I’m just stopping through. Maybe it’s also because Minneapolis is a place we’re
familiar with, a gravity well, a place people <em>end up</em>. The Chequamegon Bay is an unknown. It sounds
like a place to do some WWOOFing for a while.</p>
<p>But it really is the place I intend to <em>end up</em>. It’s the place where I imagine myself becoming an
eccentric old local who young people can come to and ask oddball questions about the history and how
to grow food. It’s where I have friends I can imagine working with on decades-long projects. It’s
not even just a random place equivalent to any other random zone of the northern Midwest. It’s
specific. It’s particular. It’s got history; it’s got unusual landforms; it’s even got a culture, or
at least the beginnings of one. So even though I’ve mentioned where I am before, I want to write
about it again, more fully, in order to put the Chequamegon Bay on the map. It is, in fact, a place
people can <em>end up</em>—it’s where I am, and where I plan to stay.</p>
<h3 id="situations">Situations</h3>
<p>Back in August, with an attempt to live with untested housemates incinerating into a disorderly
fireball of what might be courteously called “interpersonal difficulties”, Misty and I moved out of
the little log cabin we’d been living in, and moved into a whole different cabin twenty miles to the
north.</p>
<p>This is a move that was a long time coming, but I had long dragged my heels on it. The thing was:
I had never lived with so few people before. <em>Only one housemate.</em> It didn’t strike me as entirely
relevant that the one housemate was the person I had happily decided to spend the rest of my life
with not three months prior. There was a natural law that I felt I was violating: conventional
people live alone or in single-nuclear-family homes; weirdos and other such people at the forefront
of cultural evolution live with unrelated peers in a communal arrangement. By moving to a cabin with
just me and Misty, I would become more … <em>normal</em>. I moved out to the country to live
<em>alternatively</em>—living in a community house is clearly the <em>baseline</em> of alternative living!</p>
<p>All of which is of course mostly balderdash, although I couldn’t see it until I left. I was
confident I had the facts on my side. Fact one: in traditional societies (which I rely on as
a benchmark very probably more than is justified), people usually live in multi-family homes, like
Haudenosaunee longhouses. Fact two: in the hippie classic <em>A Pattern Language</em>, which explains how
to design everything from a continent to a bathroom, in descending order, one finds the assertion
that a two-person household is unhealthy because any sore spot between the two can “quickly become
critical” with no other people to offload frustrations onto or to interact with for a break from the
person one has gone sour on. But of course, this wasn’t a multi-<em>family</em> home, it was a house that
contained one nascent family and one short-historied couple actively in the process of catastrophic
failure, thus so much for Fact One; and as for Fact Two, in point of fact there was a relationship
between two people that <em>did</em> go critical, between Misty and Soren, and having other people around
may have been helpful, but as soon as we moved out, Misty’s stress-induced lung malfunction cleared
right up and it became clear that no matter the merits of communal households in general, <em>this</em> one
needed to end and was not better than the two of us living together as a couple.</p>
<p>Misty, as usual, had a clearer vision of the benefits we could get from living together than I did;
they have a knack for understanding how people work together that I’m still developing. This, they
pointed out, would be an opportunity for us to really understand who we are as a couple—not really
to test out whether we could go the discance once we get married (I believe we were both in
agreement that it seems likely but the only true test is in the living it), but just to find out how
it works when we share the mundane project of running a household. What latent abilities will that
develop in each of us? What will get done without trouble and what will keep getting left undone?
What ideas will we have and enact for cool projects to carry into our long-term future?</p>
<p>We’ve been living here five months now. Within the first week or two, I’d already been won over to
the benefits. I think I expected to feel lonely, but it’s just the opposite: when we’re together,
I feel fully <em>together</em>, the kind of together where your souls touch; and when I’m alone I feel
peacefully alone. We’ve come to the conclusion that loneliness equals aloneness plus suffering. As
Buddhist philosophy will consistently remind you, suffering is something we always seem to inflict
upon ourselves, the “second arrow” of the sutra, but it’s still optional, and if you enjoy youl
anole time, you don’t have any loneliness to worry about.</p>
<h3 id="the-place">The Place</h3>
<p>The Bayfield Peninsula is the formal name for the little sticky-outy bit at the tip top of
Wisconsin. Most of the action of the peninsula takes place on the shore of the bay that forms it,
the Chequamegon Bay, a special sheltered spot that’s one of the warmest parts of the mighty and
frigid Lake Superior, and can even, under certain conditions, be swum in comfortably. The shore is
the host to three towns that form a fairly smooth gradation in size and quaintitude. Down at the
bottom end is Ashland, college town of 8,000 people (only some 600 of whom attend bitty Northland
College, which brings hippie-like folks to the area from far and wide). Ashland used to be the next
Chicago, and I’m told it was once many times its current size, but its glory days were over by 1967,
when the last taconite train offloaded at the goliath oredock across from downtown and steamed away
in favor of the snazzier wharves of Duluth and Marquette. Nowadays the train tracks are a nice bike
trail, the old warehouses are Superfund sites, and all that’s left of the oredock is an out-of-place
concrete footing stretching most of half a mile into the water and the melancholy name of the
Ashland High School Oredockers. The cabin Misty and I moved <em>out of</em> was on an old horse farm
outside Ashland.</p>
<p>Ten miles up the shore—or a six-mile walk across the ice—is Washburn, a quarter the size and
with its heyday even further behind, far enough back that its rust has just about washed off and
it’s now just a cute little place where (those who are curious know) things used to happen. There
was a lumber mill there, biggest on the Lake, and a TNT factory too, biggest in the world, but the
only hint of industry now is the little ironworks there, bigger than a medieval village smithy but
not as grand as, say, a Walgreens. Its main street is lined with eternal old brownstone buildingns
that house the drugstore, the thrift shop, the hardare store.</p>
<p>And ten miles further north, a quarter <em>that</em> size with a year-round population last ciphered at
just 496, is Wisconsin’s smallest incorporated city, Bayfield, gateway to Madeline Island—only
inhabited island on the world’s largest lake<sup id="fnref:mad" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:mad" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>—as well as home to a density of tourist kitsch
second, on the Upper Great Lakes, only to Mackinac Island. Bayfield is a place where you can choose
between two places to get your morning cappuccino, three to get an ice cream cone, three for booze,
two different bookstores (both evidently thriving), and at least ten restaurants from dive to
country club—but you can’t get a single pound of frozen non-CAFO hamburger, because the people who
come through here are in a mood to be catered to, and the single dismal grocery store doesn’t find
it pays to stock the decent stuff, even with a farmer-direct distribution company, Bayfield Foods,
literally a few blocks away.</p>
<p>Outside Bayfield is where Misty and I live. Coming inland from the shore, the land tips up dizzily,
and then plunges into the darkly forested wilds of the interior of the peninsula, where dwell only
fruit farmers, bears, and the Northwoods’ own brand of hillbillies—among which last, we hope,
we’ll eventually be able to count ourselves.</p>
<p>There’s certainly hill enough to billy on. To get into town is a 3½-mile bike ride. The first mile
takes fifteen minutes as I grind up to the ridgeline, and then the other 2½ miles go by in about
five minutes and an eyewatering wind tunnel of a descent that seems to leave me only a little shy of
making a sonic boom as I blaze into town.</p>
<p>Our cabin was built twenty years ago by a young couple who had never built a house before. It’s
built of cordwood, which is a more polite way to say firewood, stacked up and mortared between with
some sandy hippie-devised concretion we still haven’t identified. In accordance with the natural
building gospel, it’s built with big old windows facing the south, and exposed whole-timber beams
inside. Beyond that it begins to make less and less sense, and show that it was built by people who
didn’t quite know what they were doing (as they’ve freely admitted to a friend of mine who knew
them). The wood stove, sole source of heat in the winter, is right next to the front door, so that
all the warmth fets sucked out when the door is opened. The floor plan asks more questions than it
anwers, and has led us to get really weird and creative with our furniture placement so as to
mitigate the nonsensicality of it. (Currently we have the bottom half of our rolltop desk partially
under the counter, and the top half sitting on a bench that gets too cold to be otherwise pleasant
to use.) The builders moved elsewhere after three years or so, and sold it to the organic farmer
down the road, who rents it to us. Since then, it seems most people I know have lived in it at one
point or another. It’s a reliable stopover between blowing in on the wind as a directionless
idealist and starting up a homestead of your own. Few have stayed longer than a year and a half,
largely because it’s so blessed hard to keep the place warm all winter that not a lot of people try
to do it twice. We’re not sure how long we plan to stay: we’re considering trying to prove a point
by outlasting the usual upper limit, but we’ll see what happens.</p>
<h3 id="the-neighbors">The Neighbors</h3>
<p>Part of why I moved to the Chequamegon Bay was for all the great people. So it’s ironic that I spent
my first year living as something of a hermit, and at the beginning of my second year, just as I was
getting ready to break out of my shell, I suddenly had to think about phrases like “shelter in
place” and “social distancing”. I’m not sure if “ironic” is the right word for Misty’s situation,
which is this: as the pandemic was setting into place, I called them and invited them to live up
here with me and get out of the city, a place that we both knew was causing them to spiral deeper
and deeper into depressive patterns. Those patterns got simply translated and even accentuated in
that first ill-starr’d cabin, but now we’re on our own and Misty has shaken off those cobwebs almost
entirely. And we’re here amid lots of cool, interesting people—none of whom we can make friends
with. I at least had friends, if not many, before all this started, and can maintain the friendships
I have. Misty has gotten to know about six peers in the ten months they’ve lived up here, some of
them through what amounts to maybe twenty or thirty total minutes of conversation. It’s a hard time
for community-building. This summer we bought a lot of board games, looking forward to finally
having people over for big, festive game nights at the end of all this lockdown. So far we’ve played
exclusively with each other, except for a single round of Dominion with the folks down the road, and
even when that one happened Misty was at work.</p>
<p>Thus Misty has to take my word for it when I tell them about the great people on all sides of us,
and even I don’t really know what it’s like to <em>live</em> around them, because for the last year no
one’s been allowed to fully live. But there’s at least a little bit that I can tell you.</p>
<p>Most immediately, we’re surrounded by fruit farms. The Bayfield Peninsula, because it’s right on the
water, has its hots and colds tempered by the wind coming off the Lake, and that puts it in an
agricultural sub-zone one notch warmer than anywhere within a hundred miles or so. Make no mistake:
it’s still frigid here in the winter, with temperatures well into the negatives pretty routinely.
(The main character in Neil Gaiman’s <em>American Gods</em>, a Hoosier staying briefly in the fictional
northern Wisconsin town of Lakeside, gamely tries going out for a short walk downtown one winter
day, and before long finds himself in fear for his life. “This isn’t cold,” he thinks, “this is
science fiction.”) But to our south a little, the inland towns of Hayward and Mellen get unmitigated
arctic winds sweeping across the plains, and up here the blast is somewhat softened. As a result,
people have been growing apples here for as long as there have been people here who know about
apples. (They come ultimately from Kazakhstan and were a new one on the Ojibwe, who call them
<em>mishiimin</em> or “bigberry”.) Over the last few decades some farmers have branched out to berries too.
My summer job the last couple years has been at one farm that began thirty years ago with an unkempt
old orchard of Cortland apples planted sometime vaguely around the Great depression. The ownes]rs
tidied those trees up, added a few hundred of their own, and then planted several blocks of
blueberry bushes. Now they have forty acres of blueberries, raspberries, and apples, which are at
this point more than they know what to do with as the enthusiasm of youth leaves them, and that’s
after they already took out their blackberries and rows of bouquet flowers.</p>
<p>That farm is a couple miles from our cabin. Just outside our door is another blueberry farm; our
landlongd grow strawberries, raspberries, and half a dozen others; and all up and down Highway J are
apple orchards—Bayfield Apple Co., Betzold’s, Rabidaux’s, Weber, Erickson’s, Blue Vista, North
Wind, and others that don’t come to the top of my mind at the moment. Even where there are no farms,
there are apples. the old railroad grade to Bayfield, now a snowmobile trail (and bicycle train for
those not afraid of bouncing), passes by feral apple trees here and there, still full of delicious
apples come fall. Most people who live on some little country plot, especially one with a history,
have a few apple trees tucked back in the woods somewhere. Wild plums have been here since the
glacierrs departed, and you can find a tree full of those bouncy-ball-sized sweet-and-sours if you
know where to look. Not to mention wild blueberries, thimbleberries, raspberries, huckleberries,
whortleberries, and saskatoons (a.k.a. serviceberries, juneberries, shadbush, etc.). The fruit
situation is so extreme, in fact, that the Chamber of Commerce calls on tourists to help us eat it
all. Each year on the first weekend of October they put on the Bayfield Apple Festival, and each
year it coincides perfectly with the arrival of the cold drizzles of fall. And yet people come up in
their droves every year to huddle under tents, give up a few fillings to caramel apples, and drink
cider by the gallon. Shame about the weather this year, runs the refrain, but maybe it’ll be nice
next year. Hope springs eternal. Last season the Apple Festival weekend was actually beautiful; of
course, last season, Apple Festival was canceled amid rising <span class="smcp">covid</span>
numbers.</p>
<p>So the land is fruitful, and many of our neighbors are fruity. But then there are all the other
people around us who, like we have, have come up hre so as to get back to the land. Here’s the thing
about the Chequamegon area: a lot of people here are from elsewhere. Moving here isn’t like moving
to a little holler in Kentucky where the families have all been there since 1750 and have grudges
and judgements just as long, the kind of place where if you move in and never leave, your
grandchildren will still be referred to as “new here”. Around here, I do know people from families
that have been around so long that there are roads with their names—the Daryl Jolma who sends me
insurance junk mail matches Jolma Road—but mostly the people I know have come here within their
lifetimes.</p>
<p>Partially this is because of Northland College. Though tiny, it’s also rare, in that it has a strong
environmental focus. There are little colleges for idealists all over, but if you know your specific
idealism means you want to help the environment, Northland is one of just a few places that will
teach you everything you want to know. It has a huge Environmental Studies program, a composting
facility, a campus that seems to be half forest, and a bunch of other things I don’t know about
because I haven’t read their brochures, all of which draw young hippie types up here. Once they
graduate, in turn, many of them stay. Some get jobs with GLIFWC (say “glyphwick”), the Great Lakes
Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, helping to keep the wild rice harvest going or to advise the
tribes of the Ceded Territory areas on how to conserve their pike, or such things. Some live in town
awhile, doing odd jobs in town or on farms and hanging out with their friends. And some scrape
together enough to buy a plot of land, and settle down there. I know some of each kind.</p>
<p>But then there are also those who know the place through some other connection—their family always
used to vacation here,or they came up to work on an organic farm, or their friend grew up here—and
they come up and stay. Misty and I fall into the “random connection” category, having never heard of
this place until we came up to visit a permaculture homestead (back then, a prospective permaculture
<em>community</em>) that we heard about from someone we knew back in the Twin Cities. My path here, if you
remember, was a lot of slowly approaching until I finally jumped in; Misty’s followed mine.</p>
<p>Wherever they come from, there’s a kind of character that people who come up here to live off the
land tend to have (and in describing this, I don’t exclude myself). Your typical Chequamegon
back-to-the-lander—</p>
<ul>
<li>is a big fan of potlucks</li>
<li>has copies of Sam Thayer’s books on wild edible plants, and regularly harvests food from the
forests and roadsides</li>
<li>would not hesitate to pick up a roadkilled deer</li>
<li>looks grimy all winter long except for a big smile (which may be related to a recent outing on
snowshoes or cross-country skis)</li>
<li>does not think it’s appalling to have to regularly go to a well with jugs to get water, and has or
aspires to have a composting toilet</li>
<li>grows a tremendous garden every year, and probably has chickens if not goats or pigs</li>
<li>has never owned a new car or a new couch</li>
<li>has some obscure interest like blacksmithing, printmaking, or hide-tanning, if not several such.</li>
</ul>
<p>Among the few dozen people I know here, I can name at least three who’ve hopped freight trains, and
several others who’ve said they’d like to try it with me. As far as I know wobody’s come up with
a more concise name than “Chequamegon back-to-the-lander”, and eve that name is one I’m using <em>ad
hoc</em> here. But there really is a type, and it’s strange to find, after a lifetime of being an odd
duck, that I may have found a place where I actually fit in.</p>
<p>On one hand, it’s been really unfair that Misty arrived when they did, just in time to be in a state
of extended limbo because they can’t get to know anyone. On the other, Misty has told me they
actually appreciate having had this liminal period, so as to get to know the place—the towns, the
roads, the forests, the seasons, the businesses—before trying to hold down a conversation with
someone whos been here for years.</p>
<p>When the pandemic lifts—if it ever fucking <em>does</em>—there are so many people and places I’m
excited to go see with Misty. Down the way a bit are some interesting people from Minneapolis who
told me their pipe dream is to buy a place next to the abandoned railroad tracks in Ashland and
start up a hobo-themed railbike excursion business. Our neighbors just two doors down, a couple
we’ve gotten to spend a <em>little</em> time with, are fellow board game fans on top of being fathomlessly
knowledgeable outdoorspeople. There are some great hangoun spots—the coffeehouses, a bar made of
a revived burlesque theater, another made of plywood, the little diner out in the middle of the
woods—that I’ve been yearning to spend some time at. This is a good place—when it’s allowed to
be a place.</p>
<h3 id="the-power">The Power</h3>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:mad" role="doc-endnote">
<p>We’re not counting the Keweenaw Peninsula, here, on the groundns that it was made an island
by canal-building, nor Isle Royale, which is inhabited only by National Park personnel. <a href="#fnref:mad" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Note: this post is unfinished. I stopped working on it partway through, when I realized it substantially repeated things I’d written about already. But before I set aside the time to get out the redundancy, I accidentally published it… so here it is. The section “The Power” at the end was meant to be about solar electricity. Perhaps I’ll finish this in some form.New Maps2020-10-07T00:00:00-05:002020-10-07T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/10/07/b-new-maps
<p>Part of why my writing here has been more sporadic is that I’ve been working on the little projects of
getting more self-sufficient. Getting a truck, fixing the truck (as I talked about in the <a href="/blog/2020/09/23/a-tools">post just
before this one</a>), building a little woodshed out of saplings and
tarps, splitting wood to fill it. Another part, though, is that I’ve been laying the groundwork for my
next big project. I’m starting a magazine.</p>
<figure>
<p><a href="http://www.new-maps.com"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/v1602094802/logo-with-map.png" alt="New Maps logo and link to
site" /></a></p>
</figure>
<p>A story I wrote in 2018, “The No-Account”, as well as one I finished just recently, “Sports Talk with
Clark Vonderhaar”, have been published in <a href="https://intotheruins.com/"><em>Into the Ruins</em></a>, a quarterly
dedicated to the genre of deindustrial science fiction: in short, imaginings of what the future may look
like with energy depletion taken into account. The editor of <em>Into the Ruins</em>, Joel Caris, announced
this spring that he’s stopping publication of that magazine, so he can focus on other projects. In that
announcement, he mentioned that he hoped “someone else will take up this mantle” and keep up with the
publication of deindustrial stories. I reread that announcement, and realized that I had the skills and
the interest, and that someone could very well be me.</p>
<p>So I’ve spent some of the last few months putting together a website and an infrastructure for <em>New
Maps</em>, a magazine that will mostly pick up where <em>Into the Ruins</em> left off. It’s planned as a quarterly
of about a hundred pages, generally with four to six short stories, plus a letters section and
occasional essays by myself or by readers.</p>
<p>I’m really excited about this project. It’s a big commitment, more pulic and larger than things I’ve
taken on before, but I’ve seen in the pages of <em>Into the Ruins</em> that there are some really stellar
authors out there in the deindustrial fiction genre, and I’m looking forward to collecting and spreading
those stories. In the four years that Joel published <em>Into the Ruins</em>, something of a community has
built up around it, with a generously laden breeze of cross-pollination from <a href="https://www.ecosophia.net/">John Michael Greer’s
blog</a>, and I’m excited to continue giving that community a regular venue to
exist in print. And of course, this also means that I get to create a really nice-looking book, and
I feel strongly about the value of well-designed books.</p>
<p>If you think you might be interested in visions of the future that are powered not by antigrav engines
or a car in every driveway but by down-home cobbling-together and ingenuity—visions that run from the
pessimistic to the optimistic, including everything between and whole worlds not so easily
categorizable—well, subscriptions are available at the <a href="http://www.new-maps.com"><em>New Maps</em></a> site. The
first issue is planned for January, and there will be the option of ordering individual issues as
they’re released. I plan to announce each issue both here and on the <em>New Maps</em> site as it comes out.</p>
<p>There’s going to be good stuff in here. Because it won’t just be me creating what’s inside this
magazine, I believe I can safely say you won’t be disappointed.</p>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Part of why my writing here has been more sporadic is that I’ve been working on the little projects of getting more self-sufficient. Getting a truck, fixing the truck (as I talked about in the post just before this one), building a little woodshed out of saplings and tarps, splitting wood to fill it. Another part, though, is that I’ve been laying the groundwork for my next big project. I’m starting a magazine.Tools2020-09-23T00:00:00-05:002020-09-23T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/09/23/a-tools
<p>A few months ago, I found myself with a sudden longing to get a little truck. I know: it was
a surprise to me too.</p>
<p>I haven’t had a motor vehicle to call my own since 2016 when I got rid of a Mustang that was kicked
down to me after a brief midlife crisis my father had, by selling it to a dissolute character
I found on Craigslist. What’s more, I was pretty evangelical about the blessings of a car-free life.
I lived in a city and didn’t need one; my bicycle was plenty. Then I traveled hobo-style for two
years, and for that time shoe leather, my thumb, and freight trains got me everywhere I wanted to
go. And when I moved up to northern Wisconsin, though the distances were longer—five miles from my
bedroom to the nearest town—I found I rarely felt compelled to move anything besides my own person
and the occasional load of groceries from place to place, and I could accomplish all that by bike
and bus, even in dead of winter.</p>
<p>(I waited long enough after getting rid of the Mustang, in fact, that before ever considering owning
another car, I had managed to hear the end of its story. One day I got a letter from a junkyard in
Alabama, asking if I owned the below-named vehicle. I called them up and confirmed with the
friendly, down-home woman who answered that yes, I had once had a green Mustang, but I had sold it
years ago and I’d eventually even filed an official notice saying so. She explained that it was
white now, and had been languishing in their lot since getting confiscated during an armed robbery
a month prior. It had South Carolina plates, but South Carolina didn’t know any legal owner, and
referred her to West Virginia—where it had also never been registered legally. West Virginia told
her to check Minnesota, where it turned out I was the last one to legitimately hold a title on the
car. I could even have it back, if I cared to pay $6,700 in garaging fees. Tempting though this
sounded, she and I agreed that it was probably better if I let them scrap it.)</p>
<p>Partly this new longing for a pickup was because I had just inflamed my imagination with a wonderful
book called <a href="https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-hand-sculpted-house/"><em>The Hand-Sculpted
House</em></a>, which is about building with
cob. <em>Cob</em> (unrelated to the kind corn comes on, deriving from a Welsh word for “lump”) is
a building material not much in use anymore, but which formerly made up a sizeable number of the
houses in the British Isles, as well as places further flung, like Yemen. It’s a mixture of sand,
clay to hold it together, and straw to give the whole deal tensile strength. Houses built of it have
been standing in England for five hundred years. You can build a house out of cob for a few percent
of what it costs to make a stud-frame house, and it’s a process much friendlier to beginner
mistakes. The house you get is more energy-efficient and the material begs to be made not into rigid
boxes but into nice curvy shapes conducive to a hippie-dippie vibe that I, despite an occasional
disdain for the hippies and their failures, still have to admit I’m drawn to. The pictures in the
center of the book made me seize paper and start dreaming up floor plans for a house Misty and
I could live in.</p>
<p>One shortcoming of cob that <em>The Hand-Sculpted House</em> mentions is that it does poorly in places
where the weather gets seriously cold. Its great thermal mass is extraordinarily good at maintaining
heat at a steady level, day and night, over the course of a week or so, but this amounts more to
<em>averaging</em> heat nicely than to particularly <em>retaining</em> it. And the winters up here, where it hits
–20° pretty reliably a few nights each year, certainly qualify as seriously cold, cold enough to
cause problems with cob houses as described in the book. But the authors also mentioned that people
were currently at work on solving that very problem, and twenty years had passed since the book was
published, so I allowed my hopes to fly, tempered with the knowledge that I was riding high on an
initial wave of excitement, and also that what I hoped to do may not in fact be possible.</p>
<p>But, I reasoned, if I ever wanted to build with cob—or if I ever wanted to build a house of any
sort, which I certainly did—I would need a truck. Something to haul sand and clay and big heavy
door lintel beams and all those things that excited me when I imagined them.</p>
<p>And come to think of it, I realized, I was starting to get tired of having such limited
effectiveness in the world. With my bike I could get myself from place to place, and I could carry
around lightweight things, like ideas and words and friendships. And a life spent moving nothing
heavier than those could certainly be interesting and worth living. But I was starting to yearn to
change the world not just in the realm of ideas but <em>physically</em> too. I’d been reading Wendell Berry
and I’d just planted one of my first real gardens. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to stop
being exclusively a gadabout and flâneur, and open up the possibility of becoming a <em>homesteader</em>.</p>
<p>An earlier version of myself may have judged a truck to be an unacceptable capitulation to the
dominant system. I may have proclaimed confidently that I would never settle for anything that
emitted any more CO<sub>2</sub> than a horse. The current me is still somewhat conflicted on that
point, but has, it appears, come down on the side of wanting a truck. I will still be pleased,
though, if in a decade or two it turns out my main methods of transportation are bicycle and
horse-and-buggy.</p>
<p>It’s just that it takes effort to swim against the current. Right now, the world around me is set up
for cars. The roads teem with other cars; on Highway 13, part of my only practical route to most
places I need to go, it’s certainly <em>legal</em> to drive a horse, but the speed limit of 55 <span class="smcp">mph</span> and the tight curves mean the buggy would probably become kindling within
a month, and possibly the driver with it. Nor are there hostlers or hitching posts handy in these
towns anymore. The bike is more practical around here than a horse, but even a serious heavy-duty
bike trailer brings its functionality only to a remote shouting distance from a truck or even
a buggy. For one, a bike turns sixty miles into a day rather than an hour, and the distance to good
jobs and good foods is harder to close these days than it was before cars showed up, small family
farms began disintegrating, and the railroads all pulled up their tracks. And for another, biking is
mostly solitary, since the kind of people dedicated enough to go long distances on bike like I do
are few (though by no means absent): going somewhere with someone else would usually end up with the
other person riding a car anyway. Though I may be able to get a tandem into our lives one of these
days.</p>
<p>I entertain a vague hope that eventually I can learn to do enough good for the biosphere with
a truck that I partially offset, or even outweigh, how much I use it. That may be wishful thinking,
since gasoline really is a powerful force for environmental havoc. If it turns out I really like
building with cob, a little truck may be just what I need to start up a business building cob houses
for people all around here, and then the BTUs that people don’t pump into the McMansions they would
otherwise build may make the truck carbon-negative. But more likely, I’m resigning myself to being
a part of the destruction of the planet on what I hope is a temporary basis—long enough for me and
Misty to build ourselves a house, get situated in it, and become self-sustaining enough from the
land that most of our transportation needs can again be met on foot, bike, or even hoof. It’s an
adjustment phase, while we dial back the clock.</p>
<p>And fittingly, the truck that I found is nearly as old as my little brother, a ’98 Ford Ranger, old
enough to have voted for Jill Stein in 2016. It’s small and durable, and has only 135,000 miles,
likely to last years longer with good treatment. We got it from a guy who painted my former
landlady’s mom’s house once. He sold it to us for a sweetheart price and threw in an extra set of
wheels and a toolbox full of goodies. When we don’t just call it “the truck”, we call it Blondie.</p>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/scat-illi-09-18_01-31-10.jpg
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/scat-illi-09-18_01-31-10.jpg" />
</a>
</figure>
<p>This truck represents the first time <em>I’ve</em> really decided to be an automobile owner, and I’ve
noticed an interesting contrast between now and the past couple cars I’ve ended up owning out of
happenstance. It’s just this: with Blondie, I actually care about maintenance. Up until the last
couple months, I had an almost gut aversion to doing anything under the hood of a car. I could fill
the gas, add oil, and, in a pinch, put on a spare tire. But beyond that, I filed car knowledge under
“stuff car people care about”. I wasn’t a car person, and accordingly I ignored it. There may have
been<sup id="fnref:may" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:may" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> a touch of smugness underlying that disregard: “I wouldn’t know <em>that</em>—I don’t deal with
those terrible machines.” The same kind of smugness an evangelical vegan has about not knowing how
to cook meat.</p>
<p>This past week, I changed the leaf springs in Blondie. The guy who sold it to us warned us that
those would need to be changed. “It’s super easy,” he said, “you just get the new one and slip it in
there.” I nodded but thought to myself, “<em>Easy</em>, sure. You are so full of shit.” But after putting
it off for a month, I finally got around to having some new springs cut, at a place over in Duluth,
and then without dragging my heels any worse, I set about putting them on a couple days later. The
guys at Duluth Superior Spring assured me it was really simple to put on the new spring. “You just
cut through those bolts, and slide it in, and hammer down that bracket, and bolt it all back
together.” I could already tell it was going to be a nightmare.</p>
<p>But I borrowed a floor jack from our landlord, and got out my hacksaw and hammer and the rest, and
got to it. And, well, it <em>was</em> awful. One of the wheels wouldn’t come off at the beginning with
anything short of a lot of really hard kicking. I had eight bolts to saw through, and not one of
them was in a place that gave me enough elbow room to comfortably saw. The hacksaw and the electric
saw both jammed up consistently every thirty seconds or less. The first bolt on either side more or
less exploded apart when I got it cut through, which was pretty disconcerting. Until I understood
which way all the forces were balanced, I proceeded at arm’s length and with my eyes squinted,
convinced that at any moment the tension in the leaf springs would recoil and send bolt
fragments everywhere. I got exhausted from sawing, exhausted differently from maneuvering heavy
chunks of metal, and covered in grease up to my elbows. The car was up on blocks for three days and
two nights, and for half that time I remained convinced that I’d either damage the truck beyond
repair or get in way beyond my depth and have to find some car whiz to bail me out.</p>
<p>But I got it done. And when I did, I felt a sense of real accomplishment. <em>I have a tool, and I know
how to maintain it.</em> And that makes me feel in control.</p>
<p>The other cars I’ve had have been something like adversaries: I work with them for as long as they
see fit to keep working, but at any whim of theirs they could break down, and leave me with no
choice but to pay hundreds of dollars or abandon the notion of having a car. I treated them with
suspicion and mostly dealt with their problems by ignoring them, indeed ignoring the whole car. (I
barely used either of them. Misty knew me for most of a year before finding out I had the Mustang,
because I had lent it long-term to a friend. The other, a Civic, I had barely any relation to aside
from being on the title; Misty was the one who used it.) With Blondie, though, I’m taking
a different tack. I’m treating this useful thing with respect, keeping it clean, keeping it in good
order. I changed the oil the other day, and the air filter too. I’m learning how it works so that if
it breaks down I’m not at the mercy of gearheads—I can actually do something.</p>
<p>In return, I’ve been able to accomplish some cool stuff. I’ve moved house for me and Misty. I’ve
hauled some firewood. (Admittedly, I’ve hauled only about a ninth of what we have out front of our
house right now, the rest of it having come in the trucks of people we know who actually have
chainsaws. But on the other hand, Blondie did bring the pallets that the wood is all stacked on.)
I’ve carried a canoe to a wild rice lake and gone ricing. And hopefully sometime soon I’ll even be
able to build a new house with Blondie’s help.</p>
<p>The essential thing is to own the tool, not be owned by it. A truck I understand and can work on is
a truck I own. A truck that does things I can’t predict and can’t fix is a truck that owns me.</p>
<p>In a strange way, it’s even liberating to make mistakes. When I “changed the oil”, it turned out
that the nice big plug marked <span class="smallcaps">drain</span> was in fact the drain for the
transmission fluid, and the reason the truck soon started making a hideous moan was that I’d drained
the transmission dry believing it was the oil. We ran the transmission like that for over 200 miles
before finally figuring out my terrible mistake.
But had you asked me beforehand what the consequences of running a transmission without oil in it
might be, I would have guessed, “catastrophic bricking of the engine followed by a tow to the scrap
yard.” As it happens, the truck perked right back up after I added fluid back in, and seems barely
the worse for wear (although in fact I may have taken thousands of miles off its lifetime). And now
I know better. There’s more than one drain on a car. The more I learn, even the hard way, the better
off I am.</p>
<p>Does that mean I’m going to become a car geek? Not likely. I might not even make it to the top half
of people I know, in terms of car knowledge. However carefully maintained, any car is inherently
going to spew greenhouse gases,<sup id="fnref:tes" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:tes" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> and that knowledge will always temper any enthusiasm I have
for things automotive. But what’s important, here, is that I’m the one in control, because I won’t
give up my power. I can change a leaf spring: nothing can stop me.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:may" role="doc-endnote">
<p>There was. <a href="#fnref:may" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:tes" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Yes, even a Tesla: it just spews them from the power plant instead. <a href="#fnref:tes" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}A few months ago, I found myself with a sudden longing to get a little truck. I know: it was a surprise to me too.On Other People’s Land2020-07-24T00:00:00-05:002020-07-24T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/07/24/on-other-peoples-land
<p>(Includes Summer 2019 Approximately-Reverse-Chronological Catchup, Pt. 4, sort of.)</p>
<blockquote class="prefatory poem">
<ul>
<li>I want to go home</li>
<li>But I am home
<cite class="small"><em>“Riches and Wonders”, the Mountain Goats</em></cite></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<ul class="prefatory">
<li>Big News enclosed: keep reading, you’ll get there.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hello everyone. How’s it going? I’ve missed you. I’m back.</p>
<p>There’s something about living in the country, perhaps. Since I’ve moved out here, I’ve written less
here than ever before—now a little over three months since the last time I mentioned anything
about my life here. In large part, I think, that’s because around here I find it so much more
interesting to actually live my life than to write about it. The summertime is here! The
strawberries are already done, the raspberries are passing their prime, and soon we’ll be all the
way to blueberries, which will carry us straight through to September. Each day that flashes by
seems to be packed with the weight of three or four days, and from my vantage point doing the things
I’m doing, I can barely glimpse the rush of things I could’ve been doing. Who can find the time to
sit down at a computer and document what’s whooshing past like a herd of bison? And the spring moves
just as quickly. Fall seems to finish almost before it even starts, and winter, as long as it is,
never quite has enough time for all those inside projects I put aside for it. People who prefer
living in the city talk about how much happens there. But my life here feels fuller than ever.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in cities most of my life, in fact, and I never seemed to have a problem finding things
to write about, and time to write about them. There, I was surrounded by all the problems of modern
life that I’ve gotten so much mileage from describing. My daily routine in Minneapolis was nothing
but disjointed, a bike ride through traffic and over asphalt to a cubicle where I monkeyed with
computer code for a company selling products I didn’t care about in the least, until going home to
cook food I bought from a store. I shopped at the bougie, organic store to make it all seem better,
but I could only deceive myself just so far. In the concrete-trapped evenings, when sitting on the
porch listening to hoopties, sirens, and subwoofers lost its appeal, I would pour out all my
frustration with the city into the computer.</p>
<p>Out here, though, I’m surrounded by the health of the land. When I go to town, my bike ride takes me
past thick forests, country houses, and fields of stunning fertility where, day by day, grass has
exploded up from the cold spring earth in a game attempt to fill up all the space between soil and
sky, been mowed and baled, and started filling up the air again, to all appearances unperturbed. My
friends are farmers. The house I live in is a hundred-year-old log cabin built by Finns in a little
town nearby called Oulu, moved here and modernized by my landlord. It is surrounded entirely by
forest, and in the apparently endless back acreage, behind the pastures, there’s a beaver pond full
of industrious beavers, which drains into a creek with suckerfish and sandbars.</p>
<p>At least, I can imagine that that’s the health of the land. But it’s only thanks to my disconnection
from the land that I can think so. In the city, everything is human-made, and when it’s in disorder,
I can tell because the mind that ordered it is much like mine. In the country, understanding order
and disorder requires skills I haven’t developed yet. For that I need to live <em>with</em> the land. So
far I live <em>on</em> the land. Anyone with a hundred grand to burn can live on the land. There’s an acre
or so near me whose deed-holders have fenced it off and strewn it with a couple RVs, the carcasses
of a good dozen cars, and a muddy dirt track where they sometimes drive four-wheelers in circles
well into the night. Even those people live on the land—and come to that, so do city dwellers,
since every city is built on some land of its own (even if some of its citizens might imagine that
it’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM">“beyond the environment, it’s not in an
environment”</a>).</p>
<p>Living <em>with</em> the land, though, requires more attention, more intention, more work. It’s something
I’m still only beginning to do. For all I’ve written about nature and the importance of growing
one’s own food and all that, this year, my thirty-second on the planet, is the first year that I’ve
taken even the rudimentary first step of planting a garden of my own. It feels good, finally. I’m
getting my hands dirty; I’m watching the beans climb. But I have a lot further to go. Wendell Berry
writes, in <em>The Unsettling of America</em>, of going past farms near his own, and seeing hillsides
gullied out, topsoil eroding, single crops grown year on year with fertilizers where there should be
rotation and manuring, the death of a way of life that embodied the relationship of the words
<em>healthy</em>, <em>hale</em>, and <em>whole</em>. Up here, I can see the obvious problems: fields that, in the spring,
turn into mud pits and grow stunted corn, a farm with so many cattle that they’ve churned the ground
to dirt, forests shot through with invasive buckthorn. But I haven’t lived here long enough, or
worked the land anywhere long enough, to see the subtle problems, something in the fatness of the
fish or the size of the birches, maybe, that would tell me what work we humans have been neglecting
to do.</p>
<p>But in the end my lack of writing isn’t really so much to do with a shortage of visible problems
around me. If I only wrote about problems my writing wouldn’t be much worth reading. Even in the
perfect world there are stories to be told, if for nothing else then to celebrate the perfection.
And as much as I may want to convince myself that I haven’t been writing because I’m outside working
too much, the facts won’t bear me out on that. I spend a hard-to-justify proportion of my time
sitting in this old log cabin, only one tree trunk’s width of wall between me and the forest, with
my computer open, looking at news and comics and videos.</p>
<p>Most of the time while I’m doing that, I’m feeling guilty for not being outside. The sun is shining
just outside the window. The forest is calling. But the thing is: if I went out there, what would
I do? The land here isn’t mine, legally or ancestrally; the most I can comfortably claim here is the
right to walk around and maybe the right of usufruct, as long as I don’t chop down any prominent
trees. I don’t <em>know</em> this land. There are only two non-city places where I feel like I’ve even
started to get to know the land, and neither of them are here. One is Crow Duck Lake, where my
mother’s family has vacationed every year since before I was born. From memory I could draw at least
an approximation of the shape of the lake and the good fishing spots, and if I were dropped off
there blindfolded, I could find my way to any part of the camp by feel. The other is my father’s
family’s land in West Virginia, where since I was a kid I’ve roamed the hillside in search of deer,
old metal junk, and adventure, and I know what crevices next to the house the garter snakes lurk in,
and I’ve caught skinks and turtles and frogs, and I’ve walked miles of the endless creek.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to assume that my familiarity with these places comes because of the time I spent
there as a kid. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I started actually learning the lay of Crow
Duck Lake, and my appreciation of the place has deepened as I’ve learned my way around it and
explored farther afield, finding blueberry patches I never knew as a kid. Likewise it’s during my
deer hunting trips to the West Virginia land that I’ve felt like I finally related to the place as
an adult. I treasure the memory of a walk up the hill just a couple years ago, talking with my
cousins Travis and Jackie about our grandfather, his life and his death, in the same way that
I treasure memories of splashing around in the creek on an inner tube with Travis twenty years ago,
before Jackie could even walk.</p>
<p>To build a relationship with land, the important thing isn’t to have grown up there. That helps, of
course. But the important thing is to be able to come back to it year after year, to know you’ll be
back again. You explore because you can imagine yourself coming back to the places you’ll discover.
You spend time outside because even if you don’t know what you’re learning there, you know when you
come back to that place, even ten years from now, you’ll remember what you learned that day. Your
picture becomes fuller, your friendship with the land strengthens. It becomes a kind of kinship,
eventually. After long enough, we may trust the land to hold us more than we trust most people we
know. The land is genuine. It will not let us down if we don’t let it down. It is a good place to be
buried.</p>
<p>And this lies at the root of the anomie and anxiety that I feel, even after I’ve moved out to the
country where, the theory goes, I shouldn’t feel that anymore. I have no permanent place here.
I have yet to live anywhere more than a year. No room I’ve lived in has felt like <em>my</em> room, just as
no forest I’ve wandered has felt like <em>my</em> stomping grounds. The last grounds I really stomped are
in Minneapolis, where I haven’t lived for three years, which is as long as I lived there in the
first place. Being surrounded by lushness and greenery is well and good. But it’s time to find
a place where I can build a house and build a home.</p>
<p>This mission takes on added significance, and becomes more possible, now that Misty and I are
engaged. Wait, let me say that more slowly and sonorously: <span class="smallcaps">Misty and I are
engaged!</span> The reason you’re hearing about this here is that when it happened, in late May,
someone in my family was planning to pull together a family reunion over that Zoom thing that
everyone’s using these days, and I wanted to announce it there. But then the reunion didn’t happen,
and continued not happening. It was only a few days ago that I realized I could announce it here,
and avoid having to decide who hears first. No, we don’t have a date picked out, or answers to any
other questions you might have. The sum total of what we’ve done to plan our wedding is to decide
that there’ll be one.</p>
<p>But I’m very happy to be able to say at least that. We’ve always been a bit of a bizarre match,
Misty and I: one who gets lost in the written word and one who’s suspicious of it; one who’s taken
long practice to notice that he has emotions and one whose emotions are often at the helm of their
life; one who geeks out about languages at any opportunity and one who mostly loves them from
a distance. But there’s a commonality basic to the two of us that overrides superficial differences,
and it’s to do with some of what I’ve been talking about. We both feel implacably drawn to making
a healthy life as part of the land and part of the community. Our progress toward that goal might be
halting and irregular, but it pulls us both forward, and pulls us together. And our differences make
us stronger in the end, because we can learn from each other. I’ve learned things about life that
I’m not sure I ever would have arrived at if I’d never met Misty. And my concept of the fullness of
life has repeatedly overflowed its limits with Misty, as I expect it will continue to do for
decades. As Wendell Berry says, “What marriage offers… is the possibility of moments when what we
have chosen and what we desire are the same… which give us the highest joy we can know: that of
union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment).… It is possible to imagine marriage
as a grievous, joyous human bond, endlessly renewable and renewing, again and again rejoining memory
and passion and hope.”<sup id="fnref:wb" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:wb" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p>
<p>We don’t have the land aspect figured out yet, but we at least have a lead or two. I’ve started
reading about how to build houses, and I’ve let my friends who are working on houses of their own
know that they can ask me for help. It won’t be too long, I think, before I can write on here about
the progress of Misty’s and my house made of cob, or strawbales, or timber framing, or all of the
above.</p>
<p>But of course it’s not just a house and a parcel of land that a marriage or a life complete. Sure,
the house and the land will be where we spend most of our time, and where we put our energy most
intensely. But every healthy relationship with the land extends much further than the bounds of
one’s own homestead. It’s only a rich paranoiac who comes to the country and builds a private
compound with <span class="smallcaps">no trespassing</span> signs. (I’m looking at you, Ronald and Grace
Hutchinson of 78210 Singer Road, Bayfield.) That person’s web of connections ramifies across the
continent along supply chains, vast but brittle, sustained only by the illusory power of money,
which did little to protect the Antoinettes and will not help the buyers of a $3,000,000 <a href="https://survivalcondo.com">Survival
Condo</a> built into an old Atlas missile silo once their alleged five years
of luxury food supplies have run out. A healthy, real web of connections centers on the house and
the garden, but reaches out into the community, through friends and work partners and vague
acquaintances. Though the deed or lease may describe a certain forty-acre plot as home, in this way
home will be practically the entire region, all its trout creeks and saskatoon patches and beaches
and bonfires with friends.</p>
<p>Which brings me to one other thing I’ve been doing that I want to mention in this post. One of the
ways that I’ve been connecting myself to the community is by learning Anishinaabemowin. I’ve been
putting effort into learning the language since I lived in Minneapolis, but it’s alwasy been slow,
because I only had books to learn from, no actual teachers or people to speak it with. Last month,
though, I got serious about Anishinaabemowin, and took part in a language immersion camp that’s put
on by the Fond du Lac Tribal College outside Duluth. It lasts two weeks and it’s called
Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang (‘Let’s Speak Ojibwe Together Here in Our Land’). Normally all
the participants stay the whole two weeks somewhere near the college and take a vow not to speak any
English the entire time (except the weekend break). This year, of course, <span class="smallcaps">covid</span> drove the whole thing online, and it turns out it’s difficult to be in two
places at once, so my language learning was leavened with a lot of stuff I had to do at home. But
I still learned more about the language than I’ve learned any other place, and I have enough notes
in my notebook to keep me busy for months.</p>
<p>Where this ties in directly with the community around me is that I’ve applied to work at an
immersion “Early Head Start” (pre-preschool) program at one of the reservations here, Bad River, and
although that’s only temporary, I’m looking at making something like a career out of teaching this
language, if I can find the opportunities—which I think I can. When Misty and I move in a few
days, we’ll end up a fair distance from Bad River. But this region mostly consists of three small
towns bookended by two Ojibwe reservations, and when we move we’ll be much closer to the other one,
Red Cliff, whose director of language programs I’ve already written to.</p>
<p>Lastly, I just want to mention that if you’re wondering what happened to that
Approximately-Reverse-Chronological Summer 2019 Catchup, the answer is that I’m declaring blog
bankruptcy. I got three of four parts written, and one of them took me a hundred pages to write, and
the last part is just my trip to the Rainbow Gathering. Since I went to that little shindig in the
woods, so much has happened in my life and in the rest of the world—the Minneapolis riots, <span class="smallcaps">covid</span>, my plan to start publishing a magazine, a truck Misty and I just bought
today—that I now have to consider the possibility to be minimal that anyone will have any interest
in my hot take on the Rainbow Gathering. Here’s the summary: I went, I hung out with my friends,
I climbed on some ropes and met some weird folks, and I watched consensus-based decisionmaking in
action in a much-too-big group. That’s that wrapped up, and I’ll be talking more about the other
things soon. I’ve broken my writing slump, even though it took me two tries to do it—I managed to
delete the first attempt utterly and irrevocably during a computer shuffle—and now I’m back in it
for anyone who wants to know more about what I’m doing, or what <em>we’re</em> doing, as I can now say.
Thanks for reading. See you around.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:wb" role="doc-endnote">
<p><em>The Unsettling of America</em>, pp. 126–7, 124. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015. <a href="#fnref:wb" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Hello everyone. How’s it going? I’ve missed you. I’m back. There’s something about living in the country, perhaps. Since I’ve moved out here, I’ve written less here than ever before---now a little over three months since the last time I mentioned anything about my life here. In large part, I think, that’s because around here I find it so much more interesting to actually live my life than to write about it. The summertime is here! The strawberries are already done, the raspberries are passing their prime, and soon we’ll be all the way to blueberries, which will carry us straight through to September.No Quarter2020-04-05T00:00:00-05:002020-04-05T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/04/05/no-quarter
<p>My partner Misty is moving up to the Chequamegon Bay. The news here isn’t that we’re getting back
together—we never entirely broke up—but that Misty is moving house in the middle of a global
pandemic.</p>
<p>It may seem, at first blush, that there are few stupider things Misty could do. But they<sup id="fnref:pr" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:pr" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> have every
reason to get out of their current situation. A place that appeared to be pretty decent with low rent
turned out (there’s always a catch, right?) to have an upstairs neighbor who is functionally nocturnal
and likes to play bad rap loud, as well as bring home a succession of women who quickly end up hating
him. This is a guy who, in a discussion of sex, felt the need to clarify, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t
<em>make love</em>. I <em>fuck</em>.” The bathroom in the basement (where Misty lived) has no functioning door—for
privacy you have to pick up the door and sort of lean it in the frame—and it’s recently become clear
that the water dripping out of a pipe directly above the toilet is in fact arriving straight from the
upstairs shower drain. But the icing on the cake is that their housemate Sergio, whose name is on the
lease and who’s apparently an all-around nice and reasonable guy, has tested positive for
<abbr>COVID</abbr>-19.</p>
<p>Sergio quarantined himself as soon as he suspected he might have it, without waiting for his test result
to come back, and when it did, he had been holed up in his room for a good week or so. He’s been good
enough about avoiding contact that Misty hasn’t seen hide or hair of him since he went in, and can’t
even tell me how he’s feeling, though everyone presumes he’s at least still alive. It’s entirely
possible he’ll avoid transmitting it to his housemates. But he does still have to walk down the hallway
and use the bathroom.</p>
<p>Besides making that house an excellent place to get away from, though, that leaves Misty in an
awkward position. It’s good to get away from someone who has <abbr>COVID</abbr>. John Prine caught
the virus from his wife, even though she was quarantined on one side of their house. But once you
get away, where do you go?</p>
<p>Misty and I will be staying with our friends Katie and Soren in a log cabin on a horse breeding farm
a few miles outside of Ashland. The cabin is spacious and well-lit and has a giant porch The porch also
connects to a small windowed outbuilding, possibly once used as a room by someone who was a little more
hermitic than those in the main house, but now just used for storage. This, we all reckoned, was more or
less the ideal situation for quarantining. Misty could stay in the outbuilding for two weeks, reading
books, and the rest of us could cook for them, and on warm days we could all sit on rocking chairs on
the porch, a prudent six feet apart. Perhaps I would learn how to knit. It would be a rough two weeks,
with no hugs allowed, but we could certainly follow all the CDC’s guidelines and still have a passably
nice time.</p>
<p>In the last couple days before we were all due to move in together, though, negotiations started
breaking down. The owner of the horse farm, a guy I haven’t met yet and who’s been described to me as
old and sort of grumpy, was made aware of our plan, and he made it clear that he didn’t feel comfortable
with Misty being on the property at all. This seemed to at least marginally make sense to me. After all,
it’s hard to trust a quarantine if it’s self-imposed, especially if the person quarantining has to use
the same outhouse as other people. And the guy is old—I’m not sure how old, but old enough to be
concerned. He wasn’t unreasonable; he had a canvas wall tent that he could lend Misty, and a propane
heater. They could pitch it anywhere, as long as it wasn’t on his land.</p>
<p>This all happens just as all four of us—me, Misty, Katie, Soren—are in various states of housing
limbo. A few weeks ago I moved out of the little country house I’d been in, and in with my friends Liz
and Nathanael. The plan had been that I would housesit for them during their honeymoon trip to Europe,
but that trip and that plan were pretty effectively scotched by <abbr>COVID</abbr> before they even
began. Still, I had already put plans in place to move out of my old house, and Liz and Nathanael have
a spare room and welcomed me in. As Misty’s situation unfolded, I raised the idea that perhaps Misty
could set up the wall tent somewhere outside L & N’s house. Then, although there would be no big porch
where we could sip sweet tea and knit afghans, we could at least talk and take walks. Liz and Nathanael
were both unenthusiastic about the idea, though: they have three cats and a dog, and it’s now been found
that pets can serve as vectors for the virus too. Just a couple days ago, two tigers at the Bronx Zoo
tested positive for <abbr>COVID</abbr>. Unwise cats, hanging out with humans too much. Liz works at
a factory where older people come in, and Nathanael does caretaking work for a quadriplegic guy who’s
convinced the coronavirus will be the end of him in time. Their land would not be the place for Misty.</p>
<p>I planned to call around to some more people and find someone with a more welcoming patch of land,
but at the same time, Katie and Soren were talking to Misty, and the three of them figured Misty
could just camp on National Forest land. The Bayfield Peninsula is shot through and surrounded with
National Forest land, where it’s entirely legal to set up a tent in unreserved areas for two weeks at
a time to do some “dispersed camping”, so this plan seemed doable, though a bit isolating for Misty and
heavy on car travel.</p>
<p>But up here in the Northwoods, spring is just starting to progress, and everywhere that seemed promising
turned out to still be covered in a foot of snow. We found this out after Misty had already arrived and
was now in quite urgent need of a place to stay the night. So I started calling anyone I knew of who had
land. First choice was a local organic farming couple who also rent a few little cabins, and had at
least one vacant, far away from their own house. I caught the guy just as he came in from farm work for
the day. Once I finished telling him the story, and asked if Misty could rent the cabin for a couple
weeks, his very first reaction was, “Well, then I can’t rent it to anybody else, can I?” Once he’d
worked through that train of thought, his next was, “And we have the farming to do, and if either of us
gets sick, that puts the kibosh on that.” He offered a few halfhearted suggestions for where to find
land, and concluded with, “I guess the best I can tell you is ‘Good luck’.”</p>
<p>That was the conversation that finally began to clarify things for me. This pandemic has become
mythologized in real time. We are not dealing, anymore, with a disease that’s somewhat worse than
the flu and can be transmitted through contact with droplets. We are dealing, it would seem, with
a force of evil, an indiscriminate killer that’s lurking invisibly everywhere we go, even in plain
sight, and will surely reach out and claim us all as its share of souls. It must be kept out of our
homes with the same measures we would take against a zombie invasion. I got a text from someone
I know a couple days ago. “Trying to find a place to park my camper, so I can isolate with all my
survival gear and preps,” she wrote.</p>
<p>If we were now dealing not with a disease but with an invisible dark spirit, it made sense now why
the guy renting us our cabin, despite having a good 40 acres to his name, never raised the
possibility of, say, finding a back corner of the property where he never goes, and letting Misty
put up the tent there. It also made sense why the organic farmer told me with complete confidence
and little room for nuance that he wouldn’t be able to rent that cabin again for the entire summer
if Misty quarantined there. It seems there’s no good scientific consensus yet on how long
<abbr>SARS</abbr>-nCoV-19 can remain viable outside of a host, but a good guess is six hours;
I didn’t press this point with the farmer, because I don’t know him well enough to try to argue with
him, but I got the sense that as far as he was concerned, the cabin wouldn’t be safe for at least six
months, and perhaps he would have to burn it down.</p>
<p>The mythic understanding of the virus that I began to gather is that once it crosses over your
property line, your entire citadel is lost. As well, the virus is ineradicable; once a place has
seen an infection, there will forevermore be <abbr>COVID</abbr> lurking there in a crevice waiting
for the right host to possess. And the only way to stay away from it is to fear everyone, for
an indefinite period of time, possibly the rest of our lives. Which may be short indeed if we catch
the coronavirus. Of course people don’t believe this with their minds. Consciously we are aware that
the virus can only wreak so much harm, and the human species will survive this just as it has
survived the Spanish flu, the bubonic plague, and countless other pandemics. But in the collective
subconscious, this disease seems to have found embodiment, even apotheosis, as something like
a Jungian archetype. It is ready to be its own tarot card. <em>The Unseen</em>, perhaps. Faced with an
enemy like that, we wash our hands and might wear masks, but we do it desultorily, with the feeling
that these are just superstitious gestures while we wait for the inevitable to accost us, invisible
fangs bared.</p>
<p>Normally it takes stories hundreds of years to be distilled into myths. That a wad of RNA
originating in a Chinese bat has managed the feat in under five months should make us sit up straight
and start asking questions. Sure, there is reason to be alarmed about <abbr>COVID</abbr>. But to listen
to people on the streets—well, if anyone were on the streets—you’d think Cthulhu had risen from
drowned R’lyeh and begun flaying minds.</p>
<p>Certainly I think there’s a part played by the entertainment industry. In the last few decades, zombies
have ascended from an obscure bit of <em>vodun</em> folklore to become such a mainstay of American cinema that
zombie movies now form an entire genre. In the translation, they’ve been fitted with a detailed system
of rules and lore—how they spawn, how they can be killed, what they’re capable of during their
undeath—and the nerds who know and care about all this could stand on a roughly equal footing with an
ancient Roman <em>paterfamilias</em> explaining the mythological background needed to properly honor Pluto.
Other fiction gives us different ways to understand and mythologize the present: In <em>Pontypool</em>, a 2008
movie, a new disease is transmitted when a host simply makes eye contact with a victim, and before long
host and victim are both in a terminal spiral in which they can only speak in free-association word
salads, while the disease spreads on. The same avenue of transmission is at play in Nobel Prize–winner
José Saramago’s 1995 novel <em>Blindness</em>, but the condition this time is an instantaneous inability to see
anything but blank whiteness, “a milky sea”, and the devolution that results isn’t merely bodily but
social on a vast scale. And we also have Michael Crichton’s <em>The Andromeda Strain</em>, which has
a constantly changing pathogen of mysterious properties arrive to Earth by way of a meteor; it’s
narrowly stopped from taking over the entire planet only when a scientist sacrifices himself and his
entire research complex.</p>
<p>But popular media explains more when you understand it to be built by a people’s psyche, rather than to
be the agent building that psyche. After all, stories get popular when they get us down deep, get us
right there—they’re something we needed to hear, and by hearing them, we get some kind of deep
satisfaction. What kind of thing does that for people has by no means been the same in all times and
places. Ancient Greece gives us the term <em>catharsis</em>, and it described the crowning moment of many Greek
dramas—the part where the hero, despite being heroic, dies a tragic death. That doesn’t play too well
in Hollywood. Nor would John Bunyan’s classic <em>Pilgrim’s Progress</em>—probably the best-selling book in
all of English literature, if you measure not by copies sold but by percent of the contemporary reading
populace who bought a copy—which now reads like a low-effort, hamhanded allegory about why
Christianity will solve all your problems. To say nothing of stories from cultures even farther removed
from ours. An old story of the Pacific Northwest’s Tulalip people tells of Boil and Hammer, two sisters
who would go picking berries every day. One day while Hammer wasn’t looking, a fir needle fell on Boil,
who, being just a boil after all, was lanced and disappeared. All Hammer found was her braids. After
mourning Boil for a long time, Hammer felt it was time to get out again and pick more berries. But when
she went down to the river to wash her face, she slipped, and, being just a hammerstone after all,
rolled on down into the water and sank and drowned.<sup id="fnref:vh" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:vh" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup> We can appreciate that there’s <em>something</em>
interesting going on in this story, but it feels to the Euro-American mind more like a weird dream than
a story, and the storyteller herself, Vi Hilbert, mentions in concluding that it’s “such a puzzle to
most people who hear it.” Even David Lynch would have trouble making it work on the big screen.</p>
<p>So if we want to know why zombie movies are popular, we should look not to the zombies but to ourselves.
In so doing, it doesn’t take long to discover that American culture seems to practically <em>hunger</em> for an
apocalypse. The U.S. has been waiting for the end times for centuries, possibly since it began. Most
recently we can point to 2012 and the ringing in of a new Mayan <em>b’akt’un</em>, which, besides meaning
traditional Mayans all had to go down to the office supply store for new calendar stones, was of course
a nonevent. Before that we had Y2K, during which all the world’s computers tragically failed to stop.
The pattern goes back and back, from the mass suicide of the Jonestown Massacre, to 1844’s Great
Disappointment in which the Millerites failed to be raptured, on to various communes that were founded
during spates of millenarianism through the 1800s and 1900s. That’s just the mass movements; lone
Biblical <em>gematria</em>-hounds and extraterrestrial message-receivers have been convincing themselves for
just as long that some entity is about to come along and relieve us all of the bother of paying taxes by
ending the world. With <abbr>COVID</abbr> we didn’t have much advance warning time to get the wheels of
the old apocalypse myth engine turning, but the machine has proven perfectly up to the challenge, and
furnished us with an end-of-days narrative in what must be record time.</p>
<p>Not only that, but it’s a story with a distinct advantage over all those other apocalypses: it involves
something that’s actually happening. You don’t have to take it on faith or on authority that the
coronavirus is coming, because it’s here already, and the scientists were the first to say so. Whether
or not the scientists said that it amounts to the end of the world is a secondary matter and may be
assumed to be of little importance, since my subconscious clearly indicates that it does in fact amount
to the end of the world. And if you needed any further evidence that our days are numbered, look no
further than the unprecedented stoppage of basically everything. Nobody can remember anything like it,
and it’s a clear signal that we’re entering a metaphysically novel realm.</p>
<p>That’s all well and good, but there’s something missing. The apocalypse myth accounts for a good chunk
of how we’re understanding the news lately, but it’s not the whole thing. What’s the proper reaction to
an apocalypse? To repent, make your peace with your maker, and then lie down and wait until the death
ray reaches you. But that’s not what people are doing. They’re holing up, of course, but still acting as
though tomorrow exists, even if they’re not entirely convinced on that score. Even deep down it seems
like not many people quite believe that <abbr>COVID</abbr> is going to kill all humans like that meteor
in <em>Armageddon</em> almost did, or (apocalypse lite) send us back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Which
tells me we’ve got some other stories we’re trying to fit events into.</p>
<p>At least one of these has been noted widely, most perspicaciously by Charles Eisenstein:<sup id="fnref:ce" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:ce" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> we’re
treating this as a war. Of course there is very little similarity between fighting an army of humans and
stemming the spread of a virus, but waging wars against abstract concepts and other such non-warring
entities has been an American standby for quite a while now—the war on Communism, the war on drugs,
the war on crime, the war on terror—so it’s not much of a stretch for us. (The fact that we won
exactly zero of the wars I’ve just cited is not considered terribly relevant to those working with this
myth, because we’ve never lost a war against humans—in Vietnam we merely failed to win—so we’re
still undefeated and will surely remain so.)</p>
<p>Acting as though we’re at war, of course, does have its uses: some legal provisions meant for wartime
use are being dusted off to get factories to convert their production over from consumer crap to
newfound necessities. A factory in Michigan has stopped making cars and started making ventilators, for
example, although they did it not at the behest of the government but at the demand of the
workers.<sup id="fnref:npr" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:npr" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> The war analogy also leads to harm and nonsense, though, like the expanded powers police
have been given in some jurisdictions to arrest people for violating orders to stay at home and socially
distance<sup id="fnref:int" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:int" class="footnote" rel="footnote">5</a></sup>—which would be iffy even if we could trust the police with extra power, because
arresting someone involves getting rather socially proximate, but of course I and a lot of people with
skin darker than mine don’t have enough faith to issue every officer even an extra Roman candle. For
better or for worse, though, memories of Victory Gardens, ration stamps, and Rosie the Riveter are
starting to resurface, along with less helpful ones, like Agent Orange, fear of strangers (spies?
disease-carriers?), and internment facilities.</p>
<p>War and apocalypse make for an awkward mix of myths. It’s an unwise soldier indeed who levels an AR-15
at one of the Four Horsemen. But we have yet a third framework for making sense of 2020, less of a story
and more of an archetype, perhaps even a biological instinct: the distinction between the clean and the
impure. In the absence of the germ theory of disease, this subconscious binary has, for a couple hundred
thousand years or so, given humans a good way to keep from contracting any more communicable diseases
than they strictly have to: people in cultures around the world know that if you touch poop, or mud, you
have to clean your hand before you eat with it. There’s decent evidence that this is a heuristic we’re
born with. Imagine two little cups are given to you. One is filled with bright blue dish soap, and the
other is filled with dish soap that’s been dyed dingy brown instead. Are you equally willing to stick
your hand in both of these? Experimenters have found that people everywhere give the same answer you
just did.<sup id="fnref:unk" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:unk" class="footnote" rel="footnote">6</a></sup> On the darker side, though, the same binary has helped fuel thousands, perhaps dozens of
thousands, of years of superstition, intolerance, and fear of the Other.</p>
<p>So the situation today is that we have at least three different myths, or perhaps two myths and an
archetype, and we don’t know which is the proper one to frame our understanding with. The simple answer
is that none of them is. Though stories are useful and help us feel more oriented in the world—though,
in fact, we can’t make any sense of the world without them—we must remember that the world is yet
under no obligation to conform to them. If some event doesn’t fit into one of our stories, it’s not the
event that has to change, because in all likelihood we have no power to change it. Our story has to
change, or we have to build a new one. Luckily, since we’re humans and have language, we don’t have to
create new behaviors (new stories) the way other species do, by painstakingly evolving them over
generations. But even so, it takes time for a new story to set in, so it’s no wonder we’re all
defaulting right now to old ones. It’s only been well-known for about 150 years that microorganisms
cause diseases, and we don’t have much mythology ready for a situation like this yet. Perhaps some will
develop as we push through this. Equally, it’s no wonder that so many of us feel scared and confused,
since none of our stories are working quite right and information keeps coming in and we have nothing
coherent to do with it. That is, it’s probably not misinformation that’s the problem here, nor is it
overinformation or underinformation. It’s that we’re having a really hard time finding any way to
convert that information into knowledge, still less into wisdom of the sort we could use to act with
self-assurance while this virus takes its path through the eight billion or so of our species and a few
unlucky tigers here and there.</p>
<p>To that end, I want to propose something that might get us closer to a story we can actually use. Most
stories are contained within some other story, and one of the most overarching that currently holds the
world in thrall is this: that there is a linear direction to history. History begins in the caves and
has been proceeding for many thousands of years toward its eventual endpoint, whether that be in space
or in a nuclear fireball or in immortal robot bodies. The evidence presented by our culture seems to
make it obvious that there’s a linear trajectory being followed here. But then again… wouldn’t it
just? Since that history-is-a-line narrative forms one of the backbones of modern industrialized culture
(such as it is), you can’t expect to get much confirming evidence for other frameworks unless you look
at things a little askew or have learned other ways of looking at the world from some other culture that
knows the world differently.</p>
<p>By far the more satisfying narrative to me, then, is that history moves in cycles. And though this
pandemic may look like the Great Pandemic, the Globe-Cleanser, in fact it’s just one more pandemic.
We’ve enjoyed a pretty good hiatus from widespread disease thanks to some clever inventions and some
good luck, but sooner or later microbiology always figures out a new trick, and our bag of counterspells
is getting pretty light as more diseases become resistant to antibiotics. We’re getting off pretty easy,
all things considered. C<abbr>OVID</abbr> has no higher than maybe a 3.5% death rate (and probably
closer to 1%), much better than the Spanish flu, to say nothing of the Black Plague. It can be killed
with soapy water, and be thankful for that, because a wildlife biologist recently explained to me that
the prion that causes chronic wasting disease in deer can’t be destroyed by boiling, or even in an
autoclave, but must be burned, and has been found to persist in soil for at least 13 years (until that
particular experiment ended). Even bedbugs are harder to get rid of than <abbr>COVID</abbr>.</p>
<p>And if it seems a lot has changed already this time around history’s wheel, while the world shook off
the Spanish flu with comparative ease, here’s another story you can try out: the virus isn’t the
ultimate cause of all this disruption, only the proximate cause. The real reason the stock market has
gone into freefall isn’t that stores are closed for a little while, it’s that stocks were inflated to
irresponsibly, impossibly, unconscionably high levels through an unholy pantheon of financial gimmicking
and conjuring. It only took one nudge to set the whole thing tumbling. Or in a different metaphor,
Eisenstein wrote, “For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled
tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two.”<sup id="fnref:ce2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:ce2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">7</a></sup> In
1918 they still had a few years left of bubble-inflating to enjoy before the Great Crash. For us it’s
possible the epidemic arrived just in time to trigger our new Depression.</p>
<p>I’m not saying, here, that there’s no cause for vigilance in day-to-day life. There certainly is, and we
should all wash our hands and all the rest. I’m just saying that there’s cause for perspective.
C<abbr>OVID</abbr> is bad, possibly worse than any disease in the last century has been. But malaria is
bad too, and so is <abbr>AIDS</abbr>, and so is malnutrition. We’re used to living in a world where all
those exist. We’ll get used to living in a world with <abbr>COVID</abbr> too. Keep your distance from
people, so we can slow the initial spread as humanity’s collective immune system gets used to this
newcomer. But for goodness’ sake, don’t act as though <abbr>COVID</abbr> is going to attack you from
across a field, or show up in your dreams with a rusty blade like Freddy Krueger.</p>
<p>We eventually found a bit of land for Misty to camp on. Funnily enough, it’s at the house I just moved
out of. That’s where we found someone with perspective. Misty is keeping their distance from my recent
landlady, and so far enjoying life in a fancy canvas tent, though I imagine after two weeks it will have
gotten quite old. Misty will be fine, or might turn out to have the disease and (being 32) very likely
recover, and afterwards if all went well, we’ll move in together. A certain number of people will have
died from <abbr>COVID</abbr>, just as a certain number of people died from the common flu last year
(80,000 in the U.S.). And summer will arrive, as it always does, and I’ll explore the creek behind the
house with Misty, Katie, and Soren. And after this whole thing has done what it’s going to do, we’ll all
get a story out of it.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:pr" role="doc-endnote">
<p>And for those just joining my blog, if such there be, <em>they</em> refers to Misty alone,
gender-neutrally. <a href="#fnref:pr" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:vh" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Hilbert, Vi. 2000. <em>Kwiat Syaya Vol. 2: Journey on the River</em> (TW #4), track 4, “Boil and
Hammer”. Undisclosed location, Wash.: Ten Wolves (<a href="http://www.10wolves.com/">http://www.10wolves.com/</a>). <a href="#fnref:vh" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ce" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Eisenstein, Charles. <a href="charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/">“The Coronation”</a>. At Charles
Eisenstein (blog), Mar., 2020. <a href="#fnref:ce" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:npr" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Domonoske, Camila. <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/30/824079160/ford-to-build-50-000-ventilators-at-michigan-auto-parts-plant">“Ford To Build 50,000 Ventilators At Michigan Auto Parts
Plant”</a>.
NPR, Mar., 2020. <a href="#fnref:npr" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:int" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Speri, Alice. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/nypd-social-distancing-arrests-coronavirus/">“NYPD’s Aggressive Policing Risks Spreading The
Coronavirus”</a>, Apr.
3, 2020. <em>The Intercept.</em> <a href="#fnref:int" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:unk" role="doc-endnote">
<p>I can’t find the study just now, though. You’ll have to be satisfied with the thought experiment
until I can track it down. <a href="#fnref:unk" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ce2" role="doc-endnote">
<p><em>Op. cit.</em> <a href="#fnref:ce2" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}My partner Misty is moving up to the Chequamegon Bay. The news here isn’t that we’re getting back together—we never entirely broke up—but that Misty is moving house in the middle of a global pandemic.Rundown2020-03-19T00:00:00-05:002020-03-19T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown
<p>(Deep Island: Table of Contents)</p>
<p>Back in August, when I started recounting my summer here, I was playing a little trick on myself.
Since summer of 2017, I had been meaning to write something about the traditional Ojibwe fast that
I went on that May. But at the time, I found it just too big a project to tackle, and I punted it.
This past May, I went on another fast, and I knew that if I promised to tell about my entire
summer, I would eventually force myself to write about the summer’s fast, which in turn would make
me tell about my fast in 2017.</p>
<p>The reason this story is so long—indeed, the longest single thing I’ve ever written, not counting
my journals—is that I found that in order to tell about either fast, I had to first go back even
further and write what nearly amounts to a memoir. The reason I don’t write about religion very
often isn’t because I don’t have many thoughts about it, it’s that my thoughts about it are so far off
the beaten track and so hard to separate into individual self-contained ideas that I know if I’m going
to write anything at all I’ll need to write something vast, and I usually just defer the job until
later.</p>
<p>But now I have written about it, and a few words of orientation will probably be helpful. What I’ve
written is, really, one long post. But I know no one browser tab can survive long enough in the
harsh environment of the modern computer long enough for you to read an entire blog post that
amounts to 101 printed pages. So I’ve broken it up into 12 smaller posts:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/a-viewers-of-views">Part 1: Viewers of Views</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/b-you-cant-get-there-from-here">Part 2: You Can’t Get There from Here</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/c-indian-trails">Part 3: Indian Trails</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/d-spirit-peeks-in">Part 4: Spirit Peeks In</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/e-stranger-in-strange-enclave">Part 5: Stranger in a Strange Enclave</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/f-around-kettles">Part 6: Around the Kettles</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/g-introductions">Part 7: Introductions</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/h-shaken">Part 8: Shaken</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/i-lost-found">Part 9: Lost and Found</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/j-what-river-said">Part 10: What the River Said</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more">Part 11: Back for More</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/l-doing-work">Part 12: Doing the Work</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Part 11, “Back for More”, also functions as Part 3 of my “Summer 2019
Approximately-Reverse-Chronological Catchup” (<a href="/blog/2019/08/20/remedial-summer">Part 1: Remedial Summer</a>, <a href="/blog/2019/09/17/on-anarchists-trains-babies">Part 2: On
Anarchists, Trains, and Babies</a>). Some of Parts 5 and 6 may seem familiar if you read the
series of posts I wrote about my first sugarbush experience in 2017, “Anishinaabewaki Immigrant”
(<a href="/blog/2017/03/16/1-the-language">Part 1: The Language</a>, <a href="/blog/2017/03/16/2-the-sugar">Part 2: The Sugar</a>, <a href="/blog/2017/03/16/3-the-spirits">Part 3: The Spirits</a>).</p>
<p>I’ve also laid this out as a printable booklet, for anyone who would rather chew sand than read
a hundred pages’ worth of text on a computer screen: <a href="/assets/pdf/DeepIsland.pdf">“Deep Island” PDF.</a>
In fact I consider the booklet the primary version of this piece.</p>
<p>You may possibly be interested to know that I wrote most of this longhand first, then typed it with
a still unexcelled terminal-based program named Vim (written in 1991 on top of code from 1976), and
while I was in the thick of writing it my desk looked like this:</p>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/wintry-bits-1508
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/wintry-bits-1508" />
</a>
</figure>
<p>The chair has since fallen apart and been burned.</p>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Back in August, when I started recounting my summer here, I was playing a little trick on myself. Since summer of 2017, I had been meaning to write something about the traditional Ojibwe fast that I went on that May. But at the time, I found it just too big a project to tackle, and I punted it. This past May, I went on another fast, and I knew that if I promised to tell about my entire summer, I would eventually force myself to write about the summer’s fast, which in turn would make me tell about my fast in 2017.Doing the Work2020-03-19T00:00:00-05:002020-03-19T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/03/19/l-doing-work
<p>(Deep Island, pt. 12)</p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><strong>Deep Island:</strong></p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/a-viewers-of-views">1</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/b-you-cant-get-there-from-here">2</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/c-indian-trails">3</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/d-spirit-peeks-in">4</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/e-stranger-in-strange-enclave">5</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/f-around-kettles">6</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/g-introductions">7</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/h-shaken">8</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/i-lost-found">9</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/j-what-river-said">10</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more">11</a> •
<strong>12</strong></p>
<figure class="image-fig prefatory">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/wintry-bits-1521
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/wintry-bits-1521" />
</a>
</figure>
<p>Today is February ninth. On this morning bright with sunlight off the snow, I put on my boots and
coat and carried my wooden turtle out to the woods behind the house I live in now. I walked over the
narrow, handmade bridge over the creek, my feet elevated a foot and a half above the
deck on hard-packed old snow, and sat down on one of the stumps that serve for
steps on the far side. Sitting there and looking north, there’s nothing to see but woods. I set the
turtle down in the snow on the bridge, and took off its shell. Inside in a couple little compartments
were matches and a mussel shell with the four medicines—sage, sweetgrass, cedar, and tobacco.</p>
<p>I lit the medicines and wafted them to each of the four directions, and then sat down and meditated.
Since November I’ve been practicing something called “discursive meditation”. The familiar,
Buddhist-American style of meditation seeks to dissolve the mind’s attachment to its random stream of
thoughts by training the practitioner to stop focusing on all those thoughts—the “monkey mind” that
constantly jumps from one idea to another barely connected one—and instead empty the mind of contents.
Discursive meditation has a similar goal, but once you’ve wrested your attention away from all these
monkey-mind thoughts, instead of focusing on nothing at all, you focus on following one and only one
train of thought, constantly returning to it if you go astray. It’s a style of meditation that was much
in favor with monks and nuns in the Middle Ages, used for contemplation of the depths of truth to be
found in the Bible: choose one phrase—say, John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word…”—and follow
your thoughts about it wherever they can take you. It’s been out of fashion for some centuries, but
I discovered it by way of old-ideas enthusiast John Michael Greer.<sup id="fnref:dm" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:dm" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> He points out that it can be
used to great advantage with any spiritual system; he uses it himself as a pillar of his modern Druidic
practice (which is, in fact, a real thing, as are modern Heathenry, Wicca, and Hellenism).</p>
<p>Before I started, hints had been accumulating in my life for a while that I would probably get a lot out
of a meditation routine, but I’d been only half-inspired by Buddhist-style meditation. That, and I kept
remembering something Brandon told me he’d once been told by a Dakota eacher of his: “Don’t cross the
pipes.” That is, if you’re going to learn a spiritual tradition, learn <em>a</em> spiritual tradition, not two
or three at once. Spiritual practice is all depth. Depth is of course abhorrent to Americans, especially
in the age of Google and Wikipedia, but it’s the only way to learn any spiritual tradition. Because what
such a tradition amounts to, after all, is a way to understand things you will never fully understand.
Shallow dilettantism is not rewarded in that pursuit. That gets you things like a hippie-dippie
celebration I attended once, in a very white middle-class part of Minneapolis, that featured
a disgusting mixed salad of spiritualesque empty gestures. There was a singing bowl meditation led by
a Mexican guy who said, “I am… <em>from the Mayans</em>,” and then proceeded to use exclusively Sanskrit
jargon (<em>pranayama</em>, <em>kundalini</em>) to narrate his charade. They had “sound healing” with tuning forks
tuned to the orbits of the planets. Also a big circle where everyone was expected to go to the center
and say what makes them “enter their divine place”, while chanting women sang something irrelevant about
Mother Earth. Nothing real was learned by anyone that night, except that I learned very vividly what you
get when you cross the pipes and think grabbing the grooviest bits of eight different traditions
constitutes a useful system of practice.</p>
<p>In this regard it was interesting to me that, although no one had described a specifially Ojibwe
style of meditation to me, discursive meditation sounded somewhat like how Pebaamibines had
described his morning routine, and even more like how Richard Wagamese described his in <em>Embers: One
Ojibway’s Meditations</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the tea is ready, I cradle the cup in my palms and inhale the scent of lavender. I place the cup
on the living room table. Then I rise to retrieve the bundle that holds the sacred articles of my
ceremonial life. I open it and remove my smudging bowl, my eagle wing fan, my rattle and the four
sacred medicines of my people—sage, sweet grass, tobacco and cedar. I put small pinches of each
together in the smudging bowl, which I set upon the table. I close my eyes and breathe for a few
moments. Then I light the medicines, using a wooden match, and waft the smoke around and over my head
and heart and body with the eagle wing fan. When I am finished, I set the fan on the table, too.</p>
<p>There are certain spiritually oriented books I read from each morning. I lift the books from the
couch beside me and read from them in turn. Then I place the books on the table as well. I close
my eyes and consider what the readings have to tell me that day. When I’m ready, I settle deeper
into the burgeoning pool of quietude, and when I feel calm and centred and at peace, I say
a prayer of gratitude for all the blessings that are present in my life….<sup id="fnref:wag" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:wag" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Since I started meditating, I’ve been working my way through some of the lessons of the Medicine Wheel.
It’s a simple shape: a circle divided into four quarters of four different colors, usually yellow,
black, red, and white. But Pebaamibines once condensed an entire dissertation on Ojibwe thought into
a somewhat elaborated version of it. Much of Ojibwe spiritual tradition can be keyed to the Medicine
Wheel in one way or another. I’ve gone around it twice now, dedicating a few days’ meditations to each
direction in turn, but today was the first day I meditated outside. I had reached the North, which is
naturally also the quarter of Winter, and I had been planning since I started in the East this time to
supplement my four days of indoor discursion on the North with some days actually sitting outside <em>in</em>
the Winter.</p>
<p>I relaxed my body; I took a few minutes to steady my breathing. And then I considered where I was.
Perhaps unwisely, I didn’t bring a specific phrase or image to this meditation; I’ve been finding that
I can derive interesting lessons from meditation on even fairly vague themes, though I’m interested to
use more specific ones in the future. Instead I looked out at the forest. The sun off the snow was
blinding; I couldn’t even keep my eyes open. I thought about the Northern Lights, <em>Manidoog
Niimi’idiwag</em>—the Dance of the Spirits—up in the sky. I thought about the little animals living
burrowed under the snow all around me. I thought about the fires we keep burning through the winter in
our houses, and the fires we keep going in our souls—coals glowing singly or together, spirits abiding
in themselves and in contemplation through the season. My mind started out very much the monkey mind,
from one vaguely wintry thought to another. But as I kept thinking, it relaxed into a calm focus,
a state I’ve been able to reach only occasionally, but more and more often as I practice. And a little
after it got there, my thoughts stopped forming themselves exclusively in words, and began taking shape
into images. Like Jung’s symbols, those images suggested more than my mind could pin down in rational
explications. Foremost of the images was one of a forest of great, snow-white conduits stretching from
the ground to the sky—linking, it seemed, our spirits with the Earth’s spirits with the universe’s
spirits. Not just an image, rather, but a sort of resonance, as if I had started vibrating at the same
frequency as the forest, and that was making strange things happen. The air of the forest took on
greater substance and color, and permeated through my mind and body. The borderline between me and the
rest of the world became hazy. I was the world experiencing itself. Around me were other points of the
world’s awareness, aware of me—as I, at last, was of them. The North ceased to feel like it was way
off at the pole, a direction to be looked toward, and instead was right on top of me and around me, and
part of me, alive with energy and meaning. I held on to the feeling for several minutes, and finally it
faded and I opened my eyes and looked out into the day. It was the same day as when I sat down, but more
so. It seemed from every angle fuller, more vivid.</p>
<p>When I fasted this May I hadn’t yet learned to meditate this way. I barely meditated at all, even in the
Buddhist way, for the whole three rainy days; somehow I couldn’t get myself started. Instead
I contemplated everything on the island rationally: the water beetles in the puddle, the windthrown tree
roots. All evidence of evolution at its interesting work: pretty perhaps, but without any resonance in
the question of the meaning of the world and the spiritual communion of all things, if those were even
concepts that had meaning. Now, though, I’m finding that this year’s fast had another lesson to teach
me: you get out what you put in. Waiting for spirits to strike your eyes open and give you
a phantasmagorical vision with no effort on your part is unlikely to be rewarded. Communication with the
spirits of the world is a two-way street, and requires exertion, contemplation, openness. Without all
that, three days in the rain is three days in the rain.</p>
<p>The person I was ten years ago would be stunned to find out that I now believe it’s quite possible that
I’ve communicated with spirits. Voices haven’t spoken to me inside my mind, telling me, “I am Jesus,”
or, “I am Wenaboozhoo.” I haven’t had an all-enveloping psychedelic trip. Anything that has passed
between me and them has been subtle, along the lines of what I experienced in today’s meditation.</p>
<p>I certainly don’t believe I understand what the spirits <em>are</em>. In fact I no longer believe anyone can
answer that question; by all accounts it’s unanswerable. I think Basil Johnston gets it right when he
says that the correct translation of <em>manidoo</em> isn’t ‘spirit’ but ‘mystery’.<sup id="fnref:bj" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:bj" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup> But I do think I can
explain some of what the spirits <em>do</em>. When I look at the world with the assumption that it’s full of
spirit, the forest in an intangible way fills out; the sky gains color without changing its color.
A song somewhere turns from a precisely but meaninglessly arrayed series of notes into a jam that lifts
me up off my feet to dance. I lose the feeling that I’m hunkered in a concrete room somewhere, watching
a screen that displays the camera signal of a robot in the shape of my body, twiddling joysticks to move
it through the world, and I emerge into an outdoors where I’m connected to everything on all sides of
me. The birds aren’t just chirping, they’re speaking, and I can learn from them if I pay attention; the
trees aren’t just green, they’re green in a way that means something to me. I’m not alone. What a lonely
cosmos where the only intelligences are human. Though the road to understanding the <em>manidoog</em>, the
mysteries, may be endless, the further down it I go, the more I feel like I’ve returned home, like
I belong here on Earth with the rest of the life around me, from prokaryotes to
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)">Pando</a>, and all the spirits they entail.</p>
<p>Does this mean that the religion I practice is now the obscure, animistic spirituality of a people
I have no familial relation to, who I’ve known for only a few years? Yes and no, I suppose. It’s more
true than saying I practice any other religion, at least. I’m trying to follow this path ‘in a good
way’: <em>weweni</em>, a word I hear like a refrain during Ojibwe prayers.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, I will never be completely Ojibwe: even if I married an Ojibwe woman tomorrow and
lived on the rez for the rest of my life, I would still have grown up in a foreign culture and been
molded in inescapable ways by my summers in West Virginia and my Thanksgivings in Ohio in my own
lifetime and the time I spent catching frogs in Warder Park. Ojibwe history is something I can learn
about and from which I can take lessons small and great. But it isn’t a heritage for me in the same way
it is for someone whose mother grew up in tribal housing, whose grandmother
grew up grew up in a tarpaper shack in the woods, whose great-grandmother grew
up making the family’s living by spearfishing and
harvesting wild rice, whose generations further back sold beaver pelts to <em>voyageurs</em> and paddled
birchbark canoes across entire Great Lakes and sat at the feet of elders every night of the winter to
listen to stories of Wenaboozhoo and Nookomis and <em>wiindigoog</em> and <em>memegwesiwag</em>. Ceremonies that will
wake something up in people with that family history might well stir something in me too, but it will
usually be a different something. I can close some of that gap by listening to stories, learning the
language, and spending time with the land and its spirits. But no matter how much effort I put into that
pursuit, there will always be a gap.</p>
<p>Some of this is true even of some people who are Ojibwe by birth, like the U of M student whose fast
last year was her first exposure to her birth parents’ culture. A person’s relation to the spirit world
is unique and built on their entire lifetime of experiences. No two Ojibwe traditionalists practice
exactly alike, and that diversity is reckoned a strength by people I’ve heard talk about it. In that
way, I don’t think my relation to the spirit world is condemned to always be partial if I relate to it
through an Ojibwe perspective. Rather it will be some sort of hybrid, formed of bits of my Ohio past,
bits of my own self-created rebellion against that, and helpings of the stories I’ve picked up since
moving to the part of the world where I feel at home.</p>
<p>Stranger things have happened. Before monotheism became so dominant as to be nearly the only game in the
Western world, the question “What’s your religion?” would have been unimportant and possibly halfway
incomprehensible. Not that religion wasn’t considered important, but distinctions between them weren’t
drawn nearly so starkly. Greer notes, “A Greek traveler who went to Phoenicia on business, say, would
likely participate in the worship of Melkarth and Astarte while there, and then sail back home and
sacrifice a bullock to Poseidon in gratitude for calm seas and favorable winds, without anybody, human
or divine, taking offense.”<sup id="fnref:cg3" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:cg3" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup> Not only that, but the distinction between one’s religion and one’s
culture has likewise mostly been fuzzy or absent, even in monotheist cultures, until recently; it
wasn’t so long ago that what we call a “first name” was habitually called a “Christian name”. And it’s
always been a part of the immigrant experience to pick up some of the new culture while retaining some
of the old. My ancestors were immigrants to Turtle Island (as North America was known before Amerigo
Vespucci’s name got attached to it), and I continue to be an immigrant even hundreds of years later,
since the culture built by the intervening generations of my ancestry has never grown up and rooted into
the land. I’m doubly an immigrant, having left Ohio and come to an unfamiliar land to try to grow into
it. I can use all the help I can get. Given a name, I’m now visible to the spirits here.</p>
<p>The Anishinaabeg have a prophecy of the Eighth Fire. The first seven
fires were lit as the people followed a <em>miigis</em> shell that appeared in
the sky, from one point to another along a centuries-long migration from
the shores of the North Atlantic. We live now in the time of the Seventh
Fire, a time marked by chaos and forgetting. As a people new to this
land finds its confused way into a relationship with it, it leaves a
trail of wreckage in its bootprints. Now we’re being asked to choose
which path we’ll walk into the future. Down the wrong path lies
destruction, death, and suffering. But if we walk the right one, the
Eighth and final Fire will be lit, and the people from all the quarters
of the Medicine Wheel—all the corners of the world—will come
together and become a New People, the <em>Oshkibimaadiziig</em>, who will live
in peace.[^1] There is no putting Pandora’s demons back in her box; the
new people are here on Turtle Island and even if they could be sent back
it wouldn’t undo the harm they’ve done. But being one of them, I can
choose to walk the right path. If I’m to have any part in the beginning
of the <em>Oshkibimaadiziig</em>, it seems to me I can’t stay holed up in the
white quarter of the circle. I have to learn something about where I am,
the people I’m here with. I have to learn how to be here in a good way.</p>
<p>I’ve started walking creeks again. Last week I traced the one behind the house upstream until it ran
under a hundred-year-old logging railroad grade. Along the way I felt the world expand around me,
starting from my small mind until it encompassed everything I could see and hear, and much that
I couldn’t: the crows calling overhead, the wolves who left tracks there weeks ago, the young aspens at
the edge of a field, the big warts of mushroom on a birch, the long-forgotten train engineer who helped
loggers cut down this forest a century ago. I’ve always known there was magic out there along the creeks
and around the forests. I had to take a long, twisting route to convince myself it was alright to
believe it. But look where it’s brought me. Home, always home.</p>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/wintry-bits-1528
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/wintry-bits-1528" />
</a>
</figure>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a></li>
<li><em>Back to</em> <strong><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more">Deep Island, pt. 11: Back for More</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:dm" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Greer, John Michael. “Discursive Meditation” (5-part series). <em>Toward Ecosophy</em> (blog).
<a href="https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/65232.html">https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/65232.html</a> (pt. 1), <a href="https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/66287.html">https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/66287.html</a>
(pt. 2), <a href="https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/67579.html">https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/67579.html</a> (pt. 3),
<a href="https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/68294.html">https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/68294.html</a> (pt. 4), <a href="https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/69547.html">https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/69547.html</a>
(pt. 5). <a href="#fnref:dm" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:wag" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Wagamese, Richard. <em>Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations</em>, p. 11. Madeira Park, B.C.: Douglas
and McIntyre, 2016. <a href="#fnref:wag" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:bj" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Johnston, Basil. <em>Ojibway Ceremonies</em>, p. 30<em>n</em>. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press,
1982. <a href="#fnref:bj" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:cg3" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Greer, “Changing” <em>op. cit.</em> See also Deloria <em>op. cit.</em>, p. xxiii. <a href="#fnref:cg3" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Today is February ninth. On this morning bright with sunlight off the snow, I put on my boots and coat and carried my wooden turtle out to the woods behind the house I live in now. I walked over the narrow, handmade bridge over the creek, my feet elevated a foot and a half above the deck on hard-packed old snow, and sat down on one of the stumps that serve for steps on the far side.Back for More2020-03-19T00:00:00-05:002020-03-19T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more
<p>(Deep Island, pt. 11<br />
<em>and</em><br />
Summer 2019 Approximately-Reverse-Chronological Catch-up, Part 3: Late May
)</p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><strong>Deep Island:</strong></p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/a-viewers-of-views">1</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/b-you-cant-get-there-from-here">2</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/c-indian-trails">3</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/d-spirit-peeks-in">4</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/e-stranger-in-strange-enclave">5</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/f-around-kettles">6</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/g-introductions">7</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/h-shaken">8</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/i-lost-found">9</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/j-what-river-said">10</a> •
<strong>11</strong> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/l-doing-work">12</a></p>
<p class="force-drop">Anything that might be called “spiritual development” in my life proceeds slowly and haltingly. In the
year after I spent those couple days under the pines with my name in May of 2018, I had moments that
approached transcendence, like some of the days I spent bicycling around Lake Superior. I also had long
periods of just muddling through, like the month I spent in a limbo between places to live, humping my
big hiking backpack around Minneapolis to crash on friends’ couches and under bridges, frankly baffled
as to the point of being alive. I kept up at least the outward manifestations of the responsibility I’d
accepted when I asked for a name. I offered tobacco by a tree or in the water every day. Later in the
year I made a hand drum for myself, fulfilling another obligation that I’d been given with my name there
in the teaching lodge, the making of my <em>izhiwan</em> or namesake-item. And I brought the drum to the forest
with me when I feasted my name again that spring, so I could break it in and “spiritualize it”
(<em>aadizookaazh</em>). But not much of it felt like it meant anything. When May rolled around, I knew it was
time to go back out on an island and attempt to reacquaint myself with the mysteries of the world.</p>
<p>It so happened that Misty also felt called to fast again, so together, fighting various schedule
crunches, we set out from Minneapolis one evening and drove all the way to Nigigoonsiminikaaning in
one night. The border guards in International Falls, I discovered, are less chummy in the small hard
hours of the night when the Rainy River recedes into the darkness and the world is reduced to the
sterile geometry of the floodlit customs post. On behalf of the Queen, they
confiscated a Roman candle Misty had forgotten in the trunk. Piloting the little Honda Civic down the
five rutted miles of gravel to the cabin like a small craft on Superior in a November gale, I had
a troubling sense that all the things I’d been hoping to leave behind were riding right there in the
back seat. When we made it to the end of the road, silvery hints of dawn were beginning to burnish the
edge of the night, and all we could do was stumble into the bunkhouse and fall asleep.</p>
<p>The sun rose over the lake while we slept, marking the beginning of both of our fasts, and when we
finally managed to wake up, the sunlight pierced into my half-baked mind and threw into sharp relief
all the spider webs hanging off my soul. Besides us, the only other person in camp was Pebaam’s wife
Laura, who greeted us with a smile I wished I could reciprocate. We’d called ahead, so she knew we
wanted to go out that morning, and together we slung a canoe over the back of Pebaam’s motorboat so we’d
be able to come back on our own steam, howbeit reduced by four days of fasting. She brought Misty to one
of a cluster of islands around the corner from the cabin, and left me with the canoe at another island
nearby.</p>
<p>I climbed onto my island feeling at best half alive. It was a cool, sunny day, and I fell asleep
almost immediately on the rocks, still in tatters from the night of driving. I didn’t make it far
from sleep all day. The sunset brought a rainbowy ring around the place where the sun had sunk below
the horizon, and then an orange-red that flooded half the sky. It was the last sunlight I would see
for days.</p>
<p>I emerged from my tent the second day into a world shushed, stilled, and chilled by drizzle. My spirits
dimmed to match the weather. This time around I had no big colorful ceremony halfway through the fast to
look forward to, just three more days of this island—on which I couldn’t go exploring off the little
patch of rocky shore without getting soggy from the spongy dirt underfoot and the water collected on the
million little twigs I would have to bushwhack through. I
spotted a little gaggle of mergansers next to a nearby island, and attempted to derive meaning from
watching them swim around, one of them occasionally diving or flying away. I also stared at the rocks.
I found an interesting downed tree, all its roots spread through a thin mat of dirt that had been
clinging to the granite until the tree blew over and took the soil with it,
leaving bare rock and a standing disc of tangled roots taller than me. To keep
warm I walked in circles, or I huddled in my sleeping bag, staring out sideways
at the next island over, occasionally able to catch glimpses of the mergansers.</p>
<p>By the third day, I was having trouble seeing the point. I was wet. I was cold. I was hungry. The
flat gray of the sky was disarranging my mind. I woke up that day and walked in circles on the
granite shore for hours, willing the morning to pass away. When I couldn’t do one more orbit,
I figured it must be around noon or one—lunchtime, I couldn’t help thinking—and pulled out my
watch for the first time that day to check. It was 8:40 in the morning.</p>
<p>An ineluctable stream of secondhand words flowed through my head all day. A song lyric would grab
hold of me for half an hour, refusing to leave even after I sang it aloud. Then just as
mysteriously as it arrived it would fade and be replaced by a clever passage from a book I’d read
five years ago. I would find, to my surprise, that I could reconstruct whole paragraphs from memory.
I had enough experience with meditation to know that ceding my attention to these used-up words was
no way to reach a greater awareness of any aspect of the world, be it physical, mental, spiritual,
excretory. I dismissed them. Within minutes they were back, crowding in through the alley door in
greater numbers than before.</p>
<p>The <em>manidoog</em> were out there, ostensibly. They were all over my island. But I sure couldn’t see
them. In a pool in a depression on one of the granite stones I’d been orbiting, tiny water beetles
swam back and forth in the algae that had grown to fit the shape of the bowl. They were very neat,
perfectly inscrutable in their tiny lives made of tiny decisions. The Ojibwe word for insect is
<em>manidoons</em>, ‘little spirit’. But they seemed more like little automata to me, more reminiscent of
<a href="https://playgameoflife.com/">Conway’s Game of Life</a> than of any cosmic truths or mysteries whose
contemplation would open the world out into something strange and wonderful. Over on the other island,
the mergansers paddled and dove and issued quacks too quiet to reach me. And I walked around in circles,
waiting for the slow darkening of the sky that would be, absent the sun, my first signal that night was
coming. Not that I would be able to sleep. I had never slept so much in my life as those first couple
nights, and I’d napped through the days, waking up from each nap both pleased and dismayed to find the
day a little closer to ending. I had dreams of shocking triviality: going to the mall, reading
Wikipedia. Now I was slept out; my eyes wouldn’t stay closed, and I’d find myself right back where I’d
always been, looking out at the mergansers’ island.</p>
<p>In what I presumed was the afternoon, as I was walking in circles again, I heard my name. It wasn’t
a spirit, at least not an incorporeal one. It was Misty shouting from their island. “I want to go
back,” they said.</p>
<p>I tried, unsuccessfully, not to admit to myself that I was filled with glee at having a change of
pace and something actually happening. I untied the canoe and paddled over to Misty’s island, where
they explained they’d fouled up their back somehow on the first night and could now only assume
a small range of positions, all of them seated, without excruciating pain. They had gotten no sleep the
previous night. Unworried that I hadn’t eaten for about thirty hours, I helped them pile their stuff in
and paddled us back. I’ve never been more thankful for small talk.</p>
<p>A few other people had shown up at camp—Pebaam had passed us with some of them in his boat on our
way in—and there was a fire going inside the cabin. Misty broke their fast and figured out
a bizarre, contorted sleeping position on the recliner. I stayed inside awhile, enjoying light,
dryness, warmth, friendship. But I set up my tent on the lawn and stuck out my fast until the fourth
morning.</p>
<p>Pebaam and Misty helped be break my water fast. Food came a short time later when Tammy, who was
there to support her daughter during her fast (which would start the next day), cooked up some
strikingly orange seagull eggs that Pebaam had harvested from a little island the night before.</p>
<p>As soon as I’d eaten I was given a job, and found myself helping prepare things for a sweat lodge:
kindling, firewood, grandfathers, repairs on the lodge frame, tarps and blankets to cover it, cedar
boughs to carpet the floor. I surrendered into the bustle of activity, and felt happier than I had in
days, maybe months. I was a part of something again; I was here for a reason, getting the lodge set up
and learning from Pebaam’s goofy nuggets of wisdom. Pebaam busied himself frying fish, the final big
meal for a whole clutch of people who were going to sweat tonight and then start fasting tomorrow
morning.</p>
<p>Stuffed with fried walleye, we stuffed ourselves into the sweat lodge. I had never been to one of
Pebaam’s sweats before. He gave the first door over to songs for the spirits. The other three doors
he split equally among the nine of us: each of us could say anything we felt called to say. In
situations like this I’m apt to feel anxious, the out-of-place Ohio boy in a sweat lodge far from
home among people who, it seems, must have heard enough speeches from white people to last their
whole lives. But when the drum and stick came around to me at the end of the second door, a gush of
words poured out of my mouth, with little more self-consciousness or filtration than there was on
the sweat pouring off my forehead: my journey in capsule form, my hope for the future, my joy at
being in that lodge with everyone, my gratitude. When Pebaam runs ceremonies at sugarbush, sometimes
when he smokes the pipe and starts his invocation of the spirits, he speaks for a solid five minutes
or more straight through in Ojibwemowin, naming and thanking entities east, south, west, and north, and
when he finishes and switches back to English for the benefit of the crowd, the first thing he says is,
“I did not know I was going to say all that!” It’s the pipe talking, he explains—its spirit and the
spirits it channels. I think, talking in the lodge, I felt for the first time something like that state.
I even quoted his little epilogue when I was done. And I sang a song I’d
learned at sugarbush that spring. By the end of it I was flowing everywhere
with sweat and shuddering.</p>
<p>I was like that through the remaining two doors. When the <em>oshkaabewis</em> threw open the door at the
end, I crawled out feeling open, everywhere open, in every pore open to the bright
Nigigoonsiminikaaning evening. During my fast I’d entertained the idea that I was having the most
mindnumbing time of my life in preparation for some climactic reversal in which everything would become
clear. It seemed, strangely, to have come true: I had known the depths of boredom and the purest feeling
of pointlessness, and now all I had was pure joy. In the evening the camp bustled with fasters getting
ready to go out, and then going—some for the first time, full of excitement. (And bustled again, more
modestly, when one of them called camp on her cell phone to say she’d found bear poop and didn’t want
to be on a peninsula after all but a real island.) Misty’s back had clicked back into shape overnight,
and we spent the night in the tent talking about our lives, how far we’d both come since we met each
other, the sweat, how tremendous it was to be here, the lessons to be learned from a lifetime as
a human. Life was so full, so ripe with potential and experiences. A few claps of thunder sounded in the
far distance.</p>
<p>I stayed at camp for the next week to help out and get to know the place better. Misty had to leave
after a couple days, but before they did, we shoveled sand into low spots together and cut cedar boughs
for a sweat. After Misty left, Brandon and Liz showed up, and I worked with Brandon to fix the tilty
dock and dig a new hole for the outhouse. (To move it we screwed long two-by-fours to the walls and
assembled a crew of four to carry it to the new hole like a big gross bier.) I even served <em>oshkaabewis</em>
duty for a couple sweats, one by Pebaam and one by his brother Don.</p>
<figure class="image-fig right">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/tag-end-2532
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/tag-end-2532" />
</a>
</figure>
<figure class="image-fig right">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/tag-end-2537
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/tag-end-2537" />
</a>
</figure>
<p>Fasters came and went. A number of them were students from the University of Minnesota’s American
Indian Student Cultural Center, most of them on their first fast, looking as innocent and eager as
puppies. There was also Joseph from Bad River, who was only 24 but already learning to hold
ceremonies, and planning to start an immersion school back home. Later on two teenage girls from Lac
Courte Oreilles showed up, students at the Waadookodaading immersion school. Not only were they fluent
in Ojibwe, they were also quick-witted and already more skilled at questioning approved stories out of
textbooks than I was at age twenty. Everyone pitched in to make the camp run. And Pebaam took us all to
see local sights. On one powerhouse day I rode with him and three of the U of M students to see the
Nigigoonsiminikaaning powwow grounds, then cross the water border into Minnesota and see Ober’s Island,
where beloved local conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer (1884–1977) had built a fantasy world of cedar
houses crazy-quilted onto a tiny, remote island and stuffed with eleven thousand books; then we puzzled
at the red-ochre paintings left by unknown ancestors on granite lake cliffs hundreds of years ago; and
we came back by way of an island where we raided seagull nests for late-season eggs: big, gray speckled
with black, with thick shells built for the wild.</p>
<p>And of course we circled up on the porch to share our experiences of our fasts. Gabby, one of the
U of M students, went out merely open to the idea of getting a name from the experience, as she’d heard
happens sometimes, and was surprised when one actually presented itself. Then Joseph mentioned that
names kept coming to him while he was fasting, and he’d eventually realized he was being given the right
to name people. When Pebaam confirmed this interpretation, he gave Gabby another name that had been
coming to him for her. But it wasn’t all names and revelations. One guy went out looking for
clarification about the mountain lion, which he’d been told was his spirit helper, but came back with
a different clarity instead, one he couldn’t or didn’t put into words. Another girl said her takeaway
was mostly a kick-start to learning about her ancestral culture, which had been absent in her childhood.
When I talked about my less-than-revelatory time in the rain, a few people combined ideas to say that
not every fast gives you a big vision (“or as the cool kids call it, ‘vizh’,” Pebaam says)—Liz said
it can be like a tree you look back at years later to find it’s a lot bigger than you remembered, even
if you couldn’t see it growing day by day.</p>
<p>Working with the people at camp, jumping into the lake with the rest of the outhouse team once we
got it repositioned, eating dinners and talking the evenings away out on the porch next to the mouth
of the Ottertail, I felt that community spirit, that feeling I’ve goten at sugarbush and fasting
camp and maybe nowhere else. Whatever spirits may or may not have visited me on my fast, the spirit
of community was certainly thriving and feeding all of us there. It’s a spirit that’s no less
important or real just because it’s makes itself clearly known. It’s the spirit that allows
knowledge of all the other spirits to be passed on. While I was there in that pop-up community
pitched on ancient foundations, I felt at my most alive, and though I don’t know what the people
I met there are like outside camp, I believe I could tell most of them did too.</p>
<p>It was hard to leave. In fact I was the last to leave; after everyone else went home, I sat Pebaam and
Laura’s dog Ziinzibaakwad (‘Sugar’) for a couple days before catching a ride to Fort Frances with Pebaam
and hitching along on my way. When he dropped me off, I told him I planned to be back.</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a></li>
<li><em>Back to</em> <a href="/blog/2020/03/19/j-what-river-said">Deep Island, pt. 10: What the River Said</a></li>
<li><em>On to</em> <strong><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/l-doing-work">Deep Island, pt. 12: Doing the Work</a></strong></li>
</ul>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}Anything that might be called “spiritual development” in my life proceeds slowly and haltingly. In the year after I spent those couple days under the pines with my name in May of 2018, I had moments that approached transcendence, like some of the days I spent bicycling around Lake Superior. I also had long periods of just muddling through, like the month I spent in a limbo between places to live, humping my big hiking backpack around Minneapolis to crash on friends’ couches and under bridges, frankly baffled as to the point of being alive.What the River Said2020-03-19T00:00:00-05:002020-03-19T00:00:00-05:00http://www.chuckmasterson.com/blog/2020/03/19/j-what-river-said
<p>(Deep Island, pt. 10)</p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><strong>Deep Island:</strong></p>
<p class="text-center prefatory"><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/a-viewers-of-views">1</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/b-you-cant-get-there-from-here">2</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/c-indian-trails">3</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/d-spirit-peeks-in">4</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/e-stranger-in-strange-enclave">5</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/f-around-kettles">6</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/g-introductions">7</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/h-shaken">8</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/i-lost-found">9</a> •
<strong>10</strong> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more">11</a> •
<a href="/blog/2020/03/19/l-doing-work">12</a></p>
<figure class="image-fig prefatory">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/arc-ohio-minnbike-1836
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/arc-ohio-minnbike-1836" />
</a>
</figure>
<p>If I hadn’t been looking for the sign, I probably would’ve gone right past it—a little brown one by
the side of the trail that said <span class="smallcaps">walk in campsite</span>. I slowed to a stop and
took my bike by the handlebars down off the pavement and into woods that fairly sighed with spring.</p>
<p>It was May of 2018 now. As it turned out, in the year since I’d been given my name, I hadn’t experienced
a sudden upwelling of purposefulness and clarity about life. In fact I’d rather spent it
directionlessly: hitchhiking and trainhopping with Misty from one off-grid community to another, mostly
out West where the skies are big and the air is thick with dreams attempting to manifest. I was trying
to convince myself that I was learning how to live in the country after a lifetime of living in cities,
but a few months into the trip it became very clear that although I imagined I was moving to the country
to be close to the land and thus solve all my problems of feeling estranged from the Earth, the real
estrangement wasn’t geographical but mental, even—dare we say it—spiritual. I was very capable, it
turned out, of going to a permaculture farm whose mission I believed in deeply, and nonetheless whiling
away a whole month reading books, waiting for an enlightened feeling to arrive. It was due any minute.
I had read of people and met people who were very at one with nature, felt at home in the woods. That
was what I wanted. And I knew that in order to feel that way I had to learn, learn, learn about those
woods, spend time there, learn to perceive what’s not obvious, until I could go out and see the stories
all around without relying on a woods-wise friend to tell it all for me. But the problem was, I wasn’t
good at that <em>now</em>. And when I went outside and wasn’t good at understanding everything, that was
a bummer. I had been a kid who tested well and didn’t need to study for exams. I should have grown up to
be someone who walks into a forest in an unfamiliar biome and points to a tree and says, “Ah, yes, the
little nutlike fruits on this tree can be boiled and mashed to a pulp to be used as a wonderful addition
to the squirrel I plan to snare for tonight’s dinner.” But the natural world was reluctant to give me
its secrets as readily as an SAT “critical reading” multiple-choice question. I wasn’t good at the
natural world. Know what I <em>was</em> good at? Reading books, learning from <em>them</em>. And so I kept finding
myself, on summer days, in the shade of a beautiful forest, reading ink-stained bits of dead trees while
living ones rose up sheltering and mythical around me.</p>
<p>I could see the problem; I had barely begun to glimpse any solution. And so I rode my bike: after I went
back for a second spring at Porky’s—hoping perhaps that my spirit guide would explain my life’s
purpose to me during one of Pebaam’s ceremonies—and after the May sun finally melted all the snow,
I pedaled out alone to spend some time outside. If I didn’t know quite how to approach learning about
life in tune with the natural world, it at least couldn’t hurt to just get out there awhile and breathe
fresh air. Whatever I did under the trees, at least I’d be under them. When your way forward isn’t clear
to you, there’s something to be said for the old strategy of “fake it till you make it.” A person who
gave me a hitchhiking ride years ago told me, “Take the first step, and the second one will be
revealed.”</p>
<p>When I came to the end of the quarter-mile trail to the walk-in campsite, I started to believe that
I had been shown the second step. I found a single picnic table in a little clearing lain with soft
white-pine needles, which gathered the sun and transmuted it into a lazy-warm gold glow, an alchemical
process that quite evidently imbued the light with a life all its own. The clearing sat on a little
river. The river flowed by at just the right speed, not too fast, not too slow, and redwing blackbirds
tossed out their reedy calls cavalierly from the other bank as they bombed through the air from one
dried cattail stalk to another, picking spots at random to perform their strange sideways landings. As
I came in, two herons flew upstream. The pines that embraced the campsite also leaned out over the
river. They were celebrating the arrival of spring by dropping a magnanimity of rich golden-yellow
pollen, which streaked the top of the water and made it seem to glow from within.</p>
<p>My name came with a few stipulations I didn’t mention yet. One of them, common to all Ojibwe names as
far as I know, was that once a year I would need to feast it, as it’s called: a quiet, contemplative
little ceremony I could do anywhere I could find some woods. Another, explained to me by
PaShawOneeBinace in his teaching lodge—where the pine-needle floor, come to think of it, looked a lot
like what was under my bare feet here—was that I should display a star somewhere on me. The how and
where were up to me, but that Morning Star should be there to see. I was coming right up to the first
anniversary of being named, and I had yet to do either, but I’d biked 170 miles now hoping a place would
present itself where I could sit quietly and listen to the world, or the spirits, and figure out how to
give my name that respect. Under one of the pines I found a little feather from Migizi, a bald eagle,
the one who flies highest and intercedes with the Great Spirit on humanity’s behalf. As I poked around,
more feathers kept turning up until I had five on the picnic table. If everything else around me had yet
failed to make my mind up, that good omen certainly would have been enough. I set up my tent and
prepared to stay awhile.</p>
<p>I found the water was not just the right speed, but the right temperature as well, even though there had
probably been snow on the ground here until a few weeks ago, and I could walk from one side of the river
to the other without ever stepping into unnerving muck or going more than chest-deep. I also found that
it begged for me to drink it, not filtered but straight, with all the pollen granules and subtle scent
of algae that marked it as living water. My awareness that giardia and cryptosporidium could lurk
upstream was overruled by some faculty in my body that could clearly sense the health of the water and
assured me I had nothing to worry about. I filled my bottle and took the land into myself.</p>
<p>I took a couple days to settle in before doing anything too big. I got acquainted with the town of Pine
River a couple miles up the road, sharing a name with the river: a homey little place where Jim at the
Chamber of Commerce (a big log cabin by the trail) showed me some of the historical items scattered
around the building, like the town’s first telephone, and explained that tourist money does help, but
a lot of the people of Pine River are farmers and ranchers. At the campsite, I watched a muskrat swim by
the landing, and noticed the amazing whizzing sound geese’s winds make, and I wrote a haiku:</p>
<p class="text-center">the moon got caught in<br />
the powdery pine branches<br />
over the river</p>
<p>When I decided, after two days there, that it was time to feast my name, I couldn’t say I was doing it
as someone who knows the spirits, communes with them every day, has a close relationship with the spirit
helper invoked by his name. I was little closer than I had been a year before to working out in what
capacity I even think spirits exist. But on the other hand, I hadn’t been completely idle in the
previous year. I had searched with slight but nonnegligible success for Ojibwe stories that mention the
Morning Star; I’d talked about it with Pebaamibines at sugarbush; I’d looked into the tradition of star
quilts, which are sometimes said to represent Waabanang specifically of all the stars. From all this and
from plain old-fashioned contemplation and common sense, I’d gathered at least the simple insight that
the Morning Star represents hope: the light that shows up into the darkness a little while before the
sun, to reassure those who are watching that even the longest night does have an end. And hope is, after
all, something I’ve always felt called to carry. These days people everywhere are prone to hear the news
and slump into an impenetrable pessimism-fest. Planet on fire this, endless wars that, and on top of it
all every movie’s a remake. I’ve always felt more drawn to the longer, more positive view: through all
that, there are people in Iraq and Indonesia and Idaho living lives they love with people they love, and
coming up with creative ways to keep living good lives amid everything that’s changing. Our species may
cause a lot of problems for a while, but it won’t end Earth, and a rebirth is inevitable once the
problems eat themselves. Maybe it’s a weird, backhanded kind of optimism, but it keeps me going and
makes me happy.</p>
<p>I cooked some rice and beans, and dolloped some onto a birchbark plate I’d made that morning, and
carried it with those thoughts away from the campsite and into the woods. Then, feeling a little silly
about it, I sat there—glad the mosquitoes hadn’t hatched yet—and quieted down and talked into the
forest about what I’d learned. I spoke in English and halting Ojibwemowin and addressed whatever spirits
might be existent and listening. Fake it till you make it, I had read, isn’t just good advice for when
you’re directionless in life, but also for when you want to establish a relation with the spiritual
realm, whether for an Ojibwe <em>Mide</em> priest waiting to see what happens when she smokes a pipe or for
a Christian kneeling by the bedside hoping someone really is listening. Act as though there is someone
to hear you, and they’ll be more inclined to answer.</p>
<p>I don’t know that I got any answer in particular when I was out there feasting my name. But I still felt
like I’d done the right thing: not just by honoring what I’d agreed to do when I asked for a name, but
by remembering that even if I never fully understand even the one thing it seems like I should have
complete understanding of—myself—the reward is in trying and always understanding more.</p>
<section class="poem">
<ul>
<li>The way you can go</li>
<li>isn’t the real way.</li>
<li>The name you can say</li>
<li>isn’t the real name.<sup id="fnref:t1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:t1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></li>
</ul>
</section>
<p>But it’s a name I can use while I’m here among the ten thousand things.</p>
<hr />
<p>Then there was the matter of showing a star somewhere on me. From before I was even given the name,
I was getting hints about how it should look. My first day on the island, I found a little plastic
pinwheel that had washed up on the stones, with eight petals, alternating blue and orange. After the
<em>jiisakaan</em>, in the teaching lodge, I noticed Ralph’s leather bag had a star beaded onto it: eight
points, radiating in colorful patterns. Back at Pebaam’s cabin I noticed a quilt I hadn’t paid attention
to before, showing a big eight-pointed star. A star quilt, Pebaamibines said. The Morning Star.</p>
<p>I had toyed briefly with the idea of a rotating series of shirts, or a patch on a jacket, or (most
plausibly) a beaded tobacco pouch. But really I knew from the moment Ralph told me to show off a star
that it was time to take what I had learned in a year or two of giving my friends stick-and-poke
tattoos, and put the star right there on my skin. There were only two questions left: what colors I’d
use—which I’d settled that January during a series of predawn walks out onto a frozen lake to look at
the Morning Star and let inspiration come—and whether I’d actually have the nerve to do it.</p>
<p>It wasn’t that I was afraid of the pain; the consideration of pain ranked somewhere near “negligible”
for me. It was that a tattoo is so, well, permanent. <em>(“No kidding?”)</em> I had always thought it’d be cool
to have one, but I had already changed so much in the decade since I’d hit the legal age to get one, and
if I played my cards right I still had a good five or six more decades to live. Wouldn’t regrets just be
a matter of time? Even in this case, when I had been all but mandated to get one by actual spirits,
I found it hard to convince myself I’d always agree with the decision. Perhaps later I would decide that
beaded pouch was the right choice after all. I’d asked elders and been told it was no sacrilege to get
a spiritually oriented tattoo, but would everyone I met agree?</p>
<p>The day after I feasted my name, I woke up having decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to
do it today, but I still didn’t really know if I was going to. So I figured I’d just proceed as if I’d
come to a yes, and at some point if that was the wrong answer, I would come to a step where I’d realize
I had to stop. I got some paper and sketched out the shape I’d devised, and did a little basic
trigonometry to figure out the measurements I’d need. I cut some straightedges out of birchbark and drew
the star onto my arm to check out the placement. Good, good. I opened up my kit and mixed the first
color of ink. Alright, getting a little heart-poundy here, but still seems good, just… big. I got
a needle out of its package and fixed it onto a pencil for grip. Hmm, that looks quite a bit like
a needle one could use to permanently put ink under one’s epidermis. Hmm. I sat down on the picnic
table. It was a bright, warm day, and redwing blackbirds were crashing through the reeds, and I dipped
the needle in the orange and poked the first dot into my skin. When it came right down to it, I didn’t
even hesitate much before I did it.</p>
<p>And of course just a little patch of orange would look ridiculous, so once I started I did the whole
star, eight points in a six-color pattern, poking straight through the whole day. After one of the
colors I stopped and considered eating, but found I only had an appetite for finishing the tattoo.
I poked the last few dots as the long dusk of the Northwoods’ late May was beginning to gather. I stared
at it for a while.</p>
<p>As a kid I had spent days at Warder feeling completely, unabashedly at home. Then I had grown up and
left Cincinnati and spent, it seemed, all the years since then chasing a grown-up version of that same
feeling. Now I had come to a place where the muskrats came by to see me, the redwing blackbirds played
just across the way, the eagles left behind feathers for me to find, and the air was fat with pine
pollen and the lightness of life. I wasn’t tempted to pull out a book; none could be as fascinating as
where I was and who was there with me. I felt at home in the outdoors as I hadn’t since I was a kid,
a feeling I’d been starved for for all these years, now filling me up over the brim. It wasn’t hard to
believe spirits of <em>some</em> sort were responsible. I put some tobacco in my left hand; I closed my fingers
around it and the muscles moved around under the freshly placed ink. I walked over to the river and
offered the tobacco into the water. All that, at least, was worth giving thanks for.</p>
<figure class="image-fig ">
<a class="mfp-trigger" href="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/arc-ohio-minnbike-1838
">
<img src="http://res.cloudinary.com/chuckmasterson/image/upload/c_limit,h_800,w_800/arc-ohio-minnbike-1838" />
</a>
</figure>
<hr />
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/m-rundown">Contents</a></li>
<li><em>Back to</em> <a href="/blog/2020/03/19/i-lost-found">Deep Island, pt. 9: Lost and Found</a></li>
<li><em>On to</em> <strong><a href="/blog/2020/03/19/k-back-for-more">Deep Island, pt. 11: Back for More</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:t1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Le Guin, <em>op. cit.</em>, ch. 1. <a href="#fnref:t1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
{"chuck"=>{"pic"=>"/assets/images/design/chuck.jpg", "name"=>"Chuck"}}If I hadn’t been looking for the sign, I probably would’ve gone right past it---a little brown one by the side of the trail that said walk in campsite. I slowed to a stop and took my bike by the handlebars down off the pavement and into woods that fairly sighed with spring.