The flock of geese

I think I have always known that when you cross rivers things change. When I was young in the Twin Cities, and crossed the still-narrow and willow-strong Mississippi from one city to the other many times, sometimes many times per day, my life was rootless. My father left and visited occasionally, the five of us kids changed rooms now and then, acquired and lost rodents, reptiles, fish and friends. Staying for overnights or weekends at grandmothers' houses, we always knew we were guests and would be going home, and back at home, we never felt comforted, but that we would have to go somewhere else to enjoy closeness, and we often crossed rivers and culverts on our way from one house to another. But our lives were precarious, we would have to pack and leave. So many crossings, so many changes. I scarcely knew on which side of the river I belonged, and I wished for the waters to bring me to a new world, a new place.

Many years later, I was crossing a different river eight months pregnant with twins and I felt something change. I was not surprised. I was riding the city bus that autumn afternoon to a healing session at a bookstore. The November trees were bare and stretched up toward a mottled grey sky. As the bus crossed the Alewife Brook, I glanced out the window. A flock of geese was passing overhead, a precarious necklace that an unseen hand seemed to be shaking, trying to dislodge goose-shaped beads. At the same instant, several small hands and feet drew a path across the outer reaches of their atmosphere, the inner surface of my belly.

Those two simultaneous lines of movement undid something in my psyche, and brought me to an awareness of multiple levels of movement, of comings and goings. The geese flew, the bus's drive shaft rotated on its axis, the bus churned forward across the bridge, the tiny hands and feet described their intimate arc, and the river below us flowed in its dirty concrete channel to a salty harbor six or eight miles away—the combination of all these quickenings at once turned in me a cosmic machine, like the gears and orbits you see in a silent movie town-square clockworks--ancient, ponderous, plodding; the movements rendered in me a state of consciousness that I can only describe as other, and knowing.

In my mind, the children and birds changed places, and the birds were then drawing their wingtips across my belly from the inside. My children in that instant were flying with their companions south for the winter, and I knew the pregnancy at once to be a sad one, with partings and goodbyes.

I don't remember the healing session in the bookstore that day, but I remember the wingtips of my small birds as the geese flew overhead, the sadness, the workings of the cosmic. I have often tried to capture the story of the two birds, to write them into their own children's tale, of knowing and adventure and foresight. Two birds on an adventure, one flies up, one flies down. Two birds who are jolly companions. Two birds who get into mishaps together. But nothing can take me away from the fact that these birds are babies, and one of them takes his leave, crosses that great river to the other side. It has taken me eighteen years to be able to write this story.

Okay … the one time I went to the peak of “Eagle Mountain” in Minnesota, was on a weekend getaway with my sister. My son was young enough to miss me for the weekend, so it must have been about 8 years ago. Laura and I were actually heading to Sleeping Giant park in Ontario, so the trip to the top of Eagle was a spur along the way. We headed straight up the gravel road from near Grand Marais, and got there in record time (when my sister is in a hurry, she’s in a hurry). I think we sprinted up that boulder- and windfall-strewn trail to the little curlicue in the trail that marks the steeper part of the climb. I had an elevation map at the time, and we tracked each 100 feet. As we rounded one of the turns, there was dense forestation in a few places and the trickle of water, and staccato of mossy bogs dripping from one level to another of the rising trail. It reminded me, mood-wise, of the Peter Weir film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” which was one of my faves in college. In the film, some young boarding school girls in Australia go for an outing at Ayers rock. During the outing they get a little audacious and misty and swoony, as young girls do. A few of them break away from the group to go up this little rock pass, and they simply disappear off the face of the earth—a true mystery. I look for that feeling sometimes when climbing or hiking up high, that swoony, otherworldly feel, as if you could simply disappear into the landscape, into a hidden dimension. And that’s what it felt like hiking with my sister on the Eagle Mountain trail, in a few places. I think there was even some mist near the top. But also, I was running and panting to keep up with my hyper sister. At the top was a giant granite boulder with a plaque on it. We took the photo op and got a few pictures. Then sprinted down again, and made it to Sleeping Giant by nightfall. The end.

Except we had only made the journey for me, because I’d made the trip and tried to make the climb a few years previous to that, and I really wanted to complete the peak. I had joined a hiking club when I first moved to Minnesota, and went on this “winter camping” trip with two folks, and the guy had said he would bring all the gear for winter camping. I learned a lot from him—mainly how unprepared I was and how great fleece is for warmth and how crazy but okay it is to sleep in a freezing van with two people you barely know and four giant dogs. He had his skijoring dogs with him, and they needed a lot of attention, including walking. If you ever want to know how it feels to be a piece of Gruyere when it’s run over a grater, all you need to do is walk a few sled dogs on an icy trail strewn with boulders the size and shape of skewed living room furniture. But there was a wonderful, dreamy display of northern lights that night, blues and greens all cirrus-y. And I completed the peak a few years later.

Colder nights
And darker--just a curtain
Of warmth in wood smoke.