Solar Storms

  In the past, I’d heard, it was a woman who saw the first white men arrive in a boat. They were floating toward her. Before she’d seen the wind-filled sails of the graceful boat of death, she thought it was a floating island and that it carried strange and beautiful beings instead of the tormented world that was its true cargo. No one could have guessed its presence would change everything until she and her people would want to lie down on ice, like Dora-Rouge’s little sister, and die. The woman who saw the island coming toward her didn’t know beloved children would be mutilated, women cut open and torn, that strong, brave men would die, and that even their gods would be massacred. She didn’t know of horses, the long-necked ones, that would stand in one place in the winter and freeze like statues and still be there next spring, aloof and majestic and blue, with frozen manes and ice crystals shimmering in the air all around them.

  AS WE TRAVELED, we entered time and began to trouble it, to pester it apart or into some kind of change. On the short nights we sat by firelight and looked at the moon’s long face on water. Dora-Rouge would lie on the beaver blankets and tell us what place we would pass on the next day. She’d look at the stars in the shortening night and say, “the Meeting Place,” or “God Island.” True to her word, the next day we reached those places.

  God Island, according to Bush’s maps, was now named Smith’s Island. It had been an old settlement. We paddled toward it in silence, slowing ourselves as we neared land, drifting toward it. There was a sense of mystery about it. A few tall, moss-covered stone walls remained half-standing at one end of the large island, like a crumbled fortress. A sense of richness dwelled on this island, as if it were inhabited by people to this day unseen but present all the same.

  A very tall man had gone there in search of copper mines, Dora-Rouge told us. He was part of a tribe from the east, but had become lost, and instead of the copper, he found this island inhabited by small women and only a few short men. Instead of continuing his search for the island of red silver, he remained. Eventually he took several wives, women who bore taller children, all of them beautiful and copper brown. Whenever strangers came, they thought the people were so beautiful and straight they looked like gods.

  “God Island,” said Dora-Rouge. “It’s an appropriate name. The people there feared no evil and wanted not,” she said. “Look, it still has the trees.”

  It was true, there were ancient trees in the center that looked as if they belonged in a southern swamp. They were something like cypress.

  Even from a distance the island had a feeling of intimacy. It was open and inviting. I thought maybe that was why the tall man had stayed. Or perhaps it was the word “God” that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah.

  I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. To use words and sing, to speak. And call out that island did. I heard the sound of this strong land. It was so lovely that, skeptical or not, I wanted to stay there for the night.

  “No. We should move on,” Bush said, even though the island seemed to plead with us to remain. “All the campsites are taken.”

  When I looked back, I agreed with her. Something lived there, something I didn’t understand, but would always remember by feel, and when I felt it, I would call it God and that was how I came later to understand that God was everything beneath my feet, everything surrounded by water; it was in the air, and there was no such thing as empty space.

  Now, looking back, I understand how easily we lost track of things. The time we’d been teasing apart, unraveled. And now it began to unravel us as we entered a kind of timelessness. Wednesday was the last day we called by name, and truly, we no longer needed time. We were lost from it, and lost in this way, I came alive. It was as if I’d slept for years, and was now awake. The others felt it, too. Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land, swallowed a little at a time. What we’d thought of as our lives and being on earth was gone, and now the world was made up of pathways of its own invention. We were only one of the many dreams of earth. And I knew we were just a small dream.

  But there was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams. They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived. These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the same way.

  “No one understands this anymore. Once they dreamed lynx and beaver,” Agnes said. “It used to be that you could even strike a bargain with the weather.”

  For my own part in this dreaming, as soon as I left time, when Thursday and Friday slipped away, plants began to cross my restless sleep in abundance. A tendril reached through darkness, a first sharp leaf came up from the rich ground of my sleeping, opened upward from the place in my body that knew absolute truth. It wasn’t a seed that had been planted there, not a cultivated growing, but a wild one, one that had been there all along, waiting. I saw vines creeping forward. Inside the thin lid of an eye, petals opened, and there was pollen at the center of each flower. Field, forest, swamp. I knew how they breathed at night, and that they were linked to us in that breath. It was the oldest bond of survival. I was devoted to woods the wind walked through, to mosses and lichens. Somewhere in my past, I had lost the knowing of this opening light of life, the taking up of minerals from dark ground, the magnitude of thickets and brush. Now I found it once again. Sleep changed me. I remembered things I’d forgotten, how a hundred years ago, leaves reached toward sunlight, plants bent into currents of water. Something persistent nudged me and it had morning rain on its leaves.

  Maybe the roots of dreaming are in the soil of dailiness, or in the heart, or in another place without words, but when they come together and grow, they are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and ice. In this way, the plants and I joined each other. They entangled me in their stems and vines and it was a beautiful entanglement.

  “I KNEW there’d be another plant dreamer in my family someday,” Dora-Rouge said. Her mother, Ek, had been an herb woman. I got it from blood, she said. I came by it legitimately.

  “Can you draw them?” she asked.

  We searched the packs for a pencil. But we had forgotten a pencil, along with all the other things we’d left behind: combs, pencils, paper, keys.

  Bush lit a match, blew it out, and handed it to me. “Here. Try this.”

  I laughed. If the world came to an end, I wanted to be with Bush. She could make do with anything. “What a good idea,” I said. I appreciated her. Bush could find water in a desert, food on an iceberg. She knew the way around troubles. These waters were the only things that muddled her.

  She tore open a brown bag, flattened it out, and laid it before me, almost reverent, a map awaiting creation.

  I drew carefully, but after a while, the smudges vanished into the paper, so I merely began to remember the plants inside myself and describe them to Dora-Rouge. “This one is the color of sage,” I would say, closing my eyes, seeing it. “It opens like a circle. It grows between rocks.”

  “That’s an akitsi plant,” said Dora-Rouge. “It’s good for headaches.”

  SOME MORNINGS as we packed our things, set out across water, the world was the color of copper, a flood of sun arrived from the east, and a thick mist rose up from black earth. Other mornings, heating water over the fire, we’d see the world covered with fog, and the birdsongs sounded forlorn and far away. There were days when we traveled as many as thirty miles. Others we traveled no more than ten. There were times when I resented the work, and days I worked so hard even Agnes’ liniment and aspirin would not relax my aching shoulders and I would crave ice, even a single chip of it, cold and shining. On other d
ays I felt a deep contentment as I poled inside shallow currents or glided across a new wide lake.

  We were in the hands of nature. In these places things turned about and were other than what they seemed. In silence, I pulled through the water and saw how a river appeared through rolling fog and emptied into the lake. One day, a full-tailed fox moved inside the shadows of trees, then stepped into a cloud. New senses came to me. I was equal to the other animals, hearing as they heard, moving as they moved, seeing as they saw.

  ONE NIGHT we stayed on an island close to the decaying, moss-covered pieces of a boat. Its remains looked like the ribs of a large animal. In the morning, sun was a dim light reaching down through the branches of trees. Pollen floated across the dark water and gathered, yellow and life-giving, along the place where water met land.

  ONE DAY we came to a long swamp that neither Bush nor Dora-Rouge could identify. Agnes looked at us with her arms across her chest. Bush furrowed her brow and looked around as if a clue to our location could be fathomed by the shapes of trees or the sounds of birds. She took out her maps and looked at the lay of the land, trying to decipher any familiar shape. Dora-Rouge rested her scrawny back against a bedroll. “Well, we’ve passed God Island and the ribs of that boat. We must be at …” But just then, before she finished speaking, Bush once more unfolded the map and held it open, and as she did, the creases split, the map came apart, and parts of it fell from her hands.

  Dora-Rouge laughed. “Throw it away.”

  But even after that, useless as it was, there were many evenings Bush would look at a piece of the map, hold it up in the light and stare.

  I never understood why she placed so much faith in paper when she trusted nothing else about the world that had created those maps. She wanted to know where she was at any given time, as if not knowing would change everything, would say there was such a thing as being lost. Whenever frogs in the swamp ahead of us began to sing, she fretted. “There’s no swamp on any of the maps, not here, anyway,” she’d say. Or when we crossed a stream, “I wonder if this is Willow Creek.”

  From the west, soft clouds floated over. We set up camp. I placed stones in a circle and built a fire, then walked across the rocky island and entered the cold water. For a while I floated and dog-paddled and looked at the land on which we were camped. There was smoke from our campfire. It was a place of mosses, lichens, and calm water. From the water I saw Agnes off by herself, singing, walking toward a group of trees.

  I was swimming stronger than ever. The water was cold and it was sharp against my skin, as if it had blades or edges. But I swam. My arms were lean and newly muscled. I moved through water easily. Then, refreshed, I dried myself, pulled on my jeans and sweater, and went about the job of gathering more wood. We had worked out our routines by now. We had our roles. Wood gathering was one of mine. And fire building. Bush and I set up tents, unrolled sleeping bags. Agnes cooked.

  Soon we had boiling water and black coffee, and I saw Bush walk toward us with two large fish on a stringer.

  I teased her. She was a dreamer of walleyes, I told her.

  Agnes looked at Bush, looked at the two fish, and said, “Where’s yours and Angel’s?”

  ONE EVENING it seemed cooler. The air had a different feel, rarefied, clean, and thin. Wolves in the distance were singing and their voices made a sound that seemed to lie upon the land, like a cloud covering the world from one edge of the horizon to the other. We sat around the fire and listened, the light on our faces, our eyes soft. Agnes warmed her hands over the flames.

  There was a shorter time of darkness every night, but how beautiful the brief nights, with the stars and the wolves.

  THE NEXT DAY, as if we’d become too complacent, a dark cloud of mosquitoes rose up from swamps and marshes. It was late for them, Bush said. Up to now, we’d just been lucky. She reached to the bottom of the clothing pack and took out four white cloth hats and shook them until the brims opened. I laughed but I was grateful she’d brought them. “Where in the world did you get those?” I asked. They looked vaguely like safari hats. Bush was too busy searching among the clothing for veils to answer me.

  Within a few moments we looked like brides on safari. The insects landed on the netting, attracted by our warm breath. Already the droning of them made me anxious. I was grateful Bush had remembered the nets. We had to cover our hands, as well. The high noise of the mosquitoes, as they came near me, tightened my stomach. I waved them away, but more of them seemed to slip around behind any movement I made.

  “Don’t bother to fight them,” Dora-Rouge said. “It only wastes your energy.” Then she said, “I don’t know what I had in mind. We should have been drinking swamp tea.”

  Yes, I remembered the tea. People in the north had used it for centuries as tonic, as repellent.

  “We forgot it,” Agnes said, but she did not say that Bush, in her zeal to keep our packs light, had probably left it out.

  Bush set to work making a larger fire, a smudge, and we put green wood on it, grass, and leaves until smoke was all around us.

  “We need to get the tea leaves,” said Dora-Rouge, coughing.

  My eyes watered.

  But even if we found swamp tea that day, it had to build up; it would be a few days before enough tea was in our blood to keep the insects away. In the meantime, the insects tortured me the most, flying toward me with an electric sound, finding the places I’d neglected to cover: the hole in my jeans, the gap between neck and shirt collar. Pant-leg openings. “It’s because you eat too much sugar,” Agnes said.

  Later, I heard stories, accounts of caribou and men killed by mosquitoes, almost bloodless or drowned as they submerged themselves to get away from the tiny swarming insects.

  At darkness, when the mosquitoes abated for a time, Bush went out to gather stalks and leaves of the tea. She was careful in the canoe as she paddled toward the swampy regions where both mosquitoes and swamp tea grew, taking with her a light that would, unfortunately, also wake many of the insects prematurely.

  I saw her move across the lake, the water silver and heavy as mercury.

  Mosquitoes are one of the oldest forms of life. They were already there when the first people lit their fires of smoke. That’s what Dora-Rouge said. Their ancestors heard the songs of my ancestors, she said, and they were there when the French passed through the broken land singing love songs and ballads of sorrow. They were there when the fur traders paddled swiftly through rivers, up and down, searching for furs and for the dark men who would offer them for trade. The mosquitoes remembered all the letting of blood. They remembered the animals sinking down into earth.

  Sometimes I thought I could hear these things myself, the lonely, sad songs coming through trees and up from the banks of their destruction. Always, behind those songs, I heard our own deep-pitched songs that were the songs of land speaking through its keepers. Sometimes, too, I heard the old ones in the songs of wolves. It made me think we were undoing the routes of explorers, taking apart the advance of commerce, narrowing down and distilling the truth out of history.

  We were still and let smoke curl around our bodies. The next day I resorted, finally, to wearing mud in order to protect my too-sweet skin, and to draw the sting from the bites. In what we thought of as evening, the mosquitoes and swarms of black flies were a shadow, a dark cloud, clinging to the tents. I was ashamed to be so afraid of them, more afraid of them than of bears or wolves, or even wolverines. But one evening we looked at each other, our veils covered with alive, dark mosquitoes, mud on our faces, gloves on our hands, and I started laughing. It was contagious, the laughter. Agnes said, “It’s not funny,” but even she laughed.

  ON OUR JOURNEY, Bush opened like the lilies that flowered on some of the islands, at first tentative and delicate and finally with resolve. It was as if she had needed this place and all the water, to sing in, room to hold out her hands. Water and sky were windows she peered through to something beyond this world. Or perhaps they were mirrors in which sh
e saw herself, her skin, her hands, her thighs, all brand-new. She was as uncontained as she had previously been contained by skin, house, island, and water. Now it seemed there were no borders. In shadows and in deep woods, she vanished, or she danced a slow dance, or she talked to the land. Some nights I sat beside the fire and saw her against the deepening sky, walking toward us, or sitting on a rock, or moving into the woods, stealthy as an animal. Time dropped away from her. Her eyes softened. She might have been thinking of the things she had been dealt in her life: the betrayals, the unhealable wounds made by Hannah, the loss of me, the solitudes she had needed and thrived on.

  At times, too, I heard Agnes singing, talking the old language, mumbling inside a tent.

  Agnes remembered the bear more strongly now and, even without her coat, she talked with it. Dora-Rouge sang low songs that sounded like wind. She read things in the moving of waters; she saw what couldn’t be seen by us as the land and soundless mists passed by.

  As for me, I was awake in time that was measured from before axes, before traps, flint, and carpenter’s nails. It was this gap in time we entered, and it was a place between worlds. I was under the spell of wilderness, close to what no one had ever been able to call by name. Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did water and land in the marshy broth of creation. Inside the clear water we passed over, rocks looked only a few inches away. Birds swam across lakes. It was all one thing. The canoes were our bodies, our skin. We passed through green leaves, wild rice, and rushes. In small lakes, dense with lily pads, tiny frogs leaped from leaves into the water as we passed.

  Sometimes I felt there were eyes around us, peering through trees and fog. Maybe it was the eyes of land and creatures regarding us, taking our measure. And listening to the night, I knew there was another horizon, beyond the one we could see. And all of it was storied land, land where deities walked, where people traveled, desiring to be one with infinite space.