Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

4 Books

The Skylark Motel

Weary, Kiizhikok and I stop at a spot just off the highway, one of those square tubes of rooms facing the road. The line of identical brown doors and windows, like staring faces, has a sullen aspect. No skylarks. The texturized siding is a defeated looking tan color. There is a small office, dim but for a glowing television screen. The yard is dust, struggling weeds, trampled gravel. When looking for a small motel, I usually choose a place with window boxes, or at least a few flowers growing in a tractor tire filled with dirt, feeling hope rise at that small signal of care. But it’s late, Kiizhikok is hungry, and I’m disoriented, as one always is leaving some wild place on the Earth and returning to human disorder. The unattractive nature of the towns and buildings seems purposeful. There is a belligerent streak to the ugliness. Or maybe I’m just tired. Here is an island, but of a very different sort.

The loneliness of roadside motels steals over me at once. Walking into my room, number 33, even with Kiizhikok’s presence to cushion me, the sadness soaks up through my feet. True, I might have dreams here, these places always inspire uneasy nights and sometimes spectacular and even numinous dreams. But they test my optimism. My thoughts go dreary. The door shows signs of having been forced open. I can still see the crowbar marks where a lock was jimmied. And oh dear, it is only replaced with a push-in knob that can be undone with a library card, or any stiff bit of plastic, I think, as I don’t suppose that someone intent on breaking into room 33 would use a library card. Or if they did, I wonder, dragging in one duffle and the diaper bag, plus Kiizhikok football-style, would it be a good sign or a bad sign? Would it be better to confront an ill-motived intruder who was well read, or one indifferent to literature?

I rein my thoughts in, get my bearings. There are touches. Although the bed sags and the pickle-green coverlet is pilly and suspicious looking, the transparent sheets are tight and clean. A strangely evocative fall foliage scene is set above the bed — hand painted! Signed with a jerky black squiggle. The bathroom shower has a paper sanitary mat picturing a perky mermaid, breasts hidden by coils of green hair. The terrifying stain in the center of the carpet is almost covered with a woven rug. As always, on car trips where I will surely encounter questionable bedcovers, I’ve brought my own quilt. There is a bedside lamp with a sixty-watt bulb, and once Kiizhikok is asleep I can read.

Reading Sebald’s Austerlitz in a cheap motel, insecure, with a chair pushed beneath the doorknob and the drapes held shut with hair clips, is an experience for which I will always be grateful. Books. Why? For just such a situation. Marooned in this uneasy night, shaken by the periodic shudder of passing semi trucks, every sentence grips me. My brain holds onto each trailing line as though grasping a black rope in a threatening fog. I finish half a page, then read it over again, then read the next half of the page and then the entire page, twice. Not many books can be read with such intimacy, nor are there many so beautifully composed that the writing alone brings comfort. I carry Middlemarch along with me on book tours because the elaborate twists in George Eliot’s sentences provoke in me a mood of concentrated calm.

Austerlitz is about the near dissolution of a man’s personality during the reconstruction of his memory. Austerlitz, who has forgotten most of his early childhood, follows threads of history, traceries of his own consciousness; he digs through lists of deportees and examines photographs and propaganda movies to find the truth of his origins. He learns that he was sent on a children’s transport from Prague to England at the beginning of World War II, and that his mother died in the humanly mechanized and phenomenally cruel “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt. He understands this slowly. The book moves minutely along this path toward knowledge, and seems at every sentence to deviate but always returns to the unfolding story. It is a very simple book, and unbearably profound. Page after page is about how history sinks into the mind, tormentingly sometimes, and what arrests and disturbances truth causes until finally the human heart can accept its sorrows, heal itself by enduring the unendurable, and go on beating.

The books we bring to strange places become guides and prevailing metaphors, catch-alls, lenses for new experience. As I read late into the night, moths whirling at the spotted shade, this book speaks to me with melancholy prescience, anticipating 9/11 in the first pages when Austerlitz speaks of how the smallest buildings — cottages, little pavilions — bring us peace, while we contemplate vast buildings, overdone buildings, with a wonder which is also dawning horror “for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” The description of the village of Llanwddyn, in Wales, submerged by the waters of a great reservoir, reminds me of the sensations I experience when talking to Tobasonakwut about the many settlements and cabins far out on Lake of the Woods, some of them drowned. Like Austerlitz, I too feel as though I’ve seen the vanished people walking, felt their eyes upon me, and that when I stare down into the opaque water, they are somehow calmly looking up from their ordinary tasks, which they have carried on, below us, for thousands of years.

I try to stay awake for as long as I can, getting up to wash my face at the rust-stained sink. Every time I turn on the tap unseen pipes clunk. Finally, one page sluices into the next and I start awake to find I have been holding my book upright, perhaps reading in my sleep, for I don’t know if my eyes were even shut. And I wonder as I turn out the light and settle into the sagging mattress if my sleeping self understood what it read, and indeed, if I will ever know who I am during these dark hours? Asleep, we are strangers to ourselves. Sometimes, as now, it seems odd that we go on day after day accepting this great dislocation, growing used to it, trusting that our night self resembles our day self, that neither will betray the other come morning.

Kay-Nah-Whi-Wah-Nung

On Minn. 11 driving east toward the border crossing at International Falls, I see a large billboard that advertises “a gathering place of historical interest.” Kah-Nah-Whi-Wah-Nung. I’m intrigued and as I have some time to dispose of, I decide to investigate. The road I am directed down is quite deserted, and for many miles I see only pastures, a few tawny brown cows, fence posts and gravel. Then suddenly I turn into a large parking lot filled with cars from as far away as Illinois and Florida. The place is still mysterious. From the lot I can see only a wooden door and part of a cedar shake roof. Upon entering the door, and facing a sudden and surprising curve of descending stairs, I understand I’ve come upon some sort of museum. As I walk down the long, wide, yellow stone staircase, the building opens into a cool, graceful, pleasant interior space divided into display sections, a book and craft shop, and an aquarium filled with live sturgeon, namewag.

I’m very glad to see the sturgeon close up, and watch them eagerly. They are, indeed, strangely ancient-looking with their rumpled snouts and whiskers. Their bellies are a cool off-white and their skins are gray, the color so soft, and they look painted. They are here, in this building, because the Rainy River Band of Ojibwe is raising and releasing them into the Rainy River. These young namewag are the size of large walleyes, but they may grow to be underwater giants, like the one that Kiizhikok and I saw at the Eternal Sands, or even bigger.

After looking through the displays of Ojibwe life and at the collections of artifacts, I treat myself to the gift shop. I find a number of handmade mocassins, the word is from the Ojibwe, usually spelled makazinan. These locally made makazinan are unusually fine, some made with brain-tanned moosehide, No. 13 beads or cut beads, and lined with blanket material or rabbit fur. I pick out several pairs, and then find a book of poems, Spirit Horses, by an Ojibwe poet I admire named Al Hunter. The woman who handles the sale proudly tells me that she’s Al’s niece, and that he happens to be downstairs.

I point out my name on the back cover of Al’s book, a blurb. Al comes upstairs and we sit down in the little café which serves fresh, beautiful, Ojibwe-influenced wild rice soups, casseroles, fruit salads. We drink the ubiquitous iced tea of this part of Canada. Al and his partner Sandra recently completed a walk around Lake Superior to draw attention to its pollution. That’s a long walk. Al says the days merged, and that time was beautiful. He works for his band, Rainy River Ojibwe, on a land claim that has had promising results — so far, this center, which is located on land containing huge burial mounds restored to the tribe, is one of those results. He tells me something very striking. He says that when he returned home after his education, to work, there were many terrible and pressing needs to address on his reserve — poverty, alcoholism, despair — so he called a meeting. At this meeting, he needed to tell people there was something that their reserve gravely needed. A library.

Books. Why?

Because they are wealth, sobriety, and hope.

Al’s reserve now has a library bought with tribal contributions and slowly filling with books.

The Border Crossing

I try not to be nervous, but I can’t help it — I am carrying those eagle spikes and although I have a right to carry them and I have my band enrollment card, I hate the questioning, the scrutiny, the suspicious nature of the border guards. What I don’t expect is that the man, my age, very trim and professional looking in his blue uniform, will question me about my baby.

“Do you have any proof that you’re her mother?”

I stare at him in shock, it is such a strange question. I have to think.

“Well,” I say, “I can nurse her.”

He stares back at me. Gestures to the side of a building.

“Pull over.”

Am I going to be required to nurse my baby in front of some border-crossing guard? I pull over, wishing that I had a copy of the Jay Treaty, which guarantees Native People the right to cross the Canadian — U.S. border without hassle. A woman meets me. I undergo more questioning. I start to grip Kiizhikok a little harder, in alarm I suppose, and in response she holds onto me tightly. The guard asks a series of easy questions and then, suddenly, as though to trip me up, shoots the question, “And who is this?” at me, indicating Kiizhikok. Each time, grasping the strategy, I shoot right back, “My daughter!” Each time, Kiizhikok grips me even tighter. I’m so glad she isn’t going through one of those mother-rejecting stages, or branching out adventurously, or growling at me, as she likes to do as a joke, right now. Eventually, the sharp-eyed woman clears us. We’ve passed some mother/daughter test. But when I get into the van I find that I’m actually shaken. For the first time in quite a while I’m surprised to find that I crave a stiff drink. Yes, I do. A straight shot of really good whiskey. And a cigarette.

“What have they done to me?” I say out loud, buckling her in, giving her the baby cell phone and the Chinese blender and her sippy cup, then buckling myself in and guzzling water from a plastic bottle. It’s time to get out of International Falls and back onto a lake.

Meeting Up Again

Once again there is this meeting-up uncertainty. I am supposed to rendezvous with members of the Lac Court Oreilles Ojibwe Language Society. We are going to stay together at an island on Rainy Lake among Ernest Oberholtzer’s thousands of books. There was a phone call, a plan, a lost cell phone number, a time to meet. The words Super Stop or Stop and Super or One Stop or Super Shop and Save. Immediately after hanging up I should have written down the name of the meeting place! As I enter International Falls I am more and more confused by the similarity of gas station stop names and supermarkets. They seem to have the same name in various combinations. I make a slow examination of each one, but don’t find my friends. Finally, I haul Kiizhikok out and we do a magnificent shopping at a place called Super One. We buy fresh cherries and all the makings for a corn stew and for an innovative type of trail mix that we have developed on this trip — one that includes salted nuts, pecans, figs, cinnamon chips, and golden raisins. We buy milk, lettuce, and a box of arrowroot baby crackers. Slowly, we walk the aisles, waiting for our friends, until I realize that in one-half hour I have to meet the boat that will take us out to the island.

As it turns out, it was just lateness, an Ojibwe trait so common it is not considered a failing. I’m relieved to see that everyone is gathering and consolidating gear once I go out to the point from which we will embark. My particular friends are a young couple with a baby boy just Kiizhikok’s age. They are Ojibwe teachers and very passionate about the language. They speak only Ojibwe to their son, and to my baby, too. She understands them and has quite a few Ojibwe words. Her shoes are maki for makizanan and her water is nibi, but we have a long way to go before sentence structure. We are going to drive out in a pontoon boat steered by the caretaker of the island, a very agreeable, sunny-haired woman from Ames, Iowa, named Mary Holmes.

Years ago, Mary fell in love with the island of the books, became a caretaker of that island, and is now on the board of the small foundation that administers a tiny trust and takes care of the estate that belonged to Ernest Oberholtzer. The trust allows a few small groups to visit the ecologically fragile island. Because Ernest Oberholtzer was a close friend to the Ojibwe, the foundation honors that relationship by allowing teachers and serious students of the language, as well as one or two Ojibwe writers, to visit on retreats. Most people who come to Ober’s island more than a few times become working members of the loose conglomerate of people who support the place in one way or another. It is the kind of place that inspires a certain energy that I can only term “Oberholtzerian”—a combination of erudition, conservationism, nativism, and exuberant eccentricity. Perhaps, I think, the air of Tinkertoy idealism here has something to do with the confluence of fascinations that occurs when Germans and Ojibwe people mix. This place reminds me quite a bit of my own family.

Ernest Oberholtzer

He was born in 1884, grew up in an upper middle-class home in Davenport, Iowa, suffered a bout of rheumatic fever that weakened his heart. He went to Harvard, where he made friends with bookish people like Conrad Aiken and Samuel Eliot Morison. His heart kept bothering him. Told by a doctor he had just one year to live, he decided to spend it in a canoe. He traveled three thousand miles in a summer. Paddling a canoe around the Rainy Lake watershed and through the Quetico-Superior wilderness was just the thing for his heart, so he kept on paddling. He lived to be ninety-three years old.

Ernest Oberholtzer packed those years with passions and enthusiasms, ceaseless physical activity, and loving friendships. He never married, though he lived on his island with a woman who supported him and apparently would have liked to tie the knot. He was trained to play the classical violin and he loved literature, book collecting, landscape architecture, bike travel, and photographing moose. The greatest political act of his life was to take on the massive lumber companies and save the Boundary Waters, the Quetico-Superior wilderness, I hope for all time. His friendships with the Ojibwe were abiding, he was a devoted and very curious companion. He was attracted to the unknown, to great deeds, and exploration.

In 1912, at the age of twenty-eight, he persuaded an extremely capable fifty-year-old Ojibwe man, Taytahpaswaywitong, Billy Magee, to accompany him on an expedition that he hoped would make his name as an explorer. He intended to travel the Barrens bounded by Lake Winnipeg, Hudson Bay, and Reindeer Lake. The area was unmapped, unknown, unexplored since Samuel Hearne’s 1770 expedition. They were, of course, going by canoe.

Oberholtzer wasn’t much of a hunter, so they had to pack an inordinate amount of food — seven hundred pounds. Every portage consisted of five round-trips. They had a small window of opportunity before the lakes and rivers would freeze solid, stranding them, and so began their journey in late June. By August they would experience freezing nights and woodlands covered in frost. By September, October, and at last November, they would be paddling for their lives. Filling in blanks on the map by using a compass and watch that his mother had given him, Ober mapped the terrain through which they passed. They paddled steadily, and thereby estimated distances hour by hour. Often lost, they desperately navigated mazey lakes, ultimately Nueltin, or Sleeping Island Lake, searching for a river called Thiewiaza that would deliver them in a path toward Hudson Bay.

Loneliness, anxiety, and the strangeness of the lake itself worked on Oberholtzer and at times his journal entries took on a desperate, dreamy quality. On the Barrens, the men hallucinated, lost themselves, but managed to plunge on. Ober saw trees as city smokestacks, people who weren’t there. Ever after, the journey was to haunt Ober and remain mysterious to others. At one point he climbed an esker and left in a can a note with his last words. In his journal, Ober notes that Billy Magee would tell him how, every night, he talked in his sleep or made horrible noises. The two came down the side of Hudson Bay. They missed the last steamer out of the country to run before the lakes and rivers froze over, and so they headed south just a hair before winter, freezing all the way and paddling fourteen hours at a stretch, often through the night, their feet and legs stuffed all around with wild hay. Incredibly, they paddled until the first week of November, through snow, along the shore of Lake Winnipeg, and at last made the small settlement of Gimli, Manitoba. There, the two beached their canoe, got haircuts, and returned to the world. They had been paddling and portaging non-stop, often deep into the night, since June 25.

It was a grueling, original, life-changing feat. Though Ober lectured on the trip, he never managed to write about it. Joe Paddock observes in Keeper of the Wild:

Though a conflicted desire to do so haunted him into old age, Ober would never publish or even complete a written account of the Hudson Bay trip. Over the years, whenever he did try to write of it he was overwhelmed with emotion. One is reminded of Meriwether Lewis’s inability to write of his great wilderness adventure. As with Lewis, Ober’s careful journal of the trip may in itself be the significant book he hoped would one day tell his tale.

That book, Toward Magnetic North, has recently been published along with many of the extraordinary photographs that Ober took of the places and of the people he encountered. His photographs of a family of Inuit hunters who took them in and guided them at the northernmost reach of their voyage are the most remarkable. In one, an ancient woman, probably about my age, is framed by a huge stack of wood on her back. She drags herself along or rights herself with two sticks. Another, of a ten-year-old boy to whom his father gave the pipe Ober offered the family as a gift, smokes that pipe gazing with shrewd and thoughtful economy into a familiar distance.

Ober’s House and Ober’s Books

On reaching the island, I find I am the last to choose a place to stay. I’m thrilled to find that no one else has decided to sleep at Oberholtzer’s house. Though each cabin has its own charm, I’ve always wanted to stay at Oberholtzer’s. I want to stay among what I imagine must have been his favorite books. The foundation has tried to keep the feeling of Ober’s world intact, and so the books that line the walls of his loft bedroom were pretty much the ones he chose to keep there, just hundreds out of more than 11,000 on the island. Heavy on Keats, I notice right off, as we enter. Volumes of both the poems and letters. Lots of Shakespeare. A gorgeously illustrated copy of Leaves of Grass. In some shelves in an alcove above the bed, curious volumes on sexuality including Kraft-Ebbing. I take down one work entitled Sin and Sex, and find that an old letter has been used as a bookmark. I read the letter, which is from Oberholtzer to his mother. The subject of the letter is the stock market. Oh well. I replace the letter in the book. Kiizhikok and I spread our quilts on the bed and then we lie down to admire the view from the bed, straight down a rocky channel into a lovely little bay.

Both of the islands next to this one, also owned by the foundation, are kept wild. This island, Mallard, is planted with cheerful care — pink petunias in bark planters. Baskets of salmon impatiens. Tiny perennial gardens of daisies and lilies are set against stone walls. It has seven cabins and two outhouses. But to call the buildings cabins and the privies outhouses is completely inadequate. To start with, Oberholtzer’s house is built against the side of a rock and rises three full stories with a surprise sleeping cupola on top, a secret room that can be reached only through a ladder leading into what looks like a chimney. For handles, the sturdy riveted doors are fitted with pieces of curved driftwood, or antlers. The very first floor, the kitchen, is reached either through a trapdoor from above, or an outside screen door above stone steps that lead directly down into the lake. Next to the kitchen door, against the cool of another rock wall, an ice house is set, disguised by vines that loop over a pale turquoise door. I love this door-leading-into-the-stone-hill. I have photographed it many times. There is a Japanese teahouse at the end of the island. To reach it, one crosses an arched stone bridge. Another set of stone steps leads into what is called The Roman Bath — a deep tub of silky lake. There is The Birdhouse, rising like a Seuss concoction into the pines, story after story, with a zigzag of steps and ladders. As the other cabins are, it’s heated with a tiny woodstove. There is one more house, made like the others of unpeeled cedar logs, there is a library cabin, which I’ll get to, and there are the outhouses. Mine is built with a tiny step up, a perfect screen door, a lovely window, and a long view down the center of the channel facing east.

WE CONVENE TO eat in an old early twentieth-century cook’s barge used by lumber companies to feed their crews as they ravaged the northern old-growth trees and floated the logs down to the sawmills. Ober had this cook’s barge hauled onto his island. An old bell signals meals. Original plates and dishes of every charm — Depression glass, milk glass, porcelains, and sweet old flowery unmatched Royal Doulton china dishes — crowd the open shelves. A cabin just out front of the cook’s barge, hauled here too, was once a floating whorehouse, I am told. Now it houses a piano, and three neat beds. A child has written a sign, tacked to its wall, that advises visitors not to be alarmed if they see things they are unprepared to see — like spirits. There is supposed to be a spirit family that inhabits this island.

I’ll tell you right off, I don’t see hide nor hair of the spirits. But I can’t speak for Kiizhikok, with her still open fontanel. They might be talking to her. Or singing her to sleep. Because she sleeps on this island, takes naps of an unprecedented length and then tumbles into sleep beside me as I read long into the night. There is a fever that overcomes a book-lover who has limited time to spend on Ober’s island. A fever to read. Or at least to open the books. There is no question of finishing or even delving deeply. I have only days. Among the books, I feel what is almost a low swell of grief, a panic.

Once the baby is asleep I vault to Ober’s shelves. I first wash and dry my hands — I just have to. Really, I suppose I should be wearing gloves. Then with a kind of bingeing greed I start, taking one book off the shelf, sucking what I can of it in, replacing it. This goes on for as many hours as I can stand. G. K. Chesterton on William Blake. Ben Jonson’s Works in Four Volumes, Oxford University, 1811. Where The Blue Begins by Christopher Morley, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, first edition and first printing. An 1851 copy of The House of the Seven Gables. And The Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson, Being an Account of His Travels and Experiences Among the North American Indians. A wonderful volume, more recent than most, published in 1943 and transcribed from original manuscripts in the British Museum. I keep reading this last book until, late at night, the loons in full cry, my mosquito coil threading citronella smoke, I have to quit. Knowing that I must be alert enough tomorrow to feed Kiizhikok and take the stones from her mouth, I force myself to sleep. But as I drift away with her foot in my hand I am led to picture an alternate life.

In my imagined life, there is an enchanted interlude. All children are given a year off from school to do nothing but read (I don’t know if they’d actually like this, but in my fantasy my daughters are exquisitely happy). We come to this island. One year is given to me, also, to read. I am not allowed to write. I am forced to do nothing but absorb Oberholtzer’s books. Every day, I pluck down stacks of books from the shelves upon shelves tacked up on every wall and level of each of the seven cabins on Ober’s island. Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word. Then I do read every word, beneath a very bright lamp. When my brain is stuffed my daughters and I go swimming, play poker, or eat. Life consists of nothing else.

Ober and Moose

I find some lovely photographs of moose among the archives — Oberholtzer took them. Tracking down, sneaking up on, and photographing moose was a big passion with him. His guide, companion, and mentor, Billy Magee or Taytahpaswaywitong, thought Ober just a little strange, but went along with it, bringing him to within feet of some of the shiest and orneriest creatures of the lake. The photographs that resulted were the first such ever taken of the animal, and Oberholtzer became known as a great expert. Keeper of the Wild makes use of notes that Ober took on those photography trips. I think, of course, of the three young female moose we saw in Lake of the Woods, those awkward young beauties cavorting in the reeds, and so innocent about our approach. Ober wrote beautifully about a similarly trusting young bull:

Inch by inch, scarcely moving, Billy propelled the canoe forward, while I knelt in the bow, camera in hand. The sun was fiercely hot, there was only a breath of breeze. The little bull several times raised his head to gaze at us wonderingly; and each time Billy stopped paddling. Thus, during the moments when the moose’s head was submerged, we advanced till we were only twenty feet away. The bull edged off a foot or so, turned his back, and suddenly faced around again, whined ever so slightly like a dog and at last, after a moment’s reflection, dipped his head under water. I was itching to take his picture, but I noticed something remarkable. Instead of immersing his head completely, as is the custom of the moose when feeding, he left half his long ears protruding. He was listening; and I was afraid that, if I clicked the shutter, he would scamper away. When he raised his head again, however, I decided to chance it. I clicked. He flinched, moved away a step again and then resumed his feeding. He seemed completely reassured, for I noticed now that even the tips of his ears were under water. We were still gliding nearer. I took another picture, a third, one after another. At last, lo and behold, the little fellow got down on his knees on the river bottom, and for a second or so his body was wholly lost to sight. His head came up first, with ears pricked. He shook it and the ears flapped drolly against his cheeks. When he rose, he looked at us inquiringly, almost mischievously, with his languid brown eyes. His shaggy winter coat was still clinging in patches to his hindquarters…. To my great surprise he calmly stepped toward us and sniffed with his long snout; and I could have touched him with the paddle. But Billy, always cautious and respectful toward a moose, backed the canoe a few strokes. Thus for fifteen minutes we played with this strange neighbor.

Feasting

The blueberries, miinan, have ripened on the island. The first thing Kiizhikok does the next morning is crouch low to the berry bushes and stuff herself with miinan. I show her how. This is the one traditional Ojibwe pursuit I’m good at. Now, before Kiizhikok picks and eats all of the blueberries, it is time to feast the first ripening. Rose Tainter, a traditional elder from Lac Court Oreilles, prays in Ojibwemowin, with her sacred pipe, at breakfast. We have a huge bowl of blueberries. A spirit dish is prepared. The dish is made up of small portions of the food we’ll eat, with tobacco set alongside the portions. The spirit dish is either left outside for the spirits or burned as an offering. This is the way the Ojibwe have always given thanks for the first berries of the year. After Rose has finished praying and the spirit dish is set outside, we eat. We eat seriously. We eat with attention. We eat with a lot of laughing.

It seems to me that Ojibwe people always eat with happy grace. Food is part of every gathering and ceremony. Even our weekly meetings to learn the language are based around a potluck dinner, mainly centered around casseroles heavy on wild rice. Today on Ober’s island, breakfast consists of pancakes and Ojibwe maple syrup, scrambled eggs, fresh walleye breaded and fried, a hash of potatoes and crisp turnips, and a big bowl of blueberries. There is also lots more fruit on the side, coffee, and black tea. We’ll have a big lunch just a couple hours after the breakfast dishes are cleared and washed. And then dinner, which might involve venison sausage, more walleye, boiled cabbage and potatoes, or if we are lucky enough to see Nancy Jones, whatever she has hunted might appear.

Nancy Jones, Ogimaawigwanebiik, happens to be one of the most extraordinary women I know.

For starters, she holds the world record as the quickest beaver skinner. I don’t know where, exactly, she earned the World’s Quickest Beaver Skinner title, but I’m assured this is the truth. She makes a few judicious cuts and turns the animal inside out. It’s like sleight of hand. Nancy does exquisite beadwork, placing each tiny cut bead just so on makazinan of smoked moosehide, trimmed with otter fur, lined with blanket. Nancy has a great laugh and deep spiritual knowledge, she is an Ojibwe language teacher, and fiercely devoted to Ojibwe culture. Her children are language teachers, too, and she has taught them her bush skills. Still, they are amazed at her fortitude and endurance. Nancy has been known to kill, skin, and cart back to her cabin a whole moose and a deer in one day. She can snare rabbits, trap anything from lynx to pine marten. She can shoot the head off a partridge sitting in a tree, and probably catch the partridge as it falls, too. Ojibwe are meat eaters, that’s just how it is. The joke goes: What is an Ojibwe vegetarian called? A poor hunter. Nevertheless, it was Nancy’s deer haunch and a fat string of bass three years ago that changed my then youngest daughter, Aza, from a supermarket carnivore to a thoughtful vegetarian.

It was either the deer haunches, or the ribs. Anyway, on our last visit to Ober’s island, Aza made a decision from which she has never deviated. I was amazed that a ten-year-old could decide with such conviction. She won’t even eat a fish after she went to the dock to check on Nancy’s stringer. Later, she said to me that one of the fish had looked up at her. That did it. I must have been a hard-hearted little person, because as the granddaughter of a pair of butchers I helped kill chickens and watched from a corner of the slaughterhouse as my uncle knocked sheep, shot cows, scalded and gutted dead pigs. And yet it has taken my daughter Aza to make me really attempt anything like a consistently vegetarian set of habits, and it started out purely because I felt bound to support her tenderness on behalf of animals.

At any rate, although killing and eating wild game is for the Ojibwe a spiritual as well as delectable enterprise, there is no vegetarianism this year on Ober’s island. Nancy and her son Pebaamibines are running an Ojibwe language camp this summer on her land, about a forty-five-minute boat ride from Ober’s island. They come to stay for a night, but all the game is left at the language camp and so we eat the most incredible spaghetti bolognese. Maybe it’s the red pepper flakes in the sauce, or the type of onion. Maybe it’s the air. Maybe it’s the mosquitoes, and how we are free of them in the well-screened kitchen.

Nancy remembers Ernest Oberholtzer very well — he made eggs for her family on their first visit, when they paddled over and tied their canoe to his dock. In Oberholtzer’s photo archive there are dozens of pictures of Nancy’s family, her late husband’s family, and of Nancy as a child, strong-minded looking even then, grinning, wearing a soft red woolen hat. Pebaamibines touches a picture on the wall. I recognize it as a photograph of Billy Magee. The man who guided and paddled with Oberholtzer on the great 1912 adventure is a close ancestor.

Maang

A hot wind blows over the island, and Kiizhikok and I are in and out of the water all afternoon. We edge ourselves carefully down a stone stairway into the cool tea-colored water of Rainy Lake. Pushing off, we float together, into the channel, sighing in dreamy relief. We bob along in our life jackets, talking part Ojibwe, part English, and part mother-baby nonsense. The world is perfect. The shadows are long but on the rocks they still burn like iron. The sun’s a fierce gold. Baby and I watch the silhouette of a big loon approach down the channel between islands. It comes nearer and nearer, as silent as we are. Then the maang is abnormally close, closer, too close, and again I am filled with the now familiar sense of uneasy assessment. That beak looks sharp! Will it peck Kiizhikok? The loon’s eyes are very red! But the loon isn’t going to poke my baby, of course, it only circles, coming close enough for us to count the white spots on its back and regard the spectral pupil of its weird reflective eye.

Again, I marvel how animals seem attracted to the baby, and once we have emerged from the water and are drying off in the light breeze, I ask Nancy Jones if she saw the loon swimming with us. I ask modestly, sure that she’ll tell me that Kiizhikok has some unusual power to attract maang.

“Geget, I saw it,” she says casually. “He liked your life jackets.”

Our life jackets?

“They’re red. That’s how we used to catch loons and eat them,” Nancy says. “We used red things. They’ll come close and investigate anything red.” Then she adds, “We don’t eat them anymore.”

“How did they use to taste?” I ask her.

“Rich,” she says.

The Library

I am haunted by a book that I found the first time I visited Ober’s island. It was stuck away in a corner of a little cabin I haven’t described, one devoted to books alone, the library. My find was a little pamphlet-sized inconsequential-looking book covered with a black paper that looked like oilcloth. I slipped it from the shelf and opened it. Tristram Shandy. One of the first novels in the English language. As it was originally published in serial form this was but a portion of the first edition and first printing. Laurence Sterne had signed the title page. I had a strange, covetous, Gollum-like feeling as I held the book, my precious. I suppose it was the beginning of the sort of emotional response to books that drives those collectors you hear about, occasionally, to fill their apartments with books until there are only book tunnels to walk through and the floors eventually collapse down onto their neighbors.

Of course, I have to see Tristram Shandy again. I want to visit this book, and also to make sure I really saw it. But this time I can’t find the book although I crawl with Kiizhikok on hands and knees looking for likely places it could have been stashed. Its absence bothers me. Although I’m helplessly in the grip of other books now, and currently in love with a corny purple edition of Catlin’s journals, I keep sneaking around the bottom of the shelf where I found my precious, peeking over other books, behind the shelves, like a dog sure that it will find a bone hidden years before.

Mary Holmes goes through the catalog with me, and that particular volume isn’t mentioned. Which doesn’t mean, she tells me, that it wasn’t actually there. So I might have seen it. This is, for me, like a birder having possibly photographed an ivorybill then losing the film. I’m chagrined — why didn’t I do something about the book? Show it to someone? Make certain it was cared for? But I know that the answer is that I didn’t because I am in somewhat uneasy agreement with the spirit of the island, which is to let the books exist as they were meant to exist, to be read, to be found and then unfound. To have their own life. Somehow, that also puts me in conflict with a piece of my heart. For I also want the books to be protected from people like me, whose itch to hold them might overwhelm even the strictest conscience. Even now, I can feel it, the line is thin. Especially when you can’t find Tristram Shandy.

Signed, goddamnit, I’m positive!

Mary tells me that Ober had left no will regarding the island and his books and cabins, so that ten years passed while all of the legalese was sorted out. During those years, the books were alone. I brood on this. The books. Alone in the cold and through the humid summers, alone in the cabins for ten years as roofs collapsed, alone as squirrels invaded and dismantled eighteenth-century bindings to line their nests with rare pages. I am afflicted with such melancholy at the thought of the books all alone on the island that I have to walk back to Ober’s house, to nap with Kiizhikok, to settle my mind. This whole island, filled with books, and no one to care for them! I would have liked to have been here. I imagine it as something like living in a great Cornell Box, only while Joseph Cornell’s visual themes were white spheres and tiny glasses and peeling cubicles and star maps that suggested vast compressions of time and space, here the themes would be the books, the words stacked endlessly. Spine to spine, margin to margin. Peeling, curling, waiting in a thrilling passivity for someone — like me!

There was an original Edward Curtis portfolio of portraits of American Indians among the books. I’m glad that I don’t know what else. Some of the most valuable were sold once the little foundation of Oberholtzer’s friends and supporters was formed. In a panic of retrieval, some were bought back. But a piece of the careful intention and depth of Ober’s collection was lost. Still, the collection is for me both a caution and an inspiration. It is surely a good thing that Oberholtzer devoted only a portion of his vast energy to book collecting. He was a dedicated bibliophile, careful and disciplined, ordering books from London booksellers with great specificity and detail, and receiving notes and invoices in return, some of which are still tucked into the pages of his books. Nicholas Basbane’s wonderful book on book obsession, A Gentle Madness, begins with a description of the difference between the bibliophile and the bibliomaniac:

With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character. When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior. “The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave,” the German bibliographer Hanns Bohatta steadfastly maintained, though the dividing line can be too blurry to discern. Whatever the involvement, however, every collector inevitably faces the same harsh reality. After years spent in determined pursuit, a moment arrives when the precious volumes must pass to other shelves. Some accept the parting with calm and foresight; others ignore it entirely. Some erect grand repositories as monuments to their taste, others release their treasures with the whispered hope that they reach safe harbor in the next generation.

Whatever Oberholtzer’s intentions were, I’m happy that his island is still filled with the books he pursued and acquired. Other than actual writing, the books a person leaves behind reflect most accurately the cast of that person’s mind. If his spirit is with the spirit family living on the island, as some believe, then I’m sure that Ober misses his chief treasures, but feels relieved that the collection is more or less intact. For his assemblage does reflect his character, as the best collections do. His books on exploration, the great north of Canada and the Arctic, and his painstakingly procured works on Native American life, as well as the volumes of poetry he so loved and the works in German and the books on music, probably reflect as much as anyone can know of him.

Ober and the Ojibwe

One of the reasons, I think, that Ober so loved and was fascinated by the Ojibwe is that he loved the books in the people. He loved the oral tradition of storytelling, where the person becomes the book as in Fahrenheit 451. His Ojibwe name, Aadizookaan, means traditional story. As Pebaamibines tells it, Oberholtzer was always entering a circle of Ojibwe asking eagerly, “Aadizookaan? Aadizookaan?” And so, as Ojibwe do, he was affectionately nicknamed. He recorded several stories but never did complete a collection, or indeed, write the books he meant to about the Ojibwe. He hadn’t, perhaps, the degree of passivity it takes to actually sit down and write a book. Or he hadn’t the patience, maybe, to sit down long at all. His phenomenally active life benefited his Ojibwe friends in many ways, not the least of which is in the area of conservation, and now, in the ongoing hospitality that the board of the Oberholtzer Foundation has shown toward Ojibwe people, Ojibwe writers and language teachers, storytellers. During this retreat to the island, for instance, I am able both to take notes for this book and to work with Keller Paap and Lisa LaRonge on details of the first book that our nascent publishing house, Birchbark Books, will publish. It is a book by a gentle and deeply knowledgeable Ojibwe elder named Nawiigiizis. Ober definitely would have added this book to his collection, and as I leave I promise to send it, and this one, too, up north to the island of books.