Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

AFTERWORD

Another Journey

The islands and the books still call us every summer. In June 2013 we set out in a newer version of the van — a 2005 Honda Odyssey, similarly packed to the gills. It is an innocuous silver gray, like most other cars. One of my daughters calls it the Manatee. I call it the Ark. Inside, there is my daughter Aza, the artist commissioned to make the cover of this book; Kiizh, who is now twelve; and me.

There is also Roadie, the travelin’ dog, who was born the same year as Kiizh. Roadie has a maniacal devotion to my oldest daughter, Persia, but tolerates me. Roadie is recovering from surgery to her neck. A little white Jack Russell, she looks like a repaired stuffed animal with neat black stitches attaching her head to her busy muscular body. The other dog, Ryoga, has his own story. Named for the black pig of Aza’s favorite childhood anime series, Ranma ½, this dog is a graceful wisp of charcoal. Roadie is outraged by his playful sorties. She glares in reproach from her tiny pink bed at the passenger’s feet.

The many toys Kiizh had on the previous trip have been replaced by electronic devices — iPhone, laptop, iPad, and so on. After the forty-ninth parallel there’s no reception, so I let her glut herself with screens for the first few hours. Anyway, we are visiting Persia on the way up north.

Ojibwemotadidaa

To my dear surprise, Persia has become the Ojibwe language leader in the family. For the past four years, she has been doing all she can to become fluent. This is her third summer as coordinator of an immersion Ojibwe language program held at the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. For three weeks in the summer and one weekend a month during the school year, absolutely no English is spoken there — cell phones and the abovementioned devices are confiscated upon entry. When I visited the program for a weekend last winter I excitedly opened my mouth to speak and found a well of nothingness. After two hours of stilted trying, I went to my room and fell into a dead sleep. My brain had saturated. That’s how the whole weekend went. A few hours of Ojibwemowin, then a dead sleep as my brain cells absorbed conjugations. It is very difficult, people struggle, they cry. But they begin to speak. Persia loves her work.

She gets an evening off to check in with us, and, similarly, falls into a deep sleep in the motel room, clutching Roadie. We plot the rest of our travels. Next morning, we are off. First we go to Canada, but here things take an odd turn. While there we inadvertently, grudgingly, add a baby grackle to the ark.

Bineshiinh Island

This island in Lake of the Woods has innumerable birdhouses and is, like the predator-free zones in New Zealand, only for birds. There are no feral cats because the eagles get them. There are no squirrels because the vigilant owner and keeper of the island relocates them — to squirrel heaven. Bineshiinh means bird, and only birds are allowed.

Mergansers, mallards, buffleheads, arctic terns, goldfinches, purple finches, black and white warblers, warblers of many other varieties, rose-breasted and evening grosbeaks, ruby-throated hummingbirds, white-throated sparrows, grouse, blue jays, loons, and grackles.

Why books?

Why grackles?

It is here that we find a fledgling with a broken wing. Aza climbs a ladder and puts him back in the tree, close to his nest. We think the parents, who are still taking care of the other nestlings, might feed him. But although for an entire afternoon the baby grackle emits a hoarse grack as persistent and irritating as the low-battery signal on a smoke alarm, his parents swish around, ignoring him.

They have left him to die, Kiizh says.

Oh god, I think. Nature is harsh. But please don’t let me rescue him, because the common grackle is a greedy, opportunistic, feckless, fearless, cold-eyed, only slightly glorified lizard of a bird.

And yet, what would Kiizh do?

Of course as the night comes on, the grack continues. I climb the ladder and scoop up the bird. We bring it in. I show the girls how to feed it. When the mouth opens, push a tiny gob of soft dog food down the gullet with the eraser end of a pencil. That’s how I’ve saved crows. Drugged with protein, the nestling drops off. Next morning, this bird is focused. More food. Every few hours. We teach him to drink from a cup. His wing still drags, but he couldn’t care less. He’s growing right before our eyes! We daub an antibiotic cream on his wound. I contemplate getting him drunk on a few tablespoons of wine and sewing his wing together. I think my operation might kill him, but I also have a sense that not much can kill a grackle. He’s a dystopic sort of bird — grackles will make it through climate change and every other sort of catastrophe humans throw at wildlife. So he gets his name.

Tenacious G

To get back down to Ober’s Island, we now have to smuggle a grackle over the Canadian border. We put him in a cardboard grackle box, covered with a Costco bag. He has preempted Ryoga’s seat. When hungry back there, he gracks. If he gracks at the border crossing, Kiizh plans to pretend to have lost her cell phone. But as I do at all border crossings now, I ask my daughter to take the wheel. No border guard ever troubles Aza, with her splendid eyes and radiant smile. We have the correct papers for the dogs and a bandanna around Roadie’s neck, so nobody can see that her head is sewed on. The young guard gives us a cursory check and wishes Aza a good, a very good! day, and we drive to Rainy River.

Island of the Book

We are meeting two friends who were married on this island last year. They have a granddaughter, Sequoia, nearly Kiizh’s age. We don’t travel lightly — but when Beth Waterhouse, executive director and wise woman of the island, shows up with a sturdy gear-toting vessel, she takes us in stride. She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at Tenacious.

From the first step onto the island, it is obvious that this place has made the right friends. Ten years have made it even better because of hardworking volunteers. The gardens are cheerful and immaculate — a huge bed of scarlet poppies is in full fancy-skirted bloom. Ober’s house and the extraordinary fireplace that houses the spirit of a man named Charlie Friday, Giiwewosaadang, has been lovingly repaired. There is a fancy new Swedish bathroom with framed doggerel and a gate made of a swinging paddle. Each book in the collection has been catalogued, cleaned, repaired, and replaced where Ober left it. The scent of old paper and cedar fills the rooms of each house. The bookcases, some ingeniously hanging from rafters, have been invisibly reinforced.

The scale of the commitment to Ernest Oberholtzer’s legacy, the intense thought that goes into each invisible improvement on his island, the forthright love, and the welcome. God! It is all so moving that my eyes tear up and I put the grackle on my shoulder to remind me that the world is hard. Grack! We are at home here. Aza chooses her spot in the artist’s cabin, close to the water, simple, with wooden hooks for her clothing and dappled light. There, over the coming week, she works and reworks the art piece that becomes the new cover of this book.

Asabikeshiinyag

The name in Ojibwe has to do with making nets, no surprise. The surprise is how big they are, how suddenly they appear. A wolf spider hunts in bounds across Aza’s cream-colored wall at night. The giant water spiders that bask on the rocks near the bathing pools at Ober’s are mottled like the stones, and motionless. Aza nearly puts her hand on one. The most amazing spider moment on the island occurs for me on the loading dock, where I find six or more Halloweeny-looking black, white, orange muscular fellows, a WWF-sized spider gang, soaking up the heat. They don’t like the vibrations of my footsteps, and they stand on tiptoe. Swivel their faceted eyes at me. I stop. They relax and start goofing around again. One spider grabs another by the arm and slings his pal off the dock into the water. Too much! I jump. They disappear.

We are here to work on the language, and Kiizh and Sequoia decide to catalog and draw the spiders, turtles, mosquitoes, deerflies, frogs, and fish that surround us, all in Ojibwe. As they work on the pictures and words, I translate the Star Trek Book of Opposites. My friend, the writer Gail Caldwell, has a phrase in her book New Life, No Instructions. Slower than the speed of light. That’s my Ojibwe language learning. But I’m still at it, still trying. Same with our little independent whose picture I end with, Birchbark Books. The little store has not only survived but is beginning to float by itself. Mysterious. I am up north getting ready to go home, tend to the bookstore, and bring the grackle back down to be cured at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in St. Paul, when we hear about the tree.

Abiding

Of the great elm trees around my house described in the book, only one is left — the guardian of the west, Abiding Elm. The black locusts, Haywire and Entire Trust, have grown high enough to fill my third-story windows. There are hornbeam and white pines, a couple of maples to name, a catalpa that had its origins in my mother’s flowerpot. I think a lot about the trees around my house.

Up north, my cell phone suddenly fills with calls. I talk with Persia and she tells me what happened, very tenderly, because she knows that this tree is special. Abiding was a boulevard elm planted by the city when my house was built. Abiding was felled with 3,500 trees in Minneapolis by the straight winds of a ferocious storm, following weeks of rain. These conditions toppled the trees with the biggest canopies, for with the soaking rains their roots lost purchase.

I try to be philosophical. It was an extremely beautiful elm of the classic wineglass shape. One by one the other elms succumbed to Dutch elm in spite of years of inoculation. Abiding stood alone, which made her more vulnerable. Fallen, she fills the backyard and makes it a jungle, impassable. With most of the power gone in Minneapolis, Persia has driven home from Fond Du Lac to an apocalyptic scenario, with people in line at the liquor store buying booze with cash and trees down everywhere, blocking streets. She makes it home only to find a camera crew at the smashed gate.

It is now four months since Abiding fell, and as I write this, the city is just now removing her 108-year-old stump. The crane claw worries, digs, worries, digs, and finally drags the stump out of the earth like a great tooth. Then I see why Abiding fell in the only place that would miss our house. Beneath the earth a mirror tree existed, the roots thick as the old branches, flowing toward the watery sand of the yard, away from the sterile dangers of the street.

Northern Lights

Lastly, this. Traditional Ojibwe people do not speak the names of those who have gone to the spirit world. Elders often shrug, hum, or look away when those names come into the conversation. After a generation, those names can be given to a close family member. That keeps the name alive. It is said that the person securely in the spirit world, visible dancing in the northern lights, is very happy to hear their name spoken by the living. But not using the names of the dead when referring to them, at least for some time, makes sense to me. It is a way of dealing with sorrow over the grievous loss of someone you love. I wasn’t raised that way, but it makes sense.

It is not, as some say, because you are calling their spirit back. It is not, as some say, because the spirit might grow troubled and return. I think it is because not speaking the person’s name keeps their spirit closer. It is somehow comforting not to speak of the person by name, but just to think of him leaping up rocks, scowling in his piercing way as he concentrates, smiling in delight or kindness, laughing in surprise, carrying his child on his shoulders. Mii’iw.