Sunday March 7th, 2010: a mild, cloudy morning. The snow cover continues to thaw. You wouldn’t know it looking across Lake Pepin from the top of “Point No Point” in Frontenac State Park, Frontenac, Minnesota. It’s a vast white plain beginning 500 feet below and continuing to the far side of the lake, where it stops at a border of hazy bluish gray, the forested bottom land of the delta of the Rush River on the Wisconsin shore, about two miles away.
There are ice fisherman on the lake, their trucks parked near them, dangling lines through holes in the ice into the dark water below. The tracks of their vehicles etch the ice in paired lines, silvery gray, crossing and crisscrossing until they fade off into the whiteness of the ice plain. I hear a truck start up now and then, and the metallic rumbles it makes as it crosses a pressure ridge. I am startled occasionally by the singular clarity of a human voice coming up from below. I cannot understand the words but I hear matter of fact, work-a-day inflections.
I’ve started a picture. I remember to be thankful because it doesn't come naturally. I am thankful for this day; thankful for the long dark of Warrentown Ridge, for the haze from the thaw melting into the gray of the sky up the Rush River Valley, and for the faint shadow that is Carson Ridge, millions of tons of ancient sea bottom hardened into limestone and carved by pre-historic floods into a humped shape, velvet gray.
After rubbing in a gray tone, I lay down the shapes of the ridges, the lowering sky, and the snow on the plain. Crows make a racket; an eagle flies by, close enough to see its yellow eye, the hook on its beak; not far away but far beyond my reach. The crows continue to riot for a long time. A buck white tail with stubs of new antlers grazes in the sumac near the top of the ridge a hundred yards up. His hidden mates are a little deeper in the woods, no doubt. He looks a little rough. I spot the lighter areas on Warrentown Ridge, openings in the trees, steep hillside meadows, silvery. A juvenile eagle rises from below, brown and spotted, broad winged. He soars away and a little while later soars back again. The crows are off chasing the elder cousin. I spot the shapes of groves of evergreens, the same shade of blue gray, their shapes distinct. Homesteads, maybe cemeteries.
I shift my weight, and shift again; just cold enough to get stiff. The paint is sticky like it is on a hot day. I’ve kept it in the freezer too long. I squint at a haze of branches, the dull mossy greens in a slender tree trunk. A freight train wails on the Wisconsin side; the clack and the rattle and the deep diesel rumble echo. Then it is still. Cardinals flit from branch to branch. They aren’t singing just now. I turn and look south, where the sun is beginning to blaze through the fog where the lake makes a big bend east, making yellow glare in the sky and on the ice, and the ridges sit like stoics under a cloak of blue frost. The haze is lifting and my time is up, and I have only grasped a little of what I have been given. “Your way led over the sea, your path over the countless waters, and none could trace your footsteps.*”
Photo by Nora Koch, an eagle over Lake Pepin, March 7th, 2010.
*Psalm 77: 19, The New Jerusalem Bible.
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