There were Swans

Pressure Ridges, oil on canvas, 16 x 20
Copyright Peter Bougie 2018
This photo is my own snapshot of the painting and not a professional scan,
hence the lesser quality.

I am painting along the St. Croix river, on the Minnesota side, north of Stillwater. It is a cold day to paint outside; about 20 degrees. There is a slight wind out of the north west, but I am leeward of a substantial riverside bluff, the subject of my painting. There is an urgency to work because I know that the cold will limit the time I can spend. So, I get after it; I make what I call ‘notes’, indications containing information about color, value, shape, or all the above, with the brush on the canvas, to be developed later after the session on site is over. Even with the urgency, sometimes I pause and just look at what is in front of me, or around me. I just look, and I am amazed at it, and thankful. Thankful too that warmth from combustion is available to me almost as soon as I want it. If it weren’t, this winter environment wouldn’t leave me much time for pausing. After about an hour and forty minutes I start to chill. I feel the cold under the layers in my chest and shoulders. Needless to say, when my torso is getting cold I am done painting outside.

This is the second time I’ve had this painting out here. We got about a foot of snow since I last visited a week ago. The slope of the bluff I am painting is south facing and most of the snow on it was melted then. I think the new snow is good for the painting because it shows on the ground through the trees in various places in the woods, providing depth of vision into the woods that wasn’t there before. There are low-relief pressure ridges making long arcs in the river ice following the curve of the shoreline. Darkened areas in the snow indicate slushy spots, probably thin ice. There is also a house tucked away on the bluff top; I can make out a little of the blue tinted glass and a roof line through the trees. 

 

Pressure Ridges, detail.

This place is called “The Boom Site.” In the 19^th century, loggers cut the primeval white pine forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin and floated the logs downstream to Stillwater, where there were saw mills. The logs were taken out of the river here, sorted, stacked and dispersed. A boom or booms were employed in this work. There is often three or four feet of water flowing where I am now standing; in the spring, or during wet summers when the river rises. During the last glacial retreat when all the ice was melting, the water ran through here over a hundred feet deep. The St. Croix drained glacial lake Duluth, which occupied an area approximating modern southwest Lake Superior and the surrounding territory, 170 miles or so north of here, and carried run off to the River Warren. The River Warren was a monstrous, unimaginable torrent miles wide and hundreds of feet deep. It carried meltwater from glacial Lake Agassiz through what is now the Minnesota and Mississippi River valleys south to the Gulf of Mexico.

Photo by Nora Koch, copyright 2015

Trumpeter swans are in our area today, in the water and on the wing. They are the largest native North American water fowl, weighing up to 25 pounds and with wingspans of 6 feet. Once endangered, they are now recovering. We see them in January and February each year. They look creamy white against the cold gray of the sky this morning, as I pause from my work to gaze after them. They fly north, up the center of the river valley, in formation. What is it about them, or even the Canada geese, when they are in flight and calling that inspires wonder and yearning? Before motorized transport, they were among the fastest things flying, capable of traveling hundreds of miles in a day. Surely that is part of the wonder and mystery. They are here now but swiftly off to parts unknown and are seemingly unimpressed with human pretensions. Recently my wife and I tracked a group of them flying down the Trimbelle River valley near Lake Pepin. We were southbound on Pierce County Road O, and we encountered them flying downstream above the Trimbelle at treetop level, looking for a place to settle on the water. We kept parallel with them for a mile or so. Even at that low altitude they kept pace with us at about 30 miles an hour. Presently they found a suitable stretch of water at the south end of a horse pasture with wide open space on both banks of the river and settled there. Nora commented that it was quite a day, with “horses and swans and eagles.” For years there has been an eagle’s nest in the top of a cottonwood next to the river in that same horse pasture. But the eagles and the horses are a story for another day.

Photo by Nora Koch, copyright 2015