Lessons from Northern Travels and Travelers

On a Friday in July, I drove a minivan-load of us up to the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. We were headed to Work People's College (WPC), an extended organizers' training and camp by and for members of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)  (more about them and why I am a member in another post). The following Tuesday, I drove us back.

A 68 year old man from Alaska flew out the night before our northward drive and stayed at our home. He stayed another night after WPC and flew home Wednesday morning. He brought us salmon that he’d caught himself and kept frozen on the flight, salmon we stuck in the freezer, which he thawed out and cooked for us that last Tuesday night. He sliced the skin back and tucked just a sprinkling of chopped onions underneath with a little butter, and then he baked it. And he brought us two packages of honey-smoked salmon. He told us story after story from his life, stories that constituted a kind of travel for us in themselves from someone unlike anyone I have ever met. There were stories about traveling around the country in the 1960s and 70s – poaching, he said - hunting deer and other animals for food, fishing, without permits, pulling watercress out of the bottom of a stream, trading rattlesnake meat for four lobsters one day when he and his girlfriend had made their way down to Florida.  He worked for money only when he had to. "My goal was to work for The Man as little as possible," he said  By 1975, they'd moved up to Alaska, where he’d always wanted to live. Stories here involved bears, water that numbs you in one minute, taking turns in his car at full speed when someone was chasing him and his wife to shoot him, and building up their branch of the IWW. There were other stories - continual stories.

Periodically, he would ask, "Do you want to me to keep telling stories, or do you want to rest your mind for a while?"   I love the layered kindness and decorum of this question. Not only does he break to give the listeners a chance to say whether they want him to continue, but he offers them such a humane reason which doesn't require them to further explain themselves.  And he offers a reason which in turn lets them avoid hurting him, a reason that lets them be both truthful and considerate. This is one lesson I'd like to hold onto from this July.  I hope I can remember it.

On the drive up, I talked with another person, who is a therapist, which fascinated me, because I have always been drawn to disciplines and practices connected to mental health, yet for years now have also been down on them for ofen propping up the capitalist status quo in various ways (getting people to put the emphasis on their individual "choices" in order to function as well as possible in the system rather than supporting their radical critiques of and challenges to that system). But here was a Wobbly (members of IWW are called Wobblies) who is also a therapist.  He talked about how he asks people to consider why they're telling certain stories about themselves and their experiences rather than other stories. This question and some of its implications keep returning to me.  What stories do I believe about myself, the people I am close to in various ways, the social structures I inhabit, and the larger world?  If people live as characters in false stories, how does this affect them and how do they in turn affect those around them?  What is my story? These are my own questions, emerging from what I understood about some of his approach.  Another lesson I'd like to not only hold onto but greatly expand upon.  And it connects to my own work studying and writing about stories, especially nonfiction narratives.

WPC needs its own post, maybe connected to the one about why I'm a member of IWW.

The day after our Alaskan comrade left, I headed back up north, this time to the shores of Lake Superior, with my sister. We’d planned this trip back in January, the first time in our lives that we’d finally go somewhere like that, just her and me. She planned it all, and she drove. We stayed in a cabin twenty miles south of the harbor town of Grand Marais. We each took our own breakfasts and lunches. She made dinner one night; I made dinner one night; and she treated me to her favorite restaurant one night. We headed back home on a Sunday.

While we were there, we walked; we sat by Lake Superior; we hiked some trails to see some of the waterfalls in the rivers rushing to pour into the Lake. We talked, more than we have in years. We had no internet service there, and I left my computer at home. Mornings and evenings, I wrote a little in a big spiral notebook. I woke up early and stretched out on the small sofa. From there, if I turned my head to the left, I could see Lake Superior out of the window. For those cabins, it’s just down the sloped driveway, across the road, and down some rocks to the shore. From that position, its vast blueness remained mostly beyond my scope of vision, curtailed by the wall to the left of the window and the tops of a couple chairs out on the porch – one chair, then spruce needles with a cut off tree trunk in the foreground, then the other chair top, then more spruce, then wall. Visible Lake Superior became about an inch if I held up my thumb and index finger to measure it. Yet the seen and measurable always suggested the unseen and immeasurable.

I brought a few books and read to my sister from them at times. I read from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and Zitkala-Sa, and I asked her to read an excerpt of a poem by H.D. (the modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle), an excerpt a friend emailed me in June. It’s from “The Walls Do Not Fall.” I hadn’t read it before he sent it.

so I in my own way know
that the whale
can not digest me:
be firm in your own small, static, limited
orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstances
will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.

That poem was on my mind a lot during my travels. I think our psyches sometimes grab and embrace words and images that we need at particular times.

Sunday, before we headed home, Tammy stopped at Temperance, where the Temperance River gushes into Lake Superior. The rivers and streams around there carry a lot of organic matter from various swamps they intersect with, and they carry some iron in them. For both these reasons, even when they're rushing and falling over rocks and big drops (we saw so many cascading waterfalls), they have a lot of brown in them, like coffee streaks. And so much white foam. (I read some of the signs explaining all this as we walked and climbed some of the trails.)

By Lake Superior, masses of rocks, thick piles covering all the ground at the shore, are what you walk on and sit on.  I individually picked out some rocks to bring back. After that I wrote on a piece of scrap paper:

Sun July 21 - Temperance   I chose these rocks from among so many in thick piles on a shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota - where they are tumbled and smoothed and aggregated into so many interesting combinations - minuscule, tiny, hand-holding size, and larger. All worthy and beautiful and of earth. What 'makes these stones stony,' as Viktor Shklovsky would say, is choosing them from among so many others, and holding them up to examine more closely, and sometimes to bring along with us into more of our lives. 

In his essay "Art as Technique," Shklovsky writes:

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....

 And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.  'If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.' [Leo Tolstoy Diary quote] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.  Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

We might also substitute here "traveling" for "art," and traveling itself can be a kind of living art, a story to live in - a changed story, new painting, different music.  What matters is looking and listening and feeling closely. Freshly. Observing carefully, being deeply attentive and present. Everyone and everything is always more than what we see and measure and think we know of them.  Pounded by massive forces, tossed about with others, immersed, cooled, warmed, wet, dried out, wet again, rounded, smoothed, and aggregated in particular fusions for a time.