Issue #14, Autumn 1998
Voice Over by Rod Clark
There is a mystery that lurks deep in the north country, at the green rim of things. Anyone who comes here can feel it -- something that is never far away, yet just out of reach. You may notice, for example, a susurration in glittering poplars along a bank that builds to the edge of something magnificent, and then fades away. Or the way a phantom sweetness comes in the interval of silence that follows the loon's vibrato. It is a reaching for this mystery, this something beyond, I am convinced, that brings people into the north country when summer shines. And it is certainly part of what has been bringing me with my family and friends to this island of pine year after year, a need to escape the close circle of ourselves and the giddy hum of our being, a chance to step close to the perimeter of our experience -- to breathe...
For nearly forty years now, these few acres of river-wrapped granite with their two cabins and floating dock have brought out the best and the worst in me, and I have thought a great deal about why that should be so. Perhaps it is because here, the mystery is so close, that it warps the carefully constructed realities we have brought with us from less wild places to the south, twisting time and space. Time doesn't pass here, it composts. Anchoring it all is the Canadian shield, a vast stretch of glacier-scoured rock that covers much of south central Canada and the U.P. On top lies an uneven layer of clay chewed from the stone by lichens, and tiny plants, and on top of that, a humus of rotten wood, many-colored moss, jack pine, poplar, finery of ferns. There is, in this fragrant crumbly upper soil (our own layer in this geology of things) so little distinction between what is alive and what is dead. Which is dead branch? Which is living moss? Why is it that every time the cabin door opens I look up half expecting to see someone who has not been here for decades, or even the face of my father, who loved this place and passed away some 25 years ago? Why is it that the problems of the year melt away as you gaze out over the water sparkling in the sun? How is it that here, a spark of ancient anger can fan the most trivial debates? What makes this place such a fertile ground for ghosts? Nothing here vanishes quickly. Underfoot,the living and the dead form a seamless layer between the unforgiving granite and our lives. Rock and a softer place.
Space too, curls and twists in the magical grip of river and stone. The laugh of a loon or a fisherman can carry over half a mile on water as if it were only a few yards. If you are out on the path, and crouch down, you will see that there is a miniature forest down there, thriving under the umbrella of the greater one. Dense little fens of ferns and branching moss that magnified, could have made a movie set for the island of King Kong.
But it is at night that the mystery closes in on us. While the sun shines we might imagine that this is a luxurious wooded estate, but when night arrives, full of murmurous sounds and voices, our visitors learn that this is not a suburb. It is we, not the creatures who move in darkness outside the cabins, that are the intruders. The nocturnal curiosity of wild creatures can be an unnerving thing. It is unsettling to, say, hear something in the dark moving parallel with you through the woods as you journey to the outhouse and back. I believe, however, that although the dangers of this country require a healthy respect, we bring many terrors with us. I remember a guest in the great cabin who kept returning from her bed into the firelit main room to complain that something or someone was scratching the outside wall just above her bunk. "That's ridiculous," I told her. "No one in their right mind would be out there!" "I know!" she replied, in such a haunted tone, that I realized she had twisted my cliché into a confirmation of her most unreasonable fear.
Yet not every mysterious thing that has happened up here over the years can be taken lightly. One evening in July, years ago, my wife Melanie and I were alone in the upper cabin, reading our mysteries and sci-fi by Coleman light. The cabin sits perched on forty-foot cliffs overlooking the back channel. It was past ten in the evening, but, as often happens in the north country, a late light hangs above the water, starving the landscape of color, but making everything visible. Even at this modest height, some forty feet above the water, you can easily block out the image of a passing boat by putting the tip of your thumb in your line of sight. What is big looks small, and what is small shrinks into insignificance. At the foot of these cliffs, as our fishfinder has since revealed, the channel drops rapidly to a cold, inky depth of sixty or seventy feet down to crumbled pink mountain root, river-dark stone. Across from this perch, perhaps a hundred yards away, stands the massive granite wall of the opposite bank, embroidered with lichen and tufted with jack pine. Below, the endlessly flowing waters of the channel, blue by day and silver gray by night, bathe boulders the size of pickup trucks, broken from the cliff and polished pink by the endless labors of winter ice.
I have been looking down at the channel for so many years that it is as familiar as the back of my hand, so that evening, as I stood to stretch and look over the channel I was startled to see a long, smooth oblong shape lying in the channel some twenty feet from the base of the cliff. I called my wife to the window and asked her what it was. At this height it was clear that the thing was not small, and we had the nearby boulders at the foot of the cliff to supply perspective. I estimated that the long, perfectly smooth shape was approximately forty feet long -- dwarfing the dimensions of any boat on the flowage. There were almost no roughnesses on its glistening surface. At most, the shape rose perhaps two or three feet from the surface of the water, suggesting disturbingly that most of it lay below. If I had been in salt water, I would have imagined I was looking at the back of a whale.
"It's just a rock," Melanie suggested. A good guess, since many rocks and islands take that shape in the flowage, and can glisten in the evening as water flows over them. "No," I told her, "I know this channel. There is no rock there." We looked down at the motionless form for several solid minutes, trying to pin down hypotheses of what it might possibly be. It was a clear, strong shape -- as defined as anything in the landscape, it did not change or waver. Nor did it its apparent remarkable size diminish as we tried to guess how large it might be. Then, finally, we had to step away from the window for a moment. It was as if we had to step back and confer with the familiar -- speculate in the comforting warmth of the Coleman about what we were looking at. When we returned to look again -- the river was perfectly smooth and the thing was gone.
In the morning we made the mistake of telling my family what we had seen. There was, of course, lots of skepticism. People do not believe in large things that go splash in the night. Sturgeon perhaps, but sturgeon are spiny and finned, and only on rare occasions reach a length of eight or ten feet. Also, my talent for fantasy was suspect, even though my wife's down-to-earth testimony was hard to refute. As the joshing continued, however, I found myself getting annoyed. My annoyance came not from the fact that my doubters did not believe in monsters (I myself, in spite of what I have seen, do not believe in them, not, at least the fire-breathing, or Tokyo-stomping kind), or that my family was not willing to make a free-wheeling leap into a belief in the supernatural. Nor did Melanie and I believe that what floated to the surface of the bay that evening had anything to do with the supernatural. We simply saw something remarkable that we did not understand: something that looked like a whale drifting in a fresh water flowage thousands of miles from the sea.
But is it really surprising that in the course of a lifetime, many people experience moments in which they see something they cannot explain? Moments in which religion, education, values, systems of logic, practiced pat certainties of what reality is, and all the machinery of explanation we have been assembling since birth suddenly fail to provide us with a clear certainty of what we are looking at? And isn't the smug, everyday presumption that we already know everything even more fantastic than seeing a long smooth shape drifting in a river on a Canadian evening?
And where does this anger I feel surface from? Why do I grumble that these people have never taken me seriously enough, that they do not know me, really -- that even the corroborating testimony of my wife on every detail means little to them? Perhaps it is because I know they are thinking that if they had been there looking down from the cabin window they would have, in a split second at the very least, recognized the floating log, the bottom side of an old boat with its tin ribs displayed to the sky, the overturned Dixie cup downstream, or even perhaps pointed at something in the river and said "Oh look -- a monster in the lake," as a joke. Maybe they want any mundane explanation, preferably an absurd or humorous one, that fits with their memory of my making up stories to entertain them when I was six. Perhaps, but I think the truth is much simpler. They are jealous. They would like to have seen what we say we have seen, to possess the unexplainable, to trade their dull certainties for the mystery of the beast below.
And now sometimes on vacation, when late Canadian light still hangs over the back channel, I look down from the cabin to the foot of the cliff, where the river whispers its secrets against the fallen boulders. And I have a hope that on this night, any night when I am there, the mystery will surface again and reveal itself. That the long, gleaming back of the beast will rise from the channel below-and I will see that it is as great and silvery and inexplicable as I remember it. But this time -- I swear it -- I will rivet my eyes to the spot, not look away. And maybe, if I am extraordinarily lucky, the mystery will roll in the dark jade of the Winnipeg, extending a great fluke to the starry sky. And then -- yes -- this time I imagine it! A great eye the size of a dinner plate opens, sees me on the shore, lingers for a moment -- winks...and is gone.