Pigeon River Country: A Michigan Forest

1. North Woods

1 North Woods It lingers here yet: the smell of glaciers, mingled now with the sweetness of north country plants. Movement and change are the great forces of life. Elements like iron that were formed in the turbulence of stars now merge and shift in arrangements as complicated as human beings. One of our most deeply felt symbols of life force is a river system, particularly the clear-running rivers of the north. Even the most peaceful forest is alive with the movement of water. In a scarcely understood arrangement between water and tree, water moves out of the ground and up the trunk just beneath the bark, bringing star stuff from the soil to feed the tree. Then the water departs through the leaves to continue its movement from air to earth and back again. Put your hand in a stream and you touch the sky, the leaves, the tree, the roots, the earth. They say the water that dinosaurs drank is with us still, endlessly freezing, melting, and ›owing. The bonding of two parts hydrogen with one part oxygen carries our past into our present. If we stand by a river, it seems to come from some mechanical source, like a pump that is draining a reservoir—our long experience of getting water at a tap. If we stay by the river awhile, we get the sense of water on the move from all around. On a wooden footbridge over the Pigeon River after a night of rain, we see water over the banks, bending the grasses into long needles pointing the water on its way to the sea. It ›ows north to Mullett Lake, then into Lake Huron and on down the steps of the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic. In the collection of ancient Eastern writing called “The Way of Life,” there is a thought about water translated as follows. 21 The softest thing in the universe Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe. That without substance can enter where there is no room Not only is it the nature of water to shape without having a shape of its own. It takes on shapes that are in‹nite in their variety, those of snow crystals . Arctic natives are said to have 100 compound words to express different varieties and conditions of snow. Farley Mowat writes that “snow is crystalline dust . . . but on earth it is, in yet another guise, the Master Titan. Glaciers are born while the snow falls; fragile, soft and almost disembodied . . . but falling steadily without a thawing time. Years pass, decades, centuries and the snow falls.” Michael Delp, a poet living in northern Michigan , writes in “Walking Over Black Ice”: First you are struck by the very transparency of it, the darkness, the blackness of water below you. Then, you notice the slightest apparition of re›ection Its own weight depresses a glacier into black ice. The glaciers of the Pleistocene were two miles thick. They are not gone. Glaciers over Greenland toward the end of the twentieth century were two miles thick. Geologists say the Ice Age has just begun. Glaciers in North America have come and gone a dozen times, and there are about 50 more cycles to go. An average cycle lasts 100,000 years, meaning that we might have about 90,000 years to go before the snow again begins to accumulate summer and winter . A drop of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the average north woods temperature would start a glacier, with snow packing down, recrystallizing, turning to ice. When the glacier gets big enough, it shears into horizontal bands and slides on itself, moving toward the equator. It can start in any place cold enough; those that over the last two million years reached New York City and nearly to Tennessee formed in many places and spread in all directions. It is not hard to imagine on a winter evening that a glacier might start in the neighborhood of the Pigeon River Country, perhaps within the city limits of Gaylord, which calls itself the Alpine Village because of its moderate elevation and not so moderate snowfall. Glaciers are so frigid that they put enormous cold air masses into circulation , the kind that, on encountering humid air to the south, once PIGEON RIVER COUNTRY o 22 turned Nevada into a string of lakes dotted with islands. The islands are now mountain ranges. When glaciers reach places that are warm enough, the melting equals the...