Ebenezer Creek

We come to Ebenezer Creek in Georgia in late afternoon and it is already too late and the weather too iffy to assemble Julia and set out. And by now we are hurrying home anyway, aren't we? Or at least we should hurry, rather than poke around some marvelous mud holes and expand our list of very good reasons why we should delay our return to a more predictable life.

I walk along the creek, a tightly twisting tributary of the Savannah River, and move from one fluted tree to another, from a golden patch of hard sand to a bonsai skyline of cypress knees. I also think about a December day in 1864 when the Union soldiers under Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis crossed the swollen creek on a pontoon bridge and then cut it loose to prevented a large group of newly freed slaves from crossing as well. Caught between their unwilling defenders and the hostile Confederate cavalry riding on their heels, hundreds of ex-slaves, women, men and children, rushed into the icy creek, struggled, and drowned. 

Where did it happen? Maybe right here? Around this bend? This is a vast watery cemetery, now glided over by fishermen in noisy boats and tourists paddling candy-colored kayaks. A nearby family house with clapboard marked by green streaks of mold sports a Confederate flag. A red cardinal, a drop of blood in the thicket, vanishes and reappears. 

The night is coming and John and I drive away, toward tall cypress trees of South Carolina's Congaree National Park. It is now pouring thick dark rain which beats on our windshield. The road almost disappears and the trees flap madly in the wind. Glad we did not go and paddle. Happy to be dry.

But maybe we will come back next spring to this black creek, and pay our respects to the dead by floating really slowly, slowly and quietly? And then go on to the Okefenokee Swamp further west, the place that gave me my first bout of swamp love many years ago, and my first wild snake -- a large Indigo, in shades of midnight blue -- crawling up my warm body while I perched on a dry pine island.

©Yva Momatiuk

Living with genus Vespa

It is dark and windy, and I walk in an oak grove on a ridge between pewter cold lakes. The Turtle Mountains' woodland in North Dakota is thick with ash, quaking aspen, maple, elm and birch. But oaks, gnarly and spreading, stand out with their brown canopies of October foliage. I look for them: in this colorful forest of bright leaves they are monochromatic and solid, old and set in their ways. I search the branches with my lens and catch a glimpse of a grey swaying hive. Hornets' nest!

Too early in the season to get it down? Well, the nights are already freezing and we are near the Canadian border, so it should be fine. Too high to reach? The hive dangles maybe 17 feet above the clearing, and we have our camper. And John is tall and long limbed, so -- maybe?  Too early in our trip to burden ourselves with a large and delicate object, intricately constructed from saliva and dry wood shavings? Should it travel on our bed for another two months, for there is no other flat space large enough to accommodate its magnificence?

We already have three handsome hornet nests hanging in our house and this lovely hive would feel right at home. So just in case we could get it down and transport it safely I later mention it to John. We go and look, and yes, he wants it, too. But now I have second thoughts, so we call for a lunch break to think it over. The place in the nearby St.John is called N-8 Cafe -- for the owner's son, Nate -- and the soup of the day is listed as 'if available.' We ask, and it is. I check the life cycle of the genus Vespa on line, and there it is, as clear as a great fall day: the last workers in the hive die off in early November, good three weeks from now. No go. No hive. Not now. 

But on our way back to the forest John turns the camper straight into the clearing and parks it under the swaying object of my desire.

"Remember," I say, "it is too early. We cannot do it. It is their home." "I know," he says. "I do not want to take it down. I will just check if they are still there."

My wifely realism sounds a note of alarm. Why climb the camper roof in this sharp wind and struggle with the oak's porcupine of branches just to check? But his logic trumps mine, for what woman in love would say 'no' to this declaration of devotion: "I want to please you. And if it is empty, I want you to have it'."

In no time John climbs the camper and reaches the hive. He touches it, shakes it, listens to it, and then fishes out his Swiss army knife and gently detaches the hive from the stiff embrace of many branchlets the hornets used as its lofty foundation. Grateful, I intercept the offering which is as silent as any late in the season hive should be. Everybody left; the workers died off, and the queen is already burrowed somewhere in a soft rotten stump to survive the winter. If she lives, she will emerge as the world warms up and find a new location for a family home. This nest will not be recycled: soaked by cold rains and torn to pieces by winds it will disintegrate to smaller and smaller shreds, another Andy Goldsworthy-like opus of impermanence, devoted purely to procreation and the passage of time. 

The hive settles on our bed in the cold dark camper. Tomorrow we will return to N-8 Cafe, ask for a really large cardboard box, and mail it home. We will ask our friends Katherine and Richard who live there now to open the box and admire the hive, as we know they will. 

We walk around, photograph and smell the pewter ponds framed with golden aspens. Then night comes and we climb into our camper. John is downloading our pictures. I am starting a cauliflower soup, and the little space is now pleasantly light and warm. I open the refrigerator and there, on top of it, there are two dark and winged shapes sitting on our white pee bucket. Warmed by the cooking stove, alive and present. They look like miniature medieval warriors with horned helmets. 

Yes. It was too early. And we destroyed their home. Never mind they would soon die: they were not ready, and we did it.

The hornets are not even aggressive, just a bit dopey and disoriented, and I release them into the dark forest. Then I take the hive out and place it gently on the ground. Tomorrow we will hang it on another tree, a futile gesture of restitution which has no happy ending. I climb on our bed with a strong flashlight to search. I find no one else. But later I locate another one right by my foot, resting like a tiny domestic dog. This one has to leave, too, and we hope there will be no more.  

The morning brings light and warmth, and we go out to paddle in our Julia. The canoe slides across the blue Pelican Lake like a dry leaf, and we eat our lunch -- served on the paddle -- and drink our clear water from a big square bottle. We return early and unpack. The sun makes us lazy and warms the camper and ... oh no. Two more genus Vespa are already sitting on our water bottle in the sink. Where were they hiding? How many more? Are we surrounded? Should we surrender? Beg for forgiveness? Sprout wings and try to live their wild lives in order to appreciate what huge effort is needed to survive if you are a hornet? We search the camper again -- nothing -- but we sleep poorly.

The following night John is climbing into our bed when he spies a small elongated shape on the comforter cover. At first, his ingrained instinct is to see the ordinary and insist it must be a dark fluff from our thick socks. He wants to swipe it away but he confesses some frontal lobe neurology suggested he turned the light on first. Another hornet.

By now, I sleep with an EpiPen under my pillow. I know: our hornets are not hostile and warrior-like. They are tired, confused and lost, and I do not expect them to attack us. But if they are still in our bed and we roll on one or two, they would have to be saints to resist stinging us. And I am glad our EpiPen is a 2-pack variety: one for me, one for John.

Maybe the uncertainty and unknowing we still feel -- and will feel again tonight when we crawl into our bed -- is a fair price to pay for getting what we wanted when the seasons had not quite turned over and tumbled into winter.  Maybe it is good to feel a bit uneasy. 

©Yva Momatiuk

On the rocks

During the last few days we have been paddling in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and even nipped to Ontario for more lakes. But eventually the bad drizzly foggy and otherwise nasty weather pushes us south. 

Crossing the American Narrows on our way back to the US we run a maze of old railroad tracks, confusing industrial bridges spanning who knows what, and changing lanes which twist like dry spaghetti. The rain is still coming down in a cold nagging drizzle, the way it did all last week in Canada, and we are hoping for better paddling weather here. But this place does not look promising.  

"Have you ever seen a stranger border crossing?" asks John. The U.S. customs' officer does not look too good, either: pockmarked and somber, he offers none of the usual "welcome home" stuff. He takes our passports and asks about any fruit or vegetables we may have with us. John tells him we just ate our last two apples. 

"Any onions?" the guy asks, and his expression darkens.

Onions? Onions? How does he know? Yes, we do have one onion. Maybe, like John, I should offer the greatest possible information and tell him that being a crazy mushroom picker I carry onions and sour cream wherever I go. But this guy may be looking for a deeper meaning accessible only to him. Onion rockets? Onion bombs?

"What kind of onion?" he asks. This is getting slippery. "Red. It is a red onion. One," I stress. He startles a bit, as if this revelation confirmed his nasty suspicions, and waves us into a side bay. Two agricultural inspectors, both women, approach our truck. 

"So, you've got some onions?" one asks, knowingly. "What kind?

"Red onion," we reply in unison. "One. One onion."

She wants John to dig it out. He obliges and she eyes it critically. "Oh, it is red. That's OK," she says. "You can go." 

We wait until her co-worker opens a heavy barrier separating us from the free people who are allowed to keep all kinds of onions. The free people of International Falls, Minnesota. We roll into town and can tell by boarded up storefronts and front yards decorated mostly with old cars and appliances this place is down on its good luck. Large murals cover whatever they can. 

We need to look for the usual four: food, gas, water and propane. And: flu shots. A community pharmacy clerk calls the town's health department for us ("no, they are not from here, just traveling") and sends us to K-Mart. But what K-Mart! We are seated in two comfy chairs behind a red curtain, get help with filling out forms, and are allowed to select the arm (left) which we like to have stabbed. All done, we ask where we should go for lunch and two pharmacists deliver in unison: "Sandy's Home Cooking!" 

The home cooking place is a warm and crowded codgery. This is our name for back country cafes where old codgers sporting stretched suspenders and backs wrecked by decades of farming congregate daily for their refills of truly terrible coffee and some corner-of the-mouth gossip. There is a FREE WI-FI sign but not a single laptop, tablet or a smart phone anywhere in sight: are we in some foreign country? Here you talk. And eat stuff which is definitely bad for you but seems to put heat in your body and keep it there. 

Our warmth persists much of the dismal day, so when it suddenly stops drizzling and we find a rapids-free sweep of the Little Indian Sioux River meandering among tall reeds, we put in. Julia goes in the river first, then our gear, and we are off, upstream. Finally! 

Not really. Soaring over tall birches, pines and cedars, a flapping wing of rain overtakes us in no time. The rain comes down so fast we get drenched before we yank our rain gear from their dry sacks. For some idiotic reason, we try to flee and paddle like mad upstream to escape the deluge. I have to watch for barely submerged rocks but all I see are fat droplets whipping the river into an array of watery stalagmites, which raise and collapse like miniature pistons. Mesmerized, I want to photograph them, but we come to what appears to represent our senses, and turn back. John hoists Julia on the roof of the camper with seats still attached to speed things up. We throw our soaked gear in. And then it stops raining. Yes. And I do not even have a single picture of beautiful rain stalagmites. Subdued, we pull into a small forestry campground beneath a massive elephant rock. 

Morning is overcast. I read the campground's bulletin board and learn that Boundary Waters bears can recognize camping food coolers left unattended in cars. And they rip into vehicles to get to them. Smart bears. 

A man approaches our campsite and asks if he can cross it to get to the top of the elephant rock. He cradles in his arms a plastic bag filled with what looks like a fine grey gravel. His face is solemn and I suddenly know why he is here. 

"Is this what I think it is?" I ask, and he says yes: these are his mother's ashes. She loved this lake, these rocks, and used to come here often to hunt grouse. A crack shot, she liked to teach others how to do it well. Worked for Honeywell, supervising four engineers involved in the Gemini program and the Apollo. Met all the astronauts. Later in life she suffered congestive heart disease and had to move to a nursing home. But last time he called her she told him she could not talk because she was too busy: she was cooking dinner for all home residents. He managed to tell her he was clearing her house which needed to be sold, and she asked what he did with her bottles of bourbon. She had more than 40 of them stashed all over the place, and he already gave them to her friends. Ah, she said, that's good, but did you find an unopened vodka bottle? Yes, I did, and I put it in the freezer. Great, she said, just bring it over when you come on Sunday. And two hours later the home called because she died. So he will scatter her ashes on the rocks and go for a 35-mile hike. Three days.

I walk over and put my arms around him. "Thank you, Ma'am," he says simply, and I sense this is it. There will be no more words, just his short climb to the top of the elephant rock and the ritual of parting with what can still be touched of the woman who gave him life. She was a crack shot, and loved her bourbon, and this lake, and her life, too. We do not meet him again but late in the evening we climb the rock and see a grey layer of fine ashes scattered on a sloping ledge overlooking the darkening lake. 

"Goodnight, Mother," says John. 

His mother, too. And my own. Goodnight, Mothers. 

©Yva Momatiuk

Black Lake, bear lake

"These your hunting dogs?"

"Yeah." 

"What are you after?"

"Bears. The season just opened."

The dogs' owner just came out of the woods. He is tall and rangy and gray all over: gray jeans, jacket, baseball cap, hair, skin. Not fast or willing with words. I do not try to pet his dogs who peer from their kennel box mounted on the pickup tray. Their noses, black truffles tuned to the staggering multitude of smell molecules, twitch. 

Good for bears?  I used to hunt with my father as a kid, and still remember a joke about a hunter who bought a bear dog from a stranger. But right after it smelled a bear, the dog panicked and got between the hunter's legs, shivering all over. Furious, the hunter found the seller and yelled:  "What did you sell me? This here is no bear dog. They scare him shitless!"  "I am surprised," the man said. "I tried him on ducks, and he hated water. I tried him on hares, and he just sat down. So I figured he must be good for bears..."

I pull Gray Guy's tongue and learn how he hunts: he uses bait. Bait? Yes. What kind? "Anything they like: corn, grain, pancakes..." and I think: this is like nailing someone who came to dinner you set out with great care. Later I check Wisconsin bear hunting regulations and yes, you can shoot your bruin diners here, providing your bait is not "located within 50 yards of any trail, road, or campsite used by the public, or within 100 yards of a roadway having a posted speed limit of 45 miles per hour or more." I am guessing that if the posted road speed is lower than 45 mph, it is OK to bait bears right along such road and nail them in plain sight of a passing school bus. But I hope I am wrong.

We decide we better go and play on nearby Black Lake. Northern Wisconsin offers many, and they are often sandy-bottomed and surrounded with mushroom bearing forests. Sweet, kind lakes.

Playing on Black Lake involves a deliberate paddle to some interesting spot, and then staying put and looking for pictures. Hours pass, and we are still trying to photograph an array of floating vegetation, shaped like arrows, ribbons and wrinkled bonnets. And just like in our early digital days when we had only one camera body and had to be really polite in order to have our turn, we try to be on our best behavior. Stuck in one small canoe we became instant Siamese twins: one moves, and another loses the whole hard won composition of a watery close up. In addition, the slightest breeze drags our boat around and makes the whole exercise strangely futile, and at times infuriating. You ALMOST have it, and then the canoe drifts right over your floating subject, the blinding water reflection you tried to avoid comes right in, and you have to start all over again but what you saw will never happen the same way twice. We know that if we really want our subjects to hold still we should climb the nearby bank, wait for the wind to drop, and forget all this watery business. But this is not why we are here.

We are here because -- feeling I am sinking up to my nostrils in some thick disability muck -- I cancelled my second hip replacement surgery in July and pushed it out of my way and into December so we could just -- go. And because John  experienced a stroke of genius and decided that if I cannot walk well I can still paddle. He also found two used canoes on Craigslist, both excellent and wonderfully cheap, and we bought them. The traditional Canadian 14-footer will be used in the Catskills, while Julia -- named after her previous owner -- the folding wonder resembling an elongated umbrella when fully opened, came with us. Neatly packed, she fits on the side of our Toyota Tundra truck and becomes utterly invisible. Once assembled, she can travel on top of our rig, lashed down by John who scales the camper's roof with the fluid ease which makes my jaw drop. We are reluctant to subject Julia to high speed interstate travel, but once we reach a bunch of lakes laced together by rivers we slow down and she, sitting on our roof like a 17-foot long green lizard, is quite safe.

And we are also here because this fall we want to paddle our way West, stopping for days or even weeks in some wet places. Photograph. Cook. Walk. Reintroduce ourselves to wilderness from a new watery perspective, which calls for a novel set of precautions. Beaver lodge ahead? Watch out for masterfully sharpened willow sticks parked under the surface by the workaholic rodents: they think winter food, and we think punctures in our tender canoe skin. A nice put-in spot we used this morning? Never too speedy to embrace modern gizmos, we still do not have a GPS, and come evening we better find the spot in the approaching gloom, or we will shiver all night curled up in Julia instead of sleeping in our camper bed. The morning breeze building into a steady wind, with white caps to follow? Paddle toward the nearest lee shore, before our canoe begins to drift and bounce on a heaving lake like a dry leaf.

But we are lucky again and locate the spot and the camper. 

When we camp on the ground in high desert, I do a rattlesnake walk before we crawl into our joined sleeping bags. But out in the forests of Wisconsin there are no rattlers, only uneven terrain to park our truck. And since I want to sleep with my head elevated just so, I often have to do a rock walk and look for the right stone I will slide under one of our truck's wheels. John will drive the rig on top of it. 

And as I look for the best rock I see my MA in architecture is still useful. For it to be functional, I need the rock of the right size. And the right shape, so the tire would climb it easily. And I need to avoid sharp corners which may puncture the rubber. And it should not be so big that I bust my lower back and end up with my sleepy head as elevated as I want -- but in pain. And I like the rock to be beautiful, too. Dunno why -- it just feels good to have this way. 

©Yva Momatiuk