LITTLE GRAY BOATHOUSE ON THE BIG MUDDY RIVER
(Copyright 2024 by Richie Swanson)
ELECTION NIGHT, NOVEMBER 3, 2020
I dreamt I lost my home, my boathouse on the Mississippi, on election night, November 3, 2020. The wrong presidential candidate led in electoral votes as I climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft. The election map online showed key battleground states shaded pink, and I lay down nauseous, devastated that an incumbent who ignored environmental protection, who raged against people of color and immigrants, who spread hate and falsehood might win in a landslide. I slept fitfully, a nightmare visited me: a cargo ship larger than an oceangoing freighter somehow steamed beneath the old “Wagon Bridge” a half mile downriver from my house. The huge ship dipped beneath the bridge and bobbed up, scraping trees from the bank on the back channel’s north shore. The huge ship kept coming. It scraped the shore directly opposite my boathouse and smashed people to pieces. Body parts and trees tumbled down a hill, though the opposite shore is actually flat. People screamed and fell helplessly, and emergency vehicles filled the parking lot above the boathouse on the south shore. I went up to the lot, and flashing lights blocked me from reaching the portable toilet across the lot, the kind used at outdoor concerts and festivals. A policeman told me I must move my boathouse across the river, so the people could gather on my shoreline rather than the north bank, which continued to collapse into the water.
I went inside and lay on my boathouse floor, exhausted and sleepy. A big black poodle shoved through my front door, followed by its master. I looked outside my door, and people crowded on the deck around my boathouse, waiting to rush in. I stood opposite the poodle’s master and told him he had to leave. He pulled out a pistol, a black automatic, and I drew one too. I stared across the tiny boathouse, fourteen by twenty two feet inside, and realized one of us had to shoot.
I woke harried, distraught. Until I checked the election map. The battleground states had turned blue, the incumbent would lose. Tundra swans hooted high in the sky, sounding like children crying out with joy, playing on a distant playground. They were migrating from eastern Alaska and northern Canada as they did every autumn, and a flock of mallards waited as usual outside the boathouse–dark shapes on a dim gray flow in the indigo dawn.
I felt blessed, still witnessing daybreak on the river 33 years after moving into the boathouse. I poured corn kernels for the mallards onto a plank, and the ducks watched cautiously, keeping their distance as a muskrat slipped onto the plank, pointing its snout at the ducks, ready to snap and claw. It hunched above the corn, and its fur gleamed coppery-red, and I saw pelts stretched on the drying racks of Indian women…pelts pressed flat and piled into bales…bales loaded into canoes paddled by French-Indians and Native Americans to Yankee clerks at the nation’s first trading posts on the upper river.
After the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812 placed the Mississippi firmly into the hands of the United States, the American Fur and other companies eagerly pursued the rich beaver resource on the upper Mississippi. But beavers had previously been overhunted by the French and British, and by 1836 muskrats comprised ninety-five percent of pelts traded on the river.[1] Muskrats also became a means of currency more trusted than government script and bank notes. Twelve “rats” (muskrat pelts) could buy a pouch of Venetian beads; twenty rats, a hundred pounds of lead for musket balls; forty, a rifle with a percussion cap.[2]
So, the muskrat deserved to eat first—its ancestors had helped fuel the economic development of the nation that eventually included the State of Minnesota and city of Winona, whose laws allowed me my floating home. The muskrat fingered corn from my plank into its mouth, and its tiny black paws also spoke an ancient story of the Anishinaabe, Native Americans who have for centuries called the “greatest river” the Michi-zee-bee.[3]
I don’t claim any inside or direct knowledge of Anishinaabe or any other Native culture. I don’t claim any indigenous birthright to American soil, and I recognize the colonial thefts of North America and other continents. I admire Native stories greatly, since they inspire me to see beyond the Eurocentric and anthropocentric traditions I learned in school and from Hollywood and television westerns. The appreciation can be a problem, I admit. I currently have so many Indian books in my boathouse I can hardly keep it afloat.
Edward Benton-Banai in The Mishomis Book, The Voice of the Ojibway celebrates the muskrat’s crucial sacrifice. When first people of the Earth quarreled and killed one another too much, the Creator flooded the land to purify it. Waynaboozhoo–a culture hero, a spirit with human attributes—survived the flood by floating on a huge log. Some birds and animals joined him, and Waynaboozho decided to create a new land. He dove down into the flood, hoping to find a handful of Earth. The flood was too deep, he failed. A loon, merganser, otter and other creatures also tried and failed, and then Muskrat said he would try. Muskrat was riddled and teased. He dove down, remained under a long time. He floated up dead yet held a little ball of Earth in his paw. A turtle volunteered to bear the weight of Earth on its back. The Four Winds blew the dirt in all directions. Waynaboozho sang, the animals danced in a circle. The land grew into “Turtle Island,” and the Creator “made it so that muskrats will always be with us because of the sacrifice that our little brother made for all of us.”[4]
These days the Michi-zee-bee also sacrifices herself for the nation’s economy. I feed the muskrat corn produced by industrialized agriculture that deposits such an overload of sediment and fertilizer into the river that it helps create a zone of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico below her mouth. Most years the “dead zone”—ocean water so deprived of oxygen that clams, mussels, snails and other natural life cannot survive—is about the size of Massachusetts.[5] When I buy the corn for my little brother the muskrat, I help create a market for the shipment of the grain in barges that require a navigation channel dredged unnaturally deep—nine feet, mandated by Congress. The river is currently squeezed between dikes from St. Paul to St. Louis, cut off from her adjacent backwaters and tributaries. Locks and dams maintain her water levels and create lake-like conditions that inundate floodplain forests and other wetlands in some locations, and that dry up marshes and fish-breeding sloughs in others.
Yet muskrats haven’t abandoned their role of sacrifice. One April morning I heard mews and thumps from the water—a male mink swam atop a female, biting her nape, pushing her down through flood sludge wedged against the house (flood sludge=logs, beaver clippings, mats of last year’s wild celery and bulrush, wine-red maple flowers, fish tackle, bait cups, beer cans, sudsy-brown flood-foam). The male mink dragged the female screeching onto the duck log I had tied to the bank to provide a basking refuge for waterfowl and turtles. The female mink hissed, bit and wriggled free. She dove and disappeared in the water and popped out of a hole beneath the woodpile, just above flood-line. The male caught her by the nape and dragged her mewing down to the foot of my plank. He mounted her fiercely. He paused once, and she wagged her rodent-nose, gawking tiny-eyed, looking stunned. She lunged to escape, and he tightened his forepaws around her chest, yanked her closer and banged away for 45 minutes, the plank shaking so violently my floor shook.
Several weeks later, the flood dropped below the level of an old brick sidewalk on the bank, and a mink raced on it in a driving rain and disappeared upriver in riprap. She returned with a muskrat kit, holding it by its nape like a mama cat carries a kitten. She brought the kit into the hole below the woodpile, feeding her own young. She made six trips, probably taking the entire litter, if not the mother too. Such had been the muskrat’s sacrifice this time around.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Now my plank rattled as thirty “greenheads” rapped bills against wood, eating corn. The mallards swam to the duck log, shuffled onto it. They fluffed, preened and quacked for more.
LEARNING THE ROPES, NOVEMBER 1, 1987
The day I moved into the boathouse, its owner Mickey directed my gaze to the sleepy-cold current creeping downriver. “It’s easy now, hardly moving at all,” she said, and led me to two ropes tied from the house to a silver maple a few feet upstream. She stepped on the lower rope, and the house slid readily toward us, nearer shore. She was a long-distance jogger, her foot held the lower rope and house easily in place. Mickey untied the top rope, took out the slack, showed me the knot that kept the house moored tight to shore. She untied the lower rope, and I mimicked her knot, understanding the gravity of the situation. Mickey had moved in during the spring of 1982 and had recurring dreams of “waking up in the boathouse, and finding it was floating unmoored in the middle of the channel.” The following year she had pulled into the parking lot during the flood, and her headlights had “shown on an empty space over dark water” where her house should have been. “A large tree floating in the floodwaters had hit the most upstream house tied together with those of us on a shared walkway,” said Mickey. That house and Mickey’s broke loose and floated downstream with the current. The first house ended up lodged against the Wagon Bridge, but Mickey’s passed under one of its arches. Neighbors rescued both with motorboats and tied Mickey’s to a boathouse that was “gin-poled,” attached to a steel spud in the water. Mickey was renting from an owner named Penny at the time but needed a boat to get to its emergency location and had none. “The whole time, I’m sure I pestered Penny about getting the boathouse back to its spot.” Mickey offered to buy the boathouse. “Maybe the whole episode was enough of a pain in the neck for her (Penny), she was happy when I offered to buy the house from her,” said Mickey. “I think I got a bank loan for $700 to pay for it. Oddly, I never had another dream about waking up in an unmoored boathouse.”[6]
The rent I would pay Mickey would be river-rat cheap, ninety dollars per month, but I would also have to heed a second flood problem. I would have to prepare for the spring flood in November. “You have to push the house out before the ice floes come, and the river freezes,” said Mickey. She shared her adventure from the spring of 1984. “Not knowing that the ice froze deeper close to the shore, I’d snugged my house within about four feet of the rocks back in the fall and let it freeze in place. In spring, as the ice melted and the river started rising, the ice around the riverside of the house cleared. But the shore-side of the house and its barrels were still locked in ice almost a foot thick. “The river flowed over that ice and began to lap at the carpet at the front door. Meanwhile the house was beginning to tilt toward shore, and I was afraid I’d start losing barrels from the river end of the house.
“I bought an ice chopper and waders and got to work. With a borrowed ice augur and axes and choppers, Phil (future fiancé) and I worked steadily for a few hours. We’d made deep cuts and broken through in some places, yet there were some areas where the ice was still thick. Finally Phil went home to get his chain-saw. He was able to cut through the remaining ice binding the house, somehow without flooding his machine. What a relief to watch the shore-side of the house rise up! There was still ice frozen to barrels and floor’s frame, but it was it was now clinging to the house ABOVE the water.”[7]
Mickey laughed about the incident and continued my boathouse lesson. She lifted the near end of the walking plank, a sagging oak board about twelve feet long and eighteen inches wide. She pushed its far end against the boathouse, and the house slid farther into the river. “You live back in the Stone Age now,” she said, and got down in riprap and wrestled boulders around until they held the plank in place. She gave me the skinny on the neighbors. “Bonnie’s a deer,” she said of the single mother who lived two boathouses up the row of seven. “She moves quiet like a deer, holds herself quiet like a deer.” Two bachelors and two parents and young boy also lived in boathouses above Bonnie’s, their structures single-storied, each with small floor spaces, only about twenty by twenty feet. “They live here because it’s what they can afford,” said Mickey.
I soon learned all islanders wanted to help one another, but no one knew how long they’d keep their boathouse. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had disallowed boathouses on the river years ago. The State of Minnesota did not allow habitation on public waterways, which was clearly happening here on Latsch Island. The city of Winona owned the island and rented about one hundred license spots where boathouses, docks and boat garages were moored. When I first moved to Winona in 1979, I attended a city council meeting, a discussion about the fate of Latsch Island boathouses. I recall that some folks complained that boathouse owners were living too easy on city land, using city services like the library and streets without paying taxes. Indeed a boathouse resident called Crow walked through the public woods without the inconvenience of clothes, and eventually landed in prison after placing a bomb in a judge’s mailbox. But a county judge, teachers, nurses, potters and other professionals also lived in boathouses. So did a fortune teller who worked at Renaissance Fairs, free-spirit carpenters who wanted to build beautiful boathouses forever, a gay man who educated Winona about HIV prevention, an entrepreneur who owned a gutter service, a river advocate who founded an effective environmental organization, seasonal tree planters and apple pickers, and even a jealous boyfriend who islanders claimed had untied the boathouse owned by his girlfriend’s ex and let it go down the river through the dam at Trempealeau. The press loved to feature boathouse residents, but many boathouses were owned by people who also owned houses in town, who used boathouses recreationally, to boat, fish and gather with friends and family. No matter the owner, the future was iffy. Most of the boathouses in “my row” had already been removed from a shore farther upriver and had been squeezed into the state’s legal right-of-way downriver from a highway bridge.
Old-timers in Winona claimed boathouses were once “everywhere on the river,” and that babies had been born and raised in boathouses during the Great Depression. But by now every islander had attended or heard about a government meeting where the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources had expressed displeasure about the increase of boathouses and additions of sleeping lofts. Latsch Island had become the last place where people lived in boathouses on the upper river, despite the state law that forbid it.
Mickey gave me a vote of confidence before she left. “We handpick who’s going to stay in our houses down here,” she said.
* * *
I slept easy that night in my sleeping bag on the floor and woke in the morning to a fog that swallowed the entire river valley. The blue river hissed lazily beneath the gray soup, and Taoist phrases floated through my head. “The sound of water says what I think.”[8] I wanted to receive the river’s gifts, by acquiescing to my own adaptation of Chapter Fifteen of the Tao Te Ching.
As careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
As fluid as melting ice.
As receptive as a valley.
As clear as a glass of water.
As murky as a troubled stream.
I lived by bicycle and foot, had to borrow a car to haul six-gallon jugs of drinking water home. One evening a carpenter-friend dropped off scraps of pine, and after dark I kindled a crackling fire in the black belly of the old coal stove inside. I filled the stove with two-by-fours, happy as a cat about the sudden and radiant heat. The stovepipe glowed orange, then pulsed red. I stepped outside, and now the roar of flames, not water, said what I thought. A chimney fire! The whole place—the new side decks that Mickey had built while swimming in deep water, hanging by an elbow from a board—the phone line connected to a trench she had dug by hand—the sleeping loft she had added—the stove and LP gas tank—waited below flames leaping above the stove cap, firebrands dancing above the roof. I called Barbi my sweetie in town, who had heated with wood in an isolated farmhouse the first winter after her son Jonah had been born. “Close the damper,” she said.
The fire quieted, but thin sheets of ice scraped against the floatation barrels beneath the house, frost shaving off, tinkling delicately like crystal. The sheets came down the river cavern-black, shining like glass, flashing a fluid white light from a moon hidden by clouds. Come morning goblets of ice jangled against one another and knocked hard against the barrels. I heeded Mickey’s warning. I untied ropes, pushed out the house and set the plank in place from the downriver corner of the house. I did the same with the “standout,” a four-by-four, from the upriver corner. The boathouse had no front deck yet, only steel mounts for the plank and standout. I secured the plank and standout with steel pins, and then a southeast wind gusted, and the house swung upriver, crashing against the neighbor’s. The plank and standout climbed the bank, and the front barrels scraped bottom.
If the house froze in where it was, it would remain locked in ice as water rose in the spring. So, I pushed the house out again—into whitecaps rolling backward up the Mississippi. Gusts kept blowing. The house kept swaying and banging the neighbor’s, luckily vacant. I felt like Sisyphus who the Greek god Zeus had sentenced to endlessly push an immense boulder nearly to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down. Yet Albert Camus envisioned Sisyphus happy at the bottom of the mountain, about to push the boulder again. “If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”[9]
Besides, the wind had become my big brother years ago. I had quit college in Ohio in 1977 and had headed west on my bicycle, so I could gather material and become a writer. When I had crossed Kansas and other Great Plains states, the wind had battered me until I had retreated into cafés and had scrawled in my journal with wrists so sore I could hardly print.
Nonetheless I continued taking bicycle trips, and wind had blown me into ditches where I’d laid face-down as hail pounded my back, and face-up as dust, pebbles and bits of sage had screamed above me as if chased by a tornado. Headwinds had met me at mountain summits and had forced me to pedal as strenuously downhill as up. Crosswinds had nearly blown me from my bike as the Thunders had hurled lightning bolts all around me. So, sometimes I’d retreated from wind, sometimes I muscled against him. Now I sat on a side deck, set my feet against my neighbor’s house, pushed it upstream with leg-muscle. I let an extra barrel roll between the two houses—a buffer. I tied an extra rope on the front, sat in the riprap, pushed boulders with my feet and buried the standout in place with the rocks. I was Sisyphus indeed, if not Fred Flintstone. But the little gray boathouse now floated in its place, far enough out, so it would float safely free in spring.
WINTER 1987-1988
The wind turned north, throwing waves for days across the back dock, covering deck boards with glare ice. The full moon approached, and a parade of ice floes descended the river, white forms shaped like continents, some so thick that islanders were known to skate on them. The floes gleamed pearly and silver amid white vapor, crowding from bank-to-bank, and smashed the house’s upriver corner and spun off heavily and slowly, denting barrels. Geese and swans flew furiously south beneath the stars, honking and hooting a desperate-sounding commotion. I lay in my sleeping bag beside the fire and hoped the floes would not bang the house loose or shake the stack from the woodstove. I must have slept because I woke suddenly to silence. The house no longer rocked, and the pearly gray continents stood motionless, locked together by crooked white borders.
The cold collapsed upon the entire valley like a leaden inhalation. I stepped on snow, it squeaked and thudded through brittle air, and echoed crisply from the opposite bank, Wisconsin. The ice growled and sang, and two mythical brothers belched beneath the frozen river. G-a-a-a-a Loop burped in a slow and lazy voice, and G-a-a-a-a Lunk responded in guttural baritones. Each sounded as if he tried to belch longer and louder, and then Mama Mississippi readied herself to thunder. She rumbled, wailed and whined, and then she twanged like an enormous saw-blade. BOOM! BANG! The elbow of the stove’s stack clanged, and the whole house shook as if wall-studs would snap apart.
Barbi brought nine-year-old Jonah and his best friend Matt to the boathouse for a sleep-over. The two boys bedded down in the sleeping loft and discovered a knothole in the floor that allowed them to spy on Barbi and me below. They whispered and giggled all night. We ate all-you-can eat pancakes for breakfast, walked across the back channel and witnessed funnels of frozen white bubbles suspended in clear black ice below a highway bridge–indisputable evidence of G-a-a-a-a Loop and G-a-a-a-a Lunk.
We walked an old dirt road through frozen bottomlands, and Jonah and Matt discovered Batman’s “Bat Cave,” and then we dared to walk on the Main Channel, where crusts of ice angled up where floes had collided. Jonah and Matt broke off sheets and smashed them into pieces across their heads—sheer joy—instant gratification–no Sisyphean struggle necessary–just snow suits that allowed them to make snow angels oblivious to the cold.
* * *
Winter storms blew roaring clouds of snow downriver, and sometimes little white sprites spun past, snow devils jumping and skipping like tumbleweed. I learned to use pine only as kindling, and I bought oak from an old Swede who delivered it in a crooked green pickup with gray-wood sideboards. Carl always wore bib coveralls, whether he was eating a steak at the greasy spoon where I cooked, or if he was dropping logs from the bed of his truck. He charged me sixty or seventy dollars per load, about twenty dollars shy of what I earned in a week. After he finished eating at the café, he would lean back in his booth, smile sidewise, flash a gold tooth or two. After he finished unloading his wood, he’d sit in the wicker chair in the boathouse, cup his hands together on his bibs and cock his head with great pleasure. “Ricky!” he said, needing only to stare at the flames and feel the heat, not to speak anymore. I couldn’t imagine how long and hard he’d worked, chain-sawing my wood, or how many years he’d run his farm at the bottom of a hollow outside town. “Yah,” he would say, “long time.”
Carl was the first of several tight-tongued old-timers who “got up wood” for me into their seventies and eighties, some Swedes, some Norwegians. They stacked logs so densely in their trucks a spider could hardly squeeze between the pieces. They said more with the firmness with which they clutched wood than with their words. They took pride they could still get up a cord for whomever needed it, and always climbed back behind their steering wheels, sitting straighter than their sagging sideboards, looking grateful they could help a young fellow who wanted to live simply, close to the critters and birds.
I split wood with a six-pound mall, and as pieces fell around the chopping block, chickadees flew over from tube feeders and pecked into freshly-open larvae holes. Nuthatches and downy and hairy woodpeckers scoured the new stacks, flapping from log to log, yet sometimes they clung terrified and motionless against tree trunks, bills pointed skyward. They hoped to hide from a hungry predator perched ten feet away. Nuthatches froze upside-down. Scores of sparrows vanished inside bushes. Cardinals perched stock-still in brown tangles. One day a black-capped chickadee made a dash from one feeder to another, and a sharp-shinned hawk snatched it into its talons in midair. Another day a starling lay on the ground in the grips of a Cooper’s hawk, and raised and snapped its bill uselessly, and surrendered its vitals in a flurry of blowing feathers as the Cooper’s slurped its intestines like vermicelli.
I wrote every day at the rear window, working on a novel on a Commodore 64 computer, and stopped once when a strange weeping came from outside the front window. A gray squirrel lay sprawled in sunflower seeds littered on the ice, crying a plaintive squeal–a barred owl stared at it from a treetop, its head slung sidewise, dead calm. I cracked open the front door to see better, and the owl flushed—not far. I would come home after closing the greasy spoon, and the owl would soar silently from the same tree, probably attracted to the rabbits and rodents that scrounged through the sunflower seeds at night.
I’d enter the boathouse at night and turn on the light, and a deer mouse would somersault from the coffee maker, or a gray house mouse would shoot like a shrew-shadow along a wall. I’d grab a piece of wood from the stack outside, and a fuzzy dark bulk would lie motionless in a gap in the stack. Shine a flashlight, it didn’t budge, seemed not to breathe–a possum playing possum.
When the river finally thawed, I made my first duck feeder, framing a square of plywood with two-by-fours. I floated it outside the front window, and a great blue heron landed on it. It raised and depressed its head plumes, looking like a perturbed old gentleman, a dignitary clearly annoyed by the allocation of fish at a fisheries meeting. Old Man Heron thrust his head sidewise and held a gangly, reptilian eye parallel to the coffee-colored current. He turned into a gray-wood statue, the breeze wafting the tips of his belly plumes. He stabbed the river and instantly squeezed a mooneye longwise in his pterodactyl-bill. Both the yellowish eye rings of the mooneye and the golden eye rings of the heron seemed about to burst with primal intensity. The heron shuffled his bill, and down the throat went the mooneye. The heron stabbed the water three more times, never missed, and suddenly a song sparrow trumpeted, perched in red osier above dwindling patches of snow. I yipped inside, my own primal intensity set afire. First song sparrow of the year!
Mickey also had spring pastimes at the boathouse. “One afternoon, the sun was strong, quickly melting the trailing edge of the ice as the river flowed out from under it,” she said. “A couple neighbors and I entertained ourselves, curling stones out onto the ice, trying to get our missiles as close to the melt-edge as we could. Then we’d wager how long it would take for the ice under a stone to disappear.”[10]
“I can still remember the way the light in spring filtered down through the new maple and cottonwood leaves,” says Mickey. “I’d be hiking around on the rip-rap, yanking on lines, fighting with stubborn knots, feeling the warm breeze full of promises.”[11]
SPRING 1988, MOM VISITS
Indeed spring brought me the same optimism, even when my mother visited from Connecticut. Mom never knew who her father was. She told me she’d been given away at birth. She said her grandmother had come to visit her and had found her unattended, howling in her own vomit in her crib. Grandma Mimi had taken Mom home and raised her, and Mom did not learn the identity of her biological mother until a half-sister visited and taunted her with the fact. Mom lived enraged, the pain of abandonment always boiling below the surface.
As a boy, I never knew when Mom would “blow her stack.” A cash register girl at the A & P would glance at her the wrong way, Mom would launch into a tirade, and I’d feel everyone in the store staring at our family in disbelief.
Mom threw things at my father and ranted about his inabilities. She cried while she cooked meals, afraid they wouldn’t work out. She cooked bacon with fingers in her ears, afraid the grease would pop, and the noise would terrify her. But she loved nature, especially the beach in Norwalk, Connecticut, the city where she’d been born, where we lived. She loved to turn horseshoe crabs upside-down and marvel at their prehistoric legs amid the “rotten-egg smell” of low tide. She loved the way gulls screamed when she tossed pieces of bread to them, and loved to bait her own hook and catch blowfish on Long Island Sound.
She visited the boathouse in April and lit up when two sandhill cranes bugled, flying above the river. “Listen to that! Just listen! Listen to it!” We sought out the sound. We camped an hour away in a state forest, and Mom, Barbi, Jonah, Matt and I climbed a viewing tower in pre-dawn darkness, and the calls of cranes exploded in a meadow below us. Cranes danced without inhibition. They arched red-caps backward, pointed bills skyward. Tossed weed-stems and other debris from their bills into the air. Opened wings, leapt, bowed to one another. Twirled, circled. Hopped daintily up and down, flapping enormous wings.
The cranes blasted their calls and shook the air with a success so loud it vibrated inside our bones. Sandhills were nearly hunted to extinction by the early 1900s, but hunting bans, wetland restorations and other conservation measures have enabled their recovery.[12]
Mom bonded naturally with Jonah and Matt, since each boy suffered a parent who had vanished from their lives. Mom grew up in Connecticut a couple blocks from a village green and a colonial-style church, shaped by a Puritan heritage that would judge Jonah and Matt as “illegitimate,” born out of sin. She told me old high-school acquaintances still looked at her as if she were a “bastard,” yet now she camped in the free air where neither Barbi nor I regarded the boys with any such vicious judgement. She cheered the way Jonah threw a tennis ball against a park shelter. “With a vengeance! An absolute vengeance!” She clapped when Matt and Jonah showed up with an uncanny amount of firewood: they had “beat the system,” crawling through a gap at the bottom of a fence of a bin of for-sale wood that was still closed for the season.
We returned to the boathouse, she continued to play hooky from her past, just fished with the boys on the back dock, just watched the spring flood rise, the river grow brighter as the sun climbed higher in the sky every day. She passed in 1996, but cranes still bugle from the sky every spring, and I still hear her cheer, and thanks to an Ojibwe story, I also hear the “pretty voice” of a loon inside her heart.
The crane clan was one of the original seven clans for the Ojibwe, and the loon clan was another, says Anton Treuer in The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Living in the Modern World. The two clans once “dominated the civil chieftainships across the country.” The loon with a pretty voice would speak first and do most of the talking at councils, and the crane with a commanding voice would deliver the last word.[13]
Treuer’s story reminds me that Mom had the pretty voice of a loon inside her as well as the commanding voice of crane. She played the piano magnificently and read stories to her children beautifully. But rage constantly ignited her commanding voice. She screamed, and I hid inside my bedroom, wrapping my pillow around my ears. She screamed, and her rage sank into the entire family. She screamed, and her voice commanded that we hear the rage and fear that wracked her.
She died in fear, terrified to undergo a cataract surgery, afraid to see any doctor about a growth she believed was growing inside her. She died of heart failure alone on her sofa, unattended in her house, afraid to seek or accept medical help. She remained inside the tragedy of her origins, but these days sandhill cranes can be heard from the boathouse during breeding season as well as migration. They remind me that nature, if given the right conditions, can heal herself.
SACRED BUSH, SACRED TREE
I did not know it when Mom visited in 1988, but a Lakota constellation that speaks powerfully of natural renewal can be seen from the boathouse shortly after sunset on the Spring Solstice. It’s formed of stars in Triangulum and Aries and looks like “a branch with the bark stripped off,” says Ronald Goodman in Lakota Star Knowledge. Oral traditions called it Caŋasa Ipuyse or “Dried Willow” after red-osier dogwood, a species of shrub that grows on my bank as well in the Lakota homeland.[14]
The inner bark of the red osier “is the principal ingredient in the smoking mixture used while praying with the Sacred Pipe. Caŋasa Ipuyse stands for “the whole Sacred Pipe” which is used in a ritual by both the powers in the sky and people in their winter camps to “rekindle the sacred fire of life on earth.” The “Dried Willow” enters the Zodiac, the sun’s path, during the time of the vernal equinox. Its bowl is lit by the Big Dipper–the “ritual spoon” employed by the Wakaŋ Waste—“the sacred above powers of good”—to carry “the live coal of the sun” to the Sacred Pipe.[15]
The constellation marked the end of winter, the start of spring. It told ancient Lakota to leave their winter camps and perform “a celestial Pipe ceremony to regenerate the earth.”[16] It also told them to stop harvesting their sacred tobacco, to let the red-osier grow until the autumn equinox, when the plant was dormant.[17]
When I read this story, I planted red osier in pots on the docks beside my boathouse, thinking of Mom. She was not allowed to grow undisturbed, her demons haunted her entire life.
I applied the moral of the Dried Willow story to my boathouse life: when grape vines or a red-osier or indigo shrub grew luxuriantly and blocked the path to my plank, I tied the vegetation out of my way rather than cut it, and I told friends that I had added a sacred bush to the sacred tree I grew in pots on my docks, the cottonwood.
The cottonwood’s the granddaddy tree of in the upper Mississippi River floodplain forest. It grows the tallest and harbors massive nests of bald eagles as well as the delicate nests of a tiny, endangered warbler who once bred high in cottonwoods across the channel from the boathouse, the cerulean.
In late May cottonwoods release “snowstorms” of seeds above the river, white puffballs like dandelion seeds that float dreamily through the entire valley, filling the sky. The puffballs also create fluffy white borders along the shores of the river’s sloughs and channels and beside the river’s highways. But when I search the floodplain forest here for a cottonwood sapling, I can’t find one.
The red buds of silver maple also rain down in spring, forming rafts in sloughs so thick that migrating warblers and larger birds like the disappearing rusty blackbird swarm and walk across the burgundy-colored mats, feeding on insects. Later in spring the maple’s helicopter seeds—keys—twirl down from treetops and float so densely against boathouses that some of my neighbors mount outboard motors to docks and loosen the mats with a churning engine rather than try to send them downstream with a canoe paddle, as I do.
Before the locks and dams, the river dropped so low in late summer and early fall that people walked across her. Mudflats emerged. Cottonwoods, river birches and other trees pioneered the muck, and islands formed. Now the historic forest of the slow sinuous river is gone. Floods last longer and crest higher in the channelized river than in the old natural river. Silver maples thrive in the wetter conditions. They create a closed canopy that shades out young cottonwoods and also swamp white oaks, black willows and river birch.[18] When the canopy opens and sunlight reaches the forest floor, the exotic Reed’s Canary grass usually moves in like an army of European settlers on Native ground, choking out tree growth altogether.
But cottonwood seedlings sprout between sidewalk cracks and in gravel lots and lawns in town. I transplant them in pots on my docks, and when they grow five or six feet high, Barbi and I move them to parks.
I surround my house with cottonwood saplings and evoke a cottonwood chant shared by the Dakota writer Ella Cara Deloria in her description of a Sundance Ceremony in her novel Waterlily:
“You! You living ones, who sing the hillsides of the clouds!
Give ear to me!
You, called the red woodpecker!
You, the flicker!
You, the robin!
You, the crested woodpecker:
This is your tree; your home.
Here you raise your young…”[19]
Barbi had similar thoughts about a boathouse. The son of Bonnie who held herself “quiet like a deer” had reached walking age and was apt to fall in the river. In the spring of 1988 Bonnie sold Barbi her boathouse, which floated just one boathouse upriver from mine. One single mother provided for another. Barbi bought her first home, a place to raise Jonah. She paid a whopping 5000 dollars for it.
JONAH’S BIRTHDAY, JUNE 12, 1978
The day Barbi gave birth to Jonah in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I was 350 miles away in Minnesota, finishing my first visit to the Mississippi’s headwaters at Itasca State Park. I didn’t know Barbi, was on my first bicycle tour to the west coast. I’d left Ohio May 15 and had reached my first major destination ten days later, the birthplace of Mark Twain, Hannibal, Missouri. I waded across my second major destination—the stream that drains the lake that’s considered the Mississippi’s source—June 7, and spent the next four days canoeing and reading Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I lit out on the bicycle again June 12, entered the first Indian reservation I’d ever visited, the White Earth. I grew quiet and anxious, didn’t know what to expect. I passed dirt driveways, fallen sheds, sagging barns, boarded windows, abandoned foundations and windmills surrounded by weeds. I saw no Indians, only real estate signs. I stopped at a café at a resort, sat in a booth, and after a while noticed a small Ojibwe boy on a stool, playing pinball in a corner by the door. He had wide cheeks, wide chocolate eyes and a shy but bright white grin. He wore a sweat shirt, plain-colored trousers and bargain-rate sneakers. I had not heard or seen him at the machine when I had come in, but evidently he had been there.
Two white teenage boys came in wearing ball caps, nylon jackets and Adidas sneakers. They sat at the counter by the proprietor, a white woman in her forties sorting bills and chain-smoking. One of the teenagers tilted his head toward broad windows that looked out to a softball field scarred by all kinds of tire ruts. Most of the home run fence, a snow fence, lay on the ground, and trash blew beneath the bleachers, and bottles and cans overflowed from barrels. “What the heck went on?”
“The grand, old, Indian tournament,” said the woman.
“Dad don’t even call it baseball,” said the other teenager. “He calls it the skunk drunk.”
“There were more than I could count,” said the woman. “They really crawled out from everywhere.”
“I’m so sorry I missed it,” said the tall boy.
“This time they run over one another.”
“What kind of car?”
“Dodge pickup.”
“They can’t work, but they gotta have a good truck.”
“The guy was sleeping it off right in the middle of the road, and some fat little squaw didn’t even feel him under her tire.”
“I see they left the bases.”
“But not their brains,” said the woman. “You can’t leave what you don’t bring.”
The white teenagers laughed, and I watched in disbelief as the woman shook her head merrily, walking into the kitchen.
The Ojibwe boy pulled out the spring handle of the pinball machine, let it go and watched his ball. He pressed the flipper buttons, leaning softly into the machine, flexing his shoulders silently. The machine did not shake from his weight. He did not look up. During the entire hour I was in the cafe, he did not speak.
I pedaled out of there, very discouraged. It was the first time I encountered white racism on an Indian reservation, and would hardly be the last. I rode past an overgrown thicket, and an Ojibwe man called out beside the road. “Where you from and where you going?” The man stood beside a red-plank trough, his thin-framed glasses reflecting white flashes from the sun.
I jammed on my brakes and blurted my next-known destination. “Glacier National Park! The Rockies!”
The man smiled matter-of-factly, eyeing me directly. “You have a long way to go, I can tell you. I been that way many times. It’s Blackfoot country. I know it like I know my own reservation.”
The man was stocky, dressed in faded farm bibs. His biceps were brown and beefy, and his hair was gray, a thin crew cut. His face was round, and his skin, smooth. He looked younger than his hair indicated. He spoke more softly than his size suggested, slowly. He put down a hammer and held out a hand for a shake. “Glacier Park!” he said, smiling again. “Montana!” He gazed all along my bike and gear and met my eyes again. “I got a brother that way, and I go Route Two. You going Route Two?”
I didn’t have a Montana map yet. I didn’t know.
“You’ll go Route Two,” he said. “You’ll see. That road goes all the way across North Dakota, all the way across Montana. You go through Browning, and then the road makes a big, sweeping curve, and you climb like you never climbed before. Then you’ll be in the mountains, and you’ll be going over Logan Pass.”
I had never been to the Rockies, but the man’s face as he talked filled me with so much expectation I could hardly keep my feet out of my toe-clips.
“Then you’ll be in beautiful country,” he said.
I believed him explicitly, straddling my bike in the middle of the road. But I saw no house, only the thicket and then larger trees behind him. “You live here?”
“No, this is my rice mill.” He ran a palm along the inside of the trough. “I’m fixing it.” He peered west down the road. “You know the next town, Mahnomen? It means wild rice. My people are the Wild Rice People.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen any rice.”
“It’s off the highway. Back on the lakes.”
“Or Indian homes. I’ve only seen white homes.”
“A lot of us live back by the lakes by the rice”
“The resort back there–”
I told the man what I had seen, and he shrugged. He frowned and then smiled as if he were resigned.
“The resort was probably started by us, but later it got sold to whites,” he said. “A lot of the land’s been sold off for a long time. We got it, but we didn’t get so many jobs, and a lot of people couldn’t keep it.” He reached down and touched his mill again. “It became that way.”
“Don’t you get mad?”
The man smiled matter-of-factly again, breathing easy. “There’s only three states and one province where the wild rice grows,” he said. “Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Manitoba. It grows on its own. You don’t have to plant it.” He looked at my bike again, the pedals, crank and chain. The sun shone on his glasses again. “Some people use motors, but not many. I don’t. The rice gets ripe in August, and I only go for it in a canoe, not a motor boat. I go with my cousin or nephew, and sometimes I stand up in back, and I pole through the marsh. Other times I sit in the middle and sweep the grains off the plant with a wood baton. I knock it into the bottom of the canoe, and we hull it here. My parents lived here.”
The man knelt down and picked up his hammer. “You coming back?” he said.
“I wanna make the ocean,” I said, “Seattle, Vancouver. I don’t know how I’m coming back.”
“If you come back, start before August. Those Rockies in Canada will snow on you if you don’t.”
The man lifted his hammer and gave it a short, single shake. He smiled his easy smile one more time, and I went on, his voice singing inside my head. Where you from and where you going?
* * *
Before I’d ridden through the White Earth Reservation, I’d sent Tom Sawyer home, so I could read it again. I was charmed by its 19th century river setting and Tom and Huck’s playing hooky on an island (which I still do), and by Tom and Becky’s adventure in McDougal’s cave and the boys’ triumph over the “murderin’ half-breed” Injun Joe.
I had after all just visited Twain’s childhood home (Hannibal, Missouri) two weeks ago. I’d bought Tom Sawyer in the Becky Thatcher Bookstore, had drunk a 58-cent milkshake in the Becky Thatcher Dinette, had daydreamed my way along a cobblestone street that included Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence and the window he had leapt from whenever Huck had meowed for him after dark.
Dioramas in at least three different museums had drawn me into a history and innocence I craved, and a bronze statue of Samuel Clemens high on a river bluff had allowed me to feel the writer’s genius as he and I gazed upon the mighty Mississippi below. But as I left the White Earth, I suspected Twain had drawn Injun Joe–the most famous Indian villain in American literature–with the same bigotry I’d just witnessed in the resort’s café. He’d characterized him as a savage thief who had killed a grave-robbing doctor because the “Injun blood” wasn’t “in him for nothing.”[20]
But not their brains. You can’t leave what you didn’t bring.
Ultimately Twain placed Injun Joe where much of his white audience supposed Indians belonged: punished due to their un-Christian and non-white nature, gone forever (inside McDougal’s cave) from the newly settled white world that would be redeemed by their own presence and religions.
* * *
Ten days after I left the White Earth, the incident repeated itself on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, 550 miles west in eastern Montana. I turned out of the wind on Highway Two and sought a grocery store amid a sorry-looking Main Street, all its buildings badly in need of paint, with signs too faded to read. The grocery was boarded up, its door padlocked. The only way in through was via the post office next door, which had iron bars on its windows. The town’s café, gas station and Lion’s club were boarded, closed and padlocked, but Hank’s Bar was open, and I went in and headed for the john, and the white proprietor stopped me, “The pipes got busted during the Indian celebration last weekend.”
“How long has everything been closed here?” I asked.
“Two years. Ever since the Indians took over. The businesses were run by whites, and the Indians started raising hell, and everybody sold their goods and packed up and left.”
“Everybody?”
“Except me and the guy who owns the elevator, and we’re about ready to go too.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, the Indians think they’re making progress. Look at it! It took them two years to tear down what it took the whites sixty to build. They have their own laws, you see. They could rob this place every night and spend two days in the tribal jail, and if I rob something, I get twenty years in the federal penitentiary. And they don’t pay taxes, but I have to!”
In another town I painstakingly avoided broken glass strewn all over Main Street and leaned my bike against the dirty, drab wall of a tiny grocery. A white woman coming out the door gave me a warning look. “Watch your stuff, so they don’t steal it.”
I bought bananas inside, sat on a crumbling sidewalk, and a native voice cooed above me. “O-o-o-o-o, you must be traveling?” A 62-year-old Assiniboine woman stood in a roaring gust of dust, her old Indian clothes wrapped tightly against the wind and boiling-hot sun. Her face looked ancient and wrinkled to me, and her eyes, kind and motherly. “Where?” she asked.
“From Ohio to Vancouver.”
“O-o-o-o-o. You’re halfway.”
“And it’s been a good half, but I meant to get here by five before the museum and Indian headquarters closed. Is the next town still on the reservation?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I can learn something there.”
She mumbled to herself. “I don’t trust my own people. Some are all right, but the young ones…” She shook her head. “They’re no good. No one follows the old ways here.”
“Who owns most of the land?”
“The whites, that’s the problem, the trouble, here.”
I asked her about the next town, where whites had told me not to dare camp.
“They don’t like us in Wolf Point,” she said. “There’s discrimination against Indians there.”
I reached Wolf Point while that last bit of sunshine flooded the Missouri River bluffs, and I camped with two teenaged Indians at a roadside table across from an old grain elevator. I don’t remember the teenagers as vividly as the elderly Ojibwe man and Assiniboine woman, but my bicycle journals claims they worked at the concession stand at Red Bottom Celebration Grounds and disdained the tribal rituals performed at the powwow. “Taking an hour to drop a feather,” said one.
“To pray to have patience with the white man who has always robbed them, and still is,” said the other.
I kept riding against the hard western wind, getting physically and spiritually stronger every day. I got to know my country firsthand, discovered a lot of what hungered for—a new, larger truth about America, which I desperately needed after coming of age during the Vietnam War.
COLONIAL WAR HISTORY
Japan took control of France’s old historic colony of Vietnam during World War Two, and when it surrendered in 1945, Allied leaders might have allowed the Vietnamese to hold elections and choose its own government. Ho Chi Minh had been asking Western powers to grant Indochina its independence from France since World War One, and he had also helped form the League for the Independence of Vietnam—also known as the Vietminh—in 1941.[21]
The Far East division of the U.S. State Department warned President Truman in 1945 that if France did not grant Indochina “true autonomous self-government” that there’d be “bloodshed and unrest for years.” Nonetheless Truman feared the Vietminh would increase the spread of Asian Communism and assured France that the U.S. supported its old claim to Indochina, including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.[22]
Several weeks before the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered to General MacArthur on the USS Missouri, the Allied leaders divided Vietnam at the 16th parallel. They temporarily put England in charge of South Vietnam, and Chinese Nationalists (allies against Japan) in charge of North Vietnam. Each was to administer the removal of the Japanese.[23] But by the time Japan surrendered, the Vietminh controlled Hanoi, the capital of the North.[24] It also vied for control of Saigon, the capital of the South, and unfortunately the British general in charge of the South believed that “natives” should not defy Europeans.”[25] He exceeded his orders, declared martial law, freed and armed French troops who had been interned by Japanese.[26] The next day the French troops went on a “rampage,” killing Vietnamese citizens, hanging Communists, ousting Vietminh from government buildings and hoisting the French flag over Saigon again.[27]
Three short weeks after Japan had surrendered to the Allied forces, a new war to control Vietnam had begun, fueled by Western concerns about Communism but also by colonial blindness and arrogance. France and the U.S. had just fought a terrible war against the horrors of Nazi occupation, yet neither could recognize Vietnam’s right to be free of foreign occupation. Instead they enacted the same abuse that colonial powers had wielded for centuries. They denied self-determination to a non-white, native population thousands of miles from their homelands.
The U.S. spent 2.5 billion dollars—more “assistance than France received in Marshall Plan aid from America”—to finance France while the Vietnamese fought their “War of Resistance” against the French.[28] The Eisenhower Administration considered but rejected using tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Vietminh troops while they were decisively defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.[29] After peace accords in Geneva, Eisenhower supported and funded a repressive regime in South Vietnam led by a former colonial official, President Ngo Dinh Diem.[30]
Diem’s secret police executed and imprisoned Communists and other political opponents, and Diem refused to hold elections scheduled for 1956 because he, Eisenhower and others believed Ho Chi Minh and Communists would win.[31] The Kennedy Administration helped plan the coup of Diem in 1963, when he was murdered.[32]
Presidents Johnson and Nixon continued the war against North Vietnam, and before the U.S. was driven from the country in 1975, it dropped four times as many bombs upon the land it was supposedly saving, the South, than the North (four million tons versus one million ton). By the war’s end, the U.S. drove five million South Vietnamese, roughly one-third of the population, off their land. The U.S., in effect, destroyed the South in order to save it.[33]
* * *
As I bicycled through Indian reservations in Montana, I didn’t consciously realize that the U.S. had also displaced and destroyed Native Americans to supposedly save them—had forced them from their non-white world into white civilization from the 1700s to the 1900s, as it would later try to force Vietnamese Communists into capitalism favored by white Euro-Americans. I could not have articulated the correlation in 1978, but my impressions were colored by the Vietnam War. I was fourteen in 1968 and haunted by the prospect of being drafted and ordered to take part in killing both citizens and soldiers in Vietnam, or of being killed or maimed myself. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were objecting to the war, each was shot, and the My Lai massacre also hit the news.
When I was fifteen, National Guard soldiers opened fire on student protestors at Kent State University while Nixon waged secret war in Cambodia. Mostly I wore my hair long, coped with my parent’s tumultuous marriage. But my country’s atrocities repulsed me, and as I witnessed bigotry and dirt-poor conditions on Indian reservations in 1978, I was repulsed again. I felt and recognized ugliness. I needed more dignity than American triumph could provide—needed to love and respect nature and humanity rather than bomb them. I knew, at least, that reservations did not reflect a democracy that treated all people as created equal.
SUMMER 1988
Ten years after the White Earth incident (to the day), Jonah celebrated his birthday by leaping off second-story deck of my boathouse and swimming up the lazy brown current with friends to Barbi’s house. He and his pals floated on inner tubes, clinging to ropes tied to Barbi’s flower dock, which held so many potted zinnias etc. that I kidded Barbi that barges in New Orleans were running out of draft because she dipped her watering can so much into the Mississippi.
During our first summer on the river Jonah could joke that he was the only guy in his class who could swim under his room–though the state didn’t necessarily allow it, we expanded Barbi’s house, adding a bedroom for him.
The owner of the boathouse between us swapped places with Barbi, and we pulled the houses by ropes, so we floated side-by-side. Then we built the bedroom’s foundation of two-by-sixes right out in the open where anyone could see it, on the side of the island that faced the main channel of boat traffic patrolled by county and state officials. Denny who designed and captained the project had already dared to add a loft to his boathouse down-island, and to build an exquisitely peaked roof and a beautiful interior with cherry floors. And Jon who lived in a munchkin-like boathouse with an arched loft fit for a gumdrop forest helped pound the foundation together, and his wife Ellen, a nurse, also played a vital role.
Barn swallows raised a brood that summer behind my boathouse and seemed to provide a perfect example of how a guy and girl could communicate while parenting a young boy. They built a nest atop an old electrical junction box that had a million-dollar view the river, and that risked full exposure to the northwest wind. Ten years later a thunderstorm roared with 80-mile-per hour gusts and knocked down the biggest cottonwood on my bank. Nonetheless the nest, parents and young survived—probably because a parent hunkered flat on it while the storm raged.
When chicks begged from the nest in 1988, Mom and Dad took turns flying in alacritous loops above the river, catching bugs for them. They also took what appeared to be commiseration breaks. They would perch side-by-side on an eave and would jabber, twitter and warble to each other. They’d go on and on, garbling and gurgling. They’d twist, turn and nod their blue-hooded heads and pulse and puff their chestnut throats. They’d air it all out, whatever they needed to say, whether it pertained to the bug harvest, predators, their young–or their fitness as reflected by the complexity and length the song, as ornithologists suggest.[1] And then whoosh! They’d zoom off to catch more bugs.
And so I acted like a good barn swallow. I aired out my concerns to Barbi about having Jonah present on the day we attached the floating foundation of his bedroom to her house–it had no floor yet, only the two-inch edge of two-by-sixes to walk on, and if someone fell through, they’d get a good knock on the way down, cut themselves on joists and bolts, and maybe get a hand or leg squeezed between a barrel and a board. Barbi agreed, and we sent Jonah to Matt’s for the day, but a couple hours into the job the two boys biked down from the Interstate Bridge to the boathouses like the kids on BMXs in E.T. A few minutes later Jonah fell through his room’s foundation and caught a calf on the point of a framing nail—a three or four-inch gash in need of stitches to stop the bleeding, I thought. But Jon and Ellen were helping that day, and Ellen cleaned the wound, pinched it closed with an expert hand and warned Barbi about tetanus—Ellen who in a couple years would have to drive hurriedly on the frozen Mississippi and then to the delivery room after her water broke unexpectedly in her and Jon’s boathouse.
“Yes, indeed on February 20th 1990, at 6:00 am, I did lose the water in the boathouse loft,” says Ellen. “That wasn’t supposed to happen until March 17, Riise’s due date. The ice was in strong that winter though, so we were able to drive right on down “Ice Road” to the Interstate bridge, then onto Highway 61 and on down the river to Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse. Just like in the suburbs.
“Riise was four pounds, five ounces and a month early. I recall that I was quite reluctant to discuss the living situation with the nurses and staff, even though I was already working there, on staff in Pediatrics. Everyone down there from the midwife to the pediatrician were considered friends. I didn’t want them to mount an intervention! She was so small and we were taking her to live in a boathouse in the winter! My trusty mate however, kept that little place all warmed up and lo and behold, she survived. She slept in a little basket in a hammock until we moved into our farmhouse June 1990. Despite her inauspicious start, she is getting married October 19!” [2]
TO BE CONTINUED…
[1] Brown, M. B. and C. R. Brown (2020). Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.barswa.01.
[2] Gundersen, Jon. Ott, Ellen. Message to Richie Swanson. Email. March 26, 2024.
TO BE CONTINUED…
[1] Gilman, Rhoda R. “Last Days of the Upper Mississippi Fur Trade.” Minnesota History, Vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1970) pp. 132-140.
[2] Chittenden, Hiram Martin. The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Vol. 1. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, First Bison Book Printing: 1986. p. 8.
[3] Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: the Voice of the Ojibway. University of Minnesota Press. 2010. p. 8.
[4] Benton-Banai. The Mishomis Book: the Voice of the Ojibway. pp. 29-34.
[5] Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force. “Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone: 2020 Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Site.” https://www.epa.gov/ms-htf/northern-gulf-mexico-hypoxic-zone.
[6] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Notes. Message to Richie Swanson. January 18, 2021. Email.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Watts, Alan. Tao: the Watercourse Way. Pantheon Books, New York. 1975. p. 90.
[9] Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York. p. 91.
[10] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Notes. Message to Richie Swanson. January 18, 2021. Email.
[11] Maslowski, Michelle. Boathouse Thoughts. Message to Richie Swanson. January 17, 2021. Email.
[12] Gerber, B. D., J. F. Dwyer, S. A. Nesbitt, R. C. Drewien, C. D. Littlefield, T. C. Tacha, and P. A. Vohs (2020). Sandhill Crane (Antigone canadensis), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.sancra.01
[13] Treuer, Anton. The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Ojibwe Living in the Modern World. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 2021. pp. 47-48.
[14] Goodman, Ronald. Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Theology. Siŋte Gleska University. Mission, South Dakota. 1992. p. 7.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid. p. 50.
[18] Guyon, L., J. Sloan, R. Van Essen, and M. Corcoran July 2016. Floodplain Forests and Water Quality in the Upper Mississippi River System. Report to the Audubon Society. Natural Great Rivers Research and Education Center, Lewis and Clark Community College. p. 9.
[19] Deloria, Ella Cara. Waterlily. University of Nebraska Press. 1998. p. 115.
[20] Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in The Complete Works of Mark Twain. Abner Doubleday, January 1, 1960. pp. 60-61.
[21] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press. 2013. p. 3.
[22] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 137.
[23] Ibid. p. 147.
[24] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 32.
[25] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 148.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 36.
[28] Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: a history. Viking Press 1983. p. 137.
[29] Ibid. p. 199.
[30] Warren, James A. Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam. St. Martin’s Press 2013. p. 125.
[31] Scheer, Robert. How the United States got involved in the United States. The Fund for the Republic Inc. p. 40.
[32] Appy, Christian G. American Reckoning: the Vietnam War and our National Identity. Viking Penguin 2015. p. 24.
[33] Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. First Vintage Books Edition August 1973. p. 569-570.
