Inside, the air smells of ash and cedar. It’s calm and quiet, but there’s no place to sit. Baskets and wooden implements hang from the walls, along with tied bundles of dried plants. She guesses she’s not supposed to touch anything, but she can’t resist touching the tawny birch-bark wall, or holding the hanging white hat in her hands. The fur is soft and luxurious between her fingers. A circle of stones forms a fire ring on the floor. Straight overhead is a circle of blue sky. The northern lights spin in her mind.
Nora emerges into the daylight to find a girl pouring water into the pot. She’s wearing an old threadbare dress, a scarf wrapped around her head. “Pronounce it over, would you, please?” she asks a man who’s sitting on a log.
“You’re learning fast. Don’t get frustrated. Ojibwe is not an easy language.”
“Excuse me. I’m sorry,” Nora says, feeling as if she’s been caught trespassing. The girl startles. The man removes his glasses.
The girl clears her throat and composes herself. “
Boozhoo.
Welcome.” The man looks down the path past Nora, then says something to the girl in Indian.
“My daughter will demonstrate weaving a mat. There should be a group along any minute.” He tamps tobacco into a pipe. “Feel free to look around, and if you have any questions. . . .”
“Actually, I do have a question. Did you see the northern lights last night?” Nora looks from the girl to the man.
“I didn’t,” he says.
“It was unbelievable. The entire sky was covered. They were everywhere, and then spinning in a circle,” she points straight overhead. “They’d spin and break apart and come back together.”
The air fills with the sounds of chattering children, an adult’s herding voice rising above them. The girl turns to the man with a questioning look. He gestures toward the children as they swarm into the clearing. They gather around her. “Boozhoo. Welcome,” she says.
Nora walks back up the path. She’s disappointed; she thought they would have something to say. The circle thing was so strange. And the sleeping giant lying out there in the water. It seemed like something Indians would know about. But then, of course they were only actors, not real Indians. Well, no. They were real Indians. She’s not exactly sure what she means.
Nora wanders around in the gift shop, not seeing much that attracts her until she comes across a small birch-bark canoe. It’s perfect. The bark is white on the outside and satiny brown inside, lined with seams of black pitch. And though it’s over a foot long, it’s light as nothing in her hand. Nikki could store her hair ties in it, or maybe her agates. That would be pretty.
Nora holds her cigarette to the crack in the window and lets the ash fly off behind the car. She opens her notebook to the “What Next?” page, and sets it beside her on the seat. She’s only twenty-five miles from the border. The land out her windshield is different from anything she’s seen so far. It’s farmland, though there are flat-topped buttes rising up like in the old Western movies, but they’re not brown and dusty, they’re green with trees. She hasn’t seen a rock sculpture since she left Thunder Bay. “What Next?” Under the heading are three entries: “California,” “No winter,” “Pink plant.”
“What Next?” The page is irritating. Nora stubs out her cigarette. Life doesn’t work that way. More often that not, it simply happens. Janelle wasn’t exactly planned. And she never expected to be a bar owner; the bar came with Ralph. She never had a big plan for herself, never envisioned anything in particular. Unless her little-girl fantasies count—princess, nurse, playing bride. There was a phase, she must have been eight, when she’d stop at the bakery on her way home from school. She’d stand at the window and watch the woman squeeze colored frosting from a cone-shaped bag. She’d make ribbon designs and flower petals, write out Happy Birthday and people’s names perfectly.
When she was little, she drew pictures of cakes. She didn’t want to bake them; it was the decorating. Nora reaches for the notebook on the seat. She writes “ck. dec.” in tiny letters, so at least there’s something new on the page.
The lake is on her left as soon as she crosses the border. She can feel its airy coldness even when the view’s obscured. The Pigeon River. Hat Point—it’s reservation land. She passes a casino sign advertising a powwow.
Rivers cascade from the hills to the lake, spring-high and rushing beneath the bridges. The Hollow Rock River. The Reservation. The Flute Reed. Twenty-five miles to Grand Marais. Twenty-five miles and she’s back in known territory. The Brule. Nora lets her speed lag.
I hear the beat of the primordial ocean. The submerged volcanoes building on themselves. The seas that bring the new islands down. There is the tumult of earthquakes. Underwater landslides. Laying new strata. Building new landmass.
Rock and sky form a barren arc. Turn of day, the sun’s heat falls unchallenged. Turn of night, the rock is a frigid plain.
Held in these waters is the wrenching echo of the mid-continental land tearing. The lightning bolt rift spews plumes of liquid rock. There are burning fountains in the sky. Scalding heat. Acrid fumes.
The glowing lava plains turn flood basalt in air. Layer upon layer of molten rock. The weight compresses the rift’s axis. Heaves the edges of the plain toward the sky.
Rain and wind. Persistent erosion. Bring the new landmass down. The sunken rift fills with rock and sediment. Piling to a depth of miles.
The grinding glaciers creep down from the north. It’s the blunt smell of ice that lifts from these waters. The glaciers gouge debris from the sunken rift. Take the wieldable rock on retreating tongues. In their wake they leave this lake basin. Its northern rim still rebounding from the weight. In their wake. This billion-year-old cradle of rock.
1902
The predawn birds have stopped their cacophony, but Berit’s windowpanes are still dark over dark, reflecting her face in the lantern light. “I was in the skiff and there was nothing,” she scribbles, her letters tiny at the top of the page. “I couldn’t see land. My hands were blistered from rowing, but every direction I attempted was the same. There was nothing. No birds. No clouds. No land.” She pauses the tip of the pencil below the words, but she doesn’t know how to draw it. She makes a straight horizon line, but the feeling is entirely wrong; it’s flat and singular, not encompassing. She draws herself as a dot in the center of a circle. It’s better; it captures her sense of turning.
“The boat started to vibrate,” she writes. She could feel it in her feet through the bottom of the boat. She makes a quick sketch of the skiff in the water, lines circling out from its hull. “There was something happening below the surface,” she continues, “a rumbling, but I was afraid to look over the side. Suddenly, I was walking in a dark forest, though I knew it was day because thin spokes of light were coming through the canopy.” She draws heavy tree trunks and fills the space between them, then rubs in the angled lines of light with an eraser.
Out the window, the sky through the upper panes has lightened. There was something else about the forest. Something she always knew, or felt. The pale oval of her face in the glass stares back. She has no idea how to draw them. Her pencil hovers over the page. The first one she saw was a glimmer between the tree trunks. She applies her pencil again. I followed it as it darted and crouched. It was human in form though small as a child, and shimmering as if it were made of copper. She sketches its shape passing through the trees, but can’t represent its shimmering.
She was on a cliff and they were dancing below. She’d had to shield her eyes from the brightness. She sketches the shape of the movement, twirling and sinuous. The pink light from their bodies spun and flashed against the cliffs.
She looks over the page, knowing there’s something missing, but not knowing what it is.
2000
Everything on the shelves is made of glass, and lit from the sunlight coming through the windows—red, yellow, purple. Tumblers and bowls. Nora’s eyes fill with the glowing colors. Green platters. Orange and pink plates. She lifts a vase with scrolled yellow handles. The name, P. Eck-something, is etched in the bottom, and a sticker reads $110.
When she’d entered the office, a buzzer went off, but nobody has come to the door behind the counter. A blue plate dabbed with yellow catches her eye. She’s holding it to the light when the door finally opens and a man wiping his face with a handkerchief walks in. He’s forty maybe, brown hair, bearded, wedding ring.
“Sorry,” he says, “I heard the door, but I had to finish up what I was doing.”
“It’s gorgeous in here,” says Nora, setting the plate back on the shelf.
“Thanks. That’s a new one. Just made last week. What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for a room.”
“Well, what we have is a couple of cabins. A two-bedroom, and a smaller one-room.”
“Cabins?” She’s not so sure. “Do they have plumbing?”
“Oh, yeah. Bathrooms, showers, fully equipped kitchenettes.”
Behind the counter, a shelf holds a small stock of food. She wouldn’t mind cooking something for herself. “Does your pancake mix use only water, or would I have to buy eggs?”
“Water,” he says, lifting a box down.
“And syrup?”
“The best. It’s from our neighbor’s grove up the road. I helped them tap the trees this year.” He stands a small bottle on the counter.
The two cabins are separated by a tall, leafy hedge. Hers looks the older of the two, but inside it’s not dingy or smelly, it’s just a little dark. Nora dumps her stuff on the bed and parts the thin curtain on the window, where a bush crowds against the glass. In the living area, there are sliding glass doors that lead to a deck facing the water. She unlatches the door, pushes it open, and the sound of the lake sweeps in.
Nora settles in one of the deck chairs and taps a cigarette from her pack, happy to be back to her old brand. It’s only two o’clock, the sky huge and cloudless, the horizon a straight sharp line. She takes the box of color from the bag at her feet. It’s not exactly her shade, but it’s close. She’d stopped at the drugstore in Grand Marais, hesitant about what to do next—stop at Janelle’s or go straight home—when it occurred to her that she didn’t want to do either. She needed a day to get back to herself.
Nora lounges on the deck with her hair in a towel, feeling the kind of rejuvenated that only comes from standing under running water. Her skin is still damp, her head wet and clean. Patrick—his last name was Eckdahl, he’d said—is sitting beside the big open door of the building down below her cabin. He waves and she waves back.
When she digs in her purse for a nail file, her fingers touch something hard. She pulls out a cream-colored rock. She can’t imagine why she’s carrying it around until she turns it over. It’s the fossil she’d found with Frank. Bits of tobacco are stuck in its ridges. “Once there was an ocean,” he’d said.
The expanse of water is vast and blue. She shakes her purse and fishes with her fingers. Sure enough, she still has the agate. She holds it up to the sun and looks at its banding. The lake washes against the shore. A family of ducks is in the cove, swimming with their heads below the surface.
The sun is warm and pleasant on Nora’s face as she strolls around the property, holding her fingers apart to keep her wet nails from smudging.
“Cabin okay?” Patrick asks when she walks past the big open door.
“It’s fine.”
“Yeah, that one’s our favorite. It’s the oldest, the original building. We think it has the most character.”
Nora checks her nails, then lets her fingers fall naturally.
“I’m going to work a bit more before I call it a day. Have you ever seen glassblowing?” He flashes her a welcoming grin. “Come on in and check it out.”
There are two large ovens and it’s hot in the building. “Just pull that chair over by the door,” says Patrick, dipping a rod longer than a pool cue into the mouth of one of the ovens. All she can see inside is white heat. When he draws it out there’s a mass on the end that’s so filled with light it looks like a piece of the sun. His fingers, thick and as dirty as a mechanic’s, turn the rod around and around.
“Why do you have to keep turning it?”
“People often wonder about that,” he says, stilling the rod. “It’s really all about . . .”
“Look out.” Nora points to the glob, which is oozing to the floor like honey and landing in thin squiggly lines.
“. . . Centrifugal force.” He lifts the cooling squiggles from the floor with the orange-hot end.
“You did that on purpose.”
He laughs and puts the whole thing back in the oven. “No problem, you just start over.”
“What are you going to make?” she asks, as he removes the rod from the oven again and rolls it against a smooth flat surface. He nods but says nothing, then sits down on a bench, lifts the rod to his mouth, and blows. The bright glob expands with his breath, filling like a small balloon. Then he’s up and over to the other oven, where he slides one end in and sets the other in a brace, turning, turning, his fingers like spiders.