It’s 35 degrees, and I’m drenched in sweat in a bog. I stopped to take off my neck gaiter, and my parents glide along ahead of me, their backcountry skis leaving a slick, crystalline trail over the snow. The dogs frolic somewhere, the young one pouncing and pirouetting in her very best effort to get the older one to play.
I’m squinting in the sun glare. Panting from the effort of pushing through the sticky layer that lays atop the crust snow. Grinning, too. I love this: leaving behind the narrow band of the highway. Disappearing out into the edge of the wild.
We’ve come prepared. My dad brought a map, a compass, and some duct tape wrapped around a small yarn cone. My mom wears ice picks around her neck. We all have dog treats.
“What are you doing?” I had said before we left, gasping with laughter, as my dad wandered around with the duct tape and the yarn cone.
“It’s so we can duct tape stuff back together,” my mom explained, “if something breaks.”
Now we’re on our way back from skiing across the bog, the lake, the wetland. Fortunately, we didn’t need the duct tape. We brushed past soft tamaracks and ducked under black spruce, their cones hanging down in dark bunches. The snow changed depending on the spot: sometimes granular but sturdy, sometimes lumpen and crunchy, and in the shade of the pines, soft and yielding. We were heading for the cleft in the upland, where the trees would part just enough for us to slip through, down to the river.
But this being early afternoon on a Thursday, we’ve run out of time and had to turn around. We picked our way past the soft hollows in the bog, one hiding a black maw of open water. Now we’re back here, in view of the lake.
Have you ever been someplace like this? Somewhere so wild, you wonder what humans last passed this way—if any. A place that can only be accessed at certain times of the year: in late March, when the crust snow is just right, by backcountry skis.
The bog lies quiet. The young dog chases a raven, the only wildlife we’ve seen. But tracks crisscross the dimpled snow. We know of many neighbors who live back here—the wolves, the coyotes, the red fox, the bobcats. The moose and the white-tailed deer. The black-capped chickadees, the red and white breasted nuthatches, the blue jays. They, and more, all live here. We simply do not see them today.
My great-grandparents bought a house and land on the edge of this wildness back in the 1920s, from the widow of a peg-legged Civil War veteran. They built a bridge across the river and kept a summer kitchen near here. (It’s a public campsite now.) They cleared a field and planted potatoes and picked raspberries.
Before them, fire scars on pine trees reveal that the Ojibwe people used fire to clear the area, too, in the 1800s, perhaps to encourage berries to grow. The fire scars are right here, on the edge of the little lake we’re approaching on our skis.
When I was a kid, I took this wildness for granted. I grew up beside it; it was what I knew. As a teenager and young adult, I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as a lot of other things. But over time, I have realized that this place has etched itself into who I am in a way that defies words. My heart is the shape of the trees and the bogs and the wide-open blue sky. I don’t feel like myself if I’m away from the woods for too long. I hunger for the wild places.
It is so quiet here, though whole lives are being lived unseen by our neighbors, the animals. The sun across the snow is more brilliant than the glare of any screen. We can be alive here, on the edge of the wild, in a way that’s not possible in places that are dominated by humanity. We can feel our smallness—three skiing people, two bounding dogs—in the vast mystery of the marsh. And in feeling small, we can feel a connection to the rest of the living world, a relationship with it that is difficult to find under electric lights, in the computer glow.
My back is to the wind. I turn, taking a gulp of the cold, refreshing air, before I push off, across the white, under the dome of the cloud-streaked sky.
Lovely. "My heart is the shape of..." is evocative. I use the phrase, "a fresh cut in my memory whittling stick" to describe the impact of a special experience. My wife and I live on part of a homestead occupied by her Polish immigrant grandparents in 1921 and carved out of former Yawkey Lumber Company cutover land. The vestiges of that time can be read on the land with a careful eye.
Keep writing. You have a wonderful gift.