From My Own Listening Point |
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by Nancy jo Tubbs |
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Nature does what she will, and that is one of the rules on which I rely. Here at Camp Van Vac we never tire of talking about nature and her effects: whether the blueberries are at peak ripeness or when the leaves will turn. My family's resort attracts many of the same guests year after year. One family is in its fifth generation, and several in their fourth. Kids with whom I grew up catching frogs and climbing the big white pine on the point take their sun glazed grandchildren out to that same point to watch the sunset or the northern lights. This spot on the southern shore of Burntside has been my Listening Point. I was born here in 1947 in the log cabin where I now live. My Great Aunt Kate and Uncle Van Harris hired their Finnish neighbors to build Camp's 24 log and stone guest cabins in 1917, and when they retired, my parents, Buell and Winnie Tubbs ran the resort. I was lucky to grow up here, adventurous enough to go away for 20 years after high school, smart enough to visit every summer, and lucky to come back in 1984 to pick up where my folks left off. It was the going away that made me realize I had a Listening Point. In 1993, the year after my mother died, I left the lake and flew back to the West Coast with tears in my eyes. So much had changed, and I didn?t know if my father would sell the resort and whether I would see it again. The first day back in my job as a public relations director for a hospital in northern California, I went to check the labor rooms where the volunteers were putting up new wallpaper. The workman was smoothing the last corner when I walked into the room. I took in a photo mural of a deep blue lake, a granite shoreline, a horizon of pines. "Where was that picture taken?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. The workman peeled back the corner of the photo and read the label: "Burntside Lake, Ely, Minnesota." Sometimes I think we must be imprinted like geese heading home in the dark, like trout swimming upstream to spawn at the place of their birth. There is a snapshot on the walls of our very molecules of a place that nurtures us and give us peace. I hear it from our guests at Camp, how they wait for vacation time to return to that cabin, that sunset, a certain way the pines frame the night sky and the Big Dipper. And so, like geese, like trout, I'm back on Burntside. Camp is a simple place with log and stone cabins, wood stoves, cold running water. The hot shower, flush toilets and sauna are down the path. One mother told us that her son was very upset when he went inside their cabin for the first time. He had recently seen the movie, "Witness," and was enthralled with the Mennonite way of life. She had told him that staying at the Camp would be much like that. "Mom, it has electricity," he said, disappointed. There is a simplicity here in carrying wood for the fire and heating water in a teakettle on the stove. Somehow, the simplicity gives us more time to notice the grouse frozen in camouflage against the dead leaves this morning or the loon, which suddenly surfaced yesterday beside the dock in a narrow edge of open water. For the moment we are drawn deeper into the membership of woods creatures. |
The pack of five wolves at the International Wolf Center offer the opportunity to watch longer. I chair the board of directors there, but at least as meaningful to me is the honor of spending time in the presence of MacKenzie, Lucas, Lakota, Malik and Shadow and their curator, Lori Schmidt. From Lori and the pack I'm learning to watch more in detail. Today MacKenzie, the alpha ranking female, had a drop of blood on her right ear tip. Lori knew that it was a bite from another wolf. "See the vee crease?" she said. "It's a classic tooth mark." Wolf researcher, Dr. David Mech, knows the wolves he watches on Ellesmere Island. "People think it's romantic," he says, "but mostly I watch them sleep." I believe paying attention matters. It's what Sigurd Olson did. He noticed the movement of clouds, a chickadee's song, a riffle of moving water. And then he listened to himself and gave meaning to that music. His writing tells us the story and song of the northland. And so, when the wind and ice and water carried that music down Burntside Lake yesterday, I heard the choir one more time from my own Listening Point.
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