Brown horse, brown cow

We're walking into the green foliage. I have a feeling that Fatu Hiva is one of those destinations where no one really have been.

 

I suddenly want to get online but there's no such thing on the island. Why sail halfway around the world to go online?

  

I start to think about Thor Heyerdahl. He arrived on Fatu Hiva in 1937, hoping to escape civilization. But he didn't get along with the locals. Eventually he and his wife took shelter in a cave, anxious to get home.

Five leaves left

Unable to deal with people I turn to flowers and leaves. Then the flowers seem too pretty, or just too much, so I just stick with the leaves.

I'm not proud of this. Most people come to Tahiti to have a good time, but I'm dragging the camera and tripod through the thick foliage. It feels like I'm coming down with a fever.

The bald eagle

The bald eagle is not bald at all. I wonder how they came up with this misnomer. A better name would be “whitehead eagle”, but I guess it’s too late now.

We saw these immense birds in the fall. They seemed unapproachable then, and always kept their distance.

They returned early in the spring, before the ice was gone. Food was scarce and the bald eagles started to circle over Tapawingo Lodge. Their calls were a long thin shriek that sounded desperate. It’s not easy on an empty belly.

We once counted eleven bald eagles at the same time. The ice was still thick on Bistcho Lake, no open water for the eagles to catch fish. It was a bit strange. Why did they return to the Canadian north so early?

The ice melted in May, almost two months after the first bald eagles arrived. The bald eagles once again kept their distance, and regained their pride and posture.

Walking

Most writers like to walk. They can continue writing while walking. It gives great agitation, as in the novella Walking (1971), by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, where the actual walk is more abstract than the thoughts while walking.

Henry David Thoreau’s Walking (1861), is an essay that probes deep in the art of walking. It’s a kind of knowledge that doesn’t change much, but still, it's uncanny the way he anticipates our modern life. Thoreau’s walking is the opposite of Bernhard’s; the walk overtakes the thoughts; the walk in nature puts the walker straight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about Thoreau: The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.

When we stayed the winter at Tapawingo, in Alberta, Canada, the wilderness demanded solitude and silence, if we wanted to see any wildlife. But me and Nina also preferred to walk alone for another reason; the thoughts got cleansed by nature, because the mind got distracted by something bigger than itself. Talking would destroy all this.

Annie Dillard wrote, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that walking in nature is not so much about seeing, as being seen. We're not really thinking either, it's nature thinking through us.

The black-capped chickadee

We had another cold front before Easter ─ windy for a change ─ and the wind chill went to the bones. The wind churned up particles and made the snow drift like smoke over Bistcho Lake.

I was driving the snowmobile from Indian Cabins and back to Tapawingo. I was driving without goggles and my eyes turned red and painful.

Towards the evening the row of pines shook wild and dark. We could hear branches break and fall.

The next day the wind had calmed, but it was even colder. We’d noticed the black-capped chickadee before, even down to ÷50˚C, but this morning was different. I kept staring at this little bird, this tiny little ball of feathers. I kept staring.

The wolf-bird

The raven has been called the wolf-bird, because of its tight connection to wolves. The ravens will enter the scene only a few minutes after the wolves have succeeded with a kill. The ravens follow the wolves, but could it also be the other way around?

Of course, the wolves will observe ravens in the air, circling around a carcass. But I’m thinking about something else. I’m thinking about an active role, a tell and show; a raven’s clue for the wolf to follow.

The ravens know what’s going on. It’s an overview in everything they do. The ravens also know what they would like to eat, but the wolves have to kill it first (unless the humans dump it).

I once tried a sound decoy on the ravens. They were gathered in the trees maybe a hundred meter away. I hid in the bushes and started the wild death-cry of the snowshoe hare.

Within seconds I had a black ball of circling ravens above me. The intensity of the ravens took me by surprise.

An hour later I tried again, but this time I observed the ravens through the binoculars. Not one of the ravens got fooled. They just sat in the trees, and if anything they reacted with contempt to my little act. But it did look like they gave each other some sidelong glances.

The fox

As the fox passed our window early one morning, I grabbed the camera and went out, wondering why the fox was so unafraid.

The fox ran around me like a dog. Curious, playful, intelligent. There’s something alluring about friendly encounters with wild animals. It’s easy to think that you’re experiencing the world like it was meant to be.

Hunters and trappers will often claim nature as brutal, in order to have a moral right to do their own killing. I think it’s interesting when, say, wolf hunters get indignant at the way wolves hunt. But this discussion is not getting anywhere. I’ve met enough hunters to know when they start to circle their wagons of belief. I’m not against hunting, either; I’m against certain types of hunters.

The fox sat down and yawned. I guess it’d been a long night. Then he suddenly sensed something a couple of meters away. He arched over and dived down with the nose deep in the snow. Up came a lemming.

It felt like I'd gotten a friend for life, but we never saw this particular fox again. Maybe it got trapped. Maybe the fur hangs in the closet of a bourgeois woman. Or maybe the fox had more important things to do, than hang around with me.

The fox acted as it was tame, even domesticated, but it had probably never seen humans before. This is the alluring thing about encounters with truly wild animals; they sometimes act as if humans aren’t dangerous. They don’t know better.

The owls

One of the most common sounds in the dark, during our stay at Tapawingo, was the calls of the great horned owl. It sounded something like “hoho hoo-hoo”, and then it would be quiet for maybe 10-20 seconds, before the call was repeated.

The great horned owl is a big hunter, up to 1.5 meter wingspan, and highly skilled (as all the owls). I once saw a great horned owl early in the dusk; it just swept from the tree and down the cut line in front of me. The wings were almost touching the snow. It was remarkable how this huge bird could fly totally silent.

We never got a good picture of the great horned owl, and I was getting a bit obsessed, since we often could hear the calling at dawn. The first times I dressed quickly, but later I stopped, thinking “damn it, the bird will be gone anyway,” and undressed. The call would continue. Hoho hoo-hoo. I couldn’t listen to this for long. I dressed up again, grabbed the camera, and went out. The bird was gone.

It sounded like a couple was going to nest close by the cabin. We even found the tree. The owls swallow their smaller prey whole, and we could see the regurgitated nuggets of bone and fur, but up in the dense pine there was nothing.

Nina discovered the boreal owl; it was just sitting in the snow, like it was sick or injured. This is a small owl, rarely seen. It seemed to accept that I was crawling around in the snow for a good shot. But the eyes flared up in panic when our cat entered the scene. We managed to hold the cat, though.

A couple of hours later the boreal owl was gone. We couldn’t see any animal tracks around, and hoped the owl got better and flew away.

The owls are mysterious, and subjected to at lot of myths in medieval Europe. We once photographed the horned owl from a great distance, it didn’t turn out well, but after enlarging the picture we could see how the owl seemed to be without a head. It was flying headless. This, of course, has been taken for an incarnation of the dead: “There is a decapitated man flying in our yard!” They didn’t need horror movies in those days.

If eyes could kill. We saw this great grey owl on our way to High Level. There were several along the road.

Wildness

An ocean belongs to no one, but a lake is an entity. It collects everything in the murky water.

Bistcho Lake surely had some kind of memory. The still surface was like an eye, and when the lake froze over it formed a lens. Then it started to snow. The lake was blind until the spring. We forgot about the lake and acted like it was a field.

But a native collected a huge chunk of ice. It was important that the ice should come from the middle of the lake. He meant to bring it to the medicine man, but instead he got drunk, and lost the ice and most of his belongings along the trail; "[...] in Wildness is the preservation of the World".

Henry David Thoreau is often misquoted on this particular saying. He never did write "in wilderness is the preservation of the world", but he used the word "Wildness", with a capital "W", in his famous essay Walking.

I'm not sure if I really understand what he meant. It's not as obvious as it first seemed to be. And I can't help thinking about the drunk man with a chunk of ice.

The killing of magic

We left Demopolis early in the morning. It was cold and crisp. The landscape appeared stunning in the frost smoke, with great egrets flying like ghosts.


But then we reached the first lock and the magic disappeared. The man in charge was in a terrible mood and started to scream over the VHF. I’m not going into details because there are none.

To go through a lock is a simple task. After a couple of locks it gets downright boring. But for the US Army Corps of Engineers it’s comparable to a landing on the moon; that’s the kind of attention they want, in order to feel that their work is important.

It comes down to this: Militant people don’t hate their enemies as much as they hate humanity, even within their own ranks, in the very barracks. They can’t stand diversity. That’s why they always dehumanize the environment in which they rule.

In general we passed through several locks without seeing humans at all, just a surveillance camera in every corner of the lock. I guess there were people behind the dark glass in the tower but I can’t tell for sure. Sometimes we heard a cold cartoon-like voice in the PA-system, ordering us to do so and so.

There was no point trying to be friendly with these guys. Friendliness seemed to be taken for sloppiness. If they got agitated the next couple of locks would be slow indeed, without any other likely reasons than as a punishment.

I got an understanding of conspiracy through these locks. But Nina, being more humane, refused to believe that the US Army Corps of Engineers were that crazy.

The heron

Down Illinois River we started to see the herons, with their eyes focused on the water below. The bird looks like it’s carved out from bleached sun-dried wood.

If compared to humans the heron is like a lanky academic in a grey suit. You don’t like him in a personal way, but have to respect that he’s sharp and serious in his field.

The herons seemed to have divided the river into exact portions among themselves. We passed them at regular intervals. Some of them were still as statues. Others got nervous and started to move their long thin beak, it was just a short movement back and forth, like a person who suddenly gets a whiff of something disgusting.

They always fled downstream and landed on the bank again. The situation would repeat as we came closer.

In Kentucky Lake and further down the Tenn-Tom Waterway, when it was getting really cold in November, the herons looked even more introvert.

The heron likes solitude. If disturbed in the dark he would scream like it was the worst thing ever.

Aurora Boralis

Without a full moon we needed a torch to find the way to the privy. I always flashed the torch around, the shadows of the tree trunks were like wheel spokes around me. It was a fair chance to see reflections in the eyes of animals, especially foxes, which wasn’t uncommon among the cabins.

I must admit that I also kept a lookout for ghosts. Once I saw a strange light among the trees, a ghostly flickering that made me look upwards, through the branches. It was the northern light.

This particular night was really amazing during our stay in the Canadian wilderness, away from the light pollution of modern society. We didn’t have a tripod for the camera, but brought a bucket along and went out on the ice at Bistcho Lake. The northern lights kept changing above us. Serpents of silver, ribbons of yellowish green and red. It lasted for two hours, and then we needed the torch to find our way back to the cabin.

Mississippi

The autumn colours came in October. Every day I could see some new trees on the other side of the Mississippi, first a yellow shift, a sort of warning, and then the bright red flush that lasted a couple of days, before dying in a dull brown.

Nina was still in Norway, working, while I stayed in Portage des Sioux alone; writing, walking, waiting.

I thought about the autumn colours following the Mississippi like a flame down south. And I thought about the coming winter, the cold temperatures we would get instead.

I was walking and waiting. I could hear the soft honking of ducks or geese, following the Mississippi south.

I looked across the endless fields of corn. It was hard to imagine that Missouri River flooded this area some years back. I couldn't even see the Missouri from where I was standing. But still; the strong Missouri crossed the endless fields and flooded Portage des Sioux in waist-deep water and whirling eddies, before entering the Mississippi, and combine forces for more flooding further down.

There's a lot of water and history that comes together in this area. I was reading about Lewis and Clark, and how the natives considered Lewis to be without a spirit; too restless and industrious to have a soul. The new linear time was cutting like a knife through a seemingly endless circle of seasons. And where were they heading? The natives didn't understand. It sounded like a spiritual journey but was not. Why hurry towards the sunset? How can you be late for a mountain? And if there is such a thing as an endless lake; wouldn't it always be there?

The cold spell

We got a really cold spell during our winter in the Canadian wilderness. It was towards the end of January, the temperature was dropping below ÷40˚C and the trappers left, since the weather was supposed to get even colder.

30. January it dropped below ÷45˚C late in the evening. We were using a wheelbarrow of wood every day. I used to stack it neatly in a wood-box, but now I just hastily rolled the wheelbarrow directly into the cabin and unloaded it on the floor.

I had my mattress next to the stove and could feel a wall of heat on my face, and a bone cold chill on my back.

I could see the metal top of the wood stove glowing in the dark. I could hear the hissing sound of wood burning.

I had to get up and load the stove during the night. I could tell by the sound of metal expanding or contracting if the stove was getting warmer or colder. I knew the sounds in my sleep.

At dawn Nina was looking at the thermometer outside, and declared ÷50˚C (÷58 F). It might have been colder. A trapper nearby measured ÷57˚C (÷71 F), before getting out of the area. The weather report on the radio spoke in general of temperatures in the negative fifties.

We went for a walk. There was no wind. No birds. It was like standing still in a photograph.

It was so quiet I could hear my wristwatch ticking. It's in a silence like this that you realize that there are always sounds. I could hear my own heartbeat: somehow transferred through clothing and amplified inside the hood.

We needed water. We carried four buckets down to the lake and started to chop the newly formed ice on our waterhole. The heavy iron bar broke like nothing. I chopped through the ice with the remains of the bar. Nina tried fishing and got a pike that wriggled just once before freezing solid.

The sun was getting low on the horizon. The woods around Bistcho Lake felt strangely fragile. Everything were covered with white spiky snow flakes. The hole landscape was like painted on thin brittle glass.