Part Two of the Desert Series. It leads backwards into time.
I had been previously living in Ashland, Wisconsin, on a Norweigan horse farm in the dead of a 30 below winter on the otherside of the road, but as far as the Eagle flies, somewhat near the edge of Lake Superior. It was a Black Ice winter, and walking the lake to the ice huts during 30 below froze my thighs a new name of cold.
I was living in a haul your own water and wood cabin, eating my soul out of its memories writing my way through coming of age material in order to free myself of hidden ghosts, both salty and ancestral, magical realist and mythic. I spent a lot of time in two different coffee shops near the town --one was the Born again Christian coffee shop, where I met some interesting characters, including two different schizophrenics, one a woman who was the former prom queen of Port Wing, who had extremly heart breakingly aching stories about her violent traumatic childhood and a guy name Loki (or something like that) who heard voices and shared those stories with me. And there was the other coffee shack, The Black Cat, where I met interesting lumberjacks who looked like Thor.
There is even a Valhalla in that area, and I walked with said lumberjack around Valhalla, listening to his amazing stories from his life in Alaska working with troubled youth. And there was Joe, who survived triple bypass heart surgery, who was a vietnam vet full of a heart of ancient grief, and who had been a stunt man in Hollywood and who made Ojibway style drums and snowshoes, and who invited me to the first sweat lodge where i was one of 2 white people and one of 2 women, who listened to the Chief from a rez in Eagle River blow the Eagle penis bone flute to call in the grandfather stones with the other Ojibway men from Red Cliff.
Turtle Island was right there, literally a stones throw away from where we sweat. Near the edge of Lake Superior. Gichigamiing. And the stories fell down like rain and acorns, tears and sweat.
The Cabin was cold as ice. I had no idea what I was in for. It was a mad attempt to get close to the earth northern Wisconsin style. Set me back in time at least 100 years and slowed me way the fuck down. So much so that anything beyond hauling wood and water and getting up at 3 am to either kick out the mice my cat brought to me alive and dripping with fear upon my chest or to keep the fire alive ... some of the wood was green, I learned to curse a lot that winter, anything beyond that was a privledge.
When you are in the middle of collecting your own frozen forgotten waste land of story, it is amazing what stories come to you. From the earth. The old stories that were hidden and told orally in those parts by Anishinabe, but which were now long forgotten. Including the story about the Lost Girl of Little Girls point (Kauk Wudgjoo, or crouching porcupine was the name of that land where I went to girls sleep away camp, in the 80s called little girls point, where the large Ojibway girl from Watersmeet, punched me a good one and spit on me) and the puckwudginee which will forever be etched into my heart like someone carving their love initials on the bark of a birch tree.
And the stories about Jim, the mechanic and his lost penny. And the story about the semi truck driver and his grief, or the lost stories I came home to find (like how I got lost and pregnant at age 15 and had an abortion and had it shucked out of me like moldy corn) but had left the shame to fester somewhere at the root of an old oak tree.
Stories are funny in the way they roll, in the way they die, in the way they fester, in the way they unwind sideways or shriek like banshees or run wildly and mad, naked and unashamed in the woods when you come to find them and call them home.
I learned that Story is a bit like a creatura, furry and one eyed or one thousand eyed or like a mosquito or a snake charmer or a mushroom fruiting under a moonless sky. You forget and then you trip on it. You eat it accidentally and it is poisonous but then you remove a thin skin of it and your own skin is now shinier.
Stories like Little Red Riding Hood have a belly of their own, and when you crawl into them, you learn which larger than life stories you have carried for decades, and how they have become a life of their own within you and have seasoned and grown you into more than a girl, more than a woman, into a wild, toothless hag with a purpose to crow.
Story. Sometimes I wish it were my middle name but then I would be afraid I would wake up in a different animal skin each and every day.
All this because I was about to tell the story of how my car died that May before June in 2008 and it was dead. Just plain dead and never to start again, and how that catalyzed my life to a biodynamic farm in the middle of the desert in Santa Fe New Mexico with a Chicken farmer named Steve. But somehow, just bringing up those dates, the stories from upper Michigan and northern Wisconsin wanted to pound themselves out of my fingertips the way the ocean waves pound the shore before a storm, before the story clears and we find the lake calm once more ready for stones to be skipped to eternity.
All this to say, when you spend time near a lake that is really an inland mystical sea, you learn something or two about story. And when you find yourself without a car, without bearings, without a clue about red earth and desert kachinas and rabbit brush and gambel oak and arroyos, you learn a different thing or two about stories. Anywhich way, from the north or the south, the east or the west, story is more powerful than salt. Or plutonium. Or stardust. Or blood. It is ancient and bold, fierce and unafraid. And it is born from the mouth of gods again and again and again recreating itself and shapeshifting through you, through me, through the world in its own happy jig through time and place, body and memory, imagination and dirt.
Sometimes you have to check out from all that you know and throw yourself into a cabin without any amenities beneath the old oak and pine trees where the owls mate and teh bears hibernate for a time being. Until spring, when the thaw thaws the meaning of story into your own being and the water of your tears and of your brain and of your flesh is imbued with story deeper than the waters of lake superior and you return to that toothless grin of the hag knowing something about the cold dark places.
And in spring, when a memory about a chicken farmer pops into your mind, and you simply start there with the beginning of the story, you let the story cluck and strut and lay an egg on your keyboard and here it sits.
as for the chicken farmer, I do wonder about him. He was a really funny, strange and interesting guy. You can read about him in Deserts Part One.
Words and Image: The Wild Matryoshka