Great Lakes Book # Notes ## characters Quinceañera A woman plants trees and hemp so that someone of his descendants will be able to build tall ships. her great grandaughter: We meet her as she comes out of a lawyer's office in Milwaukee, the cold spring wind is blowing down the street. The lake is still frozen, icy clouds billow in the wind. The snow on the ground is patchy though. She drives out to his land is walking among the young trees and fields cleared for hemp. Oak trees and pigs, he's a pig farmer. Regenerative ag. His farm is growing trees for an ark his descendants will build. Long view. Re-incarnation view. then far enough that there is no lineage: the man with his two daughters. the wife in the village. The cold is less, but the darkness remains. The light is already faded They're on the north shore, they're headed for teh south shore to winter. There's not much snow left, but it's still cold and dark. It's mid september. wonter comes in October. they have to be south before the shores freeze. And the meet up, the fisher gathers seas gypseys exchange food and news. there they will learn something that propels them on a journey to something. in search of something perhaps. There needs to religious undertones here, local gods godesses, the plot needs to be steered as much by greater then human actors as by human. nudges, stears. the dream of the road leather cloth, finding the round leather cloth and the reaction to the finding, you have been given a great gift. we will stop and you will create this ceremony for yourself. the tantamus spirit the daughter finds it and the daughter goes off and creates the ceremony. The father lives with his daughters one one boat, his wife and son live ashore in the southern village. midwife and teacher of herbal lore perhaps. I'm kinda making an ideyllic and boringc culture, what happens, what thing would be most threatening to this culture, where would the sotry e? Other details: the boats are made of oak. They're sailing fresh waster so they don't have to worry about worms though the do need tar and do go to a tarring camp where everyone pitches in thogether the repair the ships. ships as vesseles of men and gods. viking lore perhaps might help here. the man makes portraits of people, darkroom on the ship. The woman is his daughter. She's 18, her younger sister is 15. They live with him, their brother lives with their mother on shore. There has been a shifting of the plan over the centuries. The oak is gradually cleared in places, as ships are built, but that leaves space fo the medicinal plants, and for birds, the blackburnian warblers that come every summer. # Prologue Death was standing in the corner, as he often did. He didn't bother her, he never had. Death was not a stranger, how could death be a stranger when you're 98? Death is patient. Death is rarely in a rush. What puzzled her was that no one else seemed to see him. She noticed the nurses in their starched stiff shirts avoided looking in that corner. She couldn't blame them. They were young. They didn't want to see death. Still, you'd think with their jobs they'd recognize him for what he was, that old guardian of the gates. "Did you hear Ms tk?" She turned her head back from the window. "Forgive me doctor, what were you saying?" "That I can't release you." "Oh that. So you're going to hold a 98-year-old woman against her will are you?" "No, I can't hold you against your will." "Then you mean I am free to go?" "That's just what I am saying, I cannot let you go, I don't believe you would live long without our care." "I don't believe I would either," she said cheerfully. "That's why I want to go." "You want to die?" "Doctor, I have lived 98 years. I don't want to die, I rather dislike dying in fact, but I do plan to do it with some dignity, certainly not here, with all these," she gestured at her arm, "tubes and wires and nonsense." The doctor opened his mouth to say something but then, stopped and closed it. She met his gaze unflinchingly and tried to focus on showing him something that might change his mind. "I'm sorry," he said finally. "What for?" She smiled at him. He smiled at her. "I'll be back to check on you tomorrow." "Oh." She nodded. "Well, Doctor, try not to be too disappointed if I'm gone then." She glanced at Death. He wasn't there anymore. The Doctor closed the door softly behind him. Thought I'd never get rid of him she muttered to herself. She pulled the tubes out of her arm, took the blood pressure cuff off her other arm, and unclipped the heart monitors. She leaned back and shut off all the machines before they started beeping. She lay there in bed for a moment. It wasn't like when she was young, leaping out of bed to start the day. For the last ten years there had been no leaping. It was more a shuffling these days. She missed leaping. She wanted to leap. She wondered if she could leap. She sat up slowly and slid off the bed to the floor. It wasn't a leap, but a slide was something. You take what you can get. There was a bag sitting in the chair on the other side of the room. Her her daughter had brought it earlier that morning. She walked over and unzipped it. Inside was a new shirt and a pair of pants. They were ugly, but they would do. She put the bag on the floor and sat down to pull on her pants. Wouldn't do to break a hip just before you're supposed to die. Once she was dressed she put the bag and couple of towels in the bed and pulled the covers up over it. She stepped back and looked at it. It didn't look much like a person, but then again they never noticed death so maybe they wouldn't notice her being gone either. Her feet were still in slippers and made no sound on the tile hallway. She could hear the nurses talking down in their station. She walked as quickly as she could, but it was harder and harder to draw a breath. She quietly opened the stairway door and slowly let it click shut behind her. She stood at the top of the stairs, panting. Slowly she descended. The icy wind was a slap in the face. Spring was always that way in the north country. Step outside, and get a slap of cold in the face. She smiled at memories of childhood. Memories of cold spring mornings, running through the woods, the crunch of icy snow breaking under her boots. The smiled faded. She would miss the snow. No she wouldn't she thought, she doubted she'd remember snow at all. It would be a story people told of the olden days. The days with cars, the days with snow. Her daughter was waiting under the light pole, just as they'd agreed. Her daughter had furrowed brows as she settled herself in the passenger's seat. "What's wrong?" She shook her head. "My brother is never going to forgive me." She smiled. Her son. She loved her son. "Everyone is on a different path," she murmured. She could feel her daughter's glances, like the alternating plowed fields and forests pulsing by out the window, all still wreathed in white. "I will miss the snow I think," she said again to herself, but loud enough that her daughter caught it. "Mom, it's hard enough that I am doing this. Don't make it more morbid than it is." "Oh dear, I am sorry. I had forgotten." She turned to face her daughter, looking closely at the slight lines beginning to form at the edges of her eyes. She did the math in her head. Sarah was thirty two. "I forget that when you're young you still think you are doing things in the world." She sighed. "I rather miss those days. Not that there isn't plenty to do at my edge. Good lord I think I have done more this year than I did in my 30s, but I no longer have the illusion of it being me that it doing them." "What do you mean?" "Oh, I don't mean to be coy Sarah, but I can't tell you. I mean that literally. It is impossible to convey. You won't understand anything about this drive until it is your turn. If you have the luxury of choosing." She reached out and tucked a small strand of her daughters hair back behind her ear. Then she pretended not to notice the tear at the edge of her eye and turned back to the window. It was nearly dark when they turned off the last paved road. The cabin was another ten miles of unpaved road, rutted and ice. It took almost as long as the highway driving. But from up here she could see the lake in the winter. She felt bad about her daughter having to drive back in the dark. She would have asked her to stay the night, but there wasn't time. She lit the stove with old newspapers and dry kindling by the stove. She made a pot of tea and they each drank a cup, sitting side by side on the porch swing, her daughter's head on her shoulder just as it had been all those years before. Before what? Before now? Was that all? Time was a funny thing. Then, gently as she could, without trying to hurry her too much, she packed her daughter in the car and got her heading back down the icy drive toward the city. This was what she loved about the winter. The absolute silence and stillness that doesn't end,but slowly drifts through the night and into your sleep. She drank another cup of tea on the porch, staring up at the stars and out at the lake, it's stilled edges still locked in ice. It will be breaking soon she thought. She got up and walked down the hill. It was hard walking on the crusted surface of the snow. She slipped and came crashing down on her thigh. She was half surprised there hadn't been a terrible crack of breaking of bone. She rolled on her side and tensed and relaxed muscles and felt around her leg. There was pain, but not so much that she thought anything was broken. All at once the absurdity of it hit her and she laugh back laughing. When she opened her eyes everything was stars. They seemed so impossible close, bright and sharp, yet cold, clear. She shivered. And then she noticed him. Leaning against the tree. He looked different now, more human, less abstracted. He looked somehow polite even. Like a man waiting patiently for the restroom she thought. She thought she even saw him smile at this thought. Here then? She turned her head to the side and looked over a grove a birches. They were young trees, but well established. She turned her head the other way, down the slope toward the lake. She could see the scrawny trunks from here. Grow she thought as she rolled her head back up to the sky. Grow. Like the stars. So many. So many trees. So many stars. # The farmer in milwakee. Milwaukee drained her. It always had, but it had become worse as she'd aged. The train ran so seldom just getting there was a hassle hardly worth the effort it seemed. she'd waited a week for a southbound engine with spare cars. Then weather had delayed the trip further, an early snow had iced the tracks and she'd spent an extra day in tk town in the middle of Wisconsin. That she hadn't minded so much. The quiet cold evening, the lights of the streets flickering in the wind, snowflakes swirling down, it reminded her of a picture she'd found cleaning out her grandmother's house. She discovered it at the bottom of a shoebox full of strange puffy pictures just like it, most faded beyond recognition, but this one she could still make out the image, a night scene, a yellow-white snowy road, snowflakes caught in the glare of the light, an electric light, and a woman she assumed was her grandmother, maybe her great gandmother, probably in her early twenties, stumbling, or running, it was hard to tell, but smiling. She sat for hours in the front room of the boarding house alternately staring out the window and listlessly reading an account of tk town before the wars, when the snow and cold were much greater and everything it seemed, had been better. She kept thinking of that picture. It was probably taken after the wars, but not long. Electricity hadn't lasted much more than a year or two after the last war. Unless his grandmother had lived in a city and not told her. But she'd never mentioned it. And it wasn't like one just moved in and out of cities. Not even back then. Had her grandmother really lived through winters where the temperatures routinely dipped below zero? She'd lived to 94. She talked of the winters in her youth. When winter meant terrible cold. And darkness. The darkness she understood, it still came. And she didn't like the cold she felt around her as a child, couldn't imagine it being another 30, 40 degrees colder. Freezing was far colder than she liked. She'd left at 18. Joined the Lakeland Volunteer Army to get away from the cold. She'd served in the east, part of the humanitarian mission to New York. She'd seen firsthand the horrors of New York. She shuddered at the memory. Milwaukee was bad, but it wasn't as bad as New York. She'd heard some of the bigger cities had stabilized. She wasn't sure she believed it. It was hard to unsee what you've seen. When she'd been called back to the cold she hadn't actually minded. The Army had not turned out to be what she'd wanted. She'd already decided not to re-enlist when she got the telegram from his mother. And just like that she'd been back in the cold. Surrounded by the trees. Her life had been lived for the trees from then on. She was in service to them the way some were in service to their gods. It was similarly mysterious, myths of the distant past, obligations, ceremonies, rites and passages. She was the priest. she chuckled at the thought. A fellow guest at the inn looked up at her and smiled. She stirred and forced herself to stand, to get the blood moving through her body. She walked over to the fire and added another log. The depot was on the edge of town. She stepped off into the cold wind that came off the lake this time of year. There were closed carriages offering to drive her through the checkpoints and into the city without needing to stop, but she marched past them and walked alone across the great expanse of the distancing field. The grass was still frozen, crunching under his boots as she walked. A lifetime serving trees had left her sensitive to the damage one does, just walking through the woods. Not that there was anyway to avoid it, just that one might recognize it and feel, not regret, she did not feel regret, more appreciation. She tried to appreciate where she was in this cycle, that she was the boot, not the grass beneath it and to think always of the grass beneath it and to try to step as lightly as one could. It was the religion of the forest. Step lightly, out of obligation. Out of necessity. Move silent and light lest the prey escape or the predator sense you. She showed her card at the window and stepped into the room to the left. She removed her clothes, shivering in the antiseptic cold of the changing room. She put on the strange, almost slippery clothes the city demanded and moved into the exhausting room where she was fumigated and blasted with air designed to remove all the dust and dirt and potential illnesses that might be on her. Illnesses she didn't even know she had. With that completed she donned the thin coat she was offered and stepped out of decontamination chamber into the city. It was silent. It was always the silence that got to her in the city. There was no one on the street. Few people left their homes. Few could of course, but even animals had left the cities. Birds did not land in them. There was little life at all. Some trees. More down by the river. Some grass, though it was all white now under a thin coating of icy snow. She checked out a bicycle at the stand and road west, toward the lawyer's office. She followed the map he'd included in his letter, but already streets had been renamed. She took a wrong turn down a new Chavez when what she wanted was old Chavez. She had to retrace her steps back to the river. After an hour of riding, several dead ends, she found the white three story house of the lawyer. She knocked on the fourth door in a row of doors and she head the bolt slide back. She waited the usual minute and then entered. The room was small. white, very white, and lit by several lamps, making it nearly as bright as outside. There was a chair, a narrow table and a window that looked into to the house where she could see the lawyer busy at his desk. --- She's in a small room, with a glass window that looks into a larger room that's the lawyer's office and then there are three other rooms, two are arbitrators and the third has her brother in it. Her brother wants to sell the trees and is suing her for the right to sell them. Them go through the circus of law that has become the custom of the cities. The brother wins. She leaves and goes back to defend her land and her trees. This is how another war starts, the final war in which the cities are burned out. No humanitarian effort this time. We follow her daughter through the war. She is the fighter who plays out the laws of combat and leadership that i want to write about. the boat then becomes what happens much further on. The winter camp the boat is headed for is a small village built around a boat building industry that has sprung up around that plot of trees. The great oaks that they don't cut unless they have too and only so many, always planting more when they cut. generations of trees. elborate ceremonies of trees. what is the point of their lives? To be alive and to work on their souls, to figure out what they need to do to move foward in their spiritual journey. Everything is a gift of the creator a love of the creator. Talk about her in the city. the trains, the horses and bycycles. don't mention that there are no cars, but there are no cars. there's not much electricity. Power during the day in the form of solar energy, but no batteries to store it. Candles and fires. wood burning stoves. the midwest as the old milkwaukee sense, but then the spanish influence. the southerners coming up, cultural collision. the native tribes still there, still remaining seperate. unbroken lineage for them, they are the keepers of the long history, they will not tell it to just anyone. there is no widespread literacy anymore. no need. # boat intro The wind was from the North. She sat up. The north. The wind was from the north. "tkname," she yelled into the hatch. "Tell Papa the wind has shifted. Comin' fr'up noth." She laughed imitating the old accent. The old man was one deck in a beat, vaulting out of the hold with lightness that belied his age. He had no hair, but for some stubble around the back of his head. His skin was a deep brown, whether by nature or by sun was unclear since he had never been out of the sun. He was of medium height, but had a boxer's lithe build and a sprightly manner of walking that came from years striding ships wood decks. "Noth eh?" She smiled at him. He didn't just imitate the old speech, he had grown up in it and while it had faded, certain words brought it out. He glanced up at the tethers atop the mast. They fluttered lightly, but unmistakably to the south. The wind was indeed out of the north. Well then. Nearly time to head down. He glanced at his daughter, then over at the rocky, pine and oak covered shore. You think there's any blueberries left up in that clearing?" She nodded. He stretched his arms and swayed about the waist. You think those old bears left us some? Well then, let's go get em. You eaten?" "Had some fish." "Fish? What you eaten fish for at a meat camp?" He laughed. 'Couldn't force a fish down my throat when I'm up here. But you do what you want." He turned back toward the companionway. "I'm going to carve up a slice of something and then we'll head in get some blueberries so we can start some mead for the ceremonies." --- It was two weeks more before they were ready to head south. Two weeks of skinning, cleaning, and packing the three more boar her father managed to shoot. Then more days stepping on blueberries, crushing the juices into barrels where they would ferment into blueberry wine. She danced with her sister, side by side in barrels, laughing and squashing while the old man played the fiddle at the top of the companionway. Their legs were stained and sticky when they leaped overboard into the icy lake waters, plunging down to the depth where the unsuspecting always drown. That thermal further down that is so abrupt and so cold it makes you inhale sharply, involuntarily drawing water into your lungs before you can stop yourself. The uninitiated are never seen again. The rule on Zepher was that you never went over without full lungs. Breath into the point that you can hold no more and then you can't inhale against your will. You still get damn cold though thought Iza lying in the warmth of the sun on the teak foredeck. Her sister was ashore, gathering hazelnuts from the grove that grew back above the rocky north shore of the cove where they were anchored. He father was below, working on boat projects, getting their aging ship ready to sail across the lake. She watched her sister walking with the heavy basket, unaware her father had come up on deck behind her. "She's got a few days left if we want them all eh? We should get over there and help her." Iza sat up. "Aren't this trees planted?" Her father shrugged. "could be, why?" "Wouldn't that make us farmers?" "Diggers? You're calling us diggers?" There was an edge in his voice that she did not look. "No, I'm not saying we're diggers, but aren't be benefiting from past diggers?" Her father came and sat down on the hatch next to her. "Sure, we're benefiting. I have nothing against diggers Iza. Everyone can do what he feels called to do. Just don't try to make me dig." She laughed. "Who would make us do anything? Who could?" He smiled. "It might seem hard when we're out here. It might. But it can be done." She frowned. "Why don't you like to farm?" Why would I be tied to this bit of land, and then destroy it to grow these plants. grows her own plants. I can just eat those. I can hunt, I can fish. I can go where the rice grows, I can go where the rushes are. I can go where the oaks drop their kernals, I can go where the hazelnuts are," he spread his farm out around the cove. "This is the connection between the world between and us, to violate this, to try to turn the world to our hands, this is arrogance. This was the unraveling of the last peoples. They did not listen to what the land was telling them, they turned their back on what was offered and they said, no, i can do this better. They were wrong and showed them that. Do you think that about Ma then? She plants. Is she a digger then? She does not plant." She saw a light of anger in her father's eyes. "She gathers. It is different. It is what we do. We gather. She stays ashore because she does not like boats. She is a person of the earth, but not a digger." What are you then? I am a person of the fire. You say that, but here you are, living on the water... how does that happen? Isn't that obvious?" He smiled. "If I go ashore I burn everything up. Water is how I stay balanced." He glanced over at his other daughter on the shore. "Your mother does not have that problem." What am I? What do you mean? If you are a person of the fire, what am I? "Now? You are not a person. You are young. "My quinces is less than one moon. Already I bleed. I could have young. I am not young Papa, stop saying that." Your quinces is in a moon. Then you have the ceremony." He nodded. "It is not good to talk of these things too much before hand." "I just want to know what I am." "You will become a person of water." What is Karrin? Also a person of the water. And X? X is a person of the air. Like you, he may go awy where, but unlike you he will be welcome. You might not always be welcome to people of the fire. Who says we are these things? Who says? Yes? No one. We are these things. What if we don't want to be these things? My dear, how could you want to be other than you are? You are water. I am fire. We cannot be otherwise. It is like you are a girl, I am a man. We cannot change these things, there is no reason to resist them. They just are. She said nothing, but stared off into the distance where the blue line of water met the blue line of sky. Sil sat in a troubled silence. "I think," he said at last, "this is something Fire cannot understand. I will seek council of the Water People on your behalf. See if this is known amoung them. If they can help you resolve thios." There is a council of the Water People?" Yes. When you are a few moons older you will go to them and learn what water has to teach. It will help you find your way. Not to spoil it, but the way of Water is to West. What is the way of Fire? South. Earth? North. Air? East. Her father shrugged. It is a wheel yes? I do not put too much into this, but maybe that is the nature of fire to see it this way, I do not know. What I know is that someone had to be each direction. I have never felt any pull to the south. If anything I feel a pull to the west. Water again. Hmm? Yes. I suppose you are right. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He did not mention that water also flows downhill, always toward the sea. He did not know all the ceremoney of the Water People, but he'd seen enough of them to know that she would be a leader among them. He was good at sensing these things. I was his place to find them, the leaders. He had not expected to find them so close to himself though. He wondered though at the old teaching, that love grants clarity. What if there were leaders he did not sea simply because he did not know them well enough to love them and therefore not see what was in them, what if he lacked the clarity he had with his own children and that was why he say it now in her, but not in others who might be just as worthy as her. THey are going to the annual winter festival, the gathering of the rice, but also to her cumpleanos her age ceremony when she will be adopted into wider tribes, the people of the water and everywhere she will go the people of the water will welcome her. PFOA leads to fertility problems, increased risk of cancer and developmental delays in children. This has happened in the cities, where degeneracy leads eventually to their collapse and then plagues wipe them out. The people of this age do not go near them. The biggest of them are buried under water. only Milwaukee and chicago remain as a wasteland at the southern most terminus of lakeland. Something calls one of the man's children south, he sails them to the shores of abandoned milwaukee. don't drink the water here. Don't drink until you are well south. Carry this. He handed her two large bladders of water. This is how long you can stay. When this runs out, you have to leave. there is nothing to hunt, nothing alive. animcals avoid the place, the gods of old ruined it, smashed the arrogance of these people. but the arrogance lingers. people go in, and the arrogance infects them and they think they can do what they cannot do. They think they can stay here, drink and eat. And they can of course. Nothing happens right away. But they never have children. the grow old when they are still young. things begins to grow on them, in them, something eats them up from the inside and it is because of this place.