path: root/glb.txt

Great Lakes Book 

# Notes
## 2120 


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.


### The Farmer
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.


## 2520 

Quinceañera 
A woman plants trees and hemp so that someone of his descendants will be able to build tall ships. 


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 greens and blues 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 age. 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 is 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 icy. 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, its 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 laughed. 

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 Milwaukee.

Milwaukee drained her. It always had, but it had become worse as she'd aged. Now even the thought of the journey was enough to make her wish she were an only child. Or at least that her siblings had had the sense to leave the city. She wasn't sure if it was her getting older or the travel getting harder that wore on her. The train ran so seldom now. Almost no one had business in the city anymore. Little went in, nothing came out. In a place where once all roads had run north-south, now only two did and there was only one train line into the city. Like is in the country she'd told her brother years ago, between the wars. It was one of the rare occasions where they'd had a civil conversation. Until she'd begged him to leave the city. Then he'd laughed and told her that only the cities would survive. In a way he was right, only the cities had survived, the people in them were the walking dead. The walking dead with lawyers she reminded herself.  

She was no long willing to sit in the open boxcars that most people used. It would have been quicker, or at at least she could have left sooner. She'd waited nearly a month for a southbound engine with a closed car. But then, the thought of sitting on the hard metal floor as the train jolted along. She wasn't that young any more.The weather had delayed her trip further, spring rains had soaked the earth and mudslides blocked the tracks. She'd spent an extra day in tk town in the middle of North Lakeland waiting while somewhere up the track work crews shoveled out the mud and all around them storm clouds gathered, threatening to soak the earth again. 

That she hadn't minded so much. The quiet cold evening, the lights of the streets flickering in the wind. Just after dark it turned cold and a few snowflakes came swirling down, it reminded her of a picture she'd found cleaning out her grandmother's house the previous year. She discovered it at the bottom of a shoebox full of strange puffy pictures, 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 grandmother, 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 first war, but not long. Electricity hadn't lasted much more than a year or two after the new borders were drawn. 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 found it hard to believe. But the woman had lived to 94. She talked of the winters that had been 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 the north woods 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 read that 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 her 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 lived in service to the trees the way some lived in service to their gods. It was similarly mysterious, myths of the distant past, obligations, ceremonies, rites and passages. She was a 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, it was birch, a wood that burned hot, but didn't grow much anymore this far south. Even her home in the north had only remnants of the massive tracts of birch that had once filled these flat lands. 

She awoke the next morning to a world in white. Snow. Only an inch or two, but still snow. It had been years since anyone had seen snow this far south. The railroad was anxious to be underway before it melted and unleashed more mud. The train left early.

The Milwaukee depot was on the edge of town. She stepped off into the chilly spring winds whipping off the lake. 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 her 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. She checked out a bicycle at the stand and rode 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 New Chavez when what she wanted was Old Chavez. She had to retrace her steps back to the river. That she didn't mind so much, the river was the only thing alive in the city, the clusters of trees that hugged its edges made the rest of the city more bearable. She looked at the map again and plotted a new route that stayed beside the river as long as she could. That was how she saw the fox. It was standing on the bank, watching something she could not make out. She stopped to watch it, but it heard the crunch of her tires and turned toward her. It had a smile on its face, the way foxes always seem to, it studied her for a bit, with what she took to be mild interest. Then it turned away and trotted off down the bank, on about its business. She sat a while longer on her bike, watching the banks for other signs of life, but seeing none.

After an hour of riding, including hitting several dead ends and retracing her steps, she found the white three story house of the lawyer. She knocked on the fourth door in a row of doors and she heard the bolt slide back. She waited the usual minute and then entered. The room was small. White, very white. 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.

Beyond him she could see her brother. He hadn't noticed her yet, he appeared to be studying something on the table in front of him. He looked older than he had last year, more than a year older. His sallow complexion continued the yellow, like a book fading in the sun, though in his case it was probably more from avoiding the sun. He was gaunt and thin. He was sick. She wasn't about to argue otherwise. But that was the choice he'd made. And he would have to understand that the trees were not there to continue to prop up a life he'd forfeited years ago though decisions of his own choosing. No one had forced him. She felt the anger rising in her. She took a breath and looked away. That's when she noticed her sister.

he is suing to sell the trees because he needs the money for an organ replacement.

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. 






---

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. 





# boat intro

A soft breeze woke Iza in her berth. She'd left the portal above her open when she went to bed because it was stuffy and the wind and rain never came from the north anyway. Wait, she sat up suddenly. The breeze was coming in the portal. The breeze was from the North. The north. "Karrin," she yelled. "Tell Papa the wind has shifted." There was no response. "Karrin," she yelled again. There was still no response. She much have gone ahore Iza realized. Damn. She grabbed a shirt from the locker above her head and rolled out of bed. She put on the shirt as she climbed up the companionway. 

She went to the stern hatch that led to her father's room, the captains quarters as he liked to call it. "Papa. Wind comin' fr'up noth." She laughed imitating the old accent. 

The old man was on deck in a beat, vaulting up the stairs and 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 his daughters had never known him to be 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. While it had faded, certain words still 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, half yawning, half stretching. "You think those old bears left us some? Well then, where's your sister? Let's go get em. You eaten?"

"Had some fish."

"Fish? What you eaten fish for up here?" 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."

---

She stepped lightly, silently through the shadows and the forest. She knew her father was several paces to her right, but through the play of shadow and light in the rustling of the leaves. The wind was strong enough to rattle the birch leaves, the pines that towered over the edge of the glade she moved through cast deeper shadows to the left. The noise of the leaves was enough to cover any missteps, but she had her pride to contend with. She put her feet down slowly, feeling the contour of leaves and twigs before putting her full weight down. She shifted her foot to avoid what felt like a dry maple leaf, only the find she had brought her weight down on a tough, dry strip of birch bark that dug deep into the soft middle of her foot. She winced but did not let the bowstring slack. 

Four paces ahead the birch abruptly stopped. There was a clearing, made by her father several years ago. In it they'd been mounding acorn and sour mash, on top of buried caches of the same. Boar, according to her father, love to dig for their food. The first day they eat the easy food, but what they really like is the buried food, they like to work for it. Like you Iza said. Her father smiled at her, yeah, I suppose a little like me. 

The trick was shooting them. Despite being her father's daughter, Iza had never put an arrow in anything larger than a beaver. She was a fair shot at waddling beaver, but a snorting snarling pig with six inch tusks on either side of it's sizable teeth was another matter entirely. She was terrified of boar. She'd have rather hunted wolves or grizzlies. But her father insisted that his contribution to the Lughnas be boar. Specifically boar rendered in its own fat in the traditional way. And she here she stood, creeping up on a clearing where an animal ten times her weight and twice her size was busy rooting around in folded birch bark containers they'd buried two days ago. What happened to gathering blueberries, she thought to herself. 

She brought her arm up, ready to shoot as she inched up to and then relaxed against the birch. She glances around quickly, trying to find something climbable if the hunt took a turn for the worse, as her father had put it. She reasoned she could probably vault herself into the limbs of a fir if worst came to worst. She brought her mind back to the task and hand. 

The boar had its head down, rooting a mixture of dug soil, roots, and the remnants of their birch bark container that had been full of acorns. She looked to the side of it, so as not to stare. Animals did not like to be stared at. They could feel your stare. The boar's neck was too low to shoot at though. Then her father's imitation of a scholing Chickadee rang out and boat suddenly lifted it's head. Before she realized she'd done it, the arrow was gone and she was pulling another out of her quiver without taking her eyes from the boar, but boar had already slumped on its side, her arrow was deep in its shoulder and a second had gone straight into its throat. She saw her father move out into the open now and put two more arrows into it. 

Iza!

She ran over and he grabbed her in a bear hug. That one was you. Look! that is your arrow, went right through to the heart. Amazing shot. 

Lucky papa. I was too scared to be anything more than lucky.

There is no such thing as luck Iza. Take credit for the skills your training has built. 

She smiled. Okay Papa, maybe it was. I don't know. I don't remember letting the arrow fly.

That is good said her father excitedly, that is excellant. You are hunting then. That is good. Very good. her rubbed his hands together and turned around, still muttering to himself, or perhaps to her, she wasn't sure, but she could no longer understand him until he said, 'You shoot like a huge warrior hunter, but alas, you are not very big." He scratched at the stubble on the back of his had. "How are we going to move this beast Iza? I don't want to clean it here, this bait circle might still be good. We will have to travois the body out of here and back to the shore. We can butcher it there. He moved to the opposite edge of the clearing and began to hack at two birch saplings with the small hatchet he carried on his belt. It took a minute but he soon had then cut and stripped into poles. 


---

It was half a turn of the moon before they were ready to head south. The days were spent 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 as she lay in the warmth of the sun on the teak foredeck. 

It was Iza's first trip to the northern hunting grounds. An early present from her father who said she really shouldn't go until after her quinces, but he needed the help and she suspected, he hated saying no to her and she'd asked. Maybe even begged. When she was a girl she'd hated when her rather left for the summer hunting camps. She remembered clearly sitting on the dock swinging her legs and looking out after the line of boats fading into the foggy waters of the lake through the murkiness of tears. This year only two other boats had come and neither had anchored here, both headed farther west, to an island rather than risk the northern shore. Fewer people plied the waters the way her father did, she wondered if anyone would next year. Few people wanted to negotiate with the Ojibwe on the north shore. Her father loved the Ojibwe, the only people who really know this place he had said several times during their stay. He'd left her and her sister on the boat by the themselves for two nights while he ranged the shore and a considerable ways inland he'd said, looking for them, but they were not there. They had not seen anyone since they anchored in this cove almost two moons ago. It was the longest Iza had ever gone in her life without seeing another human being besides her family. She was looking forward to getting back to see her mother and brother and tk and tk and tk and all the other faces of the winter village. She had never really thought of it as the winter village until now, that was just what her father called it. But now it did feel that way to her, it was a thing apart from here, there was no need for it in the summer her father said. It is good to roam, to see the world, to find out what's happening over the horizon, he'd told them one even beside the fire they had on shore. They'd slept on the island most of the time, though when there was work on the boat they stayed on the boat. 

She sat up, using an open hatch for a chair back and watched her sister on the shore, gathering hazelnuts from the grove that grew back above the rocky north side of the cove they were anchored in. He father was below, working on boat projects, getting their aging ship ready to sail across the lake again. It was only about a two day sail, if the wind and weather were in their favor, but there was always something to do on the ship. 

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 did not really want to gather hazelnuts. She wanted to swim and lie in the sun until it was too hot and then swim some more, but she knew better than to say that. If she said that she'd be picking hazelnuts until the moment they left. Instead she tried to slip in a question that had been weighing on her for several days now, ever since her father hand talked about "diggers" around the fire. "Papa," she said slowly, "aren't these trees planted?"

Her father shrugged. "could be, why?"

"Well, if they were planted, and you could say we're tending to them, Wouldn't that make us farmers then?"

"Diggers? You're calling us diggers?" There was an edge in his voice that she did not like.

"No, I'm not saying we're diggers, but aren't be benefiting from past diggers?"

Her father came and sat down on deck next to her. "Sure, we're benefiting. I have nothing against diggers doing their work Iza. Everyone should do what he feels called to do. But don't try to make me a digger."

She laughed. "Who would make you do anything? Who could?"

He smiled. "It might seem hard when we're out here to make us do what we don't want to. It might. But it can be done."

She frowned. "Why don't you like to farm?"

Her father stared off at the water in silence for a moment. "I don't know really, it's not in my nature. I always think, why would I want to be tied to this bit of land? Why would I want to depend on this bit of land and these bits of plant when I can wander through the while land? <tk god> grows her own plants. I can 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 kernels, I can go where the hazelnuts are," he spread his arm out around the cove. "This is the connection between the world between <tk god> and us, we have to walk through it and observe it, it would be an insult to <tk god> not to. To try to turn the world to our hands, this is arrogance. This was the unraveling of the old 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 <tk god> showed them that. To change the land is change yourself. Some may feel okay doing it, but it's not something I wish to do.

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, nor does she like to hunt. She is a person of the earth, she has alliances with the animals that prevent her from hunting, but she is 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 mother is a person of the earth and you are a person of the fire, what am I?

"Now? You are not a person. You are young."

Her face flashed a sudden heat. She clenched her teeth. "My quinces is less than one moon. Already I bleed. I could have children." She stopped to steal the anger that was rising in her voice. "I am not young Papa, stop saying that."

She saw him smiling at her out of the corner of her eye. "Do not be angry at being called young Iza. To be young is a gift you only get once, enjoy it." He paused. "I mean, no one does. I didn't. Now I understand, but there is no way to impart what I understand to you. It is impossible I think. No young person has ever appreciated being young. Perhaps you would not be young anymore if you could. Whatever the case, yes, I know these things. Your quinces is in a moon. Then you have your ceremony." He nodded. "It is not good to talk of these things too much beforehand."

"I just want to know what I am to be."

"You are a person of water."

"What is Kerrin?"

"Also a person of the water."

And X?

"X is a person of the air. Like you, he may go anywhere, 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 among 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."

"And Air is East."

"Yes," Her father nodded, pleased. "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 each had to have a direction. Maybe there is more to it than this, I don't know. I know have never felt any particular pull to the south. If anything I feel a pull to the west."

"Water again."

"Hmm? Ah, yes. 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 ceremony 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.

He was lost in this thought when he realized he could no longer see his daughter on the shore. He was just about to stand up to look closer when the arrow hit the mast with a loud crack and Iza screamed. He quickly rolled to her side and covered her mouth. "Stay down," he hissed. And then he slithered away, elbow crawling his way over the deck to the companionway. He disappeared down the stairs and returned with his rifle and a glass. He crawled to the bow and and propped the glass against a hole cut in the gunwale, half for this purpose, half to drain water in rough seas. He put his eye to the glass and scanned the tree line. There was nothing. He swept as far as he could to the south side of the cover and then back again toward the north. He was about to conclude that whomever had shot the arrow was gone when he saw him. A lone man was leaning against a birch tree. He was dressed in skins, and had a quiver strap across his chest. He was staring straight into the lens and laughing. 

"I can see you you know."

Her father carefully slide the rifle up in to the edge of the portal. can you see this is whispered and cracked off a round that hit the birch tree a few feet over his head, sending a splatter of bark and green wood splinters down on his head. He was pretty sure he never flinched though. He brought the glass back to his eye and saw that the man was now frowning slightly, but had not moved. he heaved himself off the birdch and dusted the splinters from hair and shoulders. He glanced out at the boat and bellowed, "come ashore, we'll settle this in a ring.

Papa what is going on?

Nothing to worry about Iza that's TK. we're friendly. usually.

He shot an arrow into our mast and you fired your rifle at him, that doesn't seem friendly to me. And now he wants you to go ashore. And where is Karrin?

Relax Iza. I will go ashore, we will get int he ring and later tonight we'll all be sitting around their fire. They just have some different customs is all. Actually I don't think it's them, not the Ojibwe maybe, just tk. Anyway, I will go ashore now. Here/ He handed her the rifle. If it looks like I'm losing, fire a warning shot.

What? 

I'll be fine.

And with that he stood up and walked to the stern where the little digny was tied and hopped in. He rowed to the shore where tk was already dragging his foot in a cirle. It was then that Iza saw the other men emerge from the woods. Two dozen at least. They stood around the circle. Her father and the tall brown man squareed off in the ring. She heard a count of some kind and then they began to circle each other.

They have the fight, throw some jui jitsu in there and then everyone is friends and they are allowed to the circle by the fire.

there needs to be more description of the land and the water, the weather, more details more lushness, the silence and quiet of the deep wood. though the trees may change the presence of the places does not. there is something here very old and ancient that bears witness to everything to walks upon it. get to the animals, the way in which they become part of the fabric of life and are not a comodity to be taken, but a partner to worked with and respected. I need to go back and redo the hunting section and show the father doing it and skining and cleaning rather than just glossing over that bit.

Make the more than human part of the story without overdoing it. show from the deeer's perspective maybe. or at least his perspective 

maybe the man has a child in the village? maybe the mother is gone? Maybe he has two families? I don't know, is that too much. but then why would he leave his son behind? I would never do that, why would he?

They go ashore, spend time with the Ojibwe tribe that's come down from the north to winter cabins on the lake. For them it's too keep warm, to fish, to hunt where there is still game. To works the southern forests. The father has become friends with them over the years, his long hikes in the woods when he was young, he ran away from the village he was raised in to the south, he came to live among the trees. he lives with the Ojibwe for several years before he is captured and shanghaied somehow and ends up at sea on the lake and then later all the way to the southern seas where he has adventures and then he decides to return to the north. He walks up from present day tennessee mountains to the village that's where ashland is now and meets his wife there and settles, but still hutns and fishes, is unwilling to live a stationary life. he spends his summers on the boat, his winters in the forest outside the village. the wife lifes in the village, forages and grows the medicines. she is the village healer. the healer for the whole area. 

They spend a few fires with the Ojibwe. Iza sees a young boy, a hunter who catches her eye. not too much there, but something about him stays wtih her so that he comes up later when she is south. why does she go south? something drives her south. 

her father photographs the Ojibwe and they want him to take pictures of all the new children and the young men who have left the nearby villages to join them. that's his service to them, so they stay a week longer and he makes the photographs. Get into how he does it. The old camera that has been handed down. a film camera artifact from a museum in a city. Her father when to a photo museum and saw the images and the camera and figures out how it works, teaches himself to read enough of the old language to be able to use the camera, which he and everyone else considers a kind of magic. their approach to it is science but they think of it in terms of having its own life, of being a thing that is alive and that can help them. Learning the ways of it, learning its nature rather than a deconstructionist scientific approach. Everyone must learn the way of things and then must find their own way within the way of things. 

Everyone to do their own thing is not chaos, it's nature. yes people work together, people help each other do their own thing when they need it but no prescribes the way to do a thing beyond basic community standards. In other words you do not harvest the rice until it is ready, but once it is ready how you harvest it and how much you harvest is up to you and yours. the collective model of the spainish village, wherein some obligations and pressue of the community is exerted in such a way that you want to be better. as in the jui jitsu philosophy that training to be better yourself encourages an esprit de cour in the whole village that makes it stronger. there is thought of the collective, but the thought is how can I make it stronger, not what do I need to do, but what can I do.


THey are going to the annual winter festival, the gathering of the rice, but also to her 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. All these places. This is not the only one. You will see plenty before you reach the south sea.