Where From Here?

     Only made it on the water up in the Boundary Waters this year. Never floated a boat at the cabin. Seems people fear for my life and see me being alone on wilderness water as a straight line to death.  I don't think they fear me dying as much as my inevitable toasting on the coals. Odd thing is that thought hasn't entered my head. It's not that I'm stupid, though some'd disagree, more that I still have a sense of my limits. Not a vision in my mind at all of soloing down the rapids in the Canadian Arctic. Nope, none at all. These days my visions lean toward a couple of hours on calm water with a fly rod in hand. The intention would be catching a couple but wouldn't pass the line into burning desire. Yeah, I still desire these days but it doesn't burn anymore.
     Over Christmas I spent a few minutes with El. Dean. Good minutes. If you've read a few of my posts then you know El. and I have passed a hundred or more hours paddling the same canoe. This spring will mark three years since we've shared the water. Three years too many. While we were talking, the thought struck me that the end of a tradition is rarely a decision. More that one day you wake up and you realize half a decade has passed. Years slipped by.
     Anyhow, the upcoming year holds the possibility of another Boundary Waters trip, maybe two. In a week or two I'll put the bee in Brian's bonnet, then, when my grandson's summer schedule is fleshed out, set up the dates for his introduction to the wilderness waters.

Folk Art

     I'd like to be a better writer. Or cabin builder. Paddle carver. You name it and I'd like to be better, maybe even a master, but I'm not. My punctuation's inconsistent, ragged. Don't know if I'm lazy or efficient but I sure leave out a lot of words. Heck I even do it on purpose and have been screwing up in general for a long time. I look around the cabin and can recall structural errors here, there and everywhere. The cedar siding is board and batten but lacks the batten. Run your hand down the loom of any paddle I've carved and you can feel the inconsistencies.  It's not that I haven't tried to be perfect and drive every nail straight but I sure as heck haven't. On the upside, everything works as it should and there's even a little bit of pretty in most every one of those things, especially when the light is low and you're willing to squint just right.

     What I'm angling toward is my writing. It'll never be perfect in any sense or form. Can't say I'd know what it would look like if it was. So I write my writing off as folk art; imperfection as beauty; screw-ups as creativity or at least as not ugly.

     At the moment my butt rests up at the cabin and cozied into the red Ikea chair that was too ugly to leave at home. My coffee sits next to our thirty year old radio on the scrap-made table. Emil nicely describes the table at the end of Archie's Tale - 1965, though the lamp  atop the one next to me came by way of my father-in-law, as was Emil's wounding in the Philippines. Thanks John.

     I've spent my life learning a little about this, something of that but have never made it close to shooting expert in anything except me, where I've been and what I've thought and done. Even then my expertise can be a little clouded, doubtful and skewed. So when I finally sat down to peck out the Little American Novel, it had to be about me. So that's what it is. Call it autobiographical fiction. 

     Years ago I rambled on a lot about writing up the details of my life so my grandchildren could have an idea of how things were back in the dark ages of my formative years. That was the original intent behind Between Thought and the Treetops. Kind of a convoluted method if you ask me. If I was a nice grandpa I'd of made it a lot easier on the five of them. But I'm not. Instead I ran off four hundred pages they'll have to give some thought as they root around in my words. Or maybe not give a damn one way or the other.

     Suppose I could blame it on Emil. Back a few decades when I first took a stab at writing, my words left no margin for doubt, they were graceless just like I'd been taught in Comp I at the U. Then around a fifteen years ago Emil showed up at a liar's contest to set me straight. Problem was I killed him off on the same day I realized he was there. In 2013 he resurrected himself, gave me direction and the two of us were off and writing. He and personal experience taught me that the shortest distance between two points in life, just like a portage between wilderness lakes, rarely follows a straight line. That could be the reason why the novel was such a roundabout way of saying who I am. Call it Emil's revenge or possibly his gift; either way we're having a good time. A single glance at one of my somewhat irregular paddles will tell you it's not perfect but you know for sure what it is. I don't know about you but I'd call that balance.