Boundary Waters
Because we live in a time when spontaneous and unlikely outreach across miles and decades is possible, I received a birthday message last week from my first husband Richie, who will forever be my only (hopefully) ex-husband. We were married in Chicago in 1971 by a cantankerous judge at the Cook County Courthouse. Richie was a medical student then, while I worked as the front desk receptionist in a downtown office. He was a good person, and it’s hard to explain, but just a few weeks into our marriage I began to understand that we would not be happy together in the long-term. We had met when I was only fifteen, barely beginning to awaken to the world, and I was still a confused young neurotic with very little credibility even among those who loved me, but I saw clearly that I had to leave. It took a couple of years, but I somehow managed to do so, despite abundant disapproval from everyone I knew, and no plan at all.
Richie is a retired dermatologist now, residing in a southern state with his third wife, comfortable with a culture and politics that I would have found dissonant. He is a father, grandfather, and de facto patriarch of his extended family, and from my vantage point, he has everything he ever might have wished for and would never have had with me. I thanked him once in an email for all the nice things he did and tried to do for me when we were young, and I secretly hoped he would thank me in return for having had the courage and good sense to essentially set him free, but no absolution was forthcoming. I suppose I will forever be the villain in that story. The woman who abandoned Richie-the-Good.
And so, I was a little surprised to receive a birthday greeting from him, and even more so because, contrary to his usual parsimony with words, he wrote a few lines and mentioned a tangible memory. He had recently been in contact with a classmate from medical school with whom we had traveled for a canoe trip to the Minnesota Canada Boundary waters. He wondered if I remembered that trip.
Did I remember that trip? With ridiculous detail. It was a very a long drive from Chicago up to Ely, Minnesota. (I-90 West, and U.S. 53 North?) The sky was wide and white, and at one point, I looked up and saw a pale pink rippling curtain of light in the far, far distance above. It was June, and thus unlikely, but if it is scientifically possible, I believe that what I glimpsed that day were the Northern Lights.
Meanwhile, a Gordon Lightfoot song was playing on the radio: “If You Could Read My Mind.” It’s a song filled with ghosts and yearning, disappointing heroes, and lost, irretrievable feelings. Years later, I learned that the song was written by Lightfoot about his divorce, and to this day, if I hear that song, it all comes back to me, and I know exactly how it felt to be a young woman on a long drive north in a car with someone she cared about but knew she would be leaving.
We stopped in Ely to be “outfitted” and set out with camping supplies, canoes, and maps. I had no idea what to expect, but I doubt that I could have been less prepared. I could not swim and was terrified of the water. The closest I had ever come to paddling a canoe was stirring sauce with a wooden spoon, and I didn’t find much overlap in the motions. The weather when we got there was drizzly and chilly, for which I had no tolerance. My idea of a vacation in those days was more along the lines of sunbathing in a nice beach chair with a book in my hand. Now we were to sleep on the ground in damp tents, and between paddling on waters that were not always placid, there were overland portages which required us to carry our canoes on our shoulders while mosquitoes feasted on our flesh.
Did I remember that trip? I did.
But I also remember a moment on the night of the Solstice, when I wandered alone to the shore of a lake and dipped a tin cup into the water, and I drank, and it was pure and cold, and in the clean magic light of 10 pm, I felt a stirring, a premonition if you will, of something I would come to love but was not yet ready for. I heard the haunting call of a loon then, and the lake looked as smooth and glassy as a mirror, embraced by an arc of shadowed woods, and before I turned to walk back to our tent, I sensed that I had by chance crossed a border into another realm possessed of its own mysteries and wholeness.
I realize now, all these decades later, how lucky I was to have visited that part of the world, known even today as one of the most pristine wilderness areas on the continent, straddling the Canada–United States border between Ontario and Minnesota. But it’s all about timing, isn’t it? And I never did learn to swim, but I have since gazed beyond many confines and borderlines, and stood on shores of wonderment. I saw the Bosporus Strait, part of the boundary between Asia and Europe, shimmering in moonlight. I’ve walked along the Thames, the River Wye, and once, the Mississippi. I climbed to a high place, not far from where I am right now, saw a meadow with a vernal pool like a small dropped jewel, and to the south the Channel glistening, and a blue island fading and floating like a mirage on the horizon.
On my birthday last week, I hiked with four friends to a sandstone rock formation that we call church, and we gathered by a pond newly filled with rainwater, and read poems in the wind. It’s true. My 72nd birthday turned out to be as good as my tenth, and I am spilling over with gratitude.
The rain and mist continue here, and white clouds cling to the green hills, and I wonder what twilight zone trickster has transported us all to Scotland. Maybe while we were sleeping? Or maybe we are still sleeping. Who can say? We’re in a fog.
I will forever be amazed and grateful to have been given the gift of briefly bearing witness. I’m glad too that I have learned the trick of pushing sorrow aside now and then. I own the sadness, and I cannot ever purge it, but it has etched my soul into lace, and light shines through its filigree stitchery. And where loss has carved my heart into a bowl, the hollow fills sometimes, like the sandstone pools after rain, with something beautiful and good.
I left the known and found this borderland, and I live at the edge. I am not absolved, but I have license to be nonlinear and a little loony, a wobbly kind of sanity.
As Gordon Lightfoot sang in his song: If you could read my mind, what a tale my thoughts could tell!
And if Richie won’t thank me for leaving him, it’s okay. I thank the brave girl who used to be me.