Dark Woods to Big Big Sky

Driving north from Duluth was beautiful, and exploring the Minnesota State Forest lands embedded in Voyageurs National Park was amazing. There was a sense of something congruent within me and in this landscape. I guess, a sense of soft, loving grief, but combined with fertility and something new and rich. The forest smells returned me to my Pennsylvania childhood. 

I got a campsite at a Minnesota State Forest campground right on Lake Kabetogema. The national park campgrounds are only accessible by boat, definitely something I want to try someday. My campsite was beautiful though. Sheltered, private, steps away from huge rocks on the lake shore, where I could sit and listen to loons and watch the sun go down. I was having jarring experiences where I would revel in my solitude and feel connected to my present time experience, but then, all of a sudden, I would plunge into fierce longing, and wish she could be there with her kids. Sometimes I would just experience all of these new sights and places as "wow, this is humorous, or amusing, or very cool, or incredibly beautiful," and that would be that, but other times I'd add "...and I wish she were here." Very frustrating and sad. Sometimes I played a game that worked to some degree: what if it is a fond memory. It was a weird game, because of course we two had never been to any of these places. But it did soften things and take the edge off. I'd think, I wish she were here. And then I'd try to trick myself, "well, didn;t we just have a great time here, wasn't it amazing?" I can't fully explain why that worked, but it did, sometimes. 

But I also was beginning another cycle of letting go that felt somewhat deeper and more organic. For one thing, I had let go of fighting, which, until I let go of it, I didn't even realize I had been doing. I realized I just felt the way I felt, and that was that. I wondered if I could make friends with those parts of myself. It didn't feel likely, but at least I had started thinking about it. What would it be like to make friends with this missing of this person? To make friends with this grief? With this confusion and anger? To make friends with everything you're experiencing and just let it be what it is, and stop trying to change it, and stop trying to deny it, and stop trying to do anything about it? I had somehow not had space for those questions until the north woods of Minnesota. 

 Lake Kabetogema. Really looking forward to spending more time there someday. If you have 100% DEET, it's very pleasant. 

A huge, wild thunderstorm blew through overnight, and soaked everything. Waking to petrichor, wrangling all the gear, and heading out, I was feeling okay. I was especially curious what crossing the rest of northern Minnesota and then most of North Dakota would be like. 

So much sky, so much beauty all along the way. North Dakota was a little boring and monotonous, and, instead of pushing into Montana as I had hoped, I stopped in Williston, ND, thinking it was probably a nice little town. I didn't know that it is the hub of the Bakken Shale Oil Fields boom, and it was crowded and expensive. But afforded a view of rainbow number three of the trip. 

The next day was a light driving day, from Williston to Shelby Montana, to stage my visit to Glacier National Park. I had timed it so that I would be arriving in Glacier early on a Sunday morning, to have a better shot at a tent campsite. Shelby was a somewhat forlorn, high plains railroad town, right along I-15, with a real throwback main street. 

I had no idea what to expect from Glacier, and had only seen pictures here and there, but something was pulling me there pretty fiercely. The drive from Shelby to the park revealed vista after vista after vista of the high Rockies, and I kept thinking "this is jaw dropping," but each new scene, as I got closer, was an order of magnitude more amazing than the last. I felt soaring, free, unfettered and another strange feeling that caught me by surprise: happy. I realized only then how sad and weighted down I had felt for so long, months really, and not just by what couldn't be, but also by PhD squabbles, health issues, painful self realizations, dark nights in an endless string. As the Rockies rose and then towered over me, and then as I started driving up into them, I felt relief for the first time in months. The air itself seemed full of lightness and clearing, and something was saying to me, remember, you have this too inside. You have this and you have known this and this is yours. I felt like Percy allowed up from the Underworld in spring. 

Many more images from Glacier to come, but it obviously was a healing place for me. These first two photos, I took from my campsite at Two Medicine Lake, before I set up camp.