Hulks and Flotsam -- the Old Urban but Ageless Rustic

Out at the edges of cities and between cities abandoned things beckon, useful for collecting by hand or sifting for all the meaning they're worth. On a frozen Sunday morning far down Minnesota Point, one of the nose-to-nose barrier islands that surround the outlet of the St. Louis River into Lake Superior, two of us seemed to hear the reverberations of a haunting. We had walked the beach on the Duluth, Minnesota side as far as a washed-up spruce frozen against some birch, both bobbing, with icicles like a row of tusks bonding them together. A surf rolled from the lake, with the sand undercut in a kind of terrace just about where these trees lay crosswise to the breaking waves. I said, 'Do you hear somebody shouting?' and we both did, exactly like a man's voice calling one word, always in the same tone from way out on the water. But it didn't vary. It sounded like 'Help!' in the manner of an instructor showing how to intone a key word. A little leaning over and listening proved the voice to be a suction sound, generated each time a wave ebbed back from a scooped-out area beneath the two logs. From a few steps away it sounded like the sh-shunk!  a heavy glass door on a public building makes sometimes as it opens and closes to the outside. When we returned and passed the same spot the sand had been re-contoured and the floating trees, my friend thought, moved a bit from where they were, and the sound had gone quiet though the waves were the same or bigger.

There used to be more authorized people-activity at the end of the point and the leavings are there in buildings I'd not examined so closely when I was last there. No car access anymore, unless you could count the fenced-in runway for small planes, extends beyond the airport; but boats used to come and go from piers, connected with a long-gone village and trading post, and there are the remains of a boat garage  made all of concrete, even the roof, with early 1900s-style stair-step blocks going up to a peak in a false front at each end. All the doors and windows gape open without a trace of glass or wood framework left, and graffiti artists have addressed themselves to the inside. Campfires have been enjoyed on the pure sand that spreads in place of any floor from times past. Over the door are some very faded block letters that can't all be read for sure but look something like this: U.S......DEPOT.

A stroll away into the pines you come across a two-hole privy with no door in the doorway, no glass in the window, but still a shabby wooden seat and the stump of a lid helpfully propped up on one of the holes. I'm advised that the concrete walls and roof are an old  construction meant to stem accidental  fires, since welding and other hot repair work took place there, facing the Superior, Wisconsin shipping channel.

Way down at the sandy fingertip of this 7-mile-long isle are logs and entanglements of driftwood, some of it propped into a frame for a tepee. Someone had to have camped there. One horizontal log bears a phantom word in magic marker: (again) Help!

A short ways back toward Duluth is a brick silo, all fenced around for some reason to keep people out. The bottom is open like a fireplace; the top is crumbled away and open to the skies. This was a lighthouse dating to 1855, though at an original fifty feet in height it must have surpassed any and all surrounding trees. In its vicinity are white pines in an uncharacteristic squat form rather than mast-like, maybe limited in their height by sands that shift beneath them and chronic wind from off the lake.

In the leafy seasons of the year much of Minnesota Point beyond the city park is matted and ragged with poison ivy, courtesy no doubt of extensive public works that brought dredged-out fill into the Twin Ports waterfront from other places where poison ivy is native. Along the spine of the point in winter, poison ivy stalks bristle with pale berries serving as forbidding markers to whomever might remember affliction with poison ivy rash. This place has its parallels with the central Indiana of my childhood; it was a poison-ivy-ridden zone of dwindling value for farming. The tract of land to our south bore an Airstream office trailer that a fire had gutted, a junked Ford station wagon and a tractor left to rust into crumbs and attract children like ourselves during days of no school. 

Dumped-upon, scrambled and re-vegetated places via their human histories are apt to leave the present-day visitor with a mood formed by stories heard or read and connecting with one's own story. Much as the smack and swirl of surf against a rip-rap
breakwater partway back along the Point conjures an upset stomach coping with a big meal, karst limestone forming slots in the ground down in southern Minnesota made me think of a face stiffened by sorrow, ebbing to a secondary stage in which comfort first feels possible.

The poem I'd written and used on the greeting card shown below:     'Your face a crust that dried like that...blown grit lacing your crevices of loss--but yet again, at last, you're circulating back into the pillowlands of crumpling, regenerating hills and sense that pock or fracture's coming loose--your mouth--cracking the sands that edge it, and it expands counter to its late laws, not quite a smile, a fountainhead...' is the face of a landscape and of a person, any person, easing into a phase of enjoyment in the wake of deep grief.

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We look into the land and listen, hearing souls, lost and adrift, calling out to us; we see faces that look past us or into us, much as the land's own local character penetrates via our senses. The message we take from it ties into the stories that have led us to the point where we find ourselves now. The process, I believe, is entirely vital to our well-being.