Just north of White Bear Lake I spotted an owl that lifted off from the edge of the woods and spun up into the air like a kite tilting in the wind. There’s a copse of trees and old farm houses there. Birch trees and what look like burr oaks, brown leaves still rattling in the winter wind and framing the soft cloud-like white under feathers of the owl’s wings as she rode up higher into the breeze.
After this, the “natural world” gave way to construction cranes, concrete walls and John Deere earth movers. Industrialized corridors of expansion and improvement. On the last leg of the journey of returning Juliet to college for spring semester, I was struck by the transition.
As you know, most of the route down Highway 35 looks like farmland and wide open grasslands. This winter, that’s a lot of brown and not a whole lot of white. Therefore the owl’s shape and silhouette stuck out against the drabness of the day like a fluttering flag.
It reminded me of sitting in my darkhouse and swimming decoys, staring endlessly at the glowing rectangle and the aquarium-like world underneath. The same mundane scenery, sometimes for hours, patience wearing thin until the arrival of a crawfish crawling along the lake bed seems like a reason for celebration. The appearance of a sucker, smallmouth bass or stray walleye’s white tipped tail causes the heartbeat to elevate.
Like I always say, it never fails. Hours of uneventful sentry duty in the shack leads to lethargic responses and expectations of more of the same ole same ole. In short, just about the time you decide to boil some polish delights in the old coffee can, or reach in your pocket for that energy bar, open your thermos for something that will warm your core, it is then and always then, somehow, that the big pike comes in.
My most recent visitor shot in and out of the corner of my hole in the ice, very close to the surface in fact, very similar to the quick arc of the owl’s rise and flight into the trees. There and then, not there. Like a figment, like a dream.
The one that got away. The one that was never there to “get.” On the drive, it was a welcome sighting. The owl was a distraction and a happy thing for me to take note of and remember.
Somehow, in the darkhouse, the appearance of the big northern was not received by me in quite the same fashion. I wonder, as I write this, why that was so? It wasn’t any less real because I didn’t have a shot of throwing my spear at it.
In fact I think that is now more of a fixture in my memory than if I’d eaten it for dinner. It was big, did I say that? It really got my heart beating. I think that my decoy spooked it, because I lifted its nose to complete a new circle just about the time that big wolf of Shagawa Lake pushed its big shovel head in under my saw marks.
These arcs of inspiration obviously show up when I’m least expecting them. I wonder at the directions they may be attempting to point me.
I wonder why I saw the owl at all or why I wasn’t checking my polish when the fish came to visit.
Just like I wonder why some mornings on my walk to work the cold smacks me right in the forehead like a painful slap and woodsmoke is thick in the air and then on other mornings snowflakes melt against my cheeks and eyelids nearly before they land. Small and insignificant touches of something almost bigger, almost meaningful. Like a lost trail of raven tracks that lead to nowhere...
Like as not, these smallest of things mean more than we think. They might be the key to unlocking it all.
