Essays by Thomas Dean
"Eye of the Bear" (c2021)
“Look me in the eye.” We’ve all heard it. “The eyes are the doorways to the soul.” We’ve also all heard that. These are calls to authenticity, to a connection bound by honesty and deepest reality. And I found the deep reality of wildness looking into the eyes of a bear not ten feet away.
My family and I spend time each summer in the North Woods of Minnesota, where we share the forest with wilderness creatures large and small. Nearly every year for the past twenty, we have gone to a remote cabin off the Fernberg Road near Ely, thirteen miles from the Canadian border. Ely is an old iron mining town, now the gateway to one of the largest expanses of wilderness in the country—the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Aware Wilderness. One of Ely’s town slogans is “the end of the road”—and that is literally true. The end of the Fernberg Road out of Ely terminates the country’s pavement heading north at that point, with only ten miles of glacial lakes, deep
forest, ancient greenstone, and profound mystery between it and the Canadian border. If you can’t find wildness here, you can’t find it anywhere.
The chinkered log cabin we visit sits above the small boreal Sundew Pond, ringed by bog full of pitcher plants and sundew (of course). Without electricity or running water, the Sundew cabin still provides us with ample comfort (including a separate sauna house), but most importantly a couple of weeks at the wilderness’s edge miles from any other humans, a time to rest, reset, and recreate (in the best sense of re-creation)—a time to find the green fire of the wild.
The great conservationist Aldo Leopold coined the term “green fire” in his seminal essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which appears in his classic A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949). Leopold relates how, early in his career with the US Forest Service in the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory, he and his colleagues one day spotted a mother wolf with her grown pups at the bottom of a canyon. At the time (1909), predator extermination was the policy of the Forest Service, and Leopold and company were soon “pumping lead into the pack,” as he says. Leopold goes on to say, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.” Leopold dates this as the beginning of his understanding of what he would later in life call “the land ethic”—that all of the natural world, including humanity, is part of an interdependent community. The green fire he stared into in the dying wolf’s eyes started his journey to “think like a mountain,” to understand, respect, and act within the holistic interconnectedness of all life.
I subscribe to no religion, but I believe there’s a fundamental animating force in the universe. Many words have been used to name this force—spirit, God, divine, demiurge, creator. In all cases, these words cannot be but metaphors. Fire serves me as a vivid image for this animating force. It’s no wonder that two of my favorite lines of poetry in English are from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Or, as medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen said, “I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond/the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters,/and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars.” To go along with that image of fire, wild for me serves as the concept for the anima mundi, the world soul, even the vital force of the entire universe. So Leopold’s “green fire”—whether he intended it this way or not—speaks to me of the interconnectedness of all beings—and Being.
Which brings me back to the bear.
One day a few years ago, while my daughter, Sylvia, and I were out hiking around Bass Lake, about five miles from Sundew Pond, my wife, Susan, was alone back at the cabin, tending to our five dogs. When we finished our hike and returned to our van, Sylvia (as a twenty-something would) checked her phone. There were two or three text messages from Susan, garbled to near incomprehension, since even “all thumbs” is an optimistic description of my wife’s texting abilities. Something about a bear.
On our return to the cabin, Susan regaled us with the tale. A black bear had decided to visit the cabin and, in search of food (as bears are always wont to do), to pull down a bird feeder full of sunflower seeds from the roof overhang outside the cabin’s pond-side window. Susan first saw the bruin on the other side of the cabin, lumbering down the porch running along three sides of our North Woods retreat. The big black burly beast paused to look into a window, sending our five dogs and Susan into a bit of a frenzy before it sauntered to the bird feeder on the opposite side of the cabin. The cabin sits atop a hill (a glacial esker), so from a story and a half below on that side, our intrepid bear attempted to jump up the ten feet or so to grab the feeder. With one of his leaps, still short of the bird feeder, it actually dug its claws into an exterior log of the cabin and peered into the window. Its furry Peeping Tom face smack up against the window pane unnerved Susan even more and sent our canine family into fits of even more agitated barking.
From his grip on the cabin’s outer logs, our wild visitor then launched itself backward toward the dangling bird feeder, successfully grabbing it with its mammoth paws. Tumbling to the ground, the big bruin then sat nonchalantly emptying the plastic tube of its succulent sunflower seeds. Having finished its midday snack, it tossed the bird feeder aside, stood up, and shambled away, its shaggy fur glistening a bit as its generous hindquarters wobbled in time to its steps. Sylvia and I regretted missing the excitement, but we all still came away with a great North Woods vacation story.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. The next day, as I was returning to the cabin from my morning visit to the outhouse, walking on the porch deck toward the door, our ursine friend appeared once again, coming around the side of the cabin, not ten feet away from me. At that moment we both stopped short and locked gazes. As I stared into the close-set eyes and into the power of this beast of the north, the wild visitor returned my stare as it assessed if I posed any threat. Black bears actually present little danger to humans except in unusual circumstances. I experienced no real fear, and I’m sure the bear wasn’t especially afraid either. But it had no desire to stick around with me close by, and I knew it would soon be on its way. Indeed it was just a moment later when Susan opened the cabin door with our dogs on leash, heading out for a morning walk. I blurted out, “Bear!” Susan and dogs quickly retreated into the cabin, but Ursus was galloping down the two-track road back into the timber in an instant.
This brief encounter allowed me to peer into the green fire, to share a moment of wild kinship with this magnificent creature. And, beyond the bronze mystery of those eyes, as should happen when we look into the wild, I also glimpsed untamed history, the feral earth, the infinite stars, and what might even be called the sacred cosmos. I sensed profound depths of humility and wonder, a moment of trust in wildness. I still wonder what the bear saw in mine. I hope something at least interesting, and maybe something more, a brief encounter that spoke of interconnection.
In the North Woods, I’ve enjoyed many gazes into eyes blazing with green fire: those of a regal great grey owl, chattering red squirrels, a hissing pine marten protecting its young, placid but alert deer, even the sharp, confident stare of a timber wolf. I return those gazes with both companionship and wonder, seeking wildness in our shared looks, the green fire that will help me unwrap the mysteries of our existence on this earth. When I am lucky enough to make such wild acquaintance, I deeply know and feel not only the green fire within me, but a profound sense of connection with my new friend, not just as two corporeal beings but as fellow travelers along the interdependent web of all existence. Together, we join the living world as partners in wildness and as mutual manifestations of the animating spirit of the universe. Each time I peer into the living green fire in the eyes of a fellow being, I know I also am looking into my own soul, into my own place in the whole of existence, seeing how, as the poet Mary Oliver said, I am “in the family of things.”
"The Tamarack" (c2021)
On any visit to Sundew Pond on the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, I cannot miss paddling out and paying my respects to The Tamarack. The boreal Sundew Pond is ringed by bog, so tamarack is a common tree, along with its companion black spruce. But I’m referring here to The Tamarack—an unusually large, stately tree that stands sentry in the middle of the bog on the pond’s west end—and has become a totem of the wild for me.
My ritual circumnavigation of the pond by canoe instinctively pulls me first eastward, past the southern grassy peat mat full of blue flag irises and pitcher plants, around to the northern “shore” full of scraggly spruce, and then finally slowing through short channels amidst the muskeg to stop near The Tamarack, maybe twenty feet tall. As the canoe floats gently in the still, brown, murky water, I honor this tree as a symbol of this beautiful northern place, and as a guide or mentor to the mysteries of duality—and more—in this liminal space, not quite land, not quite water.
I have spent much of my life peering into forests, pulled by their dark mystery and wild abundance, trying to ken the secrets and enigmas I sense within them. Storyteller and mythopoeticist Martin Shaw would tell me I am attempting to find myself, my whole self, and of late I’m believing him. The secret in the forest is “relatedness,” Shaw says, and “relatedness is how we wake up”—to the whole world in which we live. Shaw says the old ones, through stories, tell us that “to cast the language of relatedness, you have to know you have a wild twin . . . that the day you were born, a twin was thrown out the window, sent into exile.” In its wandering, that wild twin is “always asking after you.” In order to “court the wild twin”—to make ourselves whole once again—Shaw says that many stories tell us we must “go to the liminal forest,” that we must “enter the wayward.” Over my life, I’ve gone to the liminal forest of the north, from Wisconsin to Minnesota, but rarely have I felt myself entering the wayward as much as I have at Sundew Pond, where The Tamarack is my sentinel.
Sundew Pond is not your typical “vacation spot.” It is a boreal wetland, a smaller body of water that is poorly drained. Without a freshening flow, the still waters lend themselves to the formation of peat mats, where plant material decomposes slowly. In the cool, wet conditions of a pond like Sundew, deeper and deeper and wider and wider organic mats are formed along the open water’s edges, with grassy tussocks reminiscent of my prairie homeland growing atop them, but also plant life that thrives in this acidic environment: the carnivorous sundew (the pond’s namesake), pitcher plants (also carnivorous), black spruce, and tamarack. “Bog walking” is a family tradition at Sundew, the challenge being to traverse the muskeg without your leg sinking through the grassy mat into water. Few fish live in the pond, though frogs abound, the spring peepers of May and June singing a loud, glorious mating chorus each night. With organic decomposition robust in such a pond, a bit of a rank smell arises at times, especially when you push your paddle against an unsurfaced peat mat that your canoe bottom has gotten stuck on. The muskeg grows downward and outward continuously, and one day—long after I have left this living world, but not long in earth’s time—Sundew Pond will be a meadow.
So no, there are no fishing piers or swimming platforms on Sundew Pond. We still laugh at what one of our son’s grade school teachers must have thought when, in an actual “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay he was assigned to write, Nathaniel spoke lovingly of the “swamp with carnivorous plants” that his mom and dad had taken him to. Sundew Pond may not make the cover of a Minnesota tourism bureau brochure, but there is unmatched beauty, even a piquant loneliness, in, near, and around its still waters—an unusual, often ethereal allure—that provides its own unique wild splendor.
In this thin northern space where the line between land and water can be ill defined, The Tamarack—Larix laricina, or the Algonquian akemantak, meaning “wood used for snowshoes”—thrives and asserts, unequivocally, its true self, its essential character—which is what the old stories tell us we can find within ourselves in wild places such as this. And that essential character, the truth of The Tamarack, is a magical multiplicity.
Tamarack lives a hybrid existence as a deciduous conifer. Although it looks like a pine or fir tree, its “needles” are actually “leaves,” changing to gold and falling in autumn. The Tamarack dances across borders, lives its existence through transitions while it appears to be an evergreen. It rises in stunning beauty out of decay. It challenges our conceptions, the straight-line boundaries we draw around our lives and the world outside us. We divide so much—“land and water,” “good and evil,” “love and hate,” “deciduous and conifer.” But the universe really isn’t so dualistic. The dialectical tends to limit rather than open. When we think about the world, we often oversimplify, failing to account for the vast in-between—the swamp, the androgynous, twilight. The Tamarack opens me up to the numinous diversity of the world.
In this multiplicity, even ambiguity, I hope to find my “wild twin.” I know my parents named me “Thomas” for no particular reason aside from its sounds, but recently I have come to appreciate its meaning as “twin.” As well, though I hold no stock in astrology nor have ever felt any particular identification with my sign, I now feel more at home as a Pisces, the twin fish. Yet The Tamarack, as a wild totem at Sundew Pond, assures me that I seek more than just the duality of a “twin.” Rather than simplistic “dark” and “light” halves of myself, I know the wild—my wild twin—lives in complexity, an interdependent ecosystem of interbeing. I need not discover and embrace my wild twin as a singular dark entity, as some might envision it (though there is certainly darkness to be found), but as an unexplored side of my wholeness.
Soon I will make my annual pilgrimage to Sundew Pond. I will paddle ’round the muskeg edges from the south to the east, then north, arriving finally at the west to greet The Tamarack once again. As I do every year, I look forward to its silent welcome: “Welcome to your wild place. Welcome to your wild self. Welcome, Thomas, from your wild twin.” And then I will paddle back to the cabin atop the glacial esker to begin new encounters with the wild. I don’t know what they will be—looking into the eyes of a bear, hearing (and maybe joining) a chorus of wolf howls, finding a thunderbird in a piece of birch bark, pondering the delicate beauty of a showy lady’s slipper orchid, listening to the sighing of the west wind through the pines, trying to divine the stories of ancient greenstone. Whatever I meet in the forest, though, I will hope to submit to its enchantments and fathom its enigmas, and in so doing discover something of my whole—my wild—self.
"Prairie Home," Rootstalk, Vol. 1 No. 1, Spring 2015.
Read the full essay here.
I still love to listen to the “News from Lake Wobegon” on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night. Mr. Keillor’s droll yet often sharp narratives of life in a small middle land town continue to amuse and comfort me after all these years. Over those years, the phrase “prairie home” has resonated more deeply, more acutely in my imagination, my heart, maybe my soul.
For two years in the late 1990s, I lived in the northern prairie region in Moorhead, Minnesota, the Red River of the North serving as the good fence with our neighbor Fargo, North Dakota. Tucked in the middle of Moorhead, not six blocks from my house, was the Prairie Home Cemetery, from which Mr. Keillor himself says he derived the name for his radio program after a 1971 reading at Moorhead State University (the institution where I taught at the time I lived there). It’s an old Norwegian graveyard, and in fact the house my family and I lived in in Moorhead was connected to one of those buried there. Our beautiful 1925 Dutch Colonial was built by Bottolf T. Bottolfson, an ophthalmologist and two-term mayor of the town. (The “T” stands for Thomas, in welcome serendipity). A small, tarnished brass plate engraved with “Bottolfson” still sat above the house’s doorbell, which we of course left on. Once we found out the mayor was buried in Prairie Home, my family and I could not resist the urge to wander the field of grave markers in the cemetery until we found and paid our respects to our home’s builder and his wife, Jeanette.
Prairie as home is an evocative idea that extends beyond my brief two years in Moorhead, and even my many years of Saturday-night appointment radio. As my life’s years have marched on, “prairie home” has become a phrase, an idea, and increasingly a reality that has compelled, even called me more and more. It has been a yearning, a longing as well as a comfort, even solace. Now, today, I know deep within me that prairie is my home.
Read the full essay here.