Spring: Rubber Boots & Pussy Willows

I walked the driveway and picked pussy willows this morning. I had rubber boots for the muck and a buck knife for the unyielding stems; a dog for company and spring all around.

Of course, here late April spring is not the same as it is farther south. Here, closer to Canada than to Duluth, spring means still-frozen lakes ringed with cold water, animal tracks in the mud, and much-longed-for sunshine. It means birds—warblers who have been so long-absent their utterly decadent trilling stops me in my tracks; the echoing percussion of woodpeckers and the pileated’s other-worldly kuk-kuk-kuk-kaa! cry; the accelerating drum beat of the male grouse in love.


I was in town on Tuesday as always. I ran my errands, stopping at the post office and the library; I bought groceries…and black rubber boots. They were twenty dollars at Joyne’s Ben Franklin, and, as is my policy with all new shoes, they were worn at once. I kicked off winter without a backward glance and left my imitation Sorrels in the car; it was time to test my new boots out.

I went to Artist’s Point on Lake Superior, named for the beauty of the views it provides: sweeping clouds, glittering sunsets, November storms and a marina full of sail boats with colorful Grand Marais sandwiched between the water and the Sawtooth ridgeline. I had been gone so much in April that the last time I was there the lake was a splintered field of heaving blue ice. The rocks had been covered in frozen white like bridal giants or silent, hulking elephant seals—but now everything was alive! Everything was moving, pushing, pulling, sweeping back on itself and playing with the wind and the sky!

I couldn’t help myself—in those black rubber boots I became impenetrable. I became a child. At first, I splashed sensibly through small puddles with my jeans rolled up to mid-shin. But then I grew bolder; I strode confidently into the lake, misjudged an oncoming wave and soaked my cuffs! There was no point in trying to stay dry after that.

I did handstands on the rocks—moving closer and closer to the wet warning line that turned the pale stone to deep brown laced with red. The wind and the waves competed for my attention and then joined forces, the waves pulling at my ankles, the wind pushing insistently at my back, closer to the deceptively inviting blue-green water. The sun glinted off the big lake and I had to squint to see the Sawtooth Mountains extending to the south as if they would never end (and as if cities did not exist).

Why do we need more than this: lake, sun, small town, rubber boots?


This week, the first week of spring that I’ve been home, we’ve gone walking almost every evening. (“We,” being some combination of me, Jay, Kati, and the dog, Taffy). Last night we all took a new route and saw a moose as reward. We had turned around just before dusk and were less than a quarter mile from our driveway when Jay spotted it—a mangy-looking cow with half her winter coat, grazing in the far ditch. Taffy didn’t see it until we were only a hundred feet away. Jay had her collar in his hands and she went suddenly stiff. This was no deer! All the fur stood up on her back, from head to tail, and for the first time in our 3 ½ years together, she growled!

The moose looked up calmly, having heard us long before we saw her. She was as big as a horse, but still didn’t look full grown. Her nose was long, her dewlap a little brown tuft that dangled like an ill-fitting necktie, her legs spindly. She moved off into the evergreens a few paces; if we hadn’t watched where she went we would never have been able to pick her out—she blended in almost completely.

Jay took the dog home, and the moose reemerged, having found a good spot to munch on both balsam firs above and salt on the remaining heap of snow below. It was almost dark. She faded slowly into the shadows and the sound of her massive teeth on the balsams echoed down the road after us as we left.


Perhaps she followed us home. The pussy willows lining our driveway had already been picked over when I arrived with knife in hand this morning. Massive coffee bean imprints in the soft gravel matched the height of the nibbled off bushes. Taffy got one whiff of the tracks and let out a low growl.

There are no daffodils or crocuses or snowdrops yet, no blueberry or strawberry flowers, and only buds on the most impatient trees. But the lake is melting. The animals are out. The paths to the cabins are muddy enough for black rubber boots. And in between the burned and soot-black trees, gleaming like faery silver, there are pussy willows.




April 23rd, 2009.

p.s. Now the lake is completely open, save for a few nomadic floes of ice pushed our way by a westerly wind.