Out on the water I am untraceable-sad. Or, I suppose I could trace it if I wanted to, but the leylines that bleed from my eyes to my teeth to the unmapped chambers of my heart glimmer a new color. Cobalt, maybe? But they shed bioluminescence, like those delicate flies laden with wet, glowing, bright-blue goop, which I don’t know the proper name of and am incapable of Googling. I am struck by how much I don’t know. I’ve been struck. Every few steps I take these days, I look down and see something old-new and think, “What is that?” And my answer: “I don’t know.”
Anyways. I’m writing you from Cranberry Lake Biological Station. Well, the lake itself. Two person canoe but it’s just me. To weigh down the other side I’ve put my camera bag, which actually holds three or four cameras right now, plus the shotgun mic, a smudge bowl I got from a man named John out in Maine, who himself got it from the Diné, thirty-five years ago, and my backpack. There’s a poem here somewhere but I’m too tired and uncomfortable to unearth it. Something about a work/life balance. Something about being married to the Job, whatever the Job means. Something about wanting a divorce because I need a real human being on the other end with a paddle because I look dumb as hell trying to keep course by myself.
A couple years back, I was sitting across a fire from a professor who’d done a lot of work in food sovereignty. She was charming and introduced herself as one of my close friends’ aunties. We talked in hushed tones about something I will not share with you, but her familiarity with the issue, her strong opinion, her care, it all endeared me to her and gained my trust.
“You’re Meskwaki,” she said.
I nodded. Then shook my head. Then shrugged.
“Yeah, you are. Your people… you bring the weather.”
I sat up. When I was a little girl, I’d watched Men in Black 2 on loop. I think I was in love with Rosario Dawson. Her character could bring the weather. If she cried, the sky cried. If she was happy, the sun came out. The same had been happening for me. There’s that line she says, when Agent K tells her what she is, where she screws her face up and yells, “I’m a Libra!” I, being a Libra, nodded intensely. Then I went outside and stared at the clouds until they parted and I thought: I could be an alien, too, just like her. Her, Gonzo, and me, all abandoned by our ships, always out of place. Waiting for someone to come back to earth. Waiting for something to make sense.
This, this thing the professor shared, this made sense. This drove a stake through me. This bound me to the ground. I was rooted, suddenly, even if my mother’s nation would not or could not claim me as one of theirs. This was something no amount of greed or vengeance could take away.
“Do we?” I asked, trying not to seem too invested.
She nodded, and shared with me a story that will always be true, even if she turned out to be a lie.
I have always been afraid of big things. When my father was getting his degree in anthropology at the University of Iowa, we would walk by their taxidermies to get to his office. I was three years old and the giant sloth was nothing like Sid from Ice Age. The giant sloth was a god to me, and like any good heathen child, I was absolutely horrified by gods.
This carries over well into my adulthood. I think if I saw a whale near me I would throw up. I’ve seen herds of bison return to the Great Plains and trembled. I’ve seen massive seagulls swallow smaller birds like it’s nothing. I’ve seen bears in the road and huge bucks in the woods and I’ve been cut down time after time because something in me minds my manners. Manners older than church. Older than man. Older than anything on my body except maybe the silicon on my wrist and the obsidian on my forearm.
So it goes I fear dark water most of all. When I was small and we’d go ricing, my dad and I, I either saw or imagined I saw a great serpent beneath us, buoying us forward. Keeping the protocols.
Now I float between two islands, an island unto myself with all this stubborn sadness. I know if I had a stone I could push it all into him. I’m normally stone (butch) but today I woke up a girl and I feel raw about it. Like when you’re little and you skin your knee down to the bone but you can’t stop playing no matter how much sand your body swallows. The sun on your skin and the dirt in your hair and the heat in your mouth. All the blood. I can do this, I say. I can be a girl on the water.
Unbidden, one of the “rules” an Anishinaabekwe threw at me comes back up like bile. How when you’re on your moon you can’t do this, that, or the other thing. No eating berries. No cooking. No standing in water. All bullshit, of course, but far be it from me to say that to a woman’s face when I look like this. Even as a little girl, I was always incorrectly female. But enough bellyaching about that. I’m not on my moon. The rules don’t apply, whatever they truly are. I’m in my own canoe and I can still see clear through the tides. A comfort. Look at all those underwater trees! Look at the stones, the silt, the mud, the mulch and the weeds. How many little beings sleep in the wet fields below? Who will I see riding my undertow?
All day I’ve been wondering why I stopped going outside or when. My friends are all farmers, mycologists, entomologists, witches and fairies. They are of the land even if they aren’t of my land. The earth knows them each by name and footprint and cradles them. People ask me what my favorite plants are. What medicines to use. What is that tree over there. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Canoeing is something innate, though. Even if I wasn’t Ojibwe I’m sure I’d be fine out here, having grown up in Wisconsin. Going to the Lake is the only thing we do. Summertime? You’re going to the lake. Winter? Polar plunge. Spring? Get fucked, you’re going to the lake. Fall? Ooh, sorry, I have homework, I can’t.
Bored of the sadness and blaming my own stagnation, I set out for where the lake darkens indigo. The deep. I won’t see any little creatures out there, sure, but it could be peaceful. I imagine myself laying back in the tentative sunlight, far from the dragonfly orgies and the swarms of biting bugs that attack harder when you smack one. Not that I’m a prude, I just don’t like paddling through all that sex and feeling like the asshole who turns the lights on at the club, you know? They only live for like, forty-eight hours. Let them get their rocks off while they can.
Clouds move in the closer I get to the deep. No big deal, I just take off my douchebag sunglasses and let my eyes wander the skyline. There’s so much green out here. I love the different shades of green. How they change from place to place. The Pacific Northwest is an emerald, obviously, but it’s also got a blueish-grey tint to it, like Puget Sound wants to rise up and reclaim it, but can’t, and so settles for a light dusting of salt and brine. Hayward, Wisconsin, my hometown, is the green of a folk horror forest. Amber and gold and red veins to hide the hunger. Ithaca is similar, but there’s a trapped, frenetic energy to every leaf and root. I once saw an Ithaca root push itself out of the earth and scream. It looked like a spongy bone.
I’m not sure what to call the green here, but it makes me sleepy. Although, whether that’s the green or my travels catching up with me is anyone’s guess. They get up early here at the Station. Breakfast is at 7:15, and everyone has a breakneck schedule, so that’s when you make your lunch for the day, too. I feel like a visiting princess with how much laying about I’m allowed to do. I guess that’s what propelled me to get in this canoe in the first place. Hands too idle, mind too full of nonsense with no real drive to write. Did I tell you? I’m the writer-in-residence here for the next three weeks. I couldn’t sleep last night because I realized how short a timespan that truly is. Also, I still have phone service, even out on the lake. My wrist buzzes with an Outlook notification and I sigh, paddling farther and farther. I keep glancing back to make sure the shore is out of sight. For some reason, I don’t want them to see me. I don’t like being watched, even by accident.
Now the wind’s kicked up, which is a blessing. It’s almost like having another person. Almost. I don’t have to keep tossing the paddle back and forth like a baton, at least.
then it grabs me
or. no. there’s an impact
a thud. my stomach lurches with that fear again but even older still and a sense of urgency because this is not a taxidermy
or a far away buffalo
or a song
or an eagle
this is something i catch a glimpse of for a split second and my breath stops in my throat and i realize how small i am
and there’s a tiny sliver of hope for another split second because it kind of looks like a lilypad and a cluster of weeds so maybe?
then the hand. the weeds vanish or coalesce into something else or get pulled down or maybe they’re that thing maybe it’s alive in a sentient way. not sentience but animal
please be weeds. please let me be silly. please let me laugh this off and shake my head at myself with my eyebrows raised because there’s not another person in this canoe to do it for me. please let me laugh at myself and love myself anyways fondness growing in my chest because that’s what i’ve had to do to survive this nigh-endless loneliness, loneliness i don’t can’t have disrupted right now. flashes of lore of sirens and selkies and sailors ripped away from their boats but i’m a girl please see that
i’m a girl
i’m just a girl
I want it to be weeds. I want to have run aground on an impossibly long knot of weeds in the middle of the lake. I want my “I don’t knows” to be here, too, like didn’t you know there’s a species of lake flora that grows in huge, girl-shaped masses of tangled, shiny skin? Didn’t you know that? Here, check the guidebook. You’ll see right here. Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay.
Then it—she?—knocks against the bottom of the boat as if to say, “Look up.” And I do.
The wind’s really at it now. My stomach drops the moment I notice. When I idle, when I don’t paddle, even without the wind, I drift. I am stock still now. Impossibly still.
I look down again.
There’s nothing visible but endless water dark as pitch. That tangle of green from earlier is gone. I can’t see what, if anything, has me steady. My heart hammers in my chest and I say “don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic” like they do in the movies and I wish I could feel stupid for it but I don’t. I’m panicking. Something immense holds me down. Images of me being pulled under or inhaled come in shaky flashes. Gone just like that. Would I scream? I’m not screaming now, so probably not. No. That can’t happen.
She taps against the bottom of the canoe. Three little taps with sharp fingernails. Four. The canoe doesn’t shake. Just how strong is she? And where?
I’ve decided I don’t want to see her. As if she can tell, she doesn’t show me again. Probably caught a glimpse of my face when she hit me the first time.
I cling to that. There’s honor there. Care. Or maybe I just look fuck-ugly when I’m terrified, but I doubt it.
I lick my lips and in a voice so small and cowed I scarcely recognize it as my own, I begin to introduce myself in my language. Then I trail off. I know nothing else. I don’t know the word for “lake” or “mermaid” or “kill” or “live.” Maybe if I were calmer I would. I know there’s a mermaid clan and I hope that means something. She doesn’t let me go, though. She drums her fingers along the sides of the canoe. Little waves. Caressing it. I give her an offering. I open my mouth to sing her a song. When Lakota words and my frightened off-key tremolo come out, I almost laugh. Almost. She does, though. I hear it. Not to sound like HP Lovecraft, but it’s… indescribable. I’ll try anyway.
Bike wheels on gravel. TV static. Throat singing. The purr of a cat. Stainless steel on fine china, that scrape you can feel in your teeth. All of this at once.
Certain words in Lakota are gendered. As in, if you’re a boy you say this, if a girl, that. I get to the part of the song where your gender comes through and the girl part cuts loose on my tongue easy as anything. There’s a thump and a smack and suddenly I’m free. She’s letting me go.
I sing in Mohawk all the way back to shore until I’m within earshot of the white people. Then I stop. I don’t want to be anyone’s magical Indian, even if I am both magic and also an Indian. That brings me back to my project, actually. Thoughts of merpeople and drowning subside in a foamy wash of half-remembered lies.
Something happened yesterday. I will not tell you what. Perhaps you will dream about it or it’ll visit you, too, and you’ll know because some part of you still has extrasensory perception or delusion or disillusion or whatever else fuels the things that make us See.
In the absence of the telling, though, I wonder if that’s what happened? More than violence. More than “trauma,” that god-awful mainstream word that seems to be the mainline for grifters like “truth” in the 1970s. Or not “more than,” but in addition to. Yes we lost so much. And also we stopped talking.
It’s still none of your business. When I see Native or “Indigenous” influencers posting themselves doing ceremony, my whole body goes tense. Me, I keep my mouth shut about real things until I get consent.
Also yesterday, though, I went in the woods for the first time in a very long time. I walked with purpose until I stopped and let myself wander. I asked myself, not for the first time, when I stopped going outside and why. I’ve always held onto that rule, “live first, write later.” Maybe it hurt you, too, the moment you realized Life was being taken from us in newer, more insidious ways than ever before, and fast. We claim to be frogs, boiling. We’re more like lobsters. Alive and dead in a flash. Our pain is brief and salient and then they chew us up. I was a child when I could wander. I was a teenager and an adult and I could still wander directionless. Then that became suspicious, that directionless wandering. You had to go somewhere. You had to go somewhere and buy something, too, or else leaving the house was pointless.
When I left Bemidji for this residency, I set the intention to take it slow. I’ve been back and forth across the country so many times. I’ve folded it up wholesale. Everything less than ten hours is “just a short drive.” Part of it’s to do with my lovely Prius, which, after our little freakout, got a brand new air filter and can breathe again, but the lights are still a problem and if I engage cruise control, the whole computer shuts down. Not great. But before all that, I was in Minneapolis. Then Chicago. Then I cut north to Madison to spend time at Kim’s place, which felt like a microdose of the ease I feel here at the Station, her garden around us and the lake just so. We walked awhile in a vast dog park and I imagined bringing my children there. Then from Madison back to Chicago, where I got a tattoo over my top surgery scars that cost more than my top surgery and went viral on Twitter (Lord help me) and met with Jacqui Shine, who met my mother while on a roadtrip by way of the New York Times, a couple years ago. Their task was to define patriotism. From snacks with Jacqui I headed to Grand Rapids, MI, a city that would have been a flyover if not for Ishkwaazhe McSauby casting me in Mino Bimaadiziwin back in 2017 and my own insistence on having as many friends as possible before I die. I stayed there for awhile with my friend Cass and her two kids, aged six and three, plus Cass’s sister Aleigha. Then Hamilton, ON, where I crashed with my friend Daimhin and headed to Toronto to intercept Smokii Sumac before he hosted some big book discussion because he’s all famous now.
Then Ithaca. My siblings. My mother was there.
Then Baltimore.
Just… Baltimore.
After Baltimore, I took a breather with my auntie Mary. You know the rest.
I stopped in York, PA, because I have a friend there named Sunshine who’s heavy in the black metal scene. They described it as a “diamond in the rough,” and I’d have to agree. The band I caught the last few songs of—they were amazing. They’re called the Constituents. I glanced around the room: I don’t think I’ve seen this many people of color at a hardcore venue… ever. We all sprawled out into the bar while I tried to strategize (remember, my car was still going sicko mode and I needed to get up to the Adirondacks in time for my boat in… seventeen hours) and I got to sit with Sunshine’s hilarious friend group as they commiserated about bad jobs, bad pay, good life and the Amish.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’m getting hungry and it’s dark and I still have a three hour drive. Or more.”
“If you’re looking for some good eats,” said Sunshine, “the Round the Clock Diner’s right on the highway there. You gotta go that way anyway.”
“Hey, thanks.”
At the Round the Clock Diner, the waitstaff was all gathered around watching a video of a police officer in town doing some kind of atrocity and incredulously discussing it. It was surreal to see. I guess I expected the 24 hour diner to be relatively empty this late, but the place was hopping, and everybody knew each other. Behind me there were two men dressed kinda small town nice. One of them had the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard in my life. I couldn’t figure out if they were on a date or just friends or maybe related. The younger one, with the younger, less sexy voice, said, “I stopped watching the news. Had me too keyed up.”
“That Fox News is some…” started the older man.
“Exactly,” said the younger man, cutting him off.
“You know, I liked them well enough. Back when they first started.”
The younger man said nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him smirk. “You would,” he finally said.
Date, then. Maybe.
The younger man opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I just… there’s too much. There’s just too much. So and so said this. This couple you don’t give a heck about broke up. This politician got caught doing this crime. This country invaded that country. I can’t. I can’t. And the takes! Everybody’s got a take! Everybody’s got something to say!”
“Like hell they do,” said the other man.
“Exactly! And it’s just… I get… I get wanting to speak out. I get… needing to react. But just… just don’t become so hateful that you end up looking exactly like the thing you claim to hate.”
They leaned in to each other then, and their conversation took on a more personal note. I turned away. A father and daughter came in and the whole waitstaff greeted them both with so much love, I thought, again, as I have this whole trip, about Adrienne Rich’s Lonely poem. I wanted that. I wanted to live somewhere long enough to have banter with the kitchen. Maybe? Maybe that’s what I want.
I guess what I’m getting at is that even in this time of forced lifelessness, we are alive nonetheless. I might not be in the world I occupied when I could walk for hours and not grow tired, but I am in a world where I can go to a diner and people-watch and drink coffee way too late at night. Me and the graveyard shift man by my side.
When I went to get gas, the two cashiers, who were identical, greeted me with “Good morning.” It was 11:45pm. I had two thoughts: it’s morning?? then: I guess I’m one of them now. I mulled over my apparent sudden vampiric nature all the way to the disgusting men’s restroom, at which point I forgot everything and wished desperately that the new stand-to-pee prosthetic dick I ordered from Gramma’s Sausages was already in my pants so I didn’t have to look at whatever bomb went off in there. Good god.
On my way out I thought, I’m fucked. They get up mad early at the Station. I’m so fucked. I’m doing okay though (I say, despite this being my first full day) with the schedule. I anticipate sleeping early tonight, but that’s what I said yesterday. We’ll see. Like I told Sunshine, I’m gonna try to use this residency to reroll all my stats. I came here a night owl fighting tooth and talon for a crumb of productive energy and I’m leaving here a full-throttle morning person. Mark my words.
There is one more thing. An image or a sensation I can’t quite get out of my head. It happened when I was driving the rest of that night. I used to like driving at night before Fiadh pointed out how dim my headlights are and I realized yeah, she’s right, I actually do enjoy being able to see where I’m going. I was making my way across Pennsylvania when the car…
…or, no. God, what am I trying to say? The road? It curved. It curved up. No, not just that, I was almost vertical. Parallel with the road, which was less a road and more a steep drop, and I felt that sort of dip and lift you get before you go down a particularly intense rollercoaster, but what was worse was the other side. Two hills. I was going down one. The other was just ahead. In the grey-dark, dimly lit by who-knows-what, all I could see was vastness. Like I wasn’t in a car at all but actually dangling over the earth. Or this curve was the crest of a top lip and the bottom lip was swift approaching me.
I still feel like I’m falling.
I still feel consumed.
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