Isle Royale: A Reflection
(Artist-in-Residence, 1999)
When I came to Isle Royale in July 1999, my writing life had just received a welcome lift, and my personal life had just undergone a climactic seizure. That is, in the two months prior to the residency, I had been awarded a fellowship in Cornell University’s Knight Writing Program, and at the same time left a long-struggling marriage. Isle Royale was part of a great transition. Traveling north to Michigan, I was quite literally on the way from my former home in Austin, Texas, to a new one in Ithaca, New York.
To Dassler Cabin, a remote, decaying cottage lacking electricity and conventional plumbing, I brought the barest living necessities, plus paper, pencils, pens, and books. If I had a project, it was to reflect on my situation – whatever was on my mind -- which I did, in letters to a friend, a Cajun musician and naturalist who lived in south Louisiana, west of New Orleans (where I had lived twenty years before), and who had once taken me birding in the swamps. He and I happened to be reading two of the same books at the time, and had agreed to share our responses to them, although personal material found its way into my letters – how could it not, at this particular moment? Those letters were all I wrote at Isle Royale; they constituted an almost daily diary. Months later, when urged by a ranger to submit a piece of writing from my residency, I asked my friend to return the letters to me temporarily, so that I might select excerpts for the park service. By then, a year had passed since I had occupied Dassler Cabin. I was about to move from Ithaca to Laramie, Wyoming.
When I read the letters, I was surprised to see how many observations of nature they contained, in addition to reflections on the books I was reading: eco-philosophy, the phenomena of sound (I am also a musician), and poetry. My meditations were not those of a sad, grieving woman, but of one inspired by art, natural surroundings, and exuberant physicality. I selected twenty pages of excerpts for the park service and packed up for the Mountain West. I returned the letters to my friend. We fell out of touch. I forgot about the twenty pages.
Two decades later, in 2019, I was asked to contribute a reflection on my residency. The request reminded me of the 2000 submission, so I asked the park for a copy, as it had gone missing in one of many computer changes. I couldn’t even remember what I’d sent in.
When the pages arrived, I was astonished by how many seeds for future work lay planted in them. Three finished projects spring immediately to mind.
One is Possible Paths, a five-movement musical composition for speaker and percussion, written by composer/percussionist John Lane and myself. Portions of the text, about a woman taking leave of a man and traveling on roads of increasing firmness – water, gumbo, caliche, packed earth, asphalt - come directly from the twenty pages. John and I premiered the work at the University of Wyoming, where both of us were teaching at the time. We later took it on tour, as part of a program for narrator and percussion. We collaborated on a second piece, Three Places West, invoking natural areas both of us had visited in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Hawaii.
Another project is a recent book, Where’s the Moon? A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream (2016, TAMU Press), which explores not only my childhood in Florida, but its context: the post-war Florida land boom and the Apollo Space Program, which irrevocably altered the state’s ecology – its once lush and distinctive natural world. As part of my Isle Royale residency, I had read to visitors at Rock Harbor Lodge from an essay that would eventually become part of that book. I spoke to my audience about Florida’s plight, and discussed it with my friend in the Dassler letters.
But the most remarkable outcome – one I could never have predicted – was also a book. River Music: An Atchafalaya Story (TAMU, 2011) was the result of a renewed tie with my friend, the recipient of the twenty pages. Our reunion came in late August, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Earl Robicheaux lived far from the city, but I included him in my search for south Louisiana friends who might be in danger. As it turned out, everyone was safe, except for Earl, who lay in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, about to receive chemotherapy for a rare cancer proven to be caused by pollutants spawned by the oil and gas industry in his home town. The Navy was about to air-lift him from Charity, now flooding, to Baton Rouge General. I had just left my teaching job in Wyoming for another in Texas; Baton Rouge was a day’s drive, so I hopped in the car. From his bed in the ICU, Earl explained how, in the intervening years, as manager of a wildlife sanctuary, he had made a project of recording endangered sounds and speech – from weather to bird calls to oral histories. I sensed his urgency: his native home was at risk. His urgency called me to write. Yet it took me two years to realize he should be at the center of the book, as informant and protagonist, for I thought that particular focus too difficult. In writing about a friend, one whose illness, and the chemicals required to control it, could compromise thought and memory, might I misrepresent his work or endanger his integrity? Once I made the shift, though, the book coalesced, as has, it seems, much of my work since Isle Royale. I completed River Music at another residency offered by the Thinking Like a Mountain Foundation in Ft. Davis, Texas, and while there began the Florida memoir. When the memoir was underway, the same foundation offered support for a biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the lyrical author of The Yearling, who tended a lifelong obsession with cosmic consciousness – the radical interconnection of all elements of the natural world -- and was one of Florida’s early spokespersons for the protection of the Florida’s natural environment. That book will be published in 2021.
As well, the texts for Possible Paths and Three Places West led to commissions for more ambitious musical projects, including libretti for three operas, one premiered by the Center for Contemporary Opera at the American Opera Center, New York, in 2017, another to be premiered this spring by the CCO, in the same venue. In the 2017 and 2020 operas, natural settings play a significant role. Swan’s Inlet, with composer Mark Taggart, is based on an original story of mine and set in a small coastal town in the Deep South. One of its lead characters, Marco, an outsider artist, is directly modeled on Louisiana driftwood sculptor and fisherman Adam Morales, who I met through Earl. “When I go into the swamps, I feel like I’m in another world,” Adam told me one day, as we walked among his sculptures at water’s edge. “I feel closer to God. I can talk to God better, you know? No interruptions.” Marco feels the same way. The newer opera, Purewater, with composer Andrew Rudin, is set in the Dust Bowl. Purewater is the true name of a Nebraska community devastated by drought in the 1930s; it is now a ghost town. Although the drama, adapted from a novella by Andre Gide, centers on a preacher’s unholy love for a young blind girl, it is the unforgiving landscape that triggers his tragic messiah complex and makes desperate characters of his family.
In the twenty pages submitted to the park service in 2000, there are few mentions, except for weather, of the sky. I seem to have dwelled mostly on what I saw, heard, smelled or tasted close by on the ground or around me, not “up.” There is a fascination with how dreams and their connections to inner and outer landscapes may be combined in one’s consciousness. I was reading eco-philosopher David Abrams’s book The Spell of the Sensuous, and copied out several passages in my diary-like letters. A favorite: “It is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth”.
“But in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures,” Abrams continued, “the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish life. It is not by sending his awareness out into the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface.”
For the most recent libretto, a church opera with composer C.G. Walden, I was given a story from the Gospel of Thomas, in which a wealthy king, Gundafar, orders Thomas to build him a grand castle. Thomas takes the construction funds and distributes them to the poor and needy. In doing so, he builds “An endless mansion of many rooms, wide doorways, soft light and sweet air -- where no one is in want, and all are comforted.” At first King Gundafar is angry, for he sees no physical structure to represent his material wealth. But eventually he understands what sort of mansion Thomas has built, and wishes to enter it. And how simple it is. The mansion is the King’s relationship – his radical, lateral interconnectedness -- with others. The door is his heart.
I am grateful for the opportunity to once again thank the National Park Service for the privilege of working in Dassler Cabin, as well as Isle Royale’s invitation to gather the threads connecting then and now. It shows me how much work originated with this precious residency and points to what might come next. At the moment I am still in thrall to Marjorie Rawlings’s obsession with cosmic consciousness, or interconnectedness, but haven’t I explored this idea myself, for years? It was at Isle Royale that my own, similar obsessions surfaced mightily, and where I began, in earnest, to follow them.
A few weeks ago, when Isle Royale staff restored the twenty pages to me, I sent a copy to Earl, who survived his cancer, but whose health is severely compromised. I asked if he still had the original Dassler letters.
“There is a chance I will come across the letters,” he wrote, “but it may take years. My system of filing ends with ‘A.’ ‘A’ stands for the abyss.”
“Your filing system is not unlike mine,” I replied.
But at least I have the twenty pages, and one of them describes an afternoon hike on Isle Royale, part of which I eventually wove into Possible Paths. I would live these ecstatic hours again and again:
… an unexpected storm blew up from the west side of the island. One immense thunderhead, like a mass of gray dough, moved into the blue, and above it, an eerie halo of aquamarine. The noise of it was like a half-dozen jet planes tearing around in circles. I wondered if the cloud might be a swarm of contrails, a sky-sized knot of exhaust. It moved so fast. I could either stay put or try to outrun it, and I chose to run because I’d brought no raingear. But before long, the rain came splashing down, not in sheets, but in gobs that poured and smacked. In minutes I was soaked to the bone; even the chamois shirt was dripping. The trail was a stream, and the lightning, hidden before in the clouds, became visible. I was frightened and elated at the same time. In the midst of it all, I began to laugh wildly, out loud! What a great trick nature plays on human minds. One bolt of lightning and all self-involvement evaporates. The dialogue between weather and a woman needed no words; it was immediate. Such a blessing. When the storm began to dissipate, I took to the trail, back to Dassler. How good it felt to finally lurch into the cabin, throw together a fire, peel off the clammy clothes, and let the wood heat blast my skin.
Return to Ann's Page
Return to the Artist-in-Residence Exhibit
