June Haibun: Bus No. 61

The number 61 bus takes me clear across these cities on my way home from work. First, it’s out of downtown Minneapolis (crowds of office workers at the stops, usually waiting for other busses) then across the elegant Hennepin Ave. Bridge (the giant Grain Belt Premium sign on my left, the green suspension cables, St. Anthony Falls on my right, the Stone Arch Bridge beyond, the university hospital towers in the hazy humid distance).

I see a group of tourists having their photo taken on the bridge, all of that in the background, and I love that I love this place. I realize that I love it because I know it, and that I know it because it is home.

I know a lot of folks who have fled, or else drifted away, not enough holding them here. That hasn’t happened to me, and I consider myself fortunate, though I also can’t hold it against anybody who simply didn’t develop the same attachment, or felt a stronger pull from elsewhere.

But yes, this is home, and what a complex thing that is. Everything this bus takes me past, I seem to have some connection to from the life I have lived here so far. A neighborhood where a friend once rented the first floor of a house, a grocery store where I used to shop, a park where I once laid on the grass under leafy trees and blue skies.

Heat lightning blazes
    The cavorting gods of the ancients
Watch it from a backyard

June Haibun: Sunfish

I walked around a familiar park one warm and golden evening with Katie and Lola. We walked first through a brushy woods, lots of buckthorn, and then down a path sandwiched between a barbed wire fence and a row of pines. The trail took us down a small hill through a healthy stand of sumac. To our left was a hillside, all prairie, and we walked around the edge of it when we emerged from the sumac. We talked of the future.

Oaks at prairie’s edge
The dog splashes in a pond
    Empty bluebird house

I came to this same park once with a good friend when I was a restless senior in high school. It was the middle of the night but the moon was full and we played tic-tac-toe on a scrap of paper by the light of that moon, then we rambled around the trails, finally stopping by a lake.

    Black trees, black sky
Silver glimmering water
I throw a rock, splash

One summer, I came out here a few times a week to run the trails. I remember the mosquitoes being terrible and not being able to take a break and walk like I thought I would be able to. But I also remember the woods themselves receding, my heartbeat, inhaling and exhaling becoming the only thing that mattered.

Breathe warm humid air
    A narrow path up a hill
Think of distant things

June Haibun: Firewood

On Saturday about six o’ clock Brian and I got into Gabe’s canoe and paddled away from the site and across the river, looking for firewood. We tried the big backwater right across from us first, hoping to find driftwood that had hung up in the grasses there when the water came down, but there was nothing but a gaggle of red-winged blackbirds and a few ducks that exploded out of their hiding spots skyward at our approach.

When the bottom came up too far and I had to get out and nudge us off the sand we turned around and headed back to the main channel. There, we turned upriver and went a hundred yards or so up to a spot where the steep eroded banks provided just a small enough beach to pull the canoe up.

We scrambled up the vertical bank, the sand slipping out from under our feet, and then we headed back into the woods. It was mostly just trees and grass, no under-brush, and we walked around until we found where the flood waters had stopped earlier in the season and there was a winding line of driftwood piled up.

I put on gloves and unsheathed the axe and went to work making a pile of usable firewood, mostly wrist-sized pieces twice as long as optimal for burning. Later, we would break it or chop it up as we needed it to stoke the fire. Brian took armloads back and forth to the canoe and we loaded it up to the gunwales. It was warm and dirty work but rewarding. In 15 minutes time we had a boatload and we pushed off and paddled back to the site.

  Unload the canoe
     The bright light of day is gone
   A long evening begins

June Haibun: Nowhere Else But Here

Sunrise at the spot

I awoke this morning at dawn because our dog, Lola, was standing over us in the tent, acting agitated. No matter how tired she should be from the previous day’s adventures, and no matter the fact that she routinely sleeps in until 9 a.m. on the weekends at home, it starts to get light out when we’re camping and she has to get out of the tent. But it was a good prompt to pull on some clothes and climb out of the tent and take in a few moments of sunrise in the valley.

There was fog blowing around over the water and the grasses across from us and the sun had just come over the bluff on the Wisconsin side. The dominant sound in my memory of the moment is of the rushing waters of the spring-fed creek tumbling over sand and rock before merging with the river at our feet. But there is also a chorus of songbirds, their singing coming from every direction. Warblers in the trees around us, red-winged blackbirds across the channel, untold others singing in every key.

Birdsong, water rush
    For quiet eternity
Never leave this world

Some hours later, after sleeping some more, after oatmeal and strong coffee, after fishing from shore and packing up bags and canoes, we pushed off into the river again, our backs to the site. The paddle downstream to the landing was substantially more relaxed than the paddle up to the site had been. We paddled steadily but easily, and pulled off at a beach shaded by big cottonwoods for a last swim and admiration of the white clouds in the blue sky, the quiet river carrying canoes, the minnows nibbling our toes in the sandy shallows.

Before we had left the campsite, I said goodbye to the site like Jack Kerouac would, with a bow and a “bah” as I walked down the trail. Our tents, chairs, coolers, and other random camping gear was all gone then, the site just a clearing in a woods of tall white pines, a fire ring and a pile of wood. The creek kept rushing by and the wind kept blowing off the river and none of that would change when we were gone, when I was back at work or home or barbecues or anywhere else. No, it would remain.

Canoe beached on the sand
    Fireflies in damp night woods
Swim long in this river

Sunrise on the St. Croix

(Be sure to click the photos to see nice, big, beautiful versions.)

June Haibun: Upstream

We paddled against the current about two miles to get here. Hardly able to believe the good fortune that the campsite was open. We sat by the little creek for a bit and sipped some beers and then left to paddle up another mile or so where we beached the canoes at a sandbar and wandered in the shallow water for a bit. Then we floated back down, fishing unsuccessfully. When we got back to the site late in the afternoon we sat by the creek again and sipped some beers.

Cold water flowing
   White pines with negative space
Laughter of good friends

June Haibun: Water

The sun is out in the sky and the river is surely flowing as it always is. We’ll float on down it with the birds singing from the banks and us laughing in the canoes, talking about the flowers on shore and the fish swimming below and the ducks exploding from their hidden nests.

The river will transform you if you let it. Give you hope, accept your love. Hope that whatever we do this water will keep flowing toward the sea. Accept your love for a place that is greater than rush-hour traffic and bank account balances and television.

Take your medicine
   A day to face what is real
Get them in the light
(apologies again to Cloud Cult)

An osprey nest on a railroad bridge, parent bird returning with fresh-caught fish from the channel we’re now passing through. Bumping the canoes laden with three people, a dog and a pile of camping gear over gravel bars, hopping out to push over the obstacle.

Arrive at the hidden spot where a little creek spills down a last little falls of rock and into its own little cove. Hope to not find another canoe on shore already. Walk up and around the short trail to the site, the crystal cold crick on the left, a ridge topped with a spine of pines on the right. There, just a flat spot between water and hill, a fire ring next to a clear pool three feet across and the worn earth of previous visitors who knows how many generations old.

Set up tents, make fire
    Do anything, hear only
the sound of water