Click to enlarge.

Santa Monica Mountains – Conejo Peak 1

and

Santa Monica Mountains – Conejo Peak 2

Southern Utah

And out the car window and in the mirror I saw this:

Saint George, UT in the mirror.

Early morning pronghorns in Rawlins, WY.

And I zoomed in a little closer.

Pronghorns and Burger King

Cairo – January 8, 2007

And then in the distance I saw these:

Pyramids of Giza – January 8, 2007

I was just tinkering around with some of the images I’ve been gathering in my life and on my hard drive over the years.

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Self-portrait with wind and ice.

I was in Holland, Michigan, at Hope College for their Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series with my dear friend the poet Elizabeth Bradfield. An old friend who’s a professor at Hope College, the poet Pablo Peschiera, brought us there. Among other things Liz and I talked about historical research and poetry. We had a great time visiting with Pablo and his students. And we gave a reading at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.

Our names in lights!

It’s always a great pleasure to read with Liz and hear read her wonder-filled poems. She read poems from Interpretive Work, her first book, and from her second book Approaching Ice, which is about polar explorers and the history of polar exploration.

Before taking us back to the airport in Grand Rapids, Pablo took us out to Lake Michigan. I found looking out into the lake where as far as I could see there was ice and snow, fascinating. I know the lake doesn’t freeze completely over, but from where I stood it looked like ice and snow stretched away to the horizon. That’s what’s behind me in the photograph above. The expansive vista that day gave me the sense of potentiality, like in the vastness great things were possible—it’s a hopeful feeling. Maybe this is some sort of semantic confusion that has become emotional for me.

Pablo on the shore of Lake Michigan near Holland, MI.

This is the opposite reaction I had to my very first experience with wide-open spaces. I was born and raised in central Georgia a place that doesn’t offer this kind of view. Almost a dozen years ago I took my first road trip across the lower part of the United States, and a couple days after we left east Texas and started getting into the vastness I felt anxiety displacing my usual calm. It culminated with me not being able to sleep in Albuquerque. The room felt like it was spinning and I was overwhelmed by a sense that my family and Georgia and maybe most of the East Coast (the known world to me at the time) had somehow gone to oblivion, not been devastated by natural or manmade disaster but been erased, excised, just didn’t exist. Maybe like if I could see as far as I could in those open spaces and not see my family then they must not exist. I’d driven up to New York and New Jersey and not felt this before. There was something about the distances in this case—how far we’d driven but probably more importantly how far I could see.

All of this and the photo of me above reminded me of Matthew Henson, a polar explorer with Admiral Robert Peary who claimed to be the first to reach the geographic North Pole in 1909. Henson, an African American, skilled navigator and able seaman, was a longtime associate of Peary’s and accompanied him on a number of expeditions. Liz has a great poem in Approaching Ice about Henson, “Polar Explorer Matthew Henson, Assistant to Admiral Peary (1909).”

Self-portrait with Liz and wind and ice on the shore of Lake Michigan near Holland, MI..

I’ve decided that I need to walk over to the Bemidji Public Library to see if I can find or order a copy of Henson’s autobiography, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. It’ll be a good way to celebrate the receding of the snow and arrival, albeit slow, of spring to Bemidji.

I went ice fishing for the first time in my life on Thursday, March 3, 2011. As a matter of fact this was also my first time angling in Minnesota. A new friend took me ice fishing—an environmentally conscious enthusiastic outdoorsman and native Minnesotan; that’s some Minnesota nice. He drove us out on Lake Bemidji around one o’clock in the afternoon. Once we got to the spot, we took his clamshell pop-up tent fish house out of the back of his truck and we set it up. The clamshell looks like a really big suitcase or something a band would keep instruments or equipment in. I thought we were heading for one of those fancy fish houses that folks tow out onto the lake with their trucks and leave over the winter. They look like camper trailers; actually they’re basically campers with special wheel systems for lowering them to the ice and trapdoors in the floor for fishing. They have heat and some of them have stoves and generators for the lights and microwave oven and plasma TVs with satellite hook-ups. At any rate, we set up the fish house so he could mark where to drill the three holes through the four-foot thick sheet of ice. And then we had to drag the pop-up out of the way for the drilling. After he drilled the holes with his gas-powered ice auger, we had to level the area and drag the “house” back into place before we could get to fishing.

Inside the clamshell with The Art of Angling

This happened to be a couple days after my contributor’s copy of The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, edited by Henry Hughes, arrived in the mail. My poem “Bemidji in Spring,” which is about lake ice and ice fishing, is included along with work by Homer, Shakepeare, Goethe, Yeats, Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Audre Lorde, and Derek Walcott, and younger voices like Kevin Young, Cecily Parks, Ed Skoog, and Derick Burleson. I took the anthology along; I thought it might bring me some good luck. There is this quote from Ovid in the book: “Let your hook always be cast. / In a pool where you least expect it, / there will be a fish.” I landed my first walleye and my friend landed a walleye and a perch—none whoppers, but all keepers. He taught me how to sex a walleye at a glance, pointing out that a male walleye will have a dark spot at the rear end of its dorsal fin and that the spot is particularly prominent on male walleye found in Lake Bemidji.

Any minute now

We were out there till seven o’clock. We sat in there with an intermittently working heater for six hours talking and listening to NPR and to the sounds of the lake ice. Due to water currents, changes in the temperature and pressure on the ice sheet it creaks and crackles and pops and thrums. At times it was pretty talkative that day. In the middle of all that we heard a shriek that we first thought was an early returning gull, but then the bird began to chitter, and I recognized it as the bald eagle’s call. We both poked our heads out of the fish house to see the bald eagle that had landed about hundred yards behind us. A large bird, it stood tall and beautiful against the snow.

Bald Eagle and empty Mountain Dew bottle

The sun drops and so does the temperature