Saigon to Superior: Superior New Year

Eagle Ice, Eagle Harbor

Lake Superior was the darkest I've ever seen her waters yesterday. A greasy black, her rolling swells so heavy with slush they could not release themselves in their usual frothy white breaks along her shores. Just dark and slowly rolling. Swollen in her containment. Angry. There was a ship out there. An old freighter of the same vintage as the Edmund Fitzgerald. A black ghost with ink-like smoke crawling out of her stack.

I waited for an eruption, but none came. As the cloak of night set in, she settled, awaking the next day to her deep winter blue once again. Had I witnessed for the first time a passive-aggressive bout?

As morning wore on, the small circular blooms of ice began to form and merge as they always do on calm days. Like a slow moving pack they congregate, then seem to breed their way in a blanket across the harbor - usually across about half its surface, depending on the wind; on a really cold day, the whole thing. It was shaping up to be a really cold day. Seeming to sense this, the town otter was busy getting done what fishing he could before the blanket hardened. Perpetually at play, he was a dose more serious than most afternoons.

Toward eve, two bald eagles came gliding down Eliza Creek to the harbor. These two were hunting together and, as the forest gave way to town and beach, they raised their six foot spans and came to perch on the frozen sand.

The otter was diligently engaged in his underwater world. I wondered if the eagles could see him through the hardening slush. Or hear him maybe. Or smell him. They seemed to know he was there. He was big. They were immense. He broke the surface, looking for a fast breath, realizing probably that any chance of finishing his tasks was fast being sealed up by the ice.

The hunting duo caught eye of him immediately. He also caught site of their fast swiveling heads and quickly slipped under the ice - a thick float of the stuff, with only one real opening that I could see. The eagles saw this too, their necks cocking their yellow eyes into dart-like focus in lightning movements that seemed more like those of a caffeinated robot when compared to the slippery smooth movements of their expectant prey below. One flapped its way out onto the ice floe, while the other stayed perched by the stream's mouth, no doubt the source holding this doorway open in the ice.

Jane Boggio, a Scandinavian beauty turned pseudo Southern Bell via marriage, was standing on the road above the beach. She was raised here. A sweet woman, made somewhat lonely I think, by the Yankee spirit Lake Superior has no doubt refused to release in her. She watched the scene unfold for a minute in morbid curiosity. It's amazing how the awe of nature here never ceases to inspire. I've never grown bored with it.

The otter was no doubt plotting what he was gonna do when he burst through that hole. Had he had time to scout his options? I thought about how pressured lungs hurdle time to move faster. Would he be pushed to hallucinate a remedy to this fiasco? Were his improv abilities snappier than the skills of the two perched in the lighter medium above?

He burst up through that hole. White heads flicked around and were angling to move. Wings raised, chests hurling forward, they suddenly stuttered in stride. Their white heads swung backward around. The otter shot from the water over the ice, as his aquatic tail passed its action to his sharp clawed feet. Like a brown lightning bolt, he crashed body and soul into a large stand of bushes up the beach. They were dense and plenty twiggy enough to keep those two away.

I looked behind the eagles to see what had broken their stride. There was Jane, one foot forward from before. An unconscious honed look of movement in her eye. She had barely budged from her place on the road, but they saw her, through the eyes in the back of their heads. She'd given Mr. Otter that one second window to his second chance.

All four of them were pretty magnificent at that moment. The hunters then brandished on their faces the frustrated look that they'd been unnecessarily foiled. But come on guys - an otter’s a cool animal - one of the more fun-loving species I've ever watched. I think you'd find their love of revelry contagious. Keep yourselves happy with the fish.

(01/01/03)