Hole in the Day

The great Ojibwe chiefs Hole in the Day (father and son), Bug-o-na-ghe-zhisk, were tranformative leaders here in northern Minnesota in the 1800s. There is a park named Hole-in-the-Day near Leech Lake, a few towns over from where I sit today typing. I'm in Bemidji visiting my parents before heading down to Mille Lacs for a meeting. The younger Bug-o-na-ghe-zhisk was handsome, diplomatic, charismatic, one who traveled to Washington to meet with President Lincoln as part of his work on land treaty negotiations. I'm taken with his picture, above, shot in NYC during that trip.

I'm online courtesy of the Kitchigami Hot Spot wireless network. I should be on the lake but it's cold and windy. I hope Dad and I can go out later. It's very quiet on the lake this long weekend. I woke this morning and sort of tip-toed out to the lakeshore. Just beyond the dock was a merganser--I didn't see her chicks but Mom says she's got them. Two loons cried out further in the bay. Mom's got yellow finches at her bird feeder. Down the bumpy road, yellow ladyslippers have started to wilt and fade but I see now red-and-yellow columbine in new bloom and the wild pink geraniums.

My dad was awake early reading and watching CNN in the living room on mute. They just got air conditioning in the house because, even though the lake weather can be cool and breezy it can also be unbearably hot and humid, and Mom doesn't like the heat. The lakehouse is pristine; Mom keeps out the spiders and the bugs and the rusty water from her pipes. It's a home for them, not a lake cabin, and I try not to get bummed that we can't flop around wet and barefoot and let the screen door slap and build campfires out near the beach. Mom is afraid of even contained fires in the woods and they don't have a slapping screen door.

Right now, at this moment, I feel a gravitational pull to clarity, one thing or the other. Black or white, not gray. I'm really a little sick of the gray. We all live in the gray all the time, it seems. Can't be expecting wisdom to come down completely on one side or the other.

My dad and mom have a storm scanner set up in the second bedroom to warn them of oncoming bad weather but I'd rather just go out to the dock and look up at the sky. I rather resent the loud bleeping of the weather watcher; I'd rather the loud screeching of the loons. Technology intrudes on nature.

And I can't expect work not to blur into home and home to stay separate from work. I text on my cell phone at my son's game and I take calls from home when I'm at the office.

Blending makes things easier, I suppose. It's the only way to juggle our multiplex lives. If I take a stand on separation--THERE WILL BE NO TEXTING AT THE TABLE!--I get the stink eye. If I tell myself, today I will not check Outlook, today I will not check Outlook, it seems a trap, like I'm a bulemic, fasting all day only to pig out come 9:00 pm, because sure enough I'll make it through a lovely day of gardening, and biking, and G&Ts on the porch, and then I get into bed, bring up the laptop to the top of my lap, and click into work.

Can I tell you something? Last Friday my husband and I went to a backyard party. It was lovely, at first. A blending of families from our son's hockey team and a few neighbors, and the younger kids. The teen boys all gathered at another house to watch the NHL draft. We were friends with some of the gathered, not so much with others. We shared really good homemade salads and grilled chicken with aioli and some beers. We played that ball-golf game that people make with PVC pipe and rope. And then at the end of the night the conversation of a few couples turned racist. It was a small comment or two but I can't say "a little racist" because that's like saying "a litte pregnant." You are or you're not and they were. Are. And so my husband and I looked over at each other and left. And we felt uncomfortable about it through the next morning. About not saying anything, I suppose. About feeling complicit. And I thought, "I'm blending my values and politics and belief systems into a wider circle of people and I don't really know who they are and what they believe."

I do believe that blending in is a part of life; we all assimilate one way or another. We blend the old and the new. We blend the strange with the familiar. And we all bring to our lives our own beliefs and preferences (and fetishes and extremes) and through them alter our surroundings to fit. Too much one way and we lose control; too much the other and we lose serendipity and the charm of an arms-wide-open view.

I'm about to learn the wisdom of chiefs Hole in the Day thanks to a work assignment. I know my small examples here pale to their struggles: between traditional life and customs and the new white immigrants. Between life and death. I imagine that their best diplomacy was that precarious blend of clarity and compromise, between a strongly held belief system and what they did/we must do to survive in this world.