Way Up North, Watching

Not long after arriving in Wisconsin a new colleague mentioned that we should be sure to go “up north” sometime. I found this hilarious. To an Arkansas boy who moved most recently from Southern California, I felt sure that anywhere in Wisconsin was “up north” already. It turns out that there are actually places farther north than my part of Wisconsin, and after two years of living here, Jody and I finally took some vacation days to check it out.

We loved it.

We drove through the “U.P.” (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) and encountered small towns with names like Escanaba and Manistique before crossing the international bridge in “the Soo” (from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada) to spend several days in a hotel on the Canadian side of the border. In Canada, as folks with noticeable accents of our own, we enjoyed hearing the wait staff at restaurants say “eh” and “youse guys” and “soar-ee,” and we took a day-long train trip even farther north — 114 miles into the Canadian wilderness — where we hiked in spectacular Agawa Canyon Park. On the Michigan side with the “yoopers” (aka Michiganders from the U.P.), we feasted on “pasties” (pronounced, “pass-tees), which I would describe as a delicious pot pie that you can hold in your hands like a taco, and we even went for a quick dip in Lake Superior; it was far from a polar plunge, but we counted it as one just the same.

(Oh, and in the touristy gift shops in the Soo, I saw a zillion sweatshirts that featured the words “up north.” There were some that even said “WAY up north,” so it turns out that my original reaction wasn’t so original after all.)

It was the vacation that we needed, but of all the adventures on our trip, my personal favorite turned out to be sitting at Rotary Island Park on the Michigan side watching the ships pass by. We saw the famous “Soo Locks” in action, too, and the entire process of witnessing the massive ships pass through was incredible, but seeing them lumber by up close was the best.

Raymond Carver’s poem, “At Least,” is one of my all-time favorites. The poem features a man watching ships, too, a man who gets up early with his coffee and spends the day observing the action before Carver concludes with these incredible lines:

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—I have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait. Just wait,

to see what’s going to happen.

I love that so much for reasons that I cannot explain or even fully comprehend. Somehow Carver captures so beautifully disparate concepts like contemplation, gratitude, contentment, and anticipation, all mixed up in a lovely soup of emotions.

I felt it in Rotary Island Park just the other day.

Well, we did not get up early, and we did not have coffee, and I was not alone, but we witnessed something beautiful, too, something that escorted me into the world of one of my favorite poems. We sat in lawn chairs near the riverbank, I in the shade, and Jody in the sun. When we saw the CSL Laurentien approach, a Canadian ship a couple of football fields long, leaving Sault Ste. Marie on its long voyage to Quebec, we were joined by a handful of others. Two stood on the bank waving a Canadian flag at the crew as they passed. Two others stood together waving and yelling “Thank you!” over and over again, to which we could hear the crew shout back, “You’re welcome!”

I got chills, even on a sunny summer day. To be candid, I am not sure what we witnessed in that moment, not fully understanding what led those people to stand by the river and shout their gratitude toward the passing ship, but to use religious language, just being there at that moment felt like we were witnessing something sacred and holy.

I have lived quite a life. As of lately, I have waded into the waters of Lake Superior “way up north” and the Gulf of Mexico way down south, plus the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the east and west. Looking back, I once sat in a billionaire’s living room in his mansion in Delhi, India, and at another time a poor man’s only room in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. I have seen the lights of Paris and the colors of Rio. I have dined in fancy Beverly Hills as well as in rural gas stations. I have seen both birth and death. I have loved and been loved, and I have lost people that I loved. I have succeeded, and I have failed. I have pushed through, and I have started over. I have experienced so much. My life is already full any way you slice it.

Like Carver, it feels obscene to ask for anything more, and at this point I cannot complain if such requests are denied by life. But it would be such a gift to experience yet another special moment. Way up north, watching the ships pass by, I made a conscious decision to fully appreciate any additional sacred and holy moments that I am privileged to witness. Each day that I wake up, I plan to be watching…

to see what’s going to happen.