BOG RITUAL by Sarajane Woolf
Cool, ankle-deep water lurks in the brilliant green moss of our sphagnum bog. What looks solid and dry is squishy and wet, and yet the surface has an unexpected integrity. As we push up from bent knees, mossy waves spread out in blurry, concentric circles. My brothers and I laugh and slop around, renewed by the sterile, acidic water. The bog as natural fun house, the bog as giant baptismal font. Sterile or not, shoes, socks, pants, and shirts dipped in bog water will never be the fresh crisp colors they once were, and no amount of toxic laundry products will change that. Clothes take on the brownish-greenish bronze of bodies retrieved from bogs.
Sphagnum moss can break apart under pressure, creating wet canyons to the geologic beginnings of a bog. Though I’ve never seen this happen, I warn heavy-footed friends of the danger. “There are no bodies in our bog,” my brothers scoff. “None that we know of,” I say. I fear bog rifts; ours is not a family with rifts.
* * *
My brothers and I return to our family’s cabin in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota – fueled by memories of rainy childhood Junes where our shoes were never dry, of the few hot days in July or August that arrived like unexpected gifts, of the night-time thunderstorms that killed the power and drove us from our beds to gather at large windows facing the lake, watching lightning and waves, our eyes lit by candles – and we return to our bog in the woods.
The bog had long hibernated in my mother’s mind, forgotten at my father’s death. Widowed at thirty-eight with four kids, six to sixteen, she had other things to think about. Four or five years later my older brother remembered trees, ticks, dense brush, our father’s mint-green Ford in mud past the bottom of the doors, and a tentacle of our world reached out to this land. The older three of us, in our teens and early twenties, swam in a leech-infested lake, harvested water lily buds rumored to be hallucinogenic, and ate wild raspberries the size of raisins, red rubies from the woods. We picked nettle leaves, mentally narrowing them to match the illustrations in a youth group brochure that warned of the dangers of Cannabis. Dried over a small fire on foil scavenged from one of our packs, the leaves’ harsh smoke filled our lungs with the joy of a shared rite.
* * *
The Turtle Mountains rise six hundred feet above the surrounding plains along the North Dakota-Manitoba border. Lakes and muddy swamps, forests and cleared farmland, small cabins without heat or running water and large homes with the usual amenities: these pairs mingle uneasily – one could become the other with a few years, maybe decades, of drought or well-timed rain. From the plains, across fields of wheat and sunflowers, the wooded mountains first appear as a thin blue band, like low clouds on the horizon.
Where the dense, intertwining aspen, oak, and birch part slightly, just off the road a few miles from the lake, the route to our bog begins. Those who’ve seen a car enter this gap from a distance may think they’ve seen an illusion, that the car must have turned on a bend in the road. Only when viewed at a certain angle do the woods invite you in.
Before slipping into the woods last year, we stopped at the adjacent farm, fusing neighborly and legal rules to both ask and tell that we were driving over their land. “Any new activity at the border?” my older brother asked the man who responded to his knock. Our dad knew his dad, but we barely remembered each other and pulled out this connection, a key to unlock the door. We all smiled at this reference to terrorism and our country’s tightened borders. It could be fifty years earlier here; except for our newer cars, no one would know.
Our bonds renewed, we turned into the enveloping woods and then careened down a rocky chute that spewed us into a field shaped by the advancing and retreating forest. Years ago it was planted with wheat, forcing us to drive more slowly, parting the stalks as one might part bristly hair. The view from the front seat was that of a canoe through reeds, a wood tick through dog fur. The grass sprang upright, closing behind our car once we had passed. From the backseat, the car felt like a stationary obstruction, the head-on flow of grass splitting around us and then merging at the rear to rush downstream. In late-summer trips to the bog, our hard-edged car bumpers threshed the ripe, spiky-awned grass, spilling grain onto the hood.
* * *
The bog has no identifiable origin in our lives, no specific before. In our early woods wanderings, we didn’t know about the bog, and we don’t know when we found it – that is my version of our bog history. When I asked my older brother he said, “We always knew about the bog,” and the younger two agree. Their memories are fluid, and what one did, another remembers having done, as though their minds are a communal vat. My older brother recently remembered the chore of teaching me to drive a manual transmission many years ago. But he hadn’t been there. It was my younger brother who helped me shift our shared Ford Comet the year we were at the university together. And our youngest brother remembers sitting in the back of Pauline’s Bar, waiting for our dad to finish his drink. The rest of us agree he definitely wasn’t there – but we don’t tell him that. As the youngest, he has so few memories of our dad and now can’t separate the threads of his memory from the greater fabric of ours. I try to think of stories to tell him, small things, but the past too swiftly coagulated into a form defined by cheery adjectives and few concrete nouns. Even just after our dad died, I tried to remember the last time I’d seen him, but my memory wasn’t linear enough to step into the day of his car accident, and the day before that, until I could retrieve our last good-bye.
We would not have found the bog in winter, frozen and covered in snow, like the night we camped on Boundary Butte thirty years ago, two of my brothers and I. The night was dark and clear, and pins of starlight rushed to me like oncoming snow flakes in a blizzard lit by car lights. Years later, when I said to my youngest brother, “You would have liked that night,” he said, “That was me, I was there.” I tried but could not see him lying next to me. We’d zipped two sleeping bags together and two brothers burrowed into the outside edges of the bags to my left and right, pulling the top taut to shield me from falling ice crystals that formed on the walls of our tent. Mulling over these details, I’ve tried, but cannot push my middle brother out of the story, because I might have been willing to cuddle with the youngest, the brother I’d known as a baby, and who, for perhaps too long, was “the baby” to us all.
* * *
At the far end of the field the road takes the form of parallel wheel-wide paths of shorter plants flanked by taller. With a light breeze to keep mosquitoes away, the road is pleasant to walk and is not worth driving – downed trees are inevitable. At some point the path crosses the southern boundary of our land, though I could not say where that line is. The straight edges of mapped boundaries belie the lack of straight lines in the woods: the hills, ponds, limbs and trees felled or broken by storms, the blurred edges of decaying wood against crisp new shoots.
The path ends at a small clearing. To the west are the remains of a rusted buggy and a Depression-era log cabin whose door must have once let in the morning sun. Trees now grow in the interior, part of a grove that straddles the walls as they recede from the material world. Aspen leaves, soughing in the breeze, reify the ghosts of the woman and her children who once called this home. Other trees have lived a natural span and died in the time since the roof and floor collapsed.
At the north side of the clearing are the remains of a geodesic dome, built by my brothers in the early ’70s. Six foundation holes marked the hexagonal beginnings of this dream. The day after the holes were dug, my older brother and I looked down to the bottoms, to one live toad per hole. Just the length of his outstretched arm and fingers, he lay over each hole with his arm socket centered on the opening, the side of his face in the dirt, and scooped up each toad. Both the toads and their rescue, we felt, were a good omen for the dome. My younger brother and I walked to the clearing this summer. The plywood struts that had once formed the dome, and for a few years had shaped a concave surface, cradling a fallen tree, are now not recognizable as a framed vision in the woods. Around what had been the dome’s perimeter, tree branches jut into the hollow space and banish any lingering thoughts of fires in the wood range, vegetables simmering, water from the nearest pond boiling for tea.
* * *
Summers are short in the woods, and the winters long and cold. Take a typical North Dakota temperature and subtract ten degrees for the Turtle Mountains, “the hills.” When I lived in Iowa I’d see the same flowers bloom two months later up north – buttercups, columbine, wild roses. In V-shaped Canadian cold fronts, the hills are just behind the last and coldest V. After a harsh winter a few years ago, when people in more temperate states complained about temperatures that, admittedly, were below zero, a friend in the hills said, “I checked the thermometer on the barn one day and it read minus fifty; next day same thing. The third day I started to think it was odd that it would be exactly minus fifty three days in a row. Then I realized that was as low as the mercury could go without blasting through the bottom.”
This is land with glacial memories. And yet I had longed to be on that trip, when I was twenty or twenty-one, the one where my oldest and youngest brothers snowshoed into the woods and camped on the other side of the border. It was cold that night, maybe thirty or forty below. If you have not lived in cold air, you might think that once it gets below zero it doesn’t matter whether it’s ten or thirty or fifty below. But it does, it definitely does.
That night they settled into their tent and watched the temperature drop and had the thought that this wasn’t ideal. Late in the night they heard a snowmobile – a Manitoba park ranger who offered a ride out and didn’t question their route over the border. It must not have looked like a drug run, more like something dumb for its own sake. Anyway, as the story was told and retold over the years, I couldn’t absorb all the details. Each was a reminder that I hadn’t been invited to share with them that cold, cold night and then to join in the telling of our story. The dark starry night on the butte the winter before had been the end of camping with my brothers, and I’ve never known why, and I won’t ask. There must have been some reason, and I suppose there is a grand “why” of my father’s death that I’ll never know, but I would ask that if I could.
My next younger brother said to me last summer, regarding our youngest, “You know what his central anguish is?” And I did. He’d been asleep when our father died, and no one had wakened him. It probably seemed kind at the time, or maybe we all just forgot him. We were eleven, thirteen, and sixteen and maybe just thought of ourselves. I wonder if it is too late now to describe in such minute detail to my youngest brother about that night so he could recall it too. How our mother came home early from a meeting at the church, the minister with her. How she called us into the dining room, and we stood in a line, the oldest, my younger brother, and then me. How she whispered to the first two brothers, one at a time. How I’d heard her words but said I hadn’t, needing to hear them spoken directly to me, and how my youngest brother, too, had wanted words of his own, even if they had to say, “Your dad’s been in an accident, and he might not live.”
Our oldest brother told him the next day, “Dad’s not coming back,” and my youngest brother answered, “He’s dead.” I did not hear this story until thirty-five years later and only then realized I had not been told that he died, that night or ever, I’d only been told of the possibility. Late in the evening a family friend came into my room and said, “It doesn’t look good.” That was it. But the next day death hung in the air, and we absorbed it through our skin and digested it in the salads and casseroles that arrived at the door and breathed it deeply in the fragrance of the flowers. Again and again I inhaled the spicy scent of carnations on the wall-mounted table under the mirror in the front hall, not knowing the face in the mirror, the face of a girl whose father was dead.
* * *
Shadowy, translucent walls of tangled trees and shrubs enclose the clearing to the north and east, the direction of the bog. Edged with cattails, vegetal breaks look inviting as possible paths, but are wet and muddy to unpredictable depths. Deer trails and extended-family beaver dams across the mouths of swampy ponds begin to look like highways after walking through brush that begins at your feet and stops above your head. More promising is the route to the west on a faint trail just slightly more tangible than a memory. That route takes us to Boundary Butte, the highest point in the Turtle Mountains, on a twenty-foot-wide clear-cut running east and west. The longest continuous clear-cut in the world, this is the American-Canadian border.
This swath through the woods keeps us from getting too lost. We might veer too far to the east or west on the way to the butte and on our return, but the north boundary of our land is unmistakable with clear views to the main lake in one direction, of endless hills in the other, and above us, the sky. Approaching the peak from the south, the words United States of America on a silver painted obelisk tell us where we’ve been, with Canada on the other side. Everyone reacts to the obelisk in universal ways, wanting to be photographed standing in one country, one of us in the other. Or we each brace a foot at the base, hang on with one hand and lean out, stretching into the air as if whirling on a merry-go-round, whirling on our mental axis of the earth.
From the butte the walk to the bog a few hills away on the border is almost relaxing – no need to clear away branches or step over fallen trees. In wet seasons, low meadows between hills force us around the edge, back into the woods, but the general direction is clear. Route-finding discussions – Should we follow this deer trail? Veer around the marsh? Pick our way through the brush? – settle to the bottom of our minds.
* * *
During the Wisconsin stage of the Pleistocene glacier, left and right lobes wrapped around the Turtle Mountains, and abraded them as they embraced over the top. The receding glacier left flat, fertile land in its wake, an eroded morainic surface over the hills, and small cold lakes. On one of these, straddling the Canadian border, grew sphagnum moss, a species that likes the stagnant, acidic water of melting glaciers. Gas-filled cells kept the growing moss buoyant, while lower layers died from lack of sun, sunk to the bottom, and condensed into peat.
Ten thousand years after the first sphagnum moss began to decay in our glacial lake, the dark, dead layers crept up from the bottom to the green living layer, continuing to push upward until the surface water drained to the perimeter. Held in by the surrounding hills, this moat around our bog is six feet wide, or so. The edges of the bog are ill-defined, though they give the illusion of solid ground. What looks like a safe landing pad, for those who attempt to leap across the moat, may be merely flotage that disintegrates on impact. The bottom of the moat is vague, uncharted. Those who’ve fallen in haven’t stayed long.
Safest moat crossings are over fallen logs wrestled from a tangle of shrubs and coaxed over the water. My older brother always crosses first and then waits with an outstretched hand, as though we are forty years younger and only he, among us, is big enough to help the others. Large biting ants live on the outside banks of the moat and cruise the surfaces of downed trees, bare feet, and hands that seek the safety of branches. With the ants chasing me from one side and my brother beckoning from the other, I quickly cross the moat.
* * *
We tell stories about getting lost on the way back from the bog. About the time our oldest brother brought his new GPS unit with the dead batteries. About our youngest brother hiking with a female friend, who wore a strapless tube top into the mosquito-infested woods; how he got his directions confused (“It was cloudy,” he tells us); how the walk to the car took longer than expected; how she made it to a wedding that afternoon, barely, and that the brush abrasions on her arms and back, although visible above her strapless bridesmaid’s gown, had not bled during the ceremony. And we tell about a boyfriend of mine who kept saying, “Aren’t there any rock outcroppings we can crawl up on to see where we are?,” and, as if performing a rehearsed call-and-response routine, my brothers respond in boisterous unison, “Rock outcroppings?,” prompting me to say, “A week later, out of the blue, he said to me, ‘You know that part where we had to go crashing through the brush to get back from the bog? I didn’t like that.’” And my brothers shrug their shoulders, hands held upward and emit a collective, “So?”
We rarely take the same route to and from the bog. It’s not that easy to retrace our steps; from the bog, the forest is an undifferentiated mass of mottled greens and browns (not unlike the color of bog water), flecked with the white trunks of aspen and birch. And when we start back, some other route inevitably looks more inviting than the one just taken. Though we never know exactly where we are when we go into and out of the woods, we reassure friends who accompany us, “We’ve never not gotten out.”
* * *
Dreams and memories may not be so very different. My dad walked in the front door of our home one evening; he’d just come back from work. We were all there, my brothers and mom and I, and Sheba, our dog. Everyone but me talked to him at once; I silently met his eyes and thought, “But you’re dead.” He returned my gaze and winked to seal our secret before turning to speak to my brothers. In 1976, when the POWs came home from Vietnam, on television I watched the soldiers step off a plane as their dates of capture flashed on the screen. Many had disappeared ten years before, the same year as my dad, and it was hard to think of him walking into our lives that day. How would we look to him, and he to us? Only in the woods, walking to the bog, can I imagine our lives meshing. When a dad dies young, you can make of him a god, and maybe that, and his absence, binds my brothers and me more than we know.
Sarajane Woolf’s work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.