Water and Clay

For the St. Louis River and for Mike Simonson

Water and Clay is an essay I wrote in 2015 for the “One River, Many Stories” project in Duluth/Superior. The project was initiated as a memorial to my good friend Mike Simonson. It eventually became a partnership between the UMD Journalism Program and KUWS at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, where Mike had been the regional news reporter from 1990 to his untimely passing in the fall of 2014. The program included publication of poetry and essays, as well as broadcasts and published articles, all focused on the story of the St. Louis River.

In writing Water and Clay, I tried to communicate several feelings: of waiting, of quiet, of the somberness that comes in late fall, of the loneliness of the wild country just southwest of Superior where I maintain my section of the North Country Trail.

Material from “One River, Many Stories” was hosted for a number of years through the Wisconsin Public Radio website. It’s no longer available there, so I’m sharing it here now.

The auger takes a tentative bite into the red soil. Twisting the T-handle, there is resistance and grittiness, proof of the chunky nature of what lies below. On this gray fall afternoon, here on a narrow hogback between Clear Creek and the Nemadji, the task is to set a trail sign to guide hikers headed west on the North Country Trail toward the state border. In specific, to take a substantial lump out of this old glacial lake bottom, replacing it with a sturdy post and a pine board that points the way.

The first cuts into the clay come out a little dry, unlike nearby spots where it’s thick and moist. Small stones, basalt-gray and jasper-red, are couched in the soil as it’s lifted out and dumped into a pile. Their smooth surfaces tell of a long tumble under ice and in gray, cold water. They may have rolled here from Hudson’s Bay, then stopped to be submerged under centuries of sinking silt, packed over time into clay.

Lake Nemadji was here first, dammed up in the basin that stretches off southward, blocked to the north by the great wall of dripping white. The last glacier melted back over the higher ground between here and the main channel of the St. Louis, feeding a red lake with solid, chunky bergs and finely ground rock. Later, it was Glacial Lake Duluth, larger but lower, starting to drain off eastward. Some things happened very fast; blockages broke, huge floods ran over the bare stone around what is now Jay Cooke State Park, valleys were torn into the hide of the earth in just a day or so. Other important matters took a very long time, as the red bits sifted out and settled down into the bottom, into the clay that stains the rivers red in spring, the clay that now fills the auger.

Scraping below now; a tree root. Must be from the big popple that stands a few feet away, the sign leaning against its pale bark, waiting for the digging to finish. Lucky the root is not too large. A more forceful turn on the handle and the root is cut, then pulled up out of the hole. The real topsoil here, the plant matter, was thin and black, just an inch or two of stuff made from rotted spruce needles and soggy popple leaves. The steeply sloping sides of the hogback are proof that water continues to shape this spot and all the country around. Coming as heavy rain or a strong snowmelt, it sloughs off the soil against the best effort of trees, hazel brush, and creeping plants. It rips open the steeper places down to the clay, then sluices the red downstream toward the big lake. It loosens the trees at their roots, rolls them down into the river, tumbles them into angular snags that rake the flow, that break loose and drift silently down on nights of high water till they scrape against the bridges by the entry to Superior Bay.

The view from here is wilderness, such wilderness as there is in this section of Wisconsin; really, one of the wildest parts within the state bounds. A gravel road bends past the bottom of the slope, the way for log trucks and occasional rattling pickups. All the rest is forest; the steep clay banks dotted with balsam, the tall river maple forest lining the river channel. The nearest house is not more than a mile upslope, but there is no habitation in sight here. The land is quiet this afternoon, quiet with the calm that comes when the leaves are off and wildlife settling in for the cold to come. This land belongs to the deer, to the crows and ravens speaking hoarsely a few miles off, to the raptor drifting above, following the watercourses.

A few more cranks and the hole is deep enough now, a good thirty inches. Time to drop in the post, grab a few clumps of clay, and stuff them in to straighten it in place. A water bottle is balanced on the top edge of the pine board, doing as a makeshift level. The sign will be here to entice hikers to climb up the ridge onto the plateau above, and explore on toward unknown landmarks; MacQuarrie Trailhead 3.0 miles, Saunders State Trail 4.1 miles, County Highway C in 4.7 miles. Up on the level ground, long native grasses shoot up waist high, surrounding the balsams, maples, and the ever-present popples, nourished by the richness left behind by the glacial lakes and by the ever-present moisture held by the clay.

More soil is packed in, then tamped with a boot, thumped in with the curved blue bit of the auger. The sign should stand here for a good while. Yet nothing in this place will remain long but the movement itself of wind, ice, water, and clay.