Chris Fink

I’ve been watching a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers excavate a cavity in a dead white oak behind the shed. Since I’m home all the time, I can wander over and look at them whenever I feel like it, which is more often than you might expect.

I have a beer bottle cap in the pocket of my spring coat that I worry with my thumb and forefinger. I’m not sure how long the bottle cap has been there. I find it with my fingers, and then I forget about it again. 

The poet Allen Ginsberg advises writers to “pay attention to what you pay attention to,” the idea being that the source of your creative impulse lies deep in your personal obsessions rather than in some more public space, where someone is always telling you what’s worth your attention. 

On the night after Christmas, I was ice fishing on Carlin Lake near Presque Isle, what they call “Wisconsin’s Last Wilderness.” Part bored, and part cold, I gazed across the dark lake at the warm lights of the Carlin Lake Lodge. Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne had both lodged here back in the day, evidently. Imagine those two in the same room.

I noticed that I had a flag up on my tip-up. Finally. I knelt to set the hook.

This fall I’ve given several public readings from my new book, which means I’ve had to dust off The Suit. If you know me, you’ve surely seen The Suit. I got it twenty years ago, when I was finishing my PhD and interviewing for jobs.

“You know, Fink,” said John Goulet, my major professor at UW-Milwaukee, “you’re going to have to go in debt for a suit.”

“A suit,” I gulped. I didn’t know anything about formal wear. But as a graduate student I did know about debt.

“Listen,” Dr. Goulet said, recognizing my unease. “I’ll take you shopping. But bring your credit card.”

Rain. My word. And thunderbolts split the sky. Of late these storms ride at night, when I’m wide awake. Power flashes and the black dog cowers. Worry. Gutters overflow. The basement pools. My friend Mike says night rain makes him drool. Better than some pill.

This July 4th I was the first person awake in our household, which is always a good feeling, to be first at something.

Even before I pushed the button on our old coffee maker, I looked out the window and noticed we had visitors. Three Tom turkeys stood in a slant of morning sunshine on the dewy grass.

Some people when you ask them why they fish will tell you it’s not about the fish at all. They like to be outdoors in the fresh air and the scenery. I don’t know any of those people. I’m in it for the fish. 

On a rainy May afternoon, I took my daughter Iris and our black dog Shady for a walk down to the confluence of Bass Creek and the Rock River to see our regal new neighbors -- The Pelicans! They moved into the area in early April and still haven’t flown north. There’s something affirming about having pelicans for neighbors. If these glamorous creatures have chosen this stretch of muddy river, well, it must be a good place to live after all. I must have chosen well!

Let us now praise….spring peepers!

Lately I’ve been thinking about a bench in Northern California. This particular bench is made of stone and perches along a dirt trail atop the long ridge of the San Francisco Bay Peninsula.

Do you know about dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring dating? Counting tree rings reveals not just a tree’s age, but also the conditions under which it lived. A tree’s cross section shows prosperous years, where it put on much good wood, and drought years, where it just hunkered down. It also reveals the years of fire. 

Poets love willow trees. Johnny Cash “taught the weeping willow how to cry,” and Lorine Niedecker wrote, “I’m not young, and I’m not free, but I’ve a house of my own, by a willow tree.” I love the poetry, but sadly I cannot love a willow tree. 

You know how, when you see a thing you haven’t seen for a long time, suddenly you see it everywhere?  

My wife Breja and I were walking our black dog Shady down a gravel road near Low Lake, north of Ely, Minnesota. Deer flies swarmed our heads in their hundreds, and mosquitoes and black flies battled for any remaining bare flesh.

I wonder what I’ll write about for my next perspective, I told Breja.

How about mosquitoes? she said.

Mosquitoes? I said. I was thinking of writing about a bog. Something pretty. Lady slippers.

I suffer from an affliction I call Cabin Dreams.

The roots of my disorder are traceable to childhood. I grew up on the shores of the Kishwaukee River near Kirkland. In the summers, once school was out, my family packed up the Buick and headed north to Wisconsin, to our knotty pine cabin on Blue Spring Lake.

Oh, time at the cabin was exquisite: pancakes for breakfast each morning, one pine drawer for all my belongings, and the lake itself, which seemed to bend summer days to its own shape, with shallow bays and windy points and a middle part deep and fathomless.

We started the day in Watertown, where Carl Nelson and I were pleased to discover the weather had improved considerably.  Instead of cold, it was pleasant and, instead of rain, it was no rain. We had breakfast at a cafe and were met by Chris Fink, Professor of Literature and Wisconsin Awesomeness at Beloit College.

Of course you know the dozen reasons why May is the sweetest month.

But put aside for now May’s eye candy—the orioles and buntings and tulips. And May’s nosegays—hyacinths and lilacs and lilies of the valley. You must put aside even crappie fishing, for now, to focus on May’s rarest gift: morel mushrooms.

You’ve waited 50 weeks for their arrival. But now, somewhere on the edge of a forest, it’s beginning; morels are pushing themselves through the duff. You’d rather hunt for mushrooms than anything else, admit it.

If you had just 90 seconds to say something to the world, what would you say?

As I sit pondering, a cooper’s hawk lands on the porch outside my window, rescuing me. He hangs around, hunting the feeder. More it snows, more I see him.

The snow has been remarkable, hasn’t it? Everything that’s not flocked is frosted. Just what we needed, I think, fresh whitewashing of the old cow barn. If the only thing the snow did was make the cardinal stand out, well, that would be enough.

One of my favorite things that presidents do, or used to do, is create national monuments.

In 2000 Bill Clinton created the Ironwood Forest National Monument north of Tucson, Arizona. My sister Melanie and her husband Lee run a small store, the Valley Mart, just across the road from this monument. Every winter, if we’re lucky, my family pays a visit over Christmas. My wife Breja and I love to hike this protected landscape.

When they say they love animals, most people mean they love domestic pets. In other words, they love animals they can own.  

I’ve always put myself on a higher plane than these pseudo animal lovers. I’ve never wanted to own a watered down, domestic lap warmer. My idea of animal loving is catching a glimpse of a wild creature in its habitat. I like to imagine that if I had a pet it would be a wild one: a fox maybe, or falcon.

Pooh Bear, it’s widely known, is a bear of very little brain. What he lacks in cognition, however, he makes up for in appetite.

In the Hundred Acre Wood, Pooh’s appetite is legendary. Remember the time he went to Rabbit’s house and ate so much of Rabbit’s honey that he couldn’t fit out the door? Even that humiliation didn’t curb Pooh’s appetite. At a certain point, a strong appetite counts for you. Later on, it’s a point against.

Among the many strange events 2017 hath wrought, it hath wrought a mast year for nut trees of the forest. Mast years are years that nut trees like oaks and hickories bear an abundance of fruit -- or mast, as it’s called by scientists and people who know Old English.

Every campsite in the Boundary Waters Wilderness between Minnesota and Canada comes equipped with a fire grate, a pit toilet, a tent site … and a snapping turtle.

These ancient creatures, some a hundred years old weighing 75 pounds, haunt the campsites, waiting for a stringer of fish to float in.

As a fisherman myself, I feel a kinship. Many times I’ve crouched on the greenstone shore, fileting my catch, listening to the nasal breath of a hungry snapper mere feet away.

I’m spending my summer in Minnesota, near the Canadian border, thinking and teaching about the difference between wildness and wilderness.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 allows Congress to designate “wilderness areas.” In 1978, the boundary waters canoe area wilderness was created here. At a million acres, it’s the largest wilderness in the Midwest. There are now nearly 110 million acres of wilderness in the U.S.