Losing Our Landmarks

For years, I relied on landmarks to orient myself to the world around me. That’s especially true when traveling in remote places, like the Lost Lake Swamp, one of my frequent destinations. Landmarks have served as visual anchors for humans from our earliest days, providing a connection to place and, in a sense, time. They can provide a sense of permanence in a world that is always changing.
For me, an enormous white pine snag on a small upland island found miles out in the swamp, that had been visible from our living room couch or any open expanse in the swamp, served for nearly three decades as an important way finder. While long dead, I had assumed the enormous snag, with its prominent topknot of two gnarled branches, would stand the test of time better than me. I had visited the snag several times over the years, and always marveled at the huge plates of bark, many of them ten feet or more in length, that it regularly shed as it slowly succumbed to the natural order of things. For a giant of the forest, of course, the dying process and ultimate decomposition can be a long, long process.
It was another giant that served as my second landmark in the swamp. An enormous white spruce which had certainly lived for at least two, if not three, normal human lifetimes, towered above the other trees on yet another upland island. When I could locate both of these special trees, which I frequently could in the more open terrain far out in the swamp, I could instantly triangulate with a map and compass to determine my location.
I lost both of those landmarks in one of our increasingly frequent derechos, now almost a decade ago, and I still find their loss unsettling. It’s as if my North Stars have fallen from the sky, and it’s contributed to my growing sense that our world is increasingly unmoored.
Other normally well-grounded points of connection to our surroundings are disappearing as well, the calendar being one of them. While sometimes dismissed as a mere scientific tool for measuring the passage of astronomical time, calendars play a crucial role in anchoring our collective memory, coordinating our behavior, and fostering our cultural identity.
These days, it seems that the calendar is playing tricks on us. For those of us getting on in years, and who have lived here in the North Country for all or most of that time, the months and seasons used to be their own kind of landmarks. Not anymore.
Perhaps because I’m a gardener, or am naturally observant of the natural world, I take more notice of how the seasonal landmarks have shifted. As a young man, the opening of deer season marked the beginning of real winter here in the North Country. I remember my first deer opener up here, back in 1984, when we already had several inches of snow on the ground and it was 15 below opening morning, a temperature that was at least guaranteed to keep you awake.
That was the rule back then, not the exception.
These days, winter doesn’t seem to arrive here in the North Country until Thanksgiving, and even then it tends to arrive with a tentative whimper, not the cold slap across the face we used to experience.
For several years in the 1980s, I kept daily weather records at our homestead. Looking back now, it’s astonishing how our weather has changed. As a gardener, I won’t deny there are advantages to the rapid warming of our fall season. I used to hope to have until mid-September to ripen winter squash or tomatoes before the killing frosts. This year, with help from some row covers, I was able to keep my squash growing and viable until Oct. 20.
One of the worst snowstorms I can remember came in mid-October back in the late 1980s, when about ten inches of wet snow, driven by high winds and an abrupt and hard freeze left everything plastered with snow for days. Downed trees by the millions cut power across the region, for days in many places. It took several days before temperatures warmed enough to start melting it all.
I’m not suggesting I miss such storms, although they were part of our identity back then. We were hardy folk, who lived in a place where winter, or at least a convincing early stretch of it, could set in weeks before Halloween.
We used to live in a place where precipitation fell almost exclusively as snow from December to mid-March. Unlike today, rain in mid-winter was virtually unheard of. The past few winters, by contrast, we’ve seen much, if not most, of our winter precipitation fall as rain. I remember hiking in the Boundary Waters three years ago, on Dec. 27, in a landscape as green as a spring day, without so much as a whiff of snow on the ground. It was astonishing, and utterly disorienting.
I think, too, of the month of April, a time when I used to set aside at least two to three weeks for skiing on the late-winter crust. It was one of my favorite times of year, with the dark days of winter long behind us and conditions for skate skiing that were nearly ideal. I used to joke that my version of heaven would be an endless sheet of perfect crust. That may soon be the only place to find those conditions as warming overnight temperatures in more recent years have prevented the once-firm set-up that used to serve my crust-skiing fixation so well.
These are changes that alter our perception and our sense of place. We can see it in fallen landmarks, the warming climate, and in the changing makeup of our northwoods fauna. The once-ubiquitous gray jay, so emblematic of our region in years past that some crazy folks named a newspaper after them, are clearly on the decline. Over the past two years, I could count the number of times I’ve spotted one on the fingers of one hand. At the same time, wild turkeys, unimaginable here as recently as 15 years ago, can now be found just about everywhere.
Change is one of the few constants here on Earth, but the pace of it today is unsettling, as if our world is built on shifting sand. Finding an anchor, a point of reference, or a connection to a place that is in so much flux, may simply not be possible in our increasingly uncertain future. Only time will tell how we navigate our new reality.