Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Skate Away
April 2009

         Now that spring is here, there is no better place to watch the rebirth of our region than the source lakes of the Columbia River – those twin long narrow wetland seeps that stretch north from Canal Flats to Invermere, British Columbia. In the middle of dry juniper and grassland, they sit like sponges in the Rocky Mountain Trench, swelling a seam that hinges the whole North American continent. Each April, as green lines of sedges, rushes, and cattails begin to peek up through the mirrored sheet of Columbia Lake, migrating waterfowl spread across its surface, their gabbles and honks drowning out the long-awaited sound of water leaking into another new season. But even now, it is hard to forget the tight lock of winter on these source lakes, and feel the power of the frozen stories they have spread across the Columbia country for untold generations.
In February, at temperatures well below zero, these sheets of white ice sing like a pod of humpback whales. Doppler effects dance around every tentative step as we try to figure out how we can possibly skate on a surface that rides with the hummocks and dips of topographical relief. The only way in appears to be a curling rink fashioned near the boat launch at Columbia Lake’s south end, and we push off from a rectangle that has been lovingly swept clean and marked for play, one speck of organization imposed on eight miles of random ice.
It is slow going out in this wilderness, because the surface is marred by pressure ridges that make for sudden drops. Open cracks have struck like lightning and refrozen as black lines on a white field. There are cornified snow spots and bubble seeps that can catch a blade and send you flying. But a few hundred yards away from shore we find there are also vast stretches of milky, refrozen, rock-hard snow on ice.
Although it feels curved rather than flat, this surface skates just fine, allowing us to work north for mile after mile. I remember listening to Alfred Joseph, a Kootenai who for years ran pack horse outfits into the mountains above here, describe trails across to Alberta that had been worn smooth by people treading over and back, over and back, for thousands of years. In places, Alfred said, grooves a foot deep had been walked down into the rocks.
North West Company fur men built their first trade house at the source of the Columbia only two centuries ago, among Kootenai people who provided them with the food and information that kept them alive. The newcomers struggled through summer and fall, but as the weather turned cold, groups of elk gathered on winter range above the post, and trumpeter swans floated in warm sulfur pools around the lake’s north end. Fueled by bird fat and lean venison, the traders gathered with their hosts during winter evenings and listened to stories of the land. When agent David Thompson heard one about large scary creatures in the mountains above them, kneeless monsters who had to lean against trees to sleep, he filed them away as “nursery tales.” He did not mention that a medieval Bestiary written in England described African elephants as the same sort of jointless leaning dozers.
During a winter crossing of Athabasca Pass three years later, Thompson’s crew struck a line of large tracks in the snow that set his Cree and Iroquois hunters on edge. The sign was distinct, fresh, and carried on for several hundred yards. Thompson noted that each track showed four three- or four-inch toes, with a small nail at the end of each. He carefully measured a few of the clearest prints at fourteen inches long by eight wide.
The Kootenai had told his hunters of a “large unknown animal” that plied those slopes. The men even pointed in the direction of a mountain where the creature was supposed to live.

On the top of the eminence, there was a Lake of several miles around which was deep moss, with much coarse grass in places, and rushes; that these animals fed there, they were sure from the great quantity of moss torn up, with grass and rushes; the hunters all agreed this animal was not carnivorous, but fed on moss, and vegetables.

None of the guides had actually seen the vegetarian monsters, but all assured their boss that they had no interest in tracking this one down. 
Ross Cox, an Irish fur clerk and occasional teller of tall tales, crossed the same pass five years later and heard the same tales from the company’s mixed blood hunters. According to Cox, these hunters alleged that the animals stretchedtwo to three hundred feet in length, and were tall in proportion. The men said that the beasts formerly lived in the Great Plains and far to the east, but that the Indians there had gradually driven them into remote mountain valleys. One hunter, in fact, swore that his grandfather had seen the animal long ago while crossing just such a mountain pass. “On hearing its roar, which he compared to loud thunder, the sight almost left his eyes, and his heart became as small as an infant’s.” Ross Cox, who like many people of his time had heard about large bones being dug up out of the ground, later speculated that his hunters might have been talking about a mammoth, and it’s easy to catch the whiff here of a true encounter, passed down and amplified by dozens of grandfathers around many winter campfires during story time.
In his own later years, David Thompson also revisited his Athabasca Pass encounter with the large tracks. On the one hand, he compared those same hunters’ natural history ruminations with contemporary accounts of large ivory tusks thawing out of ice in Siberia. On the other, he decided that despite the trustworthiness of his experienced hunters, their 1811 party ascending Athabasca Pass must have cut the tracks of a large grizzly bear. But Thompson couldn’t bring himself to deny the possibility that there might be a mammoth out there somewhere, stepping new prints into fresh snow, and he always remained in awe of what secrets the vast reaches of the Mountain West might hide.
Ice and cold are elements that greatly expand those reaches, opening up ever more possibilities. They override the heartbreak of living on tough land for generations, of going broke, of lean hunting years when no animal approaches the blind, of communities erased by disease and devastation and dams. A good winter howls across the landscape like a message that can be read but not quite understood: Who are the people? Where does the fear come from? What is that uneasy sense of change that hangs in the air?
One February skate collapsed all those questions into unmarkable time. I bent my knees and swung my arms hard, listening for a sound that might shrink my heart, searching for a smooth path that would carry my blades deep into the mountains’ cold embrace. Now that spring has brought back a liquid world, those same steps sink into the mud of a primordial marshland.

This column is adapted from an essay in Looking Together: Writers on Art, an anthology just released from University of Washington Press.

Illustration: Skating on the Bog Ditch
by William Kuralek

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