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When you break into the Frost River proper, you break into an intimate, great country.
Though the Frost is a famous river, it is humble and small, mostly quiet, occasionally babbling. And though it is called a river, it comes to you like a brook, or a stream at most. And though it presents itself as a stream or brook, it is navigable – meaning travel-able by paddling or portaging or dragging or pushing a 16-foot canoe by two brothers with Duluth packs and a game cocker spaniel.
From the upstream end proper coming out of big, windy Frost Lake you can hear the Frost River emptying over great boulders into its watershed beyond. The transition is not a waterfall, no. Not rapids, no. What the trout fishermen call “pocket water” and “freestone.” Great granite boulders around and over which water flows and makes the loud sound of sleep.
On the Frost and separating its long sections of flat, winding channel are sharp gradients. Places where the contour lines of the McKenzie maps from the 1960s’ USGS surveys descend twenty feet from one channel stretch or beaver pond or flood plain to the next. Around these un-floatable places, you portage. One rod and five rods and 10 rods and 15 rods. Some dozens of feet or some hundred yards. Then you drop down again into the deep, quiet, tight channel of the Frost. Thirteen of these short portages in total over two long miles.
The channel again is just narrow enough to permit the canoe between soft green walls of grasses 6-foot high. Here is the tuft grass that hisses and whispers from either side of the canoe as you pass through it. Here are the alders and floating bog scraping the side of the canoe as you pass through them. Here to your paddle’s end is a boulder with its top dry above water where the muskrats squat to chew vegetation and leave their droppings.
Always there are the green-leaved cut alders floating in the stream, cut by the beaver for food or dams, the beaver -being largely nocturnal – having left them for the day. Many small beaver dams – six that you have to drag the canoe over and one that we simply ran.
In the broad stretches a few yards wide lay wild rice in the ribbon stage laying flat on the water, and in stretches broader by a few yards more great fields of white lotus and yellow lily pads whose pads create friction on the hull of the canoe and slow your forward movement and spin around your paddle.
Above the Frost are the heights. The promontories and ridges and hills that create the bends and turns and watershed and great contours. I cannot speak to them much. We didn’t get up country. We don’t leave the waterway, the ways of the water.
Off a quarter-mile dying spruce and much thriving jack pine; over beyond are the drying tamaracks; away up a half-mile red and white pine and poplars.
My attention is always taken back here, near. To the dark, hidden, muddy and clear, dead and green, solitary and lush, great – in the most intimate sense possible of the word – Frost water.
There is something about relative distance and nearness I’ve thought about elsewhere…
Under high Portage Brook Overlook
Winds the namesake clear, clean, cold brook,
Down a slope true one hundred meters,
Among the fern and grass, the birch and cedars.
The Portage, the Pigeon, the Stump all flow
In a basin wide a good ten mile or so.
Beyond lay John, the Fowls; between the Royal races.
And though distant, I am familiar with those places.
Once by plane it was my privilege to travel,
When I was green and unripe to the Big Apple.
Our pilot chose to gain from MSP.
Over St. Paul, above my hometown, NSP.
High overhead Highway 36 I could take.
A walk by air by block to our Silver Lake.
I thought of all the people on that plane.
I’m the only one familiar with this terrain.
I’ve seen the glorious Northern Lights
But can’t bring to mind those famous sights.
Maybe in my childhood a time or two,
And maybe twice, drunken, just recently, too.
They hold no fascination for me:
Great distance breeds no familiarity.
I can look off afar and love a thing,
If I have gained it, or lost it, in remembering.
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