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In the first two months of winter the harbor didn’t want to freeze. The harbor does not regularly want to freeze, but the various pockets and shallows and backwaters along its inside rim usually do, and in the colder winters the freeze starts from the inside perimeter and creeps toward the center then the harbor mouth and even beyond the mouth.
The first freezing waters include the little 10-foot deep marina where the sailboats and larger watercraft are moored and where aerators are needed to keep the ice at bay from the hulls of the boats, and the brook trout come in to the protected and aerated marina, and under the right conditions you can see through the glass ice down 10 feet to the silt bottom and sometimes spy a trout. Also, the acre or so inside the sweeping bend of the new concrete breakwater at the summer boat landing. And the natural slip the other side of the concrete breakwater but behind the old, great Lake Superior spit. And for the other shallows behind the great Lake Superior spit on the far side of the harbor mouth near the Coast Guard station.
This year the ice came late to all parts of the harbor, and we couldn’t ice fish the marina. Every few days over a month or two we went down to the public landing to run the big empty, windblown parking lot and the icy rocks of the lake side and walk the concrete breakwater cupping the landing, and each time – enough times to extrapolate a pattern but not plot it precisely – we’d see a male ringbill duck out in the middle of the open water inside the boat launch break. Foxy could see him, and, when she did, she went into her poorman’s point, then she’d run the concrete breakwater to get downwind of the duck and get into a point again – less of a hunting point than a killing point…a guard dog point if there is such a thing.
He was just sitting there in the cold water and wind and flurries over the course of a month or two. Just sitting there. Unmigrated. Say what you will about the act of running away, or migrating; at least it’s movement in a direction away from here.
This one time we were coming in and walking up towards the landing (I was walking; the girls were running out ahead of me) and I got startled by a large series of quack! quack! quack! – real deep and guttural, and four mallards jumped from the natural slip in between the concrete breakwater and the Superior spit. In February! I couldn’t figure out what they were doing up here in February. Freezing. Frozen. Nothing to eat. Why haven’t they migrated?
It’s bad enough to be one of a family of four mallards finding yourselves on the north shore of Lake Superior in February.
It’s another degree of bad entirely to be a single, lonely ringbill here for a month waiting as the ice creeps in to consume you.
When he was 90 years old, Leo Tolstoy ran away again. This time he got away. He had run away before, and he had been set on running away his entire life.
This time, on an early winter’s eve when he was 90, he snuck off and boarded a train. But he only got just over 200 versts away, a day’s journey south, to the train station at Astopovo, Ryazan Governorate. It was on the train that he fell ill with pneumonia.
The porters at Astopovo Station lifted him off the third-class car and brought him to the stationmaster’s bunkroom. He was laid on the stationmaster’s bed with his beard on his chest and his hands on his belly.
I have run away a few times in my life. Not in the sense of a troubled teenage girl or delinquent boy. Not in the Dickensian sense or the 1967 Summer of Love hippie sense. Just only in the sense of escaping, not knowing where in the medium– to long-term I was going. Never when I was a teenager. Only when I was a young adult or adult or middle-aged man. When I couldn’t face my rage or frustrations or my shakiness. Either your emotions get control of you, or your emotions get out of control.
Sometimes people went out and tried to bring me back, for which I am appreciative, and many other people through the years reached out and expressed their concern. I ran off in secret at the time, or not so secretly, or sometimes in ways that are secret still.
In the stationmaster’s bunkroom the doctors had quickly been gathered. Crowds of peasants gathered around the station, on the platform, along the tracks.
Tolstoy lay near death in the stationmaster’s room for seven days. Reporters came to bear witness to the monumental moment, the last moment of this monumental life.
And they came to report and went forth reporting that Leo Tolstoy’s last words were, “I do not know what it is I am supposed to do.” Or, maybe, where it is I am supposed to go.
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