The Haunting Season
By Robyn Earhart
This place is haunted. Or it could be, with its bravado of wind and rolling whitecaps and the rhythm imbued by waves slapping the rock wall. All an implication of a lifeforce churning in the swell and fury. Who am I to say that someone else hasn’t stood on this point, too, staring into recognition, haunted by ghosts of yesterdays?
The cabin my husband and I have rented for the weekend boasts expansive views of Lake Superior, but the rental website’s photos don’t accurately capture the mystical beauty of the rock wall I’m looking out from. A waterfall sluicing behind me, the sun yearning to break through fog, ice-coated moss underneath my treadless boots. The photos we viewed online only show the cabin nestled in green, sloping woodland on the Gitchi Gami. I imagine families gathering on its strip of sandy beachline toasting marshmallows around a campfire, their wet trunks and suits dangling on tree branches. There are no photos of the cabin in winter, when its discounted price is within our budget to rent. We had to conjure those images ourselves. Most of the resorts we passed on Highway 61 in drive-thru towns with Scandinavian names like Shroeder and Tofte appeared shuttered. Most people don’t run to the North Shore of Minnesota after the fall foliage reaches its peak colors.
A light in the water below catches my eye. It’s a glimmer from some amorphous shell, or so I think. I watch as waves lift the shell and it pirouettes forward only to sink. But the rock wall I’m crouching on is a few hundred feet above the frothy water; can I really see a shell from this point? It could be anything—a fishing hook, discarded trash, but I want it to be something left behind with intent, something meaningful to this place. Lake Superior is the largest of the five Great Lakes. If it were emptied at its current capacity of water, it would take nearly two hundred years to drain, uncovering specters of sunken ships from long ago disasters that haunt this region of the state. The absence of salt makes freshwater an excellent preserver. Pieces of cargo, personal effects like a pocket watch, a mother-of-pearl comb. Steel apparatuses teeming with algae and zebra mussels. What is a ship after all but a container, a shell, a body moving from one place to another.
I find the precariousness of shuffling closer to the wall’s edge thrilling. The outlines of ships traveling. I choose how far I can go, how, if I squint my eyes and the rock wall disappears, I’m out there with them. How I take in deep breaths of crisp November air. Hold for as long as my lungs allow. One, two, three, four. This was one of the first techniques I learned years ago in treatment for my agoraphobia, when, at the age of twenty-six, I started on a cocktail of medications and cried in weekly talk therapy sessions. I gained coping skills like breathwork and visualization. After several months, my symptoms stabilized. I returned to college to complete a second bachelor’s degree, got a full-time job, went out with the new friends I made after the old ones gave up on my repeated cancellations. My life became a series of routines, and routines helped me move through spaces outside of my home. I knew what to expect: wake up, go to work, visit the gym, come home, make dinner, go to bed, and do it all over again.
Within the span of six years I made progress coping with my disorder, until months ago when my coworker invited me to attend an active shooter training with her. We work at a university campus supporting faculty in the medical school. It was important, she said, we should know how to respond. That was it. One simple, innocuous request, and a switch flipped inside my brain. The nightmares are back—the kind where I wake up sweating, my heart palpitating with such gusto. In these nightmares, I ride shotgun and unbuckled in cars driven by men that fly off cliffs, waking right before the crash. The more tired I become, the less rational I am. One day I was in the produce aisle of the grocery store, picking my cuticles to red while a stream of water misted broccoli heads. That familiar bloom of tightness in my chest, a slight itch on my neck. The wall of the store trembled ever so slightly and then I knew. A ghost returned.
***
The cabin is so close to the rock wall. We could hear the nag of frozen pellets slap the panes. The tiny kitchen assembled as scratched linoleum floors, faux butcher block countertop, a space heater that reached to my hips. I stood in front of a window dicing an onion to fry with eggs. Outside the cabin, a buck stood in a foot of snow. His build was stocky, his chest broad. He pulled seeds from a pine tree while I switched tasks and fished a pin of an eggshell from the hot skillet. The sound of gloppy, loose eggs made me flinch. He had yet to lose them: the set of antlers crowning his head. He had yet to lose them: the men and boys brandishing guns, their blaze orange coveralls pocketing tins of chewing tobacco. We saw the warnings on our drive up to the cabin, the trucks parked alongside the highway. My husband was surprised when I told him people pull off to the side of public roads to walk the land. He never grew up in a culture that hunts for sport. My father used to do it. I did, too—or at least I tried wanting to hunt. But to carry a weapon was unbearable with such responsibility loaded in its barrel.
A smaller doe entered the frame, her head up. Scanning. How similar we look out in the open, she and I, with our eyes wide and our necks turning. We are hardwired to respond to threats when our nervous systems are triggered. I want both animals to make it out alive. These two together in late November are racing against the clock of hunting season.
***
The ghosts of the Gitchi Gami beckoned for me to stand on the rock wall after making breakfast. A ghost should always be acknowledged. Heard. If I can swaddle myself in my puffer jacket and wool socks, the sharpness of temps dipping down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit won’t sting as much. This experience isn’t the same as leaving my home for the day to go to work. I don’t have to angle my body as I walk through clusters of students with their heads down, eyes glued to phones. Out here, where the leaves that once beckoned tourists are now tamped down under a bed of snow, is where I can feel safe while being outside in the world. I can move my body around winterberry trees, listen to the quiet distillation of the waterfall within walking distance to the cabin. We have only a few hours left of our weekend rental before we return to our home in the metro; why should I spend this time among the rattan furniture and floral-printed pillows? I sought out this place to reconcile with the past.
A dangerous storm rolled into Minnesota on a November weekend in 1905, bringing heavy snowfall and high, hurricane-like winds. The storm took several ships in its path out of service. The SS Madeira, a schooner barge under tow of the steamer SS Edenborn, attempted to travel through Lake Superior to the Apostle Islands. The ferocity of the storm made it impossible for the crew to navigate, and instead, they sailed toward the rocky shoreline cliffs. The captain of the Edenborn made the fateful decision to cut the schooner free, hoping the Madeira would cast its anchors and ride out the storm. Instead, the Madeira drifted until it collided with rock at a site we call Split Rock, only miles from where I now stand with my dog near the cabin rental. The Madeira’s stern hit broadside, and the schooner split in half.
More than 300 discovered ships rest at the bottom of Lake Superior; fifty of those are presumed to be in Minnesota water. It wasn’t so long ago that schooner barges prowled these waters carrying grains, timber, and iron ore. In the first half of the century, Minnesota was a major supplier of iron ore for steel production mined from three ranges in the northern region of the state. Its mines produced more than 75 percent of the iron used by Americans in World War II. Ships, tanks, guns, and bullets. From near the cabin, I see the residual effects. The terracotta-colored mounds of overburden, refineries with their shoots outstretched like begging arms, the port and canal of Duluth and Two Harbor. Entire towns—some active and thriving, and some long abandoned—were built around operating mines.
I’ve never fully stomached looking at photos taken underwater of sunken ships disturbed by aquatic flora and fauna. Perhaps I owe it to watching Jaws when I was a kid. It could have been any of the rising action scenes that did it for me, like when oceanographer Matt Hooper finds the remains of a local fisherman in a submerged boat, or when Sheriff Brody chums the brackish water as the great white shark surfaces, or when a single woman yells for help before being pulled underwater in the opening scene. I learned to keep that terror with me—not of sharks, but of what I inferred about their habitats: the outside, the openness, places where I can’t easily blend into my surroundings and hide or make a quick exit. Of what might happen to me in those spaces, might pull me down and hold me under.
The news informs me of each new mass shooting and of gun violence that kills more than 300 people daily in America. Each fall, as our department at work prepares for the upcoming promotion and tenure season, someone will make a grim reference to a national shooting where faculty, students, and staff were targeted—our macabre clock. At the active shooter training, I learned what furniture I could use to barricade myself in my office or how to knot a tie or scarf around a door handle to hold it secure. I also learned most active shootings in America last between ten and fifteen minutes and five times as many people are shot during a mass shooting when a semiautomatic firearm with a high-capacity magazine is used. The laws of physics can help predict the trajectory of a single traveling bullet, but how do we calculate the paths of hundreds of bullets discharged in a matter of minutes? Survival depends on how one acts just as much as pure luck; being in the wrong place at the wrong time could mean life or death.
The diagnosis of my agoraphobia was a minor shock. Though I had been assessed as a teenager with having a panic disorder, the only representations I knew of agoraphobia were sensationalized characters in Copycat or Twin Peaks. My disorder wasn’t on par with these characterizations of zigzagging hallways and debilitating loneliness. Throughout my teens and early twenties, my fear of panicking in a public space lent to long stretches of reclusiveness, but I wasn’t crawling on all fours in respiratory distress while trying to cross a threshold as these Hollywood versions depicted. So, after six consecutive years managing my anxiety disorder post diagnosis, I worry what’s in store for me now that I am on the verge of relapsing. Once again, it takes me longer each day to put on my shoes, exit my front door, get on the bus, and walk across the campus where I work. I needed this North Shore cabin trip to give myself space to walk openly among flocks of brown finches huddled on birch trees, over the tufts of field grass poking through snow. These fields would be my refuge, where I could wander about with no risk of breaking down in public, without worrying I might cry on the bus or cower in the stairway of my office building. The cabin is miles from the nearest town. Except for my husband, I haven’t seen another human in days. This wintry setting is a wonderland of exposure and privacy, where I am shielded from my fears in the human world, but here I am, out there, unhidden.
***
On this last walk in the fields, my dog pulls on her leash and whines—my signal that it’s time to step away from the edge of the rock wall, walk the hundred odd feet back to the cabin and pack up the car. This sweet companion of mine wears clumps of snow on her large Shepherd ears, on the velvet of her snout. Her whiskers sag. She’s been digging her head under the snowbacks. We’re not alone out here.
The shriek of a crow pierces the air, alighting it with energy. We stop walking and watch as falling snow collects on tree branches, the ground, my dog’s ears, and my arms. Moments like this in the quiet wilderness have been a respite I will hold onto. I know I will carry my relapse back home with me, to my job, out with my friends, to my life again. I will have to schedule an appointment with my doctor and consider changing the dosages of my medications or adding a new one to the mix, see my therapist weekly again, and restart a strict regimen of self-care practices. One, two, three, four. But though my ghosts have returned, they don’t have to bring me back to that haunted place from my past.
I let my dog root around the snow. With some animals, herding species in particular, it’s easier to let them act as their instincts dictate. Plunge and smell. My companion helps me to feel safe. She stops at fresh hoof prints. White-tailed deer, the smallest members of the North American deer family, cross paths all over Minnesota where they’re native to landscapes with dense woodlands that help protect them from predators like moose, wolves, and humans. On our drive up to the cabin days earlier, my husband and I had stopped at two state parks, including Split Rock where we walked out to the lighthouse that became operational five years after the great storm of 1905. Much of the Madeira’s hull remains nearly in one piece underwater. On a clear day, you can see it if you’re close to the lighthouse looking down. The fog impaired our efforts, but we did see all the signs posted along trail paths warning visitors of areas closed off for hunting.
Proponents of hunting say it’s a necessary measure to keep deer populations under control, that survival of the species depends on humans carrying weapons. One of my oldest nephews has started to hunt, learning first with a bow before being gifted his first gun. It’s a rite of passage for many kids, mostly boys in rural areas like the one I grew up in, to own a gun. I remember feeling proud when my father first bestowed me a small pump-action BB gun after I passed my book and field safety tests. I was the only girl in my class of dozens to participate. I used to enjoy walking the fields with my father and our dogs. I liked witnessing the changing of seasons, smelling the ripeness of earth and wood and grains. But hunting with him also left me in a perilous state, anxious of the impending moment when I would be forced to decide: Am I really a hunter? I recall one trip when I nearly stepped on a pheasant hidden among rows of cut corn stalks. We both startled the other, predator and prey. She took flight, and I hoisted my gun to my shoulder, switched off the safety, and squinted one eye. When it came time to do it, I couldn’t pull the trigger.
The deer tracks that my dog finds are pristine cutouts, two sets of two leading back to the woods. This is where the deer belong. It’s okay for me to go home now. My husband packs the car with our suitcases and leftover food, which stresses out our dog who bumps into our legs, panting heavily, as if we could possibly leave her behind. Nothing of ours will be left here: not her, not our belongings, and certainly not the anxiety that lives within me. Years ago, I gave up on thinking that I could outrun agoraphobia. I was naive to hope that it could belong anywhere other than within me. Some days I still wonder what it would be like to not feel a gnawing pit of worry, but living with the disorder also means I have a greater vision of the world. Even when they’re irrational, my fears are a sense of heightened intuition. Knowledge. America is gun culture. Anyone can holster my life in steel. My chest may tighten each time I make it to my office on campus, or anytime I step into a grocery store, but I live for that same, aching grip that extends from rib cage to spine when I see a pink-orange sun setting over a body of water, witness deer chuffing in the woods, or hear the cackle of a tree-perched crow. What ghosts would I miss if I couldn’t gather the courage to walk in the wild open, wherever that may be? Some haunts should be left behind. I’ll take one last look in the passenger mirror and hope I see them, the ghosts out there.
About the author
Robyn Earhart’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the The Under Review and Barren Magazine. She lives in Saint Paul, MN, with her husband and pets.
