Need a day off.
Really need to take a weekend and go up on the north shore. Love it there. Wish I could live there. Maybe someday I will.
Superior in November is great and frightening, splendid and massive, stirs your spirit, calls you out from the shore, and makes you very glad to have firm ground beneath your feet. She's beautiful, and she claims ships, and she never gives up her dead.
That's one of the interesting quirks about her. Ships are lost on the other Great Lakes, too, but no one's ever found a body washed up on the shore of Superior. Huron, Michigan, Erie, yeah. Not Superior. She's the greatest, and the deepest, and mysterious just because of her sheer SIZE. There's so much depth there - not the deepest in the States, but the furthest below sea level. Stays so cold. I didn't understand why God made ice float until I met Superior - if it sank, it'd NEVER have a chance to melt.
K's got a couple videos of himself and his brothers on the shore, when fifteen-foot waves are coming in. She's COLD. And spirited. Laughing, powerful, as alive as something without body heat could be. Bigger than anything you've got in you, and you're afraid of her, but drawn to her at the same time.
The woods up there are wonderful, too. Admittedly, also cold. There's this zone you cross over a little ways north of the Cities, where the landscape changes from cornfields to woods. It's not like crossing a line and suddenly feeling it, but surprise surprise, everything up by the lake is 10 degrees colder than down here (yes, I realize, there are 14,000 other lakes in this state). Cold, but so much range to explore. Big hills to climb, ridiculously steep valleys, rivers rushing and leaping joyously, and trees. Trees and trees and trees. Everywhere.
I have this thing about trees.
So, I need to take a weekend off in November, and go meet up with more nature than I can handle.
