Gregory Ormson

Judges' general comments can be found at the bottom of this entry.

DRAGONFLY, UP

Word Count: 3561

I was underwater and freezing. For a moment in the dead of January, I had joined the world of fish. My brain was fired

with visions of orange, my imagination stretched by ice and heat, tails and fins, scales and glossy eyes.

During those underwater seconds, I did not miss the world, but my lungs screamed for oxygen; I rose, taking shallow breaths, standing in cold, dark, steely water. My extremities paralyzed by cold, my face dripping ice chunks, my naked body was shielded by the night and a few old boards stuck in snow.

Shaking, I tied laces on my tennis shoes and sprinted 60 feet to a toasty dressing room next to sauna. Finally seated, in ecstasy and pain, I laughed to myself at the absurd ritual, and read a sign in my friend’s dressing room: “The Great Road Race: Toivo Races the Stroh’s Beer Truck from Negaunee to Ishpeming.” It’s a sign that residents of rural Upper Michigan, would understand.

My race back to my place of survival, I realized, was no less dramatic and possibly more traumatic than broken beer bottles on the highway, although beer certainly has its place in the culture of Upper Michigan -- what’s called the U.P. -- and for some U.P. residents, spilled beer would be a trauma.

I was on winter break from teaching to visit my friend Ken, and stay at his resort in Big Bay, Michigan. Ken and Martha call their place, the Little Tree Cabins. Having lived in the U.P. for twelve-years I knew what to expect of winter, but I had been away for a while. My will to survive Upper Michigan’s brutal winter, and its economic pinch turned to bite, had faded.

Sitting in the warming room, I had stopped shivering. Ken observed correctly of my five-years away, “Greg, living in the city has made you soft.” He was right; I was a little embarrassed. The U.P. was, and still is rugged land; it takes tough-minded, thick-skinned people to live there, folks able to endure bitter cold and mountains of snow from October to May.

Near the end of the nineteenth Century, when Finnish immigrants floated across the Atlantic to establish a new life, many of them moved to the U.P. While they brought little, their most important resource and a mark of pride was their sisu, or guts; and that they packed in abundance.

It took sisu and courage to work the U.P. iron mines, and carve out a living from the dense hardwood forests. The immigrants also brought their legacy of sauna, and their 1000-year old family-bonding mantra: sauna on kuma! That phrase, sauna is hot, along with a little peer pressure, had brought me to my frozen underwater moment.

From a ragged wick: four wavy walls: a ceiling of rough logs/ To catch the vapours and make the cloud of wingless insects/ Brood upon the ledge erected for the bather:/ A stove: heaped up with stones, heated below; four washing/ Tubs and a copper scoop to slake the burning ledge and goad/ The stones to throw the stings of steam their rising temper bred:/ This was Paavo’s Purgatorio.

-James Bramwell, Sauna

In January, on Lake Independence in Big Bay, crude ice-fishing shanties dot the snow-covered lake. Many of them are alike, made with cast off wood and steel. Most draw little attention. But near Ken’s house, 20 yards from shore, four wooden panels, each about five-feet

high, had created a square barrier with a small opening facing his house. Within that barrier was an approximately four-by-four-foot opening in the ice.

Lacking a roof and smokestack, like the kind on most ice fishing shanties, curious winter tourists’ from Illinois couldn’t resist a look at the misplaced wood, rigged upright by sloping boards lodged in ice. “They’re drawn in,” Ken said, like passing motorists at an accident, until they realize the wood is just a border to keep their snowmobiles from going down.

Those winter visitors from the city, some staying at the Little Tree Cabins, didn’t know that behind the barrier was a place of submersion and birth, a place of pain and exhilaration, a place to dip after sauna.

Curiosity satisfied, inner clocks still tuned to the rhythm of the cities they had escaped, tourists’ from down south cranked the throttles on their Artic Cat snowmobiles, and sped off like fast moving beer men at ball games. Their high-powered machines left behind clouds of sky-blue smoke.

Not far from that spot, a former neighbor of mine hit the shore at 2:00 a.m. one Sunday, traveling nearly 100 miles per hour on his sled across the lake. His stiff, lifeless body was discovered near shore later that Sabbath, bent around the frozen branches of a slumbering hardwood.

I was warming up, and thought back to an event several months earlier. Ken invited me to an isolated spot near the sandy shore of Lake Independence where I watched him dispose of fish remains after his resort guests had cleaned and filleted their walleye, perch and whitefish. They had completed their smelly duty by throwing severed heads, fins, and entrails into a large blue barrel.

That warm July day, choosing a sandy spot near the shore, Ken drove his auger eight feet down, breathing hard and whispering to me, “I don’t want the skunks to dig it up and spread it all around the campground.” He dug deep.

From that barrel, Ken poured a swirling mound of eyes, bone, and skin into the hole; a strange collection of slime and organs, a pungent brew of death and life in fish remains and the parasites they hosted.

Stirring the mix with a long wooden pole, Ken added sand and water, and spun a vital swirl of dead fish, flies, and maggots. He said, “What if creation started right here, in this hole in the ground?” We took turns that day, stirring and talking out loud of the metaphor before us: are we little more than foam stirred by another master, our eyes glazed, our bodies food for parasites; are we fish out of water, well-camouflaged swimmers having gradually shed scales and tails?

I threw down the last chunk of a White Owl cigar, added sand, stirred a bit with the long pole, and then retreated to a lawn chair on his deck.

Ken completed the job by rolling a heavy driveway tar flattener back and forth over the hole. “The skunks won’t get those fish,” I thought to myself; I also thought that his fish-burying ritual was the most complete work I’d ever seen in my life, the one thing that couldn’t be improved. Tetelestai, I whispered, thinking of the Gospel of John’s record of Jesus’ last words, “It has been finished.”

Ken sat, and I commented on the number of dragonflies flying wildly among us, moving between his house and the lakeshore. An image of pitchers ducking away from fast, unpredictable line drives shooting off the bats of baseball sluggers came to mind. Attuned to the rhythms of nature and life at the Little Tree Cabins, Ken then spoke, and weaved for me the incredible story of the dragonfly from its genesis to its eventual demise.

“Dragonflies,” he said, “live through the winter at the bottom of Lake Independence, in well-insulated larvae that survive the cold.” I didn’t know it then, but in that January plunge, my stinging toes were stirring those slumbering larvae, the same ones that in seven months, or two years in the future, would fly in line drive fashion at my head, only deterred at the last moment by a disgusting, smelly cloud from my cigar.

Later, I learned that the male is actually the dragonfly of the scientific sub-order Anisoptera, while the female is called a damselfly, of the sub-order Zygoptera. Both male and female are of the Odonata order. Their sexual union is acrobatic:

When a damselfly enters territory of the dragonfly he pursues her and grasps her behind the neck with special clasping organs on the end of his tail. The female then contacts the male's receptacle with the end of her abdomen to receive the sperm. The pair may remain in this looped position for some time and will fly when hooked together in this way.

- Encarta 2004

When spring arrives, dragon and damselfly larvae crawl up out of the lake to nearby trees, and to Ken and Martha’s house. He tells me that the grass is thick with them, “You can hear them crawling up here, and if you look down, it appears as if the whole yard is moving.” On his porch, on the side of his house, or digging into a nearby tree, they find a place to anchor themselves and wait for their silent metamorphosis.

Odonatas’ defy great odds to complete their life cycle, overcoming the dangerous ascent from water, to land, and eventually turning into circus air dancers. In July, they were mating while soaring upside down and backward. “How about that,” Ken said, “An upside down and backwards in-flight 69.” Oh to be a dragonfly.

I was pumping Ken for more information, “they actually hatch out from the back,” he said, and then told me of witnessing it. “Once, I saw an insect crawl across the back of a dragonfly as it was just unfolding from the cocoon, and the place where the bug crawled over it, what came out was a gold colored liquid.” Sipping a cold drink in blue aluminum casing I said, “How fragile.” “How marvelous,” he replied.

Two years previous, in the summer of 2002, I had decided to do a vision quest. I wanted to go into the desert to participate in the indigenous American tradition of seeking a vision through fasting and isolation. Lame Deer said, “Your old prophets went into the desert crying for a dream and the desert gave it to them.” I wanted that; I needed that.

My twin pillars of identity and security, often provided by marriage and a career, had crumbled. In the course of two years, I quit working in a professional field which had been mine for 14-years, my marriage of 20-years ended, and I had moved away from a log home near the southern shore of Lake Superior, a land and place I loved and had lived-in for 12-years.

My reasons for a vision quest were more than academic; finding a new vision meant the difference between crawling or flying. I was either going to limp into the second half of my life, or I was going to march into it, but either way it was up to me.

After exploring where to do a vision quest, I settled on Antelope Ranch in Southern Wyoming. I made a telephone call, answered some pointed questions, then was invited to Wyoming by John, owner of the ranch and my vision quest guide. John had been trained by Lakota elders to lead vision quests. I remember his fecund comment before we began, “You will still be learning what happened out there for years after your return.” He was right.

When John was preparing me for my upcoming quest, he said “Greg, before you come out here, start noticing everything around you. Pay attention, and take notes. Don’t eat meat, and try not to kill anything, even bugs.” At the time, I was on a three-week camping trip in the U.P. I was well positioned to kill thousands of bugs every day. I asked myself if I heard him right. Did he say, “Don’t kill anything, even bugs?”

When it was time to travel from Marquette, Michigan to Savery, Wyoming for my quest, I hit the road at 6:00 a.m. on my Harley Davidson Road King, excited to be on a journey that promised beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Motorcyclists’ enjoy wind in the face. I was ready for the wind; I was paying attention.

The last 20-miles to Antelope Ranch were a motorcyclists’ nightmare, a ruddy gravel road with holes and large boulders. I moved steadily, light grip on handlebars and throttle, rumbling toward my destination. I noticed bleached skeletons of deer and cattle just off the road. I wondered if that’s what the desert held for me.

When I finally arrived at Antelope Ranch, I turned off my Harley. John met me and smiled, “Well, this is the first time we’ve ever had anyone come up here on a motorcycle,” he said. I noticed greenery and birds, a dog, a baby crawling, and two women in the yard. I was in the right place. The bones were alive.

Over two days, John thoroughly prepared me for my quest. We arranged communication signals, decided where the water would be, and he tutored me on what would be wise or unwise to do in the desert. “Don’t go very far, you’ll be weak. Don’t worry about rattlesnakes,” he said, “they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.” I doubted it, but quietly accepted his advice.

He taught me how to prepare my purpose circle for my last night in the desert. Such a circle is the culmination of a vision quest, a setting up of sacred space to receive your most important insights. In my purpose circle, I took only a baseball that I had inscribed with names of friends and family.

During the first three days, I spent hours with that baseball; tossing it up, catching it with a bare hand, and then saying prayers for the person whose name came closest to my index finger: I’d toss the ball, Briana; I’d toss it again, Desmond; I’d toss it a third time, Ashley: my children.

That night, I burned sage. A pungent aroma filled my nostrils. I observed ants and sky, heard the hawk and horse, stood, stretched, sat, slouched. The boulders were hard. My hair was filthy, stiff and brittle from desert sand, bleached by my sweat in the Wyoming record-heat summer. I wore a stained and ragged red T-shirt, with a small logo of a mother pig and five piglets. My face was burned, my body dark and chapped from a 1000-mile motorcycle ride and three days in the desert. I was a mess – yet never better - fragile in body, strong in spirit.

I learned the truth of Gretel Ehrlich’s terse observation, quoted in The Solace of Open Spaces, “In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are only consequences.”

While saying prayers that night for my children, a dragonfly landed on the baseball sitting directly in front of me. It left. I paid attention. A dragonfly came a second time and landed on the ball. I noticed. Sitting still, smoke of sage rising and coursing over me, the dragonfly came a third time and sat on my prayer ball. I saw, and felt vibrations within my spine.

Back in Michigan, enjoying a cool breeze from nearby Lake Superior, Ken didn’t know the why of my intense interest in the dragonfly, but he listened to my questions, and continued answering. “Have they ever been a nuisance,” I asked. “They were here first,” was his gracious and wise reply. Indeed they were, estimated to have lived as early as the Carboniferous period, 270 million years ago.

Zygopteras’ and Anisopteras’ were in the desert long before I was too, as were the Cheyenne, along with wild horses and coyotes that sang through the night. In the U.P., the Finns were there before my family, the French explorers before them, the Ojibwa before them, dragon and damsel larvae deep underwater in frozen January before them all.

By the time my slow burning ceremonial sage died out that third night in the desert, I was sleeping. After my quest, I cleaned up, breaking my fast slowly; I rested a full day, and then sat on a soft chair one evening at Antelope Ranch with John to coax out and test the lessons the desert had given.

I read from my journal, where sweating under a gnarled cedar tree I had written: “In the desert you hear the sound of bells, and there are no bells. You hear the sound of a train, but there are no tracks. The call to prayer is not a ram’s horn, church bell, or chant; but screech of hawk and stillness of creation, a bowled amphitheatre. Your teachers are lizard, spider, dragonfly and sun.”

When I told John of the dragonfly, he smiled and said that perhaps it was there to remind me of the fragile nature of relationships, children, and life in the desert. I knew about fragile relationships, I knew about fragile children – the dragonfly was telling me – and I was learning about the fragile nature of that desert; mirroring my heart.

Having served as clergy in a mainline Protestant denomination for a dozen years, it is easy for me to talk about humanity in its wintry discontent. The professional lexicon at my disposal is thoroughly theological; I could wax baptismal on my cold place of submersion, and I know the language to describe sin and grace. My religious tribe called baptism, “the happy exchange.”

I could celebrate with lyric and rhyme, or sing in minor chord dirge the import of going underwater: dying to self in a font, or in a cold lake. Once, when disgusted by religious ignorance yoked to excessive drinking, I quipped to the badgering questions of a psychic attacker wanting to know if I read the Bible, “No, I don’t read it. I memorized it.”

Under the ice with frozen larvae, and dumb eyed fish, it’s easy to decide for rising up, even though I was no longer inclined to acknowledge my own depravity and need for divine guidance. My church tribe loved to speak of baptism, and talked of the need to drown underwater in the cheery language of “evangelical despair,” a remnant of theological fights from 16^th Century Europe.

Geographic and economic fights provoked the long journey of early Finns in the U.P. They were either Lutherans or communists; once while discussing this cultural dichotomy, an elderly Finnish-American clergyman told me that the splintered Finnish community shared very little in common, except their homeland, recitations from the Kalevala on a warm sauna bench, and their healing mantra, sauna on kuma.

Those immigrant miners painted grim descriptions of exhausting, unending, despairing work in the iron mines; while the Lutherans spoke of baptism and the wages of sin, the Communists spoke of wages, and the sin of alienated labor. I imagined their ethnic holiday celebrations were hosts to a profound irony: political theory grown in Scandinavian and Russian town halls, clashing with the adopted American evangelism of free market economic practice. The Finns needed the market; the market needed their bodies. I thought of Voltaire who said, “The world is admirably arranged,” and in theological parody added, “God loves to forgive, I love to sin.”

Brutal economics were all just debate, until a cave-in buried miners in their boots in the famous Barnes-Hecker mine disaster in Ishpeming. When the men descended through a four-by- four-foot surface opening into the 1060-foot shaft that November 3^rd, 1926, they had little reason to believe they’d be part of the worst mining disaster in Michigan history.

Fifty men died that day, including 18-year old Finn and father, sole supporter of his family, Harvey Vepsola. Communist Party leaders and Finnish Lutheran Clergy were not down there:

Ishpeming was shocked as never before, Wednesday afternoon, when word reached the city that a cave-in at the Barnes-Hecker mine of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron company, five miles to the west of here, had cost the lives of fifty miners and the county mine inspector, William E. Hill, who was underground making an examination at the time of the disaster. Only one man employed on the shift, Wilfred Wills, of the Barnes-Hecker location, escaped alive.

- Ishpeming Iron Ore, November 6, 1926

Wills climbed 800 feet in ten minutes, barely ahead of the ice-cold water gurgling at his heels. Iron Ore reported that following his ascent; Wills emerged from the depths and, “collapsed on the cold hard ground.”

From a personal and theological storehouse, I could continue on the brokenness of marital relationship, and talk in severe case studies of life in the “cold, hard, pew,” to use writer Richard Rodriguez’ words; but I’m part of the dragonfly clan now, gravely aware and deeply appreciative of the tensile nature of swimming, crawling, and flying.

In a way, we are all part Odonata. We make our way here “from afar” said Wordsworth, overcoming great odds, yet “trailing clouds of glory,” swimming in the embryonic ocean of ecstasy.

Focusing on life tasks, we quickly forget all that, using our early years to learn about crawling on carpets and linoleum, falling down 300 times before we begin to walk, and then continuing with the lifelong struggle of finding our wings.

In the later stages – sans teeth and hair perhaps – but fed by imagination, we might sit on a porch with a good friend, and conjure the electrifying image of a dragon and damselfly in mid-air passion.

“How fragile,” I said. “How marvelous,” Ken replied. And that exchange, it seems, truly is a happy one.

Judges' general comments:

Our judges really liked the stories within stories of this piece. We picked this piece as our third place winner mainly due to its promise. It has the feel of a piece that wants to tell you something important about the depth of the human soul…however the judges felt much of the message is lost in the shuffle of several of the stories which interrupt the flow of the primary information. Our biggest suggestion to Gregory was that he take a close look at the quotes, descriptions, and scenery to see what can be cut out (without changing the primary focus of the piece) and what needs to be left in to fulfill that role—specifics were given in Gregory’s private critique.

Additionally, we also recommended careful editing in transitions, comma splices, verb tense shifts and paragraph breaks.

Overall…clearly an excellent piece waiting to bloom.