Cyntillating Cycles: Bonding and Tattoos

July 6, 2008

Dear Diary,

I have to tell you about our tattoos....but first....

When I was getting ready this past year to take this journey and planning a route, I knew that part of the pilgrimage, if you will, had to be about my Dad and the place where I grew up.

I grew up in a small little area about fifteen miles north of Duluth known as French River. It had a Duluth mailing address but was very rural and I lived on the Ryan Road about two blocks from the lake shore.

The house I grew up in had originally been built as a train station! So, Diary, take a guess at how close it was to the railroad tracks!!!!!! Extremely close...."Holy crap the train is coming through the living room!".... CLOSE.

I can remember that as a child I was allowed to roam the seeming wilderness with a couple of friends. We would occupy our time with activities such as finding dead birds and holding services for them and then burying them in the "bird cemetery" we developed in the back forty of the old sea captains yard. (We chose his yard because it was very beautiful but mostly because it pissed him off so much and he couldn't come out and get us because he was so old.)

We would skip rocks for hours at the lake or walk the half mile to the candy store for penny candies. Sometimes we would steal apples from the MacCleans yard only to line them up on the road and patiently wait for a car to drive over them, squealing with delight that we had been so mischievous.

One year we decided jumping from garage roof tops would be fun. The Whitings had a wood pile that rose to their flat topped garage. Scaling that and leaping into leaf piles was great until a visiting cousin broke her toe.

The sea captain really hated it when we climbed onto his garage roof. His garage was built into the side of a hill which made the top easily accessible. Did we ever have a wonderful time climbing onto that steeply peaked roof and making our way to the other, more dangerous, end where the captain could see us from his kitchen window. The first time I climbed it it was in the fall and I was so terrified that he would come out and yell at us that when he finally did I leapt off of the high side of the roof and impaled myself on a very brittle, but thankfully large, Hydrangea bush. I am lucky I didn't put both my eyes out on that one...but I digress.

Most days my little friends and I would leave home unsupervised and make our way through the woods to the French River about two blocks north. We would climb the slippery brown rocks...slide down the small falls....swim in the various rock pools until dark.

We would have bear in our yard on occasion and once in a while a moose would venture into the meadow across the road. Deer were a permanent fixture (and food source..YUK!)...and I know my brother tells an hysterically funny story about trying to shoot a bobcat from his bedroom window.

I have many important memories about my Dad from when we lived there. I hunted for night crawlers with my Dad...learned to fish from my Dad....watched him gut, not only fish, but deer, turkeys, chickens, .....

My Dad used to make us moccasins from the tanned deer hide using an old treadle Singer sewing machine and he once made himself an entire outfit on that machine from deer hide. He made a fringed hunting jacket, pants, knee high fringed boots and I believe a hat with a deer tail on it.

He could make just about anything. In fact one year he announced he was going to build a boat in the backyard. And not just any kind of boat but a boat from a Scandinavian pattern that required something called ferro-cement. I think it took him twelve years but he made and launched a 38 foot motor-sailor built out of ferro cement.....and he did it all by himself.

So...where is all this leading to you may ask...it is leading to why I needed to take my motorcycle back to Duluth. I needed to ride that Harley in the very places where my best and strongest memories of my Dad are. I am not certain why, even now that I have done it. But I just needed to. I needed to experience that space that I had shared with him while feeling strong and proud on my bike.

You know, no matter how old we get...we still like to have the approval of the person in our lives who taught us to want to do good work, to want to work hard, to want to enjoy the earth and appreciate all its wonders...the person who let us swing from their forearm by our knees when we were tiny...who gave us whisker rubs when he came home from a hunting trip...who taught us to carry what we pack....who pulled out our baby teeth just as they were ready to fall out.

We want to reconnect with the moments we had with that person. The ones that went by so quickly that we didn't know how awesome they really were...like when he got lost at three in the morning trying to find me in the middle of no-where when my friends were too drunk to drive me home...or when he took me to the father daughter dance...or trusted me to mow the lawn...or took us to the dump to find any number of discarded treasures (much to my mother's dismay).

....perhaps to find a moment to stop and be thankful for the gift of having had the privilege of being with him at the end of his life; making his last meal for him... helping him walk to his bed for the last time... holding his head in my arms while he accepted his last communion in his bedroom....remembering how he didn't want me to let him go so I stood next to his bed and cradled his head till he fell into his last sleep....hoping that he wasn't scared or anxious as he had been earlier in the week...hoping I could bring him that feeling of being safe like he had done for me throughout my life. Remembering, remembering, remembering and being ever so grateful for all of it...the good and the bad...his goodness and his demons.

So, Diary, before the bonding experience of the tattoos, Scarlett, Twitter and Bev blessed me with accepting an invitation to ride out to where I had grown up on the North Shore. We traveled along the two lane "old highway" 61 north that hugs the rocky and gorgeous shore line of Lake Superior all the way to French River.

The house was gone and an empty, over grown lot remains. But it was still "home". We walked the tracks to the bridge over the river. I reminisced a bit, soaked in the energy from the river, found and ate a few wild strawberries and felt completely in awe of how gracious and supportive these three women had just been. They will never know just how great a gift they gave to me when they stood silently beside me on that railroad trestle and just spent the moment with me. A moment connecting my past to my present. A true and unforgettable bonding moment! Diary, it just doesn't get much better than that!

And then??? Then we rode the four lane "new highway" 61 ( which is now 40 years new ) back into town and got tattoos!!!