White Iron Lake relaxes between mysterious moments.
Hearing a massive wolf chorus on the half-baked holiday immediately following my birthday didn’t faze me in the least. Like most Devil’s Night babies, I love deep, raw sounds, and White Iron Lake, where I spent the weekend, offers plenty–not only of wolves, but their sled dog cousins, along with owls, loons, ravens, woodpeckers (some the size of standard poodles, I swear), killer electrical storms, and winds that often sound as if they’re coming from distant galaxies and getting more mysterious by the mile.
Just a stone’s throw from Ely (easily Minnesota’s most enchanting small town) and White Iron Lake, the International Wolf Center–one of many places unlikely to welcome America’s best-known nutjob loser aerial hunting advocate anytime this century.
Part of a vast network of lakes and rivers crowned by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, White Iron remains just wild enough (and the real estate surrounding it expensive enough) to have staved off overcrowding…so far. Not that it’s environmentally pristine: even a few powerboats or vacation home fireworks shows equal “too many” when they’re driving critters away.
Wolf with ravens: upon seeing a car hit with the latter’s poop, you can’t help but think, “flying horses.”
Still, the place’s essence makes its presence felt even during summer peak. Sunsets take hours. Twilight lingers forever. On clear nights, the moon and thousands of visible stars set black water a-twinkle with silver-white fire. Even summer afternoons can be spectacular: on a cold day in early June, I got to see a triple rainbow arch over the lake anf give birth to a bunch of babies.
Even double rainbows rock.
But dawn is best, even longer than dusk, and often climaxing magnificently when the sun finally blazes over the treetops like the hydrogen bomb it is. . As my first night there (August 16, 2007) turned into my first morning, I stood, sat and laid for hours, watching mist twist and turn over the water, forming a seemingly endless cavalcade of phantasmagorical shapes. The display was so theatrical, I would have interpreted it as a welcome from the local deities even if my first wolf chorus hadn’t come smack in the middle of it. As what sounded like a sizable pack ran, naturally panning left-right along the opposite shore, I couldn’t help but notice that what we call “howling” sounds suspiciously like singing when we squint our ears enough to actually open them.
I’ve heard at least half a dozen choruses since, including Halloween’s. While listening to wolves on the other side of the lake convene, then carry their song off on some mission, I realized that the three most memorable sonic events I’ve experienced so far this millennium have had nothing to do with commerce, or even “performance” in the mundane sense.
Two–an incredibly complex, utterly raging frog chorus I caught in the wetlands west of Minneapolis in May and a multiple-pack, full, 360-degree surround, relayed wolf chorus at White Iron in January –didn’t even involve humans. The third happened at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000.
Having played in bands and worked in nightclubs far too long to have the slightest interest in New Year’s Eve, I found myself happily at home and alone, working on a review of Sonic Youth’s Goodbye 20th Century for City Pages. Around 11:55, I decided to step outside, hoping to catch a little pandemonium if the Y2K bug lived up to its hype. (Jaded? I could teach a class…)
Like wolves, carilions sound better in packs.
What I got instead was every carilion in town simultaneously going off. Well…maybe not every one, but downtown Minneapolis’s relatively low elevation makes it a natural amphitheater, and from my building’s parking lot, it sounded at least like dozens. As anybody who knows beans about math will tell you, nothing is truly random. Plus, carilions tend to all employ the same limited pitch pool. Hence, what I heard was this grand tintinnabulation, with harmonics bouncing off each other like electrons in a light bulb and the resulting ghost tones clustering into ancillary melodies, the likes of which I might never hear again.
Wolves, that’s another matter, and I’ll cherish the show more each time. Oscar Wilde once famously observed that we don’t appreciate sunsets bacause we don’t have to pay for them. A few years later, G.K. Chesterton remarked that we do pay for them…by not being Oscar Wilde. Profligate though I am, I gotta go with Chesterton on this one, long as it’s understood that “not being Oscar Wilde” simply means not getting so caught up in any kind of artifice that we fail to seize the opportunities our immediate environments offers–sonic as well as visual. All too often, they’re better than the stuff we’re supposed to pay for. Just ask America’s greatest connoisseur of electric fan sounds:: Mr. Colin McCardell.
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IPR faculty veteran Colin Mcardell folds everyday life into his art and whips the mixture to a heady froth. For a session in one of downtown Minneapolis’s most mysterious warehouse spaces featuring a 400-Watt electric fan, click here and scroll down.
