An Anchor in Time

Further thoughts on the pursuit of perfection and its fleeting nature.

Last week, I wrote about my search in the Brooks Range of Alaska for a valley called “The Place of Perfect Beauty.”

This week, I offer you a tale of finding, or perhaps not finding, the perfect place in the Apostle Islands. You decide. Either way, it all starts with a sound:

Shhhhhk.

There is a sound that the bow of the Little Dipper makes when it sinks into perfect beach sand - no rocks, no sticks or mud, no hidden boulders, just pure, sweet sand. The engine is up and off. One last wave nudges the stern with the gentlest of touches and with the last bit of momentum the bow slips perfectly into the sand with a sound like a whisper: Shhhhk.

That sound is the exclamation point of my landing at Stockton Island’s Julian Bay on what may be the perfect morning - a gift-like dawn wrapped in grey-white ribbons of fog and glittering rays of sunlight. The Little Dipper is the only boat in the bay. No footprints in the sand. No bugs. Calm water. Comfortable temperatures. The leaves just at their peak. “Perfection,” I think to myself as I sink the anchor deep into the sugary beach sand and walk towards the bog behind the dunes with my camera.

But an age-old question follows me: is perfection even possible?

If it is, I think just as the sun rises dripping with color out over the big lake, what better place to search for it than a morning like this one at the bog on Stockton Island.

From the French meaning “almost an island,” Presque Isle was, in fact, two separate islands not so long ago geologically speaking. The sweet sands I am walking on began to gather here some 6,000 years ago as the prevailing winds and currents, as well as receding lake levels, slowly went to work building a kind of land bridge between the main body of Stockton Island and a smaller island just to its west. A comet’s tail of sand dunes, bog, and pine savannah known as a “tombolo” was formed, creating a shifting, dynamic ecosystem and one of the most perfectly beautiful sandscapes in all of the Apostle Islands.

(photograph by William Cronon used with permission)

The Presque Isle tombolo, one of the best examples of such a formation in the state of Wisconsin, is a place now of pitcher plants, rare orchids, sundew, and bog pine. It is jeweled with the blue beads of a lagoon, starred with constellations of blueberries, forked with tracks of geese on the mudflats, and bear tracks in the sand. Mornings like this are announced with the ancient trumpeting of sandhill cranes and loon calls wavering somewhere deep in the wild heart of the bog. Between such calls, there come a silence deeper than the mosses, and as ephemeral as the long, gray-white strands of fog winding in and out among the branches of the pines along far shore.

I’ve long dreamed of such mornings in these islands - the sun warm on my neck, my feet in the sand, surrounded by beauty so deep it catches in my throat. It is, this morning, nothing short of perfection, a work of art, a still life with a bog pine.

Perfection has long been a favorite subject of artists - the allure of it, the price paid in pursuit of it, even the debate over its existence.

Poet Mary Oliver sees a field of lilies that are “so perfect” that she can “hardly believe it” in her poem “The Pond.” And then looks closer. One is “clearly lopsided” and another “wears an orange blight … full of its own unstoppable decay” pausing her in her reverie and causing the poet to ask rhetorically, “But what in this world is perfect?”

The answer, she knows, is nothing. Nothing in the world is perfect, even the scene in front of me. Everything changes, wilts, grows older. That is a truth known not only to poets. Still Life painters have long known it too. At first glance, Still Life may seem like an artistic attempt to cast the world in amber, to stop time and preserve the moment of perfection, in reality the genre is most often thought of as a body of work mocking the idea that time can be stopped at all. Look closely and you will often see the poet’s “blight” upon the fruit, a slight wilt to the flowers. There are often sputtering candles or feathers and bones in Still Life paintings, “memento mori” or reminders that everything dies and that perfection, if it exists at all, can never last.

(Anatoly Che)

National parks are not Still Life paintings either. For all the talk of “future generations” in the legislation and political speeches that surround our protected lands, time does not stand still in a national park. And, that is as it should be.

Although many are designated because of their natural features - arches, mountain summits, waterfalls, canyons, bogs (the products of nature) — the more important value of national parks is to provide places where the process can continue uninterrupted by the hands of humans. We don’t really “preserve” anything by creating a national park or lakeshore, not in the same way we preserve an artifact by floating it in a jar of formaldehyde on a museum shelf. We only preserve the conditions for processes of nature to continue. That is why it is so important to look beyond the scenic turnouts and postcard perfection when drawing the boundaries of a park. We must preserve ecosystems. We must preserve the artist, not just the art.

Perhaps that is the whole point to perfection, not its permanence but its fleetingness. “Nothing gold can stay,” another poet, Robert Frost, has written. But does that really matter? Is there a moment, just a single moment, when the leaves just now flaring on the maples are precisely at their peak, when the flower is completely blossomed? And if so, are those leaves and blossoms somehow lesser the moment before perfection, or the moment after? Perhaps the point should not be perfection itself but to celebrate the process that makes perfection even fleetingly possible at all. “What I want in my life,” concludes Mary Oliver, “is to be willing to be dazzled.” If perfection can dazzle us, so should the process of creating it. And, so should mornings like this one, perhaps even more beautiful for the knowledge that it cannot, and will not, last.

Back at the Little Dipper I sit for a time with the anchor still set, trying to prolong this seemingly perfect morning. But there is no anchor, no matter how strong the bite, that can stop the process of time. A scud of clouds is already scratching its way into the sky. By noon, the wind will be up, the last thread of fog unraveled from the bog pines. Even with my anchor set deep in the sands of this morning, the world is still spinning, time is still passing, and things much bigger than the weather are already beginning to change.

— Jeff Rennicke

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What days or places in your memory come the closest to perfection? Drop me a line below and let me know.