The Journey Home

Celebrating our first 100 subscribers

The crescendo of a breaking wave on Lake Superior,

or, unfurling ribbons of northern lights,

or, leaping into the frozen lake dressed like a fish.

Everyone celebrates milestones differently. But whatever your chosen method, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say “thank you” as the Little Dipper reaches a milestone: +100 subscribers in the first two weeks.

Why such interest in a blog about a small boat on a big lake and the search for a sense of place? It is, I think, because I am not alone in my search. It is a human need, I believe, to seek a place in the world where we feel like we belong, a landscape that sustains us in both body and soul. Sometimes we are born into that place. Sometimes we stumble into it: think of the way 17 year-old Edward Abbey first saw the canyon country of the Southwest after waking up from a nap in an empty boxcar as he hopped freight trains across the West.

"Proud of my freedom and hobohood I stood in the doorway of the boxcar, rocking with the motion of the train, ears full of the rushing wind and the clattering wheels, and stared and stared and stared, like a starving man, at the burnt, barren, bold, bright landscape passing before my eyes.”

Sometimes we literally fall into it like 14 year-old Ansel Adams who climbed atop a rotting stump on his first visit to Yosemite to take a picture with his Kodak Brownie camera. The stump collapsed beneath him and sent the young artist tumbling just as he clicked the shutter (a photograph, he said in his autobiography, that remained one of his favorites throughout his life.)

However it happens - whether we are born into it, discover it later in life, or fall off a stump — we know it when we see it, or more likely we “feel” when we see it. We have come home. I think of Willa Cather describing the main character’s first sight of the prairie she would come to love in her novel My Antonia:

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

This blog will be a running exploration of what it means to have a sense of place, to feel like you belong in a chosen landscape, what it means to be home. Let me know where you feel most at home. Where does your heart live? Tell me what landscape speaks most clearly to you and why. And I will tell you mine: the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior.

Thank you for joining me on the journey and being one of the first 100 subscribers to:

I’m glad to have you on the journey, wherever you call home.

(all photography by Jeff Rennicke)