Why I Go North
By Robert Vivian


I feel it pulling at me at me most days with a strange, tugging insistence as if I’m connected to it by a thin wire made of threadbare light, this sudden desire to drop whatever I’m doing or where I am and head north alone up 127 until I pass the town of Clare to Roscommon County where my wife and I have a tiny house out in the woods, a sanctuary I account as the truest, most steadfast haven of my spendthrift life.

But why should this be exactly?

Why do I continue to feel this almost daily draw and drag as if my soul were so many iron filings magnetized around this one northerly direction that apparently goes on forever? I’m essentially a tabula rasa on the move when I head north, or a child again—I’m one who doesn’t know much except that the arc of this same longing trajectory is closer to my one true essence. I don’t understand the fine particulars surrounding the desire to go north and probably never will, not even when I wake from my own death. But who needs particulars when the absolute itself is opening its windows? Some days I just want to keep going, cross over Mackinac Bridge into the U.P. and on up into Ontario until the highways and dirt roads trickle out into the vast tundra of remotest Canada, not even deigning to stop at the North Pole, but venturing farther and farther northward until I’m belly up to the stars.

This is not a responsible compulsion, nor anything else that reeks of duty or decorum: it’s much deeper and lighter than that, this flight of the alone to the alone, filling the buds of flowers and trees along the way in the ongoing miracle of photosynthesis, the nearly constant temptation not even to flee so much as to truly and finally be, which I’m coming to suspect is a scandal and downright danger to so many in this bustling world. Otherwise, why would this hushed summons feel so sacred and so threatened—why would its solemn giddiness run quietly unchecked throughout me to accompany such headlong movement? All I really know for sure is that a mysterious jettisoning takes place each time I drive north, that ten miles past Mt. Pleasant things begin to fall away of their own accord without any of my own doing, certain roles and personae and concerns like so many leaves spiraling down from a tree, that in fact I die a little death whose ritual is more than passing strange that I nonetheless and heartily recommend for the staunchest defendants of gregariousness and social obligations, the games we’ve all learned how to play until they start playing us.

It would seem on the face of it that going north is almost a betrayal or abdication of the most basic calls for community, and yet I cannot help but feel that this is nowhere near the whole story, that even these hallowed assumptions have their distortions and shadows that just as often parade under the auspices of a towering and monolithic lie, that any one of us is really who we purport to be when we don our titles or roles, no matter how noble or selfless they may appear to be, that we are good citizens or church members or anything else zoot-suited for righteousness.

But when I go north, these somehow have precious little purchase and drop away one by one, not even because I want them to but because there’s just not much to sustain them in that quiet little house in the woods: they simply can’t live in such relative peace and quiet, not to mention the state roads and bear-haunted trees, the places I return to again and again like some wandering tatterdemalion who keeps coming back to the ground zero of his essential poverty and brokenness, the anti-qualities that stamp him for the wandering beggar he truly is.

There’s nothing new in this, of course, nothing at all surprising, which doesn’t change one wit the startling nature of its mojo. I don’t mean to suggest that going north is always even something I want to do, for in its own way it’s a kind of stern and austere ritual, a gradual unfolding of some interior landscape to match the changing landscape I’m driving through as northern Michigan comes into its own slow-rising topography of forests, lakes and rivers with every kind of growing loveliness in between. It’s not always easy to drive to such aloneness, though in a real way each one of us already is, no matter where we are or who we’re with: we just don’t have the requisite space and silence to know it for ourselves in the marrow of our bones.

So I go north once or twice a week to rediscover this timeless fact and to experience it again anew, I go north in order to listen and to see and to allow myself to be—I go north less to live deliberately in the woods than to settle my racing heart among them so that it may assume once more its proper beat and rhythm that, who knows, may very well be just another miniscule echo chamber of the cosmos after all. Besides, each one of us inherits a universal ache to a greater or lesser degree, a low-grade and strobing sore that can only be appeased when we turn to our one true direction and leave everything behind. I’ve learned this much in going north, if nothing else.

Now I realize I’ve been going north all my life, reading about Peter Freuchen living among the Eskimos as a twelve-year-old boy in an Omaha library, or listening to the music of Glen Gould and learning about his own fascination with the north, in walking into the cold winter winds that swept down from the Dakotas bringing blizzards in their wake, or even my writing desk up north that looks out and faces, you guessed it, a plumb and drop dead north. It’s not that I harbor any prejudice toward other directions (how preposterous would that be?), only that at the end of the day and the end of my life the direction must always point northward, which for all of my avowals here still carries its fair share of foreboding and misgivings: the north’s unnerving ability to unsettle. It’s like hearing the music of Arvo Part for the first time in the unmistakable ringing of eternity, or entering into a vast territory of silence that keeps opening out onto ever-vaster vistas that likewise have their counterparts in me—and so I tend to go north with a sense of reverence and even awe that’s almost laughable for how much humble ground I cover (a mere 70 miles away).

I’ve often wondered in a dim-witted and doubtful way if I’d ever be able to share this ongoing, seismic attraction and bring it to the level of utterance, if I’d be able to take the experience of driving north and offer it to others as a small, chipped talisman of the absolute, however meager, however tiny, if this same palsied tug on the hem of the cosmos could somehow be added to the long record of other seekers, those who keep going to ever more remote places because it’s somehow inside them to seek them out. In the end it isn’t really a matter of choice and must be pressed out from within like a fine glacial paste, having so little to do with will or volition that cannot touch this simple and profound truth.

I don’t want to be a hermit or recluse, though it’s true I can’t get enough of being near the woods, of sitting out on the deck and looking at the sky and the trees and birds that swim inside all of that astonishing ether, for I truly do feel, like Meister Eckhart, that they are my brothers and sisters and I’m somehow in paradise with them for hours at a time, which is all I ever really need to know about living in this world. It’s not the kind of thing one cries out from the rooftops, this hushed and intimate knowing so sacred that sometimes even a stone by the side of a dirt road where I walk or run becomes a friend to me, an ally or lover in being.

But then, almost invariably, the roof of this metaphysical proclivity caves in, and I become almost afraid: I don’t want to get burned or crucified for going north or feeling the summons to do so, for admitting to the attraction for such zerohood where no choir sings or color blings, the continuous subtraction that attends the spanning flight that never ends yet still contains within it everything that ever was or will be because it’s the void I’m finally talking about here, the drop-away abyss that makes everything possible and insignificant at the same time, potential itself falling into fathomless abodes.

Better to be polite and sociable and send Christmas cards, to pay and mail bills promptly, to keep up on current affairs and weigh in with one’s disapproval and dismay. Leave the void alone, don’t poke it with the needle of the odometer, let it incubate out beyond the province of zip codes, phone numbers, platters of salt on the chests of the dead, anywhere else but dragging even the mere mention of it into one’s living room and office, the meetings one is already late for. You’re an American after all, I remind myself, an almost dutiful son and husband with trash to take out—this preoccupation with going north and the emptiness beyond has no place here, nowhere to set up shop and so this headlong summons must cease in service of sociability.

So yes, I can speak in this voice also and feign my belief in it; I’m a long-accomplished imposter who has mastered the ability to disguise and ride along the surface with everyone else, pretending to believe what I do not believe and invest this same non-belief with something like cheerios, knowing all the while that these small traces of north won’t leave me alone, that they are in fact constantly tugging at me in subtle ways, pulling on that infinitesimal thread that’s connected to the fabric of this life and every life, without exception. It’s only when I stop or pause however briefly that I’m able to clear my mind of cant and become aware again that for all of my playacting the grains of north are gathering all around me, collecting themselves into those same finely-shaved filings that will one day, sooner or later, make the ultimate journey en masse and alone. I see or sense these harbingers of north in the oddest and most unlikely places, an empty shaker on a dining room table turned on its side, the vacant stubble and stare of an old man gazing out a window with his mouth open, rife litter at the back of a supermarket near a dented dumpster, a chain link fence run into by a car.

They point the way but are also somehow the way itself, the greased skids of the infinite that rightly scare the living daylights out of anyone who is stricken by them. An icicle hanging from the eaves is north, but so is a drooping shoelace on a Nike dangling from a telephone wire, its woebegone tongue be praised. There’s a northern glory in the glowing skeleton of a deer every bit as radiant as any stained glass cathedral, but you need the eyes of north to see it: I drive through this bone-light church every week and have felt it hum in my innards like a distantly-struck chime. Maybe we all have a monk hiding somewhere inside us, kneeling in the dark before a cratered candle and ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice. That’s what going north does to me, how it goes about its business of steady subtraction.

I used to think this was a character defect I dare not mention, that these solo drives north proved that I’m unsocial, unable or unwilling to abide the presence of others. But then this judgment broke in me as the bad faith and feckless chatter of a desperate bargainer, and I don’t know when or how it happened, only that it did. What I’ve slowly come to realize is that going north is a kind of preparation, a ritual that is preparing me for what lies beyond even in the midst of such natural splendor, a splendor that cannot be fully understood by anyone, let alone be possessed.

I’m learning how to die in going north, and at the same time learning how to live. It’s teaching me that I don’t need very much, that in fact I need nothing very badly—and the more nothingness, the better. So I taste and nibble away at absence; I drink the slow-moving waters of emptiness and feel space opening up inside me, space that needs the company of other space, other emptiness. I never considered myself an upright chasm in training, and yet that is exactly what I am—what I think we all are. Who knew such northern exposures weren’t anything to be afraid of, that they didn’t need to be filled because they allow everything to pass through them?

This is why I go north so faithfully, and why north has become my stern and loving teacher, though it instructs without saying a single word, without asking anything of me except to go back to it again and again—however feebly, however imperfectly.

© 2009 prickofthespindle.com