Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, teh rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves. Then there is a special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise's letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe that might explain the book-islands of Lake of the Woods.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country begins with author Louise Erdrich piling into a blue minivan with her newborn daughter, Kiizhik. This is an unconventional trip, and at 46 years of age, she's an unconventional mother. The destination is the lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake, vast freshwater lakes that are dotted with islands, a place that is still home to the Ojibwe. Erdrich herself is a "plains" Ojibwe, from the eastern stretches of North Dakota, and so the place still retains some of its strangeness, but there's home here, too, not least because she is meeting the mysterious father of her infant, a medicine man named Tobasonakwut. (One reads between the lines to see that the pair are not quite a conventional couple; elsewhere I've read that he was a married man.) In these islands she sees something akin to the books that are her lifelong passion: numerous, inviting, mysterious, and even, in some cases as she explains above, legible.

What a precious object this book is for me. I picked it up at Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books, after a week of exploring the Ojibwe lands around Lake Superior. We never quite got up to where Erdrich describes in this book, but we did end up a stone's throw from Rainy Lake, at Lake Kabetogama, also now a part of Voyageurs National Park. But I recognized something, just a little, of the awe that suffuses that place, where the islands really do fan out and multiply in an impossible way. The book is just a book, it isn't even signed, but it lies at the crossroads of my own experiences and that of an author who has meant a lot to me. Maybe there's even a small touch of the numinous in the way of Erdrich's visit to the cabin of explorer and naturalist Ernest Oberholtzer, where she sleeps among his vast library, making herself known to his immense store of books.

Beyond that, I was really touched by this book. I've only read Erdrich's fiction, which can be fanciful and goofy, but reading her in this mode, a mix of memoir, naturalism, and travelogue, was really fascinating. She's always had a way of persuasively writing about the way that myth and magic appear in everyday life, and she manages to make the ancient stone glyphs of the Lake of the Woods seem as mysterious and meaningful as anything from Tracks or Bingo Palace. And I was struck by the gentle, strange relationship between herself and Tobasonakwut, as well as the late-coming child, who seems to have a natural attraction for the lake's animals: sturgeon, otters, moose. Even the principle metaphor of the book, which ought to be silly--a book is like an island--seems natural and persuasive in Erdrich's hands. I really enjoyed seeing this other side of a great writer.