Wood smoke, iron ore, and a Psalm

As if Minnesota didn’t have enough lakes to start with…

Yeah, if there’s one thing more Minnesota than Tater Tot Hotdish it’s a lake – a lake more than an hour north of the Twin Cities to be specific. As a state we lay claim to better than 10,000 of ‘em – big and small, deep and shallow. Church folks say the Good Lord put ‘em here. Geologists credit a passing glacier. But up on The Range, folks say with perfect certainty it was U.S. Steel and the Oliver Iron Mining Company.

A goodly portion of ‘em, anyway..

Now, adding to the North Star State’s inventory of inland waterways really wasn’t on the minds of those fellows coming to Minnesota looking for the iron ore Andrew Carnegie would turn into steel and, incidentally, make their fortunes. When they found it – and they found a lot of it – they learned that the easiest way to get at that ore was to just dig a hole and haul the ore away. Since there was a lot of ore in a lot of places, the mining companies dug a lot of holes – mighty big holes -- hundreds of them. In fact, if you know somebody who can’t tell his hinder from a hole in the ground, a trip to Hibbing will make that distinction quite clear.

But I digress…

There was one small hitch … when the ore’s gone, the hole’s still there.

That was of small concern to the mining companies. They just packed up their steam shovels and moved on to the next promising patch of primeval woodland and the hematite lying beneath it. But nature famously abhors a vacuum, and a hole is just a vacuum’s third cousin. Since a lake is little more than a hole filled with water, Mother Nature gave a nod and –Voila! --Lake Ore-be-gone! (Hey, that’s a real 140-acre artificial lake, formed by the flooding of three open-pit iron ore mines within the city limits of Gilbert, Minnsota. You can’t make these things up!)

I just got back from a few days on the Iron Range, and, as a matter of course, spent some of that time paddling about on a lake — to go Up North and not wet the bottom of a watercraft is to put one’s claim to Minnesota citizenship in serious jeopardy. As you might be guessing, two centuries ago that lake was virgin pine forest with iron underneath it…

Today it’s deep, cold and crystal clear, ringed with dark, dense pine forest; sheer dynamite-scarred walls echoing the cries of loons amidst a deep arboreal silence.

But above us, the sky was milky white from smoke drifting south from distant Canadian wildfires. Paddling for miles across a watery hole in the ground that wouldn’t be there but for us, under skies that should have been blue, but weren’t, brought to mind the ways we change this place we live in.

Those blasted rock walls, water and smokey skies made tangible the underlying reality of our changing climate. Just as we’ve altered the earth beneath our feet, we’ve left an indelible mark in the atmosphere that surrounds us all – and the depth and extent of that mark is making itself felt across the globe.

Mining scarred the land, but, with effort, that scarred landscape is being reclaimed, restored. Now, turning from our dependence on cheap gas, oil, and coal is going to be a lot tougher than turning an old ore pit into a swimming hole, but we’re starting to seriously feel the heat and time is running out to make the hard choices.

Out on the water, the words of the Psalmist kept pace with my paddling, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad,” And to that admonition I added my own refrain, “This is the Earth that man has made…we can do better than this.”