Because the sequence of poems I am working on is so steeped in the natural world, and because every trip I make after this might involve the youngers in our family, and because it is nearly winter break and my own students are as ready for it as I am, my husband gifted me the morning and afternoon to myself, so I went to the Twin Cities and purchased a household membership to the Bell Museum.
The manuscript I'm interested in developing began as a way of combining the passions of my family: my husband and his roots in stream ecology and the mapmaking world of GIS; my daughter's intense brilliance when it comes to the lives of animals, their habitats, their behaviors, and other specificities; and my son, whose interest in being a helper has led me to imagine a family modeled after our own in which they are experiencing catastrophic events of climate change, where the father goes in search of mythic ways into the earth (see: animal habitats in winter) as a way to ride out a storm. I wanted to think of a way, instead of searching outside of our planet (see: explorations of Mars) for rescue from our own destruction, we go into the womb of the planet we live on. Why would we do that, if climate change is warming, and going further into the Earth is also warmer and warmer?
I can see I'm already spilling too much; I'll leave it at that for now, especially as I am in the embryonic stages of developing this book. I've got a handful of poems already, ones based on this visit, ones based on the glimmers of ideas, ones that come from watching a documentary with my daughter, and memories I have of winters in Minnesota. It's a new foray, thinking speculatively about very real scientific issues, especially when my own writing tends to be so experience-based, but this will be too: walks in the woods, passionate research, the roots in my own family of four, but then so many what if questions (which I live with every day from that girl of mine) pumping around the action of the book.
For now, I'll share the photographs I took at the museum, where answers to so many of my questions as I write and think this manuscript out, exist. I didn't want this to be a fact collecting experience though; I have many more visits in my future to do this. I didn't even want to answer any of my initial questions. I wanted this to be a first tour of a place I know I'll return to, filling in pieces: spending time with the mural that is the image of the layers of earth and rock beneath the Twin Cities, spending time with the Jim Brandenburg film on seasonal Minnesota, looking at the places where our biomes meet and considering how the rivers move out of our state in varying directions. I wanted this to be an initial visit of wonder before I got to the real work of finding answers.
I had two really fantastic conversations with two people working in the museum--one an undergraduate employee who talked to me about mammoths and muskoxes and the other a volunteer who told me some really amazing things about Glacial Lake Aggasiz and the moraines and ice dams breaking and I just felt so silly and giddy and a little weepy in amazement at all that was available for my brain and my kids', who also feel this hungry curiosity about the natural world.
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