Following the shadow of Etienne Brule: Much of the magnificence of the Lake Superior shoreline still exists today as it did yesterday.He hunted and found a fantastic intangible ....
Today, I "hired" a fellow to write something for me. Bruce Catton was a journalist, a historian and a pretty remarkable guy. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his books about the Civil War. He was one of the founders of American Heritage magazine. He enjoyed writing about colorful characters. One of the characters he mentioned in one of his books was Etienne Brule, a Frenchman who came to America in 1608 at the age of 16. Brule spent more than 20 years wandering and exploring the wilderness. He was a chameleon of the first order and, undoubtedly, his contemporaries thought him to be more than a little queer. Basically, he saw the world for what it was, not for what other people told him it was. Meet Monsieur Brule.
By Bruce Catton
Etienne Brule .... had better luck. He hunted a fantastic intangible, found it, made the most of it, and vanished at last into bloodstained legend, his final thoughts unrecorded. He wanted to get to the fabulous back-of-beyond -- to discard everything he had been taught in seventeenth-century France and find out how it would go with a man who followed total loneliness into the loneliest forest on earth -- and he did precisely what he set out to do, which is more than most men ever do. The result was something he had not foreseen. Discarding civilization and making himself total uncivilized, he nevertheless dragged civilization after him, which is why no one today can go where he went and see what he saw. By escaping into the wholly primitive, he helped to destroy it ....
The interesting thing about this is that Brule himself begged (Samuel) Champlain to send him into the wilderness. It had bugged him, and it drew him on to a mutual catastrophe .... Brule saw something far beyond, and it was this far-beyond that he wanted. So away he went (in 1610 at age 18) -- up the Ottawa River, over Lake Nipissing, down the French River to Georgian Bay, along the coast to the pocket where the land runs north-northwest again to Lake Huron, which is deep and wide and blue and cold and deadly -- and he was the first white man to see any of this, the first to escape entirely from the tight limits of Europe, the first one free to explore himself under the guise of exploring a new land. This is very strong wine. It is much as if, today, a man landed on the moon and found the gates of fantasy wide open, with an enchanted garden waiting to be entered; if he went in, he might die there, and he knew this perfectly well; but as a young man, he also knew the final value of life better than the old do, so in he went, and there he died, and if he could have come back afterward, he would not have undone any of it ....
Brule had many adventures, obscure and apparently pointless. He wandered all over the high country, getting into Lake Superior and coasting along its magnificent and deadly shores, seeing the copper country .... and going to the great harbor that lies under the long sand bar behind which Duluth now climbs the hills to breath-taking beauty ....
He went back to the Huron country and turned south and east; got into up-state New York and was caught by a party of Iroquois, who prepared to torture him to death and began pulling out his beard by the handful, just to give him a foretaste. Brule threatened them with the wrath of the Great Spirit; at which moment, in the most unbelievable story-book fashion, a thunderhead that had climbed the sunny sky unnoticed exploded in a great blast of bumping noise and blinding fire, so that the Iroquois were suddenly converted and tried to atone. They untied him, gave him a big dinner, and sent him on his way with their best wishes.
He kept going .... and returned to the high country, where he lived here and there. It is easier to say this than it could possibly have been to do it. He was not just living among the Indians: he was living among an all but infinite number of different tribes of Indians, some of whom felt this way, while others felt that way. Make friends with one tribe, and you make enemies of another, and your life is poised on a knife edge, all the time. Also, the Indians had taboos, superstitions, and social codes that nobody knew about, and a man could lose his life if he pushed too hard against any of them.
For years, Brule played the game very well; that is, he stayed alive and had exactly the kind of life he wanted to have, becoming -- as happened afterward to many another man who wandered away from the settlements -- more Indian than the Indians. He seems to have disconnected himself completely from all his old ties. The English fought the French, and Brule did not know which side he was on, going with the English for a time and then at last picking up the old threads again with the French. In the end, he managed to make a fatal mistake in dealing with the Indians; if he could forget that he was a white man, they could not, and at last -- in a Huron town called Toanche, whose site is lost in the gloom of wilderness prehistory -- the red men found that they were mortally tired of him. They clubbed him to death, and then, according to legend, they ate him; so, in 1632, his story ended forever.
Music Note: Listening to Bob Seger ....
Specifically, "Against the Wind" ....
Some lines from: "Against the Wind:"
And the years rolled slowly past
And I found myself alone
Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends
I found myself further and further from my home
And I guess I lost my way
There were oh so many roads
I was living to run and running to live
Never worried about paying or even how much I owed
Moving eight miles a minute for months at a time
Breaking all of the rules that would bend
I began to find myself searching
Searching for shelter again and again
Against the wind
A little something against the wind
I found myself seeking shelter against the wind
Well those drifter days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out
Against the wind
I'm still running against the wind
Well I'm older now and still
Against the wind
