# Tracks *(Howell Creek Radio Address for Feb 16, 2014)* This is Howell Creek Radio. It's February 22nd, 2014. I'm Joe Dueck. It's night-time in Minnesota. Lake Superior is almost completely frozen over. The 16th of February marked a new weather record, the 60th day this winter that Duluth has recorded a subzero temperature, and it was about zero a month ago when I started on the journey I'm on my way back from now. It's a long walk through the woods to the train tracks, a beautiful walk, and it's arduous in an otherwordly, non-threatening way, which is part of its rare pleasure. For one thing the walk has to be made at night -- this is simply due to the time you have to catch this particular train. There is no road or trail between our house and the tracks; you get out a topo map, take a bearing, and follow your compass on a bee line through the woods as best you can. And because you need to refer to your compass and be able to see at least to your next marker, you pretty much require a clear sky and a full moon, or as close to a full moon as possible. This time of year, the snow is too deep to walk through; you need snowshoes. Walking out onto ten feet of unbroken snow at night requires faith; it's like walking on a mist, or stepping out into... space! The Moon, the Milky Way are all around above your head, and if you're lucky the northern lights are out as well. There's no human company for many miles, but you nonetheless feel surrounded by beautiful, quiet, numinous activity. When you do lower your eyes, everything suddenly feels very close. Large, furry trees approach as you walk, loom over you, and recede again. There are small and large tracks crossing yours, and there are things out at night, moving silently and calling to each other across great distances. - - - - So the destination towards which I was navigating on this particular night was not a fixed point: I was not aiming for the train *station* in fact, but rather the train *tracks*. You might think this is like hiking toward a road, in that you can be way, way off, and still find a road eventually. But it's really not the same as hiking towards a road, because if you're too far off, you could find the tracks and still miss the train. The target was not a one-dimensional point, and not a two-dimensional line, but aa smeary, indefinite smudge: roughly this area of track, between roughly these two clock times. Somewhere out there a train was ploughing along the midnight tracks on stolen time between schedules, and like the stars above us we were tracking across the endless field towards an inevitable convergence. But the inevitable is made inevitable only by temporal uncertainty and self doubt. There's a metronome or a mantra beating away inside your head: counting off every pace, from one to a hundred, and every time you hit a hundred, you flip a bead on a piece of rope tied to your coat; this is how you keep track of how many kilometers you've gone. Over and above this rhythm, you're constantly calibrating and checking your internal progress bar -- am I on pace? How fast am I averaging? How much longer? How much time to spare? How far off can I be? Eventually I pushed out of the trees into a long clearing, so narrow that in places the pine boughs come close to overhanging the tracks. And then you just wait: you sit down in a snow bank and watch the sky, and try to enjoy it, and push away the thought that if you've missed the train it might be sunrise before you get home again. * * * As it happened this time my timing was nearly perfect. I had only ten minutes or so to wait before I heard the train. I lit a flare and waved it above my head; the engine slowed to a running pace, and I scrambled aboard. It was nice and warm in there, and the hot glow of the coal-fired boiler shone like a hilltop beacon in my night-widened eyes. And there stoking the coals was my old friend Anders, with his yellow hair tufting out from under his toque. He paused long enough to shake my hand as I unslung my bag into a corner. "Well if it isn't the radio pirate of the North Shore!" he said. "Welcome aboard." I grabbed the other shovel and gave him a hand. I knew we'd be coming up on Heston Grade soon, and any extra steam we could get up would push us over it that much faster. "You don't get out much these days," he said. "Yeah I'm laying low till the heat blows over." "You layin low cause you got *diapers to change*." "Darn right," I said. "Trixie and I are into improvised bio-algorithmic art these days. It makes a mess sometimes." That made him laugh. It's actually pretty cool, though. The project combines both of our genetic material into an autonomously developing, self-actualizing art installation with generative behaviour. It learns your words, your mannerisms and eventually even your thoughts, and remixes and recontextualizes them over a period of years and decades. It forces you to constantly adapt your conception of the self, and in most cases continues to define and radically reshape your identity long after you are dead. Anders laughed but he said "No thanks!" I said he should at least visit sometime, but I knew it wouldn't happen unless in connection with something wild, something that needed doing. We kept talking and we kept shoveling. I never remember what we talk about, but I always remember what he was like. I have some friends whose patience and reserve make me feel like a restless wave of careless destruction by comparison. But Anders has such eagerness to find new stories, and such disregard for security, that beside him I appear to myself as the original stick in the mud in fact. The contrast is humbling, but it does awaken a drive in me to accomplish things, and a willingness to endure the hardships that come in the cause of securing better life, better ground. When we were near the top of the grade, he poured me a cup of burning, sludgy coffee from the kettle clamped on top of the boiler, and then we moved to the next car back, where he had his amp plugged in, and we took turns on the guitar late into the night. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I'm Joel Dueck. If you don't live close enough to the Superior National Forest to hear us on the air, you can always click over to howellcreekradio.com to download the latest episode, leave a comment, or read the notes and transcripts. You can also follow us on twitter @HowellCreek, or at facebook.com/HowellCreek. Howell Creek Radio has no sponsors. This song is the Ghost of O'Donahue by Johnny Flynn. The text of this podcast is available under a Creative Commons license. ## Synopsis Radio broadcast for February 22, 2014. A narrative of the first two legs of the trip I took in response to the blue light seen on the *Baie Comeau* in January: a midnight snowshoe hike in the woods, and boiler-stoking our way up Heston Grade in the train. The closing music is [*The Ghost of O'Donahue*][god] by Johnny Flynn. [god]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2SlofAfFI0