Book It!
Written By Elizabeth Larsen
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Peter, Henrik, and their mom visit a good read.
Talk about a curveball. Four days before our trip to Madeline Island, a claw-shaped dot of white pines and sandstone bluffs off Wisconsin's Lake Superior shore, my 8-year-old son Peter announced that the reason for our journey was lame.
"I don't like that book anymore," he said. He was referring to The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich's charming — at least to me — story of Omakayas, or "Little Frog," a young Ojibwa girl living in 1847. Only four months earlier, Peter adored the book. When he said he'd love to visit the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker (the island's traditional Ojibwa name), my supermom bells started clanging.
Nature! Literature! History! This remote Eden, part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, is one of my favorite getaways. Separated from the rest of the world by miles of crisp, sweet water, the landscape — think daisy meadows and slow, milky sunsets — has an almost transcendent pull on the imagination. Surely a long weekend there would kick the stuffing out of our previous excursion to the indoor water parks at the Wisconsin Dells — the family destination of the Midwest. Or maybe not.
Fortunately, the mood shifted once our car bounced onto the Madeline Island Ferry. "I can see the island!" Peter shouted. Over the churn of the wake, Peter and his brother Henrik, 5, started ticking off the animals they hoped to see: deer, ducks, beavers, bears. After more than 40 years vacationing in Minnesota and Wisconsin's North Woods, I knew that bears were more likely to overturn garbage cans in the dead of night than casually pad by a hiking trail. So I was as shocked as the boys when, toward the end of the 15-minute drive to the cottage our friends had loaned us, a black bear and her cub loped across the dirt road. "It's just like in The Birchbark House," Peter exclaimed, referring to a scene where Omakayas feeds heartberries (a Native American name for strawberries) to two cubs, only to get pinned by an angry momma bear.
I vowed to experience Madeline Island purely on the boys' terms. If I brought up the book and they balked, I'd back off — or at least try to. We dropped our bags inside the door of the cottage and hiked down to the huge beach on the edge of the lake. Lake Superior's north shore, in Minnesota, is famously frigid — it's rarely swimmable, even on a 90-degree day. But here on the lake's south shore you can dive and float to your heart's content, with nothing but loons and an occasional iron ore barge between you and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
I took a seat on a boulder and watched as Henrik picked up a pebble and stacked it on top of a larger stone. "It's a rock child," he said, recalling a scene from the book where Omakayas plays with people she made from rocks. The boys were fascinated by the rock children, mostly because they couldn't imagine a time when toys didn't dance and beep at a 5-year-old's command.
Henrik and I built a family of rock people while Peter found a flat skipping rock. "She's got breasts," he said, pointing to the plumpest of Henrik's and my creations. And then he skimmed his stone at her. "I'm Little Pinch," he laughed, referring to Omakayas's irritating younger brother. Indeed. We lived the book for much of the trip. When we visited the island's old Catholic cemetery where some of the area's Christianized Ojibwa are buried in graves that look like little houses, Peter reminded Henrik that Omakayas dreamed that she met a bear spirit in the form of a woman who promised to look after her. Henrik excitedly announced that spirits are both ghosts and angels. "When Grandma Karen dies she'll become a spirit and protect me from getting hit by a bus," he said.
On a hike through the fern-strewn paths of Big Bay State Park, we stopped in a cluster of birch trees to imagine that this could have been where Omakayas and her family lived during the summer. I'd bought the boys "Voyageur" garters — beautiful woven sashes tied around the knee to keep leggings in place — at the Madeline Island Museum, but they quickly turned into belts, and then blindfolds. Peter knew from reading the book that the Voyageurs, Canadian fur traders with a fancy French name, brought smallpox to the island, and many Native Americans died from it. "It's like chicken pox, only worse," he explained to Henrik. "You scratch so hard that you can bleed to death."
Henrik turned quiet and I wondered if all this talk of death was too much for him. "Are we white people?" he finally asked. "Am I a white people?" I wished my husband were there to hear it too. I'd brought Henrik along mostly to keep his big brother company. Yet here he was, connecting the dots. "Of course you're white," Peter said. "And white people have done a lot more than that to the Native Americans." I wondered what course this conversation would take. But then my boys raced toward the shadows cast by the towering pines and yelled that it was my turn to be blindfolded. If one of the boys had informed me Omakayas was running beside them, I almost would have believed it.
The origin of Omakayas
Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House (Hyperion, $7) and its sequel, The Game of Silence (Harper Collins, $6), are often called Native American counterparts to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. Like her heroine, Erdrich's Ojibwa ancestors lived on Madeline Island during the time of her books, which she was inspired to write while researching her family history.
About the Author: Elizabeth Larsen is hoping someone will invent a time machine so she and Henrik can take a Magic Tree House vacation.
Next: Booking travel to the location of a favorite children's book
Booking travel
Visiting the location of a favorite children's book sparks it to life like nothing else. Choose a title and then see what you might actually tour: Of the many places Little House author Laura Ingalls Wilder lived, most have original or replica buildings. Anne of Green Gables turns 100 this year and Prince Edward Island, where the stories are set, is celebrating (raspberry cordial, anyone?). A prime resource is Storybook Travels: From Eloise's New York to Harry Potter's London, Visits to 30 of the Best-Loved Landmarks in Children's Literature by Colleen Dunn Bates and Susan LaTempa (Random House, $18).
