Adaptation

In 2018, we moved to the North Shore of Lake Superior.  Born and raised in a suburb near Minneapolis, I was accustomed to the vagaries of Minnesota’s weather.  For instance, on a recent trip to Minneapolis, it was 100 degrees.  Only two weeks earlier, the Twin Cities had been hit with eight inches of snow.  They’d had the latest ice-out on city lakes in over 40 years.

You could say that year, May held a grudge, and by the end of the month she was madder than hell and burning to show us what she was made of.

Unfortunately, not on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  By the first of June, we were topping out at 45 degrees.  It was windy and rainy.  Minnesotan’s usually reserve the wind-chill factor for the depth of winter, but in June 2018, the wind-chill off the Big Lake made 45 feel more like 35.  My son and his wife arrived on a Friday for a visit, just in time for the polar plunge.  But they’re runners — and 45 degrees feels heavenly when you’re training for a marathon and it’s your weekend to grind out 15 miles.  And when you run that much, you can eat whatever you like.  So, we spent a lot of time in restaurants — good ones, mind you — eating fresh Lake Superior Trout with wild rice pilaf at the Angry Trout Restaurant and cast-iron fried chicken with jasmine rice and pickled chiles at the Crooked Spoon.  Not to mention beers at the Voyageur Brewery and a stop at Wunderbar for a second.

But even with all this food.  We were still cold.

My husband had a more difficult time adapting to the 20 degree drop in average temperature here on the North Shore of Lake Superior vs. Minneapolis.  I consider myself adaptable.  I wear a lot of layers — and as I approached sixty years old, that seemed to suit not only the cooler temperatures but my slumping musculature and sagging skin.  My husband is like a lizard, the hotter the temperature, the better.  He glowered in Minneapolis during the summer, as I reapplied my deodorant for the fourth time while driving down the freeway.

Not to say that he doesn’t appreciate the beauty of the North Woods, the majesty of the Big Lake, his new friends, and the lake trout he catches 100 feet off shore.  He loves to catch, and he’s made lots of new friends who know just how to do that, on whalers with down-riggers and GPS systems.  When he finally finds just the right boat of his own, I know that he will adapt.  At least that’s what I tell myself.  He’ll be like a snail with a new shell.

George Washington Carver said that nature was his greatest teacher, and that he learned from her the best while others were asleep.  There are so many great examples of adaptation in  nature.  Consider the Blow Fish, that  puffs up twice it’s size with thorny protuberances when threatened by a predator, or bears that hibernate all winter when food is scarce, or the snowy hares and owls that adapt their color to the season, or those tricky Viceroy Butterflies, that mimic the Monarch — which every butterfly-eating bird knows, taste terrible (unlike the Viceroy, which is delicious — although I can’t vouch for this because I’ve never actually eaten one, but I sure like the story.)

I started a new job in my new town.  After working for the same company for twenty years, and very comfortable with their systems and protocols and culture, I was the new dog learning new tricks.  I was the old new dog.  And I was uncomfortable because I was accomplished in my old job; I was an expert — not like it was nano-science, but I was good at what I did.  Even if it was only sales and event planning.  I was a Viceroy in a Monarch world; I knew how to make the system work.  But when we moved to the North Shore, I felt like a . . . well, a moth, flying toward the light and flapping my wings, hoping that someone would notice that I’m not as stupid as I feel.  I guess you could say that my husband wasn’t the only one who needed to adapt.  I needed to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I considered the natural world — it is all around me here — the woods, the water, the starry skies that seem to be falling into the Big Lake at night.  It is different from my previous home where ambient light washed out the Milky Way, and run off clogged the lakes with silt, but where the average temperature was twenty degrees higher.   Here, we are foreigners.  We are the alien to the insider, the non-native to the aboriginal.  I could have easily shrunk back from this challenge at this stage of my life.

Instead, I considered the tree in the picture above — at some point in it’s life cycle, something got in its way, but the tree kept growing in spite of it.  I took a cue from nature — telling myself to remain adaptable and keep growing, and if all else failed, be a Viceroy, and fake it … till I made it.