Living next to the sky

Reflections on touching the stars and residing at the bottom of a glacial lake

Trees reflected in the ice along the Red River in south Moorhead, Minn.

It’s February, and it finally snowed.

There is a park along the river bend I’ve discovered that almost feels like home. I walk there often.

One day, I spotted two bald eagles in a skeletal tree.

Most people weren’t looking up. I asked a person in passing, “How is your vision?” as I squinted toward the skyline. He looked over his shoulder at the tree and said indeed, it could be eagles, and then went back to his conversation. 

I’ve been told there are many eagles here. As if it’s common.

It never feels common, to me, to see an eagle fly over. “Migizi, who signify love,” my friend

Chris La Tray

told me.

Is there anything more beautiful than love?

It’s its own kind of pretty out here: an exceptionally flat land caused by lakes of glacial meltwater. The Red River Valley once held Lake Agassiz, a vast glacial lake that left behind vast pancakes of plains and a fertility in the soil that was coveted by those who came after. 

According to the North Dakota Geologic Survey, Lake Agassiz began to form 11,700 years ago when a glacier retreated between Hudson Bay and the Mississippi River drainage basins near Browns Valley, Minnesota. Draining rivers, blocked by ice, formed a lake that overflowed into the Minnesota River Valley and onward to flood the Red River Valley.

Within a couple hundred years of the lake’s origin, forests of spruce and deciduous trees with sagebrush in the land’s openings lined the shores, and wooly mammoths roamed.

Evidence of Lake Agassiz spans 110,000 square miles across Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in Canada. Some of the first humans to arrive in North America, according to archeological record, did so as the waters of the lake receded after the last ice age — nearly 10,000 years ago.

Lake Agassiz was named for Swiss-American biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, who proposed its existence in the mid-19th century. Agassiz, considered the father of glacial geology, is also a controversial figure for propelling scientific racism and false ideologies.

I was not surprised to learn this. Most historical features are named after white men who to came to conquer and dominate the land and its peoples, not live with them.

I am living on the traditional homelands of the Dakota, Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe/Chippewa), and Otipemsuak (Métis) people. The Cass County Historical Society also attributes this region as home to other tribes including the Apsáalooke (Crow), Notameohmésêhese (Cheyenne), Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), Nųmą́khų́·ki (Mandan), Hiraacá (Hidatsa), and Sahnish (Arikara). 

“Located at the intersection of several trails and waterways, this land naturally became a site of travel, trade, and rest for many tribes,” the organization explains in its land acknowledgement.

It is land that is still home to many First Nation and Indigenous people. The European push to conquer brought many farmers and emigrants of Scandinavian descent to North Dakota. Norwegian immigrants began arriving here in the 1870s, coveting the fertile land for farming.

The Red River at sunset, frozen in time and seen from the Minnesota side.

“She’s almost touching the stars up there,” my mother likes to say. The distance feels larger, now, a space that is growing between my old life and new. I’d like to think these lives are the same, but a new place has a way of collecting your thoughts and shifting your body.

“You’re right next to the sky,” my friend Chuck Medicine Bull told me when I shared the news I was living in North Dakota. The way the land meets us here — it is like being part of everything and nothing at the same time.

I like imagining this land as a lake, the same way I could imagine Billings being under a vast, inland sea. If you climbed high enough, atop the sandstone cliffs you could see the edge of the shore and the lapping lines as water receded until the valley became what it was — coveted for its beauty and shelter.

I’ve met people who have lived their whole lives in Billings and never knew it was sea. Never asked, “What was this before any of us?”

Next to the Sky

In the movement from Montana to North Dakota, I have been unsure of myself, been stumbling a bit as I find my place. As I miss my friends. As I live in the unfamiliar. Even the snow that gave me feelings of home has already melted, leaving vats of ice and instability throughout the land.

I’ve started recording again and released my first track in collaboration with my guy, Matthew Taggart. This might explain the feeling of being here, more so than my words.

There’s someone who never fails to capture a feeling, and that’s Louise Erdrich. In her story “The Hollow Children,” Erdrich writes of in a blizzard in North Dakota in 1923. She modeled the story after a sudden, terrible blizzard that ran across the plains in March 1966, killing 16 people.

Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and would play in snow caves they built as children when blizzards cancelled school.

“I still love the taste of snow on the wind,” she told the New Yorker in November 2022.

“Driving in whiteout blizzards is utterly harrowing, which is why I wrote this,” she described of “The Hollow Children. “I have many such driving experiences to draw on, and have to say I feel lucky to have survived them. In years past, I’ve twice had a child as a passenger through a blizzard like this one, which takes the fear to a whole new level.”

Ivek was bouncing down the muddy road when the mist dissolved and he saw it—a boiling white mass rolling at him like annihilation. He drove straight in at full speed, hoping to make it the rest of the way on sheer momentum. But in the whiteout he slowed to a crawl. Then crept along, feeling through the tires for the road. The children had gone dead silent.

The silence lasted until Ivek lost his feel of the road and knew that they had left it. The earth on either side of the Red River had been rolling-pinned by a vast and ancient glacier. The flat fields and prairie were of a time eternal, and the human presence in that expanse was slight. The children knew it, and he knew it. They had to keep moving or die.

Some stories stick to your bones. Erdrich possess this power as a storyteller, one who can stitch her words into your consciousness.

“This story came to me like a waking dream,” she said.