50 yards from Crazy

At the end of May, I rented a yurt in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This was to be a business trip to work on things. I left on a Monday morning, grabbing antihistamine and one last iced coffee in Skokie before getting on the highway. After hours with my thoughts driving across what would be Governor Walker's Wisconsin, I found myself at the edge of Lake Superior in a remote old growth forest where the signs are amazingly still in English. I found no one around except a man and his dog several hundred yards away at another campsite.

This would be my home for 3 nights: a round wooden frame hut with a canvas skin. Inside were bunk beds and a table and chairs. The yurt had plastic windows looking out from a tangle of branches at Lake Superior's shore.  I stayed there by myself with no electricity, sleeping with heat from a woodstove (it got into the 30s at night), and all the food I would need packed in tupperware. I made instant coffee on a miniature propane camping stove. My diet consisted mostly of bananas,  pre-cooked pasta, rice and beans, a jar and half of peanut butter, and an enormous bar of dark chocolate.

 In the stillness that was my circular hut above the waves,  I watched the energy of the peanut butter turn directly into lines on paper and rocks. Peanut butter turns almost directly into words here with little interference from myself. I tried letting art happen like freckles. The yurt started working its winding spell turning around my thoughts. With no other people or any electronic source of sound to drown me out, I belted out fake opera singing all day long at the little table and chair. At one point, I could have sworn I achieved throat singing. Perhaps this two toned sound in my throat is only possible when no one is in earshot of it circulating round and round in my corner-less yurt universe.  I've decided that all of these uninhibited aural and visual experiences I had should be attributed to the intoxication that can only come from isolation.

No one told me that I've been 50 yards from crazy all this time. Just put at least a 50 yard radius between me and any other human and I dip down into my own universe. I can't think of a time in my life I've been at least 50 yards away from other humans, strangers or not, for an extended amount of time.  It became completely dark around 10pm each night but I continued to work on the floor next to the woodstove, a modest heat source that was occasionally fueled by bad-drawing-kindling. The flies would flitter and dart around the plastic walls of the Eveready 6 volt battery lantern making it look like a candlelit room. Spiders and other things with legs would meander across my drawings.
With no electricity to recharge devices, I used 3 different cameras until they ran out of power. I worked at documenting everything as if I were a spy on myself. In between naps and long hikes, I found a distinctive slab of rock about a quarter mile away from my yurt at the shore of the lake. I ended up embedding my endless pages of torn up handwriting onto this rock...as you do.  I worked all afternoon on my second day adhering the paper to the rock. I made several trips back to observe this installation I'm calling "Rock Written." On the day I left the yurt, I took one last walk to my writing on the rock. While looking closely at how the paper was holding up to the wind and the waves, I noticed fresh cigarette ash resting in a crevice next to the paper. Was I being watched from the trees? Who was here?!?! Does someone know I was singing all day? Did someone have a moment with my writing this morning before I came back? Did they sit inside the paper circle? Were they just passing by and flicked their ashes on my rock? Did it blow in from some mysterious ship sailing by? I left the writing on the rock to decompose and drove home to Chicago that Thursday afternoon.  Since then, I've been staring at these photos on my computer trying to decide if what I made was remarkable or not. I've also been wondering about the choice and act of being alone and the feeling of being alone. Was I really in isolation for 4 days and is that rock still holding my words?