Fred Dalmquist, age fifty-three, was a computer consultant for the Minneapolis Board of Education. He and his wife Cathy, a nurse, were empty-nesters in a quiet exurb north of the Twin Cities, their one child, Janet Elena Dalmquist, recently graduated from Mom and Dad’s alma mater, St. Olaf. Fred voted DFL (occasionally Green), listened to corny American folk music, drank fairly decent micro-brews, used only Apple computers, was on his second Prius, shopped mostly at the Coop and the farmers’ market, recycled nearly everything, and took off as much time as he could to visit the northeastern corner of Minnesota where the boreal forests stretched from the northern shore of Lake Superior to the Canadian border and beyond.

Fred’s old college buddy Paul Larson had called him on Thursday asking if he wanted to take over his weekend reservation at a resort near Minskoog, a tiny Lake Superior hamlet some ninety miles northeast of Duluth. It was the first weekend in October and an early cold snap had pushed the fall colors ahead — the aspen, birch, and maple on the North Shore already past-peak. Fred, always looking for an excuse to get up in the woods, bailed his friend out, agreeing to pick up half the bill.

Fred arrived at Raven’s Cove Sea Villas just north of Minskoog early Friday afternoon. It wasn’t too late to do something, but the cold, windy, foggy, overcast weather seemed uninviting after the four-hour drive, so he checked into his room and took it easy for the rest of the day. Saturday morning showed no signs of brightening — the iron-gray clouds very low, a wind-driven mist coming down the hills from the northeast. Normally, fall tourists headed straight for Sandeberg Mountain, just south of Minskoog, where on a clear fall day the many vistas of the colorful maple, birch, and aspen forests, as well as Lake Superior were spectacular. But Fred had another destination in mind, namely, the trails following along the east and west sides of the Salaaka River.

After a big pancake breakfast, Fred drove the seven miles north on Highway 61 to the lake-side parking lot where the wild Salaaka emptied into the lake. He wanted to hike the ten-mile circuit before dark: up the eastern bank that morning, lunch at the County Road 37 bridge, and then down the western bank that afternoon. So with his waterproof-breathable outerwear, hydration backpack, and black diamond ash walking stick, he set off up the steep trail, the noisy lower Salaaka to his left.

For the first mile or so the path offered many overlooks of the river’s thundering falls and cataracts. Fred didn’t linger long, however, having seen them all many times before. He really wasn’t in the mood for the spectacular, rather, for what lay just below the spectacular: the subtle play of mists and fog upon the forest understory, the lingering leaves on branches, the still vibrantly colored carpet of leaves scattered along the way, and especially the quiet, the deserted quiet. He loved this hike. Here he could see a bit of the old Northwoods untouched by the “Tree Holocaust”, or the complete destruction of the Great Lakes forests by the infernal timber industry of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Still to be found in this steep, narrow river gorge were the giant white pines, the spruce, the white cedars of yore, never touched by ax or saw. Although he was appreciative of all the Northland’s wilds, the majority of the northern forestlands were greatly lessened after-growth, so much of it no further along than the scrubby aspen or “popple” woods which typically sprang back up after the never-ending cycles of clear-cutting. Here the forest had an unmistakably deep and mysterious feel like very few other Northwoods places.

There was, too, another reason for his fascination with the Salaaka. As a teen back in the early seventies he had hiked this same gorge and experienced what he could only describe as a great vision or epiphany. It had been on just such an autumn day: cool and misty, leaves all but gone. What had it meant? What had it meant? For all the years since he had wondered.

He paused on a footbridge which spanned a small brook racing down off the side of the gorge. He stared down into the gurgling water and revived his old, worn memories of that strange event. He remembered the charged, scented air. He remembered the voices in the splashing water of the river. He remembered the indescribable feeling of pure elation. It was as if he had left the world and entered some fairyland. He remembered the overriding feeling of enticement — to stay, to never leave, to take up life in the forest.

Fred could trace so much back to his magical hike along the Salaaka. From that day forth he was changed: He became thoughtful beyond his years, shunning his old knuckleheaded buddies, foregoing old adolescent pleasures. He quit the football team, did an about-face from his family’s conservative politics, lost interest in church, left high school ROTC. And after high school he went against his parents’ wish for him to become an accountant like his father, settling eventually on psychology and education.

Years later, he worked up a theory about what had happened to the seventeen-year-old Frederick Jeffry Dalmquist on that autumn day along the Salaaka River. The idea came to him in a grad course where they had touched on Konrad Lorenz’s theories of learning and imprinting. He concluded his epiphany had been what he called his “Great Teen Imprint Event,” a powerful event (or series of events) which set a primary vision and path for life.

He asked family and friends whether they had ever experienced a similar event during their teen years: a powerful, even mystical experience whereby something had spoken to them and told them “this is your path, your real self, your life’s desire.” Surprisingly, many people could remember just such an event. His rich cousin’s face had lit up with instant recognition at the question. He described how as a teen he had been invited to a Christmas ball held by a wealthy family and how he had fallen in love with their beautiful daughter. “Oh yes, Fred,” said Cousin Gary Dalmquist, the investment broker. “It was like I’d fallen into a dream. From that moment on I knew I wanted to be rich and have a classy débutante for a wife, and nothing in the world was going to stop me.”

An old friend remembered a visit to relations in Tennessee which had put him on the path of overalls, bluegrass music, and organic farming. Another friend spoke of a visit her junior year in high school to her black-sheep aunt and uncle in St. Paul. “Yah, yah,” said Amy Nordelm, “something just clicked. I was on cloud-nine that whole week getting away from my stupid right-wing parents. Yah, I knew from then on I’d be an artsy city bohemian all my life.”

Fred knew he was onto something. This was fish brain stuff, he concluded, that is, it went way deep, way past the frontal lobes to some part of a person’s psyche that would thenceforth remain immune to any dings or dents of reality or logic from the outside world. Still, he found nobody who had experienced a strictly wilderness epiphany. Usually, a late-teen watershed moment was clear and concise, like his mechanic’s story of how one day, helping at his father’s shop, he and his father had looked into each other’s eyes — and he knew right then and there he’d be a mechanic and eventually take over his father’s shop.
For so long Fred wondered just what he was supposed to do with his fuzzy Salaaka River vision. There seemed to be no real path to follow, at least as far as he could tell. Why couldn’t he have gotten a nice, clear, simple, realistically doable sign like so many others had? Eventually his frustration led him to favor his rational, pragmatic side and suppress his intuitive, creative side. Fred Dalmquist became a left-wing Northern Midwestern pragmatist who shied away from things too dreamy, quantumy, artsy-fartsy, or New Agey. For him there were facts and there were lots of fights to be fought armed with the facts — and no amount of dreaming or chanting or wishful thinking would advance anyone’s cause, no matter how worthy, et cetera, et cetera. Facts. Just facts, please.

Despite knowing her father only too well, daughter Janet had given her father a fancy set of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for Christmas the previous year. She gave him a strange, knowing look as she made him promise he would read them. She knew her father absolutely despised fantasy and science fiction and read nothing but political and social non-fiction. She also knew he really hated all the crazy, over-the-top fanaticism surrounding Tolkien. Janet knew very well what a fuddy-duddy her father was, but she was a daughter on a mission and kept after him until she actually had witnessed him reading.

Fred found the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, surprisingly enjoyable. Tolkien spoke in an earthy, peasanty, poetic realism way about his hobbits and their endearments and foibles. And when he did “go off the deep end” with the fantastical, unreal elements, with his super-heroes versus arch-villains, he did it in such a smooth and matter-of-fact way that it wasn’t half as disagreeable as he thought it would be. But when he got to the chapters on the Elves in their magical forest of Lothlórien a light really went on in his jaded, cynical head. “This is it,” he said out loud one night sitting in his Scandinavian easy chair. “This feeling I get from reading about Galadriel and the Elves in Lothlórien is what I felt back on the river that day.” He had to laugh, from the belly, for a good minute or two until there were tears in his eyes.

Even though a thread had finally been discovered so many years later, he was none the closer to understanding the vision. Surely there’s no way to go out in a forest and be a Tolkien Elf. How crazy! Still, for very many evenings hence, he read and re-read Fellowship chapters six through eight, soaking up as much of the magic and mystery of the Galadhrim Elves in Lothlórien as he could. He finally read the rest of the story — and enjoyed it despite his prejudices — but returned again to the Lothlórien chapters to soak in every line. He then bought the movie version of The Fellowship on DVD and — no different — watched the Lothlórien scenes over and over again. Damnedest thing…

It was just after noon when he reached the small county road crossing the river. The North Shore Hiking Trail reentered the forest and continued to the east, and, according to his pocket map, a primitive campsite lay just under a mile up the trail. He had never visited that stretch of the trail and decided to make the detour, having plenty of time to make the rest of the hike back to his car. He crossed the lonely wilderness road and started up the steep trail, which still followed the Salaaka. After almost a mile he came to a fork in the trail: ahead was the campsite, while the trail turned off to the east. Good enough, he thought, let’s have lunch. But as he entered the clearing he found a group of young people already there.

So odd, he thought, not a soul all day, but then these folks all the sudden. He noticed how strange they appeared: All six — three men and three women — were freakishly fair with fine, soft features: all had long, thin, fine hair ranging from dark to flaxen blond, and all were very tall, even the women over six-foot. Stranger was their clothing — some sort of medieval-looking get-ups: woolen hose-tights, silken green brocade tunics, and dark greenish cloaks with what might have been a sort of camouflage pattern. One or two of the strange young people glanced his way, but for the most part they seemed to be purposefully ignoring him.

Okay, okay, thought Fred, this must be one of those wacky Society for Creative Anachronisms group; Janet’s involved with some SCA group in the Cities. He reconsidered their looks as he took a seat on a split log near the rock circle fireplace and concluded that their soft, fine, fair features weren’t really that out of the norm in German and Scandinavian Minnesota. But then he heard some of them speaking — and it wasn’t English either. Okay, a — what? — a Danish SCA group? “All right,” he whispered to himself, slightly miffed by their aloofness, “I’ll just eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich real quick and be off. Don’t want to intrude on you. Not at all.” The SCAers, who were all standing near an ancient cedar tree, looked over at him — as if they had all heard his clearly inaudible mumbling.

He slowly, hesitantly unzipped his pack and got out his sandwich. The mild surprise of finding people on such a lonely day had worn off, and now a strange, clammy feeling of discomfort, even intimidation had settled over him. Then a very strange thing happened: He remembered having heard singing as he had climbed the trail! Yes, he was sure the sound had come from this campsite. But how can I just now be remembering singing? he wondered. He was having increasingly more “senior moments,” gaps in his short-term memory, but this was too weird. Maybe he had just imagined it.

He stopped chewing and took another long look at the strange company. They still seemed to be ignoring him, but not doing anything else either. It was as if they had been doing something, something private, and he had interrupted them and now they were just standing there waiting for him to leave. Okay, fine, he thought, I’ll be gone after a few more bites. But then the stubborn, middle-aged contrarian in him came to the fore. Hey, he had just as much right to be here as they. And he was really getting tired of the younger generation’s insular attitude toward older generations. They don’t have to act like I’m some uncool intruder, he thought. And long afterward he could not say why he did it, but suddenly he blurted out “mae govannen!” the only bit of Tolkien Elvish he knew. Suddenly, six heads snapped around and six sets of sharp, intense eyes — gray, green, and blue — were upon him.

“Mae govannen,” finally answered one of the men in a careful, soft, almost sullen voice.

“That’s all I know,” said a very surprised Fred, grinning sheepishly.

The man gave a fleeting smile and the others went back to their waiting-for-the-stranger-to-leave poses. Fred jumped up, quickly got his things together, and without another word headed back down the trail. But as soon as he was out of sight, he heard the strange, ethereal singing again. “That’s too weird!” he muttered to himself, his pulse racing. He thought about them some more. “They had no hiking gear,” he whispered to a big spruce. “What the hell were they doing? There’s no vehicles at either parking lot, not up here or down at the lake,” he said to a rock. Suddenly, he remembered he had left his North Shore Hiking Trail map back at the campsite. He sighed and thought about it for a moment. Leave it? he wondered. After all, it was only that spiral-bound pocket thing, and it was already out-of-date. No, no, it was a perfectly good map. No sense leaving it behind just to save a hundred yards. He turned around and headed back up the trail.

When he reached the campsite again, he found the foreign SCAers just as before: standing around and being enigmatic with negative body language. “Mae govannen!” he said with mock cheer.

Again, the same young man as before repeated a soft but hesitant “mae govannen” in return. He took a step forward and straightened up to his full height, easily six-four, striking an almost hostile pose, his feet shoulder-width apart, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes burning unblinkingly into Fred.

“Forgot my map,” said Fred as he scanned the area around the fireplace. He spotted it on the log where he had sat, strode over, and picked it up. He then took up the challenging gaze of the young man and, before he could stop himself, blurted out, “Were you guys just singing a minute ago?”

All heads turned, the fair and perfect faces serious and grave as they stared. Fred felt a knot in the pit of his stomach, but he refused to be cowed by their strangely intimidating gazes. Staring back at them, he was not going to budge from his deeply ingrained sense of civility and propriety. He wanted an answer to a perfectly normal question. He had heard singing and all they had to do was say yes or no.

A young woman nearest the tall man said something to him in their language. Fred was sure it was not Danish. “Yes, we were,” said the man to Fred. “But we’re very surprised to learn that you heard it.”

The alien SCAers continued staring at Fred and he at them. “Well, I did,” said Fred with mock joviality. “It sounded very nice. Do you sing in the woods often?”

Again the young man and woman exchanged words in their language. “We are here, yes,” said the tall man.

Fred was confused by the answer and studied each of them in turn, half-smiling. He thought he heard an accent, but he wasn’t sure. “So — so you’re saying you’re natives?”

“Yes, we are here,” said the man enigmatically, if not evasively.

Fred was being stonewalled and it raised his ire, as well as piqued his curiosity. Damn, but they look like what I imagine the Elves in Tolkien’s book look like, he thought. “So are you guys in one of those medieval reenactment clubs?”

“No.” This time the young woman had spoken. She now took her place beside the tall man and helped him stare very hard at Fred.

At this point Fred knew good and well it was time to leave. The young people were not exactly friendly nor forthcoming. He had stumbled upon something they were doing and they weren’t all that pleased about being interrupted. Fine. Good. Time to go. Good. Let’s go… But Fred was stubborn, and Fred was curious, and Fred’s rational, scientific mind needed answers. “But I said mae govannen and you answered back mae govannen, so you must be Tolkien fans, right?”

If the six mysterious medieval fashion models had been staring harshly before, it had just been a warm-up, because now they were really staring. “I am not sure of your meaning,” said the man.

“Well, I’ll say it plainly,” said Fred, “you remind me of the Elves in Tolkien’s book. I’ve just been reading Lord of the Rings, and I’m guessing you’re some sort of Elf reenactment group, right?”

“We are not some sort of anything, and we are not ‘reenacting,'” said the woman.

“So you’re not doing Tolkien Elves from Middle Earth?”

The sounds of the fast-flowing river, the wind in the nearby white pine came to the fore as Fred and the young people stared silently at one another.

“Okay, okay,” exclaimed Fred, raising his hands in surrender and chuckling, “I shouldn’t pry into your affairs. It’s a bad habit of mine. I do a lot of surveys and interviews in my line of work, you know.”

“You don’t believe in Elves,” said the man, his expression still blank.

“What? Yes, I like Elves! They’re very cool!”

“We are here to sing a cycle of songs to the river,” said the woman. She was taller than Fred, her long hair was light brown, and her eyes were gray-green and very deep and expressive.

“Oh, so you sing a lot then?”

“Yes,” said the woman — then she smiled and the tension somehow left the scene.

Fred felt as though a restrictive band around his skull had just been removed. He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly, relaxation flowing into his body. So these were a bunch of college kids from Europe, and they were having fun pretending to be Tolkien Elves. Cool. “So, can you sing something for me?”

The Euro-Elves looked at one another questioningly for a moment, then the young woman said yes. They proceeded to sing an antiphonal-style song. It was so beautiful that Fred had to sit down, his body turning to jelly. It lasted for five minutes — or an hour, he lost track of time. To say there was magic in their singing was to put it far too crude and simply. He felt his boyhood epiphany welling up within the wonderful sonority they had created. He could have sworn there was light all about them.

They had finished and were again silent for a good minute before the audience realized it. Fred jumped up and applauded. “That was — that was wonderful! Now, what language was that in?”

“Our language is what your Tolkien called Quenya,” said the tall man.

And just as suddenly the magic fled from Fred’s mind and body. He knew from poking around in the Appendices of Lord of the Rings that Quenya was the original Elven language. Yes, these young people were impressive, but, yes, they were also a bunch of fruitcakes! Again, a chill descended on the scene, the Euro-Elves noticeably tightening up. “Yeah, Quenya. I’ve heard of it. So you folks speak it fluently, huh?”

“Yes, of course,” said the young woman.

“And you come here and sing in Elf language to the river.”

“Yes,” said the young woman, now no longer smiling.

Fred’s false smile gave way to a frown as he rubbed his face with his hands. “Well, that’s quite a hobby, I must say. I’m a researcher and a computer specialist, and all this Tolkien stuff is rather new to me. You’ll have to excuse my–”

“You don’t believe in us,” stated the man in a flat tone. “You see us and apparently you can hear our songs, but still you do not believe your eyes and ears.”

Fred grimaced, trying desperately not to let go with a guffaw. “Don’t believe in you?” Again, Fred winced in an effort not to laugh. “I–I don’t know what to say to that. It’s just that I’m more used to–”

“You are from the so-called real world and we are not, you mean to say,” said the man.

“Well, now that you say so… I mean — I mean I don’t want to disparage your pastime here.”

“This is our life,” said the woman. “We are the First-Born and we rejoice in nature.”

Fred’s undisguised smirk turned to a theatrical leer. He no longer thought they were funny. He wanted to leave, but some part of him just had to get them to admit in some way that they were just play-acting. His stubbornness, his rationalism would not let him just pick up his pack, turn his back on them, and stride off down the trail. He exhaled sharply and stared at the woman. She had spoken so smoothly, so matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s special. I like the woods, too. So — so what’s your names. I’m Fred, Fred Dalmquist.”

“I am called Melian after Melian of Lórien,” said the woman.

“Oh yeah, like Lothlórien in the — the Tolkien book.”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Melian slowly. Her posture was again stiff and formal.

“So you guys must really be Tolkien fans. My daughter’s a big fan, too. She’s read all of his books.”

“Yes, there are very many books,” said Melian.

“Yeah, right. So, Melian, what do you guys do when you’re not singing in the woods? What do you guys talk about back at your tree house?” His tone was patronizing.

“Things unresolved. The growing doom.” Her gray-green eyes, now boring into his, seemed to flash with real anger.

He laughed, but then coughed, wanting to keep this young kook on the line. “Well, that’s a big subject,” he said with an even more patronizing tone.

“Indeed,” replied Melian in a wispy voice. She closed her eyes, took in a deep breath and released it.

Fred watched her, the superiority complex his wife always insisted he should work on reducing as big as it had ever been. But then suddenly it was as if some sort of pressure or ringing had started in his ears without the ringing sound. It was as if time had been stopped and then restarted again. Once more, he felt the shimmer of his teen vision. He eyed Melian suspiciously. “Yeah, I think about stuff, too. It’s just that I try and stay, well, grounded, you might say.”

“Someone like you rarely touches the ground,” said the tall man. “You spend your time in man-made spaces far off the ground, far away from the forests.”

Fred eyed the blond-haired, blue-eyed young man. “And you are?”

“I am called Olórin.”

“Okay, O-lure-in. Yes, you’re right. I don’t get out as much as I’d like to.”

“You must realize there is nothing to know but the forest,” stated Olórin flatly.

“Right. Yes, you’re probably right.”

“But you still want to laugh at us,” said Olórin, “even though you came here today to do anything but laugh.”

“Ahhh, yeah, I guess so,” said Fred in a slow, suspicious tone.

“For if you have no honesty, you have no hope here today,” continued Olórin.

“Ha! I guess that’s one way to put it.” He clapped his hands. “Yeah, well, I should be off.” At that he turned and left.

He stumbled back down the trail in a daze. He checked out of his villa and drove back home that same night. It was almost midnight when he got home, but he immediately burnt his Lord of the Rings set in the fireplace and then destroyed the DVDs with a hammer.

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