Following The Inuksuk

My great, great, grandfather, Peter McGlyn(n) was born in County Sligo, Ireland.  Sometime early in his life, Peter emigrated to England.  He met and married Margaret Barron and had 5 sons.   One of the sons, Alphonsus, my great grandfather, emigrated to Canada when he was a young man.  He married Mary Jane Kelly and had 7 children.  One of the sons, Peter, my grandfather, was the only one of his siblings who emigrated to the States.

I have had a wonderful time tracing my ancestral heritage back to Ireland.  Searching for dates and hints here and there has been an adventure to be sure.  During the search, I began to wonder about the impact of those who have gone before me.  What traits had they left for me to follow?  How much of what I am today has been impacted by the generations before me?

One of my friends, +Clao Wue told me about the Inuksuk. She built one in the Scottish Highlands at a fantastic place she had fallen in love with.

Wikipedia explains, “An inuksuk (plural inuksuit) ^[1] (from the Inuktitut: ᐃᓄᒃᓱᒃ, plural ᐃᓄᒃᓱᐃᑦ) is a stone landmark or cairn built by humans, used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America.

The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for travel routes, fishing places, camps, hunting grounds, places of veneration, drift fences used in hunting ^[4] or to mark a food cache.^[5] The Inupiat in northern Alaska used inuksuit to assist in the herding of caribou into contained areas for slaughter.^[6] Varying in shape and size, the inuksuit have longtime roots in the Inuit culture.

Historically, the most common type of inuksuk is a single stone positioned in an upright manner.^[7] There is some debate as to whether the appearance of human- or cross-shaped cairns developed in the Inuit culture before the arrival of European missionaries and explorers. ^[7] The size of some innaguait suggest that the construction was often a communal effort.^[4]”

The Inuksuk is a type of cairn. A cairn helps travelers keep heading in the right direction.  It is unlike a road map or GPS which prescribes a specific route.  Cairns allow for variation in the path on the way to the next cairn.  Sometime, when a view, or interesting plant, or animal has caused me to deviate from the path for a closer look, I have had to back track to the last cairn to regain my bearings.  The beauty of this is getting to experience the same path twice,  but from two different perspectives.

What I find fascinating about the Inuksuk is its tendency to be human in its shape.  Unlike an amorphous pile of rocks, it’s like having someone there pointing the way, encouraging you to keep moving forward.

I think the generations of our families point us to things.  They are our Inuksuk.  They point to things within ourselves and things around us.  When I look into the face of my father, I see some of the characteristics of my grandfather.  When I look at my father’s life, I see bits and pieces of my grandfather’s life, and so on.

In a time when we were less mobile as a society, each generation were impacted by the previous one or two possibly three generations which preceded it, because they lived next door or even upstairs.  Now days, it is a different story.  My parents are in New York.  I am in Michigan. While some of my kids are in Colorado and California. Thousands of miles separate our daily lives and significant life events.  While we might catch these events in flickering pixels, they are better seen in the flesh and blood of family faces.

I think we need inuksuit throughout our lives.  We need a “human form” reminding us about where we came from and at the same time, pointing us forward to the future.  Maybe your family hasn’t been so connected.  But there are inuksuit, people who are willing to guide, to friend, to experience life and be the witness to your journey.

Carrying the Cairn

For those of you who go hiking or hill-walking, as my Irish friends call it (+Nicky McBride), you will be familiar with the concept of a cairn.  A trail marker can be just about anything from a painted “blaze” on a tree (Appalachian Trail), or stick shaped arrows on the ground.  But a cairn is more traditionally understood to be a pile of rocks.  But not just any pile of rocks.

Wikipedia tells us, “a cairn is a man-made pile (or stack) of stones. It comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn (plural càirn). They vary in size from small stone markers to entire artificial hills, and in complexity from loose, conical rock piles to delicately balanced sculptures and elaborate feats of megalithic engineering. Today, cairns are built for many purposes. The most common use in North America and Northern Europe is to mark mountain bike and hiking trails and other cross-country trail blazing, especially in mountain regions at or above the tree line.”

While the most common usage of a cairn is a trail marker, stone piles have been used for millennia to mark boundaries, religious ceremonial places, and to commemorate events.    When a significant event had taken place, stones were piled up in a unique way as a memorial marker or a reminder of the event.  

Commemoration is great reason for making a cairn.

Almost 20 years ago, I first heard of a place called Isle Royale.  It is a remote island out in the middle of Lake Superior, the biggest of the 5 Great Lakes in the US.  It is a true archipelago formed by glacial movements long ago.  It is accessible by ferry, but can only be explored on foot.  What started as a thought slowly became a dream to hike thru the wilderness that is Isle Royale.

The dream remained just a dream for 13 years.  I had been cleaning out some files and found my Isle Royale folder.  I lovingly leaved through the collection of papers.  Each article, every magazine, all my handwritten notes were examined carefully.  I thought I would share my long lost treasure with our children when they came for Thanksgiving.

Surprisingly, my sons (which include son-in-laws) said, “Let’s do it, Dad!”  So the planning began for a week on Isle Royale the following August.  Video conferences, emails, the creation of a Facebook page, designing of tee-shirts and numerous phone calls kept us all connected for the following months as we prepared for our journey.

Men of the Dream

In the middle of all this planning, I realized what a big deal this was for me and for my boys.  My sons were making my dream a reality.  They were giving me a gift, an opportunity to experience my dream.  My dream had become their dream.  That was very special indeed.  I needed to do something.  They needed, I needed, a tangible reminder, a memorial marker for this dream.  We needed a cairn to remind of this dream, this trip.  Have you ever given someone a bag of rocks as a gift?  Unless they’re diamonds, or some other precious gem, don’t bother.  For some reason, people don’t see the value in a bag of plain old rocks.

So I searched and found the next best thing to a bag of rocks.  I found a “cairn” necklace, the outline of a pile of rocks stamped on a small piece of metal.  Just before we boarded the ferry for the island, I gave each of my boys their “cairn”.  We all put them on and to this day, some 3 years later, we all still wearing them.

For that first trip (and the 3 subsequent), we made a cairn somewhere on the Island and placed our “personal cairns” on it.  Here is the picture from our first trip.

Fiontar Tine 2010

By the way, this past year, 2012, my oldest grandson (14 years) and my father (81 years) came to the island with us.  Each one got their “portable” cairn as well. There were 4 generations of “cairn wearing” McGlynns on the island.  The island was very happy; so was I.

Do you have a cairn?  It can be of the portable or permanent type.  They are important for our lives.  More than memories, they are tangible evidence that something significant has happened.  When we take the time to build or make or find a physical object that represents the event, it adds weight to the memory.  It becomes a silent witness to the event.  There is also an added benefit.  It will cause people to ask, “What is that for?”  I have had literally hundreds of people ask me what my necklace means.  Imagine my joy, when I get to tell them about my dream, about my adventure and about my boys.

So every day, I carry the cairn.