North Shore Weekend

We got back an hour ago—maybe two—from skiing the Homestead Loop, a few miles up the Sawbill Trail. It’s prettier than I remember, or perhaps I’ve become more sensitive to landscape with the passage of time. There are maple forests and birch forests, cedar groves, occasional clumps of spruce, few and far between. Along some stretches you can see the sweep of the big lake in the distance, almost unbelievably expansive from this height and distance, with Carleton Peak to the right and another knobby outcrop—Oberg Mountain?—to the left. We took a few long downhill runs, which are challenging less because of the turns than the bumps and gullies that you drop down into suddenly and then swoop up the other side of, perhaps going airborne a bit at the end.

The snow cover is the bare minimum, maybe three inches. Just enough to keep the rocks and roots at bay, enough to keep us going. Twigs and grasses stick up through the white snow hear and there, though the grooming machine has rudely mangled and severed the worst of them. Very few people have been out, and ice is certainly not a problem.

I can image people saying, “Ski conditions poor.” These are the ones who stay at home to watch college football, perhaps. But the snow-cover is only one of several factors. Weather? Cloudy and 28 degrees. Crowds? None. Terrain and companionship? Superb. Silence? Complete. Final ranking: Very good indeed.

By the time we got to the turn-off to the Oberg Loop, we did some calculating for the first time and determined the entire circuit would be more than eight miles. The stiffest climbs were just beyond the turnoff, we were getting tired, and considering we were not yet quite halfway around the loop, it seemed we had a long way yet to go. But we eventually reached a crest from which we could see another long stretch of gray peaks in the distance through the trees, one of which, I’m sure, was Leveaux Mountain. By this time we’d come around and were now looking down across a valley rather than out toward Lake Superior.

The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the chatter of red squirrels; a single deer barreled past us through the brush at one point; and at another point on the trail we were suddenly overwhelmed by a strong skunk-like smell. I suppose it could have been a bear hibernating nearby?

There were several easy downhill stretches on the return route, during which we felt we were making good time. On one of the steeper ones I came up over a gully and didn’t quite land right. For a split-second I thought I might pull it out before I went seriously horizontal, landing on my left shoulder in the snow and feeling a stab of pain as my calf bent under me and tightened into a cramp. A second later I entered that familiar zone of feeling, half embarrassed, half chuckling to myself at the thought that I’d be back on my feet in no time if it weren’t for the stupid skis stretching out in opposite directions from the ends of my legs.

“Are you OK?” I heard Hilary shouting from the bottom of hill.

We rounded a corner a bit further on and the rugged gray two-tiered mass of Carleton Peak came into view once again below us, its gray-green pines looking like some sort of shaggy goatee.

A half-hour later we emerged from the woods and shuffled over to our car. The lot now held eight or nine other vehicles, though we’d passed only one skier near the halfway point of our three-hour jaunt, and two family groups near the trailhead. I found myself lifting my left leg up into the car with my hand, grunting and groaning, though alongside the usual minor aches I was tingling with joy at having completed a very fine ski on the last day of the year.

* * *
My plan had been to work up a little essay about Plato during the trip, but I’m not sure I’ve got it in me right now. Last night I read Montaigne’s essay on repentance, during which he doesn’t really describe what repentance is, but comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t have a whole lot of misdeeds to repent of. Montaigne is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, but he is nothing if not self-satisfied, and his recurrent denials of any sort of agenda or expertise sometimes strike me as tiresome dither.

This morning I got going on the third speech in Phaedrus, during which Socrates tries to explain why and when madness can be a divine gift rather than a debilitating illness. The two-horsed chariot and all of that. His description of what the gods see as they look out in the opposite direction from the starry firmament is quite interesting and incredible, like The Book of Revelation, (which I’ve never read.) As is his theory of ten thousand years of a roaming soul.
But the salient elements to be found in Plato’s work, in a nutshell, are these:

First and foremost, an intuitive sense of the motion of the spirit toward the good. Yet the soul already knows more of the good than it has actually experienced, and Plato spends a good deal of time trying to explain why. He approaches this feeling, which we might fairly call an inkling of the divine, from several avenues, and concludes that we know of things we’ve only imperfectly experienced because we met up with them in a previous life, and vaguely recollect the experience.

A more static way to describe the same situation would be to say that there’s another world out there—the world of forms. The things we experience in this world are but imperfect copies of the ones they’re copies of, or aspire to become. There is a perfect goodness, a perfect, truth, and so on, all of which the things of this world “participate in” to a greater or lesser degree. If pressed to provide a single quality that these various types of eternal perfection possess, perhaps Plato would say harmony.

Accompanying this theory of forms is another signal contributions to our understanding of life: the breakdown of our values or ideas into categories—the good, the true, the beautiful. Trying to determine the validity of a remark, for example, is something different from evaluating how persuasive it is. Plato raises this issue time and again in his attempts to differentiate the craft of the sophists, who were then teaching young men the art of rhetoric, from the critical acumen of philosophers like himself who were in search of the truth about things. We take such distinctions for granted nowadays, or worse that that, ignore them entirely, and the result is error and confusion. Worst of all, perhaps, is the habit of conflating them deliberately, for example, by suggesting that “everything is political.” Plato made a great effort to distinguish between qualities and values, and in the process elevated thought to an entirely new level.

* * * *
This morning we drove up the shore and headed inland on Cook County 7, planning to do some skiing at Bailly’s Creek. A quarter-inch of soft snow had fallen during the night and the minor roads that snake across the broad hills above the big lake were sheer white. We barely made it up a small hill at the turnoff onto County 158, and a few hundred yards further on we noticed a patch of snowy commotion in a ditch where a large vehicle had gone off the road recently. We had not seen a soul since leaving the main highway, and when an opportunity presented itself at a fork in the road we gingerly turned around and retraced our route to Highway 61. The snow looked good up there but the prospect of hiking miles to a phone and waiting for hours for a tow truck did not seem that appealing.

At Cascade State Park, a few miles to the west, there was less snow but the road to the trailhead had been plowed and sanded. There was no one in the lot. We took the trail uphill alongside the east side of the ravine above the Cascade River through the pines and cedars. It’s a pretty route, and from a turn above the ravine we could see the sun, which was just emerging from behind the gray cloud cover, as it hit the face of a distance cliff. The pines in the foreground were cloaked in white and the scene had the look of a Christmas card, though the fresh cold air and the exhilaration of our mild exertion lent an added luster to it.

We continued up into the woods, then took the long way back along the park boundary, avoiding the more direct downhill runs that might well have been murderous with only two or three inches of snow on the ground. Near the parking lot I heard a pounding sound, and looking over into the woods, I saw a black-backed woodpecker at work on a half-fallen spruce a few feet off the trail. I recognized the white line across the face immediately, and as he turned his head I spotted the little yellow cap, too.

It’s a great feeling to come in off the trail, return to your snug little cabin on the lake, put some Haydn piano trios, chosen at random, on the little plastic CD player, and pull the chicken liver pâté, red cabbage, and candied beets out of the refrigerator. A huge ore boat suddenly appears outside the window, if such a thing is possible. The clouds have closed in again but they look thin and there are patches of blue here and there. Maybe we’ll see some stars tonight!

I’ve had it with Plato; and turn my attention to that wry and ornery North Shore prose poet, Louis Jenkins. Many of these one-paragraph monologues, one to a page, carry the music of quiet angst or desperate irrationality, usually diffused (though not contradicted) by a humorous turn in the final sentence.

And now the music, too, grows mores serious, as we complete the long weekend with the fourth and final CD of the Budapest String Quartet performing Mozart’s String Quintets and the quartets dedicated to Haydn. The Quintet in G Minor K.516, which is playing just now, is especially dark and lovely. The set was recording in 1952, the year I was born.

Jenkins has some sort of connection with the early Plato, and also with Montaigne, for that matter. He allows himself to run on, not sure of where he’s going but confident that the method can lead to some interesting juxtapositions and is more likely to produce a moment of beauty or insight than anything that’s been worked out rigorously ahead of time.

That’s what makes the poems so interesting: the flow of commonplace associations that bring us to surprising conclusions. Plato would chide me if I went so far as to describe these creations as “true.” It would be muddling the categories. But Jenkins has captured the flavor of middle-aged dissolution in striking images that exhibit a degree of Plato’s divine madness in their brilliant illogicality. Jenkins knows the fish, the vessels, the woods and winds of the North Shore, and he captures their flavor well. But that isn’t what these poems are about.

In one poem he takes a walk across a woodlot at dusk, observes the call of the birds and the sway of the aspens, which remind him of spindly women lined up waiting for partners at a dance. He carries this flight of fancy for a sentence or two and concludes:

“…Now the music begins again: ‘Moon River.’ Ladies choice. That tall homely one bends over to whisper to her friend and .. oh, hell, they’re all looking straight at me.”