In Scotland

In Scotland there are millions of sheep but very few billboards. The roads are narrow but the people are sharp. As you drive up the A82 from Crianlarich to Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor, especially in the fog, you could almost imagine yourself on the moon.

There is no fog on the moon, however.

One problem with the Highlands is that you often don’t know where you are. Most of the villages have Gaelic names, which mean nothing to most of us. What’s worse, those names often have so many silent letters and are so hard to pronounce that you don’t know where to start. If you can’t say them, it makes it hard to remember them. I spent a week trying to get a handle on Drumnadrochit and never did get it right, though we stayed there for three days, in a modern, well-designed cottage in an orchard on a green hillside above Loch Ness with chickens and a lily pond at the bottom of the hill.

Hilary got the names down better than I did because she was the one typing them into the GPS of our rental car—some sort of Hyundai with far too many buttons to figure out. (But aren’t most rental cars like that? You diddle with enough things to get them going, and find out maybe four days later that you’ve been driving in “antiskid mode” the whole time.)

The Scottish Highlands rank among the most sparsely populated regions in Europe. And the fact that the landscape is largely covered with grasses, bogs, and woods rather than corn and soybeans adds to the sense of isolation. There are lakes (they call them lochs) and massive hills (they call them mountains) all over the place, and in the most beautiful and challenging stretches you’ll see hikers trudging along, across, up, and down the landscape like ants.

You’ll also see quite a few camper vans. We encountered many on the road, and saw many more in the parking lots. Evidently it’s legal to park your van and spend the night at any pullout you happen to come upon.

It’s become somewhat of a thing to “do the 500,” an enterprise that consists of driving the 500-mile coastal route around the top of the island. One problem with this approach, we were told by a couple who’d done it, but were now traveling by car, is that “you never meet anybody.” They were from Bristol, and they’d just returned from a week on the island of Lewis, a three-hour ferry trip from the mainland.

“What I never know about Lewis until we went there,” the man said, “is that there are no trees!”

Hilary and I maintained a comfortable pace throughout the trip, in part because we had no agenda, no “must see” destinations. We met lots of interesting people during our two-week visit; that was certainly one of the highlights of the trip. Everyone seemed eager to talk.

 In the Trossachs we met a couple from Manchester who told us “it was so hot this summer that the only birds we got on our feeders were starlings.” We met a young couple from Southhampton while we strolling a shingle beach in Oinch who had climbed Scotland’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis.

“We took the ten-hour route, rather than the seven-hour route,” the man said.

“Did you use ropes?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“We should have had ropes,” his girlfriend muttered.

They were perhaps the only couple we met who took a passing interest in Minnesota. “Is it in the middle? Is it flat?” To most Europeans, the US consists of New York, Miami, Las Vegas, L.A., and maybe the Grand Canyon.

The next morning, while taking a stroll around a small loch near Glencoe, we met a woman from Devon who was enjoying a “free” day during a week-long tour organized by a firm called HF Holidays (founded in 1914). She told us about the program, and we talked politics briefly. She consoled us for our current regime, and we offered condolences for Brexit and the string of bad prime ministers Britian has suffered under recently.

“How long did Liz Truss last?” I asked. “Forty-nine days?”

“Oh, don’t say that name,” she replied with a shutter. “Our new prime minister did good things in Manchester. We have high hopes for the future.”

On our first day in Drumnadrochit. We drove west on one-lane roads to Glen Affric (Dappled Glen) where we ran into a couple from Dundee. They were staying at a farm nearly for a week, hiking and studying the rewilding projects hereabouts; Glen Affric offers one of the few remaining chunks of Caledonian forest in Scotland.

When he heard we were from America, the man asked, “Why come to Scotland?”

“Landscapes. Birds. Outdoor stuff,” I replied. “We’re not much interested in the folklore, and couldn’t care less about Bonny Prince Charlie.”

“I’m with ya there,” he replied. “He was a wastrel, and he made a lot of bad decisions at Culloden.”

We took a hike up the glen along a bubbling stream, the crossed and climbed the steep hillside opposite, marveling at the rich vegetation—not only the towering Scots pines but also the ferns and heather and various unidentifiable ericaceous plants that covered the rocky understory. Along the way we passed several solo backpackers heading out into the brush with large packs. And on the way back up the glen on a one-lane road we passed a group of oddly garbed young men dragging canoes through the brush down to the river.

We toured the battlefield at Culloden the next day, late in the afternoon. Earlier in the day we’d driven a few miles down the coast of Loch Ness from our cottage in the hills to the ruins of Urquhart Castle, which changed hands many times during the wars with the English in the late seventeenth century, was later given by the English invaders to a noble family from the Aberdeen coast to maintain, and dynamited and abandoned a few decades later when it lost its strategic importance.

The ruins sit on a rocky shelf extending out into Loch Ness, and the views from the castle are superb, naturally—the buildings have no walls! (We didn’t see the monster … but we weren’t really looking.) The site is now equipped with a classy museum and a giftshop loaded with plaid scarfs, tiny bottles of Scotch, postcards, walking sticks, and other kitsch. We ate lunch in the café, which served fish and chips, meat pies, and vegetarian burgers loaded with exotic middle-eastern spices.

The people we got to know best were the ones who ran the B&Bs we stayed at. I’m thinking of Karen in Edinburgh, Graham in Ullapool, Moira in Dumgoyne, and Mairi in Oinch. Several had left home early in life and returned in late middle age for one reason or another.

Mairi might be the classic case. Before showing us to our room, she brought us into the breakfast room and pointed out the window at a cluster of distant buildings. “My aunt lived there, and I grew up in that house with the brown roof.” She pointed. “We moved away. My husband worked at the embassy, in security. But I always wanted to come back. There’s something about the landscape. It becomes a part of you. You miss it.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “We hadn’t been here long before I started thinking to myself, ‘Photography cannot capture the beauty. It’s all around you.’”

“Well, we bought this place,” she went on, “and started to run it as a B&B, invested in fixing it up as we built up some cash. Then Covid hit. We didn’t think we were going to make it.”

The next morning we found ourselves at a large square table in the company of a young man from Aberdeen and his girl-friend, a woman of Asian extraction who’d been raised in Germany. (They met in the Yucatan.) Seated next to them was a young woman with a long face and black hair who told us she was from Bologna.

“We’ve been to Bologna,” I said. “We flew in, rented a car, and toured the Umbrian countryside looking for paintings by Piero della Francesco: Urbino, Sansepolcro, Ravenna….”

She almost shrieked. “I’m actually from Ravenna, but I never mention it because no one’s ever heard of it.”

“What?” I said. “The mosaics, the proto-Byzantine architecture? The first time we ever had a wood-fired pizza was in Ravenna.”

“I was about to remind her that Ravenna was the capital of the Roman Empire—at least the western part—for several hundred years. But she had wisely drifted off to attend to her boyfriend, a frizzy-haired young man who didn’t understand a word of English and looked uncomfortable throughout the breakfast.

The young man from Aberdeen and his girlfriend had spent the day doing long hikes up local mountains (recommended by Mairie), while also finding the time to visit the spot where, in the Harry Potter movies, the train runs over the Glenfinnan Viaduct. They timed their visit so that the train would pass by while they were there. “We saw it,” he said, “along with about two thousand other people,” he said with a laugh.

We had no such glamourous tales to tell. I mentioned that we’d eaten at a very fine seafood restaurant out in the middle of nowhere a few miles from town, and asked Mairi why the waitresses had been so unfriendly. It turns out she’d known the chef since childhood, and told a long story about how she’d been assigned by her friend to discipline the woman’s son, her own son’s best friend at the time. He’d developed the habit of stealing bottles of gin from the restaurant.

“Did you visit him later in prison?” I asked. The remark passed unnoticed.

Graham, our host in the tiny hamlet of Letters, across the bay from the attractive town of Ullapool, was a different kettle of fish. He’d spent much of his adult life in California and upstate New York, but mostly on the road. working as a sound technician for touring rock-and-roll bands. It was clear that at the age of 69, he still loved rock-and-roll.

“I haven’t listened to rock-and-roll for ages,” I told him. “The last album I bought was The Beatles Second Album.” In an effort to keep the conversation going, I mentioned that a bit later in life I’d taken an interest in the music of Tom Verlaine.

“I knew Tom,” he said. “Very bitter. He was bitter because he felt he’d been neglected. But Marque Moon was a landmark album. It pointed the way to grunge.”

Graham was a staunch separatist. He’d voted for Scottish independence and grew heated as he described the lies that had been spread by the English during the campaign. “And the Crown!” he exclaimed. “They own vast parts of Scotland. They even own the sea. Don’t pay taxes. And the constitution prohibits the passage of any law that might harm the financial interests of the royal family.”

Graham’s wife, Natasha, happened to be at a UNESCO World Heritage Convention in Nepal.  We met their daughter, aged 15, briefly, while we were eating breakfast the morning after we arrived. “I’d like to stay and chat,” she said shyly as she stood in the doorway, “but I have to catch the school bus.”

After she left, I said, “You must have married late.”

“Three times,” he replied. “Too bad Natasha’s not here. She would have enjoyed meeting you.”

Graham knew the region well, of course—he’d grown up there. We told him we were planning to visit the Bone Caves, which were mentioned in several guide books.

“Waste of time,” he said. “The bones are long gone and the caves are only three feet high. You should go to Stac Pollaidh. It’s ten miles north of Ullapool.”

We’d never heard of it, but it turned out to be good advice. The peak is described online as a Graham (a Scottish mountain between 2,000 and 2,500 feet). It formed as a nunatak (a rocky peak protruding above an ice sheet) during the last Ice Age. Its smooth lower flanks were shaped by ice flows, while its jagged crest, made of Torridonian sandstone, has survived eons of frost-shattering weathering.

When we arrived at the site, we met a woman in the parking lot wearing dark silver sunglasses. She had a large pack on her back.

“Are you going camping?” I asked her naively.

“No. Just out for the day,” she said with a smile.

“What’s in the pack?”

“Ropes.”

It was a windy morning and we kept to the steep but smooth lower flanks. A climb past a gate along the cobblestone path put us in possession of an exhilarating view across the surrounding landscape of grass-covered peaks and valleys, with a small loch at the bottom. Isolated clouds were moving swiftly across the sky, throwing large chunks of the scene in shadow. Three antlered red deer were feeding on the hillside. We were passed on the trail from time to time by hikers a generation or two younger than us. One young man carried an infant on his back.

On Graham’s recommendation we continued north to a smallish café an hour away called the Lochinver Larder, regionally famous for its meat pies served with peas, mash, and gravy. The food was good, but the drive was better. A small two-lane road wound its way through gorgeous grass-covered hills for forty-some miles, reminding me of the Unaweep-Tabeguache highway in western Colorado, not in character, but in its isolation and ever-changing magnificence.

Our final stop of the day was the town of Ullapool itself. We’d visited the previous day before checking in with Graham. That day had been relentlessly gray, and when we stepped into the Ceilidh Place, a long white typically Scottish building a block off main street, it seemed like heaven. A bookstore was to the left, a hotel reception deck to the right. Four or five backpacks were lying on the floor behind a kiosk, belonging, I surmised, to travelers who’d be checking into their rooms later in the day. The tables and chairs in the back, visible through the windows of an interior wall, turned out to be part of a casual bar/café attached to the hotel. The entire place was fitted out with warm lights and well-worn wooden furniture. Two men were chatting at the reception desk, people were laughing a few rooms away, and a general bonhomie pervaded the place.

After perusing the books we went into the café and asked to see a menu. The waitress advised me to move our car to avoid getting a ticket, and told me precisely where to move it to. Once we were settled into a table, I asked a passing server about the langoustine.

“Is that like shrimp with everything still attached? Shells? Antennae?”

“That’s right. They come in a bucket, served cold.”

Hilary decided to take a chance and ordered the shrimp. I ordered the Cellidh Place bowl, a sort of hippie concoction comprised of chickpeas, quinoa, beets, cauliflower, carrot chutney, and garlicy yogurt dressing.

The langoustine, locally caught, were huge—maybe seven inches long—and beautiful to look at, in a beady-eyed, sinister sort of way. But there wasn’t much meat on them. And the waitress forgot to bring the “chips.” The salad was interesting, in that vaguely Middle Eastern vegetarian way involving cumin, garlic, and just a touch of cayenne.

The sun was shining when we pulled into town the following afternoon after our exploratory romp across Wester Ross. The boats in the harbor were more colorful, people were sitting at tables along the waterfront drinking beer. We stopped into a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and examine the colorful labels of the many Scotch bottles, boxes, and tubes—a local industry we’d been ignoring throughout the trip. And out of curiosity, we went into the ferry terminal to ask about the trip out to the island of Lewis, 50 miles offshore.

“It’s roughly a three-hour trip, depending on the weather,” the woman behind the counter said.

“So you probably can’t see the island from here.” I said.

“No. Definitely not.”

 The next morning at breakfast Graham asked us where we were headed next.

“Skye,” I said. I added that I we had no idea before our trip what a popular destination that was.

“At the car rental desk they asked everyone if they were going to Skye, and everyone said yes.”

“Oh, yeah,” Graham said. “For many tourists, a trip to Scotland means Edinburgh and Skye, Edinburgh and Skye, Edinburgh and Skye.” He said it three times, each time flapping his forefinger back and forth like a windshield wiper along with the words. “Edinburgh and Skye.”

We went to Skye because it’s one of the few islands you can access on a bridge. We reserved a tiny cottage on the Sleat Peninsula—the quiet part of Skye, as they say—because it fit our itinerary and was among the few reasonably priced lodgings we could find. Our plan was to check in the first afternoon and get a feel for the place, drive up through the island the next day, visiting a few of the notoriously overcrowded geological wonders and anomalies, and head back to the mainland the next morning.

We’d crossed the bridge and were motoring south along the island’s inner coast when the tire pressure light came on. That doesn’t necessarily mean much, but when it started to blink a few minutes later we knew we were in trouble. The woman behind the cash register at a gas station we stopped at told us the nearest hope of a repair would be Broadford, sixteen miles away. Our BnB was only three miles away, and it was on the way, so we pulled in there, met our hosts, and explained our predicament.

“It happens all too often around here,” Anthony said. “You’ve got to call the car rental company.“ Once I’d reached the proper line, Anthony took the phone, and an hour later a 24-hour tire service van was pulling into the driveway.

We spent the evening on our little gravel patio looking off to the east across the Sound of Sleat toward the mainland. The next morning we headed back up the island coast toward Portrie and the weird formations of the Quiraing beyond. But the rain grew heavier to the point where we decided to turn around. The landscapes were largely obscured by rain and fog, and the driving, never easy in Scotland, had developed a treacherous aspect.

Lucky for us, there was a castle, a museum, and a café in Armadale, a few miles south of our cottage. The museum was excellent, covering everything from pre-history to the Picts, the Romans, the early Christian missionaries, and the Vikings, to the clans, the wars with the English, crofting, the enclosure movement, the pivotal visit of George IV in 1824, and much else.( The same material had been available in the local museums of several of the larger towns we’d visited, I’m sure, but we’d been passing them by.)

After a pleasant lunch at the café we took a stroll around the grounds and on to the castle, which was merely a shell, though from a more recent era than the ruin we’d seen on the shores of Loch Ness a week earlier.

Before returning to our cottage, we took a series of obscure one-lane roads north across hilly country to get a good look at the Cullens, the biggest mountain range in Great Britian. The road seemed to have been merely pasted onto the landscape with no attempt at serious engineering, and I wasn’t keen on making the trip, but Hilary had her heart set on it. I'm glad we went.

When we reached the opposite coast we drove through the ungentrified villages of Achnacloich, Tarskavaig, Tokavaig (where a good-sized stream rushed into Loch a’ Ghlinne), and Org,  with the ruins of Dunscaith Castle visible on the opposite shore. We saw the Cullens in the distance, I think, maybe ten miles away, though in the mist it was hard to tell how big they really were.

On our way back across the peninsula, we got a pretty good look at a golden eagle.

There was still plenty of light in the sky when we got back to our cottage, and we decided to take a walk pask the Torabhaigh distillery and down through the woods to the waterfront, where we could get a better view of Caisteal Chamuis, the third in a trio of castles that once served to defend a seafaring kingdom. When was that? Who were these people? To judge from the names, I’d say they were Vikings. Norwegian settlers arrived on Skye around 875 AD.

But the woods were muddy and we gave up the project, though along the way we met up with a little boy carrying a fishing rod in a tube.

“Did you catch anything?” I asked.

“No. It was my first time,” he said. “But I’ll come back tomorrow.”

That’s the spirit!

Ten minutes later we came upon a mother and daughter (or granddaughter?) who were gathering blackberries in zip-lock plastic bags. (Perhaps they would call the berries “brambles.”) The elder woman told us they were on holiday from the Midlands.

There are still some good ones right over there.” She pointed.

“Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “We’re going to make a crumble.”

 We spent our last night in Queensberry, on the south bank of the Firth of Forth, a fifteen-minute drive from the Edinburgh airport. The inn has been there since the mid-nineteenth century, and it has a warm, old-fashioned feel. It’s not hard to believe that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote part of Kidnapped there.

 The Forth Bridge, a dramatically cantilever orange structure completed in 1892, runs almost directly overhead. In 2016 the bridge was voted Scotland’s greatest man-made wonder, and it’s also been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

While we were strolling the riverbank after our evening snack we met up with two men by a ticket booth near shore, feeding crackers to a crow. Hilary noticed that they both had binoculars (so did we) and we went over to chat. It turns out they were professional bird-spotters who had been hired by an environmental agency to survey the bird life in the vicinity.

“We’ve seen skuas, graylag geese, black-headed gulls coming through recently,” one of them said. “The firth is a east-west migration route this time of year.”

Who knew?

Itasca in Evening Light

Itasca State Park attracts half a million visitors a year, but it's also big—33 thousand acres—which makes it easy for visitors to “get away from it all” if they know where in the park to go, and when. Hilary and I spent a few days there recently and were richly rewarded.

A defining event of our last visit took place when we pulled out of the driveway, leaving the tent behind. This time, we snagged a last-minute room before we left in the four-season suites, a modern complex just up the hill from Douglas Lodge with a small kitchen, stripped-log furnishings, and faux-Northwoods decor. There isn’t much of a view out the window, but when you’ve been stomping through the woods all day, who cares?

The trip north through Little Falls and Wadena has become so routine (though Menagha and Sebeka are wonderfully droll) that we decided to add a small detour to our route. After the traditional stop at Morey’s Fish House in Motley for fresh walleye and herring in horseradish sauce, we continued west on Highway 10 past New York Mills to Frazee, where Wannigan Regional Park opened recently, directly adjacent to the high school football field?!?

It’s a small park—a few miles square—though the locals have big plans for extending and developing it. It consists of a river, a covered bridge, and a few short walking and biking trails across a harmonious arrangement of woods and open fields. We’d been fighting a strong headwind all the way north, and it took some effort just to assay the lovely scene while standing in the parking lot.

One added feature, and the likely reason there were five cars in the lot when we arrived, is the larger-than-life-sized wooden statue of a troll that’s been built in the woods down by the river by a Thomas Dambo,  a Danish sculptor and self-proclaimed garbage-artist. He and his team have crafted quite a few such figures in the region, and around the world, out of recycled materials. Many people enjoy hunting them out. I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of fairy tales. I have quite a few volumes from the Pantheon Folklore Library—French, Arab, Irish, Swedish, Japanese, Native American, Victorian, Provençal—not to mention the classic works by Grimm, Andersen, Perrault, Marguerite de Navarre, and the Neapolitan pioneer Basile.

Trolls have their place in some of these worlds, like genies, kitsune, memegwesiwag, and leprechauns. But trolls are usually small, malevolent, creatures, also elusive. A twenty-foot wooden statue of a troll, resting in broad daylight under a tree, doesn’t seem much like a troll to me.

We took a tour through the reserve on our bicycles, and made a detour on foot through the woods to pay obeisance to the wooden giant. A half-hour later we were eating lunch a few miles down the road at a lakeside café in Detroit Lakes called Hub 41.  It was voted “best new restaurant in Minnesota” by Lake Time Magazine (which I’ve never heard of.) The view of the big lake from the patio was nice; the food was satisfactory. The most notable thing about the place was the decor.

From there it was back east on Highway 34 to Itasca, where the angled afternoon sun streaked through the dappled woods and lakes along the south entrance to the park.

We stopped by the campground office to pick up our key. The woman in line in front of us had a license plate from New York. “I’ve been camping out for a month,” she said, “I need a room with a bathtub.” She held up her left arm; it was in a cast.

Once we’d hauled our stuff into our suite, we got some dinner fixing together and headed down to the lakeside picnic area. We had the place to ourselves. Evening had arrived, and we sat at a picnic table a few feet from shore eating a cold supper while we listened to U of MN biology students (I guess) far out on the lake chatting as they kayaked toward the headwaters. “Yes, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Maybe we need to return to …”

It reminded me of my days as a camp counselor, of childhood evenings in Oklahoma playing kick the can, and also of something my mother told me one evening at the family cabin on Lake Vermilion about Carl Jung’s belief that the crepuscular hour was a “liminal threshold” where the ego's defenses dropped and the "unconscious" opened the soul. 

That may be true. But it’s the sound of distant, youthful voices in excited conversation that seals the uncanny emotional power of the moment.

The Schoolcraft Trail

We spent several hours the next morning in the vicinity of the headwaters, most of it on the Schoolcraft Trail, which follows the western shore of the lake. Small waves of warblers were working the woods along the trail. Most were juveniles or had lost their mating plumage and were hard to identify, but we did recognize a blackburnian, a black-and-white, a chestnut-sided, a Nashville, a golden-winged, a pine, a black-throated green, and a few other species.

On our way back to the car we ran into a couple heading out to the point. The man was wearing a floppy leather hat of the Buffalo Springfield variety and a tee shirt from the Winnipeg Folk Festival. “Are you from Canada?” I asked him. “

No, we’re from Cold Spring, just south of St. John’s. I sued to be an electrician at the university there.”

Hilary and I attended one of the first Winnipeg festivals, back in 1975. They last attend in 2018, just before Covid hit. “We couldn’t believe it! They had rap in the mix!”

Hilary mentioned St. John’s resident potter, Richard Bresnahan, and the woman piped up: “They’re going to light the wood kiln on October 14 at 4 p.m. It’s open to the public, and very ceremonial. You should come.”

“But I like to go a few days later, at night” the man added, “when the kiln is really hot and the flames are shooting up from the chimney toward the sky.”

Back at the parking lot, we ran into a ranger and we caught his attention.

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said.

“I’m not the guy to ask,” he said, “I’m in security.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. “The last section of the trail has been closed for years now. Why?”

“They made some archeological finds out there and they don’t want people disturbing the site before they get a chance to dig.”

“Well, we just want to go out and enjoy the view …”

“You’re not the kind of people they’re worried about,” he said.

So we went back down the trail, climbed through the brush alongside the barricade, and continued a quarter-mile to the point to enjoy the wonderful view across the lake toward Schoolcraft Island and the pristine wooded shoreline of the scientific and natural area beyond.  

State Fair Strategies

A day or two before visiting the fair, I copied the text from a Star Tribune article ranking the food into a Word document, then edited it down from six pages to two by removing all entries relating to cookies, desserts, ice cream, and alcoholic beverages, and every item that ranked lower than three stars. I also removed the cutesy narrative verbiage that accompanies such articles:  “We all liked the xxx but the yyy was bland and strangely salty at the same time.”

We forgot this document at home, but it’s just as well. Once you’ve had a pronto pup, an “about a foot long” hotdog with fried onions, a chocolate malt, and a bag of hot, greasy mini-donuts, you don’t have room, or funds, for much more.

We left home at 7:45—twenty minutes earlier than usual—and didn’t meet up with the line of cars west of the North Lot on Larpenteur Avenue until after we’d passed the Bell Museum. Halleluiah! Twenty minutes later, after repeatedly cursing the stream of cars entering the line from side-streets to the north, we turned the corner into the lot. It was going to be a good day.

We entered the fairgrounds proper at 8:45. There were still hints of coolness in the air, and the North Plaza was half-deserted. But there were plenty of people around, and when we spotted Giggles Campfire Grill down the way Hilary said, “Why not have some walleye cakes right now?”

So we did.

Year after year, we habitually begin the day in the Eco-building, but we decided on a whim to tackle the art building—the day’s piece de resistance—first. But we made a stop at an ATM because we couldn’t remember if credit cards were widely accepted on the fairgrounds. (Duh! I must have been thinking back to those days in junior high when you went to the fair with a friend and fifteen dollars in your pocket, which you’d been saving up all summer.)

The art exhibit was a mixed bag, as usual. The two qualities that were in short supply were freshness and expressiveness. Some works were laborious constructions using bottle caps or hand-made tiles. Some were nature paintings done from photographs that got all the details right but failed to bring things to life. The sculptural pottery was uniformly uninteresting.

But there were also quite a few pieces that made you look again, and again. Everything came together, for one reason or another. A casual confidence, a lack of evident effort. Also, perhaps, a sense of mystery.

Here, for example, is a piece by Kimberly Wetzel called "Hidden in the Marsh."

It isn't easy to see the delicacy of the lines, but I would simply say that it's pretty cool.

Or if that's a little messy for your taste, how about this wonderful image of a green heron that has been created entirely out of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Or how about this landscape by R. Baller called "Sharp Landscape."

The title hits the nail on the head. The painting has a sharpness in the edges, and also an intensity in the tints, without becoming overly detained or undermining the almost statuesque beauty of the landscape itself. 

On a different plane of exactitude in Ronda Dick's elegant and slight stylized "Who Doesn't Love a Birch."

You may accuse me of highlighting nature-oriented works while ignoring the portraits, scenes of human drama and whimsy. Maybe so. But here is a piece of whimsy that I could not pass by or ignore.

And here's a remarkable pencil sketch by Robert Lundgren with the portentous title "Portent" that captures the spirit of the scene without in any way clarify what it was all about.

In one of the first aisles I came upon this print by Josh Bindewald called "Discourse." I don't particularly like the colors but for some reason the ensemble works.

 As Hilary and I made our way through the building I heard one volunteer say to another, "The line at the crop art exhibit is already two-and-a-half hours long."

Yikes! But that's the thing about the fair. There are plenty of things to do. If you want to wait in line, you wait in line. If you don't, fine. You go do something else.

When we emerged from the Art Building, I noticed there was no line at the "about a foot long" hotdog stand, so I bought one. Hilary usually geta a Pronto Pup at the stand down the street, but the line there extended all the way down past the Education Building. A forty-five minute wait!

In the distance, the line at the Pronto Pup food truck.

So she went to get a malt at the Kiwanis booth and we sat in the shade of the park across the street listening to a performer called Duke Otherwise sing a song about a dog. The fiddler was very good!

In the 4-H Building we watched a large group of young people do a choreographed line dance while singing a cheerful song the exact import of which I no longer remember. I noticed that the kids in the front were much better at it that the ones in the back, and I tried to imagine what the rehearsals had been like, off in far away Pelican Rapids or Waubun or Thief River Falls. (After all, the fair is billed as the "great Minnesota get-together." Shouldn't we be trying to get to know the farm kids from outstate?)

We spent some time in the Handicraft Building admiring the knitting and the quilting and even the jewelry. 

The bagpiper had begun to play outside O'Gara's by the time we reemerged into the sunlight. The day was getting hot. (It had reached 91 by the time we left.) We headed for the Agriculture Building, where I chatted with a woman from the Minnesota Horticultural Society about old cottonwood trees and the best time to fertilize your garden. We crossed back to the Farmers Union, and along the way I stopped to tell a woman selling metal roofs about the rubber roof we recently had installed on our house. (These people are bored. They'll be happy to talk to anyone.) 

At the Framers' Union we bought a pork cutlet in a bun with cole slaw and a cup of iced coffee, which we consumed on a shady park bench nearby. As we passed Ye Olde Mill I suddenly realized I had always wanting to take a flume ride through a dark tunnel where you're sure to get soaking wet. But not today.

We learned some things from the woman at the Voyageur National Park booth outside the DNR Building, wandered into the bat cave and wandered back out again, looked briefly at the fish pond--always refreshing--some beautiful chickens, a man sheering a sheep ...

Our final destination was the West End Market ... a terrible, treeless place to be. Five dancers were twirling in a performance circle, only one or two grades higher in skill level than the 4-H teens, I would say, though their costumes were better, and it appeared they were having fun. (Maybe they were getting paid?)

We bought a $12 strawberry lemonade on our way back to the lot on Larpenteur Ave that was so sour we had a hard time finishing it. But we were in need of hydration, and the Culligan booth was three blocks away.    

Tinges of Autumn

And aren’t they grand! Who knew (or remembered) that cool morning air could feel so good.

Our weekend commenced with a Friday morning trip to the downtown farmers’ market. Such color! Such hubbub! We contented ourselves with a few spectacular tomatoes, two long and massive leeks, a huge clump of kale, and a cardboard tray of oversized zucchini and summer squash.

One teenaged kid was unloading ears of corn from the back of a pickup truck by the armload onto his table.

“Think you’re going to sell all that?” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied blasély, and went back to work.

I asked the guy with the zucchini if he’d do a three-for-ten deal. “No. I work too hard,” he replied.

We had a few friends over for a late afternoon meal on the deck consisting of kale salad and a simplified version of cassoulet in which the duck and sausage are replaced by a few slices of bacon to go along with the chicken, cannellini beans, squash, and leeks.

Almost by chance, we kept to the southern French theme with the wines: a Saint-Véran, a Vacqueyras, and an obscure white from the Costiéres-de-Nîme.  

The air was cool, the dappled evening light was beautiful coming in through the trees, and the chipmunks were plunking. One red-eyed vireo passed by and lingered to examine the white berries on the dogwood shrubs along the deck. For a moment we thought it might be a warbler heading south!

The next morning, hardly fazed by the food and wine, we loaded our bikes on the car and drove up to Elm Creek Regional Park, which has the finest bike trails in the metro area—at least for the kind of recreational biking we do. 

It’s a nice mix of hills and flats, woods and fields, marshes and lakes, with relatively few cyclists and nary a dwelling in sight along its 20-mile length.

Another thing I like about it: there are so many twists and turns and so few recognizable landmarks that you seldom know quite where you are or how far you still have to go.

Catbirds meowed and squawked from the woods, peewees pined, goldfinches chuckled. We passed fields of goldenrod and black-eyed Susans. The sumac is not quite turning red, but a few plums are ripening on the trees.

Back home, Hilary diced a few of our market tomatoes and raided the garden for a handful of basil to put together a topping for bruschetta. She added some drizzled olive oil, salt, a minced clove of garlic, or two; that’s all it takes.

The tomatoes were moist and red and absolutely flavorless. The vine-on tomatoes at Trader Joe’s are far better. But the ensemble tasted good heaped onto pieces of toast. The mild afternoon heat was already on the wane.

 And one of our resident owls started to hoot again. Everyone likes it cool.

   

The Revolution of Everyday Life

The recent death of Raoul Vaneigem, at the age of 92, must give all of us pause for thought.

To be honest, I’d never heard of the man until I saw his obituary in the Times. His chief claim to fame was to have written a manifesto in 1967 called The Revolution of Everyday Life, which was an inspiration to the student uprising that closed down universities in Paris and elsewhere in May 1968.

The literal translation of this little book of aphorisms—sort of like Mao’s “little red book,” I suppose, also popular at the time—would be The How-to-Live Handbook for the Young. Whatever wisdom this book may contain, I’m probably too old to benefit from it. But I requested a copy from the library, and I also requested another of Vaneigem’s many subsequent books: A Cavalier History of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, I fetched from my basement stacks a slightly musty paperback copy of The Spirit of May by J.-J. Servan-Schreiber (marked ‘25 cents’ in pencil on the front fly) and also the hardcover volume right next to it, The Taxis of the Marne, by Jean Dutourd (one dollar).

Perhaps you see the connection. The taxis Dutourd refers to were used to transport soldiers to the front lines in the exuberant early days of World War One.

I had originally planned—that is to say, forty years ago—to include a third volume in a study of the vicissitudes of the modern French state: Strange Defeat by Marc Bloc. That essay never got written. None of those books got read. I can’t find the third one. Is it still around somewhere? (Who cares?) Anyway, if you're familiar with the books, you can connect the dots.

Perhaps I was intuitively following the path set out by Vaneigem: down with capitalism, screw the state, abandon the quest for wealth and glory and enjoy yourself, your friends, your community.

In one line quoted in the Times obit, Vaneigem asks: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”

I guess this is where surrealism comes in.

Vaneigem’s name came up during a breakfast conversation I had recently with a friend of mine at the Buttered Tin. We also talked about Agora, the classic film set in ancient Alexandria in the months before its famous library burned down. Jeff had recently had breakfast with a mutual friend, the documentary filmmaker and poet Mike Hazard. Jeff did the sound production for several of Mike’s films.

I’ve heard it said more than once that “everyone knows Mike.” It might almost be true. I worked with Mike briefly on a book of poems by the late Roy McBride, but I’ve run into him here and there at other times. He once came up to me at a book convention covering his face with three pieces of “poetry on a stick.”

There’s a touch of zaniness, color, freedom, and “Why not?” in much of Mike’s work, and his films often focus on other masters of this poetic domain.

It was a beautiful morning, and when I got back home from breakfast, Hilary and I decided to pay a visit to the Andersen Library on the West Bank, which is hosting an exhibit of Mike’s work.

We came prepared with a telephone number. The building is locked: you have to call someone to come to the door and let you in. This may explain why there was no one in the galleries but us. The exhibit spaces are small but elegant, almost lavish. Several Plexiglas kiosks contained samples of postcards, flyers, chapbooks, and photographs that either depict Mike’s work in arts education or are the result of it.

You can view quite a few of Mike's works, including videos, here. 

A second room, beyond the main gallery, has been given the look of a gentleman’s club: antique globes, finely unholstered wing-back chairs, stained glass windows, and maybe even a replica of a bust by Houdon. It reminded me of the rare books room on the fourth floor of Wilson Library and the book-collecting legacy of James Ford Bell and the library’s namesake, Governor Elmer Andersen, both of whom employed book scouts for years to explore antiquarian collections in London and the Continent in search of rare volumes.

It made for an interesting contrast—aristocratic digs and exuberant ephemera. I love them both. I have enough books in the house to satisfy almost any pang of curiosity, but I also have a cheap metal pin stuck into the window-frame behind my desk that says “Demolish Serious Culture.” I picked it up years ago at the Walker Art Center’s extensive Fluxus show dedicated to the work of Joseph Boyce and the German avant garde.

Some of that stuff is playful, some of it is pretty angry, or grim. By way of contrast, here’s a poem by Mike, reprinted in the little handout on a table near the door.

Namesake

Pounding a black gavel

Engraved with a nickname HAP,

The handle of a grandfather I never met for real,

And my last name, HAZARD—

My heart pounds.

 

It was time for lunch, and we decided to cross the bridge on the freeway to Dinkytown to find a place to eat. I don’t need to tell you that the neighborhood has changed since 1978, the last year I tended parking lots for the U of M. I don’t need to list the used bookstores, hamburger joints, bakeries, guitar shops, and Italian restaurants that have vanished either. 

We had a perfectly decent lunch at a Vietnamese café called Pho Mai that seems to be an offshoot of a more elegant restaurant in Brooklyn Park. To be honest, it was better than the tendon we used to get at the Tokyo cafe years ago. But the street is entirely different. Perrines is gone. Annie’s Parlor is gone. Gray’s Drug is gone. The Loring Café is gone. (Wasn’t I going to skip that part?)

Around the corner, the upstairs incarnation of the Bookhouse is still there and still packed with used books. Yet in this case, I find that my interest is gone. You can tell at a glance that most of the books are rattier than the ones we have at home. The poetry section is especially bad. The books are too skinny, dust jackets gone, you can’t read the titles on the bindings. All is lost. They might as well chuck the whole section into the Mississippi.

As I was passing the front desk I heard a young man on the telephone: “Books from that era are usually so ragged that they aren’t worth anything. Old is not necessarily good.” I was impressed: he’d heard it all before--and said it all before--but by the tone of his voice I could tell he was being good-natured about it.