Another beautiful morning, I walk downtown past beds of still-blooming snapdragons and dodge beneath mangy plum trees, the fallen fruits of which have been tossed in little heaps on either side of the sidewalk.
I pause at the railroad tracks, which stretch to the horizon
and gleam in the morning sun, and gaze at the grain elevator standing a block
away to the west.
I have no idea how those things work. They must be privately
owned. Does everyone heap their corn into the same big bin? There must be more
than one grade. How do they keep track of it all?
Then I hear a train whistle, off in the distance. I’ve been
hearing that sound ever since I got here. I’ve seen a few trains go by from a
few blocks away. They don’t slow down, but merely blow their mighty whistles
seven or eight times as they approach.
Now, standing twenty feet from the tracks, I wait.
I’m surprised at how long it takes the train to arrive. I
didn’t measure it but it could have been five minutes. Maybe more. As the train
approaches, the conductor blows the whistle again seven or eight times. The
screechy, metallic, reedy, bellowing noise is almost frightening, as is the
clattering rush of the cars, many of them double-stacked with Hyundai
containers. The semaphore is down across the roadway, of course, and its hidden
bell, clanging somewhere nearby just above my head, adds to the exhilarating
cacophony.
A kindly looking woman named Kathy was sitting behind the desk. I introduced myself, and before long we were talking about the swans at Tamarac Wildlife Refuge. “That’s my favorite place in the world. It’s so peaceful there.” She says.
“Across from one of the broad overlooks there’s a small
pond,” she tells me in her soft, high-pitched voice. “Two adults and two baby
are often drifting there. The other day I just sat by the end of the pond, and
after a little while, they came over right in front of me, almost as if they
wanted to say hello.”
A tall gentleman comes striding up from the back of the
gallery and introduces himself as Jamie Robertson, the director. We discuss the
likely attendance for the evening event, and move on to the broader scope and
mission of the center. Jamie was formerly the dean of students at the Leech Lake
tribal College in Cass
Lake , and he tells me a bit about what’s been going
on in that neck of the woods.
At one point he mentions a sign he once saw in the window of
the local bank at Cass
Lake . It said, in Ojibwe,
Bring Your Money Here. He uses the
Ojibwe tongue to describe it, and that reminds me of something I’ve been
meaning to ask people around here. Has he ever heard anyone refer to the hills
of western Otter Tail County
as the Leaf Hills. (The term is derived from the Ojibwe phrase Gaaskibag-wajiwan which I'm told
means Rustling Leaf Mountains.)
“I live in the
town of Leaf River ,
and I’ve never heard that usage,” he replies with a bemused look on his face.
“It comes from the same Ojibwe phrase someone used to name Inspiration Peak back in the 1880s,” I say. “But I
haven’t met anyone around here who’s heard of it; maybe I should just drop the
reference.”
“No, actually that kind of thing can be very interesting,”
Jamie protests. “better to keep it alive, at least in print. In fact, when I
retire from this position, I have a dream of developing a sort of historic
atlas of this region, with contributions from artists like the ones we have
here, to preserve the various traditions and keep them moving forward.”
*
My afternoon excursion was to Old Wadena, which is located a
few miles north of Staples on the
The picnic area itself is enclosed in a split-rail fence and
pleasantly wooded, and there’s a path along a little bluff above the Partridge River that eventually drops down to a
little bridge. Continuing along the path, you soon reach the confluence of the
two rivers. I sat there on the grassy bank for quite a while, watching the
leaves swirl in the current under the surface of the water and looking out at
what appeared to be a row of silver maples, their leaves pale and yet filled
with afternoon light, on the opposite bank.
The fort is long gone, but in other respects things don’t
look much different here, perhaps, than they did in 1783. Then again, maybe
they do. Two hundred years ago the surrounding landscape was covered with
forests rather than farms, and there were quite a few majestic white pine in
the mix. (The original mill at New York Mills was built to cut white pine and
ship the lumber back east.)
On my return journey I took Highway 210 west from Staples. I
wanted to see the drumlin fields. The highway bobs up and down as it crosses
these elongated hills formed by passing glaciers maybe 30,000 years ago; no one
knows quite how.
The banners hanging from the streetlights in the largely deserted
village of Hewett say “On the Move”; perhaps they
should have said “Moving On.”
There are Amish farms here and there along the highway and
the countryside is gorgeous, with long marshy stretches full of willows between
the folded hills. The wind was whipping something fierce, and it gave the
silvery leaves in the lowlands an added luster.
But I find it’s hard to take a good picture of a drumlin. To
the eye, they stretch away impressively. To the camera lens, they look like
nothing but half of a low hillside.*
In the evening I was the focus of an official meet-and-greet
set up by the cultural center. I arrived ten minutes before the event to
find that there were two people there—Kathy Anderson, with whom I’d been discussing
swans earlier in the day, and Betsy Roder, the gift-shop manager and director of
the center’s residency program, whom I had not previously met.
“I’m glad I could make it,” she said, smiling, as we shook
hands. “The city council meeting got over early. The session last spring went
‘til eight.”
“I’m glad, too,” I replied. Then, looking around the largely
deserted room, I said, “Well, if no one shows up –” but Betsy cut me short.
“What do you mean? We’re here!”
Good point.
Two rows of chairs had been set up opposite a lonely-looking
metal podium, just beyond a table arranged with bars, coffee, and bowls of corn
candy. A nice spread.
And other women did begin to trickle in and sit down, one
after another, until we had a group of eight avid readers, most of whose names
I’ve forgotten. They all knew each other, of course; from her chosen spot at
the far end of the back row Kathy kindly introduced them to me as they arrived.
One of the women, I learned almost immediately, was in the
process of writing a book about her mother. Before reading a short piece about
French-Canadians in the Red River Valley, I learned that everyone in the room
claimed to be Finnish, with the exception of a tallish woman named Pat who was
mostly German—and a lapsed Catholic, to boot.
One woman arrived with her teenage daughter. “The reason she
doesn’t look like me is that her father is Japanese,” she said.
Her daughter, who had taken a seat in the row in front of
her mother, was grinning from ear to ear.
I eventually read a few short pieces. One about
French-Canadians, one about the Nisswa music fest. But mostly we all chatted
amiably about whale-watching and travel and writing and book production and the
book-buying compulsion.
I asked the young Japanese woman after the reading “Are you
a writer?”
“I write songs,” she replied in a shy, excited voice.
“You mean, with guitar music?”
“Yes. I wrote my first song today.” She went on to explain
that she’d written many lyrics but only today put her first song to music.
Are you going to put it on Youtube?” I asked.
“Someday,” she giggled again.
I ran out to the car to get some books out of the trunk.
Meanwhile, my Japanese friend had gone over to the piano in the back corner and
commenced to play a series of arpeggios, adding an element of pleasant chaos to
the already animated conversation in the darkened gallery.
Her mother started to tell me about the three kilns she’d
had to sell recently—evidently she was a potter—and how much she now regretted
doing so.
I would have started in on the Hamada-Bernard Leach-Warren
MacKenzie theme, but others were pulling out their check books and waiting for
me to sign things.
I eventually sold a few books, ate a brownie, learned a
little something about stray cats and a young boy’s upcoming birthday party,
and left the center feeling that things had gone pretty well.
2 comments:
Sounds exactly like what should happen when a writer goes on a retreat - wish I had been there to be part of the discussion - they look like a great group. Thanks for the fun updates! -- Pat Mc.
I enjoy hearing about this place. My grandmother lived on Crow Wing Lakes when I was little and we traveled through Staples to get there. I recall my dad taking that road with the repeating hill, speeding up over the crest, my stomach pushing up into my chest and dropping in the free fall. My sisters and I let out a "tourtured" giggled each time.
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