Duluth Overnight

After hosting a large family gathering on Thanksgiving, we thought it might be a good idea to take a brief vacation, and what better place to visit than Duluth? I had downloaded an article from the Midwest Weekends website about hike opportunities in the hills above the city, after which you could return to your car via local transport. We were also equipped with a list of top restaurants and a few pages of the official Duluth events calendar that I'd edited down to size.

We were on the road by 7:45 Sunday morning. The freeway was deserted and the countryside was mute and hauntingly beautiful. The low sunlight spread across the fields and swamps; every branch stood out,  sharply etched in brilliant, muted colors, as if a calm perfection had settled across the landscape, dormant perhaps but not yet frozen: a soft blue sky with scattered puffy clouds, clumps of gray aspens, orange-tipped willows and darker red-osier dogwoods catching the sunlight in the ditches, and vast islands of red oak trees, as crisp and rusty brown as a newly poured bowl of Wheaties.

We took the 21st Street exit off the freeway in downtown Duluth, drove up the hill past UMD, and by 10:45 we were pulling on our balaclavas in the parking lot at Hartley Nature Center. We eventually found the thin strand of the Superior Hiking Trail amid the broader, flatter, and more prominent ski trails and headed up into the woods. The trail was hilly, rocky, snow-packed, and icy in some places, but it felt good to be moving through the woods, and once we reached to top of the ridge we could see the sunny glare of Lake Superior in the distance through the trees.

The plan had been to cross Arrowhead Road, continue along the trail though Bagley Nature Area, and pick up a bus back to the nature center on campus, but it had been slow going through the woods, buses only run once an hour, and we chose to return to the car on foot through the woods on Old Hartley Road instead. It was lunchtime.

We were intrigued by a little place on the list I'd created called Martha's Daughter, a café tucked into a narrow storefront on Superior Street with a very old "Coney Island" sign above it. It was warm inside. That was a good thing. On the other hand, the café was brightly lit and deserted, the music was bad, and the seating stretched bench-style along the wall across from a lunch-counter with stools—not my favorite arrangement. We were greeted by a bulky young man wearing a crocheted stocking cap, tilted to the side. We examined the menu briefly (Chicken and Waffle $17) and decided to move on.

Superior Street was like a wind tunnel, and by the time we got to Pizza Luće our standards had dropped considerably. But the place looked suburban and there was a 20-minute wait, so we ambled back toward the car with the idea in mind of revisiting O.M.C., a ten-minute drive away in Lincoln Park.

Then I noticed the Zeitgeist Cafe. It has always seems dark and deserted to me in passing, though it's often touted as a centerpiece of the downtown Duluth revival. We crossed the street to take a closer look and found there were people sitting at the bar!

Inside it was warm and lively. A folksinger was at work near the front window. Looking to find a place a little farther away from the music, I notice that a long flight of stairs leading up to a mezzanine above the bar.

"Are there tables upstairs?" I asked the greeter as she handed me a menu.

"Do you have trouble with stairs?" she said, giving me a look of friendly concern.

"I'm not that old," I said, as good-naturedly as I could. "After all, we've been out hiking for the last two hours."   

"In that case, let me show you to a table." And up we went to a table overlooking the front window and the entryway far below.

Hipsters and families with young kids were scattered at tables here and there. Strange and diverse works of art hung on the walls. From a distance the music sounded pleasant.

"That's an early Beatles song," Hilary said.

"I don't think he's got the melody quite right," I said. "What is that? 'Here, There, and Everywhere'?"

The food was top-notch. Hilary's salmon hash was tasty, and my omelet, with a creamy river of white wine sauce dribbling out from  a pale yellow envelope stuffed with prosciutto and spinach, was suffused with a distinctly fresh aroma of garlic. The potato latkes alongside the eggs—our waitress called them "rosti potatoes"—were light and mild.

"I read in the menu just now that this place is a non-profit," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Yes, it's a group effort to give back to the community, and not only as an art space. What comes to mind right now is the program we have to provide transport to elderly people who can't get out to buy groceries."

The only troubling aspect of the dining experience was the number of times our waitress had to go up and down the stairs to bring us coffee, jam, ketchup, and to refill the water glasses. During one of her visits, I said, "There's something in this jam besides strawberries, I can't quite pinpoint it...."

"I'll go ask the chef," she said, and was off before I could dissuade her. She reappeared a few minutes later.

"Cinnamon." 

"Ah, yes. Sorry to put you to all that trouble, up and down all those stairs."

"That's my job," she said cheerfully. "And besides, I used to be a ballerina."

*   *   *

On our way out we wandered around the lobby of the theater that adjoins the cafe. Someone had installed a Day of the Dead exhibit on a few banquet tables, with plastic skeletons, orange and red posters, and other unidentifiable things. I was enjoying the bright colors, but wasn't looking very closely.

The lobby of the Zeitgeist Theater

At our next stop, the nearby Nordic Center, we had an opportunity to examine a collection of objects cut from an entirely different piece of cultural cloth: gingerbread houses.

The center occupies a modest storefront that used to be a print shop. A brick ramp runs up through the back of the long thin space, who could say why. It was dark in the room, though in the light coming in from the street I could dimly make out a group of women sitting around a table, chatting freely as they worked on some sort of craft project. Gingerbread houses of all kinds had been set out on white sheets along both walls, at a level low enough to be seen easily by eight-year-olds.

I especially liked the roofs, some of which were studded with spice drops. A few of them had rows of Dots running from eave to eave. I was reminded of a similar house my mom made when I was a kid, following instructions she'd gotten from Ladies Home Journal, no doubt. She constructed the roof out of Necco wafers, overlapping them like multicolored shingles. It's seemed a tragedy that, due to the adhesives involved, no one--not even me--would ever get to eat those wafers. 

The Nordic Center struck me as a poverty-stricken but good-natured place, run by volunteers yet dedicated to its mission, and perhaps even punching a little above its weight. We chatted with the two women who seemed to be in charge about how they'd gotten the little houses, who'd put them together, and whether they keep them from year to year. (No.)

One of the women had been to the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis recently and come home with two smocks by celebrated Swedish clothes designer Gudrun Sjödén. She was offering to sell one of them at half price because it didn't fit her very well. Hilary tried it on; it didn't fit her, either.

Then the woman said, gesturing toward the craft table,"Alison here had a show at the Swedish Institute recently." Really? Alison went into the back room and returned with her card. Turns out she's a professor at UMD, and has recently written a book about Norwegian author Cora Sandel. I looked at a few of her paintings on line. Very nice.

After a brief stop at the nearby Karpellus Museum—always free, always deserted—to take a look at some letters exchanged between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, we decided to head up the shore to enjoy the lake, the rocks, and the now-bright afternoon sun.

The offshore wind and the low light gave the lake a rugged five o'clock shadow, though it was only three. Near the end of Stony Point we stopped to take a picture of an old fishing shed. At one point along the way,  perhaps imagining what might have been going through Hilary's mind, I said, "Too bad the candy store in Knife River is closed for the season."

"Well, there's also a nice candy store in the Seitz Building on Canal Park," Hilary replied. True enough.

Back in town, we bought a few pieces of candy at Hepzibah's Sweet Shoppe, and then wandered into the kitchen supply shop next door, where Hilary took a liking to a locally printed Christmas card. Looking at the address on the back, I said, "This company is on South Lake Avenue. They might even be in this building."

Thirty seconds later, one flight up, we found the Kenspeckle Letterpress— "Curious Engravings / Eccentric Broadsheets." It would be hard to imagine, I think, a more attractive setting for such an operation or a more colorful and whimsical selection of woodblock prints, posters, note cards, and other printed objects for sale. A man in slightly outmoded dress (owner Rick Allen?) showed me the presses and told me a bit about them, but they were on the verge of closing up shop and we spent most of our time hurriedly thumbing through the cards and printed posters.

I came upon one small poster devoted to the word coddiwomple. "This looks very familiar," I said to the woman behind the counter.

"You probably saw it on the Grammarly website," she replied with just a hint of annoyance in her voice. "It got forty thousand hits. We didn't get anything."

Oh.

Hilary picked out two nice sets of cards, marked down to half price. I think we were catching the tail end of an extended Black Friday event. Merry Christmas!

By the time we'd checked into our hotel out on nearby Park Point, the sun was setting. It was approaching 5 p.m. The next event on our free-and-easy agenda, a "beer and hymns" singalong at Sir Benedict's Tavern, was scheduled to start in five minutes. But it was cozy there in the room, looking out through the last splash of evening light past the Coast Guard cutter moored nearby and on across the inner harbor to the distant grain elevators in Superior. 

We decided to hole up, order a pizza, do a little reading, and sort out a plan for the coming day.