A Few Decent Films

On a quiet night I pause to consider a few of the year's most celebrated films. Among my favorites are

The Two Popes. Once again, Anthony Hopkins plays a somewhat dastardly individual—Pope Benedict—but at lease he doesn't eat anybody. And Jonathan Pryce, as the soon-to-be Pope Francis, stands as a perfect foil to Benedict's world-weary nihilism. Excellent settings and dialog throughout.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. The most emotional film of the year focuses not on Mr. Rogers but on the man who has been assigned to interview him. The interactions, once again, are choice.

The Wild Pear Tree. My favorite film of the year, this Turkish gem runs to more than three hours but the pacing is exquisite, and at no point did I find myself thinking, I wonder when this will be over. The film recounts the life of a young man names Sinan, fresh out of college, who returns from the city to the small town where he was raised. He plans to be a teacher though he hasn’t yet taken the exam. He’s also written a book and has high hopes of arranging to get it published. Trouble is, the book is a fictionalize memoir of his adolescence, and it paints an unflattering picture of his relatives, neighbors, and friends.

He chats at length with the mayor, who declines to help him, though if it had been a tourist guide he would have had no difficulty providing a subsidy. The mayor sends him to the man who runs the local gravel pit. Another lengthy and futile conversation ensues. Back in the city to take his exam, Sinan runs into a locally famous author in a bookstore and corners the poor man for quite a while to discuss his manuscript, the current state of literature, and so on.

Interspersed with these lengthy but discordant and futile exchanges are encounters involving Sinan's old high school flame, two imams stealing apples from a tree, and Sinan’s own parents. His home life has long since come unglued thanks to his good-natured father’s gambling addiction, and he often visits his grandparents on their rustic farm in the hills near town.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the world's heavyweights. He won the Palme 'd Or at Cannes a few years ago, and his recent film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was dark but stunning. Here he has given us a complete multi-generational package. Call it art. Call it life.

Little Women. The time shifts are confusing, and those who know the book well (I don't) might quibble with aspects of the screenplay, but director Greta Gerwig succeeds in animating almost every frame of this film with razzmatazz energy and emotion.

Parasite. Often humorous and filled with unexpected twists, there is never a dull moment in this zany film, though it never gives us a good reason to care about the protagonists, a family of clever near-do-wells who ingratiate themselves with  a wealthy household while dutiful, long-term employees get cast aside without a qualm. To assuage those pangs of conscience, try Shoplifters, a  recent Japanese film with similar class-consciousness.

Knives Out. Daniel Craig's Southern accent takes some getting used to, but this is otherwise an engaging whodunit.

Before the Frost. This Danish film set in the mid-nineteenth century, focuses on a farm family that’s struggling to keep food on the table. In the opening scene, Jens, the old man, sells a cow he can ill afford to lose to support his lovely but malnourished daughter and the two nephews he’s raising now that his sister has died. Soon afterward a wealthy Swedish farmer who’s moved south to be with his mother in her old age offers to buy a patch of Jens’s land—land that Jens needs to grow fodder for his two remaining cows. These are desperate and dreary times, but Jens finally works out a deal, giving up his entire farm along with its livestock, in exchange for a pension. After all, the farm is insured, so if it burns down ... ? There is one condition: the Swede will have to marry his daughter.

It’s a nightmare scenario—Jens and his daughter don’t fit in amid these sophisticated foreigners, not to mention the two nephews—but the situation unravels with stunning artistry, with new and ever more grim moral quandaries at every turn of the path.

The Farewell. This Asian family drama isn't red-hot, but it's plenty of fun, as various relatives gather to say goodbye to the family matriarch before she succumbs to the illness that no one has told her about.

Less interesting were—

Marriage Story. This well-made but inconclusive film left me with no one to root for or admire. It's much shorter and slicker than Ingmar Bergman's landmark Scenes from a Marriage, which is a plus. But I preferred Chef. Or why not Noah Birnbaum's excellent previous effort, The Meyerowitz Stories.

The Irishman. Why should we care about a man who steals thousands of dollars of merchandise from his employers without a qualm before we've even gotten to know him? I turned it off before the jerk did anything really disturbing.

Cabin in the City

I haven't left the house in days, except to shovel the driveway, refill the bird feeder, and deposit the container of vegetable peelings onto the compost pile out back.

During these snowy stretches, when the evening commute becomes treacherous and  outstate travel positively reckless, I count my blessings in a) not having a commute at all, and b) feeling no great need to leave town. The other afternoon I was sitting on the couch with a pile of books beside me, watching the sun go down while the fire from a single log roared in the Jøtul stove. We were listening to a brand-new CD of piano music by Sibelius—I might describe it superficially as a cross between Grieg and Saint-Saens. Hilary had brought home some fresh walleye from the supermarket. And potatoes. When the recital was over we cued it up again.

   

Yes, there are advantages to having a cabin in the city—that is to say, of having a home in the city that has a woodsy feel. Among other virtues, inhabiting such a dwelling obviates the long drive from the city to a lakeside retreat. It also eliminates the toil and expense of maintaining two domiciles. Of course, the signal purpose of owning a cabin or a "summer place," for many, is to make it possible to exchange, at will, the noise and clutter of city life for the simplicity and quiet of the woods. It follows, therefore, that an urban home must, before all else, be woodsy and quiet to deserve consideration as a "cabin."

I couldn't say when I started using the term "cabin in the city" with reference to our house but I suspect it was during one of those informal tours people give to guests visiting for the first time. Passing through the conventional living room and the modest kitchen, we would reach the more unusual dining room, a later addition set at a 45-degree angle to the rest of the house with a twelve-foot ceiling and tall windows looking out toward the backyard. Visitors would look out through the windows to the broad deck, the narrow sward of grass below, and the woods beyond.

first snowfall

From that point I would direct their attention to the left, where a new room has just come into view doubling back toward the front of the house. A previous owner—back in the 1950s, I'd guess—converted the breezeway between the house and the garage into a relatively spacious room paneled in knotty pine, with that small Swedish stove I mentioned jutting out into the middle of it. A pair of antique Ojibwe snowshoes now leans against the brick wall behind the stove, and some faded mallard decoys sit on the ledge up top.

"We call this our cabin in the city," I might have said facetiously on the occasion of that now-long-forgotten tour.

I was joking, of course.

But over time the underlying truth of the remark began to sing in. There isn't a lake anywhere nearby, and the woods out back is only twenty feet thick at best; we could probably name the individual trees. But the room has the feel of a cabin. And the house itself, though surrounded on every side by other smallish, one-story, post-war ramblers of similar construction, is only one strip of housing away from an extensive wood running down a steep hill to a marsh, a creek, and a far larger chunk of undeveloped land that continues south for several miles through Theodore Wirth Park and the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes to Minnehaha Creek. 

That might explain why deer often pass through the yard and sometimes spend the night, why we hear owls hoots every winter and sometimes find them perched in the yard, why a beautiful fox passes through on odd occasions ... and so on.

This is common suburban stuff, I know, but it keeps us looking out the windows in every season, taking walks around the block, biking down Wirth Parkway to Cedar Lake and beyond, feeding the backyard birds, listening for the high-pitched keen of the local Cooper's hawk.

Light flows into the house at every hour of the day. We often sit in the living room and watch the sun come up, and cook dinner with the pink spread of sunset above the backyard woods just outside the dining room windows.  

The first house we owned, in South Minneapolis, didn't have much light. In 1980, the year my mother died, we bought a one-and-a-half story "shotgun" house on Grand Avenue built in 1907. It had crumbling limestone foundations, an octopus furnace, and a coal bin in the basement. (I imagined, way back then, that the coal bin would make a good wine cellar; trouble was, I didn't have any wine.)

The house next door effectively blocked out all light from the south. To the north the view of the neighbor's house—no great thrill—was largely obscured by a massive oak staircase leading up to the second floor. To the east the front porch, with its aluminum screens, allowed little in the way of natural illumination to enter. Our view to the west was entirely obliterated by the dark oak buffet of the type that had been so popular in 1907, and also during the 1970s, when suburban kids like Hilary and me had returned to the city in search of authenticity and tradition. Let me confess here that I have never stripped an inch of oak in my life, though many of my friends lost precious brain cells liberating their woodwork from the tyranny of paint. All the same, I liked the "mission" look, and still do, up to a point.

The only room in the house that had a view of any kind was a small second-floor room facing west that had a sash window. But the room wasn't big enough to be used for anything except an office, a sewing room, or a nursery. Neither of us spent much time up there.

In contrast, our cabin in the city is filled with light. Looking out, we don't image or dream that we're somewhere else. We're looking at the shapes of the trees, trying to identify the little birds moving through the forest or scraping up the underbrush.

How we happened to arrive here is a story in itself. After spending seven years on Grand Avenue—a major bus route with houses built unusually close to the street—we decided the time had come to start looking for someplace new to live. I say "we" but it was Hilary who initiated the search. She hired a realtor named Pat who showed us quite a number of dwellings in our price range in several parts of South Minneapolis—we were still committed city-dwellers—but none of them were much better than what we already had. In exasperation Pat asked if there were any other neighborhoods we'd like to investigate.

At that moment something came to mind. A few years earlier we'd been invited to the birthday party of a friend of a friend, a woman we didn't know well. It was a joint party, however, and it was being held at the other birthday girl's house, way out in Golden Valley. As we zigged and zagged the final few blocks to that event I remember saying to myself, "Why would anyone live way out here?"

But the house was nice. There were some woods in the back. I even got the impression there was a stream off in the distance, though I couldn't see it. Hilary loved the place.

So when, years later, Pat asked about "other" neighborhoods, I said, on the basis of that single evening, "Why not line up a few houses in Golden Valley?"

A week later, on a hot summer night, Pat took us around to a succession of smallish ramblers, trim but uniformly undistinguished, all within a few blocks of one other. The last one on the list looked much like the others. But when I walked in the door, I noticed that the house extended much farther back than you might have guessed while standing in front of it on the street. As we walked toward the back we entered a room bent at an angle, with tall windows looking out onto a deck. When I saw the two short steps down from the dining room to the den, I had one of those deja vu experiences that's both pleasant and creepy. It wasn't just that this house was as nice as the one we'd visited years earlier. It was the same house. Of course we had to buy it.

It might be worth mentioning that the man we bought the house from held an executive position in the Nature Conservancy. He'd recently been promoted to a post in Washington D.C. and he and his wife were eager to move, but they were having trouble selling the house. The asking price seemed too high for what looked like a conventional rambler. "Not a drive-by," the ad in the paper read. But it was considerably lower than what the house was worth.

When he gave us a house tour, he spent less time discussing the virtues of the plumbing than identifying the various trees he'd planted in the yard. There was an American chestnut and a Haralson apple tree in the front and a row of tall red cedar forming a privacy screen in the back. Along the edge of the deck he and his wife, an environmental lobbyist, had planted a mountain ash, a Russian olive, and a row of gray dogwoods. They also maintained a handsome vegetable garden in back, with a pin oak nearby and a buckeye flourishing just beyond at the edge of the woods. They'd planted the terraced garden spaces under the bedroom window with windflowers—wild geraniums, wild honeysuckle, and golden alexander come to mind—and they'd put down trillium, hepatica, and dutchman's breeches in the shadows of the little woods.

Most of those plants are gone; the yard is a lot shadier now than it was thirty years ago. But we've replaced them with other things, and we've also nurtured more than a few of the volunteers that have arrived. But the place had been well nurtured before we arrived.

One obvious drawback to owning a cabin in the city is that you have nowhere to escape to when the rat-race starts getting you down. But is this really the case? For much less expense than maintaining a vacation home Hilary and I can go practically anywhere we want to go for a few days, then pack up and leave. After returning to the same resort—even the same cabin—year after year, a familiarity and hominess begins to settle in.

I admit, this coziness will never approach the feel of a family cabin with a layered, multigenerational history, but it will also be free of such chores as retrieving the dock that floats away with the ice every spring, removing the pine needles from the shingles on the roof, and keeping the problematic and perhaps dangerous gas line to the antique propane refrigerator in good repair.

Well, you know what they say: "You can't have everything."

New Years Journal

Lake Superior. New Year's Day. It's getting dark. Fairly calm out on the big lake.

Not many cars on the freeway driving north. We ate lunch at the Vanilla Bean (Swedish pancakes stuffed with lingenberries, walleye cakes topped with swirls of aoili) bought some fresh whitefish at Mont Royal supermarket, took a little hike along the shore and through the woods at Two Harbors, and stopped at Cooter Pottery a few miles back in the woods just east of town.

Just as we arrived I saw Dick Cooter approaching through the woods. He was returning from his morning sauna. "I'm just recovering from the bubbly we had with the neighbors last night," he said with a smile as he kicked the pile of snow away from the door into the showroom. Hilary asked him a few things about his firing methods (wood fired kiln stoked for 36 hours, which eventually reaches 2400 degrees) and he asked us if we'd seen any good birds. (I had my binoculars around my neck.)

A few days earlier he'd seen a snowy owl on a path in the woods. We told him about the ones we saw last winter sitting on the runways out at the airport in Minneapolis—not quite the same thing.

Dick headed back to the main house—his hair was wet—and we continued our wander through the chilly showroom. Hilary eventually settled on a flat open bowl with scalloped rim and a cosmic yellow-green glaze unlike anything we have, and we put some bills in the container on our way out.

* * *

We're at a new cabin this year, number 8. The units are architecturally identical but the views differ slightly. This one has a broad rock shelf out front and a mountain ash off to the right as you face the lake.

Another novelty: by sheer coincidence a friend of Hilary's is staying in the cabin next door with her husband. I'm afraid it might be a little harder to settle into that "away from it all" mode with Barb and Dave nearby. We'll see. Barb is adamant and sincere about not intruding in our space, but Hilary is more adamant about reassuring her that it won't be a problem. Right now the two of them are off exploring the ski paths on the resort property. It's almost dark; I hope they get back soon. Meanwhile, I've got a glass of wine, some peanuts, and a few books here beside me on the rustic futon couch.

For example, Big Cabin by Ron Padgett. A good part of this slim volume consists of cabin notes similar to the ones I'm writing here.

"Who was it that used to say, 'I get tired of hearing myself think'? (There must be people who would say the opposite: 'I am very pleased to hear myself think.')"

I fall squarely within the second category. I'm usually thinking about four or five things—often spurred by something I've read—and I take great pleasure in doing so, though I don't imagine or expect that others will be amused by the process or the result. I consider it a wonderful gift to possess a mind  cluttered with half-baked ideas  to be investigated, elaborated, pursued, fleshed out, and otherwise scrutinized more closely. The act of writing them down forces me to polish and clarify a few of them. And occasionally I arrive at a determination of whether one or two are actually true!

I ran across this remark just the other day in Susan Sontag's journal, As Consciousness Is Harness to Flesh:

"I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think.
But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when-talking). If I'd written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently...
This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MOMA to complain about my attack on the American playwright Edward Albee: “I don’t claim my opin­ions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn't mean I’m right.”

A good conversationalist should be able to couch his or her judgments in language nuanced enough to facilitate further conversation, should others involved have differing opinions. Whether Sontag could do this I don't know. But it strikes me as disingenuous for her to put "I" and "thought" in quotes. These were her thoughts at the time. Better simply to admit that we entertain thoughts the same way that we entertain guests. They come and go, and only with time and repeated exposure do they become trusted friends and pillars of personal identity.

*  *  *

A fine dinner of fried whitefish, perfectly cooked broccoli, and noticeably fresh boiled potatoes. Butter everywhere. We have now used up three-fourths of the butter we brought with us, much of it for frying the fish. Bill Evans on the iPad: "You Must Believe in Spring."

*   *   *

My plan was to get to know St. Thomas Aquinas better during this trip—don't ask me why—but opening a book called The Cave and the Light, I almost immediate get distracted by someone else: the Florentine neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino.

"Through the power of love we become fully conscious of our powers as spiritual beings. Suddenly we realize we have the power to shape our lives, our environment, our relations with others, with the same confidence and creative range as God himself. 'Therefore the mind in understanding conceives as many things in itself as God in understanding creates in this world,' Ficino explains, 'in speaking it utters them in the air; it writes them down on sheets [of paper] with a quill; in making images it figures them forth in the material of the world.' Love's ascent, in short, teaches us how to become creators like God himself.'"

Not sure that was worth writing out, but there it is! Yet I'm slightly troubled by the notion, which appears several times in this chapter, of love as "a desire for beauty" or some such thing. Wouldn't it be more accurate to describe love as the recognition of beauty, or some other value? It might be argued that the recognition engenders a desire for possession. But the love comes before the desire, and the desire, carefully examined, might turn out to be an urge, not to possess, but to absorb into and somehow become or participate in that value. It should be obvious that I have not "carefully examined" anything here.

Rather than pursuing a long line of historical analysis, let me explore the association between love and recognition as it relates to the bands of fuzzy gray clouds that were hovering out over the lake a few hours ago, with a pale pastel blue sky behind them. I saw and I loved. A marvelous moment that no line of poetry could capture or reproduce—though it might be worthwhile trying. There was no desire involved except a desire to share the moment, the feeling, the recognition.

*   *   *

"Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses." Abbot Segur

*   *   *

Thursday morning. Total dark at 5:30. Coffee a bit strong, and, I forgot to pack my bathrobe. But this fisherman's knit cotton sweater will serve, warm and bulky, baggy, droopy.

The poems in Big Cabin are light and mostly frivolous. On the other hand, the poems in Louis Jenkins' new collection, Where Your House Is Now, are almost invariably strong. Still, it seems strange that I left the house with neither a Bly collection nor and Tang poets in my bookbag. I did toss a small collection devoted to A.R. Ammons. Haven't thought about him in years—if ever. Other early morning options include Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics, and Sheer Joy, in which Matthew Fox interviews St. Thomas Aquinas. There's also plenty of food for thought in Arthur Herman's The Cave and the Light. The Council of Sens, Abelard against St. Bernard, 1140. Remember that date.

Sunrise at 7:52 according to Hilary's phone. Sunset tonight at 4:27. Lots of darkness these days.

The date 1140 was also the year that Gerard of Cremona arrived in Toledo, where he learned Arabic and spent the rest of his life translating Aristotle into Latin.

*   *   *

Morning ski at Gooseberry. One car in the lot. It probably belongs to the woman shoveling about an inch of snow off the sidewalk with a shovel mounted on wheels.

"We saw a coyote just now out near the highway," I said.

"Really!" she replied. "I've never seen one around here. Wolves are getting pretty common. What color was it?"

"White and gray, touches of rust. I suppose it could have been a wolf."

We skiied for maybe two hours, the usual trails along the east side of the river up to the footbridge and beyond, though we added the short extension that runs under the "deeryard" and then rises to that bivouac shelter. But rather than take that climb we veered left, which put us on the lake side of the ridge. I'd forgotten how nice the views are from there. I walked down the first half of one long hill. Good call.

A single beautiful raven passed us overhead several times, cawing. As large as an eagle, almost. Shapely tail.

We saw a dead deer on the far side of the creek, maybe fifty yards away; a distant splash of brownish-red, two stiff legs, the naked ribs half-hidden behind  the trunk of a tree.

And a blue patch of sky expanded, the birch trees took on a coppery hue, soft light, and just a sprinkle of white on the spruce trees so prevalent along the trail.

*   *   *

Lunch at the Rustic Inn with Barb and Dave. Barb is reading Hamsun's Hunger and I bent her ear a little dilating on his later novels, his visit to Minnesota, and his associations with the Nazis.

Dave described a few campsites they'd stayed at in the Ozarks. We talked about blueberries, and Anza Borrego Start park in California, when Dave proposed to Barb many years ago. I was astounded by the large number of Kalamata olives in my salad.

*   *   *

                "philosophy is
a pry-pole, materialization,
                useful as a snow shovel when it snows:
 Something solid to knock people down with
                or back people up with:
I do not know that I care to be backed
                                up in just that way:
                the philosophy gives clubs to
everyone, and I prefer disarmament:
                that is, I would rather relate
to an imperturbable objective
                than be the agent of
"possibly unsatisfactory eventualities"
                isn't anything plain true ..."
                                                                 —Ammons, p. 14

*   *   *

The waves break mildly on the shore. Hilary is reading a narrative of a destitute couple who walked the "salt trail" around the Cornish coast.

*   *   *

After dark we take a walk around the grounds, down the road past the house where the third-generation owners of the resort, Clint and Jamie, are watching a film with Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd—I can see the screen through their big picture window. Meanwhile, on the other side of the road the waves roll in, polishing the rocks as they've done for millions of years. And far out in the night, on the South Shore, which is 70 miles away, we can see the tiny red light on a communication tower. Is that Herbster?

*   *   *

6:15 a.m. As I tiptoe around the cottage I'm reminded of those cabins we used to stay at at Fenstad's Resort, where the inside walls were eight feet high but the ceiling at the ridge was thirteen feet high, with little chance for escape from sound and light between rooms. I'm also thinking of the lemon bread Hilary's mom used to make and give away to the kids every Christmas, some of which I would eat during trips like these in the morning darkness while waiting for Hilary to get up. I'd mention that to Dorothy one day but I'm afraid, rather than taking it as a compliment, she would feel bad that she no longer has the energy to do that kind of baking.

*   *   *

Friday afternoon. The lake is almost calm, purple and gray, silky looking, metallic. Gray skies, but full of light. The Wisconsin shore is a thin blue line across two pale blue-gray worlds.

This morning we left the cabin at eight and arrive at the Britton Peak parking lot an hour later. We had planned to do the Hogback Loop but talked ourselves into doing the longer Homestead Loop, which I remembered as being sort of drab. It might be all of six miles, and it took us two hours. We stopped quite a bit to admire the scenery, which was better than I remembered, though there weren't many pines in sight. No, the woods are mostly gray and bare, but you can see the big lake in the distance through the trees in some places and at other times you look out toward Oberg Mountain, Mte. Levaux, and other unidentifiable massive hills. There are a few log hills, but only one that gets you going faster than you really want to go. I found myself appreciating the layers of terrain, the rising and falling, the switchbacks, the rising and falling of the land, the cedar and alder lowlands. 

The wildlife consisted of a few passing ravens and one red squirrel.

Three ski-skaters passed us during our two-hour circuit; otherwise we had the woods to ourselves until we approached the parking lot, when we met a few parties just heading out. One family of seven had spent the previous day downhill skiing at Lutsen, at a cost of $900. "As I get older, I like the pace of cross-country skiing better," the woman told us.

*   *   *

"Give a man a pen and paper and he will obliterate the Garden of Eden!" — Ron Padgett

This is a far cry from Ficino:  'Therefore the mind in understanding conceives as many things in itself as God in understanding creates in this world. In speaking it utters them in the air; it writes them down on sheets [of paper] with a quill; in making images it figures them forth in the material of the world.'

Padgett: "One cannot live entirely in an existential quandary. We need breakfast, too. And in the end, who is to say that breakfast is less important than quandariness, or even that the two aren't fundamentally the same thing in different forms? That is, you do what you do."

Padgett again: 

"There is something beyond my concept of my own mind, beyond my sense of myself, but I do not know what it is.
A dragonfly hovered over the water's surface for a moment, then sped on, as if with an absolute sense of purpose.
The new pine boards in this cabin smell good."

*   *   *

It was getting dark when we left the cabin, but in winter, when everything is white, darkness glows a little. So it was dusk. We were walking up to Highway 61, a quarter mile away, along the snow-covered gravel road past a resort that was closed for the winter, then a single house with a very lifelike plaster deer in the front yard under a spruce tree. It must have rained here quite a bit in recent weeks because the ditch alongside the road was filled with large broken slabs of brown ice about an inch thick. They probably formed during a cold snap when the runoff was high and then broken apart after the water had drained off into the lake.

Our objective was a little free library sitting in someone's front yard not far from the highway—an unlikely location considering the paucity of foot traffic on that rural road.

"Don't get your hopes up," Hilary said.

"No expectations," I assured her. (But you never know.) The motive for our walk, in fact, was simply to catch the last of the evening light before the world went dark once again.

Long before we reached the "library," however, we were rewarded with the howl of a robust canine emanating from the alder thicket on the right side of the road. It sounded like a lonely dog, but it was followed by a number of somewhat lighter howls and yips, all of them off-key. A pack of coyotes, though to my ear they sounded lower pitched and less delicate, less "haunting" than the coyotes I've been hearing all my adult life. Maybe because they were so close by? Or because these were wolves rather than coyotes. We'll never know. In any case, that sixty-second concert was one of the highlights of the trip. The creatures sounded so near-at-hand that I combed the shadowy recesses of the swamp, looking for a shining eye or a flash of movement.

A few minutes later we reached the little free library, a tiny house sitting on a poll. No one had taken a look since early December, to judge from the pristine condition of the snow in every direction. An official-looking oval "little free library" plate had been fastened to the little door jamb. Taking a look inside I saw Grisham, Patterson, Vince Flynn, Elizabeth Gilbert. Dragon Tattoo. No surprises.

Our dinner consisted of polenta topped with a ragu made of tomatoes and Italian sausage with a pinch of cloves. Lots of stirring in front of the stove, which can be fun. The cabin begins to smell like an Italian restaurant. At one point there was a knock on the door. It was neighbor Dave, offering us half of the blueberry pie he'd just bought at the Rustic Inn. A nice gesture. We agreed to stop over after dinner to have a slice.

Pleasant conversation about camping—they, too, still take long road trips and sleep on the ground—skiing, long-tailed ducks, polenta, and the break-up of the Methodist Church, which took place just today!

*   *   *

There has been an interesting copper band, thin and largely straight, stretched across the lake this morning—sunlight squeezing through the gap between land and cloud cover. A few minutes ago the sun itself began to appear, leaving a spectacular dancing ribbon of intense orange light spreading vertically across the surface of the lake, directly toward my eyes. The sun itself was also a fiery blot, though too large ever to be fully exposed through the gap. 

Now it's once again become a thin copper line, like a dribble of molten iron ore you see at a documentary at school. The sky above, however, it now dotted with large patches of pale blue. hat's the freshest sky I've seen in several days, and it's getting better by the minute.

*   *   *

Noonish. Back from a short but brilliant ski in Two Harbors. Erikka Sisu, or something like that. We took the shorter loop through the woods cutting across the middle of the golf course. Brilliant blue winter sky.

Our next stop was the Cedar Creek Coffee Shop. I'd never heard of it but Hilary found it on her phone while looking for bakeries in Two Harbors. "It's next to ShopKo," she said, which conjured images of a generic deli where the pastries come in plastic bags. But no. The cafe was a modern building—sort of a Salmela knockoff, but none the worse for that—tucked into the woods alongside Cedar Creek a quarter-mile beyond the shopping center, with a well-stocked bicycle shop attached. The bakery was not exceptional but the coffee was good and the place was packed with locals. The sun was shining down through the cedars along the creek onto the clean white snow. We could see it out the huge windows, just beyond the snow-covered picnic tables. A few chickadees were bobbing from branch to branch.

As we left the café I turned right instead of left, not entirely on impulse. I had asked the young woman who took our order what was up that way. "Just an industrial park," she said.  It was true. The road arced to the east and terminated at County 2, on the other side of town. A right turn here would have taken us back to Highway 61 and Lake Superior, but we turned north instead and spent an hour driving through spruce and tamarack woods along the straightest two-lane road this side of Nevada.

A logging truck passed us occasionally with a double-load of timber. Often there was not a vehicle in sight in either direction, and the woods took on the quality of a vast sea, solemn, undifferentiated, and formidable. If we had been going somewhere, the miles would soon have become monotonous. But we weren't.

At one point I saw a few birds fly up from the side of the road as we passed. Thinking they might be pine grosbeaks, I slowed to a stop and backed up along the highway for a hundred yards or more. Who knows? They might be sitting on a branch nearby, eager to return and peck some more salt from the road. At one point I saw a dark, bird-sized lump on the shoulder and brought the car to a stop, and walked across the road to take a look. It was a red crossbill. I picked it up. It wasn't warm to the touch, but it wasn't cold and stiff either. One of the logging trucks might have hit it fifteen minutes earlier.  

The sky became overcast a few miles inland, and it stayed that way until we approached Silver Bay, thirty-five miles later. During that time I had a distinct sense of going inland, and then returning to the coast, though the landscape was largely flat. It was interesting to note that the upper branches of the trees on County 15 looked much frostier that had the trees on County 2. And although I described it a moment ago as undifferentiated, we crossed quite a few creeks along the way, several of them probably named for some obscure resident or passerby from a century ago. Hurley Creek? Lanley Creek? The names have faded from memory already, whereas others stick—Silver Creek, East Beaver River, Little Gooseberry Creek—due to their associations with the North Shore.

*   *   *

Finally, on the afternoon of Day 4, I crack open Matthew Fox: Sheer Joy. "For Aquinas—as for any creation-based thinker—all of life, existence itself, the universe, all history, is mysterious and holy."

"What the West has forgotten about scholasticism is that it was, in its healthy days, a radical intellectual movement that came to Europe from Islam and that was essentially a methodology of asking questions."

"The Pseudo-Dionysius is more of a creation mystic than Augustine; his eastern s[piritual sensibilities are more about theosis, the divinizing of the universe, than about guilt and redemption. As Chenu points out, "The Augustinian bias led to considering the sacraments as so many remedies for a fallen world," whereas with Dionysius "symbolic action is a normal part of the dynamism of a cosmos reaching upward toward God."

*   *   *

So we headed out into the dusk at 4:25, hoping for another encounter with the coyotes (or were they wolves?) though not expecting to be so lucky. A young man on a bright green snowmobile raced by in the distance, came to a stop, backed up for a few yards, then roared off in a different direction into the woods. He seemed to be enjoying a Christmas toy.

No howling tonight. The critters are probably ten miles from here. Sitting here by the window I hear the surf rolling in much more energetically than it's been all week. And opening Fox, I read:

"Visible creatures are like a book in which we read the knowledge of God. One has every right to call God's creatures God's "words," for they express the divine mind just as effects manifest their cause. "The works of the Lord are the words of the Lord." (Eccles. 42:15)

*   *   *

Lower back, left side. Sharp pain. Somewhat of a surprise. I woke up this morning with no pains or aches whatsoever, following a day of hilly skiing. Today we skier maybe four miles, mostly flat. Yet now I'm hobbling around like an old man. How do you explain it? It might simply be a cumulative effect. Or it might be because we're running out of ibuprofen.

Sunrise at 7:51. We've gained a minute, but we're running out of milk for the coffee. We haven't seen a star the entire trip, and this morning continues the trend. But the weather has been fine overall. No slush, so treacherous ice, and no subzero temperatures.

Reading Cultural Amnesia, a collection of essays by art critic and historian Clive James. You never know what you're going to get. The essay on Sir Thomas Browne is mostly devoted to a discussion of book titles, good and bad. The one on Charlie Chaplin is largely spent on an analysis of humanist vs. scientific culture. James digresses freely and the digression becomes the piece. The essay about Miles Davis becomes a meditation on the advantages, for an artist, of being rich."If I don't like what people are writing about me," Davis said, "I just get in my Ferrari and drive away."

The last morning. Trying to squeeze a little more vacation out of the remaining hours, but fully aware that the drive home will be more fun that anything we do here.