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.