North Shore Getaway

The North Shore is always an inviting prospect, though during the summer months it's often thick with tourists (like us). But Hilary's brother told us about a house in the woods above Caribou Lake, a few miles east of Lutsen, that he and his wife, Mary, had booked for five days in late July. We took a look at the website. Though it was a few notches above our normal price range, it looked very nice. The first available dates, however, were in mid-October. Not a bad thing, either. We booked it, telling ourselves we needed a few things to look forward to once the cold weather set in. 

The drive up was windy but uneventful. The lunch line at the Northern Waters Smokehaus on Lake Avenue in Duluth was too long, and we were content to eat some take-out ribs from Famous Dave's, right across the street, while watching the choppy water in the inner harbor from the comfort of a parking lot out on Park Point. 

Ten pine siskins feeding in a tree

The raptor traffic up on Hawk Ridge was negligible due to the high winds. No matter. We went for a walk along the waterfront in Two Harbors and came upon a huge flock of pine siskins, feeding furiously amid the cones high up in a clump of spruce trees. 

We pulled in to our "cabin" (actually a house) a few minutes after the 4 p.m. check-in time, and I almost immediately spotted two grouse feeding on berries or buds twenty feet up in a tree, off in the woods but directly in front of the window. We set up two plastic Adirondack chairs on the shore of the lake and watched the fading sunlight streak across the clouds on the far side of the bay. 

The stars that night were intense, riveting. We felt lucky to be seeing them, knowing that gray weather was likely to be moving in overnight. 

Morning light was gray. We got out into the day early, driving a few miles up the shore to Cascade State Park. One car in the parking lot. Hiking up along the west side of the river, we come upon the first falls almost immediately. Each North Shore river has its own distinctive character—Gooseberry, Temperance, Baptism, Little Marais—and for me the Cascade River possesses the most Asian feel, perhaps because the wooden bridges seem ancient and the overhanging cedars evoke the mood of Chinese scroll paintings. 

Cold air in the lungs, pine scent in the nostrils, we moved up the trail above the fast-moving water. We passed no one during our hike other than a single grouse who was in no hurry to remove himself from the path. 

We spent the rest of the day inside, playing cribbage, listening to the gentle rain on the metal eaves of the house, and reading. I found myself reviewing a paperback introduction to Greek thought, focusing my attention, for no reason that I can think of now, of Aristotle's concept of God as the unmoved mover. The author, Guthrie, does his best to make the idea sound attractive. 

The conception of God as unmoved—or unchanging— and pure form, unsatisfactory as it remains, for several reasons, to the religious mind, is not quite so cold and static as it appears at first sight. As pure actuality he is, though exempt from kinesis, eternally active with an activity which brings no fatigue but is forever enjoyable. His essential quality is life.

It follows that God's activity is to think his own universal perfection. Guthrie continues: 

Wrapped in eternal self-contemplation, he calls forth by his mere presence the latent powers of nature, which strive in their various ways to achieve form and carry out their proper activities, thus imitating in their own particular spheres the one pure form and eternally active being. God does not go out to the world, but the world cannot help going out to him. That is their relationship, summed up in another pregnant phrase: ‘He moves as the object of desire.’ 

Something to ponder as the fresh fish we bought in Duluth are frying in the pan. 

I was less taken with the views expressed by translator David Hinton in his new book, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. I own quite a few of Hinton's translations. They're good. Here he tries to take us deeper, reproducing the Chinese characters to illustrate how unlike Western sentence construction the Chinese original often is. This is interesting up to a point, but the result is that time and again Hinton suggests that the clear and vivid images we often find (and love) in Tang poetry actually refer to a deeper Taoist truth, which he describes in the introduction as follows:

The concepts of Absence and Presence are simply an approach to the fundamental nature of things. In the end, of course, they are the same: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is therefore always a manifestation of it. Or to state it more precisely, Absence and Presence are simply different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms. 

But consider these lines: 

Amid spring mountain, alone, I set out to find you. 

Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery deepens. 

Hinton devotes almost a page of analysis to the phrase "quiet mystery deepens." He tells us that the Chinese character actually means “quiet solitude.” and admits that such a reading would be "sufficient as a description of the empty-mind opened by the perceptual clarity of his walk." But Hinton wants to dig deeper.

Appearing often in recluse poetry,[the idiogram] infuses the surface meaning “quiet solitude” with rich philosophical depths, beginning with the sense of “dark /  secret / hidden / mystery”; and that leads finally to the term's deepest level, which animates the whole cosmological process of tzu-jan. Here it means forms, the ten thousand things, barely on the not-yet-emergent side of the origin-moment: just as they are about to emerge from the formless ground of Absence, or just after they vanish back into that ground." 

He continues on in this vein for thirteen lines, using phrases such as "all-encompassing generative present" and "occurrence burgeoning steadily forth." All of this totally obscures, for me at any rate, the experience being described—the sound of wood being chopped, which, when it ceases, leaves us hearing the silence, wondering if the chopping will recommence and then becoming aware of ourselves, out in the woods as time passes, focused on a sound we do not hear, on nothing. Or everything? Or the nothing of everything? 

The phrase "quiet mystery" is entirely adequate to the occasion; anything more ruins the effect. 

At one point in the afternoon we walked down to the lake for a breath of fresh air. It had started to snow, tiny white crystals, well-spaced, dry, and harmless, almost like laundry detergent shaken from a box. 

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Hilary woke me up at 3 the next morning. "John. The stars are out!" We went out onto the deck in pajamas and slippers, crunching across a fine layer of snow. The big dipper was there above the bare branches of a clump of aspens. The Pleiades was now overhead and Cygnus was riding the Milky Way. Within half a minute I saw a fine shooting star streak down toward the horizon, leaving a glowing tail.

And then I chose a star, any star, and tried to convince myself that was real, a burning orb at an unfathomable distance; that the space that separated us was real. In my mind's eye, I even attempted to step to the side to "get some perspective" on that distance, as if I were looking across a landscape at a distant rise and trying to imagine how long it would take to walk there. And suddenly the universe takes on dimension, if only for a few seconds. The vast spaces in between. The perspective is far from accurate but it's awesome just the same. Vertiginous. That's the effect I was looking for, beyond the canopy of pinholes, beyond the badly shaped mythological figures, fatalistic and frightening, yet also invigorating: the depths of space, summoning a primitive, cleansing frisson. 

A few hours later we were up again and plotting the day's activities. The cabin lies only a few hundred yards from the Superior Hiking Trail, and we'd always presumed we'd head west along that trail to Agnes Lake and beyond during out visit. But we've done that hike before. It's basically a walk through deep woods, which would be shaded and perhaps muddy. So we decided to focus on two hikes near Grand Marais that were new to us, and more likely to include stretches of open country. 

On a frigid Thursday morning in October, the town of Grand Marias is quiet. Yet the line in front of the World's Most Famous Donut Shop was still too long for our liking. We parked nearby and walked back to the Java Moose for coffee, but it was closed. We watched an American pipit hop around on the sidewalk in front of the café for a few minutes. That was a treat! 

And the coffee at the local co-op was just fine. Whenever we shop there—or at any co-op—I feel I'm part of a sacred guild. Not one of the inner circle, perhaps. But we do have a number at the Wedge. The New Age magazines on sale next to the cash register look ridiculous. I wouldn't want to buy one. But I sort of believe in it. Love, peace, happiness.

Our first hike took us to the top of Sweetheart Bluff. The trailhead is located in the municipal campground, which I had always considered the antithesis of genuine North Woods experience. (But as we drove through the grounds I noticed they have a number of pretty nice tent sites near the lake.) The hike was easy and the views of Grand Marais Harbor from the broad slab of open rock at the top were fine. The vegetation was moist, the sun was coming in low, and the colors were rich.

Along the way we ran into a woman who was visiting her brother in the local hospital. "My kids say I'm hippying it," she said. "I'm sleeping in my van."

 

"It was sort of a cold night," I said vaguely. 

"Don't I know it. I was freezing," she said. "I'm going to buy another sleeping bag today." 

"Try the Ben Franklin," I said. "They have everything." 

But that hike was merely a prelude to our next venture—a two-mile hike through the woods to Pincushion Mountain. The trail starts at the cross-country skiing lot at the top of the rise behind Grand Marias. It's basically flat, and the numerous stretches of boardwalk along the route look to be almost brand-new. After an hour of easy walking you come to an enormous whale-like lump of rock erupting from the forest—many times larger than Carleton Peak, for example. After scrambling thirty feet up the face of the rock, you find yourself on a sunny, windy expanse dotted here and there with individual trees. The seaward view is magnificent, but the inland view is staggering.

On our drive home the next morning we made an impromptu stop at Caribou Creek, which may be the niftiest half-mile hike on the North Shore. The parking lot used to be treacherous, especially in winter. The driveway dropped precipitously from the highway, and when it was packed with snow there was no telling where you'd end up on the way down. Meanwhile, there was no place to alight on the way up before careering out onto the highway.

Someone has fixed all that, and the entry is now handsomely landscaped and perfectly level. The hike up to the gorge is easy, and the gorge itself is impressive. But what moved me most on this occasion was the grouse Hilary spotted on the way up--our seventh of the trip. It stood stock still as we watched it through binoculars. Photographs can hardly do justice to the richness of its varied markings. The back of the neck has an Escher-like checkerboard complexity that becomes more subtle and featherly lower down, while the flanks are marked with bold black stripes. As I looked at its array of features in the soft early-morning light, I said to myself, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."