Zug Zug the Caveman

With six inches of snow on the way, we went down early this morning to see Zug Zug, the caveman encased in a block of ice that appeared suddenly in the neighborhood a few days ago. It's only a fifteen minute walk from our house, but we drove down before breakfast, planning to beat the crowds and maybe take a stroll through the woods or across the golf course.

Artist Zach Schumack was commissioned to create the life-sized figure for a trade show a year ago. Since then it's been standing in his garage. That seemed like a waste, so he convinced the  Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to grant permission to relocate it to one of the city parks. The Bassett Creek Gorge in Theodore Wirth Park, on the western edge of the city, was an inspired choice for the new site. It's wooded, there's a delightful creek running nearby, yet it's easy to reach on foot from the parkway, and the golf course parking lot isn't that far away.

Schumack's motive for putting his caveman on exhibit al fresco was to encourage people to get outdoors, stretch their legs, and get some fresh air. In that he succeeded. An article appeared about Zug Zug in the Star-Tribune a few days ago, and since then parking has sometimes been hard to find nearby. By mid-afternoon cars are often parked illegally all the way up the parkway to Golden Valley Road and beyond.

There was no one in sight when we arrived. I was impressed by the sophistication of the sculpture. Zug Zug doesn't photograph well. He isn't encased in ice but in a plexiglas box sitting on a sturdy plinth. It's only when you get close that you can see, through the translucent box, the richness of detail—the boots, the furs, the hair. He looked cool, but he also reminded me of something out of an old Time-Life book.

Then I heard a kingfisher rattling off in the distance. The creek was frozen where we were, but there were some rapids just upstream, also a beaver dam and some wide, reedy pools.

It's hard to get around the fencing protecting the golf course in the summer, but nowadays you can simply walk under the bridge on the ice. Which we did. As we walked across a snow-covered fairway beyond we heard a downy woodpecker drumming, a white-breasted nuthatch beeping, a chickadee gurgling, a robin clucking. A jogger ran by in the woods above us. We passed piles of dead buckthorn that had been flattened as part of a clean-up effort, and copses of living buckthorn, full of sinister black berries, right alongside. At one point we came upon a tree at least a foot in diameter that a beaver had brought down fairly recently.

I've never seen a beaver in the creek, though I've seen a few mink over the years.