Last Days of Roger Federer - Geoff Dyer

There isn't much about tennis in Geoff Dyer's latest book, and most of the tennis talk it does contain focuses not on Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, or Novak Djokovic, but on the aches and pains that Dyer himself has been experiencing on the court more severely than ever as he presses on past his sixtieth birthday. 

But Dyer still loves to play, and his boyish enthusiasm extends far beyond the tennis court. In this longish ramble through the back pages of cultural history Dyer examines the later careers of individuals as diverse as Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Turner—the painter, not the soul singer—but he has no difficulty throwing in de Chirico,  Bob Dylan, D. H. Lawrence, Phillip Larkin, John Coltrane, John Berger,  Jean Rhys, Eve Babitz, and many other artists and thinkers alongside them, while also keeping his own experiences firmly in view. The musings trip along, returning to their ostensible "theme"—how advancing age has affected the creations of this or that individual, and of Dyer himself—almost surreptitiously, and sometimes not at all.

Dyer isn't advancing a pet theory of aging, however—how dull that would be!—or offering words of warning or encouragement or advice.  He's observing, reporting, speculating, in a narrative style that, because it shifts its focus so often and so abruptly,  never becomes ponderous. On one page we're wandering the streets of Turin with Dyer in search of Nietzsche's ghost, and a few pages later we're in the Nevada desert at Burning Man, where Dyer had sworn he would never return ... until he went again, seduced by the invitation to appear in a documentary about the annual event.

This has always been Dyer's style. Here the passages are numbered and divided into four or five unnamed sections. The connecting links are often intuitive or non-existent, but when an author knows his or her material well, such a method can hardly be bettered, as subterranean connections rise to the surface and assert themselves. Similar examples of the same approach that come to mind are Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart, Karen Olsson's The Weil Conjectures, and Adam Zagejewski's Slight Exaggeration. 

But there's a difference. Those other works are all about something rather specific. Dyer's grand exercise in thinking out loud is about all sorts of things, from train travel to painting to literature to tennis—and on to the hip-hop being played on the boom-box at the basketball court next to tennis court number 6 (which you don't really want to play on) and even how the smell of marijuana, wafting his way from that basketball court, has changed over the years.

Though Dyer doesn't claim to be an expert on any of material he examines, he's certainly done plenty of research, and he flits back and forth between areas of focus expertly, like a hummingbird among the foxgloves. If there is one bloom he returns to a little too often, perhaps it would be Nietzsche's theory of the Eternal Return. This is the notion that we are all doomed to live our lives over and over in exactly the same way an endless number of times. There is no evidence that this is the case, however, and if there were, that evidence would vitiate the theory, because it would suggest that we have memories of our previous lives, making the current one different from the ones we've lived before. In short, the theory is illogical and conceptually ridiculous, though it does serve to convey the sense that even the most spirited among us must have occasionally of the grinding sameness of things.

Would Dyer take an interest in my little critique. I doubt it. At one point he writes:

In 1910, at the age of twenty-one, de Chirico wrote to a friend, I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche—all of my work demonstrates this.’ The claim to exclusive comprehension is some­thing all readers of Nietzsche will recognize, one of the things we all have in common. If you don’t feel this way you haven’t experienced Nietzsche at all; you’ve only studied him.

Dyer also seems to be somewhat out of his league when analyzing the appeal of Beethoven's late string quartets. He admits that writing about music can be hard when you don't know the technical terminology, and on the whole his judgments here seem a bit second-hand. But he makes good use of the biographical material, and we can give him credit for scouring Adorno's unfinished book on the subject for insights. Dyer reveals himself here (and elsewhere) as a working class Joe who yearns to absorb whatever's sublime and expressive in both life and art, with the drive and the smarts to do so and the candor to make his quest sound funny, and ring true. It's a rare gift.

Near the end of the book, Dyer confesses that his original plan had been to do a collective study of three roughly contemporary nineteenth century artists working in different fields each of whom developed a widely recognized "late" style, perhaps in the manner of Jacques Barzun's Darwin, Marx, Wagner. He soon settled on Beethoven and Turner, but had trouble finding a writer of roughly the same period who fit the bill.

This has allowed him to make use of his original research while also sifting through and processing  a much wider field of creative endeavors--including tennis!--in constructing the book he actually wrote.

Dyer spends quite a bit of time, for example, describing the plot-lines of specific films, from Robert Redford's All is Lost to those old-fashioned British classics Brief Encounter and Colonel Blimp, (which made him cry).  He discusses the significance of the American artist Albert Bierstadt's painting "The Last Buffalo" and describes the profound impact of a Clash concert he heard in 1988, adding that he can hardly bear to hang on to the end of one of their songs today.

In one section he reflects on all the canonical novels he read as a young man without really comprehending, and those he simply could not finish, "great" though they were purported to be.

"Just because something's a classic doesn't mean it's any good ...  My Penguin Modern Classics edition of a certain book quotes Walter Allen's opinion that 'a good case could be made out for considering it the greatest novel in English of the twentieth century.' Since that's an experience no one in their right mind would want to miss out on I will milk the suspense no longer: it's Nostromo, a book I waded through forty years ago, when I had the stamina of a youthful ox and the dumb faith of a bespectacled lamb, a book that has stayed with me because nothing I have read since has been quite as boring as Nos-frigging-tromo. That's not true, obviously, but the horror, the horror of trudging through Nostromo is something not easily forgotten. 

(I presume the reference here to Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the horror, the horror— is not merely coincidental.)

 At another point Dyer describes in some detail his waning enthusiasm for smoking marijuana, a passage that concludes:

Anyway, that's all in the past now. I just don't like marijuana anymore and at some level I can scarcely even remember what it was like when being stoned lit up the world, releasing the latent glow of things. It's difficult not to feel, like Wordsworth, that 'there has passed away a glory from the earth.' which is not at all the way to feel in California, the land of glory, one of the last places on earth where the glory fades each day, where everything glows, where the blue sky that shows nothing—though whether sky this blue can be counted as nothing remains a moot point—is nowhere and is endless. 

In the end, Dyer's interest in tennis takes him far beyond Roger Federer's career to those of earlier stars who eventually flamed out, as all athletes must:

Sampras seems to be a champion who was utterly unfazed by life after tennis. Borg, in his untutored way, was heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court jumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Strindberg, held in check during the course of his career by a sweaty headband (or, conceivably, caused by the headband?)

In a book full of judgments delivered almost in passing, no reader is going to agree with them all. Dyer likes Keith Jarrett's noodling solo piano recordings for ECM more than I do; he's less enamored of James Salter's exquisite sentences that I am, and even goes so far as to suggest that Salter's first book is his best—a judgment with which few readers will agree.

Dyer's passing enthusiasms are many:

"If you don't find [Joy Williams] funny then there's no point even having a sense of humor."

And he cannot resist the occasional zinger:

"I read somewhere that W.H. Auden believed he was always the youngest person in the room—quite an achievement given the state of that thousand-year-old face ..." 

And how about this one?

"No one wants to be lectured at once a lecture is over. In Milosz's case he sort of converses with the reader from on high, as if that's where he habitually dwelt. It's not even self-regarding; it's more a well marinated assumption of the high regard in which he is held. Fair enough, you might say, the guy won the Nobel Prize. How could I forget, given that he mentions it so often?"

 In short, Dyer's ruminations are all over the map, and the book might fairly be described as a romp. This may be because Dyer has become adept at following his own advice: "After a stage in a man's life—especially if a degree of eminence has been achieved—it is essential that he retain some residue of how he saw the world as a fourteen-year-old."

Road Trip 2: On to Ashland

Many parts of the so-called "driftless" area of western Wisconsin have a heavenly lilt, though the specific character of the landforms changes from place to place, and it seems to me that the hills are more appealing when you're driving up through them rather than merely looking down on them from some modest rise or peak.

(Minnesota has a "driftless" zone, too, of course, but that's a subject for another time.) 

We crossed the Mississippi and were soon heading north on Highway 86, weaving our way toward Eau Claire on a narrow asphalt road past woods, pastures, middling farms, and quaint or weather-beaten towns with names like Czechville, Cream, and Praag, sitting alongside sluggish streams with fields and wooded hills rising gently on either side.

The countryside leveled out a bit as we approached Eau Claire and the suburban/industrial clutter increased. This was the world we'd left behind, though there were still rolling hills here and there, and we took advantage of the freeway and the Highway 53 corridor as far north as Bloomer. A more intense cluster of smallish hills rises north and east of there—a tongue of the Chippewa Moraine—though you can't see it until you're driving into it. It's a glacial phenomena, whereas the driftless region was formed before the last set of glaciers arrived; geologists are still pondering how and why the glaciers missed it, but I'm glad they did.

We hiked a short loop through the dappled light of the hardwood forest that surrounds the Ice Age Visitor Center, and watched three red-headed woodpeckers—which are mostly white—dart dramatically through the shadows of the forest, intent on some nesting plan or community project. It was a thrilling sight. Equally thrilling was a perfect and extended sighting of a mature male bay-breasted warbler, which we hadn't seen in four or five years. The glacier museum at the visitors' center is well worth a stop, too. 

From there we zigged and zagged through unmemorable country past Island Lake and Bruce to Ladysmith.

I have always wanted to go to Ladysmith. Why? Because for many years Hilary and I often spent weekends at her family's cabin on a small lake near the Chippewa Flowage, to the north and west, and along a brief section of the route we would invariably pass a sign that said "Fifield" and "Ladysmith." I knew nothing about either town, not even vaguely where they were located.

Now I've been to Ladysmith. It's a nice, healthy looking place with a robust main street. We ate lunch in a park overlooking the reservoir. But before long we were on the road again, traversing countryside I'd seen many times before, due to its proximity to the family cabin. The towns of Radisson, Couderay, and Ojibwe may have fine qualities, but I've never noticed them. Winter used to have a splendid landscape center run by two couples from the Netherlands. Is it still there? We didn't stop to find out. We were hungry for new territory, and soon we were deep in the Chequamegon National Forest, north of Loretta on County GG. It was the flattest, straightest highway we'd been on all day. Also the narrowest. Also the emptiest. (Also the dullest.) But we were now truly in the pine woods, and whatever may be said in defense of the prairies, hills, bluffs, and farms, you're not really in the woods.

At one point I saw an intensely dark ridge ahead of us in the distance on the highway. Is that the remnants of the Penokee Range, I asked myself. No. It was a bank of clouds, and it was coming our way carrying buckets of rain. When the downpour arrived I would have pulled over but a) there was no shoulder to pull over onto, and b) there was no one else on the road, anyway. I finally found a wide spot at the stop sign in Clam Lake Junction, just as the pea-sized hail arrived.

Twenty minutes later the sky grew lighter, and we continued north on GG to Mellen, and on to Ashland.

ASHLAND

Ashland sits on the shores of Lake Superior, which sounds nice. Then again, so does the much larger city of Superior, little more than an hour to the west down Highway 2. Yet neither city has a great reputation as a holiday destination.

Approaching Ashland from the west, you find yourself on a causeway of sorts, crossing the mouth of an undistinguished body of water called Fish Creek, with a string of motels to your left obscuring the big lake and a vast swamp filled with muddy brown water to your right. Soon the antique power plant comes into view, towering over the bay. On a gray day it can be a dismal entry indeed, and it's hardly improved by the sight of a big white box of a multi-story hotel, recently restored, on the waterfront right in the center of town, dominated by its more than ample parking lot.

That had been our impression on previous visits. But on this trip we emerged from the south, dropping down out of the woods from the long ridge of the Penokee Hills. The sky was clearing and the air was cool and fresh. On the way into town we took a spin around the campus of Northland College—a small collection of mostly brick buildings, nice if not quite venerable. There weren't many students around, but a woman's soccer match was in progress out on the pitch, and for a split-second, it occurred to me that it might be fun to watch.  

Our cabin was a gem, situated in the woods a few miles east of town looking out across Chequamegon Bay toward the distant Bayfield Peninsula. The forest had been soaked by the rain, it smelled like a piece of the North Woods, which, of course, it was. Once we'd settled in we drove to a nearby public boat landing where we spotted some ducks out beyond the breakwater: redheads, golden eye, and at least six common mergansers. A Caspian tern (I think) flew by. The surface of the lake was calm and the sight of the ducks bobbing gently on the incoming swells in late afternoon light was like something out of a dream.

Then it was into town, where we picked up a pizza and a few other things for dinner at the supermarket. On a leisurely drive down main street we spotted several cafés, a bakery, a pasty shop, a few vintage clothing shops with names like Bargain Hut and Solstice Clothing, and two old fashioned furniture stores. That's rare. We'd passed a Walmart on the west side of town coming in, but these local businesses seemed to be holding their own!

We admired the numerous murals, each of which depicts actual citizens of Ashland in various occupational or service groupings, and Hilary read to me from a brochure about the women who painted them.

At the downtown boat landing we parked and took a walk along the pier, looking for shorebirds. A middle-aged couple were making a fuss at the ramp. He was in the cab of the pick-up truck with boat and trailer behind. She was holding a rope from the boat alongside the pier, yelling, "Stop! Stop! Stop!" I thought they were having trouble pulling the boat up out of the water, and almost volunteered to help. But a few minutes later, as we returned from the breakwater, the boat had vanished out to sea and the woman was driving away in the truck.

Our little cottage has been given the name Norrsken Scandinavian Cottage by the owners, and it was a perfect spot to relax at the end of a driving day, though a merlin seemed to be nesting in the pined behind the place, and it shrieked again and again during the evening, as merlins do.

After finishing off the slightly doughy, vegetable-topped pizza we'd bought, I put Gould's Goldberg Variations—the 1981 version—on the stereo, settled into the couch, and pulled a book by the Sung poet Su Tung-p'o out of the book bag.

Sixth month, twenty-seventh day. Drunk at Lake Watch Tower, wrote five poems.

 

Black clouds — spilled ink half blotting out the hills;

pale rain — bouncing beads that splatter in the boat.

Land-rolling wind comes, blasts and scatters them:

below Lake Watch Tower, water like sky.   

 

Looking out at the broad expanse of Chequamagon Bay, I noticed that the wind had changed—it was now coming in from the northeast—and the fog was lowering, obscuring the heights of the Bayfield Peninsula.

_____________________________

 It's nice to have a base for a day or two. We started our excursion the next morning in town at the Black Cat Coffeehouse, a narrow, wood-paneled joint with a small collection of used books for sale in the backroom, courtesy of the exemplary Chequamagon Bay Bookstore in nearby Washburn. The service was slow—someone must have called in sick—and the latte wasn't terribly hot, but the hazy morning sun was streaming in through the front windows and a low hum of animated conversation filled the room.

The Black Cat Coffeehouse, as seen from the bakery

We'd been to the Black Cat on several previous visits, but the Ashland Bakery, right across the street, came as a big surprise. The interior was warm and sparking, and it smelled pleasantly of butter and Parmesan cheese. The glass cases to the left as we entered were loaded with savory breads and pies rather than confections. The pert, middle-aged woman behind the counter cheerfully helped us with our croissants and pain-au-chocolate. You could see one or two bakers in the open room behind her preparing loaves for the ovens. It was like something out of a movie, almost too classy for a town like Ashland to support, and I thought, "I hope this place make it." I later read online that it's been going strong for twenty years and ships its products as far afield as Grand Marais and Virginia, MN.

Our morning walks were fruitful. At Maslowski Beach on the west side of town we came upon a solitary sandpiper, and at the Upper Great Lakes Visitor Center nearby we spotted four different sparrows almost on the same bush—white-crowned, Harris, clay-colored, and savannah. But the big thrill was watching a pair of snipe chasing each other around a field near the marsh.

In Prentice Park, where you can fill your water bottles at the artesian wells, we struck up a conversation with a man with a two-day stubble wearing a hunting jacket and a baseball cap with an American flag printed on the bill. He didn't look like a birder, but he had binoculars and a notebook. He told us he would be leading a walk at the upcoming bird festival. "We sometimes see a least bittern sitting right on this bridge," he said. (I haven't seen one in fifteen years.) "And over by that birch tree on the path looking out across the slough. That's where we sometimes see the Virginia rails." Wow.  He suggested that if we were looking for warblers, we might want to try to Bayfield fish hatchery, where they could often be seen snatching bugs above the ponds behind the barn.

A few gravel roads south into the hills  took us to the trailhead for St. Peter's Dome. A huge parking lot, nobody there. We hiked in to Morgan Falls on a spur trail, then continued on the main trail half-way to St. Peter's Dome. They say the views are spectacular from up top, but we had other fish to fry and decided to leave that for another trip.

The Bayfield fish hatchery ponds were a dud, bird-wise, but the small museum of Lake Superior aquatic life in the hatchery barn was fascinating.  I have never quite nailed down the proper succession of fish species from smelt to lamprey to Como salmon to herring as the big lake reeled from one population  crisis to the next, but I gave it another try.

We had a decent dinner at the Deep Water Grille, made more memorable by the pink neon lighting and the several multi-generational families sitting nearby, with kids shouting and crawling all over the chairs.

How peaceful it seemed a few minutes later down at the waterfront, where we watched a few of the locals wading out into the bay with long fishing poles in search of sport.

"And what about the Porcupine Mountains?" you may ask. Yes, we drove east the following afternoon through Hurley and on into Michigan. We explored the harbors of the Black and Presque Isle rivers, both of which were lovely, mostly deserted, and more than a little enchanting. A highlight was the hike we took upstream along the bank of the Black River through a mature hemlock forest from one impressive waterfall to the next, with the afternoon sun illuminating the sparse vegetation amid the shadows of the forest floor.

But a hemlock forest soon grows monotonous, and the interface between hills lake was abrupt: you were either on the coast or deep in the woods. Our rental cabin was clean, cozy, and cheap, but it was situated in the midst what seemed to be a backwoods community of charmless vacation cottages, perhaps occupied by people who dined on venison most of the year. Pickup trucks were parked in every driveway, and large silver propane tanks were scattered seemingly everywhere you looked.

We heated up the pasties we’d bought in Ashland, and spent a comfortable evening reading. 

But the double bed turned out to be less than firm and unusually short. In the morning I said, “Well, I guess it beats camping.”

Hilary said, “I was wondering how to bring that subject up.”

I said, “Well, we don’t have to stay two nights. We’ve seen what we came to see.” So we packed up and left, enjoyed another day exploring both urban and rural features of Chequamegon Bay, and camped in the Washburn Municipal Campground that night.

  

Road Trip: A vacation is an improvisation

A vacation is an improvisation. The reservations are the chords, the proposed route is the "standard" melody. Around these two elements travelers spin an adventurous solo based on anticipation, research, whim, fatigue, unexpected mishaps, digressions and encounters, and the vagaries of the weather, among other things.

One of the fundamentals shaping our recent road trip was flighty in the extreme—the spring warbler migration, which we wanted to see in all its beauty and particularity.

We take such a trip every spring, combining elements new and old.

There's no way to predict precisely when these waves of small, colorful birds, most of which spend their winters in Central America, will be passing through, but some locations are a much better bet than others for witnessing this lovely event, should you happen to find yourself in the midst of it. Two of the best in these parts are Frontenac State Park and the nearby Lake City municipal park, which goes by the name of Hok-Si-La.

In either location, you can stroll along a bank of trees, this year conveniently free of heavy foliage due to the late spring, and see colorful little birds flitting here and there. Many of them belong to a small set of "common" warblers—palm warblers, myrtle warblers, redstarts, yellow warblers. Yet none of them are truly common, and the next one you spot might well be a less common species, so you'd better take a good close look. I won't drag out the phenomena or attempt to capture the thrill of each unusual sighting. Suffice it to say that by the time we were through with six days of intermittent investigation, we'd seen 22 warbler species, whether often or only once or twice: Northern waterthrush, redstart, common yellowthroat, ovenbird, northern parula, magnolia, Nashville, Tennessee, black-throated green, pine, bay-breasted, Cape May, palm, myrtle, black-and-white, golden-winged, blue-winged, yellow, chestnut-sided, orange-crowned, blackburnian, Wilson's, and Canada warblers.

There is a certain elation, hardly distinguished from pride, associated with a good warbler count. Opinions will differ as to how good a particular "list" might be, but it would be a mistake to imagine that some sort of competition is involved. It's far more a matter of reconnecting with feathered friends you haven't seen for a year or maybe two or three. You welcome their presence, one after another, as you spot them, and you marvel at their beauty. It's also reassuring to see that they haven't gone extinct; the very act of spotting them seems to play a part in insuring their continued survival. As a birding trip progresses, and the sightings mount, they become "old news" and you find yourself saying: "I haven't seen a blackpoll yet!" or "This river bottom environment would be just right for a prothonotary." 

A second fundamental of our trip was much more down to earth: a desire to get a better feel for two medium-sized towns—Winona, Minnesota, and Ashland, Wisconsin—both of which we'd visited often but had never spent much time in. Here the sightings were far less difficult. Some of the sites—a bakery, a museum, a historic building, a beach—had been sitting in the same place, plain to see, for decades. But we were also eager to feel the vibe of these municipalities, both of which had once been port cities of considerable stature.

A final element in the equation was the desire to see new country by drawing our route north across Wisconsin from Winona to Ashland a little further to the east. Spooner and Siren and Hayward are as familiar to us as Brainerd or Grand Rapids. Bloomer and Ladysmith and Loretta? Not so much.

Our final "push" would take us further east along the south shore of Lake Superior from Ashland to the Black River basin and on to the Presque Isle River on the fringe of the Porcupine Mountains.

And that's what we did. More or less.

But there were wrinkles in the plan almost immediately. We left home in mid-afternoon and arrived at Frontenac State Park with some deli food from a supermarket in Red Wing, nursing visions of the quaint campsite (#53) where we'd often camped before, with its grassy tent pad looking south across the fields and a picnic table lapping up the shade of two nearby trees. The trees were gone. The tent pad was gone. The DNR had cut down the trees, bulldozed the site, and covered it with chunks of gravel the size of marshmallows—though undoubtedly not nearly so comfortable to sleep on. We took a brief stroll around, and after a moment of discussion, Hilary called the campground reservation hotline and succeeded in getting us moved to a site thirty feet away (#57) that, if anything,  was even nicer than the one we had remembered so fondly.

From that point on, all was well. Baltimore orioles singing everywhere (but no orchard orioles!); a late afternoon stroll through the campground, and on to the picnic grounds half a mile away on the bluff above the river; a cold dinner of chips and hot sauce, pre-packaged cole slaw and potato salad, followed by a good night's sleep—as far as tent-sleeping goes—with coyotes howling nearby and the sound of trains in the distance passing up and down the river throughout the night. Ah, wilderness!

It was gray the next morning, and we could hear heavy rumbling to the south and west. The sky was unusually dark. A severe weather system was making its way through the Twin Cities, though we didn't even get a drizzle. We broke camp early, took an extended drive through the village of Old Frontenac—which would make a good set for a Civil War film—and then wandered through the woods at Hok-Si-La Park.  

At the north end of the campground we came upon a birder who had been camping there for three days, solo.

He had seen a lot of birds.

"They had the bird event here on Saturday and saw only five warblers," he said with ill-concealed glee. "The stormy weather was holding up the migration. But it started to move through yesterday, and I've seen more than twenty!"

Aside from a few rare warblers, the one thing that seemed to be missing was someone to share his delight with. We were it. And we made for a sympathetic audience, because we knew the birds and understood his enthusiasm. His mention of species we hadn't seen was encouraging ... but also discouraging. I was happy to hear they were coming through, but slightly anxious that we hadn't seen them yet. Well, we were just setting out. But when I pointed to a nearby branch and said, "There's a nice magnolia warbler," he replied, "I've seen SO MANY magnolias...." as if he found them disgusting and never wanted to see one again.

He told us that long-time park manager Joanne Klees, who lives on the property, was retiring and moving to Grand Marais to be closer to relatives. "I had a meeting in the Cities on Sunday night," he said. "I called Joanne to let her know I'd be returning to my campsite after midnight, so she wouldn't be surprised to see someone prowling the grounds that late with a flashlight."

Now that's dedication.

We moved on through the woods and back to the car. A half-hour later, heading up to Whitewater State Park on a gravel stretch of Highway 74, we turned a corner and came upon a construction crew blocking the road.

"Looks like we can't get through," I said to the worker who came over to turn us around.

"Not unless you drive real fast," he said. "We're replacing the culvert. Didn't you see the sign? Back at the turnoff, six feet high, with the flashing lights?"

"Oh, way back there?" I said. In fact, I'd missed it entirely.

The detour to the park was elaborate so we returned to Highway 61 and across to the Weaver Bottoms landing—a place we wouldn't normally stop. We were greeted at the overlook by the fuzzy, wayward songs of a flock of warbler vireos. We also heard a sora whinny, and I spotted a northern waterthrush down amid the grasses near shore. All in all, not a bad consolation prize.

But enough about birds.

WINONA

Until it closed in 1998, Winona's chief claim to fame among travelers may have been the Hot Fish House, a restaurant with a large parking lot conveniently located (as I recall) at the intersection of highways 61 and 43, far from the center of town but an easy stop, two hours from the Twin Cities, for a final meal or coffee-break during that long drive north from Dubuque, Prairie du Chien, or wherever. Back then, there seemed little point in going downtown, and no clear signage as to how to get there. Unless, that is, you were interested in Prairie School architecture. Downtown Winona is home to the finest of the banks designed by Purcell and Elmslie, (see below) and Hilary and I have ventured into town more than once to see it.

But Winona is also home to one of the most bizarre buildings in Minnesota, the Winona Savings Bank, which stands a few blocks away. It's an unhappy cross between a Greek temple and an Assyrian ziggurat, and it might almost be called a post-modern structure except that it predates the modern period. Mussolini would have liked it.

Not knowing quite where either structure was located, we would sometimes turn a corner hoping to see the one, only to come face to face with the other one. Eek!

Winona hosts an annual midsummer Beethoven festival and also an annual Shakespeare festival. (No one's sticking their neck out too far with those choices, though they'll never run out of good material, either.) But here we were, well before the summer arts season, contenting ourselves with the exhibits at the Marine Museum, which are also first-rate.

Viewing the exhibit offerings online before we set out, I 'd been attracted by the exhibit of German expressionist seascapes, which almost seemed like a contradiction in terms, but the paintings themselves proved otherwise. The show was small, but very good. The Hmong tapestries on display were familiar to me in style—you can get them at many farmers' markets, and we have a few on the walls at home—but many of these were much larger, and the interpretation was illuminating.

The extensive permanent collection of Hudson School landscapes was fine, as usual, but the smaller room of French Impressionist works seemed a bit depleted. I said something to the guard sitting in her Plexiglas booth in front of a keyboard.

"Well, it's been in the papers, so I guess I can tell you," she said. "They're selling off some of the paintings. The Seurat! I loved the Seurat!"

"So did I," I said.

"And Washington Crossing the Delaware," she added with a grimace that I found hard to interpret. "The estimated sale prince is $25 million." (I read in the papers a week later that it had sold for $45 million.)

She told us there were plans afoot to build a new concert hall somewhere downtown and move some of the artwork to an adjoining gallery. That sounded like a good idea to me. The Marine Museum is situated on the Mississippi riverbank in an industrial district north of town, not far from the Fascenal distribution warehouses. It's a great museum but it doesn't contribute much to the city's pedestrian energy.

"Well, life is change," I said. "You can volunteer at the concert hall downtown."

"Yes," she agreed. "I'm a grandmother now, and a mother-in-law. I've got to stay sharp!"

We had rented an AirBnB apartment downtown accessed from an alley. It sounded a little dicey, but so many buildings have been replaced by parking lots in downtown Winona that when we arrived, the locale seemed open and airy. The apartment itself was clean and modern, almost like a Room & Board showroom, and the only drawback seemed to be the French press coffee-maker, which we had forgotten how to use.

From our little apartment we walked north two blocks to a used book store where I bought CDs of music by Dowland, Bach, and Durufle for a dollar a piece and a copy of Virgil's Georgics, and chatted with the owner about the play he was directing at a theater on the other side of the highway in a log cabin tucked into the shadows of the bluffs. Then Hilary and I walked down to the waterfront levee, which was new and clean but deserted. A few blocks to the west took us past a small grassy park, situated between two brick buildings a hundred years old, where they were selling draught beer, and quite a few twenty-somethings were eating sandwiches and salads at a row of picnic tables.

"You don't have to buy the beer," the friendly woman behind the counter said. "You can just come and have a picnic."

I thanked her but told her we had other plans.

Which was true. Hilary was taking me out for a birthday dinner at a restaurant called Scratch - Nosh, a few blocks to the south.

"Do you have a reservation?" the woman at the front desk asked.

"No. I didn't think we'd need one," I replied. "It seemed pretty quiet in town. Now I see why. Everyone's in here."

It was, indeed, a lively place, and the meal was top-flight: a warm beet salad, crab cakes, a distinctive burger made of Italian sausage and locally harvested ramps. A glass or two of wine.

The air had been steamy all day, with the afternoon temperature rising above 80 degrees. Things had cooled off as we walked the block-and-a-half down the alley past the Purcell and Elmslie bank to our cozy apartment. The city was quiet, and we were pooped.

Covid and Me

When I saw the result on the email from Walgreen's—"positive"—I was momentarily taken aback. Evidently I had Covid! After two long years on the sidelines, the coach was finally sending me out onto the field.

(Yes, but who really wants to play? And who is the coach?)

I was slightly flabbergasted. I couldn't quite wrap my head around the idea. Who, me? But it wasn't merely an idea. The determination came from a lab test, hence highly reliable. I'd had a sore throat for several days, and I'd stood in a room packed with thirty or forty people talking wildly for several hours the previous Sunday. That's why I took the test.

Yet I didn't feel nearly as dreadful as you imagine someone feels when you're told that he or she has Covid, and, utterly surprised, you groan "Oh, no!" in sincere sympathy. Not that bad at all.

Some get it worse than others, I realize. And some have no symptoms at all. As for myself,  I felt like you feel when you've got a cold: a cough, a sneeze, a runny nose. A fiery sore throat at night, but not bad at all during the daytime.

In fact, the previous day, following an at-home test that came out negative, I'd gone to a library sale in St. Anthony Park to check out the CDs. I brought a mask, of course, but forgot my reading glasses, and few things are harder to decipher than the lettering on the spines of a long row of jewel cases lined up in a cardboard box in the shadowy hall of a library basement. There were four or five such boxes, but no jazz in sight.

I struggled to come up with four items, fifty cents apiece, all from the fringes of the classical world: an anthology of Manuel de Falla's orchestral works including "Love, the Magician," which serves as the soundtrack of Carlos Saura's great flamenco film of the same name; a two-CD set of Scriabin's astral piano music; some sluggish organ works by Edgar Elgar that I almost threw out the window of the car after a brief listen on the way home; and a collection of Darius Milhaud's piano works that I used to love and still have on LP in the basement, though my turntable is kaput I have no way to listen to it.

Perhaps I wouldn't have done the drive-through Walgreen's test, which takes two days to process, except that we'd been invited to a dinner at the house of some friends who were leaving a few days later with their granddaughter on a vacation to Africa. Wouldn't want to muck up their plans by transmitting a dreaded disease! No doubt, the fact that three other friends at the party we'd attended the previous Sunday now had Covid also figured into the equation.

But I don't for an instant regret going to that party to honor the memory of our old friend Mary, who died recently after a long struggle with a rare form of Parkinson's. I can't recall being in a room with a larger and more closely packed collection of animated, good-natured, and chatty people, many of whom I knew only slightly, or only by reputation. 

Mary's husband, Dana, has told many tales over the years about his California friends Barbara, Tom, Frank, and others I might have forgotten. Here they were, in the flesh. We'd heard stories about Mary's sisters and cousins, a few of whom had flown in from Baltimore or Arizona. And we'd known Mary and Dana's two sons and their wives and fabulous children for decades, though we rarely saw any of them. Mary's son Wyatt gave a heartfelt and eloquent introductory speech that lovingly captured Mary's free-wheeling yet deeply caring and appreciative personality, and the entire event, as Dana told me later, "Couldn't have gone much better."

Our friends Jane and Louis brought their daughter Emily along, and it was nice to chat with them all. Louis had recently gotten back from a ten-day "vacation" as part of a crew clearing brush along the North Country Trail in northern Minnesota. A few days after the party, as promised, I emailed him a photo I took a few weeks ago of the same trail several hundred miles to the east as it crosses the Presque Isle River in Upper Michigan. The raging water is at least five feet deep.

In return, Louis informed me that both he and Jane had tested positive for Covid, and sent me a photo of the anti-viral drug they were taking. I ordered some, too, and Hilary picked it up for me this afternoon. She never caught the virus, strange to say. She got a negative result back from Walgreen's just this afternoon, and we've started to wear masks around the house.

This morning our friend Tim, soon off to Africa, dropped off a "doggy bag" of grilled meat and vegetables from the dinner we missed, along with two half-empty bottles of wine from the same event. We'll have it all for dinner tonight.  

I'm still in quarantine until tomorrow. But it's just my good luck that the finals of the Rollad Garros  tennis tournament is on tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll make an egg pie or sneak off to the store for some croissants in early morning light, when no one's around, and throw that CD of Milhaud's piano music onto the stereo to play during commercials.

Will Nadal win his fourteenth French Open title, on that sore foot of his? Maybe. Maybe not. But it would be a little foolhardy to bet against him, considering the tight spots he's already extricated himself from on the way to the finals.