Wild Gray Weekend

It's a grayish part of the year, more suitable for afternoons in front of the fire than touch football, or even skiing. But it really does pay to get out and about on occasion. 

On a recent Sunday morning Hilary and I drove down to the Art Shanty Village, which has been set up in the hills behind the bandshell this year rather than out on the lake, due to concerns about slush and other unpleasant ice conditions.

We've been going to this event almost since its inception in 2004 on Medicine Lake, later White Bear Lake, and in recent years on Lake Harriet. The current village isn't one of the better ones. Because the installations are scattered here and there, often out of sight of one another; there is little community hubbub, and the few shanties that have been erected seem simpler, less outlandish, more pointedly designed for kids. Meanwhile, the vastness of the ice, where the entire village was visible and strange creatures would pass by on bicycles and sleds, doesn't come into play much.

Which is not the say the village isn't worth a visit. We got there early, before the scene had really warmed up, but it gave us more time to chat with the women and men who created the installations, and that's often the best part of the event. The woman at the "house of treasures" insisted that Hilary take her favorite piece of mini-art. The artist in question had retired and moved to the North Shore, but found it too isolated and ended up in Sturgeon Bay, where she now makes collages out of antique pieces of paper.

"But I don't have a treasure to exchange," Hilary said.

"Don't worry about that. We have hundreds of tiny treasures in these chests," the woman said.

At the bottom of the hill a minister was in attendance at a Chapel of Love. You bring the marriage license and he will marry you. Traffic had been slow but he was looking forward to doing a brisk Sunday business.

Thirty yards away stood a strange shack with plastic sheathing decorated with wreathes made of weeds and sundry other things. A large number of shoes were hanging from pieces of string nearby, and each of them was stuffed with a potato-like object painted gold. Why? I have no idea. The theme was re-use, though it was hard to tell.

I chatted with the proprietor about the joys of pallet wood, of which there was an unlimited supply on the loading dock where I worked for twenty-odd years, and even began to rave about a wine cabinet I built from such material forty years ago. It now stands in the basement behind the furnace, filled with old manuscripts, maps, travel fliers, and MACARONI back issues. (Just let me know if you want some.)

At one shanty children were given the opportunity to design quilts using frozen blocks of colored ice. (Sound like fun?) At another stylish sculptural installation at the top of the hill you could generate eerie sounds while watching colored strips of cloth rustle in the wind.

Mid-afternoon would have been a better time to visit. A klezmer band was scheduled to perform and also an opera troupe. But we enjoyed our unhurried stroll through the grounds and also our walk back to the car through the neighborhood.

Our afternoon stop was at the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear a program presented by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra called "Distillations." The university campus was a good venue for the program, which seemed a little like Modern Music History 1-001. It was devoted to a range of musical styles and moods, though the pieces were all written within a narrow span of years. The most recent of the bunch, Richard Strauss's "String Sextet from Capriccio," was also the most conventional. A lovely interweaving of string voices—nothing more, nothing less—it showcased the sound of violins, well played at close range. (We were in the seventh row.)

Concertmaster Steven Copes, who both designed and introduced the program, described the next piece, Arnold Schoenberg's "Chamber Symphony No. 1," as "forty-five minutes of music compressed into twenty minutes of time." The question he didn't answer was, "What's the rush?" I succeeded in enjoying the piece for a third of its length by closing my eyes and imagining it was the soundtrack to a long chase scene in a German Expressionist film, perhaps starring Peter Lorre. It also brought to mind George Antheil's obscure opera Transatlantic. But Schoenberg didn't do the work required to fashion his brief and frenetic symphony into a more expansive and coherent or even superficially satisfying piece. It was obvious he wasn't listening to or imagining the sound, but merely devising logical schemes for rearranging the notes and shuttling material from one instrument to another. Scholars enjoy analyzing such things. Sometimes musicians too. Most music-lovers don't enjoy listening to them.

The best flashes of the piece reminded me of Igor Stravinsky's Octet, which is also harmonically challenging but far better paced and shaped.  

Sensing that we'd need a break after such a dense extravaganza, Cope followed it with a four-minute solo flute piece by Edgard Varèse called "Density 21.5" performed by SPCO veteran Alicia McQuerrey. Hilary read in the notes that this is a famous piece, its brevity notwithstanding. I'm not sure why. It reminded me of a typical Japanese shakuhachi solo, better suited to a pine forest or a Zen monastery than a concert stage. I "liked" it, but it didn't add up to much.

Yet all of these efforts were worthwhile, if only to prepare us for the final piece, Maurice Ravel's String Quartet, which is a sui generis masterpiece, hauntingly beautiful in a slippery and sophisticated way. I first heard it in college, decades ago, and as I listened I was reminded of the Nonesuch LP I owned back then, with a hot-air balloon on the cover. In the SPCO performance everything sounded a little different—which is what you want at a live performance. The cello was unusually prominent and I noticed for the first time how many of the sounds being made were unmusical flashes and squiggles amid the otherwise free-flowing lines.

The young Ravel dedicated the piece to Gabriel Faure, who deemed it a failure. When Ravel's slightly older contemporary Debussy heard it, he said, "Don't change a note."

We spotted violinist Maureen Nelson just ahead of us as we walked through light snow to our car after the performance. "Nice concert!" we shouted, almost in unison. (What else  are you going to say?)

 "Thanks," she said, as she hurried off.

Maybe it was the flute solo, but we were primed for the remarkable Happy Hour at the nearby Thai-sushi restaurant Soberfish. We're talking egg rolls, spring rolls, tempura, gyoza, and a sushi sampler, along with several glasses of wine, for just over $40. The cozy dining room looked to be half full of students from nearby Augsburg University, though an Asian family of five was eating a big meal that included oysters lined up in a row in little white spoons.

We drove home through light snow along West River Road feeling we'd had a good day.  

In Praise of Firewood

I had been putting off the task of buying firewood for far too long, due to COVID, the holidays, and simple inertia. We'd been burning up odds and ends from the yard and a few bundles we'd purchased from the DNR but never used. And we'd been having fewer fires, too. But the pile was dwindling.

There was a time when I considered buying firewood a sort of quest, or a game, where city folk buy things from country folk, trying to be friendly while not getting swindled. There was a time, in fact, when woodcutters would go from door to door selling their nicely split but perhaps slightly green product. If you bought some, they'd make a note of it and come back again a year later.

The men who cut, split, age, and haul the stuff around are a breed apart, only one step higher, perhaps, on the ladder of atavistic trades than the men who apply hot asphalt to warehouse roofs in the summertime. Yet I feel that I’ve got a lot in common with them. I love the woods, I love the trees, I’ve cut and split plenty of wood myself, in my time, and feel an almost Hamsun-esque attachment to individual trees, living and dead.

The chain saw and the power-splitter have no doubt changed the industry somewhat, but the men who come around to drop off the stuff don’t seem to change much at all. They typically don't care to chat about trees—unlike the arborists at Rainbow Tree Service—and there isn't really much to say. Oak, maple, birch. Brainerd, Little Falls, Deer River. How long was it aged? Is there any point in asking, now that a ton of it is sitting in your garage?

I had some wood delivered this morning, quick and easy, from Five Star Tree Service. Friends had recommended it. I spoke to "Greg" yesterday, and he quoted a price somewhat lower than Ron's, a suburban firm with a cadre of woodcutters and a paid customer service rep with an agreeable voice.

And the wood looks good. By this stage in life my attention has shifted from healing the urban/rural divide to fully appreciating the wood itself sitting in a beautiful stack inside my garage. It's a sacred moment, a moment of subtle rejoicing and heart-felt awe, and it will be repeated again and again each time I bring a few more pieces of wood into the house

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Vacation - Minnesota-style

 

We left town at 9:30 and arrived here at our rental cabin just beyond Castle Danger at 5 p.m. in near darkness.

That's not good time—the trip would normally take 4 hours—but on the way up we veered north through Cloquet and ate a pleasant lunch at Wilbert's Cafe in Cotton. On the TV in the bar next door the Packers were just then crushing the Vikings, but we opted for a more pleasant diversion, heading west on back roads and across the tracks toward the Brigadoon of Meadowlands and the nearby Shangri La of  Sax-Zim Bog. This region is famous for its rare owls who dip down from Canada to hunt for voles and mice amid the fields and black-spruce bogs. 

On any given winter day you might see a car parked on the side of the road with a license plate from Texas or Florida. Birders, of course.

A great gray owl can hear a mouse under four feet of snow a hundred yards away. That's amazing, but I know it's true: I read it on the place mat in Wilbert's Cafe while I was waiting for my BLT.

We stopped briefly at the visitors' center, which has been expanded and now boasts a small exhibit room with sub-floor heating of which the staff is very proud. After consulting the whiteboard listing recent sightings, we headed down a path through the snow—the Gray Jay Trail—and a quarter-mile later we came to an elevated platform supporting a bench facing a stunted and leafless tamarack tree. Someone had put a swab of peanut butter at the tip of the naked trunk, and several chickadees were darting back and forth to it from the protection of a piney thicket a few feet away.

One of them was a boreal chickadee. 

Visitors often see them here, but we never had. That was a thrill. Other sightings during the hike included pine and evening grosbeaks and quite a few ravens.

The gas fire is flickering. The wind is coming up on the lake. There's a big stack of books sitting here on the table beside me, defining the limits of my literary explorations. It's hard to say what mood you're going to be it once you leave the city behind.

Glancing at the stack, I see: 

George Steiner: On Difficulty, which has an essay with the intriguing title "Dante Now: the Gossip of Eternity."

Mark Kurplansky: Cod

Jules Superville: Selected Writings

Dark Blue Winter Overcoat: recent short stories by Scandinavian authors

How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells, Lewis Wolport (a bit of science never hurts)

The Autobiography of Benedetto Croce

The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I

The Lost Origins of the Essay: an anthology containing some unorthodox selections

At the last minute before we left, it struck me that my stack was a bit heavy on the "intellectual" side, and I removed a yellowing Beacon paperback of essays honoring Ernst Cassirer (ca 1934) and,replaced it with a slim volume containing two novellas by Natalia Ginzburg under the title Family.

That was the first book I opened tonight.

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After breakfast and a morning walk out to the highway, we drove back to Two Harbors to buy some groceries. We also paid a visit to the harbor and took a walk along the rock shelf just beyond the breakwater looking for snow buntings. A large ore boat was just leaving the port when we arrived. 

When we got back to the parking lot, a middle-aged woman without a hat was looking frantically out to sea. The man who was with her had climbed down closer to the breakwater.

"Did you lose something?" I asked.

"A ship was supposed to be docked here, or just departing," she said.

"We saw one leave fifteen minute ago. You can still see it if you walk out along the shore. It's pretty small now. What's so special about it?"

"It's the Arthur Anderson. It was with the Edmund Fitzgerald the night it went down. It made it to shore."

Hilary showed the woman a photo she'd taken on her phone.

"I don't think that's it," the woman said. Okay, whatever.

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Lunch of pea soup and melted cheese on toast. Then nap time. Hilary had the idea of playing some CDs we'd brought to listen to in the car on the miniature DVD player that's tucked into an alcove in the chimney wall of the cabin. We've been coming up here for years but had never thought of that. We're listening to Til Fellner's version of the Well-tempered Clavier on piano—a meditative rendition, heavy on the sustain pedal, that suits the mood of the hour.

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Darkness arrives; we're done with dinner: leftovers from last night. I just now finished reading the second of Ginzberg's novellas, Borghesia.  When I was done with the first one, I read the first thirty pages a second time over. The names are odd and hard to keep track of—Ninetta, Dodò, Carmine, Ivana, Angelica, Amos Ilia, Ciaccia Oppi—and the story doesn't unfold with any kind of focus . Ginzberg has a crisp, gossipy, and "omniscient" narrative style devoid of interiority, mystery, or suspense. It just skims along. Both novellas chronicle the messed-up lives of people who can't seem to stay connected to one another, though the focus is less on the personal drama of the couples involved than the secondary and residual connections that keep everyone's life afloat emotionally despite all the antipathy and confusion. Paying bills, making meals, going to the movies, looking for work, heightened from time to time by a break-up, break-down, or suicide.

Ciaccia Oppi had questioned Ninetta and now knew that she was having an affair with Giose Quirino and suffering badly, because she had always thought adultery was a sad, degrading thing. But although she was suffering, she was perhaps proud and stunned to be experiencing such a sad, degrading adven­ture. Her old radiant smile had gone, and in its place was a humble, tremulous, pained little smile. Carmine had met Giose Quirino at Ciaccia Oppi’s house a few months before. He thought him the most ghastly imbecile. He was a tall, thin man with a face that was all furrows, wrinkles and bags, a grizzled forelock and pale eyes. His lean figure was always clothed in soft, elegant white sweaters. The first time she had seen him, Ninetta had said he looked like a monkey. There was that rag monkey of Dodò’s, which was completely pulled to pieces now, its head was all floppy, but he always wanted to take it to bed with him ....

There are no real highs or lows. Every tidbit gets the same emphasis.  

I read a few of Ginzberg's novels thirty years ago—The City and the House, Valentino, Sagittarius—and it feels good to renew the acquaintance.

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At three we walked down to the end of the road past the owner's fine new house and three or four of the older cottages, where we've stayed at various times by ourselves or with friends thirty or forty years ago. We continued east though a copse of pines along the ski trail into open fields and more spotty woods, a nice trail that we would have been skiing if my back weren't a bit out of whack due to some recent heavy shoveling back in town. It's been cloudy and "close" all day, with temperatures in the 20s.

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Bright stars this morning at 6:30 against an inky black sky. Impressive. Exciting even. An hour later, a pale blue sky to the west with wispy white swirls of cloud, nineteen degrees. Refreshing. An ore boat is passing fairly close to shore. How close? It's hard to say. It looks to be about an inch long. In any case, it's clearly "hugging" the North Shore, heading for Silver Bay or Thunder Bay rather than Marquette or Sault Ste. Marie.

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Oatmeal. And now the sun is breaking above the clouds.

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Back from our morning excursion to nearby Gooseberry Falls State Park. We walked across the expanse of the rock-shelf picnic area. Gray clouds had arrived in earnest and the day was suddenly much darker. A pileated woodpecker erupted out of the woods, squawking. A raven croaked from the far side of the hill. We admired an unusually handsome jack pine well situated in a snowy clearing, surrounded by tall yellow grasses. At another place Hilary noticed three first-year spruce trees protruding a foot above the snow. They had turned a bright greenish yellow.

"They aren't going to make it," I said. But a second later I added, "Then again, you never know."

Before we'd reached Pipit Point—a name I made up just now because a few years ago we saw a flock of pipits there—we turned back on the bike trail, now a ski trail, that passed along the edge of the deserted campground.

We spent a little time at the Visitors' Center examining the plastic lynx and the stuffed bobcat. Back outside, we noticed a flock of purple finches, most of them heavily streaked but colorless, flitting back and forth between a feeder and the branches of a nearby grove of birch trees. 

A park employee wearing a luminescent green vest and sunglasses passed us on his way to empty the trash cans, and we talked with him for quite a while about the wildlife he sees in the course of his work here at the park and at other locales in the vicinity. We were standing there for so long that after he left we returned to the car immediately. No need to venture out on another hike.

The waves are now sizable, with white-caps everywhere. A dark gray, leaden, almost sinister seascape as night comes on. Snowy rain in the forecast for this evening. Well, we're not going anywhere.

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In late afternoon I finished Cod, Mark Kurlansky's book about the North Atlantic fishing industry. I think I may be the last person in the world to read it. It's a nice mix of nautical lore, international politics, environmentalism, national character (you know, "fish & chips"), reflections about the allure of the life at sea, and recipes from Scandinavia, Portugal, Newfoundland, and other places. Why do tourists, including me, love to wander through yuppified fishing villages? Part of the allure, I'm sure, comes from the expansiveness (and smell) of the open seas, compounded by the ruggedness and aesthetic "look" of boats, piers, nets, and lobster pots, compounded by the evident intelligibility of what's going on all around. You can see the watercraft, the rigging, the men, and sometimes even the fish, which you can buy and cook up for dinner or order off the menu at waterfront cafe. 

Last spring, in a little restaurant in Pacific Grove, California, I ordered a fish I'd ever heard of. Nothing special, but tasty, prepared with some sort of Caribbean flair. When I asked the waitress about it she said, "We get it from New Zealand."

Lake Superior doesn't support much commercial fishing, though you can get fresh lake trout and herring here and there. Our dinner was a seafood chowder consisting of canned potato soup, milk, sautéed onions, flour, marjoram, cayenne, thyme, and a big bag of assorted frozen seafood bits from Trader Joe's—scallops, squid, and who knows what all? 

Excellent. With Joe Lovano's Joyous Encounter on the CD player.

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The gas fire is flickering. The wind continues to rise. But wave-watching is hardly a meditative experience, especially when the waves are big. You find yourself evaluating the waves, trying to guess which ones will break magnificently and which ones are going to fizzle out, which will get subsumed in other waves approaching from one side or the other or by the backwash of the previous foaming crest. It's an endless exercise, irresistible but also tedious. The roar of the surf is ever present, rising and falling, and there is never a "last wave."

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This anthology of essays I've brought along has turned out to be a shrewd pick, with as much variety as anyone could want, but it's also unorthodox, and that starts with the title, The Lost Origins of the Essay. The entries are arranged chronologically from 1500 B.C to 1974, and Plutarch, Montaigne, Swift, and Virginia Woolf are among the familiar contributors. We're not dealing here with origins, or with essayists who have been "lost." But quite a few of editor D'Agata's choices are peculiar, and some are perverse. Last night I skimmed an essay by Michel Butor about Egypt, translated by Lydia Davis. I also read some catty passages from that classic of Japanese literature, The Pillow Book, circa 996. Both pieces were highly idiosyncratic, and I guess that's the point. I might even be tempted to call them trivial. But lyric poetry often follows such paths to good effect. Why not prose?

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If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot it from my memory. -- Montaigne, "On a Few Lines of Virgil."

But I don't see this as a problem. Sure, we ski less, but we read more. And I'm reading books I first read forty years ago—Ginzberg, Montaigne—but relishing them more. The heavy seas outside the window seemed ominous in the pre-dawn dark, but they now strike me as dramatic, tedious, and irritating.

I am on my way to a point where I will leap for joy as at a novel favor when nothing pains me.

This I can relate to, as I adjust the hot-pad on my back and reach for the bottle of ibuprofen.

Our masters ... seeking the causes of the extraordinary flights of our soul, have attributed some to divine ecstacy, to love, to warlike fierceness, to poetry, to wine, but has not assigned a proper share to health—an ebullient, vigorous, full, lazy health, such as in the past my green years and security supplied me with now and then.

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Back from another excursion to Gooseberry. We hiked up the west side of the river through the shadows of snow-covered spruce and balsam. Not a soul in sight. The river is frozen over though the roiling water has broken through in a few places. The cedars lining the bank are almost black in the low light. On the way back to the parking lot we passed a man who said, "Go to Grand Marais. It's beautiful up there. Bright and sunny."

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It was maybe 1:30 when we headed back in to Two Harbors. Hilary's mom isn't feeling well and she wanted to check her emails for news. I was looking forward to taking a look at the better-than-average de-acquisition shelves at the public library. We returned to the cabin with a spy novel by Alan Furst, a book of poems by Amit Majmudan (never heard of him), a DVD of Julie and Julia, and a classic full-color book of outdoor photography by Galen Rowell.

Darkness grows out on the lake, though the waves are as fierce as ever. The Rowell book turns out to be a personal and well-written photographer's credo, along with plenty of climbing stories and practical tips about shooting film. I haven't thought about Kodochrome for a long time. 

We're listening to a CD of Bach cantatas, and the joyous shouting seems appropriate to the evening. I opened a bottle of Savigny-Les-Beane (2017)  which reminded me a remark by Montaigne that I came across yesterday:

We should take the whip to a young man who spends his time discriminating between the tastes of wines and sauces

.This red wine is light, but well-structured, and it TASTES like a Burgundy. It will go well with the Spicy Mexican Squash Stew we'll be cooking up soon. I ought to know the shipper; in Burgundy that's important. But I don't. Looking at the label, I see it's Villament. My friend Tim, who knows far more about wine than I do, would say, "Unreliable, but worth taking a chance on occasionally."

And now a lovely soprano aria emerges from the chorus, very familiar, I ought to know what it is, but once again I don't. Could it be "Man singet mit Freuden von sieg"? Or "Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich"? All I know, based on the liner notes accompanying the CD, is that Arlene Auget is the soprano and the music is wonderful.

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Now the smell of cinnamon fills the air. The stew is simmering. We've been chopping things.

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Morning. The lake is calmer, no white-caps, and the swells break in handsome forms rather than crashing with wild abandon. On our pre-breakfast walk we ran into Jamie, the third-generation owner of the resort, out walking her golden retriever, Penny. We also passed an old sign I'd never noticed before. "Ole's Acres: Established 1898." I doubt if the highway came anywhere near here back in those days.

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Only two cars in the parking lot at Gooseberry. We hiked up across the highway bridge and circled right on the Gitchi Gummi Trail through the woods, enjoying the views across the valley. We spotted two deer on the trail ahead of us who plunged effortlessly down a steep, snow-covered hillside toward the river. We heard a few bizarre notes from a nearby raven that Hilary compared aptly to someone striking a few random notes on a broken marimba. Although the trail was well-traveled it was also hilly and vaguely treacherous in a few places. I don't think a physical therapist could have devised a better exercise regime for my aching back.

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Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself.

                                         - Montaigne

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Finally a bit of skiing here on the property. Brilliant sun on the new snow and a few animal tracks—a vole, maybe, and the oval tread of a coyote who was following the groomed trail.

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The afternoon has been splendid, it looks like a summer day, and for at least an hour the sun was shining across and through the immaculate white of the breaking waves, so that they looked like clumps of warm white coral glowing from within. Now the sun is lower, the waves are in shadow, and they've taken on an aquamarine or pale turquoise sheen.

I opened a book of Jules Superville's work just now and hit upon a poem, "Homage to Life," that seemed oddly familiar, as if I'd quoted it in a book somewhere long ago. Here are a few lines:

It is beautiful to have chosen

a living home

and stayed awhile ...

And to have all these words

moving around in the head

to chose the least beautiful of them

And make a little feast ...

 The sky is clear tonight for once, though the moon is insanely bright. Mars cannot be outdone among the stars. Orion is fair, and the Pleiades look good through binoculars. We'll go out again later, the moon will be brighter. People have arrived. Cabins are lit up on either side of us, and all the way down the road.

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I was up at 5:30 this morning, made the coffee, sat near the window waiting for signs of sunrise. Two hours later, the sun is one finger above the wisps of cloud on the horizon. We followed the progress of light, noting every shifting phase of illumination in the clouds, the sky, the gentle waves, the atmosphere. Stepping out into the morning, we walk along the road past a string of Hyundis, Rav4s, Subarus, and one black Tesla. The weekend people have arrived.

It's cold—maybe ten degrees. The sky is streaked in bands of soft pink.

It's time to pack up.