New Year's Eve. Castle Haven Resort. Waves crashing in the dark.
Our now-standard side-trip to the Sax-Zix Bog on the way up was fruitful. No exotic owls, but the rough-legged hawks seemed to be everywhere, both dark and light phases. Several Canada jays.
A highlight was an extended view of a martin feverishly eating something wonderful—probably some peanut butter put there by a bog volunteer—out of the hollow bore of an upended log near a feeding station on Admiral Road.
* * *
Monday morning, approaching seven. Still pitch dark. Surf is down. We're sitting by the fire. Still in the bird-watching mood, I just looked up the differing traits of the black-backed and the three-toed woodpeckers. Much more white behind the eye on the three-toed variety. Also some pale white stripes running from side to side down the back.
* * *
* * *
Now there's bright sun blazing into the cabin. I'm sitting on the futon/couch, but I. might have to move as the sun creeps west.
I
read hurriedly
to
finish the book before
the
sunlight reaches my face.
Yes, I'm reading the learned introduction to Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, but the passages the author refers to as "clever interpretation" and "ingenious transfer" seem ho-hum to me. As do nearly all haiku. The syllable count isn't interesting, except as a creative challenge. The simplicity of the result is.
Awakened
from my nap,
I
see the white-caps have grow.
Time
to relight the fire.
Coming upon a child abandoned by its parents on the beach, Basho gives it what food he can spare. Attributing its sorry situation to "the irresistible will of heaven," he passes on, leaving the child to its fate. He refers to a massive pine as a "cold senseless object," but a few lines later describes it as "eternal as law." This "law" is probably something similar to the Greek notion of "logos."
* * *
An afternoon foray to the Superior Hiking Trail a few miles inland from the Rustic Inn. A rocky, icy climb through brilliant sun and snow to the top for a spectacular look out to sea across the valley of the Encampment River. But during the second leg, across flat scrubby country to Crow Creek, Hilary's eye started to act weird and we turned back. It's happened a few times before, always while hiking in winter. Now we're sitting in front of the fire again, eating spicy pretzels and looking out at the whitecaps stretching as far as the eye can see. The sun is low and everything here on land is in shadow.
* * *
Basho compares himself at one point to a bat who waivers ceaselessly between being a bird and a mouse. A few pages later he writes:
Unwilling
to part with the passing year, I drank till late on the last day of December.
When I awoke after a long sleep, the first day of the new year was more than
half gone.
Hilary and I shared a bottle of white wine and got up at 5:30 this morning.
Having
showered and changed
I
pour myself a glass of white wine.
This
plastic juice glass better suits the winter day
than
cut crystal.
There are few things here to distract me from Basho's simple-minded but somehow charming travelogues. At one point he writes:
My
only mundane concerns were whether I would be able to find a suitable place to
sleep at night and whether the straw sandals were the right size for my feet.
Every turn of the road brought me new thoughts and every sunrise gave me fresh
emotions. My joy was great when I encountered anyone with the slightest
understanding of artistic elegance. Even those whom I had long hated for being
antiquated and stubborn sometimes proved to be pleasant companions on my
wandering journey. Indeed, one of the greatest pleasures of traveling was to
find a genius hidden among weeds and bushes, a treasure lost in broken tiles, a
mass of gold, buried in clay.
To
talk casually
About
an iris flower
is
one of the pleasures
of
the wandering journey.
This is one of Basho's better poetic efforts. His prose is often equally poetic.
It
was the middle of April when I wandered out to the beach of Suma. The sky was
slightly overcast, and the moon on a short night of early summer had special
beauty. The mountains were dark with foliage. When I thought it was about time
to hear the first voice of the cuckoo, the light of the sun touched the eastern
horizon, and as it increased I began to see on the hills of Ueno ripe ears of
wheat tinged with reddish brown and fisherman's huts scattered here and there
among the flowers of white poppy.
* * *
We inched forward along the deck, feeling with our feet for the first step. It was dark, also cold; no moon, the stars were very bright. The square of Pegasus, Orion, Auriga, the Pleiades, against the rich blackness of night. Hilary saw a dramatic shooting star. I missed it.
The yard light a hundred yards down the way was out. Good. We located Andromeda without much difficulty, a lovely smudge in the darkness. Jupiter was blazing. I was hoping for a second meteor, but no such luck. The biting wind eventually drove us back inside.
You don't see such a brilliant night sky in the Cities. Nowhere near it. It touches something deep and mysterious—a welcome gift.
* * *
Tuesday afternoon, we're back from an extended excursion up the shore. The sky is a mottled gray, and the big lake is covered with gentle, almost imperceptible swells burnished with tiny ripples. The crests that finally appear a few feet from shore make only a half-hearted murmur when they break. The distant shore is clearly visible, including a few of the Apostle Islands.
As we drove up the shore earlier this morning the clouds were scanty, and our hike out to the end of Shovel Point was full of sunshine and clear green-blue water, not to mention the glistening rocks and moss and the bristling evergreen shrubbery. A heavenly walk.
By the time we returned to the car the clouds had moved in again. Having come this far up the shore, we decided to continue east to Grand Marais. The big question became: Where to go for lunch? We considered several alternatives but finally chose the Cascade Lodge because it was closest, we'd never eaten there before, and the menu Hilary called up on her phone listed a "bliss" beet salad with arugula, feta, sautéed garbanzos, and mandarin orange slices.
The place had a woodsy feel, but it was somewhat classier than one would expect to judge from the weather-beaten exterior. I went with the salad. Excellent. Hilary ordered an Irish beef stew cooked with Guinness that was thick, warm, and tasty. There was only one other couple in the place, and when I asked about the vaguely Irish flavor of the place, our server explained that the previous owners had been Scottish, and the current new owners even more so. I told her a bit about my Scottish roots and she shared the results of her recent DNA test. "My people are from Ohio originally. Like did you read Hillbilly Elegy? That's my region. Some of my ancestors left, some stayed. Different choices, different outcomes. I was actually born in Alaska."
As we were leaving I said, "I've driven by this place for fifty years, and this is the first time I've stopped in."
"Lots of people say that," she said.
* * *
Grand Marais was cold and quiet. I felt a little sorry for the flock of golden-eye we saw bobbing in the harbor. The Ben Franklin was closed. The donut shop was closed. But Drury Lane Books had a sandwich board set up on the sidewalk proudly proclaiming that it was open from 9 to 5 seven days a week. Warm and cheery inside. Plenty of best-sellers and local titles on display. A few are tempting. Then again, I've got a stack of books waiting for me back at the cabin.
Now for the long drive back.
* * *
Basho: The pines are
of the freshest green, and their branches are carved in exquisite lines, bent
by the wind constantly blowing through them. Indeed, the beauty of the entire
scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed of feminine countenances,
for who else could have created such beauty but the great god nature himself?
A few pages later I come upon one of his less appealing haiku:
Bitten
by fleas and lice,
I
slept in a bed,
a
horse urinating all the time
close
to my pillow.
For dinner we finished off Hilary's Irish stew, preserved for us at the restaurant in a light brown cardboard container like the ones used to transport live worms to be used for bait. Once we'd finished that we moved on to some broiled chicken with prunes and olives left over from a birthday party we hosted recently with friends. Not bad!
* * *
I've finally finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and remain unconvinced of Basho's gifts as a poet. But I thoroughly enjoyed his home-spun descriptions of sights along the way and encounters with other travelers. Isn't that the challenge facing the chronicler? How to express the ecstasy of seeing a patch of moss on a rock lit up by glancing sunlight, or the good feeling that develops briefly among passing strangers?
At one point in the introduction the translator, Nobuyuki Yuasa, quotes Basho as follows:
Your
poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when
you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden
glimmering there.
Well, maybe. But it seems to me that poetry is never about objects. Always about events. Turning to the Everyman Library of Zen Poems, I come upon this gem by Basho:
The
beginning of art—
the
depth of the country
and
a rice-planting song.
I step outside into the cold. A hazy darkness. Not a hint of a star. Only a brief yellow flash or two my eye provides for itself.
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