Have I Lost My Sisu?

It's been hard to find a good place the ski this winter. Or maybe I just haven't been trying hard enough. Looking out the windows at dormant grass and dead leaves spreading out in every direction is sort of pleasant, but it also engenders a listless sense of stasis, of waiting. But let's be honest: the recent string of mostly sunny days has been mostly magnificent.

A few days ago the Star Tribune ran a story identifying Minnesota as the "epicenter of a sauna revival in the United States." Well, we'll grasp at any excuse to feel "special," and I'm sure many snow-birds in Texas, Florida, and Arizona are now green with envy. I must confess, however, that I don't enjoy saunas as much as I once did. You get hot, then you want to go out but you don't. No one else is going out, and you don't want to be a sissy. Finally you do go out, coaxing someone to go with you, but as often as not there's no lake nearby to jump into.

The first sauna I ever took was in the mid-1960s, on the shores of Wake-Um-Up Bay on Lake Vermilion, near the cabin where my mom had spent her childhood summers. She still had friends in the neighborhood, and they had a sauna right next to the lake. During one visit my brother and I were introduced to that old backwoods institution. I was ten years old, and I didn't quite see the point. It was too hot for me. I was more impressed with the two-gallon galvanized kettle sitting in a shed nearby, filled almost to the brim with blueberries that our hosts had picked in the scrubby open country along a gravel road up beyond Elbow Lake. That was a lot of blueberries.

During the years I worked at a canoe camp a few miles from the Canadian border the sauna became a regular part of the routine. We'd stoke it for hours—the record temperature was 230 degrees, as I recall—then sit around inside, sweating like mad, before running out to jump in the lake, which was only a few feet away. I can remember one moonless night, swimming out into the lake under a starry sky and spraying water into the air, which would catch the light from the sauna on shore behind me and explode into silent clouds of mist against a black sky filled with stars.

The best part of any sauna is the tingle you get as your overheated body adjusts to the frigid  lake water. Is it actually good for you? I have no idea. In any case, these days a motel hot-tub suits me just fine.

Last winter the snow was so deep that rabbits gnawed all the bark off several newly planted shrubs in our backyard. I bought some green fencing and a few white plastic sleeves to protect the ones that survived, and it's nice to see them here and there in the yard, differentiated somewhat from the generally weedy things that show up every year.

I'm especially excited about a pair of volunteer chokecherry trees that I discovered last summer just inside the neighbor's new fence. All winter long I have had it in mind to remove a twenty-foot elm tree that's crowding their space. "It's only four inches in diameter," I would say to myself. "I could cut it down with an ax. And winter's the time to do it." The other day, with the temperatures in the fifties, I decided it was now or never. I got some rope, an axe, a little aluminum hand saw, and my long-handled pruning saw from the garage and set to work.

I tied the rope (not a very good rope) from the spindly elm to a nearby spruce tree with a taught-line hitch (not a very well tied knot.) I thought I might lop off some of the upper branches that were overhanging the power-line, but they were too high to reach with my extensions, and I was unsure of the wisdom of waving a long metal pole in that particular direction. When it starts to go, I said to myself, I'll tighten the rope and direct the tree out away from the wires.

I hacked at the base of the tree with the ax for a while, then decided it would be better to saw it off four feet up, so that it would weigh less when it fell. I made the lower cut in the direction I wanted the little tree to fall, but that didn't matter much. It was leaning in the opposite direction, out over the wires, and the minute I began to break through the trunk, it dropped down onto them. Not a crash, but a weighty and definitive movement that I knew immediately would be impossible to undue or counteract with the tools I had. That was not the way I'd imagined it.

Then I went inside and called the power company.

A jolly man not far from retirement age arrived two days later in a white pick-up truck. I met him at the door.

"A tree fell on the wires?" he said.

"It didn't fall; I cut it down. I guess I got in a little over my head."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "It happens all the time."

We went around back and he took a look around. "You stopped at a good time," he said.

His method for removing the tree was the same as mine, but he had much better tools, and a half-century of experience under his belt. He had a beautiful hank of supple pale blue rope at least an inch in diameter and a pole much longer than mine with an attachment on the end that he used to string the rope fifteen feet higher on a different tree nearby. "This pole doesn't conduct electricity," he said. "I think yours might."

Once he'd secured the rope he took my little saw from where I'd left it on the edge of the deck—I almost laughed out loud—and completed the cut. When he broke through the trunk it swung down away from the wires like a pendulum and came to rest against my neighbor's fence in the midst of a buckthorn thicket. What a relief.

He was having a slow day and we spent a few minutes talking about trees and birds. He owns a few acres up in Ramsey. When his kids were little he had a clock in the kitchen with birds instead of numerals on the face: robin, goldfinch, blue jay. Rather than chiming on the hour it would produce the appropriate bird call. "Imagine how thrilled my kids were when they heard a real mourning dove cooing in the back yard," he said. "And knew what it was!"

On quiet days I can now stare out the dining room window at a section of the yard that suddenly looks healthy, prim, and full of potential—the way I've been envisioning it for several years. In part, this is because I had to clear out several large buckthorns (which I should have done anyway) to get at the tree I wanted to remove. But now a new section of the sky has been exposed, too, and all summer we'll enjoy the extra sunlight shining down on our otherwise mostly shady garden. 

 

  

A Farm Morning

I read in the paper the other day that Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died. His is an all-American entrepreneurial success story with Biblical overtones, not only the part where he struggled to learn Hebrew and Aramaic, but more especially the part where he spurned numerous offers from mega-food producers to buy his company and instead turned Bob's Red-Mill into an employee-owned outfit.

By coincidence, I happen to have a hefty bag of Bob's Red bulgur in the pantry. Fetching a few ancient cookbooks from the basement, I opened Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Grains and Greens to the appropriate page and read, "There's no particular reason for eating bulgur." What? Oh. I had misread the line. It actually says, "There's no particular season for eating bulgur." That's better.

Bulgur seems to be an ecumenical grain, popular among Turks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, and aging hippies, which are more numerous than you might suppose. I didn't read Wolfert's analysis of the four or five types of bulgur, but skipped to the recipes, where "Zeliha GunGoren's Scallion Bulgur Pilaf with Golden Raisin Hosfaf" caught my eye. It sounds pretty good.

By coincidence, the previous night I had been reading The Dawn of Everything, in which anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow explode several myths about the nature of early humans by simply examining the archeological evidence. The huge structures found at Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, for example, which date from 9500 BCE, don't look much like the kind of things that small bands of egalitarian nomadic hunter-gatherers would have built. The even more massive structures at Poverty Point, Louisiana, which Hilary and I have visited, also date from before the agricultural revolution which, in the standard view, led to cities, hierarchies, and all of our current urban and environmental woes.  

Graeber and Wengrow seem to know their stuff, reaching back deeply into the literature, quoting Levi-Strauss, Radin, Lowrie, and other anthropologists whom I've actually heard of, in an effort to scuttle the conventional account of human development—a simple-minded scheme that ignores most of the evidence. In short, a far greater variety of ingenious patterns of social organization have been devised by humans across the millennia than we've been led to believe.

Did the seasonal inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe eat bulgur? I don't know, but maybe I'll find out soon. The Dawn of Everything is a long book. 

 Meanwhile, I was cheered to read in the Star Tribune this morning that the average Minnesota farmer made $141,869 last year, more than twice the 2017 level, and also almost twice as much as the national average. And here's another reason to celebrate: Minnesota farmers planted 760,00 acres of cover crops last year, thirty percent more than five years ago.

There are more big farms than there were five years ago, and also more farms between 10 and 49 acres.  I imagine this odd fact reflects the bifurcation of production methods between mega-farms and those who are following a more sustainable path. You can buy cheap food or good food. You can work to preserve the health of the environment or follow in the footsteps of Louis XV — après moi le déluge.  I face that dilemma every time I go shopping for carrots at Cub.

The Guardian published an article the next day crunching the numbers on a national level. Among its conclusions:

"The steepest decline – 17% – was among the smallest farms with less than 10 acres. The US globalized agricultural system favors large and corporate-owned operations, as smaller farms struggle more with boom and bust prices, extreme weather linked to the climate crisis and access to government subsidies and other credit."

I don't know anything about farming, but it seems to me that a farm of less than ten acres is going to have a hard time staying afloat regardless of the weather or market conditions.

At times the analysts seemed to miss the obvious, while attaching undue importance to meaningless categories of their own devising.

For example, the Guardian observes that "the number of farms enrolled in USDA conservation programs that pay farmers to leave environmentally important areas such as wetlands fell by 7% between 2017 and 2022. Smaller farms saw the steepest decline, which is likely due to high commodity prices on the global market that offered short-term economic gains."

Does anyone really care how many farms in each arbitrarily created category are enrolled in conservation programs? No. From the environmental point of view, the question is, how many acres are enrolled in these programs. The Guardian observes that the acreage increased by 17 percent, but complains that the increase was mostly due to larger farms planting more nutrient-rich cover crops between growing periods for cash crops. Well, isn't that what the program is all about? Larger farms, by definition, have more land, so we should be happy they're doing their part, and more, rather than aping the quest of smaller farms for "short-term gains."

In the end, the health of the agricultural sector is a tough one to assay, with corporate profits, cheap food, environmental health, and a manageable lifestyle ceaselessly jockeying for priority. 

I get emails from the Ninth Federal Reserve District on a regular basis keeping me up to date, but I'm pretty sure it's a tough business any way you look at it. And I must confess I'd rather settle back in my easy chair and read a few lines from Virgil's Georgics:

Winter's the lazy time for husbandmen.
In the cold season farmers wont to taste
The increase of their toil, and yield themselves
To mutual interchange of festal cheer.
Boon winter bids them, and unbinds their cares,
As laden keels, when now the port they touch,
And happy sailors crown the sterns with flowers.
Nathless then also time it is to strip
Acorns from oaks, and berries from the bay,
Olives, and bleeding myrtles, then to set
Snares for the crane, and meshes for the stag,
And hunt the long-eared hares, then pierce the doe
With whirl of hempen-thonged Balearic sling,
While snow lies deep, and streams are drifting ice.

 

World Cup in the Neighborhood

On a stunning Saturday morning we left the house after breakfast and made our way down Theo Wirth Parkway to the World Cup cross-country ski races being held on the golf course at the bottom of the hill. They've been making snow and grooming trails for months, of course, but the arrival of six inches of new snow was welcome, to say the least. A large TV screen had been set up in front of the chalet and we could hear the distinctive tone of Senator Klobuchar's voice as we approached. By the time we got there her face had been replaced on the screen with that of Governor Walz, who was welcoming fans to the first World Cup races to be held on American soil in more than twenty years. 

We joined the stream of attendees who were continuing west to the trailhead. It was a colorful scene.

The sprints were set to begin in a few minutes, and we clamored up a hill past some handsome oaks to a vantage point above the finish line and the grandstand full of VIPs and full-blooded skiing fans on the other side. 

Hilary and I have skied these same trails many times, like lots of other people, but it was fun to wander the hills watching these remarkable athletes move so swiftly across them, even from a distance. But the greater pleasure was to find ourselves in the midst of this joyous and colorful scene, with flags from all parts of the world dangling in the breeze nearby.

All of the skiers looked the same, for the most part, though quite a few of the women had pony-tails. It was easy to tell when Jessie Diggins went by, because the crown noise suddenly increased. Diggins was later quoted as saying: "That was surreal. It was already the best atmosphere we've had all season, and that was an hour before the qualifier."

After a while we crossed an open vale to another vantage point closer to the track where we could see the skiers better. As they passed I found it hard to tell if they were competing or merely getting familiar with the track. 

Twenty minutes later we moved on to another hilltop from which point we could watch the skiers descend the final hill before the finish line.

Then we walked home. 

I didn't hear a single remark from fans in the crowd in Norwegian, Swedish, or German, but a few interesting remarks later appeared online.

"A little snow came the day that we arrived," Andrew Musgrave of Great Britain said. "It's beautiful now; so different from anywhere else we race. 'Minnesota Nice' has definitely proven true so far."

"I had big emotions before the start," said Italian skier Federico Pellegrino. "I almost cried with all these people knowing my name."

Diggins finished fourth in the sprint final behind Scandinavian sprint specialists Jonna Sundving, Linn Svann, and Kristine Skistad. 

Today they held the long-distance races. We  watched them on TV. Alaskan Gus Schumacher pulled off a surprising win in the men's division, four seconds ahead of the Norwegian favorite, Harold Ostberg Amundsen. 

Incredible.

The Ides of February

Though the skies have been gray, and the weather strangely warmish and out of season, it's been one riotous festival after another. Shall I number them?

1) February 7. It's the first day of spring, at least according to Cato the Elder. In his book on farm management (c.a. 160 BCE), he identifies that specific date, and even gives a reason for choosing it. The wind changes on February 7. (Which way it changes he doesn't say. Probably from North to South. I guess weather patterns were more consistent in his day.)

2) February 10. It's the lunar New Year!

3) February 12. It's Fasching! A two-day festival when Germans get drunk, run wild, and so on, prior to the onset of Lent.

4) February 14. Valentine's Day.

What am I doing about it all? Very little.

But that's not entirely true.

On the afternoon of February 7, I was sitting out on the deck after work watching the sun go down. The skies were blue that day, with a pale white band of thin clouds drifting by overhead. I'd gotten a pot of yellow-pea soup going on the stove. The recipe called for 1/2 cup of sherry, which isn't very specific. Oloroso? Fino? Almontillado? Well, all I could find in the cabinet above the stove was an old bottle of Marsala. Once I'd added the quantity specified there was only an inch left in the bottom, a bit muddy. I made short work of it, as a service to the household. Now we can get a fresh bottle of something similar.

As I sat on the deck, I took a peak at an essay about Johann Gottfried Herder from Arthur Lovejoy's Essays in the History of Ideas—a nice way to start the new year—but then I noticed that the buds on the branches of the silver maple above my head, those spiky little red clusters, seemed to have grown larger. Already? A red squirrel started chattering and the sun dipped behind a bank of clouds near the horizon. Four mallards raced by at tremendous speed, high overhead, traveling north. Why?

I could hear a CD of the Polish trumpeter Tomas Stanko on the stereo inside. I'd forgotten how good this CD is. But it's a moody thing. And the smell of peas wafting my way from the half-open door reminded me that it was time to stir the soup.

The following afternoon Hilary and I drove down to the Mississippi and along River Road downstream past the Guthrie and the Ted Mann Concert Hall to the Northern Clay Center on Franklin Avenue. It's always fun to see what the local potters are doing, but we were surprised to come upon a retrospective show of Warren McKenzie's work. McKenzie, who died a few years ago, is the long-standing local superstar of the Mengei tradition. It's an Asian tradition, in fact, appropriate to the lunar new year. 

These classic rustic vessels, exhibiting a wide variety of shapes and surface decorations, did not disappoint. If they had slipped a few pots by Guillermo Ceullar or Will Swanson into the show, would we have noticed? It doesn't matter, and such quibbles degrade the integrity and depth of the tradition.

I also have my doubts about the value of the price list, though its presence was unavoidable; the show was a fundraiser, after all, and all but a few of the pots had sold. But it's a little disconcerting to know that Hilary and I eat our breakfast every morning out of $400 cereal bowls. Better not drop them!

From Northern Clay we drove a few blocks to the West Bank campus of the U of M, where an exhibit of indigenous art was on display in the Katherine Nash Gallery. If I imagined that I was somewhat jaded by the seemingly endless influx of Native American stuff recently, this show was a pleasantly rude awakening. 

White walls, bright colors, exotic and familiar imagery. The incandescent purples and pinks of George Morrison's Lake Superior landscapes are always a treat. But I was no less taken by such large-scale works as Michelle Defoe's immense The Stars Remember: We are the caretakers of the land and our ancestors reborn. And Rabbett Before Horses Strictland's carefully rendered mythological scenes from Anishinaabe lore brought the works of Poussin to mind. Bright colors predominate; it's the age of acrylics. But Patrick DesJarlait's watercolors have that pleasantly old-fashioned WPA look and feel.

A few days later, on the spur of the moment almost, we decided to take a spin down to New Ulm, where we hadn't been in many years. Though hardly a tourist Mecca, the town is well-known for its German heritage. In a few hours you could visit the historical museum and Turner Hall, have a meal in the basement rathskeller or at the Kaiserhof downtown, then drive by the oversized statue of Herman the German at the top of the hill and the more modest statue of Bohemian immigrants down in the city park, before heading to the Shell Brewery or upstream along the Minnesota River to see the historical sites associated with the Dakota War of 1862.

But our plan was simply to see how the town was doing, then take a hike at nearby Flandreau State Park. 

We had a pleasant lunch at a place called Lola's, then walked down Minnesota Street to a fine brick building called the Grand that's been converted to an art center, with a beer hall next door. Along the way we stopped in at low-lit place called Sweethaven Tonics that had a few comfortable chairs and enough open space to host a pop-up bookstore. 

I noticed later on their website that the bar also hosts musical events, including a recent show by a group called Uccellino, two women who sing and play the ukulele and Melodica. Evidently Sweet Haven makes and distributes a variety of concentrated non-alcoholic  "tonics," including Lemon Basil Lavender and Ginder Lime Peppercorn. Just add some booze and you're all set.

While we were perusing the books a woman appeared from the shadows wearing a floral print dress and a big smile. I don't remember her name but she told us she'll be opening a bookstore soon across the street. I hope it goes well.

We also enjoyed chatting with the young woman at the nearby Grand Art Center. I asked her whether anything special was in the works for the weekend. "Do you know about Flasching?" she asked. "It's like Mardi Gras, but not so grand. Do you know what Narren are?"

"Are those the people wearing the grotesque wooden masks?"

"Yes. They gave me the creeps when I was a kid."   

"We haven't seen any on the street this morning."

"It's probably too early. I'm not sure what the schedule is. You can find more information online."

She gave us a tour of the cabaret next door, which had oversized images on the walls of Wanda Gag, Tippi Hedrin, and a famous local accordion player whose name neither of us couldn't remember. "That's not really my kind of music," she said.

"But you do know how to polka?"

"Kind of. You shuffle back and forth...."

A few storefronts down we went into a fair-trade shop stocked with fabrics, gifts, and doodahs from around the world. The proprietor, a retired kindergarten teacher, gave us a bit more information about how the town was changing. Someone was retrofitting one or two of the handsome brick buildings across the street. "And we've got a bookstore opening soon, too."

"We met the owner a few minutes ago."

"Isn't she a breath of fresh air!"

I asked her about Fasching and she said, "Did you see the rags hanging from the lamp posts. That's part of the festival. Spring cleaning. Out with the old." But not very festive, really; I hadn't noticed them.

Rags dangling in front of the Grand Art Center

I asked her about the Shell's brewery. "The last time we were down there, you couldn't sample the beer unless you took the tour."

"That was a long time ago. People didn't like that. Now they have a big beer garden. And one of the Marti sons has opened a distillery. You should come down here during Octoberfest." Indeed.

She and her husband are cross-country skiers, and we commiserated briefly about the lack of snow.

On our way back to the car we passed the Kaiserhof Restaurant—I could see a long line inside through the darkened window. And though we'd already had lunch, something in the air gave me the strong desire to sample a few sausages and some hot potato salad, with a pile of sauerkraut on the side.  

Next time.