Sparkling Fall Days

These sparkling fall days called out for a response, and we answered the call, engineering an overnight on the North Shore.

The leaves were brilliant, of course. And the lake exhibited an uncanny depth of color when calm and also once the wind came up. A few days before we left, Hilary spotted a mom-and-pop place called the Islandview Resort in Knife River, just east of the candy shop—the kind of place where the cabins are up on a hill several hundred yards from the lake, on the "wrong" side of the highway, and you might say as you pass by, "Who would want to stay there?"

We booked the Honeymoon Cabin—our 47th honeymoon, I guess—and it was great. The cabins are strategically situated so they all have a view down across an immense lawn and out across the lake.

 They're old; you can almost imagine the tube-and-knob wiring under the paneling. The cabinets seem to be home-made. The chairs are wicker. Knotty pine walls. All the wood surfaces have the glow of antique shellac. The bathtub is four feet long at most.

But it was quaint and cozy, and considerably larger than many of the places we'd stayed in England. It was also much cheaper. And the view from the front deck, nestled in the midst of mature white pines and perky yellow popples, was superb.

But we hadn't gone north simply to sit around. We stopped at Hawk Ridge, which was quiet. We had better luck at McQuade Safe Harbor, where we saw a few Lapland longspurs. They're not especially striking in their non-breeding plumage, but I'd never seen one before.  The evocative name refers to their Arctic breeding range and the unusual length of their back claw.

Other afternoon stops included the Two Harbors library, which has a splendid de-acquisition shop, and the harbor itself, where we spotted some juvenile Harris sparrows and joined the crowd that was watching the James R. Barker ore boat maneuver around the breakwater and into the dock, delivering its famous horn salute—the Barker Bark—several times as it turned the corner.  (You can hear the salute on this link, not quite so sonorous as the original.)

Our dinner consisted of a chicken pasty we'd picked up at the Northern Bakery in Duluth and the remains of the BiBimBap Bowl Hilary had ordered at the Duluth Grill for lunch. After dinner we walked down the hill and across the grass to a large fire that the owners had started for guests in the firepit. Back on the deck we read aloud from the poems of T'ao Ch'ien and Louis Jenkins. Returning later to the firepit, we threw another log on the fire and watched the stars come out.

Simple pleasures continued the next morning. Gooseberry Falls State Park was teaming with visitors, but the Gitchi Gummi Trail was deserted. Out near the end of the loop we met up with an elderly man hiking alone. "Does this trail eventually take me down there to Agate Beach?" He asked. He glanced down at the beach hundreds of feet below us.

"I'm afraid not," I said. "That beach is on the other side of the river. You'll have to continue around this loop, cross the river on the highway bridge, and return to your car. You can drive down to that beach. There's a parking lot right next to it."

"My wife will like that," he said, seemingly unperturbed, and continued on his way.

In some ways the most extraordinary event of the trip was also the most unexpected. I had gone out with binoculars before dawn. The eastern horizon was glowing and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see the comet tsuchinshan-Atlas unobstructed by buildings and trees. 

If I'd done my research I would have known the comet has swung around and is now visible on the western horizon, just after sunset. But I did see something else—the Green Ray. I had my binoculars trained on the spot where the sun was about to peek above the horizon when I saw a sudden flash of intense green. It lasted only a split-second. Then the edge of the sun appeared, a flaming orange-red.

I wouldn't have known what to call it if I hadn't seen the Eric Rohmer film The Green Ray, which came out in 1986. The plot concerns itself with a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make the most of their summer vacations, which are mostly full of frustrations, disappointments, and missed opportunities, as I recall. Most of these kids end up watching sunsets on an ocean beach somewhere, probably in Brittany, and there's a lot of talk about seeing the Green Ray. At the time, I had no idea whether the phenomenon was real or merely a plot contrivance.

Now I've seen the Green Ray. Incredible. Hilary wants to see it too, naturally. We can add that rare event to the list of the North Shore's many enticements. 

Note: The film is currently available on several streaming platforms under the title "Summer." Easy to find if you add the word "Rohmer." (I wouldn't recommend it.)

The Lustre of the Masters

Researchers in the Netherlands have found a means to quantify a phenomenon that art-lovers have been aware of for centuries: original works of art are more engaging than copies and posters. A recent article in the Guardian reports that by fitting viewers with a helmet equipped with eye-tracking technology and MRI scans to record brain activity, these scientists were able to determine that genuine artworks generated a response ten times stronger than did reproductions.

It seems likely that these scientists fudged the numbers to come up with such a tidy ten-to-one ratio. But little matter. The difference between original and reproduced is real. But everyone knows that. Two important questions remain unasked: Why is the original more stimulating? Des such an effect necessarily mean that the piece is a better work of art?

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay on this question in which he suggested that the difference lies in the unique physical presence of the original, which he referred to as its authenticity and also, strangely, as its "aura." This argument doesn't take us very far. A better answer might be that an original work of art—and especially an original painting—distinguishes itself by its luster. (An equivalent argument in the realm of music would make reference to the richer timber of instruments used in live performances.)

Luster produces a variety of effects that cannot be reproduced by offset or digital printing. For example, the red cloak in a Modigliani recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts bristles with an energy that derives entirely by the sheen it gives off. A more subtle example of the same phenomenon might be the Pissarro landscape they own in which the mid-afternoon heat and the dust in the air can be seen, and felt, in the chalky luster on the building facade.

We spent a few hours at the National Gallery in London recently and I came away with a variety of impressions regarding those classic works we see again and again in books. The marriage scene by Van Eck was deeply engaging. The Holbeins seemed less attractive, less complex that I'd remembered them. A few of the Veroneses almost measured up to the best of the Titians. And it struck me that some of the late portraits by Van Dyke were top-flight. Who knew?

To my eye, the composition of Mantagna's six-panel Triumph of Caesar offered a new and astounding way to fill a large canvas. And there were individual faces in several of the works that conveyed great depth of character.

Over all, I came away from these galleries with a renewed appreciation of the human face. The modern galleries, in contrast, were dominated by color, often depicting landscapes clothed in pleasing but entirely artificial harmonies. But in the modern rooms of the National Gallery, I felt that I was just looking at surfaces. The Cezannes, in particular, struck me as flat, dry, harsh, generic ... uninteresting.

On the other hand, most of the artworks—prints, posters, photographs—that are hanging on the walls of our house are landscapes and domestic scenes, most of them dating from the twentieth century. I've long been a fan of the Fauves, and we have framed posters or book illustrations by Matisse, Miro, Dufy, and Braque hanging here and there, and even a N. C. Wyeth book poster of Kidnapped.

You can be moved by the shadowy penetration of a Rembrandt self-portrait in a museum without feeling the need to have such a face bearing down on you enigmatically day after day. To judge from the artworks we pass by on our movement around the house, you might wonder if we had been inspired by the remark of Henri Matisse:

What I dream of is an art of balance, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…..a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue. 

A Slice of England

Why England? Good question.

It's quasi-European, but they speak English there. It's a non-stop flight, a mere eight hours across the "pond." We hadn't been there in forty-odd years. And there were a few places we'd never been that we wanted to see, especially south of London.

We set up an itinerary that included three nights in London followed by stops in Canterbury, Rye, Eastbourne, and a few villages in Dorset and Wiltshire. What we were going to do, specifically, was entirely open. As the trip began to take shape I might have mentioned Greenwich, Hampstead Heath, and Samuel Johnson's house as places I'd never been that might be interesting. We went to none of those places. Rather, we wandered London, visiting the National Gallery and the British Museum, Hyde Park and Westminster Abbey, and attended an international art song competition at Wigmore Hall—all of which places we'd been to before. So what? 

On our first morning, after dropping our bags at our B&B near Marble Arch, we wandered out into Hyde Park, where a large section of open ground had been roped off. Bobbies and military women and men wearing berets were at attention maybe a hundred yards apart. I asked one of them what was going on.

"We're going to do a 41-gun salute to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the queen." Interesting. The field was full of geese and crows; there was no artillery in sight.

A half-hour later, while we were eating some sandwiches at a café overlooking the Serpentine, a pack of elaborately uniformed horsemen rode by just outside. Time to head back to that field. We arrived to see them charge down from the north dragging cannons, set them up, and blow them off one at a time. Then do it again. And again.

On the first blast, the crows and geese took off. The smoke billowed out of the cannons and hung in the air in clouds fifteen feet off the ground. I could hear a military band playing on the other side of the field, where a crowd had gathered that seemed slightly larger than the fifteen or twenty passersby we were among.

It took a while to reach forty-one blasts, but we had time. Then they reattached the cannons to the horses and charged by us again, their swords and accoutrements clattering at their sides.

 

A few hours later, on the advice of the couple who ran our B & B, we were sitting at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Duke of Kendal Gastropub. It's situated on the triangular tip of a backstreet intersection in quiet Connaught Village, a neighborhood just north of Hyde Park that I'd never heard of until I looked it up just now. The streets here are lined with tiny shops—cheese, patisserie, fresh flowers—and "ethnic" cafés, including a Persian "tapas" restaurant and two Iraqi places. On our plates, fish and chips and a fresh Greek salad. People were conversing in twos and threes at nearby tables over beer or wine. Bicycles and cars whizzed by. The best of European life on a mild sunny evening.   

We wandered London for two days, then hopped a train to Canterbury, a fairly large town masquerading successfully as a lively village. Lots of restaurants, street musicians, tourists ogling the impressive cathedral, and students attending one of the four local universities. Two blocks off main street things quite down. We enjoyed a peaceful walk along the river, listened to the bells chiming at some length, and attended an evensong at the towering cathedral, which was directly behind our hotel.

Another short train ride took us to Dover, where we'd rented a car. That night we were at an inn near the coast just outside the village of Winchelsea. Taking a walk across the fields at sunset we came upon a man out for a stroll with his son. Formerly the London bureau-chief of Knight-Ridder news service, he wanted to talk about Trump. Why? Why? Why? I finally had to remind him about Brexit, and said, "Liz Truss wasn't too impressive, either."

"Tell me about it," he said. "The first day she was in office, I lost ten percent of my pension."

I asked him whether there was a footpath from Winchelea to Rye, which lies a few mile to the east along the coast.

"There is; you can do it," he replied, "but it's a rotten trail."

The next morning we drove into Winchelsea, one of the few English towns laid out in a grid—it's only a few blocks long—and hunted down the house where Ford Madox Ford lived for several years early in his career. Ford's work is not well known today, but I was deeply impressed in college by his tetralogy of WWI novels that were later published together under the title No More Parades.

Here, in a nutshell, is the way Amazon describes his career.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor. He was an international influence in early 20th-century literature. Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic environment as the son of a German music critic and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown. He wrote his first novel at 18 and went on to publish more than 70 works. He is remembered for Parade's End and his generous encouragement of younger writers.

For many years I was in the habit of hunting down Ford's lesser books in used-book stores, and over time I amassed quite a few, most of which now languish in a box in the basement alongside forgotten works by W. H. Hudson and George Moore. I took a closer look at one of Ford’s early travel books, The Heart of the Country,  before we embarked on our whirlwind trip across the countryside of the southern Home Counties, but it didn’t grab me. I’m reading it again now, having been there, with greater pleasure.

Our next stop was Lamb House in nearby Rye, where Henry James lived for several decades in the early twentierth century. Not large, but “well appointed,” as they say. The walls of the study ar lined with pencil scetches of those of James’s literary friends who also happened to be friends, including Ford, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and others.

I’m not a huge fan of “the Master,” as Ford often referred to James. He seemed to be fond of writing books about things that didn’t happen, at increasingly great length. My approach has been—the shorter the better: Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle.

I asked both of the tour guides present in the house whether they were full-fledged fans of James’s work, and neither would admit to it. I shared two quips with the knowledgeable guide in the bedroom and got a hearty laugh from both. “Henry Adams’ wife once remarked that in his later novels Henry James chewed more than he bit off.” And “I believe it was Oscar Wilde who remarked that James wrote novels as if it were a painful duty.”

But I have it in mind to give James another go … right after I finish The Heart of the Country.

In an entirely different key, we drove out the Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, a vast and impressive collection of trains through salt marshes and across beaches at the edge of the English Channel. And we saw some new birds there, including the little egret, common redshank, eurasian curlew, eurasian oystercatcher, great crested grebe, little grebe, and great cormorant.

From that point on our route was designed to take us past long-distance footpaths. England has quite a few. We had planned to walk the last few miles of the North Downs Way, following the route pilgrims used to take into Canterbury, but events intervened. We picked up the South Downs Way at Beachy Head and walked it for a few miles, high above the sea. And we joined it again thirty-odd miles inland just west of Steyning, where it proved a lot harder to hike up to it than to follow it once we reached the top of the “down.” We were overtaken by a psychiatrist and his Irish setter during our ascent who advised us as to the best way to the top, and during our subsequent trek I enjoyed chatting with a man who spends his winters in Crete about the recently concluded U.S. Open, where the rising British star Jack Draper had made an impressive run to the semi-finals.

The countryside was grand. We passed yellow fields of wheat and herds of white cattle, with blackberries in the hedgerows and red kites occasionally hovering above. And from time to time we could see the English Channel glistening on the horizon far to the south.

The most luxurious of our lodgings was Gore Farm, an AirB&B a few miles south of Shaftsbury. We were surprised when the caretaker informed us that the little cottage we’d rented, which looked out onto a plowed field surrounded by mature woods, was appended to the home of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, renowned orchestra conductor and founder of the Monteverdi Choir. That evening we sat on the terrace in front of the house with a glass of wine and watched the shadows lengthen across the recently plowed field as the sun set while listening to some Bach cantatas Hilary had called up on her phone. The next morning we walked through the woods and across the road to Fontmell Downs, the obscure but lovely National Trust holding that had attracted us to the area in the first place.

Near the end of our two-week circuit we spent some time wandering the famous landscape garden at Stourhead and exploring the Stone Age archeological sites in the vicinity of Avebury. These generally ill-formed stone megaliths are less concentrated and less impressive than the ones at nearby Stonehenge, but they’re more extensive, cover a much wider area, and are a delight to wander among. The nearby West Kennet Long Barrow, sitting on the top of a hill in a farmer’s field, is also an impressive site. The burial remains it contained have been dated to around 3600 B.C.E. 

A mile or two down the road we parked at the top of Hackpen Hill and walked a few miles on the Ridgeway Trail to Barbury Castle—not a castle at all, but an ancient grass-covered hill ringed by primitive earthen defenses.