The Owl That Wasn’t There

My dad was fond of the A.A. Milne poem that goes

As I climbed upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

I didn’t think much about it as a kid—he was just being whimsical—but it strikes me now that perhaps he identified somewhat with the man who wasn’t there. A melancholy thought.

Hilary and I occasionally (fairly often, in fact) go out looking for birds that don’t turn out to be there. And I sometimes search for a particular bird on the ebird website only to discover than an even more interesting one has been sighted in the same vicinity. Last winter I was hunting up a barred owl in our neighborhood and discovered incidentally that a much less common bird, the saw-whet owl, had been sighted repeatedly at a park five minutes from our house.

A week or so ago I was checking for sightings of the rough-legged hawk, which visits us in the winter time. I hadn't seen one, and hoped to see one before they all left for the arctic. I discovered, to my surprise, that a short-eared owl had been sighted repeatedly at a wildlife management area west of Marine on the St. Croix called Keystone. Not just one, but three. That particular owl has never even been on my radar. One morning we drove out to take a look.

The “park” consists of a parking lot on Manning Drive just south of County 4, a few miles east of Hugo. A few dirt roads lead out into the grassy hills but they were closed due to the spring mud. We got out of the car and immediately began scanning the bare branched of a copse of trees tucked into the hills nearby. Nothing. 

Suddenly a very large bird appeared out of nowhere and flew ten feet above my head, landing on a branch of a fallen tree on the edge of a gully. I tried to convince myself it was a skinny owl, but eventually had to concede that it was a large hawk. A rough-legged hawk. Well, that was something.

We spotted two killdeers on the open gravel before heading down one of the muddy roads through the grasses. It reminded me of northern New Mexico, but without the sage and rabbitbrush. We soon decided to veer uphill in the direction of some woods to the west, where we now presumed the owls would be hanging out. We followed along some tracks made weeks or months ago by off-road vehicles through the thick grasses, passing one small lake, then a larger one, up and down the hills, and finally reached the edge of the woods on the west side of the property.

Nothing.

But is landscape nothing? Knowledge of the countryside? With Big Marine Lake to the north, O’Brien State Park to the east, and the deli of the Marine general store just a few minutes away?

Looking back to the east, we could no longer see the tin shed on the far side of the road near where we’d parked, but we could see the bare tops of the now distant trees near the lot arching above the grassy hills.

It was a sunny morning, windy and cold. The landscape was expansive, and we were having a good time, though I kept imagining we’d come up a gravel road just over the next hill that we could take back to the car.

That road never materialized. Nor did the owls. But we trudged through the grasses along random tracks—up, down, left, right—on a meandering route, mindful of the sun and a distant stop sign that was intermittently visible out on Manning Drive.

Back home, hours later, I reviewed the owl reports again and noticed that they’d all been filed not in the morning but late in the afternoon or at dusk. Hmm. Perhaps we should take another look.

But it’s a forty-minute drive. And they might not be there again.

 

Celebrating Spring, Celebrating the Sun

The notion that spring starts on a specific day is absurd, both meteorologically and emotionally. Spring arrives by fits and starts, never the same schedule from year to year. Part of its charm lies in the mystery, anticipation, and blossoming.

We had a fine “false spring” in February. Remember? Everyone knew it wasn’t the “real thing.”

On the first day of March, Hilary and I attended a Martinitza—the traditional Bulgarian spring celebration—at the Granada Theater in Uptown, which some might remember as the Suburban World. The last movie I can recall seeing there is Richard Pryor Live. It was released in 1979. The movie was funny, as I recall. I had forgotten all about the theater’s twisted columns, the faux-Roman statues in the alcoves, and the twinkling stars on the ceiling.

We had purchased standing-room tickets but were pleased to find and join some friends who had booked a table on the upper tier of the seating section behind the bar, where we could chat but also see the stage, hear the music, and watch the dancing. Other friends dropped by now and again in the course of the evening.

The music was great, the dance floor was packed, and the atmosphere was festive—everything that the Bulgarian School of Minnesota, who sponsored the event, might have hoped for. (You can read more about the traditions involved here.)

I didn’t think much about spring per se that night, but as we walked back to the car I was reminded of the days when we lived nearby and still thought Uptown was cool. There are other forms of cool these days, I’m sure. Styles come and go, but the sound of the clarinet and the accordion in sweet harmony is eternal.  

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There are usually a string of days in early March during which it’s imperative to get out into the sun. We were treated this year to a Wednesday blizzard—seven inches at least—and the snow brightened things up. The next morning the snow was soft. It wasn’t the best for skiing, but better than gliding across grass and sticks.

On Friday morning we headed downtown to look at flowers—the flowers on exhibit in the Cargill Gallery at the Institute of Arts. It’s a small show consisting of ten or twelve exquisite wood-block prints by Hokusai set against a single large and idiosyncratic oil painting of chrysanthemums by Claude Monet.

Our next stop was Westminster Church downtown, where we listened to the Artaria String Quartet perform two of Mozart’s celebrated “Haydn” quartets. Not bad. But the true glory of the day was the stroll in bright sun from our parking spot on Yale Place through Loring Park for a late lunch at Gai Noa, a Laotian restaurant overlooking the park. The food was good. The experience of being out and about on foot in the heart of the city was better.  

But as the temperature rose, the urge to spent an entire day outdoors increased, and a few days later we headed south down the river to Lake Pepin in hope of spotting some birds. Before we’d even gotten into the car Hilary noticed a hawk in the front yard devouring a songbird. She took a few photos and we later identified it as a merlin.

An hour later we were in Bay City on the shores of Lake Pepin, looking out across the bay, which tends to thaw early due to the meltwater arriving down Isabelle Creek. Countless ducks were milling around both out in the lake and at the mouth of the slough a quarter-mile down the shore: widgeons, buffleheads, ring-necked ducks, gadwalls, and mergansers of several varieties, with bald eagles soaring overhead and Canada geese heading north in large flocks high above.

The drive south along the east shore of the lake was glorious. The cheese shop in Nelson was packed with people lining up to buy sandwiches and ice cream cones. Liberation and hints of the summer fun to come were in the air. We bought some sandwiches and ate a late lunch in the car overlooking the slough on the causeway connecting Nelson with Wabasha and punctuated the return trip up the Minnesota side of the river with a stop at Frontenac State Park.

How Economics Explains the World

In today’s political climate of mendacity, cruelty, bluster and hatred (among many other things) it can sometimes be refreshing to take a step back and consider the long view. I had that pleasure a few days ago, unexpectedly, when I picked up a book called How Economics Explains the World: a Short History of Humanity, by Andrew Leigh.

The title itself is intriguing. After all, there’s a lot more to humanity than economics. But Leigh does a good job of telling the story from that perspective in less than 200 pages. In contrast to the idiocy and hysteria we met up with almost daily in the news, Leigh delivers an even-tempered narrative, touching on issues such as inequality and global warming from a perspective stretching back to the agricultural “revolution” that took place around 3,000 BCE in the Indus Valley, which “might be the best example in history,” he writes, “of a community where settled agriculture led to shared prosperity.”

Why did Europe develop faster than Africa? Leigh argues (quoting Jared Diamond) that it was a matter of geography. Europeans had a wider range of fruits and vegetables, and the opportunity to migrate widely east and west across a relatively homogeneous climate; Africans and South Americans migrating north-south lacked that luxury.

He briefly describes the emergence of trade and the use of money, including such offbeat examples as the system in use on the Yap islands in Micronesia, where stone sculptures up to twelve feet tall changed hands during financial transactions like NFTs—without actually moving at all. He describes the significance of double-entry bookkeeping, the role of the printing press, and the impact of the Black Death, which killed a third of the people in Europe but also had the effect of doubling the wages of those who survived and making land much cheaper and more widely affordable. In short, it destroyed the feudal system.

Leigh’s familiarity with the research literature is impressive, and the pages are scattered with endnotes for anyone who wants to investigate a assertion or learn more about a specific topic. For example, he cites one study suggesting that during the seven centuries prior to 1700, daily earnings in Japan (and in most other places in the world) rose only from $2.70 to $2.80. That is to say, not much. “Mostly, economic growth had led to a bigger population, not a better standard of living.”

We owe our breakthroughs in incomes and life expectancy to the Industrial Revolution, though he stresses that industrialization itself is only a part of the story.  Equally significant was the urban revolution that brought people to cities, and the commercial revolution that facilitated trade and thus enhanced the power of “comparative advantage.” But it was a bumpy ride, to say the least. Among the tidbits Leigh offers along the way is this bit of trivia: in the early days of the nineteenth century the British government mobilized so many troops to fight the Luddites who were destroying machinery that they exceeded the number who were fighting Napolean. Due to the effects of trade and specialization, he writes, “from 1820 to 1900, living standards in Europe more than doubled, while living standards in Asia and Africa did not rise at all.”

Monopolies and hyperinflation, barbed wire and antibiotics, the Great Depression and Bretton Woods, Keynes and Hayek, the benefits of early childhood education and the invention of the shipping container, Wow! Thumbing through the book again just now, I feel like reading it all over again.

Does it have any relevance to the issues we face today? Of course it does. Yet Leigh isn’t actually advocating any particular plan of action. He's offering us a historical overview designed to tell the story of how the market system emerged, discuss the key individuals (many of them women in recent times) who have shaped our understanding of economics, and outline how economic forces have shaped world history. One of its many virtues is its even temper. It was written before the recent presidential election, but Leigh describes the tariffs Trump put in place during his previous time in office as “one of the largest tax increases in decades.”  He also points out that for every job gained by the steel industry during that period, sixteen were lost in the auto industry.

Leigh begins the final chapter with the observation that weekly news magazines invariably have a different focus from daily papers. Though he doesn’t say so, Leigh’s book resembles a newspaper of global scope that comes out only once a decade, or maybe twice a century.

“One way to think about the role of government,” he writes near the end of the book, “is as a risk manager: providing social insurance against risks as diverse as earthquakes, diseases, and recessions.”

Needless to say, that’s not the way the current administration thinks about it.