Sweltering Masses of Humanity … and Jazz

‘Twas a beauteous evening, free ... but hardly calm.

Yes, the Twin Cities Jazz Fest was free, as usual, but temperatures had risen to the high 80s, and the streets of Lowertown St. Paul were thronged with people out to have a good time in spite of it. Some were local residents. no doubt, out walking their dogs, and a baseball game underway at nearby CHS Stadium also added to the buzz. But several streets had been closed off and fitted with performance stages, six or seven food trucks were lined up along the east side of Mears Park, and music was in the air. Jazz Fest.

We’ve heard plenty of top-flight musicians at the event over the years, including Joshua Redman, Joe Lovano, Kenny Garrett, and Anat Cohen. (I’ve been told that Dianne Reeves put on a great show at the Amsterdam Bar a few years back when a rainstorm sent everyone inside.) And gigs by local performers and students from McNally-Smith at small cafés and makeshift bandstands have also been memorable.

Defying the heat, we met some friends at the Metrodome Brewery, ate two small pizzas together, then wandered downstairs to Fingal’s Cave to listen to Trius, a trio of Prius drivers led by vibraphonist Dave Hagedorn. The joint was packed and we ended up scattering to isolated chairs and bar stools to listen to “The Girl from Ipanema” arranged to accommodate six key changes—I don’t know why—followed by a bouncy rendition of a tune from West Side Story, the name of which escaped me at the time.

As we left the club we passed a man hovering in the entryway, surveying the crowd.

“There are a few seats open in there,” I said. “It won’t be hard to find one.”

“No. I’m just checking out the scene,” he said. “I came down to hear the Four Freshman.”

I gave him a closer look: tall, curly salt-and-pepper beard.

“I guess you could be old enough to remember that group,” I said.

“The Four Freshman were popular in the fifties,” he replied. “I’m pretty sure the original members are all dead by now.” Good point.

Back on the street, we wandered west to the Fifth Street stage to listen to an all-woman group from Columbia called Las Guaracheras. Three of us sat on a low rock wall quite a ways from the stage but conveniently close to a truck equipped to dispense drinking water, while Tim went closer to stand amid the throng in front of the stage. Lots of energy and rhythm here, very little melodic or harmonic intricacy.

Once the set had concluded we wandered up to Mears Park and were lucky enough to stake a claim to an empty slab of landscaping rock facing the stage, more or less. 

Before long the entry aisle had filled with people, at which point we could no longer see much. And the level of conversation had risen to the point that we couldn’t hear much, either. Emmet Cohen’s cheerful and explosive piano work rang out, and the vocal quartet—a recent revival of the original quartet, I guess—was doing its best to belt things out across the thickening crowd of hot bodies. The second tune they did is one of my favorites: “All the Things You Are.” In fact, I like it so much I wrote a book about it. 

You can hear Emmet and the group doing the same number here.  

The Mysteries of Browallia

I might say that the lowly browallia is my favorite annual, but then it would be difficult to explain why I forget about it, year after year. We’ve planted some impatiens, taken a chance on some new shade-tolerant perennial—this year it was the wood aster—and maybe stuck a marigold or two in among the herbs out front. But something’s missing. Things don’t look quite right.

Then it comes to me: where are the browallias?

The problem stems, in part, from the fact that browallias are never in great supply at garden centers. Geraniums, impatiens, snapdragons, begonias are everywhere. All sorts of things, in fact. But when I ask a passing employee about the browallias, they either give me a blank look or say, “I think there are a few down there at the end of the table.”  

This year I made an effort to find out why these beautiful, purple, shade-tolerant plants are always in such short supply. Out at Gerten’s in Inver Grove Heights, an entire table was labeled “browallias,” but unlike all the other tables nearby, which were bursting with color and greenery, it was empty.

I asked a passing employee for an explanation. “Well, we have them for a while, but then the stalks get too tall. We deadhead them. Then, a few weeks later, we bring them out again.”

I asked a second worker in the greenhouse the same question. “There’s been a issue with the seeds and reproduction,” she told me. “It’s a worldwide problem. The day might come when you just won’t be able to get them.”

One sunny morning we drove downtown to the northside famers market, which was still loaded with bedding plants. People were enjoying the bright cool morning, eating bratwurst or drinking lattes and listening to the Peruvian music wafting in from a nearby aisle. But nary a browallia in sight.

We talked to one woman tending a booth from Waverly, an hour west of town. She had an accent. I spared her the browallia question and asked her where she was from. South Africa.

“That’s a long flight.” I said, “Do you like it in Minnesota?”

“Oh, yes. I make a little money. And people here are so open and friendly.”

At the Bachman’s in Plymouth, which isn’t far from our house, I asked a passing employee about browallias, and she directed me to a row of four spindly plants on an otherwise barren section of the table. They were the white variety—not my favorite. She took the time to check the inventory sheet and returned to report that more of the purple variety were on the way. They hadn’t been closed out yet.

“What’s with that plant?” I asked her.

Her reply, in essence, was: “Not a long shelf life.”

And just the other day we drove out to Carver Park to do some biking and see if we could spot some bobolinks. They were out in the fields again, as in other years, evidently nonplussed by the road construction nearby. We could hear their cheerful R2D2 bubbling call above the wind. Once we’d entered the woods, we were entranced to hear the equally unearthly but far more ravishing song of a wood thrush, seemingly just a few yards away, though we never saw him.

We decided to take the long way home, bought some Mexican food at the old train station in Mound, and ate lunch at a very small park—one table, one garbage can, thick grass, one stubby tree—overlooking Jennings Bay.

We were headed to Kelley and Kelley Nursery in Long Lake, now run by third-generation owner-manager Steve Kelley and his wife, Arla. Steve is well known for his annual garden newsletter, a handsome publication full of plant essays and personal reflections on the gardener’s life, accompanied by old-fashioned black-and-white illustrations drawn from a variety of Old World sources. We’ve been getting it for years. It’s conceived in somewhat the same spirit as the print edition of Macaroni, which explores a wider range of subjects but has a much smaller subscription base.

I worked with Steve a few years ago, editing and formatting a few of his essays into a handsome book, A Century in the Garden.   

At the nursery behind the house, many of the plants are still in the ground. Much of the landscape here is dotted with trees, and the acreage looks both unusual and attractive.

I asked one of the passing workers, a portly man with a wide-brimmed canvas hat, if they had any browallias in stock. He thought for a moment, and then said, “You mean that little purple flower? If we did, it would be in that greenhouse over there.” He pointed.

Of course, they had none. Out in the grounds we picked out a few shade-tolerant perennials, and as we were leaving we ran into Steve himself.

Our conversation covered familiar ground. When are you going to retire? How’s Arla doing? What are you doing about the rabbits and deer? What did you lose during the winter?

“It was a bad winter,” Steve told us. “Very cold in February, and bad snow cover.”

"I'm glad to hear that," I replied. But that didn't sound right. "I mean, well ...."

"I get it. It's nice to know it wasn't just you."

I had to ask him. “What is it about browallias? No one seems to stock them.”

“You mean that little purple flower?” he said. “Then he struck a pose as if he were thinking, and said with a shrug, “Not much demand.”

A note on pronunciation: Every person I asked was puzzled at first about the question, because I was pronouncing the plant's name wrong. They would sometimes repeat the name in what seemed to me to be an odd way, but they were right. Forget about the "a" in the middle. It's a two-syllable word, in essence. BROW-lya.

 

Low-Riding Moon

Moon events tend to be low-key and inconsequential. Blue moons—a second full moon in a single month— aren’t astronomical events at all, but merely the result of our current calendar conventions. And “super” moons are hardly more exciting. Sometimes the moon looks big, sometimes it doesn’t.

But lunar event that’s fast approaching takes place only once every 18 years, as the moon arrives at the low point of its almost two-decade swing up and down the horizon.  

This event has no practical significance, either, and it’s not impressive to witness. But I find it fascinating to consider that a thousand years ago residents of the area we now call the American Southwest were aware of it, and found it so intriguing that they built an observatory to pinpoint and perhaps even celebrate the occasion.

I’m referring to Chimney Rock, located amid the austere and haunting landscapes of southern Colorado. Hilary and I visited the stark contours of the ruins years ago. It rises above the pines, both strange and awesome, like a towering knobby ridge. 

Archeologists had long been puzzled by the presence of sophisticated core-and-veneer masonry at the top of it, typical of the Ancestral Puebloan culture centered in the high desert a hundred miles to the southwest. The mystery was compounded when scientists who surveyed the site in 1988 discovered that the buildings rested on solid bedrock. This meant that not only the stone and timbers, but also the soil and water for making bricks, had been laboriously carried by hand up the 1,200-foot escarpment from the river valley below. Why? The slightly longer growing season on the ridge could hardly justify such an enormous expenditure of labor. There had to be another explanation.

Before long someone noticed that if you stand in the courtyard of the loftiest and most elaborate pueblo you could watch the moon rise directly between the two “chimneys” further east along the ridge. Could Chimney Rock have been a lunar observatory?

Perhaps. But there was a hitch. The moon rises at a slightly different point on the horizon every month. Its position also changes from year to year, moving from north to south and back again following an 18.6-year cycle. At each end of its path, it pauses for two years before beginning its slow journey in the opposite direction. Astronomers, rather unimaginatively, call this pause the Major Lunar Standstill.

The archeologists studying the site in 1988 happened to witness the moonrise during just such a “standstill.” This meant that the moon would soon begin to rise further south along the horizon, and it would then be sixteen years before the quasi-dramatic sighting became possible again.

Clearly, the infrequency of the event was a mark against the theory that Chimney Rock had been used by the locals as a lunar observatory. But an archeologist from the University of Colorado determined, by analyzing the tree rings of the beams used to construct the buildings, that the site had been in use first in 1076, and then again in 1093, after a sixteen-year hiatus. Could it be merely a coincidence that the northerly lunar standstills of the late eleventh century began in 1075 and 1094?

Although the correlation in dates doesn’t prove that Chimney Rock was used to observe the moon, the evidence is intriguing; and the fact that sophisticated devices for tracking the moon’s rhythms have also been unearthed at Chaco Canyon, the capital of that now-lost Ancestral Puebloan world, lends further credence to the idea. It wouldn’t have been necessary for the Chacoans to calculate anything—they might simply have put sticks in the ground to chart the moon’s shambling peregrinations.

  

 It remains to be explained why anyone would care to track the moon so precisely in the first place. Well, modern observances of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all dictated by lunar cycles, and many pre-literate societies have developed even more elaborate correspondences between events in the night sky, seasonal farming and hunting activities, time-honored myths, and ceremonial observances. Even today the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande and Black Mesa have a particularly rich set of such associations.

We’ll never know for sure what part the moon played in the lives of the Chacoan people—they lacked a written language—but the efforts they took to establish an observatory, and presumably a ceremonial center, at the top of a towering ridge of inhospitable rock, many miles from the bustle of life at Pueblo Bonito, testifies to their keen interest in the moon’s movements. Considered in that light, it becomes easy, when visiting Chimney Rock today, to envision the purpose of at least a few of the ninety-one structures that have been exposed by the excavations on the ridge.

Chimney Rock is now a national monument. If you’re interested, you can sign up to participate in programs there anytime, though it seems they’re hosting a special festival to celebrate the Major Lunar Standstill on September 23. The event may not carry the significance for us that it did for the Ancestral Pueblans, but what it lacks in spiritual overtones is compensated for by its historical resonance.

As we watch the golden orb appear between the twin peaks of Chimney Rock, we’re being moved by the same event that touched the local residents a thousand years ago.  

 

A Sweetness in the Air

Stepping out into the early morning sunlight, I was assaulted by the freshness in the air. The sky was blue, unlike the curtain of orange we’ve been living in the past few days due to the fires in Manitoba. There was dew on the grass, and I could see a few blades of fescue emerging from the ground out near the curb. How much of it will grow to adulthood I have no idea, but in the heavenly atmosphere of the morning I found it easy to enjoy.

The entire scene reminded me of a trip Hilary and I took to Burgundy in May of 1998. We brought our camping gear along in a suitcase, picked up a rental car in Brussels, and headed south. We were usually the only people camping in the village campgrounds, which were often located alongside a bend in a small but robust stream just outside of town. I was amazed, day after day, at how quickly someone showed up to collect the camping fee.

We toured archeological ruins from the era when Julius Caesar and his troops were locked in mortal combat with Vercingetorix and the native Celts—later immortalized in the Asterix comic books—and we also visited a few wine caves and museums in Dijon, Beaune, and thereabouts. We spent a few nights in small hotels, and one beautiful morning before we’d gotten out of bed two barn swallows flew into our room through the open window and twittered around briefly before departing. Was that a dream?

I’ll never forget the remarkable museum of pre-Roman artifacts housed in the local museum of Vix, which we happened upon purely by chance. The dazzling ornaments, weapons, and household items on display would give those from Sutton Hoo a run for their money. If I remember correctly, the main burial site contained a woman, her chariot, and all sorts of military and domestic finery, plus a bronze urn about six feet high that has been fashioned in Greece.

One day we parked the car strategically and took a hike through the woods past a dilapidated fish farm to the peaceful and almost-too-pristine Cistercian abbey of Fontenay. The monks used water power to perform a variety of mundane tasks, and a plaque on the wall proclaimed proudly that the abbey was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

Every morning we’d drive into town to have a breakfast of café au lait and croissants in the dining rooms of one-star hotels where the old-fashioned wallpaper sometimes gave me the impression I’d stepped into a novel by Balzac.   

Near the end of the trip we drove up into the Alps past Lac D’Annecy toward Chamonix. We secured a spot in a huge but deserted campsite only because a maintenance man was there mowing the grass and he’d left the gate open. We chose a site from which we could see Mont Blanc out the door of our little Timberline tent.

But it seems I’ve gotten off the subject: the sweetness in the air. Great-crested flycatchers shrieking right and left. We take our daily stroll around the block. We wave at a neighbor heading to work and say hi a block away to a woman we’ve never seen before who’s out in her front yard with a dog. The dog barks at us. She's embarrassed. "Oh, he's just saying hi."

The air is not only fresh, but cool. And what about those negative ions? I’ve been told—well, yes, I read it online—that they “enhance mood, improve cognitive function, protect against airborne irritants, reduce stress, and boost immune function.” That's all well and good,  though it sounds sort of technical.

The question is, what do you do with all this fortuitous glee?

Hilary's off playing tennis with a friend. Her brother, Paul, will be stopping by soon to help me replace a few rotten boards in the deck. Or rather, I will help him replace a few boards. Or rather, I will make some ice tea while he replaces some boards. Then we'll relax and drink the tea. 

Seduced By the Merlin App

If you happen to enter into conversation with a beginning birder, it’s rare that more than thirty seconds elapses before they mention the Merlin app, with a special glee. Learning the songs and calls of, say, two hundred birds, can take years, and perhaps decades. But all you need to do is hold up your phone with the Merlin app open and within seconds it will identify every bird that’s singing in the vicinity and provide a photo and a link to further information about that species.

For years I poo-pooed such an approach to birding. I neither needed nor desired an electronic device to mediate between me and the great outdoors. Such an arrangement undermined close communion with the landscape. And besides, I didn’t even own a cell phone until 2024.

I’d learned many bird songs over the years, one after the other, by seeing the bird sing it and somehow remembering the sounds and the patterns. The descriptions in the bird book were occasionally helpful, for example the “teacher, Teacher, TEACHER” of the ovenbird, the “witchity-witchity-witch” of the common yellowthroat, or the “drink your tea” of the Eastern Towhee. But I found that such verbal approximations only seemed to work in retrospect, helping to retain and internalize a pattern of sounds once you’d already heard the real thing and matched it to the bird that delivered it.

I devised unique descriptions for many of the songs I learned. For example, the spirited song of the ruby-crowned kinglet sounds to me like the creaky workings of an old hand pump, only three octaves higher. And the high-pitched song of the eastern wood peewee sounds to me like the lament of a jilted lover: first a plaintive three-note call, “Are you there?” followed by a long pause, then a dejected, off-key, two-note descent. Uhhh-uh.

I don’t know, but I wonder whether bird enthusiasts who merely hold their phones to the sky again and again actually absorb and retain the patterns they hear and succeed in associating them with the proper species.

But in recent times I’ve gained some insight into the usefulness and also the visceral appeal of the app. The first breakthrough came when I was hired to lead a small group of birders on a hike. I’d never met them before. They were beginners, full of enthusiasm. Two of them had the Merlin app.

We were walking through the woods out in Oakdale. It was a rainy morning, the leaves had filled out, and we weren’t having much luck. I heard a warbling vireo in a cottonwood tree fifty yards down the path. The song is common but difficult to describe—a rapid but wandering successions of fuzzy notes unlike that of any other bird. It seemed unlikely that we’d see it, but I drew everyone’s attention to the song, then asked one of birders to look it up on her app. She played the song, then showed the photo to everyone.

That was great. We never saw the bird itself, and if we had, it would likely have been a small white pellet the size of a cannellini bean scuttering through the upper story of the trees. But everyone had seen and appreciated its subtle beauty, and we knew it was up there somewhere.

A few weeks later, Hilary and I were in Old Frontenac, hiking the trail out to Sand Point, when we heard one of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard. One expert describes it as “a vigorous, wide-aware, intentional medley of odd noises that may continue for long periods of time…the alarm call of a wren; a series of nasal quacks; a wolf whistle; a foghorn; and a chuckling, high-pitched laugh.” He also mentions whistles, chortles, cat-calls, gurgles, and grunts. 

The song was loud; the bird was very close. We looked around for at least twenty minutes but saw nothing. No movement, no fleeting avian form. As we left, I said, “It’s probably some weird creature like a yellow-breasted chat.” I’d never seen one, or heard one. A shot in the dark.

A few hours later we were in Lanesboro, settling into a cozy upstairs room at the Cottage House Inn, when I suddenly heard it again! Impossible. “That’s it!” I all but shouted. “That’s what we heard!” Hilary had looked up the chat on her Merlin app and was playing the song.

When we got home a few days later, I submitted the "sighting" of the chat to eBird along with the narrative of how we'd figured it out, and they accepted the event as legitimate, based on our description of the song, though the bird is considered a rarity in these parts. 

This spring the app has become a useful tool for confirming a song we’re unsure about, and for identifying a song we’ve never heard before or don’t recognize. Just this morning we were up at Sherburne NWR walking a path through the tall grass when I heard a faint but piercing “chip.”

“I wonder if that was a Henslow’s sparrow?” I said. Wrong. Hilary pulled out her phone and turned on the app. Grasshopper sparrow! We heard the “chip” a few more times, then the bird burst out of the grasses and perched on the stalk of a leafless sapling twenty feet ahead of us, where we could see his characteristically flattened head.

Twenty minutes later we were chatting with another birder at the bend in the gravel road where we sometimes see an orchard oriole. He was just then looking at an orchard oriole, as chance would have it, and he showed us where it was. I told him we’d come upon a grasshopper sparrow, and he said, “Yeah, I got a good picture of him. He was sitting in plain sight on a leafless shrub."   

But it’s important to recognize that the Merlin app is sometimes wrong. This morning at Sherburne it mistook a catbird for a brown thrasher. And at the crack of dawn, as I stepped out onto the deck to rehang the hummingbird feeder (which we bring in every night because of the raccoons) the app informed me that a mockingbird was singing somewhere in the vicinity.

I don’t think so.

It occurred to me just now that all three of these birds are mimic thrushes, whose songs are full of complex, harsh, and seemingly random noises. Maybe someone at the Cornell Ornithological Lab is working on that glitch right now.