The Blaze of Summer

The key to enjoying the hot summer months is to get out early in the day. The bristling sunlight and the cool shadows make a delightful mix, summoning a spirit of exhilaration that seems almost heaven sent. We’ve had more than our share of rain this summer, but it’s been good for the plants, and there have been plenty of fresh, sparking days, too. Days of heart-rending beauty.

One morning Hilary and I drove south down West River Road with our bikes to Minnehaha Falls and took a trip up the creek to Lake Harriet. Bright, cool and spectacular. The trails were uncrowded, the gardens by the Longfellow House were stunning; and the pickleballers at Lake Nokomis—trim and athletic—were having a blast.

By the time we got back to the falls the Minnehaha Art Fair was in full swing. (Before setting out we’d seen the rows of square tents lined up under the trees like an Arabian bazaar, but had no idea what was going on.) The line at Sea Salt was already long, so we gave up on the dream of a calamari lunch and took the plunge down the first aisle.

It struck me almost immediately that the quality of the work was high, though many of the objects for sale inhabited that broad but vague realm between fine art and gift shop merchandise.

Halfway down the first row I was drawn to the linoleum block prints of Matt Otero.

Across the aisle, at a tent devoted exclusively to long, narrow bowls carved out of mid-sized pieces of birch with the bark left on, I was struck by the seeming incongruity of the sign: Erv Berglund – Fridley. Erv was standing right there, and he looked Scandinavian, as did the art, so I took a chance and said: “You look like someone who should live in Scandia or Lindstrom.”

Erv nodded and said, “I used to do some hunting out that way. I grew up in South Minneapolis. There was a Dane down the street, and another Swede on the next block.” My God. He had an accent!

We made our way down the aisles, past jewelers and silk-screeners, potters and weavers. I tried to convince one soap-maker to look into the possibility of linden soap. “Is that an essential oil?” she asked. How would I know? She looked it up in a book that was sitting on a table nearby. “Hmm. Yes, it is.”

During our stroll Hilary was on the lookout for the woman who made her purse. She loves that purse, but she needs a new one.

We have several friends who have made a good living selling things at events like these. But after two or three aisles everything starts to look slightly superfluous and vaguely meretricious. (I blame it on the heat.) Having failed to locate the food trucks (if there were any) we returned to our bikes and cycled the remaining quarter mile to our car, which was parked near the entrance to the lock and dam. A stunning morning, well spent.

A few days later we headed west early to the Landscape Arboretum and took a stroll around the grounds. The day lilies were singing, the herbs were fragrant, and the bedding plants were spectacular. Even the orangish shades were appealing in the long shadows of mid-morning. We cut behind the Snyder Building on our way back to the car and met up with a young man selling coffee on the terrace. Hilary commented on the book by the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron that was sitting on the counter of his cart. She’s a fan.

"I’ve read all of her books,” he said. “They’re pretty similar. But she’s helped me through some tough times.” I asked him what he did when he wasn’t baking in the summer sun on the Arboretum terrace selling coffee. “I’m a yoga instructor at LifeTime Fitness,” he said.

I couldn’t quite picture it. “You mean, like poses and mediation and stuff?”

“I think you’ve got the general idea,” he said, smiling good-naturedly.

A woman was watering plants with a sprayer hose a few feet away. As we passed her she said hi, and I said, “If it gets too hot, you can just spray yourself.”

“I do. I do,” she said. “I just spray up into the air and down it comes.”

“Would you spray me?” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

So she shot a shower up into the air in my direction. That was refreshing. Unfortunately, as she brought the nozzle of the hose back down she inadvertently “let me have it” with a direct hit to the chest.

“Oh, I sprayed you too much,” she said with a sheepish giggle. “Well, don’t worry. You’ll be dry in half an hour!”

Though the afternoons have been almost unbearably hot, we hosted my cousin Rich and his wife Sarah for lunch on the deck one day at noon. 

And a few days ago we met some friends for a late afternoon performance at the Theodore Wirth Trailhead given by the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company. They were doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, an early “opera seria” that’s sometimes referred to as his first masterpiece, though it’s seldom performed.

Mercifully, the troupe had decided to move the performance into the cool and capacious confines of the Trailhead building itself, rather than out on the grass behind the building. And the show was an utter blast.

The group takes its opera seriously, in so far as the voices are strong and the singing heart-felt. But they ham up the drama as if it were a SNL skit. The orchestra has been replaced by a cabaret quartet consisting of cello, violin, accordion, and guitar. And by editing out two thirds of the material and adding a few pop tunes and jivey dances here and there, they succeed in keeping the audience amused—even those who might not like opera much. We loved it.

You can hear a snatch of the music here:

 

Bear Head Lake State Park: Home on the Range

We took a few days off recently and headed north to Bear Head Lake State Park, which sits deep in the woods on a large peninsula extending south into the largely undeveloped lake. By “woods” I mean the North Woods—a mix of pine, spruce, aspen, and hardwoods, hazelnut and dogwood, ferns and sarsaparilla, that was logged more than a century ago and is now robust again. Many of the white pines in the park were too small to be harvested back in1910; they’re majestic now. 

The remains of some of the largest open-pit mines in the Western Hemisphere are located nearby, but you see them only occasionally along the highway, vast depressions in the earth, often surrounded by mountains of slag and clothed in a veneer of scrubby vegetation. What you see more often are the towns that once supported the mines—Gilbert, Eveleth, Tower, Virginia, Biwabik, Aurora; the ore was largely depleted decades ago, and now most of them are struggling.

At this point I might note that my mother grew up in Virginia, and we visited her folks from time to time. Though I didn’t play hockey, we watched the annual high school hockey tournament together year after year with great interest. I’d heard the names Mountain Iron, Roseau, Baudette, and International Falls many times before I had the slightest idea where they were. (Check out Jim Hoey’s fine book, Puck Heaven, for more details.)

My mom and her two older siblings on Lake Vermilion

Later, my parents bought a slice of land on a cove in Black Bay, at the west end of Lake Vermilion, and we built a boxy plywood cabin there, making sure not to disturb the towering red pines growing nearby. In time, by imperceptible and almost Proustian degrees, the natural mystique of the Iron Range sunk in, and it was compounded later by the summers I spent canoeing in the BWCA.   

A few years ago Bear Head S.P. was voted the best state park in America as part of a promotional campaign sponsored by Coca-Cola. I don’t know why. It doesn’t even rank among the ten most popular parks in Minnesota (which highlights a troubling aspect of the democratic process more generally: people who know absolutely nothing about the issues often do the most voting).

Yet Bear Head SP does have an attractive array of features. First and foremost, it’s a boater’s park. It’s on a large lake, but the shoreline along the campground area is riddled with inlets that would appeal to visitors interested in kayaking, canoeing, and—yes— paddleboarding. 

If you take the path through the woods along the shore between campground loops you’ll pass a number of makeshift docks where overnight visitors have casually moored their vessels and hung their life vests out to dry, evidently on a first-come-first-serve basis. Across the inlet lies the boat landing, a five-minute drive down a gravel road through the woods.

The campsite we reserved, sight unseen, would not be considered glamorous by anyone. It’s exposed to overhead sun for most of the day. The afternoon shade arrives at around 4 p.m. when the sun drops below a few scraggly trees and shrubs.

But almost immediately upon our arrival we spotted a female redstart in the bushes ten feet away. Then the male. We set up our camp chairs and sat down in time to get a good look at a chestnut-sided warbler in the shrubs on the other side of the picnic table. A few minutes later a northern parula arrived, so close I could see the double break in its eye-ring.

“This is going to be great!” I said.

But it wasn’t great. A scrawny (but cute) chipping sparrow was a frequent visitor. Two flickers in the distance. A catbird sitting on a boulder on the far side of the campsite. Slim pickins.

What was great was the openness and privacy of the site. We enjoyed looking off at the distant trees, the blue sky, fireflies at night, a good view of the (hazy) midnight stars, and no other people in sight.

Nevertheless, we left camp the next morning after breakfast to hike the Norberg Trail, which starts near the landing, the beach, and the unusually sophisticated “visitors’ center,” which is modern, air-conditioned, and fitted out like a suburban showroom you’d see in Design Quarterly.

The trail is lovely, winding through mature forests with the bright blue lake often in sight through the trees. Norberg Lake itself is a peculiar sinkhole with mineral-rich, turquoise-blue water—some people might call in a kettle lake. The return route follows a different path, and it’s also fine. Three miles of beauty, solitude, sunshine, and semi-open woodland bliss.

From there we drove a half hour west to the Kawishiwi Falls Trailhead, a few miles east of Ely. The hike itself is short, easy, and popular. The view of the falls is impressive. At one point, while we were examining an unfamiliar wildflower, a not-so-elderly couple squeezed by us. A few steps later the man turned and said, “Gee, we finally passed someone.” He seemed pleased.

The day was heating up by the time we set off on the two-mile loop around Blackstone Lake, a few miles further east on Fernberg Road. The light was getting harsh and the vegetation was scrubbier. Serviceberries were in bloom here and there, and Hilary also succeeded in harvesting a few handfuls of early blueberries. A young couple was camping at the walk-in site. We could see their bright yellow tent and hear their cheery voices as they swam together across the lake. They were having fun.

Back at the car, we took a short drive down the road to Moose Lake, one of the most popular points of entry into the BWCA. In 1968, at the age of 16, I headed out from here with friends Carl and Dave for our first wilderness experience without adults. A year later, my dad, my brother, and I explored one of the most beautiful parts of Quetico Provincial Park: Agnes, Kawnipi, Cutty, Sark, Kahshahpiwi. I remember the names of the lakes, but I hardly remember the trip itself (though Agnes Falls is truly unforgettable.) In 1980 we took a trip with two other couples down Knife and Kekekabic and around through Insula to Snowbank, stopping for weak root beer one afternoon on Dorothy Molter’s island. And Hilary and I started a trip here at Moose maybe fifteen years ago, though the weather was so bad on the return trip that we paid one of the numerous water taxis that ply the lake to give us a ride the last few miles back to the landing.

Truth be told, the Gunflint Trail has always been our preferred avenue of approach to the BWCA. I remember all these Ely-based trips now, as I stop to think about it, but the Moose Lake landing holds little nostalgic appeal for me. On our recent visit, we didn’t even get out of the car.

Our plan was to stop at the Subway in Ely to buy some sandwiches for dinner, then return to Bear Head for a cheese-and-crackers lunch at the beach. 

Sitting at a table under the pines, we listened to the merriment at the beach a hundred yards away, watched a family of common mergansers swim back and forth a few feet from shore, and convinced ourselves that after seven miles of hiking, we weren’t really in the mood to take kayaks out into the increasingly choppy lake. Next time, for sure.