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.
 

The Trouble with Transcendence

It was a fine weekend, cool and sunny, and gardening was on our minds. I sometimes file such thoughts under the heading “futile gestures,” based on decades of experience, but it did seem to be worthwhile addressing the large bald spot in the front yard, brought on by laziness, neglect, and two years of drought. And it’s hard to resist the urge to head down to the north-side downtown farmers’ market when the sun is low and bright and the neighborhood great-crested flycatcher is shrieking.

We arrived before eight only to discover that construction work has obliterated our favorite parking spots, and we ended up under the freeway overpass, happy to have found a slot but slightly worried if we’ll be able to get out of it later.

But these are fleeting anxieties when there’s life and color everywhere and your heart is swelling with the joy of the morning. We wandered the three long aisles, where the stalls often spread out into the street. Ignoring the vegetables, we focused on herbs, tomatoes, and those ever-illusive annuals that will grow well in shade yet offer bright summer-long color. Such plants don’t really exist.

Hilary had already planted some impatiens. We rejected the begonias and the torenia, and arrived back home with tomato plants and herbs. (I’d forgotten about browallias—my favorites—entirely!)

The wonderful smell of grilling bratwurst was everywhere, but we prudently returned home to a perfect late-spring lunch of bruschetta and grapes, after which we set to work planting. I prepared the soil in our little vegetable garden alongside the driveway, pouring on half-empty bags of manure and “soil enrichment” and then working them into the bed. Then Hilary got to work planting while I went out back to dig up some of the lily-of-the-valley that’s slowly creeping toward to deck, year by year.

At one point I noticed that Brendan, our neighbor across the street, was loading his canoe into the back of his pick-up, and I went over to chat.

“It’s such a nice day,” he said. “Sara and I are going out in the canoe. Have you heard of a place called the East Mississippi River Flats? It sounds like it would have lots of backwaters to explore.”

“Yes, I have heard of it,” I said. “I used to run a parking lot down there. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a launching place. It’s just a straight shot down the river from there. And how would you get back to your car?”       

We kicked around a few other ideas. “How about the Rice Lake Chain of Lakes? Or a simple paddle on Wirth Lake, which is practically right down the street?” Then we got to discussing what to do with our lawns. His looks pretty good. “You’ve got so many trees,” he said. “No wonder your lawn is struggling,”

“Yours is pretty good,” I said. “And Chad’s looks great. But he has full sun, and Sean told me the fertilizer company has already done four applications.”

We were soon on the neighborhood news—“Did you hear that Elfie’s furnace went out last winter?” By that time Brenden’s wife, Sara, had come around the house, and she and Hilary were already deep in conversation.

I realize there’s nothing extraordinary in all of this. On the other hand, maybe it’s a vision of perfect harmony, peace, and light, albeit on a very small scale.

While I was turning over the soil in our garden strip, I was reminded of a scene from Woody Allen's great early film Love and Death. One of the characters, I don’t remember who, says with great enthusiasm: “I have a piece of land…and I plan to build on it someday.” He’s holding a small piece of sod in outstretched hands.

On a loftier scale, I’m just now reminded of a few lines from T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets. that I became acquainted with at about the same time.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Even way back then, those lines irked me. Why not start knowing the place right now?

 

Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, Minnesota-style

Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party or Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe offer us an appealing vision of relaxation and conviviality in a semi-rural setting. These scenes look idyllic, but of course, we sometimes find ourselves in a similarly leisurely and delightful situation.

Take last weekend. The weather was near perfect, sunny and cool in the mornings, sunny and warm in the afternoons. The trees were in bloom, and anyone who went outdoors was likely to be assaulted unexpectedly by a waft of perfumed air. I was, several times. Chokecherries? Crabapples? Lilacs?

How did we spend our time? Mostly outdoors. That’s the key.

We drove up to Wild River State Park on Friday morning and took a hike along the river. The birds were sparse, though we saw our first kingbird of the year and heard a blue-winged warbler and several rose-breasted grosbeaks.

From there we drove a few miles up the river to the Will Swanson/Janel Jacobson Pottery Studio in Sunrise, where he, Janell Jacobson, and several other potters were exhibiting in the open air as part of the annual St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour.

Hilary bought two coffee mugs, and she also ran into several of her teachers and friends from the Minnetonka Art Center. I saw a lot of people that looked like people I knew, though they weren’t those people: men and women of about my age—liberal, artsy, outdoorsy. One of them looked at me briefly as if he recognized me, too: the ex-husband of a former friend and colleague. No, it couldn’t be him.

We next stopped in at Guillermo Cuellar’s studio, once again to admire the pots—the shapes, the glazes, the decoration. We didn’t buy any, but later bought a bag of Tostidos at a gas station in Askov and were back in town in time for me to pay a visit a poet-friend who was in need of a bit of conversation.

Saturday morning, after a cruel half-hour on the tennis court, we drove down to the Lake Harriet gardens, where scads of people were out picnicking and taking photographs of each other. It looked like a big communal wedding. Orioles seemed to be singing from the top of every tree in Roberts Bird Sanctuary, though we only saw one. Our best sighting was of a coy warbling vireo ten feet away at eye level.

The day deepen as we sat on the deck looking out into the yard. “I think I’ll water the garden,” I said. Hilary was reading a Bruno mystery on her Chromebook. “Maybe you could water over by the fence, too,” she said. Sure.

Time passes. Clouds appear, then vanish. As I wander the “grounds,” I spot a baby rabbit feasting on the Virginia waterleaf in the cherry orchard. More power to him.

Once I’ve given the garden a good soak, it occurs to me it would be a good time to divide and transplant a few hostas to the back corner of the garden, a shady patch of solid clay where nothing else seems to do well, no matter how seriously we try. I bring over a few fronds of ostrich ferns for good measure.

These light tasks being completed, I feel that I’ve accomplished something, and sit on the deck looking idly up through the branches of the venerable silver maple that anchors the “woods.” There’s movement. A shaft of sunlight is striking a leafy branch that a squirrel is feverishly wrestling into place on a new nest, as if winter were right around the corner.

It’s well past six by the time we go inside to make some quesadillas. Hilary blackens the tortillas perfectly, and that appetizing aroma adds a final touch to the woodland atmosphere.

Moss Landing

Best known, perhaps, for its nuclear power plant, Moss Landing  might seem like an odd choice for a two-night vacation stop-over, but it served us well. It’s located roughly half way around the curve of Monterey Bay, midway between Santa Cruz and Monterey itself. The estuarian waters of Elkhorn Slough enter the bay nearby, and the Nature Conservancy owns the nice chunk of hills and woods and fields it flows through before it arrives. Sea Harvest Fish Market and Restaurant sits on a pier at the mouth of the slough, with Monterey Kayak Rentals at the far end of the same parking lot. On a gray day, you can visit the Santa Cruz Marine Biology Research Center on the west side of town. It’s not the Monterey Aquarium, but it’s nearby, and it’s free.

But what kind of a “town” is Moss Landing? The old river bed of the Salina River slices through it lengthwise, parallel to the ever-busy two-lane Highway 101 that runs along the landward edge. There’s a peculiar “main drag” with a colorful—and popular— Mexican restaurant, and a Shakespeare Museum—closed— that seems to have been lifted from Dodge City, Kansas. There’s a port lined with muscular pleasure craft and utilitarian vessels seemingly over-equipped with heavy duty fishing rigs and antennae, and to the north and west, a warren of pole barns and dusty sheet metal warehouses. The Pacific Ocean is invariably just a few feet away, a three-minute drive down the street or a short climb over the grassy dunes.  

We booked a room at the Captain’s Inn for two nights on the strength of a few pictures on Air BnB. You couldn’t see the ocean, but the rooms looked out over the old riverbed, where we had hopes lots of shorebirds might congregate. But two days? Well, we wanted to explore the Nature Conservancy property, which we’d been to twice before, but both times in a rush, an hour before closing. And we wanted to kayak up the slough, which is often teeming with sea otters and harbor seals, to get a view of the same heavenly terrain from a different angle.

Hilary was especially keen to do the kayaking. I was also in favor … but only if conditions were right. So our first stop was to the kayak rental. The man behind the counter—he had an English accent—led us over to a large and attractive screen where we could see the predicted wind and tides for the next few days in a panorama of overlapping blue digital waves.

He pointed. “Tomorrow morning at 9 or 9:30 would be perfect,” he said. “You see. The tide will just be coming out, so you’ll be fighting that a little…” At this point I felt it appropriate to interject that we’d canoes for miles in fierce wind In the North Woods on the Canadian border and against the current of the Mississippi. “Good. The wind will be light, you won’t have any difficulty, and once you’re ready to turn around, you can drift all the way back.”

He seemed far less concerned that we’d be carried out to sea by the tide (it does happen) than that we’d get too close to the otters and seals. Also a good sign.

We spent the afternoon at the Nature Conservancy property. The main trail through the fields leads down the hill to the estuary, where there are usually plenty of shore birds feeding. It’s a three-mile loop, and you’re likely to see some interesting things in the woods, too. As we were starting out from the visitors’ center we met up with an elderly couple who live nearby. They told us they’d recently seen a great-horned owl drinking water out of the dog dish outside their back door on more than one occasion!

I won’t bore you with the details of our walk, but for the birders in the crowd, here’s a smattering of what we saw: Brewer's Blackbird, Least Sandpiper, Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed Dowitcher, Marbled Godwit, Long-billed Curlew, Oak Titmouse, Common Raven, Black Phoebe, Acorn Woodpecker, White-tailed Kite.

The next morning we arrived at the kayak rental in plenty of time to be convinced we ought to wear the plastic pants they provide for their guests. It was a good idea. We paddled in an open plastic two-person vessel past the seafood restaurant, turned east, and headed up the slough, entering a realm of solitude and silence populated by long, sausage-like creatures—seals and otters—that we were mildly fascinated by but had been instructed to avoid.

There were quite a few exotic birds, too: Pacific Loon, Western Grebe, Eared Grebe, Forster's Tern, Common Murre, Black-bellied Plover, Common Yellowthroat, White-crowned Sparrow. The individual species meant less, however, than the exhilaration of a bright warm morning in March, low to the water on a red plastic kayak, paddling against a gentle tide.

We’d brought neither cameras nor binoculars. Too risky. And the fact that we’d seen so many birds from land the previous day made it an easy call. Just breathe the air, soak in the surroundings, keep paddling. Or drift.

We are lunch for a second time at the Sea Harvest, why not? But now, looking out over the rail at the entrance to the slough, we knew a little more about what lay beyond.

 

Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died a few days ago. He was well-known at one time for both his novels and his probing intellect. As a journalist for the Atlantic put it in a recent obituary, “His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic.”

I know nothing of Llosa’s novels, though I see one or two here on the shelf. And of his turbulent personal life I know only what I’ve gleaned online in the last twenty minutes. But I’ve enjoyed reading the man’s essays for years.

For the most part they were written for newspapers in Madrid and syndicated throughout the Spanish-speaking world. That’s a good thing, in so far as it makes it likely they'll be self-contained nuggets of reasoning and description written in an accessible style and directed toward a wide audience. Ortega y Gasset hoed that same row a few generations ago, and so did Javier Marias more recently.

Llosa’s essays have been collected in several volumes. The two that I own and return to fairly often are The Language of Passion and Making Waves. Dipping into these collections is like reliving the last half century of popular culture—personal, cultural, political, and even philosophical.

For example, in the piece called “My Son the Rastafarian” Llosa combines anecdotes about serving on the Berlin Film Festival jury under Liv Ullmann with a bemused fatherly description of the radical vegetarian views of his college-aged son who’s arrived in Berlin for a visit.

There’s an insightful description of his life as a student under Franco’s repressive regime when Madrid seemed to be hardly more than a provincial backwater, and a nostalgic sketch devoted to the many hours Llosa spent in the library of the British Museum before the books were moved (alas) to the new British Library.

An essay about Cuba or Nicaragua written in 1975 is likely to sound dated today, but it also reminds us how intensely concerns about communism, authoritarianism, and neo-colonialism colored political discourse half a century ago.

Llosa’s lengthy review of The Golden Notebooks is also redolent of any earlier age: “I do not know why this novel became a feminist bible. Read from that standpoint, its convulsions are so pessimistic that they bring one out in goosebumps.”

And when was the last time you thought about Albert Camus? Llosa considers the man’s career at some length, observing at one point: 

All his life he remained true to the conviction that man fulfills himself completely, lives a total reality, in so far as he is communion with the natural world and that the divorce between man and nature mutilates human existence.

On the strength of this remark, it occurred to me that I ought to take a closer look at Camus’ book Summer (1954), which I spotted just now in his collection Lyrical and Critical Essays. But I began to have second thoughts about that project when, a few paragraphs later, Llosa remarked that:

His is a statuesque style which, apart from its admirable conciseness and the effectiveness with which it expresses an idea, seems somewhat naif: it is a stuffy style, old fashioned, smelling of starch.

In the course of these essays Llosa returns repeatedly to the role played by irrationality in history and daily life. It has no place in the world of theory, which is always rational, by definition—even theories of irrationality. Yet in personal life—the aggregate of which, considered in retrospect, is history itself— “unreason, the unconscious and pure spontaneity will always play a part.”

I might delve here into an exploration of Llosa’s comparative analysis of the theories of Isaiah Berlin and George Bataille, but we’ll save that project for another time, and turn to his essay on the Madrid World Cup of 1982. He argues here that the appeal of soccer is rooted in the fact that it’s intense and absorbing … but also “ephemeral, non-transcendent, innocuous.” At another point he describes it as “exciting and empty.”

After devoting a few paragraphs to the appeal of the Argentine hero Maradona, he takes a step back—how can he resist?—to explore the deeper roots of the appeal:

People need contemporary heroes, beings that they can turn into gods. No country escapes this rule. Cultured or uncultured, rich or poor, capitalist or socialist, every society feels this irrational need to enthrone idols of flesh and blood and burn incense to them. Politicians, military men, film stars, sportsmen, crooks, playboys, saints and ferocious bandits have been elevated to the altars of popularity and turned into a collective cult, for which the French have a good image: they call them 'sacred monsters'. Well, footballers are the most inoffensive people on which one can confer this idolatrous function.

Llosa is well aware how dangerous the enthronement of a sacred monster can be. In an essay on Salman Rushdie that appeared in 1992 he writes, “One of the truths which remains unshakeable in these times when the hurricanes of history are sweeping everything away is that civilization is a very thin veneer that can crack on the first impact with the demons of faith. At the first onslaught of social outrage.”     

Scampering Toward Earth Day

It was Friday, and to be honest, I wasn't thinking of Earth Day when I decided to make a fire out of some grape vines I was extracting from the thicket beside our neighbor's fence. I was thinking of the French Riviera. 

Hilary had just pointed out that the vines were dead. They had been severed during some clean-up months ago and were now dangling in space. As I was pulling them away from the branches they were still fiercely clinging to, I was reminded of a morning we spent in Grasse--the world capital of perfume--decades ago. It was late March, and workers were pruning vines in the vineyards nearby and tossing them into wheelbarrows fashioned out of old oil drums, inside of which fires were smoldering. A haze of acrid smoke filled the air.

I liked that smell and was curious to find out if these vines would produce the same aroma. They didn't.  

Nor was I thinking of Earth Day on Easter when we gathered at Hilary's cousin's house, out in the country, to eat and chat and take part in the annual egg fight. It was a bubbly afternoon, with lots of food and an egg hunt for the kids. The talk ranging from Rory McIlroy's emotional win at the Masters to California redwoods, from Bruce's days as a racecar driver to the difference between the songs of the goldfinch and the indigo bunting.

At one point, dimly aware that some of the guests were too young to know who some of us old folks were talking about, I tried to explain to Missy who Cassie was. "Cassie is Ginny's daughter, you see. And Ginny was married to George. George was Skid's brother. Skid was married to Ollie. Ollie is Laura's mom, and also Dorothy's sister. Hence, Laura is Hilary's cousin. Got it?" 

Missy's thoughts seemed to have drifted elsewhere by that point, and I don't blame her.

* * *

We have the good fortune to live near a parkway. It runs for miles down the west side of Minneapolis and we’ve driven it countless times. This time of year—and especially after an overnight rain—a simple drive down the hill through the golf course and past the Quaking Bog and the Wildflower Garden will take us to the Chain of Lakes.

The sky is gray but the air is warm and people are out, biking and on foot. We haven’t reached that slice of the season when the leaves begin to appear en masse like a green mist, but it’s easy to enjoy the nascent efforts of the honeysuckles and the bright blue carpets of squills that are appearing here and there.

Today is Earth Day, and we’re on the way down the parkway to see how the ducks are faring. They pass through at about this time every year. A few days ago there were coots everywhere on the south end of Lake Harriet—cute, clumsy gallinules without much stature or cachet. This morning there are hundreds of them on Bde Maka Ska. Quite a few red-breasted mergansers—among the most striking and elegant of all the ducks—are swimming nearby. Ten or twelve bright white buffleheads have also joined the party. 

Everyone’s milling around. the mergansers occasionally perform their neck-craning ritual, and the coots, who have short necks, have come up with a feeble version of their own.

A few hundred yards south of Lake Street we pull over, park, and approach the shore, where thirty-six ruddy ducks—yes, we counted—are casually swimming together, off by themselves. This small creature, with a bright blue bill, compact body, and upturned tail, might almost be a Disney creation.

Lake Harriet is somewhat quieter, but down on the south end we meet up with a similar raft of waterfowl--coots and red-breasted mergansers, along with a few mallards and wood ducks, and two horned grebes!

From here it’s only a few minutes’ drive to Turtle Bakery. I don’t know the name of the flaky chocolaty pretzel-shaped thing they sell next to the caramel rolls and the croissants, but that’s what I got to go along with the coffee. Hilary picked out something that looked like a custardy caramel roll topped with raisins. Most of the tables and booths were filled with middle-aged women and men deep in morning conversation. On the bulletin board I saw a flyer proclaiming that 25 percent of Mayor John Frye’s campaign donations came from Republicans, and I thought to myself, “That’s a good thing. Right?”  '    

We drove back to Lake Harriet, past the newly resurfaced tennis courts at Beard's Plaisance that I haven’t gotten a chance to try out yet, and parked on the road overlooking the lake. 

Some Bach cantatas had been playing on the radio but we turned it off, the better to hear the chuckling and squawking of the coots.  

  

Film Fest Overview

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film festival has largely run its course, for the 44^th time, and the Best of the Fest line-up has been announced. These are films that will be aired again because they were deemed the best by viewers, though I sometimes wonder if they’re simply the ones that are currently available to be shown again before moving on to festivals in Keokuk and Elephant Butte.

Hilary and I saw twelve films and we liked them all. Would we recommend them to friends? Maybe not.

Part of the buzz comes from showing up day after day at the theater, which sits across the river from downtown Minneapolis. It’s a vibrant scene, and it’s not uncommon for us to run into longtime friends, casual acquaintances, and film buffs with whom we’ve chatted at some festival years ago without ever learning their names. That adds to the fun.

The five-screen theater complex is only fifteen minutes from our house, and we adopted a new parking strategy this year that made the approach even easier. Rather the wasting time scouring the neighborhood for an open spot on the street and worrying about the two-hour time limit, we took to parking on Marshall Avenue, where there was always a spot available, and setting off on the ten-minute walk to the theater.

Among the films we saw, several were expertly made and one was actually gripping. These films might do well in a normal first-run setting. Others were classic “film-fest” movies: slow to develop, set in exotic locales, giving you the time to soak up the atmosphere and listen to the crickets chirp. And then there were the bio-pics and documentaries.

In the first category I would place a Czech film, Waves. It depicts a few episodes during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the struggles of the employees of the “official” radio station to broadcast honest news under the scrutiny of government officials who are always asking themselves, “What will Moscow think about this?” I won’t be giving away any secrets if I remind you that five Warsaw Pact countries under Russian leadership invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of that year. The film captures the décor of the era, and also the Western music that had become so popular—for example, the Shirelles “Be My Baby.” There are plot twists and Russian tanks, heroism and loyalty and defeat on the streets of Prague. It’s a great mix.

When we got home, we pulled out a copy of A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century,  by Richard Vinen, to fill in the details, but the focus wasn’t quite right. Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting offered fewer historical details but was much better suited to the mood and complexity of the film. And after all, Kundera was there.

In Meet the Barbarians, a French comedy/drama directed by Julie Delpy, a small town in Brittany that’s expecting to welcome a refugee Ukrainian family is surprised to discover that in fact the family that’s arriving from Syria. It’s a strangely light-hearted film, considering the context, but it works none the less. I couldn't help thinking of darker films like Green Border and The Old Oak here and there along the way.

A third film in the “polished and ready for prime time” category, Mistura, was less effective. Here the daughter of the French ambassador to Peru is humiliated when her husband runs off with a beauty queen. Facing disgrace and financial ruin, she vents her emotions on the only people still close at hand—her devoted servants. In the course of the film she recovers her self-esteem, if not her social status, by means of the one thing she loved to do before her marriage: cooking. She opens a restaurant with the help of her father’s former chef (Asian), her trusted chauffeur (black), and a maid (Latino) who’s served the family for decades.

It's a food movie, among other thing, and the close-ups are appetizing. It’s also a fairy tale of ethnic sharing and cooperation, which is fine by me. But I didn’t get the sense that our protagonist had really changed all that much by the end of the film. She had cut back on the stylish clothes and the heavy make-up, but she was still the boss, and they were the servants.

We'd run into an old friend while waiting in line, and in the lobby after the film she told us, "I lived in Peru for three months when I was in college back in the 70s. It was really like that! Everyone was thinking all the time about what they wore, and what so-and-so would say if they did this or that. You can do this; you can't do that or be seen there."

One thing the chauffeur and the ambassador's daughter have in common is that they can both quote the poet Cesar Vallejo by heart. When we got home I pulled Trilce off the shelf and was soon fast asleep.

The Property follows an elderly woman and her granddaughter as they travel from Israel to Poland in hope of regaining ownership of an apartment that was confiscated during the war. Hidden at the root of this simple endeavor is a pre-war love affair between Jew and goy that everyone in the family knows about but no one talks about. The film consists of various appointments in Warsaw and also random meetings with strangers, some of whom become friends.

Grandmother and granddaughter are pursuing different strategies and are seldom in the same place at the same time, and their local cantor, who has ostensibly accompanied them to attend a conference, also figures in the plot. Several enigmatic elements come together nicely by the time we’re through. Do they get the apartment? I’m not telling.

The Last Journey details a son’s efforts to rekindle the spark in his aged father, who has somehow lost his “pep,” by taking him on a road trip from central Sweden to the French Riviera, where the family enjoyed some memorable holidays decades earlier. The father seems very feeble, but the son is bursting with energy and he recruits an old friend to help him make the trip memorable. Both of the younger men are highly skilled directors and producers in real life—a fact I only learned after seeing the film. That might explain how they succeed in cobbling together the funniest and most touching trip—and film—you can imagine, considering that the old man can hardly walk.

The other engaging comedy we saw, Fun Raiser, is set half a world way from the Riviera in the depressed mining town of Chisolm, Minnesota. Crafted by local filmmakers Wyatt McDill (director) and Megan Huber (producer) and almost obeying Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action, it takes place in a single afternoon and evening during which an odd collection of small-town folk attempt to host a fund-raising event to keep their fledging art school afloat. A media star with local roots will be arriving from L.A. for the event, but the money to rent the hall and pay the caterers has fallen through. If these hapless educators did succeed in holding the event, and they did raise some money, everything might turn out differently, of course. The result is a madcap succession of frenzied conversations as we get the know the characters, none of whom seems to be sure what anyone else is doing. It’s a rocky start, but (spoiler alert) once the event is moved to a dilapidated warehouse nearby and the wealthy guests start arriving, the film reaches what chemists call “activation energy” and (with the help of a gummy bear or two) it starts to hum with an accelerating rhythm of absurd gags, hilarious pratfalls, and touching testimonials to the importance of arts education and its power to unite and inspire even the most down-at-heal community.

Among the “third-world” films we saw, Regretfully at Dawn stands out. Set in rural Thailand, it tells the simple story of a girl who’s being raised by her grandfather on a farm of some sort. They enjoy being together and get along well. But she’s very bright, and her teacher at the local school is convinced she should continue her education abroad. Her grandfather, meanwhile, is ailing a bit, and seems to be enmeshed in memories of the time he spent in combat years ago—memories that he cherishes. It’s a gentle film, slow-moving, full of rural expanses, but also punctuated here and there by sudden explosions.

The most unusual film we saw, I think, was Grand Tour. The story-line isn’t much: British functionary stationed in Burma (or somewhere) flees fiancée; woman follows. The fleeing man says almost nothing and has virtually no distinguishing characteristics. He’s less than a cypher; he’s merely a prop. He serves the purpose of providing a narrative thread with which Portuguese director Miguel Gomes can string together exotic footage of the Far East taken at various times during the twentieth century along with footage he shot himself, much of it in black and white.

The fiancée shows up halfway through the film, and she’s much more dynamic. She gives the film a lift. But the entire work carries the flavor of an old silent film, where the fascinating imagery trumps the odd and sometimes arbitrary way it’s juxtaposed, like the phrases in a good surrealist poem. It reminded me of the recent Gods of Mexico, and also a black-and-white film from Russia that I saw years ago, Bag of Bones. Similarly odd, yet strangely refreshing.

There are times when a film fest comes to an end, and you find that you’ve seen three or four films about farming, or arctic exploration, for no particular reason. This year, we happened to see three biopics. All good.

I have never read anything by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, but Hilary recently read The Country Girls, and friends told us Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story was well put together. It is. O’Brien comes across as sharp, honest, playful, curious. The men she associated with less so. Her two bright and articulate sons add a lot to the story. The petty and scathing remarks her husband wrote in her journal expose a narcissistic tyrant. In the course of the film we get to know her, and it’s fun to catch a few newsreel glimpses of the London party scene, but the film’s richness derives even more from the atmospheric home movies shot in Ireland.    

Flicka, a portrait of the opera singer Frederica von Stade, is hardly less appealing, and her life followed a similar trajectory, up to a point. She achieved surprising success at an early age, never took herself too seriously, and was capable of doing things for the sheer fun of it. The film takes us beyond the obvious talent and success to probe Flicka's irrepressible thoughtfulness and humanity.

Ai Wei Wei’s Turandot gave me a clearer idea of who this Chinese dissident is. It jumps back and forth from China, where Ai was imprisoned for his outspoken views, to Rome, where he’s been put in charge of designing a new production of Puccini’s opera Turandot. Wei envisions the work as a statement about free speech and repression, and there is undoubtedly an authoritarian element to the plot. Ai is in his element fashioning costumes of strange creatures to fill out the scenes, though he's never designed an opera before and admits that he doesn't really like opera. But I’m sure some viewers were eager to hear a bit more of the music. I know I was.