A Few Days on the Coast

After the extended Christmas hubbub, full of early darkness and general good cheer, Hilary and I almost invariably head for the fresh air, stunning beauty, silence, and solitude of the coast—the north coast, that is. Lake Superior.

It’s long since become a tradition.

We try to mix things up a bit from year to year, of course. Theme and variations. But the drive up is often punctuated by a visit to the Sax-Zim Bog. The following days are likely to include a few cross-country skiing excursions, pasties and fresh fish on the menu—not on the same night!—with herring, Jarlsberg cheese, Aunt Nellie’s red cabbage, and Ingebretsen’s liver pâté prominently featured on the lunch-time smorgasbord. Gooseberry Falls State Park. Two Harbors, and Shovel Point are all near at hand.

Our cabin is right on the shore, a half mile from Highway 61. It has a gas fireplace which generates a lot of heat and is easy to flip on. We’re always eager to relish the call of the coyotes (or wolves) and the startling brilliance of the night sky—especially the Quadrantid Meteor Shower on January 3.

And then there are the books.

Operating on that principal, as usual, I limited myself to eight or nine books. That might seem like a lot, but you never know what mood you’re going to be in. Among my choices were a small early paperback of Milosz’s selected poems, a book about the Old Testament called People of the Book by A. N. Wilson, and a wide-ranging collection of essays about literature and art by Clive James called As of This Writing. Add to that a slim hardcover by a once-famous Columbia University prof, Sterling Lamprecht, called Freedom and Nature, an obscure (but handsome) paperback by Neal Atcherson called The Black Sea, and a fat hardcover collection of nature writings by Barry Lopez with a cool blue cover called Horizon. I was set. And if none of these books struck my fancy, too bad for me. I’s have to read at least one of them anyway.

What was that remark by Kierkegaard? “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

But as we walked into the Wilbert Café in Cotton my mind was engaged in deeper issues: the burger or the pasty or the BLT? It’s a small but spacious room with pale green walls; several groups of people (with binoculars) are usually sitting in the booths along the window that looks out across the snow-packed parking lot and the four-lanes of highway 53, an expanse that’s uniformly flat and dreary. But the talk is lively. And during our recent visit Sparky Stennsaw, one of the moving forces behind the bog, happened to be eating there. As he was leaving, I heard him say to the group in the next booth, “Head for Two Harbors and on up the shore to Grand Marais. Look for that mountain bluebird. Look out beyond the harbor for long-tailed ducks.”

A man sitting alone a few tables to my right tried to catch my eye once or twice. I learned why a few minutes later, when he engaged another customer in conversation, telling the man about the ten acres he was developing near Cherry, and the two cabins he already had for rent. He gave the man a card.

Our own sightings in the bog were modest: a Canada jay near the visitors’ center, a boreal chickadee in the midst of a flock of black-capped chickadees at the Admiralty Road feeders, and a flock of pine grosbeaks at a platform feeder on Auggie’s Bogwalk  No hawks. No owls. Not even a siskin.

The bog had gotten a bit of snow, and the black spruce forest was stunning with the late afternoon sun coming in low and bright through the frigid air.

Rather than head back to Duluth and up the shore, we decided to cut cross-country through a chunk of the north woods we didn’t know well. I had never been to Forbes before. A few years ago we skied some sketchy trails near Brimson, a town better known for the New Years Eve bashes at Hugo’s, the local bar, which seems to be almost the only building in town. 

But the setting sun was behind us and the sky to the east was tending toward peach near the horizon. It had a scintillating dreamy quality that reminded me of childhood summers in Oklahoma. Quite a contrast to the street-light glare of the strip malls and body shops of the highway into Duluth.

It was still light when we arrived at the resort on Castle Danger. We drove to our cabin (#8) to find that it was already occupied. Hmm. I’d printed out the reservation. There was no mistaking it. We stopped in at the office. “No, you’re in #11,” Jamie said, looking slightly confused. “The key’s on the kitchen counter.” End of problem.

There followed three or four days of reading, hiking, skiing, cooking, and staring out the window. Bright moon through the clouds, but very few stars. A few passing ore boats.

I won’t bore you with all the notes I took during our afternoon reading sessions, but one gem from Lamprecht is truly golden: “Despite the admirable character of the kindly Kant himself, the Kantian influence, in practice, has been as deleterious as in theory it has been incoherent.”

Bravo!

A second trenchant observation won’t hurt. “Nature is a lush welter of teleological profusion. Man faces the moral task of organizing as best he can what nature offers with total disregard of centrality.”

How about this one? “Scorn of matter is a mark of arrogance of spirit. People of healthy spirituality never lose capacity for enjoyment of material goods.”  

We enjoyed our frozen walleye “from Canada,” breaded, fried, then baked, while listening to some poundy, youthful piano sonatas by Beethoven, then watched the gentle waves outside the window reflect a shimmering moon. 

It was a supermoon, in fact, and it also happened to be at perihelion. The last time than happened, in 1912, the Titanic sank!