Winona Beethoven Overnight

Winona has been holding a midsummer Beethoven Festival annually for almost two decades now, with world-class performers and a wide array of classical ensembles, styles, and programs. After reading about the event for years—often after the fact—we finally committed ourselves this year to an evening of Beethoven quartets performed by the Ariel String Quartet.

It wasn’t the most auspicious moment to embark on an overnight getaway to Winona. Temperatures were in the 90s and forest fires in the BWCA had sent the air quality index to dangerous heights. The smell of stale smoke was everywhere, and the Minneapolis skyline had been reduced to a vague dystopian silhouette.

We went anyway. We’d already booked the tickets and the motel. And there was reason for hope. The forecast mentioned the possibility of rain, which would wash some of the smoke away, and the NW wind might just shush the nasty stuff east into Wisconsin.

We left town at 1:30. There was water on the roads in Red Wing. The air had improved. Patches of blue sky appeared. Clouds took shape.

It rained heavily while we were checking into our motel on the outskirts of Winona. (Good timing.) We dressed for the concert (summer casual) and headed down into the city a few minutes later, looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. Hilary was scrolling the possibilities on Trip Advisor and happened on Sapori di Sicilia, which described itself as a “panificio : pasticceria.” A bakery and pastry shop?

It was only three blocks away. We parked right in front of the steps leading up to the place. Downtown Winona is full of half-decrepit storefronts, but this place seemed to be housed in a repurposed bank. Modern. Large tiles on the floor. Bakery cases half-full of tasty-looking morsels.

A closer look at the menu on the wall behind the cash register suggested that we’d come to the right place: truffle fries, falafel fritters, capicola panini. aglio e olio, gnocchi. And six or seven house wines at $ 6-8/glass.

Everything tastes better in an oversized bowl.

We ordered a Greek salad and pasta carbonara, took a table by the window, and settled in to watch the passing scene. The chairs were remarkably comfortable. Hilary had a great view of a group of seven elderly women engaged in animated conversation. A book club? University professors discussing some upcoming candidate for tenure? Or were they all headed to the Beethoven festival later that evening?

We nursed our orders, passing them back and forth across the table, happy to be inside watching the weather improve through the window. At one point I went up to the counter to get two glasses of water and said to the young woman behind the register, apropos of nothing, “This image on your menu looks like it came from Crete.”

“Well, it happens to be in the center of the Sicilian flag,” she replied, cracking a hint of a smile.

The concert took place at a theater on the campus of St. Mary’s University, tucked into the wooded bluffs a five-minute drive up the hill from our motel. The night wasn’t cool, but it was no longer unpleasantly hot, and the air had improved so greatly that Hilary spotted the crescent moon peeking through a rift in the clouds. People were milling around on the terrace in front of the concert hall, and it seemed the only thing missing was the sharp report of a passing nighthawk.

The concert itself was deeply expressive and thoroughly engaging: Beethoven—early, middle, and late. Works like these don’t carry you along like a breeze, they draw you in like a compelling argument, and the Ariel Quartet offered a flawless exercise in emotional logic and probing intensity. The first half of the program ran 90 minutes. The single piece after intermission was a mere twenty-two. The balance seemed perfect.

I was impressed. I had never heard of the Ariel Quartet prior to coming upon them in the festival schedule, though they’ve been playing together for almost thirty years. But I’m sure these musicians are less concerned with impressing people than with fully exposing the challenge, the anguish, and the beauty of Beethoven’s imagery.

The next morning, after a "light breakfast" at the motel, we returned to our new favorite Sicilian cafe stop to sample the bakery goods. The same young woman was behind the country, and when she brought us our coffee we learned a bit about the owner's background.

From there it was across the river to Trempealeau NWR, where we drove the nine-mile gravel circuit, stopping hear and there to take a walk or get a better view of a bird. The sky was clear and the humidity had dropped, though not by much. 

We spotted four or five indigo buntings along the way--they like to sit in the open at the tops of trees, displaying their iridescent feathers--but most of the birds were sheltering in the shadows of the vegetation. We heard warbling vireos, common yellow-throats, great-crested flycatchers, Eastern towhees, robins, pewees, yellow-bellied woodpeckers, catbirds--the usual suspects. Hilary spotted a few pelicans drifting out in the river. A beaver swam by. Perhaps our best sighting was of a red-headed woodpecker disappearing into the underbrush. 

   

The News from Campus

I have a soft spot in my heart for things related to campus life. There’s something “cool” about those years you spend learning things while doing crumby part-time jobs and hanging out with your friends. And in more recent years, Hilary and I have wandered over from time to time to see a play or an opera staged by the music department. I've attended a few programs hosted by the Carlson School of Business, the Heller School of Economics, and the English Department. I taught a class on the St. Paul Campus for several years as part of their Compleat Scholar program. And now that I think about it, I was once invited to join the programming committee for the West Bank Film Society. 

So when I received an email from the University of Massachusetts/Boston inviting me to join a focus group to discuss ways campuses can “engage with older adults in the community” and “foster intergenerational interactions,” I signed up. Why not? The meeting would only take an hour, and I would receive a $50 Amazon gift card as a reward for my efforts.

I was a little proud of myself for noting that the meeting was scheduled in Eastern Daylight Time. That meant that the 2 p.m. Zoom session would be starting at 1. But when I tuned in, the session was almost over. The moderator invited me to return in an hour, when a second session was scheduled to start. That gave me time to refer back to the original email invitation, which specified Fri, May 22, 1:00 – 2:00 EDT. My mistake. (Perhaps this faux pas established my bona fides as an elderly person struggling to come to grips with the complexities of the modern campus world.) 

I was surprised to discover, in any case, that both of the sessions—the one I’d missed and the one I attended—were made up entirely of women, all of whom were employed at college campuses in Massachusetts. Quite a few of them seemed to know each other personally. It struck me as odd that they were all academics or administrators. None were average citizens expressing concerns about campus access--the things that the panel was purporting to address.

Except me.

The facilitator was articulate and well-organized. She had drawn up a series of questions, and also mentioned how much time she planned to devote to each—five or ten minutes—before initiating discussion. The questions were broad, on the order of “How can colleges and universities support accessibility, navigation, mobility, and safety for all ages on campus?” and “What discourages or prevents older learners from coming to campuses?” Within the confines of the time limit, our answers were inevitably superficial. Concerns about crime? Better campus lighting, more cops. Navigation? Kiosks with maps. Parking? Take a bus. And so on.

The section that seemed most fruitful to me explored ways to connect older students to academia by scheduling classes and events off-campus. Although I tried to maintain a low profile during the discussion, I couldn’t resist mentioning the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute, which supports learning programs at more than 250 universities around the country, with classes held in local churches, high schools, libraries, and online. I also mentioned the numerous readings and educational programs hosted within our local Hennepin County Library System, and the city-wide system of motorized scooters that make it easier for older adults to traverse the sprawling U of MM campuses.

(The idea of older people riding around on scooters may sound absurd, but in the minds of the panelists, a twenty-five year old would be considered an “older” returning adult. Anyway, isn't this a prime examle of the much encouraged "thinking outside the box"?)

With about three minutes left in the hour, someone brought up the issue of Zoom classes, which obviate the challenges involved in negotiating a college campus entirely. “I think they’re great.” I chimed in. Someone countered with a remark on the order of “but then you miss the interactions between student and teacher and among the students themselves.”

“That’s true to some extent,” I said. “But in the classes I teach on Zoom, there’s a lot of useful interaction going on between students in the chat—questions being answered, enthusiasms being shared. Far more than in a "live" classroom. And everyone has the opportunity to email me directly after class with questions, observations, or challenges to my remarks.”

I might have gone on to observe that quite a few people in my classes would never dream of leaving their assisted living arrangements to attend a class ten (or two hundred) miles away on a 400-acre campus serving 50,000 students. In my most recent class there were students from as far away as Crosby and Lac Qui Parle.

What I did says was: “More than 160 people registered for my most recent class. You’re unlikely to reach a third of that total in a college classroom.”

I might also have mentioned, as an aside, that Luther Seminary, after more than a century of operation in the beautiful St. Paul neighborhood of St. Anthony Park, now plans to sell its entire campus and reincarnate itself as a more lean and nimble institution, responding to the reality that even now 70 percent of its students attend mostly online. 

So many avenues to explore, so little time!

The question that remained most forcibly in my mind as I switched off the Zoom portal was this: to what extent, in its efforts to expand inclusiveness and nurture “community,” is the university willing to shed its dedication to "higher" education and refashion itself as a purveyor of community ed?     

Any professional educator will confirm that learning styles differ from person to person. At the U of MN, anyone over the age of 62 can audit courses for free and earn credits for only $20 apiece. That’s a good deal, though it doesn’t appeal to me much. I don’t need credits at this late date. And although some professors can be inspiring, my eight years on campus back in the 70s convinced me that many of them aren’t. In such cases, I’d rather just read the book.

My plan, all along, had been to devote my $50 Amazon credit to buying books that I might otherwise have shied away from as too esoteric, too expensive, too dense. The books I chose were Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle, What’s Eating the Universe by Paul Davies, and Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeoisie Deal Enriched the World, by Deirdre McCloskey. 

That should keep me occupied for a while.     

 

Doors Open Minneapolis 2026

On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.

We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D. Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse, Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.

The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement, from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.

The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”

The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the North Loop, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Lindsay Brothers Building, the jazz club Berlin, Origami, the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.

It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling. 

“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”

“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator, to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the refrigerator.”

Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a foot-wide plexiglass tube.

A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.

Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.

Where's the sandwich?

Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.   

From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.

The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.

The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.

Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all that easy, however.  

Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10^th Street Bridge to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.

I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.

As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!” 

The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was Clay Squared, a custom tile manufacturer fitted with electric kilns and all sorts of tools for creating ceramic tiles. Down the hall was the studio/classroom of Layl McDill, a polymer clay artist who was hand-shaping beads and buttons for an upcoming class. We waxed nostalgic for a minute or two about the Play-Dough Fun Factory sets we both fiddled around with at kids. Layl went on to make a career out of the artform.

Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, set on the hillside of a tony neighborhood the Walker Art Center. Lots of nice landscapes and prints ... but a little out of our price range. The smallish exhibition rooms were crowded, but programming director Victoria Keith took the time to draw my attention to the subtle works of plein air master Joshua Cunningham.   

A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered through an extensive display of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to spot.

"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I got it on eBay."

We took the long way home, north on Lyndale, west on 36th Street past the tulips in Lakewood Cemetery, north along the shores of Bde Maka Ska, then a meandering route up the parkway past Cedar Lake. 

We were taking our time, relishing the wonderful afternoon, and also the richness of our fine urban world.

 

 

Why a Duck?

We drove south along the river to meet and greet the ducks migrating north and were welcomed with open arms. Well, that’s not entirely true. The ducks were too interested in one another to pay much attention to us. In fact, they tended to drift off any time we opened a car door or pulled the spotting scope out of the trunk.

The appeal of the spring migration has several sources, prominent among them being its mystery. Why do tundra swans depart in huge numbers from Chesapeake Bay and fly 4,000 miles to the arctic wastes of northern Canada? Hilary and I were walking the upper trail along the cliffs at Frontenac State Park when we first heard their joyous shouts and honks. (You can listen to it here.) We looked up and there they were, silvery bodies no bigger than grains of rice, flying in formation, hundreds of feet above us.

Five or six flocks passed as we wandered the park. The sky was clear; the air was cold and crisp. I could feel the ardor passing back and forth as these very large birds churned their way north. The excited, clamoring voices set the mood and also told the story.

Hilary and I were also in a quietly ecstatic frame of mind simply to be out in such a beautiful morning, The bluebirds were iridescent. Field sparrows called in the distance—at a more rapid, insistent pace than they do in summer heat. Several woodpeckers were hammering away in the woods along the path to the overlook, as loud as I’ve ever heard them, but hitting notes more than an octave apart.

The previous afternoon we’d driven around Lake Pepin, and in the town of Pepin itself we came upon a huge assembly of ducks milling around near the protection of the marina. They were mostly scaup and ring-necked ducks, with a few handsome canvasbacks and redheads here and there.

On our way out to the end of the pier, we met a short, energetic, casually dressed woman returning from the breakwater. She was excited. “Oh, there are so many!” she said. “But yesterday there were even more. What are they?”

“Mostly scaup,” I told her. “Hunters call them bluebills.”

“Oh, ruddy ducks!” she exclaimed.

 “Well, no,” I corrected her. “Ruddy ducks do have blue bills, but they aren’t called ‘bluebills’. And do you see that duck with a big white ring around its beak. It’s called a ring-necked duck. But you can’t really see the ring around its neck.”

“Strange,” she said. “But I’ve got a duck with a blue bill in a plastic bag back there on shore. An eagle was eating it. It’s dead. I’m going to bury it.”

We passed the woman again on our way to the opposite end of the marina, where the ducks were now congregating, and she showed us the bird in her bag—or what was left of it. Mostly guts.

When we reached our new viewing spot, I noticed that one of the eyepieces on my binoculars had fallen off. But where? We retraced our steps around the harbor, scanning the grass and rubble along the path. No luck.

Then our new friend appeared out of nowhere and said, “Did you lose an eye ring? I found one.” She showed us where it was. How nice.

A few hours later, at the wayside rest north of Lake City, we got a much better look at another raft of ducks. To identify them is one thing. To see them well enough to thrill at their beautiful is something else again. Once again, the redheads and the canvasbacks stole the show.

Before checking into our motel on the western outskirts of Red Wing, we took a little trip away from the river and up into the hills on the urban fringe, in search of Spring Creek Scientific and Natural Area. I’d printed out some details before we left home, and we had no difficulty finding it. We parked in the single slot provided and headed down a path through the woods. Ten minutes later it opened out onto wonderful views to the west of the valley created by Spring Creek eons ago as it cut its way down through the Rochester Plateau to the Mississippi. Three ospreys drifted by overhead—or the same osprey three times? Pasque flowers were blooming inconspicuously amid the dry grasses on the rock exposures.

We spent the next day puttering south, indulging ourselves with a series of side trips and detours. We discovered a coffeeshop in Lake City we'd never seen before. I asked  the young woman behind the counter how long it had been open. She thought for a moment and said, "About eleven years, I think." 

We took Highway 84 out of Kellogg and came upon a large group of blackish ducks frolicking in a vast puddle out in a farmer’s field. They were hard to identify in the midday glare but Hilary finally noticed the flash of green on the face that convinced us they were green-winged teal. Looking up that species in the bird book she read: “Common in very shallow marshes and flooded fields.”

A few miles further south, we heard three eastern meadowlarks during a short hike through the Weaver Dunes. And our duck quest received a further boost as we wound our way though the backwaters of Goose Island County Park, a few miles south of La Crosse: Gadwalls, shovelers, blue-winged teal, and a single widgeon, his white forehead glistening in the early morning sun. “The hunters call that one a ‘bald pate,’ “I would have told our new-found friend from Pepin. “But the forehead isn’t really bald.”

Pelicans are a common sight on the river this time of year, sometimes soaring together in graceful arcs, at other times bobbing far off shore in large, brilliantly white clusters. One evening a few years ago we watched four hundred of them—I counted—come gliding in at dusk in a long line to a back bay south of Goose Island to spend the night.

Our pelican sightings on this trip were more sporadic, but we did come upon a huge congregation on our last day, just north of Winona, at McNally Landing. The wind overhead was fierce, but they all seemed to be having a good time together!

 

Before the Blizzard

Waiting in front of the fire for the storm to hit,

drinking wine and nibbling a dish of nuts.

I’ve thrown a thick log on the blaze,

Unsplit. Now I’m wondering

which tree it came from. And when.

I saw the first flake two hours ago,

while we were walking down by the creek.

A loner. A scout. The avant garde.

Hooded mergansers were drifting in pairs;

(I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.)

 We met a couple on the trail

who’d seen a brown creeper!

(Did I hear crane croaking in the distance,

Moving north above the clouds?)

 I’m reading a biography of Li Po. It fits the mood.

Now Hilary’s in the kitchen mixing dough.

The pasta machine’s clamped firmly in place.

The pesto thaws as the world turns white again.

  

February Light

It’s the same every year: mid-February, late afternoon, and the sun is beaming into the kitchen, strong and low, rendering translucent whatever it is you’re busy chopping at the counter—onions, red bell peppers, butternut squash. This is something you need, no matter how hard you’ve been trying to appreciate the months of “cozy” winter darkness. Not the radiant energy itself, but the sensation, the effect on the eye, an effect that shoots directly to the heart. Suddenly you’re reminded of garden plants, of grilling on the deck, of listening to the barred owls hoot while lying in the woods in the dark in a tent. This is what the future holds.  

An exhilaration comes upon you in the midst of that sparkling brilliance. Everyone feels it. Couples are passing by, walking the dog, pushing the baby carriage. It isn’t just a promise of the future, it’s a visceral feeling, now.

And this year the effect has been compounded by the fact that snow is melting, streets are glistening, water is running along the gutters. It gives the city an enchanted quality due to the reflections, the urban sounds, and the balmy air, that would have been impossible to appreciate during the holiday season, not to mention the recent murderous federal “surge.”

The other afternoon I spent some time cutting back the forsythias and the grey-twigged dogwood. Years of experience have taught me that you can’t really kill these things--I've tried--so you might as well be bold. 

A few nights ago, we met some friends at a Venezuelan restaurant at 35^th and Nicollet in south Minneapolis. I’d made a reservation for 5 p.m., though to judge from the website, no one else had made a reservation at all. I was hoping the place wouldn’t be deserted. We were seated at a corner table. It was perfect, except for the loud-speaker affixed to the ceiling directly above our heads.

When the server came by, I said, “You know, we all have hearing aids. Do you think we could move to that table down at the other end?” Not exactly true, but she understood and got the okay from on high.

The food was good and the low table-lighting added to the ambiance. But what impressed me most was how animated the clientele was. And how young. These were people from the neighborhood. Well, what did I expect? I had to remind myself that forty years ago we lived five or six blocks away ourselves, and this was our neighborhood.

The other morning we headed down to the Cedar Avenue Bridge to catch the morning light. And that same afternoon we went on a drive down around the lakes. The light was low to the west, but there were fishermen standing around on the ice in the middle of Lake Harriet. The ice itself looked gray and scuffed and lustrous, with pools of water reflecting the blue sky here and there. The potholes in the road were also filled with water--a constant challenge. 

 February light doesn't merely hold the promise of spring. It's an intrinsic good. It's free, and it's all the more pleasant and surprising for the fact that, unlike the speck of a comet or the fleeting dance of the Northern Lights, it spreads itself everywhere, morning and evening, day after day.

Ice Shanty Village 2026

The official name is “Art Shanty Projects” but I prefer to call it the “Ice Shanty Village.” It’s been a yearly gathering since 2004, though the location has changed a few times: Medicine Lake, then White Bear Lake, and now Lake Harriet. I’m wondering if it might even have been held in Stillwater at some time in the distant past. A few years ago, when the weather wasn’t cooperating, they set up the shanties on land.   

Wherever it pops up, the village consists of whimsical and sometimes elaborate structures—ice houses, basically—that have been created to advance a civic value, a scientific concept, or a mode of personal expression, and spread out across the ice with no apparent order or logic. Some function as performance venues. One shanty invariably serves as a Digger store, offering second-hand hats, scarfs, sweaters, and gloves to anyone who’s ventured out on the lake without the proper wraps.

Though the themes of specific shanties are often serious, the entire operation is conceived in the childlike spirit of “let’s build a fort.” Bike races are held from time to time—they provide the bikes--and there’s a kite day, too. In previous years we’ve come upon aerobic exercise classes, lip-synching contests, flamenco mini-juergas, and scenes from La Boheme. Years later, I’m still ruing the day we arrived too late to see a performance of “Waiting for Godot” on skates.

It was cold yesterday—we’d decided not to go—but patches of blue were appearing in the sky here and there, and next week is forecast to be colder. We were reading in front of the fire when it suddenly seemed like the perfect time to take a break before the afternoon got too dark.

“Let’s drive down the parkway to the ice shanties,” I said. “Maybe we’ll snag a good parking lot near shore. And if we don’t, we can just call it an afternoon drive and come home.”

By the time we got to Lake Harriet the clouds had returned, but we got lucky with the parking. (In previous years we’ve chosen to park in the neighborhood nearby, usually too far away.) And it wasn’t really that cold. The bad news was that the ice on the lake had only a thin veneer of loose snow on top, and it was slippery. But there were plenty of people wandering around, reading the signs, entering the shanties to warm up, or chatting with the creators about their shacks.

The shanties drawing the largest crowds seemed to be highly interactive. One was a witch’s candy house, inside of which they were concocting some sort of potion. Outside, a second group had formed to recite a curse together—perhaps to rid the city of demonic ICE agents. (Good idea!)

A few shanties away, a three-piece rock band was pounding away aimlessly on some bass guitars, as if they were just learning how to play. But perhaps they were just expressing their frustration that their shanty was located in the far corner of the village, a little off the beaten path.

Inside the Yellow Submarine shanty, you could get a look at images taken at the bottom of Lake Harriet through fake portholes. Not far away, a large group of heavily clothed visitors was square-dancing to a three-piece string band enclosed in a plastic bubble.

promenade left with your left hand ...

The caller was standing on a small stage outside with a mic. “Second-hand left, dosey-doe, and round the corner.” She was good.

A biologist was giving a lecture in the beaver dam house, constructed mostly of thin reed window-blinds. it was too crowded to enter, but we spent some time admiring the colorful papier-mache fish dangling from strings outside, designed to evoke the beaver’s largely underwater habitat.

One shanty focused on the notion of inescapable trade-offs. In order to feed the fire, you had to pull a slab of firewood off the wall outside, thus increasing the draft inside. Another option would be to spend some time outside in the cold, sawing new planks for the walls … or the fire.   

Near the entrance to the village, we passed a booth consisting of a large array of small chalkboards, upon which passers-by had taken the time to complete somewhat personal statements. Most of the statements were phrased as double-negatives, and I had a hard time determining precisely what was being said. For example: “I don’t try to not need ….” One of the answers was “drugs.” A second, scrawled on the same slate, was “financial planning.” Another statement began: “I know I want to not try ….” One of the answers was “gourmet mac and cheese.” A second was “insomnia.”

From first to last, it was a cheery and heartening scene. And the fun continues next weekend. Details here.

 

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.

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

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’ll have no choice but to read at least one of them, anyway. (Though in a pinch, the discard shop at the Two Harbors library is usually full of pleasant surprises!)  

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 in 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 the number. 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 remark by 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.”

And while we're at it, 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 extra gravitational pull set one or two icebergs loose, and the Titanic sank!