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. 

   

California Wedding

In the past we’ve sometimes carved out a week in California in early April, when Minnesota is struggling to emerge from hibernation, while the Pacific Coast is awash in fragrant air and riant with color. We amuse ourselves walking along a beach or across the grassy headlands above the beach, or into the redwood canyons extending up through the hills.

But June is a fine month to be here in Minnesota.

We went to California recently because our niece was getting married. And a glorious wedding it was! It was held at an organic farm on the Russian River a few miles outside Healdsburg, with a barbeque the night before at a park nearby in the shade of a grove of redwoods.

The happy couple met while working in an olive grove run by monks up in the hills somewhere north of San Francisco. Scott later paid Emily a few visits when she worked at the farm where the wedding was being held. They found they had a lot in common. And the rest is history.

 Emily arrived at the late-afternoon riverbank ceremony via the Russian River, in a canoe. Her dad was in the stern. Her mother, Mary, officiated at the service, and her sister, Nora, read a poem. Music for the event was provided by Scott’s father, Phil, an accomplished guitarist.

Emily, Scott, and Sarah

It was a golden afternoon.

After the ceremony, Scott tried to get me to eat an oyster. "I haven't eaten one of those since the spring of 1978," I said. "It didn't go down well." 

"Well, here's your chance to get the hang of it," he replied with a grin.

Emily and Scott have a lot of nice friends. I would be tempted to use the word “attractive,” though the fact is that they were simply young, fresh, animated, and casually well dressed. I never talked to any of them. They were busy talking to one another, and I’m pretty sure Hilary and I were the oldest people there.

Emily’s dad, Jeff, was beaming throughout the afternoon. Love, joy, and relief were jockeying for position on his smiling face. Things were going well.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of relatives for Hilary and me to catch up with, or get to know. I chatted with Scott’s father at some length about the guitars of Grenada and the wonder of synthetic fingernails. I expressed my enthusiasm for a few flamenco guitarists—Paco, Tomatito, Chicuelo, Vicente Amigo—and offered to burn him a sampler CD.  I chatted with Mary’s nephew John about all the family (and historical) lore that’s being lost while the youth of today flip through their phones. I chatted with my niece Sarah, who lives in Portland, about her chickens. Brother-in-law Paul described a few episodes in his family’s free-wheeling seat-of-the-pants road trip down the coast from Oregon. And I chatted with my sister-in-law Mary’s sister-in-law Gretchen about the urban attractions of St. Louis, where she lives.

The food was spectacular and tasty. It arrived in leisurely stages, which tended to encourage over-eating. One never knew what was coming next. If anything.

The wines were also far better than average. I was especially taken by the GMS blend made at the farm, to which they’ve given the proprietary name Palmeri.   

And to top it off, the speeches given by friends and family members after the meal were affectionate and also informative. It’s a part of a wedding--one of many--that’s difficult to relate effectively after the fact.

 You really had to be there.

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!

 

My Zen Retreat

Hilary is down in Costa Rica hunting up some rare birds with a few friends, and I’m making use of the free time to participate in my own private retreat.

As luck would have it, my old friend Dave came to town for a family wedding during my week of solitude, and I took him out to lunch at a restaurant in a strip-mall on Highway 55. 

We reminisced about old times a little—high school and college days. We ranted for a few minutes about our current Bloviator in Chief, chatted with our young waitress about her aspirations to become a dental hygienist, and made a stop at the Goodwill out in Minnetonka.

Due to the snow in the ground, I was denied the pleasure of weeding the moss garden in the back yard—the traditional monastery task--so I chose an equally tedious and fulfilling one: spackling over an unsightly stain on the kitchen ceiling that I have been ignoring for quite some time.

The first morning I applied some spackle from a half-empty container I found in the basement. The next morning I sanded it down and applied some more. I could see I wasn’t making much progress, and on the third day I stopped at the hardware store to get some coarser sandpaper. 

While I was downstairs fetching the spackle that first day, it occurred to me that I ought to tidy up the basement and dispose of some useless junk. Such a task takes time; every item needs to be evaluated. But I had time. In the end, I kept all the memorabilia I’d saved from high school; it wasn’t much. I tossed all the term papers I wrote in college but kept the pay stub from the first article I wrote for City Pages—an unsolicited review of a Pat Metheny concert. I threw out several boxes of travel brochures from Europe, Nebraska, New Mexico, and other places, most of them dating to the 1980s and 90s. I also threw out most of the maps we’d collected of various parts of the BWCAW, some of which were old enough to be printed on that old-fashioned crinkly waterproof paper. Jigsaw puzzles? Out. An old Jeopardy game? Out. Anything smelling of mildew? Out.

During my retreat I kept to simple meals. To maintain the Asian vibe I made my way through a big bag of yellow curry Thai potato chips from Trader Joe’s, accompanied by kale coleslaw from a bag. Pickled herring and Jarlsberg cheese on Wasabröt added a Scandinavian touch.

As mid-afternoon rolled around, I was usually ready for a stroll along one of our favorite routes. We call it “the pines,” because it takes us past a grove of pines halfway along the parkway—very Zen-like.

You might imagine that in the midst of this toil I would take a break to read a few lines from a classic like The Seven Pillars of Zen or Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, but I’m beyond all that. You know what they say: “Those who teach don’t know, and those who know don’t teach.”

(I don’t know precisely who said that, but you’ve got to admit, it’s more than a little redundant.)

Yet I didn’t entirely ignore that interior stuff. In fact, I came up with a small library of thought-provoking material that I was confident would drive me to new depths of enlightenment.

A few examples:

1) Julien Marias: Philosophy as Dramatic Theory:      

“Since philosophy is something that ‘has to be done,’ this means that it is not made or finished, but is something “to be made,” a chore or a task, which is to say that we have to make ‘another’ philosophy, different from those that have preceded us.”

2) Withold Gombowitz: Diary

“Knowledge, what ever it is worth, from the most precise mathematics to the darkest suggestions of art, is not to calm the soul but to create a state of vibration and tension in it.”

3) Antonio Machado: Juan de Mairena

“To think is to meander from highway to byway, and from byway into alleyway, till we come to a dead end. Stopped dead in our alley, we think what a feat it would be to get out. That is when we look for the gate to the meadows beyond.”

4) Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

“Morning, spring, hope—they are all connected in music by the same melodic intention; they are connected in our souls by the same memory with the same intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I recognize that what I have to hope is for this day to end, as all days do. Reason can also see the dawn.”

What? Come again?

After a day or two, such ruminations were beginning to get me down, and one evening I turned on the TV to watch a documentary about Gobekli Tepe, an archeological site in Turkey that’s upending our understanding of the development of agriculture, and cities. As usual with such shows, an hour of footage was devoted to about ten minutes of information, but the scenes of stone walls and rubble, vast rolling hills, and youthful archeologists with heavy German accents scratching at chunks of rock with tiny brushes, somehow held my interest. I also enjoyed those electronically generated SHOCK chords that resounded as each new tidbit of speculation was unveiled.

Eager to learn more, I hunted down my copy of The Dawn of Everything, picking up the argument where I’d dropped it months or even years ago. Among other nuggets of information I came upon, the iconoclastic authors politely report that the so-called “agricultural revolution” took place over a span of about three thousand years, which is roughly equivalent to the interval separating us from the Trojan War.

That “revolution” was carried out almost exclusively by women, and it took place largely on mudflats in the section of the Fertile Crescent south of the Tarsus Mountains, the precise locations changing as rainfall and water levels shifted from year to year. The authors suggest it would be more accurate to refer to these pursuits as “gardening” rather than “agriculture.” It was just one activity among many contributing to the complex Neolithic economy.

I thought about that golden era the next day as I concocted my black bean/canned corn/avocado salad, laced with olive oil, salt, and cayenne.

Another means of escape from ponderous thinking lay in games. The morning Wordle was a must, of course, but I also spent a little too much time playing backgammon, using a program I uploaded years ago from a $10 CD I bought at Office Max. Backgammon comes from India, as you probably know. So does Buddhism. I think.

The weekend arrived with cold, leaden skies, and it was with great pleasure that I broke my schedule of meditations to host a game of dominoes with two old friends. (Dominoes can be traced back to twelfth-century China, by the way.) For the special occasion we made short work of a Papa Murphy’s pizza and a bottle of Gigondas, followed by the better part of a tasty Oregon Pinot Noir.

The sunny skies returned the next morning. In fact, the air was so sharp and clear that by 8:15 I was out of the house and on my way up the hill along the “oak” route, which veers north at the parkway and rises to the road following a narrow stretch of deciduous woods. At that point you cross the road and return south along the tree-lined bike path toward the “pines,” with a row of handsome prewar two-story houses lined up in the distance, just across a second sward of parkway grass. It’s a two-mile route, and it occurred to me that it had never looked better. I was reminded that before it became the name of a deity, the word Zeus referred simply to a quality—brilliance.  

Another remarkable aspect of my retreat was the nightlife. A few days in, I was awakened by the hoot of a barred owl, loud and close. It was dark—just before dawn—but as I looked out the bedroom window, I could see her on a branch maybe 25 feet away. Then the male flew in and landed on the same branch. I know it was a male because a clumsy, fluttering, airborne mating event ensued almost immediately. Five seconds later, the male was gone.

A few nights later the couple was back, this time delivering raucous shouts and trills and monkey laughs. It was 2:32 in the morning, and they seemed to be having a blast.

As my immersive meditative journey grew more intense, I finally came up for air, finding a few hours of relief in a not-entirely-relaxing film called One Battle After Another.

By this time the remains of the black bean salad in the fridge were getting soggy—especially the avocado. I didn’t want to eat them, but I didn’t have the heart to toss them. So with a continuing emphasis on frugality, I took a small Tupperware container of old rice from the fridge and a half-empty bag of frozen “roasting vegetables” from the freezer. I spread the vegies out on a roasting pan and slid the mélange into the oven. When they were done roasting, I mixed them with the rice, added one tablespoon of fish sauce, one tablespoon or hoisin sauce, and a few splashes of siracha, and heated the concoction in the microwave.

It didn’t taste quite like anything I’d ever eaten before. I’m not saying it was bad ...

Hilary and I talked on the phone every night. She told me tales of fording mountain streams to reach jungle resorts, wonderful lunches in toney botanical gardens, hot ocean beaches and cool swimming pools, rare birds perched on almost every branch, and, more important than anything else, simply having fun with her friends.

She’ll be flying home tonight.

This morning I took another walk up to "the oaks." Most of the snow has melted along the parkway, and the air now smells earthier. We're on the cusp of a lustrous new season.

In my lackadaisical perusal of The Dawn of Everything, I’ve gotten only as far as the rise of Uruk, which flourished from roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE. But that will have to wait. I’ve got some tidying up to do. And a trip to Trader Joe’s is definitely in the cards. For flowers, of course. The flight doesn't arrive until 8:45. I'm wondering what kind of late-evening snacks would be appropriate?  

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!

 

Halcyon Fall Days

It’s become a struggle, almost, trying to make the most of the seemingly endless string of beautiful fall days we’ve been having. There have been excursions to the Landscape Arboretum, the river banks of downtown St. Paul and Mounds Park, Bud’s Landing at Spring Lake Regional Park, and even an overnight down in Forestville. The coup de grâce was a leisurely three-day trip under clear blue skies up to Itasca State Park.

We were in no great hurry to arrive at the park, and took a few secondary roads east of Rice to visit the Crane Meadows Wildlife Refuge. We spent a half-hour strolling along the Platte River through an oak savannah and were rewarded with a sighting of a bittern in the reeds on the opposite bank. They’re not exactly rare, but bitterns are hard to spot; I hadn’t seen one in five years. I also caught sight of a small bird moving through the underbrush and managed to get a good look with my binoculars. “I think that’s a Harris sparrow!” I all but exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Hilary replied. She’d pulled out her phone and identified the short, wheezy call on her Merlin app.

Our next stop, a half-hour up the highway, was Morey’s Fish House in Motley. We’re fond of their herring in horseradish sauce, and also picked up two nice walleye fillets for dinner, along with a pint of seaweed salad. “We eat quite a bit of that in California,” I told the woman behind the counter, by way of idle conversation.

“Do you harvest it yourself?” she replied, with a straight face.

That night we cooked up a fish dinner at our cabin rental, and later took a walk in the dark down to the Douglas Lodge parking lot in hopes of seeing a few shooting stars. Zilch. The Draconid meteor shower is almost invariably disappointing, and this year was no exception.

The next morning we hiked an unnamed two-rut road just west of the north entrance in cool fresh air and glancing sunlight, flushing a grouse and a pileated woodpecker, and noting the many young pines that had been capped with slips of white paper to protect them from browsing deer. 

On the Bohall Trail, where many of the pines are more than 200 years, the seedlings and saplings had also been capped. 

The dogwood shrubs had lost most of their leaves and the trails we took seemed pleasantly open. We came upon bittersweet, highbush cranberries, and even some grapes. In the six miles we walked we met up with only a single group of hikers.

Late in the afternoon, a sheet of gray clouds arrived, and we decided to take a short trip up to LaSalle Recreation Area, a few miles north of the park. We took the trail from the picnic area down through the woods to the dock and looked out on the deepest lake in Minnesota--225 feet, so they say. We circled down a few gravel roads on the return trip, passing prosperous cattle ranches and hardscrabble homesteads that looked like something out of a Knut Hamsun novel, startling a few magpies in the process. No corn in sight. Hurray!

I had brought up a fine selection of reading materials: Death by Black Hole (Neil deGrasse Tyson); The Works and Days (Hesiod); The Limits of the Known (David Roberts); Silk Dragon II (Chinese poems translated by Arthur Sze); and Last Night’s Fun (Ciaran Carson). A book for every mood.

Did I do any reading? Nothing to speak of.

We left the next morning, but not before hiking the Roberts Trail, where the air was crisp and the ground moss was frosty. Or simply dead. Not a loon in sight on the lake.

   

Ratatouille in Half an Hour

 

Yes, it’s in the oven, and I’ve got a strict deadline.

Why ratatouille? Because we were walking the aisles at Trader Joe’s this morning, gathering ingredients for our upcoming pesto-making day, and I spotted some bulbous purple eggplants sitting in a bushel-basket alongside a produce gondola otherwise cluttered with onions and potatoes.

“We’ve got to make ratatouille at least once this summer,” I said.

“I’m not that keen on it… but why not?” Hilary said graciously.

So after she left for her knitting group, I got to work.

I made an error immediately, choosing a Brazilian album to listen to as I minced the garlic. That wasn’t right. I switched to a CD of music for wind instruments by Darius Milhaud.

This might seem an even more inappropriate choice. Milhaud’s music tends to be buoyant, open, casual, and spring-like, and these selections are no exception. The frequent harmonic clashes are meant to be rambunctious and exuberant rather than distressing in the serial Germanic style. If memory serves, Milhaud even did the soundtrack for Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), one of Jean Renoir’s more frothy and frivolous films.  

Yet we’re just now entering into that luscious season of late summer, when the air gets cooler, darkness comes earlier, there’s often dew on the ground in the morning, and a touch of welcome melancholy begins to seep into our thoughts.

On the other hand, Milhaud hailed from Aix en Provence. We went to a wonderful concert at the Milhaud Institute there in 1989. Didn’t understand a word anyone said—many of the songs were performed in Russian, in fact—but the vibe was more than friendly. Ah, those were the days.

And ratatouille is a Provençal dish, after all, and eggplant is just now coming into season. The first piece on the CD is “La Cheminée du Roi René.” The "chimney" of Good King René of Provence, that is. For whatever reason, the pairing was perfect.

Years ago I made a “home cookbook” containing recipes we make often. I do a reprint maybe once a year, adding new things and sometimes taking things out that we no longer make. That ratatouille recipe has been hanging by a thread for a few years, but now I’m glad we kept it. The dish turned out well.

One bittersweet element signaling the approach of fall is the growing irascibility of our backyard hummingbirds. A female or a juvenile will arrive and alight on the feeder, only to be chased off immediately by a ruby-throated male, who doesn’t linger but disappears into the woods himself. What’s the point of that?

As we were out on the deck enjoying our dinner, I got up for a minute and stepped over to the edge to survey the back yard. Just then, a hummingbird flew right up to my face, hovering no more than a foot away. He moved to the left, then to the right, always facing me, as if he (or she) wanted to get a good look at this strange creature from every angle.

They say hummingbirds can be curious. I didn’t get a good look at it because I was reluctant to open my eyes fully so close to such a fast-moving and potentially aggressive creature, but I didn't flinch, either, and the sound of beating wings (fifty times per second) was loud.

As it flew off into the woods, I felt strangely blessed.