Foot in the Door - At Last!

 I've been negotiating with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for quite some time, trying to get them to add some of my work to their collection. My curriculum vitae is fairly impressive, if I do say so myself, and I'm not sure why they've been dragging their feet.

- When I was five I grew a picture of a clown with a conical hat and sent it in to Highlights Magazine. Month after month, when the new issue arrived, I would turn immediately to the page with the crossword puzzle, the cryptogram, and the drawings, hoping to see my work in print at last. After a few months of such anticipation, invariably followed by ill-concealed disappointment, my mom, a talented painter in oils herself, felt it best to interject a bit of friendly criticism: "Well, it wasn't one of your better drawings."

- In third grade, a drawing of mine—a full-color rendering Crayola of a flying egret—was included in a exhibition held in the basement of a deconsecrated church in White Bear Lake, several miles from the town where I grew up. One dark night after supper my dad drove me around the lake to see it. Meh. For some reason I felt rather more embarrassed than proud to see my "work" exhibited in the midst of so many more vivid and arresting pieces.

- Yet I did somehow develop a reputation as an artist, at least to the extent that I was recruited, along with a friend of mine, to make the plaster statues for a high school production of Antigone. You can see the results here. (It's clear that at this stage in my career, I hadn't shaken Rodin's influence entirely.) 

- After performing dismally on a pre-entry math test at the University of Minnesota—our small-town high school didn't offer anything remotely resembling calculus—I dropped that subject and became a studio arts major. I must confess that I wasn't seriously considering art as a career, but you never know, and the designation made it much easier to enroll in art classes. Which I did. Tom Egerman was the most memorable of the professors I "studied" with. His work was fresh, loose, and often funny, and so was he.

After years spent in aesthetic oblivion, my career got a reboot at the art shows we used to hold after hours at the Bookmen, a warehouse where I worked for quite a few years. I organized one or two of the shows myself. There were lots of talented individuals on the staff, keeping body and soul together while they waited for their big break. We had everything on display from Gothic chainmail to farm aprons to installation art. At one of the shows I entered a couple of hand-made album covers.

When the warehouse operation folded, I applied for all sorts of jobs, in the classic bohemian style, but before long I became involved in editing and designing books. As I honed my "style" in a serious way, I began to contemplate the next big step: the state fair art show. Trouble was, this thought would occur to me only when I was AT the state fair art show. Always too late.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when I got an email from the MIA soliciting my work for its "Foot in the Door" show. I hope you realize I wasn't the ONLY one to receive such an invitation; anyone who sends in a piece will be accepted, as long as the artwork is one foot square. And you might complain that I didn't give my entry as much thought as I should have, considering how long I'd been waiting: I sent in the screen-saver from my computer monitor.  But what's done is done, and I've learned over the years that the first impulse is often the best one.

The MIA holds a foot-in-the-door event every five years, and I've been to most of them as an appreciative art-lover on the lookout for people I know, both in the crowd and up on the wall. The new digital event doesn't have the same buzz, but it does have its advantages. For one thing, you can see the art better, because each piece is right in front of you rather than ten feet above your head. Also, presuming you have a nice 30-inch screen like mine, the pieces have that wonderful digital luminescence that enhances many, if not all, works of art. On the other hand, the webpage loads only twenty or thirty pieces at a time, and when you ask it to load more, it just slips a few more rows onto the bottom of the array. And once you click on a work to examine it more closely, it seems to disappear from the array entirely.

All the same, if you want to add a little color and whimsy to your life, these vivid and arresting works are sure to please. 

Why not take a look?  Link  

 

Fall Birding

 

Fall birding is a different kettle of fish.

You don't expect to see much, because there won't be much there

and you've already seen a lot anyway.

A few flashy warblers? Let's face it: none.

I would like to have seen a golden eagle or a goshawk at Hawk Ridge.

It could happen. But no such luck.

We did see a pipit on the sidewalk in front of the Java Moose in

Grand Marias.  Equally good. Haven't seen one in ages.

Birding is an act of unexpected sensuous immediacy, but lurking in the underbrush

is the desire to see something new—for this year, at least.

The fox sparrows have been moving through the yard. They scrape vigorously

amid the leaves, and I know what they're thinking:

"This would be a lot easier if I had arms."

The distinctive call of the white-throated sparrow

is now a feeble, half-hearted whistle. But give him credit:

he's the only one still trying.

We drove down to the river this morning—the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge.

Lots of geese and coots, with trumpeter swans in the distance.

A young birder standing nearby helped us locate a few pintails

on the fringe of the cattails a hundred yards upriver.

Elegant birds.  It's been years since I saw one.

"There are some pied-billed grebes nearby," I said.

"How can you tell?" he said. "They all look like coots."

"Longer neck, lower in the water, squarish head, comically proud. Often alone.

And maybe you can see a little crook in the beak."

"Oh yeah. I see him."

We thanked each other for the tips.

The visit concluded with a smattering of sparrows

flitting here and there through the underbrush, and

a cluster of green-winged teal amid the mallards

in a backwater near the trail.

Then a stop at Patrick's Bakery for croissants and coffee

in a backwater east of Southdale.

Apartment buildings everywhere.

Geese flying overhead.   

North Shore Getaway

The North Shore is always an inviting prospect, though during the summer months it's often thick with tourists (like us). But Hilary's brother told us about a house in the woods above Caribou Lake, a few miles east of Lutsen, that he and his wife, Mary, had booked for five days in late July. We took a look at the website. Though it was a few notches above our normal price range, it looked very nice. The first available dates, however, were in mid-October. Not a bad thing, either. We booked it, telling ourselves we needed a few things to look forward to once the cold weather set in. 

The drive up was windy but uneventful. The lunch line at the Northern Waters Smokehaus on Lake Avenue in Duluth was too long, and we were content to eat some take-out ribs from Famous Dave's, right across the street, while watching the choppy water in the inner harbor from the comfort of a parking lot out on Park Point. 

Ten pine siskins feeding in a tree

The raptor traffic up on Hawk Ridge was negligible due to the high winds. No matter. We went for a walk along the waterfront in Two Harbors and came upon a huge flock of pine siskins, feeding furiously amid the cones high up in a clump of spruce trees. 

We pulled in to our "cabin" (actually a house) a few minutes after the 4 p.m. check-in time, and I almost immediately spotted two grouse feeding on berries or buds twenty feet up in a tree, off in the woods but directly in front of the window. We set up two plastic Adirondack chairs on the shore of the lake and watched the fading sunlight streak across the clouds on the far side of the bay. 

The stars that night were intense, riveting. We felt lucky to be seeing them, knowing that gray weather was likely to be moving in overnight. 

Morning light was gray. We got out into the day early, driving a few miles up the shore to Cascade State Park. One car in the parking lot. Hiking up along the west side of the river, we come upon the first falls almost immediately. Each North Shore river has its own distinctive character—Gooseberry, Temperance, Baptism, Little Marais—and for me the Cascade River possesses the most Asian feel, perhaps because the wooden bridges seem ancient and the overhanging cedars evoke the mood of Chinese scroll paintings. 

Cold air in the lungs, pine scent in the nostrils, we moved up the trail above the fast-moving water. We passed no one during our hike other than a single grouse who was in no hurry to remove himself from the path. 

We spent the rest of the day inside, playing cribbage, listening to the gentle rain on the metal eaves of the house, and reading. I found myself reviewing a paperback introduction to Greek thought, focusing my attention, for no reason that I can think of now, of Aristotle's concept of God as the unmoved mover. The author, Guthrie, does his best to make the idea sound attractive. 

The conception of God as unmoved—or unchanging— and pure form, unsatisfactory as it remains, for several reasons, to the religious mind, is not quite so cold and static as it appears at first sight. As pure actuality he is, though exempt from kinesis, eternally active with an activity which brings no fatigue but is forever enjoyable. His essential quality is life.

It follows that God's activity is to think his own universal perfection. Guthrie continues: 

Wrapped in eternal self-contemplation, he calls forth by his mere presence the latent powers of nature, which strive in their various ways to achieve form and carry out their proper activities, thus imitating in their own particular spheres the one pure form and eternally active being. God does not go out to the world, but the world cannot help going out to him. That is their relationship, summed up in another pregnant phrase: ‘He moves as the object of desire.’ 

Something to ponder as the fresh fish we bought in Duluth are frying in the pan. 

I was less taken with the views expressed by translator David Hinton in his new book, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. I own quite a few of Hinton's translations. They're good. Here he tries to take us deeper, reproducing the Chinese characters to illustrate how unlike Western sentence construction the Chinese original often is. This is interesting up to a point, but the result is that time and again Hinton suggests that the clear and vivid images we often find (and love) in Tang poetry actually refer to a deeper Taoist truth, which he describes in the introduction as follows:

The concepts of Absence and Presence are simply an approach to the fundamental nature of things. In the end, of course, they are the same: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is therefore always a manifestation of it. Or to state it more precisely, Absence and Presence are simply different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms. 

But consider these lines: 

Amid spring mountain, alone, I set out to find you. 

Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery deepens. 

Hinton devotes almost a page of analysis to the phrase "quiet mystery deepens." He tells us that the Chinese character actually means “quiet solitude.” and admits that such a reading would be "sufficient as a description of the empty-mind opened by the perceptual clarity of his walk." But Hinton wants to dig deeper.

Appearing often in recluse poetry,[the idiogram] infuses the surface meaning “quiet solitude” with rich philosophical depths, beginning with the sense of “dark /  secret / hidden / mystery”; and that leads finally to the term's deepest level, which animates the whole cosmological process of tzu-jan. Here it means forms, the ten thousand things, barely on the not-yet-emergent side of the origin-moment: just as they are about to emerge from the formless ground of Absence, or just after they vanish back into that ground." 

He continues on in this vein for thirteen lines, using phrases such as "all-encompassing generative present" and "occurrence burgeoning steadily forth." All of this totally obscures, for me at any rate, the experience being described—the sound of wood being chopped, which, when it ceases, leaves us hearing the silence, wondering if the chopping will recommence and then becoming aware of ourselves, out in the woods as time passes, focused on a sound we do not hear, on nothing. Or everything? Or the nothing of everything? 

The phrase "quiet mystery" is entirely adequate to the occasion; anything more ruins the effect. 

At one point in the afternoon we walked down to the lake for a breath of fresh air. It had started to snow, tiny white crystals, well-spaced, dry, and harmless, almost like laundry detergent shaken from a box. 

------- 

Hilary woke me up at 3 the next morning. "John. The stars are out!" We went out onto the deck in pajamas and slippers, crunching across a fine layer of snow. The big dipper was there above the bare branches of a clump of aspens. The Pleiades was now overhead and Cygnus was riding the Milky Way. Within half a minute I saw a fine shooting star streak down toward the horizon, leaving a glowing tail.

And then I chose a star, any star, and tried to convince myself that was real, a burning orb at an unfathomable distance; that the space that separated us was real. In my mind's eye, I even attempted to step to the side to "get some perspective" on that distance, as if I were looking across a landscape at a distant rise and trying to imagine how long it would take to walk there. And suddenly the universe takes on dimension, if only for a few seconds. The vast spaces in between. The perspective is far from accurate but it's awesome just the same. Vertiginous. That's the effect I was looking for, beyond the canopy of pinholes, beyond the badly shaped mythological figures, fatalistic and frightening, yet also invigorating: the depths of space, summoning a primitive, cleansing frisson. 

A few hours later we were up again and plotting the day's activities. The cabin lies only a few hundred yards from the Superior Hiking Trail, and we'd always presumed we'd head west along that trail to Agnes Lake and beyond during out visit. But we've done that hike before. It's basically a walk through deep woods, which would be shaded and perhaps muddy. So we decided to focus on two hikes near Grand Marais that were new to us, and more likely to include stretches of open country. 

On a frigid Thursday morning in October, the town of Grand Marias is quiet. Yet the line in front of the World's Most Famous Donut Shop was still too long for our liking. We parked nearby and walked back to the Java Moose for coffee, but it was closed. We watched an American pipit hop around on the sidewalk in front of the café for a few minutes. That was a treat! 

And the coffee at the local co-op was just fine. Whenever we shop there—or at any co-op—I feel I'm part of a sacred guild. Not one of the inner circle, perhaps. But we do have a number at the Wedge. The New Age magazines on sale next to the cash register look ridiculous. I wouldn't want to buy one. But I sort of believe in it. Love, peace, happiness.

Our first hike took us to the top of Sweetheart Bluff. The trailhead is located in the municipal campground, which I had always considered the antithesis of genuine North Woods experience. (But as we drove through the grounds I noticed they have a number of pretty nice tent sites near the lake.) The hike was easy and the views of Grand Marais Harbor from the broad slab of open rock at the top were fine. The vegetation was moist, the sun was coming in low, and the colors were rich.

Along the way we ran into a woman who was visiting her brother in the local hospital. "My kids say I'm hippying it," she said. "I'm sleeping in my van."

 

"It was sort of a cold night," I said vaguely. 

"Don't I know it. I was freezing," she said. "I'm going to buy another sleeping bag today." 

"Try the Ben Franklin," I said. "They have everything." 

But that hike was merely a prelude to our next venture—a two-mile hike through the woods to Pincushion Mountain. The trail starts at the cross-country skiing lot at the top of the rise behind Grand Marias. It's basically flat, and the numerous stretches of boardwalk along the route look to be almost brand-new. After an hour of easy walking you come to an enormous whale-like lump of rock erupting from the forest—many times larger than Carleton Peak, for example. After scrambling thirty feet up the face of the rock, you find yourself on a sunny, windy expanse dotted here and there with individual trees. The seaward view is magnificent, but the inland view is staggering.

On our drive home the next morning we made an impromptu stop at Caribou Creek, which may be the niftiest half-mile hike on the North Shore. The parking lot used to be treacherous, especially in winter. The driveway dropped precipitously from the highway, and when it was packed with snow there was no telling where you'd end up on the way down. Meanwhile, there was no place to alight on the way up before careering out onto the highway.

Someone has fixed all that, and the entry is now handsomely landscaped and perfectly level. The hike up to the gorge is easy, and the gorge itself is impressive. But what moved me most on this occasion was the grouse Hilary spotted on the way up--our seventh of the trip. It stood stock still as we watched it through binoculars. Photographs can hardly do justice to the richness of its varied markings. The back of the neck has an Escher-like checkerboard complexity that becomes more subtle and featherly lower down, while the flanks are marked with bold black stripes. As I looked at its array of features in the soft early-morning light, I said to myself, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

   

The Club

 At a time when it's become more difficult for us to make use of that "third space" in social life between work and home—the gym, the bar, the restaurant, the church—readers may find it worthwhile to spend some time at one of the most eminent gathering places of the eighteenth century. I'm referring to that social group known to its members as simply The Club. Unlike most gentleman's clubs in eighteenth-century London, the Club had neither a fancy name nor membership dues nor a building to call its own. It met every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern, and it's members had no other thought in mind than to dine, drink, and converse until midnight and beyond.

What makes it worthy of our attention is its roster, which included eminent men from several walks of life. Alongside the two men who founded the club—painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and man of letters Samuel Johnson—it included such luminaries as economist Adam Smith, playwright Richard Sheridan, historian Edward Gibbon, actor David Garrick, and statesman Edmund Burke. James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson has long since become a classic, was also a member, and he also figures prominently in the narrative.

The book is vastly informative and also a pleasure to read, though readers ought to be forewarned about what kind of a history lies in store. The Club is not an intellectual history of the type that evaluates the contributions made by the individuals involved to the advancement of their respective disciplines, on the order of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Nor is it a social history, describing the changing tastes, norms, and mores of the era as exemplified by these collegial but disparate men. And strange to say, very little of the book is taken up with reproducing or imaginatively reconstructing conversations that might have taken place at the Turk's Head.

What Damrisch gives us is a series of "brief lives," highlighting the moments when those lives intersect but also delving amply into the meat of each individual story, while making no claim to originality with respect to determining the significance of any of them. Yes, The Rivals and She Stoops to Conquer are funny plays. Yes, The Wealth of Nations is a landmark work of economic theory. Yes, The Decline and Fall had a profound effect on how people of the time thought about Christianity. But Damrosch seems more interested in the love lives, the dining room bon mots, and the rising (and falling) fortunes of his protagonists than in the abiding relevance of their masterworks.

The "star" around which the narrative unfolds is Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson

But that star is a binary star, because much of what we know about Johnson's private life and career comes to us by way of the exhaustive journals of his young and sycophantic friend  James Boswell. Nowadays no one but an academic is likely to be reading Johnson's picaresque moral tale Rasselas, or his Lives of the Poets, or even his once-famous dictionary. His fame depends largely on the portrait drawn of him by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. By all accounts Johnson was an argumentative but tender-hearted curmudgeon who lived in poverty, suffered from depression, was unhappily married to an opium addict, and spent as much time as he could away from home. He is well-known for such one-liners as "Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Or "Wine gives a man nothing ... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost." Or "Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel." Or "Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them very little."

Women do play a significant role in the narrative, prominent among them Hester Thrale, the wife of an enormously wealthy brewer. She invited Johnson and his friends to many lavish dinners and even seems to have acted as a sometime counselor to his nightmares and warden to his most deviant impulses. Also present at these dinners were bluestocking Lady Montague and novelist Fanny Burney, the daughter of pioneering musicologist Charles Burney. Drawing on the private journals of these and other members of the Thrale's social set, Damrosch paints a vivid portrait of a heady social environment in which wealth and social status went hand in hand, as did patronage and artistic reputation. Sir Joshua Reynolds made a fortune painting portraits of the rich; Boswell inherited a fortune; Burke borrowed heavily to maintain the lifestyle of a distinguished MP, and so on.    

Dr. Johnson was never well off himself.  Hence his famous remark: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Then again, he also remarked: "Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments."

With the passing years more individuals were elected to join the Club, few of them well-known today, and Johnson attended less often, but very little of the book actually focuses on the meetings themselves, and it hardly matters. Damrosch has fashioned a series of lively portraits, and he's included such outliers as the rabble-rouser John Wilkes, philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli, in the mix. The result is a free-flowing and affectionate essay full of witty remarks, telling anecdotes, and shrewd observations. Damrosch doesn't aim to be comprehensive or deep, but he knows how to weave a complicated tale artfully, and every page of this book is interesting.     

Biking Lanesboro - Again

We see our friends Don and Sherry maybe three or four times a year. Once in December for a whirlwind holiday evening of conversation, once in May for a bike trip ostensibly in celebration of our birthdays, all of which happen to fall within a stretch from late March to mid-May, some sort of summer event, and a grand occasion in the fall when we indulge in a two-day biking extravaganza, usually around World Series time.

It doesn't sound like much, but we've been doing it for 35 years. There is no way, at this late date, to pin down exactly how many years it's been, but it seems to me we've never missed a year, and as I think back on the places we've stayed overnight during those fall weekends, it begins to sound impressive. Our Wisconsin bivoucs have included Trempealeau, Alma, Fountain City, Wilton, Eau Claire, Menomonie, River Falls,  Chippewa Falls, New Post, Dresser, Bayfield, and Bailey's Harbor. Our Minnesota adventures have included overnights in Duluth, Little Falls, Nisswa, Sauk Center, Dundas, and Lanesboro.

Many of these settings are associated in my mind with a particular scene or event, which is perhaps the only reason I remember we were there.

In Trempealeau,  the wedding at sundown out on the lawn with young women in strapless gowns and near-freezing conditions, with the floodlights of the barges coming through the lock just beyond the "hotel"; the creaky springs on the narrow bed and the bathroom down the hall that made you feel like you were in an outtake from the TV show Maverick.

In Alma, the room where the window screens were ripped, and you could hear the claws of the hunting dogs scraping against the wooden floor out in the hall as the duck hunters retired after a long night at the bar just below.

At a budget motel in Wilton, the mid-point of the Sparta-Elroy Trail, where we were given the wrong  key and accidentally made the acquaintance of a young couple who were definitely done biking for the day.

On a subsequent visit to the same trail we stayed at a farm quite a ways out in the country and were charmed by the host couple, whose sweet daughter, that very evening, had been crowned the "cranberry queen" of the region.

 In Eau Claire, we agreed to meet up "downtown," having no idea how convoluted the layout of that town really is due to the meanders of the Chippewa River.

In River Falls, we stayed in the suburban home of a Christian couple who, when they heard I worked with books, showed me a rare volume from the eighteenth century that they'd inherited. I might have said, "I'll give you $100 for it, no questions asked." But instead, I said, "I think you should contact the James Ford Bell Library at the U of M. They specialize in that kind of thing."

It might seem that Wisconsin locations are over-represented here, until you factor in all the times we established our bourgeois base camp in that quaint and appealing Root River town of Lanesboro. 

 Why Lanesboro? Two branches of the Root River flow through it, it has two theaters, restaurants in every zone from a counter-service pizza place to a one-seating establishment where they serve crostini topped with flying fish roe, a small but top-flight local art gallery,  60 miles of bike trails, Amish farmers selling quilts and pies in the city park with their horses tethered nearby, a genuine livestock market every Friday, a first-rate wild bird store up in the hills just west of town, and a wide variety of affordable accommodations.

If memory serves, over the years we have spent a night at the Scanlon House B&B, two years at the Hilltop B&B, at least three years at the Cottage House Inn, and one year at the Stone Mill Inn.

Whatever the lodgings happen to be, the fall weekends in Lanesboro tend to take the same shape, year after year. We arrive at the Ladig residence at 9:30 sharp, just as Don is loading the bikes into their van. Fifteen minutes later we're entering the Dunn Brothers on Snelling and Grand to pick up some coffee and pastries. From there it's roughly a three hour drive down Highway 52 through Cannon Falls, Rochester, Chatfield, and Fountain, to our destination.

We usually ride upstream that afternoon and downstream the next morning. The trail follows the Root River much of the way, with a few narrow canyons and quite a few bridges. I often make a suggestion before we head out: why not eat our picnic here in town; then we won't have to pack everything onto our bikes. This notion is invariably dismissed out of hand, and wisely so. It's not such a big deal to pack up our fixings, and it's always a pleasure to stop at a picnic table forty-five minutes up the trail, unfurl the India-print tapestry  tablecloth from Depth of Field that we're been using since our very first trip on the Luce Line more than three decades ago, and set out all the goodies. We used to make an effort to coordinate the menu, but now we just bring stuff—cheeses, salami, crackers, horseradish, cookies—confident that we'll cover most of the bases and no one will starve.

For our recent excursion Sherry booked two rooms at Mrs.B's, Lanesboro's oldest hotel, established in 1875. The layout of the building—its narrow hall, steep staircase, and smallish rooms—give you the impression that it's always been a hotel or a boarding house. Hilary and I ate there once many years ago, and since that time I've associated the place with ornate wallpaper, potpourris in every room, baskets full of yarn in every corner, and vintage needlework on the wall.

The building has changed hands at least three times since then, and the current owner, Trish, a middle-aged woman with seemingly boundless energy, has modernized it thoroughly while retaining just the right amount of "vintage" charm—very comfortable but not over-stuffed. In response to the pandemic, Trish has lowered her rates and no longer serves breakfast, which is also a plus in my opinion.

Two Audubon prints, expertly framed, hung from the wall of our second-story room. The single window, deep-set in the thick limestone walls, looked south down Main Street across the bike trail toward a canoe-rental outfit, the local historical museum, and in the distance, the city park. Though small, it had a built-in corner fireplace that you could "ignite" with a remote.

To my mind, the great challenge of the weekend would lie in finding something to do after dinner. On a normal trip we might sit around playing cards, drinking booze of various types, and (occasionally) trying to annoy one another with our falsetto Neil Young imitations. Then again, we might have gotten tickets to Commonwealth Theater, where we've seen quite a few plays together over the years, including the British comedy/romance, Enchanted April, Henrik Ibsen's last play, When We the Dead Awaken, and most memorably Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The Covid virus rendered those indoor options unattractive or unavailable, but we devised perhaps an equally good one: sitting around a table on the patio behind the hotel thirty feet above the Root River with a half-full bottle of Grand Marnier that Sherry had brought along. 

During the evening we continued to unwind the strands of conversations about family, music, food, and books that we'd initiated out on the trail, and started a few new ones, while wandering only occasionally into the world of politics, where we're all in perfect agreement about the deficiencies and dangers of the current administration. 

There was no need to revive old standards like "Sugar Mountain" and "Cinnamon Girl": it was open-mike night  in the parking lot behind the High Court Pub midway down the alley, with a live back-up band! The only song I recognized was "Johnny B Goode," but the gathering was far enough away that it lent a pleasant background to our own conversation.

I remember a single starling squawking from a wire far about our heads in fading light, and, as darkness descended, a quarter-moon hung high in the sky to the south, with Jupiter and Saturn trailing behind it to the east. Just as we were getting up to go inside—yes, by that time the bottle was empty—a couple emerged from the darkness of the alley. It was Trish and her boyfriend, Greg, who had been playing in the band. We extended our compliments and they invited us to the house party taking place the next evening, giving us detailed instructions about how to get there. In the midst of their enthusiasm, I didn't have the heart to interrupt them with the news that we would be leaving town the next morning.

The next morning was sunny, cool, and crisp, and Hilary and I sat on two Adirondack chairs on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, watching the world go by. Several livestock trucks passed by, and also a delivery truck with an enormous advertisement painted on the side for Kinky Blue and Pink liqueurs. Ugh. The driver made an impressive U-turn in the middle of the block—not much traffic at that time of day—and disappeared from sight into the loading dock of the liquor store.

A few minutes later a fit-looking retiree with a carefully groomed stubble took the chair next to mine. We talked about campgrounds—he owns a vintage Scamp—and about the hotels in Duluth. He told us that at one time he was part-owner of a sailing vessel docked at Indian Point, a mile or two up the St. Louis River from the harbor. "We would take it once a year up to Isle Royale, Thunder Bay, and beyond," he said.

"I take it you're not referring to just a thirty-foot craft," I said.

"Oh, no," he replied. "It was 150 feet long." And he went on to describe the sails and the rigging in some detail, using terminology most of which I was not familiar with.

"On its final voyage, some of the owners decided to sail it to England," he said. "They sailed too close to Greenland, got trapped in pack ice, and had to be rescued by a Danish shrimp boat. Our boat sank."       

A few minutes later Don and Sherry appeared, well scrubbed and smiling, and we made our way on foot to the Home Sweet Home café at the other end of Main Street—that is to say, two blocks away. We ate an excellent breakfast al fresco and were soon on the trail again, chatting and pedaling. The morning was perfect for cycling, though the bike traffic was heavier than the previous afternoon. 

The leaves were just beginning to turn, showing quite a bit of yellow but few reds beyond the low-lying tangles of sumac and Virginia creeper. We passed a gravel pit with some impressive piles of sand, spotted a family sunbathing on the far side of the river, and also noticed an abandoned railroad bridge beyond a cornfield that looked worthy of further investigation on some future occasion.

Two hours and twenty miles later, we were back in town, saying our goodbyes and hoisting our bikes onto our vehicles. An ice cream cone before departure? No. The line was too long.     

 

Fall Equinox Birdbath

It was one of those almost somnambulant fall days. A few days before the equinox, in fact.

Friends were coming over for an afternoon visit on the deck. Sad to say, such events will soon be less frequent, shorter, harder to arrange. One couple we know  has purchased outdoor propane heaters to keep their social alive through the coming season. We've done a little research along those lines ourselves.

I had made an early morning run to Trader Joe's, taking advantage of their Sunday morning "old folks" hour. I was impressed to discover that they had the Musak tuned to the "old folks" station, too. I was greeted at the door by a song from the seminal Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album Deja Vu. "Carry On," I think. Then it was "Green Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf.

I was home by 8:30 with two bags full of produce: peppers for the salsa, fruit that would be easy to serve without touching, blue corn chips full of mystical desert power. The cashier was—by Trader Joe's standards—unusually reserved. He got out two brown bags immediately, making it clear he wanted to bag the items himself, and stayed hunched behind the plexiglass shield the whole time. I don't blame him.  While I waited for him to finish the job I studied the huge map of Lake Minnetonka on the far wall, trying to memorize the municipalities and bays—Lower Lake, Chubbs Bay, Tonka Bay, Minnetrista, Deephaven, Shorewood—while I grooved to "Who'll Stop the Rain."

By noon Hilary had cleaned the bathroom, swept the deck, and chopped the various ingredients for the salsa.  I had watered the compost pile and turned the leaves with a pitchfork; we're going to need more room in there soon. I also got out a ladder from the garage and repaired two holes in the gutter—created by me with an ice pick years ago—using duct tape and silicon sealer. I've done it several times before. Nothing seems to work for long.

While I was out in the garden I stopped to admire the white turtleheads that, modest though they may be, are currently its chief glory. They look feeble all summer, crowded out by the expansive bleeding hearts. Now the bleeding-hearts are mostly dead, and they shine above the violets and hostas that have been eaten down dramatically by the rabbits.

Most gardeners would not be impressed.

I was relaxing with a game or two of free cell on the computer when I heard a call from the other room: "John, there's a redstart in the birdbath!" A few warblers pass through the woods behind our house every fall, but they rarely come anywhere near the deck.

It was a female, less dramatic but more attractive than the male. She had an unusual way of dealing with the water in the bath. She would fly over it, moving from one lip of the basin to the other, dipping in very slightly or not at all. It was hard to tell.

Eventually she took a plunge directly into the pool. She didn't splash much, but she lingered at various points around the birdbath for at least five minutes.

This has been one of the great discoveries of this very odd summer: how much more popular a bird bath is when located on the deck rather than out in the yard. I suppose the protection provided by the nearby shrubs far outweighs the longer sightlines available out in the yard, where a cooper's hawk can swoop in out of nowhere.

We made this discovery entirely by accident when we brought the birdbath up from the basement last spring. I don't remember why we set it on the deck. Maybe we hadn't uncovered the garden yet. In any case, we put some water in it and the birds seemed to like it. Four or five cardinals sometimes jostle for position, and when a blue jay or a robin hops in to rustle his or her wings, it's quite a show.

Labor Day Fire

 Labor Day, a drizzly afternoon. First fire of the season in the fireplace. A spot of wine in the glass.

A fire sometimes doesn't roar. It purrs. It murmurs like a brook, irregular but always keeping within the same range, punctuated by an occasional sharp report, as a reminder that it's not something to be trifled with.

As the fire muttered and stuttered I sat on the couch thumbing diligently through the latest L.L. Bean catalog. I wouldn't normally do such a thing, but a $10 coupon was burning a hole in my pocket. Flannel shirts, bathrobes, sheepskin slippers, sturdy duffle bags, faux Amish quilts. Nothing jumped out at me. "So much more than just a sweatshirt," the copy reads. Really? How so?

This morning we left the house at 7:45, headed for Sherburne National Wildlife Reserve, an hour away to the northwest. I didn't expect to see much in the way of bird life, though the open fields there are peppered with sandhill cranes in family groups, and there are quite a few pelicans and trumpeter swans milling around in the bigger sloughs.

Among my favorite sightings was a female harrier—rich dark brown with a white rump patch—moving low across a field. Also a red-breasted nuthatch, which I associate with wintertime. We saw one exquisite pied-billed grebe, fresh and fuzzy, comical and proud.

But my favorite bird sighting was a flock of blue-winged teal dashing across the sky above a pond. This duck nests more commonly in Minnesota than any other, I think, but I rarely get a chance to see a whole flock, their pale blue wing-panels flashing.

The most arresting sight on the morning, however, was a grassy field strewn with pale yellow goldenrod and pale purple asters, with a border of poison ivy—already turning red—in the foreground. There were patches of wild sage, pale green, here and there, too. The field was a delight to the eye, mesmerizing in a quiet way. It has texture, color, balance, but no discernible pattern. Nature at its best.

There are many such fields at Sherburne. Some have asters but no goldenrod. Others are dominated by baby bluestem or sunflowers. And there are also a few open woods full of gnarly oaks, widely spaced.

Most of the summer birds are gone, or lying low, but we spent two hours traversing the Six-Mile Drive, wondering why some asters are big while others are small, and probing the muddy reeds with our binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of an elusive wren or rail.

The drive home placed us in the midst of monstrous pickup trucks and families returning down Highway 169 from Labor Day weekend at the lake, but little matter. The fire is burning here in the fireplace, and I smell the sweet aroma of a French tomato pie with basil and gruyere cheese that Hilary just pulled out of the oven.