Polka Chicks

 Some folk ensembles are so steeped in tradition that their performances become a tiresome ethnographic slog. Other groups, in their eagerness to embrace a “fusion” of one kind or another, leave behind the elements—often it’s the odd and intricate rhythms—that made the music interesting in the first place. 

The Polka Chicks, in their sparkling debut performance at the Cedar Cultural Center, charted a middle course, turbo-charging their fiddle-and-accordion material with lightning technique while suffusing it with a sense of fun that was further enhanced by sweet vocal harmonies and droll, self-depreciating on-stage patter.

I first heard the duo a few years ago at the Nisswa-Stämman and was immediately taken by their approach. Their talent and technique put many of the other festival performers in the shade, yet their happy-go-lucky melancholy on stage was perhaps more appealing yet. It seemed as if the duo (Kukka Lehto on the fiddle and Teija Niku on the accordion) were confidently engaged in an unending struggle to overcome their stage fright—and more broadly speaking, to establish their place in the world of music as two young female performers who had the talent, but also the Moxie, to thrive in that often unforgiving environment. Their music was sprightly and lovely and strange (and they were, too), but I began to wonder if I was in the presence of that famous and elusive Finnish quality of sisu.

Back when the Finns were battling the Russians during WWII, Time magazine defined sisu as “a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity, of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win.” I think, though I know nothing of the Finnish language, that sisu also entails a degree of devil-may-care acceptance—a warm embrace of the wreck of human life, often accompanied by the warmth of aquavit. I would put sisu on the same spice rack as the Spanish duende, the French ennui, and the Italian sprezzatura, in the same way that cumin, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and thyme sit side by side on the shelf, though they have nothing to do with one another.

In any case, the Polka Chicks are far more charming than World War II. Yet there’s a hard-edged sadness to their music, too. They’ve been performing together since 2004. Among the traditional lyrics they chose to offer us are these:

When I was just a child,

My mother used to foretell, “A rambler and boys’ cheater you will be.”

I’ve shown her I need no one—my heart is buried in the forest,

and I’m happy as long as I’ve got my fiddle and a drop of liquor.

The evening was made more interesting by the addition of the talented local duo Kaivama. Fiddler Sara Pajunen told the audience, “I came from classical; Jonathan came from rock.” And that pretty much tells the story. The duo possesses almost none of the rooted Old World feeling of the Polka Chicks. In particular, Rundman’s exaggerated prancing and facial grimaces on guitar seem less suited to a Finnish folk performance than to a display of American air-guitar.

But that’s merely cosmetic. Song by song, Kaivama’s set was engaging. The opening ballad was haunting, and other tunes, if they seemed more “by-the-note,” were nevertheless entirely pleasant to soak up.

All the same, I was happy when the Polka Chicks returned for a second act.

“I feel stronger,” Kukka had said, seemingly ad lib, when Kaivama first joined them on stage. Perhaps she meant, “I feel LOUDER.” The expanded sound gave “legs” to the evening, though I’m sure many in the audience left the Cedar enthralled by the peculiarly haunting and energetic sound of the Polka Chicks themselves.

And By the Way, they’ll be performing next week at the Swedish Institute’s Midsommar Fest.       

The Smokies Themselves

Since the Smoky Mountains drifted in from Africa 250 million years ago, erosion has taken its toll. The peaks look cool, shrouded in mist, receding layer after layer toward the horizon, but they don’t look very tall.

That they’re still rugged can be affirmed by the fact that loggers have been kept at bay to some extent. The guidebooks tell us that “only” 20 percent of the Smokey’s old grown timber remains. It sounds like a remarkable preservation rate to me, considering how long folks have been living in the vicinity. (Less than one percent of Minnesota’s old growth is still standing.)

For every tourist who makes the trek to the Grand Canyon, two visit the Smokies. They’re a lot closer and probably more manageable for many, though they’re a lot more difficult to encompass in a glance—and also, I think, less “grand.”

Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg have become legendary in their sprawling tackiness. Smog and acid rain run rampant. And the crowds are so thick in the height of the summer and fall seasons, you can walk the eight-mile Cades Cove loop faster than you can drive it.

In April, however, the air is clear and crowds aren’t much of a problem. We booked a mountain cabin for the night by phone while driving east from Nashville in a steady drizzle, downloaded the entry code from a McDonald’s parking lot an hour later down the freeway, and were comfortably ensconced on a rustic porch outside of Townsend, Tennessee, looking out over the mountains, well before dinner-time.

The Smokies have been inhabited by Anglos since before the Revolutionary War, and viewing them from a rocking chair seemed entirely fitting. When the full moon rose, big and orange, it appeared to be coming from just the other side of the hill.

The morning broke clear and bright, and before long we were winding our way up Laurel Creek toward Cades Cove. The Cove is really a vast, open valley surrounded by hills and dotted with log and frame structures from the nineteenth century. Wild turkeys and diminutive deer abound, and three or four photographers with tripods were wandering around out in the valley looking for the perfect angle to catch the fast-vanishing mist—or for a bear sleeping in a tree.

The cabins along the one-way driving tour are lovely—rugged yet newly chinked. The first one we visited was built in 1810, though its antique atmosphere was undermined to some degree by the park service worker with a leaf blower who was cleaning up the site.

A half-mile down the road we entered a white frame Baptist church to find a woman banging out a hymn on an out-of-tune piano near the altar. She was just a tourist passing through, I’m sure, but it added a nice touch to the hallowed atmosphere of the long-since-deconsecrated building. We wandered the graveyard on the hill above the church and followed a path a little further up into the hills.

At the far end of the Cove an ensemble of buildings are clustered around a flour mill at the edge of a stream. It can still grind corn to this day, and there’s a sorghum threshing tub sitting under a tree out in the yard, too. A sturdy cantilevered barn and a couple of frame houses complete the scene.

To tell you the truth, I find it difficult generating enthusiasm for such pioneer stuff.  Though the construction techniques are interesting, things haven’t really changed that much in two hundred years. Four walls and a roof. A chimney, some windows….. For me, the vegetation in the Cove, moist and fresh after the rains of the previous day, was the star attraction. The dogwoods were in bloom; streams were rushing down from the hillsides; rhododendrons grew wild to fifteen feet in height; the pine forests were fragrant and  rich with moss; dwarf iris, phlox, and other less familiar wildflowers were blooming underfoot; and birds twittered and darted through the scrub willows at the forest margins.

At one point along the loop we stopped to have a picnic before retracing our route along the northern edge of the park, continuing on to the Elkhorn region, where we spent the afternoon touring some early-twentieth-century vacation cabins and resort buildings, most of them abandoned, many of them overgrown and falling into disrepair.

But how to you really get to know the Smokies? The answer we arrived at, back on our comfortable porch looking out across the hills (making the most of our “pioneer” sojourn), was a simple one—on foot. The hot tub, too, was nice. But the answer remained the same—on foot.

Yes, but hiking takes time. And we knew that a serious sheet of bad weather was moving northeast toward us from the Gulf. In the single day of sunshine remaining, we did what many first-time visitors to the Smokies do—we took the short, 1.5-mile hike to Laurel Falls and then drove up to Clingman’s Dome. 

Nice, nice, nice. All the way around, nice. Hiking trail in shadow, morning cold, bright sun on the opposite hillside stretching off into the distance. A scarlet tanager in the treetops, but down the face of the mountain, putting it not much above eye level.

I pointed it out to a volunteer who was picking up trash in the underbrush and Hilary offered him her binoculars. After taking a brief look, he returned them and shook his head. “I wouldn’t have seen that in a million years…You really gotta be into it.”

The drive up to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in the park, was gorgeous. From Cove Hardwood forests we rose into alpine woods that look a lot like northern Minnesota. At one point we even passed a “bog walk,” though we didn’t stop. The air was unusually clear, and from the peak—a quarter-mile climb up a broad asphalt trail—we could see Mt. Mitchell, seventy-three miles away. We could also see the outline of Fontana Reservoir, like a long and alluring turquoise gash in the forest carpet, and nearer at hand, the bleached trunks of countless Fraser firs sticking up through the greenery—uniformly striken by an infestation of stray European insects.

The trail to the dome crosses the Appalachian Trail, and we hiked a stretch of it—maybe a hundred feet, there and back. Not a cloud in the sky. Then we made our winding way back to the natural history museum in the visitor center just outside Gatlinburg to get a better handle on the local flora. 

The gray skies had arrived in earnest by the time we got to the relatively remote campground south of Cosby, on the east side of the park, and set up camp. Perhaps the low clouds added to the richness of the atmosphere along the one-mile nature trail that winds its way through the verdant valley of Cosby Creek. Rhododendrons were everywhere, the rocks in the creek bed were covered with moss, vines twisted down like broken power lines from the treetops, and wildflowers of several hues peppered the woods. Once we’d traversed this enchanted jungle circuit we drove into the town of Cosby, a vaguely defined settlement that stretches for a mile or more along Tennessee Highway 321.

We were headed for the Front Porch, a Mexican restaurant featured in our guide book, said to have live bluegrass on the weekends. There were plenty of cars in the lot by the time we arrived—but no musicians or Mexican food in sight.

“I thought there was music here on Friday nights,” I said to the friendly waitress who took our order. 

She shook her head. “No. At this time of year we only have music on Saturday nights.”

“Who’s playing tomorrow?” (I thought maybe we’d stick around.)

“She’s a local gal. Does a little blues, a little folk...”

The restaurant didn’t serve beer, either. Too close to the local church, we were told. Nevertheless it was a warm, friendly place, bustling with good cheer, and the food was somewhat better than average. My shrimp-and-grits was a little on the salty side and Hilary’s chicken-and-dumplings was a gooey mess, but the fried green tomatoes were topnotch. The bourbon pie was also tempting.

A faint drizzle had set in by the next morning, and we broke camp at dawn, removing ourselves to the picnic area to make our morning coffee. As the day warmed the drizzle became a mist, and we headed off into the woods toward Mount Cammerer. We had trouble finding the trailhead, however—it was located a few hundred yards up the road past the group camp—and hiked most of the nature trail a second time before we finally came upon it. It was nice climbing up into the mountains at last, on a dirt (rather than asphalt) trail, with no one else within earshot. Mist shrouded the valleys, and tulip trees rose to great heights all around us.

We took a spur up to an overlook and came upon a couple about our age who had backpacked in the previous day and spent the night at a campsite a few miles further up the trail. They were from Indiana, but often made the exhausting all-day drive down to the Smokies. In fact, they loved the area so much they’d bought a house in Cosby.

“You’re in the best part of the park,” the man told us. “And Cosby is the best campground. Have you gone to Snake Den Ridge yet? And you’ve got to take the hike up to Ramsey Cascade!”

Indeed, that would have been the best way to get to know the park: on foot, with a pack on your back. But it was not in the cards. We had other fish to fry. The weather was turning sour, and Cherokee, Asheville, and the Blue Ridge Parkway still lay ahead.

The Blue Ridge Parkway runs from Cherokee, N.C. northeast for 470-odd miles through the mountains and hills to Shenandoah National Park in northern Virginia. It’s a well-groomed route largely devoid of signage, commercial development, or cross-traffic. In fact, it can get a little lonely up there on the Blue Ridge on a foggy day in April. The route also tends to generate anxiety. It’s loaded with pullouts from which you can look down across the landscape below, but they’re frequent and it’s hard to tell one from the next. It would take forever to stop at them all, but there are times when the one you decide to skip suddenly looks spectacular in the rear view mirror.

The most beautiful thing I saw on our entire two-week trip was the forest passing by us along the parkway between Cherokee and Asheville. It was foggy and the forest was wet. The serviceberry trees were flowering and their leaves, which were hardly out, were still a rusty red. The silver bell trees were also flowering, and the blue-green lichen on the tree trunks was luminescent. The intricacy of the crossing branches receding down the hillsides in the largely leafless forest, with touches of white and red here and there, was nothing short of sublime.  

All the same, we were happy to arrive in Ashville, where a cozy eighth-floor room downtown overlooking the city awaited us. The lobby of the hotel was full of twenty-somethings in glamorous attire.

“We’ve had weddings here all week,” the receptionist informed us excitedly.

 After scrutinizing a few restaurant websites we headed out, wandering the streets of the city in the drizzle, and ended up at an Irish Restaurant called Jack-o-the-Wood where a “session” was underway. The music was nothing special, but it was free. The atmosphere was casual, the beer was fine (brewed on-site), the kale chips were marvelous, and the rabbit ragout was the best meal I had on the trip. Yes, city life is good.

The air had grown lighter by the time we emerge again into the evening, and we were tempted by a wine bar we passed on our way back to the hotel where a piano-trumpet duo was playing. The crowd was a little too hip, or maybe we were a little too tired. We returning to the hotel past Thomas Wolfe’s childhood home (another writer I’ve never read) and settled ourselves in front of the huge TV, where we lucked upon the perfect film for the evening: The Rare Breed, a Western starring Jimmy Stewart and Maureen O’Hara. 

We’d been looking at the countryside of Kentucky and Tennessee  for quite a while, and now we got to take a good look at a recreation of early Texas shot on location in the Coachella Valley of California.

We continued north on the parkway the next day, at one point following a spur to Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi. An hour further up the parkway we took a twenty-minute hike out to Linville Falls. The falls was lovely but I was more impressed with what we saw along the way: first, two Carolina wrens chattering away on the railing of a footbridge; then a worm-eating warbler scrounging in the underbrush at the base of a mountain laurel bush; and flinally, on our way back from the falls, three black-throated-blue warblers singing in the middle story of the forest.

We’d never seen any of those species before.

Minneapolis Walkabout

What a day!

Cool and clear, after the thunderstorm in the night that got me up to unplug the computer.

Household projects ditched, we oil our chains, inflate our tires, and are off around the lakes. Orioles chirp from the cottonwoods, with vireos warbling from the lower story. Cool wind off the lakes, I veer left toward the muddy paths along Dean Parkway, forgetting the normal route along the Greenway. It’s been a long winter.

At Harriet we wander the rock garden, admiring the wildflowers. The blooms in the perennial garden across the road are more colorful and robust…but far less interesting. Swinging north past the band shell, we come upon a mass of school children surrounding the stage. (We’d seen them earlier in smaller groups, walking along the footpath with teachers and chaperones, happy to be out of the classroom.) It seems they’re handing out awards for Clara Barton School. One young man broke his own school record for pull-ups. Last year 21, this year 23. (I’d mention his name but I didn’t catch it.)

We cut across some parking lots at the north end of Lake Calhoun and find ourselves in front of Rustica Bakery. Naturally, we stop in for a baguette (and a couple of cookies). Riding back through the woods along the rail-lines to the car, I check my shadow from time to time to make sure the bread’s still back there. We're stopped by a train—it picks up steam as it heads into the city.

Lunch across town at Gandhi Mahal on Minnehaha and Lake. This is an interesting intersection, what with Mosaic (Great Bánh mì meatloaf sandwich), Midori’s Floating World (Japanese), Patrick’s Caberet, a flamenco workshop (or is that gone?), El Nuevo Rodeo, and the Harriet Brewery all in close proximity. I never met an Indian restaurant I didn’t like—Delights of India, Star of Indian, Taste of India, Dancing Ganesha--but maybe the buffet at Gandhi Mahal is a cut above. The mango lassi is also good. And a genuine atmosphere of “peace” prevails.

Overstuffed,  we head south along leafy Minnehaha Avenue in search of Moon Palace Books. There it is! Nestled behind Trylon Microtheater and Peace Coffee. A young man is sitting on the pavement outside the shop wrestling with an inky-looking bale of hay encased in an airy crate. He explains that they’ve been grooming the hay to support the flowers they’re going plant to brighten up the bouvelard.

Inside, we chat with the friendly, self-confident proprietress about Halldór Laxness and Edith Perlman as we peruse the shop’s small but well-culled selection. She looks vaguely familiar; I don’t know why.

“Are you from the neighborhood?” she asks at one point.

“Pretty close…Golden Valley.”

Yes, a good selection of books. In the end, I actually buy one! Notes of the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems of Anselm Hollo.

I couldn’t resist telling Angela about another book I was excited about called By the Way. “Here it is,” she says, having looked it up. “Essays on books and life, music, birds, gardening, food, firewood, and the great outdoors.”

“That’s the one.”

Back in the car with Hilary and Hollo, puttering across South Minneapolis, I say, “Read one. Just read a short one."

The one 

long hair in my beard

 makes me smile: 
 It's yours.

 "How about one more?" I plead.

Elegy

The laundary basket lid is still there though badly chewed up by the cat but time has devoured the cat entirely.

On our way to the Institute of Arts we stop at ‘Lectric Fetus. Not only a record store but a beautiful institution. No, I’m not going to buy a poster or some incense or a hipster cap any time soon. But the Fetus is still the head shop and music mecca par excellence that it was back in the 1970s, when we biked over from the University, asking ourselves, “Why did they put it here?”

Nor has the neighborhood been gentrified much in the course of the decades. Franklin Avenue has a few more bakeries and galleries and clinics than it used to, but it’s as gritty as ever.

Of course, music downloading has taken its toll on the Fetus. I had heard that the jazz section was sorely depleted but find that it isn’t as bad as I’d feared. There are many more anthology CDs at very low prices of things I purchased on vinyl as a kid. I clutch a compilation of three early Ornette Coleman LPs ($11.99) for quite a while as I wander the aisles, but in the end decide to take the plunge on new and local material: Excelsior, Bill Caruthers, solo piano (recorded in Paris).

Our visit to the Art Institute, which is just around the corner from the Fetus, is further delayed by a detour up to 27^th Street to see if our friends Dana and Mary are home. As we drive by I honk at a woman with hair blowing wild in the wind. She's wandering down the sidewalk. It’s Mary!

“Hi!” she says. “I was just going next door to see when the new clinic is going to open. This used to be an Ethiopian coffee shop. The sign on the door says it will open tomorrow. Huh? Written with a ball-point pen. Not very professional, do you think?”

Mary gives us a tour of their gardens—they hacked down the clematis this spring. Dana emerges from the “office” upstairs and we sit on the porch watching the world go by.

The show at the Institute, Art in an Age of Truthiness, sounded a little odd, but it proved to be well worth a visit. We entered via the “old” doorway, up the long flight of steps facing the park. I love going in that way. You're already on the second floor, only a few steps from the exhibit. Lots to think about inside. They were getting ready for a gala dinner, setting places and taping heavy wires to the floor between the tables.

The show itself? It was cool, diverse, trivial, mesmerizing. The premise itself is flawed, in so far as art is never “true,” strictly speaking, but quite a few of the installations were fascinating. I liked the Freudian Coney Island artifacts, whether real or fake; the photos of passing outer-space objects; the digital collage nature canvases of Joel Lederer, which are no different from any other landscape in conception; and the branding doll anime avatar (I don’t remember her name) who was given her freedom and vanished, leaving behind a three-minute farewell note. The best, however, was a luscious big-screen reenactment of what the characters who appear in Velázquez's “Las Meninas” were doing immediately before and after the scene we see on the canvas.

 

     

Spring Gardening

Memorial Day Weekend, gray skies, a high of 61 degrees, or so they predict.

It’s time to take one of those desultory wanders through the garden, to see what’s coming up.

But first we make a dash downtown to the Farmer’s Market—full of life and color, as usual. We picked up a flat of impatiens and a few larger New Guinea impatiens for the deck.  I was sorely tempted by both the smoked trout and the whole fresh duck, but we limited ourselves to some Kalamata olives and two bundles of asparagus—risotto tonight!

Our back yard has a shady, woodland feel, and we like it that way. But it means we depend more on the things that drop in—the volunteers—than on the things we buy. Violets would soon overtake the entire plot, if left to their own devices, and this has been a source of ongoing controversy, year after year.

Hilary says: “I like them all.”

I say: “I like them…but enough is enough. They’re choking out the other plants.”

Right now I can admire the yellow and white-purple blossoms that have appeared amid the purple. Tomorrow? We’ll see.

Jack-in-the-pulpit are also spreading themselves effortlessly across the yard as the years go by. One clump has decided to insinuate itself between some monkshood and Siberian bugloss.

Another dilemma that grows in importance by the year is what to do with the rotting ties that define the edges of the garden. No doubt many industrious gardeners would simply replace them, but I see two additional lines we might pursue. We could remove the logs entirely and create a more natural interface between our mossy lawn and the more “formal” garden space within the enclosure. Or we could simply leave them to rot. They’re probably forty years old by now, and it might be argued that they add a venerable touch to the yard.  

What I really ought to do is crawl under the deck and reattach the drainpipe that’s been spilling sand out across the lawn every time it rains for longer than I’d care to admit.

But no. I hear an oriole chirping in the cold, gray, midday air; I see the Virginia creeper making its slow ascent up the branches of the weedy ash. The sand cherry has been almost entirely defeated by the volunteer pagoda dogwood that blew in a decade ago—I really ought to cut it way back and see if it can reassert itself on a more modest scale. It’s Do or Die at this point.

And behold! The lilac we planted in our woods four years ago has produced its first blossoms ever! Lilies of the valley. Kerengeshoma palmata, already eighteen inches high. Bleeding heart, just coming into its own. And  the hostas are just now unfurling their tightly-wrapped leaves.

I'm in a daze, and perhaps there's nothing better to do than head inside and finish reading The Budding Tree, a set of short stories by Aiko Kitahara set in Edo-period Japan  .

The next two weeks may be the best of the summer for native plants--mostly just green, but full of freshness and variety.

Bicycles and Trout

We went to SE Minnesota to catch the migrating warblers, and we met them head on at Hok-Si-La, Frontenac, and Forestville.

But we also met up with some interesting people pursuing entirely different objectives.

On Friday night we checked into a motel in Red Wing to escape the inclement weather, and the next morning we ran into two oddly-dressed gentlemen in the breakfast room. One of them was wearing tweed knickers and yellow-and-black argyle socks. Hilary told me later: “I had the passing thought that they might be going to a clown convention.” 

They were, in fact, from Winnipeg, and they were in town to participate in the Lake Pepin 3-Speed Tour. Here is a bit from the website I dug up just now:

“To gain a better perspective, here is a list of things we leave behind: derailleurs, lycra, target heart rates, SPD, SIS, STI, HRM, XTR, etc. There will be no sprinting, spinning, drafting nor will there be any carbon fibre, drillium, eludium or unobtanium. Please note we are not advocating being a retro-grouch or ridicule those with alloy handlebars but instead we are asking you to strip away all you know modern cycling to be and hop aboard your £5 Thrift Store Raleigh and come with. Leave your lycra and Johnny-Rebel competitive spirit at home and instead, bring your sense of adventure.” 

The elder of the two men had a warm, toothy smile and a silver-gray flattop. At one point he held up a medal that was hanging around his neck on a ribbon. “I still hold the 70-and-over time trial record for Manitoba,” he informed us proudly.

But speed is not the thing for this two-day, eighty-five-mile tour around Lake Pepin. You need to have a vintage bike, and you need to know how to take your time.

“Everyone stops to make tea here and there, and we also pull in at all the cafes…like the Lord Nelson Cheese Shop.”

Yes, there is a cheese shop in Nelson, Wisconsin, though I don’t recall it being knighted.

“I believe Hilary and I could almost qualify to enter,” I said. “Our Raleigh Capris are veritable antiques.”

“Well, those old Raleigh’s will last forever…but to participate your bike must have a three-speed hub.” Tough luck.

We talked for a bit about Winnipeg—the several folk festivals, the new Museum for Human Rights, the historic riches in nearby St. Boniface, and the films of Guy Madden. I told them I once canoed from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg; they asked me what my route had been, I mentioned the English and the Wabagoon rivers, and that got them going on the Bloodvein River.

“When I was working for the Crown, we bought out the last remaining lodge on that river,” he said. “The owners told us, ‘Are you sure you want to see us go? We’ve saved a lot of lives over the years. We have the only phone for fifty miles….’ ”

Then we headed off for Frontenac State Park and our rendezvous with the orchard orioles.

It was a good day of birding, the tale of which I’ll leave for another time. Road races entered the story again as we drove from Wykoff toward Forestville and came upon hundreds of bicyclists grinding out a long uphill stretch. There were more of them hanging around the Forestville State Park office, and yet more lounging in the yard in front of the historic barn at the far end of the now-closed bridge across the Root River.

Though most of the cyclists wore colorful lycra suits, many of which had club insignia, it was clear to me that this was not an ordinary race, either. There was lots of good feeling but not much urgency in the air.

We didn’t find out what was going on until the next morning. Rain was imminent and we broke camp early, heading down to the picnic pavilion near the river to brew some coffee. A few minutes later a bedraggled cyclist wandered into the shed. He had a black Manfred Mann beard and insect-wrap goggles. The metal toe-clips on his shoes rang on the concrete as he walked.

“What’s with all the cyclists?” I asked.

“It’s the Almanzo Wilder bike race,” he replied, in slow, measured phrases. “It’s a hundred mile road race, mostly on gravel. It started out small, with maybe 30 cyclists, a few years ago, but it’s grown, and this year I think there were more than 1,300 entries. What makes it different is that it’s free….and there’s really no winner. It’s mostly a personal challenge and a nice day of camaraderie for the people who enter.”

Is Almanzo Wilder some famous cyclist?” I asked. Hilary hastened to inform me that Almanzo was Laura Ingles Wilder’s husband. The Wilders once lived in nearby Spring Valley, where the race starts and finishes.

“But I’m doing something different,” the cyclist said. “I’m riding a 380-mile loop down to Prairie du Chien and back. It sounded like a good adventure.”

“When did you start?” I asked him.

“Friday morning…I’ve got thirty miles to go.”

(That’s 175 miles a day…on gravelly hills. Jesus!)

“Were you in the campground last night? Where did you sleep?” I asked.

“In a ditch. My knee was really bothering me…and I was holding up my friends, so they gave me an extra emergency blanket and went on without me. It’s better this morning.”

“Do you want some coffee?” Hilary asked.

“Are you offering me some coffee? That would be so good,” he replied.

“With milk?” I asked.

So we gave him a cup of piping hot coffee and some banana chips.

Meanwhile, another couple had wandered into the pavilion. He was a trout fisherman—tall, balding, gray mustache. She was heavy-set, with character; she could have won a bit part as a hobbit herbalist in The Lord of the Rings.

We got to talking about trout fishing, and soon he was reciting all the little rivers in Michigan’s U.P. he’d fished. Like us, they come to Forestville every spring.

“I may read Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” when we get home tonight,” I said.

“But he wasn’t writing about that river,” the man replied. “You can tell from the nearby towns he names.”

"How has the fishing been here?" I asked. "I haven't seen many fishermen around. The water's awfully high...and muddy."

"Not good. Trout feed by sight, and they can't see much right now."

It was obvious that birds didn’t interest him.

“There is one warbler that we always expect to see down here,” I said. “We never see it anywhere else. The blue-winged warbler. It nests in the trees beyond Loop C. I heard one last night the moment we arrived at our campsite. But we haven’t seen him yet.”

I was going to do an imitation of the song—a faint sigh followed by a slobbery exhalation. But I knew it would have been pointless.

While we talked the air lightened. The fisherman’s wife had built a fire in the fireplace the moment they arrived, using the method of building the little fire on top of the big logs, rather than underneath it. The bicyclist had gone over to warm himself in front of it. By this time we’d poured him a second cup of coffee; he was still cradling the plastic cup in his hands.

At one point a bird shot through the open building and landed on a picnic table beyond.

“Did you see that?” the fisherman said.

“Female redstart,” I said.

“He shot right through the pavilion,” he said.

We eventually retrieved our cup, and as we left I said to the cyclist, “Have a safe trip. It’s an impressive feat you’re undertaking. Maybe we’ll see you again out on the road.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Then we went back to the campground to hunt down our blue-winged warbler. 

Minnesota Home Birding 2013

It was a bizarre and seemingly endless winter, by all accounts, but we’ll soon forget. Remember all the tornados in 201x? Not really. And what about that horribly wet June of 20xx? I can’t recall.

One result of the retarded spring of 2013 has been a very good birding season. The little feathered creatures have been moving through in bunches and they’re easier to spot than usual, due to the delayed leafing out. I’ve already logged 120 species, and our annual Mid-May birding weekend still lies ahead. I’m not counting the mockingbirds, Carolina chickadees, Eastern towhees, and worm-eating warblers we saw in Tennessee. This is Minnesota stuff.

Wood Lake Nature Center, where Hilary and I learned to bird thirty years ago, has been crawling with bright yellow warblers and handsome myrtle warblers, along with a few dazzling examples of more exotic species such as the Cape May and the magnolia.

The orioles are singing like crazy down in the cottonwoods on the north side of Cedar Lake. Flocks of  mergansers dot the surface of Lake Calhoun.

Just yesterday, I looked up from my computer to see two orange-crowned warblers bopping through the honeysuckle bush outside the window. Earlier that morning an ovenbird had been strutting proudly amid the nascent wild geraniums in the back yard. And just this morning, before breakfast, I spotted what I took to be yet another warbler in the elderberry bushes outside the bedroom window. It turned out to be a blue-headed vireo.(See above)

A few minutes later I head the call, “John!” from the other side of the house. I know that awe-filled call, urgent yet cautious; it means there’s something unusual to look at that mustn’t be scared away. I crept out into the dining room, camera in hand. A rose-breasted grosbeak was sitting on the feeder.

A few minutes later we both happened to be looking at the feeder when a monster appeared. “What’s that?” I exclaimed. It looked like a gigantic house sparrow with a black head. The name soon came to me from some deep recess of memory. Harris sparrow.

I remember the last time I saw a Harris sparrow. We were babysitting for some friends and one suddenly appeared on the deck out of nowhere. “Look at that, Abbie; a Harris sparrow,” I said. Abbie may have been eight or ten at the time.

Now a mother of two, Abbie passed her bar exams last summer. 

Nashville

When in Rome, do what the Romans do.

And when in Nashville…you gotta hear some country music.

I’m not a total stranger to the genre (which is actually a congeries of genres). My mom used to listen to Flat and Scruggs, and Webb Pierce. (I was surprised to read in Wikipedia that Pierce had more number one hits during the 1950s than any other country artist.) “Walkin the Streets..Takin Only a Few”  sticks in memory from my childhood years, perhaps because I couldn’t figure out what it meant. (Taking a few what?) My first Zen koan!

But looking at the lyrics now, I don’t see that phrase anywhere. The mysteries of childhood! 

I'm walking the streets watching the sun go down
The sun's sinking low leaving me sad and blue
Walking the streets I'm thinking only of you
 Since you went away I'm the loneliest guy in town

I don’t mind admitting that during the 1960s we watched Hee Haw fairly regularly as a family. Roy Clark, Buck Owens. That’s probably where I honed my wonderfully sophisticated sense of humor—having moved on from the joke page in Boy’s Life Magazine. We mustn’t forget The Beverly Hillbillies. (A decade later I was able to polish my comic style watching Sha Na Na.)

But Country was not something I ever paid much attention to as an adult. I own one Bill Monroe LP, one Dwight Yoakum CD, two Lucinda Williams CDs, and anthology collections of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. I have a four-CD collection of Patsy Cline, mistakenly sent to me by my record club—I’d order a Maria Callas collection. I burned a CD of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" for the trip. And that’s about it.

Yet one of the great gifts of travel is to wrench you out of your routines, strip you of your prejudices and predilections, and focus your attention on what’s right in front of you. After all, that’s why you came.

We’d been hiking at Land Between the Lakes, a vast expanse of semi-wild country a hundred miles west of Nashville, for most of the day, and we were plum tuckered out by the time we got to town. But we hadn’t been there more than an hour before we were eating barbeque and drinking beer in Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant while Meghan Saletta and two of her young male friends sang and strummed a few feet behind our table. 

I’d never heard of her, nor any of the other performers we caught snatches of later, as we walked the streets downtown, past the cowboy boot outlets, the Ernest Tubbs record shop, and ten or twenty of the narrow bars and honky-tonks that line Broadway. Rockabilly, Cajun, and knee-slapping old-time fiddling reached our ears before the sun went down. 

We walked past a gigantic, two-story Hard Rock Café to watch a barge tug moving down the Cumberland River from the terrace above the park. And on our way up the hill toward our hotel we passed the historic Ryman Auditorium.

The next morning we spent four hours in the Country Music Hall of Fame, tracking the history of the genre from the earliest days of films and audio recording. It’s a marvelous presentation, with clips of Jimmy Rodgers singing “He’s in the Jailhouse Now,” Patsy Montana jiving her way through “I Want to be a Cowboy Sweetheart,” Hank Williams doing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and Elvis shimmying through several hits.

   

Along the opposite wall were glass cases with a well-balanced array of old instruments, album covers, articles of clothing, and other historic paraphernalia including Carl Perkins’ blue suede shoes. Hundreds of performers were featured, and strange to say, I’d heard of most of them. From Lefty Frizell to Loretta Lynn, from Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies to Maybelle Carter. Patsy Cline had a special exhibit at one end of the hall and there was an exhibit devoted to the Bakersfield Sound at the other.

When we finally reached the end of the hall we realized we hadn’t yet entered the 1960s. That was on the floor below.

 Well, I won’t go into all the details. By the time we’d gotten through it all we knew what we had to do next. Though we’d planned to leave town that day, after a delightful lunch at Jack’s Barbecue  we went out the Grand Ole Opry, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Nashville, to see about getting tickets for the evening performance.

It was 3 p.m. and the only thing available was standing room at $45. We snapped up two tickets, then drove to the nearest McDonald’s, hooked into their WiFi from the parking lot, and scored a room at the Best Western a half-mile down the service road  for $50 through Priceline.  

The Grand Ole Opry occupies a strange location between a freeway and a suburban mall. You park in the mall parking lot and wander haphazardly over to the auditorium, which is obscured behind a bank of trees. We returned to the mall at 6:15—it was a warm, bright evening and people with good seats were sitting on benches in the park. We hurried inside to make sure we got a good position, and spent the next three hours leaning against a wall halfway up the auditorium, listening to bands and artists most of whom I’d never heard of. They were almost uniformly good, though in very different ways.  

 Striking Matches—a young, hip, and talented duo; Jimmy C. Newman (who first appeared at the Opry in 1956) doing a Cajun set; The Del McCoury Band—blistering hot bluegrass; and on to

Hall-of-Fame country crooner Connie Smith, son-of-an-outlaw Shooter Jennings, and super-group Alabama, among others. Great acoustics, a palpable reverence for both the tradition and the venue. Schmaltzy sentiments but powerful voices, expert musicianship, and heartfelt emotion. Plus, a radio announcer, advertisements, and a Minnie Pearl impersonator to warm up the audience before the show.

Hilary remarked, and I had to agree: "It's as gripping as an opera."

The couple sitting directly in front of us was from Austria. (I’d chatted with them briefly before the show.) They got especially excited when Jimmy Newman did “Jambalaya,” but also seemed to be enthusiastically familiar with all three of the songs Alabama performed to wrap up the show.

Country. I guess its appeal is widespread, if not universal. After 36 hours in Nashville, I’m ready to go back for more.