Exploring the Neighborhood

 In an effort to "meet the community" I decided to attend a church service, it being Sunday morning, and me with nothing pressing on my schedule. The church at the far end of Main Street, across the tracks and past the cultural center, looked promising. I learned from the website that it has a female minister; it welcomes "those who will ask questions of faith so as to add purpose to their lives," and the social hour takes place before, rather than after, the service. I imagined myself stepping into the fellowship hall perhaps fifteen minutes prior to the service, meeting and chatting with a few friendly people, and then moving on to the service itself.

But that’s not how it came down.

As I approached the little white church from the city hall parking lot across the street, I noticed that the marquee in front said "service at 9:30." (The website said 10:30. Oops.) It was already 10:15. The first door I tried was locked. I heard nothing inside, but there were plenty of cars parked nearby, so I tried the other door. It was open. The minute I stepped inside, the sound of a man’s booming voice reached my ears. I turned the corner, took one glance at the assembled congregation, across the expanse of the fellowship hall, and decided to sit in the lobby where I could hear the sermon perfectly well without drawing attention to myself.

The man was discussing a passage in Deuteronomy in which the Israelites are advised to teach their children about God, not just occasionally or during festivals, but every day, through both speech and example. He talked about how much children learn from watching their parents, how busy everyone is nowadays, and how rarely references to God figure in family conversations. He went on the describe how often he had been saved from going down the wrong path by God, how many opportunities had been sent his way, how often he’d been forgiven. It was good stuff, though it was clear to me that the man was expounding rather than working off a script. He kept returning to the same themes—teaching the children, the rush of modern life, the need to be admonished by God. It was like one of those model trains that run on a track high on the wall above the booths in a restaurant—here it comes again!

As I sat there on my solitary pew, with its red cushion, listening to the man intone, I looked at the plastic fig tree next to the opposite wall, the large paper banner that had been decorated with colorful Crayolas by the children, and the walker that someone had stowed above the coat rack. A duck-hunter’s hat sat on the shelf next to the walker, and there was a food shelf bushel on the floor under the long row of coats.

Finally the sermon came to an end and a woman with a pleasant voice began to sing. At that point I decided to slip into the nave and join the congregation. Turning the corner cautiously, I came face-to-face with a woman in high heels who was pacing back forth with an infant in her arms. I smiled at her. She gave me a slightly questioning look in return.

I took a seat in a pew against the back wall next to one of the ushers. He wore a quilted green hunting vest and had a friendly, rugged face. He looked a little like Nick Nolte. The minister, on the other hand, bore a striking resemblance to Eugene Pallette. I read in the program that he was a guest pastor from a church in Baxter. That resolved the gender issue. Before being ordained he’d run the local café in New York Mills for many years.

I sang. I recited the prayers. I noticed that when the congregation said the Lord’s Prayer, no one made much of an attempt to keep pace with anyone else, and as the prayer reached its "for ever and ever" it sounded like holy hell. I even threw a small bill into the offertory plate. From where I sat I had a very good view, through the arch to the hallway, of the coffee thermoses and ham sandwiches they were stacking onto serving plates out in the fellowship hall.

The trouble was, when the service was over, I was likely to be the first one to leave, because I was sitting right by the door. But I wasn’t going to just walk across a room full of empty tables set for luncheon and grab a sandwich, so I stood in the hallway and let people passed by.

I had a vague hope that someone would stop and say, "You’re a stranger. Who are you? And what are you doing here?" Many congregations in Minneapolis have designated greeters who scan the crowd like Secret Service agents looking for lonely newcomers, whom they make it a point to welcome. But no one welcomed me. On the contrary, it seemed that everyone was making an effort to avoid looking my way.

Finally, two young woman came to a stop right beside me in the hall. "Do they always have this kind of a spread after a service?" I asked, by way of breaking the ice.

"I don’t know," one of the women said. "I’ve never been here before."

"Really? Neither have I. I’m from Minneapolis. Where are you two from?"

"We’re from here. But we’ve never been in this church. We used to work in Wayne’s café. They called us and told us to come down."

Conversation in the fellowship hall was starting to get lively. I probably would have bumped into some very interesting folks if I’d stuck around, but suddenly, I felt it was time to move on.

 

*

And move on I did, first to Perham, nine miles up the highway, where I was impressed by the huge Tuffy pet food factory and warehouse. It’s much bigger, I think, than the Lund boat factory here in New York Mills.

 

I took a side trip down Highway 228 through the rolling hills of the Alexandria Moraine to Vargas and was rewarded with the sight of two swans drifting in a placid lake edged in flaming orange trees.

In Detroit Lakes I chatted briefly with the clerk in Bookworld. "No, a store of this size doesn’t have the budget to send anyone to the Chicago book convention," she responded to my inquiry, smiling wearily.

I was impressed that they had Javier Marias’s new book, The Infatuations, on display on their New Releases end-cap.

"Has anyone been reading this?" I asked.

"Not that I know of. Then again, it just came in. Can I help you find anything?"

A few minutes later I was waiting in the drive-thru line at Caribou on the next block for a small latte and also a ham-and-cheddar mini-quiche. (Maybe I should have stuck around the church for those sandwiches.)

The lake itself, a few blocks down the hill from downtown, was teeming with coots, most of them just offshore. They’re a lovely gray, but they’re skittish, and seemingly idiotic.

 

*

A few hours later, back at my personal retreat center in New York Mills, I was sitting here at my laptop, tinkering with an old essay about Puccini, when the sky cleared. Suddenly the town seemed friendlier; mothers strode down the sidewalk pushing baby strollers.

I headed south on Ottertail County 67, planning to pick up the Leaf Lake Trail, which appeared to be a continuation of 513^th Street. (I have good maps.) But I was sidetracked by a small sign pointing the way to the Outdoor Finnish Museum. I took the left turn and proceeded down a gravel road to the park entry—gated and locked. The sign said: open Memorial Day to Labor Day. A smaller sign said Under Continual Electronic Surveillance. But there wasn’t a sign saying No Trespassing.

There are some very nice buildings in there, and the setting is bucolic. (There were also lots of white-throated sparrows in the thickets on the way in.) One of the structures is painted red, several of the clapboard buildings are white, and quite a few--the ones with the dovetailed corners--are a natural gray, like the similarly rugged structures you see in Embarrass and in Finland on the North Shore. 

I found it strange that the dates posted on the buildings seemed to refer to when a given structure was moved, not to when it was built. Or maybe the buildings aren't as old as they look.

It seemed stranger still that there was a trailer-camp with hook-ups in plain sight behind the historic general store. Nothing spoils the atmosphere of a pioneer Finnish village like a bunch of aluminum Winnebagos parked behind it. Maybe that’s how they finance the enterprise, but it seems to me there are plenty of other fields nearby that would serve the same function just as well.

Of course, there are no Winnebegos there now, just unobtrusive hook-up posts amid the grass. The place was deserted and the afternoon light was spectacular.

I peered in the window of the Ottertail town hall and the dry goods store, full of antique merchandise, but was more impressed by the bright green grass, the bright red barn, and the immaculate white of the clapboard farmhouse. It all looked a little like a surreal Scandinavian dream. (I know Finns aren’t Scandinavian but that’s the association we tend to make.)

I stared long and hard at the sawmill blade—a flat disc of barbed steel maybe three feet across. It looked wicked. But this is how you turn trees into lumber. The mill blades of today are wafer thin, to keep waste to a minimum. Who knows, maybe they’re doing it with lasers now?

 

*

Back on the road, I returned to County 138 and continued south. At the intersection to Highway 67 I went straight-on, after which the road is no longer paved. I crossed a reedy stream—Leaf Creek, I suppose—and not long afterwards, deep in the woods, came to 513st Street, where I turned west.

These are the best roads, of course—the ones that traverse the marshy or hilly terrain where you can’t plant crops. The roads where the birds live.

 

 

That "street"—it’s really a hard-packed sand road skirting the edge of a swampy creek, miles from any town—becomes Leaf Lake Road after crossing Highway 67. I became interested in that road when I noticed it was very small but passed along the edge of an attractive string of rivers and lakes. It also interested me because the entire range of hills hereabouts, extending down to Fergus Falls, was once known, to geographers at any rate, as the Leaf Hills.

It turned out to be a pretty road, more clay than sand, perhaps, with plenty of gravel, too. The leaves are turning, and it’s interesting to note that there was once a town on the Red River ox cart trail called Leaf Lake. I don’t think it lasted more than three or four years. You can see the diminutive brass plaque, about the size of a Kindle screen, mounted on a bolder at the public landing on the west end of Leaf Lake.
 

At several places during my mini-road trip I saw flocks of birds rising up, in the way that snow buntings rise up in the wintertime. I finally got a good look at a few of them; they were bluebirds.

I also saw a single, superb, swamp sparrow amid the reeds at one of my stops.

New York Mills

It’s a bit strange, but I’m getting used to it. A three-hour drive through the drizzle, which I extended by taking a few back roads between Little Falls and Motley. I was rewarded during that detour by the sight of three kestrels on the telephone wires and a trio of sandhill cranes flying by overhead, squawking. I passed two tractors pulling trailers full of some ochre material—like a cross between wood chips and wheat germ. I have no idea what it was. Chicken feed? Kernels of corn?

The countryside near Randall and Cushing is somewhat hilly but it flattens out soon enough. Motley is notable mostly for the Morey’s Smoked Fish plant on the edge of town. I bought some chunks of whitefish and salmon, though the prices are the same as they are in Minneapolis—maybe higher!

When I arrived in New York Mills I stopped at the cultural center on Main Street to pick up the keys to the house.

“Are you Lynn?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m John Toren. I’m your artist in residence.”

Her already cheerful eyes brightened further. “Oh! Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.” She pulled a set of keys from a drawer and handed them across the counter. “What knd of artist are you?” she asked unabashedly. (Hemlock? Maple?)

I’m a writer.”

“Then I’m wondering if you’ll be needing the studio space upstairs.”

“I don’t know. I might as well take a look at it.”

“There’s a stairway by the window right behind you.”

A couple was standing near the door, looking idly at some Swedish blown glass—the gift shop extends from the door halfway back into the gallery. The woman came up to me and said, “Did I hear you say you’re a writer? That has always seemed like such a romantic profession to me.”

“It’s really kind of boring,” I replied, suddenly conjuring the image of two long weeks alone in a house I hadn’t seen yet, out in the middle of nowhere. “Actually, I make my living mostly by editing books. And designing books.”

“Oh, I love the center for book arts in Minneapolis,” she said enthusiastically.

“So do I,” I replied. “But I don’t design that kind of book. They tend to be one-of-a-kind works of art. I work on a computer, making books like the ones you see for sale over there on the shelf.”

I told them a little bit about my Minnesota travel book, and added a little sheepishly: "I don’t have anything about New York Mills in it. It’s sort of between regions."

The woman said, “Oh. You should put in something about the B & B we stayed in last night. The rooms are refurbished train cars. They’re so imaginatively decorated! And when the trains come roaring by in the middle of the night, it really adds to the atmosphere.”

Her husband nodded silently in agreement.

Turning back to Lynn, I asked: “So how does it happen that there’s an art center way out here?”

“A man named John Davis created it,” she said, and went on to explain that the building was vacant; they were going to tear it down and Davis said, “Instead of spending thirty thousand dollars to demolish this building, why not give me the money to make an art center out of it?” And they did.

Davis had been painting barns for local farmers for several years and was well-known and liked in the community. (I read this later online.) His experience of rural life had convinced him that there was both intelligence and interest to spare in the vicinity to support such a project. He was right. In 1994 New York Mills was named one of "Top 5 Culturally Cool Towns" by USA Today Weekend Magazine.

Twenty years later, looking down Main Street on a misty Saturday afternoon in October, you’d never guess it. No doubt in summer, when the Great American Think Off takes place here, the place is jumping. But as I drove through town most of the activity seemed to be at the bowling alley. Aside from the couple I was chatting with, there was no one in the gallery.

Well, I know there’s at least one artist in town, and he’ll be staying in a one-bedroom bungalow, across the tracks and two blocks down from the cultural center.

“Do you know where the house is?” Lynn asked.

“Just down the street?”

“Yup. On the right hand side, across from the bait shop. It's the same color as the trim on the façade of this building. Go in the back door—the front door doesn’t lock.”

I thought I knew what the place looked like, having done some research on Google Maps, but as I pulled slowly down the street none of the buildings fit the image their roving camera had taken of a house enshrowded in cedars. I remembered the number as 224 Main Street but it turns out such an address doesn’t exist. I suddenly wished I’d looked at the color of the trim on the Cultural Center more closely, or better yet, brought the fact sheet from home. I was a little concerned about fumbling with a big set of keys at the back door of some stranger’s house. I could see the headlines in the Wadena Pioneer Journal:

City Man Shot Attempting to Burgle House

Maybe with the subhead—elitist thief had 120 books on ancient Greek philosophy and a case of fine French wine in trunk.

I finally chose the house with the most distinctive color—a blazing cadmium yellow, not unlike the chicken feed I’d seen earlier in those trailers. It was next door to the house directly across from the bait shop, which I’d already ruled out—the garden was too elaborate, too well-maintained. As I stepped around the back I looked over the fence in that direction and saw several elaborate, hand-crafted metal wind-chimes hanging from the laundry pole. Maybe an artist lives there, too?

The first key that I tried worked. Hallelujah! I stepped into a large mudroom, took a half-flight of wooden stairs up to a frame door, opened it, and stepped into my little four-room, two-week, coenobitic cell. It was only 50 degrees inside, but I liked it immediately.  

*

So, what am I going to read? I have everything here from Virgil’s Georgics to Carol Bly’s Letters from the Country. John Berger’s King to Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice. Early Greek philosophy to Paul Ricoeur; Ernst Cassirer and Seamus Heaney; Glenway Westcott's Wisconsin novel, The Grandmothers, and Charles A. Eastman's Indian Boyhood. I even brought up a short biography of James J. Hill.

So, let me repeat: what am I going to read?

 *

Looking at the clock on the computer screen, I see it’s 5:47. Hilary has been home for an hour. I wonder how her day went? I’m making vegetable soup, though the refrigerator is so small, I doubt I’ll be able to get the leftovers into it. I’m listening to Remede de Fortune by Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1340). Rather haunting and atmospheric, like today.

I’m slowly getting used to the idea of typing ephemeral comments onto a computer, rather than writing them out in a journal.

I actually brought up some of my old journals, thinking it might be a good idea to copy some things out of them before throwing them away. In a journal of 1986, the first noteworthy remarks I find are roughly halfway through the book. It’s a series of quotations from Thomas Merton:

 “After all, if our salvation consists in finding ourselves in God, it means finding ourselves as God is.”

 “Who can comprehend or explain the mystery of what it means to awaken to one’s own reality as an existential consequence of the fact that we are loved by reality itself?”

 “Some of the Fathers stress the idea that ‘the true image of God is the man who does good.’…Others…are absorbed in the thought that the divine image in man is especially constituted by man’s freedom.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken an interest in ideas framed by such terminology. For example, what does it mean to be “loved by reality itself”?  If, as Merton suggests, you can’t comprehend, much less explain such a “mystery,” then how does it present itself to you? What form does it take?

I’m not feeling “loved by reality” right now, I can tell you that. I’m feeling a little closed in by the rain and the house and the strange new neighborhood, which I don’t know anything about. I’m not feeling scared, exactly, but there’s a hint of apprehension in the air. I’m in unfamiliar territory with nothing pressing—no assignment, no commitments—to keep me moving ahead.

Well, you know what they say: familiarity breeds affection. Perhaps we feel “loved by reality” to the degree that it has become familiar to us, that we've become a part of its family.

*

I wrote those quotes out at a retreat—three days of silence during which I had a lot of time to spin theories. During that time I also wrote an essay asking the question: Who or what is God?

Before long (this back in 1986) I’m remarking, “For my part, I am a great lover of vegetables. It is not only the flavor of the carrot, a potato, a green bean or a turnip that excites my interest. The very presence of one of these products of seed and soil consumes me with love. Everything honest, simple, enriching and content with itself is to be found in a potato, everything bright, sweet, and elegant in a carrot; while a fresh green bean both smells and tastes of rich and exotic earth.”

The gist of the ensuing argument is that vegetables are not my god, nor is my wife my god, nor my own pleasure in thinking about such things. These are all aspects of the dynamic force that animates my affections and draws me outside of and beyond myself.

I’m eating my vegetable soup as I write these words. It’s good.  

*
I just took a walk downtown through the night and the drizzle. Not many people out. A few cars passing in the rain. Lots of them parked down by the municipal liquor store, which I’m guessing is also a bar. It reminds me a little of walking the night-time streets of Mahtomedi.

Now I’m in for the night. In the morning everything will look different.

 *

Hilary called. It was nice to hear her voice. She said I sounded a little strange. (I think it's the phone, a feather-weight princess phone that runs through a satelite connection.) She’ll enjoy her time alone in the house, though she’s got a fairly busy day tomorrow.

*

Reading Carol Bly’s Letters. She complains a lot about other people, but she can also write:

“…farming is truly absorbing. It has the best quality of work: nothing else seems real. And everyone doing it, even the cheapest helpers like me, can see the layout of the whole—from spring work, the cultivating, to small grain harvest, to cornpicking, to fall plowing.” (p. 10)

She describes how the rural Scandinavians are reluctant to feel things; they don’t feel like discussing the Vietnam War and chide their children for crying during Charlotte’s Web. I see elements of myself in that description. I’m not in the habit of forming vigorous opinions about foreign policy and then speaking out about them. On the other hand, I have no difficulty showing enthusiasm for things. I cry in movies. I misted up a little just the other day, reading Caddie Woodlawn.

 *

I’ve had the music off for quite a while now. It’s nice just to hear the gentle rain and the occasional swish of a passing car. I did get the soup into the refrigerator. It’s turning into a pleasant evening. 

Biking Menomonie and Beyond

I have long been a fan of Minnesota landscapes, which range from dramatic cliffs and bluffs to aspen parklands and wooded moraines. (If you don’t believe me, take a look at my book, Seven States of Minnesota.) But every time we venture east along I-94 into Wisconsin, I am struck by the fact that they have some gorgeous landscapes, too, against which Minnesota can set no real equivalent.

The Driftless Zone straddles the Mississippi, extending a good ways into both states, but Wisconsin has far more of it than Minnesota, and as you move away from the river, its hills offer more radical contours and striking vistas. There is something pleasingly sculptural about the way the fields follow the lay of the land as they rise to meet the heavily wooded hilltops. 

We headed that way not long ago to bike the Red Cedar Trail with friends. Though the day was mild and clear and the leaves were beginning to turn, there were few cyclists out. We followed the river south from Menomonie, hugging the shore for a few miles, passing wooded embankments and sheer cliffs of unquarried sandstone (Dunnville sandstone from the Wonewoc formation, deposited 510 million years ago?) The river was green, then blue, then green, swirling in the morning sun, and we could see long gobs of seaweed fluttering from submerged rocks in the swift current. 

The trail crosses the river north of Dunnville and the second half is slightly more open and agricultural. The last few miles pass through the Dunnville Wildlife Area, and there are likely to be hunters out at this time of the year, but no one took a potshot at us. The only sounds we heard were the squeaking of cedar waxwings, the sharp “pip” of cardinals, and the blustery wind in the cottonwood trees.

The bridge over the Chippewa River makes a fitting turnaround point. It’s about thirty miles there and back from the trailhead in Menomonie. In the summertime the broad, sandy beach just downstream from the bridge can be full of picnickers, most of whom come by boat, but the only people near the river when we arrived were standing on the bridge. They looked to be a pack of college students from nearby Eau Claire, most of whom were deeply engaged in texting on their smart phones. (Maybe it was part of an assignment?)

We’ve biked the Red Cedar Trail many times. What struck me with greater force on this occasion were the natural and cultural accoutrements to be found in the vicinity. We are dinner at Jake’s Supper Club on Tainter Lake, and it met every expectation: outdoor seating on a deck with a fine view of the lake, a decent and affordable house wine, a varied menu. I should have ordered a manhattan followed by prime rib (the Sunday special) but was content to have the lemon-artichoke chicken with a huge mound of lukewarm but obviously hand-mashed potatoes on the side.

Our drive out to the supper club took us north on Highway 25, and the broad fingers of wooded hillside extending down from the northwest into the river valley were ablaze in the setting sun. Spectacular.

The next morning we drove to Durand and biked the tail end of the Pepin Trail east, arriving at the same bridge across the Chippewa we’d visited the previous day from the opposite direction, passing snakes of three different species along the way.

We gave the Old Pepin Courthouse (the last remaining wood frame courthouse in Wisconsin) only a passing glance. Old, but ugly. I was more impressed with the Eau Galle Cheese factory a few miles north of town—once again on Highway 25. It takes some doing to fight your way past all the scarves, jewelry, and hand-made soap on display in the entryway, but the cheese is worth pursuing. Their Parmesan took first place in the United States Championship Cheese Contest a few weeks ago, and at $7.99/lb it’s a real bargain.

True to the character of the region, the locals pronounce Eau Galle as “Oh Golly,” just as we in Minnesota pronounce Milan “my-lan.” No one seems to know where the name Milan came from, but the probable origins of Eau Galle lend credence to the local pronunciation. In early documents the river was referred to as Augalett, Augallett, and Au Galet. Galet is French for coarse pebble—what in Britain they might call “shingle.” In early times there was a heavy gravel sandbar at the mouth of the Eau Galle River. (I’m not sure if it’s still there today.) French traders probably referred to it, as they passed it going upstream on the much larger Chippewa River, as the “river of the gravel sandbar.” That would be the river “au galet,” the French pronunciation of which would be o galay.

Our final stop before heading back toward the freeway was the childhood home of Caddie Woodlawn. It stands in a beautiful park-like setting just off the highway. There’s a historic monument describing how the book of that name got written, and there’s a one-room log cabin fifty yards off to the south. A much larger, white frame house stands fifty yards to the north, and I’m sorry to report that from the text on the monument’s brass plate, it’s impossible to tell which structure was the one Caddy grew up in.

In the introduction to the book itself, Caddie’s granddaughter remarks that you can go to a park south of Menomonie and “enter a small gray house and see exactly where Caddie” once lived. Now, the house to the south is small and gray. The one to the north is white and somewhat larger. All the same, it’s clear enough from the book that the Woodlawn family lived in a multi-room house. So someone must have painted the “small gray house” at some time in the past. And in fact, in 2005 the Menomonie Sunrise Rotary Club took it upon themselves to “restore” the previously gray and unpainted structure where Caddie was raised. Mystery solved.

What that little log cabin is doing there is anybody’s guess.   

Whale Watching

It’s not as if I have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, onto the whale-watching boat. But I consider myself a frugal traveler and I would be inclined, on occasion, to forego that annual expedition out to sea in search of our aquatic cousins. Hilary feels otherwise, and she’s invariably right, in so far as no two whale-watching trips are the same and every one we’ve taken has been eminently worthwhile.

"What’s so great about seeing a mess of whales?" you say. Or even a few? Or even the back of a single whale rising ominously above the surface?

For one thing, whales animate the sea. So do other aquatic species, I guess. But when you see a long string of salmon leaping out of the water, their silvery bodies glinting in the setting sun (as we did on the west side of Whidbey Island during our recent trip)  you may find yourself thinking, “I wouldn’t mind catching a few of those for dinner.” 

When you see an orca or a fin whale thirty feet beyond the gunwale of the boat, the impact is entirely different. For one thing, these creatures might well be bigger than the boat. It seems, at times, that they’re looking at you. Sometimes they arrive in pairs or groups, with offspring trailing behind, perhaps. Researchers speculate that they can communicate with one another across hundreds of miles of water. You start wondering where they’ve been recently, and what they might be thinking.

Seeing a whale, in short, evokes an alternative world just below the waves—graceful, harmonious, communitarian, and wise. It’s one we humans admire, and almost feel we can relate to.

Oceanographers paint a more complicated picture of whale-life, of course. One whale-watching skipper was recently overheard to remark: “If one more passenger tells me they want to be reincarnated as a whale, I’m going to puke.” But I’m referring here to an emotional effect that’s very real, albeit all but indescribable. Which may be why we find ourselves heading out to sea, again and again.

Our excursion left the dock at Port Townsend at ten a.m. in medium fog. Eavesdropping earlier at the office across from the dock, I learned that one couple taking the trip was from Austin, another from San Antonio.

The boat might have been forty feet long, most of it taken up by a cabin with an official capacity of seventy-six, though the thirty of us that spread ourselves out in the booths seemed to fill it up rather nicely.  Out on deck, the walkways alongside the cabin were just wide enough for one person to stand upright while another squeezed by. The front deck, though tipped at a sharper angle, had ample room to stand and watch whatever might come leaping up out of the blue.

Our skipper introduced herself as Corey and explained as we left the harbor that our plan would be to head north across the Straights of Juan de Fuca toward San Juan Island, hoping to run across some transient orcas. The resident pods, which tend to make themselves scarce when the transients show up, hadn’t been sighted in weeks.

Hilary and I stood on the starboard rail for quite a while, watching the flotsam and jetsam go by. We also passed an assortment of gulls and black sea birds—pigeon guillemots and common murres. Further out, flocks of small brown-white birds occasionally flashed by that Lily, the mate, told us were red-necked phalaropes.”I just learned that last week,” she said. 

At one point a large ship emerged from the fog a quarter-mile away, heading toward Puget Sound from the open ocean, and I began to wonder if our little boat had radar. Well, of course it did! All the same, I was curious. We were now a long ways from shore.

Fifteen minutes later we hadn’t seen any whales—or much of anything else—though the fog was beginning to lift. Cory stopped the boat, came out on deck, and dropped a hydrophone over the side to see if she could pick up some whales by sound. Nothing doing. Back on the bridge she kept us heading north and a few minutes later someone spotted a knife-like black fin sticking up out of the water off in the distance. Everyone hears the shout of excitement and pours out on deck. The fin vanished, but then another one popped up. Maybe the same one. Then there were definitely two.

As Hilary and I stood our ground on the front rail, whales began to appear on either side of the bow. We’d stumbled onto one of those elusive resident pods. Some were far off. In time, others surfaced twenty feet from the boat, swam under it, and reappeared on the other side. Not more than one or two were visible at any time. Often we’d see the gray behind the fin. Sometimes we’d see large parts of the body. And three or four of the orcas leaped entirely out of the water, exposing their put white undersides.

Other boats began to arrive from all directions. (The skippers radio to one another. Their joint livelihood depends on finding the whales.) Victoria, Friday Harbor, Anacortes—they were all present and accounted for. At one point I heard Corey say excitedly to Lily, “The resident pods have gone missing for three weeks…and for the first time this summer, I’m the one that found them!”

Corey is from Wisconsin. She’s been in Port Townsend for ten years—a relative newcomer. But the resident orcas of the Straights are so well known that Corey recognized one or two of them by the notches on their fins. “That’s L-87,” she’d say. Or, “See that little yellow one? He was born in May; he’s tagging along after his mother.” She finally came to the conclusion that we’d made contact with at least two of the resident pods. Maybe all three. (For a closer look at summer and fall orca sightings in the region, click  HERE.)

Meanwhile, the fog had lifted, and we could see the sandy cliffs of San Juan Island, frosted on top with a row of scrawny evergreens, just a few hundred yards off to the north.

Whether the whales moved on or we drifted off, I‘m not sure. There are regulations against pursuing them relentlessly or getting too close, and we were due back in Port Townsend at two.

Most of the passengers went back inside for the hour-long trip back across the straight, but Hilary and I went outside once or twice to stare out across the gray expanses. The sea was pretty calm, though there’s always a lot of movement, what with the tides, the currents, and the wake of ocean-going vessels that may have passed by an hour ago.

The most amazing thing I saw during our return journey was a sea gull sitting on a chunk of cleanly cut log about a foot long. There’s nothing remarkable about that—except that I’d seen the same seagull on the same long hours earlier on the way out! I couldn’t be sure that it was the same gull, but I’m confident it was the same log. I found the coincidence astounding, considering how vast the Straights of Juan de Fuca are. But then Cory mentioned she was following her own sea-trail back to port. 

On the Northwest Coast

 The word “awesome” is overused these days, no doubt, but it comes to mind repeatedly when you’re travelling through the Pacific Northwest. The first time Mount Rainier appears through the scarf of clouds that so often surrounds it, to say that it “sure looks big” doesn’t seem to catch the immensity of the thing, the dazzling blue-white surface of the glaciers, or the handsome collar of dark green subalpine fir circling its base. By the same token, when you’re watching a pod of five or ten orcas frolic just beside your boat in the shadow of San Juan Island, referring to them as “frisky” won’t quite do. Then again, as you stroll through the tangle of vegetation in the Hoh Rainforest on the west flank of the Olympic Range, which receives close to a hundred inches of rain every year, to call the scene “verdant” only hints at the impact such an environment makes.

Such experiences fill the eye and heart with expansiveness and perhaps even joy, but they also tend to empty the brain of words. “Wow,” you may say. Or you say nothing.

Hilary and I drove and hiked through such environments for ten days in early September. I had spent a good deal of time prior to the trip burning CDs to listen to in the car, but for the most part they proved to be a distraction. Though the Syrian chemical-warfare crisis was in full swing, I have to admit that the only news reports elemental enough to catch my eye were devoted to the progress of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

It was only by coincidence, but in the course of our travels we stayed in a tree house, a historic national park lodge, a retrofitted ranger cabin on the side of a hill, several campgrounds, a budget chain motel, a mom-and-pop motel, and a rustic, Native-American-operated seaside resort.

We took four ferries and a four-hour whale-watching expedition. We hiked out Dungeness Spit, which was shrouded in fog, but could find no local crabs for sale. We bought and cooked fresh clams, chatted with people who were gathering oysters on the banks of the Hood Canal, and also heard some great Alaskan fishing stories from a Portuguese sailor, now long retired, who was sitting across from us in a tiny restaurant in Hoodsport. When we told him we’d been out to see the whales, he replied, with a laugh followed by a slightly disgusted grin, “I don’t need to see whales. I’ve seen enough whales.”

We hiked out to Gray’s Bay wildlife refuge, one of the premier bird-watching hotspots on the West Coast, but the only birds we saw were flitting through the shrubs amid the blackberries as we made our way out to the mudflats. (I know—it was the wrong time of the year.)

Yet one more extraordinary sight met our eyes one gray morning on the beach. I looked out to sea beyond the rugged island stacks just off-shore and noticed a ragged line of lanky black birds with pale white underwing patches heading north in a steady stream. The wildly flapping birds stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions, and the parade continued without cease throughout the forty-five minutes we stood there admiring the scene, breathing the sea air, and examining stones and broken shells on the beach. I’m sure that several hundred thousand birds flew by during the time we were there.

When I turned in our key at the office later I asked the proprietress if she knew what the birds were.

“We call them “black sea birds,’” she replied.

“Yes, but do you know the name, specifically?”

“That is their name: black sea bird.”

I suppose it might be a translation of a Quileute term, but I wasn’t satisfied. Examining out field guide later, it occurred to me that most of them were sooty shearwaters, which the guide describes as forming “flocks of hundreds of thousands.”

Less staggering to contemplate but more fun to see were the sanderlings, small white birds about the size of a cell-phone that race around on the beach on stiff legs in medium-sized flocks, running out when the waves recede and dashing back to higher ground when the surf rolls up again. Their movements are mesmerizing and also cute, and it’s fun to pick out the western sandpipers and semipalmated plovers here and there amid the pack. But when the flock takes flight, moving like a coordinated wave across the beach, turning and diving like a magic carpet made up of dazzling sparkles as they catch the evening sun, the word “awesome” once again creeps into view.

My favorite sighting, however, was of a chestnut-backed chickadee. I didn’t know such a bird existed until I saw one in a tree on the edge of our campsite at a state park on Whidbey Island. It looked just like a thousand other chickadees I’ve seen, but something was different. You guessed it: the back was a rich chestnut color. I’m not saying it was the most stunning bird I’ve ever seen, but it’s always great fun to see an old friend in a dramatically new outfit.

But back to the awesome sights—next to the enormous mass of Mount Rainier, I would set the remarkable expanse of the Olympic Range as it appears from Hurricane Ridge. The morning we were up there the valleys were shrouded in fog and the row of distant peaks, covered in snow and seemingly almost uniform in elevation, looked cold and forbidding. By way of contrast, the clumps of pearly everlasting along the trail looked especially cheerful in the gray morning light, and the black-tailed deer standing out in the meadow looked regal, like an advertisement for an insurance company. During much of our three-mile hike an unseen marmot was making a high-pitched shriek at regular intervals, which I rather enjoyed, though it made me wonder how effective a warning could be when it’s being repeated endlessly.

The fog had lifted by the time we got to the crest of the ridge, and we could easily see Vancouver Island in the distance to the north across the Straights of Juan de Fuca; the spit that forms the harbor of Port Angeles lay nearer at hand just below.

Back in town, we decided to go out on the spit, but the highway heading out that way seemed to run smack-dab into the entry gate of a sprawling paper mill. We turned around and pulled over onto the shoulder, but as we sat by the side of the road pondering our options we noticed that several of the vehicles entering the plant weren’t being driven by mill-worker types. So we turned around again and forged ahead down a narrow road bumpy with railroad tracks and lined on either side with chain-link fence, parking lots, yawning delivery doors, semaphores, tin sheds, orange plastic cones, and men in hard hats wandering around like ants.

Sixty seconds later we emerged on the other side, unharmed, on a long, largely undeveloped split of land. We could see the coast guard station off in the distance, like the bead on a rifle. A good-sized raft of gigantic logs floated in the harbor to our right, contained within an invisible corral. We pulled off the road to watch four or five harbor seals at play, then walked to the other side to look out toward Vancouver Island.

We stopped at another small gravel lot further out along the spit only to be greeted by an amateur rowing club whose members were using it to launch their sleek, narrow vessels.

It was a calm, beautiful, light-filled evening, the kind that makes even the smallest events  interesting, and doing nothing also seems just fine. You say to yourself, “I’m getting to know Port Angeles.” There’s an oil tanker anchored a mile or so down the way—painted an immaculate and heavenly shade of dark blue. And two elderly gentlemen have puttered across the bay in their 40-foot yacht from the recreational marina to get a view of the sunset unobstructed by the wooded mountains that rise up to the south at the edge of town. 

Between the marina and the mill there’s a lumber yard covering many acres. As we drove by it on our way to the spit we could see gargantuan stacks of trees of roughly uniform dimensions, any one of which would have been a prize specimen in Minnesota. But here the piles seemed endless, and Hilary noticed that at various points there were signs, presumably to help the truckers bringing in the logs: Douglas Fir, Western Cedar, Western Hemlock. That struck me a comical for some reason, like a rudimentary taxonomy class on a very grand scale. These were the trees (along with Sitka spruce and red alder) we’d been seeing (and trying to identify)  throughout the trip

.

I love trees, and I don’t even mind seeing them prostrate on the bed of a fast-moving truck. We met many such trucks west of Port Angeles as we headed out toward Neah Bay and the Makah Reservation at the extreme northwestern tip of the contiguous United States. In fact, one of them went off the road at milepost 42 and backed up traffic for hours. Lucky for us, we’d taken an inland route around Crescent Lake and inadvertently bypassed the delay. We learned about the accident on the travel advisory radio station but had no idea where milepost 42 was, and were informed of its location, and our good fortune, by the woman at a drive-through espresso shack in Clallum Bay.

Neah Bay is a quiet reservation town, as far as I can tell, with a genuine fishing fleet as well as a recreational marina. The hike out to the tip of Cape Flattery is the chief draw for many tourists, and it’s certainly haunting and beautiful out there. But for me the most interesting sight to be seen was a canoe—two canoes, in fact, that are on display in the tribal museum. The larger of the two, which holds eight men, is a replica of one used by the Makah perhaps five hundred years ago to hunt whales. It’s based on a vessel that was buried in a mud-slide and only unearthed in recent times.

   

The idea of taking an open canoe out onto the ocean seems a bit insane to me; the thought of using it to bring down a whale even more so. But that’s how the Makah used to make their living, and they’ve been whaling again since 1995, when the courts granted them the right to harvest five whales a year for tribal use.

The rest of the museum is hardly less interesting. Most of the artifacts on display were unearthed from the same mudslide that buried the entire village of Ozette back in 1560. All told, more than 55,000 artifacts were excavated during the eleven-year dig that got going in 1970; anthropologists estimate they span a period of roughly 2,000 years of occupation.

By early afternoon we were headed up into the rainforest. Here it’s typically so wet that trees sprout from the branches of other trees, moss clings to everything, and you can see complex ecosystems developing along a few feet of bark on a fallen giant.

Along one of the short trails near the visitor’s center we met up with two middle-aged men just returning from a backpacking trip.

“How long were you out?” I asked.

“Five days.”

“Did you do a loop?”

“We made a base-camp five miles in and did day trips from there.”

“Much rain?”

“Not really. Though I’ve hiked here in December in full rain gear. The forest glistens!”

“How was it out there this time?”

“Absolutely stunning,” was the uninhibited reply.

I asked if I might take a photo.

“Don’t get too close. We’re pretty ripe.”

To me the most interesting thing in the rainforest was the herbarium-like grown that develops on the bark of trees, both upright and fallen, and the maple groves, where the leaves were starting to turn, adding a few golden speckles to the otherwise green and brown ensemble. 

If I had to chose between forest types, I’d pick the slightly drier and more open woods farther inland, on the other side of the mountains. In fact, the most awesome “woods” we visited was the famous Grove of the Patriarchs in the southeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park. It’s an easy walk in along the lovely Ohanapecosh River, with the morning sunlight streaking through the shadows of the towering evergreens. You cross a suspension foot bridge to an island where the Douglas firs, western hemlocks, and western red cedars, scattered here and there amid less distinguished species, are a thousand years old. A few of them approach fifty feet in girth. Even the bark can be an object of wonder.

The water in the river is a pale, glacial blue. On the way in we spotted two dippers frolicking in a narrow lagoon at the far side of a rocky sandbar. The air was cool and the trees were tall, and the atmosphere was, well, awesome.       

James Salter’s The Hunters

I have long been a fan of James Salter’s fiction, though I’ve thus far avoided contact with his latest novel, All That Is. Salter is now 88, and this is probably his swan song—you never know?—but after reading a few reviews, I’m worried that I would find it uncomfortably similar to his autobiography, Burning the Days (1997). The right time will come.

Looking for a book to read on the plane recently, I pulled out a reissue of Salter’s first novel, The Hunters (1957), which deals with fighter pilots during the last days of the Korean War. I bought it when the reissue came out in 1997, somewhat rewritten, but never gave it another glance. The pages have long since begun to yellow.

It’s a very good book. It has all the qualities that make Salter’s writing seem “great” to his (belatedly) growing body of fans. The sentences are exquisite. There is poetry in the prose. Adjectives and phrases pile on one another to generate a rhapsodic, lyrical atmosphere of the moment.

But reading the book, I was also struck by a few aspects of Salter’s work that are less often noted. For one thing, he has a bead on the world of male competition, rivalry, envy, and self-esteem, arrogant and otherwise, as do few other writers. Even rarer still, I think, is his dedication to exposing a realm beyond those things, in which a man succeeds in exploiting his potential to its utmost, regardless of the impact it has on the crowds surrounding him who are unlikely to have a clue as to what he’s striving for.

The novel describes a few months in the career of an experienced jet pilot named Cleve, who’s called up during the Korean War to serve under his old flight leader Emil. Emil is a talented commander but also a self-aggrandizing hot-shot, more concerned with how many “kills” he can report to his superiors in Tokyo than with his pilots’ safety or any military objective.  

The central conflict of the tale arises when a new recruit, Pell, arrives in Cleve’s unit. Bursting with charm and swagger, Pell soon gathers two dubious “kills.” (Cleve has none.) A wingman, there is some question whether Pell abandoned his position in pursuit of personal glory. He offers a facile defense of his actions, which both Cleve and Emil accept: Emil, because Pell is getting the “kills,” Cleve, because he doesn’t want to sow the seeds of enmity in his unit—an enmity that would appear to many as sheer envy.

But Cleve is privately disgusted by Pell’s behavior and also his character. His notion of aerial combat is on an entirely different plane.

Early on in the book, Cleve is talking to one of his men who admits that his great ambition is to survive the war and return to his wife and children in the States.

For a naked moment, they looked at each other. It had been a genuine confidence, and Cleve knew then how good his chances really were. Whatever the advantages of ability, there was some­thing even more important. It was motive. He had come to meet his enemy, without reservation. The discomfort was there, even after talking to Desmond, of perhaps encountering one that would prove his equal; it was always a chance, but, even so, he felt encouraged. He had not come merely to survive. He sud­denly felt the uplift of being that much above those who had, who lived on a subordinate plane of endeavor.

The loftiness of Cleve’s quest has touches of arrogance and condescension about it; after all, he doesn’t have a wife and kids to go home to. But it also carries an aesthetic dimension. For him, vanquishing the enemy is not an act of patriotism or violence or aggression or justice being done—it’s an act of nobility and panache. I am better than you, and I’ll show you how. World affairs has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of sky and clouds and landscape and maneuver, like a deadly ballet in which only one dancer remains standing.

The unfortunate thing is, the missions Cleve flies come up very short of MIGs, whereas Pell continues to rack up the kills, eventually becoming an ace.

Cleve arrived in Korea with a vaunted reputation, but as the uneventful missions mount up his reputation erodes and he begins to doubt himself. On leave in Tokyo, he meets and falls in love with a Japanese woman—the daughter of an artist to whom his father has provided him with an introduction. He tries to explain the nature of his quest to her but she doesn’t quite understand, and when she asks him, point blank, “And after the war? What then?” he finds himself at a loss to answer.

The two plan to meet the next day, but Cleve cuts his furlough short when he learns that Pell has scored another kill.

I’m not going to reveal anything more about the plot. And I’m not going to rhapsodize about the quality of the prose. Here’s a passage, chosen at random:

The days became hot buzzing. Long, dusty walks crossed them. Shoes scuffed at the dry earth, and the sun shone down heavy as mist. Voices at night carried far through the swollen air, and the weak glow of electric lights lasted late in the rooms. It was not easy to sleep—not like the winter with its hushed, blanketed hours and the metal of the stove creaking from the heat. The in­sects were bad, and there was only Korean ice.

It’s like Hemingway, but with added sophistication.

I’d only like to say that The Hunters is a good book about men. The literati like it…and all the retired fighter-pilots swear by it, too.

Why We Hate Typos

 Everyone hates typos. We react to them in almost the same way we react to creepy insects. Disgust, revulsion, disbelief.

With respect to typos (though not to insects) there might also be an element of vanity involved. Few of us have actually proofed, much less written, a book, though many of us revere them. When we see a typo, we’re dismayed to consider that the underlings who made the book did not treat it with the respect it deserves. The author drew on a lifetime of gritty personal experience, tedious research, or feverish imagination to produce a work of staggering art or thought, and then the interns and proofers who looked it over failed to notice what anyone (even you or me) would notice: there are two ‘and’s in a row here; there’s an “in” missing there; it says “breath” where it should say “breathe.”  

Once you’ve proofed a book or two, you’ll understand how the experts miss such things, because you’ll find yourself missing them, too. Your wife will be looking over your shoulder and she’ll say, “Shouldn’t that be “fool” rather than “tool”? Egad!

I was recently working on a reprint of a novel by a locally famous author. The job required scanning the pages of the original book, using OCR technology to create a Word file, and then correcting the horrible text the software extracted from the image of the page line by line.

Here’s a sample of the scanned but uncorrected text. I see ten typos. (Let me know if you see more.)

Going through the 300-page Word document I found thousands of things to correct. (I also found eight typos in the original book, which was published by Atheneum.) I thought I’d done a pretty good job…but we decided to hand it off to a talented editor and proofer we know, just to make sure.

She found a few things I’d missed—about five hundred of them. In the course of making her corrections I found only three things she’d missed. We were reaching the point of diminishing returns.

How many more typos are out there? I have no idea. As the saying goes, “We’ll fix them in the next printing.”

All of this costs money, of course. And most books lose money anyway. Maybe someday publishers will start issuing two versions of every book. You can get an inexpensive version for 15.95, or wait for the proofed edition, which will cost you a few dollars more.

But the bigger message here is how much we tend to revere the printed word, thinking of it as not only perfect, but hallowed. A typo is a desecration.  It jolts us out of the magical world of literature and reminds us that we’re just looking at ink on a page. We don't linger there for long before heading back in.