Apostle Island Ice Caves

Yes, we were among the 11,300 people who made their way out to the Apostle Islands caves last Saturday—but it isn't like you think.

It happened like this. One morning I saw a photo online somewhere of the blue ice that's been building up along the North Shore. I hadn't seen such a thing since the mid-70s, when two friends and I spent a few winter days in the vicinity of Grand Marais. It was an awesome, unearthly, unforgettable sight.

Hil and I hadn't been on a weekend getaway in several weeks, and I said, "Let's go see the blue ice on Lake Superior!"

Hilary said, "Maybe we can book the 'residence" in Bayfield?"

That wasn't the direction I was thinking about but it sounded like a good idea. It's one of our favorite spots—an entire house, with sauna, overlooking Chequamegon Bay and Madeleine Island.

I called Mike, the Seagull Motel proprietor. The "residence" was booked but he had a room with kitchen and similar view for $70 a night.

"And what's your cancellation policy again?"  I asked.

"If you wake up that morning and don't fell like coming, just call me," he said. "I'll have it booked again in half an hour."

Only later did I see a few posts about the ice caves. I wasn't sure how the crowds would fit into our quiet weekend getaway, and I was vaguely relieved when they closed the caves due to high winds on March 3.

They opened again a few days later.  To go, or not to go?

We got a late start Friday morning, took the freeway north to Duluth and across the harbor on the Bong Bridge. As we puttered through the stoplights in Superior I tried to assemble the scattered brick architectural relics we passed into a pleasing whole, and also to remember where the accordion museum was located.

A half hour down Highway 2 we stopped at the After Hours Ski Trails in Brule and skied a few loops before continuing to Bayfield. It was sunny, the temperature was 31 degrees. Parts of the trail took us through long stretches of poplar, maybe thirty years old. One of the trails closer to the Brule River was lined with mature white pines. Magnificent.

The next morning, tired of over-thinking the issue of crowds and spectacles, we headed north through the Red Cliff reservation and arrived at Mawikwe Road at 7:10. By that time there were perhaps twenty cars lined up alongside the highway. We pulled over and took our place at the end of the line.

It was a 1.4 mile walk down the road to the lake, and I began to wonder if it might have been a better idea to continue on to Meyers Beach Road. But who could say how many cars were already parked there? Mawikwe Road made for a pleasant stroll through the woods and fields, downhill all the way, and the minute we stepped out onto the ice I was glad we'd come.

Snow-covered ice stretched off to the horizon. Small groups of people were passing by further out on the lake, heading to the caves from the Meyers Beach parking lot.

"The caves start right over there," someone said, pointing to reddish cliffs we could see maybe a half-mile to the east.

The sky was clear, the cliffs were in shadow, and the sunlight was streaking across the treetops, sending blue shadows hundreds of feet out across the snowy lake. A week earlier the ice had been bare and park officials were recommending ice cleats or crampons, but it had snowed since then and walking was easy. We'd brought along our ski poles but didn't need them.

The expansiveness of the sky and lake was exhilarating. Blue sky and white snow as far as the eye could see, with Eagle Island floating like an island of greenery in the distance, maybe two miles away and a mile off shore.

If I never make a trip to the arctic, a few half-hour treks like this will have to do.

There wasn't much congestion, except at the entrance to one or two of the caves. In fact, the people added to the fun. I heard one group of young men discussing when they needed to turn around and head home. I don't know where they came in from, but it was four hours away.

Another couple found it impossible to secure a reservation within a hundred miles and ended up driving up from home. They left at 2 a.m.

As for the caves themselves? I wouldn't say they were beautiful. For the most part, the ice was oozing out the sides of the cliffs in grotesque patterns, ribbons, and shapes. The red rock was beautiful, the trees above the face of the cliffs were gorgeous, and the entire ensemble—trees, stone, ice, snow, sky—was sublime. But considered in themselves, the "ice caves" were less than dazzling.

By 10 a.m. we were sitting in Ehrens General Store in Cornucopia eating hot chili out of cardboard cups. On the way back to Bayfield I measured the line of cars parked along the road by Meyers Beach. It was four miles from one end to the other.

That afternoon we drove out across the ice bridge to Big Bay State Park on Madeline Island, where we found one car in the parking lot and open water as far as the eye could see. During our hike along the cliffs through the hemlocks we came upon some of that famous blue ice that had drawn us north in the first place. Ecstasy once again.

   

The Wasted Day

There are days when the time slips by, events take place, this and that, the sun is out and little things get done at random.

Like Saturday, which started for me at dawn on the ski trails at Wirth Park. I'd retrieved my skis from Hoigaard's on Friday afternoon, having brought them in the get the tail-tips reglued. The ski expert took a look at the skis, held them together, noted the fading camber, and said, "Are these still working for you?"

"I just keep shuffling along," I replied.

Which is true. If he saw me in my choppers and felt balaclava, with the pattern of the cotton fishnet long underwear showing through my jeans, he'd understand, and be reminded that having a good kick and glide is of secondary importance. The main thing is getting out on the trails on a regular basis.

Not that I'm a Luddite. When my leather ski boots (right) finally lost a lacing hook, I took the plunge and ordered a new pair of boots from Rossignol (left) and they're fantastic. Felt insoles, no-lace boots, Velcro strap. But in general I endorse the remark Henry David Thoreau once made: You should never take up a sport that requires a new set of clothes. In other words, don't worry about the equipment.

But back to the skiing. That morning I skipped the backwoods trail at Wirth, where the drifted natural snow wasn't deep enough to be groomed and looked pretty icy. I stuck to the loops that have artificial snow a foot deep and, as usual, were groomed before I got there at 7:45.

Back home, I ate a hard-boiled egg sandwich and worked for a bit on the layout of the spring newsletter for nearby Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. That was refreshing. While I was at it, I put a CD called Piano Circus onto the stereo. It was perfect for the morning: a collection of  minimalist neoclassical twenty-first-century compositions for five pianos by various young composers. I'd gotten the recording at the library for a dollar, and I started wondering what might be waiting for me at the library de-acquisition shop at that moment!? Otherwise put, I felt like getting out of the house.

An hour later I was back with a bag of eight CDs: the Cantatas of J.S. Bach, volumes 34, 48, 51, 28, 33, 63, 59, and 39. I already own volume 32 in the same series.

You may point out that if you've heard one cantata, you've heard them all.

I guess I''ll find out.

I also snagged The New American Cookbook by Joan Nathan (whom I've never heard of) and a book called Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend.

Checking my emails, I discovered that the results had arrived from the DNA sample I'd sent in on a whim to Ancestry.com months ago. There weren't any tremendous anomalies, I'm afraid. Not a drop of Native American, Jewish, Neanderthal, or Japanese blood anywhere amid my 700,000 genetic units.

According to the report, I'm 55% Scandinavian, which isn't surprising considering my dad's parents came from Sweden. I'm 17% Irish, which goes with my mother's McIlvenna heritage. Great Britain accounts for 8%—shooting back into the past through my crazy maternal great-grandmother Galligan, I suppose. Then we have 14% Western European (i.e. German and French, which are indistinguishable genetically), 3% Iberian, 2% from the Caucasus (which explains why I loved the film Jason and the Argonauts), and 1% Finland/ N.W. Russia.

Taking a closer look at the vague regions outlined on the website maps accompanying the data, I noted that my "Iberian" genes could well be from Perigord, and my 5% excess of Scandinavian genes might have come from Scotland. (The name McIlvenna ultimately derives from the Scottish clan Macbeth.)

I next set to work for a few hours on the layout and cover for a book of nature poems. Haiku, in fact. I called a handyman as a first step toward fixing our kitchen cabinets, which appear to be falling off the wall.

Nothing interesting came in the mail, but UPS delivered a package at mid-afternoon inside of which were Hilary's binoculars. We'd sent them to the Nikon factory in Los Angeles weeks ago to get an eyepiece repaired. (Lifetime warranty.) When I glanced at the return address on Wilshire Boulevard, I felt warmer.

The afternoon sun was streaming into the back part of the house by that time, and it occurred to me that it was time to log off and start cleaning up the kitchen, which begins to look pretty crummy at this time of day.

There was no need to cook anything. I'd made a poor man's cassoulet the previous day with leeks, chicken, bacon, carrots, yellow squash, and three kinds of beans. I added some powdered ancho chili, cayenne, cumin, and dried thyme in lieu of the chili paste mentioned in the recipe.

When Hilary got home from work we ate.

After dinner we "dressed up"—good shoes, sport coat ... but no tie—and headed downtown to take in one of the GREAT compositions of all time, Verdi's Requiem. We arrived early enough to listen in as the conductor, Roberto Abbado, was interviewed in Orchestra Hall's new Atrium. This beautiful space has a high ceiling and glass walls looking out across Peavey Plaza toward Nicollet Mall. Buses pass in the dark, the lights of Caribou Coffee beam in the distance, and you know that people are enjoying a fine dinner at Vincent or Brit's Pub not far from where you stand.

I found Abbado's comments on the current opera scene especially interesting. The gist of it was: we don't have the great opera singers we once did. There are still great singers, but the field is much thinner. He thought it was worth pointing out that Jonas Kaufman, a German, was recruited to sing the tenor role in a recent opera production in Rome. "Kaufman is great, yes, but thirty years ago that would not have happened."

We ran into a former client of mine on the way down the aisle before the performance and he told us a few jokes in his unmistakable Hungarian accent before we found our seats.  

    

As for the music itself, I couldn't begin to describe its force or beauty. Others have. (Read a fine description of it here.) I have no idea which section is the "Dies Irae" and which is the "Tuba Mirum." But I do know that the cavalcade of musical thrills is virtually nonstop.

We were sitting in the seventh row and had a very good look at the four solo vocalists. I've heard the piece live several times before but had forgotten how consistently involved these soloists are in the ninety-minute tour de force, singing solos, duets, and trios right and left—unlike Brahms' German Requiem, in which the solos figure less prominently.

Oscar Gunchers 2015

As long as there are Oscars, there will continue to be Oscar-gunchers.

If big-budget romances like Titanic take home the statues, pundits complain about commercialism. If unusual, high-quality films like Birdman and Boyhood win, they argue that the Academy has lost touch with the viewing public.

The New York Times recently ran an article declaiming a "gap" between movie-goers and the academy. Duh! There's supposed to be a gap. If the point were merely to celebrate the movies everyone likes, there would be no need for an Academy or a vote. The awards could be given out based on box-office receipts.

The point is to reward and celebrate artistry, not Saturday matinee entertainment or least-common-denominator pandering.

And no matter who wins, the results are always fodder for social analysis from several (not multiple) points of view.

This year's Oscar ceremony was one of the best. Perhaps I say that because I actually saw most of the films in contention. The MC, Neil Patrick Harris, while not in the same category as Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, or Billy Crystal, did a better-than-average job of keeping the event moving along. The worst thing about his shtick was the running joke about his own predictions, which were ensconced in an inviolable Plexiglas case on stage. It was harmless but really, who cares?

Before the show the red carpet was agog with beautiful women in odd and sometimes striking dresses saying they were just there to "enjoy the moment." It reached a high (or low) point when the star of Fifty Shades of Gray, Dakota Johnson, tried to convince her mom, Melanie Griffith, to see the film.

Melanie's own mom, Tippi Hedren, is from New Ulm, Minnesota. I remember Melanie herself as an eight-year-old girl in Arthur Penn's minor masterpiece, Night Moves. These are the thoughts that go through people's minds as they reconnect with the Oscars, year after year. It's part of what makes the movies fun.

We didn't have to look at Jack Nicholson's grinning maw this year: that's good news (though Jack was in a long string of great films back in the seventies, as everyone knows). And the tiresome Meryl Streep references were kept largely under control. I even liked most of the songs, though the tribute to The Sound of Music seemed arbitrary and lame, Lady Gaga or not.

I suppose in 2042 , if the planet still exists, they'll do a tribute to Wayne's World?

Bunching the best picture candidates into groups was weird but (once again) moved the show along. The clips were uniformly great. And awards recipients voiced a large number of social concerns with sincerity and true feeling--a tradition dating back to the Brando era at least.

Artists still seem to be thrilled to receive these awards, and chagrined when they don't, even if the 36 million who watched the show have "lost touch." Michael Keaton didn't win—too bad—but the clip they showed of him shouting at Emma Stone might have given us an indication why.

I'm not sure that Birdman was the best film I saw last year but it might have been. It was powerful and idiosyncratic—the kind of film that people used to complain never won. It belongs in the company of several very different but equally powerful films that were released last year: Mr. Turner, Selma, Ida, and Boyhood. Two Days, One Night falls into its own minimalist category. Meanwhile, Wild, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, and Interstellar are also "keepers" on grounds of craftsmanship and entertainment value alone. 

Grand Budapest Hotel? Rather a dud, I'm afraid.

Among the documentaries, Verunga and Looking for Vivian Meyers were good, and I heard good things about Timbuktu. Evidently CitizenFour was even better.

     

 In short, it's been an extraordinary year at the movies, and the Academy did a good job of celebrating it.

The Hapsburg Stuff

You can see the billboards along the freeways throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul: a beautiful young woman, head turned skyward, lips parted, against a rich green-gray background.

You don't really see the shadowy face of the god who's giving the woman such pleasure as you whiz by. Your attention is given over to the woman herself, and to the golden words to her left -The Hapsburgs, Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe's Greatest Dynasty.

The show arrived at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a few weeks ago. It's well worth seeing, though some viewers will be disappointed, after having spent $20 for the opportunity to tour the exhibit, to find that much of it is devoted to decorative arts.

The show's curators were undoubtedly well aware of the challenges they faced in presenting a selection of knickknacks that were accumulated over the course of six centuries by a royal house largely known for its overweening arrogance and imperialistic oppression of religious and ethnic groups lying within its dynastic borders, including the Aztecs, the Incas, the Pilippinoes, the Dutch, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Czechs, the Moslems, the Ashkenazi Jews, and various Protestant groups, among many others. 

The curators chose to minimize the reactionary political tendencies of the collectors involved, which is probably just as well. It's hard to say how far the Hapsburgs diverged from their Bourbon, Visconti, Hohenzollern, and Romanov peers, and in any case, this is a show about art.

Of course, there are timelines and maps, and a few notable rulers are highlighted in an effort to focus our attention and to give some sort of historical context to the artifacts themselves. But the emphasis is on the "stuff," which is as it should be.

For my money, the paintings make the show worthwhile. The Giorgione canvas "The Philosophers" is alone almost worth the price of admission. Giorgione died at 33, leaving behind hardly more than a handful of canvases, several of which have been described as enigmatic or mysterious. "The Philosophers" is one of them.

Who are these men, we might ask ourselves? Probably better not to know, but remain in a state of puzzlement mixed with awe. What's important to note above all is the distinctly Venetian luster of the painting, a quality Giorgione's work shares with his predecessors Giovanni and Gentile Bellini and the early Titian. It's a sort of vibrant matte that doesn't come across in photographs and posters.

The Velasquez across the way has a less enigmatic subject—the young Maria Teresa, Infanta of Spain at the time (1648-51) but the quality of the painting itself is equally remarkable. In fact, looking closely at the young woman's coral necklace and the doodahs in her hair, I was amazed at how such loose and confident daubs could generate such a delicate and compelling effect.

One of the guards, a short elderly woman, asked me to step back from the canvas. "You probably don't realize how close that jacket you're holding is to the artwork. You should keep a foot back, at least."

"This is a good eighteen inches," I said, looking down at my coat. But I'd probably stepped back when she addressed me. "Don't worry, I'll keep back," I reassured her.

Next on the list of wonders would be the Correggio that appears on the posters. The skin alone is SO good it puts to shame Titian's "Diana" hanging next to it, if such a thing is possible.

Titian makes up for it in the next room, however, where early portraits of Isabella d'Este and a gentleman who's name I don't recall hang side by side.

And at the far side of the room hangs Caravaggio's rendering of Christ receiving the crown of thorns. It's characteristically dramatic and shadowy and smooth, and gleefully overwrought, like a Tarentino movie. I didn't much like it.

In the midst of these varied wonders, the Holbein portrait of Jane Seymour looks a little tame. Still, how often do we get to see a Holbein?

These paintings and quite a few others cover the walls, while the bulk of the floor space is given over to suits of armor, coral-handled daggers, astronomical devices, drinking goblets crafted out of ostrich eggs, ornate silver crucifixes, ceremonial gold-plated platters, and other generally useless and vaguely uninteresting objets d'art.

There are halberts, rifles, and ornate robes worn by members of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which was established in 1430 back when Burgundy was the richest country in Europe and had not yet fallen to the Hapsburgs. A huge carriage fills half of one room, while two suits of armor mounted on model horses are frozen in jousting mode in the center of another one. This kind of thing looks better in the movies than in real life, I'm afraid. And the fact that the carriage I'm looking at is the actual vehicle that transported so-and-so back in 1742 doesn't have much purchase, at least not to me.   

A special difficulty presented by the exhibit is the fact that the Hapsburg domains were so scattered and enduring. A map in the first room moves us through the various accretions and losses of the dynasty during its 600-year history in about three minutes. It's fun to watch, but not very informative. (If you've got seven minutes to spare you can see a better one on YouTube here.)

It would have been less innovative and dynamic, but more useful, to have a series of maps printed on the wall next to the timeline, so we could see when and how the various Austrian, Burgundian, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Slavic pieces of the empire arrived, departed, or split apart. Indeed, it would have been useful to have such a display several times, because once we've moved into the main halls of the exhibit, we start asking ourselves questions that would never have occurred to us a few minutes earlier. "Now, which Ferdinand is that?" "And what exactly IS the Holy Roman Empire?"

The upshot of such quibbles is that you can draw as much stimulation from the current MIA exhibit as you've got a mind to. Home from the show, I pulled out an old anthology of essays edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper called The Golden Age of Europe: from Elizabeth to the Sun King. I also located an over-sized book about Velazquez but it's so old (c. 1943) that most of the images are in black and white, and the colored plates have been "tipped in," as they used to say.

Perhaps as stimulating as anything was this interview with the last living Hapsburg that appeared the other day in the New York Times. 

Once curious aspect of the show lies in how dramatically it stands in contrast with the lonely Vermeer hanging a hundred yards away in the lobby of the Institute. There are no Dutch paintings in the show, as far as I can remember, though I'm sure the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna owns some. The Dutch fought the Hapsburgs for nearly a century before achieving their independence once and for all in 1648. It was an ugly fight.

It has often been argued that the Dutch Republic was the first modern state--oligarchical, commercial, tolerant, middle-class. One might be tempted to consider whether the Hapsburg exhibit highlights all the things a modernizing Europe struggled to escape from--only to put Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler in their place. 

Philip Levine, and Two Films about Work

You probably think I've been lazing around all weekend. That I drove up north with Hilary to Woman Lake, cooked some good meals, skied a few miles and then sat around a rented cabin reading about the Blaskett Islands or "The Narrow Road to the Deep North."

Well, it was sort of like that.

We even ate some bacon--rare treat--with our wild-rice pancakes from the White Earth Reservation.

We arrived back home to find that the poet Phillip Levine had died. He was adept at drawing our attention to things we might otherwise never know about work. When I read the news, I immediately pulled out his book of poems, What Work Is, and read a good ways into it. I should have done it sooner. These are vivid and lyrical creations drawn from his experience at a number of industrial occupations that you and I would shy away from.

And this reminded me that two films I saw recently were both about that subject which Maynard G. Krebs used to refer to in a terrified squeal: work.

Virunga, is a documentary about a national park in the Congo that provides habitat for a healthy but dwindling population of rare mountain gorillas. The keeper obviously loves his animals, and the gorillas love him.

The park's director is cut from a different piece of cloth. His bearing is aristocrat, his language complex. Yet it's obvious he's as dedicated to the gorillas as anyone, and prepared to sacrifice his life for them if necessary.

And it may be necessary. Park rangers are killed by poaches regularly in those parts, and the park is also under siege by British oil interests that are drilling nearby. Meanwhile, a group of rebels who refer to themselves as M23 are operating on the northeast fringes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the park is located.

 What began as a documentary about animal protection is now bringing itself to bear on the disregard for both wildlife and human life in the vicinity. A French journalist involved in the project interviews oil workers and rebels while equipped with a hidden camera to record their disregard for law and their collusion with one another.

It's a nasty situation, and when the rebels advance, moving past the park headquarters while artillery booms in the distance, the uncertainty and fear are palpable.

Virunga remains a compelling story about the perils and rewards of wildlife preservation, but it also gives us a first-hand look at how unstable the underlying political terrain really is. Between the danger to the gorillas and the violence perpetrated against the villagers, we hardly have time to ask ourselves how much of the profit from the oil will ever reach those whose lifeways are being ruined to gain access to it.

   

The second film about "work" I saw was more personal. In Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a emotionally fragile woman who's been on medical leave for depression. She returns to work only to find that she's been the focus of a bizarre campaign. The company has informed its employees that it cannot afford to pay the traditional year-end bonus unless Sandra is dismissed. Forced to chose, all but three of her colleagues vote for the bonus.

Due to irregularities in the way the vote was presented,  and with the urging of a friend, Sandra arranges to have a second vote taken the following Monday. That gives her the weekend to visit her workmates individually and try to convince them to forgo their bonuses.

The bulk of the film deals with how Sandra's friends and colleagues respond to that request. But it's no less seriously concerned with examining Sandra's own lack of confidence and self-worth. She suffers from anxiety attacks and pops Xanax with startling regularity. It's all she can manage not to start crying in front of her children.

Her husband drives her from house to house, lavishing his support in ways that Sandra finds almost patronizing. "Why would anyone want to give up their much-needed bonus for me?" she asks herself repeatedly. Yet she forges ahead.

We soon become mesmerized by Sandra's fluctuating emotions. And it's also fascinating to catch glimpses of how her co-workers and their families live. By the time Monday rolls around, Sandra has made contact with most of them. The argument she presents is not compelling. Yet in her unassuming way Sandra forces her workmates to recognize the very human dilemma they all face, whichever way they decide to turn.   

Then there's the vote. Happy ending? Perhaps, but not in the way any of us could have anticipated.  

The Loppet

The Loppet is a fabulous festival that takes place every winter at Theodore Wirth Park—depending on the weather. The events include several high-class cross-country ski races, a dogsled race, some ski joering, and a fat tire bike race across the frozen lakes.

This year the snow wasn't so good, which made it impossible to ski the traditional course that starts at the chalet and ends up at Lake Calhoun. But they'd been making snow in the park all winter, which made it possible to run several of the long races as multi-lap loops through the park.

The park is just down the hill from our house, and I walked down to see the Hoigaard's marathon on Saturday morning. It was quite a scene. Someone was grilling sausages on the terrace of the chalet, and the smell of grease and smoke in the winter air reminded me of Boy Scout camp. A pleasant reminder.

There were waxing stations for the contestants, REI was giving away metal drinking cups at a booth. 

And of course, there were skiers whizzing past out on the course, and also wandering here and there in their colorful, form-fitting outfits. It all reminded me of some paintings I saw once on the walls of a palace in Ferrara.

I stood by a fierce downhill corner for a while, and the two men standing next to me seemed to know quite a few of the skiers. I heard them talking about a guy named "Toren" and I was tempted to butt into the conversation. It might have been a long lost relation from Sweden! I later found out that one of the racers was four-time U.S. Olympian Torin Koos. He won the sprints but was aced out of the marathon championship by a local boy.  

Later in the day we went down with some friends to ski the Luminary Loppet, a non-competitive shuffle around Lake of the Isles that's made more interesting by the presence of hundreds of luminaria—candles protected by ice enclosures in various shapes and sizes.

The chief thrill of this event is being out after dark, wandering the lake past innumerable candles in the midst of hundreds of people all of whom are wearing plastic tubes that glow in several colors. The organizers have punctuated the trek with points of interest including the Ice Cropolis, Ice Henge, fire dancers, and Ice-ter Island.

There are blazing fires at most of these featured "stops." Some serve cocoa; at others you're given a free Kind Bar. (They're pretty good!)

No doubt for many of the adults, the Surly Beer Tent is a highlight. You get a free beer and a salted nut roll, though it seems to me the high-decibel hip-hop band was a little out of place.

Due to the miserable snow-cover, the event organizers dropped the idea of skiing and instructed everyone to walk. That might have been a good idea. I talked to one woman who did the entire loop with her kids, on skates.