MIA: Hearts of Our People

The current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts features a collection of artworks crafted by Native American women ranging from traditional Navaho weavings and Inuit sealskin jackets to an automobile painted in the style of a Maria Martinez pot.

A healthy proportion of the artworks showcase the traditional beadwork, quillwork, and decorative ceramics that we might expect to find in such a show, but the quality is uniformly topnotch, and the range of indigenous cultures that have been sampled , from Florida to the Northwest Coast and beyond, is impressive.      

Perhaps a lesser number of pieces, while exploiting traditional materials and techniques, also nurture a conceptual element: a machine gun, broken chards of china made of buffalo bones, post-modern adobe towers, a cartoon image of the moon. A few pieces look entirely traditional from a distance; only when you get up close do you see you're looking at a finely detailed acrylic painting rather than an elaborate century-old piece of beadwork.

There are poems hanging on the walls, some of them are recited on tape loops in the original languages through speakers nearby. In the first room you enter you meet up with a colorful stack of blankets at least fifteen feet high symbolizing nothing more, I guess,  than the comfort of blankets.

And there are high quality artworks that were created explicitly for the tourist trade, or at the request of ethnologists hoping to preserve examples of techniques that were in danger of being lost—for example, a series of exquisite strip baskets made in 1890 by a woman well-known at the time for her skill in this vanishing art.

Some of the pieces illustrate collaborations between native artists and established "white" industries, an example being a mahogany dining room chair fitted with seat- and back-panels decorated with Mikmak quillwork patterns.

And then there are creations that are totally "off the wall," for example, a vast field of small leather cups—it takes up a good portion of a room—connected in pairs by thongs vaguely  resembling the yarn often threaded through a winter coat to keep a small child's mittens together. What?!?

One of my favorite pieces consisted of four wooden pedestals  standing in front of glass-covered chalkboards with images behind and Cherokee words written on the glass. Thinking caps are suspended above each pedestal, and the mirrors are rimmed with images of human hands. I don't know what it means, but it looks cool.

Tradition, continuity, innovation, confrontation. It's a fascinating mix. And the exhibit is enhanced by video displays. Some are triptychs of the landscapes—desert canyons,  deep spruce woods— from which some of these artists draw their inspirations, others broadcast interviews of the women who made the art, often several generations of the same family.  

Such a concatenation of objects, cultures, styles, and themes is bound to evoke all sorts of aesthetic and anthropological quandaries. Though the scene I've been describing might sound schizophrenic, with radical and traditional objects vying for attention, the exhibition rooms are spacious, and the curious juxtapositions heighten the appeal of individual works, traditional and post-modern alike.

For some viewers, the exhibit is likely to evoke fond memories. I was reminded of the homes of Indian families Hilary and I have visited in Jemez Pueblo, Acoma, the Hopi village of Walpi, and even farm fields in SW Colorado where heaps of Ancestral Pueblan pottery are unearthed every year during spring plowing.  I recall a crisp Easter morning at San Ildefonso Pueblo (Maria Martinez's home town), where we stood with a few other tourists and villagers as forty-odd bare-chested male dancers emerged from the central kiva wearing pine boughs around their necks, deer antlers on their heads, and some slight wrapping around their torsos. Just then bells started ringing and people began to emerge from the church at the far end of the plaza wearing traditional "Anglo" dress.

Two of the locals standing nearby invited us into their two-room adobe home to share a brief meal of stewed lamb and hominy. I will never forget the shaft of morning light beam in through a window to illuminate the tidy square of bright green Jell-O on my paper plate.     

Camping on the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge or in the hills of Valle Vidal, or on the banks of the Chama river. The glint of the sun, the smell of the sage brush, the endless miles of stunted piñon and juniper.  It isn't that hard to make contact with the spirits of the ancestors, even if they aren't your ancestors, when you hear a rush of wind coming up a canyon and a flock of pinyon jays appear from around the bend and whiz by, only barely recognizable in the dusk. Thoughts of the Barrier art in Horseshoe Canyon, which predates most of the items in the exhibit by centuries, and of the Hubbell Trading post on the Arizona-New Mexico border, where (among other places) notions of turning household items into marketable works of art gathered steam, fill the head.

Meanwhile, contemplation of the artistry exhibited by a single basket, shawl, or pot, brings to mind hours of tedious repetitive activity resulting in works of remarkable vibrancy, endearing and covetable at first glance. As if the harmony of the universe could be restored once and for all by placing our stone-ground corn and  parched wild rice in the proper containers.

The flamboyant colors of the clothing are also appealing, though no one is likely to wear such garments to the grocery story—other than Robert Bly, perhaps.  Yet their beauty and ceremonial "power" is undeniable, and almost irresistible. Quite unlike the glittering silk robes on display at the recent China show, for example, these pieces carry the rough-hewn facets and the earthy grit of the materials out of which they're made, and it gives them an autochthonic authenticity that any Boy Scout could appreciate.

One of the central themes of the show is that female native artists have remained in the shadows too long, considering how stunning their aesthetic accomplishments often are. This may well be true, at least in the world of museums. But anthropologists and collectors have taking a keen interest in artists and their lineages now for at least four or five generations.

The massive, full-color, 340-page book that accompanies the show isn't cheap, but the text is dense and scholarly, fleshing out the background to the artists, their works, and the cultures from which they arose. It also includes photographs of quite a few pieces that aren't included in the show we saw the other day. I presume they'll join the exhibition as it moves on to Nashville, Tulsa, and Washington, DC.  

Meet My New Friend

Life is peppered with serendipitous meetings, which sometimes prove long-lasting and rewarding. I believe I had one just the other day. On the basis of some passing reference that I no longer remember, I requested three books from the library (this is the boring part; bear with me):

Essays on Kant and Hume, by Lewis White Beck

David Hume: Philosophical Historian

The Essays of Hume

They all came in on the same day, and having nothing better to do, I drove over to the library to pick them up.

The first was a disappointment. I expected to receive a volume by a world-class expert explicating in detail how Hume was right and Kant was wrong about almost everything. It became obvious immediately that Beck was a Kant enthusiast.

The second was much better. It explores the fact, using the Scottish master's own texts, that although Hume (rightly) debunked the concept of causality, he went on to write a six-volume history of England in which events follow one another in seemingly causal fashion. Recognizing that this was a dense but valuable piece of scholarship, not to be absorbed in an afternoon, I ordered a hardcover copy online--as it happens, the only one currently available in the United States.

But the real surprise was the third volume. I had requested the essays of David Hume, but what I received was the essays of Leigh Hunt! Strange. The call number was correct: 824.0 H94. This volume, published in 1905, was mis-cataloged from the start, and had been sitting on the shelf with the wrong title and the wrong author for more than a century! 

The book still had a card in the front pocket. Someone had checked it out on March 18, 1948. Probably was a surprised as I was when he or she took a look at it.

My first thought was to toss it in the return bin on my way out to the car. But that would be an insult to the workers who had gone to the trouble of retrieving it from the Minitex off-site Minnesota Library Access Center downtown, five miles away, placed it into a gray plastic tub, loaded it onto a truck, and shipped it off to Golden Valley, where another low-paid worker had rolled it out on a metal cart and shelved it in precisely the slot appropriate to the number on my library card.

I had heard of Leigh Hunt, of course.  If you'd asked me, I would have placed him vaguely in the third tier of English essayists of the Romantic era, below Thomas de Quincy (second tier) and also Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt (first tier). But I'd never actually read him. Well, here was my chance.

The first essay in the book was devoted to the geranium sitting on Hunt's window sill. Seven pages on that subject. I liked it. Even on the first page Hunt hits upon one of the cardinal virtues of the geranium: the smell of its leaves (similar to that of a tomato plant) which remain on your fingers after you've touched it.

But Hunt hasn't touched it. He's only thinking about touching it:

"We perceive, in imagination, the scent of those good-natured leaves, which allow you to carry off their perfume on your fingers; for good-natured they are, in that respect above almost all plants, and fittest for the hospitalities of your rooms. The very feel of the leaf has a household warmth in it something analogous to clothing and comfort."

As I read further, this was the tone I encountered throughout: accurate descriptions by a sensitive observer who has moved beyond the "knowing" irony and cynicism  of sophisticated commentators to present us with experience in its freshness and innocence.

Emboldened, I committed myself to a travel piece of 32 pages a little deeper in the collection called "A Walk from Dulwich to Brockham."  I do not know where either of these municipalities are, though I believe Hunt was traversing, on foot, with two companions, a stretch of countryside southeast of London proper that might, today, be referred to as the North Downs.

This essay intrigued me because I have myself written longish essays about places no one has been to, with digressions at every step of the way about flora and fauna, architecture, history, and chance meetings with the locals. I have always wondered whether such things can really hold the interest of someone who hasn't been there. Well, Hunt's piece held mine.

On the one hand, his descriptions are peppered with philosophical asides, for example: "Remoteness is not how far you go in point of ground, but how far you feel yourself from your commonplaces."

He praises out-of-the-way country museums:

In going to see the pictures in a beautiful country village, people get out of their town common-places, and are better prepared for the perception of other beauties, and of the nature that makes them all."  

On the ecclesiastical architecture of the day: "A barn is a more classical building than a church with a fantastical steeple to it."

Passing a field of poppies:

"It looked like a bed for Proserpina glow of melancholy beauty, containing a joy perhaps beyond joy. Poppies, with their dark ruby cups and crowned heads, the more than wine color of their sleepy silk, and the funeral look of their anthers, seem to have a meaning about them beyond other flowers. They look as if they held a mystery at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe."

Hunt is convinced, as are many experts today, that walking itself is the cure for many ills:

"Illness, you know, does not hinder me from walking; neither does anxiety. On the contrary, the more I walk, the better and stouter I become; and I believe if everybody were to regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, as a signal from nature to get up and contend with it in that manner, people would find the benefit of it. This is more particularly the case if they are lovers of Nature, as well as pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties in which her visible world abounds."

He knows the history of the region, and there are plenty of references to Elizabeth and Charles II, as well as to local grandees that few modern readers will have heard of, but Hunt has a knack for shaping an anecdote to give it meaning regardless of the specifics of the  historical background. He also chats with the coachmen and innkeepers,  and gives them credit for being as sensitive and eager for "the good life" as any blueblood. 

In one village he tours a church with an organ, and learns that the organist is the son of the parish clerk.

"When I asked his sister, a modest, agreeable-looking girl, who showed us the church, whether he could not favor us with a voluntary, she told me he was making hay ! What do you say to that ?"

Hunt presumes that the father too, was a day-laborer, and had been organist before his son took over the job, "out of a natural love of music." He then paints the following scene:

 I had fetched the girl from her tea. A decent-looking young man was in the room with her ; the door was open, exhibiting the homely comforts inside; a cat slept before it, on the cover of the garden well, and there was plenty of herbs and flowers, presenting altogether the appearance of a cottage nest.

At this point Hunt reflects on the role played by music in the lives of these village people:

 "I will be bound that their musical refinements are a great help to the enjoyment of all this; and that a general lift in their tastes, instead of serving to dissatisfy the poor, would have a reverse effect, by increasing the sum of their resources "

Arriving in the village of Streatham, where Samuel Johnson spent a great deal of time with his friends, the Thrales, Hunt makes an effort to find someone with personal impressions of the great man. After a few misfires, he meets up with "a decent-looking old man, with a sharp eye and a hale countenance, who, with an easy, self-satisfied air, as if he had worked enough in his time and was no longer under the necessity of over-troubling himself, sat indolently cracking stones in the road."

Among other bits of minutia, Hunt learns that Johnson would sometimes "have his dinner brought out to him in the park, and set on the ground; and while he was waiting for it, would lie idly, and cut the grass with a knife." According to Hunt's elderly informant, Dr. Johnson's  manners were "very good-natured, and sometimes so childish, that people would have taken him for 'an idiot, like.'”

At another point in his ramble Hunt pondered the case of a local grandee, considered to be generous and kind by the villagers, who nevertheless prohibited access to the local churchyard (except on Sundays) because the path passed in front of his house. "How his act of power squares with his kindness, I do not know," Hunt remarks. "Very good-natured people are sometimes very fond of having their own way."

Hunt's curiosity seems boundless. He even goes so far as to read, and reflect on, the sentiments expressed on the gravestones he passes in the churchyards. Though the story is too complicated to describe in detail, after reviewing the facts related on one such headstone—a story that Hunt suspects his contemporaries would consider unduly sentimental—he delivers the following aside:

"There is more friendship and virtue in the world than the world has yet got wisdom enough to know and be proud of; and few things would please me better than to travel all over England, and fetch out the records of it."

In short, I like this guy: his temperament, his powers of observation, his easy-going style. 

But I was disconcerted to discover that Hunt has developed a reputation as an irresponsible scoundrel.  He is described by the discerning critic John Bayley as "a careless butterfly sort of man, abounding in fine feelings, who loved his fellow men and let them pick up the pieces." 

But wait! Bayley isn't describing Leigh Hunt in this passage. He's describing Harold Skimpole, a character in the novel Bleak House. Dickens claimed he had drawn Skimpole as an exact likeness of his friend Hunt. I rather doubt it. The bio posted by the Poetry Foundation observes that Hunt produced, during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, "a large body of poetry in a variety of forms: narrative poems, satires, poetic dramas, odes, epistles, sonnets, short lyrics, and translations from Greek, Roman, Italian, and French poems." He was the indefatigable publisher and editor of several liberal magazines, including the influential Examiner, in which he published early works of both Keats and Shelley. He also spent two years in prison as a result of one of his inflammatory editorials.

The bio goes on to state that Hunt "has probably had more influence on the development of the personal essay than any other writer," and describes his Autobiography (1850) as "perhaps his best work and arguably the best autobiography of the century." In another on-line source we read that “his death was simply exhaustion.” 

Hardly sounds like a frivolous and conniving wastrel to me.

Bastille Day on a Bicycle

It's that time of the year again--Bastille Day--when we celebrate freedom, diversity, cosmopolitanism, spontaneity,  and fellow-feeling, through music, food, wine, and just hanging out together. Entirely without premeditation,  Hilary and I began the weekend on Friday morning with a bike trip downtown along the North Cedar Trail, which is currently closed while they begin work on the SW Corridor light rail—the most expensive public works project in the history of the state. Well, that's what tax money is for! To make it possible for us venture into town, and out of town, without resorting to our cars.

The Walker Sculpture Garden made for a fitting urban pre-Bastille Day stop. The south end (see above) retains the grassy swards, crushed limestone walkways, rectangular layout, and old-fashioned humanist sculptures, that remind me of, yes, Paris.  The north end has been replanted with prairie forbs and grasses, and on a blazing Friday morning ... I didn't much like it.

   

Following this excursion we stopped for lunch at an Ecuadorian café in Bryn Mahr, a mysterious neighborhood  just across the freeway west of downtown that's neither utterly run-down nor entirely chic. The café is equipped with a wood-burning oven, but the sidewalk tables have always been teetery. The quesadilla I ordered—five cheeses, chicken, and carmelized onions—was good. Next time maybe I'll order a pizza.

Arriving home, I found a box waiting for me on the door-step: two new books to review for a local literary magazine. I knew what was inside: The Storm by Columbian novelist Tomás Gozález and Night School by Hungarian author Zsófia Bán.  I've never before received two books written by people both of whom have accents in both their first and last names. It's a mark of the cosmopolitan world we live in.

Saturday morning we took a hike across the open fields at Highland Park Reserve in Bloomington, where prairie plants seem entirely appropriate. They grow there naturally . An osprey couple was occupying the platform erected for that purpose, though I didn't see any chicks. And the lead plants growing among the grasses were heavy with pollen.  But the most extraordinary thing we saw was two bright yellow goldfinches in an extended chase that ended in a confrontational grapple fifty feet in the air. It lasted for five seconds at least, during which time the birds, fluttering their wings to maintain position while they clawed at each other aggressively,  were essentially in free fall. Finally one of the birds flew off.

On Sunday—Bastille Day proper— we found ourselves, appropriately enough, standing at 8 a.m. in front of the one-time home of Pierre Bottineau, one of Minnesota's founding fathers. Sometimes referred to as the last of the mountain men, Bottineau was a Métis—half French, half Ojibwe or Cree. He founded both Maple Grove and Red Lake Falls, once owned a big chunk of property along what is now Robert Street in downtown St. Paul, and developed a reputation during his lifetime as a skilled, sober-minded, fearless, and utterly reliable leader and guide.  We made a mental note to return sometime to learn more about Bottineau when the house was open (Saturdays between noon and 4)  and proceeded along the gorgeous and hilly bike trails of Elm Creek Regional Park.

And Monday morning, feeling the need to extend Le Weekend in the French manner, we drove out to the community beach in Wayzata, on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, to ride the rail trails once again, this time to Mound and back. Afternoon thunderstorms had been forecast, and the west wind, coming in across the enormous lake, was already filling our nostrils with the heady aroma of seaweed and dead fish. The ride itself was much more pleasant that I'd remembered it, perhaps because it was cool at 8 a.m. and the weekend crowds were nowhere to be seen. During some stretches I felt like I was riding through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens, not the least bit envious, mind you, simply appreciative of the architecture and the landscaping.

Only a few thousand affluent people can enjoy living on this wonderful— if over-crowded— lake, but anyone with a bicycle can enjoy riding alongside it for an hour or two, while avoiding the often  noisy and belligerent weekend boaters and the astronomical real-estate taxes. That's the nature of the community-spirited, post-Bastille Day world we live in.

Later, sitting with a latte on a bench downtown alongside stock-brokers and yoga instructors, we enjoyed the breeze and cringed at the deafening whistle of a passing train.

I know, there's trouble in paradise. Most people don't care what I think about Tomás Gozález or Zsófia Bán, and there are thousands fleeing violence in Central America, just looking for refuge, not a bike trail through a park.

But now the thunderheads are arriving. Rumbling from every direction over the purr of the air conditioner.  A glass of cheap white Burgundy in hand—although no genuine  Burgundy, even the most generic, is all that cheap. I'd turn off the computer and unplug it, just in case lightning strikes, but it's getting old, and I'm afraid it might never come on again .... As I step out onto the front stoop to get a dose of the rain first hand, I see my neighbor Carlos and his son arriving home in their pickup truck from a long day at work: maybe tending to one of those lake-front homes that Hilary and I were peddling past a few hours ago.

Stopping to Smell the Lindens

In some vague and irrational way, I always thought it was MY fault when, year after year, the linden tree beside the driveway failed to produce that glorious fragrance for which it's famous. Did I cut back the low-hanging branches too recklessly? Did I neglect to fertilize? (But who fertilizes an eighty-foot tree?) The long green wings (which are called bracts, I think) appeared, yes. The little pods dangling beneath, yes. But beyond that, nothing except a carpet of desiccated fruit strewn across the driveway. I had dim recollections of a time when the tree was sweet. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Take a look at this glorious specimen.

And then, this year, everything went right. Perhaps it was all the rain. Whatever the case may be, the tree fruited up handsomely and began to emit that wonderful aroma for which it's famous.

Yet as I mentioned this phenomenon to friends, it soon became clear to me that the scent of the linden isn't so famous after all. They hadn't noticed the smell, and often had no idea what a linden tree looks like.

In case you think I'm exaggerating the appeal of this delectable, if short-lived, summer phenomenon , here is a passage from A Natural History of Trees by Donald Culross Peattie, written in a age when rhapsodic prose was nothing to be ashamed of:  

"When the shade begins to be heavy and the midges fill the woods, and when the western sky is a curtain of black nimbus slashed by the jagged scimitar of lightning, when the wood thrush seldom sings ex­cept after rain and instead the rain crow, our American cuckoo, stutters his weary, descending song — an odor steals upon the moist and heavy air, unbelievably sweet and penetrating.

"It is an odor that comes from no bed of stocks, no honeysuckle. More piercing, yet less drugging, than orange blossoms, it is wafted, sometimes as much as a mile, from the flowers of the Linden. All odors have evocative associations to those who know them well — wild grape, wild Crab, wild rose and honeysuckle. The odor of the Lindens in bloom brings back to many of us the soaring wail of the treetoads, the first fireflies in the dusk, the banging of June beetles on the window screens, the limpness of the flags at Fourth of July, and all that is a boy’s-eye view of those languorous first days of vacation from school."

Reading further in Peattie's entry, I came upon a bit of trivia that I found reassuring:  the linden produces its honey only  two or three out of every five years. That certainly explains the intermittent and unpredictable behavior of our tree.

This afternoon Hilary and I swept the flowers, seeds, and bracts off the driveway. There are many still hanging, so we'll have to do it again, but we'd just returned from a bike ride down to Loring Park followed by lunch at an Ecuadoran café in Bryn Mawr, and we felt like being outside. It didn't take long.

Unlike the rose, you don't have to "stop and smell" the linden. At its best, the aroma is pervasive. Most often, you smell it first, then look around for those pale green bracts and flowers hanging from the dark green heart-shaped leaves of a nearby tree.

In case you're interested, the sidewalk on the south side of Gold Medal Park, next to the Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis, has been planted with a double row of lindens. There's usually a meter available on the east end of the park. Why not drive down this weekend, get an ice cream cone at Izzy's across the street, and take a stroll along that shady boulevard, and maybe even up the spiral trail to the top of the hill? You might catch a lingering whiff of this heavenly midsummer aroma. Then you'll recognize it the next time it comes floating by.
    

Carleton and Frontenac: "He Never Saw the Fireflies"

Frontenac State Park, one of the most beautiful and varied in the state, isn't often crowded on a Monday night. We booked our favorite site (#37) and headed south on a Monday morning just after rush hour. But the weather looked iffy, to say the least, and in order not to get to the park too early in the day, and add an element of novelty to the excursion, we headed south on I-35 and made an extended detour through Northfield.

It seems we're always passing through Northfield on our way somewhere else. This time, we made it a point to drive up the hill on the north side of town to explore the campus of Carleton College. I'd printed out a map of the arboretum, and after parking in a lot just off Highway 19, we wandered through the woods behind the recreation center looking for "Jo-Ryo-En," the Japanese Garden.

We finally found it, nestled behind a different recreation center much closer to the main campus. It's attractive, but so small they discourage walking around in it. You're supposed to sit in the little hut and contemplate it in silence.

The giant yellow leaf-blower sitting on the bench  in the hut detracted somewhat from the contemplative mood, and notions of silent reverie were further undercut by the two workmen who appeared out of the woods and wandered across the pebble "lake" with a big tarp, which they draped unceremoniously over one of the spreading ground-level evergreens.

"I don't think you're supposed to go in there," I said to one of the men.

He nodded noncommittally.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"We're going to prune the dead wood off of those pines," he said.

"That must be satisfying work," I said.

"After a slight pause, he replied. "Well, it's work."  

I was serious, of course. With a careful eye, you can improve on nature in subtle, undetectable ways, by simply following the inner logic of the growth, while cutting out the dead stuff. It's like editing a book, I guess.

We returned to our car,  walking down the hill past a lake, and drove into town and up the other side of the hill to the main campus, where we eventually located the Gould Library. (In fact, the Japanese garden and the library are both on the "main" campus. We could have walked there in less time than it took us to drive. But only a few buildings were marked on my arboretum map. And in any case, the point was to "get to know" the campus. Right?

In the library I glanced desultorily at a small collection of Chinese figurines in the rare books room and, with greater enthusiasm, examined a temporary exhibit of exotic photographs taking by Carleton students in India, Tasmania, and other locales during their studies abroad. Most interesting of all, to my mind, was a single display case containing illustrated books from the middle ages that was put together in association with a recent alumni lecture : "Nebuchadnezzar's Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History."

The oldest of these books dates to the ninth century, and they looked old indeed. I had trouble wrapping my head around the notion that they were authentic.  (They aren't.) I saw a reference to the Morgan Library on one of the labels but was having trouble reading it—I'd forgotten my reading glasses in the car.

Several of the images depict events described in the Book of Revelations. Hilary read a few lines to me from one of the texts. It referred to a seven-headed dragon whose tail wiped a third of the stars out of the sky, and I thought immediately of the constellation Eridanus, a sprawling dragon in a region of the night sky otherwise largely blank to the naked eye. (The trouble with this theory is that Eridanus was considered in ancient times to be a river, not a dragon.)

Maybe I should read Revelation, I mused. I've never given it much thought, deeming it violent, crazy, and generally incoherent, entirely by hearsay. Maybe it's poetic, once you strip away a millennium or two of exegesis?

A Kentucky coffee tree

On our way back to the car, we enjoyed the scent of the basswood trees blooming on the Bald Spot and also stopped briefly to admire the foliage on a Kentucky coffee tree. (Nature can be strange, too.) During our lunch at a hot hoagie place on main street, I got to thinking about how pleasant a college town can be, with free lectures and concerts, youth and conversation, dreams and possibility in the air. (And much easier to enjoy if you don't have to go to class!)

Back on the road, we continued on our way across the state on Highway 19 past Cannon Falls, Vasa, and Red Wing, finally arriving at the park about three.

It didn't take us long to notice that campsite 37, which is airy and open in mid-May, has become dark and dank by early July. After a bit of hemming and hawing, we changed to #53. You're always taking a risk when you switch, but it turned out to be a good move. We enjoyed sitting under the tarp in the drizzle, looking out across the fields, eating potato chips, and saying to each other every now and again: "I think the rain is letting up. A little. The sky looks lighter over in that direction."

Crawling out of the tent in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, Hilary was dazzled by the fireflies glowing everywhere in the forest. I got out the other side of the tent wearing a headlamp and didn't see a single one.

North Shore, Mergansers, and Milosz

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Megan Craig, a professor of philosophy at an East Coast university, laments the fact that her profession doesn't entail  "more calisthenics, rugged walking, running outdoors." Perhaps for a professor of philosophy such activities are not required, and might be difficult to squeeze into the daily campus grind, but an academic in her field ought to be aware that genuine philosophers since the time of Aristotle, widely known in his time and for a millennia afterward as the Peripatetic, have associated thinking with walking, and more generally with being outdoors.

Though I'm not much of a philosopher myself, when Hilary and I head north, as we did a few weeks ago, I load my bookbag with the kind of esoteric reading matter that can only be absorbed bit by bit in an environment free of distractions. On our recent five-day "retreat" on Lake Superior, I brought along The Mirror of Ideas, by Michel Tournier; The English Mind: studies in the English Moralists; Philosophy, Writing and the Character of Thought by John T. Lysaker; Connections to the World by Arthur Danto; Heidegger's Hidden Asian Sources by Reinhard May; Nietzsche, Life as Literature, by Alexander Nehamas, and four or five other books of a similar ilk.

I didn't look at any of them. The weather was too fine. But it was nice to have them near at hand, in case I felt the urge to develop a clearer understanding of why joy tends to leap from my heart when the gulls are keening, the sun is bright but softened by a slight morning haze, there's dew on the grass, and the temperature hovers near 60 degrees.

It was a cold wet spring on the North Shore. Ask anyone. By the time w arrived, the sun had reappeared and the hiking trails were lined with lush plant life. I haven't seen so many bunchberries and bluebells in bloom for decades. Then again, we haven't come to the North Shore at this time of year for quite a while. Pale yellow clintonia were blooming in profusion, and also the delicate white flowers of the serviceberry trees.

The non-flowering vegetation was hardly less appealing: native honeysuckle, sarsaparilla, nameless ferns, little strawberries two inches high and alder shrubs twenty feet high. Hiking around Larsen Lake at Crosby-Manitou State Park we came upon quite a few infant mountain ash, may six or eight feet high, and also some rich carpets of club moss.

*  *  *  *

Intoxicated by the plant life, yet I did turn my attention occasionally to one of the books I'd brought: The Land of Ulro by Czeslaw Milosz. I was under the impression that Ulro was somewhere in Lithuania. Turns out it's an invention of Wiliam Blake. Looking it up just now on line, I read:

Ulro is the land of the living dead, the realm of the ghostly and the spectral. It is the land of idols, delusions, and abstractions mistaken as primary realities.

In the course of this longish book, Milosz spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the imaginary worlds created by three writers who don't interest me much: Witold Gombrowitz, Adam Mickiewicz, and Theodore Swedenborg. Yet I kept reading, and was actually enjoying the journey. Here's a typical passage:

How to explain an extreme pessimism coupled with ecstatic praise, with hymns of ecstasy. Who knows whether this contradiction, so full of import, does not constitute the proper theme of this book. At any rate, I have always been hostile to the "dark" tradition of 20th century literature; its mockery, sarcasms, and profanations have seemed cheap to me when compared to the power of Evil that is within every man's grasp. (p. 38)

If that seems pretty grim, how about this:

For some, reading and writing are a passion. The Way, in the sense in which the word is used by the Taoists ... There is a species of people who feel the compulsion more than others, people for whom reality is too painful as long as it remains anarchic, untrappable, and who feel continually obliged to give it order, a language. (p. 46)

And how about those people who feel the urge to write because they consider reality not painful but mesmerizing, staggering—at least some of the time; who find in it an order that has nothing to do with words, or with them, but arises from the earth unbidden and pursues a harmless and attractive agenda?

Wasn't it Gombrowitz himself, Milosz's alter ego, almost, who wrote: "If literature generally dares to speak, it is not at all because it is certain of its truth, but only because it is certain of its delight"?

Such experiences are difficult to capture in words. They tend to sound fatuous, Pollyannaish, or commonplace. Example. For two days we watched a red-breasted merganser zigzagging back and forth across the bay, head under the water, looking for fish. On the third morning, in the sharp clear light, a merganser paddled by—it might have been the same one—with eight chicks trailing close behind, each of them about the size of a lemon. Half of them looked to be actually sitting on mama's back.

A few minutes later, a gull started keening, and a second one replied from a hundred yards up the shore. Not so haunting as a chorus of loons, but still redolent of shipwrecks, bad weather, and lonely walks on the beach.

The water here is utterly clear to a depth of thirty feet at last. A blanket of stones covers the bottom; a few feet from shore, most of them are the size of a golf ball or a small, misshapen potato. Invariably fine-grained and smooth, they're a hodge-podge of pale blues, reds, and tans, and the honeyed glow and slight distortions created by the water above them adds to the charm. 

But charm isn't the right word. We're talking about something elemental here.

Nothing beyond it. No meaning in it.

At one point Milosz writes:

There is in Pascal a kind of Manichean distrust of nature and the things of "this world" which has made him a hero in the eyes of the pessimists, of those who later, in an era proclaiming the intrinsic good of the "nobler savage," responded with a mordant irony. Pascal's defense of Christianity is thus waged in anthropocentric terms, asserting the "anti-naturalness of that unique phenomenon call consciousness.

Milosz makes it clear that he shares that distrust. Not me.

Spring All Over Again - Locust Petals

White petals of the black locust tree litter the garden and the deck, like confetti from a grand celebration we weren't invited to. It's impossible to see the blossoms themselves on the branch without binoculars, the tree is so tall. For twenty years I thought it was the neighbor's tree, deep in the woods, obscure and last to leaf out. Well, who really owns a tree?

As I sit here on the deck, soaking up the bright sun and exquisitely cool air, I'm thinking I might start up a pagoda dogwood farm. 

We got our volunteer by chance (I guess that's what a "volunteer" is) from one-time neighbors Chris and Julie, with the help of the local chipmunks, no doubt. Chris had a thick head of Lebanese hair and a maniacal grin. He liked The Who and wished he could party more. Julie, shy and near anorexic, spent a lot of time with her mother. Eventually they had a child and moved to Edina—the schools, don't you know.

I spotted the sprout under the bedroom window one spring day. Now it's thirty feet tall, and three of its youngins' are developing here and there out in the yard. We've given a few away.

Every spring I catch sight of the chipmunks venturing out on the delicate branches  to harvest the berries with feverish daring and precision.

Jeremy, Our neighbor to the other side, is a bachelor. He likes the local schools so much that he teaches there. One day recently, in a fit of good humor, I agreed to help him remove the buckthorn from the woods that separates our yards. I suppose it was the right thing to do, but now the privacy screen is largely gone.

"My sister's friend is a landscape designer," he told me. "She'll help me figure out what to plant there to create a new screen." Knowing Jeremy, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

A few days later, I noticed that the forsythia in our front yard had sent out a substantial sucker. I dug it up and replanted it in the disturbed soil where the buckthorn had been, along with a two-foot chunk of root—making sure it was on our side of the lot line, or at least near it. The plant is gangly, but three weeks later it's still green, and it looks to be doing fine.

As I tamped down the soil around the plant, I was reminded that we'd gotten that shrub from the woman who lived next door when we moved it, back in 1986. Cliff and Jan were among the neighborhood's original residents. A childless couple, they'd been living here for forty years by the time we arrived. Cliff worked for the phone company. Jan volunteered at the University Landscape Arboretum, where she availed herself of every opportunity to bring home cuttings from the experimental plant stock.

I'm sure the redbud at the corner of their house, right next to our driveway, is one of the oldest in the state. She once told me she had nineteen varieties of hosta growing in the shady northwest corner of her garden.

One day we ran into each other by the garbage cans next to the garage, and she offered me a clump of roots from the forsythia she was tidying up. At the time, I didn't know what a forsythia was.

"You know, the yellow flowers. First bloom of spring," she said.

"Oh, yeah," I lied. "Sure. I'd be delighted. Thank you."

"Don't thank me for the plant," she replied. "Just thank me for the labor of digging it up."

Now there's a gnomic remark.  I puzzled over it for years. Still do. 

Half a life later, the forsythia is returning home to the other side of the lot line.

Cliff and Jan used to go bowling once a week. "I don't much like to bowl," she told me once with a chuckle. "but if I stopped going, we wouldn't have anything in common." She delivered the remark without rancor, out a deep yet somehow chipper melancholy that she'd probably lived with throughout her life.

In any case, she was exaggerating. Cliff, too, liked to garden. He looked after the roses and the lawn, while she handled everything else. Back in the Korean War era Cliff planted the five Colorado blue spruce—one-dollar seedlings—that served as a privacy fence between our two back yards for several decades. A few years after planting them he severed the roots with a shovel to encourage them to go deeper, thus stabilizing the tree.

I told that story to a master gardener at the farmers' market just last week and she said, "Well, all he did was bonsai the tree. Anyway, they don't recommend planting blue spruce in Minnesota any more. Too humid."

Those trees are now sixty feet tall. I wouldn't call them bonsai. It's true, one of them blew down in a storm a few years ago--so much for deep roots--and Jeremy had a second one removed this spring. It was dead. The other three are doing fine, though on two of them the branches are bare to a height of thirty feet. Not enough sun. 

One of my great gardening challenges is to get things to grow underneath these towering spruce. Buckthorn, honeysuckle, and other invasives seem to do the best. Wild grapes. Canadian elderberry. If it's green, we'll take it.

I wonder if anyone thinks about Jan any more. Or even remembers her? In later years she had eye trouble and wore boxy wrap-around sunglasses when working out in the yard. The year Cliff died, I asked her (tactlessly, it seems to me now) where she was going to go for Christmas. "I suppose I'll be with Cliff's family," she said. "His brother lives right down the street." Then she gave that sweet little cackly laugh and added: "I don't know if they like me, but I guess I'm part of the family by now."