The Fly Trap

When you're standing in a ditch or a field all afternoon holding a long pole with a net at the end of it, you've got a lot of time to think about things.  All sorts of things. The rare hoverflies you're trying to catch, yes, but also modern literature, environmentalism, the importance of "disturbed" natural areas, the lure of collecting things, the value of limits, and how to respond to passing tourists who ask you what you're doing. 

The Swedish adventurer and entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg has spent his time well. He has also developed a knack for stringing such musings together in a comfortable pattern and giving a breezy, self-depreciatory flavor to the mix. The result is a book-length essay that flows effortlessly from one topic to the next, full of humor and wisdom, switchbacks and surprises, tidbits of trivia and expressions of understated joy in the face of the marvels the natural world spreads at our feet, or in the shrubbery above our heads, just out of reach.  

Sjöberg's career as an entomologist figures prominently in the exposition, though he never makes it clear exactly what kind of a "career" that is. It's hard to imagine why anyone would pay him to catch or study flies on a small island in the Stockholm Archepeligo. It might well be nothing more than a lifelong hobby. He makes passing reference to experience in the jungles of Africa, and near the end of the book he writes "after thirteen months of travel around the world, I was now finally on my way home, tired and disillusioned," but he offers no clue as to what he was up to during that time.  

"Anyway, [he writes] the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold." (p.12)

One of the central beams of Sjöberg's construction, which he returns to repeatedly and dilates on at considerable length, is the career of Swedish entomologist René Malaise, who invented the fly trap referred to in the title in 1934. It revolutionized the practice of catching flying insects and is still in widespread use today. Sjöberg resisted buying such a device for years, mostly out of vanity, it seems. It wasn't his style. He now attests to its great value as a tool, but he's less interested in the trap itself than in the career of the man who invented it. Malaise was an adventurer and researcher in an era that has long since given way to helicopters and video cameras. He spent ten years in Kamchatka, some of them with the famed Swedish author, researcher, and femme fatale Ester Blenda, whom he married there. She returned to Sweden but he remained, trapping sable to earn a livelihood and eating bear for dinner, and he later studied insects in the wilds of upland Burma with his second wife, returning home with thousands of new species. Sjöberg claims that now, seventy years later, they still haven't cataloged them all. 

Sjöberg moves on to other subjects, including a analysis of a novella by D.H. Lawrence and an encounter in the brush with an Englishman looking for yew forests on his tiny island, but a few chapters later he returns to Rene Malaise. In later life Malaise's renown as an explorer faded, and he eventually became an academic laughingstock for denying the theory of plate tectonics while pursuing researches into the location of Atlantis. Sjöberg admires his tenacity and conviction, if not his quasi-scientific theories. And as if that weren't enough, Sjöberg spends a good deal of time near the end of the book investigating Malaise's art collection, a few pieces of which were stolen immediately after his death and never recovered. Like so much of the rest of the book, it seems slightly irrelevant—a brand-new line of inquiry interjected so near the end of the book?—but it makes a good story, and it sheds a gentle light on themes that Sjöberg has brought up before: the collector mentality, the difference between grand and modest achievement, the fleeting nature of fame amid the vagaries of history, and the appeal of personal conviction and unbridled enthusiasm. In our day many such portraits are laced with mordant irony, but Sjöberg presents his in the spirit of simple romance and wonder.

Malaise and Ester Blenda

And speaking of romance ... did Malaise really love Ester Blenda, or was his first marriage a matter of convenience, to make it easier for the couple to travel together in the then-newly created Soviet Union? An entomologist friend advises Sjöberg that  the answer lies in the specimens Malaise collected. He never named a wasp or fly after Blenda, though he did name one after Ester's  brother, a famous entomologist himself. But Sjöberg does not find that argument conclusive; Malaise named many of the species he'd discovered during the 1930s, long after his marriage to Blenda was over. More telling, in Sjöberg's view, is that Malaise named one of the many insects he discovered during his trip to Burma after his second wife, Ebba Söderhell.

"As usual, what I found in the end was not what I was looking for. Ebba soederhalli. A sawfly from Burma. Malaise had finally found love. An unmistakable case."

Though Sjöberg mentions his own wife and children only once or twice, in one longish passage he sheds some light on the origins of his own romantic bent. After acknowledging the importance of genetic factors in shaping an individual's character, he goes on to make a case for the importance of early childhood imprinting in a particular environment. He attributes his own "pronounced romantic temperament" to Sweden's long summer nights. 

"We in Sweden have the world’s loveliest summer nights, he writes. Even a short distance down into Europe the nights become gloomy, pitch-black conveyances from dusk to dawn. Tropical nights can build into tre­mendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas cel­ebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later. It doesn’t come close to the endless beauty of a summer night in Sweden."

Sjöberg had been around a bit, in other words, and he's got a few exotic points of comparison.

"Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong—the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

Sjöberg  was also blessed with parents who gave him free reign as a child to enjoy those nocturnal hours to the full.

"In the superficially darling town by the sea on the outskirts of which I had my childhood, I was the only kid allowed to run free at night. You can’t send a moth-hunter to bed, no matter how young he is. And my parents were—still are—touchingly unsuspecting people who never even considered the possibility that their little boy did anything but catch moths under the nearest streetlamp.

I was constantly out at night. I listened for marsh warblers, spied on badgers, stole strawberries and threw pinecones at girls’ windows. Of course I also collected moths, lots of them, and was almost always alone. It was only when I was older that I rode my bike into town and drank like a Polish translator, but that’s not relevant here. The imprinting was already irrevocable.

Ever since, I have regarded all warmish summer nights as my personal property."

Sjöberg refers in passing quite a few times to the loneliness that an entomologist is likely to experience—very few people are interested in bugs—and of the ties that develop within the field, and also across time through the published works of famous explorers and backyard enthusiasts. The field is so vast, however, that he's long since recognized the importance of establishing limits to one's area of research. He's the unquestioned expert on the hoverflies on the small island where he lives, and has rediscovered seven or eight species that had been considered extinct, and has also found quite a few new ones. 

The author with some of his collection

Sjöberg makes it clear that he collects and studies hoverflies merely for pleasure. He knows that people would take greater interest if he tied his studies to some grand environmental project, but as he puts it, "It would be a lie." He compares his situation to that of Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. DeQuincey could have devoted his entire book to the devastations wrought by opium, just as any modern insect collector could expound at great length on environmental devastation and its effect on insect populations. But that isn't Sjöberg's point. He finds the world of bugs fascinating in itself. As with De Quincey, "the rapture of intoxication seeps in between the lines." Sjöberg also believes that some of the richest and most interesting environments are precisely those—pastures, urban gardens, roadside ditches—that have been disturbed and modified by humans.

Chrysotoxum vernale 

One of the book's most interesting chapters, "The Legible Landscape," comes near the end. He admits that beyond the pleasure that insect collecting provides, he thinks it would be a good thing if people—his readers, you and I—developed greater "landscape literacy." He suggests we ought to approach nature the same way we approach literature or art. Of course, everyone can appreciate a beautiful sunset or a field of poppies, but Sjöberg is suggesting we would benefit from developing the specific knowledge that would allow us to go deeper into the relationships that bind the natural world.

"To recognize a Chrysotoxum vernale when you see it, to know why it’s flying in just this place and at just this moment, is a source of satisfaction not all that easy to account for."


A page or two later he delivers an extended and rhapsodic account of the delight he experiences in the field. His points of reference are insects, not surprisingly, but any botanist or ornithologist would understand.

"On a gentle slope at the edge of a wood, between a hayfield and an av­enue of high-voltage towers, there is a large stand of broad-leaved sermountain growing among the oaks and hazels, which, when the sun is at its zenith, attracts fantastic hordes of insects to its large, white umbels. I usually see the noble chafer there, Gnorimus nobilis, and out on the hayfield, without a care in the world, are Burnet moths, to whose odd colour only Harry Martinson gives full justice: 'The prime colour of the wing is a dark, inky, blue-green blue; carmine-red spots shimmer against that background.'

"On that slope, every summer, I also see the puz­zling bee fly Villa paniscus, a darting tuft of wool that no one knows anything about and that was thought to be extinct until last year, mostly because few if any people could tell it from Villa hottentotta (yes, that’s really its name). Bee flies are really for extra credit, but there’s something about that slope that attracts me for the sake of reading something other than hoverflies."

The more extreme environmentalists he knows worry him. "They are severely tormented by nightmares of extermination. You can see it in their eyes."

While he admits there is cause for grave concern, Sjöberg reminds us here, and in many other parts of the book, what it is we should be caring about. "No one learns to tell the song of the woodlark from that of the skylark in order to make it easier to detect approaching catastrophe," he writes. References to beauty, pleasure, even joy appear infrequently and hesitantly--as if to say the word would destroy the magic--but they're scattered throughout the book. And he passes those feelings on to us not only by the scattershot yet strangely coherent unfolding of his many fields of interest, but also by the leisurely, unmannered charm of his prose.

Rendezvous with a Hurricane

A friend of mine once remarked that the two best parts of a vacation were planning for it and remembering it later.

I don't quite agree. Planning can be fun. And any good vacation provides a wealth of impressions that we draw on for the rest of our lives—the difference between knowing a place just a little and not knowing it at all.

But memories tend to fade into slide shows and  often-repeated stories that don't quite measure up to what really happened, while a good deal of the energy of planning, especially as the vacation approaches, goes into worries about whether the Uber you've scheduled for 3 a.m. will show up, whether you'll make it through the security line on time to catch your flight, whether the car rental agency will stay open past 7 if your second flight is delayed, and whether you'll be able to locate your AirB&B in downtown Halifax in the dark. Travel anxieties. Not fun.

Why go to Halifax? Good question. We weren't going to Halifax in particular—that just happened to be where the airport was. Nova Scotia was the destination. Hilary and I like the sea, open vistas, seafood, birds, and wild, uncrowded countryside. It seemed like a good fit. We'd been to northern Maine, and believe it or not, we've toured Quebec, Tadoussac, and the Gaspé Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, twice.

The first unusual thing I noticed as we approached the Halifax airport is that it sits in the midst of a vast spruce forest stretching for many miles across the province from Wolfville and the Bay of Fundy. You can see on any map that  the airport is quite a ways from downtown; I presumed that the intervened territory was suburbs. Not so. I felt like we were touching down in Bangor, Maine! The spruce trees themselves weren't aged and majestic. No, they looked stunted. Bent.

The Eurocar agency, located in the lobby of a dilapidated Quality Inn, was still open. The young man behind the counter threw a set of keys my way. "We've given you a Toyota Tundra," he said, either imagining or hoping I'd be pleased. "No thanks," I replied. "I reserved a Yaris."

"Okay. I'll see what we can find in the lot that's clean enough to go out."

We ended up with a Corolla, which was fine with us, though it wasn't entirely shipshape. No big deal: the previous driver, an insurance agent named "Ken," had left his card in the front seat and three cans of beer in the trunk. Much worse than that, the vehicle didn't have a CD player!

View from the library

We spent two days in Halifax, which was plenty. Fish and chips, the marine museum, Maud Lewis, the Citadel, Point Pleasant Park, and the spectacular new public library. We were only slightly concerned that Hurricane Dorian was headed our way. It sounded serious, but we'd never experienced such a thing, and it was difficult to get information about how serious such an event might be.

I asked two young women behind the information desk at the marine museum about it. "We're scheduled to stay at a cottage on the coast near Shelburne tomorrow night," I said. "We don't want to get washed out to sea."

"Are you going to be right on the beach? Shelburne is right where the hurricane I supposed to make landfall," one of the women said. "I'm not a fortune teller, but if I were you, I'd make sure to be off the highway and snug in your cottage before it arrives. Bring a flashlight or some candles. And don't forget your storm chips."

"Storm chips? I've never heard of it."

She shot a glance at her colleague behind the counter and they started giggling a little. "Those are the chips you eat during the storm."

Later that afternoon we walked over to the MEC sporting goods store, which, as far as I could tell, was the only place in the province that sold iso-butane canisters. (We'd brought along a little stove along with our other camping gear in a suitcase.) The bin was almost empty. It took me half a second to figure out why...

During our afternoon tour of the Citadel, a historic military fort on top of the hill, one guide said: "See that ship coming into the harbor? That might be the new British aircraft carrier. It's not even commissioned yet." He explained that NATO was bringing all of the ships in the vicinity into port to wait out the storm.

But the first palpable evidence that things were going to be a little different when Dorian arrived came a few hours later when we stopped into a local supermarket and noticed that many of the deli and frozen food items had been heavily discounted, and the checkout lines snaked off into the store for fifty yards past the bottled water displays and well into the pet food section. Everyone was stocking up. And not only potato chips.

Back in our tidy Airbnb apartment I tried, without success, to get a weather or a news channel for quite a while, and finally called our "host," a woman named Tiffany whom we'd never met or even spoken with  —she lived in Dartmouth, on the far side of the harbor.

"I can't get any channels on the TV," I said.

"You can watch any movie you want on Netflix," she replied. "Or Hulu, or Britbox. But we don't subscribe to any broadcast channels. Weather? Just use your phone."

We set off early the next morning. Gray skies, slight mist, few cars on the highway heading south through the stunted, and now vaguely sinister, spruce forest. We had originally planned to visit Peggy's Cove briefly and spend the rest of the morning at the World Heritage Site of Lunenburg, famous for anything to do with shipbuilding, but under the circumstances we proceeded southwest directly to the small and quaint town of Shelburne, founded by loyalists from Massachusetts during the American Revolution. Hilary had been rereading the guidebook along the way, and we stopped in at a B&B on the harbor waterfront to inquire about a room less directly exposed to Dorian's wrath.

An elderly gentleman answered the door, looking somewhat surprised. His tallish, silver-haired  wife soon rounded the corner and stood beside him. When we explained our situation, she said, "We do have rooms available. But if there's a surge, we'd be just as vulnerable as you would be out on Sandy Point Road. We'll all lose power, of course. During the last hurricane the road in front of the inn here was entirely flooded. The next morning people drove down to gawk. I hate to turn away business ... but if I were you, I'd inquire at the motel at the top of the hill. On the other hand," she added, "we're on the same grid as the local hospital. We'll get our power back sooner."

We drove up to the motel and had no trouble booking a room. Then we returned to the grocery store we'd passed on the way into town. Once again, everyone was stocking up. It was almost by chance that we then stopped in the parking lot at the local library so Hilary could pick up the wifi on her phone. She'd received a text from Leah, the host of our ocean-side cottage. "I'm down here at the property. Are you coming down?"

We canceled our room at the motel and drove eight miles along the coast on a narrow but decent asphalt road before finally pulling into the gravel parking lot beside a small but nifty modern cottage sitting in a field fifty yards from the ocean. There were six or seven apple trees in the front yard, none of them tall enough to fall on the house. The wind and rain had picked up considerably. Leah met us at the door and we came inside.

"Our hurricanes aren't like Florida hurricanes," she said. "Those people on the hill opposite came down just to watch the waves."

A robust and confident woman, Leah had been raised in Shelburne—her mother still lived just down the road—but went to college in Regina, Alberta, where she met and married a local boy and spent the next thirty years on a farm nearby. When he died she settled up and moved back home, and she now builds and restores houses for a living. Including this one. 

It was reassuring to hear her dismiss the loud but intermittent flapping noise from just outside the house—like a thick piece of plastic being buckled back and forth—as "nothing to worry about." She had just opened the refrigerator to show us the condiments other guests had left behind when the power went out with a faint "pop."

"There it goes," she said, smiling wanly. "It was inevitable. There are candles all over the place. And blankets. But we have a well here, so you won't be able to get water or flush the toilet."

"We brought our camping gear," I said. "And we have at least a gallon of water in the car."

Leah drove off in her pick-up and we settled in to an afternoon of reading, naps, and extended glances out the windows. They were somewhat clouded by the spray, but I could see twelve or fourteen waterfowl feeding at the mouth of the river that ran alongside the cottage. Some looked like black ducks, others  might have been female common eiders. The wind was howling and the apple trees were shaking in every direction like a dog shaking the water out of its fur. The waves were large but not ferocious; I've seen bigger ones on Lake Superior. Still, it wasn't the kind of weather anyone would be likely to take a walk it.

During the first few hours we were there I went outside only once, to get our two-gallon water bottle. I noticed during that dash to the car that one of the apple trees had gone down in front of the cottage. The waves looked frothier, messier, and more powerful, but the sky looked lighter.

At one point Hilary picked up a report on her phone from Environmental Canada, or some such agency. It was focused on Halifax and the Eastern Shore, and it was hard to tell from the report whether the worst was over out here in Shelburne, a hundred miles to the west, or whether the hurricane hadn't arrived yet.

We nibbled on some cheese, salami, and stoned wheat thins, and I heated some water for tea on the camp stove. A little later I uncorked a bottle of wine. 

We also had some chips.

A book on the shelf caught my eye: The August Gales. According to the cover copy, it's focused on a series of shipwrecks in 1917 out on Sable Island, a hundred miles offshore, but the forty pages I read concerned themselves with the development of the fishing industry in Lunenburg from earliest times, when the British brought in hundreds of Germans—who weren't terribly interested in fishing—to populate the area. I'm sure I learned more in those forty pages than I would have wandering around the streets of Lunenburg itself—in any case, enough to chat halfway intelligently with the fishermen we met later on about schooners, dories, line fishing, and trawling.

At 6 p.m. the sun came out. It happened abruptly as the curtain of gray clouds moved inland. We stepped out into the cool and amazingly fresh air. I counted nine roof shingles lying in the front yard. Though the thick grass in the fields surrounding the cottage was sodden from four hours of rain, a path led down to the beach, fifty yards away, where five-foot waves were still rolling in. The late afternoon light was now catching the flurries of white spume on their crests. It was time to take a walk.

Before it got dark we went back inside and heated up a can of chili on the camp stove, lit a few candles, and sat in the gloaming, listening to the diminishing ruckus in the trees outside.

With cool, clear air and no ambient light for miles, the stars that night were spectacular.

The next morning we spent some time wandering the beach. Then we drove into town. A few trees were down, a few roads were closed. Power was out everywhere. We zigzagged down to the harbor, and I happened to notice that the couple we'd talked to the previous day were standing on the corner outside their inn, chatting with a neighbor.

As I pulled to a stop I rolled down my window and greeting them.

"We're the couple that was looking for a room yesterday. We ended up down at the seafront cottage after all."

"How'd you make out?" he said.

"Not bad. One apple tree came down. Lost power and water, of course. But it ended up being a lot of fun."

As I drove off it occurred to me that it wouldn't have been as much fun if you actually lived there. Across Nova Scotia 450,000 people lost power, many of them for three or four days. During our morning ramble around the southern tip of the province, we passed several gas stations that were closed; fifteen or twenty cars might be lined up along the road waiting to get into the ones that were open.

At noon we were sitting in a very busy cafe just north of Yarmouth eating hot lobster sandwiches.

"This place is really hopping on a Sunday," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Most of these people don't have power," the waitress replied with a smile. "Everyone likes a hot meal once in a while."    

Down the Gunflint Trail - without a Paddle

Confucius say: better to be windbound at the landing than ten miles out to sea.

We had headed out to "sea" once again, across Seagull Lake, just south of the Canadian border. We had found the path through the islands on the north end of the lake against moderate wind, passed the Palisades, and turned the corner into a back bay where we hoped, but didn't actually expect, to find a campsite free. 

A year ago we had the good luck to camp there, but it's usually occupied. It was.

We crossed the tip of the bay to the only other campsite nearby, fighting the much stronger waves that were sweeping in across four miles of open water. Taken.

Back to the protection of the islands, we  visited four other sites in the vicinity. All occupied. At two of the sites young couples—one with small child—were taking a "layover" due to the wind. The other two had been occupied just that morning. No one wanted to proceed out across the big lake.

At that point, we had little choice but to return to the landing. To be honest, I didn't really mind. 

There are quite a few lovely sites at the Trail's End Campground where we'd spent the previous night—a warren of loops and cul de sacs that defies topological analysis. It was only ten in the morning. We had plenty of time to locate the unreserved sites and evaluate each of them with care.

We finally settled on #30, high on a hill, partially surrounded by delicate popples,  with a nice view out toward the lake and only one other site nearby.  You couldn't actually see the lake, unless you walked out to the end of the bluff, but little matter. It was like being in Colorado. We ate lunch. We set up our camp chairs. We rolled out the super-delux air mattresses we'd brought along, too bulky to bring out on the trail. We took an evening paddle around the channels near the landing, where I first set eyes on the BWCA at the age of 12 in 1964. And that night the stars were fabulous.

An entry permit to the BWCAW is only good for one day. If a ranger had caught us trying to sneak out again the next morning, I think he would have "understood," but it happened to be raining, and we decided to scuttle the very idea of a canoe trip and spend some time exploring a few of the places on the Gunflint Trail that we invariably streak by, year after year, on our way to the landing and the wilderness of lakes and woods beyond.

Our first stop was Clearwater Lodge, a few miles north of the Gunflint Trail down Clearwater Road. It's a classic log cabin structure with a long front porch, and I wasn't surprised much to see the plaque on the wall commemorating its "national historic register" status.

The young man behind the counter was personable. When I mentioned that we'd been stymied by the wind the previous day, he said, "I'm not surprised. We didn't let anyone go out until late afternoon yesterday." We got onto the subject of Grand Portage—nine miles long—which he'd done recently. I told him I once did it going uphill, with two weeks of supplies, and then continued all the way to Lake Winnipeg.

"Did you canoe across Lake Winnipeg?" he asked. No. (Why would you?)

"My wife did it recently. It took twenty-two days, and they only paddled at night. It was too windy during the day."

We swapped a few more canoeing tales, not trying to one-up each other, just sharing experience. He'd never heard of the small private camp I once worked at, though it was only a few miles down the road. Well, that was fifty years ago.

"What do you and your wife do in the winter?" I asked.

"We're here, answering emails, shoveling snow. A few of the cabins are open year round. In summer we work seven days a week. Winter is our weekend."

Hilary and I wandered into the lodge, where there was a jigsaw puzzle set out on a card table, and a middle-aged couple was playing Four in a Row. An elderly couple was eating breakfast in the room beyond.

Such scenes always seem quaint, but also a little depressing to me. Maybe it was the rain, or the bad lighting. But it seems people aren't having as much fun as they imagined they would, and would almost rather be at home or outside sitting at a campfire under a tarp.

We visited several Forest Service campgrounds—Flour Lake, East Bearskin—which looked well designed for privacy but often narrow and closed in. Much more appealing was the campground on Devils Track Lake, only a few miles up the hill from Grand Marais. We chose site #8, later decided #11 was better, and finally settled in at # 12 and dropped our $11 into the metal slot at the entry kiosk.

On our way to Devil's Track, we had taken a sidetrip to Elbow Lake, where we met a man named Leroy Johnson. He was about to begin a shift checking outboard motor propellers for undesirable weeds and other invasive organisms.

"I've lived in Cook County all my life," he told us several times with obvious pride. "I know everyone around here. And that dog there is a Norwegian lundehund," he told us with a chuckle. "My son bought it. Then he moved out. So I guess it's mine now.  She doesn't hunt. I don't konw what she's good for. But she is kind of cute."

I looked it up later. That dog was bred in Noway to hunt puffins. 

The next morning we snagged the last remaining campsite at Judge Magney State Park via telephone and spent the day exploring the coast east of Grand Marais, where the crowds thin out and the roadside cliffs vanish, leaving you with miles of pebbly beaches. We got out our chairs at the Kadunce River Wayside and sat looking out at the calm water and the fresh blue sky for quite a while, utterly at peace. Before long a family of mergansers swam by in a broken line, fishing together, their heads often submerged and swiveling back and forth as they scanned the depths for fish.

A group of school children had assembled in the lot. After frolicking in the frigid waters of Lake Superior for a few minutes, they took a hiking trail up the river, accompanied by their chaperones.

A few minutes later a young woman came by with her daughter. She was  carrying two green Lund's shopping bags.

"We thought we'd just get out of town for a few days," she said, "just the two of us. I looked on my phone for beaches where you could find agates." 

Hours later, after visiting the museum and fort at Grand Portage, thirty miles up the road, and spotting a pectoral sandpiper in the gravel parking lot of the ferry landing to Isle Royale, we pulled into the lot at Kadunce Wayside once again. The school kids were long gone, the mother-daughter pair was several miles up the beach, and a hearty-looking middle-aged couple was playing cribbage at a picnic table nearby. It turns out they had biked up to the Canadian border from Mora, a small town east of Mille Lacs Lake, roughly 200 miles away. Now, on their third day out, they were heading back to Grand Marais.

"Who's winning?" I asked.

"She's kicking my ASS," the man said with a wild grin. He reminded me of Woody Harelson a little.

"Well, the worm will turn," I said encouragingly. "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"Right under that tree!" he said, gesturing to a place where their two bikes stood  near the beach. "This beach is on the Superior Hiking Trail. You can camp anywhere around here. We got a six-pack in Hovland  and decided to stop here and play some cards."

It's all part of the scene.

The next morning at dawn, after a very quiet night at Judge Magney, we hiked up to Devil's Cauldron. No one on the trail. And after four successive breakfasts of granola with powdered milk, we splurged on a hot breakfast at nearby Naniboujou Lodge.

Our waitress was a young Ojibwe woman from Grand Portage. "Have you ever been to the Suzie Islands?" I asked her. (Why did I ask? because only tribal members can go there.) "Not since I was a child," she replied, a little wistfully. "There isn't much out there. Just a couple of campsites."

Sounds nice.

"We stopped this morning at the wayside rest on Mt. Josephine," I said. "looking down on the Suzie Islands. I think that may be the prettiest view in Minnesota."

"When I worked for the tribe, I used to pick up trash there," she said. "I would look around and say, "This job's not so bad...." 

Summer Films

Summer films are supposed to be fun. Well, I suppose hiding out behind a cairn from a helicopter can be fun.

Here are a few films that we enjoyed in the last few weeks.

The Biggest Little Farm (USA)

This movie chronicles the efforts made by John Chester and his wife Molly to transform 200 acres of arid land in Southern California into a healthy, working, organic enterprise. Not being farmers themselves, they hire Alan, a self-professed expert in sustainable agriculture, to help them spend their money. Where did the money come from? A bunch of good-natured friends and investors. It sounds like a utopian dream, and a financial disaster in the making.

Alan has lots of theories about diversity, manure tea, ground cover, pigs, diversity, gophers, sheep, erosion, bees, diversity, and other concepts. After forty-five minutes of struggles and setbacks, I was curious to see the farm's balance sheet and listen to candid interviews with some of the major investors.

But at a certain point, those thoughts faded into the background, because the farm operations themselves became so darned interesting. The mama pig gives birth to fourteen little piglets. (For cute.) The starlings ruin most of the fruit—all 147 kinds—but there is a market for it anyway. Eggs become a cash crop, a production mainstay, highly valued in town ... until the coyotes start killing all the chickens. Chester reluctantly shoots a few coyotes, only to discover that along with enjoying an occasional chicken dinner, they've been doing a good job of keeping the gophers in check. Barn owls are added to the equation to nab the gophers. And on it goes.

By year seven, some things have died and others have flourished. The young people hired to work the farm are so energetic, I was surprised they didn't start a little winery on the side and open a Friday night farm pizzeria. We still haven't seen any balance sheets, but we've seen a lot of plants, animals, insects, and people, shot with often amazing cinematographic skill, and it's all very beautiful and, yes, heartwarming.           

The Farewell (China)

Every recent summer has had its Asian hit. Two years ago it was The Big Sick. Last year it was Crazy Rich Asians. Now the break-out star of that film, the rapper Awkwafina, is back in a film called The Farewell. This time around she plays an anguished and independent young  Chinese-American woman who returns to China along with her parents to visit her grandmother, who has only a few weeks to live. Trouble is, they haven't told the old woman she's on death's bed.

Awkwafina abhors the hypocrisy, and struggles to keep her mouth shut. Meanwhile, grandma appears to be not only the wisest and most pleasant, but also the liveliest member of the family. There are plenty of misunderstandings and squabbles to go around about why various family members moved to Japan or the US. They haven't been together as a family for a long time. And the young nephew whose wedding has provided the excuse for this family farewell provides plenty of laughs, too.

Everyone loves a wedding. No one cares much for a death bed scene. Not even grandma.      

Woman at War (Iceland)

Terrorist in any form is hard to stomach, but the eco-terrorism in the Icelandic film Woman at War, waged with a bow and arrows by a choir director named Halla, is fairly palatable. She wants to shut down the foreign-owned aluminum plant by disrupting its energy supply.  She has a bit of help inside the local  government, but it's mostly a matter of pulling down the high-voltage power lines that feed the enterprise.  They stretch across the treeless heaths of Iceland—very hard to patrol, even with helicopters—though Hella finds she needs a bit of help from a local sheep farmer who happens to be a distant relative. (Everyone in Iceland is a distant relative.)

This cat-and-mouse game can't last forever. But the plot is thickened and invigorated  when Hella learns her name has finally risen to the top of the list of candidates to adopt an infant from the Ukraine.  Her twin sister, on her way to an ashram in India, also has a part to play in the unfolding story.

The most controversial aspect of the film, from the aesthetic point of view, is the tuba-band soundtrack. It lends a comic, almost circus-like flavor to the tale, and that element is further accentuated by the fact that the musicians themselves often appear in the scenes they're accompanying. This is an imaginative effect, but it tends to undercut the drama, turning the film into a fable, if not a long and languorous joke.  Not something to take entirely seriously. But something to think about ...

A Fortunate Man (Denmark)

This three-hour Netflix drama is based on the not-so-famous (except in Denmark) Danish novel Lucky Per.  The author won the Nobel Prize in 1917, but has since been so thoroughly forgotten that at the moment  his name has slipped my mind, too. But the story is a good one.

The director, Bille August, won an Oscar for a previous film, Pelle the Conqueror. Here he follows the life of Per, the son of a rigid and austere country preacher. he escapes the oppressive piety of his country home by pursuing an education as an engineer in the city, where he falls in with a wealthy Jewish family, and even becomes engaged to the elder daughter. The family is eager to finance Per's schemes for modernizing Denmark by means of a series of canals and hydroelectric projects. The plot hinges on whether Per can kowtow sufficiently to the bureaucratic powers-that-be who must approve his schemes—an act made difficult by the legacy of his father's paternalistic oppression, but also of Per's seemingly inexhaustible personal vanity. 

Perhaps the most interesting character in the tale is Per's fiancée, Jacobe, who is liberated by her engagement to him from her warm but clannish family circle, in the same way that Per is able to escape from his austere and repressive Lutheran upbringing through the wealth and flamboyance of Jacobe's family circle. It's an epic tale in the tradition of Tolstoy, trimmed down to Danish proportions.

Welcome to Greenland (France)

NETFLIX. Two nerdy, unemployed, French twenty-something actors, both named Thomas,  travel to a remote village in Greenland, where everything is already remote, to visit Thomas's father and simply hang out. The snow-covered hills are gorgeous,  the sea is covered with ice, and they amuse the kind-hearted locals as they jog across it in their brightly colored down parkas.

The villagers welcome them, they sample seal liver, and do a little break-dancing on the ice. Neither Thomas speaks Inuit, so they have to guess what the locals are saying about them. They're usually wrong.  There isn't much of a plot. A lukewarm romance, some health concerns, a seal-hunting excursion. It's all pretty lighthearted, sweet, and fun.  

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.