Surprised by the Falls — Owamni

 

It was a crisp morning, with heavenly blue sky and sharp sunlight igniting the yellow leaves, and it cried out to be experienced. I could see that from every room of the house. When Hilary returned from an early morning walk along West River Road with a friend, she was eager to get back out in it, and take me along.

"Well, why don't we go downtown," I said. "There's an article in today's paper raving about the architectural features of the newly opened riverside park down there."

Good plan. We parked in a pay lot across the river from Boom Island and began our stroll under the brilliant trees along the pedestrian path past a very active children's playground, past the Federal Reserve building, and under the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to Water Works Park, which architectural journalist Linda Mack was calling "the most intriguing new building in the Twin Cities."

We weren't seeing it at its best. It was half-wrapped in mid-morning shadows, the charcoal firepits hadn't been lit, the chairs were tilted up against the tables, and almost no one was using it. I found it hard to remember what used to be there, because the area had been under construction for many months. But all of that being granted, this short slice of riverfront looked handsome. No doubt next spring it will look even more appealing.

A spanking-new two-story building stands at the east end of the park.(see top photo) The facade is partly rough-hewn limestone of the type used to build the flour mills than once dominated the riverfront neighborhood. The rest is faced with attractive fresh-cut stone, perhaps of the same kind, if not the same vintage. This is the home of Owamni, the Native American restaurant that has been in the news off and on for years, though the restaurant itself opened only a few weeks ago. (I picked up a copy of chef Sean Sherman's cookbook at a book convention several years ago, and I've actually tried to make a few things.)

It was dark inside, but the heavy glass door opened when I pulled on the handle, and we went in. To the left I could see a hall containing several comfortable-looking chairs; to the right a man was sitting behind a desk, minding his own business. We continued straight up a long flight of stairs, eager to see as much as we could before they kicked us out.

Upstairs a young woman was standing behind a podium, talking to someone on the telephone. "No. We take a few walk-ins, but reservations are booked until the middle of December. Once the reviews appeared in New York and Los Angeles ...."

When she hung up I inched closer and said, "Can you find a place to squeeze us in?"

"Two? I can seat you at the bar."

"That would be great."

 We hadn't planned to eat lunch at Owamni. We'd never discussed it. But we followed her into the restaurant without a word or a glance.

When we'd seated ourselves the bartender said, "You know the basic idea here, right? No dairy, no wheat, no care sugar." He handed us a couple of menus.

Sitting at the bar has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you can't see the river. But we've seen the Mississippi hundreds of times. No big deal. On the other hand, you can see things being done in both the bar and the kitchen, so much so that you almost feel involved. You can chat with the staff from time to time; they're right in front of you. On the other hand, you see food under the heat lamps that you wish you'd ordered, but didn't, and your server is often standing three feet in front of you, mixing a drink for someone else. A drink you wish you'd ordered.

The food was very good. The drinks only fair.

We've made two of the drinks on the menu ourselves at home or on the trail more than once using ingredients we'd gathered in the field. Sumac tea tends to be bitter, like Lick-um-Aid without the sugar, and Labrador tea tends toward a nauseating vegetative flavor. In a word, terrible. We were curious to see how Owomni's versions, which came iced rather than hot, compared. The flavors were the same, but much milder, and refreshing at first sip. By the third sip, however, and especially with the food, I felt we might just as well have stuck with tap water and devoted the funds to other food items.

Waksiti (left) and Garden Sisters (right)

The dishes we ordered were all good in different ways. The fresh tostatas that accompanied the smoked Red Cliff lake trout, blueberry/maple syrup reduction (wojape) and tepary bean spread were wonderfully light and crispy. The Garden Sisters, which consisted of black bean puree, pickled squash, and purslane on a chubby corn disk, had a complex blend of flavors and a surprisingly spicy kick. And the native grain bowl (waksica) with bison offered a complex but balanced palette of  flavors drawn from the beans, nixtamal, wild rice, quinoa, pesto, wojape, and grilled vegetables. (I ought to mention that our servers described these things to us one by one as they were being served, but I had to look them up on the menu later and google a few Ojibwe and Spanish terms to complete this paragraph.)

Looking around, I didn't see a salt or pepper shaker anywhere in sight. The bison could have used a pinch. But I suppose it was hard to come by in precolonial times.

Smoked trout with crispy tostadas and wojape

Lots of other things on the menu sounded interesting. I wouldn't mind going back, though we might not be so lucky as to get in next time.

 A young woman with long blond hair was sitting alone next to Hilary. She was trying quite a few of the dishes. I wondered if she might be a reviewer, but she wasn't writing anything down. Hilary struck up a conversation, asked her which dishes she'd liked best. Turns out she was from Los Angeles, but not a food critic. She had enjoyed most of the things she'd ordered, but found the squash too spicy, and had hardly taken more than a bite. (I was tempted to ask her to pass it over to me, but I didn't want to reinforce the widespread bi-coastal stereotype of Minnesota Gauche.)

She expressed disappointment that the walleye only appeared on the dinner menu. "We don't have walleye in Los Angeles," she said. I was on the verge of remarking, in order to add to the stereotype, that walleye was delicate, but didn't really have a distinctive taste.

Our bartender/waiter, who was also hers, assured her near the end of her meal that all of the wild rice served at the restaurant was Minnesota-harvested. She had no idea that most of the wild rice on the market comes from California and Manitoba. I tried to explain that most wide rice is now paddy-cultivated and machine-harvested, though the natural Minnesota type grows in shallow lakes and stream margins and is harvested by canoe with wooden poles.

Do they taste different? I have no idea.

As we left the restaurant, I heard the couple to our right mention that they were from New York. But anyone can come to Owarmi. And you don't even have to come inside. The outdoor seating is accessible from the street. After all, it's a public park.

First Fire of the Season

Wednesday night. First fire of the season blazing in the fireplace. Chunks of dead branches from our maple out front that I cut up during the summer. Wonderful smell.

Thus, one thing leads to another. The branch falls. I saw it up, and months later we burn it. Then, smoke.

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous lines deals obliquely with this phenomenon. Something about "exploring," followed by a remark to the effect that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started from, and know it for the first time." Not a direct quote, obviously.

I could look it up—I see the collected poems on an upper shelf, almost out of reach—but the exact wording isn't important. I received that book as a gift from a friend back in college days. On the end paper he wrote, "Merry Christmas, and I'll be seeing you when we're both famous." An atypical remark, considering how modest and self-effacing he tended to be. He and his wife headed east to grad school, and I haven't heard from him since. 

I have never liked that line by Eliot. Pseudo-profundity, or at best sheer speculation. After all, when he wrote it, Eliot hadn't reached the end of his searching, so how would he know? And in any case, it doesn't seem likely we'll end up right back where we began, unless it's in oblivion, a place we won't be able to recognize at all.

I prefer my own pseudo-profundity: "One thing leads to another." But let's not confuse this notion with an altogether different one: "One thing leads to the next." That phrase implies that the steps are preordained or somehow causal or unavoidable, which isn't the case. Considered in retrospect, they often seem entirely fortuitous.

Such notions often cross my mind when I spot a book on the shelf—one that's been there for quite a long time—and chide myself for having bought it. "I'll never read that book. I should get rid of it," I say to myself. But I almost invariably leave it be, though once in a great while I will actually pull it down and take an extended look. Occasionally, in some small way, it changes my life. How close I came to missing this path entirely!

A few weeks ago a collection of essays by Theodore Adorno caught my eye for perhaps the twentieth time. The title, Critical Models, stands out in thick yellow lower-case italics on the spine. I have rued the day when I bought that book many times, because it reminds me of an entire realm of thought, loosely referred to as the Frankfort School, that I've never investigated. But on this occasion, I said to myself, for no reason that I can think of, "I'm finally going to read some Adorno."

I read a few pages dealing with interactions between the city and the country, and I found them interesting. I even went so far as to copy out a few passages.

"Urbanity is a part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either."

"The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions are meanwhile irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself."

"I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes."

I suppose these remarks sound sort of cranky and high-handed, but it's worth noting that Adorno escaped Nazi persecution as an adult and returned to his home after the war to find that the German's hadn't really changed that much. Though he has plenty of scathing things to say about modern culture, his heart seems to be in the right place, to judge from this somewhat longer passage about spirituality and teaching:

"Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling's age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has under­taken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement."

I find this association between "spirit" and "momentum" very attractive.

Some of Adorno's reflections on authoritarian personalities have obvious relevance to the American political scene today, but one or two sentences will suffice:

"Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents. [e.g. fascism, communism] Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives."

At one point a blurb on the back cover caught my eye in which Susan Sontag praises another of Adorno's collections, Notes to Literature, and especially that volume's introductory essay, "The Essay as Form." I requested the book and it arrived at my local branch a few days later, after having sat on a shelf in the semidarkness of the downtown stacks for years, in all probability.

Good stuff, though rather dense. For example:

"The essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure.  It is not unlogical; it obeys logical criteria insofar as the totality of its propositions must fit together coherently ... but it neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria."

A better gloss, perhaps, appears a few pages earlier:

"[The essay's] efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him....[It] reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say."

This particular essay is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, I think. Adorno clearly feels the need to defend his chosen form against the strictures and the ridicule of the positivist scholarly community that had come to dominate German culture well before the 1960s.  At one point he writes, "In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship [Wissenshaft] comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism. Positivism's irresponsibly sloppy language fancies that it documents responsibility in its object, and reflection on intellectual matters becomes the privilege of the mindless."

Reading such humorously scathing passages, I almost feel like I'm rereading a Thomas Bernhard novel.

Yes, one thing leads to another. And another. And sometimes three or four things. I really ought to order a used copy of Adorno's Notes the Literature. (Really? To sit there on the shelf beside Critical Models till the end of time?) But perhaps I ought to take a look at Susan Sontag's collection Against Interpretation. And why not her Notebooks, which offer fresh snippets of thought devoid of the hidden formal excellences that Adorno attributes to the essay form? For that matter, there are unread Thomas Bernhard novels scattered here and there on the shelves—Frost, Gathering Evidence. It's a beautiful situation: a plenitude of options, sullied only by an agonizing sense of insufficient time in which to do the exploring adequately.

Yet it strikes me that this agony of overwhelming possibilities grows weaker as we age. We don't give up in despair or resign ourselves to a third-rate understanding of things, but we come to recognize that our microcosmic worlds echo or exemplify the larger ones lying beyond our grasp, and the things and people we know best offer far more enrichment than a scattered and superficial familiarity with everything.

This may be what Eliot means when he says that at the end of our exploring we finally "know" a place for the first time. You can see, I think, how clumsy the wording is. There isn't much finality to the process. We gradually get to know and love things better, sink into them, feel more at home, limiting our field of view while honing our senses. Once eager to hike the Compostela Trail, we now stroll down to the creek at the bottom of the hill and relish every step.  

Which is not to say we won't be doing the Compostela Trail one of these days!   

Alec Soth in Park Rapids

The Nemeth Art Center is located on the second floor of an old government building—maybe a courthouse?—with dim lighting, blue-green plaster walls, and oak woodwork all around. A quilt hangs from one wall in the lobby above a scale model of the building itself, with an old (but fancy) dress hanging from a manikin nearby. It was as if we were entering an enormous historical museum cum B&B.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which houses the art galleries. The words “Alec Soth, Paris / Minnesota” had been painted in an elegant font on the glass transom above the double doors into the large open gallery space, though which we could see a few very large photographs and also two or three long tables around which little kids were crowded, engaged in some sort of craft project.

A quick glance at a few of the photos reinforced the opinion I had already formed of Soth’s work. The quotidian subject matter and the superb handling of light and color drew me in; but as I looked, I felt my interest fading into a kind of cold admiration and a puzzling disappointment.

I know very little about photography as an art-form, and I’m halfway toward agreeing with the viewer whom you sometimes overhear at a show mumbling, “My daughter takes better pictures than this.” But every famous photographer has his or her signature tone. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s warmth and humanity, Garry Windogrand’s exuberant and chaotic street-formlessness, Diane Arbus’s weirdness, and so on. Alec Soth doesn’t probe his subjects; he forces than into our faces with a flat, visual uniformity that’s almost uncanny, and is usually less about them—the subjects—than it is about the distress of taking a photograph without succumbing to the “picturesque.” Comparing his work with the images in a volume like Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light, one of my favorites, may be taken as an example of a photographer whose work can be formally and tonally astute, rich in atmosphere, and unafraid to include images of people having fun together.

On the far wall an array of smaller images had been arranged in a square. I was going to take a picture of it—I didn’t see a sign saying you couldn’t—but then I saw a young woman standing nearby with a camera, and I said, “Are you taking pictures?”

“I’m Tessa Beck, the museum director,” she said. “I was doing some video of this textile workshop.” And she came over to talk. She had a friendly smile, and wore a bright blue and white checkered blouse that almost matched her eyes. 

“Are you familiar with Soth’s work?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I like it. We saw a show at the Weinstein in Minneapolis a few years ago ... and then there’s the Mississippi series.”

“Well, this show predates those,” she jumped right in. “Alec went to Paris to shoot a fashion show, mostly back stage. Then it occurred to him to come back here to photograph the style of people in this area. Everyone has a style of dress, don’t you think?” I looked at the bright blue squares on her blouse, which were actually shaped like small, bent, stove-pipe hats. Then she started talking about something called “W.” I’d never heard of it. A fashion magazine? She spoke rapidly, interjecting “like” and other place-holder phrases liberally here and there, like young people often do, and for a while I lost the thread. She was enthusiastic and obviously very bright.

“Are you from around here?” I asked, changing the subject slightly.

“I’m from the Fargo area, but my family has a cabin on Bad Medicine.”

“Fargo’s getting to be pretty hip,” I said. “Especially along Broadway.”

“Yeah, and they have that new hotel.”

“The Donaldson?” Hilary and I explored the lobby ten years ago.

“No. Now they’ve got the Jasper,” Tessa updated me. Then, hardly stopping for breath, she pointed at the array of photos on the wall and said, “These pictures were in a box.”

She used a photographic term for them that I’d never heard before, describing them as part of the process but not intended for exhibit, the rejects from an oversized contact sheet. “Alec said, ‘If you want to frame them, you can use them.’ Most of them have never been seen before.”

Tessa was excited about that.

“Do you get to keep them?” I asked, naively.

She rolled her eyes as if to say, “Dream on.”

Hilary said, “Where are the photos from Paris?”

“We decided to omit them from the show, so we could add more of the images from this part of the world.”

“Hmm. Interesting.”

Tessa let us go, having enriched our visit immeasurably,  and returned to her textile workshop. We wandered the floor for fifteen minutes. Many of the images were of teenagers at a dance. Formal poses. Lots of seemingly blank faces and empty space all around. But was there more?

The most memorable image, I think, was of an adolescent girl wearing a pink coat and a crocheted stocking cap: colorful, wistful, enigmatic, slightly wary, bordering on the sentimental but not quite tumbling in. Perhaps the photo nearby of the adolescent male looking out through a gray window showed us the same world, but from the opposite point of view.

It would have been interesting to see the photos from Paris, too. But perhaps the division between haute couture and backwoods “whatever” would have been too obvious. Yet wasn’t that what Soth himself was driving at? Maybe. Maybe not.

Poking around online when we got home, I discovered that “W” refers to a book disguised as a fashion magazine that Soth put together for Magnum Photos. I located it in the library catalog and requested a copy; it arrived a few days later. Running along the top of the front cover, in thick black capital letters, are the words “Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth,” but on the center of the cover, in larger letters, it says “Paris Minnesota.” A library cataloger’s nightmare, but a postmodernist’s dream, I guess. It’s a complex, multi-layered work, loaded not only with formal and casual photos but also with articles that a fashion magazine might run. Are they for real? I’m not sure I could tell the difference, and I didn’t take the time to check. But the curators in Park Rapids were wise, I think, to limit their focus to images taken nearby.

I'm reluctant to look too deeply into W or other secondary materials. Often that ancillary verbiage, which tells you what you're looking at, or how you should be looking at it, is doing the work the art itself is supposed to do, while obscuring its intrinsic value intuitively considered. 

But I'm warming to Soth's work, almost in spite of myself.  

 

Remembering Pamela Espeland

Incomprehensible that Pamela Espeland is no longer with us. 

My encounters with her were few and far between, though over the years I got to know her fairly well. I met her at a book awards ceremony at the Minnesota Humanities Center in St. Paul, where we were seated at the same table. It may have been 2006, she was still with Free Spirit Publishing at the time. That summer we found ourselves attending the same Writers' Union meetings in Linden Hills. On one occasion, the subject under discussion was arts reviewing. Hilary and I had recently been to the Dakota to hear a set in which tenor saxophonist David Murray and two accomplices succeeded in jamming for an hour while avoiding a single musical reference to one another, and I expressed frustration that you could read an entire jazz review without finding out what kind of jazz was going to be performed.

"Well, David Murrray is still a great tenor saxophonist," came a voice from the other side of the room. It was Pamela.

As art-lovers and friends have invariably mentioned in tributes following her sudden death, Pamela and her husband, John Whiting, went to many concerts, readings, gallery openings, and plays in the course of a week. Sometimes three in a single evening. A few years ago we ran into her at Plymouth Congregational Church, where poet Louis Jenkins was reading from his last collection, Where Your House Is Now. The next night, there they were again, at the grand opening of a South Indian fabric studio loft in Northeast Minneapolis.

"How do you know Anita?..." "What drew you to this event?" And so on.

Loaded with accumulated expertise, both local and international, she graciously highlighted the best upcoming events in her weekly MinnPost Artscape column. 

During the pandemic, of course, there wasn't as much going on, no one got out so much, either. Hilary and I watched a variety of performances on-line— jazz, classical, theatrical. On one occasion we tuned in to a live show at Crooners given by jazz singer Kurt Elling that was also available for streaming, and were impressed by the emotional intensity of the performance. Was Elling always this wired up, expressive? Or were we witnessing a rare explosion of energy following the lockdown?

I knew Pamela was a big Elling fan, so I sent her a note. A few days later I got a reply that will give you some idea of her knowledge, enthusiasm, and eagerness to help others enjoy the things she enjoyed. The last few lines are almost unbearably poignant.    

Hi John,

Good to hear from you.

I thought Friday’s show was one of the best I’ve seen from Kurt, and I’ve probably seen him 20-30 times (because he never does the same show twice). That he started with a 20-minute improvised scat-a-thon was astonishing. He let us know he was going to do his show, his way.

We happened to be sitting in front of the sound board, where his manager was hanging out. More than once, I heard his manager sound surprised by what Kurt was up to on stage.

Kurt has been a road warrior for years, performing 300+ shows every year. I’m sure the pandemic and being stuck at home were hard on him. Midway through the pandemic, he and his family moved back to Chicago from New York. Early in the pandemic, he started a “Cocktails with Kurt” weekly livestream that kept him in touch with his audience (and made them aware of his politics, many for the first time). He followed that with a virtual tour - six weeks of concerts in a row - that you could subscribe to and get a T-shirt.

When he returned to Chicago, he immediately started streaming live performances from the Green Mill and also from his porch. Because he has spent a lifetime building relationships with audiences all over the world, people all over the world tuned into his livestreams. For at least one concert, unless I misheard this, he had 130,000 viewers. Thousands were watching Saturday’s livestream. If you were watching on CrowdCast, its counter told only a small part of the story.

His last two studio albums, “The Questions” (2018) and “Secrets Are the Best Stories” (2020), were both swallowed by the pandemic. Even though “Secrets” won a Grammy, I’m not sure how well it did. His next album comes out this fall - funk and dance music with Charlie Hunter.

All of the above is a circuitous route to answering your question. Yes, emotion and inventiveness are typical of his shows. He sings what he wants. He writes his own lyrics to instrumental tracks. He’s an expressive guy who loves what he does and thrives on the connection he makes with his audience. And his voice! I’ve never heard him sing such low notes and jump so many octaves, finally ending with falsetto.

And I’m sure he could not wait to get back on the road. This is true for a lot of the great ones. Fred Hersch has also hit the ground running.

I’m glad you heard him, and glad you felt him. I’ve been to several events over the past few weeks (a surprising number, all things considered) and this was the first one that grabbed me.

All best, and good for us! We’re still here.

P.

 

Semper Itasca

 

I like to call it Minnesota's little Yellowstone, not because of the wildlife—our best sighting on a recent visit was a porcupine waddling across the road—but because of the classic lodge, the stately pines, and the succession of minor sites to visit on your way from the Brower Visitors' Center near the park's east entrance to the Mary Gibbs Visitors' Center at the other end of the lake. You have Preacher's Grove, the Indian Peace Pipe stop, the Wegman Cabin (which makes me think of a sleek greyhound every time we pass by), the campground, the beach, the museum, the canoe and bike rental shop, the U of Minnesota Biological Station (established in 1909), the Indian graveyard, and so on.

Lake Itasca is shaped like a tuning fork, long, thin, and bifurcated; its beauty reveals itself mostly via sidelong glances through the trees, often from the road along the high bank on the northeast side. The west side of the lake is inaccessible except by water or intermittently along two shortish trails—the Dr. Roberts Trail and the Schoolcraft Trail—but they cover only a fraction of its length. And that's good. Because one of the underlying, yet crucial, virtues of Itasca State Park is that all the while you're enjoying its recreational offerings, you remain dimly aware that the greater part of the park is inaccessible to humans, and hasn't been altered much in more than a hundred years.

Hilary and I hiked both the Roberts and the Schoolcraft trails during our recent two-day visit, along with the hilly three-mile Hiking Club loop that includes parts of the Oziwindib and Deer Park Trails, and the BoHall Trail, which took us deep into the relatively undisturbed scientific and natural area. The bird-life was meager but the turning leaves, though sporadic, were all the more dazzling for that, and we took our time. The vivid but often isolated yellows, oranges, and reds were rendered more striking by other trees nearby, including the stately white and red pines, that were still rich shades of green. I think some of the combinations, enhanced by the bright sun and sharp cool air, were among the best I've ever seen.  

But we're not the type to say, "Let's go north to see the changing leaves." The pale purple asters weren't dazzling, but they were nevertheless superb in their own way. The green grasses bending uniformly in a marsh. The grayish green of the arrow-wood bushes.  A blue beech, its leaves dipped in mauve. There's always something to see, or feel, even in the depths of winter. Let's go any time.

The cabin we'd rented was small—Bert's Cabin # 6. I would estimate it to be 12 x 30 feet. But it had everything you might need—kitchen, bathroom, couch, table, bed—all in close proximity. It didn't take more than three steps to walk from one room to the other. The space heater was loud, but the deck out front was ample, and the nearby cabins weren't that close—fifty yards or more away.

We met our nearest neighbors because they stepped out to see the pileated woodpecker that was wandering across the road. (Bizarre behavior.) They'd been coming up for fifteen years with the same and other friends in varying combinations. We liked them immediately.

"But there are only five of you, and four cars in the lot!" I said.

"We're persnickety who we drive up with," one of the women said with a knowing grin that reminded me of a scene from The Adams Family.

We never saw them again, though we spent quite a bit of time sitting out on the deck. After dinner we watched the light fade from the sky. Only three stars appeared in the narrow space open to the sky amid the pines. No traffic noise. It was so calm and quiet all I could hear was my own ears ringing.

On our last night the temperature dropped down to 45 degrees in the night. In the morning, before dawn, we listened to the hoot of the great-horned owl. And then the report of shotguns. One. Three. Eight. Eleven. They came from every side, but always remote, like a feeble neighborhood Fourth of July celebration in the next county.

"I wonder if duck hunting season started this morning," I said. "seems sort of early for that."

"Can you hunt in a state park?" Hilary said.

"I have no idea," I said. "But those shots sound pretty far away."

I thought of the wood ducks we'd flush on the Schoolcraft Trail the previous morning. Not very meaty, and squealing with all their might as they made their escape.

Before we left the park that morning we took a last two-mile hike through the woods on the Roberts Trail. It was overcast, and the colors were muted. At one point we passed a trio of hikers: young girl, middle-ages man with pony tail (Native American?), and elderly woman. "It's a beautiful morning," I said. "There's always something to see on the Roberts Trail," he said cheerfully. (He reminded me of Dave, the short-order cook on Northern Exposure.)

Then the little girl said. "Why are you hiking with ski poles?"

"These's aren't ski poles, they're hiking poles," I said. "They come in handy on muddy terrain, give your upper body a workout, and keep your knees healthy. You should get some."

"I'm NINE," she said, with emphasis.

Then grandma, who was bringing up the rear, said, "I could probably use a set." 

As we left the park we became aware of another event we knew nothing about. A hundred-mile bike race was in progress between Park Rapids and Itasca. First we saw the refreshment station set up in a parking lot near Douglas Lodge. There were a few hand-made signs along the road, hardly legible. As we headed south out of the park we began to see the bikers on the opposite shoulder pedaling north past us in small groups. They were stretched out, with long gaps between the clusters, all the way to Park Rapids. (That explained why several guests staying in nearby cabins had left before dawn.)

In Park Rapids we made our final major discovery. The annual Art Leap festival and driving tour was under way. Nine galleries were open in town, with twenty more spread out across the countryside from Akeley to Menahga.

You gotta love those back-country names.

We had a lot of driving ahead of us as it was, so we grabbed a latte at Bella Café, wandered the Beagle and Wolf Bookstore next door for a few minutes, then headed over to the nearby Nemeth Art Center. Hilary had picked up a festival brochure and noticed that an early Alex Soth series titled "Paris / Minnesota" was on exhibit.  More later about that....

Memoir or Nature Guide? An Author Visit

When I mentioned to the author that I might stop by the following day to pick up a few books, it wasn't the kind of remark that committed either one of us to be around. It turned out to be a wonderful day, sunny, breezy, and cool, and I sent an email, left a message on Carol's voicemail, and Hilary and I headed over to Northeast Minneapolis to try our luck, intending to make the trip worthwhile in any case by taking a stroll along the Mississippi in hope of sighting a warbler or two, and maybe picking up a few things at Holy Land Deli or the food co-op on Central Avenue.

Carol wasn't home. I rang the buzzer several times. We waited. "Maybe she's out in the garage unpacking books," I said. We were returning to the car when I heard the aluminum screen to the side door rattle and there she was, smiling as she descended the concrete steps to the back yard.

"So glad you came," she said. "And hello, Hilary. I feel like I already know you. Come on back to the garage and I'll get you some books. Tessy won't hurt you."

Tessie is a dog. I recognized her immediately, because she figures prominently in the book that Carol and I had been working on intermittently for the last four years—Critters, Creeks, Neighbors, and Woods: a Natural History of Isanti County. Tessie even appears on the back cover, sitting in the driver's seat of Carol's pale green Hyundai Tucson, which she calls the Frog.

 For most of its life, the book didn't have a title. We weren't sure what kind of a book it would turn out to be. And as we sat on plastic lawn chairs inside the cyclone fence, Carol said, "John, I have to ask you, is this book a nature book or a memoir?"

"I would say it's both. That's part of the charm."

I happened upon the job purely by accident. One morning, while scrolling aimlessly through my Facebook feed, one of those "people you make know" bars showed up—almost invariably strangers, though I'm sometimes curious to find out who, among the individuals I've "friended," also has this unlikely individual as a "friend." On that morning someone I actually knew showed up. Didn't I take a class from that woman in grad school, many long years ago? Yes, it was her.

I didn't imagine Carol would remember me. She'd worked with hundreds of students over the years, and  I was in the twilight of my grad school career. I never finished the class--though I still have my unfinished essay on Abbe Raynal's Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the East and West Indies in the basement somewhere. Who knows? It might come in handy someday.

In those days Carol was the head of the James Ford Bell Rare Books Library, on the fourth floor of Wilson Library, and she struck me as a smart, fun-loving woman. I also recalled that during the brief interval that I knew her, she was in the process of self-publishing a book about owls. In those days, that meant "camera-ready" pages and metal plates.

I sent her a message, re-introduced myself,  and asked her what she was up to. She replied that she was retired, now ran a used bookstore, and was trying to complete a nature book about a chunk of somewhat marginal land—woods, creeks, bogs, fields—she had purchased in small increments north of Cambridge. I wrote back that I edited, designed, and produced books for a living.

"Maybe I should hire you," she replied, with the cheery enthusiasm and courage that came to characterize every phase of our project.

Thus began a four-year partnership, conducted almost entirely via email and snail-mail: editing text, extracting photos from Word documents, formatting pages. I'm sure I have more than thirty flash-drives with Carol's handwriting on them. And I now have twelve gigabytes of material in my Carol Urness folder, though the only files worth keeping, perhaps, are the final PDFs and the InDesign files for the text and cover, which include all the graphics.  

It goes without saying that the work was intermittent. We constructed the book, chapter by chapter, and there were extended breaks as Carol dealt with unhappy personal issues. A long-time friend who lived next door and also managed the bookshop died suddenly; another friend lost a struggle with memory issues and had to be moved into a care facility. The pandemic didn't speed things along much, either.

But it was fun. The text was personal and jaunty but also full of particulars about spiders, frogs, mushrooms, and wolves. Working with Carol was like taking a walk in the woods with a skilled naturalist while also getting to know her life story and her friends--Jessie, Mark, and Arnie, to name a few. 

As the parts of the book finally came together, timing became crucial, because Carol had received a grant from the University of Minnesota to help finance it, and the deadline for dispersing the money was approaching. Yet the printer we were using had difficulty handling the logistics of receiving payment from several bureaucratic sources for a single project.

In the same way that an ocean storm leaves a residue of gently lapping waves behind, the project's final issue was the cost of delivery. Carol couldn't believe the quoted price was correct—it was too low!—and she almost demanded to pay more.

I volunteered to stop by and help unload the books. Carol had a few neighbors lined up, but said she would contact me if need be. A few days later she let me know that the delivery driver had unloaded the entire shipment in about two minutes, and all was well.

A week later I sent her a note, curious to find out how things were going, and perhaps missing our frequent exchanges a little. Here is her reply.

John--Thanks. I have been doing pretty well, considering that getting the book somehow knocked me off me feet. I really couldn't believe it, I guess. I just sat down and cried. Took copies to the people in the country yesterday and stopped at Scout and Morgan, a good bookshop in Cambridge. They will take it at 60/40 so I get $15 per copy. They have a stock of 25,000 books so they know what they are doing.

 Scott and Morgan (named for the wife's two rescue dogs) ... and Corner Books [Carol's shop] would be the only places selling it. I think it works. My chief pain is not getting the mailing boxes yet from Office Max. I would really like the people who helped pay for it to get their copies... anyway, all is just fine. If you want to stop by, Wednesday afternoon would work. I know you will like the book.

Thanks. Carol

P.S. Not many unusual birds in the country--swans gathering at Mud Lake... but at least the country looks green now and mushrooms are showing up ...

As we sat chatting in the yard that afternoon, Carol offered to sign a book for me.

"I've got to tell you," I replied, "that at my first book signing, I thought my personalized remarks were uniformly brilliant. Since that time—that was twenty years ago—I have written so many simple-minded, stupid, and embarrassing things in the course of signing books that I've pretty much given it up. I suspect that every copy of the Seven States  travel book that I've personalized says either "Happy trails!" or "Enjoy the trip!"

"I'm so glad you said that," Carol said. "I've experienced that already. 'Dear, dear friend ...' and then I can't think of a single thing to say!" We laughed.

Carol was waiting for the auto repair shop to deliver her Frog so she could visit another friend in memory care. 

"We'd be happy to drop you off at the repair shop," Hilary said, "We're just out enjoying the afternoon."

"Oh, I wouldn't trouble you."

"It's not a big deal."

And so, we all hopped in our car--a generic Toyota with manual transmission that we might have named the Silverfish, if there had been any point to it--and off we went.

_____________

Though it isn’t germane to the story, it might be worth mentioning that when my grandmother died, she had an antique book about American history in her possession that passed  somehow to her son, Jim. His much younger sister Eleanor (my mother) was an enthusiast of books, history, and reading, and though it wasn’t a big deal, she expressed regret to me several times over the years that she hadn’t gotten that book. Jim and Ellie are no longer with us, but a few years ago I told this story to Jim’s daughter, Pat, with whom Hilary and I often share a lively breakfast.

“I have that book!” Pat exclaimed. “But you should have it. You’re the book person in the family.” Au contraire. Pat is a voracious reader, and so is Hilary. They often exchange books at these breakfasts, and when they get going about their book clubs and reading lists, I just sit back and listen.

But Pat insisted. And I was curious to see the by-now-legendary volume. It turned out to be a small, weathered but intact edition, printed in 1782, of The Revolution in America by none other than L’ Abbé Guillaume Thomas Fronçois Raynal, the man whose work I’d been desultorily studying in Carol Urness’s class so many years ago.

Morning Idyll on the North Shore

 

Rocky bay at the mouth of the Temperance River

thunderstorms rolled through in the night,

loud and worrisome, though I didn’t

hear any trees coming down nearby.

Some loud thunderclaps,

the kind that go beyond sound into shock.

Heavy rain, of course.

But at 5 a.m. the stars were blazing:

Cassiopeia, Auriga, and the Pleiades,

melded into a fuzzy ball by the still-humid night air.

 

Now Hilary examines the rocks on the beach

beside her camp chair, one by one.

She shows me a few. I give them back,

expressing interest and admiration.

“You should keep that,” I might say.

“Those are agates. Maybe Thompsonite.”

“This one has a red line through it. What’s that?”

“Could be jasper,” I take a wild guess.

 

A sweet, vegetative smell permeates the air,

like rotting wintergreen or Labrador tea.

Four mergansers are drifting at the mouth of the river.

(Not drifting, fishing.)

And two fat gulls fly by.

 

These shelves of rock look like walruses,

struggling to come ashore across the pebbles,

their children: reds and grays,

butterscotch, an occasional green.

Here’s one that’s etched in green foliage.

"Don’t throw it away. I’m going to keep it.”

 

The blue sky advances, like Oklahoma,

but it isn’t getting any warmer.

Now a skein of muted sunlight dances toward us

from the horizon across the waves.