Don't Look Back

This week's PBS broadcast of Martin Scorcese's "No Direction Home" consistently entertained and provided me with a few revelations. I was born late in 1963, just before Dylan released his third album, and I have never really grasped his phenomenal rise to icon, only hearing it through his music. This film nailed his charisma and eloquence. And the contemporary interviews surprised me because he still exudes certain Minnesotan sensibilities, for better or worse.

My Bob Dylan story is really a non-story, so I don't expect it to make headlines. I am a big fan, but I have never seen him live. And I've gone to great lengths to avoid that encounter. I had first started listening to him during my last two years of college, a well-worn vinyl copy of "The Times They Are A-changin'" purchased at Positively Fourth Street my first consistent reference beyond radio play. Along with Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska", Dylan's early albums inspired me to pick up the guitar, and I regularly kidnapped a six-string Ovation from Pete up the street.

After graduation, I enrolled in grad school in Stockholm, which proved to be a very foolish move academically. I had a wad of student loan money in hand and was sick of being told what to read. So, in addition to devouring the English literature section of a Swedish library, I purchased my first guitar, a Yamaha (thus an American spending Swedish currency for a Spanish instrument made by a Japanese company in Taiwan). A Finn in the dorm room across the hall taught me plenty, but during the long nights of my Scandinavian winter I was still basically a three-chord strummer.

On the train back from Copenhagen, where I had spent Christmas with friends, an American man much my senior struck up a conversation over my guitar and long hair. He introduced himself as Izzy Young, and the name struck a bell. I was at the time reading Robert Shelton's No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, and this was indeed the very Israel Young who had once run the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village and booked Dylan's first professional show. Izzy complimented me as a "freak" and told me to come and see him at his shop, Folklore Centrum, in south Stockholm. I wouldn't have called myself a guitar player yet, so I balked at visiting. But after I heard his voice on the radio speaking Swedish with a distinct Brooklyn accent, I screwed up my courage and took the subway to Södermalm.

Izzy introduced me to another American kid who was a very capable fiddler, and he encouraged us to do some street gigs together. Six months later, after I had holed up in the taiga for a few months, listening attentively to songs and earning the ability to sing and play simultaneously, I might have taken him up on it. But it never happened, and I averted buskerdom infamy.

Oh, right. This is supposed to be a Bob Dylan story. After dropping out of grad school and returning to watch the ice disappear from White Lake, I moved back to Minneapolis for a couple of months. Pete and Rolf and I nabbed some tickets to see Dylan and the Dead at Alpine Valley, and I was primed to finally see the artist I was emulating. And then, a few days before the show, Pete's brother Bill tempted me to accompany him back up to Alaska and work in the slime mill for the summer. We left the day before the show.

My guitar playing improved steadily until it panned out about five years later. Despite several other close encounters, Bob and I have yet to cross paths. These days, we both play a Montana Gibson.

Times Select: Take it or...

The New York Times has recently decided to charge you, humble reader, for the privilege of reading its generally talented corps of opinionists. South of the Taiga continues to pledge that, as long as we can still put food in our kids' mouths, we will make no such selfish demands on your wallet. You would think the Old Grey Lady would have learned the lesson that Slate and Salon dispatched long ago: this ain't cable (especially if one is clever enough to get one's wi-fi on) and you, ma'am, are most certainly not HBO.

Times columnists are still syndicated through other media, but apparently only in the processed-forest edition. For instance, Paul Krugman's "Find the Brownie" appears in this morning's Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but not on the Strib website. Perhaps Maureen Dowd is weary from ducking the constant vollies of poisonous darts linked from conservative blogs. I can't say which fancy pants I'll miss most, probably because I won't miss them much at all. And that's my point: For every web-news junkie who hangs upon Frank Rich's every word, there are dozens of us who don't care all that much. Is this simply another example of New Yorkers basking in their self-perceived indispensibility to civilization? 'Cause I still have some dried knish on the soles of my Timberlands that suggests it isn't so.

I read the Times most of all for its reporting, and that's still free. Their slant is close enough to my own, and their breadth casts a shadow across the globe. I was pleased to see that they have not as yet risen to the bait of this useless chaff from today's Washington Post (as headlined in the Strib) :

Masked anchor proclaims hurricane 'joy' on Al-Qaida newscast
Daniel Williams, Washington Post
September 27, 2005

ROME -- An Internet video newscast called the Voice of the Caliphate was broadcast for the first time Monday, purporting to be a production of Al-Qaida and featuring an anchorman who wore a black ski mask and an ammunition belt.
The anchorman, who said the report would appear once a week, presented news about the Gaza Strip and Iraq, and expressed happiness about recent hurricanes in the United States. A copy of the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book, was placed by his right hand, and a rifle affixed to a tripod was pointed at the camera.
The origins of the broadcast could not be immediately verified. [Umm, see headline.] If the program was indeed an Al-Qaida production, it would mark a change in the group's use of the Internet to spread its messages and propaganda. [See! Pop-up adds and user fees for exclusive content just alienate your audience.]


I believe Hurricane Joy isn't scheduled until next season, and Hugo Chavez is already taking credit. Aside from this story's obvious lack of ripeness, I thought I was reading the prospectus for a Scooby-Doo script. I think FOX might want to run a feed on the diamond vision at half-time next weekend defying the infidel Patriots to score. Plenty of people will see and read this "news" and resolve somehow that we should bomb somebody somewhere back to the Pleistocene. And it gives some Koran-thumping nutbag publicity when everyone knows the hottest new shows are on CCCP 1. Bottom line: not news. It looks a little like news, but open it up and all you smell is hype. We are one small step from seeing the Unabomber on "Hollywood Squares."

Used: Black and Blue

Perhaps it's the Y-chromosome, but I'm probably less sentimental than Genie. She was saddened by our decision that Ol' Blue, our 1984 Volvo wagon, needed to be put out to pasture, or at least spend a week at the spa. Yet another link in the exhaust system had failed on our last trip from the cabin, and we broadcast our return to Minneapolis like the mujahadeen roaring into Kabul atop captured Russian tanks. That plus several long-ignored creaks and oozings mandated that we either "bring on another thousand" (B.I.'s explanation of the acronym B.O.A.T.) or proceed to the next vehicle. For my part, I was relieved to resolve that I would no longer examine its greasy underparts.

Last year, in a fit of irrational exuberance over the mercurial rise in our home equity, we contemplated buying a new minivan. We rationalized the need for increased space, and the gloss of reliability which a warranty would bring. We raved about the Toyota Sienna after a lengthy weekend test tour. But that dream has been postponed by calmer heads and the spectre of $3 per gallon at the pump. We lit on the idea of another 240, and found an onyx gem built in '93, the last year for that spartan breed of Swedish buggy.

I know this model causes certain hipsters to shudder for its solemn, reliable squareness. But I am taken with the practicality of every nook and angle (though baffled by their stubborn lack of cupholders). Ol' Blue moved me home from Brooklyn: I portaged my entire kit (sans books) north of the Great Lakes via Canada in its cavernous hold. U.S. Customs was so daunted by the prospect of scrutinizing my return--even the front passenger seat was packed allowing only a clear view of the right mirror--that they just waved me through, shook their heads, and alerted the highway patrol.

I took her for one final ride last night. The seller, a Volvo mechanic, had agreed to take the '84 in trade and tweak it back to marketability. As I exited the freeway, my latest exhaust-pipe band-aid failed, and for ten last humiliating blocks I was Zhukov blatting across the suburban steppe. All I lacked was a leather helmet and bugs in my teeth as I rumbled to a stop beside the gleaming '93. Godspeed, Ol' Blue, you served me well.

The return home was refreshingly smooth and quiet, and this new ride should give us years of secure, self-righteous motoring. The boys were sleepy and cranky, so we snared them in for a first family ride, and discussed a nickname for the newest member of the household. "Black Beauty" is already taken by the '91 Saab that shares the garage, but Cole finally nailed it: "I think we should call it Black Blue" he said, getting every last ounce out of the "ooo." By the faintest of chances, it could be his vintage first ride someday.

Category Five and Counting

As another colossal storm lumbers into the Gulf of Mexico, Bush's energy dispolicy is primed for a Wizard-of-Oz unveiling. "We got to be ready for the worst," the president said this morning, throwing conjugation to the wind. Hurricane Rita is currently generating the third lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. It thus supplants Katrina, which at 27.11 inches of pressure prior to landfall was the third most intense storm since 1900. Of the previous top ten storms, none struck within the same season as another.

Bush's rejection of the Kyoto accords was the signature act of his presidency pre-9/11. Kyoto proposed to reduce world carbon dioxide emissions and cap them at 1990 levels; American emissions have grown by more than 15% since 1990 and are increasing. While the Bush administration has softened its devolutionary denial that the biosphere is warming, he again rejected a global accord at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. "The Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt," he said, as simple as pie. And one cannot deny that Katrina has already benefited certain sectors of the American economy.

The Guardian's science correspondent posited not long before Katrina that global warming has reached a tipping point. A permafrost region of Siberia the size of France and Germany combined has begun to melt for the first time since its formation 11,000 years ago. The terrain is a peat bog, which by one estimate will release as much methane per year as is currently released by all global wetlands and agriculture, a cloud to humble even Dick Cheney on cabbage rolls. (According to the EPA, Methane traps over 21 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide.) Of course, Bush could blame the mammoths for their untimely rotting. Or perhaps his noise makers can explain all the unprecedented storm ferocity with satellite pictures of massive fans blowing northward from the coast of "Hurricane" Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Hurricanes culminate on the last swell of summer, and Rita appears to be taking this equinox seriously. In the next few days Bush will have plenty to do: He needs to be shown sharing the pain by constructing levees around his little hobby farm in Crawford so he'll have brush left to cut. He might determine which Best Buy in Galveston has the dopest booty to loot. He certainly must figure out how to pin the misery on Michael Chertoff. But from here on out we desperately need leadership instead of some aw-shucks Nero fiddling while Babylon drowns.

Review: Sonic Butler by James Greve

One of the benefits of my itinerant past was the diverse cast of characters with whom I traveled. Prominent among them was the bright and seemingly cranky James Greve of Portland, Oregon, with whom I spent many an idle hour aboard such Alaskan fishing vessels as the Chichagof or crammed into a booth in the cafeteria of the floating processor Bering Star. We both worked the western Alaska herring fishery for years as a peculiar form of parasite known as a herring technician, a job that was about 4% perspiration and 26% recreation--the rest was sleep. One measure of our daily economy in that endeavor: Greve and I both read the same copy of Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund (or maybe it was Magister Ludi) on the same day, and we were paid to do it. This is to say nothing of that book's merits, but simply to point out what gravy days those were for people with hungry minds. All this as a long way of fully disclosing my possible lack of objectivity toward his latest novel, Sonic Butler.

I am an aspiring novelist myself, and Greve was kind enough to read my first effort, Eating Crow, and send me abundant helpful feedback. All he got out of me was a congratulatory message and the following blurb: "A sub-cool crusade against the lords of a godessless age; a no-holds-barred rampage against the pug-nosed, pasty spawn of mediocrity. Nole Sterling is an aging Holden Caulfield in post-real America, matching him dose for butt." But he deserves much more.

I read Sonic Butler on a brief trip to Seattle to hang out with the Nelson and catch some Twins games in outdoor splendor. I finished most of the book in a coffee house in Georgetown, a rare gritty and greenless corner of the Pacific Northwest. It was the perfect backdrop to appreciate Greve's work. Urban settings dominate Sonic Butler, but the scent of Doug fir and salal is never far away. Greve portrays his protagonist Nole Sterling's mucky descent with a touch of fury, and employs brilliant descriptions of Nole's musical expression to trace the trajectory. But his ability to root ecological damnation in the pavement of Portland is the novel's triumph. Nole is redeemed by tripping up his sinful CEO father and sweating out a few dark family memories. He is ably assisted by his alter ego/younger brother, an earnest environmental lawyer. The roving band of supporting characters echoed every beer-soaked night I ever spent in Seward, Arcata, Bellingham, or Homer. In other words, for this reader, Sonic Butler was an evocative read, and one that added another galvanizing layer to my world view via a protaganist whom I was repeatedly defied to like.

I have a few spare copies lying around, so the first person to so request gets one free, postage paid. All I ask is your promise to spread the good word. Or tear him a new one, what do I care? The rest of you, however, must cough up some clams to the good folks at Plushwest.

Extra! Extra!: Birds Die of Natural Causes

I'm all for news of things ornithological. The rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is one of the great stories of our time, a tale to brighten the despondency of the most misanthropic deep-ecologist. The success of that expedition ranks with the reappearance of the coelacanth, a fish whose resumé once ended in the Cretaceous period, or the inevitable reality show starring some hack cloned from matter scraped off the last girdle worn by Elvis.

But this story emitted from the "news" wire yesterday, which I admittedly read with fascination, strains the bounds of relevance:

DULUTH, Minn. (AP), September 14, 2005
- A sudden blast of wind is the suspected cause of the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of migrating songbirds found floating in Lake Superior.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources staff collected about 50 of the birds after receiving a report from anglers about hundreds of them east of Grand Marais.
The tiny birds were found in debris lines, sometimes called bug slicks, where flotsam gathers on the lake's surface, said Dave Ingebrigtson, DNR wildlife manager in Grand Marais.
"We recovered 50 of them. ... But there were other reports, as far away as Tofte, so there were probably a lot more. We'll never really know how many,'' Ingebrigtson said.
He said he suspects the cause was an unusual blast of strong wind that may have overwhelmed the small birds, who were flying during one of the peak migration periods.
"The two ideas that hold the most weight are either that they got blown out over the lake and didn't have the energy to get back to shore against the wind, or that some sort of unusually strong wind actually pushed them down into the water,'' he said.
The National Weather Service reported offshore winds on the North Shore at nearly 40 mph early that morning, while other areas had winds of about 15 mph.
"That would be enough to do it. Sometimes they just can't make it,'' Ingebrigtson said.

This on a day where "insurgents staged more than a dozen suicide bombings that ripped through Baghdad for much of the day Wednesday, killing at least 160 people and wounding 570 in a coordinated assault that left much of the capital paralyzed." Yes, the latter story received wider coverage, but will fade quickly from American papers only to be replaced by news of today's 160 or 24 or 11 hapless human lives destroyed by civil unrest. And those lives too, will fade: no moment of silence before an NFL game, no granite memorial on the mall, no congressional hearings demanding to know what went wrong.

That said, songbirds are in trouble. Habitat loss, Felix domesticus, communication towers, environmental toxins, West Nile virus--all of these perils constitute a formidable modern obstacle course. But migration itself has always been perilous. And there's nothing more natural than a stiff, deadly, offshore breeze.

Of Lefse, Jazz, and Monetary Policy

There are few advantages to having an ethnically distinct, consonant-rich surname. For one thing, I've already spent precious hours of my mortal years spelling it for clerks, tellers, receptionists, etc. And the temptation to mangle it maliciously was irresistible to classmates. "Nordhog" had already taken root on my older brother when I reached school, and it clung to me like fungus for a few years. Of course, "NordBlog" might be my redemption, but the current title stays for now. However, the name Nordskog certainly makes the google-sifting easy. A few years ago I came across knowledge that one of my tribe who drifted westward played a role in the popularization of America's elemental art form.

My great-grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, made his first home in Story City, Iowa, where a brother had settled before him. After marrying in 1899, my progenitor migrated to northern Minnesota, where he endured a diet of herring, spruce bark, and Lutheran guilt. But his nephew and namesake Andrae, Iowa born in 1885, took a more adventurous turn, leaving Story City for life on the road as an opera singer. Settling in sunny southern California, Andrae became general manager of the Hollywood Bowl in 1920. Soon after, he founded Nordskog Records in Santa Monica, the first commercial recording studio on the West Coast. There he produced what are widely considered to be the first jazz recordings made by an African-American band from New Orleans, including a recording of "Ory's Creole Trombone" by Spikes Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra, a session name for Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band. (Kid Ory went on to greater acclaim with Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in Chicago.) It's a raucous track, guaranteed to put you in a good mood. The tale has its sordid side, though: the pressing was supposed to carry the Sunshine Records label, as expected by the local impresarios who had arranged the session, John and Benjamin “Reb” Spikes. They refused to pay the full cost of the pressing and relabled some of the stock. Andrae sued them for full payment and won, and Sunshine set upon the wide Pacific.

Nordskog Records was also short-lived. The company from New Jersey that pressed records from Nordskog masters fell into bankruptcy. They failed to return more than 80 masters, including lost recordings by King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton--although those might have been lost during shipment across the desert, when the wax cylinders would often melt. Andrae closed up shop after releasing 27 titles and turned to other interests, inserting himself into the volatile world of California water politics, voicing a public-affairs radio show, and publishing The Gridiron, a weekly rant against graft. One contemporary described his writings as those of "a bond salesman with a yen to be a poet." I don't know if anyone ever called him "Nordhog," but dilletante, self-styled, amateur, and gadfly are other common labels. Andrae even tilted his lance at the White House, with a short-lived run for Vice-President with the Liberty Party in 1932, until he was bumped off the ticket because he and the Presidential nominee were from the same state, a constitutional no-no. His final blip on the mediasphere was a notorious suit against the Federal Reserve in 1936, but he no doubt went right on nordblogging until his death in 1962. For reasons I don't fully grasp, nor will I endeavor to, he appears to be gaining new life as a dead pundit in the distant cyber-bunkers of fiscal policy flat-earthers.

Soot and Soothing

Eli Wirtanen's Savusauna

The Lake Superior hinterland did not lack a cultural tradition steeped in heat when Europeans first explored the region in the sixteenth century. The Ojibwe used sweat lodges to purify and cleanse, just as the Lakota and Cree had before them. But those traditions were removed to enclaves like Grand Portage, Fond du Lac, and Bois Forte by the time the fur trade had dwindled and the region became lightly settled by Caucasians.

That most northeasterly of the new European immigrants, those who called themselves Suomi, brought a similar tradition with them. Shanty towns near the copper and iron mines, and logging camps in the vast pinelands began to sprout a distinctive sort of outbuilding, built to embrace a raging hearth and furnished to survive a good soaking. The sauna was probably as strange and impractical to a Yankee superintendant or Scots foreman as the sweat lodge had been to Jesuit missionaries. And for that difference, Finns formed rural agricultural communities that have survived into the 21st century. Once a Finn laborer had saved enough to choose landownership, he almost always built a sauna on his property. Most often it was the first building staked and raised.

Like most Finnish immigrants who homesteaded at the dawn of the twentieth century, Eli Wirtanen got his foothold in America by serving in the front lines of resource extraction, cutting pine from the Minnesota winter woods and milling it in the summers. He had landed at Port Arthur in Ontario, where a brother lived among a burgeoning Finnish community, but Eli migrated in search of work to central St. Louis County in Minnesota. He struck up a friendship with his boss, and as a worker he took often to the tavern, that ready sinkhole of wages earned. But the boss's wife tamed her mate, committing her husband to homestead a forty acre woodlot at Markham on the Vermilion Trail in 1904, and Eli anted up as a bachelor neighbor.

The soft midlands of Minnesota's Arrowhead region bear small resemblance to its flinty edges and spine. The rocky north shore of Lake Superior forms the sharper edge, but bedrock also defines the serpentine, watery northern border with Ontario. The ridgeline of the arrowhead is the Mesabi range, drifts of iron ore and rusty shafts of hematite. But in the wide expanse between the Mesabi and the Superior highlands lies a softer country, where terrestrial bones are buried deep beneath gravel. It is a land rich in the oddities of glacial topography: drumlins, eskers, and moraine. This is the watershed of the St. Louis River, and Markham sits near the headwaters of a tributary called the Whiteface. Atop this plain of glacial outwash and agricultural improvidence, the immigrant Eli staked his claim.

He built a sauna near the road that marked the northern boundary of his forty acres. Doubtless his enterprise required thrift, and it may have been for that reason that he built a savusauna, a structure that differs little from many one would have seen in the forests of Eli's homeland centuries before. The building features a small vestibule, which opens into a dark room. A savusauna encloses an open fire or some manner of primitive stove piled with stones; some are vented through gaps in the logs, but Eli's is tightly fitted, exhausting through a hole near the peak of the back wall and intaking through a chest-height box a side wall. The structure is simple in its beauty, and decades of functional tweaking are apparent: a culvert section became the hearth, a weathered and reddened metal roof crowns the hand-squared, dovetailed logs. This sauna has seen one hundred winters and warmed thousands of evenings.

After a long week's work in the forest or a day spent teaming his horses for 40 cents an hour, Eli would close the week in his savusauna. The room would fill with smoke while the rocks heated, and Eli would stoke the fire with breath held and eyes tight. Only after the fire had died and the smoke cleared would his bath begin, and he would pour water on the kiuas to produce the telltale flash of sauna steam, löyly (say "loo-loo" and you'd be understood in Helsinki, because that's about as close as an American larynx can get).

Finns' affinity for sauna dates to a distant chilly past. While such baths once flourished throughout northern and central Europe, plague and vice had pushed the tradition to the edge of civilization, where people still hacked a thoroughly rural and meager existence from a begrudging landscape, in the Finnish highlands. In the nineteenth century, Finnish nationalism stirred after centuries of provincial status beneath Sweden or Russia. Elias Lönnrot, a linguist trained in the university town of Turku, traveled the Russo-Finnish frontier gathering the stories he would collect into the Kalevala. This epic verse, he hoped, would gather strength like a boreal Bhagavad Gita, galvanizing the self-awareness of a nation. The verses contain many references to sauna, and many references to desperate struggles against frigid northern evils. Embraced by all who read the Finnish language, sauna again flourished in the coastal regions as a crucial Finnish element.

There is no mystery behind the Finns' importation of this tradition to the new land so many of them chose, the shores and uplands of the Lake Superior basin. The average daily temperature in Markham bottoms out near zero in January, and frost is no stranger to any month. (In contrast, the average January temperature in Eli's native parish of Karstula in Finland is a balmy 16 degrees). In this new world, sauna gained a ritualized Saturday evening regularity in response to the American work week.

Sisu, a Finnish amalgam of spunk, chutzpah, and Sisyphean grit--"even through a stone wall" is one characterization--must have helped Eli Wirtanen throughout his bachelor life. The sauna was the first building of many, and would have been his first shelter. He carved a wide meadow out of the norway pines, white spruce, and tamarack, and built a sturdy modest log house that remains wafer tight to this day. He raised a few animals, kept a horse team for hire, and worked winters in the woods well into his seventies. Several barns ring the meadow, and the forest still stands respecfully distant more than a half century after Eli's death at 87 in 1957.

His legacy is now a historical treasure, thanks to the efforts of such locals as Gerry Kangas and the generous support of many, including Arnold Ranta and Bill Aho, successful Markham expatriates who have matched fundraising efforts. The site, held for years by the St. Louis County Historical Society, was acquired in 2001 by the Friends of the Wirtanen Pioneer Farm. These secluded acres are valuable for their ability to portray to the visitor a simple farmstead economy, to view a plot that was developed not under the strictures of a contractor's calendar and a bulldozer's blade, but rather by the annual fortunes and ambitions of its industrious steward and his reckoning with the land and seasons, all without electricity or internal combustion. But the Eli Wirtanen Farm is precious most of all because of its homestead savusauna, a rare relic. Such scorched chambers are understandably prone to conflagration every generation or so, and have all but disappeared from the Arrowhead woods.

For most who grow up in Minnesota's Arrowhead, Finn or fowl, the sauna is as common as a pickup truck. You may not own one yourself; you may never even feel compelled to borrow your neighbor's. But you are accustomed to its proximity and know that severe warmth sometimes comes in handy. Much to the benefit of all, the community of Markham continues to fan the cultural embers.

(Note: This entry is a draft of the first chapter of my manuscript on the sauna tradition of northeastern Minnesota. My collaborator is the photographer Aaron Hautala, who gets credit for the featured image.)

On the shining Big-Sea-Water

I have followed a dispute in my hometown with keen interest over the past two years. Two Harbors, Minnesota and environs is home to 5000 people at most, a port town on the shore of Lake Superior whencefrom the first shipload of Minnesota iron ore departed in the 1880s. The Duluth, Missabe, & Iron Range railroad fueled the town's growth, and owned most of the waterfront, including the handsome old lighthouse. The point is one of the few places on the rugged north shore where you can still get your toes wet without park pass or trespass.
Not long ago, a holding company acquired the railroad that had acquired the DM&IR, or some such baroque arrangement, and that owner commenced liquidation of most non-productive assets. The lighthouse itself, and a fine boat launch and dock built a decade ago were already secured in public ownership. But the wooded acres behind the lighthouse, where local volunteers had built a fine trail that grants a remarkably remote sense of this coastline, fell into private hands. The new owner, a Twin Cities based developer, intended a large condo complex, shops, and restaurants.

Remarkably, local resistance flared up and stayed lit. The city, which had probably dropped the ball by not acquiring this parcel in the first place, did not rubber stamp the developer's ambitions. Plenty of local debate ensued, and the usual gaggle of simple-minded graderheads advocated unbridled property rights and the virtues of ephemeral ticky-tacky. But the city council recently voted to deny the developer the zoning change he sought. Somewhere, quietly, a few lawyers felt their appetites quicken at the promise of a skirmish. But for the moment, a small town with plenty of tourism charm has taken a stand that, if successful, will look mighty wise fifty, seventy, one hundred years from now. By resisting to trade precious lakefront for a paltry dose of property taxes contributed by weekenders who buy their booze and groceries elsewhere, Two Harbors has averted killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Spilling the Wind

We closed out the summer like many Americans, slipping out of town to our favorite beach. Ours is on a small lake in northern Minnesota, a pond easily conquered by paddle. And we made a new investment in leisure, purchasing a 20-year-old sailboat, a little racing model called a Force 5.

Of course, this being America, most of the lake's weekend residents feel the need to burn gas, and the lake hosted more power boats than we had seen all summer. Usually this grates on my nerves somewhat, the putt-putt or ripping roar over stillness, the stench of exhaust on the breeze. But at $3 per gallon, one can't help but feel sorry for folks who are so desperate to justify the expense of their boat that they motor unabated with flabby triceps drooping over the gunwales and doughnut waistlines bulging out of the seats. Fortunately, by a wide majority, they plod their girth courteously around the pond.

Our new boat sailed very nicely on light breezes, and Sunday was one of those perfect northwoods days. We took turns on the boat, watched the boys wade in the shallows, and finished with an evening sauna.

The day ended with competing volleys of fireworks from opposite sides of the lake. I'm not crazy about the symbolism of all that rocket's red glare, we being at war and all. And when I was a kid, a few packs of bottle rockets, Black Cats, and sparklers on Independence Day were enough. But I'm not going to Scrooge over a half-hour of admittedly spectacular sprays of potassium nitrate and sulfur.

Then, once the exchange ended, one camp kept on launching long into the night, interrupted by a severely amplified and inept karaoke debacle. They finally settled down well after eleven on a Sunday night, concluding their dick-wagging with a few dozen colossal--we're talking wake up the kids and send the canines under the sheds--booms.

Call me, if you must, a limp-wristed comforter of the enemy: this was a sad display of what is so wrong about this country these days. Our descent from civility, our pathetic need to entertain ourselves by cocky displays of power. My refuge, a place where I have indulged in the comfort of quiet, isolation, and tonic breezes, is eroding out from under my feet.

Everything Flows Downstream

Maybe it's just part of the stupor caused by recently returning to work after a wonderful four-month hiatus, but I have been far too susceptible to loops of estuarine suffering and the almost-smarmy credibility of Aaron Brown this week. I never watch CNN or network news in general, but this evolving display of meteorology, politics, sociology, fluid dynamics, and pathos has kept me hostage.
I see a link between N'awlins and Iraq, but nothing as obvious as absent national guard troops or guns-or-buttress choices about federal spending. It's the intractability of ideas: the folly of Bush's recent talking point about staying the course in Iraq is paralleled by three centuries of colossal metropolitan error in allowing a city to flourish on such a site. Bush says we must persevere in order to honor the dead; New Orleans endured because Louisiana never had the political will to remove its primary city to higher ground. Too much invested, perhaps, in both cases to change course.
The river never had trouble changing course before federal engineers channeled it into a long last culvert spewing the effluent of the heartland into the Gulf of Mexico. It swamped its banks and abandoned old channels for eons. But young man hubris, he just keeps strolling along.

South of the Taiga

The taiga is one of the earth's biomes, though one with less of a reputation than tundra, rainforest, or desert. Ringing the subarctic climes of the northern hemisphere, it's a place where spruce are abundant and mosquitos are redundant for all the blackflies, at least for the six weeks of the year when the cold isn't bone-cracking. I don't live there, and neither should you.

But it's also a place of wilderness and emptiness, a vast potentiality the presence of which gives me comfort. If you want a good read about the taiga, I would suggest Farley Mowatt's People of the Deer. If you want a good read about anything else, stay put. I hope to fill these pages with observations on events micro and macro, recollections, revelations, and commentary. In other words, I'm not setting any rules, except that my prose should give you one good thing to share at the next idle moment in the elevator with that guy who is about to lapse into a reverie about his impetigo. Whether you've landed here by accident or via reference, your feedback is welcome. The DEET is in the tent.