The Jaques Generation

I recently attended a gathering at the Tamarack Nature Center in White Bear Lake to open their series on nature and art. Murray Olyphant lectured about his late friends Francis Lee and Florence Jaques. Lee was a noted wildlife artist, one of the best ever, and arguably Minnesota's greatest painter of any style. His wife Florence wrote a series of timeless travel and conservation books illustrated by her husband. They spent the last 20 years of their lives in the Twin Cities suburb of North Oaks.

I wrote a lengthy article about Lee and Florence Jaques earlier this year, and I have delved deep into their biographies. But this was my first time in a room with a bunch of their contemporaries--a good third of the crowd was octogenarians who, a generation younger than Lee and Florence, had clearly revered them. Olyphant himself is an accomplished portrait artist--though he prefers the term portrait "engineer"--and he provided plenty of insight into Lee's technique that my untrained eyes would never have caught. Among the many attendees were Art and Betty Hawkins, who first met Lee and Florence at the Delta marshes in Manitoba, a visit eloquently chronicled by Florence in Canadian Spring (1947).

This gathering represented to me the most important generations in American conservation, those who took the stand that our natural resources were not limitless in the face of America's growing prosperity. Without their diligence we would not have a BWCAW in Minnesota--it would likely be a series of reservoirs devoid of virgin forest, probably ringed with fly-in lodges and private vacation homes. Lee and Florence Jaques were acquainted with some of the greats of that movement: Sigurd Olson, Ernest Oberholzer, and William O. Douglas just to name a few. Those that remain among us have wonderful stories to tell, tales of journeys to the near north long before the ubiquity of paved roads and air travel; warnings about the suburban steamrolling of greenspace; distant memories of life's simplicity.

Events honoring the art of Lee Jaques are rare these days, and members of my generation and younger who recognize his name are few. But two institutions in Minnesota continue to celebrate his art: the Bell Museum of Natural History on the U of M's Minneapolis campus, and the Jaques Art Center in Aitkin, his hometown. Lee painted backdrops for many of the Bell's wildlife dioramas, and those installations alone are very much worth the price of admission. (I recently read that his background paintings in various museums total close to 30,000 square feet!) The art center in Aitkin honors its favorite son with exhibitions of his work and workshops on a variety of artistic skills for residents of the region. Lee was a pioneer in his ability to portray birds in flight, but his paintings are compelling for many reasons beyond mere technique. He mastered the Minnesota landscape with strokes that are both starkly realistic and startlingly beautiful.

Jerome Hill: Creative and Generous

My latest published article hits the newstands today, a review of the films of St. Paul's Jerome Hill. I thank my editor at the Rake, Julie Caniglia, for offering this topic. Another notable stroke of fortune: knowing only that Hill had been a major philanthropist, I was very pleased to find his films engaging. A scion of one of Minnesota's wealthiest families, Hill was confronted by skepticism throughout his creative life--a showing of his paintings in Paris was once canceled by the gallery because they feared his wealth would taint their reputation. I was the latest to approach his work with the label dilettante at the ready; instead I was moved and challenged by this gifted cinematic talent. His lifelong artistic discipline and yeoman's diligence toward his craft are an inspiration.

Review: Two Harbors by Kate Benson

The words Dex and Stone do not appear together anywhere in the first 100 pages of Kate Benson's recent first novel Two Harbors. I had noticed the name of the protagonist's lover in a synopsis, and it's one of those details that can really prejudice a reader, so I read with trepidation for awhile. The handsome interloper, had he come to my hometown and taken a railroad job away from an unemployed local family, would have gone undercover as Art Ruberg or Ricky Wiita (or, if he really wanted to disappear, Brad Johnson, which doubles back to the princely quarterback connotation).

But Dex did not arrive in my hometown; he populates Benson's fictional Minnesota port town of Two Harbors, a place mostly lacking authenticity aside from the frigid lake beyond. And her novel is not about the handsome interloper, but the lover he leaves behind, a beautiful and precocious local fledgling named Casey who wears the hairshirt of her mother's pageant-queen, footlights, cuckoo legacy. Kate Benson loves adjectives even more than I love a gaudy mixed metaphor, decorating her early paragraphs with "balloons in bubbly bursts" and "wispy blue streamers." (Quoth the maven: avoid describing nouns that imply the description.) Early on, I sensed that this novel takes place in the near future on a soundstage somewhere in Van Nuys, hopefully with a face like a young Cate Blanchett's in the lead role, and a navel to match; that would at least make the many closeups interesting.

After those first 100 pages, however, Benson stashes the dollhouse and grinds out some compelling passages. The mother-as-refugee-to-Hollywood motif creates a big pit of longing around which this story plausibly orbits. Benson has the patience to tease out the essense of her improbable heroine and tend the garden of dysfunction from which she sprouted. Casey pursues a passion for cinema far from the cultural hearth--did somebody mention Ed Chigliak?--and Benson frequently embeds a cinematic sensibility in her prose. Of course, this conceit tends to read like screenplay, mostly to its detriment. I suppose Two Harbors is an ideal counter-point to Hollywood, its name serves up a handy metaphor, and it did celebrate Winter Frolic for decades--one of its annual midwives was a gay man who sold shoes.

There are writers, and there are doers, and Benson is still a writer. Perhaps she'll seize the opportunity during her nascent adulthood to do some things as well, and distance herself from the too-fecund ivy of the writers' academy and her fickle relationship with place, time, and scene. (Indeed, you can detect this transition in the course of her writing this novel.) The world is bones and rock, first breaths and last, not just post-adolescent circumspection behind hanging drapes of gauzy tulle. For this reader, Benson's Dex Stone, heavy petting, and streams of psycho-hygiene were seldom engaging. Unless you've recently canceled a subscription to Seventeen, this read probably won't thrill you either.

(Incidentally, "Two Harbors" is also the title of a recent indie movie set in the Agate City directed by Minneapolitan James Vculek, and starring Catherine E. Johnson and Alex Cole. I was trying to track the film down when I stumbled upon Benson's novel, which, as it turns out, describes a fictional movie with the same title. Fortunately, I never thought to wedge that notion into my novel, Eating Crow (a recent revision to be serialized here at South of the Taiga in the near future).)

A hurricane by any other name...

Granted, Wilma doesn't exactly conjure images of nature's fury, but the theme is worth rehashing:
The record hurricane season of 2005 continues, with Wilma's unlikely wrath poised to lash the Cuban highlands with 175 mph winds and 25 inches of rain. Recent pressure readings dropped to 882 millibars—the lowest ever recorded for an Atlantic hurricane. Thus Wilma leapfrogs sisters Rita and Katrina on the list of the strongest storm systems in history.

Just to keep the rhythm going: the Bush administration lobbied congress earlier this month to relax controls on emissions from refineries, continuting the drumbeat of deceit that we can somehow produce our way out of global warming. "The storms have shown how fragile the balance is between supply and demand in America," Bush said following a post-hurricane briefing at the Department of Energy, missing the point.

Indelible

An old friend of mine, Todd Ronning of Two Harbors, has carved out a fine artisan's niche for himself. He was a forester for awhile, then worked for years at one of the big employers in town. But he had been tinkering in his basement with the idea that he could carve beautiful depictions of lakes in wood, and suspected that people in this shore-obsessed state would want such works for their walls. If you take the common figure of ten thousand lakes and multiply by a very conservative five cabins per lake, you begin to see the potential for such an endeavor; add in the den at home and the figure doubles. He's been busily self-employed ever since, and he still produces every one of his Lake Carvings free-handed with a high speed router. But only I know why he's so freakin' obsessed with maps.

When we were twelve or thirteen, Todd and I decided to venture out on our first overnight canoe trip. Although we were boys of northern Minnesota, we wisely did not choose the Boundary Waters for this little experiment. We chose a stretch of the Cloquet River, an iron-red tributary to the St. Louis, not far from my family's cabin. The Cloquet is a tame course, meandering through piney upland and spruce bog, interrupted by the occasional Class II rapid where the river cuts through eskers and drumlins, ancient glacial remnants. We launched at the landing near Bear Lake, and headed off into mysterious bends in the river we had never seen before. No roads reach the Cloquet on this twelve-mile run.

We stopped at Marion Lake, roughly the halfway point, and started to pitch camp. But the sun was still high in the sky, and I suspect the awareness dawned on us that we would be out in the sticks without a ready escape once Bigfoot came a-callin'. So we decided to pack up and paddle the rest of the way to the relative security of Doc Barney's portage, where the adults would drive to meet us the next day. We had already descended a riffle below Marion Lake when we realized that we'd left a hatchet behind. Instead of portaging back around the fast water, we struggled to paddle up, and actually made it. Now audacious upstream paddlers--certainly a badge of honor for any capable timber cruiser--we claimed the axe and headed back downstream.

Did I mention that the Cloquet is a fairly tame course? Well, I think we underestimated just how tame it could be. We soon entered a stretch of earthly purgatory that has forever remained known in our common lore as "the squigglies." The squigglies were to river running what flossing is to eating, what shoveling is to winter, what pledge drives are to oratory. The river did not run; it sat, fat and heavy, and oozed mosquitos. We became convinced that we were going in circles--and I don't mean "convinced" in the way a dissembling 40-year-old uses the word. We were spooked by the river's seeming immutability, Paul Bunyan's Round River writ real. We believed we were absolutely, impossibly lost.

Through sheer clueless perseverance, we did eventually reach the portage that afternoon, relieved by the eventual static roar of the rapids reaching up the river. Unfortunately, the eerieness did not end there. We fished for awhile, and I think Todd caught a walleye below the rapids. But we hit the sack early, not equipped with anything like a cribbage board, a good book, or tales of foolish boys and their squiggly imaginations to keep us occupied. I remember waking up and checking my simple watch--it was already eight!! A new day had broken misty and damp, but we had made it through the backcountry night to the morning of our rescue. And then the mist got heavier, the damp murkier, and we realized that we had been asleep for all of about an hour. Night continued to fall on our heavy spirits.

I have enjoyed dozens of successful backcountry tours since that wilderness baptism in dread. The lesson I learned: as bad as things can sometimes seem when you are out there, it always makes for a good story afterwards. Todd obviously learned an additional lesson: etch your path indelibly, and you'll always be able to find your way home.

Pinus Strobus

My favorite touchstone at our family's northern Minnesota cabin is a haggard old white pine that presides over the lakefront. It's been big as far back as I remember, which is pushing 40 years now.

While our state tree is the Norway pine (Pinus resinosa), Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) was the driving timber species behind Minnesota's lumber rush. Vast pure stands of these magnificent trees once covered large areas of the state. Our cabin is in the Cloquet River watershed, and that area alone yielded 8 billion board feet of pine lumber--that's a one-by-twelve plank over 1.5 million miles long, or roughly six flimsy catwalks to the moon. But only 2% of the original white pine acreage remains, largely because logging practices of the day encouraged devastating fires after an area was clearcut, and the fire killed off all the seedlings.

According to the Minnesota DNR, a section near the Cloquet once produced the largest quantity of timber ever recorded: 33 million board feet from a single square mile. I've always wondered how that could be, given the comparitive hugeness of certain timber species out west. Maybe it had to do with the purity of the stand; maybe they just grew densely on the land and really big and had been spared wind and fire. But if any forest ecologist out there has an explanation, I'd appreciate the insight.

Not that our pines don't themselves get huge. On a canoe trip a few years back I was wandering the Kekakabic trail in the boundary waters with my friend Rolf. Most of the area had been leveled by the Fourth of July storm of 1999. Because this was late May, the open country was lousy with ticks--we each tossed more than 70 into the fire when we got back to camp later that day. But the most impressive thing we saw on our hike was a blowdown victim: a white pine that measured more than five feet across at the stump and Rolf paced off at about 120 feet tall. The ecologist Miron Heinselman created historical fire maps for most of the BWCAW's virgin forest, and revealed that the oldest trees where we hiked that day originated in the late 1600s. White pines over 600 years old and 200 feet tall have been documented, so the great storm may have stopped this one short. If our measurement of that pine was correct, it was bigger than Minnesota's current champion.

Minnesota's White Pine Society works to reverse the dwindling white pine legacy by promoting reestablishment of the species. Several factors still conspire against creating healthy white pine forests: White-tailed deer nip the tops off seedlings in winter, the successor birch/aspen forest crowds out the pines, and blister rust (a fungus imported on seedlings once grown with American seed in Europe) kills or stunts mature trees. The big pine at our cabin successfully fought off blister rust about ten years ago after much of its crown died; it also survived a major windstorm in 2002 that toppled many of the nearby mature pines. With a little luck, the old tree will reign as our shoreline monarch for generations to come.

Conspicuous Consumption

While America, sandbagged by theocrats and Hummers, is only now emerging from the ridiculous debate about the existence of global warming, the New York Times reported this week that plenty of other countries are looking to economically exploit the imminent thawing of the northern polar ice cap. Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway have all begun to jockey for rights to explore the arctic seabed. This past August, the Russians made the first voyage to the North Pole in a vessel unaided by an icebreaker. Within 20 years, the Canadians estimate, the legendary Northwest Passage will open to regular seasonal navigation, knowledge that would have brought great relief to British explorer Sir John Franklin. These countries have all made confident investments in the polar thaw while the Bush administration repeatedly implied that the jury is still out on global warming. According to the United States Geological Survey, a quarter of the world's untapped oil and gas lies beneath the Arctic Sea.

In a 1979 report--a quarter of a century ago--the U.S. Dep't of Energy stated that "it is the sense of the scientific community that carbon dioxide from unrestrained combustion of fossil fuels potentially is the most important environmental issue facing mankind." But Bush's EPA ruled in 2003 that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, reversing the position of the Clinton administration. Here is a brief timeline of other recent statements by our combuster-in-chief:
October 2000: "I don’t think we know the solution to global warming yet and I don’t think we’ve got all the facts." (I mean, if the world is round, half of us would fall off.)
June 2001: "We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming." (She asked for it.)
February 2002: "Addressing global climate change will require a sustained effort over many generations. My approach recognizes that economic growth is the solution." (At least we now know the solution, but this is akin to advocating viagra to prevent rape.)
September 2002: "We need an energy bill that encourages consumption." (per O.E.D.: con·sump·tion n. 4.a. A wasting disease.)
February 2003: "A year ago, I challenged American businesses to develop new, voluntary initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." (Probably more effective than challenging hurricanes to develop voluntary initiatives to devastate only Cuba.)
October 2004: "[The Kyoto Treaty was] one of these deals where in order to be popular in the halls of Europe you sign a treaty." (Leave it to a cheerleader to play the popular card.)
May 2005: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
September 2005: "Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don't buy gas if you don't need it." (Bush's first-ever lip service to conservation, post-Katrina; sounds like guzzler's lent.)

Global warming is very much a reality to the world's energy interests. The imminent exploitation of the once inaccessible arctic seems doubly cruel given that climate change, a phenomenon attributable to excessive use of fossil fuels, is the force that will drive the arctic's transformation from stark frozen wilderness to hydrocarbon hotbed. Ironically, the United States cannot yet lay claim to any of this new frontier because, due to years of largely Republican opposition, it has yet to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty. But as long as conservation remains a "personal virtue" as characterized by oil advocate Dick Cheney, and not a national goal, the U.S. will want to claim a slice of the polar pie.

Superior's Arctic Enclaves

The north shore of Lake Superior harbors some unlikely denizens of the far north: arctic plants. Certain areas of lakeshore experience such a moderate cool-to-cold climate throughout the year that some plants can be found in small pockets far south of their normal range. Botanists call these plant communities "arctic-alpine disjuncts." This phenomenon is likeliest where topography juts into the lake, or on islands.

Two of the plants associated with this anomaly are butterwort and Hudson Bay eyebright. Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) is a plant with a peculiar appetite, slowly absorbing nutrients from insects that are trapped by its sticky leaves. The plant endures the toughest conditions, rooting in rock crevices where storms occasionally polish the shore clean of most anything else. Hudson Bay eyebright (Euphrasia hudsoniana) is a member of a family of herbs once thought to cure 'all evils of the eye.' Euphrasia is still used as a homeopathic treatment for sinusitis--think of it as nature's Flonase.

In Minnesota, the Susie Islands shoreline, especially the Francis Lee Jaques Memorial Preserve, is a pristine example of this sort of habitat. The Susies are tucked beneath Pigeon Point, the easternmost tip of Minnesota's Arrowhead. The preserve is owned by the Nature Conservancy, which requires special permits to land on shore, but they're pretty tough to get to anyway. Two other examples are the Butterwort Cliffs SNA (Scientific and Natural Area) within Cascade River State Park near Grand Marais and Sugarloaf Point SNA near Little Marais, which served as a log-shipping site for years and was recently rehabilitated to restore its native plant communities. Both butterwort and eyebright are also found on Lighthouse Point in Two Harbors, a particularly accessible site for those hoping to view a botanical rarity.

Maybe the most drastic example of an arctic-alpine disjunct in the region is neither on the lake nor in Minnesota. Ontario's Ouimet Canyon, just beyond Thunder Bay, features rock walls so steep and high that they create a microclimate, and I have been told that ice sometimes endures year-round beneath the boulders and moss at the canyon bottom. Plants that are common throughout the region survive here only as stunted specimens. Visitors aren't allowed to journey to the canyon floor because of the unique and fragile plant community, but the view from the platforms leaning over the canyon walls is spectacular. You can see all the way down the canyon to the Sleeping Giant on Lake Superior. And my son Cole (Cole) can testify that the canyon produces a clear echo (echo).

Summer's Last Gasp

We are drenched in south Minneapolis this morning, five fresh inches of precipitation atop yards already charged to the brim with recent rain. I would be worried about mold and mildew (though our basement checked out bone dry at 5:30 a.m.) if it weren't for the foretaste of winter poised to our north and west.

The best season, in my opinion, is always the one that's about to start, and right now I await fall with arms open wide, fleece and corduroy at the ready. Summer has clung to early October like a groupie. We removed our window a/c units a few weeks ago, and have endured several nights since that have not dipped below 70. I am a northern person by habit and pelage, and the heat index has no place in a month that ends in "brrr." This recent intractable ridge of warmth and humidity (yesterday LaCrosse and Aberdeen were nearly 50 degrees apart) seems from the weather map to be defying the inevitable, as if it were a Floridian who just bought a condo in St. Cloud.

But fall's frosty mornings and temperate days will win out, and in a few months I'll be wishing for subfreezing consistency so the snow can get a foothold. And in March? Nothing invites good riddance more than the hard brown budless days of late winter once you have first caught the scent of unfrozen soil.

Twins, Cities

It's over, the Twins' 162-game return to near-perfect mediocrity. Things looked promising back in mid-May when Justin Morneau seemed like he'd been beaned into the second coming of Mickey Mantle. But baseball seasons are epics, and this one took a turn for the tragically mundane about the time Torii Hunter fractured his ankle against the centerfield wall at Fenway. Still, there are reasons to look forward to the next campaign.

The Twin Cities' current favorite son Joe Mauer almost had the world on a string after his first six major-league at-bats back on opening day in April of 2004. Then he limped back to third after base coach Al Newman stopped him from attempting to score on a Shannon Stewart single. Gardenhire yanked him immediately, and two days later surgeons filleted a tear in Mauer's knee, granting him a month of idling and rehab. Nonetheless, his auspicious debut performance for the Twins, when he reached base four times, scored twice, and tagged out a potential winning run at the plate in extra innings, obliterated what little doubt remained as to his readiness for the majors. While his first season was shortened by that injury, he still was named to the American League all-rookie team. This year he quadrupled his at-bats, hitting .297 while marshalling a stellar pitching staff that was undermined by a perpetual offensive funk. It appears that St. Paul, hometown to hall-of-famers Dave Winfield and Paul Molitor, as well as likely inductee Jack Morris, has itself another green-diamond icon, and this one could play his entire career here.

Just what is it about St. Paul that produces such superior baseball talent compared with its neighbor and rival? Both cities have produced their share of native-born major-leaguers: St. Paul with 26 (prior to Mauer) including 9 pitchers; and Minneapolis with 34 (16 pitchers) roughly proportionate to the cities' populations. The pioneers from each city are surprisingly ancient, both born before the Civil War. Joe Visner of Minneapolis was first signed by the Baltimore Orioles in 1885 and played four seasons in the outfield, each with a different club, compiling a lifetime average of .261 while slapping 12 home runs. Joe Werrick of St. Paul spent most of his four-season late-1880s career as an infielder with the Louisville Colonels of the American Association, hitting .250 with 10 homers. But the similarities end with these early Twin Citians.

St. Paul, as one would expect, comes out ahead, rounding third while Minneapolis is caught in a pickle between first and second. The only stat for which St. Paul does not hold an edge is home run frequency, and that's mainly because Kent Hrbek (raised in the shadow of the old Met in Bloomington but born in the City of Lakes) accounts for more than one out of every four at-bats by a Minneapolis player. But even taking Molitor and Winfield out of the equation (both had almost as many at-bats as the Minneapolis total), as well as Hrbek, St. Paul batters prevail. Among them is the great Arnold "Chick" Gandil, who played nine solid seasons, once hitting .318, before his untimely expulsion from baseball as ringleader of the World Series fix known as the Black Sox scandal. Notable among the Minneapolis also-rans is Johnny Blanchard, who platooned as a catcher during five consecutive World Series runs by the Yankees, but never played a 100-game season. Pitching tells the same tale: in addition to Morris, St. Paul produced the stalwart Tom Burgmeier (3.23 lifetime ERA over 16 seasons); Minneapolis produced one "Walt" Johnson (18 earned runs over 27 and 1/3 storied innings).

This discrepancy begs an explanation. A less interesting one might consider disparate little league programs or some grand city policy. I would prefer a cause like municipal water, astrology, or gamma rays. Any ideas?

The Tale of the Tape (again, pre-Mauer, as gleaned from Baseball-Reference.com):

Batting

St. Paul-----AB 44780; H 12381; Avg. .276; HR 984 (46 AB/HR)

Minneapolis--AB 13013; H 3329; Avg. .256; HR 477 (27 AB/HR)

Pitching

St. Paul-----IP 5836; ER 2452; ERA 3.78; SO 3413 (.58/IP); BB 2043 (.35/IP)

Minneapolis--IP 1764; ER 804; ERA 4.10; SO 741 (.42/IP); BB 652 (.37/IP)