Going Out Like a Lamb

A family in northeastern Minnesota has amassed a front-yard snowman that measures 23 feet tall and 50 feet around. This feat would seem heroic enough during a standard Minnesota winter, but given that this January will enter the record books, one must admire their sheer defiance of the elements. Throughout the upper midwest, January has felt more like March, departing with ovine timidity. I've already noticed a few tentative sprouts in some of the perennial and bulb patches in our garden. Here in Minneapolis, we descended into the single digits only once this entire month; historical average low temperatures for January nights are 6 degrees and lower. Pete Boulay, assistant Minnesota state climatologist, states that this January in Duluth has been typical of Springfield, Illinois, a name that conjures only meterological mediocrity. While every previous January on record in Duluth had at least three days with subzero temperatures, it happened only once for a few hours in 2006.

Speaking of defiance, St. Paul continues to boost its winter carnival, an event originally organized to defy a New York reporter's claim that St. Paul in winter was "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation." But the time has come to admit that the emperor wears no clothes: King Boreas might as well strut buck naked through Rice Park for all the chill his arrival brings to these once frigid latitudes. Pond hockey becomes water polo, ice sculpture is now a speed event, and future ice palaces will be constructed of lexan.

As the climate shows all signs of heading south, I have to suspect that it will take a toll on our identity and, modest heating bills aside, I believe that is not a good thing. If winter's adversity no longer defines Minnesotans, who are we? Mosquito swatters alone, I suppose. When they start hatching in February, maybe that will be adversity enough.

I was surprised, therefore, to encounter a description of dwindling winters from the distant past. Published in 1909, Dwight Woodbridge and John Pardee’s two-volume “History of Duluth and St. Louis County” mostly reads like a chamber of commerce tract. But one subheading grabbed my attention:

Decreased Cold of Recent Winters

"During the past ten or fifteen years the extreme cold and rigor of our winters have materially modified. In the early days, forty years ago, the cold of our winters was steady, dry and uniform. Moccasins could be worn without having wet feet from the middle of November to the first of April. It was almost the rule to see ice on the lake until the first of June. The writer knew of two men getting off a steamboat that had been stuck in the ice for several days, on the 9th of June, almost forty years ago, and walking to shore on the broken ice a distance of six or eight miles. Our winters are now much milder than in the early days. We are not now surprised to see all the snow disappear in mid-winter and to have it rain. Such extremes would have been surprising thirty or forty years ago."

Ask any Minnesotan over the age of thirty about winters in their lifetime and they would likely give you a similar response. Reading this passage, I felt a knee-jerk desire to keep it under wraps, to leave this dusty paragraph in the library where no flat-earth global-warming denialist could find it. This is not the sort of armchair meteorologizing we need floating around out there to justify yet another eighty-mile commute. But I had to reflect: am I just another Henny-penny? Are these dog days of January a sign of climate change, or simply a reminder of the jet stream's inconstant path?

The power of the personal anecdote is strong, its homespun authenticity often unassailable, especially when bookbound. But strong, too, is the skeptic's glare. Woodbridge and Pardee’s second volume contains a chapter with a dubious title: “St. Louis County Fertility.” For twenty pages they extol the agricultural potential of what we know now to be a boggy, seasonally-stunted region, best suited to growing spruce and ticks. I suspect that Woodbridge and Pardee were scheming to make a killing on cutover timber lands purchased for pennies on the acre, and hoped to lure a hapless trail of homesteaders into fruitless enterprise.

But like every cranky grandpa from Lake of the Woods to Lake Street, they still probably remembered their youth with an eye toward the heroic. The Nordskog boys of south Minneapolis are new to the art of snowman installation. Their latest creation, built just after Christmas, attained neither a height of 23 feet nor a girth of 50--we would have to borrow from the neighbors to compile that mass. January has reduced our snowman to a slushy bump on the lawn, and that much only because we posted it in the shadow of the fence. Will my boys look back on their youth and recall frigid white seasons of travail? I am beginning to come to terms with the fact that, as it does for most Americans, winter to Minnesotans will soon simply mean the season when you don't have to mow the grass.

Review: Two Harbors by James Vculek

I previously mentioned this movie in my review of Kate Benson's novel of the same name. I grew up in the Agate City, a third-generation graduate of THHS. All of my great-grandparents: the Carlsons, Ericksons, Nordskogs, and Lassondes, raised their families in Two Harbors. So the coincidence of two artists in the same year capturing a title from that tidy metaphor piqued my interest. Unlike Benson, James Vculek's film uses the notion ably, and captures a setting that is gritty, bland, and vaguely comforting, all at once.

Shooting in black and white in the perpetual meteorological malaise of late winter, Vculek prods the willing viewer toward several homely and cramped interiors: a camper trailer, a labyrinthine flea market, and the front seat of a '94 Buick Skylark. The caustic male lead is played by Alex Cole, whose turn as Vic answers the question "whatever happened to Al Franken's brother, the one who didn't get into Harvard, flunked out of U.W. Superior, and has never held a job for more than three months?" Vic's shellac is balanced by the vulnerable misfit Cassie, played by Catherine Johnson in a performance that could propel this film to a national arthouse audience. (At last report, Vculek was in negotiations with a distributor after landing several film festival awards.)

Why is the metaphor of Two Harbors so apt to Vculek's script? This is, at heart, a story about isolation and yearning. What better place to launch such existential musings than from a place suggesting refuge for two hearts? Vculek skillfully enforces a certain distance between his characters, despite their cramped settings, and lets the unfathomable emptiness of the North speak for itself. Vculek drew inspiration for "Two Harbors" from a 1982 New York Times story about two people from St. Paul found in a car near the Gunflint Trail--one dead, one dazed--following a month-long vigil awaiting an alien rendezvous. Don't let the kooky premise fool you: this film is grounded, and every reverie fizzles. The truly crazy notion is that our technological aptitude has allowed us to maintain distance from those nearest to us. Vculek's characters, for all their oddness, lend credibility to their surroundings. Two Harbors the place, poised for a moment before its inevitable gentrification, provides an ideal fringe-of-the-culture setting for this clever, understated film.

Bit Stream

An update about my public war with squirrels: a new squatter has taken up residence in the dormer roofs of the third story. Our attic rafters are infested. I know this not because I heard a rodent behind the walls, which I have since, nor because I have seen critters on the roof, which I had before. I know this because of the many bits of news that I find on the snow.

Most of the roof of our house was last insulated sometime during World War II, when it was common practice to use newsprint for that purpose. The pages were piled together and bound into heavier paper sleeves, courtesy of Montgomery Wards (I found a label on one of the bags that I replaced last summer with the itchy pink stuff). I have no idea whether this practice was a result of wartime frugality, post-depression frugality, or simply because newspaper was cheap and effective insulation--good old frugal common sense. Last summer, removing old insulation gingerly, I was able to pause and read unabashedly xenophobic headlines: Japs and Krauts in full 48-point grandeur. But when the squirrels tunnel news from the house, the yard is adrift in snippets: truncated coupons, rent classifieds, stranded midsentences of forgotten legends of the funnies.

The third-story dormers are equipped with aluminum soffits and fascia, ineptly installed by the low-buck primates contracted when the city rehabbed the house ten years ago. Once I replace them, the most ingenious squirrel will be thwarted, I'll boast. But I'm in no hurry to hoist the ladders atop snow, ice, and frozen ground. A likely immediate solution: the draconian removal of the mulberry tree that provides an easy street to the roof. I've trimmed it repeatedly, but the thing grows fast and lives to grope clapboard. And allowing the rodents up there in the first place fosters a temptation they are not bred to resist. A tough call, really, because it's a reasonably handsome tree that screens much of our backyard from the neighbors. That's reason enough, I suppose, to consult the garden catalogs for a hardy and swift-growing evergreen replacement.