South of the Taiga

March Madness

2009-03-16T17:44:00.004-05:00

With winter on its heels in Minnesota, Aaron and I rushed up north one last time to capture some images in snowy landscapes. The ice floes were pounding the ledge rock as we visited a Lake Superior subject, but four foot drifts surrounded the old Alex Rouska sauna at the Finland, Minnesota Historical Site.

The most important shot was an attempt to capture the experience of plunging through the ice after sauna into the cold lake. We spent two hours boring with a power auger and sawing by hand through ice to clear a 30x30" entry, not exactly an Olympic venue. But in just four feet of water on a gravel bed, it was just right for a personal plunge and dunk, and would make for an easy out for the plunger.

But first we had to get four 30-inch-thick chunks of ice out of the hole. That took a two long pry bars and a lot of patience. Imagine two mice trying to dislodge ice cubes from a square lowball with toothpicks to get the proportions. But that was much more fun than the slow march of the handsaw.

The Opposite of Cold

2009-01-06T18:30:00.007-06:00

I am halfway to completing a manuscript for my book with photographer Aaron Hautala about Finnish saunas, a journey that so far has taken us from Toimi to Wolf Lake in Minnesota, Bjurbäcken to Jyväskylä on the Nordic peninsulae, and back again via Kivi, Aksel and Misery Bay on Michigan's UP. We have had a few very good sweats, but fewer than I would have imagined. Hustling around on unfamiliar ground taking pictures and interviewing people is not always a path to relaxation and simplicity.

But I was able to spend the holidays in the north woods, and simplicity got its first boost when I took the boys out to harvest a fresh balsam near the driveway at sunset on Christmas Eve. During the weekend, we all, down to the last Kaia, enjoyed a prolonged sauna afternoon through a solstice sunset as the temperature eased back into single digits. I gained a thorough reminder that sauna is one of the few ways to unwind while defunking the stinky bottoms of your children. And to build leverage against an arctic front sprinting out of the northwest.

Still to come: Oulu, Wisconsin, Cook County, Minnesota and the frigid shores of Thunder Bay, home to Kangas Sauna and Hoito pancakes.

Moving Water and Earth

2007-05-29T14:52:00.000-05:00

My latest published article hits the newsstands today in the June issue of The Rake. I profile the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, an earth-science research center embedded in the falls in downtown Minneapolis.

Ice Up

2006-11-29T13:00:00.000-06:00

We spent Thanksgiving weekend at the lake. A few cold nights had finally frozen its surface, but the days again became sunny and warm, and water pooled over most of the ice during the day. The nights were cold enough to even the score--the first evening dropped quickly from around fifty into the low twenties, and I sat by the fireplace long after Genie and the boys were asleep.

During one trip out to the deck to inspect the stars and take a deep breath, I heard a sound like distant machinery across the lake. I knew the sound well, because I lived at the cabin during the summer of 2000, when the last five miles of highway from Pequaywan to Brimson were paved while I studied for the bar exam. The engineers had sited a gravel pit very close to White Lake. The road crew ran only during the day, but the gravel sorter ran twenty-four/seven for a couple of weeks, and I grew to be almost unperturbed by the ceaseless summer serenade.

This time it sounded more distant, beyond the farthest shore, but a steady and regular mechanical sound. All had been silent when we first arrived, and even the first time I'd been back outside after dark, and those are empty woods back there. Could it be that I was hearing the crystalline din of a lake freezing? I almost convinced myself of that certainty, then dismissed it. Maybe someone was running a cement mixer on the beach...

Two nights later, we had a fire outdoors to burn some brush, and I was down near the lake all evening. The temperature once more fell quickly at dusk, and soon the distant jangling began again. It started from where the lake had first been shadowed at sunset, migrated slowly across the far shore to a point where it sounded like crickets and peepers, and culminated in a faint tinkling that didn't come from any particular direction. The next day the weather turned overcast, windy, and cold, and the lake emitted the occasional whoop and moan, running the gamut from loon to humpback whale--one long dispeptic bloop must have lasted three seconds. The surface thickened quickly, and I kicked myself for failing to bring mine and Cole's skates. I have heard the ice often in the depths of winter under snow, loud rifle shot to deep alien warbles, and it never ceases to amaze me. But with the luck of a mild late November respite from winter, I was treated to an unmatched natural concert.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Eating Crow: An Introduction

2006-11-24T06:26:00.000-06:00

When I wrote a novel three years ago, I had no idea it would become a critical and popular sensation, and thus I have not been disappointed. I've let it steep for awhile after a couple of rejections: Graywolf was put off by the lack of dialogue in the sample chapter; Coffee House actually summoned the entire manuscript before remitting a form-letter rejection. I saw this as progress, because at the time I'd just gained my first freelance byline.

I have recently decided to revisit the story, work out a few kinks, and flesh out the characters via periodic postings to a separate blog. The chassis of this novel is the notion that we are all beings with a consciousness that, properly tended, exceeds our hat size. That spiritual fulfillment is as diverse as are the means by which life reproduces, as varied as the many shapes of seeds. That some get a second chance to sum up their mistakes and soar on the thermals for awhile, and that some get it right the first time. Eating Crow certainly will require your suspension of disbelief, but I would not call it magical realism--I would use the term supernaturalism. If I have succeeded, I have adapted the story of the ugly duckling to a familar context and entertained the reader.

Seaside

2006-08-23T08:47:00.000-05:00

We've left the seaside behind--a week on Genie's native Cape Cod shore and the more rugged coast of Maine. Not enough time in either place, but this has been a journey for mere sampling. Still, we saw enough of those places to know that we'll return for a longer periods in the future. Nauset, Cummaquid, Nantucket, Provincetown, Camden, populated respectively with body surfers, horseshoe crabs, blueblooded daysailors, drag queens, and lobsters. The boys have expanded their grasp of natural history.

We spent the weekend at Chris and Gayla's lakeside camp (read cabin) in Rangeley, Maine, a place absolutely identical to Brimson except for the mountains that rise in the distance and large hills near the lake. White pine and birch abound, as do mosquitos and black flies. But we were beyond that season--we felt the first breath of autumn and stayed snug inside while it rained and rained. We're not pollyannas, finding a silver lining in every obstacle, but this was just what we needed--a weekend of books, games, and easy comfort among great friends.

We're in Vermont this morning with Arleigh (Genie's neice) and Jay, and the two youngest progeny of the Petrovits line, newborn twins Sophia and Taj. From here we leave family and country behind. We plan to camp every night across Canada, depending on whether we can escape the sights of Montreal later today. Plenty of miles of two-lane Canadian shield highway lie between us and home waters.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

High Point

2006-08-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

We have reached the halfway point of our trip, and after one slight day in NYC, we're currently enjoying the Hudson River valley at the home of Jeff Bark and family. We had a wonderful side trip to the roots country of Genie's mom in Colesville, New Jersey, the highest part of the state. The old Campbell property borders High Point State Park, where we camped for the night. Natural settings don't come to mind when most of us think of New Jersey, but these highlands are beautiful, covered with mature forests and small lakes surrounded by sharp ridges and plenty of bedrock, and threaded by the Appalachian Trail.

After a peaceful night's sleep in the tent, our second campout of the trip (the first ended soddenly with a morning deluge on Lake Michigan in an Illinois state park), we drove a few miles to visit Genie's first cousin Jim and family, folks she had never met. They showed us around the farmstead, complete with old stone walls and an ancient barn--the core of the farmhouse itself dates to the mid-eighteenth century. Best of all, they directed us up the brook that Monnie always recalls so fondly, to a waterfall with the family reputation as the highest in New Jersey. It was the highlight of the property until they recently sold 35 of their 40 acres to the state as an addition to the state park. Among other mysteries, we saw via an old baby picture of Jim's sister Edie that Jasper does indeed favor the Campbell side of his provenance.

We have put a wonderful day in Chicago behind us, and a very comfortable weekend stay with Brian Nordskog and family in Pittsburgh, where their new pool mitigated the last of the big heat wave. From here we bear northeast to Cape Cod, new ground to everyone but Genie, followed by stays on the coast and in the mountains of Maine. Strangely, this morning's New York Times travel page examined both of these destinations along with Minnesota's Arrowhead!

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Viroqua

2006-08-01T11:26:00.000-05:00

We have escaped the summer heat in Minneapolis--101 by late afternoon--and traded it in for the summer heat in the driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin. Yesterday, we embarked on a three-week drive to New England and back. It felt downright unhealthy to close up the house when it was still 95 degrees inside. But the three-hour air-conditioned drive to Genie's mom's farm in Viroqua completely erased the compiled tension and sweat of a long day in the garage getting the car packed and ready.

The duration of our trip is greatly encouraged by all of the dear folk we will visit along the way, family and friends conveniently spaced a short day's drive apart all the way to our easternmost destination, Camden, Maine. This first stop is a frequent destination, but also conveniently enroute to Chicago, and any chance to avoid a full day in the car is welcome. We head to the windy city tomorrow, planning to spend much of Thursday on the waterfront visiting the Field Museum and taking in the spectacle of a tall ships festival. But first we linger here for a day with Helena and Alexandra, watch the soybeans and corn grow by another fraction, and await a promised cold front and thunderstorms to wash over the old Runge farmstead in Harmony township.

In a couple of weeks, we will repatirate via that most familiar of foreign lands, Ontario, where we know nobody and thus intend to camp on the hard Canadian ground. I anticipate at least a few details worth relating en route: the phantom hitchhiker of the turnpike, the ghost ships of Nantucket, the rich smell of roadkill. And three weeks in small quarters with a four- and two- year-old promises at the very least an occasional rant. But today it's familiar Viroqua, steamier than usual, a small town wholesome and groovy all out of proportion.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

First Fish

2006-06-29T06:06:00.000-05:00

Cole Nordskog, 4, never one to shy from a challenge, had a week of triumphs during our annual solstice sojourn at the lake. First and foremost, the fundamental rite of passage into boyhood: catching his first fish, a pumpkinseed sunfish, and he ate it for dinner that night. Thus fortified, he hoofed it three miles round trip to the top of Tofte's Carlton Peak the next day, his first mountain (Jasper rode in a pack on his old man's back). He returned home to master the bicycle, aided by training wheels and a broad patch of asphalt at the playground across the street.

Cole will return to the ocean this summer--we will drive to Cape Cod and Maine this summer, imposing our presence on family and friends all the way. Cole saw the Pacific back when he was one and a half, long before he could tell a sea slug from a nudibranch, and we are shopping for a rooftop cargo carrier just to accomodate his anticipated haul of flotsam and jetsam. Family wisdom dictates that one never bring a shell potentially housing a hermit crab into the car, a lesson learned by yours truly in the jump seat of a Ford LTD circa 1975. There's only so far a boy can flee within the confines of a station wagon.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Mythical Moose

2006-04-14T09:43:00.000-05:00

Some fine baseball in the Twins' home-opening series--a few deliberate clockwork one-run innings, and a big swat or two every game. They have momentum to clash with that of the Yankees, who are coming off a home-opener sweep of their own. Michael Cole Mussina gets the start, and so the pundits today revive the sputtering myth of his career-long dominance against the Twins: "For all the success he has enjoyed over a career now spanning 16 years, Mike Mussina has never been a 20-game winner...Except against the Minnesota Twins." But that statue was toppled when the Twins prevailed in game one of the 2003 playoffs in the Bronx. He's hardly made a dent since. Mussina is still a crafty pitcher, but the Moose's mojo is spent.

The numbers: April of 2003 he got a 2-1 victory, giving up the run and six hits over eight innings and outdueling Kyle Lohse, who gave up 3 hits over 7 innings. Mussina beat them again later in the month and scattered five hits and two earned runs over seven. In Game one of the A.L. division series, all one could hear above the crowd was how Mussina had never lost to the Twins, 20-0 over his stellar career (the only team he has a losing record against is the Yankees). But he was tagged for 3 runs, and that was enough for the loss due to a brigade's effort from the Twins' bullpen after Johan Santana cramped out in the fourth in his first national spotlight performance. 2004 was Santana's revenge as the two were matched in all three of Mussina's starts against Minnesota. The gatorade obviously worked: Santana dominated in August, with Moose exiting in the fourth with four earned runs and already on the hook for the loss. The Yankees won a meaningless late September game, but no decision for Mussina. The teams met again in the first round of the playoffs, and he was solid over seven innings but lost to Santana's complete-game shutout. Last year he faced them once, getting the loss while giving up 8 hits and two walks, and six earned runs. Mussina, storied Twin killer, now 20-4, has never beaten the Twins since the streak ended.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Le Toil de Nord

2006-04-11T06:08:00.000-05:00

Walking near the state capitol on my way to the office one recent morning, I passed a couple who were admiring a rendition of the state seal embossed on a building. The image features a man plowing a field under his own power, working around a stump with his axe still lodged in it, and a muzzle loader leans within ready reach. This being the official seal, every detail is mandated by Minnesota Statute § 1.135. In the near background, a "male Indian in loincloth and plume riding on horseback at a gallop...sitting erect and holding a spear in his left hand at an upward 60-degree angle to himself" appears to have the upper hand. The setting--the law requires that the two be looking at each other--unintentionally suggests surprise if not conflict. The pioneer, legislated forever barefoot, appears to have his work cut out for him, and so I wasn't completely galled when I overheard the man say that he thought the state seal's French motto--L'Etoile du Nord--honored the toils of the Norwegians.

But of course he was wrong: it's all about me, the work of Nord. I've been putting my work ethic under some close scrutiny recently, because my day job combined with a compelling and demanding writing gig are requiring my wits to be ever nimble. I recently nipped off from work for a moment to google my old employer, Icicle Seafoods in Alaska, and found some pictures of the fish-packing scheme I once ran there. This reminder of summers filled with sixteen hour days under fritzy light and knee-deep in marine rot gave me a sense of grave respect for what I am capable of enduring. Couple that with a new foreman to answer to at the current day job who shows a strong desire to reconstruct my legal acumen, and the freelance leap suddenly seemed wise and inviting. I'm turning down other work to keep this dry, well benefitted seat, but benefits are what you want them to be. I am less than thrilled with the trade-offs after another winter of rushed migrations on gritty highways through the commuter ravines of Krasnoyarsk to the seat of government.

This is the north star state, where we honor Polaris, the star that does not move, fixed in the northern sky. Winter or summer, Polaris presides atop the north celestial pole. But the state seal also commemorates the northering summer sun, and some of us, like it, must wander. After many summers lost to the artificially lit indoors, this one won't be housed by a day job. Yesterday I had the singular pleasure of giving notice, and the grass suddenly looks much greener.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

The Groke

2006-03-23T06:54:00.000-06:00

Much of our bedtime reading this winter has come from Tove Jansson's wonderful Moomin books. Jansson was a Swede who grew up in Finland, a distinction imperceptible to most of the world that I seem to be stuck on. Her books are a relatively mild phenomenon here in the U.S., but are popular enough in Japan to have landfills worth of discardable toys molded in their tribute. The stories are full of unexpected niceties, and the Moomins, the family at the center of all the inaction, are the kind of folks you wouldn't mind being cooped up with all winter. Mostly because they hibernate.

One of Jansson's least animated characters is the Groke, a shiftless energy sucker who tries to sit on the others to get warm. Parasitis borealis. But despite her efforts, the Groke is doomed to wander forever cold. The Groke has glommed on to our first peek of spring here in Minneapolis, and is currently parking her clammy ass on the crocus shoots in our front yard. A buzz kill? Not really--we did a bunch of gardening before the weather turned--cold-sowing lettuce and spinach--and this snowpack will turn bright green in a few weeks.

Despite twenty inches of snow last week, the powers-that-be declared that life should go on as usual. Some lesser powers dissented: the highway patrol advised against travel. But the schools and the state wanted butts in seats, greasy roads notwithstanding. I stayed home and moved snow, confident my employer would not reimburse damaged taillights and fenders. We hosted a high school student for about an hour after her bus failed to show up for its appointed two-hour delay as the wind flung two-to-three inches of snow an hour at our neighborhood. Finally, alas, the beancounters have seized our collective common sense. And that shiver you can't shake is the Groke trying to sneak a hug.

Today I took the bus to work, the first time that's been necessary since a tailgater totaled our second car in January. I put my transfer in the wrong slot on the University Limited, and was scolded, but the driver thawed a little and didn’t make me pay again. A gritty day with plenty of sallow commuters mounting the dirty snowbanks, and one special-needs pedestrian (or a guy coming off a serious night of partying) in someone else’s clothes, blue jeans a few sizes too small, another's buttock wear highlighting the backs of his thighs above highwater hems and tumbledown socks. The calendar tells us that spring sprang this week, that vital moment when the sun crosses the equator as the earth bows north to the light. But the streets of Minneapolis are pre-vernal today.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Counter-Finn

2006-03-14T06:41:00.000-06:00

When I set out to write a story about sauna renovation a few years ago, I struck upon a very convenient fact: my great grandfather, known as Charles Erickson (1877-1964) to his fellow Two Harborites, had been born Karl Hagberg of seemingly Finnish ancestry in a remote corner of Sweden. He must have desired to blend in: the Minnesota Historical Society lists five late Charles Ericksons for Lake County alone, and well over 1,500 for the entire state. As many Charles Ericksons have drawn their last breath in Minnesota as would fill a small arena. But the improbable family legend was that he changed his name because there were too many Hagbergs. Erickson is listed on the death certificate as his mother's maiden name, so that reveals the source. While I thought he might have changed his name to shake a trail of finnophobes, the reason remains a mystery.

The fortunate event behind my discovery of his hidden ethnicity dates back to 1928, when a local group in the Swedish province of Värmland purchased the Hagberg farmhouse from Karl's brother Johan and moved it to a local homestead museum--Gräsmarks Hembygdsgård--dedicated to preserving the Finnish imprint in the mountainous borderlands near Norway. When I visited relatives in the region as a teenager in 1982, they took me to visit the home, but they spoke no English and my Danish companion was little interested in the yokels.

I was recently pleased to find pictures of the house on the museum's website while revisiting my research. I also found much more information: the house dates to 1832, and the Hagbergs were relatively prosperous and probably not Finnish. When I wrote the story, I corresponded with a local Swede who confirmed that the buildings at the museum were all of Finnish origin. But my recent painstaking (i.e., Swedish language) review of newly posted information about Gräsmark suggests that the museum is a bit more ecumenical. The Hagberg farm, Asphagen ("aspen meadow"), occupied the western shore of Lake Rottnen, the Swedish bygd, or district, of Gräsmark. Its farmhouse appears to have been moved to the museum grounds to represent Swedish farm life. I've often thought that my incipient finnishness made the sauna story work on a separate level, and so this is perhaps my James Frey moment, however unintentional. Thus I've rushed this correction to self-publication, where its obscurity is assured.

The house seems larger than I remember: two full stories and a gable roof, a plain and respectable dwelling. A house affording a little room to ramble, not a backcountry stuga. Not that there's any shame in resuming this Swedish quarter of my selfhood: life in Värmland around the time of Karl Hagberg's youth is detailed in several of the books of the great Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (Gösta Berlings Saga), who grew up on and later reacquired her family estate at Mårbacka, a few miles east of Gräsmark. My recent discovery inspired me to read Lagerlöf's memoirs, named for the farm. She was an earnest supporter of her Finnish neighbors and Sweden's--the first woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, she donated her medal to the Finnish resistance against the Russians during the Winter War. I'm eager to someday again explore this part of the world with more curiosity and attention than I showed the first time around.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

"Jump on my back. I'll carry you."

2006-03-07T19:04:00.000-06:00

We invest a lot of glory in sports figures, most of it undeserved. And they are paid well enough anyway that it sort of transcends glory. The synthetically dominant Barry Bonds embodies this prima donna ethic, refusing to be formed into anybody's image of an idol but his own. Maybe he doesn't realize that deigning to be a hero, at the worst a nuisance for him, can make a kid's year. What do I know--maybe he is just peachy face to face with fans. But he refuses to allow the media to amplify his potential to inspire.

Kirby Puckett was the consummate sports hero. He led, he cheered, and he performed. In every encounter I read about today, his generosity of spirit shone through; this guy had it great and knew it, and he shared that benefit with seemingly everyone he met while he wore a Twins uniform. One attribute I never saw mentioned, though, was Puckett's clear loyalty to his teammates and fans. More so than his perfectly suited name, his surprising speed, or his tenacity, what made him such a standout was his commitment to one team. He was one of the few athletes, at least since television made heroism astromonical and highly portable, to enjoy tremendous success by staying put for a little less money. If you can't sit back and enjoy sport and be a homer once in a while, what's the point of even tuning in? That's why people loved him, Kirby, the homer.

The quote above comes, of course, from game six of the 1991 series against the Braves, when Puckett famously robbed Ron Gant of a homer and then hit one of his own in extra innings, generating game seven with a single stroke. I was in a bar in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, a major league no-man's land where no loyalty prevails, but everybody seemed to be Twins fans that night and I felt close to home. Similarly, despite his off-field tangles, most everyone revives a fond memory of Kirby Puckett this week.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Moan Dog

2006-02-13T19:08:00.000-06:00

The Swedes call this day Måndag, the start of the work week. That sounded right this morning, it being February, the month that begins with a clever rodent who then departs willingly into the gaping jaws of the March lion. The groundhog prudently decides to stay in if it's sunny, which suggests air imported from the arctic, and we are still susceptible to such incursions. If the creature wants to have it both ways, sunny and warm, he should make like humans and install windows. Groundhog, moan dog, sleeping soundly as a log, deep dark underground.

I have noticed this winter that working in our basement has a salubrious effect on our family fortunes. I know little about feng-shui, but I ran into an old friend at Menards recently who told me that the ancient Chinese art of geomancy favors a tidy cellar. I was at the store gathering pine to panel the walls and convert a broad reach of basement into a rumpus room for the boys, who will continue to spend large parts of their winters indoors despite my late January clucking. Strangely, each step in that project seems to be rewarded with a bolt of luck, and today was no exception, but I won't risk a jinx on this streak by explaining too much.

One big benefit of our basement warren is a tall south-facing egress window, which invites enough light by late February that I am encouraged to start up the tomatoes. This is a short month that takes us a long way to the start of spring. My dreams about gardening take flight and I begin crave the feeling of fingers in the dirt, the smell of humus, the first thawing dog turds of the mild season. Just beware: the Qi masters caution that if wind chimes are placed improperly they can actually cause problems.

© 2006 Michael Nordskog

Going Out Like a Lamb

2006-01-31T07:04:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-24T06:43:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-17T07:02:00.000-06:00

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.

Snowfall Scofflaws

2005-12-16T07:15:00.000-06:00

'Tis the season for many of us to celebrate the transformed landscape, and for some to complain about its considerable gravity. We received our first major snow this week. My definition of major is 4", my threshold for firing up the snowblower. Below that, my aging back moves the mess; above that, I wrestle the heavy contraption and it pitches a blizzard where I desire.

There are two types of people in this world--those who shovel after the storm and scofflaws. Our neighbor Frida is the most dedicated shoveler in south Minneapolis. She works continuously from the descent of the first flake until spring to ensure that snow never taints her driveway, using a small snowblower, a leaf blower, road salt, and even an actual shovel in continuous rotation. She also keeps the sidewalks clear, of course, but where she starts to get a little kooky is by clearing the strip between the walk and the street. I think I've finally persuaded her to not push that particular snow into the traffic lanes, which is entirely counterproductive, given that the strip is the place where plows deposit the street snow. But her grandest achievement, after the recent dump of 8+ inches, is the clearing of her entire yard down to the grass. Where does it go? Into her neighbors' yards, of course. Not that I would mind this if we lived next door, but the dearth of logic behind this Sisyphean endeavor baffles me. I mean, if it's a good idea to shovel the yard (!!), why dump it on your neighbor? So, Frida is one extreme.

On the other extreme is Gustafson, across the street. Like us, he has a corner lot, so his work is cut out for him. Which makes no difference--he might shovel a thin path to his doorway from the street so he can prance in sneakers to his car. But if he ever clears the corner, which is used ever day by dozens of schoolkids awaiting the bus, it's two weeks after the fact following a prolonged thaw. "See! I'm shovelin'!" he seems to boast as he stops to catch his breath every thirty seconds. Gustafson isn't such a bad guy, but he has already reserved a stained couch seat in the Slacker Hall of Fame.

Finally, there are those who never seem to grasp the rhythm of the city's street plowing process--the arcane Snow Emergency. I don't mind so much those who actually get caught and towed, though they can stuff their complaints. They, at least, are forced to ransom their autos to ensure future snow removal. It's the one's that don't get hooked before the plow comes through that trample my civic sensibilities. They are a menace, scofflaws of the winter streets, sitting for weeks safely within levees of chunky, salty, grey-white snow; icebound monuments of apathy.

It's hard work, this seasonal rearrangement of precipitation that refuses to flow. It's also a simple civic gesture, one of the few ways we as residents are required to pitch in and help a city function. But the requirements, like the abominable snowman after elfin dentistry, are mostly toothless.

Winter Roost

2005-12-08T17:29:00.000-06:00

To me, winter hardship means getting up for work in the morning before the kitchen has hit 60 degrees. I suppose I could encourage the furnace to awaken earlier, but hot coffee usually provides heat enough. When I glance out the window to the first grey winter light of a Minneapolis morning, I inevitably see a few crows headed southwest, flying in dips and swoops as though it's windy, even when calm and 10 below. I would rather not be that cold, I think, clutching my hands around the warm mug.

But crows are winter roosters here in this part of the state. Ravens stay in the north woods year round, but their smaller cousins migrate slightly south, to dense aggregations where scavenging is good. I see them in the evenings too, a steady stream flying northeast on the last light of day, seemingly endless. But just where they go, I have never known. So I endeavored to find out.

Common sense would suggest that they head for the river, where plenty of trees line the banks and the closest thing to a natural order reigns. I planned to head down there some evening, tracing a line, quite literally as the crow flies, from our neighborhood to the Mississippi below St. Anthony Falls and the University. So imagine my surprise when driving home from work last night, just after the early dusk of a pre-solstice sunset, to notice a cloud of crows circling the I-94/35W commons, and alighting en masse in the trees of the neighborhoods that overlook this urban tangle.

The ecologist Bernd Heinrich has written a wonderful book about the habits of denizens of the snowy north, Winter World : The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, which will provide answers to anyone who has wondered how turtles get by for six months without taking a breath, or speculated about the marginal caloric economy of a tiny chickadee. I was pleased to find that he confirmed my experience--biologists have noticed over the past 50 years that crows have begun to prefer roosting in cities in the winter, and choose the brightest, noisiest places. Heinrich speculates that they may have learned to do so because such an environment discourages the crow's top predator, the great horned owl.

But why do they get together in the first place? Protection via group awareness is one likely reason. But Heinrich's theory, the result of detailed observations of ravens in the winter woods, is that corvids (crows, ravens, blackbirds, and grackles are good examples) benefit from communal information-sharing about the location of food sources in the lean months. Imagine the mother lode that might satisfy the largest conventions: Heinrich writes that some crow roosts out west contain several million individuals! But even our urban gathering could draw hundreds of thousands of birds.

Review: Down from Basswood by Lynn Maria Laitala

2005-12-02T18:22:00.000-06:00

I read and write for a living, which is probably why I don't take on as much fiction as I would like these days. A few years ago, during the lengthy layoff which gave me time to write Eating Crow, I read constantly--I remember ingesting ten of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels in a two-month period. What precious time I now have to dedicate to the printed page tends to go to journalism, in that furious scramble to always stay on top of events; to remain politically fluent and relevant. But once in a while an intriguing volume lands in my lap and I have to give it a look.

One recent example was Mark Munger's Suomalaiset, People of the Marsh, which chronicles the Finnish-American experience in northeastern Minnesota in the early 20th century. Judge Munger is obviously a capable researcher, but in attempting a historical novel, it's almost as if he forgot to remove the footnotes and cross references. Suomalaiset is often smothered in verisimilitude--brands of beer, descriptions of settings, name-dropping--and this fetish was ultimately puzzling. Lack of editorial rigor, I suppose. The result was a bland amalgamation of pulp fiction and history, as though two books had been mistakenly bound as one. I'm glad I read it, because his attention to detail helped to inform my grasp of the subject and confirm my own work, but I cannot say that I was entertained.

Lynn Maria Laitala, however, has done a superb job with Down from Basswood. This book had escaped my attention since it came out in 2002, but was recently recommended by a local editor. Laitala is a trained historian, and I believe this book resulted from her dedicated effort to record the oral histories of members of the Finnish and Ojibwe communities near Ely, Minnesota. Down from Basswood is not threaded around a unifying plot; it is, rather, a series of interrelated short stories about individuals on the margins of the economy and civilization in the first half of the 20th century. Every chapter chronicles the small triumph or profound tragedy of a character, each informed by Laitala's astute take on the political dimensions of the time and the harsh economic climate. Laitala's sensibilities are unabashedly rooted in northeastern Minnesota's union/socialist tradition, but this book cannot be pigeonholed as a polemic--her touch is very light, her characters are not simply victims but fallible, and their plight is always uncertain. I continually found myself pleased by small writerly details, and I suppose stumbling upon passages that I wish I'd written is the heart of the reason why I read fiction.

Perhaps the genius behind Down from Basswood is the notion that documentaries, at best, are more compelling and moving than drama. Lynn Maria Laitala has managed to exploit the seam between the two. In so doing, she has written the best book about the Arrowhead region that I have read, and a volume that could sit confidently on the shelf beside Main Street, Giants in the Earth, North Star Country, or Staggerford.

Googolplexic

2005-11-18T06:52:00.000-06:00

I recently scored a regular writing gig for the premier brand of a major Minnesota radio empire. The ideal nature of my contribution is the requirement that I do field work for future broadcast locations, all from the comfort of my home office. That is, I create capsule geographies of distant sites. I am a zealous advocate of all things geographic, from compass, sextant, and GPS to globe and atlas. I can happily pore for hours over demographic minutiae, especially if it's attached to a map. So to glean and express the nature of a place is right up my fully explored alley.

Two exceedingly powerful tools provided free of charge by Google are making my research much easier. The first is Google Earth, probably the coolest thing readily available on the internet to someone with my peculiar obsession with images. Google recently acquired the massive Keyhole Graphics database of satellite images (previously available only by subscription) and made basic accessibility available for free--you can upgrade via subscription to finer options. But the basic version alone is an amazing tool, allowing you to get a fairly close bird's eye view of any place on the earth's surface, including highly detailed shots of the world's major cities. For instance, you can discern a person standing in Manhattan's Washington Square Park from their shadow. And you can select layers of information to add: if there's an ATM in Ulan Bator, you can feature it; in fact, you can add info yourself via something akin to a bulletin board. You can tilt the view and build in topography, including the proportions of buildings. I just completed some research of a venue in Miami, and this capability helped me to understand the context of the site. Absolutely no substitute for being there, but a tremendous aid to navigating the imagination.

Last night, as I was seeking information about bilingualism and Miami's latest census, I noticed a new search option at the bottom of the Google results page: Try searching for [insert topic here] on Google Book Search. I had heard rumblings about this project and some attendant controversy, but I had no idea the concept was reality. The basic idea is Google and a host of libraries (Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan) are scanning every book they can get their hands on and making the text susceptible to the unfailing eye of the search engine. The researcher can then view sample pages to see if the content fits, and purchase the book or find a library copy via a nearby link. This is certainly more efficient than delving into a card catalog, marching off to find the book, and browsing accordingly. And for my purposes, the viewable text gave me the information I wanted. The spiraling depths of this pool of knowledge are unfathomable in the truest sense, but suddenly much less forbidding because of this tool.

The Authors Guild has decided to sue Google, alleging massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers. Google counters that it is engaging in what is called "fair use" under copyright doctrine. One cannot cut and paste the displayed text, attempts to print default to an informational page about the book, random pages are immune to display, and individual authors can request that their works be removed from the database. Google sells advertising on each page, thus this venture is far from a grand philanthropic gesture. Personally, on the day my name first rides the spine of a tangible volume, I will freely embrace the promotional potential of this search capability.

This dispute provides an excellent lesson in the complexities of internet law, and perhaps the best example yet of the medium's educational potency. Maybe an ASCAP-like arrangement will resolve the dispute, for I'll be the last person to deny a writer's entitlement to a few meager shekels. But shouldn't the aggrieved author focus on this question: how does this display of my work hurt me? Could it somehow hinder sales?? I don't think so. And one can't deny the revolutionary nature of this development; how a musty backshelf text on sociology can again find the light of day, if only digitally. Suddenly, I am well-equipped with anecdotes and figures about the post-Cuban-revolution transformation of Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.

Armistice Day

2005-11-11T09:31:00.000-06:00

I sometimes go to war with squirrels. Not that it's something I'm proud of, but this conflict necessarily arises when you own an old house with flimsy soffets. I believe I finally cured the problem this summer after several weeks of high-ladder carpentry. As I replaced the final lengths of fascia, I kept an ever-baited live trap on the roof to lure the last defiant interloper from its insulated den in the attic rafters. What you do after the squirrel has entered its galvanized slammer is your business: I did the responsible thing by relocating my captives to a suitable suburban apartment and getting them all jobs at the Bloomington Wal-Mart.

I assumed that the squirrels in our south Minneapolis neighborhood were eastern grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). But upon close inspection of their snouts and pelage, I learned that we were beset by fox squirrels (Sciurus niger). One clear behavioral difference is the way they build their nests: fox squirrels gather twigs and leaves into a crotch near the trunk of the tree; greys prefer nesting out on a limb. It's tough to distinguish on this basis when they've become squatters, however. Fox squirrels tend to be bigger (up to 3 pounds!) and longer and have reddish-orange to pale yellow bellies, while grey squirrels have mostly white bellies. Grey squirrels tend to favor areas with denser forests--parks rather than neighborhoods.

There is always a quiet period after the armistice, and then one day you notice a bold new rodent exploring your backyard. Our redoubt now theoretically impregnable, I don't see any need to breach the peace. Sure, they occasionally knock the feeder down, and they've managed to make our jack o'lantern even more horrid. But they are thorougly adapted to the urban forest, and as long as they aren't hitching a ride on my hard-earned utilities expenditures, they can have the run of the place. At least until we get a dog.

Putting the Crone Back in Cronyism

2005-11-04T17:38:00.000-06:00

One must resist the ad hominem attack when criticizing the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's token conservative columnist Katherine Kersten. Both The Rake and City Pages have taken the leathery bait, but I resist. I will call her neither harpy nor hag. I would never suggest that her hair looks like a 3M byproduct nor that she appears to survive on a diet of tacks (it's hard to tell now anyway, as the Strib keeps updating her picture and making it smaller). I will not summon images of the undead and bloodletting and midnight trysts with the Beast. I will not do these things because that would give her too much satisfaction. But I will state that her dogmatic, humorless exercises are consistently diametrically opposed to my reality.

Today's column takes the cake, and I hope for her sake it has a tasty file in it. She dismisses the recent student anti-war protest, trotting out the numbnuts conservative lie that resistance to the war in this country is being orchestrated by Stalin from beyond the grave, then suggesting that these kids are only seeking a little spotlight. You know: commie tools with MTV savvy. So I tapped her a little message:

Dear Mrs. Kersten:

What a dreadful fallacy you propose in today's column. Equating legitimate protest of this country's abysmal foreign policy with communism is about as relevant as tailfins and "Leave it to Beaver" reruns.

Your column is so transparently informed by stale conservative talking points that I am amazed the Strib continues to allow you to haunt its mediocre pages with your crypto-plagiarism. Here's a column suggestion: Eric Rudolph, abortion opponent and terrorist, is hailed by white racists and neo-nazis as a hero; ergo, teenage pro-life advocates should read Mein Kampf before going back to mass and contemplate how their message would have played outside Dachau in 1939. Does that make sense? I didn't think so.

I suppose you'll get your comeuppance for your evil machinations at St. Peter's gate, malfeasor. I am a patriot and defender of free speech, but I am offended that your writings appear anywhere more prominent than a basement bathroom wall.

I'll grant her the last word, given her valiant response: "Clearly, we disagree. But thanks for taking the time to write."

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

2005-11-03T18:06:00.000-06:00

The president's recent announcement at the National Institutes of Health of a multibillion dollar government investment to insulate us against the eventual bird flu pandemic highlights an interesting paradox for his presidency. How does an opponent of evolutionary theory (assuming, somewhat implausibly, that W has ever thought about the issue beyond its political dimensions) ignore the implications of such a rapidly adaptive pestilence? If Bigfoot doesn't exist, how do I keep him from raiding my garden?

Skeptics of evolutionary theory often attack the notion of the large shifts necessary for a species' progression from one stage to the next. For instance, advocates for intelligent design state that "evolutionary theory claims that random mutations can build very complicated biological structures over time. Yet, mutations are almost always harmful to the organism." But, according to the CDC, that's basically how the most harmful viruses become dangerous. (Viruses are typically not considered to be organisms.) Influenza viruses can change in two different ways: antigenic drift and antigenic shift. The leisurely pace of the former allows public health wizards to produce an effective vaccine ahead of each winter's contagion. The latter, which is much less common, is defined as an abrupt, major change in the influenza virus, resulting in a new virulent strain that can infect a much broader variety of humans. Pandemics sometimes occur in the wake of an antigenic shift because most people have little or no protection against the new virus, and it romps unimpeded through the public respiratory system.

Intelligent design theory is on its best footing when it attacks the ability of science to explain the origins of life on earth or of the universe itself. Of course, we are a young species, with only a few thousand years of technological advancement and a few hundred billion hours of egghead methodology yet devoted to these immense mysteries. Take my musings with a grain of NaCl, because I'm neither biologist nor theologian. And I'll readily admit that when I peer into the depths of night and try to comprehend the edges of eternity I often take refuge in the divine. Sure, theories produced via the scientific method sometimes become obsolete (perhaps this is proof enough that evolution works!). But when I get my flu shot or use a telephone or start my car, I'm thankful that I stand on the shoulders of giants wearing pocket protectors.

The Jaques Generation

2005-10-28T07:56:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-24T08:08:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-21T10:06:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-10-19T13:05:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-17T07:36:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-14T12:08:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-12T06:50:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-10T06:27:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-05T06:57:00.000-05:00

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

2005-10-03T07:02:00.000-05:00

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)

Don't Look Back

2005-09-29T08:33:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-09-27T07:07:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-23T07:03:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-22T08:12:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-19T18:49:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-15T09:47:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-12T11:54:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-08T15:46:00.001-05:00

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

2005-09-06T08:55:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-01T15:36:00.000-05:00

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

2005-09-01T13:33:00.000-05:00

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.