Reflections on Duluth

 

Having returned from a very happy vacation in Duluth with my wife, I am eager to somehow convey my impressions of this strange, appealing, decrepit, beautiful, and fascinating northern city as succinctly as possible.

But before I do let me describe this of Duluth's downtown: It is by no means small. It extends for 16 or 17 blocks by my count, and is four to six blocks wide, its width climbing a steep hill away from the mighty Lake Superior. The downtown is abundant in great, many storied, stone buildings, and though perhaps 25 percent of its storefronts are in various states of abandon, it still supports a strangely rich and interesting collection of businesses, shops, galleries, libraries, cafes, restaurants, and oddball stores.

And with that said, and without agenda, or theory, or the least ambition to insult or complain, here is my signal comment on Duluth:

Walking, often, as we did, in fair weather and daylight, through the breadth of this reasonably dense, long, and economically active cityscape, we almost never saw any person I was more than half sure wasn't homeless.

Soft exile

In a kind of soft, but real exile I am in a lovely room looking out at a frozen Lake Superior. It's late Winter and though it has been warm for days, nothing out there moves. Nothing. It could be a picture but it isn't. Indeed it says "fuck pictures", because it is Lake Superior. You either see it, in its natural, bewildering guise, or you don't.

Holy gods all these miracles putting the world at our fingertips. Skip away on your fancy machines for 20 seconds and you can find thousands of pictures of Lake Superior, film, books. But none of it is real.

Luckily I am at liberty to tell you what Lake Superior told me today:

Magic is the absence of illusion.

Mike Matt Mark

I was meeting Matt Damon at Du Nord, a distillery in my neighborhood that also serves cocktails. Matt was there for some meeting George Clooney had set up between me and Matt to try and "help" me. Clooney likes to help me. I like to help him by letting him try. We're a mutual aid society.

Anyway, Mr. Damon did not know what I looked like, and when I saw him, sitting forlornly at the end of a dark bar, poking at his phone, I decided to tease him a little. I ordered a glass of sparkling water, glanced over at him a couple times, looked away a couple times, and finally asked "Do you go to the _______ Library a lot?"

"The ________ Library? No, I'm not from here." Mr. Damon replied.

"You look familiar." I said, not letting it go.

"I'm an actor." Matt said.

"You check out mysteries." I said. "You're always reading those Dick Francis books."

"No, really. I've never been to your library."

"You're sure? It's uncanny how familiar you look. I could swear it."

"It's not me, sorry." He said, returning to his phone.

"Mike? You're Mike? No! Mark. You're Mark! Whitney or something." I exclaimed.

"Matt." He said "Not Mike or Mark. I played Mark Watney in a movie called The Martian. Maybe that's what you're thinking?"

"Oh. I saw that movie. That was a good movie!"

"Glad you liked it. So that's it then."

"No." I said. "I know you from somewhere."

He checked his watch. He looked around the room, presumably for me, but he didn't know what I looked like. "Seriously, man, I'm in a lot of movies. You're probably just mixing that up with something. I've never even been to Minnesota before."

"You don't like Minnesota?" I asked.

"It seems fine. Look, can I just do this?" He said, gesturing to his phone.

"Sure, just, do I look familiar at all to you?"

"No. No. I don't know you okay. You don't know me."

"Have you been to Lake Como, in Italy."

Damon looked up for once from his phone and gave me suspicious glare. "Yes." He said tentatively.

"Have you been to Laglio? To Villa Oleandra?" I asked.

"You bastard." He said, laughing.

"That's it then." I said. "I saw you at George Clooney's Villa Oleandra."

Matt Damon laughed. "Clooney did this. Clooney is such an asshole!"

"To business?" I said smiling.

"To business." My new buddy Matt Damon said.

But first we ordered drinks.

Agate hunters handbook, part three

Agate Hunters Handbook Part Three

We have informed you of the history of agate hunting. We have outlined famous people who collected agates. And we discussed the great moments in agate hunting and what they might mean for us going forward.

We haven't?

That doesn't sound right. Wait here while I read over parts one and two of the Agate Hunters Handbook.

Hmm, I guess we didn't. I guess we were planning to but were too busy agate hunting.

Yes, since you ask, we did find one. Well, at least something we classify as "vaguely agate-like", which you will soon learn is a very good haul indeed.

Anyway, we could do the history of agates and all the famous Agateers and all that, but this is only a three-part series so don't you think we'd better get down to the shore and start collecting?

Me too.

The first important thing with agate hunting is knowing where to look. I suppose, once upon a time, any old Lake Superior shoreline with rocks was good enough. This was back 100 years ago when ten percent of all the rocks here were attractive, fist-sized agates. Unfortunately the popularity of agate hunting has made agates quite rare. By my modestly scientific sampling of roughly 50,000 Lake Superior stones I have determined that there aren't any actual agates left here, though you can still find some of varying quality and prices in local stores.

What does this mean? It means we have to use our wits. We have to search in unlikely places. Agates won't be sitting high on an easily accessible, scoured over shore. You need to dig down, preferably on the wet side of the tide line, possibly while you're perched awkwardly between two huge rocks, with freezing cold incoming waves lunging at you. You'll have to catch large lake trout and search their bellies on the possibility that they swallowed something really good. You must go deep sea diving in forgotten Lake Superior shipwrecks in the hopes that some doomed passenger was traveling with their museum quality agate collection. Or best yet, buy an old brass lamp in a Grand Marais antique store, rub it, and when a genie appears and offers you three wishes, wish for three agates, nice ones, worth at least $40 each on Ebay. Three agates, three wishes, no genie worth his or her salt will allow you to group multiple agates into one wish.

Now that you have found yourself a likely agate hunting spot, what next? Look for agates, but because you won't find any, enjoy the other stones. You will be seeing a lot of them.

The other stones are graded thus:

A. Underwater, and of jewel-like amazingness.
B. Wet, pretty and compellingly complex.
C. Dry, interesting, kind of, a tiny bit, if you try, and remember, you only need get them wet to make them pretty!
D. Dry, at home, in your rock collection where they are random rocks of no particular interest to anyone. Don't try to show these to people.


But what do you do if you find a genuine, glorious, bona fide agate?

Congratulations. Leave the agate there for the next person.

Just kidding. Get an expensive case for it and ask everyone you know and have ever or will ever meet "Want to see my agate?'

Of course they do! And while they are marveling over your amazing agate don't forget to mention "The Agate Hunters Handbook" in three parts. It will have had little to do with your triumph, but a little common courtesy never hurt anyone.

Agate hunters handbook part two

Agate Hunters Handbook, part 2

Before we get started today, let me just answer the question "Why agate hunting?"

Agate hunting is a wonderful excuse to crouch and squat along the shore of Lake Superior, looking at millions and millions of pretty stones. A word of warning though, these stones are only pretty when wet, peered at with a careful eye, and then only up until the moment you collect them, at which point they will pretty much look like random stones and you will have no idea what possessed you to pick them up. Of course you also could, theoretically, hypothetically, in a probably-it's-technically-possible way, find a big, gorgeous, prize winning Lake Superior Agate valued at over $40 on Ebay. But, honestly, if that's your game I suggest the lottery, or trying to make it big by writing a three-part blog post about agate hunting.

Okay then, let's get started.


1. When should I go agate hunting?

I suppose ideally the best time is on a calm day after stormy weather, but I say that the true best time for agate hunting is when you just happen to be up at the Lake Superior shoreline for other reasons altogether. That way if someone asks "Are you agate hunting?" You can sulkily answer "No, I'm just here for a friend's wedding. Do I look like I'm agate hunting? Not that there's anything wrong with agate hunting. I hear it's a very respectable hobby." At which point you'll probably be left alone.


2. What do I need to have to go agate hunting?

You should have:

     A. The heaviest grade fishing waders.
     B. Good quality diving gloves.
     C. A full set (at least seven gradations) of stone sizing screens.
     D. A standard, professional level geologist's kit, restocked yearly, replaced every five years for obvious reasons.
     E. Some kind of sonar set up. It doesn't need to be fancy.
     F. Collecting buckets and pack.

Alternately you could just have pants or shorts with pockets. If they're the kind of pockets where things fall out of them when you squat that's probably for the best.


Now that you're all prepared, take a deep breath. Exciting isn't it? Tomorrow we go collecting.

Agate hunters handbook, part one

Agate Hunters Handbook, part one

Agate hunting on the shores of Lake Superior can be a fun, rewarding, and profitable hobby.

Just kidding. It's a fool's game. But if it's the fool's game for you this guide will help you. 

No, it is unlikely to help you find an agate. It is more likely to help you in that way where you complain and someone says "I know! Totally!"  Think of this guide as a shoulder to cry on in the early years of your apprenticeship to the unprofitable hobby of agate hunting. Let's get started!

Ah, yes, you'll want my qualifications. Fair enough.

1. In 1981, while on a backpacking trip in a beautiful canyon called West Clear Creek, in Arizona, someone brought along a fishing bow. It was cheap and simple, and came with one barbed fishing arrow that attached by line to the bottom of the bow. The creek was full of fish, big ones lurking in deep pools and shadows, little ones readily visible everywhere else in the appropriately named "Clear Creek". For the two days of our visit there, dawn to dusk, barefoot and nearly naked, I tirelessly hunted fish. Stalking in slow motion over stones, perfecting my approach and technique, I launched my arrow thousands of time upon the theoretically tasty fish of those waters.

Though many were startled, I don't believe I ever so much as injured one of them. Fortunately we had packed in many pop-tarts.

2. I have hunted agates on the shore of Lake Superior for three Summers running now.

That concludes my qualifications.

Ah, yes, you'd like to know if I've ever found any agates. Good for you! Already going after the old master's secrets! That's just the sort of initiative that will make little difference in your hopeless, but gratifying, career as an agate hunter.

The answer is yes. I am 85% sure that I have found some small stones that are, technically, agates.

What Is an Agate?

I think I know, sort of, but if you want pictures of and clear explanations about what an agate is I will have to direct you to one of those Agate Hunter's Handbooks that go for $18.95 in your North Shore gift shops. That steep cost is very unlike this guide, which is free. I should also note that those $18.95 guides will be written by pros, who have too much to lose by telling you all their agate hunting secrets, unlike me, who doesn't really have any secrets, but at least is happy to go ahead and tell you all of them.


Tomorrow, in part two: Getting started.

Birder

According to my week long ornithological studies I have discovered the eight bird varieties of the Lake Superior shoreline. If the intensity of the scientificness and complicated ornithological terms are too much for you you are free to skip this blog post, or maybe read the March 1, 2014 blog post instead. No, I don't know what that March 1, 2014 one is about, it was a random choice of dates, but odds are it's as good as this one.





Okay, so, you're still with me. We're ready to roll up our sleeves and do some proper research science. Here are the eight birds of the Lake Superior shore:


1. Seagull.

They fly by on a regular, indiscernible schedule, sometimes silent, sometimes crying out. Every once in awhile they will make a loop, to slow their progress and make sure they don't get ahead on their carefully timed route.


2. Little yellow birds.

These are the only birds that get confused by the windows of our lake house, which can, in the right light, look like another lake through another forest. One day one crashed into the glass and sadly, but fascinatingly, lay dead on our balcony. Another day one crashed and lay on its back on our balcony, and even though its bold, tiny heart was rapidly pounding, I thought it would die eventually,  but after awhile of lying flopped on its back the little yellow bird hopped up and flew away.


3. Geese.

The geese can speak for themselves.


4. Dragonflies.

All birds in the science classification system lie somewhere between dragons and flies. But the dragonfly is at the exact center between them.


5. Bald Eagle.

Standing at the kitchen island counter I saw a distant bird flying along and I thought "Wouldn't that be something if that were a bald eagle." A few minutes later a big bald eagle came flying along our long row of windows. It was so close I gasped.


6. Loon.

Only ever on the water, you can see them from far away. They like the calm water best, and when they dive you will not see them for a very long time because they like flying under water better than they like flying in the air. 


7. Bats.

They are only out in the last five minutes of daylight and in that time they eat all the mosquitoes that the dragonflies could not catch during the course of an entire day.


8. Hummingbirds.

Oh man, these birds are like looking into another, more lovely, reality. If only we belonged to the same beautiful dimension as hummingbirds.


 

I hope you learned something. Personally I was unable to get past my preconceived notions. I saw only what I expected to see, and yet, I don't seem to mind at all. 

Did this happen

The lake house is a dream because it is out of time, and alone, and far away, but mostly because it looks and looks and looks at the lake. The lake is ever further than the eye can see and disappears, changes, and always stays the same. I have to tell you this about the lake, even though it will break all my poetry and sound so obvious as to be daft.

The lake is full of water.

If someone went mad here and someone had to come take them away, the mad person would be mumbling "It's full of water. The lake is full of water" over and over.

But no one is going mad here, and no one will. Do you know why? Because the lake is full of water- too much ballast. It's so grounding, so leveling. 

Of all our days at the lake, this one, our last full one, is the dreamiest of them all. The lake is almost waveless, as waveless as it can get without freezing over. One can see the stones under water. The dense confections of clouds, strung out like distant mountains along the horizon, are reflected with an inaccurate mysteriousness in the quiet water. Sky and lake are the same color and for the first time in seven days, without the undulating roar of waves, we are surrounded by silence. Blankets of whispering mist lie across vast areas of the lake, but when you look closely at them they dissipate, and you see that what you thought were mists are merely areas of water so placid and full of light that they glow. 

When we arrived here a week ago the lake tossed and large waves excitingly pounded the rock shore. It was thrilling and it matched our restless and wild spirits. Each day the lake quieted a little, and so did we. Now we are all still and deep. There is no longer any meaningful distinction between the real and the illusory. The lake is full of water and so, after all, are we.

I am so calm that I am even willing, as we must, to leave tomorrow morning. But that doesn't mean I want to, or that I think it is a good idea.

Once you see them

There is a principle I have noticed in the natural world. There is a lot we don't see or notice until it's named, pointed out to us, or, most of all, until we learn the trick of seeing it. Then it's everywhere. Then it's readily available for our notice.

Because of an interest in Monarch Butterflies, spurred by my library's grow and release display in the kid's room, I took the short amount of attention it required to get clear on which plant, exactly, is the milkweed they love. As soon as I knew the plant it turned out milkweed is everywhere. It's like a weed, because, I guess, it's a weed. I have found, to my surprise, that our yard is swimming in it. It used to be part of our unkempt collection of wildly overgrown weeds, but now I know. Those aren't weeds. That's our native butterfly habitat. In a blink of knowledge we go from neighborhood lawn menaces to the best citizens on the block.

Up at our lake house I have had a not dissimilar experience of discovery with agates. After endless, fruitless searching through the millions of small stones on the shore of Lake Superior I started rooting around in the cold tide line being churned up by the waves. There I found my first agate, and knowing what and how I was looking for, I found more, although none of them yet, I admit, so fancy and wonderful as the ones they sell for two dollars in an antique store in Grand Marais.

Wonderfully this revelation happened a third time when we were hiking in the woods a couple miles from here. I was admiring the mushrooms and the dense fairy copses. I was marveling at the beautiful deep creek-bed cutting down in the red stone, the gnarled roots of pines, and the subtly strange sounds of birds, when suddenly it occurred to me that I was seeing a lot of small trees that looked peculiar. The tree trunks were the right color, brown, but, oddly, they seemed furry. I looked up and the strange shaped branch above me moved against, rather than with, the wind.

These weren't trees, these were moose legs. That big branch was a moose antler! I wasn't walking through a forest of trees so much as I was walking through a forest of mooses.

Up until a couple days ago I would have been fairly convinced that pretty much all the moose were gone from up here in the Minnesota Northwoods, but now that I've got their silhouette down I can tell you, it's pretty much all mooses all the time. You just have to know how to see them.

Global warming global schwarming

Like many people I like to pretend to keep my finger on the pulse of the global warming disaster. This is a brilliant disaster because it is happening in a slow motion fashion. The trick to being an effective global disaster, the kind where you can cause epic levels of devastation, the kind that can aspire to destroying half the life on earth and not look silly about its ambitions, is you must happen slowly, you've got to take your time. If a disaster gives people ample time to deal with something, even a dire emergency, especially a dire emergency, they won't. Sure, they might pretend to, but while people are readily fooled by pretending, global disasters aren't so much usually. However, if a global disaster makes any sudden moves we tend to spring into real action. If, for instance, there is a zombie apocalypse, then the zombies massing together in a tidal wave of their numbers is a recipe for the failure of that zombie uprising. Human kind is resourceful, crafty, able to bond into effective units to fight seemingly insurmountable threats. But a zombie invasion playing the long game, going slow, that's the one that will succeed. Let us get used to them gradually, a zombie here, a zombie there.

"I don't like these zombies." We might say "But they're so ridiculously slow and stupid. They can't even open a door!" And so, imperceptibly the zombie population will grow.

"The zombies got Joe out by his garage." We might say "But Joe was a very old man, crippled with arthritis, and he had horrible glaucoma. It's probably a relief for him to be a zombie."

"I saw a few zombies shambling through the neighborhood honey. Make sure you keep the doors closed." How hard is it to close a door? You don't even have to lock it. They're zombies, all they can manage is a bit of light pushing, and, of course, a little teething. Anyone can keep a door closed. I mean, until they don't.

"Harold, I think the zombies got the Jacobsens."

"I never liked the Jacobsens." Mutters Harold under his breath. "Jesus!" He says "What does it take to close your damn doors at night!"

"Well" Louise, Harold's wife, replies "The Jacobsens always were fools."

And so it goes. Housing gets cheaper, resources more plentiful, jobs easy to find. Plus it's fun to run over zombies on the way to work, albeit in a sick sort of a way. Yes, there are zombies absolutely everywhere, but they're as slow and ridiculous as ever.

And then, one day, it's all zombies. A sea of zombies. But only so long as they took 80 years not 80 weeks, or even 80 months. Nice and slow.

"Wow" You might think "I never thought it would be all zombies everywhere. They were so slow!" Except that you won't think that, because you'll be a zombie too, and zombies don't think. If they could think they could open doors, and if they were that much more of a threat then by god we would have had them! We'd have sprung into action.

Of course, global warming is nothing like this inch by inch zombie apocalypse. Sure it's slow and dangerous, theoretically, but we should all be okay if we get to high ground. How hard is it to get to high ground?

Fly Away Home with mooses

Fly Away Home is a beloved movie in my house. If you haven't seen it, now would be the time to do so, before you read this and find the entire plot crudely outlined. In the movie Jeff Daniels plays a Canadian inventor/artist with a penchant for ultralight planes. When his ex wife dies in a car accident in New Zealand it turns out he'd better learn how to be a father fast because his heartbroken, barely known anymore to him, daughter, played by a young Anna Paquin, is now his full responsibility.

In Fly Away Home, this pre-teen Anna Paquin starts to find the beginning thread of healing when she finds and spontaneously adopts a clutch of orphaned geese.

I adore this lovely movie. I think it is very nearly a perfect movie. I would make only one small, tiny really, change to it. I think instead of finding baby geese, Anna Paquin should rescue baby mooses.

A mother moose, dying of global warming related causes, like parasites who no longer die off due to warm winters, dies under the stress of local fracking and the complications of giving birth to moose triplets. Anna Paquin finds the triplets and gives the baby mooses all the chocolate milk from her lunch causing them to think of her as their mom. She hides the moose in her dad's barn/studio. There are some antics with her acquiring dozens of gallons of chocolate milk. But because, after a week or two, the three mooses are frisky and each the size of a white-tailed deer, she is found out.

However, as this is the first interest Anna has shown in anything since coming to Canada, she is allowed to keep the moose, who now follow her everywhere while she bugles.

A game warden, who at first seems helpful, finds out about the mooses and says people aren't allowed to have pet mooses in Canada, which shows how bad things have gotten in Canada with the fracking and conservative government. Then he pulls out a small pocket saw and tries to cut off one of the moose's antlers, either to hang up in his weekend cabin or maybe because captive moose in Canada aren't allowed to grow antlers because they can easily put someone's eye out.

So after Jeff Daniels throws out the evil game warden they decide they should teach the moose, who are normally non migratory animals, to migrate. They can get the mooses to go south in Summer to Minnesota where everyone will be happy to see them cause all our moose died, and we miss them, and then they can go back to Canada in Winter where all their parasites can die in the necessary bitter cold and make life difficult for evil game wardens who will have to sweep up all the dead parasites.

Now in this slightly improved version of the movie Jeff Daniels is not an ultralight plane enthusiast, rather he's a tractor enthusiast. So they dress up a tractor like a moose and try to get the young mooslings to follow it. But the moose won't follow Jeff Daniels so young Anna Paquin has to go too on an adventure of a lifetime on a tractor, while bugling.

And then my wife and I, sitting in our vacation home over Lake Superior, see five mooses working their way down our shoreline. One of the mooses looks like Jeff Daniels and one like Anna Paquin, and I am so excited to finally see mooses on our shoreline that I tell you all about it in my blog. But you think I'm just being silly, and you don't believe me at all.

But then later you see the move Fly Away Home (With Mooses), and you are very, very sorry you ever doubted me. 

Pine tree

Up here, on the north shore of Lake Superior, the realm of the pine tree begins. And like anything ubiquitous, it can be easy to overlook them. Pine trees will be the first thing to tell you you are in the north lands, and they will be the first thing you stop seeing once you're here.

But don't write them off. These are some serious trees.

We have pine trees down in the cities where I live too. Indeed, there is a huge one right in our front yard. Bigger than any of these northern pine, ours is shaggy, friendly, and domesticated. It has been trimmed and cut over the years for its health and to steer it away from the house, from electric lines, and from the sidewalk that it likes to lay its weary branches on in the heavy snows and rains. It is a giant English Sheepdog of a tree, shedding copiously in season, well fed (on our sewage line, no less) and groomed, one of the family. It is a far, far distant cousin to these wild pines of the north.

Likewise we have hardwood trees, both here and down south. These are clever trees, bursting into bloom as the sun comes out, unfolding their flat, sprawling leaves into the warm and long days of summer, and in the first hints of winter burning their leaves off and going into a deep, tight, long slumber.

None of that for these Lake Superior pines. No cozy domesticity, no clever devices for them. They have no strategy. They don't have a plan. Yes, some botanist could surely detail the vast tools of their dominion. But I'll have none of that because look at these trees. Grim, gentle, battered, and calm. They are growing out of rock on the quiet summer shore of Lake Superior, looking just the same as they will when it is 40 below zero and the whole lake is trying to blow them off the face of the earth. These are wild trees and heedless, not going anywhere, doing nothing different. These trees are scabrous, uneven, broken, stately, and elegant. They are straight and tall until you look closely at them and see they are full of scars and lichens, muscles and bends and careful, uneven progression. They curve and lean and give up and have never given up.

Let me go out there with them. They are wild but don't even know the meaning of the word skittish. They take no care or offense. Let me stand with them. It is the easiest weather of the year. The breeze is gentle. My spirit is calm. I stand, perfect in the air and the light. And standing, I can last three minutes.

Three minutes! These trees are here for forever! Do you know how long forever is? I cannot tell you. Ask these trees. They know.

Sky

What if I said this year it's all about the sky?

What if I said we came to one of the great wonders of the world, the greatest lake of them all, and we found a house distant and beautiful, full of a long, tenderly beaded chain of windows, strung out meticulously across this lake's wild shore, and I said it's all about the sky?

Yes, that sky, the one you will find anywhere one earth. That same sky. Different. So different, but the same.

I wouldn't want to hear about the sky.

You go off to Tanzania to be with the herds of zebras please don't come back and tell me about the grass.

"But the grass is amazing in Tanzania! I can't tell you anything about Tanzania if you don't know about the grass."

No.

You don't go to Antarctica to tell me about the stars. I want to hear about the penguins on the endless ice.

"But the stars are different in Antarctica. They feel different. You have to know about the stars to know anything at all."

I've already seen the stars.

"No, you haven't seen these exact, perfect, precise stars."

Well, so be it. I don't have to like it, but I understand. I understand because that's how it is with the sky here. That same blue sky. Yes, you know, you've seen it. It has not escaped your attention.

And yet, no. This isn't your sky. These are bigger clouds than you have, doing wilder things. This is the sky that has run away from home. Just look, look at this blue sky. That is a cloud growing from nothing before our eyes, billowing, taking strange shapes, thick and solid and permanent, then retreating into itself, fading, and completely disappeared. Did we really see that? Or how about that cloud, over by itself floating in the blue, almost comically alone over the light water. That cloud is raining by itself. One cloud raining, the rain like tendrils of downward whisping smoke, the patch of rain on the lake a smear of distant black.

So much sky everywhere.

And at night the full moon rises and it is dark out and yet bright at the same time. The clouds turn colors no one has yet named. The light is smeared and splattered by a heavy hand across the surface of the stars and the water and the air. Yes you have a moon where you are. You have clouds where you are. Go look for these wonders. Go search your skies, but you are as likely to see a herd of zebra racing down your streets, a flock of penguins gathered curiously together in your yard, as you are to see these things that I see happening above Lake Superior.

If a great storm were stirring up terrifying 30 foot waves onto our shore of Lake Superior I would tell you. If we could see wolves howling in the woods to our east I would tell you that too. And if a giant bull moose were wandering down to the water's edge to take a prodigious sip of water I would tell you everything I could about it. But we have the sky, and it is just as good, and so I am telling you so.

Cherry basil martini

I am drunk, as I promised you I would be. I am not terribly drunk. I am mildly drunk. That's as far as I'm willing to go. I am drunk enough to watch the waves of Lake Superior and have them look like they're not moving, rather, I am.

And I am writing, drunk. I am drunk on this drink:

(I warn you ahead of time that this is a complicated recipe)

Cherry Basil Martini

1. In the middle of May plant some basil seeds in healthy soil with full sun exposure.

2. Over the course of 10 or 15 years cultivate a friendly relationship with a co-worker who has a green thumb and grows excellent sour cherries.

3. Acquire a local honey just because, by some fluke, or really, by the ingenuity of my wife, I did, and so now make it a condition of this recipe for both accuracy's sake and for the almost painful air of sophistication it brings.

4. Pit cherries acquired from friendly co-worker and cook them in the honey. They will become surprisingly liquid. Cook them down and drain off the cherry liquor.

5. Pick basil that has grown into bushy plants in the course of two and a half months.

6. Go to a house on Lake Superior designed by a clever architect who learned many important lessons directly from Frank Lloyd Wright.

7. Pour Hendricks Gin into a mason jar.

8. Put a bunch of ice in that jar.

9. Pour some St. Germaine Elderflower Cordial into the jar.

10. Rip up a bunch of your basil and throw it in the jar.

11. Pour in a few thick slugs of that sour cherry syrup.

12. Put some reserved honeyed sour cherries in a glass.

13. Close the lid of your mason jar and shake it until you've really had enough of the shaking and what could possibly be the point anymore. A little foamy is good news.

14. Strain the mason jar contents into your glass as best you can using the lid as a crude strainer.

15. Pretty!

16. Drink it. It's not actually as good as it sounds. But it's close.

17. No, wait, it is as good as it sounds.

18. Has it all been drunk already?

19. Yes. It is time to write. You are William Faulkner!

20. Did William Faulkner write recipes?

21. Probably, but none of them as good as this one.

Dragonfly

The sky is full of dragonflies, darting and hunting between the house and the lake, all through the morning and then later on up until the full moon rises out of the water in the evening. But, right now, out the grand, long windows of our lake house, I can't see a single one of them. It is mid afternoon and, as near as I can tell, the dragonflies are all Italians. At two in the afternoon they all close up shop and go sleep somewhere for three hours.

And why not Italians? Surely dragonflies are the sort of thing da Vinci would have designed with copious notes in one of his idiosyncratic little journals. Or better yet, Bernini would have come up with them to festoon all over some Roman fountain, all diaphanous and yet made of stone. Such a contrast would suit them well. They are half like fairyland creature and half machine purposed biplanes. They are creatures of fancy and ferocious hunters.

I have heard that a single dragonfly eats a pound of mosquitoes a day. That may not sound like much until you start thinking about what a bag of mosquitoes that weighs a pound might be like. I mean, besides really disgusting. Going from that full pound of eating one has to figure that your average dragonfly must weigh something like five pounds on its own. The way they dart about, weightless, electric, they sure don't seem to weigh five pounds, so I may have some of my facts wrong. But I am thrillingly disconnected from the Internet at this house, and though they have a prodigious number of books here I have found no copies of The Weights and Measures of All Things, which is a handy reference book someone might want to just sort of mention to the owners.

But either way dragonflies eat a surprising number of mosquitoes every day. Your standard magazine article, brochure, documentary, or book of popular natural history loves to trot out the mosquito hunting prowess of the dragonfly to impress upon us how the dragonfly is our friend, our friend because of all their mosquito eating.

I'm not so sure.

I have read a lot of these natural histories, and one common theme is always how the hunter strengthens the prey it feeds on. Wolves prey on the weak, slow, and sick moose so only the strong ones survive to pass along their healthy genes. 

So doesn't it stand to reason that the dragonflies pick off all the pokey, unalert mosquitoes, leaving the quick, savvy, and agile ones to reproduce? Doesn't it stand to reason that if not for the dragonfly there might be a good deal more mosquitoes, but they'd all be so sluggish and torpid that we could scoop them up in fine nets and see what it takes for there to be a pound of them? Wouldn't it stand to reason that if not for the dragonfly the mosquito would be far too slow and feeble to ever manage to take a bite from a human being like you or me, I mean, unless we were weak, or sick, and were getting weeded out of the gene pool?

But this doesn't mean I don't love all these Italian designed dragonflies, little WWI planes flying straight from fairyland, making wild designs in the sky, hunting our hunters and teaching us a thing or two about napping.

They are wonderful little animals, just, there's no point in getting carried away.






 

Mea culpa

The other day I was rather sharp when it came to a certain Minnesota dentist lion killer. I intimated quite strongly that he kept a pit of man eating sharks on his private island stronghold where he hunted shipwrecked human prey in a sporting, but still cruel and insane, manner. I also suggested this hunter might be found to have some billing irregularities when is came to his unusually lucrative dental practice.

But I wanted to say here that Who Am I To Judge? Who am I to judge this big game trophy hunter? Who am I to say it is so evil to bag a lion or an elk or polar bear? Who am I, sitting up here in my remote and dreamy vacation home, over the very shore of Lake Superior, to be so critical of a hunter who is ever following the thrill and danger and triumph and challenge of bringing down a ferocious beast?

I am no one to judge this dentist, no one at all. For I am a hunter too.

I am a fly hunter.

I am a hunter of flies, a hunter of the defenseless fly. And, sadly, I too understand and cannot resist the thrill of the hunt.



Like any youth I grew up making the idle, irritated swats at any number of flies. But I remember no particular accuracy or avidity in this endeavor. There was no noticeable proclivity or indication of my future. It was not an avocation that developed gradually or with any warning. It happened all at once, with a house.

In my early twenties I moved to a house in a small town in Sonoma County called Penngrove. It was a charming, albeit rundown, house, on the edge of the lovely wine country countryside. Like an astonishing number of places I have moved into, this one in Penngrove had been driven to the edge of decrepitude by its previous tenant. I have, in the past, moved into a former heroin den in Oakland, and my current house itself, now immaculate and adorable some $40,000 and 40,000 man (and woman!) hours later, had, when we moved in, gaping holes in the walls and the imprimatur of the previous long term tenant's hardcore poverty "never call the landlord" aesthetic. The last tenant of the house of my wife and I was actually so much like the last tenant in the Penngrove house that they are nearly identical in my mind. The main difference with the Penngrove tenant (we'll call him Jerome) was that he hadn't lived there as long and so had done less sustained, erosive damage than the last tenant (we'll call him Jerome) of our own house.

The Penngrove house was filthy when I moved in with my friend Patty, and, temporarily, her former boyfriend Seth. Jerome appeared to live on cheap steaks he broiled directly in the oven's broiling pan (that he never cleaned), and he dealt with the vast clouds of greasy smoke this produced by throwing open all the screenless windows in the house. As to how he dealt with the terrible, vast swarms of flies this ushered into the house, he didn't.

And thus the Penngrove house was when Seth, Patty, and I arrived late in the summer of 1988. We crossed over with Jerome, who was having himself a farewell steak. The house was smoky, filthy, and swirling with flies.

We cleaned. We built our own screens for all the windows. But the flies were a more persistent problem. They moved. They did not leave when one told them to. And they were fast, wary, and elusive. Nothing we did was very effective in ridding ourselves of them, and ever they emerged from hidden sources.

Until we hit upon the vacuum cleaner. There was an old, upright vacuum in the house. I don't know if the bottom part was gone or broken or we simply removed it, but the upright vacuum terminated in a simple tube. The tube produced a mediocre, at best, level of suction. One could not simply point the vacuum at a fly and suck it up, one had to stalk the fly, slowly. One had to get within a foot or so of the fly without startling it, and then swiftly thrust. The vacuum, thus handled, sucked up the fly into its innards and produced in its wielder a tiny burst of triumph.

Through days of careful hunting, and with improving technique, we slowly cleared our house of flies.

And a fly hunter was born.

Let us move forward in time some quarter of a century. My wife and I rent this beautiful vacation home on the shore of Lake Superior. It is ours for a week at a time. It feels a little like heaven here. And yet it also makes me think of that Penngrove house. Maybe because they're both in such uniquely pretty places. Maybe because they're the only rural houses I've ever lived in. Or maybe because they both somehow manage to produce, from out of nowhere, a slow stream of flies.

The first summer we were here I was hounded by a fly and hounded it back. I stalked and attacked it for 24 hours, until, in something akin to a miracle, I caught the fly in my bare hand and removed it to the outdoors (account here). This was clearly not a sufficient solution for the number of flies showing up in this house. I needed a clever and powerful device in the nature of Penngrove's sawed-off vacuum.

We went to a hardware store and I put my most creative, problem solving frame of mind into play. They were selling some cheap, small, very long handed plastic spatulas. These spatulas were flimsy and whippy and just the thing. I took one of these home and called it a "fly spatula". I used it to swat flies. 

This fly spatula was brilliant. I keep it nearby always. And when, as one does every hour or two, a fly shows up, I patiently track it. Then with one sharp swat I splatter the fly into whatever surface it has alighted upon. Then I clean it up with a half wet kleenex.

I am a fly hunter.

Do I enjoy all this fly hunting?

Well, yeah, sort of.

And if it were to turn out that I killed a fly that was beloved in the nearby town of Grand Marais? If they had a mascot fly that tourists came from far away to see and to buy stuffed versions of and postcards and wind up toys? If I killed that fly? If I became a notorious mascot fly killer reviled throughout all the Northlands, what defense could I mount? What could I possibly say? 

Nothing. There is nothing I could say. I would be guilty. I am a fly hunter.

So maybe I should try and go easy on that dentist lion hunter, even if he is probably a cannibal or something. I have my own crimes to speak to. I have blood on my own hands to account for, even if that blood appears to come in the color of green, and is produced in tiny, tiny, tiny amounts.

At the beginning

Now is now, and then it's over. The mighty books of wisdom are excellent with the first part of this and stumble over the second. Why not. Our visions are not investments. Plans may save us, but when they do it will happen in the present.

At Lake Superior, largest lake in the world, I stare out at the horizon to see how far I can see. My close vision is shot at age 50, but I still pride myself on how distantly my eyes can reach. And there, peering into the horizon, I am surprised. The line where the lake meets the sky is not flat or straight or smooth or clear. It is full of dazzling illusions, false islands, waves, floating pieces of sky.

Moment to moment everything out there changes. Wonders come down like falling rain and disappear forever. Everything that is near can pierce your heart and spit you to the ground. All the far things dissolve into dreams.

Now is now. All wisdom will beg us to live here if we can because nothing can ever reconcile us to the endless things we lose in each passing second.

The lake house posts

I usually do my bit to make each blog post as much a stand alone affair as possible. Generally posts are not serialized or tightly grouped together, and there would not usually be any need for an introductory post. You may even have noticed my blog posts so much like to start out as introductions to themselves that we don't always get around to the subject matter at hand.

But this post is explicitly an introduction. It's not necessary to the 17 posts that will follow it, but I felt an urging toward the formality of it. The next 17 days of posts are almost as disparate as usual, do not (mostly) follow one upon the other (though they are more inclined to it than usual), and vary in tone, subject, and approach. But they are also like a little book to me, a discrete journal, a group of all the blog pieces I wrote at the lake house.

Clerkmanifesto, now two and a half years old, is not a strong one for following tradition or observing commemorations. It may follow the seasons, or mark occasions, but it does not have holidays, seasons, or occasions of its own.

Except perhaps the lake house.

Every year I race to get far ahead on my blog so I can safely leave it behind for the lake house. Invariably that preparation is part of the discussion itself. One post catalogs the books I am bringing to the lake house, and on return I give my accounting of them. And up at the lake I write. In a spiral notebook I write blog posts. By a roaring fire, on our sadly last night for the year here, I now write my 18th post. This is the only one, for obvious reasons, that will run out of order from the others. Written last it runs first.

Over the next 17 days? My usual array of long and short, farces, ruminations, revelations, reminiscences, satires, and left turns. Lots of left turns. But no matter their nature every one of them was written in this grand room I love, perched like the prow of a high boat over the wild shore of Lake Superior, and they belong, in their way, together. So I have written this introduction and hope you might, just a little, follow along in spirit these next 17 days.

Pull up a metaphorical chair. I must go put the last armload of wood on the fire. It will burn a little more tonight. From the lake, the great lake, I bid you greetings, and farewell.

Ambitions of oblivion

Often enough, in my life, I have started with a joke, and then seen what happens. A surprising number of jokes turn out to be serious, and a good deal of seriousness is just a joke. Or so you better notice before this life eats you whole.

When we go up to the lake house I like to bring a joke dream, a dream that is joking on the square. In years past I have spoken much on the subject of these dreams before I go. They are dreams like meeting a moose, or buying all the maple syrup of the north woods, picking wild blueberries, or taking my fragile boat of air onto the greatest lake of them all, Lake Baikal. 

Wait, I don't mean Lake Baikal! Why would I say Lake Baikal? I meant Lake Superior. It's greatness is in its very name! Lake Superior.

These are little dreams, impossible dreams, easy dreams, joke dreams. And I go with my wife to the magical house on the mysterious lake and see what the house and the lake decide to do with the dreams.

My dream this year is to be a drunken writer. My dream is to drink and write.

I realized this is my dream only as I have been packing for our trip. Or, more accurately, not packing. Nothing is packed but for a bottle of Hendricks Gin and a bottle of Elderflower Cordial. The lime spearmint honey syrup and the black and sour cherry syrup would be packed too if their refrigeration weren't an issue. I haven't been able to bother with anything else yet, no 40 gallon maple syrup tanks, no moose lures, no paper boat or dark blue blueberry nets. Just a pen and a notebook and an array of cocktail ingredients and plans.

Everything has ancient origins, and mine here is connected to the origins of our going to the lake house itself, an early, shared dream of my wife and I. It comes a little from the movie Julia. I say this now from a memory, of a movie no less, not scholarship, and we'll leave it that way because the memory is the important thing here, the dream.

Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman live in a beach house on Cape Cod. There are no neighbors to speak of. They wear sweaters and make fires on the beach. The movie is about Lillian Hellman and her friend mostly, but it's that beach house. That life. Dashiell Hammett drinks. There's water. He pokes at a fire. There are typewriters. Writing. Drinking. And a slow burn of nothing.


The first thing one finds on vacation is that nothing is where everything is.

Same and different

I don't know how we are changed. And I am not prepared, sitting by the great V of windows on our last morning at the lake house, to take any real look at that. But there is one kind of change I'd like to speak to. It suggests that we are immutable. That there is only acceptance, self-understanding, and the order of ourselves. Sideways, we are a block, but turned 45 degrees the world flows through us. It is essential change, yes, but, isolated, we are unaltered.

Of course, we are not isolated.

I only have a short time before we must pack up and leave the lake house for the year. And my attention is partly pulled by the last views of Lake Superior, with beautiful sweeps of wind made visible as they move along the surface of the lake.

So I'll just say this:

When I am home sometimes, late at night, I stay up too late fussing with my computer. In the basement, glowing lightly, I do one more read through, one more edit, one more search, one more bit of entertainment, one more... click.

At the lake house, however, I go to bed early. Altered perhaps by peace, I go to sleep a little after it is fully dark, and I awaken, well, a while after the light, when the flies tell me to. But after six nights of going to bed early, one night a long, slow thunderstorm rolled around in the north woods behind us, moved past our house, and eased onto the lake. Sitting in the full dark my wife and I watched it until she went to bed and I was alone. It was late. The storms had spread far out across the dark horizon. Every few minutes there was a brilliant flash of light. Depending on the source sometimes it was diffuse, sometimes it was thrillingly blinding, seeming, in my pop culture infused brain, to reveal all the skeletons of the world. Do pine trees have skeletons? It appeared that way to me. And sometimes, when the lightning struck, I could see it ribboning across the sky and down into the lake. This would be followed by slow thunder, deep and rising and oddly gentle.

I knew I needed to go to bed, but I couldn't tear myself away from my perch at the edge of the windows, gazing out eagerly into the deep night of the lakestorm.

"One more dazzling flash and I'll go to bed."

And then, wham and crash.

And then,

"One more dazzling flash and I'll go to bed."

On into the night.