Remembrance of Chickens Past

Despite the happiness I feel at being back at home, I miss some things from Minnesota (things other than my lovely family of course).

1. My mom's mad grilling skills. Move over Bobby Flay!

A close-up of that fabulous chicken (sorry vegetarians!)

2. The unparalleled joy Bella gets when playing with her cousin Zach.

3. Fitger's beer.

4. Swimming in the clean waters of northern Minnesota. Water is an agate's throw away from just about anywhere.

A Pair of Pears

I cannot remember the last time I saw a pear tree. I don't know why, but pears are one of those fruits that I can't imagine growing on trees. They seem too delicate and blushing for such a rigorous existence. Well, I saw a pear tree in a backyard in Milwaukee. It did not seem loved, but I knew that we could not get it on the top of our Subaru and back to Buffalo in one piece.

Study of Two Pears

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Opusculum paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

Our other exciting find in Milwaukee, not counting our great friends and the pear tree above, was a labyrinth on the grounds of Mount Mary College. It was patterned after the labyrinth on the floor of the nave of Chartres Cathedral. While that one is grand, this one is humble. While that one requires a transatlantic flight, this one waits unassumingly for anyone to stumble across.

It pleased me.

Labyrinth at Mount Mary College, Milwaukee

Pattern for labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, France

The dog didn't quite get it.

What do you do with a drunken sailor?

The Tall Ships came to Duluth today and paraded into the harbor through the Lift Bridge. We tracked their progress from the shore of Lake Superior.

With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,

Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;

Some lying fast at anchor in the road,

Some veering up and down, one knew not why.

William Wordsworth

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

"It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. ....Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

After the Sea-Ship—after the whistling winds;
After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship Walt Whitman

Mt. Oberg to Cascade River

The Superior Hiking Trail meanders up the North Shore of Lake Superior, paralleling Highway 61 but inland over the peaks and valleys that comprise what is known as the Sawtooth Range because the schizophrenic elevation. You are constantly walking either uphill or downhill, with a few ridges thrown in for good measure.

We started Monday morning at the Mt. Oberg parking lot, where we ran into a few day hikers out for a nice walk on the mountain loop. Not us. We were headed 25 miles north to Cascade River. The other hikers warned us that the bugs were pretty bad, but knowing Minnesota we were prepared with Off Deep Woods.

Here we are still clean and fresh.

The first half of the hike took us to the Lutsen ski area and the Poplar River. Another spot rife with day hikers, most not knowing where they were going. Some with only half a bottle of water between them. It was a hot, humid, sticky day so water was key.

We ate lunch on the Poplar, after traversing a quick 7 miles in 3 1/2 hours, and also pumped water out of the river to supply the second half of the hike. I have contracted giardia before only using iodine to purify our water so I insist that Turner bring the water filter.

The trail to Lake Agnes, our destination for the night, had a couple nice views like this.

But often the hiking was through this.

However, the trail was constantly cutting through raspberry groves. I say groves because the bushes were almost chest high and dripping with ripe berries. We didn't stop to pick much because of the heat and the bugs, but they were nice snacks every now and then if you reached out a hand while you were hiking.

We also saw plenty of fungi, like this one.

And lots of wolf poop (to my dismay), some moose tracks, and red squirrels galore just to taunt Bella.

Luckily, Bella found enough spots for a quick cool down and drink because she wasn't getting any of our hard-earned filtered water.

I probably will never camp on Lake Agnes again. After finding a "renegade" campsite, meaning the regulation sites were already taken, we went down to the lake to pump more water, swim, and have dinner. This "lake," though large, was little more than a beaver pond. It was shallow and filled with organic matter giving the water a very muddy look. We did little more than rinse off the bug spray.

This is the lake at 6:30 in the morning on the second day.

The weather forecast for Tuesday called for thunderstorms, hail, and high winds. This is why we were up and hiking by 6:30am. We wanted to make it to Cascade River, and the shuttle back to our car, before the bad weather hit. Storms on the North Shore can be vicious. The area just west, in the Boundary Waters, suffered a severe blowdown in 1999, damaging 400,00 acres of forest. The trail to Lookout Mountain worked its way through quite a bit of blowdown.

I kept thinking that the bases of the ripped-up trees, now horizontal to the ground, would make excellent hiding places for the wolves. The darkening sky and silent wind lent our journey a somewhat ominous tone.

But after hiking 11 miles in 5 hours we made it to the Cascade River by lunchtime. The hike was kind of a march, since we stopped infrequently and just walked on through the heat and brambles.

Luckily, the waters of the Cascade were cool and refreshing. We hopped in, despite some onlookers, and washed off the days' grime.

After freshening up and eating the rest of our food, we sat on the shore of Lake Superior to wait for the shuttle. The lake and sky melded into one horizon of stormy grey. We could tell that the weather could turn at any minute, but it didn't thankfully.

We waited about an hour for the shuttle-that-never-came.

It was supposed to arrive at 1:17 at the Cascade wayside. Well, by 1:45 it had not come, so we asked a couple of tourists for a ride back up Highway 61 to our car. (We found out later after calling the shuttle organization that it only drives the route Friday-Sunday. And there we were on Tuesday, waiting for Godot.)

The kind folks dropped us off at the base of Onion River Road, which meant that we had to walk 2 miles, uphill, in steadily warmer and more humid weather. And this just after getting clean and fresh in the river.

I was not a happy camper. Points like this get termed "death marches." All I could think about were Gatorade, Snickers, a cheeseburger, and a shower.

In the end, I got all those things and the memories of a lovely hike.

The Moods of Lake Superior

The lake is fickle.

She changes her mood on a whim.

Her color is never the same.

Agate Picking

My family has gone to pick agates on the beach where Knife River empties into Lake Superior since I can remember coming to Minnesota.

Lake Superior agates are quite different from the standard agate because of the rich iron ore in the bedrock. The iron contributes the rusty tint to the agates, which are the rocks in the pictures below that are opaque and striated.

Blueberry Moon

We spent two days on Crane Lake in northern Minnesota, just south of the Canada and bordering the Voyageurs National Park, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and Quetico Provincial Park. My aunt and uncle took us by boat to Sandpoint and Namakan Lakes to explore islands and beaches. One of our stops was Burnt Island, and it was covered in blueberry bushes. They dropped from the branches like grapes. We picked 5 quarts of wild blueberries in a couple hours.

The sky and water at this time of the day were an ominous shade of grey, the grey of the rocks that jutted out into the turbulent water.

At other times during the trip, the weather was pristine and then a dark storm cloud would roll in and change our lunchtime plans.

Bella had a marvelous time, chasing after the ball, flying through the air off the dock. Hannah, her cousin, couldn't keep up with our lab's enthusiasm and energy.

She positively launches through the air, probably twenty feet or more at times, to retrieve the ball or stick.

Although we did not catch any fish from the boat, Turner casted a line off the dock at the cabin and caught some small-mouth bass and walleye.

The evening fell bringing wandering loons, dark clouds, and a purple sunset.

Photos by Turner and Sara from the Jarvinen cabin on Crane Lake.

Stratford, Day 02

Ex post facto... I did not review The Tempest in my earlier post. The artistic direction and set design nicely established the setting and the emotion of the first scenes, although I found the swaying of the sailors in the "tempest" a little overly done. It was also very hard to hear the lines in the first act. Choosing to set Miranda and Prospero at points around the theatre was a good choice, however her cries of "Father" were distracting. Julyana Soelistyo as Ariel, however, expressed the mischeviousness of the sprite with energy throughout the five acts.

Peter Hutt, as Alonso, King of Naples, appeared unaffected throughout much of the performance. His lines were devoid of emotion and bordered on monotone. One wonders if he was feeling under the weather but decided to perform due to the recording of this performance. Trish Lindstrom's Miranda felt too rushed and boisterous to portray a girl marooned on an island with only her father for company. In all, Christopher Plummer, as Prospero, and Lindstrom presented a father-daughter pair all too complicit in their laughter and thoughts. I felt no tension between the 15-year-old girl and the overly aged Prospero.

Caliban (Dion Johnstone), Trinculo (Bruce Dow) and Stefano Geraint Wyn Davies) made amicable companions in the play's comic (and subtly tragic) sub-plot. As a "fishy" Caliban, Johnstone's diatribe against Miranda and Prospero deftly countered what they argue is their island utopia.

An odd bit of staging was the wedding masque in Act IV. The three goddesses appeared to threaten more than bless and used opera as the vehicle for their lines.

In all, the play was a success, mostly due to Plummer's charismatic presence, the comic actors, and the sub-plots of usurpation from both Antonio and Caliban.

So, apparently no camera came with us around Stratford our second day except the one on Turner's cell phone. We took Bella to a dog park and had a picnic lunch on the banks of the Avon. It rained in the evening but cleared up just before we went to the evening performance of As You Like It, which I liked very much, although again some of the stage design seemed frivolous and disconnected from the action in the play.