Flight Music

So I recently flew back to Minneapolis from Tucson by myself, and I have to say it was an incredible experience to see the Sonoran desert drop away into the sunset against the backdrop of Jim Croce's I Got A Name.  Later in the flight we were out over the nighttime lights of Denver and the other front range cities while I enjoyed some Sturgill Simpson and some Old Crow Medicine Show.

I've been lucky enough to fly a decent amount in recent years, which has been great.  It's really allowed me to expand on my flight soundtracking.  For instance, I've learned that if you start Lamb's Gorecki once you taxi away from the gate, just after they've gone through the safety card, it will take you on an almost choreographed journey through takeoff and up to about ten thousand feet before it's over.  The song was made for air travel.  Going to Boston for work, I've enjoyed starting The Pogues' The Body of an American as we get into our final approach to Logan.  It wails along through the decscent and landing, and then it has that long slow coda while we taxi to the gate. 

This might be the single most privileged thing I've ever admitted to, but I love accidentally curating playlists for flights.  I mean, we've all seen the Mad Men episode where Don sits in the ascending plane while The Tornadoes' Telstar plays over the end credits.  But truly, what a spectacular thing it is to take off just after sunset and watch the sky darken outside over orange cloud tops as you climb into the inky black and hear Paul Simon's Born at the Right Time while the Earth curves away below you.  Or to follow the Mississippi down to New Orleans with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band blaring I'll Fly Away through your auditory complex.  When you're a kid they don't tell you this is part of your reward for growing up.  There are so many wonderful experiences that you just never hear about until you have them, and air travel with noise-cancelling headphones is one of the more magical.

My wife downloads shows and movies on Netflix to watch in flight.  I cannot do this.  I am a nervous flyer and have always needed to sit, staring out the window, with a couple gins and tonic to stay sane, so I can't watch anything on a screen.  I don't know if it's the visual connection to the Earth, but I prefer to watch the ground and listen to music while in the air.

Of course, over most of the country you can look out from thirty-five plus thousand feet and hear any music in a whole new light, but certain catalogs lend themselves really well to air travel.  Pretty much everything New Order ever recorded counts in this category, as does the entire discography of Booker T and the MGs.  However, timing is relevant, too.  Nothing beats looking out of a redeye flight onto a moon that's close to full over the snow-covered Great Plains with Blind Faith's Can't Find My Way Home playing in the background.

My soundtracking seems also to usually involve unlikely cover versions of songs - maybe it's because you're literally looking at the world from a new perspective, but it is a great time to hear someone else give their version of an old favorite.  I love California Dreaming, but for some reason on the landing approach I prefer hearing the version from Jose Feliciano.  One of my favorite covers of all time, Yo La Tengo's version of The Cure's Friday I'm in Love, sounds excellent no matter what you're looking down over.

The advanced lesson here though is that certain flightpaths and landmarks are also truly enhanced by specific tracks.

I love flying from Mpls to Chicago's Midway airport, mainly because it's like a 90 minute flight, but also because the approach to MDW is great.  It's an urban airport, but there are so many suburban culs-de-sac on the initial descent that, from above, remind me of Keith Harring figures.  It also takes really well to whatever John Hughes era cinematic 80s jams I have going on.

Flying into Seattle is a trip - you start out in this sunlit utopia with Ranier to your front left, and then you descend through the top layer of floof clouds to reveal there's a writhing layer of harder, meaner clouds several thousand feet below.  Only after you get through that lower layer do you see how far below you the city and its life and vibrance still are.  If you really want a mindfuck, listen to Such Great Heights by the Postal Service (or better yet The New Standards' cover of it ) on full blast while this all takes place.

DC for me is a strange call because from above you really see how close it is to both the hills and the low country.  Of course the obvious (and correct) choice is CCR's Fortunate Son, but if you don't want to get overly political any old Appalachian country music will do - or better yet, find yourself Will the Circle Be Unbroken from the Nitty Gritty Dirtband's 1972 effort to bring the generations of Americana together.  Though I did also once land at Reagan with the full dueling banjoes track from Deliverance wailing in my ears and it just felt somehow right.

Some of course are obvious - I shouldn't even have to say that flying into Las Vegas you should always be listening to someone who either currently or has in the past had a residential gig on the strip, and when landing at JFK, one needs to have a mixture of old Rat Pack nostalgia and A Tribe Called Quest churning in the earbuds.

Alternately though, part of the magic of flight music is opportunistic.  We flew into San Diego a few winters ago, and while passing over the grand canyon with the sun rising I happened to find Way Out There by the Sons of the Pioneers, and it was a transformative experience.  Flying back from Boston last Fall, while careening over southern Ontario, I had Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 come up in my earbuds unexpectedly, and with the wispy high clouds moving in the opposite direction over the autumnal brown patchwork of pastoral farmland, I truly felt a connection with the Kappelmeister.  Coming into Memphis, I enjoyed hearing Hold On by the James Hunter Six in our small (2X2 seater) plane downriver.  And the Atlanta skyline was beautiful on the horizon as we approached with Tom Petty's American Girl ringing in my ears.  

All of which is to say, sometimes the music I hear above a place informs my memories of it.  Even if I never land there.  So at sundown, when you can see a plane in the sky only by virtue of its reflection, and then suddenly the sun drops far enough below the horizon to stop reflecting off it, but it's too far away to actually see so it just looks like it disappeared...  ..remember..  ...someone on that plane is listening to Tears for Fears and looking down at your city.

Time For a Regroup

Okay, it's been a while.  I'm not ready to look at social media in earnest, or talk about yesterday's election with anyone I love one on one, so I'm just pingponging around the places where my life takes place, trying to figure out the most productive way to process what's occurred.  Looking for a comforting venue in which to receive terrible news, I guess.  I hit on this stupid old word depository and thought that maybe it'd be helpful.  For me.  If you're not me YMMV.  I took a long walk around downtown Minneapolis this morning before work, and this is what I shook out of my head:

It should surprise no one that as an American I dream of a very different future than the one we're now presented with.  I am a liberal Minnesotan who came of age under Paul Wellstone, so I've always been fed (and joyfully consumed) the optimistic idea that I could be the change I believe in in this world.  And that's great.  I love living my best life and imagining I am inspiring others to do the same.  But sometimes you're reminded that not everyone's best life is... well, the best.  Sometimes the prevailing winds are ominous, and you have to accept that the zeitgeist is working against your vision.  I was a bit blindsided by this election, because apparently many peoples' best lives are at odds with mine.

That's fine.  But that doesn't mean they're right, and that doesn't mean they win.  They will control the discourse for a bit, but we will regroup, and we will all get to weigh in again before long.  When that happens, I expect most people will tell them we've decided to go in a different direction.  However:  In the meantime there will be real damage done to real people who you definitely know and love.  These people will need you to be there for them.  They will need to know that you see their anxiety, and that you have their backs.  You will need to take real action to alleviate the damage inflicted by the prevailing winds.  I realize this is all terrible, so here's a hopeful coda:

I accidentally started scrolling through LinkedIn this evening (becuase who ever goes on LinkedIn intentionally?), and I was seeing a lot of posts from old coworkers, from the last several months of me not checking the site, of happy shit about new opportunities.  And I found myself actually saying aloud, alone in my kitchen, "good for her," or "oh that's great," or whatever.  Many updates weren't even work related.  And I think that may actually end up being my bandaid for this hurt.  Everyone I saw still has something unrelated to and uneffected by the election that I can appreciate is happening for them.  It's true we're all experiencing something large and awful, that will hurt a lot for a long time and be tough to get through.  But we also all have at least something that we can be excited about, and that nothing beyond us can take away.  I say this in no way to minimize the anxiety anyone is feeling, but just to amplify the excitement of something that makes you happy when everything else is at odds with what you're working for.  I guess in these times I just have to cling to something joyful that can make me smile, and I would love the same for you.  It doesn't even have to be something worth noting on an inane social-resume website.

Here for your consideration are just a few things that make me happy, that no elected official at any level of government can take away - feel free to comment with your own lists of pleasures or accomplishments:

• Watching summer waves on a lake from a cool shady spot on shore
• Antonín Dvořák's 9th symphony, especially the 1st and 4th movements
• The smell of vanilla, in either bourbon or pipe smoke
• Putting on a giant puffy coat for a two block walk to the bar for a beer, just to be out of the house in January when it's -5 degrees F
• Driving way too fast on a winding two-lane road through the bluffs of the Driftless Area
• Eating a pea pod directly off the vine in June, while tending the other vegetables

Walt Disney Lied To Me!

Happy New Year, Everyone!  I spent the afternoon behind my refrigerator, toweling up poop and bleaching surfaces.  I guess it's an apt finish to 2021, but I could have done without 2022 introducing itself with me bagging a corpse and putting it out into the subzero cold.

This past Autumn, when Lisa and I winterized our back porch off the kitchen, we found some droppings in the bin that holds our lanterns and bug spray.  There were apparently mice living in the shelter of the porch.  We found the storm door wasn't fully sealed, and so I fixed that after a full Clean'n'Bleach of the room.  About two weeks later, I was in the kitchen standing at the sink and I saw something scurry from under the kitchen island to under the fridge.  It would seem that when I sealed off the porch, there was someone still inside, who then came into the kitchen when outdoor access was cut off.

At this point I was pretty naive, and panic didn't even cross my mind.  I bought traps, confident that this would be a minor hiccup in the holiday season, but the traps went neglected.  We pulled the fridge out and discovered the extent of infrastructure that a mouse can build when left to his/her own devices.  There was very little evidence of anyone living in the kitchen, other than the distinct, hamster-cage odor when we pulled the fridge out of its cubby.

But then I crawled back there and pulled the access panel off the back of the fridge, and I began to comprehend just how heedless I had been to the original evidence of infestation.  I found the remains of two towels, disassembled and reimagined into a nest surrounding the nice warm compressor, along with a quarter cup of pilfered kibble from the cat dishes.  This mouse meant to hang out for a bit.  So we took away the nest.  I cleared the area of all fibers and food, and I bleached the bottom of the tray.  We re-baited the traps and figured we'd have a dead mouse to dispose of soon.

But then we went out of town for Christmas.  We were only gone for three days, but when we got back the kitchen smelled like the old pet shop at Har Mar Mall.  I actually got my hopes up - had we caught the thing in one of the traps?  I checked, and no.  It was still living here, mocking us with its nonchalance.  Now dread was starting to take hold, but we all have work and the holidays to deal with, so we let it go until I had a day off.  On New Year's Eve we pulled the fridge back out and I again took the panel off, only to find that they were still pooping under there.  I spent more time than I'd like to admit cleaning poop again and scrubbing again and bleaching again.

Throughout this ordeal, I feel I need to state that a prominent proprietor of cartoon mouse content, et al., lied to me.  I was led throughout my youth to believe that if mice chose to grace my life with their presence, it would be in a benevolent way:  tailoring my suits, cleaning my kitchen, helping me solve mysteries...  No one ever once implied they would just shit under my refrigerator.  That is not helpful to me at all!  And so prolifically - this has been a LOT of mouse shit.  According to Don Bluth they're always wearing colorful shawls and offering sage advice, but in reality they don't even understand English.  And it makes sense, I mean they obviously have to poop somewhere - Rankin & Bass just never zoomed in on their asses when they were dropping pellets all over the clock tower.

Meanwhile, Jebus the cat had really dropped the ball.  She had two choices, and she neither chased down and drove out the menace, nor did she strike up an unlikely friendship with it in an adorable way.

So I got a couple more traps.  The mean kind.  We had the little igloo-shaped spin traps originally, with the tiny door that Mickey goes in, which then slams shut and crushes his head.  But those require engagement from the mouse.  This time I bought the old-fashioned, tried and true, Snap Shut On Their Necks type of traps.  I didn't use the recommended peanut butter as bait - since this prick was just stealing cat food, I piled three kibbles on each trap under the island, took the cat dishes up off of the floor, and went about my holiday evening.

Then, after I went to bed, Lisa was still out in the living room when she heard the snap.  She got me up, and had me look under the kitchen island.  This fucker was big.  No wonder it hadn't gone into the igloo traps - there's no way it would have fit.  I even did some research into the difference between mice and rats, but it turns out it was just a VERY LARGE mouse.  So big in fact that the mean trap had not snapped shut on its neck, but smashed across its head.  When we moved the island to reveal the horror show it still had its face stuck in the trap, but it was most decidedly dead.  We dropped it into a bag and put it out into the -12F temps out back.

I am ambivalent about the killing of household pests.  I don't like to be personally responsible for the end of living things (except centipedes - fuck those guys), but at the same time they can't live in my house.  They shit a LOT, and they carry diseases and they steal kibble from my cat.  I do not apologize for crushing this giant mouse's skull, but I still felt a pang dropping it into the bag and putting it out into the cold.  And this speaks to the Disney point I raised earlier.  I have been conditioned to believe a mouse is an adorable anthropomorphic oaf who just wants to be a sidekick to whatever adventures I am piloting.  This is not the case.  A mouse is 100% id.  It wants to eat and poop, and it absolutely does not want to die. Even when you slam a metal bar across its face it'll take a couple minutes to expire, legs twitching while it respires agonally.  Again, no apologies, but mixed feelings nonetheless.

Don't shit under my fridge though.

Cherry Crumble

I just started cutting up my cherry tree.  His name is Steve.  Of all the things I was most excited about when I bought my house fifteen years ago, the prospect of having a fruit tree in the backyard so that I could have company over and present a bowl of cherries that I made was at the top of my list.
As it turned out, Steve produced tart cherries.  Good for baking and preserving, but not so much setting in a bowl on the coffee table for guests.  And while I myself disagree with this assessment (I actually love sour cherries right off the Steve), I accepted the fact that Steve was, like me, a bit antisocial.  His talents were better appreciated with a little behind-the-scenes finessing.
Over the years Steve and I have made crowd-pleasing slab pies, decadent sorbets, and even infused some Basil Hayden's with tart cherries and orange peel to the tune of a campfire manhattan for the ages.  Now that I'm thinking of it, about the only thing I haven't used his fruits for over the years was drying.  That would have been a perfect way to introduce him to company - some dried cherries on a coffee-table cheese board next to a funky blue and some salted almonds?  Missed opportunities, for sure.
The first few summers, while he ramped up production, I had to fight the birds.  Those little pricks were relentless in their pursuit of Steve's goods.  I tried netting, foil strips, and even a slingshot, until he finally got big enough in about the fourth year that there were plenty of cherries for the birds to take the top third and I could still get around a quart per day for my own use.  The birds and I had an understanding.
One of the things I used Steve's cherries for most often was to make jelly that I then submitted to the MN State Fair.  Repeatedly.  Over and over I spent hot summer afternoons pitting, mashing, straining, and processing dozens of pounds of cherries into jelly, and it was always delicious but it never judged well.  I spent hours passing the juice through coffee filters until that shit shone like stained glass, leveling off the top and measuring a quarter inch of headspace without allowing any bubbles on the surface.  And though I never got a ribbon for my efforts, they did make judging notes so I got some free advice on how to improve my product.
Meanwhile, Steve himself grew to absurd proportions.  He's a North Star Cherry, a cold-hardy dwarf hybrid developed by the University of Minnesota to thrive in our frost-heavy climate.  And thrive he did.  He was supposed to top out at 8-10 feet, but in the last few summers he's grown up into our electrical lines, which are at least 16 feet off the ground.  Either I have magical soil or Steve is a goddamn wizard of a tree.  Every year just before Memorial Day or so he would explode into a thousand beautiful tiny white blossoms, and a couple weeks later, for almost a month straight, I had to spend an hour a day picking, pitting, and refrigerating a quart or more of small tart cherries just to keep up with production.
So two summers ago, I'd finally given up on a positive outcome for the cherries from the wise elders at the state fair, so while I went ahead and made jelly, I had all kinds of other things going on too.  I froze some, made some cobblers, was planning some infusions.  That year I had three other Fair submissions because I expected nothing more than free input on my process for Steve's jelly.  As it turned out though, all three other submissions were busts, and the jelly garnered me a State Fair Blue Ribbon.  The best cherry jelly in the state of Minnesota came from my backyard - it came from Steve!  I considered setting a couple jars out on the coffee table when we had guests over, just for effect.
Then, we had an unusually hard winter.  The following summer Steve blossomed out like he always had, but all his fruit was kind of smallish and shriveled.  We didn't really have a decent harvest, but I chalked it up to the harsh January that we weren't used to after being spoiled by a series of easy winters in the early teens.
Last summer though, Steve checked out even further.  He has three main branches coming off his trunk, one growing toward the garage, and the other two arching houseward. The house-facing two had no leaves or fruit last year, and the garage side branch leafed out and seemed to bloom just fine, but the fruit didn't come.  They were tiny pea-sized pebbles that just didn't develop into cherries.  And the trunks of the dead two branches had these scaly, lichen-y fungi on them.  Sadly, it looks like Steve has bloomed his last.
It's weird that he stuck around long enough for the accolades to roll in, and literally as soon as he had won the recognition that he'd reached a zenith, that was that.  Steve had done what he'd come here to do, and was done doing it.  So I started cutting him up today.  Mostly he'll provide twigs for kindling to start bonfires next summer once they're dry, but a decent amount of trunk cherrywood for smoking will also be harvested and dried.  I'm already thinking of the pork tenderloin that I'll cook over his charred torso alongside my next summer's sapling.  Is that macabre?  I think maybe I'll try pears next.  Those look good in a bowl on the coffee table, right?

Spring Feverish

We went to MN Monthly's Food & Wine Experience at Target Field last Sunday.  It was a beautiful, sunny March afternoon at the ballpark, tasting local wines and brews alongside samplings from well-known restaurants in town and thinking of the upcoming Twins season, followed Monday by six inches of frozen precipitation.  I say precipitation because in March we don't have snowstorms.  We have multi-precipitory events.  It started overnight with standard sleet, laying a slick base layer of ice under everything to come.  Then, throughout most of the day what was primarily falling is technically called Graupel.  It is a horror.  Half snow, half hail, it is essentially tiny hardened snow pellets that pebble the ice layer previously laid down.  After this it went dry for a couple hours while the temperature dropped, followed by the main event, four more inches of crisp powder over the top of the pebbled ice layer.  I'm currently looking at my tomato seeds and experiencing some spring fever.  Springtime in Minnesota is essentially a game of chicken.  It's looking really good for an early thaw and you're putting your coats and boots away for the season and the next morning you wake up to seven inches of snow on your car.  And just when you're ready to end it all and drive into the Mississippi, you come home after work to see the crocuses are finally peaking out of the boulevard garden.
Minnesota is a spectacular place to live.  We have the longest summer days but we pay for them with cold and snowy winters that will test anyone’s resolve.  Minnesota is physically a large enough state to have a geographic optimism gap, too:  The southern and western portions of the state rely mainly on farming the land, and coaxing nutrients out of it, to provide both income and sustenance.  The northern and eastern parts rely heavily on mining the land, and selling what they take out of it, to get their incomes.  In northern Minnesota they know that eventually they’ll wake up and all the iron will be gone.  All they’ll have left is some glacial soil too rusty and sandy to grow anything in.  In the south it’s different – they plant crops in their loamy soil every time the frost goes away, and even if they have a bad year, there will be some harvest, sparse or lush.

I am of northern descent.  While I am a mildly successful home gardener, I still originate from that fatalistic stock of Midwesterners who know how finite their fortunes are.  The first time my cousin took me out into the forty acres of woods behind my grandmother’s house she told me a story about the Windigo and snuck away to leave me to find my own way back to the house.  I was eight, and it was January.  It gets dark at four-thirty in January in northern Minnesota.  In short, I was raised knowing this land (or something in it or inherent to it) will eventually kill me.  Like the aforementioned cold and/or snow.
But that’s the price we pay for our ridiculous quality of life in the upper midwest.  Whenever we sit in an inner tube in the middle of a lake drinking a mimosa in sunglasses on the 4th of July weekend with only a half dozen other boats on the lake we have the obligatory moment when we have to imagine that same lake frozen damn near solid in January, covered in blowing snow dunes, and realize how fortunate we are that the winter keeps anything more nefarious than a tent caterpillar from being able to pupate and survive in this place.  This year in fact was the first since 1924 that the overall temperature between Christmas and New Year’s Eve averaged sub-zero Fahrenheit, and they think it may have some impact on our fight against some invasive insects, saving some berries in the garden and some boulevard trees.

So let's talk about cold.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is cold.  And you may have experienced some extreme cold and think that you know about cold.  You do not.  At zero degrees Fahrenheit we have to bring our beers in from the porch or they’ll freeze.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is nothing.  For a solid week in January, the temperature outdoors (in the world your god supposedly made for us), dips as low as -17F (-27C).  This is a temperature few humans know how to behave in.  It does however provide us with a convenient blast chiller adjacent to our kitchen - January is when the best pot pies and other multi-layered savory dishes are prepared, due to our porch being a walk-in freezer for a few weeks.

When it gets brutally cold in the winter many people think that once it gets to a certain point it’s as cold as it can get, or at least as cold as one can perceive.  Once it gets to -2F for instance, it can’t get any colder, and any colder it gets doesn’t register because the body can’t compute that kind of cold.  That is a fallacy.  At -2F you need some serious layering, but with long underpants, an undershirt, some jeans, and a wool sweater, with a fleece or wool vest under your outer coat, and with gloves under mittens, a good hat, and a scarf you should be okay as long as you move your body.  If you’re walking briskly for a few blocks you’ll be fine.  At -17F, it doesn’t matter how many layers you have on - if you’re outdoors for more than a minute or so and you’re not moving you will start to die.  I have felt this sensation waiting for the bus - where my legs, despite three layers of wool, start to go numb in the wind.  My fingers, despite being inside fur-lined leather gloves, will begin to ache if they’re not also in a second layer (coat pockets or mittens). I honestly don’t know how bears and other hibernating animals do it…

We’ve gotten spoiled in recent years with mild winters, and I can only assume it’s because all eyes were on our Super Bowl this year that real, honest to god, frost-your-nuts winter has returned to us.  But I recall winters from my youth where it wouldn’t get above 0F for five or six days at a time.  I remember a Christmas in my mother’s hometown of Eveleth when everyone was at a Christmas Eve church service, and I was at the house alone and I went out for a smoke in -30F (that’s -35C for our worldly friends), and I was so addicted that I put on three separate pairs of gloves so I could stay out there and smoke a whole cigarette.  I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to my aunts, since I’m pretty sure one of them came back to find their gloves reeking of cigarette smoke that Christmas.

I honestly have been amazed in the nadir of winter crossing I-94 into downtown on the bus and I know it's -15F outside because I just waited in that cold for the bus to come (my beard is probably just getting thawed by now), and it's dark, but there's still a heavy stream of headlights coming out of the Lowry Hill Tunnel and tail lights going in, and life continues unimpeded by this ridiculous obstacle of cold that's been set before us at six or seven in the morning.  Minnesotans seem impervious to the cold that winter throws at us.  This is just where we live, and we'll work through the winter in order to see the Twins win a bunch of games next summer only to choke in August yet again, because that's what we do, goddamnit!  Even if we're not baseball fans, but just gardeners with weak tomato yields, this is still our ritual - crippling cold, then guarded optimism, then mild disappointment.  It's the Minnesota way.
So let's talk about snow.  If you live in Minnesota you can expect to push a stranger's car out of a snowbank approximately once per winter.  If you're doing winter right, you'll only be on the receiving end of that charity once every six or so years.  I'm going on seven winters myself, and feeling pretty good about it (I can't believe this was already seven years ago!)...  This year wasn't too bad until after the holidays, but some Monday in January we had our first real Roads Are Useless snowfall in a few winters, reminding us that winter can end us whenever it feels the whim, and I found myself driving home through ten inches of fresh powder.  I followed a trio of plows out Olson Memorial Highway, but as soon as I turned on Penn Ave I knew it was going to take some luck to get all the way home.  The car right in front of me kept skidding off to the right, but pulled back into the traffic ruts every time.  It took a while, but we got up to my neighborhood.
When I finally turned on 35th Ave, there was a white car at the alley hung perpendicularly across the entire drivable road.  The driver got out and put floor mats under the back tires (of course it was rear-wheel drive), and after she got back in they were still going nowhere.  So I turned off my car and got out, and two other neighbors coming from the other direction came over to help, and we gave her a shove backwards into the alley so she could then angle out with our help into a parallel spot against the curb.
When I got back into my car and drove past her I nearly got hung up myself turning from 35th to go the half-block to my house, but luckily the Malibu has a high enough undercarriage that it soldiered through the snow mess left by evacuating neighbors.  And I was back out after it finally stopped snowing at 11pm because it is way better to shovel and then go to bed than to have to shovel before you go to work.  I dug both cars out, shoveled the walk, and slept like a baby - for five hours until my alarm went off.  In most cities this would begin round two of the "Snow Might Kill You" show, but in MSP?  There was a snow emergency declared, which meant the entire Mpls fleet of plows was out overnight from 9pm to 9am plowing major arterial streets, which is great for my commute downtown.  By the time my wife and I came home after work at least half (the even side) of all non-snow emergency streets were also plowed to the curb.  And by the next morning?  Life moves on - the third day they plow the other (odd numbered) side of lesser streets, and then everything should be able to go back to normal.  And this just happens, several times per winter, whenever more than six inches of snow falls, the city says "parking is weird for three days," and then you just keep going about your business.  But going about you business starts to seem bleak after six months.  That's how the snow demoralizes you.  Prince was not kidding around - it actually snows pretty often in April.  I've seen it snow here as early as mid-October (ask any Minnesotan about the Halloween Blizzard, we all have a story), and I've seen it snow as late as May 5.  And it's not like it snows and goes away either - between those calendar extremes you can sometimes have to navigate through this.  So when those crocuses show up, or when I can get the tomatoes started in the basement, it feels like a remarkable victory against the forces of the Windigo, and I get to spend a few glorious days living in the mind of a Southern Minnesotan, with my eyes on the harvest rather than the eternal frost.

Infinite Potential

I love having an autumn birthday.  A birthday is a great time for self-assessment.  And autumn is a great metaphor for inevitable decay.  Getting intimate with my own mortality at a time of year when my entire habitat is shutting down to hibernate and go numb has made me the existentialist powerhouse I am today.  Yes I did just take a couple of 8-hour courses in CPR & first aid, so yes it’s on the front burner, but even aside from that, how does one live in the Northland and not think often of death?  I don’t mean that in a morbid way, but every October I watch my garden wither, and well, I’m used to it.  And I know in the spring when new plants come they won’t be the same plants, but they will offer the same fruit by the 4^th of July.  It’s not sad when they finish producing, it just means I need to get out the canning kettle.  We are tilting away from the sun, and it’s about to get cold for a while.

Sometimes on a September morning on the bus, if the sky to the east over the river has the right light and the right mixture of low Stratus and high Cirrus clouds, I begin to think about infinity.  When I look at the clouds and think of the enormity of things, I am sometimes over-awed.  I have to look away because it is just too vast to comprehend.  I look down at the skyline of the city I love, and the small scale makes sense.  I can see the building where I work from the bus, and this is a comfort.  I am headed toward a warm tower where I have created my own world.  The clouds above are not gigantic quivering pools in the infinite sky, but just a backdrop.  They are decoration behind the tangible play that is my life.  The building where I work is 792 feet tall.  I work in the basement (or concourse), about 16 feet below street level.  The parking ramp goes down three more levels, so I would guess all told that adds another sixty feet at most to the overall height.  When I walk through the dock from the tower to my office, I see these giant concrete columns, and they enclose steel beams.  Beams that are around nine-hundred feet long.  That’s .17 miles.  That’s a long piece of steel.  But I can make sense of it.  I’ve been to both ends of it.  I work at the bottom, and I’ve eaten (and served) holiday brunches at the top.  It’s a long elevator ride, but I can fit it in my head.  When I see a jet contrail against an orange sky, that’s sometimes 36,000 feet in the air.  That’s almost seven miles.  Think of something seven miles away from you on the surface of the earth, and try to imagine seeing it from where you are.  Imagine everything that exists between you and it isn’t there – that’s just space.  Seven miles is a longer distance than you think it is.  To put it differently, it takes roughly 45 seconds to get from the basement to the 50^th floor, but imagine that times forty-five to get to 36K ft.  That’s a really long elevator ride.  Thirty-three and a half minutes of express elevator.  On top of this mindfuck, there are clouds that you can see up to eight times further away than that.  Not to mention the satellites blinking cheerfully as they traverse the night sky.  They are barely clinging to Earth’s gravity.  I sometimes think I’ll understand the scale of the universe better once I die.  Once I’m not trying to fathom eternity, but rather am a part of it, it may all be clearer to me.

Neil Armstrong recently died.  He is the fourth moon-walker to leave us, of twelve.  His peers were all born in the 1930’s, and soon there will be no one left alive who went to the moon.  That’s weird – it’s like old Tolkien-esque fantasy books, where there’s this mythical land that’s been mapped and explored, but no one alive has seen it, and no one can recall how to get to it.

It made me think about our collective lore a little.  What is lore?  It’s wisdom passed down generationally, or the fundamental narrative of a people, no?  A people, of course, is the collective description of a person.  It is like a school of fish or a murder of crows. More than that though, it is a tribe or a nation – it is a group of persons who all share a similar origin story.  The words, ideas, and solutions to problems may be different, debatable, or even diametrically opposed, but the frameworks in which the texts are built are the same.

Name a common exclamation of frustration when someone can’t accomplish something because of a technological shortfall.  I’d bet that by “Family Feud” rules, the phrase “we can put a man on the (God-damned) moon, but we can’t _____!” would be on the board.  The moon, and the fact that our peers have been there, is such an inherent part of our culture that I can’t even imagine someone coming back and saying, “Wait – can we put a man on the moon?”  A man on the moon is the concrete model of an abstract American Ingenuity that still exists, and still drives us to strive.  It’s the original MTV logo, for Christ’s sake.

So we went to the moon.  So what?  Well, for one thing, it is one of the oldest recurring characters in our discourse.  If you want to wax poetic about it, it has gazed down upon every moment of our history, yet it has always been out of our reach.  The very concept of flying through space to reach it is kind of absurd.  Can you blame the ancients for anthropomorphizing it as a god?

The peak of Everest is one thing.  You’re still standing on the planet where you originated.  The bottom of the ocean is one thing.  You couldn’t live there, and there are a lot of hostile conditions between you and home, but you’re still standing (submarining) on the planet where you originated.  When you stand on the moon the hostile conditions between you and home are literally nothing.  There is an actual lifeless void between you and the place that made you.  And you’re outside of its gravitational pull.

It is weird for me to think of all the moon-walkers being gone because it’s not like in my family when my mom says, “Grandpa came from Vermont,” and none of my cousins have been there.  There is a road between Vermont and me, and if I wanted to go there, all I’d need is a long weekend.  If no one remains who has been to the moon though, we actually do lose some real experience, via collective memory, that we can’t get back.  That road closes, and the moon passes into our history.  But I’ve seen enough 1960’s TV to know that the moon has always been our future, not our past.  The popculturephile in me cries out against this relegation of the moon to some musty academic “seen it,” but a certain voice in the back of my head tells me it doesn’t really matter.  On a larger scale, we can lose the voices that came back from the moon, but we can never lose the knowledge gained from the moon trips, or any other space explorations. 

Speaking of enormous distances, remember the Pale Blue Dot?  Dr. Carl Sagan’s single pixel of light is an actual photograph of our entire world in its greater context.  That is what I think of sometimes in the morning on the bus.  Because I am in that photograph.  And if you were born before 1990, so are you.  I was likely riding my bike with my friend Jon to Krinke’s Korner Grocery in New Brighton, or building one of a dozen or so tree forts in the forests of Arden Hills.  But I’m on that tiny blue speck living my life in that photo, just like the boy hustling in the streets of Santo Domingo is in that photo.  Just like the girl fishing a Norwegian fjord is in that photo, and like the old man hunting in the jungles of the Congo is in that photo.  And if you zoom out on that photo, there is no way to tell what time of year it is on Earth.  For the record, it was taken between March and June of 1990, so springtime in the northern hemisphere.  On half of that blue dot the days were getting longer.  On the other half, they were tilting away from the sun, and it was about to get cold for a while.

Ode à la Grand Marais

When I was twenty-two, my best friend Jon and his girlfriend Jill invited me to join them for a weekend festival in Grand Marais on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  It was something of a family tradition for Jill, and apparently that year was the first summer the honors had been opened up to non-family members.  I was flattered, and didn’t have anything else going on that weekend, so I said I’d be there, on a lark.  I haven’t missed the Fisherman’s Picnic since.  The first few years I was there I learned the history of the group – who the regulars were and how the stateside kids had gone up and met the Canadians and they had all hiked up the rivers and jumped from bluffs and played in rapids together and other harrowing feats.  Near-death experiences in the formative years nourish life-long bonds; this I know as someone who was once seventeen.  I know how romantically dangerous a street dance on a Saturday night can be, juxtaposed against afternoons leaping forty feet into an icy brook with complete confidence.
But by the time I showed up, we were older, if not necessarily wiser.  When I started going up we were walking back to the campground from town as cautionary tales – with our cigarettes, and our liters of vodka and the innocent DQ Mr. Misties we poured the Karkov into.  We were higher than the kites we flew all afternoon Saturday on the beach, but we didn’t care, because it was the most fun we’d have in one weekend all year.  To be a hedonist among puritans, just once a year, is an experience I highly recommend.  It will discombobulate you, but luckily that word sounds a little dirty, so you’re already on the right track.We went on for several years, kayaking in the harbor, Bingo-ing at the legion hall, and climbing on the rocks overlooking the bay.  One weekend per year, we got to get all our crazy out at the end of summer and come back to the city to be serious for the oncoming winter.  That is, until Jill’s parents bought a house in town.  We all claimed to have figurative roots in the town, now suddenly they had put down literal ones.  And it's an adorable little cottage a block from the main drag, with an extra bedroom.  Then something different happened.  Jill, who had long since broken amicably from my best man, married the guy she was destined for.  And they had twins.  Twins!
Ages on, most of us still make the pilgrimage every August, though now things have changed slightly, and not in any way I could have predicted. My friends and I still go up north every summer, and those with kids bring them along.  We all have mellowed, though we’ve done so at different paces.  Some of us have children, others don’t.  Some of us still camp, others don’t.  Most of us still hike out to the bonfire one of the nights, and get just a little bit silly.
I was the first at the campsite this year, and that’s never happened before (I didn’t even make it up first the year that I paid for it).  My initial priority was getting my tent up and checking out the rainbow over the bay to the East.  When my campmate arrived, he & I enjoyed a couple beers and some homemade brittle and waited for the familied friends to get in touch.  After they did, we were anchored in the town with them and in the festival for the weekend.  I don’t have children, but I know quite a few of them, and it is a humbling moment the first time you turn to the baby you think you know and realize you’re talking to a fully formed human child, capable of running, and laughing, and skipping stones, and you have stories that predate her.  She did not exist when most of your life took place.  She is a Descendant.
When you have so many years of history in a place it is tempting to claim it as your own.  When you can no longer differentiate the years you were down by the lake from the years you were up on the hill – and no one thing happened in any specific summer or another – you don’t just have a history, you have a mythology.  Yet while it’s tempting to claim it as your festival, it is so much bigger than you.  It is the one who shaped you, not the other way around.  It went on for decades before you arrived, and it will go on just as merrily if you never come back.  But you are that little girl.  You are a product, a Descendant, of it, and you owe a little piece of who you are to it.  Here’s to you, Grand Marais… may you shape and mold many good friends to come.