Mental Vacation

It's been raining for over a week, and mushrooms are growing as fast as the grass. At night the sky breaks open into cavernous rumbles and cracks of light, but the days hang low and heavy. At times like this, I crave sunshine and open skies and the ocean in my ear.

Sailed Ships

Reason tells me the boats that once docked here are now in storage for the winter, but I like to imagine that they have set sail for warmer seas.

Gray Days

Solstice

Greeting the sun.

 

A short-lived daylight.

 

The days begin to lengthen, starting now.

Harvest

Arboreal Days

It has been since Easter that I visited the arboretum. You may remember that then I found it false, a tree museum in the heart of pseudo-urban sprawl that smacked of the Lorax.

The seasons have changed.

The arboretum cannot compare with the remoteness or the cool, peaty air of the farther flung state parks. Here the highway runs adjacent and even in the middle of 1000-plus acres of groves and gardens you can hear traffic. But the arboretum staff and volunteers are on a mission to restore endangered species of trees and prairie grasses, and the results are beautiful. 

 Perhaps it is just that I love fall, and all it takes is to surround myself with its evidence to win me over. Or that I have become more accustomed to this place, and can be happy in its highs. 

This last photo is not very good; the lighting is not quite right. But I wish that I could be as these leaves, aloft on a breeze, lifting my face to the sunlight, furling and unfurling all the day long.

One Thousand Words



Driftless Region

They call it the Driftless region, the southwest corner of this state where the glaciers didn’t drift. It's a name that suggests absence but the geography is a proclamation of presence in an otherwise razed Midwest.

Left to the whims of wind and water, the land plummets and plunges, thrusting upward before disappearing into clefts created by forces no longer present.

This canyon? Once it was an ocean. The water receded and the bare beaches became stone. Centuries of flood waters surged over the sandstone flats, forging rough valleys out of the sea bed. 

Here trees grow from rocks, long trunks surging upwards until a profusion of green meets the endless blue. If you climb to the top, you could be there too.

Or so it seems.

The hard verticals and sudden shifts in altitude take my breath away.

(If only you knew how literally I mean that.)

Mushroom Land

We welcome you to Mushroom Land.

We wish you could stay forever.

But we all know that you can't.

(Unless, of course, you eat the mushrooms. Then anything is possible.)

Cicadas

Hey there, R.J. Reynolds. You're hard to escape in this small town. 

So is the sound of cicadas, chirruping in a mechanical chorus more like a car alarm than an insect love song.

If the song is successful, the mated cicadas fertilize and die. Their hatched offspring bury themselves underground and emerge years later to sing their own love (death?) song.

It's rather poetic, despite the fact that cicadas are still insects, prone to mistaking human arms for sap-filled tree limbs. I imagine it's hard to differentiate between tall, swaying entities when your eyes are bigger than your brain.

Fix to Summer

Is it wrong that summer makes me crave the fall?

It reeks of sacrilege.

When I was young, summers were spans of long shoe-free, school-free days that hardly began before they ended. As the sun hung heavy overhead, my mother would start the fans, draw the shades and send me out to play with a knobbly cucumber in hand. Each bite exploded and dripped down my chin until all that remained was the bitter end.

Much, in fact, like summer itself.

I love summer days wiled away by the water and nights spent staring up at the stars (it seems impossible that all those lights hang in three dimensions). I love the steady warmth of sunlight on my shoulders. I still get excited to eat cucumbers in one go.

But I get restless. I want the blackberry bushes to shed their flowers for fruit. I mentally paint the trees shades of red and rusty orange. My collection of canvas jackets hangs in the closet, waiting for the days when I can again have warmth in the face of the brisk.

In the meantime, I hike, and look forward to the day when a path is actually a path rather than a poison ivy exposure test. Summer reigns abundant but some things serve a better purpose as detritus.

There was actually no poison ivy on this particular hike.
I am somehow never inspired to take a picture when I'm dodging leaflets three.

Thoughts on trees

Arboretum: "tree-garden," 1838, from L. arboretum, lit. "a place grown with trees"  ~ http://www.etymonline.com/

How does a place become an arboretum as opposed to a forest?

The difference must lie in the spaces between the trees. The garden, the lawn, the paths where one can stand and contemplate the contrast between tree and not-tree. In the forest, such distinctions blur into canopies and shadows. All is tree.

I like forests. I like trees in their unlabelled, unclassified state. Arboretums are tree-zoos: spaces to preserve and exhibit a waning kingdom.

In a perfect world, suburbs would not exist and cities would be ringed with forests.

In an imperfect world, we have cities with arboretums and I live in the suburbs.

If I could choose, I'd rather live in the arboretum. The suburbs come in shades of beige and they don't smell like spring.

Messages

 
Messenger
By Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Until Monday I had never heard of Mary Oliver. Despite having won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as numerous other awards and fellowships, Oliver failed to make any reading list in my English classes. The canon lives! (though its components are all long dead).

I would have much preferred her work to the rather soporific Romantics. Alas.

I start a new life in two weeks. I'm young (though even half-perfect is questionable) and I'm open to astonishment.

Hey there, moth, I'm leaving town. Let's rejoice. 

Ho-ho-who?

This little alien graces the retaining wall just outside my back door. He (or she) is a fairly recent addition to the landscape, still vividly drawn and commanding in the surrounding cement. Yet how long will this image survive? Months? Years? Weather will undoubtedly wash away the paint if the city doesn't take care of it first.

The longevity of the Hohokam artists clearly outranks that of my neighborhood graffiti artist. An ancient culture centered in the Phoenix basin, the Hohokam built canals and irrigation systems across the desert to support ambitious agricultural pursuits. When they weren't growing maize, beans and squash (otherwise known as the Three Sisters) they were carving pictures in rock. (It seems the Hohokam appreciated a challenge. If it had been up to me, I would have grown my corn in the Midwest and carved my pictures in oak trees.*)

One of their artscapes, the Hieroglyphic Canyon Trail, has a bit of a misnomer. Petroglyphs are pictures, hieroglyphs are words. The Hohokam didn't have a written language, a condition which prevents them from being a "true" archaeological civilization like the hieroglyphically-inclined Mayans and Egyptians. Wordlessness aside, the trail and its ancient petroglyphs offer a glimpse of life in the ancient American southwest, pre-stucco villas and urban sprawl. It went something like this:

I was fairly certain the animals in these drawings were deer but I didn't immediately realize that the box-like objects were people. Truth be told, they don't look all that different from my retaining wall alien.

I've yet to see a real snake while hiking, which I consider a good thing. This squamate (or scaled reptile) is awfully cute though. Maybe all snakes should look like this? And maybe we can start calling them squamates, which sounds a lot more innocuous than snake.

Most humans aren't prickly enough to thrive in the desert. Somehow, the Hohokam and their ancient neighbors did anyway.

*This is, in fact, exactly what I grew up doing.

It's Always Sunny in PHX

The desert seems intent upon discouraging life in all but its most prickly forms. Water, the precursor to life, is a foggy concept. Rivers contain dirt, not water. (True story: In 1944 25 German prisoners of war interned in Phoenix's Papago Park tried to escape by boating down the Gila and Colorado Rivers to Mexico. They were easily apprehended when their boat failed to float down the dry riverbed.)

Outside of the faux green lawns and non-native palm trees of Phoenix the skyline disappears into a swath of burnt sienna and spiny cacti. Actually, much of the city looks like that too but the neon In-N-Out Burger signs lend a different air of desolation to the cityscape.

After so much brown, a field of sunflowers in downtown Phoenix served as a jolt to the senses. Such a vibrant yellow is missing in the earthen, rusted desert color wheel. Planted as a sign of life and regeneration in what has become a derelict downtown, the field was abuzz with bees.

A tornado, four months later

This past July a tornado wreaked havoc on my parents' property in rural Minnesota. It wasn't a big tornado and with their land so far removed from town it didn't make the news. The only evidence was the photos my mother took the next day, scenes filled with so much broken greenery it was difficult to decipher the destruction. The vertical lines of the woods had given way to jagged abstractions and profuse chaos. It remained that way for the rest of the summer, the starved leaves slowly dying on their broken branches.

Come autumn, the leaves have fallen and all that remains is the skeleton of the storm. Walking the paths takes some navigating, ducking under branches and scaling trunks. Some of the trees will become firewood for the sauna, stacked along the house and left to age until dry enough to burn. The rest will remain in the woods, hollowing and crumbling into detritus.

The best thing about nature is that even when it's broken it is beautiful. Then again, perhaps these are not scenes of brokenness but of forces so much bigger than us.

A swamp once named the most beautiful place on earth in a fit of youthful naturophlilia

Forgive the poor lighting but I think those roots are huge. Apparently the tornado did not.

Note that the tree trunk split entirely to the base

Homegrown happiness

Cherries, the Eiffel Tower and thoughts on perspective

Every city has its iconic structure (or structures). Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Seattle has the Space Needle and no trip to Washington D.C. is complete without seeing the Washington Monument, among others. As a tourist, one is compelled to go and stare in awe of said structures, forced to take photos and comment on the sheer size of _______.

Yet from the ground, the Eiffel Tower looks essentially the same in real life as it does on a postcard except for the addition of hordes of fellow tourists, security guards and dirty pavement. I want to see it from the utmost top, looking down. Or laying on the ground, looking up. Few people get that experience, few postcards capture it for mass-market inundation. It would be new, a fresh sight.

In Minneapolis, we don't have any famous structures jutting into the sky but we do have the cherry and the spoon. This seems suitably Midwestern, a style favoring enigmatic representations of daily life over grandiose gestures. Officially named "Spoonbridge and Cherry," the sculpture is one of the most photographed sites in the city. Yet nearly all of the photos show the same perspective: the long side view of the spoon with the cherry perched jauntily at its tip. The truly original pose so as to be picking or eating the cherry, or perhaps even wielding the handle of the spoon.

I've lived in Minneapolis for over four years now and for four years I resisted the draw of the spoon and cherry. "Have you been to the Sculpture Gardens?" people ask. No. "You've never seen the cherry and the spoon?" Well, yes, I have. It's on every visitor's guide to Minneapolis and hundreds of postcards.

Then last Thursday I found myself with a guest, a sunny morning and the Sculpture Gardens a block away from her departure point. And there we were, standing before the cherry and the spoon.

From the side it looked (as I thought it would) just like the postcards. Yet postcards never show the view as seen above, with the handle inviting you to walk right up over the water. Rather than a simple object of contemplation, the cherry now seems only seconds from consumption.

Why is this view second-rate?

Why don't more people take pictures laying on the ground beneath the Eiffel Tower?

Why do we accept the standard view as the one we should admire?

By only noticing, photographing, writing about the socially accepted norms we perpetuate those norms. Yet there are more sides to every structure, more perspectives on every culture. Standing where everyone else stands does not guarantee an authentic experience of reality -it just means you've been lost in a crowd.

 

R: Why are you photographing broken electrical panels?

B: Why not?

The broken glass and wires made as much sense as anything else in the Sculpture Garden so I kept the photo.

The other kind of hiking

At age 13 I went on a hike with my sister Katie. She was working on her Ph. D at the University of Utah and I was visiting her over fall break. A brilliant geophysicist, my sister loves being surrounded by rocks. Where other people look at canyons and mountains and see interesting formations and pretty colors, Kate sees fault lines, compositions and millenia of plate tectonics at work.

Let's walk to the university, she suggested, and take a little detour through the foothills for a more scenic route.  Scenery sounds nice, I agreed, and off we went.

SuperKate

Several hours into the walk I realized why we had packed water bottles and an entire picnic. Though her school was only a mile or so away from her apartment, I was now standing five miles up a mountain. "Foothills" be damned - I was breathing pure oxygen and treading carefully high above dark canyons.

Here's a little Geophysics 101: when speaking with a geophysicist, notions of scale differ greatly. A layman's eternity is a rock scientist's millisecond. "Little" detours compare accordingly. Hence my position atop a mountain far from any sign of the city.

Ten miles up and down rock faces did a number on my feet. I had borrowed her sneakers, only a half-size too small, and when I took them off I was greeted with bloodied socks. A few toenails had turned purple and two months later, during the family Christmas celebration, they fell off.

Yesterday was not that kind of hike.

Yesterday involved actual hills (not mountains) and more scenery-gazing than walking. Hills are hard to find in Minnesota, a land mostly shaved clean by the glaciers. To gain a little vertical perspective - at least in the eastern half of the state - the best places to go are the Mississippi and the St. Croix river valleys.

I live along the Mississippi but for my birthday expedition I wanted something new. I wanted glacier deposits, frozen lava flows and remnants of ancient fault lines. Perhaps I'm more like Katie than I realized - I like rocks too, though I'd rather write about them than measure them.

Four of us set off for Interstate Park, so named because it straddles the St. Croix River in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. We walked. We talked. When the ascent wore us down we sat and looked down at the valley below.

We had initially agreed upon a five-mile loop but I don't think we made it three. It didn't matter. The scent of the pine cones underfoot mingled with smoke from scattered campsites and the leaves above and below us shuddered in anticipation of the winter. We shivered too, at first, but as we warmed up as we climbed.

It gets dark early now and so as evening fell we followed the sinking sun down the narrow path to the car. Back on the highway signs at first advertised "Pumpkin' Chuckin' here" and corn mazes, then Gander Mountain sporting goods stores and Dairy Queens. Eventually the signs and billboards disappeared to make room for converging highways and we were back in Minneapolis.

At home in our top-floor apartment in an early 1900s brownstone I put a lasagne in the oven and put the tea kettle to boil. We were cold and the hills-induced aches were settling in but our toenails were still firmly attached. Come Christmas I bet mine still will be.

*Hey there Kate - if you're up for climbing mountains again I've got my own hiking shoes and I don't ask "Are we there yet?" every five minutes anymore. I like your kind of hiking too.

Chasing the Intangible

If this book could be more, could show more, could own more, this book would have smells....

It would have the smell of old farms; the sweet smell of new-mown hay as it falls off the oiled sickle blade when the horses pull the mower through the field, and the sour smell of manure steaming in a winter barn.

~ Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room

 

If my camera could be more, could show more, could own more, my camera would have smells. So too would this blog, this two-dimensional medium which prevents me from conveying the scent emanating in the wooded area down along the river by Father Hennepin Park.

As I walked the trails last Thursday, alone over the lunch hour, I was taken aback by the perfume of the trees and shrubs. Up above the river banks we have city trees, city shrubs. Lovely they may be, but all I smell when walking down the street is car exhaust and olives from the Greek deli on the corner. I forget that plants have smells. I forget that nature in its natural state is stronger, bigger, more forceful.

All I could think, then, was of the preface to The Winter Room by Gary Paulsen. I first read it in sixth grade, or more accurately, my teacher read it aloud to the class. Few books really stick with me from my preteen years, an era marked by largely disposable juvenile fiction. The Winter Room stuck with me.

The yearning in his words (quoted above) captures the inadequacy of expression, the inability to ever take a moment and present it in entirety to another. How do we really communicate? How do we make people understand our ideas and our experiences? As I walked the tree-shrouded path, I wanted to make my camera take a smell-picture. I wanted it to suck the scent of the blossoms into its lens, reflecting and imprinting it for others to relish.

But it couldn't. And neither can books. Books and blogs can't have smells, tastes, texture. And that is a shame. That walk was lovely, and I would have liked to share the air and all its heavy humid scents with you.

Along the way I came across a man sitting cross-legged on the edge of an overhang. He was posed as if meditating but in his left hand he held an unopened book.

Was his book, like this blog, inadequate in that moment? Both fail in comparison to moments like these. Nevertheless, it is our nature to try to grab hold of fleeting impressions and to try to convey them to one another as best we can.

If this blog had smells, this blog would smell like spring leaves and tightly closed blossoms, slowly warming under weak afternoon sunlight, It would have a sweet, wet floral scent, one which I thought was lilac until I smelled the distinctly different scent of lilacs the next day. If this blog had smells, it would smell of damp soil, slick with the morning's rain, and crushed green grass.

If this blog had smells, it would smell greener and wilder than any breath inhaled along a city street. 

Minnehaha Falls: A Little Laugh

And he journeyed without resting,

Till he heard the cataract's laughter,
Heard the Falls of Minnehaha
Calling to him through the silence.
"Pleasant is the sound!" he murmured,
"Pleasant is the voice that calls me!"

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Suggestive of a little laugh, Minnehaha translates to "waterfall" in Dakota, making Waterfall Falls a clumsily redundant appellation.It's a beautiful word, however, and trips nicely off the tongue.

Minnehaha is also the love interest in Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," an ill-fated beauty who succumbs to famine and fever in a winter wasteland. Though the poem is written in an awkward meter (trochaic tetrameter, better used in Finnish epics than in English) I love the lines "And he journeyed without resting/ Till he heard the cataract's laughter." 

Did Longfellow think that the "haha" in Minnehaha meant laughter or was he just amusing himself with words? Or am I reading too much into his phrasing?

Regardless, I applaud his choice of the word cataract, which in this case means deluge of water rather than an abnormality of the eye. Perhaps cataract was in common usage in his day or perhaps, like me, Longfellow thought scoring thesauruses for obscure synonyms was fun.

Cataract is much like the Spanish word for waterfall, "catarata." A strong, hard word, catarata suggests a steady drumming, a rat-a-tat cadence reminiscent of the waterfall come summer. Right now all that can be heard is a deafening, rhythm-less rush. It seems Minneapolis' fourth snowiest winter and rain-soaked spring have made this cataract more likely to damage the auditory rather than visual faculties.

But I digress. This is not an English class, nor a lecture on etymology. This is a walk in the woods. This is an escape. Or perhaps it is all of these things. That's the beauty of a good wander. Everything begins to connect until you feel that you are part of a world that is not only so alive in the present moment but is also burgeoning with the past.

Do these little flowers have a history? Known as Creeping Charlie, ground ivy, gill-over-the-ground and Glechoma hederacea, the purple trumpets are both loved and despised. Some, like my sister, uproot them as weeds. Others use the plant for medicinal purposes or eat the greens in salads. And some, like me, take photos and contemplate the fact that Glechoma looks like glaucoma.

Glechoma, glaucoma, cataracts. My eyes feel fuzzy. Is that background supposed to be blurred?

Oh, that's right, it is. That's me playing with my new camera. Do you like it?