Winter's Child

Fond Goodbye

2010-01-24T18:22:00.000-08:00

Ten days after leaving International Falls, I realize I did not say a proper goodbye or convey to anyone listening that I have enjoyed your company. My going was too soft and too hard, too happy returning and too hard to leaving.

I feel welcome here in the oasis of Pasadena. I feel a warm wind of reception as if I have brought some sense of metaphor from the cold to share. People seem receptive to ideas derived in much different air. I have given the talk twice, trying to answer the questions I posed before going. Empathy with my strange vacation has felt good, as if some people think their own lives could use a little weirdness.

Back in November I tried to explain what sent me off alone to a cold place for the winter, where I have no family or friends, no tourist destination, no prospect of making money—and to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. I tried to convince you that it’s a budget item against available time—some thirty years—in the same way that the available money is allocated where length of life is unknown.

I felt honored to be doing this strange thing—to have the time, the freedom, health, and tolerance for being alone. I wondered, as I talked about it back then, if Thoreau who built his own house in a far-off place, felt any more honored on its completion than I did as I began.
I could have gone anywhere that’s cold with a small town and cheap accommodations, but I found those conditions met in only a few places. I arrived at International Falls because it promised to be the coldest place in the lower forty-eight states and has virtually no tourists in the winter.

I expected to spend a lot of time outside, learning to survive extreme cold, feeling and finding insights. I wanted to ice skate and ski and snowshoe. I wanted to become part of winter, not just a brief observer of it. And I wanted to understand the lives of people who live in these conditions all their lives, to compare, edit, write and ponder the exceeding cold and loneliness of border songs, bird songs, and the Aurora Borealis. This is what I expected, and I expressed the hope that I was wrong. For in being wrong, I would change and find childish newness.

What I found is mostly put down in these sixty-two blog posts. It is not what I expected.

I spent a lot of time outdoors, as hoped, and I skated and skied. I became a part of winter, not just an observer, and learned after many errors, how to dress and how to breathe. I have a little black spot on one toe, frost-nip, gained early, and it told me that to make it here I needed training. But after many days of not giving up, I can say that I have learned to survive for a few hours in most cold circumstances. While living in simple houses as the Paleo Indians did is still beyond me, living outside in the daytime is not, and if I find a warm place at night I feel quite proud to say that I can stand a day at well below zero.

But mere survival is just the start, a kind of potty training that an infant Eskimo learns on the way to becoming fully socialized and acclimated. I learned that almost none of the residents care about these things. They walk from their houses to their cars and from their cars to the next warm place. They dress with half the insulation I wear because they do not stay outside long enough to need more. With few exceptions, they are happy living here because the interiors of buildings are warm.

I did not associate with them very much because most of our interests differed. I walked to Sandy’s Café most mornings or had coffee with Jerry and Sandy, my landlords, and walked to church on Sundays, and that was about the only contact. The rest of the time I was alone on skis, in boots, in the woods, ice skating and generally being enthralled with the wonderful cold sparkling place I had come to.

I made a few friends, but even they did not quite understand my coming. There was always a small suspicion in their eyes as to my real motives. Katrina at Sandy’s Cafe understood I think, but she is a free thinker on many topics. If it seems that I have emphasized the beauty of ice crystals and diamond dust at the expense of understanding the people, then you see this adventure as I do. I wish to have better communicated with them; they are good people.

In summary, I got more than I hoped for in winter knowledge and appreciation, and less than I wanted in the lives of residents.

Thank you for reading and for your comments.

All Packed

2010-01-13T17:57:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow home. One last picture looking across the river to Canada.

In Transition

2010-01-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

The air is full of imminent departure. Warm, unseasonably warm toady, clear up to thirty degrees; and tomorrow is expected to do the same. The weather was warm on my arrival back in November, and now warm at the end, as if a cycle is completing. Warm at the start—then winter set in good and earnest—then warm at the end, which is a beginning. I almost hear winter saying with a sly grin, “I made it easy for you when you were unprepared, then I showed you my full hand. Now on your departure I prepared a warm transition, and say, aloha, glad you came.”

I feel as if I have nearly proven myself indigenous in this environment, though absent for a very long time. As the wolf has established herself into modernity, where once she was made extinct in these parts by an earlier age, so I seem as one returned. The old mandate of “Subdue the earth for the good of mankind” has passed, and maybe I would not have survived that ethic any better than the wolf did. I might have become extinct too, and come back from another place only when the opinions of mankind changed. Though not completely settled in my role here, perhaps in some future mindset, like the wolf has found in this one, I might find complete adaptation. The folks here have not been hostile, but they have not understood, and like the wolf found her age-old welcome cancelled and then restored, so when the reign of poetry commences here, as the reign of environmental protection has come for the wolf, then I might be strung about the neck with colorful seeds and nuts, as necks of Paleo Indians were long before International Falls existed. Perhaps then I shall resume my ancient importance and dignity and admire myself as an oak tree does when dressed in fall regalia and sees herself in the smooth mirror of Rainy Lake. Then the news may read like the latest from Walden Pond, and I may be editor of The Daily News. I am happy to have come, and happy to be returning, the cycle swinging upward so that warm Pasadena will not be too much of a shock.

I walked again to Canada where a raven finds water at the edge of ice.

beyond a Canadian cemetery flows a river
beyond the river an American paper mill
beyond the mill lies a town where winter held me
beyond the town an airport and another life

The same fruit that I saw on November 20 (right) hangs in there today, a bit more withered.

Ranier to Remember

2010-01-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

With only three days remaining, I walked to Ranier for the last time. I unzipped my jacket and took off my gloves on the way home because the air rose to plus ten, and I felt warm. This seemed strange because on those California days at Mt. San Jacinto when it was around twenty I was thickly bundled. Something has changed inside as if antifreeze now runs through my veins.

It’s a fine sunny day, and I even see traces of diamond dust in the morning at these higher temperatures. I can’t resist taking pictures of the illusive sparkles, trying to show them as they are, against snow in its many forms. Boulder and desert snow, tiny stars in the boulders, shimmer of water in the desert.

I still see deer tracks, squirrel, others too I’d like to meet. I hear the familiar sounds—the whistle of the driverless train bringing wood chips from Chip Mountain just a quarter mile to the mill, the squeak of tires on packed snow, and the call of a raven.

I am the object of this writing, this novel; I have no protagonist. Being here is so much like an image of something real, not reality itself, that it makes the whole experience seem already made into a poem or a painting. The need to make metaphor and impression seems not as strong now. I have called relationships together in these missives and drawn attention to the things back home as likenesses of things here, but now it’s like the ending of a life where what has been done is final and only recall remains.

Birch trees with their horizontal lines and vertical strength, bark that sheathes canoes, roofs dwellings, bark that heats the paper mill, their wood from which I read a book, write a letter, eat a bowl of soup, and set the bowl on, these adaptable, bendable, and recoverable trees are on the level and they measure up. I can’t get enough of them.

Whenever I have gone to Ranier, I have taken a picture from this viewpoint. This final entry into that sequence.

Diamond dust and boulders

Cold Facts

2010-01-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

Today, as I sit inside watching big snowflakes sashay downward, meandering in from Canada, I thought I’d review the temperature history of my winter. Each day, I recorded the morning reading from a thermometer hanging outside my door, and also the high for every day. These I compared to the averages for the past 110 years from Weather Bureau data. I put this very-personal information into an AutoCad routine I wrote many years ago for the plotting such fascinations. I include here even the next three days, but of course they are not accurate, but taken from the forecast.

I expect everyone will enthrall with wonder at the concision with which I present my winter—the unseasonably warm November, the December Plunge, the record cold of early January, and finally a warm spell at the end—all shown as a physicist might prefer.

Five more Days

2010-01-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

Another chilly morning with temperature and wind chill well below normal. With the days winding down and only five remaining, I wonder how to proceed. I still have not found the mysterious bicycle rider, have not used the snow shoes except on one day, have not walked on the lake, except for one of its small inlets, have not gone ice fishing with Jerry, and have not Nordic skied with the two women who wanted to. Other obligations have consumed their time, while I have repeated treks in the same woods, to the same windswept fields, stores and cafes. I have experienced all that I wanted to, on a plan that evolved and changed as the days went by.

Today I walked five miles in chilling conditions that would have scared me indoors on my first day here. Fortunately, winter came on slowly, giving time to learn and acclimate. Most working people can’t do that, but stay inside except for perhaps ten minutes at a time to perform some outside duty. I can confidently say that I am better prepared physically for winter than most of the people who live in International Falls.

I feel fortunate to have been allowed to come here, to enjoy winter, and to do so without feeling that I have shirked some duty. I am fortunate to have good health and enough money, but I am also fortunate for mental ability to live frugally. It is not by will power that I have a small apartment in Pasadena without even a kitchen, but rather an innate lack of need for comfort. I am fortunate because this mental state allows me to use what I have to go and experience, rather than to stay home and feel secure. It seems an inherited trait, and not some great choosing on my part. I blame no one who chooses comfort, and sometimes I wish for a desire to settle down.

And so today I report seeing more snow, more sparkles, more crystals of growing ice, and kids playing hockey. Once I was one of them, on the ice at Pasadena Winter Gardens. Now, with just as much free time, I am open for ideas on where to go next. The desire to settle down is still only a wish.

Ludicrous Art and Absurd Theology

2010-01-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday I reported seeing tiny sparkles in the air as I looked in the general direction of the sun, but not in other directions. They could not have been falling snowflakes or wind-raised snow on that calm and clear day. They refused to land on my glove and did not show up on my photographs. Yet they glistened for flashing moments, hundreds of them at a time, like tiny fishes turning their shiny sides to the sun in a great blue ocean. Could I have just imagined them, having become cold-crazy as we do at the onset of hypothermia?

On Monday I reported my internet research: Tiny fog-sized droplets of water do not freeze even when the temperature falls well below the freezing point of water. Unless a particle of dust enters a droplet to start the freezing process, the droplet remains super-cooled down to minus twenty or thirty. But in extreme cold, droplets turn to ice and glisten in sunlight. They are called diamond dust. I was encouraged at finding that what I saw was possibly real, and I hoped to find some way to photograph it.

On Tuesday I saw the sparkles again, seeming to come from a vertical rainbow-like column of light which stood beside the sun and glistened with tiny stars.

The next two days were cloudy with no sign of diamond dust. But today I saw it again: unique flashing of minute points, like stars, in the sunlight. As before, the column-rainbow stood in the same position relative to the sun. I was determined to get pictures to prove that I am not cold-crazy. My attempts are shown here. I tried to catch diamond dust against the dark background of a road, the tan color of a car, the white of snow and the blue of sky where they are most distinctive and beautiful. But my pictures are like child’s drawings compared to the real phenomenon. The white spots in these pictures show my sparkles about as well as milk drops might represent stars.

I must ask you to take my word about this marvelous thing that I have seen. None of these pictures do my vision justice. I feel like Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone in his hands, saying “Look! These are not my carving, they were given to me by God!” And the people said, “Yeah, right. Looks like ordinary carved stone. What’s the big deal?” So Moses, in dismay, broke the tablets, went back up the mountain and carved nicer ones by himself. I feel like going back to carve my own pictures, to render in some way what I have seen, perhaps exaggerating my sparkles to show what I feel they are, rather than how they appear in photos. Then folks might say, “She has become enthralled with these sparkles of hers and wants us to think she really saw them.

Is this the fate of art?—that unless the viewer has seen firsthand the real thing depicted, the art is good only as abstract rendering of some feeling within the artist? If, after rendering my wonderful sparkles in some art form, I am told that I have made a nice fantasy, then I might fall into sulking and think that the sparkles I remember were not really what I saw, but what I wanted to see.

There was only one solution on this bright sparkling day—go to the vacant rink and skate.

More Snow

2010-01-07T17:19:00.001-08:00

Five cars stand idle in the cleared and frozen parking lot at Sandy’s. Three of them puff white breath from their exhaust pipes. I never considered leaving the engine running while I go shopping or read a book with a morning omelet, but here the risk of car theft apparently underweighs the discomfort of a cold car. Larry turns his engine off at Sandy’s, but about ten minutes before he is ready to go, he presses a button in his pocket and assures me that his car has started. He offers me a ride, but it’s only four blocks back to my room, and this time I decline. He honks as he passes; I wave, and feel just like a native.

Jerry is busy with the plumbing again today. My room is on the second floor, and a deck runs along all the upper rooms with a stairway at one end. My room is nearest the stairway, and I use a broom to clear the deck near my door and stairway of snow. The rest of the deck has a foot of snow and no footprints. For several weeks, I have been the only person up here. Jerry, who owns the place, discovered a leak during the night before last, which he traced to the baseboard hot water heating system in the second floor. He keeps the heat turned on in the unrented rooms, but still, a pipe froze during the extreme cold we have been having. When it thawed, some of the first floor rooms had minor rainstorms, including the one Jerry, himself, lives in. My room was not affected. Any room left unheated can have frozen pipes within an hour at thirty below zero. In this case, it was a heating pipe in one of the vacant rooms that froze where it passes close to an outside wall, and once it froze, the heat stopped. Jerry would have had a major flood if he had not noticed the problem early. He went about with a hair dryer, blowing warm air on cold pipes. Today a plumber came to repair the break. “We have these problems every winter,” Jerry says.

Today it is snowing, and that makes it a little warmer, minus five and remaining about the same all day. This is the first snow, other than flurries, in about two weeks. The old snow has settled and crusted somewhat, so that walking on it, I usually remain on top where it sounds like walking on an empty oil drum. But sometimes the crust breaks and down I go, two feet to the bottom, or farther if the snow has drifted up. These holes are where I fell through while following a snowmobile track, which had packed the snow and made the going easier.

These deer tracks show that the deer are falling through too. Their small hoofs put more pressure on the snow than my boots do. They cannot run very fast in this kind of snow. Wolves, with their broader paws and lighter weight, can usually run on top of the crusted surface. It must be a nervous time for deer. Maybe that’s why these tracks lead into town where wolves seldom go.

Walking Thoughts to Ranier

2010-01-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

ice and tree will hold
a skater like me
no shadow of doubt

cushions ready
footstool set
relax enjoy the show

arrows set
bows drawn
winter’s ready

dumped and pushed aside
graveyard for city dead
they keep on falling

Beauty

2010-01-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

Beauty creeps from a snow-bank where it was deposited after being scraped, pushed, compacted and left to remain until spring finally melts it. It resides in solid water, and after all these days, continues to amaze me. Today it defies the snowplow and the encroachment of a town and paper mill into its domain. Beauty does not accept its sentence and creeps out from cloistered piles. It wakes in the night and grows intricate appendages, adorning itself for the opening reception of another show.

This is not the real world, I thought to myself on the way to Sandy’s this morning. After just a few strides from my door and my heated room, I landed, like an alien in ethereal animation, inhabited by fantastic creatures. And they don’t know it. Maybe they used to know, before the great forgetting, and they ceased to be senescent, retaining the art of a bygone culture.

Beauty stands erect beside the source, the sun, today, as if made, like it, to nurture new life. Bits of diamond dust pass from a column of light to me, imparting their sparkles. My camera sees them as white spots, but it does not know them as I do.

When piled up high in disposal heaps and left to die, beauty doesn’t pout, does not form dark and twisted poetry. Instead, it gathers strength and rises from the grime, forms shapes for the sun to see and reflect to me.

On the surface of its piled-up fate
no angry image does beauty paint
but grows from what it has within
and what it finds without
fronds and winged seeds and forest trees
likenesses in miniature
Or is there something else it wants to show?

Beauty doesn’t shun
the dead the plow scraped up
and threw with it to die
but builds a little monument
above a fallen twist of grass
to hope and life anew

We make for our enjoyment, replicas of beauty, Styrofoam and frosted glass, but seldom do we place ourselves in such a cold and hostile place to see it real at Sandy’s, inside a single pane.

When beauty encounters, in its descent, a pile of machine-ground woodchips for the mill, not a tree or child it surely prefers, it doesn’t gather there in ugly form, no patterns of contempt, but acts as beauty calls.

Isn’t life really more like stories we tell ourselves about our daily experiences, rather than hard science. Life seems more like magic or alchemy or something I don’t know how to theorize about. This solid beauteous water.

Diamond Dust

2010-01-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

I walked to Sandy’s this morning and could still see my footprints from Saturday. No more than three other people have walked this way in two days. Yet, Sandy’s has about fifteen customers, and most of them drove less than a mile from my direction. At noon, I went for the three-dollar lunch at the senior center, where a dozen people were chatting about how brave they are to be out in minus twenty degrees—brave meaning they went from house to car.

I thought I had a firm grip on the reality of extreme cold before yesterday. Forty-five days in the Icebox, outside for several hours on all of them, had hardened my body and taught my mind. My research felt complete; I was familiar with winter and with the people who live here. With only ten days remaining, I was feeling ready to come home. But suddenly, cold presented a new aspect of itself.

Yesterday I reported seeing tiny sparkles in the air as I looked in the general direction of the sun. They could not have been falling snowflakes or wind-raised snow, for wind was calm and the sky clear. I could not catch them or photograph them, but they sparkled with amazing clarity and beauty. Something unknown was doing I didn’t know what, but it was beautiful.

This morning, with the temperature at minus twenty-four on my deck and minus thirty-six at the airport, I see a strange fog, dense enough to blot out the sun, but only perhaps twenty feet thick. And on every horizontal surface, there is a white dusting, fine as flour, that blows away with the fanning of my glove. Someone said it is ice fog and that we don’t see it very often.

On searching the internet, I think that yesterday’s sparkles were called Diamond Dust—tiny crystals of ice which would be fog at higher temperature. These minute droplets of water do not freeze except at well below thirty-two degrees. They can exist as liquid water down to about minus twenty, super-cooled, having no dust particle to start the freezing process. But in extreme cold, the droplets turn to ice and glisten in sunlight. As the concentration of droplets increases, they can block the sun, as they did this morning, and then they cannot glisten. Now they are ice fog and can settle on things as fine white dust of ice crystals.

Now, I must ask myself how many things about cold are unknown to me and doing I don’t know what. I feel as much like a new wineskin as I did the day I arrived here, as much a vessel ready to be filled with intoxication as I was then, and this after all the awakenings I have been filled with. I feel almost like a tourist who steps off the bus, follows a sign-carrying guide for an hour, and says, “I have seen enough.” And inside she knows it’s only a show. There is not much support in our world for moments of revelation that come, like diamond dust, from the blue. I come in an era where a worldview of mechanical causality prevails, where insights are cast off for lack of evidence. In earlier times, stories of epiphany fared better. And for artists and poets they still do.

After the ice fog went away, everything was still and covered in white dust, like volcanic ash. When a breeze came up, it returned some of the fallen ice fog to the air—recycled.

A mountain of wood chips looks like the Rockies.

Record Cold

2010-01-03T12:42:00.000-08:00

On this cold morning, I see tiny sparkles in the air as I look in the general direction of the sun. I don’t see them in other directions. They could not be falling snowflakes or wind-raised snow, for the wind is calm and the sky clear. They are too small to catch or photograph, and they refuse to land on my glove. They glisten for flashing moments, turning their shiny sides, reflecting the sun like small fishes in a great ocean.

The tops of bare trees are whiter this morning, as if they have caught some elusive stardust. They sparkle in quiet sunlight with varying patterns that seem to depend on where I stand to look at them.

“It was minus forty-one when I left the house,” says a man in town. My deck thermometer read minus twenty-nine. The airport reports a low of minus thirty-six last night, one degree below the previous record for this date. The all-time record low still stands at minus fifty-five on January 6, 1909.

Ice is creeping under my door where a small leak in the seal allows outside air in. The small advancing glacier is a measure of cooling outside. Right now my inside thermometer reads 72, and the baseboard heating water is keeping my air 101 degrees warmer than outside.

Bitter Cold

2010-01-02T16:59:00.000-08:00

Last night’s forecast summarized today as “Bitter Cold.” It said that arctic air would pour down from Canada in the night, dropping the temperature to minus thirty-six before morning. The thermometer on my deck read minus twenty-four at eight AM, the lowest so far by eight degrees. But there was no wind, so the day should feel no colder than prior days. The airport was reporting minus thirty-six, but that is two miles south of my home, and does not get as much of the moderating affect of Rainy River and Rainy Lake.

I walked to Sandy’s where a new waitress said she has a wood stove in the garage. This made no sense to me and I asked her to explain. “I don’t worry about carbon monoxide and my allergies like I did when it was in the house,” she said. It only made sense when she explained that the stove heats water, which runs through a pipe to the baseboards in her house. She makes several trips to the garage every evening and night to stoke the fire.

As I write this, I see that the temperature in Pasadena is seventy degrees, eighty-seven degrees warmer than it is here.

Cold and Clear

2010-01-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

Minus sixteen this morning when I started a walk on New Year’s Day. A big bronze moon was about to set at 8:30 dawn. Last night, the same big moon had a circle around it, and the night was clear, which accounts for this morning’s low temperature.

I walked a mile or two toward the airport and stopped for coffee. “You look cold,” said the waitress at the Chocolate Moose Restaurant. But I didn’t feel cold. “Here’s a napkin to wipe your nose,” she said. I stood in the vestibule and peeled off layers—first the thick gloves, then the under-gloves, pulled back the hood of my coat, the sweat band which serves as a nose warmer, the elastic face mask from Sharon Rizk (Where is she anyway?), knitted bogan off my head, shake out my matted hair, now unzip the coat. I walk to a table, carrying all this, take off the backpack, take off the coat, remove the under-vest. Finally, I sit.

I took a shortcut through a field and left knee-deep holes in the powder. It’s been a week since any significant snow fell, but thawing temperatures have not happened, and the powder stays just as it falls, unless wind comes to disturb it. But in this field surrounded by forest it looks as if the snow fell last night.

Chocolate Mousse means the same here as it does in California, except that almost everyone but me has seen a moose around here, and they really are the color of chocolate. It’s best not to see their lanky legs and big antlers coming at you on the highway. Not that they are aggressive, they just don’t know what to make of a car.

Standing under icicles like these can lead to a very bad poetic experience, as shown by a man who died from a falling icicle in Devon, England. They put this on his stone:

Bless my eyes
Here he lies
In a sad pickle
Killed by an icicle

Snow Art

2009-12-31T15:35:00.000-08:00

Snow blower
tool for clearing paths
maker of a mazes for pleasure of kids
paintbrush on white canvas

A few days ago I reported finding no snowmen, no carrot noses or cabbage ears. So I set out to correct the oversight with the rolling of a big snowball on which my plan called for two more. But no matter how hard I tried to compact the loose snow, I couldn’t even get it a foot in diameter before it crumbled. Could it be, I thought, that in the Icebox of the Nation snow is too cold for snowballs? Is warmer snow required for compaction? I gave up and kept walking. I don’t know how the artist did it, but having tried and failed I appreciate the result.

A truck driver with logs this long, approaching a turn this tight, is like an artist with brush in hand, approaching a canvass with confident sense of form.

A small isolated town is not a place for animosity, hatred and bad manners. You see your townsfolk nearly every day and deal with them whether they are nice or not. So you learn how to get along. This too is art—bending your lines of personality to enhance the town canvass. The water tower represents cooperation, necessity of nourishing the whole, and the importance of community. Big cities don’t paint this way.

You don’t put a sign like this on a road entering Pasadena. You get laughed at if you do, and jokes are flung. Here too it brings some quips, but everyone understands it, and they think it better to have the sign than not to have it. This too is community art.

Crossing the Line

2009-12-29T17:24:00.000-08:00

Rainy River, a boundary between countries, has a bridge with a pedestrian lane that is like walking through a factory. The bridge is just upstream from the dam, which makes electricity for twin paper mills—ours and the Canadian. Short trains cross the bridge trading wood chips and bark with Canada. A noisy conveyor pipe carries more chips and bark, equalizing supply between friendly countries. And trucks carry more supplies. A pedestrian must weave among the industrial shapes and stay within white lines which are under white snow. But few pedestrians cross this way, and I am always a kind of novelty for the customs agents on both sides. They always ask why I am crossing and then why I am staying so long in International Falls. I answer as honestly as I can, and they always say something like, “That’s a new one.” They search my pack, sometimes my coat, and say, “Have a good day.”

Walk with me through the industrial maze of borderland, through pictures taken in order from US to Canada, left to right, and again, left to right.

Christmas lights designed to look like icicles, now encased in real icicles.

A tree just inside Canada, still celebrating Christmas.

Windy Cold

2009-12-28T17:44:00.000-08:00

After forty days in the Icebox, I have come to believe certain things. These are not the same as things I observe, measure and record, nor things I deduce. No, there are some things of which I say, “I hold these truths to be self evident.” Upon such belief, I proceed to build a life as America built a nation. If you prove me wrong with science, I will smile and acquiesce, but my beliefs will not change. They will comfort me and guide my actions far longer than mere reason or science.

One such belief is that “cold” is not just the absence of heat as science says, but is instead a real quality, more real perhaps than heat. Aristotle called it “primum frigidum” and has been “proven” wrong. But I know he is right because I know cold.

Now, you will respond by saying, “Define cold.”

As soon as I try to define it, something goes haywire, so I say that it can’t be defined. And I hear you say, “But definitions are the foundation of reason. If you can’t define “cold” there is no way you can say it exists.” Please forgive as I have this dialog with you, writing your thoughts with my fingers, I do enjoy it; but defining “cold” is like defining art; it leads to wonderful schools of experts who determine where each artist succeeds or fails. Some things are best left undefined.

I can single out aspects of “cold” such as pinpricks, numbness, shivers, icicles hanging from glasses, creaking sound of a frozen coat, squeak of boots. But these do not substantiate its existence; and it does exist. With definition blocked, I view “cold” as a romantic, undisturbed by thought structures. Without cold, poetry about it would disappear, since it has no practical value and seldom makes sense.

When I am Nordic skiing in a wind chill of say, minus twenty, I see the world as a trinity of cold, mind and matter. The past exists only in memory, the future only in plan. Present and cold, the only reality. Cold is the parent of mind and matter, the source of all subjects and objects. And now you are about to say, “This is preintellectual and unimportant in light of science and reason.” Or maybe I have convinced you; it doesn’t matter. Today, I met cold again, my ski tracks left in the past.

Oak leaves die in the fall as do birch, alder and lilac leaves. But unlike its peers, the tree holds onto a few of its summer memories. They flutter brown and brittle far into the winter. Only in a strong wind do they detach and land on snow as the only memories of summer.

Dry and not much growing
desert wind from the arctic

Some folks are not much into snow removal.

Map of the World

2009-12-27T17:20:00.000-08:00

Stop for passing trees! Look up to admire them along Sixth and Seventh Streets in the Nation’s Icebox—trees posed against a gray, still-snowy sky, a day after the first big snowfall.

“I just love the outline of bare branches. Seems to be a map of something I don't understand but am drawn to” –Liz

“Bare branches against the sky—a mysterious map” –Kathabela

The paintings on the right are by Toti O’Brien from her Map series, posted at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/poetsonsite/TheArtOfTotiOBrienInTheLivingRoomGallery#5401231225419451618 by Kathabela.

My poems between the trees and the paintings were inspired by two kinds of maps.

Follow That Tree

I judge each branch by look and feel
like buying fruit from unknown trees
like choosing roads from maps
but after holding, feeling many
I sense the tree has grafted limbs
each unique, but from a whole

trunk and branches, twigs
their bent and pretty form
how they spread and seem to aim
pointing upward in a general way
though roundabout with interest
my tone is altered by their form
in seeing things unseen by them
partly through tree eyes I see
a tree across the street

Come, Climb on Me

I decide to stand awhile
let feet take root
wet earth between my toes
moss creeps my legs and arms
leaves sprouting from my hair
maybe a child will climb me
find his way along my paths
perhaps that boy I saw last summer
throwing pebbles
to an empty fountain
afraid to join the baseball game
too much wisdom for his age?
not made for worlds like this?
I want to say —
If not you, who?
give him comfort
like trees can

The Easy Way

A tree with crocked branches
brushes gently on the wall
smooth siding of a human home

suggesting to whoever listens
how very different
men and nature build

nature trembles in the breeze
stretches asymmetric
yearns, adjusts, and bends

human houses, measured, plumb
concepts mapped, bold and true
lines on paper, expressed in walls.

mankind strives
for straight and level
more special than we are

the tree looks on
at perpendicular
and asks how that is better.

Content, But Lacking

I was once a tree
void of leaves
naked and brittle
cold hardened
to outlast winter

you fell gently on me
like a snowflake
not needed, but warm
like a spring leaf
with a faulty map
come when leaves must die

you rested softly
repaired a breach
where I knew no lack
restored forgotten paths
created a place to dwell

Here are more trees, map-like, to follow in curious directions, but always leading upward to their tips. Buds surviving winter will lead onward in spring.

Mountains of Snow

2009-12-26T14:42:00.000-08:00

Last night, we sat together at The Roadhouse Night Club, two miles east of I-Falls, on Christmas. “Why would anyone cook for Christmas at home,” said a speaker of consensus, a jovial man who stopped by our table to bring holiday greeting. The dinner was free to everyone, and we could drop a donation to charity in the box if we so desired. The food was donated by Super-One Foods and the nightclub did the cooking. So many people came out in the snowstorm that parking became precarious.

I sat with two athletic women—a triathlon competitor and a searcher for ancient petroglyphs. When I mentioned the bike travels, they wanted details, nuts and bolts. We agreed to do some Nordic skiing together before I leave.

It snowed all night, and in the morning I had to sweep away snow just to get across the deck and down the steps. It was the first morning that I really saw a need for snow removal. Once outside, I climbed over a four-foot-high ridge of snow that the plow left along the road. Nobody will get in or out of here by car until somebody removes this snow. I walked to Sandy’s, trudging in knee-deep new snow, around piles of pushed-up snow, and along a narrow walking strip between the cleared driving lane on the road and the bank of snow that the plow left. Nobody was in Sandy’s except me and Katrina. She got stuck driving, but somebody gave her a push, and she made it. “All the streets in town are impassable except a few plowed ones,” she said, “and for those you have to shovel your driveway.”

The snowshoes were not much help as I left to see this for myself. I sank all the way down to solid old snow, just as I did in boots. And since they are harder to pull out of the snow than boots, I decided they need to wait for stiffer snow. I set out along a plowed road to see a snowstorm, as heavy snow continued to fall, Jack frost nipping at my nose.

I decided not to skate on the ice rink today.

Limber ladies, intertwined
bend their boughs and share the load
this too will slide away

Stronger
able against the wind
because we have each other

Seventeenth Street is the southern leg of a triangle that encloses most of International Falls. It’s two miles across, and today I think it was easier walking than driving.

The city plows snow from the road to the side, while the businesses move snow from parking lots to the road. Where the two movings meet, a mountain of snow rises that will surely remain until spring. It sounds competitive, but is not. I hear them talking and arranging piles. It’s a community effort.

Some people like to do their snow blowing in comfort.

Looking along Third Street, the main street of town—on the left is how it looks today. On the right is how it looked yesterday. I cannot walk the sidewalk today as I could yesterday. The plows have made the street passable but hardly parkable, and if you are walking, it has to be done where the cars go.

A Very White Christmas

2009-12-25T16:04:00.000-08:00

After a night of snowfall, I walked into old town and Coffee Landing Metro, the only place open today. “No charge on Christmas,” said the owner when I tried to pay. Big flakes fall as I take this picture of the place. You can sit either inside or out.

I tried to make a snowball as I walked a residential street. Few people decorate their houses like this one. Most houses show no interest in Christmas. No snowmen either, no carrot noses or cabbage ears. So I set out to correct the oversight with the rolling of a big snowball on which my plan called for two more. But I couldn’t even get it a foot in diameter before it crumbled no matter how hard I tried to compact the loose snow. Could it be that in the Icebox of the Nation snow is too cold for snowballs? Is warmer snow required for compaction? I gave up and kept walking.

The downtown street, Third Street, is nearly vacant of cars and crowded with snowflakes. They fall sidewise, and my camera catches them in its flash.

A Christmas tree seems appropriate, so I photographed this one near the library.

Where is my bicycler? All his tracks are gone now. Has something happened?

Is this a road or park perhaps? Maybe it’s a railroad. If a gray squirrel has hidden nuts here, how will he find them?

It seemed like a good day to try out the snow shoes that I brought and have never used. Is this how snowshoe tracks are supposed to look?

Happy Christmas from Frostbite Falls

2009-12-24T17:25:00.000-08:00

Snow falling this morning, coming in sideways on southeast wind. I walked to the Post Office and the coffee shop in old downtown, a warm twenty degree stroll, enjoying the pleasant sting of flakes on my cheeks and their cold taps on my eyes. Everyone is outside it seems—snow shovels, snowplows, snow blowers, snow scrapers and pickup trucks with mounted blades—all seeming to have as much fun as frolicking children making snowmen and snowballs. Yet I see not a single snowman, no snow forts, no snow angels, and even the snowmobiles are silent. All such activities stop for the all-important community effort of snow removal.

A man remarks at midday that the job is complete for now, to which his eightish son says, “But Dad, I snow blowed half of it.” And another man says, “It’s not so bad with six inches. It’s when ya got a foot that it’s harder.” I felt so bad not participating that I got the broom from under the stairs and took five minutes out of important activities to sweep the snow from my deck and steps. The forecast calls for three days of snowfall. I am thrilled about this, but must restrain my excitement; everyone worries that too much effort will expend in removing snow and that the piles will get too big and too much in the way.

I did not post anything yesterday, so let me tell you about the old snow that now lies about six inches buried. It was not silent under my boots as today’s new snow is. Something about snow that has been around for several days gives it a musical quality that new snow has to learn. Walking on old snow sounds like Styrofoam boots walking on Styrofoam. It still kicks up and carries in the breeze like new snow or like dust in the desert, but it also plays musical notes. I think the tones are lower at higher temperatures. Yesterday, it screeched under my skis and squealed as my poles turned to push away—odd sounds for snow to make. It was twenty degrees, ten degrees warmer than last time I skied the Blue Ox Trail, and the difference allowed me to go without a face mask.

This evening, I attended the Candlelight Eve at Zion Lutheran Church. I didn’t know that this tradition would quadruple the normal Sunday attendance and that everyone dresses up. Women walked through six inches of new snow from their cars to the door in pumps, wiping their feet and stocking legs with a cloth upon entering. I can only imagine how the snow felt on their feet, sliding in over tops of their pumps. I came in insulated clod-hopping boots, as always, and slid into my dress shoes on arrival. I wore nice pants and felt underdressed.

I came early and had to ask several people if empty seats were saved. Families sit together; a son or daughter comes early to save seats. Finally I sit by Julie, also by herself. This Christmas Eve tradition is part of the unity within families, I see it on faces of children and grandmothers, love and friendship, ties and commitment.

A Young Town

2009-12-22T16:13:00.000-08:00

Snowflakes sparkle on this sunny day like stars in the night.

Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, is a fictional small town created for the “Rocky and His Friends Show.” Rocket J. Squirrel, better known as "Rocky," and his pal, Bullwinkle J. Moose cartooned their way to popularity during the 1960s. But after living here a while, it’s pretty easy to see that Frostbite Falls is a parody on the real-life town of International Falls.

Rainy Lake and Rainy River, with their many islands, contain the boundary between the US and Canada. Near Frostbite Falls are the fictional Veronica Lake and an island called Moosylvania, of which Bullwinkle was "Governor." The U.S. claims the island is part of Canada, and Canada claims it is part of the U.S. Bullwinkle vacations in Moosylvania because "after two weeks here, anyplace else feels like Heaven."

Perhaps this unnamed island in Rainy River, seen from the north end of Ninth Avenue, is the writer’s inspiration for Moosylvania Island. Perhaps gray squirrels like Rocky dart about on it as they do here on the mainland, looking for nuts they squirreled away in the fall, and can’t quite remember where.

So much happened here before any town was—so many snowstorms, squirrels and native people—that to talk about the town’s history seems like discussing yesterday. Yet, here you have it—“old” buildings of a town that began around 1905.

The Bauscher Brothers still have their name faintly visible on the meat market (left photo), now a coffee house. Built 100 years ago, a few of the old meat hooks still drop from the ceiling. Ice from the lake cooled the meat all summer, stored in straw. And the wood-burning water heater in the basement—well, it’s gone. But the owner likes to talk about the “old” times when the mill was young. The old ways of birchbark canoes and French-Canadian Voyageurs taking beaver skins to Europe, well, those are “really old.”

Today, the nicer houses overlook the river—Americans to the left, Canadians to the right, as you look westerly or downstream. You can view them from Riverside Drive, but don't park on the north side on odd days or the south side on even days, lest you be considered snow and heaped up along the side.

In Paths of Snowmobiles

2009-12-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

Two inches fell in the night, and I hear the rumble of snowplows in pre-dawn. They don’t have much snow to remove, so they make a lot of noise doing it. I still fail to agree with snow removal unless there is enough of it to keep cars from moving. But when only two inches fall, how is that reason for the plows to spring into action as if the town were on fire? The country roads, where plows have never gone this winter, seem just as fine for driving as the bare streets. I think the unplowed roads are safer because you know they are slippery and don’t have to wonder where the icy places are.

The city is not alone in fastidious snow removal. Larry shoveled his driveway and walk before coming to Sandy’s this morning. And Jerry has already got Russell here with his pickup-mounted plow to clear the parking lot. “Stop!” I want to scream from my deck. “You have done this all you lives, and you have not even thought about what you are doing!”

The warmer temperature allows the chemical that they mix with sand and flail from the backs of trucks to actually melt snow. When they spread the same mix after the last snow at minus ten degrees, there was no melting. Now we have slush, water, sandy mud and packed snow, all in different places on the road.

But soon I had finished breakfast at Sandy’s, finished holding my tongue about snowplows, and was off for Ranier via a new route to the east. It seems that everyone went to their garages, sheds, tarps and storage units this weekend and tuned up their snowmobiles. Tracks head out of town on every trace of a trail, and the trails cross and circle, leaving a new person, who might be looking for a new way to get somewhere, in a quandary. I have a compass but don’t need it, except under thick clouds. I follow the sun like a plant. Even at noon, it’s far down from overhead and hovering low in the south. So keeping the sun to my right in a general way, I follow the tracks, where the going is easier after they mash down the snow.

Today, the noon shadows are longer than on any other day. I say this with solstice certainty because historical repetitions act this winter as they always have, and it’s fair to say that such predictions are based on “laws.” But maybe it’s a religious belief. I’m surprised at how long the shadows are up here in borderland, compared to Southern California. I took these pictures within an hour of noon.

This picture is looking south into a cloud that hides the sun, so low it’s just above the trees. The other is my shadow, so long it seems like early morning or late afternoon.

Snowmobiles leave the land in this picture and go out onto the lake. I follow them, walking on water.

Tree shadows on thin ice.

Palm Fronds and Ice

2009-12-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

“Do you have family or friends here?’ says a woman I just met, just exchanged enough information with that she asks the obvious question. I want to create art for her, perform in her presence, so she feels my state of mind and relates to it in her own way. I want her to smile back at me with insight, thanking me for clarifying a feeling she already had. That’s the point of creativity and art, I think,—to express emotions in unusual ways so listeners or viewers find a part of themselves in me.

I have found it strange and gratifying how far from a listeners' experience some of my stories diverge, even from their desired experience, and still find a familiar tune in their repertoire. But the question this woman asks does not draw that response. I have answered it a dozen times and seldom has the glint of art appreciation returned to me from the questioner’s eyes.

“Over Christmas?” comes next, and I sense a spiral of irrecoverable honesty descending from my lips, and pity mixed with perceived stupidity returning from their eyes.

Such dialogs leave me feeling that I am inherently a wild thing, having no sense of friendship, family and home. Yes, my genome comes from wild, natural places. Sometimes I want to take it all the way, and say, “Should it be surprising, then, that when I go to places like here, I feel less stressed and more sane in the elemental world from which we all came?” But of course they are not ready for that and will read into it things like, “She is running away. I wonder what she wants to escape from.” But they are not willing to ask.

I have devised no answer that diverts their adverse reactions and still maintains some degree of truth. I figure they will either take in stride the fact that I simply want to be here, to experience winter, and learn why people stay here, as Katrina has, an Jerry wants to but can’t quite, or they will reject me as odd.

Perhaps if I did not have this question to answer with each new potential friend, I would not escape so often to the sweet elixir of wilderness. Possibly, by their asking why I came, I am driven farther into the truthful answer than if they had not asked. Maybe I love the accepting attitude of trees and the falling snow, and yes—cold, and move away from them more and more because they fail to accept my motive, and assume it is cover for something else. But trees really do bring to me the fresh body odor of nature, its matter of endurance, and animals accept or reject me based on my perceived threat to them, or my flavor—ideas I can usually deal with easier than the opinions of humans.

Yet, it is only because people have invaded and changed the wild by building roads and airports, that I am able to come here, and ride a bicycle through places like this, and experience it from the electric comfort of a motel. So I say to the woman that I want to experience winter, and yes, those dates include Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

After receiving her expected chagrin, I took a long walk in the woods. The air is almost twenty degrees, much warmer, and heavy clouds descend onto the treetops. Light snowflakes zigzag down. Wind is nil for a change, and all is quiet except for the raven’s squawk and distant sounds of humanity. On the way into town, I pass the skaters in Kerry Park, but do not stop. My first twenty years were chiseled into bungalows and tree-scattered streets of Pasadena. Skinny palm-ladies with frazzled braids so high we rode their locks like broomsticks, when they fell, rode them even higher, to heaven, as our bean stakes were guns and our red ants, friendly subjects. Childhood slips back through its private door as I see these skaters, even though we had no outdoor ice rink. The art of these hockey kids, their turns and yells, are my turns and yells, certain as if I’d been born right here ten years ago. In some shaded place these happenings are still there, unseen, but felt, still trying to say the unsaid things.

A snowmobile flies by on the Blue Ox Trail, carrying two young adventurers out of town. I come back to my rented room. Twenty-five days are left to finish whatever I will do here.

Hockey

2009-12-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

The ice rink at Kerry Park attracts the town kids on this school-free Saturday. Parents drop them off or wait in pickups while they skate. Some of the older ones arrive on snowmobiles. Only one adult beside me gets out on the ice and maneuvers the flurry of pucks, hockey sticks, and kids just having fun. They slap the pucks sending them into the wall with a bang, they intercept passes, as many girls as boys, some half as tall as me.

They look with curiosity at the older person on long blades. Figure skates they know, and all the kinds of hockey skates, but racing blades they can’t figure. They say nothing as I turn some slow laps, getting used to the cold ice, so different from the indoor rink of many years ago, and so many years since these blades felt any kind of ice. But as we cross each other’s paths, exchange expressions, turn to avoid collisions, eventually a hockey puck came to me. I flicked it back to them with my long blade, which they thought a cool thing for an older person with odd blades to do. Soon we mingled and followed one another, they quick and fast-turning, me methodical with long strokes. They could out-turn me, but on the long turns and open straights I gave them a pretty good run. Unlike me, they face the wind with unmasked faces, their cheeks a bright cherry red. I sense they feel that only wimps wear facemasks, and I am happy with that. It’s good to play with skaters who grew up far away from me and learned the sport in vastly different conditions. It reminds me of the movie where a city banjo player encounters back-woods Tennessee folk who learned banjo in a very different way. They bounce tunes off each other and pick up what the other knows.

The total snowfall this winter is a mere fourteen inches, while the average for this date is twenty-four. Two inches fell last Thursday, and it has been mostly pressed into the icy pack by tires or shoveled away by diligent storekeepers. My mystery bicycle rider has either eluded me in scarce snow or has gone missing. That was my thinking until this morning when I crossed the bridge into Canada and found his tracks barely discernable on the pedestrian bridge.

Greetings from Iceland

2009-12-18T16:06:00.000-08:00

A wide open field, where no one has walked after new snow, has no visible features. Walking over it feels like walking in total darkness, like space. Especially on this cloudy day, there is nothing to guide, no contrast, everywhere white. Looking back, only my footprints mark change. The cold spell is over now and I breathe easier, bare faced in ten degrees. This field is the back way into Holiday Inn, a plush hotel that I’ve avoided until today. It rests on a bluff overlooking Rainy River, having a fine restaurant with a view. It’s mostly vacant in the winter, but filled with fisherman and sightseers in the summer. I came for breakfast and was the only customer.

On the way home, I walked by Kerry Park, and my jaw dropped! After all the promises and delays, the city has finally flooded the concrete, and a shiny glaze of ice covers the area. Not a soul skating. I hurried back to get my skates, haven’t been on them in years. I laced up the racing blades that I still have from high school, when every week, Royal Blades met at Pasadena Winter Gardens on Arroyo Parkway. I skated behind Olympic racers then, never as good, not even close, but just being on the same ice with world champions felt promising. I’ve never skated on ice like this, outside, unrefrigerated, the way skating began. I felt clumsy at first, a beginner, and happy nobody watched. But an hour into it, the feeling of easy speed partly returned. I felt some control on the slippery ice, some balance, as I leaned into centrifugal force. Speed skating was my thrill then, much faster than running, crouching low to the ice, leaning heavily into the turns.

The pictures here look like a skater on some other world. I perched the camera on a rail, timer set. Somehow it could not adjust itself for ice. Tomorrow is Saturday; surely the town folk will be out skating, and someone will hold my camera.

Friendliness

2009-12-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

How does the old-timer we call Ray maneuver his walker, slowly, deliberately, inching ahead on his faulty legs over lumpy snowpack? Or the man so fat he can barely walk on a carpet, yet somehow makes it over icy snow to his car? Why don’t they move to Pasadena? And why do teens and adults fraternize in more numbers than Pasadena, and politeness in general is more prevalent? Why do they worry less about security, shoplifting, burglary and assault? They leave their car engines running while they shop.

Such questions intrigued me from the first week here. From my previous posts, you see that I am the self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and the recorder of progress of the advancing ice on the lake. My duties include the poetic inspiration of cold dogs, admiration of hardy fir trees, photography of snowflakes, ice crystals and bicycle tracks, and the study of friendliness. All these duties I perform while learning to survive bitter cold. I may say without boasting that I am faithfully doing my job. Still the city council does not admit me into the list of town officers, nor grant me even a small stipend. My records, they have not audited. As a poet said, “Poets are the last on the food chain.”

Maybe I will write an exposition of Now in Frostbite Falls. To interview and think until truths rise up. I wonder what it is like to know what everyone on an island is thinking at the same time—this little conclave of souls separated from the rest of society, especially in bad weather. If you lined all those thoughts up, would it add up to anything? So when this place came to me, it seemed a good opportunity to try to get my arms around a people and a place and a time. A community capsule of sorts. It took a while to figure what my subject is today.

About two inches of snow fell last night and it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. The temperature rose with the coming of snow, clear up to plus nine, and walking was a pleasure, without face covering. “Nice day,” said an old lady with a cane in one hand and dog leash in the other. Slipping is less of a hazard, and more people are outside.

But subtracting Holiday cheer, I wonder if the greater friendliness I sense here comes with hardship. It’s not a hard life, but it’s harder than Pasadena, as far as weather and isolation affect hardness. I wonder if cave people were friendlier because their lives were harder.

Calm

2009-12-16T14:45:00.000-08:00

Smoke rises almost vertically from the mill this morning. Never in my recorded history in this place have I seen such calm. Not that it’s a windy place, but every day there has been enough wind to make the cold seem colder. But today I walk in minus eleven degrees with my coat half unzipped.

(For information about wind chill, see http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/windchill/index.shtml I have walked in temperatures of 0 to -20 with winds of 5 to 15 mph.)

I passed a brown dog beside the road, sitting, shivering—a short-hair domestic breed not built for cold. I say, “Hi, cold dog,” to which her ears lower, sensing a safe creature, no danger. Perhaps I relieved her boredom, and she felt loneliness wane in nearness of another soul, the comfort of two in the same predicament, put out in the cold. “Were you tossed out for some misdeed?” I ask. “Is that why you sit here shivering?” She lets me pat her head. “You should go run and sniff for new life. That’s what I did in your shoes.” Then I slap my leg and shout. “Come with me!” Her tail wags. We walk together and I watch lethargy leaving her. She sniffs a tree, trots into the woods and returns as if to tell me what she found, her tongue emerging for the first time since I met her, as if to post a blog, or say, “I think I smelled a beaver, but it might have been a mink or weasel. I’m going back. You come too.” But I did not understand, and soon the dog went away after scents I cannot know. I have to believe that this dog did not give in to the shivering lethargic symptoms of hypothermia, but carried on somehow, if not back to the one who put her out, then to another or to solo exploring. Maybe she feels, while darting after smells in the woods, that life does not end with rejection, but goes on if you make it. Maybe from here on she will want to live as well as she can for now, just sail ahead confidently, trusting her little ship to currents of the time.

For humans, hypothermia begins when the core temperature drops to about ninety-five degrees, and we shiver uncontrollably. We may become argumentative and detached from our surroundings; mind slows. We become “cold stupid” and sleepy like the dog was when I met her. At ninety-three degrees, amnesia sets in, and we can’t even remember where our glove is. At ninety-one degrees, apathy takes over; we no longer care; muscles become stiff and unresponsive. And I have seen them like this in a warm room.

Most creatures deal with the cold. They fly south, hibernate, or learn to breathe without icing their glasses. I’m inspired by them every time I see one in the morning who has made it through the night. But the ones that take my breath away sometimes and leave me wondering how anything can be so tough, are the trees. These spruce and balsam firs, with their delicate cambium layers just under thin bark, cells that if frozen will die, standing in one place, growing high into the wind—they dazzle me. They stand out in the open, dormant but exposed, not dug into a burrow or snow mound like some cowering thin-blooded hibernator. Redwoods die at five degrees above zero, but these trees survive in minus forty in blizzard winds. Spruce branches arc gracefully downward allowing snow to slide to the ground, and the fir boughs flex to shed snow. Lesser life would just break.

I don’t see many icicles. It takes the thawing of snow on a roof to send water dripping over the eve to freeze again. Once in a while, on a south-facing eve, a dark strip of exposed roof absorbs the sun and melts some snow, but that is rare. What we have here on this east-facing eve must be a roof over a weakly insulated ceiling, allowing heat to rise into the attic. Whatever caused it, this picture is unusual. I am turning away, like a local resident, from the ordinary wonders that I captured me during the first month, to shoot the bazaar and “beautiful.” And this makes me ask why a beautiful picture has to be unusual.

Shadow of a tree cast on thin ice. A poem lives here. I can sense it.

Glacier Ice

2009-12-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

Another morning with the thermometer on my deck reading minus eighteen, much lower than normal. Every morning when I get up, I record it, and again when it appears high for the day. In the table below, I compare the normal highs with my actual highs for December 7 to 14. All of my daily highs are far below normal, the greatest difference being twenty-five degrees.

.............High for the day ........... Mean high
..............per thermometer .........for the day
Date .....on my deck ....................per US data

12/7 ........10 ......................................21
12/8 .........0 .......................................21
12/9 .........2 .......................................20
12/10 .....-5 .......................................20
12/11 ...... 0 .......................................20
12/12 ...... 0 .......................................10
12/13 .....-8 ........................................19
12/14 .......2 ........................................18

After a normal stop at Sandy’s, I headed west into the wind, along the Blue Ox Trail to Fifteenth Street, followed it to where it ends, then across the open field to Highway 11. After that, it’s not far through the Rainy River Community College campus to Super Value Foods, nearly an hour in all.

My mystery bicyclist did not show me his tracks today, and I know he comes this way. Maybe the packed snow is getting too slick even for his knobby treads. It is almost too slick for my coil-clad boots.

Since no snow has fallen in many days, and none has melted during the cold snap, any snow left on streets and parking lots has remained, pressed down under enough tires to compact it into hard, almost ice. In some places it is ice, having that clear, shiny, dangerous surface. I take to the woods and fields more these days to avoid it.

Ten thousand years ago in these parts, snow was being compressed under its own weight, and the ice so formed was sliding slowly, grinding rock and mixing the grindings with ice to form a dark mass like what I see on streets today. When the glaciers melted, their non-water load was left for us to interpret. In a similar way, this dirty snow on the streets carries its own modern load—cigarette butts, dog droppings, brown leaves, and a mix of sand and chemical placed there to melt the snow, but which has been captured by the snow-ice it tried to melt. All things falling on the ice will reappear.

Meanwhile, in these modest but charming houses on Seventh Street, residents worry that not enough snow has fallen to insulate the ground against penetrating frost. They fear their pipes could freeze. And in the cold mornings I see jumper cables trying to start cars. But jovial Larry, from his stool inside Sandy’s, pulls a clicker from his pocket, presses a button, says, “Now my car is started.”

Going Too Fast

2009-12-14T19:45:00.001-08:00

I rented a car today in order to see farther than a day’s walk. I had to walk forty-five minutes in morning cold of minus fifteen to get the car, and I did it in my “big ugly bear-scaring coat.” But once in the heated car I was traveling west at an inhuman rate of some forty miles an hour. It felt strange going so fast—unnatural. I could not go that fast all the time; there was snowpack and hills, and sights to see out the window. It all happened so fast.

I drove seventy miles along Rainy River, just south of the border, without a single service, just the forest, the river, the occasional log truck and me. There are no towns near International Falls that are larger, nothing bigger within two hundred miles. I stopped at Baudette, where she said, “The pancakes are huge. Are you sure?” I said, “No problem,” seeing that eggs, pancakes and coffee total $4.99. They were a foot in diameter and half an inch thick.

I turned south on 72 into even more loneliness. Forests which are thick and tall at I-Falls, thin and shorten as I travel south, apparently in poor soil, and barely a cultivated field in the next sixty miles. Sometimes an open acreage looks like an ocean with white waves.

At Upper Red Lake, I see tire tracks leading out of a cove, and way out on the lake, in the far distance, little houses where ice fishermen wait. I remember Jerry saying that he’s improved his ice house and is anxious to tow it onto Rainy Lake for Northern Pike. He will cut a three-foot-square hole in the ice. Then he puts a minnow in a little harness—no hook. He lowers it on a string. Pretty soon a Northern comes along, bites the minnow, and won’t let go. He pulls the fish in without even using a hook. Sometimes the Northerns are not hungry, just curious. He can see them swimming around just below the ice, so he takes a spear and gets them that way. I say how interesting that would be to watch, but I would not buy a fishing license. Of course the answer I want is, “Why don’t you come with us, just as an observer. That’s legal?” I still have to work on getting that answer.

I head northwest on 71 back toward home—more sparse forests, the occasional farm, and on occasion, a healthy-looking stand of trees that seem like conquers on a battlefield where little else can survive.

Dress Code

2009-12-13T14:28:00.001-08:00

Below are some of the outfits I have donned in the many cold treks. They are shown here in chronological order and in order of increasing cold. I present them again for your amusement and comments concerning alien arrivals, fierce and frightening costumes for scaring away bears and wooly mammoths. But my padding is not exactly appropriate in the company of nice people. For example, when I walk to the dignified services of Zion Lutheran Church, a transformation is needed before I accept the nicely printed program and take a place in one of the pews. The other parishioners drive to the door, unload their women and then park the car nearby. One woman who does not have a man to deposit her within twenty feet of the door said, "I come early so I can park close." The women remove their coats, hang them on the rack just inside and they are ready. But my walk of just fifteen minutes, does not allow for high heels with open toes, or for a skirt not underlain with substantial leggings. I don’t want to leave Frostbite Falls with its two words meaning any more than the name of place. So how did I perform the miraculous transformation from the way I look below to the picture at the left, taken this morning at church? A magician never divulges her secrets and neither will I, except to say that the thermometer on my deck read minus eighteen when I started for church, the coldest so far. Go figure.

A Deer and Me

2009-12-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

A road where only three have walked
since the last snow from a week ago—
a deer, an unknown rodent, and me.

Fifteen years ago, the shooting of wolves was outlawed, and the situation has returned to the way it was. “We shot ‘em then,” says Jerry over motel coffee, “we had ‘em pretty well wiped out. Back then, you could let a pregnant cow have her calf in the field. No more. Wolves will get that calf every time. You could have sheep and goats back then, but no more.” I say something foreign and inane in this setting, about a balance in nature, to which Jerry compassionately shrugs. “Now it’s like it was in the real early days, where any dog, sheep or calf was gone if not kept inside.” I ask if children had ever been taken by wolves. He said he’d never heard of it. They will circle around a lone person in the woods at night and growl—enough to scare a person to death, but no reports of actual attacks.

Deer are in short supply this season, partly from wolves, partly because the snow fell so deep last winter and they had a hard time getting down to the food. And when the snow crusts over, it gives the wolves an advantage—they don’t fall through the crust like deer do, and can easily catch them.

“Usually we see a lot of deer in town,” Jerry says, “because they are smart enough to know that the wolves will not come in. But this year there’s hardly any.”

“Coming into town is a very smart adaptation,” I comment. “Such species will survive the human explosion.” Again, I see the local shrug in response to the city-girl comment. “Deer are smart in some things, but stupid too,” he says. “Once, a deer ran into the side of my pickup in broad daylight. Once, one jumped over the hood of a friend’s moving car in the daytime.”

While deer are digging away the snow to expose their meager winter browse, several bird species tough it out rather than migrate or hibernate, feeding frantically to supply the calories needed to stay warm. I notice it too. Heat from the lungs goes into warming the air, which noticeably increases breathing and heart rate for a simple act like walking on the level. Some people say they have to walk slower in the winter. I tend to walk at the same speed as in Pasadena, but with greater effort.

I walked out of town on a country road today, feeling braver against the cold, willing to venture farther, now that I’ve acquired basic skills. I remember telling a lady at the Lutheran church that I came here like a stork with a headstrong notion. She said it reminded her of something, and when I saw her the next time she gave me this poem from one of the oldest books in the Bible, Job, Chapter 39:

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork.

She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,

unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.

She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,

for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.

Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.

Though God did not give me wisdom perhaps, I remember the lessons learned: the icy fall where, in a blink, what felt like firm footing became slicker than oil. Thin snow on top of ice smashed me onto the concrete where I trembled and crab-waked, sliding shamefully on my behind, and now the solution with steel coils on my boots. And the much talked about icing of my glasses, now relieved through proper breathing. I will not describe the difficult maneuver of peeing in the woods after finding a private bush, only to say that for women it’s a bit more complicated.

Yes, I feel all grown up today as I walk, far from warm shelters. My stories from here on will no doubt involve exploits that show me in a good light. I have enough confidence in myself that I could create a meaningful life even in Siberia if I decided on that location.

A field under a dreary sky—a Poet’s Farm if only for five minutes

A house on a country lane, a home for a short rest or a lifetime

Welcome to my winter hometown

Sunny and Cold

2009-12-11T18:12:00.000-08:00

Before first light, I opened the door, felt the air, and looked at the thermometer as I do every morning. Today it says minus seventeen. I feel a breeze, and loose snow is drifting about as if it can’t decide where to land. I dress for moderate cold—coat, gloves, hat, and bare face—for the ten-minute walk to Sandy’s. Heavy attire is not needed if you do like the locals and keep your walks short.

On the way I see a most beautiful sky. Daybreak is just beginning, a crescent moon in the south. It is the first morning I have seen the moon or stars; overcast has been the norm. But the astounding thing is not so much this crystal clear morning, but the snow-white brilliance of the moon and the fluorescent deep blue of its backdrop. I have never seen a morning sky so beautiful. I have heard that cold air makes the night lovely. And also that clear air makes the night cold. Both are here today, and I have to stop watching before my face freezes.

The counter crew forms up inside Sandy’s—left to right: Bob, Woody, me, Larry, Christina. And before us, Katrina, like a coach with final encouragements before the game. In the background a radio says, “The Weather Service has issued a severe cold warning for today, wind-chill down to minus forty.” The sun begins to rise as we consider the good and the bad of a day like today, the risks and the pleasures. But despite what anyone warns, this day is too beautiful to miss. I must go out in it, feel it, and learn what it wants to teach. Occasionally, I’m amazed at how determined I am to capture this time and place.

Back in my room I put on the full regalia for the cross-town and through-the-woods jaunt to see this bright and sunny day and to do some shopping. Where I follow roads, I tread on packed snow. The main streets are cleared and dry from all the plowing and chemical sprinkling. I usually avoid them in favor of residential streets where snow is packed to a brown icy mat. Some places appear glassy slick, but my slip-resisting boot coils hold firm. I enjoy the squeak of packed snow under my feet, almost musical, like a bird call.

Thawing temperatures have not been felt in over a week, and no new snow has fallen except an occasional powdering. I trudge through soft powder in the woods and fields. Wind has whipped up the flakes and formed them into little drifts that look like white sand dunes.

Crystals grow on grass and twigs, delicate and lifelike as if some winter-spring life has sprung from the dormant plants.

Again, I see the mysterious bicycle track. Its tread appears the same, shown here with my boot print. The coils on my boot leave distinctive marks in the packed snow. I have left these prints beside this bicycle track in many places now. I wonder if he wonders whose they are.

Fog rises from the river as if it boils with fish ready for some giant feast.

The main roads are clear and dry but fluffy powder covers the grass. Most of it fell a week ago and moves with the wind, unable to melt.

Seven-Mile-Walk at Eleven Below

2009-12-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I felt satisfied that my new breathing techniques had solved the problem of ice on my glasses. I learned to direct exhaling air downward inside my face covering toward my chin and neck. As long as I remembered to do this, glasses stayed clear. But if I forgot for just a few breaths, then ice started to build up on the lenses, and did not go away. When it got so bad that I couldn’t see, I had to stop and remove one glove, remove glasses, blow on them to melt the ice, then wipe the lenses with a napkin—a difficult maneuver, leaving one hand cold.

But today is the coldest morning so far—eleven degrees below zero this morning, about thirty degrees below average for this date, with wind at about ten miles per hour. I didn’t know how I would fare in cold like this and seriously thought I might not be able to breathe. When my sister went to Fairbanks in the winter to visit her daughter, she said that when it got colder than ten below, including wind chill, that she could not breathe and went scrambling back inside. I figured this might surpass my limit, and would have to spend the day reading, writing, blogging, emailing.

Despite all this, I determined to try and to do everything right. I would begin the 3.5-mile walk to Ranier, and if I make it, to visit Grandma’s Pantry again. If the going became too hard, I would return to my warm room. I feel like a child just learning how to go outside.

I did the usual preparations—set my glasses outside to cool, put on my coverings, and left with the face mask pulled down to expose my mouth. I have learned that glasses ice immediately if I start with my mouth covered. On previous days, starting this way, my lips would begin to hurt after about five minutes, and I would pull the mask up. Today, being the coldest, I expected to pull it up sooner.

But twenty minutes pass, and my lips are still movable, the pain diminishing. Could it be that I have toughened against the cold? Wind kicks up loose snow around my feet and feels like it is blowing little knives into my face. After half an hour I touch my glove to the exposed skin on my lips and know that I still have feeling. This means that frostbite has not attacked my only exposed skin. It approaches without any pain or discomfort, taking away feeling from freezing skin. As cold penetrates muscles and tendons, the ability to move is lost. So here I am in minus eleven with a wind chill of perhaps minus thirty, and exposing my lips to the elements. An hour passes, trudging through drifted snow and packed snow. I find a snowmobile track, and it eases the pushing of my boots against loose snow. Ranier is only a mile away now, and I don’t feel cold, glasses not iced. I feel like a conqueror.

I approach Grandma’s Pantry just as a train moves slowly to the road crossing, where Grandma’s is just on the other side. I pick up my pace knowing that trains can take half an hour or more to cross this road on their way to or from Canada. Inside Grandma’s, the air is seventy and I peal back the layers. Wild rice pancakes and coffee feel perfect, and Grandma asks how far I walked.

This train is going to Canada, and we watch it from the window—dozens of empty lumber cars, empty gondolas that say “potash”, tank cars with “Canadian National” on their sides, grain cars with elaborate graffiti in huge mural-like displays of ornate letters spelling unfamiliar words or acronyms, painted by artists from a different world, but artists just the same. Now a tanker with a foot of snow on top as if it alone stood here for the past two weeks. The train stops on the road. “Have to go around,” says one of the diners to nobody in particular. But going around would be three miles out of my way, so I have another cup of coffee. “Oh, you miserable thing” says Grandma’s daughter to the train. Ranier is cut in half by the tracks, and these long delays have given Grandma’s customers something to complain about for the past twenty years. Finally the huge and lumbering snake of civility clanks its couplings and creaks away into Canada. Its empty cars will return from the country, giving lumber to American cities. Forests of Canada will hand their logs to the mill at International Falls. Out go huge rolls of paper, in come the books. Here come your groceries, country.

Can it be that a creature reared in the mild winters of Southern California can adapt to a winter like this, can live outside in severe cold? Am I really becoming able to stand it the way loggers do in these woods, working all day in this cold to feed the paper mill and their families? I wonder if my body has become more able to stand cold than most of the people who live here and never stay outside for more than a few minutes. After walking home I feel pretty good now with a glass of wine to celebrate. Seven miles walked at eleven below, or some thirty below counting the wind. 7-11 ~ It’s a gambler’s lucky call, but I feel better than lucky.

A note about the pictures:
(Dates, starting at the top: 11/19, 11/24, 11/27, 12/2, 12/10)
Whenever I go to Ranier, I stop at the bridge where the bike trail crosses an inlet of Rainy Lake. I have watched the lake change from water to ice to snow. In the sequence of pictures at the left, advancing ice, starting at the shore and now past the mouth of the inlet and far out onto the main lake.

Tara’s Wharf

2009-12-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

“I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.”
—William Cowper

Tara is one of the many people I emailed and telephoned in search of winter accommodations. She lives in Ranier, three miles east of International Falls, a village on the shore or Rainy Lake. Initially, her price was too high, and I told her that I only want Internet, non-smoking, heat, and quiet. Tara’s Wharf, as she calls her four-unit B&B, has suites with bedroom, kitchen and sitting room, all with views of the lake. Breakfast is not served in the winter, but still, Tara’s Wharf is a very nice place. Nobody rents the units in the winter except for a businessman who stays there all year. She offered me a unit for nearly the same price as my simple room in International Falls. I refused only because Ranier has no stores and only one restaurant—Grandma’s Pantry with her famous wild rice pancakes. I would have to walk, ski or snowshoe three miles for staples.

Tara drove to my room in a minivan, pulling a trailer. As we rode to Ranier, she said, “It has 260,000 miles, about time to turn it in.” Her trailer carries three large plastic tanks. “I bought them to set on the boat dock. When full of water, they’ll hold the dock in place against ice pressure and keep it from breaking.”

I had walked to Ranier a few days before and ran into Tara at Grandma’s Pantry. I didn’t want to call her unless the place in I-Falls didn’t work out. But there she was and we talked briefly before she had to go show somebody a house.

She called me a day later and offered to come and take me to Tara’s Wharf, no obligation. “My businesses, ” she said on the way, “fill up the summers and part of the winters. I buy and sell houses, rent apartments and houses. I look at every place as a place to own, at least for a while.”

Tara’s Wharf was an industrial building that she bought and changed into the B&B. We sat inside what could be my winter home, looking at the lake. “You can sit here with your morning coffee and watch the otters climbing onto the dock,” she says.

I ask about going out on the ice. She explains that the lake begins to narrow here and the current increases as it becomes Rainy River. The ice is unreliable here, thin and unpredictable. Thick ice forms to the east in the broad part of the lake. Visitors don’t always know this and get into trouble. Last winter, she says, three snowmobiles came over the ice right here. The one in front went down. The other two were able to stop. It took a helicopter to get the poor man out of the water, and amazingly he survived. There is still a snowmobile somewhere on the bottom.

She says that every property she sees is an investment in her eyes. Not so much a money-maker as a raw material from which she creates art. “The money is nice,” she says, “But it’s the art that I’m after.” I understand immediately, and tell the story of John and our six-month jaunt about the United States, looking for a site for the best little farm in America. It didn’t have to be a good farm, but it needed to instill an image in our minds. We settled on forty-seven acres in Tennessee with a house that needed a lot of work.

Taught by those months in searching, considering properties for their future rows of corn and secluded home sites, I can’t escape what I have come in later life to call, The Poet’s Farm. Now, while resting after cycling or while skiing through the woods, I scan the countryside, and there I might live, and did live once. I’ve become accustomed to consider almost every country property as place to build a home or farm. In imagination, I have bought them all in succession. Whenever I sit for a spell on a piece of land, there I might live. And there I did live for an hour, a week, a month or seven years. I see in these imaginary farms how I could let the years run off there. And see the spring come in. Thus I became rich without any damage to my poverty. Each property yields for me the most abundant crop of the kind I want, if I can only leave it alone. For it makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. Imaginary farms are better, each one now a poem, uninterrupted by hoeing. They are mine as much as the owner’s.

Tara’s Wharf is really nice, but I fear that getting to groceries or any place but nearby Grandma's Pantry might be difficult. She responds, saying people will take me to town. I wonder. She lives nearby, but is gone a lot. It’s just so nice right there on the lake.

December Plunge

2009-12-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

The storm which hit much of the north Midwest did not leave much snow here. Instead it sent the thermometer to minus ten when I looked at it this morning, and barely got up to zero this afternoon. I have never walked very far on a day so cold, so I did the safe and conservative thing—a couple of jaunts about town, not out for more than half an hour at a time. The only real problem was fogging of my glasses, or I should say “icing.” Fog usually evaporates away, but ice tends to get thicker. Removing it requires taking off my gloves, finding the napkin in my pocket and rubbing hard to remove the ice. By then my hand is cold. Everything is harder at minus ten than it is at ten. And it’s not long before the glasses are iced again. Any Eskimos out there with suggestions?

I did some work in the meantime, a little AutoCad, and in the process made this plot of the temperature data I have been collecting from the thermometer outside my door. You can see that while November was mild, December has plunged way below normal. And the next few days are supposed to be about the same.

Generation Gap

2009-12-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

A little more snow falls each day, but not enough to erase a day’s boot holes. My Saturday tracks from home to Sandy’s are easily traceable this morning. They follow my tracks from an unknown number of days. Only two or three other set of boot holes go this way.

Having few tracks to examine, I easily become a tracker. This one wears knobby boots—high tops, size 10 or so, longer stride than mine, feet not lifted much between steps, dragged through the top layer of loose snow, probably male and tall.

These steps I know—have tracked this one before—size 12 or larger, smooth soles with the slightest cross ridges, half-inch heel, stride considerably less than mine, boots barely lifted between steps. These tracks are fresh from this morning and they belong to Larry. He walks four blocks to Sandy’s, and today he has beat me there. I will see him at the end of the counter on his regular stool and will hear some friendly, but unpredictable greeting, like “I’ve been coming here fourteen years,” or “Used to be twenty-five below, every morning.”

But he’s quite today, doesn’t say much—good days and bad, he’s said. So I remark, “Sparks fly off the snowplow blade at dawn this morning,” and give a little laugh, like a child who has not seen such wonders before. “Christmas cheer,” I add, and get a rather bland “Yep.” Larry knows the seasons and the days and the sparks from snowplows. After finishing his sweet roll and coffee, he carries his dishes to the kitchen and makes a pot of coffee. Nobody gets service like Larry does at Sandy’s. “Love you,” Katrina says as he leaves.

There really seems to be no generation gap in this town. I saw a sixty-something sitting with a teen and learned they are not relate, just friends. And Katrina, who just graduated from college, talks to her fifteen-year-old brother as an equal, a buddy. He’s good kid, easy to talk to. I see him drive a snowmobile away from Sandy’s, hit a little hill and fly twenty feet across a ravine. Maybe I can ask him for a ride.

Discoveries

2009-12-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

I have mentioned on my long bicycle trips, which visited small towns like this one, that I generally withheld the fact that I’m from California. “Oh, the Land of Fruit and Nuts,” they would say and laugh. From that point in a budding conversation, I would become part of “that” culture, and charged accordingly. To avoid ostracism, I learned a version of strategy used by Berlin women as the Russians defeated their city and took them in 1945. They disfigured themselves to avoid rape and contrived all sorts of protective stories. Californian women in Midwest small towns are not generally raped, but they are often marked as undesirable. So, my stories of origin evolved like a prey species evolves against predators, and I strove to be understood as a decent person before I revealed my home.

But here, that has not been their reaction, not with the twenty or so people who know my home. They console me on having no seasons, or complain about the traffic I choose to endure, but the stigma of weirdness as inherent fate that all Californians, is not immediately applied to me, and I find it pleasantly odd.

You remember the slovenly man who disrupted the Zion Lutheran Church service last Sunday, and the round table of pundits, sitting with coffee and snacks after the service, concluding that “all kinds are welcome here.” In like manner, at today’s round table, the lesbian teen is deemed welcome, and the autistic one who brings her “guys,” which are really stuffed animals, sits happily at the next table. A visitor from California, who asks if she can join them for a few weeks, is ushered right in. And tomorrow she will return for the annual Christmas party.

The picture above shows the stretchy coils of wire that slip easily onto my boots. Walking on packed snow and apparent ice feels as stable as walking on dry pavement. They and the people I’ve met here have added greatly to my happiness, and I did not know they exist.

Swish of Skis

2009-12-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

Days have gradually cooled and shortened. Overcast with flurries seems the norm now. We get an occasional visit by the sun. But at night, we don’t fret because it is always seventy degrees. I can almost hear the dishes rattling on Southern California dinner tables—shaken by shivering. Anyone so afflicted has my sympathy.

I had a notion while growing up in Pasadena that people from cold climates came to my hometown to retire and get old. They seemed to rank it right up there with Miami and Phoenix. If they did not move permanently, then they came for the winter. I imagined places like Chicago and Staten Island filled with young winterphobes, surviving and saving for the day they can come to us. We listened to stories of ice and snow told at church socials by old folks who had left all that.

But I was wrong. Or maybe I judged a population from an atypical sample—judged Northerners from a few who believed that way. Here in the “Icebox of the Nation” I meet, not so many young and wistful, as a preponderance or wrinkled skin and gray hair. I meet old-timers who will go to Phoenix for Christmas to visit their kids.

Christina, who sits on the stool next to me and Sandy’s, has her driveway shoveled and her ticket bought. Her gray hair is beauty-shop fresh and her nails are all the same, “working length,” finished in modest pink. I don’t know how old she is, but her husband died ten years ago of “old age,” and she still wears his ring. She says to me, “You have spunk.”

You remember Sandy, the namesake and owner—long single braid, thin and strong, fast as a hockey player. It turns out she’s Katrina’s mother. I am slower to learn about them than they are to discover me. Isn’t that a fine fate for one who came here to observe, blend in, and write an outsider’s view of Frostbite Falls? And Sandy is not going anywhere.

Larry, on his stool at the end, the stool everybody leaves for him, says that my gloves are good. I blush, knowing that he’s eighty-something and has lived here all his life. He says they’ll do me down to minus twenty if I’m active.

And today I was active. So anxious was I to get on the skis, that I didn’t wait for enough snow to make skiing really effective. I set off on just a foot of snow, where boots would have worked fine. The Blue Ox Trail is just behind my room; I bundled up in zero degrees and started off. I still make mistakes in my bundling, learning, as the temperature drops, some nuance that does not work at zero, but worked fine at ten. Today, my glasses fogged-up right away. They always do that, but it goes away in a few minutes. Not today. The fog turned to ice and stayed there. I cleaned them and tried again, and finally did without them. Next time I’ll try setting them outside the door to cool first, and I’ll leave my face uncovered for a few minutes at the start. Yes, that should work.

Now I am back in my seventy-degree room, comfortable—a bit of wine, a bit of microwave soup.

soft snow
impressible
by feet of men
how deep the ruts
tradition
conformity

Clearing Snow

2009-12-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

After one of the warmest Novembers on record, December is proceeding with below normal temperatures and about normal snowfall. Ten degrees again this morning. Two more inches drifted onto my deck in the night, ignoring the protecting roof, swirling right under it. I hear metallic clank of blade against pavement as plows make their way over the streets for the fourth night in a row, doing their work while normal people sleep. They sound like a moving traffic accident. Then comes the sand truck, flailing its mixture of brown grit and chemical for melting snow. Jerry is out this morning, shoveling and salting. He just came in the door as I came down for coffee.

Pickup trucks drive about town with snowplows mounted on their fronts. They scrape driveways and parking lots, anywhere the city plows don’t go. A mountain of brown snowy grit is growing behind the building. “I used to plow,” Jerry says, “but now I let Rex do it. He does a good job, gets up close to the curb.”

Keeping one’s driveway and walkways free from snow is an art form, it seems, having ranges of quality and individual taste. I can almost hear Mrs. X say, “My walk is lovely and walkable, almost as she would say, “My quilt is unique and I finished it with a pleasant ruffle.” She has shoveled down to the concrete, and now her desalting chemical is melting away the last of it.

All of this snow removal seems unnecessary and counterproductive. Just let it build up in the parking lots and on the street—let it pack down as cars move over it. Shovel the walkways, but not down to the concrete, for this allows ice to form. But I say nothing. In the sixth grade, I used to let my teacher know when he was wrong. Now I wait a little longer before telling a whole culture of settled rightness that they’ve got to change.

I walked over the bridge into Canada again today. On the way I see the same bicycle track that I saw while walking to Ranier on Wednesday. The tire appears the same—knobby tread of a mountain bike—and the steady unswerving control of the rider seems unmistakable. He or she came from Canada earlier this morning and leaned the bicycle against the U.S. Border Patrol building to report for inspection. Could it be that my mystery cyclist lives in Canada and rides all the way to Ranier? I lost the track in confusion of trucks and cars at Canadian Customs.

Dee’s Restaruant on Scott Street, Fort Francis, Canada, used to be the lobby of the Fort Theatre. The motel behind it was the auditorium. This I learned from a man born in 1926 who saw a movie here just before he went to war in 1943. What other kind of person comes to Dee’s at ten in the morning? His lungs were gassed in the war. “Could do a lot of work, but my breath gives out,” he says. Still he walks a lot and appears in good condition. He might be a superman if the gas hadn’t got him.

Dee comes around, bouncing like a teenager, but she’s much older. She walks two miles to her restaurant, and then flits about in cheerful conversation while getting the orders out. She goes outside to smoke and is back in two minutes.

In case anyone thinks that I ascribe my good health to good living and exercize, no, it is pure luck. I exercise because I prefer it, just as Katrina prefers her car engine running and the steering wheel warm before she darts from the house.

Feet Planted in Earlier Time

2009-12-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

It’s getting colder now, ten degrees this morning, rising to fifteen by afternoon. Snowflakes drift from a dark sky, and the sun never appeared. I walked to Sandy’s Place so I could hear Katrina say, “Decided to go back to California yet?” She’s been gone since before Thanksgiving and just got back. “No, but I thought you did,” I said, knowing why she was gone, but expecting her back sooner. She recently graduated from University of North Dakota—Grand Forks, and met her boyfriend there. He lives in “The Cities” (Minneapolis and St. Paul). She drives five hours to stay with his parents, unless he is driving here. “I saw you walking yesterday—on the bike trail.” She says. “Yes, I was going to Ranier.” “Wow, I don’t even walk to my car in the morning unless the engine is running and it’s warm.” She’s almost typical I think. Hardly anyone walks very far.

Having become a resident and having favorites, I walked to my favorite market over on Highway 11 today. The town lies in a triangle bounded by the river and Highway 11 on the northwest and Highway 53 on the east where I live. The south boundary is generally 17th Street—a good way to cross town. For a person on foot, there’s a wide grassy area along the side. At this stage of snow depth, about ten inches, it makes for safe, easy walking. I’m anxious for a another foot of snow so I can go shopping on skis. My tracks from two days ago are barely visible, mostly covered in new snow, and I see no other tracks. It’s a pleasant two-miles, along field and forest getting to Super-Value Foods, and a good test for my warmer bundling.

On the way home I step in the snow-holes I made coming, now dusted with a new inch. It’s intoxicating to swish along on flat white, only my tracks, just white, step after step. I mean intoxicating in a drunken way, sometimes almost falling because “up” seems a nebulous concept. It must be like vertigo that pilots get when everything looks the same from their cockpit window. Of course, falling on ten inches of snow, underlain with grass, is nothing but silly fun, so different from a fall on ice.

The blue water tank, seen here from the Blue Ox Trail is my beacon. I live just a quarter mile northeast of it and I can see it from almost anywhere in town if the air is clear.

Grandma’s Wild Rice Pancakes

2009-12-02T16:23:00.001-08:00

I walked the three miles to Ranier again today, following the bike trail, now a blanket of snow. My destination was again the snowy woods, but also the warmth of Grandma’s Pantry, the only eating place in Ranier. Here is Grandma, resting after the morning rush, after thirty years in Ranier running this lovely place. Her daughter does most of the work now, but Grandma is clearly the matriarch, and her wild rice pancakes are legendary.

You can make them, but it takes a helper and a canoe. One person paddles or poles into shallows where the wild rice grows. The other bends the stalks into the canoe and knocks the grains off. Back at the rice camp, you roast the grain over an open fire. Now you are ready to remove the hulls by tramping with your bare feet and then tossing into the air where wind carries away the chaff. Or you can get one-third cup of raw wild rice from Grandma. Add a cup of water and simmer for twenty minutes. Pour off the water and add two tablespoons of sour cream, two tablespoons of butter, a cup of milk, and one egg. In another container, mix a cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of sugar. Now pour the first mix into the dry ingredients and beat until smooth. Makes about ten pancakes.

Much is covered under this blank page.
I have stood here and seen it.
Most is not remembered,
but one thing pokes through and
casts its shadow on all that might be written here.

Mound of snow or dune of sand
Water wave or mountain range
Last no longer than a seed of tree
A book to read and sprout

I have posted at least one picture from this location before, but then only a small film of ice floated on this water and hugged close to the shore. Now it advances to the mouth of the cove.

Someone has traveled here by bicycle today. See where the pedals have scraped the snowy surface as the tires sunk in. Someone walked here yesterday, tracks half covered with last evening’s snow.

“Minnesotans don’t walk,” I overheard the Salvation Army lady say while ringing her bell. She did not see me coming into K-Mart with an inch of snow on my head. Only as I started shaking, stomping, brushing and taking off layers did she say, “There’s one,” and we both laughed. Here on the bike trail that I walked this morning to Ranier, I step in my tracks going home where no one else has walked today. See the older set of tracks where just one person walked yesterday. Such a lovely walk, but Minnesotans don’t walk.

Snow is beautiful in fields and forests, but here it looks like chocolate ice cream, way too much and in the way. Hungry loaders will eat their fill, dumptrucks too.

more snow
more snowplows
who will tire first?

Catch a Falling Snowflake

2009-12-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

Snow fell most of the day, and I walked most of the day in it. At first I worried about slipping on ice, but as the snow deepened, slipping seemed less likely and landings appeared softer. Unlike yesterday’s snow, the flakes came big, sometimes huge, landing as intricate crystals. I discovered that if I photograph directly into them and use flash, I can catch the floating flakes midair. They collect on every twig and blade of grass, forming delicate structures with their interlocking limbs, like coral reefs or swarms of bees, almost alive in gregarious communities. I wish that my close-ups turned out better; most of them are blurry. Any suggestions?

Across Rainy River in Canada, the flakes are just as big, but that’s the kind of assumption I came on this venture to investigate.

Nature, where it creeps and winds
Among her lovely works with secure
And unambitious course, —William Cowper

Woods full of crystalline white
emptiness of my apartment
back in South Pasadena

Doubts swirling away
as light snowflakes
winter has come

Hidden Danger

2009-11-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday’s snow, all two inches of it, mostly melted or turned to slush beside the road, the temperature rising to about thirty-four. By morning it had fallen to twenty, and I went downstairs to see what Jerry and Sandy were doing.

She sat there silent with flushed face, holding her coffee like a baby, so unlike her cheerful self. “She hit a deer last night,” Jerry said. “Driving to Minneapolis, wrecked the car.”

“Is she injured?” I’ve heard how disastrous a deer collision can be. “She’s ok” he said, obviously still shaken ten hours after the accident. “She drove the car home, very slowly. It was hard to steer with the front wheel wobbling and rubbing on the fender.” She couldn’t use her cell phone; they don’t work outside of town, and decided, since she was only forty miles out, to drive back. I shared coffee with them, as I often do. He called their insurance company.

Snow began falling as we talked. I went back to my room and bundled up for a walk to the woods, southward toward the airport. I worried about the ice that might hide, camouflaged by new snow. The half inch of cover was not enough to render icy patches safe, but just enough to hide them. On previous days, I could see the ice patches and knew enough to go around them. Today I walked very carefully while in town, wanting to get out to the safe woods, where puddles of frozen water would be easy to see.

My first slip happened just a hundred feet from my door—a patch of ice on concrete, hidden under new snow. I didn’t fall, and used the experience as a lesson, analyzing what indicators I should learn to notice. People fall on ice every winter, and the results can be as disastrous as hitting a deer on the highway. I walked slowly and carefully, avoiding pavement wherever possible, choosing the friendly grass or dirt beside the road, though it was not easy to know the difference.

I was learning the signs of ice and thinking I could manage the situation. I walked more confidently as I started across the driveway leading into the car dealership. Suddenly I was on my back—an instant so short I can't remember any of it. I looked up into falling flakes, and lay there a while, thinking. “I am down. Am I hurt? I must have slipped on ice. Is this how it feels being shot? Was I shot? I landed on my pack, grateful for its soft cushion.” I rolled onto my side and felt no pain. Back on my feet, I slid on ice and went down before falling. As I crawled along, I brushed aside the snow and felt the film of ice on the concrete driveway. Looking back on what happened, I still could not predict that ice. I felt like crawling back home.

I was not far from the woods and could get there by going through a couple of back yards. Once under friendly trees and walking on rough ground, I felt safe. Snow began falling harder, and I could walk among the trees until enough snow fell that any ice would be too far down for slipping. I could cut through the forest over to Highway 53 which has a wide grassy shoulder and no paved driveways. I felt happy to have had a few mild days to learn these locations before having to learn them in a snowstorm. Also along Highway 53 is a café near the airport. If I stay there a while, perhaps more snow will fall and make for a safer walk through town.

I made it home after about six more inches of snow fell. I can’t say if it made the walking safer, only that I did not slip. I would like to say that I learned how be safe on a day like today, but I can’t. I will be wary of cold mornings after warm afternoons and after light snow has fallen. Beyond that, I have no sure method of walking safely in this condition.

SNOW

2009-11-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Yes, about two inches fell in the night, and I walked to church this Sunday Morning in falling snow. I made new tracks on Fourth Avenue, and looking east along Third Street in downtown—not a sign of human passing.

Zion Lutheran Church on Sixth Street begins at eight, which seems early by California custom, but just right for a sunrise walk in the snow.
We all hung our coats on the many hooks provided in the narthex and quietly took places before the service began, knowing that the live radio broadcast would begin precisely at 8:30.

Lutherans are quite formal and liturgical; they read everything except the sermon from a booklet, which we all received as we entered. I was surprised to see a teenage girl leading the readings and doing most it from memory. The middle-aged male pastor seemed quite pleased with her performance.

About halfway through the service, a slovenly man walked clumsily down the aisle to the first row and noisily took off his coat before sitting and blowing his nose. I wondered what the ushers were thinking. But the service proceeded without incident, and the newcomer added his loud Amen and the end of each reading.

After the service, coffee and treats were provided in the social room—homemade tarts and muffins, cheese and crackers. With about sixty people in attendance, it was obvious who was new, so the ladies came up and welcomed me. We sat at a round table where I tried not be the center of attention. I tried to minimize myself without lying, and it was hard. I would rather have told them I’m here on business or something easy to swallow. I wanted to hear them talk, learn stories; but instead, I listened to their questions and gave answers as blandly as I thought truthful. The pastor joined us, and it turns out he takes teenagers on 400-mile bicycle trip, so off we went in that direction. I became a starlet, trying to steer it back to here and now. But they were all friendly and welcomed me back and said I should join them for Christmas and for the ladies’ activities. As for the slovenly man, they said that all kinds are welcome here.

Becoming Accustomed

2009-11-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

I stepped outside this morning and took a draught of undiluted twenty-degree air. Sun was rising as I walked two miles for coffee and groceries at Super Value Foods, then returned before noon. It could have been a day at home, only a little colder.

Some say to me, “I would think you feel lonesome up there and want to be near folks—cold days especially.” Or if they might say, “Over Christmas?” I wonder what sort of space separates a person from friends and makes her solitary? I can’t be impartial, but it seems that many people are more isolated in the metropolis of Pasadena than I am where I know only a few—new people from the past eleven days. At home I take a morning walk and read a book with coffee, as I did today. Yesterday, I rode a bicycle as I do at home. My internet is the same here and so is my cell phone. And since the weather is near record for mildness, I could have done it all at home. I still hope to use my ice skates, skis and snowshoes, but if not, then I will experience a new and very different place and become a little familiar with it. So is my evaluation at what seems like the end of newness. It will not be time subtracted from my life.

At first I was fascinated with the forest, so different from our western pine and fir. My first few days in the woods were amazement, and never ceased to be novel. I brought twigs and leaves to the astonishment of people who looked at me and at the leaves, wondering how anyone could be excited about a new kind of tree. Nothing memorial was accomplished in that effort except that I learned, saw, noted, took pictures and placed marks on my map. I look back today on my notes and pictures and feel happy that it did them, for now, in the stage of early familiarity, I might not notice leaves. I see them today and remember how special they were. Above familiar leaves I see the horizontal brown lines on a white tree and know that it is birch, probably paper birch, but maybe river birch. It would have been seen by an Ojabway Indian as good for the outer covering of a canoe, or lapped roofing for a house. Today, a forester would evaluate it for making paper. All these things were unknown to me on November 18 when I first saw a birch tree and had no idea what it was.

I come to a new forest and take some little piece of it in my hands to play with. The days grow from morning to evening as if to light the work, with exploration and wonder at new things. I’ve been fortunate to see work and play almost merge throughout my life. Seldom is any task drudgery. But in a new surrounding, I hop about like a newborn calf, immature and kicking, just to feel the experience.

I go to bed later here so not to wake before daylight, which begins about seven. It is morning and then it is evening, and soon it is eleven pm. I wish for snow and ice, but I will not allow myself to be bored. I am reading books and even doing some computer work which I could do at home. And to enliven life a bit I go out in the cold without a jacket.

I met my landlord as I returned one evening, sitting outside in his tee shirt in twenty degrees. I was wearing gloves, heavy coat, hood and heavy socks inside my insulated boots and felt about right. “I won’t stay long he said; it’s good for the blood.” So I took him up on it and started defying the cold. It's funny how it can be fifty-five in Pasadena and feel cold. I have my jacket on in the house sometimes at home when it’s sixty. But last night I walked to the liquor store without a jacket or gloves, a ten minute walk in twenty degrees with some wind. It did not seem too bad for that short time, but I could not stand it for long. But why do it? To save the time of getting all bundled up? Partly. It’s a way of thinking. Some people jump in the lake before it freezes. But we always have a warm place to go inside; at least I think we all do. In California, we don't even turn the heat on, believing it never stays cold very long; we shiver in our unbelief in lasting cold. It’s the defiance of cold, the disbelief that it really is cold, that drives us go outside under clothed in Frostbite Falls. But all that might, of necessity, when it is not twenty, but minus twenty.

Pedaling East

2009-11-27T17:26:00.000-08:00

I went to The Sports Shop a few days ago to inquire on bicycles for rent. He was sharpening a hokey skate at the time, sliding its blade over the spinning grinder as sparks flew. “The bikes are put away for the winter,” he said. “All but a few kid’s bikes. How tall are you?”

“Five-seven. And you can probably tell me where I can ice skate too.”

During a few minutes of talk, in which I was being judged for likelihood of returning a rented bike, I learned that each winter at Smoky Bear Park, in the middle of town, they make a shallow pond for ice skating. It’s been too warm to do it yet, but I can have that to look forward to. He finally thought he could find a bike that would work in my size.

So it was that I returned this morning in twenty degree air to rent a bicycle, thinking it might only get colder if I waited, and maybe snow. Today might be my only chance. Soon I was pedaling east out of town on a 21-gear Trek hybrid, watching very carefully for ice on the road.

It took only half an hour to get farther than I had ever walked, past Ranier, over the railroad, and into the forest and hay fields leading to Voyageurs National Park on Highway 11. I passed several resorts, all closed, a gas station and store, driveways leading to lakeshore homes. I climbed hills which rise above the wetland and allow pine trees, with their preference for dry soil, to replace the birch, spruce and fir.

At the Park Headquarters, I got closer to a great blue heron than we ever could at Balsa Chica in Southern California, albeit stuffed in the exhibit, but still strange to find the same species thriving here. (Incidently, if you miss Rocket J. Squirrel in your living rooms, he’s here for the winter.)

The park is named for French Canadians, called voyageurs, who traded with the Ojibway Indians for a hundred years. They exported beaver skins to Europe for hats, so popular there. The voyageurs did not kill many beaver, but made it lucrative for the Ojibway to, giving them steel knives, beads and cotton cloth in trade. It might still be an active market if silk and wool had not come into European style, replacing beaver-skin as the “in” hat material.

Those who frequent the Ranier City Beach in cold weather before snowfall, find tracks of the regulars—common goldeneye, loon, Canadian goose, the occasional great blue heron, deer, and maybe moose. The first snow will cover these remnants of Indian Summer, preserving them until the sand thaws again in spring. This unusual print of a migrating Californian may survive the winter and become visible again in May.

Here is the sunset this evening from near my abode. Notice the Blue Ox Trail, a notch in the trees to the left of the sun, leading out of town, where, depending on snow conditions I can ski or snow shoe.

Trivia: A sign in Barney’s Restaurant says: “Barney’s is now taking Canadian money at par.” This summer, as I pedaled east, my American dollar was worth $1.20 Canadian.

Two Minds—Two Images

2009-11-25T19:52:00.000-08:00

You may wonder where the falls are. Niagara has falls. Where is International Fall? And here it is around 1900, not a fall really, but a rapid in Rainy River called Koochiching Falls. Natives and fur traders had to portage their canoes around it.

That was before Edward Backus (1861-1934) came here from Minneapolis when there was not even a railroad. International Falls did not exist as a town, and what we call the Boundary Waters area was mostly wilderness. Traveling to the trading post here took him five days on a circuitous mix of rail, river and lake. He saw an abundance of timber for logs and visioned in these cascading waters a dam to power lumber and paper mills. To Backus, these developments would be art, poetry and money.

In 1905-1909, he built the hydroelectric dam at Koochiching Falls (seen in this photo taken from the Canada side) water gushing forth from its turbines that powered his paper and lumber mills. In the 1920s he proposed seven more dams in the area, but these were successfully opposed by environmentalists, notably Ernest Oberholtzer. Backus lost all his money in stock market crash of 1929 and died a few years later. The paper mill now owned by Boise Cascade, along with its Canadian twin, still use power generated at the dam.

I walked across the bridge into Canada this morning and then southwest along the river to have a look at the US from there. In particular, I wanted to see the Boise Cascade mill which is so big, possibly the world’s biggest, that it can’t be seen well from the US side. And I wanted to see the dam that Backus built and the thing Ober (Oberholtzer) so bitterly opposed. -- http://www.eober.org/Oberholtzer/Oberholtzer.shtml

In 1917, Ober writes, “I have lived almost continuously among the . . . Ojibwe Indians [near] Rainy Lake. I have made numerous trips alone on snowshoe or in canoe to tribes within a radius of 250 miles, one of the objects being to record their . . .language, . . . legends and songs. I have taken down a great many of their stories.”

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day and one restaurant in International Falls will be open. I hope to take down some stories from the natives there, those who, for whatever reasons, are not with their families.

Here are two pictures of Rainy River below the dam on the Canadian side.

Walking in the Rain

2009-11-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

Dark overcast and forty degrees this morning, could be a winter day in Pasadena. On an average November 24th, I’d be walking to Ranier in twelve degrees, and the ground would be hard under a foot of snow. Construction workers would be erecting the new Voyageurs National Park Headquarters, thickly dressed, but dry. Today, they slop about in mud under light rain.

Water in Rainy Lake (properly named today) is dark slate in color and polished to a shiny mirror in calm air between drizzles. Like the pupil of an eye, it sees these leaning trees above and transmits images. No matter that it has no brain to interpret, no imagination; neither does an eye. The Northern Pike behind its surface know; their view is clear today, and floating prey know too and stay away. Things reflected on the water, on the art, on the page the papermill made and the poet thought—these the eye and water give to fish and bird and all who think.

How do you feed a paper-mill the wood chips it needs to keep going? The same way you feed corn chips to children—upend the box and pour them in a bowl. Or back your loaded truck into the slot and stand back while a machine turns it up on end.

Ranier is a fine little village just three miles east. Its waterfront is lined with cabins, rental cottages, houses and boat docks. There’s only one café here and no stores except a liquor store. There is a nice bike path connecting the village to International Falls; I expect it to become a fine Nordic skiing path. Today I came and ate and took pictures and listened to more talk about the fine weather.

Inching Into Winter

2009-11-23T15:12:00.000-08:00

Maybe we are inching into winter here in Frostbite Falls, but it’s no more noticeable than the coming of a predicted ice age. Today it’s raining, and the little ice around my doorstep is melting. I just drank more wine to feed the delusion and to stay in character. I came here to know cold and secondarily to know this land and its people. I said in my Pedaling East talk, “Let the bicycle represent some dream you have but have never had the courage to do.” I said it to entwine my audience into a story, to trap them. Now I am the one caught in a trap. I eat my words with a dream of winter in the far north. “It will come,” they say. “You don’t have long to wait.” Part of me wants to wait; another part wants to cross Rainy River and just keep on going across the wide continent and see what it offers or threatens day by day until I die or came to Hudson Bay and the eternally dark Arctic Circle.

I am up at the first hint of morning, around seven. I am soon walking in the town or in the woods, snapping scenes and noting impressions—listening. From the ground I gather brown leaves, soft and beginning to rot, frail as the summer flowers that flourished. My boots press almost silently into them—birch, oak and quaking aspen, which they call popple. I carry them back to my room, press them, and ask folks for their names. The conifers are still green with needles and they too come to my room—the aromatic balsam fir, spruce, and cedar.

I have one meal each day at a café, usually breakfast; today it was at Barney’s. No bright orange outfits grace the café today because hunting season ended yesterday. The yield of deer was low this year because last winter’s snowfall was so deep that many of the deer starved before giving fauns. At least that’s the consensus. I am no deer hunter; few women are—Sarah Palins excepted. I think of the deer that you glimpse in the summer and fall; they are survivors of winter when they have to dig through snow for meager browse, only the strongest. Still, in a normal year there are plenty of deer, and licenses are even given for does in the plentiful seasons. “They will eat the pumpkin off your porch,” one hunter muses. “And your garden is gone without an electric fence.” “I could shoot ‘em from the kitchen window, but for her sake I walk into the woods and wait in the cold hunt shack.” The table of men chuckles. They bring venison home for the Sunday roast like she brings tri-tip from Safeway. Kathabela would sketch the faces that stick in her mind. Then, in her jingle skirt and tinkle top, might present them to the hunters. I would do it too if I could, but only joined in the chuckle.

Unlike Manitoba to the northwest where I ended the bike ride in July, very little of the land is cultivated; the soil is too poor. Its best use, they say, is forest to feed the paper mills. But for a few, there is an old mountain of bark left from the environmentally insensitive days of Boise Cascade. Now, the bark is burned and converted into heat and power for the mill. But in the early decades, it was piled outside town where it has rotted and become black mulch, rich in nutrients. You can bring home truckloads for a fine garden. Thus a few residents attach themselves to the earth like Caltech students, each with a small plot of cool-weather crops in the mild Pasadena winters or short Minnesota summers. Immature vegetables seem impatient to be hoed. And they become hungry or thirsty. So you come to their rescue with hoe, manure and watering hose. And in the end they deliver gifts to poets, astrophysicists and mill workers—a long acquaintance cultivated with marigolds, cauliflowers and spinach.

Ten thousand years ago the ice was retreating back to the north. Rocks, grasped within the ice, cut like knives into the bedrock where their scratches remain, as shown in the close-up at the top of this post. The great weight of the ice made depressions that formed the Great Lakes and many smaller ones like Rainy Lake. Vegetation returned to the scoured landscape, then the caribou, then the Paleo Indians. They made canoes from hewn laths, bent with steam to form ribs, and covered the frames with birch bark. A four-person canoe weighed only thirty-five pounds, easily carried between highways—the rivers and lakes. They knocked wild rice off aquatic stalks, growing along these shores, and the rice fell into their canoes. They dried it over fires and winnowed away the chaff in birchbark trays. The Paleo wore skins of caribou, moose, and beaver, stitch with tendons of mammals. When the snow was deep, they wore shoes of laced twigs to distribute their weight. Their houses were constructed of sapling poles, made tight with birchbark. Thus the savages survived for thousands of years in these cold winters waiting for Europeans. Ed Oerichbauer at the Historical Museum was most helpful with this information; it seems his clientele is almost nil for the winter and he provided a personal tour.

A Day of Worship

2009-11-22T13:23:00.000-08:00

Before coming here, I looked for a thermometer that I could hang outside my room and consult each morning on what to wear and perhaps where to go. It took some time to find one that reads to minus forty. Here it is, visible from my window. This afternoon it says plus forty-five under a few frilly clouds. I want to put on sandals and a short-sleeve cotton dress, and go swishing along a dry sidewalk in the sunshine. But I didn’t bring sandals, so boots with short heels have to suffice.

On Sunday mornings during my bicycle travels, I have found churches to be good sources of conversation and information. I am quite tolerant of doctrine, whether I find it in church, bar, or café. I try to pick from the litany morsels of good smell and easy tote, like the squirrels do as they climb about in these spruce trees. Perhaps I am better than most at tolerating preachers who speak of God as if they employ a monopoly on the subject, who cannot bear all kinds of opinions. I find atheists easier to talk to, but today I attended the Evangelical Covenant Church. Here I learned that the people of International Falls are almost entirely Swedes, Norwegians, and Germans. And it confirms what I have observed—no ethnics, no other races, not a single foreign accent. I look and sound like them, and wonder how I might be perceived, and what I might be suspected of, if my speech or color were different. That is something another visitor will have to address. Still, I was not readily accepted into the congregation of this church. I understand their reluctance. Too often, churchmen welcome the smiling visitor only to learn that her rent is due or her car is out of gas. “O Christian, will you send me away,” is surely a repugnant plea.

After church, I walked out of town to the east on Fifteenth Street and returned on Thirteenth Street. If you know how the streets and avenues run in Manhattan, then you know them here—streets run east-west, avenues north-south. I found Sandy’s Place closed, so I returned to the Shorelunch Café. Not knowing the hours, I asked:
“What time do you open?”
“Depends on what day.”
“Weekdays.”
“Depends on who’s here—five, six, seven.”

Still no snow, and the next two days are calling for rain. When you wait for bad weather, for sure only the good comes along. So let’s enjoy Indian summer. Even in Pasadena, the forecast is sunny and warm.

These houses are typical of the staunch workers and God-worshiping people of International Falls. Few shacks, few mansions—just regular houses, regular people.

Who Are You Today?

2009-11-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

I walked to Sandy’s Place for the second time this morning. Though the air is twenty-two degrees, I feel warmer then when it was thirty-two, and feel good for having adapted. Ice crystals grow on the brown grass in places where the sun never shines. Katrina greets me by name, and I recognize four of the men at the counter—in their places since my visit on Wednesday, it seems. Already I feel almost like a regular who knows everyone.

Katrina has a gap in her duties, and says to a man wearing bright orange:
“Been huntin’?” —yeah
“See anything?” —no
“Dad was out all day. Didn’t see anything either.” —shrug
“Last weekend of hunting season.” —right
Katrina knows how to pull the thoughts out of a man.

From his stool next to mine at the counter, Dave sidles up to me, and says, “Did you know that Giovani’s has dinners at half price from 6:30 to 7:30” I took it almost as an invitation. Then he said, “But not on weekends.”

“Border Patrol is up to sixty agents now. Used to be two, and they didn’t have anything to do.” “Why the increase?” I ask. “Don’t know, especially in winter when this place shuts down.”

I had imagined the illegals in their cars traveling south on Third Avenue past my place: a Moroccan with a flat nose and eyebrows like warning flares, a Frenchman with long wide sideburns and swollen lips, an old Algerian with almond eyes and a creased mouth in a face finely boned as a child’s. But on crossing the border yesterday, I saw only an occasional car enter the checkpoint from Canada—about six during the hour that I watched water approach the dam, smoke drift leisurely from papermill smokestacks, and imagined how many woodchips were passing between countries on a huge conveyor. If those sixty agents were looking for drugs or illegals, they were not looking here.

A sign inside Sandy’s says “Thou shalt not whine.” Back in the summer as I pedaled across Canada’s great prairie, I knew that winter on that windswept flatland was hard. I hoped to get impressions about it from the locals, to get them going on stories. I wanted to feel how winter works on that harsh farming plain, because I don’t know how people stand it in the winter. International Falls is hard country too, cold and windy. But they know it’s hard and get ready for it. If someone complains, I suppose he just makes it harder for the others. These people must have stamina, they must know how to keep going. But today everyone says how nice the weather is. Nobody whines.

I saw Sandy of Sandy’s Place today—a slight woman with a long braid and Harley Davidson sweatshirt. She moves fast and smiles strong and sincere. It’s easy to see why Katrina chose her; she could have had any boss she wanted.

If any of my readers are beginning to feel that you are reading a novel, not a blog or travelogue, then you are changing in a likeminded way as I am. I intended to write my impressions of a cold snowy winter in a remote non-tourist location. I wanted to convey both the nature of the place and my personal change as result of being here—a self-discovery, recording of an adventure. But after four days, these missives seem to unfold more like opening pages of a novel. I read them as you do, not knowing the characters fully, but having hints of their personalities—and no ideas whatsoever about the ending.

I did not want to be perceived by these people as a writer, come here to study them. I thought I could get around those kinds of questions. Of course they ask where I am from and why I came. Katrina was the first to figure it out. Now she knows where I am staying, a few of my reasons for coming, and my initial reactions, all of which I wished to withhold.

I brought books and envisioned lone days in the woods. Thoreau had almost convinced me of solitude with only occasional human contact. Now, I fear I am changing the thing I wanted to observe. I am becoming part of these people, and we are adjusting our lives to each others. I have talked at length with my landlords, Jerald and Sandy (not the same Sandy who runs the café) and already love them. I still like Thoreau’s friendship with “every little pine needle, expanded and swelled with sympathy.” They environ me as much as the lake and the sky do, and perhaps as much as snow and ice will. But the nature of coming here is changing.

It is not a little interesting to me that I and these people are subjects of an unintended experiment. There is a part of me which, in a sense, is not a part of me, but spectator, one who does not share the lives of the characters of which I am one. This person observes and notes, but is not a part. When the play, it may be a tragedy, of this life is over, and the spectator goes her way, a kind of fiction, a work of imagination, will remain.

This doubleness came upon me today like a flood, and I cannot escape it. I am writing a novel where I know no more than the reader. It is impossible for me to foreshadow anything or to develop those scenes which are important later in the story. It will unfold however it does, and we will all be surprised, unless some of you predict more than I do.

frozen apples in the sun
once hidden by leaves
now in season

North of the Border

2009-11-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

The border between International Falls, USA, and Ontario, Canada, is the middle of Rainy River. Several methods suffice to transport goods and people southward into the US. They work as well going north, but only the easy way is needed in that direction. There is the narrow road bridge just above the dam with its pedestrian walkway, and three miles to the east is the railroad bridge. But these are not adequate for transporting certain goods. For these, small aircraft, radio controlled boats and hollowed out logs are sometimes employed.

A man was out night fishing recently when he noticed a black skiff gliding southbound across the bay. Its captain in her black wetsuit, raised the jib and filled it with no more noise than a tossed bedsheet. A rotund man was pacing a gravelly beach just east of where my coffee-mate fished. My new friend had bigger sailboats in mind than the old plywood flattie, but as he watched her, she assured him the boat was built for beaching and she could pop eighty pounds across the bay without having to dock or have another boat meet her. But what if she got up on the flats and the man holding a flashlight in one hand held a gun in the other? I think border people like these stories as much as British Columbians like bear stories.

I took a loop through a field in walking to the bridge this morning. As I passed near the Boise Cascade paper mill, I was notified of its presence by a pleasant aroma. A wind brought it to me, and I was not offended. Horror stories surround paper mills of old—their terrible stench, but Boise is one of the most modern and seems not to stink. I can say the same for the Canadian paper mill just across the river.

The frozen ground is lumpy with old boot prints and fossil bicycle tracks, now hardened and preserved for some springtime anthropologist. These tracks were left by boys or tomboys on mountain bikes—knobby treads, weaving without determined direction. My direction is not determined either, but I make it seem so by pedaling quite straight.

I crossed the bridge and was looked at skeptically by a Canadian in uniform. He searched my pack and did not believe me, I think, when I said I was out walking to Canada for pleasure. I turned east on Scott Street and walked the length of town. On the way is Dee’s Café where the cadre of retired Canadian men seems very American. Here too, they all know each other and all wonder about the newcomer. I might become famous before this is over, just because they don’t get many newcomers in the winter.

At noon my shadow is ten feet long as I walk along the river on a very nice pedestrian path. I don’t know what fruit these are, maybe somebody will tell me. By the way, my yesterday question about the birds has been answered somewhat credibly here in Canada. They call them “common goldeneye.” They look like mallards, but cannot be called such so as not to appear Californian.

A Walk East

2009-11-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

I set out for a small town to the east this morning—Ranier on Rainy Lake. But first I settled into the ShoreLunch Café for another lesson in northland demeanor. Since there was no counter, I found a table close to a cadre of old men, hoping to overhear. Bright sun pours in the window on another day they call “perfect” or “fine as fall gets” or the pessimistic say, “Cold weather will come—another week.” Here is another small café, another group of mostly old men, and me, the only stranger. Conversation stopped when I walked in, as if they expected a certain person and were let down. These men don’t quite know how to handle me, so they steal glances and carry on with their talk, while I take off my backpack, coat, and gloves. Even the waitress joins in quiet scrutiny, saying only, “Want ketchup?” when she brings my order. Then she goes back to her phone call, “You can talk to my parents if you want to. I don’t care.” Then she smiles and jokes with the men. She’s no Katrina. Two men walk in wearing bright orange. They say Hi to the others and add, “We don’t have a gun.” One of them is breathing oxygen through a tube. I overhear a man say, “. . .back when people used to respect each other around here, like it was fifty or sixty years ago.”

I left the café in thirty-five degree air and headed east. The picture at the top of this page is a look north from 16th St. at East First Ave. I hope to show you how it looks as winter progresses.

I passed the staging area for Boise Cascade’s paper mill—where trucks bring logs, and loaders pile them high. These are the logs I write on, but they need a little work first.

Skinny, knotty logs, too poor for lumber, come here from forests and leave as blank pages of books, magazines, and the marriage license I never had. Each log waits in these mountainous piles for its turn in the chipper, where its identity as part of a tree fades into its future as a piece of paper, and wishes perhaps, if trees do, to remain a tree at least in part.

These piles of chips rise along Third Avenue East like sand dunes.

On the left is the Boise Cascade Paper Mill, in the middle is Rainy River, and on the right is Canada with its own paper mill.

A bicycle path goes between International Falls and Ranier, and if winter proceeds as it has so far, I should have left the skis and snow shoes at home and brought the bike instead.

So quiet is this stretch of coastline where Rainy River is about to widen and become Rainy Lake, that across the river I hear laughing in Canada.

If you are coming here from Canada by small boat, you must, of course, pass through US Customs and Immigration. You are required to tie your boat at this dock and go to the office. The office is locked and nobody is here, so our Homeland Security protectors have written this message on the door: “Push in here while turning knob. Lock is unpredictable. Close the door when finished. Push here. Push and turn knob at same time. Use last three numbers of VHF emergency frequency for access to this building.”

Some of the inlets from the lake, those which are always shaded from the sun, have already formed a thin layer of ice. The shiny area is liquid and the frosty area is ice. Of course it is too thin for anyone heavier than a robin.

A railroad crosses the border here in Ranier on this bridge. Cars and trucks cross back in International Falls.

I will eventually learn what kind of birds these are. Maybe one of you will tell me.

Grandma’s Pantry is the only eating place in Ranier, so I stopped for lunch. Three men at the next table were discussing a gay wedding about to be held in Des Moines, Iowa. “I don’t see any point in going all that way just for a gay wedding,” one said. “He just came out a few months ago.” Soon they complained that the stock market is down 150 today. Then it was on to the walleye he caught this summer just offshore from his home in Ranier.

I didn't try swimming here, but it looks very Southern
California.

First Day of Winter

2009-11-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

I have given the blog a new template, simplifying it, and eliminating the pictures that I used for musing before coming here. All of the prior posts and all of your comments are still here, only the layout has changed.

After my first full day in International Falls, Minnesota, I feel quite settled—the heat works in my room, groceries are not far away, and nobody has accused me of smuggling drugs from Canada. The sky was clear all day, and the temperature rose to about forty. There is no snow on the ground, but every puddle is frozen and it’s quite possible to slip on the ice. I must have walked ten miles, exploring every main street of this small town, learning where wine is cheapest, groceries too, and peeking into all four of the restaurants. I walked along the river and into the woods and listened to a flock of Canadian geese crossing the border like bandits.

This morning I walked into Sandy’s Café and decided to sit at the counter; it’s the best place to meet. I took off my heavier than heavy coat, gloves, and bogan. Finding no coat rack, and wanting to act not-Califorian, I stood there a minute as if pondering where to sit. Soon a man came in, slung his coat on one of the stools at the counter and sat on it. So I did the same; it’s a perfect solution since the stools are hard wood.

Katrina, our waitress, can’t be over eighteen, but she’s got it all over the pros. It’s just the way her mind works—friendly, considerate, accurate—in spite of the herd of us who all came in at about the same time. She gets the people fed and makes them happy, and the men at the counter love her. Of course I tried the flying-north angle, even laughed at their jokes, but Katrina was the clear winner. Her clinching blow was to ask one of the men to make another pot of coffee for her because she was running behind. It was the perfect compliment, and he grabbed it with joy. Larry said the winters have been milder the last few years. In the old days it would stay twenty-five below for weeks at a time. But Jerry disagreed and quoted last year’s total snowfall at 128 inches. “ It was piled up to the roofline of a two-story building,” he said, “pushed up there with a city loader just to keep the street clear. And the stop signs kept having to be dug out so drivers could see them.” I think it’s like all hard times, remembered clearly for a while, then forgotten by the time another winter rolls around. Two women just got back from Orlando where they shopped for the grandkids. “I don’t like winter anymore,” one said, “not anymore.” Katrina says winter is fun. In the background, U2 is singing on the radio. Larry gets up to leave. “Love you,” says Katrina.

This town changes today from what it was during the two months of investigating it on the internet. The pictures, maps, advertisements and missives that I absorbed there are being replaced with people, cold air, and a winter that wants to wait.

The pictures below are Rainy River on the west side of International Falls. Click on any picture to enlarge it.

The center part of International Falls is much undeveloped as shown here:

The Stork Has Landed

2009-11-17T18:27:00.000-08:00

I flew across the land today, northeastward, while my friends frolicked warm in California or headed for Acapulco. I set my mind on doing this the way a certain kind of stork decided back in August.

Funny how a eucalyptus sways in California as if belongs there. It feels the air and knows it. But my Pasadena bark shivers in this Minnesota air, and my landlord says how nice a day it is. How long can a swaying eucalyptus stay rooted in a frozen land?

I put my things in the rented room and headed out this evening, looking for bearings, sights on which to hang my stay. The air was about forty degrees and the wind was nil. At five in the afternoon the sun was down and darkness was covering the watery boundary between us and Canada.

I am tired and will settle into northland sleep soon, but hate to leave this day, for it is only one containing both Southern California and Minnesota, having at its ends both warm and cold.

I took my assigned seat 28A early this morning at LAX, one of three adjoining seats. But happily nobody sat in my row. Already, I was alone, reading Thoreau and happy. As I looked left during ascent, long shadows pointed westward from LA’s tall buildings on Bunker Hill. And so soon over the desert, peaks beyond the San Gabriels cast shadows that amplify their north-south topography while diminishing the east-west features, as if they had certain aspects of their personalities to show off.

I see snow even on the desert peaks, but their shadows on the piedmonts are black. I remember how the webcam at International Falls showed me an absence of snow, and thought it strange on the hot desert. Stranger, how this eggshell-thin film of hazy air that surrounds our spheroid of rock captures this buzzing shell I ride in, like a fly caught between solid window glass and the impenetrable screen of ionosphere, a gap from which it cannot escape.

Now, we fly over the high end of the Midwest, sheeted in white snow. East sides of hills collect more snow than west sides, evidence of nor’easters as the source. I shiver a little in these migrating wings, just watching its white expanse, knowing that in the belly of this bird my snowshoes and skis await. On the plane’s left side, where the morning sun does not come in, my views are to the north without glare of sun’s reflection on the snow.

Now, over the lower Midwest, no snow covers the fields, and I see their rectangles or circles, depending on styles irrigation. I remember the 2007 pedal west, rising across Kansas and Colorado, now played in reverse and much faster.

A plane overtakes us, a little faster, a little higher, its tail a hundred times its length, a dog’s tail, near white, but a hint of brown, tainted with some exposure to worldly filth, unmentionable byproduct of a dog’s goodness.

Now, a great river meanders, perhaps the Mississippi, wide as two irrigation circles, which I believe makes it a mile wide. It almost shortcuts a piece of itself, and leaves a lake behind.

From Minneapolis it’s an hour hop on a small bird to International Falls. Lakes dot the north of Minnesota where glacial ice long ago rounded the hills into green and gold dunes before stopping to melt in huge chunks, like ice cubes in a tray.

(The two pictures below were taken over north Minnesota as I flew from Minneapolis.
Click on any picture to enlarge it.)

I must sleep now or wax silly. Here is my first sunset and my first look at the waterway separating us from Canada.

Thanks for listening.

About the Reasons for My Departure to an Unlikely Place

2009-11-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

Photo at right by Kathabela in Winnert, Germany

Winter’s Child
Sharon Hawley

A stork upon a Winnert pole
in gentle Germany warmth
senses shortening summer days
Africa comes to mind
so sweetly that it haunts her

The way she knows, the coastal route
but something quivers in her restless heart
a wistful wild and idle pleasure
falls upon her sleepy mind

Why seek the warm, she asks
when winter pleasure might lie north?
in places storks have never gone

She steals a hasty northward glance
then to north she gazes
til soothing dreams she dreams
upon her Winnert perch

The following day she broods and frets
mock study fills her nest
her heart leaps up
and wanders like a sudden breeze
on frozen lake and lovely snow
upon their shapes and sounds
in that eternal language
known to birds who fly

She hears the universal teacher
who would mold her future thoughts
hang them up in icicles
all seasons will be sweet, he says

Her mind returns of course
to well-known trips
south and safe and understood
they served a well-known purpose well

The more she thinks
the more she knows
and then she sets her mind
casting off accepted facts
she chooses ones that please her

She sets a course up north today
while standing on a Winnert perch
makes a toy of somber thought
she dreams of dark and cold

Packing List

2009-10-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

Anticipation has overtaken me! It always does. It’s a kind of travel insurance, this obsessive planning. If the venture fails, I have this long imagination of its perfection, formed and finished weeks ahead of departure, like an architectural drawing that I can bring up like an archived file.

It seems premature—a packing list and a pile already started, three weeks ahead of time. But never having packed for a cold winter, I rely on a few frozen memories, the internet, and advice from online Eskimos. And now I appeal to all you north-country emigrants, you refugees from blizzard, whiteout, hypothermia, and falling icicles. I need your suggestions. Please do not sit back chuckling if I appear going off like some rank amateur from California. Rather, come rallying with delicately-worded advice.

Packing List

Insulated winter boots

Thick socks and under-socks

Chemical toe warmers, “designed to work inside boots”

Mitten-gloves, thickly padded, so the fingers keep each other warm like four bodies in a sleeping bag

Finger-gloves for the warmer days

Under-gloves that wick away sweat

Thick winter coat borrowed from my sister

Thick vest to go under the coat

Windbreaker to go over the coat

Thick furry head covering that leaves only a circle of face exposed and which Sharon Rizk thinks she will not need in Pasadena.

Ski mask to go under said head covering to protect my identity

A Pauli-Dutton-style scarf for warming the air to -20 or so before I breathe it

The maroon dress that goes so well with the strappy black heels. This, in case my other oddities fail to get the attention I crave

Thermal tights with sweat-wicking fabric

Snowshoes, 25” by 8”, the right size for my weight, able to shed snow, all per the internet. I wonder how people walk in snow shoes.

Nordic skis, boots and poles

A high-tech LED flashlight, so light in fact that I swear it has no batteries, presented by Rick Wilson

Henry David Thoreau—“Walden” and other writings

Stephen Hawking, editor—“On the Shoulders of Giants”

Ann Jauregui—“Ephanies”

Anonymous—“A Woman in Berlin”

Ice skates

Ski goggles

Swimsuit, only because they say that only wimps do not jump in the lake just before it freezes for the winter

Laptop computer, and in case it dies, the little netbook

Tales from Frostbite Falls

2009-10-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

Frostbite Falls, Minnesota is a fictional town created for the “Rocky and His Friends Show.” Rocket J. Squirrel, better known as "Rocky," and his pal, Bullwinkle J. Moose, cartooned their way to popularity during the 1960s. Some folks think that Frostbite Falls is a parody on the real-life town of International Falls, where I am going.

Rainy Lake, shown in these pictures, with its many islands, contains the boundary between the US and Canada; and its shore is where I will spend two months of the winter.

Near Frostbite Falls is the fictional Veronica Lake and an island called Moosylvania, of which Bullwinkle was "Governor." The U.S. claims the island is part of Canada, and Canada claims it is part of the U.S. Bullwinkle vacations in Moosylvania because "after two weeks here, anyplace else feels like Heaven."

International Falls is a border town with a bridge crossing over into Canada. But in the winter, you can cross just about anywhere on the ice. I am confident that as a stranger holed up there for the winter, nobody will suspect my motives as any more than I tell them—that I come to observe, write, snowshoe, experience the dark and cold of a real winter, and become reinvented. They will not, will they, suspect me as accomplice to the “pharmaceutical” trade or helper of undocumented travelers? Everybody believed Bullwinkle, didn’t they?

I look ahead, probably more than any of you, to future tales from Frostbite Falls.

Looking to Winter

2009-10-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

November 17 looms like D-Day to General Eisenhower during the weeks before the Normandy Invasion. Its outcome will shape an unfinished sculpture within me, and the world will evolve in a new way. Eisenhower’s anticipation of victory would shape all humanity for good, or his failure would turn unimaginably foul. My outcome in northern Minnesota this winter will change everything I say in this blog, or the venture will have failed.

Ike had an objective and a plan. I have only a longing for something not known and a simple uncluttered plan for finding it. I will say, in future posts, contradictions to what I am saying now, and if this very statement is contradicted upon my return, then the venture will have failed.

When I fly north to the border town of International Falls, Minnesota, it will be a leaving behind of friends as I love them, the bicycle as my vehicle, and everything warm and cozy about Southern California. I will take on the discomfort and necessity of mornings in the minus thirties and days perhaps in positive Fahrenheit, simply because I have never done this, and think it will be inspiring.

I want to watch the border between us and Canada as it freezes so solid that fisherman have to drill through two feet of ice just to drop their lines, and cars can drive on its watery depths between countries. I want to dress thickly and walk in snow shoes or skis among trees, meeting creatures of the ice. I will feel the warmth of cafes and bars devoid of summer tourists, surviving on conversations of locals as they ride their laurels through the long winter. And, crossing the bridge into Canada, I want their stories also, to compare, edit, write and ponder the exceeding cold and loneliness of border songs, bird songs, and the Aurora Borealis. This is what I expect, and hope that I am wrong. For in being wrong, I will change and find childish newness.

Stay Tuned

2009-09-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

I am excited about this winter adventure. I plan to spend two months in the "Icebox of the Nation" as the folks at International Falls, Minnesota like to call their town. Please join me starting in mid November for daily posts and comments from and to a cold dark place.