The Harbour Mind

The rush from Thanksgiving to Christmas has been its usual series of frenetic weeks, twice to Chicago and once to DC and twice consumed by hockey. It is only Christmas weekend that I finally have time to pause, a reversion to a few days of quiet family time and remote work, a peaceful time only once I look past this embarrassing excuse for a Duluth winter and shrug off the unwelcome reminder of Covid pandemic solitude in the work week that follows. Most people are off but I plug away, either in an empty office or an empty house, no ski trails to escape to, just driving rain outside, achieving in bursts before lapsing into boredom. This inaction suits me less and less as I age.

I manage to finish the one book I set out to read over this month, Adam Nicholson’s How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks. It traces the emergence of philosophy with the emergence of the trading city-states of ancient Greece, from the god-determined fates of the heroes of the Iliad through Odysseus’ radical agency, from the first interrogations of existence in Miletus to the sense of self emerging in Sappho and her contemporaries in the Aegean basin. Symposiums take place; leisure and thought intertwine. Life emerges as a fire in Heraclitus, an eternal soul in Pythagoras and the Orphic cult, a single reality in Parmenides before Empedocles unites it all, these final thinkers acting as forerunners to Plato and Aristotle, the foundations for basically all Western thought since.

How to Be is more than just pop philosophy, though: it weaves in a journey to the cities that formed these early thinkers. Nicholson wanders these acropolises atop harbors, the temples built to gods who match the questions of their particular age: Athena as city-states form, Demeter as they grow to flourish, Aphrodite as questions of love grow more profound, Persephone as thinkers dig deeper into the meaning of eternity. He parses the relics they have left behind to show how these communities were interconnected with their neighbors, how ideas born on the Aegean coast of Turkey interacted with Ionian Ithaca or colonial Sicily and beyond. All of this flourishing thought, he contends, is the result of a “harbour mind,” a life of commerce and exploration and incipient leisure that was fundamental to making the Greeks the thinkers they were.

These past two years have been a time of deep harbour mind, with many mundane days at sea broken by arrivals in thrilling ports. In 2023 I found literal harbors on a trip up the California coast and an unforgettable family venture to the Mediterranean, and metaphorical ones in treks near and far and as I pushed my body further and relished the results. I also found harbors in times of grief, this sense never more immediate than this past February, and though that scar is still raw it is also a reminder of just what kind of a harbor I can build, both for myself and for other people. It is a strange feeling, to be supremely self-assured in grief; one that requires delicate words to avoid sounding callous. But as I sat through my cousin’s funeral I found myself not burdened by agony but instead consumed by a fire I’d known was there but only rarely let out. It was a fire I tended numerous times in the following months, through late-night euchre vigils and over beers at hockey games, on a wind-blasted deck on a rocking cruise ship and on the slopes of Cloud Peak, on the dance floor at weddings until the last song played and all my muscles ached, only then believing my work was done. These are the moments I feel most myself.

In between the surges I do not lead a bad existence, and I have no trouble listing off the ways in which life has improved in the span since I started this burst outward with a venture to the Virgin Islands deep in the pandemic. But the mundane everydayness gnaws at me, and while it has its small triumphs and defeats, it never brings major change. When I do have events worthy of words they are among the best I’ve ever written, but the act itself does not come often enough, and too often I go to bed without even consulting my writing, plagued by a nagging annoyance that I am not using my greatest gift to its fullest extent. For too long I have been too frozen in routines to unleash it, too frozen by convention or belief in how I had to be, lip service alone to the pursuit I preach.

I will always owe a deep debt to the Greeks. They have framed my life over the past decade-plus now, a necessary port on a stormy sea, and I will never forget that debt, will someday go to pay homage at the sites Nicholson visits, when the time is right. (The time is not yet right. I will know when it is.) The Greeks’ basic insights still form the channel in which I sail. But this holiday season, I find myself drawn to the burning paradoxes of Heraclitus and the love inherent in Empedocles, fueled by that radical turn, and reach once again for Hannah Arendt’s verdict on Greek thought at the end of her chapter on Action in The Human Condition, something I saw in a snippet atop Zion last spring but did not fully process:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored all together, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

If human action is founded on reason and faith, on Athens and Jerusalem, it is time to grapple with Jerusalem again. This is hardly some announcement of bold conversion or spiritual quest; it is merely an acknowledgment of another journey that awaits. In my year-end post last year I said I craved a Renaissance, and while a Renaissance means a rebirth of the Classical it is still rooted profoundly in a faith. In its most obvious form this will come as a pilgrimage, a concept I will grapple with as I head for Santiago de Compostela this April, to say nothing of a subsequent adventure to southern latitudes. The opportunity to rethink things is before me.

I look ahead to the deeper truth-seeking afforded by this sabbatical of sorts in spring, but the true process must begin now, the harbour mind unleashed. It is time to set sail, whether on steely Superior or on the South Atlantic, and find faith in daily routines yet again. Maybe this will lead me to change my life in more significant ways than I have in recent years; maybe it will instead be a stripping away of false desires and a focus on a simpler core that is already right in front of me. But I am ready for a journey once again.

Grand Staircase II: Stairway into the Unknown

This is Part 2 of a three-part travel series. Part 1 is here.

My night outside Zion is fitful, nervous, eager with anticipation, the sense that my plan for the next two days is no casual stroll. I have a one-night date with the West Rim Trail. When I go to collect my permit, the ranger appraises me carefully: this hike is a 3,000-foot climb, the upper reaches of the ascent are covered in snow, up top the trails are thick with mud, the only water source there is probably snow-covered, and oh, have you noticed all the rain in the forecast? I assure her I am a northern Minnesotan, and when she learns I’ve day hiked to three-quarters of the route before, she gains a bit more confidence in my abilities. The day dawns a dreary grey, which only makes for perfect hiking weather. A couple with overnight packs is also on my shuttle up the canyon, and we leapfrog our way all the way up to Cabin Spring, where they settle in at the first campsite on Zion’s roof.

This trek is one of phases. The first 2.5 miles follow the well-worn route to Angels Landing, the iconic clamber up chains between thousand-foot drop-offs that I conquered four years ago and feel zero compulsion to climb again. After Angels Landing is my favorite part of the whole trek, as the crowds thin out and the trail climbs a series of shelves with views to rival those of the famed promontory, culminating in a huge, white dome. From there, it tucks in along the backside of one of the mounts lining the canyon, past cool streams of snowmelt trickling down the rock. Higher up, the snow begins, first as little clumps alongside the trail, and later covering substantial portions of the trail itself, though it is firm enough and well-enough worn that at no point is it awful. At the top of the snow I encounter a family I’d seen high up on the East Rim the previous day, and their intrepid 10-year-old daughter advises me on how best to have fun with the snow. My kingdom for children who someday show the same pluck and guile as her. From here, there are more exposed switchbacks up another steep wall to the West Rim Lookout at Cabin Spring, where most day hikers (including myself four years ago) turn around.

I see no one in my 24 hours beyond Cabin Spring. There are more climbs, but they are gradual, and the muck is indeed treacherous in places, first as an insidious yellow mud that isn’t thick but clings to boots like leeches on legs, and later in a thicker, gloppy ascent with a full-blown stream running down the middle. The views are stellar, or so I am forced to guess: I am in the clouds, the chances to see outward sporadic, and while the mesa here is exposed enough that most snow is off the trail, it still clings to shaded hillsides. The late winter landscape takes on a haunted, empty air, and phantom voices carry through the howling wind. I am as alone as I’ve ever been.

Finally, I arrive at campsite 5, which sits atop a ridge between Phantom Valley to the west and Telephone and Imlay Canyons to the east. The clouds whip directly over me and plunge my ridge into obscurity, and I pass the afternoon cycling from one side to the other, admiring the vista in whichever direction has the higher clouds at that moment. I don’t tire of it. In time, though, the thicker clouds get too close, and rain, interspersed with ice pellets, begins to fall. I have a tent malfunction, but some string and some rocks solve my dilemma and keep me dry through a 12-hour span under the covers. I sleep poorly, never warm but never exactly cold, yet somehow content that I have made it where I want to be. I rise at sunrise and finally look out to see the view from my throne atop Zion. The world glitters beneath me, ignited by a fiery glow. I am transfixed, my pilgrimage at its apex.

I wait until nearly ten to break camp so the sun can eat away at the ice on my equipment and dry out as much as it can. The trek down reveals all the views I’d missed the day before, made somehow more stunning by their temporary withholding, and I plow down in an hour less time than it took me to make the climb. Beyond the snowy bits I join a day-hiking couple from Beaver Bay, just an hour north of Duluth; we trade shared acquaintances as we go. Angels Landing is an absolute zoo, and I may have seen it at its absolute worst: in just two days, the National Park Service is finally imposing a permit system on the famed hike, and only the select, pre-scheduled few will be able to head up the chains. I fight the crowds down the switchbacks and settle for a half-mile stroll along the canyon bottom back to the Zion Lodge for a much-needed meal and a drink.

The Lodge is not quite what the doctor ordered for a weary hiker. The food has all the flavor of a McDonalds with none of the speed. There is only one beer on tap until the distributor’s truck arrives again, though at least it is a decent local microbrew. There are no open tables and alcohol is not allowed off the patio on to the inviting lawn, so I decamp on a wall by the beer stand until a departing couple takes pity on me. I pay it forward and let a couple from St. Louis join me, and we bond over our fondness for road trips and incredulity over the crowds. (Shouldn’t all these children be in school?!) I share my shuttle back down the canyon with a clump of high schoolers on some sort of Christian retreat, all of whom ignore the mask mandate and talk earnestly about what they are looking for in relationships. Is it bad that my instinct is to buy them a case of beer?

I return to my car and climb back up out of Zion, back through the Mount Carmel tunnel and then north on US-89. My abode for the next two nights is a no-frills roadside cabin some 20 miles west of Bryce Canyon, and my dinner that night comes at a family diner in the town of Panguich, a bustling joint staffed almost entirely by teenagers. From my spot at the bar, I get a front row seat to the chaos, as the POS system is deemed a POS and three orders come out for tables with no one sitting at them. At least the wings are tasty.

A poll of acquaintances who have visited both Zion and Bryce has been inconclusive on which is better. While Bryce cannot match the sheer scale of Zion, it has an intimacy to it, and its famed hoodoos never cease to amaze with their wild shapes. Trails chart labyrinthine courses around the pinnacles of rock, never flat as they wind down to the floor of the canyon and then back up and around to get over to the next feature. South of the bustling amphitheater, a 17-mile road snakes its way up past 9,000 feet in elevation, with repeated overlooks up and down the Grand Staircase and across the Paria River valley. It’s snowing when I arrive, and while it is a bit too warm for anything to accumulate, three more squalls break out over the course of the day. The most eventful one comes as I traverse the Bristlecone Trail at the far end of the scenic drive; the woman I am following loses the trail entirely for a spell. She is one of five lost people I help over the course of the day, and I can’t pass up the opportunity to lament the decline of navigational skills. “Trust me, I don’t get lost!” I want to yell at the dude making his second circuit of the Peek-a-Boo Trail even though he is sure he isn’t; later in the day, we meet at an overlook and he concedes defeat. Don’t mess with my geography skills.

The burst of wind and snow that nearly stole my hat away atop Bryce Point tells me it’s time to wrap things up here. I wrap up my Bryce hiking with a quick trot to an ice-filled cave off Highway 12, where dripping water produces a trickling symphony that silences the cluster of viewers. I am glad I saw Bryce, but in a day, I feel like I have seen what it has to offer, while after nearly a week in Zion across two trips, I still haven’t touched its northern unit or The Narrows or Observation Point or its little-known southern desert. I conclude my tour of Bryce with a geology lesson in the visitor center, content with a rock-filled day sandwiched between two experiences of wilderness sublime.

This entire trip is, in effect, a traverse of the Grand Staircase, a series of rock layers that rise up from the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River into central Utah. These different bands of geological time give the rocks different hues, often ending in dramatic dropping shelves. Closest to the Colorado are the Chocolate Cliffs, while the Vermilion Cliffs rise near Kanab, just south of the Utah-Arizona state line, and include the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, the areas around Colorado City, and the lower layers of Zion. Next come the White Cliffs, which look like a jagged scrape on an aerial image; they form Zion’s upper reaches. The drive from Zion to Bryce follows the cut of the Sevier River up through the Grey Cliffs, and finally, at the top, are the Pink Cliffs that reach the heights of Bryce at 9,000 feet. Above these sit the great upland plateaus of south-central Utah, themselves rising in steps: the Markagunt, the Paunsaugunt, and the Aquarius. The Staircase’s eastern railing is the Kaiparowits Plateau, which stretches down from the Aquarius to the Colorado and falls off on its own eastern side from the Straight Cliffs into the canyonlands of the Escalante River. It is in this remote land, the last portion of the lower 48 states to be mapped by the US government, that I will spend the bulk of the next two days.

The drive east from Bryce has the distinct feeling of heading deeper into the wilderness. I tumble down from the Paunsaugunt through a series of Mormon frontier towns in the Paria River valley, oasis outposts with verdant fruit trees clustering around dust-choked homes. The road winds up into the Kaipirowits and down through funky Escalante, traffic thinned to a trickle. My eagerness at this fresh landscape grows, but nothing quite prepares for the Head of the Rocks Overlook, where the scrubby plateau disappears and the rocky canyonlands of the Escalante River undulate out in all directions below, the ribbon of the CCC-built Highway 12 the only thing interrupting the march of these rocky waves out to a few snow-capped ranges on the fringes of the wilderness.

At the direction of a ranger, I head straight for the Calf Creek Campground and claim one of the 13 sites nestled just above that small stream’s confluence with the Escalante. I wish I could have arrived just two weeks later to see this small Eden at its best, but as it is, these oases in the desert are budding and coming to life. I plug up the creek some three miles to Lower Calf Creek Falls, a 120-foot plunge of water into a deep, cold pool. The route is gradual, with views to ancient pictographs and granaries up on cliffs, and while a healthy crowd hikes this trail, it has nothing on Zion or Bryce. I dip my feet in the icy waters and take my time to soak in the warmth on the stroll back.

After a recovery spell in a hammock, I drive north into Boulder. On the way, Highway 12 skirts high above Calf Creek and the canyonlands to the east, an Angels Landing for cars atop the ridge, and then plunges into Boulder, the last town in the US to have mule-delivered mail, accessible only by unpaved road until the 1980s. The Burr Trail, an old cattle route, swings east from here, and a cheery sign announces a mere 72-mile trip to the Lake Powell Ferry. The trek would take hours; I settle for a trip in to the aptly named Long Canyon, a deep red gash in the stone, and home to a lonely slot canyon worthy of a quick exploration. That night, back at Calf Creek, I hop up on a natural red rock seat, sip away at some wine, and drift into a reverie as the stars emerge, deep in this lonely desert, the crackling fires and stray laughs across the campground filling me with a warmth independent of the cool evening air.

Some ice forms in the water bottle I leave out on the picnic table, but I have my soundest night of sleep in a tent on this trip. After packing up, I do a 6-mile stroll up and down the Escalante, wading its frigid waters 14 times as I process up the canyon to a natural bridge and an arch. The trail snakes along those pure flowing waters, up and down ledges and across dry washes, nestling beneath cliffs and cottonwoods and through fields of sage. All is at peace.

I take my time in making my exit from Grand Staircase-Escalante. First, another hiker mentions some unadvertised petroglyphs just above the parking lot by the river where I’ve been hiking, so I head up the trail opposite the river and, after a few false turns, arrive at these signs from the past. On the other side of the river, I pause for a scrumptious lunch at the Kiva Koffeeshop, a new agey wonder built right into the hill, with views up and down the canyon. Grand Staircase-Escalante is a beauty, Zion’s essence distilled to its basics and stripped of its crowds. I shall return.

Part 3 is here.

A Portage to Simplicity

It’s a Fourth of July with no crowds, no grills, and no fireworks, save the ones from the lightning up in the sky. My dad and I, having gone too long between wilderness retreats, strap his canoe to the roof of his car and head for the Boundary Waters, that great escape in the wilds of northern Minnesota. It is time to get lost in the woods, paddle in deep away from the crowds, and forget the worries of the world for a spell.

Our entry point on Kawishiwi Lake is near the headwaters of a river of the same name that works its way north and west across the Boundary Waters and worms its way through some of its better-known lakes. I have not canoed since our last venture four years ago, but I have become a much more accomplished outdoor adventurer in the intervening four years. I am willing to develop a few arm bruises to go in further and faster than many of the other adventurers on a busy holiday weekend.

Our trip north is a well-traveled one, and all nine permits on our entry day are taken. From Kawishiwi Lake the water trail approximates the course of the river, thought it often meanders off or is lost in rapids or beaver dams, forcing a series of portages. The journey goes north through Square and Kawashong Lakes before arriving at Lake Polly, a common destination for paddlers on this route. We stop here for lunch, and my dad, after some brief reconnoitering to see how things have changed, confirms that this was indeed the site where he and a friend stayed on his first ever Boundary Waters venture nearly 40 years ago. The two of them hitched their way up to Lake Polly in flip-flops with an aluminum canoe, only to have a bear eat all of their food other than the bullion cubes.

Despite this inauspicious introduction, my dad has been back to this chain of lakes several times since. The destination lake on most of those trips has been Malberg Lake, which is two beyond Polly, and it is the same for us. We check out some of its inviting campsites—the open yet shaded site at the mouth of the Louse River, the clifftop site above the narrow channel into the lake’s western arm, a sandy site tucked behind that point—and eventually settle for a different sandy beach in the lake’s far northwest corner. Such dreamy landings and inviting swimming holes are a rarity in the rock-strewn Boundary Waters. Its kitchen area could be a bit more open, but the tent pads are shaded and the waterfront real estate is some of the best I’ve seen, and it will do for our midsummer retreat.

We spend all three of our nights out at that site on Malberg, but we undertake a long day trip on our second day. The portage out of Malberg into a wider meander of the Kawishiwi poses an immediate challenge: beaver action has created a large water hazard in its middle, effectively making it not one but two portages. Low water levels further along complicate the passage up a tributary toward Beaver Lake, but Beaver rewards us with a beautiful campsite at the confluence of its arms and some impressive cliffs. My dad ranks the overgrown boulder field of a portage into Smite Lake one of the worst he’s ever done; the portage smites us, though we are also smitten by the large rock outcroppings along the lake. This is deep wilderness, and we meet just two other people on the entire day, at the mouth of the portage from Smite to Adams Lake, where they have paused for a rest.

We chat with the couple for a while. The man is an ornithologist at a branch of the University of Wisconsin, and Adams Lake is his personal retreat. He comes here several times a year, and knows it well enough to paddle in at night by headlamp. As we paddle around Adams, we understand he has become its resident naturalist: it is serene, varied in its landscape, and buried in deep. Even the portage from Adams back into Beaver to close our loop is lovely, with a stone staircase and a cool rock wall, a welcome respite after a long day of travel. Back at our site late that afternoon, we swim off our beach and I float about, looking to recover that same bliss I found in a bay off St. John in January. It proves elusive, but I do not linger on its absence.

On our third day in the Boundary Waters, we do nothing. I cannot remember the last time I did nothing in a day, and I would not want to make a habit of it, but after some initial fitfulness likely spurred on by biting flies, I settle in. It is a brutally hot weekend in the North. The temperature clears 90, a rarity in these parts, and the day is mostly spent following the shade. In the morning, that means parking in a canoe chair along the beach, while by afternoon, shade has come for the hammocks, and while the breeze is a warm one, at least it is there to stir things up. We read, take our meals, and have our nightcap at a point far down the beach.

The paddle back out to civilization goes smoothly enough. The heat, combined with the effects of some distant wildfire, creates such a haze that we can barely see across some of the smaller lakes. The area between Polly and Square Lakes, cleared out by a forest fire some years back, looks almost desert-like when viewed from beneath a portaging canoe. The day starts stock-still, humid and oppressive, the hoped-for cold front never appearing; later, a strong breeze whips up to add an element of adventure to the final few lake crossings. Even back by Lake Superior, usually a reliable air conditioner, the temperature stays above 90. For a few days, northern Minnesota has become a languid, torpor-suffused sweatbox, but we have gone out for a burst of activity in spite of it.

Canoeing, like many of my recent wilderness adventures, satisfies because it simplifies needs to the most immediate, pressing questions. The only things that matter are the basic tasks of completing one’s itinerary and meeting straightforward human needs. It allows both urgency and activity to live in harmony with bliss, while those sometimes-competing claims can struggle to find resolution in the civilized world, where hunger for activity and achievement and desire to live as if on borrowed time all collide with an inherent patience, caution, and preference for temperature-lowering over outright conflict. A not insignificant part of me enjoys that challenge, but a step out of the trenches is necessary to see it for what it is. After a year and a half of frequent travel in very small groups or in solitude, that is all about to change, and I am ready for that shift. But escapes like this one will always have a special allure.

A Shot in the Arm

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

—Joan Didion

Never have I been so delighted to feel a bit off as I did this weekend. My second dose of Moderna left me not sick but exhausted, aching, and free, as if I’d just finished a punishing hike over terrain. A fitting emotion at the end of a strange, long year.

I received my first shot on March 11, the one-year anniversary of the declaration of a global pandemic. My March 2020 had begun with the Minnesota boys’ state high school hockey tournament; here were rumblings of danger on the coasts and a vague sense that maybe we should wash our hands a little more often, but no sense that the world was about to change. (A few people I know insist they got the virus in the Xcel Center petri dish that week.). Just a few days later, a sense of doom lingered over my favorite coffee shop in Aurora, a portent that this time would be different. I stocked up on food and booze just before the mad rush began and settled in to my pandemic existence.

In that changed world, I carried on in the shadow of the two twin specters of the twenty-first century: solitude and existential uncertainty. These afflictions existed before the coronavirus pandemic, and for long periods of the past year, they did not figure in my life. I accepted my fate as a chronicler of interesting times, I ran a lot, and I settled into a slower but diligent routine. But the two malaises festered, dormant in the daily blur but apt to reappear on slow work days or lonely weekend nights.

I will start with the looming uncertainty, which became manageable quickly enough. The virus has not come for me or caused any serious illness in my extended family. No one particularly close to me has died, though I did catch the obituaries of a few more distant acquaintances, including my no-nonsense high school biology teacher, Jeanne Mendoza, whose lessons on mRNA crawled out of some recess of my mind on the drive back from the vaccination site in Eveleth. Like a soldier at war, I will remember this year as one of great tedium punctuated by the occasional outburst of excitement somewhere else.

The year was one of chaos and murkiness, even aside from the social and political turmoil that infected the United States. For all the easy morality tales, our understanding of how the virus spreads and kills remains stunningly poor. The failure to respond fell especially hard on the allegedly developed, scientifically inclined West. Public discourse became consumed by painful, simplistic narratives. On one side, a brash, often spoiled mob too bullheaded to understand any concept of personal sacrifice or common good steamrolled any hope for national solidarity in times of crisis. In response, a less damaging but still insidious crew of dithering scolds invoked capital-S Science for political ends and was deified for meeting the exceedingly low bar of appearing sober-minded. Meanwhile, most humans muddled through somewhere in between, taking reasonable precautions but also finding ways to keep up with family and maintain some semblance of sanity.

Through it all, I am strangely optimistic about the post-pandemic world. Change happens slowly, then all at once, and its shepherds are those who have the shrewdness and good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, not the most strident activists. In one fell swoop, the United States reversed course on its social safety net after 40 years of neglect and now seems willing to spend money to stop the drift toward hollowed-out towns and a caste system in which even the people on top don’t feel secure. Rapid vaccine development showed the power of research and development in a crisis and offers the promise of additional breakthroughs in realms beyond mindless tech stuff. This lurch will no doubt have its own obstacles and excesses, but the collective turn encourages me more than any immediate alternative.

The lingering effects of pandemic isolation, on the other hand, are at once easier to correct for and harder to see. I now head back toward a world of unrestrained gatherings with other people, but I don’t yet entirely know how the coronavirus changed me. People who spend time alone tend to develop a clearer sense of self, and this year has featured a lot of time alone. It accentuates inherent traits, both virtues and vices, and more often in some grey area in between that can be either, depending on the channels they take on their way out to the sea. In my case, I observed the resurgence of drive I have always had, at times a self-defeating stubbornness and at times a life-giving tenacity. It formed in long, dark nights in the back room of my old apartment, on lonely roads across the American West, as I moved to a new home, as work bled over the walls I’d set up to contain it, as I booked a trip to the Caribbean, and as I searched out ways to maintain a semblance of the social life I’d led before.

Isolation increases bipolarities. I have always been one to internalize conflict, and that tendency only became more pronounced when there was no one else to squabble with, even in the mildest of ways. I am now the sort of person who yells a lot of vulgarities at his computer, for wont of better company, and one who occasionally texts friends “fuck Zoom” with no additional context. I work to fight off the fear that post-pandemic life may not be so different after all, that it will take vital effort to resist the continued drift toward the anomie and virtual reality that consume sad, late capitalist lives. A lack of human distraction made me tenser, more likely to sink into doom loops of mindless consumption, and I was not surprised to find myself on blood pressure medication by the end. Even so, I grew increasingly turned off by the therapy-speak that filters through so much of the general media response to the virus. I wonder at what point an obsession with wellness reinforces a sense of unwellness.

This is not an endorsement of raw stoicism or the denial of pain. I have come out of my pandemic tunnel with a few scars, including the literal one on my knee from the day last May when I fell in heap on a run along Chester Creek. I crawled to my feet, bleeding from all four limbs, and assured the concerned walkers who witnessed my graceful dive that I was fine. I was somewhat less than fine, but I ran on home in spite of it. This, I think, is the vital distinction: I never sought to deny any of my own struggles of this past year. I preferred to get up and keep running.

I avoid describing my slowly growing freedom as normal, or worse, a new normal. The world is different now, just as it would have been with the passage of a year without a pandemic. The freedom afforded by a vaccination is not a return to a past life but a new beginning, a chance to appreciate the lessons of that scar on the knee, a chance to see not just more windows on to the world but a chance to once again immerse oneself, to lose oneself in a crowd and to find new value in things that had been beyond our reach. Let us live the way we were meant to live, in community with other people, and make the most of this jolt forward into new possibility.

USVI III: Tropic Solitaire

Part 1 | Part 2

Early in the pandemic, I resolved not to let 2020 be a lost year. I mostly succeeded. I bought a house, managed a great summer trip, strengthened some local ties, filled my newfound downtime with some productive and athletic pursuits, and tacked on this spontaneous Caribbean adventure at the end. It was a trying year at times, certainly; never have world events felt so immediate, in spite of my isolation, and the pandemic put my most pressing search into a deeply unsatisfying pause. But I came through it all the same, and the Virgin Islands provide some catharsis ahead of a quest for more satisfying releases in 2021.

When I went on this summer’s road trip, I went with pretensions of grand discovery. I got a sense of it, perhaps, but little more. Before I left for this one, though, I looked back on how I started 2020 and realized I already wrote the only beach story I needed to write for the foreseeable future. I am not on a plaintive search for anything besides the obvious sun, surf, and rum. I can zone out as I gaze into the waves, write down little nothings, let this account come naturally over time, let it stand as a testament to two weeks of freeing, clarifying escape in a strange era.

Traveling alone is nothing new for me, but that travel usually comes in a tent, not in a L’Esperance. Seeing the view, a friend calls me Citizen Kane, though I’ve arrived at this Xanadu merely through good fortune and general competence. I also undertake this journey amid an ongoing pandemic, which comes with obvious limitations. Many Virgin Islands activities, given the weather and buildings designed to beckon in the breeze, can go on with only minor changes; a beach is still a beach, and there’s plenty of space on the ones here. But with a few exceptions, there are fewer opportunities for a long afternoon of casual banter at the bar, or a night out on the town: except one somewhat later ferry ride back from St. John, I’m back at my hilltop perch for the sunset each night. With a view like this, why not?

Even in paradise, life settles into the same rhythms of the past nine months, albeit with better Zoom backgrounds and more novel diversions. I start my mornings in the exercise room; when the internet goes down briefly one day, I hop in the pool until it reboots. I rotate my work stations between the great room couch and the pool house and the kitchen counter, while evening reading or writing happens on other stray patios or seating areas. On nighttime Zoom calls, the fauna are so loud that one friend thinks an alarm is beeping in the background; dog barks and rooster crows give the night some life. For a few days during the first week, a vicious wind rips across Flag Hill. Said flag whips in the wind outside my window, and I settle into a rhythm of trade wind management, bartering between cool air flow and keeping my work papers from flying off to Venezuela. I spend inordinate amounts of time locating kitchen implements and figuring out which light switch is where.

My job proves entirely doable from thousands of miles away. I miss my second screen and feel an odd limbo in being two hours ahead of my work calendar on central time, but any annoyances are fleeting. At one point, my distance even proves beneficial, as most of the internet goes down in Duluth while I can jump in and manage a focus group with my pretentious background. (I got in a debate with the woman I meet at the St. John brewery: do we rub our tropical lives in, or try to hide it with blank wall backgrounds?) On the flip side, malfunctioning data tools are just as anger-inducing whether one has snowbanks or palm trees in one’s backyard. Work ends, happy hour begins, and I rinse and repeat the cycle the next day.

I mostly cook for myself in the villa, forking over the price for food commanded by an island that must import practically everything. I do chance a few meals out, most memorably at Duffy’s Love Shack, an open air tiki bar and a Red Hook institution that proved educational for nine-year-old Karl when his adult companions got “lei’d” here for ordering exotic drinks. Sadly, this time around, its confines feature just five tables and my lonely stool at a bar; the fun drink glasses have been replaced by plastic cups for the duration of the pandemic, and the mechanical shark gazes down on the proceedings in forlorn silence. I settle for enjoying the ever-colorful view of the parking lot around Duffy’s. Just in front of me, a college-age girl vomits in a bush (this is four in the afternoon); across the street, a security guard and a few good Samaritans chase down and corner a shoplifter. “Dinner and a show,” muses the woman at the next table.

My solitude continues on New Year’s Eve, a strange night to be alone. After wrapping up a Zoom around 11:00 local time, I launch a cathartic solo dance party to a college-era playlist, then head down to the pool deck and dive in at midnight. The pandemic has killed the usual festivities at the cable car platform just around the hill, but stray fireworks erupt here and there across Charlotte Amalie, while a villa below me supplies a soundtrack and another launches a few lanterns into the sky. Car horns honk, and somewhere, a lonely flute player pumps out Auld Lang Syne. Later, a drum circle erupts down the hill, and I stand out in the prow of the balcony and revel in my perch above it all.

I get plenty of reading done, from Zadie Smith short stories to some grazing off my aunt and uncle’s shelves: a book on St. John, an autobiography of the paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey, a brief delighted dive into some convenient Wallace Stegner. On the weightier side, I give myself equal doses Jerusalem and Athens: first, through Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, the blur of divine ecstasy under the moonlight, and later, as I move toward a return to my earthlier concerns, yet another return to Hannah Arendt and The Human Condition. At the end of the dream is action, and a time to begin.

It is an incongruous time to enjoy two weeks in paradise. The pandemic rages on, and several close friends or their spouses contract the coronavirus while I am on St. Thomas. Others in my life are consumed by work, lockdowns, or other various annoyances. Early in my stay, my 94-year-old grandmother’s intestinal woes lead to a touch-and-go emergency surgery; with characteristic steadiness, she plows through it and is on the road to recovery. To sit and talk to a hospital-bound woman who can count the number of times she has left Wisconsin in her life on one hand is a jarring contrast for her grandson who alights to villas atop Caribbean islands on a whim. Toward the end of my stay, I find myself watching a news feed of rioters storming the U.S. Capitol while helping facilitate a tribal entrepreneurial focus group taking place in Minnesota while gazing out on the sun-splashed harbor of Charlotte Amalie. How’s that for cognitive dissonance?

A less self-assured soul might feel some guilt over the good fortune that allows me to enjoy these two weeks in paradise. But throughout this trip, as I knew it would be, my composure is basically a constant state, even with chaos elsewhere. I’d like to think this is some new equanimity, but history suggests there will still be lurches, and a little well-timed anxiety can be a healthy corrective at times. But if that ferocious ambivalence is the threshold of freedom, I took another step toward the door on this trip.

At times, this adventure just feeds my wanderlust. The sailors I meet on the Ram’s Head on St. John bring to mind C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaca, a poem anyone returning home from a great journey should revisit: that freedom to put into “harbors new to your eyes” isn’t limited to the ancients, is something I too could do in a sailboat down the Antilles to keep this dream alive. There’s so much of the world I have yet to see. Someday, perhaps. But fixating on that as the end goal would miss the point. “It’s been one my best escapes ever, but escaping alone ain’t life,” I text my Duluth brain trust on my final night.

The fisherman I talk with on the Hull Bay beach tells me of his lifelong escape: endless surfing and fishing, traveling up and down the island chain, a home on the hill peeking out over the bay. “Living the dream,” I tell him; “I never need to act for anyone,” he assures me. It’s a dream, yes, but not my dream. I am here to play that game, to accept different roles on different stages, to know that my life contains multitudes, not some essential trait that I can find if I boil everything else away under the Caribbean sun. But there are moments when it all coheres, when all the different threads twist together, and whether they come on a picturesque ruin on St. John or on a moonlit ski trail in Lester Park, they show how to fend off any lurking demons and open up the complete range of possibility. And so, refreshed and tanned and one step further along a twisting, potholed island road, I begin anew.

Coronavirus Chronicles Continued

[O]n the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other it is a longing to escape from ourselves. Solitude—the very condition of our lives—appears to us as a test and a purgation, at the conclusion of which our anguish and instability will vanish. At the exit from the labyrinth of solitude we will find reunion (which is repose and happiness), and plenitude, and harmony with the world…Solitude is both a sentence and an expiation. It is a punishment but it is also a promise that our exile will end. All human life is pervaded by this dialectic.

—Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

To write in the time of coronavirus is to become a chronicler of history, whether or not one aspires to such a lofty title. Journaling has, apparently, exploded in recent weeks; people all over now realize their thoughts on these weeks and months will be of interest to posterity. We detail our tedium, our glimmers of hope, the moments that we know will define a generation. The indelible images: a hospital ship steams past the Statue of Liberty into the New York harbor, a very different beacon of hope; Pope Francis, resplendent in white, before an empty St. Peter’s Square under an ominous, rainy sky. Deadened streets, all commerce at a standstill, silence save from the very welcome pets and children in the background on Zoom meetings.

As with any crisis, coronavirus produces some case studies in uncommon heroism. I now thank grocery store clerks for their work in the way I’ve seen some people thank soldiers for their service. When I do takeout or delivery to support local restaurants, I leave the largest tips I’ve ever left. The body shop down the street has a sign offering a discount for healthcare workers, and I look out at the snowboard bro of a FedEx driver who lives across the way in an entirely new light. While my role is somewhat distant from the front lines, a situation that leaves me feeling an odd remove, some of my colleagues in economic development and local government are putting in yeoman’s hours trying to keep their communities’ businesses afloat. My firm was born at Duluth’s economic nadir in the mid-80s, when northeast Minnesota found itself in need of someone to facilitate recovery processes, and we may get to play that role again in the coming months and years.

In my own mundane quarantined corner, I adjust to a work life of marathon Zoom meetings, which means I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at my own face on a screen. My attire regresses to that of a ten-years-younger version of myself, and after toying with the idea of growing my hair out again, it now seems safe to say it’ll happen unless I decide to get creative with scissors. My work habits take me back to days spent struggling away at term papers in my glorified closet of a bedroom in Burleith. My life is an eternal return. Perhaps the best piece of advice I read over the first three weeks of working from home: wear real pants every day.

I recognize my luck: I can spout off in droll good humor while a third of the country gets furloughed or laid off, has to navigate a convoluted system of unemployment benefits and business support programs that seems designed to maximize confusion. This crisis has only exacerbated the gap between those of us who trade in the knowledge economy (even for those of us who are not in its more lucrative arms), and the people whose jobs are not so easily sustained via screens. Tech skeptic that I am, I’m not sure my class will get off so easily next time crisis hits—or if this one drags out—but for now, we sit pretty, American divides exacerbated once again.

The biggest divide I encounter myself, however, is the one I find between myself and other people. I live alone, and have not had meaningful contact with another human in weeks. Sorry, those of you who feel like you’re cooped up with your families too much: I’ll trade places in a heartbeat. Individual living may help slow the spread of disease, while multigenerational mixing, as the Italians can attest, can cause more harm than good. But the virus, if we needed one, is a reminder that humans are not built to live like this long-term. “Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself,” Hannah Arendt wrote in a quote from Cicero attributed to Cato, a bit of wisdom passed down the chain. It’s a sentiment I need right now, because never have I been more by myself than I have been these past few weeks.

“Do you live around here?” one acquaintance calls to me in pleasant surprise as I scoot by on my daily run. “No!” is my cheery reply. I might just run every street in Duluth by the time this is done, or at least all of them on the east side, more easily accessible from my front door. I’ve started tracking my destinations on a calendar, a register of Duluth neighborhoods and other convenient destinations. Even as I run, the signs of a changed world abound. The morning the stay at home order comes out, the streets are eerily dead. I wonder if the young couple I pass sleeping in a running car off Kenwood Avenue are among the newly homeless.

For the most part, though, these runs are my saving grace, a luxury afforded by a blessedly mild Duluth spring. Every few days I scoot past a work colleague or a stray acquaintance, all of us pulled out into various forms of activity as our only release. A profusion of chalk art decorates the streets of Morley Heights and Congdon; in Woodland, kids wish their friends a happy birthday in chalk on the driveway. A few houses throw up impromptu art exhibits in their windows. The Lincoln Park parkway, liberated from traffic, teems with hikers and disc golfers. I idly house-hunt as I cruise the streets, check out lake views and front porches and bay windows, along with those more practical concerns like the quality of the roof and the siding and the garage. Rarely do I feel more alive as when I climb the Hillside in driving sleet; and one evening, I round a bend on the Scenic Highway and gaze down a coastline swathed in a California late afternoon glow, and any weight of the world lifts away into the haze.

I take a vacation that gives me glimpses of the whole world, which means I sleep in my sleeping bag on the spare futon in a second bedroom whose walls are papered in maps. This exotic locale is less a bedroom than a dark, wide hallway to a back door that happens to have a closet, but for one long weekend, it will do. This room has become my refuge now that my living room is part of my office suite: every evening I retreat here for at least a little while with a book or this laptop to inhabit a world away from any of those thoughts. I need just a little more space to endure this easily.

I travel vicariously, learn of the chance meeting between two cyclists crossing Asia, and of the party of rafters on the Colorado who left a world with no coronavirus fears and came back to it when they emerged. I travel away from thoughts of where I would’ve been on my planned vacation by now, away from wondering if a backpacking trip in July will still hold up. The social distancing paradox: if we flatten the curve successfully, the restrictions may go on for longer, the terror of overwhelmed hospitals and pop-up morgues replaced by a low-grade, endless dread, a fitting new normal if we truly are in an age of decadence.

One thing I am not, thankfully, is bored, except perhaps when the Zoom meetings drag on for too long. I will never lack things to read or write. I won’t pretend the coronavirus has led to any great writing projects—there’s a challenge, perhaps—but I have been able to noodle out some mindless stuff, and make a real dent in the pile of books. (The latest addition: an advance copy of a new book by a reader of this blog!) Hearteningly, sales of classic literature have exploded over the past month. We are still indeed all readers, a reminder that deteriorating attention spans are not some congenital defect but an entirely correctable drift forced upon us by our thoughtless consumption of certain forms of media that are ill-attuned to human focus.

Technology has made this misery infinitely easier to bear. Even two years ago, my office would have been hopelessly lost, lacking laptops or file-sharing opportunities. Still, the shortcomings of that world become more and more glaring with each passing day, and my hope is that, instead of accelerating the move to more online existence as some forecasters have predicted, coronavirus will remind us that screens have their shortcomings. Deprivation can lead us to place new value on certain forms of human interaction, better appreciate why it is we go to concerts or sporting events or festivals or bars or even just hang out with large groups of friends or family. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do any of those things, but may we never take them for granted again.

The Devils We Know

Before the 2018 hiking season comes to a close, I want to get in at least one good overnight weekend Superior Hiking Trail trek. The timing isn’t ideal; it’s late enough to be a bit cold, but too early for most of the fall colors. I’m going to spend most of the next two weeks away from home for various reasons. But down time never seems to fulfill its desired function, and a 25-mile march will give a kid some focus to diagnose his writer’s block, to say nothing of his whole long quest, some ten years in the making, that guided him back to this shoreline he knows so well.

I leave my car at the scenic Pincushion Mountain lot above Grand Marais, and my dad drops me at the other end of my hike. We park at Judge C.R. Magney State Park, the eighth and final of the state parks the SHT traverses heading northward. Magney, named for a conservationist mayor of Duluth from a century ago, lines the Brule River on its way down to Lake Superior. Its star attraction is the Devil’s Kettle, a mile upstream along a path that rises gently until it plunges down a 200-step staircase to a few waterfalls. The Devil’s Kettle is a famed split in a waterfall, half of which behaves like a normal waterfall, and half of which plunges into a deep hole that long baffled geologists as to where the water actually went. Alas, there is no devilry on display when my dad and I arrive: the Brule, torrential in its force after a week of rain, overwhelms the whole cliff and bounces out of the kettle and back into the main channel. Instead of a unique geological feature, we’re left with a pretty waterfall.

We return to the parking lot, and I strap on my pack and bid my dad farewell. After the rain there are countless small streams to hop, and sometimes the trail itself becomes a small stream, especially in the unremarkable first few miles out of Magney, where it follows a ski trail and then rigidly follows property lines up and down a hill. Things brighten at the Little Brule River, a small stream that still manages to carve a deep North Shore ravine on par with its more voluminous peers. The trail hugs the high bank and passes stray white pines before it breaks southward to the Lakewalk.

The Lakewalk is a 1.5-mile stretch along the shore of Lake Superior, the only wilderness portion of the trail that runs along the Great Lake. Its vast openness unfurls in stark contrast to the dense woods that line so much of the trail. The sun dances across rolling waves, the golden glow of the North; a bit larger and these rolling swells would be a surfer’s dream. The sound of the rocks pulled back with each retreating wave isn’t quite as powerful as the Pacific, but the dreamlike effect is the same. I eat a leisurely lunch from a seat atop a pile of rocks across a narrow channel from a small island.

I fancy myself a veteran beach hiker after my Lost Coast adventure in July, but that experience only takes me so far: there are a few easily traversed rock ledges, but much of the hike comes across bands of small rock that only last for so long. Frequently, I’m forced to scramble up to higher ground. The lessons of California do not apply, and the lake, at its highest levels is recorded history, doesn’t offer a retreating tide to make passage easier. At one point the trail disappears completely into the waves, and I’m forced to crash through a thicket, perhaps the most challenging bushwhacking I’ve ever done. One last beautiful stretch of beach follows my emergence from the brush, though I wonder if the rising lake will allow this stretch of trail to last.

My mind wanders to a debate that began over Grain Belts at Liquor Lyle’s, as all great pop debates do. A West Coast friend who’s guided my view of California as the mythic American frontier did battle with a fellow Georgetown grad, who stood his ground in defense of East Coast hierarchy. Our elites in Washington and New York may have their flaws, but at least they don’t pretend to be saving the world. That elite is wrapped up in a self-inflicted legitimacy crisis now, and while I too will lean in the direction of the devil I know, I’m more convinced now than ever that answers will come not from Park Slope or Pacific Heights but instead from wilds where we can restore ourselves, if only for a little while. The lessons of California again do not apply, mugged by reality; the East helps only in its acknowledgment of history, not in a pathway forward. As a society divides, Octavio Paz writes, “solitude and original sin become one in the same…When we acquire a sense of sin, we also grow aware of our need for redemption.”

The Lakewalk complete, I plow upward and pass a couple of young grouse hunters, a sure sign of coming autumn. The Kadunce River had been my tentative goal for the day, but the campsite atop a ridge with no view of the river doesn’t strike my fancy, so I stop to refill my water bottle below some falls past the site and push on. The trail here is immaculate, the fruits of a diligent trail crew that I encounter rebuilding a bridge over the west fork of the Kadunce. I thank them for their work, skip past their site, and waffle over taking the passable campsite on Crow Creek before deciding to trust the guidebook’s glowing description of Kimball Creek 1.2 miles onward.

Kimball Creek rewards my patience: after a long descent down from a road, I come to a pleasant site perched above a rushing creek. I set up camp, read and write in peace, content, and decide to prepare my dinner. I then discover my grave error: somehow, I’ve managed not to pack a lighter or matches; even if I’d wanted to make a fire, all of the wood around me is wet. I settle for a freeze-dried meal made with lukewarm water, all but the rice in my “Himalayan” lentil dish reconstitutes passably, and I wash it down with some bourbon. After spending a night at a site with 12 other people in May, I appear to have Kimball Creek to myself tonight, and I’m delighted at this chance to write in peace.

That all changes at dusk, when Jerry stumbles into camp. He’s a middle-aged hiker with a t-shirt that proclaims him a “Drunkle,” and he’s parked his car along the road at the top of the bank and is using this site as a base for a hiking adventure up toward the Boundary Waters. There’s no escape from my chatty new sitemate, but he’s an amiable veteran of wilderness adventures and he shares some of his various sinful goodies with me, which further wipes away the taste of my mediocre dinner. I write long into the night after we retreat to our tents, and struggle through a fitful, cool night’s sleep.

Jerry asks me few questions. He walks away from our encounter with no idea of my family life or what I do for a living or what I do for fun besides traipse around the woods. At the time it annoyed me, but there’s something freeing in frivolous talk, and the disappearance of my easiest talking points allows my mind to get past them and on to something more existential. This summer, my mind has often been caught up in a battle between pride in what I’ve built in my three years back in Duluth and a gnawing sense that I made a mistake and came back home too soon. It would be easy to lapse into careerism, or to obsess over various power plays. Tonight, I end my night looking at the last line in a passage from an old story I’d screenshotted the day before so I could have it even when I’m unplugged on the trail: “even the eternal striver knows his place.”

Jerry and I set out at the same time the next morning, him up to his car, and me across the two branches of Kimball Creek before a long climb up through a lush, mossy spruce forest. The rain that had loomed in the forecast never materializes, but it is oppressively humid, and I’m drenched in sweat despite a second day of ideal hiking temperatures. Faint views of the lake peek out from the ridge beyond Kimball, and the rising sun paints a band of orange across the horizon between the greys of the clouds and the lake. The trail drops through groves of spruce to Cliff Creek, then passes over a seemingly interminable stretch of peaks and valleys over nine gurgling streams, one of which features a descent so muddy that one can only settle one’s boots into it and slowly ski down, grasping at the trees lining the path for stability.

A crossing of wider Durfee Creek signals the end of this endless up-and-down, and it’s followed by a much steadier up. The reward at the end is a beautiful Alpine meadow with views all along the shore and an array of flowers lending color for the scene. The trail then loses itself in some ridgetop woods, and Woods Creek comes as a mild surprise, its rushing waters audible down below long before I can see it. The trail then plunges 800 feet down alongside the creek, and I stop to reload on water when it makes its way down from the top of the ravine to the side of the stream. I cross Lindskog Road and work my way away from Woods Creek before abruptly coming to the gorge of the Devil Track River.

The North Shore has no shortage of gorges, but that of the Devil Track, I quickly decide, may be its grandest. Red cliffs tower hundreds of feet over the river, and the trail works its way up the east bank with scattered views. The climb up along the ridgetop is the most exhausting of this trek, but a steady string of red pine stands, natural cathedrals that have always been my favorite of northern forests, keep my mind off my burning quads. The trail wraps around a couple of tributaries, beautiful ravines in their own right, and finally plunges down to the river past a pair of excellent campsites, one right on the riverbank and one right across the bridge. I pass some other backpackers eating lunch and have one of my own on a convenient rock beneath some cedars just before the trail rises up again. My delight at this gorge justifies any muddy feet, any forgotten lighters, any lack of sleep. The North Shore restores and redeems yet again.

The climb up a long staircase away from the Devil Track punishes me, but at the top the SHT joins a mercifully smooth ski trail. Half a mile onward I come to a quick spur up Pincushion Mountain, which angles up a sheer rock face and traverses a giant granite dome to offer views in three directions. I find a seat and put pen to paper as I gaze out over the Devil Track gorge, silent from this high up, and back across toward the meadow I traversed a few hours earlier. The breeze here on the exposed dome cools me, and I wander about it freed of my pack to drink it in from every angle. Mission accomplished, I trudge along ski trails for the last 1.7 miles of my trek.

This hike is bookended by devils, the Devil’s Kettle and the Devil Track River, names that my dad guesses are the result of poor Christian translations of Anishinaabe spirits. Devils don’t have a lot of purchase for a religiously sympathetic agnostic clambering past these roiling waters in the twenty-first century, but the concept, when stripped of stereotypical accoutrements like tridents and horns, still has some value. Whether we call it original sin or human nature, our species retains its dark and destructive sides that are difficult to shake, something that no love-is-all-you-need faith nor Silicon Valley change-the-world claptrap nor narrative driven by human power structures alone will ever overcome. Most of us blessed with some capacity for self-reflection can name the things that hold us back; the courage to find our way out remains both our greatest challenge and the transcendent task that makes us human.

Nostalgia is a complicated force, one that can both fuel or drown a life. I decided I wanted to go home out of nostalgia, both to honor a past that was and atone for a past that wasn’t. At times, I’ve achieved it; at others, I still have many miles to go. On to the next campsite, and may it bring me not a plaintive musing, but gratitude over what I’ve found.

WRTII, Part 2: East into the West

This is part 2 of a series on my recent Western road trip. Intro here, part 1 here.

My coastal forays complete, I’m now ready to begin the National Park phase of my road trip. I plan to visit four across the next six days, a bug planted by past brushes, the travels of others, and some Ken Burns documentaries. I follow a highway toward Salinas, congested only in the opposite direction, and turn off down a river valley. Here, I get my first look at California agriculture. Dozens of trucks sit parked next to a field, and a flag from Chivas, the Guadalajara soccer team, looms over them. (One suspects that mechanized agriculture would be a far more effective tool to limit immigration than a wall, if that is one’s thing.) It’s a drizzly morning, and the tops of the mountains are wreathed in clouds; to my right, the coastal range is green, while to my left, the range on the other side of the Salinas Valley is that classic California gold. My next destination, Pinnacles National Park, is up in these hills.

Pinnacles is one of the newest additions to the National Park System, a 2013 creation designed to protect a big, dormant volcano that was once down near Los Angeles, but has made its way some 200 miles north thanks to the San Andreas Fault. Its namesake is the set of towering rock formations at the heart of the park known as the High Peaks, where fat fingers thrust their way upward from the earth in an imposing array of jagged ridges. No roads cross the park, and its primary entry lies on the eastern side near Hollister, but I come in from the west through the town of Soledad. Beyond the rocks its greenery is traditional chaparral, a dry and scrubby landscape with stunted oaks and unexpected pockets of life, especially now in spring when the flowers are abloom. My access road is just one lane for long stretches, and pitches its way up through the hills to a lonely visitor center. No rangers are on duty, and a custodian waves me through and just tells me not to freeze. It’s 46 degrees when I park. Some escape from Duluth spring this vacation is turning out to be.

I’m the second car in the lot when I arrive, and I have the first trail I explore, the Balconies Cliff and Cave loop, to myself. At the start it’s a wide, flat trail, but in time it switches back and wanders up a cliff for some respectable views of the main peak and a valley leading on to the other side of the park. It proceeds in the shadow of the sheer Machete Ridge, a popular rock climbing destination. The mist shrouds the high peak pinnacles, and this park, quiet save for the birdsong, has an otherworldly quality, like some land I would’ve imagined as a kid when mapping out some fantasy world in my mind. I descend from the ridge and make my way through a valley that slowly closes in on itself before I cove to an opening in the rock, a gate ajar in front of it. Time to explore a cave. My small flashlight is less than adequate, and I spent a minute trying to figure out how exactly I’m supposed to climb over the waterfall before finding the actual trail somewhere to its left. It’s a tight squeeze up a passage and over scattered boulders, but before long I pop up into the mist again, and slip through another crack between rocks on my way back toward the parking lot, which hasn’t added any cars since I set out.

The next stage of my hike takes me up the floor of Juniper Canyon before it rises up a long set of switchbacks into the High Peaks. It’s a decent prep hike for Angel’s Landing at Zion; while it has few sheer edges, it does offer a substantial elevation gain. Later, in the aptly named Steep and Narrow Section, a thick metal railing is a very welcome addition, both to pull oneself along and to prevent a fall. The climb up into the High Peaks is a reminder of the first rule of mountain climbing, which is that peaks are always higher than they seem to be, but the CCC-era marvels of engineering make it all easy.

Some slight spits of rain start to fall as I reach the top, but it’s a pleasant sensation now that it’s warmed up some and I’ve worked up a sweat. The fog burns off as I make my circuit of the High Peaks, and I’m rewarded with good views in all directions. A small air force keeps watch over the heights, most of them hawks of various persuasions; I would like to think the larger birds in the distance are condors, but I’m in no position to say for sure. The foot traffic picks up some on my way down, and I settle in at a now-sunny picnic table by the parking lot to eat lunch and catch up on my notes.

I return to Soledad to gas up, then head south on The 101 for a spell before breaking east on California 198, which will take me all the way to my destination in the Sierras later this night. Having seen a big ocean and big rocks, I’m now ready for the big trees of Sequoia National Park. The first 40 miles of 198 are along a weaving mountain road reduced to single-lane misery by construction in places. Later, I hit California’s Central Valley: flat, filled with agricultural groves, countless more Hispanic farmworkers, and scattered, dust-choked cities. Nothing in Hanford or Visalia makes me want to stop and look around, so I just drive on, and begin my ascent by the Kaweah Reservoir, a pretty lake marred by a truly ugly collection of houseboats at one end.

I climb through foothills wreathed in fog, and random rain drops disrupt my new collection of bug carcasses on my windshield. A sign of more ominous weather events higher up? Sure enough: at the park entry gate, I learn that tire chains are a requirement to go any higher than my campground. I could head back to the nearest town, Three Rivers, and rent some, but between that inconvenience and the construction delays of up to an hour in each direction announced by sign boards for higher up on the Generals Highway, I concede my defeat to the Sierras. I won’t get to see any sequoias on this trip.

Still, I settle in for a night in the foothills. Potwisha Campground, whose name I still cannot pronounce, is nestled in the now familiar landscape of California chaparral. It is more verdant than at Pinnacles, with thicker foliage and the rushing Kaweah River right below the sites across the road from mine. The rushing river provides the soundtrack, but otherwise, it’s an unremarkable National Park campground that fills up with people who don’t linger much in the cool evening. After a frigid night, I take a convenient hike up through that lush chaparral, following a path that clambers along a ridge overlooking the Kaweah toward some waterfalls. I flush a bunch of bunnies but otherwise see no one until the tail end of the hike as I return to the campground. Today looks like a clear day, even around the highest visible peaks. Perhaps if I’d pushed it, I could’ve made it up to see the big trees after all. Instead, I turn my attention southward.

The road between Three Rivers and Bakersfield, aside from the monotonous cropland of oranges and olives, is a rather dismal one. Everything is dust-choked and drab, and giant political signs yell their slogans everywhere. Even the wealthier homes look questionable, as if no one is really sure they belong here; the nonexistent flow of the Kern River through Bakersfield suggests that might just be the case. The guidebooks I’d consulted before the trip didn’t have a word to say about Bakersfield, its omission saying all there is to say about this city of nearly 400,000, but the locals are plenty welcoming when I stop for a classic California lunch at an In-n-Out Burger.

My path east from Bakersfield sees a sudden change in the terrain. Gone are the farm fields and chaparral, and the land is dry, mountainous, all covered in some shade of brown. A few stray Joshua trees begin to appear, and after a pause to get ripped off on gas in Tehachapi, I come across the largest wind farm I’ve ever seen. I’ve left California and entered the West.

A road trip across the rural West is a reminder of how much of the American economy still depends on logistics, agriculture, and extraction: practices that are afterthoughts to many city-dwellers. It’s not hard to see why the people who work one set of jobs now seem a world apart from those in the other, and why this is likely to only grow more extreme. The convenience economy of a San Francisco doesn’t require anyone to ever see a roadside fruit stand, a passel of parked trucks beside oil rigs, or the semis groaning their way up the pass on Highway 58 between Bakersfield and Mojave, unless they decide to clog the passing lane at 45 miles per hour to get around the even slower trucks working their way east.

Few forces have had as dramatic an effect on the American countryside as the development of expressways, whether they are part of the formal interstate highway system launched in the Eisenhower era or just a state highway like Route 58, which Caltrans has slowly rerouted around the major towns to allow for free-flowing movement. They resulted in the complete reorientation of rural America, as Main Streets were supplanted by exit ramp strips. Call it transportation-oriented development of sorts: investment follows the major infrastructure projects. But in so many of the towns, it created little new wealth and instead just left a derelict strip in the middle of town, which invited in a sense of decay that broke up a stable, placid small-town existence. The money moved around, but it’s hard to know if the pie really grew.

And if that change hadn’t happened? Well, the crossroads at Kramer Junction gives some clue of what it would look like. This meeting of California 58 and U.S. 395 is, frankly, a gross mess of service stations and dozens of trucks coming together at this lonely stoplight. Five miles later, they finally accelerate back to the speed limit, leaving behind clouds of exhaust in their wakes. Yes, it’s a good thing that we’ve kept this stuff off of city streets. The forces that drive the economy go far beyond the routing of highways.

I continue on the road of the longest travel day of my trip. I pass through Boron (home to the world’s largest Borax mine, and the Twenty Mule Team Museum!), Barstow, then a lonely stretch for many miles to the south into the Lucerne Valley, a hardscrabble hole with more churches than people. Some residences are RVs, others are ruins barely clinging to life, and barring more outward urban march or some new discovery of wealth locked in the ground, one suspects this little pocket will someday join the list of Western ghost towns. Edward Abbey—whose Desert Solitaire is my reading material for this leg of the trip—says people shouldn’t live in these deserts at any scale, and he may be right: how do some of these towns I pass through even exist, if not just as escapes for those who don’t want to be part of the rest of civilization?

Yucca Valley, one of three oasis towns just north of Joshua Tree National Park, has a bit more life to it, with 20,000 residents and some well-appointed desert homes. It hardly feels like a portal to a desert park when I drive through, though. The car thermometer comes in at 59 degrees as I enter the park around 3:00 in the afternoon, and there is water on the pavement. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, at least when it comes to the weather.

The heart of Joshua Tree is a savanna of its eponymous yuccas on a high table of the Mojave. Most other national parks have a handful of sights that make them famous: Half Dome and the waterfalls in the valley at Yosemite, a handful of trees at Sequoia, Angel’s Landing and The Narrows at Zion. Joshua Tree isn’t like that. The main attraction is the desert. Every quarter mile or so, a parking area invites visitors to simply stop and wander out into the grove of Joshua trees and pick their way along trails with no names among the cacti, kicking up a wave of dust as they go. As is the case so many times over my time in the desert, Abbey’s take rings true:

The desert says nothing. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation…Despite its clarity and simplicity, however, the desert wears at the same time, paradoxically, a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting—but waiting for what?

My early arrival gives me some time to explore, and I head for the Barker Dam Trail, a flat nature trail that gives a quick introduction to the park’s ecology. One rock bears a series of pictographs that have received some enhancements from vandals, and at the end of a trail is a fetid little pond that nonetheless was a vital source of life for the early prospectors in the area. Joshua Tree is home to several hundred mines, nearly all of which failed, though a few of the desert adventurers made a decent living for themselves.

As a base for my own decent living over the next two nights, I set up shop at my tent in the Jumbo Rocks campground. Here, I notice my only great error of the trip: I’ve left my ground fly behind at the campground in Sequoia. Thankfully, I won’t need to worry about too much condensation on the ground affecting my tent here. Jumbo Rocks, meanwhile, is about as excellent as a campground of its size and style can be. Its namesake rocks separate all the campsites and make them seem much more isolated than they are, and some scraggly bushes offer additional privacy. People pop up on rocks here and there, once again answering the park’s invitation to explore and hop from boulder to boulder.

Some things one can’t escape in a car campground. Just after nightfall, the site across the way is, very gradually, occupied by three vehicles: first an SUV, then a camping van, and then a monstrous RV that is towing another camper. This can’t be legal, but after about 50 attempts and a forced relocation of the neighboring camper’s vehicle the RV’s driver manages to fit it into the parking spot. But, other than their headlamps occasionally brightening my quiet site, they turn out to be passable neighbors. Even though my evening meanders take me past a few sites throwing full-fledged parties, it still manages to be a fairly quiet place thanks to the maze of rocks.

I make my own explorations of the rocks that evening, first with a half-mile walk over to Skull Rock and back, and then with a clamber up the boulders right behind my site. Joshua Tree’s second great claim to fame, its starry skies, slowly begins to emerge. The daytime clouds are gone now, and the heavens slowly open up. Jupiter is immediately visible in the west, and in the hours between sundown and moonrise, as brilliant a night sky as I’ve ever seen emerges. Even in the darkness, it seems crowded: whether due to proximity to Los Angeles or just something about this latitude, the skies are littered with satellites and airplanes. Ignore the flashy lights, I tell myself, and focus on the more permanent specks that complete their hundred light year journeys in my eyes.

It’s going to be a chilly night in the desert, but I leave my rain fly off: the stars are worth seeing for as long as possible. I cocoon myself in my sleeping bag and wrap myself in excess clothes for insulation, and fall asleep far more easily than I had the night before. I wake with a start sometime in the wee hours and am shocked by what I hear: silence. Pure, untouched silence in the night, not even a breath of wind. I shudder and wrap myself up tighter, but grin in spite of myself as I stare up at the waning gibbous moon.

The sun pours through my scraggly bush early the next morning. I slowly extract myself from my protective casing, then head straight out for a hike before the heat and sun can take their toll. My first destination is Ryan Mountain, one of the highest points in Joshua Tree at 5,457 feet. The trail is 1.5 miles of nonstop climb, though nothing technical, and it’s early enough that parts of the western slopes are still in shade. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, but the chill wind persists. I can get all of the sunburn without any of the sweat. I plow up Ryan Mountain, appreciate the view, and then push down, stopping only to chat with a poor Ohioan who is already struggling with this sudden discovery of elevation even though he’s only a quarter of the way up.

Next, I head to Keys View, a drive-up lookout over the Coachella Valley, which includes the town that hosts the music festival and the resort haven of Palm Springs. To the west is a gap in the mountains, and a signboard informs readers that this pass over to Los Angeles is the reason why this valley is so hazy. I can make out the Salton Sea despite the smog, along with a couple of the highest peaks in southern California, including Mount San Gorgonio, which still bears some snow. On the way back down I stop by a couple of the well-named rock climbing spots, including the Oyster Bar and the House of Horrors, to drink in the desert.

My second hike of the day leads toward a place named Pine City (not to be confused with the small town halfway between Minneapolis and Duluth). It’s off the beaten path at the end of a gravel road, and merits only a cursory mention in the park guide. I climb gradually through open desert, the path marked only by rows of rocks on either side, with colorful cacti brightening the way. Eventually, it descends into a wash of sorts populated by a bunch of pinyon pines, by far the largest living thing out here. Further on, a ridge provides a window down to a valley to the north, and while the trail isn’t maintained past this point, I pick my way down a slope and rock-hop for some better views. I come back a bit and settle under a pinyon to guzzle some water and read a chapter of Abbey, who rhapsodizes about the nostalgia and hunger for that which is beyond our reach that lies in the desert. Could there be a better settling? Content, I hike back to my vehicle, meandering to see a few more trees and rocks along the way. I don’t see another soul.

It’s after noon now, and while it’s still a temperate desert day at 73 degrees, it is cloudless, and my skin is starting to bake. I head in to Twentynine Palms, another of the oasis towns just north of the park; down here in the lowlands, the thermometer hits 88. I check out the palm trees around the Oasis of Mara, read the signage on Joshua Tree godmother Minerva Hamilton Hoyt (“The Apostle of the Cacti”), and use this oasis of cell service to inform a few people that I haven’t fallen off some boulder somewhere. My return into the park is disrupted by that scourge of any summer road tripper, the construction crew flagging traffic down to a single lane. Back at my campsite, I find a note from a ranger scolding me for hanging my camping dish towels from a bush to dry. This seems petty, but above all seems sad that rangers are compelled to make daily rounds with form letters to chastise people for their sins. Are we really that bad? I settle under a juniper next to my site for more Abbey. His misanthrope is normally a bit of a turn-off for me, but after a day in his wilderness, it seems more understandable.

After a quick dinner, I head down to the Cholla Cactus Garden, which sits in the transition zone between the high desert of the Mojave and the more barren lowland Colorado Desert. The chollas live up to their reputation as they are set aglow by the setting sun. I make a couple of circuits of the quarter-mile loop, once in each direction: one of the greatest hiking mistakes is not looking back along the way one has come. I wait until driving back to the campground won’t put the sun directly in my eyes, and am rewarded along the way by seeing three coyotes in less than ten minutes. Back in camp, the giant RV people across the way have been replaced by a young pot-smoking couple who have little Christmas lights up in their tent and a hip-hop soundtrack as a backdrop to their conversation. With enough wine, I get it to a point where it fits my mood, and I write in contentment before another night of cold and stars.

This trip features a lot of time to myself, and I’m a rare loner in these campgrounds. I’m glad I’ve traveled this way, as it’s given me no shortage of time to think and clear my mind. I’ve become a proficient long-distance driver, and it’s a very Me way to travel, just pushing on to the next destination, an ambitious itinerary executed as well as I can realistically manage. I’m writing plenty, and going through plenty of good books. Boxes checked, left and right. But at the same time, I’m not exactly pining for another such trip.

Some of my concern is practical. Everything just takes longer when one travels alone, and times when I thought I’d be free to read or write turn into food prep or dishes or setup and takedown, even for someone who has efficient systems for all these tasks. A simple division of labor is one of the best arguments against atomized living that I’ve ever encountered. (I’m aware this is an ironic point coming from a single person who lives alone, but that doesn’t mean I think this is an admirable state of affairs, or that it is the endgame.) But for all my enjoyment of Abbey in the wilderness, I find my wandering to an old favorite essay, one by Jonathan Franzen (whose misanthrope can put Abbey’s to shame) on his trip to one of the Pacific’s most isolated islands in which he concludes that radical solitude is no way to live.

Perhaps I’m too much of a lover of a communal life. Maybe that’s why, for all my writing pretentions, I’ll remain an intermittent blogger, and never a noted conservationist writer, or a Great American Novelist. But for now, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Highway 61 Revisited

When I was a small child who wouldn’t shut up, my parents would just strap me into the car seat and take me for a drive. It worked every time, and put Baby Karl to sleep. As I learned on my whirlwind West Coast road trip last summer, a good, long drive still has the power to lull me into a satisfied place. Perhaps no road can do this better than the one lining Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior, a pathway woven through childhood memories that also looms up in vague visions of the future.

Minnesota Highway 61 runs some 150 miles from the end of Interstate 35 in Duluth to the Canadian border. It was decommissioned from federal highway status a few decades ago and is no longer the continuous highway that ran from Bob Dylan’s birthplace down through the heart of Blues Country to New Orleans, but it remains the only connection between the U.S. and Canada through Minnesota’s Arrowhead region. The highway is an engineering achievement, often blasting its way through the thick Duluth Complex and the volcanic extrusions that jumble together in the headlands on the Shore. I drive this road with some regularity; no year is complete few trips up the Shore for hikes, runs, and skis. Work takes me up this way at times as well, including a trip to Silver Bay and the old Finland airbase site just this past Wednesday. But while this voyage has a few ulterior motives, it’s primarily dedicated to the ribbon of road.

20170506_135522[1] — The view from Mount Josephine toward Canada

The North Shore is a tourist playground of rocky beaches and cascading streams, rustic beauty frozen in time. Resorts and vacation homes that range from humble cabins to palatial lodges with floor-to-ceiling windows out on the lake dot the way along 61. The greatest of these is the house atop Silver Creek Cliff that was once rumored to belong to Arnold Schwarzenegger, that illustrious alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Superior. I’ll have to dust off an unfinished short story that took place in a house modeled after this one. But that castle is just one of the retreat homes on the Shore. There are also the homes of the Encampment River People, the residents of a cloistered community north of Two Harbors whose sole purpose in life appears to be yelling at people who disturb their peace; north of Ilgen “City,” I pass a house on the market for $5.5 million that looks worth every penny on its Sotheby’s listing. Real estate now excites me. I’m getting old.

These vacation homes are a far cry from some of the Shore’s most distinctive markers: the ore docks of Two Harbors, the taconite plant in Silver Bay, and the ghost town of Taconite Harbor, home to a now-idled power plant. These and the occasional logging truck are the only vestiges of the industry that led people to first settle on the Shore. While doing my homework before my visit to the Finland airbase, I stumbled across a forum devoted to these shuttered military installations, where a few aging former servicemen and their children who lived their early years on the base at the height of the Cold War reminisced on their time atop a hill in rural Lake County. Despite the desolation and cold—many of them were not native Minnesotans—they almost universally called it the best years of their lives. Now, the base sits vacant aside from a few apparent squatters, a superfund site at the end of a crumbling, precarious road. In place of the solidarity of years on the base, the Shore has now often become a playground for people who live somewhere else.

20170506_122932[1] — Intermingling rocks at a wayside south of Grand Marais

I’m guilty as charged today. This road trip emerged from a plan to test out a new pair of trail running shoes, and their maiden voyage commences at Oberg and LeVeaux Mountains, two peaks that flank the Onion River and its eponymous road just south of the Lutsen ski resort. I start with LeVeaux, the longer hike up an oblong bluff rising 900 feet above the lake. I don’t see anyone else on this 3.5-mile loop, which features some muddy slop to mar my new shoes, a bridge over the rushing Onion, and a climb up the north face, some lingering drifts of snow tucked in at its base. The stark solitude here exudes both a complete rightness and a wistful loneliness, two peaks twinned in my first eight months back home. The trail that circles the summit doesn’t offer nearly as many views as other hilltops in the Sawtooths, but there is a superb look back to the south and west at its far end, as clear as one will ever see it with no leaves on the trees quite yet.

Oberg, meanwhile, is bustling with hikers, including a father who, when asked by his young daughter why that guy was running, immediately replies that “he’s being chased by bears.” The run here is easier than on LeVeaux, so it’s easy to bounce along and repeat those old clichés about climbs and endless pursuit. Yes, I need more of this. The views fan out in each direction as I make the circuit, with long looks down at both Superior and inland Oberg Lake. I do, however, opt to skip the overlook at which a man with his significant other appears to be pulling down his pants. I careen back into the parking lot, both tired and wishing I’d found myself a longer route.

I stop for a spell at a wayside to put some thoughts on paper at a bend in the highway where I can enjoy views all the way north to the breakwater in Grand Marais. I press on to that town whose name is better left untranslated, which stirs to life at the start of another tourist season. Downtown bustles with the precise pace of a place that knows what it is and makes it work. I’m tempted to stop in a gallery to find some local art to check off one of the boxes on my ever-expanding apartment decoration checklist, but restrain myself and settle for a sandwich from the Java Moose. (Alas, the tamale cart is nowhere to be seen.) It’s been a good five years since I was last in Grand Marais, and that last visit mostly involved the hospital after a friend separated his shoulder on a Boundary Waters trip, but it’s just as vibrant and quirky as I remember.

My plan had been to turn around at the Devil’s Kettle at Magney State Park a short ways north of Grand Marais, but then I decide, what the hell, I’ll go to the border. I’ve only crossed here once before, on a childhood vacation to Thunder Bay most memorable for the words my mother uttered when faced with the hike up Sleeping Giant. I have a vague memory of Mount Josephine, which towers over the last settlement in Minnesota, Grand Portage; I’d forgotten how much the highway climbs to cross this final rampart before the Pigeon River. If we ever decide to build a wall with Canada, this portion of the border is already covered. I’m rewarded with a stellar view from the wayside, with Pigeon Point and a few islands at the mouth of the river dotting the azure lake.

The last stop on Highway 61 is a few hundred feet from the customs booth at Grand Portage State Park. A paved path traces its way along the Pigeon, which bursts its banks with spring rains. I am spattered with spray long before I see High Falls, a torrent down into the ravine that separates two nations. When the sun emerges, rainbows proliferate, and the torrents thunder with such power that water rockets back upward in fountains off the rocks below. It’s the most impressive waterfall in the Midwest (even if half of it is in Canada), and it’s not hard to imagine the misery of the Voyageurs as they struggled to find a way around it. This is the end of the road.

20170506_142428[1] — The gateway to Canada

After one last glance at the land of maple leaves, Tim Hortons, and Justin Trudeau, I turn around and head south, past the signs telling me how to translate kilometers into miles. I swing off 61 in Grand Portage and search for a hiking trail up Mount Josephine, but its parking lot has spawned a sixth Great Lake, and with some clouds rolling in, I’m not too disappointed to head on my way. I meander through the heart of the Grand Portage Reservation, which boasts a shiny new school whose playground teems with children, alive on this otherwise desolate stretch of shore. Much more alive, at least, than the old Voyageur fort at the Grand Portage National Monument. It sits in sad in repose, still closed for the season; in one part, orange construction fencing stands in place of the wooden palisade.

I get another dose of the Shore’s limited brushes with history beyond this little corner of the planet when I stop in the hamlet of Colvill to wander along the beach. This was the old summer home of Col. William Colvill, the commander of the First Minnesota regiment whose suicidal charge at Gettysburg ranks among the most crucial military maneuvers in American history. The First Minnesota suffered an 80 percent casualty rate, but stuffed the Rebel advance and may just have saved the nation as we know it. Shot twice and left with a wrecked ankle, Colvill found solitude here as he gimped down this rocky beach, recovering from the horror of war. I follow in his footsteps, any of my more plaintive musings paling in comparison to what weighed on the old Union hero.

Nowadays, elsewhere in northern Minnesota, I’ve seen a surge in the number of Confederate flags flying from pickup trucks. History is rarely as decisive as we’d like to imagine. What endures a century and a half later is the sense of duty of a man like Colvill, who was the first Minnesotan to enlist when the War Between the States broke out. That sense of compunction, unfathomable until we realize there are things that we, too, would fancy to think we’d drive to the end of the earth to achieve. It’s all somewhere in the pursuit, I muse as I brush a little mud off my leg.

The return trip drags more than the venture northward, as I’m repeatedly stuck in columns of slow-moving traffic. Tourist season is indeed upon us. By the time I’m passing Gooseberry Falls I decide I deserve a beer, and swing down to the Castle Danger brewery in Two Harbors. I sit at the bar and unwind, even as I remind myself how much I have to do to align dreams and reality. Along one road, however, they already blend, and I head home with little doubt that I could just drive this highway into eternity.

Farewell Duluth III: Solitude

You’re a believer in community, you buy all that sentimental stuff you peddle every day, that life is found in intertwining your history with those of the people closest to you. And yet. And yet there are days where it wears you down, where you get too caught up in whatever bubble you inhabit, grow annoyed by the little tics of those around you. Community is one of the greatest sources of life you know, but it is not the only one. You have to get out. Just you, and you alone.

This is another of your town’s triumphs: nowhere is it easier. There are parks at every turn; some packed, some more wild; some well-worn, some neglected. A short drive can take you to places where you won’t meet a soul, if you so desire. You head out to recharge, to find distance; perhaps to cast judgment from afar, perhaps to head for a realm where judgment has no meaning.

You are swift to retreat into these moments; at times you were perhaps too swift, but even now as things come together, you cannot neglect this. This is your cycle inward, necessary before you pull back out. You must go. Back out to some little corner you’ve claimed as your own simply because it cannot be owned. Time is short, so you hurry upward, the jagged rocks in the path turning your feet as you climb. You could stop here or there to admire the view, but not here, this isn’t the place. Across a road, past the spot where you once saw a bear, ever winding upward. A few signs of youthful dalliance, carelessly hidden in the woods; was that you not so very long ago? How the time goes, how much more precious youth now seems.

Out you go, hurrying to time this journey just right. Before long you’re hopping from rock to rock, down a staircase carved in stone. Through the birches, across a boardwalk, the deer far back in the woods flushed, bounding back through the underbrush for only a moment before they’re silent, and then all is silent for you, too. Up a hill, though the view disappoints, back through another stand of wood, a mysterious half-hidden trail, whether from deer or teenagers or something much older you do not know, up to that oak tree near the top of the ridge where you once stood there trying to make sense of what exactly it was you’d done, brandishing a manifesto from an earlier self and proclaiming its wrongness, though now you’ve come full circle and have forgiven yourself. Your younger self deserves more credit than you ever gave him. Who could you have been if you’d gotten over those crippling anxieties, acted on that self you always wanted to be? God only knows now, though that impulse is still inside of you, can still be channeled into something good. Onward, you press, on to the outcropping, site of many a picnic and also your first goodbye to this place, a sunrise at dawn beneath a different oak, this one now as dead as the finality of that goodbye. Take the right fork, you haven’t been that way before. You make your way down the path, looping in and out behind spruces, careening downward so easily you can’t help but run. You bend to pick at a malformed raspberry, sample the latest thimbleberry, scarf the smattered juneberries, a regular forest feast.

Down a field of talus, across the bit that gets muddy when it rains, and you’re nearly there: or maybe you’ve come from the other direction, up from the wider path, past the ruin of an old mill and the side creek that you once waded up for a mile or two, picking crayfish out of the shallows with a couple of people you chose to share this garden with, down the path where one great story reached its peak and another arose; where it led was never entirely clear, but still it has its roots here, high on the bank above the little stream. The destination is always the same. This little patch of woods birthed so many of the convoluted thoughts of the past seven summers, your blessing and your curse, a burden you could not live without. Here is where the last story came to an end, and here too you hope to end the last and worst of the stories you’d rather pretend were not yours.

You reach the gates, push aside those tumbled branches and finally, there it is before you: the cathedral, the dying pines towering up above an open glade, the sun dancing between the trunks, the blinding light of the sinking sun pouring through, setting it all ablaze, and you set out gingerly through the waist-high grass, your hand trailing through it as you go. Perhaps you should drop to your knees, make a show of it all? No, you cannot linger, the mosquitoes nip and the sun sinks. Now, it seems, that time is over, gone without any obvious moment of revelation. It all makes sense now. You complete your duty without any fanfare, and life goes on as if it had never been more than a fleeting thought. Victory.

You head off the path and into the heart of the little stand. Not quite a sacred ground: you’re still in a city, after all, and the reminders of life beyond never quite die. Wilderness is a myth, or perhaps a state of mind. Yes, death comes only to the pines, nearly half of them now just towering empty trunks, lonely pillars supporting a ceiling of fading blue. Et in Arcadia ego. Spruces rise up in their place, and even here before you, a solitary oak tree, fighting above the tangles of thimbleberries and announcing its arrival on the scene. Bring your children here someday, and it might all be gone: just another clump of wood in a forest that buries its past. You could move on to the next hill, where the pines stand a bit more resolutely, but no: yours are these ones, right here, the ones that remind you that you don’t have long. Everything seems more immediate, both the triumphs and the tragedies of life given a vivid edge, and you relish them that much more because you know how much it means to feel all of these things, to live with that joie de vivre that overwhelms all weakness and fear. The more you lay claim to these trees, the more you sense that they are not yours alone, that another set of eyes watches. You’re not quite sure yet where one story begins and another ends; perhaps they all just blend together here; here, in this garden of all your dreams.

You’re free here, though you don’t quite feel it. Gone are the days when every little victory was cause for rejoicing; now you just take it all in stride, natural, the next step along this little chasm through the grass. All is right, all goes on, and as long as you may linger, this is not you: you must share this, come down from your messianic ideal not into a nihilistic doom but into reality where you belong, where you can still be the author of a story that aspires to everything you might desire, even as you know you might not ever quite get there. The pursuit is enough, and with moments like these, you’ll have the wits to make sure the chase never eats you alive.

It’s time to move on. The sun sinks away, and you have far to go before you can rest your feet again. You’ll miss this spot, but you are forever changed by what it’s gifted you, and that is enough: it belongs to you, you belong to it, and whatever shall come will be in the shadows of those towering pines. The light will filter through, blinding but bearing that gift of life all at once, all of those apparent contradictions borne together into something that is, quite simply, you.

Part 4 is here.

A Patient Cycle

Karl Schuettler on Culture, Politics, and High School Hockey

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