Gas (@ $4.79 per gallon unleaded with 15% ethanol).
Gas and Snacks.
Gas and Snacks, Bait...
Gas, Snacks, Bait, Propane (for gas-fired grills and Summer barbecuing).
1.
West-bound I-94 100 miles from Fargo: bluish shadows bob and wobble over the sidewalk. Dragonflies are hovering fifteen feet above the garbage bins. The insects cast their shadows through a lens of hot air onto the pale concrete. They are like drones, silent and mechanical-looking, wavering in the air, torpedo-shaped bodies glinting between the flicker of wings invisible except when a sunbeam is refracted through them
2.
Although it’s 90 degrees in front of the hotel, two beds of green-blue crystals harbor fire, some slender almost imperceptible veins of blue and orange flame momentarily twitching over glass chips. Why has the hotel staff ignited these flames? I’ve seen fire burning here before, on chilly evenings in the Autumn but today – June 17 -- with heat advisories expected for the afternoon and the next few days? The transient flicker of flame above the troughs full of bead-like crystal is the only warning that there is fire incongruously burning midday in the shadow of the portico at the hotel’s front door. This seems hazardous to me. The rays of the sun decorate the nearby sidewalk with arabesques of writhing shadow, densities in the air over the flaming hearths visible a few yards away from the fire. Look at the flame directly and it’s mostly imperceptible in the bright light – like the delicate wings of the dragonflies, mostly invisible, except when cast as shadows...
3.
South of downtown, the Fargo law firm where I am meeting my clients can be reached from only one direction. It’s an old Victorian-style mansion, built shingle-style on one-way streets shaded by trees that tremble in the hot wind. In the small parking lot behind the building, cars and pickups clog the access alley. There’s a garage-sale underway in the old carriage house to the rear of the three-story building and people are rummaging among lamps and battered wooden chairs and cardboard boxes of crockery. A man and woman haul a big picture to their pick-up. The picture is turned away from me and I can’t see its subject.
4.
At the Pilot gas station and C-store at St. Cloud, a dog trots along the sidewalk. The dog has a little harness around its shoulders and carries a small leather pack slung under its belly. The dog’s owner is a kid with a nimbus of wild red hair around his freckled face. He’s hefting an enormous rucksack, an apparatus of camouflage-colored canvas replete with buckles and straps and zipped pockets, tumor-like protuberances in button-down pouches with dangling clasps and hooks. The kid asks me if he can hitch a ride to Fargo.
I look at him skeptically. “I guess so,” I say.
“A ride for me and my dog?”
“I guess so.’
“Where is your car?”
I point to my Honda under the metal awning next to the fuel pumps. The kid has a mandolin or lute in a leather case. His dog pants.
Something about my vehicle discourages him or, perhaps, now he has taken a closer look at me and doesn’t exactly like what he sees.
“Well, you probably have to be going right now,” he says. “I have to take a shower.”
“Yes, I have a meeting in Fargo,” I tell him.
He shrugs: “Well thanks for the offer anyway,” he says.
So I drive to Fargo, stopping at a rest stop near Alexandria where a flotilla of dragonflies hovers in the air, then, meet my clients at a law firm in a mansion-house south of downtown, and, at last, check into the Candlewood Suites on S. 17th Street next to an elaborate automated car wash, entering the hotel between yard-long troughs of green-blue glass beads where fires are burning.
5.
The next morning, we are driving to a State Park northeast of Crookston across the border in Minnesota: it’s supposed to be hot today, but, at 10 am, it’s cool with torrents of chilly wind blowing out of the sky. The horizon is dark, a sector of blue standing like a wall over the shelter-belts lining the stubbly fallow fields and black abrasions where the plows have passed. Lightning flashes earthward. It’s too remote for thunder to sound over the two-lane highway where we are driving. Sometimes, a spark of white flashes parallel to the horizon, splitting the dark sky. Along the edges of the blue wall, we can see lighter sky streaked with rain falling in disorderly, wind-whipped pennants. Somehow, the storm never seems to advance, nor does it retreat – it simply stands immobile at the end of the highway.
The character of the land changes. We’re traversing the ancient beaches that once formed the rim of glacial Lake Agassiv. Before the plains were flat and dark isolating the abandoned building sites all grown over so that they appear like green battleships moored at intervals in a great armada on the vast flat lake-bed. The shelter belts are either dense green parapets or diffuse, rows of long-stemmed trees with bulbous balloon-shaped foliage suspended forty-feet in the air – it’s almost as if these stretched-out colonnades of trees are trying to evolve into palm trees of the kind that you see in Los Angeles, tall abstract columns bearing at their capitals puffs of frond. For most of the way, the trees are the exception to the rule of the flat black plains, but, now the shelter belts zigzagging this way and that intersect and close-off the horizon and the overgrown farm-sites have blurred into one another and forests rise in terraces over small acreages of cultivated land. It’s the edge of the great northern tamarack swamps, the bogs and the marshes and the enormous shallow lakes that are relics of the glacial ice. Sometimes, in alcoves in the woods, pale Lutheran churches pose against the underbrush all tainted with poison ivy. The churchs are clapboard sheds with white coffin-shaped steeples, a privy in the shadow of the trees and little graveyards full of pious Protestants, saved by Grace, proud to have never done a good deed in all their years on earth.
It’s rained not too long ago. The road catches the oblique morning light and glistens.
6.
The State Park is a forest that holds a fast-flowing river in its green grip. The river is white with rapids, surging between low soggy banks. Apparently, the woods flood and, walking twenty feet from the stream and ten feet above the white, hissing bore of the water, one encounters pillowy mounds of sand and gravel, deposited among the brush by the engorged river. Pioneers built a mill here, not much of a structure, just a clapboard shack perched on the edge of the stream. But the water was too unpredictable and, every few years, swept away the mill and, so, the Swede who owned the water-wheel and millstones had to move the building back away from the brink of the river, defeating the whole purpose of his apparatus. (In recent years, the stream – it’s called the Middle River – has become even more fickle and the remains of the mill are now a hundred feet from the river, set in the center of grassy clearing in the woods.) It’s a humble-looking structure, a lathe granary with one wall open to display a steam engine set under the sloping shingled roof. Because the river was either full spate and flooding or too low to power the water-wheel, the Swede acquired the steam engine on its big wheels with yellow spokes to drive the grinding apparatus and a wheel for sharpening knives and scythes and, even, a log-splitting mechanism. The equipment still works because fire is applied once a year to the boiler and the steam spins the power take-off and people picnic on the grass in front of the mill-shed and there’s even a whistle-cord that be tugged to make the machine hoot. A couple decades ago, someone hauled an old log cabin onto the site and it stands at the opposite end of the little moist clearing, a reminder that the frontier was a place of relentless poverty and despair. White mud seals the square-cut log walls and there’s a loft above the first-floor living quarters (dining table, hearth, some cooking gear, old pictures under oval eyelids of glass on the walls) where presumably a bed of some kind is located. My son, Martin, puts his drone aloft to let it peer into the upper windows on the log cabin, but the camera records only dark shadow, some opaque glass stretched over the window-frame in which the whirring flying frame of the drone is reflected.
7.
Presumably, propane is burnt to boil the water in the steam engine. Once at a seminar on fire investigation, I heard an cause-and-origin expert say: “Propane isn’t bad for the environment. It eliminates the environment.”
Propane blows everything to pieces.
8.
The fender of the steam engine caged behind bars is John Deere-green. Four mason jars are poised on the steam engine’s sheet-metal fender: one contains bran, then, fines, then, chaff, then, a jar full of clotted-looking grey flour produced by the mill.
9.
The green shield of a dead turtle is flattened on the gravel of the driveway leading to the mill-clearing. The turtle’s snake-like head is mostly intact, extended from the crushed shell. Some older women with a Borzoi are ambling between the historical markers explaining the cabin and the mill building. The big, noble-looking dog sniffs disdainfully at the turtle’s crushed corpse.
10.
Two robins flutter and cry out indignantly in the brush near a small brick building, a windowless bunker that houses, perhaps, some electrical equipment and, maybe, a pump to provide water at the campground. On the top of the wall, the reason for the robins’ rage is visible – it’s a small, improvised-looking nest. Martin launches his drone again and sees that there are pale earthworm-colored baby birds in withered and sere straw atop the brick wall.
11.
It’s cool and windy and the forest along the river trembles and bows to the gale. The river has split along a tufted torso of island, flowing white and perilous around its edges. There’s a suspension bridge made with pallets all rotted-out and impassable hanging over the torrent. Some orange webbing keeps pedestrians off the span. After a half-mile in the woods, the trail drops down to a retaining wall made from field stone near the river. It’s an inscrutable heap of rock that may once have been another crossing over the stream, although now the boulders that comprised the bridge or weir are simply lined up in a row overlooking the flowing water. Another quarter of a mile brings you to second suspension bridge, this one intact and moored on big piers of stone bracketing the river. On the other side of the water, there are some cyclopean steps with water drizzling down them in small cataracts. The steps carry outflow from a swimming lagoon that has been gouged into the upper river terrace, an acre of green, foul-looking water edged with a pink sand beach. A metal pipe spurts water into the lagoon (seemingly pumped from the river) where there are three bubblers aerating the pond, pale blisters in the center of the teal-colored lagoon. Grassy fields surround the pond and some flights of wooden steps lead to a higher terrace where there is a gravel parking lot. Big WPA-era shelters, including a Changing House, stand apart from the water, massively built with great boulders jigsawed together in a matrix of grey concrete. Large rough-hewn wooden beams support heavy dark roofs covered in fat rustic shingles. A hundred yards away, a toilet facility built in the same style is half-embedded in a hillside. Because the day is dark, a yellow lantern-like light gleams on the side of building which is protected by big, ancient trees. In the distance, a kind of fortification tower, also massively built with loop-hole embrasures framed by iron, stands militant and useless at the edge of the woods marking the slopes of the third and upper terrace. Presumably, the structure may have held a water tower. On its squat concrete base, a bronze plaque identifies this as a WPA project, completed in 1939 – an austere-looking and savage eagle is embossed into the top of the metal plate. More WPA-shelters occupy a hollow in the hills – the wooded knolls are old sand-dunes that were once beaches at the edge of the glacial lake.
When I was growing up, these WPA shelters and bridges were incidental to the State Parks where they had been built, ubiquitous and scarcely even noticed. Now, these hulking structures are, themselves, monuments, protected by Federal law, things worthy of preservation and, perhaps, the last persistent relics of the Great Depression. Built to last, these towers and concrete restrooms clad in rusticated stone and sheltered by massive timber roofs will undoubtedly remain in these places for a thousand or more years. It’s hard to imagine any force sufficient to destroy these great walls and iron-like beams of rough, creosote-soaked wood.
12.
The wind flings the clouds to the edges of the sky. In East Grand Forks, we stop for a late lunch at a taco place across the boulevard from a cemetery. In the graves, the trees are bent double in the gale. The air is congested with blowing dust, a turbulent haze in which the rafts of trees far on the open plains float. On the freeway, I have to slow to 35 mph because visibility is reduced by all the debris flying through the air. I stop for gas in Hillsboro. The town is arrayed for some kind of celebration, fifty or more big American flags all posted at hip-height along Main Street. We stop at the Courthouse square: a bubble of shiny metal dome sits atop a brick tower and the flags strain at their reins, cracking like whips in the hot wind. At the edges of the town, distance vanishes into surging clouds of grey and brown dust taking flight over the barren fields.
13.
Approaching Melrose, Minnesota, where I will stop for the night, I observe that the town has two identical water-towers separated by a green fog of trees flogged by the relentless wind. The towers must be only about six blocks apart. What accounts for this?
14.
An white porcelain Buddha occupies a corner of the office in the Super 8 motel where I check-in. The clerk behind the desk is the owner of the place and, presumably, the servant of the merry Buddha. The fat deity wears a string of beads like a tourist in New Orleans. Immigrants bear traces of their origins. In the State Park with the old mill, a historical marker informs visitors that Lars Larson, the settler who built the gristmill brought seeds for Scotch Pine trees from the Old Country. He planted the seeds and nurtured the seedlings and, along the trail, there’s another marker explaining that the big tree beside the trail is one of Larson’s Scotch Pines and a tribute to the country from which he emigrated, not Scotland, of course, but Sweden. Unfortunately, a blight has killed the tree and it stands like a naked blackened specter at the edge of woods all green and frothy in the wind.
15.
In the middle of the night, all hell breaks loose in the room next to me. Voices rise, quarreling, and, then, there is a sound like drilling in a dentist’s office. Someone with heavy footfall marches down the corridor, randomly pounding on doors. Then, there is a tapping sound, persistent and piercing, as if a sculptor were painstakingly chipping flecks off a marble block. A chorus of voices surges and someone batters a wall. This continues for two hours.
16.
Morning offers no explanation for the alarums of the night. I’m on the highway at 7:15. The roads this Sunday morning are empty.
17.
Michael Barone hosts Pipedreams, a weekly radio show devoted the pipe organ music. Barone has hosted this show for as long as I can remember and it always makes me happy to hear his rich, baritone voice on Minnesota Public Radio. On this Sunday morning, he’s featuring organ music by a British-Belgian composer named Weitz (pronounced “Weets”). Barone is fond of puns and he has named the program “Whole Weitz – it’s good for you!” Barone has been on the air on Minnesota Public Radio for more than fifty years and, like the pipe organ music he celebrates, his shows are all the same and all good. When you first hear a pipe organ wheezing and humming and roaring at you, the instrument seems to be producing avant-garde sounds of the most remarkable sort – even, if the organ was built in the 15th century and is playing variations on a hymn composed two-hundred years earlier. After a while, of course, monotony sets in and you can’t exactly find your way through the music. But this isn’t Michael Barone’s fault and, whereas he once seemed very intelligent and gracious, his patter now has acquired something like wisdom that is a pleasure to hear. In fact, his show would be better if he dispensed with the organ music entirely and just reminisced about wonderful instruments that he has known or described entirely imaginary preludes and fugues written by strange and eccentric composers. Even the host’s name is wonderful, more musical, in fact, than most of the compositions that he features.
This morning, as I drive, I listen to variations on De Profundis, a tune based on the Psalm that begins “Out of depths, I cry out to you.” As I pass Freeport, the water tower painted with a smiling face grins down at me.
18.
The heat index, a radio host declares, will exceed 104 degrees today.
19.
On a Christian broadcasting station, a fundamentalist pastor justifies his refusal to break bread with a Muslim imam. “There is no path to salvation except through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” the radio pastor says. He extols this relationship as being the only way to achieve heaven and says, forthrightly, that good deeds are worthless. In that respect, the pastor recalls a philanthropist who donated “thirty-four million dollars” to have the obelisk of the Washington Monument restored to its former glory. “Donating all that money won’t insure that the millionaire is saved,” the pastor says. Another preacher, acting as the pastor’s sidekick on this broadcast, seems a little concerned about his brother’s words derogating good works. He remarks: “But you know, God is not unimpressed by good deeds. I don’t think He wholly disdains good works.”
Gas, Snacks, Bait and Propane.
Snacks, Bait and Propane.
Bait and Propane.
Propane (which blows everything apart.)
June 20, 2022
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