1.
I drove to downtown Minneapolis for a seminar. The sun struggled to rise over the horizon east of the highway but was trapped by clouds dangling blue nets of falling rain. Workers have returned to the city after COVID kept them home for two years and so there was traffic on my commute. The downtown parking lot near the seminar lecture hall was more than half-full. But all went well and I reached the continuing legal education program on time. In fact, I was almost an hour early for the nine am start to the program.
2.
The seminar ended at noon. I drove about twenty blocks to the Walker Art Center where I saw a retrospective of works by Pacita Abad. I took some notes in my Moleskin from which to make a review on my blog.
3.
Then, I took the freeway north by northwest to Fargo. I planned to drive another two-and-a-half hours and spend the night in Fergus Falls. The Crow River north of Minneapolis was flooded. The freeway ran like a causeway through a gloomy drowned forest in which stark leafless trees stood as pillars amidst barricades of sodden arboreal wreckage – it was acres of doom surrounding the highway, a stark watery sentiment that darkened the day. The Crow River flooding was different from the vast lakes occupying the plains beside the Minnesota River – there the terrain was open and the sky intervened and the flood wore a bright, almost merry, aspect. At the Crow River, the darkness seemed impenetrable and falling rain dimpled the waters.
4.
The rest stop is a little brick box on a moraine next to the freeway. Some cold-looking lakes fringed with marsh and savannah with scattered oaks and elms filled the hollow next to the highway. For fifty miles I had passed and, then, been passed in the north-bound lanes by a fellow traveler, an old guy wearing a stocking hat and driving a pick-up. He pulled into the rest stop ahead of me and held the door into the toilet, ushering me into the rest room as if it were a companionable room in his dwelling.
“Where are you headed?” he asked me.
“Fargo,” I said, although my end destination for the day was Fergus Falls.
“Oh, going to Fargo? Does that make you think you’ve made some questionable decisions in your life?”
I wondered if he was quoting a movie.
“I don’t mind Fargo,” I said. “Have you been there?”
“I’m from North Dakota. Up by Turtle Mountain.”
“It’s very nice up there,” I said.
We had washed our hands.
He said: “I don’t know how long I can make keep on making this drive. My daughter is a veterinarian in – “ And here the howl of the hand dryer deafened me and I couldn’t hear where his daughter practiced her profession: somewhere south, but how far south I didn’t know.
“– she says she makes so much money down there that I can’t entice her to return home,” he concluded.
“Well, she’ll come back at some point,” I predicted. “People get a hankering to return to where they were raised.”
“Hankering”? I don’t use that word except that I had said it and, now, was a little ashamed both of my diction and the sentiment. Was there something wrong with me?
We went out of the toilet where the rain was skittering down from heavy-looking, dark clouds and moistening the vehicles.
“Safe travels,” the man from North Dakota said.
He was slow to start from the Rest Stop and I got a few miles ahead of him and I don’t think he caught up with me again. On this stretch of freeway, there is really only one destination, particularly in the mid-afternoon and that is Fargo.
5.
But I was going to Fergus Falls, stopped there, and stayed in an AmericInn two-hundred yards from the freeway. All went well. At 6:00 pm, I drove across the highway overpass to a restaurant called Mabel Murray’s. The place stood in the shelter of trees rimming low bluffs overlooking yet another stygian flooded river (all inky water and snags in halos of pale phosphorescent foam) and the structure was old, built like a French manor with dark turrets and shingled gables. The interior was shadowy and the big picture-windows that opened onto the wet bare forest, slick with sharp blades of wood and thorns, didn’t so much illumine the place as they carried into its interior the growing darkness outside.
The food was good. Next to my table, two couples were celebrating a wedding anniversary – did I hear right? A 72nd anniversary? Could such a thing be possible? An old man with bright eyes glared at his food like a hawk watching for rabbits in a snowy meadow. The two old people made a curious impression upon me – it was as if they were simultaneously very ancient and new born. Of course, they scarcely touched their food and styrofoam boxes were brought to carry away the left-overs. At another table, people were happily discussing their precocious grandchildren. “You know,” the man said, “girls are way ahead of boys at that age, both emotionally and physically.” This thought interested the man so much that he repeated it, at least, four times.
After paying for my dinner, I looked at some of the engravings on the walls: an old mezzotint showed a medieval-looking farmstead with a thatched barn and a strange round tower, something like a silo, but, perhaps, intended for defensive purposes. Next to that picture, there was an engraving by Cruikshank, it seemed, a sort of goblin caricature in a florid admiral’s hat, saluting a scroll on which some act of parliament was incised in clerical script. (Could this engraving be an actual Cruikshank? I assumed not, but stranger things have been known to happen. Somewhere in North Dakota, there’s a clapboard Lutheran church in a community of 80 people adorned by an altar showing a transfiguration scene painted by the Czech-Bohemian art-nouveau master Alphonse Mucha.)
6.
At the motel, I looked out my window and saw the corpse of a Burger King below the slight embankment on which the AmericInn was erected. Wan light originating amidst broken clouds in the West had invaded the defunct restaurant and I could see tables and booths with chairs stacked upside-down on counters. Floor tiles caught the watery rays of the setting sun and the inverted chairs cast long shadows through the filthy windows and the drive-through displays seemed to have been looted hanging like wrecked half-open doors on their aluminum pylons. At the prow of the Burger King, an annex was filled with slides and climbing towers, dubiously candy-colored like knick-knacks sunk in the bottom of aquarium. If I looked long enough at the shell of the Burger King, I supposed that white faces would appear supplicant in the windows and, then, the air would reek of rotting grease in which the corpses of french fries were floating and, perhaps, a carol of children’s voices from the ghastly playroom would ring out across the intervening lane of the drive-through sunk beneath the levee where the motel stood. This was something that I didn’t want to see. And, so, I read for awhile and watched TV, a show called Battlebots in which little mechanized machines, a bit like Roomba cleaning appliances fought to the death in an arena lined with plexi-glass windows in stark iron frames. The mascot for one of the teams was a boy dying of cancer, appearing at the tournament under the sponsorship of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Unfortunately, the robot operated by his team lost its battle.
7.
Returning to the motel from the restaurant, I crossed the parking lot. I had put my vehicle in the corner of the lot so that I could find it easily the next morning when making my exit. (My SUV looks like almost every other SUV on the road and is easily confused with other vehicles.) Ahead of me, I saw two men, perhaps, truck drivers or construction workers, lean and well-built lugging 18 can cases of beer toward the motel. A woman walked between the men, but I couldn’t really focus my eyes on her for some reason. She was a wraith, mincing and slender, carrying a paper sack but not burdened by the beer that the men were bringing into the motel. They went ahead of me in the motel hallway, drowned in the shadows of the corridor. It was pretty evident to me that there were some shenanigans afoot.
8.
About an hour after the Battlebots show, I heard a man bellowing in a nearby room. He was howling in pain. I thought: “They are murdering him.” He continued to bawl and squeal for ninety seconds and, then, I suppose, his orgasm was complete and he fell silent. I heard voices murmuring but couldn’t make out what was being said. This guy’s pleasure was indistinguishable from pain. I was troubled. What would make a man cry out like that? It was as if there was a world behind the world filled with unimaginable sensations.
9.
Now, everything was eroticized. I heard clicking, slowly at first, and, then, faster and faster. Bedsprings? But the clicking intensified until it was rapid-fire rattle and, then, a continuous gushing sound and, so, I recognized that I was merely hearing a fan operating somewhere in the room’s cryptic HVAC system, the blades turning faster and faster and, then, the whoosh of air blowing out from the heating register under the window. This happened at intervals all night long and, each time, roused me from my unquiet slumbers so that, at dawn, my head was aching and my eyes burning.
10.
The flooding around Fargo is invisible. The river can’t be seen from the freeway bridges or, indeed, from the crossings that span the Red River of the North between Moorhead and Fargo. Guardrails and barriers obstruct vision, almost willfully, it seems, as if to spare the traveler from the sight of the river’s humiliating paucity in late Summer (then, it’s a mere trickle in a bed full of snags the color of rusting iron) and its furious rage in April and May. Engineers have scraped out a few grassy troughs, the size of major-league ballparks, scattered along the stream and designed to relieve the pressure of the current, and I suppose those are now lakes of dark, muddy water too dense to reflect the sky full of tattered, wind-blown clouds. But my transit through the city doesn’t bring me near those depressions and, so, the presence of the flood is subliminal, an icy halo around the town.
11.
I’m at the public library at 9:30 in the morning and park at a four-hour berth along the curbside. A heap of vinyl blankets conceals someone sleeping in a doorway to a public building, a government office, that seems to be abandoned. About six natives are sitting on a metal bench outside the bland steel and glass facade of the library. They are invisible to me, stout columns of torsos in black sweatshirts and a smear of brown faces where eyeglasses glint and a yellow tooth catches the oblique rays of the sun. It would take an act of will to look more closely at the homeless Indians and that attention, most likely would be misconstrued and might lead to an unpleasant encounter and, so, I focus my attention on a strange sculpture, a balding bearded giant with a look of ferocious determination on his face stooping as he drives a harrow through sod; the colossal sod-buster’s plow is pulled by bison with globular eyes between its horns like the eight or so eyes you might see on a spider.
The library won’t open until 11:00 am and, so, I return to my vehicle and the motionless heap of vinyl and cloth in the doorway and, then, tune my smart-phone to guide me to a used bookstore about a half-mile away.
12.
BDS books occupies a concrete-block bunker across from Thai-kota, a Thai restaurant, and the studios of the local college-affiliated radio station. A man sits on a bus-bench, wearing a skimpy short-sleeved shirt and drawing on a cigarette between his lips. He looks cold. I greet him and he nods. I expect him to ask me for some money and, I’m about to grope in my pocket for cash, when he says: “Good morning, sir!” but nothing more.
The entry to the bookstore is like the opening of a cave, blocked with boulders and bare, fallen logs around a narrow slit in a wall of boxes and books and paper ephemera. I have to thread my way through the stacked boxes and the precarious piles of books that crowd around the door. The cashier’s station is a grotto arched over with books and piles of magazines, the counter lined with book-ramparts. The aisles between the shop’s wooden shelves are narrow and, in fact, made even tighter by the walls of boxes lining the walkways. The books in the boxes don’t seem to have been sorted and are not priced. Along the perimeter walls, sets of books in dark bindings are ranked, rising from floor to ceiling (except the floor is buried in avalanches and pyroclastic debris fields of old books) – these are elegant, if now decaying, volumes comprising the works of Carlyle or Thackeray or George Eliot. The books exude a sort of fragrant gloom and, in their vast numbers, darken the day and the heart as well.
13.
A friend and I are attending Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater next weekend and, so, I need a cheap, reading edition of the play so that I can familiarize myself with the labyrinths of Elizabethan gibberish in which Shakespeare writes. The owner, a bearded guy in his fifties, bespectacled and enthusiastic, of course, asks me my pleasure and seems glad when I tell him Shakespeare. If you sell books, Shakespeare is always the crown of your collection of wares for sale. The man leads me between precarious towers of books to a shelf with about twelve copies of Hamlet on offer. He shows me an edition by A.L. Rowse. “This was my old teacher at Oxford,” he says. He describes Rowse to me as being monkish, pretentious, and afflicted with a pipsqueak voice. “He was my Don,” the proprietor says and he tells me that he would meet Rowse once a week in his chambers and discuss Shakespeare with him and, then, the scholar would frame a question for him to think about and answer during their next session. I tell the bookstore owner that he’s convinced me to buy the book but that I would like to browse the store and purchase a few other items as well. So, the bearded man departs, vanishing between shadowy pillars of stacked books.
14.
I end up with seventy dollars worth of books, really the last thing that I should be buying at this stage in my life. I carry my discoveries to the bower of over-arching books where the owner is fiddling around in his niche. He tells me that Rowse’s examination consisted of seven questions. Choose three and write essays on those topics. “We had all day to complete the test,” the book dealer tells me. He said that he asked Rowse if he could rent a typewriter somewhere. The Don was horrified and said that all tests must be written by hand. “I didn’t mind it,” the proprietor tells me. He says that he still recalled two of the three questions on which he composed his essays: “What do relations between parents and children signify in Hamlet?” and “Is Hamlet mad or not?” I said that you have to study Shakespeare before attending a play otherwise you won’t understand what the actors are saying. “It helps to see the plays, I think,” the book dealer said. “They can act out the unfamiliar words.” He provide an example: the admonition of the Player King not to “saw” the air while speaking – the proprietor of the bookstore waved his arms back and forth around his hirsute, smiling face.
All conversations about Shakespeare in used book stores devolve, ultimately, to the question of whether the man known to history as Shakespeare wrote the plays. “I have a customer who is wild on that topic,” the store-owner told me. “He comes in and spends hours explaining his theories on that point. I don’t much care myself but – “ he shrugged, “I guess some of what he says make sense.” I nod. “You know, Shakespeare never traveled at all, but his plays are set in places like Genoa and he seems to know all about those cities and lands. My customer’s theory is that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a diplomat who had traveled widely in Europe and, therefore, knew all about the foreign lands in which the plays are set.” I said that this was an interesting theory. Of course, Shakespeare’s plays are set in a peculiar topography best described as “Shakespeare-world” where places like Illyria are occupied by earnest Elizabethan princes and where landlocked Bohemia somehow sports a sea-coast and, so, I must admit that I was not at all persuaded by this notion, presented by the store-owner admittedly in a rather haphazard way.
To the side of the entrance, some windows high on the wall admitted yellow rays of sunlight. An Inuksuk of books had been piled on top of a bookcase, a cairn like those found in the Arctic made from flat-stones reaching almost to the ceiling. The person building this cairn had delighted in making overhangs, oversize books pinned down by the central stack so that they extended out over the aisle like precarious eaves. The air was full of dust and the sun glittered around that monument of paper and cardboard and words.
15.
I went back to the library and parked my car about a block and a half away. The car occupied a space under a big mural-painting, a liquor advertisement probably about eighty years old, displayed above me on a wall, the outlines on the bricks restored to their black, glossy authority. The picture showed a grinning man wearing a cowboy hat, a clean-shaven fellow with laugh-lines around his lips and under his big bright eyes. Next to the man, a bottle of whiskey floated nearby, a sort of apparition of a certain kind of desire, ordinarily suspect but rendered acceptable by the merry cowboy. “It’s from Kentucky,” the man said in heavily-lettered words unscrolled from his thin, curved lips. “Sunnybrook” was the name of the whiskey and, in smaller print, still probably about a yard-high, the words “The Dude”, labeled the jolly cowboy. I took a photo of the advertisement and, then, walked to the library. I found a warm and sunny nook in the library’s second floor, among the butt-end shelves of adult fiction. Some Indians were pawing through newspapers and, then, pacing around the edges of the big, bright room like caged big cougars. I read half of Hamlet in Rowse’s modernized edition – “who would fardels bear...” becomes, under his ministrations, “who would burdens bear...” Around 1:30, I left the library and walked out to find my car.
16.
Easier said than done... My cellphone showed me that my car was parked ten minutes walk away from the library at a distance of .4 miles. This didn’t seem possible. I thought, although I was unsure, that the car was located somewhere nearby, two blocks or less, and, certainly, not almost a half-mile distant. But I also knew that the machines are accurate and that one ignores their prompts only with peril. I recalled that an airplane altimeter once told a pilot that he was only 3000 feet above the ground when his instincts, the product of thirty years flying, assured him that the plane was at about 15,000 feet. The pilot, guided by his unerring instincts, flew right into the side of a mountain – of course, his plane’s altimeter was completely accurate. And, so, I thought that I should hike in the direction shown on my phone toward the parked car.
I walked several blocks, but nothing seemed familiar. The signs on the streets were strange to me and the store-fronts were places that I didn’t recall walking past and, at last, I found myself on a broad concourse, an avenue aimed toward train tracks and a district of warehouses and, alarmed, I stopped and decided that, for some reason, my phone was mis-directing me, nudging me away from downtown toward the used bookstore. So I tried to retrace my steps, but this was not as simple as I expected. The route that I had walked had removed me from the vicinity of the public library and, now, I found myself wandering aimlessly, scanning the rows of parked cars for my vehicle. This task was, further, complicated by the fact that many of the vehicles looked exactly like my SUV and, so, I had to position myself on the road or sidewalk to sight license plates, sorting the Minnesota cars which were abundant from the North Dakota plates and randomly charging down one lane or another simply because I saw a black vehicle that resembled mine. This zigzag search further disoriented me and, now, the streets were busy and the parking spaces at the curb were all occupied and, as I walked to and fro on the streets of downtown Fargo, I began to regret my life-choices that had brought me to this juncture. I was foot-sore and the search continued and it seemed to me bizarre that I should have lost my car so irrevocably within two or three or four blocks from the public library. At last, I sat on a bus stop bench and thought to myself that, probably, someone had stolen my car and removed it to Canada or the north woods of Minnesota and that, now, I was doomed to become homeless myself, that I would find myself sleeping in the entrance to a government entitlements office abandoned during COVID, resting on a bed of wastepaper strewn over the cold concrete and buried under a heap of vinyl and army surplus blankets. A cold wind smelling of floodwater swept down the street and the shadows seemed to lengthen and, then, I had the sense that eyes were staring down at me, that someone was watching and, so, I lifted my head and there he was! The Dude in his cowboy hat gazing with love and affection at the bottle of whiskey painted on the brick wall. I had forgotten that picture on my phone and, so, I rose and walked toward the sunrise of the Dude’s grin and, sure enough, my black Honda CRT was parked across the street from the old advertisement and, thus, I was saved.
17.
The next morning, with my son, Martin, and two of my grandchildren, I drove out into country, southwest of Fargo. The land was flat and treeless except for the rivers wrapped in attendant woods, all abstract and bare here, with curved fortifications of old snow melting in their shadows. On a county highway, every in-drive was guarded by a parked pickup truck, left by men who must have been hunting the roadside thickets. But hunting for what?
We found a trailhead with a map displayed under a small shingled hutch. This was access to the North Country Trail, a hiking route that extends from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan across Wisconsin and Minnesota and North Dakota to the Montana border. There was a trail register with some pencils in a coffee can but no one seemed to have come this way for several months. The trail was mown into the grass across a meadow and, then, ran cloistered by bare trees along the ravine full of water. In a clearing, there were a dozen beehives. It was about 45 degrees but some of the bees were stirring, hovering about the bottom rim of the utilitarian-looking white boxes. Someone had collected dead bees from the ground and set them in neat piles atop each hive. I supposed that you could use the mosaic of dead bees to write your name or the date of your encounter with the hives across them. A faint murmuring sound came from the white boxes. There was a pick-up truck parked next to where we had stopped to inspect the map at the kiosk. Presumably, hunters were combing the banks of the nearby river. Another pick-up pulled up to where we were parked. A kid with a backpack got out of the truck, adjusted his hiking togs, and, then, approached us on the trail. He was walking briskly in the general direction of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
I gestured along the county highway where four or five pickups could seen, parked along the side of the road.
“It must be some kind of hunting season,” I said to the kid.
He looked at me skeptically. “Maybe, but I don’t know what anyone’s hunting here.”
The kids found bones and some teeth on the trail, trampled down into the brown muck.
We walked across the road to the terrace overlooking the Sheyenne River. At this place, the river slammed into the clay side of an embankment like a freight train. The current had undercut the banks and several trees leaned over the flood, their tangled roots exposed and dangling down from the muddy river side. Cold came off the water which surged and spun in vortices where the river bent sharply to flow under the concrete highway bridge.
On the slope tilted down to the drop-off into the brown, churning river, some fist-sized rocks were exposed and, so, Martin with the kids rooted around in the bed of stones looking for fossils or agates or neolithic hand tools. The gravel was river-tumbled and the stones were fist-sized.
I was hypnotized by a surge of water directly below the river-bank where Martin and the kids were scrambling around, the three of them stooping under a contorted little tree (it looked like an olive) where the stones were protected by thorny stems and spikes of shrubbery. Below my vantage, the river sometimes cast up from its depth a pale white wave, possibly created by the current recoiling off the sheer mud-bank. The wave crested and, then, was swallowed by the river leaving as its trace a string of foamy white vortices, pearl-colored whirlpools marking the place where the wave had subsided. Then, the water gushed again, hissing like a cascade in the mountains, and the white lateral wave appeared rolling up and curling under once more to make more whirlpools along the side of the channel. It was a fascinating spectacle and one that I could have watched with pleasure for a long time.
On the road, two men swaggered past, marching along the ditch and wearing camouflage vests, heavy boots, as well as khaki fatigue hats. Both men were carrying long guns slung over their shoulders.
18.
We drove back to Fargo and, then, across the Red River into Minnesota. On the highway toward Detroit Lakes, we passed through a small, desolate town, the sort of place that looks like it is shattered by a tornado every three or four years, and, then, took a byway to nature reserve.
In the park, a railroad right of way had burned within a hour or so of our arrival. Some yellow firetrucks were parked on the gravel road so that we had to navigate around them and little fumaroles of smoke and steam gushed out of hot spots in the soot lining the railroad embankment. Beyond the burn, the gravel lane curved toward a big structure that seemed mostly windowless, a research facility with enclosed walkways and several metal outbuildings. A trail dropped down toward a river flowing in the lea of the research building. A saw-horse was draped with a sign that told us that the trail was closed.
We ignored the sign and walked through the cold woods between stark, bare trees. In the trough of a river bed, water was flowing like a millrace all glittering with rapids.
19.
A finger of river-polished stones extended into the fast water, a causeway about two yards wide but tapering to a point. The spit was perilous – if you approached it’s edges too closely, the sand and gravel undercut by the current collapsed in great sheaves into the water. The river was taut with energy at this bend, kicking up little plumes of spray, and I thought it would be a catastrophe if one of the children ventured too close to the edge and fell into the water.
Martin and the children combed through the stones, looking for agates or crystals. I inspected the gravel as well and saw something iron-colored among the rocks. It was a tooth or a claw of some extinct animal, set in a matrix of brown petrified bone. The tooth had gothic, pointed edges that, when washed, glistened with a silvery black sheen. The inverse side of the stone, for it seemed to have a front and back, was anatomical, a glimpse into the crystallized pulp of the tooth, concentric structures of ebony that may once have been hollow but were reduced to a brown rock core. It was a wonderful find, something discovered quite by accident when I had no expectations of seeing anything interesting in the gravel debris on the sandy bar extending into the river.
I gave my son, Martin, the petrified stone and he put it in his pocket and continued the search. He told me that the previous season he had found a much larger tooth of the same kind embedded in the sand bar and, in fact, sold the fossil to a collector for thirty-five dollars. An older couple walking a big dog stood beyond the screen of withered winter-ravaged trees and looked down at us skeptically. I climbed back up the bank and sat on a bench on the grassy terrace overlooking the bend in the river. Martin and the grandchildren inspected the stones for another twenty minutes. Rain clouds chased one another through the sky and crows swooped low over the tall-grass prairie on the uplands. The grass still lay flat against the ground, battered down by recent blizzards – all of this had been buried under three feet of snow only a couple weeks ago.
20.
Back in Fargo, we stopped at a shed with sign that said Freight Warehouse. I bought the kids a rock-tumbler. Martin told me that the machine was for sale in this store because people used tumblers of this sort to erode away the rust from their nuts and bolts.
21.
I had planned to drive to Avon, about twelve miles from St. Cloud (and three hours from Austin) where I had a reservation at a motel. But I left Fargo about three in the afternoon and made good time and, so, I thought I would just drive the rest of the way home, forgoing another night on the road. I wasn’t in the mood to hear any more orgasms and the low-rent motel in the little village next to the freeway seemed a sex machine, in fact, a kind of tumbler ceaselessly turning flesh to flesh between two broad and cold lakes. It was early Spring, of course, and the season for love.
22.
I reached Austin with the last shreds of sunset stretched across the horizon, tattered ribbons of pink and pale grey pinned down by pillars of rain clouds. Saturday Night Live was a re-run and so I read Shakespeare for an hour, but the diction was unfamiliar to me and the syntax forced to the limits of my comprehension and Hamlet induced in me a strange sort of panic. I had lost my car in Fargo; the rivers were flooded and I seemed to be unable to read. Sex and homicide were all around. The world was abrading me, but instead of becoming polished to a hard core, it felt as if I was about to disintegrate.
No comments:
Post a Comment