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Nov
18
Forty Years, Forty Posts #38
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I was doing the math in my head yesterday, and this is what I came up with — if you strung together all the hours I’ve spent at the University of Minnesota, and I mean the actual hours on campus, it would come to over three years. I’ve worked at the U for 13 plus years, and it is the only place I’ve really had a permanent, full-time position of any kind. I started out as basically a secretary and with the grit and determination of Horatio Alger hero, climbed my way to the middle. I’m pretty happy in the middle, since I prefer not to work 70 hour weeks and hustle from meeting to meeting.
In any case, the U of M has become a kind of home to me, considering the hours I’ve put in here. It’s a massive, sprawling campus in both Minneapolis and St Paul, and with a little river called the Mississippi running through the Minneapolis version. I work on the oldest part of the camus, “the mall,” a nice arrangement of stately, collegiate, buildings flanking the student union on one end and the auditorium on the other end. The auditorium is frequently used by ex-presidents and Nobel laureates giving speeches, when it’s not being used by dance troupes or rock bands. Dylan played there the night of the election.
Another interesting landmark is the Washington Avenue Bridge, a two-tiered bridge with a covered pedestrian walkway up top and motor traffic below. Student groups paint signs all along the inside, and the outside used to be an object of anthropological fascination for me, with several decades of graffiti in indecipherable layers. About ten years ago it was blasted off and repainted, and has been fairly well maintained ever since, which is a loss to those who like quirkiness better than beauty. We can still enjoy a tree inexplicably laden with old shoes, and students of literary history can map out (as I have done, with a friend) the area where a famous poet took a swan dive, and quietly pay their respects.
My favorite neighborhood used to be Dinkytown, a little market area just off campus to one end featuring consignment stores, coffee shops, and burger joints. On nice days you can go to the deck of Annie’s and enjoy an actual egg cream (which is made with neither eggs or cream) on the sunny deck and watch the old train yard which plays into the name somehow. You can also point out the fancy restaurant that used to be a drug store, and above which a young Robert Zimmerman would teach himself Jimmie Rodgers and Pete Seegar songs before he changed his name to Dylan and moved to New York City. Another touchstone of historical interest is the Dinky Dome, which used to be a bible college, and is where an ernest young spritual pilgrim from Michigan named Jimmy met a cute little Minnesota girl named Tammy, married her, and started a traveling Christian puppet show that went all over the midwest.
If you continue down University Avenue, you’ll see the new stadium being built, the future home of the maddeningly mediocre Golden Gophers football team, who have ached for ages to be big enough for the Big Ten conference where they play. There’s a secret bike path behind the stadium that gets you to the St Paul Campus, the curiously Kafkaesque tumble of buildings and barns where I am today, jotting off a quick blog entry before I get to work for another 13 years.
Nov
17
When I lived in Maine I discovered a fondness for the outdoors, though I still prefer a cabin to a tent and if the cabin has wireless internet and cable, all the better. I prefer a tame wilderness, the kind of pastoral countryside that Emerson would have rambled across before jotting down magnificent thoughts in his journals, or would have inspired Wordsworth to write a poem about clouds and flowers.
Maine has plenty of tame wilderness, and a bit of wild wilderness. Usually I’d go for day-long sojourns, footing it up a hill or through some woods without need for belay equipment or a 22-gauge shotgun. I’d come across brash deer and brasher raccoons, but rarely anything as remarkable as a bear or a moose (though I always hoped to see one from a safe distance).
The pinnacle of these expeditions was the top of Mt. Katahdin in Baxter State Park, the second-highest peak in New England. It’s a good five hour hike, uphill of course, and while you don’t need mountain climbing gear or heavy-duty camping equipment, there is some rigorous bouldering and opportunities to take deadly falls or get hopelessly lost. You might also run into a ton of ungulate, if you are unlucky enough to find one dozing on the path. That didn’t happen to me, but I heard it happens and turned it into a (yet unpublished) story.
You have to embark at dawn, so you have to time to go up and come down before darkfall. It is easy to take such a climb to be mythic in scope, and for me, a farily recent transplant to the state, and even more recently a nonsmoker and enjoying a spate of new outdoorsy activities, I did just that, moving steadfasly forward on a path that Thoreau himself had taken some 150 years earlier, and one that had changed very little since. I felt like I was climbing up to a better me, one who would do such a thing as climb a mountain. I had a partner and met others on the way, but preferred to hang back, seeing this as a solitary journey.
I ate a PB&J sandwich half way up (it was a warm day, and I didn’t trust anything else to be warmed by the sun for six or seven hours before eating it), and washed it down with fresh water from a mountain stream that was better than any bottled water (though it may have been why I got terribly sick later that week). As I neared the peak I met climbers already headed down, including some sinewy mountain men with Grizzly Adams beards who had hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, an amazing two-month effort that several hundred of the hardiest hikers do every year. Being the northernmost point of the trail and the last day of the season, there were dozens of them, comrades from the trail, and I envied them for having done such a thing and marveled at their long adventure finally being over.
I arrived at the summit at the hottest part of the day, and was greeted by the tangy scent of urine and a horde of blackflies. The peak of Kathadin has a pyramid of stones placed there by climbers so it could be officially a mile high. It seems the quicker climbers who arrive first at the top that day (and perhaps every day) and toasted their accomplishment by marking the stones with their scent. It was an abysmal climax to an epic climb, and it didn’t help to see nine and ten year old children had taken the same great trek in flip-flops.
(Mt Katahdin Sign photo by Matt Pettengill, taken from Flickr and covered by the Creative Commons license.)
Nov
15
A frequent question a writer might get is, what is the most interesting job you ever had? Hopefully the interviewee has been a whaler or a prison guard and has an interesting story to tell. Another question might be, “what is the silliest picture you have of yourself?” For me, the answer to both questions is right here.
Now, the puppet is one of a small troupe of puppets I commandeered in the early 1990s as a Vista volunteer. I’ve always loved puppets, since I turned two socks into snakes who told each other knock knock jokes for a school talent show. I would check out puppets from the public library, and they would assist me when I did oral reports. Like a lot of things, there came a time when I had to put away childish things, and later took up again when I realized they never really needed to be put away in the first place.
Now I have a menagerie of puppets, mostly Folkmanis critters: two hamsters, an otter, a skunk, a pig, a sheep, a raven (he just squawks “nevermore” and pecks your head) and others. For a while they did book vlogs for me, which can still be found on youtube (the squirrel and the rabbit are the best, but skip the one with the turtle).
In short, though I may be turning forty, I make no apologies for playing in puppets. After all, I used to be a professional puppeteer. I have no excuse for that hair, though.
Nov
12
My Favorite Author is a books blog featuring several upcoming debut authors this month, including me. Thanks for the interview, Speedy and Aubrey! Be sure to flip back a few pages and read my friend Saundra Mitchell’s interview as well.
Nov
11
Forty Years, Forty Posts #35
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I have the miserable fate of being someone who loves games but hates losing. I am sure I knew my destiny early, tipping a Candyland board and throwing a feverish tantrum just to demand a rematch a few minutes later. The next thirty-odd years of my life would follow the same pattern, though I learned in time to only play games I’ve got a pretty good chance of winning. Stratego, Chess, and Backgammon are fine as long as my opponent isn’t actually a former state champion. Monopoly, Risk, and anything involving cards and coins are my inevitable doom. In Scrabble I draw my cutlass and take no prisoners. I spent more all-nighters in college playing Scrabble than studying, and have a mental laundry list of obsure two-letter words, not to mention a lifelong dream of laying down QUETZALS across two triple word scores and the Z on the double letter score, for something like 266 points (for most people, that’s a respectable score for the entire game.) Of course, the certainty of a victory in Scrabble makes the occasional loss that much harder to take. I got nothing but vowels, I’ll explain as my opponent gloats over a long-waited victory. I had more I’s than a potato farm. I had more A’s than an Oakland baseball reunion. I had more U’s than… um… Well, I had a lot of vowels, is all.
Video games are good because you can be as competitive as you want without annoying anyone that much, since they are (multi-user games and Wii cow races with my wife excepted) games of solitaire. Nobody but me has to suffer if I get so frustrated by the stupid monkey getting between me and the giant spider that I finally switch the thing off mid-death-throes, and nobody but me has to know. Anyway, sword fighting isn’t really my sport. I bet I could beat that monkey in Scrabble.