Mark Odegard lives in Minneapolis, received his BA at the University of Minnesota in sculpture. He also attended the LA Art Center to study design and typography. He volunteered for the Peace Corps in the Fiji Islands, creating museum exhibitions of traditional artifacts. He returned and became head of design at the Science Museum of Minnesota for 20 years. He was active in the American Institute of Graphic arts, served as president, and started Insights Lecture Series at the Walker Art Center. In the last 15 years he has worked in Asia at the National Science Museum of Thailand, taught art and design at Bemidji University, and worked as a lockman at Lock and Dam #1.
Just to let you know that the Superior Wolf Moon daily reminder has been working. I’m over 17,000 words into this new novel. It feels like some of the best work I’ve done. Of course, I always think that at the beginning of a project.
Kate’s birthday is tomorrow. 72. She works as hard now as she did when I first met her though she may not be able to sustain the work as long as she could. Neither can I. She’s remarkable and I’ll have a birthday post for her later today.
On Friday, buddy Mark Odegard has his “Bridges of the Mississippi” opening. He’s been working for the last year or so on this wonderful print series. It’s a contemporary, jazzy look at these important connectors. We think of crossing the Mississippi every day as a non-event, usually. And that’s because of these bridges that he has memorialized. They’re the often ignored civil engineering projects that make the Twin Cities possible. He’s made a unique contribution to our seeing them, an artist’s true task, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.
On a similar note, Jon Olson, step-son and art teacher, has developed a unique print making style that utilizes found, crushed metal objects. He picks them up from the sides of highways and streets, brings them here or to his art classroom in Aurora, inks them up and runs them through a press. In this way he’s printing directly from the object, like Mark, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.
Spoke by Skype with Bill Schmidt and Scott Simpson today. No reason, just catch up. It was good.
Friends. I don’t make friends easily and the almost 30 years of Woolly relationships and the 12 years for my docent friends will not be repeatable here. I’m making my peace with that, too. As long as my docent and Woolly friends will connect with me, I plan to maintain the relationships. There is an easiness, a knowingness, an intimacy that has taken years to develop with these folks.
Also, my work occupies my time, not in an escapist way, but in a fulfilling way. That’s why I don’t feel lonely here. Kate, the work, the dogs, family, casual relationships are plenty for now. And may be enough for the long haul. Even so, I imagine I will find new friends here at some point, but if I don’t, that’s ok, too.
In other words, I am flourishing as an intellectual and creative worker, lodged in a beautiful place, with family and canine companionship. I’m happy as well. A hard combination to beat.
You wanna find Stock Show weather? Go to Minnesota this weekend. Friend Tom Crane sent me a link to the Updraft blog of MPRNews. “Thought you might want to know what you’re missing,” he said.
Paul Huttner, the meteorologist for the Updraft blog, repeated a Minnesota weather nostrum often used at times like these: “The only thing between Minnesota and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence.”
In Minnesota, not often, but often enough, you realized the weather could kill you. No winds necessary. This will be one of this times.
Colorado, at least for us so far, doesn’t produce weather like this. If you go higher in altitude, then yes, you can find extreme winter cold, but even at 8,800 feet nothing like this. Can’t say I miss that bitter cold. though looking out the window from a warm house, over a snowy frozen landscape has its charms.
Holiseason. Well underway. Two important holiseason gifts with a day of each other. (see post above for the second.)
Tom Crane, who flies the skies a lot, used some frequent flier miles to come out to Evergreen for lunch with me yesterday. We ate at the Willow Creek restaurant across Upper Bearcreek Drive from Evergreen Lake. It was, of course, a great feeling to see this long time friend and his willingness to trade his Saturday for lunch 900 miles from home made it even more special.
(Tom, on the far left, at an end of our 2015 retreat breakfast in Ely, Minnesota.)
It was, in the best sense, an ordinary lunch. We covered children, wives, parents, friends in the Woolly Mammoths and what Tom called an unusual number of infrastructure projects. This last referred to sleep studies, blood pressure measurement, a new furnace and a.c. unit at his house, a split pipe in the shower fixture, my prostate cancer, various arthritic ailments, hearing aids, our new boiler, kitchen and our still ongoing attempt to install the generator.
We’ve been friends now for over 25 years, meeting in the Woolly Mammoths where we’ve spent twice monthly meetings and annual retreats together over all that time. The nature of our meetings have been intimate and personally revealing, the length of our time together adding group history to personal history.
Both of us sense that we don’t have time to replicate that kind of intimacy with others, the third phase has its inexorability. It means we need to go the extra 900 miles to retain and maintain what we’ve created.
Into Denver in the morning today. Unusual for us since our city excursions are usually in the evening.
We went to Lucile’s, Denver for breakfast. I mentioned Lucile’s, Littleton a short while back. The Denver site, at Alameda and Logan, is hip. Full at 8:30 am with whip thin Coloradans, men and women, young families and a few older guys sitting at the bar eating scrambled eggs and drinking Bloody Marys.
Kate had rice pudding porridge with currants. I had red beans, poached eggs and cheese grits. We shared a side of collard greens and finished the meal off with beignets. Tasty.
After breakfast, we made our way through Denver, navigating north and east toward the old Stapleton airport. Jon and Jen live near there. We were bearing those Hanukkah gifts.
On the way home we made a complete circle, taking I-70 to Evergreen, then Brook Forest Drive to Black Mountain Drive and home. This particular route gives us a view of snow covered peaks to the west and lets us drive through more mountains on the way to our house.
Tonight we go to Domo’s, the rural Japanese cuisine restaurant Jon and Jen introduced me to long ago. Scott and Yin Simpson are in town and we’ll meet them there. Lot of driving.
Lonnie and Stefan came to Shadow Mountain yesterday. We had a nice visit, showed them around the homestead and had a deli lunch Kate gathered at King Sooper. In correspondence with Stefan later I gave a voice to a recent recognition about friends:
“I’ve been thinking about making new friends out here. At first, it was a high level need. I jumped into a sheepshead group, tried to connect with the Sierra Club and a group called Friends of the Mt. Evans Wilderness. Then I realized that the friends I made in Minnesota like you and Lonnie have a depth, a history that I will never replicate here. Not enough time.
So, a high priority for me is to maintain face-to-face contact with as many of you as I can. The Woolly retreat is one way and I hope to make it back for the Nicollet Island Inn dinner in December. That way, combined with trips like yours and Lonnie’s, I can stay in relationship with those I love in Minnesota.
I’ll make new friends here, too, eventually, but these will be third phase friends. They can’t share the second phase time I spent with all of you in Minnesota.”
This might sound dismal. But it simply recognizes the truth of the friendships I found in political work with the Sierra Club, among the docent corps at the MIA and in the Woolly Mammoths. These are not to be left behind, but nurtured still. The times of being with many of these friends was episodic even while in Minnesota. So the duration between face-to-face moments may increase, but it also may not.
Friend Tom Crane sent me a package the other day. It had the familiar Amazon prime tape across it, so I didn’t check the sender. I just opened it. The first thing I saw was a blue nalgene water bottle. Filled with water. What? I ordered water from Amazon?
It was a heavy package for its size, 10# was written on the front. In bubble wrap I found two large chunks of rock, samples Tom had collected near Carleton Peak, east of the Temperance River. It’s anorthosite, he says in the accompanying note, which also identified the water as Lake Superior water.
Knowing me well, he said I’d look up anorthosite. Here’s the first thing I found:
Anorthosite /ænˈɔrθəsaɪt/ is a phaneritic, intrusive igneous rock characterized by a predominance of plagioclase feldspar (90–100%), and a minimal mafic component (0–10%). Pyroxene, ilmenite, magnetite, and olivine are the mafic minerals most commonly present.
Who needs to go further after a description like that?
Phaneritic means it has large, identifiable matrix grains. “This texture forms by the slow cooling of magma deep underground in the plutonic environment.” wiki
“Mafic is an adjective describing a silicate mineral or rock that is rich in magnesium and iron, and hence is a contraction of “magnesium” and “ferric”. Most maficminerals are dark in color, and common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite.” wiki
“The Plagioclase series is a group of related feldspar minerals that essentially have the same formula but vary in their percentage of sodium and calcium.” www.minerals.net
The most interesting thing I learned while looking up Anorthosite is that the highlands of the moon seem to be anorthosite, too. So the ancient Sawtooths, volcanoes of the midcontinent rift which pulled the North American landmass apart in precambrian times, created rock similar to that found on the moon.
Tom and Paul Strickland at the Ely greenstone site in Ely, Minnesota
It’s odd to consider but mountain ranges like the Sawtooths and the Appalachians, ground down by millions, even a billion, years of erosion, were once like the relatively young Rocky Mountains. So here on Shadow Mountain we are in, or rather on, a recent geological event compared to the precambrian era of the Sawtooths. In the Precambrian era life evolved and during its entire millions of years there were only animals with no hard parts.
To walk the shore of Lake Superior, in other words, is to walk on a truly ancient landform. The Canadian Shield, which exposes some of oldest rock on earth, underlies much of Minnesota, from the oldest deposits, gneiss in the Minnesota River Valley like near Morton, to the Ely greenstone found in the town of Ely.
On Shadow Mountain, by contrast, we live on evidence of the Laramide orogeny, (mountain building), only 85-55 million years ago.
In my cancer season I had significant conversations with Bill Schmidt (at the International Wolf Center) and Mark Odegard (at Camp Du Nord and by e-mail) and Charlie Haislet (Camp Du Nord). Each in their own way helped me place my cancer in perspective. Mark’s own experience with prostate cancer gave me the most practical help, what to expect from the surgery and its aftermath. Bill and I talked, as we often do, about matters cosmological and philosophical, putting cancer itself in the broader context of life as a terminal disease. Charlie recounted his knowledge of patient’s husbands and fellow docs, emphasizing as he did the effectiveness of current treatments.
This is the Woolly way. All three of these conversations occurred while we were on retreat at the YMCA’s northern Minnesota Camp Du Nord. These conversations happened on the ancientrail of friendship, the strongest bond among humans outside the bounds of family.
At this remove from cancer season, which ended for now on September 25th, I can see the web of support that carried me on its strong threads. Though we are existentially and finally alone, we are also alone together. My image of the web is of arms joined hand to elbow in a network mesh, a bouncy but tough net, warm in its embrace and durable.
This goes by way of saying thank you. More gratitude.
Buddy Tom Crane’s work takes him across the country, making him a favorite of airlines and the Marriot Hotel Corporation. In Denver for some work he came up to Shadow Mountain for supper last night. Kate slow-cooked a pot roast* and vegetables and made a raspberry pie from our still substantial cache of Andover raspberries.
We spoke of those kind of things third phasers often do: hearing aids, grandchildren, mutual friends, recent surgery, thoughts on who delivers care when no family is around. Of course, the content is less important the context, the being together, being seen and being heard. The importance of this last is underlined by Tom’s mother who at 98 has outlived all her friends. She’s become reclusive over the past few years. Friendship is not trivial, it’s a life-sustaining need and when it begins to disappear it matters.
