Category Archives: Minnesota

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Becoming Native

May 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

“…I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” Joan Didion, California Notes, NYRB, 5/26/2016

Becoming native to a place implies the opposite of what Joan Didion recalls in this fine article taken from notes she made in 1976 while attending the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. The becoming process implies not being easy where you are, not knowing the place names as real, not knowing the common trees and snakes.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is not a real place to me. Neither is Four Corners nor Durango nor the summit of Mt. Evans, only 14 miles away. The owls that hoot at night, the small mammals that live here on Shadow Mountain. No. The oak savannah and the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Familiar. Easy. The Big Woods. Yes. Lake Superior. Yes. The sycamores of the Wabash. Yes. Fields defined by mile square gravel roads. Pork tenderloin sandwiches. Long, flat stretches of land. Lots of small towns and the memories of speed traps. Yes.

A local photographed yesterday near here. from pinecam.com by serendipity888

With the fire mitigation this property here on Shadow Mountain is becoming known. It has three, maybe four very fine lodgepole pines, tall and thick. A slight downward slope toward the north. Snow, lots of snow.* Rocky ground, ground cover and scrubby grass.

Denver. Slowly coming into focus. The front range, at least its portion pierced by Highway 285, too. The west is still blurry, its aridity, mountains, deep scars in the earth, sparse population. The midwest clear, will always be clear.

Becoming native to a place is the ur spiritual work of a reimagined faith. First, we must be here. Where we are.

*”Snowfall for the season on Conifer Mountain now stands at 224 inches (132% of average).” weathergeek, pinecam.com

Family, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Park County

Seafood Paella and Spanish Music

January 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

Kate and I went to the Aspen Peak Winery in Bailey last night for seafood paella and Spanish music. I love local events and this one had a good combination of homemade ambiance and terrific food.

On the drive to Bailey, about 20 minutes under normal circumstances, we experienced rush hour on Highway 285. The event was at 6 pm and Bailey is west of us in Park County. Rush hour is rush hour, even in the mountains, and I would not want to make this commute every day, especially after a big snow storm.

Saw a pick-up with a funny, but biting bumper sticker: Save an elk, shoot a land developer. Sort of the flip-side to a 1970’s bumper sticker that has remained in my memory: Sierra Club, kiss my axe. That was in Ely, Minnesota during the debate over the creation of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.

Kate’s had a good, but long week organizing the kitchen. She’s ready to get back to sewing. Golden Solar is coming to finish the critter guards on our micro-inverters today. Tai Chi later this morning. Probably chainsaw work later today. The weekend.

Memories, Minnesota, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Snowman Will Want to Be Inside

January 15, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

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.

Friends, Minnesota, Third Phase, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

Where They Know My Name

October 26, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Moon of the First Snow

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.

Minnesota, Mountains, The West

The Mountain Difference

July 21, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

The last few nights the clouds at sunset have been what seem to my eye a color of red peculiar to the west. They remind me of Riders of the Purple Sage or High Noon if it had been made in color. The sun goes down behind Black Mountain from our vantage point, so just beyond it the old west could still be banging saloon doors, its streets filled with dust as the cowboys ride in after payday.

I’m no geographical determinist, but to say that living on a mountain is different from living on the flat lands of the Midwest is only common sense. In Minnesota the variation in the landscape came from beautiful rivers, forests of deciduous trees sprinkled with conifers, lakes and ponds, wetlands and the changes going north wrought on all of these. It was not big sky country, but on the way home to Andover the dome of the sky was large and largely visible.

In the Front Range the variation in landscape follows an altitude gradient, different trees and different plants, wildflowers appear as we drive up from Denver the 3,600 feet that separates Shadow Mountain from the start of the high plains. The sky, once in the mountains, is visible in fragments determined by the height and shape of the mountains. The trees are mostly conifers and firs, green throughout the year, though the aspen grows well even at our 8,800 feet. Along the creeks willows and dogwood grow, deer and elk browse.

The changes are more subtle here and require some to time to absorb though the mountains, in their bulky looming make themselves known like the slow-moving, light blinking semi-trailers that crawl slowly up the highways into them. You have to move around them. In the fall there is no blaze of color, jack frost running from tree to tree calling out magenta, dark red, yellow, subtle browns. In the mountains there is green, the conifers and firs, and gold, the leaves of the aspen finished with their summer’s work.

Colorado, Family, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase

I’m An Old CowHand From the Rio Grand

June 2, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Three things of significance today. Picked up Mary for her first visit to Black Mountain Drive. I’m wired up with leads and a belt holster, ekgs available at the push of a button. This is for thirty days or until I have 3 episodes or events.

And. The Andover house closed, almost all of the money is in our bank account. We are no longer cash poor and paying two mortgages. Yippee, Yi, Ya as we say out here in the West. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but we’ve looked up our bank balance and it’s pretty damned healthy. Great to have that uncertainty behind us.

Now the entire circus tent has been struck, all three rings, loaded on the train and the train’s left town, heading west. Our last physical and fiscal ties to Minnesota ended today around 3pm. The friendships, the cultural and political ties, those will remain.

But today we are wholly here from a business perspective. Black Mountain Drive already feels like home, as does the Front Range. How long it takes for our souls to take root in the mountains is an unknown, but a pleasant one, a process of taking the mid out of the midwesterner. It’s already begun. Gotta go now and hitch my hoss to a post.

Anoka County, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Health, Minnesota, Third Phase

Chunks of our life

June 2, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Word on Real Estate Street is that our closing may, if the gods of the under(writer)world are appeased, happen today at 2 pm. May it be so.

Holter monitor gets strapped on at 11:45 this morning and then it’s out to DIA (Denver International) to pick up Mary. She’s flying here from Minneapolis where she goes to see her financial advisor. Mary gets around. She’s been in Greece, Indonesia and I don’t know where else already this year. Her home is still in Singapore.

Which brings up Mark. Brother Mark. Who reports that Riyadh is hot. He also sends me news of bombings and shootings in Saudi Arabia, many of them claimed by the Islamic State. He says he feels safe, especially since he lives near the King’s palace.

Steadier internal seas, less distraction. Even cancer can recede when it becomes ordinary, a part of the inner furniture. That’s not to say it’s out of mind, just relegated to the we’re doing something about this and have to wait pile. This will, I’m sure, go through changes, but right now, a good place.

(How I will feel after the closing actually happens.)

Colorado, Dogs, Minnesota, Third Phase

Under the Closing Moon (I Hope), Just Me and My Gal

May 29, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Spoke with Kate and our money manager, RJ Devick, yesterday. Made plans for the house proceeds that we will not receive today. (see below) I know real estate deals aren’t over until the money exchanges hands. I know it. But, I let myself believe this week. Shattered faith. Well, no. But disappointed? Yes.

Kate’s headed for a quilt shop in Hot Springs, South Dakota, also site of the adolescent mammoth suicide hole. Hot Springs imbedded itself in my memory on one early visit. I ate lunch at a local cafe and when I got the check, it had a 10% discount on it. When I asked what the 10% was, the clerk, in her teens, said happily, “Oh. That’s the senior discount.”

On Kate’s trip. Got a strange call from Enterprise, the car rental folks yesterday. Mr. Olson? Sort of. Huh, oh, well anyway. We’d like to go over the final bill for Kate Olson. What? Yes she checked in today. No, I don’t think so, since she’s still in Minnesota. What? A lot of confusion, silent but pregnant. After all, he had the numbers right in front of him. Then. I see, do you have a number for her? I did.

Meanwhile I had a day of rest, no medical tests, no interactions with others except the four dogs. Priceless. In much better spirits this morning. Better rested, unprodded and quiet.

There was that matter of the Zatarains though. Kate bought me some crawfish meat and I planned to stir into a Zatarain’s jambalaya mix for supper. I set the Zatarain’s box out on the counter in preparation. Later in the day I looked where it had been. Only empty space. Some dog ate it. Cardboard and dry contents altogether, leaving only the aluminum foil liner that held the rice and seasoning. So, I went to Brookforest Inn and got a pizza.

Family, Health, Minnesota, Our Land and Home

To Our Future

May 23, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

We celebrated last night at the Prague in Evergreen, wiener schnitzel, reminiscent of our honeymoon’s late night dinner on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. We’ve traveled a long distance since that red checkered cloth table across from the Hotel Astoria and we’ve traveled it together.

The house in Andover will close next week, the funds from the sale wired into our bank account. This means we can replenish our emergency fund. The emergency fund served us well during the move, providing our our 20% down payment to avoid mortgage insurance, paying the movers and the many miscellaneous expenses of an inter-state change of homes. We did drain it though, almost to the bottom, with all of our non-IRA cash then effectively tied up in the Andover property.

With two mortgages and two sets of utility bills we’ve had a tight budget in Colorado for our first five months and little reserve. So, yippee!

We’ve also confronted, unexpectedly, a serious challenge to our life together. A cancer diagnosis may not seem like a reason to celebrate, but it was for both of us. As a couple, we work much better with facts, data. We can then make decisions, choose ways to move forward. From April 14th, the date of my physical, until May 21st, the day I got my biopsy results, we were in a zone of ambiguity. That was tough on both of us.

With not only a diagnosis, but actual data about the cancer, we can work together, suss out the most intelligent line of treatment. That removes the anxiety of the unknown and helps us see a way beyond vague fears. It helps a lot, of course, that this particular cancer is usually caught early and has good clinical results for treatment, in many cases a cure.

Kate started our dinner with a toast, “To our future.” That was why we were celebrating.

Minnesota, Woolly Mammoths

Camp du Nord and Ely

May 4, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

post1430527346148 — A room in Thor’s cabin

Beltane Beltane Moon

post1430527341517 — Overlooking the North Arm of Burntside Lake

post1430527327652 — Chipmunk dining table

post1430527326829 — At the International Wolf Center

post1430595222663 — The bear that walks like a man

post1430527325184 — Woolly’s at the shore