Frontenac 5/16/2014 10:40 pm

At 5:30 pm we drove in to Red Wing for dinner at the St. James Hotel. This is a red brick fronted boutique hotel that sits just across the way from the Red Wing depot where the Amtrak still stops. It was easy to imagine passengers disembarking in an earlier time, bustling across the way to book a room for a night or two before continuing the trip, perhaps to St. Paul.

The Red Wing corporate offices are on the same side of Highway 61, but separated by a short street that ends just before the river.  Glass fronted windows filled with boots, chain-saws, saw-horses, outdoor gear give the headquarters a quasi-retail store feel. A Red Wing store is across the highway.

The activity screen on the elevator door showed the Red Wing Philosophers Club met at 8:00 am on Saturday while this evening dining in were a regional Porsche club, several Masons and the Woolly Mammoths.

The dinner table conversation went from memory palaces to men’s lives. After the waitress cleared the dishes away and before desert, I noticed that all 8 of us were leaning forward, elbows on the table, listening to each other. The body language told of long-established intimacy.

We returned and heard Charlie Haislet’s wonderful 32 Ways of Looking at a Mammoth, discussed memorable walks and sat with each other in the darkness for a bit before heading off to bed. Tomorrow we head down to Wabasha to the Eagle Center and to eat lunch at Slims(?), the Wabasha cafe where scenes from Grumpy Old Men were filmed. Sounds about right.

Frontenac 5/17/2014 5:15pm

Hmmm. Up at the break of 7:57 am, just in time for breakfast. After a time in the noisy refectory, there were over 70 people eating, the noise level defeated the hearing capacity of most of us Woollies. We retired to Brescia, our own room, and spent an hour or so discussing a Tom Crane question, What about legacy?

We seemed to decide, after kicking the concept around for awhile, that legacy is not intentional and depends on reception, that its content (the received legacy) may differ from person to person and is something over which we have little to no control. Even the grossest attempts at legacy, like naming buildings and bridges, for example, eventually wither away decayed by time. Legacy is, too, something that may be accidental, in the way that children pick up learnings from their parents often very different from the one a parent imagines.

Following this conversation we loaded up Tom’s white Lexus bus and Charlie’s blue Volkswagen for a sojourn first to Slippery’s, the cafe where Grumpy Old Men had several scenes. The Mississippi, about 8 feet high, flowed fast and wide, brushing the top of a cement railing along an outside porch at Slippery’s. The porch had green sandbags as decor. In 2001 the Mississippi filled the room in which we ate lunch to a depth of 5 and a half feet. From a culinary perspective you can miss Slippery’s.

We went on to the National Eagle Center. The star attractions for me were the eagles themselves. They have injured eagles there who serve as ambassadors to the larger eagle world. We met Angel. She was a beauty with a head white with feathers, a keen eye which watched, watched, watched and a yellow beak ending in a cruel tip. She was, the keepers said, dominant, and always wanted the prominent spot in the display. That’s in front of the wide expanse of clear glass. From there she can exercise dominion over her territory which extends across the river and up as far as she can see. If other eagles enter her territory, she gives a high pitched cckkk, cckkkk, cckkkk.

She’s been around humans since the age of 14 weeks and has, the keeper said, preened a person, moving their hair with her beak and occasionally nudging others. The etiquette of such matters these days is that that is a bad thing since this is a wild animal and should be able to display her wild behaviors without human conditioning. That’s nonsense. This is an animal, wild or something in between, that can choose its mode of relating to others in its environments.

While I agree we shouldn’t manipulate these animals into doing tricks for us, developing a relationship with them seems totally natural to me. Ask any keeper of animals, and I asked the ones here with the large leather gloves on their non-dominant hands, if the eagles are individuals and the immediate answer is, yes. Mark Odegard and Elizabeth discovered this with chickens during their time in California and Bill Schmidt still remembers the personalities of dairy cattle from his farming days. Within the domain of their individuality, how they react to another species is their province, not ours.

On the way back we stopped at a geology marker to satisfy my curiosity about how Lake Pepin came into existence. It seems the Chippewa River, which empties into the Mississippi, has a steeper gradient than the Mississippi and, as a narrower stream, ran faster. This caused it to carry rocks and stones and sand into the slower Mississippi at a high rate of speed. Somewhere back in geologic time the Mississippi ran through a 22 mile long gorge which narrowed at the southern terminus of Lake Pepin. The sand and rock deposited in the big river by the Chippewa flowed down stream, blocked the gorge and dammed the Mississippi backing it up into the wider and slower version of itself we know as Lake Pepin. The base of the old gorge is now 150 feet below the river bed, presumably the size of the original dam.

 

Frontenac 5/17/2014 10:43 pm

I took a long, late nap and got up in time for dinner. The first meal we had here, Thursday night, was chicken done to perfection. The evening meal tonight was pork and tough though the steam table had plenty of vegetables, especially beets, which have become one of my favorite foods. Again the dining room din grew as more and more people came in and our old ears were not able to adjust. So, we retired again to Brescia where we watched a wonderful short film, The Voorman Problem. Tom Crane brought it, purchased from I-tunes. It’s a study in solipsism with a delightful and unexpected twist at the end. 12 minutes long.

After the movie we gathered at a barn to the north of the retreat center. There was an iron fire ring, a wood pile and a plastic bin with newspaper, kindling and matches. I built a fire that we sat around for over 2 hours, talking, watching the stars and listening to coyotes. The coyotes howled, but there was, too, yips as coyote pups tried out their voices, imitating adults. A loon’s cry blended at one point with an owl.

We took leave of Charlie Haislet over the fire because he plans to leave early tomorrow.

This is our last night here. Tomorrow brunch is at 10:00 am, then we leave for home.

 

Frontenac 5/18/2014 6:56 am

Sunlight streams in the window of my second floor room on the last morning of our retreat. I slept well here. The window fills the room with morning sun, much more than our south facing bedroom gets in Andover. So, I’m up.

I’ve missed regular, easy access to the internet since I’ve had to carry the laptop to another spot to connect. This has meant following up on information from the group has been much harder, like the old days before instant research librarian. Some of the questions simply fade out. I suppose this would be the place for some nostalgia about our less connected past when a natural winnowing would occur between curiosity and the ability to satisfy it, but you won’t find that from me. Sine qua non criteria for our new home in Colorado, access to broadband.

A couple of observations about moving. First, I’ve been grounded in our interactions here, the mutuality borne of long acquaintance has kept me in the now. That’s been excellent. At the same time there is a certain bittersweet quality to this retreat, realizing that this is probably the next to last retreat when I will attend with a full year’s worth of meetings in the immediate past. That signals a distinct and profound change, one made even more palpable by a reasonable discussion about bringing in new people since the regular, Minnesota core group will shrink by one more when Kate and I move.

There is a sense, a strongly felt sense, that my relationship with the Woollies has changed already. To return to the circus tent metaphor I’ve used before, I can feel the stakes loosening in the earth of our long time together and bit of slack beginning to appear in the rope. It will be a long period yet before I strike the big top on my Minnesota Woolliness, but it is in the future, my presence no longer anticipated to continue until the big Roustabout comes.

Well, gotta strip my bed and repack my stuff. Get some coffee and post this. The retreat continues for a while yet.