In Which A Grammatically-Inconsistent Summary Is Provided And Analysis Foreshadowed

Saturday, 12/5: Fly. Stop. Fly. Arrive at New Orleans aeroport at approximately 4:30 p.m. local time (which is, as I'm constantly forgetting, one hour behind time-to-which-I'm-accustomed). Drive to Baton Rouge. Eat at local Greek-and-Lebanese chain. Find motel. Sleep.

Sunday, 12/6: Arise. Examine websites of two local megachurches. Choose The Healing Place Church on basis of less overtly political Statement of Belief (this territory has been well-covered in a previous post). Attend "church". Leave "church" emotionally numb and further from God than when we arrived. Drive to Livonia, LA. Eve bikes about 30 miles to Plaquemine as I drive there and look around. When Eve arrives, go to Bayou Segnette State Park, set up camp in the dark, and sleep.

Monday, 12/7: Arise to rain. Determine too cold and wet to bike, so drive to Plaquemine and look around. Find beautiful Catholic church. Examine abandoned lock. Climb levee. Follow river south. Find plantation, attend tour administered by contagiously-unhappy Darlene. Tour attempts to address issue of slavery in Southern culture; ends up, as was inevitable, both euphemizing and romanticizing it. Drive into New Orleans. Get coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde. Find that we both like beignets more than any other form of fried dough. Wander French Quarter. Eat oh-my-god-this-is-amazing sandwiches. Go to Bayou Segnette. Sleep as rain starts to fall.

Tuesday, 12/8: Arise to puddles as previously described. Dry clothes and sleeping bags in free laundry room. Go to Westwego Library. Drive to Grand Isle State Park. Set up camp, explore, eat, get flat tire on drive back from restaurant, sleep.

Wednesday, 12/9: Arise to one tire flat instead of four flats as dreamt by Mac. Make arrangements to get tire fixed. Unpack car, organize everything. Bask in first and only sunlight since Saturday. Shower. Fix tire. Drive back up to NOLA, stopping at Walmart for groceries and two new tires and oil change. Drive to St. Bernard State Park. Set up camp. Drive to New Orleans. Park, wander, look for music. Find, first, passable music at trashy tourist bar. Leave, find pretty good music at emptier bar. Go to Candlelight Lounge. Wait for Treme Brass Band to arrive and play. Wait. Wait. Listen to excellent Treme Brass Band. Eat. Sleep.

Thursday, 12/10: Arise to cold. Drive to New Orleans, find cafe. Go to surprisingly small exhibition of pictures of the end of the Mississippi. Drive around New Orleans. Go to African-American Museum. Eat. Sleep.

Friday, 12/11: Arise to colder-than-yesterday. Drive to New Orleans. Find cafe. Post.

Stanley Fish Is A Complete Fucking Idiot

I'm sorry. I know that the few of you who might read this thing don't come here for this reason. But my god. Despite his badass name, this older essay and, more recently, this I'm-trying-to-be-contrarian-but-this-is-all-I-can-come-up-with-may-God-forgive-my-stupidity-and-the-New-York-Times-reward-it deserve nothing else but public scorn. And that's all I have to say about that. More coming, and when it does I promise it will be about New Orleans, neogeography (this is a stupid term, I know, but don't you love the rhyme?), and music. Honest.

In Which We Go To Church Without Going To Church

Baton Rouge, LA--More accurately NOLA, I suppose, but in my mind I'm back in Baton Rouge, and since this post will take as its subject a memory I feel it's fitting to town-stamp it at the memory's site. In Baton Rouge we went to church in a warehouse and listened to a fake preacher who was actually an accountant. The church, which retains the name not because it deserves it but because I can't think of what else to call it, was this one suggested to Eve by the person (I think a he, but his name is eluding me) who showed her around St. Francisville LA. Brief Sunday-morning analysis of the website was inconclusive--we chose the Healing Place Church over Bethany because of the former's less overtly political website; Bethany's scared us, HPC's scared us less, but we shouldn't have worried in the least, because just once before (in a classroom--a brief primer: this fool of a professor equated the perjury charge leveled against a policeman friend of his who had perjured himself during a murder trial with Bill Clinton's acquittal in the Senate of perjury, neglecting to consider that just maybe lying to a jury during a murder trial isn't quite equivalent to saying that someone didn't fellate you when in fact they did (brief, brief aside: Google's dictionary doesn't recognize the verb fellate, and I'm not sure if the reason is more likely to be prudishness or frequency of usage, but a brief experiment reveals that it does recognize the noun fellatio and so it's probably the latter reason)) have I been in a place where so much was said without anything being said. We arrived ten minutes early and sat in the car for nine, watching the cars-nearly all expensive, and nearly all SUVs--file in and steeling ourselves for we-didn't-know-what. They could tell we were first-timers, either because we had quizzical expressions or because we reeked of Christlessness or both, and so ushered us to specially-marked seats in more or less the middle of the warehouse theater (I simply can't think of another way to describe this place) that they tried to pass as a nave--for the entire "service" I fretted, and my guess is that Eve did as well, that they would try to work on us, as it were, but thankfully they left us more or less alone.

The first half-hour was dominated by a predictably solid but mind-numbingly dull band singing what seemed to be secular love songs with two or three references to Jesus scattered throughout. Instrumentation: one drummer; one percussionist (solitary, inaudible conga); no less than four male guitarists, two of whom sang; two female lead vocalists; one mixed chorus of perhaps 25; one bassist; one keyboardist. Type: all young; all dressed nicely but casually; all painstakingly groomed to varying degrees of hipness. Intra-band engagements: one, between blond female vocalist and indistinct guitarist. Favorite Christmas carols of Mac's forever ruined by godawful cover: one, "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear".

Ratio of spoken-word mentions of "dollars" to spoken-word mentions of "God": approximately 4:1. Ratio of amount of sermon devoted to various fundraising efforts to amount of sermon devoted to reading and analysis of biblical passage (from Luke): approximately 1:1. Amount of money raised by church in the previous 21-day period: $830,000. Amount of money spent on new church complex that could instead have been spent on any number of excellent causes in the area:.... but I'm becoming bitter. Eve said after we left that she didn't feel like she had gone to church.

In Which There Is Water-Oh-My-God-Everywhere-!

New Orleans, LA--Once again (in a metaphorical rather than literal sense), some other-named town just outside of a city will not get its just deserts in this blog, as New Orleans will serve as a stand-in for whatever municipality truly contains the St. Bernard State Park (which, by the way, has free wireless, as do two of the other three LA S.P.s that Eve or I or both have stayed at; the one holdout S.P., at Grand Isle, is consistently rated one of the top State Parks in the country, a fact which I'm sure provides its supervisor a simultaneously plentiful source of pride (that his State Park, alone of Louisiana's, made the list) and fear (that when the day inevitably comes that sees G.I.S.P. fall off the list, his professional life will be, for all intents and purposes, ended)). Had I written something at Bayou Segnette S.P., however, I would most likely have town-stamped the post "Westwego, LA," not because B.S.S.P. is any further from New Orleans than St. Bernard, but because "Westwego" is such a wonderful name--as is, by the way, "Cut Off, LA," which, before you ask, is most definitely not cut off, and in fact it's difficult to imagine when it might have been, and so the pertinent question becomes not "From what is or has Cut Off (been) cut off from?" but rather "Just what, exactly, is or was cut off?"

But I'll diverge from this burlesque line of questioning-or-not-questioning (Ed.: not to mention sentence-completing-or-sentence-fragment-abandoning) to address facts: there is more water in Louisiana than anywhere else I've ever, carefully, set foot. On Monday night, we were positioned at Bayou Segnette S.P., Eve comfortably in her hammock (which setup now includes accompanying tarp so that it looks like a sharply-executed, floating blue tent), I in a new and unfamiliar tent, hastily and haphazardly erected (the consequences of this slapdashery being, as we shall see, more severe than I would have predicted). Our shelters having gotten us through the previous night's showers moisture-free, we viewed Monday night's projected thunderstorms with scorn. I learned, quickly, that "thunderstorm" has in a hurricane-ravaged land a slightly different meaning than that to which I was accustomed. The storm raged for close to five hours, and when I say "raged" I mean think of the most powerful Northeastern rainstorm you can. For me this is Hurricane Bob (I think) of the early nineties, when I was maybe seven. Tent-posts and guy-lines were whipped out of the ground like candles from a cake (Ed.: spare us your pathetic hyperbole: you replaced precisely one post, and the fact that you replaced it three times speaks more to your weakness than to the strength of the storm). Maybe so--but the rain and wind and lightning and cold, and the inch-deep-and-growing puddle in the tent drove me, still sleepless at 3 a.m., to the shelter of the car, and it was only when the rain and lightning ceased at 5 that I fell asleep, awakening at 6:30 to this strange and dreamlike sight. The rain had created ponds where the previous evening there had been grass--and, we later learned, had flooded a few suburbs not far from where we were staying.

Let me clarify the term "suburb" (Ed.: as usual, I see absolutely no way of stopping you), for here, again, the typical Northeastern meaning of the word is inadequate. The areas around New Orleans are overwhelmingly, for lack of a better word, depressed (topographically and economically) and depressing. In a way, it's the opposite of what seems to happen in the North--where the richer, and overwhelmingly whiter, folks move out of the inner city to the suburbs or (though I detest the term, it is occasionally useful) exurbs. But here--and I cannot speak to Southern cities in general, although I have a (fallible, obviously) hunch that it applies generally--people flock to the city. It doesn't seem, at least I haven't seen evidence of it, that there's a single suburb in the Northern sense of the word. Everyone seems to live in the city, if not formally then at least roughly defined. But let me leave sociology, such as it is, to the sociologists, seeing as they know how to do it properly.

The parts of Louisiana south of New Orleans extend much further than one could imagine, particularly if (like me) you heard a "preacher" in Baton Rouge proclaim his masculine being-from-Southern-Louisiana and thought there was a great deal more to go in that direction--but that's a story, and what a story, for another time. Maine has islands, plenty of islands, and a rocky coast which appears on a map to be a fairly accurate kind of meta-geology, that is to say it looks as rocky pictographically as it does in person; and southern Louisiana (actually southern, you shape-shifting ape-lifting preacher-man) looks much the same, map-wise; but it is not. For one thing, it's bigger: broader, longer, grander, but also thinner, less dense. I think it's the effect of the trees. In Maine you can't see very far because even the islands have enormous thick pine forests; in southern LA you can see forever, over the islands to the sea to more islands to more sea to even more islands and beyond them who knows? And Grand Isle is their apogee, level enough but in danger (as, geographically speaking, is New Orleans) of falling into the flat, flat ocean. That's the thing about these places--they're precarious.

Brief Banalities; and Withdrawal Makes The Fix Even Sweeter

Dubuque, IA--Before reading this post, do yourself and my ego favors and check to see if you've read the one below, which I just put up a few minutes ago (Ed.: you're such an asshole. You think they can't figure it out on their own?). Or don't. Whatever. I don't care.

Back to camping, which feels surprisingly good--the fact that I'll be sleeping in a real bed semi-permanently in a couple of nights lends a melancholy comfort to these last two sleeping pad and bag experiences (Ed.: lends these last two experiences a melancholy... oh whatever you'll never learn). Today Eve is biking from Guttenberg IA to Dubuque or so (the “or so” referring to her discretion in terms of mileage) while I wait patiently in cafe(s) in Dubuque instead of setting up camp like I said I would (in my defense, it's like 20 miles to the campsite and I did at least look up if camping there is allowed and it is, and plus it takes us like 20 minutes to set up and what's the point of driving down and back because she'll definitely want to use the Internet), and tomorrow I will either bike or kayak down towards the Quad Cities (Davenport IA, Rock Island IL, Moline IL, and Bettendorf IA, although B-Dorf's inclusion has its opponents, among which I'd have to count myself for the sole reason that “Quad Cities” is just kind of an ugly name and something along the lines of “Tri Cities” would be much nicer).

Also: Iowa is pretty. Like really pretty. Especially here (I'm not sure how I'd feel about the flat parts), where there are hills and bluffs and I actually saw a sign with an arrow and the words “Ski Area”. It's all farmland, and it's beautiful.

I guess I don't really have much to say right now. Which is too bad because I'm not sure I'll be able to post anything more before I go home, and though I plan on continuing to write (because honestly, how much of this blog was directly related to the particular places I was or what I was doing?) it'll be interesting how the subject and tone change when I'm back in familiar territory. And here again: how much of the subject matter and tone of the blog so far have been driven by fear and uncertainty? It's tough to say. And now I have to sign off quickly because I've only got like five minutes to get to the parking meter so maybe I'll put up something again later but then again maybe I won't OK bye!

A Return To Form

Ferryville, WI (but probably posting in either Prairie du Chien, WI, or Guttenberg, IA (UPDATE: Actually am currently in Dubuque IA))--Sorry for the lapse in posting frequency, it's been a very busy and Internet-and-cell-phone-free couple of days: nice every now and then, but eventually it's an itch you gotta scratch. Nick and family hosted us like long-lost relatives (it makes strong bonds, this River) and were able (sans one who had I believe a football game or something of the sort) to come out paddling with us yesterday, and we formed a small and slow-moving flotilla (seriously guys ever since I learned that word I've been aching to use it so cut me some slack re: its “proper” meaning (UPDATE TO THIS POST: I just discovered that Apple's TextEdit uses the same algorithm for determining the direction of quotation marks (I've also been dying to do a third parenthetical at some point so here it is: is there a specific word or term for the direction of quotation marks? Quotation Vector? Sub-Question: If one person somewhere made up such a word and used it exactly once, would it be a word? Super-Question: ..............? Super question! (Ed.: I'm going to kill you, and I already know exactly how and when I'm going to do it: with a knife. Sometime soon.)) as does Google's Blogger. Is this, like, the best we can do? Aren't these guys the giants of the algorithm-innovation-and-development fields? Hasn't MS Word had like a perfectly good algorithm for precisely this problem for, like, twenty years? Am I the only one who cares? (I know, I know, but Sub-Question: Is there a dedicated Quotation Marks Algorithm Developer on the Programming Staff of any of the three aforementioned companies, and if so, how does he feel about his title? Is he out for the Senior Punctuation Manager's job (and its accompanying colloquial title of “Pun(c/k) Guru?”), and if so, does the SPM know, and is there pushback (I'm sure there would be really nerdy, passive-aggressive pushback, although is there pushback that isn't passive-aggressive (excluding sexual harassment)?)?)); it's such a cool word, especially when “armada” is just out of the question) moving through the backwaters of the UM (Upper Mississippi for all you landlubbers (shore-shovers? concrete coolies? leg-lemmings? walkie-talkies (we neither walk nor talk on the UM)?)) (Ed.: oh my god get a life!).

T.O.: If you've made it this far, and read each parenthetical the way you should (read pretty much straight through until a close-parens, then go back two open-parens and start again, skipping the complete thought you already read and finishing the interrupted thought), congratulations. I felt that after a couple days of rather lax posting, my return shouldn't be a whimper (Ed.: Christ, you show this guy one fucking poem and suddenly he's... well, well, well I can't really think of any writer who is best-known for his allusions, I mean Joyce is kinda close but they're not so much allusions as archetypes; I'm sorry, you all know I'm a figment of his imagination and thus it's really him who's at fault for this shortcoming; but wait again, if I start blaming him for my flaws then do I lose free will? I've never been one of those people who can stand a paradox e.g. “God gave me free will.”). But it's also a result of paddling 20 miles in the hot sun on Friday then getting up and paddling a canoe a whole bunch yesterday (OK OK a whole bunch is, like, seven or eight miles but still it was also in the hot sun) and currently facing the prospect of another 20 miles in the hot sun today. So enjoy it while it lasts, buckos, cause nothing lasts forever.

T.I.: So all of this just kind of goes to show that it's been a pretty exciting few days, and exciting is all well and good (witness, e.g., how good this post is!) but it doesn't leave a whole lot of time or energy for writing, or really I guess producing anything at all. It's a sort of condensed absorption phase, and I was thinking about that again yesterday (Question: can writing or thinking about the creation and production of art and even artistic impulses, and I mean all that in about the broadest sense possible, possibly be considered art? And I really really don't mean that in a sort of freshman-in-college (-or-if-you're-me-junior-in-college-cause-I-didn't-get-a-whole-lot-of-those-questions-in-high-school (“get” meaning either receive or understand)), and I suppose I should modify the question to read “possibly result in art” rather than “be considered art”. And I guess first of all it's sort of a meaningless question, as is every question about what might constitute or prevent from constituting a work of art. So anyway.) and I was particularly considering this point, again, that the question of what this trip does for me (I still think it's too soon to say “has done for me”, not to mention that that formulation makes me a little sad), i.e. how does it change the way I see and hear and respond to things, is far more important the question of what I produce in direct response to it, which in the long run might not be anything beyond this blog. But then I started re-thinking: I've been dreaming a lot recently (which is, as a few of you might know, not something I do regularly), and they've been not especially vivid or memorable but one thing they have been is odd and, well, original and creative. I remember the night before last having a dream with a very cool soundtrack that I have never heard before (oh to have remembered it!), which has only happened to me a very few times and is both a fun experience and a sign that I have some, well, stuff that I want to get out. So I wouldn't say absorption is complete because obviously it never is. But I've spent a month and a half in places I've never been, doing things--highly mythologized things or at least a highly mythologized thing--that I've never done before. That's gotta do something.

Geometrics Really Just Isn't A Word, No Matter What Anyone Says; And This Isn't Covered In The Post But Stanley Fish Is Still An Idiot

De Soto, WI--A couple miles north of De Soto, anyway, at Black Hawk Park, looking out into Battle Slough and across it at Battle Island (there's a definite theme here). There's no cafe in De Soto (I had hoped that it would continue the pattern of there being no real correlation between size (in terms of both geography and population) and economic/hipness-possessing prosperity, but even on a non-correlative graph there exist outliers. Anyway. We spent the night in luxurious comfort at the home of Nick Lichter, who wrote this book that we've been referring to pretty frequently and who lives in La Crosse with his wife Margaret and kids, and I slept in a bed for only the second time in a month and a half. Today Eve kayaks from Brownsville, MN, where I finished yesterday, 18 miles to Black Hawk Park and a few miles north of here will cross the state line from Minnesota into Iowa, which means that (A) we've entered our third state and (B) Minnesota, which had started to feel like a perpetual companion and looming comfort over on the right shore, is no longer there, replaced by Iowa, a state about which my feelings are shall we say somewhat mixed (even though there's no real geographic/geologic distinction between Winona and Dubuque and the state line is a more-or-less arbitrary distinction based on the reasonable if arcane and artificial (i.e. prescriptive rather than descriptive, no?) system of latitude/longitude which also formed the U.S./Canada border and the Mason-Dixon line, and though I'm perfectly aware that this part of Iowa bears no resemblance to the industrial-corn-farm Iowa of the central and western part of the state, it's always seemed to me on the map to be adequately evoked by its shape, a square-that-they-made-not-quite-a-square-cause-hey-it's-gotta-have-something-to-distinguish-it-by). And it remains to be seen if we will experience the same transformations of Wisconsin and Iowa through which we experienced Minnesota, from the wild North Country to the Iron Range to the (especially) lakey region to the bluffs of the Southeast, and my guess is that we won't.

I'd continue these fascinating thoughts but it's hot today, probably not much over 80 but the kind of heat that makes you want to just lie down and turn off your brain. But maybe I'm just dehydrated or something. But either way I should stop.

On Provinciality (But Not the Kind You Think)

La Crosse, WI--Once again, the unrelenting sun has melted my brain to a low-viscosity pink froth, like strawberry ice cream abandoned too long, and though I feel an odd compulsion to write (not an obligation exactly, and honestly if Eve wasn't hogging the computer--mine's AirPort card is dead, don'tcha know--it's pretty likely I wouldn't be at it at all), about what I haven't the slightest. When you kayak all day (Ed.: shut up, it was five hours), you generally don't have much to say at the end of it; it's the days off that are the most productive.

I went through Lock #7 today, and a guy watching me (I couldn't tell if he was involved in the operation of the lock or if he was just spectating), after being told of our (Eve's) plans, said, “I don't think you'll make it.” I was so shocked to hear him say it (for three reasons: first, that as he was well aware, we'd already gone a month and a week, including a week of really heavy traffic, which I find adequate evidence of commitment and determination; second, that I don't think I look like a clumsy fool out there--I clearly knew how to lock through efficiently and safely; and third, that it's just kind of an asshole thing to say, even, maybe especially, if you follow it with “Good luck!”) that I didn't ask what in retrospect is the most important, and obvious, question: why? Is it just a matter of statistics (I'm sure that a significantly greater number of people being such a trip than complete it)? If not, was it some kind of mistake I had made in the lock? I don't think so, if only because the person operating the lock (regardless of the conversant's affiliations, he definitely wasn't controlling the mechanism) let the water out wicked quickly, which seems like something you do for a guy who clearly knows what he's doing, not something that's prudent when you have a novice in the lock. Or was it because the river is just unimaginably difficult and scary below, say, Cairo? How did he know we hadn't done it before (I'll admit I was tempted to tell him this was my third time kayaking the length of the Mississippi, just to knock him down a couple levels)? I understand that giving this much thought to the words of a man who seemed to me to be the kind of guy who acts seasoned about the tiny bland corner of the world that he knows at all because it's all anyone ever asks him to talk about is completely ridiculous and neurotic etc., and I'm not worried about it in the long-term (really, I'm not, he was an idiot); it was just so strange to hear someone be so rude. Bah! Anyway. I'm done.

On Caffeine (Coffee Shop Hip-Bop Be-Hop Short-Stop Art-Pop)

Winona, MN--Feeding a growing caffeine addiction--having never really been addicted to anything (Question: does Addiction exist as infinitesimally-spaced points along a continuum or as an on/off switch and does the distinction matter?), I now live in a deep-seated fear of anything-too-much--in yet another coffee shop. Last night we stayed, for the first time, at a campsite inaccessible by car (we parked about a half-mile away), at the end of a slough (pronounced like "flue" with an S; and one of these days I need to learn pronunciation symbols like that upside down "e", although there are many ways to explain how to pronounce words without such symbols and after all even the pronunciation shorthand itself requires explanations drawn from actual words--see e.g. the beginning of any dictionary--and so couldn't it be said that the symbols are so unnecessary to the whole procedure of explaining pronunciation as to serve as yet another example of the leisure classes' cultural exclusivity?) that sees no traffic but is foggy and silent and beautiful in the morning. The campsite was revealed to us, a la the bequeathing of a secret passageway by father to son (Ed.: where do you get these awful metaphors?), by David Echelard, a singer and accordionist and hurdy-gurdyist who specializes in early French music, particularly that of trouvers and troubadours (Ed.: and where do you get off italicizing the former but not the latter? Although I guess trouver is still pretty much an exclusively French word, while troubadour has made the jump, e.g. "sans", to common SWE usage) which if you'll permit me to rhapsodize for a moment (Ed.: and what if we don't? Writing is the aggressive act, reading submissive, and a writer asking his audience's permission is like a dictator asking for that of his subjects) is music that I always love but I don't know nearly enough about, especially as it fits into my whole pop-vs-art-transitions-over-time thing (i.e. the history of European, essentially popular, music from 200 or 500 years ago was required for my college degree; popular music from even 50 years ago was not).

Eve and I were just talking about grammar and its decline in the American curricula and if said decline matters and I started thinking about DFW's (I know I bring him up a lot, but show me a better American essayist in the last 20 years and I'll declare you stark raving mad) essay on approx. the same: "Authority and American Usage," which sounds like the dryest read ever--the type of Essay Stanley Fucking Fish would write, not inthe NYT but rather in some academic journal and in the first paragraph of which he'd only half-jokingly refer to "finally writing something for an educated audience" or some shit, at whichthe two or three young, still passably self-aware English professors would roll their eyes but the rest would nod knowingly--but if you know DFW or even me (hopefully) you'll realize is not that at all. The essay is a review of a book by Bryan Garner (I didn't even have to look that up) on, well, Authority and American Usage (of Standard Written English (i.e. Standard White English), if that wasn't yet clear), and DFW is essentially saying that Garner's brilliant contribution to the debate over descriptivism vs. prescriptivism (i.e., and here I'm really summarizing Wallace's also-brilliant summary of this timeless linguistic conflict, the "Dictionary Wars", whether the role of the dictionary should be to describe or prescribe grammatical and linguistic patterns and changes, such as whether a dictionary should continue to insist that "ain't" ain't a word or whether it should cave to overwhelming popular usage and include it in the dictionary; a more fundamental approach to the debate could even question whether dictionaries matter, because communication gave rise to dictionaries and not vice versa, and whether the basis of language is speech or writing) is that it doesn't really matter what position you take in these debates so long as you acknowledge that there are and will forever be multiple ways of using the language that are equally valid in their respective contexts--hence "Standard White English"--and that what really matters is not "correct" usage but the ability to possess several different dialects and to use them in the correct context.

And I started to think about this in respect to music. (First of all: kudos if you've made it through the above paragraph, let alone understand it, and you should all really just read the article because it's much clearer and more fun there.) Because for all the talk of provinciality in the music world, and despite the fact that the intimacies and details of each musical sphere are much more intricate than those of language (regardless, I think, of whether or not you're a musician, though it might be more difficult for musicians), one of the crucial skills for anyone interested in music as a performer or critic or composer or audience member or whatever is to be able to move between different musical contexts fluidly, to understand that the important musical elements of a work are entirely different from one kind of music to the next, and to understand and adapt our understandings as we go. In one context, "ain't" is perfectly acceptable but "hermeneutics" might as well be a four-letter word, while in another the reverse is true. I think this is all fairly clear, and as DFW points out, most of us go our whole lives not needing to really sit down and think about it because it comes fairly naturally to most of us (to paraphrase, "the kid who doesn't understand that the language you use with adults is different from the language you use with other kids is the kid who gets beaten up by the other kids," and obviously I don't mean "naturally" to mean "by instinct rather than acculturation" necessarily), but it bears repeating and maybe even contemplation if only because debates over quality can so easily leave out the question of context.

This Post Is Not Worth Reading

Winona, MN--I'm not sure how I manage to keep all these coffee shops associated with the correct city, but I do: if you held up pictures of all of them, I could tell you where they're located (I could even distinguish between the Caribou Coffee in Monticello and the Caribou Coffee in Elk River). Now, maybe you could say I have a prodigious memory. And you would not be far wrong. But the frequently transparent efforts of coffee shop managers to make their businesses distinctive are surprisingly effective regardless of how aware the viewer is of such efforts (the same can be said for a lot of modern advertising, actually--despite the fact that we're all aware of advertising's efforts, it still works, and often its own willingness to play on our assumptions and the way non-advertisers think advertising work is one of its most effective mechanisms), and so I have no trouble remembering that the coffee shop in Grand Rapids (“Brewed Awakenings”) had blackandwhite tile floors and lots of yellow elsewhere while the one in Hastings (“Second Street Coffee Shop”, and that's another interesting story out here; a town's First Street is the first street parallel to the river, and so on from there, except that because of the threat and history of flooding a lot of First Streets are basically empty or abandoned to the point where there frequently isn't a First Street at all, and Second Street is the one with shops and cafes) is the one with the slightly overbearing proprietor.

But enough of such banalities. There is important business to which to attend. Was it about kayaking? Where's my damn editor? (Ed.: it's Labor Day. Shut up so I can go back to sleep.) Ah. Well, in that case I suppose we all deserve a break.

On the Summary of a Life, Particularly a Life of Kayaking

Wabasha, MN--Well, this article came out in the NYT today, and while I can pretend to be nonchalant all I want, the fact is that one's first mention (and photo credit) in the “Journal of Record” is, if not a Big Deal, especially considering that the effort and agency actually required of me in order to achieve such a mention (and photo credit) was not exceptional, kind of really exciting... even if the term “musicologist” makes me squirm a bit (besides the obvious questions--what the fuck musicology have I actually done, and isn't that kind of professional title usually reserved for people with, you know, professional degrees?--it makes me wonder how other people react to their titles; the conflict between the most efficient way of summing up what a person is or “does”--and of course writers have to be efficient--and the full sum of a person, and don't be put off by the phrase, you know what I mean, the myriad things they are and do and so on, and I don't mean just the inane eulogistic phrases e.g. “father, husband, brother, son, yada-fuckin-yada” (Ed.: wow, you're a bit surly this morning), but let's use my example, because it's my blog and as you're all well aware I'm a raging egotist (also, no kidding, I use the word “narcissist” and its synonyms so frequently here that I actually just googled “narcissism thesaurus” because I momentarily couldn't think of a fresh way of putting it): I am, according to the Journal of Record, a “trombonist and musicologist”... well you all know what I'm going to say, that I do other things besides, and maybe my embarrassment at the description owes more to the phonetic ugliness of the word “trombonist” than to any problems of substance. The fact remains that, while I have yet to see my name in print (hint hint to anyone with access to hard copies, and it's on page AR15 of the Sept. 6 paper), I'm still pretty excited.

So. I realized earlier that for all my verbiage I have yet to provide a detailed account of what it's actually like to kayak 20 miles in our 17 ft., 62 lb. (when empty; loaded with food, water, and safety equipment--spare paddle, whistle, etc.-- it's probably approaching 80) “bright red” Prijon Marlin. And aware as my generation is of the limits of writing's ability (and, honestly, pretty much any other medium's ability) to convey experience, I might give it a try over the next few days. For now, because it's fresh in my mind, I'll concentrate on two things: locking through a lock and the efficient application of sunblock (we don't dock, we fight the clock, and we tell knock-knocks about pickpocks) (Ed.: leave the rhymes to the rhymers).

Yesterday we were explaining to Mary Kay the procedure and experience of locking through, and I insisted that the dam I had gone through that day (Lock and Dam #4, which has its very own Wikipedia page; they all do) was a good deal smaller in terms of length and width than #3, which I had gone through a few days before. But later I was reading about the dams and discovered that in fact they are all the same size: 600 ft. long and 110 ft. wide, which leaves just two and a half feet on each side when barges lock through (which is why the barges take so damn long to lock through). They do, however, vary quite wildly by depth--the Upper St. Anthony Falls dam in downtown Minneapolis, the first lock on the river and the source of these pictures, falls probably 25-30 ft., while #4 descended at most 10 ft. It's not too frightening, actually--the people running the locks seem to be, if not happy about it, at the very least resigned to canoes and kayaks locking through, and honestly we're probably kind of a relief from the recreational powerboaters who occupy most of the lock operators' energy and attention--we're too small and slow to be dangerous to other boats, and too vulnerable and sober to be risk-takers, and the powerboaters are generally less brash and jackassish around us, if only because we are a novelty and a tiny minority even this far down the river (I haven't seen a single other canoe or kayak since Minneapolis; I'm not sure if Eve or Mary Kay have).

These days we're heading mostly southeast, never varying past east or south-southwest (I'd use degrees but I'd rather come off as knowingly ignorant than unwittingly ignorant), and so the sun never sees our backs. What it does see, besides the obvious face, neck, and arms, is a triangle of flesh above our left knees. The knees themselves are tucked up against the top of the kayak so that we're locked in place for balance, but the “Kayaker's Triangle” (Ed.: not gonna catch on) is immobile and exposed to the sun all day, occasionally drifting from side to side as the river changes course a few degrees and the sun moves from east to southwest (we start early and finish by early afternoon, which is why it's only on the left leg), and though at this point I barely notice it, it must be quite striking when I wear shorts around town.

So that's about all I have time or energy for now, but over the next few days I intend to publish a more complete description of the practice of Kayaking Down The Mississippi.

On the Relationship between Population and Hipness, Among Other Things

Wabasha, MN--So we really and truly have no idea how big or hip or together these towns are going to be until we explore them.

Logic Puzzle: Red Wing, Lake City, and Wabasha are towns along US Hwy 61 (“out on Highway 61” as Dylan sings, and the name “Wabasha” occurs in another, slightly crappier song of his, though there it describes a street rather than a city). By population, Red Wing is the largest with ~15000, then Lake City w/ 6000, with Wabasha in a solid last at 2600. In the DeLorme Gazetteer, they all look approximately the same size, with Red Wing appearing maybe just a little smaller than the others (though this might be an optical illusion created by the river--not the Mrs.--that splits it in two). In the Midwest, I'm finding, the distribution of cafes and libraries and bike shops and other indicators of my version of cool/hip is not even per capita. For every cafe in Red Wing, there are 5000 people; in Lake City, 3000 (but a full 6000 if you count only the cool one, and as the sole arbiter of “cool” on this blog I'll be using that standard; subjectivity be damned, I'll be prescriptive); in Wabasha, 1300, which is a much more reasonable number of potential patrons per cafe. To make a thoroughly useless comparison (Damariscotta-Newcastle is a different pop., not to mention economic climate, in the summer months), D-N, serving a year-round population of <4000, style="font-style: italic;">particularly non-academic conservatives, who are by far the most irritating in this respect because they don't possess the rhetorical skills necessary to argue the points in the same intellectual plane in which they--the points, not the conservatives--originated), tend to overreact and not think enough; and to find a median between these stridencies is very trying indeed; and that the most frequently-overlooked disciplines--e.g., I think, musicology--tend to attract those who don't find either extreme too attractive; and that too frequently these factions have a way of isolating and alienating and exiling (ha!) students and even faculty who could otherwise be really productive; and that this last point must be why academic research in the arts and humanities so frequently seems practically dead-in-the-water despite the fact that there's so much interesting stuff in the world that remains inadequately examined and explained; and, lastly (Ed.: I hope), that those academics who are able to resist the poles (not the Poles, obvs) are so frequently the ones that rightfully attract the most quiet respect (e.g. Shuck)).

So the point is that I have a lot of strong positive feelings toward Wabasha, not least because it hasn't turned its back on the River at all, which is a tendency I find gratingly ungrateful, if rational given the Mississippi's well-documented propensity for overwhelming its banks pretty much regardless of human intervention, and as a resident of a river town which very clearly hasn't turned its back on the geographical feature that gave it cause to begin, I feel a gravitation toward towns that do the same.

In Which Our Hero Gets Flustered

Red Wing, MN--I really am just too dumb to live. I know I don't like getting hot drinks with food. I always prefer cold drinks when I'm thirsty, and food (and kayaking) makes me thirsty. So I'm sitting in the Blue Moon, like Cafe or something (real original name there, guys) in Red Wing (which is an awesome name--take a cue, Blue Moon Cafe-or-Something, and not just algorithmically--Color, Object--but creatively), and I just kayaked 20 painful miles w/ no current and wind in my face (i.e. wind in my face but no current) and thus, understandably, I'm pretty tired, thirsty, and hungry (UPDATE: Just ate, now not so hungry). SO I decide to get food. So I'm looking at the menu, having decided to get a Coke to drink, but I take so long to find “Bagel and Cream Cheese” that when I finally spot it I forget what kinds of bagel I like so I order a plain bagel with plain cream cheese and to top it off (well, the cream cheese is technically what tops off the bagel, but I mean the metaphorical topping-off) I order a latte instead of a Coke! And though I realize my mistake immediately, I pause and completely forget to rectify it before the girl behind the counter has entered it into the register and then of course I can't possibly recant or even express skepticism because I've used that kind of cash register and in my experience, cancelling stuff is a total bitch, well probably not for most people but I always had trouble with it, and so in Mac's Reality once the buttons are pressed the decision is final. And in the long run, once the latte cools down it'll be at least as good as a Coke, but for now its heat and the lingering resentment I feel toward it are keeping me from enjoying and appreciating it.

I locked through my first dam today. I can't express how awesome it was. But I can express how cool it was. (Ed.: don't be cute.)

In Which Irony Is Avoided Altogether

Hastings, MN--Again, right outside of Hastings (the name is reminiscent of Hibbing, if the town isn't) at the St. Croix Bluffs Regional Park. “Regional” isn't a political definition, so I'm not sure how that gets handled, although evidence (i.e. a park survey) would indicate that administration is at the county level. “Regional” my ass. Sorry, I've spent a good deal of the evening listening to complaints about bureaucracy and nepotism and drinking beer (the complaints did not extend to the latter, which was from an excellent WI micro, New Glarus Brewing Co.), and these experiences seem to be revealing themselves in what again appears to be a pretty straight stream-of-consciousness post, the obvious problem being that my consciousness is nowhere near as interesting or realistic or fucking archetypal as that of a Daedalus or Darroway or Compson (my drink-addled brain tends toward what Hemingway might have written had he even once in his drink-addled existence written a stream-of-consciousness but perhaps he knew what I do not, that drink makes for an extremely tedious read, whatever flashes it may show, no matter how lucid the writer).

And here again I show little respect for my audience. My parents, bless them, most certainly do not want to read a transcription of their beloved son's mildly intoxicated thoughts (Ed.: should I even bother editing tonight, or will His Majesty exercise restraint for once in his goddamn life and not post this at all?). I think you know the answer, and His Majesty might just remove his right to decapitate his Editor if you know what I mean.

Sorry about that, he gets out of line sometimes. And now my drinking companions (both of whom are more or less respectable, though one or maybe even both might object to such a description for various reasons) have retired, leaving me with about half a delicious, delicious beer to finish. And I already brushed my teeth! But it really is quite excellent beer...

I think mostly I'm excited to be back on the River, back in our odd little routine-that-isn't-routine (my Performance Studies professors might have had something to say about that little formulation, but there are of course advantages and freedoms that come with attainment of a degree, even if money doesn't). As nice as certain qualities of city existence are, I think I wasn't letting myself enjoy them because I knew that it would be back to camp life sooner or later and now that we're back, I'm happy. It's difficult to express, or to understand, just how I feel about camping so consistently. On the one hand, I don't think my underlying attitudes about camping, which some of you will know from personal experience to be “resist at all costs”, have changed much, if at all; on the other hand, there's something about this trip specifically--being with people I don't know well but that I've grown to like, doing something every day, treating it as a means of traveling rather than as an end in itself, etc.--that has rendered temporarily insignificant my prejudices against the practice (the practice being camping). And that's all I have to say about that.

Pre-Post Scriptum: As regards my previous two posts, the underlying point, if it wasn't clear, was that I really don't know what to make of all those problems and I just need to think about them some more.

P.S.: I finished the beer. Spotted Cow, indeed (Ed.: what the hell is wrong with you?).

P.P.S.: Today was Sept. 1. We started Aug. 1. Yeah. And we reached our second state today. It was not planned, but we spent exactly one month in MN alone (if we ignore the fact that the Gregorian month is not an exact measurement etc etc etc).

In Which Someone Expounds

Hastings, MN--At least I think we're still in Hastings. We basically are. At the very least we're in a very small sub-suburb of Hastings. We're camping for the first night in a few and I keep thinking about the Battle of Hastings. 1066. Poor Harold. I realized just now that when I read my post from last night earlier today I was kind of unhappy with its brevity, a concern I had also expressed in the post itself (in fact, said concern might have had a not-insignificant effect on my perception of the post's quality), and I'd like to write more about it now. Basically I can feel a weird tension between three groups: artists, popular artists (you know that I don't mean that members of the first group can't be popular), and non-artists. Being 23 and not particularly perceptive of shifts in cultural tectonic plates, and painfully aware of the bias about current events always seeming more significant than they end up being in history's eyes, I'm not sure how long this particular kind of tension (I'll explain in a minute) has existed or how it is currently changing, but my hunch is actually that it seems to be calming, and I also tend to attribute this result to precisely the kind of arts funding that has developed in the past, say, 20-30 years. Freeing artists from creating commercial art has spurred innovation not only among those artists who are free from such requirements, but even among those who do make commercial art because of the increasing artistic awareness and critical skills among non-artists (Ed.: this is precisely the kind of over-generalized, underthought nonsense that spews from the mouths of academicians and Republicans, as from God and Lucifer).

General Problem (General Problem): What is the economic role of the artist in society? An artist must necessarily be supported in his basic human needs by providers of those needs: farmers, carpenters, plumbers, &c., and obviously those providers benefit from the artist's work. But what if the farmers and carpenters and plumbers and the cetera were to become artists as well? This is the dilemma of the Professional, Full-Time Artist, who simultaneously recognizes the artistic urge in those for whose pleasure and fulfillment (there are cetera there but that issue is beyond the scope of this post) he creates his work and the talent for creating such works that he possesses (the talent, not the works) and that his audience does not. Until at least the 20th C and maybe not even until halfway through it, this wasn't a dilemma at all for European/American Professional Full-Time Artists--even when they weren't creating their art they were critiquing their fellow Professional Full-Time Artists' (Ed.: time for an acronym). But the broadening of general education (General Education) around the beginning of the 20th C created a more nebulous barrier between the artist and the general public (Ed.: you serious? The “general public” prefers Brahms to Schoenberg) and in doing so created opportunities for non-artists to create art that demanded critical attention (obviously that's a racially charged statement since most non-white artists find it difficult to attract critical attention as artists even today, just look at the way hip-hop is still treated by conservatives or even Midtowners--it's a fucking travesty, but that's a story for a different night, kids). Did Charles Ives sell insurance door-to-door when he wasn't reinventing American band music, or did he reinvent American band music when he wasn't selling insurance door-to-door (Ed.: oh, right, the nice rhetorical flourish eliminates all logical and historical problems with your argument. Good luck applying to grad school, asshole.)?

Another General Problem (Ed.: don't say it): Hypothesis #1: All humans react to art. Hypothesis #2: Art is not created in a vacuum; a common history or understanding of the world or at least some knowledge of the history of an artistic tradition is necessary in order to critique a work of art, because all art, and I know those of you who like to believe in “artistic revolutions” might find this difficult to swallow but although it might be a wonderful romantic notion they don't exist, is influenced by something, and to really understand the work it is pretty much necessary to be able to connect it to some other work of art in some artistic vocabulary. So. Hypothesis #3: If we combine Hypotheses 1-2, we see pretty clearly that people can get very frustrated by artwork they don't understand. I get frustrated with Indian paintings because I have next to no idea what's going on; lots of people find John Cage insufferable, even today; &c, because there are many different artistic traditions and contexts, and consequently artwork that some people make sense of in one context will be made sense of by other people through traditions that they understand. Senior year of college, I was complaining (Ed.: whining, ranting, sermonizing, don't use the least connotative word, say what you mean!) about the choice of Third Eye Blind to play Spring Fling, because Third Eye Blind sucks. Like, really sucks. Like, a powerful vacuum cleaner in a ceiling fan in a black hole sucks. (N.B. If there's one thing not to take away from this post, it's de gustibus non est disputandum; some art is better than other art, although it would reek of mediocritizing to flatter Third Eye Blind with the name “artist”.) And Mack said something like, “They're fine, even though there are no underlying mathematical progressions etc.” Because he thought I was complaining about their lack of pretensions to “serious artist” status. I wasn't, of course. They just suck on every level. But the point is that it can be difficult to understand other people's adoration for or objections to works of art if our education and experience don't extend in that direction. Which is a really obvious point but it needed to be said.

On the State(s) of (the) Arts

St. Paul, MN--In the surprisingly-lushly-appointed-but-not-opulent basement of Philip and Preston, who have so graciously allowed us to tread our muddy feet all over their home for the past three-or-four-or-five nights (honestly, we have absolutely no idea what day of the month or week it is anymore), and posting way too late at night to get up early in the morning. I've spent the weekend around people intimately involved in the bestowing of grants of various kinds, and who are experienced in, you know, the politics and shit (nothing gets you street cred more quickly than appending “and shit” to the end of every sentence you speak, although something of the effect is lost when you either: (A) write it; (B) write it on a blog; or (C), went to a white-person college), and I'm not really sure what to make of it all. It's the sort of thing you know goes on but that you ignore, if you're not involved in it, to the point where every time you're reminded of it you get a little jolt of surprise and memory at the same time, that this is practically the only system for distributing the money to support the arts, and consequently of distributing the arts, in America.

Speculative aside (i.e. footnote #1 if Blogger had footnotes): I'm sure this point has been raised since time immemorial, or at least since the early 1990s which is practically the same thing, but I first heard it a few months ago, and that's that the patron system in the arts was historically an almost exclusively Western concept. In most cultures, what we call “art” is thought of as an integrated part of everyday life (now obviously “we” refers to Europeans/Americans and I so totally do not want to get into the globalization shit right now but you all know what I mean, problematic though my terminology may be), not as a set of exclusive events (e.g. we're going to the opera (i.e. “art”) and then later we will go drink port and smoke some fine Balinese cigars (i.e. “not-art”, and do they make cigars in Bali?)), and consequently... well I suppose there have been a few consequences of this different kind of conception. One, which I will not address much here, is that art is seen as simply another type of consumption, a sort of hobby, be as it might a highbrow one. This is pretty clearly related to the second effect, which I find the most interesting, which is that in few other cultures in the world is the production and consumption of “art” so clearly divided among two groups: the artists and the audience. I'm too badly-read (I hope just too young, but I'm not inclined to give myself the benefit of the doubt) on this subject to analyze it in any depth, but it's a fascinating distinction, isn't it? We have people who specialize in making art. Now, one obvious problem is that the exclusivity of the “artists' club” can lead to a kind of resentment by those excluded, especially if we haphazardly speculate that the lack of this distinction in most other cultures points to a kind of basic human urge to create art, and that the sorting of people into “artists” and “non-artists” at let's face it a very young age based on developed skill at that point, and much though we might deny this it's pretty clearly true that talented young artists are pushed to further their skills in ways that the less-talented are not because the number of teachers is obviously finite, and while it clearly makes sense to encourage the talented artists to produce art we can clearly worry about what effect this rationing has on the untalented, must surely do much to engender such stances as the GOP likes to take regarding the NEA.

But let's not forget that third rail of arts funding: that the most popular arts and artists require no funding, no grants; that the market (such as it is) bestows upon these lucky few not just the resources to continue production of their art, but riches such that they might live like kings. The “popular arts” and their royalty exist in an entirely different world from those who labor in the shadows, and consequently it is difficult to conceive of the fact that the works of both these groups are put into the world for ostensibly similar reasons.

I'd like to continue, and indeed I might do so tomorrow, but it's been my experience that when I don't sleep before kayaking I can get pretty grouchy. Grouch. Also most of this post was a “Speculative Aside” which is bullshit.

In Which Various Neurons Get Fired in Precisely the Wrong Order

Minneapolis, MN--No shit. We're back in the Twin Cities; I came to downtown Minneapolis from out near the edge of the suburbs--and you have to understand that Minneapolis/St. Paul ”suburbs“ don't have a whole lot of urb to be sub, although I guess this last point is pretty obvious from the fact that I got like immediately downtown, and even here it's a pretty stark... well actually it's not even much of a contrast because nowhere does it become terrifically obvious (save for when you look up at the 'scrapers) that you're in a significant urban center. All the elements that define this urban riverbank are present in various other places: you've gone under highways before, you've seen factories flabbily bulging down to water's edge (and near Monticello you even saw liquid from one of these factories pouring right into the River and you didn't want to imagine what it might be). And OK, so I didn't want to do the dams, at least not to be the first one through them, so I haven't gotten necessarily to the heavy part yet (that particular pleasure has been reserved for Eve's turn tomorrow), but we took a look at it to quell our qualms and it doesn't look too unbearably frightening.

OK sorry to change the subject but I can feel my resolve to WRITE fading (seriously guys I'm so tired and I'm doing this for you damnit) and I want to toss off a few halfway-considered ideas or some fuckin thing so guys it is so weird and magnificent to be back in a city. And I don't know why I say back because it's not as though I live in a city the rest of the time, far from it, but something about this trip feels like a jump from city to city or at least from town to town, which makes plenty of sense from a practical perspective, and it's not as though we get anywhere by avoiding people. Forgive me, I know that this is probably the least coherent paragraph I've written yet and that's a distinction that takes some effort to achieve but I really shouldn't have done 35 the other day although honestly I think it's more the time in the sun that's devastating the tiny corner (except it's not really a corner (footnote: does a sphere have corners? What if it's aligned on a 3D graph? Would the corners be those areas furthest from any axis? I know the brain's not spherical--it's the one part of neuro I remember, besides how ”personality“ actually means ”correctable chemical imbalance“.)) OF MY BRAIN that works on logic and reason and other good stuff (none of you assholes better point out that modern neuroscience is obviously a descendant of the Enlightenment and so how can I condemn one but not the other and fuck you I just can it's my blog I'm sorry I'm so tired and punchy I think what's happening is my neurological processes are so slow at this point that my hand can pretty much record them in real time so look out world.

OK anyway so whatever. Let me serenade you in the dulcet seductive tones of a wise world-weary lounge singer. I worry about becoming so lost in the voyage that I can't think critically about it (Ed.: what don't you worry about? And do you call what you do thinking?). Being in a city as hip as Minneapolis/St. Paul (do Minnesotans ever refer to the cities as ”the Twins“?) makes me conscious of trying to be hip, while as recently as Little Falls I was going out of my way to appear vaguely unhip, or at least not aggressively hip (I may be overstating my inherent hipness but I figure I'll err on the side of caution). I'm not sure which version of myself I like, or like to play,more. I'm not sure it matters. The people who fed us on Monday had the largest collection of “Sambo” dolls I've ever seen. I need to see Merce Cunningham's troupe before it dissolves. I need to go to sleep.

On Suburban Malaise, Whether You Like It (Not The Malaise, Obviously) Or Not; And Google Is Not Infallible!

Elk River, MN--We've finally hit suburbia. Looking back, it was only a matter of time, but now that we're finally within commuting distance of the Twin Cities, we've run up against the kind of life I'm thankful to have never had; Elk River is a town that isn't a town, and consequently I felt very lost and bewildered. The population is double that of Brainerd or Bemidji (for those of you who value a further analogy, it's about the size of Brunswick, ME) but it's spread out and dislocated and honestly there are so many problems and different ways to demonize this kind of thing that it doesn't even feel worth it because at this point these problems have been quite thoroughly catalogued and have been for fifty years, ever since Levittown. And so I'll spare you all this sort of generalized bile.

What I will do is run through a few very specific problems and solutions that I can find in probably my longest, and certainly most independent (i.e. I've never really been by myself out here), stay in suburbia (I'm tiring of the term “suburbia” but can't really think of any others that convey the same broad contempt, and so let's make a deal--and try a little linguistic/literary experiment--that for the rest of this post, any term that I employ that is similar to “suburbia” in general meaning will take on the connotative and, fine, denotative meanings of the word “suburbia” unless I make an explicit and per-use exception; e.g. “subdivisions”-----

OK guys I'm sorry about this but just one quick side note: I've discovered a pretty egregious flaw in Google's software, which OK isn't a huge flaw or maybe even a flaw necessarily (i.e. it might actually be more efficient, but my brief foray into comp sci lends me to believe it isn't). When you're typing a new post in Blogger, the quotation marks, rather than being programmed to face the correct way based on where the spaces and characters are a la Microsoft Word and basically every other typing program ever developed, simply alternate between left and right, which if the person typing never made a mistake would be a perfectly fine way of doing it but since humans are of course fallible especially when it comes to such a recently developed mode of coordination as typing, can be quite frustrating when you need to go back and edit. It's actually kind of ridiculous because while MS Word's algorithm isn't infallible either, it's usually pretty good, and this discovery is sort of comforting given the level of obsessive perfectionism and ease-of-use that Google tends to exemplify. Of course knowing Google there's probably a valid and extremely logical reason for such a simple quotation-mark-direction algorithm in what is otherwise a not-too-simple piece of software, but I just thought that certain nerds among my readers might enjoy this.

So back to what I was saying (Ed.: have you noticed that my comments have become more and more infrequent? Yeah. Consider for a moment the fact that he controls my comments and their frequency. He's been getting sloppy--let's not let this shit slide.) Dude. Do not mix those last two metaphors because I just got an image of sliding--(Ed.: Christ, dude!)

OK. I think maybe I'm just a little sensitive about standing out because Eve and I were talking about suburbia last night and she mentioned that because it's all so similar--the places, the people, pretty much everything except the names and even those are pretty frequently interchangeable--it (A) takes serious effort to be different and (B) is even harder to be different in a significant way (a few e.'s g. to be black or gay or poor). Being a straight, white, Williams-educated, upper-middle-class male, I would expect (/would be expected? That's a question I don't want to get into.) to feel quite comfortable in these kinds of places; I don't think the point need restating that I don't (Ed.: it doesn't. It really, really doesn't.).

But. And you know there's always a but. If we don't grant, and I really don't think there's any reason to, that I am a more sensitive/thoughtful/whatthefuckever person (whether by nature or upbringing or education or experience or anything, and I suppose we could at least grant that I am more agoraphobic than your average suburbanite) than, say, the people sitting around me in Caribou Coffee (the Starbucks of the North! Not that Seattle isn't like the same latitude as here but back to the point), then we have to ponder just what it is that these people enjoy about living here. Why is the trope “I have to get out of this small town” rather than “I have to get out of this stifling atmosphere”? I'm asking this as a serious question because it does not make sense to me. Because I guess one of the main issues I have is that there is nothing here, and by that I mean that there's nothing you couldn't get somewhere else. So what is keeping people here, rather than some other suburb? How do you choose when all the choices are the same? It's almost never because your family has been here for generations (these are not old towns), so what is it? Is it really just as simple as that the city is too dangerous or expensive but you have to work there? Is that really it?

It's reasonable to assume that pretty much everyone reading this blog has given at least a passing thought to these questions (and there are literally thousands of other important and fair questions re: suburbia that I have no space in blog nor mind to ask). It's also reasonable to assume that most of you have far better answers than I could develop, or at the very least have carried these questions further than I have. It's certain that there's plenty to read about these problems, fictional, academic, “cultural”, and I'm fully aware that there's not really anything I can contribute to the discussion except by virtue of being an outsider, a suburban virgin, and by having amassed a not-insignificant amount of experience in other kinds of places but never really having experienced the American Suburb in the leisurely way I'm doing today.

In Which the Sun and My Brain Get in a Fight; And the Victor is Clear

Monticello, MN--I might have another post waiting in my journal but I don't think so. I'm pretty tired. I'm too lazy right now to recap the events of yesterday but they can be found on Eve's blog; today's events have thus far been limited to putting the kayak in the Mississippi in Sartell, MN and finishing the day eight hours and 35 miles later, here in Monticello (according to Wikipedia, this town is named literally from the Italian, “little mountain” or something, but I think we all know to whose house they were actually referring (and Jon, before you go looking this up, it's Thomas Jefferson's)). Basically the current was so strong (by the way, Sauk Rapids is the first place named “____ Rapids” to actually have rapids, and they were awesome) that I decided to go an extra eight miles past where I was planning on stopping, which would already have put me at like 27 miles which is as far as I've gone yet. So needless to say I'm pretty fried, and surprising unexhilarated. Which is why I'm going to stop about here for now. I'll write more tomorrow but this'll have to just tide you over for now. If you're bored, google “bear trampoline”; and if you've already seen it, go outside. It's a beautiful day.

In Which Nazis Dominate, But Not Quite to Their Standards

Little Falls, MN (August 23)--Went to an actual Episcopal Church for the first time in probably 6+ years because Eve was looking for a Lutheran Church (the Lutherans just in the last few days voted to allow noncelibate gays and lesbians to become ordained) but the only one we found had started service a half-hour earlier, and so we went to the Episcopal instead, and they ended up being really friendly as I guess one might expect although it is really interesting how intimidating it is to go into a public place like a church when you're more or less a foreigner, and to participate in the service etc. etc. Eve mentioned as we left that it's really too bad that the Catholic Church stopped doing services in Latin, and I have to say I agree because not only does it create a common bond (in the physical rather than spiritual realm) but it enables a foreigner to find, well, not to be blunt but to find a place of refuge and sameness in a divided and xenophobic world.

Little Falls is the home of one Charles A. Lindbergh, senator, namesake of the State Park at which we've stayed the past two nights, and father of the more well-known Charles Lindbergh. But if it can be said that sons usually take on the political and cultural prejudices of their fathers (and this tendency is even stronger in political families), then I'm not sure exactly how I feel about the adoration of LF for Mr. Lindbergh, whose stance on WWII &c. I'm extrapolating from that of his son, who (I'm not sure how widespread this knowledge is so please excuse me if I'm rehashing C.K.) so corrupted his name and reputation (but not, as will be discussed, his mythology) by actively supporting the Nazis during WW the Second and being an outspoken anti-Semite and xenophobe and general, well, asshole (General Asshole...). So it's always interesting to me to see mythology (and here I refer mostly to the aviator, not to his father, even though Eve observed that the facade to the elder's museum looks suspiciously like the wing of an airplane) fly (ha!) in the face of the mythologized one's life as a whole. And Lindbergh is a particularly dissonant figure in this regard because the act for which he is mythologized is, or at least was, inherently apolitical (as opposed to e.g. Thomas Jefferson, whose slave-holding--and occasional dalliances w/ said slaves--cannot be held in absentia from his political writings: “We hold these truths...” etc.), so that it is logical (if not morally) permissible (if not responsible) to talk about Lindbergh the Aviator as a separate entity entirely from Lindbergh the Bigot. When you take US History in high school, you get the mythology and it's true you might get a reference or two to the Lindbergh Baby stuff but (A) that situation and its cultural context can be kinda tough for HS students to really understand and (B) unless you hear about the two events at the same time it's tough to reconcile the flight with the personal complications so that you start ot create two different people whose connection is so nebulous and vague (just the name) that they are, well, two different people. Which is really too bad because Lindy is such a fantastic example of the dangers of popular mythology: Philip Roth's “The Plot Against America”, despite being one of those books that actually reading does little more good than reading its summary (i.e. it's not a great book), is a disturbingly realistic imagining of a successful 1940 Lindbergh campaign for POTUS and consequent Nazification of these good old States and if it makes you think at all makes you consider other people whose mythology has been allowed to overshadow any sort of critical reflection on their person as a whole (and I'll be honest again, it's easier for me to think of Republican politicians of whom this is true than Democrats).

In Which Fishing Is a Sport

Little Falls, MN (August 22)--Did 18 miles today, from 8 miles upstream of LF to the Blanchard Dam, 10 miles downstream. Before you reach dams (oh, there's one right in the middle of Little Falls, lending the town's name a poetic literalness) the current dries up, as one might expect, and the river widens and deepens, but the issue with the current is the one that bugs you as a paddler as you shout to the River “Come on man, carry me along!” because paddling downstream is more fun than paddling on a lake. Between the two dams I noticed a ton of fishermen, all of whom seemed to be really heavily concentrating on the task at hand, and while I will concede that there's more going on in a fisherman's mind than meets the eye (try to decipher the synecdoche in that phrase), they also seemed surlier than most fishermen (who tend, by the early afternoon, to be on their third or fourth Bud Light and to have attained its state of heightened friendliness towards strangers), and every boat featured a pair of anglers rather than one or three or four, and I was never out of earshot of a pair of intensely focused men in T-shirts and jeans and sunglasses and Twins caps watching depth finders and changing tackle and despite all this, it never crossed my mind (save for a brief joke fantasy at the beginning) that I was kayaking through the 1st Annual Royalton, MN Lions Club Bass Tournament, the HQ of which was at the landing where I got out, except that when I got there the competition still had an hour to go and so I ended up in the midst of a bunch of very bored middle-aged mustachioed pillars-of-the-community, 20 Ford F-150s (each with accompanying boat trailer), and a scoreboard with only the names of the competitors but of course no one's score yet, at which I'm sure there's a joke to make but I'm too tired to make it because haven't you heard I kayaked 18 miles and carried a 70-pound kayak 300 yards (Ed.: you're not too tired or, knowing you, drunk to proceed?)? Shut up, asshole, last I heard drunkenness or depression or both was practically a prerequisite--(Ed.: God, I know that bullshit back to front and I gotta tell you as someone intimately involved in the biz it ain't true.) In the biz? You're a figment of my imagination!

Editor's Note: here I'm going to make an actual editorial decision and just continue.

We're toying with the idea of taking a day off tomorrow

[Future] Editor's Note: We did take a day off, and the necessity of this act can be observed in the fact that he was too tired to continue.

Water, Water Everywhere

Little Falls, MN--“Slow Falls”, the guy in the coffee-supply store (for lack of a more precise term; that's pretty literally what it was, a small but still-too-big-for-its-merchandise-so-that-it-looks-like-a-drug-front store with bags of ground coffee along the walls and a few miscellaneous coffee-making devices and then the guy himself, sitting on a stool in the middle of the room with a computer in front of him) called it after I had outlined my thus-far-fruitless attempt to find a source of wireless internet in Little Falls, which looks almost as populous as Bemidji or Brainerd and is a degree of magnitude bigger than the town of Aitkin, which had I believe more than one place where one could plug in and turn on. And though I couldn't exactly disagree with him, the name isn't entirely accurate except in one respect. The one place where one could purchase brewed coffee in the downtown area, “Pete and Joy's Coffeeshop and Bakery”, had neither seating area nor Wi-Fi. After inquiring at a local business-supply-store (no shit, this town is a pretty good size and seems to be at least getting by economically, but no enterprising individual or even chain has recognized this one gap in the local marketplace), I discovered that there was in fact a library with available wireless, but after spending half an hour searching for said bibliotheque and a further fifteen minutes talking to the woman outside while we waited for it to open only to discover that the current day of the week was not, as we had both thought, Th. but in fact Fr. (and I mean come on, I've been making my way through the wilderness of northern MN for three weeks and I was the one who ended up realizing that we were waiting for something that wasn't going to happen! Although maybe she was just too absorbed in our fascinating conversation to give it a second thought.), I ended up at a Perkins. Yup. A Perkins. The lady in front of the library had told me that the Perkins a mile out of town (when I asked what a Perkins was, she replied, after shaking off her disbelief at my ignorance, “Perkins? Nationwide family restaurant?”(and at this aside those of you who also didn't know what a Perkins was can breath a sigh of relief at the sameness of our world-spheres)) had internet, and thus here I am. Typing this post up in TextEdit because the fucking wireless doesn't work. I have, however, learned that one does become an easy target of condescension when one “dines alone”, even when one is clearly just eating at the establishment in order to use its internet as evidenced by the not-at-all-microscopically-small computer set in front of oneself on the table and thus one probably doesn't want to be interrupted every five minutes to respond to inane questions to which one's answer clearly wouldn't have changed since the last time said inane questions were asked not five minutes before. And this knowledge might actually serve me pretty well, as I've been shed of my assumption, now proven erroneous, that the seeming invitation and openness to inane questions of the single diner is not exaggeration but is in fact solid, corroborated fact.

Now of course Stuart might suggest that all of this drivel provides only a neat summary of the means of posting without addressing what it is I've actually done or seen today (Ed.: should I even bother raising my objections to this straw man, or are you by this point ignoring what I say altogether?) but as you can see this is nonsense, as I've worked anecdotes and descriptions into the fabric of the post ostensibly about how I've found Internet in order to post, in various subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. But for those of you thirsting to hear more mundate details about my workaday life, here they are.

It rained again last night (after the day saw more sun than rain) and the tent was, once again, soaked. I had learned from the previous night where exactly to put my sleeping pad and bag and pillow and clothes so as to best avoid puddles, and this turned out quite nicely, save for the fact that I slept probably no more than an hour because I was so stressed about avoiding the rain and keeping my sleeping bag on top of the pad so that it wouldn't get wet because if it got wet I wouldn't be able to get to sleep. There's a joke to be made there but my approach is a little too blunt for it. (Question(s): at what point does a purposeful lack of irony become, itself, ironic? And is my generation thus doomed to irony no matter what we try, or is the only possible approach one of retreat from irony rather than progress past it, which is of course an utterly depressing thought?) So we're considering buying a new tent, one that costs a little more than the $25 Eve paid for this one, which, and I have to be fair, is a pretty cool tent, and had made it dry through a few nights of rain prior to these two so we're still trying to assess the pattern.

Today Eve is paddling past Camp Ripley, a military reservation that dominates (ha) the map, and right now I'm sitting right next to three men in camo, and listening to their conversation has started me thinking about the military. I know that I, and a significant proportion of my world-sphere-sharing intellectual Ivy-or-Little-Ivy-educated Northeastern hyper-literate liberal peers, have a certain automatic distrust of the military in the abstract (and here again in this sentence the question of irony is raised but I won't address it here (Ed.: have a gander) as another segment of the power structures that dominate and regulate American life, like the police and MSM &c, and it takes a conscious effort, a sometimes dishearteningly strenuous one at that, for me to remember that in contrast to (e.g.) the police, people in the military are not, by and large, power-tripping assholes, because of course most people in the military have no power, whereas you become a news producer or cop in order to feel and exercise power. And I was reminded of this because when the three guys sat down, one of them asked the waitress if they had a gluten-free menu (they don't, but the waitress also didn't know what it was) and then they got to talking about Michael Vick in some less-than-flattering terms, and I know all this I know I know that these things shouldn't surprise me but (A) they do, whenever I'm reminded of them, and (B) I know I'll forget and in two days I will again start making assumptions like that but is B a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Everybody Called Him "Wilkes"

Brainerd, MN--In the Brainerd Public Library, resting and drying out after an 18-mile day. It was raining last night and into this morning and we were considering taking a day off, but the rain stopped and I kayaked. Six miles in, I had to portage around a dam (providing the hydropower which now constitutes probably no more than ten percent, if that, of the paper plant's electrical usage--all this just like in Grand Rapids), which, because a chain-link fence prevented Eve from assisting with the portage, provided the first opportunity for me to carry the kayak on my shoulder in the real world. At the outfitter's we all picked it up real quick just to make sure we could, but then it didn't have a whole bunch of extra stuff in and on it. I've had more fun. I did get some footage of the portage and the plant and dam, all of which probably puts me on some terrorist watch list, before kayaking through Brainerd and ending up at the State Park where we're spending the night. I'm sorry, I know this is all really lame and fact-fact-fact and probably boring as hell but I'm pretty tired and just kind of felt obligated to post. Because I suspect that most of you don't check this very often, which is of course fine because usually I can't post very often, lacking what you might call "access to the Internet" for much of the day, but I figure if I put up something dumb it just might keep you all coming back for more.

So I suppose I don't really have a whole lot to say (Ed.: I'm sure you knew this was coming, but what was the point of that?) and on the whole you might say I'm pretty wiped. And plus, a lot of the time there just isn't much to talk about oh wait wait WAIT I remember what I was thinking earlier.

So. A lot of the time there's not really much to do on the river. Sometimes it's just like going for a really long drive, except that you can sometimes tune out. So today was one of those days, after the portage and a series of bridges, I had like ten miles to do and nothing in the way of an interesting view or reason to, well, think. So I started singing, which is nothing new, I've done it a few times before. So I was singing "Rocky Raccoon" and then "Ballad of Booth" (devotees will recall a previous reference to this latter song) and then I started, well, kind of hallucinating. It started off fairly innocuously--I was singing "Ballad of Booth" and then imagined Stephen Sondheim pulling up on a boat, having heard me butchering his wonderful song, and as a matter of course (according to my mind), we got to talking. We talked about having gone to the same college, and I expressed sympathy for the difficult time he would have had as a gay Jew at Williams in the 1950s, and we discussed my introduction to his work, and I discussed "Ballad of Booth" and some other bits of Assassins, and in the course of all this discussion he had slowed his boat down to my speed, in order to talk to me, and I actually started looking over to my left where I imagined the boat would be. About halfway through these events, I was looking off to port, talking to Stephen (I never really got around to imagining what he might prefer to be called, but I suppose that by this point we were familiar enough for it to be "Stephen", and plus I can't really imagine that he would insist on "Mr. Sondheim"), and all of a sudden I hit a rock and almost tip the boat over. And not only that, but after recovering from the shock, which had jerked me out of my daydream, I went right back to the conversation as if I hadn't missed a beat. I remember that I had recognized him based on a composite of two images: the photo from his Wikipedia page and circa 1972 video of him watching Carol Channing (right?) trying and failing to record some song at like two in the morning. He was very nice, and only mildly annoyed at the fact that not only could I not remember all the words to "Ballad of Booth", I could barely remember any other song, and nothing at all from works other than Assassins (well, if West Side Story counts--he helped Lenny with the lyrics fyi--then I suppose I could always belt "America" for all the nothing to hear, as I was doing just the other day). So yeah. (Ed.:...)

Of Cows and Coffee Places

Brainerd, MN--Sitting in a coffeeshop (well actually a “coffee bar”, to refer to its name, and actually this is a pretty literal description because it serves coffee for when you just need caffeine as well as coffee for when you've had kind of a rough day but still need caffeine and not only that but it's an actual bar so when you walk in you experience a kind of momentary dislocation) (Ed.: you can't make it five words without a parenthetical? You really do hate me, don't you?) in Brainerd, a town for which Eve professes to have a certain distaste, a distaste I hesitantly shared until coming in here, and the bar and the coffee and the gift shop (that's right, it's a gift shop too--“Coco Moon Coffee Bar and Gift Shop”, I shit you not, and every single one of the last five words are literally true and most have more than one meaning) made such a weird and unique combination, not to mention the strange demographic assortment of clientele that all these northern MN coffee places seem to attract (Jonathan Raban, on his trip down the Mississippi, frequented waterfront bars, which as a Mainer I could have told him meant that he would only experience a certain kind of weirdness and hostility because booze seems to bring out the (at the very least) xenophobia that remains bubbling just under the surface the rest of the time, but we, not being raging alcoholics, seem to have chosen coffeeshops--until two hours ago I had never had booze and the Internet available to me at the same time), that it appeals to my possibly-but-probably-not erroneous assumption that even sleepy little towns have a little caffeine in them, if you know what I mean (Ed.: do you know what a little dot means? It means we have these things called sentences into which our thoughts can be organized, so that we don't confuse or annoy our readers with endless tangents. Not that you're not already confusing or annoying your readers, but it's nice to spare them from a little extra exasperation now and then.). And Brainerd isn't little, at least not for up here; it's about the same size as Bemidji, population in the 13,000s, although it's a little more spread out and a little less tourist-oriented (Bemidji had a lake; Brainerd has but a river, albeit an impressive one).

Yesterday I finally saw cows along the river, and in two different locations at that; Eve and Richard had both seen cows in the river already, and both had begun to talk about the experience as though it was something that one took for granted, and consequently (well really this was the consequence of my by-now-too-well-documented insecurities) I had begun to suspect that there were, in fact, thousands of cows lining the banks of the Upper Mississippi and through some fault of my own--stubbornness, lack of open-mindedness, lack of understanding of what cows actually looked like (along the lines of Descartes's and numerous others' quandary about how do we know we aren't simply being bedeviled when we see or describe &c.)--I had been unable to see them and was by this time feeling woefully inadequate in the being-able-to-spot-cows department, and thankfully I was vindicated not once but twice, as if I were the beneficiary of some cosmic apology (“Sorry to have taken so long; here's a little extra for the trouble”; and speaking of vindication). The first time I spotted them, I took some video, ostensibly for posterity (? or something) but really for my own peace of mind; after I had returned the camera to its deck compartment, I began to paddle, which all of a sudden frightened them and they ran away. I had never before seen a cow run--for those of you who still haven't, if they're running away from you, you suddenly understand why you don't see cows run very often: they're very slow and clumsy and almost comical (OK, comical). The next herd, just a few hundred yards down the river (but on the opposite bank; I know some of you probably have a low opinion of my intelligence and I want that group to understand that this second group was most definitely not the same as the first), was also subjected to the gaze of the bright yellow camera, but when I had finished and gone back to paddling, they did not run away. In the interest of scientific research I began to paddle very loudly and violently, and got much closer to the bank than I had with the first group, but these cows stayed put, and their stares seemed to me to reveal either a complete idiocy or a wizened, kindly pity for this poor stupid human, who so clearly did not know how to paddle a kayak in the most efficient manner possible. I'm not sure why one group of cows was so impervious to the sound and image of my paddling a bright red kayak while the other group was so sensitive--according to my (very limited) knowledge of bovine breeds, the two groups looked pretty similar--but I like to imagine that a farmer, wearying of his cows stampeding away from the river every time a boat passed (because if I scared them in a kayak, imagine what a powerboat would do), painstakingly trained his herd to merely gaze, dumbly, at whatever appeared on the river, and that after a number of failed methods (most of them comical, in my mind) he finally hired a local “cow-whisperer” or something to teach them, successfully and through a secret and possibly Montessori-influenced method passed down from generation to generation, that a boat was not a natural predator of the cow (Ed.: I don't say this enough: you're an idiot.).

Maps and Metaphysics

Aitkin, MN (August 17)-- Richard left from Brainerd and we are down to two. Tomorrow I have a 27 mile day (during which I will hopefully be adequately hydrated (Future Mac: he was)) but that's looking like the furthest anyone will have to go for a while--it's tough to say because the river is straightening (or will begin to straighten around Brainerd) so much that each map only reveals one or two days' worth of distance, and we don't like to get more than a map or two ahead of ourselves. We have 3 sets of nine maps each from the Minnesota DNR that we keep in Eve's MacBook Pro box (get it?), and being nerds we don't like to disturb the order of the maps (which on the first day of our possession of them I organized into sets) until we need to. The maps are great, running from Itasca to the Wisconsin border (at which point we will switch to a booklet of more highly detailed maps, also from the MN DNR, which go to the Iowa border--typical bureaucratic incompetence government freedom fuck terrorists sorry about that)--they're pretty good for both navigating and for locating places to camp, with only one or two egregious and potentially life-threatening mistakes of the type I've grown accustomed to seeing from the mapmaking industry. Not to cast aspersions of incompetence on all cartographers, and aware as I am of the fact that realistically the maps are technically correct even when they don't match an amateur's ground-level estimations of how the map should look, but your field's got a ways to go in respect to, you know, what your job is.

It's a favorite activity of ours to examine the next day's map every evening as the sky dims, like old sailors or river dogs or mall rats (do there exist maps of malls in portable format, and if so, do bored housewives and teenagers study them or bring them home or leave them in their car or are they (the maps or, I suppose, the people) just like so many useless brochures or business cards or other pieces of paper with colors or words but that might as well be blank? If not, I suppose that latter analogy pretty solidly falls apart.), and to bask in the warmth of knowing exactly where you will be going tomorrow, which is something that excites the spirit so long as its different than where you went today (this latter condition explaining why so many workadays lead dismal disinterested lives, and I apologize if that's mean but come on, it can't exactly be surprising at this point for someone who isn't at the moment workaday to lament the fate of those who are, as though they lack the capacity to do it themselves, and after reflection upon that last clause I think I actually have changed my mind and retract said lamentation, and if you have your workaday fate you don't need me to complain about it for you). It's a nice feeling, especially, and maybe this is contrary to the spirit of adventure, but especially when you end up following the right trail.

On the Differences, Where They Exist, Between Coast and That-Which-Isn't

Aitkin, MN--Richard is leaving later today for Minneapolis/St. Paul, and so in his honor we stayed in a motel last night (but also really to dry all of our stuff which was soaked after yesterday's downpours--during which I could feel the rain splashing through the tent a la a mist tent which is wonderful at Bonnaroo but less so in central Minnesota). Apparently earlier this weekend there was a NASCAR race in Brainerd or environs and consequently all the rooms in the area had been booked, which would have been bad news had the rain moved in a day earlier.

Going to cut this short because I'm typing it up rather than having written it up earlier in the journal, which for some reason always improves my writing, which throws another wrench into that whole business I posted yesterday but I'm not going to think about it now, I can't and I won't.

But but wait Mac hold on here a second. Aitkin's purported population (try saying that five times fast) is a shade under 2000, just about that of either Damariscotta or Newcastle. Yet Aitkin has a downtown area that I would say approximates the size of, well, at least Wiscasset, maybe even more like Waldoboro (I realize these examples are entirely useless without a detailed understanding of Midcoast Maine and that their sizes and characters can't even be experienced on the Mighty Interweb but bear with me--suffice it to say that Aitkin is bigger than its population would suggest) and I can't really figure out why. It has appeared to me for almost the entirety of this trip that the very concept of a town or village (or especially a city--there doesn't seem to be a firmly set tipping point at which a town becomes a city but it appears to be upon arrival of its first coffeehouse, by which standard, of course, the Village of Damariscotta would be a Metropolis) is quite different here, and I'm now going to work through why that might be, beginning with what, exactly, differs.

Let's begin with the smallest town I can think of (N.(B.?): size and descriptive-of-such adjectives--small, large, etc.--of these examples will be based upon populations as recorded by the 2000 U.S. Census, and while as a former employee of that organization I can attest that the methods by which its numbers are derived are sometimes highly suspect, I can only hope that the discrepancies between the real and reported numbers are more or less the same from town to town, though as an amateur statistician and, again, former employee I'm not intellectually confident of that hope's basis in reality): Ball Club, MN, given population as recalled by the author as something in the 100's (Jacobson, described by Wikipedia editor “Bkorman” as an “unincorporated community”, which I imagine to be something like the “townships” that cover most of northwest Maine, is at once too simple and too complex to be assessed by such a meager intellect and world-experience as my own, not that these other's aren't but I gotta have something to talk about). Ball Club, located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Leech Lake rivers, consists of little more than a gas station along U.S. Rte. 2 (which passes for what you could loosely call the town's “main drag” and which also bisects the campus of one “Williams College” which I suppose partly, alright mostly, explains my fondness for Ball Club, the rest being explained by the fact that when the gas station didn't stock any duct tape the lady at the register loaned me her personal supply and said I could return it “whenever” and when I did return it later that day her son was at the register and expressed absolutely no surprise when I said that she loaned it to me, and call me cynical--tough as that may be--but even I wouldn't expect such a thing to happen in my own hometown even though I might someday refer to it as “the kind of town where [such a thing] might happen”) and two or three side streets along which are placed maybe 20 or 30 depressing little houses (and I'm sorry for such a label because I'm sure most of their residents love their homes but I can't think of a way to describe them to the outside world that doesn't denigrate them (the houses, of course, not the residents) at least a little bit, and even though my readers might recognize “depressing little houses” as a subtle euphemism for “really run-down, cheaply constructed buildings scarcely bigger than a shed or a garage, the kind of buildings that, were one to spot it in a poor urban area, one might point at and shout, 'Crack den!'”, it's just the kindest way I can describe them without whoring myself to upper-middle-class white guilt) and not a single other commercial building I could spot with my tired eyes. It's quite a bit like Jefferson, ME, actually (again, an entirely unhelpful reference if you don't possess highly detailed knowledge of Lincoln County, and potentially even if you do, but I retain authorial privilege so I feel pretty good about myself) (Ed.: that was so egregious I don't even need to comment), but unlike Jefferson its sole function as a town seems to be as a gas station, like a highway rest stop, since its function as a stop (a gas station, if you will) along the Mississippi has of course eroded entirely. And because northern Minnesota, whatever its history, is not expanding in population or development at any great or even detectable rate, its status in both the present and the future is somewhat nebulous. It stands at the crossroads of yesterday's highway and today's, but today's doesn't really go anywhere and yesterday's, while it did go somewhere, is deceased, which put Ball Club in a difficult position. But what a great name for a town!

You start to wonder what might attract someone to a place like Ball Club. And I don't mean that in an absolute kind of way, because there are of course pleasures in rural MN that take experience to appreciate, experience you gain by growing up there, but what might bring an outsider? The way the Midwest was settled has given rise to an idiosyncratic stratification of communities--you get considerable permeability between its cities and those of the Coasts, but there doesn't seem to be much change in the small towns. It was settled at a rapid rate and without regard, as Eve has pointed out, for future generations, while up and down the East Coast you see development with an eye for the future. The term “the country's bread-basket” is apt not only in a simple economic sense but also in a cultural sense--the attitudes of both those that demanded settlements in the Midwest and those that settled them seem to treat the land and the settlers as servants to a function rather than as people who demanded long-lasting communities (which is of course ironic with regards to the treatment of Indians by everyone involved but this post is long enough as is), and consequently places like Ball Club don't seem to really know what to do with themselves.

Some of the larger communities, the “cities” of Grand Rapids and Bemidji and the towns of Aitkin, do seem to have been in a continuing process of reinvigoration and reinvention, the transition from function to form, as the understanding of a more or less self-sufficient community has developed. And this creates an odd conundrum, as the old mantras of development and growth and settlement has merged into, well, settled, and the communities have to deal with what it means to be a functioning community for itself rather than for the cities or the East Coast (the West Coast is of course a whole other story). And they call soda “pop”! Isn't that adorable?

And of course none of this is a problem as long as freedom of movement and growth and, if so desired, contraction and so on is maintained but that's always something to be watchful for because the consequences can be so disastrous, as the non-Indian residents of communities like Ball Club must know so well after seeing what a century and a half of forced stagnation on Leech Lake Reservation has done. Although I wonder just how much interaction there has been, or is now, between those outside the reservation and those on it, even between Indians on and off the reservation, and particularly whether those lessons have been learned. But that question is too heavy for what is already a heavy and mournful day as Richard leaves us, to seclude himself in the warm and dusty (in my mind) archives of the Minnesota Historical Society like an incommunicado monk. We're driving him down to Brainerd later today, where he'll catch a bus and we'll get our first glimpse of the city which is in my mind more closely linked with Paul Bunyan because I'm not sure I ever heard of Bemidji when I was a kid and because Brainerd is such a weird name--you'd think it would imply a kind of nerdiness but in fact it seems to do just the opposite, at least to my ears.