you are where you eat

Originally posted on April 19, 2010 at middlecitymosaic.blogspot.com

The eastern boundary of my Minneapolis neighborhood is formed by the Mississippi River, while the western edge follows a line of industrial buildings along Hiawatha Avenue. Some of the buildings are in use, some are vacant, but one grain elevator in particular, with broken windows and a faded wheat stalk painted on its side, catches my attention each time I pass by.

My house in Ghana was on the edge of the village, between the road, the clinic, and the neighbors’ steeply sloping farm fields. Local livestock – cows, goats, chickens – frequented my yard for grazing, but one rooster in particular, with curly feathers and a jerking, frenetic stride, caught my attention each time he trotted by.

What do these two images have in common? How can a grain elevator in a Midwestern American city be connected to a rooster roaming through a West African village? They both share an important place in my mind. I see the elevator daily, and I once interacted daily with free-ranging African livestock. Both images present a source of food: one an anesthetized, defunct food-processing building; the other a living animal and potential meal.

The wheat-stalk-painted grain elevator on Hiawatha Avenue is no longer in use, but it sits directly across the street from a functioning flourmill. When the weather turns warm in the springtime, I open up the house to the night air and hear the sounds of the flourmill drift through my bedroom window. Like the background hum of a highway, I hear the steady grind of wheat into flour, plants into food, and the clanking of rail cars carrying away the finished product. While some of that flour will be distributed to local food businesses, the company that owns the mill also sends its grain worldwide. Will this flour join other milled grains in the bags of USAID staple flour provided to refugees and people living with AIDS in developing countries?

In the village in Ghana, I lived in direct association with the animals and plants that would become my food. The plantain and papaya trees growing outside my door, the animals that frequented my yard, all were my daily companions and they fed me directly. A chicken would be roaming and grazing one day, and the next it was dead and eaten. This close relationship with my food enlarged my consciousness of what I take from the earth and showed me the direct consequences of my consumption.

Back in America, I notice sharply the long separation between me and my food. Wheat is grown somewhere in the Midwestern region, it is trucked and ground and packaged, and flour ends up on the shelf at a big chain grocery store. There is a real disconnect between food and consumer, created by the miles of transportation and layers of packaging that lie between us. In Ghana I knew what I ate intimately enough to give it a name – I affectionately called that flashy rooster “Fabs.” Here in America, the only relationship I have with my food is the act of buying it. You are what you eat, the saying goes, but if I don’t know what I eat, do I know what I am?

I sense something wrong with our relationship to our food in America, and the broken grain elevator at the edge of my neighborhood is a physical reminder of this disconnect. Locally grown grain was once processed here for local distribution, but the old mill is no longer in use, and the newer mill sends its flour far away. The people living closest to the flourmill are not being fed by what comes out of it, and I think this does us a disservice. When we ship our grain far away and we import processed foods, we not only waste precious resources, but we miss an opportunity to connect to the food with which we meet our most basic needs. Producing our own food could give us a sense of self-sufficiency, purpose and pride in this 21^st century that has been buffeted with social and economic instability.

For my part, I continue to be the connection between my two far away homes and their differing food systems. I want them to share an important place not just in my mind, but in my actions. Having once grown my own vegetables in Ghana, I am producing more and more of my own food now that I own a home in Minneapolis – strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, peppers and greens – all in the back yard of my city lot. Using what I learned in Ghana, I will increase my self-sufficiency, create a sense of food security, and cultivate a stronger connection to this land that ultimately feeds us all.

former glory

Originally posted on February 19, 2010 at middlecitymosaic.blogspot.com

When I look at this grain elevator, I see the history and former glory of my neighborhood. Rather than research the building’s owner, its purpose, or its future, I like to imagine its back-story and former backdrop.

I see a booming milling operation in the 1930’s. I see the city of Minneapolis sprouting up; the Longfellow neighborhood growing out of the ground around the base of this grain elevator just like the wheat stalk painted on its flank. I see a place of business, proud and useful, train tracks carrying loads of wheat into its ground level then ground flour out. I see workers arriving on foot for their shifts then whistling the short walk home to cozy craftsman bungalows built from blueprints out of a Sears catalog. I see family-owned corner grocery stores at frequent intervals throughout the neighborhood, and a crop of new school buildings to serve its growing number of residents. I see holiday picnics at Minnehaha Falls with women in long skirts and men in moustaches. I see civic pride in its days of glory.

But I’m not in the 1930's, I'm standing on the frozen ground of February 2010. The wheat stalk so lovingly painted on the side of this now abandoned building has faded. Corner groceries in the Longfellow neighborhood, my new home, have closed their doors while the majority of its school buildings are being shuttered or sold. Foreclosed houses sit vacant waiting to be bought, while former industrial buildings are turned into luxury condos. I never knew this neighborhood in its heyday of housing the mill town’s workforce. I live here now.

I could let the loss of purpose and pride embodied by this abandoned, broken-windowed building sadden me, but I won’t. I don’t foresee a sad fate for my neighborhood. With the cyclical swings of demographics, we’ll need our school buildings again in time and our empty houses will eventually be bought. And over time, the fading of one industry from prominence leaves room for a new one to take its place.

When I look at the light rail trains that run at frequent intervals past this grain elevator, I see my neighborhood’s new glory.

wreckage & recovery

Originally posted on April 14, 2010 at middlecitymosaic.blogspot.com

On the evening of August 1, 2007, after calling my family members and friends to make sure they were all safe, I proceeded to ignore the collapse of the 35W bridge into the Mississippi River. When the TV news broadcast images of the collapse, rescue and recovery efforts, I changed the channel. Crossing the river in downtown Minneapolis I drove the long way around to avoid catching sight of the disaster site. For a while I stopped listening to Minnesota Public Radio because its coverage of the unfolding recovery was so thoroughly ever-present. Nine months before the bridge collapse I had returned from living in Sub-Saharan West Africa where I watched the disaster of AIDS take its daily toll on innocent lives. It was just too much for me to process the reality of a disaster here at home, here where we supposedly have the benefit of public infrastructure and modern technology to prevent the loss of innocent life. For a time following the bridge collapse – which killed 13 and injured more than a hundred in an instant – I traveled in intentional oblivion of our local disaster.

The Mississippi River forms the eastern boundary of Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood where I’ve bought my first home. A few blocks from my house is access to a public bike path and walking trail along the Mississippi River bluff. To the south, the path leads to Minnehaha Falls, while to the north it descends from the bluff into the river flats and eventually leads to downtown. Traveling north on the bike path, on a brimming spring day two and a half years after the 35W bridge collapse, I rode past an unlikely ghost yard of twisted steel wreckage. In that instant, my self-imposed disaster oblivion came to an end.

Salvaged beams from the collapsed 35W bridge spread out along the banks of the Mississippi River in what was once a city park called Bohemian Flats. In the shadow of the University of Minnesota’s Washington Avenue Bridge, Bohemian Flats sits directly between the river and the Mississippi River Road with its accompanying recreational trails. A line of metal fencing separates bikers, joggers, walkers and the curious from a large collection of laid-out metal beams, each with its own identifying mark. Riding along, enjoying the river on a spring day, it was a shock to encounter the remains of this bridge that failed us, these broken pieces that caused so many broken lives.

No longer able to ignore it, I have finally engaged with this local disaster that took place so close to my home. After my bike ride, I looked into the story of the bridge wreckage and learned that the litigation resulting from this wrenching failure of modern infrastructure is far from over. Two and a half years on, lawsuits are still pending, and those marked pieces of steel are active pieces of legal evidence. The web of litigation reaches wide and has entangled the Minneapolis Park Board and the Minnesota Department of Transportation as legal antagonists with a mutual goal. Both agencies want the wreckage removed from the river flats, but the Park Board wants it removed immediately, refusing renewal of MNDOT’s park-use permits for its storage. MNDOT is seeking legal protection from any liability for tampering with evidence before it commits to moving a single beam. Between the river and the road, the bridge wreckage lies in a hard place.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book A Paradise Built in Hell, claims that in times of disaster people tend to engage with their community and work together for the common good, but my experience doesn’t directly support that idea. I responded to the 35W bridge collapse by not responding at all. As a bystander to disaster, unable to provide immediate service as a rescuer of victims or re-builder of the bridge, I felt it was a better use of my time to disengage from the media frenzy of hashing and re-hashing the circumstances of a tragedy. I and my own were unaffected by the bridge collapse, so what good would my avid attention to the anxiety-producing aftermath do for the real victims? And how much disaster can one person truly absorb in one year?

As it turns out, now that I’ve re-engaged with this important piece of our local history, one act of the ongoing bridge collapse drama is taking place just down the road. With the acute action of the bridge collapse long-finished, I am engaging with the more mundane story of its restitution. Having a home and roots along the river bluff, and knowing more about the long-term effects of our local disaster, I have reason to engage in my community’s struggle with those effects. Reason, even, to attend and participate in future community council meetings.

recycling work

For the next few posts I'll be re-publishing here some of the posts I wrote for my class this past spring. The class was called, "Collisions of Beauty and Violence: Terry Tempest Williams and the Mosaic of Community." The readings focused around author/activist Terry Tempest Williams' works and the works of those that inspired or were inspired by her. The class culminated with a 3 day campus visit by Williams during which we attended a writer's interview with her, conducted by our instructor and one of our class members.

Throughout the class we read a lot of creative nonfiction, writing about home, place, landscape, community, democracy, and people's connections to one another. Our major assignments involved writing around the theme of "Broken Midwest," for which I wrote two individual blog posts. I wrote a third post as part of a group project centered around the theme of Landscape, Home & Community, and the book "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit. (I highly recommend Solnit's work - she is amazingly smart, does deep and thorough research, and writes in a truly engaging and personable style.) We ended up looking at Minneapolis' 35W bridge disaster in 2007 from our three different perspectives, inspired by Solnit's examination of how people come together during times of catastrophe.

Since I posted so little over the summer, I want to remember that I really have been writing - just not necessarily up in here. So even though the next few posts will have been recycled, at least they're new to this blog.

strawbunnies

Back in May, we came home from a spring camping trip to find our wild strawberry patch growing up at a fast pace. We had planted a dozen or so strawberry plants in mid-summer last year, and they rapidly multiplied themselves as soon as the growing weather hit this spring. This was the first time I was seeing them produce their tiny fruit, and I was pleasantly surprised to find so many ripening strawberries upon us before the end of May.














Then, while I was looking closer at the cute little berries, I was even more surprised to find this cute little critter hanging out among the plants.














Cute as it may be, it was trying to burrow underneath our strawberries, and I was not having any of that. I shooed the bunny out of there, and tried to fluff the trampled plants back into shape. Later in the day I saw the strawbunny lurking near the patch, eyeing up the cool green expanse of leaves and the dirt underneath. Now, I know these bunnies are cute, and I'm fine with them lounging languidly in our lawn all spring and summer, I really am. But once their bunny pursuits threatened my edible garden area, I allowed no points for cuteness. Their digging would damage the roots of the strawberry plants, thereby interfering with my burgeoning plans for back yard sustenance. Although I normally coo over fuzzy animals and babies, I quickly adopted a more pragmatic, cold-hearted stance toward these coprophagic critters: "Sorry Strawbunnies, but find a different patch of dirt to dig!"

The husband and I covered up the strawberry patch with a sheet of garden fabric, which we left in place for around 5 days. It did the trick and prevented the bunnies from accessing their desired burrow dirt, forcing them to seek out a different patch to dig. And our strawberries kept on producing fruit well into July, so our defense tactic was a success. But I think maybe I should share our bounty with the neighbors whose yard the bunnies relocated to. Sorry neighbors!

a timeless, timely comment

In her 1995 book Radio On: A Listener's Diary, in the wake of the 1994 Republican take over of congress led by Newt Gingrich, using the refrain of a Rolling Stones song Sarah Vowell makes a comment about the state of our country that I find to be an apt summary of our political condition today.

"From the looks of things, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is turning into the national anthem. Problem is, what if you can't get what you need?"

Fifteen years later have we really made all that much progress?

food full circle

This weekend we bought a few vegetable plants at the farmers' market to grow in containers in the back yard. I want to grow more of my own food but since the overall landscaping plan for our yard is coming along ever so slowly, I don't want to put in a permanent vegetable patch until some other key components are nailed down. Like the path from the back door to the garage, for one. So I'm content to begin my amateur city-farming in containers this year.

I read up on container gardening online and knew that I wanted to start small - two tomato plants and two pepper plants were all we bought this time. I might get some basil and other supplemental herb plants, as those are relatively easy to stick in a pot and get growing, even in July. But the Internet advised that if I wanted to grow vegetables in pots successfully I needed to plant them in the right growing medium - i.e. not just straight yard soil. I guess that gets too compacted and won't let the roots do their thing.

Enter our compost bin. I was pretty happy when we got our big black plastic compost bin two years ago about a month after moving in. We've been filling it faithfully with our food scraps, but it was starting to seem like that's all we do - keep adding food scraps, over and over. And it never seems to get full, so I guess it's been working in there all this while, turning identifiable pieces of food like banana peels and onion skins into dark, nutrient-rich humus. Still, it felt a little bit out-of-sight-out-of-mind to just keep dumping food into the bin and carrying on about my business. Until this weekend, when, with vegetable plants to get into containers and the Internet's exhortation to use potting soil or compost rather than straight dirt, it was time to dig in!

I was a little hesitant at first to stick my hands in it. The husband took a wheel barrow and put a small amount of excess yard dirt from our neighbor's pile then wheeled it over to the compost bin. He took a shovel and moved the top layer over to the side and started digging out the darker, more uniform stuff from the bottom. Then we mixed the compost into the yard dirt with our hands, pulling out the identifiably not-yet-composted stuff as we went. I'm talking teabags, avocado skins, egg shells - all food waste that we had produced. I was worried it would feel and smell bad, or that confronting our waste directly by touching it would gross me out. But to the contrary and to my surprise, the stuff smelled rich and slightly sweet, and thanks to my morning addiction, the coffee grounds gave it a nice aroma. Even picking out the solid bits wasn't bad - we just threw them right back into the bin to further decompose.

We then added in the remnant potting soil from a couple of house plants that had died, and we ended up with a thick, moist potting mix to fill the vegetable containers. We planted the tomato and pepper plants in their new homes and as a final touch, we covered them with a little of the mulch from the flower and shrub beds that we finally got going this year. Voila! Now all I have to do is remember to water these new friends daily so they survive to actually produce some food later this summer.

The beauty of this process has been to experience productive results from our decision to compost in the back yard. Not like we were ever on the fence - we always knew that once we had our own home we wanted to compost for its environmental benefits. But now that I've actually used that compost, and with my own hands, it has moved from idea to action. Not only are we preventing waste from going into a landfill (good idea), we are using what was potential waste as productive soil for growing more food (good action). It's satisfying to know that our food scraps are providing us with a growing medium for plants that will produce more food, then more scraps, then more growing medium, then more plants, more food, etc!

back on the saddle

I don't want to jinx myself by trumpeting the fact that I've kicked off my bike commuting season without a hitch, but I seem to have kicked off my bike commuting season without a hitch! This is a big deal because last summer my bike commuting season was cut short by a real hitch - a pain in the ass. Literally.

I had been so excited about my discovery that I too could commute to work on a bike (because I finally bought a decent bike) getting exercise and decreasing my carbon footprint in one fell swoop. So excited that I biked to work 3 days in a row at the beginning of August and promptly noticed shooting pain in my lower back and upper right glute (sp.?) The pain lasted for over two weeks so I went to the doctor who said it was my sciatic nerve and that I should cool it with the biking for a while. Bummer. Literally. She also said that swimming and yoga were very good antidotes to lower back pain, so I started up a regular swimming routine post-haste. I also took some Pilates and yoga classes, and started doing some lower back stretches my friend taught me, but I stopped biking to work.

I think what caused the great back pain of 2009 was a combination of overdoing it without giving my body a rest, and wearing a backpack while biking. Biking was entirely new to me, as were all the accessories. When I bought the bike I left the store with a water bottle, holder, and rear light in hand, but I had neglected to buy a carrying system. So I just used my backpack - simple solution right? Not for my back. The pressure of the pack caused my back to curve inward, causing some bad bike posture. Realizing that, I bought a bike rack and attachable "panier" at the end of September in preparation for the next year's commuting season. I didn't plan on staying off the saddle permanently.

This spring when the weather showed signs of getting warmer, I got on the ball. Or the stationary bike in the gym here at work. I had been swimming and stretching all winter, and my back was feeling good. I wanted to ease back into commuter biking with a warm-up period of simulated machine biking. Then at the end of March I began taking short jaunts on my actual bike. All of this was the lead up to an eventual attempt to bike-commute once more.

April 19 was thusly my inaugural ride to work - it was great! I stretched before I got on the bike, and a little bit right when I got to work. The weather was beautiful. I remembered my route from last year; I navigated traffic with confidence; and there was a space at the bike racks waiting for me when I pulled up. I took the next day off in order to not over-do it, biked again that Wednesday and then not again until the following Tuesday (yesterday). Not the most impressive record perhaps, but so far so good.

I'm not a natural-born exerciser, so I had to learn the hard way what my physical limits are and how to nudge rather than push them. I may not be a hard-core bike commuter, but at least my body is cooperating with me now. I'm back on my bike saddle, people, and that's what counts!

found in translation

I was a French major in college. After giving up on a degree in music performance, French was my next best subject. French literature got me out of practice room isolation and into the library with the rest of my friends. It would seem I let my need to socialize dictate my major and by extension my future career.

Senior year found me scrambling to make post-graduation plans for what to do with myself in “the real world.” The most obvious paths for someone with a B.A. in French were to become a high school French teacher or to pursue further studies in French, i.e. an M.A. or a PhD in French Literature & Culture. My dream at the time was to become a translator/interpreter and go to work for an important organization like the UN. But I’d have to go through special training for that type of work, and heading directly back to school after finishing 16 consecutive years of it was unappealing at the time.

I ended up making a post-graduation 3-year plan and followed it through: one year living with friends in the Twin Cities and working a random call center job; one year living in France teaching English to high school students; and the third year entering the Master of the Arts in French program at the University of Minnesota. The intervening summers I spent teaching French in an outdoor language immersion program for teenagers. For the duration of the 3-year plan I was using my language skills, developing my teaching skills, and following along the path laid out by my choice of college major. But when I finished the first year of grad school I was no longer interested in acquiring another degree in French. I left the program to join Americorps and, as their slogan says, get things done.

My professional path has ranged wide since then, twisting and turning with no clear direction, but providing engaging and worthwhile experiences nonetheless. I left behind my focus on French language and culture as I discovered new fields that captured my interest and passion. Since abandoning my French career I’ve developed skills in natural resources fieldwork, volunteer event management, grant writing, non-profit development, international development work and HIV education, as well as canoe instruction and wilderness trip leading. Though I’ve retained my ability to speak French, the full-time foreign language speaker in me went dormant for several years. My overall language skills served me well when I served in the Peace Corps and learned the Ghanaian language Twi. But taking on a new language pushed French further into the background as familiarity with Ghanaian language and culture gradually took its place.

When I returned from Ghana I concentrated first on being gainfully employed, then on settling into the house my husband and I bought. When I realized I wouldn’t be able to continue in international development or public health work without susbstantial schooling, I settled on work that would at least pay the bills. I didn’t give any thought to reestablishing my French career path. But last summer I got a call from the St. Paul Public Schools Special Education Early Childhood Intervention program (say that three times fast!). They were in need of a French interpreter/translator and they were given my name by a friend who used to interpret for them. I gladly accepted the call and embarked on what has now been 8 months of regular interpreting work.

A family from French-speaking West Africa needed interpreting services for their regular meetings with a special ed intervention team. My job is to accompany the team – consisting of an occupational therapist, speech therapist, physical therapist, and early childhood teacher – on home visits to work with the parents and their child with a particular disability or developmental delay. The visits last an hour and take place twice a month on average – I conveniently schedule them over my office job lunch hour. I mostly do real-time interpreting where the challenge is to know how much to let one person say before translating it to the other. I’ve also had to learn some very context-specific vocabulary words for physical therapy exercises, early childhood development terms, elements of speech, etc. As a result, French has rushed back to the forefront of my mind with such regular use. On occasion I will even translate a document or two with instructions for particular exercises from English to French. And so, unexpectedly and serendipitously, I am living the long-lost dream of using my college French major for translation and interpretation.

The other serendipity - or synchronicity - in this whole affair is that the family I work with is from one of Ghana’s neighboring countries. They don’t speak Twi as their native language, but they are from an ethnic group that lives in Ghana too, so I am generally familiar with their cultural and communication customs. Because of this, I am able to convey information to the parents with cultural sensitivity, bringing a major aspect of the Peace Corps experience – learning a foreign culture – to bear directly on work I am doing back home. In this one fortuitous opportunity, my academic study of French has combined with my Peace Corps service in West Africa to form a unique set of skills and background knowledge that are perfect for this job.

Through this work, I am helping a recently arrived immigrant family respond to and cope with a discouraging diagnosis for their youngest child. And I am hopefully making their experience of the American school and health care systems that much more manageable. While I am helping them meet their communication needs, they are also helping me feel a new sense of personal and professional purpose. In the end, I'm not actually working for an internationally important organization like the UN. Translating and interpreting twice a month may be one small job, benefiting one small family, but to me it’s making a world of difference.

words for a wary patriot

It's been almost a month since the State of the Union address by Barack Obama to a joint session of congress. I still want to post my favorite excerpts from that speech because for the previous eight years my country's leader rubbed into my face the fact that he did not care what I thought about the state of our union and would never listen to what I had to say about it. Hearing our new leader speak to the over-arching values of this democracy, and appeal to human kindness and decency while promising not to walk away from we, the everyday people, well, it's astonishingly healing.

Here are the words from that speech that spoke to me most poignantly, and make me willing to attempt patriotism once more:

“It's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength.”

“From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while. For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?”

“By the time I'm finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance. Millions will lose it this year. Our deficit will grow. Premiums will go up. Patients will be denied the care they need. Small business owners will continue to drop coverage altogether. I will not walk away from these Americans, and neither should the people in this chamber.”

“Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here.”

“These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, they've been taking place for over 200 years. They're the very essence of our democracy... [but] neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can... It's precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it's sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government. So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics.”

“We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.”

“In the end, it's our ideals, our values that built America -- values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every corner of the globe; values that drive our citizens still. Every day, Americans meet their responsibilities to their families and their employers. Time and again, they lend a hand to their neighbors and give back to their country. They take pride in their labor, and are generous in spirit. These aren't Republican values or Democratic values that they're living by; business values or labor values. They're American values.”

“Each time… politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith.”

“Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated... (but) The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive."

“The spirit that has sustained this nation for more than two centuries lives on in its people. We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don't quit. I don't quit. Let's seize this moment -- to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.”

the roof, the roof, the roof was on fire

One weekend this past summer we watched a house burn entirely to the ground. Usually that kind of statement evokes images of tragedy and loss, but this particular house fire was no accident. It was more like a party - there were muffins and juice, lawn chairs and rain umbrellas, and a general mood of excitement as a crowd of over 50 people gathered to watch the local fire department and its trainees set fire to a residence.

Earlier this spring, our friends seized an opportunity to buy the nuisance property immediately next door to them. The house, or more correctly – the shack – had been the rental home of a drug dealer and rabble rouser for the past few years, and once the landlord evicted him from the run-down house with the trash-strewn yard, he was ready to be rid of the whole property. Our friends jumped at the chance to improve the aesthetic value, and the morale, of their neighborhood.

They bought the property and then donated the structure on it to their local fire department to use for training purposes. At 8:00 on a Saturday morning, two fire departments arrived with 3 trucks and about 2-dozen firefighters and trainees. The fire fighters did some training and maneuvering inside the smoky structure before letting the fire blaze to full force. After the fire got going, their main work was to protect the neighboring houses and nearby trees from getting unintentionally scorched.

Watching the house burn was like watching scenes from the movie Backdraft, but more thrilling because these fire fighters were training for real-life versions of the scenarios that were so stunning to watch on the big screen. Their bravery and fortitude were something to behold, and I felt honored to be able to watch them at work.

And it was exciting to watch a house burn down from the safety of being across the street, but it was also nice to calmly watch something take place that we are conditioned to consider an emergency. Normally, if you see flames billowing into the sky out of a sunken roof, someone calls for help, right? But this was a completely intentional, controlled fire, and it was arrestingly beautiful to watch. A thunderstorm happened to roll through just at the height of the burn – the sky turned dark, bolts of lightning were visible and peels of thunder clapped overhead - but the flames showed absolutely no sign of abating in the rain. Once the fire was going, it was going, and no other force of nature was going to stop it. Witnessing the roaring, destructive power of the flames was a humbling moment.

We stayed into the afternoon, until the house had become a smoldering, smoky pile of rubble. The friends and neighbors who had come to watch the house-burning eventually dispersed, but the fire department would be on watch over the next two weeks to make sure the embers eventually went cold. The husband and I had once upon a time been certified wildland firefighters, so we felt a faint sense of familiarity with the clean-up operations we watched the fire fighters perform. Nowadays I’m happy to leave that important work to the professionals, but there was a little part of me that wistfully envied them the excitement, adrenaline and sheer brute labor of a blaze well contained. My time doing such work, however, is over, so I mentally saluted the fire fighters as we left and returned appreciatively to my own, totally not-on-fire home.

girls gone wild

My friend Z and I went camping last summer in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The trip mirrored one we had taken five years earlier to celebrate Z’s passing the bar exam. Much has transpired in the intervening years in both of our lives – marriage, Peace Corps, childbirth, relocation, home ownership – so it was all the more significant for us to pull ourselves away and go back to the woods, which is where we first met.

Z and I began working together as counselors at a French immersion, wilderness canoe program for 14-18 year olds in northern Minnesota in 1998. We lived in tents out in the woods for 10 weeks at a time. We got up every morning and went to bed each night outside, among the stars and the mosquitoes. We cooked and ate all our meals outside. We taught French songs and outdoor camping skills outside, and when it rained, we put on our rain gear and remained - outside. We were pretty tough when I look back on the experience, and I’m sure it helped make us who we are today. We even had contests to see who could go the longest without bathing, a true test of toughness, but we’ve outgrown that particular brand of bravado by now. (OK, sometimes Z thinks we’re still having that competition in the middle of the winter when no one in Minnesota really likes to take off clothes for the mere benefit of taking a shower, but she’s running that race without me.)

In the early aughts, we eventually stopped spending our entire summers camping and speaking French with teenagers in the wilderness, but we never stopped canoeing or francophoning. Our 2004 trip not only celebrated Z’s scholarly and professional achievement, it was a chance to relive our glory days, but with the novelty of being just the two of us; no teenagers to be responsible for, no schedule to keep, just two girls, our boat, our paddles, and our packs out in the wilderness. It was great, and we did it again in 2009. Taking these duo trips tests how soft we’ve gone as a result of living the civilian city life, with all our adult responsibilities and routines. But in our collective past, Z and I have toughed it out through lightning storms, the 1999 BWCA blow down, medical evacuations, heat exhaustion, hypothermia, black bears at campsites, and whining teenagers. It’s good to find out periodically if we still have that toughness in us. Our 2009 trip confirmed that we do.

We did a four-day paddle out of Ely, and even though the weather was entirely cold and rainy, my raincoat leaked, my feet got soaked on the first day (and in a fit of minimalism I hadn’t packed enough socks), it was a fun trip. Faced with less than ideal camping conditions, we called upon our arsenal of outdoor skills; Z spent 3 hours making a campfire in the rain over which I eventually dry-roasted my soaked socks. I dusted off my knot-tying/rope skills and set up a tarp to shelter our stuff from the incessant rain, and I hung the bear bag each night. (OK, the first night’s bear bag was a joke but that’s because we didn’t get to our campsite until 8pm and we were in a hurry to get into the tent to get dry.) When we went for a paddle in the drizzle one evening we saw an astounding number of birds along the shore of an island – more birds than I’ve ever seen in one spot. There were eagles, osprey, loons, gulls, and probably some teals or mergansers – it was like the Noah’s ark of bird species. They were the only creatures showing any signs of animation out there in the wet cold, them and us, two girls who defied the weather and our wetness to paddle in the evening rain and earn the privilege of seeing them.

The trip presented us with other challeges aside from just being waterlogged. On our last big day of paddling we accidentally took a wrong turn after finshing the Canadian portage. We weren’t exactly sure where we were, but we knew we weren’t on the lake we needed to be on in order to take out the next morning. So we used our (only momentarily-lapsed) map reading and navigation skills to take an un-marked portage back into the correct lake. Problem solved.

The moment that confirmed our un-faded glory for me was when we pulled up to an overgrown portage at a beaver dam. There was a group of wet, bedraggled, unorganized, unhappy-looking teenage boys milling about in a stupor at the portage landing. They were pacing around disgruntled in the calf-high water, submersing their plastic raingear and boots uselessly in the muck. Then here we came, two thirty-something women breezing past them in a rush of competent, unfazed efficiency. We just paddled by, went further up the creek to a second opening onto the portage trail (probably the original landing that had since been obscured by the beaver workings) hopped out of our boat and shouldered our light-weight, minimally loaded packs off across the portage. For logistical reasons we double-portaged, but we finished up our two runs before the first batch of boy scouts reached the other side.

It’s reaffirming to know that even though we don’t lead canoe trips professionally anymore, and we’re girls, our camping mojo is alive and well. Z hadn’t been wilderness canoeing at all since our 2004 trip (and I only make it to the wilderness once a summer these days) but she could still steer the canoe and build a camp fire. More importantly, we knew how to function and have fun in the rain, and we enjoyed our precious days in the wilderness undaunted – something those boys definitely needed to learn how to do. If they had come to our camp we could have taught them a thing or two.










Girls can portage and steer the canoe.








Girls can cross international boundaries in the remote wilderness.











Girls can make campfires in the rain and conquer their own islands.








And girls can tie boats securely onto vehicles.


Here’s to girlfriends; here’s to the wilderness; and here’s to these girls who can still go wild.

Z & me, summer 2000










Z & me, summer 2009

goal posts

2010 is well underway, people, so it's time for me to get busy. Blog-wise anyway. I have a window of about two weeks here before my spring semester class starts (and before LOST comes back on the air for its final season, ahem). I have a back-log of blog post ideas that need to be fully developed and shown the light of day. I carry around a little notebook where I jot down insights and ideas to use later in blog posts, essays, what have you. But that elusive 'later' never seems to materialize! It's already an uphill battle to get my ideas from draft to post, and we can see from my track record this past fall that my blogging frequency seems to diminish while I'm taking a class.

So, my goal is to get cracking here and put up several posts over the next two weeks. They will be out of chronological order, perhaps, and seemingly unrelated, except for the fact that they have each been burning a hole in my little notebook for months now. My own lack of holiday festivity aside, it would be nice to start out the new year with a clean slate, or at least a little more room in my notebook. That's the wonder of the Internet - it will enable me to transfer the cloggy contents of my writing notebook over to the seemingly limitless storage vault provided by its minions of servers. Then my load will be that much lighter for the year ahead.

That's the goal anyway.