Margotlog: Empty Water

Margotlog: Empty Water

     As the family car drove past the beautiful blue-green lake, the boy wondered why no one was swimming in the lake. Why no ducks or geese paddled its rippling surface. Why no cat tails swayed along its shores.

     "It's the mine," his father said. But the boy saw no mine, or at least no buildings that might cover a mine shaft. Mines were dug deep into the soil, he believed. They went so deep they hit rock which had to be chiseled away. Deeper and deeper went the mine into rock, until it reached coal, when it stopped. Miners wearing headlamps were lowered in rickety elevators far into the ground, there they extracted the coal. When miners and coal came to the surface, the miners' faces looked black as if they'd bathed in coal dust.

     There are mines in Minnesota but not coal mines. I was about to find this out first hand. The day began quietly as I sat in the dark before a huge picture window. I'd brought coffee and notebook to a long table before the window. Slowly as I came awake, the sky brightened. Clouds touched with vermilion lifted into the dark above a gradually brightening layers of blue, red, pink, and gold. The sky was intensely beautiful, and empty except for a crow flying past. Below tte sunrise rippled the huge body of water we call Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world.

     Later I met a fisherman named Sven. By the time I arrived at the solid, spacious fish house, he'd developed a rhythm, lifting a herring from a wet bag, slapping the rather stout silver fish on a cutting board, chopping off its head, slicing down its middle and scooping out its innards. He checked the lungs to make sure they were dark red. If they were white, it meant the fish had been dead too long. Such fish he flipped into another bag. "For the gulls," he said and smiled at me. Outside in the shallow water, gulls called and lifted and settled, pushing against each other, eager to snatch up the discards.

     Once the inedible parts were sliced away, Sven daintily filleted the pink flesh--a surgeon of herring for restaurant patrons up and down the North Shore.

     Sven had a comfortable face gray-bearded face, and easy-going ways. He introduced me to the wide wooden rowboats herring fisherman row out into the lake. There they anchor nets which they check the next day or two. Drawing a length of net into the boat, they toss the herring stuck in the net into pails of lake water, and draw another segment of net forward. Their boats are deep as refrigerators, and curved as melons. Their ribs are stout as oak branches. Sven's grandfather made many in his time. The newest one Sven showed me was still golden in its stout elegance.

     "We couldn't fish for herring when Reserve Mining was still dropping tailings into the lake," Sven recounted. "Herring don't tolerate murky water." Now that the mining has stopped, herring have returned. "They'll never be as many as before," Swen said.

     That's what worries many of us about the newest proposed Poly Met mine near the North Shore of Lake Superior. Poly-Met implies many, poly, metals, met. Poly-Met wants to copper and nickel out of sulfide-containing rock. The water used in the mining operation would be dumped. Lately the Sierra Club estimates that it would take 500 years for natural processes to clean flowing water of sulfide pollution. These waters would include the Boundary Water area and the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior, not to mention groundwater, of this highly toxic sulfide pollution. Poly-Met needs state approval to begin this mine.

     Though proponents argue that the mine proposal has passed all kinds of environmental reviews, that it will bring hundreds of jobs to a depressed area of the state, the counter arguments have, in my opinion, far more weight:
     * once Poly-Met (run by a Canadian company) is established, the number of jobs will decrease...
     * Poly-Met will be mining a rock that contains sulfide. Sulfide pollutes water--water deep underground, water in rivers, lakes, streams and in Lake Superior. Sulfide pollution takes hundreds of years to dissipate. It essentially is permanent for any foreseeable future.
     * Such a mine would be an environmental disaster for any location, but this Poly-Met mine would be situated near the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior. Its sulfide pollution would seep into ground water which feeds a vast network of lakes and streams and potholes throughout northeastern Minnesota and the contiguous part of Canada. Vast segments of forest and many towns would find the water that makes life possible so polluted that, as Rachel Carson's opening to The Silent Spring foretold, all would be quiet. All birdsong and spring peepers, all children's singing and shouting, all creaking of fisherman's oars, all yelping of wolf pups and snorting of does and stags. Children would develop intestinal trouble, Many would die young. Mothers would abort fetuses. Fathers would find themselves wheezing when they lift something heavy.

     Environmental disaster has only one other name. The surface of it can be quiet, and peaceful, even beautiful. But it is silent because so much that was once alive is now dead.

Please note: If you want to oppose the PolyMet mine, here is a link to take you to a site for that purpose.

            

Thank you for taking action to oppose the proposed PolyMet mine. Please tell your friends and families to also make their voices heard by visiting our comment page or forwarding this email and asking them to click on this link to submit their comments.

 

Sincerely,

Jon Nelson and Kris Wegerson

NMW Co-Chairs

www.nmworg.org

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

In third grade, when I couldn't see the board, I got glasses. Suddenly every hair, every whisker on our cat shone. I spied dust on the chalkboard erasers. My mother developed wrinkles.

I needed a pair of eyes, properly adjusted. It was a quintessential transformation, but not permanent, only intermittent. Since then, I go through the days with adequate sight, until a certain slant brings me to a halt.

A few moments ago as I stood at the wide upstairs window onto our backyard, the sun caught fire in the yellowing maple. The yellow gained intensity from a feathery green pine behind it. Higher up, the naked branches of an elm scratched the pale sky. Two jays lighted there, wings ablaze with lapis lazuli.

 A rare lucidity was being made plain.

I am in love with the arrangement of words, and their capacity to bring an imagined world to life, full of motion and clarity. The light falls on a scene, I watch transfixed. Beings flit about, gathering essentials.

Lately I've been listening to an exceptionally fine recording of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett. This is the third time I've enjoyed this very fine book, read by a woman who renders masculine voices brilliantly--from Karenin's brusk, reserved suffering, to Vronsky's rather slapdash encounters with life, to Levin's self-critical, yet often ebullient love for what exists outside himself: people, dogs, the land. I suspect that Tolstoy's women, despite being well differentiated, from shy Kitty to upright, long-suffering Dolly, to Anna herself, are displayed more fully in their actions than in their inner and outer voices.

Yet overall, Anna Karenina is the most illuminating, the most clearly realized piece of literature I've ever encountered. A clear, gentle light opens first this, then more of it, then slight actions, then emotions, strong or submerged, then encounters quiet yet building in intensity, until with a gentle turn of phrase, this scene, this revelation slows, the chapter ends and we begin again.

It is my kind of bliss. Not Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas with their pell-mell, inside-outside word play, not even Emily's quiet exquisite knife-blade. But a world brought into the utmost, unfolding clarity. It makes me shiver and stand and stare, or close my eyes and listen to each breath, each scrape of the pen. 

Margotlog: The Dark Days

Margotlog: The Dark Days

It might as well be November today, October 25--the sky is gray, the trees though still green and gold and brilliant red are silent and no birds sing. In fact, as is usually the case as the season turns, many birds stop coming to our feeders. Even those who remain here all winter, seem less hungry. I read in the paper that this is the time when they change their feathers (like us, changing our wardrobes), and become more quiet.

Yet a few days ago in sun, the feeders were swarming with all kinds of birds--woodpeckers (more about those in a moment), chickadees almost flying into each other to get to the pole feeder with its four sites for food, nuthatches, and finches too, swarming around the long, fat tube feeder with its openwork access to seeds.

We have a new woodpecker, a ladder-back, red-bellied woodpecker. This ladder backed woodpecker has a wide stripe of red all the way from its forehead down the back of its head. It's identified as having a red belly, but I don't see that. This is a big bird, 8 inches to our more common Hairy at 7.5 and Downy, at 5.75. These two frequent woodpeckers, who are almost identical with black and white patterning and red spots at the back of their heads, take turns swooping toward the suet and fruit/nut cakes. The Red Bellied glides more than swoops, and has a softer "chuck"; whereas, the two black and white critters almost caw, they're so loud.

Attitudes toward birds vary so much, from almost complete inattention, to dislike--"they poop on my deck, etc" to my kind of fascination. I like them around, feed and water them, mourn those who die, enjoy using the binoculars to sight a bird in the trees, and on vacation like to identify different birds from those at home--like storks in South Carolina or curved-bill thrashers in Arizona. But I don't want to go on birding trips with "life birders," those people who start life lists and make it a point to check off finding the truly rare ones.

"My" birds are a part of my home, which I've extended into front and back yards with trees and bushes, and bird baths and a growing love of what are disreputably called weeds. To me they are among the most fascinating plants. In fact, this year we've had an array not found before because Fran has stopped mowing. We've let creeping Charlie become our grass, and now, lo and behold, all kinds of plants I've never seen before are cropping up.

Here's one to help me identify--it's low but not too low, maybe grows a foot off the ground. It's leaves are startlingly lobed--not sharp like a maple leave, but long and smooth-edged, like a glove for ten lizard-appendages; the stalks are very prickly, and the flowers are soft yellow and open  like small poppies. When they die, the seed pods that replace them are very prickly. What could this be?

A friend who has kept a beautiful, though very tidy garden for years recently admitted that she's stopped cutting down her dried stalks. "I've heard leaving them is better," she says. She means, I think, that we now understand the crucial interrelation between insects, native plants, birds, and probably native mammals (not, roaming cats!). A friendly family down the street, with a tiny house and two adorable tiny children, recently asked if they could harvest some of my milkweed seeds. Since I planted the boulevard years ago with native plants dug out of an abandoned ox-cart route, I have an ever increasing garden of milkweed, golden-rod, and maybe other plants native to this region. The Wild Golden Glow (in the Rudbekia family) I transplanted to a sunny spot beside the house bloom profusely, and then die back to clacking sticks topped with seed clusters.

Yesterday I watched two chickadees eating the seeds from these spiky clusters. It was a confirmation so moving I had to stop. Slowly, I and others are learning how much better our environment is if we allow as much that is native to the area to remain. Yet I too love the neighbor's monkshood, with its brilliant stalks of deep blue, purse-like flowers. Maybe monkshood is native to Minnesota. I'll have to look it up.

Margotlog: New site for reading my blog

Dear Friends and Readers,

I have a new website

margotgalt.com

You can now access my blog via my website. Simply type in the address above

into your browser, and it should bring you to the site. You can comment as before. I so appreciate

comments. My most recent entry is fairly recent, and doesn't appear on this site.

Let me know what you think about this change.

All best, Margot

Margotlog: My North Dakota Grandmother Augusta

Margotlog: My North Dakota Grandmother Augusta

When my sister visited from Boston last week, we dragged out the family albums and letters. Really, it's only one side of the family that's represented, and only one letter writer--our North Dakota grandmother, our mother's mother Augusta. We knew her not at all. But we knew the town of Hankinson, North Dakota quite well because our mother Maxine took us there, summer after summer, to stay in the big house where she grew up. It's still there, the house, being renovated by an enterprising family, after being broken into apartments, and generally neglected for years.
     But that's another, more recent story. What my sister and I found, or more truly, read for the first time were a sheaf of letters written in our grandmother Augusta's fast, open hand  during the winter and spring of 1928, the year our mother and her older sister Elinor lived together near the University of Minnesota. Their address was 1312 7th St SE, Minneapolis.
     Sometimes Augusta addressed the letters to Elinor Maxine Wipperman, no comma between the first names, certainly no zip code. Each small envelope contained two, maybe three pages written on both sides of somewhat yellowed paper. Each sheet, not even as wide as my stretched out hand. But the pages are still intact. It was 1928: My mother was a junior at the University, her older sister Elinor a senior.
     Augusta addressed my mother not as Maxine but as Mousie. Despite being shy, our mother would be the in-coming president of her sorority, Phi Omega Pi. She was making very good grades. But she was Mousie, her sister the older, less pampered Elinor.
     You would never know from these letters that a handful of disasters had struck the family: Augusta suffered a nervous breakdown, the first or second year my mother went to the University. There's enough family lore to explain that without her children, she fell into depression and had to be hospitalized. There's also the whispered implication that her husband, my grandfather, at least 10 years older than she, beat her, probably trying to "beat some sense into her." Maybe she would not stop weeping.
     The sprightly, loving tone of these letters gives a lie to such a tale, but I heard it in whispered conversations from my mother, though she never implicated her father in any way. I heard about that from my cousins who grew up in Hankinson. Their father was my mother's twin brother, Bud to our Mousie.
     My mother idolized her father, a self-made man who'd come from Milwaukee to take a job in a mercantile establishment, married (his first marriage) the owner's daughter, and in time owned the company. He later acquired a handful of rental properties and quite a bit of farm land outside town, around Lake Elsie.
     My mother's family was well-off by the time she was born. Years later, I experienced "Papa Max's house" as a mansion, but it wasn't that. Rather a well-built, spacious two-story prairie home with a full attic. Its shadowed rooms were lined with gleaming walnut woodwork, the upstairs bedrooms papered with cabbage roses or iris, a different design for each daughter's bedroom.
     By 1928, the agricultural depression had preceded the stock market crash of 1932, and eaten into the well-being of local business. In one of her 1928 letters August comments that it was 100 degrees that May afternoon, but she had to bake a turkey because a farmer had come into town wanting to trade it for some flour. The turkey had to be cooked or go bad. "I served it cold with potato salad," wrote Augusta to her daughters the next day. "I plan to make 'chicken salad' tonight."
     It's clear August was in charge of the household, and her mothering extended to the University and advising her daughters about clothes. "Mousie," she would write, "when you come home to keep house for Papa, bring a warm sweater--it's sometimes chilly in June. But buy a nice new voile dress in town, something peachy, and a pair of cotton knickers too."
     In another letter she will make Mousie undies from "Papa's wedding suit...nice fabric and the silk lining is lovely. The suit is too small for him now." Even in our tight times as the professor's "girls" in South Carolina, our mother never considered taking apart an outgrown suit to make us undies. This difference hints at Augusta's need to contribute to her daughter's wardrobe in the most satisfactory way possible, using fine fabric and her evident skill as a seamstress. She could make what was needed for practically nothing.
     Times were tight, but not that tight. Augusta would soon leave on the train for New York, "going east," as my mother used to say, to visit one of her older sisters, the one she called "Aunt Lena." What Lena was doing in New York I have no idea. But many of Augusta's May letters describe intricate plans for her train trip east. Mousie is to get on the Soo Line train in Minneapolis and ride with her mother to Saint Paul, where they'll "have a lovely dinner in the station." That would be Union Station which was beautifully renovated recently, perhaps to its original glory as the Twin Cities' railroad hub, where my sister, mother and I would also change trains years later, heading to North Dakota after our three days and two nights from South Carolina.
     It touches me to hear how precise and insistent Augusta is about seeing her youngest daughter. If Mousie can't meet her on Monday, then she'll change her departure for Sunday. "You are to slide through the turnstile and some sit with me," August directs. Or, "I'll be on the observation platform when the train pulls in, watching for you."
     I assume that this trip of six weeks to see her sister in New York would be therapeutic. She will not be lonesome, but active, involved, going to sit on the beach in her green sweater. Beach? This is not the New York City of skyscrapers and busy traffic I've envisioned. Perhaps beach means Long Island or Coney Island. No letters remain from Augusta's trip to explain.
     She died when I was three months old, dying at home from stomach cancer. I know the small narrow room the family created for her illness, downstairs beside the front bedroom where Papa Max slept when we visited years ago.Even as a child, I sensed something closed and secret in her bedroom with its narrow cot and toilet. Standing in front of the dressing table mirror, I brushed my heavy dark hair with Augusta's soft bristled brush on the dressing table. The brush did nothing but glide across my heavy hair. It was hard to open the warped drawers of the tiny table. But the sense of her gentle, dusty presence remains with me. I wish I had known her alive, though the letters are probably the next best thing.

Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog

Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog

     No matter how depressed I get, summer season only, there's an instant remedy--lifting one of our two (out of three) cats who'll tolerate a sit on the back deck, and carrying her (they're all hers) out with me. The deck itself stands rather high off the ground. The bench at the back of the deck (there's no roof or awning except the towering silver maple) at this time of year is wreathed with flowers--red hot pokers, purple pansies, yellow and gold marigolds, petunias (always some of the only kind that smell--midnight blue) and various spiky white and pink things whose names I forget the minute they're potted.

     With Julia, the black and white, lying at my side, my hand stroking her from ears to rump and flicking off the gathered fur, I stare into the deep backyard, trying to make out what birds are on the mid-way "fountain" feeder, meaning arms that rise up like fountaining water, and carry with them various kinds of bird feeders. The two types of familiar woodpeckers--downy and hairy--push themselves up and down the center pole--don't ask me why--then flit to the suet and fruit cakes. Chickadees with their chick-a-dee-dee, undulate from the dying apple tree--kept especially for their staging area--snatch a seed from the round "just for them" feeder, and undulate back. Arguing finches--gold and purple--land in groups on the sunflower feeders.

     Yesterday, Julia and I (she's named an honorary bird watcher) followed an intensely yellow goldfinch fly in, grab a seed, fly back to the apple branch where it met its wing-fluttering, whining offspring, who did not let the parent out of its sight. If the golden glow of the parent sped to the feeder and did not return within a minute, the gray-brown child followed, perching on the top knot of the feeder, doing its wing-flutter beg.

     Are these creatures my real family? Or is their ability to charm and delight a factor of how little I resemble them, but how much I love them? Probably the second. How I came to the cat thing is not a surprise. When I was in first grade, I "rescued" a meowing baby tabby cat as I walked to school. Carried him to my teacher who had the sense to call my mother rather than insist I release the varmint outside. And my mother had the sense to walk herself and my smaller sister the seven long blocks on foot from the Old Citadel in Charleston, S.C., where we lived, to the three or four houses that the lower school of Ashley Hall used for early grades. This kitten grew into a cat, but didn't live long, as I dimly remember. Still he was my cat, my first rescue.

     These days with "rescue" animals all around us, we are familiar with the obvious human (or maybe American) need to do right by wounded, lost, defeated, abandoned animals (usually domestic). But in the 50s when I was in school, such an idea did not exist. We might take in a vagrant cat or dog and make it our pet, but we did so as individuals. We could not join a group dedicated to such activities, as has my neighbor, a single woman with a house of her own, who has left corporate America to write for a rescue organization. Now she works at home with her two rescue dogs and various puppies she fosters toward new owners.

     Yet my mother, who was far from sentimental except about Italian tenors (she married one), seemed to grasp my need for that cat I rescued. But she never fed the birds, though she appreciated the cardinals who sang in her Charleston back yard, the fifteen years she sat every evening with her "Chummie," a low-to-the-ground mutt, with crinkly fur and an entirely friendly manner. The fifteen years she lived alone after my father died. I do not live alone, but I need to foster, feed, watch, enjoy the birds I can draw to my yard, and we humans in our house love our three cats, even the ever timid Tilly who would fight any attempt to take her outside for a sit on the back porch.

Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!

Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!

Here in fly-over land we've had a beautiful spate of clear, sunshiny days, low humidity, fresh breezes. The last few days especially, the sky has looked like a clear polished gem winding us around a god's finger. Monarchs arrived earlier than I've seen in years, flitting among the huge stand of milkweed populating our patch of boulevard. For a brief moment, I imagined the world was saved. Farms worldwide had outlawed neoniconicides, and soon all would be well with bees, butterflies, not to mention those of us on two legs who depend on water sources and soil and air.That fantasy dissipated as I walked down the block and found two car/trucks idling their engines as the occupants stood outside and gabbed. Where were the environment police?

Out back, high clouds of green have taken over the sky. I dream up into them, remembering "green, how I love you, Green" (Neruda) while beside me Julia hums her own purr of pleasure. From the bird feeders we catch chickadees' deep-in-the-throat gurgle, and gold and rosy finch chatter, and the squawks of many many woodpeckers stabbing at suet. Truly I've seen more downy and hairy woodpeckers than ever before at our summer feeders, while the dozens of finches pile onto the open-work sunflower cage like starving immigrants just off the boat.

I've been listening for birds that hide in the shrubbery--cat birds and wrens. They're back, just not where they were last year, but within range of my feet. Once I saw four wrens slice across a nearby alley and into a bush, chattering up a storm. They're so sassy, these little mites, but also hard to pin down, with nothing of a robin's sedate saunter from yard to yard.

No one has died, no one was struck by lighting, no one ran out of gas on the freeway. The daughter, for her birthday, is going to Sicily in October, on her mother's dime, and I, the mother, could not be happier. At first she and I talked about going together, but when I saw her excitement, meeting her friends in Western Massachusetts, I knew instantly who her companions should be. "It's a trip of a lifetime," she just wrote me from Minneapolis. Well, maybe not of a lifetime, but of this moment. She works so hard, and she's such a good "mom" to two dogs and two cats, not to mention such a good daughter to divorced parents. It's time to get away, so far away that until a few months ago she had never hear of the town where her tour will be based--Taromina, on the west coast of Sicily, above sun-bright sea with a real volcano rising in the distance--Mt. Etna.

But not all sudden visitations are so happy. Four days ago I woke with such agony in my eyes I felt sure they'd split open. The "layers of my cornea had come unstuck." This has happened before, enough times that every night, I apply eye ointment and every morning use artificial tears to help the lids open without dislodging the fragile layers with their bursts of pain. But this pain was not a burst. It was an eruption--wave after wave. I walked around with my head down and begged the gods for mercy. Next day the eyes were red, lids swollen. Pink eye. Common disease of kindergarten. Had I shaken the hands of any kindergarteners?

The nurse at CVS Mini Clinic knew just what to order. Now three days later, hours pass and I'm only minimally aware of being somewhat challenged by light, or wind or  fatigue. Imagine a staple being suddenly driven into the eye, and you have the agony that was mine, but now has passed. I won't wish it on anyone. Except to wonder who wished it on me and spitefully plan ways to return the favor in spades once I find out.