Tabernash

And after passing mile after mile of parched brown Nebraska cornfields, we came home to the Front Range. Two days later we drove over the Continental Divide where the winter's first snows had fallen.




We were going to spend a long weekend in the town of Tabernash. Well not really a town...more a kind of settlement...permanent population of about 200 spread over mountains and meadows in the Fraser Valley. We had a cabin right off the highway.




It was a home-built cabin, constructed on several levels, with outside stairs resting on a pile of earth and rock like an old Norsk farm building but with an interior wall of glass facing north to take in the views. Views that constantly changed as the sun moved overhead and as clouds brought snow down to our elevation, as morning fogs came over the valley, as clouds obscured and then revealed the distant peaks and the ski runs at Winter Park were covered with their first white blanket of the year.












We read. We ate. We went for walks. We talked. We slept.















I did all that but also discovered how much fun it is to play with blocks.










Always something new to create with blocks. Especially when you can look up from your playing and see the world writ so at large outside.

Chicago

A city. By a lake. Tall buildings. It is good to experience a city when we live in this fairly small town...just to remind myself of scale. And the diversity and density of humanity. And the kinds of buildings and public spaces you can create at that scale The lobby of the Palmer Hotel. The new wing for contemporary art at the Art Institute.










As far as the new wing, the best part is the pedestrian bridge connecting it to the Millennium Park...making a more democratic connection to "the people." and it is very functional in its ability to display new large scale contemporary art. But it does not juxtapose art with architecture, does not cause the spirit to soar as does, for example, the new spaces at the Met or MOMA in New York. Yet it was thronged with a crowd of 20 and 30 year olds which bodes well for the future of the institute.





And, well, any museum that can give my nephew, Greg, and his wife Mary, a chance to spend Sunday in The Park with Seurat can't be all bad.






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Location:Chicago

Sculpture

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We saw a lot of good, even great, sculpture on this trip. Among other sites the Meijers Botanic Gardens. In Grand Rapids. AT the same time as the ArtPrize, a major arts festival...some good, some not-so-good...but some wondrous pieces.

Like the above horse. Modeled on some preliminary sketches by da Vinci but never executed because of the immense amount of technical requirements for the creation of such a huge figure. Now it sits in a kind of amphitheater with sloping lawns that school children can roll down when they have their lunch break.




The gardens provide framing, so different what you see between four walls in a museum...even five walls. Trees, grasses...not manicured but left to grow and fend for themselves...cover the approaches to these structures...suddenly they, or parts of them, are There.





Meanwhile down on the Grand Rapids, one of the finalists. "Horses." made of tree trunks, branches, twigs...probably on a steel outline...barrel down the Grand River...fleeing a battle? Running free? Just splashing around?









But my very favorite, "Albert Einstein between theorems," on a street corner downtown.





I have a whole lot more respect for Grand Rapids than I did when I went to college down the way in Holland, MI

Location:Grand Rapids, Michigan

Books

So what is it about books...and reading? Here's my brother, Tom, sitting in his favorite spot on the sofa (a Turkish word for the dais on which the Grand Vizier sat), with...could it be a large format comic book? Or a manual for a new electronic device?


Which assuredly is not what the saint below was reading...probably something to do with his immortal soul. Which is actually what Tom teaches in some of his courses: the religious themes in American literature.




So I guess they are both engaged, one way or the other, in that most human activity, learning. Let's that all those nameless souls who gave us an alphabet, a clay tablet, a scroll, a book, an iPad.



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Our Lady

Spent a few days visiting my brother, Tom, an English literature professor at Notre Dame in Indiana. The university claims to fame: its football, its high academic standards, its Catholicism, its endowments.

So students walk across the well tended grounds, sit in the fine library with its touchdown Jesus, upside down in the reflecting pool, probably visit the grotto for a prayer before exams, go to classes. Tho' sitting in my brother's class, one of the students (joint accounting and English major) sid he would not be in class on Friday "because he was going to China for a week" for some form of international business school competition. Didn't happen when I was in college.













I wandered through the basilica...gothic revival recently restored...noting the stained glass saints with their halos and the popes with their crowns...gives one the sense of France rather than the American Midwest...













In the ornate administration building, an historic note on Catholicism. Murals painted in the 19th century on the life of Columbus. Columbus? Well, at the time the university was founded...1880s...the country, and particularly rural areas, experienced a wave of anti-Catholicism. The pope as the anti-Christ. So Catholics tried to create a symbol to stand for the Catholic contributions to America. They pushed for making Columbus a saint but that was a stretch even for the 19th century. But they did get a federal and bank holiday...in addition to the murals.







Given the current attitudes toward Islam, it is useful to remember that some of us have been there before.

Nebraska Run

The drought is real. Mile after mile of scorched earth...as if a prairie fire had just passed by. And, then, every 20 miles or so, a crossroads, a place to sleep and eat and get ready for the next day.


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And, then, in Omaha an excellent art museum housed in what was once voted "One of the 100 most beautiful buildings in the United States.". They had some real jewels...I especially liked the mid 19th century plains paintings.






But also there were unfamiliar worlds to explore.









Which after all what art does. Makes you stop the car and get out and take a look. Like this allegory of a Venetian victory in a sea battle against the Ottoman Empire. It is all in the perspective of going through portals that frame your sight.

Am sitting across from the Notre Dame campus, drinking an evening coffee, ready to bike back to Tommy's house.

Location:Drinking coffee

In the Clouds

Trail to James Peak

 Thursday August 23.  I set out from Winter Park this morning to hike to James Peak....a mountain I had seen often when skiing at the resort.  Clouds were hanging low over the mountains but I thought that this was an early morning phenomenon.  With more sun later in the morning, the clouds would life.

 They did not lift.  But the clouds, billowing up, rising over the ridges, careening around this portion of the continental divide, offered glimpses of the deep valleys and gorges on the east side...like flimsy curtains blown by the wind in an open window...just enough to make me realize how immense the scene must be on a clear day.

I kept hiking along the ridge, this divide of the continent into waters flowing east to the Mississippi and waters flowing west to the Gulf of California, until rain began to fall.  A gentle rain...more like a drizzle than a downpour...but, lacking rain gear, I headed back to the trail head at Berthoud Pass/  

The clouds had another effect besides harboring moisture to rain down...they caused me to look more intently on the alpine vegetation growing at my feet...the lichens, mosses, grasses, sedges...their colors, forms, distribution.   I guess when the macro landscape is hidden, our attention focuses on the micro environment, the low plants underneath that would be ignored when confronted with brightly-lit, sun-drenched mountain vistas.  Clouds cause the focus to shift...if one lets them...to things that otherwise would be unseen.

The Farm

Eilif's Tractor

The farm is sold.  End of chapter in family history.  Eilif Miller had bought the farm in the late 50s or early 60s.  A work refuge for him:  planting trees, building ponds, raising barns, mowing vast swaths of meadow, growing garden crops, raising children (the supplementary work force)...the joy (for him) of hard, physical labor.  The farm.  Upstate New York, half hour to Albany, in the Helderberg Mountains, long drives from main homes in New York, Maryland, India, Paraguay

The Porch

I did not spend many days at The Farm, but it was always there in the background.  "Eilif went up to The Farm to get the Christmas trees ready for sale."  "He got the tractor fixed."  "Hazel is doing a lot of canning this harvest...lots of beets."

After five years in the trust since Eilif's death, Peter (the eldest) was able to sell the farm.  To a family who wanted the land for hunting, fishing.  They knew they wanted it when they hiked to the upper pond that Eilif had built (with family help) and saw the thick marsh grasses, the deer tracks where the animals come to drink, the thick forest grown up around it.

The Lower Pond

We made this last trip to gather up some of Charlotte's personal books.  I had a last interaction with Eilif when an attic ladder he had installed fell apart (the steps pulled away from the nails (not screws) that held them in) beneath my weight...and that of a box of books...and I crashed to the ground.  I never did much work at The Farm...Eilif had probably wanted me to do more...so this was his final payback.

Ahhh...not often we have such direct commerce with the ghosts in our lives.  

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