Walk on the random side

“Life is a journey, not a destination” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

This concept can be put into a single word: serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754.  It means finding good things where you weren’t looking for them.  It comes from “The Princes of Serendip”, an Arabian tale.  Serendip was also featured in Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges”.

Ah, this whole column is going to be very serendipitous.  I thought of this column as about the twist and turns of my own life.  But like my life, this column is going to turn up ideas I wasn’t looking for,

The March from the “Love of Three Oranges” by a Soviet composer was, irony of ironies, used as the theme song for the radio program “FBI: In Peace and War”.  One of the FBI’s tasks at the time was finding Communists.  On the other hand, many of Prokofiev’s works were anti-establishment.  Think of “Lieutenant Kije”!

After my parents divorced when I was about five or so, my mother moved in with her aunt and uncle.  Once I started school, I was often free to roam.  I knew all the vacant lots and stores, where the library was, and where a super-duper playground was.

When I was nine, my aunt and uncle bought a house on the other side of town.  I don’t know which came first, a new job or a new house.  Whichever, my mother’s uncle still worked within walking distance.

Again I explored an ever wider area, learning where the movie theater was, a great sledding hill, and the community center and the Y.  I had a take a streetcar to the downtown library.  I made a new set of friends, and eventually joined some of them in a Boy Scout troop.

After my first year of junior high, my mother decided to get her own apartment back on the other side of town.  Again, I had freedom to roam.  No sledding hill, but a vacant lot for baseball and an actual ball diamond a bike ride away.  I also frequented a drug store for malts, ice cream sodas, and sundaes.  That lead me to drop my paper route and work 5-10 after school three times a week.

After I started high school my mother remarried and we moved back across town.  I was supposed to go to a high school with about 3,000 students, but I got district permission to go to the high school where my Scout friends went.  And this road made all the difference.  Would I have gone to Case if I had a different math teacher who didn’t punctuate his remarks with “When you go to Case…”

When still in high school I also decided on my own to go to a Methodist Church within walking distance. I wound up being active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) even into my college years.  This lead to some pressure to go into the ministry.  This and the long daily commute to Case created several conflicts.

While in college I decided to run for the President of the MYF subdistrict.  Also sitting on the subdistrict were a couple of attractive high school girls, both of whom I dated.  But I preferred the second one.  Fifty-six years later, neither of us regrets the choice.  And my wife still doesn’t regret voting against me because she thought MYF was not for college students.

During my tenure on the council I didn’t do so well in my junior at Case.  I was asked not to come back for the spring term.

I don’t remember what led to my choice of Ohio Wesleyan University other than it was Methodist.  Possibly it was my new girlfriend was starting there in the fall.

When I visited OWU before applying, the registrar recommended that I major in mathematics, which I did.  Surprisingly, after my dismal last two semesters at Case, I got all As in math except for a single B.

Prior to graduation I applied to Case for a graduate assistantship in the computer center.  I also applied for an assistantship at the University of Michigan in communications, which included computer science.  I heard from Case right away and was even offered a summer job in the computer center.  I didn’t hear from U of Mich until late July or even early August

When I graduated from OWU we got married and rented the upstairs of a duplex in Cleveland.  This also meant that my wife would have to go to college in the Cleveland area.  She chose Baldwin-Wallace way the other side of the metro area..  Fortunately, she could commute with an instructor who was friend of her mother.  By the way, this friend was also the one who recommended the duplex.

We both liked canoeing and made a few day trips to Portage Lakes.  But our dream was to go to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.  We did so in August 1961.  The trip was a mix of adventure and misadventure.  We didn’t know it at the time, but it changed our lives forever by offering a wide range of unexpected choices.  Many of them were “the least traveled” and “made all the difference.”

That covered about 25 years of my life. I have notes for the next 50 but have run out of space and have other articles lined up for the next few weeks.  If you really, really want more, tell me so when you see me.

Mel thinks he has each day well-planned but something else always arises.

This was also printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2014-09-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/09/25/4105_walk_on_the_random_side.

Bear Stories

Bear Stories
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in
Northland Reader
Now the Reader Weekly
September 30, 1999

I've observed bears on County Highway 4 south of Gnesen, the Sawbill Trail, and on our property in Brimson.  On Highway 4 we saw a bear just slipping into the woods next to someone's front yard.  On the Sawbill Trail we saw a bear slipping into the brush.  This sighting was significant because we were with my sister-in-law and husband who had never seen a bear up close.  We couldn't have planned that sighting better.  On our own property we often see gouged out marks on our trails, especially in grassy sections, where a bear has been looking for grubs or other buried delicacies.

The first time that I encountered a bear was driving up the Gunflint Trail to canoe out of Seagull Lake.  In this case the bear was ambling down the road.  I had to stop and wait for the bear to get off the road.  I thought of tales about bears breaking car windows to get at candy bars in the glove compartment.

A few years ago we were awakened about five in the morning by a banging outside our cabin in Brimson.  I thought it might be a raccoon clambering around the aluminum ladder we have lying behind the cabin.  After the banging repeated a few times I got up to look out a window.  I saw a big black back.  I jumped into my pants and boots, grabbed the camera, and went out the front door hoping to get a picture as the bear came around the cabin.  I was too slow; it had already left.

The most exciting encounter was fourteen years ago on our last Boundary Waters canoe trip together, our 25th anniversary celebration.  We were at our farthest point in - Knife Lake.  We had just finished breakfast; my wife was cleaning up the dishes, and I went up the hill to the latrine.  As I came back down the hill, my wife looked to the shrubs on her left and said, "There is an animal in there!"  She continued, "There is a large animal in there!"  And then she said, "There is a bear in there!"  She backed away to her right toward our tent.  Then she went back and grabbed our food pack.  I went to the tent and grabbed my camera.  Meanwhile the bear busied itself around the fireplace looking for scraps.

Standing about 25 feet from the bear I pushed and pulled the lens of the camera until I was satisfied the picture was right.  How I did this I don't know, my knees were knocking enough to cause bruises.  I clicked off a couple of pictures and then thought about an escape plan.

I told my wife to take the food pack down to the shore and that I would push the canoe out and meet her.  I went to the canoe and banged on it with a paddle, hoping to scare the bear away.  The bear merely raised its head, looked at me, and then went back to its search for food.

I turned the canoe over, pushed it out into the water, hopped in, and paddled downshore to pick up my wife.  We paddled out from shore about 200 feet and wondered if the bear would swim after us.  After ten minutes or so, the bear wandered off and we returned to our campsite.  With visions of a shredded tent and scattered belongings we were relieved to find everything intact.

Later that day we talked to a group about a half mile away.  They weren't so lucky.  They had several items of food broken into and scattered.

When we returned home I had the film developed.  When we looked at the bear slides it was Fuzzy Wuzzy was fuzzy, wasn't  he!  You push and pull a telescopic lens to frame your shot; you twist any lens to focus!

Political manipulation - begging the question

Rep. Chip Cravaack, R-MN8, has sent out an email in support of the PolyMet mining project in St. Louis County, Minnesota. The title of the article is "In case you missed it: Environmentally sound mining vital to Minnesota's economy". You can also find it at http://cravaack.congressnewsletter.net/mail/util.cfm?gpiv=2100082997.10586.164&gen=1.

What he does is conflate not very controversial iron and steel projects with a very controversial sulfide copper mining project. Then he phrases a poll question: "Do you support responsible expansion of precious and strategic metal mining operations in MN?" The choices are yes, no, and not sure. My gosh, most people are for responsible operations of any kind, but is the Poly Met project a responsible operation?

Rep. Cravaack implies it is because a panel he assembled says "Mining without harm is the only way to build a sustainable, responsible minerals-exploration industry in northern Minnesota." One, he doesn't say if the panel stated if the PolyMet project would be without harm. Two, he doesn't say in the email or the web page who is on the panel. Did it include town boards who will have to maintain the limited weight roads damaged by heavy equipment? Did it include the Indian tribes who say wild rice yields will be adversely affected? Did it include all the guides and outfitters who will see their business evaporate?

Let's draw the curtain aside and look at who's supporting this project and another sulfide mining project. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP when the Deep Horizon oil rig blew up, was hired as the "executive expert in charge of environment and safety" for Glencoe, one of the backers of the PolyMet project. Twin Metals is proposing a sulfide mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area; it has hired URS Corporation to do an environmental impact study. URS Corporation declared the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis safe six months before it collapsed. URS cut corners because it was too expensive to do a proper job. See "Proposed mining operations get their environmental advice from strange quarters" by C. A. Arneson in MPR News. I recommend that you follow all the links you can, especially to Don Shelby's article at http://www.minnpost.com/donshelby/2011/07/26/30314/remember_bps_tony_hayward_hes_trying_to_get_his_life_back_in_northern_minnesota.

"It is by this superior knowledge of [the merchants and manufacturers] own interest that they have frequently imposed upon [the country gentleman's, often a member of Parliament] generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public." - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations