A highlight of any northern summer is time with cousin Terri and family who live about as far north as one can get without crossing over into Canada (if only…) Terri lives just outside of Roseau in Red River Valley (of the North) prairie country, few miles south of the border. (And may we all say ‘keep up the good work Mark Carney’…you know, it’s one thing to say those of us who are paying attention support the Canadian leader over our own utterly corrupt foolish failed head of state…but quite another when we normies also support every other world leader [only a few exceptions like Putin] over our slimy guy in DC). Sorry, sometimes a tiny rant dropped in the middle of a sensible post about family and travel, is necessary.
Cousin Terri. One of my favorite people of all. I kinda count on seeing her every year even though that hasn’t always been possible and I know will be less doable in the future. I write about every visit with glowing words so I won’t add to them now…except to say that Terri represents one of only a few extended family connections remaining, which the older I get the more important that becomes; my South Dakota cousins and Norwegian cousins have been and continue to be of enormous importance, both because they’re lovely people, and because they keep my world from a further narrowing of experience and memories. That’s the thing though isn’t it? As we age and our peers among both family and friends pass on, soon it becomes lonely. No one else alive in the world today was, like Terri’s mom, Audrey, next door from the day I was born and lived in my world until just last Christmas…and now Terri represents her in my life. Of course, there’s also the fact that Terri and her family are a pleasure to be around … and she and husband Brian prepare walleye that is near the top (maybe at the top) of all of the very best of the whole world’s foods.
Should I apologize for being so glowingly sentimental about almost all things Minnesota? I guess I won’t; it’s what one gets to do when we’re this bloody old, wax endlessly maudlin (and perhaps just a bit boring?). Early this month, Scott (who stayed on in Minnesota to hang with his uncle Robert) and I drove up to Terri’s for an overnighter. It’s about a four-hour drive but no place is too far to travel for the company of Terri and Brian…and did I mention…Walleye. We went by way of Bemidji for a minute with Paul and Babe and then a woodsy farm and prairie drive on up. Terri and Brian have just moved into their recently-built, and wholly designed by them, new home. It is centered in a small forest, bright and open while at the same time managing to offer coziness while viewing autumn rains or winter blizzards. The grounds won’t be completed until late fall, but a wrap-around porch, everyone’s ideal-home dream, is ready for talking, dozing, reading, and admiring the ‘changing of the leaves’ from the greens of summer to the last gasp of October red and gold.
I’ve written about Brian’s grandfather, Arthur Link, before. He was governor of North Dakota from 1973 to 1981, and I mention him again because his deep concern for the environment was unusual for his time. There’s a fine documentary about him, “When the Landscape is Quiet Again,” available on YouTube. Also, Governor Link was a like-minded, and equally honest and progressive contemporary of George McGovern’s, my forever political hero and whose campaign I am proud to say I worked on in 1972. My first serious political activity. Here are the words (or at least many of them) from Governor Link’s speech that forms the basis for the documentary.
When The Landscape Is Quiet Again (reprinted from “The Prairie Blog”)
We do not want to halt progress.
We do not plan to be selfish and say “North Dakota will not share its energy resources.”
No . . . we simply want to insure the most efficient and environmentally sound method of utilizing our precious coal and water resources for the benefit of the broadest number of people possible.
And when we are through with that, and the landscape is quiet again,
When the draglines, the blasting rigs, the power shovels and the huge gondolas cease to rip and roar
And when the last bulldozer has pushed the last spoil pile into place
And the last patch of barren earth has been seeded to grass or grain
Let those who follow and repopulate the land be able to say
“Our grandparents did their job well. This land is as good as, and, in some cases, better than, before.”
Only if they can say this will we be worthy of the rich heritage of our land and its resources.
Finally, here’s a picture of Terri’s mom, my cousin, Audrey, who died December 26th 2025. She had been dealing with memory issues for a long time and her death was not unexpected. As I’ve stated many times, Audrey was my idol; to me she was always beautiful and wise and funny from my earliest memories up to last year when I visited her one last time. Her death was the end of our family story out on the tiny farm on the very edge of Koochiching County, Minnesota. My brother and I are the last survivors, but Audrey was the last to share our stories of that place and time.
I had a somewhat strange reaction to her death. Of course, there was the sadness and the sense of loneliness that accompanies such exits these days. But, for whatever reason, I experienced a lot of almost-intense anger when Terri called to tell me. I tried to write about my sense of both loss and anger but I really couldn’t nor can I now. Except to say that, while in many ways Audrey had a good life with a loving husband, great kids and grandkids, and close friends, she also had more than her share of tribulations, especially in the beginning with alcoholic parents who offered a chaotic and probably somewhat dangerous home life and who did nothing to give her a sense of her own strengths and rights and opportunities. To a lesser, but important degree, some of my anger was directed at the strictures of life as woman back then; raised in an environment of catering to a husband’s way of life, however benevolent the husband. Ranch life with little money or cooking for a small crew in a remote Alaska gold mine, both difficult and the Alaska remoteness a great hardship for someone as outgoing as Audrey. On the other hand, she had a whole realm of good times too, especially some years as a staff member at the Northome nursing home. While it wasn’t perfect, Audrey absolutely loved going to work and, finally, having her own paycheck. And having family and friends close by.
On the way home from Roseau, Scott and I stopped on the shores of Red Lake, home to the federally recognized Red Lake Band of Chippewa, unique as the only fully “closed reservation” in the United States of America. “The tribe claims the land by right of conquest and aboriginal title; they were not reassigned to it by the United States government. The Red Lake Band of Chippewa refused to join with six other bands in organizing as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe in the mid-1930s; at the time, its people wanted to preserve their traditional system of hereditary chiefs, rather than forming an electoral government. As of 2011, the Ojibwe language is the official language of Red Lake.” (Wikipedia)
Minnesota 2026. The End.
I keep revisiting this post and debating why I’m writing it. This morning, reading a new story in Le Monde about the horrendous flooding in Nepal, I imagined so vividly sitting halfway up mountainside drinking tea, looking down at the small houses and cultivated fields spreading below, peaceful and productive. My tea-drinking taking place in a little row of three or four ramshackle structures serving instant coffee with condensed milk, tea or soft drinks and bread; a small quiet group of trekkers sat a few tables over with drinks and brown rolls. The mountain loomed high overhead, a few houses and huts, a goat or dog visible here and there. My mountain did not have the height for steep rock and glacier but others all around did. And I see and hear in my mind’s eyes and ears the roar and crashing and shaking that must have accompanied the breaking mountain, the loosened glacier, forced-on river, lake, earth, small buildings, farmers, cows, trees…
Am I commenting on the horror of the landslides and floods in Nepal and Tibet and noting here the pitiful U.S. aid response (half a million dollars I read, approximately what Trump and sons bilk the taxpayers of one way or the other in five minutes on any given day) or celebrating the extent of my travels in this post? Celebrate seems like the wrong word to use in these paragraphs about so much death and sadness. A silly party word. But I mean it to express this: Without a whole lot of reading or traveling, how one can feel much of anything about what happens to the planet and its people outside of our own little patch. I also believe that if one is a fair and caring human being in whatever space we occupy that is enough to make each of us worthy of comfort and safety, and that we fortunate readers and travelers owe it to the world to care bigger … and not be the greedy pigs running so much of the planet’s business. So there…. I’m glad to have been out and about enough to feel some feelings when shit happens in other places.
***
To Nepal (and Tibet). Where landslides and floods are scourging the earth. The Guardian and others sources have astounding show&tells on the actions and extent of the devastation, likely caused by a huge chunk of mountain and/or glacier breaking loose in the grand mountain ranges of the Himalayas. Rock, ice, mud, water, and debris pour over fields, homes, trekker camps, villages, with full-throated death roars. The video I’ve watched literally causes me to gasp.
Here’s me sharing (bragging?). I was not far away from that area in 2017. Staying in Kathmandu and being driven out into the mountains and valleys nearby. What I’m saying is this: I was there. Nearby. But who cares anyway!
I care. Curiosity about what I might find to care about is why I wandered out to all of those places, all of those countries. That may not give me greater insight than people who have read as many books but gone to fewer world places and come to know them in depth, whether as explorer, or return visitor. Well maybe it does give me just the smallest amount of greater attachment to the whole damn planet. Maybe not.
Seventy some years ago, my science teacher, Mr. Matta, at Northome High School said I should be a journalist. And yes, I should have done. They’re the people I admire most. Always have since Eric Sevareid was at the CBS News that was … and am admiring to this day Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now. Journalists are the only people who, if they are fortunate enough to work for national or international publications, actually take a good hard look at that ‘whole damn planet’ I will keep mentioning. People who vacation at resorts or on their yachts, I won’t bother to call travelers. Diplomats, soldiers, sex tourists may go far but all are limited in their own, mostly nefarious ways, by their ‘assignments’ to particular spots on earth.
Back to Nepal and why I’m even posting about this when the Guardian, Le Monde, Aljazeera, and others tell the story so well. It’s not really helping Nepal and Tibet is it? But having been there gives me a sense of caring that has a personal component, compelling me to ramble on. The stories jar me with memories of real people I met, sights I saw, awe I experienced when flying by Everest or eating lunch next to a table of trekkers, those crazily brave and adventuresome souls who do stuff I wish to have been brave enough to do myself.
It is my strong belief that however we come to know the world: books, or travel of the curious nature, or maybe lectures, classes, documentaries … that knowledge should be how we earn the right to vote! Oh, come on, you say. You don’t really need to know about the world to vote on a new community center, for example. Hmmm…maybe if you knew something about the whole wide world, you’d want to be sure that people of all beliefs and colors and places of origin, and ways of being, were welcome in that center. Just saying….
When I was in my awestruck seeing-Everest moment, I was hardly thinking about the voting booth. But it is possible I care just the tiniest of bit more about the planet because I was there and can attest to the grandeur and beauty that very-real global warming is and will keep destroying. It confirms my responsibility to help elect people to public office who give a damn about something other than money and power. People who care about the natural world and the humans who depend on it.
Anyway, every now and then, I’m quite proud of my global meanderings, haphazard as they sometimes were. I know the way I did it is not necessarily for real adventurers, or even the more serious of purpose. But it satisfied what in Window Seat I declare to have been the reason behind my obsession: “I want to see for myself / Those faraway places I’ve been readin’ about / In a book that I took from the shelf”.
I’ve never had the desire or energy to get into book promotion, but I really do think you should read Window Seat. It is about the world. (So okay, maybe a little too much about me and my family, but you can pass quickly over those parts and focus on what I saw out there on my global forays.) Here’s the only excerpt from Window Seat about Nepal. I’d apologize for the brevity but, in my defense, I was writing about 114 countries and some involved extensive visiting!
EXCERPT FROM WINDOW SEAT: Nepal was next—Kathmandu, to be exact, and Everest. I flew back to Yangon and on to Kathmandu the long way, through Bangkok overnight. A friendly, smiling passport control official joked with me as he checked me in at the Bangkok airport—when was the last time someone joked with you in a security or passport line? Bangkok even has a special line for monks, the disabled, and people over seventy! And who knew I’d ever get to Nepal? My life astounds me sometimes. Now all I had to do was scale Everest! Or at least fly by. Kathmandu appeared to be a dusty mess, with the streets torn up and full of the most maddening traffic I’d seen so far in my travels (outside of Port-au-Prince). I saw a big part of the Himalayan range flying in, and while I didn’t know which of the mountains was Everest, how awe-inspiring it all was. My new home was the Apsara Boutique Hotel, which was modestly priced, with great service. I loved it. I had spinach soup and fried mushrooms for dinner, accompanied by a Nepalese wine made from grapes grown in the world’s highest vineyards. Most people staying there were trekkers, which gave me elbow-rubbing, eavesdropping time with explorers, who are always among my heroes; it was nice to feel included but not to have to climb high mountains to do so. The people at the next table sprinkled “Uff da” into their conversation, so there was no doubt as to their country of origin—at least not to another Norwegian. I was the hotel manager’s pet guest, and he became my fixer, host, and buddy.
It was soon time for the long-anticipated flight around Everest. I was at the airport at five o’clock in the morning and off at six thirty for the hour’s ride out and back, past the Himalayas. I experienced teary-eyed moments of pure awe while gazing at those mountains. The earth is grand and glorious—and we humans are not, mucking about with our trash and digging, piercing, and exploding tools. Contemplating the garbage left behind on Everest by the climbers is to reach a last exasperated straw in thinking we can ever change our attitudes about who owns geography—and what the geography of Earth represents compared to our puny, careless presence on the planet.
QUOTE FROM JOHN MCPHEE: When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.
For a slightly more in-depth look at Nepal please go to my blog Time and Place at mneset.me and google https://mneset.me/2017/11/13/kathmandu-baby-kathmandu/
https://mneset.me/2017/11/16/hanging-around-in-kathmandu/
https://mneset.me/2017/11/17/and-then-i-had-another-excellent-idea/
Sorry for twice/thrice said things. Having some passion-filled moments!
It appears the changing of plans midway through Minnesota confused me. It takes less and less to do that. So even though I call this post the end, that is a lie. I will return in a day or so with two of the absolutely favorite parts of the journey. Cousin Terri in Roseau and a logging camp in Grand Rapids.
Scott and I were tired by the time we reached Duluth, 70 or 80 miles from Grand Rapids and flights to our homes. So tired. But we tried our damnedest to tourist just a little. I am posting these final photos just because Duluth is an interesting small city, kind of a poor man’s San Francisco. Less wild and glamourous history BUT also minus the evil tech sh*t. I’d like to return…less jaded, ready to celebrate Lake Superior.
Until Next Time Then…
Up the shore in Two Harbors. I think.
I was a sentence or two into yet one more sentimental note about my ‘glorious’ Minnesota childhood. A perfectly fine childhood in a better than average place…but it is possible I get a bit carried away with it all when the place I’m in is faraway New Mexico and my distance from childhood is about a hundred years. Well, not quite 100, but closer than seems possible!
Last photo album of the Old Place and farewell shot from a last night on the shores of Lake Superior.
The gravel road leading the 1 1/2 miles from US Highway 71 out to my place.
This summer in Minnesota is already distanced from me in ways I don’t like. In miles and climate and that feeling of homeness (whatever that means). But however long I live in New Mexico, whenever and wherever I’m out in the world, I will never miss it in quite that same childish/childlike (?) way as Koochiching County, Minnesota and our own spot in the northwoods.
This time I visited the ‘old place,’ my childhood home a few times and have already posted more than a few 2026 photos … looking much like 2025 (and further back) pictures, except to my eyes! Well, that’s not exactly true, I have a hard time telling the difference as well. But my heart knows, I say to myself. It’s true though, the last visits out home on any trip north is ever more fraught… ‘will it be my last? Nah, of course I’ll be back. For sure? Well, perhaps not for absolute sure. Then, let’s stay another moment so I can be sure to have imprinted the image for a future mind’s eye moment. Done and done and done, taking photos all the while.
Here then. The first post from the final two visits out to ‘the old place’ (or ‘out home’, interchangeable expressions) from August 2026. There are too many for even a single post intended to be viewed mostly by me in a future blog book. I am choice-averse when it comes to photos…as everyone who’s ever viewed a Time and Place post will have noticed long ago.
I thought about topical groupings like trees, big views, broken house but have just decided to mosey along in real time through each visit.
And below: the interior of the home in which I grew up. Humble (but ever so fine in spirit) from the beginning. I always enjoy my visits, never finding them depressing, as the house and I (almost exactly the same age) exit the planet creakily, but somewhat interesting in our gradual demise, together.
(Judy, Ray, Me)
Old friends, old friends
…
Can you imagine us years from today
…
How terribly strange to be 70 [80] [90]
…
Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
…
Old friends.
I’m an introvert…often thought of as avoiding or being less connected to people than the average human being. Not true. Introverts simply aren’t fond of groups, gatherings, crowds, masses. We are happiest with one, or two, or possibly three, friends at a time.
Without ever slighting the importance of family as being at the heart of who we are, I want to honor friends as making up a great part of everything we become.
This post was intended for few summer photos of Minnesota friends. With this blog as journal, I feel compelled to document everything energy allows in word and picture. And as I scrolled through photos, it came to me once again, how absolutely vital to our lives, friends are or can be. Sometimes family provides all of the human and world experiences we desire. But, for many of us, friends enhance and expand our whole, hopefully long, lives. For brother Robert and me, the latter is, or often appears to be, true.
About Robert and me and our friends. Personal friends, buddies. The ones whom you admire and with whom you share secrets and agonize over when all goes south; the ones who have fleshed out whole areas of your life. You know, they’ve known you since … always, it feels like—and still care about and are a little bit interested in what you think and actually have fun with you. A select few of those friends were right there with us up north this summer.
Making getting older and older both more doable and even adding a bit of joy to the process.
The following photos are from a gathering at Robert and Marsha’s, celebrating friend Barb’s 80th birthday. They have all known each other for varying lengths of time, but here’s an important point for right now. Robert and Marsha are really (they say) moving this year to warmer climes, forever abandoning Minnesota and winter. The friends who follow represent some of why that is such a hard decision. They include friends from 50 years ago and from 15 years ago. You really can’t replace 50 years of friendship easily and you certainly can’t replace moving into a new place and finding out, with great relief, your one close neighbor loathes the same political fraudsters you do. It’s had to replace that kind of human security.
And sharing my summer’s Minnesota adventure, friends from early school days (also known as a very long time ago).
Here’s where I want to further explain what I mean about family being our heart and soul (if we’re lucky) and friends being some of that and part of everything else about our lives.
Among my friends are those who have literally and figuratively shared my chilly Minnesota childhood and those who have traveled the world with me, broadening everything about my lived experience. They have kept me connected to childhood days of sharing secrets, big and small, and playing in the snow, and to stumbling on Greenlandic rocks, and to talking ageing bodies, books, and (being tutored in) music over coffee, via zoom and messenger and email. I simply cannot imagine my life without every single one of my friends, some passed these last years, most in the very present majority.
Just a photo or two from my slightly abbreviated summer trip, originally intended to include additional oldfriends, but for now more than perfectly represented by Judy and Ray, especially Judy whom I’m pretty sure has been a friend from as early as the 4th grade. After spending my first three years of school at a tiny country school called Haupt, upon its closure I was transferred to a big city school (Northome, population at the time, 300+), and Judy was there then or soon thereafter. And a year or so later, Ray appeared in our 6th grade year in the nearby village of Mizpah (part of a cohort of evil boys pushing the girls down in the snow…as I remember it). Now that is a while ago. Let’s say a minimum of 75 years ago. That’s not so easy to replace even if one has moved as often or lived as faraway from home (Minnesota) as I have.
Talk about expanding the breadth and length of one’s life. Breadth in the sense, for me, of a grounding in the green and blue of northern forest and lake, living much of my life in the high desert of New Mexico, and visiting streets of Cape Town and steppes of Mongolia. One obviously doesn’t need to travel far geographically to find significant markers; for me though, with my first book love being an old geography text of my mom’s, distance counts. Which brings me back to where it all began…and where it will end with my ashes, the Northwoods.
Length. That’s even more important to me right now. How to note, satisfactorily to myself, that I’ve lived a long and interesting life. Go back to the beginning…and only then check in with this abominably sunny New Mexican day in my present state of old ladyhood. In the beginning…there was mom and dad on the tiny farm at the end of a gravel lane in Koochiching County, Minnesota. And that geography book. And some dogs and a friend named Susie and a brother named Robert and school and schoolfriends, one of whom was named Judy.
See how this family and friend thing works.
So, forgive me if I’m being a bit sentimental. If not at this age, when?
Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
(Thanks Paul Simon.)
Summertime. Family. We gather. Here and there, now and then. Our positions defined in the usual way. Moms and dads. Kids and grandkids. Uncles and Aunts. Siblings. We like and love each other, mostly all at the same time and all of the time, with only the rare flash of irritation or misunderstanding (my sons will claim the latter is mostly on my part…nah…).
This summer’s week of most togetherness came in late July, with me already up north with bro Robert and sister-in-law Marsha, and sons Scott and Steven, and grandson Steven, joining us. In spite of Robert and Marsha’s lingering colds and my bronchial attack, we managed many good times. My greatest pleasure was in watching the family dudes hanging out in endless desultory talk talk talk mixed with plentiful teasing, hard labor over the grill, and a once-in-awhile much argued over TV show.
Here’s my brief record of 2026 togetherness.
The dudes of serious thoughts and opinions.
Important picture in the middle. First cinnamon rolls we’ve seen that looked like my mom’s. Missing the sour cream in tha glaze though. What to do… Still good.
Plans represent possibilities, right? As in Plan A/B/C. And, if I may advise, from what seems like a hundred years of both successful and thwarted plans, you need at least three backup plans for a satisfactory outcome.
I had big (stupid, but initially beautiful) summer plans for a two-month Minnesota road trip with benefits (as in many days and nights with various family and friends). First mapped like this:
Before getting even halfway through Big Stupid Plan A, I developed a horrendous case of bronchitis entailing emergency rooms and the inability to breathe, never a good look for holidaying. Even before that awkward situation had resolved, the available vehicle became unavailable, further diminishing the odds of heading out ‘on the road’ again. Imagine if I hadn’t made such ‘big, stupid’ elaborate plans ahead of time, there would have been nothing left.
Plan B to the rescue! Son Scott, also in Minnesota, only for a week (his Plan A), but being somewhat footloose and fancy free—as in retired—arranged to stay on, providing nursing and chauffeuring services for his kindly old mother.
And so…a slightly altered but generally enjoyable Minnesota time was had by all. Which means you will be treated to an even greater number of tree, old house, family, and friend pictures then originally intended!
You’ll be proud of my determination, one could almost say stubbornness, to hear that there is a Plan C. Which is to return September 2027 with a goodly supply of anti-biotics and my own car, to complete unfinished elements of Big Stupid Plan A/2026.
***
If I appear obsessed with time in the Northwoods it’s not actually so stupid if my age (very old) and the likelihood of having many more opportunities to enjoy such times are considered. So, 2027 may not be doable…but then again it may.
So, here’s to Big Stupid Plans…long may we have them.
I’m sitting at my own desk in my own pleasant study in my own ever-sunny Albuquerque, preparing to tell you a few small Northwoods stories before returning to Decades and World stories projects.
Since returning home, I’ve been to the grocers for milk-coffee and bread and butter supplies, to the gym where I only took 10 extra minutes to walk my regular three miles and to make yet more plodding headway on The Magic Mountain, and to my very own wonderfully comfortable giant bed for a few sleeps. Home is a fine place indeed. Made even better by a big-stupid-plan to leave it now and then.
This summer vacation my friend Celia came to visit my Minnesota visit. We played: talking arguing teasing touristing eating. What a nice time it was. Here’s an album to prove it.
Above three photos: Naniboujou Lodge & Restaurant north of Grand Marais, MN
Sven & Ole’s Pizza is a most popular Grand Marais landmark…and since my dad’s name was Sven I find the pizza delicious.
Lake Superior island from the walls encircling the trading village reconstruction at Grand Portage.