Day ten.

It's melting up here, and fast. I've had to become used to the new sounds that arrived with the warm: the drip drip drip of snowmelt, the occasional loud thud of a sheet of snow sliding off the metal roof and the more active twittering of the birds. There's bare ground up here now and a layer of slush and standing water atop the ice on the lake that is growing by the hour. It's nearly reached the docks now.

I'm certainly in for a few more freezes and a few more snowfalls, but it even smells like spring up here now, that sort of soggy fecund smell I remember from growing up in Minnesota. It's not unwelcome, even if the widespread mud means that I have to wipe the dog off every time he goes outside.

I made the trip into Bemidji yesterday, more for the sake of getting out of the cabin for a while than any pressing errand I had to run. Once there, I parked near the Paul Bunyan square, got out of the van and immediately was called a Nazi by a passing carload of college kids. The shaved head might have had something to do with it, although I was carrying a pink Nalgene and wearing sneakers—not exactly the Hitler Youth uniform. I was bursting to pee, so I ran to a Subway to use their bathroom and, while there, asked the clerk about a place to get a beer and a bite to eat. "Where do the kids drink?" I asked, feeling like the oldest old in Oldsville, and she pointed me to a place called 209, which, but for the hockey posters on the wall, could've passed for Bemidji's sole hipster bar. (There was, at least, a pierced and tattooed bartender who brought me my club sandwich.) I sat alone, reading the Journals of Captain Cook, while the place, packed with Bemidji State kids, sang along to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on the jukebox. Three times in a row. There'd been CHA hockey playoffs in town, so I gathered, and one table hosted a huge trophy. It felt nice to be around other people, even if I wasn't talking to any of them and instead read about natives, "Coper coloured and with long Black haire," that Cook and his men encountered before wiping them out with syphilis. Metaphors abound.

On my way to and from Bemidji, I passed through Cass Lake, the closet town of any size, and saw with some surprise that their one-screen movie theatre, a big metal-sided barn, was playing Slumdog Millionaire. This seemed totally incongruous until I realized that Cass, a pretty poor town and predominantly Chippewa, probably has a lot in common with the slums of Mumbai. So thanks, Danny Boyle, for bridging the gap between Indians-with-dots to Indians-with-feathers.

There was also the clunker on Cass Lake itself, a beat-up car with its engine block and tires removed, on which people place bets as to the date it'll finally go through the ice. For those of you who have read Neal Gaiman's American Gods, you'll remember this as a crucial plot point, and I wanted to go find the guy who was selling tickets to see if he was as grizzled and charming as the character Gaiman wrote.

So? My jerky? Bad-ass. Just flat-out delicious, spicy and flavorful and beautifully textured. I wish I'd made more of it, since three pounds of meat cook down to about a pound of jerky. But there's always the three weeks I have left up here, and I'm sure I'll be making more. On today's agenda: writing and writing and writing, then writing some more. The warmth means that I don't have to pay quite as close attention to the fire (I have, in fact, let it go out during the day the past few days), which means less carrying, less stacking and, sadly, less chopping. But there are always those periods of writers block that can only be broken by means of swinging an axe, thankfully.






(Oh, and, in random occurrences, I parked in front of a tattoo parlor to go into 209 in Bemidji, and as I got out of the van, a guy was leaving the tattoo place, locking up the doors. He looked at the van, saw the THE GREAT REDNECK HOPE on the back and told me, matter-of-factly, "You know there's a band called that." I sort of spluttered, "Yeah, I know, it was my band, that I was, like in," and he just soberly nodded and walked off. Weird.)