Does it average out?

While skimming through some photos, I noticed that, near the end of September a couple of years ago, the bird bath was covered by a skim coat of ice. The normal high temperature for today, August 28, is 76℉. The normal low: 60. A month later, which is when the photo in question was taken back in 2018, the normal high and low are 66 and 47, respectively. So, the bird bath icing was premature and out of the norm. In light of what passes for normal weather in Minnesota, residents of this state have developed a high degree of tolerance and coping mechanisms. I know I have. What I haven't been able to figure out is if weather exhausts our ability to tolerate and cope with wide differences among people and behavior (Minnesota Nice, anyone?) rather than provide us with the fortitude and serenity to simply accept a number of attitudes and actions we might not adopt or engage in ourselves.

bird bath: September surprise

Photo by J. Harrington

If you've looked around our state, you may have noticed that we include portions of a number of different ecoregions, depending on who's providing the framework. Each of those regions is inhabited by a wide variety of flora and fauna and has significant weather and climate variations. As I was taught after I moved here, that variety is part of the state's strength. If one sector of our economy is down, a different sector in a different part of the state helps hold things together. There's the logging economy and the mining economy and the farming economy and the urban economy and.... Like a healthy ecosystem, we depend on a variety of actors and activities to help meet our needs for clean air, clean water, shelter and healthy food.

Audubon Center of the North Woods

Photo by J. Harrington

And yet, as I've noticed over the past decade or so, Minnesotans seem to be getting less and less tolerant of each other, to the significant detriment of all us who live, work and play here. In fact, it seems to me we've become about as intolerant of each other as our neighboring Wisconsinites are reported to be. I spent a fair portion of the morning looking at summaries and reviews of Katherine Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. I suppose I'll now have to actually read the book because there's a lot to unpack in it and referring to the source is always advisable. One of my major take-aways though is that the growing fracture between urban and rural perspectives isn't helping any of us. In fact, I was prompted to dig out a book I haven't read for decades, The Intellectual Versus the City. I wondered if the rural folks described by Cramer as resenting the "urban elites" realized that the city has a number of urban detractors also. But, we now live in a world where, for the first time in the history of humans, the majority of us live in an urban area. Much of the world we've created depends on the availability of either a labor force (urban) or natural resources (rural).

Healthy ecosystems derive from interdependence. So do healthy economies and cultures. Much as I dislike cliches, I'm going to close today with one from Minnesota's former Senator, Paul Wellstone. I believe this is true as much as I believe anything: "We all do better when  we all do better." I wish more of our politicians believed that. We have an opportunity to do something about it in about 60 days. Do we favor division or distribution? The choice is ours.

Digging

By Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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