In the days before pavement and 4 wheel drive vehicles mud vacation meant dirt roads became impassible causing schools to close until roads dried out and Model A cars and horse drawn wagons could pass. Kids stayed home until the declared “mud vacation” was over. Maybe back in the history of our once agrarian nation, mud vacation was the origin of what we now call spring break. I first heard the term mud vacation from a neighbor Dahlia Spivey who was raised in rural Itasca County in the 1920’s. I also came across it in A Finnish American Girlhood by Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, a book I’ve used much as a source.

My back walkway presently resembles a small pond. I live uphill and less than a mile from the Mississippi River and this reminds me that my backyard is actually a beach in the Mississippi River watershed. So to the water moving out, as the world warms and snow melts, adios my backyard hello New Orleans. That’s an example of one of the connections connecting us to our planet.

Spring snowmelt and the rise of the river is an annual event like a pulse of the world’s heart. One beat a year and the central vein of the North American continent swells sending the water necessary for all life south into the Gulf of Mexico. With a global perspective we can see our world as the living organism that it is and hopefully appreciate and treat it as such.  Take time on your mud vacation and reflect on that.

April 17, 6:30 – 8:00, Edison High School is the time and place of a community education class I’m teaching Minnesota History! Read Local!

Register @mplscommunityed.com

The picture below was taken circa 1890. How many years ago? Take 100 years between 1900 and 2000 add 10 years each between 1890 and 1900 and 2000 and 2010. Add 3 to get to 2013 and we get 123 years ago.

I was thrilled to spot in this historical photo of lower Hennepin Avenue, an image of the Dime Museum, a human oddity museum that I reference in Walter Meets Mack A Minnesota Adventure.  Streetcar tracks run down the middle of the Avenue, horse drawn wagons and surreys north and south. There’s a Clothier, the White House Restaurant, Diman’s Lodging House and Chisholm’s Restaurant and Cigar Store. An electric pole has ten levels of relays and I’m guessing glass-insulated connectors.   The Dime Museum has a sidewalk placard advertising I believe, the hourly shows and strange attractions inside.

Take a whiff of this picture and imagine the life and color of Minneapolis. Where are the pedestrians going? What are the wagons delivering? If it cost a dime to get in the museum that must have been an affordable price and the museum must have needed a high volume of visitors to turn a profit. What was on the menu at the White House? What kind of clientele stayed at Diman’s Lodging House? Questions like these are why history turns me on.

Look around the world of 2013. What is amazing about the world now that will be worth remembering in 2113?

I am sitting poolside scribbling away in the shade of mango fruit, red-blossomed bougainvilleas and palm trees. However, my favorite reminders of all that we live on an amazing biologically diverse planet are the gargantuan Coral Gables banyan trees.  The biggest of these specimens are like home tree in Avatar. They create their own climate. Huge winged reptiles circle their crowns. Populations inhabit their massive branches in cities and suburbs.

Ok the last bits aren’t technically true but I do believe that any aliens setting down in Coral Gables saying “Take me to your leader” would be referring to banyan trees. Read more about the Banyan here.

Regal Banyan rules the course

Banyan behavior

Naturalist speculates on if Banyan tree fruit is edible

Banyans, fig trees native to India I think, have this adaptation of sending roots down, dangling from branches to seek root around the trunk. Once established, the root eventually melds into and become part of the central tree.  Nature provides us so many metaphors but this rooting strategy is so disorienting to my northern naturalist’s sensibility that I’m still seeking the correct parallel to human behavior.

Which is one of the great things about being on a break: Being in a different environment so your brain has something new to noodle. In this way we forget all other problems and focus on our blessings.

Thanks to Seward Writer’s Collective and to the audience participating in the Read and Drink Local! event December 22 at Harriet Brewing!

The Minnesota DNR explains:

“About 1.1 billion years ago, volcanoes spewed fiery lava which cooled and built up in thick layers which form the bedrock along most of the North Shore. Much later, when glaciers moved down from the north, they scraped and dislodged the rock. As the melting glacier retreated, it left deposits of rock and soil on top of the scoured bedrock. Between the many glacial advances, streams on the land gradually eroded through these deposits and into the bedrock. Today, the rough, tumbling waters of the Manitou River still work to sculpt the gorge through which it flows.”

I hope you can visit this park sometime and when you do dip your paddle into the naturalist’s stream of consciousness. Here the geologic evidence tells the story of how eons ago, from deep in the earth’s core an upward swelling of molten magma split surface plates of our globe and laid the rock on which we walk.  I’m thinking the volcano scene from Fantasia.  Much later on the geologic timeline, according to one theory the solar system passed through an immense cloud of cosmic dust that dimmed the sun’s nurturing warmth.  This caused the great age of ice, cycles of freezing and melting lasting tens of thousands of years creating dramatic, energy filled places like Crosby Manitou. When you go there and you must, try to imagine the fire and ice, the yin and yang, the pendulum power of nature that shapes our world.

And in the end the world seeks equilibrium. As water always seeks the lowest point nature will always rearrange the world to how it ought to be.

Chancing upon the tranquil waterfalls and streams of Crosby Manitou gives a nudge in the direction of instinctively understanding the balance of the world. I invite you to virtually do so below.

video taken from my iPhone Crosby Manitou Park

In September Minnesotans are feeling the last gasp of summer. A hard frost, temperatures in the 30′s is predicted for tonight. At a farmer’s market on East University Avenue today an abundance of peppers, tomatoes, cukes, melons and much more was on sale at bargain prices as local farmers and gardeners try to sell off produce before it possibly freezes tonight. We stocked up on a bushel of tomatoes to freeze in our chest freezer and at this moment the fine smell of garlic and basil from a fresh batch of pasta sauce wafts through our house.

I spied a final monarch butterfly a couple of days ago. All summer long they have been flocking to our backyard attracted by the bright orange blossoms of towering tithonia, also known as Mexican sunflowers. These incredible plants shoot out hundreds of flowers on each plant and serve as wildlife magnets. This season hummingbirds have been  regular visitors and I have never had to wait for more then a few minutes to see an iridescent fairy like colibrí  (most words in Spanish are more lyrical)  eagerly sucking nectar. I’ve seen at one time two monarch butterflies, a couple of bumblebees and a hummingbird all feeding on the same tithonia. Very cool.

In any case that brand of natural splendor is moving south to be replaced by the milder pleasures of autumn. So, naturalists everywhere take a moment to look outside for something beautiful, no doubt a small revelation will appear.

Walter Meets Mack author visits the Roseville Barnes and Nobles on October 20 and appears with the Seward Writer’s Collective at  Vine Arts Center on November 3.

Folks familiar with my work keep asking me, “What’s next for Walter?”

Answer: I’m about halfway through a draft of a sequel to Walter Meets Mack entitled Walter Goes West. Briefly, in Walter Meets Mack Walter Myllymäki explores the ecology and nature of the boreal biome, the coniferous kingdom of Minnesota’s northland. In Walter Goes West Walter, or “Mack” as his trusted associates know him, becomes one with the great grasslands, the magnificent and under appreciated  prairie of the southwestern region of Minnesota. He also returns for more adventure in the colorful and corrupt underbelly of the central urban core of Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century, continuing the theme of connection between city and country.

In elementary education teachers learn never to assume that students already have background knowledge.  Some may not have a vision or schema for understanding the place called prairie.  I recently visited the area around Luverne, Minnesota and enjoyed very much exploring Blue Mounds State Park and Touch the Sky Prairie. It was an August day and a strong northern wind came to visit. In eight hours the temperature dropped almost 40 degrees, giving the air a real fall like texture. Amazing there, the sky and air. The modest movie below maybe captures some of that ambience.

Movie:  A cool and windy summer day on a Minnesota prairie

Walter Meets Mack: A Minnesota Adventure now available at: Hennepin History Museum , Mill City Museum Bookstore,  Minnesota History Center, Common Good Books, Hennepin County Library and my favorite: Schneider Drug thank you Tom Gupta gentleman, scholar, pharmacist.

Upcoming events for Walter Meets Mack include a October 20 reading at the Harmar Mall Barnes & Noble in Roseville and a book arts event with Seward Neighborhood Writer’s Group at Vine Arts Gallery on November 3.

Last month I visited some old friends who are living and working in an oil rich nation in the Persian Gulf. Out of respect for my friends I’ll not say where. Upon arrival I presented my passport to immigration. To my surprise my passport was confiscated and I was made to wait. Exhausted after traveling halfway across the world and eager to see my friends I was maybe too bewildered and disoriented to feel afraid. After a couple of hours I was called into a small room. While 3 or 4 unidentified men in sunglasses and full Arab dress watched, another official who resembled Saddam Hussein grilled me as to what department of the Washington Post I worked for, where in Washington DC I was based and what recording equipment I had with me. I don’t, I’m not, I don’t have any I responded with the most courteous demeanor my jet lag addled brain could muster. I showed them my Minneapolis Public Schools ID and membership card to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The official put me on the phone with someone who he said was from the Department of Justice. This man’s English was hard to understand but his questions were along the same lines. Finally I was told to fill out a journalist’s application for entrance. On all the lines pertaining to being a reporter I answered: I am not a reporter. I am an elementary school math teacher.

In the end it was not clear that I worked for the Washington Post, it was getting late so they returned my passport, stamped a visa and let me in.  I’m still not sure where they got the Washington Post thing. However, I’m pretty sure the guy on the phone did a Google for my name and came up with this blog. What did he think about the glacial erratic and extinct Ice Age mammals blog posts? He didn’t mention them. In any case the digital age is making for a smaller world when Walter Meets Mack meets the internal security operatives of a paranoid mideast nation.

In this desert country the wealthy natives speed around (these folks are possibly the most aggressive drivers in the world) in high-end luxury cars and huge SUVs. In the extreme desert temperatures, without universal AC this place would be uninhabitable, at least to my heat intolerant Scandinavian self. Lacking any annual rainfall, fresh water flows out of an underground aquifer into grand outdoor fountains. Thanks to cheap energy and airfreight any consumer good is available. In the well-stocked supermarkets one can sample a wide variety of fine European cheeses from Stilton to Gouda. Just don’t take a picture of the cheese I learned in my second encounter with security. Not to judge, ok I am judging, but this way of life can’t continue. Someday oil, the only significant natural resource found here, will run out. Not soon but in a generation or two. Among the Aussie (my new favorite cultural group and the phrase a dog’s breakfast is a real nugget of slang) and Yank expats I met, a topic for discussion is what the nation is doing to prepare for that day.  No one seemed to know. Here, the arid, dusty landscape is filled with multiple unfinished high-rise apartment complexes abandoned with tall construction cranes left in place. Judging, yeah still judging, from this lack of affordable housing planning the future doesn’t look good.

Unsustainable housing is a dog's breakfast

Unsustainable! became my other new catch phrase but who can blame other nations who live as if natural resources are endless. The rest of the world is only mirroring the US, that’s us, the people enjoy the highest standard of living in the world, based on cheap energy. Say its Minnesota in the dead of winter and you must have a BLT. The T in tomato has been trucked from Florida or Mexico and is available for a reasonable price at any grocery store. Someday when the price of energy becomes prohibitive we’ll all have to adjust our lifestyles. No more fresh T or even L on your sandwich in frozen February.

Sustainability issues in decades to come are a reality for students of today, citizens of tomorrow. In Walter Meets Mack our hero notices how old growth trees are being depleted to satisfy the building and construction needs of a growing population. In this passage, page 82, he observes and reflects on the contrast between clear-cut and uncut land and the sustainability of the logging industry. This scene is based on a location in Scenic State Park up in Itasca County.

At one high point, the round, multicolored gravel and rocks of the hill had eroded, leaving a vertical face bare of trees. Walter liked its westward view of the swamps and woods draining into the Bowstring River and had enjoyed more than one fine sunset there. From the summit, the pine treetops were like green clouds. In the wetlands scrubby spruces and autumn tamaracks painted the land with hues of green and yellow. Passing clouds cast oval sky-ship shadows that tinted the soft colors of the trees with purple and gray. The cutover zones that had been logged out appeared brown and dry. From up high Walter could see how people were a force of nature, like the wind, rain, or fire, changing the land at their will. Every season the cutover zone spread further, like paint spreading outward from a tipped can. Walter thought about the endless stacks of freshly cut pine in the lumberyards of Minneapolis.

Students are ready to think about how their lives and lifestyles depend on natural resources. Visiting the mideast, the source of much of our fossil fuel energy, really got me thinking about global sustainability. Just like how the old growth pine trees of northern Minnesota were clear-cut, our other natural resources are becoming scarce. Hopefully the people of the mideast are planning for that day. Tomorrow’s citizens right here also need the seed of an idea planted as to what sustainability means.

All humans need to be thinking about and planning how to live in an energy scarce future. Sustainability and how we’ll be living in a generation or two are questions to be faced. If not we’re looking at a dog’s breakfast of a future.

Greetings, Friends of Walter Meets Mack A Minnesota Adventure, long time no blog. No worries … I’m getting my mojo back

I was pleased to be a Midwest Independent Publisher’s Association Finalist for 2012 Best Young Adult Fiction back in May.

Young Adults (YA) are ready to think deeply and consider new ideas about their world. Their emerging intelligence and idealism set them apart from adult readers.  Yet my 18 years of experience of working with young people tells me that if adults beat them over the head with serious themes we risk losing their interest.

Especially boys. Brain research is providing big breakthroughs in understanding how humans learn.  For example, in the brains of adolescent girls the emotional locus is right up in the frontal lobe next to the verbal and logic.  These parts of their brains interface easily and many girls are adept at analyzing and talking about their feelings.

Boys’ brains however, carry the emotional locus in the brain stem and the pathways of communication with the verbal and logic are not fully developed. Ask a young man how he feels and you might get a blank stare because he may not know or be able to articulate how he feels.  To be sure there are boys and girls who are outliers, but brain research informs us that adolescents in general interpret the same world in gender specific ways.

Sadly many books that young adults are given to read are about feelings, friendships (cliques and fitting in with the crowd) and mushy love stuff. These themes are fine but they don’t necessarily resonate with boys. Think about all the brooding, moping and sighing in the Twilight movies.

Woe is me, Edward or Jacob, what shall I do!?

So, while Walter Meets Mack is not strictly a “boy’s book “, our hero does have a love interest that confuses him and I did try to include lots of elements of humor and adventure that boys relate to.  For example, in chapter 16 Walter Worries, Walter is keeping an eye on his only enemy in the world, the heinous Henry:

Henry and his shifty pal Alfonso mostly kept to themselves, bunking together and working as swampers in a section of woods near Walter and his crew. Both were green, and Sutton had to lecture them again and again on the right way to swing an axe. Walter had spied Henry swinging wildly and half hoped that he would miss and chop off one of his toes.

In this regard, Walter did get some satisfaction one chilly day. Two sawyers had just finished the final cuts into a huge old white pine. When the tree began its doomed lean, the experienced sawyers quickly ran out of harm’s way. Just then, Henry and Alfonso appeared, moving towards the fall zone where the massive tree would come crashing down.

“Timber!” the sawyers yelled in warning.

Henry and Alfonso looked up in alarm to see the falling tree and tried to escape. They disappeared in a cloud of exploding snow. When the cloud cleared, they were found buried in snow next to a big branch. They had just missed becoming pancakes. Walter was not among those who rushed to the rescue. He did enjoy mightily the tongue-lashing they received from Sutton!

“Your brains must feel brand new, seeing as how they’ve never been used! If ignorance is bliss you two are the happiest men alive! Ya both must have fallen out of a stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down! Why, your stairs must not go all the way to the top floor! Now listen good, to stay alive in a logging camp ya gotta pay attention! Keep that one thought in your brains, if you have a place to put it!”

Sutton paused to catch his breath before continuing. “Now this is what we call a tree. This is a saw and that is an axe. We use them to cut down trees and we try not to get killed when they fall down! Got it?”

Many YA readers need something more beyond obsession with feelings and friends.  While I’m pleased with the MIPA judge’s assessment of my book, I didn’t see many signs in their comments that they understood YA readers.  I’m just as happy if not more, with all the kids who have read WMMAMA and told me they loved it.

Check out the silver medal that now adorns the cover of Walter Meets Mack A Minnesota Adventure! Thanks MIPA!

Springtime and I love the beautiful intense deep purple irises growing in my yard. According to neighborhood oral history these particular irises traveled to Minnesota over a century ago in an English Lady’s suitcase.  A dear friend down the street,  a couple three or four decades ago got them from another neighborhood gardener, who told her the tale of their transatlantic odyssey, gave us a clump of them a few seasons ago.

Clever irises with their sensuous color trick us humans into their own dissemination.  We admire and nurture them in a natural rhythm, their qualities and character passed down through the ages.  It is amazing that a continuous organism is perpetuated in this way.

People do the same.  Although our qualities and values are not so obvious as the beauteous purple iris, when nurtured across the ocean of life in the valise of a family’s love they still emerge from one generation to the next.

Young adult readers are way perceptive and I have faith that the few nudges in Walter Meets Mack, in the direction of this universal truth will register.  No need to over analyze or masticate into mush, because deep thoughts and so forth do not take root when rudely jammed into the ground. Trick them into growing with some color and humor and ideas will become incessantly appealing and attractive on their own.

]]> http://WalterMeetsMack.com/?feed=rss2&p=220 0 http://WalterMeetsMack.com/?p=217 http://WalterMeetsMack.com/?p=217#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:17:00 +0000 the Author http://WalterMeetsMack.com/?p=217 Continue reading →]]> I’m pleased that Walter Meets Mack A Minnesota Adventure has been chosen as 1 of 3 finalists for best Young Adult Fiction by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.

A big honor but more importantly I hope that the lessons about history, natural resource use, natural science and others that are part of Walter Meets Mack might reach a larger audience.  The Awards Gala is on Wednesday, May 9. Thanks to everyone for your support and wish me luck!