Minnesota Archives | Carol L. Douglas

February 4, 2022

Snowdrifts and shadows

A world without shadows is disconcerting; objects seem to float in space. Shadows give objects form and ground them.

My son Dwight Perot took this photo of the Wyoming night sky last year at this time. It’s almost like this winter jaunt down US 90 is getting to be a habit.

It’s a balmy -2° F as I type this on Thursday afternoon in Blue Earth, Minnesota. These are temperatures we don’t typically encounter in the northeast, where our idea of deep cold is somewhat warmer. But it is, as they say, a dry cold. It’s miserable.

The Prius is ticking along quite beautifully, although we seem to have lost the front valance and lower grill somewhere in that snowstorm in Ohio. It was a typical winter storm, dumping about a foot of powder in Chicago, but it was preceded by a warm front which made wicked ice. That effectively encased the car, necessitating a quick windshield-wiper swap today. A few minutes without our gloves on, trying to manhandle the frozen clips loose, and our fingers were frozen.

The trucks follow each other into the median like lemmings. I rapidly lost count of the wrecks along the Indiana Toll Road. It was just the same last year.

“There’s nothing to paint in the Midwest,” is a lament I sometimes hear, and one I adamantly disagree with. The sky is so spacious and the earth so flat that all spatial relationships are upended.

In the tropics, the summer solstice sun sits directly overhead at noon for just two days a year. The only American state that experiences this is Hawaii; the rest of us are too far north. A world without shadows is disconcerting; objects seem to float in space. Shadows give objects form and ground them.

Here in the north, the drifting snow drops down along the roadside, creating a curling ribbon of blue shadow that plays against the golden light of the sun. I’m not here to paint, but if I were, I’d stop and paint that.

The ice storm shredded what was left of Dwight’s windshield wipers, necessitating a quick change.

There are solitary farms set within copses of trees, and power lines marching resolutely toward the horizon. A windsock is frozen in the last storm’s position.

The snow isn’t deep. Its surface is marbleized like sand dunes. That makes sense because they’re both sculpted by wind. But unrelated natural forms also mimic each other. The map of a river tributary system bears, for example, a striking resemblance to a tree. Why is that? Chance? Mathematics? Intelligent design?

Windmills are part of the prairie landscape.

The grain elevators of Minnesota are mostly metal, unlike the frame elevators of the Canadian prairie just to our north. The prairie states and provinces developed with the same cultural, economic and environmental influences, so why did wooden elevators persist in Canada and not here? Are human beings that much more idiosyncratic than nature?

West of Illinois, rest stops become more austere. You no longer run a gauntlet of goods and services to reach the washrooms. But at the Missouri River in South Dakota, there’s a surprise: art and a small display about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

At the Camp Pleasant rest stop above the Missouri River.

I-90 is the longest and coldest east-west road in the national interstate system. It was started in 1958 and not completed until 1978. It’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember, because the New York and Massachusetts sections are older than me. I know the section from Boston to Buffalo intimately, and that from Buffalo to Chicago quite well. I’ve driven the western section to Wyoming, but not often. The piece from Idaho to Washington is a mystery to me.

After yesterday’s storm, the sky is utterly clear. It would make for perfect night-sky photography, and both Dwight and I have cameras with us. However, we didn’t shoot any pictures. It was too miserably cold out there.

February 5, 2021

I didn’t outrun the weather

Even the dismal road has its blessings.

The open road in Minnesota. Photo courtesy Douglas Perot

“You should have been a cross-country truck driver who paints,” Mary Byrom told me. This week, that’s exactly what I am.

I didn’t stop to paint in the Badlands on Wednesday. It was a crying shame, for they were beautiful and the weather was clement. But the sky told me the weather was changing faster than I’d anticipated. “I have to get ahead of this storm,” I told my husband, and gunned it.

Our original plan was to cut down to I-80 and stop in Iowa. According to Google Maps, that would shave twenty minutes off my trip. “I don’t believe it,” I said, and stayed on I-90. Anyways, I kind of liked the idea of driving 2000 miles on the same road. We coasted into Albert Lea, MN in the late hours.

The Badlands are vast and fascinating. Photo courtesy Dwight Perot.

My dog and I did a quick tour around the shrubberies but neither of us wanted to prolong the Minnesota winter experience. It was ferociously windy and snowing steadily. That bad weather I’d wanted in Thermopolis had caught up with me.

The next morning, I borrowed a shovel to clear out the bed of the truck. We wrapped our stuff in contractor bags and eased back on to the highway. I have a niece who lives in Minnesota on purpose. She tells me that the temperature tomorrow will drop to -15° F. It’s hard for me to see the attraction when the wind is howling and the mercury is dropping, but she too is from Buffalo.

I amuse myself on long-distance drives by doing arithmetic. This trip, I calculated just how far behind we were dropping behind. After I got to -5 hours, I decided my game was too depressing. It was still better than talk radio, however.

My truck will get a tonneau cover as soon as I swap the tailgate back to the original.

My son is with me. He’s a responsible driver but he’s young. There was no way I was letting him play bumper cars in a blizzard.

Travel generally gets cumbersome east of the Mississippi anyway. There are tolls (which you can’t pay with cash right now) and the clean, efficient rest stops of the west have been replaced with travel plazas where you must run a gauntlet of merchandise in order to freshen up. And, of course, there’s much more traffic.

At a rest stop, I caught a message from Jane Chapin. A 40-car pileup had paralyzed I-80 eastbound in Iowa. It’s days like this that reaffirm my belief in a providential God. Had I not ignored my itinerary, I’d have been on that road.

That’s not to say my prayers are always answered. Yesterday an old friend died of COVID despite my earnest entreaties on her behalf. There has been no respite in the onslaught of COVID recently; another friend lost her husband to it last week. I was already struggling with those back-to-back deaths when I learned that still another friend has been diagnosed with a very serious cancer.

I realize there’s no equivalence in these things; Kathy’s death is a cataclysm, whereas a truck is just a truck. But still, I’d lose all hope if it weren’t for the occasional touch of heaven on my shoulder. When the stakes are high enough, we’re all with that guy in the Bible who cried, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!”

I’m going right through Buffalo but there will be no public funeral. That’s actually a relief since it takes the decision out of my hands. I’ve been all over the country; I ought not risk bringing more COVID to my friends and family. My uncle’s funeral back in March was private for just that reason. In this plague year, the obsequies are gone but the grief remains.

April 24, 2018

End of the trail

You can still buy some pretty horrible unauthorized copies of James Fraser’s work, but few people remember the artist.

End of the Trail, cast 1918, by James Earle Frazer, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had the smaller version in our house when I was growing up.

When I visit a city, I try to seek out its famous artists. Minneapolis-Saint Paul gave us Prince, Leroy Neiman, and A Prairie Home Companion. However, visual artists are thin on the ground. That’s surprising, because it’s a robust city of great beauty. Moreover, the prairie has given us so much great art, ranging from the novels of Willa Cather to the paintings of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and so many others.

1913 Indian Head Nickel, courtesy US Mint (coin), National Numismatic Collection (photograph by Jaclyn Nash)

James Earle Fraser came from tiny Winona in the southeast corner of the state. His name is pretty well forgotten today, but two of his works are iconic 20th century pieces. The Indian Head nickel was struck from 1913 to 1938 as part of the US government’s first attempt to make beautiful currency. “I felt I wanted to do something totally American—a coin that could not be mistaken for any other country’s coin. It occurred to me that the buffalo, as part of our western background, was 100% American, and that our North American Indian fitted into the picture perfectly,” Fraser said about his design.

End of the Trail was intended to be cast in bronze, but wartime shortages prevented that. The original slowly deteriorated until 1968, when it was obtained by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and restored.

Fraser sculpted a monumental plaster version of a Native brave dropping in exhaustion for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. End of the Trail was based on his experiences growing up in Dakota Territory. “As a boy, I remembered an old Dakota trapper saying, ‘The Indians will someday be pushed into the Pacific Ocean.’”

“The idea occurred to me,” he later wrote, “of making an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific.”

End of the Trail was copied on the cover of The Beach Boys 1971 album Surf’s Up.

The sculpture earned a Gold Medal at the fair. Within a few months, thousands of photographic prints had been sold. In 1918, Fraser began producing bronze miniatures of the statue. They caught the troubled spirit of the times. They were everywhere, including in my father’s study when I was growing up.

You can still buy horrible copies of it, both in bronze and in less permanent forms, like this t-shirt.

Fraser had great sympathy for the plight of the Native Americans, who were being pushed west or restrained on reservations. His father, Thomas Fraser, was a railroad engineer helping to push the great rail lines across the country. A few months prior to James’ birth, Thomas was among a group sent to recover the remains of the 7th Cavalry Regiment after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

End of the Trail was meant to illustrate the Native American plight. Instead, it became an early piece of pop-art, copied endlessly not only in bronze but in prints, posters, t-shirts, pins, bags, belt buckles, and bookends. It was featured (badly) on the cover of The Beach Boys 1971 album Surf’s Up.

The same is true of the Indian Head Nickel. This is an insulated Whataburger Coffee Mug.

Fraser learned to carve by scavenging limestone from a nearby quarry. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, the École des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian. He worked as an assistant to America’s foremost sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Starting in 1906, he taught at the Art Students League in New York, eventually becoming its director.