April, with its sunny days and frosty nights, is cruel to my perennials but still a reasonably good month for writing. [T.S. ELLIOT: "THE WASTELAND"] I live five miles east of Bemidji on the Mississippi River. Spring in the Twin Cities means open water and barges and tulips outside the Saint Paul Hotel; “up north,” the landscape remains chilly, bland, muted. The Mississippi outside my library window palely loiters [KEATS "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI] icebound and still. On the far shore, the palette of colors is from the Ebenezer Scrooge Crayon Collection: leafless aspen, dusty-green conifer, a brush stroke of washed-blond riverbank grass. Nothing moves but a slow-flying raven, and, closer in at the feeder, a few dependable Black-capped Chickadees. The days are lengthening, though slowly. The afternoon certain slant of light [EMILY DICKINSON, POEM] is higher and wider, but still without heat. Seasons en pointe. Nature’s caesura.
This is the time of year I feel most literary. At the end of a winter’s writing, I can hold the full arc of a novel in my head; I can see its assemblage, and I can make cuts unimaginable just weeks earlier. My characters’ lives pulse in my fingertips. My editor in New York returns my emails within the hour. The whole world turns on the novel.
Then the robins arrive. Wood frogs hawk their throats in sunny ponds, and the river begins to groan and stir. As ice tectonics grumble in the night and daily heighten their pitch, I press to finish work-in-progress. Like someone diagnosed with incipient memory loss, with imminent derangement, I start writing earlier and earlier each morning; I wake up in the night to jot down notes. I try to leave myself a trail.
On April 16th, give or take a day, it’s “breakup” time on the river. Honeycombed, crushed ice slides downstream with the sound of a thousand chandeliers stirring in a summer breeze. I put my papers in order, and try to muster a happy face: only a crazy person or novelist would be unhappy for the arrival of spring in Minnesota. The same day the river is clear of ice, two loons swim steadily upstream, towing summer along in their perfect wake.
Spring up north is an hour long. It’s rough strife. [ANDREW MARVELL, "TO HIS COY MISTRESS"] It’s hot and windy, the air thick with pine pollen and aspen fuzz, the highways littered with road kill. Barely into May, there’s blue daylightat 4:30 a.m. Birds are in full call at 5:00, the woodpeckers drumming like the Blue Man Group; a beaver, not long out of her cold dark mud hut, thuds the water again and again with her spatulate tail.
No use going back to bed. I make coffee, look through some pages of my fiction. The sentences are flat and lifeless on the page, their effect diminished, as if written in disappearing ink, even as I read–but no time to fret over adverbs or semicolons–the dog is barking at a skunk, intervention required–and by then my wife is up, fully dressed in summer shorts and top, and has cooked eggs (it has taken her only seconds), and after breakfast I’m drafted to plant peas and onions in the garden, where the chives burst through the ground when my back is turned, and the Baltimore Orioles, hummingbirds and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks arrive as a cohort, an avian circus blown in on a warm south wind; I hustle to cut a couple of oranges in half and nail them onto the garden fence, but a thirty pound Snapping Turtle—her shell alarge, rakku serving platter etched in the lost language of turtles–blocks the front door, she who comes every spring, programmed in her turtle brain to lay her eggs where my house sits (which is why, for karmic reasons, I cannot pave my gravel driveway); I go for a stick–she’ll strike it and clamp onto it–and I can drag her away to a better spot, but when I return she has left, on the sunny side of the driveway, a scrabbled, damp-mouthed excavation softened by her own urine, a moist channel into which she has hunched out her twenty ping-pong ball-sized eggs; I make a mental note to cover it with chicken wire against night-sniffing skunks–however, first I must mow the lawn, which is already ankle high and rising (within minutes my old mower will not handle its lushness) because I want the yard looking good for the flood of summer visitors: daughter Caitlin and herfiancee’, both from Manhattan, who arrive only moments after I put away the mower–luckily the first peas are ripe, and a perfect complement for our lunch of fresh Crappie, buttered toast, a chilly viognier, and rhubarb pie, Caitlin’sfavorite. They stay only ten minutes, then fly back to New York, which affords me a moment to write, during which I manage the first sentence of a new story: “The funeral was not all that sad,” a sentence solid enough to sustain me through Bill, a pal from the old glory days [RICHARD FORD, "ROCK SPRINGS"] at Stanford (he’s getting divorced and stays only thirty seconds, twenty of which he spends online), and after him the Norwegians, a foursome of writers and filmmakers on some kind of New World, post-emigrant research/vision quest; they want to meet me, writer and son of the pioneers, and I tell them mystory, how my great-grandfather, out of loneliness for the Old Country, drowned himself in the shallow lake on the home place, and whether it is that tale, or the aquavit talking, within seconds we are all weeping (I really need a nap), and when they’re gone my wife and I head down to the dock to lie on the hot cedar boards for sun and a siesta with the dragonflies circling around us [VIRGINIA WOLF, STORY], and I am just drifting off when there is aviolent shrilling, squalling, flapping in the air directly above: I jerk upright as a prism falls from thesky, its rainbow colors flashing, and an osprey screams at an eagle which has tried, mid-flight, to grab the osprey’s catch–a fat sunfish that thumps onto the shore, then flips onto the dock six feet away where it lies stunned: the raptors fly off, harping at each other, and the iridescent fish, gasping and punctured, we push back into theriver; remarkably, it swims away: enough is enough! I tell mywife, and I head to the house for a real nap–at which point Lin and Jay, and Marsh and Linda, friends from upriver, arrive by pontoon bringing champagne and a croquet set, and as their golden retrievers race about with my dog,“clock-clock” go our mallets, though none of us knows the colors of our stripes [STEPHEN CRANE "THE OPEN BOAT"],and tomorrow will be one of those mornings when everyone sits around saying “I drank too much last night,”[JOHN CHEEVER "THE SWIMMER"] but we complete the croquet game in four minutes after which time the Icelanders arrive, a group of teachers, aneducational exchange, and we drive them on a speed tour around the area,stopping at Red Lake Reservation, at Itasca State Park with this handsome groupof people and their language that confounds all amateur linguists– “It’s the language of turtles!” one of the Icelanders says, and we all laugh wildly(we’ve been drinking wine) while we pontoon, turtle-spotting, over to Marsh’sisland upstream from my dock; there we picnic and bonfire and sing Icelandic folk songs until as the stars wheel out, Andromeda and Cassiopeia (what has become of the constellations of midsummer?) [CHEEVER, "THE SWIMMER"]
We shiver in our summer wear. It is, we realize, Labor Day weekend. In the morning, the yard and river are quiet. The loons have gone. The last geraniums glow ruby and garnet. A tardy hummingbird, as fat as an oversized thimble, buzzes the petunias, which we have stopped watering. Inching across thedriveway is a turtle the size of a fifty cent piece; skunks got the rest, but this little one survived, and is headed for the river.
My wife murmurs something aboutgoing inside to take a long, hot bath.
I go to my study.
I sit down and look around. It’s a comfortable place. A manuscript lies beneath a large, agate paperweight. I open a chapter at random and start reading. It’s like somebody else wrote these sentences, but they’re not half-bad.
