Unexpected Minneapolis

I am in Minneapolis.

Cornell sent me here to join thousands of other plaid-wearing scientists to talk about plants and soil for four days. A conference! And I will be giving my first Big Girl talk at it, all smart gray suit and carefully crafted PowerPoint slides.

Minneapolis is a city, hip and busy, tall glinting buildings, taxis in lines, Saturday night swarms of carefully dressed beautiful people Going Out. I haven't been in a proper city since San Juan, Puerto Rico. And the local folks here don't even consider Minneapolis that substantial. But to me, with the skyways linking downtown buildings warmfully, and the web of bus routes, this place is a metropolis.

Although I had a four hour meeting yesterday, with a team of people who care about cover crop traits and breeding trials, the conference proper hasn't really started yet and thus I have had some gift time to explore.

And, wowza, I love exploring a city.

Fortified with a bus schedule, a map, and a container of water, I set out south of downtown yesterday. I found myself in a city that could have been in Costa Rica or Cambodia. I wandered into Mexican grocery stores, bought a beautiful scarf at a thrift store with no other white people in it, and unintentionally caused a man to brake on his bicycle to ask if I was a model (it's these leather Frye boots, I suppose). Posters of soccer stars, hair places advertising dreadlocks, Super Mercados, a little African store selling thumb tacks next to bulk spices next to cell phone cards. A panaderia where the smell of plump yeasty breads brought me back to my favorite Latin American places. I bought a puffy twist of a bun for my coffee later, likely a third of the price of the pretentious glassed-off baked goods I would find on offer at my gourmet coffee location.  Halal meats. Saddle shops. (Saddle shops? They were the only indication I was in the Midwest)

Then I made it onto a bus and rode into another part of Minneapolis. Leaving Unexpected Diversity Land and arriving in Standard Hip Urbane Area. With the gourmet cooking stores, the North face shop, the hipster coffee, the young people on their sweet bicycles. The kids can ride fixies here because its flat as my chest. I tried on a fur coat in an H&M shop but bought a dress instead. I sat and enjoyed a very good coffee (thanks Seattle for ruining me) and listened to a gray haired couple and friend talk about food additives and complain about the tofu having been fried at a supposedly health-conscious restaurant. "I signed up for a knife skills class..." one said in passing.  Later, talking about travel: "I'm huge in Paris but tiny in Wisconsin", said their decently sized friend. Outside the shop a tiny Honda's license plate read "BIKE_NOIR". 

This morning I woke early, and joined the good Catholics for the last bit of the 7:30 mass at the stunningly grand basilica of St Someone. I went there for the pipe organ. My breath caught in my chest as I entered the space, the ceilings soaring, the windows, the pillars, the organ practically shimmering gold, with the trumpet pipes pointing out towards the sanctuary like guns out a ship's gunnels. My entire skin had an electric current over it when I heard the thick sound fill such the space. Being a Catholic church, only three people sang, but the cantor doggedly put her cheerful voice above the grand beast. I walked upstream against the flow of Catholics leaving during the postlude (a Mendelssohn Fugue), and stood adoringly in front of the organ as it roared. I will always love this.

I spoke with the Organist afterward, he was thrilled to learn I too was one, and the world became tiny when he said he was from Buffalo NY and studied in part in the SUNY system. I asked him his favorite stops ("oh heavens! There are so many!") and he played the 16 foot diapason, rich like hot chocolate; I asked him his best advice: "learn as much as you can about style and always practice technique."

There is sunshine. I wandered around a wee lake in the city, the water rushes expanding the sunshine around them, and am now contentedly thumbing these words out from behind a plant in a busy coffee shop.

Hooky

I played hooky this afternoon. 70 degrees and sunny, the world just hues of gold and burnt gold and golden gold. I flipped down my laptop in the windowless office, climbed into my bike shorts, consumed the last icecream cone of the year, and set off on my bike.

I went east, towards the lands of Hammond Hill State Forrest, the golden corn set against the auburn hills. Glacier carved hills so prominent and jutting in these parts, and heaving up and around them, I could say the same for my legs after a season biking around here: carved by glaciers. For miles it was just me and crunchy floating leaves; the peace of empty roads with no lines down their middles. My favorite is to see a steep bugger ahead, "oh arg", but there's a decline before it, and I can pedal frenzied enough to coast half-way up the other side. Being out here is leaving the bike lanes and the Priuses of Ithaca, entering instead into space and forest punctuated by diesel trucks, baseball hats, and the occasional horrifically tacky lawn display. In East Nowhere I stopped at a farm store and bought cheese curds, $4 said the sharpie-written cardboard sign, all homespun looking with a quaint clip-art on the label of their zip lock baggie and tasting inarguably of Barn. Delicious. The big man behind the counter was so friendly and refilled my water bottles and gave me free apples.

I biked into the woods a bit, just listening to the trees and the wind. I sat on an outcropping of moss tuft and had thoughts. Just to sit in peace and solitude in a forest is a wonderful thing. I highly recommend leaving work and sitting on moss in the woods for a while sometime.

I thought I'd have some nice profound thoughts while I was there in the peace, but all I could come up with was how incredibly good my life is, and how indescribably blessed and fortunate I am. Also, simply looking at a forest floor, with all the colored leaves, weed species, slanting shadows, illuminated by bright sun: the visual information is almost overwhelming, the shapes and colors...especially contrasted with our constructed simplified creations of indoor walls and office desks.

Being in the warmth, in a forest, on new roads: this was like going on vacation, just not with all the logistics of where the next hotel would be. Pedaling and observing the passing-by of it all.

This is what I love best.

I came home at the same time as I would have if I'd been coming out of the office. Back into the students and the traffic. But instead 31 miles later and with the heady knowledge that there is so much else out there.