Superior Moon

Here we view Lake Superior beneath a (nearly) full moon.  The first part of my road trip was full of frenzied travel, the second filled with visits to relatives, and now I’m on my own and kicking back.  I’ve rented a one-bedroom “condo” with a kitchen, and tonight I roasted myself a chicken, ate it with a tossed salad and some pasta, and stared out the door at the lake till the sun went down.  I expect the leftovers will last me several days.

I also went for a trail hike today— the first real exercise since I left home— and scheduled a massage for tomorrow (because all that driving is bad for me), and bought some wine I haven’t opened yet.

All my problems seem rather distant.

Except that I just got kicked out of the sauna for being there after hours.  I don’t remember this from my childhood!

It was great fun reconnecting to my relatives, though it required a bit of mental adjustment to properly absorb the fact that the people I remember as a cloud of hyperactive children are all grandparents now.  (I, however, remain young.)

(Though if I finally grow old, I’ll have to poach someone else’s grandkid to look after me.  Shouldn’t be hard— I will tempt them with literature!)

The North Shore remains as lovely as ever— I’m on a 30,000-foot-deep slab of billion-year old lava, subsequently scraped to the bedrock by a mile-thick glacier— and the result of all these titanic catastrophes is a jagged coastline of red basalt cliffs plunging into a debris-stewn inland sea.  Sort of like Cornwall, but with a Finnish accent.

As a child I spent many hours along the shore of Superior, and I still feel its pull.  I remember perching on one of those cliffs, and fantasizing that I might be the natural son of Poseidon, and that if I leapt off the cliff right now, my divine father might rise from the deep and claim me.

I did not jump off the cliff, and subsequently Rick Riordan adopted my childhood fantasy to write the Percy Jackson books and make a zillion dollars.  Never let it be said that this sort of juvenile self-mythologizing doesn’t have its own power.

(I should make it clear that Riordan did not in any way steal my idea.  Actual original literary ideas are pretty rare, and it’s not at all uncommon for writers to work along similar lines.  And of course I never actually used the Poseidon idea myself, beyond some rather poor comic-style art long lost to the ages.)

The moon is settling toward the west, which tells me that it’s time I finished this post and wrote something I might get paid for.

More later.