Pedestrian View

It’s true. In the winter time, Minnesotans drive out onto lakes, drill holes in the ice, huddle in little houses for hours, and wait. I spent all day last Saturday with my brothers, Dave and Nate, on Upper Red Lake, and then all day Monday with Dave and his friend Bruce on Lake of the Woods. I caught one fish too small to keep, and I caught it about ten minutes before we packed up and left on Monday. I was really pleased.

I’m kicking myself that I didn’t bring a camera to supply more documentation, so you’re looking at some generic internet photos used to promote ice fishing vacations. You’ll never see these getaways given away on The Price is Right, but there are thousands of folks out on the ice each weekend in Minnesota.

What are they doing? This is a good question. I think a Top Ten list is the best way to approach this subject:

1. Drinking lots of cheap beer (Grain Belt is my favorite)

2. Discussing trucks that went through the ice recently, how they got them out, what fines they paid, and what morons they are

3. Eating cheesy sausages boiled to perfection in lake water

4. Grilling venison chops from November’s deer hunt (also done in the cold from small, portable buildings)

5. Eating venison chops from a “plate” made from an over-turned pickle bucket washed with a handful of snow

6. Remembering fish that we’ve caught on other trips (necessary because we aren’t catching any on this trip)

7. Peeing in public under more sky than Montana’s within earshot of the fish house, and commenting on force, volume, velocity, duration, and color.

8. Privately wishing we’d stayed home to watch the cooking channel and help our wives clean the mini-blinds

9. Letting go of every gas formerly withheld in polite company

10. Swearing as if it’s something we do every day without thinking about it

Notice that catching fish isn’t on the list. Dave did haul in a 19 1/2 inch walleye Monday. With that and two smaller ones Bruce brought in, we did feed Dave, Vicki and I Monday night in Warroad. This is about as good as the fishing gets, however. There are other people who do better - who even do well - but these people have never been me or anyone I know. They’re spoken about with reverence and mystery. They’re something akin to Yeti or Sashquach.

Still, it’s a good time. Saturday was a warm day - about 30 degrees. Monday was sub-zero with a wind our of the northwest that made your eyes water after ten seconds.

It was great to be with my brothers and rehash the old days on the farm. What’s more, they provide all the equipment. If you can match their offer, any time you want to go, let me know.

Reading along with my daughter and her AP English class, I picked up another that I have missed.  Twenty six years ago as a high school senior, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms and wrote a terrible senior research comparing characters.  I had nothing to say, and no idea how to say it.  Mr. Dyrud, who’d had my brilliant sister and brother before me, said, “This is very disappointing.  I was expecting so much more,” as he handed it back to me.  In truth, it was a B (not terrible, I guess), but I knew it was bad without him having to be disappointed.  Ever a people pleaser, I just wanted him to be pleased.  At that point, becoming an English teacher wasn’t within a million miles of my plans.

How did I get here?

I digress.  This is supposed to be a book review, but I must finish w/ Bell and Arms.   I loved Bell.  Robert Jordan was cool and I felt like I knew him.  The romance and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War moved me.  I was set to head out and fight fascists myself at a moment’s notice.  I was unimpressed by Arms.  I didn’t get Frederick Henry.  The things he would say and do made no sense to me.  In my essay, I was supposed to compare these guys for eight pages.  I used lots of quotes, and have fond memories of a week’s worth of late nights in my parent’s basement with Mom’s manual Smith-Corrona clacking away.  There were moments when I felt like I was saying something.  There were other moments when I’d carefully type, “Ibid.”  Good memories, but it’s no wonder it took me 26 years to Return to Hemmingway.

I’d have to say that Sun kind of falls in with Arms.  Hemmingway’s style is detatched and journalistic, and I  had a hard time connecting with Jake Barnes.  Also 87% of the book seemed to be descriptions of drinking, with occasional eating thrown in.  The whole expatriot scene was foreign.  All of these Americans and Brits are unhappy and hang out together even though they disliked each other intensely.   And where did they get their money?  I guess this was Hemmingway’s point.  They were the Lost Generation (thank you Barnes and Noble synopsis).

I know Jake got his wang shot off in the war, and that he and Brett might have been happy if this had not been the case, but they both were pretty pathetic.  I suppose I was a little in love with Brett.  How could I not be when everyone else was?

I did enjoy the characters of Bill and Romero.  Bill was just a terrifically funny drunk.  He says, “Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs” and “I’m fonder of you than anyone on earth.  I counldn’t tell you that in New York.  It’d mean I was a faggot.”

Romero was just a terribly interesting figure.  Like everyone else, I wanted to know how he got into that green bull fighting suit. 

Finally, the fishing and bullfighting were fascinating.  In these cases, I appreciated the dispassionate but detailed way that Hemmingway presents things.  Jake never acts like he’s excited about these things, but the detail in which he presents things says otherwise.

Anyway, I wouldn’t mind passing around a five liter leather wineskin sometime with some Basques and feeling tight.

Four days ago - a week after my 44th birthday - I moved back in with my parents.  The basement’s cold, and Mom’s cooking experients are as interesting as ever, but all in all, it’s pretty decent.

It’s not really what it sounds like.  I’m lucky enough to be on sabbatical from my teaching job at LSC this semester, and when my dad - turning 80 this summer - ended up in the ER and overnight in the hospital last week, Sherry suggested that I head home for awhile.  Thankfully my in-laws were in town and shuttle me back to TRF.  Sherry’s been looking for a reason to get rid of me for several weeks anyway(with good reason), and luckily Dad seems to be fine.  The leading theory on why he passed out and was disoriented was a reaction to some 30 year old cologne he found and slapped on in a fit of boyish vanity.  Mom poured it down the toilet, and he’s been fine since.  Though there’s been a follow up MRI to check for a stroke with a neuro-psychologist consult coming up, he hasn’t missed an exercise class, and has delivered all of his meals on wheels to the correct parties.

The highlights so far have been:

• a rousing game of 3 handed Rook, lasting well past 10:00 p.m.
• hob knobbing with old Zion folk at the Wednesday night Lenten supper
• watching the Northland Men’s basketball team win
• devotions every morning
• a night out with Nate, my brother, at the Evergreen
• a day as mule/jungle gym/sled puller with my neices, Marryn and Ani
• Three Amigos and Triple Decker on the sledding hill @ minus 10 degrees, also w/ M and A
• watching my nephew, Alec, get ready to walk
• helping Dad figure out how to use Quicken to keep track of the Pennington County Historical Society’s finances
• working up some piano/guitar duets to play with Mom in church Sunday
• lunch with Diane Drake - my former teacher and mentor - again at the Evergreen
• getting a Valentine in the mail from my wife
• getting another Valentine in the mail from my children
• shoveling the driveway

This is a hopping place.  Am I getting much sabbatical work done?  Nope.  But that hasn’t affect my happiness.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

                    –from “To a Mouse”? Robert Burns

I’m conflicted about Burns here. He has so much empathy for the beastie, an earthy field type (probably in tiny overalls and chewing on a stub of straw) turned up by Burn’s plow. Like Burns, I am generally against chasing wi’ murdr’ring pattle, but for a different reason. Mice give me the heebie jeebies. Unlike Burns, however, I faced the beastie this morning with a gleam of murder in me eye and a pounding heart in my breastie.

There’s a false ceiling in our bedroom. Former residents of this house disguised cracking plaster by dropping down a false ceiling from which 2 x 3 foot insulated tiles hang. There’s even a big translucent panel covering the light. Lying on our bed looking up, one might imagine one is at the office.

Last fall, we woke at 2:36 a.m. one morning to the scurry of tiny claws — a track meet in the space between the false ceiling and the plaster. Slumber was scant until Victor slew the beastie a few nights later. He was really a cute little guy hanging by his crushed skull from the jaws of Victor. Brown, smooth fur and a creamy white underbelly — the poor little fella was just trying to come in out of the cold; only to me he was just a miniature RAT.

Perhaps it’s unfair, but I link mice and rats, and I can’t help but remember the time on the farm that Dad discovered a rat’s nest in the old auger pit next to the granary. The pit had filled with straw and grain over the years, and a family of rats had come to nest there. “Nest”? is such a sweet word, and there was a hoard of little sweeties crawling around in there. With shovels poised for smashing, my brothers and I waited while my dad prodded and dug with a pitch fork. I was never as alive as when rats hurtled straight for me, dauntless of my smashing spade. There’s an adrenaline laced satisfaction that comes with the sound and feel of making contact that cannot be duplicated, even by the Wii. There’s an even worse horror when, after that contact, rat continues to scamper on over ones foot. We killed about every other one, I think, the others making it to freedom. My memory records that there must have been over twenty of the buggars. They lay scattered about the yard - fat with grain, pink noses, whiskers. Heebie jeebie. I didn’t sleep too well for a long time, then, either.

There’s also the story of my wife’s grandfather’s encounter with the beastie. He was moving a pile of garbage when ratty shot straight up his pant leg. A better man than I am, he throttled the beastie just before it reached his groin and snapped its neck through his pants with his bare hand. From then on he tied up his pant legs when working at the garbage pile. (Note: This was in a time when garbage was not encased in Rubbermaid, but heaped, and then moved from smaller heaps to larger ones).

I digress. The fella I’d caught above my false ceiling wasn’t a rat, but cousin enough to make me his sworn enemy. That wasn’t the end, either. Victor slew two more before the ceiling went quiet and I figured we were in the clear until next fall, when cold might chase the next mouse family indoors.

Wrong. Two nights ago, Burn’s beastie was at it again. Scurry. Scurry. Scurry. Time for Victor.

2:36 a.m. this morning we were wakened by the snap. It was a solid, satisfying snap, finality and mortality in one instant. Only, wait.

Drag. Drag. Silence. Drag. (repeat)

Turns out mousie was not dead. I proposed to Sherry that I lift the tiles and go after it wi’ murd’ring pattle and a pair of gloves, but since my in-laws were in town and in the next room, she counseled that we avoid making a racket, sleep elsewhere, and tackle it in the morning. Cruel, but I figured mousie would die soon enough.

This morning when I found her, poor mousie had pulled herself up above the plaster through a hole, but Victor wouldn’t follow. Her left rear leg and tail were trapped; I suppose it was like me pulling a storm door around with a broken leg. I’m feeling pity and remorse as I write this (as you can see, mousie has morphed from it to she), but at the time, I was all about murd’ring.

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men Gang aft agley.

I expect she’ll die, which she certainly hadn’t planned. The stench will be unpleasant, methinks, but I faintly hope she returns to the bosom of her family and lives. In the mean time, on advice of my father-in-law, I’ve set the Victor cluster bomb — three traps set in a circle so that when she jumps away from the first”¦snap!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!

I first read Paulo Freire 17 years ago in graduate school. What I remember was that Pedagogy was challenging and difficult to apply to an American context, but it also transformed how I saw my relationship to students and clarified the real purpose of literacy education for me. I didn’t think of teaching composition as teaching literacy back then, and it was an important shift in my thinking. Over the years, I’ve sort of lost track of that thread, and so I decided to begin my sabbatical by rereading Freire. It was a good decision.

Freire doesn’t use the word “literacy”? once in Pedagogy; instead he talks about “problem posing education”? in which people learn to “name their world.”? In this process, oppressed peoples in solidarity with teachers experience conscientization and begin to transform their world. Freire calls this combination of thought and action praxis. In the developing world, praxis amounts to revolution — people recognizing the value of their humanity and taking power back from oppressors. (Ideally, oppressors would be transformed as well, but Freire notes that this is unlikely as it would require them to relinquish power. Nobody wants to do that.)

In the context of teaching developmental writing and composition at an open enrollment institution like an American community college, there’s much to be learned from revisiting Freire. Freire worked with oppressed peoples in his native Brazil, and then Chile (after he was invited to leave Brazil by the Brazilian government). In the book, he also refers to Castro’s revolution in Cuba and Mao’s revolution in China. These are places where the contrast between the “oppressors”? and the “oppressed”? was profoundly violent in ways that Americans probably don’t fully appreciate. That said, many argue that the gap between rich and poor in America in 2008 is wider than we care to admit, and getting wider. Furthermore, the students that come to an open enrollment institution like Lake Superior College, where I teach, come predominately from the latter group.

What my colleagues and I typically think of ourselves as doing for our students is this: we equip them with tools they need to compete successfully in a world controlled by oppressors. Part of this sounds very noble - until we get to the part about who’s in control. Very few open enrollment students become oppressors, and clearly we fail our mission if they do. More likely, our successful students will join a working middle class, and essentially become tools of oppressors. Our unsuccessful students? Well, they’ll return to the netherworld from which they came. In either case, the world will remain largely unchanged.

What we’re not doing is what Freire suggests: changing our world. Along with our students, Freire suggests we examine our lives and the problems encountered there, and sifting through these problems we discover broader themes that help us understand ourselves and our world. Through this conscientization, we begin to take meaningful action — individually and collectively — to not just transform their personal situations, but transform their world.

This sounds like revolution because it is. In contrast to the violent revolutions of the last century, I’ll argue that in America, we can affect change from the grassroots level by peaceful means, but no such change will be possible without a broad base of enlightened folk, especially including the poor.

Subversive? Yes. Part of our college’s institutional stated mission is to work with business and industry leaders in our community to “train”? people to meet the needs of the local economy. I imagine folks invested significantly in that part of our mission will be alarmed by such talk. I’m nervous writing it, so that makes us even. I don’t think it’s the either/or situation of Freire’s experience where a finite amount of power meant that one group’s gain was another’s loss. I think that when the poor transform themselves through literacy, we all will benefit and no one loses.

I’ll admit that I cringe when Freire quotes Castro and Mao, and holds up their revolutions as examples of folks on the right track. My perception of their communism has been colored, for sure, by an American lens, and from a Recife ghetto, Havana probably looked like a beacon of hope in 1969, but I’m pretty sure both Cuba and China are failed and miserable experiments in utopia. Mao and Castro may have begun with good intentions, but the corruption of power won out in the end. Still, these poor examples don’t negate Freire’s basic principles for me.

In practical terms, I don’t know yet how this can shape my pedagogy as a teacher of developmental writing and freshman composition, but conversations about what a C means and who should be passed on to the next level make me tired. Reading Freire, on the other hand, inspires me.