The High Line

I am riding Amtrak’s “Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago,” listening on my headphones to “Bob’s Song” from the “Assassination of Jesse James” movie soundtrack, its sharp high piano keys drowned out by heavy, melancholy violin chords, the bow scraping slowly over the strings, evoking frontier America.  It seems so appropriate to the setting.  Looking out the club car window, I can see mist and rain, and low clouds.  When the rain lets up, stretched before me is a palette of medium blue skies over gently rolling medium green fields.  No trees.  We are on the “High Line,” the northern area of Montana, near the Canadian border, isolated, paralleling the two laned Highway 2 with the occasional pick ups and sedans trudging along, their amber headlights on at 3 p.m..  It is June, but cool.   We are speeding through beautiful, empty country.

As we approach North Dakota, the land acquires more definition, has more mounds and ravines, more rivers with short trees lining them.  The clouds are whiter and more stretched out; the sky is lighter blue, thinner.  Soon we are passing through flooded landscape.  Later, we pass into Minnesota, which is more Mid-Western, with its Holstein dairy cattle, evergreens and clover, and elegant two lane asphalt roads and Volvo station wagons going off into the country over gently rolling lands.  It could be Sweden.  We pass occasional farm houses, white with enclosed porches, creating a certain aesthetic.  Minnesota, like Utah and Wisconsin, gives the impression of a state where everything has been done well, where all has been well planned and crafted.   There are yellow fields near Little Falls, and ahead in the distance, towards the northern horizon, I can see a silver slice of sky beneath dark, low clouds, giving the impression of a wide, shining river.  It is but a slice of low sky, illuminated, as night pours in and evening disappears.  Later, we are paralleling the Mississippi River.

I feel like a zephyr in the night.  The coach is dark, the lights off, and I lie with my head against the window, which is spotted by raindrops.  The window pane acts as a mirror, reflecting the interior of the car–gray leather seats, overhead reading lights, and blue floor lights–  all mixing with the outside world as I look though the window.  It is as if I am sitting outside the train on the gray seat, moving along fast, meeting oncoming cars on a frontage road next to the tracks.  There are distant red lights outside atop radio towers in the cobalt night, and we speed past dark patches, which are woods, broken by an occasional yellow house light emerging between the black patches.  There is the solid backdrop of dark trees and dark gray Minnesota night sky, then a few individual houses with single porch lights, then another black patch of trees, then, as if a miracle, a small town emerges, carved out of the forest with streets and cars going all directions, and empty parking lots with black asphalt surfaces wet from rain, lamp poles spaced evenly.  These are towns which have mainly gone to sleep, families snug in their unlit northern houses.  As we move along the tracks, the lights of the village fade behind, leaving a necklace of white dots spread through the night in the distance.  The horn blows a quick farewell.  The small town was a miracle, symbolizing life, saying you are not alone in the night.  People and nature can exist together as in the stone age.  All is as it should be.  Ahead, in the distance lie the high buildings of St. Paul, the elegant city of Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Cass Gilbert, Elmslie and Purcell, and Summit Avenue.

I am left with an appreciation of the north, Minnesota to Montana, beautiful lands, nostaligic under balmy skies with heavy, moist air, lush and green with cool blue evenings, wild birds, lakes, rivers, and nature, empty space, small farm towns, red brick buildings, blond girls straight out of Scott Fitzgerald standing at the railroad crossing in Fargo, men wearing light jackets on June evenings, white wood-framed houses with porches and gardens, plus the feeling of  being north.   The passengers on the train add to the aura:  Montana and Dakota small town people, sons and daughters of Scandinavian immigrants like my Uncle, strong people who survive in a tough area.

Chicago

I enjoy my first morning in Chicago, walking the downtown streets between Union Station and the Art Institute, and riding the “El,” the elevated subway, over the streets and between great early modernist buildings like Daniel Burnham’s steel framed Reliance Building and Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott and Auditorium buildings.  The second morning, I take the Red Line to the suburb of Oak Park, a combination of Prairie architecture, gilded age Victorians, and bungaloes.   I walk to the World War I memorial, a bronze statue of a “Doughboy” with Springfield rifle, long bayonet, leggings, and British tin saucer helmet.  The base includesa list of boys from Oak Park who fell in the Great War, reminding me that given the number years involved, World War I was costlier than World War II.  I walk on to the Hemingway Museum, formerly a Christian Science church, which is a bit run down but has great content.  The museum divides Hemingway’s life into phases, early Michigan, 1920s Paris, 1930s Key West, 1940s Cuba, 1950s Idaho, etc.  There are, glass panels hanging from the ceiling, with passages from his novels etched on them.  From Islands in the Stream aboard the Pilar: “he was happy again to be on the flying bridge…”  From For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan telling Maria she can’t stay with him to block the fascist patrol when he is gravely wounded: “Nay Rabbit, listen…”  From A Farewell to Arms, the hospital scene with Catherine in the Swiss hospital where she is in labor: “she can not die, but what if she does.”  And, the last paragraphs from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” where the white hunter with gangrene is in the plane going to Nairobi, and looks out at the peak of Kilimanjaro, and knows that is where he is really going.  He won’t make it to Nairobi.  There is also a wonderful film documentary of Hemingway’s life, with interviews of dos Passos, Hadley, Pauline, and even Agnes von Kurowski, his nurse/love in Milan in World War I.  You can’t get the film anywhere else.  It was grandfathered in over objections of Hemingway’s family.  The bookstore sells photos of Hem with his favorite cat, Boise, one of which now sits in my study.  Glass cases in the museum contain his original typed manuscripts, edited in pencil.  He didn’t need to do a lot of editing, despite what he said.

From the Hemingway Museum, I make my way afoot on my own Frank Lloyd Wright tour.  I pass street after street of beautiful Victorian Queen Annes with carved filagree, towers, bay windows, and wrap around porches.  I finally begin my Wright tour with Unity Temple, on the corner of Kenilworth and Lake, built in 1905.   Modernist and the first major building made of concrete, it stands clearly apart from the nearby Victorians.  What a statement it must have made in the era of horse and buggy, being geometric, cubist, and unpainted, a church no less.   Plain on the outside,  just a few carvings on the concrete walls for decoration.  Derided at the time as a “Mayan Handball Court,”  it, nonetheless, had great effect on the European modernists, Oud, Mies, LeCorbusier, and Gropius.  Inside, it is a typical Wright jewel, with Arts and Crafts designs, colors of nature, a coffered ceiling which lets light in, plus amber and green clerestory windows high up, everything geometrically connected, combining art and craft.

Leaving Unity Temple, I walk down Lake and take a right onto Forest Avenue, encountering the first Wright “Prairie House,” the 1901 Frank Thomas House, known as “the Harem,” low and horizontal, with hipped roof, Sullivanesque arched doorway, and smooth stucco finish.  Its green wooden trim and  banks of art glass windows run the length of the house and separate the levels.  I stand there on the street admiring it, knowing its significance and that it is still being lived in.  A couple of blocks further down Forest, and I take right turn on a cul de sac, Elizabeth Court, to see the 1904 Laura Gale House, a bit smaller and with squares rather than rectangles thrown together in a more complex pattern than with other Prairie Houses, and with cantilevered balconies extending out, the model for the larger “Fallingwater” to come years later.  Just beyond, on Forest, is Wright’s house and studio, and museum.  I backtrack two houses to my favorite Prairie house, the 1902 Heurtley House, made of alternating horizontal layers of contrasting bricks, which blend together at a distance, giving the house a rusty sandstone quality.  It, too, has the Sullivan arched brick door, which Wright would later abandon, and the usual bands of stained art glass windows, low pitched roofs, and concrete capings.  I have been inside, on a Wright Plus tour, but it is the outside which I love the most.  Next, I turn left onto Chicago Avenue for deep dish pizza, then back onto Kenilworth going past Hemingway’s boyhood home, where he lived from age 7 to 18, when he left home to become a reporter in Kansas City.  On East Avenue, I stop to view  the 1901 Fricke and 1903 William Martin houses, tan and white stucco, respectively, with wood trim, a combination of intersecting, sliding horizontal planes, with a few vertical planes thrown in, and with wooden mullioned banks of art glass windows.  I finish with the 1902 square patterned, brick, almost hidden, Cheney House.  I  then take a taxi to the neighboring suburb, River Forest, to see the prototype of the Prairie House, the 1893 William Winslow House, a beautiful golden brick jewel, with stone facade surrounding the front door and stone bands surrounding the windows, and with a brown terra cotta band with floral shapes for the entire second story above the brick, underneath a tall, overhanging, hipped roof.  How appropriate that Warren Winslow should have such a dream house, since he was Wright’s collaborator, constructing iron gratings and other artistic items designed for Wright.

The following day, I take the El downtown to the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, taking my time, going slowly through the halls.  I particularly enjoy the artifacts from Chicago architecture of the late 1800s, the iron work screens and elevator doors with cast iron foliage patterns from Louis Sullivan’s buildings, plus Sullivan’s Arch preserved in the courtyard.  I enjoy seeing the craft of Wright’s assistants:  Marion Mahoney’s art glass windows, Ionelli’s angular sculptures of spirits, or “sprites,” reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” characters, Elmslie and Purcell’s wooden furniture, horizontal in design and of light polished oak.  I drift into the Asian Collection, and am overwhelmed by the Chinese works, the blue undercoated Ming porcelain, the thin jade burial ovals, and the Buddhist stone votive, of gray marble, twelve feet long, eight feet high, and two feet in width, with stories carved onto it in rows, Egyptian style, dated about 551 A.D., the highlight of the Art Institute for me.  There is the T.T. Tsoi Gallery of Ming dynasty silk screens, with their drawings of brightly colored birds, leaves, and people dressed in long purple robes.  Such screens were used outdoors by the gentry to block the wind, the exhibit says.

I make a few new personal discoveries.  These include Richard Berthe’s sculpture, particularly his glossy black bronze work entitled “The Boxer,” thin and elongated, dated 1942.  The second is George Hitchcock, who did a painting called “The Annunciation,” 1887, of a girl in a field of lillies.  It had a pre-Raphaelite quality, even with a thin halo above the girl’s head.  He also did a painting of a Dutch girl on a canal, with cream and cheese pots balanced over her shoulders.  He was one of those American artists who benefitted from post Civil War prosperity and traveled for inspiration, living most of his life in Amsterdam.   The classical Dutch period (1600-50) painter, Jan van Goyen, was another discovery for me.  He did a beautiful seascape, “Fishing Boats off an Estuary” with low horizon, monochromatic palette showing smoke, a tan sail, birds, and sky and sea almost blurred in their grayness.  Saw a Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who I had encountered before, “Lady in Green and Gray,” 1911, again monochromatic.

Among my favorites in the Museum were Gustave Caillebote’s “Paris in the Rain,” 1877, the centerpiece of the Impressionist gallery, and Rembrandt’s “Man with a Golden Chain,” 1631, the finest Rembrandt I have seen anywhere, with his craggy partially illuminated face, black gown, gray neck armor and gold necklace, and dignified background going from light to dark gray.  In the same area was a Rembrandt School painting of a young Dutch country girl with brown dress and red necklace standing behind an open half door.  The inscription says of the painting: “otherwise the same as Rembrandt, but lacks the grandeur.” That is how they determined it was not done by Rembrandt, but one of his Leiden students.  Next in my order of favorites was Alfred Sisley’s “View of the Seine,” with sand hills in the background and light blue river; Renoir’s “Two Sisters,” with the same sisters, one a child, in Manet’s “Gare St. Lazare,” (with puppy) that I have always loved; Monet’s “Women on the Seine,” with Camille and her baby in a basinette, her in broad striped blue and white dress and with buildings across the river reflected on the surface; Berthe Morrisot’s “Woman at her Toilette,” seated in front of a mirror, applying makeup, her back to us, all in white; Winslow Homer’s “Peach Blossoms; Whistler’s large serene portrait of his friend, Arthur Jerome Eddy, in grays and his “Nocturne in Blue and Gold,” with the shapes of ships barely visible in he mist of the Southampton Canal, clouds and smoke mixed, and a small gold disc of a hazy moon; John Singer Sergeant’s impressionistic portraits in white, in the tropics, informal setings, with light and shadows, one of Charles Deering, 1917.  There are good Georgia O’Keefe’s, Abiquiu sand hills before green mesas, bold greens; and Daniel Chester French’s small, but wonderful statue of Abraham Lincoln, standing and thinking with head down.

For the trip back home, I rent a car, driving west to Delevan, Wisconsin, a midwestern version of a New England small town.  From there I make it to Owatonna, Minnesota, where I visit Louis Sullivan’s Farmers and Merchants Bank, 1908, beautiful interior with terra cotta murals, cast iron vegetation decoration, sky lights above, and a large green art glass windows all around, high up, casting a green glow out onto the street at night.  From the street, the bank is a palette of green glass, terra cota, burgundy brick, and bronze trim.

On the freeway, I listen to an audio tape of “Anna Karenina,” as I enjoy the flat landscape.  A red sky dusk is replaced by a full moon peeking through an overcast night.  I love driving the interstate at night.  White headlights, with orange lights above them, outline the silhouettes of 16 wheelers coming from the opposite direction.  Green and white road signs pop up at intervals, on overpasses.  There are occasional lights off to the sides in the distance.  Radio towers, red lit. Even in the dark and overcast, you can see a glimmer of light to the south, a light gray haze.  Perhaps Iowa is not overcast.  As I drive into South Dakota night, I switch to the 1960s music station.  Each song brings back memories of places and time.  Bobby Vinton reminds me of El Paso in the early 1960s, the Dave Clark Five of Ft. Ord in California, the Righteous Brothers of Roswell High School.  The night reception is crystal clear, like KOMA of my college years, driving nights like this between Lubbock and Roswell.

The next day I am between Sioux Falls and Rapid City, on I-90.  I pull over atop an overpass on the interstate, and turn off the car engine to enjoy the view.  The wind is whipping the car.  You can hear it pounding against the side.  I am watching billowy pipelines of clouds in rows, moving fast, in formation, to the southeast.  This is wild country, sparsely populated.  A red Dodge pickup passes me up on the overpass.  Other pick ups with trailers and 16 wheelers are running on the interstate below, working trucks, but new.  You hear the tires first.  The gray clouds above are now turning lavender gray, and I am reminded what a beautiful orb the Earth is.  As I pull out, the sun is shining through the clouds, the wind is blowing through the grasses, the trucks are rumbling below, the wind is rushing, and high above is a blue sky, above the layers of clouds.

As I pass through South Dakota Badlands, there are beautiful black mounds all around, like Rwandan coffee hills, often a darker greenish-khaki color like Indian Army uniforms. Ahead, in Wyoming, new land is emerging, with fewer clouds, more mesas, shorter grass, and silver-domed mountains in the background.  Fourteen miles south of Sheridan, Wyoming, where my maternal grandparents were married in 1919,I can see teal-colored pine forests running to the West, towards Montana.  The land is more undulating and the hills more conical, like foothills, as I head north towards Custer Country, the Little Big Horn, and Billings.  The evening sun creates pink skies under a light blue dome.  At a small farm, painted horses are running to feed in their corrals.  The other horses in the corral turn their backs to a cold wind that has come up.  The highway is distinctive Wyoming, red clay, like French Open tennis courts.  Ahead, a gray cloud covers the sky like a large blanket, but off to the west, the sky is blue.  I realize I have been under a canopy of big sky all day, through South Dakota and Wyoming, desolate, a lone traveler on the sphere from Chicago to Sheridan, crossing the northern plains for two great days.   It is dark as I cross the Montana boundary.  I look forward to the drive: Billings and great trout and river country, passing Big Timber, Livingston, Bozeman, all magical, with roads leading south to Red Lodge, the Beartooth and Absoroka Mountains,  and Paradise Valley, also magical.

I am listening to the audio tape of Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy understands human emotions so well.  His description of Anna when she is first introduced, meeting Vronsky on the train at the provincial station stop is masterly, her warmth coming from her face, her nature overcoming her reserve, her ability to resolve the broken marriage of her brother, knowing what to say, her inner thoughts right on the mark.  And, Tolstoy’s animals are great.  His Laska, Levin’s faithful dog in Karenina, is a joy, lying down with his head on Stephan’s shoe when he visits getting his gums rearranged around his teeth, then settling in and falling asleep.   When setting out bird hunting, pulling everything together, Laska was so excited that he ran around licking everyone, even the guns.  Levin and Stephan take a pause after shooting and talk, but Laska looks up at the sky and perks his ears, as if to reproach them for not paying attention to the hunt. And there is Fru Fru, Vronsky’s gray mare, who ran the steeple chase.  You feel the nervousness of the horse, flaring her nostrils and poking her lead foot on the straw, and the “blood” which is important in breeding and racing,  Tolstoy has a total understanding of horses, describing the way Fru Fru tries to get up after breaking her back, falling  back and burying her nose in the ground and looking knowingly at Vronsky with her eyes.  She tried to rise, but could get only her two front legs up.  Anna Karenina is interesting for its romance and its Nineteenth Century Russian history lesson, showing Russian peasantry becoming more disgruntled.  Levin in a 19th Century liberal, and dislikes “speculators,” who are not merchants.  There are other lessons from Tolstoy.   Kitty, the youngest daughter, jilted by Vronsky, realizes while recuperating in Germany that it is better to think only of others, not of one’s self, to devote yourself to helping others.  And Anna offers some insights, too, telling her brother that “it is never too late to mend, an English saying.”  Things can, she says, usually be reversed for the better.   These are good lessons for anyone driving along life’s highway.   I am thinking of home and the macaroon cookies at the Wheat Bakery near Three Forks on the way. (2011)