Journal Entries

Dustin Solberg spent June 13-July 13, 2006 on retreat at the Yurt. Dustin completed a Master’s in Biology at the University of North Dakota and is continuing a career in environmental writing and journalism. In 200-2001, Dustin lived and worked with the family of Salome and Dina Lucas on the family farm in the highlands of Guatemala as part of the Young Adult Volunteers Program of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Prior to his mission work in Guatemala, Dustin worked as a carpenter at Holden Village, the ecumenical retreat center in Washington State; wrote for two newspapers in the American West, and graduated from the University of Montana. He lives in his hometown of Grand Forks, ND, where he serves as co-chair of a local environmental group, Grand Forks County Prairie Partners. Dustin enjoys bird watching, skiing, canoeing and hiking.

Summer at the Yurt in 2006

by Dustin Solberg

Dustin's Journal Entries:

• Final Note
• Wednesday, July 12, 2006
• Monday, July 10, 2006
• Monday, July 3, 2006
• Sunday, July 2, 2006
• Saturday, July 1, 2006
• Thursday, June 22 , 2006
• Wednesday, June 21, 2006
• Tuesday, June 20, 2006
• Monday, June 19, 2006
• Saturday, June 17, 2006
• Friday, June 16, 2006
• Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Final Note

When I was first planning this retreat at MICAH, I looked at the calendar with some worry, because the month I was setting aside seemed an awfully long time, to live alone, in a landscape mostly empty of people, in a yurt just eight yards across. I'd had a lot of questions about how the living would be out here, and about the loneliness that would, I thought, inevitably come to a person staying alone as I have. To stave off the loneliness that I thought would come, I thought, I'd invite plenty of guests: on a regular basis, someone new could come out for a visit, perhaps a simple dinner prepared on the two-burner gas stove I brought along. And I brought a stack of books, to keep me occupied during the long days of this northern summer. I see now, as I begin to pack up the books and the canned goods I brought out here nearly a month ago, that the expanse of time I'd feared was nothing to fear at all. It became, in fact, a gift.

Loneliness and boredom didn't creep into my days as I'd thought they might. And so while there were a few guests, and these visits were appreciated and I will savor the remembrance of the uncluttered time we had together here, the social calendar was less cluttered than I'd first planned. And while I did plenty of reading (Thomas Merton; a thrilling novel by Cormac McCarthy; "Hannah Coulter," by Wendell Berry; a number of contemporary poets) and the reading of scripture is a part of my practice here, a number of books were never touched. There was simply too much happening -- too much silence, watching, exploring -- for time to busy myself with books. This has been a place and a time apart, to be sure, but I don't want to give the impression that it has been pure solitude. I have tended to a few matters on the phone from the yurt, where my new cell phone will usually function. And there have been occasions to drive into the nearby towns of Crookston and Grand Forks. This is to say that the loose model for this time apart is somewhere between that of those true hermits, the desert fathers of fourth century Egypt, and the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who's shack lay just a couple miles from the town of Concord, allowing him to host gatherings so large that there weren't enough chairs for his guests. (Such has never been the case here, and I have eight chairs. I don't know about the number of H.D.T.'s chairs.) The gift of a time and a space apart, once I settled into it and found it mostly comfortable, is one I can recommend. And I think we owe it to ourselves to take the ideas of retreat and spiritual practice seriously.

This time has helped me listen to the quiet voice of the One who is always present but cannot be heard in the perfunctory manner in which we reserve space for God in our lives, if we go even that far. And while the ability to be intentional about developing a spiritual practice when deadlines do not call us away, or hasten our prayers, or obfuscate the voice that calls us, may seem an impractical luxury, it is more a necessity for us all if we are to wipe clean the mussed slate. Then we can begin to discern the purer etchings awaiting us. I am thankful for the opportunity to be a part of the community at First Presbyterian Church, in Crookston, Minn., where MICAH is a mission project. I have felt their care and their prayers and I have appreciated my time in worship and fellowship with its members. Together with them, in the sharing of scripture, prayers of the people, music, and, of course, coffee and cookies, I have felt something of what is meant by the beloved community. Conversations and gatherings with a number of MICAH folk have been encouraging and have been an important part of my community here. The house of Dan and Debra and Sam and Max has been a welcoming home away from home. Trey and Corrine have shared their home and hospitality, as well, on the most lovely summer evenings you would ever care to imagine. And, lastly, Dan has been a gracious and helpful friend and teacher. Thank you to all.

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Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Today is a very hot day. I have spent some of the heat of the day in the shade of the tall cottonwoods and willows down in the dry coulee, and I've found it to be a very comfortable place despite the 90 degree heat. This copse is alive in the morning with birdsong. Lately, I've been paying particular attention to the song of the catbird -- I think it improvises -- when it perches on a tall willow snag. Later on, I sat at a corner table in the cool of a downtown coffee shop in the town of Crookston, and, for the first time in a while, watched the bustling at a busy intersection, such as it is, of a small town. I was reminded of Thomas Merton and his epiphany on that street corner in Louisville, Ky., in his book, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." I have no epiphanies to report from my time at the bustling street corner, but there was much to observe, most notably one very old man who shuffled across the street when the light flashed "walk." He was a thin man, wearing old but not disheveled clothes and wearing brown leather shoes without laces that might have been slippers. He walked into a very old downtown brick building, carrying a humongous bouquet of purple gladiolas.

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Monday, July 10, 2006

There is a ragged bank at the bend in the river where the bank swallows build their nests. To go near them is to watch a cloud of swooping flight, erupting as they fly from the little holes they excavate, and then line with grass, even though they seem ill-equipped for earth moving. Swallows are certainly well-designed for flight -- to watch them for a moment is to know this -- and I marvel, with some disbelief, all the more at how they tunnel into the bank in the spring. Yet the proof is there in the clay bank. For such a streamlined bird to carve out a burrow as any badger would; this seems outrageous to me, akin to a jet crafting its own hangar. Yet the swallow somehow performs this task, and I don't know. Where I've been staying, on a bench above the river and the old oxbow, I will sometimes see the swallows overhead. I've come to recognize their chittering, in fact, because they so frequently congregate in that big open space that stretches up and up into the blue above. And while they are sometimes close, hovering not far above the roof of the yurt, I sometimes see them high up where it's hard to imagine them finding many winged insects. But how am I to now? When have I hovered a thousand feet above, an eye toward finding mosquitoes or the day's mayfly hatch? And perhaps a swallow flies not only when its offspring are hungry, but when it simply feels like soaring? It is not unreasonable to assume that birds play. I once watched a good number of loons gather on a lonely northwoods lake in much the same way I used to watch older boys hang out on Main Street in my grandparents' little town on summer evenings. They would shout and rev their engines and generally carry on, and the loons I watched on one particular night in the Boundary Waters, many years ago now, were doing essentially the same. Just as any small town Main Street might become a drag strip, so too a lonely lake in the northwoods in August. In my time here, I've spent a lot of time watching birds. Almost never with binoculars, and not necessarily setting out to watch them. Here the birds are constant companions. MICAH is set at a particularly interesting place on earth: here is where the northwoods and the prairie meet at a bend in the Red Lake River. This means that the birds of the grasslands, the sparrows and bobolinks, are to my right when the forest birds, the catbird and woodpeckers, are to my left. Down at the river, I see geese and ducks wading in the shallows of the sandbars and little sandpipers along the muddy bank. They all meet here, and this is only the most brief of lists.

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Monday, July 3, 2006

A half-dozen sesame seeds were left on my table after lunch one day. I brushed them into my cupped hand and tossed them out the door. Today, I noticed one of the birds with whom I share this patch of grass foraging in that very place. Those sesame seeds had come from crackers and, as you can tell by my sweeping them off the table, meant so little to me that I am surprised I even remember them at all. But to that little sparrow, which weighs less than even my little finger, the oil and carbohydrate contained in those seeds must comprise an amount that if not substantial is at least worth adding to their never-ending meal. I'm certain that these sparrows are of the grass nest they built here in the shadow of this yurt before I moved in. As neighbors, we are like the elephant and the mouse. They flush hurriedly if I so much as look their way when they're near (which is often) and I am endlessly amused by their miniature antics of foraging for insects and seeds, alighting on my boots or camp stove, or buzzing in song from atop a stout blade of grass.

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Sunday, July 2, 2006

My friend Eric came out today and we spent the afternoon searching for raspberries in the woods. Perhaps it was presumptuous on my part, but I brought along containers that would have allowed us to carry home two quarts. We walked to the far patch of the forest and scoured it, all the while hopeful that we would find more of the raspberries that I'd found just
a few days before. On that day, I ate three, the first of the season. Well, Eric and I walked for quite some time through the most dense forest and in the sunlit patches, too, and after the first hour, I had found as many woodticks as raspberries: two. We did nibble on a few gooseberries, but I think there is something to kitchen table wisdom: gooseberries are for pies, and not so much for eating in the woods. In time, after we'd left the first patch of woods hungry, thirsty and sweaty, having given up on the berry picking, we ambled through a different patch of woods following a new prayer trail where we found what we had quit searching for: a picture-book raspberry patch. Here, we picked raspberries for fifteen minutes or so, just eating, and we walked back with fingers stained red.

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Saturday, July 1, 2006

This evening as the sun was dipping below the horizon I pedaled my bike on the gravel road running due north from here. It's an inviting road, one of those that I'm usually too busy to travel. In Minnesota, roads that don't get much gravel are labeled "minimum maintenance." For some, that's an invitation. I hadn't expected to go far, maybe a mile or two before turning around and coming home. But the going was easy and the road remained inviting and so I continued to pedal, stopping on occasion when the remarkable appeared, as is won't to happen around here when I explore. First, a prairie-nesting bird called the short-eared owl appeared almost directly overhead, hovering with occasional wingbeats, probably a nundred feet above. Then its mate appeared, though it was hunting, soaring low, banking to and fro in that unmistakable way that they do. One of them even "barked," the rare and I think surprising sound that careful listeners will sometimes hear -- it's a sure sign that the young are near. There was also a pair of sandhill cranes, which flew off, bugling their consternation, towards a setting sun. So a jaunt to watch the sunset became a bike ride into the early, soft dark of dusk.

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Thursday, June 22, 2006

When I was leaving the farm in Guatemala after some time volunteering, my companion and brother there, victor, invited me for a send-off, or, in Spanish, what's called a despedida. We gathered not at his home up the hill, where he tends a lovely and somewhat wild garden of flowers, a small orchard of apple trees, and a couple of beehives, but up in the woods so beloved to Victor, where there are still big oaks with leathery leaves able to withstand a dry season that turns the old, worn-out clay underfoot into rammed-earth adobe. Birches and madronas grow there, and pines that look for all the world like the ponderosas of the Rocky Mountains.

The old-growth forest of these highlands disappears as locals looking for firewood to cook their meals cut down more trees from this commons. They enter with a horse, their bestia, and an axe of Spanish iron with a crooked handle of oak, cut from these very forests. And increasingly, those who've made a little money working mojado, bussing tables and laying sod in the Oklahoma and Florida, will, where the terrain allows, drive their four-by-four Toyotas into the forest with not an axe but a chainsaw. In this way, they collect a little more firewood for home and sell a little on the side. It's a business, and in this way they bring in some Guatemalan cash: ones, tens, twenties, fifties, and maybe even some hundreds. The hundred Quetzal bill, at that time anyway, was worth twelve dollars to you and me. So in this dwindling forest, we gathered at a spring, where Victor liked to mark special occasions.

This spring flowed into a subterranean concrete tank, which Victor and his neighbors had rigged up to capture the spring water, piping it to their farms in thin pvc pipes. This they did with shovels, stout hoes, and tin buckets, and when they were through they wrote the name of their local committee, along with the date "1,999", in the wet cement, though nothing, even if it's set in concrete, diminishes the sense that this forest is a timeless place. (Today, Victor operates a little tree nursery here, a hub of reforestaion, holding back the hands of time just a little longer.)

The spring was in a little draw, damp and green, with a small break in the canopy above. Epiphytes grew from the mossy branches of the oaks around us and a slender fern grows like a quetzal's tail. Victor's entire family came, along with Abuelita, who looked so distinguished that day, and the family's little dog, muneca. Here, we sat and ate beans and tortillas and drank soda from tin cups: Victor, his wife, and their four children were sharing from an abundance that would be invisible to many of us.

Somewhere, I have written down much of what was said that day. Sweet words, all. There was much prayer, some hymns, and also sadness because we all knew this would be a long goodbye, though I am pleased to say that I have now returned twice to visit Victor since that day. With my clunky camera, we took pictures of the despedida. And that's why I'm retelling this story, years later now. When the pictures came back from the little shop, they were all tinged with yellow, giving the photos a stark pallor that surprised me as I flipped through them. "I didn't know a camera could capture a bittersweet melancholy," I remember thinking. Today, I awoke just as the sun was rising above these Minnesota oaks, before it disappeared behind low clouds. For a few moments, everything was the same jarring yellow. Light, I have discovered, uncovers memory.

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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Like yesterday, this morning dawned cold, and refreshingly so. The constant out here is just this: cool mornings, sunny days, sunsets and sunrises that I really can't even try to explain. Last night I returned from the labyrinth late, when the last of the sunset was long gone. The labyrinth lies at the brow of the valley, beyond a copse of oaks, about a quarter-mile away. I walk along this arc between this little abode and the labyrinth a couple of times in a day, but last night it was different: All above me only a dome of stars, the Milky Way defined as clearly as on any desert night. Stars above, and fireflies--blinking, zooming -- all around.

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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Rain today, the rain that we were waiting for, so expectantly. A local biologist I ran into at the grocery store tells me that a shallow wetland she measures as part of an amphibian study was present one day and the next day gone. Today's rain was a cold, slow, lazy rain, and even inside, I bundled up against the chill. Late in the afternoon, in the heat of the late afternoon sun, I scrubbed down in 98 degree water from a simple but suprisingly satisfying solar shower that I hang off the tall roll-bar on the blue tractor. I remembered this evening that I had packed another set of small cooking pots, and so my simple one pot meals became almost as simple two pot meals. Sweet corn, with beans on the side, and a cup of tea.

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Monday, June 19, 2006

Last night I watched a couple systems of dark clouds pass overhead, but I heard no thunder and saw no lightning and, alas, no rain came. Though this river valley saw the highest flood waters of two or three generations just two months ago, today the valley is dry and in need of rain. On the edge of a field planted to sugar beets here, dirt has begun to sift like flour in
the wind and the path at the door is hard underfoot. As I look out at the river from the south window, I would guess that it must be twenty feet lower than it was on the day it crested in the spring. Here at the yurt, the living is simple by North American standards.

While the yurt is really quite comfortable, I haul my drinking water from town and there isn't really any plumbing. But simple living doesn't necessarily mean living without. By living thoughtfully, we can also live simply. We are considering the lilies of the field, and we notice that they obtain their energy from the sun. We decided to try the same. The MICAH yurt now has a very simple system of solar power, and so I am able to type this journal entry on a laptop computer and operate a reading light while remaining "off the grid" delivering electrical current.

Like just about everyone in the United States, I have almost always lived where water, wastewater, and electricity are piped in, piped out, and wired into the walls of my home. I would say that I trust a light switch almost like I trust the sunrise: In my experience, they are almost as dependable. Yet a light switch supplied with energy via the sun of today, instead of the, in essence, old sunlight of a coal-burning power plant, is actually as dependable as the sun.

This morning I was washing my breakfast dishes at the second-hand kitchen sink we put in the other day. It's a regular sink, but without a faucet, of course, and it drains only through a pipe extending through the floor. The coffee grounds clinging to the bottom of my one-cup press seemed especially stubborn and so I added perhaps a couple ounces of water from the jug sitting on the countertop. I stepped outside while I swished the water in the bottom of the little French press. Then with a quick flick of my wrist, threw the water into the grass. Almost simultaneously, a small bird, a clay-colored sparrow, to be exact, flew up from where the water had landed in the grass, just ten feet away. It seemed to be acting peculiarly -- it didn't fly away but only landed on one of last year's lingering wildflowers -- so I watched it for awhile. Then, with careful steps, I walked to the point where the bird had first flushed from the grass and pushed aside a tuft of grass. As if I had pulled a lever, four little mouths opened to the sky. I let the grass spring back, and the birds in the nests closed their gaping mouths--nestlings of this age seem more mouth than bird. A nest, just 25 feet from the wall of the yurt.

I never thought the last of my coffee grounds, nonchalantly tossed into the grass, could be so disturbing to the world outside, but maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. Our human footprint reaches farther than we think, more often than we think. It's at the micro-scale, when our daily routines turn spare and simple, that we can understand the ways in which the consequences of our behavior reach beyond ourselves.

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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Today we put three boats in the water: two kayaks and a canoe, and four of us paddled a length of the Red Lake River. It's a route I've paddled a number of times now, and every trip has been a surprising exploration into wild corridor in this farm landscape of northern Minnesota. This particular stretch, from the almost nonexistent berg of Huot to the Gentilly bridge, as it's known around here, is always a quiet run of river. It's rare to ever see another boat on the Red Lake River, and today was no exception. It was a quiet paddle. These days, the last of the cottonwood trees to let loose with their cottony seed are, well, releasing it to the wind. This means that on the river, even when the air is still, these delicate puffs of cotton float through the air like snowflakes and for a while today, all four of us (Trey, Debra, Dan, and me) glided on the river, our paddles still, watching the airborne seed float all around us, slower than snow. As we came around one gravelly point, Trey spotted a pair of spotted fawns playing on the beach. We watched them for nearly ten minutes as they seemed to pull out all the tricks in the book: butting heads, poking at one another with needly legs and sometimes just falling over, legs splayed. We also noticed that the eagle nest near the MICAH land contains two eaglets, and we could see them with the naked eye. And Trey nearly caught a swimming garder snake with his butterfly net. Then there was that rainbow that wasn't really a true rainbow, but the entire spectrum was hanging in the wisps of a cloud. It's a remarkable river, and every time I paddle it, I see something new. On my last trip, we saw a coyote running along the bank, and on a kayak paddle one year ago with Dan, we discovered a bison skull along with a number of its bones.

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Friday, June 16, 2006

A parable: A man was pulling weeds from a rocky path when he encountered a tiny seedling with delicate leaves. Because the path was to be clear and the seedling was in the path, he pulled it from the rocky soil to find its slender root had followed not a straight path to fertile soil below, but instead a hard, circuitous one of the kind that is intimated and discerned because the way is not known. Thus is the kingdom of God.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Whenever I settle into a new place, I like to take a look around. Even if I am traveling and staying for only a night, I’ve always enjoyed learning what I can from taking a walk around the neighborhood or through the countryside. These walks always seem to uncover something interesting.

On one early Sunday morning a few years ago, shortly after I had moved into my new neighborhood in Atlanta, I’d decided to go jogging and take a look around. When I did see people out in their yards, they often gave a friendly wave. Mostly, though, the streets were quiet and most of the houses were still. So still, in fact, that probably no one saw me pick up the still-loaded clip to a 44-magnum pistol that was lying in the street. I brought it home and set it on the coffee table where it was an irresistible conversation piece for my roommates and our guests. A few days later, I stopped at the local police precinct and turned it in. “Where did you find this?” an officer asked me. I pointed to the exact place on his map. He said to me, “Do me a favor; don’t go jogging over there anymore!”

On Salome and Dina’s farm in Quetzaltenango, there was plenty to see but my protective hosts were reluctant to let me walk, by myself, the trail between the farmhouse and the simple casita where I stayed. After a number of days, I was “allowed” to make the
60- second trek to my bed after dinner and wouldn’t you know it, I stumbled and fell on a plank just outside the kitchen, making all kinds of racket in the process. My hosts rushed from the kitchen, afraid that I’d hurt myself. Just as they’d feared – I seemed a helpless and delicate outsider. I learned to stay on my feet and Salome and Dina saw that I’d be alright without parental supervision.

Here on the land of MICAH, the only limits are my own; I went out on foot last evening to inventory my new surroundings, my home for the next month. Here is some of what I found:

• Gooseberries along the trail to the river, just as you climb out of the river bottom forest.
• Along the riverbank, a patch of raspberries and a gnarled, perseverant elm tree that grows down and then up out of the bank. Buried deep in the sediment, a skeleton of what was probably a buffalo.
• Rocks sufficient for a very nice fire ring.
• A monarch caterpillar.
• Across the river, a bald eagle nest, along with 2 bald eagles that flew about making a squeaky, jangly sound like none I’ve ever heard before. It was as if their wings were old rusty hinges, and their bellies full of rusty springs. Because my presence was distressing to them, I’ll avoid that stretch of the river from now on.
• Only a few wood ticks and only a few mosquitoes.
• Lovely patches of the white-flowered wood anemone and stands of lush ferns.
• Two beavers, one of which studied me intently for a couple of minutes before slipping silently beneath the river’s surface.
• A perfect walking cane, carved by the beaver or perhaps one of his cousins.
• Four Canada geese, loafing off the downstream point of the sandbar island.
• Not a single person, but a few cars passed on the Red Lake County Highway 17.
• How quickly the oak, ash and sumac sprout on fields fallowed only very recently.
• A nice stand of wild grape in the warm, cozy confines of the crumbling foundation that must once have been a small barn.
• Giant cottonwood and oak trees along the river.

Back at the yurt, after a spaghetti dinner, I watched the measured blinking of hundreds of fireflies all around, at sometime after 10 p.m. I also noticed, just a few hours after the crew had installed the walls, ceiling and dome skylight a top the yurt, six spiders and their webs ringing the skylight vent that would draw any mosquitoes back outside. In just a few hours, those spiders somehow knew to colonize this new insect corridor.

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