McKusick Road Blues

Today, as I was driving home from skiing (three pairs of gloves, two each of hat and sock!), I drove down McKusick road. It passes trees, a few houses with garages and snowmobiles and piles of chopped wood between trees, like little hammocks, a marsh of just ice and headless cattails, some thickets of brush. It climbs and dips a little, perhaps clambering over a glacial moraine or a tiny, immature volcano, waiting to burst.

I've been down McKusick road before. We usually take it to descend into the St. Croix River valley on summer afternoons.

I wished that instead of leading me back to White Bear Lake, and my house, and a State of the Union address, that it lead me into a small New England village, with a square, and a trout brook, taverns, maybe a small house in the woods, mine, where I could chop my own wood and rake the leaves and stones.

White Bear Lake, I'm leaving you soon, to drive again all over the west, to ride my bike the preposterous distance of 2,000 miles in five weeks, to camp the whole time and probably be wet and cold, potentially miserable. I'm not going to find a little village, no squares or little brooks. Just big rivers and big mountains and a whole lot else.

I baked whole wheat bread when I got home. It took hours. The rising was slow. It's cooling in the kitchen, and will go great with almond peach jam that I made this fall out in Utah. I'm eating bread tomorrow in the morning and will wishing the windchill wasn't so below zero. Little New England brook, you'd be frozen through and through.

Be good to yourselves.