We moved away from the scenic North Shore of Lake Superior on October 12. Our new-built home is in Woodbury, MN east of St. Paul. The furnace works. Water pipes don’t freeze. The power company does not turn off the heat for hours for power sharing.

We missed most of the sleet and feet of snow that dumped along I-80 in January. What do you need to know about climate change? Persistence with variations. Every morning this Valentine’s Day weekend, our kitchen thermometer reads -20 F until about 10 AM. Then it warms to -1 at noon.

I don’t report daily weather observations to the National Weather Service or the Minnesota State Climatology Office. That was one of the joys of living in Northeast Minnesota for 21 years. Here in Woodbury there may be a dozen daily reporters, including one true meteorologist on our local CBS affiliate. Enough friends around the country respond to my reports on Facebook. Many of us get together on Zoom several times a week.

This post is in response to at test posting by Ryan McCarthy on Long Island. He is one of many Weather Watchers Online who have been at this for nearly thirty years.

Dave C

Ten years ago I posted “Black and White”, after Obama was elected President.  Race remains a serious issue in the next presidential election.  White supremacists occupy national political office.  

In rural Lake County, Minnesota, young leaders use conservative Christian doctrines to justify slavery and white privilege.  Baptism River Church in Finland, MN promotes inclusion of all kinds.  Independent devotional gatherings meet monthly, including my wife and I, the only Baha’is in Lake County, two Buddhists, Lutherans, and naturalists.

I read recently the Amazon ebook “Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley”,  by Christopher P. Lehman.  See below the opening summary.

“Ordinance in 1787 banned African American slavery in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, making the new territory officially “free,” slavery in fact persisted in the region through the end of the Civil War.
Slaves accompanied presidential appointees serving as soldiers or federal officials in the Upper Mississippi, worked in federally supported mines, and openly accompanied southern travelers. Entrepreneurs from the East Coast started pro-slavery riverfront communities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota to woo vacationing slaveholders.
Midwestern slaves joined their southern counterparts in suffering family separations, beatings, auctions, and other indignities that accompanied status as chattel. This revealing work explores all facets of the “peculiar institution” in this peculiar location and its impact on the social and political development of the United States.”

Interesting stories include the Lewis and Clark expedition through Indian territories to the Pacific Coast.  How Indians had never seen a black man.  How Indians from Canada came to see these travelers.  How chiefs offered their wives to produce black offspring.  But then,  the black men who followed often  were the sharpshooters who slaughtered the natives, while their white soldiers could not or would not.

Of course, we know the same politics were involved through the 1970’s, and now repeat.

How many of us does it take to promote race unity?  Equality of men and women?  One God. Youth lead the way.

June 1, 2018 was my most recent post.  My wife underwent brain surgery at University of Minnesota Hospitals, July 23, 2018.  A fellowship-trained surgeon did the work, 18 hours with his team.  The benign meningioma, shaped like a large wedge, shut off the flow of spinal fluid across the brain stem, and created its own blood supply.  Truly it was a bloody mess.  Two and a half months in three hospitals in Minneapolis and St. Paul, then another four months of outpatient therapy followed in Stillwater.

My daughter and I went apartment hunting in Woodbury, east of St. Paul, one day in early September 2018.  We found a good one just two miles from her home.  Now my wife and I look out on Jerry’s Market loading docks. Convenient walking distance for light loads. Once a week we drive from our heated underground garage, and stock up with a few things we can’t get in rural Lake County on the shore of Lake Superior.

We both have enough clinic appointments across the Twin Cities every month to keep this apartment.  We have driven nearly 500 miles in the past three weeks to and from our home at Little Marais.  We have taken first steps toward selling our home.  We have Woodbury neighborhoods in mind for a move next year.

Storms!  Three years in a row major storms on Lake Superior damaged our boathouse, always October 10-11.  This year waves  near shore estimated at 14 to 20 feet washed away more of the vegetation line.  Massive new barn doors were in place, but the storm surge washed up and under the doors, gushing water more than two feet up the sliding glass door inside. Transverse waves surged from the west and pounded under the siding.  We fixed that last week.

Before the first storm damage in October 2017, we had installed a hurricane shutter two weeks before.  A crank inside the boathouse rolled the shutter up and down.  That October 10th the shutter was down. My wife and I stood next to the boathouse watching the storm surge.  Suddenly the surge was up to our knees.  The deck in front tore away from the concrete foundation, turned 90 degrees and lodged against the volcanic bedrock.  Lucky us, it could have washed 500 feet southwest, where we found the broken steps.  Before this year’s storms, heavy concrete supports for the deck were still buried in pebbles 100 feet to the southwest.

In 2018, the October 10-11 storm sent a large rock through the hurricane shutter.  Shoved the sliding glass door inward, ripped the sheet rock off the walls each side of the door.  Was it flood water. No, we reported to our insurance agent, but 45 mph wind blew rain and spray through the open space.  Was our boat damaged?, asked the agent. No, we don’t have a boat.  My wife’s office and my art studio were in the boathouse.  We had plenty of help getting furniture carried up to our residence.

A young property manager has been doing most of the repair work.  A gentle giant, Ben,  can do heavy lifting.  This year’s storm, again we stood next to the boathouse to watch. The surge was about to carry the picnic table into the lake. Ben pulled it back 30 feet.

After the 2018 storm damage, Ben found black mold behind all of the sheet rock.  The floor joists were not green-treated.  The pink fiberglass insulation between the joists was black with mold.  The plywood flooring was ruined.  We rented a huge dumpster to haul the debris, and it stayed in the yard until June 2019.  Water will not penetrate the new plywood flooring.  All new sheet rock covers the walls.  Carpet tile will get wet, but not ruin.

Days of gale force winds this past Halloween week uprooted a huge spruce.  My wife watched from here desk chair looking out the dining room window.  At first she thought it was leaves blowing by.  No, the spruce feel across the driveway.  It had uprooted.  I called Ben, who came an hour later with a chainsaw.  Not only a fallen tree with poor root system, the tree fell against the pole next to the septic tank and broke the electrical conduit.  Where else but in rural Lake County can you call another Dave, an electrician who came within two hours and fixed the problem.

Then another Ben arrived, a Tree Service in Silver Bay we had called a few days before.  I wanted him to clear all of the spruce on the north side of our garage.  I could already see a fallen tree held up by other trees.  Ben saw that all of the offending spruce had double-split trunks, and poor root systems.  Any of those spruce would crush the garage.  $2000 will fix the problem this month.  Ben has removed trees for us twice.