Jay Wrote

Public Transit in Chile Maicolpue is a Pacific beach fewer forty miles from the regional transportation center of Osorno.   However, it takes nearly an hour and a half to drive from Osorno to the family friend’s vacation cabin hunkered on the low hills overlooking a crescent of sand.   Osorno sits   on a plain amongst lakes, rivers and just west of the volcanoes in southern Chile.   At Maicolpue, the low coast range   blocks the otherwise dominating view of Mt. Osorno, one of many snow-capped volcanic cones in this section of the Andes.   You can get a bus to Maiculpe and beyond. It was May, November-equivalent for northern hemisphere, few of these middle-class summer cabins were in use this season.   Two yellow boats with anchors,   empty gas cans, compressors and long unruly coils of plastic tubing had been deserted far up onto the beach.   Worked so hard by the divers - likely poachers of locos, abalone-like mollusks, the wood...

“WELL REGULATED”,   A Report From The Minnesota Gun Rights Rally Spray painted in fluorescent green on two sides of a cardboard sign, “WELL REGULATED”.   I took that message to the pro gun rally on March 31st   at the Capitol in St. Paul.   I chose these Second Amendment words a week after the youth-led rally of up to 20,000 (my guess was there were 10 or 15,000, but who really knows) demanded an end to gun violence and legal action to limit the ever-increasing number of deadly weapons in the U.S..   This Saturday the winds were moderate and the temperature a few degrees higher than the cold march a week before.   I walked up the mall past a car with an InfoWars bumper sticker towards the Capitol steps arriving just after the rally got underway.   I thought gun control advocates would be on the sidelines wearing orange t-shirts and holding signs to assert rights of safety, children’s education and freedom from fear.   But I saw no...

48 Hours in Zottegem, Belgium Jay Wilkinson,   April 2018   balthazarw@gmail.com Road cycling enthusiasts and beer lovers find fulfillment in the Flemish Ardennes with classic cobbles, climbs, and ales.   Zottegem is a town of 25,000 less than 45 minutes by train from the major Belgian cities of Ghent and Brussels.   If you’ve read up on Belgium, you may know that there are two major languages: French in the south (Wallonia) and Flemish, a form of Dutch, in the Flemish north.   But your high school French will do you no good in Zottegem, although it is only 10 miles from the border with Wallonia.  I learned that the Flemish will go across the globe to help others, but still roll their eyes about the backwards Walloons. English is the second language in Flanders.   We prefer to travel with our own fitted bikes on the back of a rental car, settle in one place for a few days of cycling and then drive onto a new destination.   Airl...

Midtown Greenway Guide The trees along   the river gorge are leafless this time of year.   Chances are good you can catch the white flash of a bald eagle perched in splendor.   West River Road north of Lake Street is the terminus of the Midtown Greenway.   The Greenway is a path dedicated to cycle and pedestrian, stroller and rollerblader, runner and wheeler running westward from the Mississippi to the Chain of Lakes and another pathway that continues to the Depot in Hopkins.   At Hopkins, about twelve miles out, pavement turns to crushed limestone path which you can follow all the way to Chaska and the Minnesota River. If needing fortification, there is no better place to start than The Birchwood Cafe, about two block north of the Greenway and   five from the River.   High class counter service with an excellent selection of entrees, salads, baked goods and the like.   Beer and wine for a recovery stop at the end of the ride.  ...

Pech Merle in France, Where Gods Were Invented.   Jay Wilkinson, May 2018  Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.    H.L. Mencken   In the caves of Lascaux, I’ve heard, the Aurignacian  Men and women took leave of the other animals,  a trauma t hey tried to lessen by painting the animal spirits.                      “No Matter What, and After All, and That Beautiful Word So" Hayden Carruth In southwestern France, in the Department of the Lot, east of the Dordogne, the Cele River flows three seasons of the year. In the summer it burbles only here and there while making its way to join the River Lot at Bouzies. At this junction of the two rivers and two roads, a bar-restaurant is A Vendre (For Sale.) Shall I stake my retirement account here? We have taken the less-traveled road again...

So What Worship and The Atheist-Agnostic Monarch Conundrum So What Miles Davis’ solo in ‘Round Midnight , piercing and quiet against sophisticated fills by Red Garland (p), Philly Jo Jones (d), Paul Chambers (b). The trumpet rings out… do I hear spit skitter across the horn’s bell? John Coltrane (ts) and Julian “Cannonball” Adderly (as) trade solos; the faint echoes following their lines rise and retreat depending on the direction the saxes swung towards in that corner of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in 1959 NYC. Next, on to So What , with Bill Evans: piano and James Cobb: drums from Kind of Blue , recorded a few years earlier. One of humanity’s greatest achievements. I cannot describe the creativity, teamwork, concentration and completeness that make up these blues and ballads and other iterations of America’s classical music - jazz. According to the Kind of Blue album notes by Bill Evans, “Miles conceived these settings only hours before … you will hear something close ...

I am hauling out boxes and binders of Americana Family history, collected and created by my mother. In my youth, she and her mother discussed the who’s who and The when and where of the Walkers, Dukes, the Johnsons and the Abbotts. In Salem, they were the convicted witches and their accusers. The first Duke Vermonter, reported Ruth, came over from Quebec in a hay wagon, A Huguenot, a “French Jew” she said, who dodged the pitch-forks of the revenuers. On the dining room table, tintypes, daguerreotypes, faded paper portraits from St. Johnsbury studios. Yellowed newspaper clippings -- death notices and 95th birthday celebrations, poorly afixed in notebooks with deteriorating cellophane tape. In my boxes now, my mother’s handwritten family trees on pre-printed pedigree charts. She invented her own cross-referencing system and squeezed in irresistable details. “Nathan Hanson. In Capt. Sam Runnel’s Co. of Col. Mooney’s Regiment, NH defense of RI, Rev. War. A private.” C...