November 18th

This morning I had breakfast with my father, as we have been doing together since August of last year, when I moved into Grand Avenue in St. Paul. He paid for breakfast, as he has been doing for a long time. Even back as a kid, we would go to breakfasts together after church once in a while. Meg's Last Chance Cafe in Stillwater, on the corner of Main and Mulberry, which was the video arcade, before being made into Meg's last chance Cafe, was one of our favorite spots, also The Main Street Cafe, The Oasis, Savories and Perkins.
These days, here in St. Paul, we have been going to The St. Clair Broiler, Trotters, Coffee News Cafe and The Neighborhood Cafe next door to Cahoots on Selby Avenue. There is something nice about sitting down every friday and hashing over some old topics, and having the chance to catch up with my dad, who spent his career as a physicist for 3M, developing data storage techniques in a research department, (think tank), which eventually made computer data storage what it is today. Believe it or not, I don't care. I enjoy breakfast.
Today we talked about a book I had just finished reading, called River-Horse, about a man who travels from the Eastern coast of the Contiguous United States, through rivers and channels all of the way to the Pacific ocean, out of the Columbia river in Washington / Oregon. I wrote a review of it on Goodreads, and will link a copy of that review to this page. My dad's passions have always been bicycling, sailing, coaching and community involvement.

I have this memory, of playing soccer on one of my dad's VAA teams.

Another kid my age, named Toby, had a father who was a coach. Thobias, as I will call him now out of respect, and I knew each other all through high school. He was the Lemmon to my Matheau. For every effort I made to excel at music or soccer, Thobias was there, seemingly infinitely more capable of success and focused thinking than I. Anyway, Thobias's father was also a coach, and apparently didn't speak a word of English. Even during the game, he's standing on the sideline, screaming at Thobias in German...we were probably 10 or 11 years old, and for some reason the game carried a weight to it, even then. This foreigner was trying to beat my dad! I remember losing the game on a penalty kick - I was the goalie. Thobias actually scored the winning goal and strategized the screen play that made a quick penalty shot into what would forever stand in my mind as an astute play. I told my defense to make a five man wall, to help shield part of the goal. Thobias in turn, added three or four of his own players, to screen my vision of the shot. I never saw the penalty kick, just the ball going into the net.

This was 25 years ago.

This morning, my dad picks me up at nine in the morning, takes me to breakfast and tells me he still hasn't read his own copy of Cadillac Desert, which I read eight years ago. I tried to explain once, to a friend, the difference between a mountain and a river, from an allegorical perspective. One is defined by its obstinate lack of change, the other by its constant evolution - in that disparity are eons of erosion and flow, but little room for lack of definition.

Anyway, here's my review of River-Horse. A little Passage to Juneau, a little Cadillac Desert.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Passage to Juneau had many of the same sentiments as this book. William Least Heat-Moon captures a quick summation from one of the strangers he encounters, "When a man takes to the road, he is running away from something. When a woman takes to the road, she is looking for something." While he tracks a course through the Midwest, having started from the East Coast of America, carrying a liter of the Atlantic ocean in a mason jar, William Least Heat Moon seems intent on holding himself to some ideal. He briefly mentions two marriages, as though the loss of those is not as important as the quest he imperils himself upon. Passage to Juneau frequently speaks of the author's distress and heartbreak, and occasionally allusions can be made to the sailing habits and the emotional status of the author. Taking port in a storm, as it were. The intent of that novel, it seems, is an attempt by the author to re-establish his sense of competence and self-worth in the aftermath of losing his wife. River-Horse, in turn, seems less involved in the sociological well being of William Least Heat-Moon, and more involved in describing the accomplishment of a goal.

To that end, I don't think Least Heat-Moon was specifically running away from anything so much as he was swimming upriver for the challenge it represented. After dumping his liter of the Atlantic ocean into the Pacific, he announces the journey complete, and turns his boat back East; considering the thousands of miles and hundreds of strangers he meets along the way, the ending seems anti-climactic.



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