Friday
Then: On the Gunflint Trail, November 2002
For those readers who count themselves as “regular guys”, what’s your reaction when I tell you that need to go on a Vision Quest after successfully battling a disease, or going through a trauma like a divorce or loss of a loved one? Are you thinking I’m some wacky New-Ager who wants you to go dance around in the woods and chant? Or, some evangelical Christian who wants you to go on a vow-of-silence retreat to a monastery and talk to Jesus? I’m neither.
I’m simply urging you to find a place to escape for three or four days where you can shut out as much of your life as possible and just think about how whatever happened to you is the best damn excuse ever for changing yourself for the better.
In my case, six months after surgery, I chose the Gunflint Lodge to fulfill a request by my healer Jon MacRae that I escape to do some work via quiet reflection about what I had been through.
My quest was to take me a cabin on a narrow lake off the famous Gunflint Trail in Northern Minnesota with Canada 500 yards away on the other shore of the lake. And the Gunflint Lodge, known for its food, was hosting the Hibernating & Feasting Weekend. Hibernating referred to the added service of delivering breakfast and lunch to your cabin.
The following is what I first wrote on November 1, 2002:
Here I am on morning one having just finished a breakfast of fresh fried walleye with homemade tartar sauce, scrambled eggs with wild rice and Monterrey Jack, and a slab of hash browns. (The hard work of writing justifies an occasional fall from the grace of a low-fat, cancer-fighting diet.)
Now shield your mind’s eye because I sit here shirtless with my stomach fuzz just beginning to fully cover my eight-inch scar extending from my navel to the netherland. The fireplace beside me is finally crackling after this lapsed boy scout cursed it for 30 minutes. And with me? Atop the dining table I pushed over next to me and under the window looking out to the lake, is a three-foot round dog bed covered with an old flannel sheet. And holding court in the middle of it is a 15-pound silky white dog, Morrie. But Morrie doesn't like to stay long on his bed. Instead he is climbing atop my head to get a better view out the window and to woof and scratch at the squirrels scampering by inches away and the birds dive bombing and bonking the glass. When he's on my head, I have to resist the urge to get up and leave this writing, so in essence he's keeping me on task.
Arriving here at the Gunflint Lodge in the afternoon yesterday, I did plunk myself into this chair and spent nearly six hours pounding out a bucket of words that seemed at the time to be the beginning of this book. Reading perhaps half of this work earlier this morning, I didn't hesitate to highlight the stuff and hit the delete key. The words were so obviously oozing from the head rather than flowing from the heart.
Can I hit the heart this weekend? I don't know, but allow me try. ¶ 1:54 PM
I’m simply urging you to find a place to escape for three or four days where you can shut out as much of your life as possible and just think about how whatever happened to you is the best damn excuse ever for changing yourself for the better.
In my case, six months after surgery, I chose the Gunflint Lodge to fulfill a request by my healer Jon MacRae that I escape to do some work via quiet reflection about what I had been through.
My quest was to take me a cabin on a narrow lake off the famous Gunflint Trail in Northern Minnesota with Canada 500 yards away on the other shore of the lake. And the Gunflint Lodge, known for its food, was hosting the Hibernating & Feasting Weekend. Hibernating referred to the added service of delivering breakfast and lunch to your cabin.
The following is what I first wrote on November 1, 2002:
Here I am on morning one having just finished a breakfast of fresh fried walleye with homemade tartar sauce, scrambled eggs with wild rice and Monterrey Jack, and a slab of hash browns. (The hard work of writing justifies an occasional fall from the grace of a low-fat, cancer-fighting diet.)
Now shield your mind’s eye because I sit here shirtless with my stomach fuzz just beginning to fully cover my eight-inch scar extending from my navel to the netherland. The fireplace beside me is finally crackling after this lapsed boy scout cursed it for 30 minutes. And with me? Atop the dining table I pushed over next to me and under the window looking out to the lake, is a three-foot round dog bed covered with an old flannel sheet. And holding court in the middle of it is a 15-pound silky white dog, Morrie. But Morrie doesn't like to stay long on his bed. Instead he is climbing atop my head to get a better view out the window and to woof and scratch at the squirrels scampering by inches away and the birds dive bombing and bonking the glass. When he's on my head, I have to resist the urge to get up and leave this writing, so in essence he's keeping me on task.
Arriving here at the Gunflint Lodge in the afternoon yesterday, I did plunk myself into this chair and spent nearly six hours pounding out a bucket of words that seemed at the time to be the beginning of this book. Reading perhaps half of this work earlier this morning, I didn't hesitate to highlight the stuff and hit the delete key. The words were so obviously oozing from the head rather than flowing from the heart.
Can I hit the heart this weekend? I don't know, but allow me try. ¶ 1:54 PM
