The River voyages of the hungry mind

Paddlefish & A Final Press Run

With The Bicycle Diaries in the hands of the binder, I was able, at last, to get back on the river, setting out early in the morning of August 17. Attempts at catching fish were futile, but while working my way up the river I began to notice large fish floating down the river. I discovered that six of them were paddlefish: each about three feet long. I had seen one before, alive, but only briefly as it leaped from the water next to my boat. In an attempt to take full advantage of this opportunity to examine a paddlefish more closely,  I tried to lift the tail of one, but when I lifted I could hear the gurgling of air bubbles moving through the tail toward it’s bloated belly--not a pleasant sound. I left the fish in the water.

The paddlefish gill is covered by a long, thin, pointed flap that is peppered with a pattern of black spots that continue across the snout of the fish’s paddle. The skin appears scaleless, and leathery.

Back in the studio, besides dealing with an array of last minute binding decisions, and attending to various other Bicycle Diaries production details, I’ve been preparing the color blocks for the river image Moxostoma macrolepidotum, the shorthead redhorse.

The Bicycle Diaries: the final press run.

High Water

Below the Wabasha Bridge a rock-lined narrows joins the main channel of the river with her backwater. The river is still high, and as water rushes through the passage it boils and swirls into whirlpools while it drops toward the green-choked backwater maze. Floating through the narrows I remember the threat of drowning the little Tongue River of North Dakota: "The current could take you down for good" they said.

Butch Thompson kindly contributed the score: a segment of the Bessie Smith tune Backwater Blues from his 1993 CD Lincoln Avenue Blues.

The river remains high, but it's not the reason I have only been out on it twice this year. I'm nearly finished printing the engravings for The Bicycle Diaries, but I have 148 pages of text yet to print by summer's end. Printing a book is not unlike being pulled in by the current: it's sink or swim.

“Diaries” Approaching the Press

Cutting paper for "The Bicycle Diaries" engravings.

The days leading up to inking up the press for the first press run of a book pass slowly. Every excuse for delay is taken: sweeping the floors, getting one's hair cut, feeding the dogs. I have cut the paper for The Bicycle Diaries engravings. This is not as simple a task as you may think. A number of subtle details must be taken into account such as loction (within the printed book) of water marks, decked edges, and alternating the front and back sides of the paper throughout the book. Although the two sides of mould-made book printing paper are remarkably similar, there is a subtle difference in texture, and one side is slightly convex, making the other side, naturally, convex. It is important to alternate the relative faces of the paper or the pages will tend to cling to each other, and spreads will not open easily. All this plus the accuracy and squareness of each cut of the paper is critical.

Multiple image blocks locked into a single chase.

I used to think it was important to make images and text share the pages in a book as seamlessly as possible. Image and text would often be printed on the same page, and I had no problem printing type on the back of an image. I felt this was essential to maintaining a smooth flow through the book. I have changed my mind with Diaries. At the outset I decided to print the images not only on a separate sheet from the text, but also on a different paper with nothing printed on the back. An unexpected bonus to this approach is the opportunity to print more than one image at a time. This is possible because the printed image sheet will later be cut up, and the individual images inserted into the book in their respective positions.

A Long Winter

Rough proof from "The Bicycle Diaries".

Much of the studio time this winter was spent working on the engravings for The Bicycle Diaries. Casting of the type in now nearly complete, and I will begin printing engravings soon. As for The River, I had two productive spurts of work on the dummy: one just after returning home from the East Coast in October, and another in the dead of winter. I have decided to treat the fish specimen prints like Benjamin Fawcett and others have done in the past--placed in the land/water scape from which they came.

A color wood engraving from "Fresh Water Fishes" (1880), engraved and printed by Benjamin Fawcett.

Photo taken when the short head red horse was caught.

While cutting the short head it occurred to me that each scale is unique--within the over-aching symmetry of the pattern there exists constant variation. Though the surface of the water seems a grand abstraction, there is really nothing abstract about it: the physics involved must be absolute.  I am interested in how these two ideas might relate to each other in the composition. I haven’t tackled the problem yet of how to do this.

Proof of the short head red horse key block in the book dummy.

I have been looking to a Dutch book of birds from (I think) the mid-nineteenth century as a typographical model for the river book.

Winter has come, and gone, since my last post. It was a long and busy season. In March the Lund Volunteer Fire Department (along with Pepin), conducted water rescue training. I am in the gumby suit being tethered so that I can be retrieved.

Yesterday the taps were removed from the maple trees. I had been going into the woods, almost daily, since mid-January laying new sap lines. This year 850 gallons of sap was hauled to Plum City for processing. The syrup will soon be available from the “special” page of the website store. Really. Label type was printed letterpress on the Heidelberg, along with the 3-color wood engraving.

Under the Swan, River Text, & New York City

A sheet of ice has begun to form. Birds still here follow the edge of the ice slowly advancing toward the center of the lake. A few days ago, while driving through, I noticed four swans still at Maiden Rock. Today two remained. I stepped out onto the ice with them. The marsh bottom beneath my feet was magnified by perhaps two inches of ice, judging by the bubbles frozen into the sheet. I was encouraged by the tracks of a man, presumably setting muskrat traps, but alarmed by the sound of ice shifting beneath my weight.

Tommy Mayo added Pomixis nigromaculatus to the species list in November.

The text of the river book will follow ( I think) two threads: one, a narrative illustrating the engravings, and two, excerpts from historical texts. So far I have selected an excerpt from Louis  Hennepin’s journal of 1690 in which he describes the sobbing of Indian men intent on killing him, a piece from Robert E. Coker reporting on the freshwater mussel (button) industry for the US Bureau of Fisheries in 1918, some of Elliott Coues’ 1895 annotated edition of Zebulon Pike’s journal from 1810 in which he cross-references accounts of various land marks around Lake Pepin from the accounts of Pike and other early European explorers, and an excerpt from Mark Twain’s description of a steamboat pilot’s view of the river from Life on the Mississippi in 1883. The excerpts will not necessarily be in chronological order, but will loosely reflect the narrative/engravings.

I visited Bill Logan in New Jersey and spent some time looking at his extensive collection of 18th and 19th century specimen prints. This timely visit kindled an interest in the idea of “hand finishing” prints, to add certain color effects, and in the use of gum arabic, applied by hand to specific spots of an image to add depth (the iris of a fish, for example). Thank you Bill. Again. (see "Sea Trials", August, 2009)

Meanwhile, it is full steam ahead in the production of The Bicycle Diaries, which I hope to finish printing this spring. I met with author Richard Goodman in New York, biked his route from the upper west side toward ground zero, and have begun engraving the images. The book will contain two full page images, two double page images, and two vignettes. The Diaries will slow progress on the river, but I am looking forward to printing fish...

Why Do Fish Jump?

Cave Paper makes fish jump.

The sobering calculation of time in the last post started a downward spiral in confidence.To base the structure of a book on a stack of expensive hand-made paper, and to expect the content to follow seems more and more absurd. I wiled away the summer fishing and writing poetry, instead of collecting specimens and recording observations. Toward the end of September, with little confidence in my grand scheme, I hit the road for the Oak Knoll Book Fest in Delaware:  but I did have a little book of river poems called Report From Pool Four. I must confess that composing and printing poetry, something I hadn't done in more than thirty years, was a pleasure.

Back home I realize that I have more than enough river material to face the coming winter. I am refreshed--renewed in my resolve to move forward with the grand scheme--due mostly to spending time with bookish friends. I will also be printing Bicycle Diaries this winter. Still time for a few more outings in the boat, I hope, before putting it away for the season.

Photo by Tommy Mayo

Circles

Pelecanus erythrorhynchos

Pelecanus erythrorhynchos took nearly a year to complete. My original plan for the river includes a large format book, in installments, with a dozen-or-so images in each one. At this rate, it will take 12 years to complete the first installment, and 120 years to include the seventy species of fish I hope to catch. I will be 175 years old.

Individual numbered prints of Pelecanus erythrorhynchos are now available in the MPS Store.

This is what was left of the key block after three reduction cuts and four printings.

Back on the river circles keep appearing. Gizzard Shad chase each other around in a shallow sideways wheel. Sometimes a shot from below sends hundreds air borne, like the first drops of an oncoming storm.

If I Was Washington

Permission granted to use Townes Van Zandt's If I Was Washington. It says it all (I think).

Dead Fish & A New Day

29 June

This morning I push my boat away from Stockholm landing and let the wind take it. A night crawler on it's 3-hooked harness drags along behind, but the chance of catching a fish is remote, at best. I lay on my back on my little deck...

Sustained only by a thin gruel of moonlight
And the knowledge that all was perfection outside my prison of skin.

I am reading McGrath when a seagull catches my attention. I turn the boat to see that it is with a large fish.

The eyes are gone, and the entrails, and color. It smells.

7 July

As I motor upriver, I am aware of a large serpentine weed mass running down the middle of the lake. I cross over and troll near the buoy off Point Au Sable.

Real men. Cloudless, determined men. Perfect boats.

I am a fisherman without much hope. Drifting with the current I drag a small minnow along the bottom. As I approach the serpentine mass in the middle I am surprised to find it is not a mass of weeds at all, but instead a mass of the empty hulls of mayfly nymphs and dead adults: a massive funeral procession making it's way down the river. I had come three or four miles along it's route and it continued, unbroken, the whole way. Sometimes fifty yards across, and sometimes less, but no number could describe how many mayflies there were.

I become aware of herds of carp tipping up their bodies at the surface so that their down-turned mouths could collect the dead.

(I had selected a cut of Junior Wells for this, but it made me nervous so I used Ode to Toothless Joe by Mark Krurnowski off a royalty free music site.)

At noon I dragged a large sucker minnow on a Prescott Spinner off the mouth of Pine Creek thinking there may be some rogue Northern Pike out there. I had caught a Northern Pike on this rig last fall, and this was my way, I guess, of trying to get back into the game. I was reading Thoreau:

Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the Gods to pardon this clear flame.

I felt an odd weight on my line and checked to find the minnow was gone. I still had two, so I hooked another and cast him in. Again, an odd weight. Not a fish, I thought, not a Northern Pike. They leave no doubt about a strike. This time when I checked the minnow was still hooked, and I could see he had been cut. So there had been a fish!

I had some idea of where this had occurred, and I began trolling back and forth. Again the odd weight. This time I lowered the tip of my rod and waited a few seconds before pulling back on the rod to set the hook. This time there was a fish. It was not the obvious tug on a Northern Pike, but instead the steady pull of a walleye. I remember the pulls of the different fish of my youth. I couldn't believe it. I hooked the third and last sucker minnow, and as I trolled across again, another fish.

Later the photographs showed the fish to be Sauger. Finally, a seventh species of fish.

A new day. A perfect boat.

Ricci Map & Back on the River

Ricci Map

The month of May was spent engraving a large block (14 x 25 inches) of a section of the Matteo Ricci world map for the Associates of the James Ford Bell Library. It was a grueling 30 days of hard labor, but interesting--both the map itself and the technical problems involved. The size of the block was pushing limits. Too big for my press, it was printed at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The image was transferred onto the block using a heat transfer method developed by Carl Montford of Seattle. Here is a video of clearing wood from between characters. Note the red background, a suggestion from Carl that was helpful.

Back on the River

16 June 2010. 1 pm - 9:30 pm. North wind 5-10 diminishing and switching toward the east.

Three pelicans flying down river suddenly swoop and land in the path of a distant boat. The first pelicans of the year. Soon they are air borne again, crossing the river toward Point Au Sable, and turning up river toward the shallow bay above the Rush River. Even heavy-breasted pelicans impress when they turn their wings to descend, the seemingly simple shift of planes for such a clean and swift decent.

While traveling by car along the lake I had become interested in a stretch of shoreline between a scenic overlook and the rest area at the base of Bay City Hill. The overlook is atop a high cliff, and the rest area a place of short stops for travelers passing through. Looking for solitude, I thought I might find an obscure beach to comb somewhere between the two.

The beach I found was surrounded by weeds. All the better, I thought, a difficult approach from the water as well. Soon I became aware of two groups of shore fishermen, one up river, and one down. Pairs of fishermen in boats trolled by with regularity, voicing their position on the lake, and in the bigger picture. Fishing is a social sport.

A point of dense young willows separated two dank beaches. Just off the point the trunk of a great tree had snagged, wrested loose of it's territory by recent heavy rains. Where roots swelled from the trunk a large turtle sat, timing his slide into the water with my rate of approach. He slid with a swiftness not unlike the pelican's decent.

I moored my boat to the roots and threw in two lines: one baited with foul smelling catfish bait, and the other an Canadian night crawler that I doubt had ever crawled in the night. For an hour I watched the two lines lay limp on the water until the sun was low and it was time to move toward home.

It is interesting how often I see other fishermen landing fish. I may be developing into the worst fisherman in the history of the Mississippi River. Maybe that is the point.

At Pine Creek trolling toward the Rush
sun burns the birdless bodies of clouds.
Trains rumble longer than themselves.
Imagine either end along a lake of tears:
fore and hindsight reverberating in one direction.

On the surface of the water land and sky roll and break,
pursuit and retreat at the same time.
Abstraction is not random.
It is determined.
As I am here.