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I went to a city an hour-and-a-half from home yesterday evening for work. I fulfilled my duty and was on my way back by about 9 p.m. It wasn’t long before I was on the Interstate, cutting east across a big flat part of Minnesota, listening to Retribution Gospel Choir loud and driving a comfortable speed in the right lane.

It is the darkness outside my headlights that I usually think of when I think of driving down a highway at night. I like doing that. I like the narrow cone of light in front of me and the vast blackness outside of it. Last night though, I had been driving along for a while when I noticed that it was not black outside the light of my headlights.

The moon will be full on Saturday night, but it was already big and bright in the sky. And it was a cold night, maybe -3 or -4°F, and the air was extremely dry and clear. So the big flat expanses outside my headlights were illuminated in this moonlight. Trees cast shadows on gentle hills a quarter-mile away, the snow was blue.

I thought to myself then that maybe this is a benefit of winter. I believe that to make it through winter you must find things you enjoy that you cannot do during the other parts of the year. Cross-country skiing is one example. And now I thought maybe such moonlit nights were another thing to look forward to. But then I remembered similar experiences on bright summer nights when a full moon throws its light on the lush landscape and you are on your way to and from swimming in the river. Alas.

"January Moonlight," © Marc R. Hanson '10 (painted last night, too!)

When I got home, I just caught Katie before she retired to bed. I asked her if she wanted to go walk on the lake in the moonlight with me and Lola and no, she would not, but she told me she did it last night when I wasn’t home and it was wonderful and I should be safe.

I put long underwear on and a hooded sweatshirt and then boots and hat and gloves and my warm jacket. Lola was surprised when I asked her if she was interested in a walk. She is a creature dependent on habit and walks at 10:30 at night are not her habit. But she quickly got on board with the idea.

We walked down to the lake and then I slid on my butt down a path to the water. It has been cold lately and everything is very frozen. Out on the lake, the wind and sun have conspired to wipe the snow clean off big patches of ice, leaving a surface so hard and slick that you really can’t walk on it. Lola neither. So we picked our way along paths on the snow-covered patches, where the walking was really quite good, with just enough snow to give firm purchase.

It was beautiful out there. The moon was almost directly overhead, with Mars right next to it. I could see the whole lake and I could see Lola running to and fro in front of me, scouting our path through the ice, occasionally coming back to me when she went down a dead end.

I felt very good. I was enjoying winter. And I was doing something that I couldn’t do during the rest of the year. It was very cold, but it was also very still, and with no wind, a few degrees below zero is really nothing. I saw the landscape with eyes that seemed anew, and I felt deeply appreciative for the experience.

It is something else to walk across a frozen lake under a full moon. But you grow up in Minnesota and you maybe take it for granted. It was just another frigid night to many folks, and such nights have been nothing more than that to me, too. But tonight, I was warm and safe in my choices of clothing and just walking across a city lake felt like an adventure.

It occurred to me that to survive a Minnesota winter, it is necessary to maintain a childish sense of adventure. You must enjoy the very act of survival. You must want to prove your worth against harsh elements. And you must never tire of remarking on a cold night to anybody: gas station attendant, waitress, friend, family, coworker.

There’s no denying, though, as the frozen days stretch into weeks and months, that maintaining that youthful perspective can be pretty hard to do. But one should just think of a childhood hero like Will Steger, spending months crossing Antarctica by dogsled, just the gear in his sleds and thousands of miles of ice and snow, uncertain outcomes, a historic journey, and remember what it was like to dream those kinds of dreams.

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A hawk sits watching
Nervous mice in grassy ditch
Nest in winter’s sand

This new 90 page magazine-book hybrid, subtitled “Nowhere Else But Here,” is based on a project I undertook last June, writing every day for the whole month (one of Minnesota’s finest months).

For the project, I observed the progress and passing of June using the Japanese form haibun. That’s a fancy word for something that is simply, beautifully, the combination of prose and haiku poetry (you know, three lines of five, seven and five syllables, respectively).

In this collection, the prose tells of the journey through the season, and the haiku are images captured on that journey.

I think I’ve produced a high-quality publication and I’d love it if you’d buy a copy. I am hoping it would be good for your soul during these dark winter months to read these daily entries about days of sun and swimming in the river, nights of fireflies and driving home with your hand out the window in the cool, damp air. The tales find me traveling from Minneapolis to the St. Croix River, from the northern forests to simple morning walks around the lake.

In addition to the the 30 haibun, “Nowhere Else But Here” also features my photos on the front and back cover, both taken in June in the St. Croix River valley. And, as a bonus, there is a prologue to the chapbook that includes some of my favorite previous writings on summer in Minnesota.

You can get your own copy for just $12. Ordering online is quick, easy and safe. Thanks!

Buy “Esker — Volume 2″ »

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Shepard is out with a new collection of stories, Day Out of Days. He has had two stories published in The New Yorker in the last few months (here is one) and they have been subtle, wry tales of relationships and aging, written with his usual imagination and precision.

“Have you got a girlfriend?” she asks me out of the blue.
“A girlfriend?” I say, checking to see if our daughter has overheard this, but she, too, has been lulled to sleep by the heat.
“Yes, that’s right. A girlfriend,” my wife repeats.
“Where did this come from?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You could very easily have a girlfriend and I’d never know it, would I? How would I know?”
“I’m sixty. Those days are over.”

Read the story on newyorker.com »

This is not the Sam Shepard of the 1960s, ’70s and 80s, when he wrote edgy plays like “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love.” Those were the works of a young writer pushing the envelope of art, challenging convention, and expressing a dark, modern vision.

Today, his work seems to have mellowed in subject matter, as he is a father and husband and getting a bit older. His last collection, Great Dream of Heaven, was well-written, but the subject matter frankly focused a bit too much on his time in Stillwater, shuttling the kids to school and the such.

This review of Day out of Days on NewWest.net gives me the idea that his latest effort has more in common with his 1997 collection Cruising Paradise, and finds him returning to the western U.S. and its cowboys, con men, cheap motels and long open highways:

Day out of Days is a road trip of the spirit through the American West, a book that should cure anyone’s mental rut with its quirky tales and unexpected observations. In this collection, Sam Shepard has proved himself an enormously inventive writer, working in territory that seems familiar, but that proves to be surprising and revelatory.

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As we hiked away from the car, we could feel a breeze at our back and Katie remarked it would be in our faces on the way back. Our hike took us along the edge of a woods of mixed hardwoods with rolling corn fields to our left. As we trekked along, the sun came out and we reveled in the feeling of it on our faces. The woods narrowed and then jutted out like a peninsula into a large wetland. When the woods terminated, we set out across the marsh, aiming for more woods on the other side.

We didn’t make it that far. About halfway across it suddenly became apparent that the dog was flagging. While she had a lot of energy from not getting much exercise, apparently she was also out of shape. She was no longer bounding through the snow and when I called her back she struggled along slowly, pushing through the chest-high snow. Since she’s not smart enough to just slow down, we turned back.

The breeze was on our faces like Katie predicted, but the sun and blue sky was out too, and that more than made up for it.

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