We just received word that Southwest Media will be closing six small town newspapers in the southwest suburbs of the Twin Cities. They were small papers, but they were a connection for the people of the community. I watched this same thing happen along the Mississippi River when RiverTown Multimedia reduced their small newspapers from nine to two over a period of less than two years. This reflects a larger movement across the country to close or reduce publications. As a newspaper reader my entire adult life, I am saddened to watch this trend play out, and feel a void where those papers used to exist. I always felt local newspapers gave a community a common thread, a shared experience of that the town was about and how it was developing. Without those venues, something important is missing.
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Earlier I reported that Sport Literate journal accepted my essay An Awful Quiet in the Heart about climbing at Devils Tower for their spring edition. It arrived today and looks great. Unfortunately it is a print only journal, so I can't share a link to the essay, but I'll share a link to the journal itself. They do a nice job of bringing in a variety of essays and poems about sports and activities of all sorts. It is a good read.
On a recent visit to Phoenix, my family and I stopped in a restaurant called Chompie's. We were looking over the extensive menu when I saw exactly what I was going to eat -- a sandwich called Stevie G's Sandwich. I couldn't believe that name, so when the waitress came back, I told her my name and that I had to give that a try. She brought it out and it was bacon, turkey, avocado, tomato, and enough other ingredients to stretch from edge to edge on the plate and rise four inches high. I ate all I could and took the rest to our vacation rental where I ended up with two more lunches from the same sandwich. I never expected to see my name on a sandwich.
Having moved to Minnesota six years ago, I have seen the amazing interest in hockey at the high school, college, and professional level in The State of Hockey. One of the most impressive demonstrations of this fever is the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament which was played this week. The games are held at Xcel Energy Center, the same venue where the Minnesota Wild of the NHL play their home games. It much be an incredible experience for high school kids to step onto that ice and play their games which fill the arena with thousands of screaming fans. The tournament is a spectacle and I've gained huge respect for the players and coaches who work for years to get a chance to be part of the event.
On a mountain climbing expedition to northern Greenland in 1996, I was with a team called The American Top of the World Expedition, and we set out to walk across the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean to reach Oodaaq Island, a small island identified as the northernmost point of land on earth. We did not find Oodaaq, but instead discovered another small island somewhat farther north. This led to much discussion, but given the small nature of the island and the isolated location, the conversation slowed. We talked about it from time to time, but it became a strong topic of discussion again this year when a Swiss team, funded by a billionaire, visited the region in 2021 and 2022 and published their results in a book recently. They claim finding an island even farther north, but one of the scientists on the expedition measured the depth of the ocean there and found it too deep to support small islands. He determined that the islands were actually small piles of rocks and glacial debris floating on icebergs trapped in the fast ice hear the northern shore of Greenland. It is a topic that interests only a handful of people in the world, but having visited the region in 1996 and 2001, we were amazed to see this conversation resurface this year with the publication of the Swiss book. These small islands provided a few years of mystery for northern explorers, but with the scientific research conducted in 2022, the facts remove much of the mystery, and leave Kaffeklubben Island, a larger and more substantial island, as the northernmost point. An account of our search for these islands is included in the book Under The Midnight Sun in 2003. See a link about this book in the publications section of this website.
Earlier I wrote a short rock climbing essay about doing a first ascent on Devils Tower in 1978. I remember looking at my hand on a narrow ledge and realizing that my hand was the first to touch that ledge in the fifty million years the Tower had existed. I included a quote from N. Scott Momaday reflecting on how Devils Tower gave him an awful quiet in the heart. As I looked at my hand, I felt a similar response. Today, I received a note that Sport Literate will publish that essay in their spring edition. I'll be excited to see that in print.
A couple of weeks ago I posted that The Home Forum section of the Christian Science Monitor had accepted an article of mine about an encounter with a man in the Soviet Union in 1983. It is published now, and you can see it here.
In 1983, Peggy and I were traveling in what was then the Soviet Union. One day, we were walking in a park in Moscow and came across an old soldier, his medals pinned across his chest. I walked up to him and held out my camera. He rose, straightened his back, and pushed his chest forward with a sense of dignity. I wrote an essay about this encounter and it is scheduled to run in the Home Forum section of the Christian Science Monitor the end of January. If you don't subscribe to the paper, you can find the essay in the Home Forum section of their website after it is published.
Since moving to Minnesota five years ago, I've become a fan of Big River Magazine They cover everything related to the Mississippi River and the Driftless Region. After I retired from the newspaper, I contacted them to see if I could write articles for them, and it has been a good relationship. I have had ten articles in their pages, with the most recent two in their January/February issue. I wrote a review of Captain Lee Hendrix's book Peep Light about his fifty years working on barges and riverboats on the Mississippi River and tributaries. He gives a good view of the lifestyle of a riverboat captain. I also interviewed Judson Steinback, part of the team called Mississippi Speed Record which paddled the full length of the Mississippi River in just under 17 days. They kept moving 24 hours a day, sleeping and eating on the canoe while facing the hazards of locks and dams, massive river barges, and weather conditions such as dense fog and heavy winds. Their story is an inspiration.
Today Magazine is published in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and is distributed throughout southeast Minnesota. They invited me to write an article about my bridges book. I did, and they published it in the current issue. Nice to have an article in there, because it is very popular with residents of rivertowns throughout the region.
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Photo by John Jancik
AuthorDr. Steve Gardiner is the author of nine books and over 1,000 articles. |