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I try not going back to the topic of past travels, but it slips in unawares, as with the sense of happiness not contending with date lines, time changes and places where day and night are more or less equal.

I’d call that seasonless hell but don’t want to offend anyone. Too late now.

Let’s set that aside along with the mixed grill joys of feller trav’lers who act mighty proud and Mai Tai (explains the wobbling down corridors in flat seas) of having sat and been served while others did all the work.

And, I have to add while in the mood for it, let’s omit those who gush over Singapore as something special, other than big and over-full.

Yes, streets are clean with little graffiti, and you can get arrested for jaywalking, littering, spitting, smoking or drinking. Very strict about those things.

Wearing seatbelts and commercial honesty weren’t noticeably policed. And frankly, a subject that’ll never pop up in casual conversation unless wrangled out to be roped and saddled, a throng of tea-totaling Muslim wedding participants can equal in loudness and revelry of any crowd of nuptial drinkers in our part of the planet.

Making an ass of yourself in public is not limited to one religion.

But, Harry doesn’t want to get bog bored down in such as that. Why do so when I’m happier and stood upon firmer, more familiar ground being free from places where tall buildings, crowding, noise and commercial excess are the virtues of the seasons.

Show me one corner of Northwoods bog with cattails about to shed pollen and a frog nose just breaking the surface tension at the base of a reed and I become inexpressibly grateful and happy. Can’t explain it.

The week of pale green when buds turn to leaf is indescribably glorious. A single leaf floating on dark water, a night-full of peepers, loons calling from a lake away, or the whisper soft stirring of white pine needles conversing with the night are each and all able to stop me with a slap of appreciation.

Yes, can be damn cold in winter. Black flies, no see ums, skeeters and ticks are vexations, along with leeches, especially if you get too cozy with a female carrying several hundred hungry young. But still, and I mean this completely, I can’t help loving it.

Considering I was city bred, seems a bit strange I grew into such a woodsy willow. I grind my teeth that the great powers who guide and direct our roads and parks seem to avoid opportunities to tell the public just how amazing it is to be here where three major North American watersheds branch out.

Arctic, Atlantic and Gulf all get a move on here.

How often do we name the geologic formation that forms Duluth’s hillside or Superior’s sweeping plains?

Where did the iron in the Range come from?

Why do lakes north of the Ports mostly run east-west, and why does the N. Shore have Sawtooth mountains?

I leave out a lot not mentioning the sprawling boggy peatlands and glacial alluvia and Red Pine forest and everywhere bounty of lakes. Calling one Superior was neither mistake nor whimsy.

We’re not only fortunate living close to the natural world (drive out of the Twins and tell me just where it begins or ends), but the nature we have is (if only we take the time to know it) a treasure of geology, hydrology and geography.

OK. You got it. I love the north country, but there’s a bonus I think ought to be slipped on while chance be here to be some’at historical. Periodic hearing of reparations, a most worthy subject, I begun to think.

The lil’ ol’ Ports can’t make near the contribution to altering the weight of the past as might those sources more at the root of things. DuLuth, Cloquet, Marais and Brule, etc. not being ‘specially English shouldn’t maybe a larger pot to dip into for justice payments be addressed to, say, Paris?

MN didn’t exist as a French possession, and wasn’t a slave state when it entered the USA union, but France surely was a slave trading-owning entity so I suggest Gay Paree as a fine place to go looking for satisfaction of past due accounts.

I won’t suggest what other states should do, but go allaway down to Gulf of Spain where sits New Orleans, which wasn’t named for anyplace in Romania, was it?

Anyway, lots of material there to work with in the who-did-what-when area of barrister enrichment.

Our history as a French possession is fact, with consequence. You’d think, and of course be wrong, well intended folk in Los Angeles and Francisco San would have twigged to where they got started, Spain, which colonized with the intent to export anything of value to guess where?

Ask me, any payments to those long owed repayment should be from banks and treasuries in Madrid, Seville and etc. It’s a bumpier tale than I’ve time for here, but around the time the U.S. was civilly warring over human ownership today’s CA was much (mucho) larger and known as Alta California, which technically entered the U.S. on the non-slave side as part of a precarious balance that left a great many issues hanging and dangling.

Complicated.

Spain and Portugal were the leading New World slavery forces. Far and away. Their territories remained slave holding well after our Civil War was over. So technically (I suggest this merely for argument) anyone coming from below the border of Mexico might ought to bring along some of that stolen gold and silver to serve as restorative justice by giving up their ill-got goods.

You can look it all up.

But around the 1890s U.S. and Spanish interests clashed. No easy summary, but safe t’ say Spain was very reluctant to give up its holdings and subject people.

Given the clip Spain went at subjugating natives and importing slaves it can be suggested that the U.S. (however bungled and misguided and selfishly) came in on the side of the formerly enslaved.

I wonder, there restorative justice for that?

OK, I apologize for going some’at political, but in for a penny then here’s whole buck.

We need more Representative Omar! With an ability like hers to make big numbers shrink and go away she is the perfect solution for fraud.