Sutter's little book of essays, "Cold Comfort - Life at the Top of the Map" (some of which he debuted on public radio), stakes out a territory so remote that the ways and habits of its people point to quaint Mayberry provincialness. He writes, "And I'm tickled to live in a city where bears wander the streets every fall like country cousins come to town to see the sights."
Sutter soberly but amusingly recounts long, deep winter months when all he can do midway through the season is map fishing, an oddly humorous daydreaming of past expeditions. His simultaneous embrace and contempt of winter leads to an essay about the history of snow and his first memory of it; how he crouched under a hut his father nailed together between two backyard trees, while white feathers fell out of the sky. And as winter finally melts into summer, Sutter extols the finer points of the perfect camping sustenance - believe it or not, bagels. "Chewy, dense, compact, shockproof, even somewhat rain-resistant, the bagel is the obvious solution to the camper's need for bread."
Mostly whimsical, sometimes meditative, but most often warmhearted, these essays - each a few pages long - explore Lake Superior, its neighboring rivers and streams, duck-hunting, cross-country skiing, bridges, cider-pressing parties and camping out in the family car. But they also map Sutter's move back to the land of his immigrant Scandinavian grandparents, his alcoholism, his subsequent divorce and remarriage, and the people who live and die Minnesotans.
Paying tribute to this land of lakes, evergreens and migrating hawks, in essays short enough to flip through before tucking into bed on an autumn's night, Sutter's prose is clean, straightforward and sometimes mirthful.
"Although our summers are dangerously seductive, we are saved, up here on the northern rim, by our crummy economy, by our practical, unfashionable clothes; and, most of all, by the cold - the ferocious, unfathomable cold. As Duluthians like to say, it keeps the riffraff out."
(Jan Nguyen)
- "Cold Comfort"
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.