I’m on a John McPhee kick, which is starting to tie into my childhood “abandon me in the wilderness” fantasies. I’m reading the library’s copy of The Survival of the Bark Canoe. Someone copied part of Longfellow’s noble savage fantasy, Song of Hiawatha, into the back.

I never thought it was a good poem, even as a child growing up in Minneapolis, with this statue a semi-annual school field trip, and real Natives, some AIM activists, talking history at school and elsewhere.

But I can still sympathize slightly with the defacer of library property because it is a hard poem to remove from memory, once in. And it always makes me think of Katherine Hepburn as a reference librarian.