The Middlewesterner

GONE VAGABONDING
IN ALEXANDRIA, MINNESOTA
FROM MARCH 17-MARCH 23
I will be gone to Alexandria, Minnesota, from March 17 through March 23, and won't be posting during that time. In my absence, see your assignment below; you can work at it while I'm away.

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FAMOUS LAST WORDS
While I'm away, visitors will play.

Gary Gilmore's last words before he was executed in Utah? "Let's do it." Some fellow electrocuted in Florida said: "I think I'd rather be fishing." These got me to thinking about last words, then I got to making up my own "famous last words" for various circumstances.

These, for instance, might also have been the last thing said before execution:

"Why'd I ask for fast food?"

"Anybody want me to take a message?"

Other "last words" might occur in other circumstances. For instance, the guy who died saying "Was that your cycle I knocked over out front?" had probably just walked into a bar and was probably talking to an unhappy biker.

The fellow who died saying "I know the language" probably didn't.

Some of the other "Famous Last Words" I've concocted:

"They never attack at night."

"It's safe to eat when it's cooked."

"Maybe they'll listen to reason."

"I think we've got plenty of room."

"Disconnect that red wire first."

"That's just an old superstition."

"Act like you own the place."

"Anybody else care to try me?"

"You're imagining things."

"It's only a flesh wound."

"Nice doggie."

"What train?"

If you care to try it, leave your own "Famous Last Word" entries in the comment box. At some point after I return from my visit to Alexandria, MN, I'll compile the whole bunch of them into a single list (with proper attribution, of course).


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DESTINATION: ALEXANDRIA, MINNESOTA

Tomorrow I leave for a week in Alexandria, Minnesota. I return on Wednesday, March 24th. Alexandria is 399 miles or 6 hours and 51 minutes from Fairwater. I've been there twice before, once in the very bitter cold of January, 2003; then again in May last year.

Alexandria is like L'Anse, Michigan, in that its economy is bolstered by tourism. Unlike L'Anse, it stands just off an interstate highway (I-94); the interstate highway these days is to the middlewestern community what the railroad used to be: a life-line that helps ensure survival. Of course, you've got to get the folks passing by on the interstate to stop and spend some money in the community, and Alexandria is moderately successful at that.

While I am in Alexandria, I will revisit my friend Floyd Bolin. Floyd is in his nineties, and has moved into a nursing home since we talked last May. He is quite an inventive fellow and built and operated the first dairy in Alexandria to offer pasteurized milk that was palatable; that was his business for most of his life.

People had told me that Floyd was going deaf, that when I talked to him on the phone or left him a message on his answering machine, I'd have to shout.

I knew I'd like Floyd right away from the first moment I met him. I was scheduled to interview him at his house at 4:00 p.m. As is usually the case with me, I arrived a few minutes early. I knocked on the outer door of the porch - no answer. I stepped into the porch and knocked on the door frame of the inner door. The door into the house was open. No answer. I stepped into the house a few steps and through the doorway into the living room I could see Floyd napping in his recliner, eyes closed. The chair was tipped all the way back, Floyd had a blanket spread across his legs, he was holding an alarm clock on his lap.

"Floyd," I shouted, "may I come in?"

"Oh, oh," Floyd said, coming awake. He picked up his alarm and looked at it. He looked at me.

"My alarm hasn't gone off," he said, "you'll have to come back in a few minutes." Then he laughed that laugh of his.

I spent an hour with him that afternoon, interviewing, and found out that an hour wasn't near enough time. I spent another two hours with him a few days later.

When I visit Floyd this trip, it won't be to interview him; rather, a friend will be visiting a friend. That's one of the surprises and one of the joys of this Vagabond expedition: what starts out as research looks an awful lot like friendship before it's done. It happens again and again.

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MORE NOTES ABOUT PLACE (5)

Why does a place tug at us? The comfort it provides, spiritual and physical. It can be home for us, where we choose to live and grow. Its rhythms fit us. We have family and friends there - we cannot leave them. It becomes our image of the blessed world. We cannot leave because we are chained to it. What the land is fits what we wish to be.

We are shaped by a place, some place that chooses us. It becomes for us the image of what the world is and how it should be.

Our sense of place is shaped by our sense of who we are. Our sense of who we are is shaped by our sense of place.

The bias of those of us who live in the north: that what we endure in the place makes us stronger. The bias of those who live in the south: the world is languorous fruit.

What pushes us makes us great. The bitterness of winter is a spiritual pill we swallow here in the north. The swarmy, humid tropical nights are another kind of medicine.

We cannot see a place as it is. It changes with our coming to view it. We bend the grass. Our feet pound a path. The sound of us echoes and echoes and echoes. Animals flee, the birds go quiet. There are human footprints, still, on the moon. The tracks of the wagon trains that headed west well more than a century ago can still be seen today.

Topic for future discussion: What kinds of relationships can we have with a place and what is the nature of each of those relationships?

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THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)

You might be pleased to hear that Ivan has given up turnips for Lent.

"I was in the soup aisle at an area grocery store," Ivan also says. "I was looking for a can of soup. I saw a can of bean soup and a can of hearty bean soup. I saw a clerk heading my way so I said, 'what's the difference between bean soup and hearty bean soup?' She said, as she went past without breaking stride, 'hearty is more farty.'"

"Last Wednesday, I kinda got my feelings hurt," Ivan writes. "I was in the Second Cup cafe with Jim Fetters, John Windscheffell, Dick Stroup, Raymond Osborn, Casey Edell, and Dr. Bill Grimes. In the course of the conversation I got the impression that they thought I was lying. And it hurt. But later that day I was in a contemplating mood and I contemplated that they weren't calling me a liar, they were just saying I didn't know what I was talking about."

"You remember the story about Colleen Maydew's wheel falling off her car," Ivan says. "The hub cap off that wheel is now on display at Murphy Auto Repair and Service. It is now hanging in a prominent place on the hub cap Wall of Fame in Murphy's."

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THANKS FOR THE VAGABOND CONTRIBUTION....

My thanks goes out to the following for her recent contribution to the Vagabond Expedition:
#87 Elaine Cavanaugh, Wisconsin
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SPIDER IN THE BATH TUB
I dust off this old essay as my contribution to Ecotone's "Spiders and Place" topic this week.

How a spider finds its way into our bathtub, I confess I don't know. The occurrence is common enough, in our house at least, that I have to think these creatures are particularly adept at getting themselves into such situations. They are not, I'm finding, particularly talented when it comes to getting themselves out, however.

Even as I write this, a spider struggles against the porcelain world in which it finds itself imprisoned. It came sometime during the night, was there when I rose this morning, two and a half hours ago. Its day, thus far, has been entirely devoted to scaling the sheet white cliffs that surround it - or, rather, attempting to scale them.

Our tub is of an ordinary variety, twenty-eight inches broad, fifty-eight inches long, and - most telling - thirteen perpendicular inches deep. To me it would appear to be not an especially attractive tableau upon which to play out one's little drama - no food, no water (at the moment), and no hiding place but the drain, no obvious footholds - but I am not the spider and my choice of landscapes might seem likewise as peculiar to him.

So one of the eight-legged wonders of the world has wandered into our tub again and, resourceful as this one is, there it remains. Eight legs, he's discovering, are not legs enough to pull him out of this little mess he's gotten himself into. He knows now, I believe, that there is no easy escape, for he has circled the tub entirely, testing its boundaries, facing steep walls everywhere.

When I first saw him this morning, he was madly flailing his legs, on the theory perhaps that simple hard work would be sufficient to free himself. Hard work, he quickly discovered as he made no progress whatever, was not the answer, as is generally the case in these Sisyphean dilemmas.

If not hard work, then cunning perhaps? While I watched from my distance, the spider appeared to massage two of its front legs with its mouth and feelers, coating them - I assume - with some of its homemade rosin. First he carefully prepared the front-most leg on his right side, then the second leg from the front on his left, testing each as he finished. He employed the two legs he had gummed as anchors, fixing them to the wall of the tub and holding them in place while scrambling about with the other six. He made half an inch progress, as far as he could move with those two legs set; and then his anchors failed him and he slid backwards to the bottom of the tub. And there he sat.

A few minutes later, he moved about six inches toward the front of the tub and proceeded to apply his rosin to two of his hind legs - the hindmost leg on his left side, the second from the rear on the right. Again he rested, and then again he moved himself forward and upward, using the rosined legs not so much as anchors but as the main driving units of his climbing machine. His other legs seemed to move more lightly and quickly, while the rosined ones were brought deliberately forward, alternately, with each bit of progress, and were used for upward thrust. Of course the attempt was only as successful as the previous, and soon he was back the half inch to the beginning.

The next time I checked his progress, he had moved almost the length of the bathtub, crossing above the drain and resting to the right of it, in the corner. His position afforded me an especially good view of him as I set my elbows on the side of the tub and bent to observe him more closely. This, it began to appear, was to be his most ambitious assault yet, for as I peered from above I saw him place each of the front four legs into his mouth (or so it seemed), one at a time, working them in and out, painstakingly slowly in and out, massaging each with his feelers, testing each and applying more rosin when the results seemed unsatisfactory; then he started work on the four hind legs. From my position, I was unable to tell whether these went into his mouth or not, but I noted his mouth was moving energetically all the while, in a kind of sucking motion. Soon he had the hind legs readied.

Very slowly, almost resolutely, he headed upward again, one leg set carefully, then another, until he had gained nearly an inch and a half. The attempt ended in mid-step, when all the legs lost hold at once and he slipped again to the bottom. He sat perfectly still then, and if I were one to attribute human characteristics to eight-legged creatures, I'd venture to say he was disgusted by the futility of it all. I left him to his fate, poured myself another cup of coffee, and listened a while to some Beethoven on the radio.

Since I started writing these few pages, I've checked on the spider's progress every ten minutes or so, to see whether, wunderbar, he has succeeded in extricating himself from his rather hopeless circumstances. Often, as I enter the bathroom, he simply appears to be resting - sometimes in one corner, sometimes in another, or anywhere along either side. He had, I'm convinced, tested every conceivable route of escape. Once, as I entered, I saw that he'd made a snatch of progress by anchoring one hind leg to a piece of grit attached to the side of the tub. Yet even as I stood observing him, that tenuous foothold gave way and he slid backwards. Another time he was running somewhat sideways along the wall of the tub, as if to use centrifugal force to hold him against the porcelain. This attempt, too, was futile.

I do feel a bit foolish every time I descend the flight of stairs from my office to check on his efforts. And, too, I do feel somewhat foolish expending the energy and hours (for I am a slow writer) needed to record this insignificant little tragedy - an inconsequential struggle that matters little to the rest of the cosmos.

I am not one to believe very deeply that spiders and such are inhabited by the souls of our ancestors, nor that I too shall be a spider or cat or cow someday. I am not particularly fond of eight-legged creatures, and have no more empathy for the animal world than most of the rest of men. Yes, I am a meat-eater, a custom I have inherited and one I have thus far found enjoyable. Yet the whole morning I have noticed myself wondering if this is a metaphor for our existence in the universe. Is life a continual struggle to roll the stone to the top of the mountain, only to see it roll back to the bottom, again and again? Some days it surely seems that such is the extent of human existence. Then again some days life seems to hold much more than that.

On my most recent trip down the stairs to observe the spider, I found him motionless, his legs splayed around him. I watched for seven minutes and he didn't move at all. Without apparent reason, then, he moved a few steps forward suddenly, stopped; turned one hundred eighty degrees and moved a few steps, stopped; turned ninety degrees and moved a few steps more. He stood motionless for an instant, then went round in a circle, then another. He was motionless again for a minute or so, before he started applying the rosin to one foreleg, then another. By this time I'd watched his struggle for five hours and here he was, back to the beginning, putting rosin on exactly the same forelegs as when I first observed him.

What sensations had he felt, I wondered, while he sat motionless those seven minutes. What befuddlement caused him then to move first in one direction, then another, then still a third, and finally to walk in circles? What silver thread of instinct told him to start preparing his legs with rosin again, for another assault on the white cliffs that surrounded him? I confess I don't know. I had been content to observe his fate. It was apparent now that he didn't recognize the futility of his efforts. A spider in the bath tub is condemned to one of two, or possibly three, destinies: if he remained entirely undisturbed, he could scramble and scramble until he had no strength left, until he starved to death; or, should one of us in the house want to take a shower, he would end mashed against the porcelain or washed down the drain; or if he were adventuresome to a high degree, he might try his luck in the drain, make his way through the standing water in the curve of pipe, find his way to the sewer and, through a manhole cover, to daylight and freedom. Those were, it seemed to me, his possible fates.

For myself, I know I'd be immensely unhappy to think there is no possible rescue from my own stupidities. How a spider finds its way into our bath tub, I don't know; nor am I always cognizant of the routes I'm taking into silly predicaments of my own. I, too, have walked in circles, frustrated.

As the spider was applying rosin to the second leg, readying himself for yet another attempt, I took a piece of cardboard, got him onto it, carried him to the garage and left him there to fend for himself among the flies and wasps. This action was not - and was not meant to be - consequential; it was simply a personal affirmation of some sort, one made against my intellectual desire to observe the spider's natural fate, an affirmation, perhaps, that there is more to living than the mere avoidance of death. Something. It was a gesture I felt the need to make, the way one raises his fist against a threatening sky.


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RECOMMENDED POST OF THE WEEK:

See Dave's Via Negativa essay of March 11, 2004, "In the Evening News."

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW

Okay, I'm convinced. Blogging has the potential to alter fundamentally the way we see the world.

Yes, the blog is an "on-line journal." Yes, sometimes it might seem like too much navel-gazing. Yes, it creates a sense of community among those souls who connect.

It also allows us to communicate in ways that simply haven't been possible in the past. If you read the letters that a pioneer to Wisconsin in the 1850s sent back to his sweetheart in Vermont, you recognize that a full exchange of letters required about a month, even if you wrote out a response right at the post office and got it in the mail at once.

How long would it take a conventional magazine to put together a series entitled "The Archeology of Childhood: Injury," how long to put it together and to publish it, from conception to printed page? Go over to commonbeauty and see what is being done there: the project was conceived this past week, the "letters" started appearing the next day, we are in Day 5 of the seven days the experiment will take, and the writing is fully as good as or better than that in most of the magazines I read. What is remarkable is not only how quickly the series was created, but the interplay between the pieces, the conversation among writers that is taking place, something that would be more difficult to do in conventional publishing. Go also to my "Recommended Post of the Week" and see that we can get a report on the migration of the tundra swans the very moment they pass overhead, we get a report on their appearance and, more, what their appearance means to the human heart.

Do I sound like a farm boy on his first elevator ride to the top of the Sears Tower? So be it.

For twenty-four years I worked for a printer. In the last years of my service to the company we spent time in managers' meetings discussing "what impact the Internet will have on printing." We didn't see the blogging phenomenon, and we didn't see its possibilities. We didn't see that a really good idea for a series of essays, for that is what the "letters" at commonbeauty are, little essays around a theme, could be conceived and executed in a single week this way. Magazines simply can't execute with that speed and impact. The only thing the magazines have over blogging, I think, is a bunch of really good editors. Oh, and perhaps a wider circulation.

What does this all mean? I guess it means I'm standing here with my mouth open, amazed, trying to figure out what it all means.

Which, admittedly, is not an uncommon pose for me.

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REFLECTIONS ON BOOKS: #5
SANDILL SUNDAYS AND OTHER RECOLLECTIONS
by Mari Sandoz
University of Nebraska Press (1970)

It is always a joy to find a book you didn't know about by an author you love. Such was the case when I pulled Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections off the shelf in a used book store in Alexandria, MN, last spring. More Mari Sandoz, only $8, hardcover.

I have admired Mari Sandoz so much, but hadn't ever enumerated for myself what I appreciate about her work. Now Sandhill Sundays is an opportunity for me to think such thoughts. What do I admire?

Mari Sandoz can tell a story. It might be a big one, such as her father's, told in Old Jules. It might be the smaller stories in Sandhill Sundays, true stories of real lives. Sandoz has not tried to disguise life as fiction, as so many writers want to. Do they do this out of fear that real life isn't as interesting as imagination? I ap-preciate that Sandoz makes real blood pulse and sing.

What does Sandoz do that the rest of us can learn from? She allows the facts of those Sandhill lives to take the shape of story. In her telling, something changes; it is not a static picture she draws. With but a few bold strokes, she can re-create the people she knew. We can see them in front of us, we can tell how the lack of rain in those hills has strained them. She has a good ear recalling their conversations; we are in the corner with her, eavesdropping. She lays in the judicious details of setting and situation and we always know where we are. She is selective about what she includes, still it's hard to detect what might be left out.

Of course Sandoz was writing history: very consciously in some cases; not so consciously in others. With Cheyenne Autumn, she clearly set out to do history, didn't she? By contrast, the recollections in Sandhill Sundays come out of that cusp between personal experience and historical event; and I like that Mari Sandoz helps me to recognize again and again: writers have a place in that strange margin. Every day we get up; history unfolds around us: someone ought to be paying attention to the small details of it.

I like that Sandoz locates herself somewhere between the grassy rootedness the native feels and the surface shine the tourist takes away. She was born to the Sandhills, she belongs to them; yet she was able to step back and lay out what she saw – the beauty of it, and the warts. That's a challenge - to belong, so that you know the place, yet to let go so you can write of it. I face that challenge every day and Sandoz shows me how to handle it.

I like to say: I want to write so that a thousand years from now any visitor from another planet can read me and know who we were. That's how Mari Sandoz wrote.

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SATURDAY'S POEM
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THE MORNING PORCH
by Dave Bonta


Out on the porch at 4:00 a.m.
to watch the snow melt.
You laugh, but listen:
the fog came and went.
Lifted,
returned. You
can ask the moon.

*

A raccoon thought it
was the only one awake.
"Hey!"
The two of us can't be
alone on one porch.

*

Before the snow came
to stay, I had visitors.

Dave Bonta is a lightly employed environmental activist who lives on a mountaintop in the Ridge and Valley section of Central Pennsylvania (upper Juniata drainage). He has had poems in Pivot, The Sun, Wind, Frogpond, West Branch, Birdwatcher's Digest, and Studies in Contemporary Satire, among others. In one twelve-month period, he received 47 rejection slips in a row. Bonta has completed two collections, companion volumes entitled Spoil and Capturing the Hive, which are available for download from his website. With a background in self-publishing (including four poetry chapbooks), Bonta says he finds blogging by far the most rewarding way to reach readers while amusing oneself. "Not only is sending stuff out a time-wasting chore, but even if someone accepts it, by the time the damn poem appears in print I'm just not that excited about it any more!"

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About sixteen of them, by our current count.

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A SMALL POEM
IN MEMORY OF
CID CORMAN
by Tom Montag


Suddenly
silence - his house,

oh, his absence.

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from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 13, 1998

Sweet home. Sweet morning. The day is overcast, cold. The snow remains vigilant, looking for any cranny to drift into. Life repeats itself day after day, with just enough variation that my day is somewhat different from my grandfather's. Still it was a golden chain of moments that brought me here. I'm sitting in a cold vehicle with the heater running, waiting for the engine to warm up before I head off to work.

There are snowbanks along the curbs in Fairwater again. We'd thought they were gone. The Grand River is still flowing freely, though the pond is frozen over again. I wouldn't walk on that ice, however. I suppose the robins are surprised!

The ugliness stands out this morning, the snowdrifts soiled by what the wind has picked up from the fields.

Now it seems to be snowing again. Snow dances across the road. Heavy snow hits the windshield. This is not Atlanta. Like a magician, the snow makes a line of trees disappear.

Good morning, Wisconsin!



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LATE-BREAKING SADNESS:
POET & LITERARY SAINT CID CORMAN HAS DIED
Page revised: 9:45 a.m. CST

I am saddened indeed by the death of poet Cid Corman; we in the realm of poetry have lost a good companion. This is the message I just received from Charles Sandy in Japan, via Nancy Rafal in Wisconsin:

Dear Friends and Family ...

It is with great sadness that I write to tell you of Cid's passing from
this earth. He died peacefully, an hour ago, at 6:00 pm, March 12th,
2004. I have no words to share with you now beyond this, beyond
what Cid has already written:

Like saying goodbye
saying nothing. Be
held by letting go.

. . .

OF

So many days and
so many nights ex-
act infinity

The petals of the
flowers of an in-
dissoluble light.


GRACE NOTE

"The friends
more to me
than my song"

What song
is there
without them?

...

How far
we've gone you
can see by

how nearly
together
we are.

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FEATURE OF NOTE:

Stop and see commonbeauty's current series, "archaeology of childhood: injury." I'm to take part in it: it has taken off at quite a clip, I'm afraid it'll be difficult for me to keep up. But what a ride!

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IT'S THAT YOU WRITE
IT'S THAT YOU WRITE OFTEN,
WRITE FAST, WRITE WITH HEART

Recently Poolagirl and I were exchanging e-mails about writing. I found myself saying, "Yeah, it's THAT you write. You write and write and write, trying to find that which you were put here to write. Eventually, you find it, but you don't know it, you don't know it right away at least, so you go on writing. You have to."

Then I'm talking to myself, turning over in my mind some of what I believe about writing. I believe:

If you want to write, you should be writing already.

If you don't have a specific "project" right now, you should be keeping a journal.

You should write often, write fast, write with heart.

You should write down what you're seeing, hearing, tasting. Color, tone, texture. Turn and sweep and drop. Capture the whole swirl of it.

You should write as if you are trying to explain us to aliens who find your notebooks a thousand years from now.

If you're afraid what you write won't be very good, remember that at LEAST ninety percent of writing is re-writing, revision, re-vision.

The other ten percent of writing is perspiration.

There are no good first drafts. The people who say there are - they're either lying or lucky.

If you don't know what to write about, harness your obsessions. What do you love and pursue endlessly? Write of that first; then write of what adheres to it.

If we pay attention, what we need to write about will find us. We don't want to make so much splash in the water that we scare it off.

There are examples of good writing everywhere in the blogs on the list of blogs I read. I am astounded by the very high quality of the writing at every turn. Even though I know the answer, I ask myself: how do these bloggers learn to write so well while writing so fast? The answer: they practice. They practice, practice, practice. They might say it's fun, but they perspire, I know they do. For a great example of good writing, look at Via Negativa Dave's March 11th piece about the tundra swans. On Sunday I'm going to name that piece my "Recommended Post of the Week."

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from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 12, 1998

You cannot go away, you simply cannot. Nothing will be the same when you return. Today is clear and cold. There is snow on the ground, quite a lot of it. A blizzard passed through while I was gone. When I left, it had been spring - woolly bear caterpillars and fat robins. It is not spring now. A skin of ice on the pond again. Stiff fingers to clear the windshield.

You cannot go away, you will not be the same when you return. Where you have been, what you have seen, these will have changed you.

What do I see today? Long shadows of the gravestones in the Fairwater cemetery. Ditches drifted full of snow, or nearly so. A world that has its cap pulled down over its ears. Dirt in the snow drifts. Fields brushed by the wind - like a dooryard swept smooth with a broom. A bright dome of blue, blue sky. Red barns and white houses. A cat dead on the road. Salt stains on the asphalt. A world I love. Home.


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HERE IT COMES!

The sandhill cranes have been back for a week and a half. We saw our first robins of the season, five of them, as we walked yesterday towards evening. I think that fellow in L'Anse, Michigan, was right: winter's back is broken!

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THE VAGABOND TALKS
AT RIPON COLLEGE
ABOUT HIS TRAVELS

Yesterday afternoon I spoke to Joe Hatcher's class in Small Towns & Small Town Living at Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin. This is the second year that Joe has invited me to be a guest speaker at the class. Last year when I spoke, I had barely started my expedition, I had visited only three of my focus communities. This year, I didn't have to say "what I'm gonna do" in the future, I could start talking about what I've found.

Here's the basic outline of my presentation.

~ Genesis of the idea for the Vagabond In the Middle: it developed out of working on my memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm. I'd wondered if the strengths and characteristics I was seeing in the people of Curlew and Palo Alto County were common across the middle west; and how would I prove that.

~ Defining the project:
- Mapping the area: my definition of the middle west starts with a narrow strip on the western edge of Ohio (roughly the 84th Meredian) and continues west to the 100th Meredian or where the Missouri River comes into South Dakota, whichever you prefer. On the north, it starts at the Canadian border. On the south, it stops about the 39th Parallel. I haven't found anyone with an opinion on the topic who agrees with me, but I stand by my rationale: it starts where the tall grass prairie once stood in western Ohio and stops where the mixed grass prairie turns to short grass exclusively.

- Selecting the communities: I chose one community in each of the 12 states that fall within the boundaries of my definition; they would become "focus" communities that I'll get to know better over the next five years. These communities needed to have: a newspaper that publishes once or twice a week, a public library, and a historical society. If it had some other claim to fame, so much the better - e.g. Rugby is the geographical center of the North American continent, Vandalia is the end of the National Road.

- The essential questions I ask come down to these: Why are you here? What are the current conditions and future prospects of the community? What are the three or four adjectives that describe the charateristics of the people of the community?

Then I read to the students from my notebooks: (1) pieces I wrote while driving to my focus communities; (2) pieces about the talk I've overheard in restaurants - see an example from L'Anse, Michigan here; and (3) pieces about the people I've met and interviewed - one from each of the institutions that Ivan Burgess of Smith Center, Kansas, believes is essential to a community's survival: good schools (Richard Lavik, former school superintendent, Rugby), good banks (Murray Lull, Smith Center, Kansas, president of the Smith County State Bank), and good medical facilities (Shep Sheppard, Smith Center, retired surgeon).

And, finally, I took questions, ones such as these.
~ Which community is the most interesting to you? They are all interesting, they all differ, and each gives me something the others don't. In addition, the biggest surprise: what started out as a research project turns into friendships. If I were an anthropologist, you might say I've "gone native." I think it is okay to love the part of the country you write about, and the people of it.

~ How is your relationship with the communities going to change when you publish the book? Th question was asking if I'm going to tell the truth and what will be the consequences of that. That's a question I have struggled with. How do you criticize those you love. I have promised myself that I'll tell the truth. My solution is to say "we" when I criticize, so as to include myself among those being criticized; and to use examples of my own failings where appropriate.

~ How do you support yourself? (1) Eight-six people have made donations to the effort; and (2) my wife keeps us in groceries and medical insurance, she keeps the wolf away from the door.

~ How will you know when it is time to stop doing research and put the material together as a book? In my experience, the material will tell you. When I visit my focus communities and start coming home with the same old thing, nothing new, that's a sign that I've gone as far as I need to, it's time to make it a book.

Ah, it was exciting to be standing at the front of such attentive students and talking about work that I love! Is this a dream job or what?

---------------------

VAGABOND COLUMN: #4
BREAKFAST AT THE RUGBY SALE BARN

I was in Rugby in January. It was c-c-cold, 20 below zero for several days running. As I stepped out of my motel room heading for breakfast, so did the fellow next door. He had a piece of lathe with orange paint on one end of it; he was using it as a walking stick. He was wearing a pair of insulated coveralls. He said he was going to walk several blocks west along Highway 2 to the Rugby sale barn for breakfast at the cafe there, as he often did on sale day, Thursdays. He said if I liked good food in a place that wasn't very fancy, I should have breakfast at the sale barn too.

Turns out the fellow's name is Clayton Olson, turns out he is nearly 80 years old, turns out he is the father of Therese Rocheleau, the woman who operates the Oakwood Inn motel where I was staying.

I cleaned out the front passenger seat of my car to make space for Clayton and gave him a ride to the sale barn. He seemed a little reluctant to take it, as if riding were immoral when you could just as well walk. It wasn't that cold, after all.

Originally from Brookings, SD, Clayton re-settled near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he had farmed and where he still lives. He was staying in Room 31 at the Oakwood for the winter at the insistence of his daughter so he wouldn't have to cut and split wood all winter to heat his cold Minnesota farmhouse.

So Clayton was in Rugby, I was giving him a ride to the sale barn for breakfast, we were talking about books. He likes to read, especially Louis L'Amour novels. There's a fellow from northeastern North Dakota who also writes westerns, Clayton told me, "I can't remember his name, but he's no Louis L'Amour...."

The biscuits and gravy that Clayton wanted to order were all sold out by the time we arrived so he settled for hashbrowns and toast and sausage or bacon. I ordered my usual - two eggs, two pancakes, two sausage patties. I ended up giving Clayton a copy of my memoir, Curlew:Home, then later in the afternoon as I was talking to Therese Rocheleau she told me: "Dad must be reading your book already. He said you ordered the same breakfast this morning that you ordered on page 13 of the book."

We talked over breakfast, Clayton and I did, about the project that brought me to Rugby, my exploration of what makes us middle western. He enlisted the help of our waitress and others in the cafe to start a list of people from Rugby I should talk to. When we finally pushed our empty plates away, Clayton insisted on buying my breakfast. I don't like to try arm-wrestling the tab away from fellows like Clayton: I know that, while these old men no longer have the strength they used to, slyness trumps brute force every time. So I let Clayton pay for breakfast and I gave him a copy of my book.

When we stepped into the hallway of the sale barn, Clayton introduced me to the main auctioneer at the place, Ron Torgerson. I knew I'd write an essay about the sale barn someday, and Ron Torgerson would be at the center of it, so I got his phone number. Clayton also introduced me to a cattle buyer and farmer, Ken ("I'm a farmer first") Mattern, and I got his phone number too.

Then Clayton and I watched cattle sell for a few minutes. A younger fellow was doing the auctioneering early in the day, selling the less desirable cattle, the old cows and those not properly finished. "Watch those two buyers standing there at the edge of the ring, off to the side," Clayton told me. "When one of them makes a bid, he barely moves his hand." I watched. I saw a hand just flicker with movement; the fellow was bidding on the cattle in the ring. Another buyer - sitting front and center with a little bit of plank table in front of him - just barely nodded his head, just barely thought about nodding his head; he was bidding too. It was this flicker of hand versus that slightest nod til one of the fellows looked away. The bidding was over. "SOLD!" the auctioneer called.

Clayton and I went back to our motel, to get on with our respective days.

----------------------

TO THE FAMILY, GRIEVING:
ON MY BROTHER RANDY'S DEATH
BEFORE HE TURNED 21
from Middle Ground (MWPH, 1982)

The place he lives still is somewhere between
our guts & our grieving. Only stones fill in
where hearts have been torn out. The wounds will close,
slowly; will leave these deep scars we can touch,
remembering him. He was larger than
we are, and his heart fit his size: he would be
the last to curse the wide curve of road
which took him, taking it. Instead, he would laugh:
"By God, didn't I finally meet my match."


>

WHY "MIDDLE WEST?"

Taken from an interview conducted by Christine Townsend for an article about my reading last October at Sturm Memorial Library in Manawa, Wisconsin. Read the entire interview here.

CT: Why do you say "Middle West," rather than the conventional "Midwest?"

TM: I say "middle west" - no caps - because I want people to stumble over the words and notice them. I don't capitalize the words because middle westerners don't call that much attention to themselves. "Midwest" is a clipped quick two syllables; it is too easily dismissed. Well - I don't want the middle west to be so easily dismissed. I want people to pay attention. And using "middle" as I do, I am also drawing attention to an essential part of who we are, our middleness: we are at times mild and grey, certainly we're polite and moderate and generally conventional. "Middle" makes reference to such qualities in a way that "Mid-" does not.

---------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 8, 1998

It is afternoon. I am sitting in the Atlanta airport. Outside, the day is sunny, but cold. Here, in Terminal South, life is interesting. If you sit in the airport of a major city for long enough, you will see everything. If you sit in Atlanta's airport for ten minutes, you'll see enough to make you wonder "How much more could there be?"

I have eaten a Dominoes 6" pizza. I have had two scoops of ice cream. I have listened to a couple of men nearby trading dirty jokes. And now I am sitting near two men with closely cropped hair speaking a foreign language I have not identified. Either they are soccer players from a middle European country or they are terrorists. Actually, they look too old to be soccer players.

Sitting here you can think about place - life comes and goes past this chair at a tremendous pace. I notice that some people will wear anything in public. Tall and short, thin and thick and very thick, black and white and all shades and colors between. There is nowhere along my drive to work at home to see life of this pace and variety.

I am intrigued by all the possible stories that might be walking past me: business travelers in their suits, young adventurers with duffel bags and torn blue jeans, black security guards, pilots, women traveling alone with young children. The children themselves - what do they think of this? Old men with flowing grey locks.

I give $15.00 to a young black fellow who says he lost his ticket last night on a two hour layover from Florida to Carolina. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Good story. Good acting. It is worth $15.00 to see his jaw drop when I hand him the bills.

You won't see any of this between Fairwater and Ripon on my usual drive to work.

----------------------

from
THE BIG BOOK OF BEN ZEN

Ben does the math -

The unusual
Counts for two.


>

IS IT A DUCK?

It was commonbeauty who observed, in a comment left recently at Via Negativa: "I find it incredible that a community spontaneously forms itself within the vast universe of the internet, which is so full of websites and pages and words that you would consider it inimical to anything but navel gazing or casual intellectual intercourse."

Think about it: out of all the possible gatherings, like-minded people find each other and form a "community" with no pre-established rules, but with certain courtesies; no pre-established requirements, but with common interests. These people treat each other with respect. Humor flows freely. If a word of support is needed, it's offered.

It seems to differ from the communities I focus on in my Vagabond project, in that:

(1) This is a clustering together by choice.

(2) It doesn't have a physical center nor physical presence, i.e. members can be anywere; for instance, I visit and comment at Ivy is here; Ivy is in Ireland these days.

(3) Interactions seem serial rather than simultaneous, i.e., comments come one after another, as opposed to the simultaneity of exchange at a church supper or town hall meeting.

(4) Members don't always have a name nor a face (I don't have a clue to commonbeauty's name, nor ntexas99's at Brain Crayons, but both have real-life presence that comes through their words.

Despite such differences, there does seem to be a community here; you might ask yourself, for instance, "what is Dave gonna say about that?" You might worry if Lorianne hasn't put up post yet today, has she collapsed under the stress of writing her dissertation? You might wonder how the newspaper feature about Beth's blog is going to turn out. How is Fred's cold? How is Kathleen's smashed hand?

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a duck? Maybe it's a community? Can it be? Even if we don't necessarily know each other's names? Or is it no more than a "virtual social club" of some sort?

I'm too new to it - only a month - to have any real answers, but I will say that sometimes it seems that what you're getting here is a lot like friendship. Can it be?

What do YOU think?

----------------------

THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)

"Boy," Ivan writes, "it's nice to be old and be able to say anything you want even if it is not politically correct. In my seventy plus years I have discovered three things keep a small town going - the three are good banks, good medical facilities, and good schools. If a town has those three things it can survive. Which one is the most important? Well, it's like a three-legged stool. Which leg is the most important on a three-legged stool?"

*

"Casey Edell really knows how to hurt a guy," Ivan writes. "Last Monday morning at the As the Bladder Fills Club I was wondering if the batteries in my golf cart would last the summer. Casey bluntly said, 'the batteries in that golf cart will outlast you'."

*

Ivan called Davy Winkleman about the Cedar High School mascot. "Davy said the Cedar High School team was called the Bulldogs," Ivan reported. "We won't even go into what a Lady Bull Dog would be called."

*

"It's no wonder middle America is obese," Ivan says. "All we do is attend soup and pie suppers, church pot luck suppers, and school fund raisers. Why don't somebody have a celery and salad supper?"

---------------------

from
THE SWEET BITE OF MORNING
Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook


March 8, 2001

A sour sky far off
where the wind blows in from.
Snow across these prairies -

some stays on the road,
some runs for Michigan.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 28, 2004
LEAVING L'ANSE

I packed the car for the trip home, then headed downtown this morning for one last breakfast as Shabee's Cafe. There was only one fellow in there when I went in, in the middle of enjoying his omelet. An older man came in, sat himself down over where the fellows gather for morning coffee. He ordered tea.

One thing I've found here in L'Anse, even tough men will order tea instead of coffee, and they'll order chocolate milk too. I haven't seen men ordering tea and chocolate milk in any of the other communities; of course, it might simply be that I'm not in the right place at the right time - I'd be the first to admit that.

The fellow halfway through his omelet picked up his platter and cup and moved over to where the old man had sat down. "I want to talk basketball," he said.

The old man had been to L'Anse's game in Iron Mountain the night before. "You know the B team lost again," he said. Apparently the B team had gone undefeated up til the past two games. "They got to thinkin' they were unbeatable."

A fellow from Bianco Plumbing came in, he got himself a menu and was looking it over before the waitress could get to him. Another fellow and his daughter came in and sat in the booth next to him.

"Yeah, I'm waiting for my phone to ring," the plumber said. "I'm on call today."

There is more talk of basketball. A middle-aged fellow with a walker comes in and takes a third booth. "How you doin' Tom?" someone asked him.

"I couldn't be better," Tom said. "I getting out and around now, I'm seeing people, they feel sorry for me, I've got money in my pocket. I couldn't be any better." That was about when I noticed the lower end of one of his pant legs was dangling empty.

The waitress brought him coffee. "You might as well bring another cup for her," he said, nodding at the empty side of the booth, "she'll be coming along very shortly."

Sure enough, she did. I had seen her in there several times before.

Sure enough, the table where fellows gather for morning coffee had filled up and they were talking politics now. One of the fellows was not very happy with President Bush. "We gotta get him out of there," he said.

"I don't know if anyone else would do any better," someone else said.

"Ted Kennedy already has too much to say," said a third man a little later. I'd been listening to a different conversation and missed the thread of connection.

A fellow came in past my booth and said "Good morning" to me. It's true, these are friendly people. The cafe is pretty well filled up with friendly people by the time I finish my breakfast and pay up. Some of them are talking from table to table.

I'd love to stay and eavesdrop some more, but it's time to head south towards home. It's been a lovely week. Beautiful weather. Friendly people. Yet as with every journey, it's good to go home. I'm ready.

---------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 8, 1998

I am walking the streets of Atlanta this morning. I stop at Georgia State University, in front of the Baptist Student Union. A sign in the window says "Christians Rock the House." The sign in the other window says "Jesus Saves." Fortunately I do not need saving today.

A fifteen minute walk away and I am standing near Atlanta's "24 Hour Dance Club." It is Sunday morning. It is 10:00 a.m. It is time for church. And up and down Peach Tree Street there are all manner and variety of churches, historic and beautiful churches.

The 24-hour dance club is in an old three story brick building, a former warehouse, perhaps. The heavy bass and the drum beat are loosening the mortar. On the down beat, you can almost see between the bricks. A wail of voice cries out, escapes the building. More bass and drum. The sidewalk almost shudders. Another wail of voice crying out on a Sunday morning. Bleery-eyed dancers must be holding each other up, praying to their various gods for relief, for sweet relief. Another shudder of bass and more drum. I think: "It's good to be alive this morning, and sober."

Later, two girls are walking up Peach Tree Street towards me, carrying boxes. They're white girls. The boxes are big. The red-head is smoking a cigarette. She says "I was f-'d up last night, y'all."

*

Cajun food in Atlanta. The man behind the counter is hawking his chicken. "Try some world famous chicken," he says. "World Famous Bourbon Chicken, just like New Orleans. Try some chicken." He sounds Cajun. He pronounces "chicken" like he's got something rolling around on his tongue. You try it - soft boil an egg and put it in your mouth. Now say "World Famous Bourbon Chicken." That's how he sounded.

*

In a place like downtown Atlanta, where it is near wall-to-wall concrete, you do not get a sense of the place in terms of the landscape. Instead, you read the place much more in terms of the people, of their rituals and habits.

Still, when a storm rolls in as it did this afternoon, you recognize that all this concrete, piled high as it might be, is not enough: the tallest tower visible out the window of my hotel room disappears into cloud. Half the city is - suddenly - gone. The sudden darkness of the storm brings on all the street lights I can see.

Rain starts to pour down; it continues into the darkness of night. Near the elevator shafts in the hotel, the wind roars and roars - the draft strong enough to tousle my hair like a grandfather saying hello to the barefoot child.

----------------------

MORE "NOTES ABOUT PLACE" (4)

Place might be wild. It might not be.

We need a wilderness to let us be human. We are animals. Wilderness helps us to remember that we are animals, that we are not the top of the food chain.

Farmers necessarily tame a place when they husband it. The good farmer belongs to the earth as much as the earth ever belongs to him. The miner, by contrast, takes and does not give back; for the miner, place is simply space to be exploited.

When we speak of "natural resources," perhaps we should not ask what we want to make of what we have but what we want to make of ourselves.

----------------------

I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

I'm not very political, but...
If I hear too many more people say "we have to preserve the sanctity of marriage," I just might have to start agitating for a "No Divorce" Amendment.


>

RECOMMENDED POST OF THE WEEK:

See: Only Connect's March 1, 2004 entry, What About Lobster.

----------------------

BLESS HER: NANCY BESONEN
CAPTURES THE VAGABOND

Nancy Besonen, ace reporter for the L'Anse Sentinel, L'Anse, Michigan, captured me perfectly in her March 3rd article about my recent visit to Baraga County in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm going to have to make her lead to the story part of my definition of what I'm about; it is perfect.

She wrote: "Tom Montag is defining the character of the Midwest - one character at a time."

She also captured perfectly my gratitude to my wife and to those who have made contributions to this expedition:

"About 75 sponsors have helped Montag along his way with contributions ranging for $20 to $100, but the bulk of his support comes from the home front - more specifically his wife Mary. A nurse for Fond du Lac County, WI, Mary keeps the home fires burning while her husband is on the road doing research two weeks of every month. 'I can't say enough about her,' Montag said. 'Not all of us are afforded a chance to do our life dream. Mary, she's a sweetie. Or maybe she just wants me out of the house'."

Nancy, a tip of the hat, and thank you!

----------------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 26-27, 2004
FRIDAY NIGHT WALLEYE AT THE CANTEEN BAR & GRILL

Along about 5:30 p.m. I headed down to the Canteen Bar & Grill for some supper. The place sits across the street from L'Anse's waterfront park and has a wonderful view of the water out its wide front window. Mike Jensen, the Director of the Extension Service, had told me the Canteen's walleye on Friday nights was exceptionally; he had steered me to that good piece of meat I'd had at Tony's Steak House on Wednesday night, so I was in the mood to believe him about walleye.

I walked in and found a table. When I got my bearings, I saw that Mike and his wife Connie were having supper in one of the booths closer to the front of the place. I went over to say Hello. Mike introduced me to his wife. He asked how my visit was going, whether I'd gotten to ride in one of the snow-grooming machines, and other such talk. Soon enough, they went back to their food and I returned to my table. You don't want your walleye getting cold.

The Canteen's looked so much like a Wisconsin fish fry I couldn't tell you the difference. Indeed, as I'd been told, the secretary at the Baraga County's Extension Service was one of the women waiting tables. I'd met her on Wednesday; she stopped to say hello, and to check that I'd been taken care of.

I had the good clam chowder and salad bar, the "beer-batter French fries," and - of course - the walleye. The walleye was good. The walleye was as good as any I've eaten. Three big pieces of walleye, steaming hot and tasty. I don't know what it is about bars and bar food - these little taverns know how to take care of you on a Friday night. I wouldn't need any dessert. Again.

When they finished eating, Mike and Connie Jensen circled through the tables to mine, to thank me for selecting L'Anse as one of my focus communities.

"No, thank you," I said. "I have been so well received."

"Well, we are proud to be part of your project," Mike said. "Have a safe trip home."

Now I am an Iowa farm boy, admittedly I am a little naive. Yet I pride myself on being observant, you know I do. There I'd sat throughout my meal, eating and gauging how this Friday night fish fry was like those I knew in Wisconsin, how these people are like the people I've met in my eleven other focus communities, etc. etc. I can keep myself entertained for long stretches at a time with such thoughts, just ask my wife, and at the same time I'm listening, I'm watching, I'm paying careful attention.

So I finished my last French fry, the last swig of my soda. I pushed my plate away from me with a satisfied motion and a fullness where my belly is, and I waited for my check to come. I was interested to see how much the scrumptious walleye was going to set me back.

The woman from the Extension Service, who had been waiting on another table in my area, now wiped her hands on her apron and came over to me. "Mike Jensen paid for your meal already," she said.

"No," I said. I thought I'd been paying such good attention to everything around me! "No, he didn't," I said.

"Yes," she said, "all taken care of."

"Well, be sure to tell him thank you," I said. "I think I have his e-mail address, and I will tell him thank you myself when I get home."

I left some money on the table for a tip and started making my way towards the front of the place. "You're bill is all taken care of," said another waitress, thinking I might be headed up to the bar to pay for my food. "We weren't supposed to tell you until you'd finished your meal."

----------------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 7, 1998

I am flying from Milwaukee to Atlanta. Two college girls are my seat-mates. We are Row 16. It is Spring Break.

The girl next to me takes out a composition book. It is her journal. She makes an entry:

"I am so glad I'm getting the hell out of Wisconsin. I can't wait to lay back on the beach. I will wear almost nothing."

The other girl has just broken up with her boyfriend. She shares a poem with her friend, a poem she had written for her boyfriend before the break-up. This girl keeps a journal, too, and the poem is part of her journal. When her friend has finished reading the poem, she flips the page like she is looking for more.

There is no more poem but there is more - something about Ripon, Wisconsin. Something on another page about "F-THEM. F-THEM ALL." Then a single page in huge block letters, near the final entry, filling the whole page, letters that big: "F-YOU."

"I have always been too shy," says the girl next to me. "I have been afraid to tell people what I think. Sometimes it's better if you tell them what's on your mind."

"That's not my problem," says the other girl. "My problem is I tell people what I think. I am never afraid to tell them. It gets you in trouble. Sometimes it would be better just to shut up."

"Honesty is the best policy," says the girl next to me. "I think you should always say what you think."

"Honesty is not always the best policy," says the other girl. "If you stick to that policy, you won't have any friends. It is better to lie or to shut up."

"My brother was six and I was three," says the girl next to me. "We managed to lose our parents in Disney World. We have been self-reliant ever since. We managed to lose them again in Hong Kong and survived. When we got to Paris, they kept a close eye on us. We were such jet brats."

"When I lived in Micronesia," the other girl says, "I had a friend who lived on Okinawa. We lived close to each other, we thought. But Okinawa was 2,000 miles from where I lived. Micronesia, taken all together, maybe has the land mass of Rhode Island. But it's spread out over an area the size of the continental United States."

"I want to lay back in the sun," says the girl next to me. "I want to be alone on the beach. The last thing I want to see are boys."

"My dad called," she says. "I was telling him about my trip. He said, 'Honey, you have to be so careful these days, they've got a drug they can slip into your drink.' I said 'Like, Dad, give me some credit.' What, does he think I'm entirely innocent? It's not like I'm going to the beach to get drunk on my face and get laid. I just want to lay back in the sun and be left the hell alone."

----------------------

REFLECTIONS ON BOOKS: #4
IMAGINING HOME: WRITING FROM THE MIDWEST
Edited by Mark Vinz and Thom Tammaro
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1995

I have imagined editing a book about "home" here in the middle west. I would ask middle western writers to describe the home they were born to, and then to describe the home they've chosen to inhabit now. And – perhaps the hard part – I'd want them to tease out the connections between these two homes.

Although Imagining Home, edited by Mark Vinz and Thom Tammaro, is not the book I have imagined for myself, it is a very good immersion into parts of the same territory. Admittedly, my definition of the middle west extends beyond the area – generally the "upper" middle west – that's included here. The essayists in Imagining Home represent North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The editors hope "these sixteen essays will offer readers a starting point for exploring and discovering how the landscapes of their homes have been a shaping influence in their lives."

Certainly, as the editors say, "these writers have stayed with the Midwest: loving it; hating it; wrestling with its contradictions, its transparency, its opacity, its ambiguity; but ultimately moving to embrace it."

Many of these writers are native middle westerners. They may have moved around, as did Michael Martone, from his home town, Fort Wayne, Indiana, to some time spent in Iowa. Martone is the author of the collection of essays, The Flatness & Other Landscapes, which itself goes some ways towards defining the middle west. He is also editor of an anthology of essays about the middle west, A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1988). His work is represented here by "The Flyover" from The Flatness.

Another who is native: Martha Bergland was raised in Illinois, she lives now in Wisconsin. "We felt deprived on that flat square-mile farm" of her childhood, Bergland says, "without even an old orchard, a falling-down barn, a winding creek to play near."

"Still, that square place was our home," she says, "and now that I live in Wisconsin, in a wooded, hilly place near Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River, I miss the flat land."

"Like many, and now perhaps most, middle-class American families," she says, "no two consecutive generations of my family for six generations have lived in the same house or on the same farm, in the same town or even the same part of the country."

What the family is rooted in, Bergland says, "is in memory – and odd patches at that."

From the first landscape of David Allan Evans' Sioux City childhood, "the sky was a bowl of stars you could stand inside." The second landscape from those early years, Evans says, "has been the source of at least 70 percent of the images and experiences I've used in one way or another in poems and prose in about three decades of writing."

Kathleen Norris was born in Washington, DC, she lived in Beach Park, Illinois, and in Hawaii as a child, yet it was into her grandparents place in South Dakota that she settled as an adult. "Place can stick to us in western South Dakota," she says. A writer who knows both Norris's first book of poems and her later work told her: "When you moved to South Dakota, it's like you discovered gravity."

A dusty, rough, backroad drive to the nearest airport in Bismarck, North Dakota, was not hardship for her: "The reward in all of this," Norris says, "was experiencing all over again the incredible roominess of western Dakota, seeing signs a person would miss from the highway." The reward was a suddenness of golden eagle overhead.

Jack Driscoll is not native to the region, either; he was from Holyoke, Massachusetts, I think. Yet he has chosen the place that chose him, Michigan. Oh, his ex-wife had warned: "Don't go out to the Midwest, don't go there." She thought the Midwest "was barren and flat and full of Bibles," the people fifteen years behind the times.

"Trespasser, visitor, resident, native – my burrowing has gone something like this," Driscoll says, "though maybe native spirit will be all I can honestly claim in the end. If so, it will no doubt be enough."

It is such a strangeness, and how it blesses us, this attachment and re-attachment to place, this need to put down roots, to let a place - our special home - nourish us.

Eleven other fine writers have essays included in Imagining Home: Carol Bly, Paul Gruchow, Patricia Hampl, Linda Hasselstrom, Jon Hassler, David Haynes, Bill Holm, Kent Meyers, Robert Schuler, Mary Swander, and Larry Watson.

If you are able to find a copy of Imagining Home, read it, cherish it, learn from it. It should help you understand the terrain of your own habitation.

----------------------

THANKS....

To the following folks for their recent contributions to the Vagabond Expedition:
#85 Mike & Marjorie Gowdy, Iowa
#86 Roger & Margot Brockmeyer, California

>

SATURDAY'S POEM
----------------------
SPARE TIRE
by Phil Hey


Here's the way it is, certain places
in the Midwest: one day I was walking
in town on some errand or other
and there was this tire, a good one,
mounted on a wheel you could use,
not new but with plenty of miles left on it,
laying up against the trunk of a tree.
Nobody was around, nobody was guarding it,
nobody would have said anything
if I'd just up and rolled it away as my own.
But you could tell, somebody had lost a spare
and somebody had found it and left it there
for them when they came back looking.
You could go to any big city you wanted to
and not find that. But around here,
when it's nice out, when anybody
might be walking past - you never know -
take a look yourself: right out in the open,
where the only thing is to trust people
you don't know, a hubcap, a bookbag,
a mitten; even in summer.

Phil Hey's new and selected poems, How It Seems to Me, will be forthcoming from MWPH Books later this year. Hey teaches literature and writing at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa. He has a little piece of ground outside the city where he tends a couple horses, cuts wood, writes poems.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About fourteen of them, by our current count.

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from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 6, 1998

A neighbor, walking. I see him often in the morning. Those who walk believe. Those who believe walk. Each mile is another fifteen minutes of breath on this blue amazing planet.

A snow plow, heading south as I head north. A crust of ice and snow blasted into the air. Salt scattering on the highway. Like the taste of blood. Like a moist kiss, so deep and insistent you cannot get air. The orange blade of the plow grumbles on the pavement. Snow hangs onto the trees, as if the branches could catch and hold the light.


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IN MEMORIAM: RICHARD ROCHELEAU, RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA

I've just heard from my friend Theresa Rocheleau in Rugby, North Dakota, that her husband's uncle, Richard Rocheleau, died recently at age 82 after a bout with lung cancer. I am saddened.

Richard was a pretty remarkable man. I met him at a birthday party the Rocheleau family threw for him in January 2003, and he let me run my tape recorder for four hours while he and the family talked in the living room. Here are the passages from the Vagabond newsletter about that visit with him and the family:

January 20, 2003
I went to Edna Rocheleau's house yesterday at 2 p.m. for a surprise 81st birthday party for Jim Rocheleau's uncle, Richard Rocheleau. I got on tape four hours of conversation with Richard Rocheleau, Big Jim, and Big Jim's brother Jerry, who farms north of Rugby. It was a family experience not unlike what I'm used to - grown children and grandchildren intermingling, a great pot of scalloped potatoes with ham and ground meat, a tuna and macaroni hot dish, salads like you'd see at an Iowa picnic.

As Richard Rocheleau was Jim's dad's brother, his experience of the world would be similar to that of Jim's dad. Rocheleau (Richard) talked of growing up in those hard days, of serving in the Navy during World War II. He was on board his vessel as far as Hawaii where he and several other sailors whose names began with "R-O" received strict orders to get off and stay in Hawaii while the ship and everyone else on it went off to battle. Rocheleau spent most of his Navy career not far from Waikiki Beach.

When he returned to North Dakota, he was home only a week when he realized how lonely his existence was - in the Navy he'd grown used to the hustle and bustle of humanity around him. Yet his father talked him out of re-enlisting. Rocheleau thinks he missed his moment to break free of North Dakota right after the war, and he might regret having missed the opportunity. Once you start putting down roots in a place, once family has its hold on you, Rocheleau thinks, that's where you'll stay, you can't get away.

Rocheleau served three terms in the North Dakota state legislature. He was an auctioneer and an inventor, he farmed, ran a tree moving business, removed stumps. He removed stumps right up until last year and thinks the hard work and exercise kept him fit. He pats his tummy and says: "Now I've gone soft."

One of Rocheleau's stand-out moments in the legislature was during debate on a bill about auctioneering that he was opposed to. When it came his turn to speak, he rose up and said his piece entirely in the chant of an auctioneer. Nearly thirty years later he could repeat the chant for me. The words rolled off his tongue rhythmically, punctuated by the auctioneer's up and down and pause and burst. When he finished for the legislature, there was absolute silence in the chamber. No one knew what to say - time stood still for that moment. Then a thunder of applause from all corners of the room. "Even so," Rocheleau said, "everyone voted 'Green,' I was the only 'Red' vote." A few days later the Governor waved him over from across the street - "Oh now I'm going to get it," Rocheleau thought. He walked across traffic to take his licking. "I want to commend you on that speech," the Governor said. He praised Rocheleau's chant and Rocheleau wondered how the Governor could be talking about it as if he'd heard it. "I was on the phone with a legislator," the Governor said. "The fellow held up his phone when you started so I heard the whole thing."

Jim and Jerry Rocheleau talked also - the afternoon wasn't an interview so much as it was a discussion, family talking over Sunday dinner, over cake and ice cream. Jim and Jerry brought my sense of the family's life on the farm forward a generation. They are only slightly younger than I am, so I was hearing the North Dakota version of my childhood.

One thing that Jerry said which stands out: "There are no trees out here, we are used to seeing the horizon, so we are wide-open and a little untamed. When we go east and end up among all those trees, we feel confined. When a fellow from the east comes out to North Dakota and sees our horizon, he feels naked."

May Richard Rocheleau rest in peace. Amen.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 26-27, 2004
RIDING SHOTGUN WITH THE SNOW-GROOMER

It was 9:05 p.m. I was parked where the snow-mobile trail crosses Prison Camp Road south of L'Anse near Alberta. This is where I was supposed to meet Tom Larson at 10:00 p.m. I like to be early, rather than late, and perhaps this is the reason why: about 9:07 p.m. this apparition of ghostly lights came down the trail towards me, it was Tom Larson in the Tucker Snow Cat pulling a drag that groomed and repacked the snow-mobile trail.

I flashed my headlights, then got out of the car. Tom brought the Snow Cat to a stop.

When you look at Tom Larson's face, you see the roughened skin of a fellow who spends a lot of time working outside; you see a kind of weariness in the eyes that is common to those people who work while the rest of us sleep. Tom would be working twelve hours tonight grooming the trail to Nestoria, that to Sidnaw, then probably he'd have to groom the trail from Baraga to Chassell, too. He'd work a long night tonight, he'd worked twelve hours last night, he worked twelve hours the night before that. He's not bragging when he says it: he shrugs his shoulders as if to say "What are you gonna do?"

This is Tom's second year at grooming snow-mobile trails in Baraga County. "I've been here two years and I've got the most seniority," he said, if that will give you any idea how popular this night work is.

He warned me that riding in the Snow Cat "will grow on you." Last year on most of his trips someone rode with him as he plunged through the dark strangeness of the U.P. night.

The police scanner in the cab of the Snow Cat crackled with an exchange. "That's my entertainment for the evening," Tom said.

How did he come to this job?

"I saw an ad in the paper," he said. "I called and they told me to come get an application, so I did. Then I had to go in for an interview. They asked about my knowledge of machinery. I had worked in the woods with heavy equipment - caterpillars and skid-loaders and that sort of thing. A couple weeks later I was driving down the road and my phone rang. 'You are a successful applicant,' they told me."

"Sometimes the job isn't fun. If you breakdown when it's ten degrees below zero, you are forty miles out in the wilderness, you can't run the engine, and it's snowing so hard you can't see anything - that's not fun," Tom said. "At two o'clock in the morning."

"That happened last year," he explained. "The radiator split and blew out all the anti-freeze. There I sat in the dark. I couldn't run the engine without anti-freeze, that would burn it up. I was up above the Roland Lake gravel pit on my way to Big Bay. There is no service on the phone up there - it's a bad spot for the phone towers. That's why we have the sheriff band radio in here, we can communicate on that in emergencies. It took three and a half hours for someone to come get me. A fellow came out in another one of the machines and brought me seven gallons of anti-freeze. He pulled my drag and followed me back. If I left the cap loose on the radiator, the anti-freeze wouldn't squirt out, even though the radiator was split. He followed me all the way back. We got home at 10:30 in the morning that time."

Tom had had a gas heater in the cab of the Snow Cat to keep him warm during that three and a half hour wait. Normally he carries the heater, chain saws, a big tool kit, a fire extinguisher, first aid kit, soda, and something for his stomach if the hamburger he eats when he takes a break at Nestoria wants to give him a little heartburn. "I have to take this stuff with me," he said. "I've had to fix these machines on the trail before. Chains. Come-alongs. I've got just about everything in here."

"I worked in the woods logging for sixteen years," Tom told me. "I had to get out of that before I got killed. It's too easy to get hurt."

He illustrated how the plow on the front of the Snow Cat works hydraulically. "You use it when the trail is really bad," he said. "There are teeth on the blade of it. If you dig it in too deep, it'll stop the machine just like that and you'll hit the windshield." The windshield is cracked already. It started as a little ding and the machine's constant vibration keeps making it worse.

There are two seats in the cab of the Tucker, an instrument panel between them, the gear shift for the automatic transmission, a lever for raising and lowering the plow in front and for controlling the drag being pulled behind. Two sets of lights illuminate the way ahead.

"When it snows," Tom said, "you can't see what kind of job you're doing until you turn around and come back down the trail. The tracks throw up that much snow when the snow is loose."

Snow-mobilers might surprise the grooming operator when he's out at night. Tom has to keep watching for them.

"This is cruise control," Tom said, and he showed me a length of metal that he stuck into place to hold the gas pedal at a certain speed. "There is also a hand throttle but it keeps creeping down and you're constantly adjusting it. This cruise control, you just kick it if something happens." He did, and the machine slowed.

"This is pretty smooth right here," he said of a nice stretch. "We don't have to do too much with it." He pops his cruise control back into place.

"We're going about fourteen miles per hour now," he said. "When the snow gets deep, you can't groom this fast."

"You can feel when it's losing power," Tom said. "Snow is building up in the drag. You raise it a bit and it releases some of the snow."

He popped the machine out of cruise control to take a steeply-banked corner. I swear it felt like the machine was going to tip over, it seemed to be leaning that far. When I grabbed the handle above my door, Tom smiled and looked at me as if to say "Welcome aboard, newcomer."

"It takes some getting used to" is what he said outloud.

The drag weighs two thousand pounds, Tom told me. "It really smooths out the trail. This drag is getting worn. It needs a new cutting blade on it, but it'll make the season."

What does he do in the summer now that he doesn't work in the woods?

"Last summer I did well working for myself doing carpentry and wiring houses," he said.

The Tucker was rocking back and forth from side to side. The engine droned, its pitch climbing and dropping according to how hard the drag had to work smoothing the trail.

He could be grooming trails well into April, Tom said. "Out here in the woods, the trees shade the snow. The sun doesn't bust up the trail so bad."

He no longer snow-mobiles himself, he said. "Actually, when I got this job last year, I sold my two snow-mobiles and the trailer. When you do this all night, you don't want to jump on a snow-mobile and ride during the day."

The Snow Cat was feeling like it was going to tip over again. I grabbed the handle again. Tom looked at me with the amusement of a veteran.

Ahead we saw an overpass looming. "That's US Highway 41 south of Alberta," Tom said. "We have to go under the highway here."

"The warmer the snow," he said, "the easier it gets chewed up by the snow-mobiles." The snow on the trail was packed about a foot deep.

We came to a part of the trail that is a logging road. They'd been logging through here this winter, but recently had stopped, "so we've got good trail now." The trucks had been tearing up the snow surface of the road. "Actually, this is Old Highway 41," Tom said.

"If it's really cold, I'll have an extra coat and pants with me," Tom said. "I was putting up a sign at some water a little while back, and my foot slipped. This leg went into the water almost all the way up to my waist. I had to take my boot and liner off and put them over the heater to dry them out, and I rode all night with my bare foot up by the windshield."

Branches were coming out of the darkness at us, slapping the side windows of the Tucker.

"It's not a bad job," Tom said. "I ride around and get paid for it. But by about March, you don't want to get up and go out on the trail. This past January, with three machines, we groomed more than 6100 miles of trail. We had a lot of snow and a lot of snow-mobilers. To keep the trails in shape, we had to take out all three machines every night. The more sleds on the trail, the more they tear it up, the more you've got to groom."

So, I asked, how do you feel about snow-mobilers?

"I hate 'em!" he said. "At least that's what I tell Tracey." He laughed. Tracey Barrett is Executive Director of the Baraga County Tourist and Recreation Association. Tom's boss reports to her and so, ultimately, does Tom. "When snow-mobilers see us out grooming the trails, it's always a thumbs up. The women will throw you kisses."

When he started the job, Tom already had a familiarity with equipment. It was just a matter of learning where all the controls were located. "After while," he said, "you know exactly where everything is, you can do it in the dark."

The Chassell Trail, Tom believes, is one of the busiest in the network of trails in the county. "It leads right to the casino in Baraga," he said. "That's where everyone goes."

"They aren't getting my money," he added.

And the Big Bay Trail is also popular, he thinks.

"The smoother the better," Tom said as we flew down the darkness. "The trail feels worse in here than it does on a snow-mobile. These new sleds have terrific suspensions."

The fellows who operate the grooming equipment alternate which trails they work and which machines they drive. Or maybe sometimes it's "first one there gets his pick of equipment." Tom showed me a maintenance log in a binder kept in the cab of the Snow Cat. There's a checklist for just about everything. "It's easier to fix things in a warm shop," he said, "than to fix them out on the trail."

"Here's the power-line," he said. We'd come upon a big transmission line. "We follow this for a long stretch." The snow-mobile trail uses the same right-of-way as the power-line through that area.

"I see lots of deer on certain trails," Tom said. "Last night two rabbits ran across in front of me on the Big Bay Trail. I haven't see a wolf, but I've seen a lot of wolf tracks back there just before were we came under Highway 41, and on the Big Bay trail."

What do people up here think about wolves?

"They hate 'em," Tom said. "They don't like 'em."

We changed the subject. "These rubber tracks give a smoother ride, and it's quiet," he said of the Snow Cat's treads. "If we had the machine with metal tracks, you'd feel it and you'd hear it."

Now we'd come to a section of trail where the power company was replacing the poles that hold the electric wires. The equipment that is used to replace the poles has torn up the trail in places. "They've got to do it in the winter-time," Tom said, "because this ground is wet." Because he knew they'd be working here this year, he'd originally tried to put the trail along the other side of the power-line. "Too many rocks over there put an end to that."

He lowered the blade in front of the Tucker. "See how it will roll that snow?"

We came past a place where the power company's equipment was parked off to the side of the trail, then Tom said "that's Highway 41 over there," pointing off to our right. "If you watch, every once in a while you'll see car lights there. You wonder what they think when they see us going through the woods, this light moving among threes, no noise. It's like a ghost."

We went up and we went down. "It's kind of like a mini-roller-coaster ride here for a bit," Tom said. "If I could, I'd take you on the trail to Sidnaw. There's one hill on it, the trail comes up over the top of it and you just go straight down."

Now there were dried cat-tails standing on both sides of the trail, most of their brown furriness still clinging tightly to the top couple inches of stalk. "This is a fun spot the first time you come through it," Tom said. "This swamp could swallow up one of these machines."

We crossed a bridge made especially for snow-mobilers. "We built it," Tom said, "and we put it here."

We were swaying side to side and front to back. It wasn't exactly like trying to ride a wild bull, well maybe it was a little bit like it. "If the trails is too rough," Tom said, "you have to go slower or you'll get thrown out of the machine."

We came upon more power company equipment parked at the side of the trail. Tom pointed at a machine. "They left the lights on in that one the other night," he said. "When I came through here the other night, there it was shining in the dark. They probably parked the equipment before it was dark so they didn't notice. I found the switch and turned the lights off. I left them a note: 'The trail groomer turned your lights off at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.'"

Even where they've torn up the trail moving their equipment, Tom hasn't criticized the power company. "They own the right-of-way," he'd explained at one point. "We're lucky they let the trail go through here."

Tom pretty much knows every curve of the trail, every bump and grind of the route. "There are a couple big rocks on this trail that stay exposed until the snow gets a little deeper," Tom said. "You have to pay attention to them." The machine jumped slightly, as if on cue. "Feel that? That was a rock. I didn't hit it very hard, but I felt it."

"Yeah, the highway is right there," Tom said, pointing. "If a car was going past you'd see right into it."

"See all these signs?" he said. He was talking about the snow-mobilers' traffic signs. "We had to change our trail signs. They want the same traffic symbols for snow-mobilers as for the highways. So that whether you are in your car or on your snow-mobile, the sign is the same."

We were headed into the liquid blackness coming at us when suddenly we saw headlights coming up the trail. It was two snow-mobiles. They pulled off the trail and circled their noses back towards us. Tom gave them a couple beeps of the horn as we went past, an acknowledgement of the comradery.

"Oh, they're going to ride on my freshly-groomed trail," Tom said. "It'll have tracks on it now. The rotten buggers." If he was trying to sound like he was upset, he didn't do a very good job. When I worked on a golf course in college, getting up to mow greens and move pins at 5:00 in the morning, I tried to sound like I didn't like golfers, too. But I knew where my paycheck came from. So does Tom.

The snow-mobile trail is established pretty much where the trail groomer chooses to groom early in the season, Tom indicated. He has some leeway in the exact layout, within the confines of the right-of-way that has been established.

Tom said: "I'd liked to take someone along when it was really storming and have them videotape the trip - so people can see what it's really like out here."

"You don't get much choice here, I see," I said. We were climbing a narrow ridge and there wasn't much room to spare either to the right or the left.

"Nor here," Tom said as we topped the hill and both sides of the trail dropped away even more steeply. I swallowed and was glad Tom had all the seniority and experience he had.

Soon enough we were back out on flat ground. Tom put his makeshift cruise control in place. Our headlights were eating up the darkness.

All of a big sudden he pulled off the cruise control. The machine slowed and groaned. "Railroad tracks," Tom said. He touched the hydraulic and lifted the front end of the drag behind us. "You don't want to catch one of those rails. That'll stop you quick."

Then we were plowing down the night again, when just as suddenly it was like we'd come out of a tunnel of darkness. The sound of everything opened up, you could feel the noise of the Tucker flying away. Lights. We crossed Highway 41. The end of the portion of the trail that Tom was responsible for tonight. We pulled into the parking lot of Cozy Inn at Nestoria.

"I stop here and take a little break," Tom said. We climbed down out of the Tucker. "Oh, my back," he said as he stretched his legs and straightened up. "This is hard on your back." It looked to me like the run of long hours was wearing on him.

We went into Cozy Inn. There was a bartender on his side of the bar, there were two fellows on our side. Tom had worked in the woods with one of the fellows, the other guy was a truck driver. The truck driver was talking about trucking, as truck drivers are wont to do, the way poets want to talk about poetry. The two men looked at us as we bellied up to the bar. Tom went to the cooler and got himself a root beer, he got me a diet cola, he asked the fellow behind the bar for a hamburger. He told the fellow he'd work with in the woods that he was showing me the ropes. The guy thought maybe I wasn't dressed for the work, what with my shirt that has a button-down collar, my sweater vest. If we'd have been in the city, I'd have thought maybe he was picking a fight, but we were in the country and this was just a good-natured country fellow who had a few beers in him. I just smiled and nodded at him and didn't try to explain that I was a writer, or worse, a poet.

The truck driver was talking some more about truck driving, about which streets in Detroit you could and couldn't park on in the dark, about two black fellows who stopped traffic at an intersection for him so he could back around and get his rig headed in the right direction to make a delivery in an otherwise ugly mess of streets. When they'd gotten him squared away, the truck driver said, he'd given them a $20 bill and told them to have a good time.

Then we were talking about grooming the trails and riding in the Tucker Snow Cat and what-not. In a bar, you don't have to signal your tangents, a few non-sequiturs are expected. The good-natured country fellow opened another Bud Light and told Tom how go-o-od it tasted. Tom just smiled and sipped his root beer. The fellow wanted to ride in the Snow Cat with Tom to some bar at the end of another trail somewhere; he thought I should drive his pick-up to the bar, then we'd switch places again. He really wanted a ride in the Snow Cat.

Tom took all the banter good-naturedly until the fellow thought maybe he'd go out and climb up in the driver's seat of the Tucker. Tom didn't do or say anything obvious, in fact he was entirely pleasant throughout, but all of a sudden I knew it was time to go. Tom finished his root beer in one swallow, and though you wouldn't say he straightened his back, at least his shadow straightened its back. "We've got to get back at it," he said. "I've got a long way to go." And so we did. We climbed back in the Tucker, which had been idling all the while in the parking lot.

We were back on the trail. "The temperature is not quite right," Tom said. "See the balls of snow the drag left? The snow wants to ball up." Partly that was the result of the temperature and partly "we haven't had any new snow in awhile."

"You get used to drivimg right next to those signs without knocking them over," Tom said. He had been grooming to the edge of his side of the trail on the way out; now he was grooming to the edge of my side on the way back. "You want the trail as wide as you can make it, up to a width and a half of the drag."

The drag we were pulling packed the snow by the sheer force of weight. "We are going to an equipment show at Watersmeet," Tom said. "There's a new drag that also vibrates to pack the snow firmer."

Back at the place where the power company had been working I observed that "they really messed up the trail here." The ruts were wide and deep. "We can fix 'er up," Tom said, and he did.

Where the trail went right between the poles of the power-line, there were markers with alternating and slanted yellow and black lines. "The lower end of the lines has to be towards the center of the trail, that way the markers guide the snow-mobiler onto the trail between then. The DNR showed me pictures of some markers that had been put up wrong on one of the trails. I had to go change them. The fellow who put them up wasn't aware that there was a right way and a wrong way."

We were back along Highway 41 and saw traffic going past. "This is not such a bad trail to break down on," Tom said. "Along here you're close to the road."

I wondered outloud if snow-mobilers wouldn't give up riding their sleds if they could drive the Tucker and groom trails. Tom repeated what he'd said earlier: "This is all the trail-riding I want to do."

"Most of the riding is in the day-time, which is good," Tom said. "We groom and the trail gets to set up at night. It hardens up."

There were more ruts where the power company had been working. "They can tear the trail up with their equipment but I can fix it," Tom said. The ruts looked worse to me now that we were heading back, partly because they were on my side of the trail.

"We have less snow cover than usual," Tom observed. The engine of the Tucker was roaring, the treads throwing up some snow, the drag grinding the trail down to a white smoothness behind us.

"How much do you think the rubber tracks for this Snow Cat cost?" Tom asked me. I didn't even want to venture a guess.

"$4000 apiece."

"We send this machine out on the trail the first time because the rubber tracks help it to float across the swamps if they're still wet. The only way to get the trail set up is to get out there early and starting pushing snow down into the swamp. We call snow 'Finlander gravel" because you can make a road with it."

"This is a $140,000 machine," Tom said. "We trade them in every three years. This one has 15,045 miles on it in three years - 1700 hours of running time. You can figure the average miles per hour." That would be nearly nine miles per hour, including operator rest time when the machine is running but not moving.

"I groomed a hundred and ten miles of trail in one night," Tom said. He wasn't bragging, it was just a fact. "It took sixteen hours. If I do both these trails and the run to Chassell tonight, that'll be a hundred twenty miles. I will be a beat puppy when I get home."

Riding in the warm cab is not as cushy a job as some might think. Just staying in your seat as the Tucker jerks side to side and front to back is a workout: as the Snow Cat flies down the trail, you use all the muscles you've got to keep your bones in place. The night driving on the trail is exhilarating, but it is tiring too.

"The more the snow-mobilers come up here, the more we have to groom," Tom said. "We have three grooming machines and five trails, so we have to double up some trails every night. The warmer it gets farther to the south, the more the snow-mobilers come up here. Some years we're the only place that has good snow and people are just begging for motel rooms."

There is a crescent moon hanging in the sky ahead of us. "One night there was a full moon so bright," Tom said, "I shut all the lights off and groomed by moonlight. You could see half a mile down the trail, that's how bright it was."

We passed under Highway 41 again and Tom soon brought the machine to a stop. "Jump out," he said. "I'll show you how much the trail has set up already." We met behind the drag. "See how firm this is already?" He kicked the part of the trail that we'd groomed on the way out. I checked the firmness of it with my boot. "Now compare that to this side." He indicated the snow behind the drag, which was almost the consistency of loose snow by comparison. "It'll take just a couple hours for this to firm up, then the whole trail will be smooth as glass."

We got back in the cab of the Snow Cat and started rolling again. "Next week we're supposed to get more snow," Tom said. "That's job security, when it snows. I have a buddy who is a roofer. Every time it rains he says 'Pennies from heaven' because somebody's roof will leak and that's work for him. That's what snow is for me."

"If we had a good blizzard tonight," Tom said, "I could give you a really good ride. You can have a complete white-out. One time I just had to stop. I couldn't tell whether I was on the trail or out in the middle of a field."

"The harder the trail freezes, the less the snow-mobiles tear it up," Tom said.

We were passing through a portion of woods owned by Michigan Tech. "There forestry classes will come out here," Tom said. "There'll be snow-shoe tracks all through the woods. I'll say 'Oh, a class came through here today.'"

We were nearly back to my car where it was parked on Prison Camp Road. (Or as it says on the maps, Baraga Plains Road - but everyone knows it as Prison Camp Road.) Trail grooming is partly a matter of getting to know the trails, Tom said; and partly it's a matter of getting to know the limitations of the machines - the Tucker pulling the drag, and the drag itself.

We stopped where the snow-mobile trail came out of the woods and ran along Prison Camp Road for a quarter mile. My car was just across the way.

"Thanks for the ride," I said. I appreciated the chance to see him doing his job, to hear him talk of his work.

"Oh, thank you," Tom said, like I'd done him the favor. "I like taking people out with me."

I got down out of the Tucker and closed the door firmly. It was about one o'clock in the morning, but I was headed back to my motel room, a warm bed, a night's sleep. Tom was headed down the trail to Sidnaw, then maybe he'd have to go to Chassell if no one else wanted to do that trail tonight.

He had miles to go before he could sleep.

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 5, 1998

I suppose the first thing they have to teach those Navy fellows out to sea is not to shoot through the floor. Which maybe explains why so many of them seem conservative. And bull-headed. Sometimes I think the ship has to be sinking before they'll listen.

Cool and grey, this morning: serious, but not somber. If the sap is rising, today it pauses.

Stones are conservative, definitely conservative. Like Navy men. Trees are liberal. Stones get where they are going but it's always with a lot of grunting and puffing. Trees, sometimes they fly.

Stoneboat. Stone boat. Stone. Boat.

Even when other people are having seconds, don't ask for more. What we are given is enough. Today is enough. This is enough.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 26, 2004

I went to breakfast again at the Shabee Cafe in downtown L'Anse. Roy Kemppainen was there having coffee. He said Hello as I came in. When he left, he pointed out that while I was here I was getting to enjoy some of their "typical February weather."

The waitress said: "Roy, your nose is getting longer."

There were two fellows in the booth behind me. One of them was hard of hearing. The other one said: "It was 57 degrees at my place yesterday."

The hard-of-hearing fellow said: "It was 31 degrees at my place."

"This nice weather is coming too early," the first fellow said. "It will get bad again in March and April."

"What?" said the second fellow.

"April," said the first fellow. "We have some of our worst storms in April."

Later he said that he had gotten out target shooting with his black powder rifle. He tries to do that every month. "But there was deer season, then Christmas, then January got so g-damn cold!"

"What?" said the second fellow.

"January was too damn cold!"

*

It was a lovely afternoon, with water running everywhere, and I spent some hours in my room writing up my notes. Then I just had to get outside.

I took a drive in the country, heading northeast out of L'Anse on Bayshore Road toward Pequaming, Aura, and Skanee. I wanted to see some of the outlying parts of the county in that direction.

In Pequaming these days some cottages remain, and the fabled Henry Ford Cottage stills stands. The community once bustled with activity, now it seems a mere and random collection of houses. The Ford Cottage is at the end of a road: you could have guessed that, Tom. The cottage is not as elegant as I had imagined it. Nor is it lit by low summer sun as in the photograph of it at the Tourist Information Center in L'Anse. Tracey Barrett told me that she had lived in the Ford Cottage as a child.

I visited Aura as well. Tracey Barrett had lived here too. Visiting Aura was like visiting my hometown of Curlew, Iowa: so much has been lost. Where has it all gone? All the past on the landscape seems to have been laid over with a modern sheen. Is this what it comes to? Everywhere, I mean everywhere we so often seem incapable of preserving the things we most need to preserve. Why is that?

I want to say the same for Skanee. We're here at the edge of everything good and wonderful, right at the edge of earth and water and sky, and much of it seems to have evaporated, to have escaped us. How many Skanee stories go untold. What do we need to do to tell them?

This isn't meant as criticism of anyone or anybody. Certainly I don't know what the answer is. Basho said: "I sweep my walk, the whole world is clean." I will continue my trek, going post to post in the middle west talking with people, tape recorder running, capturing what I can. I know it's too little, too late. If everyone would do it, though, think how much we could save.

The drive back to L'Anse from Skanee was a somber one, in spite of the beautiful afternoon. I wasn't in a particular hurry to get away from my sadness, but I could not dwell on it either. I just drove and watched the water run in sheets across the road where the sun was melting snow out in the open. Losing our past, it's like the snow melting, the water running away. It's like ash flying off a fire. That's true here in Baraga County and in all the communities I visit.

It has been a beautiful day. Sometimes the theme is courage, resilence. Today the theme is loss, what we have lost.

----------------------

VAGABOND COLUMN: #3
A HAIR CUT IN RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA

It is January. I am in Rugby, North Dakota, a pretty grizzled-looking specimen in need of a hair cut. Across the street from the grocery store in downtown Rugby I see DK's shop: "Barber and Styling" it says in the window.

DK is 44, a woman with her dark hair put up. "It would be turning grey if I let it," she will tell me. She is finishing a trim for an older man whose hair might have been red once, now it's more red-head gone grey.

"She'll just have to comb it out if she doesn't like it," DK says of a cowlick on the back of the fellow's head, a turn of hair that doesn't stay down properly and she can't make it. Haircut done, she and the fellow look at a collection of black and white photos. From where I sit, the people in the photos look as if they're dressed for the 1950s. That would be the real 1950s, not something retro. DK and the fellow talk familiarly of those people and I see DK has a charm and tenderness that might not be readily apparent.

Soon enough she turns to me. "Well, come on." She ushers me into her barber chair. "How do you want it cut?" I think she knows my style is no style at all. "Do you want it trimmed up over your ears?"

"I tell the woman back home to make me look like a well-groomed mountain man - not that she listens," I say. DK gives me a look. She starts to work.

"I have to like the haircuts I give before I'm done with them," she says.

DK was a farm girl who had an itch to see what was out there beyond the farm. She couldn't be satisfied doing what everybody else does. After she finished high school in Rugby, she spent some time in the National Guard in Georgia and the Carolinas, then headed out to California for ten years, to Florida, to the state of Washington. You sense that if she'd found a good man out there, she might not have returned.

"Why did you come back?" I ask her.

"Family," she says. She is one of eight kids. "I'm sort of the black sheep, you know. I had to get out of here and see the world. My brothers and sisters were happy staying here."

What's the difference between her and her siblings that she had to leave North Dakota and they didn't? "I don't know," DK says, "I couldn't tell you."

Later she tells me her youngest brother is 23, he's an electrician, and he has built his own house. "You've got to start young and get yourself settled," she says, with - I think – some tone of admiration.

I point out that she wouldn't have seen California, Florida, and Washington state if she'd have followed her own advice about staying put and starting young. "You're right," she says. "I had to get out of here for awhile."

Yeah, DK's siblings stayed in Rugby. One of her brothers farms with her father. A couple others farm, too. One sister married a farmer. A brother loads trucks for a company in town. Another works at the hospital. DK cuts hair. Her youngest brother is the electrician.

"What's the average price for a house in Rugby?" I wonder. The fellow who runs the Rugby stockyards has come in now and is waiting patiently while DK clips and re-clips my beard getting me to look like something you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with. DK glances over at the fellow from the stockyards and asks him: "What is the average price for a house?"

Fifty thousand dollars is what they agree on. "Not that all the houses in Rugby cost that much," DK says. "I bought one for $15,000."

DK might be done with my trim. "What do you think?" she asks me.

"If you're happy with it, I'm happy," I say. The more you talk with her, the more you trust she really won't let a customer out of the barber chair until she is pleased with her work.

I think she would say "I'm proud of every hair cut I give" again if I let her. I look into the mirror and see her looking into the mirror too, looking at the reflection of me, of herself, of the streets of Rugby out the window, of the town she left and came back to.

----------------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 4, 1998

Yesterday's snow is mostly gone. Clouds cross the sky from different directions, different-colored: as if the day does not know where it is going. It is a little crisp around the edge, this morning, and a very, very fine snow rittles the windshield. The pond down the hill from our house has been entirely open for more than a week. The wind disturbs its surface now. Across the pond, the cold steel of railroad tracks. Today is brown and gray, and a very little white.

Some things we do for love, some we do for money. Some things we do not know why we do them. Out of habit, perhaps. Comfort. We live with pain, sometimes, because we are comfortable with it: more comfortable with pain than with the alternative. It is better to die, we think, than to be afraid. I am no innocent bystander. I am as guilty as the rest. Water follows the path of least resistance and so, sometimes, does man.

The snow in the air thickens.

>

MONDAY'S THUNDERSTORM

On Monday evening a thunderstorm rolled through Fairwater. The lightning clashed, the air boomed. Rain fell, melting snow already softened by our forty-degree tempatures. Darkness was coming on.

The storm had passed when the lights went off, the computer screen went black. Power was knocked out for half an hour, forty-five minutes. Mary had not yet come home for supper. I lit three candles, one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the kitchen near the door Mary would come in.

Then I got out the little flashlight I carry in my travel bag; and I retrieved the book I've been reading from my bedside. I sat in our William Morris chair in the living room, reading. Our three curious cats formed kind of a ring around me at the edge of the light.

What was I reading? Zen poems from the tenth century to the present: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto. This, by the monk Issa (1763-1827):

Where there are humans
you'll find flies,
and Buddhas.

---------------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 25, 2004 - L'ANSE, MICHIGAN

Mike Jensen, the Baraga County Extension Director, said that I have to have a steak of Tony's Steak House and Friday night fish fry at the Canteen - "they have the best wall-eye you ever tasted" is how he put it. I ate at the Canteen last night, their Teriyaki chicken sandwich, which was tasty. The Canteen is a bar and grill, the seats in the booths are worn, the way material gets used; there is an open dining area farther back in the place, with chairs at formica tables; and there's a long bar facing the windows across the front of the building, looking out over the waterfront park and the bay. It's a bar, it looks like a bar; either you are okay with that or you're not. If you're from Wisconsin, you already know that some of the best food comes from the most unlikely-looking places. I'll have their wall-eye Friday night then. The woman who is secretary for the Extension waits tables for them. As I left the Extension office, I told her I'd see her at the fish fry. Tonight I'll run out to Tony's Steak House south of town and get a piece of meat.

*

On my way past the Tourist Information building, I stopped in to see Tracey Barrett again. She has been trying to set up a ride for me with a fellow who'd be out grooming the snow-mobile trails. She hadn't been able to arrange it for last night as we'd hoped. I stopped to see if she'd come up with anything else.

She had. I'm to meet Tom Larson, one of the trail groomers, on Thursday night at 10:00 p.m. where the snow-mobile trail going to Nestoria crosses Prison Camp Road south of L'Anse almost at Alberta. Tracey marked the spot on a map, then gave me the map.

*

Supper at Tony's Steak House. It's in the "Bovine" area at the south edge of L'Anse, no kidding. I arrived at 5:00 p.m., the place was just opening, so I was the only diner. The bartender, waitresses, and busboy looked up hopefully as I came in. If I was a disappointment they didn't let on.

The building isn't obviously an old building but if you look carefully you can see it has weathered some years. It looks lived in, comfortably settled, not harshly straight and square; it looks like folks have taken some enjoyment here.

Tony's has steak, at the more expensive "supper club" prices we're already used to in a Wisconsin supper club. I got the nine ounce filet mignon, potatoes, bean soup, hot dinner rolls, and salad bar for $23.95. I'm not a restaurant critic, I don't pretend to be, so I'll say it plainly: they gave me a hell of a good piece of meat, grilled just perfect. And I enjoyed it; I don't get to do this a lot. Tony's doesn't waste a lot of time with green things - that's not what you go to a steak house for. Their dinner rolls were hot. They served real butter. I didn't have room for dessert.

Friends, take note of that - I didn't have dessert.

It was nearly 6:00 p.m. when I paid my check. No other diners had yet come in. There was some daylight left so I drove south on Highway 41 towards Alberta. I wanted to find the place I was to meet Tom Larson on Thursday night. When I came back past Tony's, there were cars parked in front of the place. Their Wednesday night had picked up.

---------------------

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 3, 1998

The roads and fields and streets were clear of snow last evening as I drove home from work. This morning there is a thin layer of snow again on everything: a fine and powdery dusting, like the ashes of many men scattered here. Today has more of winter in its fiber than any we had in February. Yet it is much too nice a day to be run from.

The snow makes the roads slippery in places. That is something we can depend on. We go through life wanting certainty - well, here it is, slippery and certain.

That field of rye, greening, has snow caught in its teeth this morning.

The tracks of the overland trails to Oregon and California still show in places on the western landscape, even after all these years. The snow here today highlights tracks in the fields along my way. The snow points and says: "Someone has gone this way."

The sun wants to break through but there are too many hang-down clouds. As I look out across the roll of land now, it is difficult for me to peel off the past two hundred years and see the land as it was, original and primal.

Why would anyone want to, you ask. Why would anyone not?

----------------------

from
PLAIN POEMS: A FAIRWATER DAYBOOK
THE FIRST DAY OF MARCH, 2001

The sun is a big old fat ball
of orange cat. The sky is so

blue the snow is blue too.
I am witness to morning,

I mark Fairwater's hours
like a monk at prayer.

Yet this is no cloister. This
is not desert. Morning gleams

upon the fields like the wink
of love. Let me sing its praise.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 24, 2004
SPOOKED BY HOUGHTON-HANCOCK

In the afternoon, after completing my interviews for the day, I had daylight left for a drive to Houghton-Hancock farther up the Keweenaw Peninsula in the "Copper Country." I had anticipated stopping to have something to eat in Houghton. To tell the truth, though, the whole adventure got to be fairly unattractive. Maybe I suffered a bout of "the U.P. Effect*."

After a lovely drive from L'Anse as far as Chassell, things seemed to get crowded and ugly. Cottages were piled one next to the other along the water as I neared Houghton, as crowded as any strip at the edge of Fargo, North Dakota, or Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. Where I entered Houghton proper, the campus of Michigan Technological University had been set down as strange and dizzying as an outpost from another planet. There were some lovely snow sculptures in front of dorms, I have to admit, but things got worse from there. Downtown Houghton seemed crowded, noisy, closed in. I'm not claustrophobic, at least I think I'm not, but it was getting hard to breathe. Hancock, across the bridge, was more of the same. I felt as if the two cities had sucked into themselves everything that the Upper Peninsula should not be: as if the two cities sopped up the poisons so that the rest of the U.P. could remain as lovely as it is.

I will freely admit the quiet loveliness of L'Anse and Baraga had enchanted me so that anything I say couldn't possibly be objective, but I'll say it anyway: Houghton and Hancock really disoriented me. Flin-Flon, Manitoba had the same kind of spooky effect on me some seventeen years ago: I felt I couldn't possibly spend a night in a motel in that city with so much exposed rock, Canadian shield. Similarly with Houghton-Hancock, I couldn't get out of there fast enough: when a sign in Hancock pointed out that I could turn here and take Highway 41 back the way I'd come, that's what I did. I turned around and drove hard for L'Anse. I didn't stop to get anything to eat in Houghton, I didn't stop and get out of the car. I didn't stop and get any of those cities onto my shoes or my clothes or my soul.

I'm sure Houghton and Hancock are quite lovely cities in other circumstances. I got spooked: they were not lovely for me today.

I should mention that the snow gets deeper and deeper the closer you get to Houghton-Hancock, even deeper than what I'd seen in Baraga County. North of Chassell I saw that snow had been repeatedly scooped off a ranch house along the road, so much snow scooped off that you couldn't see the house, only enough roof-line to establish the notion of a house behind the great fortress of snow. Within Houghton and Hancock, the piles of snow I saw at the edges of parking lots and such went to twenty-five or thirty feet high.

These people do know how to endure, I have to say that. They do know how to handle snow. They know how to get on with the business of living despite the long and harsh winters.

I just wish Houghton and Hancock hadn't seemed so out of character with the rest of the Upper Peninsula.
---------------------
*"U.P. Effect" is the disorientation that results when you are snatched too quickly out of the Upper Peninsula's natural beauty of woods and water and set down suddenly into any part of the rest of the world.

---------------------

HE JUST COULDN'T LEAVE IT ALONE

Ivan Burgess at the 25c ECHO (501 W. Third, #12, Smith Center, KS 66967) just couldn't leave it alone. In his issue for the week of February 16th, he did it again: "Since the furor of the Super Bowl half-time show has died down it has been kind of hard to keep abreast of the news."

Of another matter, he said: ""Maybe you are not supposed to comment on this subject but I'm old enough that I can comment on anything I dang well please." It helps to have met Ivan, to know that he's a funny guy; his humor is so low key sometimes even he thinks he's serious.

----------------------

MORE "NOTES ABOUT PLACE" (3)

We don't often think of the smell of it as being an attribute of the place. Yet it is. The rotten egg smell of a town like Prince George, BC, with its paper mills is an obvious example of a man-made smell of a place. The slightly limey tang to the air in Cozumel is a more subtle version. In the natural realm, there is the muskiness of marshes, the bright slap of scent in a mountain meadow, the dusky breath of desert.

We say landscape. What we mean is the shape of the land. The great long, calm roll of the plains. The sensuality of mountains. The bare rock and scrub tree austerity of Thompson, Manitoba. The sweetness of woods and water.

Are the picture perfect landscapes still beautiful when no one is there to see them?

----------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MARCH 2, 1998

The five robins we saw on Saturday must be surprised by the snow on the ground this morning - half an inch or more. The streets are entirely clear now, the day is luminous, there is moisture on the driveway and streets where the snow has melted.

When it fell, the snow was wet enough that it is still burdening all the trees and bushes. There is no wind, so the snow will cling until the sun does its work, expected soon.

It is the ordinary that I find attractive. Today is an ordinary day - only it's extraordinarily lovely.

In the country, a fog reduces visibility - a seed enclosed in the seed pod, a day not yet opened entirely. At Five Corners, donkeys in the fog, on snow: they are a bright surprise. Some photographer for National Geographic could do them justice.

Once again I am reminded: Don't gauge the day too soon.

---------------------

I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

I am not very political, but...
I wonder why is it that the people who talk so much about wanting less government intrusion in their lives seem all too willing to intrude in the lives of others and force their narrow brand of morality on the rest of us?


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 23, 2004 - L'ANSE, MICHIGAN

A couple inches of snow fell during the night. The temperature is not far from freezing. The snow wiped off the windows of the car easily enough.

Signs posted along the motel inform us that snow-mobiles are not to be driven up onto the walkway in front of the rooms and there is to be no gas, oil, or snow-mobile covers taken into the rooms.

Last night pick-ups pulling snow-mobiles on trailers made almost a continuous parade on Highway 41 in front of the motel. This morning when I looked out about 6:00 a.m. there was a Snow Cat pulling some sort of machine to groom the trail that runs between the motel and the roadway along Highway 41.

I took breakfast downtown at the Shabee Cafe. When I walked in the place was empty. I thought - oh-oh. A woman was wiping down tables and booth seats. The woman back in the kitchen looked out.

"Do you have breakfast?" I wondered aloud, the place being empty.

"Yes, we do," the waitress said. "The special is Shabee's Omelet." The sign said: ham, American fries, onion, cheese, green pepper. Sure enough, the fries were rolled right into the omelet with everything else, making a tidy heap on the plate that got served me. And it tasted awfully good that way. I had coffee, too.

I looked at the local paper, the L'Anse Sentinel, while I was eating. There was an article about how well two area businesses seem to be recovering. Pettibone in Baraga makes lifts for work in rough terrain and equipment for gas and oil exploration (eight of these were shipped to Afghanistan is December). They also make the Carry-Lift, "one of the pioneer machines in the business." The other company, Terex Handlers in Baraga, makes extending forklifts for work in rough terrain. The companies are poised to recover from recent hard times, but the price of steel could derail that. According to Pettibone's president, Kevin Walsh, a lot of American steel these days is made from recycled steel and the cost of recycled steel has gone from $90 a ton to $320. And coke, which is needed to make new steel, is becoming more expensive as well. Only two coke mines had operated recently in the United States - one of them has closed down, the other had a fire in January. An increasingly larger percentage of the world supply of coke now comes from China, the paper reported.

The Shabee Omelet was a bargain at $4.50. Before I could spend too much time wondering about why the place was empty, it started to fill up.

A couple men wanted to have coffee and to talk about sports. As I ate, another two men joined them. They were talking about local basketball teams, it sounded like. Apparently there are a couple fellows on the L'Anse high school team who come off the bench and really hustle.

"They should be starting," one fellow said.

"Maybe they'll get to start next year," another one said.

"Not the one of them. He's only a junior, but he'll be too old to play."

"How old is he?" someone asked.

"Twenty-seven," he said.

The men laughed. It was a morning coffee kind of joke.

There was an old couple having breakfast across the aisle from these men then. And on my side of the partition a couple of working fellows had come in for breakfast. One of them went to the bathroom to wash his dirty hands.

The other fellow, the older of the two, sat down at a booth and got his coffee. "You just get up for breakfast?" the waitress asked him.

"No, no, I got up two hours ago, yeah, two hours ago."

The other man came back from the bathroom, ordered coffee, toast, orange juice.

Three others came in and took a booth nearby. "You guys workin' or playin'?" the waitress asked them.

They answered together and the waitress got conflicting information. "Well, which is it?" she wanted to know.

"Two of us are working, one of us is playing, I guess," one of the men said.

The fellow who had been to the bathroom to wash his hands had to give the waitress a hard time. "I want to register a formal complaint," he said. "I stopped here for supper last night. I pounded on the door for half an hour but nobody answered. If you want to be a truck stop, you have to stay open 24 hours a day."

"I don't want to be a truck stop," the waitress said. "I've done that. I don't want to do it again."

"We serve only breakfast on Sundays," she explained. "We closed at 1:00 p.m."

"The sign out on the highway says you serve breakfast, dinner, and supper. It doesn't make any exception for Sunday," the man responded.

"I'll tell her," the waitress said, tilting her head back towards the cook. "But I'm still leaving at 1:00 p.m."

By the time I finished my breakfast, there were fourteen of us in the cafe, enough to make it look like it was indeed open for breakfast this morning.

When I stepped back outside, the snow was continuing. It was a beautiful morning: everything was white and wet, or fast becoming white and wet.

*

The sun started breaking through the clouds by the time I was ready for lunch.

I'd already stopped at the L'Anse Sentinel office and had gotten a barrel of information about people from the community that I might talk with. The fellows at the paper couldn't have been more helpful: the editor, Barry Drue; the advertising director, Joe Schuette; and general manager Gale Eilola. And I set up interviews for Thursday and Friday with Eilola and Schuette.

Back at my motel room I'd already made some phone calls. I've got two interviews set up for this afternoon, two for tomorrow, another for Wednesday morning. There are a couple more people I need to get hold of yet, but we are underway - we are definitely underway.

I had lunch at the Shabee Cafe. Same cook, with another cook on duty. Same waitress, with another waitress on duty.

It was the other waitress talking to the fellow in the booth in the back corner. The fellow said: "February's almost over. It's melting out there. Winter's back is broken."

That other waitress responded: "You know how many conversations we have in this place about the weather? I hope those who don't have to work out in it appreciate those who do. The one nice thing about our weather here is that it keeps the population down. I like that. Only the strong survive. We get rid of the rest of them."

I suspect she was pretty close to exactly right: if you can't take the weather here, you'd head some place else, most any place else.

There were sixteen people eating in the cafe by the time I was ready to leave. The place was doing a little carry-out business, too. You like to see the little mom & pop places survive. At least I do. You may actually have different preferences entirely for all I know as certain.

Soon enough it was time for me to head to Baraga for an interview. "That's BEAR-ah-gah," I'd been told earlier when I said "b'-RA-gah."

"You'll get farther if you say BEAR-ah-gah," the fellow said.

---------------------

"BLOW UP YOUR TV"

So Vagabond field editor* Deba Horn of Ripon, Wisconsin, was reading her February 23 copy of Newsweek magazine when she was startled up and out of her chair: right there on p. 53, in an article called "Family TV Goes Down the Tube," was a quote by Rhonda McCartan, a mother of three from Emmetsburg, Iowa. Emmetsburg is my Vagabond "focus community" for Iowa, it's the county seat of Palo Alto County where I grew up (well, if I ever grew up, that's where I grew up). Rhonda was explaining that you have to watch out for what comes on even at seven o'clock in the evening, you just don't know what you'll see.

If I talk to Rhonda when I'm in Emmetsburg the week of April 18th (and I might), I might tell her how for ten years when our daughters were growing up we lived without a TV. The girls were perceived at school as being kind of geeky as a result, for they didn't have the vaguest idea of the latest new thing on TV; but both of them grew up loving books, and that's better than anything you can get from television. "Blow up your TVs," John Prine encouraged us a long time ago; we should, but we don't.

*Okay, so perhaps I exaggerate the "field editor" part; I don't have a field for her to edit. But if I did, she would.

----------------------

MORE "NOTES ABOUT PLACE" (2)

The laws of nature shape human nature. What pushes the mountains pushes us.

To be fully spiritual we must acknowledge and account for our being physical.

The sun rises, the sun sets. We move and are moved. We are rocked in the cradle of creation from our birth to our death. Indeed, we came from star dust; and we return to star dust.

What lifts the tides that does not lift us?

----------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
FEBURARY 27, 1998

Wet and windy and wild. Grey. The wind has behind it the rhythm of great, rumbling kettle drums; the percussion section in the orchestra is out of control. This is not February, no matter what the calendar says.

On a scale of One to Ten, what kind of day is it? Let me say there is another dead raccoon this morning. Let me say there are soda containers and hamburger wrappers and all manner of what else bare naked and revealed in the ditches along the way. The wind wants to blow the truck about - and I don't care too much one way or the other.

Today it's like closing time in a bar, like I've had a few beers and this morning is the only girl who hasn't said she's going home with someone else. What are you going to do? You take what you get, sometimes.


>

I'M BACK FROM L'ANSE

"They do talk with a little accent," I said of the people of Baraga County to the woman who interviewed me for an article in the L'Anse Sentinel.

"They're Finlanders," Nancy Besonen said, "you slam the first syllable and let the rest fall where they may." Nancy is a transplant to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a transplant from Chicago, one of two people I met who moved from Chicago to "God's Country." The other was Mike Jensen, the county Extension Director.

A pronunciation guide:
The "A" in "L'Anse" rhymes with the "o" in "on."
Baraga is pronounced BEAR - ah - gah.
Keweenaw is pronounced KEY - win - ah.

L'Anse is up there in the Land of Two Hundred Inches of Snow, as I call it. The only snowfall while I was up there was a few inches my first night in town. Otherwise the weather was lovely, temperatures in the 40s. I was at breakfast one morning at the Shabee Cafe when L'Anse's village manager, Roy Kampainen (CAMP - ah - nun) said to me: "You're getting to enjoy some of our typical February weather." He had finished his coffee and was leaving. The waitress said over her shoulder: "Roy, your nose is getting longer."

Throughout the coming week I'll run some excerpts here of my journal from last week's Vagabond visit to L'Anse and Baraga County. The first excerpt today is notes from my trip north last Sunday.

----------------------

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
FEBRUARY 22, 2004
NORTH TO L'ANSE, MICHIGAN

The start of any journey is usually familiar. You are leaving home ground, an area you know. As you move away from center, things become more and more strange to you - the landscape, the people, their customs. At some point you have to admit - gulp - I don't recognize this.

Some of us may be comfortable in this transition to a place that is new. Some of us, on the other hand, experience nausea at this unsettling. I wonder how much of our reaction is encoded in our genes - "nature" - and how much comes out of our experience - "nurture?"

I am somewhere between the extremes. I like to see new things, though they often discomfort me. And I sure enough like to get back home, home being that which fits us seamlessly.

We tolerate the change that we bring upon ourselves better than we handle that which is forced on us. Any changes makes most of us at least a little uncomfortable.

What I have been finding in my Vagabond travels is that the more places I go, the more any place looks like the other places I've been; that is, the less strange the new place seems, the more comfortably it seems to fit right off. Partly that's because wherever I go what I find truly is more like than different: we have more in common with what we encounter, than otherwise. Further, the more places I see, the more I've expanded what is familiar to me. Third, I seem to have begun conditioning myself to adapt.

The more you eat strangeness, the better it tastes. Which is something of an unusual statement coming from an Iowa farm boy who grew up with meat and potatoes, with having things the way they always were.

*

Northeast of Appleton on Highway 41 - oh, the stink. The rotten smell of paper-making. It looks like beautiful, rural Wisconsin but it stinks. So thick, it hangs like a haze. I'd almost rather smell hog manure.

*

What you see depends in part on where you look, on when you look, and on what you already know. What we have prepared ourselves to see, generally, is what we find.

*

I see the huge power-line running northeast out of Green Bay along Highway 41. Where power comes from and where it goes has always interested me, especially since traveling to Thompson and Lynn Lake, Manitoba, and Fort McMurray, Alberta, communities far off the beaten path.

And then the big power-line has disappeared and I don't know where it has gone.

*

I cannot see while I am recording what I have seen: that's the problem when making notes, keeping a journal, writing an essay. While one pauses to put it down in writing, life goes on.

This is a further problem: maybe what you've seen does not wish to be written down. The world is not ours simply because we've seen it. Is it any less invasive to write a paragraph about people you've seen than to take their photograph without permission?

I do it anyway, yes. I keep writing. But sometimes I get in trouble for it. As, I suppose, I should.

*

Another power-line where I cross the Oconto River on Highway 141 heading north. A mile farther, there is another big power-line criss-crossing the first. When they say electric grid here, that's what they mean.

*

North of Lena, Wisconsin: what a pretty name for a stream: Kelly Brook. A quarter mile farther along, an interesting name for a road: Goatsville. Then Little River passes under the road, and there's a sign for Kelly Lake. I don't see the lake.

When I enter Marinette County, I start noticing that the snow is considerably deeper in the plow banks and where it is piled at the end of driveways. Snow is starting to be serious business. Where I'm from, it's just a hobby. Up here, it's starting to look like it's their life work.

North of Pound, Wisconsin, the pine trees are heavy with a burden of snow: it bends their branches. Another big power-line. The plow-banks are another foot deeper than they were where I entered Marinette County. I cross Lost Foot Creek. I cross the Peshtigo River; it is not as big as its name makes me imagine.

*

When I travel I drive for long stretches with the radio turned off. The noise of it distracts me, even public radio, even music I like. I like the time alone. I like to think thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise: too often we fill our heads with noise because we are afraid to hear ourselves think, we are afraid to listen to silence.

*

At Amberg, Wisconsin, the piles of snow pushed up at the edge of several parking lots are six and seven feet deep. The branches of the pines are bent quite severely towards the ground, the snow in them like mountain glaciers. Mile after mile, one becomes accustomed to snow.

Pembine, Wisconsin: unincorporated. There are an awful lot of pine trees around here now. Like cops, that many of them in one place makes me nervous. It is three hours from home to this discomfort.

You'd also start to notice big chunks of the earth's underbelly exposed where the highway has cut through rock. Big rock. Snow-covered. Enduring.

Niagara, Wisconsin. Established 1914. Population 1999. The sky is steaming at a little paper-mill. I think it's a paper-mill: Stora-Enso. It is quite a climb out of the city as I head north. A cop has a pick-up pulled over; the pick-up is hitched to a trailer with snowmobiles on it. You see a lot of snowmobile trailers, a lot of snowmobiles being pulled south today.

*

The Menominee River is a wide one. We are in Michigan. All of a sudden, it's da U.P., the Upper Peninsula. It seems like there's a strip of stores and businesses three miles long, from the Michigan border into Iron Mountain proper. Then Iron Mountain seems to go on not quite forever.

I cross the Menominee River again on Highway 141 and I'm in Wisconsin once more: "Wisconsin Welcomes You."

Three crows big enough to be ravens are serious at a deer carcass along the road. I cross "Old 69 Highway." Florence, Wisconsin, is unincorporated. I believe there is no incorporated community in Florence County. Not much of anything is happening in downtown Florence today, it's Sunday. The Wild Rivers Interpretive Center is at the north edge of town.

I cross the Brule River, then I'm in Michigan again. There's not much but trees in the distance.

Now is it the woods I smell, a paper-mill, or myself? I got a whiff of something like rotten eggs again. I showered this morning. I don't see a paper-mill.

At Crystal Falls I'm starting to feel the sky close up. The jagged landscape. The tall pines.

I suppose the winter business up here is the snow-mobilers. There are trails being groomed, pick-ups pulling trailers with snowmobiles on them, and the occasional line of snow-mobilers coming at you, or waiting to cross the highway.

At one point all the pine trees are on the right-hand side of the road, birch trees on the left.

"Keep Right Except to Pass" says the road sign. The day is warm enough that there's moisture on the road; the tires make a sssst sound. I suppose it is thirty-five degrees out.

On my left, a small grey house with snow half-way to the roof all around it, a little wood smoke coming up its chimney.

At Casagranda Road it seems as though fire came through here many years back. When did the Conquistadors come through, leaving the Spanish name on the road?

Soon enough it's obvious that the other business here is logging. In a workyard along the road there is a great strength of trees cut up and piled like hot dogs in the butcher shop.

The road surface has turned reddish. It still looks like asphalt, but you wouldn't call it "black-top." The asphalt along the shoulders of the road is the "black"-top.

"Shhuh" say the tires, talking to the road like your dad talked to you on a Sunday afternoon when he wanted to take a nap. The snow is melting. But not to worry - there is plenty of it.

In this up-and-down landscape we now seem to be heading more down than up. Are we starting to descend towards Lake Superior, or is that just my wishful thinking? The lake is still too far off to tell. Nonetheless, I imagine I smell fish. I know it's only imagination. But now I have entered Baraga County. And I've crossed into the Eastern Time Zone. I am almost exactly straight north of Fairwater, which is Central Standard Time. Now the snow weighs heavier on the pine trees, the plow-banks along the road are even deeper, the rocks we cut through are bigger, and somehow everything seems more quiet. Is that possible? Do the trees and snow absorb the sound of everything? What surprises me most, I suppose, is that the snow is not as deep as I had imagined it would be. They've got snow here, yeah, but it's not deep enough to get lost in forever.

Just when I think we must be descending steeply towards Lake Superior, why a sign along the road says: "Lake Superior Watershed." We are just entering Covington, Michigan.

There are mixed pines and hardwoods along the edge of the road. The countryside does smell different than our part of Wisconsin.

I cross the Rock River. If it were rock, would it be river? Not a quarter-mile farther along, I cross Parent Creek.

There's another workyard where Highway 141 ends and I have to turn left onto Highway 41: most of a log cabin has been put together there. They will shape and assemble the logs here, take the house apart to ship it, re-assemble it on someone's home-site. I'm twelve miles to L'Anse.

I keep wanting to think I see the lake. It is only a change in the color of the clouds that I see, which might be lake-related perhaps, but it's not the lake.

I smell pine trees, I swear.

*

I stop at the Hilltop Restaurant for something to eat. I'd had breakfast at 6:00 a.m.; it's now 3:00 p.m. No, actually, it's 4:00 p.m. local time. The special at the Hilltop is a quarter of baked chicken. I order a hot pork sandwich - pork, white bread, gravy, mashed potatoes. Comfort food so far from home. Tanya is my waitress, she is young and sweet and attentive; when she is not taking care of me, she is cleaning off other tables. It's a big place, and though it's not full, a lot of people are eating here, they keep leaving, more people replace them. Hilltop Restaurant is famous for its sweet-roll, they tell us: it's a big cinnamon roll, I'll give you that, so big they need a Ford tractor to deliver it to your table. I have Tanya bring half of mine to the table, she puts the other half in a grocery bag for me. I'm exaggerating only a little bit about the Ford tractor. The menu says that the most they ever had to make of those sweet rolls was 204 dozen in a single, long day. If you have to be known for something, it is always better to be known for sweet rolls than for mass-murder.

*

Before I register at the L'Anse Motel, I drive through downtown L'Anse. The Keweenaw Bay of Lake Superior, just off the edge of Front Street, is frozen over. There are cities of fishing shanties set out on the ice.

I'm a little surprised at Main Street. Essentially the downtown is only a couple blocks long. I had imagined more. Yet, as with Fowler, Indiana, I know there will be so much pulsing beneath the surface of what you see. You just have to want to find it.

--------------------

NOTES ABOUT PLACE

Why write about place?

To understand the place.
To understand the history and pre-history and natural history of the place.
To understand the geology and geography of the place.
To understand the people of the place and their culture.
To understand the condition of the place and its prospects for the future.
To understand ourselves.

---------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
FEBRUARY 24, 1998

This morning: this is not Wisconsin. It is much too thick and grey. The sky today has no magic. Everything has been beaded with moisture. The road is wet. If you'd set down your airship out of the greyness, you could be anywhere.

Yet even as I say that - my breath catches. The land rolling away - I belong to it. Where the hawk lives, I see the hawk find its perch. I almost taste it now, this morning, the musk of the earth enveloping me. If I had stayed in Iowa, would I have grown to love that place so well? Would it have shaped me differently? This place is as plain as the Iowa farmland I knew as a child, yet even in the day's greyness it now seems somehow more radiant. I will never be the same.

Look at me now, this strange man, writing this.

*

FEBRUARY 25, 1998

Traveling lets us see a landscape new to us, unfamiliar. We leave our home place for another, different, new land; other, different people. As a result, we see with new eyes. We could "travel" through our home country in a similar fashion if we could learn to see with new eyes. The same ol' same ol' piles up, though, and soon enough we don't even notice the most spectacular beauty just outside our doors.

I want to travel my home country, to see it every day freshly, not to let the familiar blind me to the beautiful right here, right now.

Perhaps it is our comfort which makes us blind. We know there are few dangers here - we don't have to watch so carefully. We are so familiar with our routes that when asked to give directions we realize we don't know the names of streets we drive every day. Instead we start to describe the landmarks we have been using unconsciously to guide us. It is a shock to recognize we are so blind among the familiar.

The very ground wants to explode with meaning. "Honest, Officer," I'd have to say, "I was not paying attention when it erupted, so I didn't see it happen. Then when I noticed it, it didn't seem like such a big deal so I didn't call anyone."

---------------------

REFLECTIONS ON BOOKS: #3
GOING BACK TO BISBEE
by Richard Shelton
The University of Arizona Press, 1992

Richard Shelton's Going Back to Bisbee won the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. The frame of the book? Shelton is driving from his home in Tucson, Arizona, back to Bisbee, down in the extreme southeast corner of the state: Bisbee is an old (I should say "ex-") mining town where Shelton started his teaching career. Shelton takes us "back" to Bisbee in a lot of senses, both personal and historical.

Shelton drives literally across the Arizona landscape, he drives through some personal memories, he tells of us the history and pre-history and natural history of what he is seeing. And at one point he stops to plant his butt in the San Pedro River along the way, then sleeps briefly on its banks, dreaming "the dream I haven't had in a long time." In the dream he is at a picnic along the river, a huge red bull comes charging from the underbrush, Shelton picks up a four-year-old girl and runs from the bull. "The bull is inches behind us," Shelton writes. "I can hear him snorting and panting as he runs. There is a barbed wire fence in front of us, but I cannot make it. The bull is too close. I throw the child as far as I can. The picture freezes. The child is in the air, sailing over the fence. Her mouth is a round O screaming. Her hair is flying behind her. I am falling...."

Shelton recognizes that the landscape is invested with not only "natural history," but some personal history, the stories of the native people, those of settlers and miners who tried to wrest a living from the land. He recognizes, too, that the great wheel turns - that what made a prosperous mine no longer makes us prosperous, and those who choose to stay do so for reasons of their own. All those stories and memories and reasons, in Shelton's telling, make interesting reading.

Going Back to Bisbee is not exactly William Least-Heart Moon's Prairy Erth, but the two books have much in common. Shelton might not say he was doing the "deep history" that Least-Heat Moon talks about, yet what he achieves is similarly powerful. He has created one more book for me to refer to when I think about how local history ought to be written, when I think about how I am going to put together all the pieces of the puzzles that I have been playing with. His book is nothing if not a splendid and sterling example of what "local history" can be, throbbing with the fullness of one's own experiences mixed with the stories of those who still live on the land and of those who have come before, some of those "ghosts" who inhabit all landscapes.

And, in Shelton's hands, I have to say, the shape of the telling is as enjoyable as the story he has to tell.

>

GONE TO L'ANSE, MI
FROM FEBRUARY 22 TO FEBRUARY 28
FOR VAGABOND EXPLORATION
SEE YOU FEBRUARY 29 OR MARCH 1

---------------------

"ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU DO IS RESEARCH"

I got an e-mail this past week from the Bontasaurus over at Via Negativa; he noted that "it sounds like you've defined your project(s) in such a way that almost anything you do is research - good planning!" I laughed when I read it because it is such an apt and true description of where I've ended up. I still laugh at my good fortune, more good fortune than good planning.

As a young man I'd hoped to make my way in the world as a "writer," a poet and journalist; yet I have this constitutional inability to make any money at writing. (In fact, I may have a constitutional inability to make much money at anything. "If it starts to look successful, you'll abandon it," my wife notes. I do know that if you're using money to keep score, we didn't even get a score card.) We had daughters to feed and clothe back then, so I took a job in a printing plant where I worked until "retiring" at age 55 in October, 2002. Though I couldn't get going as a writer at the other end of my working career, I was determined to try it at this end.

I reassured my wife that we could "learn to live poor." Her reply: "You mean 'poorer'."

Fortunately, I do have Mary's support in this undertaking. Although I did have to sign a "retirement agreement" that gave me added responsibilities in the way of cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, etc. (By far, I'm the best at cooking, the worst at cleaning, admittedly.) "Signing an agreement" is metaophorical here, by the way - it's not really written, and every once in a while we have a discussion about responsibilities that look to me like they were added after the fact. I don't usually argue for long, however, because I soon enough remember how good I've got it. Mary keeps up payments on our medical insurance, she keeps us in groceries, she keeps the wolf away from the door. She continues going to work every day while I get to stay home and write, I get to head out to my Vagabond "focus communities" for a week or two every month. I have to make sure it doesn't look like I'm having too much fun.

And so if Mary takes up cross country skiing with a passion (she has) and I point out the intensity of her interest, she'll tell me "you have your obsessions, it's about time I have a few of my own."

"Almost everything you do is research...." That's the beauty of it. Poems and essays come out of this mysterious, inky reservoir and you're never sure what you're going to pull out when you reach into it. What's important is that I keep putting stuff into it (and pulling stuff out). I've got to keep having interesting experiences, meeting new people and revisiting old friends, seeing the middle west in all its weathers and seasons and scapes. That's harder to do if you're working a 45-hour week in some printing plant, even a place as good as Ripon Community Printers where I worked for twenty-four years. It's a question of what we have energy for, what we have to push off the table to do what we want to do.

Now everything I do belongs to what I'm doing. The other day I left a comment at Hoarded Ordinaries, then realized half an hour later that what I said might be a poem, I had to go retrieve it:

O, to listen so well
We hear the mountain speak.

Today is Sunday, February 22. I am heading up to L'Anse, Michigan, as you read this, there at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula on the bottom edge of Lake Superior in the Land of 200 Inches of Snow. I get to walk and talk and poke about and see what I see. When I go off, I never know what I'll find, but I always find something.

I'm so fortunate that I've ended up where almost anything I do is research, it fits, it's part of the wholecloth of my life and work. Sometimes, yes, I'm like a happy wandering monk, a little goofy, but getting to live and learn and live some more. I am witness to the universe. My promise to myself is that I will write down what I find as faithfully and accurately as any human can.

I know - it's a tough job - but somebody's got to do it.

---------------------

THE VAGABOND TAKES UP CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING

Yes, Mary and I went shopping yesterday for cross-country skiing equipment. Turns out we couldn't find shoes for me that would work with the old-fashioned bindings on the old skis we already had. We ended up buying new skis, bindings, and shoes for each of us, at dinged-up, end of the season prices. We got home with enough light left that we could try them out in the hay field behind her mother's house at the edge of Fairwater.

I suppose you don't know that I've never skied before, cross-country or otherwise. It was a Zen experience. Like a good German Iowa farm boy, I wanted to be in control. Well, you can't be in control. You go where you're going and if you don't think about it, you get there. If you think about it, you fall down. I fell down three times. Mary tried to make me feel better: she said the snow conditions were not very good for cross-country skiing; she fell down a couple times herself. I told her that if I was paying her $3500 for the experience I was having, I'd really complain. She said that if I was paying $3500 for the experience, we'd be skiing someplace a lot nicer than that hayfield.

I knew I was in trouble the other day when I heard her bemoaning the fact that the snow was melting. I can pretty well figure where we'll be after our good March blizzard comes through. Mary is the reason I learned to swim at age 52: so I could scuba dive. Now - cross-country skiing. What we do for love, huh?

---------------------

THE POET AND THE AUDIENCE

There has been a discussion going on at Ivy Is Here about poets inserting stories or explanations or other extraneous material before poems when reading them in public. Indeed, the discussion prompted Ivy to take a critical look at a recent reading she'd attended, given by poets Kerry Hardie and Joan McBreen at Poetry Ireland. Dave from Via Negativa weighed in on the topic and as usual had something interesting to say. Hannah at Awake at Dawn on Someone's Couch takes the discussion to another level by asking about the relationship between the poem and the prose we want to use to expand or explain the poetry. Ivy wonders if poetry is a distilled form of prose.

I got involved in the discussion, too, writing: "Well, I suppose some musicians do talk between songs in live shows. They don't get to talk between songs on the radio. The song is still the song. I think the talking between poems is part of the poet's attempt to establish a relationship with the audience. Do comics talk to the audience between bits? Or are their bits their talking? How hard can you push the audience before losing them?"

"Perhaps the argument I'll buy for inserting stories/preambles between poems," I added later, arguing the other side of my native position, "is that it helps to avoid the non-stop intensity of poem after poem. The alternative to the story/preamble would be a long pause, what a rest is in music. Well-timed pauses can relieve the intensity, I just don't know how many audiences are prepared for them."

On the relationship between poetry and prose, I said: "Poetry is not a distilled form of prose, in my experience. Poetry and prose are like maple syrup and dish soap. You don't get maple syrup from dish soap. Further, prose is linear, poetry leaps. Where prose explains, poetry points. Where prose needs the reassurance of the sentence, poetry brings the image."

Not that any of this would matter one bit to the fellows who have coffee at Bud's in West Point, Nebraska, every weekday morning - should you wish to sit down with them and talk about it. Yet it raises the question of poetry's place in the world, and how it inhabits that place. About how we connect poetry to the lives around us. Has the poem become like opera, a kind of relict from a previous age attracting only a small, precious, and fragile audience? Has the poem - at least the poem in English - lost its shamanistic qualities, its power to transform the world?

Dave at Via Negativa holds the opinion that: "Poets in particular can (must?) recapture to some extent the ancient intuition that language is more than mere sign and symbol - that it is in some way *alive*. This is almost a universal concept, lost only in Western Europe since the so-called Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Go to Latin America, go even among African-Americans or other minority communities in this country and one immediately encounters vastly more reverance for the poetic word than among contemporary Anglo-Germanic folks. We've lost a LOT."

As I say, this is not a discussion they would have over coffee at Bud's in West Point, nor should they; but it is a discussion we as poets should continue. Given the world as we've got it - where politicians think if they say it's so that makes it so - what is the role of poetry? Poetry's language should be where saying it's so makes it so. How do we reclaim that power?

---------------------

from
THE MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
FEBRUARY 19, 1998

A great web connects all things. Our season is the world's season. It may not be that the butterfly flapping its wings in the Central American jungle actually alters our weather, yet apparently warm water in the Pacific does. Some other time, it may be a polar bear's breath caught in the jet stream, changing our smiles to hard-faced shivering.

Still, today, this grey mildness. The plow banks continue to shrink. There is an April dirtiness to the snow: all the reasons you might have to run away reveal themselves. A layer of mud at the edge of things, as if we are unfit to play with others. The snow retreats.

In Ripon, at the corner of the house where the dog had tramped a circle in the snow, there is a circle in the grass. Some things are permanent. Some things are ugly to the bone.

---------------------

REFLECTIONS ON BOOKS: #2
A BUTTERFLY SLEEPS ON THE TEMPLE BELL:
A REMINISCENCE ON THE OX HEAD PRESS, 1966-2000
by Don Olsen
Cross+Roads Press (PO Box 33, Ellison Bay, WI 54210), 2003, $10.00

Don't consider this in any sense a usual book review. The book I urge on you is not in any way a usual book. Nor was Don Olsen a usual man; even his short biographical note in the book gives that away: "I was born in 1931," he wrote. "Suddenly, another war was over and I was in college on the G.I. Bill and then came marriage and children and more school and 24 years a librarian at universities in Minnesota and Wisconsin and then a delicious early retirement to an abandoned dairy farm smack dab in the middle of the woods in north central Minnesota and now there are lazy winters on the Texas Gulf coast and never enough time to do nothing."

I don't use the term "saint" loosely. Yet I have to say that if a holy man lived among us, it was Don Olsen. His book is purportedly a reminiscence on his Ox Head Press "& Remarks on How its Demise Begins with Anguish & Grief that Rise from the Bewildering Complexities of a Suicide & other Ensuing Losses," but the subtext is about living the holy life.

Olsen kicks us in the gut right off in the "Prelude" of the book, speaking of the suicide: "No one is left untouched when there is a suicide in the family. Everything changes. I seem to go on, but I'm not sure of anything.... The loss is made worse by the awareness that we knew it was a possibility. Several months later we find a note in one of his books, a book about near-death experiences. After expressing love and gratitude for his life to us, and to his siblings and to Phoebe, his cat, Jon concluded with the statement, 'This is nobody's fault.'" The note was dated two years before the actual suicide.

"Albert Camus wrote that there is but one fundamental question: is life worth living or not?" Olsen said. "It is. It is good to be alive, but sometimes there is anguish that is more than a person should ever have to bear."

The rest of the book may look like it's about a man's devotion to words and to letterpress printing: that's only a metaphor for being a good man in today's world. You can read almost any passage and see and feel and taste the integrity of the man, the intensity of his passions, the purity of his pursuit.

No, I don't use the term "saint" lightly. I use it in reference to Don Olsen, however; I have to: he was a good man.

Sad to say, I believe that even before I got my copy of A Butterfly Sleeps on the Temple Bell in hand, Don had already gone too soon to that Great Pressroom in the Sky where every copy coming off his Adana Horizontal Platen Press is a perfect copy.

>

SATURDAY'S POEM
----------------------
DEPOT: BEAVER DAM, WISCONSIN
from Blessings In Disguise, Viking, 1991
by David Clewell


So small there's barely room for the phone
to ring. Each time it does someone's trying
to save me. My frustration conjures
the worst: a bus curled up on the shoulder
of a road. The ticket man is brimming
with small town sense. He tells everyone
it'll be here when it gets here.
The woman on the other end
of my ticket doesn't hear.
She tosses her hair and heads home.

He puts a hand on my shoulder, the way
he's learned to comfort strangers. Whistles
a secret in my ear: I should learn
to be more patient; he believes
reincarnation. Snow inches up to the door.
A bus horn blares for the hundredth time
in my head, and he tells me how it is:
one fifty a week for changing bulbs
and quarters. Says he has a way of knowing
he can trust me, wants me to believe with him
the sky is full of spirits
on their way to new bodies.
I tell him I'll try to. He's anxious
to go on. I see myself in the station window,
thinking of explaining all this when
I get back. The ways we see ourselves through
when a bus breaks down or a life
goes broke, and waiting is the asking
of the prayer and the answer.

If the soul never dies, then some nights
it's close. No lights for miles and the sky
full of snow. Burning in another town
is a woman who turns in her sleep, who has
no way of knowing the ticket man is talking
in circles of lives that keep on going.
That I'm running my own story up and down
my tongue until I'm sure I'll be convincing.
No way of seeing the two of us going,
our separate ways, for broke.

Reprinted with permission of the author. David Clewell is the author of several books of poems, including Blessings in Disguise which was a National Poetry Series winner; Now We're Getting Somewhere, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry; and most recently The Low End of Higher Things from the University of Wisconsin Press. He teaches writing and literature at Webster University in St. Louis.

---------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About nineteen of them, by our current count.

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