The Middlewesterner

LOSING IT

The other day, in the course of a run of comments over at Via Negativa, Dave noted that he "was going to leave a comment at The Middlewesterner yesterday expressing my surprise that you were letting political remarks creep into your posts." Later in the comments he added: "if even Tom is losing it, you know we have problems."

Yeah, we have problems. Yeah, I'm losing it. It has been a tough couple of weeks; and as much as I'd like to think I'm serene and detached, I take the world's sadness much too personally. Every day the news brings more sadness. As a nation we are constitutionally unable to say "we have made a mistake." We insist on staying the course, insist on offering more of our sons and daughters on the Altar of Christian Righteousness, insist on being re-elected. Listen to them: the horror is not that we degraded fellow human beings, the horror is that we got caught at it. One of them flies to Iraq, addresses our troops, and think he redeems himself! "I am a survivor," he says.

Yeah, I have a problem with members of this administration lining their pockets off the war. And oil prices have gone up why? In the face of whose record oil company profits?

Then I wonder how much some of the companies in my own retirement account's mutual funds might be making off the same war and the same oil-gouging, and that distresses me.

I take some solace in the fact that the polls have finally started to shift against W and his Faux Douzepers, Buffoons, Dragoons, Christian-Right Hangers-On, Assorted Lackeys, and Monkeys with Influence. How many more of our troops have to die before we get these guys out of power?

I have lost a lot of respect for Colin Powell over the past couple years, an awful lot, but he is still the best of a bad bunch. He was right when he told the president, "You break it, you own it." We broke Iraq and now there is no way out. That's what "owning it" means.

Shock and awe? I've been more shocked than awed by everything associated with this administration. But this isn't a political blog. This is not going to become a political blog. My notion of how the world should be is so far removed from current politics that it would be silly for me to annoy the pig by talking about politics too much. So - while admittedly I have "lost it," while admittedly I'll continue to take the occasional swipe at things political when I can no longer hold myself back - be assured that The Middlewesterner is and will be a blog about "exploring the heart of the country."

There is something happening here - something good and tough and tenaciousness and sweet and strong and rich and local. I'd like to think that someday it will rise up and overpower the generic white-bread culture that surrounds us, rise up and overpower the Rich White Righteously-Christian Camels Passing Through the Eye of a Needle in Washington, but that's not essential to our success. What matters is that we continue to make the world a little better place - here in our homes, on our blocks, in our communities, across the township, across the county. We take care of our own place : we take care of everything.

"I sweep my walk," Basho prays; "the whole world is clean."

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
April 20, 2004, cont'd

We have been touring Horizons Unlimited, a sheltered workshop on the south edge of Emmetsburg. Teresa Murphy is our inteprid guide. Now we are in the "Redemption Center" at the far back edge of the facility. This is not a church ("Redemption Center," get it?), but the place one turns in soda cans and liquor bottles to claim Iowa's 5-cent bounty on each can and bottle so marked.

What does the Redemption Center do? The consumers working in the center sort the cans and bottles by hand, by distributor. For instance, in one area to the left of us, Jerrod was sorting beer bottles, putting Budweiser bottles into a Bud carton, Miller bottles into a Miller carton, and so on. Elsewhere, all the Coca Cola cans were being put into flats for Coke; Pepsi cans for Pepsi; and Seven-Up for that company.

The Center makes one cent per can or bottle for those sorted and counted for return to the distributors. That's how the Redemption Center makes its money. The consumers doing the sorting are paid based on how many flats of cans they sort. Each person sorting is listed on a chart; the "recorder" fills in a circle after each person's name for each flat he or she sorts; the consumer earns so much per flat. The center does a time study once a year to establish the piece rate for the coming year. The fellow who does the recording gets paid by the hour because he is not doing any piece work.

In a nutshell, then, this is how it works:

o Cans and bottles are brought to the Center for redemption at three, four, or five cents each.

o Distributors pick up their cans and bottles, paying six cents apiece for them.

o The exceptions are bottles which get crushed on-site, and for which - essentially - the Center is paid twice: the Center gets six cents apiece for those bottles, plus they are paid so much per pound for the crushed glass that is shipped out. Liquor bottles (all from state-run liquor stores) and bottles from Budweiser and Miller are the ones crushed on-site. Unfortunately, Teresa said, the value of the glass does not cover the cost of shipping it for recycling. "But at least the glass is recycled and not buried in the ground."

Crushing glass is noisy work, so it goes on in the farthest back corner of the back room of the Redemption Center. Glass is sorted for crushing according to color - brown, green, and clear. Consumers stand at a sorting table that feeds the glass crusher, allowing only the proper color of glass onto the conveyor. They wear heavy leather gloves to protect their hands from cuts; they wear ear protection to conserve their hearing. They sort off bottles of the wrong color and frequently one or the other of them takes a little hammer to the neck of a liquor bottle to get rid of the metal ring that remains there. All such metal must be removed before the glass is crushed. If plastic rings remain after crushing, that material will burn up when the glass is melted for re-use, which is not the case with the metal rings. Bottle caps have to be removed form the bottles before they go onto the conveyor. Paper labels stay on the bottles.

Last year the Center sent out four semi belly-dump loads of clear glass for recycling, two loads of brown glass, and one load of green glass. The glass goes to Shakopee, Minnesota, Teresa said.

Linda Detrick is the plant's Production Manager, Teresa said. "She's been here the longest - twenty-six years." Bill Huberty is Workshop Supervisor/Recreation Coordinator. Jeenifer Long, another Workshop Supervisor, was overseeing work in the Redemption Center while we were there; Pat Henningsen is the Redemption Center's manager.

The glass crushing operation is in the back corner of the Redemption Center at Horizons Unlimited, about as far as you can get from the front of the building and still be in the plant. Teresa led me back towards the front - through the rain, when we had to step outside; through the sorting areas; back to the Program Manager's office.

"This is my other office," Teresa said. Her duties require that she spend part of her time at the desk up front, part of her time here in the Program Manager's office. The staffing that had been underway when we'd come past earlier was finished now and the staff had dispersed. I could see Sharon Manwarren, the Program Manager, working in her office to the left of where we stood talking; and Peg Christensen, the Assistant Program Manager, was woring at her desk in the other office.

Then we crossed the building and stepped through the doors into the Creative Stitches portion of the plant. Creative Stitches is staffed by Pat Hartman, Sharon Mueller, and Lori Forry. Here a computerized sewing machine with four stitching heads will stitch words and logos onto sweatshirts, T-shirts, jackets, hats, bags, towels, and blankets in a wide array of colors. Spools of thread in the entire rainbow of colors hang on the wall opposite the stitching machine. In only a few minutes a logo that started out looking awful bland sprang to life as the final stitches were put in place.

Creative Stitches will take orders from the public, for single items to as many as five hundred. Teresa said baby blankets were a popular order, with the baby's name, date of birth, weight, and length stitched onto it as a memento. Customers can choose from 20,000 existing designs or Creative Stitches can digitize a custom design for stitching. "We don't charge a digitizing or set-up fee," Teresa said. Stitching the largest designs might cost as much as $15-20 each. A more usual logo will cost from $6.75 to $9.00. Creative Stitches usually charges by the stitch - 75 cents per 1000 stitches on materials supplied by Creative Stitches; $1.10 per 1000 stitches on material supplied by the customer.

Creative Stitches has been doing stitching for about seven years now. Screen printing was added about a year ago.

To be continued....

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DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (8)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29, April 30, May 10, May 11, May 13, and May 14, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.


McGregor says: "The cinematography itself [in Canadian television] is un-American. Visually, Canadian television is almost always characterized by a greater depth of field and a more evenly distributed focus. We see more of the background, and it is more fully realized. Correspondingly, we see less of the personalities. Characters are shot at longer range, and with a less intimate, less confrontational lens. We get far fewer of the extreme close-ups that are almost a trademark of American commercial television - and when we do, they are more often than not designed to increase our discomfort than cement our identification with the protagonist." McGregor says "... in the Canadian version of this genre [Crossing Jordan or CSI], the emphasis is on procedure and teamwork, not science and ingenuity." The Canadian brand of hero is "flawed, ordinary, unaggressive, committed to truth and justice, but rather plodding in his pursuit of it...."

I have to admit that middle western writers do look at characters here, their personalities; we are interested in the person. Yet I think it is nearly always in relation to the background, the landscape, the culture, the family, the community, never in isolation. And it is not meant to foster a cult of personality - well, except perhaps in the case of Minnesota's brief infatuation with Jesse Ventura; still, that instance at least proves middle westerners have a sense of humor. When we focus attention on the person here, aren't we holding that character up as representative of the rest of us? Doesn't he become Anyman and isn't she Everywoman? And don't they exist only in connection with the tableaux upon which they live and act? Think of William Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner As Farmer: we have met him and he is us.

Perhaps this is the reason there aren't many "middle western" shows on American television: given who we are, we don't look like the heroes American television wants.

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 14, 1998

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We have had a warm winter and a moist spring. Will August be dry, the green grasses seared? Will autumn be a long chilly nightmare? No matter - today is bright and blue of sky.

I noticed last night a SOLD sign on the house along E north of Five Corners where the car had driven through the ditch onto the lawn last winter. It didn't take long to sell, did it? I'm told divorce is the reason it went on the market again so soon after it sold the first time. I will suggest that the process of building a house might bring a couple to divorce.

Mourning doves in the driveway again. Lilacs are opening at Weinkauf's, just north of Fairwater. I haven't seen the hawk for several days. Should I worry?

A faint haze in the distance, noticeable especially to the east.

The fellow is working his flower beds at Five Corners. A floppy hat, today. No cigar. Yet.

There are several fields south of Five Corners which haven't been worked yet, including some on high ground with corn rubble. Don't worry of it too soon, Tom, it is early in the season; and how is it your business anyway?

SATURDAY'S POEM
-----------------------
TINCTURE MAKING
by Colleen Redman


Digging roots
of Echinacea and Valerian

To strengthen my resistance
to quiet my restless sleep

Exposing the source
of innocent flowers

Dirty secrets
and childhood traumas

Washing the wounds
with the sting of vodka

Made into medicine
with the patience of time


Colleen Redman is the author of The Jim and Dan Stories (Silver and Gold Productions, 2003). This and her first collection of poetry, Muses Like Moonlight, are available via her website silverandgold.swva.net. Her poems have appeared in Mothering Magazine, The We’moon Journal, Poets Against the War online, and in a variety of local publications. She writes political commentaries that have been widely published on the web and in the Roanoke Times newspaper. Colleen is co-editor of A Museletter, a local forum in Floyd, Virginia, where she currently lives.

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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 seventeen of them, by our current count.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
April 20, 2004, cont'd

We have been touring Horizons Unlimited, a sheltered workshop on the south edge of Emmetsburg. Teresa Murphy is my tour guide. We are out in the plant, talking about the sorting and baling for recycling that goes on here.

Off to our right are a couple openings into the building, so that the public can drop off recyclables at the plant any hour of the day or night. Materials put through the openings drop into cages inside, which are emptied daily - cardboard into one cage, tin in another, plastic in the third. Outside there is a shed for collecting dropped-off magazines, and containers for local glass and newspapers. The magazine shed gets emptied once a week, the glass container twice a week, and the newspaper container whenever it gets full.

We moved deeper into the building, into the cardboard area. Here is where plastic bags and styrofoam that had been deposited with cardboard get sorted out, as well as juice cartons, which are too waxy to be recycled as cardboard. The greasiest part of pizzas boxes also gets discarded as garbage. The big baler that handles the cardboard is a "self-tyer," while bales from the two I'd seen previously have to be tied by hand.

Cardboard bales weigh about eighteen hundred pounds each. Twenty-four bales make a load. H-U ships about three loads of cardboard per month, to a place in Becker, Minnesota, which recycles it. A truck from the plant in Becker drops off freshly-made cardboard in Mason City or Clear Lake, Teresa told me, then comes to Emmetsburg to pick up a load of cardboard to take back to Becker. The circle is completed.

"This is the DNR building," Teresa said as we entered the newest portion of the plant. The building had been constructed with the help of a grant from the DNR. Before the addition, there had been so much plastic piled up in the existing space that it was difficult getting any sorting done.

The DNR grant helped pay for another baler, too, one used exclusively for plastics. Because they have a tendency to expand so greatly, bales of plastic have to be double-tied with heavier gauge wire than is required for paper or tin; otherwise the wires may break and scatter plastic across the room.

A conveyor carries the plastics up into the baler. Because milk jugs are more valuable by themselves instead of mixed with other plastics, they are baled separately. The plastics are loaded onto the sorting table with the Bobcat. Some consumers were baling milk jugs while I watched. That meant only milk jugs could go up the conveyor into the baler. Garbage had to be sorted out - plastic bags, lids, bottle caps, etc. All the milk jugs had to have their caps removed and discarded. Consumers had to put Number One plastic in one container, Number Three plastic in another container. Number Two plastic, the milk jugs, was already going up the conveyor. Any other plastics have to be discarded as junk.

A bale of pop bottles will weigh about one thousand pounds, Teresa said. Milk jugs come in at thirteen hundred pounds per bale, as do color #2 plastics. About six semi loads of baled plastic are hauled away each year. Sometimes, Teresa said, the plastic will go to Mohawk Carpets in Georgia to be recycled into carpets; some loads go to Siouxland Recovery in Sioux City, Iowa.

I suppose it wouldn't be very exciting work, standing at the sorting table, removing the cap from an occasional milk jug or pop bottle, letting the milk jugs fall onto the conveyor, sorting the remaining plastic into this container or that one for later baling. It wouldn't be very exciting, handling the dirty plastic all day. Sorting is gross work. Most of the consumers working here were wearing gloves to help keep their hands clean. Even as they concentrated on their work, they had time to look up, smile, wave at Teresa.

Sometimes the consumers will take the cap off a detergent container and find it filled with used insulin needles. Immediately they replace the cap and the container is taken to the plant's safety director to be stored with the other "sharps" in the "sharps container." Sharps and bio-hazard materials are picked up once a month.

It had been raining since I came into the building for the tour and it was still raining; Teresa and I had to go outside to get to the Redemption Center, which handles all the cans and bottles that have the Iowa 5-cent redemption printed on them.

Two big plastic bags will hold approximately five hundred aluminum cans. Up to five hundred cans gets the best price for the public bringing cans into the Redemption Center. Large quantities brought in all at once get docked one cent per can; this is done to encourage a smooth flow of customers at the Redemption Center, rather than allowing lines to form and delays to occur. Commercial customers such as taverns get a 4-cent redemption for their cans, which are left for counting at the center's convenience.

Algona, twenty-five miles to the east, still has a redemption center, but most others in the area have closed.

To be continued....

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DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (7)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29, April 30, May 10, May 11, and May 13, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.


Canadian film-makers apparently have problems with "heroic characters." According to McGregor, they "are even more ambivalent about heroic solutions." "Often this reluctance towards a heroic solution entails some kind of containment strategy," McGregor says. "As one might expect, the commonest version of this involves an appeal to community."

Here in the middle west, I don't know whether it's "heroism," or duty. We do what needs to be done and are embarrassed when someone notices. Those we would put on the hero's pedestal go reluctantly. Grant Wood's "American Gothic" is not a portrait of two people comfortable representing their fellows.

We are a pragmatic bunch as well. Whatever solution will work, well that's the way we'll go. Does the task require some rugged individualism? A farm boy will step up to bat. Is cooperation needed? A community comes together.

Out here, being a hero isn't something done when times get tough - it's something practiced every day, in small ways, unnoticed. Caring for an aging, failing parent is heroic. Teaching an autistic child is. So is changing a tire for a stranded motorist. We've got a reputation for rugged individualism, sure; at the same time, when I've asked about the characteristics of the people in their area, at least one person in each of my 12 Vagabond focus communities has said: "These people are caring. They'll do anything for you." That doesn't sound like "heroism" and "heroic solutions" in the sense that McGregor is using the terms, but it sounds like heroism to me. And no doubt it is part of our middle western definition of community, writ in the dictionary of our hearts, not scrawled on some public wall.

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 12, 1998

The morning ritual. I rise about 5:00 a.m. and work at writing for two hours. At 7:00 a.m. I start my shower for work, dress as a businessman, sort of. Putting on coat and tie for me is very much like the priest putting on chasuble and stole. That symbolism. Then I drive to work, taking note of my morning thoughts along the way. In the parking lot at the printing plant, I sit for a bit while I record those observations. Some would look at me askance as I sit there, scribbling. Screw 'em if they can't take a joke.

This morning is no different. Blue sky and bright sun. A wonderful day in May. I will spoil it by going to work. The need to make a living keeps us on the straight and narrow, doesn't it? The owner is a good man, but a Republican. His challenge is to make money on his money. That is not my challenge - although I do want him to succeed. My challenge is the juggling, the puzzle, the making of something excellent where nothing had been before. It is different than the money impulse, isn't it?

A still pond. The call of the mourning dove. Morning dove. Good morning, dove. Morning, love.

Fairwater is a trim and tidy village. Mowed lawns. Colorful flower beds. Houses that are cared for. Ah, there - a rusted out automobile.

North of town - another field has sprouted, in green rows. Is it corn or beans? And there - another one. 'Tis the season.

The pattern of tractor and planter in the soil: this is some massive artwork, isn't it?

A new calf stands on new legs in the pasture of cows and donkeys just south of Five Corners. Farther north, a farm wife drives a tractor pulling a flat rack. She has covered her hair with a scarf. She is in the field picking up rocks. This is a task that never ends. You think you have them all, then over the winter some wicked elf spreads more on your fields. Is this a picture of hell?

*

MAY 13, 1998
Another fine day, after a little rain last night. The mourning dove flies from our driveway. The wind ruffles the surface of the pond. Blue sky. Here we go.

Great piles of stone have been dumped in the canning factory's field north of town. Perhaps they will put stone along the paths of the tires of their irrigation unit?

The field of peas is already thick green. There is a hint of corn in another field. Blossoms are off the trees in the orchard of the farmstead north of Carter Road. The old horse is out to the far end of his pasture this morning. This is not usual. What is it a portent of?

The fields south of Five Corners are still wet, still untilled. The weeds overtake them.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 20 2004, cont'd

I have been touring Horizons Unlimited in Emmetsburg. Teresa Murphy is my tour guide. We have already been through the kitchen and dining area at the plant, and now we're standing in the "pre-vocational" area. We have already talked about the laundry that gets done in this room.

Horizons produces ID badges and buttons, Teresa told me. They had recently done 500 buttons for the effort to get casino boat gambling on Five Island Lake, for instance.

Here in the "pre-vocational" area, the workers also do paper-shredding. Since passage of laws mandating greater protection of personal information, more and more documents need to be shredded. "That's what Richard is doing," Teresa said. Richard was sitting in a wheelchair in front of a small paper-shredder, feeding in a few sheets at a time. The work of shredding material with personal information is assigned to people who are unable to read.

Others in the room are going through boxes, sorting colored paper from white, newspapers and magazines from office paper.

Jamie Parsons was overseeing the working going on in the room. Teresa said "She's an ICFMR Instructor." I said "Huh?" Jamie said "ICFMR - Intermediate Care Facility for the Mentally Retarded." A light went on for me.

"What does an ICFMR Instructor need to know?" I asked Jamie.

"I'm supposed to know everything I'm supposed to know," she said. She made it sound like she had to be prepared to deal with whatever came up.

Cheryl Hilton was sitting at a small desk near the door, helping as needed in the room. I asked what she does. "I'm retired," she said. "I just substitute wherever they need me." She is a "residential instructor" and usually works overnight in a group home, from midnight to 8:00 a.m.

"Do you have to stay awake for that whole period," I wondered.

The answer was yes. "The other night with the storm," Cheryl said, "there was a loud clap of thunder and one of the consumers shot out of his room just like that, terrified."

Teresa and I stood at the doorway, talking about the organization. Horizons Unlimited publishes a newsletter for parents and guardians of its consumers and for twelve communities in the area surrounding Emmetsburg. The plant receives recyclable materials from some surrounding counties. Fund-raisers include a Superbowl Breakfast and the Non-Dinner Dinner where donors receive a description of an imaginary meal corresponding to the size of the contributions. The Non-Dinner Dinner promotion takes place about the time of the Thanksgiving holiday.

"People from the community who come into the plant are surprised," Teresa said. "They say 'I didn't realize how big it was in here.'"

Teresa and I moved into the next room in the plant, farther back in the building, part of the space that the public doesn't know is so big. "This is the pop bottle de-capping area," Teresa said. Here consumers take caps off the plastic bottles, dump any liquid from the bottles into a bucket, and bag the bottles. These are some of the "dud" bottles, according to Teresa, those which don't get the 5-cent Iowa refund, either because they aren't marked for that (bottles from Minnesota, say) or they're plastic liquor bottles. Bottles need to be de-capped before they're baled.

When we pass the Program Manager's office on our way farther back into the building, the door is closed because the "staffing" is still going on in there. Teresa said that the status of eight or nine consumers was being reviewed this month. Horizons Unlimited supplies work activity for a total of eighty-seven consumers.

In the next room back, newspapers and magazines get sorted on a huge scale, white paper gets shredded, there are bunkers for tin cans and aluminum. The industrial shredder will cut through paper half an inch thick. It is run once or twice a month depending on the volume of paper the plant is handling.

Jessie Manwarren, Recycling Manager, and Laura Sidles, Workshop Superviosr, oversee work in this area. There are two Bobcats sitting off to the side. It's not that they always have two of them: the shiny new one is replacing the older Bobcat. Large bales of aluminum cans and of paper are stacked up several bales high.

A pick-up from the City of Mallard has backed a trailer into the work area. Consumers unloaded paper from the trailer onto the floor. One of the staff members got onto a Bobcat and pushed the pile of paper into a bunker for sorting later. A Toyota forklift moves carefully through the work area. Staff members drive the forklift, Teresa said, "plus one consumer is allowed to."

The paper shoved into the bunker will get sorted out into white paper, magazines, cardboard, "and the garbage," Teresa said. "You'd be surprised what people put in their recycling." In a month's time, the bunker for storing paper can be filled all the way out into the aisle. "In fact, we've had it all the way out to the desks before," Teresa said, indicating two desks across the twenty-foot aisle from us.

Bales of newspaper weight 1400-1500 pounds each, Teresa informed me. Thirty-one bales make a semi load. The plant sends out about three semi loads of newspaper each month, to a Bowater papermill in Canada.

One neighboring county delivers a "roll-off" load of magazines to the plant each month. A "roll-off" is a container that rolls off the frame of a truck for use; when it has been filled, it is rolled back onto the truck for transport.

A private outfit, Shamrock Recycling, brings in materials from Emmetsburg and surrounding counties, including five roll-offs a month for Pocahontas. Shamrock has roll-offs with compartments for glass, tin, aluminum, plastic, newspapers, and cardboard. Roll-offs of tin are brought in as well, and Teresa said that Pocahontas used to bring in the equivalent of a garbage truck full of tin every three months; she doesn't know if that's still the case.

One of the balers in the plant is devoted entirely to newspapers. Another bales tin, magazines, shredded white paper, and newspaper, as needed.

Bales of tin weight about a thousand pounds each. Forty-five bales make a load. The plant sends a load of tin out about every three months. Tin is sold to Connecticut Metals and gets shipped to East Chicago, Illinois, or Chicago, Indiana.

A bale of magazines weighs two thousand pounds. Twenty-two bales make a load. The plant ships about one load per month, to a papermill in Canada.

The aluminum "duds" get baled, six hundred pounds to the bale, about one bale per month, and they're sold to the Shine Brothers in Spencer, Iowa. Not much "dud" aluminum has to be handled because most cans in Iowa are redeemable for 5-cents per can, as we would see in the Redemption Center in another building at Horizons.

Some dog food and cat food cans are aluminum and some are not. How do the consumers tell the difference when they are sorting cans? There are magnets along the side of the sorting table. If the can is held up when you put it next to the magnet, it's a tin can; if the can falls back onto the table, it gets sorted as aluminum.

We've been standing in the center of the room watching activity around us. A couple groups of consumers come past us. They are going on break. Many of them say "Hello, Teresa" as they come past, with obvious affection.

To be continued....

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DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (6)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29, April 30, May 10, and May 11, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.


"The whole corpus," McGregor says, "is overflowing with enclosure images. It is also overflowing with signs of anxiety about the integrity and meaning of these enclosures. Are they cages or caves?" Many of the "iconic boxes exude a feeling not of entrapment but of safety."

Rather than images of enclosure, the central metaphors in the pioneer middle west likely were images of things man-made or natural that reached for the sky. The flatness here is immense, the horizon is forever. Bell tower, church steeple, windmill, water tower, barn with cupola, silo - for the pioneers all these broke the great horizontal sweep of their world. Sometimes, perhaps, the vastness of sky was oppressive in the way wilderness weighed on McGregor's Canadians. For our pioneers, those towering edifices helped push back the sky.

The other central metaphor here might have been the railroad tracks pointed at the sunset, gleaming with a golden shine that greased the path west, each new community pushing the frontier farther towards the mountains.

I say that the middle western metaphor was not box or enclosure even knowing full well that this region was surveyed to rectangular regularity section after section after section in grid-like monotony. Yet that squared severity on the landscape was not taken into the middle western heart, not incorporated into our sense of who we are the way that McGregor believes enclosures hold Canadians. Our pioneers here were more given to pushing into open space than to looking for comfort in corners.

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 8, 1998

The long view: a very mild winter, a moist spring. Both the result, I'm assuming, of the El Nino. Wisconsin is carpeted thick and green following such mildness and moisture. It is a beautiful world by comparison to some harsh, ugly, reluctant springs I have known. We should take joy in the beauty of this season's world.
There are so many times we get caught up in the details, overwhelmed by the minutiae, that we overlook the true beauty in the sweep of things. Cannot see the forest for the trees, as they say. Cannot enjoy the loveliness because of a small blemish. Cannot enjoy what we have because we wish for something we don't have. Perspective is a wonderful thing, if you can find it. Why is it so difficult to find? We really are trapped in our own little orb of skull bone, aren't we? The elephant confined by a ten foot piece of chain can pace only a distance of ten feet, even after the chain has been removed. What must we do to set ourselves free of our own such tethers?

The white daffodils are spent. The peonies have shot up and become very bushy. Some of the tulips bend towards their end. The lilies of the valley have a notion they'll open soon, to release their sweet perfume. It is a sunny morning, a little cool but bright. Send the whiners home - this will be a good day.

Another explosion of blossoms in the orchard at Weinkauf's, just north of Fairwater.

Where is the hawk taking breakfast this morning? I do not see him.

*

MAY 11, 1998
We had a wonderful weekend and the week is starting out lovely too. Blue sky and bright sun. Grass is green and thick. The birds are calling. Charge, I say. Charge!

Long shadows of the morning sun. This is almost a morning made for cutting hay. I know, I know - it is too early in the season.

The hawk is not in his tree; and there are now nearly enough leaves on the tree that I might not see him even if he were. In the evening, he likes to sit on one or the other poles of the powerline along the highway, just south of the grove of trees I call his home.

A few fields are green with crops. It is peas which have sprouted. Some fields have not yet been worked at all and they are turning green with weeds. Dandelions have turned to fluff, gone to seed for the first time this season.

At the farm near Five Corners a baby donkey is taking suck.

North of Union Street along Highway E, it is corn that has just barely sprouted.

Today must be "bulky article pick-up" in Ripon. The streets are lined with couch and bookshelf and end table and all manner of cast-off. The ritual of spring is playing out here, now. Spring house-cleaning. Where and when did the impulse originate? And why? And how has it been transmuted?

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 20, 2004

I've spent this morning working on my notes and I've arranged for an interview on Wednesday afternoon with Dick and Anne Marie Nelson, whose son Bruce plays with the Carolina Panthers. Bruce just got married this past weekend, I believe. I have also arranged an interview for Thursday morning with Andy Joyce, who has a funeral home in town. He's a fellow who left Emmetsburg for work elsewhere, then made the decision to come back.

*

The narrow profile of the building turned towards the highway belies what happens inside the doors at Horizons Unlimited. This is a "sheltered workshop" for individuals with disabilities. Or, how I'd put it, for the dinged of the world, for the broken-winged angels, for those not able to make their own way safely.

Teresa Murphy met me right at 9:30 a.m., as scheduled, right at the front of the building, and - to mark my visit - she presented me with a couple pens, a band-aid dispenser, and a calendar printed on a sheet of magnetic material. I suppose if I were a journalist with some newspaper's or magazine's code of ethics, instead of being a vagabond poet, I might have to be careful about accepting even pens and calendar. But this is a different kind of news I'm writing. In any case, I have nothing to offer that can be bought. Teresa is an Administrative Assistant at Horizons Unlimited and today her job description included giving me a tour of the place.

Horizons Unlimited is a sheltered workshop for individuals with disabilities. Have you ever stepped into a sheltered workshop? I hadn't. The organization has residential facilities as well as the workshop; two of their houses have eight residents and one holds nine. Mary Kay Ulrich is the Residential Director. Teresa said H-U also oversees "supported employment" for higher functioning consumers. ("Consumers" are what some people call "clients" and what others, I suppose, might call "the people I care for.") Some of the consumers have food prep jobs at Food Pride in Emmetsburg, some are able to clean for Emmetsburg businesses, and for Kathleen's, another residential facility for individuals with disabilities.

That the building at Horizons Unlimited presents a narrow profile to the street, that's a metaphor: here is part of our world we drive past every day without thinking about it too much. And most of us don't go out of our way to get a peek inside, to see what happens here, how it happens, who makes it happen. We'd just as soon not have to pay too much attention to this part of life, I suppose, yet this is work that must be done - the work the staff does, the work the consumers do. I wanted to peel back the walls and look inside. I teased Teresa that she got "the short straw," being the one who had to give me the tour. She said that wasn't the case.

Up front, closest to the street, closest to Highway 4 on the south edge of Emmetsburg, are the administrative offices for Horizons Unlimited. Here was Toni Baker, Management Assistant for Residential Services. There was the office of Marvella Wickman, Office Manager and Safety Coordinator. And Ron Ludwig, the CEO of Horizons Unlimited, he gets an office and a desk, too.

Then Teresa was showing me the Food Services Department, where meals for sixty people are prepared each day, served at noon to staff and consumers. There are six long tables in the dining area near the kitchen; there are more tables and chairs in an adjacent room.

"Consumers usually eat breakfast and supper at home," Teresa said, "and they have lunch here."

Some of the consumers help with meal preparation. In fact six of them were busy working when we stepped into the kitchen.

"Those who are higher functioning do most of the meal preparation, with staff assistance," Teresa said. "Those who are lower-functioning set the tables."

The food is served cafeteria-style, with portions individualized according to each consumer's need - this one may be diabetic, that one may need to gain weight.

In addition to lunch, consumers at H-U take a snack break at 10:15 a.m. and a break for coffee or soda at 2:00 p.m.

Leftover food is labeled as to what it is, when it was served, and when it must be used by. Leftovers get used within three days or get thrown out, Teresa said.

Some consumers do the dishes, scrub the pots and pans. As we talked in the kitchen, a woman worked at the sink with a large pan, cleaning it with a devotion to the task you can't buy, that meticulously. She was going to get every speck.

Horizons Unlimited does a "light catering" business as well. Though perhaps "three hundred buns is not 'light,'" said Helen Mohler, the Food Service Assistant who was in charge of meal preparations while Tara Miller, the Food Service Supervisor, was at a "staffing." The kitchen would be catering for a bowling banquet tomorrow night - lasagna, lettuce salad, garlic bread, and such.

A "staffing" is a meeting that, once a year, reviews the needs of those consumers whose "anniversary date" falls in the month. What are the changing needs of the consumer, what kind of progress has been made, has there been any deterioration, have there been any behavioral issues? April's staffing was taking place while I was getting my tour.

Teresa and I entered the shop. The first room is "pre-vocational," for lower-functioning people. Horizons Unlimited offers a laundry service, and this is where the washing gets done. The people who work in this room do the laundry for Emmetsburg's Suburban Motel, for instance. Some of the washing machines handle "industrial loads" - as much as three queen-size comforters. Some are more like the washing machine in my basement. The laundry service takes in washing from the general public as well as businesses.

Heidi just had to say hello to Teresa as we talked. She wanted to know who I was. As you go through the shop, you'll notice that "Who is that new person in our world" is a constant concern. Being able to place the new or the strange seems to be important. It's also clear as we walk through the plant that a lot of the consumers have to say hello to Teresa. Some want to come up and touch her when they say "hi." You feel the warmth of the relationship. You could not pay people to behave in such a fashion. Perhaps the folks I'm seeing at work here have something to teach us.

To be continued....

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

from
"MAKING HAY"

& we can
taste it:

that cool
drink/ of water

that cold
drink/ we think

of, heading home:

slowly, with
full racks/

three racks
full & sun

behind us
as we move,

driving,
barely

in a shadow,
driving

fast enough
by some logic

to keep up
with it.

the racks
groan: wood/wear

& wood/strain,
old planks

& two by fours
creaking

under such weight
as loads

shift
over rough spots

in gravel
& washouts. you can

wonder/ that strain:

that dull distant strain
as your muscles relax

in slow breeze,
as smells

of strong black earth
& dust from the road

mix with hay dust
full of air

mix with
blood & bone

& tendon
deep within.

our eyes have
other dreams

in these
moments

& cold
water in our

throats
does more

than cut the phlegm.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 6, 1998

Last evening as I took garbage out to the curb, I noticed three more tulips open in the bed along the garage. Were they open yesterday in the morning? Did I fail to notice them then? Do I see only what I expect to see, am I blind to everything else? How can I begin to consider myself an observant man, a true "witness" to this life, if such things escape my notice?

It is a foggy, foggy morning. I have noticed that, at least. I can barely discern the outline of a neighbor's garage across the street. Visibility is less than thirty yards.

It is too foggy to see the hawk's tree this morning, much less the hawk in the tree. The sun does a slow burn, seeking attention.

The blindness today is both literal and metaphorical. Except there is no blindness in Ripon. I can see down the length of Watson Street. Now the sun shining.

I have always said that town kids have it easier.

*

MAY 7, 1998
A slow rain, this morning. A mourning dove sits on the driveway, getting wet. It is the picture of acceptance.

"This Door Is NOT in Use" says a sign on a house in Fairwater. What is that a metaphor for? What is that a meta for?

A grey day in the country. The strobe light atop a school bus gets noticed. Rain on the windshield all the way to Ripon.

There is a skunk on the road, wet and dead.

At the Sina pig farm, a girl waits for the school bus. Her hair is wet. She tosses her head to flip her hair out of her eyes. Her brother waits with her. They do not stand in the shelter at the end of the driveway, but under the dripping trees.

Most of the fields I see have now been worked to a fine, smooth consistency.

THE STRANGE DEMOGRAPHICS OF WRITERS' WORKSHOPS

On Sunday I taught my "Keeping a Writer's Journal" workshop for the third time, this time a three-hour session at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee.

All six participants were women. Three of the six were left-handed. When was the last time you were one of seven people in a room, four of whom were left-handed? (Well, actually, I write left-handed, shoot basketball left-handed, high-jump left-handed; I bat right-handed, throw a baseball right-handed, throw a football right-handed. I eat with both hands.) I suppose we can explain the left-handers by noting that creativity is usually a right-brain function, and left-handers are right-brained.

I don't know how to explain the fact that all the students were women. It is not the only time I've seen this phenomenon. Participants at the Creative Nonfiction Conference I attended in 1999, in Baltimore, were mostly women. I've delivered other seminars over the past couple years, to groups mostly of women. My sense is that there are more women than men in MFA writing programs around the country. And usually, in my experience, more women than men show up at poetry readings.

Either we are bringing up our sons to stay the hell away from writing as a vocation; or we are instilling in them the notion that they don't have to take instruction, they can learn what they want to know pretty much on their own.

In either case, I'm sad about the state of things: I'd like to see more men take up writing; and I'd liked to think that men are more tractable, more teachable than it appears we are.

Part of the reason the world's such a mess is that we so often won't let anybody tell us anything, we won't let them teach us very much. The result is oftentimes disastrous: consider the current administration's testosterone poisoning and the mess they've made of things. Does the world need any more people like Paul Wolfowitz? I don't think so: one is more than enough. Besides the immensity of its scale, how is the Bush Doctrine different than other kinds of bullying?

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
APRIL 19, 2004 - EMMETSBURG, IOWA

Well. I've done a hundred-thirty-two interviews without a single person saying they didn't want to be interviewed. Now I've called a fellow who was our dentist half a century ago, and he has declined, pleasantly.

"No, thank you, I don't think so," he said.

I asked again, another pitch, thrown-side arm.

"No, thank you, I don't think so."

So - that's one who has declined. The record is: 132 to 1. I'm saddened by the refusal, even though it didn't sound the least bit personal. My mission is not his mission. Not everyone wants to tell the family story, and not everyone will. The nagging thought that I might be missing something, that disheartens me a little.

*

I drove to Spencer, some twenty-five miles west of Emmetsburg, to Tuesdays Coffee and Books where I'll be signing books on Saturday. One of my books there is out of stock, they told me by e-mail last week, and that just won't do, to be out of stock.

When I walked in, Jessica, the manager, was on the telephone with a reporter at the Spencer paper, telling about me and my book signing. She'd just read into the telephone the number where I could be reached for an interview when I said: "or they could talk to me standing right here." Jessica looked up, a little surprised. "He's standing right here," she said into the phone.

What else do you do in a bookstore? I bought myself two books and a cup of coffee. As if I need two more books. I met Jeff, the owner and the fellow I had been in contact with via e-mail. I took my coffee and books, told them I'd see them on Saturday; they went on trying to deal with the internet connection problems they'd been encountering. Jeff was taking up the chase. Jessica said to him, "Tell them that the last time this happened their techie told me a line was out, even though that's not what the problem was. That didn't make me very happy."

This makes me think how often people tell a truth that is convenient rather than accurate; makes me think, in other words, of the current Republican administration in Washington. Watch Condelizza Rice's eyes when she's talking: every time her eyelids flutter, she's telling another lie; they flutter all the time. Bush's eyes don't flutter because he actually believes what he is saying, as unfortunate as that is - I mean, he thinks Rumsfield is doing a "superb job," for chrissakes. Cheney's eyes don't flutter much, because he is such a predatory reptile; there is no such thing as truth in the reptile's world, only the straight-ahead urgency to go after the fly on your nose, with no thought of consequences. Watch the rest of them, though; their eyes will show you their lies.

*

In the afternoon I stopped back at the Emmetsburg Welcome Center and Chamber of Commerce office. I had stopped in this morning, and bless her heart, Kathy Fank, the Chamber Director, has set up the tours I requested. Tomorrow morning I'll be at Horizons Unlimited/Creative Stitches, a sheltered workshop. Tomorrow afternoon I'll tour Sky Jack, a manufacturer who has been through hard times and is now starting to come back; they make high lifts. Sally Jordan's husband, Tom, was plant manager there until his untimely death. On Thursday I'll visit SNC, which makes transitors, and IEI, which makes countertops, some of them for Winnebago mobile homes.

Kathy also extended an invitation for me to attend the Chamber's annual banquet at the Emmetsburg Country Club tomorrow evening. I'll be a fish out of water there, I'm sure, but it will be a view of the community I have not had yet.

Later I stopped in to say "Hello" to Myram Tunnicliff and her husband. I had interviewed them on my visit to Emmetsburg last November, and had borrowed some historical materials I wanted to return.

What I got was I got myself invited to a meeting of the Emmetsburg Writers Club at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon. Members share their work with each other, Myram said, and perhaps I could share some of my work with them. It was asked as a tentative question because the Writers' Club doesn't have money to pay visiting writers, of course. I said I'd be happy to stop in and share my work. I'll need to be sure and finish my visit to IEI by 4:00 p.m.

I have also managed to get myself invited to the ground-breaking ceremonies for the Voyagers ethanol plant that is coming to Emmetsburg. The shindig will start up at the college with coffee and some talks, and then will proceed to the site of the plant, for turning the first shovel of dirt. Again, this is a view of the community I have not had before.

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (5)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29, April 30, and May 10, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.


McGregor argues that "the only recourse we have against the horror of mortality is art. Like the mediator of myth, the art text, in modeling wholeness, effects a reconciliation between the self and its most-feared other."

The middle westerner might argue that the only recourse we have against the horror of mortality is the church. Church steeples aspired skyward in every community almost as soon as the community was founded. In interviews with residents of my twelve middle western focus communities, I sense that we think of ourselves as a godly people. I'll venture that we believe religion is an effective recourse against mortality. Further, we think that art will not protect us. We don't have time for it. Indeed, art is the province of women and children, you might hear us say, and not a proper activity for a manly pioneer already busy enough in the hard-scrabble effort to get crops from the land. One must do something that moves us towards harvest, we think, and art doesn't do anything in that regard; it is only an ornament and a filigree in an otherwise hard life. Even today the farmers come into town wanting to cut the school budget to keep their property taxes down, and the first part of the curriculum they want to eliminate is art and music and such; the horror of our mortality, some might suggest, can be faced without any such nonsense.

The mimesis in Cynthia Scott's 1990 film, The Company of Strangers, says McGregor, "is not about inwardness (as it would be in the American version) but about between-ness.... One might, in fact, say that what Scott has created here is a tangible facsimile of the classical Green speech category known as the middle voice..., in which the action envelopes the agent and the agent remains immersed in the action." McGregor thinks Canadians "share with the Greeks a vision of the individual as, at least potentially, a pawn and sometimes casualty of a possibly inimical, at least impervious Fate.... The middle voice spoke not only for but also to the Greek sense of self. The same could be said about Strangers." McGregor suggests the Greek tragedies and the Canadian images alike "affirm the value of the social over the personal" and "reproduce the reconciliation of human and inhuman."

The modern, generic, white-bread American version might be about "inwardness," but I doubt that was the case when the middle west was being settled. Those pioneers had a confidence, yes, directed outward against the elements they struggled with continuously. I won't deny the individualism of those settlers, their self-reliance that bordered almost on psychotic, their immense stoicism. But they were not looking inward.

I think of the Hargrave farm journals I've read, from the early twentieth century, Ripon, Wisconsin. One day's entry was "Pat died." Pat was the work horse that had been mentioned often in the journals with obvious but unstated affection. The entry the next day was: "Skinned Pat." You don't go burying a hide like that, even if the horse was your friend. How this differs from "the action envelopes the agent and the agent remains immersed in the action" I don't know. In life's Great Grind, the middle western pioneer was, I think, as much of a pawn of Fate as any Canadian ever was.

It is not only Greek tragedy and Canadian images that "affirm the value of the social over the personal," it is also the middle western pioneer reality. I'll stand by my notion that - despite the rugged individualism of middle western settlers - the wilderness here was tamed by communities, not by individuals acting alone.

Perhaps the question is: are you going to relish the new and the strange and the wild, or are you going to barricade yourself from it. The middle western pioneers embraced the world they settled, they embraced it with an affectionate fatalism.

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

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

"Whoa - hold the phone - come to a screechin' halt," writes Ivan. "We got some thank-you-in' to be a do-in'. That tremendously talented but taciturn trio, Lyle Morgan, Tim Albert, and Jack Yenne have been working their buns bone-ward in getting the train that will be on display at Wagner Park in Smith Center ready for the dedication day. They have worked long and late after they have completed their day job to have the train ready. The trio needs no introduction. Lyle Morgan is the guy everybody asks when they really want to know something when the early morning group assembles at Paul's Cafe. Tim Albert has taken shade tree mechanic friendliness into 21st century high tech ability. Jack Yenne quietly, without flamboyance, can take you into the inner workings of John Deere products. Smith Center is thrice blessed to have this trio of local products who operate at the near genius level."

"Ludene the dancing machine and waitress at Paul's Cafe has a new hair-do," Ivan reports. "She said, and I quote, 'it stood up to an 85-mile-an-hour motorcycle ride.' I asked her if she shellacked it. She said, no just hair-spray. That must have been industrial strength hair spray."

"As of last Sunday night 1100 people had attended the movie The Passion of Christ," Ivan says. "Ticket-taker Mike Hughes reported that one family said it had been 35 years since they had been to a movie."

"It's funny how some things stick in your mind," Ivan writes. "Bette Lambert, who will be moving into the Mildred Gibson house in the near future, when she was a junior in high school gave a book report on Gone With the Wind. I remember that the book report was so interesting and she had done such a good job that I just had to read the book. I had one advantage over Bette. She read the entire Gone With the Wind by kerosene lamp in her upstairs bedroom. We had electricity at our house - one bulb that hung from the middle of the room."

"Ol Linton Lull showed up at the As the Bladder Fills Club on Friday morning," Ivan says. "Linton looked good after a winter spent in the Valley of the Sun. There was a lot of things happened in Smith Center while Linton was gone. So many things that it took us a better part of ten minutes to bring Linton up to speed on all that he had missed, all that had happened in Smith Center while he was enjoying the winter."

"We have had about three RV people here this spring getting some work done on their RVs," Ivan indicates. "I have noticed this about RV people - they are pleasant people to visit with. In all cases either the husband or the wife or in most cases both are enjoyable to drink coffee with. Now you don't get that kind of average among the permanent residents."

"There was a guy here from the Chicago Tribune one day a week or so ago," Ivan writes. "He asked me who I thought the people would vote for in the upcoming election. I told him that we don't vote for somebody here - we vote against people. All the voting ever done in Smith Center is a vote against somebody that you don't like. Don't make any difference about his/her qualifications - If you don't like him/her, you vote against him/her. Smith County is predominantly Republican. Back in 1932 Roosevelt carried every place but Maine, Vermont, and Smith County, Kansas."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURAL
MAY 4, 1998

I drove to Iowa over the weekend via backroads, passing through small farming communities in both Wisconsin and Iowa. They called out to me, they said "Tell my stories...." There would be a lot of stories to tell, I'm sure; they would be stories of family, of hardship, of endurance.

Looking at Iowa, I get the sense the land is reclaiming itself. A lot of farm houses abandoned already, or near abandonment. A lot of fences have been torn down. A ragged roll to the land as if it is healing itself, as if it is coiling to expel these European invaders, these white men. Well - actually - I'm sure it's too late for that.

Dew sparkles in the morning light. A pair of sparrows mate in the street. A bright sun. The village enjoys its quiet morning.

White siding is going up on that house on Highway 44 downtown. In places, the original clapboard has been revealed and shows itself still. It will soon disappear.

The hawk is in its tree; all is right with the world.

Farmers have been busy over the weekend. More fields have been tilled. Some fields have been planted. Good black dirt.

Yellow-headed dandelions in the ditches, in a couple of fields. They are shouting orders. You put them under a girl's chin - if the skin of her throat reflects the yellow, she will marry a farmer.

Oh, if life were so simple. If we could be sure they'd stay married.

*

MAY 5, 1998
Man is a territorial animal. Is that because he is greedy, or is it for legitimate reasons of survival. We in the United States have taken line and section and town to a high art. Surveying is a quintessential human skill, to mark what's mine from what's yours.

What's yours this morning is a wet, grey day, wet streets. I would have sunshine.

Yesterday I failed to note that the tulip had opened. I had not noticed it. Even when you say you shall watch the world around you, you don't. Tom, you sometimes go off half ready, lacking the mindfulness you'd require of others. Pay attention or shut up.

Stillness. Perhaps that is what I love about village life. The quiet pond. Real birds. An empty street. Lazy days. We live, we love, we die. Life goes on - no one gets very excited. Peace is found in accepting the cycle of things. Stress comes when we try to hi-jack or short-circuit things out of the normal order of life. The happy man is the patient man.

It is something of a dark day in the country. The hawk is in its tree. The small orchard at the farmstead just north of Carter Road is in blossom. An explosion of white. White on the trees like snow on pines in a Christmas card.

The large, wet area along Highway E where we'd seen the gulls is now nearly devoid of water, despite last night's rain. It is not yet ready to farm, but soon. Soon.

HOME FROM MONTANA

She did it! Daughter Jessica presented her dissertation results this past Friday afternoon, to a packed classroom at the University of Montana, Missoula. One disinterested observer estimated a crowd of 50-60 people at the presentation. Among them, of course, were the proud parents, Tom and Mary Montag. Jessica's presentation was artfully done - "flawless," I would say but you wouldn't believe me, I'm her father. Afterwards Jessica went into private session with her committee for two hours and emerged as "Dr. Jessica." We celebrated the news for a few hours then, at MacKenzie River Pizza Co. in downtown Missoula, with several pitchers of beer, bread sticks, and platters of nachos for the twenty-some people who stopped by to congratulate the new doctor. Then mom and dad took daughter and son-in-law for a late lovely supper at Sushi Hana on North Reserve Street in Missoula. Jessica fell to sleep almost immediately upon arriving home. It had been an exhausting day for her.

Last December Jessica and her husband Tait bought a house on a couple acres in Stephensville, about half an hour south of Missoula in the Bitteroot Valley; during our visit, we got to stay at the new house for the first time, and to enjoy its amenities, which included a terrific Sunday brunch with several of Jess and Tait's friends the morning after we arrived. Can you say Caramel French Toast?

There will be fires in western Montana this summer, that much is obvious. While the irrigation ditches run heavy with water right now, the snow pack in the mountains is a lot less than is typical. So the drought continues. We will soon be reading of more scorched acres in Montana, unfortunately.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
APRIL 18, 2004, cont'd

All day I have been driving from Hampton, Iowa, where I'd spent the night with my parents, towards Emmetsburg, where I will spend a week. I have just finished a side trip through Havelock, Iowa, which I hadn't seen in some forty years, and now I resume the drive north, working my way towards Emmetsburg.

I drive the mile back towards Highway 4 from Havelock and see that the fields along the way have come right out to the power poles in the ditches. Is that what it has come to: we have to farm every inch of it?

Now as I head north again towards Mallard, I see that the wind has shifted slightly and is coming somewhat from the southwest rather than directly from the south. Debris angles across the highway in front of me.

Mallard. Mallard holds on the best it can. The wind would blow it away, except these are tenacious and hardy people, good people, the stuff of the earth, the salt. The grain elevator remains. The library. Community center. Tavern. Tavern. Funeral home. Oil company. Schools. Churches. St. Mary's Church, where I took First Communion. The emptiness of the parking lot where once a school had stood. All the wind blows your memories away.

As I leave town, there's a friendly wave from a fellow out working in his yard. The sign as you come into town says "We're friendly ducks," and he proves they are.

Just out of the northwest corner of town, I peer farther to the northwest and see the sentinel pines at St. Mary's Cemetery.

You'd think a cemetery would be a peaceful place, all those souls laid to rest, but No, the wind wants to lift the graves right out of the dirt, that's how hard it's blowing. The grave stones have to hunker down and hold on with their fingernails.

When I get out of the car, the wind is coming high and hard. I stand at my brother's grave, and at the stone marking where my parents will be buried. I am so sad. I want to lie down here and die, let the wind blow my stink away. So much has been lost.

Someone has put silk tulips, yellow and white ones, on Bryan Wilson's grave, and on Joe Wilson's. Joe was Bryan's dad. Bryan was a best friend from childhood, killed in the Vietnam War. I am sad and can't even muster a curse at the goddampoliticians who think they know how the world should be and they don't know squat. This wind has more substance than anything a politician could say.

I do not know yet that when I return home there will be an e-mail waiting for me, with a photograph of The Wall. My brother Henry and his wife Sue had gone to Washington, D.C. The photograph shows the portion of The Wall that says: "Bryan L. Wilson." I do not know yet that the sight of it will be like a kick in the solar plexus, that I will go to my knees, that I won't be able to catch my breath.

*

I stopped at Curlew to see Uncle Larry and Aunt Pat. Larry is my mom's youngest brother. He was our hired man for a while when I was growing up. In the 1950s, my dad helped him to get a start farming on the other half of the section we farmed half of. Of all my mother's family I probably know Larry the best.

I've always liked my Aunt Pat, too, and my cousin Robin who had been a nurse but now is teaching high school English in Lake Mills, Iowa. She'd had Sunday dinner with her parents and was still there when I arrived. She and Pat had been looking at an old plat map of Curlew, trying to remember where people lived and who owned what.

Pat said she always wanted to get some of the old women from Curlew together for a coffee, so she could sit and listen to them talk about the history of the community. But now it's too late for that - one of the women has gone into a nursing home, another has moved away to be closer to her sons, and so on. The beat goes on. The big wheel keeps turning. What's gone is gone.

I spent nearly three hours sitting with coffee, visiting. The television was on in the other room, telling about severe weather across the middle west, severe weather that was headed this way, high winds, thunderstorms, tornadoes.

Now I am parked in the driveway of the old home place a mile south and a quarter mile west of Curlew. When I said before that the wind was blowing hard, I didn't know how hard it could blow. It was just a gentle zephyr then compared to this 60 m.p.h. straight wind coming at us mostly out of the south, slightly southwest. The wind is blowing that hard; they'll say so later on TV. It whips the windbreak of trees on the old place, all that remains of the farmstead, about one-hundred-twenty-five trees in the shape of an L. The farm buildings are gone; the house is gone; the old cottonwoods we used to play beneath, gone. Where the house had stood, where there used to be a bright green ghost of a house in the grass, that has been plowed up and planted. Where soybeans grew last year, that's where I grew up half a century ago. The hard wind is erasing the notion that I was ever here.

I sit in the car making notes and the car is rocking like a boat on wild open waters. The side of the car is to the wind; the car is getting sand-blasted. I'm watching Iowa's farmland blow away. It is an awful loneliness, to be here with so much gone already, with the wind coming so hard to blow the rest away.

As I'm headed north again on Highway 4 towards Emmetsburg, the dust blowing across the road is like a blizzard, but black, so thick you cannot see oncoming cars three hundred yards away. The wind sweeps a dust pile across the road like a cleaning woman with an angry broom. It's a terrible fierceness, this Iowa wind.

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (4)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29 and April 30, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.


McGregor says: "The truth is that nature and death have always been intimately intertwined in the Canadian imagination." Says: "... there is a shadow wilderness lurking behind the real wilderness which cannot be 'managed' by the simple rituals of human interaction...."

I think many of those who settled the middle west came here with the simple faith that a man with horse and plow could tame a wild land. The only thing to fear was despair; the only sin, surrender. Wilderness was bounty to be taken. Some of the families who settled Wisconsin and Iowa, I know, had come here after a generation in Quebec or Ontario. Certainly, if these folks brought any sense of "a shadow wilderness" with them, it soon disappeared from their thinking. They very quickly set to making the wilderness into farmland.

Middle westerners didn't mix nature and death in their imagination, so much as they entwined work and death, I believe. First, the work was often dangerous and a misstep could quickly be fatal; walk through any old cemetery, you'll see that. Second, the work went on and on and on; it ground a man down in the field, ground down the woman in her kitchen or at the wash tub. That ceaseless tromp, tromp of work continued into the 1940s and 1950s, when tractors and combines and other farm equipment became more common, when kitchen appliances and gadgets and washers and dryers entered the home.

Perhaps some sense that nature and death are entwined would be found among those who settled the American west, the land west of the 100th Meridian; yet I'm not even sure of that, for a man on horseback thought he could do just about whatever he had to.

Those who came here had enough faith and confidence to eradicate any "shadow wilderness." Farming was the simple human ritual that would manage their world.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
APRIL 30, 1998

As I walked last night, I noted how much progress farmers have been making in their fields. The tractors roared toward darkness, the land is tamed once again.

It is a foggy morning. The sun is a wet coin. The dome of grey reduces visibility to less than half a mile. The blades of grass are bent with the weight of the morning's moisture.

The hawk is in its tree, hungry I presume.

At the low spot where we saw the Bonaparte gulls, the water has receded further. Now every cornstalk is revealed.

For the first time this year, the old farmer is out to work his flower beds at Five Corners. He has been there in years past, spending a lot of time caring for his flowers. He walks there now, cigar clenched in his teeth, watering can in his hands.

On Watson Street in Ripon, a middle school student crosses in front of me. She dribbles a basketball and ambles towards school with her parts all askew. The way she has her baseball cap pulled down, you know she's serious about her basketball, you know she doesn't want any guff. Her timing, crossing the street, is good - I don't have to slow even the least bit for her. In my rearview mirror, I see her dribble her way onto the cross street, still she's serious, still her parts are askew, as if unsure of how everything is meant to fit together.

*

MAY 1, 1998
May Day - wet, dripping, grey. The month comes in much like the winter was, like a sponge with water, waiting for someone to squeeze. Warm water, I might add, for it is a warm morning. The grey sky belies the mildness of the day.

Out in the country the greyness rolls away in waves. The black soil is a strong contrast to the grey sky. Two large seagulls swim through the air. There is water back where water had been.

Seven cars at Five Corners - a traffic jam!

A crow pecks at the remains of the deer carcass in the ditch along Highway E between Union Street and Ripon. Perhaps the rain has softened the leathery toughness.

At several places along Watson Street in Ripon, tulips stand at attention. If they could, they'd march in their own May Day Parade. They are the day's only color.

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

THANKS FOR THE VAGABOND CONTRIBUTION....

My thanks goes out to the following for her recent contribution to the Vagabond Expedition:

#90 Anonymous

GONE TO MONTANA
HOME AND BLOGGING AGAIN
ABOUT MAY 10TH

We'll walk in the mountains. We'll see our daughter present her dissertation. We'll support her as she goes in to defend it. We'll celebrate afterwards and call her Doctor. We'll walk in the mountains, oh, I said that, didn't I? You can't say it too often....

In the meantime, I'll leave you with all the usual, plus an extra (and extra-hearty) helping from Ivan Burgess's ECHO ECHO. It's like a blog, folks, except it's on paper, and he says some amazing things in his own fractured way.

See you May 10th.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
APRIL 18, 2004, cont'd

I have spent Saturday night with my parents in Hampton, Iowa, and now I am headed west on Highway 3 towards Pocahontas and Highway 4 where I'll turn north for a week of Vagabonding in Emmetsburg.

I slow down as I approach Dakota City and Humboldt. A wild turkey flies across the road in front of me. I'm amazed: it looks like it's really flying.

I detour into Humboldt. The Chinese restaurant downtown is closed on Sundays. The library is closed. The churches seem to be packed full. What's a fellow like me to do? These are God-fearing folks and I'm just a fellow poking about. You can't go into a church and say "just looking" the way you do in a store.

I see that girls drive pick-ups out here in Iowa and they look like they know what they're doing. Take note of that, fellas.

West of Humboldt, atop a rise back from the road a little bit, one of those long-handled pumps, the kind that should have a tin cup hanging off it. It's an awful lonesome sight. I suppose the pump still has one end in the water as well as one rusting in the spring-time air. I suppose it would take some priming to get that pump to pump. Sometimes in life you have to give a lot to get anything.

A skunk dead on the road in front of a big empty farm-house. You can tell the house is empty because of its vacant stare, like that of a man with no friends and no prospects. That's what it comes to - everything crushed by something we don't understand in of a universe we can't believe.

In Gilmore City, grit pelts the windows of the car as if to say "Move along." This is another town I've mostly driven through. There is no longer much here to drive into town for. They hold onto what they can. I make a lap of what's left of Main Street - a tavern, a restaurant, the post office, the senior center, the library, Sabo's Body Shop. The churches, yes, the churches. The wind blows straight up Main Street, all the way out of town as far as wind goes.

It's as if the wind has got in under the rug of the world today. You've got to keep your head down. Anything you want too much will blow away.

These are God-fearing people. These are patriotic people with their flags blown straight out to the north today.

Pocahontas is thirty feet tall, she's wooden, she's standing along the highway at the east edge of where? Pocahontas, Iowa, another community holding on at the intersection of Highways 3 and 4. This isn't Palo Alto County yet, but we're getting close. The wind blows all the way through town, up Main Street, flat into the huge stone courthouse that brings the street to a T. You can hear the roar of the wind in the trees from three blocks away. The car sitting sideways to the blow of things shakes and shudders. Yeah, Pocahontas holds on. It is not as prosperous as you might like, but it's here. That's saying something in the rural middle west these days, where hard times start earlier, run deeper, and last longer than they do in the Republican imagination. These are real people out here struggling to survive, not some numbers on a balance sheet. I suppose you can't afford to see the hard times when your intention is to line your pockets with other people's money. George W. Bush tried to tell people in Des Moines, Iowa, that his tax cuts have helped them. It's a little disingenuous to say "my tax cuts have help" when the problem that many people face is finding an income to start with. I like "Outsourcing is good for America" almost as much as I like "We have to destroy the village to save it" (and isn't that coming back into currency: we have to kill the Iraqis to free them). Send more jobs overseas and watch the wind blow away some more of these communities. Declare a war, and when there is no one to respond to the call, they'll have to outsource the military. Oh, I forgot, they're doing that already. Eventually big corporations will have to destroy each other because they will have already destroyed us.

There's a Pizza Ranch in Pocahontas with a lunch buffet. I eat, drink soda, read my paper. Then I sit in the car on Main Street making notes. Tulips in front of Princess City Floral dance a crazy one in this wind. The sun heats the furnace of the day. I have to be moving along.

These are honest, staight-forward people here. A hand-written sign in the door of an empty place on Main Street says "Closed. Out of Business. Thank You."

I hope the window of the car cracked open and I am covered with dust and grit. How the wind flies. It's time for me to move on, I mean it this time. It's 1:30 p.m. Emmetsburg is twenty-six miles straight north, but I think I'll mosey through Mallard and Curlew on the way. Mallard is where I went to church and grade school. Curlew is where we lived, a mile south, a quarter mile west. The cemetery lies between them, St. Mary's Cemetery, where my brother Randy is buried.

Six miles north of Pocahontas impulsively I turn west off Highway 4 to drive through Havelock. It has been forty years, I suppose, since I was last in Havelock. The interval has not been kind to this community, either. Most of Main Street is empty buildings. There's Sandy's Bar, and the Havelock AmVets Hacker Post No. 39, and what? An elevator with a collection of rail cars on the siding near it. The Havelock Public Library. A feed store. Grit, and the wind to pick it up. Pretty soon even the grit will be gone. There will be only the wind.

Dammit, Tom, don't sit here bawling for a past we can never have.

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (3)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, and continued on April 29, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.

McGregor lists "the less tangible means by which the pioneer creates a bastion against chaos - songs, dances, stories, games, communal food preparation." And McGregor speaks of "using the rituals of everyday life as a mediating device, to create community." A footnote adds that in Canada, community is "an essential concomitant of survival - both physical and psychological." Further, "the community does not (as so many American thinkers seem to believe) necessarily oppress individuals but rather that individuals come into being in and through the community."

While the frontier was pushing through the middle west, farmers and tradesmen may well have seen themselves as rugged individualists; even to this day, I think, middle western farmers like to think of themselves as their own bosses, answering to no one, responsible for themselves. Yet the reality, I believe, is that the middle west was built not by individuals but by communities. I think cooperation trumped heroism in this regard. Admittedly, the characteristics of an individual can season a community with that person's qualities.

It may be that even today in the middle west "individual" is a masculine noun, embodying the traits of some past male ideal. "Community," then, would be a feminine noun for us. Certainly, as the frontier pushed through here, women gave themselves quietly to the business of community-building, and community is what saved many of them from loneliness. Some of the women who didn't find community here died directly of loneliness: the suicide rate among pioneer women here was awfully remarkable. When you leave a family behind in the east or the old country and have no one to talk to for months on end but your tight-lipped husband and the wind, you may go mad. I know less of suicides among male pioneers; in any case, given their occupations, men could more easily disguise their deaths as accidents.

Because we as Americans never thought the wilderness encircled us but instead it rolled westward away from us as settlement pushed westward, we have less need (than the Canadians of McGregor's essay) for community to create a fortress. For the middle westerners, community didn't "save" us from the wilderness but from ourselves and helped to make life bearable. It was a haven not from the wilderness but from the harsh realities of the daily grind.

As McGregor's footnote suggests, there was an element of "community oppresses the individual" in our thinking. In this regard, one might look at critiques of our communities by such as Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser if he wishes.

My own position is that you can blame "community" for anything you want. You are gangly and awkward and something of a misfit, as Lewis was? Blame it on the community that you didn't fit in. I was gangly and awkward and something of a misfit, too, yet I've never thought the responsibility for that belonged to anyone but myself and my particular set of genes.

In any case, I think, how you see community, how you choose to see community, determines what it is for you, and what kinds of effects it will have on you.

If community only oppresses, in the middle west, why were the pioneer rituals of community - church meetings, summer picnics by the river - anticipated with such relish and attended with such glee?

I grew up beside a small community in rural Iowa. I don't think the community oppressed me. I think life oppressed all of us. Even in the 1950s, it was sometimes a harsh life. As a farm boy, I was expected to work hard. We all were. No one had it easy. If I was oppressed, it was by the crush of everything we had to do to survive on a half-section grain and livestock operation. If I was oppressed, so was everyone else.

If we could ask at our cemeteries about it, I'm fairly certain the consensus among the ghosts would be: moments of community were more often moments of solace than of oppression. Community, for many, was family without the blood-ties.

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

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

"Whenever someone mentions that I have a bald spot," Ivan says, "I always take solace in the fact that God is good, God is fair, to some he gave brains, to some he gave hair."

"Dwayne McGinnis," says Ivan, "was holding his head in his hands and moanin' at Paul's Cafe last Sunday afternoon. Dwayne was getting ready for the opening day of mowing season. He grumbled and growled and snorted about the fact that it took nine and a half dollars to fill his riding mower gas tank. He is danged lucky that the danged thing don't run on Gatorade. Then it would have taken close to forty dollars to fill the tank."

He adds that "with the price of gasoline what it is and everythin', if you see a shaggy lawn this summer, give the owner the benefit of the doubt. He might be, in his own little way, making us less dependent on foreign oil."

"Judy Hall and Mike Hughes are going to be guests at a noon luncheon at the Senior Citizens Center in Esbon," Ivan writes. "Hall and Hughes are going to talk about the advantage of Western Plains living [for the the elderly] and the actitivies at Western Plains. Hall and Hughes - sounds like an old vaudeville team. Maybe they should do some songs, skits, and snappy patter and some of the old soft shoe."

"Dennis Hansen has showed up at the Barnes Aerobic group, camera in hand, a couple of mornings," Ivan says. "Hansen is helping with a brochure that is being put together to promote Smith Center. One of the goals is trying to show retired people the advantages of living in Smith Center."

"John Boden's mom joined us at the As the Bladder Fills Club last Monday morning," Ivan says. "Mom is from Idalia, Colorado. Idalia has a population of 88. But it is only 30 miles from Wray, 30 miles from Burlington, and 30 miles from St. Francis, Kansas. So, you see, all 88 people are right in the middle of a lot of activity."

"I was gainfully employed last Wednesday. But I would guess that will be my last day of gainful employment. When you hire me you are hiring a fat, one-eyed old man who can't see, can't hear, and can't write so as it can be read. And this fat, one-eyed old man is also fighting a losing battle against senility."

"Judy Hall's maiden name was Rellinger," Ivan writes, "but it is spelled Rilinger."

"Is it true that Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, is the only city in the United States with an apostrophe in its name?" Ivan asks. The answer is No. L'Anse, Michigan, has an apostrophe in its name. L'Anse is also my Vagabond community for Michigan.

"I drove out by where Frieling had his consignment auction last Friday afternoon," Ivan says. "A lot of the stuff had already been removed. What was left looked like old maid school teachers that had been stood up and were still waiting for someone to pick them up."

"The annual firing of the buffalo grass in Gene Conaway's lawn is a done deal," Ivan says. "Every year Gene burns his buffalo grass lawn and every year people will go tsk tsk tsk - he will just ruin the grass. But he has been doing it for years and every year his buffalo is plush, lush, and weed-free. Gene must know just when, just how, and just why to do it."

"Every time I drive anywhere or ride anywhere, when we stop and I get out of the car I'm kinda, I don't know just how to describe it - not really dizzy, just kinda 'lurchy.' I kinda lurch from here to there like a fellow that has had too many. Don't know what it is unless it is old age. It's a funny feeling that don't make me laugh."

"Here's something," Ivan says, "that I got right straight from the horse's mouth. On April 29th Smith Center will see the end of an era. For it is on that date, April 29, that the Weltmer Livestock Auction will hold their last sale. I mean their last sale forever, as far as Dick Weltmer is concerned. Dick said that the Sale Barn Cafe would remain open. Smith Center without a livestock auction? Just don't seem possible. The Chance brothers, Skin and Red, built the sale barn back in the middle '30s."

"The way my knees, ankles, hips, and shoulders hurt," Ivan says, "I'm guessing the frost-free date to be somewhere around May 12th."

"Stay ahead of the posse," Ivan closes, as he always does.

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

THANKS FOR THE VAGABOND CONTRIBUTION....

My thanks goes out to the following for his recent contribution to the Vagabond Expedition:

#89 Phil Hey, Iowa

POETRY READING IN GREEN BAY TONIGHT

It's nearly two hours from here and there's no pay, so why am I doing a poetry reading in Green Bay? Well, there are some things we do simply because we want our names on the roster. My poetry reading tonight is at the Neville Museum, which has been sponsoring a series of monthly poetry readings for some time, with an "open mic" reading for the first twenty-five minutes, followed by a "featured poet" who reads for thirty to forty minutes. I am the featured guest. I like that.

The museum's gift shop will make my books available for sale. That's a plus. It is still April, still the cruelest month, still National Poetry Month, that's another reason.

And I really like museums, both those that are professionally curated such as the Neville and those that are homier and more hand-made such as the Fairwater Museum. The objects to be found in museums have been smoothed and shined with the oil of human endeavor, and such objects speak powerfully, to me at least. In the museum at Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada, some years ago, I touched a railing that led to the upstairs loft in an old house; the railing had been worn smooth by many hands. A charge like electricity nearly put me on my knees when I touched that wood: I was touching all those who had ever touched it. "Even in an empty house," I wrote, "you may be surprised at what you startle."

I like museums, yes, and I like reading my work. This time, I shall be doing something a little different by including some newer pieces I haven't read much in public. I'll read "Half the Afternoon in Fairwater," wherein "the cottonwoods are having public sex again." I'll read "Chicago, Be Gone," wherein I cast the city out of the middle west. "Chicago, you sow," I say. I've had it with the traffic there. I'll read my poem that is posted on the Poets Against the War site, "Of Weather and War and Love;" I wrote it on a Thursday and Friday before we went to war against Iraq, suggesting that we need more disasters to keep us from war, and on Saturday the space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas. That didn't keep us from war. I wrote that:

... bad things keep happening to good
People and politicians go right on
Making laws like saying so makes it so.
Someone somewhere will do something and some
Republican president will have to
Start a war....

I have never been very political, but these days I am angry. I am angry that they lie. I am angry that they steal from us. I am angry that they get away with it. I am angry that 51% of the American people are blind to it.

Did you hear the one about the Secret Service questioning a Washington state high school student about drawings he'd made in a portfolio his art teacher made him keep? I am angry that they have lost their perspective.

Oh, yes, sorry... I'm talking about a poetry reading here. I will wrap up my portion of the reading as I often do, with some poems from The Big Book of Ben Zen. Ben says:

You cannot see
What you've come to see.

What you've come to see
Changes with your coming.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
APRIL 18, 2004

I saw my brother Flip and his wife Vickie at supper last night with my parents. I saw my sister Colleen and her husband Dean at breakfast with my parents this morning. My mother had a stroke a month ago and rather than taking breakfast at Seven Stars Restaurant as I'd planned, we ate at home. My mother says she's "not good enough to eat in public yet."

The night was a dark storm. Clouds blew in, and they're dripping a little rain. The wind is a freight train in the trees. I'm packed and ready to head to Emmetsburg. It's about 10:15 a.m.

The trees in Hampton are much closer to spring than those I left behind. Some leaves have already started to open here; that's the difference a few degrees of latitude make in the middle west, I guess.

The wind is blowing hard from the south. It's a grey hang-down day. I'm headed west out of Hampton on Highway 3.

My mother has had a stroke. She says she doesn't know what the future holds. My parents may move to Minnesota, to live closer to three of my sisters, in a place with everything on one level. My dad worries about not having an Iowa address. We are all stay-put people. None of us likes to move after we've set ourselves down. My mother used to get "home-sick for the chickens" and I'm kinda that way myself. I like to go away, but even better I like to come home. I can't help it.

When I want to go deep inside myself, I align myself with the road and drive straight into it. Sometimes I find what I'm looking for; sometimes I take what I get. It is always better to have no expectations, to break through to whatever is here for me. I find that the more I have expectations, the more I miss.

Today I am just bumming. I told Sally Jo I wouldn't show up at her door until 7:00 p.m. I have much of a day to drive and dream and meander the hundred-some miles from Hampton to Emmetsburg, to see Mallard and Curlew and my brother's grave between them, the old farmstead. I can visit my Uncle Larry and Aunt Pat this afternoon if I choose to. The only thing pushing me is the wind.

This is Iowa, where they can build a pole building, put three thousand hogs in it, and call it a farm; where they can build a pole building, put a steeple on it, and call it a church.

Here at the intersection of Highways 3 and 69, this is where my niece's boyfriend was killed some years ago in a car accident, driving her car. He was hit by a drunk driver, the car exploded in flames, he died. So did the drunk driver. You feel the shadow of it as you pass.

The Security Bank in Clarion says it's 10:41 a.m., 68 degrees. I stop for the three stoplights in town: Sunday morning, you wonder why you need to.

A high wind is dragging a blanket of dust across the flat openness of these fields. Pieces of corn rubble scuttle across the road like small furry animals. A handful of sand is tossed against my windshield. And the world smells like pigshit.

The stink of these days is different than when I was growing up. The aroma of 200 pigs in a farmyard versus 10,000 pigs in a factory operation. The smell of money versus the smell of greed.

Out in a field, a big John Deere is pulling a disk half as wide as Kansas, stirring up dust, turning up the smell of earth. Ah, refreshment. Half a mile down the road I see a smaller John Deere pulling a planter, putting hope in the ground.

Sometimes I feel like such a cranky old man, talking about the way things used to be.

Now I pull off into Goldfield, a town I've always driven through, never into. I find Main Street and sit to make some notes. Not that there's much here to make note of. As with many small communities, time has not been kind here. The churches have cars parked in all directions around them. There is a post office, the fire station, the phone company, Goldfield Family Hair, a bank. A log cabin stands near the downtown, built by the Boy Scouts in 1926, restored by the community in 1976. What we have is what we have and we'll honor it. You might think I'm "making fun" of this characteristic of making do. It is part of our charm and part of our steadiness and it is to be admired. Like every virtue, its flip-side is a vice: too much "making do" can lead to immobility in some, disgruntlement in others. That is true here, and anywhere. There are a couple gas stations with convenience stores along Highway 3, and a couple restaurants. One of them calls itself a steakhouse, what in Wisconsin we'd call a "supper club." There's Campbell's High Pressure Washers, Becky's Consignments, Thrivent Financial. It could be worse.

West of Goldfield there's a red-tailed hawk atop a fence post, pointed into the wind like a weather vane. It's staying low for the time being, not so hungry that it has to try to fly in this wind.

It's just another day on the great flatness. The sun breaks through the cloud cover and heats the stink of pigs to another intensity. You can run but you can't hide from it; the stink permeates everything. How did the world get to this sorry state?

It is the stink of efficiency. Like school districts, I suppose. There are about 375 school districts in Iowa now. Those in charge of such matters want to see the number reduced to one hundred over the next twenty years. One school district per county, you might say. You can curse it, but still the wheel turns, grinding up everything in its path, as if greed has co-opted the great mandala.

To be continued....

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (2)

This continues our discussion about "the construction of place," started in our post of April 28, in response to the article "A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life" by Gaile McGregor. I have been highlighting points of interest from that article and considering them from the perspective of my Vagabond in the Middle project.

McGregor quotes Margaret Atwood as saying: "Canadians show a marked preference for the negative."

Middle westerners are not negative, I think; rather they exhibit a quiet acceptance of "this is the way things are." I do not mean this as resignation, for resignation is darker than I intend. Nor do I mean ours is joyful acceptance, for sometimes one simply bites his lip and endures. Rather, you put your head down and do what you must: this is what one does.

McGregor talks of "that oh-so-Canadian syndrome that Northrop Frye called the garrison mentality," also referred to as "the fort in the wilderness."

We had our forts in the wilderness, when the middle west was the wilderness. Rather than being "surrounded" by wilderness on all sides, as settlers moved into the middle west they felt that wilderness lay just to the west of them, that civilization was off to the east, and that the building up of each community pushed the frontier farther towards the sunset. There was the sense here, I think, that civilization was sweeping westward. And when the frontier did move west beyond our boundaries, the settled middle westerners became middlemen: innkeepers and bartenders and provisioners for those chosing to go farther on. Admittedly, some of those frontiersmen who pushed farther west were middle westerners who wanted more than what they found in Indiana and Illinois and Iowa. On the other hand, it is somewhat sobering to realize that Daniel Boone died a middle westerner (or damn near) in Defiance, Missouri, and may be buried with his wife Rebecca near Marthasville.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
APRIL 28, 1998

The year's very first daffodils, the two of them, are spent. They have closed for the last time; they have crumpled, we might say. Sring has come and gone for them. For the rest of us, a cool morning, a still pond, a hazy cloud cover.

Kweek kweek kweek goes the speedometer cable of the pick-up, singing like a bird.

The drivers of two on-coming vehicles in succession look sad or angry or ungodly serious - why even bother to get up, ladies, if things are so bad?

In the low spot where we saw the Bonaparte gulls, the water is receding remarkably now. Overnight, it seems, it has moved back from the edge twelve feet or more. At Five Corners there is still a small rivulet in the ditch, only a faint memory of its former self.

To the northwest, vaguely, there is a low cloud like smoke, dissipating.

*

APRIL 29, 1998
I saw egrets last night, and herons.

A very little black paint,
some water, white paper - clouds
painted on the morning sky.

Along the garage, one tulip thinks about opening.

The Grand River still runs higher than usual, though not so fiercely as earlier this spring.

There is a raccoon dead on the road. As a species, I think, raccoons have the reaction time of rocks. I like raccoons, they may be intelligent, but they have no common sense. Well, I suppose that's not entirely fair - squirrels aren't much smarter about roads. Crows have about the most road sense of any creature I've seen.

I have said that, in the rain, Ripon looks like an old town. In this gray light, this morning, she looks like an old lady.

Although it is somewhat cool this morning, the young nubbins walking to school have bared their legs. Obviously, then, it cannot snow again this season.

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THANKS FOR THE VAGABOND CONTRIBUTION....

My thanks goes out to the following for her recent contribution to the Vagabond Expedition:

#88 Sally Jordan, Iowa