The Middlewesterner

GONE ON VAGABOND VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
BACK TO BLOGGING HERE JUNE 20th OR JUNE 21st


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SATURDAY'S POEM
-----------------------
BY THE WISCONSIN RIVER
by Robin Chapman


Walk the old logging trails
through the spring woods,
six miles out to the spine of the ridgeline,
walk the tractor paths overlooking the river
six miles back to the bluff and road.

Walk the deer trails through the underbrush,
walk through the aspens just showing their green
and the carpets of leaf mold,
walk through the red of the poison ivy leaflets,
the whiplash of raspberry canes.

Walk through the prairie’s first showing
of pussytoes, puccoon, and bird’s foot violets,
walk through the tick-ridden grasses,
walk through the wild phlox
and unfurling ferns of maidenhair.

Walk through the cloudshapes
moving on turned fields,
walk through the sunsoaked uplands,
the lilacs of old foundations,
the white light of wild plum at wood-edge.

Walk the river margin, sandhills calling,
walk through the morning, walk through afternoon–
return with empty hands to the city.
Dream into the long green well of walking
that opens now whenever your eyes close.


Robin Chapman's poems have appeared recently - or will soon - in The Hudson Review, OnEarth, Rosebud, Calyx, Earth's Daughters, and Wisconsin Trails, among other journals. Her poetry book The Way In (Tebot Bach) may be obtained through Small Press Distributors or Amazon.com, and her chapbook The Only Everglades in the World through Parallel Press, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706. Her earlier book Learning to Talk and CD Banff Dreaming may be obtained from Fireweed Press, PO Box 482, Madison, WI 53701. She co-teaches a poetry workshop at The Clearing with Judith Strasser and is the Lake Wingra watershed poet for the Wisconsin River of Words Poet-Educator-Naturalist demonstration project. She is a co-founder of the Epidemic Peace Imagery exhibit of over 85 poets' and visual artists' works now traveling around the state.

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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.

INDEX OF SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o David Clewell, "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin" - February 21, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Tom Montag, "February 1, 2001" - February 14, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004


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VAGABOND VISIT TO
SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13-19, 2004

On Sunday morning, bright and early, I'll be leaving for a week's visit to Smith Center, Kansas. The book says it's a 12 hr. 47 min. drive; last time I did it in 12 hr. 15 min. non-stop except for gasoline and bathroom; I had to drive steady, and sometimes fast, to cut the time by half a hour - I remember the 90 m.p.h. semis hurling themshelves from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska; I just climbed in the hammock between them and they carried me.

I will post "Saturday's Poem" for you tomorrow; then I'll post another "Saturday's Poem" on June 19 from Smith Center before I leave for home.

I will return to blog here either Sunday, June 20, or Monday, June 21st. See you then!

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003, cont'd

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meredians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is the sixth part of my report of the trip. Here I have just crossed the Missouri River on Highway 47 in South Dakota, just south of Fort Thompson. It is still Day One of the drive.

Sign: "Big Bend Dam - Corps of Engineers - US Army."

Sign: "Good Soldier Recreation Area."

Then I am rising away from the Missouri, climbing out of its chute. The hills are like women lying about immodestly, they don't care who sees what they've got. You cannot pay attention to both the road and the landscape. You have to pull over and take a look.

Sorghum and range-land and an abandoned house leaning thirty-five degrees towards its doom. You cannot hold onto the future if you cannot stand up straight. "All fall down," I remember from a children's game. The house "all fall down."

An old one-room school house going to its ruin on its little plot of nothing. The wind whistles as sad a song as any in the cemeteries.

I've driven into wheat country again. Off down a lane next to a field of stubble sits a semi, half a mile from the road.

I pass a little cemetery just north of Reliance, South Dakota; I blink at it and keep going.

The population of Reliance is 169. The community is losing its struggle. It is choking on its uncertain future.

Okay, people, these are not pronouncements. They are quick impressions, observations made at 60 m.p.h. I might have missed something important today. I might continue to miss things that are important. The point is: I'm out here looking. I'm trying to gauge, to understand. I'm not flying over at 35,000 feet. I'm here to see it up close.

I pass beneath I-90. All the drivers look so serious, so stern, so earnest. What's so great about the Interstate?

I feel as if I am a long ways from home. I always feel this way when I'm in South Dakota. I don't know why. Perhaps it was my mother's homesickness on our vacation to the Black Hills when I was a child; she had to get home to her chickens. Perhaps it was my grandmother's family, which tried South Dakota, but then retreated to Iowa. Perhaps it is the way the light lays on things.

I come over a rise and the view makes me admit that this doesn't look like the middle west any more; south of Reliance, it could be the west.

My left shoulder is sore form the day's long drive. Am I that much out of shape? What kind of Vagabond gets a sore shoulder from an easy day's drive?

I cross the White River. What water remains is mostly white. The river is mostly dry. It runs all the way from southwestern South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska, it passes Chimney Butte and the Badlands National Park, it forms the northern boundary of Mellette and Tripp Counties and it is nearly exhausted where it reaches the Missouri.

A pick-up with a stock trailer behind it pulls out of a lane ahead of me. I have to slow down. That driver leads me up the hill away from the White River. Another pick-up pulls out of the land behind me.

At the top of the hill, the first pick-up turns left into a field. I don't see where he is going to unload. In the rearview mirror, I see the pick-up behind me turn left too.

Corn is on my left again, to the east; hay and range is on my right. The metaphor holds.

A semi loaded with cars comes towards me; it is headed north on this lonely road. I don't quite imagine its story. Is he hauling used cars? Is he taking them from the back country to the city?

Another abandoned farmhouse falling face down in its sadness. I know I cannot answer all the questions. Sometimes I think I cannot answer any of the questions. Sometimes I think I am jousting at windmills. I am always a poet.

Circle CE Ranch.

Talsma Ranch.

A pick-up with a stock trailer comes at me. A minute behind him, another pick-up with stock trailer. Stock trailer. Cornfield. As is the case with most things at the margins, this is not clearly one thing nor the other. To my left, a Harverstore silo alone at the top of a hill, for instance; to my right, rangy grassland.

The woman behind me in the black car pulled out of a ranch driveway awhile back; she is gaining ground on me. I wonder if she ever muses about things the way I do; or does she just drive to get from A to B? The shortest distance between two points is the poem you write of the journey.

An International tractor sits in a farmyard, a middle western icon with a disk attached behind it. A little farther to the south, another disk and a drag are parked along a fence.

Bar H backwards J.

An abandoned house - well, abandoned except for the cattle rubbing up against it.

The North Star Saloon stands at the intersection of Highways 47 and 44. I am not thirsty. I have miles to go before I sleep.

To be continued....

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from
BETWEEN ZEN & MIDWESTERN (1981)

Another
thick sky

this morning.
The light

diffuse &
wind-driven.

Grey as stone.

*

I cannot return
what I have not taken.


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SPEAKING ABOUT "WRITING'S RITUALS"
TO NORB BLEI'S CLASS AT THE CLEARING

I got home about 1:00 a.m. last night after a three and a half hour drive home from Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, at the far tip of Door County. Norb Blei had invited me to speak to the writing students in the sessions he is delivering at The Clearing. The Clearing is a marvelous place; if landscape can be magical, The Clearing is.

When I arrived, I had a glass of wine with a few folks gathered in Norb's room; we had supper in the common dining room - soup and a pita bread sandwich, home-made chips, bread pudding to die for, with cherry "raisins" baked on top.

Then more than thirty of us adjourned to "the Schoolhouse" where I talked longer than I was supposed to about "writing's rituals," those habits we need to get our work done. I suppose it sounded more like preaching than I wanted it to. I talked to them about:

o Understanding and harnessing one's obsessions. It is out of our obsessions, I think, that our best, most passionate writing will come.

o Having no expectations. As soon as we think we know what we'll find, invariably we exclude other wonderful and serendipitous possibilities.

o Writing without purpose as well as writing with purpose. Unless one has a wonderful editor, it has been my experience, he or she seldom finds the breakthrough astonishments when writing "on assignment."

o Likewise, keeping journals in addition to working on projects. When it comes to journals, I am a true believer. Much of my published worked was orignally drafted in journal form. I think we can be our freest, truest, most authentic selves in our journals; we can write in them without pressure. There's no blank-page-writer's-block when writing in a journal; the journal is already underway, sailing of its own momementum. I told them to keep daybooks and project journals, dream journals, nature journals, walk journals, "wake up in the middle of the night" journals - however many they need of whatever kinds they wish. I told them to take their notesbooks with them always and everywhere - often we don't get a second chance. Admittedly, when I spoke about the "Morning Drive Journal" I kept for nearly five years each day on my way to work, one of the women quoted me the relevant Wisconsin traffic statute; I said I thought I could honestly testify that "I didn't drive while I was writing." Heh, heh, heh.

o Blogging. Putting up a blog, I said, is a kind of promise you make to your readers that you will stay at your work; that everyday you will show some of it to the world. Making that promise really can energize one to get work done. Writing is a loneliness task; keeping a blog also offers the possibility of community. But I warned, too, that we must stay focused on what our real work is; you already know, don't you, that you could spend way too much time blogging and reading other people's blogs, at the expense of your real work. Well, you could....

o Putting oneself in the situation where work is necessarily squeezed out. "Do what the airlines do," I advised. "Overbook. Set yourself up so it's always end of the semester and you have to get your work done to graduate." I know that if I don't write while I'm out making Vagabond visits to my focus communities, I will come away empty, I will come back with nothing, and eventually - unless I record them at once - all the communities I visit, all the people I talk to, all the experiences I have will become a grey, undifferentiated mass. I know I have to come back with seventy-five or a hundred pages of journal entry. If I'm to have anything in the end, I know that my writing hand must be cramped and swollen from the task of keeping up with my notes.

There were some wonderful writers among the students, some of them already better writers than I am, some of them working at getting better than I am. They had wonderful questions; I'm still thinking about some of the questions, still revising some of the answers I gave. And, folks, they bought books! One woman alone wrote out a check for $58 worth of my books. A fellow joked afterwards that I should have writer's cramp what with all the books I had to sign. It hurts so good when you have to sign that many books.

It hurt so good all the way home, in the dark, in the rain. It hurts so good, even this morning, remembering the reading and the wonderful treatment. Thanks, folks, I want to tell them. You know how to treat a writer. Thanks, Norb.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003, cont'd

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meredians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is the fifth part of my report of the trip. Here I am in the middle of South Dakota, having just entered Faulk County from the north.

These are such great long stretches. Your mind drifts. You could be headed into outer space. You'd have just the same isolation to occupy your mind.

Then: Seneca. "Watch your children," the sign instructs us. The grain elevator in Seneca is adding a building. There's not much else happening in town.

I turn east on Highway 212 to get back to Highway 47 headed south. Following Highway 212 to the east, eventually I'd come to Redfield, some fifty-three miles distant.

Headed south on Highway 47, I find soybeans on my left, range-land on my right. I am running the edge of the middle west.

Another farmstead gone to ruin; and with it, every piece of farm equipment and every vehicle the family ever owned. "Back at it, Tom," the wind says.

Round bales have been stacked into tidy pyramids in the fields. A line of windbreak. A decrepit grove where another farmstead is gone, only the barn remains, painted red. The color of hope or of the setting sun?

The land could smirk at me if it wanted: it rolls so far, it is so large; I am so small.

A deer dead along the road. The great wheel turns.

I wonder what a semi would be doing out on this lonely road, then I recognize it as a stock truck. It is here to haul some cattle.

Hyde County. Rocky exposures in the hillsides again, a hump of gravel, the occasional rock pile. Fields with grazing Angus.

What looks like a tree nursery in the middle of nowhere runs alongside the road. Three young hen pheasants on the roadway make me brake suddenly and almost come to a full stop.

The edge defines the center, I think. Rugby is everywhere middle western. Redfield is. This strip I'm seeing along the western edge of the middle west, this is what we all are.

Looking out across this land, I wonder how anyone can believe the earth is round - it's flat; it is quite obviously flat. I've been traveling all day and have not yet rolled over the curve of it.

Another dead deer.

Another dry slough.

Another farmstead gone. The empty house stares at nothing and nothing stares back.

The great wheel turns.

Corn and soybeans and grass and corn.

And here's a cop coming down the road at me - State Patrol, I think. He winks a finger in greeting. The fellow behind him doesn't dare pass. It's 3:20 p.m.

I don't know why: the sky is spitting rain at me again.

There is a Minnesota license plate on a van I meet. This isn't Minnesota, it isn't Iowa. And yet in a strange way, it is every middle western state, every middle western state of mind.

Just north of Highmore, South Dakota, I meet a school bus, its brightness an exclamation. Old threshing machines along the fence-line, three of them, for contrast.

Highmore is surviving; maybe it is doing better than surviving. You can't make a U-turn on Highway 47 as you pass through town. That's something. And the businesses seem to be thriving. There is no empty space where a vowel might have fallen out of the sign for VCLEK SUPERMARKET.

A few miles to the south of Highmore: rows of dead windbreak, dry sloughs. The land has gotten rougher. A big line of power-generating wind-mills to harvest that South Dakota wind. None of the wind-mills is spinning, not one of the twenty-five. Okay, one of them is moving, barely.

Another empty farmhouse and the abandoned barn - they look blindly to the past, not to any possible future.

A tower of rainfall ahead of me again. The sun shines on it brightly; the sheen of it is almost like a rainbow. From this distance, the tower of rain is about the width of my thumb held up at arm's length; it is but a small smudge on the wide sweep of the southern horizon; I suppose I will end up driving under it nonetheless.

Sign: "Crow Creek Reservation High School -->."

A farmer is chopping corn into a silage wagon. The corn looks too brown and dry to be any good for silage, but perhaps he has no choice.

A mess of transmission lines now; they all want to point in different directions. We are not far from the Missouri River. I am entering Buffalo County.

The spreads are calling themselves "ranches" along here now. I haven't seen much besides hayfields and pasture and several horses for some miles.

Here, a power substation. I suppose I'm looking across the Missouri ahead of me, I just can't see the water; I see the ridge on the other side.

A lonesome farm house on a hilltop sheds its tarred siding. Wind blows through its windows. Where would you go from here?

Fort Thompson. The Lewis and Clark Trail. Welcome to the Lode Star Casino. Fort Thompson is almost exactly due west of Fairwater, Wisconsin.

I pass Lake Sharp and cross the Missouri. There is no sign that says "Missouri River," but what else would it be?


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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003, cont'd

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meredians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is the fourth part of my report of the trip.

Eureka, South Dakota, is holding its own. The newspaper in town is the Northwest Blade, its office just across the street from the Luncheonette Cafe. Post 186 is the American Legion. The Luncheonette has competition right next door - Jan's Cafe. The Eureka High School has a football season going, according to a sign in the cafe. The cars and pick-ups parked along Main Street are new, some of them. There's a big supermarket.

I'm making notes in my car and when I look up I see the windshield speckled with raindrops; I can see blue sky through the pattern they make.

I drive south out of town - here there's an implement dealer, there a hospital, a tire center, a park along the lake, a big "Eureka Information" building where Highway 47 turns south.

Blackbirds fly above a cornfield, a tube of them a quarter-mile long.

A bleak farmstead - the house and barn and outbuildings left unpainted and exposed to their disgrace. Trees are broken. Tall grass. Roughness.

Off to the southwest, a real cloudburst. It is not raining here, not any longer, but very distinctly it's raining there. The land here is so big that I can see the entire rainstorm and a big sweep of the horizon to the left of it, and to the right. I can see the wind rippling the downpour as if it were a curtain; I don't think I have ever seen something like this before. The sun brightens part of the rainfall, the other part is in shadow.

Now some rain slaps my windshield, but only for an instant. The day shall never come again.

Oh, now it's steady rain coming at me. The soybeans to my left are nearly ready for harvest. I haven't seen anyone out here for miles and miles. I am alone at the far edge of the middle west. The rain stops. And now the road is dry.

Ducks on a mucky pot-hole. Other pot-holes are dried out; one has cows asleep in it.

Here's another desolate farmstead - tower of an old wind-mill, rusting; a shed getting indistinct in its lines; a break of trees, broken.

Cattle fill a feedlot. You can smell them. I'd say it was a "large" feedlot, except I've been to West Point, Nebraska, and have a standard for comparison. On the other side of the road, a pasture with cattle in it.

Another power-line headed northwest to southeast.

Enough wind to push me sideways. I reach Bowdle, South Dakota, pop. 571, and take the county road south out of town to Tolstoy, so I don't have to go seven miles west on Highway 47, then the same seven miles back east a little later. I'll re-join 47 a little farther south.

In the two fields of corn that have been harvested, four rows have been left standing down the middle of each. For pheasants? For deer?

Sign before the driveway to a gravel pit: "Trucks Hauling."

Is it white cattle or large rocks on a distant hillside? They would be Charlois. I see Charlois in a nearer pasture, too.

The car could drive itself down this long, straight streak of asphalt headed south, and I could write a book. The road is straighter than the track of a rain drop blown by high wind. The country is as lonely as a fugitive. All the side-roads are gravel.

Another farmstead, headed for desolation: house and barn, outbuildings, a few trees, palpable sadness.

A hayfield with large round bales in it, and a hundred large boulders like giant tortoises, just dug out of the ground. They wait for a stone boat to haul them away. That will be heavy work for some farmer's son.

A stand of evergreen trees around a tidy farmstead. A gash of stones along a dry creek bed.

Tolstoy has already come undone. There is not much left. It still has the "Compassionate Hands Massage Center." New Age here at the far reach of the middle west? Can it be these farmers believe a massage will help defeat their troubles? Or is the massage for the farmer's wife - a softness of hands, instead of the callused touch of her husband; a lingering measure instead of slam bam thank you ma'am?

I jog east seven miles on Highway 20: a sign for "German Zion Congregational Cemetery." It's so far off down a lane that I can't see it. I don't stop.

Sign: "Entering Faulk County."

A slough has dried out; it is baked white. Now I can se rain to the north of me, wind blasting the sheets of it.

I turn south again on County Road 3, I'm heading for Seneca. Ducks on water and grass on range-land, then the stubble of wheat and more round bales again.

A barn falling down. A new modular home.

Soy beans. A slough, still wet on one side of the road, dried up on the other.

The few people coming towards me down these roads are invariably driving pick-ups. Invariably they wave at me.

The grassland is full of stones.

Yes, the people I meet along these roads wave in passing. Life hangs on out here. I suppose you say "Hello, I'm alive" whenever you can.

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from
THE BIG BOOK OF BEN ZEN (2004)

You want to
Pay attention,
Ben says.

Even the rocks
Talk.



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IN OUR GRIEF AT THE DEATH
OF FORMER PRESIDENT REAGAN
LET US NOT FORGET THAT:

--His policies mortgaged our future and the futures of our children and grandchildren. Some people called it Reaganomics; others called it Voodoo Economics: in either case, we are still suffering its effects.

--He presided over the decimation of American agriculture.

--Henchmen in his employ, on his watch, and in his name committed criminal acts without shame.

--He made the skies a whole lot less safe by firing all the air traffic controllers.

--And didn't he, in 1947, appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to name groups within Hollywood that he believed were "following the tactics we associate with the Communist Party?" Or have we forgotten that?

May the Great Communicator rest in peace. And may we learn from our mistakes. Amen.

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NO COMMENT

"US Not Bound by Torture Laws" - Why is this not a surprise? When will it end? I think there is no need to comment further, as it - unfortunately - speaks for itself.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003, cont'd

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meridians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is the third part of my report of the trip.

At the edge of a wheatfield, in a little dish in the landscape, a clump of beehives.

A roughness of land off to the southwest, and to the south where I am heading now. Some corn, some wheat, then range-land on the ridge.

Three cars have been parked at intersections, sitting empty. Is this North Dakota's way of car pooling? "Come out to the hard road and I'll pick you up and take you to town."

Now and again the sun breaks through the clouds. The sound of the wind picks up.

Sign: "Landfill." Off to my left a half mile back, an artificial mound.

Anhydrous ammonia tanks are lined up in a work yard like bombs waiting to be loaded.

Sign: "Burstad."

Sign: "Wishek Welcomes You."

Wishek is holding its own anyway. I turn south with Highway 3. There's a big junkyard just off my turn.

Nearly to South Dakota on Highway 3, a field of soybeans as bright as a coward's streak. A pile of stones looks like an altar. What are these careless cairns? I leave Highway 3 for an unnumbered asphalt road headed directly for the state line.

Then all of a sudden I am headed west towards the Hundredth Meridian. I think I should be headed south, and as if in agreement the road turns south about halfway between the Ninety-Ninth and the Hundredth Meridians. A red-tail hawk sits on a round bale in the ditch watching me pass, watching everything.

Serious rock piles - several of them to a field. What gift were these? I will have to study some geology.

South Dakota State Line. McPherson County. Speed Limit Strictly Enforced. 55 m.p.h. instead of 65 m.p.h.

I will follow Highway 47 down through South Dakota, nearly as far west from Redfield as I can get while staying in the middle west.

A pasture with horses. Corn. Soybeans. Wheat stubble.

I look at the speedometer; oops: "Honest, officer, I didn't mean to speed, I just have to tear off some of these miles."

Just north of Eureka, South Dakota, the corn looks as if it made ears. Perhaps these farmers will have a crop. Across the road, the soybeans are turning. A deer runs across the road in front of me, in broad daylight.

I stop for lunch in Eureka at the Luncheonette Cafe - "Luncheonette since 1926" says a sign inside. A "German meal" is served every Wednesday. The two women tending business wear T-shirts for Eureka's 14th Annual Schmeckfest - Sept. 21-22. "The Place To Be In 2003." I order knoepfla soup and a double-cheeseburger, cherry pie and soft-serve ice cream. A man and his son and daughter were eating when I came in. An old woman was having coffee and a newspaper.

My waitress speaks a kind of English, but an English badly bent by another language; she isn't as old as I am, I'd say not more than fifty years of age.

Three older women come in; they seem well-dressed for farm country. They take a booth, get themselves coffee and cookies. A fourth woman wants to join them. They are expecting someone else and five women would be too many for the booth, so they pick up and move to the big booth behind me. I hear them talking.

They are talking about a woman who was picked up by the police yesterday. She was blonde, 5'2", 120 pounds. A fellow had found her along the highway, confused. He'd taken her to the motel in town. She had no place to stay, the old man had paid for a room for her for one night. A ministerial association paid for a room for two nights more. Still the woman had no place to go, so the owner of the motel called the cops to come and get her.

One of the women in the booth behind me isn't sure the woman was confused, so much as she was lying, telling different versions of her story. She'd apparently had "about ten suitcases and plastic bags" when she was brought to the motel. One of the women behind me speculates the woman must have had a car at some point, with that much baggage.

Another of the women behind me wonders if the troubled woman might be the missing woman they've read about, described as blonde, 5'2", about 130 pounds.

"She had nice hair, she was very clean, she had nice clothes," one of the women said.

To be continued....

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

Ivan got political right off; he said: "We might as well have casino gambling in Smith Center. Gambling takes place all the time right out in public. Just last week, Saturday and Sunday to be exact, we had two days of betting right in Paul's Cafe. Now you can expect it Monday through Friday, but on Saturday and Sunday? That kind of carrying on would indicate to me we are ready for casino gambling. It was on Saturday that Kendall Nichol and J.C. Chance bet a dollar on the location of Nichol's 800 acres of land in south Smith County. That's what you call bettin' a cinch. It was Nichols' land and he ought to know where the boundary is. And then on Sunday morning the same two combatants bet a dollar on if, when, and whether Don Rumsfeld would resign. The local people are always ringing their hands and saying gambling would ruin the town because of all the poor people it would make. Now there was some rampant gambling right there and I doubt if either of those guys will miss a meal or a car payment."

He said: "You know, there has been a strange silence out of Arizona this spring. It used to be that Claude Gripp wouldn't have let day one go by without quoting Rush Limbaugh. But his silence along these lines has been deafening this spring. Maybe I should have just left well enough alone on this front. But diplomacy has never been one of my strong suits."

"Fred and Martha Coon were in town last Tuesday," Ivan reported. "They came to get some pampas grass from the Linton Lull residence to take back to their acreage near Grinnell, Iowa. They showed up at the As the Bladder Fills Club looking for volunteer labor to help dig the pampas grass and load it on a trailer. Out of eight or ten people sitting there they didn't receive one solid commitment to help. There wasn't even a good solid 'maybe.' The reaction by the group was one of fear for their physical or emotional well-being. The reason Fred and Martha drove all the way to Kansas to get pampas grass was because it was some of the original plantings of Ruth Lull. Martha said the plantings had more sentimental value than they did intrinsic value. Fred didn't comment either way."

"Oh," Ivan said, "the milled asphalt has been laid at the Faith Congo parking lot. Looks good and I believe it is going to be all right. But it does take away one more excuse for not going to church. Can't use the old 'afraid of getting stuck in the parking lot' as an excuse for not going to church."

"I asked Bobbi Miles if the old bank building had any mold," Ivan said. "She said it did. So I said I won't be able to help on the work day because I'm allergic to it. She said 'the mold?' I said 'No, the work.'"

"Don't know if you have noticed it or not," Ivan said, "but Dick Stroup has gained two pounds. All thirty two ounces of it hangs over his belt buckle."

"Woke up on Thursday, May 13th, and it was 34 degrees," Ivan said. "Now that's cold. Probably be a run on the ASCS office with city folks turning in their tomato crop disasters."

"You know, I talked like the church building program was some of my business," he said. "It is none of my business. So why am I even talking about it? I'll tell you why - because it is getting close to when I've got to have this paper written. And if you are in the newspaper business you occasionally frequently all the time have to write about something that is really none of your business. Except if when it has to do with boosting Smith Center. I'll not take a back seat to anyone when it comes to boosting Smith Center - even though I think we are terminal - you still gotta be a booster."

"I don't know where it is all gonna end," Ivan concluded. "All I can tell you is: Stay Ahead Of The Posse."


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003, cont'd

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meredians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is the second part of my report of the trip.

A big power transmission line crosses the landscape from northwest to southeast. Swallows bank and turn above the road in front of me. The sky has clouded up now. I drive in shadow, in light, in shadow. Another mud-flat where recently there had been a pot-hole.

Another transmission line, a bit smaller than the first: it runs from west to east. A machine shed coming apart one sheet of tin at a time. Another transmission line, larger, running form northwest to southeast. Why have there been three transmission lines in the past thirty miles? Are there power-generation stations just west of here on the Missouri River? Where is the power headed?

A pot-hole has gone entirely dry; a crust of mud is the only surface of it. A pasture of Holsteins. It is not a Wisconsin pasture. They are not exactly Wisconsin Holsteins. It is not Wisconsin light laying on them.

Not five miles farther on, now I see another transmission line in the distance. We are back in wheat country. Grain bins. Sunflowers, fields of corn again.

I get gasoline at Steel, North Dakota. I get some orange juice. The sky has clouded over almost entirely, the day has darkened.

Highway 3 follows I-94 east for a few miles. It is 149 miles to Fargo from here. I was in Fargo a week ago.

I get off the interstate at Dawson, North Dakota. "South-central Therapeutic Massage" does business in a very old building that used to be a gas station with an overhang of roof out over the pumps. When you say "Massage Parlor" here, you get a very different image from what you might find in the city.

A barn on the ground like a crippled cow.

A yellow ribbon on the post of a mailbox.

Lake Isabel has cottages all the way around it. Yet off to the right side of the road, mud-flats in the slough.

As if to prove the dividing line between middle west and west falls right exactly here, there is corn on the east side of the road, there is range-land on the west side. Could it be any clearer what line I am straddling?

Another mailbox, another yellow ribbon on the post for it.

There is a sign in evidence that they raise polled Herefords out here. What I see is a pasture of Black Angus, a hundred white egrets settled among them.

A stand of trees. An old shed. Some rubble. You know it used to be a farmstead. Land, tell me your story!

Range-land on both sides of the road now. Another transmission line running from northwest to southeast. I'm chewing up all this country, spitting out quick impressions. I try to record everything. I can and yet I can't capture so much as the odor on the wind. All the stoney hillsides. Or hills made of stones. Rock piles. A field of corn. More rock piles. More stoney hillsides. One cone-shaped hill is topped with a rock pile like a nipple, a metaphor of nurture. This land sustains us.

Out beyond a wheatfield, a cone of sand; another cone, of gravel. Each of them is twenty feet tall.

Again there are wheatfields rolling away to the west. I'm approaching Napoleon, North Dakota, now; the community appears to be holding its own in this wind, in this economy, in this culture.

Just south of Napoleon, several hundred sheep fill a barnyard; they have made wool for winter.

Dammit. I hate myself always doing this: I passed a sign for "Historical Marker" yet half a mile down the road I turn around and head back to it. The marker says: "Oley T. Thompson. Born in Norway 1851. Homesteaded and buried one mile west. Froze to death February 6, 1887. In Logan County he was the first white man married, father of the first white child born, and the first white man buried." Most of us don't have any such claim to fame, most of us won't have a marker to remember us.

A rise and fall to the land. North Dakota is ruffled, it has ridges. Off to one side of the road a couple threshing machines have been set out where we are meant to see them, and to remember where we've come from. And perhaps we're meant to think about where we're going.

To be continued....

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

LORINE'S LIBRARY: BOOKS & MARGINALIA
IN THE LIBRARY OF LORINE NIEDECKER
Presented by Tom Montag
at the Wisconsin Writers Conference
Baraboo, Wisconsin, June 4, 2004

I won't say that your library is your destiny. I will argue, however, that what we read shapes us to the degree that all of our experiences make us who we are. And when we have a dialog with the books we read, that tells even more about how we're being influenced. When we mark up our books and leave marginalia behind, we have a record of that dialog. You might say that our marginalia provides a little window into the soul. My look at her library offers a look in Lorine Niedecker's window.

At the Niedecker Centenary Celebration in Milwaukee in October of 2003, Amy Lutzke of the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson, WI, issued this challenge: She said someone should go through the books in Lorine Niedecker's personal library and check them for marginalia. The Dwight Foster Library has the bulk of Niedecker's library, a bequest from the Niedecker estate and a gift of Gail and Bonnie Roub. Gail Roub had been a close friend of Niedecker's. We know that some of Niedecker's books may also have been given to family at the time of her death.

Originally the books the Niedecker estate had given the library were put into circulation, but that misstep was soon rectified. Niedecker's books are now kept together under lock and key in the main area of the Dwight Foster Library, along with a display of some Niedecker memorabilia. This is one of the ways that Niedecker's home town continues to honor her. Bonnie Roub typed the list of the authors/titles that were in Niedecker's library into a database that is now available at the Dwight Foster Library web-site on a page title Lorine Niedecker's Personal Library ( http://www.fort.lib.wi.us/lorine/niedecker.htm ).

I'm the fool who took up Amy Lutzke's challenge to look at Niedecker's marginalia.

In December of 2003, I spent a week at the library examining Niedecker's books and recording the marginalia I found into the library's database. I returned several times between December 2003 and May 2004 for a day, or two, or three at a time. At this point I have been through all the books at least once.

As I say, I recorded my findings into the library's Niedecker database.

What did I find?

There are about 506 titles in Niedecker's library, books and issues of literary magazines which, it seems to me, is quite a few books for a woman who made her living scrubbing floors. There are sturdy hardcover books in the library, but there are also many very fragile paperbacks from the 1940s, '50s, and 60s.
294 of the titles, or 58% of them, are identifiable as "Literature."

Two textbooks from Niedecker's youth are particularly well-marked up: John William Cunliffe's Century Readings for a Course in English Literature (c 1910) and William D. Lewis's Practical English for High School (c 1916). These books and her marginalia in them give us a base-line image of her early literary education. They would be worthy of further study, I think.

From the evidence of her library, we might say that Niedecker was grounded in the classics. Twenty-seven books in her library are related to the Classical Greek and Roman world, including works by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, Marcus Aurelius, Caesar's War Commentaries, the complete works of Horace and Tacitus, Plutarch's Lives, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, Ovid's The Art of Love and Metamorphoses, and Virgil's Aeneid and Pastoral Poems.

There are 11 books by or about Shakespeare in the library, including a copy of his Complete Works.

Niedecker seemed especially fond of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She had 8 books by or about him. Her copy of Basic Writings of America's Sage is extensively marked up. She seems to have learned vocabulary in Emerson – for instance: "vitiate" is underlined, with "corrupt, weaken" written in beside it; "depriving" is written next to "privative;" and "contemporaneous" is next to "coeval."

As you might expect, Niedecker owned Thoreau's Walden and also A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

You may recall that the late poet Cid Corman grouped Niedecker with Sappho and Emily Dickinson as the three greatest women poets. Niedecker owned 2 books of Sappho's poems; she owned 6 books by or about Dickinson.

What of other ground-breaking poets had she read? Niedecker had copies of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Specimen Days. She had a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems and prose, and John Pick's Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poet and Priest – in it she underlined Hopkin's phrase "... undo the very buttons of my being." She also owned copies of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Drunken Boat and Mallarme's Selected Poems; we remember that there's a surrealist strain in her work.

There are 16 books in the library by Objectivist poets, including 8 by Louis Zukofsky and Celia Zukofsky's biography of Louis.

Niedecker owned 12 books by or about Ezra Pound, including The Active Anthology, The Cantos, and Noel Stock's The Life of Ezra Pound.

She had 9 books by William Carlos Williams.

Two novelists who apparently interested Niedecker were Henry James (she had 11 books by or about him) and D.H. Lawrence (6 books by or about him).

She owned 3 books by Henry Miller, but curiously not his most famous: On Writing, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, The Wisdom of the Heart.

There were 14 books related to Asian thought and poetry in her collection, including The Book of Tao, Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Arthur Waley's Madly Singing in the Mountains and a couple other collections of haiku, and Alan Watts' The Way of Zen.

Niedecker also owned John Cage's Silence and Louis Fischer's Gandhi (published in 1946).

Niedecker had 2 copies of the Bible in her collection, one a King James version, the other called Every Man's Bible. The King James is extensively marked up.

We know of Niedecker's interest in Thomas Jefferson. There are five books about Jefferson in her library, including his Autobiography.

She had the Journals of Lewis and Clark as edited by Bernard Devoto.

Edwin Honig knew Niedecker in the late 1930s and has made the statement that "It seemed pretty clear that most of Lorine's reading of poetry, science, political and music theory came directly from Zukofsky and Pound." Did it? Niedecker's library may help us to argue otherwise.

Niedecker owned 39 books related to science, including William Dampier's History of Science, three books by Loren Eisley (including The Immense Journey), Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne, Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee, Anne Dowden's The Secret Life of Flowers, and Glover Morill Allen's Birds and Their Attributes.

There are 11 books in the library about politics, more than half of them Marxist titles, which doesn't sound like Pound to me: Handbook of Marxism, a collection of writings by Marx and Engels, Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticisms, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, Those Who Built Stalingrad, and Anna Rochester's Rulers of America.

Niedecker owned 11 books about music, including Edwin C. Woolley's Handbook of Composition, Stravinsky's Poetics of Music, Elson's Pocket Music Dictionary, and biographies of Beethoven and Mozart.

There are 10 books about art in the library, including Wechsler's Pocket Book of the Old Masters, Winston Churchill's Painting as a Pastime, two books on Winslow Homer, a book about Picasso and one about Renoir.

Niedecker was not like the rest of us, putting books of philosophy on our shelves but never reading them. She read hers, and some of them she argued with. There are 49 books about philosophy in her library, including 3 books by Henri Bergson, Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, Pascal's Pensees, Rousseau's Confessions, 7 titles by Bertrand Russell, 9 titles by Santayana, and 2 books by Alfred North Whitehead

There are some curious books in Niedecker's library, at least I think they are curious: The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson, The Scottsboro Boy by Haywood Patterson, Kurt Krueger's I Was Hitler's Doctor, and Perry Wolff's A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy.

I think there are some "omissions" from Niedecker's library, too. I admit we could talk for a long time about books that aren't in her library, but these are ones I do find especially curious: no Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, no Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, no Ulysses by James Joyce, no books by the Objectivisit poet Carl Rakosi.

At the Centenary Celebration last October, it was obvious that feminists have embraced Niedecker. The feminist critics should take note, I think, that there seem to be no identifiably "feminist" texts in her library. In fact, I can recall only two passages she marked that might be possible evidence of a feminist outlook on her part.

Now – the marginalia itself. How did Niedecker mark her books?

Most often she would draw a line in the margin along a specific passage.

Sometimes she would underline words, sentences, or passages.

Sometimes, as I say, when she was underlining words, she was learning new vocabulary; the word's definition would be nearby.

Sometimes she would bracket a passage at the beginning and the end.

Sometimes she would write things in the margin, in response to the text, and occasionally she'd write in fresh thoughts of her own.

Niedecker marked a wide variety of books. The examples I present here are only a small sampling of the marginalia. The books I include are only some of those that were more extensively or more significantly marked. Among them were both the Holy Bible and the Handbook of Marxism; Jesus, a Myth by Georg Brandes; Robert Browning's Promegranates from an English Garden; Confucius' The Conduct of Life; Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; Robert M. LaFollette's Political Philosophy; Albert Schweitzer's Out of My Life and Thought; and Oscar Williams' A Pocket Book of Modern Verse.

She marked Francis Bacon's Essays and New Atlantis, including these passages:

"Revenge is a kind of wild justice."

"Life is ever a matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies.

"It is impossible to love and be wise."

In James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life, which is a discussion about realism, she noted the passage: "Facts must be kept in their proper place, outside of which they lose veracity."

Written out on a slip on paper tucked into John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? is a quote from Ciardi: "The act of producing a word involves breath and music, and various kinds of muscular activity tend to produce various kinds of feelings." On another slip of paper in the same book Niedecker notes a statement by I.A. Richards to the effect that "One talks about the subject of a poem when he does not know what to do with the poemness of the poem."

Niedecker marked with an exclamation point in the margin of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy: "But what if we have knowledge whose truth is certain to us even before experience - a priori?"

In Lao Tzu's The Way of Life she marked "Live within yourself; do not exhaust yourself in the world as it is."

In Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathurstra Niedecker couldn't let pass a paragraph that begins: "As yet woman is not capable of friendship: women are still cats...."

There's a poem in Robert Payne's The White Pony with the line "The delight of a mountain hermit" in one poem; Niedecker has put a note behind that, reading: "or a bachelor lady?"

Nor could she let pass an entry in Donald C. Peattie's An Almanac for Moderns about how "there are no truly wild spots hereabouts unless they may be the marshes."

In S. A. Robbins' See America Free, she marked passages referring to communities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montanta.

This passage in Frank G. Slaughter's Your Body and Your Mind caught Niedecker's attention: "We know, too, that even such simple psychosomatic conflicts as the oral desires, which lead to so much gastrointestinal disturbance, are fundamentally sexual in nature."

In Harold Stewart's A Net of Fireflies she marked this quote by Takuboku: "Poetry must not be so-called poetry. It must be accurate reports, and honest diaries relating happenings in the author's emotional life."

This sentence was marked in J.W.N. Sullivan's The Limitations of Science: "If nature did not possess a harmony that was beautiful to contemplate, said Poincare, science would not be worth pursuing, and life would not be worth living."

On a slip of paper between cover and first page of Thoreau's Walden Niedecker has written out this quote from Emerson: "He chose to be rich by making his wants few."

Several noteworthy lines Niedecker marked in Marguerite Wilkinson's New Voices (c 1921), including:

"Poetry is often thought to be a painless twilight sleep out of which beauty is accidentally born."

The word "concise" is underlined, with a question mark in the margin, near: "He believes that poetry differs from prose partly in being more concise."

"When he has been published a poet may have inferiors, equals and superiors, but he has no rivals."

Niedecker made very extensively markings two particular books, that seem especially telling. She marked a total of 66 pages in Upton Sinclair's Mammonart (1924), including:

She wrote "Not so much!" next to a sentence that ended: "... and that in technical skills the modern work is superior."

There is an exclamation point near to this sentence: "Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he writes?"

"Oh Help!" is written in margin and underlined twice next to this passage about Oscar Wilde: "He went back to London and wrote more plays, one of them, 'Salome,' assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting piece of lewdness in the English language."

Next to the sentence "If poets saw things as they are they would write no more poetry" Niedecker wrote: "Nonsense!!"

The other book with extensive significant markings worth attention is Havelock Ellis' The Dance of Life, some as follows:

"We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our own past selves."

"I have never seen the same world twice."

"Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing."

"Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination."

Style in writing "is also defined – and, sometimes I think, supremely well defined – as 'grace seasoned with salt.'"

"To exalt pleasure is to exalt pain; and we cannot understand the meaning of pain unless we understand the place of pleasure in the art of life."

"... [A]rt must not be consciously pursued for any primary useful end outside itself."

And the single most remarkable passage in all of Niedecker's marginalia, a notation that makes the hundred hours of work worth the effort, is this: Niedecker wrote in ink at the top outside corner of the p. 348 of The Dance of Life:

"3 reasons for seclusion: 1. [to] cultivate a detached manner; 2. to watch the world; 3. to instill a faith and a feeling of aloneness" with an arrow pointing to text reading "without which no art is possible."

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

"Hawk at Evening"
from MIDDLE GROUND (1982)

that bird
that wild    wild
    edge of sky
    high-flown
bird    turns back

dusk on its wings
like wetness    turns
back on a breeze

riding its spine

turns    driving
splits the air

a fast attack
fur & feathers
on the ground

then filled that bird
off again    climbing
    into evening
against blood-red sky


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE WEST
SEPTEMBER 13, 2003

In September, 2003, I drove down through North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, into Kansas; I drove from Rugby, North Dakota, site of the geographic center of the North American continent, to Smith County, Kansas, home of the geographic center of the lower 48 states; I drove along the western edge of the middle west, staying between the 99th and 100th Meredians. It was mostly backroads I drove, not the highways but the lowways, the by-ways. I wanted to see what the western spine of the middle west looks like. This is my report of the trip.

9:00 a.m. I'm set to leave Rugby, North Dakota, headed for Maysville, Missouri. I've been here a week, camping. I've got the tent and all my gear packed up now. It rained during the night and the tent is wet. It not as wet as it got on Wednesday night when I had to take a motel room but wet enough that I'll have to lay it out soon to let it dry so it doesn't mildew.

I'm heading to Maysville for a week there. I will be driving south along the farthest western edge of the middle west. I will take Highway 3 south through North Dakota, Highway 47 south through South Dakota, Highways 11 and 281 through Nebraska towards Lebanon, Kansas, in Smith County.

Leaving Rugby, I am leaving the geographic center of the North American continent. Passing through Smith County, Kansas, I'll touch the geographic center of the lower 48 states. Then I'll turn east on Highway 36 in Kansas, and head for Maysville.

I'll stop tonight where I feel comfortable. I don't know yet where that will be.

I didn't get to tell my friends Jim and Therese Rocheleau good-bye this morning. Neither of them had come over to the motel and campgrounds by the time I had packed up. I wanted to tell them how much I appreciate their hospitality. I will write to them when I get home.

*

The line I am driving is at the far edge of the middle west, the near edge of the west. The line is where something ends, something else begins. I know there is gradation, not dramatic demarcation here, yet I wonder whether I'll see any evidence that this is where the middle west ends.

South of Harvey, North Dakota, along Highway 3, there is a great openness like the west is open. Yet there is a middle western flatness, too. This isn't the west, obviously, but it's where the west begins.

At the turn for Fessenden, North Dakota, I can see a ridge looming ahead of me, not as impressive as the Turtle Mountains behind me, but a welt on the plains. A red-tail hawk has landed on a power-line, it is steel-eyed, looking west. There are wheatfields and hayfields here, corn and sunflowers, and where the land rises, range-land. I'm at the far eastern edge of this formation, this ridge. I have a long view to the east, of land and water and sky. I see a gnarled landscape to the west. When I've topped the rise I've been climbing, I have a long view to the south, too, a straight, long road ahead of me to the next ridge three miles distant. In the low ground before that next rise, standing water and a wave of rushes. Knobs of hills. Stands of trees. Baled grass. A dead skunk. "America, America," I think, looking out across this landscape. Here, a field of soybeans. There some grain bins. Light on everything.

Now, a small lake with a farmstead at one edge, a junkyard at the other.

I pass Hurdsfield, North Dakota. Dark water in the lake at the south end of town, like an omen. The highway turns west briefly, past a sign that says "Watch for water on road." There is only a dead skunk where water on road would be. And a dead turtle with a blood smear on the concrete near it.

Pot-hole. Pot-hole. Pot-hole. I didn't know there was this much water in North Dakota.

I look off to my right and see a coyote crossing hay stubble. It runs like a wild thing, side-wise, looking back over its shoulder. It runs, but you can see it's not in a hurry.

A cormorant stands atop a rock, watching the dark waters of a pot-hole. The wind is making white caps. The cormorant is steady as stone holding its place.

Ah, a weathered building - was that a schoolhouse once? It is unpainted and coming apart at every neil/nail. Its desolation is shouted Its desolation is shouted as loud as the wind through its boards.

At the top of the next rise, a sign that knows no irony: "School bus stop ahead."

A pot-hole lined with dead trees. Then all of a sudden it is range-land in all directions. I'm just entering Kidder County from the north.

There's a lone pick-up moving across an empty pasture. Okay, there is an occasional patch where wheat has been harvested. A dead jackrabbit on the road, long-limbed, bloated. There is a great large collection of large round bales. There is the occasional house left to ruination.

Here's a field of sunflowers. Except for that, you might think this was the west.

The stubble of wheatfield. Clumps of mud left on the road by tractors. Power poles standing in the water of a pot-hole that comes right to the edge of the road.

Here, a pot-hole that is nearly dried up serves as reminder that the west is defined by the moisture it receives, or rather by the moisture it doesn't receive.

Another empty house, hollow-eyed and gaunt as the wind.

To be continued....

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

"The Shed"
from MIDDLE GROUND (1982)

At night I hear its boards creaking in a steady
     wind.
Unfit to house tools now, the shed has opened
     itself
to field mice & moonlight. The air within it moves.
An owl leaves the rafters.
                                          By day the shed
                                              sags &
leans toward the trees behind it. Sometimes
     a play of light
through the roof marks the age of this aging
     wood: cracked
& bent, tired as the farmer was, who built it,
     when he died;
the wood grows dark as soil.
                                          The old lumber's
                                              knotty ache
reverberates as, bowed, the shed falls so slowly
     - year
by year - back to the land. The green floor, here,
     measures
the patience of the earth, waiting to take
     the wood.


>

SATURDAY'S POEM
-----------------------
MY PRAIRIE WEDDING
by R. Chris Halla

For MK & TM: You’ve had your weddings,
now I’ll have mine

Crow, the speaker in "Prairie Wedding," is something of a character. His father was Coyote and his mother another shape changer, of whose true identity we aren't certain, but who happened to be in the shape of a crow when she fell for the old Trickster. And, as we all know, once you fall in love, you never know what shape you're going to be in from there on out. Crow's common involuntary changes into the shape of a man, as well as his desire to stay one, suggest that maybe, even probably, Mom was a human at heart and in her other parts. Or it could be that there's even more to it than that. Chances are you'll be seeing more of Crow in the not so distant future.

I want
to take a turn
with a pretty girl
at a prairie wedding

I want
to be
the handsome farmboy
the unmarried bridesmaids
lust after

I want
to break
their hearts
and leave them all
as I found them...
unmarried

I want
for a prairie moment
at a prairie wedding
to be a man

not Crow


R. Chris Halla's poetry and nonfiction are well enough published in both the literary magazines and the "paying markets." Most of his more recent published work has been in the outdoors, travel, road trip observations and uncategorized fields. Although, rumor has it that he has been at work on a new collection of poetry, a journal/diary based memoir and a couple of longer works that cross pretty much all of the areas noted above. In his spare time, he's an award-winning producer of safety training videos. And he fishes. He fishes a lot. For a recent sample of his prose work, check out Dan Small Outdoors. Dog lovers, in particular, may find the piece amusing. Chris's Wisconsin Blue Ribbon Trout Streams and Everyone's Illustrated Guide to Trout On A Fly are both available in bookstores, fly shops and from the publisher at Amato Books.

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

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.

INDEX OF SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o David Clewell, "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin" - February 21, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Tom Montag, "February 1, 2001" - February 14, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004


>

GONE TO WISCONSIN WRITERS CONFERENCE
BACK SATURDAY AFTERNOON TO POST SATURDAY'S POEM

This afternoon I leave for Baraboo, a day and a half at the Wisconsin Writers' Conference. On Friday morning I will be delivering two twenty-minute presentations. The first is called "Lorine's Library: The Books and Marginalia in the Library of Lorine Niedecker" and by the end of it I will have enumerated LN's "Three Reasons for Solitude" as recorded in the top outer margin of p. 348 of The Dance of Life by Havelock Ellis. Finding this bit of scribble made it all worthwhile, all the more than hundred hours spent poring over her books, examining them page by page.

The second presentation will be about my Vagabond project. Yes, I have only twenty minutes. Yes, I have prepared for twenty minutes. I have practiced for twenty minutes. Praise be, it'll be a miracle if I can hold myself to twenty minutes talking about the Vagabond Expedition.

The powers that be accepted two of my proposals for the conference, but they didn't invite me to read my poetry or prose. I offered. Damn them. Next year....

I will return home on Saturday afternoon and post this week's "Saturday's Poem" before the end of the day. Plan on it.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL
DRIVING TO SPENCER, THEN HEADING HOME
APRIL 24, 2004

I'm driving to Spencer for my book signing at Tuesdays Books and Coffee. Spencer is about twenty-five miles west of Emmetsburg on Highway 18. Only a few miles out of Emmetsburg, an eagle rises in front of me above the road. After I pass, I see it in the rear view mirror, settling on carrion back along the shoulder. An eagle, here, now.

It is good to be driving here, now. This morning the sunrise was first an orange wall to the east. Now the day is bright and blue, with some haziness along the edges of the world. Fields have been worked for planting. The black dirt looks refreshed. The ditches and the hayfields are greening up. Leaves on the trees are more than my imagination this morning.

It is supposed to rain today, but it won't come early. Farmers will get a few more hours of work done in the fields. The rain is needed, of course, so they won't complain when they get chased up to the house by it.

The book signing this afternoon. Ah, yes. I think Thomas Wolfe was wrong - you can go home again, if you ever loved the place you left. You can go home, and they will embrace you. Witness my visit to Emmetsburg. Witness the invitation to do this book signing in Spencer. They could ignore me. They haven't.

There is rough ground along here, wetlands. Old farm buildings falling in on themselves. Farm houses with empty eyes.

There is the swing of the seasons. There is the swing of the generations, of life and death and life. And I suppose there is the swing, too, of something larger, those greater processes we only see a small portion of, the breaking of the sod here, the building of farmsteads at one end, the wood becoming earth again at the other. The torn earth restoring itself. The come and go of the earth's great urges. The swing of star time, when we are but a cinder speck.

It is easy enough in this moment to want to lay oneself down in death and become part of the great phoenix cycle of things - birth and re-birth, Big Bang and Re-Bang. Now I feel this loneliness, yet so much a part of the cosmos.

*

4:30 p.m. I'm headed home. It's raining. So now it rains all the way home? Two blackbirds fly in the rain above the road. The farm fields are hung with water.

*

Wet black cows in the cold rain.

All the headlights coming at me.

Crows and seagulls hunkered down.

Miles to go, hours and hours.

I am as sad as farmers are hopeful.

*

The patter-rat-pat-pat of rain on the windshield takes away thought. Or is the dying of the day that takes it? I'm on I-90 headed east towards home. I feel as if this highway knifes straight on through the world. The keen edge of the cut leaves nothing for me to think about.

*

Dress your sadness in grey: they won't know how bad you feel. Is it that you want to be well-known, or that you want to tell these stories? Are you trying to bask in the glow of good men's lives?

I move on, and they stay here. Which fact is the source of my sadness? Is it that they go unrecognized, or that I do?

*

Can the rain outrun a fellow's sorrow?

Apparently not.

The rain lessens; my sadness does not.

The rain increases, decreases, my sadness stays steady.

*

Which is greater - the gathering darkness or my desire to write these stories?

*

Sadly, I find I have nothing to say now. My sadness wins this round. Sic transit gloria mundi.

*

Except a red-wing blackbird is poised on a stalk of weed in the ditch along the highway. Red wing between earth and sky, between mud and hope. Sometimes you have to let go: three crows in the wet air; one in the tree, unhappy.

*

Sometimes I want too much.

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

from
"Letters Home"
The Civil War Letters of George H. Cadman
in MIDDLE GROUND (1982)

I find
the more

a man
has here,

the worse
it is:

the more
he has

to pack:
it is

useless
for us

to make
ourselves

the mules.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 3, 1998

Preparing to leave this place for a ten day journey is more a mental task than a physical one. I will be leaving behind a landscape I know familiarly, that I observe closely, that I love. It is not that I fear strangers, for most of my neighbors are strangers to me. I am not a gregarious fellow and do not go out of my way to meet even those who live close to me. I am happy with silence. My Chinese birth chart says I will have only a few, deep friendships.

Partly, I will be leaving behind my familiar daily routine - rising early to work on the book, showering for work, the morning meditation on the drive north, the close look at the changeless/changing land, a good day's work, a walk after work, sweet sleep. A pleasant enough existence getting left behind. I will have to endure hours in the car, lines of people, rude behavior perhaps, a foreign language - these jerk my out of my comfort.

Still, it will be refreshing. I will see a landscape I have never seen. I will be able to come back and view this landscape with new eyes as a result of the experience.

The field of winter rye along Highway E north of Fairwater is starting to head out. A field of soybeans shows itself.

It's cool this morning. Clouds are blanked to the east, to the west; there is a layer of grey overhead.

All three of the baby donkeys are at pasture just south of Five Corners. They will watch my world for me while I am gone.


>

BETWEEN STORMS ON MEMORIAL DAY

Monday, between storms, I saw a scarlet tanager in the one moment of sunlight. Everything shone green behind it, heavy with moisture. The bird itself held my attention. A splash of fresh blood on carpet. So red it took my breath away.

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

THE DIFFERENCE

Some apprehend with their minds. These become the scholars.

Some apprehend with their hearts and hands and eyes, more directly. These become your middle western poets.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 23, 2004

This afternoon at 1:30 p.m. I went up to Iowa Lakes Community College on the northwest corner of town for a ground-breaking ceremony. Well - the talkin' part of it would be at the college, the gold shovels were out at the site where the Broin Companies' Voyager ethanol plant is to be built, a mile southeast of Emmetsburg, almost across the road from AGP's soybean processing plant.

Half the auditorium at the college was set up with coffee and cookies and such; the other half had the stage, and chairs for the couple hundred people in attendance.

Most of the folks knew each other. They stood in groups, talking. The din of their conversation died down as the program started getting underway and people took their seats.

Larry Ward of the Broin Companies em-cee'd the program. He is project manager for the venture.

John Bird, Emmetsburg's City Administrator, was the first of nine speakers. He said, "It's a great afternoon - the sun is shining, it's Friday, and we have the opportunity to welcome the Broin Companies." Factors that made Broin select Emmetsburg for the ethanol plant? "I believe they heard what great people lived in this county," Bird said, "and they said, 'let's build a plant there.'"

Larry Ward concurred. He said: "It's not the corn, it's the fantastic people in the area." And he introduced Lannie Miller, a Palo Alto County Supervisor.

Miller said: "We haven't even scratched the surface of what we can do with an ear of corn."

Jeff Broin spoke next. He is the CEO of the Broin Companies. He said Emmetsburg's Voyager plant is the Broin Companies' twentieth. Broin handles development, design, operation, and marketing for the plant, which is owned by a group of 12,000 private investors, including many Palo Alto County farmers. "This will be one of the most efficient ethanol plants in the country," Broin said. The project will cost $64 million, it'll create an annual payroll of $1.5 million, it will employ 40 people. It will process corn from 115,000 acres, to produce 50 million gallons of ethanol a year.

"The nation benefits as we produce more of our energy at home," Broin said.

Brian Jennings was the glad-hander of the bunch. He's with the American Coalition for Ethanol.

"Fantastic day for this community and the area," he said.

"Congratulations to the investors for putting their money to work in this effort producing clean energy," he said.

"I want to congratulate the farmer-investors, showing they can pulls themselves up by their bootstraps," he said.

"By the end of 2004, Iowa will produce more ethanol than any other state," he said. "Nine hundred million gallons. The equivalent of California's ethanol needs."

"We can expect the price of corn to increase 12 cents per bushel," he said.

"No better time to get into ethanol," Jennings said. "I want to assure you the market will continue to grow."

You would think Jennings sounded Republican, except when he talked about Iraq, about why we had troops there. He said that "another reason they're over there is oil. This facility will help create energy independence." I've never before heard a Republican actually admit we went to war for oil. So either he's not Republican, or he slipped up.

Matt Eide of the Iowa Ethanol Producers Association was more politic. He said: "We have a great friend of ethanol up here, Senator Kibbe." He said: "You have one heck of a company in the Broin Companies." This is the one you want in Palo Alto County."

Mike Jerke of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association said: "You will definite benefit from the impact of this plant. It will have a $481 million impact." I didn't catch whether that was for a year, for the life of the plant, or for the half-life of uranium.

Daryl Haack talked of the "special meaning for Iowa farmers" that the ground-breaking should have. He talked of the promise "for a better rural economy."

"Last year," he said, "a billion bushels of corn were used to produce ethanol."

"Corn worth $2.60 was used to create a product worth $4.75," he said.

"An increase of 12 cents per bushel of corn means an increase of $22 million per year for farmers in Palo Alto County," he said.

Ellen Huntoon got it. She was from US Senator Tom Harkin's office. "I'm a farm girl," she said, "so I drive like my dad, with my head to the side."

"From the Senator's point of view," she said, "we need to be aware of our consumption. Yesterday was Earth Day. What are we doing for the earth? Ethanol is a big step in the right direction."

Larry Ward again. "Many have pitched in to make this project happen," he said.

"We need to recognize Shirley Schmitt of the local office," he said. "Without her we probably wouldn't have a ground-breaking today."

"Well, how come she's not up on the dias," I wondered.

Then soon enough we were out at the site of the new plant, a mile southeast of Emmetsburg; we were standing around waiting for the intersection of cosmic forces that would allow the taking of a photograph of the actual "ground-breaking" itself. The planets not being quite in alignment yet, I had the opportunity to listen to a couple old men talking. It's not exactly the talk you expect to hear in a conservative Republican state. One of the fellows looked like a retired farmer wearing his years in his hands and eyes and face. The other fellow was probably a lawyer or retired lawyer, a white-mopped head, a green suit flapping on his bony frame. They stood next to each other, in each other's space even, as if they were old acquaintances, and they talked. I start my eavesdropping in mid-conversation; it was going like this: "... he has to get rid of bin Laden and deal with that other political problem and do something with the economy before he has a chance." The old farmer continued: "Just get out of there. I've always been a supporter of our military but he got us in some place we had no business going...."

The principals were lined up with hard hats and golden shovels, about nine of them. This used to be corn field. "On the count of three," the photographer said, "dig!"

"Awright!" went up the cheer. Everyone applauded. The sun shone on Republicans and Democrats alike.

"Everybody get enough pictures?" someone asked.

"Try another one," someone said.

"Dig deeper this time."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 2, 1998

Our peonies are playing themselves out. Everything is early. Heat in the waters of the Pacific Ocean affects us. Everything is connected, isn't it? We can think regional if we wish, but we cannot forget the global perspective. Air and water, winds and tides connect us. The dust of Dustbowl, Montana, sets down in Depression, Wisconsin.

Grey skies.

The radio says the Wisconsin travel season has started earlier than usual this year, due, it is suggested, to the warm El Nino spring. Everything is connected, isn't it?

The corn has grown amazing inches over the past week. Some of it is nearly a foot tall already.

A big blast of peonies at Five Corners - red and pink and white. They blaze in full glory, they wave in the wind.

What they want is choice, the radio says of high school students in their cafeterias. What they get is the same ol' fast food - hamburgers and tacos and pizza. Now Chinese, Thai, Indian, Afghani, Greek, German food, that would be the start of choice. Junk food for the tummy, junk for the mind. There are way too many overweight people in this country, victims of someone's desire to make a dollar. You have to work at it to eat healthy foods these days. Where was it that we went off track? Back in the Eisenhower 1950s, when we all thought we should be the same as our suburban others? And wear the same white whites? Buy the same kitchen appliances, the same dinette set? Spread the same Miracle Whip on the same Wonderbread? And our hair? A little dab'll do ya!

Is this enough of the Fat Man preaching? Yeah, I think so.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 22, 2004, cont'd

I have been touring IEI in Emmetsburg with its president, Michael Webb. IEI makes countertops and cabinets, many of them for motorhomes made by Winnebago Industries. We are out in the plant along Highway 18 at the east edge of Emmetsburg.

We stopped so Michael could show me a "shipping container" used for sending out finished parts. Those table tops I'd seen get shipped standing on edge, between rubber covered posts that keep them standing up without damaging or marking them. "We deliver each of these carts for a specific workstation at Winnebago, so it will have all the parts it needs for a day's worth of production, and typically we ship it one day before they need it."

"We extract our order once a week from Winnebago and make parts based on that order," Michael said. "Every part we make for them has a serial number that corresponds to an RV they're building. Our software coincides with Winnebago's software. This cart is for Workstation 803B/3 at Winnebago, for production tomorrow."

"Responsiveness to our customers is critical," Michael said.

"We wrote our own software system to handle Winnebago's order, then to generate the code to make the specific parts needed."

Supervisors get a list of what needs to be done each day. Each workstation has a team leader and monitors its own progress. Overall, there's a production manager and an assistant production manager to see that work flows smoothly.

Now we're at the back of the building, where staining of pieces is done. Michael has been carrying a piece of wood with him all through the plant. It is the sample they have to match for Winnebago's new "light cherry" finish. He held it up to some stained pieces that had been hung up to dry. An exact match. He took it over and showed it to the fellow in the spray booth who puts the finish on the wood. "They dry right like the sample," Michael told the fellow, then he put the sample down on a work bench over to the side, for future reference.

Fumes from the spray booth get filtered out of the air and new air gets pulled into the work area to create a positive air pressure in the area where staining is done and the final finish coat applied. The positive pressure keeps sawdust and debris from coming into the work area and marring the surfaces being finished.

"The staining group here has to communicate closely with finishing, to push what is needed in finishing for shipment," Michael said.

Michael and I walked back through the storage area. "Those are pieces of Corian," Michael said, pointing to materials in storage. "They're 30 inches wide by 12 feet long." Farther on he saw something he didn't like, I think, and talked about it to the fellow who was helping get a semi unloaded. It would be taken care of.

We stood and talked for a bit, Michael and I, amongst the apparent chaos of work getting done on the shop floor.

"The company was sales only when we were founded," Michael said. "I grew up in the business. I grew up on job sites." His parents, Ken and Rose Webb, moved the business to Emmetsburg from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1982 when they needed to add the manufacturing element. Michael has a sister who is interested in running the company, and a brother who worked in the business until two years ago when he stepped out to establish a similar business of his own in another geographical area.

Michael is president of IEI; his parents retired three years ago and are supposed to be retired but they get pulled back into the business because of recent growing pains. "We need to get them back in retirement," Michael said.

Now that's a good problem to have, I thought.

*

The Emmetsburg Writers Club meets at the Lakeside Lutheran Home in Emmetsburg, in a room just inside the main entrance. I'd finished my tour at IEI in time to arrive for the meeting right on schedule. It was 4:00 p.m.

Soon enough several women gathered around the table and we shared our work and offered each other comments and suggestions. I read from The Big Book of Ben Zen as Myram Tunnicliff, who'd invited me, had requested, and I answered questions about that quirky fellow. Janice Kassel was working on another meditation for the religious radio program she speaks on, and she read from it. Liz Culligan offered some "Grandma's Musing." Cecilia Miller, whom I'd met at the Chamber of Commerce Dinner on Tuesday, talked of "Spring," and none too soon as the day had turned summer-like and we had to open windows in the meeting room to let a cool breeze blow through. Jovena Curran told of treasure-hunting in a thrift store with her sister. Mary Ellen Leners, former librarian at the Emmetsburg Public Library, spoke of family recipes, including one for cookies made by a strict teetotaler; the "secret" ingredient was whiskey. And Myram Tunnicliff read her piece about a mine explosion that had occurred when she and her family lived in Alaska: five of the Tunnicliffs' friends were killed in the accident. Her true telling of it sounded like good fiction but it was too true, ever sad word of it.

Ed Meyer of Emmetsburg's web site stopped by to tell members of the group how to post submissions to the local web page. Cecilia Miller has figured it out. She has several poems up that you can see by clicking on "Heartland View" at www.emmetsburg.com .

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

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

How old is Ivan Burgess? "I am so old," he said, "that if sex was an offensive football team I couldn't make a first and ten against tall grass."

"Here is a true story of Smith County wildlife," Ivan wrote. "John McDowell and Bob Kastle went mushroom hunting. While they were hunting mushrooms, they heard this growling and snarling and spitting and all them kind of noises. They looked up in a tree and saw a bobcat was after a coon. They said that while they were watching, the coon actually threw that bobcat out of the tree. When the bobcat landed, it decided it had all of Mr. Coon it wanted, and it took off."

"One of my favorite Smith Center stories," said Ivan, "is the time when power company manager Deke Divens looked at Ed McFadden's time card and it showed Ed had worked 25 hours one day. Deke said to Ed, 'how could you work 25 hours in one day?' Ed said, 'I skipped lunch.'"

"I wish I had some influence so I could peddle it," Ivan said. "About any place I am any more, the only claim to fame I have is that I am the oldest one in the group. Think about it - I have no accomplishments to parade before the group - just that I am the oldest one there. And I'll tell you, being honored because you are the oldest one there is a hollow victory at best."

"I went out and played golf last Thursday afternoon," Ivan reported. "I took an 8 on one and an 8 on two and an 8 on nine. Then I had trouble on the rest of the holes."

"Jim Fetters was telling about an old time judge down in eastern Kansas," Ivan said. "He told the guy who was appearing before him that he ought to be ostracized and that he himself would hold one leg while they done it."

"Things are moving slowly in Athol," according to Ivan. "Gerald Ratliff said that last week all he knew of that was going on was that the Co-op was spraying. And they had their inventory all counted up and were ready to do the adding up."

"Linton Lull didn't show up for the As the Bladder Fills Club meeting last Thursday," Ivan said. "Apparently his wintering in Arizona made him forget some of the ground rules governing the As the Bladder Fills Club. The age of the group makes it imperative that when you miss a meeting you are supposed to let someone know, because with the new Privacy Act we never know when someone is in the hospital. Friday morning Linton showed up and showed proper repentence for his oversight. No disciplinary action was taken."

"You notice I don't say 110%" said Ivan. "You can't do that. It is impossible to give more than 100%. That giving 110% is just like Mary having a little lamb. It is a biological impossibility."

"Got a coon up in my neighborhood," Ivan reported. "The first time I saw him/her, she was facing my cat eye-ball to eye-ball. I yelled at her/him and he/she took off. Last Thursday night he came back again. It was about eleven o'clock. I opened the door and Miss Kitty bolted in to safety. I yelled at the coon and he/she just sat there. I yelled several times but the coon never did act like he was 'fraid of me. After I yelled at him loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood, he finally ambled off like he owned the place. I was in my shorts and no shoes, or I would have grabbed a rake and took after him/her. And it wasn't because I didn't have my brithces on. It was because I was bare-footed. If I'd had shoes on, the whole neighborhood would have been treated and greeted by me chasing the coon in my Fruit of the Looms."

"Stay ahead of the posse," Ivan said to end his report, as he always does.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 1, 1998

While we were out of town over the weekend, high winds - as heavy as 70 mph - moved through Wisconsin. The only damage in Fairwater seems to be the very large, very old, very punky silver maple that stood at the corner of Mary's mother's property. Fortunately when it blew down it fell into the empty lot between Mary's mother's house and the neighbor's. No one was injured. Power was out for the neighbor's for about 12 hours, however.

Some cornfields have water standing in them this morning. Some corn badly needs cultivating. The fields of peas are thick and green.

Between Five Corners and Union Street, the basement for the new house has been dug. A school kid rides his bike towards town in the wrong lane, then veers back into my lane right in front of me. I have to stand on the brakes to avoid hitting him. Life is short enough without such recklessness.

Or conversely, life is too short not to be reckless?

A bright sun, a fresh day, a new month - and no indication in the air that storms had rolled through here on the weekend.

The day throbs, innocent as the fair-skinned girl in white dress, in full sunlight, with mischief on her mind.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 22, 2004, cont'd

I have been touring IEI in Emmetsburg with its president, Michael Webb. IEI makes countertops and cabinets, many of them for motorhomes made by Winnebago Industries. We are looking at a Computer Numerically Controlled router.

We got up close to the CNC router. It was cutting a piece of stock into several smaller parts. Designs are laid down on computer in the Auto-CAD program to maximize the useful pieces coming out of a single big piece of stock. The design is then translated into the language that runs the router, and the pieces get cut accordingly.

"We have 2000 particular part numbers for Winnebago alone," Michael said. IEI runs two shifts on the CNC router, one shift in most other areas of the plant. Summer hours are 6:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 6:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m. on Friday. That's so employees can get an early start on their weekends, get out for an afternoon of golf, go to the lake, or whatever, Michael indicated.

Employees running the CNC router need to be comfortable in the Windows-based computer environment; they get training in understanding geometric code; plus they need "tool logic."

Those who prepare the designs need familiarity with Auto-CAD, "then we train them on Router-Sim,the program that creates the code that actually runs the router."

Pieces coming off the CNC move to various areas of the plant, depending on what needs to be done with them.

"We make a lot of our own moldings here," Michael said as he showed me the straight line rip saw. Lumber cames into the plant by semi load from lumber brokers, or from regional lumber dealers for smaller quantities. Of course you get a better price when you buy a semi load at a time.

The five-head molder first trues a piece of lumber, then the counter-rotating side heads and top/bottom heads fashion the molding exactly as the machine has been set up to do. You put a raw stick of lumber in one end, a piece of molding comes out the other end. Adjustment of the cutting heads allows a great variety of moldings to be manufactured.

Farther on stood two wide belt sanders. One usually does the rough sanding, the other does the finish sanding.

We saw some fellows fabricating dinette tables for Winnebago. These particular pieces got trimmed with a wood edge. At another station, Michael asked one of the employees making some cabinets, "For the YMCA in Ankeny?"

"Yeah."

Cutting out the opening for a sink in a bathroom counter creates a fairly large piece of waste. "We write programs to use those pieces," Michael said. "They're large enough we can use them for some of our smaller pieces. You don't want to let too much of that pile up."

I saw a woman tapping a T-mold plastic edge piece into the face of a countertop. "That's for lower-price models," Michael said. The higher-priced models get the wood-edge trimming I'd seen earlier.

"Here let me show you," Michael said. "These tables fold and come apart for easy storage." He took a table apart for me. IEI not only cuts and finished the wood for those tables, but also puts on the hardware that allows the tables to fold up and to come apart.

Farther down the line we saw tables we an even simpler edging that was glued and screwed on, for the lowest-priced models.

We walked through the area where raw materials are stored. I was surprised that it wasn't any larger than it was. Michael said that, as needed, they do have storage at an off-site warehouse.

I'd seen as many women as men working in the plant and asked about that. There are 121 employees at IEI in both plants, about as many women as men, Michael thought. Employees come from a radius of about twenty-five miles in all directions from Emmetsburg - that includes Pochahontas, Spencer, Estherville, and Algona. Some of the women, no doubt, are farm wives from the area.

To be continued....

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

from
THE BIG BOOK OF BEN ZEN

They have new shoes, Ben says, so they have to
Like walking barefoot in mud. Those who have

No shoes, he says, have to like it too.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 22, 2004

Michael Webb doesn't look like he is president of IEI. It's clear he goes to work to work. It was 2:45 p.m. when I met him at the IEI plant at the east edge of Emmetsburg, along Highway 18. The plant is entirely a production facility, so I had a little difficulty finding the office end of it. The company's offices are at the other plant in Emmetsburg. As president, Michael is support by a director of manufacturing, an engineering manager, an estimating manager, a quality assurance manager, and accounting.

IEI is Institutional Equipment Inc. The company started out as the Iowa/South Dakota dealer for institutional grade cabinets and counters with a plastic laminate coating similar to "Formica" but made by LSI. They have added a wood laminate now, made by Campbell Rhey. In addition to selling these product lines, IEI now manufacturers cabinets, countertops, and doors, plus outsourcing "fixtures" to complement the products they make in Emmetsburg.

"We do a lot of component manufacturing," Michael said. "Our largest customer is Winnebago. The pieces we make for them get more sophisticated as the RVs [recreational vehicles] get more stylish. We've had a lot of growth as a result of our association with Winnebago."

I'm new to this industry, so as we talked I had to ask for more explanation than I'm used to. You'd hear Michael say "We used a lot of solid-surface Corian." Corian is the brand name for a type of acrylic filled with aluminum tri-hydrates and pigments; it is the original solid-surface product, so its name has become somewhat like "Kleenex" - you might say it is the "Formica" of the solid-surface products. "It's a very high-quality product and it's a lot of fun to work with," Michael said.

You'd hear Michael say "PVA glue cold press line," where a panel is cleaned, a layer of glue is put down, the laminate is applied, the panels are stacked and then pressed for an hour while the glue cures.

The portion of the plant closest to the meager offices at the north end of the building is devoted to "contract work." The rest of the building is given to manufacturing the parts that IEI makes.

IEI has a press to bend laminate and adhere it to the front edge, back scribe, and inside cove of a countertop. The laminate is heated to make it soft for bending. "We're the only people in the US who can make this countertop with such tight radiuses," Michael said. "Most people would have to use a contact glue and thinner laminate."

Here some fellows are working on pieces with unusual shapes. "We're retro-fitting an older room with wood-edged countertops," Michael said by way of explanation.

Specifications are communicated through a workorder. Geometric code is generated for custom shapes and the pieces are cut on the CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled).

In the distance we saw a maple door IEI is starting to manufacture for Winnebago. It'll be the door for the bathroom. "The high end units are getting more upscale all the time," Michael said.

To be continued....

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

from
MIDDLE GROUND

your eyes at daybreak:
sometimes the rain.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 29, 1998

Once the clouds cleared away, yesterday turned hot and steamy. Another thunderstorm rolled through last night and cooled things off. The sky is grey still. Our peonies are still bent with the weight of that storm's moisture.

To the north and northwest, the sky looks cold and wintry, the clouds like ice cubes.

Just south of Ripon, equipment sits on the empty lot next to the house that sold recently. A man looks over some papers, looks over the lot. Will he be digging a basement today? Is there another house going up on good farm land? Will we ever reclaim what we are losing? Does anybody care?

The radio wants to talk about pain in places all across the planet. I have to turn it off. There is enough pain right here, right now.


>

SATURDAY'S POEMS
-------------------------
RITUAL
by Jim Reese

Linus Cummins never learned to drive.
Never had anywhere, he said, worth going to.
He's a 69-year-old German farmer
who came back loony, some of his family claim,
from the Korean War.

He's lived in the big house
his father's father built
since he was born.
Only gone once for that call of duty
in Pusan - never married.
The rides he does get
are to and from church every Saturday night
and to a handful of family get-togethers.

"You know they were saying..."
Well, he gets that information from
the Yankton Press and Dakotan.
You can see him each early morning
through the kitchen window
thumbing the paper
and again at noon.

In between meals and chores
he sits on a feeder bucket - head over a
rusted coffee can.
In that can, he breaks up glass bottles.
In a rhythmic movement, he quarter turns
an old rusted ball hitch, grinding the bottles into
fine sand.
When the can is full, he takes the bottles' remains
and spreads them down the lane,
creating his own glass highway.

Last fall he'd made a trail with the sand
a quarter mile up the lane
before that first winter blow.
If he lived somewhere warmer, where the trail
might grow all the way to the road - I wonder:
which way would he go?


*


WILLING AND READY
by Jim Reese

1870 - 1933. Floyd R. Knipplemeyer, Farmer - Will concluded on said date of December 13th 1930, Cedar County, Nebraska:

To son Floyd Jr., 80 acres of broke ground of his choosing - quarter horses and the 30 aught 6. East side of house. All out buildings.

Son Ronald T. 87 Head of Angus. West side of house. North forty. Outhouse squatting rights.

Daughter Florence. 1 Hereford Bull. Mother's wedding ring to do with as you choose. All household appliances, furniture and accessories except, Ronald T. and Floyd Junior's beds, kitchen table and wood stove. Said savings of $16,328 and 33 cents.

Neighbor. Floyd Sr. grants permission to finally move fence at the south end of Snake Creek. You're welcome you son of a bitch.

Witness. Mary A. Armkanecht. Dec. 13th 1933.


Jim Reese is a writer, photographer and editor who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he teaches in the English department and works on the editorial staff of the Prairie Schooner. He is cofounder of and Imagining Editor for Logan House Press. Reese's poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies: South Dakota Review, Nebraska Life, Nebraska Territory, Morpo Review, Touchstone, Plains Song Review (University of Nebraska Press), Platte Valley Review, Poetry Motel, and in his first book, As Worthless As Tits On A Boar (Cacthouse Publishing 1995), Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham (Grizzly Press 2002), and his most recent collection, The Jive (Morpo Press, 2004).

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

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.

INDEX OF SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o David Clewell, "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin" - February 21, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 4, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Tom Montag, "February 1, 2001" - February 14, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 22, 2004, cont'd

I have been talking with John Davis, plant manager at SNC in Emmetsburg, Iowa. We are at the King Street plant. John has been explaining what SNC does, and its history in Emmetsburg. Now we are ready for a tour of the plant.

We stepped out into the production area. Over there a woman was working magic at a machine. "Most things made here are made by hand," John said. "You can't mass-produce an order for forty-two pieces."

"Over here," he said, "is a toroid coil for a high frequency welder made by Miller Electric in Appleton, Wisconsin."

He said things like "That gets one hundred eighty turns of wire. This one requires exactly 48 turns." Then he was talking about "encapsulates" - varnishes and rubberized bake-on coatings.

All the employees in the department were women. John called it the "High Frequency Area." One of the women said it was more like "High Maintenance." She laughed and the other women smiled and nodded in agreement.

John and I moved into the next work area. "Our products get bigger as you move towards the back of the plant," John said.

A woman came up and introduced herself to me. I remembered her parents. She said they had hired my sisters to baby-sit her when she was little. Where did forty-some years go, I wondered to myself.

A woman at one work station was making what John called a "standard audio transformer." She said she could produce a couple hundred a day of them. If you've ever taken an old hi-fi cabinet apart, you should have seen something like what she was making.

John showed me a strand of the wire used in one piece SNC makes; it was as fine as a hair. The wire must be wrapped 6800 times to create the transformer; tolerance on this piece is plus or minus sixty-five wraps. "We have electronic counters," he said, "so we should be more accurate than that."

"This is a job shop," John said. "We have a lot of machinery working on different jobs."

Here they were making electronic brake controls for the Dings Corporation in Milwaukee, in different configurations and different voltages.

Not only do the products get bigger towards the back of the plant, the windings get bigger and some of the pieces get welded together before they're finished.

Here, a transformer for power sub-stations, made for General Electric. There, the transformer used to charge the battery on the E-Z-GO golf cart.

"E-Z-GO used to have three suppliers," John said. "They couldn't seem to get enough of the parts [a fero-resin transformer that converts AC power to DC; it works like a battery charger]. They wanted us to do a pre-production order of twenty-five, and the seemed surprised when all twenty-five of them functioned properly. Well - they were supposed to work."

"They asked us to have a hundred of the parts always in stock," John said. "When they ordered a hundred, we made a hundred more to replace what had been shipped. Over six months we shipped four hundred or five hundred of them. Then they asked 'How would you like to be a weekly supplier?' We said yes. 'Could you make twenty-five a day?' We said yes. 'You will be our #2 supplier,' they said. '#3 is gone.' A year later they asked us how many we thought we could make. They wanted three hundred a day, fifteen hundred a week. We ramped up to do it and now we are their only supplier of the part. We can make four hundred and twenty five of them a day if we need to. On an average day we'll make three hundred seventy five of them."

John pointed to a machine that is used to test parts, to make sure they work as they're supposed to. The testing machine itself isn't working today and John has been trying to get a technician in to repair it.

We got back to talking about transformers. "Now we've got another customer for a similar kind of part," John said. "Railway Equipment Company makes battery operated crossing lights for railroads. In that grey box you see by the railroad crossing lights there is a bank of batteries. They are using our transformer to charge those batteries with current coming off the power lines."

"Customers come to us by word of mouth," John said. "One satisfied customer will tell others. That's been the story of our success."

John had to get back to work. He's a hands-on plant manager and time was a-wastin'. And I was minutes away from another interview across town. I had seen SNC Plant #2, but not the Airport Plant. "Come back on another visit," John said, "and I'll show you the other plant."

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

from
PLAIN POEMS:
MAY 25, 2001 (3)

At Five Corners the retired farmer works
his flower beds. He is sprawled there, weeding
and working the soil, he is sprawled as if
this were a Sunday picnic and he has
eaten his fill. Everything about him
shimmers. His red shirt. His baseball cap.
His cigar. The denim of his overalls.
The light which lays on him like a blessing

----------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 28, 1998

A storm this morning - long, low roar of thunder; rain. Lightning reflected off windows across our driveway. The farmers will appreciate the rain. So will the little green growing things in the farmers' fields.

Tires spit moisture from the street, leave tracks so you can see where they've been. A different song today, sung in a different key. Would the farmers take a rest, clean out their tool sheds, grease their equipment?

You can run away from home, but you can't run very far. What made you keeps you. A farmer's son is always a farmer's son. Cut yourself, Tom, do you not bleed green?

The peony blossoms are bent low with the weight of rain on them. The pond is dimpled. In places the road ahead mirrors the sky above. Grey, wet road. Grey, wet sky. Electric moisture. The clouds do not say we are at the edge of an ocean, nor even a very large lake. That takes different clouds.

Heavy rain now. At the Sina pig farm, children in slick, shiny rain coats wait for the school bus, which is not far behind me.

At Five Corners - to the southeast, white and purple flowers bloom close to the ground; to the northwest, peony blossoms on their bushes.

Despite the greyness, despite the rain, all is right with the world, or as near so as gratitude can make it.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 22, 2004, cont'd

We have been talking with John Davis, the plant manager at the SNC in Emmetsburg, Iowa. We are at the King Street plant. John has been explaining what SNC does, and its history in Emmetsburg.

"We bought this building in 1996 from Horizons when they moved," John said, speaking of the King Street plant, or #2. The airport plant runs orders which require molding. Plant #2 is "the magnetics division."

"Orders declined over the past two years," John said. "9-11 put a kabosh on things. Right now things are picking up - we're the busiest we've been in two years."

"In twenty years we've grown phenomenally," he said.

SNC in Emmetsburg has 86 employees; in Oshkosh there are 140 employees, counting office staff, sales, and engineering. SNC also built a plant in Mexico recently.

The company has 2000 customers and manufactures parts from 20,000 different designs. Customers include three divisions of General Electric, five divisions of Rockwell, American Power Conversion, Banner Corporation, and Trombetta. SNC makes a battery charger for E-Z-GO Golf Carts, parts for Acme Corporation's mobile MRI equipment, "neutralizing transformers for the telephone industry, "and a lot of stuff for the military - we're a subcontractor for firms selling equipment to the government."

"We used to do a lot of stuff for the computer industry," John said, "but we've lost that to Taiwan." SNC used to produce 40,000 solenoid coils for hard drive devices each week.

"Parts we've made are in the scoreboards at most NFL stadiums in the country," he said. Daktronics in South Dakota makes those electronic scoreboards, including scoreboards used at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Our talk was interrupted by a phone call. It was an engineer from the office in Oshkosh, concerned about aspects of the manufacturing process for a new customer. The customer required a written procedure called a "process sheet" and the engineer was clarifying the changes that had been made at the manufacturing phase to make production more efficient.

John finished his business and turned back to me. "Daktronics also makes portable 'leader boards' for the PGA, so every golfer knows where he stands at any given moment."

"In 1996," John said, "we refurbished all those leader boards. It took us about two years. It required 600,000 transformers to finish that project."

Those leader boards are electro-mechanical devices, last built about 1979. The PGA intends to replace them with leader boards that are entirely electronic, but a successful prototype hadn't been developed yet when the old devices came in for refurbishing.

To be continued....

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

YES, THE FINAL INSTALLMENT!
DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (11)

This concludes 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, May 14, May 16, May 17, May 18, and May 26, 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 American north [Alaska] is lived in to a degree that the Canadian one isn't." The typical Canadian northern town, "is a well-serviced, highly rationalized, pre-fab imtitation of a southern community with houses tightly huddled and outer boundaries clearly marked." By contrast, its American counterpart will be "a sprawling, unbounded, fortuitous agglomeration of mismatched and often makeshift building types, where people precede services, where space and privacy are more important factors in residential site-selection than security, and where the outer edges seem to be trying to migrate into the trees."

One can look at specific Canadian towns such as Lynn Lake, Manitoba, or specific personalities such as Twelve Foot Davis as evidence contrary to McGregor's thesis; or we could look at planned communities such as Leaf Rapids, just miles from Lynn Lake, where school, grocery store, cafe, art gallery, and city offices are all found under one roof as evidence in favor. Nonetheless, I think she is essentially correct: American towns are sprawling and diffuse and unbounded; Canadian northern communities are more planned and rational. Canadian communities still seem to be encampments. The middle western communities I'm most familiar with are places settlers staked their claims and put up their buildings where they could. This was where they were going to live; it was not where they were going to live until they could go back south. My middlewesterners took possession of the land in a way that McGregor's Canadians never did. The land has become a permanent part of us; by contrast, those northern Canadian mining communities are often inhabited by miners who will leave once the mining plays out. Perhaps it's that middle westerners play for keeps in a way that McGregor's Canadians do not.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 27, 1998

These mornings on this familiar ground I am as far as one can imagine from being a stranger in a strange land. And yet as much as I know about the roll and swoop of this ground, there is also much I do not know. I don't know the families who farm these fields, and the families before them, all the way back to the Indians who walked here.

Granted, it is nearly impossible to gather certain kinds of historical information. Still, how can I pretend to speak with any authority on this morning as I drive if I have little clue who these people are, who those who came before them were? Will this essential ignorance doom my effort?

In front of the garage, three peonies have opened, pink and heavy. Another bud is ready to. All of these are on the end of the peony bed that is closest to the morning sun.

I cannot go on saying how lovely the village is in morning light. There! The post mistress raises our flag in front of the post office.

The corn fields definitely need cultivating. El Nino has been kind to the weeds as well as to the crops.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 21, 2004, cont'd

About twelve people gathered for my presentation about my memoir, Curlew:Home and the Vagabond project at the Emmetsburg Library tonight. Most were older women and an older man, there was Nathan Clark, the librarian, and there was a boy about ten years old and his mother. You wonder how a boy is going to endure two hours of talk about all the boring stuff adults talk about. Well, he did fine, he did just fine.

There was some concern expressed during the discussion about the fact that only old people seem to get interested in family history, genealogy, and local history generally. I think it is partly that we wait to get interested until our own experiences can be seen as part of history; and I think, too, that parents raising children, working, maintaining a house, and running kids to after-school activities just don't have much time to think about history and what it means.

I come to history by default. Certainly I didn't set out to become a historian. Yet if you are going to undertake a project to understand people as I have with my Vagabond endeavor, you have to look backwards at their experiences, and backwards even farther to their grandparents and greatgrandparents, to their immigration to the United States and settling into communities across the middle west.

As soon as someone starts to tell you a story, they are drawing on a real or imagined past, they are drawing on what can be perceived as history.

I do history as a poet would do it. I don't have the skills and patience to track genealogies, for instance. The people who can do that work are angels, in my estimation, and they have my highest respect. Nor can I trace the niggling little details of history - dotting the i's and crossing the t's. I am interested in the sweep of the story, in the color of the lives, in the motion of the forces marching through time.

And I recognize I could not do my work without the genealogists and those detail-oriented folks who preserve the essential nuts and bolts of our past. I could not do my work without the efforts of all sorts of people who have recorded community histories and family histories to the best of their abilities, unsung, unrecognized, and often unappreciated.

Here's a cheer for all the people intent on preserving our memory of the past. Bless them.

***

APRIL 22, 2004
Employees were on break when I arrived at the SNC plant on King Street in Emmetsburg at 1:30 p.m. this afternoon, as scheduled; and no one was at the front desk. John Davis, plant manager, whom I was scheduled to meet, I found out, was in the plant dealing with a balky machine. None of them looked like Superman or Superwoman, the folks I saw outside having a smoke as I came in, and none of those I could see at tables in the break room; they looked like ordinary employees.

When break got over, a woman came up front and found me waiting. She went back into the shop right away to let John know I was here.

It was a few minutes later that John arrived. We sat down to talk in his office for a while, and then he gave me a tour of the place. I tell you what: every man in the place is a Superman; every woman Superwoman. That, or they are true magicians. How they make those little electronic parts and transformers is amazing. I was awed.

John Davis is from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. SNC's home office and plant are in Oshkosh. The satellite plant in Emmetsburg was built in 1981. SNC had been making a part in Oshkosh for Allen Bradley; production went from 250 units per week to 2000. Allen Bradley asked SNC to give them a description of their process for making the part so they could find a back-up supplier in case SNC had any problems keeping orders filled.

"Why don't we another plant as a back-up for you?" SNC suggested to Allen Bradley.

"Where?" Allen Bradley wanted to know.

"Somewhere west," SNC said.

That was about 1979.

Potential sites for the expansion were narrowed to Storm Lake, Sheldon, Estherville, and Emmetsburg - all in Iowa. "I wasn't involved in discussions at that time," John said. "I only know that they decided on Emmetsburg after negotiations with the communities."

The "airport plant," as it is called, was the original facility built and is still in operation. The building John and I sat talking in is the second plant opened in Emmetsburg.

Even before the original building in Emmetsburg was finished, demand for the part had intensified and in response SNC in Oshkosh developed more efficient methods of manufacturing it in order to keep pace. The Emmetsburg plant opened with six employees and with an Emmetsburg man to run the place. As the new plant was coming on-line, John asked his superintendent in Oshkosh, "Do you need anybody to go out there and help?" Early on, they didn't think they'd need John to go to Emmetsburg to help, but as it turned out the new plant had problems. John was asked to go west and look things over.

His report back to Oshkosh was simple: "I can't believe what I'm seeing." He made a commitment to spend six months in Emmetsburg trying to straighten things out. He promised to stay there long enough to get some new equipment installed and production flowing smoothly.

Well, soon enough the plant added a second shift. An addition was put on the facility. The workload grew and grew. New product lines were added in Emmetsburg. In the course of all this, John found himself living in Emmetsburg. His wife wasn't happy about moving from Oshkosh at first, as she was leaving family behind. "But we liked the area," John said. "The kids adjusted well in school. Things were going well at the plant. I remember saying to my wife, 'I'll bet that in the next year we'll have forty employees.' 'You're crazy,' my wife said. Now we've far outstripped that."

To be continued....

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (10)

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, May 14, May 16, May 17, and May 18, 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 divergence in viewpoints about wilderness (between Canadians and Americans), McGregor says, has "a lot to do with the conceptual difference between a northern and a western frontier, with one representing the limits of knowledge and the other the limits of endurance."

I'm assuming here that the northern frontier is the one that pushes the limits of knowledge and the western frontier pushes the limits of endurance. This may be precisely the difference in world view between McGregor's Canadians and my middle westerners. The land itself is neither one thing nor the other; it is our conception of it. The Canadian looking to the northern frontier imagines (images?) its unknown-ness, builds the fort in the wilderness. The middle westerner pushes on, endures, and finally finds a place that looks like home. The difference is between those who imagine the world is a place we cannot know and those who believe we can do whatever we need to do. Ultimately, pushed to its extreme, it is the difference between those who don't try and those who die trying

McGregor says: "Mind structures environment which structures mind."

My middle western sense of it is this: we shape our environment; our environment shapes us. I think I mean it in a more blood and muscle sense that McGregor does, however. It is not simply "mind" that shaped here. I think of father's hands, his fingers deformed by hard work. The shaping goes on in every part of our being, not only the mind. Further, the shaping goes on beyond the individual: place shapes the community, just as community shapes the place.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 26, 1998

I saw the hawk Friday evening on my way home from work, the first time in a while I've seen it. It was circling above its grove. It was being harassed by two blackbirds. One of them was flying into its face, as if trying to peck at its eyes.

Can we speak about place without speaking of the people of the place? If we do not speak about the people of the place and their relationship to the land, then are we speaking about wilderness? There is an exchange between the land and the people on the land which tells an interesting part of the story about the place. We bend the grass and take down the trees and change the shape of the hills. The land feeds and sustains us. Isn't it wonderful that the fruit of the earth tastes good to us, nourishes us. Apples could just as easily have been bitter as sweet.

Think of the Sandhills of Nebraska, their harshness and the difficulty that Old Jules had establishing an orchard there. That piece of ground did not easily wish to give back. Old Jules wrestled with it and wrestled with it and even today, a century later, it is difficult to say man has won that struggle. It is still a bitter and harsh and lovely ground and the lives of those who choose to remain there are not easy lives.

The peonies in the back yard are opening, white. Those in front of the garage are still tight balls.

The first crop of hay has been taken already along Highway E north of town. Some rain on Sunday has helped the peas and corn and the weeds between the rows of corn.

Another baby donkey, wobbly-kneed and new, at the farm south of Five Corners. No one has worked the fields of corn stubble west and south of there.

School will soon be out. May is nearly spent, like a blossom that has dropped its petals.


>

DELBERT COTHERN
OF VANDALIA, ILLINOIS,
HAS PASSED AWAY

Last night I heard that Delbert Cothern of Vandalia, Illinois, passed away about two months ago. I'd interviewed Delbert when I was in Vandalia in February, 2003, and heard him play his harmonica. In fact, Delbert gave me a tape of the songs he'd recorded on his 4-track recorder in his room at Cherrywood Nursing Home in Vandalia.

Delbert had been paralyzed when he was sixteen years old, back in the 1930s, diving into Ramsey Creek on a family outing. He and a cousin kept challenging each other to dive into the river with hands at the back of the head instead of extended in front of them as they entered the water. Once too often Delbert dove in that way and his head hit bottom, he broke his neck, he was paralyzed the rest of his life.

With effort, Delbert eventually started getting around on crutches and could move well enough that he did most of the housekeeping for his parents. Out of the money his mother paid him for keeping house, Delbert saved enough to buy two acres out in the country. His parents put a trailer house on the property. Delbert and his folks lived there for many years. Delbert kept a large garden on the acreage. Though he couldn't walk, he could stand without support. He would hoe as much as he could reach from one place, he'd use the hoe as a crutch and move forward, he'd hoe some more. Through the years, he kept the freezer and cupboards stocked with food from his garden.

Delbert came from a musical family and had taught himself mandolin as a youngster. After the accident that crippled him, Delbert could no longer play mandolin. If he were to continue playing music, he had to learn an instrument he could play with one hand. So he took up harmonica, learning fiddle tunes and traditional bluegrass, and transferring them to his new instrument.

Delbert played his harmonica at the Illinois Old Time Music Harmonica Championships, coming in as high as second. He won a national championship in 1988 at Avoca, Iowa, tearing off renditions of "Soldier's Joy" and "Silver Bells" and a waltz. He also competed at a contest in Tennessee but that championship draws a lot of great harmonica players from Nashville, Delbert said, "and they are tough to beat."

Delbert wrote songs of his own and and recorded them in his room at Cherrywood Nursing Home. He released a 13-song tape, Just an Old Man and His Old Music: Old Timey Type Music No. 1, and on it referred himself "Ol' Delbert." There's harmonica on the tape, of course, and Delbert's singing and talking and whistling. Many of the songs were his own compositions. He introduced them with his Ol' Delbert drawl.

Did Delbert think he was an inspiration to others? "Well," he said when I asked him, "I hope so, but I don't know if I am." He was not one to brag, not about his music, not about the example he set for the rest of us. He just kept on making music.

Now he's making music with the angels, on the big back porch in the sky. So long, pardner.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL
EMMETSBURG, IOWA
APRIL 21, 2004

I interviewed Lee Beem at his glass shop in the morning today and Dick and Anne Marie Nelson in the afternoon. The Nelsons farm north of Emmetsburg; their son, Bruce, who was a walk-on at the University of Iowa, is playing for the Carolina Panthers. He doesn't start yet, but he will. You read it here first.

During my interview with the Nelsons, I asked Anne Marie "What did you feed Bruce?"

"He ate a lot of potatoes," she said.

After the interview had concluded, I followed Anne Marie the half a mile north to "the Nelson cabin," a log cabin overlooking an old spring-fed gravel pit. Dick would follow behind with the pick-up, bringing materials to repair a "privacy fence" along the patio that had blown over in Sunday's sixty-mile-an-hour winds.

"Here's a saying for your book," Anne Marie said as we stepped toward the cabin door. She pointed at a rock along the waterfall; the rock had this inscription: "The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth."

"That's from the Indians," Anne Marie said, but you know it's also part of the Nelson's philosophy of farming.

The waterfall is man-made, of course, with water pumped from the pond and flowing back into it. "The waterfall was our 30th anniversary present to each other," Anne Marie said. The lovely gurgling of it is appreciated at the breakfast table in the corner of cabin.

We stepped behind the cabin before we entered it, and Anne Marie made a sweep of her arm from south to north along the railroad tracks. "All this is seeded, from Emmetsburg almost to Osgood," she said. Her seeding business is one of the firms involved in such restorations in the Emmetsburg area. Last year's native grasses sway in the breeze. Private landowners, the Department of Natural Resources, and the County all have restored parcels that are part of a project that has been underway for seven years.

"It takes two years to look like anything," Anne Marie said. "Before that, it looks like thistles."

After two years, it makes the best pheasant habitat you can imagine. In the few short minutes we stood surveying the grasses, I heard three pheasants call - one to the north of us, one to the west, one to the southwest. The Nelsons have restored two hundred acres to native grasses, which abutts a public hunting area that has also been restored. In addition, Anne Marie leases hunting rights on some other land nearby as well. It is no wonder that sixteen hunters from Alabama return to the Nelson cabin year and year during pheasant season.

The cabin itself won't accommodate sixteen people, so the hunters bring Winnebagoes or what-not to bed some of the fellows.

You step into the lob-cabin on a concrete floor textured to look like stone. "Poor man's tile" is what Anne Marie called it. When the floor was poured, Anne Marie made every effort to get all the twigs and leaves and debris off the soft concrete before it was covered to cure. Everywhere a leaf had remained while the concrete dried, now there is a delicate leaf pattern imprinted into the floor. Such a lovely touch, and entirely unintended.

The cabin is warmed by radiant heat coming up from the concrete floor.

The wood of the stairs to the loft and the second floor bedroom and the wood of the entertainment center in the living room is oak. He had said once that he'd tear down an old corn crib for another farmer, hoping to get a little bit of salvageable wood out of the old structure. When he got to work on it, Anne Marie told me, he found that "it was all oak in there." We were looking at some of that oak in the cabin.

There's a living room downstairs, a bedroom with three single beds and a bunk bed with upper and lower berths, a bathroom, and the kitchen area. The south wall of the cabin rises to a big window beneath the tall cathedral ceiling. Up the stairs there are three beds on the open air loft, and a sofa-rocker near the railing, positioned so you can take your first cup of coffee there and look out over the water in front of the cabin just as the sun lays morning color on it. The master bedroom off the loft has a queen-sized bed in it, its own bathroom attached.

"It's another home ot maintain," Anne Marie said, reflecting on the downside of all this beauty.

Dick arrived and was ready to start putting the bence back where it belonged. He added to the conversation before he started work: "This is our retreat," he said. "This is as far away as I can get when we're busy. You might say it will be our Golden Pond."

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

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

"There was a flat-bellied man and his wife up at Paul's Cafe last Tuesday morning," Ivan wrote. "Flat-belly said he was walking across the United States. His wife would drive thirty miles and he would try to catch her in one day. That's walking thirty miles a day. I couldn't figger out why anybody would want to walk across the United States in thirty-mile increments. I asked him how old he was and he said he was 67. I still couldn't figger out why he would want to walk thirty miles a day. I asked him what he did before he retired. He said he was a physiologist and a minister. That answered the question."

"So far the wheat plot has had worms, freeze, and drought," Ivan reported. "I hope it is a hardy plant because it has been hit with a triple whammy."

"Kendall Nichols got a telephone call that was a political poll," Ivan said. "The first question they asked was 'are you a Republican?' Kendall told him he was every morning, but sometimes by noon he was about to change."

"I see," said Ivan, "where the town of Downs has gotten a grant to make an access street to the elevator so that the grain trucks won't have to go down Main Street. Well, I love to hear the throaty growl of the diesel engines as they warn sedans and vans and sissy pick-ups to get out of the way. I love to hear the muted rumble of the loaded and in many cases overloaded grain trucks. I love to feel the ground move, the Main Street buildings echo with the sound of a bountiful harvest back and forth across Main Street. Let Downs have their snooty, exclusive path to the elevator. Let Smith Center keep the trucks rolling right down Main."

"I heard Jim Fetters say something that I have been chuckling about to myself for several days," Ivan noted. "Jim said he had been invited to a meeting. He said 'At the meeting, they will pee in your pocket and try to convince you it is raining.' That is just about the most graphic and accurate appraisal of politicians you can get."

"Melvin Post told me this story many, many years ago," Ivan recalled. "One time Melvin decided he needed a bottle of booze, so he went to Clyde, a bootlegger during those Prohibition days. Clyde told Melvin to go out east of town by the slaughter house and over the railroad tracks. Then he told Melvin to look in the grass by the first telephone pole. Melvin did. Sure enough, there was a pint of whiskey. But Melvin got to thinking - if there was one here, let's check out the other telephone poles. So he did, and picked up six pints of whiskey. Then he came back to town and told Clyde that there wasn't any whiskey there. Clyde said, 'those G-D kds,' meaning some local high school kids, 'have stolen all my whiskey.' He gave Melvin back his money and he hated kids until he left town a couple years later."

"I put $27.84 worth of gas in my car one day last week," Ivan said. "The first car I ever bought and finaced, I think the monthly payments were $27.00"


>

EIGHT AND A HALF INCHES OF RAIN
IN THE PAST TEN DAYS

We have had eight and a half inches of rain in the past ten days. Saturday night's storm left enough that on Sunday morning there was an angry dark torrent of water dumping over the Fairwater dam, and an even angrier, even darker, even more swollen torrent pushing downstream. By evening that torrent had moderated some, but still it is obvious you should not go wading.

Fortunately, Fairwater sits at the headwaters of the Grand River. The main stream drains only a township to the north and east of us. A couple side creeks drain patches of farmland to the northwest and the south. There is only so much run-off that we'll see. Downstream, however, as additional drainage accumulates, the river will be more fearsome. The Grand drains into the upper Fox. The upper Fox drains into Lake Winnebago. Lake Winnebago empties into the lower Fox, which empties into Green Bay and Lake Michigan, which ultimately flows over Niagara Falls and rushes past Montreal and Quebec on its way to the Atlantic. You might watch for the dark stain of our rainstorm as it comes flowing past you.

For some years the middle west has had a moisture deficit. As fiercely as this percipitation is rushing its way to the far sea, little of it is going to make its way into our ground water, little of it is going to stay in our fields. In fact, when the sun comes out and dries the fields, they may bake to a hard crust that is not friendly to green growing things.

Here in Fairwater, we were fortunate: all we got was rain. Storms across the middle west included tornadoes in several states. One of them destroyed all or nearly all the buildings in Bradgate, Iowa. Those of you who have been following my recent Vagabond adventures in Emmetsburg, Iowa, might be interested to know that Bradgate is only about twenty-five southeast of Emmetsburg and only a few miles south of West Bend, the community that has to claim my strain of the Montags. Fortunately, despite the immensity of the destruction in Bradgate, there were only a few injuries, no deaths.

Perhaps those who inhabit the urban canyons of New York and other large cities can be oblivious to the power of Mother Nature, but out here in the great flatness we are constantly humbled by the fierceness of the rushing waters, by the might of the terrible swift winds.

This morning, in the grey light, the pond down the hill from us is a quieter brown urgency. The fierceness has not been subdued, however; it has only moved downstream, as I say, to trouble others on its way to the sea.

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

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

When I pulled into the clubhouse parking lot at Emmetsburg's country club for the Chamber of Commerce Annual Banquet, I was thinking to myself: "I don't know anybody here." Ma Coincidence begged to differ, however. I parked beside a white car that had pulled in a moment before I did. Kathy Fank and her husband, Nick, got out of it. Kathy is Director of the Chamber of Commerce. I interviewed her when I was in Emmetsburg last November.

You would call it a stately old club house. Big. Square. Proud. We started at the bar, of course, for it was cocktail hour. I saw a lot of Busch products in people's hands so I had to remind people that Milwaukee still makes beer by ordering a Miller Genuine Draft. I think Miller is still in Milwaukee.

Nick and I sat down next to a fellow who takes care of Emmetsburg's parks. He was having a beer. We talked for a bit about the likelihood of a random test for drugs and alcohol when he got to work tomorrow. He has a CDL (Commercial Driver's License) so there is zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol in your system when you're on the job. Even the minutest amount left over from the night before will get something put into your file for a year. The fellow didn't bad-mouth the random testing program but he did say it that it didn't address the elemental problem that "some people are bad drivers drunk or sober."

I saw Paul and Peggy Osterman of Emmetsburg's Queen Marie Bed & Breakfast, where I'd stayed while working on my memoir, Curlew:Home. They invited me to their table where I met three other couples, including Cecilia Miller who belongs to the Emmetsburg Writers' Club and who expects to be at the meeting I'll attend on Thursday.

Among the people I sat with at supper were Dr. and Mrs. Coffey. I interviewed Dr. Coffey last November about his work preserving and restoring Emmetsburg's Five Island Lake. The fellow who declined an interview with me was also seated at the table; we greeted each other but neither of us made mention of our earlier phone conversation. I know you win people over with sweetness, so I tried to be sweet, or as sweet as an old bear can be.

The food was terrific, far superior to what you might expect at a small town middle western country club - the best Iowa beef, fried chicken, sliced ham. Potatoes mashed with the skins on, the right touch of garlic added. Potato salad, macaroni salad, one of those Cool Whip salads with miniature marshmallows that are de rigueur at Iowa picnics. Green salad with several choices of dressing. Sturdy rolls to go with the sturdy meal. And green beans. As a rule, I won't eat commercially prepared green beans because I've never had a good experience with them. So I didn't take any of the green beans. When we sat down and started to eat, the doctor's wife comment that they were very good beans.

After supper, the entertainment. Speeches by a couple Emmetsburg high school students. Before you say "Oh, God," consider the possibility that they might be entertaining speeches. Laura Hersom had been county Fair Queen last year, and she spoke as if it were her crown speaking about the experience. Talk about a surprise of expectations. In all its dreams the crown had never imagined "the perfume of livestock." Of course, by the end the crown had been a little more enlightened about county fairs in middle western from country.

Patrick Baker was an exchange student from Germany with the most charming command of the English language. He spoke as if he were the donkey of the Brementown Musicians. "I saw an old dog along the way," he said. "I, with my big donkey heart, felt sorry for him."

"The dog couldn't sing and the cat couldn't sing at all," Patrick said further on. Soon the group was "me, this great singer, and a dog and a cat and a rooster." They found a home, eventually, with a group of bandits, but "we had to promise never to sing again."

Dennis Greenfield sang five Irish songs for us, Irish "because this is a Chamber of Commerce dinner in Emmetsburg, after all." Dennis could sing.

"It seems as if Irish songs are all about war and death.," he said, "so I'll sing about war and death." And he did, in a lovely tenor, a capella.

But not before placing his Want Ad: "I've just finished my degree," he said. "I'm looking for a job in music education."

Andy Joyce, president of the Chamber, had to thank Kathy Fank for her hard work all year as Director of the organization. Kathy had to thank a list of specific people for their help, the Chamber volunteers "who do so much - I don't know what Emmetsburg would do without them." She thanked "this Chamber board - they never ask for recognition, they just do it." And she said that if you want to succeed, you can't be afraid of being ridiculed; you can't be afraid of getting laughed at.

The final moments were given to presenting the "2004 Citizen of the Year Award" to Tim Jackson of Mid-American Energy for everything he and his family had done for the community. The whole Jackson family was there, his wife, the sons, and the daughter. Some of Mid-American Energy's employees were present.

It was a Chamber of Commerce banquet like thousands of other Chamber of Commerce banquets, I suppose. The same kind of appreciation was expressed that you'd hear in other towns across the length and breadth of the middle west, I suppose. This dinner took the form of any dinner in any town, I suppose. Another spot of the glue that binds us, the adhesive that holds our communities together.

And the best part of it - it didn't go on too long. They did what they needed to do. They got that done and got out of there. Tomorrow was another day, and they knew.


>

DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY
COMES TO VISIT THE MIDDLEWESTERNER

I suppose it was a benign visit, because if it wasn't I doubt they'd leave such big tracks in the sand:

Domain Name: NIPR.mil (Military)
OrgName: The Defense Information Systems Agency
OrgID: DISA
Address: DISA/DSSO/JCLCC
Address: Room BF655A, The Pentagon
City: Washington
StateProv: DC
PostalCode: 20301
Country: US

In a comment for his May 18 Words On the Street over at Via Negativa, I left Dave a note that "I had The Defense Information Systems Agency visit my blog-site today. What do you suppose that means?"

Dave, of course, is real reassuring. He said: "They're makin' a list, checkin' it twice, gonna find out who's naughty or nice..."

"Well, fellas," I responded, "it's been nice knowing ya."

Dave said: "Ah, don't panic yet. As my friend Fred used to say at the bottom of all his e-mails, 'You will be notified in writing when it is time to panic.'"

A little Googling reveals that "NIPRNET" is an unclassified but sensitive Internet protocol router network, what was once called the "Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Net." Owned by the Department of Defense (DOD) and created by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), NIPRNET is used to exchange unclassified but sensitive information between "internal" users; apparently it is also used to give Internet access to DOD employees without endangering the secure network, SIPRNET - the "S" standing for "Secret." It may have other uses as well.

One fellow with repeated visits from such an address thought at first that his web site was being examined by a robot but he ultimately decided it was a web proxy of some sort. When he inquired further at NIPRNET, the hostmaster told him: "You know all you need to know."

There may be an innocent explanation. What is it?

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

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

Fritz gave me a to the ceiling in one of the 19' lifts waiting to be rolled onto the dock and loaded for shipment. It was a smooth ride up; he drove the lift forward several feet, then put it back into place. We were up in the thin air; 19' is higher than I like to get without an airplane. He shook the platform. "See," he said, "pretty sturdy." He let the lift back down to the floor position and we climbed off it.

We moseyed over to where a couple fellows were taking pieces of the conveyor that brought painted parts out of the drying oven. What goes into the oven at five or five and a half feet per minute comes out at the same speed, except the parts of warmer. The heat cures the paint to some extent, but still the fellows taking the pieces off the chain wear rubber gloves "because it's too easy to leave marks in the paint at this point," Fritz said. "It'll take a couple hours for the pieces to cool down and for the paint to cure completely. The cool-down is as much a part of the process as heating the piece up."

Just standing near a rack of pieces taken off the line, you could feel their heat. These pieces were parts to the scissors mechanism and the bushings at each end were entirely clear of paint. I'd no more looked at them and wondered "Now how'd they do that?" when Fritz explained there had been a plastic plug in there while painting was being done. The plugs had been pulled out before the pieces got taken off the line and put on the rack.

"You need to stage a certain amount of the grey pieces, then a certain amount of the orange pieces," Fritz said, "so that everyone has the pieces they need in assembly." You can't paint all the orange pieces you'll need for the day because you'll run out of grey ones.

I looked at a piece of metal that obviously would become the floor of the platform. Circles of the steel had been cut out of it towards one end, reducing its weight where strength would not be needed. Every pound that you reduce the platform is a pound of payload the lift can put 19' in the air.

We were back at the receiving area near the front offices. I was looking at the tag on a skid of steel pieces. "That's part of our Kan Ban system," Fritz said. I looked at him like he was speaking Japanese to me.

"It's a Fax Ban," he said. "When this skid of supplies is put into production, this sheet gets turned in to the office where it is faxed to our supplier as a re-order."

It is part of the "lean manufacturing" process that Sky Jack is starting to employ. "Some of us have been through the training," Fritz said. "Now it's time to train the employees."

The Sky Jack facility consists of "several buildings cobbled together over time, with three or four additions," Fritz said. Despite the transitional nature of necessity's cobbling, product flows through the plant in quite a logical fashion, from receiving dock, through the lines in manufacturing to painting, through assembling and testing, to the loading dock.

Fritz and I stook at the front desk talking for a few minutes before I said good bye.

Fritz said: "When you have to lay people off, that's tough. That's the hardest thing I ever had to do. I don't want to do that again. It affects how you think about expanding your production capacity. I'd rather have people work some overtime. Then when things slow down, they are still working eight hours a day."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 22, 1998

How long it has been since I had to scrape ice off the windshield. After these days of very warm weather, the cool breeze this morning is refreshing - almost as if one is stepping out of a cabin overlooking a far Canadian lake. A smell that is fresh, a day that is new. How do they live in the smog of their cities, those who choose to?

Blackbirds flirt and do their mating flutter at the curb on Main Street.

Far to the north, clouds blow through. They are the edge of someone else's cloudy day.

Dandelions have gone to seed. Roadside ditches need mowing. Lawns around the farm houses have been clipped close, like the farm boy's summer butch.

Is that the red of geranium in the flower beds at Five Corners? Certainly it looks so.

A pick-up comes at me pulling boat and trailer; a couple fellows are thinking about fish.

The radio tells us about the boy in Oregon who opened fire on his school mates. "Voted most likely to start World War III by his peers." The joke is not so funny now, as they clean up blood in the cafeteria. Not so funny at all.


>

SATURDAY'S POEM
-----------------------
THE BUTTERFLY GRAVEYARD
by Susan Firer

I have grown old in this city, on this lake,
on the banks of words. I've walked
its beautiful cruel chemical lawns,
given up on perfection, accepted
handseled molecularity. Entrances & exits
are always colder, nearer to doors & outside
than to ins. The earth's a greenhouse.
Here people bend under invisible knapsacks of grief,
visit butterfly graveyards with their Jeffrey Dahmers
& Father Groppis, with their corner taverns and church bells.
On hot days in Lake Michigan bodies bob & emerge
against horizon-sized ore boat backgrounds.
Ghosty empty plastic bags somersault in lake air,
wind snap catch in trees. The city
is clearer with Calatrava's wings.
Maple seeds make black roofs gold.
The lake is generous with stones
and a horizon of language, tugs, & ghostships.
Look! The lake folds over us in our sleep
drowns us in brave weeping vowels.
Before I was born, I buried people I loved.
In the morning lake a dead father's
yellow, palm-tree covered bathing trunks
a dead mother's blue petalled bathing cap.
In a story from my childhood, one brother
holds an entire sea in his mouth,
while his siblings scavenge the seafloor.
I have always lived on this lake.
It is in my breath.


"The Butterfly Graveyard" appeared in Natural Bridge. Susan Firer's fourth book, The Laugh We Make When We Fall, won the 2001 Backwaters Prize and is published by Backwaters Press (Omaha, NE). Her third book, The Lives of the Saints and Everything, won the Cleveland State University Prize and the Posner Award for the best book of poems published by a Wisconsin author in 1993. Her other books include The Underground Communion Rail (West End Press) and My Life with the Tsar and Other Poems (New Rivers Books). Her work has appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Best American Poetry 1992, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press), A Whole Ohter Ballgame: Women's Literature on Women's Sport (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road (Faber and Faber), Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves (University of Illinois Press), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), The Georgia Review, Ms., Chicago Review, Iowa Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship and a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Two poems from her most recent book were featured and archived on Verse Daily. Recent work has appeared in New American Writing, Third Coast, and Lungfull!, and is forthcoming in The Book of Irish American Poetry (U.of Notre Dame Press).

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

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.

INDEX OF SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o David Clewell, "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin" - February 21, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 4, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Tom Montag, "February 1, 2001" - February 14, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004

>

STOP IN AT BRAIN CRAYONS
FOR A NEW APPROACH

Stop in at Brain Crayons and see the exchange between apennyforyourthoughts and NT99 that took place last Sunday, May 16. They're talking about A New Approach for dealing with the demons some of us have to wrestle. I can't speak to the efficacy of the method discussed; instead, what stands out for me is the humaneness of the exchange, the caring, the courtesy. If you want to see two people talk about issues that are difficult to speak of, and talk about them with compassion for each other, this is the post to read. If you're at all squeamish when people talk about wrestling their real demons, then this is not the post for you.

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

SOME NOTES ON THIS HABIT OF WRITING
Another conversation with myself - May 18, 2004

There are days I don't think about my writing any more than I think about my breathing. I breathe. I write. I have put myself in the position where I am constantly making notes. I am never "writing." I am either making notes, or refining them, or typing them up; sometimes I have to make something of them, but that's not writing either, exactly.

Less and less I think about the act of writing. More and more I think about what I see and hear and want to record. This is a delicious place I've got myself into. I don't know if my method would work for anyone else, but it works for me.

Of course I haven't yet come face-to-face with any major blockage of my impetus to make notes. At the point I have difficulty recording what I observe, I'll have a serious problem. And I don't know how I would deal with it. I've had "dry spells" before, sometimes for years at a time. For the time being, though, I'll just thank the gods that as a writer I have a horse to ride, even if sometimes it seems like an old nag. I can't complain because I'm not such a vision of loveliness myself.

Partly, I have reached the point where I have some perspective and a sense of humor. I know I'm not going to compete with Shakespeare; doing what I do, no one will make that confusion. And I know I'm not going to make money doing it; I accept that.

If it's not art, like Shakespeare, and if there's no money in it, what's left?

What's left is to have fun. I know what I'm after and I should enjoy going after it. The journey, not the destination. The process, not the product. The vagabond trail. If you keep doing what you love, why, you'll live forever, won't you?

My habit, in making notes, is to include everything to the extent that I can. It is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Of course I have been accused sometimes of failing to see the forest for the trees. That's a risk you take. When you gobble up great parts of experience trying to understand it, it won't all get digested exactly perfect. I'm okay with that. I am a human being, ergo I fail.

But didn't we have fun on the slide down?

My intention is to write until I have stood every place there is to stand and looked everywhere there is to look. When I have seen everything, I will look at it from the other side, I will pick it up and turn it over.

I never get tired of quoting the good folks I've met along my way.

Because of what I write - other people's stories - I want to be less proprietory in where and how I tell them. The thing to remember is that what's important is telling the stories; what's not important is me. I am merely the radio through which the stories are heard.

That should be enough for me. I'm not sure it always is. Sometimes I want some recognition. Sometimes I want my work to be noticed. Sometimes I want some of the money that the better-selling authors make with their lesser stories. I want to be invited to teach at some of the conferences I only get asked to enroll in. Jealousy is a green-headed hydra, I tell you. You can laugh at it, and still it returns.

The problem with note-taking along the way is that one may have nothing to say about great swatches of one's experience. There are times when any observation you make falls leaden and dead. What do you do then, Tom, huh?

I suppose you've got to write a lot of sentences to find the really good ones, the gems. Most of what one writes is craft - sturdy and reliable and as good as you can make it. Craft prepares for and carries the art of it, I think. Your beautiful passages will be inaccessible unless they are set into decent and respectable surroundings. So that's what you strive for, even when the note-taking isn't going well.

The other thing is: the first effort is never the final draft. Capture all the important elements, even if your prose doesn't want to sing; capture the important elements now, and revise later.

I think I have nothing to write about. I am sitting parked in the rest area along Interstate 90 in Minnesota. An old man gets out of the car, walks around to the passenger-side door, and helps his wife get up and out of her seat. She is slow about it, and he is patient. He offers her hand to get hold of; when she's finally up, balanced, he offers her his arm. He smiles. The smile is genuine. They walk towards the rest rooms. She is taking very small steps, just nibbles.

As he leaves her so he can go into the men's room, her feet get away from her and it looks like she's going to drift away down the incline, a runaway out of control, headed back towards the car. Quickly he closes the distance, grabs her by the elbow, steadies her. He leads her to a newspaper rack. She puts her hand out, onto it, steadies herself there. He is still smiling. He uses the men's room. When he's finished, he leads her back to the car, helps her into it. You wouldn't think he'd have to still be smiling sweetly.

I don't know why he walked her up to the rest rooms. She didn't use the Ladies. Did she simply need to get out of the car and stretch her legs? Did they need to give me this little something that shines, when all I've been thinking are dull and leaden sentences?

The world is full of its million surprises.

Part of my success as a chronicler of my time and place is due to the fact that I'm open to what comes to me, to the extent that I'm able to resist having expectations. Insisting on what you expect to see will blind you to the gifts of serendipity. As soon as you start thinking the world is a certain way, it will be different than that.

My openness to the world must be seen by others. I don't know how it shows. My daughters call me a geek magnet because strangers feel comfortable coming up and telling me about themselves. The people I interview are comfortable enough they sometimes tell me things their spouses don't know. If I'm to be the safe receptacle for what these people tell me, I must be conveying to them somehow that I shall do them no harm. People are comfortable talking to me.

I think partly it's because I look deeply. During interviews. In restaurants. Sitting on a bench in a shopping mall. I have to be careful with that. People can get the wrong impression.

Is that it? People see that I'm seeing deeply? If I were a crook, this would be quite an advantageous characteristic to possess. Yet if I were a crook, perhaps I could not make the unspoken agreement that I will do them no harm.

Whatever the characteristic is, it doesn't show up in photographs. I was pleased when a photographer for the L'Anse Sentinel took a picture of me interviewimg Joe Schuette last February when I was in L'Anse. I thought that when my picture ran in the paper I'd get to see what it is that I do during interviews to encourage people to talk freely. Alas, all I could see was an over-weight, grey-bearded, grumpy-looking fellow you'd wonder why anyone would talk to. So the quality is kinetic, not static; you have to see it moving, you can't stop it and get it.

I have read transcripts of my interviews looking for it, and have listened to the tapes trying to discern the characteristic in the content of the interview and the quality of the exchanges. I don't find it in either of those places.

It may be as simple as this: I listen. Perhaps I listen deeply. Or perhaps anyone who actively listens will create the same kind of comfort and be able to elicit the same kind of information.

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

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

At its peak, Sky Jack in Emmetsburg employed more than three hundred people. Then the bottom fell out of the business. "There was a realignment in the industry as a whole, a consolidation in the customer-base, and overproduction on the part of manufacturers," Fritz said by way of explanation. 9-11 worsened the slight recession we were experiencing and slowed the industry a bit too."

Ideally, Fritz thinks, the Emmetsburg plant should continue to make about the number of lifts it currently does. "We could do a couple more machines per day, but it is a seasonal industry and you want to balance your work throughout the year."

"The question is," he said, "how much market share can we get?"

When Sky Jack employed three hundred people here, the plant produced three products: about 16-18 per day of the lifts they still produce; about five aluminum lifts per day; and about 4-6 engine-driven scissors lifts. The line of aluminum lifts has been discontinued because Sky Jack wasn't selling enough of them to make the return worthwhile. Production of the engine-driven lifts has gone back to the facility in Canada.

Some companies are still making aluminum lifts, Fritz added, "but they've become such a 'commodity' it's hard to be competitive."
Five or six years ago there wer twelve different scissors lift manufacturers, Fritz indicated. "Basically, it's down to three now."

Sky Jack's biggest North American competitors are JLG and Genie. Both are larger companies, both are also in the "boom" business.

"We don't produce a boom product at this point, neither here nor in Canada," Fritz said. "That's not to say that we won't in the future. Time will tell."

We're talking about self-propelled, not truck-mounted booms. "Booms on trucks are nearly a while different industry," he said.

The different between Sky Jack's 15' model and its 19' model is an additional layer of scissors to gain the additional four feet of height. Nineteen-foot scissors lifts are the industry's biggest seller. It is the most popular model and satisfies the widest range of needs.

"Does the market want something taller?" Fritz asked rhetorically. There are taller lifts, he said. Sky Jack at Guelph makes a lift that is 46" wide in the bvase with models that reach to 20' and 26'. There is also the 9250 made at the Guelph plant - 92" wide at the base, lift to 50' in the air. What you order "all depends on what you need the machine for and what you need to lift."

The models built in Emmetsburg have the advantage of fitting through standard office doorways. They'll fit in an elevator to be taken to another floor of a building.

Fritz demonstrated how easily the bank of batteries swing out from one side of a lift's base. With another easy motion, he swung out a door on the other side that holds everything else you might need to do maintenance on. "Nobody has doors that open up and allow such easy service as ours," Fritz said. Even the reservor for the oil that lifts the scissors swing out on the door for easy checking and filling.

When the lift starts being elevated, bars on each side of the base turn 90-degrees so the flat surface becomes parallel to the floor. This will prevent the lift from tipping if the wheels on one end get driven over a drop-off. "Everyone is doing this now," Fritz said. "At one time, no one had this. As industry regulations developed, more safety standards were mandated in the ANSI specifications."

"We have input into the standards," Friz said. "All the scissors lift manufacturers have representatives at the trade organization, the Scaffolding Industry Association."

"When the scissors lift just came out," he said, "the question was: how do you classify it? Is it a crane? A boom? How do you regulate it? There have to be safety regulations in place."

"Scissors lifts are elevating platforms, aerial lifts, a whole new category of equipment developed some twenty-five years ago," he said.

After the industry shake-out of the past few years, Fritz said, "the industry has come back healthier and stronger than it was. The next four or five years look good for the industry as a whole and look good for Sky Jack specifically."

"Production has increased 30% over the past two months," Fritz indicated. "Sometimes it has been a struggle to keep all the parts flowing in as needed. If you increase production 30% in two months, your supply base has to be able to do the same thing."

"Our employees' biggest aggrevation is running out of parts," he said. "It's a disruption. You're messing with their flow."

To be continued...

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 21, 1998

Another lovely morning. The peonies are heading out; some are showing a little of the color. Soon the ants will come to open them. Usually this comes in June, here along the garage, but we may see it a little earlier this year.

Birds in the morning - they are as single-minded as water. All that empty sky and they must fill it with sound. They try, mightily.

The land is clearly farm country this morning - fields worked smooth, crops sprouted, sun on black soil and green plant. A field thick with peas, near the pole where sat the snowy owl. Corn four inches tall.

A few fields near Five Corners still have not been worked at all.

North of Five Corners, a skunk dead on the road. Farther on, a dead possum. The night has not been kind.

Crows are boastful fellows, even to the way they walk.


>

THE PRESENTATIONS IN EMMETSBURG

I went to Emmetsburg to make two presentations for the Senior Fun & Wellness Day coordinated by Iowa Lakes Community College, Northwest Aging Association, and Palo Alto County Health Systems. Session #1, at 10:30 a.m., was titled "The Story of Curlew:Home." I used the opportunity to talk about how I came to write my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm. I was speaking to an audience of twenty-four, as large an audience as I have had in front of me in quite some time. The classroom was full.

These senior citizens had just come from hearing the keynote address, a fellow billed as a "motivational speaker."

"That was too noisy," one of the women said as she entered the room. Yeah, I'd heard him at quite a distance. "I promise you I won't be that loud," I said. Although, I have to admit, people don't usually have to turn up their hearing aids when I'm speaking either.

I told my story and read swatches of my memoir. Before I read from the piece about butchering chickens, I asked them how much they wanted to hear about butchering chickens. One woman right up front answered for the whole group of them. She said, "We've all butchered chickens, you can't shock us." So I read about killing the chickens:

I was only ten or eleven years old when the task of killing the chickens fell to me. The oldest child will be your natural-born killer, loaded as he is with the most the soonest in the way of responsibility; too much too early has a way of bending you. I was, at that age, too young to empathize with the plight of chickens yet old enough that it felt real good to be important. You could have asked me to do damn near anything....

My mother's method was different, learned from her mother, as I learned it from mine. It is elegant in its simplicity. You take hold of the chicken by its legs. You put the head and neck of the chicken on the ground. You put a broom stick on the chicken's neck, behind the head. You set your right foot on the broom stick to the right side of the chicken's head and your left foot on the broom stick to the left side of the chicken's head. And then - remember you've got the chicken's legs in your hands - you pull the legs of the chicken up until its head is separated from the rest of it.

I could kill four chickens in the time it takes to tell you how to kill one.

"We castrated pigs, too," I said. "But I'm just going to read to you from the end of that essay."

We were men - or were fast becoming men - in a world we had to wrestle a living from. We were poised between the way it used to be and the way it was gonna be, doing our best, our jaws clenched tight as the world hit us again and again.

We could do what had to be done, but we didn't want to stay at castrating pigs more than a few hours. There is only so much blood and manure you can take at any one time. Only so much scream of pigs. Only so much knowledge of pain.

You can tell when you've got an audience with you. There's very little coughing, no fidgeting, everywhere you look there are eyes looking into yours. It's like the whole room is holding its breath. That's the kind of audience I had for the whole hour. When I finished - "Something had ended, something new was begun" - I got a warm round of applause. And I sold a few books.

The audience for Session #2 at 12:30 p.m. was considerably smaller, but just as attentive. I told them about my Vagabond project, about the talk you hear, the people you meet, including Ivan Burgess, whom you know as the inimitable writer of the ECHO ECHO, seen here on Tuesdays:

After his father died, Ivan's mother took in washing and ironing to support the large brood. To earn a little income for the family, a couple of Ivan's older brothers would go up town every morning to do whatever needed doing. One brother would clean out a farmer's chicken house for him; he'd get paid with a big container of milk that the cream had been skimmed off of; he'd bring that home and it would be milk for the children. "My mother would fix a meal," Ivan remembered, "and then she'd step back from the table while we ate. If there was anything left over when we were done, then she would eat."

"In those years we were probably the poorest people in Smith Center," Ivan said.

Their house was near the train tracks and there was a hydrant out in the yard. Hoboes got in the habit, when they got off the train, they'd come into the yard to drink from the hydrant. One day the big container of skim milk disappeared from the house. Ivan's older brother went marching off towards the Hobo Hotel farther west along the tracks, a circle of stones where the hoboes stayed when in Smith Center, where they sat and talked, cooked their meals, slept. Ivan went tagging along behind his brother. His brother marched right into the Hobo Hotel, he walked up to the jug of skim milk that was sitting there plain as sin, picked it up and headed towards home. None of the hoboes said a word. They knew they'd crossed the line. You don't take from poor people. You don't take from people what they can't afford to give.

About the time he was in the seventh grade, Ivan spent a lot of time in the Hobo Hotel with those men. "They were ordinary people looking for work," Ivan said. "In those days the train going west through town was carrying men looking for work to the west. The train going east would be carrying men looking for work to the east. I was never afraid. Those were hard times. Those were good men. A kid couldn't do that today."

"I sat with them all one evening," Ivan remembered. "When I got up to go, one of the fellows said, 'Kid, come here.' He said, 'Kid, if you are ever riding the rails and pass through Denver, help them fill the refrigerated cars with ice. It's hard work, kid, but when you get done they'll buy you the biggest breakfast you've ever had.' That fellow didn't have anything, but he gave me the best thing he had. He gave me everything he could."

At the end of the Vagabond presentation, one of the fellows in the audience asked how I could see red-tailed hawks everywhere. He was teasing me. Obviously he had read Curlew:Home, in which the red-tailed hawk becomes something of a poet's icon and an omen of good fortune; the birds grace the book with their surprising frequency. And he had noticed.

"When my wife and I are traveling," the fellow said, "one of us will say 'There's a red-tailed hawk.' The other one will know what we're talking about."

Yeah, they'd be talking about me.

I stopped briefly after that to see my friend and grade school classmate (and the one who provides room and board when I'm in Emmetsburg - puts me up and puts up with me), Sally Jordan. Sally was putting her plants back out on the patio. She had put them out once before, but had to bring them back in the house when temperatures were forecast to get below freezing. We talked, and I had some ice tea, but I couldn't stay long. I had a long drive home ahead of me, almost seven hours.

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

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

We've been touring Sky Jack in Emmetsburg. Sky Jack makes highlifts, about twenty-three of them a day. Plant Manager Fritz Eggel is my tour guide.

Sky Jack builds 15' and 19' models in the Emmetsburg plant. The product has a "tilt sensor" that keeps it from elevating if the base is tilted more than a certain amount form side to side or front to back. The proper operation of the tilt sensor is checked too, before a machine passes inspection.

The folks doing final inspection and testing are familiar with operations throughout the plant so they know when something is not right.

At the very end of the line I saw a woman with a little paint brush in hand examining each machine that came out of the inspection tower for any dings in the paint. She touched up any imperfections she found. This, folks, is attention to detail. You want the finished machine to be perfect when it goes to the customer.

How does Sky Jack communicate a customer's expectations to workers on the floor? A shop work order follows each machine through the plant, specifying options. Some customers will want a full gate at the end of the platform, instead of a chain across the opening. Some will want a flashing light to give their lift higher visibility. Some may order hinged railings that can be folded down onto the platform to create a lower profile, as when the lift might have to be moved under low-hanging piping or ductwork.

A plug-in for a 110-volt outlet is now standard on Sky Jack machines. Some manufacturers still require that you specify this feature as an option. Equipment that requires electricity can be plugged right into the outlet on the Sky Jack platform, even when it's 19' in the air.

"Another option is special colors," Fritz said. "The cusotmer might want us to match their corporate colors."

"Our company colors are orange and grey," Fritz said. "Orange because it stands out, it's noticeable. Orange and grey have been our colors for at least twenty-five years. If you see a lift that's orange and grey, you know right away it's a Sky Jack product."

"You see Sky Jacks everywhere now," he said. "They're in shopping malls, they're in the movies. It used to be special to see one. Now it's 'Oh, there's another Sky Jack.' The people here have a sense of pride in what we build."

Sky Jack has a sales force across the country calling on cusotmers. The primary customer for their lifts is the equipment rental industry, such businesses as United Rentals and RSC, as well as independent rental shops.

Sky Jack's lifts have a reputation as a better quality product, more "robust" than some of its competitors, Fritz said. "Customers think ours are more solidly built."

They have a reputation for lasting a long time, too, he said. "The typical life time of such a lift is five years. We saw some Sky Jack machines get sent back to be reconditioned when they were thirteen years old."

Why do lifts have such short lifetimes? "Machines get beat to hell," Fritz said. "Worn out or damaged tothe point you can't repair them. Railings get bent. The machines get dented. A lot of damage gets done to them in the course of being used."

The Sky Jack lift stands on solid rubber tires. "These will wear out quicker depending on where you use them," Fritz said. "Rough concrete wears the tires down more quickly. Airport tarmacks are especially hard on them. Tires also get messed up when used for dry-walling and concrete work."

The harshest use that a Sky Jack lift has been put to, in Fritz's knowledge, "was in a steel mill, re-lining the coke ovens. It was a hot, dirty environment, tough on the wheels. When your wheels start getting cut up and they're losing chunks, you've got to replace them. The wheels are what you're resting on."

Sky Jack in Emmetsburg is in "the aerial industry." The aerial industry has replaced scaffolding, Fritz said. "There has been an evolution in the construction industry. Lifts are safer and faster than scaffolding."

Lifts are also being used in more factories. "Some industrial buildings have twenty-eight foot side walls," Fritz said. "They have huge open spans. No one wants anyone on a ladder any more."

The design of lift equipment has to meet ANSI specifications (American National Standards Institute). "You can't build a lift that doesn't meet those standards," Fritz said.

I asked how Sky Jack was able to evaluate the work of its employees doing so many parts of the job independently. "There is a supervisor and a lead-hand in assembly," Fritz said. "Work at each station should take about twenty-three minutes. Can the person do the job in twenty-three minutes? Can they do it at the level of quality that's required?"

Nobody is more important than anybody else, Fritz said. "It takes everybody to make a lift. It has to flow all the way through the plant. All the jobs have to be done for the finished machine to come off the end of the line."

Sky Jack hires for appropriate experience and provides on-the-job training. Work instructions specify how any particular part of the job needs to be done.

"If you take care of these guys, they'll take care of you," Fritz said. "People have to help each other out when they're done with their own work, and they do."

Fritz was born and raised in Canada. How did he get to Sky Jack in Emmetsburg?

"It was an opportunity, something different for me," he said. "I was in the Guelph [Ontario] plant of Sky Jack. An opportunity came up down here, I came down and took a look, I said Okay. I've been here five years, going on six."

The Guelph plant is larger, Fritz said, and runs a wider variety of products. "The narrower product range here makes it easier to focus on what we have to do."

"Culturally, Canada and the United States are so similar," he said. "The biggest adjustment was moving from a larger community to a small one."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 19, 1998

A cool, blue sky this morning. It was a hot day yesterday - for May - and will be a warm one again today. El Nino? A natural cycle of some other kind? Whatever the case, I like to say: "If it's not 30 degrees below zero, you won't hear me complain too much."

I head north on Highway E. The smell of pigs is strong in the morning air. On this scale - one farmer's hog shed - it smells like money to an Iowa farm boy. From one of those hog factories, with 10,000 head under one roof, it smells like greed.

On the radio we're told government officials fear that whatever is destroying amphibians world-wide may also affect humankind. Duh.

*

MAY 20, 1998
Clay Pameter takes his garbage out to the curb in front of the C&D Bar. He turns and waves. One of the Stellmachers stands talking in front of the lumberyard. He and his brother were much younger men when we moved into Fairwater. So was Clay Pameter.

Another raccoon is sprawled dead on the road north of town.

Once again the horse is grazing at the north end of its pasture. I don't know what that means.


>

GONE OFF TO EMMETSBURG, IOWA,
TO DELIVER PRESENTATIONS -
I'LL BE BACK THURSDAY MORNING

You can go home again.

And you will be embraced. A few years ago I wrote my memoir of growing up on a farm in Palo Alto County, Iowa, Curlew: Home and residents welcomed me. The book spoke to them, and for them.

I've been invited to speak Wednesday at the Senior Wellness Fair in Emmetsburg, to make two presentations actually: "The Story of Curlew: Home", where I'll talk about the process of writing the book, and read from it; and my Vagabond in the Middle presentation, where I'll speak about my current work, and read selections from the Vagabond Journals.

I don't suppose I'll sell a lot of books, though selling a few would be nice; what's important is being able to explain what I do, what I love doing, and share some of it with people in the seat of the county where I grew up. These are the people among whom I was raised, and they shaped me indeliably, just as that place in Iowa that has marked me forever. One receives, one also gives back.

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

"A VERY SPECIAL PATIENT LIVES TO
TELL EVERYTHING THAT WENT RIGHT"

I was shocked yesterday when I looked at the mail and saw a big, colored photograph of Harry Eisele on the front of the Redfield Press, Redfield, SD. It's not Harry's photograph that was shocking, but the fact that it accompanied an article entitled "A Success Story for EMS Week." Any time the Emergency Medical Technicians show up, you know it's not good.

I had interviewd Harry when I was in Redfield a year ago. Harry is 92. He had farmed all his working life outside Redfield, near Frankfort, SD; farmed, and led a dance band. Harry plays saxophone. He gave up an opportunity to audition for Lawrence Welk in 1933 when his father took sick. Middle western duty: Harry stayed on the farm instead of becoming a big-time musician. Still, he had his dance band for sixty years! When I asked him how he could play music much of the night several nights a week and still get up in the morning to farm, he said that sometimes when he got tired, he had to stop the tractor and rest his head for a bit on the steering wheel; and sometimes he had to stop the tractor and take a nap on the ground in the shade of it, out in the middle of his field.

According to the Redfield Press, "Harry Eisele survived a series of heart attacks thanks to a quick thinking barber, a pair of prompt and prepared paramedics, two dedicated deputy sheriffs, and an incomparable local medical staff."

As Harry tells the story, he'd stopped to get a haircut; "Art Solheim was ahead of me, and we always have a few remarks of wisdom when we meet. I remember getting in the chair, and when Art walked out the door I said to Dick [the barber], 'There's a good guy,' but Dick said he had a hard head of hair to cut."

That is the last thing Harry remembers, until he woke up in the Sioux Falls Hospital.

Thanks to all those local heroes, Harry was still around to wake up in the hospital. And that pleases me greatly. See, I still owe Harry a dinner. He tricked me into letting him buy me dinner, when it had been my intention to buy dinner for him after our interview was done. So I owe him one. I hope to repay the debt when I am back in Redfield this July.

Dawn Oakley, one of the EMTs who provided emergency treatment to Harry, thinks he survived his ordeal because "he definitely had things left to do. Given his age, it's really something. He gives so much to the community, and plans to get back to doing that."

See you in July, Harry.

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

PORTENTS IN THE MOVEMENT &
LOCATION OF LARGE ANIMALS

It started innocently enough. In the May 13, 1998 "Morning Drive Journal" entry I posted here the other day I said: “The old horse is out to the far end of his pasture this morning. This is not usual. What is it a portent of?” Peter at slow reads left a comment that he's glad he is "not the only one who wonders what the position of large animals in a field portends." I suggested maybe Peter could write a blog-entry outlining his thoughts about portents in the movment and location of large animals. Well, seems this fellow Nash wrote a letter touching on this very subject, and Peter posted it yesterday. The letter concludes with an idea for a research project:"I’m starting small," Nash writes. "I’m hoping to get a grant from The Old Farmer’s Almanac to study the connection between cow arrangements and long-term weather forecasting. I hope to continue with this farmer [with whom he'd already talked about Bovine Positioning] because he was very nice. My working plan is to outfit the cows with battery-powered Rudolph noses in order to study their movements at night. It would be in December and I don’t think anything would look out of place."

I just had to leave this comment at Peter's site: "If Nash gets a big enough grant, maybe I could sign on as a 'technical advisor' and belly up to the trough too. You know I'm interested in the outcome."

What d'ya think? Check out Nash's letter and let us know.

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

MOSEY OVER TO "SWITCHED AT BIRTH"

Mosey over to Switched at Birth and read Delores' List, Beth's post from Sunday, May 16th. This is some of the punch-line: "No," she laughed. "Once you've sky-dived, if there's anything else you want to do, you just go do it."

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

I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

I'm not very political, but... who would you believe? (A) The people who may have reason to cover their butts by denying the report OR (B) The fellow who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the My Lai massacre? Yeah, they said, let's accuse the guy who won the Pulitzer of "journalistic malpractice." I've got a collection of rocks smart enough to know that "A" is the wrong answer to the question.

I'm not very political, but... I think W could use Time Management training, to say the least. Why does he spend time talking about Banning Gay Marriage (which hurts no one) instead of doing something about the Record High Oil Prices In the Face of Record Oil Company Profits (which hurts us all and is going to wreck economic recovery). Oh, yeah, that's right, I know why... W is a Righteous Christian Oilman, that's why.

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

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

Fritz Eggel looks like a Plant Manager should look. Solid and serious, a twinkling of fore-knowledge in his eyes, lithe and obviously used to moving. He met me at Sky Jack's front desk and led me on a tour through the Emmetsburg facility.

Sky Jack makes high lifts. At peak production, the Emmetsburg plant employed more than three hundred. When times turned bad over the past few years, the work force in Emmetsburg was reduced to almost a skeleton crew. Things have been picking back up and now there are about eighty people working, turning out twenty-two or twenty-three lifts per day.

The receiving area where materials arrive is near the offices at the front of the building on Emmetsburg's south edge, but in the manufacturing portion of the facility. Several work lines flow from receiving towards the paint booth, where finished pieces get a coat of the company's colors before they go to the assembly side of the plant. On the assembly side, several lines flow towards the loading dock at the back of the building where finished lifts are shipped out. All through the plant, everything moves towards that shipping dock.

Steel comes into the receiving area, some of which Sky Jack cuts for use, some of which has been pre-cut to specified lengths. Some of the steel goes into the machine shop for working before it goes out on the floor. Kooima provides the steel for the arms of the scissors lift, laser-cut to exact specifications.

Fritz and I stepped through a big doorway into the manufacturing area, the "dirty" side of the factory. I was wearing safety glasses as required, but they don't protect you from a welder's brightness. "Don't look directly at the welding," Fritz said by way of caution. I knew that as a child, but had forgotten.

The first work station, right inside the doorway, was a robot welder made by Motoman. A fellow would set up pieces on one side of the welding booth, he took finished pieces out the other side. Doors to the welding booth closed so that you could not see the welding being done, you couldn't see the robot move from position to position. Once the welding was completed, the doors opened, the operator set in the next batch of pieces to be welded, he took out the finished part, the doors closed again.

Kenin Miller, Sky Jack's manufacturing engineer, programs the machine to make the welds as required. The welder will run the same part for long periods, so it doesn't have to be re-programmed often. The automated welder is twice as fast as welding by hand "and the welds are consistent," Fritz said.

The pieces being welded together up front become part of the scissor arms later on as they move towards the paint line. Another line is fashioning motor housings, another is making the platforms. Finished pieces stack up, waiting to be hung on the conveyor that will inch them towards the paint booths. Sky Jack's colors are orange and grey. In one booth, a grey primer gets sprayed onto each piece as it passes through. In the second booth a top coat of orange or grey is applied, as appropriate.

In each paint booth, there's a fellow in there dressed in a protective suit, looking like a spaceman. He pulls a hose that uses compressed air to force paint out and onto the piece; he spray-paints each item as it moves through at five and a half feet per minute. Paint fumes are constantly being removed from the booth by an air filtering system.

Work in the spray booth is hot and dirty and I imagine you can't be claustrophobic. Employees switch off working in the spray booth so no one has to be in there too long at a time. Still, one fellow probably paints a thousand parts each day, Fritz said.

Once the top coat has been applied, the line pulls the piece forward into the drying oven. The painted piece comes out the far end of the oven and feeds into a line on the assembly side of the shop, the "clean" side.

This work station is intended for assembly of particular pieces. At another station, assembled pieces get bolted to assembled pieces for other lines. Typically the work needing to be done at any of the stations here should take twenty-three minutes. In other words, every twenty-three minutes each station should send its finished work one click towards the shipping dock. That means a finished Sky Jack lift should come off the line every twenty-three minutes.

The lifts are battery-powered. A 24-volt system is created by linking four 6-volt batteries in series. The completed lift will be expected to hoist about five hundred pounds or so. I saw the batteries being put together in four-packs. Components were feeding in from the side and being bolted onto the basic chassis. The scissors component was added, the platform was bolted on. Every twenty-three minutes a machine was one station closer to the finish line. Railings get put on the platform. Striping and decals are added. The machine looks finished at that point.

Yet it is not finished. It is not ready to roll out the door until it has been tested. Can the lift safely elevate 150% of the load it is rated for? If the answer is yes, the limit mechanism is re-set to the rated capacity so the lift will not operate when there is more weight on the platform than there's supposed to be.

At the design stage, a prototype of a Sky Jack lift will be cycled continuously for twenty-four hours a day with 150% of load for what is considered to be the lifetime of the machine, to ensure that it holds up and there are no weak components.

To be continued....

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

DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (9)

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, May 14, May 16, and May 17, 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.


There is a propensity among Canadians, McGregor suggests, "for political solutions that will accommodate both or all possibilities raised by a situation rather than forcing a choice between them." Supporting this analysis, McGregor says, "is the Canadian Supreme Court's 1998 decision in the Reference on Quebec Separation, which not only declines to find for or against either party, but also makes a legal duty out of negotiation."

If I'm to be honest, I suppose I have to admit there is a propensity among middle westerners to believe there's one right way to do things, and if you don't know what it is perhaps you're a damn fool. It's true that we are neither so pluralistic nor so accommodating as McGregor's Canadians. This may have something to do with the higher percentage of Irish, Scottish, and French in Canada's population, and a higher percentage of Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians here in the middle west. In any case, we do tend to see things as black and white, on and off, cold and hot. Partly that's because the struggle here is life and death on a grand scale; and partly it's because we've got enough to do without having to grade shades of grey all day and split hairs. Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but not much.

We don't consider all possibilities. If something looks like it'll work, well, by God, that's what we'll go with. You can't be a-yammering all day whether it's this or that or t'other, there's work to be done.

Further, sometimes we think of the tire iron as a negotiating tool. It doesn't very precisely discriminate the nuances, but it does help the other guy to see things your way.

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

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

"One thing you can't be if you live in Smith Center is thin-skinned," Ivan writes. "Has nothing to do with the weather - it just means that if you spend your time in cafes in Smith Center your alleged faults and idiosyncracies will be discussed not after you have left but while you are still present. Of course you are expected to reply in kind."

"Hey! Listen up, pilgrim," Ivan says. "If you are needin' a talent for a program, I know one. Last Sunday I heard Casey Johnson play a cello solo at church. She was good. Casey is a teacher in the local grade school. Not very often you hear a cello player in Smith Center, Kansas."

"Dick Weltmer is closing in on having his last sale at the Sale Barn," Ivan says. "I don't know what he is going to do after that. He don't play golf and he don't fish. About all that is left is going to car races or singing in the choir."

"Things have sure changed over the years," Ivan observes. "You see a lot of grills out in the yard or patio. Years ago we used to go to the bathroom outdoors and cooked indoors. Now we have seen a reversal in this. Cooking outdoors and going to the bathroom indoors."

"When I was young, I mean really young, like 6 or 7 years old," Ivan says, "I used to listen to a radio station that I can't even remember. One of the songs a country singer sang was 'The Bald Headed End of the Broom." All I remember was the words "Boys, stay away from the girls, I say, and give them lots of room, because when you're wed they hit you on the head with the bald-headed end of the broom.' And the same guy used to sing 'who broke the lock on the hen house door.' We didn't listen to much opera at our house."

"Well," he says, "it was one of them Ask and You Shall Receive kind of things. Last Thursday morning the local boys were moanin' and groanin' about the lack of moisture. At about 1:30 a gentle rain started falling. It was one of the most beautiful rains I had seen in a long time. And by a quarter to three in the afternoon the local boys had become their old arrogant selves."

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURAL
MAY 18, 1998

A hot day yesterday. The night air has cooled us. More heat expected today; Mary says they are predicting hot and muggy. We have blue sky and bright sun now, so summer-like weather is certainly possible.

We are expecting a friend to visit tonight or tomorrow. He's leaving Boston, heading for San Francisco. He's a younger man, so the extreme wrenching that change of address requires will not affect him so much as it might someone of my age and my middle western temperament. He is adventuresome to a greater degree than a settled man like myself.

A quiet morning in the village. Long shadows. North on Highway E, a dead cat; farther on, a raccoon, dead. Two blackbirds harass a crow.

There are only a few fields that are not showing signs of one crop or another. The fields south of Five Corners are still chief among those that haven't been worked.

It is Monday. It is the start of the work week. You might also say it is the start of summer.

Ripon is a city with trees. They arch over Watson Street like a cathedral's ceiling. Let us pray. Let us thank God, as Cummings would say, for most this amazing day.


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

This post concludes our tour of Horizons Unlimited, a sheltered workshop on the south edge of Emmetsburg. Teresa Murphy has been my tour guide. We have been in the "Creative Stitches" portion of the plant, and have just entered the screen printing area.

Pam Hartman was at work in the screen printing room when we entered. She said that screen printing allows customers to put a bigger design on a shirt at lower cost. At least twelve of the same item must be ordered at once, from one color to four colors per design.

The first step in silk screening is to burn the design onto a piece of light sensitive material that will be placed on the silk screening machine to allow ink at certain places on the T-shirt or sweatshirt, and to keep ink away from other areas. The material has a light sensitive emulsion. Where the light touches, that area opens up to allow ink through.

The design is burned; the material is put in place on the silk screen machine for production. A shirt to be imprinting is stretched out to expose and flatten the area to which ink is to be applied. The silk screen is brought down onto the shirt, ink is squeegee'd over the design and gets left on the fabric.

Four color designs are the hardest to set up. The separate colors all have to be registered to each other on the first shirt. Thereafter the equipment maintains that same register from shirt to shirt.

Stretchy fabrics are the most difficult to deal with, simply because they stretch. "We have to put an additive in the ink to make it stretch when the fabric stretches," Pam said.

When printing a light color on a dark fabric, ink gets laid down twice, to make the light color ink opaque enough to cover the dark background.

Between each color or a repetition of the same color, a lamp is used to set the ink on the fabric so it doesn't smear during the next application. When printing has been completed, the shirt is run through a heater which finishes the drying of the ink. At that point, the shirt can be safely handled for packaging.

Consumers from Horizons Unlimited sort the shirts by design and by size and package them up for delivery to the customer. Consumers also clip extra thread from stitched logos and remove excess backing, then fold and package the stitched products, too.

Then Teresa and I were headed back to the front of the building. I had seen everything there was to see, except we still had to poke our nose into the financial department. The Director of Finance, Pam Beschorner, was busy on the phone in her office, but we said hello to Kitty Schneider, who handles accounts payable, and Sue Leonard, who does the accounts receivable. Sue is the one who keeps track of the per diem owed to Horizons Unlimited by county or state for services to consumers at the plant, as well as per diem for consumers living in the group homes.

I wondered how accounts receiveable at Horizons Unlimited might differ from that of another kind of organization. "We may have to keep track of more things here," Sue thought, "things related to Medicare and Social Security, for instance."

Soon enough Teresa and I were standing in her "other" office near the front door. I asked why she was working at Horizons Unlimited. "I needed a job," she responded, almost as a question. She had started out in criminal justice, in corrections, but "decided that wasn't for me."

Linda Detrick, the Plant Manager, was answering phones for a bit, and while Teresa had to step away for a moment, I talked with Linda. Linda has been at Horizons for twenty-six years, longer than any other staff member.

"How are you different now than when you started here?" I asked.

"More patience," Linda said.

"Why have you stayed so long?"

"At one time I was supporting a daughter," she said. "Now I'm kinda stuck here."

"I went to school for art," she said.

"To be honest," she said, "I love it here. I love being around the guys." She means the people everyone else calls "consumers." Linda feels reward "to see that you can do something for them."

"It was my dream to go somewhere in art," Linda said. "I draw about once a year now, a Christmas card."

"Maybe when I retire..." she added, almost wistfully.

Teresa had returned. "Are you going to be here twenty-six years?" I asked her.

"That's a tough question," she said.

Both Teresa and Linda enjoy seeing the consumers making progress. "We do goof around a lot with them," Linda said. "They like to interact with the community. Some bowl on 'regular' bowling teams. We have guys who can bowl way better than a lot of us. They have Special Olympics softball, basketball, volleyball, field and track. They go to movies. Two guys went to Florida on a guided tour, to visit the Minnesota Twins training camp." When Linda said "regular," you could hear the quotation marks she put around the word.

Linda left me with this. One person they care for got sick and had to be taken to the hospital.

"She almost died," Linda said. "Her family wasn't able to come to see her. I went up to the hospital every day. These people are our family, our friends."

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DISCUSSION OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE - (9)

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, May 14, and May 16, 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: "If they aren't writing about difference (borders, boundaries, edges and margins are endemic among recent Canadian book titles), they are contemplating ways to connect. The classic topic for Canadian historians has been the role played by communication and transportation networks in the development of civilization in general and Canadian society in particular."

Communication and transportation have been important issues for most middle westerners, not just for our historians, and they remain important issues today. Middle western communities these days want high speed internet access and wireless access, to attract those sorts of jobs that can be done anywhere if such infrastructure exists; then they can use the peace and serenity and lovely pace of their lifestyle as selling points to lure entrepreneurs. The interstate system is the railroad of our age: communities along the interstate thrive, or at least hold on, while other communities languish. Towns stretch out or migrate to envelope their interstate exits, the way towns used to move themselves up alongside the railroad. Here we used to talk about "market roads," ones designated for farmers to bring their goods to market in town. Now the concept might be expanded from its original "farm-to-town" context to mean "rural-area-to-world," and to include the makers and manufacturers in our communities. If no one will drive that far off the interstate to buy what you have to sell, really you have nothing to sell. We might like to think "this is the electronic age," but the middle west is still very much a physical place where goods have to be shipped great distances. In fact, in a world of e-commerce you still need warehouses and trucking companies, UPS and Fed Ex. Middle westerners will volunteer to fill these roles: it is work we understand. But, ah, the great distance from the interstate, that will be a problem for some of our communities.

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
MAY 15, 1998

It is the middle of May already, and nearly five months since I started keeping this journal. It is another fine day, with thunderstorms promised for late in the afternoon or evening. It is too early to gauge the worth of what I record here, except perhaps to express amazement: (1) that I am faithful to the task; and (2) that there is anything still to be said. I do watch the weather, the fields, my hawk. I am watching low spots recover from this wetness. I watch the birds - call of the robin, sound of mourning dove flying from my driveway. The flowers. The color of grass. None of this is of earth-shattering importance; much of it is of no importance at all. But it is real. And what I have learned - that I don't see very well, that there are things I miss even as I look right at them. And this is when I want to see. Think about the people who hurry past in their daily rush - how much do they miss? Does it matter?

The tall grass is being cut into windrows in the field where the canning company sprays its waste water. There is haze in the distance - what you think of when you say "Canada," "early morning," "looking out across a roll of wilderness."

Is that my hawk flying two miles north of its usual haunts? It has the right coloration but maybe is not quite big enough.

It is amazing how fast the fields planted to crops have been turning green.

At Five Corners, the fellow is working his flower beds again. He's wearing a baseball cap today, not a floppy hat. He is a barrel of a man, like a retired farmer or factory worker, not at all what you'd expect to see tending flowers but here nonetheless.


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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.

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

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?


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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.

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