The Middlewesterner

INTERVIEW WITH THE POET LAUREATE COMMISSION
& APPEARANCE OF A POSSIBLE CONSOLATION PRIZE
 
I interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission yesterday, as expected.
 
"How did it go?" you might ask.
 
"Very well, thank you," I would say.
 
I think I did a good interview. "Charmed them," as our friend Pearl Mt. Castle might put it. Yet I wasn't a mouse in the corner during the interviews with the other two finalists, who may have "charmed them" even more than I did.
 
When Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, chair of the Poet Laureate Commission, called me to set up this interview, I had my choice of time slots - first, second, or third. I chose the third slot, because I wanted the interviewers to have a clear sense of the other candidates when they were weighing my answers to their questions.
 
Questions came in fairly orderly fashion from the circle gathered round me. Some were questions I expected - "Why did you apply for the position?" Some were questions I didn't expect - "How do you think appointment as Poet Laureate might affect your writing and your career?" I hadn't thought about that very much, actually, thinking more about the work the Poet Laureate would need to be doing.
 
It was a comfortable interview, in the sense that I had six interested people focused on me for an hour, listening to my every word. How we do long for this kind of attention as writers, and how seldom we find it!
 
One member of the commission is the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, who has served these past four years. She noted that if I were appointed, I could put the letters Poet Laureate Of Wisconsin after my name, P.L.O.W. "which spells plow." She knew that would warm a farm boy's heart.
 
At the end of the interview, they gave me a long-stemmed white rose, as they had done for the other two finalists, because we were finalists. A nice touch, I thought. I took my name tag off my rose, brought it home and gave it to my wife, and told her it was from the Poet Laureate Commission, "because you have to put up with me."
 
Those serving on the commission have a thankless task, really. No one, I am sure, will ever go up to any of those folks and say "I really want to thank you for all the time and energy you've put into selecting the next Poet Laureate." Just won't happen. But it should.
 
I did a good interview and I am prepared for whatever recommendation the commission makes to the Governor, and whatever decision the Governor makes. An announcement should be forthcoming sometime in the next two weeks, I think. I'll keep you updated.
 
*
 
In the event that the appointment goes to someone else, a "consolation prize" of sorts has already been offered to me. I got a phone call on Friday from the head of the writing department at a college in our area, about an hour's drive, asking if I could teach a fiction-writing course for them in the fall semester.
 
"Our fiction writer will be on sabbatical in the fall," my caller said. "No problem, we thought. We expected to offer fiction-writing in the spring. However, because we are in transition between our old curriculum and our new curriculum, the dean says we are obligated to teach the course this fall. Can you do it?"
 
"Oh," I said, and I was kicking myself as I was saying no. What an opportunity. "I have to tell you I don't feel qualified to teach fiction-writing. It wouldn't be fair to your students. If it were a course in writing poetry or creative nonfiction, I'd say yes in a minute."
 
Not silence on the phone exactly, I could hear wheels turning. "Let me check schedules and talk to the dean," my caller said. "I may be able to teach the fiction-writing course, and you could teach the creative nonfiction course I'm supposed to. I'll call you back."
 
He called back, said: "The dean is sending you a contract."
 
So, in the midst of everything else, I am exhilirated now to be putting together a course in writing creative nonfiction. It is quite an honor for a working writer (one who has learned the craft in the school of hard knocks, rather than in a writing program) to be asked to teach a class like this. As I said to Mary, "the farm boy will be telling the college kids what he has learned about writing prose."
 
I'll keep you updated on this development, too! Life is WHEE! quite a ride!
 
---------------------------
 
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART EIGHT 
 
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
 
"I picked raspberries and gooseberries and shocked wheat and planted tobacco," Pearl said when I asked her if she had other stories about her life on the piece of ground she has inhabited for ninety years. "Working with my dad. I never drove the horses, he always did that."

"I had a little experience with the horse one time," Pearl remembered. "My little brother always rode bare-back to go bring in the cows. He had a case of appendicitis and could do the things he had been doing. So he sat up in the barn. And the little horse he rode bareback was a very gentle little fellow and so Pearl said she'd ride it this time, to go back for the cows. He saw me off. The barn's on a hill, and there was a big valley where the lake is now. I rode horseback out to get the cows, had them all coming in like we usually did. The horse came to the barn without Pearl on it. That scared my little brother to death, he was just sick about it - he had caused Pearl to get hurt, you know. Pretty soon I walked up the hill where he could see me. Everything was okay. A horse-fly had got after the horse, and it was switching its tail and shaking itself, and I slid off. Not hurt, but I slid off."

"I fear for farming in this area," Pearl said when I asked her to assess its condition where she lived. "The land is being filled up with homes. People are moving out from the city. They like the out-of-doors, they like to be out. Farmers are not making money. They are selling lots along the roadside. You can hardly drive half a mile anywhere that you don't see new houses being built. People are moving out because they like the out-of-doors and farmers are hard up so they're selling their land, which reduces agriculture in the area. It seems that many city people want their cities to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and they want to bring in business and so on, but they're cutting the agricultural area to hardly any big farms. One young farmer who does nothing but farm has to have a lot of land or he doesn't make a living on it because prices are not what they should be. So he farms several farms, and that's his business, and the fellows who own the farms go into town to get jobs. Farmland is being lost."

"I wonder what the future will bring?" Pearl asks. "We have to have farms. One of the biggest farms in our neighborhood, between here and Lewisburg, it has about thirty houses on it now, not a single farm field on the whole place any more. That's an example of what's going on. If you keep putting on new houses, where are they going to grow corn? And this is supposed to be the Corn Belt."

"We have several factories in Lewisburg now," Pearl said. "People are coming into Lewisburg instead of going out due to General Motors or the other big businesses in Dayton. The community is growing in terms of people. Their work is right here in Lewisburg."

"We didn't have electricity on this farm until 1939," Pearl said. "Neither did other people in the area. Along came Rural Electrification out of Greenville - the office was in Greenville, Ohio, which is twenty miles away. They came through before they built, wanting to know if people would accommodate them, and be patrons of their business. That was in 1939. My father, of the old school, went along with everybody else, ten dollars to be wired in. When they started putting in new posts out here for the electrical wires, Dad wondered what it was all about then. He said he didn't care whether he had electricity or not. This was in 1939 and all the family was gone from home - it was just my father and me. Electricity would be such a convenience for me. With the big family - all the nieces and nephews by this time - how could I handle it? I've got to look out for Pearl. So I talked to my dad about it, I said 'Dad, the farm is in your name, but I'm going to put this money into wiring the place - it was costly - what about it?' And he said I could buy the farm. It would be in my name. He could still live here. And he did, from 1939 to 1954, just like he always did, and made what he could make off of it. But Pearl paid the taxes and insurance and got electricity put in. So I had the conveniences everybody else had."

When did Pearl learn to drive?

"Everybody had cars," Pearl said. "The father of an extra-good friend told me, he said 'Pearl, you've got to have a little car.' So I bought a second-hand Model T in 1924 - that was my first car."

"My first radio was right here on this table," she said. "That was back in the 1920s some time, and that chair right there sat right here where Dad listened with ear-phones."

When television came, Pearl said, "it was just another thing, just another invention."

"This is a good time to be living in Ohio," Pearl said, "with all the history being celebrated. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903 and that's the year I was born."

To be continued....
 
-------------------
 
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL 
JULY 9, 1998

A cool morning, air wet with haze. I am home after a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a meeting. I flew Super Death Airways - but spent three times as much time on the ground as in the air. Tuesday evening in Midway all six flights on their board were delayed. People working for the airline were all under stress. There was a terrific system problem of some sort. I will repeat my observation from my Atlanta trip that an airport takes on its own reality; all airports are essentially the same and indistinguishable from one another, featureless, without weather, hypnotizing in their monotony.

I will add one more observation: why the hell is Grand Rapids, Michigan, intending to look like Los Angeles? Stop and go traffic on its freeways, sprawling across farmland as if the supply of good ground is infinite. So Grand Rapids has tripled in size since the 1960s - can't it look like a midwestern town instead of an LA knock-off? It is obvious that we do not think about the big picture in our everyday little decisions. I am inclined to agree with Wallace Stegner that man is a rogue, weed species. Grand Rapids, were it a thinking entity, would be thinking about gobbling up some more of the world around it.
 
To be honest, the same charge can be made against Fond du Lac, Rosendale, and Ripon. The same charge can be made against the development being done in the fields behind the Village Mart in Fairwater.
 
A stray cat stands on our driveway, thinking he owns it. The windshield of the pick-up is dark with bug parts. I drove home from the airport last night. I had forgotten what driving at night will do to a windshield in Wisconsin in summer.

How many of us could be set down randomly on a piece of ground and be able to identify where, roughly, we are? What would you need to look at to succeed? What kind of test would this be? Who could pass it?

Our good retired farmer is working the flower bed at Five Corners this morning. He is offering the flowers water and they are taking a drink. He is smoking a cigarette. He stays to his business and doesn't look up.

There! That is a distinction to make in the world - between those who look up and those who don't. I'm afraid I am one of those who looks up and that's more a curse than a blessing.

You run a lot of make-ready, sometimes, creating the context for one good idea.

*

JULY 10, 1998
I lay abed an hour longer than usual again this morning and I'm moving kinda slow. Those damn birds, they have got to start singing louder at 5 a.m., if they're to roll me out! But at least I'm moving now, breathing, heading to work, another day another dollar. Consider the alternative.

All of a SUDDEN - I am lost in the day. I've driven to where the hawk lives without a single thought, only silence, without realizing I haven't had a single thought. Then the leaves of the trees, being two-toned as they are, snap me to consciousness, suggest a storm is coming. The corn, too, seems to have itself curled against fierceness. Even starlings are hunkered down in a row along the ditch at Five Corners. The coming day doesn't look bad to me. Perhaps it is the heat for which things are preparing.

Ripon is all set up for its celebration, which starts this evening. Note to myself: stay home; you know how much you don't like crowds.

In the distance, the caw of crow.

Who owns the day?

What I choose has chosen me. 


>

SATURDAYS POEMS
--------------------------------
APOSTLE ISLANDS HISTORY
by Judith Strasser

I spend the morning reading scholars' accounts
of people early to these shores: Ojibwa who moved
to Chequamegon Bay the decade Columbus "discovered"
America; the trappers, traders, voyageurs who paddled
the unsettled lake; 19th century masons who quarried
brownstone in eight-by-four blocks and shipped it
off to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, as far east
as Buffalo. By noon I am weary of driving stakes
for pound nets, cleaning lake trout, felling white pine,
stripping hemlock bark. I need a nap. I am drowsy
from sawdust history and growth-of-industry fact.

I go down to the lake to haul water for washing dishes.
Wind drives three-foot breakers onto the shallow beach.
Rollers slosh in and out of my brown Rubbermaid pail.
A wave breaks on the rocks and soaks my boots, my socks,
my jeans, the sleeve of my polypro fleece. Fog drips
from the balsam branches. Nothing will dry today.
I have a change of clothes, a roof, a fireplace.
But what of the voyageurs, rushing to rendezvous?
And the loggers, swarming the smoky cookhouse in sweat-
drenched trousers and shirts? How wet does a fisherman get
in November, racing the making ice to pull his herring nets?
This is the story. The sun disappears, Ojibwa children shiver,
a gale howls from the northeast.

*

COUNTY ROAD
by Judith Strasser

Sand Island
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

The settlers are gone, cabins
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail -

choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.

Penny candy from the co-op;
Noreng's berries, big as
hens' eggs, too juicy to ship
anywhere; dances - pump organ,
squeezebox, fiddle, the whole
village at the school; crossing the ice-
bridge for mail; the storm
that took Harold Dahl.

>

PHIL HEY'S HOW IT SEEMS TO ME
COMES BACK FROM THE PRINTER

One of my projects this spring and summer has been preparing a volume of Phil Hey's new and selected poems for publication. How It Seems to Me has been a wonderful undertaking from the start. Phil is one of those poets who labors with quiet diligence, more concerned with substance than flash; I think he wants to be a good man and a good teacher first, and if his poems get published or they don't, so be it. The kind of man with the kind of work I'm proud to publish.

I met Phil in Sioux City, where he lives, when I was on book tour in support of my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home. He gathered a group of fellow faculty members and students and brought them to hear me read at a local coffee shop. God bless him, he still sends me the occasional e-mail expressing his pleasure with some of the prose in my memoir.

The common rap against poets is that they tend towards "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." That's not the case with this book, folks. Phil doesn't have much to offer me except his friendship and possibly a reading at Briar Cliff University where he teaches. I'm not going to let friendship get in the way of publishing this book; and, for the record, I haven't done a reading at Briar Cliff. I don't have much to offer him except friendship and - one hopes - a few readers for his good poetry.

In the interest of complete honesty, I suppose I should confess also that when I e-mailed him the other day about when copies of the book would be arriving at his humble abode, he did state that if he wins the lottery, MWPH Books, my imprint, would receive "a huge endowment." To tell the truth, I don't think he plays the lottery.

I am not the only one who loves Phil's work. God rest her soul, Gwendolyn Brooks said of it, "These poems are so good, so bready!" James Autry, author of Love and Profit and Life After Mississippi, said "by all the Gods of poetry, if this isn't an authentic voice, we're never going to find one." Vivian Shipley said the poems "take flight at every moment's crossroad in order to preserve the hard daily lives of men and women who are living scant, but like the farmer's wife who buys day lilies with egg money learn to flower in the midst of such neglect." Jeanne Emmons, author of Rootbound and winner of the Minnesota Voices Award, wrote that "in his hands conversations overheard, places discovered on the road, found objects, and the events of everyday life become gifts and graces."
 
I've included a sample from the poems, below, "Route 39 south of Pittsville," which won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine.

Phil Hey's How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (96 pp., trade paper) is available for $12.50 per copy plus $2.00 for shipping and handling; order from: Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. Make check payable to Tom Montag. You'll be glad you did.


Route 39 south of Pittsville
by Phil Hey

For years she had dreams of getting
a bait and fried chicken place,
nothing fancy, one of those
little bungalows like you see with
white painted clapboard and green trim,
not new when she got it and not
likely to get any newer either,
and out front a screened-in entryway
with those enamel metal signs
of Nehi and Mission Black Cherry,
and inside, some used glass cases
full of reels and lures gathering dust,
and on the wall shelves of those red
cedar curios they don't make within
two hundred miles of the place.
And those cards and signs you wouldn't
laugh at anymore if you ever did,
though one in particular sticks in my mind:
if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
And in the air hangs a certain scent
of cigarettes and fried fish,
specially over by where they eat
at old Chromecraft tables
but wooden chairs, and all around
near the ceiling are these pictures
of folks and the big fish they caught.
That's the place she got, too,
so well known in those parts
she never even named it,
though they call it Myrt's
after her. She ain't smart,
doesn't care much about money,
wouldn't trade.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART SEVEN

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"So what'll I do with the sheep?" Pearl continued. "I'll take care of them. They're good mowers, and I learned what to do with them. Sure enough, lambs began to appear in the morning before school, and so forth. One morning I went to the barn to take care of the sheep and here stood a little lamb, back in the corner, helpless, of course born during the night. And the mother was not taking care of it. She was standing off some place else. Well, I was prepared. I had condensed milk, very rich, and the ewe's milk is very rich. And I had all the equipment to feed the lamb with a bottle. That little lamb would not be alive when I came home from school because it hasn't had anything to eat. What'll I do? What'll I do?"

"I came to the house and had my breakfast," Pearl said, "and I got a bushel basket and lined it with newspapers. The last thing I did before starting to school was to talk in the barn and pick up that lamb and put it in the back seat of the car. I took along the milk and things I'd need to take care of it at school. It was winter-time, but lambs come pretty warmly dressed, you know. It'd be alright in my car because the car was warm. With the sun out, it would be well taken care of in the bushel basket."

"I got to the school building with the lamb in the basket," Pearl said. "I had everything taken care of, the bottle and everything to take care of it. And I even had a leash, a little leash that I had on my puppy. In my room at school, the encyclopedias were in a little case that had legs. But I thought I'd leave it in the car, it'd be okay, I'd go out at noon to feed it. I parked my car; I went into the office; I told the principal, I said: 'I have brought that lamb in my car - it'll be alright out there - I'll go out at noon to feed it.' She said, 'Bring that lamb in.'"

"I had the leash on it already," she said, "so I went out and brought the little lamb in, laid down some newspaper, tied the end of the leash to the Britannica stand. I had it all ready for the children when they came in. Their eyes popped, you know. City school. Little lamb walking around up there in the front of the room. It got taken care of really well."

"During the day," she said, "I let the children, three by three, take the lamb, the bottle, and the paper towels to the kindergarten, the first grade, and so forth. The little lamb was taken care of. I fed it on the bottle and it grew up."

Pearl said: "Often at the end of the year, the last week of school, I'd tell the children, 'Now we've had a lot of fun and we've worked hard and we've done a lot of things. I wonder if you wouldn't take a piece of paper and write an evaluation of your fifth grade. Rather like writing me a letter, and I'll read it this summer when I'm not with you."

"Dear Miss Mt. Castle," the letters would start, Pearl indicated, and they would talk about the things the students liked during the year, "the poems that we learned, the fun that we had one way or another. I had been to South America that one year and I had pictures I'd shown them on the screen. They talked about different things we'd done, and how much they think they had learned that year, and some of them liked the teacher and some of them didn't say whether they did or not. They wrote what they thought was a good evaluation. And many of them wrote, 'The best day of school was the day you brought the lamb.'"

Pearl laughs at the memory. "Oh, I had a lot of fun with my teaching, a lot of fun."

"That was in 1954," Pearl said. "In 1988, we had a drought - no pasture, and nobody would sell me hay. My pasture was just like straw. I couldn't buy hay. I didn't have any way to them the sheep. I had to give them up, which was like a funeral. I'd had sheep all those years, raised top-notch lambs, went to lamb school when professors from Ohio State came down to Eaton and collected the sheep people of Preble County for classwork on how to feed lambs, how to have healthy sheep, how to shear them, that sort of thing."

Pearl also kept a garden all those years - "green beans and peas and tomatoes, sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, enough onions to last me the winter."

"Once I wrote down on a card what I canned one year," Pearl said. "I had about two hundred quarts of green beans and peas, peaches, all kinds of fruits. When my dad was living, we always had peaches - that was his favorite fruit. He'd go to the orchard and come back with a bushel of peaches and say 'Here, Pearl, here are the peaches.' That'd be twenty quarts of peaches."

"Through the years we had fruit trees here," Pearl said, "apples, pears, and cherries, but they're gone now. There's one apple tree left, up near the barn."

To be continued....

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 6, 1998

We are coming off a three-day weekend celebrating our independence from Great Britain. How much different would this place be had we not won our independence? Would this be a French land, or at least bordering on a French land? Thomas Jefferson would never have made the Louisiana Purchase without our war of independence, would he? Wisconsin and Michigan would be very much like Ontario, wouldn't they? Our government would be different, our schools would be different, our landscape would be marked differently. We'd be more Canadian, eh?

It has not been so hot. It is overcast and humid this morning. There is a sticky summer sweetness in the air. In the country, a fierce greenness today, in farm fields and scrub land alike. A flock of sea gulls is set down in the field of alfalfa recently harvested, a study in green and white.

White morning glories cling to a rare stand of fence.

Corn is five to six feet tall in places; tassels are, all of a sudden, very much in evidence. Elsewhere along Highway E, the corn is only six inches high.

North of Five Corners, the sour smell of pea vines left on the ground after harvest. The rip of that odor is part of the cost of doing a business in peas, I guess.

In Ripon, an ambulance screams, turns toward the hospital. A quiet summer day is broken by the siren. A quiet summer day, and someone lays dying.

*

JULY 7, 1998
Our friend who moved to California in May for a new job has quit the job and headed back east. He lasted about three weeks. He is visiting a friend in South Carolina and looking for a job in that area. He is a Massachusetts boy and when he told me he was going to California, I laughed. I laughed and laughed, over the phone, talking with him, and he may have been offended. He wanted to know why I was laughing. I said the California gestalt would not fit his Massachusetts psyche. He lasted three weeks. He e-mailed me saying he was quitting the job and going back east, admitting that I had been right. He said the job didn't allow him an ounce of creativity and "Los Angeles was too weird." So - it's true that some things are eternal and one of them is you can't easily transplant a sardonic Massachusetts fellow into a show-place California setting. What formed us holds us. We ignore this fact at our own risk.

A cool, grey morning. A riffled surface to the pond (where it's free of algae). A mourning dove's call. The trees are quiet. This is very much, today, like waking in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, except I have to go in to work now, and later fly to Grand Rapids, MI. A fat robin in the back yard shows me the way to peacefulness. If only we, too, could accept what we need to accept. But NO! we think we should be happy and then we don't know what happiness is. Whoa, Tom! Now you're goin'.

Along Highway E, the beans are growing by leaps, wide leaves turned to the morning. Three crows eat at a raccoon killed on the road; they hop out of the way of traffic then return to the feast. The grey overcast above is air-brushed in place. A woman drives a big rig south-bound towards Fairwater, secure at the wheel, rolling.

A goat trims the farm yard grass just south of Five Corners. He is kept in place with a rope tied to a tire filled with cement. Every couple of days, the tire gets moved and the goat trims another area. If only we could learn to accept what we need to accept.

>

SO HERE IS THE NEWS I'VE BEEN
SITTING ON FOR ABOUT A MONTH

Look at the following news release closely and you'll see the name of your Fairwater correspondent among the three finalists for Wisconsin's next Poet Laureate appointment. How fortuitous is it that August 31st is my 57th birthday? We'll see.

I am honored and humbled to be selected as a finalist. And, of course, excited as hell.

The three finalists interview with the Poet Laureate Commission this Saturday, July 17th. I'd say "Wish me good luck," but it is better to want this to come out the way it should, whatever way that is.

I will say that I wouldn't be embarrassed to lose the appointment to either of the other finalists. The Poet Laureate Commission has a tough task, making such a choice.

Here is the text of the news release the Commission has sent out:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Finalists!

Who will be the next Wisconsin writer to carry the torch for poetry? We should have that answer soon, because three finalists for the Governor-appointed Poet Laureate position were recently chosen – they are John Lehman (Cambridge), Tom Montag (Fairwater), and Denise Sweet (Green Bay). One of these poets will succeed popular outgoing Wisconsin Poet Laureate Ellen Kort, Appleton.

The responsibilities of the second Poet Laureate will be lofty ones – "to serve as a herald for Wisconsin’s poets and their work, to promote poetry statewide, and to enrich the lives of our citizens by sharing and encouraging the gift of poetry."

The seven-member Poet Laureate Commission will make a final recommendation to Governor Doyle, who will officially appoint our next Poet Laureate. Chair of this Commission is Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler (Appleton) representing the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Other members are David Brostrom (Waukesha), Vice-Chair of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Barbara Coan Houghton (McFarland), representing the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association, Jane Hamblen of the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Poet Laureate Ellen Kort, Marilyn Taylor (Milwaukee), of the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and Linda Ware (Wausau), Vice-Chair of the Wisconsin Arts Board.

By August 31st, this important literary torch will pass from poet to poet.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART SIX

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

What does the work of a 99-year-old woman consist of? What is her day like?

"I go by the clock," Pearl says. "I'm going to bed at 11:00. I start yawning, maybe, at 10:30, then I get to bed by 11:00 and it's not long until I fall asleep. I slept til - like now - I slept until about 7:00. So I get my seven or eight hours of sleep. I cook my own breakfast, slowly. The same thing every day. I like brown bread, I buy the sandwich kind, whole wheat bread. Two slices of toast with butter and jelly or preserves, absolutely home-made. Then, one egg, fried in bacon grease. For many years, I took coffee, but I have bladder trouble, so I quit coffee and have a glass or milk or a glass of juice. I could go into that kitchen and fix breakfast almost blind-folded, I've done it so many years. I don't cook every day because I might have things leftover that I warm. My micro-wave is a stainless steel skillet about so big around that holds just enough for one big helping of soup or warmed over green beans or whatever. I have an electric stove. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables."

"I'm so slow, I don't get much done," Pearl said. "I've kept this house all this time. You have to dust and run the sweeper and do all that sort of thing. I've charmed a couple of the little girls in the neighborhood - who are forty or fifty years old - their husbands grew up in this area and fished in my pond. I haven't told you yet, some of my best friends are my fishermen. When you drove in, if you'd have gone just two or three rods farther, you'd have seen the lake. All we needed to do was build a dam and the water just flowed in. It's about two and a half acres of water, and it's good fishing. Stocked it with bluegills and large-mouth bass. Now one bluegill is enough for me for a meal. You never saw bigger bluegills than the ones in that pond. A lot of people like to fish, and some of my best friends today are my fishermen. One fisherman, for instance, keeps me in that brown bread all the time. Are you familiar with the Roman Meal bread? Well, that's my loaf. That's the only bread I eat. I can eat it with fried chicken gravy and any other way, toast, sandwiches. I'm not eating too much bread, but I'm getting the good bread. That's the way I eat. That's part of what's keeping me going here - good food."

Pearl's siblings were no older than 80 when they died. "My oldest brother was 80," she said, "and the older girls were only in their 50s and 60s when they died. My oldest sister was in a tractor accident and died after that, she was only 58 at the time. She was a farmer's wife, driving a tractor down the road, pulling a wagon that had some big heavy tool on it. It started weaving and pulled her over in the ditch and the tractor rolled on her. There was a lot of diabetes in the family. I lost three sisters to diabetes. I've been very, very careful about my food. In fact, my doctor insists that I take a very tiny little tablet in order to keep me on the level. I've never had high sugar. I go in every three months for a check-up, and one test is a sugar test. So I keep ahead of that. My younger brother died in 1983, he would have been 70. My younger sisters also died in their 50s, 60s, 70."

"If I went into Lewisburg and asked people for stories about Pearl, what would they tell me?" I asked.

"That she lived around here and was the flunky for the neighborhood," Pearl said, laughing. "The fishermen are always here. The boys in the neighborhood. I haven't told you about the sheep yet, have I?"

"Why don't you tell me about sheep?" I said.

"Oh, my," she said, "that's a big story, a big story."

"This farm, seventy-six acres, only part of it can be tilled because of the terrain," she said. "Dad farmed most of it with horses. We had cows and we had sheep. Dad always had sheep in pastures and they ate the grass down low. We rotated pasture. When dad passed away in 1954, in December, he had sixteen ewes that were to lamb in January or February. His passing away in December left me here with lambing time coming up. Well, I didn't know too much about it, but I studied it. At that time, my brother lived next door and could help - the father of the nephew who lives up here now, my younger brother. What am I going to do with these sixteen ewes that are about to lamb. Take care of them. How? Well, you get up at five o'clock and feed them and take care of them and see if there were any lambs born during the night, and that sort of thing. Come back to the house and get yourself breakfast and dressed up ready for school. You go to school and wonder what's going to happen by the time you get home. I had to put my mind to looking after sheep as well as the little pupils. I was living alone now that Dad was gone. My brother was next door and ready to be called for anything that I needed, although he was not here every day then. But it was up to me to get it done. He was a great help - my little baby brother. He was only nine years old when my mother died."

To be continued....

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 1, 1998

We enter the second half of the year. A mourning dove calls in the distance. Blue sky. Quiet pond, summer algae. Beads of moisture on the grass. Daylight comes.

The sunlight on the cornfields creates a golden sheen. The irrigation rig north of town on the east side of Highway E is spraying canning factory waste-water today. Farther on - a strong smell of skunk. GOOD MORNING!

Thistles in the ditches have fat blossoms. Red clover and sweet clover are in bloom, too, along the roadside. Sweet, sticky smells in the morning air.

At the Sina pig farm, a man sits motionless out in the middle of his yard. In the morning sun, his skin is bronzed; he could be a statue.

Those pea fields that were harvested have been tilled again. What will come up next?

I am contemplating the division of lands: farm-land, wilderness, waste-land.

Once again, the monster-beast goes to work, like the good German he is.

*

JULY 2, 1998

Shall I complain about another perfect summer day? How can I? It is another good one!

North of Fairwater, waste water from the canning factory is being sprayed onto the field to the west of Highway E. A strong, sour stench.

I am missing the hawk. It has been a long time since I've seen him. Where is he?

Weeds and corn are starting to show themselves in a field of beans. I remember the miles and miles of beans I've walked. That was an eon ago, of course. That was a previous life.

I do love the flowers at Five Corners. Someone should hug the man good who tends them.

Farther north along Highway E, day lilies are in bloom. They are tough competitors, sturdy beasts. This season is a good one for all plants, though. It's green all the way to the mountains.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART FIVE

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"With a case of polio," Pearl said, "a person is crippled by it in some way or other. Of course, my crippling was in the ankle and foot, which is what bothers me now, that's my biggest problem right now. After a while you lay the polio aside and kind of forget about it. You put up with it - not being able to wear good-looking shoes and not doing all the things others did. You just make peace with it and go on, on your own, and forget about the difficulties. A thorn in the flesh is what it is, you know. You can't just sit down and do nothing, if you have a mind. And I'm blessed with that, but you have to keep that mind busy, and I've done that."

"My family is all music," Pearl said. "I can tell if you're a half a pitch off. A keen ear. None of our immediate family ever cultivated the music, but we had an ear for it. My oldest brother played the fiddle back in the old days, and all of us sang. I sang a solo in church before I started in school."

"I've lost my voice now, at this stage," she said, "but I've sung for my friends' weddings, at funerals, and I always taught music in school. Many times I taught in other rooms because that teacher couldn't teach them music. She'd come in my room and teach a little writing or something while I helped out with her music."

"I've always been around music some way or other," she said. "In college, I was in choir. While I was teaching in Dayton, I was in the Philharmonic Choir, which was a hundred fifty voices. I sang with them. I directed the choir in my church for fifteen years. I sang in every part of the program they've had in church."

"I taught Sunday school class for sixty-four years," she said somewhat nonchalantly.

"If I had a dime for every hour I spent in the little church up here in Lewisburg," Pearl said, "I could have retired many, many years earlier. I loved the work and was educated to the point that I could be a leader in certain things. When they needed someone to teach the class that was coming out of high school, and there was no place in the Sunday School for that particular age - they had up through high school age - it was 'Pearl, you're chosen.' I taught that class sixty-four years. I was in my nineties when I quit teaching. Some of those students are my best friends now."

How did Pearl relate to those recent high school graduates?

"For a while," she said, "I was almost one of them. I wasn't much older than they were. They were at the place they were either going to college or being employed in one way or another. We studied the Bible."

"I've been in a Methodist church for many, many years," Pearl said, explaining what she taught those young adult students. "There's a set of Bible study lessons that we had. We studied that way - the Scripture, and applying it to the present day. One time I was talking with an older woman who was very strict in her Bible study. For me, studying the Bible, you compare the old time to the new, and apply what you read. That's the way I taught the Bible. Once I was teaching about Joseph in the Old Testament, and I said 'he was just a spoiled brat, wasn't he?" Well, strict woman thought I was being sacrilegious."

It was 1964 when Pearl retired from teaching grade school. "I was 60 years old and 1964 was my last year of teaching," she said. "I could name doctors, attorneys, teachers, farmers, and sweet little old grandmothers who were my pupils. When you are teaching ten-year-olds, you wonder what their potential is, what will happen. One of the best heart specialists in Dayton was one of my little ten-year-olds, and a doctor in Springfield, another doctor in Dayton, and several attorneys. I read their names in the paper and see what they're doing."

"I watch very little television," she continued. "Some of it isn't worth looking at, you know. If I can finish my work, I like to watch the news at 6:00 p.m."

To be continued....

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

from
BETWEEN ZEN & MIDWESTERN (1981)
"For Mary, At Work"


How the light shimmers, these
mornings, with you gone to

work & only the wind
to whisper what you would

tell me, suddenly behind
me with your surprise of

arms, hugging. Instead -
my coffee goes cold & I

haven't finished saying
how much I love you.


>

I'M BACK, I'M TIRED,
I'M FULL OF STORIES

I will tell you that it rained all day on the Fourth of July in L'Anse, Michigan, and after twenty-two hours of it my rain-proof tent gave up keeping the water out. I slept that night in the car. I had to dry the tent (and some of my clothes) once I got to South Dakota, when it wasn't raining there.

The rain didn't dampen my spirits, nor did it get in the way of some good Vagabonding. While in L'Anse, I toured the Ford Sawmill in Alberta Village. I hiked to Canyon Falls and to Sturgeon Falls, and on the steep climb back from Sturgeon Falls I was hearing "a distant pounding like a motor trying to start, but it can't. I suppose that is my heart working for me, as hard as I'm working to gain this sense of who we are." I drove almost to the highest point in Michigan, Mt. Arvon, but gave up the attempt when the pool of water was wider than what they call a road, and I didn't know how deep it was and how soft the mud beneath it. A challenge for another trip; the pamphlet did say the roads are not always suitable for passenger cars. I toured Pettibone Manufacturing in Baraga with company president Kevin Walsh, and talked with plant manager Jerry Niemi, chief engineer Ray McDonald, and Phil Latendresse, grandson of the Phil Latendresse who invented Pettibone's flagship product, the Cary-Lift. Later in the week I also did formal, more personal interviews with Ray and Phil. I climbed to the top of Little Mountain just outside L'Anse, and noted that "in that battle between water and rock, water always wins." I made my way by car and by foot to the far tip of Point Abbaye; and walking back to the car I had something of an experience; this is what I wrote: "Part-way back to the car, I hang my head and cry. I don't know why. I have touched something large, I know that. Have I over-juiced on God? Have I felt a tug of what it means to be part of the universe? Have I just had a mystical experience? Shall I never pass this way again?" On July 3rd, I attended the Fourth of July parade in Baraga, but I didn't stay for the fireworks that started at dusk. I did wake that night when the rainstorm hit at midnight; that's the rain that continued all through the Fourth and into the following night. I interviewed Nancy Besonen who, in writing about my February trip to L'Anse, had said: "Tom Montag is defining the character of the Midwest - one character at a time." Nancy is a Chicago girl who always liked the northwoods. I heard Da Yoopers in concert, part of the Lumberjack Days/Fourth of July celebration that wasn't rained out, but got moved into the Bingo Hall at the Baraga Casino.

I drove kitty-corner across the upper middle west, from L'Anse, Michigan, to Redfield, South Dakota. On the way, I stopped in Doland, South Dakota, to see what remained there; Doland is where former vice-president Hubert Humphrey graduated from high school in 1929, and where Dennis Koslowski graduated in 1977; Dennis "was the first American to win a medal in Greco-Roman wrestling in a non-boycotted Olympics - a bronze in 1988. He won a silver medal in 1992." I also stopped in Frankfort, South Dakota, to see what was left in Harry Eisele's hometown. It was obvious all across Eastern South Dakota that the area has been getting plenty of rain this summer. Things looked green.

Again on this visit, I stayed with Marlin and Lyn Flint; they always take such good care of me. I did finally get a hair-cut, for those of you who worry about that. I couldn't go into Alley Cuts by front door, though; I had to go through the alley - Main Street has been torn up for a couple months and, though work is almost completed, sidewalks still need to be poured. I interviewed Barb Paulson, a teacher in Redfield who grew up in Redfield; Barb left the community to make her way in the world before she and her husband decided that Redfield was where they wanted to raise their family. I interviewed Barb's father, Royce Bush, who operated a full-service gas station in Redfield for much of his career, back in the days when Redfield had fourteen gas stations. I interviewed Gerald Marlette, whom some think of as Redfield's Mr. Lions Club. I visited Tulare, south of Redfield, to see what's there - the South Dakota Wheatgrowers elevator by the railroad tracks, the Bar With No Name, Mrs. Louie's Cafe, and what else? I interviewed Stan Schulz, who with his wife Kari operates the SAKS Restaurant in Redfield. Stan was "the foot" in Dances With Wolves, the foot seen kicking out a campfire at one point in the movie; he has been in several others since then. Kari Schulz showed me through Redfield's depot, which is being restored and soon will be re-opened as a tourist information center. "Imagine all the history that went on in this building," Kari said. "A woman told me the depot has both happy and sad memories for her. She said she'd gotten engaged on the platform, and that her father had dropped dead in the door of the express freight room." I think Kari sees the same kind of ghosts I see. She said, "When these old buildings are gone, they'll never be back." I interviewed Pastor Tim Fugman of the Congregation Church and Dave Durfee, the veterans service officer for Spink County. I interviewed 80-year-old Andy Clawson, a Republican who doesn't think he can vote Republican in the coming presidential election. I got a tour of Redfield from Craig Johnson, Spink County's economic development director, who took me to the CallSynergy call center in Redfield where I talked to Mike Rohrbach, the night-shift manager, about their work. Afterwards, because the afternoon had grown hot and we had grown thirsty, Craig and I stopped for a beer at the Chrystal Palace; Craig didn't tell me the history of the place and I couldn't print it if he had. Then we gathered up Craig's wife, Corrine, and Craig bought me supper. Thanks, Craig. I saw the Redfield American Legion team lose its first game in the weekend tournament, 3-2. I interviewed Redfield physicians Jo~ and Dewi Cabacar, who came from the Philippines for additional medical training in America, and are still here, doctoring in an "under-served area." Jo~ is an internist with a specialty in nephrology; Dewi is a peditrician with a specialty in pediatric neurology.

And, to understand where and how the middle west ends and the west begins, the last official act of my trip was to drive the 181 miles west from Redfield to Faith, South Dakota, on Highway 212, then drive 64 miles north to Lemmon, South Dakota, and then return to Redfield via Highways 12 and 281; I've made 45 pages of notes about that drive, some of which I'll inflict on you at some point in the future.

It was a good trip. I got lots of good material. I worked hard, but not so hard that I didn't have a good time. I didn't have such a good time that I didn't want to come home, however. I'm glad to be home.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART FOUR

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"In 1991," Pearl said, "I had my first opportunity to see this place my uncle lived, and where the Olson boys lived, near Minot, North Dakota." There was no longer any of her uncle's family in the area, however. A friend of Pearl's, knowing that she loved to travel, had said 'Pearl, where are you going to go next?' I said 'I want to go to North Dakota." She said 'I'll take you there.' So she and her friend, who'd just bought a new car, and her mother and I - four women - took the trip to North Dakota."

"It was my 50th State," Pearl said. "I'd been to all the other states before. It was one of the nicest trips I ever took, of course, because of the things we saw and did."

Pearl talked about her travels. "In 1932," she said, "two other teachers and I and a fellow we knew who had a new Chevrolet car decided we wanted to go to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. So all of us, in our twenties, late twenties, went to the Olympic Games in 1932. We visited all the western states while we were out there."

"One of the girls knew a fellow who would be in the Olympics," Pearl explained. "He would be running in a relay race at a certain date. We started our trip early enough that we could visit parks in Colorado and Arizona and so on. We hit all the states - from Los Angeles we went north to Oregon and on up into Washington. A big circle - we took in all those states up there. We saw everything else but not North Dakota. I took a hundred dollars with me, and came back with some money left, after four weeks of travel."

"While we were in Los Angeles, Pearl said, "we lived in the home of a cousin of one of the girls and, of course, that was cheap living."

"We cooked for ourselves on the trip," she said, "and stayed in little parks, like rest areas are today. I still have the iron skillet we took along with us. We'd do some cooking when we had the chance to. We really pioneered, but we got to see a great deal, back in the days when things weren't so commercialized. An example of that - Mt. Rushmore which we saw on that tour was just Washington, and the second face was started. In 1991, when I went to North Dakota and around through South Dakota, all four faces at Mt. Rushmore were finished and it was very commercialized. There was a big difference in the area in that length of time."

A girl who was my first pupil - she was 12 and I was 19 - finished college and started teaching and still lived in Lewisburg. We became great friends. Not too many years between us, see. She wanted to travel and she was free to do so. I took many summers when I'd do something for Pearl - I'd work hard for ten months - and she and I traveled together a great deal. Our first trip out of the country was to Mexico. Another trip was to Alaska. Another trip to South America."

"I had another good traveling mate," she said. "She and I went to Australia"

"I've been to all fifty states," Pearl said, "to Mexico, to seven countries in South America, the Holy Land, Egypt, Spain, and Portugal. If I had a good strong arm to hang onto, I'd still go to Antarctica, which is the only continent I haven't been to."

"It must have been the 1960s when we went to South America," Pearl remembered. "Our first stop was in Panama. Then over into Ecuador, Peru. We crossed the Andes a couple of times. Over into Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile."

"I spoke very little Spanish," she said, "but this was a school group, so we visited schools in various places. It was a conducted tour. We met teachers at the different places we went."

Back in the classroom at home, Pearl the teacher said, "we studied these places in geography. And I'm a geographer. I could just tell you lots of things. One time I beat the people who were on the Jeopardy program because I knew my geography - they all missed the problem and I got it."

"All that was curiosity," she said. "I think I loved the first map I ever saw. I know maps. I know left or right, east or west. A lot of people don't know east or west, you know. The only place I don't know east or west is in the mountains, where I've got to know straight up."

"In 1928," she recalled, "my college room-mate liked to travel as much as I did and we decided we wanted to go to Canada, so we drove my car to her house, which is eighty miles from here. I left the car there. We went to Toledo and took a boat across the lake, shot the rapids of the St. Lawrence, visited the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec. We took the train from Montreal through New York into Vermont and on into Massachusetts, by ship into New York City, and from New York City down to Washington, DC, then home. That was 1928 or 1929."

"My sister two years younger than I am lost her husband and wanted to get away one summer," Pearl said, explaining how she saw the southeastern United States. "She and I took a trip, stopping at Roanoke to visit relatives, then down through the Carolinas, on down to Florida. We hit Kentucky and Tennessee and so on coming back."

To be continued....

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

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

"You know," Ivan said, "one nice thing about living in Smith Center - when they have a class reunion we don't have to drive hundreds of miles to attend. We're already here."

"Gas gets any higher, I'm gonna have to see Jim Tharp about buying a bicycle," Ivan wrote. "They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle. What they meant was you never forget how to wreck a bicycle."

"Judy Hall was coaching first base for her little girls T-ball team," Ivan said. "One little girl came running down to first base. Judy said 'Nice going, Ashley.' The little girl said, 'I'm not Ashley, I'm Kaitlin.' Judy said, 'Oh, that's right, I never can get you girls straight.' Kaitlin said, 'You ought to be able to. I got freckles and Ashley don't.' That reminded Nolan Hajny of a song he used to sing - 'She's got freckles on her but she's pretty.'"

"Where did I go wrong," Ivan asked. "All my kids are Republicans. And now my youngest is running in Senior Track Meets. What fun is it to run 1600 meters when you are fifty years old? Unless you are running to a voting booth where you can vote Democratic."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 30, 1998

A cool morning. We get to start the day fresh, but I suppose it will be very hot by noon again, as it has been here the past few days.

I am lost in the day - in the blue sky, the white clouds, the green corn and beans - dreaming. I am halfway to Ripon before I am conscious that I am halfway to Ripon. It is a shock to recognize that I have been "in the moment" entirely - not thinking about it, just here. Then I ruin it by thinking about it, by making these notes! Isn't that the curse of the writer with his material, and the curse of the physicist trying to study wave and particle?

I lean forward to let the breeze cool my back that has grown sweaty against the seat of the pick-up. To ride the moment once again.


>

SATURDAY'S POEMS
-------------------------
SPEAKING MIDWESTERN
by Harriet Brown

Now that I've lived twelve
winters here, and another
coming, I've grown fluent

in the language of coldness,
I've learned to keep cool,
skate on ice so thin

it's invisible, so thin
the slightest flare of heat
and you fall through forever.

Here words are like rock salt,
scattered one pellet at a time
to thaw the surface.

There are other languages
for fire – the one I learned
growing up, the language

of history and oppression,
the deep exotic gutturals
of loving and of loss,

where words simmer
and steam and boil over
like soup left on the stove.

Still, even on the endless
prairie, every now and then
there is a warm spot, a brief

bright rush of grief or lust
out of the frigid land,
an arterial gush of longing

that never freezes, no matter
how long winter lasts.
And this needs no translation.

*

WHERE WE WENT
by Harriet Brown

You to your mountains,
your ruins and old stories.
All the loves of your life.
The bony underpinnings.

I to what's mine – unspeakable
blue evening, nearly full moon.
Such contrast between darkness
and light, such faraway shining.

The same moon shines
over you, just a different
face, her long hair
spread over your pillow.

Maybe you dream of me –
the sharp taste of my tears,
scent of my hair. The shadow
of your hands across my skin.

Where I am the land is smooth
with age and weather. No one
would guess these mere hills
were ever sharp with longing,

were mountains once.


"Speaking Midwestern" originally appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review. Harriet Brown is the author of The Promised Land (Parallel Press, 2004) and several nonfiction books. Her poems appear in Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, and other magazines. She lives in Madison, where she's the editor of Wisconsin Trails magazine.

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

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 THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 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 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 Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004


>

I'M GONE VAGABONDING AGAIN,
TO L'ANSE, MI, AND REDFIELD, SD,
FROM JUNE 29-JULY 12/13TH
BACK TO BLOGGING JULY 13 OR 14
YES, PETER, IT *IS* "OPEN MIKE"
THIS WEEK, THE TOPIC IS BLOGGING
AND ITS PLACE IN YOUR LIFE & WORK

Dick Jones, from DICK JONES' PATTERAN PAGES, left the following reflection about writing and blogging and playing bass in a comment over at Cassandra Pages. I will be away for two weeks. The last time I was gone, earlier this month, Peter at slow reads asked: "Does that mean it's open mike week here?" Well, yes, I guess it could mean that. And since we've recently lost Tonio's blog, and Common Beauty, and Book of Life, and Fred at Fragments from Floyd says he's gonna slow down a little bit, and I find myself leaving comments here and here about why I blog, why don't all of you have an open discussion here about your blogging, how it fits the rest of your work, whether it energizes or drains you, etc. Should you wish to oblige, I will be pleased to come home to a messy collection of wisdom on the topic. Here is Dick Jones' comment:

I feel more comfortable with my writing now than at any earlier time in my life. If I was driven excessively from the start by the desire to set the world alight with my deathless prose & my incandescent verse, that imperative ran out of momentum when I realised that all was vanity & I was only reaching a constituency of one & even he was losing interest in my prodigious output. So I stopped & played bass guitar in a series of bands instead.

This was a salutary experience. Audiences identify with the vocalist or adulate the lead guitarist; they don't notice the bass guitarist. He plunks alone, shadowy & monosyllabic behind the fireworks. So I stood on the left of the drummer, laid back on the rhythm & just enjoyed the simple process of playing an instrument. And that small epiphany had its kickback into writing: for the first time I started to write poems for the sake of the statement made & the craft of putting it together, unconcerned with rapturous reception from the world at large.

That enjoyment has been supplemented, but by no means supplanted, by some modest publishing success over the past 18 years. But it's principally been the pursuit of a personal notion of excellence that has driven the writing on.

And I guess I may well have wobbled off towards old age content enough with a small bunch of homebrew, free range poems tucked into a notebook, read by family & friends, had it not been for the dicvovery of the weblog. The joy of blogging for me - & I'm certain for many others too - is in its synthesis of ars gratia artis on the part of the writer & instant interaction with the reader. There is no sense of tailoring output for a largely invisible public: if the stuff has instrinsic merit then it will find its constituency &, one by one, maybe, they will come knocking on the door via the comments box. And for my purposes at this fairly advanced point in my life that works about as well as anything needs to.

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POETRY JUMPS OFF THE SHELF

Some time ago, Shoshauna Shy at Woodrow Hall Editions/BookThatPoet.com put out an unusal call. She was looking for "lively and upbeat poems" to launch the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program. Any topic was welcome, Shoshauna said, as long as it referred in some way to bicycles, walking, public transportation, car-pooling or appreciation of the natural environment. The poems selected will be produced for Community Car, Madison, Wisconsin’s member-based car-sharing program, and Budget Bicycle’s Red Bikes Rental Program; the poems will appear inside hand-sized books in glove compartments, attached to handlebars as laminated bookmarks, on membership invoices or in Community Car newsletters.

Shoshauna selected two of my poems for this adventure, "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain" and "Simply Morning" from Between Zen & Midwestern.

The project is coming to fruition. In today's mail, I got samples. What a nifty idea it is. My poems are printed on white stock that has been laminated on both sides; a punch-hole in the upper corner allows a key chain to be put through the sheet. These poems will be "attached to the handlebars of 4-to-8 Red Bikes. These bikes start out as trade-ins, get painted red, then given to people to use during the warm weather months for a nominal deposit. If returned intact by Halloween, the riders get their deposits back."

We can only imagine all of the places your poems go and who happens to read them, Shoshauna suggests.

I admire the inventiveness of this project, and am pleased to be included. Indeed, it takes poetry off the shelf and out of the classroom, and puts it face-to-face where people are.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT. CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART THREE

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

"I had a boy that was a nuisance in the classroom," Pearl remembered. "He wanted to show off and he didn't care whether he learned or not. The new year, my class came in. Of course, I had to get acquainted with everyone, and everyone was the same as far as I was concerned. I didn't know who they were. The teacher who had him before said 'Oh, did you get him? Oh, Pearl, I feel sorry for you.' I finally found out who this boy was. He was going to show off, make fun in the classroom, play horse. One day he came to school with steel taps on the heels of his shoes. The school building was old. It had wooden floors. It sounded like a horse walking across the room - clump, clump, clump, you know. One day I thought 'I can't take all this.' So as the children were coming in from playing, I was at the door receiving my class, and he was tagging along behind about six or eight feet. CLOMP clomp CLOMP clomp. I stepped in front of him while the rest of the class went on in and took their places. And I said 'Bob, I know that you have to have these heel taps to save your shoes. Boys wear out their shoes, I know that. But couldn't you be a bit more quiet as you walk?" He said "I suppose." So he walked on his tip-toes back to his seat. And the next day the taps were off.

Pearl didn't challenge him, she asked him for help. "Charmed him" is how she puts it. "Psychology," she said.

In the Depression, Pearl said, "we always had good food. We raised our own cows. We butchered our own hogs. We had a big vegetable garden. We canned. We had fruit preserves. I still love to cook. I cook three meals a day and eat right."

Eating right might be another part of Pearl's secret to long life. "It has to be - living here where I have good food, a good atmosphere, quiet, peace, and we have a spring here. When we first got the farm, we had a hydraulic ram that pumped the water up to the house, so we had running water in a trough in the basement - like a refrigerator. Everything stayed cool. In the family we had cows and chickens, so our income was from the milk and eggs and the butter we made. We ate well, but we were poor and didn't know it. With my mother's good management. It was all the years, I'm talking about, the early ones too, not just the Depression."

"Even now," she said, "I'm eating almost all out of the garden - the peas and so on. My nephew who lives here in the mobile home - it was his wife who just called me - he dug the garden. I had polio and can't walk - that's my big problem. See how I have to walk, that is a burden."

"With my polio," she continued, "my mother got me to the doctor right away and he diagnosed it almost at once, but in those days there wasn't much they could do. They massaged it. When I was a little girl and would lie down to take my nap, my mother would massage that ankle and that leg most affected by the polio."

During World War I, Pearl said, "my mother, being away from her family, corresponded all the time with her brothers and their families. Her youngest brother went to North Dakota and took up a claim in 1900. She corresponded with him regularly, and with the brother and his family and her mother back in Roanoke. I believe in keeping in touch with family. Right now I could go back to the Civil War era and tell you about my grandfather who wore the Confederate uniform. That's been a love of mine, to keep up with the family. That's history."

"In the First World War, there were some Olson boys from North Dakota, where the younger brother of my mother had settled. They were stationed at Wright Field in Dayton. They were on their way to Europe. My uncle wrote my mother and said 'Those boys are there and can't go home, can't get back to North Dakota. Maybe you could call them and let them know you are interested in them.' And he gave my mother the address of these Olson boys. Mother looked at me and she said, 'Pearl, that's a job for you.' I was only 14. She said, 'You can be the one to write.' So I wrote a letter right away, to the address my uncle had sent. Before the letter ever got to them, they were moved out of Wright Field and were in New York to be shipped off. They couldn't answer me until they got to England. So a little 14-year-old girl was corresponding with those North Dakota boys in Europe."

The correspondence continued for a couple of years while the boys were in Europe.

To be continued....

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

"Stevy Pete was a tellin' about when he lived in town about twenty years ago," Ivan wrote. "Pete lived in the northwest part of town. He was being bothered by skunks. Steve said one morning about three o'clock he was on his front porch wearing only his jockey shorts and boots shooting at a skunk. His neighbor yelled, 'I've got pictures.'"

"Jenifer Hamilton, the New York Lady, loaded her pick-up, Trusty Rusty, and headed for her new mission field, Sterling, Colorado," Ivan said. "Hamilton left Western Plains Village around nine o'clock last Wednesday morning. There was a trail of brown flecks in the wake of Trusty Rusty. It could have been rust or it could have been something about the same color as rust."

"Judy Hall held her first T-Ball practice one evening last week," said Ivan. "She put the helmet on one little girl. As she was putting it on, Judy said to the little girl, 'Now you know what this is for, don't you?' The little girl said, 'Yes, it's to keep the hair out of your eyes.'"

Ivan said: "I said to Brenda the waitress, 'You know, you are a kind of a pain in the rear.' She said, 'I know, but I'm good at it.'"

"Like the late Ted Relihan used to say," Ivan wrote, "'we have made a lot of improvements in Smith Center and I've been against nearly every one of them.'"

"I did learn something at Paul's Cafe last Friday morning," Ivan said. "When I got there Glen Allen was the only one there. Glen said he had stayed up all night waiting for dew on the grass. He said there wasn't any even after the wind went down. Now the reason Allen was waiting for the dew was because he wanted his alfalfa to get some moisture on it before he started baling it. He said you had to have dew. Gene Conaway came in and said you need to have a little moisture to bale. Said it kept the protein in the leaves. Then Kendall Nichols observed that there are not many old farmers who fool with alfalfa anymore. And, he continued, most of the alfalfa is baled at night. I get a better education right up there at Paul's Cafe than I would if I enrolled at K-State."

"I think I got Lonna's name spelled right," Ivan said after mentioning her. "I just sounded it out and used whatcha call your fonicks."

There were three preachers at The As the Bladder Fills Club one morning. "With three ministers gathered in one place, the place took on a kind of a sanctimonious glow," Ivan said. "Conversations were cleaned up and no one eye-balled the waitresses. Oh, that reminds me, waitress Julie Schmidt coached little girls T-Ball Thursday night. Julie takes her orders directly from team manager Judy Hall. They call themselves manager and coach but I don't think they had a bunt signal between them."

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 29, 1998

Going back to work this morning is about more than going back to work. It is about stepping back into my customary rituals, my usual habits, about going back to dance my eternal dance. In a sense, it is reassuring - getting back to what I know. In another sense, it is confining, I suppose like stepping back into the darkness of prison.

At the very least, I shall be able to start again my morning meditation on the drive to work. I wonder how long it will take me to get comfortable with this once more. My writing has been very hit and miss the past month.

Oh, loud birds, birds singing in my yard. I start the pick-up. The ritual has begun. With song, with mourning dove on the driveway, with sun coming over the tree tops, long shadows.

Dew glistens on individual blades of grass.

Just north of town I see a large part of a tree is down. I had not noticed that on Saturday.

The winter rye has turned color and should be ready for harvest in two or three weeks perhaps.

A little water still stands in some of the fields. With the moisture and the heat and the humidity, you can almost hear the corn growing.

All the fields of peas along Highway E have been harvested.

Now I see soybeans up in all the untilled fields just south of Five Corners. Morning glories are in glorious bloom in the flower beds at Five Corners.

A bicyclist between Five Corners and Union Street wears a bright tie-dyed shirt - gold like the sun, red like blood.

It is good to be home again.


>

TOMORROW I LEAVE FOR TWO WEEKS
    OF VAGABONDAGE
IN L'ANSE, MI, AND REDFIELD, SD

Tomorrow I will hightail for L'Anse, up at the bottom of Lake Superior's Keweenaw Bay, in the Land of Accent-on-the-First-Syllable-and-Let-the-Rest-Fall-Where-They-May - KEE-wenaw Bay, BEARaga County. There is to be celebration of the area's history over the 4th of July holiday. One of my Vagabond tasks is to partake of the celebrations that help define my "focus communities." You can be sure I will report on L'Anse's when I return.

I'll be camping out while I'm there, but I'll trust that any trees in the campsite will not - I repeat, WILL NOT - throw the butt end of a 250-pound branch down on me, as happened at my camp-out last September in Rugby, North Dakota. There I was, looking up at the raw, torn end of the branch inches from my forehead and thinking "What a stupid way to die." I didn't die, but I got some cuts and scrapes. It was my own fault. I'd been sitting at the table in front of my tent writing in my journal; I was just in the middle of writing a sentence poking a little fun at the cottonwood trees, the way they talk, talk, talk in just a little breeze; and one of the cottonwoods retaliated. A fellow from one of the big motorhomes set up in the area saw what happened, and he came over to help me. It was all the two of us could do to move the branch off my camp-site. You might say that only a fool would camp near cottonwoods when the wind is blowing, but the wind wasn't blowing; this happened in the stillness of sunset; there was no warning, no sound of a branch breaking, only the whoosh of it coming at me.

Be careful what you say around cottonwoods!

After a week in the green and blue of the Upper Peninsula's woods and water, I will bee-line across the upper middle west, from L'Anse to Redfield, and spend a week in the wind of South Dakota. South Dakota has wind, and these most amazing sunsets, distinctive enough in my imagination that when I see such a one elsewhere, you might hear my call it "a South Dakota sunset." As Shirley Sanger of Zell, South Dakota, put it for me when I spoke with her last year, "I like the openness that you can see out here, the sunsets. I like to go out to the Black Hills and visit, but after a couple days I want to come back." That kind of sunset. Perhaps the gulp of emotion I feel seeing them has something to do with the fact that my Gramma Allen's family homesteaded in South Dakota for a while (before they gave up and returned to the lush greenness of Iowa).

After two weeks away, you can be sure I'll be ready to return to the lushness of this big cinnamon-colored house in Fairwater. I hope Mary will be ready to have me back. The last time I was in Redfield, towards the end of another two-week trip, I called her on Thursday night, to hear she didn't think she missed me all that much. Well, Thursday at noon I had wired flowers for delivery to her at work on Friday, and I thought "What a waste of $42." I consoled myself thinking that she was just very busy and didn't really have time to think about how much she missed me. Well, she was very busy. I didn't tell her about the flowers on the phone, and they sorta knocked her socks off the next day, or would have if her friends hadn't kept asking "What's Tom trying to get away with?"

As you'll see tomorrow, while I'm gone you'll have a little assignment to work on. It'll be "open mike," as Peter from slow reads likes to put it.

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NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART TWO

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

At age 18, Pearl survived the loss of her mother, whom she loved so dearly. Why and how?

"Well, my father had tenacity," she said. "He had hardly any education. My mother was the business mind of the family and was a great organizer, wide awake to things going on in the community and taking care of her family. She would have been a hero if you are including good mothers."

"I taught school for five years in Lewisburg," Pearl said, "for nine years in Eaton, for twenty-six years in Dayton. For forty years, fifth or sixth grade, ten-year-olds, not babies and not smart alecks. You could challenge them to stand on their heads and they'd try it. And I was one who challenged them."

"Now I have grandmothers and grandfathers visit me," she said. "They are in their fifties and sixties, some of my students. Four little grandmothers were here just a few weeks ago. I taught them back in 1941."

"I've had a great life, a great, colorful life," she said, "but it's been a hard one. Blood, sweat, and tears many times, I'll tell you."

Pearl's young siblings grew up and moved away. Pearl and her father still lived on the farm and Pearl continued to teach.

"My father lived to be 84," Pearl said. "He died in 1954."

"Dad, of course, never had a tractor," she said. "He farmed with horses. This farm is a hilly farm. It's not a very highly-producing farm. It's seventy-six acres, it's hilly. We had cows and sheep. Sheep are the best lawn-mowers there are, you know."

"The kind of person my father was, he couldn't be put down - he went ahead," Pearl remembered. "I have that same tenacity. You can't push me down. I'll push through all the trials and tribulations that go along with losing all your family and trying to make ends meet here in the home, and so forth. In those days, our salaries were low. You didn't prosper too much. Enough to dress decently and have your transportation. You loved your work. I loved my work. I still love life."

Her love of life, Pearl admitted, has to be part of the reason for her long life. "My body was not a strong body in a way," she said. "Yet I could do things that were worthwhile in the world. One of them was taking care of my dad's family. And looking after myself. People might think I was a little bit selfish, but I wasn't. I was looking after the family as well as myself. I couldn't just die, I was still alive - I had to look after Pearl a little bit, you know?"

"Time went on with that life," she said. "I'd gone to college just one year. I taught two years, then I went back to school for another year and graduated from the Teachers College at Miami University, the two year program. Afterwards, to get my degree, I finished another two years with night school and summer school. I got my degree in 1940. I'd started back in 1922. It was difficult holding down the farm and taking care of dad and the children, and at the same time getting my own self promoted."

"I was teaching in Eaton during the 1930s," Pearl said, speaking of the Depression. "I had forty-five children in my class at one time. Forty and forty-five. Teachers now can't believe that. In those days, in hard times, families sent their children to school to learn, not to play horse; and I was there to teach them, and not play horse. We had fun. We laughed, and I laughed with them. And there was no more fun for me than to temper and control some little feisty boy who wanted to show off, you know. I could charm them. I had a little way of charming them. I still am charming kids. I mean that. It sounds like I'm bragging but I'm not. You give me a little ten-year-old and the first thing you know, I'm talking his life and my life, and he's wanting to know more about me and I'm wanting to know more about him. Two years ago, I was invited to go to a re-union of a Sunday School that was in a church a block from my school building. This little fellow was there listening to our conversation. I took my class pictures and was showing them to the people who were in their sixties and seventies, who'd been my pupils. And this little fellow stood at my shoulder while I was sitting there talking and people were looking at the pictures I'd taken of class work, and he just stood there and listened and listened and listened. His grandfather had gone to my school but hadn't been a pupil of mine. This little fellow, ten-years-old, he and I got together, talking. I said 'What are you doing?' and so on. He was a collector of coins. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins and showed them to me. And he handed me a gold dollar. I still have it here on my desk. He loved this old teacher. And I loved him. So, I tell you, I can really charm them."

To be continued....

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from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 27, 1998

Just back from Montana last night, I am driving into work for a half a day on a Saturday, to give myself a jump start on the coming week.

I see the canning factory is spraying waste water in its field. If I couldn't see it, I could smell it - there is a strong stench of silage.

Farther along Highway E, a field of hay has just been taken.

Driving home yesterday just west of here we saw that fields of peas had been harvested. They have also taken a field of them here, near the power pole where the snowy owl used to perch, that place.

The corn has grown amazingly in our absence. It is thigh high, waist high in places. A storm came through last night and there are wet spots in some of the fields this morning.

It looks like soy beans have come up in one of the "untilled" fields I've been pointing out all along just south of Five Corners. The beans are poking right up through the corn stalks. No till farming, obviously.

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I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

White House spokesman Dan Bartlett was quoted over the weekend about Farenheit 9/11, saying "This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it to know it's filled with factual inaccuracies." I'm not very political, but... that sounds like the way the White House responds to intelligence information, too. "We know what we want," they must say to each other. "Why would we need to know anything else?"


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
    CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART ONE

This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently in the house and on the farm her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.

Pearl Mt. Castle lives in the country southeast of Lewisburg, Ohio, north of Eaton. She was 99 years old when I interviewed her, still living on her own in the house she grew up in, with a nephew nearby to check on her as necessary.

Her parents were born and reared near Roanoke, Virginia. As a young couple with three children, they migrated to Ohio in 1897, to Montgomery County just over the road in front of Pearl's place.

"I was born November 13, 1903," Pearl said, "so I was the fifth child in the family, of nine children altogether. I was born east of West Alexandria, Ohio. Six months after I was born, my parents moved to a farm about fifteen miles from where I live now. When I was about six, they moved again, about a mile and a half, to another farm, and from there they moved to this place. So I've only lived in four houses all this time."

And, I might add just to make it clear, she's lived in just one house since she was ten years old.

Pearl had polio in 1907 or 1908 and "was not able to walk," and couldn't start school on time.

"I tried, but was too weak, so mother took me out for a year," Pearl said. "Then I became a little stronger but had to be transported to school. Back in the horse and buggy days, that was a problem."

"I went to a little school in Prymont, Ohio," Pearl said. "It is about eight miles from here, a two-room school building with four classes in each room, the first eight grades. As I went to first grade I loved every day, every day, every day - I just loved it. When I was in second grade, my teacher let me help the slow learners in the first grade and that's when I decided I wanted to be a teacher. It was second grade, I started teaching."

"When we moved here in 1913," she added, "I went to the little one-room school for a couple years."

"My mother was in favor of me becoming a teacher," Pearl said. "She and I were very close. When she died at the end of my school years, my life was gone. Because we were so close."

"I was to graduate from high school in 1922," Pearl said, "the only one in the family to decide to go to high school. My mother was so proud of that. Wanting to be a teacher - she tried to promote that. In a family of nine, it's a question whether you have the resources for that. It was a question."

"I had a very happy education," Pearl said. "I had a very happy life, with a big family - working in the garden, canning fruits and vegetables, regular old farm living."

"My mother was so happy about me graduating," she said. "In those days mothers sewed for their children. She had all our clothes made for graduation, which would be two or three different dresses."

"She passed away April 12th, when I was to graduate in May," Pearl said. "So I lost my mother. My world came to an end."

"At that time," she continued, "my older brothers and sisters were all married. I was 18. My younger sisters were still here - three younger sisters and a little brother. So what was Pearl to do? Being a little country girl, I didn't have the understanding we have today that you could do this, you could do that if you wanted to. I just thought the world was coming to an end."

"In our neighborhood," she said, "there was another family with a daughter the same age as I was. We were friends. Our fathers worked together, trading farm work, helping each other. This other fellow was a little more aware of things going on in the world. My father was a great man, but uneducated. Well-loved by everybody who knew him. Hitch his horse in a moment to go help a neighbor, in horse and buggy days. The two fathers got together and said 'What about these two little girls, here in the country. They're through school now. What's before them?' We knew the woman who was Dean of Women at Miami University that summer - we knew her because she was from West Alexandria. So the two men and the two little girls drove down to Oxford. We found out what we were supposed to do to matriculate."

"This was in August," Pearl said. "My mother was gone. We matriculated. Started to school in September. This little girl and I were room-mates in college. We spent the year down there together."

"When the year was up - one year at the teachers' college," she said, "I took the examination for teachers and I started teaching school. I was only 19. At Lewisburg. The superintendent knew me, knew my background. He was a great help to me. I'd had only one year of study for teaching elementary school."

"I came home," Pearl said, "I lived here, packed five lunches a day, taught school, oversaw the housework. Before, I had always milked cows. My younger brother and sisters had to do the milking now. I took over the household at 19 and also started teaching school at 19. I took over care of my younger sisters and younger brother, and of course of my father who was heartsick over the loss of that beautiful mother of mine."

"It was not easy living," she said matter-of-factly. "Having had polio, I didn't have the strength of body some girls might have had. But I had tenacity."

She laughed. "I was going to go on. And I did. I did."

To be continued....

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JOURNAL ENTRY:
RIDING THE TRAIN
BACK FROM MONTANA
JUNE 25, 1998 - PART TWO

At Havre, it starts to look as if we are coming into badlands, with a rough roll to the land. The Indians used to drive buffalo off the cliffs about town.

East out of Havre, a whole range of peaks to the south. We are on the high plains here, but those are not high plains there. A little farther east, the peaks appear to be much nearer. There are very dark, thick, grey clouds in the sky above them. And then, suddenly, the range ends abruptly and is replaced with what looks like a flat-topped plateau overlooking a wide plain below. Still the Great American Desert is greener than you'd reasonably expect. There are even trees in places, long groves of them.

In the Bear Paw Mountains east of Havre is where Chief Joseph surrendered. It was Chief Joseph who said: "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." Would that he had been speaking not only for the Nez Perce but also for the rest of humankind.

Further east, a couple small peaks, like a hiccup on the landscape, and then another ridge starts up.

Rain in the distance. Now it is difficult to know what we are seeing to the south - everything fades into the grey curtain.

This travel by train is the life for me - I am sitting back with my feet up, watching America unroll like a spool of film.

East of Malta, the landscape has really been roughed up. Though there is some farming, much of the land is used for grazing. Rolling land, flat-topped buttes as we head east towards the Fort Peck Dam and, farther on, the Missouri Breaks. Grey sky and a darkness like dusk, only it is still 5:15 p.m. Mountain Time as we head into Glasgow, Montana. We are nearing the eastern edge of the Mountain Time Zone, but that does not explain the dimness of the sky above. Thick grey paint has been spilled over the dome of sky. I cannot imagine, simply cannot imagine crossing this land in a wagon, not one drawn by oxen, not one drawn by horses. This iron charger eats up the miles, but even so we are still in Montana after eight hours of traveling east. You could damn near drive across Europe in eight hours, couldn't you? And we're still in Montana.

Between Glasgow and Wolf Point, six antennas are set upon a distant ridge to the south. We suppose they are radio antennas beaming away their signal into the low grey sky.

In Wolf Point, a boy standing on a gravel street throws stones at the train entering the station. Well, in Wolf Point, saying "the train entering the station" is perhaps exaggeration. High cheek bones, broad noses, bronze skin of one couple departing from the train here suggests an Indian heritage. Constant reminders here about from whom the west was won.

Even farther east, in the grey evening air, a green house, an unnaturally green house I must say, on the green plain. Beyond that, to the south, the ridge that we've been running along for quite a while continues. Which river was it we could see from the train?

An old threshing machine holds down its part of the world, bound to it by rust.

During supper we saw the Missouri and the Missouri Breaks. We saw it raining "on both sides of the train this time," as a fellow passenger said. We ate with a couple from Platteville, Wisconsin. He teaches engineering at the university there. She has had bad luck with her food on the train in the past - lasagna overdone, steak too dry. Warns me that my steak will be too well done. I tell her I usually have good luck with food; and my steak was excellent. It's karma - if you want good food, expect it; then eat what you get. Those who complain about bad food get bad food, that's how it works. They will be getting off at Columbus, Wisconsin.

There is blue sky out the window now. We went back to Central Time in Williston, North Dakota, as we finished supper.

The staff of the train is amazing - they have done their tasks thousands and thousands of times yet they make everything seem fresh this time, as if the first time. They also do an excellent job of teaching us the ins and outs very quickly. Our attendant, Henry, a young black man, "owns" this car and wants to make sure we are satisfied; and yet he doesn't hound us.

Night descends. It won't be long and we'll be asking Henry to make up the beds in this small cubicle.

The fields are flatter for longer stretches now. The farm houses are larger. Everything looks more prosperous.

A white school house and a church, once white - they are both windowless and decaying. I'd say we are on an Indian reservation where another promise has been broken, but there are large fields of wheat and alfalfa. There are roads and powerlines. There is water. I didn't know land this good was ever set aside for reservation. (When I look at a map later, I'll see that it is not reservation land.)

The roads crossing the train tracks seem to be all gravel roads in North Dakota, few and far between. The farm houses too are few and far between. We are somewhere between Williston and Stanley, North Dakota, I believe. The sky darkens. A mile to the south, a semi moves east on US Highway 2. The ditch alongside the train is full of water for a quarter mile. A grain elevator, a lot of anhydrous ammonia tanks, a farm implement dealer with a lot full of rusting machinery, 15-20 houses. Didn't catch the name of the settlement. Intercom says we are approaching Stanley and will stop there soon, so that must have been Ross, North Dakota, we passed. In the distance, a blue A.O. Smith silo. Can that be a church with a red neon light in the steeple? One if by land, two if by sea? Isn't this the part of North Dakota where there are ICBMs poised in silos, ready to right the world?

Minot, North Dakota - we step outside for a breath of fresh air before we sleep. It is after 11:00 p.m. The air is still warm, but refreshingly clear. We have our beds made up.

Thought before sleep: The system knows itself. Understand the system and use its knowledge of itself to your advantage.

*

JUNE 26, 1998
Rise at 6:30 a.m. We are west of St. Cloud, Minnesota, still, but we have slept across a great swatch of North Dakota. Any form of travel has to be A-OK if it lets you travel at 79 m.p.h and sleep the great long miles across North Dakota. Don't get me wrong - I love North Dakota, but there's just so damn much of it. We have breakfast, sitting with a retired bricklayer and his wife from north of Chicago. She is unhappy with the rough sleeping, he pretty much knows how it is.


>

SATURDAY'S POEMS
-------------------------
THAW, 2003, STANTON TOWNSHIP
by Robert Schuler

hawks suddenly
bursting out of shadowy mist
banking floating
wings spread
broad
flashing bright white
through the black
oak-thicketed draws
water bubbling spiralling
silver out of sand and mud


*


THE AMERICAN MILLENIUM
by Robert Schuler

my old man said he could buy
whatever he wanted
I'm just looking around
to see what's left


Robert Schuler appears in two major anthologies of midwestern writing, Imagining Home and Inheriting the Land, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. His eleventh collection of poems, In Search of "Green Dolphin Street," has just been published by Marsh River Editions and is available from the author, schulerr@uwstout.edu or E4549 479th Avenue, Menomonie, WI 54751, for $9.00 including postage.

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

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 THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 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 Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 14, 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 twelveth and final part of my report of the trip; it recounts the end of the second day of the drive.

I am in Red Cloud, Nebraska, girlhood home of Willa Cather and the setting for several of her novels. I think Red Cloud struggles. Even some of the houses still being lived in look as if they are coming apart at every seam. Nothing comes easy here, even after a hundred twenty five years. There is a downtown with businesses, a cobblestone street. There is a high school. The high school parking lot has a cinder surface instead of asphalt, wooden ties instead of concrete for the curbs.

Historical marker: Red Cloud is named for the Ogallala Sioux chief. The community was established in 1871. The main line of the Burlington and Missouri Railway reached Red Cloud in 1879. "Red Cloud was the childhood home of Willa Cather," the sign says, "and it is known throughout the world as the setting of her six Nebraska novels and numerous short stories. The pioneers she knew in town and on the nearby farms lived on in her writings."

I am quiet in the presence of that notion, even as I cross the Republican River.

I have been traveling too fast and I'm dazed and confused. I haven't stopped for long enough in Red Cloud even to find the Willa Cather center a sign had promised earlier. I'll come back, no doubt, some other day. One does not write for long of the middle west without discussing Cather. Her work is among that which represents us in the gallery of humankind.

Historical marker: Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. Willa Cather came to Webster County, Nebraska, at age nine in 1883, from Virginia. "This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake."

The prairie is six hundred ten acres of native grassland owned by the Nature Conservancy. There is horse shit on the driveway past the marker. I can see north from here forever. Well, not forever perhaps, but into the heart's heart.

This is a moment of quiet meditation. I wish I could leave a little mark of my own, to say that we were here. We are here, we're going to disappear so quickly, like a puff of milkweed pod blown by the wind. And, to be sure, the wind is blowing.

There is another marker here for the Friends of Libraries USA Literary Landmarks Register. A passage from The Song of the Lark:

"It was flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang - and one's heart sang there too."

Stand here in the September sun and let your heart sing too, I beg you.

It is 3:00 p.m. You barely exit the driveway at the Willa Cather Prairie and you enter Kansas. A turkey vulture is a slow pinwheel in the sky, a marker above Cather's prairie.

I push on south towards the geographic center of the lower forty-eight states; it's located in Smith County, Kansas. I'll stop again at the cairn that marks the center.

I see wheat stubble in Kansas darker than anything I'd seen farther north; it is almost as dark as the soil here. I can only assume it is the stubble of an early crop and it has weathered.

My - what a beautiful view of a ridge in the distance; it must be the ridge that Highway 36 runs along.

The cairn for the geographic center of the lower 48 states. This place in the middle of the middle. This marker at the far edge of the middle west, the near edge of the west, the place where north and south and east and west kiss.

There was a car from Missouri stopped at the little park here when I arrived. A car from Texas pulls in as I am leaving.

The same wind blows here as blows in Rugby, North Dakota.

I am hearing the same song from the trees.

I have seen everything laid along this far edge of the middle west, along this line from Canada to Kansas, along this divide between crops and range-land, farm and ranch, farm boy and cowboy.

Life along the line is tough living; merely showing up is not enough; you've got to work, and work hard, to succeed. There are no gimme's.

The wind blows. And blows. And I turn away from the far edge of things. I'm feeling my usual sadness.

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

JOURNAL ENTRY:
RIDING THE TRAIN
BACK FROM MONTANA
JUNE 25, 1998 - PART ONE

Whitefish, Montana. We board Amtrack for the Twin Cities at 9:30 a.m. local time - two hours late. The locals are not surprised the train is late.

We have left behind a daughter who is starting graduate school in Missoula. We are only miles from Glacier National Park. We have left behind the daughter who has long wanted to be a mountain rescue ranger - there are mountains hereabouts, but I wonder how many jobs to support a volunteer rescue ranger.

The train is two hours late. Doesn't matter to me. It is light out now and we can see river and mountain and the clouds banging their bellies.

Some observations about Montana:

o There are mountain girls and there are cow girls - they look different, they walk different, they talk different. One wears hiking boots, the other cowboy boots. The mountain girls are a little thicker muscled, especially in the legs. The cowgirls wiggle more when they walk.

o There are, apparently, a lot more smokers in Montana - at least we see a lot more of them than we do on average in Wisconsin.

o There are more drifters and homeless people in Missoula than I expected - and some of them look pretty weathered and grizzled. You think maybe they got as far as the Rockies then couldn't make it over the mountains. A natural barrier for the drifters to blow up against, the way Key West is as far as one can blow in the tropical direction.

o Cottonwood trees in Missoula were sending out enough fluff to make a quilt for a very large bed. It drifted into piles a foot deep along some buildings.

o I didn't say this - my wife and daughter did - all the women in Montana are pretty good looking. We did not see near so many obese folks as we would in Wisconsin or Minnesota. Reminds me of the Kentucky boy told me: "Ain't no fat people in the mountains."

o They have way more than their fair share of mountains around here and should send a few to central Wisconsin.

o The houses on the Flathead Indian Reservation north of Missoula are trim and well cared for. Some awfully pretty scenery lies within the reservation's boundary.

More.

The train came through Marias Pass and - BOOM - just like that we are out of the mountains and onto the high plains. The snow covered Rockies rise up like dark storm clouds behind us. There are ranches with horses, fields with tractors working their way across them. The land has a sensuous roll to it and is very much greener than I imagine it will be in August. Missoula has had an unusual amount of moisture this year and I suppose the same is true here on the highest of the plains.

Not fifteen minutes later it is possible to see only the very peaks of the mountains in the distance. They are mottled, very much like a Chinese water color. US Highway 2 runs alongside the tracks. It is 12:30 p.m. local time. We are #13 in line waiting for lunch in the diner car.

Then - all of a sudden - the mountains show themselves again - a great long range of them stretching to the south as far as I can see. Bam Bam Bam the clouds bang into them.

You can still see the Rockies from Cut Bank. They stretch on and on. Don't they go all the way to the tip of South America?

During lunch we watch the Rockies disappear behind us. Then a few cones of mountains to the north, a few more at great distance to the south.

We sat at lunch with a wonderful elderly couple from Highland Park, Illinois. They were returning from a trip to Vancouver, B.C., where they visited a daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren. She had a stroke last year and moves slowly as the aisles of the train are not wide enough for her walker. He has retired "six or seven times" and is still doing some teaching and administration at Trinity Seminary off Highway 41/294 at Highway 22 north of Chicago. He has a master's in theology. His parents were Ohio farm stock. He graduated from Ashland College. She was born in New York. They must be in their 80s. They were wonderful companions for our meal and I would look forward to another meal with them any time.

Here on the high plains, this must be tough country in which to make a living. Farmsteads visible along the tracks are not well cared for - by Wisconsin standards at least. There are places that look like the stereotype of trailer trash, outbuildings unpainted and falling apart, old cars rusting. Nothing looks permanent - rather it looks like it has been temporary for fifty years. An overwhelming untidiness, at least for a German. What was it the woman from Moose Jaw told me years ago - her friends had traveled in the USA as far as Indiana (to a James Dean Festival!) and could not believe how tidy Americans kept their farmsteads. Well, this Montana country looks a lot like that part of Canada.

The train rolls on - top speed is 79 miles per hour so likely we will never make up the two hours the train is behind schedule. The land just rolls away into the big sky.

To Be continued....


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 14, 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 eleventh part of my report of the trip; it recounts part of the second and final day of the drive.

Historical marker: Chalk Mine. Happy Jack's Peak served as a look-out to guard against surprise attacks by the Indians. In 1877, mining of chalk in these bluffs commenced. Then the mine stood idle for a number of years and was re-opened in the 1930s by an Omaha paint company. The chalk was used in paint, white-wash, cement, polishes, and chicken flame. In 1967 the mine area became a wayside park. The parking lot where I'm making these notes is near the top of Happy Jack's Peak. If I'd wait half an hour, I could get a guide tour of the mine. I don't think so. I have miles to go....

Sign: "Entering Howard County."

An old house. It is so closed in by trees that dreams can't live here any more.

Sign: "Howard County Bank - we measure our customers by the size of their dreams."

Elba Cemetery - 1894. I don't stop to visit its dead.

Instead, when I reach Highway 92, I turn right instead of left. Who's leading this expedition? I go twelve miles out of the way to the west, twelve miles coming back. Twice I get to see the abandoned farmstead sinking into the land. Twice I pass through Farwell, home of St. Anthony's, the oldest Polish-Catholic Church in Nebraska. Twice I get to wonder what Polish peasant immigrants thought when they saw such wide open spaces. I saw Turkey Creek and a dried up slough when I was headed west, then again when I was headed east. Windmills pumping water for herds of cattle. Entering Sherman County. I recognized my mistake at Ashton - pop. 237. Ashton has a "Polish Heritage Center."

I don't know what cues alerted me to my mistake. I'm fortunate. Knowing me, things could have kept getting stranger and stranger until the sign said "Entering Wyoming." Now think about it, Tom: if you are heading south and you turn right, which direction will you be going? Well, of course, Tom says, it's obvious if you look at it that way. Ah, says Ben, you don't have to go to Chicago to get lost.

Ashton is straight north of Smith Center, Kansas, near the 99th Meridian. Now I'm headed east and south again, the direction I mean to be going.

Sign: "Welcome to St. Paul - Batting 1.000. Historic Baseball Capital of Nebraska." The population of St. Paul is 2009. There's a Super 8 Motel here. It's a prosperous community.

I cross the Middle Loup River.

It is a hundred and thirty-four miles to Omaha from here.

Corn and range-land prosper equally.

Now I'm headed south on Highway 281. I could have picked up Highway 281 about thirty six miles east of Rugby, North Dakota, if I'd wished, and could have followed it down to this point. I wanted to be farther west, however, as close to the 100th Meridian as possible, as close to the western edge of the middle west as a fellow can reasonably get.

Water in the ditch alongside the highway - standing about with nothing better to do.

I pass St. Libory without stopping to see if St. Libory has a library. (That's a "joke." Perhaps I'm tired?)

It is almost as if the land has exhaled here. This landscape is a little calmer than some of what I've come through, the trees are thicker, the pace seems more middle western. Okay, on what do I base that judgment? I can't say, so I take it back. I'm not even sure I could ever satisfactorily define "middle western pace."

Sign: "Entering Hall County."

A flat-rack stacked with large round bales crosses the four lanes of highway at Prairie Road. Just to the south of Prairie Road, a very large cattle feedlot. Parts of Indiana look very much like this, parts of south-central Illinois.

Now all the roads are named, with signs. We are just north of Grand Island, Nebraska.

The "Poor Farm Cemetery" has no gravestones in evidence.

Grand Island is a Grand Burg. I stop at the DQ for ice cream.

The four-lane highway south out of Grand Island is called the Tom Osborne Freeway. One supposes it was named for the Tom Osborne who coached Nebraska Cornhusker football for a quarter century? He was born in Hastings, just south of here.

Even out in Nebraska, urban sprawl destroys cornfield after cornfield. This could be Indianapolis, the western edges of Chicago. No - perhaps I exaggerate slightly.

I cross the Platte River twice. It is not so impressive as I have imagined.

Sign: "Doniphan - Determined to preserve the good life."

Hastings - pop. 24,000. It has Nebraska's Softball Hall of Fame.

Sign: "Hastings Welcomes You." But not so much that they'll keep the Information Center open on the weekend.

Now I'm heading south to Red Cloud, to see what of Willa Cather's legacy shows itself. Then I will take US 36 over to Missouri. A fairly square drive down the spine of things, a square turn to the east then. It is somehow fitting to include Willa Cather in this run.

Historical marker: At the intersection of Saddlehorn Road and US 281, or Baltimore Avenue, as they call it locally, a stone marks the Oregon Trail and commemorates the Pony Express.

I cross the Little Blue River. A dead deer on the bridge.

A lot of woods here, flat valley, river bottoms, all this greenness. Twenty-eight miles to Red Cloud.

The corn that has been irrigated looks good. Th corn that has not been irrigated won't even make passable silage.

Sign: "Welcome to Webster County - Catherland and Western Museum."

Blue Hill - pop. 867.

There's half a bag of tomatoes scattered on the road, a wasteful place to put them, no?

An old farmhouse. Though its eyes are closed, the house is still being lived in.

Now I'm on the Willa Cather Roadway.

The obligatory abandoned farmhouse, this one almost collapsed in a heap on the ground.

The raccoons and skunks here in Catherland are not any wiser than those of Wisconsin - representatives lie dead and scattered along the highway.

Sign: "Lakeview Cattle Co."

Sign: "Welcome to Red Cloud."

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

from
THIS GATHERING SEASON
in MIDDLE GROUND (1982)

The steady eye, of course,
survives

this rip in darkness,
a slash

of morning light the color
of snow

in April - The silence of
daybreak

measured in the regular
pattern

of her breathing. She sleeps.
Each breath

sucks the husk of night;
returns,

then, a glow to the room -
The day

becomes more than I can own
or hold.



>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 14, 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 tenth part of my report of the trip; it recounts part of the second and final day of the drive.

Historical marker: The Easter Blizzard of 1872 - it began as rain, turned to snow, blew from April 13 through April 17, accumulated twenty-foot drifts. Twenty people died in the storm, thousands of cattle died.

Historical marker: The Pebble Creek Fight - a confrontation on January 19, 1874 with the Indians over property they allegedly stole. The whites were led by Buckskin Charley White. One white and three Indians died in the half-hour battle; several Indians were wounded.

I cross the North Loup River and enter Burwell. I get gasoline at the Sinclair station and have breakfast at the attached Mustang Cafe.

Baseball caps outnumber cowboy hats about 3 to 1 in the cafe, if that means anything.

"You here hunting?" a white-haired fellow asks me once I've taken a table.

"No, I'm just passing through."

"Where you from?"

"Wisconsin."

"You're a long ways from home."

"What are they hunting?"

"Quail, I guess."

Another table. Another conversation: "I see more of you now that you live in North Dakota than I did when you lived here."

Still another conversation: "You ought to go out to the horse sale and buy yourself about six horses. Spend some of that moldy money of yours."

"What would I do with six horses? Where would I keep 'em? Out at your place?"

"No, no - I've already got too many horses. You'd rent them out - $5.00 a ride."

Another table: "How are you? How's your brother?"

"Oh, he's feeling better since the operation."

"I read that article in the paper. Detached retina?"

"Yeah. Affected his vision."

"That's the worst thing that can happen to a photographer."

"Oh, his kids want him to retire."

The white-headed fellow says to the waitress: "How are your tomatoes coming?"

"Oh, there not coming at all. Yours?"

"Mine are just getting ripe."

"I planted those little plum tomatoes."

At a far table: "If you want to buy a truckload, give me a call."

At a near table: "You going over there? I'm going. I'll see you there."

Burwell - what I see of it - seems to be doing well, except maybe for the waitress's patch of plum tomatoes which just aren't getting ripe.

As I head south out of town, I pass the grounds for "Nebraska's Big Rodeo." Yet out in the country it's plain to see that we're back in farm country.

Sign: "Entering Valley County."

Sign: "Deer Crossing."

Sign: "Soft Shoulder."

This landscape is not quite right for Wisconsin. The valley is too broad. It is not quite right for Iowa. The hills are too high, too close together.

A dead mink or weasel on the road, something with a tube of a body.

Elyria - pop. 60. Enough said.

Historical marker: Fort Hartstuff 1874-1881. Established September 5, 1874. Named for General George L. Hartstuff. "Center of social life in the valley." The fort's major military engagement? "The Battle of the Blowout" against hostile Sioux. One soldier died.

Historical marker: St. Mary's Catholic Church: built in 1900 by Polish immigrants near Elyria. The parish served from twenty to eighty families before it was closed in 1983. Sermons were delivered and prayers were said in Polish until 1953.

Oh, what a long line of motorcycles I encounter as I pull back onto the highway after reading the historical markers. An airplane above the road makes a lazy turn.

Historical marker: Evelyn Sharp. Nebraska's best known aviatrix. Soloed at age 16, received her commercial license at age 18. Three hundred fifty men learned to fly under her instruction at Spearfish, South Dakota, her first teaching assignment. She was one of the nation's first female airmail pilots. During World War II, she was part of the Women's Auxilliary Ferrying Squadron - she flew everything from training aircraft to bombers. She was killed at age 24 on April 3, 1944, near Middleton, Pennsylvania, in the crash of a P-38 pursuit plane. She is buried in Ord, Nebraska.

Today is September 14, date of the Evelyn Sharp Days Air Show at the airport in Ord. A plane lands there; two planes take off. The roar of engines must shake Evelyn Sharp's bones.

Ord looks to be a thriving community - tidy houses, green lawns, churches, banks, businesses. The first Macdonald's I've seen in a very long while.

A Chevy comes toward me, driven by an old woman who can't see over the steering wheel. The Cargill Elevator has its own locomotive for moving railroad cars.

Off to my right, the landscape has grown rough again. There is broad water to my left, then board fields of corn. East meets west in the middle, the middle west.

I cross Dowell Creek. At the top of the next rise, a grain elevator comes into view.

Four pick-ups come towards me pulling horse trailers. Hey, cowboy, where's the rodeo? It wasn't in Burwell, at least not today.

The elevator stands in North Loup, "Home of Popcorn Days." North Loup is surviving. I wouldn't say it's thriving.

Sign: "Entering Greeley County." All the dead cottonwoods.

Scotia, off to my left, offers Extreme Bull Riding, whatever that is.

Along the road, a dead game bird big enough that I don't recognize what it might be.

A hawk rides the wind. Train tracks run along side the road here, the rails shining like promise.

To be continued....

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

I'M NOT VERY POLITICAL, BUT...

I'm not very political, but I think W has truly lost his mind. People are still getting beheaded in Iraq and what is W talking about? He's in Ohio pushing "pre-marital counseling" for parents on welfare. Either he has lost his mind, or he is so full of foresight that I can't keep up with him. Which do you think it is?

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

JOURNAL ENTRY:
LOOKING AT "PLACE"
ON A TRIP OUT WEST
JUNE 23, 1998

Summer. A trip west, to move a daughter to Missoula, Montana - 1223 miles from the Twin Cities. I made some observations along the way.

There is a surfeit of snowy peaks only 950 miles west of the Twin Cities.

Big Sky is true - the horizon is farther off. How is that possible? How can the earth appear to fall away in the distance even as it seems to rise up?

There are a lot of ways to look at the land: the farmer says "If you can't farm it, what good is it?" But you look at the ugly scruffiness of the Canadian shield in Quebec - a gnarled land - why not exploit it? What good is it anyway? It is not wilderness, it is where God dumped the leftovers when he was done with everything else. Once it has been spoiled, how could you tell? Mary tells me the landscape around Sudbury, Ontario, is much recovered from where it had been thirty years ago when she saw it first. It still looks pretty wasted to me. Suggests there is a difference between wilderness and wasteland.

There is a difference, seeing a land without history vs. seeing a land shaped by the hands and backs of its settlers. A land without history is somehow less attractive to me. I am, I believe, a "people-based" observer of landscape, rather than "wildlife-based" or "landform-based." So am I at root an historian rather than a geologist?

At home we can watch a thunderstorm roll in across a great sweep of land. Out here, I am watching a storm swirl around the mountains, almost as if it is caught and cannot break itself free.

Do we have a need to see pattern or repetition on the landscape? Is this the reason for our grid pattern laid all across the midwest? Has the land been tamed once it has been so marked?

Clouds just clear the top of the buttes - as if the clouds brushing against peaks have worn them flat.

The wildlife or wilderness experience is only one form of relationship with the land. There are many others. Some, for instance:

- The cropping relationship of the farmer, husbanding for continued, long-term use.

- The extractive relationship of the miner, taking what is to be had and moving on.

- The sheer observational relationship of the passing tourist who makes no investment whatsoever and then having seen what there is to see moves on to another landscape.

- The preservationist relationship, insisting on keeping the land as it is.

What other relationships do we have with the land?

The mountains are catching the clouds, like a child dragging his blanket.

How you look at the land depends upon how you look at the Genesis charge to have dominion over the animals of the earth. In contrast, we can take an ecological view; as with reincarnation in Eastern religion, we are part of it, not apart from it. Perhaps that is a fundamental question to ask oneself: am I part of it or am I apart from it - how you answer determines whether you think you can have dominion over animals, whether you can colonize other peoples, whether you can rape the land for personal gain.

I think about my daughter's cat, which has made the trip with me in this truck. It is a "house cat," staying inside in the Twin Cities, staying in the truck across 1200 miles of the Great American Desert, staying in an apartment in Missoula. From this position, the cat has no relationship at all with the land around it, no engagement. The farmer, the hunter, the explorer, they are engaged with the land. Is the tourist? Is the urban dweller?

What kind of relationship to nature does the urban dweller have - separated from the dirt by a layer of concrete, separated from the sky by the buildings around it. In no sense can the heat rising from the black asphalt be compared to heat from the desert floor; wind swirling around skyscrapers is not wind coming off the mountains.


>

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 14, 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 ninth part of my report of the trip; it recounts part of the second and final day of the drive.

More working windmills watering herds of cattle. Here the cattle are kept off the road by "cattle guards" - devices at the fence-line that lay in a hollow of the driveway, fashioned of round steel tubes cattle won't step on. These are better than a gate. Cattle will push through a gate, you have to stop and open and close a gate. You can drive your pick-up over the cattle guard, yet the cattle won't cross it. The cattle guard, perhaps, is a somewhat western notion; I'm not sure my German-Iowa ancestors would approve of such a solution, however obvious. It is somehow not righteous.

At a stand of trees, an empty corral and a chute for loading cattle. All of a sudden, sand hills ahead of me! Trees start to fall away behind me, openness rolls ahead, now I'll see the world according to the wind's definition of it.

Beyond Holt Creek, trees, the Buss farmstead. I climb the first of the sand hills. A mailbox along the road for the Smiths: half a mile to the east, their tin roof shines.

Range-land and cups of open sand. A few cottonwoods along the water's low course.

When I top another hill, I find a wealth of trees standing to the south. Another congregation of meadowlarks along the Sunday morning road. In spite of the trees, this looks like ranch country.

I meet a woman driving a van that looks as if it should belong to a plumber. How can you make harsh judgments out here? Life itself is a hard judgment. Behind her, a woman in a pick-up pulls a stock trailer. This is Sunday morning.

A dead coon in the middle of the road. Horse at a bale of green hay.

I crossed Dry Creek a ways back, I cross it again; this time there is water in the creek bed.

Wolcott Ranch four miles to the west. The road beneath me changes from a gritty surface to a smooth one. The South Fork of the Elkhorn River goes under the road in a culvert.

The purple flowers along the road - alfalfa plants in bloom.

The South Fork of the Elkhorn River goes under the road again, a culvert again. Then again for a third time. It is trying to find its way. We are trying to find our way.

Open sand along a fence line.

Sign: "Swan Lake -->." Around a curve, the blue explosion of it. Two farmsteads have a view of its loveliness. White buildings shine in the morning light.

A collection of blackbirds, too many for pie.

A power substation. A stand of trees, a real grove, with evergreens. Yet if they didn't have the cottonwood, what would they have? The cottonwood finds water, pins the land in place, talks all night.

A windbreak of evergreens runs for a mile along the right side of the road. They are back from the road. Are they here to act as snow fence? Where this line of trees ends, a fellow stands guard, in camouflage, with a gun. He is looking off to the southwest. The gun looks like a shot-gun. (Yeah, sure, Tom, you can tell that from three hundred and fifty yards away! Can you tell what make it is, too? And what gauge?)

Sign: "Entering Garfield County."

A grove of trees. A ranch house. Junk cars. A farm implement dealer. A "Bible Church." Mike Sitz Angus Ranch.

A white pick-up passes me at a stately pace. It is moving faster than I am, yet it doesn't seem to be in a hurry. This moment shall never pass this way again.

More open sand, on a hillside at the corner of a fence where cattle have tampled away the grass.

Is there anything I won't try to understand, won't try to explain?

These sandhills aren't middle western. They are over the line, no matter where the Hundredth Meridian falls.

Hardly enough left to that abandoned farm house for me to mention. Imagine building that house in this stand of trees in these hills and expecting to farm. Who settled these hills? How desperate were they? Did they know enough of ranching?

My gas gauge is sinking towards Empty. I need Burwell to come sliding into view fairly soon. It's a long walk to anywhere from here.

Sign: "Nebraska Highway 11," just in case we've forgotten where we are out here. There aren't many choices - what else would it be?

Suddenly: soybeans, a field of corn, alfalfa.

A desolate house and barns, a defeated trailer house set in amongst some trees: maybe it's lived in, maybe it's not.

Burwell Feeders. It's a big cattle operation at a curve in the road. The feedlot looks to be a mile deep.

Big Legion Hill - I suppose it's high enough that you can see hope from there.

Down in the valley, a thickness of trees. Jensen Feeds. Burwell comes into sight just as my gas gauge indicates I have one gallon left. I've come down out of the sand hills to greenness.

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

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

"Here is a strange one," Ivan writes. "Last Monday I was talking to a guy and he said 'As near as I can tell' etc. Later on the same day I was talking to another guy and he said 'As far as I can tell.' And they both mean the same thing. So if it is near or far, it's just a guess."

"Claude Gripp sat down and made the flat out statement, 'I'm gonna vote for a Democrat.'" Ivan says. "When I heard that my heart stopped momentarily. Then it started racing and pounding until I could feel the pounding in my ears. I adjusted my hearing and said 'what did you say?' He repeated, 'I'm gonna vote for a Democrat.' He said 'I'm votin' for Janis Lee.' That makes two of us. We could use a few more."

"Mike Hughes says he thinks he is losing weight," Ivan says, "then he looks behind him and there it is."

"Dennis Ratliff offers this bit of advice," Ivan says. "Dennis says 'don't volunteer to help a doctor or a lawyer move - they got too many heavy books.' Dennis helped his daughter and her veterinarian husband move to Andale, Kansas."

"Oh," says Ivan, "about those pillars that flank the front door or the Smith County State Bank building - would you say they were Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian? I'm leaning toward Ionic myself."

"When it comes to work, let me tell you, Ken Poyser is a good un. Ken not only knows how to work but he can see things that need to be done. That is a pretty rare combination in this day and age. I don't know if I would draft him number one on my golf team, but he sure would be my first round choice on my work team."

"George Herdt, who moved up here from Trego County, says he is getting kind of confused," according to Ivan. "He says he hears the weather forecast and northwest Kansas is supposed to get rain - and we never do. Then he says he hears the weather forecast for northcentral Kansas and northcentral Kansas is supposed to get rain - and we never do. George is kinda wondering just where Smith County is located."

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURAL
JUNE 18, 1998

Only one peony bloom left along the garage - the rest are broken and brown. The peony season is over for us.

It is a cool, blue morning, but will be hot again as yesterday was. Perhaps some haze of humidity in the air.

Tomorrow morning we will be on our way to Missoula, Montana, across a landscape far different this one - no trees - into a landscape even more different - mountains. The beauty of home is that you get to go away. The beauty of going away is that you get to come home.

The winter rye looks like it is thinking about turning color - it is no longer green exactly.

Two power poles along Highway E have been split and broken. The cross bars are dangling. A power company truck is there, with a man investigating. What happened? Lightning? It doesn't look like a lightning strike but I can't imaging what else could tear the cross bars loose. Wind? A storm rolled through last night, but didn't seem that windy. There are puddles of rain still at the south edge of Ripon and in town there are branches down. Still garbage cans sit in place and haven't been blown around.


>

WELL, STOP ON OVER
TO SAY GOOD-BYE
AT THE BOOK OF LIFE

Blogs on my blog-roll have been "dropping like flies," as we say out here. Dammit. Now Denny at Book of Life is calling it quits. He says:

A man may want to do much, but he has only so much time, only so much mental and physical energy. So it is and so it shall be, world without end. Some things get done. Others don't. If my book means so much to me, why had I done other things? How did it happen that posting blogs each day commanded a higher priority?

... Beginning with the first day of summer, I'm simply going to rechannel all my blog-writing energy into book-writing energy.

It was a tough decision for him, but he made it. His posts will be missed. And I'll miss the gentle comments he left at my blog and at other sites I read.

His blog-site will be removed by the end of the month, so if you want to say good-bye, do it soon.

So long, buddy.

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

A REAL PIECE OF POLITICAL NEWS
FROM THE CENTER OF THE HEARTLAND

I met a fellow Friday morning at coffee with the As the Bladder Fills Club in Smith Center, Kansas, who suggested that W's base is not as solid as perhaps W would like. Smith Center is a solidly Republican community. The fellow I met said "So, you're a writer. You the fellow who has been feeding Bush all that misinformation?" When Ivan reminded us that he and his wife were the only Democrats in town, the fellow confided that "some of us are thinking about changing our affiliation...." So it's not just me who sick and tired of what this administration has done to the country; it appears there are some Republicans in Smith Center, Kansas, who are sick and tired of it too.

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

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE MIDDLE
    WEST
SEPTEMBER 14, 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 eighth part of my report of the trip, recounting part of the second and final day of the drive.

It is 8:00 a.m.

Today I shall continue south towards the geographic center of the lower 48 states in Smith County, Kansas. I shall pass through Red Cloud, Nebraska, Willa Cather's home when she was a youth. I'll start out on Highway 11 which runs among the eastern sandhills.

A mural on a building along Highway 11 in Butte says: "Every Voice Counts." It says: "Save the Rural Schools." Sometimes the "great fly-over" that is the middle west also becomes the "great expendable." It is easy to dismiss that which you don't know the history of. On the other hand, it is more difficult to tell a fellow whose grandfather you knew that his son can't go to school where he did. I stand by my notion that the township is the ideal size for a governmental unit. Anyone trying to govern from farther away, from the state capitol or Washington, D.C., is too ignorant of local conditions to make good decisions. At the same time, admittedly, we at the local level are sometimes so wrapped up in each others' lives we cannot see the obvious. Yet I think it is always better for us to do for ourselves than to have Big Brother do for us. I AM NOT BEING REPUBLICAN, I AM BEING RADICAL. Would Thoreau say the same thing?

Okay - Tirade Mode: OFF.

I turn south where Highway 11 turns south, just west of Butte. There are fields on both sides of the road where corn has been taken - chopped for silage, I presume. A field of alfalfa. A hen pheasant along the road. Sun comes at me from the left. Cattle beller in a feed lot.

At a farmstead farther on, a great flock of blackbirds.

I love the way the land lays itself out: you can see tomorrow from here. When I top a rise, I see water standing at the bottom of the valley before me, blue as the sky above me. A sign on the bridge says: "Niobrara River." A sign at the other end of the bridge says: "Entering Holt County." I'm climbing away from the Niobrara and my ears pop.

I see working windmills pumping water for cattle. These windmills are common here. They are old-fashioned, the old technology. They work.

In a grove of scrubby trees, a house left unpainted for three generations; it holds its nails together with more desire than wood fiber. The wood is thicker than odor, but not much thicker; it is an after-image, the ghost of what we've lost; it is the physical manifestation of our sadness.

I cross another bridge, Bush Creek far below; I have to downshift to third gear to rise away from it. Near the top of the crest, a dozen wild turkeys in a field to my left.

A woman walks her Black Lab along the highway. Sunday morning happiness for the old dog.

A sudden congregation of meadowlarks in this Sunday morning sky - two hundred of them. I've not seen meadowlarks gather in such numbers before.

To my left, an irrigation rig. Then another in a field of corn that is waiting to be harvested. A third rig visible farther on.

A big old square farm house. A machine shed. A killdeer above the road, flashing on and off.

First it is cornfield across a couple miles, then irrigated soybeans. We're in farm country still. I am dawdling in it. A black pick-up passes me, disappears into the distance, around a curve.

A steel building has been smashed by high wind, apparently - blown against a grove of trees. It has nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be, so this is where it stays. Sometimes we stay for the same reason.

An electrical substation. Some irrigation rigs. A big stand of grain bins; they are scowling at the wind, each of them. This is the Scoular Grasslands Elevator Co., according to the sign. A mile down the road, more grain bins also scowling, no sign.

A sudden greenness in the ditches, a sudden rainbow at the irrigation rig.

This could be Iowa - there are enough grain bins. Though I suppose there are too few farmsteads.

Three Harvestore silos. Feedlots full of cattle. A yard full of farm equipment. Corn and soybeans and prosperity.

A pair of ducks above the road. The fellow in the oncoming pick-up waves a broad hand. A field of hay cut in swaths waits to be taken up for winter.

A rich farmer's big house. Big grain bins like a woman's breasts, like stacks of money. You'll find them just north of Atkinson, Nebraska.

Jewels on green velvet where lawns are being watered in Atkinson. The community holds on - two gas stations doing business, a third one CLOSED and FOR SALE.

I cross the Elkhorn River. Two deer cross the road ahead of me.

There are more trees here along Highway 11 than you'd think Nebraska would have. More trees stand off to the west, too, away from the road.

Where the road curves, three old evergreens. A piece of open ground that used to be a farmstead, I think. The trees are the only memory of it.

To be continued....

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 17, 1998

A little rain last night, a bright and beautiful Wisconsin morning today. Yesterday was warm - mid 80s - and today should be too. Dew on the grass. The pond is calm, with algae floating. A new house going up down the hill from us, where the flood of 1989 had washed out a 30 foot hole in the soil. I'm not particularly pleased to have a house go in there, but what will be will be. If I complained about everything I dislike, I wouldn't have time for the things I like.

There's a very weedy field of corn just north of town. When I was growing up in Iowa, we judged a man's character by how clean he kept his fields. It's a moral thing. Gasoline did not cost so much then.

I have not seen the hawk in a good long while, though I have been watching for him.

Some of the fields of corn are so thick now that you cannot see the soil between the rows. The soy beans are coming along well. The peas are pretty much done blossoming and are making pods.

Corn is finally sprouting in the field that had the large pool of water standing in it much of the spring. Little spikes of corn plants, only, but they are up and green across the entire field.

In Ripon, at the corner of the house where the dog has been chained outside at times during the winter and spring, a circular carpet of grass much greener than the rest of the lawn.

On days like this I sometimes think I am a monster-beast restrained by Germanic convention. It would be a good day to go wild. I go to work instead.


>

HOME FROM SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
BACK FROM A WONDERFUL VISIT

I arrived home last night, late. It's at least a twelve-hour drive from Smith Center, Kansas, to Fairwater, Wisconsin. I didn't drive straight through, however. I started at daybreak, and sat for half an hour or more at the geographic center of the lower forty-eight states a mile or so from Lebanon, Kansas. I stopped in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and had a lovely breakfast in a bar/restaurant on Main Street that doesn't usually serve breakfast. I went over to the Willa Cather center and saw a seventeen-minute video about her, and took the seven-building Cather tour of Red Cloud. Did I mention that I spent an excessive amount of money on books about Cather and her work? And then I headed for home.

Well, I stopped for lunch at a Chinese buffet in Hastings, Nebraska. I got out of there about 12:30 p.m. Oh, and I stopped to rest my eyes closed in a wayside along Interstate 80 west of Lincoln: closed my eyes about 1:30 p.m., opened them about 2:00 p.m., refreshed enough to make the rest of the drive. It was almost midnight when I pulled in the driveway here.

I had a lovely visit to Smith Center.

Every day from 8:00-9:00 a.m. I sat with the "As the Bladder Fills Club" while the fellas told stories and varnished the truth and ribbed each other. One of the fellas said they'd pay me to come back once a month and bring them the kind of rain they got while I was there. They've been in a prolonged drought. You'll see reports of their antics right here sometime in the next month.

I sat down and did formal interviews with a number of people in town, as I usually do. I rode for four hours on a combine at the Brent and Dan Jacobs farm operation, harvesting wheat. I toured Peterson Industries Excel plant on the north side of Smith Center, and LTM Manufacturing about four miles south of town. I spent a couple hours on Thursday evening riding patrol with Police Chief Randy Nelson: boredom on patrol is a sign of success.

Once we conclude the current set of postings on "Driving the Western Edge of the Middle," I'll start putting up excerpts from my journals of this Smith Center visit.

I'm still a true middle westerner, I find: it is good to go on Vagabond visit; it is even better to come home.

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

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 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 seventh part of my report of the trip. Here we conclude Day One of the drive, and start the report for Day Two.

"Smile - Your Mom Chose Life" the sign says in the abandoned farmyard. Behind the sign, two houses are falling down, the barn is falling in, some few sheds decompose. A hulk of car rusts in a ravine. Gnarled trees leaning steeply towards the ground. "Smile - Your Mom Chose Life" the sign says.

Comoseyamallahma? Two llahmas at a little farmstead nestled in a coulee.

Gregory, South Dakota - pop. 1342.

I am on US 18, which runs east through Emmetsburg, Iowa, and Madison, Wisconsin. I grew up only miles south of Emmetsburg. I live only an hour northeast of Madison. I feel so far from anywhere - the lonesomeness of the long-distance traveler.

A house at the east edge of Gregory suggests that someone in this country definitely has money. Just so we remember what has been lost, not far down the road there is another farmstead fallen to disuse.

Burke - pop. 676. The community has a courthouse, a senior center with Tae Kwan Doh right next door, a civic center. Klufa's Grocery. True Value Hardware. First Fidelity Bank. The shop called "Scruples" is closed; that's okay, I don't need any more than I have already, thanks.

I'm tired. I should stop and eat and sleep but I'd like to put on at least a few miles more.

Mom is picking up Son in the parking lot behind one of the businesses on Main Street in Burke. Son has bright tri-colored hair - yellow and red and green hair, a rainbow surprise here at the far edge of the middle.

At the end of a lane east of Burke, there is an old single-lay horse-drawn plow set atop a fence-post on the point of the plow share. From the first angle I see it, it looks like a spider; my eyes play tricks: spider, plow; spider plow.

Though I am still in South Dakota, there are more Nebraska license plates on cars coming at me than South Dakota plates.

Herrick is off to one side of US 18; a grain elevator with most of its tin sheets peeling off is on the other side of the highway. I don't even slow down for a look; I already know this sadness.

A tidy farmstead that could be set down in Iowa - all steel bins and well-kept cattle operation and fresh-painted house. If this isn't a picture of our little middle western farmstead, what is?

St. Charles - not much left at all, two or three houses, a brushy windbreak around empty ground that may once have been vibrant community. A lot of history grown over already.

A McCormick-Deering threshing machine along a fence-line. Again it calls out: we were here.

Bonesteel - pop. 297. Divine Concrete Products.

It's 6:00 p.m. I'm approaching the Nebraska state line. We've got a lot of blue sky showing again.

Between Bonesteel and Fairfax, another cozy farmstead. Far off, however, you can still see where the west begins.

Eight miles north of Butte, Nebraska, the landscape is not unlike Wisconsin's.

Sign: "Nebraska: The Good Life. Home of Arbor Day."

Sign: "Now Entering Boyd County."

I cross Ponca Creek. Ponca Creek is dry. A stream bed forty or fifty feet wide is mostly dried mud, with only a pool or two of standing water.

I think I have said about all I can say today.

***

SEPTEMBER 14, 2003
I stayed at the Boyd Motel in Butte, Nebraska, last night; it had $27 rooms, just the kind that my wife likes to find. I talked on the phone with Mary last night. I'd called and left the motel's number on the answering machine. When Mary called me back she was told, first, that no one named Tom Montag worked at the motel; and, second, that the phone at the main desk didn't work, they couldn't transfer her call to my room. If she'd call back, they would answer on the cordless phone and bring that down to my room if I still had a light on. Which is what Mary did, which is what they did, so I got to talk to my wife from this remote outpost. Did I mention the room was only $27?

Butte, I think, is the county seat of Boyd County. It has a population of 452. It doesn't have any place to eat after dark except one of the bars. The world keeps moving and Butte appears to stand still; and if you stand still, well, you fall behind. If there are rich folks in Butte, they were hiding from me. These people probably work pretty hard for their money.

In actuality, Butte probably isn't any less well set to confront the future than Fairwater, it just seems more remote.

To be continued....

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JUNE 15, 1998

So we have returned from our trip to Quebec. You cannot see home the same once you've left it, then come back. What you've seen changes what you can see.

We are more alike than we are different. If pushed to do so, I could name only a few differences in the people from here compared to those of northern Indiana and Ohio; Pennsylvania and New York; Niagara Falls, Ontario and Quebec, Quebec. Those of Quebec speak French, or French and English; their clock runs slower - by that I mean that even in heavy traffic they are never in a hurry, they are always courteous, they make way for a car to break into line rather than jealously protecting their place. They are generally a smaller people than we are - the French genetic influence, perhaps. But contrary to what we had heard, they were very pleasant and humorous and helpful.

I must say it is disconcerting to order food from a girl at a fruit and vegetable stand in the country who looks all the world to be entirely Irish and find she speaks French only and not a word of English - there should be a brogue with that red hair and those freckles, those teasing blue eyes. There goes a stereotype, eh?

The pace of Quebec definitely was slower than the pace here, and we definitely think of ourselves as more bucolic than, say, New York City.

In Quebec and Ontario - Ottawa to Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie - we saw rock, exposed Canadian shield - great city-sized chunks of it. The land was green even on much of the rock and gravel. Here and there we saw farms - especially on the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence - but nothing with soil as rich as ours, nothing so relentlessly green as Wisconsin is right now.

Woke to the familiar sound of my own bird songs this morning - the reassuring sound of Fairwater at daybreak.

Our peonies are mostly spent.

It is 6:50 a.m. as I leave for work - long shadows in the village.

It is very definitely summer now - corn a foot tall or more, blossoms on the peas, the field of winter rye fully headed out, the ditches full with grass.

There are all sorts of peonies and violets abloom at Five Corners. It is good to be home.

*

JUNE 16, 1998
A clear, cool morning. Dew on the grass. The conversation of birds. Peaceful village. I hate to leave for work when the world is this placid and lovely.

Out in the country, there is a bit of haze in the distance - the humidity is high.

The fields south of Five Corners that had been untilled are still untilled. Some things are certain.


>

SATURDAY'S POEM
-----------------------
SURVEYING THE DAMAGE
by Marilyn Taylor

Bailey's Harbor, March 2001


Even after catastrophes like this one,
I've heard it can be done—

that the damp hearth of the senses
can be poked and stirred

until the embers, still breathing
after an old fire, manage a feeble wink

and the low clouds might be at last contained
behind slant pickets of daylight

and the sky patched into something
nearing blue again—spliced, at least,

by a passing osprey riding a downdraft
all the way from the Apostles

just as a storm-door, rattling its hinges
against the late debacle, opens wide

onto a shoreline paved with residual snow,
shimmering like a coral reef.


"Surveying the Damage" was originally published in Wisconsin Poets Calendar: 2003 as well as in Taylor's collection, Subject to Change. Marilyn Taylor has been named Poet Laureate of the city of Milwaukee for 2004 and 2005. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and also offers classes regularly at Woodland Pattern, Alverno, and the UW Extension. The winner of a number of national poetry awards, Marilyn’s work has appeared in over fifty poetry journals and anthologies. Her second full-length poetry collection, titled Subject to Change, has recently been published by David Robert Books. Get your copy at Schwartz Bookshops, Woodland Pattern, on Amazon.com, or directly from Marilyn at mlt@uwm.edu.

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

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 Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 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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