The Middlewesterner

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
 
3:00 p.m. I'm still fifty-some miles east of Council Bluffs. The western sky has clouded. The wind finds its way even so. The day has not cooled.

I stop at a wayside and take a forty-minute nap. I hate to lose the driving time but - worse - I hate the notion of falling asleep and running off the road. So I do what I promised Mary I would do - I rest my eyes closed.

Now the clouds to the west seem to be stirring up a blow. I'm headed for whatever is coming at me.
Such a long drive as this gives you quite the cross-section of America. I am in the middle of the middle of it.

Now we cross the wide Missouri into Nebraska, "The Good Life." 4:10 p.m. "Lincoln, Left Lanes," the signs say.

I am headed towards an embankment of thunderheads. We are starting to lose the sun. It is only 4:21 p.m.

The sky to the northwest is a very dark velour.

Ha! There's the Platte River - "a mile wide and an inch deep," they've said. Out here a river can be nearly as wide as it wishes to be. This is Nebraska; what's going to stop it?

This eastern Nebraska corn stands a foot tall. The landscape between Omaha and Lincoln is as green as Iowa, as Wisconsin.

Now it looks as if the storm ahead has split - some to the north, some to the south. Dead ahead, blue sky is visible, a bank of clouds farther on. Lincoln, 22 miles.

Except that there are not near enough trees, this could be Wisconsin, yes.

Hang-down heavy blue to the north. Openness ahead. Wind. I am driving the seam of the storm, riding that spine. Lincoln next seven exists.

I can see Nebraska plates, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. We cross Salt Creek together at 80 m.p.h. And we're not the fastest drivers out here, by any means.

Lincoln sprawls like a tired whore, long-limbed and loose, spread across everything she can reach.
5:00 p.m. I am driving into sunshine. The storms have slid by me and are behind me now. There is only the green swarm of landscape, that and a few puffs of cloud.

I-80 shines like a liquid ribbon - traffic going west, coming east, the gleam of sun on glass and steel. There are a lot of semis running this stretch of highway. It is Sunday afternoon. Truck-drivers always like to get a little jump on the week ahead, so it's not surprising to see so many of them today.

5:12 p.m. Nothing to the west now but a faint haze, moisture hanging. Ahead of me the clouds are entirely gone.

Big irrigation rigs stand out here near the Beaver Crossing exit. Farmers, out working their fields on this now bright Sunday afternoon, raise some little dust. The only storm clouds are in my rear view mirror. Out here Nebraska is as flat as the lanes of a bowling alley. A storm can roll across it like a strike-bound ball, knock down everything in sight. Out in the open like this, the farm boys stand a fair chance of catching their girls.

I pass an ambulance from Kearney, Nebraska, which is headed towards home. The fellow in the passenger seat appears to be sleeping. A woman drives it, determined.

5:40 p.m. I have not seen the country between the York and Grand Island exits before, here along I-80. It is new territory, though the landscape is familiar - what I'm seeing, what I will see, looks a lot like what I've seen for the past forty-six miles. Nebraska has a lot of that. I am within two hours of Smith Center now, I believe, or nearly so. I am going through Red Cloud, Nebraska, on my way; perhaps I'll stop and have supper in Willa Cather's home town.

Damn, these fields of corn stretch a long way west. And fields of soybeans. This is news to the Iowa farm boy.

I have really got a lump in my throat for this part of America, for the farmers who planted these fields of corn and beans, for the women who love the farmers, for their parents and their children. The fields roll on and on. The land gets worked, gets worked again. The generations turn. We lose one, we gain another one. We gain and lose and things work out pretty much as they're supposed to. The land rolls on and on.

Some of the communities out here get exits off the interstate; some of them don't. Who plays God's hand?

How many dead raccoon have I seen today? More than thirty-five, less than fifty? How many dead deer? Twenty-five?

6:08 p.m. The shine of the moving highway in this light. Ah!
 
To be continued....
 
-------------------
 
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 21, 1998

A thunderstorm rolled through last night low-down and dirty - it knocked out power about 11:30 p.m. and power is still out! What a wonderful welcome for the four "Up with People" kids staying with us for the week. One from New Hampshire; one from Moorhead, Minnesota, to whom thunderstorms should be nothing new; one from Denmark; and one from Switzerland. They have been together in the program since January; they have just had a three-week break and are back at it with one city under their belt - La Crosse - and Fond du Lac the second city on this leg of the tour. English is the universal language and is very well spoken by the red-headed Danish young lady and by the Swiss lad. It hardly seems fair that all the world must speak English to communicate - but we Americans didn't make this happen by ourselves. I'm sure the British empire went some ways towards making the world English-speaking. At least we have a lively language and - pretty much - a sufficient vocabulary - partly because we so easily steal and transmute what we don't have but need. Potlatch is one such example; to capture the concept we had to capture the word. Is canyon another?
 
The girl from New Hampshire asked how many people live in Fairwater. "All of them," I said. "We put the dead ones in the cemetery."

Quite a storm came through. Some large branches down at our end of the street, with a lot of leaves and other debris. You almost think the morning can repair itself - a mourning dove calls - then I see a very large tree down across the other end of Washington Street in Fairwater. The Power Company is there, cutting it up. It is the reason our power went out, having fallen across our power lines. In a yard in downtown Fairwater, another tree is uprooted.

The air clings unpleasantly. Two blackbirds harass a crow. The rye straw, I see, has been baled.

North of Fairwater, all the way to Ripon, it appears the trees did not feel the fury of our storm. The corn looks undamaged as well.

As I turn onto Watson Street in Ripon, a pretty girl smiles at me. A bright start to this day.

*

JULY 22, 1998
It wants to be a dark and cloudy day, wants to talk like thunder - but not very badly; in the east there is still a little blue sky.

There are enough branches at curbside along Washington Street this morning to make the village look like a war zone. There is a brown scar along the asphalt where a large tree trunk has been dragged away - taken to Hoodie's woods to decay, I presume, or someone will cut it up there.

Just outside of town I have to stop, to allow a deer to cross in front of me. It has come out of a field of soy beans, it enters the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water.

I can see now that it looks dark to the northwest and all of a sudden the east has closed itself up. The sky is gone; clouds remain, the sun a bright splotch behind them.

Either you are on auto-pilot on a day like this, grinding your way through, or you are committed to paying attention. "Sort of paying attention" is like "a little bit pregnant."

A woman walks her dog along Highway E north of Union Street. She has worked up a sweat. Sweat soaks through her T-shirt. She strides determinedly - up and down, up and down. Her dog at the end of its leash does not pay her bouncing much attention but follows its nose.

A police officer is at a home along Watson Street in Ripon, talking with a man and woman out front. They stand circled around a large lawn ornament that has been thrown over and broken.

The universe abhors a vacuum and the ruffian's mind abhors someone else's beauty. You can almost bet there was testosterone involved, or alcohol, or both.

-------------------
 
THANKS....

To the following folks for their recent generous contributions to the Vagabond Expedition:

90. Anonymous #5, Minnesota.
91. Susan Czarnionka, Maine.

SATURDAY'S POEMS
----------------------------
FORMAGGIO
by Loren Kleinman

The cheese is born: Mozzarella di Bufala,
Erborinati de Pecora, Pecorino Toscano.

A soft Robiola ripens in a leaf. A Caciocavallo Podolico
ages in the grottoes. The cheese should reflect

the diet of the animal from which it was birthed,
the sea salt rubbed on its crust, the stone grotto beside the dairy,

the hands of the women who shape it -
these signoras, how they watch the milk and rennet

heat over an open fire, how they scoop the gentle white curds
into molds and softly press out the whey with their palms.

These cheeses are alive, given an origin by the affinatore.
They are given a soul. Their lives are shaped from the beginning,

turned out of their molds, some taken from the ground,
hung from thick ropes - to break apart, grate over

broccoli rabe and orecchiette. Locals eat it as is -
no pepper, vinegar, or oil. It is a test of faith.


*


JESTEM
by Loren Kleinman

Tomorrow you will be in another country.
I do not know if the moon sleeps there,
how it will divide you between here and there,
yes and no, stay and go. How it will want to live inside of you.
Like I do. This moon. How it will hang over your body.
Keep you captive. You will want it to leave you alone
and you will want it to stay, to say your name before mine.
You will try to sleep, but you think of the place you were born,
your dead mother, your father, your uncles.
The night will show you its face, how you will remember
our faces, kept awake, whispering over and over:
I am never going to forget you. You will remember
the poems, how I read to you, how I turned to you:
this is for you, this opening.


Loren Kleinman's work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Upstage, Poetry Motel, Promise Magazine, Split Shot: A Journal of Literary Art, Hipnosis: New Jersey's Art and Entertainment Magazine, Aspirations: The Art of Writing, The M.A.G, Sol Magazine, Conception, Karawane, In Other Words, and Destination Anywhere, as well as other journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet at Ramapo College for Women's History Month, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Nuyorican Poets Café, and more. Kleinman was nominated for the 2000 Pushcart Prize (best of the small presses), for her manuscript, Up, Down, Sideways, and Across; and the 2003 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Cooking in Tongues.” Her book, Flamenco Sketches, was the winner of the 2002 Spire Press Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her next collection I Want No Paradise and is the Poetry/Reviews Assistant Editor for Sidereality.

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

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 Harriet Brown, "Speaking Midwestern" and "Where We Went" - July 10, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 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 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 Judith Strasser, "Apostle Islands History" and "County Road" - July 17, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004
o Complete index to poems here

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004

7:30 a.m. It's a foggy morning - fog, or another kind of hanging moisture. I think of the plains of Africa. The sun is trying to burn through, as if the sky's on fire. What water is not in the air is pooled in the low spots in the fields.
 
The crops will never recover entirely.

You don't know if it's going to rain or shine. It's a roll of the die, it's luck of the draw.

I'm headed to Smith Center, Kansas, for a week. That's by design.

You have to imagine what it means, because it doesn't know. A fellow walks from his house to the corner of his lawn. His shirt seems dirty, his hair is mussed. He is not walking square to the world. He pushes and the world pushes back. I don't know why he's walking across the lawn, perhaps with a cup of coffee in his hand. It is Sunday morning; the morning lays on him like fog; he carries it; he goes on. As do we all.

The air grows heavy. Rain hits the windshield like darkness. One pushes into it. These things we do, some of them we do by choice.

The sun breaks through the haze, a temporary victory. I am going to put on 830 miles today making this drive. I could see any weather, every weather, between here and Smith Center. There were tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas yesterday. To the southwest, the sky is still dark.

Today, on this long grey drive, I'm thinking that anybody could tell these stories. I'm nothing special for trying to tell them; anybody could do it. Yet the question would be - if I don't tell them, who will? What may be special is my desire to tell them. My doggedness. It's a strange mixture - my interest, the requisite poetry in these lives, my adequate prose for the telling. One does not choose such work so much as the work chooses him.

9:10 a.m. Seventeen miles from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. A spatter of rain. A car from Kansas passes me. We are headed in the same rough direction. We move for different purposes, at different speeds. I drive not hard, but steady. I am a dogged traveler, the determined vagabond. Who else would enjoy an 830 miles trek?

The drive from Fairwater to Smith Center is a diagonal across the heart of the middle west. What I see today, that is what we are, isn't it? Now it is greenness, now greyness. Tree and ditches and fields. Haze and rain and water standing. Southwestern Wisconsin is so pretty in this light, it could be any tourist's destination.

I am not particularly interested in pretty, yet I am not put off by it. Rather, I think we learn more by observing the ordinary, the plain, the mundane. To find the story in the ordinary is to find the real story. Yet the ordinary story does not tell itself; you must seduce it. You have to tease it out as it teases you.

11:00 a.m. West of Dubuque on Highway 151. Bare sky is showing. The day has brightened. I've had another cup of coffee; I'm wired for a few hundred miles more. Heavy coffee, I call it: a cup of black coffee from a convenience store, spiked with a few spoonsful of instant coffee from the jar I keep in the glove compartment. It works its caffeine magic.

A rich odor of manure at Cascade, Iowa. There is a large pen of cattle here; they're being fattened for the slaughterhouse. This is where your steak comes from. The smell of the cattle pen is as large as the sky.

The Iowa corn is ten inches to a foot tall already.

12 Noon. I'm south of Cedar Rapids on I-380, headed for I-80, headed for Des Moines, Omaha, Lincoln. Driving the long miles west.

On I-80 a hundred and four miles east of Des Moines. Such a brimming greenness. Beans and corn, ditches and trees. Greenness on the heavy breeze.

12:30 p.m. I've passed the North English-Marengo exit. The sky is mostly blue now. A long cloud is stretched across the western sky as if something ends and begins at that place. Puffs of clouds to this side of it, to the other side.

2:00 p.m. I'm west of Des Moines. I've got less than a quarter tank of gas left. I'd like to find a little bit of something to eat. I'll stop in Van Meter, Iowa, at the convenience store. Van Meter is home of the Bob Fuller Museum. It is home of the 2003 1-A state baseball champs. The community is a mile from the interstate. The lights and bell on the railroad crossing are malfunctioning, stuck constantly on - clang, clang, clang, clang. I'm in town only long enough to fill the car with gasoline and get some orange juice and an ice cream sandwich, and already the racket has given me a headache.

It is getting hot out. The sky is absolutely blue.

About eighty miles east of Council Bluffs the land rolls about like a restless sleeper, up and down, up and down. It's like a green machine, pumping.
 
To be continued....

----------------------
 
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 17, 1998

Last night two of our cats went through the screen on the dining room door, out onto the patio, to show a stray cat - the stray cat? - just whose place this is. Obviously, our two cats think it is theirs. The discussion, I'm told - since I was asleep - was long and loud. When it was over, my wife found the larger, male cat lounging on the front porch, surveying his kingdom. We'll have to repair the screen, but the rest of the house seems well protected. The stray is not in our driveway today.

Human beings are just as territorial of their space, their place, just as protective, aren't they? Stepping onto my property is trespass; the discussion will take place in court. Sometimes we think we are superior to the animals, when in reality the principles we find there apply to us as well. We ignore those principles at our own peril.

Is that my hawk half-hidden in the leaves of the big tree out in the middle of the field? Will my wishing make it so?

The green of all the fields shines today, really shines!

A farmer in his striped overalls and a baseball cap, an older man, walks out to the road to check his mailbox. He has a five quart plastic bucket in his hand. He is really on his way to pick berries, isn't he, in the cool of the morning.

Long shadows in Ripon - houses in their morning shade.

*

JULY 20, 1998
We try to make things make sense, don't we? Because we can understand, we tell ourselves that things can be understood. If only we can unlock the meaning, if only we can cipher sense into a random occurrence of events, a random smashing of molecules, then we can quiet our restless heart which wants to know "Why."

We are human because we can ask "Why." But we are foolish humans to think that every time we ask, there will or should be an answer. Sometimes we are simply the piece of straw picked up and driven into the telephone pole - there is no "meaning" in that. It just is. Not even God will tell you why that happened here, now. It makes sense on the level of simple physics; it does not seem to make sense when we look at it through the lens of the question "Why." Random shards of pottery do not make a whole pot, no matter how much we wish them to.

There was a little rain during the night, at 3:00 a.m., say. I could hear it behind the whirr of the fan pulling cool air into the house, I could see its sheen in the street light. The world refreshed itself. This is not a desert, no matter how much some of the village youngsters might think it is. They want to get the hell out of Fairwater. Someday they will want to come back and they will not be able to. I have been able to choose the village, and Mary has, and it fits us. It does not fit our daughters - one of them is working in the city now, the other is in school in Montana. We have lost at least one of them to the mountains. Isn't that the flatlander's greatest sadness, to lose a daughter to the mountains? And - having rejected the city - to lose another daughter to the city?

A mourning dove takes off from the driveway. Dew condensed on the windshield of the pick-up. Sun and blue sky. July is perfect, just perfect. Leave me here, let me be.

Perhaps that was not the hawk I saw in the tree last week. That spot of coloration is in the same place again today, exactly.

At Sina's pig farm, the smell of money, the acrid smell of pig manure cutting the blue air.

A skunk dead on the road. We could wish it were not so, but to make it not so we'd have to get rid of some of our roads, wouldn't we?

The goat at Five Corners has dug himself a fox hole. At the intersection itself, the flowers are in full dress uniform - so much beauty, unsung at a rural crossroad.

In Ripon, a woman stands at the fence in front of the motel. She is drinking her morning coffee. She must be on vacation, for she is as bright as the day, enjoying the morning, watching the traffic pass, the sun on her, the wind wrapping itself around the soft folds of her clothes, playing with her hair. She takes another sip of coffee.

And I go on, go to work. Dammit. Dammit on a fine day.

GONE TO CURLEW, IOWA
BACK TO BLOGGING  ON JULY 23
 
Upon my return, I'll start reporting my June trip to Smith Center, Kansas. In the mean-time, enjoy (below) a healthy installment from the Echo Echo by Ivan Burgess of Smith Center. Ivan is the lone Democratic voice in Smith Center's "As the Bladder Fills Club."  You'll hear more about the "As the Bladder Fills" fellows in coming weeks.
 
--------------------
 
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
      CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART TEN 
 
This is final 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.
 
Interestingly, Pearl especially appreciates the writing of Henry David Thoreau. "He writes about nature," she said, "the things you see right out there. You know what his love was - well, that's my love, the out-of-doors. That's why I am living here. I might not really be capable of living here by myself, and yet I do. This is the loveliest place in the world. I grew up here with nature. I know every inch of this seventy-six acre farm. I've picked berries, I've shocked wheat, I've brought in the cows and milked them. There's an old song: 'I ain't got nobody, nobody cares for me. I ain't got nobody, so I'm going back to the farm, to milk the cows and feed the chickens and I don't give a good gosh darn.' That's where I am in a way, but then I also have so many people who love me and respect me and keep in touch with me all the time. That's why I'm alive."

"What would it take to move you from this place?" I asked.

"When I breathe my last," Pearl said. "I would be lost - it'd be like sitting in jail to be in a retirement home."

"What if you lived in a different house or apartment?"

"I wouldn't have the closeness of all these friends and relation, and the out-of-doors that I have here," Pearl said. "So many interesting little things happen here. Walk to the door there and hear 'bob-white.'"

I asked Pearl about the characteristics of the people of the area. She said her high school class had high expectations: "From that class, there were two nurses, two doctors, two teachers, a couple farmers. Nineteen people in my class and they went to all walks of life. A musician. A dramatist. We have a couple little grandmothers, too. And one became a specialist in candy-making; her grand-daughter right now is running her candy business. She's known for her chocolates."

"Ambition, yes," Pearl said, "and we had potential."

Pearl's mother was more forward-looking, her father more conservative, which Pearl thinks is a common split in the people of the area - some progressive, and some not so progressive.
 
Ninety-nine percent of the people, Pearl said, were "staunch citizens, thinking of their fellow man, working together, and have a view of community, from the mayor of the town clear down to the lowest position you could have. And they are all equal - they live together, they understand one another, they're not fighting."

"I'm a great believer in that sort of thing, living with your fellow man," Pearl added. She quoted a poem she'd learned in the sixth grade, in which a fellow's name was not written in the "golden book" as one who loved the Lord. "Then write that I love my fellow man," the fellow said to the angel with the book. And the next night when the angel appeared again, the fellow's name was in the book of those whom the Lord has blessed, and "it led all the rest." He loved his fellow man.

Then Pearl said: "I suppose I shouldn't record this. People ask, 'Pearl, why did you never marry?'"

I said: "Pearl, why did you never marry?"

Pearl said: "I never had time."

She said: "I had plenty of boyfriends. I could laugh. I had a sense of humor. Knew what was going on in the world. Liked education. Education has been my field. If there is anything left to my estate when I am gone, it's going to scholarships, to education. Education - that will put the world on top, that and taking care of your fellow man. That's my philosophy."
 
-----------------------
 
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
 
"Do you know the three most important things for having a winning football team," Ivan asked. "Offensive line, offensive line, and offensive line."
 
"Someone," Ivan said, "I don't know who it was, I don't think I'd ever heard of him, but someone once said 'if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.' Well, don't be lookin' for anyone to be battering Jack Benn's door down. Jack has been having a coon problem down at his place on West Court Street. So Jack put on his best outdoor game face and set a trap for the coon. In the middle of the night Jack got up and went outside to run his trap line. One of the neighborhood cats was in the trap eating the coon food and the coon was up on the bird feeder stuffing himself on sunflower seeds."
 
"At Paul's Cafe last Monday," Ivan said, "they had twelve kinds of pie listed. If I was a waitress and someone asked me what kind of pie I had, I would tell him: we got one crust and two crust, cream and fruit. Then let him order."
 
"Darren Meyer got caught up in that dreaded sequence web," Ivan reported. "You know how that works. First Darren made a new sign for Lasting Impressions. He done such a good job of that, his wife insisted that he repair the front steps. And, of course, he done an outsanding job of that. Now Darren don't know it yet, but the next project is a new front door. There is only one way to avoid the dreaded sequence web - that is to do such a poor job on the first project that the wife don't ask you to do the second project. I don't know why these young married husbands never learn that."
 
"And another thing," Ivan said. "As expensive as lumber is, it is kind of hard to realize it grows on trees."
 
"Bruce Miles wondered," Ivan said, "if, when you hit a honey bee at seventy miles per hour, is that glob on the windshield honey? Fortunately Elizabeth Ohmstede, the bee lady, was there. She said part of it was honey and part of it was guts."
 
"When I was a kid," Ivan said, "I used to hear old people talking about the weather being 'close." That was on the days when the humidity was high. Well, last week there was a couple days that could be described as 'close.'"
 
"I see a driver's ed car around town." Ivan said. "So must be having a driver's ed course at the local school. My driver's ed consisted of getting in, starting the motor, and letting out the clutch. Lettin' out that clutch would cause some buckin' and jumpin' but when you got her smoothed out, you were a driver."
 
"Last Tuesday morning I heard three different amounts of rain," Ivan reported. "I gave each one of them my stock answer - 'that's about what I had.' It's just so much simpler to say 'that's about what I had' than to go slogging out to the rain gauge and trying to read the amount in these plastic gauges that are hard to see through."
 
"You can always tell when you sweet corn is ready," Ivan said. "It is ready the day after the coons have stripped all the ears off the stalk."
 
"By fall of the year," Ivan said, "I always lock my car so people won't be putting turnips in." [Ivan, in Wisconsin, it's zucchini. You no more than turn your back or run into the convenience store for a soda and you come out there's a bushel of zucchini in your back seat.]
 
"A brunch had to be invented by a woman," Ivan wrote. "You can't have breakfast because she is going to a brunch. You don't have dinner because she has been to a brunch."
 
"The thing I like about the Fourth of July," Ivan said, "is that it is the last holiday until September 6th. The older I get, the more that holidays screw up my entire schedule. There is nothing I like better or that is more comfortable to me than routine. I hate being forced out of my routine."
 
"Stay ahead of the possed," Ivan always closes.
 
-----------------------
 
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 15, 1998

The air is still so humid you can see the moisture in it. Out here, the humidity is like a wall in the distance, a blue wall that marks the edge of what we can see. It's supposed to be hot again today. Our July weather is right on schedule. 

At the corner of Highway E and Sheldon Road, the winter rye has been harvested. All that's left is straw. The only field of peas that had remained along Highway E has been harvested too.

In the field where once there had been water standing, where peas have since been taken, now there are hundreds of little white stakes set in rows. Don't ask me - I don't know.

At the Soda farm along Highway E south of Five Corners, the evidence is clear that one of the big outbuildings and a small one burned yesterday.

*

JULY 16, 1998
Speed and scale are interrelated. Driving sixty miles per hour, the telephone poles are closer together - it's only when you're walking that you recognize how far apart they are. A conestoga wagon headed west - the hopeful settler sees the wide open spaces reaching beyond forever. From a jet, the view of the open space of the west is reduced; we can cross in an hour or two or three what used to take a very long summer.

In car or pick-up, you do not get the same sense of the road as you do walking, when you notice every hill. You do not get to hear the plants and animals talking. Because you remove yourself from "land time" when climbing into an automobile, your senses are altered - it is the large you notice, not the small and quiet. The anger of the red-wing blackbird - you can't feel it as you travel in a fast-moving vehicle. The kreee of the hawk - can you hear it? Because we miss these things in passing, we come to think they are not there, or are not important.
 
When we slow to a walk, we see how much different the world becomes.

A neighbor has water spraying across his lawn. I would not do that. Having a lawn to take care of is bad enough - you don't want to encourage it.

Again this morning - a dove in the driveway. Sun on the house is blood ripe red.

Sea gulls are flocking in the fields along Highway E, awaiting our plague of locusts perhaps. They've been here more than a week, I think, and the flock seems to be getting larger.

The leaves on the corn are curled tight. Does the corn wish for water? It was warm again yesterday. Today is not expected to be so hot as it has been.

There are three crows on the Ripon High School football field. They are talking a game all their own, calling plays I don't understand.

VISIT TO CURLEW, IOWA
JULY 20-22
 
After I put up tomorrow's post, I will leave for a short trip to Curlew, Iowa, my "hometown." The folks who bought the Joe Wilson house in Curlew live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, but they spend their vacations repairing, restoring, and refurbishing the house that my childhood friend Bryan Wilson grew up in. I have fond memories of the house, as is evident in my memoir, Curlew: Home. The house, as is the case of Curlew itself, has fallen into some disrepair over the years. Bryan Wilson was killed while serving a second tour of duty in Vietnam.
 
The owners of the Wilson house are working on it this week and next. They had invited me to visit them during their time in Curlew, to tour the house. I've offered to spend a day helping them. So I'll drive out to Curlew tomorrow after posting here, work with them in the house on Wednesday, drive home on Thursday, and return to blogging on Friday.
 
I wonder what ghosts will stir up dust in the old house as I'm in it. I wonder what emotions will stir within me. Will I get the kernel of a good essay out of the experience, or at least an interesting journal entry? I don't know. There are no guarantees, but this is the sort of experience that usually bears fruit for me and I am grateful for the opportunity to visit my dead buddy's childhood home.
 
-----------------------
 
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
     CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART NINE 
 
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 didn't tell you about my 4-H work," Pearl said. "It wasn't called 4-H in Preble County back in 1919. I was 14 or 15 years old. It started with our wonderful superintendent of schools - 'We ought to have something for these children to do in the summer-time.' So we formed little clubs of one kind or another, and Lewisburg had a food club. Seven or eight girls belonged to it. One of the young teachers, who was a grand woman if there ever lived one, said she would be the sponsor of it. We met every week or so through the whole summer and studied nutrition, menus, preparation of foods, and cooking. A cooking club. Lanier Township had a cooking club, Monroe Township had a cooking club, and Lewisburg had a cooking club. There were at least sixty some girls in Preble County at that time in cooking clubs - 1919. We had a pamphlet explaining the things we studied We helped our mothers with cooking, canning, preserving, stewing, and all that, making family dinners and so on."

"At the county fair in September," she continued, "we exhibited - canned vegetables, canned fruit, jellies, and preserves, and a loaf of bread. Prizes were given for the best exhibit. The fair was during school-time but school was dismissed so the kids could go to the fair. The Mt. Castle girls wouldn't be going to the fair until the second day, so they were put out in the field picking up ears of corn that had been knocked off by the binder. When the came up to the farmyard for Dad to shovel the corn out of the wagon into the crib, the girls came to the house to get warm. While they were sitting here getting warm, waiting to go back out to the field, the telephone rang. The principal's wife was on the telephone when my mother answered. My mother said, 'Well, you can tell Pearl.'"

"So Pearl goes to the telephone," she said. "The principal had been so anxious to see what his school had as exhibits that he went over early on Thursday morning. His group of girls had several first place prizes. Pearl Mt. Castle had the prize for 'Best Cook in Preble County.' A little girl from Lanier had second place. And the third, fourth, and fifth places went to our Lewisburg club. The principal was so pleased and surprised he couldn't wait to tell it, he had to call his wife in Lewisburg and have her call to tell me I was first in Preble County. The prize was this - first and second in the county would go to Columbus - which was like going to Europe, you know - for Farmer's Week in January, entertained at Ohio State. The trip was all furnished by the county. That was like going to Europe for little country girls."

"I didn't know the Brauers from Lanier, my family didn't know them," Pearl said. "Jessie Brauer was the girl from Lanier. They lived at Isabelle Crossroad, we called it Beantown. The families got together to talk about how we'd get transported to Columbus for that week. We decided that Dad would take me by horse and buggy down to the traction line - there was a traction line from Richmond to Dayton, an inter-urban electric. I spent the night nearby. Then in the morning a fellow took us to the inter-urban line, and told them 'These little girls are going to Columbus, be sure they get off at Ludlow so they can walk to the depot.' We got on the train in Dayton that took us to Columbus. Advisers for 4-H met us at the train station and took us to the hotel where we stayed for a week. We went to the Ohio State Agricultural Building for a lot of meetings. We saw the town. We saw the Capitol building. We had three meals a day at the hotel or wherever."

Pearl said: "It was a great outing for a little girl back in 1919, 'the Best Cook in Preble County' - Pearl Mt. Castle."

"I wasn't too dull, I guess," she said.

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

from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 13, 1998

Partly cloudy this morning. I can hear a woodpecker at breakfast. A squirrel noses its way down a tree in the back yard. In the distance, a mourning dove sits on a wire, tells me of its sadness.

We approach mid-July and I am caught, I think, somewhere in late May. Though how tall the corn is says it is July. How far the winter rye has turned says it is July. Still, being away from home for much of the month of June, it is almost as if my internal clock stopped while I was away. Well, I am here now, and the place fills me, here, now.

The village is very quiet this morning. What is it poised for? A new day? A new week?

It is a green land this year, a great green smear across the state. Should we be happy that every farmer prospers, or complain that the price paid for their products will drop as a result of a good harvest? Some are caught in that hard place where their happiness must sadden them.

The day lilies in the ditch north of Five Corners are orange summer sentinels, fully at attention.

In Ripon, the butt end of the weekend celebration remains. In the park, the rides and the midway are quiet, the carnies and hawkers and ride operaters Canjun'd by the constant sun and marinated in cheap bourbon - they sleep the fitful sleep of those who have no permanent home. Perhaps the women dream - a house and bed to call their own, a man to stand by, a sproutling child who will never have to live like this. The day will waken each of them, by and by, the heat will, each with his own, her own sour breath; then they'll be off down the road again, another town, another shill, another day.

*

JULY 14, 1998
It was blistering hot yesterday. The heat is expected to continue through the week. The humidity helps the crops, perhaps, but makes the people a little cranky. I mean "makes me a little cranky." It cooled last night somewhat and we were able to cool the house. At one point, waking during the night, I could have sworn it was even a little chilly.

People talk too much of the weather and complain too much of the heat, sometimes. Accept it, people! This is Wisconsin; this is the way it's going to be. Like complaining about it is going to change anything?

I leave early for work today. There is moisture on the windshield, on the side windows. The humidity in the cool evening air has to condense somewhere, I suppose. It is almost as if it has condensed on the morning sun as well.

The stray cat lounges in the driveway, up against the tire of a car, surveying his kingdom. This is my world, he says. Challenge me for it.

White clover shows itself in the lawn across the street, and elsewhere in Fairwater. A rabbit in the cemetery, a robin.

In the country, the humid air is so thick that groves of trees, silos, barns disappear into it a mile off or so off. It's not fog. The air is that wet. Even in the cool breeze sweat beads on my forehead. Am I talking too much of the weather, complaining? Shut up, Tom!

You can see the different maturity dates of the sweet corn, I think, looking at the color of the tassels - the paler, the later it matures.

Even the skinned lawns in Ripon - there are lots of them - soak up the dew this morning.

Two crows strut on the sidewalk in front of the bank downtown. I wonder, Do the bankers know that crows can count to ten?

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....

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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.