Monday, August 02, 2004
GONE CANOEING AND CAMPING
IN QUETICO PROVINCIAL PARK
---
BACK TO BLOGGING AUGUST 12th
If you've never canoed and camped in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, or on the Canadian side, in the Quetico region, you don't know what a beautiful week we shall be having. It's lovely country, even when it rains, all rock and water, and sky. Oh, and fish. We always get fishing licenses going in, and we always catch enough bass and northern for six adults and a ten-year-old girl to make breakfast and supper of them.
Tonight we'll all gather for the trip, we'll drive up tomorrow, two cars, three canoes, an eight-year-old boy with us this year for the first time, along with his sister who's a veteran with us at age eleven. We'll put canoes into the northwestern corner of the Quetico park, and will paddle and portage in a lazy loop that will bring us back to the cars eventually.
How remote is it? Far enough that you don't often see jets fly over, and when you do they are something of a wonder and only a slight intrusion into the peacefulness.
Yeah, you've got to like water and sky and rock, especially rock, to spend a week in Quetico. You've got to like the hard work of portaging, sometimes for long distances, carrying everything you've brought with you up one side and down the other. You've got to like sleeping on the hard ground - this is exposed Canadian shield, remember. You've got to like mosquitoes. And drinking lake water.
You've got to like wind in the trees, sun on the water, the lap of waves against rock. You've got to be able to endure some spectacular sunsets; and northerns for breakfast, bass for supper, every day.
I know, I know. It's hard work, but somebody's got to do it.
See you again about August 12th.
---------------
UPDATE ON THE POET LAUREATE APPOINTMENT
Saturday was two weeks since the three finalists interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission. I'm not saying, having heard nothing in the interim, that I've been hard to live with, but my wife might.
The chair of the Commission, Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, had told me after the interview that she thought the Governor's announcement of the appointment would be made "in about two weeks." Well, I e-mailed her to ask whether she had any update on the status of things at this point, and she explained that the Governor had been a little occupied with the Democratic convention and such and hasn't acted yet on the Commission's recommendation. (And I think to myself: POetry comes before PResidents.... but you don't tell that to the Governor.)
Cathryn said Governor Doyle is aware that the tenure of the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, expires on September 1st. "So enjoy your vacation and hopefully we'll have an update when you get back!" she added.
Now you know what I know.
Would you keep reminding me that patience is one of the first qualities of a good poet laureate? And, for my part, I'll keep trying to be patient. But it's getting more and more difficult to hide the fact that not knowing - one way or the other - is just about killing me.
---------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
Just as she promised, Starr Jacobs met me at Jiffy Burger on Smith Center's east edge. She and her daughter Carrie were picking up hamburgers and malts to take to the men working in the field to harvest their wheat. Starr has ordered a hamburger for me, too, and a malt.
"Follow me," Starr said as she got to her car. She headed east on Highway 36 for a mile or so, then turned south on a gravel road. No jet fighter pilot would handle the turn and roll and chuck of these roads any better than Starr did. I grew up driving on gravel roads and found it a challenge keeping up with her. She knew where she was going and she was a woman with a purpose. Farm women are sweet, but they are also tough. They know how to do what must be done. I stayed just back of the rooster-tail of dust Starr's car was throwing out. The road curved. We made a left turn. We met a big farm truck going the other way. It was loaded with wheat. That was Starr's husband, Brent, driving it.
Brent farms with his cousin, Dan Jacobs. Brent's father and Dan's were brothers who farmed together. Now Brent and Dan farm much the same ground - 3000 acres in crops, 900 acres of pasture. They raise wheat. They run cows and raise calves. They used to feed beef but have given that up. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the bottom of their containment pond was too close to the top of the groundwater. It's better to stop arguing before they wear you down, easier to start running cows on pasture and raise the calves.
Starr pulled off the road onto the edge of harvested wheat stubble. Her son, Steve, was there with tractor and wagon. He has been hauling wheat from the combine and loading it into his dad's trucks. When his uncle Dan extends the auger out from the side of the combine, that's a signal the bin on the combine is getting full. Steve will pull up alongside the combine as it works the field, will adjust the speed of his tractor and wagon to the speed of the combine. Dan Jacobs will start the auger and a torrent of wheat will pour into the wagon. Side by side they travel, combine and wagon, until the bin on the combine is empty. Dan will turn off the auger and make a hand signal. The tractor and wagon will peel away and head back to unload in the second truck out near the road.
Now, however, it was time for Steve to have supper. He jumped down from the cab of the big John Deere tractor. Starr and Carrie had been setting up chairs and TV trays in the shade of the truck. In addition to burgers and malts, Starr brought bottles of sport drink, pieces of cantaloupe, purple grapes, bags of a kind of sweetened trail mix that she and Carrie make every harvest for the men to take with them to the field.
Now the big John Deere combine that had been working the field was headed to where we were standing. The header on the combine is thirty feet across. The operator rides high above and behind the header - that would be Dan Jacobs, a big guy, long-haired, patient, enduring.
He stepped down off the platform of the cab on the combine, five steps down, and walked to stand in the shade of the truck with us.
"Have some supper," Starr said. "Have a chair."
"Oh," said Dan, "I think I'll stand. I've been sitting since 11:00 a.m."
The men had gotten to the field at 11:00 a.m. It was their third day of harvesting. At harvest-time you can start work in the fields once the dew on the wheat has dried sufficiently. If there were no dew, Dan could start combining at 9:00 a.m. When he starts depends on how heavy the dew is, how much wind there is to dry it off.
Dan stood eating his burger, drinking gulps of the blue sports drink he has selected. He didn't want a malt. He can't eat the fruit.
We were glad for the shade, for the breeze, for the food. I was eating a burger, too, and had a drink. I had my own bag of the trail mix, too; it had been sweetened with a sugary coating. Carrie told me the recipe but I didn't write it down and now I've forgotten it.
Yeah, Dan said I could ride along with him while he combines; yeah, I can ask him questions.
To be continued....
---------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 3, 1998
It is a sluggish start to a new week and a new month. A dark and quiet morning today when I rose. A grey sky now. I am moving slow, not thinking of much - not the month just completed nor the month coming up. I'm simply standing still in the green spray of summer, grateful that it is cool enough here, grateful that this is not Texas, that we've not had its twenty or twenty-five consecutive days of 100+ degree weather. As with three weeks of 20 degrees below zero, I think I'd snap.
It is grey enough this morning that the sky is spitting a little rain as I walked out to the pick-up. Splatters run down the windshield. A little song on the roof of the cab. A piece of cottonwood fluff brought low by the rain settles damply onto the hood of the truck. Morning sings a wet song.
Along Washington Street, there is rain enough to lay the dust, as they say in the old letters and journals. It smells like rain. There is rain enough to keep my wipers going as I head north out of Fairwater, all the way to Ripon.
This is the kind of morning that those who live here will appreciate - an easy, gentle rain for which the farmers are grateful, I'm sure. A lingering coolness. Water-color clouds. The tourist would complain about getting wet, about the lack of sunshine, about the damp grayness. We who live here understand the need. This is a day of grace in our lives.
*
AUGUST 4, 1998
Cool and damp again this morning. Tell-tale moisture on the street, though I did not hear it raining during the night.
One thing I do not see - having tied myself to this piece of ground - is a variety of landscapes. Each day I watch for minute changes - is the hawk there, has that house been sided, has the corn been harvested, are the flowers at Five Corners in bloom (yes! gloriously).
Another thing I do not see is a variety of people. What can I compare these villagers to, these farmers? There are other ways to behave than what I see here. For some, settling onto the land to farm it for a life time would be boring; they are not so rooted and can go where the wind blows them. Many such are middlewestern farm kids, I suspect. Certainly I know that Iowa is a long reach of pigs and corn - you only have to complain once and I'll agree. Yet I didn't go to Houston or Los Angeles or New York, as some of us have done, following the money. I lived for a while in the city - Milwaukee - but the country pulled back at me and I'm here, part way back to Iowa but certainly not all the way.
So there are lands I can't see from here, people I can't know. But I shall, I think, know something well - these people, this piece of ground. It is like setting a box down on the yard square chunk of prairie and knowing it entirely, deep and wide, an all-the-way-to-China kind of knowledge. I can stand that, I think. I can examine everything inside the box, look for relationships, try to understand. The effort, thus far, has been brief. Once I've done this for ten or twelve years, perhaps then I'll start to see things I cannot now even imagine are there.
Moist on the street. Moist on the windshield. Water dripping off the vehicles in the driveway. A green gauze of moisture rolls away into the distance, softening the line of tree and silo. It makes me want to sing river songs this morning.
It looks as though part of a field of beans has been harvested. Were they green beans instead of soy beans? How did I miss it? The other half of the field still stands there, which is strange, as usually they take whole fields or all the fields in an area while they have the equipment here.
As I near the edge of Ripon, I realize it won't be long and the young nubbins will be waiting for school buses again, their bodies lithe and tan and hard from summerful activities. Some of them will be freshmen, eager and straining for the high school experience, eager to see and touch and do things they've never seen and touched and done before, eager for initiation into what are now for them only dim mysteries. I've always liked the smell of new clothes on the first day of school, and I've liked the smell of the school on that first day of the year, too, when the very air throbs with possibility. As we get older, occasions for this kind of newness, for freshness, are greatly reduced as our possibilities are reduced. Our world becomes stale around us, we become stale in it.
IN QUETICO PROVINCIAL PARK
---
BACK TO BLOGGING AUGUST 12th
If you've never canoed and camped in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, or on the Canadian side, in the Quetico region, you don't know what a beautiful week we shall be having. It's lovely country, even when it rains, all rock and water, and sky. Oh, and fish. We always get fishing licenses going in, and we always catch enough bass and northern for six adults and a ten-year-old girl to make breakfast and supper of them.
Tonight we'll all gather for the trip, we'll drive up tomorrow, two cars, three canoes, an eight-year-old boy with us this year for the first time, along with his sister who's a veteran with us at age eleven. We'll put canoes into the northwestern corner of the Quetico park, and will paddle and portage in a lazy loop that will bring us back to the cars eventually.
How remote is it? Far enough that you don't often see jets fly over, and when you do they are something of a wonder and only a slight intrusion into the peacefulness.
Yeah, you've got to like water and sky and rock, especially rock, to spend a week in Quetico. You've got to like the hard work of portaging, sometimes for long distances, carrying everything you've brought with you up one side and down the other. You've got to like sleeping on the hard ground - this is exposed Canadian shield, remember. You've got to like mosquitoes. And drinking lake water.
You've got to like wind in the trees, sun on the water, the lap of waves against rock. You've got to be able to endure some spectacular sunsets; and northerns for breakfast, bass for supper, every day.
I know, I know. It's hard work, but somebody's got to do it.
See you again about August 12th.
---------------
UPDATE ON THE POET LAUREATE APPOINTMENT
Saturday was two weeks since the three finalists interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission. I'm not saying, having heard nothing in the interim, that I've been hard to live with, but my wife might.
The chair of the Commission, Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, had told me after the interview that she thought the Governor's announcement of the appointment would be made "in about two weeks." Well, I e-mailed her to ask whether she had any update on the status of things at this point, and she explained that the Governor had been a little occupied with the Democratic convention and such and hasn't acted yet on the Commission's recommendation. (And I think to myself: POetry comes before PResidents.... but you don't tell that to the Governor.)
Cathryn said Governor Doyle is aware that the tenure of the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, expires on September 1st. "So enjoy your vacation and hopefully we'll have an update when you get back!" she added.
Now you know what I know.
Would you keep reminding me that patience is one of the first qualities of a good poet laureate? And, for my part, I'll keep trying to be patient. But it's getting more and more difficult to hide the fact that not knowing - one way or the other - is just about killing me.
---------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
Just as she promised, Starr Jacobs met me at Jiffy Burger on Smith Center's east edge. She and her daughter Carrie were picking up hamburgers and malts to take to the men working in the field to harvest their wheat. Starr has ordered a hamburger for me, too, and a malt.
"Follow me," Starr said as she got to her car. She headed east on Highway 36 for a mile or so, then turned south on a gravel road. No jet fighter pilot would handle the turn and roll and chuck of these roads any better than Starr did. I grew up driving on gravel roads and found it a challenge keeping up with her. She knew where she was going and she was a woman with a purpose. Farm women are sweet, but they are also tough. They know how to do what must be done. I stayed just back of the rooster-tail of dust Starr's car was throwing out. The road curved. We made a left turn. We met a big farm truck going the other way. It was loaded with wheat. That was Starr's husband, Brent, driving it.
Brent farms with his cousin, Dan Jacobs. Brent's father and Dan's were brothers who farmed together. Now Brent and Dan farm much the same ground - 3000 acres in crops, 900 acres of pasture. They raise wheat. They run cows and raise calves. They used to feed beef but have given that up. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the bottom of their containment pond was too close to the top of the groundwater. It's better to stop arguing before they wear you down, easier to start running cows on pasture and raise the calves.
Starr pulled off the road onto the edge of harvested wheat stubble. Her son, Steve, was there with tractor and wagon. He has been hauling wheat from the combine and loading it into his dad's trucks. When his uncle Dan extends the auger out from the side of the combine, that's a signal the bin on the combine is getting full. Steve will pull up alongside the combine as it works the field, will adjust the speed of his tractor and wagon to the speed of the combine. Dan Jacobs will start the auger and a torrent of wheat will pour into the wagon. Side by side they travel, combine and wagon, until the bin on the combine is empty. Dan will turn off the auger and make a hand signal. The tractor and wagon will peel away and head back to unload in the second truck out near the road.
Now, however, it was time for Steve to have supper. He jumped down from the cab of the big John Deere tractor. Starr and Carrie had been setting up chairs and TV trays in the shade of the truck. In addition to burgers and malts, Starr brought bottles of sport drink, pieces of cantaloupe, purple grapes, bags of a kind of sweetened trail mix that she and Carrie make every harvest for the men to take with them to the field.
Now the big John Deere combine that had been working the field was headed to where we were standing. The header on the combine is thirty feet across. The operator rides high above and behind the header - that would be Dan Jacobs, a big guy, long-haired, patient, enduring.
He stepped down off the platform of the cab on the combine, five steps down, and walked to stand in the shade of the truck with us.
"Have some supper," Starr said. "Have a chair."
"Oh," said Dan, "I think I'll stand. I've been sitting since 11:00 a.m."
The men had gotten to the field at 11:00 a.m. It was their third day of harvesting. At harvest-time you can start work in the fields once the dew on the wheat has dried sufficiently. If there were no dew, Dan could start combining at 9:00 a.m. When he starts depends on how heavy the dew is, how much wind there is to dry it off.
Dan stood eating his burger, drinking gulps of the blue sports drink he has selected. He didn't want a malt. He can't eat the fruit.
We were glad for the shade, for the breeze, for the food. I was eating a burger, too, and had a drink. I had my own bag of the trail mix, too; it had been sweetened with a sugary coating. Carrie told me the recipe but I didn't write it down and now I've forgotten it.
Yeah, Dan said I could ride along with him while he combines; yeah, I can ask him questions.
To be continued....
---------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 3, 1998
It is a sluggish start to a new week and a new month. A dark and quiet morning today when I rose. A grey sky now. I am moving slow, not thinking of much - not the month just completed nor the month coming up. I'm simply standing still in the green spray of summer, grateful that it is cool enough here, grateful that this is not Texas, that we've not had its twenty or twenty-five consecutive days of 100+ degree weather. As with three weeks of 20 degrees below zero, I think I'd snap.
It is grey enough this morning that the sky is spitting a little rain as I walked out to the pick-up. Splatters run down the windshield. A little song on the roof of the cab. A piece of cottonwood fluff brought low by the rain settles damply onto the hood of the truck. Morning sings a wet song.
Along Washington Street, there is rain enough to lay the dust, as they say in the old letters and journals. It smells like rain. There is rain enough to keep my wipers going as I head north out of Fairwater, all the way to Ripon.
This is the kind of morning that those who live here will appreciate - an easy, gentle rain for which the farmers are grateful, I'm sure. A lingering coolness. Water-color clouds. The tourist would complain about getting wet, about the lack of sunshine, about the damp grayness. We who live here understand the need. This is a day of grace in our lives.
*
AUGUST 4, 1998
Cool and damp again this morning. Tell-tale moisture on the street, though I did not hear it raining during the night.
One thing I do not see - having tied myself to this piece of ground - is a variety of landscapes. Each day I watch for minute changes - is the hawk there, has that house been sided, has the corn been harvested, are the flowers at Five Corners in bloom (yes! gloriously).
Another thing I do not see is a variety of people. What can I compare these villagers to, these farmers? There are other ways to behave than what I see here. For some, settling onto the land to farm it for a life time would be boring; they are not so rooted and can go where the wind blows them. Many such are middlewestern farm kids, I suspect. Certainly I know that Iowa is a long reach of pigs and corn - you only have to complain once and I'll agree. Yet I didn't go to Houston or Los Angeles or New York, as some of us have done, following the money. I lived for a while in the city - Milwaukee - but the country pulled back at me and I'm here, part way back to Iowa but certainly not all the way.
So there are lands I can't see from here, people I can't know. But I shall, I think, know something well - these people, this piece of ground. It is like setting a box down on the yard square chunk of prairie and knowing it entirely, deep and wide, an all-the-way-to-China kind of knowledge. I can stand that, I think. I can examine everything inside the box, look for relationships, try to understand. The effort, thus far, has been brief. Once I've done this for ten or twelve years, perhaps then I'll start to see things I cannot now even imagine are there.
Moist on the street. Moist on the windshield. Water dripping off the vehicles in the driveway. A green gauze of moisture rolls away into the distance, softening the line of tree and silo. It makes me want to sing river songs this morning.
It looks as though part of a field of beans has been harvested. Were they green beans instead of soy beans? How did I miss it? The other half of the field still stands there, which is strange, as usually they take whole fields or all the fields in an area while they have the equipment here.
As I near the edge of Ripon, I realize it won't be long and the young nubbins will be waiting for school buses again, their bodies lithe and tan and hard from summerful activities. Some of them will be freshmen, eager and straining for the high school experience, eager to see and touch and do things they've never seen and touched and done before, eager for initiation into what are now for them only dim mysteries. I've always liked the smell of new clothes on the first day of school, and I've liked the smell of the school on that first day of the year, too, when the very air throbs with possibility. As we get older, occasions for this kind of newness, for freshness, are greatly reduced as our possibilities are reduced. Our world becomes stale around us, we become stale in it.
Sunday, August 01, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
There is an old Lutheran church in the north part of Kensington, north of Highway 36. There is an old Lutheran cemetery there, too. I can't help myself: I have to walk among the gravestones. The wind tries to talk to me. In the past I have tried to understand life by writing down so much of what I've found in cemeteries. I don't understand what I've already got so I decide not to write down anything more.
And yet I do. I must:
Alwina - wife of R.G. Nagel
April 17, 1899
May 26, 1919
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." - Ps. 119:105
--
Louisa - wife of Lorenzo Schnell
Died Dec. 19, 1891
Aged 51 years
I do not know where these women's husbands are buried. It is not here, not nearby. This is quite a large cemetery, so these women's bones are not alone. Yet where is the husband of each? Where have they gone off to? Why did they leave this mark of life's abandonment, these women's lonely bones here? The great wheel turns. I put sadness on my shoulder and carry it away.
Where I walk in the cemetery the grass is like straw. There are lots of little cactus plants, a reminder that - yes - this is the very western limit of the middle west. Out here where they measure their rainfall in hundredths of an inch.
The sun. The heat. The sorrow. It's not bad enough that I'm sad, now I walk back towards the car through the plot of children's graves. It's a wonder anyone survived at all to people this land.
I leave Kensington. I drive past the restaurant along the highway - CLOSED. Past the Great Plains Motel - CLOSED - FOR SALE.
These people carry on. You don't hear them complaining about their lot. You don't hear them talk about their sadness. I guess I might as well shut up about it myself.
I am quiet all the way back to Smith Center.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 31, 1998
At the end of another month, a coolness in the morning air suggesting the day is poised between summer and fall. A moist, musky hang to the day, blue sky and planes, a squirrel leaping from tree to tree, a bird somewhere, angry. I sit in the pick-up, in my driveway, in the moment. Why would I want to move from here - this home, this place, this moment. The green hugeness of it all holds me.
And yet I do. I must:
Alwina - wife of R.G. Nagel
April 17, 1899
May 26, 1919
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." - Ps. 119:105
--
Louisa - wife of Lorenzo Schnell
Died Dec. 19, 1891
Aged 51 years
I do not know where these women's husbands are buried. It is not here, not nearby. This is quite a large cemetery, so these women's bones are not alone. Yet where is the husband of each? Where have they gone off to? Why did they leave this mark of life's abandonment, these women's lonely bones here? The great wheel turns. I put sadness on my shoulder and carry it away.
Where I walk in the cemetery the grass is like straw. There are lots of little cactus plants, a reminder that - yes - this is the very western limit of the middle west. Out here where they measure their rainfall in hundredths of an inch.
The sun. The heat. The sorrow. It's not bad enough that I'm sad, now I walk back towards the car through the plot of children's graves. It's a wonder anyone survived at all to people this land.
I leave Kensington. I drive past the restaurant along the highway - CLOSED. Past the Great Plains Motel - CLOSED - FOR SALE.
These people carry on. You don't hear them complaining about their lot. You don't hear them talk about their sadness. I guess I might as well shut up about it myself.
I am quiet all the way back to Smith Center.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 31, 1998
At the end of another month, a coolness in the morning air suggesting the day is poised between summer and fall. A moist, musky hang to the day, blue sky and planes, a squirrel leaping from tree to tree, a bird somewhere, angry. I sit in the pick-up, in my driveway, in the moment. Why would I want to move from here - this home, this place, this moment. The green hugeness of it all holds me.
Yet I must go to work, I suppose. Everything is that's anything is achieved with work, a good day's work.
Another squirrel, another plane, a stray cat on the lawn. Yeah, I head off to work.
Where the tree went down along Washington Street and took out the power line, it broke up the sidewalk too. That section of cement has been repaired. The stump of the tree is gone - all that remains is a mound of dirt and soon this too will be leveled. Then what will say anything to remember that tree?
A bank of clouds to the northwest. Are they a promise or a threat? We don't always know. One thing that is certain is that nothing is certain. The sure thing is a fool's bet. I'm not talking just about the weather.
The fields that had been corn stubble just south of Five Corners - planted to beans so late in the season - are thick and green right now. Everything comes 'round in due time, I guess.
Along Watson Street, green garbage cans are lined up, all ready for a green clamp to grab and hold them. Swing your partner, dosey-do!
Come on, Tom, they're just stinkin' garbage cans!
Saturday, July 31, 2004
SATURDAY'S POEMS
----------------------------
NIGHT SWIM
by Karla Huston
My father sometimes took us to the lake
on hot Wisconsin nights when the sun started to fall
but before the mosquitoes began their feasting.
We'd spread towels on the cooling blanket
of sand, place shoes at the corners to keep them down.
My brother and I would step carefully in the water,
staying close to the shore
while my mother tucked pin curls into a tight white cap.
My father would barrel-ass down the bank, slice
into the water like a knife, and show up
on the other side of the safety ropes, grinning.
Exactly three breast strokes later,
he would hoist himself onto the diving raft, shake
water from his yellow hair and dive again
and again, bringing up handfuls of mucky lake bottom,
laughing as worms of mud crawled down his arms.
On the way home, if we were lucky, he'd stop
for rootbeers or curly topped cones.
Later, when I'd try to fall asleep, the lake came back,
the muddy scent of water swarming my skin,
my father's face smiling, waves rocking me to sleep.
*
SUMMER STORM
by Karla Huston
We clutched together in a screen tent,
nine of us lurching between
tent poles and gusts, watching
clouds gather up in the west,
the angry wave of them
hovered over the Mississippi River
bluffs like a black wall. The wind
huffed down the face of the limestone,
threw clay and trees onto highways
and shorelines. We shivered
and while the sky slung bullets,
the old man reared back, spit mud
and clams and weeds.
The wind made sodden debris
of tents and sleeping bags
while under the plastic canopy
we passed the bourbon--an amber torch,
the burning liquor the only thing
that quenched the quarrel outside.
"Summer Storm" appeared previously in Poet Lore and Nanny Fanny. Reprinted with permission of the poet. Karla Huston recently earned an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She has won the the 2003 Main Street Rag Chapbook contest and the Wisconsin Regional Writers' Association Jade Ring for both poetry and fiction. She received writing residencies from the Ragdale Foundation in both 1998 and 2002. Her poems have earned five Pushcart Prize nominations. Huston has published poetry, reviews, and interviews in many national journals including Cimarron Review, 5 A.M., Margie, North American Review, One Trick Pony, Pearl, Poet Lore, Rattle,and others. She is listed at Book That Poet. Her chapbook Flight Patterns can be ordered from Karla Huston or from The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore. About Flight Patterns, poet Denise Duhamel has said: "Karla Huston has a knack for the perfect-pitched narrative, the delicious revelation of a storyline in verse. In Flight Patterns, the heartbreak of mature and adolescent love, domestic dramas, and issues of the body stun the reader with both their universality and their particular passions. Huston wrestles with all the "what ifs," and her poems put life in a headlock at every turn. A vividly luscious debut."
----------------
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 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 Loren Kleinman, "Formaggio" and "Jetsam" - July 24, 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
----------------------------
NIGHT SWIM
by Karla Huston
My father sometimes took us to the lake
on hot Wisconsin nights when the sun started to fall
but before the mosquitoes began their feasting.
We'd spread towels on the cooling blanket
of sand, place shoes at the corners to keep them down.
My brother and I would step carefully in the water,
staying close to the shore
while my mother tucked pin curls into a tight white cap.
My father would barrel-ass down the bank, slice
into the water like a knife, and show up
on the other side of the safety ropes, grinning.
Exactly three breast strokes later,
he would hoist himself onto the diving raft, shake
water from his yellow hair and dive again
and again, bringing up handfuls of mucky lake bottom,
laughing as worms of mud crawled down his arms.
On the way home, if we were lucky, he'd stop
for rootbeers or curly topped cones.
Later, when I'd try to fall asleep, the lake came back,
the muddy scent of water swarming my skin,
my father's face smiling, waves rocking me to sleep.
*
SUMMER STORM
by Karla Huston
We clutched together in a screen tent,
nine of us lurching between
tent poles and gusts, watching
clouds gather up in the west,
the angry wave of them
hovered over the Mississippi River
bluffs like a black wall. The wind
huffed down the face of the limestone,
threw clay and trees onto highways
and shorelines. We shivered
and while the sky slung bullets,
the old man reared back, spit mud
and clams and weeds.
The wind made sodden debris
of tents and sleeping bags
while under the plastic canopy
we passed the bourbon--an amber torch,
the burning liquor the only thing
that quenched the quarrel outside.
"Summer Storm" appeared previously in Poet Lore and Nanny Fanny. Reprinted with permission of the poet. Karla Huston recently earned an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She has won the the 2003 Main Street Rag Chapbook contest and the Wisconsin Regional Writers' Association Jade Ring for both poetry and fiction. She received writing residencies from the Ragdale Foundation in both 1998 and 2002. Her poems have earned five Pushcart Prize nominations. Huston has published poetry, reviews, and interviews in many national journals including Cimarron Review, 5 A.M., Margie, North American Review, One Trick Pony, Pearl, Poet Lore, Rattle,and others. She is listed at Book That Poet. Her chapbook Flight Patterns can be ordered from Karla Huston or from The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore. About Flight Patterns, poet Denise Duhamel has said: "Karla Huston has a knack for the perfect-pitched narrative, the delicious revelation of a storyline in verse. In Flight Patterns, the heartbreak of mature and adolescent love, domestic dramas, and issues of the body stun the reader with both their universality and their particular passions. Huston wrestles with all the "what ifs," and her poems put life in a headlock at every turn. A vividly luscious debut."
----------------
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 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 Loren Kleinman, "Formaggio" and "Jetsam" - July 24, 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
Friday, July 30, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
There stands an old windmill. It is no longer pumping water. Nothing left for it to do but cry.
Here and there the occasional stand of cottonwoods shakes its leaves and wonders what went wrong. All the farmsteads, gone. All the farm families with them. Big fields. Bigger farms. The world turns. We turn with it or we resist and are broken. That's it, isn't it? Something is marching here and we keep up; we keep up or we're lost.
The wheatfields shake their heads No, No, No.
Ah - there is a field that looks as if it had to be in corn last year. Nothing has come up there yet. Here is another field worked to a fine, smooth consistency all the way to the road, but nothing has sprouted here either. These farmers must plant some fields, leave some fields fallow. Over here I see more bare fields, over there more fields with cornstalks showing.
Farmsteads gone in the country. In Athol and in Kensington, I see some houses that have been empty so long their curtains have given up holding on, have come undone thread by thread. Such houses reach a point where collapse is inevitable: no one could save them, even if someone wanted to. I saw the same thing in my hometown, Curlew, Iowa. There is a post office in Athol, and one in Kensington. Kensington has a school. There are grain elevators in both communities. There's a UPS delivery truck stopped on Main Street, Kensington, not far from the "Computer Doctor" store. These people are tough people. They don't give up. They won't give up. They hold on with their toenails.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 30, 1998
Clothes and place - you don't usually think about it, but clothes and place, too, are related. We are the "parka belt" here across the upper midwest. If you fly to Florida out of Milwaukee and it is cold here, do you leave your coat out in the car in the parking lot for your return and hope you don't freeze by the time you reach it? Why would people from Florida come to Wisconsin in winter, but if they did, how would they ever prepare themselves for twenty below zero. They don't sell clothes in Florida that could prepare you for twenty below. Think about cowboy boots - you may see them here, but they're not "mandatory." The Sherpas along the Himalayas - think how they dress, and why, and the Islanders of the South Pacific, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Partly, it's a matter of what the climate requires from clothes - warmth or coolness; and partly it's a matter of what's available. You have the Andes, you have llamas or vicunas and you use that wool to fashion warm clothes for yourself. Sometimes all you need is a skirt of leaves. In the Arctic, the Eskimos made wise use of the materials available in that harsh environment and they have survived on the edge of what's survivable.
There is enough rain to bead on the windshield, here, this morning, but it not enough to make the street wet. A grey sky. Cool. Another morning to enjoy.
I stop downtown for gasoline. Filling the tank reminds me of the cost of speed, the cost of distance. The cost is a choice. If I worked in the village, I could walk to work. I could take a horse and buggy - but that would exact a different kind of cost.
Out in the country, off to the north, blue sky. The shelf of clouds ends abruptly.
There is a large flock of seagulls set down in the newly sprouted field of beans. For what do they stay here? They are sea gulls. Is there easy pickin' in our fields?
Now I'm looking north. Now I see sunlight on the edge of clouds. I've got to say how much I love it. Celebrate!
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
There stands an old windmill. It is no longer pumping water. Nothing left for it to do but cry.
Here and there the occasional stand of cottonwoods shakes its leaves and wonders what went wrong. All the farmsteads, gone. All the farm families with them. Big fields. Bigger farms. The world turns. We turn with it or we resist and are broken. That's it, isn't it? Something is marching here and we keep up; we keep up or we're lost.
The wheatfields shake their heads No, No, No.
Ah - there is a field that looks as if it had to be in corn last year. Nothing has come up there yet. Here is another field worked to a fine, smooth consistency all the way to the road, but nothing has sprouted here either. These farmers must plant some fields, leave some fields fallow. Over here I see more bare fields, over there more fields with cornstalks showing.
Farmsteads gone in the country. In Athol and in Kensington, I see some houses that have been empty so long their curtains have given up holding on, have come undone thread by thread. Such houses reach a point where collapse is inevitable: no one could save them, even if someone wanted to. I saw the same thing in my hometown, Curlew, Iowa. There is a post office in Athol, and one in Kensington. Kensington has a school. There are grain elevators in both communities. There's a UPS delivery truck stopped on Main Street, Kensington, not far from the "Computer Doctor" store. These people are tough people. They don't give up. They won't give up. They hold on with their toenails.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 30, 1998
Clothes and place - you don't usually think about it, but clothes and place, too, are related. We are the "parka belt" here across the upper midwest. If you fly to Florida out of Milwaukee and it is cold here, do you leave your coat out in the car in the parking lot for your return and hope you don't freeze by the time you reach it? Why would people from Florida come to Wisconsin in winter, but if they did, how would they ever prepare themselves for twenty below zero. They don't sell clothes in Florida that could prepare you for twenty below. Think about cowboy boots - you may see them here, but they're not "mandatory." The Sherpas along the Himalayas - think how they dress, and why, and the Islanders of the South Pacific, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Partly, it's a matter of what the climate requires from clothes - warmth or coolness; and partly it's a matter of what's available. You have the Andes, you have llamas or vicunas and you use that wool to fashion warm clothes for yourself. Sometimes all you need is a skirt of leaves. In the Arctic, the Eskimos made wise use of the materials available in that harsh environment and they have survived on the edge of what's survivable.
There is enough rain to bead on the windshield, here, this morning, but it not enough to make the street wet. A grey sky. Cool. Another morning to enjoy.
I stop downtown for gasoline. Filling the tank reminds me of the cost of speed, the cost of distance. The cost is a choice. If I worked in the village, I could walk to work. I could take a horse and buggy - but that would exact a different kind of cost.
Out in the country, off to the north, blue sky. The shelf of clouds ends abruptly.
There is a large flock of seagulls set down in the newly sprouted field of beans. For what do they stay here? They are sea gulls. Is there easy pickin' in our fields?
Now I'm looking north. Now I see sunlight on the edge of clouds. I've got to say how much I love it. Celebrate!
Thursday, July 29, 2004
SLOW READS REVIEWS BIG BEN
AND INTERVIEWS THE POET
I couldn't be more honored. Peter at Slow Reads has put up the interview he did with me earlier this month, as well as - ahem - an insightful review of The Big Book of Ben Zen. I didn't know, when he asked, that Peter would throw me the kind of fat pitch questions a writer loves to answer. And then let me answer them at great length. Maybe he had said something about doing a review, too, but I forgot that, I guess, in the excitement of doing the interview. I didn't know that Peter's review would teach me things I hadn't known about my own book.
AND INTERVIEWS THE POET
I couldn't be more honored. Peter at Slow Reads has put up the interview he did with me earlier this month, as well as - ahem - an insightful review of The Big Book of Ben Zen. I didn't know, when he asked, that Peter would throw me the kind of fat pitch questions a writer loves to answer. And then let me answer them at great length. Maybe he had said something about doing a review, too, but I forgot that, I guess, in the excitement of doing the interview. I didn't know that Peter's review would teach me things I hadn't known about my own book.
The whole of it takes my breath away. I couldn't be more pleased by the results.
Thank you, Peter! I appreciate the attention. And I appreciate the care with which you've provided it.
------------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I have driven out into the country west of Smith Center, through Athol, and I'm just south of Athol now, pulled over to the side of the road, watching a couple combines out in the wheatfields. These are two different farmers, two different fields. Both are harvesting their wheat, bringing it in. There are tractors and wagons in the fields, fellows on them waiting to take the wheat from the combine and load it into storage bins on a farmstead hereabouts, or into a semi that will take the wheat to town.
A combine harvesting wheat moves forward into a stand of the golden ripeness. The stalks of wheat get cut off somewhere above ground level, leaving stubble; the heads and stalks fall into the combine's header and get moved into the innards of the machine where the kernel of the wheat is separated from the stalk and from the chaff. The kernels go up into the combine's three-hundred bushel storage bin; the straw and chaff and a lot of wheat dust get blown out the back end of the combine, to be scattered on the ground. Wheat mounds up in the bin.
When the bin of the combine gets full, that's nearly enough to fill a wagon. One operator jumps down out of his combine as wheat unloads into a wagon parked beside his machine. He walks over to talk with a fellow at a truck near the field's edge. He lights a cigarette.
The other combine in the other field on the other farm reaches the end of the field at the road, turns around and starts the long drive in the other direction. The dust he throws out doesn't know what to do with itself so it hangs like a fog.
Some of the roads out here are a clay and gravel combination that has been baked hard as concrete. Some of the roads look like roads, some of the roads do not; some look like lanes, and some look like less than lanes. All the wheatfields look like wheatfields - either wheat that is heavy-headed and waiting to be taken, or bare stems where the combine has been. And there is the occasional field where it seems the harvest was taken last year.
The fields are great rectangles - some of them a mile wide by a mile long, maybe; some of them with windbreaks, maybe, to mark the half mile. The wheat waiting for harvest shimmers in the heat like the surface of the ocean; the wind smoothes at the waves, pushes, pulls. The trees wave their branches. The air is incredibly warm all of a sudden. The road is baked, I mean baked, and the heat rises.
I come back past the combines on my way back to Athol; I see the bin of one of them is being unloaded into the white semi I'd met coming into town as I was going out. I can see wheat heaped in the truck box already. The other combine in the other field is unloading into a wagon again.
I drive back into Athol and find a place to park in the shade. I want to make some notes and take a moment's nap; or nap and make some notes, to put first things first.
Here's a big building that says it's the "First Congregational Church," according to stonework above the door. Yet to me it looks more like a school than a church - big, square, brick, like an old public school.
Then I'm driving backroads in the country again. Some roads are just dirt with the grass scraped off, wide enough for a semi, yeah, but not much wider than that. I'm out a mile north of Athol now. The wind is playing with the wheat. The wheat is nearly at eye level where I'm sitting in the car. If I had a passenger perhaps he could reach out and grab a handful of wheat stalks. You look at the wheat waving in the breeze; it looks as if the field is saying No, No, No.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 29, 1998
A place is not a place without time. Place exists in time - in geologic time, in the time of the year, in the time of day. Think that this place used to be at the bottom of a great inland sea. Think that there is ice and snow in winter, the great heat of summer, the color of autumn. Think of the bird chatter at sunrise, of the stillness at high noon. We cannot really know where we are, then, if we don't know when. When and where are a banded pair.
And time, I think, is linked to people. In the great universe, there is no before and after, only the great eternal NOW. For an animal - all is now. For a rock. We are the critter who insists on such distinctions as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Guilty.
Blue sky, still pond, planes rumble overhead, winging towards Oshkosh.
The corn pack has started. The sweet stink of the canning factory has changed from peas to corn silage. If you know nothing else, your nose will tell you that the sour smell where waste water is being sprayed is almost - dare I say it - almost the smell of pigs.
It could be Iowa - the green of corn stretching for miles. This could be home. Well - no - I guess it couldn't. I know about the pea fields that were here. There were never pea fields in my Iowa.
At Five Corners, the truck driver appreciates that I've given him room to make his wide turn. He waves. A load of sweet corn bound for Fairwater's canning factory.
On Watson Street in Ripon, long shadows. A quiet morning. The woman walking to work, as she does every morning, as she has as long as I have been driving the morning. She looks a little older today, and so do I.
I suppose there are things we put up with, but we don't have to like 'em.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
And soon enough Ivan was leading me down to the hospital so I could see Smith Center's Wellness Center.
Starr Jacobs, who was at the front desk, showed me around the facility. They've got exercise equipment available for use by hospital patients and members from the general public alike. There's a Nu-Step machine that provides low impact cardio-vascular workout and is useful in knee rehabilitation and with back problems. There's a stationary bicycle. Weight equipment. The Wellness Center has a personal trainer on staff.
"Lots of people from the community come in here to work out," Starr told me. "In fact, we have to schedule use of the therapy pool because it is so popular." The bottom of the therapy pool can be adjusted to make the pool deeper. People can swim, walk, or jog in the water against the current. You can use a tether to help you hold your place.
"When people become members, we show them what the machines are used for," Starr said.
"This machine," she said, "people either love or hate. She climbed on it to show how it operated. "You like it a little better if you set it to make you work a little harder. It feels more stable then. I know, it doesn't look like this is hard work. When I started, I couldn't do five minutes on it. Now I'm up to fifteen minutes."
Membership in the Wellness Center is a benefit offered to hospital employees.
Starr showed me the cardiac rehab unit, off in a room of its own. The "Tri-Fit" tests a person's flexibility, heart, and fat. It can be used to do an extensive health examination, to assess what your risks are, to compare your "body age" against your chronological age.
A fellow was set up in the unit for the cardiovascular test. A computer in the hospital was sending an image of the fellow's heart patterns to an expert off-site. A technician in the room was speaking with the far-off expert while the heart pattern continued to transmit. When I sign my memoir, Curlew:Home, I often make note that "Curlew is everywhere." The reverse is also more and more true these days - Everywhere is Curlew. Everywhere is Smith Center. When we wish to be freed from the confines of place, modern technology can free us. The world's experts are now available real time, on-line. The patient in Smith Center can benefit from the same expertise that the patient in Kansas City or Denver has available.
Then I met Arloa Barnes, who is, it turns out, Physical Therapy at Smith Center Hospital - the one and only Arloa, Physical Therapist. The Physical Therapy Department of the hospital used to be confined to a room about 20' by 12'.
"We started getting more and more patients," Arloa said. "We got the assistance of a grant to build this facility. The hospital board agreed to match half the cost. We included a cardiac rehab unit in the plans because that was something people were going out of town for. And we added aquatic therapy."
"Plans got approved," she said. "Work went forward. The project came in under budget."
Under budget? How did that happen?
"I spent a lot of weekends making sure that everything was right - that we had as many outlets planned for as we would need, that the space was big enough, that it allowed the privacy we would need," she said. "Change orders are what kill you."
"Half-way through the planning, a family from the community approached us and wanted to fund a Wellness Center as well. They provided $108,000 to outfit the center - equipment, tables, mirrors, etc. This gift allowed the center to be opened up to the public."
The PT Department brought three pieces of equipment to the new facility, and a table. The family's donation brought the total equipment up to ten pieces and added the weights that are available."
"When did we move in here?" Arloa asked another staff member. They chewed on the question for a bit and decided it must have been on April 1.
"We were moving and working," the other woman explained. "I've lost a month."
Arloa is married to Dr. Joe Barnes, a Smith Center family practice physician. "We moved here in 1985," Arloa said. "I've worked here off and on. I grew up in Norton, an hour west of here. So I'm a western Kansas girl." They moved here because they wanted to raise their family in a small town.
So how did the girl from western Kansas meet her doctor-husband, I wondered.
"I stalked him," Arloa said. "At the KU Medical School. I knew he had dated the student body president at Wichita State. He thought I was my sister. He was so predictable. He'd park in the same place every day, use the same door, ride the same elevator. He didn't have a chance."
Before I left the Wellness Center, Starr Jacobs and I arranged to meet at 6:00 p.m. at Smith Center's Jiffy Burger. She would be taking supper out to the field for her husband Brent, and for Brent's partner and cousin, Dan Jacobs, and she invited me to eat with them, and maybe ride for a while in the combine while the men continued their wheat harvest after supper.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 28, 1998
The morning light has changed, distinctly. Bird song comes later. When I rise at 5:00 a.m. now, the world is quiet (briefly) where before the birds would be chatting already. Darkness will become a morning companion once again - on into another turn of the Great Wheel. Even as the summer pushes to fullness, to ripeness, you can feel the year winding down, the circle of light diminishing, the sun heading out for new parts, to touch another place. Let me enjoy what morning light remains, then let me, too, with equal vigor embrace the darkness. This is life, this is the turn of the world in this place. This is our day and night, us.
Since about noon yesterday planes have been coming over in constant supply, all of them on their way to the EAA convention in Oshkosh. Even this far away - twenty-five miles - they will be lined up three and four in a row sometimes. A community of interest, the fly-in at Oshkosh; the place has made something its very own. It's Experimental Aircraft 'R Us for a week and a half at the beginning of August each year. Travellers cannot find accommodations within ninety miles of Oshkosh as a result.
A smooth sky, a still pond, morning in the village - lovely.
Tom, if you have to ask why there is a roll of toilet paper unfurled on Washington Street, obviously you don't have a clue. Call me Clueless in Fairwater.
I'm downtown. A little girl drives her pick-up past the post office. Well - she looks like a little girl. Damn, I am getting old.
North along Highway E, the fields of sweet corn are at various stages of maturity. Some of it must be ready to harvest.
A brown lawn south of Five Corners reminds us that we need some rain. The world here is green, sure, but this is not an eternal green.
Overhead, as I write this in the parking lot at work, airplanes continue lining up for the approach to Oshkosh. The sky is rumbling full of them.
----------------------
THANKS....
The Vagabond's big "Thank-You" goes to the following for their recent generous contribution to the Expedition:
#92 Bob & Mary Lane, Wisconsin.
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
And soon enough Ivan was leading me down to the hospital so I could see Smith Center's Wellness Center.
Starr Jacobs, who was at the front desk, showed me around the facility. They've got exercise equipment available for use by hospital patients and members from the general public alike. There's a Nu-Step machine that provides low impact cardio-vascular workout and is useful in knee rehabilitation and with back problems. There's a stationary bicycle. Weight equipment. The Wellness Center has a personal trainer on staff.
"Lots of people from the community come in here to work out," Starr told me. "In fact, we have to schedule use of the therapy pool because it is so popular." The bottom of the therapy pool can be adjusted to make the pool deeper. People can swim, walk, or jog in the water against the current. You can use a tether to help you hold your place.
"When people become members, we show them what the machines are used for," Starr said.
"This machine," she said, "people either love or hate. She climbed on it to show how it operated. "You like it a little better if you set it to make you work a little harder. It feels more stable then. I know, it doesn't look like this is hard work. When I started, I couldn't do five minutes on it. Now I'm up to fifteen minutes."
Membership in the Wellness Center is a benefit offered to hospital employees.
Starr showed me the cardiac rehab unit, off in a room of its own. The "Tri-Fit" tests a person's flexibility, heart, and fat. It can be used to do an extensive health examination, to assess what your risks are, to compare your "body age" against your chronological age.
A fellow was set up in the unit for the cardiovascular test. A computer in the hospital was sending an image of the fellow's heart patterns to an expert off-site. A technician in the room was speaking with the far-off expert while the heart pattern continued to transmit. When I sign my memoir, Curlew:Home, I often make note that "Curlew is everywhere." The reverse is also more and more true these days - Everywhere is Curlew. Everywhere is Smith Center. When we wish to be freed from the confines of place, modern technology can free us. The world's experts are now available real time, on-line. The patient in Smith Center can benefit from the same expertise that the patient in Kansas City or Denver has available.
Then I met Arloa Barnes, who is, it turns out, Physical Therapy at Smith Center Hospital - the one and only Arloa, Physical Therapist. The Physical Therapy Department of the hospital used to be confined to a room about 20' by 12'.
"We started getting more and more patients," Arloa said. "We got the assistance of a grant to build this facility. The hospital board agreed to match half the cost. We included a cardiac rehab unit in the plans because that was something people were going out of town for. And we added aquatic therapy."
"Plans got approved," she said. "Work went forward. The project came in under budget."
Under budget? How did that happen?
"I spent a lot of weekends making sure that everything was right - that we had as many outlets planned for as we would need, that the space was big enough, that it allowed the privacy we would need," she said. "Change orders are what kill you."
"Half-way through the planning, a family from the community approached us and wanted to fund a Wellness Center as well. They provided $108,000 to outfit the center - equipment, tables, mirrors, etc. This gift allowed the center to be opened up to the public."
The PT Department brought three pieces of equipment to the new facility, and a table. The family's donation brought the total equipment up to ten pieces and added the weights that are available."
"When did we move in here?" Arloa asked another staff member. They chewed on the question for a bit and decided it must have been on April 1.
"We were moving and working," the other woman explained. "I've lost a month."
Arloa is married to Dr. Joe Barnes, a Smith Center family practice physician. "We moved here in 1985," Arloa said. "I've worked here off and on. I grew up in Norton, an hour west of here. So I'm a western Kansas girl." They moved here because they wanted to raise their family in a small town.
So how did the girl from western Kansas meet her doctor-husband, I wondered.
"I stalked him," Arloa said. "At the KU Medical School. I knew he had dated the student body president at Wichita State. He thought I was my sister. He was so predictable. He'd park in the same place every day, use the same door, ride the same elevator. He didn't have a chance."
Before I left the Wellness Center, Starr Jacobs and I arranged to meet at 6:00 p.m. at Smith Center's Jiffy Burger. She would be taking supper out to the field for her husband Brent, and for Brent's partner and cousin, Dan Jacobs, and she invited me to eat with them, and maybe ride for a while in the combine while the men continued their wheat harvest after supper.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 28, 1998
The morning light has changed, distinctly. Bird song comes later. When I rise at 5:00 a.m. now, the world is quiet (briefly) where before the birds would be chatting already. Darkness will become a morning companion once again - on into another turn of the Great Wheel. Even as the summer pushes to fullness, to ripeness, you can feel the year winding down, the circle of light diminishing, the sun heading out for new parts, to touch another place. Let me enjoy what morning light remains, then let me, too, with equal vigor embrace the darkness. This is life, this is the turn of the world in this place. This is our day and night, us.
Since about noon yesterday planes have been coming over in constant supply, all of them on their way to the EAA convention in Oshkosh. Even this far away - twenty-five miles - they will be lined up three and four in a row sometimes. A community of interest, the fly-in at Oshkosh; the place has made something its very own. It's Experimental Aircraft 'R Us for a week and a half at the beginning of August each year. Travellers cannot find accommodations within ninety miles of Oshkosh as a result.
A smooth sky, a still pond, morning in the village - lovely.
Tom, if you have to ask why there is a roll of toilet paper unfurled on Washington Street, obviously you don't have a clue. Call me Clueless in Fairwater.
I'm downtown. A little girl drives her pick-up past the post office. Well - she looks like a little girl. Damn, I am getting old.
North along Highway E, the fields of sweet corn are at various stages of maturity. Some of it must be ready to harvest.
A brown lawn south of Five Corners reminds us that we need some rain. The world here is green, sure, but this is not an eternal green.
Overhead, as I write this in the parking lot at work, airplanes continue lining up for the approach to Oshkosh. The sky is rumbling full of them.
----------------------
THANKS....
The Vagabond's big "Thank-You" goes to the following for their recent generous contribution to the Expedition:
#92 Bob & Mary Lane, Wisconsin.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004
My first morning in town. I went down to the Second Cup Cafe for breakfast and to catch the "As the Bladder Fills" club at their 8:00 a.m. meeting. I had the large order of biscuits and gravy - $2.69; plus a cinnamon roll and coffee. And I had no sooner finished wiping the grin off my face than I heard Ivan Burgess coming in - "There's Tom Montag." He got me seated at the Club's usual table and started introducing me to the guys who were coming in too - people like Jim Fetters, the county attorney, and Linton Lull, who used to be one of Smith Center's bankers, Jack Benn and Claude Gripp, Raymond Osborn and Stan Hooper and a whole mess of other fellows whose names I didn't get written down.
When one of the fellows came in, the waitress asked him about his weekend. He said, "When you're retired, it's hard to tell when your weekend begins and ends."
Ivan thought I might go out and visit some grain elevators and told me who to talk to. "Just tell them I sent you," he said. The fellow in the next chair told me to be careful, though, because there are a couple big fellows who'll throw me out if I mention Ivan's name.
"These are the brightest minds in town," Ivan said of the fellows gathered for coffee. When I mentioned to Linton Lull that I'd seen his name in Ivan's Echo Echo, Linton confided that Ivan had been "short of material."
We saw that Jim Fetters was starting to grow a mustache. He had been fishing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, for a week and came back with a smear of whiskers under his nose. Ivan asked him: "How come you're cultivating on your face what grows naturally around your ass?" You can see just about how nice they are to one another, this bunch.
Someone said the county is pretty solidly Republican. A fellow quoted ol' Chot Burt on the subject; Chot had said "I'd rather have a sister who works in a house of ill-repute than a third cousin who's a Democrat."
Ivan said: "We don't vote for people here, we vote against 'em. If they don't make any mistakes, we'll keep them."
They're talking about the death penalty down on that end of the table. One is for, one is against. One is saying "I can't believe that Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty. I can't believe the people of Oklahoma did that."
Ivan has a copy of his Echo Echo opened up to a long list of names of the people running for public office. "That's an indication that the economy is bad under Bush - all those people looking for jobs."
"Did you get here last night in time to hear the storm?" someone asked. Yeah, I said, I heard the thunder but I didn't hear it rain. "That's the way it has been going," the fellow said, "we get the fireworks and someone else gets the rain."
"We're gonna get a new sheriff, a new county attorney, and a new judge," Jim Fetters is telling the fellow down at the end of the table. Fetters is not running for re-election.
Someone else is back to talking about the wheat harvest. Over at Colby to the west of here, he indicates, the harvest is so poor that "they cut their wheat in road gear. A fellow was out there driving down the road at 55 m.p.h. and the combine in the field was keeping up with him. The wheat harvest is pretty barren out there."
"I'd settle for what I got last year," the fellow next to me said. "It was the best year for wheat in Smith County history. Rain came just at the right times." He'd heard some pretty reliable sources that they'd gotten a hundred bushels to the acre last year on high, dry ground. "I didn't get anything that good, closer to seventy to eighty bushels an acre."
Down at the other end: "It's a good thing these farmers like to gamble - they do it every year."
Maybe it was Jim Fetters who said "Yeah, people are moving here by the hundreds." Someone else wanted to make sure I understood that was meant as sarcasm.
"Like Yogi Berra said," Fetters added, "if they aren't gonna come, how you gonna stop 'em?"
"You could get a pessimistic view sitting here," Linton Lull cautioned. "There are some good things happening - a new airport is being built; the Chamber of Commerce has the 'Come Home to Smith Center' promotion to get folks to return to Smith Center now that they've retired; there's the new Wellness Center; there's the library; people gave money to move water from the water treatment plant to the golf course, to water the fairways."
Then I overhear someone saying "... yeah, we're gonna make the women do without. We're gonna get all the men together and cut the women off." He's talking about sex, yes; and he adds "we'll probably have too many scabs crossing the picket line."
Linton Lull tells me about the Shrader Foundation. The community helped out Milt Shrader during the Depression when his circus was in trouble. He'd been broke and couldn't get his railroad cars home and the community took up a collection and bailed him out of a tight spot. He remembered them in his will with a million dollar bequest to the community. Some nephews had contested the will but the courts upheld it. Money has been wisely spent - the library was built and named for Shrader, the community hall was renovated. "One of the nephews came back here and was amazed that we'd built the library and named it after his uncle and had more money left than we had originally," Lull indicated. "He had a change of heart about it - we'd done all this, we'd honored his uncle, and the money hadn't been squandered."
"Most of our successful people have moved away, unfortunately," someone was lamenting. "But," he added, "they haven't forgotten us. Our graduates have all these scholarships available."
They'd like those people to come back to Smith Center when they retire. "We've got good doctors here," someone said, "we've got the golf course, great fishing, great hunting, the Wellness Center."
To be continued....
--------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"I heard a high school girl tell another high school girl that the Fourth of July was on the the fifth this year," Ivan said.
"At the time I'm talking about," Ivan wrote, "a couple of older fellows in town, Art Nelson and John Scott just came out to the golf course and played a couple of holes and then puttered around. One day Ivan Phetteplace said to John Scott, he said 'John, how can I improve my putting?' John said, 'Get the ball closer to the hole on your approach shot.'"
"It don't matter what part of town you live in," Ivan said, "it is not a high crime area. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a doctor. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a grocery store. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a library that has talking books and talking CD. There are enough soap operas on TV to satisfy the most discriminating adult taste. Don't make no difference where you live in town, you are less than twenty minutes from church. And nearly all the churches have someone in their congregation who will pick you up and take you home."
"That ol Stan Smith is quick with the quip," Ivan noted. "I don't know if you know what kind of equipment that Stan, by choice, farms with. Stan walks very carefully on the conservative side. Someone asked Stan the other day, up at Paul's Cafe, how his wheat cutting was coming. Stan said he was all through cuttin' but now he had to sneak the combine back up to Pioneer Village before they missed it."
"Phyllis Tucker says her boss, Jim Fetters, keeps his office cold enough to hang meat it," Ivan said.
"Before all the young people had cars," Ivan said, "the Old Mill and Park was a trysting place for young lovers. Vandalism was unheard of when a young swain was chewing a hickey on some nubile young creature's throat. This is not first hand information I'm giving you. I learned this from classmates bragging about their amorous conquests of the night before. I never had any success stories to tell along those lines."
"I don't know how the subject came up," Ivan said, "but it did. Last Friday morning about mid-morning the subject of getting up early in the morning came up at Paul's Cafe. Carl Stepp said he always got up at five o'clock in the morning. Bill Barretson said he did too, but his problem was he couldn't remember if he flushed or not when he got back to bed."
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 27, 1998
We know way too many people who have killed themselves - last week, the daughter of a friend. Before that, a friend, a couple of co-workers, a writer from Milwaukee, other acquaintances. May my grace be the gift to see the silver lining, to recognize that not every question Why? has an answer. Sometimes you have to run on sheer momentum. If you don't have that momentum built up, sometimes you cannot leap the gap.
Fifteen miles west of here the corn has given up. It no longer begs for rain. Its tightly curled leaves scream for release. The wind kisses the corn and moves on. Here, we had barely enough rain during the night to wet the street. If a similar rain fell west of here, it would be only enough to tease the farmers, not enough to do any good at all on that sand country. The corn cries out to an empty sky. The wind passes on.
Blue sky and sun. Wind ruffling the surface of the pond. Another day like every other day. The grass just wet enough to look like there's dew on it, not rain. The sun is already drying the streets.
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the hay has been taken now. Stubble reaches for the sun.
A woman and her dog walk west on Watson Road, south of Sina's pig farm. She is power walking. It is a large red dog and it has no problem keeping pace.
There are soy beans, I think, coming up now in the two fields where peas had been taken. I can see rows of green receding into the distance.
Flowers at Five Corners - red, white, and purple, orange and yellow and pink. They are an exclamation point at this intersection, if you ask me.
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004
My first morning in town. I went down to the Second Cup Cafe for breakfast and to catch the "As the Bladder Fills" club at their 8:00 a.m. meeting. I had the large order of biscuits and gravy - $2.69; plus a cinnamon roll and coffee. And I had no sooner finished wiping the grin off my face than I heard Ivan Burgess coming in - "There's Tom Montag." He got me seated at the Club's usual table and started introducing me to the guys who were coming in too - people like Jim Fetters, the county attorney, and Linton Lull, who used to be one of Smith Center's bankers, Jack Benn and Claude Gripp, Raymond Osborn and Stan Hooper and a whole mess of other fellows whose names I didn't get written down.
When one of the fellows came in, the waitress asked him about his weekend. He said, "When you're retired, it's hard to tell when your weekend begins and ends."
Ivan thought I might go out and visit some grain elevators and told me who to talk to. "Just tell them I sent you," he said. The fellow in the next chair told me to be careful, though, because there are a couple big fellows who'll throw me out if I mention Ivan's name.
"These are the brightest minds in town," Ivan said of the fellows gathered for coffee. When I mentioned to Linton Lull that I'd seen his name in Ivan's Echo Echo, Linton confided that Ivan had been "short of material."
We saw that Jim Fetters was starting to grow a mustache. He had been fishing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, for a week and came back with a smear of whiskers under his nose. Ivan asked him: "How come you're cultivating on your face what grows naturally around your ass?" You can see just about how nice they are to one another, this bunch.
Someone said the county is pretty solidly Republican. A fellow quoted ol' Chot Burt on the subject; Chot had said "I'd rather have a sister who works in a house of ill-repute than a third cousin who's a Democrat."
Ivan said: "We don't vote for people here, we vote against 'em. If they don't make any mistakes, we'll keep them."
They're talking about the death penalty down on that end of the table. One is for, one is against. One is saying "I can't believe that Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty. I can't believe the people of Oklahoma did that."
Ivan has a copy of his Echo Echo opened up to a long list of names of the people running for public office. "That's an indication that the economy is bad under Bush - all those people looking for jobs."
"Did you get here last night in time to hear the storm?" someone asked. Yeah, I said, I heard the thunder but I didn't hear it rain. "That's the way it has been going," the fellow said, "we get the fireworks and someone else gets the rain."
"We're gonna get a new sheriff, a new county attorney, and a new judge," Jim Fetters is telling the fellow down at the end of the table. Fetters is not running for re-election.
Someone else is back to talking about the wheat harvest. Over at Colby to the west of here, he indicates, the harvest is so poor that "they cut their wheat in road gear. A fellow was out there driving down the road at 55 m.p.h. and the combine in the field was keeping up with him. The wheat harvest is pretty barren out there."
"I'd settle for what I got last year," the fellow next to me said. "It was the best year for wheat in Smith County history. Rain came just at the right times." He'd heard some pretty reliable sources that they'd gotten a hundred bushels to the acre last year on high, dry ground. "I didn't get anything that good, closer to seventy to eighty bushels an acre."
Down at the other end: "It's a good thing these farmers like to gamble - they do it every year."
Maybe it was Jim Fetters who said "Yeah, people are moving here by the hundreds." Someone else wanted to make sure I understood that was meant as sarcasm.
"Like Yogi Berra said," Fetters added, "if they aren't gonna come, how you gonna stop 'em?"
"You could get a pessimistic view sitting here," Linton Lull cautioned. "There are some good things happening - a new airport is being built; the Chamber of Commerce has the 'Come Home to Smith Center' promotion to get folks to return to Smith Center now that they've retired; there's the new Wellness Center; there's the library; people gave money to move water from the water treatment plant to the golf course, to water the fairways."
Then I overhear someone saying "... yeah, we're gonna make the women do without. We're gonna get all the men together and cut the women off." He's talking about sex, yes; and he adds "we'll probably have too many scabs crossing the picket line."
Linton Lull tells me about the Shrader Foundation. The community helped out Milt Shrader during the Depression when his circus was in trouble. He'd been broke and couldn't get his railroad cars home and the community took up a collection and bailed him out of a tight spot. He remembered them in his will with a million dollar bequest to the community. Some nephews had contested the will but the courts upheld it. Money has been wisely spent - the library was built and named for Shrader, the community hall was renovated. "One of the nephews came back here and was amazed that we'd built the library and named it after his uncle and had more money left than we had originally," Lull indicated. "He had a change of heart about it - we'd done all this, we'd honored his uncle, and the money hadn't been squandered."
"Most of our successful people have moved away, unfortunately," someone was lamenting. "But," he added, "they haven't forgotten us. Our graduates have all these scholarships available."
They'd like those people to come back to Smith Center when they retire. "We've got good doctors here," someone said, "we've got the golf course, great fishing, great hunting, the Wellness Center."
To be continued....
--------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"I heard a high school girl tell another high school girl that the Fourth of July was on the the fifth this year," Ivan said.
"At the time I'm talking about," Ivan wrote, "a couple of older fellows in town, Art Nelson and John Scott just came out to the golf course and played a couple of holes and then puttered around. One day Ivan Phetteplace said to John Scott, he said 'John, how can I improve my putting?' John said, 'Get the ball closer to the hole on your approach shot.'"
"It don't matter what part of town you live in," Ivan said, "it is not a high crime area. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a doctor. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a grocery store. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a library that has talking books and talking CD. There are enough soap operas on TV to satisfy the most discriminating adult taste. Don't make no difference where you live in town, you are less than twenty minutes from church. And nearly all the churches have someone in their congregation who will pick you up and take you home."
"That ol Stan Smith is quick with the quip," Ivan noted. "I don't know if you know what kind of equipment that Stan, by choice, farms with. Stan walks very carefully on the conservative side. Someone asked Stan the other day, up at Paul's Cafe, how his wheat cutting was coming. Stan said he was all through cuttin' but now he had to sneak the combine back up to Pioneer Village before they missed it."
"Phyllis Tucker says her boss, Jim Fetters, keeps his office cold enough to hang meat it," Ivan said.
"Before all the young people had cars," Ivan said, "the Old Mill and Park was a trysting place for young lovers. Vandalism was unheard of when a young swain was chewing a hickey on some nubile young creature's throat. This is not first hand information I'm giving you. I learned this from classmates bragging about their amorous conquests of the night before. I never had any success stories to tell along those lines."
"I don't know how the subject came up," Ivan said, "but it did. Last Friday morning about mid-morning the subject of getting up early in the morning came up at Paul's Cafe. Carl Stepp said he always got up at five o'clock in the morning. Bill Barretson said he did too, but his problem was he couldn't remember if he flushed or not when he got back to bed."
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 27, 1998
We know way too many people who have killed themselves - last week, the daughter of a friend. Before that, a friend, a couple of co-workers, a writer from Milwaukee, other acquaintances. May my grace be the gift to see the silver lining, to recognize that not every question Why? has an answer. Sometimes you have to run on sheer momentum. If you don't have that momentum built up, sometimes you cannot leap the gap.
Fifteen miles west of here the corn has given up. It no longer begs for rain. Its tightly curled leaves scream for release. The wind kisses the corn and moves on. Here, we had barely enough rain during the night to wet the street. If a similar rain fell west of here, it would be only enough to tease the farmers, not enough to do any good at all on that sand country. The corn cries out to an empty sky. The wind passes on.
Blue sky and sun. Wind ruffling the surface of the pond. Another day like every other day. The grass just wet enough to look like there's dew on it, not rain. The sun is already drying the streets.
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the hay has been taken now. Stubble reaches for the sun.
A woman and her dog walk west on Watson Road, south of Sina's pig farm. She is power walking. It is a large red dog and it has no problem keeping pace.
There are soy beans, I think, coming up now in the two fields where peas had been taken. I can see rows of green receding into the distance.
Flowers at Five Corners - red, white, and purple, orange and yellow and pink. They are an exclamation point at this intersection, if you ask me.
Monday, July 26, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
Now I'm headed south towards Hastings, Nebraska, on the Tom Osborne Highway again. I was here last September, when I drove the western edge of the middle west. You Cornhusker fans know who Tom Osborne is, I don't have to tell you. For the rest of you, think long-time Nebraska football coach.
Where the highway crosses the Platte River here, the bridge spans sand. The river is dry. There is no water flowing right now.
Some of the corn out here is bigger than anything I've seen elsewhere today. The Iowa farm-boy hates to say that. But he knows that the corn is curled with some distress in this heat, in fields that aren't irrigated, even at Rainforth Road.
New houses out here in the country sit exposed to the Nebraska sun. No trees to protect them. Oh, there are trees, just not enough of them.
A coal train comes through Hastings, Nebraska, passes on tracks beneath us. I can see the end of the train, but I cannot see the beginning. That is typical of life, I guess.
A woman in Hastings is walking a small dog on a leash. I have see rats bigger than that dog. The woman has badly colored skin, as if an artificial tan went south on her.
6:32 p.m. Thirty-nine miles to Red Cloud. A bank of high clouds to the south, now ahead of me.
A Cadillac with Kansas plates is poking along ahead of me. Who owns the Cadillac owns the road, so some think.
I pass that Cadillac just before we cross the Little Blue River. There isn't another car for a mile in either direction. In fact, traffic is pretty sparse all along Highway 281 headed for Red Cloud.
Power-line - a big one, towers instead of poles. Red Cloud, twenty-eight miles. A smear of clouds to the south and west, blue sky overhead. Cattle take a deep wade in a mud-hole, with water half-way up their bellies. Irrigation rigs - some of them spraying, some of them not.
Gullies with trees. Or do they call them ravines? Or washes?
Entering Webster County.
Blue Hill - pop. 867. An immense sadness descends. "Welcome to Blue Hill," the sign says. I see a splash of kids in the municipal swimming pool, a life guard on duty, a couple of big girls with red blouses dangling their feet in the water. They are getting sun-burned, all of them, every single bone-white Nebraskan of them.
Across this landscape a lot of farmsteads are gone. That's not the wind you hear; it's the loneliness of the empty farmyards.
Cattle graze on some low ground. A river used to run there, broad and deep. It had to be plenty mean to cut a path. Now this is not river bottom but pasture. Like a gravel pit growing up to brome grass.
The closer I get to Red Cloud, the tougher the country looks. Were it not so green, this could be the west.
Is that winter wheat, turned for harvest already? That's what it looks like to me.
"Do Not Drive On Shoulder" the sign says, ignorant of the fact, apparently, that a farmer drives anywhere he damn well pleases.
Red Cloud. I find the Willa Cather Center along Main Street. It is open Monday-Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tours go out at 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. I'll try to get back here on Saturday for the 9:30 a.m. tour.
I stop at Subway just a few doors south of the Cather center. It is so peculiar, a Subway in such a big downtown building. Fast food with history, I guess. I get myself a sandwich, a chocolate malt (yup, they've got ice cream), and a cold drink. There are five fellows in the place just shooting the bull. Talking about cars and girls, what else?
"She's got a motor just like the other one," one of the fellows says, without context to let you understand whether it's girl or car he's referring to. Except we know he wouldn't talk to the other fellows with such obvious affection for a girl.
You wonder if these guys know who Willa Cather was, or if it matters. Does it matter? We're writers, so we think it should, but does it? It's cars and girls that fuel the tromp tromp of the generations, not my notion of literature.
Then I am headed south again, peeling for Smith Center. As I cross the Republican River, I see there's not much water in it at all. I will take that as a good omen for the fall elections. Regime change begins at home.
In Kansas, I see that some of the winter wheat has been harvested.
Now there are clouds coming in, clouds going away. Some places, it looks like rain; some places, not. Maybe they'll get a sniff of it here, just north of the geographic center of the lower 48 states.
Bee hives have been set out like offerings in a field just at the edge of a stand of trees.
The hand of God is working the western sky with long fingers of light. This is a keen moment of sadness, when sunlight comes down through the clouds like grace. It doesn't signify the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from here at the exact center. That's the paradox of our middleness - it puts us at the edge.
Sign: Lebanon, 1 mile. Smith Center, 16 miles.
It is 8:00 p.m. as I drive through Lebanon on Highway 281. Lift up my soul, O Lord. Let my sadness be lifted.
As Smith Center comes into view, light like the grace of God is shining on it, those long fingers of light down through the teasing clouds.
Just at the edge of Smith Center, a combine harvesting wheat throws out a storm of dust like darkness. It has been a long day. I am a weary wayfaring stranger.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 23, 1998
Dew on the grass this morning, and long shadows. A cool day with bright blue sky. What will this loveliness cost us?
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the grass was cut into windrows yesterday. It will dry further in today's sun.
It cannot be long before the sweet corn is harvested. From where I am, it looks so ready.
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
Now I'm headed south towards Hastings, Nebraska, on the Tom Osborne Highway again. I was here last September, when I drove the western edge of the middle west. You Cornhusker fans know who Tom Osborne is, I don't have to tell you. For the rest of you, think long-time Nebraska football coach.
Where the highway crosses the Platte River here, the bridge spans sand. The river is dry. There is no water flowing right now.
Some of the corn out here is bigger than anything I've seen elsewhere today. The Iowa farm-boy hates to say that. But he knows that the corn is curled with some distress in this heat, in fields that aren't irrigated, even at Rainforth Road.
New houses out here in the country sit exposed to the Nebraska sun. No trees to protect them. Oh, there are trees, just not enough of them.
A coal train comes through Hastings, Nebraska, passes on tracks beneath us. I can see the end of the train, but I cannot see the beginning. That is typical of life, I guess.
A woman in Hastings is walking a small dog on a leash. I have see rats bigger than that dog. The woman has badly colored skin, as if an artificial tan went south on her.
6:32 p.m. Thirty-nine miles to Red Cloud. A bank of high clouds to the south, now ahead of me.
A Cadillac with Kansas plates is poking along ahead of me. Who owns the Cadillac owns the road, so some think.
I pass that Cadillac just before we cross the Little Blue River. There isn't another car for a mile in either direction. In fact, traffic is pretty sparse all along Highway 281 headed for Red Cloud.
Power-line - a big one, towers instead of poles. Red Cloud, twenty-eight miles. A smear of clouds to the south and west, blue sky overhead. Cattle take a deep wade in a mud-hole, with water half-way up their bellies. Irrigation rigs - some of them spraying, some of them not.
Gullies with trees. Or do they call them ravines? Or washes?
Entering Webster County.
Blue Hill - pop. 867. An immense sadness descends. "Welcome to Blue Hill," the sign says. I see a splash of kids in the municipal swimming pool, a life guard on duty, a couple of big girls with red blouses dangling their feet in the water. They are getting sun-burned, all of them, every single bone-white Nebraskan of them.
Across this landscape a lot of farmsteads are gone. That's not the wind you hear; it's the loneliness of the empty farmyards.
Cattle graze on some low ground. A river used to run there, broad and deep. It had to be plenty mean to cut a path. Now this is not river bottom but pasture. Like a gravel pit growing up to brome grass.
The closer I get to Red Cloud, the tougher the country looks. Were it not so green, this could be the west.
Is that winter wheat, turned for harvest already? That's what it looks like to me.
"Do Not Drive On Shoulder" the sign says, ignorant of the fact, apparently, that a farmer drives anywhere he damn well pleases.
Red Cloud. I find the Willa Cather Center along Main Street. It is open Monday-Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tours go out at 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. I'll try to get back here on Saturday for the 9:30 a.m. tour.
I stop at Subway just a few doors south of the Cather center. It is so peculiar, a Subway in such a big downtown building. Fast food with history, I guess. I get myself a sandwich, a chocolate malt (yup, they've got ice cream), and a cold drink. There are five fellows in the place just shooting the bull. Talking about cars and girls, what else?
"She's got a motor just like the other one," one of the fellows says, without context to let you understand whether it's girl or car he's referring to. Except we know he wouldn't talk to the other fellows with such obvious affection for a girl.
You wonder if these guys know who Willa Cather was, or if it matters. Does it matter? We're writers, so we think it should, but does it? It's cars and girls that fuel the tromp tromp of the generations, not my notion of literature.
Then I am headed south again, peeling for Smith Center. As I cross the Republican River, I see there's not much water in it at all. I will take that as a good omen for the fall elections. Regime change begins at home.
In Kansas, I see that some of the winter wheat has been harvested.
Now there are clouds coming in, clouds going away. Some places, it looks like rain; some places, not. Maybe they'll get a sniff of it here, just north of the geographic center of the lower 48 states.
Bee hives have been set out like offerings in a field just at the edge of a stand of trees.
The hand of God is working the western sky with long fingers of light. This is a keen moment of sadness, when sunlight comes down through the clouds like grace. It doesn't signify the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from here at the exact center. That's the paradox of our middleness - it puts us at the edge.
Sign: Lebanon, 1 mile. Smith Center, 16 miles.
It is 8:00 p.m. as I drive through Lebanon on Highway 281. Lift up my soul, O Lord. Let my sadness be lifted.
As Smith Center comes into view, light like the grace of God is shining on it, those long fingers of light down through the teasing clouds.
Just at the edge of Smith Center, a combine harvesting wheat throws out a storm of dust like darkness. It has been a long day. I am a weary wayfaring stranger.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 23, 1998
Dew on the grass this morning, and long shadows. A cool day with bright blue sky. What will this loveliness cost us?
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the grass was cut into windrows yesterday. It will dry further in today's sun.
It cannot be long before the sweet corn is harvested. From where I am, it looks so ready.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
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.
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, July 24, 2004
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
----------------------------
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
Friday, July 23, 2004
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.
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.
