Monday, August 16, 2004
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 8, 2004
DAY FIVE
It rained during the night. This morning we prayed: "O, Great God of Canada, thank you for the moisture, which lessens our worry of fire. Now we ask you for sunshine."
It misted all the day.
We made two portages and had a long paddle.
It all blends together. "Was today the day we had to put the canoe over the beaver dam?" I asked at supper. "No, that was yesterday," they said.
We have had two hard days on the water and I have come nearly to the limit of my endurace. I think I will have to work out harder if I'm going to keep up this extreme relaxation.
Ellie has been paddling with Anne these past days, mother and daughter, with nine-year-old Andrew between them. Ellie is a trooper; she keeps leaning into her work - stroke, stroke, stroke. How many twelve-year-old girls have such knowledge as she gains here? How many have such a relationship with their mothers as Ellie does with that woman steering her canoeing?
At least for the last four or five miles today the wind was at our back. It would have been a much harder paddle against the wind.
We had baked northern for supper, that Philip caught, a big one, stuffed with onions and a small-mouth bass that Andrew caught. Plus macaroni and cheese, in case the fishing had not been successful, and "fiesta corn bread" that was really skillet-fried, in the shape of pancakes, with corn and salsa in it. We had a side of Mary's hummus that she'd dried at home and reconstituted here; it was very good with the mac and cheese, with the fiesta corn bread, with the fish. I suppose the garlic in the hummus gave a little something extra to the camp food. We are out of crackers.
I don't care how hard the ground feels, I am going to sleep tonight.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 15, 2004 - CONTINUED
At the Second Cup Cafe and Pastries, there are six tables set up for four diners; one table set up for two; two tables set up for eight; and one table set up for sixteen. The As the Bladder Fills Club sits at the table set for sixteen. Between 8:00-9:00 a.m. every day, it's their table. There is a plaque on the wall that says the Kiwanis meets at the Second Cup at 7:00 a.m. every Friday; there's another plaque on the wall, a little more home-made, with the image of a toilet on it, indicating that the As the Bladder Fills Club meets here, too, every day, 8:00-9:00 a.m.
Claude Gripp and Jack Benn are the first two fellows to sit down with their coffee this morning. I join them, and soon Ivan Burgess joins them too.
Jack likes to fish up near Flin Flon, Manitoba, and I've been to Flin Flon a couple of times. We're talking about the town, about Inge Bjornson, who outfits on Neso Lake up there and has written a book about his antics and adventures in the wilderness.
Ivan is talking to someone else who has settled in with us; he's explaining "When I was a kid, we had more fun getting ready to do something than we ever did doing it."
Linton Lull has joined us. "My favorite Burgess story," he says, "is about Ivan in school. They were teaching the kids music. The teacher gave each kid a rhythm instrument to play - drums, cymbals, sticks, and so on. Ivan was so poor they just gave him one stick."
I don't know why Ivan draws so much fire. Maybe it's because he gives it back as good as he gets. And his jab is like a paper cut - so clean you don't notice until you see the blood.
"When I die," Ivan says, "If they don't put green signs out by the highway that say 'Boyhood Home of Ivan Burgess,' then I've been a complete failure."
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 14, 1998
Respect, I think, comes to the fellow who earns it. Sure, these folks will give you the benefit of the doubt to start off, but don't misconstrue that to mean they're not watching you. You screw up, you slip in their eyes and must recover one hard piece at a time. You screw up, you re-earn respect only grudgingly. The folk memory is forever. Especially with issues of trust. If you've earned mistrust, it's near impossible to climb out of that box - how will they know for sure you won't slip again.
It's not that these folks can't deal with uncertainty. The farmers amongst them face uncertainty every time they put seed in the ground. Will it rain? Will it hail? Will the selling price be high enough to cover the cost of producing?
The issue may not be that you betrayed them so much as they didn't see it coming. Now if they put you over into the column of uncertainty, along with drought and hail and fire, they can deal with your failure. Of course, you might imagine how much drought and hail and fire are loved by farmers, and how much your betrayal might be loved as well.
Is it the same, every one of these August mornings - moisture on the windshield, haze in the distance, blue sky, still pond? What will I see to comment on in an endlessly repeating cycle? Is this week of August an emblem for the whole idea of watching a piece of ground from year to year - it will all be an endless repetition of cycles before I am done.
Except maybe for the jet rumbling overhead this morning, August 14, 1998, 7:23 a.m. CDT. The sound rolls away into the distance. I would believe it left O'Hare in Chicago and is heading for the Twin Cities, by the way the sound has crossed the sky. The jet's passengers have moved half that distance and I'm not even out of the driveway yet.
A lovely haze of a daze of a day, out in the country. A haze considerably heavier than yesterday's.
It is surprising to me how quickly the corn ground has been worked. One of those fields taken recently is plowed already.
Off in the distant haze, a spray plane drops down to skim just above a field. It is working dangerously close to high power lines. At times it seems to stand on a wing tip. You've got to love to fly to do a job that dangerous and dirty. But look who's calling the kettle black - I go in to my work, which might not be to that fellow's liking at all.
AUGUST 8, 2004
DAY FIVE
It rained during the night. This morning we prayed: "O, Great God of Canada, thank you for the moisture, which lessens our worry of fire. Now we ask you for sunshine."
It misted all the day.
We made two portages and had a long paddle.
It all blends together. "Was today the day we had to put the canoe over the beaver dam?" I asked at supper. "No, that was yesterday," they said.
We have had two hard days on the water and I have come nearly to the limit of my endurace. I think I will have to work out harder if I'm going to keep up this extreme relaxation.
Ellie has been paddling with Anne these past days, mother and daughter, with nine-year-old Andrew between them. Ellie is a trooper; she keeps leaning into her work - stroke, stroke, stroke. How many twelve-year-old girls have such knowledge as she gains here? How many have such a relationship with their mothers as Ellie does with that woman steering her canoeing?
At least for the last four or five miles today the wind was at our back. It would have been a much harder paddle against the wind.
We had baked northern for supper, that Philip caught, a big one, stuffed with onions and a small-mouth bass that Andrew caught. Plus macaroni and cheese, in case the fishing had not been successful, and "fiesta corn bread" that was really skillet-fried, in the shape of pancakes, with corn and salsa in it. We had a side of Mary's hummus that she'd dried at home and reconstituted here; it was very good with the mac and cheese, with the fiesta corn bread, with the fish. I suppose the garlic in the hummus gave a little something extra to the camp food. We are out of crackers.
I don't care how hard the ground feels, I am going to sleep tonight.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 15, 2004 - CONTINUED
At the Second Cup Cafe and Pastries, there are six tables set up for four diners; one table set up for two; two tables set up for eight; and one table set up for sixteen. The As the Bladder Fills Club sits at the table set for sixteen. Between 8:00-9:00 a.m. every day, it's their table. There is a plaque on the wall that says the Kiwanis meets at the Second Cup at 7:00 a.m. every Friday; there's another plaque on the wall, a little more home-made, with the image of a toilet on it, indicating that the As the Bladder Fills Club meets here, too, every day, 8:00-9:00 a.m.
Claude Gripp and Jack Benn are the first two fellows to sit down with their coffee this morning. I join them, and soon Ivan Burgess joins them too.
Jack likes to fish up near Flin Flon, Manitoba, and I've been to Flin Flon a couple of times. We're talking about the town, about Inge Bjornson, who outfits on Neso Lake up there and has written a book about his antics and adventures in the wilderness.
Ivan is talking to someone else who has settled in with us; he's explaining "When I was a kid, we had more fun getting ready to do something than we ever did doing it."
Linton Lull has joined us. "My favorite Burgess story," he says, "is about Ivan in school. They were teaching the kids music. The teacher gave each kid a rhythm instrument to play - drums, cymbals, sticks, and so on. Ivan was so poor they just gave him one stick."
I don't know why Ivan draws so much fire. Maybe it's because he gives it back as good as he gets. And his jab is like a paper cut - so clean you don't notice until you see the blood.
"When I die," Ivan says, "If they don't put green signs out by the highway that say 'Boyhood Home of Ivan Burgess,' then I've been a complete failure."
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 14, 1998
Respect, I think, comes to the fellow who earns it. Sure, these folks will give you the benefit of the doubt to start off, but don't misconstrue that to mean they're not watching you. You screw up, you slip in their eyes and must recover one hard piece at a time. You screw up, you re-earn respect only grudgingly. The folk memory is forever. Especially with issues of trust. If you've earned mistrust, it's near impossible to climb out of that box - how will they know for sure you won't slip again.
It's not that these folks can't deal with uncertainty. The farmers amongst them face uncertainty every time they put seed in the ground. Will it rain? Will it hail? Will the selling price be high enough to cover the cost of producing?
The issue may not be that you betrayed them so much as they didn't see it coming. Now if they put you over into the column of uncertainty, along with drought and hail and fire, they can deal with your failure. Of course, you might imagine how much drought and hail and fire are loved by farmers, and how much your betrayal might be loved as well.
Is it the same, every one of these August mornings - moisture on the windshield, haze in the distance, blue sky, still pond? What will I see to comment on in an endlessly repeating cycle? Is this week of August an emblem for the whole idea of watching a piece of ground from year to year - it will all be an endless repetition of cycles before I am done.
Except maybe for the jet rumbling overhead this morning, August 14, 1998, 7:23 a.m. CDT. The sound rolls away into the distance. I would believe it left O'Hare in Chicago and is heading for the Twin Cities, by the way the sound has crossed the sky. The jet's passengers have moved half that distance and I'm not even out of the driveway yet.
A lovely haze of a daze of a day, out in the country. A haze considerably heavier than yesterday's.
It is surprising to me how quickly the corn ground has been worked. One of those fields taken recently is plowed already.
Off in the distant haze, a spray plane drops down to skim just above a field. It is working dangerously close to high power lines. At times it seems to stand on a wing tip. You've got to love to fly to do a job that dangerous and dirty. But look who's calling the kettle black - I go in to my work, which might not be to that fellow's liking at all.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
AMERICA ZEN:
A GATHERING OF POETS
It's at press and will be available within a month, the anthology that I have several poems accepted for, America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, edited by Ray McNiece & Larry Smith. It is 224 pages perfect bound, 6x9, ISBN: 0-933087-91-8. It's available for $16 from Bottom Dog Press, PO Box 425, Huron, OH 44839.
And I am recommending that you get a copy of it. Bottom Dog should soon have more information about the anthology available at their web site here, if you're interested.
The poets included in this gathering are: Nin Andrews, David Budbill, Thomas Rain Crowe, Kathe Davis, Diane di Prima, Stanford M. Forrester, Tess Gallagher, Margaret Gibson, John Gilgun, Netta Gillespie, Sam Hamill, William Heyen, Jane Hirschfield, Holly Hughes, Mary Sue Koeppel, Mark Kuhar, Mac Lojowsky, Ray McNiece, Tom Montag, Shin Yu Pai, Paul S. Piper, Maj Ragain, David Ray, Seido Ray Ronci, Andrew Schelling, Paul Skyrm, Larry Smith, Tony Trigilio, Chase Twichell, and Anne Waldmann
"Each poet is fully represented by a biographical sketch, a photo, a statement on Zen and poetry, and a selection of five or more poems," the editors say.
Eleven of my "Ben Zen" poems are included, and four from my "Plain Poems" series. This, from "Ben Zen:"
*
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 7, 2004
DAY FOUR
It was the day for a big move. We needed to make some miles, and so we did. Because the water is low, the expected three or four portages turned out to be seven or eight or nine, hard to say exactly. Creeks you could paddle through the last time Susan's map was updated, well, you can't paddle through them now. Standing atop a beaver dam is like standing on top of the world. Yahoo! you want to yell, and Yahoo! would echo back.
The deepest I got stuck in the muck was up to my knees, both knees, same time. We pushed on, working harder than we expected to. Yet, as I said to the four people waiting for us to clear one particularly messy portage, as I was standing there knee-deep in the muck: I said: This is what we come for, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. If what we got was what we could get at home, why would we come here for it?
This morning the rain waited until we had our coffee and our cups of oatmeal and fruit compote, until we had the dishes washed, the tents rolled up and put away, the gear packed. If it had to rain, we got exactly what you'd want - a shy, beg-your-pardon drizzle. Some little wind blew the clouds away about noon or so and then we had sunshine.
We pushed ourselves pretty hard, made the promised "last portage" three or four times, and finally set up camp towards 5:00 p.m. on a little island with lovely sites for tents, a nice flat rock barely sloping into the water for washing up. I got myself washed up and put on fresh clothes. I would say I was a "new man," but not everything washed off: I am stained with this landscape. It is good to take some of where you've been with you, close as your own skin.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
How does he know when the bin on the combine is getting full? When the light flashes that indicates "Bin Full," it's too late to swing the auger out and get Steve coming with the wagon. He'd have to stop the combine and wait.
"I let it go up to the top of the window behind me," Dan said. "Then I swing the auger out. Usually when he gets here, the bin is full enough."
There was a pheasant running in the wheat ahead of us. Dan pointed at the moving stalks that gave away its position. Very soon the pheasant exploded out of the wheat, flew up and off to the left.
"If you didn't farm," I asked Dan, "what would you do?"
"I don't know," he said. "I honestly don't know."
"When it gets dark out tonight," Dan said later, "it will be dark. No moon out tonight."
At night in the dark, when the wind is blowing, when you turn away from the dirt the combine throws out, you can see what you're doing. When the wind is not blowing, it doesn't matter which way you turn; either way you are blinded by it.
"There's a fog for you," Dan said as he drove into a cloud of the chaff.
"In the dark," he said, "it's easy to get turned around. You know where you are, but you don't know where the truck is. Sometimes you have to ask the guy in the truck to turn his parking lights on."
Millers are attracted to the lights of the combine. Twenty of them were fluttering in front of the windshield. They were good for occasionally cleaning a little dust here and there off the glass, otherwise they just reflected the headlights back at you. Millers are moths with wings that look dusty or powdered, thought to suggest the dusted clothes of a fellow who works in a grain mill.
"Some of this ground here we're going to want to disk, so we can put a crop in this fall," Dan said. "But I'm not sure you're going to get a disk in the ground - it's rock hard."
We were out along the road at the east edge of the field then. "My dad told me there's one thing they don't produce more of," Dan recalled. "That's land. If you've got it, keep it. There won't be any more. They can produce more money; they can't produce more land."
"Here," Dan pointed out, "there used to be buildings. There was a house here, a bunch of trees there. We tore them all down. The old well is where we made that curve right there. The house set over there. We had a guy with a Cat come in, push the house in, and cover it with dirt. We tore out the trees - more brush, really, than trees. It was rough ground here for a few years but we've smoothed it out."
I got a chill at the back of my neck. Ghosts on the landscape. Right here, right now, in this very place.
"The wind picked back up, didn't it?" I observed.
"Yeah," Dan said. "The way it was acting earlier, I thought it was going to stay down."
Now there was a blizzard of dust in the lights of the combine again. It was difficult to see the wheat right in front of us.
Dan turned the combine tightly and headed it back the other way. "If you really want to turn short," he said, "you can stand on the turning brake and it'll come right around. It's hard on the tires, though. They're not made to turn that sharp, so they slide."
It was after 10:00 p.m. when we unloaded the last bin of wheat into the wagon. Dan couldn't see the truck. He knew where he was, but he didn't know for sure where the truck was. He had to drive only a short distance to a terrace to get his bearings; he adjusted his direction slightly and soon enough we pulled to a stop near the road, near where I'd left my car.
I had to get down out of the cab of the combine and head for town. Steve was unloading the last wagonload of the day into the truck. The other truck was being parked a quarter mile down the road. Dan said he was going to park the combine over there, too. It's the neighbor's ground, it has been disked and is bare dirt. "We won't leave the combine or the other equipment out here on the wheat stubble," Dan said. "Lightning could start a fire in the stubble and burn up our equipment."
Even when you sleep, you have to worry.
I thanked Dan for letting me ride with him. I got into the car and turned it in the other direction. In my headlights I saw Brent walking back up the road to get the other truck. I stop, get out to thank him, too, for the chance ride the combine.
"You know your way back to town?" he asked me.
"You head that way and that way," I said, indicating a direction straight ahead, and a right turn from straight ahead. "I just keep going that way and that way til I reach the main road."
I knew where I was. I knew where I was going.
"Just watch for the lights," Brent said. He meant that the lights of Smith Center will show up off to the northwest.
And they did. I was driving back roads in the dark, I was headed for Smith Center. I knew where I was. I knew where I was going. I know where I've been.
These Kansas farmers are not so different than the Iowa farm folk I grew up among.
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 13, 1998
Years ago - twenty years ago now - when I was hauling bundles of the regional newspaper Fox River Patriot store-to-store along a four-hundred-mile route, I first sensed so strongly that the place makes the man. In very marked contrast to the good black prairie where I found people of good cheer, on the marginal sands those I encountered were crabbed and a little more surly, short-tempered, hard-pressed. It wasn't just one or two incidents that gave rise to the observation, but repeated occurrence across two years of hauling papers. A hard land makes a hard people. A hard land deforms a man, perhaps. A rich land blesses him. I would add that the better land resulted in a better store as well - brighter, better stocked, better kept. On the marginal sands, you could see the stores themselves were more marginal.
I could make that same trip again now without papers, couldn't I, stopping the same places, observing the people, getting a gauge on whether anything has changed - either in my way of seeing things, or in the people themselves. It might be an interesting trip.
Moisture on the windshield this morning. A blue sky. High, thin clouds. And some low, wet, cold ones too, scattered. We won't know for a while what kind of day is coming.
The earth has a forgiving memory. She is mending where the tree came down along Washington Street. When the green grass grows in thick, we won't know a tree ever stood there.
Sometimes we don't now how to read the signs from our own past.
A thick ground haze out in the country, almost a Canadian morning, folks! More sweet corn has been taken, all of it so far on the east side of Highway E, none of it on the west side. Duh, Tom, look close to the ground in that field you thought was soy beans; don't you see the purple? That's how you tell it's a field of beets! Even knowing this, even with my glasses on, it's still tough for an Iowa farm boy to recognize a field of beets.
A good poet would make poetry of a day such as this. The lingering, smoky smell where the barn burned. The sweet, wet aroma near the new houses north of Five Corners. The diffusion of light in the curtain of haze to the east. That woman and her dog, walking. I, on the other hand, will simply note that they've been seen. Been scene. Been here. You hear that, people? We were here; we mattered this little while.
A GATHERING OF POETS
It's at press and will be available within a month, the anthology that I have several poems accepted for, America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, edited by Ray McNiece & Larry Smith. It is 224 pages perfect bound, 6x9, ISBN: 0-933087-91-8. It's available for $16 from Bottom Dog Press, PO Box 425, Huron, OH 44839.
And I am recommending that you get a copy of it. Bottom Dog should soon have more information about the anthology available at their web site here, if you're interested.
The poets included in this gathering are: Nin Andrews, David Budbill, Thomas Rain Crowe, Kathe Davis, Diane di Prima, Stanford M. Forrester, Tess Gallagher, Margaret Gibson, John Gilgun, Netta Gillespie, Sam Hamill, William Heyen, Jane Hirschfield, Holly Hughes, Mary Sue Koeppel, Mark Kuhar, Mac Lojowsky, Ray McNiece, Tom Montag, Shin Yu Pai, Paul S. Piper, Maj Ragain, David Ray, Seido Ray Ronci, Andrew Schelling, Paul Skyrm, Larry Smith, Tony Trigilio, Chase Twichell, and Anne Waldmann
"Each poet is fully represented by a biographical sketch, a photo, a statement on Zen and poetry, and a selection of five or more poems," the editors say.
Eleven of my "Ben Zen" poems are included, and four from my "Plain Poems" series. This, from "Ben Zen:"
I push the mountain,And this, from the "Plain Poems:"
Ben says, and push
The mountain and
Still the mountain
Pushes back.
JULY 6, 2001 (2)
We don't know the ponderous
thoughts of stones. What do they
dream of as afternoon heats them?
Do they dream of arms and legs
or wings? Do they dream of love?
Do they remember glaciers -
the weight, the shove? Sitting with
stones, oh, lost among stones, aren't
you surprised at what you learn?
*
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 7, 2004
DAY FOUR
It was the day for a big move. We needed to make some miles, and so we did. Because the water is low, the expected three or four portages turned out to be seven or eight or nine, hard to say exactly. Creeks you could paddle through the last time Susan's map was updated, well, you can't paddle through them now. Standing atop a beaver dam is like standing on top of the world. Yahoo! you want to yell, and Yahoo! would echo back.
The deepest I got stuck in the muck was up to my knees, both knees, same time. We pushed on, working harder than we expected to. Yet, as I said to the four people waiting for us to clear one particularly messy portage, as I was standing there knee-deep in the muck: I said: This is what we come for, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. If what we got was what we could get at home, why would we come here for it?
This morning the rain waited until we had our coffee and our cups of oatmeal and fruit compote, until we had the dishes washed, the tents rolled up and put away, the gear packed. If it had to rain, we got exactly what you'd want - a shy, beg-your-pardon drizzle. Some little wind blew the clouds away about noon or so and then we had sunshine.
We pushed ourselves pretty hard, made the promised "last portage" three or four times, and finally set up camp towards 5:00 p.m. on a little island with lovely sites for tents, a nice flat rock barely sloping into the water for washing up. I got myself washed up and put on fresh clothes. I would say I was a "new man," but not everything washed off: I am stained with this landscape. It is good to take some of where you've been with you, close as your own skin.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
How does he know when the bin on the combine is getting full? When the light flashes that indicates "Bin Full," it's too late to swing the auger out and get Steve coming with the wagon. He'd have to stop the combine and wait.
"I let it go up to the top of the window behind me," Dan said. "Then I swing the auger out. Usually when he gets here, the bin is full enough."
There was a pheasant running in the wheat ahead of us. Dan pointed at the moving stalks that gave away its position. Very soon the pheasant exploded out of the wheat, flew up and off to the left.
"If you didn't farm," I asked Dan, "what would you do?"
"I don't know," he said. "I honestly don't know."
"When it gets dark out tonight," Dan said later, "it will be dark. No moon out tonight."
At night in the dark, when the wind is blowing, when you turn away from the dirt the combine throws out, you can see what you're doing. When the wind is not blowing, it doesn't matter which way you turn; either way you are blinded by it.
"There's a fog for you," Dan said as he drove into a cloud of the chaff.
"In the dark," he said, "it's easy to get turned around. You know where you are, but you don't know where the truck is. Sometimes you have to ask the guy in the truck to turn his parking lights on."
Millers are attracted to the lights of the combine. Twenty of them were fluttering in front of the windshield. They were good for occasionally cleaning a little dust here and there off the glass, otherwise they just reflected the headlights back at you. Millers are moths with wings that look dusty or powdered, thought to suggest the dusted clothes of a fellow who works in a grain mill.
"Some of this ground here we're going to want to disk, so we can put a crop in this fall," Dan said. "But I'm not sure you're going to get a disk in the ground - it's rock hard."
We were out along the road at the east edge of the field then. "My dad told me there's one thing they don't produce more of," Dan recalled. "That's land. If you've got it, keep it. There won't be any more. They can produce more money; they can't produce more land."
"Here," Dan pointed out, "there used to be buildings. There was a house here, a bunch of trees there. We tore them all down. The old well is where we made that curve right there. The house set over there. We had a guy with a Cat come in, push the house in, and cover it with dirt. We tore out the trees - more brush, really, than trees. It was rough ground here for a few years but we've smoothed it out."
I got a chill at the back of my neck. Ghosts on the landscape. Right here, right now, in this very place.
"The wind picked back up, didn't it?" I observed.
"Yeah," Dan said. "The way it was acting earlier, I thought it was going to stay down."
Now there was a blizzard of dust in the lights of the combine again. It was difficult to see the wheat right in front of us.
Dan turned the combine tightly and headed it back the other way. "If you really want to turn short," he said, "you can stand on the turning brake and it'll come right around. It's hard on the tires, though. They're not made to turn that sharp, so they slide."
It was after 10:00 p.m. when we unloaded the last bin of wheat into the wagon. Dan couldn't see the truck. He knew where he was, but he didn't know for sure where the truck was. He had to drive only a short distance to a terrace to get his bearings; he adjusted his direction slightly and soon enough we pulled to a stop near the road, near where I'd left my car.
I had to get down out of the cab of the combine and head for town. Steve was unloading the last wagonload of the day into the truck. The other truck was being parked a quarter mile down the road. Dan said he was going to park the combine over there, too. It's the neighbor's ground, it has been disked and is bare dirt. "We won't leave the combine or the other equipment out here on the wheat stubble," Dan said. "Lightning could start a fire in the stubble and burn up our equipment."
Even when you sleep, you have to worry.
I thanked Dan for letting me ride with him. I got into the car and turned it in the other direction. In my headlights I saw Brent walking back up the road to get the other truck. I stop, get out to thank him, too, for the chance ride the combine.
"You know your way back to town?" he asked me.
"You head that way and that way," I said, indicating a direction straight ahead, and a right turn from straight ahead. "I just keep going that way and that way til I reach the main road."
I knew where I was. I knew where I was going.
"Just watch for the lights," Brent said. He meant that the lights of Smith Center will show up off to the northwest.
And they did. I was driving back roads in the dark, I was headed for Smith Center. I knew where I was. I knew where I was going. I know where I've been.
These Kansas farmers are not so different than the Iowa farm folk I grew up among.
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 13, 1998
Years ago - twenty years ago now - when I was hauling bundles of the regional newspaper Fox River Patriot store-to-store along a four-hundred-mile route, I first sensed so strongly that the place makes the man. In very marked contrast to the good black prairie where I found people of good cheer, on the marginal sands those I encountered were crabbed and a little more surly, short-tempered, hard-pressed. It wasn't just one or two incidents that gave rise to the observation, but repeated occurrence across two years of hauling papers. A hard land makes a hard people. A hard land deforms a man, perhaps. A rich land blesses him. I would add that the better land resulted in a better store as well - brighter, better stocked, better kept. On the marginal sands, you could see the stores themselves were more marginal.
I could make that same trip again now without papers, couldn't I, stopping the same places, observing the people, getting a gauge on whether anything has changed - either in my way of seeing things, or in the people themselves. It might be an interesting trip.
Moisture on the windshield this morning. A blue sky. High, thin clouds. And some low, wet, cold ones too, scattered. We won't know for a while what kind of day is coming.
The earth has a forgiving memory. She is mending where the tree came down along Washington Street. When the green grass grows in thick, we won't know a tree ever stood there.
Sometimes we don't now how to read the signs from our own past.
A thick ground haze out in the country, almost a Canadian morning, folks! More sweet corn has been taken, all of it so far on the east side of Highway E, none of it on the west side. Duh, Tom, look close to the ground in that field you thought was soy beans; don't you see the purple? That's how you tell it's a field of beets! Even knowing this, even with my glasses on, it's still tough for an Iowa farm boy to recognize a field of beets.
A good poet would make poetry of a day such as this. The lingering, smoky smell where the barn burned. The sweet, wet aroma near the new houses north of Five Corners. The diffusion of light in the curtain of haze to the east. That woman and her dog, walking. I, on the other hand, will simply note that they've been seen. Been scene. Been here. You hear that, people? We were here; we mattered this little while.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
SATURDAY'S POEM
---------------------------
THE BRIGHT WATERFALL OF ANGELS
by Susan Firer
Everywhere that summer there were angels,
hanging over the lake piers deflated with prayer,
blowing like soap bubbles past night windows,
flying from the weekend colored skirts
of young girls. In August, under the full
moon, I walked Oakland Ave., and a night
bus, windows burning yellow with angels, passed.
And still, I could see people praying for more
bird angels, drug angels, kaiser roll angels, money
angels, love angels, health angels, rain angels.
There were angels with hearts large as bagpipes
who circled our village's ice cube houses
and flew bright loud into our bang nights.
There were angels in movie houses and in sweet corn
stands, and angels who dropped like catalpa
snakes from summer. One angel followed
me into our Chang Cheng Restaurant. Where
were the angels that summer when the neighbor-
hood women were being hunted and ripped
open like field animals? Or when the man
who walked away from DePaul Rehab gave up
on my garage? When I came home from "The Wizard
of Loneliness" the Flight for Life
heliccopter was landing in my front yard.
And a young man was leaning against my garage,
his throat an awful open clown smile.
Rivers and streams of dark blood
ran down the alley. All the children
awakened by the helicopter ran barefoot
and pajamad through the actual
blood and night. Mary,
the neighborhood nurse, kept telling
everyone there was a murderer loose.
"No one could do that much damage to themselves.
I'm a nurse, I'm telling you that no one could
do that much damage to themself."
And the police, and firefighters, and pilot,
and attendants their rubber gloved hands filled
with the moon, and someone held up the knife
the man used on himself. Off they rolled
him on a cot into the helicopter.
When they took off lighted and loud into the mid-
night sky, I saw angels of despair, windfull
and spinning happy on the helicopter blades.
There were angels who wrote their names on leaves,
and show-offs who rode August's tornadoes.
Nights the sky was often a thunder of angels,
a heat lightning sky, where angel wings fit
together in crossword puzzle perfection.
At the State Fair that August, the great
chefs of Wisconsin came to convince the world
of the superior beauty of carved cheese over carved
ice for table centerpieces, and although originally
they had come planning to carve cows and swans,
always the cheddar blocks turned to the gold
cheesy beauty of angels. Angels hid
behind apples, behind goldfinches, hid in foot-high
Mexican-stuffed toads who stood forever on
their back legs, their front legs shellacked forever
into playing red painted concertinas.
And if someone would have come to you as many
years as you are old ago, and told you:
You will be slapped around, a man will cut your
mouth open, only because he says he loves you,
and you will have to give up lovers, before they are,
and children before they are yours;
friends will call you from sexual assault centers
and their stitched together voices will tell you
things done to them that you will never be able to forget.
Some friends you will bury and children and parents, too.
(Your mother and father will breathe flowers
from their graves.) Your body's skin and bones
will cartwheel around you, tilt-a-whirl around you
until you are nauseous and dizzy and uncertain.
The money angel will never like you; often
you will sleep with razor blades. Often
you will fall out of the trap door of yourself
and have to climb back up and start over, and
sometimes the angels will help and often they won't,
and you can never count on either. And if someone
had to come to you, as many years ago as you are old
right now, and told you all this, and more,
would you sign up for the bright waterfall of angels?
Would you be silent? Would you whisper, or shout:
Bring on the tour, the bright waterfall of angels tour?
"The Bright Waterfall of Angels" appeared previously in The Underground Communion Rail (West End Press). Susan Firer's fourth book, The Laugh We Make When We Fall, won the 2001 Backwaters Prize and is published by Backwaters Press (Omaha, NE). Her third book, The Lives of the Saints and Everything, won the Cleveland State University Prize and the Posner Award for the best book of poems published by a Wisconsin author in 1993. Her other books include The Underground Communion Rail (West End Press) and My Life with the Tsar and Other Poems (New Rivers Books). Her work has appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Best American Poetry 1992, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press), A Whole Ohter Ballgame: Women's Literature on Women's Sport (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road (Faber and Faber), Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves (University of Illinois Press), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), The Georgia Review, Ms., Chicago Review, Iowa Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship and a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Two poems from her most recent book were featured and archived on Verse Daily. Recent work has appeared in New American Writing, Third Coast, and Lungfull!, and is forthcoming in The Book of Irish American Poetry (U.of Notre Dame Press).
---------------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF 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 Karla Huston, "Night Swim" and "Summer Storm" - July 31, 2004
o Loren Kleinman, "Formaggio" and "Jetsam" - July 24, 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
---------------------------
THE BRIGHT WATERFALL OF ANGELS
by Susan Firer
Everywhere that summer there were angels,
hanging over the lake piers deflated with prayer,
blowing like soap bubbles past night windows,
flying from the weekend colored skirts
of young girls. In August, under the full
moon, I walked Oakland Ave., and a night
bus, windows burning yellow with angels, passed.
And still, I could see people praying for more
bird angels, drug angels, kaiser roll angels, money
angels, love angels, health angels, rain angels.
There were angels with hearts large as bagpipes
who circled our village's ice cube houses
and flew bright loud into our bang nights.
There were angels in movie houses and in sweet corn
stands, and angels who dropped like catalpa
snakes from summer. One angel followed
me into our Chang Cheng Restaurant. Where
were the angels that summer when the neighbor-
hood women were being hunted and ripped
open like field animals? Or when the man
who walked away from DePaul Rehab gave up
on my garage? When I came home from "The Wizard
of Loneliness" the Flight for Life
heliccopter was landing in my front yard.
And a young man was leaning against my garage,
his throat an awful open clown smile.
Rivers and streams of dark blood
ran down the alley. All the children
awakened by the helicopter ran barefoot
and pajamad through the actual
blood and night. Mary,
the neighborhood nurse, kept telling
everyone there was a murderer loose.
"No one could do that much damage to themselves.
I'm a nurse, I'm telling you that no one could
do that much damage to themself."
And the police, and firefighters, and pilot,
and attendants their rubber gloved hands filled
with the moon, and someone held up the knife
the man used on himself. Off they rolled
him on a cot into the helicopter.
When they took off lighted and loud into the mid-
night sky, I saw angels of despair, windfull
and spinning happy on the helicopter blades.
There were angels who wrote their names on leaves,
and show-offs who rode August's tornadoes.
Nights the sky was often a thunder of angels,
a heat lightning sky, where angel wings fit
together in crossword puzzle perfection.
At the State Fair that August, the great
chefs of Wisconsin came to convince the world
of the superior beauty of carved cheese over carved
ice for table centerpieces, and although originally
they had come planning to carve cows and swans,
always the cheddar blocks turned to the gold
cheesy beauty of angels. Angels hid
behind apples, behind goldfinches, hid in foot-high
Mexican-stuffed toads who stood forever on
their back legs, their front legs shellacked forever
into playing red painted concertinas.
And if someone would have come to you as many
years as you are old ago, and told you:
You will be slapped around, a man will cut your
mouth open, only because he says he loves you,
and you will have to give up lovers, before they are,
and children before they are yours;
friends will call you from sexual assault centers
and their stitched together voices will tell you
things done to them that you will never be able to forget.
Some friends you will bury and children and parents, too.
(Your mother and father will breathe flowers
from their graves.) Your body's skin and bones
will cartwheel around you, tilt-a-whirl around you
until you are nauseous and dizzy and uncertain.
The money angel will never like you; often
you will sleep with razor blades. Often
you will fall out of the trap door of yourself
and have to climb back up and start over, and
sometimes the angels will help and often they won't,
and you can never count on either. And if someone
had to come to you, as many years ago as you are old
right now, and told you all this, and more,
would you sign up for the bright waterfall of angels?
Would you be silent? Would you whisper, or shout:
Bring on the tour, the bright waterfall of angels tour?
"The Bright Waterfall of Angels" appeared previously in The Underground Communion Rail (West End Press). Susan Firer's fourth book, The Laugh We Make When We Fall, won the 2001 Backwaters Prize and is published by Backwaters Press (Omaha, NE). Her third book, The Lives of the Saints and Everything, won the Cleveland State University Prize and the Posner Award for the best book of poems published by a Wisconsin author in 1993. Her other books include The Underground Communion Rail (West End Press) and My Life with the Tsar and Other Poems (New Rivers Books). Her work has appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Best American Poetry 1992, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press), A Whole Ohter Ballgame: Women's Literature on Women's Sport (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road (Faber and Faber), Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves (University of Illinois Press), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), The Georgia Review, Ms., Chicago Review, Iowa Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship and a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Two poems from her most recent book were featured and archived on Verse Daily. Recent work has appeared in New American Writing, Third Coast, and Lungfull!, and is forthcoming in The Book of Irish American Poetry (U.of Notre Dame Press).
---------------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF 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 Karla Huston, "Night Swim" and "Summer Storm" - July 31, 2004
o Loren Kleinman, "Formaggio" and "Jetsam" - July 24, 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, August 13, 2004
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 6, 2004
DAY THREE
Oh, what a fine morning we woke to. It was textured with that "Canadian fog" I seem so fond of, out over the lake. When the sun took the fog away, we had blue sky, blue water, blueberries, Mary's blue eyes, all such loveliness.
As we were not moving camp today, we would have a big breakfast, our leader Susan said. It was a lovely big breakfast - bacon, eggs, pancakes, fruit compote.
As we ate, a wind from the east blew in a lake-hanging fog. Where fog touched lake, the water was rippled. We saw the fog coming, the rippled water with it; we saw it envelope us and then all was fog. And soon that same wind blew it all away to the west. As if something had marched across the lake. What?
This is how we pray; we say: O Great God of Canada, we thank you for this amazing day, this amazing place, these wonderful people to share it with.
We went off in search of the wily Quetico large-mouth bass, a favorite meal from these waters. But, alas, the fishing was not good. Tom caught the only fish catchable today - a big sucker, which got thrown back; and an 18" walleye, which encourged everyone to keep casting mightily, but to no avail.
A pound and a half of walleye does not make a meal for five adults and two youngsters, so we had our usual lunch of beef jerky and dried fruit, fresh apple, cheese, summer sausage, crackers, and so on. And we each got a piece of golden-fried walleye for dessert. Oh, it was lovely to taste.
O, Great God of Canada, we thank you for this small taste of the great walleye.
Reading and dozing and reading and dozing, not necessarily in that order. Some may think it a lazy man's pastime. To the unbelievers, I say: What do you think I'm gonna do in heaven?
It is a delicious point where what is read merges with what is dreamed.
And while I was dreaming, or reading, Mary and her brother went out fishing. They settled themselves over the same spot where I'd caught my walleye and brought back two more walleyes about the same size as mine had been, and a northern. We had all that fish for supper, plus the scheduled spaghetti which had already been re-hydrated.
Even in the wilds of Canada, we eat well, we eat very well indeed.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
We'd just emptied a full bin and Dan was taking a wide sweep up onto another terrace. "I like to take advantage of having an empty bin to open another terrace up," he explained. "If I do it now, I don't have to short-dump when the bin is only half-full or three-quarters full." You don't want to round the tilt of a terrace with any higher center of gravity than you have to.
"You watch the ends of your header," Dan said, "you watch the middle to be sure it's feeding right. You don't want to get caught snoozing."
We're talking about the drought again. "Right now our grass looks like what it normally looks like in August," Dan said. "It should be like that in August, not June."
Running cows and raising calves will be a lot more labor-intensive "than throwing them thirty pounds of grain and watching them get fat." We were talking again about getting out of feeding beef. "Now it will be more work trying to keep the animals alive."
There had been a sprinkle of rain the previous night, so he got a later start in the field this morning. "Just what we've had since January, just a hint of rain," Dan said.
On a good day of combining, he said, he can harvest a hundred fifty acres. "We're probably up over a hundred for today."
We were listening again to storm news on the radio. How does he keep from getting caught out in bad weather? "You listen to the radio and watch the sky," Dan said. "The radio lets you know what might happen. The sky tells you when it's time to get out of the field."
"This is a lazy man's combine," Dan said. "You don't have to get out to change anything, you can do it from the cab. I don't know what all the new gauges are yet - I read the book and try it out and read the book some more."
He had been surprised the other day when the machine just up and shut down on him. It wouldn't start, it wouldn't run. The only clue to the problem had been a code on the digital display. He talked to the implement dealer to see what the code was about. It was a new combine, it ought to run. Well, it was the "tired butt" code. The machine is programmed to shut down automatically after six hours of non-stop operation. The guy driving the machine is supposed to get out and stretch his legs.
Dan admitted that the hardest thing about running the combine all the time during harvest was "getting used to sitting all the time. I'm used to being up and doing something."
In decent weather, he said, it'll take twelve to fourteen days to harvest the wheat. "If everything went perfect we maybe could get it done in ten days," he speculated. It never goes perfect.
The wind was starting to die some. "It's starting to get a little growly," Dan said of the work. "When the dust and the chaff hang in the air like that and the sun goes down, it starts getting a little tough."
Somehow he mentioned that it is about an hour and a half drive to Great Bend, Kansas. "Do you think that's very far?" I asked. "No," Dan said, "an hour and a half drive is not very far."
How far does Brent have to haul the wheat to get it to the storage bins? "It's about eight and a half miles from this field to the bin," Dan calculated.
I've run a mower with a ten or twelve foot cutting bar, so I know how easy it is to break a cutting knife, and how difficult it was to change it.
"Now you can change the cutting blades right in place," Dan said. "The blades are bolted on, instead of riveted. And you don't have to take the blade out to do it."
"All of a sudden it has gotten orange, didn't it," Dan noticed. The sun had dropped behind a cloud and the air was suffused with light, honey-colored, thick.
Then he was remembering a hail-storm. He had been in the old combine at the other end of this same half-section. The hail stones had been about the size of a half-dollar. "When the first one hit," Dan said, "I thought the engine blew up. When they all started pounding, I thought the combine was going to come apart."
As it gets dark in the field, you start to lose your depth perception. It was getting harder to tell how much of the wheat stalk you were cutting, how far the header was from the ground. It was 9:15 p.m. when Dan turned the lights on. The flood of brightness illuminated the header and the area in front of it. Dan drove into the growing darkness at a speed he maintained between 3.8 and 4.0 miles per hour most of the time. Dust in the combine's lights was as blinding as blizzard in a car's headlights.
Dan greases the combine every morning. He checks the tightness of all the chains. He washes the windows.
In the pitch darkness, you have no sense of speed. "You'll be doing two-and-a-half miles an hour," Dan told me, "and it feels like you're doing five miles an hour."
We talked about the price of wheat. "I've given up trying to figure out these commodity guys," Dan said. "If they want the price to go up, they go up; if they want the price to go down, they go down. I'll tell you, prices go down a lot faster than they go up."
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 11, 1998
Last evening the sunlight was like a bucket of thick, orange paint spilled on the black asphalt of Washington Street. This morning, it rests more subtly on the concrete driveway across the street - more watercolor, today, than oil paint, more burnished than embossed. An orangeness to the light still, but with rose petals ground up and added to it.
The village seems to stir only slightly between 5:00 a.m. when I rise and 7:30 a.m. when I leave for work. I cannot believe that everyone in town is still abed, but generally there are only a few cars passing on Washington Street in those early hours - well, I would say two cars, one heading east, the other heading west. Other than that, this part of the village is quiet.
Perhaps it is as simple as this: there's nowhere to go, nothing to do at that hour on my end of town.
By the time I reach downtown, of course, I will see that things are astir. Work will be starting at the lumberyard, the flag will be up at the post office, I may have to wait for an old man to finish crossing the street in front of me.
Today as I head to work there is the sound of an airplane in the distance. It is working hard enough to be a spray plane.
There is a layer of moisture on the windshield - the pick-up sits in the shadow of the neighbor's house and the sun has not reached it to burn off the dew. A very slight haze mars the blue sky above. You - you'd probably have a song in your heart on a day like this. Me - I'm not allowed to sing.
Out in the country, haze in the distance shrouds the far farmsteads and banks of trees. The fields of beans where peas were taken earlier are thick and amazing green. Where I had said they had started to harvest part of a field of beans, however, there are wagons of beets sitting at the headlands. Can you not tell beets from beans, Tom? No - I cannot - at this distance, even now, I cannot say they are not beans.
North of Five Corners there are two sweet corn pickers and a tractor and wagon coming toward me - taking their half of the road out of the middle as they must. I drive on the shoulder, my tires sounding on gravel.
In Ripon, I see dew running on the hoods of a couple vans and cars - looks almost as if someone is writing home from another dimension. Or am I the one who's writing home from the other dimension?
*
AUGUST 12, 1998
My, my, August in Wisconsin has been cool and green - at least as much as I remember of it, on this cool morning of sun and blue sky. I suppose I should not take this loveliness for granted but give thanks for each cup of beauty offered us.
She's a lovely lass now, but later the day may be scorcher; later the month may be a scorcher. You wish you could wrestle her in the grass of a sun-lit meadow, to possess her, to have her as a warm memory for a cold winter day, for a grey old age. Augusta, ah, we love ya!
Again this morning there is dew on the windshield, on the grass. There are secret messages scratched into the hood of the pick-up. The sun kisses the east side of our house from a low angle, making it appear barn red. Later the color will be raspberry, will be almost pink at times, will be barn-red again in the late afternoon sun.
The pond is still. The pond is still green with algae. A man who would put a dock out into such a body of water would be a fool, no? There is one such, at least.
It is Wednesday. Garbage has been set out in the village for weekly pick-up. Bright red containers hold the materials for recycling - paper and aluminum, glass and plastic. A sustainable earth? Not yet, but a gesture in that direction. If Fairwater won't do it, who will?
The Sina barn which had burned partially in the fire last month is being repaired. Charred rafters have been removed. I expect new ones will soon be hammered into place. I suppose we think there's no sense in doing more than is needed to make it right - in repairing barns, or whatever.
Half my ideas go to sleep with me, and half of those don't get up.
AUGUST 6, 2004
DAY THREE
Oh, what a fine morning we woke to. It was textured with that "Canadian fog" I seem so fond of, out over the lake. When the sun took the fog away, we had blue sky, blue water, blueberries, Mary's blue eyes, all such loveliness.
As we were not moving camp today, we would have a big breakfast, our leader Susan said. It was a lovely big breakfast - bacon, eggs, pancakes, fruit compote.
As we ate, a wind from the east blew in a lake-hanging fog. Where fog touched lake, the water was rippled. We saw the fog coming, the rippled water with it; we saw it envelope us and then all was fog. And soon that same wind blew it all away to the west. As if something had marched across the lake. What?
This is how we pray; we say: O Great God of Canada, we thank you for this amazing day, this amazing place, these wonderful people to share it with.
We went off in search of the wily Quetico large-mouth bass, a favorite meal from these waters. But, alas, the fishing was not good. Tom caught the only fish catchable today - a big sucker, which got thrown back; and an 18" walleye, which encourged everyone to keep casting mightily, but to no avail.
A pound and a half of walleye does not make a meal for five adults and two youngsters, so we had our usual lunch of beef jerky and dried fruit, fresh apple, cheese, summer sausage, crackers, and so on. And we each got a piece of golden-fried walleye for dessert. Oh, it was lovely to taste.
O, Great God of Canada, we thank you for this small taste of the great walleye.
Reading and dozing and reading and dozing, not necessarily in that order. Some may think it a lazy man's pastime. To the unbelievers, I say: What do you think I'm gonna do in heaven?
It is a delicious point where what is read merges with what is dreamed.
And while I was dreaming, or reading, Mary and her brother went out fishing. They settled themselves over the same spot where I'd caught my walleye and brought back two more walleyes about the same size as mine had been, and a northern. We had all that fish for supper, plus the scheduled spaghetti which had already been re-hydrated.
Even in the wilds of Canada, we eat well, we eat very well indeed.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
We'd just emptied a full bin and Dan was taking a wide sweep up onto another terrace. "I like to take advantage of having an empty bin to open another terrace up," he explained. "If I do it now, I don't have to short-dump when the bin is only half-full or three-quarters full." You don't want to round the tilt of a terrace with any higher center of gravity than you have to.
"You watch the ends of your header," Dan said, "you watch the middle to be sure it's feeding right. You don't want to get caught snoozing."
We're talking about the drought again. "Right now our grass looks like what it normally looks like in August," Dan said. "It should be like that in August, not June."
Running cows and raising calves will be a lot more labor-intensive "than throwing them thirty pounds of grain and watching them get fat." We were talking again about getting out of feeding beef. "Now it will be more work trying to keep the animals alive."
There had been a sprinkle of rain the previous night, so he got a later start in the field this morning. "Just what we've had since January, just a hint of rain," Dan said.
On a good day of combining, he said, he can harvest a hundred fifty acres. "We're probably up over a hundred for today."
We were listening again to storm news on the radio. How does he keep from getting caught out in bad weather? "You listen to the radio and watch the sky," Dan said. "The radio lets you know what might happen. The sky tells you when it's time to get out of the field."
"This is a lazy man's combine," Dan said. "You don't have to get out to change anything, you can do it from the cab. I don't know what all the new gauges are yet - I read the book and try it out and read the book some more."
He had been surprised the other day when the machine just up and shut down on him. It wouldn't start, it wouldn't run. The only clue to the problem had been a code on the digital display. He talked to the implement dealer to see what the code was about. It was a new combine, it ought to run. Well, it was the "tired butt" code. The machine is programmed to shut down automatically after six hours of non-stop operation. The guy driving the machine is supposed to get out and stretch his legs.
Dan admitted that the hardest thing about running the combine all the time during harvest was "getting used to sitting all the time. I'm used to being up and doing something."
In decent weather, he said, it'll take twelve to fourteen days to harvest the wheat. "If everything went perfect we maybe could get it done in ten days," he speculated. It never goes perfect.
The wind was starting to die some. "It's starting to get a little growly," Dan said of the work. "When the dust and the chaff hang in the air like that and the sun goes down, it starts getting a little tough."
Somehow he mentioned that it is about an hour and a half drive to Great Bend, Kansas. "Do you think that's very far?" I asked. "No," Dan said, "an hour and a half drive is not very far."
How far does Brent have to haul the wheat to get it to the storage bins? "It's about eight and a half miles from this field to the bin," Dan calculated.
I've run a mower with a ten or twelve foot cutting bar, so I know how easy it is to break a cutting knife, and how difficult it was to change it.
"Now you can change the cutting blades right in place," Dan said. "The blades are bolted on, instead of riveted. And you don't have to take the blade out to do it."
"All of a sudden it has gotten orange, didn't it," Dan noticed. The sun had dropped behind a cloud and the air was suffused with light, honey-colored, thick.
Then he was remembering a hail-storm. He had been in the old combine at the other end of this same half-section. The hail stones had been about the size of a half-dollar. "When the first one hit," Dan said, "I thought the engine blew up. When they all started pounding, I thought the combine was going to come apart."
As it gets dark in the field, you start to lose your depth perception. It was getting harder to tell how much of the wheat stalk you were cutting, how far the header was from the ground. It was 9:15 p.m. when Dan turned the lights on. The flood of brightness illuminated the header and the area in front of it. Dan drove into the growing darkness at a speed he maintained between 3.8 and 4.0 miles per hour most of the time. Dust in the combine's lights was as blinding as blizzard in a car's headlights.
Dan greases the combine every morning. He checks the tightness of all the chains. He washes the windows.
In the pitch darkness, you have no sense of speed. "You'll be doing two-and-a-half miles an hour," Dan told me, "and it feels like you're doing five miles an hour."
We talked about the price of wheat. "I've given up trying to figure out these commodity guys," Dan said. "If they want the price to go up, they go up; if they want the price to go down, they go down. I'll tell you, prices go down a lot faster than they go up."
To be continued....
*
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 11, 1998
Last evening the sunlight was like a bucket of thick, orange paint spilled on the black asphalt of Washington Street. This morning, it rests more subtly on the concrete driveway across the street - more watercolor, today, than oil paint, more burnished than embossed. An orangeness to the light still, but with rose petals ground up and added to it.
The village seems to stir only slightly between 5:00 a.m. when I rise and 7:30 a.m. when I leave for work. I cannot believe that everyone in town is still abed, but generally there are only a few cars passing on Washington Street in those early hours - well, I would say two cars, one heading east, the other heading west. Other than that, this part of the village is quiet.
Perhaps it is as simple as this: there's nowhere to go, nothing to do at that hour on my end of town.
By the time I reach downtown, of course, I will see that things are astir. Work will be starting at the lumberyard, the flag will be up at the post office, I may have to wait for an old man to finish crossing the street in front of me.
Today as I head to work there is the sound of an airplane in the distance. It is working hard enough to be a spray plane.
There is a layer of moisture on the windshield - the pick-up sits in the shadow of the neighbor's house and the sun has not reached it to burn off the dew. A very slight haze mars the blue sky above. You - you'd probably have a song in your heart on a day like this. Me - I'm not allowed to sing.
Out in the country, haze in the distance shrouds the far farmsteads and banks of trees. The fields of beans where peas were taken earlier are thick and amazing green. Where I had said they had started to harvest part of a field of beans, however, there are wagons of beets sitting at the headlands. Can you not tell beets from beans, Tom? No - I cannot - at this distance, even now, I cannot say they are not beans.
North of Five Corners there are two sweet corn pickers and a tractor and wagon coming toward me - taking their half of the road out of the middle as they must. I drive on the shoulder, my tires sounding on gravel.
In Ripon, I see dew running on the hoods of a couple vans and cars - looks almost as if someone is writing home from another dimension. Or am I the one who's writing home from the other dimension?
*
AUGUST 12, 1998
My, my, August in Wisconsin has been cool and green - at least as much as I remember of it, on this cool morning of sun and blue sky. I suppose I should not take this loveliness for granted but give thanks for each cup of beauty offered us.
She's a lovely lass now, but later the day may be scorcher; later the month may be a scorcher. You wish you could wrestle her in the grass of a sun-lit meadow, to possess her, to have her as a warm memory for a cold winter day, for a grey old age. Augusta, ah, we love ya!
Again this morning there is dew on the windshield, on the grass. There are secret messages scratched into the hood of the pick-up. The sun kisses the east side of our house from a low angle, making it appear barn red. Later the color will be raspberry, will be almost pink at times, will be barn-red again in the late afternoon sun.
The pond is still. The pond is still green with algae. A man who would put a dock out into such a body of water would be a fool, no? There is one such, at least.
It is Wednesday. Garbage has been set out in the village for weekly pick-up. Bright red containers hold the materials for recycling - paper and aluminum, glass and plastic. A sustainable earth? Not yet, but a gesture in that direction. If Fairwater won't do it, who will?
The Sina barn which had burned partially in the fire last month is being repaired. Charred rafters have been removed. I expect new ones will soon be hammered into place. I suppose we think there's no sense in doing more than is needed to make it right - in repairing barns, or whatever.
Half my ideas go to sleep with me, and half of those don't get up.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 5, 2004
DAY TWO
It seemed we spent a fair part of the morning canoeing over and back, to find the portage we were looking for. It was hiding from us. Only someone wildly in love would think it a good portage - it was a mile long, so two trips with packs (over and back and over again) came to three miles, mostly uphill in the direction we were carrying the packs. Is that possible?
Mid-afternoon we landed on a lovely island with a well-shaded campsite. Of course there is nowhere you can drive in tent stakes, at least not far enough to do much good. This is the Exposed Canadian Shield, with the operative word being "exposed."
At both yesterday's campsite, and today's, white veins of crystalline material. Large crystals, very slowly formed.
Today has not been so windy as yesterday and has been plenty warm. I am still sweating now, nearly at bed-time.
The loons have called, haunting the stillness. Last night, sometime after midnight, we think the longer wail across the wilderness was a wolf call, far-off, repeated several times. It is good to know you are alive, and when the hair on the back of your neck stands up as you listen to that wail, you know you are alive.
In spite of the hard portage today, we are happy campers.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
"We've got about a hundred five head of cows this year," Dan said. "With no rain for the grass, that's about enough."
Brent and Dan just got into running cows to raise calves, just got out of the feeder cattle business. "The EPA was on us so bad, it wasn't worth it," Dan said. "Even if you meet today's specifications, if they change the specs, we have to meet the new ones. It was just easier to start running cows than to fight the EPA."
Dan got a little reflective: "People on the coasts don't realize the work we put in so they can have something to eat."
He remembered at college that "a kid from Kansas City showed up, who thought we still rode horses to school. He was looking for Indians. We all thought he was crazy."
Dan studied agri-business at Cloud County Community College in Concordia. "That was thirteen years ago," he said. "I don't know if anything from back then applies any more or not."
Dan was controlling the operation of the combine with a joy-stick in his right hand. He steered with his left hand. With the joy-stick, when you push forward, you go faster; when you pull back, you slow down. It's easy to adjust your speed to the changing conditions.
"This is the worst time of day to cut," Dan said. "Too many shadows. It's not so bad when you're going with the sun, but going the other way, with the sunlight and the dust, it's more difficult to see what you're cutting."
The field was terraced to control water run-off. "If the terraces are not too steep, you can cut across them," Dan said. "Most of the time, you go with them."
Some of the land the Jacobs farm is a little steeper than the field we were in. "The land around here is pretty good," Dan said. "It's got a roll to it. Up north of here they have to farm a lot more up and down. Here, looking up this draw, you can see half a mile. Up north they can't see nearly that far."
"We don't have a lot of land that isn't terraced," he said. "This ground doesn't lay too bad."
The combine was new; it had only three days of use; Steve had only three days' experience with it. The old combine had a thirty-foot head, so he was experienced with that. "The main difference is with the controls," Dan noted. "Some operate backwards from what I'm used to." Raising and lowering the header is one of those. A couple of times he caught himself lowering the header when he meant to be raising it. It was a matter of re-training his fingers from what they were used to. You don't want the header hitting the ground for you might break a blade in the cutting bar and lose machine time.
"Wind's out of the east," Dan pointed out. "It's blowing the dust right along with us.
Dan finished up the field he has been combining. Everything has to be moved to the next field now, a mile and a half east, a mile to the north. Dan had to take the long way around to get the combine to the new field because of some trees along the shorter route. "Thirty feet doesn't sound wide until you start driving down the road," he said, "then it's wide."
Brent took one truck over to the next field, I took my car over, Steve followed with tractor and wagon. Starr and Carrie were still out with us, to give Brent a ride back to get the other truck.
We had gotten readings of sixty to eighty bushels to the acre in the first field. Less than two miles away, the gauge was reading considerably worse than that - fifteen to twenty-five bushels to the acre some places, thirty-five to the acre sometimes, once in a great while sixty to the acre. "This upland will probably be pretty poor," Dan thought. "At the other end of the field there's a draw that should do pretty good."
Even in the high ground, yields shot up to fifty bushels to the acre in the terrace channel where water collected if the field got any moisture at all. Looking out at the wheat in front of you, it was not difficult to see which areas would have better yields, and which would be poorer. Even my untrained eye soon picked out the difference, even in the poor light.
The radio in the cab of the combine had been talking about bad weather. There had been a tornado sighted a mile north of La Crosse, Kansas, at 7:30 p.m. At 8:00 p.m. they were still saying "If you live in the city of La Crosse, you should be in your tornado shelter right now." There were clouds in the distance, in several directions, but nothing happening overhead. La Crosse is about 120 miles from Smith Center, mostly south and a little west.
Dan turned the combine into the sun. We couldn't see anything ahead of us with the light in our eyes and all the chaff flying in front of us instead of behind. "Wish that sun would hurry up and go down," Dan said. "I'd rather need to have my lights on than to look into that.
To be continued....
*
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 7, 1998
A single bird call, an upward turned whistle, repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated as I prepared to leave the house. I am not a bird watcher, so I don't know the call. Behind it, in the distance, the sound of an unhappy black bird.
Another grey, misty morning. The street is damp in places. It has been too cool and damp for this to be August. Out in the country, the fog is a dome a quarter of a mile distant - a circumscribed view. Around us the world has disappeared; the world around us has disappeared; the world has disappeared around us.
The sweet corn has been taken in both the field to the south and that to the north of Watson Road on the east side of Highway E. Cornstalks and rubble. The sadness of the spent field.
Moisture - dew or mist or fog - hangs from everything, from every stalk of rough grass in the ditch, every blossom, every corn tassel. If it were hot, this humidity would be unbearable. If you'd stand in it buck naked long enough, you'd sprout green tendrils, leaves, buds of flowers; perhaps you'd grow thorns.
She has stopped the car in the driveway coming out of the gas station. She has a puzzled look - is it that she has forgotten something, is it the mystery of life, is it ordinary quotidian confusion? I don't know. She bites down on her lower lip, still perplexed. I pass on, taking her question mark with me.
*
AUGUST 10, 1998
The difference between my "local" and your "local" is the difference between what's in my mind and what's in yours. Certainly, like one of Frost's hired men, we have to make allowances for each other's ignorance. I do not know your place so well as you do.
Perhaps, accordingly, I should shut up about everything but my piece of ground, my half acre. Away from the Iowa farm more than thirty years, perhaps I ought not speak of Iowa farms. Though, certainly, it should be okay to remember.
I should not speak, even, of or for these farmers, here. Should not criticize their lack of fence line, lack of cover for the pheasants, their propensity for cash crops bought and paid for by the canning factories. First of all, it's not my call - I have not invested in the land and equipment to earn the right to criticize, have I? And I do not know enough of their circumstances and conditions - how hard it is to make a living, these days, farming.
On the other hand, it is my earth, too. All these farm plots sold off for housing developments, suburbs set on good soil. It is my earth too - how can I not complain about the abuse of it.
Perhaps we need - each of us - to understand that the other has needs and has ignorances, and to listen with respect and together build sustainable places. If a farmer truly husbands, he will choose to build a sustainable land, for he will recognize this earth as the only one we have.
An American flag flies on the highestmost pipes of a complex of steel storage bins at a farm along my way. A respectable distance below the American flag flies the flag of the Green Bay Packers. Let us not forget where we are.
Farther on, a spray plane comes nose-to-nose with Five Corners, takes my breath away to see it up close and so personal. North of Five Corners, a field of sweet corn has been taken.
There is enough scent riding the humid air this morning to suggest that fall is not far off.
AUGUST 5, 2004
DAY TWO
It seemed we spent a fair part of the morning canoeing over and back, to find the portage we were looking for. It was hiding from us. Only someone wildly in love would think it a good portage - it was a mile long, so two trips with packs (over and back and over again) came to three miles, mostly uphill in the direction we were carrying the packs. Is that possible?
Mid-afternoon we landed on a lovely island with a well-shaded campsite. Of course there is nowhere you can drive in tent stakes, at least not far enough to do much good. This is the Exposed Canadian Shield, with the operative word being "exposed."
At both yesterday's campsite, and today's, white veins of crystalline material. Large crystals, very slowly formed.
Today has not been so windy as yesterday and has been plenty warm. I am still sweating now, nearly at bed-time.
The loons have called, haunting the stillness. Last night, sometime after midnight, we think the longer wail across the wilderness was a wolf call, far-off, repeated several times. It is good to know you are alive, and when the hair on the back of your neck stands up as you listen to that wail, you know you are alive.
In spite of the hard portage today, we are happy campers.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
"We've got about a hundred five head of cows this year," Dan said. "With no rain for the grass, that's about enough."
Brent and Dan just got into running cows to raise calves, just got out of the feeder cattle business. "The EPA was on us so bad, it wasn't worth it," Dan said. "Even if you meet today's specifications, if they change the specs, we have to meet the new ones. It was just easier to start running cows than to fight the EPA."
Dan got a little reflective: "People on the coasts don't realize the work we put in so they can have something to eat."
He remembered at college that "a kid from Kansas City showed up, who thought we still rode horses to school. He was looking for Indians. We all thought he was crazy."
Dan studied agri-business at Cloud County Community College in Concordia. "That was thirteen years ago," he said. "I don't know if anything from back then applies any more or not."
Dan was controlling the operation of the combine with a joy-stick in his right hand. He steered with his left hand. With the joy-stick, when you push forward, you go faster; when you pull back, you slow down. It's easy to adjust your speed to the changing conditions.
"This is the worst time of day to cut," Dan said. "Too many shadows. It's not so bad when you're going with the sun, but going the other way, with the sunlight and the dust, it's more difficult to see what you're cutting."
The field was terraced to control water run-off. "If the terraces are not too steep, you can cut across them," Dan said. "Most of the time, you go with them."
Some of the land the Jacobs farm is a little steeper than the field we were in. "The land around here is pretty good," Dan said. "It's got a roll to it. Up north of here they have to farm a lot more up and down. Here, looking up this draw, you can see half a mile. Up north they can't see nearly that far."
"We don't have a lot of land that isn't terraced," he said. "This ground doesn't lay too bad."
The combine was new; it had only three days of use; Steve had only three days' experience with it. The old combine had a thirty-foot head, so he was experienced with that. "The main difference is with the controls," Dan noted. "Some operate backwards from what I'm used to." Raising and lowering the header is one of those. A couple of times he caught himself lowering the header when he meant to be raising it. It was a matter of re-training his fingers from what they were used to. You don't want the header hitting the ground for you might break a blade in the cutting bar and lose machine time.
"Wind's out of the east," Dan pointed out. "It's blowing the dust right along with us.
Dan finished up the field he has been combining. Everything has to be moved to the next field now, a mile and a half east, a mile to the north. Dan had to take the long way around to get the combine to the new field because of some trees along the shorter route. "Thirty feet doesn't sound wide until you start driving down the road," he said, "then it's wide."
Brent took one truck over to the next field, I took my car over, Steve followed with tractor and wagon. Starr and Carrie were still out with us, to give Brent a ride back to get the other truck.
We had gotten readings of sixty to eighty bushels to the acre in the first field. Less than two miles away, the gauge was reading considerably worse than that - fifteen to twenty-five bushels to the acre some places, thirty-five to the acre sometimes, once in a great while sixty to the acre. "This upland will probably be pretty poor," Dan thought. "At the other end of the field there's a draw that should do pretty good."
Even in the high ground, yields shot up to fifty bushels to the acre in the terrace channel where water collected if the field got any moisture at all. Looking out at the wheat in front of you, it was not difficult to see which areas would have better yields, and which would be poorer. Even my untrained eye soon picked out the difference, even in the poor light.
The radio in the cab of the combine had been talking about bad weather. There had been a tornado sighted a mile north of La Crosse, Kansas, at 7:30 p.m. At 8:00 p.m. they were still saying "If you live in the city of La Crosse, you should be in your tornado shelter right now." There were clouds in the distance, in several directions, but nothing happening overhead. La Crosse is about 120 miles from Smith Center, mostly south and a little west.
Dan turned the combine into the sun. We couldn't see anything ahead of us with the light in our eyes and all the chaff flying in front of us instead of behind. "Wish that sun would hurry up and go down," Dan said. "I'd rather need to have my lights on than to look into that.
To be continued....
*
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 7, 1998
A single bird call, an upward turned whistle, repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated as I prepared to leave the house. I am not a bird watcher, so I don't know the call. Behind it, in the distance, the sound of an unhappy black bird.
Another grey, misty morning. The street is damp in places. It has been too cool and damp for this to be August. Out in the country, the fog is a dome a quarter of a mile distant - a circumscribed view. Around us the world has disappeared; the world around us has disappeared; the world has disappeared around us.
The sweet corn has been taken in both the field to the south and that to the north of Watson Road on the east side of Highway E. Cornstalks and rubble. The sadness of the spent field.
Moisture - dew or mist or fog - hangs from everything, from every stalk of rough grass in the ditch, every blossom, every corn tassel. If it were hot, this humidity would be unbearable. If you'd stand in it buck naked long enough, you'd sprout green tendrils, leaves, buds of flowers; perhaps you'd grow thorns.
She has stopped the car in the driveway coming out of the gas station. She has a puzzled look - is it that she has forgotten something, is it the mystery of life, is it ordinary quotidian confusion? I don't know. She bites down on her lower lip, still perplexed. I pass on, taking her question mark with me.
*
AUGUST 10, 1998
The difference between my "local" and your "local" is the difference between what's in my mind and what's in yours. Certainly, like one of Frost's hired men, we have to make allowances for each other's ignorance. I do not know your place so well as you do.
Perhaps, accordingly, I should shut up about everything but my piece of ground, my half acre. Away from the Iowa farm more than thirty years, perhaps I ought not speak of Iowa farms. Though, certainly, it should be okay to remember.
I should not speak, even, of or for these farmers, here. Should not criticize their lack of fence line, lack of cover for the pheasants, their propensity for cash crops bought and paid for by the canning factories. First of all, it's not my call - I have not invested in the land and equipment to earn the right to criticize, have I? And I do not know enough of their circumstances and conditions - how hard it is to make a living, these days, farming.
On the other hand, it is my earth, too. All these farm plots sold off for housing developments, suburbs set on good soil. It is my earth too - how can I not complain about the abuse of it.
Perhaps we need - each of us - to understand that the other has needs and has ignorances, and to listen with respect and together build sustainable places. If a farmer truly husbands, he will choose to build a sustainable land, for he will recognize this earth as the only one we have.
An American flag flies on the highestmost pipes of a complex of steel storage bins at a farm along my way. A respectable distance below the American flag flies the flag of the Green Bay Packers. Let us not forget where we are.
Farther on, a spray plane comes nose-to-nose with Five Corners, takes my breath away to see it up close and so personal. North of Five Corners, a field of sweet corn has been taken.
There is enough scent riding the humid air this morning to suggest that fall is not far off.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
QUETICO JOURNAL
AUGUST 4, 2004
Big water, big wind coming in. Mary is the steersman in our canoe. She says "It won't go the way I want it to." She says "I'm working and working back here." Later, after we stop for lunch, she says, "My arms are still trembling." It will take us a while to get our sea legs back under us.
Susan and Anne dump their canoe when they get cross-wise to a small rapids. They've got nine-year-old Andrew riding with them, Anne's son. All of them get wet. Andrew has his life vest on.
Anne's tent and sleeping bags got wet. She hadn't closed her dry bag tight this morning. "I didn't think we were going to do any serious water today."
We make camp early. The others are setting up their tents; Anne is laying out her sleeping bags to dry - hers and Andrew's and her twelve-year-old daughter Ellie's, who has been paddling with Mary's brother, Philip. Mary is picking blueberries.
A big wind comes up and takes one of the canoes off the rock it had been pulled up onto. The canoe slides into the water in the blink of an eye and before you can say Jack Robinson it's twenty yards off shore. Anne is into the water just as quickly; she swims out and nabs the prodigal, brings it back. Where Anne works, they call her Xena: Warrior Princess, and you don't wonder why.
Soon enough Susan is making supper noises. The first night is always prime - roasting ears and steak this year. "Cold, just like out of the refrigerator," Susan says with satisfaction as she takes the steaks out of the food pack. Philip grills them for us, to our various tastes - medium rare, medium, medium well.
"Tomorrow is a move day," Susan says, "so it'll be granola or oatmeal for breakfast." Susan's the group leader, with canoe trips to Quetico for more than twenty years. Everybody has an opinion, but one person makes the decisions; Susan's a good leader because she listens.
As we have our supper, we talk; beyond that, all one can hear is the wind in the trees. Or water against the rock. Darkness comes on.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
There is an extra seat up in the cab of the combine, off to the side of where the operator sits. Dan climbed the ladder and took his place in the cab. I followed him up and in and closed the door behind me.
The cab was air-conditioned - you want that in this sun, in this dust. It was air-conditioned, it was all windshield and window so the operator has a good view of things.
This was a brand new combine, used barely enough to start wearing paint off the moving parts of the header.
The big tires of the combine were in the front; the smaller ones you steer with, in the rear. The engine, somewhere below and behind us, gave out a throaty roar as it came to life.
Here you go. We were headed across the wheat stubble to the portion of the field where there were still about ten acres waiting to be harvested. Dan's a farmer, so I suppose he's not used to talking much. Having someone in the cab to talk to is a "luxury" he doesn't usually get to "enjoy." We were talking about the drought. There had been very little rain since last year, and this year's wheat crop had been suffering as a result.
Dan told me: "They say when Noah built his ark and it rained for forty days and forty nights, we got 20/100ths."
There was a swath of wheat near the waterway that was still too green to harvest. "With green wheat, you have to be careful," Dan said. "If you get a big wad of it, you slug the machine and that's not fun."
He took wide berth of the green wheat. "If I'm going to leave three or four acres here, I might as well leave five," he said. "We'll let this get ripe." He turned the machine away.
I asked about crop rotation, about the fields I'd seen that look as if they have stubble from last year's wheat.
"Sometimes after we harvest wheat, we'll plant the field to milo the next spring," Dan said. "Sometimes we put it back to wheat in the fall of the same year. And sometimes we leave it lay fallow - we don't put the wheat in this fall, but in fall a year from now."
I could see a bare field right alongside the one we were working. I wondered if that was a field they've left fallow. "That's not our field," Dan said. "Someone else farms that." There was no fence-line, no nothing out there to say "This is my land, that is yours."
"How do you know where the line is?"
"It's the honor system," Dan said. "There's a post set out at the road. You eyeball it. Most people are pretty good about that here. And in eight years out of ten, the two fields won't both be planted to wheat, so it's obvious where one field ends and the other begins."
When Dan had to turn the combine to head in the other direction, he was able to make a very tight turn. I observed that I'd like to have a lawn-mower that turned that tight.
"I don't know why I even have a lawn-mower," Dan said, "it doesn't rain here."
Brent hasn't been hauling wheat away to the elevator in town but was taking it to the Jacobs' bins. "You might get a little better price in the winter," Dan said of putting the wheat in storage, "and you don't have to sit in line at the elevator waiting to unload."
Then Dan had to put the auger of the combine out in the unload position, the signal for Steve to pull alongside. The young man drove tractor and wagon parallel to the combine, adjusting speed and direction as necessary to keep the wagon under the end of the auger. Unloading the wheat on the roll saves considerable time over the course of the harvest. When the bin of the combine was empty, Dan signaled Steve, who pulled away and headed for the truck up near the road.
We could see that Brent was back at the field now, having supper with Starr and Carrie, Brent & Starr's daughter.
Dan turned the combine around near the road. "That white post," he said, "can you see it through the dust?" That is set on the property line. You just farm to that marker."
How much do these Jacobs cousins farm?
"We farm about 3,000 acres," Dan said. "We own all but one of the places we farm. The place we rent, that's my aunt's farm. We have about 900 acres of grassland to run cows on."
What kind of cows?
"Angus."
GLUMPPPH! A small wad of greener stalks ran through the combine. The machine shook of it.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 5, 1998
Again this morning, beads of moisture on the windshield. A grey Canadian mist rolling away from us. A mourning dove takes flight from the driveway - good luck today! Wind ruffles the surface of the pond down the hill.
I rose late today - I'd never succeed as farmer. I'll get to work on time, though, and that's good enough for today.
Just south of Watson Road, on the east side of Highway E, cockleburrs stand out much taller than the field of corn. The clumps of burrs are big as baseball mitts.
*
AUGUST 6, 1998
Serious rain this morning at 5:30 a.m. Serious moisture on the street at daylight. The rain has stopped, but a gray pall still hangs in the air, claiming the day as its own.
Some of us care about what the weather is going to be. I am not one of those. I am among the number who take interest in what the weather is now. Actually, "take interest" may be too strong a term - I notice, but for the most part I don't "care." I have a preference for sunshine, but I'll take the rain. I like blue sky, but clouds will do too. Where I do go off track is overload - too much twenty below zero, too much ninety eight degrees plus. A few days, OK. A week, two weeks, watch out. I could not live with rain every day, a la Seattle. I could not endure the daily smog of a city like Los Angeles. I could not - even - stand sun every day. Fortunately, too, within forty miles we have a wide variety of soils and landscapes - sands, pines, loam, oaks, prairie. Farm fields, low and wet ground, the Wisconsin rock and roll. If you want water, why we got water - being from Iowa, I barely know what that is. Swimming in Lake Okaboji on August 15 each year, that's about the extent of it.
The air is so full of moisture it is almost hard to breathe. Just south of Watson Road, to the east side of Highway E, the sweet corn is being harvested - or was. They may have stopped because of the rain. There'll be cockleburrs in with that corn. Would that be "mixed vegetables?"
Rain puddles in places on the road. You can smell the corn today, the vegetation, the musty green richness. I suppose the only song a plant can sing is its aroma.
AUGUST 4, 2004
Big water, big wind coming in. Mary is the steersman in our canoe. She says "It won't go the way I want it to." She says "I'm working and working back here." Later, after we stop for lunch, she says, "My arms are still trembling." It will take us a while to get our sea legs back under us.
Susan and Anne dump their canoe when they get cross-wise to a small rapids. They've got nine-year-old Andrew riding with them, Anne's son. All of them get wet. Andrew has his life vest on.
Anne's tent and sleeping bags got wet. She hadn't closed her dry bag tight this morning. "I didn't think we were going to do any serious water today."
We make camp early. The others are setting up their tents; Anne is laying out her sleeping bags to dry - hers and Andrew's and her twelve-year-old daughter Ellie's, who has been paddling with Mary's brother, Philip. Mary is picking blueberries.
A big wind comes up and takes one of the canoes off the rock it had been pulled up onto. The canoe slides into the water in the blink of an eye and before you can say Jack Robinson it's twenty yards off shore. Anne is into the water just as quickly; she swims out and nabs the prodigal, brings it back. Where Anne works, they call her Xena: Warrior Princess, and you don't wonder why.
Soon enough Susan is making supper noises. The first night is always prime - roasting ears and steak this year. "Cold, just like out of the refrigerator," Susan says with satisfaction as she takes the steaks out of the food pack. Philip grills them for us, to our various tastes - medium rare, medium, medium well.
"Tomorrow is a move day," Susan says, "so it'll be granola or oatmeal for breakfast." Susan's the group leader, with canoe trips to Quetico for more than twenty years. Everybody has an opinion, but one person makes the decisions; Susan's a good leader because she listens.
As we have our supper, we talk; beyond that, all one can hear is the wind in the trees. Or water against the rock. Darkness comes on.
*
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I was invited by Starr Jacobs of Smith Center to have supper in the field with her husband, Brent, and with Brent's cousin, Dan Jacobs, as they harvested their wheat crop. I extended the invitation by asking if I could ride in the combine after supper while Dan continued running it. Dan operates the combine; Brent & Starr's son, Steve, hauls the wheat from the combine to the semi-truck that Brent drives; and Brent hauls the wheat to storage. This continues my account of some time spent riding in the combine on a Monday evening three days into Smith County's 2004 wheat harvest.
There is an extra seat up in the cab of the combine, off to the side of where the operator sits. Dan climbed the ladder and took his place in the cab. I followed him up and in and closed the door behind me.
The cab was air-conditioned - you want that in this sun, in this dust. It was air-conditioned, it was all windshield and window so the operator has a good view of things.
This was a brand new combine, used barely enough to start wearing paint off the moving parts of the header.
The big tires of the combine were in the front; the smaller ones you steer with, in the rear. The engine, somewhere below and behind us, gave out a throaty roar as it came to life.
Here you go. We were headed across the wheat stubble to the portion of the field where there were still about ten acres waiting to be harvested. Dan's a farmer, so I suppose he's not used to talking much. Having someone in the cab to talk to is a "luxury" he doesn't usually get to "enjoy." We were talking about the drought. There had been very little rain since last year, and this year's wheat crop had been suffering as a result.
Dan told me: "They say when Noah built his ark and it rained for forty days and forty nights, we got 20/100ths."
There was a swath of wheat near the waterway that was still too green to harvest. "With green wheat, you have to be careful," Dan said. "If you get a big wad of it, you slug the machine and that's not fun."
He took wide berth of the green wheat. "If I'm going to leave three or four acres here, I might as well leave five," he said. "We'll let this get ripe." He turned the machine away.
I asked about crop rotation, about the fields I'd seen that look as if they have stubble from last year's wheat.
"Sometimes after we harvest wheat, we'll plant the field to milo the next spring," Dan said. "Sometimes we put it back to wheat in the fall of the same year. And sometimes we leave it lay fallow - we don't put the wheat in this fall, but in fall a year from now."
I could see a bare field right alongside the one we were working. I wondered if that was a field they've left fallow. "That's not our field," Dan said. "Someone else farms that." There was no fence-line, no nothing out there to say "This is my land, that is yours."
"How do you know where the line is?"
"It's the honor system," Dan said. "There's a post set out at the road. You eyeball it. Most people are pretty good about that here. And in eight years out of ten, the two fields won't both be planted to wheat, so it's obvious where one field ends and the other begins."
When Dan had to turn the combine to head in the other direction, he was able to make a very tight turn. I observed that I'd like to have a lawn-mower that turned that tight.
"I don't know why I even have a lawn-mower," Dan said, "it doesn't rain here."
Brent hasn't been hauling wheat away to the elevator in town but was taking it to the Jacobs' bins. "You might get a little better price in the winter," Dan said of putting the wheat in storage, "and you don't have to sit in line at the elevator waiting to unload."
Then Dan had to put the auger of the combine out in the unload position, the signal for Steve to pull alongside. The young man drove tractor and wagon parallel to the combine, adjusting speed and direction as necessary to keep the wagon under the end of the auger. Unloading the wheat on the roll saves considerable time over the course of the harvest. When the bin of the combine was empty, Dan signaled Steve, who pulled away and headed for the truck up near the road.
We could see that Brent was back at the field now, having supper with Starr and Carrie, Brent & Starr's daughter.
Dan turned the combine around near the road. "That white post," he said, "can you see it through the dust?" That is set on the property line. You just farm to that marker."
How much do these Jacobs cousins farm?
"We farm about 3,000 acres," Dan said. "We own all but one of the places we farm. The place we rent, that's my aunt's farm. We have about 900 acres of grassland to run cows on."
What kind of cows?
"Angus."
GLUMPPPH! A small wad of greener stalks ran through the combine. The machine shook of it.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
AUGUST 5, 1998
Again this morning, beads of moisture on the windshield. A grey Canadian mist rolling away from us. A mourning dove takes flight from the driveway - good luck today! Wind ruffles the surface of the pond down the hill.
I rose late today - I'd never succeed as farmer. I'll get to work on time, though, and that's good enough for today.
Just south of Watson Road, on the east side of Highway E, cockleburrs stand out much taller than the field of corn. The clumps of burrs are big as baseball mitts.
*
AUGUST 6, 1998
Serious rain this morning at 5:30 a.m. Serious moisture on the street at daylight. The rain has stopped, but a gray pall still hangs in the air, claiming the day as its own.
Some of us care about what the weather is going to be. I am not one of those. I am among the number who take interest in what the weather is now. Actually, "take interest" may be too strong a term - I notice, but for the most part I don't "care." I have a preference for sunshine, but I'll take the rain. I like blue sky, but clouds will do too. Where I do go off track is overload - too much twenty below zero, too much ninety eight degrees plus. A few days, OK. A week, two weeks, watch out. I could not live with rain every day, a la Seattle. I could not endure the daily smog of a city like Los Angeles. I could not - even - stand sun every day. Fortunately, too, within forty miles we have a wide variety of soils and landscapes - sands, pines, loam, oaks, prairie. Farm fields, low and wet ground, the Wisconsin rock and roll. If you want water, why we got water - being from Iowa, I barely know what that is. Swimming in Lake Okaboji on August 15 each year, that's about the extent of it.
The air is so full of moisture it is almost hard to breathe. Just south of Watson Road, to the east side of Highway E, the sweet corn is being harvested - or was. They may have stopped because of the rain. There'll be cockleburrs in with that corn. Would that be "mixed vegetables?"
Rain puddles in places on the road. You can smell the corn today, the vegetation, the musty green richness. I suppose the only song a plant can sing is its aroma.
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
