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
>
Friday, July 30, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
There stands an old windmill. It is no longer pumping water. Nothing left for it to do but cry.
Here and there the occasional stand of cottonwoods shakes its leaves and wonders what went wrong. All the farmsteads, gone. All the farm families with them. Big fields. Bigger farms. The world turns. We turn with it or we resist and are broken. That's it, isn't it? Something is marching here and we keep up; we keep up or we're lost.
The wheatfields shake their heads No, No, No.
Ah - there is a field that looks as if it had to be in corn last year. Nothing has come up there yet. Here is another field worked to a fine, smooth consistency all the way to the road, but nothing has sprouted here either. These farmers must plant some fields, leave some fields fallow. Over here I see more bare fields, over there more fields with cornstalks showing.
Farmsteads gone in the country. In Athol and in Kensington, I see some houses that have been empty so long their curtains have given up holding on, have come undone thread by thread. Such houses reach a point where collapse is inevitable: no one could save them, even if someone wanted to. I saw the same thing in my hometown, Curlew, Iowa. There is a post office in Athol, and one in Kensington. Kensington has a school. There are grain elevators in both communities. There's a UPS delivery truck stopped on Main Street, Kensington, not far from the "Computer Doctor" store. These people are tough people. They don't give up. They won't give up. They hold on with their toenails.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 30, 1998
Clothes and place - you don't usually think about it, but clothes and place, too, are related. We are the "parka belt" here across the upper midwest. If you fly to Florida out of Milwaukee and it is cold here, do you leave your coat out in the car in the parking lot for your return and hope you don't freeze by the time you reach it? Why would people from Florida come to Wisconsin in winter, but if they did, how would they ever prepare themselves for twenty below zero. They don't sell clothes in Florida that could prepare you for twenty below. Think about cowboy boots - you may see them here, but they're not "mandatory." The Sherpas along the Himalayas - think how they dress, and why, and the Islanders of the South Pacific, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Partly, it's a matter of what the climate requires from clothes - warmth or coolness; and partly it's a matter of what's available. You have the Andes, you have llamas or vicunas and you use that wool to fashion warm clothes for yourself. Sometimes all you need is a skirt of leaves. In the Arctic, the Eskimos made wise use of the materials available in that harsh environment and they have survived on the edge of what's survivable.
There is enough rain to bead on the windshield, here, this morning, but it not enough to make the street wet. A grey sky. Cool. Another morning to enjoy.
I stop downtown for gasoline. Filling the tank reminds me of the cost of speed, the cost of distance. The cost is a choice. If I worked in the village, I could walk to work. I could take a horse and buggy - but that would exact a different kind of cost.
Out in the country, off to the north, blue sky. The shelf of clouds ends abruptly.
There is a large flock of seagulls set down in the newly sprouted field of beans. For what do they stay here? They are sea gulls. Is there easy pickin' in our fields?
Now I'm looking north. Now I see sunlight on the edge of clouds. I've got to say how much I love it. Celebrate!
>
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
There stands an old windmill. It is no longer pumping water. Nothing left for it to do but cry.
Here and there the occasional stand of cottonwoods shakes its leaves and wonders what went wrong. All the farmsteads, gone. All the farm families with them. Big fields. Bigger farms. The world turns. We turn with it or we resist and are broken. That's it, isn't it? Something is marching here and we keep up; we keep up or we're lost.
The wheatfields shake their heads No, No, No.
Ah - there is a field that looks as if it had to be in corn last year. Nothing has come up there yet. Here is another field worked to a fine, smooth consistency all the way to the road, but nothing has sprouted here either. These farmers must plant some fields, leave some fields fallow. Over here I see more bare fields, over there more fields with cornstalks showing.
Farmsteads gone in the country. In Athol and in Kensington, I see some houses that have been empty so long their curtains have given up holding on, have come undone thread by thread. Such houses reach a point where collapse is inevitable: no one could save them, even if someone wanted to. I saw the same thing in my hometown, Curlew, Iowa. There is a post office in Athol, and one in Kensington. Kensington has a school. There are grain elevators in both communities. There's a UPS delivery truck stopped on Main Street, Kensington, not far from the "Computer Doctor" store. These people are tough people. They don't give up. They won't give up. They hold on with their toenails.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 30, 1998
Clothes and place - you don't usually think about it, but clothes and place, too, are related. We are the "parka belt" here across the upper midwest. If you fly to Florida out of Milwaukee and it is cold here, do you leave your coat out in the car in the parking lot for your return and hope you don't freeze by the time you reach it? Why would people from Florida come to Wisconsin in winter, but if they did, how would they ever prepare themselves for twenty below zero. They don't sell clothes in Florida that could prepare you for twenty below. Think about cowboy boots - you may see them here, but they're not "mandatory." The Sherpas along the Himalayas - think how they dress, and why, and the Islanders of the South Pacific, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Partly, it's a matter of what the climate requires from clothes - warmth or coolness; and partly it's a matter of what's available. You have the Andes, you have llamas or vicunas and you use that wool to fashion warm clothes for yourself. Sometimes all you need is a skirt of leaves. In the Arctic, the Eskimos made wise use of the materials available in that harsh environment and they have survived on the edge of what's survivable.
There is enough rain to bead on the windshield, here, this morning, but it not enough to make the street wet. A grey sky. Cool. Another morning to enjoy.
I stop downtown for gasoline. Filling the tank reminds me of the cost of speed, the cost of distance. The cost is a choice. If I worked in the village, I could walk to work. I could take a horse and buggy - but that would exact a different kind of cost.
Out in the country, off to the north, blue sky. The shelf of clouds ends abruptly.
There is a large flock of seagulls set down in the newly sprouted field of beans. For what do they stay here? They are sea gulls. Is there easy pickin' in our fields?
Now I'm looking north. Now I see sunlight on the edge of clouds. I've got to say how much I love it. Celebrate!
>
Thursday, July 29, 2004
SLOW READS REVIEWS BIG BEN
AND INTERVIEWS THE POET
I couldn't be more honored. Peter at Slow Reads has put up the interview he did with me earlier this month, as well as - ahem - an insightful review of The Big Book of Ben Zen. I didn't know, when he asked, that Peter would throw me the kind of fat pitch questions a writer loves to answer. And then let me answer them at great length. Maybe he had said something about doing a review, too, but I forgot that, I guess, in the excitement of doing the interview. I didn't know that Peter's review would teach me things I hadn't known about my own book.
>
AND INTERVIEWS THE POET
I couldn't be more honored. Peter at Slow Reads has put up the interview he did with me earlier this month, as well as - ahem - an insightful review of The Big Book of Ben Zen. I didn't know, when he asked, that Peter would throw me the kind of fat pitch questions a writer loves to answer. And then let me answer them at great length. Maybe he had said something about doing a review, too, but I forgot that, I guess, in the excitement of doing the interview. I didn't know that Peter's review would teach me things I hadn't known about my own book.
The whole of it takes my breath away. I couldn't be more pleased by the results.
Thank you, Peter! I appreciate the attention. And I appreciate the care with which you've provided it.
------------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
I have driven out into the country west of Smith Center, through Athol, and I'm just south of Athol now, pulled over to the side of the road, watching a couple combines out in the wheatfields. These are two different farmers, two different fields. Both are harvesting their wheat, bringing it in. There are tractors and wagons in the fields, fellows on them waiting to take the wheat from the combine and load it into storage bins on a farmstead hereabouts, or into a semi that will take the wheat to town.
A combine harvesting wheat moves forward into a stand of the golden ripeness. The stalks of wheat get cut off somewhere above ground level, leaving stubble; the heads and stalks fall into the combine's header and get moved into the innards of the machine where the kernel of the wheat is separated from the stalk and from the chaff. The kernels go up into the combine's three-hundred bushel storage bin; the straw and chaff and a lot of wheat dust get blown out the back end of the combine, to be scattered on the ground. Wheat mounds up in the bin.
When the bin of the combine gets full, that's nearly enough to fill a wagon. One operator jumps down out of his combine as wheat unloads into a wagon parked beside his machine. He walks over to talk with a fellow at a truck near the field's edge. He lights a cigarette.
The other combine in the other field on the other farm reaches the end of the field at the road, turns around and starts the long drive in the other direction. The dust he throws out doesn't know what to do with itself so it hangs like a fog.
Some of the roads out here are a clay and gravel combination that has been baked hard as concrete. Some of the roads look like roads, some of the roads do not; some look like lanes, and some look like less than lanes. All the wheatfields look like wheatfields - either wheat that is heavy-headed and waiting to be taken, or bare stems where the combine has been. And there is the occasional field where it seems the harvest was taken last year.
The fields are great rectangles - some of them a mile wide by a mile long, maybe; some of them with windbreaks, maybe, to mark the half mile. The wheat waiting for harvest shimmers in the heat like the surface of the ocean; the wind smoothes at the waves, pushes, pulls. The trees wave their branches. The air is incredibly warm all of a sudden. The road is baked, I mean baked, and the heat rises.
I come back past the combines on my way back to Athol; I see the bin of one of them is being unloaded into the white semi I'd met coming into town as I was going out. I can see wheat heaped in the truck box already. The other combine in the other field is unloading into a wagon again.
I drive back into Athol and find a place to park in the shade. I want to make some notes and take a moment's nap; or nap and make some notes, to put first things first.
Here's a big building that says it's the "First Congregational Church," according to stonework above the door. Yet to me it looks more like a school than a church - big, square, brick, like an old public school.
Then I'm driving backroads in the country again. Some roads are just dirt with the grass scraped off, wide enough for a semi, yeah, but not much wider than that. I'm out a mile north of Athol now. The wind is playing with the wheat. The wheat is nearly at eye level where I'm sitting in the car. If I had a passenger perhaps he could reach out and grab a handful of wheat stalks. You look at the wheat waving in the breeze; it looks as if the field is saying No, No, No.
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 29, 1998
A place is not a place without time. Place exists in time - in geologic time, in the time of the year, in the time of day. Think that this place used to be at the bottom of a great inland sea. Think that there is ice and snow in winter, the great heat of summer, the color of autumn. Think of the bird chatter at sunrise, of the stillness at high noon. We cannot really know where we are, then, if we don't know when. When and where are a banded pair.
And time, I think, is linked to people. In the great universe, there is no before and after, only the great eternal NOW. For an animal - all is now. For a rock. We are the critter who insists on such distinctions as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Guilty.
Blue sky, still pond, planes rumble overhead, winging towards Oshkosh.
The corn pack has started. The sweet stink of the canning factory has changed from peas to corn silage. If you know nothing else, your nose will tell you that the sour smell where waste water is being sprayed is almost - dare I say it - almost the smell of pigs.
It could be Iowa - the green of corn stretching for miles. This could be home. Well - no - I guess it couldn't. I know about the pea fields that were here. There were never pea fields in my Iowa.
At Five Corners, the truck driver appreciates that I've given him room to make his wide turn. He waves. A load of sweet corn bound for Fairwater's canning factory.
On Watson Street in Ripon, long shadows. A quiet morning. The woman walking to work, as she does every morning, as she has as long as I have been driving the morning. She looks a little older today, and so do I.
I suppose there are things we put up with, but we don't have to like 'em.
>
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
And soon enough Ivan was leading me down to the hospital so I could see Smith Center's Wellness Center.
Starr Jacobs, who was at the front desk, showed me around the facility. They've got exercise equipment available for use by hospital patients and members from the general public alike. There's a Nu-Step machine that provides low impact cardio-vascular workout and is useful in knee rehabilitation and with back problems. There's a stationary bicycle. Weight equipment. The Wellness Center has a personal trainer on staff.
"Lots of people from the community come in here to work out," Starr told me. "In fact, we have to schedule use of the therapy pool because it is so popular." The bottom of the therapy pool can be adjusted to make the pool deeper. People can swim, walk, or jog in the water against the current. You can use a tether to help you hold your place.
"When people become members, we show them what the machines are used for," Starr said.
"This machine," she said, "people either love or hate. She climbed on it to show how it operated. "You like it a little better if you set it to make you work a little harder. It feels more stable then. I know, it doesn't look like this is hard work. When I started, I couldn't do five minutes on it. Now I'm up to fifteen minutes."
Membership in the Wellness Center is a benefit offered to hospital employees.
Starr showed me the cardiac rehab unit, off in a room of its own. The "Tri-Fit" tests a person's flexibility, heart, and fat. It can be used to do an extensive health examination, to assess what your risks are, to compare your "body age" against your chronological age.
A fellow was set up in the unit for the cardiovascular test. A computer in the hospital was sending an image of the fellow's heart patterns to an expert off-site. A technician in the room was speaking with the far-off expert while the heart pattern continued to transmit. When I sign my memoir, Curlew:Home, I often make note that "Curlew is everywhere." The reverse is also more and more true these days - Everywhere is Curlew. Everywhere is Smith Center. When we wish to be freed from the confines of place, modern technology can free us. The world's experts are now available real time, on-line. The patient in Smith Center can benefit from the same expertise that the patient in Kansas City or Denver has available.
Then I met Arloa Barnes, who is, it turns out, Physical Therapy at Smith Center Hospital - the one and only Arloa, Physical Therapist. The Physical Therapy Department of the hospital used to be confined to a room about 20' by 12'.
"We started getting more and more patients," Arloa said. "We got the assistance of a grant to build this facility. The hospital board agreed to match half the cost. We included a cardiac rehab unit in the plans because that was something people were going out of town for. And we added aquatic therapy."
"Plans got approved," she said. "Work went forward. The project came in under budget."
Under budget? How did that happen?
"I spent a lot of weekends making sure that everything was right - that we had as many outlets planned for as we would need, that the space was big enough, that it allowed the privacy we would need," she said. "Change orders are what kill you."
"Half-way through the planning, a family from the community approached us and wanted to fund a Wellness Center as well. They provided $108,000 to outfit the center - equipment, tables, mirrors, etc. This gift allowed the center to be opened up to the public."
The PT Department brought three pieces of equipment to the new facility, and a table. The family's donation brought the total equipment up to ten pieces and added the weights that are available."
"When did we move in here?" Arloa asked another staff member. They chewed on the question for a bit and decided it must have been on April 1.
"We were moving and working," the other woman explained. "I've lost a month."
Arloa is married to Dr. Joe Barnes, a Smith Center family practice physician. "We moved here in 1985," Arloa said. "I've worked here off and on. I grew up in Norton, an hour west of here. So I'm a western Kansas girl." They moved here because they wanted to raise their family in a small town.
So how did the girl from western Kansas meet her doctor-husband, I wondered.
"I stalked him," Arloa said. "At the KU Medical School. I knew he had dated the student body president at Wichita State. He thought I was my sister. He was so predictable. He'd park in the same place every day, use the same door, ride the same elevator. He didn't have a chance."
Before I left the Wellness Center, Starr Jacobs and I arranged to meet at 6:00 p.m. at Smith Center's Jiffy Burger. She would be taking supper out to the field for her husband Brent, and for Brent's partner and cousin, Dan Jacobs, and she invited me to eat with them, and maybe ride for a while in the combine while the men continued their wheat harvest after supper.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 28, 1998
The morning light has changed, distinctly. Bird song comes later. When I rise at 5:00 a.m. now, the world is quiet (briefly) where before the birds would be chatting already. Darkness will become a morning companion once again - on into another turn of the Great Wheel. Even as the summer pushes to fullness, to ripeness, you can feel the year winding down, the circle of light diminishing, the sun heading out for new parts, to touch another place. Let me enjoy what morning light remains, then let me, too, with equal vigor embrace the darkness. This is life, this is the turn of the world in this place. This is our day and night, us.
Since about noon yesterday planes have been coming over in constant supply, all of them on their way to the EAA convention in Oshkosh. Even this far away - twenty-five miles - they will be lined up three and four in a row sometimes. A community of interest, the fly-in at Oshkosh; the place has made something its very own. It's Experimental Aircraft 'R Us for a week and a half at the beginning of August each year. Travellers cannot find accommodations within ninety miles of Oshkosh as a result.
A smooth sky, a still pond, morning in the village - lovely.
Tom, if you have to ask why there is a roll of toilet paper unfurled on Washington Street, obviously you don't have a clue. Call me Clueless in Fairwater.
I'm downtown. A little girl drives her pick-up past the post office. Well - she looks like a little girl. Damn, I am getting old.
North along Highway E, the fields of sweet corn are at various stages of maturity. Some of it must be ready to harvest.
A brown lawn south of Five Corners reminds us that we need some rain. The world here is green, sure, but this is not an eternal green.
Overhead, as I write this in the parking lot at work, airplanes continue lining up for the approach to Oshkosh. The sky is rumbling full of them.
----------------------
THANKS....
The Vagabond's big "Thank-You" goes to the following for their recent generous contribution to the Expedition:
#92 Bob & Mary Lane, Wisconsin.
>
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004 - CONTINUED
And soon enough Ivan was leading me down to the hospital so I could see Smith Center's Wellness Center.
Starr Jacobs, who was at the front desk, showed me around the facility. They've got exercise equipment available for use by hospital patients and members from the general public alike. There's a Nu-Step machine that provides low impact cardio-vascular workout and is useful in knee rehabilitation and with back problems. There's a stationary bicycle. Weight equipment. The Wellness Center has a personal trainer on staff.
"Lots of people from the community come in here to work out," Starr told me. "In fact, we have to schedule use of the therapy pool because it is so popular." The bottom of the therapy pool can be adjusted to make the pool deeper. People can swim, walk, or jog in the water against the current. You can use a tether to help you hold your place.
"When people become members, we show them what the machines are used for," Starr said.
"This machine," she said, "people either love or hate. She climbed on it to show how it operated. "You like it a little better if you set it to make you work a little harder. It feels more stable then. I know, it doesn't look like this is hard work. When I started, I couldn't do five minutes on it. Now I'm up to fifteen minutes."
Membership in the Wellness Center is a benefit offered to hospital employees.
Starr showed me the cardiac rehab unit, off in a room of its own. The "Tri-Fit" tests a person's flexibility, heart, and fat. It can be used to do an extensive health examination, to assess what your risks are, to compare your "body age" against your chronological age.
A fellow was set up in the unit for the cardiovascular test. A computer in the hospital was sending an image of the fellow's heart patterns to an expert off-site. A technician in the room was speaking with the far-off expert while the heart pattern continued to transmit. When I sign my memoir, Curlew:Home, I often make note that "Curlew is everywhere." The reverse is also more and more true these days - Everywhere is Curlew. Everywhere is Smith Center. When we wish to be freed from the confines of place, modern technology can free us. The world's experts are now available real time, on-line. The patient in Smith Center can benefit from the same expertise that the patient in Kansas City or Denver has available.
Then I met Arloa Barnes, who is, it turns out, Physical Therapy at Smith Center Hospital - the one and only Arloa, Physical Therapist. The Physical Therapy Department of the hospital used to be confined to a room about 20' by 12'.
"We started getting more and more patients," Arloa said. "We got the assistance of a grant to build this facility. The hospital board agreed to match half the cost. We included a cardiac rehab unit in the plans because that was something people were going out of town for. And we added aquatic therapy."
"Plans got approved," she said. "Work went forward. The project came in under budget."
Under budget? How did that happen?
"I spent a lot of weekends making sure that everything was right - that we had as many outlets planned for as we would need, that the space was big enough, that it allowed the privacy we would need," she said. "Change orders are what kill you."
"Half-way through the planning, a family from the community approached us and wanted to fund a Wellness Center as well. They provided $108,000 to outfit the center - equipment, tables, mirrors, etc. This gift allowed the center to be opened up to the public."
The PT Department brought three pieces of equipment to the new facility, and a table. The family's donation brought the total equipment up to ten pieces and added the weights that are available."
"When did we move in here?" Arloa asked another staff member. They chewed on the question for a bit and decided it must have been on April 1.
"We were moving and working," the other woman explained. "I've lost a month."
Arloa is married to Dr. Joe Barnes, a Smith Center family practice physician. "We moved here in 1985," Arloa said. "I've worked here off and on. I grew up in Norton, an hour west of here. So I'm a western Kansas girl." They moved here because they wanted to raise their family in a small town.
So how did the girl from western Kansas meet her doctor-husband, I wondered.
"I stalked him," Arloa said. "At the KU Medical School. I knew he had dated the student body president at Wichita State. He thought I was my sister. He was so predictable. He'd park in the same place every day, use the same door, ride the same elevator. He didn't have a chance."
Before I left the Wellness Center, Starr Jacobs and I arranged to meet at 6:00 p.m. at Smith Center's Jiffy Burger. She would be taking supper out to the field for her husband Brent, and for Brent's partner and cousin, Dan Jacobs, and she invited me to eat with them, and maybe ride for a while in the combine while the men continued their wheat harvest after supper.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 28, 1998
The morning light has changed, distinctly. Bird song comes later. When I rise at 5:00 a.m. now, the world is quiet (briefly) where before the birds would be chatting already. Darkness will become a morning companion once again - on into another turn of the Great Wheel. Even as the summer pushes to fullness, to ripeness, you can feel the year winding down, the circle of light diminishing, the sun heading out for new parts, to touch another place. Let me enjoy what morning light remains, then let me, too, with equal vigor embrace the darkness. This is life, this is the turn of the world in this place. This is our day and night, us.
Since about noon yesterday planes have been coming over in constant supply, all of them on their way to the EAA convention in Oshkosh. Even this far away - twenty-five miles - they will be lined up three and four in a row sometimes. A community of interest, the fly-in at Oshkosh; the place has made something its very own. It's Experimental Aircraft 'R Us for a week and a half at the beginning of August each year. Travellers cannot find accommodations within ninety miles of Oshkosh as a result.
A smooth sky, a still pond, morning in the village - lovely.
Tom, if you have to ask why there is a roll of toilet paper unfurled on Washington Street, obviously you don't have a clue. Call me Clueless in Fairwater.
I'm downtown. A little girl drives her pick-up past the post office. Well - she looks like a little girl. Damn, I am getting old.
North along Highway E, the fields of sweet corn are at various stages of maturity. Some of it must be ready to harvest.
A brown lawn south of Five Corners reminds us that we need some rain. The world here is green, sure, but this is not an eternal green.
Overhead, as I write this in the parking lot at work, airplanes continue lining up for the approach to Oshkosh. The sky is rumbling full of them.
----------------------
THANKS....
The Vagabond's big "Thank-You" goes to the following for their recent generous contribution to the Expedition:
#92 Bob & Mary Lane, Wisconsin.
>
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004
My first morning in town. I went down to the Second Cup Cafe for breakfast and to catch the "As the Bladder Fills" club at their 8:00 a.m. meeting. I had the large order of biscuits and gravy - $2.69; plus a cinnamon roll and coffee. And I had no sooner finished wiping the grin off my face than I heard Ivan Burgess coming in - "There's Tom Montag." He got me seated at the Club's usual table and started introducing me to the guys who were coming in too - people like Jim Fetters, the county attorney, and Linton Lull, who used to be one of Smith Center's bankers, Jack Benn and Claude Gripp, Raymond Osborn and Stan Hooper and a whole mess of other fellows whose names I didn't get written down.
When one of the fellows came in, the waitress asked him about his weekend. He said, "When you're retired, it's hard to tell when your weekend begins and ends."
Ivan thought I might go out and visit some grain elevators and told me who to talk to. "Just tell them I sent you," he said. The fellow in the next chair told me to be careful, though, because there are a couple big fellows who'll throw me out if I mention Ivan's name.
"These are the brightest minds in town," Ivan said of the fellows gathered for coffee. When I mentioned to Linton Lull that I'd seen his name in Ivan's Echo Echo, Linton confided that Ivan had been "short of material."
We saw that Jim Fetters was starting to grow a mustache. He had been fishing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, for a week and came back with a smear of whiskers under his nose. Ivan asked him: "How come you're cultivating on your face what grows naturally around your ass?" You can see just about how nice they are to one another, this bunch.
Someone said the county is pretty solidly Republican. A fellow quoted ol' Chot Burt on the subject; Chot had said "I'd rather have a sister who works in a house of ill-repute than a third cousin who's a Democrat."
Ivan said: "We don't vote for people here, we vote against 'em. If they don't make any mistakes, we'll keep them."
They're talking about the death penalty down on that end of the table. One is for, one is against. One is saying "I can't believe that Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty. I can't believe the people of Oklahoma did that."
Ivan has a copy of his Echo Echo opened up to a long list of names of the people running for public office. "That's an indication that the economy is bad under Bush - all those people looking for jobs."
"Did you get here last night in time to hear the storm?" someone asked. Yeah, I said, I heard the thunder but I didn't hear it rain. "That's the way it has been going," the fellow said, "we get the fireworks and someone else gets the rain."
"We're gonna get a new sheriff, a new county attorney, and a new judge," Jim Fetters is telling the fellow down at the end of the table. Fetters is not running for re-election.
Someone else is back to talking about the wheat harvest. Over at Colby to the west of here, he indicates, the harvest is so poor that "they cut their wheat in road gear. A fellow was out there driving down the road at 55 m.p.h. and the combine in the field was keeping up with him. The wheat harvest is pretty barren out there."
"I'd settle for what I got last year," the fellow next to me said. "It was the best year for wheat in Smith County history. Rain came just at the right times." He'd heard some pretty reliable sources that they'd gotten a hundred bushels to the acre last year on high, dry ground. "I didn't get anything that good, closer to seventy to eighty bushels an acre."
Down at the other end: "It's a good thing these farmers like to gamble - they do it every year."
Maybe it was Jim Fetters who said "Yeah, people are moving here by the hundreds." Someone else wanted to make sure I understood that was meant as sarcasm.
"Like Yogi Berra said," Fetters added, "if they aren't gonna come, how you gonna stop 'em?"
"You could get a pessimistic view sitting here," Linton Lull cautioned. "There are some good things happening - a new airport is being built; the Chamber of Commerce has the 'Come Home to Smith Center' promotion to get folks to return to Smith Center now that they've retired; there's the new Wellness Center; there's the library; people gave money to move water from the water treatment plant to the golf course, to water the fairways."
Then I overhear someone saying "... yeah, we're gonna make the women do without. We're gonna get all the men together and cut the women off." He's talking about sex, yes; and he adds "we'll probably have too many scabs crossing the picket line."
Linton Lull tells me about the Shrader Foundation. The community helped out Milt Shrader during the Depression when his circus was in trouble. He'd been broke and couldn't get his railroad cars home and the community took up a collection and bailed him out of a tight spot. He remembered them in his will with a million dollar bequest to the community. Some nephews had contested the will but the courts upheld it. Money has been wisely spent - the library was built and named for Shrader, the community hall was renovated. "One of the nephews came back here and was amazed that we'd built the library and named it after his uncle and had more money left than we had originally," Lull indicated. "He had a change of heart about it - we'd done all this, we'd honored his uncle, and the money hadn't been squandered."
"Most of our successful people have moved away, unfortunately," someone was lamenting. "But," he added, "they haven't forgotten us. Our graduates have all these scholarships available."
They'd like those people to come back to Smith Center when they retire. "We've got good doctors here," someone said, "we've got the golf course, great fishing, great hunting, the Wellness Center."
To be continued....
--------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"I heard a high school girl tell another high school girl that the Fourth of July was on the the fifth this year," Ivan said.
"At the time I'm talking about," Ivan wrote, "a couple of older fellows in town, Art Nelson and John Scott just came out to the golf course and played a couple of holes and then puttered around. One day Ivan Phetteplace said to John Scott, he said 'John, how can I improve my putting?' John said, 'Get the ball closer to the hole on your approach shot.'"
"It don't matter what part of town you live in," Ivan said, "it is not a high crime area. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a doctor. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a grocery store. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a library that has talking books and talking CD. There are enough soap operas on TV to satisfy the most discriminating adult taste. Don't make no difference where you live in town, you are less than twenty minutes from church. And nearly all the churches have someone in their congregation who will pick you up and take you home."
"That ol Stan Smith is quick with the quip," Ivan noted. "I don't know if you know what kind of equipment that Stan, by choice, farms with. Stan walks very carefully on the conservative side. Someone asked Stan the other day, up at Paul's Cafe, how his wheat cutting was coming. Stan said he was all through cuttin' but now he had to sneak the combine back up to Pioneer Village before they missed it."
"Phyllis Tucker says her boss, Jim Fetters, keeps his office cold enough to hang meat it," Ivan said.
"Before all the young people had cars," Ivan said, "the Old Mill and Park was a trysting place for young lovers. Vandalism was unheard of when a young swain was chewing a hickey on some nubile young creature's throat. This is not first hand information I'm giving you. I learned this from classmates bragging about their amorous conquests of the night before. I never had any success stories to tell along those lines."
"I don't know how the subject came up," Ivan said, "but it did. Last Friday morning about mid-morning the subject of getting up early in the morning came up at Paul's Cafe. Carl Stepp said he always got up at five o'clock in the morning. Bill Barretson said he did too, but his problem was he couldn't remember if he flushed or not when he got back to bed."
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 27, 1998
We know way too many people who have killed themselves - last week, the daughter of a friend. Before that, a friend, a couple of co-workers, a writer from Milwaukee, other acquaintances. May my grace be the gift to see the silver lining, to recognize that not every question Why? has an answer. Sometimes you have to run on sheer momentum. If you don't have that momentum built up, sometimes you cannot leap the gap.
Fifteen miles west of here the corn has given up. It no longer begs for rain. Its tightly curled leaves scream for release. The wind kisses the corn and moves on. Here, we had barely enough rain during the night to wet the street. If a similar rain fell west of here, it would be only enough to tease the farmers, not enough to do any good at all on that sand country. The corn cries out to an empty sky. The wind passes on.
Blue sky and sun. Wind ruffling the surface of the pond. Another day like every other day. The grass just wet enough to look like there's dew on it, not rain. The sun is already drying the streets.
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the hay has been taken now. Stubble reaches for the sun.
A woman and her dog walk west on Watson Road, south of Sina's pig farm. She is power walking. It is a large red dog and it has no problem keeping pace.
There are soy beans, I think, coming up now in the two fields where peas had been taken. I can see rows of green receding into the distance.
Flowers at Five Corners - red, white, and purple, orange and yellow and pink. They are an exclamation point at this intersection, if you ask me.
>
A VISIT TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 14, 2004
My first morning in town. I went down to the Second Cup Cafe for breakfast and to catch the "As the Bladder Fills" club at their 8:00 a.m. meeting. I had the large order of biscuits and gravy - $2.69; plus a cinnamon roll and coffee. And I had no sooner finished wiping the grin off my face than I heard Ivan Burgess coming in - "There's Tom Montag." He got me seated at the Club's usual table and started introducing me to the guys who were coming in too - people like Jim Fetters, the county attorney, and Linton Lull, who used to be one of Smith Center's bankers, Jack Benn and Claude Gripp, Raymond Osborn and Stan Hooper and a whole mess of other fellows whose names I didn't get written down.
When one of the fellows came in, the waitress asked him about his weekend. He said, "When you're retired, it's hard to tell when your weekend begins and ends."
Ivan thought I might go out and visit some grain elevators and told me who to talk to. "Just tell them I sent you," he said. The fellow in the next chair told me to be careful, though, because there are a couple big fellows who'll throw me out if I mention Ivan's name.
"These are the brightest minds in town," Ivan said of the fellows gathered for coffee. When I mentioned to Linton Lull that I'd seen his name in Ivan's Echo Echo, Linton confided that Ivan had been "short of material."
We saw that Jim Fetters was starting to grow a mustache. He had been fishing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, for a week and came back with a smear of whiskers under his nose. Ivan asked him: "How come you're cultivating on your face what grows naturally around your ass?" You can see just about how nice they are to one another, this bunch.
Someone said the county is pretty solidly Republican. A fellow quoted ol' Chot Burt on the subject; Chot had said "I'd rather have a sister who works in a house of ill-repute than a third cousin who's a Democrat."
Ivan said: "We don't vote for people here, we vote against 'em. If they don't make any mistakes, we'll keep them."
They're talking about the death penalty down on that end of the table. One is for, one is against. One is saying "I can't believe that Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty. I can't believe the people of Oklahoma did that."
Ivan has a copy of his Echo Echo opened up to a long list of names of the people running for public office. "That's an indication that the economy is bad under Bush - all those people looking for jobs."
"Did you get here last night in time to hear the storm?" someone asked. Yeah, I said, I heard the thunder but I didn't hear it rain. "That's the way it has been going," the fellow said, "we get the fireworks and someone else gets the rain."
"We're gonna get a new sheriff, a new county attorney, and a new judge," Jim Fetters is telling the fellow down at the end of the table. Fetters is not running for re-election.
Someone else is back to talking about the wheat harvest. Over at Colby to the west of here, he indicates, the harvest is so poor that "they cut their wheat in road gear. A fellow was out there driving down the road at 55 m.p.h. and the combine in the field was keeping up with him. The wheat harvest is pretty barren out there."
"I'd settle for what I got last year," the fellow next to me said. "It was the best year for wheat in Smith County history. Rain came just at the right times." He'd heard some pretty reliable sources that they'd gotten a hundred bushels to the acre last year on high, dry ground. "I didn't get anything that good, closer to seventy to eighty bushels an acre."
Down at the other end: "It's a good thing these farmers like to gamble - they do it every year."
Maybe it was Jim Fetters who said "Yeah, people are moving here by the hundreds." Someone else wanted to make sure I understood that was meant as sarcasm.
"Like Yogi Berra said," Fetters added, "if they aren't gonna come, how you gonna stop 'em?"
"You could get a pessimistic view sitting here," Linton Lull cautioned. "There are some good things happening - a new airport is being built; the Chamber of Commerce has the 'Come Home to Smith Center' promotion to get folks to return to Smith Center now that they've retired; there's the new Wellness Center; there's the library; people gave money to move water from the water treatment plant to the golf course, to water the fairways."
Then I overhear someone saying "... yeah, we're gonna make the women do without. We're gonna get all the men together and cut the women off." He's talking about sex, yes; and he adds "we'll probably have too many scabs crossing the picket line."
Linton Lull tells me about the Shrader Foundation. The community helped out Milt Shrader during the Depression when his circus was in trouble. He'd been broke and couldn't get his railroad cars home and the community took up a collection and bailed him out of a tight spot. He remembered them in his will with a million dollar bequest to the community. Some nephews had contested the will but the courts upheld it. Money has been wisely spent - the library was built and named for Shrader, the community hall was renovated. "One of the nephews came back here and was amazed that we'd built the library and named it after his uncle and had more money left than we had originally," Lull indicated. "He had a change of heart about it - we'd done all this, we'd honored his uncle, and the money hadn't been squandered."
"Most of our successful people have moved away, unfortunately," someone was lamenting. "But," he added, "they haven't forgotten us. Our graduates have all these scholarships available."
They'd like those people to come back to Smith Center when they retire. "We've got good doctors here," someone said, "we've got the golf course, great fishing, great hunting, the Wellness Center."
To be continued....
--------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"I heard a high school girl tell another high school girl that the Fourth of July was on the the fifth this year," Ivan said.
"At the time I'm talking about," Ivan wrote, "a couple of older fellows in town, Art Nelson and John Scott just came out to the golf course and played a couple of holes and then puttered around. One day Ivan Phetteplace said to John Scott, he said 'John, how can I improve my putting?' John said, 'Get the ball closer to the hole on your approach shot.'"
"It don't matter what part of town you live in," Ivan said, "it is not a high crime area. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a doctor. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a grocery store. It don't matter what part of town you live in, you are less than twenty minutes from a library that has talking books and talking CD. There are enough soap operas on TV to satisfy the most discriminating adult taste. Don't make no difference where you live in town, you are less than twenty minutes from church. And nearly all the churches have someone in their congregation who will pick you up and take you home."
"That ol Stan Smith is quick with the quip," Ivan noted. "I don't know if you know what kind of equipment that Stan, by choice, farms with. Stan walks very carefully on the conservative side. Someone asked Stan the other day, up at Paul's Cafe, how his wheat cutting was coming. Stan said he was all through cuttin' but now he had to sneak the combine back up to Pioneer Village before they missed it."
"Phyllis Tucker says her boss, Jim Fetters, keeps his office cold enough to hang meat it," Ivan said.
"Before all the young people had cars," Ivan said, "the Old Mill and Park was a trysting place for young lovers. Vandalism was unheard of when a young swain was chewing a hickey on some nubile young creature's throat. This is not first hand information I'm giving you. I learned this from classmates bragging about their amorous conquests of the night before. I never had any success stories to tell along those lines."
"I don't know how the subject came up," Ivan said, "but it did. Last Friday morning about mid-morning the subject of getting up early in the morning came up at Paul's Cafe. Carl Stepp said he always got up at five o'clock in the morning. Bill Barretson said he did too, but his problem was he couldn't remember if he flushed or not when he got back to bed."
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 27, 1998
We know way too many people who have killed themselves - last week, the daughter of a friend. Before that, a friend, a couple of co-workers, a writer from Milwaukee, other acquaintances. May my grace be the gift to see the silver lining, to recognize that not every question Why? has an answer. Sometimes you have to run on sheer momentum. If you don't have that momentum built up, sometimes you cannot leap the gap.
Fifteen miles west of here the corn has given up. It no longer begs for rain. Its tightly curled leaves scream for release. The wind kisses the corn and moves on. Here, we had barely enough rain during the night to wet the street. If a similar rain fell west of here, it would be only enough to tease the farmers, not enough to do any good at all on that sand country. The corn cries out to an empty sky. The wind passes on.
Blue sky and sun. Wind ruffling the surface of the pond. Another day like every other day. The grass just wet enough to look like there's dew on it, not rain. The sun is already drying the streets.
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the hay has been taken now. Stubble reaches for the sun.
A woman and her dog walk west on Watson Road, south of Sina's pig farm. She is power walking. It is a large red dog and it has no problem keeping pace.
There are soy beans, I think, coming up now in the two fields where peas had been taken. I can see rows of green receding into the distance.
Flowers at Five Corners - red, white, and purple, orange and yellow and pink. They are an exclamation point at this intersection, if you ask me.
>
Monday, July 26, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
Now I'm headed south towards Hastings, Nebraska, on the Tom Osborne Highway again. I was here last September, when I drove the western edge of the middle west. You Cornhusker fans know who Tom Osborne is, I don't have to tell you. For the rest of you, think long-time Nebraska football coach.
Where the highway crosses the Platte River here, the bridge spans sand. The river is dry. There is no water flowing right now.
Some of the corn out here is bigger than anything I've seen elsewhere today. The Iowa farm-boy hates to say that. But he knows that the corn is curled with some distress in this heat, in fields that aren't irrigated, even at Rainforth Road.
New houses out here in the country sit exposed to the Nebraska sun. No trees to protect them. Oh, there are trees, just not enough of them.
A coal train comes through Hastings, Nebraska, passes on tracks beneath us. I can see the end of the train, but I cannot see the beginning. That is typical of life, I guess.
A woman in Hastings is walking a small dog on a leash. I have see rats bigger than that dog. The woman has badly colored skin, as if an artificial tan went south on her.
6:32 p.m. Thirty-nine miles to Red Cloud. A bank of high clouds to the south, now ahead of me.
A Cadillac with Kansas plates is poking along ahead of me. Who owns the Cadillac owns the road, so some think.
I pass that Cadillac just before we cross the Little Blue River. There isn't another car for a mile in either direction. In fact, traffic is pretty sparse all along Highway 281 headed for Red Cloud.
Power-line - a big one, towers instead of poles. Red Cloud, twenty-eight miles. A smear of clouds to the south and west, blue sky overhead. Cattle take a deep wade in a mud-hole, with water half-way up their bellies. Irrigation rigs - some of them spraying, some of them not.
Gullies with trees. Or do they call them ravines? Or washes?
Entering Webster County.
Blue Hill - pop. 867. An immense sadness descends. "Welcome to Blue Hill," the sign says. I see a splash of kids in the municipal swimming pool, a life guard on duty, a couple of big girls with red blouses dangling their feet in the water. They are getting sun-burned, all of them, every single bone-white Nebraskan of them.
Across this landscape a lot of farmsteads are gone. That's not the wind you hear; it's the loneliness of the empty farmyards.
Cattle graze on some low ground. A river used to run there, broad and deep. It had to be plenty mean to cut a path. Now this is not river bottom but pasture. Like a gravel pit growing up to brome grass.
The closer I get to Red Cloud, the tougher the country looks. Were it not so green, this could be the west.
Is that winter wheat, turned for harvest already? That's what it looks like to me.
"Do Not Drive On Shoulder" the sign says, ignorant of the fact, apparently, that a farmer drives anywhere he damn well pleases.
Red Cloud. I find the Willa Cather Center along Main Street. It is open Monday-Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tours go out at 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. I'll try to get back here on Saturday for the 9:30 a.m. tour.
I stop at Subway just a few doors south of the Cather center. It is so peculiar, a Subway in such a big downtown building. Fast food with history, I guess. I get myself a sandwich, a chocolate malt (yup, they've got ice cream), and a cold drink. There are five fellows in the place just shooting the bull. Talking about cars and girls, what else?
"She's got a motor just like the other one," one of the fellows says, without context to let you understand whether it's girl or car he's referring to. Except we know he wouldn't talk to the other fellows with such obvious affection for a girl.
You wonder if these guys know who Willa Cather was, or if it matters. Does it matter? We're writers, so we think it should, but does it? It's cars and girls that fuel the tromp tromp of the generations, not my notion of literature.
Then I am headed south again, peeling for Smith Center. As I cross the Republican River, I see there's not much water in it at all. I will take that as a good omen for the fall elections. Regime change begins at home.
In Kansas, I see that some of the winter wheat has been harvested.
Now there are clouds coming in, clouds going away. Some places, it looks like rain; some places, not. Maybe they'll get a sniff of it here, just north of the geographic center of the lower 48 states.
Bee hives have been set out like offerings in a field just at the edge of a stand of trees.
The hand of God is working the western sky with long fingers of light. This is a keen moment of sadness, when sunlight comes down through the clouds like grace. It doesn't signify the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from here at the exact center. That's the paradox of our middleness - it puts us at the edge.
Sign: Lebanon, 1 mile. Smith Center, 16 miles.
It is 8:00 p.m. as I drive through Lebanon on Highway 281. Lift up my soul, O Lord. Let my sadness be lifted.
As Smith Center comes into view, light like the grace of God is shining on it, those long fingers of light down through the teasing clouds.
Just at the edge of Smith Center, a combine harvesting wheat throws out a storm of dust like darkness. It has been a long day. I am a weary wayfaring stranger.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 23, 1998
Dew on the grass this morning, and long shadows. A cool day with bright blue sky. What will this loveliness cost us?
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the grass was cut into windrows yesterday. It will dry further in today's sun.
It cannot be long before the sweet corn is harvested. From where I am, it looks so ready.
>
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
Now I'm headed south towards Hastings, Nebraska, on the Tom Osborne Highway again. I was here last September, when I drove the western edge of the middle west. You Cornhusker fans know who Tom Osborne is, I don't have to tell you. For the rest of you, think long-time Nebraska football coach.
Where the highway crosses the Platte River here, the bridge spans sand. The river is dry. There is no water flowing right now.
Some of the corn out here is bigger than anything I've seen elsewhere today. The Iowa farm-boy hates to say that. But he knows that the corn is curled with some distress in this heat, in fields that aren't irrigated, even at Rainforth Road.
New houses out here in the country sit exposed to the Nebraska sun. No trees to protect them. Oh, there are trees, just not enough of them.
A coal train comes through Hastings, Nebraska, passes on tracks beneath us. I can see the end of the train, but I cannot see the beginning. That is typical of life, I guess.
A woman in Hastings is walking a small dog on a leash. I have see rats bigger than that dog. The woman has badly colored skin, as if an artificial tan went south on her.
6:32 p.m. Thirty-nine miles to Red Cloud. A bank of high clouds to the south, now ahead of me.
A Cadillac with Kansas plates is poking along ahead of me. Who owns the Cadillac owns the road, so some think.
I pass that Cadillac just before we cross the Little Blue River. There isn't another car for a mile in either direction. In fact, traffic is pretty sparse all along Highway 281 headed for Red Cloud.
Power-line - a big one, towers instead of poles. Red Cloud, twenty-eight miles. A smear of clouds to the south and west, blue sky overhead. Cattle take a deep wade in a mud-hole, with water half-way up their bellies. Irrigation rigs - some of them spraying, some of them not.
Gullies with trees. Or do they call them ravines? Or washes?
Entering Webster County.
Blue Hill - pop. 867. An immense sadness descends. "Welcome to Blue Hill," the sign says. I see a splash of kids in the municipal swimming pool, a life guard on duty, a couple of big girls with red blouses dangling their feet in the water. They are getting sun-burned, all of them, every single bone-white Nebraskan of them.
Across this landscape a lot of farmsteads are gone. That's not the wind you hear; it's the loneliness of the empty farmyards.
Cattle graze on some low ground. A river used to run there, broad and deep. It had to be plenty mean to cut a path. Now this is not river bottom but pasture. Like a gravel pit growing up to brome grass.
The closer I get to Red Cloud, the tougher the country looks. Were it not so green, this could be the west.
Is that winter wheat, turned for harvest already? That's what it looks like to me.
"Do Not Drive On Shoulder" the sign says, ignorant of the fact, apparently, that a farmer drives anywhere he damn well pleases.
Red Cloud. I find the Willa Cather Center along Main Street. It is open Monday-Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tours go out at 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. I'll try to get back here on Saturday for the 9:30 a.m. tour.
I stop at Subway just a few doors south of the Cather center. It is so peculiar, a Subway in such a big downtown building. Fast food with history, I guess. I get myself a sandwich, a chocolate malt (yup, they've got ice cream), and a cold drink. There are five fellows in the place just shooting the bull. Talking about cars and girls, what else?
"She's got a motor just like the other one," one of the fellows says, without context to let you understand whether it's girl or car he's referring to. Except we know he wouldn't talk to the other fellows with such obvious affection for a girl.
You wonder if these guys know who Willa Cather was, or if it matters. Does it matter? We're writers, so we think it should, but does it? It's cars and girls that fuel the tromp tromp of the generations, not my notion of literature.
Then I am headed south again, peeling for Smith Center. As I cross the Republican River, I see there's not much water in it at all. I will take that as a good omen for the fall elections. Regime change begins at home.
In Kansas, I see that some of the winter wheat has been harvested.
Now there are clouds coming in, clouds going away. Some places, it looks like rain; some places, not. Maybe they'll get a sniff of it here, just north of the geographic center of the lower 48 states.
Bee hives have been set out like offerings in a field just at the edge of a stand of trees.
The hand of God is working the western sky with long fingers of light. This is a keen moment of sadness, when sunlight comes down through the clouds like grace. It doesn't signify the end of the world, but you can see the end of the world from here at the exact center. That's the paradox of our middleness - it puts us at the edge.
Sign: Lebanon, 1 mile. Smith Center, 16 miles.
It is 8:00 p.m. as I drive through Lebanon on Highway 281. Lift up my soul, O Lord. Let my sadness be lifted.
As Smith Center comes into view, light like the grace of God is shining on it, those long fingers of light down through the teasing clouds.
Just at the edge of Smith Center, a combine harvesting wheat throws out a storm of dust like darkness. It has been a long day. I am a weary wayfaring stranger.
To be continued....
--------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 23, 1998
Dew on the grass this morning, and long shadows. A cool day with bright blue sky. What will this loveliness cost us?
In the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water, the grass was cut into windrows yesterday. It will dry further in today's sun.
It cannot be long before the sweet corn is harvested. From where I am, it looks so ready.
>
Sunday, July 25, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
3:00 p.m. I'm still fifty-some miles east of Council Bluffs. The western sky has clouded. The wind finds its way even so. The day has not cooled.
I stop at a wayside and take a forty-minute nap. I hate to lose the driving time but - worse - I hate the notion of falling asleep and running off the road. So I do what I promised Mary I would do - I rest my eyes closed.
Now the clouds to the west seem to be stirring up a blow. I'm headed for whatever is coming at me.
Such a long drive as this gives you quite the cross-section of America. I am in the middle of the middle of it.
Now we cross the wide Missouri into Nebraska, "The Good Life." 4:10 p.m. "Lincoln, Left Lanes," the signs say.
I am headed towards an embankment of thunderheads. We are starting to lose the sun. It is only 4:21 p.m.
The sky to the northwest is a very dark velour.
Ha! There's the Platte River - "a mile wide and an inch deep," they've said. Out here a river can be nearly as wide as it wishes to be. This is Nebraska; what's going to stop it?
This eastern Nebraska corn stands a foot tall. The landscape between Omaha and Lincoln is as green as Iowa, as Wisconsin.
Now it looks as if the storm ahead has split - some to the north, some to the south. Dead ahead, blue sky is visible, a bank of clouds farther on. Lincoln, 22 miles.
Except that there are not near enough trees, this could be Wisconsin, yes.
Hang-down heavy blue to the north. Openness ahead. Wind. I am driving the seam of the storm, riding that spine. Lincoln next seven exists.
I can see Nebraska plates, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. We cross Salt Creek together at 80 m.p.h. And we're not the fastest drivers out here, by any means.
Lincoln sprawls like a tired whore, long-limbed and loose, spread across everything she can reach.
5:00 p.m. I am driving into sunshine. The storms have slid by me and are behind me now. There is only the green swarm of landscape, that and a few puffs of cloud.
I-80 shines like a liquid ribbon - traffic going west, coming east, the gleam of sun on glass and steel. There are a lot of semis running this stretch of highway. It is Sunday afternoon. Truck-drivers always like to get a little jump on the week ahead, so it's not surprising to see so many of them today.
5:12 p.m. Nothing to the west now but a faint haze, moisture hanging. Ahead of me the clouds are entirely gone.
Big irrigation rigs stand out here near the Beaver Crossing exit. Farmers, out working their fields on this now bright Sunday afternoon, raise some little dust. The only storm clouds are in my rear view mirror. Out here Nebraska is as flat as the lanes of a bowling alley. A storm can roll across it like a strike-bound ball, knock down everything in sight. Out in the open like this, the farm boys stand a fair chance of catching their girls.
I pass an ambulance from Kearney, Nebraska, which is headed towards home. The fellow in the passenger seat appears to be sleeping. A woman drives it, determined.
5:40 p.m. I have not seen the country between the York and Grand Island exits before, here along I-80. It is new territory, though the landscape is familiar - what I'm seeing, what I will see, looks a lot like what I've seen for the past forty-six miles. Nebraska has a lot of that. I am within two hours of Smith Center now, I believe, or nearly so. I am going through Red Cloud, Nebraska, on my way; perhaps I'll stop and have supper in Willa Cather's home town.
Damn, these fields of corn stretch a long way west. And fields of soybeans. This is news to the Iowa farm boy.
I have really got a lump in my throat for this part of America, for the farmers who planted these fields of corn and beans, for the women who love the farmers, for their parents and their children. The fields roll on and on. The land gets worked, gets worked again. The generations turn. We lose one, we gain another one. We gain and lose and things work out pretty much as they're supposed to. The land rolls on and on.
Some of the communities out here get exits off the interstate; some of them don't. Who plays God's hand?
How many dead raccoon have I seen today? More than thirty-five, less than fifty? How many dead deer? Twenty-five?
6:08 p.m. The shine of the moving highway in this light. Ah!
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 21, 1998
A thunderstorm rolled through last night low-down and dirty - it knocked out power about 11:30 p.m. and power is still out! What a wonderful welcome for the four "Up with People" kids staying with us for the week. One from New Hampshire; one from Moorhead, Minnesota, to whom thunderstorms should be nothing new; one from Denmark; and one from Switzerland. They have been together in the program since January; they have just had a three-week break and are back at it with one city under their belt - La Crosse - and Fond du Lac the second city on this leg of the tour. English is the universal language and is very well spoken by the red-headed Danish young lady and by the Swiss lad. It hardly seems fair that all the world must speak English to communicate - but we Americans didn't make this happen by ourselves. I'm sure the British empire went some ways towards making the world English-speaking. At least we have a lively language and - pretty much - a sufficient vocabulary - partly because we so easily steal and transmute what we don't have but need. Potlatch is one such example; to capture the concept we had to capture the word. Is canyon another?
The girl from New Hampshire asked how many people live in Fairwater. "All of them," I said. "We put the dead ones in the cemetery."
Quite a storm came through. Some large branches down at our end of the street, with a lot of leaves and other debris. You almost think the morning can repair itself - a mourning dove calls - then I see a very large tree down across the other end of Washington Street in Fairwater. The Power Company is there, cutting it up. It is the reason our power went out, having fallen across our power lines. In a yard in downtown Fairwater, another tree is uprooted.
The air clings unpleasantly. Two blackbirds harass a crow. The rye straw, I see, has been baled.
North of Fairwater, all the way to Ripon, it appears the trees did not feel the fury of our storm. The corn looks undamaged as well.
As I turn onto Watson Street in Ripon, a pretty girl smiles at me. A bright start to this day.
*
JULY 22, 1998
It wants to be a dark and cloudy day, wants to talk like thunder - but not very badly; in the east there is still a little blue sky.
There are enough branches at curbside along Washington Street this morning to make the village look like a war zone. There is a brown scar along the asphalt where a large tree trunk has been dragged away - taken to Hoodie's woods to decay, I presume, or someone will cut it up there.
Just outside of town I have to stop, to allow a deer to cross in front of me. It has come out of a field of soy beans, it enters the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water.
I can see now that it looks dark to the northwest and all of a sudden the east has closed itself up. The sky is gone; clouds remain, the sun a bright splotch behind them.
Either you are on auto-pilot on a day like this, grinding your way through, or you are committed to paying attention. "Sort of paying attention" is like "a little bit pregnant."
A woman walks her dog along Highway E north of Union Street. She has worked up a sweat. Sweat soaks through her T-shirt. She strides determinedly - up and down, up and down. Her dog at the end of its leash does not pay her bouncing much attention but follows its nose.
A police officer is at a home along Watson Street in Ripon, talking with a man and woman out front. They stand circled around a large lawn ornament that has been thrown over and broken.
The universe abhors a vacuum and the ruffian's mind abhors someone else's beauty. You can almost bet there was testosterone involved, or alcohol, or both.
-------------------
THANKS....
To the following folks for their recent generous contributions to the Vagabond Expedition:
90. Anonymous #5, Minnesota.
91. Susan Czarnionka, Maine.
>
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004 - CONTINUED
3:00 p.m. I'm still fifty-some miles east of Council Bluffs. The western sky has clouded. The wind finds its way even so. The day has not cooled.
I stop at a wayside and take a forty-minute nap. I hate to lose the driving time but - worse - I hate the notion of falling asleep and running off the road. So I do what I promised Mary I would do - I rest my eyes closed.
Now the clouds to the west seem to be stirring up a blow. I'm headed for whatever is coming at me.
Such a long drive as this gives you quite the cross-section of America. I am in the middle of the middle of it.
Now we cross the wide Missouri into Nebraska, "The Good Life." 4:10 p.m. "Lincoln, Left Lanes," the signs say.
I am headed towards an embankment of thunderheads. We are starting to lose the sun. It is only 4:21 p.m.
The sky to the northwest is a very dark velour.
Ha! There's the Platte River - "a mile wide and an inch deep," they've said. Out here a river can be nearly as wide as it wishes to be. This is Nebraska; what's going to stop it?
This eastern Nebraska corn stands a foot tall. The landscape between Omaha and Lincoln is as green as Iowa, as Wisconsin.
Now it looks as if the storm ahead has split - some to the north, some to the south. Dead ahead, blue sky is visible, a bank of clouds farther on. Lincoln, 22 miles.
Except that there are not near enough trees, this could be Wisconsin, yes.
Hang-down heavy blue to the north. Openness ahead. Wind. I am driving the seam of the storm, riding that spine. Lincoln next seven exists.
I can see Nebraska plates, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. We cross Salt Creek together at 80 m.p.h. And we're not the fastest drivers out here, by any means.
Lincoln sprawls like a tired whore, long-limbed and loose, spread across everything she can reach.
5:00 p.m. I am driving into sunshine. The storms have slid by me and are behind me now. There is only the green swarm of landscape, that and a few puffs of cloud.
I-80 shines like a liquid ribbon - traffic going west, coming east, the gleam of sun on glass and steel. There are a lot of semis running this stretch of highway. It is Sunday afternoon. Truck-drivers always like to get a little jump on the week ahead, so it's not surprising to see so many of them today.
5:12 p.m. Nothing to the west now but a faint haze, moisture hanging. Ahead of me the clouds are entirely gone.
Big irrigation rigs stand out here near the Beaver Crossing exit. Farmers, out working their fields on this now bright Sunday afternoon, raise some little dust. The only storm clouds are in my rear view mirror. Out here Nebraska is as flat as the lanes of a bowling alley. A storm can roll across it like a strike-bound ball, knock down everything in sight. Out in the open like this, the farm boys stand a fair chance of catching their girls.
I pass an ambulance from Kearney, Nebraska, which is headed towards home. The fellow in the passenger seat appears to be sleeping. A woman drives it, determined.
5:40 p.m. I have not seen the country between the York and Grand Island exits before, here along I-80. It is new territory, though the landscape is familiar - what I'm seeing, what I will see, looks a lot like what I've seen for the past forty-six miles. Nebraska has a lot of that. I am within two hours of Smith Center now, I believe, or nearly so. I am going through Red Cloud, Nebraska, on my way; perhaps I'll stop and have supper in Willa Cather's home town.
Damn, these fields of corn stretch a long way west. And fields of soybeans. This is news to the Iowa farm boy.
I have really got a lump in my throat for this part of America, for the farmers who planted these fields of corn and beans, for the women who love the farmers, for their parents and their children. The fields roll on and on. The land gets worked, gets worked again. The generations turn. We lose one, we gain another one. We gain and lose and things work out pretty much as they're supposed to. The land rolls on and on.
Some of the communities out here get exits off the interstate; some of them don't. Who plays God's hand?
How many dead raccoon have I seen today? More than thirty-five, less than fifty? How many dead deer? Twenty-five?
6:08 p.m. The shine of the moving highway in this light. Ah!
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 21, 1998
A thunderstorm rolled through last night low-down and dirty - it knocked out power about 11:30 p.m. and power is still out! What a wonderful welcome for the four "Up with People" kids staying with us for the week. One from New Hampshire; one from Moorhead, Minnesota, to whom thunderstorms should be nothing new; one from Denmark; and one from Switzerland. They have been together in the program since January; they have just had a three-week break and are back at it with one city under their belt - La Crosse - and Fond du Lac the second city on this leg of the tour. English is the universal language and is very well spoken by the red-headed Danish young lady and by the Swiss lad. It hardly seems fair that all the world must speak English to communicate - but we Americans didn't make this happen by ourselves. I'm sure the British empire went some ways towards making the world English-speaking. At least we have a lively language and - pretty much - a sufficient vocabulary - partly because we so easily steal and transmute what we don't have but need. Potlatch is one such example; to capture the concept we had to capture the word. Is canyon another?
The girl from New Hampshire asked how many people live in Fairwater. "All of them," I said. "We put the dead ones in the cemetery."
Quite a storm came through. Some large branches down at our end of the street, with a lot of leaves and other debris. You almost think the morning can repair itself - a mourning dove calls - then I see a very large tree down across the other end of Washington Street in Fairwater. The Power Company is there, cutting it up. It is the reason our power went out, having fallen across our power lines. In a yard in downtown Fairwater, another tree is uprooted.
The air clings unpleasantly. Two blackbirds harass a crow. The rye straw, I see, has been baled.
North of Fairwater, all the way to Ripon, it appears the trees did not feel the fury of our storm. The corn looks undamaged as well.
As I turn onto Watson Street in Ripon, a pretty girl smiles at me. A bright start to this day.
*
JULY 22, 1998
It wants to be a dark and cloudy day, wants to talk like thunder - but not very badly; in the east there is still a little blue sky.
There are enough branches at curbside along Washington Street this morning to make the village look like a war zone. There is a brown scar along the asphalt where a large tree trunk has been dragged away - taken to Hoodie's woods to decay, I presume, or someone will cut it up there.
Just outside of town I have to stop, to allow a deer to cross in front of me. It has come out of a field of soy beans, it enters the field where the canning factory sprays its waste water.
I can see now that it looks dark to the northwest and all of a sudden the east has closed itself up. The sky is gone; clouds remain, the sun a bright splotch behind them.
Either you are on auto-pilot on a day like this, grinding your way through, or you are committed to paying attention. "Sort of paying attention" is like "a little bit pregnant."
A woman walks her dog along Highway E north of Union Street. She has worked up a sweat. Sweat soaks through her T-shirt. She strides determinedly - up and down, up and down. Her dog at the end of its leash does not pay her bouncing much attention but follows its nose.
A police officer is at a home along Watson Street in Ripon, talking with a man and woman out front. They stand circled around a large lawn ornament that has been thrown over and broken.
The universe abhors a vacuum and the ruffian's mind abhors someone else's beauty. You can almost bet there was testosterone involved, or alcohol, or both.
-------------------
THANKS....
To the following folks for their recent generous contributions to the Vagabond Expedition:
90. Anonymous #5, Minnesota.
91. Susan Czarnionka, Maine.
>
Saturday, July 24, 2004
SATURDAY'S POEMS
----------------------------
FORMAGGIO
by Loren Kleinman
The cheese is born: Mozzarella di Bufala,
Erborinati de Pecora, Pecorino Toscano.
A soft Robiola ripens in a leaf. A Caciocavallo Podolico
ages in the grottoes. The cheese should reflect
the diet of the animal from which it was birthed,
the sea salt rubbed on its crust, the stone grotto beside the dairy,
the hands of the women who shape it -
these signoras, how they watch the milk and rennet
heat over an open fire, how they scoop the gentle white curds
into molds and softly press out the whey with their palms.
These cheeses are alive, given an origin by the affinatore.
They are given a soul. Their lives are shaped from the beginning,
turned out of their molds, some taken from the ground,
hung from thick ropes - to break apart, grate over
broccoli rabe and orecchiette. Locals eat it as is -
no pepper, vinegar, or oil. It is a test of faith.
*
JESTEM
by Loren Kleinman
Tomorrow you will be in another country.
I do not know if the moon sleeps there,
how it will divide you between here and there,
yes and no, stay and go. How it will want to live inside of you.
Like I do. This moon. How it will hang over your body.
Keep you captive. You will want it to leave you alone
and you will want it to stay, to say your name before mine.
You will try to sleep, but you think of the place you were born,
your dead mother, your father, your uncles.
The night will show you its face, how you will remember
our faces, kept awake, whispering over and over:
I am never going to forget you. You will remember
the poems, how I read to you, how I turned to you:
this is for you, this opening.
Loren Kleinman's work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Upstage, Poetry Motel, Promise Magazine, Split Shot: A Journal of Literary Art, Hipnosis: New Jersey's Art and Entertainment Magazine, Aspirations: The Art of Writing, The M.A.G, Sol Magazine, Conception, Karawane, In Other Words, and Destination Anywhere, as well as other journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet at Ramapo College for Women's History Month, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Nuyorican Poets Café, and more. Kleinman was nominated for the 2000 Pushcart Prize (best of the small presses), for her manuscript, Up, Down, Sideways, and Across; and the 2003 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Cooking in Tongues.” Her book, Flamenco Sketches, was the winner of the 2002 Spire Press Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her next collection I Want No Paradise and is the Poetry/Reviews Assistant Editor for Sidereality.
----------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Harriet Brown, "Speaking Midwestern" and "Where We Went" - July 10, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Judith Strasser, "Apostle Islands History" and "County Road" - July 17, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004
o Complete index to poems here
>
----------------------------
FORMAGGIO
by Loren Kleinman
The cheese is born: Mozzarella di Bufala,
Erborinati de Pecora, Pecorino Toscano.
A soft Robiola ripens in a leaf. A Caciocavallo Podolico
ages in the grottoes. The cheese should reflect
the diet of the animal from which it was birthed,
the sea salt rubbed on its crust, the stone grotto beside the dairy,
the hands of the women who shape it -
these signoras, how they watch the milk and rennet
heat over an open fire, how they scoop the gentle white curds
into molds and softly press out the whey with their palms.
These cheeses are alive, given an origin by the affinatore.
They are given a soul. Their lives are shaped from the beginning,
turned out of their molds, some taken from the ground,
hung from thick ropes - to break apart, grate over
broccoli rabe and orecchiette. Locals eat it as is -
no pepper, vinegar, or oil. It is a test of faith.
*
JESTEM
by Loren Kleinman
Tomorrow you will be in another country.
I do not know if the moon sleeps there,
how it will divide you between here and there,
yes and no, stay and go. How it will want to live inside of you.
Like I do. This moon. How it will hang over your body.
Keep you captive. You will want it to leave you alone
and you will want it to stay, to say your name before mine.
You will try to sleep, but you think of the place you were born,
your dead mother, your father, your uncles.
The night will show you its face, how you will remember
our faces, kept awake, whispering over and over:
I am never going to forget you. You will remember
the poems, how I read to you, how I turned to you:
this is for you, this opening.
Loren Kleinman's work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Upstage, Poetry Motel, Promise Magazine, Split Shot: A Journal of Literary Art, Hipnosis: New Jersey's Art and Entertainment Magazine, Aspirations: The Art of Writing, The M.A.G, Sol Magazine, Conception, Karawane, In Other Words, and Destination Anywhere, as well as other journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet at Ramapo College for Women's History Month, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Nuyorican Poets Café, and more. Kleinman was nominated for the 2000 Pushcart Prize (best of the small presses), for her manuscript, Up, Down, Sideways, and Across; and the 2003 Pushcart Prize for her poem “Cooking in Tongues.” Her book, Flamenco Sketches, was the winner of the 2002 Spire Press Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her next collection I Want No Paradise and is the Poetry/Reviews Assistant Editor for Sidereality.
----------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Harriet Brown, "Speaking Midwestern" and "Where We Went" - July 10, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Judith Strasser, "Apostle Islands History" and "County Road" - July 17, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004
o Complete index to poems here
>
Friday, July 23, 2004
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004
7:30 a.m. It's a foggy morning - fog, or another kind of hanging moisture. I think of the plains of Africa. The sun is trying to burn through, as if the sky's on fire. What water is not in the air is pooled in the low spots in the fields.
The crops will never recover entirely.
You don't know if it's going to rain or shine. It's a roll of the die, it's luck of the draw.
I'm headed to Smith Center, Kansas, for a week. That's by design.
You have to imagine what it means, because it doesn't know. A fellow walks from his house to the corner of his lawn. His shirt seems dirty, his hair is mussed. He is not walking square to the world. He pushes and the world pushes back. I don't know why he's walking across the lawn, perhaps with a cup of coffee in his hand. It is Sunday morning; the morning lays on him like fog; he carries it; he goes on. As do we all.
The air grows heavy. Rain hits the windshield like darkness. One pushes into it. These things we do, some of them we do by choice.
The sun breaks through the haze, a temporary victory. I am going to put on 830 miles today making this drive. I could see any weather, every weather, between here and Smith Center. There were tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas yesterday. To the southwest, the sky is still dark.
Today, on this long grey drive, I'm thinking that anybody could tell these stories. I'm nothing special for trying to tell them; anybody could do it. Yet the question would be - if I don't tell them, who will? What may be special is my desire to tell them. My doggedness. It's a strange mixture - my interest, the requisite poetry in these lives, my adequate prose for the telling. One does not choose such work so much as the work chooses him.
9:10 a.m. Seventeen miles from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. A spatter of rain. A car from Kansas passes me. We are headed in the same rough direction. We move for different purposes, at different speeds. I drive not hard, but steady. I am a dogged traveler, the determined vagabond. Who else would enjoy an 830 miles trek?
The drive from Fairwater to Smith Center is a diagonal across the heart of the middle west. What I see today, that is what we are, isn't it? Now it is greenness, now greyness. Tree and ditches and fields. Haze and rain and water standing. Southwestern Wisconsin is so pretty in this light, it could be any tourist's destination.
I am not particularly interested in pretty, yet I am not put off by it. Rather, I think we learn more by observing the ordinary, the plain, the mundane. To find the story in the ordinary is to find the real story. Yet the ordinary story does not tell itself; you must seduce it. You have to tease it out as it teases you.
11:00 a.m. West of Dubuque on Highway 151. Bare sky is showing. The day has brightened. I've had another cup of coffee; I'm wired for a few hundred miles more. Heavy coffee, I call it: a cup of black coffee from a convenience store, spiked with a few spoonsful of instant coffee from the jar I keep in the glove compartment. It works its caffeine magic.
A rich odor of manure at Cascade, Iowa. There is a large pen of cattle here; they're being fattened for the slaughterhouse. This is where your steak comes from. The smell of the cattle pen is as large as the sky.
The Iowa corn is ten inches to a foot tall already.
12 Noon. I'm south of Cedar Rapids on I-380, headed for I-80, headed for Des Moines, Omaha, Lincoln. Driving the long miles west.
On I-80 a hundred and four miles east of Des Moines. Such a brimming greenness. Beans and corn, ditches and trees. Greenness on the heavy breeze.
12:30 p.m. I've passed the North English-Marengo exit. The sky is mostly blue now. A long cloud is stretched across the western sky as if something ends and begins at that place. Puffs of clouds to this side of it, to the other side.
2:00 p.m. I'm west of Des Moines. I've got less than a quarter tank of gas left. I'd like to find a little bit of something to eat. I'll stop in Van Meter, Iowa, at the convenience store. Van Meter is home of the Bob Fuller Museum. It is home of the 2003 1-A state baseball champs. The community is a mile from the interstate. The lights and bell on the railroad crossing are malfunctioning, stuck constantly on - clang, clang, clang, clang. I'm in town only long enough to fill the car with gasoline and get some orange juice and an ice cream sandwich, and already the racket has given me a headache.
It is getting hot out. The sky is absolutely blue.
About eighty miles east of Council Bluffs the land rolls about like a restless sleeper, up and down, up and down. It's like a green machine, pumping.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 17, 1998
Last night two of our cats went through the screen on the dining room door, out onto the patio, to show a stray cat - the stray cat? - just whose place this is. Obviously, our two cats think it is theirs. The discussion, I'm told - since I was asleep - was long and loud. When it was over, my wife found the larger, male cat lounging on the front porch, surveying his kingdom. We'll have to repair the screen, but the rest of the house seems well protected. The stray is not in our driveway today.
Human beings are just as territorial of their space, their place, just as protective, aren't they? Stepping onto my property is trespass; the discussion will take place in court. Sometimes we think we are superior to the animals, when in reality the principles we find there apply to us as well. We ignore those principles at our own peril.
Is that my hawk half-hidden in the leaves of the big tree out in the middle of the field? Will my wishing make it so?
The green of all the fields shines today, really shines!
A farmer in his striped overalls and a baseball cap, an older man, walks out to the road to check his mailbox. He has a five quart plastic bucket in his hand. He is really on his way to pick berries, isn't he, in the cool of the morning.
Long shadows in Ripon - houses in their morning shade.
*
JULY 20, 1998
We try to make things make sense, don't we? Because we can understand, we tell ourselves that things can be understood. If only we can unlock the meaning, if only we can cipher sense into a random occurrence of events, a random smashing of molecules, then we can quiet our restless heart which wants to know "Why."
We are human because we can ask "Why." But we are foolish humans to think that every time we ask, there will or should be an answer. Sometimes we are simply the piece of straw picked up and driven into the telephone pole - there is no "meaning" in that. It just is. Not even God will tell you why that happened here, now. It makes sense on the level of simple physics; it does not seem to make sense when we look at it through the lens of the question "Why." Random shards of pottery do not make a whole pot, no matter how much we wish them to.
There was a little rain during the night, at 3:00 a.m., say. I could hear it behind the whirr of the fan pulling cool air into the house, I could see its sheen in the street light. The world refreshed itself. This is not a desert, no matter how much some of the village youngsters might think it is. They want to get the hell out of Fairwater. Someday they will want to come back and they will not be able to. I have been able to choose the village, and Mary has, and it fits us. It does not fit our daughters - one of them is working in the city now, the other is in school in Montana. We have lost at least one of them to the mountains. Isn't that the flatlander's greatest sadness, to lose a daughter to the mountains? And - having rejected the city - to lose another daughter to the city?
A mourning dove takes off from the driveway. Dew condensed on the windshield of the pick-up. Sun and blue sky. July is perfect, just perfect. Leave me here, let me be.
Perhaps that was not the hawk I saw in the tree last week. That spot of coloration is in the same place again today, exactly.
At Sina's pig farm, the smell of money, the acrid smell of pig manure cutting the blue air.
A skunk dead on the road. We could wish it were not so, but to make it not so we'd have to get rid of some of our roads, wouldn't we?
The goat at Five Corners has dug himself a fox hole. At the intersection itself, the flowers are in full dress uniform - so much beauty, unsung at a rural crossroad.
In Ripon, a woman stands at the fence in front of the motel. She is drinking her morning coffee. She must be on vacation, for she is as bright as the day, enjoying the morning, watching the traffic pass, the sun on her, the wind wrapping itself around the soft folds of her clothes, playing with her hair. She takes another sip of coffee.
And I go on, go to work. Dammit. Dammit on a fine day.
>
DRIVING TO SMITH CENTER, KANSAS
JUNE 13, 2004
7:30 a.m. It's a foggy morning - fog, or another kind of hanging moisture. I think of the plains of Africa. The sun is trying to burn through, as if the sky's on fire. What water is not in the air is pooled in the low spots in the fields.
The crops will never recover entirely.
You don't know if it's going to rain or shine. It's a roll of the die, it's luck of the draw.
I'm headed to Smith Center, Kansas, for a week. That's by design.
You have to imagine what it means, because it doesn't know. A fellow walks from his house to the corner of his lawn. His shirt seems dirty, his hair is mussed. He is not walking square to the world. He pushes and the world pushes back. I don't know why he's walking across the lawn, perhaps with a cup of coffee in his hand. It is Sunday morning; the morning lays on him like fog; he carries it; he goes on. As do we all.
The air grows heavy. Rain hits the windshield like darkness. One pushes into it. These things we do, some of them we do by choice.
The sun breaks through the haze, a temporary victory. I am going to put on 830 miles today making this drive. I could see any weather, every weather, between here and Smith Center. There were tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas yesterday. To the southwest, the sky is still dark.
Today, on this long grey drive, I'm thinking that anybody could tell these stories. I'm nothing special for trying to tell them; anybody could do it. Yet the question would be - if I don't tell them, who will? What may be special is my desire to tell them. My doggedness. It's a strange mixture - my interest, the requisite poetry in these lives, my adequate prose for the telling. One does not choose such work so much as the work chooses him.
9:10 a.m. Seventeen miles from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. A spatter of rain. A car from Kansas passes me. We are headed in the same rough direction. We move for different purposes, at different speeds. I drive not hard, but steady. I am a dogged traveler, the determined vagabond. Who else would enjoy an 830 miles trek?
The drive from Fairwater to Smith Center is a diagonal across the heart of the middle west. What I see today, that is what we are, isn't it? Now it is greenness, now greyness. Tree and ditches and fields. Haze and rain and water standing. Southwestern Wisconsin is so pretty in this light, it could be any tourist's destination.
I am not particularly interested in pretty, yet I am not put off by it. Rather, I think we learn more by observing the ordinary, the plain, the mundane. To find the story in the ordinary is to find the real story. Yet the ordinary story does not tell itself; you must seduce it. You have to tease it out as it teases you.
11:00 a.m. West of Dubuque on Highway 151. Bare sky is showing. The day has brightened. I've had another cup of coffee; I'm wired for a few hundred miles more. Heavy coffee, I call it: a cup of black coffee from a convenience store, spiked with a few spoonsful of instant coffee from the jar I keep in the glove compartment. It works its caffeine magic.
A rich odor of manure at Cascade, Iowa. There is a large pen of cattle here; they're being fattened for the slaughterhouse. This is where your steak comes from. The smell of the cattle pen is as large as the sky.
The Iowa corn is ten inches to a foot tall already.
12 Noon. I'm south of Cedar Rapids on I-380, headed for I-80, headed for Des Moines, Omaha, Lincoln. Driving the long miles west.
On I-80 a hundred and four miles east of Des Moines. Such a brimming greenness. Beans and corn, ditches and trees. Greenness on the heavy breeze.
12:30 p.m. I've passed the North English-Marengo exit. The sky is mostly blue now. A long cloud is stretched across the western sky as if something ends and begins at that place. Puffs of clouds to this side of it, to the other side.
2:00 p.m. I'm west of Des Moines. I've got less than a quarter tank of gas left. I'd like to find a little bit of something to eat. I'll stop in Van Meter, Iowa, at the convenience store. Van Meter is home of the Bob Fuller Museum. It is home of the 2003 1-A state baseball champs. The community is a mile from the interstate. The lights and bell on the railroad crossing are malfunctioning, stuck constantly on - clang, clang, clang, clang. I'm in town only long enough to fill the car with gasoline and get some orange juice and an ice cream sandwich, and already the racket has given me a headache.
It is getting hot out. The sky is absolutely blue.
About eighty miles east of Council Bluffs the land rolls about like a restless sleeper, up and down, up and down. It's like a green machine, pumping.
To be continued....
----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 17, 1998
Last night two of our cats went through the screen on the dining room door, out onto the patio, to show a stray cat - the stray cat? - just whose place this is. Obviously, our two cats think it is theirs. The discussion, I'm told - since I was asleep - was long and loud. When it was over, my wife found the larger, male cat lounging on the front porch, surveying his kingdom. We'll have to repair the screen, but the rest of the house seems well protected. The stray is not in our driveway today.
Human beings are just as territorial of their space, their place, just as protective, aren't they? Stepping onto my property is trespass; the discussion will take place in court. Sometimes we think we are superior to the animals, when in reality the principles we find there apply to us as well. We ignore those principles at our own peril.
Is that my hawk half-hidden in the leaves of the big tree out in the middle of the field? Will my wishing make it so?
The green of all the fields shines today, really shines!
A farmer in his striped overalls and a baseball cap, an older man, walks out to the road to check his mailbox. He has a five quart plastic bucket in his hand. He is really on his way to pick berries, isn't he, in the cool of the morning.
Long shadows in Ripon - houses in their morning shade.
*
JULY 20, 1998
We try to make things make sense, don't we? Because we can understand, we tell ourselves that things can be understood. If only we can unlock the meaning, if only we can cipher sense into a random occurrence of events, a random smashing of molecules, then we can quiet our restless heart which wants to know "Why."
We are human because we can ask "Why." But we are foolish humans to think that every time we ask, there will or should be an answer. Sometimes we are simply the piece of straw picked up and driven into the telephone pole - there is no "meaning" in that. It just is. Not even God will tell you why that happened here, now. It makes sense on the level of simple physics; it does not seem to make sense when we look at it through the lens of the question "Why." Random shards of pottery do not make a whole pot, no matter how much we wish them to.
There was a little rain during the night, at 3:00 a.m., say. I could hear it behind the whirr of the fan pulling cool air into the house, I could see its sheen in the street light. The world refreshed itself. This is not a desert, no matter how much some of the village youngsters might think it is. They want to get the hell out of Fairwater. Someday they will want to come back and they will not be able to. I have been able to choose the village, and Mary has, and it fits us. It does not fit our daughters - one of them is working in the city now, the other is in school in Montana. We have lost at least one of them to the mountains. Isn't that the flatlander's greatest sadness, to lose a daughter to the mountains? And - having rejected the city - to lose another daughter to the city?
A mourning dove takes off from the driveway. Dew condensed on the windshield of the pick-up. Sun and blue sky. July is perfect, just perfect. Leave me here, let me be.
Perhaps that was not the hawk I saw in the tree last week. That spot of coloration is in the same place again today, exactly.
At Sina's pig farm, the smell of money, the acrid smell of pig manure cutting the blue air.
A skunk dead on the road. We could wish it were not so, but to make it not so we'd have to get rid of some of our roads, wouldn't we?
The goat at Five Corners has dug himself a fox hole. At the intersection itself, the flowers are in full dress uniform - so much beauty, unsung at a rural crossroad.
In Ripon, a woman stands at the fence in front of the motel. She is drinking her morning coffee. She must be on vacation, for she is as bright as the day, enjoying the morning, watching the traffic pass, the sun on her, the wind wrapping itself around the soft folds of her clothes, playing with her hair. She takes another sip of coffee.
And I go on, go to work. Dammit. Dammit on a fine day.
>
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
GONE TO CURLEW, IOWA
BACK TO BLOGGING ON JULY 23
Upon my return, I'll start reporting my June trip to Smith Center, Kansas. In the mean-time, enjoy (below) a healthy installment from the Echo Echo by Ivan Burgess of Smith Center. Ivan is the lone Democratic voice in Smith Center's "As the Bladder Fills Club." You'll hear more about the "As the Bladder Fills" fellows in coming weeks.
--------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART TEN
This is final part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
Interestingly, Pearl especially appreciates the writing of Henry David Thoreau. "He writes about nature," she said, "the things you see right out there. You know what his love was - well, that's my love, the out-of-doors. That's why I am living here. I might not really be capable of living here by myself, and yet I do. This is the loveliest place in the world. I grew up here with nature. I know every inch of this seventy-six acre farm. I've picked berries, I've shocked wheat, I've brought in the cows and milked them. There's an old song: 'I ain't got nobody, nobody cares for me. I ain't got nobody, so I'm going back to the farm, to milk the cows and feed the chickens and I don't give a good gosh darn.' That's where I am in a way, but then I also have so many people who love me and respect me and keep in touch with me all the time. That's why I'm alive."
"What would it take to move you from this place?" I asked.
"When I breathe my last," Pearl said. "I would be lost - it'd be like sitting in jail to be in a retirement home."
"What if you lived in a different house or apartment?"
"I wouldn't have the closeness of all these friends and relation, and the out-of-doors that I have here," Pearl said. "So many interesting little things happen here. Walk to the door there and hear 'bob-white.'"
I asked Pearl about the characteristics of the people of the area. She said her high school class had high expectations: "From that class, there were two nurses, two doctors, two teachers, a couple farmers. Nineteen people in my class and they went to all walks of life. A musician. A dramatist. We have a couple little grandmothers, too. And one became a specialist in candy-making; her grand-daughter right now is running her candy business. She's known for her chocolates."
"Ambition, yes," Pearl said, "and we had potential."
Pearl's mother was more forward-looking, her father more conservative, which Pearl thinks is a common split in the people of the area - some progressive, and some not so progressive.
Ninety-nine percent of the people, Pearl said, were "staunch citizens, thinking of their fellow man, working together, and have a view of community, from the mayor of the town clear down to the lowest position you could have. And they are all equal - they live together, they understand one another, they're not fighting."
"I'm a great believer in that sort of thing, living with your fellow man," Pearl added. She quoted a poem she'd learned in the sixth grade, in which a fellow's name was not written in the "golden book" as one who loved the Lord. "Then write that I love my fellow man," the fellow said to the angel with the book. And the next night when the angel appeared again, the fellow's name was in the book of those whom the Lord has blessed, and "it led all the rest." He loved his fellow man.
Then Pearl said: "I suppose I shouldn't record this. People ask, 'Pearl, why did you never marry?'"
I said: "Pearl, why did you never marry?"
Pearl said: "I never had time."
She said: "I had plenty of boyfriends. I could laugh. I had a sense of humor. Knew what was going on in the world. Liked education. Education has been my field. If there is anything left to my estate when I am gone, it's going to scholarships, to education. Education - that will put the world on top, that and taking care of your fellow man. That's my philosophy."
-----------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"Do you know the three most important things for having a winning football team," Ivan asked. "Offensive line, offensive line, and offensive line."
"Someone," Ivan said, "I don't know who it was, I don't think I'd ever heard of him, but someone once said 'if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.' Well, don't be lookin' for anyone to be battering Jack Benn's door down. Jack has been having a coon problem down at his place on West Court Street. So Jack put on his best outdoor game face and set a trap for the coon. In the middle of the night Jack got up and went outside to run his trap line. One of the neighborhood cats was in the trap eating the coon food and the coon was up on the bird feeder stuffing himself on sunflower seeds."
"At Paul's Cafe last Monday," Ivan said, "they had twelve kinds of pie listed. If I was a waitress and someone asked me what kind of pie I had, I would tell him: we got one crust and two crust, cream and fruit. Then let him order."
"Darren Meyer got caught up in that dreaded sequence web," Ivan reported. "You know how that works. First Darren made a new sign for Lasting Impressions. He done such a good job of that, his wife insisted that he repair the front steps. And, of course, he done an outsanding job of that. Now Darren don't know it yet, but the next project is a new front door. There is only one way to avoid the dreaded sequence web - that is to do such a poor job on the first project that the wife don't ask you to do the second project. I don't know why these young married husbands never learn that."
"And another thing," Ivan said. "As expensive as lumber is, it is kind of hard to realize it grows on trees."
"Bruce Miles wondered," Ivan said, "if, when you hit a honey bee at seventy miles per hour, is that glob on the windshield honey? Fortunately Elizabeth Ohmstede, the bee lady, was there. She said part of it was honey and part of it was guts."
"When I was a kid," Ivan said, "I used to hear old people talking about the weather being 'close." That was on the days when the humidity was high. Well, last week there was a couple days that could be described as 'close.'"
"I see a driver's ed car around town." Ivan said. "So must be having a driver's ed course at the local school. My driver's ed consisted of getting in, starting the motor, and letting out the clutch. Lettin' out that clutch would cause some buckin' and jumpin' but when you got her smoothed out, you were a driver."
"Last Tuesday morning I heard three different amounts of rain," Ivan reported. "I gave each one of them my stock answer - 'that's about what I had.' It's just so much simpler to say 'that's about what I had' than to go slogging out to the rain gauge and trying to read the amount in these plastic gauges that are hard to see through."
"You can always tell when you sweet corn is ready," Ivan said. "It is ready the day after the coons have stripped all the ears off the stalk."
"By fall of the year," Ivan said, "I always lock my car so people won't be putting turnips in." [Ivan, in Wisconsin, it's zucchini. You no more than turn your back or run into the convenience store for a soda and you come out there's a bushel of zucchini in your back seat.]
"A brunch had to be invented by a woman," Ivan wrote. "You can't have breakfast because she is going to a brunch. You don't have dinner because she has been to a brunch."
"The thing I like about the Fourth of July," Ivan said, "is that it is the last holiday until September 6th. The older I get, the more that holidays screw up my entire schedule. There is nothing I like better or that is more comfortable to me than routine. I hate being forced out of my routine."
"Stay ahead of the possed," Ivan always closes.
-----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 15, 1998
The air is still so humid you can see the moisture in it. Out here, the humidity is like a wall in the distance, a blue wall that marks the edge of what we can see. It's supposed to be hot again today. Our July weather is right on schedule.
At the corner of Highway E and Sheldon Road, the winter rye has been harvested. All that's left is straw. The only field of peas that had remained along Highway E has been harvested too.
In the field where once there had been water standing, where peas have since been taken, now there are hundreds of little white stakes set in rows. Don't ask me - I don't know.
At the Soda farm along Highway E south of Five Corners, the evidence is clear that one of the big outbuildings and a small one burned yesterday.
*
JULY 16, 1998
Speed and scale are interrelated. Driving sixty miles per hour, the telephone poles are closer together - it's only when you're walking that you recognize how far apart they are. A conestoga wagon headed west - the hopeful settler sees the wide open spaces reaching beyond forever. From a jet, the view of the open space of the west is reduced; we can cross in an hour or two or three what used to take a very long summer.
In car or pick-up, you do not get the same sense of the road as you do walking, when you notice every hill. You do not get to hear the plants and animals talking. Because you remove yourself from "land time" when climbing into an automobile, your senses are altered - it is the large you notice, not the small and quiet. The anger of the red-wing blackbird - you can't feel it as you travel in a fast-moving vehicle. The kreee of the hawk - can you hear it? Because we miss these things in passing, we come to think they are not there, or are not important.
When we slow to a walk, we see how much different the world becomes.
A neighbor has water spraying across his lawn. I would not do that. Having a lawn to take care of is bad enough - you don't want to encourage it.
Again this morning - a dove in the driveway. Sun on the house is blood ripe red.
Sea gulls are flocking in the fields along Highway E, awaiting our plague of locusts perhaps. They've been here more than a week, I think, and the flock seems to be getting larger.
The leaves on the corn are curled tight. Does the corn wish for water? It was warm again yesterday. Today is not expected to be so hot as it has been.
There are three crows on the Ripon High School football field. They are talking a game all their own, calling plays I don't understand.
>
BACK TO BLOGGING ON JULY 23
Upon my return, I'll start reporting my June trip to Smith Center, Kansas. In the mean-time, enjoy (below) a healthy installment from the Echo Echo by Ivan Burgess of Smith Center. Ivan is the lone Democratic voice in Smith Center's "As the Bladder Fills Club." You'll hear more about the "As the Bladder Fills" fellows in coming weeks.
--------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART TEN
This is final part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
Interestingly, Pearl especially appreciates the writing of Henry David Thoreau. "He writes about nature," she said, "the things you see right out there. You know what his love was - well, that's my love, the out-of-doors. That's why I am living here. I might not really be capable of living here by myself, and yet I do. This is the loveliest place in the world. I grew up here with nature. I know every inch of this seventy-six acre farm. I've picked berries, I've shocked wheat, I've brought in the cows and milked them. There's an old song: 'I ain't got nobody, nobody cares for me. I ain't got nobody, so I'm going back to the farm, to milk the cows and feed the chickens and I don't give a good gosh darn.' That's where I am in a way, but then I also have so many people who love me and respect me and keep in touch with me all the time. That's why I'm alive."
"What would it take to move you from this place?" I asked.
"When I breathe my last," Pearl said. "I would be lost - it'd be like sitting in jail to be in a retirement home."
"What if you lived in a different house or apartment?"
"I wouldn't have the closeness of all these friends and relation, and the out-of-doors that I have here," Pearl said. "So many interesting little things happen here. Walk to the door there and hear 'bob-white.'"
I asked Pearl about the characteristics of the people of the area. She said her high school class had high expectations: "From that class, there were two nurses, two doctors, two teachers, a couple farmers. Nineteen people in my class and they went to all walks of life. A musician. A dramatist. We have a couple little grandmothers, too. And one became a specialist in candy-making; her grand-daughter right now is running her candy business. She's known for her chocolates."
"Ambition, yes," Pearl said, "and we had potential."
Pearl's mother was more forward-looking, her father more conservative, which Pearl thinks is a common split in the people of the area - some progressive, and some not so progressive.
Ninety-nine percent of the people, Pearl said, were "staunch citizens, thinking of their fellow man, working together, and have a view of community, from the mayor of the town clear down to the lowest position you could have. And they are all equal - they live together, they understand one another, they're not fighting."
"I'm a great believer in that sort of thing, living with your fellow man," Pearl added. She quoted a poem she'd learned in the sixth grade, in which a fellow's name was not written in the "golden book" as one who loved the Lord. "Then write that I love my fellow man," the fellow said to the angel with the book. And the next night when the angel appeared again, the fellow's name was in the book of those whom the Lord has blessed, and "it led all the rest." He loved his fellow man.
Then Pearl said: "I suppose I shouldn't record this. People ask, 'Pearl, why did you never marry?'"
I said: "Pearl, why did you never marry?"
Pearl said: "I never had time."
She said: "I had plenty of boyfriends. I could laugh. I had a sense of humor. Knew what was going on in the world. Liked education. Education has been my field. If there is anything left to my estate when I am gone, it's going to scholarships, to education. Education - that will put the world on top, that and taking care of your fellow man. That's my philosophy."
-----------------------
THE TUESDAY REPORT
ON IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO
(501 W. Third #12, Smith Center, KS 66967)
"Do you know the three most important things for having a winning football team," Ivan asked. "Offensive line, offensive line, and offensive line."
"Someone," Ivan said, "I don't know who it was, I don't think I'd ever heard of him, but someone once said 'if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.' Well, don't be lookin' for anyone to be battering Jack Benn's door down. Jack has been having a coon problem down at his place on West Court Street. So Jack put on his best outdoor game face and set a trap for the coon. In the middle of the night Jack got up and went outside to run his trap line. One of the neighborhood cats was in the trap eating the coon food and the coon was up on the bird feeder stuffing himself on sunflower seeds."
"At Paul's Cafe last Monday," Ivan said, "they had twelve kinds of pie listed. If I was a waitress and someone asked me what kind of pie I had, I would tell him: we got one crust and two crust, cream and fruit. Then let him order."
"Darren Meyer got caught up in that dreaded sequence web," Ivan reported. "You know how that works. First Darren made a new sign for Lasting Impressions. He done such a good job of that, his wife insisted that he repair the front steps. And, of course, he done an outsanding job of that. Now Darren don't know it yet, but the next project is a new front door. There is only one way to avoid the dreaded sequence web - that is to do such a poor job on the first project that the wife don't ask you to do the second project. I don't know why these young married husbands never learn that."
"And another thing," Ivan said. "As expensive as lumber is, it is kind of hard to realize it grows on trees."
"Bruce Miles wondered," Ivan said, "if, when you hit a honey bee at seventy miles per hour, is that glob on the windshield honey? Fortunately Elizabeth Ohmstede, the bee lady, was there. She said part of it was honey and part of it was guts."
"When I was a kid," Ivan said, "I used to hear old people talking about the weather being 'close." That was on the days when the humidity was high. Well, last week there was a couple days that could be described as 'close.'"
"I see a driver's ed car around town." Ivan said. "So must be having a driver's ed course at the local school. My driver's ed consisted of getting in, starting the motor, and letting out the clutch. Lettin' out that clutch would cause some buckin' and jumpin' but when you got her smoothed out, you were a driver."
"Last Tuesday morning I heard three different amounts of rain," Ivan reported. "I gave each one of them my stock answer - 'that's about what I had.' It's just so much simpler to say 'that's about what I had' than to go slogging out to the rain gauge and trying to read the amount in these plastic gauges that are hard to see through."
"You can always tell when you sweet corn is ready," Ivan said. "It is ready the day after the coons have stripped all the ears off the stalk."
"By fall of the year," Ivan said, "I always lock my car so people won't be putting turnips in." [Ivan, in Wisconsin, it's zucchini. You no more than turn your back or run into the convenience store for a soda and you come out there's a bushel of zucchini in your back seat.]
"A brunch had to be invented by a woman," Ivan wrote. "You can't have breakfast because she is going to a brunch. You don't have dinner because she has been to a brunch."
"The thing I like about the Fourth of July," Ivan said, "is that it is the last holiday until September 6th. The older I get, the more that holidays screw up my entire schedule. There is nothing I like better or that is more comfortable to me than routine. I hate being forced out of my routine."
"Stay ahead of the possed," Ivan always closes.
-----------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 15, 1998
The air is still so humid you can see the moisture in it. Out here, the humidity is like a wall in the distance, a blue wall that marks the edge of what we can see. It's supposed to be hot again today. Our July weather is right on schedule.
At the corner of Highway E and Sheldon Road, the winter rye has been harvested. All that's left is straw. The only field of peas that had remained along Highway E has been harvested too.
In the field where once there had been water standing, where peas have since been taken, now there are hundreds of little white stakes set in rows. Don't ask me - I don't know.
At the Soda farm along Highway E south of Five Corners, the evidence is clear that one of the big outbuildings and a small one burned yesterday.
*
JULY 16, 1998
Speed and scale are interrelated. Driving sixty miles per hour, the telephone poles are closer together - it's only when you're walking that you recognize how far apart they are. A conestoga wagon headed west - the hopeful settler sees the wide open spaces reaching beyond forever. From a jet, the view of the open space of the west is reduced; we can cross in an hour or two or three what used to take a very long summer.
In car or pick-up, you do not get the same sense of the road as you do walking, when you notice every hill. You do not get to hear the plants and animals talking. Because you remove yourself from "land time" when climbing into an automobile, your senses are altered - it is the large you notice, not the small and quiet. The anger of the red-wing blackbird - you can't feel it as you travel in a fast-moving vehicle. The kreee of the hawk - can you hear it? Because we miss these things in passing, we come to think they are not there, or are not important.
When we slow to a walk, we see how much different the world becomes.
A neighbor has water spraying across his lawn. I would not do that. Having a lawn to take care of is bad enough - you don't want to encourage it.
Again this morning - a dove in the driveway. Sun on the house is blood ripe red.
Sea gulls are flocking in the fields along Highway E, awaiting our plague of locusts perhaps. They've been here more than a week, I think, and the flock seems to be getting larger.
The leaves on the corn are curled tight. Does the corn wish for water? It was warm again yesterday. Today is not expected to be so hot as it has been.
There are three crows on the Ripon High School football field. They are talking a game all their own, calling plays I don't understand.
>
Monday, July 19, 2004
VISIT TO CURLEW, IOWA
JULY 20-22
After I put up tomorrow's post, I will leave for a short trip to Curlew, Iowa, my "hometown." The folks who bought the Joe Wilson house in Curlew live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, but they spend their vacations repairing, restoring, and refurbishing the house that my childhood friend Bryan Wilson grew up in. I have fond memories of the house, as is evident in my memoir, Curlew: Home. The house, as is the case of Curlew itself, has fallen into some disrepair over the years. Bryan Wilson was killed while serving a second tour of duty in Vietnam.
The owners of the Wilson house are working on it this week and next. They had invited me to visit them during their time in Curlew, to tour the house. I've offered to spend a day helping them. So I'll drive out to Curlew tomorrow after posting here, work with them in the house on Wednesday, drive home on Thursday, and return to blogging on Friday.
I wonder what ghosts will stir up dust in the old house as I'm in it. I wonder what emotions will stir within me. Will I get the kernel of a good essay out of the experience, or at least an interesting journal entry? I don't know. There are no guarantees, but this is the sort of experience that usually bears fruit for me and I am grateful for the opportunity to visit my dead buddy's childhood home.
-----------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART NINE
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
"I didn't tell you about my 4-H work," Pearl said. "It wasn't called 4-H in Preble County back in 1919. I was 14 or 15 years old. It started with our wonderful superintendent of schools - 'We ought to have something for these children to do in the summer-time.' So we formed little clubs of one kind or another, and Lewisburg had a food club. Seven or eight girls belonged to it. One of the young teachers, who was a grand woman if there ever lived one, said she would be the sponsor of it. We met every week or so through the whole summer and studied nutrition, menus, preparation of foods, and cooking. A cooking club. Lanier Township had a cooking club, Monroe Township had a cooking club, and Lewisburg had a cooking club. There were at least sixty some girls in Preble County at that time in cooking clubs - 1919. We had a pamphlet explaining the things we studied We helped our mothers with cooking, canning, preserving, stewing, and all that, making family dinners and so on."
"At the county fair in September," she continued, "we exhibited - canned vegetables, canned fruit, jellies, and preserves, and a loaf of bread. Prizes were given for the best exhibit. The fair was during school-time but school was dismissed so the kids could go to the fair. The Mt. Castle girls wouldn't be going to the fair until the second day, so they were put out in the field picking up ears of corn that had been knocked off by the binder. When the came up to the farmyard for Dad to shovel the corn out of the wagon into the crib, the girls came to the house to get warm. While they were sitting here getting warm, waiting to go back out to the field, the telephone rang. The principal's wife was on the telephone when my mother answered. My mother said, 'Well, you can tell Pearl.'"
"So Pearl goes to the telephone," she said. "The principal had been so anxious to see what his school had as exhibits that he went over early on Thursday morning. His group of girls had several first place prizes. Pearl Mt. Castle had the prize for 'Best Cook in Preble County.' A little girl from Lanier had second place. And the third, fourth, and fifth places went to our Lewisburg club. The principal was so pleased and surprised he couldn't wait to tell it, he had to call his wife in Lewisburg and have her call to tell me I was first in Preble County. The prize was this - first and second in the county would go to Columbus - which was like going to Europe, you know - for Farmer's Week in January, entertained at Ohio State. The trip was all furnished by the county. That was like going to Europe for little country girls."
"I didn't know the Brauers from Lanier, my family didn't know them," Pearl said. "Jessie Brauer was the girl from Lanier. They lived at Isabelle Crossroad, we called it Beantown. The families got together to talk about how we'd get transported to Columbus for that week. We decided that Dad would take me by horse and buggy down to the traction line - there was a traction line from Richmond to Dayton, an inter-urban electric. I spent the night nearby. Then in the morning a fellow took us to the inter-urban line, and told them 'These little girls are going to Columbus, be sure they get off at Ludlow so they can walk to the depot.' We got on the train in Dayton that took us to Columbus. Advisers for 4-H met us at the train station and took us to the hotel where we stayed for a week. We went to the Ohio State Agricultural Building for a lot of meetings. We saw the town. We saw the Capitol building. We had three meals a day at the hotel or wherever."
Pearl said: "It was a great outing for a little girl back in 1919, 'the Best Cook in Preble County' - Pearl Mt. Castle."
"I wasn't too dull, I guess," she said.
-----------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 13, 1998
Partly cloudy this morning. I can hear a woodpecker at breakfast. A squirrel noses its way down a tree in the back yard. In the distance, a mourning dove sits on a wire, tells me of its sadness.
We approach mid-July and I am caught, I think, somewhere in late May. Though how tall the corn is says it is July. How far the winter rye has turned says it is July. Still, being away from home for much of the month of June, it is almost as if my internal clock stopped while I was away. Well, I am here now, and the place fills me, here, now.
The village is very quiet this morning. What is it poised for? A new day? A new week?
It is a green land this year, a great green smear across the state. Should we be happy that every farmer prospers, or complain that the price paid for their products will drop as a result of a good harvest? Some are caught in that hard place where their happiness must sadden them.
The day lilies in the ditch north of Five Corners are orange summer sentinels, fully at attention.
In Ripon, the butt end of the weekend celebration remains. In the park, the rides and the midway are quiet, the carnies and hawkers and ride operaters Canjun'd by the constant sun and marinated in cheap bourbon - they sleep the fitful sleep of those who have no permanent home. Perhaps the women dream - a house and bed to call their own, a man to stand by, a sproutling child who will never have to live like this. The day will waken each of them, by and by, the heat will, each with his own, her own sour breath; then they'll be off down the road again, another town, another shill, another day.
*
JULY 14, 1998
It was blistering hot yesterday. The heat is expected to continue through the week. The humidity helps the crops, perhaps, but makes the people a little cranky. I mean "makes me a little cranky." It cooled last night somewhat and we were able to cool the house. At one point, waking during the night, I could have sworn it was even a little chilly.
People talk too much of the weather and complain too much of the heat, sometimes. Accept it, people! This is Wisconsin; this is the way it's going to be. Like complaining about it is going to change anything?
I leave early for work today. There is moisture on the windshield, on the side windows. The humidity in the cool evening air has to condense somewhere, I suppose. It is almost as if it has condensed on the morning sun as well.
The stray cat lounges in the driveway, up against the tire of a car, surveying his kingdom. This is my world, he says. Challenge me for it.
White clover shows itself in the lawn across the street, and elsewhere in Fairwater. A rabbit in the cemetery, a robin.
In the country, the humid air is so thick that groves of trees, silos, barns disappear into it a mile off or so off. It's not fog. The air is that wet. Even in the cool breeze sweat beads on my forehead. Am I talking too much of the weather, complaining? Shut up, Tom!
You can see the different maturity dates of the sweet corn, I think, looking at the color of the tassels - the paler, the later it matures.
Even the skinned lawns in Ripon - there are lots of them - soak up the dew this morning.
Two crows strut on the sidewalk in front of the bank downtown. I wonder, Do the bankers know that crows can count to ten?
>
JULY 20-22
After I put up tomorrow's post, I will leave for a short trip to Curlew, Iowa, my "hometown." The folks who bought the Joe Wilson house in Curlew live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, but they spend their vacations repairing, restoring, and refurbishing the house that my childhood friend Bryan Wilson grew up in. I have fond memories of the house, as is evident in my memoir, Curlew: Home. The house, as is the case of Curlew itself, has fallen into some disrepair over the years. Bryan Wilson was killed while serving a second tour of duty in Vietnam.
The owners of the Wilson house are working on it this week and next. They had invited me to visit them during their time in Curlew, to tour the house. I've offered to spend a day helping them. So I'll drive out to Curlew tomorrow after posting here, work with them in the house on Wednesday, drive home on Thursday, and return to blogging on Friday.
I wonder what ghosts will stir up dust in the old house as I'm in it. I wonder what emotions will stir within me. Will I get the kernel of a good essay out of the experience, or at least an interesting journal entry? I don't know. There are no guarantees, but this is the sort of experience that usually bears fruit for me and I am grateful for the opportunity to visit my dead buddy's childhood home.
-----------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART NINE
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
"I didn't tell you about my 4-H work," Pearl said. "It wasn't called 4-H in Preble County back in 1919. I was 14 or 15 years old. It started with our wonderful superintendent of schools - 'We ought to have something for these children to do in the summer-time.' So we formed little clubs of one kind or another, and Lewisburg had a food club. Seven or eight girls belonged to it. One of the young teachers, who was a grand woman if there ever lived one, said she would be the sponsor of it. We met every week or so through the whole summer and studied nutrition, menus, preparation of foods, and cooking. A cooking club. Lanier Township had a cooking club, Monroe Township had a cooking club, and Lewisburg had a cooking club. There were at least sixty some girls in Preble County at that time in cooking clubs - 1919. We had a pamphlet explaining the things we studied We helped our mothers with cooking, canning, preserving, stewing, and all that, making family dinners and so on."
"At the county fair in September," she continued, "we exhibited - canned vegetables, canned fruit, jellies, and preserves, and a loaf of bread. Prizes were given for the best exhibit. The fair was during school-time but school was dismissed so the kids could go to the fair. The Mt. Castle girls wouldn't be going to the fair until the second day, so they were put out in the field picking up ears of corn that had been knocked off by the binder. When the came up to the farmyard for Dad to shovel the corn out of the wagon into the crib, the girls came to the house to get warm. While they were sitting here getting warm, waiting to go back out to the field, the telephone rang. The principal's wife was on the telephone when my mother answered. My mother said, 'Well, you can tell Pearl.'"
"So Pearl goes to the telephone," she said. "The principal had been so anxious to see what his school had as exhibits that he went over early on Thursday morning. His group of girls had several first place prizes. Pearl Mt. Castle had the prize for 'Best Cook in Preble County.' A little girl from Lanier had second place. And the third, fourth, and fifth places went to our Lewisburg club. The principal was so pleased and surprised he couldn't wait to tell it, he had to call his wife in Lewisburg and have her call to tell me I was first in Preble County. The prize was this - first and second in the county would go to Columbus - which was like going to Europe, you know - for Farmer's Week in January, entertained at Ohio State. The trip was all furnished by the county. That was like going to Europe for little country girls."
"I didn't know the Brauers from Lanier, my family didn't know them," Pearl said. "Jessie Brauer was the girl from Lanier. They lived at Isabelle Crossroad, we called it Beantown. The families got together to talk about how we'd get transported to Columbus for that week. We decided that Dad would take me by horse and buggy down to the traction line - there was a traction line from Richmond to Dayton, an inter-urban electric. I spent the night nearby. Then in the morning a fellow took us to the inter-urban line, and told them 'These little girls are going to Columbus, be sure they get off at Ludlow so they can walk to the depot.' We got on the train in Dayton that took us to Columbus. Advisers for 4-H met us at the train station and took us to the hotel where we stayed for a week. We went to the Ohio State Agricultural Building for a lot of meetings. We saw the town. We saw the Capitol building. We had three meals a day at the hotel or wherever."
Pearl said: "It was a great outing for a little girl back in 1919, 'the Best Cook in Preble County' - Pearl Mt. Castle."
"I wasn't too dull, I guess," she said.
-----------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 13, 1998
Partly cloudy this morning. I can hear a woodpecker at breakfast. A squirrel noses its way down a tree in the back yard. In the distance, a mourning dove sits on a wire, tells me of its sadness.
We approach mid-July and I am caught, I think, somewhere in late May. Though how tall the corn is says it is July. How far the winter rye has turned says it is July. Still, being away from home for much of the month of June, it is almost as if my internal clock stopped while I was away. Well, I am here now, and the place fills me, here, now.
The village is very quiet this morning. What is it poised for? A new day? A new week?
It is a green land this year, a great green smear across the state. Should we be happy that every farmer prospers, or complain that the price paid for their products will drop as a result of a good harvest? Some are caught in that hard place where their happiness must sadden them.
The day lilies in the ditch north of Five Corners are orange summer sentinels, fully at attention.
In Ripon, the butt end of the weekend celebration remains. In the park, the rides and the midway are quiet, the carnies and hawkers and ride operaters Canjun'd by the constant sun and marinated in cheap bourbon - they sleep the fitful sleep of those who have no permanent home. Perhaps the women dream - a house and bed to call their own, a man to stand by, a sproutling child who will never have to live like this. The day will waken each of them, by and by, the heat will, each with his own, her own sour breath; then they'll be off down the road again, another town, another shill, another day.
*
JULY 14, 1998
It was blistering hot yesterday. The heat is expected to continue through the week. The humidity helps the crops, perhaps, but makes the people a little cranky. I mean "makes me a little cranky." It cooled last night somewhat and we were able to cool the house. At one point, waking during the night, I could have sworn it was even a little chilly.
People talk too much of the weather and complain too much of the heat, sometimes. Accept it, people! This is Wisconsin; this is the way it's going to be. Like complaining about it is going to change anything?
I leave early for work today. There is moisture on the windshield, on the side windows. The humidity in the cool evening air has to condense somewhere, I suppose. It is almost as if it has condensed on the morning sun as well.
The stray cat lounges in the driveway, up against the tire of a car, surveying his kingdom. This is my world, he says. Challenge me for it.
White clover shows itself in the lawn across the street, and elsewhere in Fairwater. A rabbit in the cemetery, a robin.
In the country, the humid air is so thick that groves of trees, silos, barns disappear into it a mile off or so off. It's not fog. The air is that wet. Even in the cool breeze sweat beads on my forehead. Am I talking too much of the weather, complaining? Shut up, Tom!
You can see the different maturity dates of the sweet corn, I think, looking at the color of the tassels - the paler, the later it matures.
Even the skinned lawns in Ripon - there are lots of them - soak up the dew this morning.
Two crows strut on the sidewalk in front of the bank downtown. I wonder, Do the bankers know that crows can count to ten?
>
Sunday, July 18, 2004
INTERVIEW WITH THE POET LAUREATE COMMISSION
& APPEARANCE OF A POSSIBLE CONSOLATION PRIZE
I interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission yesterday, as expected.
"How did it go?" you might ask.
"Very well, thank you," I would say.
I think I did a good interview. "Charmed them," as our friend Pearl Mt. Castle might put it. Yet I wasn't a mouse in the corner during the interviews with the other two finalists, who may have "charmed them" even more than I did.
When Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, chair of the Poet Laureate Commission, called me to set up this interview, I had my choice of time slots - first, second, or third. I chose the third slot, because I wanted the interviewers to have a clear sense of the other candidates when they were weighing my answers to their questions.
Questions came in fairly orderly fashion from the circle gathered round me. Some were questions I expected - "Why did you apply for the position?" Some were questions I didn't expect - "How do you think appointment as Poet Laureate might affect your writing and your career?" I hadn't thought about that very much, actually, thinking more about the work the Poet Laureate would need to be doing.
It was a comfortable interview, in the sense that I had six interested people focused on me for an hour, listening to my every word. How we do long for this kind of attention as writers, and how seldom we find it!
One member of the commission is the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, who has served these past four years. She noted that if I were appointed, I could put the letters Poet Laureate Of Wisconsin after my name, P.L.O.W. "which spells plow." She knew that would warm a farm boy's heart.
At the end of the interview, they gave me a long-stemmed white rose, as they had done for the other two finalists, because we were finalists. A nice touch, I thought. I took my name tag off my rose, brought it home and gave it to my wife, and told her it was from the Poet Laureate Commission, "because you have to put up with me."
Those serving on the commission have a thankless task, really. No one, I am sure, will ever go up to any of those folks and say "I really want to thank you for all the time and energy you've put into selecting the next Poet Laureate." Just won't happen. But it should.
I did a good interview and I am prepared for whatever recommendation the commission makes to the Governor, and whatever decision the Governor makes. An announcement should be forthcoming sometime in the next two weeks, I think. I'll keep you updated.
*
In the event that the appointment goes to someone else, a "consolation prize" of sorts has already been offered to me. I got a phone call on Friday from the head of the writing department at a college in our area, about an hour's drive, asking if I could teach a fiction-writing course for them in the fall semester.
"Our fiction writer will be on sabbatical in the fall," my caller said. "No problem, we thought. We expected to offer fiction-writing in the spring. However, because we are in transition between our old curriculum and our new curriculum, the dean says we are obligated to teach the course this fall. Can you do it?"
"Oh," I said, and I was kicking myself as I was saying no. What an opportunity. "I have to tell you I don't feel qualified to teach fiction-writing. It wouldn't be fair to your students. If it were a course in writing poetry or creative nonfiction, I'd say yes in a minute."
Not silence on the phone exactly, I could hear wheels turning. "Let me check schedules and talk to the dean," my caller said. "I may be able to teach the fiction-writing course, and you could teach the creative nonfiction course I'm supposed to. I'll call you back."
He called back, said: "The dean is sending you a contract."
So, in the midst of everything else, I am exhilirated now to be putting together a course in writing creative nonfiction. It is quite an honor for a working writer (one who has learned the craft in the school of hard knocks, rather than in a writing program) to be asked to teach a class like this. As I said to Mary, "the farm boy will be telling the college kids what he has learned about writing prose."
I'll keep you updated on this development, too! Life is WHEE! quite a ride!
---------------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART EIGHT
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
"I picked raspberries and gooseberries and shocked wheat and planted tobacco," Pearl said when I asked her if she had other stories about her life on the piece of ground she has inhabited for ninety years. "Working with my dad. I never drove the horses, he always did that."
"I had a little experience with the horse one time," Pearl remembered. "My little brother always rode bare-back to go bring in the cows. He had a case of appendicitis and could do the things he had been doing. So he sat up in the barn. And the little horse he rode bareback was a very gentle little fellow and so Pearl said she'd ride it this time, to go back for the cows. He saw me off. The barn's on a hill, and there was a big valley where the lake is now. I rode horseback out to get the cows, had them all coming in like we usually did. The horse came to the barn without Pearl on it. That scared my little brother to death, he was just sick about it - he had caused Pearl to get hurt, you know. Pretty soon I walked up the hill where he could see me. Everything was okay. A horse-fly had got after the horse, and it was switching its tail and shaking itself, and I slid off. Not hurt, but I slid off."
"I fear for farming in this area," Pearl said when I asked her to assess its condition where she lived. "The land is being filled up with homes. People are moving out from the city. They like the out-of-doors, they like to be out. Farmers are not making money. They are selling lots along the roadside. You can hardly drive half a mile anywhere that you don't see new houses being built. People are moving out because they like the out-of-doors and farmers are hard up so they're selling their land, which reduces agriculture in the area. It seems that many city people want their cities to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and they want to bring in business and so on, but they're cutting the agricultural area to hardly any big farms. One young farmer who does nothing but farm has to have a lot of land or he doesn't make a living on it because prices are not what they should be. So he farms several farms, and that's his business, and the fellows who own the farms go into town to get jobs. Farmland is being lost."
"I wonder what the future will bring?" Pearl asks. "We have to have farms. One of the biggest farms in our neighborhood, between here and Lewisburg, it has about thirty houses on it now, not a single farm field on the whole place any more. That's an example of what's going on. If you keep putting on new houses, where are they going to grow corn? And this is supposed to be the Corn Belt."
"We have several factories in Lewisburg now," Pearl said. "People are coming into Lewisburg instead of going out due to General Motors or the other big businesses in Dayton. The community is growing in terms of people. Their work is right here in Lewisburg."
"We didn't have electricity on this farm until 1939," Pearl said. "Neither did other people in the area. Along came Rural Electrification out of Greenville - the office was in Greenville, Ohio, which is twenty miles away. They came through before they built, wanting to know if people would accommodate them, and be patrons of their business. That was in 1939. My father, of the old school, went along with everybody else, ten dollars to be wired in. When they started putting in new posts out here for the electrical wires, Dad wondered what it was all about then. He said he didn't care whether he had electricity or not. This was in 1939 and all the family was gone from home - it was just my father and me. Electricity would be such a convenience for me. With the big family - all the nieces and nephews by this time - how could I handle it? I've got to look out for Pearl. So I talked to my dad about it, I said 'Dad, the farm is in your name, but I'm going to put this money into wiring the place - it was costly - what about it?' And he said I could buy the farm. It would be in my name. He could still live here. And he did, from 1939 to 1954, just like he always did, and made what he could make off of it. But Pearl paid the taxes and insurance and got electricity put in. So I had the conveniences everybody else had."
When did Pearl learn to drive?
"Everybody had cars," Pearl said. "The father of an extra-good friend told me, he said 'Pearl, you've got to have a little car.' So I bought a second-hand Model T in 1924 - that was my first car."
"My first radio was right here on this table," she said. "That was back in the 1920s some time, and that chair right there sat right here where Dad listened with ear-phones."
When television came, Pearl said, "it was just another thing, just another invention."
"This is a good time to be living in Ohio," Pearl said, "with all the history being celebrated. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903 and that's the year I was born."
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 9, 1998
A cool morning, air wet with haze. I am home after a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a meeting. I flew Super Death Airways - but spent three times as much time on the ground as in the air. Tuesday evening in Midway all six flights on their board were delayed. People working for the airline were all under stress. There was a terrific system problem of some sort. I will repeat my observation from my Atlanta trip that an airport takes on its own reality; all airports are essentially the same and indistinguishable from one another, featureless, without weather, hypnotizing in their monotony.
I will add one more observation: why the hell is Grand Rapids, Michigan, intending to look like Los Angeles? Stop and go traffic on its freeways, sprawling across farmland as if the supply of good ground is infinite. So Grand Rapids has tripled in size since the 1960s - can't it look like a midwestern town instead of an LA knock-off? It is obvious that we do not think about the big picture in our everyday little decisions. I am inclined to agree with Wallace Stegner that man is a rogue, weed species. Grand Rapids, were it a thinking entity, would be thinking about gobbling up some more of the world around it.
To be honest, the same charge can be made against Fond du Lac, Rosendale, and Ripon. The same charge can be made against the development being done in the fields behind the Village Mart in Fairwater.
A stray cat stands on our driveway, thinking he owns it. The windshield of the pick-up is dark with bug parts. I drove home from the airport last night. I had forgotten what driving at night will do to a windshield in Wisconsin in summer.
How many of us could be set down randomly on a piece of ground and be able to identify where, roughly, we are? What would you need to look at to succeed? What kind of test would this be? Who could pass it?
Our good retired farmer is working the flower bed at Five Corners this morning. He is offering the flowers water and they are taking a drink. He is smoking a cigarette. He stays to his business and doesn't look up.
There! That is a distinction to make in the world - between those who look up and those who don't. I'm afraid I am one of those who looks up and that's more a curse than a blessing.
You run a lot of make-ready, sometimes, creating the context for one good idea.
*
JULY 10, 1998
I lay abed an hour longer than usual again this morning and I'm moving kinda slow. Those damn birds, they have got to start singing louder at 5 a.m., if they're to roll me out! But at least I'm moving now, breathing, heading to work, another day another dollar. Consider the alternative.
All of a SUDDEN - I am lost in the day. I've driven to where the hawk lives without a single thought, only silence, without realizing I haven't had a single thought. Then the leaves of the trees, being two-toned as they are, snap me to consciousness, suggest a storm is coming. The corn, too, seems to have itself curled against fierceness. Even starlings are hunkered down in a row along the ditch at Five Corners. The coming day doesn't look bad to me. Perhaps it is the heat for which things are preparing.
Ripon is all set up for its celebration, which starts this evening. Note to myself: stay home; you know how much you don't like crowds.
In the distance, the caw of crow.
Who owns the day?
What I choose has chosen me.
>
& APPEARANCE OF A POSSIBLE CONSOLATION PRIZE
I interviewed with Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Commission yesterday, as expected.
"How did it go?" you might ask.
"Very well, thank you," I would say.
I think I did a good interview. "Charmed them," as our friend Pearl Mt. Castle might put it. Yet I wasn't a mouse in the corner during the interviews with the other two finalists, who may have "charmed them" even more than I did.
When Cathryn Cofell-Mutschler, chair of the Poet Laureate Commission, called me to set up this interview, I had my choice of time slots - first, second, or third. I chose the third slot, because I wanted the interviewers to have a clear sense of the other candidates when they were weighing my answers to their questions.
Questions came in fairly orderly fashion from the circle gathered round me. Some were questions I expected - "Why did you apply for the position?" Some were questions I didn't expect - "How do you think appointment as Poet Laureate might affect your writing and your career?" I hadn't thought about that very much, actually, thinking more about the work the Poet Laureate would need to be doing.
It was a comfortable interview, in the sense that I had six interested people focused on me for an hour, listening to my every word. How we do long for this kind of attention as writers, and how seldom we find it!
One member of the commission is the current Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort, who has served these past four years. She noted that if I were appointed, I could put the letters Poet Laureate Of Wisconsin after my name, P.L.O.W. "which spells plow." She knew that would warm a farm boy's heart.
At the end of the interview, they gave me a long-stemmed white rose, as they had done for the other two finalists, because we were finalists. A nice touch, I thought. I took my name tag off my rose, brought it home and gave it to my wife, and told her it was from the Poet Laureate Commission, "because you have to put up with me."
Those serving on the commission have a thankless task, really. No one, I am sure, will ever go up to any of those folks and say "I really want to thank you for all the time and energy you've put into selecting the next Poet Laureate." Just won't happen. But it should.
I did a good interview and I am prepared for whatever recommendation the commission makes to the Governor, and whatever decision the Governor makes. An announcement should be forthcoming sometime in the next two weeks, I think. I'll keep you updated.
*
In the event that the appointment goes to someone else, a "consolation prize" of sorts has already been offered to me. I got a phone call on Friday from the head of the writing department at a college in our area, about an hour's drive, asking if I could teach a fiction-writing course for them in the fall semester.
"Our fiction writer will be on sabbatical in the fall," my caller said. "No problem, we thought. We expected to offer fiction-writing in the spring. However, because we are in transition between our old curriculum and our new curriculum, the dean says we are obligated to teach the course this fall. Can you do it?"
"Oh," I said, and I was kicking myself as I was saying no. What an opportunity. "I have to tell you I don't feel qualified to teach fiction-writing. It wouldn't be fair to your students. If it were a course in writing poetry or creative nonfiction, I'd say yes in a minute."
Not silence on the phone exactly, I could hear wheels turning. "Let me check schedules and talk to the dean," my caller said. "I may be able to teach the fiction-writing course, and you could teach the creative nonfiction course I'm supposed to. I'll call you back."
He called back, said: "The dean is sending you a contract."
So, in the midst of everything else, I am exhilirated now to be putting together a course in writing creative nonfiction. It is quite an honor for a working writer (one who has learned the craft in the school of hard knocks, rather than in a writing program) to be asked to teach a class like this. As I said to Mary, "the farm boy will be telling the college kids what he has learned about writing prose."
I'll keep you updated on this development, too! Life is WHEE! quite a ride!
---------------------------
NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH 99-YEAR-OLD PEARL MT.
CASTLE
LEWISBURG, OHIO - JULY 10, 2003 - PART EIGHT
This is part of an interview I conducted in July, 2003, with 99-year-old Pearl Mt. Castle of Lewisburg, Ohio. Pearl taught school for forty years, usually fifth grade. She taught Sunday School for sixty-four years, retiring from that when she was in her nineties. She still lives independently on the farm and in the house her parents moved into in 1913. She still takes care of herself. She still sometimes refers to herself in the third person, in the manner of old school teachers. I've been asked what Pearl looks like, and this is how I responded: "Pearl is white-headed, fairly thin, of a medium woman's height - neither short nor tall. Her face has seen some years, but her eyes still have some fire in them. She was wearing a long, dark house dress when I interviewed her, she walks with a walker, she wears a built-up shoe and brace on the foot and ankle most damaged by the polio." I found that my job during this interview was to stay out of the way and let Pearl tell her story. Pretty much I succeeded in staying out of the way; there's no question but that Pearl can tell her story. Try and keep up with us, now.
"I picked raspberries and gooseberries and shocked wheat and planted tobacco," Pearl said when I asked her if she had other stories about her life on the piece of ground she has inhabited for ninety years. "Working with my dad. I never drove the horses, he always did that."
"I had a little experience with the horse one time," Pearl remembered. "My little brother always rode bare-back to go bring in the cows. He had a case of appendicitis and could do the things he had been doing. So he sat up in the barn. And the little horse he rode bareback was a very gentle little fellow and so Pearl said she'd ride it this time, to go back for the cows. He saw me off. The barn's on a hill, and there was a big valley where the lake is now. I rode horseback out to get the cows, had them all coming in like we usually did. The horse came to the barn without Pearl on it. That scared my little brother to death, he was just sick about it - he had caused Pearl to get hurt, you know. Pretty soon I walked up the hill where he could see me. Everything was okay. A horse-fly had got after the horse, and it was switching its tail and shaking itself, and I slid off. Not hurt, but I slid off."
"I fear for farming in this area," Pearl said when I asked her to assess its condition where she lived. "The land is being filled up with homes. People are moving out from the city. They like the out-of-doors, they like to be out. Farmers are not making money. They are selling lots along the roadside. You can hardly drive half a mile anywhere that you don't see new houses being built. People are moving out because they like the out-of-doors and farmers are hard up so they're selling their land, which reduces agriculture in the area. It seems that many city people want their cities to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and they want to bring in business and so on, but they're cutting the agricultural area to hardly any big farms. One young farmer who does nothing but farm has to have a lot of land or he doesn't make a living on it because prices are not what they should be. So he farms several farms, and that's his business, and the fellows who own the farms go into town to get jobs. Farmland is being lost."
"I wonder what the future will bring?" Pearl asks. "We have to have farms. One of the biggest farms in our neighborhood, between here and Lewisburg, it has about thirty houses on it now, not a single farm field on the whole place any more. That's an example of what's going on. If you keep putting on new houses, where are they going to grow corn? And this is supposed to be the Corn Belt."
"We have several factories in Lewisburg now," Pearl said. "People are coming into Lewisburg instead of going out due to General Motors or the other big businesses in Dayton. The community is growing in terms of people. Their work is right here in Lewisburg."
"We didn't have electricity on this farm until 1939," Pearl said. "Neither did other people in the area. Along came Rural Electrification out of Greenville - the office was in Greenville, Ohio, which is twenty miles away. They came through before they built, wanting to know if people would accommodate them, and be patrons of their business. That was in 1939. My father, of the old school, went along with everybody else, ten dollars to be wired in. When they started putting in new posts out here for the electrical wires, Dad wondered what it was all about then. He said he didn't care whether he had electricity or not. This was in 1939 and all the family was gone from home - it was just my father and me. Electricity would be such a convenience for me. With the big family - all the nieces and nephews by this time - how could I handle it? I've got to look out for Pearl. So I talked to my dad about it, I said 'Dad, the farm is in your name, but I'm going to put this money into wiring the place - it was costly - what about it?' And he said I could buy the farm. It would be in my name. He could still live here. And he did, from 1939 to 1954, just like he always did, and made what he could make off of it. But Pearl paid the taxes and insurance and got electricity put in. So I had the conveniences everybody else had."
When did Pearl learn to drive?
"Everybody had cars," Pearl said. "The father of an extra-good friend told me, he said 'Pearl, you've got to have a little car.' So I bought a second-hand Model T in 1924 - that was my first car."
"My first radio was right here on this table," she said. "That was back in the 1920s some time, and that chair right there sat right here where Dad listened with ear-phones."
When television came, Pearl said, "it was just another thing, just another invention."
"This is a good time to be living in Ohio," Pearl said, "with all the history being celebrated. The Wright Brothers flew in 1903 and that's the year I was born."
To be continued....
-------------------
from
MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
JULY 9, 1998
A cool morning, air wet with haze. I am home after a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a meeting. I flew Super Death Airways - but spent three times as much time on the ground as in the air. Tuesday evening in Midway all six flights on their board were delayed. People working for the airline were all under stress. There was a terrific system problem of some sort. I will repeat my observation from my Atlanta trip that an airport takes on its own reality; all airports are essentially the same and indistinguishable from one another, featureless, without weather, hypnotizing in their monotony.
I will add one more observation: why the hell is Grand Rapids, Michigan, intending to look like Los Angeles? Stop and go traffic on its freeways, sprawling across farmland as if the supply of good ground is infinite. So Grand Rapids has tripled in size since the 1960s - can't it look like a midwestern town instead of an LA knock-off? It is obvious that we do not think about the big picture in our everyday little decisions. I am inclined to agree with Wallace Stegner that man is a rogue, weed species. Grand Rapids, were it a thinking entity, would be thinking about gobbling up some more of the world around it.
To be honest, the same charge can be made against Fond du Lac, Rosendale, and Ripon. The same charge can be made against the development being done in the fields behind the Village Mart in Fairwater.
A stray cat stands on our driveway, thinking he owns it. The windshield of the pick-up is dark with bug parts. I drove home from the airport last night. I had forgotten what driving at night will do to a windshield in Wisconsin in summer.
How many of us could be set down randomly on a piece of ground and be able to identify where, roughly, we are? What would you need to look at to succeed? What kind of test would this be? Who could pass it?
Our good retired farmer is working the flower bed at Five Corners this morning. He is offering the flowers water and they are taking a drink. He is smoking a cigarette. He stays to his business and doesn't look up.
There! That is a distinction to make in the world - between those who look up and those who don't. I'm afraid I am one of those who looks up and that's more a curse than a blessing.
You run a lot of make-ready, sometimes, creating the context for one good idea.
*
JULY 10, 1998
I lay abed an hour longer than usual again this morning and I'm moving kinda slow. Those damn birds, they have got to start singing louder at 5 a.m., if they're to roll me out! But at least I'm moving now, breathing, heading to work, another day another dollar. Consider the alternative.
All of a SUDDEN - I am lost in the day. I've driven to where the hawk lives without a single thought, only silence, without realizing I haven't had a single thought. Then the leaves of the trees, being two-toned as they are, snap me to consciousness, suggest a storm is coming. The corn, too, seems to have itself curled against fierceness. Even starlings are hunkered down in a row along the ditch at Five Corners. The coming day doesn't look bad to me. Perhaps it is the heat for which things are preparing.
Ripon is all set up for its celebration, which starts this evening. Note to myself: stay home; you know how much you don't like crowds.
In the distance, the caw of crow.
Who owns the day?
What I choose has chosen me.
>
Saturday, July 17, 2004
SATURDAYS POEMS
--------------------------------
APOSTLE ISLANDS HISTORY
by Judith Strasser
I spend the morning reading scholars' accounts
of people early to these shores: Ojibwa who moved
to Chequamegon Bay the decade Columbus "discovered"
America; the trappers, traders, voyageurs who paddled
the unsettled lake; 19th century masons who quarried
brownstone in eight-by-four blocks and shipped it
off to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, as far east
as Buffalo. By noon I am weary of driving stakes
for pound nets, cleaning lake trout, felling white pine,
stripping hemlock bark. I need a nap. I am drowsy
from sawdust history and growth-of-industry fact.
I go down to the lake to haul water for washing dishes.
Wind drives three-foot breakers onto the shallow beach.
Rollers slosh in and out of my brown Rubbermaid pail.
A wave breaks on the rocks and soaks my boots, my socks,
my jeans, the sleeve of my polypro fleece. Fog drips
from the balsam branches. Nothing will dry today.
I have a change of clothes, a roof, a fireplace.
But what of the voyageurs, rushing to rendezvous?
And the loggers, swarming the smoky cookhouse in sweat-
drenched trousers and shirts? How wet does a fisherman get
in November, racing the making ice to pull his herring nets?
This is the story. The sun disappears, Ojibwa children shiver,
a gale howls from the northeast.
*
COUNTY ROAD
by Judith Strasser
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail -
choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.
>
--------------------------------
APOSTLE ISLANDS HISTORY
by Judith Strasser
I spend the morning reading scholars' accounts
of people early to these shores: Ojibwa who moved
to Chequamegon Bay the decade Columbus "discovered"
America; the trappers, traders, voyageurs who paddled
the unsettled lake; 19th century masons who quarried
brownstone in eight-by-four blocks and shipped it
off to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, as far east
as Buffalo. By noon I am weary of driving stakes
for pound nets, cleaning lake trout, felling white pine,
stripping hemlock bark. I need a nap. I am drowsy
from sawdust history and growth-of-industry fact.
I go down to the lake to haul water for washing dishes.
Wind drives three-foot breakers onto the shallow beach.
Rollers slosh in and out of my brown Rubbermaid pail.
A wave breaks on the rocks and soaks my boots, my socks,
my jeans, the sleeve of my polypro fleece. Fog drips
from the balsam branches. Nothing will dry today.
I have a change of clothes, a roof, a fireplace.
But what of the voyageurs, rushing to rendezvous?
And the loggers, swarming the smoky cookhouse in sweat-
drenched trousers and shirts? How wet does a fisherman get
in November, racing the making ice to pull his herring nets?
This is the story. The sun disappears, Ojibwa children shiver,
a gale howls from the northeast.
*
COUNTY ROAD
by Judith Strasser
Sand IslandThe settlers are gone, cabins
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
rotted or burned. What remains:
the school house foundation,
moss-garden-capped concrete;
a Model T, sunk to its fenders,
kneeling under the trees.
A trail -
choked with balsam and alder,
roadbed rutted, muddy, sodden,
a permanent bog of memory
bordered by sentinel trees.
Penny candy from the co-op;
Noreng's berries, big as
hens' eggs, too juicy to ship
anywhere; dances - pump organ,
squeezebox, fiddle, the whole
village at the school; crossing the ice-
bridge for mail; the storm
that took Harold Dahl.
Crawl over tree-trunks,
muck through jewel-weed,
tread bear scat in blackberry brambles,
swim sedges over your head.
Lose the trace in the marsh. Turn back.
This is no wilderness. Still,
you've come to the end of the road.
These poems are from Judith Strasser's Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles. Strasser's memoir, Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life, is now available; it may be ordered at your local bookstore or from University of Wisconsin Press. Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles is available for $10 from Parallel Press or directly from Strasser's website. You may contact her at: jlstrass@wisc.edu .
----------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Harriet Brown, "Speaking Midwestern" and "Where We Went" - July 10, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004
o Complete index to poems here
muck through jewel-weed,
tread bear scat in blackberry brambles,
swim sedges over your head.
Lose the trace in the marsh. Turn back.
This is no wilderness. Still,
you've come to the end of the road.
These poems are from Judith Strasser's Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles. Strasser's memoir, Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life, is now available; it may be ordered at your local bookstore or from University of Wisconsin Press. Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles is available for $10 from Parallel Press or directly from Strasser's website. You may contact her at: jlstrass@wisc.edu .
----------------
A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some high class readers. About seventeen of them, by our current count.
INDEX OF THE THIRTEEN MOST RECENT SATURDAY'S POEMS
o Dave Bonta, "The Morning Porch" - March 13, 2004
o Harriet Brown, "Speaking Midwestern" and "Where We Went" - July 10, 2004
o Robin Chapman, "By the Wisconsin River" - June 12, 2004
o Susan Firer, "The Butterfly Graveyard" - May 22, 2004
o Fred First, "In Living Memory" - April 3, 2004
o R. Chris Halla, "My Prairie Wedding" - June 5, 2004
o Phil Hey, "Spare Tire" - March 6, 2004
o Mike O'Connell, "Flatlanders" and "A Farm and a Rainbow" - March 27, 2004
o Colleen Redman, "Tincture Making" - May 15, 2004
o Jim Reese, "Ritual" and "Willing and Ready" - May 29, 2004
o Robert Schuler, "Thaw, 2003, Stanton Township" and "The American Millenium" - June 26, 2004
o Marilyn Taylor, "Surveying the Damage" - June 19, 2004
o Mark Vinz, "The Old Hometown" and "Midcontinent" - April 17, 2004
o Complete index to poems here
>
