Road Tripping

Sometimes I enjoy driving long distances because it is like a field trip with no theme. Instead of touring the cheese factory to observe cool new things and learn about cheese and the dairy industry or touring the tractor plant to get an inside look at an assembly line and electromagnets and welding and things related, you get a long rambling peek at thousands of interesting but unrelated things, leading to a trippy discombobulated mindset after a few hours.
There are the other vehicles and their wacky duct taped mirrors and garbage bag replacement windows. And the odd things other cars are hauling like three different kinds of barbecue grills on a trailer. And the weird things you can see through their windows like a office chair upside down in the backseat.
There are the things being hauled on trucks like giant machines with 'wide load' signs whose purpose you cannot discern and huge rolls of plastic tubing and many many nested truck bodies and layers of crushed cars and different sizes and shapes of lumber neatly shrink wrapped on pallets and wind tower blades that look elegant compared to the other riff raff on wheels.
There is the terrain. And the ecosystems. Flatter than flat land with no natural nature whatsoeveratall of Illinois give way rather abruptly to evergreens on steep hills in Wisconsin, followed by deciduous trees on rolling hills then fewer and fewer trees and flatter and flatter hills in Minnesota to hardly any trees at all that are not in straight lines in South Dakota.
And the fields. Corn. Corn. Oh, look more corn. Oh, soy beans. More corn. More corn. More corn. Ah, some baled straw, was that wheat? Between corn and corn? More corn. Again corn. Still corn. Corn as far as the eye can see. A pasture with cattle. Corn. Corn being chopped between corn waiting to ripen and dry to be picked much later.
And old landmarks like the rock formation and the army base at the same exit in Wisconsin and the truck-on-a-stick and the first Wall Drug sign a couple dozen miles before Sioux Falls.
And new landmarks like the cool nifty Minnesota visitor center that looks like a hybrid of an old grain elevator and a red barn and the increasing numbers of wind farms with their graceful sweeping motion and their classy white with silvery grey shadows.
And road construction zones and the variety in road construction marking devices and road construction equipment. Some of that makes you wish you could pull over and watch, but I bet that would piss off other drivers since there is often one lane each way and not much in the way of shoulder in either direction.
And the weird stuff that happens at gas station pit stops like conversations overheard about domestic fights and peoples' operations and the woman who was having a cell phone conversation from inside a bathroom stall while she went about her noisy business and I mean all versions of bathroom noisy business. Didn't ANY of those sounds carry through the phone to the other participant in the conversation? And with no hint of irony, at one point, she said "That was a really shitty thing for her to say to you. She is such an asshole."
Then there is the Groton speed trap. Really, does it do anything for the actual speeding rate to have a speed limit sign indicating a drop of 10 miles per hour at a curve? If people miss the sign because of the curve, isn't is just plain MEAN to make it a speed trap? Sure, the locals learn, but those of us 'not from around here' seem at a disadvantage. Would it not make more sense to move the sign a bit more out of town so that people see it before they begin to deal with navigating the curve and actually slow down on their own? Okay, the nice officer gave me just a 'warning' which I get to keep and use as a nifty book mark souvenir, but still. It took probably 4 minutes longer to get here because of that inconvenient stop.
All in all, I saw many interesting things and learned a few things too on my field trip with no theme today. I think I'll do it again in a week or so.

You Never Forget Your First Love

A blue VW convertible passed me the other day and I was reminded once again of my very first love. I am not in general a fan of blue, except in my babies' eyes or maybe a blue Hawaiian shirt on a salt and pepper haired man of a certain age, but your first love never stops triggering a certain feeling. My license to drive was just fresh in my wallet and we were on a family boondoggle to Watertown, South Dakota, when we stopped in to kill time at the Dodge dealership. It was my first inkling that my parents had been entertaining privately the idea of getting me a car, and I was too naive in the ways of car dealing to know that we were unlikely to actually walk, er, drive, out of the showroom with anything new that day, so I allowed myself to fall in love. It was a little sporty thing, and those more wise in the popular models of the time would know exactly what it was, but it was baby blue with navy blue accent trim and an ivory interior. They had me get in and try out the fit. Yeah! I could SEE myself cruising main street in that baby, I could SEE myself pulling into the school parking lot in that baby. I could SEE me in MY new car! And so, even though baby blue is far down on my list of favorite colors, always forevermore, a certain size car of a certain sweet pale blue will always make my heart flutter, just a little.

Worrying with AD/HD: Waiting for the School Bus

The hyperactivity of AD/HD really shines when it comes to generating ideas. You tell me a problem and I can 'brainstorm' ideas for it as fast as anyone. They may not all be good or useful, but each can lead to a handful of others and on until a whole web of possibilities exist. That is a good and wonderful thing when one is in a creative field, provided one can catch hold of one and shift from ideation into production, which doesn't always happen. Sometimes too many ideas can become a handicap to progress, but fortunately the hyperactivity comes and goes in cycles and periods of brain calm allow me to evaluate the ideas and choose and move on to actually accomplishing something.
But at no time does the flurry of ideas kick into high gear more than when I perceive that a loved one might be in harm's way. When my mother does not answer her phone, when a friend is late for an appointment, when my kid is late getting home from the school bus, then I can fast as lightening think of thousands of horrible scenarios, each one more terrible and gory and awful than the last. My kids never understood why I was so frantic when they were a mere 20 minutes late after school. To them, it had been a lark, the school bus late arriving so they messed around in line outside the school waiting, or the school bus stuck in construction or taking a wrong turn, giving them a novel but thoroughly safe ride home. But try as I might to generate innocuous possibilities for why they were late, the flood of nasty ones was unstoppable and richly varied. Accidents, crimes by the bus driver or dastardly others with various nefarious motives, attacks by wild dogs or gangs of roving drug-crazed teens or pedophilic predators working in concert to nab my children on the walk from the bus stop to home, visits by the police, reports of sightings by eye-witnesses that were only false leads, years of them being missing. Oh, no mystery novel ever written or horror movie ever filmed could begin to equal the plots and disasters and horrors that I could imagine in a few short minutes.
Such is the stuff of AD/HD worry. The creative twists and turns and the sheer quantity and speed of thinking can generate a thousand seemingly plausible logical reasonable terrible possibilities for everything from the results of a medical test to the diagnoses resulting from a routine doctor or dentist visit to a letter with an official return address to someone not answering a phone call or not showing up for a appointment to the noise you can hear from the basement to simple things like driving a car or even just leaving the house. Sometimes, these fears turn into actual phobias, and sometimes, those rampant possibilities lead me to fail to make the medical appointment or to snack on some ancient box of crackers instead of going out to the store. I make myself aware of all the phobias and their names and try to recognize when I am beginning to give in to one and take steps to counter it immediately. Fears and worries are just one layer of brain buzz that someone with AD/HD must manage on a daily and nightly basis. It is not undoable, but it does take energy and sometimes it works better than other times.

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

After a week alternating between the redwood forest and Pacific beaches, where I said on a frequent basis such exclamations as "This is so beautiful!" and "Isn't this amazing?" I drove through a portion of the driftless region of Wisconsin today, in its leanest time of year, late fall, after the leaves of autumn are all gone and before any picturesque snow has accumulated. And as the hills rose and fell, as the sunlight shot from behind clouds, as the rolling land and the overlaid patchwork of fields and pastures was revealed to me, I once again exclaimed "This is the most beautiful place on earth." It is and I get to make it one of my part time homes. That is a delight.

A Small Kindness

When I am travelling and I pull off at an exit or stop in some small town to fill up the gas tank, if there is a Cenex station, I will choose it over all the other 'big name' stations and here is why:

I was on my way to a meeting once and I realized too many miles out of town to go back and still make my meeting on time that I had no wallet with me. No ID, no credit cards. I drove on but watched my gas gauge and about the time that I decided I had just enough to make it back home, thereby missing the meeting for which a half-dozen people were already assembling, I pulled over at what happened to be a Cenex station. Before I pumped the gas, I rooted around the van for cash, checking in all the usual stash places, but there was none. Too many last minute school lunches and stops for ice cream and a recent thorough vacuuming of the van had depleted it of any cash. I did find one checkbook in the little storage chamber in the door, but it was more than a little warped and distorted from having been dampened when the door was open during a few too many rains. I took that pathetic check book in and gave the people in the Cenex my sad story and the woman behind the counter contemplated how much trouble she would be in for taking a check with no ID and the men having coffee suggested that she'd be in better shape management wise if I could find SOME other document that at least had my name on it like the car registration or an insurance card, both which were in the glove box. So I went out for those, pumped my gas, and then remembered I actually knew my credit card number if I didn't think about it too hard. So I went back in and said "Write this down." and rattled off the number, then explained that was my credit card number and she could use it instead of taking the check if that was better for them. She punched it in by hand, after she looked up the directions for doing that, and an approval number popped up and we were all happy. But they were willing to take the chance and help me out, and so I made it to my meeting only a few minutes late. For that small consideration, I am forever a loyal Cenex fan!

Words and Photographs in Books - Fiction

We drove north out of town, following the directions they gave us, and stopped at the side of the road where they said it happened. But we could find no signs. Nothing at all. There were no scraps of paper, no tire marks, no beaten down grass, no broken glass, no burn marks or ashes, no signs of any disturbance or anything unusual at all really. We picked up a few beer cans and some fast food litter to try to redeem the trip from total pointlessness. We debated a while if we should go back and ask for directions again or if perhaps we'd gotten the crossroads wrong, turned too soon or gone too far. In the end, we decided we didn't have time to try again so we drove away, leaving the tall cottonwoods rustling their leaves along on the far side of the ditch. We wondered aloud and privately if it really ever happened and then forced ourselves to change the subject and stop talking about it as we drove on the our next appointment.

Years later, I was driving that road on the way to visit a friend, when the fenceline cottonwoods rose into my view ahead. The early morning light sent shadows of them crossing the roadway and without meaning to, I slowed down as I neared the spot. And there in the tall ditch grasses, exactly where they'd said it would be, was everything we'd expected to find. The books were there, tumbled in the ditch, some lying open, their pages fluttering in the breeze. Black skid marks on the asphalt lead to tire tracks that flattened the grasses. Broken glass, the smell of gasoline and oil, a burned patch in the grass along the shoulder. Envelopes of guitar strings, business cards, matchbooks, a makeup case, CDs, your sunglasses, and folded roadmaps.

I looked up and down the road, but there were no cars, no other people. I started to gather up the books into a pile when a crow landed on the hood of my truck and two more landed on the center line of the pavement. They cawed and flicked and shook their wings and cocked their heads to stare at me. I looked down and the book in my hand was open to the photo of you, victorious and smiling, a strand of hair blown across your face, standing on the steps of the courthouse. I dropped to my knees and cried as I held the book to my heart. The crows cawed, flapped wings, rose and settled again together in a broken branch of the cottonwood trees.

In the end, I left everything there. I knew if I took more time to gather things up, if I picked up the books and straightened their pages and closed them and stacked them in my truck, that I would be late to see my friend. And what would I do with them, how would I explain them being there? What good could those things do me anyway; what use were they to me now? I drove away, leaving it all there, fluttering in the wind, catching and reflecting the sunlight.

I drove away and as I did, the crows dropped out of the tree and flew along and behind me for a ways before veering off into a valley to dive and tumble with each other until I had to leave sight of them to turn my eyes back to the road.

My friend was waiting on the porch, smiling, with a pitcher of lemonade for us to share and a vase of sparkling yellow roses, fresh with dew and glistening in light reflecting from the white of house walls. We talked a while, laughed, shared stories, joked. We talked about our plans, our hopes. Then I saw it there on the chair between us, your book, open, face down. She saw me looking at it and picked it up, closed it, and slid it onto her lap. She broke the silence that had settled upon us by offering me more lemonade, and we talked a while more, remembered, planned, laughed. Once, we sat silent for a while to watch a coal black cat walk the distance of her driveway, then double back and stalk a grasshopper that was sitting in the gravel. The grasshopper popped high over the cat's head at the last minute and the cat walked on as though nothing had happened. When I got up to leave, she stood to hug me goodbye and I saw that her lap was empty, the book not there. She smiled and walked me to the truck and hugged me once more before I drove away.


I miss you but I am not sure you are really gone.

The Jolly Green Giant

I grew up with their advertising song on television. I suspect that the excitement of that time over the new technology of color television has something to do with the development of this icon or maybe he predated all that, but the medium sure did show him off. He was a kindly gentleman, cheerful and . . . green! He was always smiling, bending low to interact with humans, solely dedicating his life to getting us to eat more vegetables and therefore, presumably, enjoy greater health and vigor. And HOW MANY TIMES have I driven past the exit to see the fiberglass statue erected in his honor? You don't get much warning; a billboard and BAM there you are having to decide "Is THIS the exit?" Well, I was travelling low on sleep and any stop where I could get out and wander about a bit without making locals suspicious was welcome to me, so I shifted lanes and took the exit. And there he was! In all his green glory. It struck me as a bit odd that you ca climb metal stairs on the back side of his brick platform to stand on the platform between his giant legs and view the dramatic vista of the parking lot of some defunct business, but I went up there anyway, and photographed the guy from all angles. He has kind of a smirk on his face that is not quite as benevolent and kindly as I remembered, but perhaps that has much to do with the extreme angle of viewing him from below, and I am not certain his proportions are quite human and his curled shoes are more than a little creepy to me. But I present to you: The Jolly . . . . Greeeeeeen Gi-ant!

Tour Bus - Fiction

When we were younger and less known, we toured in a bus with our name on every surface along with lots of flash and dancing eye candy, hoping we would be as famous as we thought our bus's paint job made us seem to be. Then, when we were actually famous and well-known and sought after and tired of the attention when we were tired of being 'on' after a show, we started to tour in 2 plain white unadorned buses with heavily tinted windows. These sleek white beasts glide barely noticed through town after town and earn us the quiet our old bodies and brains need to sleep off the adrenaline and then pump it up again for another show in another town. But back when we partied all night on the road in our flashy bus, we were burning ourselves out and not all of us made it out alive. Somewhere on the road between Chicago and Milwaukee on one such trip, one of our bass players took on a bit too much of something or a bit too many of some things together and his heart stopped beating in the second seat of the 5th row. After that, nobody would sit in that seat, or even in that row, really, and there was frequently a disturbance when someone would forget, one of us or some lowly lighting guy or one of the costume girls would plunk down with a beer and the bus would gradually go dead silent as we gaped at him or her. They would remember and leap up or maybe have to be told and pulled into the aisle. One night, we were waiting in a parking lot in one of those big L towns in Kentucky, waiting to find out if the last minute add in some nearby college field house was a go or if we were going to hit the interstate for Georgia instead. We sat around in our funk of uncertainty and someone and someone else got into an argument that lead to people taking sides that lead to someone mentioning the dead bass player's name and that shut us all down. We sat in the gloom staring at the empty seat and each other when finally one of the drummers said "I'm gonna torch that seat," and started pushing and pulling on it. A couple others joined in and only managed to get the arm wrenched akimbo. Jimmie finally got up and skulked through the aisle glaring, which made most of us shut up and sit down. He went to the driver and asked for the toolbox. They went outside and underbins were opened and closed and Jimmie came back with a yellow plastic box. He yanked up the carpet and poked his head around under the seat and one of the sound guys joined him. Pretty soon they had the seat unbolted and 3 or 4 of them were carrying it over the other seats to the door. They set it down a few parking places away. We all sat there stunned for a few seconds before we poured out of the bus and gathered in a circle around the seat. There were a few whispers about how we might be arrested but a couple others were rolling up paper towels from the lavatory and wedging them between the seat and the back and pretty soon, the paper was lit and the flames started to creep. Well, it wasn't as dramatic as we'd hoped, for instead of bursting into wild and brilliant towering roaring flame, it mostly just sizzled as the flames crept around and over and under, melting then actually burning the polycarbons of which it was made. It took a long time and there were little plumes of black smoke now and then, yet no fire trucks roared up, no police cars with flashing lights zoomed in. Soon it was a twisted framework of angled metal and sinewave curving springs and then it was over. We left the metal remains there on the pavement and trickled back onto the bus as the driver radioed to dispatch for our directions. The spot in the row of seats stayed empty for years, until we got the new white buses, and became the place where the ice chest full of bottled water and yogurt that reflected our cleaner habits was kept. We fondly remember the removal of the seat as more violent, we remember the flames as higher and hotter, we remember cheering and yelling instead of the somber quiet observance that actually took place, and at least some remember the driver cleverly talking our way out of trouble with police or fire officials, but in the end, "the day we burned Eddie's seat" was a turning point for us. We lived cleaner and worked harder and played better music and earned more money. Remember the day we "torched the bus seat"?

From The Road

.

.

.

Travelling the winding hilly roads is a special joy this time of year.

The American plums were in frothy blossom and the oaks were just leafing out, giving them a pale mint green soft focus effect, a giddy change from their stark winter sculptural bareness. Last fall's harvest had been mostly turned under, rendering the black stripes of fields darker, and the recent rain had turned the green stripes brilliantly emerald. With no time to stop and take real photos like I felt called to do, I could only snap out my window now and then and hope to capture some small bit of the wonder that is spring-at-long-last in rural Wisconsin.

FLAT

The. Flattest. Place. On. Earth.

Driving Back Home

Rolling along in afternoon traffic,

Heading home

In bright sunshine;
Think about the people there,

Smile about that.

Traffic jams up;

It's some idiot stalled

In the two lane construction zone

Blocking one lane,

Costing me and all these others

An extra half hour of life on this road.

Turn up the stereo until you can feel it.

Sing along, drum on the steering wheel.

Chew all the gum.

Eat all the snacks.

Fiddle with the radio.

Change the CD.

Scream at the guy when you finally pass him,

"Idiot, Moron, F#%*head, Teabag, Toadbrain!"

He can't hear you but it feels good to yell.

Moving along again

On cruise control.

Beat down the miles.

Call somebody on the cell phone.

Sun going down

Turning everything orange;

Turn on the headlights.

Turn up that song.

Eat up the miles.

Lights along the interstate

Make lines on the horizon,

Receding in perfect perspective.

Center line,

Shoulder line,

Steer in between.

Pound down the miles.

Stop for pop and to pee;

Repass all the cars you passed before.

Pick up speed

But not too much:
Don't need another ticket

Cuz I got one goin'.

Chew up the miles,

Heading on home.

The Vast Empty Sky, The Vast Empty Land - II

The land there is vast, the sky even more so. I hated it as a child. All that empty was things I couldn't have and things I couldn't see; it was limits on what I could experience. It was limits on what I could be. I wanted flowers and I wanted to make things, art and maybe even music, though I had no talent whatsoever at that part. I wanted books and museums. I wanted to meet interesting people and learn things, and all the vast empty was just in my way. It was miles of empty between me and what I wanted to experience. I couldn't wait to get out. Sure, I loved some people there, but I hoped they would visit me after my great escape from the vast empty.

But you can't really go, not entirely anyway. The traffic and noise and constant movement of it all would wear me then, press me down. I missed the way seasons and weather mattered.


The seasons and the vast sky with its weather and the vast land with it soil were all that mattered, it seemed sometimes. We prayed for rain and thanked God when it came. We prayed for calm and dry at harvest and thanked God for the bounty. We lived there where land and sky touch, on that vast plain, that thin plane between earth and sky, hunkered down on the land, clinging to what we made for ourselves to ride out the winter blizzards, the summer hailstorms, the tornado, the dry winter days when the snow was all so driven down solid that only wisps here and there tore loose, but still the wind drove on, rolling weeds, bending branches, whipping scarves, tearing coats open, wrenching doors from out hands. Summer sun beat down day after rainless day as grain crops shrunk lower to the ground as hopes ground down low too. Nothing was easy about it. We should have been a dour and morose and sullen people, but we were not. Hearts soared with the blue sea of a flax field in flower or the golden yellow of ripe wheat and spirits flew with the northern lights and the milky way and the full moon so bright it cast shadows on the lawn grass. Vast flocks of honking geese filled that sky and settled on that land. Meadowlarks called, butterflies tumbled on breezes. But those moments still were only moments and I wanted out. For years, I never looked back.

It took me a long long time to love it in any kind of non-begrudging way. Missing the harvest called me back first, a vague uneasiness in the late summer, a wistful longing for something else, a lingering sense that I was missing something, something important, something big. There are times now, I am driving somewhere out there. Clouds tumble across the sky casting shadows that move across the land so fast it takes my breath away. The water in some pothole glistens in the bright sun or the skeleton of some long dead cottonwood calls to me. The perfect geometry of an old grain elevator, the perfect linearity of rows of corn or beans, the things men have done to claim and tame the vast land. Or just a clump of prairie grass or a wild rose at the crumbled edge of the road pavement, testimony to the once vast prairie that stretched horizon to horizon and maybe would again if we left it to those stubborn remnant plants. I stop the car at the side of the road. I stand on the center line and look every direction and just breath it in. You can do that out there, find a place to stop in the middle of the road and take in the vast. Someone might come by, and they might even ask if you need help, but if you say no, just enjoying the space, they will smile and move on. They might call you a kook when telling the folks at the post office about the mad lady with out of state plates standing in the middle of the highway, but deep inside, they know what it was all about. They understand that it is vast, above and below and in every direction, flat and vast, and sometimes, you just have to stop and be in it for a bit. Take it in. Stop thinking so much and just be, out there, small, but still, the only one there to feel the vast. It is vast and empty and it seems to go on forever, but in that vast sunlit and windswept and starlit space, it holds so very much that matters.

My Brush With Golf

I went golfing once. My husband and my friend Marty and my son rented a cart and headed out. Marty and my husband played fairly regularly and my son had had some lessons. They intended to play the game. I was baggage, the designated driver of the golf cart. It was fun to be with the people and there were some patches of prairie. I think golfers call those 'hazards'. To me they were the 'best part'. And the course bordered a forest preserve, so there was a nice perimeter of tall oak and maple trees. I think golfers call that 'extreme hazard'. To me it was 'wish I had my camera'.
There is a psychologist, Thom Hartmann, who says that regular people are 'farmers', content to do routine repetitive things over and over day after day year after year. He says people with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) are the 'hunter/gatherers', spontaneous, 'distractible', able to dash off after the prey with no notice, able to switch to bigger better prey should it present itself, yet able to hyper-focus on a task like gathering seasonal berries or nuts or shelter materials.
Soon enough, I had gone from driving the cart on the paved path and watching my party of golfers to driving about the grass just any old where I pleased, looking at the bugs on the leaves of the prairie plants and trying to find as many balls as I could at the edge of the ponds. I think golfers call those 'water hazards'. To me, they were 'potential ecosystem'; there might be frogs or little fish or mayfly larvae in there! The golfers got tired of yelling for me to come back when they needed a new club so pretty soon, they just carried the few they used most. After a while, I had my son more interested in helping fish balls out of the edge of the pond and I had Marty more interested in driving the cart as fast as we could.
I had a blast golfing that one time, but for some reason, we never did that again.

A Country Road

November, I think it was. He was probably on his way to or from hunting with his brothers in North Dakota. He called from somewhere in Minnesota. "The Northern Lights are just amazing. I've been watching them for miles and I've never seen them like this. You should take the boys out to see them." So we drove the Jeep west. That's where you have to go here to escape the light pollution. We stopped now and then to get out and see, and still, we were not that much impressed. A little wavering glow over there and maybe a bit over there. Finally, we got to a point where trees blocked the lights of towns and we watched for a bit, thinking they were lovely, but hardly worth the big deal. Then they flared and shifted and rolled and wavered and flickered. They were green and over here. Then orange and over there. Then they hung low like cliffs of blue ice for way many miles along the horizon of our view. They appeared to fade away and we contemplated heading for home, but when we glanced back, they had flared red high above in great rays and arches. I don't know how long we lingered there, watching them come and go, watching them change and shift, talking to each other, pondering the nature of things and sharing our awe. It was a magical and precious time with my boys that are so grown up and independent now. Any time I hear reference to northern lights, I am taken back to that night of the magnificent show in the sky and the wonder of my sons.

Asleep At The Wheel

I drove the route again a while ago and tried to find the place. I had no luck in my search because it had snowed another many inches and the big trucks with their long armed blades that plow the snow well past the shoulders of the road had been out. My tracks had been snowed over and plowed away, but I did see many mail boxes and sign posts that I could have smashed into. I saw utility poles and trees that I could have wrapped the van around. I saw stone walls and metal guard rails that I could have sideswiped and careened off into oncoming traffic. I saw ditches deep enough to roll a van into and others so steep that I would have ended up far from the road in the valley below after how many flips and tumbles? When I awoke at the wheel, steering myself back onto the roadway as ice and snow flew past my windshield and across my side window, and as I was thrown into the opposite lane by wheels apparently turned too sharply to the left, with traffic far enough down the road to allow me time to adjust back into my lane, I was lucky indeed to have been on one of the few stretches of the road where such a correction was possible. Driving the route again, seeing the obstacles and conditions of the shoulders of the winding and hilly Wisconsin roads, I was impressed more deeply than ever with the truth of what one friend said, which was "You are lucky to be alive" and with the even graver truth of what another friend said, "You could have killed someone!"

Sunday Driving

You never knew where you'd end up or what you'd end up doing. Sunday drives could lead anywhere and end anywhere. They were unscripted and full of potential. Sometimes, Sunday drives were just that, driving about on a Sunday afternoon, on a circuit that took us past some of our fields so our dad could gauge some level of growth or weediness or need for fertilizer or readiness for harvest. But sometimes they were farther ranging and sometimes they included a stop. That stop might be to hike across rolling hills through pastures in the sand hills where we might find a wild tiger lily, the remnant of some long gone majestic prairie. The stop might be to walk down to the dam over the Jim River where the water rushed, powerful, surging, over the spillway and we had to talk in shouts to be heard. The stop might be at a friend or relatives house where we might get to see pigs or milk cows or a new dog or a monstrous new piece of farm machinery. We might end up invited in and offered games or coloring books to amuse us and there might be some sort of sweet snacks involved. Often the drives and the walks and the stops involved stories from my dad. He was not the kind of guy you could put on stage and say 'Tell us a story.' No, that would just elicit a joking around and never a serious story. He had to be inspired by some sight or some question or some memory. And then he would be off. Telling about how something came to be or explaining how something worked or remembering how something used to be. Those were magical moments when my dad was at his best, talking with a sincerity and seriousness that was always tinged with optimism and hope and what might be in the future. "Let's go for a ride." was an invitation to adventure and spontaneity that we never turned down. That Sunday drive could lead anywhere.

Autumn Roadside Triptych

Good Money After Rust

Oh, I am a little poorer tonight but ooooh, baby, does that old 1996 Dodge Grand Caravan drive nice now! Some of you might remember how I told you it shimmied and vibrated at 54 - 58 mph so I had to accelerate quickly past that and how it vibrated again around 80 so I had to stay under that or punch it up to 85? I don't think you were very amused at the last part of that. When was this that I mentioned that? The September trip to WomanSong or as far back as the January to visit my mother after her surgery? So it has gotten worse, vibrating around 30 and also, when going very very slowly, like at a crawl in traffic. It was more like a rocking from side to side at really slow speeds.
So since I got the brakes and calipers redone before I went to Wisconsin for the last extended stay there, I thought maybe this was the calipers out of adjustment - like before the repair, it was from the bad calipers and now it was that they were not adjusted right - I know, a long shot, but that woulda made the fix free.
Kinda like the guy who is looking for his keys in the front yard and a neighbor stops to help and another and another and pretty soon one of them asks when he lost them out there and he says actually he thinks he dropped them in the basement but he can't see down there cuz it's too dark so he thought he'd look out where it was light . . .
So I took it in and explained all that and they guy said no, a caliper causes a jerking back and forth, not side to side because they grab and let go and grab and let go - he said this could be out of alignment or a bad tire belt or tires out of balance, like if a weight feel off. This is why I like these guys cuz they explain things to me and get the way I use sounds and hand motions to explain what is wrong and they actually drew me pictures to explain the brake issues last time, unlike the dealership guys who had a shut-up-and-just-trust-us-and-don't-ask-us-to-explain-anything sort of attitude.
So he calls me later after they have looked it over, and he is kinda . . . hysterical . . . I have not one but TWO tires with broken belts - one is probably the one causing the motion because it is so much worse than the other that seems to have broken just recently and well, he doesn't want to sound like he is trying to scare me, and he knows I don't want to put a lot of money into this thing, but really, do I know how dangerous it is to drive with a tire with a broken belt? Well, I knew going in they were kinda bald, as my oil change guy told me he wouldn't cross the city limits with tires that bald, let alone drive to Wisconsin. So I okay that and he hesitates . . . and I need an alignment, probably from driving with that bad tire all this time and the struts are worn too and I can leave those alone but it won't ride as well . . . so I okay that too, and later he calls to say the sway bar connectors are broken in 2 places and I really should do that too while they are in there if I drive on hills and curves (those of you who know the 'driftless area' of Wisconsin just snorted at that) - well, I know that has been broken since 2005, so I okayed that too.
He actually apologized for how much it all turned out to be when I picked it up - I like that, a repair guy who at least feels a little remorse for charging you 50-plus bucks an hour . . . but oooh, baby, does she drive like a . . . really old junker with brand new tires and perfect alignment and suspension . . .

Wisconsin Diorama

Sometimes my part of of Wisconsin is so pretty, it begins to look a little fake to me in its perfect brilliance. There was a museum in Chicago that had nature dioramas. Nooks in the wall behind glass windows contained scale models that were meticulously crafted to portray scenes from nature. They had a richly detailed foreground of an ecosystem of native plants, and a painted background of sky and horizon, and a middle ground representing how the ecosystem fit into the larger picture of the surrounding landscape. This roadside scene is very much like a diorama of the sumac fencerow.

Presidential Wishes

Just returned from a stretch of days driving around rural and small town Wisconsin, and I have to say that I am impressed. It is quite one thing to say yes when some campaign worker shows up at your door and asks to post one of those regulation pre-fab curbside signs on your property. That is one way to show your lukewarm support of a candidate. But it takes another level of support entirely to paint your own sign or have your own banner made at the fast sign place. And the number of citizen-made signs out there indicating support of Barrack Obama made me happy and hopeful indeed!