The Middlewesterner

LIKE A MIRACLE, THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS

Today is our

wedding anniversary. I have written of this before, here and here.

Today Mary and I have been married for thirty-seven years. How is that possible? Weren't we just at the church? Weren't our daughters just babes in arms? Where have the years gone? What does it all come to?

Certainly, when we married, I had no notion of what thirty-seven years of it would be like. And how could I? I was twenty-two years old then, and incredibly young for my age. A fellow doesn't know too much too soon.

If you stay married for thirty-seven years, however, you learn that you are married to the entire person, warts and all, as Mary knows. I am not exactly the pleasant young poet she thought she was marrying. Indeed, last night she used my own term back at me: grumble-bear.

There is a stretch in the beginning when you are looking forward, and all things seem possible. The marriage of this man and this woman can be anything you want it to be.

There is a stretch in the middle where you pull like two horses in harness, and you worry more about the pulling and less abut the grand enterprise of marriage. The marriage is what it is. She might question whether the effort is worth it, or you will question it, yet in the end you both stay in harness and you pull, pull, pull.

Eventually there comes a point, some twenty-five or thirty years on, when things seem a little easier. You accept each other for who you are and you stop expecting something else. In fact, you start to take joy in each other in ways that were not possible at the beginning.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you have started to agree on everything. God, no. Mostly you see the world entirely differently; or, she might say, you see entirely different worlds. Yet you have learned to accept that you actually have to agree on almost nothing, except that money is not important to happiness and that true love is the greatest gift, even if it doesn't look anything like what you imagined it would be.

We still have some good years before us. And, as we go forward, the happiness of our daughters brings us tremendous joy, and their pain pains us. We have begun to understand that these daughters have been our gift to each other, and our gift to the world, these strong beautiful women. We live our lives grey-headed now, or grey of beard, and in our daughters we see ourselves resonant in the world. It's the march of the generations: our daughters are beginning to stand in the world in our stead, taking with them a little bit of the hope and dream that Mary and I brought to each other that day we said "I do."

Thirty-seven years. Is that what it is?

I shake my head and wonder. It's like a miracle, these years.

LET ME COUNT MY BLESSINGS

First would be Mary,

I suppose. She who has made it possible for me to get back to writing in these last years. She who has inspired me time and again. She who reads my work and raises questions and makes it better.

Second are our two lovely daughters. They who are so much more than we ever pushed them to become. Strong and loving and bright women, both of them. They are the shine on my joy.

"It is a fearful thing to love that which death can touch." Yes. Yet it is better to love; it is always better to love.

I suppose my upbringing is a blessing. I am who I am because of that farm a mile south of Curlew and a quarter mile west. I look at the world as one who has stood in the field, who has butchered chickens for food. Some might think such a childhood is a disadvantage, but they do not know. Such parents and siblings as I had, such extended family, are tremendous blessings.

That I can put two words together and two sentences together and two paragraphs together - that is a blessing. Happily, I am more concerned about being the best writer I can be, doing the best job of recording the world about me, and I am less concerned about being famous or making money.

Not being interested in making money is a blessing. It is so seldom that I am jealous of what someone else has. I am already rich with the things in my life, so how could I want for more? Being able to say with truthfulness that there is nothing anyone has that I want is indeed a blessing. The jealous man is never happy, and he will never find what he wants either.

This house is a blessing, this big old tumbledown house. It is a home around me, and it feels like home. I have sunk into the soil here, and won't be moved.

I am blessed with friends. They are like chosen family. One does not want to say too much, for fear of spooking joy.

I have books. I have all the books a fellow needs. Although I'm sure I'll find another sometime soon that I'll have to order. And I am blessed in being able to order books when I want to. How poor I would be if I could not have the books I want.

Oh, there are more blessings, I'm sure. This must be like the iceberg, nine-tenths of the blessings invisible to me, below the water-line. Yet such a list as this is a good start at reminding myself that I am a most fortunate man.

*

Yet I cannot conclude this list of my blessings without including on it my great sadness, the black dog I live with. I would not take such joy in the world as I do without my sadness, which compels me to watch for the little beauties around us. Were I not immensely sad much of the time, perhaps I would be like those who walk the path and miss the flowers and the buds and the way the light plays on the water and the way shadow brings light into great relief. There is no way to know immense joy without knowing sorrow, no way of being lifted up without having been cast down. So sadness must be a blessing, and every day I should embrace it.

O, CANADA!

The first six photographs in this post - of sunrise, the shoreline, Tom and Mary in the canoe, the campsite, the bear, and the trapper's cabin - are by our friend and sister-in-law, Susan Dickert. The two photos of the gnarly trees and the final photo of the two canoes are by my wife Mary.

It was "women's weekend" on Little Caribou Lake, there at the end of July, 2006. Of course, we didn't know that. The women in question were Marg (Margaret) Lawrence, Patty Baker, and Cindy Byers, friends from Thunder Bay, Ontario, who had come up to Marg's family's cabin, one of only a few such cabins on the lake. Little Caribou is on crown land, and you can't just buy a lot for a cabin here. Marg wasn't sure how her husband's family came to own their cabin on the lake, but it had been in the family for a couple generations. The three women know each other because they all volunteer at the recreation center in Thunder Bay. This is their second such weekend together. Marg works in a Thunder Bay hospital - in housekeeping, I believe she said.

This is how we met these women. Marg was motoring down the lake back to the cabin and stopped her boat where my wife and her brother were canoeing on the lake to get in the day's supply of water. She asked them, "Would you like a pickerel dinner?" She held up a stringer of fish. Pickerel is Canadian for walleye, ay?

Pickerel is the only fish these women want to catch, and the only fish they will keep. For the rest, it's catch and release. Especially the pikes. Pike is Canadian for northerns, ay? Marg's Rule: No pike in the boat. Which is just as well, for while Cindy loves to fish, she detests northern; if one gets too close, she'll clamber to the front of the boat. Cindy does love to fish, but she doesn't eat fish. Marg eats fish, but she can have pickerel pretty much whenever she wants. So when the women go home with their limit Patty will take the fish because Patty loves fish. And these women can catch fish every day. Today they had their six fish possession limit, so if they wanted to keep fishing during the weekend, they'd have to release their fish, eat them, or they could give them to us and start tomorrow with a blank slate. We had licenses to possess eight fish. We could eat the fish the women gave us, and increase our possession limit to eight again the next day. Fresh fish is one of the joys of Canada. And walleye! And delivered to us!

*

Mary and I had come north late on Thursday night, to rendezvous with Mary's brother Philip and his wife Susan for a week of canoeing and camping just outside the boundaries of Wabakimi Provincial Park about three hours north of Thunder Bay. Philip and Susan had already been in the wilderness for a week with several friends. We met at a bed and breakfast about six miles south of Armstrong, Ontario, about 4:00 p.m. on Friday, found supper in town, came back to the B&B for a night's sleep, then had some quick breakfast the next morning. Philip and Susan repacked for another week on the water with us, and about 11:00 a.m. on Saturday we paddled north on Little Caribou.

The campsite where we wanted to stay that first night was occupied as we came past, but it appeared as if the campers were packing up. So we paddled up around the next point and, after a decent interval, paddled back and took possession of the site.

*

That was where the women found us, fishless and relaxed, and they gave us those six pickerel on Saturday night. We learned they wouldn't be returning to Thunder Bay until Tuesday, so we decided to stay at the campsite to see if they would bring us more fish on Sunday. They did. They brought five pickerel for lunch, and we had pickerel tacos; they came back later with two more for supper.

Of course, you have to invite such benefactors ashore for a little nip of brandy and some conversation. We did that Sunday. And we were rich with Wisconsin cheese, so we sent the women home with a block of cheddar. The women shared some brandy with us, though Marg, driver of the small motorboat, was careful counting her swallows. She recognizes the water as inherently dangerous. She wears a life vest while on the water, and requires her passengers to wear them too. Marg knows why she wears the vest - she tumbled out of the boat turning it on a cold weekend in May when she was out fishing with her children. Her thirteen-year-old daughter caught hold of the motor and brought the boat around to pick her mother out of the water. When she hit the water, Marg said, the last thing she thought about was swimming - the water was that cold.

"See," she'd told her children, "that's why you wear the life vest."

The women had a nip of brandy with us, and some conversation. These are confident, self-reliant women - not afraid to go out on the water, the three of them; not afraid of the isolation, nor of the proximity of bears, for there are bears about. They like the water and sky, the trees and rocks. And they like fishing.

Marg is the outfitter for this women's weekend, you might say, she of the mop of curly dark hair and faded red baseball cap, the broad smile and hearty laugh. Cindy's hair is lighter of color, cut to a short shag; she is quick to laugh, too, and like the others she is not shy about saying what she thinks, ay? She likes to fish, yeah, but she doesn't like to eat fish. Patty wears a baseball cap with a pony-tail stuck out of the back of it. Her face is a bit more chiseled, angular like a piece of this Canadian shield where it comes from high above down to the water. None of the women look like your gung-ho athletes; I don't think they'd be models for an outdoors catalog. Yet they are the real thing, the real fisherwomen of Little Caribou on a long weekend holiday.

Marg loves to fish, but she's happy being outfitter for the weekend, driving the boat, netting the fish, taking them off the hook, and putting them on the stringer. She would be back the following weekend with her husband and children to do her own fishing.

As Sunday afternoon deepened into evening, we talked about fishing, and politics, and what-not. Susan asked Marg what her fellow citizens thought of the President of the United States.

"Oh, we don't like him," Marg said. "Of course, we have some politicians of our own we don't like very much either."

Marg doesn't like Bush, and she doesn't like pike, but of the pike she tells us she handles them gently when she takes them off the hook and puts them back in the water. One assumes she wouldn't do as well with Bush. "Who knows," she says, "twenty-five years from now it might be pike is the only fish we'll have to catch and eat, so we best take care of them now."

"Yeah," said Cindy, who doesn't even eat fish, "it might be the only fish we have - who knows?"

We talked about what they were catching, and where they were catching it. They named the places - "Five Birches" ("That's what my husband calls it, though there are more than five."), and "Johnson," the place where the lake narrows, and "Pickerel Rock" and such. They talked about catching the pickerel, about the pikes they don't keep, and about catching Canada.

"Catching Canada?"

"Yeah, that's when you snag a tree or the rocks on the bottom. That's catching Canada, and when you do, you have to sing 'O, Canada.'"

Eventually the women went back to their cabin. And we went to eating pickerel. Tough work, but somebody's gotta do it.

On Monday morning, the women came past on their way out to their hot fishing spots. "How many fish would you be wanting today?" Marg asked.

This is exactly why we decided to stay in this camp another day. "Four," Philip said.

"Okay," Marg said. "We'll see you later."

"I'll clean your pickerel, too, when you come back," Philip said.

*

It was about time to break out the Nalgene bottle of brandy when the women returned late Monday afternoon. They had our four pickerel. We had cheese and crackers on a makeshift table, and trail mix, and cups for the brandy. Philip cleaned all the fish, ours and theirs. They made really nice filets.

"We aren't gonna tell anybody we didn't clean them," Marg said. "Thanks."

We enjoyed some more conversation. I love the broadness of the Canadian vowels. You know you're talking to someone when you're talking to a Canadian. What did we talk about? This and that.

You know that old cabin at the portage onto the big Caribou Lake? That's a trapper's cabin belonging to Marg's eighty-year-old father-in-law who lives in Armstrong.

"Hah," Susan said, "my brother has that cabin penciled onto his charts. I'll tell him I met the daughter-in-law of the owner."

That kind of talk. About kids playing hockey, and how it should be fun, and how too many parents make it into something way too serious.

About how the USA's requirement to show a passport at the border will mean the end to cross-border hockey tournaments for the 9-15 year-old Midgets from Thunder Bay. "How many kids are going to spend $100 for a passport so they can play in tournaments in Minneapolis or Duluth or Grand Portage?" Marg asked.

Yeah, how many?

And I wonder how many of the 9-15 year-old hockey players might be potential terrorists? Sometimes we paint with too broad a brush.

We told the women we thought that singing "O, Canada" when you catch Canada is a good rule in theory. Yet the problem with the idea in practice is that we didn't know the words to "O, Canada." We'd try to sing it, and it would end up "O, Canada, la-la-la-la-la-la."

Spontaneously the three women broke into song, confident voices singing their national anthem, full of quiet pride in the place they live. It was a lovely moment - unrehearsed and moving. The song rolled away across the water.

We agreed we should do this again sometime. "When is women's weekend next year?"

"It is always the weekend before our long weekend in August for the Civil Holiday," Marg said, which is the first weekend of the month next year. I got Marg's e-mail address.

"Maybe we'll see you next year," we said.

"Yeah," Marg said.

Then Philip was down at the edge of the water, holding the boat while the women climbed back aboard. We were saying good-bye. The last thing I heard Marg say?

She said, "We're neighbors, ay?"

WHY?

I believe this

as firmly as a righteous Christian believes in Christ, that some twenty-five billion years from now the universe will collapse back upon itself, will congeal and compact and become again the speck from which the Big Bang erupted, and everything that we know, everything that we have cherished, will be lost. That I have lived will mean nothing then. Nothing I have written will survive. Both the good I have done and the pain I have caused will have evaporated as surely as the wind blows away my spoken words, blows away the scent of the decaying world.

That we have wondered about good and evil, that we have debated the existence of God, that we have prayed for redemption – these will mean nothing.

That Christ or Mohammed or Buddha walked upon the earth will mean – at the moment all creation is a mere spot of primal ooze – nothing.

You may be furious about what I believe or don't believe. Yet your anger will mean nothing when the universe has gone dark.

By the time our sun dies and our solar system gets pulled into its collapse, some of humankind may have found refuge in some far distant galaxy. This will be only a temporary respite. By the time the universe disappears into its black speck of nothingness, there will be no refuge. Count on it. Even God, if you have a God, will be crushed in the physic of the great ending. None of us get out of this world alive, neither we mortals nor our deities. Not even the universe gets out of this world alive.

All the universe will be a cinder-speck. I don't know what becomes of time and space. I cannot imagine the primal speck without time and space around it. I have to believe that the end of time is the beginning of time. That the heat of all that darkness will create light. I have to believe that the compression of the end will create another Big Bang, another seven days of creation, another roll of the die and another shot at getting it right.

Why, then, do I not kill myself and get it over with? Why do I not steal and cheat and walk on the bones of those who cross me? Why, if it all means nothing in the end, do I strive to choose good rather than evil?

I'm a funny fellow, full of contradictions. Yes, I believe we are stardust, on the one hand; on the other hand, I believe we are noble creatures and I strive to live according to that nobility. Indeed the Sermon on the Mount will be a cinder-crisp in the end but in the meantime it represents, for me, a lovely way to embrace the world. So too with that line from the musical "Hair" – "Kids, be free. Do what you want to do so long as you don't hurt anybody."

Life is short and brutish, as they say, yet it is all we've got. There is only this moment of the eternal now, and each living and breathing collection of stardust means to make the best of it. It is a poet's argument I make, that good is more lovely than evil. Ultimately, of course, loveliness won't make a whit of difference; yet in the eternal now, the beautiful is always preferable to the brutish. This world around us is full of things that charm and glow, full of roses we should stop to smell. The alternative to embracing life's loveliness is misery soup, and I simply prefer the loveliness. My poet's sensibility would not have it any other way, just as my wife's response to a meaningless universe is to mother and nurse and care for, as if we are all refugees. This poet's argument is the same one I used in my memoir Curlew: Home, when explaining why I don't hunt: once, after I'd shot, I saw a pheasant fall off its arc of flight; I recognized that something beautiful was broken forever; and I was the cause of it.

In short, I guess I believe that it doesn't matter that everything means nothing; I have to live as if it does.

I guess I believe that the wondrous instant of the eternal now trumps nothingness. That the stardust we are pushes us to live nobly, to noble deeds.

I believe I am made of illogic and contradiction and love and desire and mud and greatness and stardust all. Made of words and ache and experience all searching for lovely expression.

I believe that this moment of eternal now, which is all we have, is wondrous and beautiful.

And I believe that when the light of the universe goes out forever, that will be beautiful too.

A NEW PHOTOGRAPH OF THE OLD FELLOW: I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF BEING FRONT AND CENTER (OR TOP LEFT-HAND CORNER)

And I have grown weary

of encountering myself face-to-face every time my home page comes up. So, as you can see, I've replaced my photograph with the one which appears on the front cover of my memoir, Curlew: Home.* In addition to myself, you see here my mother, two sisters, and a brother. I wrote of this photo in Curlew: Home, as follows:

Now I am holding another photograph. I see my mother crouched on one knee, my brother Flip on her lap. Flip is in diapers, he looks blankly to the side like some hungry pioneer child in some desolate past. My sister Kack is hooked in my mother's left arm, she has her hand to her mouth, her mouth is open as if she would speak, her eyes raise questions I cannot answer. My sister Nancy pushes up to my mother's lap from the right side, already her face is browed with worry. My mother is not looking into the camera, nor is Kack, Nancy, and Flip. My mother wears a long polka dot dress, white anklets, white shoes. Her hair is up in a braid around her head like a halo. Flip and my sisters have white socks and white shoes. My mother looks upward expectantly, as if something great is about to happen and she knows it.

I am in the photograph, too, dressed in bib overalls cut off at the knees, my hair already falling down over my forehead. My feet are in dark shoes, and the shoes look as if they have already taken root right where I stand. I am the only one in the photo who looks into the eye of the camera. I am looking into the heart of the camera. My eyes in the photo seem to me dark and bold and eternal. I have my hands in my pockets and a broken smile on my face. I look like a poet, I look like a poet should look at four years of age. As I stare at the boy in the photograph, the boy I was is staring back at me. None of it confuses him yet. If that boy has doubts, he doesn't let them show.

I do not know where the photograph was taken. There is an old car in the gravel driveway behind us. There seems to be a slash of sidewalk just in front of us. Over my mother's left shoulder, the fabric of some bush. Beyond the driveway, some buildings whose shape and meaning I can't quite make out. Let me guess where it was taken. We were at my grandmother's house in West Bend: the indistinct buildings in back, the bush. It is late spring: the grass is four or five inches long, Flip would have been born the preceding August. The year is 1951: I am four years old in the photograph, looking out at myself who will be looking back half a century later.

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*Curlew: Home is available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, Wisconsin 53931 for $15.95 plus $2 s&h. Make check payable to Tom Montag.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY: A PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER FROM CURLEW: HOME*

I don't remember my father smiling much,

yet I don't remember him not smiling. I remember his look of determination. A steadiness of gaze, a set to his chin, the lean of his shoulders forward, into it.

He was a surprisingly young man when I knew him first - in his twenties. Thin, yet muscled for his honorable profession. He was not a tall man - perhaps 5'10" - but seemed taller than any farmer in the neighborhood. His skin in season would be tanned and weathered, the hair of his arms turned golden. Through the years the knuckles of his fingers deformed with work. His eyes were steady blue like an Iowa wind.

He knew farming, of course; he could husband the seasons. We raised beef and hogs and chickens; and for a while we even had sheep. Early on we milked cows and sold the cream for butter; later we kept only one milk cow, enough milk for nine kids. In the fields he rotated corn and soybeans and oats and alfalfa. Once there was sorghum. I remember sugar cane. My father was a good farmer but that does not mean farming was good. I remember our feed salesman stopping while we were baling hay; he told my father the price of hogs had jumped slightly. We shut down our baling operation, loaded a truckful of hogs and took them to market. The line between making it and not making it was a few cents per pound and my father knew where the line was.

The beef he raised was recognized as superior by the cattle buyers in the area and our animals always seemed to do just a little bit better in the auction ring.

I must have been ten or eleven years old. We were at the auction barn, far up in the cheap seats - my father, my sisters, and two of my brothers, eight children in all, set in a row from youngest to eldest next to my dad. My mother and the baby were at home. Our cattle came into the ring. "This fine bunch belongs to Bill Montag," the auctioneer said. "Bill is here today and it looks like he's got his family with him."

We puffed with pride. All eyes were on us. "We left the little ones to home," my dad called out to the auctioneer. He meant, I think, that we'd brought only the fully finished steers to the sale barn. Everyone in the sale barn, however, might have wondered just how many more little ones - children - there could be yet. My father is not one to explain himself further.

A farmer doesn't suffer fools gladly, at least my father didn't. The tax assessor was making small talk: "Think it'll rain?"

"It'll be a hell of a long dry spell if it don't," my father said.

My father rented the farm at Curlew from late in 1947 til the mid-1960s when we bought the farm near Dows. The people he rented from at Curlew were the same people he banked with. Having one set of hands taking money out of your pockets is always preferable to having two sets of fingers going through everything. (Actually my dad and the landlord and the banker had a good relationship overall. It got to the point if my dad needed to borrow money to buy feeder cattle, he'd write the check for the cattle, fill out the loan application when he got home, and mail it off to the bank. The bank would cover the check and loan him the money. When you told people you were Bill Montag's boy, you got some respect.)

I saw a check for $10,000 once, made out to my dad, after he'd sold cattle. The sight of that much money kind of took my breath away. My dad let me hold the check for a few minutes. I handed it back to him. "Yeah, that's about how long I get to hold onto it, too, son," he said. He took the money to the bank to pay off a loan, or part of one.

I earned seventy five cents an hour walking bean fields back in those days so when my father hired on at $4.00 an hour to do some carpentry at the auction barn in Humboldt, Iowa, we thought the money train had just pulled in. Not many people were getting $4.00 an hour back then, at least not people we knew. Dad had to drive 45 minutes each way back and forth, which seemed only a small inconvenience for the big money. Dad helped build new stock pens, loading docks, and shelter barns using green wood and big nails.

Dad didn't drink but occasionally, he was a Montag. Three or four times a year, though, he and my mother might go off dancing at the Ridato, a pavilion some fifteen miles south of us. He might have a whisky or two, listening and dancing and listening, and on very rare occasion might have more than that and not be able to get up for milking the next morning. My mother would say "Get the chores done, boys, Dad's sick." Which condition was some cause of concern for us, for our dad was never sick. We figured it must be really bad. One time the only thing he could stomach all the next day was a few nibbles of oyster crackers, that's what we called them. That's like being on death's door.

My father set high expectations but he was never harsh. Mostly he communicated what he expected of us by his example, because he never said much. "Kinda crooked, isn't it?" might be all you'd hear about it and you'd know you hadn't done it right yet. The lines of his fields were clean and straight, his fences were taut, his beef cattle and his hogs were premium. How could we strive for less?

When I wonder where I got my rebel streak I remind myself that my father, quiet as he was, was Catholic in Protestant farm country, he was Democrat in those grey Republican years. He could detect a load of bullshit before it ever came off the truck, and there were plenty of fellows peddling it - feed salesmen, county agents, even a farmer down the road maybe. "I don't think so," my dad would say and the sale was doomed; might as well pack it up right now. A cloud of dust like a rooster tail and the fellow would be headed off to try his luck with some other farmer. Sometimes the neighbor might ask the salesman "How many did Bill Montag buy?"

My father was one of seventeen children. His was the large Catholic farm family. When they retired from farming Grandpa and Grandma Montag bought a house in West Bend. I remember standing in their living room watching it snow on television; television was very new at that point and I had never seen one before. It seemed so strange. My grandmother's name seemed stranger - Luna. Grandfather's name was Henry, he was tall and lean and a little stooped by the time I knew him. Sixteen of Henry and Luna's children survived to adulthood. My father was about the middle of the pack. The farm my grandparents owned had a small creek running through it. Water. In Iowa! A field with stones and sun and the run of water in a brook crossing it. Grandfather helped my dad put the shed onto the back of our barn at Curlew, something like a lean-to, but better quality; it was shelter for our cattle. My grandfather moved like my father, only slower and more methodical, much slower and methodical than the farm boy at his heels; he knew what he was doing so he didn't have to hurry. I got nails for him, I held the other end of 2x4s for him while he nailed them into place, I watched him and my father work and I might have wondered what is this strand that connects parent and child. I might have wondered then, I wonder now: what is this strand that connects grandfather and grandson across an eon.

My dad and all his siblings were bright kids. One or other of them won the county-wide spelling contest, including my dad. I know that Pa didn't finish high school, yet I don't know many men, even today, who read as much as my father does. Reading was important to him.

My father fought in Europe during World War 2. He told only a few war stories. He did what he had to do and saw nothing glorious in it. He was never good at killing things.

Once his detachment stole some old hens from a convent in Germany; they cooked those chickens for two days, and cooked them some more, and still could not get the meat tender enough to chew. They had to throw that supper away.

My father had carried the detachment's radio on his back for the greatest part of the day. Then a fellow relieved him of the burden. Minutes later a sniper's bullet cut through the radio and cut through the soldier carrying it, killing the man. My father never said "That could have been me" but we knew that could have been him and if it had been him my brothers and sisters and I would not have been born. Life is like a game of pinball, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

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*Curlew: Home is available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931, for $15.95 plus $2 S&H.

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 8

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

The couple farmed that land

near Curlew for more than fifteen years. Every year they worried this would be the year they'd have to move. They didn't know that the important man would tell them, once they'd made a down payment on a farm of their own, that he would never, not ever, have made them move. But buy a farm they would, that couple, no longer as young as they once were.

They'd go to the bank in Emmetsburg to tell the very important man's brother, Charles, that they'd bought a farm. The hell you did, Charles would say. Your account is overdrawn.

Well, that's what we need to see you about, the farmer would say. We wrote another check yesterday, for a $5000 down payment, and we need you to cover it.

All this lay before the young couple, lay off in the future. As they drove home that morning in March, maybe they talked about how 1947 would not be a good year for farming, or maybe they did not talk of it. A storm on May 28 would put four inches of snow on their fields. The corn that had been cultivated already was killed. The corn that had not been cultivated, that corn survived. Did they talk about the hail storm that would come on the sixth of June, followed by another one two weeks later, chopping at the crops; then the heavy, wet weather until the Fourth of July? About the rest of the summer without a drop of rain? About the beans that had been replanted because of the hail and that wouldn't sprout until the end of September?

Maybe they didn't talk about this: after their first year farming, they had less money than they had started with. On their tax return for the year, they would include this note to the IRS: "As near as we can tell, you owe us money."

Never would they remember exactly what all they talked of that day, driving back to Rodman from Tom Maury's farm with the oat seeder clattering in the trunk of the old black Ford. They never talked to old Tom Maury again, though they drove past his farm a hundred times over the years. Every time they did, the farm wife would relive her most perfect day. That morning of making plans for the rest of their lives, that day in spring, long ago now, in March, 1947. The snow of winter was gone then - none was left in the ditches, none along the fence rows. As the young couple drove back towards their first home, they could smell the freshness of the new earth. They could feel the weight of the sun against their skin, the wind at the hairs of their forearms. The whole world was throbbing around them, through them, in them. Their whole life together was rolling out before them. Electric. As alive as anything can be.

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 7

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

It would be another autumn,

another winter approaching. The farmer would be out harvesting corn. His wife would be hauling the corn up to the crib, unloading it, taking the wagon back to the field for another load. As she waited at the end of the field for the corn picker to come around with a full load, she'd bend to pick up the corn which had dropped onto the headland. The cornpicker loses some ears when it is turned around.

One of those chilly autumn days, it would be a Saturday afternoon, the farmer's wife was out there again at the end of the field, waiting for another load of corn, bending to pick up ears that had dropped. Into the field would drive the landlord - the important man with his important Cadillac. The young wife would think this is as good a time as any to ask the very important man for storm windows for the second floor of the farmhouse. In winter, frost came into the corner of the ceiling of the stairwell and piled up two or three inches thick in there; something had to be done about it.

So she would ask for storm windows, the young wife would.

The important man would say: no, we can't buy you storm windows. We have forty-some rental houses and we couldn't possibly afford storm windows.

So the farm wife would bend and pick up an ear of corn. You can see her, it's almost like slow motion. She throws the ear into her empty wagon, just as she had been doing all day, just as she had done often, but she throws it hard. When the ear of corn hits the far side of wagon, nearly all the kernels explode off of it - she threw that hard and the corn was that dry. If you can't get us storm windows, the farm wife says to the important man, you can bet that's the last damn ear of corn I'm picking up for you.

The young farmer, when he heard about this exchange, would be furious. He would say: Mother, it's just things like this that's going to cause us to have to move.

That would be a Saturday afternoon. On Monday morning, even before the sun was up, 5:30 a.m., the phone rings in the drafty old farmhouse. The young wife answers. Ah, says the important man on the other end, I got the boss. I wanted to talk to you. Charles and I were visiting yesterday and we thought it would be a good idea if you had the fellow at the lumberyard in Curlew come out and measure the house for storm windows. You want to have him put storm windows on the first floor, too.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 6

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

Maybe they didn't talk about

the coming August. The young farmer would be working with the threshing crew to get the flax in. His wife would see in the paper there was a 320 acre farm at Curlew for rent, from an important man in Graettinger. The young wife would have the nerve to call that important man and say to him: would you mind not renting that farm until my husband can come see you about it? And the important man would say: let me see if I have this right - you want me to hold off renting my farm until your husband has time to come see me? Yes, that's right, the young wife would say, we want to rent it.

The very first day they could, the young couple went to see the important man with the farm for rent. They sat with their straight backs in their straight chairs in front of the important man's wide desk. He told them what was obvious - they didn't have money enough to farm his land, they didn't have equipment enough, they didn't have sons to help with the work. It all sounded hopeless.

The young wife spoke up. She said: if we had enough money and equipment and sons, we could afford to buy a place of our own, we wouldn't have to rent yours.

Let me call my brother, Charles, at the bank in Emmetsburg, the important man said. Charles said the young farmer had had an account at his bank for years and if he could get his father to co-sign the lease, the young couple could rent the farm.

Then two weeks later the couple would have a son and they would call him Tom and would send a birth announcement to the important man.

They started to fill up that big old farmhouse with children and every winter one more baby had to endure its draftiness - wind came in around the windows in the bedrooms, in all the rooms.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 5

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

Maybe they didn't talk about

the lonesomeness in those early years. About the day the young farmer would be planting corn in the near field. His wife would be so lonesome for him, she would want an excuse to go out and visit with him. They would have had bean soup for lunch. She'd think: I'll take him a bean sandwich and talk with him while he eats it. Bean sandwich! the farmer would exclaim. Whoever heard of a bean sandwich! Well, the wife would say, in my family we have bean sandwiches all the time. We have bean soup for dinner and then a bean sandwich for supper. The young farmer would go ahead and eat his and the couple could talk.

Driving home from Tom Maury's farm, the oat seeder rattling in the trunk, maybe they didn't talk about the morning the young farmer and the hired hand headed off to work the other two hundred acres over near West Bend. The young wife still had chicken chores to do, but they didn't have to be done right away so she went back to bed. Along comes a knocking at the door and there's a young fellow who says he's selling magazines to work his way through college. I don't have any money for magazines, the wife would tell him, but I sure get bored out here. Tell you what, she says, you help me to do the chicken chores, and I'll play cards with you. So that's what she did. The young wife and that magazine salesman did up the chicken chores, then they went to playing cards all morning. Along about half past eleven, the wife told that young salesman that her husband and the hired man would be coming home for dinner at noon and he'd have to get moving along. It wasn't until years later she wondered what nosy neighbors might have thought about her entertaining a young fellow all morning while my husband was away. She was still that innocent.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 4

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

They might have talked

about the children they would have. The woman would have told her farmer-husband that if he didn't want a dozen kids, he shouldn't have married her. They might have talked about finding a better farm to rent next year, better than what they were farming now, better soil, better buildings, more acreage; about a big, old empty house that would stand on the place, and how they'd proceed to fill it with children. They might have talked about buying a farm at some future time, once they'd gotten their feet under them good, once they had some experience behind them and some credit built up, once they had sons and daughters to help with the work.

They might have talked about old Tom Maury and how maybe they'd name their first-born after the old farmer.

They might have talked about the first refrigerator they would ever buy; how they'd get it at Wilson Hardware in West Bend, a new Kelvinator model called the Shelvador, how they'd pay for it with some of the one hundred dollars a month the young farmer had earned as a soldier fighting the Nazis.

They might have talked about earning a reputation for paying their bills. That would get them good credit. Why - in the year or so that the rural electric cooperative made such information public, three times it announced this young farm couple had been the very first to pay their electric bill this month, and this month, and this. Do you get that bill and always run right out to pay it? a jealous sister would ask the young farmer when she saw his name in the paper time and again.

They might have talked about grandchildren and great-grandchildren, about fifty-some years of married life, a life busting full of happiness, a life with its sadnesses as well.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 3

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

Together the old farmer

and the young one set the oat seeder into the trunk of the Ford and tied it into place for the drive back to Rodman. The young wife had been studying Tom Maury's house and buildings and fields from her vantage point in the doorway of the machine shed and now she offered how it was a beautiful place he had. She might have been a little green with envy, and wistful; she might have thought Tom Maury had everything. And Tom - he was proud of his spread, sure. He beamed a little bit at the compliment. But maybe Tom envied their youth, their whole lives stretched out before them. That kind of envy was not something he could put in words.

There you go, then, he said instead, pulling tight the last knot in the rope holding the seeder in place.

They left Tom Maury's late in the morning, the young couple did, to drive home. They were headed back to their little rented farm. To a house without running water. With an outhouse for plumbing. With an icebox, not a refrigerator. In the trunk behind them, the oat seeder rattled and creaked. They would use it later that spring, putting in oats and flax. They'd continue using it as long as they raised oats, all their lives, as long as they farmed, but they didn't know that yet. Still, driving home, the young couple talked of the future. They didn't stop for lunch in Emmetsburg, they went home to bean soup. The sun shone bright all across the Iowa farmland. In the ditches along the roadside there was a faint dreaming hint of green. The young farmer had been to war and did not talk much ever; he was a man of very few words; but even he talked of his plans, his hopes, his dreams. The young wife, she talked too. They talked about everything, the whole life they'd share.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 2

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

Old Tom Maury had farmed

all his life. He lived in a big white house set square to the road. He was big and jovial and his eyes tended to well up when he laughed. He was near retirement age now and maybe that was why he'd put his oat seeder up for sale. The black Ford pulled into the farm yard and Tom Maury came out to greet the young couple who got out of the car.

The young farmer asked the old farmer if he was the fellow with the oat seeder for sale.

Yes.

Can we see it? the young farmer asked.

Yes.

And together the three of them, the old farmer, the young one, and the young wife, angled over to the machine shed where the seeder was kept. It was old. It had been well-used. Yet there still was a little paint left on it.

An oat seeder of this kind is set into the tailgate section of a farm wagon. A chain from the wheel of the wagon runs up to a sprocket on the seeder and spins a pair of trays to spray seed out in an arc of about twelve feet. Someone drives tractor and pulls the wagon across a worked field. Someone else stays in the wagon, shoveling seed into the hopper. You go up the field and back. Repeat the process until the whole field is seeded. Up and back.

Now the young farmer stood at the edge of the light in the machine shed, not far from the seeder; he stood a little side-ways to the older man; he looked down at his shoes, then up into the face of Tom Maury.

How much would you be wanting for the seeder? the young man asked.

Old Tom said he'd probably have to have forty dollars.

The young farmer said he could probably give thirty five.

The old farmer looked down at his own shoes. He paused. There was a bird in the machine shed, making noise. Old Tom looked up into the face of the young farmer. Then he looked over at the softened roundness of the wife not yet four months pregnant.

On such a fine day as this, the old farmer said, for such a fine young couple, I suppose I could let it go for thirty five.

To be continued....

HER MOST PERFECT DAY EVER - 1

"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. I grew up a mile south, a quarter mile west of Curlew, Iowa. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and their story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is my mother's memories of the most perfect day of her life. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as is humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.

Her most perfect day ever

had started as just another day in March, 1947. They were farming eighty acres and living in a drafty house near Rodman, and had another two hundred acres over closer to West Bend. It was their first year of marriage, their first year farming. The young farm wife was making pancakes for breakfast that morning, as she had done often. They ate, then, did the farmer and his wife; he was a veteran of the recent war, a farm boy gone off to soldiering, and now he was home and he was going to farm. They put butter and syrup on those pancakes that morning - butter the color of the sun melting into the morning's sweetness.

If she wanted cold water, she had to pump it at the sink in a grey corner of the kitchen, had to work the long handle of the noisy pump by hand until water splashed into the pan in the sink, or into a pitcher; hot water she took from a big pot kept on the wood-burning cook stove. She prepared a pan of warm water for dishes, a little soap in it. Then she washed the breakfast dishes, as she had done often.

She was just finishing up dishes when the farmer came back into the house from chores. Ma, he said to her, you want to go with me to look at that oat seeder? They had seen a seeder advertised in the Farm Bureau's paper, a used oat seeder for sale over west of Emmetsburg. This was their first season at seeding and planting and when the soil warmed enough they would need an oat seeder.

Old Tom Maury's farm was five miles west of Emmetsburg. Emmetsburg was fifteen miles west of Rodman. The young farmer and his wife climbed into their 1940 Ford sedan. In those days you could buy an auto painted just about any color you wanted - that was the joke - as long as it was black. It was a black 1940 Ford. They were going to Tom Maury's over west of Emmetsburg and they were going to buy an oat seeder.

To be continued....

SUNDAY MASS IN COZUMEL - 4

Each January since 2001 Mary and I have gone scuba-diving in Cozumel. We go for the diving, but also for the immersion in another culture, another way of life. We stay at Hotel Pepita, an old, family-owned hotel favored by divers, set a few blocks away from the tourist section of San Miguel. We shop for fruit at the bustling market in a big warehouse a few blocks farther back from the tourist section; and we dine where we see the locals eating. And, last January, I went to mass at the church of San Miguel Arcangel; this is part of a report of that experience.

The church is bright with

the sunlight bathing it, with the fullness of God. One hymn and another are initiated in the choir loft above me, plain guitar beside them. The people are sweating in the humid warmth of the island morning. Electric fans turn the air, the air moves in uncertain arc, providing some little comfort now and again.

When the people take Communion, nearly everyone takes Communion. A tiny young Mexican nun has to poke me in the back so I'll move enough that she can open the gate the blocks the way to and from the choir loft. Hers was one of the voices from above, now she is needed at the front to help distribute Communion. The priest feeds the flock in one line now, the nun in her bright white habit feeds the other.

When the people give the "kiss of peace," they greet everyone within their reach, without fail, whether it is a dark-skinned Mayan countenance that greets them in return or a thick-set bewhiskered gringo. "Peace be with you," I say in return, again and again. The people welcome strangers to their church much as they welcome us to their island - with warmth and genuine appreciation and generous good humor and patient forebearance. I feel well come, welcomed.

At the end, the priest takes up the baby Jesus from His Mother Mary, holds the statue for Mary to kiss, for Joseph, for each of the altar boys in turn. Then he stands front and center before the altar. The people go forward to kiss the baby Jesus, in lines as long as those for Communion.

Kissing the baby Jesus at the end of a Mass in early January is not in the essence of Mass. It is something the people choose to do in the warmth of their devotion. It is not Communion, but it is like Communion, and one of the ways these people are who they are.

SUNDAY MASS IN COZUMEL - 3

Each January since 2001 Mary and I have gone scuba-diving in Cozumel. We go for the diving, but also for the immersion in another culture, another way of life. We stay at Hotel Pepita, an old, family-owned hotel favored by divers, set a few blocks away from the tourist section of San Miguel. We shop for fruit at the bustling market in a big warehouse a few blocks farther back from the tourist section; and we dine where we see the locals eating. And, last January, I went to mass at the church of San Miguel Arcangel; this is part of a report of that experience.

There are twenty-two pews

in church, eight benches along the sides, two benches at the back. The pews are plain, wooden, and they shine with the devotion of the people. Ribbons of cloth hang to each side of the church from three candelabra spaced along the peak of the ceiling. Strings of Christmas lights undulate from the back of the church to the front along the pillars at the outer ends of the pews. The pillars themselves are dressed with spirals of light and wreath. There is a Christmas tree in front, to my right, trimmed with bows and ribbons. There are Stations of the Cross along one wall of the church and the other, the story of the crucifixion of Senor Jesus, a constant reminder for the people of God's love for them. Inset behind glass into the wall to my right, a statue of San Judas Tadeo; closer to the front along the same wall, a statue of San Martin de Porres, another of San Miguel Arcangel conquering Satan. At the front right corner, a shrine for Our Lady of Gaudalupe, with an "oracion a la Virgen de Guadalupe" that starts out:

"Oh dulce Madre, esperanza de las que caminamos en este valle de lagrimas, tiendos tu mano amorosa..."

When I visit later, eleven candles will be burning in front of Our Lady. In the sanctuary, light shines through a stained glass window in honor of the Lady of Guadalupe, and through another picturing a somewhat gringo-looking Senor Jesus. At the front left of the church, a statue of the Sacred Heart; later I will see eight candles burning there. Centered in front of the altar, a display of our Christmas story: statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; of two shepherds, one with a lamb on his shoulders; of three wise men. A stable and manger, a rooster with three hens, two geese, two sheep, a donkey, a couple doves. An ox and another sheep in the stable. Standing in the scene, too, a deer and a rabbit, maybe Bambi and Thumper, looking if they might have been fashioned for Disney.

Throughout the church, thirteen fans circulate and re-circulate the air, trying to keep us cool on a warm Sunday morning.

When the priest starts a version of the "Our Father" in Spanish and the people join in immediately, I recognize the rhythm of the prayer; here and there I recognize snatches of the words - "in heaven as it is on earth," "lead us not into temptation."

I am no longer a church-going man, I haven't been to Mass in decades. Yet today, at the moment of Consecration, at the very instant of the Transubstantiation when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, the power of the ritual takes my breath away. The people are on their knees.

To be continued....

SUNDAY MASS IN COZUMEL - 2

Each January since 2001 Mary and I have gone scuba-diving in Cozumel. We go for the diving, but also for the immersion in another culture, another way of life. We stay at Hotel Pepita, an old, family-owned hotel favored by divers, set a few blocks away from the tourist section of San Miguel. We shop for fruit at the bustling market in a big warehouse a few blocks farther back from the tourist section; and we dine where we see the locals eating. And, last January, I went to mass at the church of San Miguel Arcangel; this is part of a report of that experience.

The faux Joseph and faux Mary, the altar boys, the priest all take their places around the altar.

I know enough to know that the essence of Mass in any language and any culture is Offering, Consecration, and Communion. Though readings are not core to the ritual, there are readings, usually from an epistle, always one from one of the Gospels. On Sundays there will often be a homily.

Today it is a young woman reading from an epistle at the lectern in the sanctuary, to my left, to the priest's right as he faces us. The priest reads from a Gospel at the same lectern, then returns to the altar to give his homily. I don't speak Spanish, but I've had enough instruction in Latin and the turn of the ecclesiastical year to guess at the drift of his words. I make out each instance of "Senor Jesus" in his discourse.

One of the two couples who carry the the offering forward comes from the bench along the wall to my left; they pass right in front of me on their way to take wafers and wine in hand. The other couple comes out of a pew. Together these four bear the people's gifts forward.

Four women carry baskets among the congregation, silently appealing for the financial offerings that support the church. Some church-goers offer Mexican coins, some offer folding money. A tourist has put in some American money. I make a small donation myself - for the upkeep of the church, which is a fine old building. There are large banners in the sanctuary, against the far wall. One of them reads:

HOY

NOS

HA

NACI

DO

The other says:

EL

SAL

VA

DOR

To be continued....

SUNDAY MASS IN COZUMEL - 1

Each January since 2001 Mary and I have gone scuba-diving in Cozumel. We go for the diving, but also for the immersion in another culture, another way of life. We stay at Hotel Pepita, an old, family-owned hotel favored by divers, set a few blocks away from the tourist section of San Miguel. We shop for fruit at the bustling market in a big warehouse a few blocks farther back from the tourist section; and we dine where we see the locals eating. And, last January, I went to mass at the church of San Miguel Arcangel; this is part of a report of that experience.

The people have Sunday Mass

at 9:00 a.m. in the church of San Miguel Arcangel, here in San Miguel, Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is a warm morning in January. Actually there are four Masses on Sunday, and two Masses a day the rest of the week in San Miguel but now it's 9:00 a.m. Sunday and the people fill the church - all the pews, the benches along both sides, all the standing room.

All the women in the pews are in dresses or skirts. The dresses have mostly floral patterns - black and white flowers, or colored ones. Many of the women standing at the back are in slacks, some of them in black slacks. White blouse or shirt, black skirt, slacks, or pants - these are a standard uniform for many of the people work in Cozueml. Standing at the rear entrance to the church, one adolescent girl with hair tinted somewhat red wears a bright shirt with "SEXY" in white letters across her developing bosom; this is not standard uniform, rather it calls more attention than most of these folks seem comfortable with.

The people are a gentle people. Last night as we walked late in the streets, among all the young men still out and about, I felt as safe as I do in Fairwater. There were women and children in the streets as well, fathers, families, young lovers arm in arm. These are a fine and lovely people, welcoming and sweetly disposed, more given to kindness than violence.

If any peoples of the world mirror their past in their physical presence, the people of Cozumel are chief among them. Here in church this morning, an Aztec nose; there, the Mayan cheekbones; and over there, the fine smallness of their stature.

The people fill the church of San Miguel Arcangel this morning. I stand at the back. Above me, in the choir loft, the strum of guitar, then a break of voices. Two altar boys enter the church from the rear, carrying candles atop tall poles; two other altar boys carry censer and incense. They followed by a boy with a staff and a girl with a large scarf on her head and shoulders and the baby Jesus in her arms. Then the priest. They march the center aisle to the altar. The people sing, mixing their voices with those floating from the choir loft above, mixing with the changing chords of the booming guitar.

In a community where nearly every fellow seems to play fancy guitar for the tourists, the guitar-playing in church is solemn and square and decidedly plain. In Cozumel no one shows off in God's house. The music sounds like folk music; this is one of the people's hymns, and they sing it heartfelt.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 14

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

We will come out of

the Eastend Museum to discover that the big funeral we'd been told about is already underway. They are burying the local ranch matron whose mourners had taken all the rooms at the motel. Cars are parallel-parked along the curb the length of the long block in front of the church; that's not enough parking, so another row of cars is double-parked alongside, farther into the street. You could do the same thing on the other side of the street and still have room enough for two big trucks to pass between. The main street in Eastend is wide, I tell you. Plenty of space is one thing you've got out on the short grass prairie.

After touring the museum, we will head southeast from Eastend to the Grasslands National Park. Am I surprised that the land set aside for the grasslands park appears more rugged and ragged than the ranchlands we pass through to reach it? No. In fact one thanks his creator such roughness is preserved: we need to see how life clings even here. I drive the gravel roads in and along the park, and drive and drive; the roads nearly shake our bones apart. My wife earns a trip to some warm tropical island for her patience with me, my need to travel at the very edge of the world. "Go ahead and drive," she says. "See as much of it as you wish." Her smile is as wry as the landscape is tawny. She is a good companion.

It will be dark long before we get back to Eastend, back to Jack's for some supper. We are just finishing our meal when a road crew of ten or twelve men comes in. It is Friday night at the start a three-day weekend and after the boys eat they will head home to celebrate the Canadian Thanksgiving.

My wife and I will return to our humble motel room, to sleep another night in Eastend. I will rise before dawn once more, write in my journal, watch for the first light of another day. I will walk again at dawn in Stegner's Eastend, will walk again with his spirit in that Wolf Willow town. I will want to keep Eastend with me, there in my heart where I keep Curlew, Iowa, where I keep Fairwater, Wisconsin. The sky above Eastend will be spitting a little rain as I walk. It will not be rain enough even to lay the dust. It will be rain enough to tease. "Yeah, sure," the Iowa farm boy will delude himself, "maybe a fellow could make a living on this land."

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 13

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

This is our first morning

in town. After my walk at dawn in the streets of Eastend with the spirit of Wallace Stegner, what could be left?

We will tour the Fossil Research Center and learn of the T. Rex found locally. Our guide is the daughter of a woman who came to work on the project several years previous; our guide grew to maturity here; and she is still here. She tells us about the bones researchers are working away from stone on the other side of the window; she tells us about the skeleton of a hippopotamus-like creature unearthed here, like no other skeleton anywhere else in the world. She even tells us a little about life in a small town under a great sky upon the ocean of short grass prairie.

Back at our motel room after touring the Fossil Research Center, we will notice one of our tires going flat. Quickly we get back downtown, to the local co-op, to have them fix the tire. A fellow with red hair and a brogue comes out of a work bay at the back of the station. He looks at the tire, says "That's not good, that's not good at all." I reach down and touch the tire myself and I cut a finger on the shredded steel of the steel belted radial. "That's not good at all," I say, bleeding.

He has a pair of tires in stock he can put on the front end of our car. While he does the work, my wife and I shall go for a good long walk, half an hour or more out into the countryside, up over a rise to a place it's like we see forever. By the time we return to the co-op the tires have been replaced, the bill is made up. "There you go then," the fellow with red hair and a brogue says. "You'll be just fine now, won't you?"

We will have lunch at the hotel, hamburger and fries, then we'll tour the Eastend Museum. It is a very large museum, much like any local museum except it has a dinosaur skeleton on display, up on what used to be a stage, a small dinosaur found locally. There is a separate building, the entire log house from a local ranch furnished back to Saskatchewan's pioneer days. There is a rusting scrap heap of metal out in the yard beside the museum - what remains of a plane which had crashed in the vicinity. This was in the 1920s, or was it the 1930s? The pilot was a popular local fellow and he had built the plane himself. Inside the museum there is posted a photograph of the wrecked plane and testimony by folks who had witnessed the crash.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 12

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

I am walking back towards

the motel now, stretching my stride and being careful not to catch my toes on the occasional piece of uneven sidewalk. The sun is behind me, my shadow before me. I am exhilarated by the intensity of the experience, seeing Eastend as the sun comes up, imagining Wallace Stegner seeing it with me.

When I get back to our room, the smell of morning is in my clothes. I have to wake my wife and tell her about the three deer that had come out of darkness. I don't tell her I've walked with Wallace Stegner. I've come back to my motel room an unrepentant middle westerner. I know I need farm, not ranch; fields, not range; crops, not the luck of the draw. My cattle would need to know fences, which western cattle don't. I need the square certainty of quarter section and section and township, the endless checkerboard of gravel roads mile after mile in all directions. The short grass prairie of southeastern Saskatchewan can make you believe in forever, but the middle west brings the certainty of another kind of eternity - solid, sure, secure.

Middle west. I like the sound of that word - middle. I like the roll of it. I like what it means and what it suggests. Middle ground, middle west, in the middle of the middle, a middle state, middle people, a middling land. All the manic poet word play of it. Only a man given to obsession can get excessive about "middle."

Yet I have to admit these westerners and the middle westerners I know are as much alike as they are different. The rhythms we experience may not be the same, yet westerner and middle westerner alike understand the cycles of life and nature. Both have thrown themselves into a life on the land. I think of the cemeteries I walked along the way to Eastend: western men and women have spent themselves entirely; how is their determination different from the Iowa farmer's steadfastness?

There is an Eastend in each westerner, I realize; a Curlew in each middle westerner. We are what we are in reference to place, specific and local, each with its own lay of light, its own peculiar stink. Each with its strands entwined in our souls.

To be continued....

THE CHRISTMAS BICYCLE*

That same year we got our first bicycle

for Christmas, we got a record player too. The winter had not yet been tough. A memory of the sun was still in my eyes as I stepped into the dimness of the house. "Well?" someone said. Well what? It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, then I saw the record player in its big blond cabinet. There was only one record with it, Hank Williams' hit songs. "Good-bye, Joe, we gotta go," he sang. Over and over. And there, near the record player, stood a bicycle.

We learned to ride bicycle that Christmas Day. We bundled ourselves lightly, those with legs long enough to reach the ground, and we took the new bike outside. There was snow on the ground around the house but when you've got a new bike and you're a farm kid who has never seen anything quite so shiny, who has never had anything so red and bright and wonderful, you don't care if it's winter, you don't care if you turn blue riding and riding until you've learned to stop the wobbling. We tramped out a track in the snow around the house. We weaved and wobbled our way, each of us, learning to ride.

I am the oldest, so I go first. That's just how it is, a family of nine kids, someone has to go first, it might as well be me. I climb on the bicycle and wheel away and I don't even make it to the corner of the house before I have snow up my nose. I pick myself up and pick up the bike and I climb back on. You ride the horse that threw you. The two oldest girls, Kack and Nancy, and my next brother, Flip, all wait their turns. "Hurry up, Tom!" they say impatiently.

There were rules; they were never spoken but they were very clear: you got to circle the house once on the track we had tramped out, then it was the next person's turn, in order of age. You stayed on the track around the house and didn't go free-lancing cross country. You didn't whine or cry out when you fell. And you didn't dally-oof around picking yourself up, there were others waiting.

The oldest four of Bill and Oma Montag's kids learned to ride bike in the snow that Christmas day in the 1950s. Inside, Hank Williams was singing away - "Good bye, Joe," again and again. We would work the grooves almost all the way through that thick, black piece of vinyl, playing it over and over. Hank Williams might have been dead already, I don't know, I haven't done the math.

Done with riding bike, we might have come back into the house, the two oldest boys, the two oldest girls, smug and swaggering and shining because we had a bicycle and we could ride it. No one could take what we knew from us. We didn't have a lot of money that Christmas, but it sure seemed like we had everything we'd ever need.

Our mother might have made hot chocolate for us when we came back into the house blue and cold and laughing. Maybe we sat at the table at the end of the long kitchen, sat there back under the stairs, beyond the wood stove. We might have had our hot chocolate and laughed some more and congratulated ourselves on how fortunate we were - a new bike, learning to ride, a record player, and Hank Williams yodeling his way into the rest of our lives.

------------------------------
* from Curlew: Home - Essays & a Journey Back. Available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. $12.50 plus $2 shipping & handling.

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 11

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

Middle westerners are not given

to sullen meditation, are we? We might chew on an idea but we won't chew it for long. Soon enough we have to act, else we must discard the notion. When you face nature one-to-one on a regular basis, as the farmer does, you have little patience with idle thought. Survival requires action, not words, words, words. Plow, don't talk about plowing.

Storm or drought or turn of the season - middle westerners know they cannot change it. We make the best of the cards we're dealt. There is a middle western serenity, isn't there, an openness and acceptance. Sometimes it's viewed as a bovine kind of blindness, and sometimes it can be that. But often enough we are simply taking the world where it is, rather than struggling futilely because it's not where we might wish it to be. The Buddhist monk might understand the Iowa farmer completely. "Do you think it will rain?" the salesman asked my father. "It'll be one hell of a long dry spell if it don't," my father said. The monk and the farmer laugh together.

I see now there is a light on in an old barn or large garage near downtown Eastend. I can look inside through a window in an overhead door. In a corner of the light there is an old green car, let me guess it's a '39 Chevy. Old metal signs have been nailed to the walls inside the building, advertising tires, oil. In the lot outside a small side door stands such a collection of junk as some Iowa farmers would be ashamed of - a truck which will never run again, sheet metal, barrels rusting out, old tires, rolls of wire, weeds grown up. I think of the girl from Moose Jaw, Alberta, who'd told me some years ago about a friend of hers who drove to Indiana for a James Dean festival; her friend had been so impressed by the tidiness of American farmsteads, compared to what she knew of Canada's. She had not seen enough of Iowa farms, I think: I know where there are junk piles.

Right downtown in Eastend, kitty-korner from the hotel, now I am passing by the bookstore. There is sunlight on the sidewalk in front of it, sunlight on its walls, light glinting off its windows. I know there is an early copy of Stegner's Wolf Willow for sale in there. I know I should buy it, but I won't: I already own two copies.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 10

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

We have an undying sense

of duty - to our families, our communities, the land. Duty to our friends, to the animals we raise for slaughter, to the crops in the field. Duty to goodness and right. The horse is harnessed to the wagon and by God we're gonna go. Don't look back. What we're here to do, we do it, we don't argue about it, we put our head down, we lean into it. Such devotion is admirable when it is honorable and necessary; but sometimes maybe we don't know when to say whoa, we don't know when to say this horse has had enough. We care for aging parents at the expense of a life of our own, sometimes. We carry our children, sometimes, when they damn well ought to be walking. Our sense of duty limits our perspective and we've got no sense of humor about it. "Sorry, gotta go - time to milk the cows," we say, our lives not the least bit our own. "Independence," we say, deluding ourselves. Yeah, sure, independence, if that's what you call it. Criminy.

On the other hand, it was good, solid, and virtuous middle westerners who tapped an ex-professional wrestler with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth - Jesse Ventura - to serve as governor of Minnesota. Who says we don't have a sense of humor? Part of our charm, I guess, comes when we are a little off-plumb, a little out of square in our very square and certain world.

Perhaps our humor, at root, is dark: as dark as our woods, our waters, our rock. As dark as the soil we work. Perhaps our laughter is laughter in the face of that which we cannot change. A gallows humor. Holding our breath as we pass the cemetery. Ours is a humor at one's own expense.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 9

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

Now I've reached the bridge

at the far edge of Eastend; the sun is full in my eyes, above the horizon. Blue sky overhead, a blue cooking pot turned to pour out the golden light. I am looking back towards downtown Eastend where farmers and ranchers and road crews are already gathering for coffee or breakfast at Jack's Award Winning Cafe. The oil of sociability is being rubbed on the morning. I turn to walk back through town, to watch, to talk to myself or to Stegner's spirit walking with me.

I would tell Stegner about the character of the good Iowa farmers I grew up with, about the villagers I live with now back in Wisconsin. About who we are, what we're made of. Those of us from the middle west, I'd say, we have our certain expectations: if we put seed in the ground in spring and tend it during the summer, we will have a crop to bring in come fall. We don't expect to rush the process. We recognize there are a host of factors - drought and hail, for instance - that could destroy the crop. This pattern of work and reward shapes our outlook on life. There is no shortening the process. There are no free lunches. There is no Big Rock Candy Mountain.

As middle westerners, I'd say, we trust the cycle of things, the process, the turn of the wheel. Even in the darkest night, we know the sun will rise. Even in the deepest winter, we believe in spring. An understanding that nature goes 'round in cycles underpins our relationship with the rest of the world. If you plant trouble today you surely will harvest it tomorrow. Fruit does not fall far from the tree. Some might call it karma; it is simply the cycle of life as we see it lived day after day in farm country, where one reaps what he sows.

Steadfastness may be one of the premier middle western virtues. Solid, stable, eternal, there. Endurance may be another. We are like a toothache, aren't we? Constant as rock, constant as water defeating the rock. And our dependability is still a third trait. We're there and we will be there and we don't let our surprises surprise us much.

It's like we are planted in the soil of the past. We carry the past like a gunny sack full of chickens. Perhaps that is a middle western failure, to insist on carrying the burden of the past. Yet how could we live otherwise? If we wobble a little planting corn, we will have to live with those crooked lines the whole season through. Our neighbors see them too, and remember.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 8

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

There was a grain elevator

in Curlew. The fellow who managed it assisted the Little League baseball coach. When the game was out of town, all of us wanted to ride with him - the hard-top of his Ford would fold itself up into the trunk and we'd be riding in a convertible. There was nothing cooler for a farm kid in the 1950s than riding in somebody's convertible. That would put a little swagger in your step. It did not make us any better ball players, however. A team from one of the big towns once beat us 49-7. I'm sure of the score. You never, you don't ever forget a whuppin' like that.

There were two taverns in Curlew, one across the street from the other. One of them closed and became a hardware store. The other closed and became the post office and coffee shop. That was after the restaurant shut its doors when the owners retired. For a while afterwards you could still knock on the front door of the place in the middle of a summer Sunday afternoon; a good long notion later an old man or his wife would open the door and let you buy an ice cream cone. We'd be riding our bicycles the four miles around our section of land and a mile and a quarter from home we could stop for ice cream. Even on Sunday afternoon. Even after the store was out of business.

This is what I think of when I think of home. It is middle western as hell, it's got flies buzzing 'round, we are sitting on the steps in front of the place, our ice cream is melting as fast as we can lick it.

Now if one tries to go back, can he find it? Not likely. So much of it is gone. You cannot go home when home has gone away. You will carry home in your heart if you have a home at all. Going back to look for home makes one essentially and unredeemably middle western, doesn't it? Caring about one's home place across the years and the miles - that seems quintessentially middle western. We are not wanderers, we are rooted. We don't need wide-open spaces, we need fences.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 7

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

Wallace Stegner certainly appeared

to love Eastend. Sharon Butala, a novelist who lives on a ranch just outside of the village, is another writer who has struggled coming to terms with this short grass prairie: she was not born in southwestern Saskatchewan, but married into it; she has had to wrestle her feelings about the harshness of the life and her expectations of the land. She apprenticed herself to nature here. The result of her struggle is a book called The Perfection of Morning; it is not Stegner's Wolf Willow, which book does not need to be rewritten. Butala's meditation is a geography of the Eastend area and it is also a geography of the heart.

Sunlight is warm on my face as I walk and think about this place, about place, about my own rural experience. I walk and ponder and pontificate.

I would tell Stegner about my people, my place. About my hometown - Curlew, Iowa. The main street was paved in the 1950s, the whole quarter mile of it. The same year it got paved, the carnival came to town and set up on the new pavement. Traffic - what traffic there was - was blocked off. We could walk the length of the street, throw baseballs at the pins set up on three-legged stools, throw darts at balloons. You wonder: How poor would a carnival operator have to be to come to Curlew, Iowa, in those grey years?

The road out of Curlew that led to the main highway was paved. The rest of the streets in town and the other three roads leading out of town were gravel.

There was a lumberyard. My dad and I and my brother sometimes unloaded box cars of cement for the lumberyard - toted bags of cement out of the boxcar, into the storage shed in the full heat of summer. They'd call us when they needed us. They paid us cash money. We put that money in the coffee can on top of the refrigerator in our kitchen, along with what we'd earn walking beans and corn for the neighbors, what my sisters earned baby-sitting. Come the end of summer, often we'd have enough money in the coffee can to buy school clothes for any of us nine kids who needed them. Sometimes we'd get a new pair of shoes.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 6

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

I would tell Stegner

that I think people don't become interested in history until history becomes autobiographical. The fellow at the Eastend Museum will tell us that there are about fourteen working members of the Eastend historical group, most of them getting along in years. At a meeting of seventeen people intent on forming a Fairwater Historical Society back home, I will find only four under the age of 70. History is living and breathing all around us, yet most of us don't take notice. History is about place and about what happens in and on and to a place. Man and woman and child are agents of history, yes; they are the actors on the stage of history. Yet many of us play out our scene unaware of our part in the production. We fail to notice much about our own lives and the lives and forces around us shaping our world, our history, our place, our possibilities.

I would tell Wallace Stegner that I'm sorry history and literature always seem to get housed in separate buildings. Such separation may in part explain why Stegner is sometimes viewed as merely a "regional" writer, and why I shall be viewed the same way. West of the Hudson River, history is about place and literature is about place because both history and literature are about people and people are creatures of place. One does not play God even with the imagined lives of real neighbors. I return again and again to the image of my grandmother baking bread: it is an essential image in my existence: a certain kitchen, the sun at a certain angle at this latitude and longitude this time of year, the house set on a certain piece of ground in the shadow of the grain elevator, West Bend, Iowa, 1955. Such elements cling to our memories, cannot be teased away from them.

I am at the edge of morning light. I am walking into the sunrise, suddenly startled to hear myself talking to myself. I am walking the streets of Eastend, Saskatchewan, with the spirit of Wallace Stegner. I have a lump in my throat for this place, Eastend. People have lived here and loved here and they have grown to love such a harsh and beautiful place. You eat your bowlful of loneliness for breakfast and you go on about your work. I swell with admiration at the courage of these ordinary folks.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 5

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

Dawn comes to Eastend,

Saskatchean. The Frenchman River sparkles in the dewy light. The air is wet with morning. I walk the streets of town.

Here is the Stegner house. It has been marked, set aside, conserved. It houses visiting writers now, I've been told. There is a sign on the porch listing phone numbers I can call if I wish to tour the house. I don't feel any compelling need to get inside it. I look it over, take its measure. Stegner's father built it. It seems he did good work.

I walk the back streets. I walk a main street wide enough you could turn a big team of horses and a large farm wagon around on it, with room left over for a lady to walk and not get trampled.

Settled down along the river, Eastend is a sheltered village. You ask someone about whether they need rain in these parts and you might hear "Yeah, we do. But people up on the table land probably want to get their crops in before the rain comes." Then you pay more attention to the topography. "Table land" is not a Wisconsin term.

The sun has started to edge its way above the horizon and I think I am walking the streets of Eastend with the spirit of Wallace Stegner. I think I am having a conversation with him. I appreciate that he has helped solidify "place" as a central element in my thinking. I would tell him about the place I love, a particular piece of common ground, and about the middle west generally. I would tell him about my grandmother, of sturdy Iowa stock. She had been widowed a long time. She was standing in her kitchen. The light of dawn was coming through the window behind her. She had been up since 4:00 a.m. baking bread and the kitchen was full with the smell of it. A whole army of fresh loaves lined the kitchen table. I would tell Wallace Stegner about my grandmother's bread.

Stegner has suggested that no place has a history until it has had its poet. I would suggest that no poet has a place until he or she knows its people, those who walked their tracks onto the landscape, stood watch in the lonely evening waiting for a husband to come in from the field, to come back from the pineries, from a truck route, to come home.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 4

The morning air is brisk,

fresh enough to require a sweatshirt. There is no wind. There is no sign of traffic along the road in front of the motel. Off to my left, street lamps burn along the main street downtown. As the sun comes up, I shall walk the length and breadth of Stegner's Eastend.

I stretch my pace along the edge of the highway and am startled by three deer crossing the road; they've come out of a patch of darkness. The deer are not startled by me: anyone who'd be up at this hour is probably the village idiot and not much of a threat. I admit to being the idiot for one village.

The deer cross the Frenchman River on an old iron bridge. I follow them onto the bridge. Now they are walking off down the gravel road at a casual pace; I stand on the bridge with just enough light to see water flowing beneath it, the river a shining path into the future, coming out of the darkness of the past.

I stand and listen and breathe. A shiver of goose bumps: I think I am seeing what Wallace Stegner has seen. I think of Wallace Stegner seeing it with me.

I came to the work of Wallace Stegner much too late in life. Perhaps I should have been reading him in the mid-1960s as I entered college. Would his conservative bent have put me off then? Now, at 52 years of age, does my wanting to save some part of the world make me conservative in the way Stegner was? It has been only the past five years or so that I've been learning from him, from his nonfiction, the prose about place, about the way a place grabs hold of a person's soul and won't let go. I have been led to believe that men and women who are not deeply attached to particular places, real and specific pieces of landscape, these men and women are without souls. They are lost wanderers. I have been led to believe each of us must save the place he loves if he is to save himself, herself.

Though he was born in Iowa (as I was), though he has sometimes lived in the east, Stegner has always been a western man. I have always been a middle westerner and do not wish to escape that label even if I could. Stegner has said the west begins at the 100th meridian of longitude. I have long believed that the middle west ends about where the Missouri River crosses South Dakota. Once I looked at a map, I saw that Stegner and I pretty much agree on where the boundary falls between us.

To be continued....

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 3

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

Driving towards Eastend

from Milk River, Alberta, we'd come past two cemeteries set out on the prairie. Still within sight of the Sweetgrass Mountains, we had stopped at the Pendant D'Oreille Cemetery where a large marker read: "In memory of the pioneers who settled this area and found their last resting place on the plains of Pendant D'Oreille." There were twenty-six names carved into the monument, twenty-six lives. The earliest: 1848-1917. The latest: 1902-1982. In the shadow of the Bear Paw Mountains, we found the other cemetery laid out next to a Concordia Lutheran Church. The church was a real pioneer building. We used an outhouse behind the church, at the fence along a wheat field; it had not been used for a very long time. The cemetery lay at the crest of a low hill and there was a high, lonesome wind in it bending the grasses. It was a growling wind under grey skies and desolation. There were twenty people buried in the cemetery. "Who remembers them?" I wondered. "Who remembers how they walked, how they talked? Who remembers the smell of them as they came into church? Who remembers their goodness and their flaws?"

"We will all of us get set to earth in some piece of lonesome ground, won't we?" I said to myself. "We'll have only the sound of the wind for company, the sound of the growling wind." I was not cold but I shivered.

There is a Fossil Research Station in Eastend, across the street from the Post Office; after we'd checked into our motel, we had stopped there, curious. It was just before closing time. The girl at the desk was happy to make an appointment for us to tour the place next morning. She would be our guide. We expressed our disappointment at learning the Eastend Museum was closed for the season and the girl said: "Oh. I'll call someone to set up a tour for you. What time would be good?"

I rose next morning before dawn, as I usually do. I come from a long line of farmers and have need to rise before the sun. I wrote in my journal, as I usually do, drank some dark and bitter coffee, looked out through the slats of the blinds at the darkness. Made more notes in my journal. Looked out the window again. Saw just the very faintest hint of color along the eastern horizon. Dawn comes to Eastend, Saskatchewan. I put on my walking shoes.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 2

Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

We were fortunate

to get a room at all in the little motel at the edge of town. "I'm sorry, we're full up," said the woman at the desk in the office. It was a Thursday night.

"You are full up?" my wife said, a little astonished. We had driven a hundred miles of gravel road to get here. We were within shouting distance of nowhere.

"We have a big funeral in town tomorrow," the woman explained. "I tell you what - I have a room in the old building. It's pretty small and it's run down and we don't like to rent it out except to road crews. I can let you have that, if you think it's okay."

We took the room. It was small and decrepit. The floor wobbled and the furnace must have been installed before the war. There was a double bed in the room and a cot, an overstuffed chair, a table. We'd seen much worse shelter in more cosmopolitan places, let out at high prices without apologies. Our little room would do just fine, thank you. We unpacked the car.

Ah, dust on the car. Dust on our bags. We had come to Eastend out of Alberta via gravel roads, yes. You can take good roads to Eastend, but somehow it had seemed important to abandon them if we were to get a true feel for southwestern Saskatchewan. We had passed through open range. We had passed wheatfields. We had passed lonely ranch houses and outbuildings. The entire landscape was the color of yesterday's sun, remembered. What we'd heard in Milk River, Alberta, applied here too; an old man had said: "It don't rain here. This used to be desert."

After we'd entered southwestern Saskatchewan, we had angled south towards the Montana border on some of the gravel roads, with nothing more than a memory of Wolf Willow to guide us towards the land that had been the Stegner homestead. You can get lost on these gravel roads if you wish, and we tried to. We never did identify a piece of ground we could say definitively had been the Stegner place; instead, at one point - with a sweep of a hand - I had said: "It's here. It doesn't matter much whether it's at the end of this gravel road or of another one, it's here. You get the idea."

I looked at the land and asked myself: "Okay, how is this different from desert?" There was no obvious answer for an Iowa farm boy.

To be continued....

WALKING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WALLACE STEGNER AT DAWN IN EASTEND, SASKATCHEWAN - 1

Five years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).

So much depends

on what you want. I had come to Eastend, Saskatchewan, in early October, 1999, without expectations, without desire. I had come empty, to fill myself with what might remain of the world Wallace Stegner sketched out in his wonderful book, Wolf Willow. That work had been published in 1962; it described pioneer Saskatchewan of the early 20th Century, when Stegner himself was still a small boy and the short grass prairie was still frontier.

I had not come for any great revelations about Stegner or Eastend or nature or place or people or pioneer hardship. I had not come expecting to hear the fellow who showed us the Eastend Museum speak of Wolf Willow: "Stegner used pseudonyms in that book but everybody in town knew who he was talking about." I had come to Eastend to touch the earth here and perhaps to come to terms with myself. Don't we all have to go away to see where we are? Don't we have to walk some other piece of ground to be able to see our own?

There is a hotel in Eastend, and a motel at the edge of town. The motel had a For Sale sign in front of it; it was a little run-down, the way all motels at the edge of all little towns become eventually as they take on the local coloration. This was life, after all, not a movie. Perhaps one should not suggest Eastend, Saskatchewan, is run-down, however. Jack's Cafe, up the street from the museum, was named one of the 20 Best Restaurants in Canada in 1994; it serves mostly farm food and pizza and the occasional dish with a Greek twist. There is a restaurant and a bar at the hotel, there is a department store in town, and a grocery store, a bank and post office, a convenience store and a video store, a bookstore with used books, a tavern and an espresso shop with books by local writers and artwork by local artists and pottery for sale, with a day care center attached to one side of it and a pottery studio attached to the other side. There is a window between the espresso shop and the pottery studio so you can sit at a table drinking a hazelnut latte and watch the potter work the local white mud into a sugar bowl or pitcher.

To be continued....

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS PROGRAM IN FAIRWATER - 4

On Sunday, December 5, 2004, the Fairwater Historical Society presented its third "Old-Fashioned School Christmas Program." The first such program was produced in December, 2002, and everyone involved was astonished at the miracle that community can create. The spirit continues. This completes a report of that 2002 adventure.

Oh, the small frightened

children were afraid to approach Santa. Older children told Santa they've been good this year, that they do what Mom says, that their favorite class is math or reading.

Santa said to one fellow on his lap: "Have you been a good boy?"

"Yes, Santa," the boy said.

"All year long?"

"Yes, Santa."

"What about August 19th?"

"I don't remember being naughty on August 19th."

"Santa remembers. You be a good boy, now, you do as you mother says."

"Yes, Santa."

(On Monday morning the boy's mother would say to Santa when she saw him at the bank: "He asked me what he'd done naughty on August 19^th.")

As Santa gave out every bag of goodies the Fairwater Lions had provided for treats, children played at a table nearby, making little boxes from used Christmas cards, making Santa's face with pieces of colored material and beads and glue. One little girl, who'd been so frightened earlier, now walked right up to Santa to give him the face she'd finished.

Soon enough Santa said "Ho, ho, ho, I gotta go" and he was gone.

I don't want to say that the Fairwater Historical Society's "Old-Fashioned School Christmas Program" was a Christmas miracle. Its success surely was an astonishment, however.

Members were already wondering how they'll ever top this year's performance. I don't want to say it was a miracle, but before we went home I could tell my wife "my sadness is lifted, today has raised my spirits." I don't want to say it was a miracle, but when Kathy Schuster thought the idea for the "fairy dust" had been her husband's, I didn't care. It didn't matter whose idea it was, it doesn't matter. No one was taking individual credit for anything - this was about what we had done, what we had accomplished together. It was about community, a spirit moving among us, a pride of place, this place, ours.

You think that small towns are dying? You think the rural midwest has no future? You think there's nothing to do out here in "the middle of nowhere?"

Think again. There is a sense of community being fashioned here anew, by people who know who they are and are comfortable with that, who care about each other. The world is not saved by great men and their talk; it is saved by folks like these, salt of the earth, ordinary people who bear the weight of everything yet they can find a few minutes to celebrate their place in the scheme of things.

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS PROGRAM IN FAIRWATER - 3

On Sunday, December 5, 2004, the Fairwater Historical Society presented its third "Old-Fashioned School Christmas Program." The first such program was produced in December, 2002, and everyone involved was astonished at the miracle that community can create. The spirit continues. This is part of a report of that 2002 adventure.

You really do get juiced

when you're on stage, all eyes upon you. I'm not an actor, I don't pretend to be, I don't want to be. I admit that I read my lines from a script hidden behind a newspaper, we all did. I ad-libbed back at Arlene Erdman when she ad-libbed at me about ice fishing. The audience laughed. The children sang a Christmas carol to cheer us old fogeys. The audience laughed at the other "old man," Larry Beuthin, nattering with worry about not having his false teeth. You could hear a pin drop as I read out the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke: "A decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all should be taxed...."

Children gathered at the feet of former Fairwater school teacher Lucille Leatherberry, and she rocked her rocker and read them "The Night Before Christmas." The audience sang a Christmas carol with the stern gusto of a church hymn. David Schuster performed two Christmas carols on violin; the vibrato in his rendition of "O Holy Night" made you want to cry. David Berndt read "Old Fashioned Christmas" and told the story of his first Christmas program nearly 50 years ago, when he managed to recite about half his lines before he keeled over in a dead faint, to wake in the arms of his teacher. Cindy Lenz and Lois Schmuhl, Andrew Docter and Kathy Schuster told us the bad and the good things about Christmas, while Arlene Erdman played the cheek-pinching aunt visiting at the holidays. I read "The Christmas Bicycle" from my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the 1950s, Curlew:Home.

People could see we were having fun. The performance was more about enjoying ourselves than about being polished, perfect. The audience understood that. Whether we goofed or got it right, we were comfortable and so was the audience.

I didn't get to hear the Fairwater Rhythm Ensemble perform its jazzed (no doubt) and jingly carols, led by trumpeter Andrew Docter; they had to do an encore. I was already over at the old school by this time, changing clothes. Remember, there was a jolly old fat man in a red suit supposed to be coming; the one who knows who's naughty, and who's nice, and who's nice and naughty.

To be continued....

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS PROGRAM IN FAIRWATER - 2

On Sunday, December 5, 2004, the Fairwater Historical Society presented its third "Old-Fashioned School Christmas Program." The first such program was produced in December, 2002, and everyone involved was astonished at the miracle that community can create. The spirit continues. This is part of a report of that 2002 adventure.

The first rehearsal

for the Christmas program - on Tuesday night, December 3, 2002 - looked like most first rehearsals, like a train wreck. Anytime you try to get a dozen children to do anything all at the same time, it's like herding cats, like trying to push a string. To say nothing of trying to tell a grumpy old man what to do with his cane. No one nominated Arlene Leppin and Barb Vande Brink to take on the frustrating task of directing the program; they rose to fill a void - someone had to lead us out of chaos. No one told Cindy Lenz what props she would need for the skit she was in; she found them herself.

The second and final rehearsal on the Saturday before the production was better than the first but it was still a train wreck, no survivors. We agreed spontaneously that when Bob Schuster, then president of the Fairwater Historical Society, introduced the program, he shouldn't call it "an old-fashioned school Christmas program," he should call it "a rehearsal for an old-fashioned school program." That would excuse our rough edges, would explain why none of us knew our parts very well. I also suggested that Bob get some "fairy dust" he could throw into the air when he said "Now we take you back some 50 years to the way it used to be."

I'd had less Christmas spirit in 2002 than ever. My sadnesses weighed on me - there had been a death here in Fairwater that bothered me; there had been the sudden death of the man I'd worked for and with for a quarter century; and there had been the unexpected massive stroke and death for an old friend we'd brought up to assisted living in Ripon from a nursing home in Milwaukee where she had not been happy. My sadnesses weighed on me, but I determined to do my part for the Christmas program and I would be Santa at the Open House.

As the doors opened on Sunday, December 8, 2002, we had only modest expectations for the program. Sixty chairs had been set up in front of the stage at the Fairwater Civic Center. As curtain time approached and more people kept coming in, we had to go downstairs and get more chairs - a total of 105 were set up by the end, and not many of them stayed empty.

To be continued....

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS PROGRAM IN FAIRWATER - 1

On Sunday, December 5, 2004, the Fairwater Historical Society presented its third "Old-Fashioned School Christmas Program." The first such program was produced in December, 2002, and everyone involved was astonished at the miracle that community can create. The spirit continues. This is part of a report of that 2002 adventure.

I wasn't at the backroom

meeting where I got elected to play Santa Claus for the Fairwater Historical Society's Christmas Open House in 2002. I was at the meeting where I agreed – reluctantly - to play a grumpy old man in a skit called "The Good Old Days." My wife was not sure I'd have to do any acting; she thought the director might have been type-casting.

The Fairwater Historical Society's board of directors decided a few years ago that they wanted to stage a re-enactment of "an old-fashioned school Christmas program." The school program at Christmas had been a tradition in Fairwater for much of the 20th Century. All the way back in 1925, according to the Brandon Times, one Florian Laper was participating in that year's program. Laper, now of Ripon, is still an active member of the Fairwater Historical Society.

Throughout its existence, the school program in Fairwater was a community event, not simply a school activity. The school children were up on stage, yes, and the hard-working teachers who prepared them were angels, no doubt; yet the program brought together the larger community at Christmas - parents and grandparents, cigar-smoking uncles, cookie-making aunts, friends, neighbors, countrymen. For a moment, for an hour, the rest of life was suspended, the weight of the world was lifted: all the world was a stage where the community's children played their parts and the community shook with shared joy and laughter.

The Fairwater Historical Society was a relatively new organization in the community, incorporated in 1999. Its members seemed invigorated and on a mission. Part of the mission was to restore the old school as a museum; the 1910 portion of the building had fallen into disrepair since the school closed in the early 1980s. The old part of the school was a gift to the Historical Society from the Fairwater Lions, who had bought the empty school when no one else would.

And part of the Fairwater Historical Society's mission - which some members may not have been fully conscious of - was to help foster a sense of community in Fairwater, a pride of place in one very small village in rural Wisconsin. Focus on the old school rallied wide interest and enthusiasm. The Fairwater Historical Society joined with other community groups in 2001 and 2002 to sponsor a Heritage Days celebration; these events called back former residents from as far as New York and New Jersey, Texas, South Dakota. The old school had a new roof put on it, a new heating system was installed, the rooms were filling up and were beginning to look the way a museum should look. The Society had an oral history project - interviews had by then been completed with more than 25 old-timers. The Society would be considering a Valentine's Open House for 2003, to feature a collection of Valentines from the 1930s and 1940s.

To be continued....

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 6

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is the final part of the report of my day with the Drehers.

So, I ask again,

why this house?

For retirement. To be close to family. Karen has family in the area; Dave has a sister still living here. They intend to winter in the south while they are able, but "eventually when we'll have to live one place because of old age or health, it will be this house."

Moving from Atlanta to Curlew, the Drehers admit, "people think we're going to have culture shock."

"But," they say, "why would you want to live somewhere in retirement where you have to sit in traffic for an hour, have to spend two and a half hours to go twenty six miles?"

Why did they write to me, inviting me to see the house?

"Reading Curlew: Home," Dave says, "I wondered if you'd like to see Bryan Wilson's house again. I thought you could come look at the house if you wanted to. I feel a connection with Bryan because he was killed in Vietnam."

"I don't talk about Vietnam," he adds, "so let's not go there."

This house. If you had it to do again, I ask them, would you?

"It's hard to find the house you want," they say. "It's either this house, or build a house. We don't regret it. We think we're giving to the community. We saved a house. We've seen all these houses disappear in the rural areas. We should come back and save them."

"We're looking forward to the time when we come up here in the summer time, when we can have a garden," they say. "In a subdivision, the soil isn't appropriate for gardening. Here you can garden, it's more relaxed, there's a slower pace of life."

Dave adds: "Maybe I'll even do some pheasant hunting, too, some day. I like to do woodworking too. But I don't want to give anyone the impression I'm a carpenter - it's a hobby."

And then it was time to go. I would go get a shower and dry clothes. Dave and Karen had to drive to Fort Dodge to exchange the bathroom sink for one that would let the door close. Before I leave, though, Karen's brother, Jim, takes a photo or two of Karen and Dave and me in front of the doorway into the house. It's as if we've known each other a long time. As if we've come back together after a long time apart.

Dave wonders why I'd ever want to spend a whole hot sweating day to help them work on their house?

"Maybe it's Bryan's house I was working on," I say.

And then we say good-bye.

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 5

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

How did Dave and Karen end up

with the Wilson house anyway?

Thinking about retirement, they had been looking for a house in the Emmetsburg area as a place to retire to. They looked in Rodman, they looked in Cylinder, they heard about this house in Curlew inadvertently, seeing it on an auction bill. The house had been empty for two years at that point, after the owner, Vi Sampson, moved into an apartment in Emmetsburg. The Drehers made Vi an offer. Vi accepted. A contract was drawn up on a slip of paper, with these words, and the deal was done: "I, Vi Sampson, agree to sell my Curlew house to David and Karen Dreher for X-amount." I don't ask what X-amount equals; it's none of our business.

Why this house?

It is in town rather than out in the country. The tax base is low. The house had a porch. Had nine-foot ceilings. Had big rooms for an old house.

So the Drehers had a house. An old house with surprises like those hardwood floors under the fifty-year-old carpet. The first surprise was that the place needed a new furnace. The old one "was a danger," Dave says. The second surprise? Contractor Rick Albert, who looked at the house for the Drehers, said "You can stick as much money into this house as you want to." The place needed new windows. It needed to be re-insulated. The doors upstairs wouldn't close because the floor had sagged three inches. The chimney was pulling the roof down.

They saved the trim for doors and windows, the woodwork, "but we had to gut the house," the Drehers say. They put nine tons of plaster and lathe into dumpsters. They went at the work in phases.

PHASE 1 - Gut the house.

PHASE 2 - Install new electrical wiring, plumbing, heating, and air conditioning (which the house had never had).

PHASE 3 - Tear off the old porch, put on the new porch, re-roof the house.

PHASE 4 - "Now we are putting in sheetrock, filling voids in the second-floor plaster, painting, finishing the bathroom," the Drehers say. "The next phase - get the trim back on."

They also have to finish the kitchen "and, sometime, build a new garage."

To be continued....

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 4

The fellows have the ceiling fan

installed and now they move everything out of the two other rooms - the front room and the dining room. Then they proceed to rip out the carpet in the dining room. They carry it away. They rip out the carpet padding. Why! there is hardwood floor under that old carpet, in a pattern of concentric squares that get smaller and smaller as they get closer to the center of the room. "Look at that!" Karen exclaims. "That's so lovely."

You know the floor will need a lot of work, but you also know the Drehers are just the folks to do it.

Once the carpet pad has been pulled up, there's an hour's work pulling staples out of the floor. Broken staples, actually, lines of them where the pad had been tacked down.

Then the carpet and pad in the front room get cleared away, and once again Karen is exclaiming "That's lovely too!" It is the same pattern of concentric squares as in the dining room.

By now Karen and I are wiping down the walls and ceiling in the dining room, in preparation for priming. Wiping down walls seems a thankless task. You've got to get the plaster dust off the walls if you want the paint to stick, yes, but it doesn't look like you've done anything. We wipe down the walls. We sweat and sweat. Karen gets pulled away to talk to the plumber, Jeff Dietrich, who "has issues" with the sink she has selected for the bathroom. Yeah, the plumber is here to install the toilet and just figured out that the sink won't work. Oh, he could install it alright, but you wouldn't be able to close the bathroom door if he did. Dave and Karen will have to go to Fort Dodge tonight to get a different sink, one that will fit the available space.

Then Karen and I are priming the walls and ceiling in the dining room. We make some bit of progress and finally we're trying to use up the paint that we have poured out, then we'll call it a day. Dave is anxious to get to Fort Dodge before the stores close, and he knows I want to spend some time talking with the two them about the house.

And so our pans are empty and the brushes get washed. And so we sit out on the porch and talk for a bit.

To be continued....

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 3

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

You don't notice until you pause

from your work that you are completely drenched in sweat; your shirt is dripping with it. We have been painting grey primer and the Iowa day has heated up. Already by mid-morning, the temperature is into the 90s; the air is steam. I take some solace in the fact that Dave and Jim are also sweat-soaked when they go off to get some parts they'll need to complete the installation of the ceiling fan.

We have the parlor primed. Karen sets me up to wipe down and prime the walls of the bathroom. You'll call it a "small" bathroom, until you have to paint it. I put white primer on both the walls and the ceiling. Even with the window at the far end opened, the bathroom is more sauna than lavatory. I'm about half-done with my work there when Dave returns. "We're going to have lunch in Mallard," he says. "Will you have lunch with us?"

"Yes, of course," I say. I've come here to let the day be what it wishes. There's no way I can say "No" to anything.

Karen rides over to Mallard with her brother in his pick-up. I ride over with Dave in his, the one with the Georgia plates. We pull up in front of the Duck Stop Inn, a tavern that serves food. Dave and Karen ate here yesterday and don't need a menu. Jim doesn't need a menu. I don't need a menu either, but I look at it anyway, then order what the other three ordered - a cheeseburger and fries. Karen gets one can of soda with her meal. Jim gets one can with his. Dave orders two cans of Diet Pepsi, and so do I.

The fellow who waits on us is also the bartender. A youngish fellow, not more than 30-something, he is missing his left arm. But you don't get the impression from him that the world owes him anything more than what he can wrestle from it.

The Duck Stop Inn is a small-town middlewestern tavern, which means it smells of beer and cigarette smoke. It's mostly bottles of cheap hooch on the shelves behind the bar. The tables scattered around the room are the kind that can be cleaned with a damp cloth.

We eat and talk and enjoy the bit of air-conditioning in the place. It's a chance, also, to go to the bathroom if you need to, since the plumbing at the Wilson house isn't operational yet. The Drehers had provided a large cooler full of ice and soda at the house, and by the time we'd left off work, it was only about half full. On a day like today, you have to take in a lot of liquid, and you have to put it out somewhere. You can sweat a lot of it out, but not all of it.

We eat and talk and then soon enough we have to step back into the hot Iowa sun, into the oven of a day, into the blue blaze of Iowa's humidity.

The afternoon steams along like a big locomotive. I finish priming the bathroom. Karen has started putting the final color on the downstairs bedroom off the stairway. The paint looks dark brown when wet, but it dries lighter. Again, Karen paints the fine line where the wall meets the ceiling and down two feet from that. I paint the rest of the way to the floor. We both sweat. At least I assume Karen is sweating. How could it be otherwise? Sweat is running down my legs now, into my shoes. My socks are soaked.

To be continued....

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 2

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

8:01 a.m. I'm knocking

on the front door of the Wilson house. "Come in, come in," I hear Karen Dreher call from the parlor.

"I'm Tom Montag," I say.

"I'm Karen Dreher," she says. She calls out, "Dave, Tom is here," and she leads me through the house to the back room off the kitchen where Dave and Karen's brother Jim are trying to put up a light fixture and ceiling fan.

"How long are you in the area?" Dave asks.

"Til tomorrow," I say. "I came to spend a day helping here."

In the e-mail he didn't get, I'd told Dave I wasn't very good with a hammer but I could handle a paintbrush. Karen had been priming in the parlor with a grey primer when I came in and I could help her with that.

Karen had been working atop a ladder, carefully putting a line of grey primer at the top of the wall where it met the white of the ceiling, as well as priming the top two feet of the wall. She got me a roller and a pan, and I primed the rest of the way to the floor. We talked as we worked, Karen and I - a little of this, a little of that, and I was very comfortable in the house, with its ghosts, with these people. "We're just common, down-home folks" is how Dave will put it at one point, and that's it exactly.

Dave had been raised in Emmetsburg, Iowa, from 1945 until 1961, when his family moved to Minnesota. He graduated from Red Wing High School. Karen grew up on a farm near Rodman, some ten miles from Emmetsburg, and graduated from Emmetsburg High School. Dave and Karen had gone to the same church. Karen baby-sat for Dave's sister's children. Dave would come back to Emmetsburg during the summer. In 1967-1968, he taught math at the high school in Mallard, twelve miles south of Emmetsburg.

Dave started courting Karen after he quit teaching, and the couple was engaged before Dave went off to service in 1968. He came home from Vietnam on May 20, 1970. Karen had studied to become a lab technician; she interned in Alexandria, Minnesota, and worked for a year in Slayton Minnesota.

Dave and Karen were married in March, 1971.

When Dave got out of service, he went back to school, studying accounting at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, taking a couple courses at a time while working at American Can Company as a machine operator. He made Spam cans and vegetable cans and C-ration cans, big ham cans, pop cans, beer cans, aerosol cans, you name it. Second shift. A lot of twelve-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week.

After he finished the accounting program in March 1974, Dave got a job in cost accounting with 3-M and worked for the company in the Twin Cities from April 29, 1974 to December 31, 1985, then for Harris Lanier/Lanier World Wide in Atlanta. Though he took early retirement in May, 2000, he was asked to come back to Lanier, which was later bought by Ricoh.

The Drehers raised three daughters: Janell, Amy, and Diane; two of them still live in the Atlanta area, one in Indiana.

To be continued....

THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 1

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

I'm at my uncle's house

in Curlew, Iowa. A July morning. Coffee. I look out the window from the dining table where I'm sitting; I see two pick-ups parked in front of the Wilsons' place, what used to be the Wilsons' place. That means Dave and Karen Dreher are already there, already at work on the house. Karen's brother, Jim Flynn, is working, too.

I figure a good hand shows up to help by eight o'clock. Last May I had volunteered by e-mail to spend a day helping Dave and Karen work on the old house. Dave had told me when they'd be at the house and had offered to let me see it again, the house my dead friend grew up in, Bryan Wilson. It turns out - unknown to me and unknown to the Drehers - that Dave never got that e-mail, so my arrival is a mild surprise.

To see it again, the Joe Wilson house in Curlew.

Bryan and I and our friend Greg Reinders of Mallard, we were the "Three Musketeers," legends in our own minds perhaps, true friends. If one of us was involved in a bit of mischief, you could be pretty sure the other two were nearby. All of us attended St. Mary's School together, in Mallard.

Bryan and I had a proximity we didn't share with Greg. I lived only a mile south and a quarter mile west of the Wilson house. Greg lived on a farm north of Mallard, some four miles away. Bryan and I were team mates on Curlew's Little League team in the hey-day of the small town, the Eisenhower years, the 1950s. I always regarded Bryan as a better player than I was, better with the bat, better with the glove, better with the infield chatter. I was a farm boy, so I had plenty to do in the summer. Bryan was busy too; he spent his summers mowing lawns for people in Curlew, looking over back fences. Occasionally he saw someone's wife out in her backyard sunning herself topless, her breasts exposed to the full light of day and to Bryan's just-pubescent gaze as he worked. He told me about it. He said it was Mow, Mow, Peek, Peek, Mow, Peek, Mow. Not the Saturday Evening Post picture of the small town middle western 1950s.

Bryan and I finished our eight grades at St. Mary's School and parted ways. I went off to high school minor seminary at Trinity Prep in Sioux City, Iowa, thinking God had called me to the priesthood. Turns out God wasn't speaking to me at all; he was only clearing his throat. Bryan didn't go to Sioux City or anywhere else; he stayed and attended high school locally; and after he graduated he joined the Navy, became a Seabee. This was during the Vietnam War. Bryan was serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam when he was killed.

There are some things you never get over, and the death of a best friend is near the top of that list. We hadn't seen each other in several years by the time Bryan died, but that doesn't mean the connection had been broken. The news of his death was like a kick in the gut. It's not something you ever get over: you just stop thinking about it all the time.

To be continued....

WHY I DON'T HUNT

Yesterday was the opening day of deer season in Wisconsin. I don't hunt. I'm not opposed to deer hunting. I eat venison, a lot of venison. This little piece, an excerpt from my memoir, Curlew: Home, explains "Why I Don't Hunt."

It was one of those rare fall days:

you think you shall be fourteen years old forever, you are full of juice, you know you are immortal. I was walking the cornfield just northwest of the farmstead, walking among the broken cornstalks. I was carrying the break-action .410 shotgun I always hunted with, a gun I think had been my grandfather's, though if it was we didn't make much of the pedigree. The sky was full of blue. My feet rustled dried leaves on the rubble of harvest. I was hunting pheasants on a fine autumn day.

I suppose I hunted because I thought a farm boy was supposed to. Until that fall day I had not spent much time thinking about it. I'd shoot a squirrel for my gramma, who liked squirrel and gravy, and I'd be surprised how difficult it is to skin a squirrel. I'd shoot eight or ten cottontail rabbits in the deep snow of winter, shoot them and leave them lay, simply because there were too many and they damaged the young trees we set out. We'd visit the family of a hard-muscled tomboy I thought I was sweet on and I'd go tromping the corn fields with her brother, shotgun cradled in the crook of my arm.

And I would hunt pheasant on a fine autumn day in our own fields. It must have been Saturday. You could smell the moisture was coming out of the broken corn stalks. And your heart

STOPS.

The cock pheasant rises. The rush of it stops your heart. Stops the world. Everything so clear. The foot held in mid-step. The gun cold to the touch. The burst of bird before you. It rises in the wonderful arc that life is, the perfect part of the perfect circle. The pheasant goes up and away. The white ring of its neck is so intensely white. The red is red red. Sighting down the barrel of a shotgun, one sees everything clearly except what he feels.

The .410 was the perfect gun. If you couldn't kill it with the .410, it didn't need to die. I had friends with 16-gauge or 12-gauge shotguns, way more charge than a fellow ought to have. The .410 was enough. The pheasant was so clear. BLAMM.

The terrible moment is the instant the pheasant falls off its perfect arc. The bird crumpled and dropped out of the sky. Something was terribly incomplete. All of a sudden I recognized that something would be unfinished forever. I had broken the arc of that bird's flight. The blast of my shotgun had exploded beauty into a thousand shards. The world would not be mended. The pheasant crumpled and fell to earth.

Something in the world was incomplete and I was responsible for that.

I cleaned the pheasant. I cleaned the shotgun and set it back in its cupboard. I never again picked up a gun to kill anything.

All my life I've been waiting for that pheasant's arc of flight to be completed. All my life the bird crumples and falls to earth. What is beautiful has been broken since.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 6*

"We now have $2.10 between us,

and a tank pretty well filled with gas," Strong writes on August 9, 1923 from Livingston, Montana. He and Harv had been to Washington and Oregon and California. He wants his folks to write him next at Jardine where the fellows will be working at the mine again. If his parents don't get a wire for money, Strong says, then "you will know that we are OK."

Three days later he writes his parents to tell them he has a job running the crusher. Harv is working, too, "doing most anything that no one else will do." They had been sleeping in their car but were now moved into "the shack," sharing a single bunk bed between them. "But that's enough," Strong says. "I come off shift at 3:30 a.m. By the time I wash and eat a sandwich and talk with the boys a while and get undressed, it's about time for Harv to roll out."

All is not well with the innards of his Ford, however. "We must look inside when we have time," he says. "I think it's in the transmission somewhere." A fellow has been trying to trade an old Overland for Strong's Ford, "but I don't think it is a good idea." It would be too hard to get parts for the old car and tires cost too much.

"We are OK as usual," Strong concludes this final letter from the road. "When we get the car tuned up and have worked up a road stake, we will be heading back for Wisconsin." From the northern entrance to Yellowstone, a prodigal son goes home.

-------------------------------
"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 5*

Later in the afternoon,

as we're headed back into Gardiner, we too veer off. Our trusty vehicle climbs the five treacherous, graveled miles to Jardine, Montana. The road is clinging to mountainside, barely; it is an uphill climb most of the way; and we see mule deer and elk and buffalo along the roadside.

Jardine is desolate. It is another end-of-the-road, end-of-the-world kind of town. A young couple with a child wave at us as we approach; they smile. We will encounter them again when we leave; they will wave and smile once more.

We've come up the mountain to see Jardine. There is not much to see. William Strong was right - it is not much of a town. My daughter says "No, you cannot take my car across that bridge." The bridge crosses the ravine that splits Jardine. Snow and ice have penned a foot or more of water onto the roadbed of the bridge. Water over a troubled bridge. Whatever its name, whatever mineral is extracted - the mining company in Jardine has posted a sign saying it is "environmentally friendly." Do we believe everything we tell ourselves? We see a collection of decrepit log buildings that very well may have been in use at the mine in 1923 when William Strong worked here. Going down the mountain we have to drag our feet to keep the car from running away on us.

...

I am home, back in Fairwater, Wisconsin. Having remarked on the shabbiness of Gardiner and Jardine, Montana, there at the edge of Yellowstone, it is only fair that I consider the shabbiness hereabout. I criticized the trailer courts and their gravel streets in Gardiner. We are guilty of trailer houses, too, and gravel streets. Gardiner had its herd of elk wandering freely. We've had Hoodie's cows tromping our lawn once or twice. And you still see the occasional white tail deer wandering our streets.

We have our mud, here, we have pieces of tree blown down and left to rot, bad shingles on houses, rocks left in random piles in the damnedest places, skids stacked haphazardly alongside a driveway. There is a tire in the ditch along Highway E north out of Fairwater. There are black plastic bags caught in a fence line, flapping. A big piece of styrofoam in the ditch. An anti-freeze container. Farm buildings badly needing paint. The farmyard south of Five Corners is its own junkyard, worse than anything in all of Gardiner. A plastic milk jug in the ditch. A five-quart ice cream bucket. We are not any better than Gardiner. Who am I to talk?

To be continued....

-----------------------------
"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 4*

The road through the Lamar Valley

ends at Cooke City after curling back into Montana. You can go no farther, for the mountain pass is closed in this season. Snow along the main street in Cooke City is eight feet deep, ten feet deep. The side streets are like tunnels. It is past lunchtime. There are a couple restaurants open, it looks like, and we decide to eat at one of them. To enter, we have to climb a great bank of snow in front of the place. Someone has laid a broken snowmobile track over the snow bank to offer some footing.

My daughter thinks we may have picked the wrong place to dine. The building is down on its luck. The building aches and creaks and in the men's room the toilet wobbles like a fighter going down for the count. A trip to the bathroom is like a trip through a dungeon. It is clear we are at the end of the road, at the end of the world. Sometimes it gets so bad and we live with it so long we have no sense that others, outsiders, might look at it and see how god-awful it is, our true situation. Even our waitress seems a little off plumb. If you have first choice, she wouldn't be it. She tries too hard, like a child kept locked in the basement who doesn't know how to behave around company. I tell my daughter "This isn't one of your tourist experiences, this is real." My prime rib is average. My wife's chicken noodle soup is home-made and very tasty, and three days later she will still remember how good it was. But the french fries - if this weren't the end of the road, you couldn't get away with such criminal grease on the fries. They were soggy with it, brown with it, limp. My wife suggests there are people who actually like french fries like these.

We finish our meal. The great, thick pies look tempting, but we pass on dessert. Outside we marvel again at the snow piled eight and ten feet deep along the streets. Many stores in Cooke City are closed for the season and it's just as well - at one store the snow bank along the curb covers everything except the company name painted on the peak at the front of the building. We drive the length of the main street, its couple blocks, then turn back towards Yellowstone.

We see wolves again, where we'd caught only glimpses of them previously. We stop to watch them for almost an hour. There are two wolves, one with a radio collar. Mostly they are lounging in the snow but they are also looking for mice or voles under the snow cover. They listen, cocking their ears. They arch their backs. They pounce, diving nose first into the snow after a sound. If a little creature gives away its position, it becomes dinner. The wolves are not much more than a quarter mile from us. With our binoculars we have a clear view of them. Finally they disappear behind a snowy ridge and all we see of them is their ears, occasionally the tops of their heads.

As we leave the site, we are confronted on the road by a large bull buffalo. Large bull buffalo - is that redundant? He wants half the road and unfortunately he wants to take it out of the middle. So we wait a few minutes til he decides to amble off.

Closer to Gardiner, we see a coyote moving. He stops for a drink of water. He climbs the slope up from the meadow and crosses the road in front of us, then runs along the road perhaps a quarter mile before veering off onto a snow-covered slope to our left. Wild canines do not run like domesticated dogs; a dog would run straight and true, while this coyote runs a little off plumb, a little curved in his spine, like he's always looking back over his shoulder.

To be continued....

---------------------------------
*"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 3*

We have entered Yellowstone Park.

We are driving through the Lamar Valley in the northeast portion of the park. Before mid-morning we have already seen a coyote eating at the side of the road, its nose red with blood. We have seen buffalo and elk and pronghorn antelope. We have seen four big horn sheep.

Now we are watching three wolves sun themselves in a great open meadow. They are about a quarter mile distant. One wolf has moved off slightly onto the snow, the others recline on a patch of bare, dark soil. In the far background a couple elk move among trees and the wolves pay them no attention.

Farther on, in another great, open meadow, we get glimpses, only glimpses, of two more wolves. We move on.

Is my sense that wolves are somehow noble and majestic - is this something within the wolves or is it something in me? Those who want to eliminate the wolf might say I suffer a silly romanticism; their sense of the wolf, they'd make clear, is entirely different. Partly the difference is a matter of how one looks at the world - do we think we are the masters of the universe, or do we think we share the earth with all God's creatures?

Now we've seen a red fox, too. Up close, no more than twenty feet from the road. It is snuffling about for mice under the snow cover. It pays us no mind.

...

According to Minnie Strong, young William Strong's mother, several hardy men pushed northward in 1849 from Racine County in southern Wisconsin into the Indian country, "to spy out the land and find out what advantages it offered for homesteading." The travelers followed rivers, old Indian trails, and the nearly obliterated tracks of Wisconsin's fur traders. They headed north, they headed north and west.

The men found a place that suited them in what is now Waupaca County, Wisconsin. Although the region had not yet been surveyed, claims were staked. Here is where the pioneer families would settle.

Two members of the party stayed behind to protect the claims until the others returned the following year with their families and belongings. One was an older man, the other was still in his teens. This youth was Minnie Strong's father, Columbus Caldwell, and was William Strong's grandfather. The two who stayed behind made a clearing in the woods and built a one-room cabin to serve as winter shelter.

"My father's dog remained with his master," Mrs. Strong has recorded. In the long winter evenings, the dog - named York - played a dangerous game with the big gray wolves of the vicinity. York would beg to be let out of the cabin. The wolves would come as near the light as they dared. A chase would begin, back and forth, wolves and dog, from the edge of the clearing to the edge of the cabin light. When York tired out, he threw himself against the cabin door, a sign he was ready to come in and rest by the fire.

To be continued....

------------------------------
"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 2*

Strong was still in Jardine

at the end of June, 1923. The fellows at the mine had just held "a kind of an impromptu field meet." There had been jumping and "tricks of all descriptions." Strong himself had won the high jump and the "stand-on-head" contest. "A Greek here won most all the rest," he said. "He ought to be in the circus, sure can put himself into some awful shapes."

They worked two more days, Strong and his friend did, then set off to "ramble again," though the boss wanted them to stay longer. "If there would be any trouble getting someone else, I would stay," Strong said, "but there's a lot of men here."

...

I have been to Gardiner, Montana. I have been up the mountain to Jardine. It was March, 1999. There was a lawn in Gardiner full of snowmobiles for rent, twenty snowmobiles or more, though snow was gone from village streets and lawns. These snowmobiles were rented out for trips into Yellowstone. I saw trailer courts in Gardiner, here and there, with rough, graveled streets. There was a gritty taste to a morning walk. Sand blown up by the wind ended up in your mouth, the wind was coming that hard; a woman said: "You've got to keep stones in your pockets." The wind was shaking sagebrush and pines in the mountains surrounding Gardiner, coming down past great chunks of rock and the tracks of gullies on the mountainsides.

My impression of Gardiner - it seems to be a nickel and dime sort of town tossed down next to the twenty dollar gold piece that is Yellowstone. The worst of it is all the elk wandering freely about the town. Along Main Street, homeowners wanting to keep elk out of their yards have fenced off their lawns. Elsewhere - elk dung, elk tracks tearing up the grass, elk nibbling plants down to their roots. Walking after dark one evening, my wife and I encountered a group of twenty five or thirty elk coming across the street to the Post Office parking lot to investigate the Black Lab running loose. Elk stand in the street wherever they wish, and vehicles must weave a way through them. When I complain about the elk to my Wisconsin-raised daughter who now lives in Missoula, Montana, she says: "Better elk in the streets than homeless people."

I say to the fellow who manages our motel, I say "The first thing I would do is get rid of the elk. They are like vermin."

He says, "It's not so easy as that. We can't do anything about them. It's not bad now, with only a hundred or so in town. In the winter when the snow is deep in the Park, we might get as many as a thousand elk roaming through town looking for food. Worse than that, in the winter we have buffalo coming into town too. They are much more temperamental. Every year in the Park someone gets hurt by a buffalo, once in a while someone gets killed."

An old stone building that looks like it used to be the jail still has bars cemented into stone; the bars cover all the windows. The structure sits at the edge of the Yellowstone River just off Main Street in Gardiner. There are no shingles on the roof. It is a proud structure but will soon drop into disrepair if it is not shingled.

In some ways, Gardiner looks terribly shabby. Motels and the shops for tourists are relatively new and well taken care of, but many are closed in this season. One motel that is closed has a sign out front recommending another in town. Many Gardiner residents live in that western cardboard box, the trailer house. You are somewhat at a loss to explain the disparity between the beauty of the park and the shabbiness of the park's northern gateway. Would "ugly" be too harsh a word? I don't blame the people who live here. Are they indentured servants? Are they mining the vein that is our national park system? What in our way of doing things allows such a place to develop?

This sounds like a harsh judgment of good people. I'm not sure I know whom to skewer. Are greed and beauty two sides of the same coin? I'm not sure I know enough to make a judgment - enough about Gardiner, about the perimeters of other national parks, about the conditions that encourage people to mine tourism.

To be continued....

---------------------
*"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.

THE NORTHERN ENTRANCE: AN ESSAY - 1*

On June 17, 1923,

young William Strong was "somewhere in the mountains" headed for Gardiner, Montana, at Yellowstone Park's northern entrance. It was 10:00 p.m. when the lights on his Tin Lizzie went out and would not come back on. Strong and his companion, Harv, pulled off the road and camped for the night.

The next day the pair reached Gardiner, then went up the mountain to Jardine, Montana, described by Strong as "a little mining town." It was not much, he said - a saloon, a store, a few houses, and the mine. "Gold mining," Strong said, "but haven't seen the gold yet."

William Strong was the son of Minnie Strong, who was the daughter of Mary Caldwell, who was the daughter of G.W. Taggart, who was one of the original settlers in Waupaca County, Wisconsin, 1849. G.W. Taggart, we're told, had running through his whole being "like living nerves this yearning for the wilderness and distant places."

Generation follows generation. William Strong had that yearning, too; he and Harv were traveling west to the coast on a very limited budget, stopping to work along the way when they needed money, sight-seeing when they didn't.

The fellows were hoping to get jobs at the mine in Jardine, Strong told his parents by letter, but they had to wait "til the boss checks up after dinner to see if we do or not." The boss seemed to be "a good scout," Strong said. "A big fellow about thirty years old with corduroy breeches and laced boots."

"It's raining," Strong recorded. "Believe me, mountain driving in the rain is great stuff. I have to get out and push every once in a while." The night before, they had passed a car that couldn't make it up a grade and had been run off the embankment while backing down. "Glad it wasn't us," he said.

Well, they both got jobs at the gold mine in Jardine, though neither of them had to go down into the mine itself. "I handle the ore after the free gold has been taken out," Strong wrote. "It's still worth about one hundred and fifty dollars a ton." Harv had a job somewhere in the next process - "Don't know exactly what he has to do with it."

Strong's immediate boss, a fellow about twenty five years old, gave him a tour of the entire stamp mill - "I guess he wanted me to quit asking questions for a while."

The pay was $4.25 for eight hours work. They paid $1.15 per day for their board. "I guess I will get a little stake before long," Strong said. Though he needed to buy a pair of rubber shoes for the job, which would set him back $5.00 right off.

The work, he thought, was "real interesting to me now, but I suppose it wouldn't be as a steady thing."

In their spare time after work was finished in the afternoon, Strong and his friend had been going into Gardiner and on to Yellowstone Park. The roads weren't the best, Strong said: either you had to run in low to climb up the mountains or had to drag your feet to keep the Liz from running away.

When his boss found out Strong was from Wisconsin, he pointed out that on the whole "there is a lot better class of men here than you find in the woods." The men working in the mine might be ramblers, his boss thought, but they were smart and could understand instructions "without giving a special course to each man."

To be continued....

---------------------
*"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.