What do Poets Loose in Marshfield do?
Well, for one thing, they talk. They talk a lot. Middlewestern poets are not an especially gabby bunch, in my experience; yet we had whole lifetimes to catch up on. So part of what we did was talk - ask questions, give answers, tell stories.
For another thing, Poets Loose in Marshfield go wandering in places that are good for the soul. Two of those are hardly a mile from Linda's front door, these two "tourist attractions" across the road from each other, both of them more than the sum of their parts - the Foxfire Gardens and the Jurustic Park collection of welded "sculptures."
Is it possible to take an ordinary piece of Wisconsin landscape and turn it into sacred space? Can the land be shaped such that a fellow has to go quiet while walking it, whispering, subdued? Can a place be designed so that the water and the flowers and the trees and the rocks make you think of higher things? If the place is Foxfire, the answer is yes.
Before my trip to Marshfield, Linda had sent me a publication from the area, Boomers and Beyond, which had articles about Foxfire and Jurustic Park by Pramela Thiagesen. Thiagesen profiled Steve and Linda Schulte, the couple who created the gardens. They'd bought the property in 1979; it had been an overgrown Christmas tree plantation. This is where they live. Had they done nothing, what is now Foxfire would have been their lawn, their yard. Gradually they transformed the place into a kind of Zen garden (my term, not theirs). In everything they do, Thiagesen reported, the Schultes strive "to honor the soul of the land." Walking such surroundings, one is transported to a kind of holiness. At least I was.
The shelter near the entrance to the grounds was remarkably beautiful in a simple, earthen way, and I remarked to Linda that I would love to teach a writing seminar in such a holy place. Linda said that classes have indeed been held in the shelter. The shape of the place itself seems to open you for learning. In it, I think, the teacher would learn as much as the students.
If you think hostas are a fairly boring form of vegetation, you'll be greatly surprised at the multitude of hosta varieties at Foxfire. There are about five hundred different strains in the garden. Do they have every kind of hosta in the world? I don't think they'd say that, but they've got a lot, in patterns and coloration you haven't imagined. In response to demand from their visitors, the Schultes have been selling hostas, though they are not available by mail order.
Is there room on sacred ground for humor? Yes, perhaps we did have a little fun at the expense of those hostas as we improvised a script for a cheap horror film in which these plants would vie for world domination. Everything which is holy necessarily has a sinister aspect, perhaps, and we found it for hostas.
But mostly you come away from Foxfire Gardens holding your breath at the beauty of it, at the holiness of the place. You have been cradled in something larger than yourself.
"Do you want to walk to Jurustic Park or should we drive?" Linda asked.
"I'm training to walk a marathon," I said. "I suppose I can walk across the road."
Jurustic Park is literally across the road from Foxfire, but it's a farther walk down the length of Foxfire's parking lot and driveway than "across the road" suggests. Yet we walked the distance, we crossed the footbridge into another kind of holiness, a form of happy madness.
Jurustic Park is the yard of Clyde and Nancy Wynia and the welded sculptures in the yard are Clyde's. Nancy does make beads for the creatures' eyes, and in the Hobbit House on the place her work with glass, bead, and spinning are displayed.
Clyde retired from a career as a lawyer, to take up the welding of his vision. As you enter Jurustic Park, if your mouth doesn't drop open with astonishment, there's something the matter with you. Does "holy fool" describe Clyde? It might. If this is not divine intoxication, it's close. Clyde takes pieces of old machines and re-fashions them into creatures that might have inhabited the marshes of Marshfield during "the Iron Age." That's a joke, get it? Helio-dragons and piano-playing frogs, grotesque insects, wild-eyed plants, storks with babies, the eight-headed octonoggin, long-eared dogs and arched-back cats, and such.
You are dazzled by the madness of it and you barely notice the blue-eyed grump-faced fellow approaching. It's Clyde himself and he's about to give you a personal tour. Fasten your seat belt. He has a story for every piece on the place, you learn, and he's a funny guy. But he doesn't let on that he knows he's funny. A couple of boy-frogs peeing at the corner of a building? Yeah, and behind them, a girl frog with body language of shock and horror. How do you tell boy-frogs from girl-frogs? Well, let's say it's obvious.
A girl-frog bungy-jumped without her bra on? Yup. As she dangles at the end of the bungy, her boobies hang down half again as long as her body.
Clyde's a funny fellow, yes. Partly it's his map-cap vision of what's possible when you encounter a pile of junk with welding torch in hand. Partly it's the flatness of his recitation, making the outlandish seem highly plausible. And partly it's his courtroom air - he looks at you and those blue eyes convince you he's entirely trustworthy and you decide you would follow him anywhere. You follow him, and then he slams you with a punch line, straight-faced, and moves onto the next piece, starts telling the next story as serious as a bout of flu. Good thing Clyde was on the side of the law, you think; with his powers of persuasion, his ability to make you see what he says he sees, he'd have made one hell of a swindler.
You think Clyde's wife Nancy must help to keep him grounded. Her calmness and cheerfulness suggest that - whatever you're thinking about Clyde - he's alright. Nancy makes jewelry and buttons and beads and glass flowers and life-size dolls and such, and she offers them for sale in the Hobbit House. Nancy's serenity is like the gravity of the sun - it seems to keep Clyde and all of the Jurustic Park creatures from flying off in a million directions; it keeps what could be an ever-expanding universe from over-expanding.
And then the show's over. You've seen everything. You've heard every story. Or maybe not. There's still a little gleam of dangerous fire in those blue eyes of Clyde's, but it's time to go, time to leave this place which has at least three puns in its name:
- juris, as in jurisprudence, echoing Clyde's years as a lawyer;
- rustic, as in rural and unlettered and perhaps a little bit uncouth; and
- Jurassic, as in dinosaur movie.
Three puns in its name, Jurustic Park, and a story for every mad creature.
Seeing my poem posted in the little woods at the UW-Marshfield/Wood County is almost anti-climatic after a visit with Clyde Wynia. Still, the forest itself created an immediate sense of sacred space as we entered it. Along the Poetry Trail, we paused at each stand to read the poem, paused as if stopping at an altar, all three of us reading. And then Linda took a photo of the poem on its stand; she is the keeper of the memory. Light filtered through the trees. Birds called and twittered. Here and there blue sky showed itself. We read one poem about birds, then another. We came to my poem:
Plain Poems: February 16, 2001
The creamy sheen of sun on snow. Darkness
has run away. The long shadows of crowsremain - the singleness of their homely
sorrows, the sharpness of their clattering.
It was lovely to find the poem presented where the crows themselves might see it.
Afterwards we had lunch at Hudson's, a retro-50s diner-type restaurant with a sweet waitress and real malt powder in its malts. I don't think the blue cheese hamburger I ordered would appear on the menu of a real 50s diner, but I ordered it anyway, along with the old-fashioned malt.
It's hard to eat and talk at the same time, eat and talk and tease the waitress and eat, but that's what we did. Well, I suppose I should be clear about teasing the waitress: that was mostly my doing, and she was pretty good-natured about it.
After we'd eaten - well, it was time for Michael to go to work. He'd put off the scrubbing and polishing for about as long as he could.
Linda and I re-heated some coffee at her house and talked for a bit longer, then I too was underway, headed home from my first Poets Loose in Marshfield adventure.
Thanks, Linda. Michael, we'll stay in touch.
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