Solstice

This is my day off and cripes, you guys, it's 8 degrees below zero. The wind is blowing about 25 miles per hour. The 12 inches of snow that fell in the last 36 hours is drifting over driveways, sidewalks, roads, yards, and woodpiles. The landscape is a whirling white haze with a howling soundtrack that resembles an endless BN&SF freight train except that there is no train. And when there is one you can't hear it for the noise of the gale. Birds are losing their grip on the feeders and blowing off their perches before they get enough to eat.


The foot of snow I cleared yesterday afternoon somehow made its way back into the driveway overnight and about six inches of new snow landed on top of that. The guy who drives the snowplow for our village came by and added another foot or so that he scraped off the street in a speeding, frosty explosion as exciting as any special effect in a Hollywood blockbuster.

My first two waking hours (excludes dressing time) of this day are spent shoveling snow from the porch with a scoop shovel, making my way to the garage door in 6-inch increments to get to the snow blower.

For the sake of our friends in warmer climes it should be noted that snow blower is a misnomer; it doesn't really blow snow. Something of a cross between a steamboat and a lawnmower, it is a contraption in which an internal combustion engine takes the place of boilers and pitman arms to turn an auger-like paddle wheel amidships at a dizzying speed. The wheel in turn forces snow up and out of a smokestack on the main deck in a stream that resembles that of a high pressure fire hose. The smokestack--old-time rivermen prefer the term chimney--can be cranked so as to expel the snow in the direction of the pilot's choosing.

But it does not blow snow. The wind blows snow. And when you are navigating a snow blower no matter where you aim the chimney the wind blows the snow right back into your face and encrusts both the starboard and port sides of it into a snotty frozen mass that clings to your whiskers for the rest of your voyage.

With the offending snow again relocated from porch, sidewalk, driveway, and decks, it's time to haul the wood. Shuffling back and forth to the woodpile burrows a path that improves with the hauling of each armload. By the time the rick is full you are pretty well warmed up. Only a moron would remove sweaty hands from his gloves and grab onto the brass doorknob on his way back inside to enjoy coffee and the latest issue of The New Yorker while sitting in the warmth of the wood stove.

Today is the first day of winter. We're off to a good start.

Getting Purchase on the Moment

'Tis the season here along the upper stretches of The Big River when something in the earth's clutch slips and our beloved blue orb yaws a little off kilter and it's easy to see it's going to take some considerable time to readjust itself. This geo-mechanical contretemps, in turn, has decidedly-marked celestial consequences.

The sun's boiler is temporarily cooled and it can barely build up enough steam to navigate itself upstream. As the pressure diminishes, the ball of fire that had us on a steady bake just a couple months ago becomes so sluggish that it takes it until almost eight o'clock in the morning to achieve the summit of the bluffs to the east. After that it never does get very far up in the air and is sure to be pretty well spent before suppertime, even if you eat early. If all that isn't pitiable enough, the whole chore of just getting up and around rarely leaves Old Sol with enough spunk to punch through the cloud cover.

The upshot of this whole affair is that we don't get much light, one of the key ingredients of life. And in the absence of light just about every living thing that hasn't crept in through the cracks, flown south, or gone to sleep has surrendered its color and settled for a gray or brown as drab as the sparrows puffed with cold and huddled in the leafless bittersweet. Even the cedars and spruce that we call evergreen can't summon up enough luminescence to exceed the complexion of their own shadows.

This is the time of year when it takes a long time to get dressed to go outside. And the longer it takes to get dressed, the longer it takes to get undressed. So once you go outside it makes sense to do everything you want or need to do before you come back inside. Having established above that there isn't that much time to begin with, this is a season that demands considerably more efficiency.

So now when I come home from work I don't come inside right away. I am more likely to make a stop at the garage just long enough to pull on my quilted bib overalls and head to the poor man's woodshed, a snow-covered tarpaulin tent. On all fours I crawl underneath and, contorting myself, I toss split elm and oak logs into a wheelbarrow with which I will lumber across the yard to the basement door. From there, armloads are muscled up the stairs and into a 4' X 4' rick on the deck. (This is the last stop before said fuel makes its way indoors and onto a smaller rick where it will, within 24 hours, heat me for the umpteenth and final time.) Whenever an armload is dropped a brief rest has been earned.

It feels good to sweat in single-digit temperatures.

It was during one of those short breathers, with less than an hour of daylight remaining, when the sun mustered up some gumption and made its play. An orange-yellow beam reflected across the smooth ice for the full width of the river, perhaps a mile across from my vantage point. It broke into a rippling dance in the small strip of open water that still forms a narrow channel between shores of ice mottled with splotches of snow constantly being rearranged by a steady, bitter wind.

A cardinal landed three feet away from me in the filigreed remains of the bittersweet, eyeing the surviving berries as flaming red as he. As the sun lowered, the yellow beam on the ice climbed up the Minnesota bluffs and painted the bottom edge of the sky with orange, icy fire. An eagle stood at the edge of the open water, staring intently into the mystery below.

Some winter moments are momentous.

On That Day

Fauver Hill School was out in the country. It had four bright, airy, sparkling-clean classrooms. When the Venetian blinds were raised to the top of the huge windows you could gaze out onto giant oak trees on the playground and beyond to the endless farm fields and pastures dappled with gorgeous, grazing Guernseys. In the distance were lush bluffs with sandstone outcroppings that formed a verdant backdrop for chugging freight trains wending their way through the valley of the La Crosse River headed to big cities in far-off places I had only heard of. Madison. Milwaukee. Chicago. It was my school, my world. And it was built of clear blue sky and daydreams.

Students who would have been entering the 5th and 6th grades at Fauver Hill School were bussed to Irving Pertzsch Elementary School when the Town of Medary School District consolidated with the School District of Onalaska those many years ago.

I didn't like it at all.

Pertzsch was in Onalaska, a town of three thousand people. I might have known about six of them. The treeless playground was surfaced with blacktop. Baselines of a ball diamond and squares for hopscotch were painted on with yellow stripes like you'd find in the center of the highway. The only real earth on the school property was a sand bur patch. An unnecessary rule prohibited playing there.

There were only two things I liked about Pertzsch. One was the name. I couldn't think of another name with eight letters and only one vowel. The other was Mr. Urban.

Mr. Urban was our principal. He was the first man I ever saw who worked in a school who wasn't a janitor. Mr. Urban was as neat as a pin. He wore glasses with tortoise shell rims. His suits were perfectly tailored, his ties precisely knotted. His shoes were the same shade and as shiny as his, wavy, auburn, Brylcreamed hair.

When I was ten years old I was shy around grown-up men, a little bit afraid of them. But not Mr. Urban. Mr. Urban liked you. He shook your hand and said he was pleased to meet you. And he was. You were glad that Mr. Urban liked you. You wanted him to like you.

In stature, Mr. Urban was a small man. He was effeminate. That was something I couldn't have explained when I was ten and would have ridiculed when I was thirteen. Everything about Mr. Urban's manner put me at ease.

The 5th and 6th graders who came to Pertzsch from Fauver Hill were assigned to a makeshift classroom sandwiched between the lunch room and the music room. It was below ground level, windowless, dreary.

Since daydreams didn't come as freely here as they did back at Fauver Hill it was easy to misbehave. We were the charges of Miss Hyatt in her first year of teaching. She had not yet become a forceful woman so it wasn't unusual for Mr. Urban to visit our classroom from time to time. He would come into the room quietly, smile broadly, walk around the tightly-grouped desks, give an approving but barely discernible bow, and walk out. You hardly noticed him.

But on that day, an especially dreary one, he walked square-shouldered to the front of the class and turned sharply, facing us. He was crying. I had never seen a grown man cry. Mr. Urban's tears came without restraint. "I don't like to interrupt you with news unless the news is so very good that I just can't wait to announce it." The words came calmly, deliberately. "But today, I'm afraid the news is very bad. Our president has been shot. His condition is grave. As soon as I know more I will come and tell you."

We sat in silence. Within moments he returned with the news that the president was dead. He sat down with us in one of the small empty desks and stayed for what seemed like a long time.

We were sent home early. I remember sitting on the bus staring numbly at raindrops trickling down the window and thinking nothing bad had ever happened before now.

Another Big Circle

Cripes, you guys. I like to watch television after supper. I learned that from my dad and my grandfather. They liked Gunsmoke and Wagon Train and Bonanza. There was always a fistfight (the best ones took place next to a campfire or a swift river), usually a shootout, and sometimes there'd be the big one: a hanging. The drama was non-stop save for the commercial breaks when they'd try to sell you a Chevy with an incredibly happy family driving around in a car as shiny as you could get it in black and white and a huge chorus of people off-camera singing a snappy ditty that you couldn't get out of your head for days.

Those great westerns are gone now. Crime dramas with carcasses of victims too graphic for my taste have taken their place. So I tend to watch the little half-hour comedies about beleaguered dads who have gorgeous wives and kids who are smarter than both of them or shows about the foibles of the workplace where the characters remind me of people in my own workplace only they have better clothes and are more attractive and you only have to suffer their moronic behavior for a few minutes once a week. The laughs just keep coming save for the commercial breaks when they try to sell you a Toyota cruising the great expanses of The American West but you never see the driver. I'd probably buy one if I had the money and they had a decent jingle.

About a year ago I started watching left-leaning news shows after supper, not for entertainment or to learn anything but to reinforce my biases. I thought when the election was over I might give up on these shows but I'm afraid I've formed a habit. Right now I'm watching a segment about how the (still) President of the United States is in a race against time to further damage our country. It's just one outrage after another save for the commercial breaks when they try to sell you a pill for "male urinary symptoms" with some guys about my age drinking bottled water and driving past The Grand Canyon in a vintage Chevy from the Gunsmoke commercial.

November Sunday

Cripes, you guys. Snowflakes are sputtering in the lead-grey sky, so jittery it's hard to tell if they'll ever reach the ground. The willow is still leafy in a kind of Packers green and gold color. A few leaves cling to the tops of the hackberries, curled, dry, brown. The ground is cloaked in the orange, rust, yellow, and blood-red that recently dressed the maple. Bald trees across the November river give distant bluffs the visual texture of steel wool. A towboat slowly grinds upstream, headlong into the raw wind, as a tight flock of diving ducks speeds through the afternoon sky unnoticed by the roughneck deckhands.

It's good to be outside this time of year. It's not as easy as summer but there is a new and greater sense of purpose. Before long it will be cold. Real cold. There is wood to cut, haul, split, and stack. Warmth earned through hard work provides a satisfying comfort in a hard winter here along the Upper Mississippi.

Fall chores are a race with the sun, hurrying along behind the clouds a lot faster than usual these days. It's best to get an early start. Rushing the work takes the fun out of it. The lawn mower is stored in the basement. The snow blower is in the garage, ready. There's a lot left to do. But not today.

The delicious smell of burning wood makes the cold weather seem like an old friend. And spring is just around the corner.

Play Ball

Cripes, you guys. In the final innings of a high-stakes game some teams will do anything to win. The best hitters have to be ready to protect themselves from the high hard one. Base runners become a little more eager to take out the infielder whose job it is to make the pivot on the turn-two. And forget about the play at the plate. The catcher, who already has the toughest job, has to become more of a defensive tackle or a goalie.

It's like that in elections, too. The guys on the team I'm rooting for are now said to be catering to terrorists, murderers, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, rapists, dope fiends, and other special interest groups. They will end free speech, burn down your churches, and jail The Boy Scouts. Worse yet, these America-hating, closet commies will raise your taxes.

John McCain has followed Nixon's lead by hiring the plumbers to secure his seat in The Oval Office. Apparently John's plumber isn't actually licensed to secure the porcelain oval seat in my own rectangular office.

I have been obsessed by this very exciting game and am a little sorry that it will be over soon. I'm not sure what I will do with myself. I have been listening to it on the radio all day and watching it on TV all night.

I guess, if it stays warm I will have more time for fishing. If it cools off I'll cut firewood and hunt ducks. But cripes, you guys. I really need this thing to end in a rout. If it goes into extra innings (remember 2000?) I'm screwed.

Clothes(ing) the Deal

Cripes, you guys. If I had known that a $150,000 clothing allowance came with the job of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate I might have tried to muscle my way onto McCain's short list myself. Given the apparent rigours of the vetting process Governor Palin underwent to be picked for the number two spot on the GOP ticket, I could have been a serious contender. With my background as a school bus driver and rural mail carrier I have solid experience and an exemplary record in government at both the local and national levels. As to foreign policy credentials: I may not be able to see Russia from my back porch but nobody can downplay the importance of the fact that I have fried doughnuts in grease.


Now I can't claim that I know how to win wars or that I know how to clean up "Worshington" but, my friends, I can tell you this: right here, in the richest country on earth, fully 30% of all middle and working class males are walking around with worn elastic in their underwear. And while $150k could go a considerable way to rectify this travesty, let's face it, I could not spend that amount of money on clothes in a lifetime, with or without accessories.


Not long ago I was looking at a shoebox full of old snapshots with my children--one in high school, one in college, and one post-collegiate--when all the kids started to laugh at a picture of me and my oldest daughter when she was about 7 years old. When it became clear to them that I was flummoxed by their amusement they pointed out that the shirt I was wearing in the photograph taken some two decades past was the same one I currently had on. I still didn't get the joke.


Okay, so I'm no clothes horse. Perhaps my slovenliness tends to the extreme but if you saw me on the street I would look like an ordinary citizen. I own one nice suit. It's about ten years old and may even have been dry cleaned once, I'm not sure. I can go to a wedding, a funeral, or a graduation ceremony without feeling self-conscious or embarrassing the celebrants thereof, at least not because of my attire.


All seriousness aside, I suppose if you're a politician looking for votes it makes sense to look your best. But cripes, you guys. If most people could pay off their mortgages and send a child to college with the passel you have for a clothing allowance designed just to get you through the campaign it should occur to you that something is amiss. If you are going to pay $400 for a haircut or $700 for designer eyeglass frames or $300,000 for an outfit to wear to the convention then please stop telling us that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms.

Poultry, of a Vernal Nature.

Cripes, you guys. I'm no spring chicken. I still have my original teeth but I am old enough to be familiar with that expression about the henhouse. I am old enough to have seriously considered dodging the draft back during the days of gas wars. But I don't feel old, usually. It's just that every now and then the facts of the matter sneak up on a guy.

I have a new computer, a laptop with a wider screen than the ones I have outlived. I noticed today when I opened it up that the darkened screen reflects my image from my shoulders to my waist. That part of me doesn't look the same as it did back in the day when I used to tell the attendant to "give me a dollar's worth of regular." Some of us get thicker in the middle. Some of us get thinner on top. All of us get older--at least for a short time.

I am older than everybody who is playing on the field in the Major League Baseball Playoffs, including the umpires. I am older than the teachers who have my kids in their classes. I am invisible to young women. Alas, I must now come to grips with another abrupt reality: for the first I am about to cast my vote for a presidential candidate who is younger than me.

(The guy who I am not voting for is more years older than me than the guy who I am voting for is years younger than me. That guy is practically a dinosaur. They were the species that, according to his running mate, were running around five or six thousand years ago when even the earth was young. They had very small brains and became extinct. But, I digress).

Now, here's the good news: I like getting old. In almost every way getting older has led me to a better life, at least so far. Time has been a good friend to me. I owe it all to time. Everything I have. Every thing I am. Everything I will ever be.

Guys like me need a younger president. We need someone who is smarter than us, elite. We need someone who doesn't look at the world through such a small knothole as we do, someone who hasn't succumbed to cynicism, someone who hasn't given up on the idea of justice, someone who still knows the power of imagination.

Young people need this guy, too. They need him a lot more than we do. They need him more than they need us. They have so much time ahead of them. The last thing they need is an aging bullshitter who tries to scare them. Anybody who is 72 years old and still makes air quotation marks scares me.

That old guy has given a lot to this country. He deserves to spend some time fishing. It could make his life a lot better--and a lot of other lives,too.

(True) Fish Story

Cripes, you guys. I was ready to give up.

After four hours I had caught one tiny perch, grown hungry, gotten pretty damp, battled winds, and become increasingly frustrated with my lack of luck and the growing pain in my right shoulder. For the last half hour I had been saying, "One last cast."

I decided to troll along the rocks beneath the dike as far as the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad bridge where the Trempealeau River empties into the big water, about a hundred yards or so. Then I would hang it up for the day, land the boat, and go home and watch the baseball playoff games. It looked like the drizzle was about to turn into a bona fide rainstorm anyway.

When I caught the little sunfish there was practically no resistance on my line; it could have just been weeds. I killed the motor and reeled a little bit before it was clear there was even a fish on. I paused in a stoop to rearrange stuff on the floor of the boat and when I straightened to stand up my little sunfish seemed a lot bigger.

The fish made a run and the drag was suddenly screaming. For several minutes I battled the angry critter. Three more times I let the fish run before I finally worked him in close enough to the surface to see a big northern with a sunfish sideways in his mouth--the head out one side and the tail out the other. It looked like he was eating a sandwich.

When I finally pulled him close to the boat, the two fish had become separated. The leading treble hook of the Sonic lure was in the mouth of the sunny and the and trailing hook was in the side of the big slimer's mouth. He was pretty-well worn out. I held him alongside the boat and kept him horizontal in the water, just like a real fisherman had taught me to handle these big hogs a few summers ago up in Northern Ontario. As I reached down to get a hand inside the back of his gill the fish gave a violent toss and disappeared into the deep. I was left with a bloodied sunfish and a slightly broken heart.

I fished for two more hours. I'll probably fish for a long time before something like that happens again. Others have told me of similar experiences. It was an amazing thing to witness. I've caught a lot of northerns this summer but I sure wish I would have gotten that one.