After retiring from the Army, my father got a job with AAA in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, to me, seemed almost the Wild West compared to the tangle of traffic that is DC and Alexandria.
We uprooted and looked for house in a small town that might serve as home base for my Dad's field work. I liked the town of Sun Prairie, if for reason beyond the sound of the name, but we chose Stoughton. It was close enough to Madison for my dad and small enough for my mother to feel comfortable driving and house-holding.
While we waited or a house to become available, we lived in a cottage on the shore of a lake, Lake Kegonsa, "the lake of many fishes". I thought we out in the wilderness and would shoot my .22 standing on the back porch into the woods behind the cottage. That was not something our neighbors appreciated, and I heard about it.
It was strange living on a lake after the urban life of northern Virginia. All of us were a little naive bordering on reckless with the new surroundings.
One time we rented a row boat from Sunnyside, the resort near the cottage, and rowed out into the lake. A windstorm came up and we had to fight waves to get back to Sunnyside. The waves came up fast, and we had to row into the wind. We made little, if any progress, and our little craft was taking on water.
A glittery ski boat came to out rescue, piloted by a handsome guy Maggie's age. His interest in rescuing us took on a real mission when he saw that the new blonde from school was in trouble. He pulled up alongside to get the painter from the row boat so he could tow us to the dock. His attention was more behind his destination than it was forward. The air was charged with attraction.
I just sat in the back of the beleaguered dinghy and stared across the whitecaps at the shore.
Maggie was assimilating to the new place in her way and I would have to figure out mine.
I sleep-walked through high school, numb mostly. Two insights stood out, though. One was that I found a part of myself in words, keeping a journal. Two, I loved art. I drew for the pure joy of it in out basement. I did participate for personal reasons and could not care less about accomplishing what others felt was worth doing. I wrestled because I liked working out, but had no competitive fire. I did well in math and humanities, well enough to be elected to give a speech at graduation. But my assimilation was more cultural. This was a land of lakes, woods, and farms. People fished, hunted, and worked long days. I would learn these ways, more or less, and play the role of redneck for a while.
My best days were spent alone in a canoe on the Yahara River, which ran in front of our house. I could carry the Grumman 17 foot aluminum canoe across the street, through the Park, and down the bank to a rocky ledge near the water and launch. From there I could paddle upstream, through town, under the Highway 51 bridge, the railroad bridge, and out into the marsh. The river opened up into cattails, oak woods, and farm land. Redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails and carp swirled the muddy water in the shallows.
Out here, I found something of myself. It was part of me that I didn't know but wanted to to become. it was restless, loved rivers, woods, and mountains. This part of me would carry me through long, rough patches of shadow and loneliness that waited for me after my life in the small town.
Fast forward a few years, and I am out of high school, doing yard and farm harvesting work in the the summer and working in a truck body factory during the winter, driving an old International pick-up truck, carrying rifles on a rack over the rear window of the cab, and drinking to blackout after frustrating nights in bars trying to meet women.
I revel in being a bit of an outcast and call myself a "DG," or degenerate. I can see a path forward that includes a muscle car, a small house, maybe a wife, and a life lived in a small town.
But there is something gnawing at me. I can't quite put it into words, but it involves college, learning to think, and taking a sharp turn into the unknown.
A chance meeting at the urinals with the president of the truck body company helps me to imagine a new path. The president and I are standing beside each other at the urinals and he asks, "What are you doing here?"
I am silent, but he goes on. "This is no place for you. I can put you in charge building doors because John, the head, is about to retire, if you want. But you can do something else. I heard your speech at the last graduation. You aren't factory material. Think about it."
So there it was. A fork in the road. I knew but didn't know at the same time.
A few days later, all of us workers on the line are called to a general meeting. The president stands on a riveting table and gives us the news. At that historical moment, a recession has hit, and he offers a deal to anyone willing to quit rather than be fired.
I jump on it and resign. I apply to the University of Wisconsin -- Steven's Point, and state my major as forestry, and pay for my first semester with money I made building semi trailer doors.
My sister, Lisa, was kind enough to drive me in her little Vega up to Steven's Point under a frigid, bright January sun. She was studying to be a teacher and supported my going to the university. My father, The Bear, had other ideas.
He contended that college was for women, that men drove trucks or were tradesmen or soldiers. None of his money was going to help me go to school.
That was that. I had my own money and would spend it on learning to think and join my peers in a college experience.
At that time, in Wisconsin, the drinking age was 18, so part of that experience was drunkenness. A student who lived on my dorm floor had died from alcohol poisoning the semester before I arrived. His nick name was Lumpy, and he had inscribed it inside the floor phone booth on the painted glass door, an acrostic poem, Lickable Undulating Massive Penis Yak. I traced that inscription, feeling the contours of the scratched paint, when I was on the phone with a girlfriend or family.
The freedom of being a student was intoxicating. I dove into what, for me, was a banquet of concerts, readings, art exhibitions -- all the events that contained other ways of being. It was heady, but it was also a taste of Bacchanalia and letting off the steam of study through gang snowball fights and raucous drinking contests. I learned to walk on my hands and would walk the length of our hall, around the corner and down the women's hall of the co-ed dorm. It seemed a good excuse to visit.
It was that first semester that hooked me on writing. My teacher, Isabelle Stelmahoske was a brilliant and inspired lover of words. I soaked up the potential inherent in expressive scribbling. My journal was an outlet for the questions, rants, and wonderings of my awakening spirit. I read Kerouac, Hemingway, Gary Snyder and other Beats, Thoreau, Pirsig -- mostly male writers. I loved women writers, like Annie Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams, but it as becoming a man of heart and words that most interested me.
I imitated Twain's Jumping Frog at Calveras County in letters to my love at the time, Claudia. To my delight, she actually responded to my experiments in prose. I couldn't have been luckier than to have words hit their target and to warm my hands at the fire of connection and romance. Claudia, bless her, helped push me over the hump of living within my small-town habits and pursuing the risky dream of writing.
Some friends in the dorm and I took up an idea and ran with it. Over the summer, we would hitch hike to the Tetons and Glacier National Park and backpack into the Rocky Mountains. That seemed a suitable challenge for young men looking to test themselves in an adventure.
My mother, bless her, dropped us off at an on ramp to I-90/94 in Madison, and Pete Korpi and I hitched and backpacked the some of the trails in both the Tetons and Glacier. I saw myself in Kerouac's On the Road, one time sitting in the bed of a pickup truck driven by two rodeo clowns. For company, they had also picked up three Swiss backpacker women, blonde and strong and clear-eyed. We shared stories as the truck rolled through Yellowstone National Park under a crazy bright sky. A world opened up, and the taste of infused me with dreamy potential of what a life of adventure might become.
Of course, there were the rainstorms, long waits for rides on the side of highways in the middle of empty spaces. I calculated that I had ten cents for every hundred miles we had to travel on the return to Wisconsin. But it didn't matter. I would sleep under bridges and ride in the back seat of station wagons when kind families offered me a ride.
I spent two more semesters at Steven's Point reading and writing and partying. Mostly that time is a blur punctuated by memories of snow shoeing in the woods, concerts at the gymnasium, and random adventures around the town. I know I loved the trees changing their colors in the fall and the deep-freeze of mid-winter in northern Wisconsin.
I kept in touch with some friends from high school, and one of them shared his plan to go to Europe in the summer of '76, the US Bicentennial. I am not sure how I got it together, but I burned through the last of my savings buying a Eurail pass, a flight ticket, and enough money to spend $5 a day for two months in Europe.
I left Steven's Point and moved home after that spring semester and announced at the dinner table that I was going to Europe. Norm, my father, listened, looked stunned, and firmly said straight to my face, "No you aren't." I looked back at him and calmly said, "Yes, I am. I have already bought a rail pass and booked the flights."
He looked back at me with a mix of frustration and, I think, admiration, and conceded that the case was closed, but that I was on my own.
So, I went to Europe on a charter flight with other backpacker travelers and entered a time of my own making. I had not idea where I wanted to go or what I should do. I just let it unfold, and it did. I slept on benches in train stations, on beaches of the Mediterranean, in hostels, and on ferries. I hitch-hiked to places I couldn't get be train. I lingered a bit in the village of Tarifa at the straight that separates the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. I got know locals and helped paint houses, teach English, and practice Spanish speaking on rooftops with some women who lived across the street, Angelica and Mercedes. They were lovely and kind and we became friends who, for years, wrote back and forth to each other. They both married Germans and moved to northern Europe, where they didn't quite fit in.
I made it as far south as Greece and as far north as Norway. I ran out of money before my return home and was taken in my students at Utrecht in the Netherlands. I trusted, blindly and naively that I would figure things out when I needed to and would somehow be taken care of by the universe.
While I was in Rome, before heading for Greece via Yugoslavia, I met a woman, Susan Silverberg, and we traveled together for a couple of weeks. It was my first taste of traveling with a companion. We were lovers and kept in touch after parting in Greece, she for Israel, I for Scandinavia.
I won't detail the entire trip, but Europe and hanging out with Europeans opened my eyes to the expansiveness of perspectives. I got far enough away from American narrowness to see it from the outside. My blinders were ripped off and I hungered to learn languages and to connect with diversity and contrast. It was a baptism by fire and I returned a different person.
Somehow, I made it back to Paris for the flight back to Chicago. No one was there to greet me, so I slept in the airport and hitch-hiked home the following morning.
When I enter the house of my family, the TV was on, and my brother Andy said "Hey, welcome home Erec," between spoonfuls of cereal before he returned his attention to the television.
No one asked me about my trip.
I found a job harvesting tobacco and then another at the State Park for part of the fall and saved up travel money to be leave again, this time to be a ski bum in Colorado.
The tobacco job is important because I had to stand up for myself. I approached the owner of 17 farms, Wayne Jacobsen, and asked him for a job for the entire harvest. He was a vile looking guy, missing teeth, filthy with tobacco tar, seated in a new but grimy pickup truck piled high with clutter of soda cans and boxes of sugared donuts.
He chewed and spat brown goo as he drove between the rows of migrant workers. His eyes, though, were shrewd, calculating, and he looked right through a person.
I stood there as he asked, "What do you think you're worth?"
"Five dollars as hour," I said.
"I don't!" Spit. "I don't!" spit.
I turned to walk away.
"Hey, stay and work today, and I'll watch. The we can talk," he said.
So I worked. I was fast, having done this many seasons while I was in high school. I was clean and strong and steady. I had endurance, coordination, focus, and by the end of the day, the others were looking up to me, approaching me during breaks to ask where I was from, what I was doing here.
Wayne, true to his word, was waiting for me as I headed toward my truck.
"Tell you what... You stay with me, every day, for the entire harvest and then after to clean up and store all the tools and materials, and.... I'll give you that five dollars."
We shook on it. He put me on the hanging crew, which was the most dangerous job of harvesting. We worked in tobacco sheds hanging lath-speared stalks of tobacco on poles thirty feet above the ground. We lifted the tobacco up to the highest levels one a time. It was backbreaking, dangerous work Sometimes the poles failed under the weight of the tobacco, and tons of product would collapse into a mess of broken poles and lath all akimbo that had to be cleaned up and re-hung.
No one, luckily was caught beneath any of these cave-ins, but I was always aware of them.
We worked from dawn to sunset, and the blue skies turned crimson of September in Wisconsin broke my heart for the beauty of it.
I was fit, open, and in love with possibility. By the end of the harvest, I also had money and a hundred-dollar pickup truck.
Before the real grip of winter set in, I left Wisconsin and drove through the night to Colorado with skis on the roof and only a vague idea of how one managed to live as a ski bum. I just knew I wanted to try. My ski equipment had cost me more than my truck by a factor of five, but it was the best I could get -- K2 244s, freestyle skis, matching Scott boots and poles, Gore-Tex gloves, and mirrored sun glasses. I was going to dress the part if nothing else.
I got a job in plastics factory, working nights so I could ski. I skied Eldora, near Nederlands above Boulder. I skied Loveland, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Vail, and others.
After a few months of living hand-to-mouth and carving up slopes under the Colorado sun, I started to feel a call to do something else. I don't know why, but I wanted more.... something. So I turned my little truck east, something I never thought I would do, and headed back to the Midwest.
It was still winter when I got there, and within a day, my little truck lost a tailpipe, broke a door, and got a flat tire. It was done and had served me nobly. I sold it for $135, a $35 profit, and packed my stuff again for the university.
I transferred from Steven's Point to the UW- Madison. I wanted to go to the big-time and figure out how to live by taking literature, history, and writing courses. I knew there was no career waiting for me when I might graduate, but it didn't matter. I was hungry for the wisdom between the lines of serious writing.
To say I didn't fit in to the Madison vibe would have been an understatement. I, white, male, academically naive, and still a tad provincial, began to hang out with New York Jews, who talked politics, chain-smoked, and quoted existential philosophers.
I bumped around various roommate rentals before landing in one of the housing co-ops on the shore of Lake Mendota. My room looked out onto the lake, and I could here the crew team rowing by in the morning in the summer. I settled in to work in a grocery co-op, classes in writing and social history, and political activism.
This may have been one of the happiest times in my life. I felt seen and free from the gravitational orbit of what I saw as narrow thinking of Stoughton and small town Wisconsin. I still loved the lakes and the marshes of rural life, but chafed at the good-old-boy conservatism. It was hard to visit my family without getting into an argument about something like nuclear power or love of cars. The gap between me and my brother KC, in particular grew wide.
One time, I had ridden my bike home from Madison, a trip of about twenty-three miles. KC and some friends of his were hanging around his car at the curb next to the house as I rode up. I greeted them since I knew some of them as boy scouts or other contexts. KC jumped right in introducing me, "This is my brother Erec. His bike cost him more than a used car. He's a faggot from Madison."
I was taken aback, speechless. I think I laughed. Everyone was uncomfortable. I left it at that and tried to talk to him later. "I was surprised and offended by what you said when I got home," I said to him later. "Is there something I did to piss you off? Is everything okay?" He replied, with a blank look, "I have no idea what you are talking about," and walked out.
As much as I had uprooted from small-town conservatism, KC, and, I think Andy, had joined and embraced it. We had parted paths.
After three semesters at Madison, I needed the mountains again, so borrowed a car from my dad and took a road trip to the Rockies. I worked odd jobs and camped near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, at hot springs there. It was a bit of a hippy gathering, and a couple of women and I went into town to warm up after a fall snowstorm. We were cold and had some wine and decided to warm up in a sauna of a local motel.
I thought it would be a good idea to skinny dip after heating up in the sauna and did so. the owner saw me, called the cops, and we were all three arrested and charged with indecent exposure.
Long story short, I spent a night in jail, posted bond, and had the charges lowered to trespassing, paid the fine, and left for San Francisco. There is more to the story, but that charge stayed on my permanent record and would haunt me later.
A few weeks later, I was in Montana, where I called home just to check in. KC answered the phone. "Hey, you are going to need a tux," he said.
Silence.
"Are you getting married?" I asked.
"You are the best man," he volunteered. "Wedding is in six weeks."
My road trip was cut short and I headed back to the Midwest after a quick trip to the west coast, Berkeley and San Francisco.
I didn't know how to be a best man and did a terrible job. I got very drunk and chased anything in a dress that was single and remotely interested. My relatives thought I was a disgrace of a brother.
After the wedding I move back to Madison, into the housing co-op, and tried to pick up where I had left off.
I moved back in to Loth Lorien Housing Co-op and settled in to my routine as a student, grocery worker, and aspiring writer. My classes were mainly history, philosophy, literature, and some electives, like folk dancing.
While my mind was busy assessing social movements and personal, existential crises, my outward desires turned to bikes. Madison is famous for its bike-friendly path system and culture of both racing and touring. As a poor student, I would drool at the window displays of the high-end racing bikes, and saw myself, in spite of lack of training and talent, as a serious rider.
I did have a funky Schwinn that I used for touring trips during the summer. I rode up to Lake Superior, Door County, and over to Eau Claire and the driftless area of Wisconsin. mainly Devil's Lake. The magic of bicycles got under my skin and I couldn't shake it or turn it off. The metallurgy, the geometry, the luster of well-made machines became almost a mandala.
I lived in a radical student bubble and saw clearly the world's ills. You could say I became a bit of a counter-culture chauvinist who looked down on the filthy practice of making money and wanting material things. (No contradiction there.)
The world was wrong and messed up and I needed to act to fix it. About that time, a sweet Brazilian English teacher moved in the house. She was on a student visa and wanted to emigrate to the US. After we became friends, she asked if I would help her get a green card by marrying her.
This was a chance to take a stand against the unjust immigration practices of a dark empire, and I agreed without really thinking through what I was doing or what the consequences might be.
Suffice it to say, that I was naive, and did not know how friends would respond to a serious social ritual like a wedding.
To me it was a pure political act; for others, something clicked on a psychological level, and that changed my status in their eyes. It got complicated, in other words. Since Eliana and I needed to live together for immigration purposes, we rented a small house near the co-op. Friends would come by to ask how married life was going. To me it "married" (in quotations), while for them, it just married.
I was in love with another woman at that time, Natalia, and saw Eliana as a lovely friend and comrade. The whole situation was on its head, when Eliana invited her parents to come visit from Brazil.
Her mother, a sweet Brasilena, kept calling me her son and told me over and over how happy she was to have such good match for Eliana. I would remind her that this was to get Eliana a visa. That was all. She would cluck and pat my shoulder, "Oh yes, of course," and wink.
The world was closing in again, and I needed to get out away.
As soon as the ordeal of INS interviews was complete, I again left Madison to hitch hike to Mexico. I had graduated, didn't know what to do next, and needed the solace of movement to clear my head.
So, on a cold February morning I left Wisconsin, hitch-hiking, heading south on Highway 51, leaving Stoughton, Madison, and my known world behind for what I really didn't know. I had no plan, other than to be open, to record, and to let the dice fall where they might.
Not knowing, and still moving forward, is a hard place to be. but I wanted something that I could find only by following a hunch. I don't remember much of the trip other than being grateful for mild weather. I slept under a bridge somewhere in Oklahoma and out in the open desert in west Texas. That night, a pack of coyotes woke me up. The moon was out, and they were running around me yipping. I didn't feel afraid but also didn't know enough about coyotes to know if I should have been.
My destination was El Paso, then Ciudad Juarez, where I would catch a bus for Mexico City. My excuse for traveling to Mexico was to learn Spanish. That seemed to satisfy people who asked, but my real reasons were less easy to explain in a sound bite. I wanted to break free of the guardrails that seemed to define my future if I stayed in Wisconsin -- mainly get a job, work at it for most of my life, buy a house, grow old, and fade away.
Instead I wanted to create ... something. I didn't know what that was, but thought it might be a book or two. I wanted to fuse a welling of emotion with a thought that then turned to words in a form that was beautiful, that spoke to people, that made children laugh or cry. If people would remember me for that, then my life would not have been squandered.
I remember passing villages at night as the bus rolled south. Lights scattered up the slopes of hills and valleys, where people lived and worked and were likely sleeping all pulled me out of myself. What were their stories I kept asking. The smells of rot and diesel fumes and charcoal fires all told me I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
I stayed with some friends of friends in Mexico City. They lived near the center of the city near an enormous hospital. I spend my days wandering the sights -- Museo De Bellas Artes, the natural history and archeological museums, parks, subways, and just park benches. As a tall, blonde gringo, I did stand out, and there was baggage that went with being an expatriate: likely rich, with access to influence, and "other." It was a kind of unearned privilege I guess. If only they knew, I thought. I am near broke, here with no plan other than language school, and about as naive as a person can be.
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