Gays Mills Express

Howdy all, and I apologize for the extended absence - events conspired, all that. But there we are.

Where are we? Wisconsin, naturally. I've got this week off, as do the kiddles. (T has off when we say she has, but luckily for her, we say she has.) Janneke stayed behind to man the ramparts while we zipped across the country, courtesy of Amtrak.

That's been the biggest adventure so far: luxury accommodations in a sleeper car, waited on hand and foot by dedicated, chipper, energetic employees in white shirts and ties while gently rocking on the rails. Ainsley was the name of our general steward, a very personable man of 45 or so who came and got us at meal times and made our beds and otherwise made sure we were comfortable; Kwame was the other main character, who amazed the kids with his ability to pour soda from a can while being heaved about at a curve in the tracks without spilling a drop, let alone falling. They loved every second of it. So much more comfortable than flying - tickle fights on a giant couch in our cabin replaced endless hours of whining about your bum being too hot and the guy in the seat next to you oozing over into your space again. Lovely experience that we'll be repeating in just a few short days on the return trip.

Picked up the rental car in Chicago, at the depot, and literally turned twice when leaving Union Station before finding ourselves on 90 heading west and north. Easiest trip ever. Cooperative and thoughtful kids, well-thought-out itinerary...Can't complain.

Gays Mills is poignant as always. I have a hard time seeing the place with forty-year-old eyes. Part of its charm is that my eyes are suddenly 16 again when I'm here, and the particular scale and arc of the hills and the bends in the river ring together in a chord that puts me straight into the same emotional state I was in back in the day. Which, as those of you who know me from then will know, is a mixed bag at best. So I simultaneously feel youthful and anxious, groove-sliding and washboard-bumping all at the same time as the past and the present wrestle with each other. Very fraught.

I took a jog yesterday north on the road my Dad and sister live on, and went probably two miles before turning back. I jogged over culverts where I used to set traps for raccoons, past a giant old twisted oak where, when I was ten or eleven, I found a baby raccoon, which we failed to nurse back to health, dashing my dreams of reliving "Rascal" by Sterling North. I passed two houses, which my Dad had purchased downtown in Gays Mills and then moved on truckback out to their current resting place. We had helped him to pour the cement pads they stand on, and had done some of the hammering and nailing when they were lowered in place by a crane, all of which seemed very grand and entrepreneurial at the time. One of them sold, and has now been re-sided and re-roofed, and stands as a hunting cabin for some outlander I don't know and have never met, surrounded by ground that has been transformed into yard from the thistly pasture it was when we worked there; the other has fallen into rot, looking every bit the abandoned project it is, grown in with weeds, topped with a fallen-in, broken-backed roof. I passed the bend in the river where some years a go a blue bus came to rest and still stands in the long grass, roughly parallel to the swoop of the bank. Its back doors stand open, a heap of nameless refuse lying beneath, thrown out - by Tracy, the ghostly, bearded man who rides his bike slowly up and down the road, hauling a handmade trailer where he piles sticks and treasures, and who lives in the bus, somehow; stays alive over the winters somehow, despite the evident lack of a chimney, past the little corral where his donkey lifted its head and stared at me. Past a farm where there has always been evidence of habitation, but where I have never seen anyone, not since a bizarre birthday party I'd been driven past in the car as a kid, back before the old house that stood there was finally razed - the place had suddenly been alive with people, dozens of them, adorning the porch and charging back and forth across the front yard beneath a colorful banner, only to disappear again along with that original house, leaving only occasional signs of life, like the dog that growled at me as I ran past, or the laundry on the line, but never again any actual humans, not once in the hundreds of times I've been past there. I jogged by a pasture where a palomino horse grazed on the tiniest shoots of grass, and watched as he threw up his head at my passing and began to trot towards the road, as if to intercept me, and I thought certain he would crash against the fence - except there was no fence, and he trotted into my path and stood there a moment, vaguely threatening, before dashing past me, hooves clattering. Toward the end of the road where the Georges live, whose sons were basketball players ages ago, where my sister's dog Lily came barreling out of the woods, having traversed the same distance through the forest on the ridgeline and found me there, as if she'd planned the whole thing. And then we turned and ran back, past Tracy, who was now out, standing above the road, across from his bus, in front of a dilapidated sticks-and-straw wigwam he'd tacked together for his dog, which whined at me and Lily as we passed. All the way home.

And now I have two children awaiting me in a double bed - neither could bear to sleep alone tonight, so I put them in together with the promise that I'd crawl in among them when I got tired enough. A moment which is fast approaching.