SMITH CENTER, KANSAS: THE FIRST VISIT
Vagabond Journal: March, 2003

[From Vagabond #5 & 6]
March 11, 2003
I left Fairwater yesterday, I left below zero temperatures and snow cover. I zig-zagged across Wisconsin to La Crosse, across Minnesota to Albert Lea, down through Iowa to Des Moines, then across to Council Bluffs; from Omaha, Nebraska, to Highway 81 and down into Kansas; across Kansas from Belleville to Smith Center. The book says it's a twelve hour and forty-seven minute drive; I did it in twelve hours and fifteen minutes. I filled the car with gasoline in Mauston, Wisconsin; Ames, Iowa; and Mankato, Kansas. I didn't stop to eat until I reached Smith Center. I kept moving.

Did I see the heart of the heartland? I saw crow and sun and field and snow. I saw the shadow of crow fly into me. The hills between Des Moines and Omaha: it looked something like Wyoming, that surprised me; it looked something like Wyoming except there were a few too many trees and the occasional cornfield, there was the roadside sign advertising "The Cornstalk Restaurant."

As I was heading south from York, Nebraska, on Highway 81, cornfields stretched to the far horizon; the land was laid flat as if from some great weight set on it.

Then I was driving west on Highway 36 in Kansas, the great Highway 36, once the main east-west corridor across America. Ahead of me in the distance, a ridge crossed my path - between me and Smith Center. Wheat stubble in the fields. More trees than I'd imagined on the scruffy ground. The lay of hills reminds me of the Penny Hills around Rugby, except these seemed more sharply-formed, more severe, flat on top like little buttes. I had not imagined these hills.

I saw hawks perched on posts not a half mile apart - are they a pair? I saw twenty of the great round bales herded together in one bunch. Where the road has been cut through, there were great chunks of sandstone exposed, thick pieces, tawny as the landscape. On the full height of a ridge, two radio towers stood like sentinels. A sign for "Crest Vue Motel - East Mankato." There were remnants of snow, some measly evidence, only the occasional handful of it here and there. I was entering a world where the guys driving pick-up trucks wear cowboy hats. The ponds had ice on them, but also open water. In Wisconsin they were still walking on their lakes.

Cornfields and wheatfields. I saw a sadness of house with its porch slumped in the final despair from which there will be no recovery. The western sky was painted with long light and vapor trails; the honeyed, clotted light fell on a landscape climbing and falling and climbing again towards Smith Center. At another farmstead, a couple buildings were calling out to the earth, "We're coming home;" they leaned towards darkness. In two places, threshing machines had been set on rises along the highway - lest we forget. On other rises I saw large, new houses belonging to people with money.

Another herd of those great round bales, a hundred of them together. Cattle in nearby feedlots.

A skunk lay dead along the road; it seemed to have two narrow stripes along its back instead of the wider stripes I think I'm more familiar with. Something about it was not what I'm used to. It still smelled like skunk.

A sway-back barn ahead of me. I could see the sun through its boards.

I imagined huge jackrabbits.

Windmill. Elevator. Water tower. "We're here," these people want to say.

Why am I so moved by this landscape, these scenes, that old farmhouse with windows boarded up? What previous life did I live that I have this intense connection? All the old cottonwoods talked to me like friends. Was I a cottonwood once?

You don't know where the side-roads go, but I felt the need to take them.

As I drove west, the land rolled up and down and up. The sun set, it revealed itself, it set again. It was a big ol' sun, it was a big ol' red ball of sun, it was setting right over Smith Center as the town came into view.

I stopped to eat supper at Paul's Cafe, my first meal of the day. I slumped into a chair at a side table and Krista took my order - "cheeseburger steak, choice of potato and vegetable, salad bar, soup, and coffee, $5.75."

I had come so far to be home.

After supper, I found my way down Main Street in the thick darkness to Ingleboro Bed & Breakfast. My Smith Center contact, Bobbi Miles, operates the B&B with Bruce, her husband. Bobbi and Bruce greeted me, they helped me gather my bags and shag them up to my room.

*

Why have I had to come so far to be home? All day the land spoke to me as I drove, this land of which I'd write. Every grove of trees wanted to whisper its story, every old house invited me inside to meet its ghosts.

Perhaps it is a disability of some sort, this provincialism of mine, this sense of place, this connection to the middle part of America. Is acrophilia the opposite of acrophobia; and am I one who suffers of it? Would some psychiatrist recommend a heavy round of sessions aimed at breaking such an intense obsession with the land? Don't they lock up people who think every old, bent cottonwood is talking to them, every abandoned house, every sway-back barn?

Is there any hope for a man who has to go down every middle western road to see where it leads; who has to eavesdrop in every cafe to hear what the people are thinking; who has to touch old, grey barn boards that vibrate with what they know, what they've seen? The symbols of ourselves rise above the line of earth - the windbreak, the water tower, the elevator, the church steeple. We are mere mortals yet we would be little gods of the earth, each with his own habitation, his own local place. We set our markers on the earth as if they would be shrines, places to pray for rain, to give thanks for good harvest. Places of refuge. Markers that say: "Mine." Yet as earth-bound as these symbols are, how they reach for the sky! How they fashion the light that swaddles them.

Minnie Osterholt of Alexandria, Minnesota, said it: "It feels like home." And so it does. It feels like home and I feel like singing great solemn hymns of every shadow and field, every brightness and pond, every grove and barn, the emptiness and the fullness. If you dismiss me as the region's raving lunatic, perhaps you lose some part of yourself that you don't know, that you are uncomfortable with. I recognize that it is not natural to want to cast yourself entirely into all the middle directions until you know these people and this land, the customs and the secrets and the sadnesses and joys, to cast yourself upon the land in search of the beating heart of the heartland.

I recognize that it is not natural. It is dirty work, knowing the earth, but somebody has to do it.

*

I met with Bobbi Miles and Irene Baumann, from the Chamber of Commerce, Ivan Burgess, Jim Laurensin, and Alvin Luse at Paul's Restaurant. The conversation was fast and furious and I took down what I could. I set an interview for 4:00 p.m. this afternoon with Ivan Burgess.

Jim Laurensin is interim pastor at the First Christian Church in Smith Center. He retired to Phillipsburg, some twenty-eight miles to the west of Smith Center, and fills in as churches need a temporary minister. Why did he retire to Phillipsburg? "I drove through it for forty-seven years," he said. "Every time I drove through it, I liked the town."

Ivan Burgess said that for a small town to survive it needs three things - good banks, a good medical center, and good schools. He thinks Smith Center has all three.

Smith Center also used to have "some characters," Burgess said. "They're gone now, or are in the nursing homes in chemical straight-jackets. These characters have lent the town character. Now they're in the nursing homes on Valium."

What kind of characters?

A woman gave her husband money to go get groceries, Ivan related. The fellow used the money to get drunk instead. He went before the judge for public drunkenness, he was hoping to end up in jail overnight. He didn't want to go home yet. "No," said the judge, "that's the best punishment for you - to go home and have to face your wife."

"A fellow had a little truck, it would haul three cows. The highway patrol stopped him and said, "You're going to have to get a KCC license for that truck. You need to have a KCC number painted on it." "The hell I do," the fellow said. "I've already got more work than I can handle." When the same fellow moved into town and bought a ramshackle little house, his neighbors on the street plotted to get rid of him. They voted in curbs and asphalt on their street, thinking the cost of that would break him. When payment came due, however, the fellow went down to the court-house and paid cash for his entire assessment. All his neighbors had to stretch their payments out over several years.

A neighbor complained about bootlegging in the big house across the street from the Presbyterian Church. Sheriff John Mays went in to make the bust. As he was going in the door, a woman pushing a baby carriage was wanting to go out. The sheriff kindly held the door, then went on into the house, searching for booze. He didn't find any. He realized he'd been duped. The booze went out with the baby carriage. "I ought to have known better," the sheriff said later. "I knew they didn't have any kids."

It might have been a different sheriff who was testifying in a trial for statutory rape. "Now you know what statutory rape is?" he was asked. The fellow said, "That's when they do it standing up."

A woman had a baby but the doctor hadn't been able to get to the house to make the delivery. He called out right away, to see how the new mother was faring. "Well, she's getting us supper now," was the husband's reply.

The new motel in town had put up a sign out front. The mayor came along and told the owner "The Highway Department says you're going to have to move that sign back. It's too close to the highway." Well, the owner didn't want to go to that kind of expense. He went to his lawyer for advice. "How much will it cost you if you move that sign right now," the lawyer asked, it might have been Ted Relihan. The fellow estimated an amount. "And how much will it cost you when they come after you and make you move it?" The sign never got moved, it still stands where it was originally set.

"I think a lot of our character comes from the 1930s," Ivan said. He remembered that during the Depression a lot of doctors had to take chickens and produce in trade for medical care because folks didn't have any money. One of those doctors died during the hard times and the other physicians in town had to take up a collection to bury him.

Bobbi Miles reported a story about a love letter being found in a building in town that had never been mailed. It was addressed to a married woman and said how ardently he loved her and how hard it was to watch her going about town with her husband. The letter writer couldn't stand to see it any longer and was going to leave town. Well, the fellow never did leave town, the folks involved still have kin in Smith County, so the woman who found the letter never names names. But Bobbi told me whom I'd need to talk to for more information about the letter and the story of how it was found.

Bobbi also said that I have to ask Connie Lull about the first white girl born in Smith Center, who drove the special spike into the railroad tracks at the celebration of the Rock Island Railroad coming through town in 1887, and then she came back to the community for the 50th anniversary celebration.

Irene Baumann remembered that the Rock Island carried passengers. She rode the train from Lebanon to Smith Center for a school picnic about 1955 when she was a third grader. That was near the end of passenger service.

Someone mentioned a family named something like "Van Dorf" coming to Smith Center and changing the name to "Williams." Think how tough that makes it for genealogists, someone said.

Alvin Luse said his family name had originally been Deluce. Some portion of the family changed the S to Luce, another portion changed to Luse.

We had been sitting at Paul's Cafe drinking coffee and talking, and all of a sudden the morning had slipped away. It was time for Bobbi, Irene, and me to get to the library so I could meet Connie Lull.

*

You don't just meet Connie Lull so much as you experience her. She is so lively and expressive a woman that when she dies it may be a week before anyone knows it, she will just keep going on built-up momentum.

Connie is a nurse, she worked as an emergency room and a surgical nurse in Kansas City and Chicago and Denver. How did she ever end up in Smith Center, then? She and a friend had been skiing, they came into one of the watering holes that skiers frequented after a day on the slopes, there she met a fellow who was a bank examiner, he was in town looking at the books of the local bank, one thing led to another and when her (now) husband came home to Smith Center to join the Smith County State Bank and Trust Company, Connie came with him.

A city girl, when Connie came to Smith Center there was a little culture shock involved. It was the Cold War, there were ICBM silos in Kansas. The noon whistle blew. Oh, no! Connie thought. She was certain this was it! America was being bombed. She was holding her breath, wondering what to do, where to hide. The door to the house opened. Her husband was home for lunch. "What are we gonna do?" she asked him. "What?" her husband asked, puzzled. "Oh, that's the noon whistle."

Connie's son had been born by the time another whistle blew, "the warbly one." Her husband was gone bowling. The wind was blowing pretty stiff. We better get to the fruit cellar, she thought. They had a fruit cellar out in the yard behind the house. She opened the door and went down the stairs among the creepy-crawly things that lived there, her son in her arms. She closed the door. She could hear traffic tearing around the corner near the house, folks heading for shelter, she thought. She waited. She waited and waited. She came up out of the cellar and took a look and it didn't look so bad. She called her husband at the bowling alley and asked how long she was supposed to stay in the cellar after the siren sounded. "That wasn't the tornado siren," her husband said, "that was the fire siren. We have a volunteer fire department. That's how they call the volunteers to fight a fire."

Connie tells a lot of wonderful stories about Smith Center history, but only when you insist. She'd much rather you read the accurate version of it in the pages of the big binders on the shelves of the library's county history room. Over the years, the residents of Smith Center have been pretty good about documenting their history, getting it down on paper before it is lost. And all that county history and family history looked pretty imposing on the shelves around us as we sat at the table and talked - Bobbi, Irene, Connie, and myself.

Connie didn't want to tell the stories, she wanted me to read them off the shelves, but she couldn't restrain herself. She had to tell me that Smith Center was named for a General Smith who camped in the area during the Civil War as he headed east from Colorado to join the conflict. He was killed at the battle of the Little Blue. Connie doesn't know how anyone knows where and when General Smith might have camped, but that's the story.

She told about the 13- or 14-year old girl who drove the spike into the rails during the celebration of the Rock Island Railroad coming to Smith Center, and of the woman's return to the community fifty years later.

We talked about doctors in Smith Center, and industry, and Loren Jacobs and the Technology Department at the Smith Center High School.

We talked about the Smith County Pioneer being the oldest business in Smith County, it was in business before the county was a county. We talked about Judd Wagner up at the long term care facility at the hospital, age 103, one of the few remaining World War I veterans, the last supervisor of the Smith County Poor Farm which closed in the 1950s. "You must talk to him," Connie said. We talked of Milt Shrader, a former Smith County resident who had owned a circus. During the hard times one winter the circus didn't have enough money even to feed its performers and they were starving. An appeal went out to Smith County, money was collected, the circus was saved. Shrader never forgot the county's generosity and when he died he left a trust for the county and every year the income from the trust helps a variety of organizations and it also built the library we were sitting in.

"Donation is a way of life out here," Connie said.

We talked about "the farm that was built in a day." In the 1950s, in an effort to get people to focus on and appreciate agriculture, a barn-raising bee was held to build not just a barn but all the farmstead buildings, and not just the buildings but all the fence-line to go with it. "Every group had a task," Connie said, "and the whole farm went up in a day." The Hastings, Nebraska, Tribune did a 50th anniversary retrospective of that event in the past few years and interviewed some of the participants. Connie couldn't find a copy of the article at the library, so I'll have to go about tracking it down.

We talked about the time the First National Bank in Smith Center got robbed. That was back during the days of Bonnie and Clyde and bank robbers driving black cars with running boards and carrying submachine guns. That was back in the days when one bank's security was the bank across the street. The teller pushed the button under the counter to signify a bank robbery was in progress, the signal went across the street to the Smith County State Bank where Connie's husband's great-uncle took up the shotgun and came marching across the street. He was met by a fellow in a crisp suit and fine fedora with a submachine gun. "Don't be a hero," the bank robber said, waving the great-uncle back with the machine gun. The great-uncle backed away. The bank robbers took hostages and made their escape standing on the running board of the car just like in the movies. They headed out of town towards the northeast, a rooster tail of dust following them down the dirty road, they came upon a house being pulled down the road towards them, taking up the whole width of the road. Some days it just doesn't pay to get up, they'd gotten only a couple thousand dollars from the bank and a diamond engagement ring they'd taken off one of the girls, and now there was a house in the way. The bank robbers pushed some of the hostages out of the car then and there. They had released the rest of the hostages by the time they were captured in Nebraska.

Connie and I talked some about the banks in town. Smith Center has two good banks. Connie's husband, Murray Lull, is the fourth generation president of Smith County State Bank; she thought I should take my questions about the role of the bank in a small rural community to her husband and to Burk Phelps or John Ballhorst at the competition across the street, the First National Bank.

*

I went to Paul's Cafe for lunch after concluding my interview with Connie Lull. I had the hot pork sandwich that was the lunch special. One of the waitresses - who had poured us coffee in the morning - asked how my day was going.

I went back to my room at Ingleboro Mansion and made some phone calls. Murray Lull could see me at the Smith County Bank at 2:30 p.m. I tried to get Dr. R.G. Sheppard on the phone but he was out on the golf course, his wife said. I told Mrs. Sheppard I wanted to talk to him about being a surgeon in Small Town Rural America all these years. She said he'd likely tell me more than I'd care to know, but she didn't want to set an appointment for him, could I call back after he got home from golfing. I said I would. I hung up the phone and asked myself: "Wasn't it two degrees below zero yesterday when I left Wisconsin? What's this fellow doing on the golf course?" It was a lovely afternoon, up into the sixties, I think, with seventy degree temperatures promised for later in the week.

*

Murray Lull looks like you want your banker to look, a little bit grey, serious, as reserved as his wife Connie is animated. He is a banker like his father was, like his grandfather was, like his great-grandfather. Murray's great-grandfather and a partner had run an elevator over in Lebanon. Together they bought the bank in Lebanon in 1880. They flipped a coin to see who would continue to manage the elevator: the loser had to go manage the bank. Murray's great-grandfather lost and put the family in the banking business. "Otherwise I'd be managing a co-op elevator some place," Murray said.

Eventually the partnership between Murray's great-grandfather and the other fellow came apart. Eventually Murray's great-grandfather sold the bank in Lebanon and bought the Smith County State Bank in Smith Center. Eventually Murray gave up his job as a bank examiner and returned to Smith Center to join the family banking business.

Murray and I talked about banks in small communities; they have a two-sided obligation. On the one hand, they must protect the assets of their investors. On the other hand, they want to help the farmers in the area succeed. The hard times of the 1980s taught everyone some hard lessons - bankers and farmers alike. A lot of farmers went bankrupt during the 1980s - they had so much more debt than capital that they couldn't recover. Small town banks have learned to watch more closely just how highly leveraged the farm operators are. Murray explained: "Sometimes we have to say 'The way your financial trend is going, you are going to be out of business in a few years. We don't want to be part of your last few years. Either you need to change what you're doing or you need to find someone else to borrow from.'"

"And the good farmers are a lot more careful about watching their leverage," Murray added.

Murray is not all gloom and doom about the prospects of small communities in rural America, but he does say that he thinks towns may have life cycles - infancy and adolescence, productive middle years, the decline of old age, eventually death. Smith Center is not on its last legs by any means, he says, "but it is getting a little grey." Smith Center will likely still exist a hundred years from now, he thought, but it will be considerably different than what we see today.

"You wonder how many stores on Main Street are one sale away from closing," Murray said. The Lyons Den restaurant downtown closed recently when the woman who owned it died of illness. Murray doesn't know if it will re-open under new owners. If it doesn't, "that's one more thing gone."

A friend Murray has had since high school operated a full service gas station in Smith Center for as long as Murray has been back at the bank. The fellow just closed down the business. He could see the handwriting on the wall. He wanted to walked away from it while he could still walk away, not be carried. "That's another one gone," Murray said. "I get angry and frustrated that he had to do that, but I know he made the right choice." Times change, there is no single culprit that would be easy to blame. You have to adapt. If Murray were to speak as I do, he might say: "That's the way the Great Wheel turns."

*

March 12, 2003
If Ivan Burgess is not telling you a story, he's feeding you a line. There's a little twinkle in everything he says.

We sat at a table in the Ingleboro Mansion yesterday afternoon, I wanted to know more about the fellow who has published his own "Twenty Five Cent Echo" news-letter for the past fifteen years or so. A Kansas journalism professor had subscribed to the "Echo" so that when students complained there was nothing to write about he could bring it out and show them you can write about anything.

Ivan doesn't take himself too seriously, but neither - I guess - does he like the nickname some people call him by. I don't see any reason to call him by that nickname here,
I'll save it and use the threat of it as leverage to get Ivan to sit down again with me and my tape recorder at some point in the future. It's enough fun talking to him, you want to have another opportunity.

The "Echo" skewers specific people in Smith Center, "but only if they can take it," Ivan said. "I know who can't take it, and I don't write about them." The people Ivan associates with are pretty hard on each other. "If they think you're full of it, they're not afraid to tell you," he said. I don't think he's afraid to tell them either.

I got on tape this time Ivan's story about the fellow with the truck that would haul three cows, about Sheriff John Mays trying to make the Prohibition bust at the big house across the street from the Presbyterian church.

We got on tape, too, how Ivan came to live in Smith Center. His mother had been born in a dug-out some miles northwest of Smith Center. His father was originally from Smith Center, he worked laying track for the railroad and the family followed the tracks. Ivan has what - seven or eight brothers and sisters. When his father learned he had terminal cancer, he bought the family a little house near the railroad tracks in Smith Center. After his father died, Ivan's mother took in washing and ironing to support the large brood. To earn a little income for the family, a couple of Ivan's older brothers would go up town every morning to do whatever needed doing. One brother would clean out a farmer's chicken house for him; he'd get paid with a big container of milk that the cream had been skimmed off of; he'd bring that home and it would be milk for the children. "My mother would fix a meal," Ivan remembered, "and then she'd step back from the table while we ate. If there was anything left over when we were done, then she would eat."

"In those years we were probably the poorest people in Smith Center," Ivan said.
Their house was near the train tracks and there was a hydrant out in the yard. Hoboes got in the habit, when they got off the train, they'd come into the yard to drink from the hydrant. One day the big container of skim milk disappeared from the house. Ivan's older brother went marching off towards the Hobo Hotel farther west along the tracks, a circle of stones where the hoboes stayed when in Smith Center, where they sat and talked, cooked their meals, slept. Ivan went tagging along behind his brother. His brother marched right into the Hobo Hotel, he walked up to the jug of skim milk that was sitting there plain as sin, picked it up and headed towards home. None of the hoboes said a word. They knew they'd crossed the line. You don't take from poor people. You don't take from people what they can't afford to give.

About the time he was in the seventh grade, Ivan spent a lot of time in the Hobo Hotel with those men. "They were ordinary people looking for work," Ivan said. "In those days the train going west through town was carrying men looking for work to the west. The train going east would be carrying men looking for work to the east. I was never afraid. Those were hard times. Those were good men. A kid couldn't do that today."

"I sat with them all one evening," Ivan remembered. "When I got up to go, one of the fellows said, 'Kid, come here.' He said, 'Kid, if you are ever riding the rails and pass through Denver, help them fill the refrigerated cars with ice. It's hard work, kid, but when you get done they'll buy you the biggest breakfast you've ever had.' That fellow didn't have anything, but he gave me the best thing he had. He gave me everything he could."

Ivan doesn't adequately explain why as a kid he liked so much to sit and listen to the old men tell their stories. He liked to sit in the barbershop and listen to them talk as they told and re-told stories, as they sanded and smoothed the truth. "I don't know," Ivan said, "it's just something I've always liked to do, to listen to those fellows. I still do it today." His little "Echo" newsletter comes out of that habit of listening to people talk, of watching their little quirks. He is something of a student of humanity, you'd say. "People are gonna be people," Ivan might say. And he will be there to report it.

One thing he's noticed: "In Smith Center, when a doctor is finally accepted into the community, it'll be 'Ol Doc Sheppard, he....' If they say 'Doctor Sheppard,' why then you haven't been accepted yet. But when it's 'Ol Doc Sheppard,' why then you know he's part of the community."

Why does he write? "When you can't do anything else," said Ivan, "then you write. If you can't build cabinets or do plumbing or make anything useful, all that's left is to turn to writing. Writers are people who can't do anything else." He is unapologetic about his position. If I don't like it, I suppose I don't have talk to him. If I don't like it, I suppose I don't have to subscribe to the "Echo." But I do subscribe. I give Ivan a $20 bill and he'll send me however many issues that pays for at twenty-five cents for the paper and thirty-seven cents for the postage to mail it to me.

We filled one side of a sixty-minute tape and when the second side was full, Ivan was done talking with me for the day. "Gotta go," he said. I said I could put in another tape, I was sure he had other stories to tell me. "No, gotta go," he said, and he rushed off like a news hound pursuing a lead.

*

In the evening Bobbi Miles and I arrived at Dr. R.G. Sheppard's house at the appointed time, 7:00 p.m. Ol' Doc Sheppard was waiting at the door for us and waved us in.

His friends call him Shep.

Shep was a surgeon, a good one. Earlier in the day Connie Lull, who had been Shep's surgical nurse, and who had worked with surgeons in Kansas City, Chicago, and Denver, had told me that Shep was as fine a surgeon as she had ever worked with, none was better in the operating room than he was, Smith Center had been extremely fortunate to have such an excellent surgeon all those years Shep served the surgical needs of the area.

Shep didn't start out a surgeon. When he went to grade school in Joplin, Missouri, he had to dress in black short pants and a white shirt. When his folks moved to a farm outside Joplin, Shep had to keep wearing the city school clothes to a country school and the other kids picked on him, he was the city boy. When finally he'd worn out or outgrown his city clothes and was accepted in his mended overalls, he moved back into Joplin and now he was ridiculed as the country bumpkin.

Not such a good student in grade school and high school, still Shep knew he wanted something other for his life than the extreme hard work of farming. He enrolled in the two year college in Joplin (now Southern Missouri State College). He credits a couple of his teachers there with teaching him how to study. One of them in particular "made a scholar of me," Shep said. That teacher had also noted the fine hands Shep had, the manual dexterity. Because he had to work while going to school, it took Shep three years to finish the two year course of study. But when he was done, he was ready to face anything any other school could offer. He knew how to study and the whole world lay open before him.

It was during World War II that Shep was in medical school at the University of Kansas, and rather than drop out to work to earn enough money for another year of his medical training, Shep joined the Navy. The Navy paid for the remainder of his medical school, then when he finished up he expected to follow the Marines ashore in an invasion of the Japanese homeland. Truman dropped the atomic bombs, Shep wouldn't be needed in Japan, so he was sent to Guam for assignment. His first service was to residents on a Micronesian island south of Guam. He was the only medical care available on the island. It was eight hundred or nine hundred miles to another doctor. If Shep couldn't do it, well then it wouldn't get done. This experience taught him a lot about making decisions and accepting the consequences of those decisions - something every surgeon needs to know - and it made clear to him that he wanted to get surgical training. He served on one island, then on another, even a stint as "sanitation officer" on Guam (of which he complained bitterly to his superiors: "I'm a doctor, yet you have me checking outhouses and screen doors.").

Eventually his service in the Navy came to an end and he was ready to pursue surgical training. Earlier he'd thought of being an orthopedic surgeon but his experience in the Navy convinced him that he needed much broader surgical training. So he pursued a course of general surgical training.

Just as his training was nearing completion, Shep went to the Dean of the medical school. Since Kansas had trained him to be a doctor and a surgeon, he felt an obligation to repay the state by serving in Kansas. And his experience in the Pacific convinced him he wanted to work in an area that was under-served and truly in need of him. The Dean told him there were three communities that fit that description. Shep set out to visit them, to talk with doctors and residents of the communities, to weigh the pros and cons of each community. Then he'd make his decision.

The first community lay between Kansas City and Smith Center, and Shep visited it first. His second visit was Smith Center. Then he expected to head to south-western Kansas to visit the third town that was looking for a surgeon.

The welcome Smith Center gave Shep put an end to his search. Yes, it was partly the warmth of the welcome that won him, partly the conversations he had with the doctors already in the community. Yet, Shep told me, the single strongest influence on his decision was this: They were holding a reception for us in the fine lobby of the First National Bank. Shep's wife Edie was in attendance - Edna Jean; she held the couple's young son. The baby messed his diaper, the mess overflowed the diaper. "My son pooped on the floor of the bank lobby" is how Shep put it. The bank president ran to the drugstore next door for diapers, pointed Edie to the restroom where she could clean up her son, then knelt and cleaned up the floor of the lobby. "A place where the president of the bank cleans your son's poop off the floor, that's where I ought to serve," Shep decided. He didn't even visit the third community on the list.

At the time Shep made his decision, Smith Center was building a new hospital. The building that is the B&B I'm staying in - Ingleboro Mansion - was serving as the community's hospital. Shep still had some months left to serve on his residency when the doctors in town invited him to come do a surgery. "I suppose it was a test," Shep said. His reputation had preceded him, and doctors from all around the area gathered to watch him do his work. They wanted to see just what this young whippersnapper could do. The operating room wasn't at all like what Shep was used to. There were windows along two sides, a ceiling light, but none of the fancy equipment he'd had available to him at St. Luke's in Kansas City. Yet he felt confident he could do the operation successfully.

Any good surgeon will watch the color of the blood in the tissue while he's working, Shep will tell you. "You want to see bright red blood. If the blood starts to look a little dusky, that means the patient may be in trouble."

"How's she doing?" Shep asked the anesthesiologist working with him. "This blood looks a little dusky." "Fine, everything is fine," the other doctor said. Ten or fifteen minutes later, Shep would say "I don't like how dusky this blood looks, is everything okay?" The anesthesiologist said "Fine, fine." This continued through the whole operation.

Once the last stitch was in place and Shep took off his mask, then he noticed the lighting. His operating room had been lit by only a single 300 watt overhead light. Blood would look different under such lighting.

Afterwards the one doctor in Smith Center who would do minor surgeries because he had to do them started telling his patients: "I've laid down my scalpel. There's a fine young surgeon coming to town, there's no reason for me to do surgery any longer."

Not all doctors are so gracious," Shep said. "He didn't have to do that. What he did amounted to a good recommendation to everyone in Smith Center." When Shep arrived to start his practice there was a line-up of surgeries already scheduled for him. "I started out behind," Shep said, "and in all my years I never caught up."

When he'd made his initial visit to Smith Center, Shep had been told that another young doctor had been considering starting practice there as well. Shep called the fellow where he was visiting his family. They met, and on the strength of a handshake they agreed that they'd practice together in Smith Center. The other doctor finished his residencies earlier than Shep, and arrived earlier in Smith Center to get down to business. Soon he was on the phone to Shep, he said "I'm dying out here, there is more work than I can handle, I'd like to ask another fellow to join the practice." Shep knew the other doctor's work, he was a good man. But Shep worried: "Do you really think there'll be enough work for all of us?" Years later, in a practice that always included three or four doctors and sometimes even five, when they were up to their elbows in work, when there were patients everywhere they turned, one of Shep's partners was sure to tease him - "Shep, do you really think there'll be enough work?"

The group's practice was unusual on two counts. First, all the doctors were equal partners and shared the income equally. Second, they wanted their patients to know all of them, they made rounds together at the hospital, they picked each others' brains so that what one knew they all knew. They accepted criticism from each other and learned from it. "Our patients could see they were getting four doctors for the price of one," Shep said. "When one of us was unavailable, the patients had no problem with seeing a different doctor. When a different doctor showed up in the middle of the night to handle a problem, that was okay."

"I didn't handle deliveries," Shep said. "I did Caesarians when that was needed, but I didn't do vaginal births. One night I was at the hospital, a woman was in labor, I thought I'd help the doctor who was going to have to get out of bed to come in for the delivery. So I checked the patient. I thought it would be a couple hours anyway before the doctor had to come in. So I called him to tell him that. While I was on the phone telling him it would be a couple hours before the baby would be born, the nurse delivered the woman's baby right there in her hospital bed. After that, for any delivery it was 'That's okay, Shep, we'll take care of it.'"

Behind every good doctor, perhaps, is a good spouse. Shep had met Edie at junior college in Joplin, Missouri. They knew they were meant for each other but both of them had some things to prove to themselves - Shep that he could be a doctor, Edie that she could dance. Well, she could dance. She danced on Broadway. She danced with the Rockettes, not in the regular line because her legs weren't long enough, but in the specialty numbers. And when one of the girls in the line took sick, they'd put Edie on the end of the line where her height (or lack of it) didn't matter. Yet when Shep was ready, Edie was ready to give up her dance career. She was willing to go and make a life wherever Shep decided to practice. Generally, Edie thinks, the reason that there are not enough doctors in rural America has more to do with the doctors' wives than with the doctors themselves. "I think the doctors' wives make that decision, And many of them want what the city provides, they don't think they can be happy living in a small town."

It was the middle of the night. Shep was in surgery. He was reconstructing the face of a woman who had been in a car accident. Her face was broken up badly, she had lost an eye, Shep was reconstructing the eyebrow and stitching up the eye-lid. He recognized he'd need a glass eye to hold everything properly in place but he didn't have a glass eye. "Call Edie," Shep told the nurse, "tell her to bring me one of the boys' marbles."

"Shep, it's three o'clock in the morning. Edie will be asleep," the nurse said.

"No, she's probably up," Shep said. "She's probably cleaning the refrigerator."

The nurse called. Edie answered right away, she was up, she was cleaning the refrigerator. She brought a marble out to the hospital for use as a temporary glass eye.

Shep has enjoyed all his years of practice in Smith Center. He says he worked with a great bunch of people. He appreciated that his services were needed. He appreciated that his serves were appreciated in the community. He thinks Smith Center residents knew they were getting very good medical care. He worried about retiring in the community, however, because he wasn't sure people would let him stay retired. When the need was great, wouldn't people keep calling him? Fortunately, another surgeon came into the community to meet its needs. Shep's phone doesn't ring except when someone needs a partner for a round of golf or some tennis. He has enjoyed nearly twenty years of retirement in the community where he served for so many years."

"People here respect me and appreciate what I've done for the community," Shep said. "If we had retired to Colorado as we talked about, I'd be just another somebody. Here people know me."

*

March 13, 2003
Yesterday Bobbi Miles, Irene Baumann, and I were headed east on Highway 36 out of Smith Center, we had a full tank of gas, and we didn't have to be home til supper-time. We were going to the geographic center point of the lower 48 states just northwest of Lebanon, Kansas; we'd have lunch at La Dow's in Lebanon; we'd do an interview or two; we'd stop at the farm Irene's family owned and talk about that. It was a lazy-eyed agenda, nothing would hold us to strict account. It was a lazy-eyed day that felt like spring.

The rolling land was starting to swell with a pale green fuzz in the warmth and bright sunshine, it was such a lovely day it smelled like spring. "How am I ever going to
go back to Wisconsin?" I whined. "It was two below zero when I left there Monday morning."

"Call your wife and tell her she's moving to Smith Center," one of the women suggested.
We stopped at the marker just west of the intersection of Highway 36 and Highway 281. A sign there read: "In a park three miles north and one mile west is the exact geographic center of the 48 contiguous states. The location has been officially determined by the U.S. Geological Survey. It is the point where a plane map of the 48 states would balance if it were of uniform thickness." There were two sunflowers etched into the sign, two heads of wheat, a tornado funnel cloud. No - I'm am kidding about the funnel cloud, that's not on the sign; you start to notice that some folks in Kansas don't like kidding around about tornadoes.

Across the road from the park that lies three miles north and one mile west, that is to say, right across the road from the geographic center itself, is "Hub Dairy - the Farm Built in a Day." I've promised to tell that story. The geographic center point we'd come to see is actually in the middle of a field on a farm owned by Randy Warner. It lies at Latitude 39 degrees, 50 minutes; Longitude 98 degrees, 35 minutes. One monument indicates the center point had been located by L.T. Hagadorn of Paulette and Wilson Engineers and L.A. Beardslee, County Engineer, from data furnished by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. The marker was sponsored by "Lebanon Hub Club, Lebanon, Kansas, April 25, 1940."

Just past the park is an old motel that now serves as a hunting lodge; it is owned by a group of pheasant hunters from Texas. Originally it had been a motel with restaurant. The restaurant was gone, the brick and stone of the motel has been painted green, there is paint peeling off window frames and overhangs, the one window with the curtain tugged a little bit open was so dirty you couldn't see much in the room. "Hunters don't ask much in the way of beauty," Bobbi suggested. Here was a dog bowl under a scruffy, overgrown evergreen, there was a small broken bottle with a Jack Daniels label: "Down Home Punch - Country Cocktail." Over there, a couple spent shot-gun shells, Remington Express, 12 gauge. There was wind in the trees. "The wind always blows out here," one of the women said. The motel is a monument of its own, a monument to the dream of a fellow from North Carolina who stopped at the center point back in the 1950s when Highway 36 was the main east-west route across the country. I found out later this fellow had had "a vision" that told him, in essence, "build it, they will come." Perhaps they came for a while, but not for long. Now the hunters come. On the opening day of pheasant season, the population of the county probably doubles, the locals stay home because everything is overcrowded. Bobbi's B&B is booked years in advance for the opening weekend of pheasant season.

The monument in the little park stands in the wind, or against it, the US flag and the Kansas flag flying straight out. Irene remembered that when she was young the Girl Scouts from Lebanon would ride their bicycles out from town to camp in the park overnight; she was among them. Last summer a documentary crew showed up to get some footage of the exact center of the US. It was July, it was hot, the sun was beating down, the cameraman was insisting he had to film from the exact center. "Well, I'm staying in the car," Bobbi had said. "You go on." It was as if the country folks were having a laugh at the expense of the city feller. "Farther, farther," they'd say, waving the cameraman into the distance. "Go on, more to the right, farther, farther." Finally the camera man disappeared over a rise in the earth and one of the locals reckoned maybe he should go retrieve the fellow.

The producer of a movie called "X-man" bussed a bunch of students from high school in Smith Center out to the geographic center point and had them stand in the shape of an "X" over the site. This was used as footage in the movie.

A Japanese quiz show was filmed in the little park at the site of the center point. All the questions were related in some fashion to the United States, what better place to film the session. The board used as part of the question depicts a large map of the United States. In several places the surface of the wood spins from a blue blankness on one side to Japanese characters on the other. That board still sits in the window of an empty storefront in Lebanon, if you want to see it.

"We call this area the Heart of America," Bobbi said. "We don't mean the continent. When we say America, we mean the USA."

"I don't think it is anything we do that has created the attention the center gets," Bobbi said. "They are interested in the center and they come to us. Perhaps it's a failing on our part, not creating interest. Perhaps there's something we could do to promote it better, but I don't know what."

Earlier we had joked about middle westerners working so hard to be known for something. We want the biggest ball of twine, for instance, or the most kinds of barbed wire. Sometimes we have to be very specific in our claims: "The first white girl born in Smith Center."

Then we got out of the wind, Bobbi and Irene and I, and headed for lunch in Lebanon. "There, along the pines," I said with some glee, "some snow!"

*

Irene Bauman is originally from Lebanon, Kansas, nearly 15 miles northeast of Smith Center. She can sit in a car on Main Street in Lebanon and say "That building used to be a grocery store, there used to be another grocery store over here. That was a drug store. The bank is still in its original building. Yes, once there were three grocery stores in Lebanon."

"The building behind us was the telephone office," Irene said. "That's where the lady said and said 'Number, please.' School teachers and families used to lived in apartments on the second floor. My parents used to have a shoe repair store here somewhere."

Later we'll hear there was a time where there were five groceries in town. There used to be two drug stores, a men's clothing store, a variety store, an appliance store, a grade school, and a high school. Now there is the post office, the elevator, the beauty parlor, the American Legion Hall, an insurance agent in the old gas station, the branch of the Smith County State Bank and Trust Company.

There is a music club in town that Irene said is "alive and well." It puts on variety shows, with skits and musical numbers. "The women dress up to play the men's parts if they have to. They do it because they like to sing. They put the money they raise towards upkeep of the community hall which used to be the theater when the community supported a theater."

Even in Smith Center, Bobbi added, the movie theater has been owned by a community group to keep it in operation. "You buy a membership," she said. "You get three passes per month. If you have to pay to see a movie, it's usually $4 for adults, $2.50 for kids, but on Tuesdays everybody gets in for $2.50. It's always on Tuesday. If Christmas falls on Tuesday, too bad, there's no cheap movie that week. We don't have movies on Christmas. There is only one movie showing at a time, no matinees, the movie changes on Friday, on weekends in summer there'll be two showings, at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m."

We were in Lebanon. We were going to La Dow's store for lunch. La Dow's is a general store. That means, Irene said, "they do whatever is needed." There were groceries and hardware on the shelves, hair curlers and Bible stories, dowl rods and dolls, cheap plastic toys, greeting cards, underwear.

You can tell when you're in a religious community, someone has said, for the underwear tells the story. The more religious the community, the plainer the underwear for sale, the more it's unattractive, white, cotton. I wish I could claim this insight as my own: we can pretend to be whatever we want, our underwear tells the truth.

Lorie La Dow runs the store. Lunch specials were posted at the east end - chicken casserole, chicken on fry bread, soup, cobbler, hamburger, turkey sandwich. Remarkable choices, considering. We sat at one of the communal tables, talked with two little girls seated there, cousins, four years old. Lorie went off to make some food, or help a fellow find some dowl rods for the bird houses he was building.

Keith and Myrna Fricker came in and sat with us. Another couple came in and sat in the chairs the little girls had vacated by then, a man in baseball cap, the woman grey-haired, bright-eyed. Her left hand appeared somewhat misshapen. I see only three fingers on it, and thumb. Other folks are filling the other table, ordering, eating, talking. The men at our table are talking about the price of fertilizer - $400 a ton. If that's not the highest it's ever been, it's pretty close. Wheat is down to $3.20 a bushel and it'll get down below $3 if we have a crop. We need rain. It's supposed to rain in the area but it's expected to miss Lebanon.

"Maybe we'll get a smell of it," said the woman with the bright eyes.

*

After lunch we went back to the car parked in front of La Dow's. "This fellow right here, the big guy," said Irene, "that's Keith and Myrna's son." Another fellow came out onto the sidewalk, an older man. "He was my dad's best friend," Irene said.

We drove south along Main Street. Irene pointed at a building. "That was our Opera House," she said. "That's where I met my husband. It was the 1960s. It was Lebanon's celebration. Every year they'd have a teen dance at the end of the celebration. He came over from Kensington with a carload of kids, maybe his sisters and the Williams boys, Henry and Kirk. He came over and asked me to dance. It was hot and muggy. It was awful in there. He said 'Let's go outside where it's not so hot.' So we went out. My dad was the marshall in Lebanon, he was really busy during the celebration but he was out there on the sidewalk. My husband asked me for a date right in front of my dad. 'I don't know,' I said. 'Maybe I should ask my dad.' 'Well, how long will that take?' 'Oh, I can do it right now,' I said. 'That's my dad.' The young couple was married within a year.

*

We had a little time to kill, so we were talking. "They say some Indian promised that Smith Center would never have a tornado," Bobbi told me. "They say we have never had a tornado. Last year seventy five railroad cars blew off the tracks, that wasn't a tornado, that was a straight wind. When trees blow down in Smith Center, they say 'That wasn't a tornado, that was a straight wind, we only have straight winds around here. I used to be afraid of tornadoes. Now the straight wind has put the fear of God in me."

She turned and looked at me. "Oh, no," she said, "you're not writing that down." She looked at Irene. "Watch what you say around him, he'll write it down."

*

Phyllis Bell crossed the street carrying copies of her newspaper to La Dow's Store. Irene flagged her over to talk to us. "Phyllis, this is Tom Montag, he's writing a book about the middle west, could he interview you?" We agree to meet at her house in a few minutes.

Phyllis Bell's house is a somewhat nondescript ranch house from the outside, except for the Lebanon Times sign in front of it. We entered the living room cum newspaper office cum historical library and research center. For a moment it was a tussle to see if I am interviewing Phyllis or she is interviewing me. Newspaper folks are used to asking the questions. We did get down to the business of talking about the settlement of the area and family history. Phyllis thinks immigrants from the northern parts of Europe settled the northern tier of states here, those from middle Europe settled the middle tier of states, and those from southern Europe the lowest tier. It was German immigrants settling in this area, she said, and some English.

Phyllis's grandfather, William Schroeder, was from Prussia. He came to Kansas to homestead by way of Rochester, New York, where he'd operated a tailor shop for five years. He'd left Prussia because of the forced military conscription, he boarded a ship to America out of Liverpool, England, he worked his passage doing tailoring for the sailors on the ship. It was 1870 that he came to Kansas. He and the man who would be his neighbor for the rest of his life walked together from Atchison, Kansas, to Smith Center. (Merely a two hundred mile trek, according to my map.) Schroeder staked his homestead on a plot of ground with both river bottom and uplands. All the settlers along that creek were German immigrants.

Phyllis said her grandfather prepared three dug-outs down along the creek - one as shelter for the horse, one for the chickens, and the one he lived him. When the flood came in 1875, Schroeder tied his shoes to his plow and went off to warn the neighbor of the rising water; when he returned, his shoes had been washed away. His dug-outs along the creek had been washed away, too, so he built a log cabin, which is still standing. "It's petrified now, you might say," Phyllis told me. The cabin had a rock foundation about three feet high, which helped protect the log structure set upon it.

The family of Phyllis's grandmother on her mother's side came to Smith Center from North Carolina by way of Ohio and Missouri. Her grandmother went to work as a hired girl for her grandfather's neighbors, and that's when her grandparents met.

Phyllis's grandfather's homestead patent was approved in 1879. Phyllis lost the original of it in a fire in 1981, but has a copy that she showed me. The name on the final homestead proof was "Shrader," not "Schroeder." Because of the aberration in spelling, Schroeder had to get an "Affidavit of Identity" in October, 1924, certifying that Shrader and Schroeder were actually one and the same.

Even the 1875 census records show Phyllis's grand-father's name as Shrader. The census also revealed that the neighbors had come in from Germany, yes, and some from Iowa and Minnesota and Michigan and Missouri and New York.

*

I had to cut short my interview with Phyllis Bell because we were now due for an interview with Gladys Kennedy a block and a half away, in a house set next to the building that formerly housed the Schuette Ford dealership.

Watch out what you say about Fords when talking to Gladys, her father had been a Ford dealer, she had been married to a Ford dealer. My innocent question had concerned which parts and tools one had to carry for break-downs when traveling in the more primitive road conditions of the 1930s. "We drove Fords," Gladys said. "They didn't break down."

Watch out what you say about tornadoes in Kansas, too. "We don't have that many tornadoes," Gladys made clear. "All those tornadoes, that's not here, that's down in Oklahoma."

Gladys has a curly mop of white hair. Her eyes sparkle with mischief. Her faced is lined, marked with the years, every crease a sign of having survived the hard times of the Depression.

Gladys is a quilter. The house we were in was Gladys's but was now given over entirely to quilting. In fact, during the course of my interview with Phyllis, there were two women in the other room bent over a quilt, their needles singing to the cloth.

"We built a room on the back of the house we live in," Gladys told me, "and now it's all filled up with quilting material." She has already made an awful lot of quilts in her lifetime and even now has something like a hundred and sixteen she is still expected to make.

We talked some about family history and the car business, about the characteristics of the people of the area - "they'll do anything for you." And we talked about Girl Scouts. Gladys has been involved in Girl Scouts for much of her life. Irene Bauman remembers Gladys's involvement when she - Irene - had been a girl. Gladys still leads a troop. Scouting is something for the girls to do in a small town, Gladys indicated. "It teaches them skills. It instills confidence."

Once we'd said good-bye to Gladys and were headed out to Twin Creeks Farm, the piece of land that Irene's family owns, we swung past the old schools at the north end of Lebanon.

The empty high school has a downcast look, as if every brick had soaked in the sadness of school consolidations and closings. At some point since Lebanon students started attending school in Smith Center, the building had been owned by a business that saw fit to transform the building's main entrance into a loading dock. Irene had graduated from Lebanon High School. Seeing the building deteriorate pains her.

The Lebanon grade school almost shines by comparison. It sits across a weed-roughened parking lot to the west of the high school, it's a wide brick building, one story, a lot of wide windows in the front, all the blinds closed to keep out the light. The school's alumni association takes care of this building, Irene said. Each class takes responsibility for the upkeep of a classroom; some display historical materials, class pictures, and so on. It's a lovely building; if only a tornado could pick it up, swirl it through the Land of Oz, and set it down again, the facilities look like they could still be used as a school some place. It stands here, the wrong place and the wrong time.

"There were a lot of hard feelings when they closed the school," Irene said. "When you lose your school, you're about done."

She remembered she'd been a fourth grader when the grade school had been built. Construction wasn't finished until three or four weeks into the school year. "For the first few weeks of school," Irene said, "there were kids everywhere in town. The old school had been torn down. The new school wasn't finished. We had to crowd into the high school principal's office for class. I don't know where he was."

*

"The farmer who owns the field at the center says he has never seen the marker that's supposed to be out there," Bobbi told me as we drove past the center point of the contiguous United States on our way to Twin Creeks Farm. We were following a dirt road that looked as if it had just recently been scraped out of the field alongside it. Wheat stubble came right to the edge of the road. If it rained, the road would be a mess; sometimes they get impassable.

We were headed a few miles north and a little bit east of the center of the US. At Twin Creeks Farm, Irene struggled a bit opening the gate to let us onto the land that has been in her family since homesteading days. Irene remembered her grandparents living on the place and farming it; when her grandfather died, the family created a corporation to take ownership, each son and daughter with shares in the corporation. Shares have been passed to some of the grandchildren, additional shares have been sold, and at this point fifteen or twenty family members are share holders. The original farmstead has been torn down, the house is gone, the barn is gone. Foundations remain. Pieces of equipment rust in the sun. A couple big old dead cottonwoods are shedding their bark, the wood revealed as white as a sepulcher. Walking where the original farmstead had stood, you might feel the earth's hum, you might feel the push of ghosts trying to get your attention, wanting you to know "This was important, don't forget it." When Irene got the gate open to the place, we could take either of two paths to the house that Irene's family has built on this side of the creek from the old farmstead. Bobbi was driving, she took the high road. We pulled up in front of the house, climbed the stairs to the porch, entered.

The house is in a continual state of construction and it has been for twenty years or more, I think. Working to-gether on work-weekend by work-weekend, spare moment by spare moment, family members poured the slab and framed the structure, roofed it, sided it, plumbed it, painted it, shimmed it, shined it. Whatever needed doing, Irene said, someone would do. There had been no master plan, no preconception, no professional consultation. Piece by little piece, the house got built by members of the family who would use it as a refuge, a retreat, a gathering place for family, a condo. The ground has been in the family since the area was settled, it is sacred ground, pioneer spirits lived here still, and love here, and bring back their children and grandchildren to see what was ours. It's a nature preserve just for the family, a family-owned park with a house that will sleep twenty when you put air mattresses on the floor, more than that when you set up tents in the yard.

Whatever needed to be done - to get the house to its current shape - got done. Everyone in the family pitched in and did his part, her part. If you couldn't install windows, you prepared lunch and cooked supper for the crew that could. You took them coffee. If you were a child, you might help paint the screens or you might go down along the creek to see what you could see. No one was in charge, and everyone was. When it came time to put steps up to the front porch, maybe it was Uncle Bob who called everyone from their work to determine whether they should come straight in to the door or up the north end.

There was never an argument or disagreement or nastiness during the building of the house, work was shared, no one felt put upon, no one felt as if his ideas had been ignored. "We're a pretty unusual family," Irene said. "The people who homesteaded here were very gentle people and that gentleness continues to run in the family. That's how we are. If we find a new family member who doesn't get along that way, they have to get over it. That's how we behave."

During all those years of construction, even to the present day, family members have kept a communal journal of their experiences at Twin Creeks Farm. I saw the second book, pages from 1989 to the present, and had time to read only from 1989 to 1994. The journal is an astounding record of work and play, food and fellowship and family. Every visit someone was assigned to record what work got done, what work needed to be done, there are observations about nature interspersed, worries about war, prayers, and pinochle scores. Anyone might make an entry. When someone was trying to figure out how much lumber would be needed, he might draw his sketches in the journal, and do his calculations. There are constant notes of appreciation that the place has stayed in the family and is still available when someone needs to take comfort in the lay of the old land.

The few swatches I've extracted from the journal give a flavor of the experiences of some remarkable people and this remarkable place, Twin Creeks Farm. The journal is perhaps without compare as a document attesting to a family's attachment to place. I'll want to read more.

***

March 14, 2003
I spent most of the day yesterday trying to catch up on my notes. I'd never been so far behind, and don't know how it got that way. Perhaps I want to record too much, is that possible? Every little detail seems to speak to me. Everything I overhear. As Bobbi Miles said, "Watch what you say around Tom, he'll write it down."

On Thursdays there is a brunch at Ingleboro in the morning, and later a lunch. I took a break from writing up my notes and went down for the brunch. Bobbi was there at a table with three women who come over regularly from the Kensington area, and two others from the county celebrating a birthday. There are stories everywhere just waiting to be told.

One of the women had come from Germany after World War II with her mother and American step-father. Her father had been a German soldier who had gotten home on leave long enough for his wife to conceive the baby that became this woman. The soldier was killed towards the end of the war. Her mother had been widowed four years when she met the American GI who brought the woman and her two children to America. The girl was ten years old, her brother some eighteen months older when they entered the American school system without being able to speak a word of English. There was still a lot of resentment against Germans at that time and the school children wanted to "kill a Nazi" like their fathers had: this was a lot of motivation to become American very quickly. "Within six months you couldn't tell us from the other kids, that's how fast we adapted."

Two of the women were sisters of Swedish heritage. Their grandfather had been born in 1845; he had quite a brood of children when his wife died. He was sixty when he remarried, his new wife was forty, and they had three children together, including the father of the women I was talking with. The women were retired, I think, but you wouldn't say they were old, yet three generations stretched from 1845 to the present, which would make the average length of a generation about fifty years in that family. Pretty remarkable.

One of the other women asked me which town would be the South Dakota town for my project; she was originally from South Dakota. "Redfield," I said. "Oh, my God, that's where I'm from." She told of her grandfather coming from Denmark to South Dakota with two sons and settling a farm a few miles north of Redfield. His wife and the rest of a large brood of children were back in Denmark and unbeknownst to him he'd left his wife pregnant when he set off for America. After two years he was able to send for the family. His wife herded the brood onto the ship that brought them to America; once they landed in New York, she herded them onto a west-bound train. The train arrived in Redfield in the middle of the night. The woman packed all the children but one son onto the benches in the train station, then she and her son set off walking to the farm; they knew from her husband's description how to find it. When they arrived at the farm-stead, they found the house empty, her husband and sons had already set out for town to bring the family home. When the wagonful of father and children arrived back at the farm, breakfast was ready to be served, hot and steaming.

Another woman, originally from Iowa, had ended up in southwestern Kansas when she married her first husband; she came to Smith County when she married her second. She'd seen a corner of Kansas as a child and she concluded that she could never settle there. "Never say never," she said. She was so thoroughly Kansan she believes she wouldn't have been able to marry her second husband if he'd been from Nebraska, only fifteen miles farther north.

*

At 3:00 p.m. Dr. Pam Steinle came to Ingleboro Mansion to do an interview with me. Dr. Pam has long brown hair, intense eyes, a surgeon's hands, and - according to Ivan Burgess, as he stated in his 25 Cent Echo - "a well-turned ankle." Dr. Pam is the surgeon in Smith Center. It was never her plan that she'd end up here, but a higher power has a plan for her, Dr. Pam thinks, and this is her mission.

Dr. Pam came to Smith Center some four years ago and is starting to feel comfortable here. There is just enough surgical work to keep her position viable. She has bought one of the big houses along the street nicknamed "Relihan Row" and folks in town are interested to know what she's doing in there. That's the blessing and the curse of small towns - someone to watch out for you, yet someone watching you all the time.

Dr. Pam grew up on a farm. She has always handled tools, she plays piano. The manual dexterity a surgeon needs has come easily to her. She comes from a Mennonite background. Growing up, she wasn't sure she could be a doctor. Her father encouraged her, supported her. She hadn't intended to get into surgery but she found while in a family practice program that she was spending more and more time doing surgery, and the more surgery she did, the more she gravitated to it.

Before coming to Smith Center, Dr. Pam practiced as a surgeon for four years in a prestigious clinic in a larger community. She is happy practicing in Smith Center
because she is so compatible with the doctors she works with. "We have the same ethics," she said. "We have the same attitude about the importance of our relationship with the patient."

Older patients make up much of her client base, and Dr. Pam enjoys working with them. She feels she can say to a farmer who wants a hernia repair "Should we put this off until after calving," or after harvest. That she is knowledgeable about the rhythms of farming helps her relationship with her patients, and helps her understand their situations.

Smith Center is not unlike a lot of communities across rural America, Dr. Pam thinks. There are good people and bad people, people who work to make things better and people who work the system. There is the stress of drought, the stress of a declining Main Street. The hospital in Smith Center can't afford the latest technologies and as a result there are some surgeries she cannot do. The hospital can't possibly provide 'round the clock intensive care of a patient on a ventilator, for instance, so if she suspects there might be a chance of complications after surgery, that's a patient she will have to send elsewhere, for the good of the patient. She does worry that a continuing decline in the population here might spell the end of her time in Smith Center, when there aren't enough cases to justify a surgeon in the practice. Yet if the case load stays steady and she continues to work with such good doctors, she thinks she could retire in Smith Center.

The benefit of a practice in a community such as Smith Center? You know your patients. You can take time with them. You can talk to them about the farm or their businesses.

A drawback? "I'm a single woman in a little town," Dr. Pam said. "There aren't a lot of prospects. All my friends are couples in their 60s, their kids are gone, they have time to socialize outside the family. They are all twenty years older than me and when they die, I face the prospect of being a lonely old lady."

She'd always thought she'd practice general medicine and would marry a farm boy who'd take over the farm that had been in the family for more than one hundred and twenty five years. That's not the way it turned out. A higher power has a different plan and Dr. Pam is content to follow it.

*

In the evening yesterday I went up to the Smith Center City Council meeting with Bobbi Miles. It's no easy job those folks have, always stuck between the rock and the hard place. I know - my wife is president of the village of Fairwater. I see that sometimes the people who volunteer to run for city council or village board need the wisdom of Solomon to guide their decisions. These folks went about their work with good cheer.

This was said to the fellow who made the first presen-tation to the council, I think he is or was a preacher: "This has got to be short - no sermons." Later I overhead a whispered "Once a preacher, always a preacher...."

On the matter of music for some doings on Main Street: "It's got to be country-western, not opera."

When working with the council, this was the deal, I think: Five minutes, okay what's the bottom line, what is it you need from us?

"OK, Bobbi," the white-bearded fellow running the meeting said. Bobbi made her report. One item concerned planters that would be put out along Main Street with flowers in them. "I guarantee you people that they will be taken care of." That's what they needed to hear.

Bobbi and I stayed at the meeting until Bobbi had finished her report to the Council, then we left them to their business.

*

I packed up the car this morning, and as I headed for home I stopped at the Pioneer office downtown to say hello and give them my books. I talked for a bit with Linda Riedy and with Darrel Miller, the editor. Linda said they have several writers a year come through interested in talking about "the center." She said it like none of us are very dependable. Darrel believes that the ideas coming from organizations like the Farm Bureau have not worked, that the condition of rural America continues to decline, that people are still leaving rural areas in great numbers, that it is getting harder and harder for farmers to make it and harder for businesses on Main Street to make it. Smith Center has lost three car dealers in the past six years. Ten years ago he thought maybe the population loss had stopped, but the latest figures show they have lost another 250 people. Darrel admits he is something of a radical about agriculture and has expressed some of his opinions in the paper expecting that farmers might get riled. But they haven't reacted. He thinks the promises of the County Extension Agent and government subsidies haven't kept farm problems at bay and they may have made things worse. He worries that too many Americans have lost their connection to a place they can call home, that they're just drifters in an urban or suburban landscape, they have no sense of community, no sense of belonging to anything larger than themselves, no sense of continuity, history, responsibility. Darrel recommended that I read Wes Jackson and talk to people at the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, and the Kansas Rural Center at Whiting, Kansas. "What they are is a bunch of aging hippies," Darrel said, making something of a left-handed compliment, "but they're deep thinkers." What we've been doing hasn't worked, he indicated, and the folks at these centers are trying to imagine a sustainable agriculture and the stable rural community of the future.

I have a couple of Wes Jackson's books. I'll have to see what the organizations Darrel mentioned are up to. Walthill, Nebraska, is not that far from West Point, Nebraska.

*

Before actually heading towards Wisconsin, I drove thirteen miles south out of Smith Center to see the place where seventy-five train cars were blown off the tracks in one of the fabled straight winds. I am surprised to see they have tipped to the west side of the tracks instead of to the east. It's a pretty impressive line of hopper cars laid out with their bellies exposed. The line is a quarter mile long. I see some boxcars I think had been dumped but have since been righted. Railroad fellows who have been working back there drive out as I sit making these notes, they give me the "What you doing here, stranger?" hairy eyeball and drive on. At least fifteen axles and wheels sit on the ground near the road, no rail cars for them in sight. You know what - now the wind is blowing pretty good, it's a hard straight wind. Now the railroad fellows are back. I can't imagine where they went and came back so quick. But they're railroad fellows, you shouldn't be surprised; I've had some in my family, too. Their pick-up stirs a wall of dust along the tracks as they head back to their work.

I turn for home. It looks like spring here, it feels like spring, it smells like spring. How can I face more Wisconsin winter? I set my jaw, I lean forward, I lean into it.

*

Just south of the Kansas-Nebraska line along Highway 81 I saw a farm disking anhydrous ammonia and corn-stalks into the field. Spring has come to Kansas.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the temperature was 73 degrees. In Omaha, 63 degrees. When I got into Iowa, I saw remnants of snow, a lot of it still, some of it in these fields not ready for planting. It's plain that I'm driving away from spring. I can only hope that it's chasing me.

*

March 15, 2003
With every visit I make to a focus community, with every interview I conduct, the burden of the project weighs heavier on me. This is not some poem or personal essay. I'm dealing here with real people's lives, with their real joys and sorrows. How can I do justice to what I'm finding? How can I tell it true?

I'm painting a picture, but I don't yet know what I'm painting a picture of. Definitely I don't want to write a book about the economics of agriculture. Yet the condition of rural America is bound up in the plight of agriculture.

I haven't yet gone out to the farmyard to talk to farmers, to walk their fields and feedlots. Certainly I'd have to do that before I can say I've completed my task.

And, these days, there is more to the story of rural America than the story of agriculture. What else is part of the story? The condition of Main Street, for sure. Industry, or the lack of it. Schools and school consolidation. I don't think I can talk about the middle west without talking about faith. In Vandalia you hear the name of Jesus spoken in public places, but not as a curse, as witness. There are thirteen churches in Smith Center. In Maysville I heard the role of the County Extension Service being questioned; its role was being questioned by Darrel Miller in Smith Center, too. Dependence on the government for advice or subsidy works against the self-reliance of farmers. Oh my God, I sound like a conservative Republican: Hand-outs seem to destroy those they are intended to help.

The interstate highway system is like the railroads of the 1800s: where the Interstate goes through, those towns will prosper. Will the others sink into the slow decline of wood wishing to be earth again? Grocery wholesalers don't want to deliver to stores off the main routes. If you can't sell a certain number of cars every year, we're gonna pull your dealership....

And all of a sudden I'm writing about issues, not telling the stories of the people here. And it is their stories I want to tell. I'm a poet, not a sociologist.

I was almost inconsolable yesterday driving back towards my Wisconsin home, inconsolable about what has been lost, about what I cannot know of these peoples' lives. They've opened themselves wide, they are laying every-thing out for me to look at. Sometimes I don't know what I'm seeing, sometimes I don't have skill enough to do justice to what I'm getting. I was inconsolable: will I ever be able to do what I must if I'm to do this right? These are the real lives of real people and I'm just a poet; sometimes being a poet is just not enough.

At 2:00 p.m. I got copies of my books out of the car, I headed back to Shelter Insurance to talk to Mike Souther. Sure, he'll talk to me, he has a hard time saying "No" to anybody, that's why he won the Chamber of Commerce's "Mr. Volunteer" award last year, that's why he is sometimes known as Mr. Maysville, that's why the Sollars had said he was involved in everything in the county. Sure, Mike was willing to talk to me, but his office has a revolving door and if it's not someone coming in to pay taxes - he collects taxes for the town - it's someone coming in to ask him to drive her to Florida. "You're harder to catch than the mumps," someone says to him. Mike's grandmother, Mildred Helms, answers the phone for him after Jasmine Taylor leaves for school every day; Mildred was going to sit in on my interview with Mike; Mike suggested I go into the other room and interview her for starters while he tends to some pressing business.

It is good not to have expectations. It is good not to think you know what you do and don't want. It is good to know early on what a gift looks like. Mildred and I went into the other room, Mildred told me of her family's 150 years in the area, she told me of life off to the southeast of Weatherby on Boston Mountain, of hard work and good family and hard times and good times. Mike Souther is her grandson, Mike will do anything for her. Mildred was born in 1926, she just retired in January from the "cap factory" in Gallatin, she has stitched baseball caps all her life. She and her husband had five children. Her husband died twenty years ago. Mildred has as many greatgrandchildren as grandchildren. You can tell how important family is to her. We talk for an hour.

"Just as soon as I deal with this rental property, we can talk," Mike said when Mildred and I came to the other room. He went off with a friend to look at cleaning up a property he rents out, I went to the Library to tell Mary I wasn't finished yet with my interview. Mary was sitting in the library's comfortable reading room, she had finished her mystery and was reading a text book about the reef creatures of Cozumel. She told me that the news of our appearance in Maysville was making the circuit, one volunteer at the library had apparently told another one who told a patron. Word was getting passed along. Soon everywhere in town they'll know I'm coming before I ever get there.

I got back to Mike Souther's office, Mike got back. We went behind closed doors. "I'm with a customer and can't be disturbed," he told Mildred.

We talked. Mike is young, six or seven years out of Maysville High School, a few years out of college. He can talk. "Some people think I'm opinionated," he said. "Yeah, I've got opinions. If you listen to mine, I'll listen to yours." He's wiry compared to a thick-bellied old bear like me, he wears a goatee and a flat-top, he's got a ready smile and a quick wink and, yeah, I suppose he has opinions.

Some seven years ago someone asked Mike if he could help with the Country Harvest Festival in Maysville. He has been chairman ever since. "One thing I've found," he said, "you just ask someone for help, they'll help you. It takes a lot of hard work by a lot of good people to make the Country Harvest Festival a success."

Yeah, 4-H is an issue in Maysville - there are those who think it's not getting the support it needs, there are those who think that if 4-H gets county support the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts should get equivalent support. "I don't know enough about it to have an opinion," Mike said mildly. "I do know the world has changed since the days when 4-H was first established."

"When my dad got sick," Mike said, "I asked my parents if they had a will. My mother cried, my dad asked 'Why do you always do that?' but they made a will. I have an older brother and sister and a younger brother but they put my name first in the will. "That's so they'll know you're in charge handling things," his parents told Mike. "I realized right then that I am kind of bossy. I guess I like to be in charge. It started a long time ago. I was class president from seventh grade through my junior year of high school. My senior year I was student body president."

"I chose to return to Maysville after college," Mike said. "I choose to live here. I like to live in a place where you know everyone. I live in a house only a few hundred feet from where I was raised. I know the genealogy of everyone in town, who's related to whom, why stuff happens as it does. A couple that had graduated from Maysville left and came back for a visit. 'Mike Souther, are you still here?' they said. I nearly went through their windshield to get at them. 'I'm here because I choose to be here,' I told them. 'Okay, okay,' they said. 'We didn't mean anything by it...' 'Just so we're on the same page...' I said, and after that we had a pleasant conversation."

"I've thought about it," Mike said. "I don't really know why I feel so strongly that I have to live here, but I do. I'm here. I'm doing what I can to help make Maysville a better place for us to live."

And Mike made me an offer: "As you go along, if you think somebody in Maysville is feeding you a line, you come back and talk to me."

*

I dug around the files at the Historical Society for a while this morning and started finding material of interest right away. An undated news clipping reports on a big Ku Klux Klan rally held in Maysville after "a big delegation of white robed men" came out by train from St. Joseph. "They marched up Water St. some 300 strong, and then marched around the public square," the article states. "It was a big long white procession with a fiery cross in front of it." Speechmakers outlined what the Klan stood for:

- "100 per cent Americanism."
- "White, Gentile, Protestant supremacy."
- "Making a foreigner stay here 21 years before he can vote."
- "Putting the Bible back in the public schools."
- "The Christian religion."

One of the speakers, Dr. W.M. Campbell, "urged upon the audience that the Ku Klux Klan had been the active and beneficent force that had done so many things in recent months to clean up St. Joseph and to rid the place of law breakers."

"It is sort of semi-officially said that there is a Klan organization in Maysville with something like one hundred members in it, and that there is a much larger organization in Stewartsville," the clipping states.

"The Klansmen here announced that the Klan stands definitely for law and order, and that, contrary to the statement that has been made by hostile forces, the Klan never takes the law into its own hands," concludes the anonymous and apparently sympathetic reporter.

*

There's a larger and happier clipping about the family of the Missouri governor who was born in Maysville. James T. Blair was elected to office in 1956.

*

There's a lot of information about the Clark family in Dekalb County. A clipping from 1909 reports that former County Court Judge Isaac Clark was severely beaten at the conclusion of a case in which he represented the winning litigant. After the trial Clark had been sitting at a local drug store when the sore loser struck him, "knocked him out of the chair, and it is said, struck him several times after he fell to the floor. Judge Clark's jawbone was broken and his face badly bruised up."

The scoundrel "formerly conducted a saloon in Clarksdale," we're told, "and is the owner of considerable property. He is a middle aged man and is large and strong while Judge Clark is getting along in years and is rather frail." After the beating, the offender left town. "His conduct is generally condemned by the Clarksdale community."

*

A September 1922 report on the death of Dr. W.J. Clark, a Maysville physician: "He was reserved in his contact with people on the street and was not what you would call a mixer. But in his practice in the homes of the people he was gentle, considerate, tender, and had a manful human heart. The night was never too dark and the road was never too long and the weather was never too cold for him to get out and go. The world sometimes does not seem fully to appreciate the heroism of the earnest doctor who travels long, difficult pathways at the dead hours of night, with only God and the stars to look down and see, and sometimes not even the stars when the storm is on." Along with his wife, Dr. Clark had gone out for a professional call and was returning from that when "they ran into a muddy place in the road and the car stuck. Dr. Clark got out and pushed on the car and then tried to put on the chains and got sick while working at that task and had to stop. He got back in the car to rest and a little later felt sick at his stomach and got out of the car, and pretty soon fell headlong on the ground. Mrs. Clark rushed to the nearest house to telephone to town for a doctor. It is believed that Dr. Clark expired almost instantly when he fell to the ground."

The report continues: "Dr. Clark had not been in the best of health for a year or two, but he said little about it, and the general public knew nothing of it. About a year ago he had a serious heart attack. On his trip west this summer he had another one. Saturday night of last week he had an attack and then another one Sunday morning. However he kept going. He made two or three calls on Saturday night and just as his own life was fading away he with still steady hand and earnest purpose helped to usher two little lives into this world."

Dr. Clark "had said at different times that when he died he preferred that it be while he was at work." He was 49 years, 8 months, and 20 days old when he died. "Following his death you could hear many remarks on the lips of the people of the community, such as:

- 'He was such a useful man.'
- 'He was such a capable man.'
- 'He always attended strictly to their own busi-ness, and that is a mighty fine quality in any man.'"

*

On August 27, 1929, Benjamin Franklin Clark wrote to his sister, Mrs. Mary Ann Carre, about a piece of family history. This letter, too, is preserved in the files of the Clark family at the museum in Maysville. "Fifty years ago today," Benjamin wrote, "I took charge of the drug store Uncle William left in Stewartsville. At that time I was clerking for D.J. Ireland. About bedtime on the evening of August 26, I met Uncle William just as I was entering the drug store and he was coming out. He asked me if I would sleep in the room upstairs that night. I agreed and he gave me the key. He went on and I went to bed. It was the last time I saw him."

The letter continues: "I learned the next morning that Jack Robinson, the colored man at the livery barn, had driven him to Cameron the night before. This was the last I ever heard of him."

Another letter in the folder noted that the family Uncle William had deserted included three little girls. In the summer of 1926 those same three little girls - now grown considerably older - were suing for a share of the estate of Senator William A. Clark of Montana on the grounds that the Senator was the father who had deserted them. Senator Clark was called the "copper king of Montana" and his estate was worth $47,000,000 in 1926 dollars.
"There were several points on which the plaintiffs based their claim of being the daughters of the late Senator Clark," a news clipping from July 22, 1926 tells us. "There was the similarity of name - W.A. Clark of Stewartsville and Senator W.A. Clark, both of them named William A. Clark. They both married girls by the name of Kate. They both taught school in Missouri. They were about exactly the same age and married just about exactly the same time. They both went to Montana."

The case for the defense rested on the testimony of "the little gray-haired woman" who gave her age as 68 and "related that she had lived in Stewartsville from the time she was eight years old and, in 1878, worked for three months as maid in the Clark home, caring for the three little girls who, she declared, now are Anna Clark Hines and Effie Clark McWilliams of Missouri, and Addie Clark Miller of Denver."

She testified "that the Stewartsville Clark did not inform her of his intention to leave his drug store and desert his family, but said that he wrote her two or three months later, and, in subsequent correspondence, their marriage was planned.

She left her family in September, 1880, she said, and on October 16 she married the father of the three women now claiming heirship to Senator Clark. "Thereafter, the couple resided in Montana, the witness said, and eight children were born."

They had lived for thirty-seven years within a mile of the residence of Senator Clark, the gray-headed woman testified. "Mrs. Clark identified a number of pictures as early photographs of her husband, but declared that the tintype which the claimants had identified as a likeness of their father bore no resemblance to him."

"Under cross examination," the clipping continues, "the witness spoke fluently of buildings and streets in Stewartsville."

Counsel for the Clark estate also presented evidence that Senator Clark represented the territory of Montana at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 (when the Stewartsville Clark would have been in Stewartsville) and that he'd been made a major in the Montana militia during the Indian trouble of 1877.

The jury in the case found for the estate. The three women claiming to be Senator Clark's daughters had no legitimate claim. The two Clarks were different men.

***

February 28, 2003
After spending time in research at the museum, I walked up the street to talk to Emma Newkirk at Farmers Printing. Emma already knew I'd be coming and she knew who I was. How?

"Mike Souther told me," Emma said. "He knows to do that. If he didn't, I'd whup him like he was my own boy."

Emma had her agenda for me, today we weren't going to talk about her, we were going to identify all the people in Dekalb County I should talk to, "so you'll get the information you need about why people came here." The families of all the people Emma had in mind for me to interview have been in the county for a hundred fifty years or more. She wanted to see that all the communities in the county were represented among those I'm to interview. It was a long list of names she created for me, we got some phone numbers to go with some of those names, I had the tape recorder running for an hour yet Emma wasn't going to talk about herself today, since she was a transplant to the county. She'll only want to tell me about the Cross-roads bicyclists who ride from west coast to east coast, why they stop in Maysville. She feels responsible for making that happen. Joe Maltsberger came into the shop while I was still talking to Emma; Emma said Joe was one of the people I have to talk to, and I set an appointment for tomorrow morning. I met Emma's husband, Gene New-kirk, when he came up from the basement where he had been running a printing press. Gene apologized for not being as quick with words as Emma; running a press, he indicated, you are left to yourself most of the time. I know already that talking to a press is not like talking to people. I'll interview Gene, too, sometime - three lines of his family go back a hundred fifty years in the county - the Reids, the Wests, and the Redmans.

Emma said she was going home for lunch and Gene said he was going to meet a fellow for lunch and I went next door to Jackie's and had spaghetti with meat sauce at the "hot bar," that's what they called the little buffet. Gene Newkirk was there at another table with a friend. Soon enough he was sending a woman over to tell me the name of someone I should interview. I wrote down the name though it was already on my list. Soon enough my waitress asked me if I was the fellow who's writing the book. Why, I am, yes, that's me.

Word of my presence in the community has spread like little tongues of wildfire running this way and that in the grass. Maysville is not the first community in which I've seen the phenomenon, but it's represented here most clearly because I hadn't had prior personal contact in the community, hadn't had prior publicity regarding my arrival. One strand of notice ran from Cindy Sollars at GVS Graphics to Mike Souther at Shelter Insurance to Emma and Gene Newkirk to the waitress here at Jackie's Coffee Time Cafe. Another strand ran from Sharon Martin of the Historical Society, to Thelma Martin, the woman I'd be interviewing in the afternoon at the nursing home. I find it interesting that in all the communities I've visited I seem to locate easily the people who give me such good entrance into their world. How is it that the community presents these people to me so readily, how is it that they are so happy to be of assistance? How is it that they so quickly identify what I need and point me in the right direction? How is it that everyone seems to be willing to talk to me; eager, almost, as if no one has ever asked them about themselves, they've been saving it up and when I arrive all this wonderful material spills out. Research question: Could a fellow go into any middle western town and get the same kind of response, the same overwhelming blessing bestowed on a project such as mine? Perhaps so.

People in Maysville put two and two together rather quickly - twice I'm asked "Who is Mike Abel?" I've listed him in the Vagabond newsletter as someone with a Weatherby address who has offered accommodations during my stay in Dekalb County. "Mike is a friend," I say, "he lives off towards Boston Mountain." I can't imagine where these folks had gotten Mike's name except from the newsletter.

Last night at supper, when I mentioned to Mike that two people asked about him, he suggested with that smile of his: perhaps I should indicate his lineage has been traced back to the Abel of Cain and Abel. I wonder if that would give Mike any standing in a county where so many families go back a hundred fifty years or more.

*

February 28, 2003, con't
It was after 1:00 p.m. yesterday when I drove to the Sunset Home near the south edge of Maysville to interview Thelma Martin. Sharon Martin had prepared Thelma for my visit. Thelma sat in her chair with oxygen running, and we talked about her life and her family and what she remembers of DeKalb County history. Thelma was born in 1906, she'll be 97 years old this year - in May, I believe. She had polio when she was five years old. People thought she'd contracted it at the Fairgrounds when they used to be located south of Maysville; she had drunk from a shared tin cup hung off the water barrel. A young boy was thought to have contracted "what they used to call infantile paralysis" the same way at the same time in the same place, Thelma said, but "he never got the strength back in his legs, he had to get around on crutches the rest of his life. I remember seeing him on them as a boy, I never saw him after he grew up. I think he taught school from his crutches somewhere here in Missouri."

Thelma herself is from a family of long-standing in Dekalb County. Her husband, Willard, came to Maysville from Texas. Soon enough he was apprenticed to the local plumber and after a few years was ready to establish his own business. Willard started Martin Plumbing in 1925, Thelma said, and operated it for sixty-five years, at which time Willard Plumbing went to the couple's son, "Charles Emory," who continues in the business with two of his sons. Sharon Martin married Charles Martin after Charles' first wife died. Towards the end of his life, Willard's mind started to fail him - he'd visit pleasantly with Sharon for quite a spell out at the nursing home, then when she left he'd asked Thelma: "Now, who was that woman?"

Thelma remembered that when she was young she was frightened of "the gypsies." There had been gypsies encamped at the fairgrounds when she contracted polio; every summer there was a gypsy camp east and south of Maysville "and I was frightened when we had to go past them there in the dark."

When the courthouse collapsed on itself, Thelma remembered, a great cloud of dust was thrown up; it could be seen from outside of town. Two men had been working to tear down the Courthouse and took away too much support at the bottom so that the rest of the structure fell in on them. Both men were killed.

A storekeeper took his own life in a bank vault in a building on the south side of the courthouse square, Thelma remembered; but it was not, she says, the vault in the building currently occupied by the museum, it was farther to the east. The storekeeper was not of a long-standing Dekalb County family, though Thelma no longer remembers where he was from.

*

Once I completed my interview with Thelma, I stopped at the area Chamber of Commerce, but found no one at home, so I went back to my quarters near Boston Mountain to make some phone calls, see if I could arrange some interviews, see if I could catch up on my notes. If Friday would shape up the way I was expecting, it would be a busy day.

*

This morning I have had breakfast at Jackie's Coffee Time, a cup of coffee, a half order of biscuits and gravy, $2.67. A fellow in dark glasses was seated at the long table close to the kitchen with several other men. He must be blind. He said to a fellow, "John, is that you sitting there?" "Yeah," said John. "When I sat down, why didn't you tell me you were here? What if I'd started telling a story about you with you sitting there?" "I was just waiting to see," said John.

After breakfast I stopped at Farmers Printing to give Emma and Gene Newkirk copies of my books, I'd forgotten to do that yesterday. Both of them were sitting at the front of the shop, relaxing a moment before they launched into another day. Emma had more names and phone numbers for me, people she thinks I need to talk to. I borrowed a piece of scratch paper and made some quick notes. Emma was already going onto the next thing before I got all the facts down on this one. Pretty quick I had to get over to the newspaper office for my interview with Terry Pearl, the paper's editor.

Terry was ready for me. He's 51, fit, wiry, intense, and he talked faster than I could listen. He came to Maysville in the late 1970s and worked for a while as editor of the paper. He'd wished then that he could buy the paper because he loves the Maysville area, but that didn't seem possible back then. Fifteen years ago a motivational speaker inspired Terry to think that dreams can come true. Terry came to Missouri from Iowa where he had been free-lancing and he talked to the owner of the Maysville paper. Well, if Terry would put some money down and work for the paper cheap for a year and make another payment at the end of that year, that would be a start towards buying the paper, the owner said. So that's what Terry did, he started buying the paper.

"I can't believe it," he said now, "I've got the dream job, I've got the best job in the world. Well, if I had the ability and could play quarterback for the Rams or play ball for the Cardinals, I might like that better. Short of that, I've got the best job in the world."

Community journalism and what they teach in journalism school are two different things, Terry believes. Here he couldn't possibly make everything in the paper sound like the same editorial voice, he just doesn't have the staff to do it, and he's not sure it's necessary in any case. In one fashion or another, a lot of people write for the paper. For instance, he publishes a lot of church news. "Once I tried to shorten the church news by leaving out the list of hymns they sang," Terry remembered, "and I heard about it. People missed the list of hymns. Now I leave them in."

Terry is socially and fiscally conservative; government should do only those things we can't do for ourselves.

"Let's call abortion what it is," he said, "murder."

His column in the paper airs his views, yet he's quite willing to air the other side of any controversial topic in the Letters column, as long as the writers focus on issues and don't get into personal attacks. "To disagree with a decision the City Council made is one thing," Terry said. "But you don't call someone on the Council fat and stupid, I won't print it, even if they are fat and stupid."

The future of 4-H is one issue that has gotten space in the paper. "I suppose the Extension Service was useful back in the 1930s and 1940s," Terry said, "but I don't know how useful it is for us these days with all the sources of information that are available. Government should only do what we can't. 4-H is funded through the Extension Service. Why is government funding activities for youths through 4-H, it doesn't fund the Boy Scouts?"
Terry's favorite work is covering school news and the achievements of students. Terry believes his paper provides positive recognition for students in Dekalb County at a level that's not possible in big city newspapers where coverage of student achievement often stops when the basketball or football game comes to an end. He loves giving students such recognition, and the students' parents appreciate it too.

Terry doubts that Dekalb County will ever be attractive to industry. He noted that more and more farmers and farm wives work other jobs because they can't make a decent living on their farms. There aren't a lot of jobs in small communities for high school graduates. "All we can do is try to maintain what we've got here," Terry thinks. "It's a great place to live and a great way of life but nobody here gets rich."

"The newspaper will never make me a rich man," Terry said. "I don't want to be a rich man. A lot of people in America work at jobs they hate. I have a job I love. I'm never going to retire. I'm going to keep running this paper til the day I die. I'm doing what I want to do. I couldn't stand to sit here and watch what someone else would do to the paper. I'll be ninety years old and still putting out the paper every week."

*

At 11:00 a.m. I interviewed Joe Maltsberger in the front office area at Farmers Printing. Joe comes from a whole 'nother place than Terry Pearl, his cousin. Where Terry rushes when he talks, Joe is laconic. Where Terry is conservative, Joe - you might say - is not. Joe went off to college the way young folks do, and what he found was a smorgasbord of learning. He liked chemistry and mathematics but he also ended up liking theater. The university was a great wide adventure for the shy farm boy. He studied a lot of subjects and learned a lot of things and set off on a course that had him touring with a theater company out of Southwestern Minnesota State University playing in "The Glass Menagerie" for a year; living on both coasts and in a commune in New Mexico; playing the villain for a melodrama at Cripple Creek, Colorado; surveying water and sewer lines; working construction; and more - these are the things I remember. Joe has always liked diversity of opinion, he's not afraid of change, he's not afraid to jump out of airplanes for the heck of it. He's not afraid to talk about 4-H in the county even though his wife Beverly ends up in the thick of it at her job as a Community Development Specialist for the Extension Service.

The deal with 4-H in Dekalb County seems to be this. For whatever their reasons, the county commissioners don't appear to have much use for the Extension Service. State law mandates that the county contribute a certain amount to the support of Extension each year. The county commissioners allotted one quarter of the mandated amount in its most recent budget. Extension then said it was pulling all of its programs out of Dekalb County, including the 4-H program. A final discussion of the issues involved is scheduled to take place in a couple weeks, but likely the whole matter will end up in court because the county appears to be in violation of the law that mandates support for the Extension Service.

Is this important? Should the average Vagabond reader even care? I think so, I think this might be a model of what happens in a community during a disagreement, when sides get polarized and then harden into their separate and irreconcilable positions. I don't think Maysville is much different in this regard than any other community; it's just the current case, and the first in which I've found people to speak from both sides of the chasm that separates them.

Further, the Vagabond reader should be interested because it's the sort of little drama that plays out in our lives all the time. Whether or not we are always proud of them, we have these little stories of our existence. 4-H in Dekalb County is one story I'll continue to watch and attempt to unravel.

Joe Maltsberger came home to Maysville to help his father farm. He came back, but he didn't look like the typical Maysville resident, he had hair down to his shoulders. He came home and there has been nothing attractive enough to pull him away since. He'd had a wide range of experience with people and concludes that people are pretty much the same everywhere, you might as well be where you are. The people of the middle west might be a little more wary and a little less open to outside influence than those on either coast or even those of Mississippi or Alabama, Joe feels. The people of the middle west might be a little more reluctant to take risks and to try new things, but by and large they're not that much different than people anywhere else in the United States.

Joe came home to Maysville, he met the woman who became his wife, he fathered a son. Now he's 61 years old with a ten-year-old son. He appears to be as happy with his life as he's ever been.

Joe and I talked frankly, yet he was reluctant to speak about his work with the Boy Scouts. He didn't volunteer the information, I had to pull it out of him. He was a Boy Scout as a youth; he worked with Scouts in Maysville after he graduated from high school, before he went off on his journey across the breadth of the United States; he re-involved himself in Scouts when he returned home. Scouting is a good way for kids to learn new skills and gain self-confidence, Joe thinks. To learn responsibility. To relish challenges. Not many people in Maysville went canoeing before Joe started taking his Scouts canoeing; now, a lot of families canoe. Joe won't tell you, someone else will: he shared the work of organizing those canoe trips with all the kids involved, so they'd learn more than canoeing from the experience. Someone was charged with organizing the food - okay, who's going to do that? Someone had to organize the equipment, to get the canoes. The adventure wasn't just canoeing, it was the challenge of responsibility for the Scouts in all phases of the expedition. Joe helped to organize a co-ed troop of Scouts but ran smack dab up against the national organization trying to get a young lady into the Explorer Scouts. He wasn't able to push past that barrier.
Joe still leads a couple of troops in Dekalb County. He coaches 5th-6th grade basketball. Middle western modesty, Joe's reluctance to tell me about his contributions to the community, like Duane Baillie of Rugby waiting to speak of his awards for community service until after I'd turned off the tape recorder? Middle western duty, this need to give back to the community that nourished us?

Joe can speak with the authority of a Maysville native, yet too with the wisdom and insight gained from having lived a lot of other places and seen a lot of other kinds of people. He can stand at a distance and present a dispassionate analysis based on the facts as he knows them, before offering his own opinions. Joe's a big guy, taller than I am, I think, broad-shouldered, with elfin eyes that flash with amusement. He brings a kind of perspective one doesn't often find, but he doesn't try to push you over with his opinion. I think he'd rather laugh than complain; I know he'd rather give than take. This old world isn't perfect, he might say, but it's the only one we've got, let's make it the best world we can.

This won't be the last time I talk with Joe Maltsberger. He has said that on my next visit to Maysville, he will take me out to the Crestview assisted-living facility to introduce me to some of the old folks there whose families go back in the county a hundred and fifty years or more but who might be a little reluctant to talk with an outsider like me without the blessing of a returnee like Joe.

*

I'd hardly finished my conversation with Joe Maltsberger. Gene Newkirk was on his way back to his printing press after lunch and some pitching horseshoes in the indoor set-up he's put together in the building he owns next door. "Gene," I said, "tell me again, where is Boston Mountain?" "Oh, come on," Gene said. "Let's drive out there and I'll show you."

***

March 1, 2003
Yesterday afternoon Gene Newkirk and I walked across the street from Farmers Printing to where his white van was parked next to my grey car. He was going to play hookey from his printing for a bit, he'd show me Boston Mountain.

We headed east out of Maysville on Highway 6. Off to our left at Hedge Road: "That's where Wildcat Hill would be," Gene said, "back in there." Joe Maltsberger had mentioned Wildcat Hill, he takes his son out there bicycling. "Now they've cleaned it up," Joe had said, "now they've cut the brush and taken out the whoop-dee-doos, now my son calls it Pussycat Hill."

Wildcat Hill hadn't been Pussycat Hill those many years ago when there was a sledding accident on the hill and someone was killed. "That was before my time," Gene told me. "I don't know the story of the sledding accident. You'll have to find someone older to tell you." Gene is 73.

"You're still printing," I said. "You're 73 and still printing?" It sounded like the question it was. "Sometimes when you work for yourself," Gene said, "you don't have the best retirement plan. In my printing business, some years were good, some years weren't so good." Kind of like farming, I thought. Just good enough to keep leading you on. Always reaching for the brass ring, never grasping it. Gene wasn't complaining, I don't think he knows to complain, he's another of those fellows who goes on doing what must be done."

Gene and I continued east on Highway 6 past Hilltop, where now there are a couple trailer houses, a garage or other outbuilding. "Hilltop General Store used to sit where that trailer house is," Gene said. "They'd show outdoor movies there." You could come to get supplies at Hilltop, then stay to watch movies under the stars.

We turned south at County EE east of Weatherby at the county line where a large sign marks the inside of our turn: "El Rancho Bankruptus." Up and down the hills of Highway EE Gene drove. "We'll turn left after we pass the top of the next hill," he said. "It's hard to remember exactly. I don't have it memorized. I don't get out this way often any more." He turned left, we angled on a roadbed of crushed rock towards Boston Mountain.

"There it is," Gene said. We had pulled into a farm drive, the nose of the van was pointed at a line of power poles and an open path through the trees across a wide field from us, there where the land climbed steeply.

"That's Boston Mountain," Gene said. "For a year or two, 1931 or so, we lived there at the bottom of it, off to the left. That farm belonged to my aunt. My father farmed it a year or two, until the drought and Depression and the grasshoppers got the best of us and we went broke."

"This place," Gene said, waving at the farmstead to our right hand side, "this is where my grandparents lived. Let's talk to the fellow back there, do you mind?" A young man stepped out the gate of a cow pen. Gene pulled the van down close and waved him over, told him about Boston Mountain and his grandparents. To his credit, the young fellow's eyes didn't glaze over as sometimes happens when those of us interested in history and the ghosts on the landscape get to talking. Soon enough the young man's father came out around the end of a building. He had grown up in the area, Gene's grandfather and Victor's greatgrandpa were neighbors, his brother got the home farm, Victor now owns the place that Gene's grandfather used to. Victor has cows dropping calves out in the pasture, they have been tending to cows and calves. They've had pretty good luck with the calves, except Victor's daughter's dog got out there and tore one of the calves up - "bites on its nose and legs, flesh torn loose. I don't know if it's going to make it. If it does, it might lose a leg."

"Is that dog dead yet?" I asked. I know that bad dogs don't last long on the farm.

"No," Victor said. "That was my daughter's dog. My wife said if I killed it, my daughter would never talk to me again. It's not dead, but it's not here any more either."

"My grandfather moved a house onto this place from somewhere over there," Gene said, waving off to the right, towards a pasture and wooded hill behind it. "I don't know exactly where the house had set before. He moved it right back over here."

"Yeah," Victor said, "I took that house down."

"The house had been on the hill up there," Victor said, pointing back to the west. "There's still evidence of a foundation in the woods, and some little blue flowers they had planted around it. My grandfather said they moved it down the hill and across the pasture with horses. They rolled it on logs. When a log rolled out behind the house, they'd bring it around and put it in front again. There's a path cut along the hill where they must have brought it, you couldn't go straight down the hill."

"There's a knoll up there," Victor said, "where I found a coin from the 1860s, not far from where the house had stood."

Gene pulled out of the farmyard after our conversation was concluded and we headed off circling our way now around to the top of Boston Mountain. We passed Black Cemetery. We came out to intersect with the road that Mary and I take to Mike Abel's place, where we're lodging. We drove past the "Dead End" sign that marks the road Mike lives on, we drove right past the entrance to Mike's place, we drove right up to the dead end where Boston Mountain dropped away steeply to a creek bed and the farms that once belonged to Gene's aunt and grandfather. "You can see how steep it looks from here," Gene said. "Fellows from Winston used to bring their Model T's and Model A's out here to test them, and the occasional Hupmobile. This climb was a good test. If the car could climb Boston Mountain, it was a pretty good car."

"Mike," I said to Mike Abel as we pulled up at his place, "you live on Boston Mountain." He hadn't known that. He'd never heard it called Boston Mountain. Here I've been looking for it, and we've been staying atop it all along.

Mary gathered a few things and got in the van with us. She'd accompany me back to Maysville. I expected to do an interview at 4:00 p.m., then Mary and I would go off to get some supper. Mary had already seen Boston Mountain: she'd walked up there earlier in day and had looked down over the drop-off.

When we got back to town, Gene wanted to show us the indoor horse shoe pits in the building right next to Farmers Printing. Instead of real dirt, the pits were lined with artificial clay, a substance like Play-Doh that behaved very much like the clay of real outdoor pits. The pits have been in the building for sixteen or seventeen years. There was a time when horse shoe pitchers from all across northwest Missouri kept them pretty busy most days. Gene only gets to indulge himself during his noon hour.

Gene has always been pretty good at throwing horse shoes, four out of ten would be ringers. When he turned 70 years old, though, he got to stand several feet closer to the stake he was throwing at, and his success rate went up to about six ringers out of ten. And he could no longer hide his talent among the Class B horse shoe pitchers, he was moved up to Class A. "Some of those fellows throw 70-75% ringers," Gene said. Even so, he manages to win a game or two at the tournaments he attends.

Emma Newkirk had told me earlier that her son who lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, happened upon a couple old fellows pitching horse shoes at a park near where he lives. He got to talking with them. They were on their way back to Missouri from Canada. "My mom lives in Missouri," her son said, "Emma Newkirk." "We've pitched horse shoes with Gene Newkirk," they'd said.

***

I was supposed to meet Ben and Marie Ausman at 4:00 p.m. in Jackie's Coffee Time Cafe to do an interview. They had operated the dime store in Maysville back when "we knew what a nickel and dime and a quarter was," as Emma Newkirk would put it. Ben had hauled propane too. I've been told that if what you wanted wasn't on the shelves downstairs in the store, Marie would say "Let me run upstairs and see what I can find" and nine times out of ten she would come back down with what you wanted.

I stepped into Jackie's and a young lady asked me "Are you here to interview Marie Ausman?" I said "Yes." "She called and left a message for you," the young lady said. "She had to go into the emergency room with her high blood pressure." I said "That's not good." I think the blonde-headed lady at the cash register misunderstood what I meant. "It's not good that she has high blood pressure," the woman said somewhat severely, "not that she's missing your interview."

"Marie said she would call when she got finished at the emergency room and they could come in and do the interview then."

I said, "No, when she calls tell her that I hope she's feeling better, tell her that I'll set up another interview when I come back to Maysville, tell her I'll probably be back here in September."

"Okay," the young lady said, "I'll tell her."

*

This visit to Maysville was done. Mary and I would drive to Cameron to see what we could find for supper, I'd get up on Saturday to the prospect of meeting with the Kansas-City area book club which had read my farm memoir, Curlew:Home, and would be discussing it over lunch. Since I was going to be in Maysville, they'd asked me whether I'd join them for the discussion. I wouldn't have to do much but put up with their conversation, and answer any easy questions they might have. What author can turn down an opportunity to come face-to-face with his readers? Not this one.

Mary and I will have lunch with the book club, I'll answer the questions I know the answers to, and we'll leave for home in the afternoon.

It is a lovely morning. It was snowing yesterday afternoon as we drove toward Cameron for supper, it was snowing as we headed back to our snug accommodations, it continued snowing during the night. There's an inch or two of white covering the ground, it hangs on the trees like hoarfrost, the sun has come up yet it remains hidden in the white sky. The day has begun. I'm caught up on my notes, I feel pretty good about my visit to Maysville, I've got nothing to do for the next few hours except relax and enjoy the rest of the this picture post-card morning. And after lunch we'll make tracks for home. I enjoy my Vagabond visits immensely, but you know: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

VANDALIA: THE FIRST VISIT
Vagabond Journal: February, 2003

[From Vagabond, #3 & #4]
February 2, 2003
Today at 8:00 a.m. I left Dekalb, Illinois, where I'd visited overnight; I headed south for Vandalia. Along the way I noted that a week and a half ago as I was leaving Rugby it was nearly twenty degrees below zero. Today in Pana, Illinois, I saw a fellow in black leather out for a ride on his motorcycle - and he wasn't the first biker I'd seen.

At Oconee, north of Vandalia, Nokomis Road heads off west towards Nokomis. The Douglas County Historical Society in Alexandria, Minnesota, is on Nokomis Street. What is this Nokomis? Must I actually read Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" to find out? Nokomis, the mother of Wenonah? Wenonah, a settlement just a few miles north of Nokomis, Illinois? Related to Wenona, Illinois, south of Magnolia? Oh, it's a terrible net to be caught in. We won't go there today.

Entering Fayette County from the north on Highway 51, I see trees massed in all directions like banks of hills rolling away. I saw such a thickness of trees a little farther to the north, too, north of Macon, like a wall of trees in the distance. The heaviness of trees, I think, would make the North Dakotans claustrophobic, ay? Rugby, North Dakota, stands at the very edge of the middle west, and if the middle west is about anything it is about knowing and accepting limits, accepting such a stockade of trees. As Jerry Rocheleau suggested, out towards Rugby too many trees will make a fellow nervous. What's as important as knowing our middle western limits, I suppose, is accept-ing them. And understanding that the great wheel turns in its own due course - seed and green shoot, mature stalk and ripe head of grain, the harvest and the litter of harvest, and the land turning back for another season. The turn and return of everything. I write this the day after the shuttle Columbia burned up over Texas trying to re-enter the earth's atmosphere, twenty minutes from touchdown in Florida. Seven of humankind's astronauts died, seven of our star-men and star-women. God bless them, God bless them all.

I arrived in Vandalia about 12:30 p.m. I took lunch - General Tso's chicken - at the Chinese restaurant out where Interstate 70, Highway 51, and Highway 40 all congeal. It was as good a batch of General Tso's chicken as I've been served anywhere, in a place devoted mostly to take-out, with plastic silverware and foam plates, cans of pop, Formica table tops. The place is a little hidden treasure for those of us who like a sauce that bites back.

There really is a heat wave. I had to take my coat off and leave it in the car for the walk into the restaurant for lunch. This is not North Dakota.

When I stepped back outside into the lovely afternoon, I wondered if Vandalia is migrating north and west along the Interstate. Fast food places, the grocery store, the motels at the intersection of I-70 and Highway 51.

Walmart and Ponderosa and another development of businesses along Highway 40 a mile or so to the west. Downtown I count - what - eight store fronts that look empty along the main drag, which is Gallatin Street, not Main Street. There are a couple braces of nice Harley Davidsons in front of a watering hole downtown. There are some ups and downs to the topography of Vandalia, some turns and curves, twists and bends, as if the city were a major river town, when all I see is the Kaskaskia. Perhaps the Kaskasia is more major than I think.

I cross what I'll call the "Going to the Sun Bridge" near the original Illinois statehouse downtown. When was this bridge built, why was it built to point you at the sky as you start to cross, why hasn't it been replaced? A set of railroad tracks passes beneath. If one is headed north, there is a stop sign right at the end of the bridge, where the cross street has the right of way. Why is that, I wonder. The history of a place is written in such cues of landscape.

I wonder - what is the Vandalia Railroad and where does it go? The building that houses the office of the Vandalia Railroad looks like the kind of building where a poet would have his office, if poets had offices. The building appears to sit very near the edge of city property. The Vandalia Railroad's tracks, they look aged and rusting rather than shiny with use, they don't appear to connect to the mainline that runs east and west through Vandalia. The little railroad that could, with an office building fit for poets. I'll have to find out more.

My fortune cookie at lunch said: "Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time." I spent a couple hours walking the streets of Vandalia, trying to get the lay of the city. Fellows on their Harley Davidsons waved at me as they passed. Drivers in passing cars waved. Friendly folks.

When I stopped at Walmart out on Highway 40 to buy some blank audio tapes, though, I heard some fellow not treating his woman very nice. I kept walking back to my car, I sat in the car making notes for a bit, I heard another fellow yelling at his woman. I know one can't generalize from a couple of instances, yet a poet always wants a single instance to be all the time. I need more experience.

People in Vandalia speak broadly and a little more slowly than the folks of Rugby, North Dakota; you wouldn't mistake any of the people from Vandalia for Canadians, ay?

***

I'm to stay tonight and tomorrow night at the Brazle Inn, a bed and breakfast out in the country northwest of Brownstown. Late enough in the afternoon, I headed in that direction. When I arrived, I was greeted by Vernon Brazle, who had one wing in a contraption to keep it from moving. He'd had surgery on his left shoulder January 3rd. He had been icing his shoulder when I came to the door. His wife Judy was upstairs making up my bed.

Judy came downstairs and we talked. She comes from a railroad family of long standing. Her great-grandfather had moved from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he worked as a farm hand, then got on with the railroad. When the workers on the railway out of Danville, Illinois, went out on strike, Great-grandfather came east to Danville as a strike-breaker. His grandson, Judy's father, would be the union president of those same crews two generations later. Great-grandfather, the scab worker, was eventually killed in a railway accident; his grandson, the union president, Judy's father, was killed in another train accident. Would this be the Danville train?

Judy and Vernon met at the University of Illinois. Vernon was raised on a homestead just across the creek from the bed and breakfast. When I'm offered my choice of rooms upstairs, the one commemorating the railroad side of the family or the one with farm implements that Vernon's dad had used and quilts that his mother had made, I pick the more local farm implements and quilts. I always picked the local; that's part of my problem, I suppose - insisting the local is important. That's how I ended up on this Vagabond expedition, isn't it?

***

February 3, 2003
I met Panzi Blackwell at the radio station this morning about 8:00 a.m., to appear on her radio show "Party Line" 8:15-9:00 a.m. along with the radio professional Dan Michael. I also met Panzi's husband Bill Blackwell who was at the station, he waited for Panzi during the program. I received a tape of the program afterwards from Panzi so I'll have the memories of Vandalia that she spoke of on the air.

Linda Hanabarger, my Vandalia contact, stopped at the radio station briefly after the program and said hello. She was downtown to print out some materials she needed for a presentation in Springfield, Illinois. Her printer at home had stopped working. Linda's voice had stopped working too - she had a bad case of laryngitis - unfortunate, in the face of her impending presentation. The show goes on.

Afterwards, Panzi, Bill, and I went out to Jay's Inn Restaurant for either a late breakfast (second for me) or early lunch - Bill and Panzi insisted on buying. Love is food in Vandalia, too.

Panzi grew up in Vandalia. She was born on the banks of the Kaskaskia River and has never moved farther away than Brownstown where she and Bill live now, fulfilling Panzi's dream of living in the woods. They have two miniature horses, a burro, five dogs, a goose, a cat. What am I missing?

Panzi gave me tips on several people in Vandalia I need to talk to.

Panzi came to writing about 1986. The woman who'd been doing the Brownstown locals had retired and the Vandalia Leader-Union needed a correspondent. She said she'd give it a try, which she did. Then the editor of the Effingham daily paper asked her to write a feature - "Fayette Focus" - once a month for his paper. So the editor of the Leader-Union asked her to do a feature once a week, "Fayette Faces." Finally John Harris, manager of WPBM Radio, asked her to do the "Party Line" program and she said she'd give it a try. She thought she'd do it for six months and now it has been two years. She came to the task of free-lance writer with a varied background - working in hospital and nursing home and shoe factory and whatever else that I've missed. She has never taken any journalism classes, she simply has a knack for telling people's stories.

When she was asked to do the radio show, she'd told John Harris she wouldn't be good on radio because she sounds like Ma Kettle when she talks. "John said I didn't sound that bad," Panzi recalled. "Notice he didn't say I sounded good." There is a little southern backroad twang in her speech.

Panzi jokes that she has lied about her age for so long that she can't remember the true dates of events in her life any longer.

Panzi's husband, Bill, was raised on a farm west of Vandalia, he worked in Vandalia's street department and retired from that recently. He wasn't even retired a week when he thought maybe he had made a mistake - "I didn't have to go to work, but I was bushed." He seems very patient about Panzi's habit of bringing home stray animals, sometimes two at a time. He runs a few head of long horn cattle himself.

*

I arrived at the weekly Evergreen Outreach get-together at the big meeting room in Vandalia's United Methodist Church just before the wave crested, which is to say I was there fifteen minutes early, about 12:45 p.m. I had time to meet Phyllis Rames and a few other people, then took a seat among the crowd of a hundred. The afternoon program opened with a rendition of the Outreach song, new words put to a familiar tune; followed by another song, again new words to a familiar tune. Evergreen Outreach is twenty-three years old, it brings together old folks from assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and the hospital's long term facilities, along with a group of Vandalia's handicapped.

"Inclusion," Phyllis Rames would say, is the theme of her life; and those who come to Evergreen Outreach seem to appreciate being included.

Phyllis is an original brick in the Evergreen edifice. She has a Master's degree in English and has taught part-time at St. Elmo High School, Greenville College, and Graham Correctional Center in Hillsboro, Illinois, but never let her job get in the way of her Monday appointment at Evergreen Outreach. Her first business has always been family, she said, then Evergreen Outreach, then teaching English part-time.

Phyllis's husband was a family practitioner in Vandalia from the 1950s until he retired just this past December. He was a practicing family doctor in a world headed more and more towards managed care medical clinics and medical specialization. I arranged an interview for Wednesday with Phyllis and her husband when we'll talk about Evergreen Outreach and the career of a family doctor in a small town in rural America.

I also set up interviews with some of the people I met. One is tomorrow with Mary Peyton Meyer, 93, at the Hospital's Long Term Care facility. She said she would have to miss her exercises to talk with me. She is from St. Peter originally, she has lived in the country all her life.

Delbert Cothern played a couple of songs on harmonica for the Evergreen group. A lot of people have told me to talk to Delbert. He has been paralyzed since he was a young man. On a dare he had dived into the river without putting his arms out in front of him on the dive, and his collision with the river bottom paralyzed his legs for life. He sat in a wheel chair dressed in blue overalls, the microphone in front of him, he said "I'm gonna play an old fiddle tune here called 'Silver Bells,'" and his harmonica took off like an accordion, as lively as a fiddle would be. Then he said: "Now here's a waltz," and it's 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Where did he learn his songs? Was he interested in music before he was paralyzed, or did that come later? What has sustained him over the years? When I asked Delbert if I could interview him tomorrow, there was a playful dance of light in his eyes as if to say, "Silly boy," but he said yes.

I set interviews with Pauline ("I'm the last of the Sampson family") Hicks and Beulah ("Every hour is spoken for") Brown, a very busy volunteer. I took down the names and phone numbers of a few other people I'll want to talk to - Beverly Hood, who sang "Let There Be Peace on Earth" to a room that could not be silent; people had to share the sense of community by talking or they had to sing along, they could not contain themselves.

I'll want to talk to Floyd Meseke. He had been a farmer in the area. When he'd heard a radio program about the Evergreen Outreach program, Phyllis told me, he had called her and said: "When I retire, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to volunteer on transportation at Evergreen Outreach." And so he has.

And Joan Kelly, from London, with quite a British accent still. She has lived in London, she lived three years in Los Angeles, she came to Vandalia, and "I would never leave Vandalia."

Inge Compton, one of the piano players for the program, came here from Austria and stayed even when she divorced.

I was sitting next to Mary Peyton Meyer at the program, and when they came around handing out bells for the songs with bell-orchestra accompaniment, she made sure I got one of them. She didn't want to play it herself, she was sure I'd understand the instructions and would do just fine. There was really no arguing with her, she'd made up her mind. Phyllis Rames was up on stage, and when she held up a card that had the same color on it as my bell, that's when I was to ring the bell. The first song she had selected for the bell orchestra today was "Let There Be Peace on Earth," which Beverly Hood had sung earlier. "Bev and I must be thinking of the same thing - peace in the world," Phyllis said. She started the tape recorder, she held up the cards in time to the music, the bells rang out "Let There Be Peace on Earth." Then we did "Amazing Grace." By the third song I was having such a good time with the bell I don't remember the name of the song. My bell was red; whenever I rang it, a "C" note pealed out, joining the notes of two or three other bells to form a chord.

When it was my turn to speak to the folks gathered for Evergreen Outreach, I told them I couldn't help recognizing the sense of community in the room. The lively conversation. Singing, ringing of bells. Applause for those with birthdays, for the winners from the Olympic Corner of the room. Paintings proudly displayed on the stage. Everyone was welcome, they all seemed to feel included.

I told them about my Vagabond project, that I was already setting up interviews with people in the room. There was a glow in the crowd, pride that the people of Vandalia were being included. When I finished, a few people took the microphone on the pretext of asking a question. One of them led us through a version of "God Bless America," ragged but right. Others offered suggestions of people in Vandalia I should interview.

Even when the program was over, even as those in wheel chairs were being lifted hydraulically up into the Operation OUTING bus, I had a hard time leaving. Phyllis and I were talking, Phyllis was pointing out some of the volunteers without whom the Evergreen Outreach program could not operate.

Finally I walked out into a rainy mid-afternoon. I headed down to City Hall looking for John Feightner of the Main Street program - he was not in his office. If I want to find him there this week, I'll have to get there before noon. Then - on the half chance they'd do it - I went to the Evans Library next to City Hall to see if I could get a library card so I could check out The Talk of Vandalia by Joseph P. Lyford, which stirred up the talk in Vandalia when it was published in 1962 by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Well, I couldn't get a library card, and after trying to figure ways to get someone else to check it out for me, librarian Candy Zeman checked it out on her own card and gave me the book to take back to Brazle Inn to read. She didn't have to do that, but she did. Then she introduced me to the three women working with the genealogical materials and historical books belonging to the Genealogical Society. I got a tour of those resources. "This is like dying and going to heaven," I said. One of the women gave me a look as if to say "Obviously you're not trying to label them and secure them and keep them in order." And she'd be right - instead, I was reaping the benefit of her work and all the other volunteers who give their time and energy to make such resources available for the rest of us.

Finally, I left the library, it was raining, I tucked The Talk of Vandalia which had been entrusted to my care into the protection of a notebook and headed for my car. I've sat here for more than an hour scratching notes, fogging up the windows, enduring a deluge of downpour, then a gentle rain. Then the rain stops. It was fifty degrees this morning as I drove into Vandalia, it is supposed to be ten degrees by the time I drive in tomorrow morning.

It's 5:00 p.m. now. I think I'll go up to the Playground Cafe and get some supper - the Songwriters' Group will be playing there, I think, about 7:00 p.m.

*

Multiple choice: Playground Cafe is: (a) a coffee shop with fancy lattes and espressos, with a sideline of Italian subs or pizza when needed; (b) an extension of Guiseppi's Pizza next door; or (c) an extension of a family's living room with couch, Nintendo game, and three middle school or junior high girls being sassy with each other, especially the one with the red hair. The dad had to come in and quiet them down. A young fellow, not much more than high school age, seemed to be minding the store next door and said he was training a waitress. I ordered an Italian sub and a diet Pepsi. Later he asked if I was "that writer fellow." Later still he told me my meal was "on the house." Food is love in Vandalia, too.

I wonder how much being "that writer fellow" changes people's reactions to me - what they tell me, what they do (or don't do) while I'm around?

Later, as two of the girls were updating with grease pencils some of the signs listing coffees and other offerings, they talked to each other laconically. You wonder if their language rolls with a touch of the local twang, or is it simply the infinite boredom of junior high that bends their speech? They didn't seem to be sisters, for one of them asked: "What time do you have to go home?"

When the songwriters gathered, there were three people singing. One was an older woman named Cindy who sang a couple original songs on her turn, then turned to songs that belonged to others; she's a good guitar player, too.

A fellow named Forbes, whose first name I didn't catch, sang his own songs; they all sounded like country songs but he has a wickedness in his words. One song about how much a fellow's wife loved him had more to do with him robbing a bank in her dress and wig, killing a teller; that she swung by the neck at the end of a rope by song's end, that's how much she loved him. Forbes has 500-some songs, most of them, I gather, turning on some bit of slyness. He spent his career with the National Weather Service. After retirement he and his wife moved back to Vandalia from out near Billings, Montana.

Ed Taylor, Jr., was the youngster among the three musicians, yet was the leader of the songwriters who'd gathered. His first song was lovely praise for one's hometown - "Main Street Is Alive." A later song also seemed to speak to the loveliness of being where you are. The final song he sang was by request, it was almost a hymn, "Have Faith."

As the songwriters played and sang, girls played a video game in the corner, Forbes' cousin Stanley Forbes sat next to me talking about family history - Pauline Sampson Hicks is his aunt. On the carpet, a baby played quietly, happy as you please, at one point staring intently at Ed Young as if she'd not ever seen anyone quite like him. The songwriters talked freely with each other and with those enjoying the music. I thought I heard someone call the young fellow who gave me supper by his name, Tom. During the music, drinks were provided to musicians and listeners alike, no charge, at least they didn't let me pay. Towards the end, a tasty order of special breadsticks the size of a large pizza was brought out and served, and you'd be a Scrooge not to enjoy a piece or two. Food is love.

The last song of the evening was Taylor's "Have Faith," like a good night prayer, and we headed home for rest, preparing to face another day.

***

February 4, 2003
Delbert Cothern faces another day every day. He was paralyzed when he was sixteen years old, diving into Ramsey Creek on a family outing. He and a cousin kept challenging each other to dive into the river with hands at the back of the head instead of extended to split the water as they entered. Once more Delbert dove in with hands behind his head and this time hit bottom; he broke his neck and has been paralyzed since.

That was back in the late 1930s, I suppose. Before the accident Delbert was the typical farm kid and would rather be outdoors than anywhere. After the accident he lay motionless in bed for months on end. His folks had to move off the farm and into town because Delbert's sweat glands had shut down, he needed to stay in front of an electric fan to stay cool, and the farm didn't have electricity yet. His father opened a garage in town and went into the car repair business. His mother worked at the hospital. With effort, Delbert eventually could get around on crutches and could move well enough that he did most of the housekeeping for his parents. Out of the money his mother paid him for doing the housework, Delbert saved enough to buy two acres out in the country. His parents put a trailer house on the property and Delbert and his parents moved there. Delbert kept a large garden on the acreage. He couldn't walk, but he could stand without support. He would hoe as much as he could reach from one place, he'd use the hoe as a crutch and move forward, he'd hoe some more. Through the years he kept the freezer and cupboards stocked with food from the garden; he would bury the potatoes, onions, and carrots in a hole in the garden covered over with straw to keep these root vegetables for use all through the winter.

When his grandfather died, Delbert's father inherited the house in Ramsey; Delbert and his parents moved there, though Delbert didn't really like living so close to neighbors. Delbert's mother died perhaps twenty-five years ago, his father lived until 1997. In 1987 Delbert fell and broke his leg and it didn't want to heal. Eventually, in 1996, he moved into the Cherrywood facility.

Delbert is the harmonica player I heard at Evergreen Outreach yesterday. He comes from a musical family and taught himself mandolin when he was a youngster. He told me he was a little guy for his age and the mandolin was just the right size for him. He learned his licks from Roy Acuff's mandolin player on Grand Ole Opry, but didn't copy him exactly.

After the accident that crippled him, Delbert no longer could play mandolin. His paralysis and weakness meant that if he were to continue playing music he'd have to learn an instrument he could play with one hand. He took up the harmonica and taught himself old fiddle tunes and traditional bluegrass on harmonica. He'd always been something of a shy country boy, so when a friend who played guitar out around the area asked Delbert to play out with him, Delbert had declined, he didn't think he could do that. But, bit by bit, playing in front of bigger and bigger audiences, Delbert has lost his shyness and now, he said, he'd just as soon play for a hundred as for ten. He has played in Illinois Old Time Music Harmonica Championships, coming in as high as second. He won a national championship in 1988 at Avoca, Iowa, tearing off renditions of "Soldier's Joy" and "Silver Bells" and a waltz. He has also competed at a contest somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee but hasn't been able to come in higher than fourth there; that championship, Delbert said, draws a lot of great harmonica players from Nashville, and they are tough to beat.

Delbert has a four-track recorder set up in his room in the nursing home and stays busy learning new songs, writing songs of his own, and recording them. He teaches himself more fiddle tunes by taking a recorder to fiddle contests, recording the competitions, bringing the tape home and teaching himself the songs he wants to learn. He has hopes that one or two of his own songs might soon be recorded by a country artist he has made the acquaintance of. On the 13-song tape of his music that Delbert has released, Just an Old Man and His Old Music: Old Timey Type Music No. 1, he refers himself "Ol' Delbert." There is harmonica on the tape, of course, there is singing and talking and whistling; many of the songs he recorded are his own compositions, he introduces them with his Ol' Delbert drawl. Sometimes he sings harmony with himself. He makes copies of the tapes to sell as the need arises and earns only enough, he said, "for a little pocket money." He's not so much interested in the money as in the music, I think. It's telling that he's got a four-track recorder in his room, and no television - "I always gotta be doing some-thing," he said, "and I'd rather be making music than anything else."

Does Delbert think he's an inspiration to others? "Well, I hope so, but I don't know if I am." He's not one to brag, not about his music, not about the example he sets for the rest of us.
Ol' Delbert keeps on making music.

*

I had a lovely lunch with the Vandalia Rotary Club today at Ponderosa. I felt welcomed. Just as soon as they entered the room, I think, every member walked up to me to introduce himself or herself and welcome me individually. I had half an hour to talk to the Rotary; I don't know how long I took, but I guess we got out of there on time. The Rotarians asked some questions afterwards, including the shrewd one about "How are you supporting this project?" I had to admit that in addition to using up my retirement, it's mostly my wife who makes this possible, and some twenty-five folks who have made monetary contributions to the success of the endeavor. I talked for a while afterwards about legal issues and law enforcement in the county with Vandalia's state's attorney, Stephen Friedel. I promised I'd interview him on my next trip to Vandalia. I also talked some with Dave Bell from the Vandalia Leader-Union, who is originally from Eagle Grove, Iowa, not that far from my old stomping grounds.

*

In the afternoon I interviewed Mary Peyton Meyer, who has been a Fayette County resident all of her life. What is her claim to fame? Well, she taught in area schools for forty-seven years. She's 97 years old and still mows her own very large lawn, "and down around the pond, that usually takes me half a day." In 1921 (that's not a misprint) Mary started writing local items for the Vandalia paper about Frogtown, a crossroads in the county, and she still does it today. That is eighty-two years of writing local items. "I get paid $15.00 a week whether it's five lines or five hundred lines," she said.

And then Mary has been on Johnny Carson. A producer for the show called her up and said she'd heard Mary has been writing for the Vandalia paper since 1921, would she come be on the Tonight Show and talk to Johnny? Mary said she was flown to California first class, a limousine picked her up at the airport and took her to her hotel, picked her up at the hotel to take her to the show. Mary had gotten her hair done special before leaving for the show, "but that wasn't good enough for them, they had to do it again." In the dressing room, the producer told her, "Now Johnny will try to get ahead of you, don't you let him, you just say what you have to say and don't let him get ahead."

"Whenever Johnny had something to say," Mary remembered, "I had an answer right quick." Johnny asked her how she controlled unruly boys in the classroom; before Johnny knew it, Mary's face was inches from his and she'd blasted him LOUD with the whistle that was always her classroom companion. You can imagine Johnny's look of surprise.

How many people lived in Frogtown, Johnny wanted to know. "It's about twelve people," Mary said, "it'll be thirteen when you come with us." Johnny had been teasing Mary that he would move to Frogtown, "but I didn't believe a word of it, I gave it right back to him."

When I met her Mary had recently broken her ankle falling down the steps at her back door and was in a wheel chair. "Just as soon as this gets healed up," she said, "I'll go back to living in my own home and mowing my own lawn."

"O Lord," she said, "it seems like I have so many friends and so many people who know me. When they come up and say 'Mrs. Meyer," then I know it's one of my students from Brownstown. They all know me and I don't know who they are. How could I? They all look so different now and how many children do you suppose I taught in forty-seven years?"

*

The "Meet the Author" reception sponsored by the Fayette County Genealogical/Historical Society was scheduled from 5:30-7:00 p.m. There was coffee and punch and cookies. When I was introduced, it seemed as if every chair in the room was filled, and still a few more came in later. I made an informal presentation, speaking from a sitting position, making the connections between writing my memoir, Curlew:Home, and coming to the Vagabond project. As I listened to myself talk, it sounded as if the growth of the Vagabond idea was a clear and logical extension of concerns I'd raised when I returned in my writing to the place and time I'd grown up. Of course, the development of the Vagabond idea does make clear and logical sense, given my concern for place and people of a place. Yet I'd never gained the picture of it all at once, it came in fits and starts and pieces, I know it did. But you cannot reconstruct that piecemeal sense of it once you begin to see the thing whole. And every day with every new experience my conception of it is re-shaped.

As at my presentation in Alexandria, there were good questions and soon enough people were sharing their memories of Vandalia with each other, surprising each other with such tidbits as "the brewery stored beer kegs in the basement of my building." Many people in the room didn't even know that Vandalia had once had a brewery.

At the end of the reception, I sold some copies of Curlew:Home. Linda Hanabarger presented me with a copy of Vandalia, Illinois by Brenda Baptist Protz, which I'd seen the night before at the gathering of songwriters, Stan Forbes had a copy of it. He was at this reception, too. I said to him, "I was jealous of you yesterday, having that book. I'm not jealous of you now."
They had a hard time getting us out of the library at 7:00 p.m., closing time, but eventually we herded ourselves into the cold night air.

Katie Thaman, the features editor for the Leader-Union, had been at my presentation to the Rotary Club and she had also been at this reception. She said she had a few questions she wanted to follow up on with me. When could we do that? Well, my car was parked right in front of the Leader-Union office, the office was only a few doors down the street from the library. "If you can get into the office," I said, "we can do it now." Having worked in the printing business, I insisted on seeing the Goss Community presses in the pressroom before we sat down for the interview, which ended up as much conversation as Q&A. Katie shared with me her perspective on community journalism in Vandalia and her perspective on some of the people I'd be talking to, based on her experiences profiling them for the Leader-Union. Eventually Katie expects to end up at a bigger newspaper in a big city but she is not ready to make such a move because her position at the Leader-Union allows her to learn so much about so many aspects of journalism. "I'm not yet ready to specialize and confine myself to only one aspect of this work," she said.

She appreciates that in a community like Vandalia, she gets constant feedback on her work. "If you screw up, you hear about it," she said, "but much more often people are complimenting you, saying what a nice article that was."

*

February 6, 2003
My first interview yesterday was with Pauline Sampson Hicks. When she answered my knock on her apartment door, she was just taking her hair out of curlers. It turns out she'd expected me to interview her Tuesday morning, while I had it on my calendar for Wednesday. In any case, she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about her family history and her life.
Her parents were among the part of the family that moved to Vandalia from Effingham back in the early part of the twentieth century. Her Uncle John served a short term as Vandalia's mayor about 1918. Her uncles established various businesses in Vandalia and prospered. Her father was a carpenter and was less prosperous than his brothers. The Great Depression hit her family hard, such that she was not sent to high school after she finished the eighth grade.

Pauline left Vandalia for a life in Phoenix with her husband who devoted his life to a music ministry in his church. Pauline herself, to overcome the lack of a high school education, went to business school then to college in Arizona, finishing a degree and working for twenty-some years as a youth probation officer in Phoenix. Many of Pauline's relatives moved to Phoenix on the strength of the base Pauline and her husband had established there. Her sister, Stanley Forbes' mother, was one of them; remember, I met Stanley Forbes at the Monday night songwriters' session at the Playground Cafe.

Pauline's work and her husband's afforded them long summer vacations during which they returned to Vandalia year after year to spend time at a cottage on Lake Vandalia. "Vandalia kept calling us back," Pauline says. She'd left Vandalia, but she couldn't stay away. When she and her husband retired, they returned to live in Vandalia, yet they spent some years, too, in Florida, and other states. It was always to Vandalia they returned.

Pauline cared for her husband in later years as his eyesight diminished and Alzheimer's worsened; at the end she moved to Jefferson City, Missouri, so a son who lived there could help care for her husband, too. Eventually the Alzheimer's progressed to the point that Pauline's husband spent the last ten years of his life in a nursing home. When he died, it was to Vandalia that Pauline returned.

Pauline remembered that during the Great Depression, her mother took care of the financial matters and was always able to find a few more dollars when needed in the sugar bowl where she kept her money. In her own life, Pauline took care of financial affairs in similar fashion, except for eight or ten months after her husband had questioned one of her financial decisions. She'd said "OK, here, you do it." Keeping track of figures was difficult for her husband as his eyesight was already poor; after a time she relented and took back keeping the family's books.
"Anyway, my husband was a musician," Pauline said, tipping her head as if to suggest he was as dreamy and impractical as a poet. Dreamy or not, her husband agreed with Pauline that they should all along be putting money away for the future so that today Pauline is at least comfortable in her retirement.

She can't really explain why and how Vandalia has kept pulling her back, but it has, it kept attracting her, it was her home town, and now once again it's her home.

*

Overheard at the Vandalia Senior Center: "It's pretty out there but don't plan on planting your garden yet." It's February 5, 2003. Even in Vandalia, it's still winter.

*

I was at the Senior Center to interview Beulah Brown.

"I was in college at Eastern Illinois University," she recalled. "The superintendent from Vandalia was in summer school with me. I didn't that know. Then he approached me about coming here as a third grade teacher. I was thrilled, but too poor to make the move. I was in Effingham. I taught the McCoy School in Effingham County. It was a 'model' school, starting to serve hot lunches. The children and myself cooked our meals at noon. Teaching at McCoy School, I could live at home and pay back what I owed for my education. This was in the 1940s."

"I continued at McCoy School for two years," Beulah said. "Then the superintendent from Vandalia hunted me up again. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like to come to Vandalia?' he asked. At that time the town and the school were both progressing faster than Effingham was. Now it's the reverse. By that time I had paid my debt and saved some money. I came to Vandalia for $100 a month and I paid $25 a month rent. Quite a friendship evolved out of that experience. The superintendent and his wife, the principal and his wife, and my husband and I all got together once a month for forty years."

Buelah's husband Dave had been the farm loan manager at First National Bank. "His sister taught in the same building as I did," Beulah said, explaining how they'd met. "She invited me to go to church with them, and from then on I couldn't get rid of him. We went together two and a half years. He was Lincoln-esque, 6'4" and as straight up and down as you could make them. He was a special, special person. He had the opportunity to become the Allis Chalmers Implement dealer in Brownstown. This was the time of World War II."

"We were married in 1946," Beulah continued. "I quit teaching in 1949 and helped keep books for the business. I had two daughters. I taught here for five years, and for two years before that. It was in my blood. But I thought I should take care of the girls. I drove the oldest daughter to kindergarten in St. Elmo. By the time the second daughter was ready for school, the new superintendent in Vandalia called and said 'Would you come and teach? School starts in three days and I don't have a teacher.' I talked it over with Dave. The superintendent would have to make some concessions. I'd get to bring my daughter with me and I'd teach my own daughter."

"My first classes were large, thirty-nine kids, and no curriculum," Beulah remembered. "I had to write my own curriculum."

Her husband was an adventuresome fellow. He bought a new car, drove it up to Alaska, sold the car, and flew home. "Then he did it again," Beulah said. "Then he said he wanted to take the family up there, the summer before I started teaching again. A construction company up there wanted a big dump truck. He put one car in the back of the dump truck and I drove one with the two girls. We'd meet at mile marker posts. We sold the dump truck and the new station wagon right away. We kept the other car and drove all over Alaska where you could drive. Then we stayed in a two room apartment in Anchorage. Back then Anchorage had two paved streets. At the end of August, we sold the car and flew home. The fellow we sold the car to drove us to the airport, we didn't even have to get a taxi."

When her husband sold his Allis Chalmers business, he went into politics. He ran for County Treasurer but was defeated by fifty votes. He accepted a deputy sheriff position. "I had never before seen him with a gun in his hand," Beulah said. Then he accepted a position transporting prisoners from the correctional institution to Chicago.

"We still lived in Brownstown," Beulah said. "We'd pass each other on the road, that was about it." In 1959 they moved back to Vandalia, to the house where she lives now. She continued teaching, twenty nine years of teaching kindergarten.

On October 11, 1970, her husband had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and passed away. "Two weeks earlier," said Beulah, "we had taken both our daughters to Southern Illinois University, one was a freshman, the other a junior. We had to take two cars, I was driving one and Dave was driving the other, one girl in each car. Halfway there, we switched which girl we had in which car. Before we got home, he wanted to run over to the festival at Altamont, I think he didn't want to go home because there was no one in the house."

"The girls had just come home for their first weekend," she said. "We were going to a big political doings at Altamont. We picked up some friends to go to the barbecue. He was fine, we got our plates, he said he was hungry, he took one bite and that was it."

"I was left with everything to finish," Beulah said, "I saw the girls through college and they both got their Master's degrees. I continued to teach until 1996. Since then I've lost our elder daughter who left two lovely daughters of her own. The other daughter moved to Texas for her husband's job. I thought my world would come to an end. But it has worked out fine. I have four grandsons, too, very fine boys, attending Oberlin, Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, Texas A&M, and a high school senior already accepted at Texas A&M. Since my daughter's death, the whole family has made it to my house for a few hours every Christmas, every year."

"I remember we tapped maple trees in our neighborhood," Beulah said. "I used to dash home to see how much sap we'd collected in our buckets. You'd cook and cook and cook."

"I love to travel," she told me. "I've been to all fifty states and several foreign countries. I'd travel more but my sister had a serious stroke five and a half years ago, we brought her here for long term care. I live three blocks away and I go every morning and every night to help care for her. I call on a lot of people who are home-bound, take them soup and cookies. I have always taught Sunday school. I have a wonderful group of older women I keep in touch with, some of them are over 90 years old."

"Each day something develops that I can help somebody," Beulah said. "I like people. The impulse to help people? We are supposed to serve people. Things just happen that I'm supposed to do something for somebody. Each day I pray for Him to guide me. I'm a pink lady at the hospital, a volunteer. People say 'we need someone to help with activities, would you?' and I say 'Sure.'"

"I visit a lot of people in the hospital because I know them," Beulah said. "I take them magazines, sherbet. I work the blood bank each time it's here, also I give blood. You know what - you feel much healthier if you give your blood. At least I do."

"I came to Vandalia in 1943-1944 and I stayed," Beulah said. "I enjoy it here. I'd take my grandsons, we'd go downtown. Everywhere people would want to stop and talk to me. My grandsons said: 'Grammy, we can't get home because everybody knows you.'"

"You help people and people help you," she said.

"Lincoln Park. I really wanted that park and worked on that. I was not the only one. It takes a lot of people to do things. When you volunteer, people will say 'Well, she does, I should...."
"Vandalia is friendly," she said. "The community is willing to help you."

*

I also interviewed Barney Wright at the Senior Center. Barney told me he was the first baby born in Vandalia's Mark Greer Hospital. He had worked at Cain's Drug Store for Mr. Cain from 1950 until 1969 when Cain died. At that point Barney took over operation of the business until his retirement in 1985. Cain had established the business in 1937. When Barney retired, the business continued - pharmacist Darryl Tjaden took over and remains the only druggist downtown. Barney had employed Tjaden as a pharmacist just out of school, he remembered. "He still had to take his board exam when I hired him."

Barney got his own pharmacy license after World War II on the GI Bill by correspondence course. Actually getting his license took him about nine years. He was in the last group of students able to take pharmacy by correspondence and get their license while working with an established pharmacist. Thereafter he had to take continuing education courses to stay current with changes in the business. He said he has seen a lot of changes - a lot more red tape, more new medicines. "When I first started," he noted, "there were hardly any prepared medications, you had to mix them yourself."

At one point Barney looked over at my notebook where I was scribbling hurried notes. "You write a lot better than the doctors do," he observed.

What had attracted him to the business? "My wife was working there behind the counter. She wasn't my wife yet. She was 16, I was 21. I had just gotten out of service. Mr. Cain offered me twice as much money as I was making at the time."

Cain had been a World War I veteran and had gotten his license the same way Barney got his, by correspondence and in association with an established druggist. "He talked me into doing what he'd done," Barney said. "He was more like a father to me than my own dad."

Barney said the drug store had provided a good living for his family over the years. The business was a Walgreen agency when it started. There had been a food counter and soda fountain in it, and books were sold. "I still hear people talk about that soda fountain," Barney said; he took it out when he remodeled the place in 1973. "Some old coffee drinkers didn't like it that I remodeled. They had been able to spend a whole morning drinking a nickel cup of coffee."

*

I had lunch at the Senior Center and met many of the folks gathered there for ham and sweet potato, lima beans, and something called "sin salad," which is something you'd find at an Iowa picnic under another name. I gave a short presentation about my Vagabond project; it had to be short, you don't want to get caught between folks and their bingo.

*

I spent a good part of the afternoon with Don and Phyllis Rames at their home on 7th Street. I was interested in talking with Don because he spent nearly all the years of his practice of medicine as a family doctor in Vandalia. From 1956 to 1984 he practiced obstetrics as well as general medicine, delivering more than 2000 babies over those years. He told me it was gratifying to deliver a baby, then years later to deliver her daughter, and years after that to deliver her granddaughter. He said his relationship with his patients was more than a doctor-patient relationship - "these people were my friends." The high point of his practice was sharing their joy at the birth of a baby, new life, promise of the future, hope for tomorrow. The hard part - "telling a friend he or she had cancer and talking with them about everything that entailed." Don got to share Vandalia's joys, he also shared its sorrows.

How did medicine change over the forty-six years of his practice? Malpractice claims drove up the cost of insurance such that he had to leave obstetrics in 1984 even though he loved the work. "Some people think every baby is guaranteed to be a perfect baby," Don said, "and that's not the case. And it's not always the doctor's fault. Lawyers are quick to file suit, whatever the merits of the case, and insurance rates go up." Government regulation, Medicare, and insurance have also affected the practice of medicine.

How else did medicine change? When Don was looking to set up practice in the mid-50s, rural areas of the middle west were generally well-supplied with physicians. Today, he said, there are fewer doctors who wish to practice in rural America. Federal incentives are now used to draw doctors to under-served areas.

There was also less night and weekend work now than there used to be, Don said. Partly, he hasn't been called to deliver babies in the middle of the night since 1984; partly, he hadn't had to answer emergency calls in recent years now that there's a 24-hour emergency room at the hospital. In addition, several doctors have banded together to cover each other's weekend calls on a rotating basis, with the result that physicians can now depend on some time off.

Technological advances have also meant better medical care for patients, yet Don would probably say that healing has as much to do with the physician's hand and care and concern - the relationship - as it does with new technology and new medicines. He doesn't say it but one senses that the comfort of the physician's hand was always of paramount importance in his practice, whatever the state of medical technology.

Phyllis Rames - ah, Phyllis. Ask people in Vandalia and they'll tell you she's the can-do lady, the ultimate volunteer, the one who can find people to help her make it happen. She exudes a strength and calmness and peace; determination seems to be her middle name. And, indeed, she has grown to strength and peace and determination. Early on, however, she was reserved and lonely and afraid. "When I was 13," Phyllis said, "I was forced to take over the household duties because of an increasingly tumul-tuous home life. My father was a family physician - an excellent one, by the way - who was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His extreme mood swings made me fearful of him. My mother - stellar home-maker and mother - had periodic bouts of mental illness." Phyllis feared what her father might do to her mother; she was embarrassed to think her family might have become "the talk of the town." She says she put a mask "firmly in place" that she was to wear for two decades. "Eventually, with the loving help of a wonderful Christian mentor, Helen, I developed a healthy, firm relationship with God, who has guided me since the mid-1970s in all that I have aspired to do."

When Don and Phyllis moved to Vandalia in 1956 and Don found fulfillment in the practice of medicine, Phyllis gave herself to the care of her four children. Yet inside she was lonely, very lonely. The mask was still firmly in place. Either the community didn't know how to reach out to the doctor's wife and welcome her in those early years or Phyllis didn't risk reaching out to her new neighbors. Perhaps her loneliness is the reason Phyllis decided to teach part-time in a high school, a college, a prison. As her self-confidence improved, her participation in the com-munity increased; her involvement with innovative com-munity services was underway - Friends of the Evans Public Library, Friends and Families of Fayette County Hospital, Evergreen Outreach, and Operation OUTING, which Phyllis calls "a bus ministry serving only nursing home residents." A support network began to lift her, she began to "give it all over to God," and within herself she finally became the person she is today.

"The key ministry in my life now is the Evergreen Outreach program," Phyllis said. The program, begun in 1979, brings old people out of nursing homes and handi-capped people out of sheltered workshops Monday after-noons for a few hours of sharing and joy and community in Wesley Hall at the United Methodist Church. Remem-bering the loneliness she'd felt, it's important to Phyllis that Evergreen Outreach be inclusive and welcoming. And though she hadn't thought about it before, she did say that the program gives people living in the regimented environment of nursing homes an opportunity to make decisions on their own. Do they want to come to Evergreen Outreach or not, do they want milk or coffee, cake or cookies, do they want to paint or to play cards, chat with their neighbors or just do nothing at all, sit and enjoy the sweep of noise and life around them? Evergreen Outreach is unique in that it brings people out of the nursing homes, brings them together for sharing and stimulation in different surroundings, rather than taking the program into the nursing home or sheltered workshop. "It's called 'acceptance,'" Phyllis said; she quoted a favorite statement from theologian Paul Tillich, "Accept the fact that you are accepted (by God) and when you experience that, you experience grace."

Doing so much and involved in so many things, by 1990 Phyllis was overwhelmed and went into mild depression. She could have taken medication to lift her from the depression but she was determined to lick it herself, and "by the grace of God," she did. She quotes 1 Corinthians 10:13: "God is faithful and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength."

"Probably people don't know it," she explained, "but I no longer say yes to everything. I can't do everything that I'm asked to. I ask myself the question - will this help people? - and if the answer is yes, I answer the call."

Phyllis always remembers the loneliness she felt and in everything she seeks to include and to welcome. She knows that in helping others, one helps oneself. She believes she would not have grown in all the ways she has if she hadn't given herself "over to the Lord's inspiration and direction" in 1979; the result has been service of others through Evergreen Outreach and the other programs she's been involved in.

*

When I got back to my room at Jay's Inn where I'm staying two nights, I found a note on my door from Mike Travelstead of the high school. I called him. We added two more classes to my schedule for Friday, so I'll be seeing a total of five classes: an Advanced Composition class and an Honors American Literature class today; Freshman Honors English, Sophomore Honors English, and another Advanced Composition class tomorrow. I'll have to change the time of the interview I've set up with Ed Taylor, Jr.

Later I got a phone call from John Feightner who had to cancel the Friday morning interview we have scheduled. We agreed to meet on Saturday.

*

I find that my gift is this: people will tell me things, the most intimate details of their lives. Phyllis Rames said it was so easy to talk to me, she felt so comfortable.

My responsibility is this: I must do the best I can with the information I'm given, I must carry the unspoken pledge of trust into all aspects of this work, I must tell the truth the best I am able, yet not betray anyone. I hope I am good enough a man for the task this is becoming.

***

February 7, 2003
I met Mike Travelstead, Mrs. Bradley, and Jamie Bowen yesterday; they are English teachers at Vandalia High School. I spoke to one of Mrs. Bradley's Advanced Composition classes and to Mike Bradley's Honors American Literature. I gave them a taste of my poetry with one from the Civil War letters, one from the farm series, and one from "Married to Prairie." Then I read some excerpts from Curlew:Home, the selection about setting off from Fairwater to return to Curlew, the passage about storm windows from "Her Most Perfect Day Ever," and paragraphs from my "Meditation at the Old Home Place" near the end of the book. I read two excerpts from Kissing Poetry's Sister, one about scuba diving from "Poet in the Water," the other being the first three paragraphs of the title essay explaining "kissing poetry's sister." I read a paragraph from Mary Morris's contribution to the anthology A Place Called Home and the first two entries from my "Morning Drive Journal," December 17, 1997, and December 18, 1997. And then - finally - I got to talking with the students about my Vagabond project, and about their keeping "place" journals for loading onto the Vagabond web site, possible publication in the Vagabond newsletter, and perhaps being quoted in the book. I told them that I want their journals to be vivid and detailed as the writing that I'd read to them, that I wanted them to write so an alien a thousand years from now could understand Vandalia through their eyes. I gave out business cards so that interested students could e-mail their journals to me - I don't want to have to re-type them.

The English teachers at Vandalia High School are the first in any of the Vagabond communities to take up my offer to speak to their students about my Vagabond project and about the students keeping place journals for publication on the web site. The teachers are offering "extra credit" in class for those students who keep such journals.

After I met the two classes I had lunch in the school cafeteria during fourth period with Mike Travelstead and met several other Vandalia teachers in two waves, as Mike also had fifth period free and we talked through much of fifth period as well.

If the ice and snow we got last night hasn't cancelled school today, I will meet Freshman Honors English at 12:05 p.m., Sophomore Honors at 1:45 p.m., and another Advanced Composition class at 2:30 p.m.

I stopped downtown after leaving the high school yesterday to change the time of my interview with Ed Taylor to 8:15 a.m. today, so I could get to all those classes at the high school. Then I drove sixteen miles west to record fifteen minutes of interview with Martha Radcliff at WGEL in Greenville.

We actually recorded some nineteen minutes of conversation but Martha said she would clean it up and tighten it up and speed it up slightly if she had to, to make it fit the fifteen-minute time slot. We had a wonderful conversation that got recorded, and wonderful conversation before and after the recorder was on. Martha offered some penetrating comments on Vandalia, the area, and the little differences between two communities as near to each other as Greenville and Vandalia. Martha is originally a city girl, one who has chosen to live in rural America because she wants to live here; she has a problem with folks who come into the rural communities thinking they are better than anybody else. It wasn't until I'd talked to Linda Hanabarger by phone back at my room - now I'm at Days Inn - that I understood something of Martha's background. Some ten years ago she and another woman started and tried to sustain an "alternative" paper in Vandalia, one that tended to lift the rug where we sweep all those things we don't like to talk about. The women weren't able to gather enough backing to carry the paper into the future and it folded.

One thing Martha said about Vandalia is that it's a city of volunteers, and she named Phyllis Rames as a leader among Vandalia's volunteers. But I guess we know that already.
I had supper at Ponderosa and as I was coming out after I'd finished I met Don and Phyllis Rames coming in. They'd been planning to go out of town for a meal but the sloppy weather and slippery roads made them think better of it.

I came back to my room and hunkered down myself. At one point I went back out to the car to get a shirt and was surprised how slippery the parking lot had gotten. I don't know what I'll find when I step out this morning.

*

I met Ed Taylor, Jr., at his store downtown on Gallatin Street about 8:20 a.m. today. He was just back from driving school bus. He said the roads weren't bad at all.

We talked for a full hour and a half - about his music and his life. The song about Main Street that I heard him sing on Monday night grew out of his childhood experience - he lived only a few blocks from downtown and spent a lot of time on Gallatin Street getting to know the merchants. (In Vandalia, Main Street is not the main street). He can't forget the smell of roasted peanuts in one of the stores, and being pricked by the bulk nails in his grandparents' hardware store. Ed is grateful to the fellow - Floyd - who had a little music store and taught him to play guitar. Ed was young enough that Floyd thought he should start with a smaller instrument, a mandolin. Ed wanted to play guitar. They compromised. Ed's parents bought him an electric guitar.

Ed has played in bands since his junior high school days in Vandalia - rock and roll, country rock, traditional country. Learning to play country, he says, he had to learn to play guitar. "Playing rock and roll we didn't have to be good so much as loud," Ed remembered. His first attempt to stick some licks into country songs were awful, but little by little he learned what he needed to know.

Ed didn't write his first song until he was 38 years old. He was going through a divorce, he felt awfully lonely, he sat down with his guitar and wrote one line, he concentrated on that one line. Then he worked on a line to rhyme with it, and he concentrated on that line. He continued working on the song for another two hours, line by line, until he had enough for a song.

Next morning he got up and picked up his guitar, he was going to try out the song. He cried for half an hour. He had been so focused on individual lines the night before while writing it that he hadn't really heard what he was saying til he put it all together the next day.

In all of his years playing music it had never occurred to Ed that a song was a piece of someone's life. Ed had the gift of music and now he was given the gift of songs. He wrote more songs. With the gift, he thinks, comes the responsibility to use it well, he feels he must use music for the good of others.

A lot of things changed in Ed's life about the time his wife divorced him - those were hard times "but I had to go through them to be what I am today."

Ed's family had been in the construction business and Ed had worked construction like the rest of his family. When the business was sold, Ed had the opportunity to work for the new owners but decided that if he was ever going to change his line of work, this was the time to do it. He opened his store. He ordered the instruments to stock the store and, when they arrived, it was like Christmas. Every instrument he took out of the box was like a present. Yet he also wondered: "What have I done?"

The Radio Shack side of the store is a small part of Ed's business; even selling instruments - mostly guitars, bass guitars, and drums - is secondary to Ed's main emphasis in the store - lessons. Every afternoon from the time school gets out til suppertime is scheduled full of lessons, Saturday all day is scheduled full, and there are other lessons fit in during the work week with adults who are learning an instrument.

Ed has had someone come in and say: "I've always wanted to learn to play guitar but I have never had the time. Now that I'm retired, I've got the time." So Ed will give the old man lessons for the man's self-enjoyment and will show the young kids how to play rock and roll. "When people get nervous about how well they play," Ed said, "I tell them it's not about how well you play but how much you enjoy playing." He has seen adults come in for a lesson tight from the stress of work, "and with only a few minutes of guitar-playing the tension goes out of them, they relax, they're really enjoying what they're doing."

Some time ago, Ed saw an advertisement for a Nashville "showcase" - he didn't know what it was all about but he put some songs on tape and wrote up a little biography, he was supposed to send his "publicity package." And he promptly forgot about it. Later he got a call from a woman who said he had been selected to showcase at such and such a club in Nashville. "They put three or four people each night in some ten clubs all around Nashville," Ed told me, "and each band or artist would get forty-five minutes or an hour to play their music. Well, I put some clothes in a bag and my guitar in the car and headed off for Nashville." As he was approaching the city, the highway bent around a hill and all of a sudden Nashville opened like a surprise before him. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" he wondered. "What am I doing here?" Yet it was a wonderful visit to Nashville. Ed got to meet a lot of other musicians, he got to sit in on their sound checks, he "got to hang around with some awfully good musicians."

"Ed, when are you going to move to Nashville?" they asked him. "I thought about it. It was really tempting. But I had responsibilities in Vandalia - a kid going off to college, one in high school, one in junior high. An ex-wife, a new husband-in-law."

"Here I was, being offered what I'd dreamed of, playing music in Nashville," Ed said, "and I decided, no, I'll accept my responsibilities. So I've stayed in Vandalia. Happiness is not about what you don't have. It's about what you have and what you do with what you have. I've played showcases on Beale Street in Memphis, and in St. Louis, as well as in Nashville, and I come back here and try to share the gift of music with people in Vandalia. Perhaps one of the people I have an effect on will go to Nashville as a result of my influence."

"I don't regret my choice to stay in Vandalia," Ed said.

***

February 8, 2003
In the afternoon yesterday I made my Vagabond presentation to three more classes at Vandalia High School - Freshman Honors, Sophomore Honors, and another Advanced Composition class. The presentations were pretty unremarkable, except to say that it is a little more difficult holding the attention of a class in the last period of the day on a Friday afternoon, especially when some of the students are a little behind schedule preparing their index cards for an upcoming paper and they're trying to catch up while you talk.

I arrived at Hanabargers' house about 5:45 p.m. for supper and immediately was whisked through the house by Ethan Allen Hanabarger, who is the most articulate 12-year-old I think I've ever met. At one point he laid out a narrative of all the pets the family has ever had, with all the exactness and seriousness of a trial lawyer summing up his complicated argument. I wondered whether it was because he was home-schooled that he is so articulate, but Linda said he has always been like that. He could talk with almost anyone, she said, and he often does.

The Hanabargers live in a house that is - I would say - ever-evolving, always in the process of being built. It's about process, not product. Linda's husband Dale said as much as seventy-five percent of the materials in the house are recycled. The doors come from Linda's grandfather's house, windows from an old factory being torn down in Vandalia, and so on. The place is heated mainly with wood - one highly efficient wood stove sits in the living room and there's a little heater in the area where they keep some three thousand record albums they've just sold to a fellow in Singapore.

Dale Hanabarger is a musician and a free spirit. Linda is a writer and a free spirit, always a writer, always finding pen and paper to record any new bit of information she learns about Vandalia. Discussion of things historical got so pronounced that by the end of a long evening of talk and music I asked whether they discuss history just as much when I'm not there as when I'm there. All agreed that they do, except Dale, who said that they talk about people from Wisconsin when I'm not there.

The Hanabargers' friend Kevin Bunn and his son Wyatt arrived for supper too. Salad and lasagna. Kevin and Wyatt were "batching it" that evening - Kevin's wife Chance McDade had gone to Washington, D.C., where her oldest son, Dillon McDade, who is in the Navy, was graduating into the White House Honor Guard. "You'll see him on TV - he's the 6'4" kid they put right up front," I'm told.

Supper was wonderful, the conversation around the table was stimulating, the coffee afterwards was dark and serious, my wife's kind of coffee definitely, it bit back.

We were sipping our coffee when Stan Forbes and his wife Charlene arrived, their daughter Carla and her two daughters, and Carla's boyfriend Dale McNutt. Dale brought his Martin guitar with him, Dale Hanabarger had his Guild six-string and a harmonica, we filled the kitchen with our presence and the musicians filled it with their music. At one point Dale H. taught Dale M. chords for a mandolin song, then took his mandolin out of the case. He took the banjo Kevin had loaned him out of the case, too, and played a version of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." At some point I asked if any of them know what you've got when you've got a hundred banjo players at the bottom of the lake - "a good start." Someone else asked if any of us knew the best sound a banjo makes - "splash." I offered that they don't let banjos and accordions and trombones and bagpipes into heaven - ouch.

All through the music and the periods without music we were talking about history, constantly examining the pieces of the puzzle, trying to establish where each of them fit. Another bit of information about Vandalia? Linda wrote that down. At some point Stan Forbes told one of his outlandish stories, one that impelled Carla to make a motion as if she were turning the bill of an imaginary baseball cap around to the back of her head. So I asked the outlandish question about the mule that I'd heard from Richard Rocheleau in Rugby - "Where do mules come from?" The response is, of course, "a horse and a donkey." "Which one would be the female?" is the follow-up question, and when it spurred some discussion I told them what Rocheleau had told me - "it would be the one in front."

Dale H. said to Linda "I see you thought he was going to be serious. You almost got pen and paper to write that down, didn't you. It's the reporter in you."

Stan Forbes' two granddaughters had been in the other room. Soon they came to the kitchen and sang a couple songs for us, including "Angels Watching Over Me" that I'd heard on Monday night.

The music went on and on til midnight. Finally I had to hug Linda good night and say that my visit to Vandalia couldn't have been finer. As I stepped out of the house, headed for my motel room, the night was cold and crisp and the stars were brighter than I'd seen them for a very long time. I was tired but filled with the swirl of supper and music and comradery and more than a little history. Food is love, and music is love, and so is the unquenchable thirst to know who we are and who we were and who we might become.

*

I have interviewed Mary Truitt and have had a noon meal at Jay's Inn Restaurant. I'm sitting in the parking lot of Harmon's Market preparing to make some notes. John Feightner of the Main Street program is unable to talk with me today, so I suppose I really am done with interviews this trip. I am scheduled to have supper with Don and Phyllis Rames tonight. This afternoon I'll have to move into the Ramada Limited for my last night of lodging. I'll leave, I'm expecting, bright and early tomorrow morning.

*

Mary Truitt came to Vandalia in 1940 at age seven when her father, who worked for Illinois Power, was transferred in from Edwardsville. Her father worked for Illinois Power, then worked for the Coca Cola Bottling Company in Vandalia and handled a distribution route, then worked for one of the banks in the city as the vice-president in charge of loans. When a bank in St. Louis tried to hire Mary's father away, his boss here saw to it that he didn't leave Vandalia.

Mary's mother had been a teacher in rural schools, then she was "a housewife" when she married - women with children weren't allowed to teach. She was involved in the PTA and she enjoyed pinochle with her friends at the Tuesday Night Club.

Mary remembers registering for school in Vandalia, how imposing the big four-room school seemed to the young girl who had never seen one quite like it.

During World War II when schools were desperate for teachers, Mary's mother went back to teaching in rural schools with the understanding that she'd go back to school and get a college degree. Mary and her mother started their junior years of college at the same time - Mary at Carbondale, her mother at Greenville College.

Mary graduated with a degree in home economics and was recruited by the Milwaukee Public Schools, which is where she taught for thirty-five years. She recalled an incident during her career when she was teaching Home Economics for a variety of public and parochial schools on Milwaukee's near south side. At one of the Catholic colleges in Milwaukee the nun teaching a group of young women asked them what had gotten them interested in home economics as a career. First one, then another, then another, until there were five of them who said it was her eighth grade Home Ec teacher who had inspired her. First one then another until all of them said the teacher's name was Mary Truitt. The young women had not known each other in grade school but at this point they decided they needed to call Mary and take her out for a drink and thank her for what she'd given all five of them. Mary still stays in contact with one of those women. When she retired from her teaching career, she was the "university facilitator" at Riverside High in Milwaukee, a college-track school.

Her mother had been failing and the window of opportunity had opened for a good retirement, so Mary returned to Vandalia to care for her mother. Her father had died somewhat earlier. Mary was back in Vandalia only a few months when her mother died. Mary returned to teaching at Kaskaskia Community College and the correctional institution and she started involving herself in the life of the community. A friend who, early on, had told Mary to get involved in community organizations now wonders whether she should have; Mary is involved in that much.

Like her father, Mary has always been interested in history and tourism so she has served and continues to serve on various committees and commissions related to those interests. In 1990 she made some waves when she became the first woman to join the Vandalia Lions. Her father had been an avid Lion and Mary had been to several national and international events with him. So she knew what she was getting into. Yet gender was still an issue in Vandalia in 1990, Mary indicated, so at the first meeting she attended, she felt a little bit like she did when she was the only white person at a wedding where everyone else was black. Change comes slow. She has since served as the president of the Vandalia Lions and has welcomed additional female members to the group. Mary said the Rotary Club crossed the gender boundary in the 1990s, too, when first one woman, then another joined that organization.

I asked Mary about the community's reaction to the 1962 book The Talk of Vandalia by Joseph Lyford. She was able to observe the reaction from the distance of Milwaukee and she feels that Vandalia's reaction - "this isn't us, that's not how it is" - was mostly justified. Her parents were upset with the book. Mary made clear that it wasn't the "big" issues that upset people, it was the quotes and comments that, while not naming names and identifying people specifically, contained enough information that everyone knew who was meant; there were comments made in this fashion, she believes, that people felt were not true to Vandalia's reality.

My own sense, having read about two thirds of the book at this point, is that the issues raised in 1962 have yet to be resolved, that the problems then are still problems now. But I'm not a long time Vandalia resident, I'm not sensitive to the innuendoes and veiled criticisms that might have upset the community forty years ago. I'll have to re-read the book focusing on the "little" issues Mary mentioned, as opposed to the big ones I'd noticed right off.

Mary has received an award from the state of Illinois for all her contributions to the community "in public and behind the scenes and under the scenes." Mary has a sense of humor, you think, as large as her embrace, and at the same time you have to believe she's not one to suffer fools gladly. She's got her opinions about how things are, sure, but on such a divisive issue as "the bricks" - that is, replacing the surface of Gallatin Street with bricks instead of smooth concrete - she doesn't care much one way or the other about the bricks, she wants the community to move on and start making the whole downtown attractive to visitors, not just the street surface.

Mary seems to have made a wide and varied contribu-tion to Vandalia and you hope the community understands that and appreciates it. True, she may speak a little dif-ferent version of how things are, but we ought to embrace such people. Yet we don't always do that, do we, when what we hear threatens us and sounds like criticism? We tend to push away the people we don't agree with, rather than pulling them close to learn everything we can from those who see things we cannot.

*

I look up from my notebook, momentarily I don't know where I am - Illinois or Minnesota or North Dakota or where? It could be anywhere, everywhere. Oh, I'm still in the parking lot of Harmon's Market, I finally recognize. Yet the people I see look more like neighbors than strangers and still I don't know as much of them as I would wish. And I worry that my "poking about" might be seen by some as "prying," though I have not had a single instance in three communities to date of anyone suggesting that's the case. It was interesting last night talking to Linda Hanabarger about the day she received my initial letter about the Vagabond project. She said the thought had crossed her mind, "what if he's a homeless person looking for a place to stay?" At the outset no one has a single reason to believe a single word I say because at that point they've had no experience with me that allows them to develop trust. And yet, without fail, people do want to trust me, they give me intimate details from their lives and they expect that I'll handle those details as they should be handled. How do you ever say Thank You for a gift such as that?

***

February 9, 2003
Last night I had supper with Don and Phyllis Rames. They are lovely folks. Don is so practical - more silent, less worried about the ramifications of everything; Phyllis is introspective and analytical, given to pondering until she understands. I think both of them have been great assets to Vandalia. They are very interested in the progress of the Vagabond project, are eager to hear what I learn and what it will mean. We talked and ate and talked from 5:00 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. when I came back to my room for a night's sleep.

I'm packing my bags this morning. Now I'll swallow a cup of coffee quick, then I'm on my way again, headed towards home once more. It's great to go away, it's even better going home.

ALEXANDRIA: THE FIRST VISIT
Vagabond Journal: January, 2003

[from Vagabond #3, April 2003]
January 23, 2003
I woke yesterday morning about 2:30 a.m. in Rugby. I spent a couple hours bringing my notes up to date, took a shower, packed my bags, and was on my way to Alexandria from Rugby by 5:00 a.m. Stopped to have breakfast and get gasoline in Rothsay, Minnesota. Arrived in Alexandria about 11:00 a.m., drove straight to the Douglas County Historical Society without directions or signs, it was where I thought it should be. Is that a good omen? I got a warm welcome from Rachel Barduson, the Director of the Historical Society with whom I'd been in contact about my visit. She showed me the Historical Society's oral history collection and I spent the day reviewing cards in the index to it. Most of the tapes have been transcribed, I shall review them today, the 115 or so that I've chosen to look at.

At 6:00 p.m. six of Alexandria's historians gathered with me for my presentation on the Vagabond project. I had prepared for a formal presentation but once again did it informally, simply talking my points, sharing excerpts from my books, answering questions. A wonderful discussion about Alexandria broke out, laughter erupted, a lot of historical dots were connected informally. I think perhaps sometimes we don't know how much we know until such occasions when we can contribute to the learning.

I got the names of several people in Alexandria I need to talk with. I set up an interview for Saturday afternoon with Marge Van Gorp. I may interview a couple people today, tomorrow, or Saturday morning as well, and will spend the balance of my time here reviewing transcripts of interviews.

Douglas County is fortunate to have such a lovely resource as its Historical Society, which is housed in the former Knute Nelson residence that doubles as an historical museum devoted to the former Minnesota senator. The resources gathered by the Historical Society are tremendous, serving genealogists, historians, and anyone interested in learning their family's story in the Alexandria area. In particular I am impressed by the oral histories. At the end of the day yesterday, like a boy with a pocketful of coins in a store full of candy, I told Rachel Barduson that "I'm overwhelmed by everything you have available." She said, "You know, we were talking here yesterday and agreed that you might be overwhelmed."

Former Historical Society boards made wise invest-ment of inheritances the society received; as a result the organization seems well-prepared to continue its mission far into the future.

While I was at the Knute Nelson House yesterday, several visitors came through to see what was available. A woman - either staff or volunteer, I'm not sure, spent part of the afternoon trying to track down for the newspaper the date that an area creamery closed down. You could hear staff members call out interesting bits of history to each other as they worked. I sat for six hours at a large table with a drawer of yellow index cards describing the contents of the oral histories and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

***

January 25, 2003
I spent all of Thursday digging through the delicious transcriptions of oral histories in the family folders at the Douglas County Historical Society. To date I've made copies of about 135 pages of material and I've only touched a few of the items I've highlighted to look at. Atthe same time, researcher Marge Van Gorp was bringing me file after file she thought I ought to see, and in many cases she was right. I made copies of some of those pages, too, and will dig into them when I get home.

Yesterday at 10:00 a.m. I interviewed Opal (Vogel) Martinson who was instrumental in saving the Knute Nelson House that is now home to the Historical Society. Opal is 93-years-old. She came to Alexandria in the late 1950s and established the first licensed day care center in Alexandria. She had operated a day care in Northfield, Minnesota, for sixteen years prior to arriving in Alexandria. Opal moved each time her husband was assigned different territory for Midland Cooperative, for which he worked all his life, in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

I started the tape recorder, asked my first question, and Opal talked. After twenty-five minutes of weaving a non-stop narrative regarding the areas of her life I was interested in, she said: "I hope I'm not talking too much."

"No, Opal," I said, "you're not talking too much."

While none of the rest of her talking after that reached twenty-five minutes at a stretch, she continued to provide good information about Knute Nelson, the saving of his house when it was about to be torn down, her nursery school, and her sense that the people of Alexandria are "salt of the earth" and that they really care about preserving area history for future generations.

Opal's eye-sight has deteriorated badly, to the point that she cannot read, and she was recovering from a stay in the hospital with pneumonia when I visited her. Nonetheless, she was alive with love for Alexandria and not unlike the people of Rugby, North Dakota, she was modest in claiming any accomplishment.

In the afternoon I interviewed Minnie Osterholt, who is 90-years-old. Minnie conducted many of the oral history interviews in the Douglas County collection, and like Opal
Martinson she was modest in speaking of her accomplishments. Minnie is one of the premier Douglas County historians: she would say merely that it needed doing and she did it. She believes that saving the past for the future is essential, even if she can't say exactly why it's important.

Minnie belonged to the first "calf project" and exhibited at the first fairs instituted by T.A. Erickson, whom locals credit with founding 4-H. She remembers that Erickson's work was vital in helping rural youth have a better view of themselves and their accomplishments in an age when they felt inferior to their city cousins.

Minnie lived in California and New York for twenty years, working first as a nanny, then as a sales clerk in a Danish delicatessen at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, NYC. She met her husband at the delicatessen; when he retired the couple moved to Douglas County, to live in the house where Minnie had been born.

Minnie had always been interested in writing, had belonged to a writers' group in California ("I wrote about pioneers"), took a writing class in California, one in New York, one when she returned to Minnesota.

While it California, it might be added, Minnie sent a letter to novelist Sinclair Lewis, who was in the area on a speaking tour; she asked if they might meet long enough for Lewis to sign her copy of Arrowsmith. Lewis sent her a handwritten letter indicating that his schedule wouldn't permit such a meeting, and suggesting instead that she tuck his letter into her book. "Didn't it take courage to write Sinclair Lewis?" I wondered. "No," Minnie said, "he was just a Minnesota boy." (And perhaps that he took the time to send her such a letter proved that he was still a Minnesota boy.)

Minnie had always been interested in local history and it was after her husband died in the late 1970s that she threw herself headlong into interviewing area residents and recording county history. Hers is quite an achievement, I think, though she won't say so.

When she speaks about living in Douglas County, Minnesota, Minnie's face shines with an intense glow: "I look out the window here, I see a hill, I know it might be a man-made hill, I see the woods behind it, this feels like home." This northern light lays on her face. Her face shines.

I think about the shine on Minnie's face, the glow in Opal Martinson's eyes despite her diminished sight, about the swell in my chest as I talked with these women. It is too early in this project for me to be jaded, I know that everything still shines. I couldn't help seeing these women as representative of that march of generations which created the middle western world we know today. They follow pioneers who have already been laid to earth beneath the rough grasses of the plains. Minnie and Opal are part of that tromp tromp to build a better world. Looking into Minnie's eyes as she talked, I got a sense she is but a cog in the great wheel turning; in another sense, she and Opal and all of us are the great wheel itself, which is the reason we are here, to be the wheel's turning, the reason we live and love and mate and bring forth children, the whole process repeating itself in endless cycle. Death and life and death is but a turning, and there is no reason to fear or grieve or worry. With each turning the grass grows green again, the fields come to harvest, the husks and stalks get turned back to soil, children grow up and have children, grandpa dies, it is all important but none of it is any more important than any other.

That was what I was seeing in the shine of Minnie's face as she talked. The tromp of the inevitable joined with the swing of joy in one's ordinary existence. What we shall be is what we were and what we are and what we work for. The nine decades lined on Minnie's face told me it could not be otherwise.

***

January 25, 2003, Afternoon
This morning I stopped at Cowing-Robards on Broadway, walked up to a couple fellows at the counter in the center of the store, and said: "I'm looking for Ed Rooney. I've been told the best way to find him is to stop here and ask his son where he might be." The younger fellow at the counter was not Ed's son, Dan, but he said anyway that he thought Ed might be out at the Rent-It Store. He called out there for me and got Ed on the phone.

I told Ed who I was and what I wanted. Without knowing me from Adam, Ed said immediately: "Wait there at the store, I'll be there in a few minutes, we can talk in my office." And so we did.

For nearly an hour Ed gave a coherent narrative of the history of Cowing-Robards, established in 1872 and the oldest continuously operated business in Alexandria. The store started as a hardware store belong to the Cowing and Robards families. Eventually the Cowing family dropped out of the business. Pat (Hugh) Robards ran the business from 1920 until little by little employee Ed Rooney took over ownership and operation of Cowing-Robards.

The store no longer deals in hardware but instead operates specialized departments such as paint and home decorating (with two professional home decorators on staff), hockey equipment and trophies, screen printing and custom embroidery. Ed started at the store in 1952 fresh out of high school and over the years Pat Robards let "the son he never had" take the store in new directions. As the Alexandria economy changed, fishing equipment and guns were removed, hardware was removed, new departments were created to meet new needs. With the blessing of Pat Robards, Ed was able to keep the oldest business in town also the most flexible. With Ed assuming ownership of the business, Robards was assured that Cowing-Robards would survive him. Robards died in 1980. Ed Rooney now has two sons involved in Cowing-Robards, some assurance the business will survive him.

Ed believes that the kind of nimbleness exhibited by Cowing-Robards in the latter half of the past century is necessary if Main Street America is to survive in the face of competition from the Pamidas and Walmarts that set up business at the outskirts of Small Town USA. "You can't compete with them directly," Ed said. "You have to find your niche, you have to do what those big stores can't do, or what they can't do well." He sees services that require a level of technical expertise, such as screen printing and custom embroidery, as undertakings the big stores can't do well. As a result of such vision, Cowing-Robards is assured continued operation in Alexandria's downtown.

There was a time in Alexandria that some thirteen empty storefronts littered the downtown like so many hamburger wrappers. But specialized, "niche" businesses have sprung up to fill those storefronts now, according to Ed, and Broadway Street looks healthy.

Alexandria has had an orientation towards tourism that continues today. Well-to-do families from the Twin Cities, Chicago, Omaha, and even Dallas, have long had places "on the lake" in Alexandria's vicinity. But these days, instead of being uninsulated cottages, they are more mansion-like lake houses. Some of the visitors' money stays in Alexandria and helps the community to prosper.

As I prepare to leave, Ed makes a copy of a 1983 column about Cowing-Robards by Minneapolis Tribune writer Robert T. Smith. According to the article, Pat Robards' concern had always been that customers be treated "like family," that the business be fair to them and provide high quality merchandise and good service. Talking with Ed Rooney for even an hour, it's clear those are Ed's concerns too, "most of all service."

*

My afternoon interview today was with Marge Van Gorp, who works as a family history researcher for the Douglas County Historical Society and who has been putting interesting files under my nose for the past few days. When I'd pulled her folder out of the files and reviewed it, I found this statement about living in the Azores: "Sometimes that island was pretty small, but other times it was just the right size." Marge was a military wife, her husband was stationed in the Azores. What did she mean by that statement?

"Sometimes I'd look out at the ocean towards home and wonder how long it would take to get back there. Minnesota seemed so far away, the island seemed so small. At other times, when my friends on the island were near, it didn't seem so lonely and far away, it was just the right size."

Marge and her husband were living on the Azores still when her husband was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. "We can move anywhere you want," her husband had said. "Where do you want to live?"

Marge knew her husband was going to die, and when he did she knew she'd need the support of her life-long friends back in Alexandria. It was to Alexandria that Marge chose to return.

Marge's grandfather was in Minnesota before her grandmother and father came over from Sweden. Her grandfather worked for the railroad. He and other men were sleeping in a rail car after an exhausting time cleaning up a railway accident. Another train plowed into the car the men were sleeping in and twelve of them were killed, including Marge's grandfather. News of his death reached Marge's grandmother and her father on Christmas Eve. It was a sad Christmas Eve. Marge's grandmother and her father came to Minnesota the following spring to claim the land the railroad had given her grandfather.

We talked some of Marge's experiences during her teen years working as a hired girl for the neighbors at threshing time. Marge was giving me the woman's perspective of theshing.
We talked about her work as a family history researcher for the Douglas County Historical Society, and about how she brought together a brother and sister who had not known each other existed until one was 88 years old, and the other 86. Marge's brother-in-law had been adopted but he had discovered who his biological parents were and had given that information to Marge. When she was researching a family background in the course of her work for the Historical Society, Marge noticed the same names, father and mother, but her brother-in-law was not listed among the offspring, which consisted of four daughters. Marge was able to contact one of those daughters and a granddaughter and confirmed that this indeed was her brother-in-law's family. Marge was present when brother and sister met each other for the very first time.

"You can't imagine the emotion I felt," Marge said.

Marge sometimes writes poems to capture the emotions she has felt, and she gave me a copy of her collection, Tapestries: Selected Poems. I went out to the car and got her a copy of my book of poems, Middle Ground. I thanked her for volunteering such good files about Alexandria as she had put on the table for my review during my visit. She promised to keep an eye out for more of them so she'd have another stack for me upon my return.

When I started the car and pulled onto the highway, I was headed for home. I'd been away to Rugby and Alexandria for a combined total of twelve days. I don't get "homesick for the chickens" like my mother used to, but I was ready to flop into a familiar chair, ready to work at the comfort of my own desk. I was headed home.

RUGBY: THE FIRST VISIT
Vagabond Journal: January, 2003

[from Vagabond #2, February 2003]
January 15 &16, 2003
Of course the poet believes the world is as he says it is. The poet names, and in naming he creates the world as it will be. He also observes and thinks what he sees is what the world is. I have set forth now as the Vagabond - naming and seeing, hoping to paint the world as it will be for me, as it is, the middle western part of it.
I am struck again: how this journey is process, not product; more expedition and exploration than destination and explanation. A way of knowing rather than the knowledge gained.

*

A lot of what I'll have to say will be about light, I suppose; about how light owns us, guides us, marks us; about how light lays on things, on the roughness of that field, on the smoothness of this court house; about how light comes and goes morning and night, marking our days and our years, and the generations.

*

I stop for supplies at the grocery store in downtown Rugby, then I cross the street to DK's shop: "Barber and Styling" it says in the window. DK is 44, a woman with dark hair put up ("it would be turning grey if I let it"); she is finishing a trim for an older gentleman whose hair might have had a red tinge once, now it's more the color of an old man gone grey. "She'll just have to comb it out if she doesn't like it," DK says of a cowlick on the back of the fellow's head, a turn of hair that doesn't want to lay down properly and she can't make it. Haircut done, she and the old fellow are looking at a collection of black and white photos. From where I sit, the people in the photos look like they're dressed for the 1950s, and it's real, not retro. DK and the old fellow talk familiarly of the people in the pictures. DK has a charm and a tenderness that's not necessarily apparent on the surface.

Soon enough she turns and says to me, "Well, come on..." and she ushers me into her barber's chair. "How do you want it cut?" she asks. I think she recognizes that my style is no style. "Do you want it trimmed up over your ears?"

"I tell the woman back home to make me look like a well-groomed mountain man - not that she listens," I say.

DK gives me a look and starts to work. "I have to like the haircuts I give before I'm done with them," she says by way of re-assurance.

DK was a farm girl who had an itch to see what was out there in the big wide world. She couldn't be satisfied doing what everybody else did. As soon as she finished high school in Rugby, she spent some time in the National Guard in Georgia and the Carolinas. She headed out to California for ten years, to Florida, to the state of Wash-ington. "I don't know why all the men I ever ran into were losers," she says without bitterness. You get the sense that if she'd found a good man out there, she'd never have returned to Rugby.

"Why did you come back?" I wonder.

"Family," she says. She is one of eight kids. "I'm sort of the black sheep, you know. I had to get out of here and see the world. My brothers and sisters were happy staying here." What's the difference between her and her siblings that she had to get out of North Dakota? "I don't know," she says, "I couldn't tell you."

Later DK says her youngest brother is 23, he's an electrician, and he built his own house. "You've got to start young and get yourself settled," she says, with - I think - admiration.
I point out that she wouldn't have been to California, Florida, and Washington state if she'd have followed her own advice about staying put and starting young. "You're right," she says. "I had to get out of here for awhile."

Yeah, DK's siblings stayed in Rugby. One of her brothers farms with her father. A couple others farm, too. A sister married a farmer, a brother loads trucks for a trucking company in town, another works at the hospital in Rugby, DK cuts hair, her youngest brother is the electrician.

"What's the average price for a house in Rugby?" I ask. The fellow who runs the Rugby stockyards has come in now and is waiting patiently while DK clips and re-clips my beard trying to get it to look decent. DK looks over at the fellow from the stockyards, asks him "What is the average price for a house?"

"$50,000" is what they agree on. "Not that all the houses in Rugby cost that much," DK says. "I bought one for $15,000."

DK might be done with my trim. "What do you think?" she asks me.

"If you're happy with it, I'm happy," I say. I know just from talking to her that she doesn't let her customers out of the barber chair until she's satisfied. "I'm proud of every hair cut I give," I think she'd say again if I let her.

***

January 17, 2003
Yesterday I decided to go to breakfast at the Cornerstone Cafe and as I stepped out of my room, so did the fellow from next door. He had a piece of lathe with orange paint on one end of it, he used it as a walking stick. He had on a pair of insulated cover-alls. He was going to walk the several blocks to the Rugby sale barn for breakfast at the cafe there, as he often did on sale day, Thursdays. He said if I liked good food in a place that wasn't very fancy, I should have breakfast at the sale barn too. Turns out the fellow's name is Clayton Olson, turns out he's nearly 80 years old, turns out he's the father of Therese Rocheleau, the woman who co-owns the Oakwood Inn motel with her husband Jim. I cleaned out the front passenger seat of my car and gave Clayton a ride to the sale barn. He seemed a little reluctant to take the ride, almost as if it is less than moral to accept a ride from the new fellow in town when you could just as well walk in a temperature of twelve degrees below zero.

Clayton is from the Brookings, SD, area originally but bought a farm and re-settled somewhat east of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he still lives. He is staying in Room 31 at the Oakwood this winter at the urging of his daughter. The room has a kitchenette and when it became available Therese invited him to stay the winter there so he didn't have to be cutting and splitting wood all winter to keep himself warm on the Minnesota farm.
So Clayton is in Rugby, I'm giving him a ride to the sale barn for breakfast, we're talking about books. He likes to read, especially Louis L'Amour novels. There's a fellow from northeastern North Dakota who also writes westerns, Clayton tells me, "I can't remember his name, but he's no Louis L'Amour...."

The biscuits and gravy that Clayton wanted to order have been all sold out so he settles for hashbrowns and toast and sausage or bacon. I order my usual - two eggs, two pancakes, two sausage patties. I end up giving Clayton a copy of my memoir, Curlew:Home, then later in the afternoon as I'm talking to Therese Rocheleau she says "Dad must be reading your book already. He said that this morning you ordered the same breakfast that you ordered on page 13 of the book...."

We talked over breakfast, Clayton and I did, about the project that brought me to Rugby. He enlisted the help of our waitress and others in the cafe to start a list of the people I should talk to. When we pushed our empty plates away, Clayton insisted on paying for my breakfast. I didn't want to try arm-wrestling the tab away from him because I know that, while these old fellows no longer have the strength they used to, slyness trumps strength every time. (When he bought me breakfast, that's when I knew for sure I had to give him a copy of my book.)

We stepped into the hallway of the sale barn and Clayton introduced me to the main auctioneer at the place, Ron Torgerson. I may have to do a piece on the sale barn, and Ron Torgerson would be at the center of it. I got his phone number. Clayton introduced me to a cattle buyer and farmer ("I'm a farmer first"), Ken Mattern, who gave me his phone number and his cell-phone number. Clayton and I watched cattle sell for a few minutes. A younger fellow was doing the auctioneering early in the day, selling the less desirable cattle, the old cows and those not properly finished.

"Watch those two buyers standing there at the edge of the ring, off to the side," Clayton told me. "When one of them makes a bid, he barely moves his hand." I watched. I saw a hand make just the flicker of a movement, he'd bid on the cattle in the ring. Another buyer sitting front and center with a little bit of plank table in front of him just barely nodded his head; he was bidding too. It was flicker of hand versus the slightest nod of head til one of the fellows looked away - the bidding was over - "SOLD!"

I gave Clayton a ride back to the motel, he invited me into the office to meet his daughter, and I had to sign my book for him.

*

I arrived a few minutes late to interview Richard Lavik, who'd been a school superintendent in several places in North Dakota from very shortly after he graduated from college until he retired two years ago. "In North Dakota you can retire when your age and years of service total 85," Lavik told me. "You can stay longer but your retirement benefits don't get noticeably better. Teachers pensions aren't the best pensions in the world."

I'd been told Lavik has "a dry sense of humor." After spending four hours talking with him, I'd say instead that he has a sly sense of humor. "This is my Norwegian grandfather," Lavik said just as straight-faced and sincere as you can imagine. What he'd handed me was a very old photo of an Indian, dark as the earth, holding his pony at attention, a dog in the background.

"That might be your grandfather," I said, "but he's not Norwegian." On the back of the photo it said in pencil: "Running Rabbit."

I got three hours of conversation with Lavik on tape. He is especially knowledgeable about the history of the schools and churches in Rugby and throughout Pierce County. His real Norwegian grandfather came to Rugby about 1919 and started the Rugby Tailoring Company. His father ran a dry-cleaning business on Main Street, where Lavik helped out as he was growing up. "We dumped our spent chemicals in the alley back of the building," Lavik said. "The alley was dirt, not paved. You didn't think anything about it back then. You couldn't get away with that these days."

One story Lavik told that I didn't get on tape was about the 1963 murder of a Rugby policeman. (I hate it how people seem to wait to tell the really good stuff once I've got the tape recorder packed away.) The murder occurred in a back alley downtown. Big Louie and his crime partner had pulled up behind one of the buildings along Main Street. The way the buildings were set, Louie's car was in a "box canyon" and when the policeman saw the car back there, he knew it was trouble. Big Louie had been in trouble before, he'd always been a bully and a petty criminal. "Yoo-hoo, boys," the cop reportedly called out, "come on out." Big Louie and the other fellow came out and when they saw the cop car had them boxed in one or the other of them shot the cop and shot him again and again. The criminals emptied one gun into the body on the ground, then took the cop's own piece and shot him again and again with that gun, a total of fifteen times. Then for good measure they shot up the buildings around them. They moved the cop car out of their way and took off. Road blocks were set up. Big Louie ran into a road block trying to enter Minot, west of Rugby. Louie's car had the back seat taken out and that made a cop suspicious enough that he took down the make and color of Louie's car and the number on his license plate. ("If you're going to steal merchandise," Lavik informed me, "you take the back seat out of your car so you can get more stuff in it.") A dentist who had been getting ready for work as Louie and his partner were shooting up the buildings had seen Louie's car. He hadn't had his glasses on, still he could see that it was a small car, reddish or pink in color. Big Louie drove a car of similar description and soon enough the cops put two and two together. When they arrested him, Big Louie broke into tears: "I can't go without my teddy bear," he told the cops. "Let me get my teddy bear...."

"How many bullets do you think you have to put into one cop before you get locked up for good?" Lavik asked me. "Big Louie went to prison. He got paroled, and later he died in a house fire. His buddy got paroled too, I don't know what happened to him."

The murder was written up in one of the "true crime" magazines, Lavik told me. A secretary at the Rugby school has a copy of the magazine. "You know I always thought they embellished those crime stories when they wrote them up," Lavik said, "but this one was word-for-word a true account of what had actually happened." I asked Lavik to get me a photocopy of the article for my reference. What he wants is a copy for himself of the actual magazine, but he isn't optimistic that he's going to find one.

Then Lavik remembers: "A few years before this murder, a bunch of us kids were out playing softball in the park. Big Louie's car drove up. Out came one big tree of a leg, then the other. Big Louie was walking towards us and we were trying to pretend that we didn't see him. Ha. We knew he was trouble. He wanted to play ball with us and what choice did we have. He batted and we chased the balls he hit, that's how he played ball. When he got tired of it he thanked us and drove off. Whew. You know I was worried the whole time I'd never get to grow up and become a school superintendent."

***

January 18, 2003
At 9:30 a.m. yesterday I was at Richard Blessum's door to interview him, and he was at his door to let me in.

As I put in a blank tape to start recording the fourth hour of conversation, I told Blessum that my interview with him was now longer than than one I'd recorded with Richard Lavik the day before.

"Should I call Lavik and tell him I beat him?" Blessum wondered.

My full interview with Blessum runs to nearly five hours, not counting the times he put his hand over the microphone or when we shut off the tape to talk about stuff he didn't want "on the record."

Blessum was born in 1926; with the exception of his service in the Navy, he has lived all his life in the Rugby area. When this North Dakota farm boy first saw the ocean, he said to a more experienced Navy fellow: "Would you look at all that water...."

The other fellow said: "Yeah, and you're only seeing the top of it...."

When he returned from service, Blessum married a high school sweetheart and took over his father's farm north of Rugby. Blessum and his wife have three sons, all of them living now in Washington state. Blessum's wife died a few years ago.

Blessum became heavily involved in the Geographic Center and Prairie Village Museum when he moved off the farm in the 1970s. He has been on the board of directors of the organization ever since, and until a few years ago he was "curator" of the museum, a job which put him in charge of day-to-day operations.

You can't imagine sitting with a fellow who can recall from memory all thirty-one buildings in the Prairie Village, in their proper order and with highlights of their contents. Blessum has had plenty of opportunity to see the buildings over the years, including helping with school tours in May when as many as 800 kids will tour the museum.

"I remember one of those kids was opening and closing drawers in a cabinet at the general store," Blessum said. "I thought he'd open and close every drawer in the place. I said 'Say, did you find the one with the mouse in it yet?' Well, that stopped it. He didn't open another drawer."

Before I left him, I asked Blessum what he would identify as the characteristics of the people of Rugby. "Friendly" is the first trait he listed. He said visitors to the museum have told him they couldn't believe how friendly the people of Rugby are.

The second characteristic: "The people here are willing to do most anything for you." I have to agree: Blessum let me pick at his brain for six hours. It was 3:30 p.m. when I left.

*

I stopped at the motel office on my way back to my room yesterday afternoon. I was talking with Therese and Teddy the maintenance man when Big Jim's truck rolled into the parking lot - the tractor part of the tractor-trailer, at least. He was just back from his run to Nebraska and Iowa hauling rocks. "In Nebraska, they've got to get their rocks from Montana," Jim observed. "Nebraska rocks aren't good enough. In Montana, they haul their rocks from Nebraska. That's job security for me."

You might talk to Jim Rocheleau only five minutes before you recognize you'll need a bull-dozer if you're going to keep yourself dug out from under his stories. He hadn't even kissed his wife hello yet and already he'd told three jokes. He did kiss his wife, we did get introduced, I got invited to a surprise party Jim's mother would be throwing on Sunday for Jim's uncle's 81st birthday. "It'll be lunch and supper," Jim predicted, "there'll be plenty of food. On the farm my mom cooked for four big hungry farm boys and all the hired help and she hasn't learned to make small recipes yet."

Characteristics of middle westerners? I don't ask, but Jim offers this: "My mother is so tight she can squeeze a nickel and end up with a dime."

Jim and Teddy started talking about the work they'd done tearing out a piece of concrete in the Rocheleau's house across the street from the motel, a place where Jim bumped his head when going to the basement. "The fellow who had the house before us started tearing it out," Jim said, "but he stopped when he ran into the concrete re-inforcement." Jim and Teddy wanted me to see that it was a great adventure getting that concrete out of there; Therese wanted me to know how much grey dust settled onto everything on the first and second floors of the house while Jim and Teddy were banging on the concrete. I think she wanted me to know how much dust they stirred up and wanted to make Big Jim feel guilty about it, but I don't think he did.

Jim and I talked about making hay and about hauling hay. In Iowa when I was growing up, we put up high quality alfalfa for our cattle. Here in North Dakota, they harvest grass out of the sloughs and feed that all winter. One slough that Jim and his father and brothers harvested was fifteen miles from the home farm. Another - harvested only once, during a drought - was thirty miles away. "When we were working in the fields," Jim recalled, "my mother would bring meals out to us, otherwise we'd waste half an hour driving back and forth."

Jim told me about the custom-built truck his father bought to haul the loads of hay home. "The fellow who built it spent $200 on telephone calls just to get all the transmission and gear ratios exactly right," Jim said. You could engage the PTO to start the chain that pulled the load of hay onto the tilted flat-bed and at the same time put the truck in reverse: the truck would back under the load of hay at the same speed the hay was being pulled onto the truck. The Rocheleaus could haul a lot more hay with this truck than their neighbors could with their rigs for tractors, so they hauled hay for the neighbors, too. "The driver's seat in that rig was sweet," Jim remembered. "The passenger seat was just a foam pad and the front end suspension was real tight like it was in trucks back in those days. When we hauled hay for the neighbors, they'd want to ride along. There I'd be driving along just as nice as you please and in the passenger seat the fellow would be bouncing up and down, up and down. It got so they'd just ride out and show us where their hay was and when we got the first load home they'd jump out of the truck and let us haul the rest of the hay on our own. They'd had all the bouncing around they could stand."

"I really loved that truck," Jim said. "I really hated it when it caught fire and burned up on us."

*

4:30 p.m. I spent from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. this afternoon with Duane Baillie, talking about Baillie's Drug Store and the pharmacy business. I got about an hour and fifteen minutes of our conversation on tape, it should be good material.

It's interesting: when I asked Duane about the characteristics of the people in Rugby, he said "hard-working" and "progressive," but he didn't say "modest." However, he didn't tell me on tape about the important award he'd won this past year for service to the community, which is presented to only one pharmacist in each state or Canadian province in a year. The list of his contributions to the community takes quite a long time to recite, but he waited until the tape recorder was off to tell me! So - modesty is a trait. Baillie thinks this kind of service is what good citizens do when they are in a position to. He says he didn't do these things out of "duty" but because they needed doing. I suggested that he may be like a fish in water, which no longer perceives the water as something separate from itself; that perhaps he is no longer in a position to see what duty is, he just does it.

***

January 20, 2003
I went to Edna Rocheleau's house yesterday at 2 p.m. for a surprise 81st birthday party for Jim Rocheleau's uncle, Richard Rocheleau. I got on tape four hours of conversation with Richard Rocheleau, Big Jim, and Big Jim's brother Jerry, who farms north of Rugby.
It was a family experience not unlike what I'm used to - grown children and grandchildren intermingling, a great pot of scalloped potatoes with ham and ground meat, a tuna and macaroni hot dish, salads like you'd see at an Iowa picnic.

As Richard Rocheleau was Jim's dad's brother, his experience of the world would be similar to that of Jim's dad. Rocheleau (Richard) talked of growing up in those hard days, of serving in the Navy during World War II. He was on board his vessel as far as Hawaii where he and several other sailors whose names began with "R-O" received strict orders to get off and stay in Hawaii while the ship and everyone else on it went off to battle. Rocheleau spent most of his Navy career not far from Waikiki Beach.

When he returned to North Dakota, he was home only a week when he realized how lonely his existence was - in the Navy he'd grown used to the hustle and bustle of humanity around him. Yet his father talked him out of re-enlisting. Rocheleau thinks he missed his moment to break free of North Dakota right after the war, and he might regret having missed the opportunity. Once you start putting down roots in a place, once family has its hold on you, Rocheleau thinks, that's where you'll stay, you can't get away.

Rocheleau served three terms in the North Dakota state legislature. He was an auctioneer and an inventor, he farmed, ran a tree moving business, removed stumps. He removed stumps right up until last year and thinks the hard work and exercise kept him fit. He pats his tummy and says: "Now I've gone soft."

One of Rocheleau's stand-out moments in the legislature was during debate on a bill about auctioneering that he was opposed to. When it came his turn to speak, he rose up and said his piece entirely in the chant of an auctioneer. Nearly thirty years later he could repeat the chant for me. The words rolled off his tongue rhythmically, punctuated by the auctioneer's up and down and pause and burst. When he finished for the legislature, there was absolute silence in the chamber. No one knew what to say - time stood still for that moment. Then a thunder of applause from all corners of the room. "Even so," Rocheleau said, "everyone voted 'Green,' I was the only 'Red' vote." A few days later the Governor waved him over from across the street - "Oh now I'm going to get it," Rocheleau thought. He walked across traffic to take his licking. "I want to commend you on that speech," the Governor said. He praised Rocheleau's chant and Rocheleau wondered how the Governor could be talking about it as if he'd heard it. "I was on the phone with a legislator," the Governor said. "The fellow held up his phone when you started so I heard the whole thing."

Jim and Jerry Rocheleau talked also - the afternoon wasn't an interview so much as it was a discussion, family talking over Sunday dinner, over cake and ice cream. Jim and Jerry brought my sense of the family's life on the farm forward a generation. They are only slightly younger than I am, so I was hearing the North Dakota version of my childhood.

One thing that Jerry said which stands out: "There are no trees out here, we are used to seeing the horizon, so we are wide-open and a little untamed. When we go east and end up among all those trees, we feel confined. When a fellow from the east comes out to North Dakota and sees our horizon, he feels naked."

***

January 21, 2003
I met Dale and Marilyn Niewoehner yesterday afternoon at their apartment above the funeral home. They live in a museum - quite a collection of elephants of various sorts which belong to Marilyn; of ocean-liners, which belong to Dale; and various other obsessions sprinkled in, including a collection of most of the translations of Gone With the Wind. Dale and Marilyn salvage architectural features from old buildings, so you'll see stained glass windows from a church, doors from a school, etc.

I interviewed Dale in his capacity as the most vocal advocate for keeping Amtrak alive and well in Rugby; in his capacity as mayor of the city; and to talk about his family's story in North Dakota.

Marilyn prepared a wonderful supper for us, chicken baked with rice, broccoli, salad, ice cream and a Rippin' Good cookie for dessert. The salesman for one of Dale's suppliers lives in Ripon, Wisconsin, and brings the Niewoehners cookies from the cookie factory there, just eight miles from my home.

Dale has his obsessions - Amtrak service to Rugby, ocean-liners, old bells, old fountain pens. Marilyn has her obsessions - sewing, a collection of sewing machines, reproductions of women's clothing from 1860-1907 that she sewed herself, elephants, Gone With the Wind. The Niewoehrners showed me their apartment, Dale showed me the funeral parlor on the first floor, both of them took me to the old Presbyterian church next door where Marilyn runs her business selling embroidered goods, "Embroideries." She also has the Victorian Dress Museum in the former Episcopal church the Niewoehners own, where she displays the forty dresses she has sewn, some of them award-winning reproductions. At one time the Niewoehners also owned the Methodist church in Pleasant Lake but they've since sold it.

When I return to Rugby I will interview Marilyn for her perspective on life in Rugby, for she comes to the topic as an outsider and one who doesn't seem to accept the accepted wisdom. Dale introduces himself to new people in town as Rugby's "trouble-maker." Both Dale and Marilyn appear to bring passion to whatever they do, enthusiasm for what Rugby has to offer, and - having come into the community from outside - perhaps a bit of distance that those born and bred in the city can't manage.

Dale offered, on tape, that sometimes Rugby can be a hard place to come into - it can appear closed to outsiders, a little cliquish, which is a complaint similar to what I've heard in Ripon, Wisconsin, from outsiders coming to live in the city. In addition to not having grown up in Rugby, when Dale started his funeral home in the 1970s, he was setting himself squarely in competition with the Anderson Funeral Home, which advertises "Quality Care with Quiet Dignity Since 1921."

Dale and I talked some about the need to say Thank You in both our business and our personal lives - he thinks this has become something of a lost art. We talked about the need to create and maintain relationships with those who have power over the things that are important to you - in his case, keeping Amtrak service in Rugby. He recalls that a fellow called him for help when Amtrak was ready to discontinue service to Devil's Lake, some fifty-six miles east of Rugby along Highway 2. Dale had to tell him: "It's too late. This isn't something you can do anything about now, you needed to be working on it five years ago."

Dale has served sixteen years on the Park Board and sixteen years on the City Council, in addition to his time as mayor. He is not only an advocate of keeping Amtrak healthy in Rugby, but also of keeping Rugby healthy. He admits, however, that if he had the answer to the problems of small towns in rural America, he'd be in big demand. He thinks that if it is to succeed in the future, Rugby needs to do a better job of marketing the wonderful resources it has. The intersection of Highways 2 & 3 where Rugby sits is a prime location that has yet to be taken full advantage of.

You come away from a visit with the Niewoehners full of enthusiasm for Rugby, yet with an understanding that there is much to be done as the city heads into the uncertain future that is promised rural America.

***

January 22, 2003
Yesterday at 8:15 a.m., as planned, I met Wanda Nielsen at her house. She greeted me with coffee and warm crumb cake. I think that in Rugby, as across much of the middle west, food is love. Wanda is a widow. She is wise and she is giving. I'd been told she is Rugby's "bird lady," and so she is. You can see the bird feeding stations just outside the window of her breakfast nook, and a bird bath with heated water that stays open even in the below-zero temperatures of Rugby's winters. Soon enough three bossy blue jays appeared at the feeders, all of them wanting to be in charge of business, then came a chickadee feeding upside down. As we talked of her interest in birds, Wanda mentioned that in spring Baltimore orioles come through Rugby; when she hears of their first appearance she'll put quarters of an orange in the back yard. If she has six or eight pieces of orange out there, she'll have six or eight Baltimore orioles feeding at them. Wanda has taught a lot of Rugby people about birds - Boy Scouts and school children and senior groups and just about anybody who asks her. Her interest spills out and she has to share it. The American Birding Association lists Wanda's phone number for its members looking for more information about birds that summer in Rugby or that pass through in spring and fall migrations. People can call her with questions and sometimes they can get her to lead them on bird-watching expeditions to the J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge north of Rugby.

Wanda is a transplant to Rugby from Iowa. She was born in Des Moines. Her father was a sheriff there, he was killed in the line of duty when Wanda was four years old. Wanda attended Iowa State University, which is where she met her husband. He was studying in the Food Sciences program. They married and she followed him to Rugby. They raised a family in Rugby while her husband operated the Rugby Creamery. The business had been owned by the Nielsen family since 1915. When it was sold in the latter part of the last century, that was the end of the independent dairy in North Dakota - Rugby Creamery was the last of them.

Wanda seems to be a wise, a sophisticated, a humble woman. Of being widowed, she says the first year is the toughest: "We are not prepared to be alone." Friends and neighbors, she notes, are quick to offer support, but it lasts only for two weeks or so, then they go on to help the next person who needs it and you are left to wrestle your own grief. When her husband died suddenly some twenty years ago - he was not yet sixty - she asked the doctors for a moment alone with his body in the hospital room. "I told him I'd be along shortly," she said. "But that's not how it has turned out." She continues to live and give in Rugby. And she was not content to tell me her story only, so Wanda called her next door neighbor, Tammy Fossum, and invited her over for coffee and conversation with me.
Tammy was the impetus behind the founding of a Moms' Club in Rugby. She met her husband Randy through her work in the trucking industry when she was living in Grand Forks. Discussion over the phone and via fax turned from business to things more personal and romantic and soon enough they married. When Tammy moved to Rugby, it wasn't long before she found that the Rugby natives in her circumstances - the stay-at-home moms with small children - already had support systems in place, family and friends, and they had little time left to welcome a newcomer who felt awfully alone in her new community. Convinced she couldn't possibly be the only one in Rugby in her predicament, she wondered what to do. On the internet she found information about the Moms' Club and got instructions from the national organization on how to go about founding a chapter in Rugby. She scheduled a meeting for interested moms at the library and found plenty of interest. Soon the group had a charter and bylaws and a president - Tammy herself. Soon they were meeting in the basement of Tammy's house because there was no other space available in Rugby where the noise of all the women's children would be welcome. For the safety of its members, the national organization has a rule against chapters meeting in private homes, a rule Wanda felt she could bend because "I haven't met anyone in Rugby I wouldn't be comfortable inviting into my house."

Each year the Moms' Club has to do one public service project in the community. One project was gathering winter coats from the community and dispersing them to those in need. The group has established its own once-a-week pre-school using the various expertises of the moms in the group to enrich their children's learning experience. The most recent project involved putting together "overnight bags" for children taken from their parents and placed in foster homes. Businesses in Rugby were "overwhelmingly generous" in helping fill the overnight bags with necessities such as tooth brush and tooth paste, comb, soap, etc. The Land's End Company donated forty bags. When prepared, the overnight bags were turned over to the county's social services department to dispense as the need arose. For its efforts, the Rugby Moms' Club recently won its organization's "Most Outstanding Chapter" award. Tammy served a year and a half as the chapter's president and has now let go of the reins and works as a member of the group rather than as its leader. "It's hard to let go of control," Tammy said, "but I'm learning."

As Tammy didn't grow up in Rugby, she brings an outsiders view to the discussion of the issues facing the community. She doesn't wear the blinders that the rest of us have when we live all our lives in a community. Yet sometimes because she is not native she is not privy to why things are the way they are. This is a tension - between accepting and being accepted, knowing and not knowing - that may be common in all the Vagabond focus communities, and indeed across all of rural America generally.

*

In the afternoon Jim Rocheleau and I drove north out of Rugby to see Jim Schmaltz on land he's farmed all his adult life. Schmaltz helped to found the Germans from Russia organization in North Dakota, and the chapter in Rugby (which has recently disbanded). Schmaltz is a man with a large voice and expansive gestures. Though he speaks German, you wouldn't say he speaks it with a German accent; rather his is the high, tight speech of his fellow North Dakotans: they don't talk like Canadians here, exactly, but you sure wouldn't confuse them with Texans either.

Schmaltz talked to me about the migration of Germans from Germany to Russia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and about their migration from Russia to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the rights promised by Catherine the Great to the German immigrants started to be revoked by Czar Alexander and open persecution followed. Perhaps the fortunate of these Germans from Russia migrated to the United States; of those who didn't, some were shot, some were exiled to Siberia, most traces of them were erased from the Black Sea area they'd settled originally.

Schmaltz's grandfather ended up farming south of Rugby; his father farmed south of Rugby too. Life was not easy for those who immigrated to the extremes of the North Dakota winter. Schmaltz told a variation of the story I'd read in the Rugby Centennial book, about his grandfather and the local priest traveling by sleigh on a clear day when a fierce blizzard suddenly blew up. Schmaltz said they freed the horses, turned the sleigh box over, and took refuge in its protection. Next day neighbors or relatives saw the tongue of the sleigh sticking out above the snow and freed the men who had been singing hymns all night and praying to keep from falling to sleep, falling into the sleep that would mean death by freezing. In the bright light of the following afternoon, they were freed from the snow that had buried them, that had imprisoned them, that had protected them.

Schmaltz's father helped him get established well north of Rugby among the French and Norwegians there. "I had a friend among the Norwegians," Schmaltz said, "a fellow who was half French. He told me one of the leaders in the community said when I moved up here: 'Well, we've got to be careful now, we've got a German from Russia up here amongst us.'" Schmaltz farmed the place anyway, and now his son Jeff works the land. Schmaltz still helps out: "I don't know if he needs me but I have to do it, I can't sit in the house and watch him work...."

We sat in the house drinking coffee and talking with Schmaltz for three hours. His family's story will be important for me in understanding the life of Rugby and Pierce County. Like so many others in Rugby, Schmaltz opened his house to me, opened his heart, his life, and shared his understanding. How do you say Thank You for such a gift? I don't know. I suppose that the best I can do is write the truest account possible of the Germans from Russia in Pierce County.

***

LEAVING NORTH DAKOTA: JANUARY 2003

A dirty tooth of snow, heartbeat, frozen
sound. The approaching headlights are so far
away. The early morning sky is like
an airplane with wheels set for landing,
lights on, hung like a planet in the east.
Invest nothing, you lose nothing. If you
lose, lose big. There are ghosts on the landscape
behind me, like a flash of blizzard snow,
like the fog of one's own breathing - enough
to make us grieve for what we've lost, for what's
been taken, been taken and not put back.