Photo: moi

MARCH Notebook

THIS IS THE MOMENT BEFORE RESURRECTION…when the earth’s bare bones protrude through the dead grasses and blanched leaves…broken and dead branches, stones, birch bark, the ground littered with the broken limbs of trees. Color, if it can be called color at all, muted browns, qualities of gray, shades of yellow in stages of decomposition a long, long time. A quiet medley in morning, decay, where even the suggestion of funereal black seems too rich for this soundless, sameness theme of dereliction. A certain weightiness of angst that has suffocated the earth for weeks, now that the snow has gone, leaving it lifeless, the color of old tallow, with hardly a memory of green.

MORNINGS WHICH COULD BE OCTOBER…unraveling in a slow dance of fog, heavy and cold breathing, the solitary walker’s footsteps borne aloft amidst black, wet trunks of trees waltzing by, fields and farmhouses drifting forward and back in a rhythm of waves, the caws of crows wrapped in gauze, the world waiting invisibly for revelations of sun.

THE FIRST SPRING CALL OF THE CHICKADEE…such a plaintive cry, finally heard this early March morning after cold and snowy weeks of waiting for something that speaks spring to arrive. It’s even more reassuring, more bitter sweet, earlier in the year…back in February, in January, in those days when winter is tangled in an old man’s workshed-mind as he rummages through seasons of junk and discontent and suddenly discovers an old red fishing bobber warming his hand.

THIS IS THE TIME OF THE THIN ICE…the saturated snow, sap running from the maple trees, chipmunks and squirrels scampering across the sometimes wet, sometimes frozen earth, birds finding their way back, mornings and evening dressed in fog, the sun trying to distinguish itself in a black and white photograph. A knock at the back door: no one is there.

TALK WITH A NEIGHBOR YESTERDAY…who keeps eyes and ears attuned to the natural setting. “Red-winged black birds are back. I could hear their call in the trees the last few days,” he says. “Crows nesting. Meadowlarks should be here soon. Peepers in another month, still too much ice for them to come out.”

THE EVIDENCE ALL AROUND STILL SPEAKS WINTER…the snow has not yielded the fields; the ice has not revealed the rivers, the creeks, the lakes, the low wetlands; temperatures at night remain comfortably below freezing; the furtive wind seeks its familiar northern pathway; there is a silence everywhere about to speak.

SLUSH…the seasons still teasing each other on the first day of spring, 32 degrees, rain falling all night, snow falling all morning. Slush. Walks, pathways, roads, fields covered in white, filled with this magical mixture, water and white. Along the trunks, high into the lacy branches of beech, birch, maple and pine, winter has etched its beauty along the dark lines…birds shake their feathers, horses shake their heads…smoke from the farmhouse chimney climbs then merges gray into white. Winter exercising its failing strength. Only a momentary thing now. The miracle of air, of water, of snow. Snow no longer what it was. Snow what it is: a magic act. Invisibly visible. At the mercy of warmth. The coming sun, only moments away. The advance of spring. Now you see it, now you don’t.

MARCH 21…Robin.

MARCH 23…Robins, robins, robins…

THE SEE-SAW BATTLE WAGES ON…mornings of thick, wet snow followed by afternoons of warmth, of sun, of the white lifted off the landscape like the quick vanishing act of a magician’s hand, like a woman removing a bed sheet with a flap of two arms…revealing the dull earth in all its tangled confusion–leaves, sticks, stones, earth–of late last fall. Lasting for days. Followed by thick, wet snow blanketing the earth again.

THE BAY THIS YEAR (Sister Bay) STILL LOCKED IN ICE…(Consult `The Ice- Out Chart’ compiled by Bill Bastian.) Some say it won’t move till two winds blow simultaneously–one out of the northeast, the other out of the southwest. Others say it should happen soon because the ice in the bay has turned black. Only a short distance beyond the ice, however, open steely-blue water as far as the eye can see.

THIS IS MARCH MAGIC…the sight of men deep in snow, deep in their orchards on a mild winter day, pruning apple and cherry trees; cold nights, mild days–the sap is running, the trees are tapped…maple syrup time; wind howling its warm and cold memories of the at its mercy of sound and invisible strength; the snow-cover along the road’s edge, slowly drawn back like a blanket by the sun each day, exposing more and more earth; the first sound of a robin, March–the first day of spring, March—the first regret that the privacy of winter will soon be lost.

IT ALWAYS RETURNS WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT…winter snow, which both breaks and lifts your heart. Your mind is in two places: that need to recapture the returning song of the unseen robin in the woods just a day or two ago. The yearning to extend the white curtain of isolation a little longer. You are better in winter. A better human being. More tolerable. More thoughtful of the darkness within you. More holy. More serene. The silence suggests the comfort of a quiet end. You have been taken away. Disappeared..

UNDER A CAT FUR SKY THIS LAST MORNING OF MARCH…amidst a final gasp of new fallen snow last night, filigree-ing the branches of old maples and birch, threading the high electric wires stretched down the road to infinity, dusting the fields and fir trees …the sudden stop-and-go burst of robins everywhere, flashes of sunny breasts helter-skelter through the woods, to the tops of trees and telephone wires, and down to the fields, a sweep of charcoal gray wings into a stand of pines, fluttering snow.

TO LOOK UP FROM THE DESK AND OUT THE WINDOW AT 5 P.M…and still see daylight at this time of March, both delights and saddens me. I need that late afternoon, lingering sun…that drowsy vermillion light that warms the bark of the white birch to a rosy glow. I think of the days ahead and that same light stretching into 7, 8, close to 9 o’clock at night when I will know again the pleasure of coming back to the coop and working on into darkness. That same darkness that I miss now…that disappears a little earlier each day with the change of season. I want the early darkness. I want winter and night outside my window at 4 P.M.

SIGNS OF THE LAMB….the narrow path through the snow I have shoveled all winter, from inches to snow to a late March depth of more than two feet. But with the thawing of the past few days, I watch the path visibly spread, grow wider with each day…now last fall’s leaves, dead grasses, the wet muddy earth at my feet; the chipmunks have awakened…tame, gentle, amazed at the sight of snow they carefully tread. Comic creatures caught above the earth on a landscape they find impossible to negotiate, running crazily here and there, back and forth…put of place, out of time…squirrels, too, encouraged by their time-clocks are now chasing partners across the snow covered ground, up and down tree trunks (occasionally fully engaged), acrobatic acts from tree to tree along the mazed circuitry of bending branches, sometimes, incredibly, missing the connection–as yesterday, when suddenly a squirrel came plummeting at fifty feet from the sky, head first past my window, landing in a one foot cushion of snow, shaking it off and dashing up again. But, ah, the serenest sight of all–here and there in some of the woods that still sing the old songs of March: galvanized buckets hanging lazily from thick trunks of old maple trees, gathering sap all day, a drop, a drop, a drop at a time.

REMEMBER, Remember, remember…The furnace still going on at night…the continued comfort of sweaters and flannel shirts….Cold , cold rain….

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by
Norbert Blei

Add to the growing list of Door County writers, Dr. Shaun J. Melarvie, born in Prairie du Chien, who joined the medical staff of Door County Memorial Hospital as an employee of John Herlache in 1994 and in 1996 joined forces with him to create Lake Side Surgical Associates.

As a writer, reader, sometimes teacher of writing, I have always been interested in the occasional doctor who appears in my annual Clearing workshop, ready to take up the pen–in addition to the knife. There’s a long history of Doctor-writers going back to the Greeks…back to Copernicus, Keats, Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Mikhail Bulgakov, Céline, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Thomas, Walker Percy, Richard Selzer, Michael Crichton, Ethan Canin, etc. Doctors are writing more than prescriptions these days. Novels, short stories, essays, poetry, philosophy, plays, and…

“Not another diet book!” you exclaim. Well, yes. But no.

This one’s different. For one thing, the doctor quotes Goethe on page iii: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it./Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Then introduces the first section, “Pre-Enlightenment” with some Shakespeare:

What a piece of work is a man
how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

At a hefty 412 pages, THE RELATIVITY DIET, A Diet Theory of Everything, by Shaun J. Melarvie, M.D. may be the MOBY DICK of diet books.

The breadth and sweep of it, the narrative pull of the prose, the pure science and detail of the matter…not to mention humanistic, memoir-like quality…the ability of this doctor-writer to add significant humor to his regimen as well, yet remain focused on the passionate personal, scientific, and philosophical pursuit of the great white whale of weight-loss… Quite an endeavor.

Chapter one opens on this note, immediately grabbing the reader’s attention:

A Brief History of My Obesity
1961-2004

I never was little. I never had a growth spurt, shooting up over the course of the summer—I always was about as big at the end of the school term as I was at the start of the next one, relative to my peers. From the day I was born at twelve pounds to the peak of my obesity some forty years later at over three hundred, my body mass remained on a steady upwards trajectory but for one brief interruption brought on by the happy coincidence of adolescence and testosterone. As of September twenty-first, 1961, I was the largest baby ever born in the Prairie du Chien Memorial Hospital. A long labor, before the era of epidurals and high C-section rates, left me with a misshapen head from the forceps that pulled me headfirst from my mother’s birth canal. I was nearly twice as large as any other baby in the viewing window and as I banged away on the sides of an ill-fitting bassinet people pointed at me and exclaimed something to the effect ooh, what a huge baby… what’s wrong with the poor thing… look at his head, it’s shaped like a heart. My father told me years later that when asked if I was his baby he replied that no, it was not—he denied me if not three times, at least once.

When, as a culture, did we become so obsessed with diets?

“Diets go back a long way.” explains Dr. Melarvie. “In fact, the first low-carb diet was suggested by William Banting in 1863. I think the more recent emphasis can be tied to Hollywood and motion pictures, with the emphasis on beauty and thinness and the almost quasi-worship of the celebrity. There also seems to have been an evolution of the “desired” body habitus from full-figured, like Monroe or Hayworth, to emaciated, like Kate Moss or Angelina Jolie. The solution to overweight and obesity became not a proper and health life-style, but a quick-fix oriented, easy, painless way, usually swallowed, and at a price of some sort.”

In follow-up discussions with the doctor–how his diet book differs the myriads of others published, and about to be published–he brings this to light:

“The Relativity Diet” doesn’t spend a lot of time, none really, on telling you specifically what to eat; that is left up to the reader to figure out, based on their re-education. The book focuses on the scientific foundation of energy, calories, and the body’s various responses to the various macronutrients. What I found helpful personally, and what I feel the reader will find helpful as well, is that an understanding of these scientific truths is what will make the difference. Much of the information is familiar, but is covered from a slightly different angle, and more in depth.

“The other primary difference is the format of the book itself. It is meant to be read in a linear fashion, like a story, from front to back. It breaks down fairly scientific, complicated material into digestible chunks, and incorporates a fair amount of humor along the way.”

That’s one of the great strength of this book, as I alluded to in the beginning: the literary tenor of the author’s approach. Not to mention that Dr. Melarvie nourishes a desire to write science fiction.

So back to the chase: the great white whale of weight loss. (“ I’ll follow him around the Horn, and around the Norway maelstrom, and around perdition’s flames before I give him up.” –Captain Ahab.) So many attempts. So few conquests.

“I think that the traditional diet of low-fat, high-carb, like the food pyramid of old, is a difficult diet to lose weight on because of the high-carb fraction, and I address this in the book. The other main problem is that a diet is somehow “artificial” especially in the case of the mail order diet meal plans, and after a goal is reached, the dieter returns to their usual and normal way of eating, which often is not a healthy or appropriate way.”

Presenting my literary credentials once more, I ask the good doctor: “Rilke once said: “You must change your life.” Does this fit into your theory of dieting?

“Definitely…if you do not change the way you think about food and energy, you will return towards old eating habits, which are obviously a problem for the overweight, or obese. There is so much more to weight-loss than a caloric limitation, although, granted, that is one of the most important. This is the argument I make in my book—the argument of making positive choices, based on a personal empowerment with the knowledge of the truths and science of why things are the way they are.“

We are a nation of fat people. Adults, children…O B E S I T Y the sign of our times. The meditation of munchies. We eat our way to happiness. Nirvana. What role does the culture play in overweight-white-whale-America—and who is responsible?

“In the book, I mention a “culture of fat,” and by that I allude to the ready availability and emphasis on energy dense food in our society. There has been a movement towards eating out, as opposed to cooking at home, and as far as the “eating out” options, the focus for the restaurants, etc. is not necessarily on health, but rather, the focus is on satisfying the id, and that basically involves, fat, sugar, and salt. It is difficult for me to eat out and stay within a reasonable caloric intake…my struggle begins with the first basket of “free” bread.

“The fast-food industry is a big part of this culture of fat, with their emphasis on packaged meals of soda, white bread, red meat and deep-fried potatoes, or the equivalent. The fast food restaurants do now offer salads, and the Subway chain has caloric-sensible entrees, but I suspect that the majority of sales for fast-food burger joints involve some combination of red meat and white bread.

“The counterpart to the whole fast-food, super-sized meals is the emphasis on thinness and the “easy” fix of taking some supplement that will “melt” the pounds off. The lion’s share of claims of these diet aids are false and are not backed up by blinded medical studies. In fact, the OTC are not regulated and it is likely that the concentrations of the “active” substance (s) are not as reported, if even present. This juxtaposition in our society of the promulgation of high-fat, energy dense food and the obsession of thinness is like some kind of a twisted yin and yang.”

Your book is heavy on science…might that scare people away?

“I certainly hope not. I think it is beautiful, mysterious, and awesome…the fact that we are all but manifestations of energy, which is mass multiplied by a velocity, imbued with the actual awareness that we are manifestations of energy. We are collections of atoms, which are 99.9% space, meaning that each of us are, at the very basic level, mostly space, and what makes us solid is the fundamental force of electricity—so, when we lose weight, we are losing mostly space. Now, isn’t that fascinating?”

Ed. Note: Dr. Shaun Melarvie’s book is available in the following Door County locations:

Door County Memorial Hospital Gift Shop | Book World | Bay Pharmacy | YMCA | Main Street Market | Novel Ideas | Passtimes Books. And at the reception desk of his office: Lake Side Surgical Assoc. 1843 Michigan, Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235.  author at relativitydiet.com |  info at eventhorizonpublishing.com | Event Horizon Publishing
PO Box 609 Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235 (920) 559.0269

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Norbert Blei | Photo by Jude Genereaux

The following audio selections are taken from a reading given by Mr. Blei at the Buzz Cafe in Oak Park, Illinois June-July 2000.

Download listen to Norbert Blei | Introduction by Charlie Rossiter

Download listen to Norbert Blei | The Trenchcoat

Download listen to Norbert Blei | Picture The Poem

Download listen to Norbert Blei | I’m No Poet

Download listen to Norbert Blei | Old Hem

Download listen to Norbert Blei | Sandburg Phizzog

Download listen to Norbert Blei | Sing The Blues

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Photo by Norbert Blei

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

from

“THE GHOST OF GUST KLENKE”
by
Norbert Blei

The old, weather-beaten, white gas station with the red sign “GUS” KLENKE still stands on the corner in Ellison Bay, minus the red Standard gas pumps with the glass crowns, minus the old oval, orange 7-Up sign, minus ‘ the clock in the window, minus the Atlas tire sign, the Quaker State sign, the two Honey for Sale signs, the air hose, minus the sleeping dog in the doorway, minus Gust. (Thank God no one has dug out the lilac bushes yet.)

It’s become kind of a landmark these days. Though a landmark to or for what, leaves natives and tourists alike scratching their heads, babbling to themselves.

Natives and oldtimers will right away lapse into their own memories of Gust. A visitor or two might recall buying a jar of honey from the man, while others will recall the place simply because “it was always there.”

And there will be those who probably never stopped because it seemed a bit of a local blight in their eyes. Because it wasn’t one of those modern refilling unservice station/mini marts where well-dressed customer-attendants, without a speck of dirt under their fingernails, or a dab of grease on their pressed clothing, couldn’t tell you the difference between a sparkplug and a quart of 10W-30, let alone know how to change either.

But this old falling-down gas station with the old man and all the junk in the dark inside and car parts and tools and beehives and junk all over the place and fiddle hanging above the cash register and the stove smoking and the dog in a dead sleep against the wall and the blue neon clock glowing in the window all night long, and Gust bent over some engine with a wrench in his hand saying, “Yeeeeeeeeep,” and the derelict cars and the old schoolbus outside rusting in the weeds … all this was Gust Klenke, And Gust Klenke was all this.

And we need to be reminded of this occasionally, especially now as the county goes Condo and Cute, and before every vestige of the real Door County is homogenized in the humdrum of urban slick and country fake with shops called ‘The Maple Closet’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’.

This photo of Gust was also taken by Norbert Blei –20 some years ago.)

So smile, tip your hat, say a little prayer, or toot your horn to the ghost of Gust when you pass by. His place had ‘character’ (still has, what’s left of it). Something almost impossible to find in most of Door these days, as we either tear it down, rehab it into something it never was, or build in the current vogue of Door County Country-Cute-Kitsch. All of which is false, all of which is phony. All of which makes about as much sense as Gust Klenke alive and well, driving a BMW and dressed like a yuppie.

There’s Door County Country-Cute-Kitsch and Door County character. And you don’t have to look too far down the block from Gust’s to separate the real from the unreal. The hustle from what-it-was-like-to-fix-machines-in-a-building-that-wasn’t-trying-to-be-anything-else-than-what-it-was-and-raise-bees-and-gather-and-sell-honey-to-folks-who-stopped-by-because-they-needed-you-and-so-what-if-the-whole-place-looked-like-it-was-going-to-hell, cause maybe it was, and maybe we all was, yeeeeeeep!”

Downtown Ellison Bay still seems a little purer, a little more authentic than what’s been happening in most of the towns and villages of Door these days. Late at night, I like to think of Gust in his dimly lit garage, wearing his grimy bibs, with tools and rags and pencils sticking out of his pockets, his old cap hugging his forehead, bent over, struggling to fix the carburetor on some small engine.

The blue neon clock glows in the window … he opens the door and steps outside, onto the gravel, the smell of raw grass and the scent of summer lilacs . . . and takes a little stroll toward the Viking for his usual cup of coffee.

The street is empty. The town is quiet. A potter has replaced the gallery across the street…the small building where the market once was. The post office is no longer in Walter Severson’s house, but the house still stands, and so too that beautiful white frame house of Clint Rogers and his wife … a family with some history to Ellison Bay.

Will’s Cottages remain the same, thank God or someone for that. The most authentic lodging to be had in Ellison Bay. Rustic and real. The Town Market too, is what it is. So too the Viking, where only a few of Gusts’ old cronies are to be found at the counter these days.

The Pioneer Store… the prize and pride of old Ellison Bay as Gust knew it… and as it still stands in all its glory and history, thanks to Lester and Carol Newman. (Measure any of your Country-Cute-Kitsch shops in Door alongside this one. You’ll recognize them real, real fast.)

No comment on the church across the street. Let that out-of-character design speak for itself. The Norrland looks great. So too Kenny Gobel’s station. Who can explain the Greek Parthenon of Ellison Bay that once wag Clayton’s? Till’s fits in perfectly. So too the abandoned, old Door Reminder… and all the rest down the road, and up the hill, all a little beyond an old soul’s nightly sojourn.

Heading back to his garage, a flashlight in hand, his dog at his heels, the ghost of Gust thinks the old town “ain’t so bad yet, but sure is changing.” He wishes whoever took the blue neon clock from the window of his garage would put it back, leave it there for the local folks, the travelers, the world of Ellison Bay and beyond to keep time by.

That would be a nice-enough memorial, a remem¬brance of old Gust. Leave the station stand till it falls. And leave the light of the clock glowing in the window for all a them that needs to be reminded that time passes for everything and everyone. Though the memory of the real, like Gust Klenke, has a life of its own. Yeeeeeeeeeeeep.

[from CHRONICLES OF A RURAL JOURNALIST IN AMERICA, Norbert Blei, Samizdat Press, 1990 ]

Woodcut by Louis Smolak

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Ice Shanty

February 3

Walking the sharp afternoon, an hour or so before sunset, the light already cutting the trees in darkness halfway down the trunks, the face and the ears catching the slight but bitter wind while passing the open fields. Down to the lake, covered now with snow . . . and in the distance, four ice shanties. Smoke rolls upwards from the tiny chimneys and spreads in the late light of sky. Inside, men sit around an open hole of blue, tied to the water under ice, lost in the oldest of prayers. Walking above it all, I see and feel and know the sweep and force of wet flesh stirring a muddy lake bottom that might possibly read spring to scale and fin and shell, though the clear and cloudy heaven I trod, to fish steering beneath me, remains a constancy, a limit to leaping, a ceiling of ice.

Frost Upon the Pane

February 7

Of nights, of winter, sometimes not made for sleep or dream. Night of anguish, of a restlessness, of wanting too hard to die the death of day. Struggling to reconstruct the silence, the meaninglessness of words. To stop the mind. To stop the mind. To worry the illusive patterns of frost upon the pane. To climb that slope, reach the apex which harbors moonlight, only to slide down again in milky darkness, eyes alive, body whole, mind afire.

Snow Play

February 16

Coming home last night through the fast falling snow: flakes growing in my eyes, the play of light on the road ahead. Landscape shifting as the road, the trees, the fences, farms and fields are transformed in a unison of white. The beams of the headlights, straight, in time appear to cross, appear to turn back upon themselves, back upon the driver, eyes dancing in a whirl of flakes so big they blind, then occupy the very eye till all inside the skull is a ball of glass turned upside down, snow drifting in its own light.

The White Peninsula

February 20

The silence of this life in the country night and day, in winter, becomes so common, so casual, that only the harshest, the most strident, the most unusual of noises awakens one from this comfortable lethargy. It is almost as if a balance of nature, sounds most natural, has been reached within the ear. Which is why early this morning, 6:30 a.m., the far away sound … a hum?…coming closer to where I lay in bed…closer…rivets my attention to the ceiling, then to the window, the sky. Suddenly the steady whirring sound passes overhead, diminishing once more. A single-engine plane, flying this bleak winter landscape unaccustomed to any air traffic at all. The mind goes up to it… the sound, the plane, the pilot. With him I see the white peninsula, the islands, the blue waters of the lake. On the ground, snowbirds… a harbinger of spring.

Photo by Norbert Blei

from: DOOR STEPS, The Days, The seasons, Ellis Press, 1983, cover painting and text sketches by Charles Peterson, $15, hardbound. A year of daily notes and four essays chronicling the life of a writer adjusting to a rural landscape. Available from the publisher, Ellis Press; from the author at ngbleiATgmailDOTcom or in Door County at Main Street Market, Egg Harbor; The Pioneer Store, Ellison Bay; Passtimes Books, Sister Bay.

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Daniel Anderson

Remembering Door in Photographs
by Norbert Blei

For those who still question whether photography is art, I suggest they visit the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin and dwell on the exhibit “Barbara’s Farm: A Color Photography Memoir,” by Daniel Anderson, January 16 to March 2, 2010.

I doubt anyone can walk past the first few photographs without catching his breath. The sheer beauty of these large images (23×30 print, 32×40 frame) is staggering. You never stop to consider whether they are oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, etc. Instead, your eyes are immediately engaged, invited to inhabit the rural images Anderson has captured…holding you in their midst, be it “Pear Tree in Fog,” “Smoke House,” “Mountain Ash Berries and Wash House” or any of the other thirty-four works.

As Anderson sees it, “The question of whether photography is art or not is not one that I worry about at all. Photography has its own grammar and language that must be mastered as well as having its own history and traditions that must be respected. It shares with other forms of visual arts like painting and sculpture the fact that materials, tools and methods must be learned and practiced before one can adequately express oneself. If any form of visual communication is to be considered as art, it should exhibit some common characteristics such as conveying ideas, intelligence and an intent that is communicated.

”Here is why I consider what I do to be an art form: I create imagery to fulfill my personal creative vision. I always have a point of view and have an emotional connection with my subject and I use photography to express these emotions and ideas and communicate them to a viewer.”

Given his travels, the world-wide scope, interest, acquisition of his work, given his study under Ansel Adams and other masters, we sometimes forget that Dan Anderson, a fulltime resident here since 1991, while not an ‘official local’ has a long history with the Door County setting, going back to boyhood—which this exhibit certainly celebrates.

“Sixty years ago, I was growing up across the road from this farm and since it was the home of my boyhood friend Duane, I played in, on, and around these same buildings and trees for years. Duane’s sisters, Barbara, Sheila and Rose, were also part of the large Logerquist family. At that time, this farm was a very active one with dairy cattle, draft horses, chickens and general farming activities with busy workers using lots of equipment.

“It also had a cherry orchard, and this fact was the main motivating force behind this photo project as it was the four sheds built in the 1930’s to house the migrant workers for the time they were in Door County every summer harvesting the cherry crop that first attracted me as a photographer. All through the 1940’s and 1950’s Door County had many migrant workers housed in sheds on many orchards and farms. These folks made the county a very exotic place to grow up for me. Since I picked cherries right along with them I became acquainted with many of them over the years.

“These iconic migrant sheds have seen an incredibly rich history, housing workers from many places in the world. There have been Native Americans, workers from the Caribbean, African Americans from the south, Hispanic Americans from Texas, Caucasians from the Appalachian mountain regions and other southern states. They all would come to Door County for the cherry harvest season in late July and August during their itinerant life following and harvesting the crops throughout the United States. During the latter years of World War II, German POW’s were brought from a Wisconsin POW camp to the Logerquist farm to pick cherries and were housed in these sheds during the cherry harvest. Today, time has taken a hard toll on the migrant housing structures throughout the county, and now these four sheds are some of the last and best examples of them still standing.

“My memory of these buildings and landscape reminds me that they are remarkably unchanged in the last 60 years that I have been acquainted with them. … Yes, there have been great changes in the life and activities of this farm. The cherry orchard is long gone … The dairy cattle operation and general farming activities have ceased and of course the migrant workers whose presence was such a fascinating part of every summer to me while I was growing up have been gone from these sheds and indeed from the entire county for decades now. But the bones of my memories, the buildings and trees, are still here … Today, only Barbara still lives on the farm and she has faithfully seen to the maintenance and upkeep of her farm.

“Now decades later I again live within a few miles from the farm with access to it as a photographer and so see it with a different mindset than I did as a boy but those boyhood memories are still filtering the way I think about and compose these images. There are iconic structures and trees that appeal to me as a photographer … Now after almost three years and many visits to Barbara’s Farm this project does feel finished to me.”

Those familiar with Anderson’s education and work often associate his photography with the stunning, stark contrast of his nature prints, that intense reality of black and white. Anderson admits these days to loving color as well. In his early days, however, the technology for color was not that advanced. “I could not control the color then. While I could be way more creative in black and white.” He is truly a master of both.

Though I have lived and written about this county for many years and often work with artists Charles Peterson and Emmett Johns on my own books and publications, three years ago I had the opportunity to work with Dan Anderson for the first time on a book project. In 2006, Cross+Roads Press published, *THE NATURE OF DOOR, Door County Writers and Artists on Preservation of Place, Edited by Norbert Blei and Karen Yancey, for the Door County Land Trust. A truly beautiful book I am most proud of, featuring many of our fine local writers on particular places worth preserving in this county. Required reading–and owning. The text is handsomely illustrated/enhanced with sketches and drawings from the incredible sketch books of Charles Peterson. The book is available locally in various and through the Door County Land Trust website.

For the front and back covers of this book, I called upon photographer Dan Anderson in his beautiful Ellison Bay studio, requesting two extraordinary black and white photographs of his, which I felt perfectly set the tone of the book, `showed’ what needed to be said starkly, simply, beautifully: Here it is. This must be honored and preserved for us all.

I am beyond fortunate to be living and working in this environment, surrounded by all this natural wonder…in the midst of such generous artists and good people.

Anderson’s latest work is a confirmation of what makes this place. What matters here.

TWO FINAL NOTES:

Daniel Anderson will give a talk about his show at the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin on February 11 at 10:30 A.M.

The sponsors of this exhibit are Keith and Claudia Kasen, Norma and John Green, and Gretchen and John Maring. These are all fine people. Sponsors of the arts in Door County never get the attention or credit they deserve. I thank you. We thank these folks in particular for sponsoring this stunning show of Dan Anderson’s photographs.

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You had to live here to know about it. Hear someone mention it in conversation. It had nothing to do with summer vacations in Door County. It was invisible spring, summer, and fall when it faded into the natural landscape as the 17th fairway of the golf course that was set so perfectly in one of Wisconsin’s most beautiful state parks: Peninsula Park, Door County—between Fish Creek and Ephraim.

The transformation and challenge came in winter. White on gray. Deep snow. Long winters of no end. What to do come another weekend in cold storage? Ice skate? Ice fish? Cross-country ski?

Hill 17.

The hill seemed much higher then, forty years again when the kids were small and a friend in Ephraim mentioned it was a good place to take the kids in winter.

I recall a recent L.L. Bean winter catalog, “Outdoors” and can’t believe the stuff available: “Bean’s Kids Winter Walker Snowshoes ($49.99); Tubbs Flex Snowshoes ($179); Bean’s Toboggan ($99 to $149); Sonic Snow Tube ($89 to $129); Bean’s Flyer Sleds by Flexible Flyer ($28.95 to $32.95); Flexible Flyer Runner Sled ($79 to $99); Flexible Flyer Saucer ($28.95); Snow Castle/Snowball Maker Set ($29.95)…helmets, goggles, sunglasses, Bean canteens…

It also seemed (and was) more ‘dangerous’ in the past. More like old-time sports for kids—mostly unsupervised by parents or anyone else. You found a rise in the landscape something like a hill covered in ice or/and snow—and you went at it. Gave no mind to cold. Numbness. Frozen hands, feet, face. You made fun. Sport. Took chances. The bigger the hill the better. You slid down on a small wooden sled that didn’t steer too well…or a red-rubber-patched, black inner tube, a piece of cardboard, or the seat of your pants. Maybe an old pair of wooden skis hand-made by your friend’s Swedish grandfather. Or if you were really lucky, a toboggan that everyone could pile onto and yell all the way down.

Nothing else to do when you came to rest at the bottom, (and hopefully turned over ) but get up, dust yourself off, and climb to the top of Hill 17 again…and again… It never got old. Sometimes a parent or someone handed you a cup of sweet hot cocoa from a thermos–which made the day even tastier.

I look upon the scene today, alone, from the bottom of the hill: “No Sledding” a sign says, “Due to icy conditions.” Quiet. Not a soul in sight. A classic white-on-gray Door winter’s day…as they once were. And remain.

I take a last look up into the stillness, hold it for keepsakes…till the hill begins to fade into a Charles (Chick) Peterson painting—the ghosts of kids bundled in winter jackets, caps, scarves, gloves. Their bright color, the only color in the landscape. The sight of Ephraim across the frozen bay. The sound of voices laughing, screaming up and down the hill.

The warmth of winter.

Painting by Charles L. Perterson. You can visit the artist on his web site by clicking here… or just click the above painting please!

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Connecting from the Rural World

(That was then, this is now)

When I left the city for life in the rural, back in the late 1960’s, I found myself ‘north’ at almost the tip of a long peninsula, on a dead-end road with two neighbors: an old man who lived alone on a back forty adjacent to me (a stone fence separating us) and beyond him, across the road, an elderly couple. All of whom, in time, became good friends.

My connection to the outer world was a cranky four-party line. The three of us on this road—and somebody else, I was never sure who, or forgot …some old lady who never had much to say anyway, on another road nearby.

Sometimes the phone rang—and we all answered. Sometimes you wanted to use the phone, but couldn’t because one of the neighbors was on talking about snow or rain or church—or you.

Occasionally you picked it up just for the hell of it—just to know that another human being was out there, dead end road or not.

And sometimes, indeed, you listened in. But not long! Your conscience always got the better part of you. And you did not want someone saying: “Is that you_____? Are you listening in? Shame on you! Hang up!”

The four-partyline yielded in time to a single, “private” phone connection. Oh, joy, oh joy! All mine. I can pick up the phone any time of the day or night. Dial out! Make a connection to my folks back in Chicago. Friends everywhere.

In time, however, an isolation factor entered in. You missed the close connection to neighbors. Their voices. Their being right there…here.

I think the next miracle was the portable phone. You could actually take the damn phone outdoors where you were planting in the garden or having a beer at the picnic table under the tree and make a call to someone! Or take one. “Hey, I’m outside, talking to you! Yes, the weather’s fine. I’m going up on the roof now to clean the gutters—and taking you with me!”

Let’s make this fast—and simple: Enter the heavy portable car phone, the computer, car phone, laptop, cable, cell phone, i-phone… wireless….where are you? We?

Well, I’m still out here in the woods, the rural. Trying to make whatever connection I can. Cable doesn’t come this far—and probably never will, in my lifetime. Which is fine. I don’t need or want a 125 television channels. Sometimes deprivation is good for the soul

But I do need to stay connected. Miracle of miracles, not long ago, I was able to finally disconnect from the damned dogged land connection and go wireless! (Enter oh Brave New World—WELCOME!)

Mostly, I’m OK with everything. And sometimes slightly amused, especially in tourist-time summer, when ‘city folks’ enter my rural domain for a spell—some frustrated with laptops that can’t find a signal, some cursing into i-phones that don’t connect particularly well in these parts—the AT&T connection, haphazard, problematic at best.

Which bring me to the theme of this whole piece, this photograph, this scene not too far from me where someone, some frustrated tourist perhaps, threw down his marker…discovered a ‘hot spot’, put up a bench under the tree, a sign to alert the world:

I AM HERE! I AM CONNECTED EVEN FROM THIS DEAD-END-LOCATION! HEAR ME OUT NOW, WORLD!

norbert blei

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Greeting the Seasons
from my coop-window

This is my view every day, sometimes nights—a room with a view for all seasons. Each one, a greeting, an invitation to behold.

I can’t wait to look out from my desk every day.

Looking out, looking in. Making something of it…out there…in here…in words. Some words finding their way to you—everywhere. From me in Ellison Bay to you—you over there in Afghanistan. Just a click away. Imagine.

The woods extend their ominous presence, their shadow, comfort, light. The snow is a constant revelation, an unspoken prayer. Birds, animals, rain, thunder, lighting, wind…the harvest moon snagged in the branches of an old maple tree. The lake waters, somber, sparkling—just down the road from here.

I’ve been looking out at the world through this window since1976. Everyday, something else I didn’t see before.

My thoughts today are with you all out there in this season of light, another new beginning. I give thanks for the gift of knowing you—you on the other side of my window. norbert blei

www.poetrydispatch.wordpress.com; www.bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com; www.nbcoop.outlawpoetry.com; www.bleidoorcountytimes.com; www.norbertblei.com

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WINTER RE-VISITED

Road

The road that is ice leads to the water. Which is ice. Leads past the bedroom of the house where the old woman died in her sleep, her spine fused till she was something translucent, cold. Ice itself. Like a similar road which leads past the house where the wife, recently separated, sits alone in the kitchen loving the man still, listening for the sound of his truck, the bark of the dog, on the frozen drive. The same icy road that cuts across the fields. That cuts through the woods. That leads to the weathered house on the edge of the frozen lake where the road ends, where the old couple, partly blind, partly deaf, glide past each other like solitary skaters.
Is this frost on the windowpane? What is she saying?
Can you see my breath?
Where did she put the matches? It snows all night.
Nobody remembers this road anymore.

Windowpane

He is outside himself again. Running errands for bread and milk, morning mail, and occasional visits with the lonely, the desperate, the dying.
Isolation, illness, death make him come alive again.
The view is white. The long shadows of trees in a late afternoon sun the color of a lemon dropped in snow.
He inhabits the talk of neighbors, strangers, friends, loved ones. The talk of radio announcers and television news commentators. The world is invisible;
violence visible as love.
“Taste this,” he tells a loved one, disenchanted in his dreams.
To open the door inside again he needs magic, not the magician . . . the top hat, the black cape, the wand. Not the language of abracadabra.
To see behind mirrors through glass again. To pick slivers out of the palm of his hand. To rub the bark of birch. To root the fields and find the bird just before song and substantiate the night.
To see in the dark.
Suffer blinding light.
Touch, touch, touch the frosted glass to tears.

Love Untold in Two Landscapes

The world no longer exists for the middle-aged.

Not a story but a life.

He remembers walking over the burnt landscape. The canyon. The ravens. Making love, her head hanging over the edge.

He remembers walking over the white landscape. The bluff. The gulls. Making love, her head hanging over the frozen shore of the lake.

She wanted to meet him for a long time. Tell him I’m here, she tells herself. He knows.

People do not know how he hides in landscapes. Protective coloring.

He should tell her: Life is erotic. Or nothing. She should tell him: Your life belongs to something else.
Not me.

Unclothed, she almost makes him seem young again, though he, engaged in entering her, ravens circling above, stares over her hanging head, deep into the bottom of the canyon, part sun, part shade, part echo of a scream.

He and she bare to the middle movable parts, in the middle of their years, he makes her seem young again, though she, riding him, gulls pulling down the horizon, stares over his hanging head, mouth silently agape, tasting snow, tasting her come forward, sensing that ancient darkness before love, blue sky below.

Death and memory.

She gets to the bottom of him, he gets to the spirit of her.

She takes him again on a mud floor, the smell of native incense burning.

He takes her again in a barn on a bed of hay, and the smell of apples in a wooden crate.

Feelings of youth.

He reminds her of the first bite into a hard apple. Of sweetness. Of apples rotting.

She reminds him of ex-lovers and spouses, lost children, lost landscapes, aging flesh.

“! wanted to see how far we both would go.”

“I wanted to remember where I’d been.”

Who leaves whom?

The last time he was left with: a pickup truck, $300 in the bank, and a shelf of old National Geographies.

She was left with nothing. Which adds up. He gathers wood.

She gathers pottery shards.

He kicks off a pair of frozen boots.

She lets slide a Spanish shawl from her shoulders.

In the end, almost, she retreats to the top of a mountain she is physically incapable of climbing.

He walks in fresh falling snow with his .22 along the edge of a deep woods. And enters.

She hates him. Follows the rim of the canyon home. And takes the life of the most playful kitten in the new litter, deliberately, accidentally.

A shot, unheard, in the winter woods.

The death of romance.

[from: WINTER BOOK, Norbert Blei, Ellis Press, 2002]

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