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Obama portraits postscript: looking back
The Obamas in 1996 (photo by Mariana Cook, part of the MFA Lane Collection) I got some reflected double images when I shot this photo with my Samsung Galaxy 10; those ghostly blurs are NOT part of Mariana Cook’s 1996 shot. But they make me wonder: could this accomplished young couple possibly have imagined what lay ahead for them? Gazing back through the years is always a double exposure, isn’t it?
Good thing we can’t see very far ahead, methinks.
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Old–and REALLY old acquaintance at the MFA, Boston
1 September 2022 On the first of September I spent a fine time at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the first day the Obama portraits commissioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery were on display for members. The portraits have been touring the country, and Boston is their last stop before returning to Washington, D.C. I’d not visited the MFA since two favorite galleries, closed for much of COVID and now handsomely redesigned, had reopened. This meant for renewed acquaintance with portraits old and new, and a fine if extravagant lunch in the MFA Courtyard’s New American Café.
First, the Obama portraits: large, formidable, non-traditional.
Portraits l. to r. by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald The Barack Obama portrait by Kehinde Wiley pictures the President surrounded by vegetation whose botanical symbolism National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet explains: “The purple African lily symbolizes his father’s Kenyan heritage; the white jasmine represents his Hawaiian birthplace and time spent in Indonesia; the multicolored chrysanthemum signifies Chicago, the city where Obama grew up and eventually became a state senator.
Each flower relates to a portion of Obama’s life. Together the lily, jasmine and chrysanthemum—combined with rose buds, the universal symbol for love and courage—provide a metaphor for a well-cultivated, albeit sometimes tangled life full of obstacles and challenges.”
In Kehinde Wiley’s portrait, Obama leans into the viewer’s gaze, giving you his undivided, approachable but discerning attention. I like it very much. Amy Sherald’s pendant portrait of Michele Obama I find less successful, with the dress stealing focus from the sitter’s face. There is no warmth in the skin tones, pose, or expression: her left hand is draped casually across her right knee, supporting her arm and the hand on which she leans her chin, her expression cool, appraising, perhaps a bit judgmental and wary. The gaze is neither welcoming nor warm; she is beautiful and confident. But approachable? Not so much. There is a cartoon-ish quality to the image; somehow it reminds me of the Yellow Submarine Beatles. Maybe it’s the emphasis on lower body, outfits, and tiny heads.
1968 Clearly both portraits exert a magnetic appeal, however, and for me are another reminder of what’s been lost over the last several years, especially under the pall of COVID that seems so much a blur that I’ve come to think of the period from 2020 until now in 2022 as a wrinkle in time (pace Madeline L’Engle). Still, I prefer the official portrait of Michele Obama unveiled only last Wednesday, 7 September 2022, in the East room of the White House, Sharon Sprung’s portrait nine months in the making and kept secret for six years.
Robin Pogrebin in her 7 September New York Times post, “Official Obama Portraits Are Finally Unveiled at the White House,” explained that former presidents and first ladies for decades had had their official White House portraits (as opposed to the Smithsonian portraits now at the Boston MFA) unveiled by their successors. That did not happen for the portraits of Barack and Michele Obama while Donald J. Trump was in power. You can’t have a White House ceremony without the approval of the sitting president, and of course the sui generis Trump was bound to disrupt so generous a tradition. It took President Biden’s victory and a tamer pandemic to both welcome the Obamas back to the White House and reveal for the first time their White House portraits.
Besides, how could Trump stand comparison with Robert McCurdy’s handsome portrait of the handsome 44th president?
Seeing the Obama portraits evoked in me a painful nostalgia. For solace, I sought lunch (carnitas quesadillas) and a very pricey Stella Artois (Sam Adams was sold out) in the MFA courtyard.
MFA Courtyard with the New American Cafe 
Delicious but pricey lunch Then came a reunion with another ruling couple, King Menkaura and his Queen—perhaps wife, perhaps mother—Old Kingdom portraiture, 2490-2472 BCE. These two were a favorite of my late husband’s, who regularly assigned his art history students to write about them. And in their dramatically re-designed MFA setting, they are all the more compelling.
Like Keats’s Grecian urn, these two seem foster children “of silence and slow time,” the queen’s embrace of the king and the pair’s sightless gaze through eternity teases me out of thought of the madding present. For which I am grateful. Thank you, MFA.
MFA entrance with Sargent Murals 
Rotunda ceiling by Sargent, reflected in a helpfully placed mirror As I was transfixed and transported by art, some poor parents were transporting their college kid to school in Boston that first of September afternoon, and fixed/scalped their U-Haul under one of Storrow Drive’s low-clearance bridges. “Getting Storrowed” happens every back-to-school year. Even the traffic tailback did not fluster me, however; I was still under Menkaura’s spell, and ever so grateful to be neither college student nor parent.
Age has its privileges.
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RIP Queen Elizabeth II
Coronation Day 1953 She led a life of duty, devotion, and dignity. May she rest, at long last, in peace.
As the queen’s death was announced on Thursday, two rainbows were visible to crowds gathered near the Queen Victoria Memorial outside of Buckingham Palace. 8 September 2022 / Photo by Toby Melville / Reuters -
Labor Day and History, 5 Sept 2022
Rainy Labor Day at Gnawwood When Francis Scott Key first saw “by the dawn’s early light” a huge garrison flag, the original star spangled banner, flying over Ft. McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland on 14 September 1814, he knew that the British bombardment of the Fort had failed to prompt an American surrender. The British fleet withdrew, and the successful defense of Baltimore, then America’s third-largest city, marked a turning point in the War of 1812. Three months later, on 24 December 1814, the Treaty of Ghent ended the war. The flag’s 15 stars and 15 stripes represented the 15 states then in the Union, the thirteen original colonies plus Vermont (joined 1791) and Kentucky (1792).
I’ve flown a reproduction of this flag on the porch at Gnawwood today to honor the Federal influence on our home’s architecture and the workers of America—and to celebrate the third fall that this retired prof is NOT returning to the classroom. Time passing and the new school year have made me thoughtful about the many changes in academia observed over my 43 years of teaching. And so I refer you, Dear Reader, to Bret Stephens’s opinion piece published in the New York Times (in print on 31 August, online on 30 August (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/history-sweet-aha-academia.html): “This is the Other Way That History Ends.”
Stephens is responding to the backlash unleashed on James H. Sweet, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and president of the American Historical Association, for earlier this month publishing a column in that organization’s news magazine titled “Is History History?” Stephens regrets that the (unmerited in his opinion) brouhaha has obscured important things Sweet had to say. To quote Stephens:
“Sweet was warning that historians risked doing an injustice both to their own profession as well as to the past itself by falling victim to “the allure of political relevance.
. . . . Above all, historians should make us understand the ways in which the past was distinct. This shouldn’t prevent us from making moral judgments about it. But we can make better judgments, informed by the knowledge that our forebears rarely acted with the benefit (or burden) of our assumptions, expectations, experiences and values. There’s a lesson in humility in that, as well as a reminder that we are only actors in time whose most cherished ideas may eventually seem strange, and sometimes abhorrent, to our descendants.
. . . .If people are wondering how history ends, maybe this is how: when a scholarly discipline tries to turn itself into something it isn’t, making itself increasingly irrelevant in its desperate bid for relevancy.”
As someone who has too often heard Shakespeare called to task for living in the late sixteenth and early seventeen centuries, and myself an “actor in time,” I can only agree. Most of us know very little of history, and what we do know is necessarily filtered through our own metamodern perception. Here’s to the corrections Sweet and Stephens offer.
Happy Labor Day.
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Why I like THE BEAR 31 August 2022
Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, Hair on Fire
(photo from upi.com)Having now succumbed to temptation by streaming through all 8 episodes of The Bear for the second time in as many weeks, I’m doing a little self-audit to examine just why I love this series (which I’m happy to note will indeed have a second season).
The first few reasons are quite personal. My working at the New Orleans Hilton’s fine dining restaurant Winston’s in the early 80’s (as I struggled to write my dissertation until my wonderful dad gave me the money to quit waiting tables and just finish the g.d. thing) was a wonderful and complex experience. Front of the house was all show biz, as we worked in “butler & maid” boy/girl teams, right up my alley as a drama and English major—and a professor in training, learning how to read a room, a table, and an individual’s responses and deliver what was wanted: to be left alone (Dick Clark), to be secluded but fawned over (Billy Joel, using the separate wine room’s mirrored table for blow), chatted up, or merely taken good care of (the NOLA fire chief, who smoothly palmed me a C-note with his end-of-meal handshake). The maître d’, a mad Frenchman named Claude de Leon, assigned me the VIP tables, and so ‘twas I who waited on Robert Lawrence Balzer, the first serious wine journalist in the U.S., when he came to dinner representing Travel/Holiday magazine. Though “Bobby” Balzer found our chilled salad forks a “meaningless affectation,” I helped Winston’s earn the extra star we sought that night.
Back of house, however, was the real education, and though I had worked before at a fine dining establishment in Greenville, South Carolina (with a wonderful chef named John L who looked after this neophyte with advice to “put on the chef” whatever went wrong with service, since I was the one working for tips), I’d never before served with an executive chef and CIA-trained (Culinary Art Institute of America) line cooks. As I recall, there were three or four of these young men and a woman as pantry chef or garde manger, plus Big Al, the grill master. I think Bart Shoemaker was sous chef, regretting his surname because the last thing a chef wants to be known as is a shoe maker. The kitchen ran on adrenaline, drama, and sex; I had a brief, happy, and significant fling with one of the line cooks, a flirty Dutchman.
Their work in that kitchen was HARD, hot, fast, demanding performance work—something The Bear’s creator, Christopher Storer clearly understands. The show’s premise is that Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (the eponymous Bear, played by Jeremy Allen White), a young chef from the world of fine dining, has come home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop. His beloved, difficult big brother Michael has taken his own life and left Carmen the restaurant, so in addition to the burden of re-inventing how the shop in shambles works, Carmen and other family members—including the close-knit kitchen crew—are coping with grief. Carmen has one ally in a CIA grad who knows both Carmen’s superior reputation and the Escoffier kitchen brigade system, Sydney Adamu (played by the wonderful Ayo Edebiri). Brilliant ensemble acting and frantic quick-flash editing together with a gang busters premise and narrative arc over 8 episodes really rock, alternately hilarious and deeply moving.
Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu on set with White as “Carmy”
(photo from maxblizz.com)So, aside from the pleasure of re-living part of my young life, why do I love this show? Let me count the ways:
- The “kitchen confidential” (pace Anthony Bourdain) exposé of what goes on back-of-house in a restaurant careening through service at full tilt boogie is thrilling. Carmen’s explaining the man-hours dedicated to producing a single dish at The French Laundry alone is enthralling/appalling.
- Valorizing the sacrifice and commitment of people dedicating themselves to doing something very hard very well, over and over again, is something Americans need to see more of. Hard work in the pursuit of excellence is the opposite of “quiet quitting,” deserving of respect and emulation—especially in a culture that has come to so readily disrespect expertise in any field.
- Respect is what the diverse characters of The Bear earn and practice—another template for our currently fractured and fractious era to consider. This is what hard work for all the right reasons–and true familial devotion—look like.
- The show also does a good job of exposing the damage suicide wreaks on those left behind, another valuable lesson.
- Examining the relation of what one does to one’s identity may currently be unfashionable, on the assumption that the self exists independent of accomplishment. As Garrison Keillor used to point out, in Lake Wobegon “All the children are above average.” But that relationship is real and relevant, and attention must be paid.
When I got my hair cut by my long-term most excellent stylist Terri last week, I asked if she’d seen this show I liked so much, The Bear. She hadn’t, but one of her young associates had. “That food show?” she asked. “It’s great.” I asked her why she liked it. Her reply, “I’ve worked in restaurants. It’s real and relatable.”
She’s right.
See you in September!
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Thinking Ink: Tutored by Art
Shiao-Ping Wang demonstrates the traditional art of Chinese ink painting “Tutored by my art” is how Friar Laurence, the herbalist in Romeo and Juliet who compounds a sleeping potion for Juliet, describes his pharmaceutical credentials. In the past few days of editing my chapter on life lessons taught in that play, that phrase has leapt from the page to chime with other activities of the week. I remember from my earlier life the phenomenon of being so immersed in rehearsing a play that no matter what else was going on, everything seemed a reference to, an aspect of the play I was preparing. Of course, the richness of any Shakespearean text almost guarantees relatable correspondences of all sorts, and every fresh encounter with a play by Shakespeare, reading or seeing, reveals something new: the play doesn’t change, but we do, so we recognize things in it we did not before.
So, it’s not surprising that Friar Laurence’s phrase has me thinking about my mid-week experience in a five-hour Chinese ink painting workshop at the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit, Maine, the first time in decades I’ve had an artist’s brush in my hand, and the first time ever I’ve had the pleasure of being taught by my good friend, accomplished artist and educator Shiao-Ping Wang. Earlier this year, I’d been mesmerized by her show at the Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine (see Jorge Arango’s illustrated review at https://www.pressherald.com/2022/01/02/art-review-abstract-art-allowed-shiao-ping-wang-to-break-free-from-confines-of-identity/ ), so when another dear friend, artist and former UNH colleague Carol Aronson Shore, invited me to go with her to Shiao-Ping’s workshop, I immediately agreed.
Carol and Shiao-Ping grind ink at the Barn Gallery’s
Chinese Ink Painting Workshop, 24 August 2022A perk of accompanying Carol was her sharing with me her impressive collection of brushes, inksticks, brush stand, and large, decoratively carved inkstone, the mortar for grinding and containing ink, all acquired during her visit to China years earlier, but never before this occasion put to use. Shiao-Ping provided a variety of papers, each with its own qualities: Maobian, the yellowish practice paper, smooth and semi-absorbent; Xuan, white and soft, showing subtle ink gradations; and Mulberry, less absorbent and good for layered and opaque technique.
Brushes for ink painting compose a complete menagerie: white, soft goat brushes; brown, firmer weasel brushes; mountain horse hair brushes mixed with badger, very rough in texture for irregular and expressive effects. Apparently even the location of the hair on the donor animal is a factor: Shiao-Ping alluded to one brush’s having “belly hair.” Such natural and transparent sourcing really appeals to me.
Shiao-Ping inspects Carol’s collection of brushes 
SP’s hands, brush, and how to paint bamboo demo The materials of this art are themselves beautiful, and Shiao-Ping’s easy, self-effacing eloquence in describing not only techniques but the long tradition behind their evolution were as engaging as her demonstrations. Her instruction, I gather, followed a pragmatic and traditional sequence: first grinding the ink and then practicing initial strokes, leading to practicing making the Chinese character or logogram for “tree,” and then copying—or attempting to copy—renderings of first bamboo leaves, then bamboo culms and nodes, then rocks, then landscapes.
Practice templates All of this was completely absorbing and, because absorbing, refreshing. It’s rare that for so extended a period I’ve focused exclusively on completing a single, simple, repetitive task. The few occasions where a stroke produced the desired effect seemed magical, as if the brush itself, not me guiding it, did the deed. I recalled how when learning to ride, I often found that in the last few minutes of a lesson, by which time I had sweated through my habit, my near-exhaustion finally produced the relaxed command of my mount that allowed us to communicate effectively. Less is more.
Beginner’s attempts 
This day of discovering ink painting—tutored by art–was intriguing, reassuring, and restorative, a tonic vacation from the keyboard at which I now sit, typing away. Such hands-on creativity I highly recommend to any novice with access to so gifted a teacher as Shiao-Ping Wang.
Tradition venerated and preserved -
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date
Sunset at New Castle Common While the arrival of pumpkin spice on local menus precociously suggests summer’s end, the autumn equinox is still over a month away. Still, the New Hampshire days grow appreciably shorter, the UNH outdoor pool sends warnings of early closure, and back-to-school anxieties bubble up in my dreams—even as my third fall of retirement signals that care’s end. I reckon a lifetime of worrying about returning to school—kindergarten, six years of elementary, three of middle, three more of high school, four years of college, eight years of graduate school, and eleven years of tenure-track professing, followed by twenty-five more of just-barely-hanging-on adjunct teaching impose patterns two years of retirement cannot erase. Two nights ago I was dreaming/worrying about being back in my lovely Centre College office, explaining to the husband who would be the reason I left that perfect-for-me job that I was concerned about copying my new semester’s syllabi (8-courses-per-year load back then), and woke at 3.40 am in an absolute panic about giving up the nearly impossible-to-get rare tenured associate professor of humanities position I left a quarter century ago. It took quite while to re-situate myself in the present, despite all those troubled waters calmed long ago.
As the summer season winds down, I’m alternately chastising myself for not getting more projects accomplished and making fitful progress on sorting-and-discarding (What to do with old VHS tapes?? How to manage the saudade—that perfect Portuguese word meaning profound longing for what can never be had again—conjured by handling my late husband’s “course packs,” those pre-internet packets of photocopied course materials, along with the handwritten notes and diagrams of flight patterns he made while studying for the instrument rating of which he was so proud. Tucked into one of his pilot’s manuals I found a child’s primer, When I Grow Up, folded to “I want to be a PILOT when I grow up,” with the admonition that pilots need good teeth. And the course pack for the 1982 Humanities 610 course, “New England Culture in Changing Times,” comprises material that would be far beyond most of the undergrads I last taught in 2020. Ay, me.
Artifact of another era 
Course pack cover: “The Concord School of Philosophy” with Profs. Watters, Andrew, Clark, and Students 
Want to be a pilot? BRUSH YOUR TEETH! Meanwhile, I hear the charger’s fan cooling the large lithium battery that will power my new electric lawn mower—once I overcome my fear of it blowing up and/or electrocuting me. We do adapt to changing times, right? Evolve or else. At least I need no longer fret over congestion at the xerox machine as I queue to copy syllabi and silently rehearse my opening lectures.
And it has been a fine summer of new and returning pleasures. That swell and meaningful trip to visit family in Wisconsin. Discovering the GBH studio in the Boston Public Library with its cool Newsfeed Café and intrepid Boston Public Radio hosts, Jim Braude and Margery Eagan broadcasting about our end times.
The return of peach season at Union Lake Peach Orchard in Barrington.
Union Lake Bounty Leisurely meals out with a friend along the Portsmouth waterfront, and an afternoon stroll through Prescott Park.
Georgeann and Stephanie’s post-prandial stroll The Portsmouth waterfront and park in full bloom . . .
Memorial Bridge, Portsmouth, and love locks 
Cleome blooming 
and Echinacea 
. . . and a Beatles tribute with the Navy Yard aglow across the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth Bringing a lawn chair to Sullivan Square, Berwick, and enjoying the rainstorm that cooled that very hot day, prelude to the performance of my talented aerialist neighbor Anne, in the excellent company of her mom Beth and son Leo.
Anne strikes an attitude 
. . . and another, upside down on her trapeze 
Anne and mom Beth pre-show 
A slightly damp Leo enjoys lemonade via a peppermint stick 
. . . and transforms into a kitty-kat 
. . . then roars approval of his mom’s performance A first-time-ever swim in the bracingly cold and surprisingly rejuvenating waters of New Castle Common Cove with friend Jennifer, as the local volleyball teams gathered to play on the beach in their fluorescent shirts, composing a novel Bruegel scene.
Enjoying sunset from my deck while anticipating the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower.
Painterly sunset at Gnawwood More delights to come: three dinner parties in four days—possible again since the worst of COVID seems past. I’ll try my hand at Chinese ink painting next week, and enjoy the silent running of my new lawn mower: with headlights! For now, I’m groovin’ with comedian Tom Papa, whose book title exhorts: You’re Doing Great! . . . and other reasons to stay alive. The macrocosm’s a mess, political divide and social media run amuck. Democracy threatened. Liz Cheney out of office for speaking truth. Human endeavor all vanity.
Yet much of the time, it’s really pretty funny. Carpe diem.
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Leaving Portage, Going Home
25 July 2022
Resident Sandhill Cranes on their way to breakfast in Saddle Ridge On Monday, my last morning in Portage, I for the first time spy the pair of Sandhill Cranes that visit the Andrew home most every morning to enjoy the dried corn left out for them. Seeing them is a timely treat, and racing to the window in my underwear affords the chance to photograph them, if also a brief moment of embarrassment when I realize I am not alone in the room. What follows my partially-clad photo shoot is a welcome breakfast of eggs, bacon, and Chad’s excellent blueberry pancakes, chased with a farewell cup of Pero. I pack up my suitcase and join Rob to take a last walk around the Saddle Ridge neighborhood, golf course, and marina, and on the way catch up on more Andrew family back story. Meanwhile, Jan and Chad mow their lawn.
Saddle Ridge marina populated with pontoon boats One last time we all gather at the dining table to sample and judge some of the root beers and sodas we brought back from the Museum of Root Beer the previous Saturday. The winner: not a root beer, but Caruso’s Dark Cream Italian Style Soda, deliciously rich with vanilla. Leave it to the Italians.
Generous flight of root beers and sodas from the Museum of Root Beer Rob and Pam once more undertake the long drive to return me to the Milwaukee airport, a ride that includes their farewell gift of Whooping Crane earrings, a thoughtful souvenir from the Crane Foundation. My flight is a bit delayed, so I fortify myself for the journey ahead with a pesto chicken flatbread and an IPA for early dinner, and finish the book I’ve brought, Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, a memoir of travel and dysfunctional family romance. I recognize the phenomenon of travel evoking memory as it did for Diski: strange how new horizons often conjure the familiar, and prove foil to the past, the measure against which we understand the present.
The flight home from Baltimore to Manchester is also delayed, and when I take my place at the Southwest stanchion, Boarding Group A, Position 27, the guy next to me complains he’s been traveling all day, missing connections because of ripple effect delays caused when Dallas Love Field Airport in Texas was locked down earlier that day: a 37-year-old woman had fired several rounds in the ticket counter area before she herself was shot by a police officer “in the lower extremities,” and taken to hospital. Again, an inexplicable shooting. And so it goes.
I finally get home about 2 am, shower, and head straight to my own bed. Only the next morning do I see that my clivia plant, relative of my many amaryllis (all in the family!), has at long last begun to bloom in my absence. That’s a welcome sight. I am home again.
Clivia in bloom at last Today at the Market Basket, the first chrysanthemums are on display. It’s only early August. But fall is on the way. Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
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Excursion from Portage WI, Day 2
24 July 2022
The Wisconsin River to the north meets the Mississippi in the foreground at Pikes Peak State Park near McGregor, Iowa A Sunday drive and cookout were a tradition in my family, with the usual destination a picnic table at Fort De Soto Park in Tierra Verde, Florida, just south of my hometown St. Petersburg, 1,136 acres on five interconnected keys on Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, home to mangroves, palm hammocks, live oaks, and LOTS of bird life—including seagulls capable of snatching a sandwich right out of my mother’s hand (“You dirty dog!” she exclaimed). Typically we’d cook our Sunday breakfast on one of the stationary grills provided—scrambled eggs and bacon–supplemented by a treat picked up en route, usually from Mister Donut (the cherry cake donut was my favorite).
All these years later, what my Wisconisn family had in store for me offered a very different landscape, but just as much fun (and egg salad on croissants standing in for scrambled eggs). It’s a long schlep from Portage WI to Pikes Peak State Park, Iowa, but well worth the 119-mile drive. The only Pikes Peak I knew of was in Colorado, but it turns out this Pikes Peak is named for the same Pike. In 1805, then Army lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike led two expeditions under the authority of President Thomas Jefferson through the Louisiana Purchase territory, first to reconnoiter the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and next to explore the southwest to the edge of the northern Spanish settlements of New Mexico and Texas. It was on his expedition of 1806 that Pike sighted and tried with his men to climb his namesake peak in present-day Colorado before giving up the ascent in waist-deep snow. Pike’s 1810 published account of his expeditions proved so popular it was translated into several languages for European distribution. All that adventure and abundant new land!
Pikes Peak State Park features a 500-foot bluff (elevation 1130 feet) overlooking the upper Mississippi at the confluence of the Wisconsin River, providing a magnificent view, as stunning today as it must have been to the first Europeans to encounter it in 1673, French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and mapmaker Louis Jolliet, who journeyed down the Wisconsin River in two bark canoes to meet the mighty Mississippi. Once again, Nick Carraway’s musing at the end of The Great Gatsby comes to mind: they must have held their breath in the presence of this continent, “a fresh green breast of the new world.”
Picnic party: Jan (in her adorable red dress) and Chad . . . 
. . . Rob and Pam 
. . . et moi The wonder of the place inspired us to take turns posing before this majestic backdrop, after which we enjoyed Jan’s excellent picnic lunch.
Primo Picnic Spot I was happy to have Rob accompany me on a modest hike to see a modest waterfall, and all the world’s troubles seemed quite remote–
Rob at modest waterfall –remote, that is, until we encountered a fellow hiker, who brought news from the previous Friday we had (happily) missed on our day of reunion and good times together: the shockingly senseless, inexplicable early morning murder of three members of the Schmidt family, Tyler, his wife Sarah, and their 6-year-old daughter Lula, at another Iowa camp ground in the Maquoketa Caves State Park, the apparent murderer himself also dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Such horror in another Iowa State Park just 80 miles to the south, leaving a 9-year-old boy, Arlo Schmidt, the lone survivor, traumatized for life and all alone.
The Schmidt family, Tyler, Sarah, Arlo, and Lula On our lovely Sunday outing, I am too preoccupied by the warmth of the family around me to think much more about the family lost in yet another random shooting in America, land of the free, home of the brave—and the well-armed deranged. But as I type this, I think of the Schmidts and wonder why. Paul Simon sang it:
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong
(“American Tune,” 1975)
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Excursions from Portage WI, Day 1
23 July 2022
Amish buggies outside the Pleasant View Bakery, Dalton WI The Andrew family had a full range of Wisconsin attractions planned for this Saturday, and after our cereal and Pero (a non-caffeinated coffee substitute), we set out through miles of really beautiful farm land to the Amish-run Mishler’s Country Store in Dalton WI, a treasure trove of bulk spices, old-fashioned candy, fancy soaps, and hard-to-find practical items for use in the kitchen, including a set of ergonomic measuring cups in a full range of sizes (like ¾ C). The place was very busy, its parking lot serving on this morning as a registration site for some bicycling event. No electricity (so no ac), no credit cards, just simplicity on offer, a place so out-of-this-metamodern world as to feel like a theme park.
Sugar Fest at Mishler’s Country Store Once back in the car, we naturally all start talking about the 1985 Harrison Ford / Kelly McGillis film Witness, a favorite of my late husband’s and our friends in Munich, who found they could understand the Pennsylvania Dutch (or “Dietsch”) spoken in the film. I’ve Mennonite inheritance on my mother’s (the Senseman) side, but no gift for languages other than English, so I, however, could not: another degree of separation from the Amish and anyone not so typically monolingual as me and most Americans.
I found myself wondering about the way the Amish were in the world, traveling by horse-drawn carriages—and then thinking that the 1985 world of Witness now felt almost as foreign to me as the men in their broadfall trousers with suspenders and broad-brimmed straw hats and the women in their full-skirted dresses and aprons, prayer cap-covered buns at their napes, and bare feet—even when walking through the manure byproduct of their horses. In 1985 there were no social media, gps navigators, smart phones, or e-tickets, and back then in the first spring of my assistant professorship at Centre College in Kentucky, I still wrote my lectures and papers on a typewriter, as I had my dissertation the year before. Hard now to imagine all that away. So how much harder to imagine life without electricity? How do the Amish vote, I wonder—not just politically, but literally? Can they vote electronically? Maybe, as in my hometown of Madbury NH, pencils and paper and a wooden ballot box are still de rigueur. And I’m pretty sure the Amish are better off not consuming 24/7 news on screens.
Organic emissions outside Mishler’s From Mishler’s we drove to the nearby Amish Bakery on County Road H only to find it closed (due to health concerns, alas), but relied on our cell phones and Google maps to get us to another Amish bakery, Pleasant View, on Kiefer road, and discovered it, too, doing a bustling business. The alluring aroma of fresh-baked goods in the lower level bakery below the homestead was hard to resist, even though lunch time approached, and lots of folks were taking advantage of the fine day to enjoy some donuts on the spot. Attempting restraint, I bought a Czech peach kolache and some cashew brittle for later, and tried to distract myself with photography—and happily (thanks to my niece, who pointed out there was an Amish girl behind the bread rack I was focusing on) avoided shooting the young woman doing her best to stay out of the frame, shunning the graven images, individualism, and vanity of our selfie-obsessed era. Good on the Amish.
Pleasant View Bakery Bread 
Satisfied Pleasant View customers Pam and Rob . . . 
. . . and Chad and Jan Next stop, two firsts for me: both the Museum of Root Beer and the Wisconsin Dells where it is located. The museum is the brainchild of my brother-in-law’s namesake son Reed, and features interactive and educational exhibits (like the loop of historical root beer commercials) and an amazing bottled root beer collection manifesting the astonishing variety of root beer production, from the sassafras root beverages made by American indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans in North America, through root beer’s first commercial marketing by pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires in 1875 and well beyond. At Reed’s Museum one can taste-test a flight of root beers, enjoy “gourmet” root beer floats, and purchase an extensive selection of root beers, sodas, and related souvenirs. My favorite: one called “1919.” But I limited my sampling because lunchtime was nigh.
Museum of Root Beer, Wisconsin Dells We arrived at a Culver’s restaurant after driving the gauntlet of the Dells’ commercial drag, a stupefying several miles of tourist attractions—water parks, roller coasters, and other “family friendly” amusements built around–and completely obscuring–the natural beauty of the Wisconsin River’s glacier-carved sandstone formations. I’m reminded of similarly beautiful natural wonders blighted by crappy capitalism: Niagara Falls, for example. Culver’s is a welcome respite, a very successful burger chain rooted in Wisconsin featuring ButterBurgers, Frozen Custard, Wisconsin Cheese Curds, and Pretzel Bites in addition to less locally celebrated fare. I indulged in a mushroom-and-swiss ButterBurger and my semi-annual shake. The posted menu invited patrons to inquire about flavors other than those listed, and I asked about the possibility of getting my favorite: coffee. Brian, the boy behind the counter, sadly informed me they had no coffee shakes—only “expresso [sic].” I told him that would be fine, and indeed it was.
Chad keeps current over a reuben at Culver’s while Jan attends to Rob By then in our day of Wisconsin-themed adventures it was well past 3 pm, and we still had the International Crane Foundation to visit—and darkening clouds on the horizon. The cloud cover turned out to be a blessing on this very hot day, however, and we made a quick tour of the living exhibitions before the docents had to hurry us out a bit in advance of the 5 pm closing time to keep us safe from approaching lightning strikes. The Crane Foundation works worldwide to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds, and flyways on which they depend, and the Center in Baraboo WI features all 15 species of cranes, nature trails, guided tours, and a gift shop. The thunderstorm’s approach abbreviated our visit, but after a day filled with so many new sights for this novice WI visitor to see, heading home to enjoy Jan’s pasta salad dinner and the sound of the rain hitting a thirsty landscape felt quite a good idea.
Sculpted cranes take flight at the entrance to the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo WI 
Wattled Crane 
Black Crowned Crane 
Conserving energy, grasses, and wildflowers at the Crane Foundation Back in Saddle Ridge, I played the one piece I’ve learned after taking up the piano again for the first time since sophomore year in high school, the initial piece in Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a sunny if ever-so-slightly wistful Von fremden Ländern und Menschen. My brother-in-law’s Steinway B’s action and tone are very different from my husband’s—familiar, yet surprisingly disparate, rather like the midwestern “foreign lands and people” I’ve spent the day with.
After dinner, we survey storm damage: the wind—perhaps a microburst—has taken down a massive limb from a nearby pine, temporarily blocking the road. The branches of the family tree, however, feel more strongly attached than ever.
Storm Casualty at Saddle Ridge 
A perfect day ends with a walk to the Saddle Ridge marina 
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Georgeann Murphy 