He called at 12:30. “Are you almost here?” Ha. We hadn’t even left yet. Staying up to 6 a.m. probably wasn’t the best idea, but when you’re chatting and goofballing the time thing just disappears.
By 1 we were on the road. Ten minutes in and we ran into rain. Not regular splish-splash, a full-on torrential downpour, one of those rains where you turn the wipers on full blast and have to drive by the sight of the white line to keep you vehicle in the correct lane.
Then it stopped, perfectly dry. Wham! Another downpour. The change was abrupt…monsoon/bone dry. After an hour I was worn to bits. Hydroplaning, then hitting dry pavement. It was too much, so when we hit Harvard I turned east.
“You’re going the wrong way.” My 4th-of-July roadtrip pal said, the one that forgot the Smokey Joe and the charcoal to grill up the corn and rib eyes.
“I’m done.”
We were on the way to the Mississippi bluffs. Now we were on the way back home taking a big 3-hour loop. My pal, who is cranky about a lot of things in life, doesn’t give a damn if we are here or there or anywhere when we travel.
We drove down the snaky lake road to college camp. Pal worked here a long time ago during a college summer cleaning the cafeteria, feeding raccoons bowls of milk and bread, kissing campergirls in the moonlight.
I learned to sail here. We didn’t know each other back then, different years.
Aurora University has acquired the camp, erected many new old-looking buildings, and has a well-respected Music-on-the-Lake program now.
I didn’t kiss boys back then (I was only 12) instead I hung out at the art & craft building where I made coiled pottery and paintings of overturned boats-sail boats and speed boats and even the mail boats and the prestigious Lady of the Lake paddlewheel.
We ran through the rain and escaped into a building that displayed a black and white sign that said “Gallery Show.”
Inside, out of the downpour, we said lots of oil-touched abstracted photographs of…boats. The work was done by a Madison artist most likely influenced by the sailboats on Lake Mendota and Monona, the lakes where my father would go for the annual regatta. The work was nice…professional, tight, calming. I liked the life preserver covered with a collage of magazine torn bits about 1” square. It was entitled, “Life Savor.” The artist’s bio stated that she was going through chemo treatments for cancer. Life Savor, tasting those fleeting moments of the crystalline beauty of our planet Earth, perfect.
From there we drove by Kokoska house, an owner-built boulder house that I had dreamed upon when I was a young girl, 20. The building was abandoned and in disrepair. I found out how to find the owner by going to the courthouse and looking in the real estate records and I contacted the owner, a man in Oak Park, Illinois. He said it was a family house but no one when there any more. But it wasn’t actually available for sale. It was tied up among a number of family members who didn’t see things the same way.
Each week I would go there, walk around the property, sometimes taking a blanket and sitting in the long grass, dreaming or reading or drawing.
On one of my “housedates” I noticed that someone broke a back window and two stained glass windows were near the opening. It looked like an interrupted burglary. I saved the house…maybe. Immediately I called the owner. He asked me to all a repairman to board up the window and suggested that I go on in and take a look at the house before the repair was done. Whee-ho! The house was magical. It was as if a family had just disappeared. Everything was still there, even clothes in the closets. The two fireplaces were made of the same boulders as the outside of the building and I adored the pressed-flower pictures. For a burglar this was a goldmine of antiques. For me it was a comforting, albeit musty, fantasy.
A few days later I called the owner and told him the repair had been finished, and I told him about my house tour and asked if he would be interested in selling the black wicker set, a Heywood Wakefield loveseat and chair, located on the front porch. It was very beautiful, no curlicues, just nice softly curved lines with a small diamond pattern woven into the top edge.
He arranged to meet me at the house a week later, “Bring a pickup truck.”
For that whole week I was going crazy. But I had some trepedation...would I be able to afford the wicker?
The man was tall, elegant, around 60. He loaded the wicker on my friend’s truck. Still he wouldn’t tell me the price and I was getting all-anxious.
The wicker had been a wedding present that his parents received in 1931. The man GAVE the set to me.
I am not kidding. I was soooooo happy, still am. The wicker is upstairs in my second studio. I nap there on occasion.
Back to the road trip!
After a brief stop at the cemetery to see if the bench base, done last week, had set properly, pal and I wanted food.
In a little border town, 10 miles south, we stopped at Poncho’s for Mexican. The torrential downpour began again whipping twigs into the air and the rain came down on an angle with puffs of white rain that looked like demonic clouds. I have never seen this before.
Glass shattered in the vestibule sending long daggers of glass into the opposite wall. A man that had just picked up a to-go order had just escaped the danger. Yikes! That was scary. I drank another margarita in a cactus glass decorated with a cherry.
Back home, among upturned trees and broken limbs, I went to sleep waking at 8:30 to the racket of explosions. 4th of July! Let Freedom Ring! The neighborhood was loud, colorful, erupting, and just exciting. We did pinwheels, spinning globes, and fountains. Pal had bought a bottle of coconut rum, something a pretty girl had offered him in the grocery store tasting section, and we had a drink I dubbed cocotikis. The torches flamed in the backyard and people wandered, drink in hand in the streets, oohing and aahing at the colorful bursts over the river.
Sometimes you don’t even need to roadtrip to have fun. Although I later found out that Kerry had been on a Mississippi River tour with skeet shooting in Holman just north of LaCrosse and fireworks in Dubuque. He traveled 35. I just by accident caught the Bush tour out there in May. So I was sorry to have missed that part, oh, and family and friends and more fireworks and the food and of course the beauty that is the bluffs.
