Americana

Day and Night on Frozen Kesonga

Composed by

Boom…boom…boom!

Three shots echo across the horizon. It’s muzzleloader season and it’s a beautiful day for a hunt. I’m not wearing any orange, although I know that’s rule number one this time of year. I’m safe on my porch overlooking Barbers Bay. A blinding sun reflects off of Lake Kegonsa. Men walk on water in front of me. It’s no miracle. They’re ice fishermen; and this is winter in Wisconsin, United States of America.

Icefishing. Click to view on Instagram

Icefishing. Click to view on Instagram

“This’ll be where you get your 40-incher!”

I’m sure it’s all old hat to them down there. It’s most definitely 2014 anyways. One of them doesn’t even break stride from drilling to fight with his wife. “I’m not coming home just because you’re locked oot. I’m out on the lake!” and hangs up the phone.

“Flag up!”

“We’ve got a flag up!”

“Flag up, flag up.”

They have to layer up out there. It’s as wide open as any Midwestern plain out there. Their greatest source of warmth seems to be rubbing their hands together, (not stomping their feet on account of being on a frozen lake) and a steady stream of Marlboro Reds. The tourists and motorboats are all drydocked for the winter leaving something very authentic. 28 degrees Fahrenheit has a very cleansing effect.

“Carp! We’ve got carp.”

“Carp.”

It’s as busy as the busiest city out there in its way. The hunters in the distance and the ice fishermen are just the start of it. They’re the sirens across town and the people populating the sidewalks. Further out on the frozen lake is a rush of noise, jockeying for position and cutting each other off not unlike a pack of taxicabs. Ice boats -sailboats on skates– whip around in a large oval racing each other.

The noise of this frozen regatta is not unlike a 747 making it’s final descent. Yet it’s somehow comforting to hear all this sound and not have it tied to the rush-rush of the metropolitan rat race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfGpvOLnzQc&feature=youtu.be

At night the moon cuts a white trail across the ice and shows the preserved lake’s shape as it was right before it finally froze completely. What’s it like to be that last wave frozen out there? Getting so close, but not actually making it to the shore.

At night the wind is light enough that it only makes a very small ‘wind’ sound that they might use in the opening to a movie about the Midwest. The ice boats and fishermen are gone. The only noises that have replaced them are the occasional cracking off the ice as it heaves, and the vibrato sound of a winter beater, so common in rural U.S. of A., winding down the road along our Lake Kesonga

The moon splitting frozen Lake Kesonga.This is a heavenly place to come and write, much like the country always is. It always seems like wonderful balance to city life. The yin and the yang of artistic bounty. Spending some time in the city, and spending some time in the country. Seeing how both halves live, and understanding that there is beauty and a cornucopia of creativity buried not-too-deep from the surface.

And when you make it out here there’s a good chance that creativity might just poke its way through. That or a 40-inch carp.

NoLifeguardOnDuty

History in the Bricks

Composed by

Excerpt from original article by Charlie Monte Verde in the ‘Perspectives’ section of the July-October 2014 edition of Railroad Model Craftsman magazine.

The most newsworthy thing to happen in Mount Morris, New York, since local boy Francis Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance was the building of a new passenger station on the Buffalo Division of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (DL&W) Railroad in 1905.

The new station replaced a classic and uniquely-Lackawanna Victorian station (1880s) which then became the freight station after only twenty years in passenger service. The new facility was brick and mortar and very solid throughout, and thus it still stands today. Ever since the new facility opened over a century ago travelers, employees, and locals alike have been carving their names (or just their initials) in the exterior bricks on their way through. And much like the building itself, these ancient cave-markings of America gone by have weathered the passing of time stoically.

H. Bauman, the first of at least three inscriptions in the bricks of Mt. Morris station.

H. Bauman hired out on the Lackawanna in 1954 out of their headquarters town of Scranton, PA (anthracite, anthracite, anthracite). And by the last time he carved his name in the bricks (‘passed by on the rails 1977’), his beloved Lackawanna was no longer a through route mainline, the junior partner in a merger with the rival Erie Railroad in 1960. And by ’77 even the Erie-Lackawanna was a year into being the despised step-brother to the Penn Central Railroad as part of the formation of Conrail. Like many of our favorites the DL&W was a great railroad that just didn’t make it and Mr. Bauman’s best days were probably behind him by ’77 as well. But the story of his career would be told for all of time in the bricks.

The Route of Phoebe Snow

The Route of Phoebe Snow