Barring bad weather, me and them Long Beds will be playing at the Phark tonight. 6:30 p.m., we’re sharing the bill with The Daredevil Christopher Wright.
This concert is brought to you by the folks at Volume One, and in case of weather, they will post information here by 4:30 p.m. CST. NOTE AS OF 4:30, concert is OFFICIALLY ON.
By the way, during a recent television interview I mentioned the Cook brothers. Their band is here, and man, are they on the road!
Here’s the television interview I did yesterday. (Note it’s in two parts.)
Somebody’s rockin’ a farmer tan:
Whatever did happen to that Justin Vernon fellow?
Last night Mom (that is to say, my wife – I have a passage in Coop in which I wonder exactly how long is it after the children arrive that a man begins calling his wife mom) hosted book club (no, they never discuss my books, I’m not sure my career would survive) so after supper I took the girls for a long walk out our driveway and down the county road where crews have just replaced the old rusty corrugated culvert with a concrete tube. It’s a big’n, and even Amy the oldest sister can run through it standing up. After the big Never Play in Culverts Without a Grownup speech, I turned’em loose and they burned a good half hour running and hooting through the tubular echo chamber. Lots of Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, with the youngest one flinging herself on me in mock fear. Good fun, the smell of baled hay and the sound of evening bird calls all around.
After both were tucked in I strode manfully around in the twilight completing the evening chores, certain that the book club was watching me with barely subdued admiration, this man of letters who moves so easily from father putting his children safely abed to farmer securing his livestock for the long dark night. It is likely (I imagined them thinking) that upon retiring he will take a notepad from the bedstand and compose a sestina honoring the earth before taking his rest.
Must have gotten really caught up in it, because this morning there were chickens everywhere. Forgot to close the coop door.
No sestina, neither.
As day cooled last night I was down in the old pig pen with a cordless drill and pop rivet set, patching the bottom of the hog feeder. “Borrowed” it from my brother three years ago when we got our first set of pigs. The top 90% is still in fine shape, but the troughs have rusted through to the point that the feed just sifts on through for the mice. My brother-in-law the machinist thinks he can fabricate a new base, but for now I’ve patched the holes over with chunks of galvanized tin. The tin was just like new. My buddy Mills scored it free at the dump. Mills is a valuable friend. He knows “the dump guy”, you see, and when you know “the dump guy,” you have access to undreamed of riches. My pig waterer came complete and functional from the dump courtesy of Mills.
This feeder is a little bit of overkill for our operation. It’s a “12-banger,” as in, it has 12 hinged lids the pigs can choose from. They use their snouts to lift the lid and get at the feed, which fills the compartment by gravity. Thing that’s nice about a feeder that big when you have only four pigs is we can load it up less often and pre-fill it if we’re going to be gone so that whoever’s covering chores doesn’t have to lug feed bags. The feeder design keeps the feed dry and also prevents the pigs from rolling around in it or otherwise wasting it. I had two smaller single-lid feeders I was using ($80 apiece retail, got these for $30 on Craigslist, still had the store stickers on’em!) (not to brag) (Mills spotted’em) (seriously, don’t you wish you knew Mills?) but the pigs quickly got too big for them. Tipped them over, causing the farmer to say bad English words to a non-English speaking pig, never a good sign. Thus the need to switch to the big feeder.
For purposes of distinction, we feed our slop in two halves of a plastic barrel I cut in half lengthways. Got smart this year and pegged them to the ground with steel fence posts. Took me two years to figure out that if I don’t want to start the day by wading through mud and wet pig snouts to fetch the feeders, I need to tether them to the earth.
OK. Writing now. Editor wanting to read something other than pig tales.
A good 4th yesterday. Chores done early, then hit the road. Nice sidewalk seats for the Chetek Liberty Fest parade, then a long easy afternoon with family and friends and relatives many of whom I hadn’t seen for two decades, kids playing in the water and on haybales and getting rides on Uncle Vern’s horse-drawn wagon. And finally on the way home a stop off in a town near here for fireworks. Took a gamble and kept the two-year-old up for it (she loved the boom-bang colors, her older sister likes the whistlers), then we drove home, tucked the chickens in and all slept the sleep of the well-holidayed. Realized when it was all over that we’d had a family day.
Scene cut from the final draft of Coop:
Out here you can see roughly 120 degrees of horizon. Miles and miles, basically. And all along the blackened edge now, as the light drops and the dark deepens, I can see silent spits and fizzes of color. Sometimes they come up in a professional-sized cluster, sometimes it is just a single sparkly spritz against the night. The whole thing is backdropped by this big over-risen loaf of a cumulonimbus cloud, pale white in the dark sky. Every now and then the whole thing is suffused with orange heat lightning and becomes a mountainous shivering ember. And all around me lightning bugs switch silently off and on, sliding through the sky blinking for love. I stand there a long quiet while, my baby and wife asleep in the house, my little girl gone traveling, and I think of the beauty of our low-key freedom to live and grow on this place, and I think of all those summer nights that ended with fresh hay stacked under a roof and against the winter, and I think of my daughter begrudgingly, weepfully learning the lessons of life, and out there at the edge of the visible world the colors just keep popping.
From last year’s blog:
Never been a big fireworks guy. Enjoy them, wouldn’t necessarily drive across town to see them, although I often do, as we have friends with a great view to the display and it makes for a fine evening of visiting capped by bits of smoldering ash dropping in your Kool-Aid. And lest I come off as cynical and detached, of course I “ooh” and “aah” along with everyone else – they’re fireworks! This year there were tentative plans to attend, but things changed and we spent the evening in. This news was received with surprising equanimity by a certain 8-year-old, but apparently it was all false bravado because at 10:02 p.m. I awoke to the sound of distant thumping and nearby weeping, and in the darkness the 8-year-old announced through tears that “The Fourth of July is VERY IMPORTANT TO ME.” I am quite resolute on the point of parent as unbending boss, but in this case I knew of an easy way out, so I took her by the hand and we went downstairs and outside in the dark. I banged around in the pole barn until I found a ladder and we climbed up on the roof of the chicken coop. Because it is positioned on the brow of a hill, we had a view to roughly 300 degrees of horizon, and for the next twenty minutes we watched a county’s worth of fireworks springing up from the black all over the map.
This year we’re going to regular fireworks with the family.
Sat down with Neil Heinen last time I passed through Madison, and now the interview is posted. I haven’t actually been able to watch the whole thing (satellite internet: sounds zippy, isn’t) (yep, aware of other options, none of which are options at this latitude/longitude) (trust me and my blood pressure, we’ve checked), so I’m hoping I didn’t say anything horrifying.
Here is how the interview currently appears on my computer screen:
In addition to the recent Where the Wild Things Are renaissance, Daddy has particularly enjoyed Ken Stark’s Oh Brother! (the artwork so gorgeous and evocative of my own country childhood that it gives me happy heartache) the gorgeous, haunting, heartwarming blend of story and illustration that is Night Driving, and revisiting Katy McKy’s Pumpkin Town! (my older daughter ate up Katy’s new one, Wolf Camp). I also note the Pout-Pout Fish circulates through the stack regularly.
As far as books without pictures, thank you to the jolly good gentleman who recently gifted me with The Uncommon Reader. Most satisfying. Last night I was working on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (apologies, Oprah, it took me a while). Finally getting to McCullers and also Flannery O’Connor. Bought a copy of this in Seattle while I was on book tour, and also this.
Glad to know my mention of Eric Taylor led to someone else listening. Neat clip, too, Eric joining his ex-wife Nanci Griffith in song. I have an eight-inch-tall stack of Nanci Griffith CDs. She was one of the first to introduce me to the singer/songwriter genre.
Whenever I wrap up a book tour or even one of my shorter road stretches, I find I’ve accumulated a collection of disparate gifts and mementos. Books, notes, green-shelled eggs, tomato plants, snickerdoodles, funky magnets, a fine pair of slippers with cow appliques (those were actually mailed — thanks T!), t-shirts, rooster sweatshirts, inexplicable hoodies, fire department patches, truck mirrors (yep, you bet)…each thoughtfully presented by a reader somewhere out there. During book tour – especially if I am flying and traveling light – I often have to box them up and mail them home, so they’re waiting for me here in my office upon my return. When I’m driving myself, I keep a box or two in the back of the car and pile the goods in there.
After a couple of months of heavier touring I still have a few of those boxes to sort. I thought it might be fun to show you a photo of an item I just dug out, and how it represents (in this case, literally) a story.
This was the gift (when someone hands me something that says “International,” it’s a pretty good bet they’ve read Truck):
And here was the note accompanying (click to expand).
The references to asphalt mileage and “never been shifted into third after 1943″ are terrific.
The thoughtfulness I encounter so regularly is the greatest gift of all. Please consider this my thank-you in general. I will say that gratitude notwithstanding, one has only so much shelf and floorspace (don’t get me started on the pole barn!), so at some point there may need to be a charity auction, but I’d never do that without announcing it first. The snickerdoodles are long gone, by the way.
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