Each chapter of Coop features a photograph taken by my friends John and Julie.  This is the photo at the head of Chapter Two.  These are the wooden silos that stood attached to my father’s barn since the day it was constructed.  They were marvelously done, made of many laminated strips of wood nailed together with thousands of hammer blows.  I remember shoveling silage early mornings before deer hunting and seeing the fuzzy buttons of frost on each nail head.  Dad only used the silos a couple of years.  Mostly they stood empty, and we used to scare ourselves by climbing them and looking down.  They seemed even taller than they were because each one had a five- or six-foot concrete-lined pit dug in it at the base.  Up at the very top there was a platform and railing covered in pigeon poop.  The roof was very low and if we crawled around up there during the day we’d hear the gritch-gritch of disturbed bats, which made us duck even lower and not want to put our fingers anywhere we couldn’t check first.  The gallery of snapshots below illustrates some of those details.

In the spring (much the same time as when the chapter heading photo was taken) I used to nestle with my back to the concrete in the space where the two silos curved together.  It was out of the wind, and I could feel the sun.  I wrote about this nook on page 162 of Coop.  There was another deeper nook on the other side of the silo that used to grow up with brush and my brother John and I would hide in there with our bows and arrows to ambush grackles when they came to steal from the corn crib.  Mom planted asparagus around the barnyard side of the silo decades ago, and it still pops up there every year.

The silos are gone now.  Dad had them taken down last year.  I wished he wouldn’t, and even made some contact with some barn restoration and vintage lumber folks, but in the end it just didn’t work out.  Salvaging an old wooden silo is something everyone always says “you should do”, and when you get right down to it, you find out why it so rarely happens.  Time and finance.  Meanwhile, Dad had done the numbers on how much it cost him to have the silo roof rebuilt (it was beginning to fold) and re-shingled, and with the year’s planting to be done and the roofers coming, opted instead to have my brother over with his track-hoe, and now the silos and all those nails and that concrete are buried deep for some other millennial generation to discover.  I am a sentimentalist and a preservationist, but I am slowly finding ways to appreciate the practicality of old farmer moves like this.  Writing about it in the next book.  In some ways, they are on to something about freedom.

Studying these photos while posting, I have only just now noticed that the black and white silo image is reversed, and that it is also reversed in the book.  Does that qualify as an “OOPS”?  It wouldn’t be the first time.  The cover image on the hardcover version of Truck is also reversed.

Each chapter of Coop features a photograph taken by my friends John and Julie.  This is the photo at the head of Chapter One.  That’s our actual firewood, the stuff I was splitting in Chapter One.  The tall plants between the firewood and the oak trees are nettles.  Big old honkers.  The pigs love nettles.  I was worried that this photo wouldn’t make sense in the book since the chapter is set in the dead of winter, but maybe it works to see the firewood drying in the sun for the winter to come.  What you see there is a fraction of what we need to make it through the winter.  I never did catch up that year.  Had to buy some firewood.  A real humiliation.  I did a video essay about the experience for Wisconsin Public Television.  Hoping one day they’ll make it available as a Clodhopper Report on YouTube so we can have a look.

This year I am happy to report that the woodpile is five times this size and growing.

For expanded speaking dates (they wouldn’t all fit on the screen) have a look here.

Oh, and right at the end there?  It’s spelled www.shimonlindemann.com.

So.  I shall adjust the myth accordingly.  Having said that, you will understand my confusion should you actually obtain a copy of their new book and review the portrait in which Julie is loading hay in a vintage black…wait, I’m gonna go fact-check that.

I love to tell the story of how I met John Shimon and Julie Lindemann when we were all in prison.  It’s true, although the story loses some of its Johnny Cash punch when I admit we were there working on a story for the New York Times Magazine.  It was a few years back (as more and more things are these days).  I was writing about the concept of “home” as it relates to prisoners living out a life sentence.  John and Julie were shooting the photos.  When I approached the prison lobby and saw them waiting, I cringed.  There was Johnny in his vintage togs and Julie in what can only be described as a black thrift-store slip plus rhinestoned cat-eye glasses.  I was in my standard boots, jeans and t-shirt.  Preserve us, I thought, from the artful hipsters.

After we were done in the prison (we survived a lockdown!), we retreated to the darkened back room of a bar in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. And as I wrote in the postcript of Off Main Street:

Turned out we were all three products of rural Wisconsin.  John’s dad raised hogs, Julie’s father was a cheesemaker.  My family milked cows and raised sheep.  We talked 4H, FFA, and lambing, and parsed the virtues of Holstein production versus Jersey cream.

We talked for a long time at the little table, and when it was time to go, we vowed to work together whenever possible.  At the time I had no idea I’d one day be writing books.  When Coop comes out, it will mark the fourth time John and Julie have supplied the cover image for one of my books.  Beyond that, we’ve collaborated on a number of other projects.  In that same postcript, I tried to explain why I have come to so admire them and their work:

It’s perfect then, that the title of their new book is What We Do Here. I’m honored to say I have an essay in there amongst the beautiful images.  It’s a story about taking my daughter to the feed mill and how it triggered memories of going to the feed mill with my father when I was her age, and how I was awed by the monstrous maw of the grinder and likewise thrilled with the mill where we were allowed to stay in the cab while a cabled rigging lifted up the entire pickup truck and tipped the corn cobs out the back like dumping a dust pan.

There is also a photo of me with pigs.

Preview the book here.

This vintage author photo was taken by my friends John and Julie just prior to the release of Population 485. I maintain that I was not sporting a true mullet, as ALL of my hair was long. However, it was getting thin enough on top that one of my friends called it a “skullet”.  It’s fairly short in this photo.  Usually it was waist-length.

The t-shirt was a gift from my editor/friend Bill. I wrote for Road King trucking magazine for years. The t-shirt was my favorite, so much so that as described in TRUCK: A Love Story I wore it on my first date with my future wife. Seven years later I have more lines and less hair, but my single eyebrow is still heartily intact.

Photo taken by my friends John and Julie.

And for your meta-pleasure, here’s a photo of the photo shoot.