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The Eastern Shore

'Chestertown parking meter'

The parking meters in downtown Chestertown, Maryland have “free parking” written on them. All of them. I am guessing that, when bloated big box stores sprang up outside of this classic colonial-era town, sucking all the zest and commerce out of the place, the demand for parking spaces plummeted, the meters became just another excuse to visit Walgreen’s, and free downtown parking was adopted as one tactic designed to lure people back. But Chestertown went one step further; on the sidewalk side of the meter there’s an invitation to drop in your spare change, to support local arts organizations. So every few feet, on both sides of the street, visitors have a painless way to support the kind of vibrant, varied, and enriching experiences that make this a great destination in the first place. Plus, it is weird, giddy fun to feed a parking meter without seeing the act as an odious necessity. Christian and I laughed as we pumped in all our quarters, dimes, and nickels. We searched the car for more. We returned a second day, partly in order to stuff ourselves with crab (see below), but largely in order to giggle while stuffing the meter. Good idea, Chestertown.
A note on cuisine: the national dish of Maryland, at least in the summer, is crab. Crab cakes, crab salad, crab omelets, crab melt, crab sandwiches, crab Benedict, crab hash, crab soup, crab-stuffed mushrooms, crab pizza, crab imperial, deviled crab, and for all I know crab ice cream and crab whiskey. Other foods are available, but basically they are a garnish for crab.
I was on the Shore, for rig surveys, including one in Solomon’s Island This one went okay, in a these-five-things-will-kill-you-it’s-time-to-rerig sort of way. In the process of delivering the bad news, I got a chance to watch Actual Chesapeake Working Watercraft in action. By “action” I mean one of the most demanding tests of handling small craft under power: backing into a ridiculously tight space, with a foul breeze, with everyone watching, and doing so with utterly unaffected, industrial-grade insouciance and skill. The boats were of a type called a “Deadrise.” They are narrow, low-slung, 20 to 40ft long, an evolution of the Skipjack. They are named, with complete lack of irony, things like “Shady Lady,” “Aquaholic,” and “Some Beach.” They go out for crab in the summer and oysters in the winter, and I am sure that the Chesapeake is capable of making life in a semi-open boat really interesting; the skills required for this work run well past mere parking.
Survey done, I headed down to St. Mary’s to visit my wonderful old friend Will Gates, with whom I worked during the rerig of the barque “Elissa.” That was 35 years ago. No, that can’t be right, because that would make me way over 50, which is ridiculous. But through some oddity of space and time, Will and his spouse Tara have managed to acquire 3 grown children, and Will claims to have been skipper of the 17th-century replica “Maryland Dove” for 28 years. I will humor him in that claim, but I have no doubt that the ‘Dove” is a beautiful boat, beautifully kept. Volunteers as well as paid staff host hordes of schoolchildren all year, and the boat gets out for sails on the Bay several times a year.
As the day was drawing down, and my in-depth tour of that splendid ship was done, we stood by to catch the mooring lines of a contemporary sailboat with engine trouble. It was a 40-some ft cruising yawl, with a man at the helm who wore a look of mixed determination and sadness. It was a warm, calm, lovely late afternoon. While fussing with mooring lines we made our introductions. I then asked him what design his boat was. He looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “I don’t remember,” he said. “That is why I have to give up this boat. I am out for one more cruise.” Then he told me his name, and asked me what mine was.
As darkness fell, I drove back to Chestertown. We are so briefly in this world.

Annapolis, Coda

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On the outskirts of Annapolis there is an eatery called “Carlson’s Donuts and Thai Food Restaurant.” No, really, there really is. We went there one night, at the end of the boat show, with our dear friend Pam Wall, a woman who appears to be a cross between Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Wonder Woman, and a particularly mischievous elf. Pam, along with her late, much-missedhusband Andy, cruised the seas for years in their 39ft. cutter “Kandarik,” and now Pam counsels, coaches, and educates would-be cruisers, telling them what they need to take with them, what they think they need to take with them but actually don’t, how to relate to the assorted cultures and bureaucracies they will encounter, and all the other details that maximize the possibility that their voyaging will be the kind of lyrical, fulfilling adventure that they have dreamt it would be, and not the horrifically expensive, hazardous, soul-killing, and exhausting disaster that it by all odds actually should be. Pam is their guide, mentor, reality check, cheerleader, and, when needed, the are-you-kidding-me slap across the face that we all need once in a while.


On a different outskirt of Annapolis you will find Chesapeake Bay Sailmakers, and this past weekend the loft hosted a rigging workshop taught by yours truly, produced by Mia and Andy Schell, two utterly capable, ridiculously young, and infectiously enthusiastic sailors, who, like Pam, make a living helping others to learn how to do what they love to do. They are all adventurers who have returned to our world to say, “We are not special, but we have seen marvels, seen beauty; we wish to share these wonderful things with you.”


Mia and Andy’s method is at the experiential end of the spectrum; they take would-be cruisers out on extended trips aboard their magnificent 48ft Swan “Isbjorn,” to show first-hand what this voyaging thing is all about. It can be a delusion-shattering exercise, and tends to weed out those who hadn’t realized that offshore sailing is a sequence of grueling, terrifying, boring, and ecstatic events, with no guarantee of the latter. Those foolish enough not to be dissuaded by the experience are probably doomed to become cruisers.
To help dissuade a broader audience, Mia and Andy also host a marvelous podcast (“On the Wind”), as well as live workshops, like the one they invited me to teach. Over the course of a weekend I did my best to help them in their mission, describing all the rig-related horrors that cruising sailboats are subject to. Despite my best efforts, no one ran screaming from the room, no one decided to take up taxidermy or ice-skating, and everyone asked pertinent, sensible questions. I fear there is no hope for any of them.
Later this week I’ll be surveying the rig of a Valiant belonging to two of the students. Over the years I have treated cruising vessel surveys with ever-increasing gravity and attentiveness. These are vessels that will carry a hopeful crew towards beauty, towards fulfillment, towards awareness. I want to do what I can to make sure that at least my corner of things is as good and sound and user-friendly as it can be.


Before leaving Annapolis, we visited the Naval Academy Museum. The second floor is entirely given over to a stupendous array of ship models from the age of sail. The smallest are the size of a shoe, but a fantastically detailed, exquisitely rendered shoe. The larger models can be two feet long, or more, and the level of skill that went into them is such that, after a while, one can forget that one is looking at a model, and start to feel what the actual ship must have been like, how its massive hull dwarfed the tiny humans it sheltered, what it must have been like to venture upon the sea in it. Most of these were construction models, built as guide and inspiration for the construction of the actual ship, so perhaps there is some quantum entanglement going on here.


But along the back wall is a collection of an entirely different kind of model. These were built by French prisoners of war while they were held captive in England during the Napoleonic wars. The prisoners were destitute, and sometimes living in appalling conditions, but they weren’t about to sit around and winge; instead they collected scraps of cattle bones – cattle bones! – and fashioned them into planks and spars and cannons and all the components of full-rigged ships. They did so with stunning artistry, really unbelievable skill.


These builders offered their work for sale to the British public, making something of a living from that. But this kind of creation cannot be explained on mercantile principles. These were sailors who had been to sea, had fought storms on the sea, had fought battles on the sea. The models were their testimony. They were, I think, saying, “We are not special, but we have seen marvels, seen beauty; we wish to share these wonderful things with you.”

Annapolis

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Oct 12, 2017 3:23am
'Annapolis Annapolis is the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, where bright, determined, patriotic young people come to learn how to command the most powerful naval force that the world has ever seen. It is also the site of the annual Annapolis boat show, where by-definition lackadaisical, undisciplined, impractical dreamers come to see the latest means by which they can get into serious trouble afloat. This seems an odd juxtaposition, like staging historic military reenactments outside West Point, or radio-controlled model airplane conventions at the Air Force Acad– wait, I just Googled those things, and it turns out they actually happen. Maybe we in the private sector seek to emulate, however faintly, those whose job it is to go in various iterations of harm’s way, who are in touch with the Wild, danger, spiritual and physical challenges, and other things that give meaning and zest to life. They are just more organized about it. Meanwhile we, at the moral-equivalent-of-war end of the spectrum, seek the same things, but must fabricate our own relationship with great forces; sailing, again by definition, puts us at the nexus of wind and wave energies, throws in a laughably fragile, unstable platform, and for good measure gets us as far as practicable from provisions, spare parts, and any form of aid if (actually, when) things go wrong. Sailing is a big, beautiful, slightly dangerous dance, and the boat show is where we go to accessorize. This year, the devastation in the Caribbean highlighted how dangerous things can get, but that just seemed to add an edge to the pastime. There were of course boats for sale, many of which were so drenched in technology that they could probably be piloted from your condo in Aspen, and a few of which were both seaworthy and relatively (very relatively) affordable. But there were hundreds of vendors there, selling everything from parachute drogues to sunglasses to EPIRB’s to propellers – anything you might conceivably need or want to cram onto or into the absurdly space-constrained artifact called a sailboat. Sailors wandered the aisles, muttering to themselves and each other, making notes, asking questions that they hoped would prompt useful answers, and standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the vendors went into carefully-scripted, possibly accurate descriptions of their products’ virtues, along with equally carefully-scripted, probably distorted allusions to the products of the competition. Most boat shows are held in climate-controlled buildings, or in outdoor climates amenable to human metabolisms. But this is an outdoor show in coastal Maryland, where 90 degrees at 90% humidity is considered a dry heat, and people take saunas to cool off. This Northwest boy spent the days drenched in perspiration; if I’d had a bay leaf I could have made soup. But those same sweltering days brought a wonderful parade of old friends. And new friends, too, like Brian Gifford, a rigger from South Carolina who haunted our booth throughout the show, practicing knots and splices, discussing installation and maintenance techniques, and acting as our official photographer. And Billy Rudek, rigger from the USS Constitution (see picture) who stopped by and described some of the finer points of the staying of that grand old vessel. And the retired carpenter whose questions about high-modulus rigging somehow segued into an entrancing description of technologically-informed meditation techniques. And our Airhead neighbors (I am not dissing them; they make a composting toilet of that name) whose carefully-scripted, entirely accurate descriptions often wandered off into scatologically-hilarious-yet-somehow-inoffensive-and-distinctly-informative asides. And on and on, throughout the days, human beings prepping for adventure and fun, prepping to embrace hazards joyfully, as opposed to those who prep for hazards by building futuristic, hermetically sealed shelters and filling them with freeze-dried food. Although there is probably a convention for them, too. Right outside NASA headquarters.'

Annapolis is the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, where bright, determined, patriotic young people come to learn how to command the most powerful naval force that the world has ever seen. It is also the site of the annual Annapolis boat show, where by-definition lackadaisical, undisciplined, impractical dreamers come to see the latest means by which they can get into serious trouble afloat. This seems an odd juxtaposition, like staging historic military reenactments outside West Point, or radio-controlled model airplane conventions at the Air Force Acad– wait, I just Googled those things, and it turns out they actually happen. Maybe we in the private sector seek to emulate, however faintly, those whose job it is to go in various iterations of harm’s way, who are in touch with the Wild, danger, spiritual and physical challenges, and other things that give meaning and zest to life. They are just more organized about it.
Meanwhile we, at the moral-equivalent-of-war end of the spectrum, seek the same things, but must fabricate our own relationship with great forces; sailing, again by definition, puts us at the nexus of wind and wave energies, throws in a laughably fragile, unstable platform, and for good measure gets us as far as practicable from provisions, spare parts, and any form of aid if (actually, when) things go wrong. Sailing is a big, beautiful, slightly dangerous dance, and the boat show is where we go to accessorize. This year, the devastation in the Caribbean highlighted how dangerous things can get, but that just seemed to add an edge to the pastime.
There were of course boats for sale, many of which were so drenched in technology that they could probably be piloted from your condo in Aspen, and a few of which were both seaworthy and relatively (very relatively) affordable. But there were hundreds of vendors there, selling everything from parachute drogues to sunglasses to EPIRB’s to propellers – anything you might conceivably need or want to cram onto or into the absurdly space-constrained artifact called a sailboat. Sailors wandered the aisles, muttering to themselves and each other, making notes, asking questions that they hoped would prompt useful answers, and standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the vendors went into carefully-scripted, possibly accurate descriptions of their products’ virtues, along with equally carefully-scripted, probably distorted allusions to the products of the competition.
Most boat shows are held in climate-controlled buildings, or in outdoor climates amenable to human metabolisms. But this is an outdoor show in coastal Maryland, where 90 degrees at 90% humidity is considered a dry heat, and people take saunas to cool off. This Northwest boy spent the days drenched in perspiration; if I’d had a bay leaf I could have made soup. But those same sweltering days brought a wonderful parade of old friends. And new friends, too, like Brian Gifford, a rigger from South Carolina who haunted our booth throughout the show, practicing knots and splices, discussing installation and maintenance techniques, and acting as our official photographer. And Billy Rudek, rigger from the USS Constitution (see picture) who stopped by and described some of the finer points of the staying of that grand old vessel. And the retired carpenter whose questions about high-modulus rigging somehow segued into an entrancing description of technologically-informed meditation techniques. And our Airhead neighbors (I am not dissing them; they make a composting toilet of that name) whose carefully-scripted, entirely accurate descriptions often wandered off into scatologically-hilarious-yet-somehow-inoffensive-and-distinctly-informative asides. And on and on, throughout the days, human beings prepping for adventure and fun, prepping to embrace hazards joyfully, as opposed to those who prep for hazards by building futuristic, hermetically sealed shelters and filling them with freeze-dried food. Although there is probably a convention for them, too. Right outside NASA headquarters.

The East

The map of the U.S. looks like it was speeding eastward, ran into a wall at the Atlantic, and the seaboard states acted as a crumple zone. This is probably not what happened; it is more likely that the level of technology of governance, the assorted aspirations and identities of different groups of colonists, and assorted accidents of history conspired to make most of the first states rather teensy.
Nevertheless, the seaboard states seem compacted, intensified, and perhaps slightly concussed. Out West, it can take a good day to drive at 60 across some states; you can walk across Rhode Island in that time. But it isn’t as though Montana, for instance, had been cut into very small pieces, each one a state, but that you had instead compressed everything there into an impossibly small area, and then raised the population an order or two of magnitude. It’s like building a singularity out of humans, and as with a singularity there’s an immensely powerful gravitational well that keeps everyone and everything in, and is always trying to draw even more in. Every Eastern state, no matter how godforsaken corrupt, corroded, and crowded it might look to our eyes, is inhabited by people with a fierce sense of identity and pride of place. Okay, and despair and bitterness too, but work with me here. People strive here, in a way that most people from the other Coast cannot readily comprehend, let alone emulate.
This impression is amplified after the long jaunt by train across the broad, open plains. Out there the landscape goes by like this: farm……..farm……..town…….. forest……..city……..suburb……..farm……..industrial eyesore (factory, refinery, mill, etc)……..mountains……..farm……..and so on. But after Chicago or thereabouts, it turns to suburb…eyesore…farm…farm…town…hills-they-call-mountains…town…farm…eyesore…city…suburbs…eyesore…forest…and so on. Further east, things go by at an accelerating rate of hills/farm/suburb/city/eyesore/forest/ town/farm/city/suburb/forest, and so on, and shortly before we fetch up in D.C. things become positively stroboscopic, with towntowneyesorehillssuburbcityfarmforesttownhills going by in a blur, shocking and entrancing and disorienting until suddenly the train stops and you disembark into a dark womb of a station and stagger out into a white marbled lobby and stumble out onto a high, columned portico and look out into a bright afternoon and there is the Capitol Building, the actual Capitol Building of countless movies and TV shows and books and magazines, looking right back at you, and it is as if that psychedelic train ride had hammered open the doors of your perception, allowing you to see this storied place with supernal clarity, and therefore compassion, and you realize that, despite the epic levels of cynicism and shortsightedness that permeate this place, despite people who think of themselves as being, in I.M. Banks words,” refreshingly unconcerned with the vulgar exigencies of veracity,” that our hopes and ideals are still vested in this place, that we still harbor some hope that those we choose to represent us might at least make a serious attempt at reconciling our differences, amplifying our commonalities, celebrating our impossible, maddening, aspirational Union.
Ahem. We rented a car, drove out of that place to the relatively serene and egalitarian utopia of the Annapolis boat show.

Getting In, Getting Out

Okay, maybe we did leave Galena a little later than we had meant to. What with tearful goodbyes, one more wistful look at the beautiful architecture, and deep reserves of a sluggish refusal to get going, we were about an hour-and-a-half behind schedule by the time we left the river behind us. But hey, this still left us over five hours to make the three-hour trip to Chicago. Gosh, I feel so naïve saying that, because as I now realize, large cities create a time/space anomaly that causes time to contract and miles to expand asymptotically as you approach the destination. So even as we pushed further and further over the speed limit, we seemed to get no closer, and we saw our reserve of time eroded away.
Checking for route alternatives was of no help; we saw the blue stripes indicating no-problem-you’ve-got-plenty-of-time gradually turning to the beige of uh-oh-there-might-be-a-problem-here, and then to the you-are-so-screwed bright red of an intractable clog on almost every road. After a while, it looked like someone had spilled ketchup on my phone.
But we persevered, jinking through cutoffs and detours, into the heart of the city, at which point I missed a crucial exit, and sent us into the vast underground maze that is Chicago’s unique contribution to malevolent freeway design. It goes on for miles, on up to three levels. Deeper and deeper we went, but our phone’s Map Lady Voice (MLV) thought we were still on surface streets, so she tried repeatedly to direct us to turns that did not exist. “In a quarter mile, turn right,” she said, then, “Make a U-turn,” then, “Turn left,” then, “Holy crap, where are we?”
Meanwhile we passed Dante and Virgil, who were on the side of the road, changing a tire on an old Fiat. We passed a street corner where a group of Morlocks were singing acapella. We finally headed down a dark tunnel. Gandalf was at the end of it, and as we approached he raised his staff and said, “You shall not pass! Try the exit onto Madison Street!” We followed his suggestion, and shortly came upon the Least Regulated Intersection in the World, still underground, but there was a glimmer of daylight on its far side. Christian managed to eel our way through a maelstrom of cars, trucks, and buses, and shot up a ramp to the surface. MLV was still a little stunned, and tried to get us onto a freight elevator in the Sears Tower, but she gradually regained her senses, and steered us towards the rental car return. The clock was still ticking down, but it looked like we would catch the train.
Unfortunately, the return was, for some reason, located on the third floor of a hotel parking garage. With shall we say minimal signage. At rush hour. Suffice it to say that by the time we fought our way out of the building it was nearly time for the train to depart. No problem, we just called Lyft, who sent The Only Driver in Chicago Who Doesn’t Know Where Union Station Is. While he pawed futilely at his phone map, we woke up our dear MLV, who was in no mood for slackness. In the sweet, soulless, carefully modulated voice that we all know and love, she said, “Get this miserable excuse for a cab over to Canal Street. Turn right here, or I swear I will control alt delete your sorry ass.” Or something like that.
We raced into the station, running down the same stairs that Kevin Costner had such a festive time on in the “Untouchables,” ran to the train, and collapsed into our seats just as it headed out. And so to bed.

How to Build a Wisconsin Supper Club

'How to Build a Wisconsin Supper Club 1. Find a house on a piece of land far from anywhere else. At night, the only significant light sources should be the headlights of passing cars, and the blazing electric sign out front with the name of the place. Suitable names include “Hideaway,” “Valley Bar,” “Elmo’s Place,” or any other name likely to draw a wince from an ad agency hipster. 2. Remove most of the interior walls of the house, leaving only what is needed to keep the roof up, and to separate the industrial-scale kitchen in the back. 3. Install a 20-foot-long bar immediately inside the entrance, then fill every other bit of available space with sturdy, minimalist tables and bent-metal-framed chairs with token padding. Cover the tables with flannel-backed vinyl tablecloths. Leave just enough space between the tables that you can pull a chair out and sque-e-e-ze in to sit down. Arrange the tables in strict geometrical rows. No precious feng shui conversation islands here. 4. Clear an area outside for the parking lot. This should be big enough to allow about half of the crowd of pickup trucks that will jam the location every night. Overflow traffic will line the adjacent two-lane road. Deep irrigation ditches along these roads are optional, but are encouraged. 5. Open the doors. The place will immediately fill with large, kind, boisterous, friendly, hungry people. They have been working all day together, and now they are coming in to continue their day with each other, and to greet other members of their far-flung community. Average table occupancy is eight; a four-top is considered an intimate party, and two-tops are an oddity. Lone diners will almost certainly be dragged into a larger group. 6. When a group is seated, place a “relish tray” on table (see mandatory Facebook “food on a plate” picture). This tray contains ice-cream scoops of (I am not making this up ) braunschweiger, beer cheese, krab [sic] salad, and a small bowl of ranch dressing. All this, plus crackers, celery, carrots, and assorted other noshes make for an appetizer course to rival a complete meal in many urban bistros. 7. Present the menus. These are laminated cards printed sometime around 1957. Popular entrees include several types of steak, pork chops, prime rib, and, for the discerning palate, chicken cordon bleu. These are also about the only entrees, because why would you want to go out and order anything else? Fer cryin’ out loud, if you want pizza you can drive to Dubuque. Side dishes include steamed vegetables, cottage cheese, and my favorite, coleslaw. The latter is made with approximately 60% mayonnaise, 20% sugar, 20% cabbage, and a dash of salt. Delicious; I had two helpings. Couldn’t quite bring myself to try the bacon-wrapped cheese curds, though. 8. Don’t ask for a wine list. But try some of that Spotted Cow Beer. Or the Miller Lite. 9. Bring out the slabs of meat. There is something in the air out here that enables people to cook meat to an exalted, taste-bud-spraining, enlightenment-inducing level of perfection. It probably helps that they keep all the best meat for themselves, and ship the rest out of state, but there is real skill at work here. At our table we have a prime rib the size of a Buick, a ribeye steak that would barely fit on a queen-size bed, a pork chop that could roof a small house, and an aren’t-we-special order of the chicken cordon bleu, the making of which must have decimated an entire henhouse. All around us people are tearing into similar dishes with a sort of genial ferocity. It doesn’t seem to matter that serving sizes are some multiple of the holding capacity of the human stomach; most of the people present do hard physical work for a living, and they need the fuel. The motto of this place should be, “The Best of Everything, and Too Much, Please.” 10. Have a drink for dessert. This is a hallmark tradition. Take a scoop of Vanilla ice cream and pour some form of liquor over it. These drinks go by names like “Grasshopper,” “Dreamsicle Floatini,” and “Dirty Banana.” The idea is to make up for any shortfall of alcohol, sugar, and fat that you might somehow have experienced thus far. 11. Stick around. Supper clubs are rural social nodes, places where relationships can be nurtured and maintained over a lifetime, where generations of people can keep track of each other, share stories, greet strangers, celebrate with and console each other. To be that kind of place, you need to be a constant, over generations. Like a church where you can laugh out loud.'

1. Find a house on a piece of land far from anywhere else. At night, the only significant light sources should be the headlights of passing cars, and the blazing electric sign out front with the name of the place. Suitable names include “Hideaway,” “Valley Bar,” “Elmo’s Place,” or any other name likely to draw a wince from an ad agency hipster.
2. Remove most of the interior walls of the house, leaving only what is needed to keep the roof up, and to separate the industrial-scale kitchen in the back.
3. Install a 20-foot-long bar immediately inside the entrance, then fill every other bit of available space with sturdy, minimalist tables and bent-metal-framed chairs with token padding. Cover the tables with flannel-backed vinyl tablecloths. Leave just enough space between the tables that you can pull a chair out and sque-e-e-ze in to sit down. Arrange the tables in strict geometrical rows. No precious feng shui conversation islands here.
4. Clear an area outside for the parking lot. This should be big enough to allow about half of the crowd of pickup trucks that will jam the location every night. Overflow traffic will line the adjacent two-lane road. Deep irrigation ditches along these roads are optional, but are encouraged.
5. Open the doors. The place will immediately fill with large, kind, boisterous, friendly, hungry people. They have been working all day together, and now they are coming in to continue their day with each other, and to greet other members of their far-flung community. Average table occupancy is eight; a four-top is considered an intimate party, and two-tops are an oddity. Lone diners will almost certainly be dragged into a larger group.
6. When a group is seated, place a “relish tray” on table (see mandatory Facebook “food on a plate” picture). This tray contains ice-cream scoops of (I am not making this up ) braunschweiger, beer cheese, krab [sic] salad, and a small bowl of ranch dressing. All this, plus crackers, celery, carrots, and assorted other noshes make for an appetizer course to rival a complete meal in many urban bistros.
7. Present the menus. These are laminated cards printed sometime around 1957. Popular entrees include several types of steak, pork chops, prime rib, and, for the discerning palate, chicken cordon bleu. These are also about the only entrees, because why would you want to go out and order anything else? Fer cryin’ out loud, if you want pizza you can drive to Dubuque. Side dishes include steamed vegetables, cottage cheese, and my favorite, coleslaw. The latter is made with approximately 60% mayonnaise, 20% sugar, 20% cabbage, and a dash of salt. Delicious; I had two helpings. Couldn’t quite bring myself to try the bacon-wrapped cheese curds, though.
8. Don’t ask for a wine list. But try some of that Spotted Cow Beer. Or the Miller Lite.
9. Bring out the slabs of meat. There is something in the air out here that enables people to cook meat to an exalted, taste-bud-spraining, enlightenment-inducing level of perfection. It probably helps that they keep all the best meat for themselves, and ship the rest out of state, but there is real skill at work here.
At our table we have a prime rib the size of a Buick, a ribeye steak that would barely fit on a queen-size bed, a pork chop that could roof a small house, and an aren’t-we-special order of the chicken cordon bleu, the making of which must have decimated an entire henhouse. All around us people are tearing into similar dishes with a sort of genial ferocity. It doesn’t seem to matter that serving sizes are some multiple of the holding capacity of the human stomach; most of the people present do hard physical work for a living, and they need the fuel. The motto of this place should be, “The Best of Everything, and Too Much, Please.”
10. Have a drink for dessert. This is a hallmark tradition. Take a scoop of Vanilla ice cream and pour some form of liquor over it. These drinks go by names like “Grasshopper,” “Dreamsicle Floatini,” and “Dirty Banana.” The idea is to make up for any shortfall of alcohol, sugar, and fat that you might somehow have experienced thus far.
11. Stick around. Supper clubs are rural social nodes, places where relationships can be nurtured and maintained over a lifetime, where generations of people can keep track of each other, share stories, greet strangers, celebrate with and console each other. To be that kind of place, you need to be a constant, over generations. Like a church where you can laugh out loud.

On the Plains

There are few impediments on the Plains, little to catch at the eye but fracking camps and simple vastness. I know, spoken like a coastal Hobbit, But I liked how my mind and heart expanded in that void, how the train stretched its legs on the long continental straightaway, how our speech slowed. Conversations in the dining car drifted into the surreal, with one lady attributing climate change to increase in temperature of the earth’s core, and another passenger very confidently opining that the Kennedy assassination was faked. It is possible that, whatever their contributions to Zen-like calm, the Plains make people crazy.
But then hills, greenery, and malls returned, the stops became more frequent, and it felt as though we were shouldering into a high-pressure zone of urban jitters. This culminated in Chicago, a place whose brutal urbanity can be summed up with the fact that they reversed the direction of flow of their river to suit infrastructural convenience. We rented a car, and rattled around in the city core for a while, dodging cars and pedestrians – neither of whom appeared to be making any concessions to right of way, common sense, or simple charity – and were eventually disgorged into the sludge of Friday evening rush hour traffic, bound back roughly the way we had come, decompressing again, only faster, with massive freeways shrinking to merely huge ones, and so on until by nightfall we were winding along on an unlit two-lane, with minimal sight lines and bad cambers. It was wonderful, in a bone-weary-escape-from-psychosis sort of way. The idea was that we were going to a sweet spot between the frontal-lobe-frequency-jamming prairie and the adrenal neurosis of the city.
We fetched up in Galena, a place so filled with Victorian and pre-Victorian architecture that it makes Port Townsend look like a trailer park. It cascades down steep hills on either side of the Galena River, which feeds into the nearby Mississippi. It is completely infested with tourists like us at the moment – though most visitors appear to be here for Oktoberfest and/or leaf-viewing, and we are here to visit old friends, so we can claim to be visitors instead of the T-word.
We are in a not-awful motel, and plan to more or less remain here unless our friends pry us out to gaze at old churches or something equally stultifying/edifying.

Journey

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This beautifully battered old Stetson belonged to Christian’s grandmother. And the similarly beautiful and battered case belonged to her grandfather. They have traveled far over the years, and now they are accompanying us on a train ride to Annapolis.

We followed a river upstream into the Cascades, rolled through the night past the foothills on their Eastern slopes, past smaller and smaller cities and towns, placed farther and farther apart. We realized anew that small Victorian seaports are rare items, that some inland skies rival those of the oceans in breadth, that train tracks stitch all those disparate places together in ways that highways never will, because cars and trucks are too free, and not incidentally that travel with my bride is the best kind of travel.

More later.