The One-Year Anniversary of This Blog

Take that, Eric Rasmussen from one year ago. You said, I heard you say it, "I'll start this blog, but I know I'm just going to end up ignoring it." Proved you wrong.

The lake that inspired manuscript #3

To mark the first year of this effort, here's an update on my writing progress. Writers navigating the publishing labyrinth love reading about other writers' progress. There are gobs of places to read people's success stories, not so many places to compare one's data to those who are still fighting the noble fight. So, here are my stats.

Output: 
Since making the decision to pursue writing fiction as a professional, I have written three complete manuscripts (about 900 pages), seven short stories (about 140 pages), fourteen original creative nonfiction blog posts, a few articles for Volume One. I write just about every day. A lot of it is bad. Some of it is okay.

Successes: 
My goal was a blog post every two weeks, for a total of 26 posts. I hit 35, and one of them, Things I Left in My Classroom Over the Summer, hit 2300 views (thanks Reddit, I know you're not big on the blogs). My Volume One pieces have earned much positive feedback from friends, family, and strangers. Manuscript one earned one partial request. Manuscript two received seventeen total requests. Manuscript three enticed eight agents to look at more of the work, with numerous queries still outstanding, and a selection in a Twitter pitch contest (thanks Michelle!) Over fifty short story submissions with my name on them are being considered by various journals and websites. Through all of this I've made connections with all sorts of folks in the publishing world, including a handful of critique partners who I value profoundly. Lots of real-life, non-digital friendships have been strengthened through these writing efforts and a phenomenal writing group.

I used to waste a lot of time on the internet and watching HGTV shows. Now I'm working on something, towards something, and no matter what else, that feels good.

In the story, under this ridge, something exciting happens

Failures: 
93 rejections on manuscript one. 70 rejections on manuscript two. 51 rejections on number three, so far. A dozen rejections from short story and literary journals. For all the effort, I have not yet technically published any fiction.

Next steps:
I enrolled in an MFA program (Augsburg College, yo!), starting June of 2016. Manuscript number four sits prettily at 200 pages, and my goal is to finish by the New Year. Short story ideas abound. This blog is an actual thing. Motivation and hope persist.

The unbelievable, epic, heartbreaking ending takes place on a
frozen lake, much like this

When I started this trip, I thought what I wanted sat just over the next hill. Two states later, I'm still driving, convinced that we'll get there any minute now. If I am epically, monumentally wrong, I'll hit the ocean eventually, and it sure has been a pretty drive.

This blog, year two, stay tuned...

A Record of the Foodstuffs I'll Never Eat Again

They're making Surge again, and... I hate to say it. Surge deserved to die.

Google "Crystal Pepsi" or "Nerds Cereal" and you will find plenty of nostalgia concerning all sorts of discontinued products. The thing is, most of those trendy foodstuffs of yore tasted bad or looked weird and earned their fates. Survival of fittest. Don't feel bad, it's nature's way.

But there are several products that I will never consume again, and it makes me sad not because they were some novelty, but because they tasted great. They were unique and now they're gone forever, and this is my gallery of foods I will miss, recorded for posterity and my aging memory.

Ore-Ida Cheddar Browns

My entire childhood, my family, my parents cooking brunch on a Sunday while my brother and I played Nintendo after church, cold winter mornings before school when my mom made us warm breakfasts because she cared about our health and our school performance and wanted to make us happy, all of that would rush back to me in a deluge of memory and feeling if I could just eat one more bite of an Ore-Ida Cheddar Brown. Those things were so good, salty and cheesy, and they took forever to cook, but it you left them in the pan they got so brown and delicious. One more box of Cheddar Browns, what I wouldn't give. I like to imagine someone out there has a box in the back of his or her freezer, but they would be so freezer burnt by now. Hope dies with ice crystals and freezer odor.


Jolly Good Fruit Punch

Jolly Good was a Wisconsin brand of soda, purchased by the can, which was delightful. Mixing and matching pop cans on a little cardboard pallet, that's how I learned to plan and organize. Sour Pow'r registers on many people's nostalgia scale, but Fruit Punch was so sweet and fruity and amazing that I can still taste it, unlike many of these other products. A bit of good news - Jolly Good has a Facebook page and is once again producing soda, for sale at Cedar Valley Cheese Store in Random Lake, Wisconsin. Supposedly more flavors are on the way, and maybe broader distribution. I will attempt to corral my optimism, as that news makes me quite excited.



Campbell's Select Italian Wedding Soup

My favorite canned soup of all time perished in the Great Campbell's Salt Purge of 2009. From what I can tell, they moved Italian Wedding to their "Healthy Selects" line, took out the sodium and the flavor, and when I ate that last can of the good stuff, I didn't even know. I would have appreciated it more. I would have spent more time. I would have licked out the inside of the bowl. Now they sell an Italian Wedding soup as part of the Campbell's Cunky Line, but it's not as good. It's got a weird, gross carrot aftertaste. I could try to make my own, but it would never compare.






Coffee Mate Blueberry Cobbler Creamer

Please hold on. I understand blueberry coffee sounds atrocious, but it wasn't. It so, so was not. This sweet nectar was never intended to last; it was a special holiday flavor, but I first tried it at my in-laws on a blustery winter day, Christmas or thereabouts, and it transported me, it flew me to a land of flavor where everything good about coffee and breakfast and fruit and baked goods and the holiday season blended together in a vortex of steamy warmth and sweetness. Cuddling has a flavor, and it's coffee with a generous pour of blueberry cobbler creamer.







Oompas

Apparently Oompas existed in the 1980's as Willy Wonka's version of Reese's Pieces, and there is plenty of candy nostalgia for that peanut butter version. But in the early 2000's, Wonka released a new Oompa, which copied Skittles, except bigger, chewier, and significantly tastier. Every time my new wife and I drove to visit my parents' northwoods cabin, we stopped at the Kwik Trip in Medford and I enjoyed a bag of Oompas while we held hands across the big bench seat of my 1985 Buick Regal. The scene was almost as sweet as the candy, sweet enough to make most people nauseous. Oompas were young love in a plastic pouch, and now they're gone. Thankfully my marriage survives.

The Odd Phenomenon of the Wisconsin Corn Maze

Get in the car and drive at least 20 minutes. You’ll want to find a corn maze farm far enough away that you feel like you’ve left the city and reverted to something simpler, something agrarian, something like the way things used to be, with tractors. But you needn’t go farther than that. You’ll want to make it back by dinner.

Pack a sweatshirt, ‘cause there’s equal chances it’ll be warmer or colder than it looks. October sun is wily like that. If your spouse asks about bringing a coat, say yes.

Pay the people. Farming is hard for the farming family, especially when they spend a whole big chunk of land on parking and bouncy houses. Divide the total cost by the number of people you brought and the hours you manage to spend there. Cheaper than a movie.

Feed the animals. Goats, sheep, miniature horses, llamas, pigs, whatever they have. The creatures can’t possibly be hungry, they eat corn out of people’s hands all day, but they’re a hair closer to real wildlife than your cat or your dog, and we’re all supposed to share the planet, and the corn’s only a quarter.

When you’re in the actual maze, pretend you can’t hear the highway or see the snack trailer. Pretend you couldn’t just walk through the corn and out the side whenever you wanted. Imagine the sun sets, and something menacing lurks somewhere in the field with you, two rows away, ten rows away. If the way out obviously requires taking a left, take a right. You’ll get there eventually.

Appreciate the ingenuity. Corn mazes attract customers through tremendous lists of attractions. The pumpkin launcher took some serious engineering, but the hay pit is just a pile of old mattresses covered in hay, surrounded by hay bales. Vinyl gutters can be transformed into all sorts of impressive apparatuses, tennis ball tracks, rubber duck race courses, mini-golf holes. Kids will throw beanbags at just about anything, and if they’re filled with dry corn, even better.

Buy some gourds. You don’t eat them, and they look pretty strange, but a stack of them on your dining room table makes it feel like fall more than anything else you can do. And if they have pumpkins or apples, you might as well grab those, too. The Honeycrisps taste pretty good, and you’ll want to make a jack-o-lantern, you know you will, even if this year you’re pretty sure you won’t get around to it.

Take a big breath of the cool fall air. Consider the seasons and the passage time, if that’s the sort of thing you like. If not, buy a cup of cider. It's fall in Wisconsin, either way.

How to Be a Football Fan in Packer- and Badger- Land

Everything that can be said about football and its meaning and significance has already been said, except maybe for this: I don’t like football.

Wisconsin Badgers 58, Miami (OH) Redhawks 0

Even that’s not an original sentiment. Some football anti-fan maintains an “I Hate Football” Facebook page, and stacks of articles highlight the damage the sport inflicts on our kids’ developing brains and the decimation it imparts on the minds and bodies of NFL alumni. The sport is sexist, and crude. It used to tempt husbands away from their wives, until women started watching, and now it tempts all of us away from Sunday chores and family time, from autumn corn mazes and apple orchards and productive time at work. If the hours sacrificed by the fans and the IQ points sacrificed by the players produced something tangible, maybe they would be resources well spent. But the season does not end with any legislation or cures for any diseases. The lessons taught to our young men about teamwork and hard work are important, but they are weakened when packaged with all the aggression and concussions.

My distaste for the sport has certainly not prevented me from watching a phenomenal amount of football, this season more than ever. Living in Wisconsin and ignoring the Packers is almost as foolish as living here and never purchasing a winter coat, so watching Aaron Rodgers and company barrel up and down the field is essentially required. A good friend invited me to a Badger game at Camp Randall. I took my son to the Homecoming game of the high school where I teach, and I’ve attended all of his flag football games. On the website for my fantasy team, all the columns of statistics are starting to make sense. When I was a pudgy kid, the television coming on after Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday brunch was my cue to retreat into the kitchen or into my Gameboy. Now I set aside time to watch the NFL draft each spring.

Memorial Old Abes 29, Hudson Raiders 17

I don’t like football. But I like everything that surrounds football. My state of 5.758 million people has built an identity around a sports team, the Green Bay Packers, and however artificial and meaningless the successes and failures of those 53 players and a dozen or so coaches are, they have given me a bond with millions of people. That’s insane, but it’s true--I can go anywhere in this state and meet anyone and feel like a little less of a stranger because we both have opinions on the effects of the loss of Jordy Nelson.

That Badger game, that was a bucket-list level experience. Wisconsin’s 58-0 victory helped, but when the students filed into the stadium in the middle of the first quarter, and the band filled the field at halftime, and the alumni stood up to sing and the rest of us stood up to dance in the second half, and the school inducted a handful of athletes into its hall of fame, and I had some memorable nachos, those moments were not about aggression and violence, those moments were about community and tradition and the breathtaking things we can do when we come together. I sat next to a friend who spent time at the University of Alabama and attended games there, and he made it sound like the experience there might be even more impressive, and in that moment I understood the entirety of college athletics.

At my school, the football team is not great, and has not been great since I started teaching there. Budgets are tight, instructional minutes are precious, and maybe we need to have a serious discussion about whether football and other sports are worth everything we invest in them. But the guys wear their jerseys on game days and standardized test scores and academic programs could never, never replace the pride they inspire. My neighbor in the English hallways coaches the Spirit Line/Cheerleading team, and she pointed out wins and losses have little to do with the success of a school sport. Helping a kid feel involved is a precious thing.

Packers 14, Vikings 6

My son loves playing football, and so far it’s easy for me to love it, too. He plays the flag version on an indoor soccer field, and while turf burns are brutal, the chances of more serious injuries are slim. The 6- and 7- year olds rotate positions, and for all the praise I offer my son for his math scores and reading abilities, his piano and artistic skills, his kindness and compassion, he is fa
r more proud of his two completed passes in his second game as an EC Indoor Sports Center Viking.

I don’t like football. Watching others inflict pain brings me no joy, watching others sacrifice their bodies and their minds feels a little too Greek coliseum for me. But for someone who doesn’t like football, I sure am becoming quite the fan.

Things I Left in My Classroom Over the Summer

1. Photomosaic Darth Vader. Which isn't literary at all, in an English classroom, no less, unless you approach Star Wars through a monomyth archetypal lens, or examine composition and film techniques to uncover the film's appeal, or take a historical approach and research the 1970's political and economic situation and analyze instances of those influences in the movie, or uncover characterization, or plot, or explore how Mr. Vader has affected the presentation of villains in the sci-fi genre, or in film, or wherever. Apart from all that, it's just a cool poster.

2. This juice box. I am looking forward to drinking it, but I'll probably give it to a study hall kid with low blood sugar, or one who's thirsty.

3. A Shadowy Figure in the Corner. One fourth hour a girl, a girl with troubles I can't begin to understand, looked up at me with real fear in her eyes and asked what the man in the corner was doing. I laughed and shook my head, and she pointed quick, because she didn't want the apparition to see her, and she started shaking, and I wonder how many people would know how to deal with a hallucination, a terrifying demon in the corner, in such a way that protects her and maintains her dignity in a room full of fourteen-year-olds, and that helps her improve her writing skills and score well on the standardized test, and that gives her some sort of hope that she'll be able to find food tonight, and for the rest of her life. That fourth hour I tried my best. I don't know if I succeeded, but I tried my best.

4. $40,000. Because I get paid what I got paid in 2007, and I get it, I get it, tough times, we all had to tighten our belts, but my belt is still tight, and I just need to know when I get to loosen it. You showed me a grid full of numbers when you hired me, full of what I was supposed to be paid, and if that deal changed, if you're never going to hold up your end of that deal, you need to let me know, because I work hard and I get better every year. You need to let me know because then I can try to understand how schools work best with lowest bid teachers, because these aren't roads that can be repaved, these are kids, these are lives, these are investments and I'm how you get a payout and if you think freeways and business subsidies are a better bet, that's fine. That's not fine, but that's fine, and I just need to know.

5. A Dust Globe. It's the most incredible project student project I've received. We read Of Mice and Men and everyone made a museum artifact from the '20's and a girl made this, with her hands, with her mind, and it's impressive and creative and it never would have existed if I didn't type up the assignment sheet and set the due date. I can't take, would never take any sort of credit, but I played a role in the creation of this cool thing, of a thousand cool things. Tens of thousands of cool things.








6. A birthday card from my kids, a rock from my trip to Korea to visit my brother, and a small glass from my high school English teacher's funeral. These things mean something to me.
















7. Fifteen tables, thirty chairs, a white board, and a podium. That's what I will need to take 150 teenagers and make them better at important things like reading and writing and speaking, and thinking, and avoiding the pitfalls of advertising and working with others, and using technology and researching. There's other stuff too. We start tomorrow.

A Letter to Myself as a Smoker, One Year Ago Today

Hey man,

You don't know this, but tonight you're going to go outside for a cigarette, and that will be your last one ever, or if not ever, at least for a year. Tomorrow morning you’re going to wake up and decide to skip your morning smoke, because you’ve been telling your wife for weeks that you mean to cut back, and then, when you’re sitting at your kids’ swimming lessons, you’ll decide to be done smoking for good. Believe it or not. Some crazy and irreproducible brain chemistry formula, some unexplainable pinball of synapse firing will finally accomplish what you’ve attempted for seventeen years.

My old smoking porch, now just a porch

So, dude, enjoy that cigarette. Have two. Finish the pack. Because smoking is three minutes of pleasure, 40 cents a cigarette, 4 cents a puff, lit up as many times a day as you can afford or as the guilt will allow. It’s stinky, dirty, toxic pleasure, no doubt. Some people get a little spurt of dopamine from running down squirrels in their cars, some people get a kick out of beating up nerds or grandmas or nuns or whatever. It’s all perverse pleasure, but it’s pleasure nonetheless, and there have been plenty of times, many many times, where I watched people smoke this past year and thought of you, you lucky fucker, with one more cigarette in your future, and thought about how you better appreciate the ever-loving, honest-to-goodness shit out of it. It’s all we’ve got.

One year from now, you’re going to sit in a café, a few pounds heavier than you are now, and watch two ladies smoke at one of the tables on the sidewalk, and you’ll suddenly understand what they mean when they say addiction is mental illness. Up until that moment, you won’t care. What the hell difference does it make what addiction is? Addiction is an affliction of the weak or unintelligent, unfortunate and sad, but ultimately a decision, an act of free will that carries rewards and consequences to be weighed and factored.

I used to set my pack on that shelf next to this taxidermied squirrel, then I'd come outside and say "Hey squirrel buddy, mind if I bum a smoke?" It was awesome.

You’ll start to figure this out tomorrow morning, and understand it more and more over the next 365 days, but that’s not how it works at all. It’s mental illness because you are not yourself. You believe things that are not true, that feel real because of broken circuitry. Yes, you chose to smoke every cigarette you ever had. You chose to smoke in front of your three-year-old, even after he asked you what that white stick was, and if he could try it. You chose to step outside during naptimes, playtimes, during your wife’s labor because you purposely “forgot” something in car that needed retrieving. You chose to excuse yourself from the hospital waiting room while your dad was in surgery to have part of his lung removed, the cancerous part, because he chose to smoke an uncountable number of cigarettes. You chose to have that first one in the mall parking lot behind the store where you worked in high school, just like a little kid chooses to jump from the tree that he climbed, it doesn’t look so bad, you can handle it, it’s no big deal. You alone made all those decisions, but the tool you used was broken. The first time you smoked, it was broken because eighteen-year-olds are stupid. Every time after that, your brain was damaged by nicotine, which made you feel deeply and forever that smoking was good and important, and life without it was simply unimaginable. Picture life without your legs, or your ears, or your junk. Do you want to live that life? Would you choose that? Of course not, so please, please, slide out another Marlboro and step outside and suck it in. The shaking won’t stop until you do.

A Wisconsin smoker's view, most of the year. Why did I quit again?

Sorry man, you’re all nervous now. My intention is not to make this any worse than it will be. Quitting smoking is about as hard as winning an Oscar, and deserves it’s own little thank you speech, so here is what you’ll be grateful for this year. Your wife, because quitting weighs about a thousand pounds, and the most you can carry is five hundred. She’ll shoulder the rest, which is downright saintly, because she can’t understand how your sick and broken brain works and what it tells you about smoking. She’ll just keep offering backrubs and sympathy and rewards. Your parents, and your dad especially, because he fought hard and lost some big battles with cigarettes, but he hasn’t smoked in over a decade. Your own kids will give you some powerful reasons to quit. A handful of students will provide some unexpected reassurance, your coworkers will too. Some British guy named Allen Carr and his materials will make a huge difference, as will everyone on the r/stopsmoking Subreddit. And green tea, because making it is a little ceremony much like stepping into the garage, and it’s got antioxidants and caffeine and just enough placebo power to make it seem like it’s helping.

So, wow. Tomorrow man. It’s going to be a big day. Lots of people, smokers and non, won’t recognize how monumental, how incomprehensibly huge tomorrow will be. They don’t matter. I matter, and trust me, you got this.

Now smoke up, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Eric

The Life of a Mechanical Idiot

Evidence #1: I don’t remember if I was 6 or 18. The older I was, the more pathetic this story is, so let’s say 8. It was probably 14. My father, his father, and I stood in front of the garage across the road from the family’s cabin up north. Something needed building, and it was a three-person job. I fetched tools, and when I didn’t know which one it was that had been requested (for a big chunk of years the whole pliers/wrench division was pretty hazy for me), I brought an assortment. Then, the thing being built required two pieces of wood nailed together, and my dad looked at me and said, “Why don’t you take care of that.”

Well, holy hell.

That's not a bad looking basement. Wonder who did that?

This was not just the bonding of two pieces of wood with a sharp piece of metal. This was a pivotal opportunity to prove my manhood to my dad, and to prove to my grandpa how good of a job his son had done in raising a strong, skilled boy who was more than capable of hitting a nail firmly in a downward motion so as to drive it into the wood. I found a hammer and squared my shoulders. Dad crouched down next to me, and grandpa leaned forward with his hands on his knees. I breathed deep and visualized my stroke. I kept my eye on the nail.

I missed with the first hit, and hit my thumb with the second. I finally made contact with the third and bent the nail sideways, and kept hammering until dad wrestled the hammer away from me. He asked for a needle nose pliers. I brought him a vice grip.

That accent wall looks like it took a lot of skill.

Evidence #2: My wife and I bought a house, and I wanted to make my mark, a tiny mark, barely noticeable, but something I could point out to all the friends and relatives who would eventually stop by for tours. I tried installing a shelf. “Oh yeah, you see that shelf? That was me. I put that up.” It was a glass corner shelf in the bathroom. Screw the two metal pieces into the wall (which had to be level, for all of you who have never installed a shelf), then slide the glass piece into the slots. Can’t get much easier than that.

Except one of the screws would not go into the wall. I tried my drill, and then a screwdriver, then swearing, then throwing things, then squinty-eyed rage. Behind the wall was either the chimney or some ductwork or an undiscovered vein of pure titanium. I got so mad I had to take a walk.

I would like to sit in that well-crafted basement.

When I got back, I pushed the glass into the slots, one side with only one screw. The bastard held lotion just fine until we moved.

Evidence #3: I am smart, and I can learn, so I just needed practice. Right? Careful thought and analysis can solve any problem. So when the guy at Sears asked if I wanted them to install the new garage door opener, I laughed. “Are you kidding? Do I look like one of those types of guys? No, no. No no no. I can handle that myself.”

I got the garage door opener installed. And it worked. It only took me eight hours, the first day. Seven hours the second day. And three hours the next evening to get the stupid little sensors aligned. Totally worth it.

Conclusion: I was bad at mechanical stuff. I did not possess that type of intelligence. My dad tried to teach me, and I was a terrible pupil. When I was a kid the Star Wars universe books offered far more excitement than learning the difference between a “nut” and a “bolt.” But I know that now. Bolts are like screws, but flat instead of pointy. Nuts are the round things that screw onto bolts. Try me. I know what washers are, too.

The bathroom. I installed those mirrors, too.

There are throngs of dudes and ladies out there who are like me. They get their first houses and all of sudden choosing a choir class over a tech ed class in high school becomes the stupidest decision they ever made, if you exclude the choir trip to Winnipeg on the big coach bus where they sat next to so-and-so and played you-know-what and it was AWESOME. Just to be clear, I am not offering to help with anyone’s projects. To all of you, staring at your tilted shelves and loose wires and leaky faucets and exposed studs, I just want to say, you can do it. Check Youtube and take a deep breath.

My project this summer was to update our basement. I installed laminate flooring on one wall, painted, replaced the light fixtures, built a department store storage cube piece, hung the pictures, picked new furniture, and it looks frickin’ amazing. Next week I’m going to install some gutters. I’ve replaced toilets, faucets, outlets, installed laminate tile flooring, and I’m still a home improvement novice, but I’ve got a solid pile of mechanical skill points chalked up, and I can name every tool in my workbench. Okay. Most of them.

Why Do People Camp?

Textbook beanbag toss

“What do you think family camping will be like in twenty years?” my cousin asked. We sat in the middle of the road on folding camp chairs, because that was the only place we could find some shade. Camping weekend is always either too hot or too cold. This was a hot year, and the family all loitered around like polar bears in a southern state zoo, moving only when cars needed to creep down the street or when it was our turn to play beanbags.

“I assume the earth will be a burnt-out wasteland by then,” I replied.

“Right,” said my cousin. “So we’ll be camping because we have to. We’ll be refugees from the water wars.”

“Omigod, water wars sound great right about now,” said my wife.

“Well,” said my cousin. “It won’t be that type of water war. Not armies with squirt guns, but actual fighting over water.”

“Oh no,” said my wife.

Tornado Warning, Men's Bathroom

Fourteen hours prior to this conversation, at 11:30 PM, all twenty-five us, plus dozens of other strangers, stood in the men’s bathroom to wait out a tornado warning. The dogs’ barking echoed around the concrete room while my family finished up snacks rescued from the campfire circle. Someone had brought a cooler into a shower stall and handed out beers, and we all tried to summon some weather radar on our phones. “I don’t have any signal. Do you have any signal?” “I don’t think it looks that bad.” “Really? That dark red spot is coming right for us.” My son stood next to me and cried quietly, revealing the fear we all had, to some degree, somewhere deep down. What happens if that dark red spot really does wipe everything out? Where will we sleep tonight? What will we eat tomorrow? My daughter picked her sleepy head off my shoulder every few minutes to share the other emotion we all felt. She had no fear, only frustration. “When can we go back to the camper? I’m tired.”

The storm, like every other one that has crept ominously over the horizon during a family camping weekend, full of paparazzi lightning and locomotive rumbles, failed to live up to our worst fears. Instead of leaving us truly homeless, not just the voluntary homelessness of a camping trip, it soaked all of our crap and made us track wet sand into our tents, pop-ups, and vehicles the rest of the weekend. And it made the following day armpit, dog’s breath, giant sweat stain hot and humid, but we took care of that after the teams finished their beanbag games and we all went down to the beach and played Frisbee in the cool lake.

Quinn on the beach (it's a giraffe)

I don’t understand camping, especially around where I live. Houses aren’t cheap, and we spend a lot of time keeping them clean and making them nice and comfortable, but then we spend a bunch more money on trailers and tents and camp stoves and campsite fees to get away from our homes on the weekends. Sleeping in the forest is nice, but everyone on my side of the state has a good handful of trees growing in our yards, where they’re not “nature,” they’re just a pain the butt because of all the raking and pruning. There’s something traditional and satisfying and primal about sitting around a fire and telling old stories, but those aluminum fire pits cost less than hundred bucks, so now you can commune with your hunter-gatherer ancestors in your driveway and still sleep in your own bed. And they make s’more flavored everything, so even those aren’t that special anymore, either.

I’m sure this is obvious to everyone else, but the point of camping has to be voluntary isolation. Families have to spend time together, make meals together, play a few lawn games, get too competitive, then smooth things over afterward. Kids can’t escape to friends’ houses down the street, mom and dad can’t fall into television or laptop hypnosis. Everyone has to work together to set up camp, then take it down together a few days later.

The past few years more and more of the family have come out to start camping on Thursday night. By Sunday, everyone is pretty ready to pack up and get home. On the cold years, we all are sick of wishing we had remembered sweatshirts, and on the hot years, we are tired of sticking to our t-shirts and our chairs. But on Sunday morning, if anyone was hung-over, or if anyone had any sort of spat with anyone else, or if anyone didn’t get enough sleep because the campground red squirrel hopped from site to site at six in the morning and chirped almost as loud as the tornado sirens Friday night, no one could tell. We all pitched in to take down the camp kitchen and the big party tent and clean up the lawn games, all smiles and big hugs and promises to see each other soon, our isolation broken, our journey out of woods almost as welcome as our journey in.

A Review of the Eaux Claires Music Festival

For eight hours on Saturday, I wandered around a field and listened to music performed by old friends and other musicians I’ve heard so many times they feel like old friends. On Sunday, I spent about eight hours wandering social media, searching for confirmation that my experience Saturday was as notable and unique as it felt.

Two things. One, it was. Many a Tweet and Facebook post and big city newspaper confirmed that the Eaux Claires Music Festival was a success, both on a technical, music line-up and fest organization level, and on a deeper community vibe level. Second, as far as reviewers go, I’m probably not the guy to trust. I’m biased beyond recognition, and I have little to compare to. As I kid, I saw Kenny Rogers at a State Fair. And Weird Al Yankovic. Last year I attended Rock Fest to see Cheap Trick, Live, and Aerosmith. And that is the full extent of my professional outdoor music experience.

I only attended one day of Eaux Claires, because weekends when grandma and grandpa take the kids require a broad assortment of unencumbered activities. Friday, my wife and I read on the porch and went out to dinner. Midafternoon Saturday, though, we took a hike down a wooded trail and attended the big shh-bang. Social media and the big city newspapers can fill in the specifics. The weather was warm and the food lines were long. There were art installations and multiple stages. I had a walking taco and some cheese curds. They were delicious.

Sufjan Stevens, photo by Joel Rasmussen

But there was something deeper at work last weekend. Mike Perry, author and narrator of the festival, blamed it on the rivers. Justin Vernon cited friendship, dozens of Twitter users noted the reverential nature of the crowd all weekend and assumed it was the setting, or the music, or that everyone was stoned. But there definitely was something. The Indigo Girls were a unique inclusion in the line-up, but they brought a sense of generational connection. Sufjan Stevens told the crowd that he doesn’t play festivals because of his agoraphobia, his fear of large crowds, which is actually another reason I only attended one day. But when the crowd joined in singing at the end of “Casimir Pulaski Day,” and I felt the pull of tears at the back of my throat at the grandeur of the moment, and the song finished and Mr. Stevens said, “That was amazing,” he felt that something deeper too.

Indigo Girls, photo by Arwen Rasmussen

We Chippewa Valley folk tend to be very impressed with ourselves. It is a criticism lobbed at our media and our artists and it is something I have felt. Our city puts a park on a river, someone comes along and starts hosting concerts there, and you would think we invented the whole idea of outdoor music. We train some great bands at our schools, some of those band members go off to make careers in music,  maybe win some Grammys and come back to host notable music festivals, and everyone starts looking to the water, or the weather, or, who knows, gravitational vortexes to explain how we could be so lucky, or so special. A few years ago, when I advised Student Council at Memorial High School and we produced a talent show, a group of high school guys covered a Killers’ song, and I stood in the back of the darkened theater and knew, fundamentally and forever, that the performance was one of the greatest I would witness.

But, come on. It was a high school cover band.

What my wife looks like at a music festival

I can’t say if Eaux Claires was different, or why. Authenticity is nothing that can be measured, heart and passion are elements that are hard to account for. It is entirely possible that I loved the festival because just about all of my current and former friends were there, and all day was like a huge reunion without the judgment and crappy buffet. Maybe I would have been just as impressed with Pitchfork. Maybe that walking taco was a dinner so sublime that it will go unrecognized as the pinnacle of the experience. At the end of his set, Justin Vernon seemed to get choked up, and much of the crowd with him. Why the hell would he, and I, and we, go through all that work if we didn’t impress ourselves with the product?

The internet probably doesn’t need more people raving about Eaux Claires. Thirty-six hours after “Skinny Love,” all the gushing is becoming cliché. But just in case the festival was something worth gushing about, I need to join in. I had a really great day.