The Sinking Dreams Part 1.A

Ok. For a moment I'm going to interrupt my family reunion series. I had another sinking dream last night. This one was a doosy. I sank into not only snow but mud, and had to negotiate a steep bank and water and was embarrassing around a cute man and . . . just to add insult to injury . . . there were zombies.

For fuck sake.

I don't really remember how it started. I was the captain of a speed boat and I was very good at driving it. We were on a very big lake and I headed across it, into some kind of narrow tunnel kind of industrial place, for some reason. Two people were with me. At the beginning of the dream they were just two random people. In the middle of the dream, one turned into my sister and the other was a young boy. In the end of the dream, my sister had turned into a lesbian coworker and the little boy . . . well, he disappeared after the zombies.

Across the lake, the boat parked at the industrial water tunnel place, I had finished my business, whatever it was, and it was time to get home. The boat was parked a ways away from where we were and we had to cross a small stream to get back to it. The small boy found a narrow place in the stream where we could cross, but it was muddy and icy. The boy went across only sinking a little bit into the mud, leaving some deep foot prints. To me, it still looked safe. I stepped into the muddy place and sunk down to my armpits. Screaming and wiggling around I reached out for help and a Russian hiker tried to pull me out. He wasn't placed corrected on the shore and I nearly pulled him in. Then a gorgeous, kind hiker man came to my rescue and pulled me free. From there I still needed to get up the steep embankment to continue on to the boat, and couldn't for the life of me climb up it. Once again, cute hiker attempted to come to my rescue. He picked me up and set me up there, but I kept falling off. Twice he tried, and after that I just got embarrassed to ask for his help again. I ended up going a long way around and finding another way up a less steep part of the hill. As I walked up to join the small boy and continue on to the boat, I saw the hiker walk the other way. He walked quickly by, wearing headphones, and ignored me. It felt like he was mad.

We got to the boat and I thought we were home free. At this point the passenger turned into my sister, Ellen, and she went on the outside of the boat to untie us from the pier. I turned the boat and sped away and realized that Ellen had fallen off. I spun the boat around and picked her up. She was annoyed, but not hurt.

Then we hit ice. Thick, deep, hilly, snowy ice in the middle of the lake. It was like an island, frozen solid and snow had been falling on it for some time. It froze unevenly and we had to drag the boat -- like Shackleton -- up and over huge drifts. I kept sinking into the snow, pulling the heavy boat behind me. Over the highest and worst drift I sank deep, and buried under the top layer were picnic baskets and debris and zombies. I looked into the eyes of three, buried up to their shoulders but not quite dead. They watched as I passed, their eyes following me. Their heads frozen in place.

Out from under the zombie drift, cresting another hill and pulling the boat behind me, I went up a set of stairs and found a paved path. Down the path were people in a kind of pavilion, laughing and talking, and I thought for sure they would help us. I was headed down towards them, knowing it would be the easier way back to the unfrozen part of the lake, when I was jumped from behind by my lesbian coworker. She started screaming for me not to go down that path. No! No! She was hanging off my back, dragging me backwards as I tried to go forward.

Fine.

I went another way and was immediately on the unfrozen part of the lake. Poof. The sun was setting to my right and the whole expanse of the lake was red. Dark red water and dark red trees and shimmering houses on the far side. I got in the boat and gunned it. The evening was approaching, and I knew we needed to get home before the sun went down. Others were expecting us. As I drove away, I realized that I had left the lesbian coworker behind, and flipped around to go get her. As I headed back to the frozen ice edge, I put my arm deep into the water. She grabbed me from under the surface and pulled herself up. I stopped the boat. As her head crested the blood red water, I saw that she, too, was a zombie.

I woke myself up, feeling the lingering fingers of my lesbian zombie coworker wrapped around my forearm. It was hard to shake off.

This one wasn't fun. It freaked me out.

I hate zombies.

Tom's Burned Down Cafe

Tom's is it.

Tom's is the center piece of Madeline Island.

Tom's is the easiest to be in bar I have ever had the pleasure to be in.

It's basically a deck around a trailer with benches and a huge tarp for a roof. There are signs and sayings painted everywhere. The bar stools are cobbled together from whatever bar stool like structure they could find. The deck is held up by at least two old cars, and the holes in the deck have been mended with old street signs and yield signs that get super slick in the rain. The music is sort of a retro country hippie sound. The clients are a HUGE mix of folks . . . whomever is around . . . the very wealthy and drunk who crawl over, unearthed from their private drives after a day of drinking on their sailboats, the hippie youth who are camping around for the summer, the "locals" who live on the island deep in the woods . . . and the daytrippers, over on the ferry just to see what's what. It's a place you can just walk in to and be. It's a place where absolutely anything is going to go . . . I saw rich, white, golf-playing millionaires dancing with a little, long haired, barefoot imp. I saw married teachers swing dance with frat boys. I myself swing danced with frat boys AND waved my arms, Grateful Dead style, with the imp. Everyone is welcome and everything is fine!

My cousins, Duke and Jeff, were playing there both nights I was on the island. I, of course, went along to hear them. They rock. Jeff and Duke don't play together often, but it takes about one song and they are completely together. Very funny. Very talented. Great performers and you can tell they are having a great time. Jeff's friend, Willy, came up from the Cities to play bass.

The first night I checked into my condo and Duke was already there, taking a nap. He had driven in from Montana over the course of a few days. We got some very average and fried dinner and went over to Tom's to set up. It was pouring rain and about 90 degrees. Hot and wet and sticky, and the rain was coming sideways into the bar under the tarp. The cute bartendress was incased in a plastic bag like it was nothing, scooting around the bar like a little white bubble. Lightning and thunder accompanied the entire evening.

Before the band ever started I caught the eye of a woman at the bar. She smiled so suddenly and openly, I thought for sure I was supposed to know her. Turns out I didn't. She's just friendly. She came over minutes later and introduced herself. Terry from some town in the middle of Wisconsin. She and her sister, Sherry, and her best friend, Patty, have been coming up to Madeline Island on the last weekend of July for years. Every time they bring different friends. This year they had two along with them . . . a plain woman of a larger size who looked dazed from way too many afternoon beers, and a very beautiful yet difficult girl who seemed to pout if she wasn't getting exactly her way. I talked to both Terry and Patty for quite some time. When the band started playing, Patty was one of the first on the dance floor and made sure I came up with her a few times. They were hysterical girls, wilding away from their husbands and kids, having a grand old time.

I drank and danced and kept meeting folks until I could meet and dance no more. I wobbled home around midnight. Duke came home around 3:00 a.m.

The next day, I spent driving around the island to get a feel of it . . . decide where I would buy my house . . . and basically decided there were too many trees and not enough restaurants. Pretty, but not for me.

That night, after a greasy pizza dinner with Duke, I went back to Tom's to watch my cousins again. The second night started as a disappointment. We were hoping some of the other cousins from the reunion (about an hour south near Cable, Wisconsin) would drive up to see the band. I was hoping they would show early and stay all night. No sign of them.

Then I took my seat at the end of the bar near the stage and two of the most drunk old fucks sat down right next to me. Pitching, loud and over-tanned, these men, you could tell, were professionals. All day, every day kind of drunk guys. Old . . . into their 50's. Leathered. Loud and dickheady. And, of course, they noticed me sitting there . . . and had to talk. One of them was hosting his son whom he hadn't seen in years. The kid was about 21 and looked like he was getting hit by a train. Not into the night out with his dad. The younger of the two fuckers started hassling Jeff and asking me which one was my husband. I should have just picked Willy, but no. Not thinking fast enough, I told the truth. This seemed to imply, since I wasn't with one of the band, I wanted to be with drunk guy. It was unpleasant and nasty and made me really sad that this was going to be the tone of the evening. I got up and walked to the other end of the bar to get my next beer. I stayed over there . . . away from the stage . . . until the drunks went away. I didn't have to wait long and they were gone.

Hallelujah.

I returned to my perch by the stage and the evening picked WAY up. Willy's wife, Roseanne and their friend, Kate, (a local lady who lives in a tool shed on 3 acres deep in the dense middle) showed up. Kate introduced me to a GORGEOUS young local (young like high school young), who wants to study complexity and biology and who really wants to come to the South Pole. He seems to be related to the imp, somehow. My other cousins showed up and danced and laughed. The wilding women came back, with five drunk frat boys in tow. Jeff's friend from the Cities came up on stage and belted out some GREAT blues. She was around 30 or so, long blonde pony tail under a Nascar hat, shy about her singing and not quite used to a microphone. She ROCKED, and was a huge hit.

The evening went on like this . . . the weird, put-together tribe of it. Jeff and his friends, Duke and Willy, imps and their brothers, random cousins, pastel millionaires, frat boys and drunk mommies . . . all bundled together under a tarp in the middle of Lake Superior.

Magical.

When I walked home it was sprinkling. The lightning was going crazy like a light show, striking on the other side of Bayfield's hill and it lit up the lake in flashes. Boom, boom, flashflashflash. From the pitch black country sky, came totally illuminated blue lake and hills. Flash flash flash. In my drunken, sticky, sopping wet state, I stopped and took a long moment to watch this. To remember it. To notice what the earth was doing around me.

From up the road I heard my cousins still singing and the laugh of a happy crowd.

Discovering Madeline Island

I went to my family reunion early to check out a neighborhood I have been thinking about for years. The second family reunion, 10 or so years ago, was held in Washburn, Wisconsin and ever since then I have been dreaming of Bayfield and Madeline Island -- other cute little towns in the vicinity. This year I booked early to have a day or two up there . . . on the shores of Lake Superior, to check it out as a possibility.

You see . . . I'm thinking I need a bit more water view in my life. And, I have been really, really thinking about what my next step will be when Antarctica is done . . . which, I'm afraid, might be sooner than I would like to admit. Not because I'm doing a bad job. Not because The Program is going anywhere. Just because I might need to move on. Face other challenges. And I have been asking myself what are those next challenges going to be. Most folks who have been in The Program long enough, tend to stick with this kind of contract-hopping, over-seas-going, logistics-providing kind of stuff. Many go on to Iraq, China, Russia to work for large contractors who are providing large contracts to support whatever is going on.

Only after the smallest bit of thinking (Iraq?!), I decided I don't really want to go that route.

So what's left?

As I was thinking these career path/ family reunion thoughts . . . my day dreams turned to Bayfield -- running a liquor store or a great art gallery or an apple orchard. My hair all long and braided, my garden an acre big with corn and peppers and tomatoes and beans! My house will be a cutie pie Victorian with squeaky wooden floors and a huge wrap-around porch, perched high enough to look out over the Lake. I'll say "Oh, Yahhhh. You betchah" and have a great many friends who all come over for dinner! I'll take up quilting.

For the entire week before I left, I did very little work at work. Instead I surfed google images and shopped for real estate.

But you know what I found . . . It ain't going be Madeline Island. For one, you can't actually see the water when you're over there. Ok. From a few places in town and from one stretch of road on the east side of the island . . . but that's it. The whole place is forest, and dense forest at that. Road, dense forest and driveways down through the denseness to what we can only suspect are beautiful lake-front properties. The driveways pointing in lead to what we can only suspect are beautiful dense forest properties, deep in the forested middle. But you can't go down there or in there and see because all the signs say "No Trespassing. Keep Out." And the town isn't interesting enough. There are a few restaurants -- all of which are average -- a coffee shop, which is great, and that's about it. I couldn't live there year round. I couldn't probably spend more than about two days.

The greatest part of Madeline Island seems to be Tom's . . .

The Family Reunion Series

I just got back from my family reunion. My mother's side of the family, after the patriarch passed away, decided that the clan needed to stay in touch, so we meet every other year.

The Millers.

Although only one is still a Miller. All the other girls married. There were six . . . girls, that is . . . in the family. Three from my grandfather's first marriage (Joyce, Jerry and Lois) and three from his second (Joan, Janice, Judie). I am one of the daughters of the fifth. As you can tell, there are quite a few to gather.

I have a really great family . . . mostly musicians and artists and medical professionals and thinkers and educators and even an architect. All but two are uber-liberal, ex-hippies -- even the oldest aunties (over 80) and the youngest second cousins. Tree-hugging, guitar playing, recycling lefties! And even though we have our disfunctions and each subset faces its own challenges . . . when put together, we are kind to each other and treasure the short days we get to spend, every other year.

This year we gathered in northern Wisconsin to make it easier for the two least mobile aunties to attend. My cousin Nancy and her daughter Kayleigh organized and found the resort. We don't go extravagant . . . few of us have that kind of money. Mostly we just look for a place where we can all come, with a large enough space to host the group dinners and the talent show . . . and where no one will mind a lot of singing and drinking into the night.

The next few blogs will be about this reunion.

Miller 2006.