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.