A place to hide

The back yard to the house where I once lived was my workshop, a favorite place to be. On one side it was bordered by lilac hedge, it had a red and golden delicious apple trees, a towering maple, a row of peonies, and a tangled mound of small branches and twigs, before a country barbed wire fence at the top of the hill. The fence separated our lot from federal land and Interstate 80. The freeway, not visible from the yard, was nestled below, at least 100 yards from the back of the lot, down through the fall grasses and weeds.

The freeway below provided a steady hum of traffic noise, loud enough so one could not carry on conversation without some effort, but steady enough that it was more like the sound of the ocean. Traffic at 75 miles per hour, tires moving with the grain of our nation’s road system, hundreds of vehicles per hour. In winter, the freeway would have a fluffy silence during an Iowa blizzard.

It was a late August Saturday, still humid but no longer oppressively hot. In one week we would have an “end of summer” party in the back yard with neighbors and friends.

I remember the snapping limb and rustle of leaves that I heard, before glancing quickly to my left, up the hill, past the apple trees, just beyond the mound of twigs and barbed-wire fence, in the small stand of new trees and an old oak and pine, the barrier against the freeway hum and a shadow against the urban night sky.

But this was daytime—late Saturday afternoon—when man mows his grass, when man thins out the remains of the summer tomatoes, and when man drives on the freeway. At the top of the hill in the one spot where nothing grew, I saw the deer silently kneel, collapse, and die on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Maybe I saw the last gasp before its lifting spirit. I’ll never know.

The deer chose this place to die. It took a mortal wound from a passing automobile or truck while wandering near the busy corridor, far away from  water. He must have wandered, for the source is across 6 lanes of Interstate, and another ¼ mile to a man-made pond. The deer was lost, but its goal was simple—a place to die with dignity, on a hilltop under a tree.

This now presented a problem—the party. The following weekend, there would be kids and parents coming to frolic in the yard, but not if the carcass was there in the summer heat. It took phone calls to the sheriff, the Iowa Department of Transportation, the County, even the DNR. One thing for sure, the road kill office is not open on a Saturday. After a second call to the DOT or the County, whichever, the deer was moved early on Wednesday morning, a trail of trampled brush all that remained.

Winnebago for water

When I was a little kid and curious about all the new words around me—street signs, the newspaper, road maps, sears catalog—I was one day struck by the words on the manhole cover at the front of our lot. It read
“Neenah Foundry Co.,
Neenah, WI”.

Even the new covers of today have that imprint. The form has undergone only minor changes over the past 35 years.

We don’t even know how they got to my Iowa town, or how many a major city has stored away. Do they deliver these by rail or semi-truck? At some point, I had a general idea that Wisconsin was north and east and how to get there, but surely no idea of how to get to Neenah.

Not entirely sure what a foundry was, I had to use my imagination—that all the sewers led to Neenah. Actually, the sewer in front of my house, emptied only a half-block away, forming a creek basin that, with every rainstorm, would become a delta, with craw-daddy burrows and an occasional bloated and surely dead rat. Thankfully any rat was small and suburban. The craw-daddies, however, could be the size of your hand, if you were seven.

This was long before the clown in Stephen King’s “IT,” long before I would move to Wisconsin and see the state from just about every corner, and long before the invention of Mapquest. I never traveled to Neenah, located southwest of Green Bay between Appleton and OshKosh on Lake Winnebago, the lake with the most surface area in the entire state.

How would I know that if I could torch-lead an expedition through the rainwater tunnels and pop up here and there, I might:

Learn about stalagmites
see Bucky Badger
stop for some Renaissance mead
pop out of the gutter @ the House on the Rock
or run into the ghost of Capone, somewhere beneath.

Oakland and North in Milwaukee,
or stop for a Sprecher root beer, at the brewery.
Maybe get lost in the Horicon Marsh
the ski hill at Oconomowoc,
the Rock River at Watertown,
or land at the Dells.

Rolling down the stairs

Max came to me sometime after I acquired the vintage Ludwig circa 1920 from my great uncle Joe. I wanted to find out more about what these drums were used for. What was there place in time? What transpired after them? This led me to a review of an album reissue from a jazz player in a 1994 edition of Modern Drummer magazine. They described the particular solo by Max Roach, on one of the tracks as a set of drums rolling down a long staircase. I wondered what that might sound like, so I bought the avant garde “Deeds, Not Words” on CD, originally recorded in 1958, reissued in 1987. It took seven years for it be reviewed, and 15 more years for me to understand why I keep revisiting it.

The reissue contains the following tracks:
You Stepped out of a Dream, Filidé, It’s You or No One, Jodie’s Cha-Cha, Deeds, Not Words, Larry-Larue, Conversation, There Will Never be Another You.

The album featured tuba instead of upright bass on some songs with Max, Ray Draper (tuba), Booker Little (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor sax), Art Davis and Oscar Pettiford (bass).

On its own, the description of that solo made the disk the perfect CD purchase for that time in my life, when I needed something new. What I found was actually a relic. I get the feeling not many original copies were even sold. The search is now on for a vinyl copy!

The drumming… feet first—always think about them first. Never let go of the count with the left foot, even if you are silent with it. If the feet are in fluid time, the arms will take care of themselves. It can be as easy as walking and clapping your hands simultaneously. I could spend another life in obsessive search for recordings. But there are many other masterpieces to seek out for listening.

His obituary from Register News Services noted that his improvisations defined bebop jazz and that “he varied the meter, pushing the boundaries of jazz beyond the standard 4/4 time.” His break came in 1940 as a sub for Duke Ellington’s drummer.

He died August 16, 2007, in Manhattan at the age of 78. He continued to record until 2002, but who knows if he ever stopped playing.  The epithet from his headstone:  your hands shimmering on the legs of rain.

Max’s Bio

Freeway

I once went to school to become a writer, but relied on other marketable skills to carry me through. The power of communication has led me to return to school to learn to teach it.

Much of the time between I worked in print media as a graphic designer and production manager, building publications somewhere close to a busy freeway.

I like roads, not freeways. With roads, there are fewer long lonesome highways, ribbons to something spectacular on which we spend our money and time. Roads take us to people, they guide us home; freeways take us to faraway places and events. Sometimes the event is finding a new road to people and experiences.

This blog marks a new career for me, and a return to language.