Geekrant vs The Dairyland Summer

Greetings Geekranters,

Sometimes, it seems that every good writer that anyone has ever read has some kind of angsty family trauma in their past. Apparently it’s a prerequisite to good story-telling to have an extremely messed-up upbringing. Or some personal issue that verges on the severely anti-social. 

Many authors have an alcoholic father who never thought they’d amount to anything or an emotionally distant mother who had always thought the writer should have been born the opposite gender or been a lawyer or something. Bukowski seems to have spent half his life on a barstool, Hemingway and Fitzgerald  apparently reveled in their dissolution. Jane Austen was almost certainly considered to be an old maid, an unmarried spinster and possibly pitied for it. Dickens was working at a ridiculously young age in terrible conditions to help pay the debts of his family. 

Now, while I maybe generalising, it’s something I’m want to do when the mood is upon me, after all. It’s still true, however, that personal tragedy informs much of what we value in art and literature. So sometimes I wonder whether I should be writing at all, because my young life, while not always easy, was anything but tragic. 

My parents, to me at least, often seemed as stable and even keeled as Ma and Pa Walton, and while age has revealed to me the fact that they do argue and disagree like any couple, they did a pretty good job with my siblings and I. We weren’t the richest family but neither could it be argued that we lived in abject poverty. We always had food to eat and we always knew that we were loved.

My mother would save money all year though, just so that for two weeks at Christmas and two weeks on our Summer holidays, her and my father didn’t have to say no when we asked for things as much as they did the rest of the year. For a month a year, we could pretend that we weren’t quite as poor as we were.

Christmas Eve, therefore was a special time for us. My father would often have to work that day, his Christmas time-off from the Steelworks not beginning until he walked through the door that evening. The sun would set, the roads would grow quiet , Christmas trees could be seen in every window as our smallish Northern town prepared to celebrate the Virgin Birth and…we’d walk down to the newsagent and rent a video. Is there anything more 1990s than that?

It never really ever snows that much in my hometown but when you’re a child watching “Home Alone” on Christmas Eve, you could almost imagine white flakes beginning to fall from the dark, early evening skies onto the empty streets. That’s when I had my first encounter with the state that I’d, somewhat improbably, end up living in.

Now it was definitely not on my list of my life goals to move to the American Mid-West but love takes us to strange places and makes us do amazing things. Still all those years ago, I had been shown much that is good about the average Wisconsinite. Where you ask? That’s right, on one of those Christmas movies.

My first exposure to Wisconsin, was John Candy’s travelling polka musician who gives Kevin Mcallister’s mother a lift in a moving van in the iconic “Home Alone”, which is slightly ironic as John Candy was Canadian. Still, the man who wrote the movie was John Hughes, a man seemingly so in love with his home state of Illinois that every single one of his films seems to take place in Chicago or some suburb of that great city. A man who obviously felt that he needed to pay homage to Illinois’ neighbouring state with an injection of Wisconsin stereotypes in his script for “Home Alone”. 

Gus Polinski, the character John Candy played in the movie, is a bittersweet character, well aware of how much his job has affected his family life. Still he plays polka music, gives a lift to a perfect stranger, and wears a jacket which has a glass of beer as a badge on it. 

The return of Summer started me along the pathway of thinking about all of this. About what makes a Wisconsinite and how does it affect me. It’s a recurring joke here that Wisconsin has only two seasons- winter and road construction. In reality that’s not far from the truth, spring and autumn often feel like transitional zones between summer and winter rather than full seasons in their own right. And after all its in the way Wisconsinites respond to the weather that makes you fall in love with this place and the people who live here.

As Candy’s character shows, whether it’s summer or winter and seemingly no matter how bad life is, Wisconsinites are going to find some way to have fun, which isn’t to say that they’re lazy, in fact quite the opposite, but they make sure that they have fun along the way, after all, life’s too short.

Snow can last well into April on many years so when Summer comes around, pretty much everyone in Wisconsin can’t wait to make the most of it. The weather forecasts give advice on the best days for grilling seemingly from the moment the temperature rises above freezing and everyone watches to see the moment the ice retreats from the state’s lakes and ponds.

Not that they were strangers to the water while it was frozen, what with Ice Fishing and snowshoeing and playing “Broomball” (a variant of Ice Hockey defined by its use of shoes rather than skates, a plastic “broom” instead of a stick and played on frozen ponds.) there is barely a time when the water is empty in this state. 

Still Summer truly is the time when aquatic recreation reigns supreme. This is the season of the lake house and the family cabin, boating on lakes and inner tubing down rivers, cookouts and the balmy warmth of minor league baseball in old fashioned ballparks. This is the time when Wisconsin shows a laid back part of its soul, after the tough battle for survival that is winter and before the quest for glory that is the hunting and American football of autumn, Wisconsin relaxes beside tranquil waters in some hidden wood, down a lost backroad, in the cabin that their family has owned for generations.

There is something timeless about the way that Wisconsin, and much of the Mid-West for that matter, chooses to spend its summers. This is something that hasn’t changed particularly in a hundred years. Families returning year after year to the same spot, to boat on the same lakes, to fish the same waters, to stare at the same stars… to be bitten by the same bugs. Well, maybe not exactly the same bugs, but you get the idea. There is something elemental and unchanging in their pursuit of their time at the lake.  

Its a fleeting moment at the same time though, a transient time away from the grind of life. Never lasting for long, a couple of days perhaps, a week maybe, at the most.  This was the way their grandparents went on vacation, filling a station wagon full of supplies and heading up the highway, still a new and fresh invention. A paved road up North and into the wilderness.

Its strange for me coming from the United Kingdom, because for all the British Isles are beautiful and full of expressions of nature so spectacular they are breathtaking to behold, we tamed them all a long, long, time ago. This part of America was completely wild barely 200 years ago, the Native Americans not wanting to domesticate the landscape, as much as live in harmony with it. Some would say that much of the land here still is wild. It is, in many ways, a state that still remembers when mankind was yet sparse in these parts and the seemingly never ending quest for progress had not yet begun.

 The early European descended settlers in Wisconsin had none of the comforts of the modern world that we enjoy today. The landscape here could be brutal with the frigid winters and humid summers. Somehow though, they survived and thrived. They started to carve a life out in the midst of the trees and lakes, the oak savannah and the prairie. They brought the cultures of the nations they came from with them and they started to learn how to make this landscape their own.

A Wisconsinite is conditioned, it seems to me, to see the bright side in everything. To look for a party in every single movement, to see a way to turn every single event into an opportunity to have fun. They revel in the state’s unofficial nickname as “The Badger State”, given not because there is an over abundance of Badgers here but because the first settlers had to live in mine shafts to survive the brutal winters. 

So it is that when Wisconsin goes away for a weekend to the lake or goes snowmobiling across a snow covered pond; When the people find a place to drink beer by a boat dock or grill up some brats on their home deck; When they stop to here a polka band or sing “Roll out the Barrel” in the stands at Miller Park; They are continuing the legacy and lesson of generations before them that found a new world in the wild and decided to celebrate it every chance they got.

As an immigrant to these shores, a transplant to this fair land, it is something very welcoming and also uplifting to be invited to share in all the bounty that this place has to offer. To see the sun rise above the calm surface of a forest lake, the light reflecting of the glass like surface in a myriad of sparks and dreams, to get lost down a maze of cornfields and wetlands, to see Lake Michigan and wonder how it looks so much like the sea and yet isn’t. To sit down and eat at a Friday night fish fry and feel the warmth of community or to see the sun set over Lake Monona from the Union Terrace and hear a lone musician start to sing.

 These are things that I will remember all my life, because Summer has come and Summer is just another excuse to lay back and prove that you’re a Wisconsinite, even if you’re only an adopted son of America’s Dairyland.

Till next time, Good Bye Geekranters.