Between Kosovo and Alaska -part seven (Wisconsin)

“Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.”

― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

The stretch of road was short and unremarkable, traveled countless times as a 50 meter link between the south end of Woodenshoe road and County Highway GG. I couldn’t even remember if it had a proper name. It was one of those places that has meaning only because of shadowy memories, of a moment in time from July 1987 when so much changed, when I became a real cyclist.

Erich and I had set a goal that summer to ride the 100-mile (160km) Wolf River Century in August, a marathon distance for cyclists and not an easy task for anyone to tackle the first time out. We had a routine down, at least. I would get up early each morning, jump on my Panasonic Villager III 10-speed bike, and ride the long way into Neenah from the farm. I would set out south on Woodenshoe Road, jog onto GG over Highway 41, and take Old Dixie Road to Muttart, Adella Beach Road, South Park, Cecil, and finally onto Oak. I can still write those names without looking them up, can still remember the road textures, the short areas of higher traffic on Highways G and A, still remember where his family hid the house key. I would say hi to his mom Katy, run upstairs and kick Erich out of bed (he was not a morning person), and have breakfast with them before he and I rode together out to the farm. Erich worked with my brother Sean and I on the farm each day, and at the end he would ride by himself back into town.

We had no bike computers, and judged the distance to be 12 miles each way. That was not entirely accurate, I learned years later, but I still consider 24 miles (38.5 km) to be a standard distance for a training ride. On the weekends Erich and I would venture a bit further out, following paper maps north and trying to learn by trial and error about how to ride long distances. One morning we made it to the village of Larsen, turned back south along Pioneer Road and County M, finally turning back east when we reached GG. It seemed like a long distance, though we couldn’t be sure. We turned off GG to take the short jog and final stretch on Woodenshoe, the same motion we’d done together every morning, but this– somehow this was different. We’d been out riding all morning, we felt good, looked at each other...and we knew. 

Erich punched his right fist into the air, and yelled, “We’re in!”

Erich, me and my brother Sean, the night before I left for Norway, August 1989

He meant, and I knew exactly what he meant, that we could do the Wolf River. We had probably only ridden 40 miles that morning, less than half a century, but so much of cycling is psychological. It’s possible to ride long distances only because you believe you can, and absent that mental commitment, endurance rides are almost impossible. The physical fitness is important, but secondary to being able to imagine pulling through each mile, of knowing the end is reachable. In retrospect now, it was good we knew that, because the Wolf River, despite being a completely flat course, was tough. Two storm fronts moved through that day, soaking us all through our cotton t-shirts and driving blinding headwinds seemingly from all directions. I slept for two days after finishing. And at age 14, I was really too young to have tried it, but with youth came the naivete of not realizing that kids don’t do marathons. It was the only full century Erich would ever ride. He died two years later at age 19.

And there I was, 32 years later, standing on the same road. I had to stop and look, and it was a strange feeling. I had two points on the map I had to see in person, two forgotten backroads that were linked to memories forever burned into me, that stood out among other random moments so clearly that I had been drawn there from thousands of miles away. I had arrived in Neenah the day before, driving from Indiana, and for weeks (months?) had been thinking of this bike ride, of the ghosts from this town I had barely seen in the past 13 years. 

The writer Summer Brennan had written recently that the COVID-19 pandemic (raging as I write this now) had reminded her of an old writing exercise, "describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just died in a war–without mentioning the man, the son, or the war."

Briggs farm, with Bruno, 1988

That was what I was feeling at the time, and how I feel now trying to see everything through a prism of years. The day was hot, sticky, mostly overcast with an unusual wind from the east. I just stood there by the side of the road and tried to see the start of Woodenshoe with anything like the same eyes I had from over 30 years before. Of course I would never see it the same way, I would mourn the loss of that vision, of those feelings, and sense the disconnect that came with it. Where did I belong, and where was I going? I stood there for only a few minutes, maybe less, and turned away from Woodenshoe Road. I had not seen the farm since leaving the for last time in 2006, and I knew it had changed too much. I actively avoided seeing it, and turned back to Highway GG toward Winneconne, pointedly taking the long way round.

I couldn't really explain the route I was taking that day. I had ridden the long way around Lake Poygan only once before, in 1999 just before leaving for London with Tracy, so doing it again (in reverse) made no sense. Except that I needed more miles for that Trek t-shirt, and something was burning inside me. I had considered snaking back and forth along the country roads north of the farm, but...that wouldn't do it.

The wind was blowing fiercely out of the east, usually a sign of storms to come, but the weather forecast insisted I was safe for most of the day-- probably. The road to Winneconne was flat with a slight uphill. I was confused by a few of the intersections, major highways that had not been there before, but rolling into the village of Winneconne it was just as it ever was. I had ridden here plenty of times in the past, usually while taking Count M north-south. This time I kept heading west, jogging northwest onto smaller roads nearer Lake Poygan. I followed the GPS track on my Wahoo computer, past small farms with suspiciously few cows, past long stands of wildflowers with no bees, past supper clubs with no customers. The road curved north into the even smaller village of Poy Sippi, on the western edge of the lake, where I stopped at perhaps one of the nicest Dollar Generals I'd ever seen. Huh, the village even had its own library.

The roads snapped back and forth on the Wisconsin grid slowly back toward the east, into a sweltering headwind, stopping again at a gas station in Freemont, and taking what used to be Highway 10 back toward Larsen. From Larsen back north again, where the new houses disappeared, the signs of new road construction faded, and I found the small backwater of Winnebago County I had been really navigating toward all day.

Shady Lane.

East Shady Lane is plenty built up, was even back in the day, but no one ever goes to the western end of the road. I mean, really, no one. The road marked the northernmost east-west border for most bike rides, and only once or twice did Erich and I venture farther north from that point. We always stopped at the road's end, where there was nothing, save an ancient steam shovel that by 2019 had itself disappeared or been swallowed up by the clay. It hadn't changed in decades, and was another otherwise unremarkable place that I kept thinking of, year after year, always associated with Erich. He always referred to it as the 'end of the earth.'

The western end of the earth

And there was another time. In the summer of 1991 I had just graduated high school, was back from Norway and getting ready for college. Erich had been gone almost two years, Sean was in the Navy, and everything was uncertain. Late one summer night, I had dropped off Ann Anklam at her house and drove back home, except I kept driving, and turned north toward Shady Lane. Before reaching it I hit a dense fog bank, which itself was strange, and slowed as I drove up Pioneer Road. The fog broke just as I reached the end of Shady Lane, a small pocket of clear surrounded on all sides. I turned off the car and got out, looking up to a clear sky above, and one where silvery northern lights were waving back and forth. I was stunned. Northern lights were almost never seen that far south, and the fog made it seem that I was the only one seeing them. I stood there, transfixed, and had this feeling that it was some message-- that chaos was about to break loose again, but trust that I would survive and find my way through. 

That much proved to be prophetic. 

So why not come back, when there was already chaos around, and try to find some sense of reassurance? I can't describe that, and I can't say if it helped in the end, but I needed to see the place again.

35 years and exactly the same

Lighthouse at Kimberly Point, Neenah

The rest of the ride back into Neenah was unremarkable, various detours for construction, a mandatory stop at Archie's Dairy Queen on Commercial Street, and I had already circled Riverside Park and seen Haylett Street (where I first lived in town) on my way out that morning. And I needed to get to Milwaukee that evening.

I don't want to make it sound like I was only seeing ghosts in Wisconsin. The night before, when I had arrived from Indiana, I had dinner with Amy Gehrt (Pottner). Amy and I had barely spoken in junior and senior high, in fact I really only spoke to her once, and that in grade 12 at the Nautilus gym. But we became good friends after running into one another at a party in Madison, and she would frequently drag me to 80s dance nights at Bullwinkle's. We really hadn't talked since she'd been my date to a wedding in December 1995 (I was rarely in the US by that point), and it was amazing to see her again.

In Milwaukee were more friends, and I drove down to see Dave Graf and his wife Rachel. Dave and I had been nerdish rivals in 5th and 6th grade, then fast friends, and through college I would periodically drive to see him Minneapolis. He also flew to visit us in California and Ottawa.

Milwaukee exercise

There was really no schedule with Dave. He had taken time off work, and I mostly remember ending up bowling at a mall (how Wisconsin), drinking margaritas near the airport, and watching an ancient rerun of The Fall Guy. It was that sort of normalcy I needed. (I hadn't bowled in maybe 20 years.)

With Laura Schmitz (Hargis) I could finally meet her sons, and spent time with them and her husband downtown in Milwaukee. Laura and I had also become perhaps better friends in Madison than we had been in Neenah, even sat together through a very odd meteorology course, and in past years Laura had been facing her own tragedies. It was reassuring to see a good friend like her again in person, as if a reassurance that things were still real.

My next stop was Madison, a place I'd called home for years, both as a UW student and then later as a government official while finishing my PhD. I hadn't been back to the city since 2006, but kept dreaming of it. I was staying with Mandy Zdrale, another Neenah native who I'd known in junior and senior high, we'd been classmates at the UW, but really I didn't feel like we'd become good friends until the class reunion in 2011. Mandy and I walked downtown from the Capitol to the Memorial Union, ate ice cream at four different places around the city, and at night watched Derry Girls. Her husband Eric was a designer at Trek and owned his own bike shop south of Madison in Paoli.

Eric, Mandy and me

Madison worried me, if only because I had a clear vision of the dean in Alaska calling me to say that I had no job to go to. I even knew the exact place she would call, a quiet country road south of Madison that I had known from my student days. I rode there from Paoli, I stopped. I got out my phone and checked. And waited. She didn't call. So I went back a day later, on the end of a 100-mile loop out to Barneveld. Still nothing.

Hm...

So that meant I needed to keep going. Wisconsin was the last safe harbor of sorts. One of my new colleagues in Alaska had even called asking if I should stay there for awhile, just to see how the winds were blowing. But no, I needed to go west. And north. 

I'd already written about Minnesota, so the next stop, really, was a place I'd never been.

Fargo.