Birch trees, wildflower-soaked meadows, and clear lakes; plain towns & sturdy cities; rough & wood-hewn & strong; I love this part of the country. While this page will be expanded at some future time, here are some notes:
The countryside of Minnesota and Wisconsin rolls by greenly; stop in at local dairies and pick up cheese curds (the good ones squeak when you eat them). Notoriously liberal Madison, Wisconsin has a great infoshop (1019 Williamson). I like the town of Wausau, Wisconsin, though it has nothing special to say for itself: this is why I like it; charmingly disarming. Michigan's Upper Peninsula is full of undisturbed wilderness (see field notes below). Down on the mitten, Lansing is a straightforward capital city that desperately wishes to be cosmopolitan; I think it will make cosmo-status (and without being ruined, too)-- it has a long riverside park to walk by. The town of East Lansing is where the hip university-district stuff is; there's a Beaners open 24/7 for 3am coffee (270 W Grand River, wireless) and Moosejaw has a shop here if you need camping gear (555 E Grand River). Michigan in general has this plain-yet-educated air to it; while Ann Arbor is the famous college town, check out nearby Ypsilanti. Coffee lives at the Ugly Mug (317 W Cross) and Bombadil's (217 W Michigan). The natural foods co-op there (312 N River) is super-friendly-- and it's within the historic Depot Town, near the river.
field notes: rainbow gathering, upper peninsula of michigan, july 2003
SHIT, or, WHEN HUMANS GATHER
When 20,000 humans descend on a patch of wilderness, the first problem is shit. The ground can only absorb so much shit if the shitting is done carefully. Shitters need to be hundreds of meters away from the streams and dug at least a meter deep. The water needs to be tested for fecal coliform et cetera. The year of the Michigan gathering, the water wasn't clean, so they tried trucking tanks in. Then it rained for days, and the mud and mosquitoes multiplied. Everyone went without shoes, because you had to go barefoot when wading through the mud, but then your feet got bitten, and sometimes they would get cut, and then everyone was walking around with staph infections & no water. She tried helping the people up at CALM (the rainbow version of first aid), but even they didn't have much sterile water to bathe the wounds, little girls with bee stings & pregnant women, stuck out in the northwoods-- she felt a sour taste in her mouth
AMONG THE WILDFLOWERS, WAR BREAKS OUT
There was war that year too. The Rainbows had picked out a main meadow that was soft on a hill, yellowflowered and birch forested-- the Feds said NO, conjured up something about an archaeological site (some rusty metal ruins of a white man's house), said the Rainbows must stay on the swampy mosquito side of the Creek. The Rainbows said This is Bullshit and we have the right to gather and besides they had already constructed this gorgeous bridge from wood mud and rope spanning the burbling creek. Rumors murmured for days, darkly; word said that some Black Bloc anarchist kids were planning something--Something--and stories sprouted of the Feds taking prisoners.
One day the Feds came to Main Circle. Hundreds of Rainbows had gathered, holding hands, with the Feds on the perimeter up on their horses, uniformed, regally (nobody knew really how they were going to arrest hundreds of kids out in the wilderness, but shhh--) and they held council together. A beautiful naked woman gave a moving speech and the Feds took the talking feather to give their side of the story, implacable with sunglasses, they talked for a few hours and it was decided that the Rainbows would relinquish the meadow. They are, after all, a tribe of peace. A handful of rabble-rousers got arrested, the majority streamed back across the creek, packing up their tents and belongings quietly’Äîa migration-- the only stings were the mosquitoes, which garlic, Nag Champa, and campfire smoke would not keep away, although a lot of rainbows took up cigarettes again that summer, with the excuse that tobacco smoke keeps the buggers away.
NORTHWOODS
She stopped being a blissninny and became a worker: one of Grandpa Woody's butterflies. This is what happened: she was hanging round a Turtle Soup one afternoon hoping for stew & Grandpa Woody asked if she wanted to go mudding with him. He was a grizzled old man from Idaho with a bushy beard and a booming Disney voice. The kitchen was building a firepit-oven, mudding the stones together, and he showed her how to make little faces with the clay. "Because if it's not beautiful," he rumbled, "why do it?" She made a long thin nose and a pair of birdlike eyes, peering out from the oven wall. The eyes watched her fingers grow caked with earth. They watched a girl decide she liked to work. "You're one of Grandpa Woody’Äôs butterflies now," the man said, and she took that back to her camp that night, I'm one of Grandpa Woody’Äôs butterflies, like she's learned something for the first time, twentyone going on five, and she came back round Turtle Soup each day after that, to be flirted with by the old-timers and learn more mudding.
FOXFIRE
along the muddy main trail
NORTHWOODS, BLINDINGLY
crumpled ferns, trampled bare ground, ashes and trash
back to the map
(...this is from a collection of rainbow-chronicles called Still Life with Rainbows...)
someone had noticed the faint glowing fungus,
magical in the dark northern night,
pinned up a cardboard sign with curlicued letters
so that nobody would trample the fragile foxfire
& nobody did
everybody loved it / it was the shared light that year
prayer circle
concentric under the noon sun and
all she could see were raised hands, aching to be put down,
the phsycial pain overwhelming or was it comingling with thoughts of peace
beating sun without tarpshade
hoarse human voices united in this
desperate third-world nation