Heart Territory A Journey in Three Parts

HEART TERRITORY: a journey in three parts

PART I. Soundtrack from the Road.

This music reel captures several performances from July 26-August 21. The northern notes became part of the fabric woven into our summer journey. Acts are from Wisconsin, Michigan, and other places: Chippewa Valley Based Blues, Howard Guitar Luedtke and Blue Max; Detroit rockers, Sunset Boulevard; Almost Elvis, you guessed it; The Knockabouts, Celtic and Irish; Fashionably Late, Big Band; Foxfire Affair, Celtic; Krazy Knights, Rock; MoonBadger, their own special deal; Open Tab, Covers; Take That Back, jazz; South Beach Up North, Classical; Janet Planet, Jazz; and the Raine Stern Band.

PART II. A Record of People, Places, and Pages.

The people, places, books, literature, theatre, and memory work together creating memories. Ken Baker and I listened to Kathleen Heideman’s wind-up Victrola at her cabin on the Yellow Dog Plains in Marquette, County; afterward, I carried the idea that needle (both pine and Victrola) groove, and motion, is about all I need. And suddenly, old records and turntables were showing up everywhere, and the scratchy sounds and beautiful melodies of heart territory arrived: my daughters, son, grandchildren, families, and long-term friends.

First stop, a surprisingly wonderful musical of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy had a lot to say, and like Kathleen’s Victrola, they were wound up too. From a record of the past, they were speaking their truth and I was listening.

The beautiful minds in Marquette and the people there I adore: Jon, Amy, Russell, Maureen, Dave, Ken, Kathleen, John, Chris, and the spirit of a young one was there too, doing law school at Georgetown; the birds, trees, big lake, and people of the Keweenaw Peninsula; my favorite sounds of all time, sounds I live to hear: the laughter of grandchildren, and a bat contacting the softball or baseball. Great fun to watch the Wausau Ignite Fast Pitch Women’s Softball team and to have a few minutes to throw the ball around. A passion from my young days that will never go away.

Lakeside reposes: enjoying sun and people at Lake Superior, Lake Independence, Big Casey, and Lake Arbutus

In Copper Harbor, Michigan, I found words to tell a story by walking up the trail and into the trees. Cat Stevens was there this time. And thank God, no one was “eating the cats and the dogs of the people that live there” (Marquette, Wausau, Stevens Point). That would have made my friends and pet owners very sad.

And it was magic too, a moment that could not be repeated. I wanted a photo of a pocket watch that my friend Ken Baker had. Ken’s sister, a jeweler, had replaced the clock and timing mechanisms with a wooded cookie from a tamarack that fit right into the watch. It shows 12 rings in a perfect circle around a small dark spot in the center.

As a background for the photo, I wanted something other than the kitchen counter, so I grabbed a Michigan Map and put the wood-grain pocket watch on the map. I didn’t know it, how could I? The map is large. But I had placed that watch right on top of Portland, the place Ken’s grandfather Huizenga had lived and had carried that pocket watch for over 70 years.

At that point, the trees were already setting my compass for a trip to the Estivant Pines, leading me back to places they came from, like a dowsing rod finding its home and its heavy gravity of place.

And the learning never ends; I found out what a whistle punk was, and learned that I am a nemophilist. Humor is good; I’m enjoying it. So far, weird things are still funny, like the humor in certain birthday cards. Check this one: “Potatoes make chips, fries, and vodka. It’s like the other vegetables aren’t even trying.”

The Estivant Sanctuary led me to the eastern white pine; at the Old-Style place, I found the red pine . . . take that back, I should say the Norway Pine was always there, but it found me. And at the cabin, I looked once again at the pages going back to its beginning. A single note in the $6.00 budget book in my mother’s handwriting. “Bought cabin April, 1974.”

Photos will have to tell the rest of the story of people encounters and the pages that sprang from them: my old bandmate, another musician from my hometown, a book-store owner in a new location, my motorcycling outlaw buddy with his beautiful “Black Betty,” the 21-year-old Harley-Davidson Softail that he polishes and keeps shining like the sun.

The “tick chair,” the red water pump, the acorns falling on a tin roof, dendrology of The Old-Style Place, all of it twisting and turning its way like an old Victrola into new memes and memories.

It’s stuff from which the best folk songs are written, pen to paper, finger to guitar, pressing the grooves into a few deep chords and a good story. Another person gives the chords a stage, and they sing it out in something like “Tea for the Tillerman,” released in London in 1970.

A tillerman is someone steering the vessel. A good tillerman (man or woman) steers it right through the generations with the help of “Longer Boats,” out on the sea, “Miles from Nowhere,” “On the Road to Find Out.”