Picaresque Peninsula

May 20, 2016 — Pat Bertram

Door County in Wisconsin seems a world apart. The scenery is stunning, as if the world’s best landscape, seascape, and country artists were each given a piece of the peninsula to paint. Anywhere your gaze rests is a pristine and perfect scene.

What seems anathema to the rest of the world is welcome, including dandelions. Whole fields of the luscious yellow blooms! I have always liked the tenacious flower, and have never understood why they are so despised. (Somehow I managed not to get a photo of the yellow fields. Don’t know how that happened.)

Making the place seem even more of a world apart is the absence of franchises in any of the villages. (The ubiquitous big name stores and fast food joints are all strung along a single portion of a highway in Sturgeon Bay.) Each restaurant we patronized was different, though all had delicious specialties, made-from-scratch baked goods, and friendly employees. In many cases, the owners worked alongside their staff, and the absence of any dissension between them made the meal even more pleasant. Each building that housed the restsurants were also unique, the most notable being the Swedish restaurant. It had been built in Norway, disassembled, and brought to Wisconsin and reassembled. It was too early in the season for the goats to be out, but in the summer, goats grazed on the traditional grass roof.

(Other Norwegian buildings found a place on the peninsula, such as the hand-made and hand-carved chapel.)

Putting the final touches on the picaresque peninsula, bits of art and daphodils peeped out wherever you look. (Apparently once there had been a fundraiser to sell naturalizing daffodil bulbs, and people planted them in usual and unusual places.)

I didn’t mean to make this sound like a travelogue, just wanted to explain some of photos attached to this blog, but it’s hard not to sound like a travelogue when trying to describe such the perfect visit (and perfect weather!) I experienced in Door County.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Wowed in Wisconsin

May 16, 2016 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes on this great adventure of mine, I think I’ve seen it all. Well, not truly “all”. No one can. But so many places seem like other places, especially when it comes to shopping centers or suburban neighborhoods. Often one tree-lined road looks like another, or a body of water seems like . . . oh, let me think . . . like a body of water. I worry that I am becoming jaded, and then one day I turn a corner and fall into a perpetual state of awe.

In this particular case, I crossed the iron bridge at Sturgeon Bay and entered what seemed a fairy tale setting. A wonderland. It’s as if the entire peninsula of Door County, the thumb of Wisconsin, knew I was coming and polished everything to a brilliant gleam. Colors seem sharper here, as if every scene has been photo-enhanced to an unreal gloss. I passed a flower box of blooming tulips and narcissus, and had to touch the flowers to make sure they were real. The green of the trees, the grass, the fields look newly air-brushed. The waters of the bays and lakes are an astonishing mix of vibrant blue and teal.

My host has very graciously driven me around the peninsula to show me the sights — and oh, what sights there are! Fabulous jewel-like waters. Forest floors painted white with trillium. Marsh marigolds brightening broody marshes. Farms that look as if they belong in a children’s story book.

Even the shipbuilding plant on the bay looks more mythic than monstrous.

Adding to this sense of having entered a wonderland, we had beef wellington at an English inn that looked like something out of a fairy tale.

As a writer and lover of words, I should be able to come up with a better exclamation than “wow,” if for no other reason than to keep from boring my host, but the truth is, this place has wowed me.

Just . . .wow.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Lazy Days

May 13, 2016 — Pat Bertram

I am taking a hiatus from travel for a week. I was offered a place to stay in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, while a friend went out of town, and I jumped at the offer. I’ve been moving around for so long, driving vast miles (9,000 miles seems vast to me, anyway), that I’ve sort of lost trrainbowack of myself — I could be anywhere. At times, it’s disconcerting to realize I am so very far from where I’ve lived the past few years, so far from anything familiar, and yet, in a way it’s all familiar.

A gray, rainy day in a room in an apartment in Wisconsin is not a whole lot different from a gray, rainy day in a room in house in the desert.

Lazy days.

I had planned to get recentered while I was here. Stretching every day (which I actually have been doing). Walking every day (which I have only done a couple of times because of the rain). Eating better (which I hava bit better, anyway — more vegetables, more protein, no wheat, only trace amounts of sugar).

I sit here staring out the window, thinking of all the things I could be doing if I weren’t so lazy — working on my dance class novel. Shopping to replenish my stores for the last few weeks of my journey. Repacking my car.

That’s what I really need to be doing. Repacking.

I unloaded all my gear before I took the bug to a mechanic because it was going to be at his shop for a few days, and it didn’t seem prudent to leave everything in the car. If it were just a matter of stuffing it all back in, I could do that before I leave on Sunday, but I need to reorganize. During my more than three months on the road, and despite my best efforts at being disciplined, things have become a bit discombobulated. Maps unfolded, used bottles stuffed in any which way, scraps of trash, accumulations to be organized.

And yet here I sit, staring out the window. Occasionally I drag my attention back to this page, but then, I lose focus again.

Lazy days.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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My Ongoing Cultural Festival

May 12, 2016 — Pat Bertram

Stevens Point in Wisconsin has a cultural festival every year, and it just so happened to fall on a weekend I was there, so I decided to attend. I wasn’t particularly interested in going to the festival — I never quite know what to do once I get to such events — but I figured it would give me something to blog about. (Would you be surprised and appalled to know that I often do things simply for the sake of a blog post? But hey . . . it gets me there, doesn’t it?)

I wandered about for a bit, not really getting into the spirit of the thing. It was hard being among all those people by myself. I don’t enjoy shopping, and I wasn’t hungry, and with no one to exclaim over the offerings with me, there was no way to ramp up my excitement.

But then I realized another reason why the various booths didn’t seem out of the ordinary — this whole trip for me has been a cultural festival. I’ve been to a Greek restaurant in a Greek village in Florida. I was welcomed into a Jewish home for Passover. A friend of a friend cooked a Russian feast for me in Texas. I’ve been to Chinese buffets, French bistros, Italian trattorias, German restaurants, Mexican and Cuban restaurants, southern barbecue houses. I’ve eaten Polish food and Welsh dishes and sampled all sorts of regional goodies as I’ve zigzagged across the United States. I’ve also been to vast grocery stores that mimic European markets.

Still, I squelched the urge to leave the festival. I figured I needed to walk an hour anyway, so why not walk around the festival? And so I listened to a guy playing the mournful bagpipes, and a mournful fellow playing the accordion. I watched practiced dance performances and unpracticed dancers having fun. Despite the people crowded around the booths, I managed to see a lot of the products for sale. In particular, a green glass bird Christmas ornament that caught my eye, but I am so out of the habit of purchasing knickknacks that I never even considered buying it.

And so, as it turned out, the hour I spent walking around the festival was a good one.

And besides, as you can see, I got a blog post out of the experience.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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What if the Past Isn’t Dead?

May 11, 2016 — Pat Bertram

Many years ago, Jeff and I set off across the country to look for a kinder, simpler place. We had grown up in Denver back when downtown was barely a pimple rising from the flat plains of Colorado. We’d suffered through years of exponential growth and the resultant crime rates. When Californians moved to Colorado to escape the gangs, they brought the gangs with them in the bodies of their own children. And with Denver on the map thanks to a presidential wanabee from Texas who declaimed, “Imagine a great city,” Denver was also flooded with big-time crooks in big-name suits. Lots of shenanigans going on with shady land deals at what was to be the site of the new airport, and of course the savings and loan scandal where even the son of a president managed to score some ill-gotten profits.

Add traffic to the mix, the exhaust-blackened trees along mountain highways, and a faster pace of life than either of us appreciated, and we’d had enough. (My being held up with a gun as I came home for work added to our determination to find a better life.)

We hit the road with no real plans of where we’d end up, though we did have list of relatively crime-free places to check out. It was thrilling — and liberating — at first, but reality hit when we couldn’t find a better place. We stayed in northern Wisconsin for a while (eighteen months? Two years? I should remember, but I don’t) then we headed back west. But not back to Denver. Remember that old Joe South song, “Don’t it Make You Want to Go Home?” That’s how I feel about Denver — everything’s changed, and there’s none of me left to go back to.

And now I am back in Wisconsin for a couple of weeks.

As I drove here along I-90, passing places Jeff (my deceased life mate/soul mate) and I had visited together, tears welled up so I could barely see the road. I remembered our hopes and excitement as we’d made that journey, but I also remembered the complications and complexities that waited us. And I remembered how our story ended.

Those two youthful folks are long gone, and as I struggled to see the road through bleared eyes, I had to remind myself their failures and sorrows are gone, too. Life cannot hurt him any more. That old pain does not wait for me here.

But somehow, I found it hard to convince myself of that simple reality. And so my journey into Wisconsin was accompanied by the shadow of my dead past.

I’ve been in Wisconsin a few days now, staying at the apartment of a friend while she housesits in Mineapolis, and I am doing okay.

But I can’t bring myself to go up north to where we lived. What if the past isn’t dead? What if we are still there, struggling to create a new and simpler life for ourselves? It’s best not to find out.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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No Blues at the Blue Belle Inn

May 10, 2016 — Pat Bertram

I went from one mostly consonant-free state to another. Ohio. Iowa. A measly two consonants between them. No wonder I got them mixed up when I was very young!

Jeff and I had been to Iowa once a long time ago. We often reminisced about a motel near Ames, the quiet location, the pond our windows overlooked (though it could have been a rain puddle considering all the rain we’d driven through). We always wanted to go back through the state, and now we never will go together. But I went back by myself and this time, I didn’t stay at a motel. I stayed at a bed and breakfast, one I’d known about for many years: The Blue Belle Inn in St. Ansgar, owned by fellow writer Sherrie Hansen, author of the wildflowers of Scotland romances. (One is named Blue Belle. Hmmm. I wonder where she got that title!)

When Sherrie bought the house twenty-five years ago, it was in terrible condition, but she restored the building, upgraded it, and decorated each of the bedrooms to reflect a story. I stayed in Plum Creek, named after a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.

Talk about being steeped in luxury! Lovely and very comfortable room room. Gourmet breakfast — egg and ham strata, cranberry scone, fresh fruit cup. Delicious lunch — chicken salad on a croissant with a salad. Fabulous dinner — cottage pie with a thatched roof (her version of shepherd’s pie) and coconut cake for desert.

As you probably figured out, although the inn is a bed and breakfast, Sherrie provides other meals for guests who stay more than a night or two.

I also had the luxury of meeting Sherrie, a long-time internet friend. We met at Gather.com, a now defunct social network site for writers and photographers. Sherrie moderated one of my favorite groups — a photography group for all things color. She would choose a color, and group members submitted photos of something depicting that color. Such fun!

Sherrie is as wise and as intelligent as she appears online, making my stay at the Blue Belle Inn a real joy.

And so another online friend has become a friend for real.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Field of Dreams

May 9, 2016 — Pat Bertram

I enjoyed the movie Field of Dreams and even liked the ending as long as I didn’t let myself wonder how the magic had already reached out to all those folks, bringing them to the field. Unless they were all local (and we know they weren’t since the locals thought he was loco), some of them would have had to start traveling almost as soon as the field was completed. But this is a movie about magic, not logic.

Apparently, the magic reached out beyond the screen because the field became a tourist destination. I always found that ironic. Didn’t people realize it was just a movie, and that the magic was only movie magic? I felt disconnected from these folk, unable to understand the draw, until I was driving along a highway and noticed one of those blue signs that listed local attractions. And there it was, in Dyersville, Iowa: Field of Dreams.

I’d chanced upon other movie locations in earlier travels: the Bagdad cafe, Tom Hanks’s house in Sleepless in Seattle, the fabulous wrought-iron building in Wolf, an iconic route 66 motel that has appeared in dozens of movies, the town where True Grit was filmed, the La Brea tar pits, and several others I don’t remember at the moment. In this spirit, I turned off the highway and made the three-mile trek to the Field of Dreams.

As I drove to the site, I had to laugh at the foolishness of my becoming another pilgrim to the location, but when I arrived, the feeling of being foolish disappeared. It really is special being able to see in real life something you have seen in a movie. Beyond that, it was fun seeing the field itself, so incongruous — a ballpark in the middle of an agrarian area. And it touched me, that magic of dreams.

Maybe …

I don’t know what my maybe would be; don’t even know what to dream about or hope for, and yet as I stood gazing at that field, I sensed possibilities as yet unrealized.

Such is the magic that reached out to us from the movie. And such is the magic that draws even a cynic such as I to the Field of Dreams.

“If you build it, they will come.”

Apparently so.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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A Ghost of Times Past

May 7, 2016 — Pat Bertram

I am a generation of one, without roots, and currently without even a place to call home, so people’s rootedness often seems strange — and compelling — to me.

Perhaps the most fascinating story of roots was one I heard at a Chinese buffet in DeKalb, Illinois. Not that the buffet had anything to do with this particular history — it’s just where we happened to have our conversation.

I had arranged to meet an author I had collaborated with on a steampunk book called Break Time. This book exemplifies the wonder of the internet — the authors collaborating on the project came from four different countries, and none of us had ever met in real life. So I was thrilled to finally be able to meet one of the authors — Dale Cozort, who writes science fiction and alternative histories.

Dale, his wife Elaine, and I had a pleasant chat over plates of delicacies until I happened to fill a momentary pause with an idle question. “Do you live here in the city?”

Elaine said yes, they lived in town, in one of the first houses built there.

That sure caught my interest! When she told me the house had been built by her great-great-grandfather, I asked how they came to own the place. I expected her to say that they bought it when it happened to come on the market, but what she said made my jaw drop.

Her great-great-grandfather, Eli B. Gilbert, an attorney and Civil War officer, had built the house in 1864, and it had been in her family ever since. She grew up in that house and is the fifth generation of her family to own it.

Wow! Talk about roots!

There are reminders of the past everywhere, including portraits of her progenitors. Apparently there are places in the attic Dale and Elaine are still exploring, and they keep finding fabulous treasures, such as her great-great-grandfather’s will. They have donated many of the documents they have found to the local library, and there are probably more to discover.

Can you imagine being so bound to a place? No wonder Dale writes alternate histories! History colors everything he does, everything he touches. The house even stirred up my muse! What if someone living in the house were to open a door expecting to enter their bedroom, for example, but entered the room as it was 153 years ago, before the Civil War ended? Oh, my.

Elaine and Dale invited me to the house and, stepping inside, I could feel the weight of all that history. Elaine said, almost sadly, there were no ghosts in that house, but in a way, the house itself is a ghost — or at least a testament — of times past.

Such an unexpected and unplanned joy of this trip — meeting Dale and Elaine and being introduced to their history and their house. I just hope that in my amazement and enthrallment, I remembered to thank them.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Connecting the Dots

May 4, 2016 — Pat Bertram

When I talk about how meeting people on my cross-country trip affects me, a friend tells me that I shouldn’t underestimate how my contacts with others affects them.

I do think about it at times, especially the chance encounters — the tow truck driver in Port Richey who took a picture of “Herbie’s brother” for his Love Bug loving little boy. The men who get joy of changing the oil and doing other maintenance on such a work of art. The older women who remember the fun they had in a similar vehicle and the young ones who dream of owning such a cute car.

I saw a billboard for an automobile museum that said, “They are not cars. They are time machines.” This never seemed as true as the day I visited a VW dealer — my car looked as if it had driven straight out of the 1970s into a 2016 showroom.

And what about the girl I met in the woods? There she was, sitting by herself in sorrow, and a woman appears and offers her a hug.

But mostly I know the story from my side, at least I think I do. It seems as if we live multiple lives at once — our everday life, our spiritual life, our intellectual life, our emotional life, our mythic life. It’s the mythic aspect of my journey that I am thinking of today.

When I left Hocking Hills and drove back through Columbus, I tried following US 33 through town, thinking that despite traffic, it would be the easiest way to get out of town and on my way to Marshall, Michigan to see the Honolulu House.

I got lost in the labyrinth of detours around construction zones, not just geographically lost, but mythically lost. Afterward, I seemed to be driving to no purpose, just futilely racking up the miles, with no sense of adventure or direction.

I finally found the road that cuts diagonally through to Fort Wayne, but it turned out I was on the wrong road. I had intended visit a special candy store someone had told me about, and by the time I realized I was going in the wrong direction, I was too tired to turn around. So I kept driving and almost ran out of gas because I couldn’t see a gas station anywhere on the road.

I made it all the way to Battle Creek Michigan when I belatedly discovered a message from a woman in Ohio, who wanted to meet me as I did her. I felt terrible because it was too far to turn back, but then I thought, “Why not? Who said I always had to keep moving forward?”

So I backtracked and discovered I was still moving forward. The road was always before me, my eyes focused on the path in front of me with only occasional glances behind to keep me centered. There was not even a sense of repetition since I saw everything from a completely different viewpoint. In Indiana, bright pinkish-purple redbuds lined the road in broad swathes, trees that had not at all been visible when I went the opposite direction.

And I realized that so it is with life — even if we feel as if we are backtracking, we are always moving forward, always changing, often seeing the same things with a different perspective.

I must admit that a good part of my decision to go back to Ohio had to do with having a second chance at visiting the Coons homemade candy store. Coons Candy is a five-generation store preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary. They make much of their own candy, toffee and fudge being specialties and, as the person who recommended it said, Coons Candy was definitely worth a visit.

I roamed the store, exchanged stories with a few members of the family, bought a sampling of their wares, and took a photo of them.

I left feeling as if I’d found the self I had lost during my previous sojourn in Ohio, as if somehow I was supposed to go to that store, as if it were a connection I needed to make like those connect-the-dot puzzles I used to like in childhood. If you missed a dot or didn’t connect them properly, the picture didn’t make sense.

And that turned out to be the case here. As soon as I connected that particular dot, the next steps of my journey appeared. I was invited to stay at an ex-sort-of-sister-in-law’s place for a few days, and a friend asked me to housesit later in the month.

And so it goes, this mythic life of mine.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Searching for the Unique

May 3, 2016 — Pat Bertram

Somehow on this trip I have managed to bypass some of the biggest attractions such as San Antonio, New Orleans, Savannah and Saint Augustine. If you know my aversion to traffic, crowds, and cities in general, that makes sense, but somehow I also missed the Smoky Mountains and the Appalachian Trail although both had been on my itinerary. (They now head of list of places to go on my next trip.)

During my many visits, people have suggested I visit many places, but few of those capture my imagination. One, the mention of a sign at the beginning of I 40 outside Wilmington N.C., so intrigued me, I spent hours looking for it, even though it turns out it had been stolen so many times the highway department stopped replacing it.

Another such quest was the Honolulu House in Marshall, Michigan. I have passed and bypassed so many historic houses, I have no idea why that particular house seemed vital to visit even though it was hundreds of miles out of my way. Probably the words “unique architecture” swayed me. After 9,000 miles, it gets harder to find things to amaze. (Not that the world becomes less amazing; it’s that your tendency to be amazed becomes overpowered.)

The Honolulu House, built in 1860, is now a museum that happened to be closed when I got there. I took my photo, then wandered around the area, gawking at the houses on the aptly named Mansion Street. There were so many fabulous places in such a small area it wowed me.

Apparently, my ability to be amazed isn’t completely overpowered yet.

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(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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