I came home from the Midwest to the May porch, window corners filled with crabapple blossoms, lawn grown over for no-mow May, which timing dovetailed perfectly with the reign of no-mow wife. I never wanted a lawn, but if I’m going to have one the sonofabitch is going to be trim as a bowling green. The ghosts of generations of Midwestern men stand looking over my shoulder clucking invisible tongues.

There was snow on the ground in Marquette, grainy black late winter snow piled in the corners of parking lots and we traced the long straight roads of the Upper Peninsula into Wisconsin through lakes and swamps over little rivers charging hard and brown through choked culverts. I lost my voice on the first night of the tour and was recovering three or four notes each night and living on cherry cough drops and hot water. What a strange sensation to open your mouth to sing and find a hoarse whisper, like opening a drawer of paints to find a single piece of chalk.

When Kosko started his set in Marquette I walked across the street to the crowded bar of the Vierling — graduation weekend at Northern — and ordered a double bourbon from the harassed tender, a blonde woman with sad eyes deeply etched with pretty wrinkles. Something in her gaze made it seem that she understood everything about me, strange man in a strange town, and it felt so good to be known that way that I tipped her twice the cost of the drink and walked back across the street happy.

I drove south and bought licenses in Iowa and Wisconsin and fished the Driftless spring creeks in Decorah and then Viroqua, pulling darkly tawny and red-spotted Browns from the deep furrows and cut limestone banks, the green hills rolling away like gathered cloth. I played three-handed Hearts with my brothers in a little rented apartment above the fly shop, our style of play essentially a Mexican Standoff where we each attempt to shoot the moon every hand. I drove to my hometown in the rain, thinking about people I'd grown up with, and this strange life.

What we actually know we're unable to tell. Memorizing the bones of a river for miles doesn’t lend itself to conversation. The perfect modulation of tone and expression that comes with playing alone in the light of the great kitchen window where the sound comes back off the glass and seems to be part of the light, is impossible to capture or share. Like a quantum particle, the wave form collapses into one possibility the moment it’s observed, but that iteration is in the nature of a lie because the wave is a process, a function of space and time.

I fished a little river the other night at dusk on a bend that requires a mutable appreciation of the trespass law, and caught the first rising fish of the Eastern year. I’d caught a good number of fish on dries in the Driftless but I hadn’t even seen a rise on the freestone water in my corner of New England, despite hatches that gave the river an appearance of snowing upward.

I stood in the long shadows of trees bluing the streambed stones at the head of the riffle and watched yellow warblers darting out from the knotweed and sumac into a patch of sunlight above the downstream pool to take March brown mayflies and a few late Hendricksons, the recondite depth of the tail-out oddly lambent, sidelong light pouring unseen through a hole in the trees as if from a pitcher to fill the bowl of it gold and green.

There’s a severe ethics in the making of art, a truth available to any child and only recovered by long application, that cheap effects and false drama won’t help you. The facts are enough, and they're more than you will ever master.

FLOODWATER – There are five Friday nights in June and because I'm off the road I'm going to spend the first four of them at Floodwater Brewing Co, (June 2, 9, 16, 23) my local bar in Shelburne Falls, MA. The bar is roughly twice the size of my kitchen, so it'll be cozy, and every show will feature some novel shift of focus or personnel, but I've been fishing too much to think about themes, so this week will be trio with Moses and Donny, and the theme will be, Who Remembers the Setlist From April?

EGREMONT – Saturday night (6/3) the boys and I return to the Egremont Barn in Egremont, MA. – a great little bar in a sweet part of the world, just over on the other side of the Berkshires – and you should start your summer with us.

MAINE – The fifth Friday in June (6/30) we'll be at the Hackmatack Playhouse in Berwick, Maine. I've been in touch with the forager and poet Jenna Rozelle whose Substack letter Appetites, is one of the fast-disappearing reasons to use the internet, and she lives close enough that with luck she and her husband will come down to Berwick and we can all meet up. One hopes other people will also come out.

LUTSONG – In July I'll join the lineup at the second annual Lutsong Music Festival in Lutsen, MN (7/13-16) which promises to be a sweet little midwestern scene and full of good music. Other acts include Humbird, Dusty Heart, Story Hill, and Kiss the Tiger, among others.

June 2023