I don’t think I remembered to post that we were going on vacation, but we did–go on vacation, that is. We spent ten days in Wisconsin, all but one day in Door County. The weather was wonderful, and The Alpine, a funky old resort where we always stay, was as it always is, warm, hospitable, friendly, full of people who love to stay there, as we do, and have grown fond of the Bertschinger family who operate it.

I like to buy books in Door County. My favorite bookstores are The Peninsula Bookman, in Fish Creek and Wm. Caxton, Ltd., in Ellison Bay. Caxton is actually Kubet Luchterhand, a retired anthropology prof from Roosevelt U. I didn’t manage to buy anything from him this year, but last year I bought a beautiful copy of the two-volume Victor Lowe biography of Alfred North Whitehead. At Peninsula Bookman this year I bought a mint copy of Least Heat Moon’s River Horse. A few of years back I found a beautiful copy of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword there.

At Solbjørg’s, in the Sister Bay Café, where we usually have brunch at least once, for the last several years I’ve bought novels by Henning Mankell to read on the Alpine veranda, a pastime we have christened “verandizing.” This year I bought and read three Mankell novels, but in order to prevent myself from running out of them too soon, I’ve decided to read Mankell only on vacation at The Alpine. Right now I’m working through the Kurt Wallander series. When I finish with them, I’ll start on the others.

The Sister Bay Café is a favorite brunch place on “the door”–what some people call the Door County peninsula, a name reminiscent of its origin in the epithet, La Porte des Morts of early French voyageurs. Waters around the door were treacherous in former and more recent times, as a trip to the Door County Maritime Museum amply demonstrates. But enough of that. Another favorite place is Al Johnson’s, whose sod roof with goats wandering about chewing the grass likely attracts as many folks with cameras as the Swedish pancakes attract hungry eaters.

On the way to “the door” we stopped for a short time in Madison, where I had a chance to visit The Overture Center, about which I wrote a magazine piece in 1983 when it was called The Madison Civic Center. Refurbished and restored a second time, The Capitol theatre still nestles in the center’s heart, an elegaic stanza in the free verse of Overture’s steel and glass. I plan to write more about this place later on.

Down the Street at Avol’s Bookstore I found a copy of Betty Adcock’s 1995 book, The Difficult Wheel. I was especially happy to find it since I hadn’t kept up with Betty’s work since Beholdings (1988). The Difficult Wheel includes a poem I remembered from the late 1970s when Betty was among the first writers in residence at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC, where I had an office for a while.

The idea in those days was that poets-in-residence contributed poems that evoked the center in some way. Betty’s poem, “Written in a Country Mansion of the 1920’s Now Partially Restored as a Retreat for Poets,” evokes the gulf of time menacing between imagined raisers of the house and those first literary residents of a new decade, but it does so wistfully, as though time itself were a cosmic perplexity.

Before you could blink away erasure, before
you could wake wholly to the afternoon’s
cut flowers, the mirrors, the folded headlines
from Europe, a hand across your eyes—
you might have guessed, almost,
the longleaf pines around this house
the last of their thousand mile forest,
light changing into future, the workings of light
become knowledge towards annihilation.
And you might have seen us, strangers flickering
dark here, darker. And the whippoorwill
practicing a dying art.

A dying art, perhaps. Dana Gioia’s famous essay on the matter is worth a read. But it’s an art that many still treasure, as I treasure this poem of Betty Adcock’s, not the least because I was present when she read a draft of it to an audience for the first time. I think the year was 1979, the first year Weymouth Center operated as an independent entity. I’ve been back twice for short residencies, in 1987 and 1998. The writers’ program continues and is a feature of this year’s thirtieth anniversary celebration.