Little Lighthouses and Such
During the three-thousand-mile road trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and back, I noticed a billboard just outside Crown Point, Indiana, heading south that summed up my vacation just about as succinctly as I’d ever be able to describe it with even the full might of my literary prowess. HELL IS REAL.
Vacationally, hell, even vocationally speaking, I’m inclined to agree with that little sign. You know, I doubt this sign was posted by an existentialist with a yen for roadside advertising. There were no accompanying billboards proclaiming OTHER PEOPLE ARE REAL. No. This is likely the work of fear mongering Christian zealots. They’re trying to remind me there are fates worse than racing eight hundred miles from Manitowoc, Wisconsin to Northern Alabama, utilizing back country roads for the majority of the drive so as to avoid death by eighteen-wheeler obliteration. Well, I suppose working at Hydra would qualify as an exceptionally grievous hell. That hell is real, let me tell you. And it was coming at me pretty fast.
That’s not the only sign I was privy to on this trip home. These abortion signs littering the highways and byways of god-fearing America are getting downright diabolical. One sign really captured my imagination. LOVE BOTH OF US. That got me excited, thinking the local titty flop might be offering two for the price of one private dances like Uncle Buck’s Booty Bungalow’s Sunday stripper deal. But no. It’s these Christian zealots up to their tricks, demanding wayward men low the women and the fetus gestating in the womb on account of their week pull out game. Everywhere on these rural American roads, tiny billboards with the photos of adorable babies advocating going easy on abortions. Life is precious, these billboards proclaim, but they are never accompanied by pictures of babies born with their organs on the outside of their bodies, or worse, babies born in Utah. It’s a point that’s been brought up by social commentators far pithier than myself, but it bears repeating.
Something even more plentiful than anti-abortion propaganda in God’s country, lighthouses around Lake Michigan. The last twelve days have been a whirlwind of lighthouse sightings. Now, I’ve long known my wife has kindled a strange fixation on lighthouses, which flamed into an inferno of desire to see every last unimpressive structure mounted by a Fresnel lens. She had me stopping at fucking fenceposts where someone left a lantern hanging. And I had to take pictures of each one. And then she grabbed my camera and took several more pictures of each one that were supposed to look more artistic but actually appeared no differently than the snaps I took. Now, I got five hundred pictures of lighthouses on my phone, and all of them look nearly identical. Stubby.
After maybe the twentieth lighthouse I was beginning to bristle.
“They’re all incredibly stubby, and they all look the same.”
“They are not all the same. They all have their little wrinkles that make each one unique. Besides, you know I like little, stubby lighthouses.”
I couldn’t meet the challenge in her eyes.
“Well,” I acquiesced. “There was that tall, thin one in Sturgeon Bay, the one the Coast Guard boys chased us away from.”
“There you go.”
But not before I got thirteen pictures of it from every angle. And not one picture the wife was happy with.
Sturgeon Bay. Now, there’s another thing that boggles the mind. My wige thinks she’s clever. Or at least more clever than I am. To which I say “Congratulations on outsmarting a Polack. As far as new achievements go, it ranks right up there with tying your shoes.” Which, it should be noted, my eighty-year-old, live-in, father-in-law, Milt, can not do. Velcro shoe wearing motherfucker.
Anyway, when the wife tells the story, she says “we were on our way home and I suggested we make a visit to Sturgeon Bay. Once there, I said, why don’t we drive a little further out to Sister Bay. And once we were there, I was able to fool him into driving the Jeep onto a ferry and going out to Washington Island to spend the afternoon. Incidentally, this was the first time I ever took the Jeep off-roading.
Now, I knew she wanted to go out to Washington Island from the first. She’d been looking at the island in her atlas half the morning saying I wonder what’s out there. And that was good enough for me. There was no subterfuge. No coercing. No outmaneuvering me. It’s our vacation. That’s where she wanted to go. That’s good enough for me. Yet, every time she tells the story of our vacation, she has to make it sound like she pulled the wool over my eyes and ending up on a goddam island was a masterstroke of circumvention.
Where I did get fooled was when the wife suggested we spend the afternoon sunning ourselves on Schoolhouse Beach on the northside of the island. Little did I know this was one of five beaches in the world where there was not a grain of sand. Only smooth, fist-sized limestone rocks spread out from the water. There was probably a hundred and five of these beaches at some point, but most of the jackasses running things, got smart and hauled the rocks off and carted in some sand like sane fellas.
Schoolhouse Beach reinforced the whole HELL IS REAL scenario for me.
“Isn’t this glorious?” The wife asked.
No, it’s not fucking glorious. I’m lying on a bunch of rocks like a fat lizard. The beach towel offers little respite from the pain, and there are some idiots on the “beach” who don’t even have that. They just raw dog the rocks. Christian zealots used to apply this as a form of punishment against abortionists back in the day.
“Polish Hammer, you’re a marginally talented writer; how would you describe this beach in one word?”
Torturous.
“I don’t know, baby. I’m going to have to think about it.”
“Come on, you’re so good at using your words. Think.”
Superfluous.
“I know. I’m better when it’s just pouring out of me when I have a pen in my hand, reflecting back on my experience.”
“Well, can I read it when you write about it?”
“Of course, you can, my love.”
Not for nothing, but Washington Island thirty-seven square miles of land, 1/40th of that covered in uncomfortable limestone rocks can boast its own literary festival. Housed in an exceptional Fair Isle Bookstore. And it’s a legit festival, too, because I don’t recognize any of the names and they all sound foreign.
Northern Alabama, Huntsville in particular, is a bustling metropolis, mostly a congregation of scientists and engineers developing rockets to reach space, but also to deliver massive amounts of explosives to mostly brown people, but still, not one meaningful literary festival to be had, because… you know, Alabama. Where other people are real.
Anyway, I left on vacation with eight books. I returned with sixteen. I only read one. But it was Danny McBride’s new collection of short stories and it was fantastic.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
