What I Did on My Fourth of July by The Polish Hammer
I’m not one prone to taking vacations. Not true vacations, anyway. Sure, I’ll go on weekend excursions to hang out at pop culture conventions. I’ll take long, meandering drives around the states surrounding Alabama. And, it could be argued, I’ve been on one long staycation where I’ll just go into work and do the absolute bare minimum, taking excessive bathroom breaks, and basically pissing off anyone holding any sort of managerial authority. For the first week and a half of July, the wife and I decided to make the trek from the hothouse hell of Huntsville, Alabama, all the way up to the cool, groovy town of Marquette in Michigan’s upper peninsula to visit the wife’s son and newborn granddaughter.
Of course, the wife demanded we take the scenic route even with the understanding that I was directionally retarded which I’m allowed to say because it is a true affliction I was born with. Seriously, if the doctor hadn’t viciously grabbed me around my head with those chrome forceps and yanked me out of the womb, I’d have been the first mouth birth. And my goddam head wouldn’t be lopsided.
“You know it’s a two-and-a-half-day drive,” I grumbled.
“You can do it!” The wife said. “I have faith in you. And with me navigating you won’t hardly get lost at all.”
The wife harbored no less than three copies of the National Geographic Adventure Edition Atlas. One in each vehicle and a spare in the bedroom in case she woke up at two o’clock in the morning with a hankering to know how to travel to Butte, Montana using only backroads.
With the wife, her sense of direction was unerring, her timing atrocious.
“You needed to turn right on 41,” she’d say, once we were three miles past the 41 junction. Then she’d personally attack me. “You really have no idea where you’re going, do you?”
On a road I’d never driven in a state I’ve never visited.
Yeah, it seemed I’d have to wait a little longer for a true vacation. I was going to be on the clock this entire trip. My job being to keep the wife happy. This vacation was going to be a variation of the Green Book movie with me playing a slightly more handsome version of Viggo Mortenson and the wife playing a much crankier Mahershala Ali. And it seemed there were going to be no stops kind to Polacks.
Fortunately, the first leg of the journey was one I’d taken so often, I was susceptible to only the occasional wrong turn. A straight shot up I65 to The Region of my birth and a reunion with my three brothers and the honorary Koweski boys who have gravitated around us for the good times and all the homemade mead they could pour down their gullet. After a few hours of pool, we engaged in the ceremonial posing of the guns. My brother opens all his gun safes and flaunts his arsenal, and, like a wine sommelier, he lists the specifications and advantages of each weapon as we aim down the center sights at some imaginary target and take pictures of each other looking menacing. It’s likely the dumbest fucking thing you’ll ever lay eyes on, but, you know what, that’s probably why you’re not an honorary Koweski brother, which is like joining the Rosicrucian without all the intellectual trappings.
The next day hung over and smelling of gun oil, I was back in the Jeep, the wife sitting in the navigational seat, sauntering vaguely northward, stopping at every goddam lighthouse along Lake Michigan no matter how puny. And they were all puny. This was my wife’s version of the ceremonial posing of the guns. Half my camera had pictures of dumb Polacks standing around with sniper rifles and shotguns, the other half entailed my wife standing next to Lilliputian lighthouses seemingly constructed to guide the gnomish navy home. If ever there was a literary quote you’d pull from the Polish Hammer compendium, let it be “Midwestern lighthouses in the middle of a sunny July day holds no majesty for me.” It’s a quote the wife would ignore, like everything else I’ve ever fucking written.
Once you get past that paltry collection of lighthouses, though, Michigan, especially once you cross the Mackinac bridge into the upper peninsula, is the most gorgeous area you’ll likely find. I can’t think of too many places I’d rather celebrate the 250th Fourth of July than Marquette, Michigan.
So, brief aside, I don’t believe in poetry, but God certainly delivered some poetic justice in delivering awful weather to derail Trump’s jerk-off rallies. You know, I’m glad those Communist Democrats have been utilizing their climate control weapons to zap the weather at all of Trump’s dickheaded, underattended functions, hailing at Mount Rushmore while Trump tried to explain with the vocabulary of a demented four-year-old how a simple majority of liberals could usher in the Apocalypse, or sending the scorching heat to DC to inconvenience the five hundred, seventy five fans of the incontinent, pedophile rapist. I have to say, the democrats controlling the weather dominator machine on loan from Cobra and Destro treated me to stunning seventy degree days while I celebrated the grandeur of this country while I kayaked the Au Train, hiked Presque Isle, and ascended Sugarloaf Mountain.
At Contour Coffeehouse in downtown Marquette, I heard at least three languages spoken. Some German, I’m pretty sure, not because I’m familiar with the language but because the speaker wore incredibly tight jeans which seems to be a hallmark for those cats. I shared conversations with several people, none of whom, mercifully, were of the beatnik persuasion. There were a couple hipsters, but I managed to avoid them as they played board games and sipped their frappes. But it was wonderful to see such a wide assortment of citizens of the world congregating under one roof in a land I truly believe will never succumb to the tyrannical bullshit that jackass Trump espouses every time he opens that sphincter mouth.
That said, there was this old fella who sat near us who began a conversation with my wife by asking if she was single. He’d retired from the local school system after teaching fifth graders for forty-two years. He was a sprightly eighty-five and seemed mostly mentally acute, but I tell you, I wouldn’t fall over myself voting for this guy for any political office. He apparently drank a coffee here every morning which I took to mean he was incredibly wealthy. He put the idea in my wife’s head that it would be a good idea to climb Sugarloaf Mountain.
It was a nice change of pace to be social. Back home, most people just stared into their coffee cups. Any interactions usually resulted in purses getting clutched tighter and bogus claims of being happily married hurled.
So, Sugarloaf Mountain liked to kill me. Thirty-eight thousand fucking stairs to the summit. The wife would argue that number, like Trump’s reckoning of his audience, is significantly less, but she’s not the one heroically battling the diabeetus. Anyway, doesn’t matter, I’m half convinced she’s only with me because my insulin resistant blood attracts all the mosquitoes away from her as though I were some devastatingly handsome soda fountain. Admittingly, it was only on account of the mosquitoes draining three pints of blood outta me that I was able to tackle the never-ending flights of stairs.
There was a guy with cerebral palsy getting helped along the stairs who seemed to be tackling the challenge better than I, which put me in a bit of a foul mood. Atop the mountain is a monument to Bart King, a boy scout leader who got his ass killed in World War I. It’s made out of something like 1500 white stones, 1600 pounds of cement, sand and shit back in 1921. Basically, it looks like a phallus roughly the size of a Lake Michigan lighthouse. Which since it was erected with the help of boy scouts honoring their club leader, the phallic nature of the monument checks out.
That said, the view of the surrounding Lake Superior is absolutely breathtaking. This is a beautiful country we live in. Of course, there was a jackass who thought he was going to repel off the mountain under the shadow of the Bart King monument. I waited until he was strapped in with all his goofy ropes and hooks before I started exercising a little free speech by calling him a sissy too craven to actually climb down a real mountain.
“Those thirty-eight thousand steps too much for you to handle,” I hollered. “You know, you’d get down that mountain a lot faster if you’d just cut the rope.”
He just looked at me as if he couldn’t understand why I was sassing him. It could have been he didn’t understand my language. He was wearing pants which were entirely too tight to be fashionable in America. But I felt too good to ponder that imbecile for very long. I breathed the pure Michigan air and thanked God I was born American.
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.
