After performing my poetry at an Iron Mountain business luncheon, I returned to my hotel for a two-hour break. The message light on my room phone was blinking. It was my mother-in-law. My wife was in the hospital, and I should come home.
I was in the middle of a two-week residency in what the Yooper’s call the banana belt, and scheduled to speak to The Friends of the Library that afternoon. I finally got through to Wendi’s mom, called my contact person to cancel, packed up and headed home. This was before cell phones.
The poem “Emergency Message” describes my return. It’s a five-hour trip and was one of the toughest drives I ever made.
My wife doesn’t remember much about that day except being in a lot of pain. Everything turned out okay. Wendi was diagnosed with an infected gallstone, and it was removed.
Two days later she left the hospital. The next week while her parents helped out, I was back in Iron Mountain working at the high school.
That stretch of Highway 2 in my first poem can be troublesome. Years later driving home from Munising with my wife at night, we hit a mayfly hatch. The insects were so thick it was like a whiteout.
Cars were parked along the road from lack of visibility. I stopped twice to scrape my headlights off. I feared the radiator was going to clog up and my engine would overheat.
Finally, just before St. Ignace, the bugs thinned out. Before crossing the bridge, we stopped at a gas station and gave the windshield and lights a good scrubbing.
The second poem has a more positive story behind it. In April 1989 I was in Marquette performing poetry for a Young Authors Conference. In four days, I spoke to 2,800 students from kindergarten through high school.
One class of third graders from Whitman Elementary gave me a gift. It was a collection of short poems they’d written about a storm on Lake Superior.
That night I took an image from each child’s poem and created a montage titled “Lake Superior Storm.” A week later I sent a copy to their teacher asking permission to publish it. Miss Johnson sent me signed permission slips from every parent.
Years later Whitman Elementary was closing and being remodeled into an administration building for the university. The college invited me back to speak at Whitman and Peter White Public Library in downtown Marquette.
Miss. Johnson was still teaching, and some of the third graders, who were young adults by now, came to say hello. It was one of the high points of my poetry career.