travel

What a treat to find this great new book! This is a memoir by the most interesting character you could imagine. Michael Perry is a poet, a registered nurse, a trained EMT and a volunteer fire fighter. After years away from his small home town in rural Wisconsin, he returns and writes about the things that happen to him there. The result is a funny and often moving account of the things that are really important in life - with insights that can be gained only from a man faced daily with life and death situations. Perry has a beautiful cadence to his storytelling and makes the transition from laugh out loud storytelling to heart-wrenching tragedies seamlessly. I swallowed the book whole and marked up my copy with underlined quotations and margins full of stars of agreement. A definite must-read.

"Summer comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies at the sun."
If you're past a certain age, that opening line should remind you of the books that you read in your impressionable years; the ones that made you a reader for life. Think Richard Brautigan. Think Thomas Pynchon. Think Ken Kesey or Hunter S. Thompson.
Michael Perry has a sensibility and a style that assimilate the best that these guys had to offer: Brautigan's sweet, sad quirkiness, Pynchon's God's-eye view of his characters' worlds, Kesey's brawny prose and close observational skills, Thompson's prickly - and very funny - clarity of vision and expression. He goes on to outdo them, however, in a book so small and unassuming - and so tender - that you forgive him for knocking your old literary gods into the hog trough.
Framed by two stories of such pathos - something lacking in our daily lives as a rule, thank God - that we don't have a premeditated response to it, are a wealth of slice-of-life stories about the little town of New Auburn, Wisconsin, (population 485) that are so lovingly and meticulously rendered that you'll recognize your own town. Your own neighbors. Your own self.
The opening piece - "Jabowski's Corner" - tells the story of a hardworking farm family with a deadly piece of road bisecting their land. Part encomium to the farmer and his wife who raised seven girls and five boys on a rockpatch farm, part euology to the girl so terribly injured on the sharp curve known as Jabowski's Corner, and finally, part tale of Perry's attempt - by joining the local volunteer fire department and EMS squad - to weave his life back into that of the community in the hometown that he left years ago, this is a harrowing tale of faith and loss and love.
About the girl, Perry tells us, "Seven years since the accident, and this is what freezes me late at night: There was a moment - a still, horrible moment - when the car came squalling to a halt, the violent kinetics spent, and the girl was pinned in silence... The meadowlark sings, the land drops away south to the hazy tamarack bowl of the Big Swamp... all around the land is rank with life... The girl is terribly, terribly alone in a beautiful, beautiful world."
Between this horrible, lovely story and the end piece - an equally lachrymose one about Perry's sister-in-law of seven weeks' death under similar circumstances - are a series of meditations and just plain wacky yarns about everything from the semiotics of lawn tchachkes to the night Tricky Jackson wiped out the laundromat. My favorite is the one about the big, boozy, bearded logger who thinks he's having a heart attack. He and his fellow Budmeisters are out in the middle of nowhere, and when the EMS team shows up, and the woodsy mirthmakers hear the words "cardiac arrest", they surround their downed friend like protective, demented musk oxen - "arrest" being the only word that penetrates their alcoholic fog.
In the final essay, Perry tells us about Sarah, the young girl who marries his thirty-something brother only to die in a car accident seven weeks later. "At the wake," he says, "it was her hands that made me cry. I would look at them and think of them touching my brother." Which pretty much says all that need be said about the unspoken love between siblings.
It takes a big, strong heart, I think, to join an EMS team or to volunteer as a firefighter - to look at people at their weakest and not turn away. It took that same kind of heart to write these stories.

From describing interactions between feuding high school sweethearts in the middle of Main Street to Kodiak-chewing characters that make you say, "I know that guy," the picture of small town living Michael Perry creates for readers is dead on. I couldn't stop reading, laughing, sighing, shaking my head - this book has it all. Because I was raised small town Abrams, Wisconsin, I can honestly say that Perry captures the bittersweet life people live there and, he made me a little homesick. Please read this book!