As we near the festival in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the humid air is heavy with music and the streets become gooey with flannel. The gate is being manned by two men in black jean shorts, and we are relieved that there is no cover charge. We enter and are soon swimming through a sea of too-tight T-shirts and trucker caps. Our goal today is a secondhand book store located somewhere on this street, Collin is looking for a French cookbook and I am searching for a book of Charles Bukowski’s stories. We can’t hear anything as we move along to avoid being gobbled up by the festival.

It’s impossible to hear anything other than the band trying desperately to be cool and uncool at the exact same moment. Still, we look at each other just as everything dawns on us at the same second.

It’s always interesting when you realize something at the exact same moment as someone else. Dual recognition often occurs in movies to convey the idea that two characters are so intelligent, savvy or in tune with each other that one of them can’t possibly win the thought before the other one. As cool, smooth or even unnatural as these moments seem in movies, they are nonetheless intriguing when they occur in real life. Because at the moment when Collin and I are walking into the bookstore we have searched for, we both simultaneously and separately realize that we are in the middle of a hipster festival.

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The elevator is large and metal, how I’d always imagined the inside of my own personal Phantom Zone to look. Nevertheless, it quickly fills up with a quotient of Chicago’s most talented language-slaughterers. As personal discomfort brings out the judgmental bastard in me, this does little to aid my feeble attempts at relaxation. You see, we are going up. Way up. Someone asks me to hit the 95 button on the panel, and acting as my own executioner, I do so. The metal box rattles with grueling effort as it chugs straight up.

The elevator seems to be a place, the only place, in Chicago that doesn’t have good phone signal, so my confused fellow prisoners are forced to employ face to face conversation as a last-ditch, desperate effort to kill 110 seconds without a phone. The people start hesitantly, making sounds until they finally produce conversations that are full of grammatical mistakes that my students would be embarrassed to make. Meanwhile, I am trying to ignore the rumbling box headed north.

I close my eyes and recede into my happy place, which, at this moment, is a pizza joint that we visited a half-hour ago. I imagine the pizza covered in sausage, cheese and tomatoes. The containers of hot pepper and Parmesan cheese sitting in between the pitcher of beer and my mug. Occasional strands of poorly spoken English attack my fantasy, bringing with it a reminder that I am in a box going to the 95th floor of a building. Through it all, a familiar voice.

“You OK?”

I peep open an eye, not seeing Collin, but a large piece of Chicago style sausage pizza wearing aviator sunglasses. “I am fine, Pizza Man.”

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The American Jazz and Negro League museums are in the same building, making the 18th and Vine District in Kansas City, MO, arguably the coolest place in North America. Both are lousy with memorabilia commemorating the most classic American music and entire generations of talented men who couldn’t play major league baseball. Collin and I wander through the museums, taking it in like twelve-year olds: Josh Gibson’s jersey, Cool Papa Bell’s glove, one of Charlie Parker’s famous plastic saxophones.

As men, we have a few happy ‘fields.’ Two of these fields are sports and music. For some men this is NASCAR and thrash metal, for others it’s ping pong and Liberace. For me it’s baseball and jazz. This means that at this moment I have attained a level of content that I don’t often reach without lying beneath a masseuse or without a fork in my hand. Also, the air conditioning is on high. I giggle into the dark hallway.

Things get better from there.

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“I’m gonna need the police at 200 Crawford Avenue. Domestic abuse in room 320.”

It’s 8 p.m. and we’re at the most active motel in Kansas City, probably the most active motel in the entire state of Kansas. There are more than thirty teenage female softball players running around the lobby filling up bags with ice and discussing athletic subjects at a grotesque volume. There is a constant flurry of activity as people storm in and out the door, most of them talking on phones.

Also, the police are coming.

The only five people standing still are Collin, me, the two men in front of us and the woman working the desk, who, though moving, is doing so with the imperceptible slowness of a sniper as she prepares their room. She is misplacing priorities by telling us the details of the evening’s events rather than handing over keys and pointing us to a room. “There are two big guys beating on a girl in room 320.” She leans in, “and apparently, they threw a toaster at her.”

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Our pre-rafting preparation consists of blowing up a boat while getting an instructional talk by a highly qualified guide. It focuses on safety tips, reactions to possible (and various) accidents that can occur, and avoiding mistakes that can lead to either injuries or a watery death.

The danger of mutilation begins within the ostensibly safe confines of the raft. Holding a paddle incorrectly can lead to a broken nose, lost teeth and black eyes. There is the highly possible, even likely event of going unwillingly into the water. And since collision with a massive rock often causes one to fly into the water, the water you fall into will probably not be deep, placid or free of rocks the size of buffalo. A rafter can get stuck under the raft. He can find himself sliding along a shallow rapid with only his hands, knees and genitals to help negotiate his rocky traverse. He can get a foot lodged into a crevice of the river bed, which explains the carved in stone rule: Don’t stand up in shallow rapids. And, in a scenario I have seen in a worse case scenario book, he can get trapped under a downed tree in the middle of the river. I recall the pictures in the book, however, I notice with alarm, not the advice.

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“That fire still out there?”

“Oh yeah.” I’m looking out the window of the Super 8 Motel that we chose in lieu of a another night of sleepless, airless, gruesome night in a tent. As we pulled into Hot Springs, South Dakota last evening there was a chimney of smoke sloping into the air. As we set out on our journey today we find that there are now two fires. There are now two fires. There are 100% more fires than there were the night before.

Brush fires are a very real traveling drama since at the very worst they are a concrete threat to life and limb and at best they are an impetus to detour. There’s a decision to be made: flee or flight. We, for some reason or other, decide to fight.

So, we gear up the Diesel and head into the fire.

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The street is full of college kids, twenty-somethings and townies celebrating a festival in this small university town. Every university town demographic is represented: ex-jocks with breaching beer guts, hippies, townies, barflies, farmers, the former big man on campus who lives with his parents again and the sorority girl who is dressed like a senate candidate. Other than the three people I am with, I have never seen any of these people before in my entire life, yet I recognize them all. I organize them into social partitions in my mind as though I were walking amongst people I knew around my university town. This is because every university town is exactly the same; only the name of the town changes. Sometimes.

At the River Falls Days festival, the town celebration attracts alumni and townies, glass blowers, former residents and, well, English teachers living in the Czech Republic. For most it’s a chance to celebrate the town, but for alumni (and us) it is a chance to live like university students once again. And that is exactly what we do.

We arrive and immediately start drinking Miller High Life in cans and chilled bourbon shots. We sit on the porch and annoy the neighbors and slap at mosquitoes and tell stories about cavalier actions in times of duress that are, quite frankly, crap. Yet each story is more glorious than the last. There is tobacco in every form and Taco Bell, which quickly reminds me of why I stopped eating it in the first place about fifteen years ago.

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The interstate has given way to a small country road and the sky is blocked out by the surrounding forest and trees that hang over the road like leafy umbrellas. It’s dark up in the north country, far from any city or town that might have a movie theater or, well, a dentist. As we turn off the country road onto a gravel path, the horror movie atmosphere is enhanced by an eerie mist which rises off the road and grass. We put on the Danse Macabre just to perfect the imminent feeling of doom that is now pervading the car. In an attempt to lighten the spooky mood, we make jokes and laugh, just like two kids walking past a graveyard at night.

“Did you see that?” Collin asks.

“I did. What the hell was it?”

It is quiet in the car. “There’s another!” he yells. It takes us a moment to realize what is happening on the dark and narrow road around us, but it soon becomes clear:

We are surrounded by frogs.

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The announcer on the field is a round girl with a hell of a lot of charisma. Her name is Julie and she speaks like a comedian warming up a crowd with such vitality that one can’t help becoming emotionally invested in her mid-inning wares. This inning, the 6th, she calls forth two people garbed in Sumo wrestler body balloons who waddle to the sideline at her behest. She introduces them as Blue and Red, explains the rules of engagement (knock the opponent to the ground three times) and then she shouts, “ready, set, go!”

The 1,415 people at Joannes Stadium (I call it the Frog Pond) cheer as Red and Blue bang into each other until Blue hits the first base line and Red struts along the batter’s cage until the next round begins. After two more knock downs by Red, and one attempted escape by Blue, Julie announces Red the winner along with her booty of a free haircut and a hotdog at the concession stand.

We decided to come to a summer league baseball game today as it’s a nice way to spend the evening outdoors but away from spiders. The local team, the Green Bay Bullfrogs, are spanking the Lakeshore Chinooks after jumping out to an early thirteen point lead that they have had no problem clinging to. By most barometers this game could be labelled boring, but we’re having a blast. Perhaps it’s the $2 local hop ales, or the surely animal yet oddly unidentifiable mascots running around, or Julie’s mid-inning shenanigans, but everything about this game has a sense of charming ‘Small Town America’ to it.

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