HARBOR
In the early ’60s ore cars still crossed a rail bridgeover Highway 2, carrying Bessemer ore onto a wooden trestle,
the beginning of the Soo Line Dock.
The tracks continued for 1800 feet out over water,
lifted by a structure of reinforced concrete.
Lakers anchored alongside. Through doors opened
at the bottom of the funnel-shaped rail cars, ore
poured into dock-side bins, and from the bins
through chutes and hatches into the ship’s hold.
Today I telephoned my brother to ask
if we could have seen the dock from the attic window
looking out over leaves and houses toward the lake.
We didn’t think so: the window faced
north-northwest and the dock
was at the east end of the Ashland harbor.
Still, when my mind climbs the skinny steps
and goes to the window, the ore dock is part
of what seemed always to have been there.
It stood idle after 1965, its concrete pillars
seven stories high above its basin of wood pilings,
chutes like black wings on either side –
years measured against it:
our young adult lives, dispersed, regathering
for holidays and summer visits
Charles and Diana, our own
marriages, and divorces and remarriages
Sandra Day O’Connor, Sally Ride
Kosovo and hanging chads
9/11 and the Apple iPod
all that we saw coming
and didn’t, or looked
the other way, Alvin Toffler’s
Future Shock (its lime-green cover)
and the constant shift and weave
of light and dark and finally
the ore dock, too, came down,
deemed a safety hazard, dismantled
piece by piece, only its pilings kept as a base
for a low pier, its own years measured
against the blue of Chequamegon Bay opening
into the vast waters of Lake Superior.
Our years too, then, bobbed on the waves
of that longer view, and we remembered
a winter when we walked beneath the pillars
daring ourselves out toward the end, the structure
a rusted nave, high and light-streaked on the frozen lake.
GATHER THESE WOMEN
Put a cup of coffee on the table, a maroon Melmac cup. And the Ashland Daily Press.
The table is round, oak, a pedestal table with claw feet. The chairs are sturdy, with tall wooden
backs. Seat a woman, Eleanor, in one of the sturdy chairs. She and her family moved here a year
ago, when her husband was transferred to the Ashland County Soil Conservation Service office.
Start further back
“Make a good bed and you’ll get a good husband,” her mother said.
She did and she did and she’s halfway through raising four children
and yes, life is bumpy sometimes, she remembers when she was
young and single and worked and bought stylish dresses, but life
goes along and now she’s here, in this big kitchen with its good
solid table and chairs
Draw a map from here where she sits reading the news, reading about people who make news
Sheffield, England The Beatles have begun their Spring UK tour
Birmingham, Alabama The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
is holding a sit-in in Birmingham
Madison, Wisconsin Circuit Judge Bruce F. Beilfuss has won a seat
on the Wisconsin Supreme Court
the moon The Soviet Union has launched Luna 4
Draw a local map
Joyce, up the street a ways and Jean, a few blocks over
Saron Lutheran, Beaser Elementary, Ashland High, all within walking distance
JCPenneys, The Bandbox, Shoe Shack, Northern State Bank, on Main Street
the last remaining Soo Line ore dock, in the harbor down below Water Street
Gather the women together. Joyce and Jean, Lou and Laura, lively, friendly women, in their
forties, with kids they’ve stayed home to raise, husbands who ‘bring home the bacon’ while they
grocery shop, hang out laundry, garden, cook, serve meals on their own substantial tables, oak,
or maple, or shiny Formica – women of privilege, we would say now, middle-class women living
their lives in the time and place where they find themselves – they are provided for, and their
college educations are not wasted, according to dictums in magazines like Redbook and Ladies
Home Journal, because that experience has made them more interesting wives and mothers.
They serve coffee at church, join the PTA, the Ashland Monday Club,
and a group that studies
public policy issues, the League of Women Voters. Though this year, when Eleanor is sipping
coffee and reading the Daily Press, they’re down to too few members. They’ve asked her to join.
Her mother-in-law, in Minneapolis, belongs to the League. She knows it’s worthwhile.
Draw a map to the UW Extension Experiment farm
where her husband introduces her to the chair of the County Board. They chat – weather,
pulpwood raft in the harbor, Maxwell Street Days downtown. As they’re parting, he says
“By the way, don’t join that League of Women Voters – that bunch of communists.”
Later, at the dessert buffet, she meets him again. She is headed back to her table with a dish of
raspberry crumble. “You know that organization you mentioned to me …” she says sweetly.
He is smiling from his patriarchal height as she finishes her sentence, “I’m their new president.”
She returns his smile, nods to him, continues on her way.
VOCABULARIES
Odanah means village in Anishinaabemowin, the native language of the Bad River Ojibwe,
whose land once included all of present-day Ashland.
This was before Allotment, before leases that cheated the Ojibwe, before Asaph Whittlesey
claimed the distinction, in settler legend, of being the first white man to fell the first tree in
what would become the city of Ashland, with its coal docks and ore docks, its turn-of-the-
century brownstones and complacency of leafy lawns, at the head of Chequamegon Bay.
The name Chequamegon is of Ojibwe origin. It is derived from chagaouamigoung, a French
transliteration of the Ojibwe Zhaagawaamikong or jagawamikiong, meaning a “sand bar place;
strip of land running into a body of water.”
The word Ojibwe has various meanings and interpretations. One of them, “to write,” remembers
the people’s ancient scrolls of birchbark inscribed with pictographs.
When Eleanor spent time in Odanah, in the Teacher Corps in the early ’80s, she might have
practiced, out of respect for bilingual speakers, the pronunciation of Boozhoo and Miigwech
to say hello and thank you, Niin Eleanor nindizhinikaaz to tell another woman her name,
Aaniin ezhinikaazoyan? to ask the woman’s name in return.
She learned from them a language of seed beads, of long thin beading needles, tiny-eyed,
and of nylon thread, idioms of eye and thumb and forefinger, syntax of warping a beading loom,
spells of pattern. Her daughter has two necklaces she beaded: one, a fringed pendant on leather
backing, its stylized flower bright against black background, nine diamond-shaped petals each
white-bordered red, around a small circlet of green sepal, yellow style, dot of red ovary.
The other is a long chain to knot lightly or to wear loose around your neck, its pattern
a continuous sequence of triangles, white, their bases and apexes blue, manidoominensikaan na
[an item of beadwork] said to represent a path through the woods.
THAT DAY, SHE PULLED OUT THE GRASS IN THE SIDEWALKS
Here she is, deft fingers on the typewriter,ribbon like an old long distance call fading
in and out, sending her news
the book David loaned her
the retired teachers’ lunch last week
and she’s been watching CNN.
“I am hurting,” she writes now, “for all the people
in Louisiana and Mississippi ”
You can find it still on YouTube
footage of Katrina newscasts
like an old letter saved:
lurid spirals over a Gulf Coast graphic
reports of uh, people trapped
(Does she check another channel?)
droplets judder on a camera lens
desperate calls to 911
She wonders about her friend Joe Voldrich – “Slidell
was wiped out. What will happen
to these thousands of people”
an ellipsis.
“I am going to put those thoughts aside and spend
a little time at my outdoor project –
digging up, pulling out, the grass in the sidewalks –
(Does she cushion her knee on the orange gardening mat?
down close to the roots, twist a little, pull slowly.
There. Quiet today,
fall hovering in the stilled trees along MacArthur.
She misses the elms.
Another tuft, fingernail dug into narrow dirt,
concrete rough against her bent knuckle
Joe Voldrich, the hole in the Superdome,
the blind chance of blessings, luck)
– then spray vinegar, salt, and soap in the cracks.
That works for a while.
Love, Mother.”
Sue Chenette lives with her husband near Toronto’s Humber River, where on morning walks she watches for egrets among the gulls and Canada geese. She grew up in northern Wisconsin, and graduated with a degree in music from the University of Wisconsin. As a pianist she specialized in chamber music, and taught piano for many years at Toronto’s Havergal College.
She is the author of Slender Human Weight (Guernica), The Bones of His Being (Guernica), What We Said (Motes Books), Clavier, Paris, Alyssum (Aeolus House), and So That We Might Finger the Words: The Biography of Eleanor Jones Bussey (Aeolus House). Her work has been anthologized in Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era (Seraphim); In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Raincoast Books); Untying the Apron: Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s (Guernica); I Found It at the Movies (Guernica); Pandemic Love and Other Affinities (IceFloe Press), and Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2019 (Biblioasis).
Banner Art: Sometimes We Remember The Backyards, a visual poem. (c) 2023 Robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter, IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.
IceFloe Press 