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Up until about two weeks ago, Mike Byard was a daytime operator of the historic Stillwater Lift Bridge. Byard is one of three seasonal attendants who keep the bridge manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until mid-October, when the Coast Guard restricts river traffic in anticipation of winter. The bridge, built in 1931, stays down until the spring. It’s a well-earned rest for bridge and operator alike. Byard typically lifted and lowered the bridge at least twelve times during his 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift.

Byard is fifty-four. He is a man of experience when it comes to machinery. Although this was his first season as a bridge tender, his three decades of operating heavy equipment for the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Spring Lake Park shop has given him the steadiest of hands. He is built close to the ground, his movements are deliberate, his eyes are alert, and he smokes constantly.

First, warning lights and gates were activated on both ends of the bridge as the traffic cleared the deck. Next, Byard eased forward a lever in the middle of a control panel and the 480-volt electric engine whined to life. The ride was surprisingly smooth. No great groans or cracking joints from the 72-year-old piece of machinery. The motor turns a drum beneath the bridge to wind massive cables that run through a series of pulleys and terminate at two 300,000-pound counterweights. When the counterweights go down, the 600,000-pound section of bridge goes up—along with Byard, the tender’s house, and, on this day, me.

A scale on the wall indicated how high we were going. “Today, the river was eleven feet below the deck, so add eleven onto that number—that’s how far above the water we are.” At the top of the lift, we were about forty feet above the water.

It was 2:30 p.m., and traffic was already building rapidly at both ends of the bridge, clogging downtown Stillwater and stacking up the hill on the Wisconsin side. Boats moved underneath. We began our descent. Going down can be tricky, Byard said, because some hot-rod boaters try to squeeze under at the last moment. “I can’t stop this real fast,” he said. “But I haven’t clobbered anyone yet.”

The tender’s house offers little in the way of comfort. The traffic rumbles past just a few inches away. The roughly four-by-eight-foot space bristles with circuit boxes and wiring harnesses. The windows don’t open; the only ventilation beyond a propped door is a tiny air conditioner with one setting—frigid.

We sat out on a small adjacent platform and watched the traffic. Some people waved, most wore expressions of annoyance. A decent breeze kept the exhaust fumes from becoming thick. Some days are certainly worse than others, Byard said. “But I’ve spent thirty-one years working with diesel equipment, so I’m probably half brain-dead anyway,” he joked. —Mike Mitchelson

Every year about this time, the Noise Pollution Clearing House gets a flurry of calls about leaf blowers. Some people don’t like them, and in California, the gas-powered models have been outlawed or restricted in several municipalities. They can’t be used within five hundred feet of a residence in Los Angeles.

The director of the Noise Pollution Clearing House is Les Blomberg, an Arden Hills native. He clearly enjoys his work. Reached at the group’s headquarters above a travel agency in Montpelier, Vermont, he had just come in from conducting a field test, using a hand-held decibel meter. He was measuring the sound produced by a rake. “We’ve done lots of readings on leaf blowers,” he explained with a laugh. “One of our guys was just curious how they’d compare.”

For the record, the rake, measured at fifty feet, registered forty-four decibels. That’s about four times quieter than the quietest leaf blower. Up close, the gas-powered models are noisy enough to permanently damage hearing. “The leaf blower is really a silly invention,” said Blomberg. “It solves the problem of ‘leaf pollution’ by creating a bigger problem of noise and dust pollution.

One might think the Twin Cities, with its solid if shrinking liberal core, would be predisposed to take up the issue, but that hasn’t been the case. A municipal clerk in St. Paul agreed to show me a few pages of recent noise complaints. It reads like a poem of urban malaise: “Working on cars till late hours of the night, dogs constantly running loose”; “Ethanol plant is louder than usual”; “Noise all night and during the day. This is so loud”; and the oddly moving “Noise complaint. Ringing in ears. Two tones.” But no mention of leaf blowers.

That fact put me in mind of something I once witnessed while driving east across the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A few blocks ahead, I noticed a thick, brown turbulent haze. It looked as if one of the shopping centers at Highland Village was on fire. It turned out to be just two men at work, using leaf blowers to flush debris out of the foliage, onto the sidewalk, and into the street. The air had that strange color it takes on just before a total solar eclipse. The sound was like two angry chain saws. Nonetheless, the outdoor tables at a Starbucks, about twenty yards away, were fully occupied, boulevardiers sipping their lattes as if nothing was happening.

But something was happening: Two machines were “pushing relatively large volumes of air, typically between 300 and 700 cubic feet per minute, at a high wind speed, typically 150 to 280 miles per hour,” in the words of the California Air Resources Board. (“Hurricane wind speed,” that study noted helpfully, “is 117 miles per hour.”) The localized storm raises a cloud of dust that, according to a California grand jury, includes “fecal material, fertilizers, fungal spores, pesticides, herbicides, pollen, and other biological substances.” In an urban setting, the blower also stirs up what some studies call “paved road dust.” That would include your allergens, your heavy metals, and the residue that comes from brakes, tires, and engine exhaust.

The only place this issue has risen to the level of a political battle is California. It went on for years, and it isn’t over yet. “It was a battle of Democrats,” says Larry Rolfuss of the California Landscape Contractors Association in Sacramento. Hispanic workers carried the water for the landscapers, at one point staging a hunger strike in the state capitol over the issue. Los Angeles passed its leaf-blower ordinance in 1998.

One anti-blower activist was Joan Graves, still an active member of a group called Zero Air Pollution Los Angeles, and the wife of Minnesota-born actor Peter Graves. “They are really dreadful machines,” she said. Today enforcement is lax, according to Graves. She noted that the elderly and chronic asthmatics, who may suffer the most direct effects, may be the least likely to complain.

Robert Moffitt, communications director of the American Lung Association of Minnesota, agrees there’s a problem. Two-cycle engines are part of it, he says. They pollute as much as several cars can. Electric models solve that, but not the problem of the “fine particulates” leaf blowers stir up. “They get right past the body’s defenses and breathed deeply into the lungs, where they are trapped,” he said. —David Rubenstein

“Wilbert! Wilbert!” his wife yelled at the top of her lungs toward the makeshift house behind the llama cage at Behn’s Game Farm in the tiny town of Aniwa, in northern Wisconsin. “He’s hard of hearing,” she explained. With a slight limp, Wilbert slowly emerged from the plywood building, looking as though he’d just awakened from a nap.

At eighty years old and some change, Wilbert Behn is the oldest lion and tiger tamer in the world. His white hair is frazzled, perhaps from his snooze, and his ratty jeans and soiled shirt carry a ripe smell that suggests he knows animals. As he walked by the tiger cage, the fierce Bengali and Siberian cats watched him nervously. Obviously, they know who’s the boss.

How does one become a lion tamer? “One day I just jumped in the ring and tried it out,” Wilbert remembered. “I’ve been doing shows ever since, for the last forty-nine years. You should try it—you never know if you’re a natural until you get in the cage,” he told me. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I did not point out that if I find out I’m not a natural, I’ll be dead.

I asked the missus what they usually feed these big cats, who seemed to be eyeing me hungrily. “Oh, fresh meat. Usually beef or veal. We don’t get as many horses anymore because people sell them for dog food.” Wilbert said that feeding time can be dangerous, though. “Once when I was feeding the lion, I got bit through both of my legs, and I got clobbered. I stepped over the trough and he just figured I was meat. I was real hung up for a while, until someone came to help me. If it wasn’t for rubber boots, I wouldn’t be around anymore.”

Nevertheless, Wilbert retains his cool composure around the cats. “I always look them in the eye. If you don’t, that’s when they get you. I use two objects, since the cats can’t concentrate on two things at a time. You know if I really didn’t want to get hurt by the cats, though, the only thing I could really do would be to stay the heck out of the ring.”

The danger isn’t only to the tamer, however. “I’ve had up to six cats in the ring at the same time, and once I did a show and the lioness went after the tiger. She bit the tiger right through the shoulder blade and blood was everywhere. I finally was able to get them separated by distracting them, so they didn’t kill each other. I looked into the stands and noticed that the audience had run away.”

“See, most cats are declawed to make them less dangerous, but I never declaw or neuter them. If they’re neutered or declawed, I wouldn’t even have them on a plate—they’re still dangerous. A woman just got maimed down in Busch Gardens, Florida. A cat got her and chewed off her arm at the elbow.”

Wilbert seems to love the danger of training lions and tigers, however, and he lifted up his shirt to show me scars from tiger bites across his body. But many tamers aren’t even that lucky. Wilbert told the gruesome story of his friend Dwayne who started another circus in northern Wisconsin. “The first show he did, a cat got a hold of him. The lion dragged him around the ring in front of two hundred schoolkids and their parents. He was dead by then, though.” Wilbert shakes his head sadly. “Now, every time I do a show, I can still see him standing there in the ring with me.”

Wilbert viewed this incident as a reason to continue with his work. He pointed out his plywood auditorium with the large sign above the door that says, “NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES.” Ever the showman, Wilbert said, “If you want, I could bring the cats into the ring and give you a show now!”—Eric Dregni

“So you’re telling me,” I ask the Pope of Witches, “that Hubert Humphrey was a vampire?”

“Yes, he actually was. Hubert was a very interesting person.”

So says Carl Llewellyn Weschcke. We are sitting in his spacious office at the St. Paul headquarters of Llewellyn Worldwide, the largest independent occult publishing house in America. At age seventy-two, he’s a sage and grandfatherly figure, like a well-groomed Father Christmas or Albus Dumbledore. He has been president of Llewellyn for forty-three years. The ascendance of his company has both mirrored and fueled the rise of New Age from an obscure fringe phenomenon to the remarkably mainstream movement it is today. And because of his influence, the Twin Cities is one of the nation’s major pagan population centers. Just across town, in fact, the hugely popular Edge Fest conference kicks off later this month. Weschcke can take some small measure of credit—or blame, depending on your point of view.

The Weschcke family has for four generations combined business with an uncommon interest in unusual religions. Carl’s grandfather Charles was a successful pharmacist, patent-medicine inventor, and prominent theosophist who passed his views on to his son and grandson. As a young man, Carl felt his life’s work went somewhat beyond his grandpa’s herbal laxative, and in January 1960 he spent forty thousand dollars on a small mail-order astrology publisher, Llewellyn, and moved it from Los Angeles to St. Paul.

Unless he’s clairvoyant, Carl couldn’t have known how successful this would be. He tells me that if he’d only wanted to make money, he’d have done something else. But he was passionate about the occult, and he identified with the company so strongly that he literally took its name as his own. And his timing was perfect: Llewellyn may have been decidedly fringe in the Eisenhower era, but few people in the fifties guessed that the next decade would be…the sixties. Vision-questing hippies found their needs met in a steady stream of books with the distinctive crescent-moon logo on the spine.

In the late sixties and seventies, Carl Weschcke flourished as a sort of public emissary for Wicca, the ancient religion of witches and warlocks. Crowded gatherings at his bookstore, a former mortuary he dubbed “Gnostica,” snowballed into the first openly pagan public events in America, now remembered as the legendary “Gnosticons.” These were sort of Star Trek conventions for druids, psychics, witches, and astrologers, who flocked here from all over the world. He picked up that tongue-in-cheek papal moniker for his founding role in the Council of American Witches, a short-lived but influential cadre of occultists. Their main accomplishment—creating a thirteen-point statement defining Wiccan belief—was no small feat for a brand of faith with no central authority, and no moral precept other than “If it harm none, do what thou wilt.”

“That was the first time in this country that witches got together to try to hammer out something saying ‘This is the way we should act toward one another,’” says Magenta, a cofounder of the New Alexandrian Pagan Library in South Minneapolis. It was a vital statement of self-identity for New Age religion in the face of a mainstream that often equated nature worship with Satanism.

Still, Weschcke was willing, if not eager, to play the role of the eerie wizard around the press, who relished such an interesting character. Newspaper photos of him back in those days are often candlelit and spooky, his eyes owlishly peering out like a Midwestern Vincent Price. Articles describe secret initiation rituals into his coven at the notorious mansion on Summit Avenue, supposedly the state’s most haunted building, that was Weschcke’s home and corporate headquarters.

After his son, Gabe, was born, Carl decided to settle down a bit. He sold the mansion and discontinued the festivals. These days, he is relieved to have it all behind him. “I never enjoyed being in the limelight,” he insists. “But I did it because I felt I had to do it. I was a very shy person as a young boy, and basically reclusive. I did a lot of lecturing on behalf of Wicca, and some I felt very good about. I was on the Phil Donahue show once. And no, I didn’t enjoy it.”

Magenta credits Weschcke’s open lifestyle with helping to break down barriers not unlike those faced by gays and lesbians. “In the seventies and eighties, a lot of us weren’t willing to be out of the broom closet,” she says. “People were worried about losing jobs, losing houses, losing kids. But Carl was publishing the books, so he kind of had to be.”

The last decade has seen an enormous increase in the New Age audience. Llewellyn has thrived, especially in the burgeoning teen market, with books like Silver Ravenwolf’s The Solitary Witch. But the tarot cards are growing more insistent. Not today, but soon,Weschcke must face the inevitable: retirement. “I’ve got 10,000 books I haven’t read,” he said. “I’ve got books I’d like to write.”

Maybe one will be a Wiccan biography of HHH. Humphrey wasn’t a blood-drinking fiend, explains Carl, but more of an energy vampire. (This is a relief.) “I remember one time he was giving a speech in downtown St. Paul,” Weschke says. “There was the most drained man. He was pasty white. He’d been at it all day. And then he started talking. And you could see him absorbing vitality from the people. The more he talked, his cheeks got rosy, he got this vibrant energy, bouncing up and down. That’s a form of vampirism. It happens.”—Christopher Bahn

Never take a self-defense class with your sisters. Especially if the class is called Training for Life, in which you learn techniques that, unlike traditional martial arts, are designed not to inflict permanent or even semi-permanent harm upon an attacker, but instead rely on a series of intensely painful, twisted pinches. Three sisters, six hands, and the permission to clamp those claws onto each other equals years of sibling rivalry resolved through innumerable bruises.

We discovered this agony too late. My sisters Erin, 19, and Kelly, 22, had agreed to attend the class with me. I had already met with Pat Feahr, who, along with her sister Chris, is a newly licensed instructor in TFL; the Feahr sisters are the only such instructors in Minnesota. She explained the premise of this type of self-defense: a regimen of simple jabs, pinches, and kicks that, when aimed at some of the body’s most sensitive nerves, can disrupt an attacker’s central nervous system long enough for a victim to get away. The moves were created by Tom Patire, a lifelong professional bodyguard to the rich and famous. TFL is supposed to be easy to use and easy to remember, even when you’re under duress. Ironically, it’s also supposed to be easy on your attacker. This might seem a bit counterintuitive, but Professor Pat pointed out that most of us just aren’t violent people by nature. Therefore, the program surmises, we don’t really want to hurt people. TFL allows you to harm a person just enough to help yourself, but not so much that you’d have trouble sleeping at night. I’m not sure mainstream Minnesotans, now potentially wielding firearms on their persons, would agree that this is a concern. But the minimum-harm ethic is good for another reason: It will help you win that case when your attacker takes you to court for battery. Ridiculous, I know, but still potentially useful in our litigious, avaricious, and heat-packing society.

From the sound of it, the class was effective. It seemed like something my two younger sisters, both in college and therefore subject to the dangers of university campuses, should attend. We filed into the Feahr’s martial arts school, Mask Karate, and sat on folding chairs while Pat and Chris demonstrated some of the moves. Then practice began.

We started with “the horse bite,” an incredibly painful pinch and twist that you can use on an attacker’s underarm or inner thigh. If you use the technique on an aggressor who has hold of your arm, the intense pain is supposed to result in him or her instinctively releasing you. Pat described it as a tweak a grandmother might give, but I’m sure my grandmother couldn’t be that harsh. My sisters and I, though, grasped the concept quite easily, and we immediately dug our fingers into each others’ skin, with the varying outcome of yelps, squeals, “uncles,” and even a fall to the ground. We carried on through “the v-trigger” (a sharp jab to a nerve on your hand that immediately forces a person to release his grip); “the shin insertion” (a swift, straight-legged kick to a person’s shin that causes him to double over in pain); and “the dual facial points” (jabs into an attacker’s cheeks so deep and painful that you can “hold” the person and actually force him to the ground). The idea during this rehearsal was just to get a feel for where the nerves were, but what’s the point of learning a self-defense program if you haven’t learned to use it properly? Being the eldest sister, I confess I was the biggest bully of all. So much so that two hours and about eight new techniques later, my sisters cowered at my approach and forgave me only when I bought them each a Diet Cherry Coke. But for the record, I’ve got more than my share of bruises, too.—Katie Quirk

Lawyers are the ultimate insiders. Just ask anyone foolhardy enough to represent him- or herself in court. So just how does a lawyer get to be an outsider? Rob Lowe’s stunning 1985 haircut for his new TV series, Lyon’s Den, seems to be doing the trick for him. But around here, nonfictional lawyers do it with art. The evidence was entered into the record recently when “Lawyers as Artists” opened at the newborn Outsiders and Others gallery in downtown Minneapolis. About half a dozen artists, all members in good standing with the Bar Association, hung their work and braced themselves to mingle with a jury of their peers.

Under the questionable influence of chocolate martinis, the crowd gave much attention to a set of lush, erodelic pen-and-ink compositions by attorney Valerie Tremelat. Avron Gordon’s black-and-white photos of lilies were easy on the eyes. Still, there was clearly a drift toward one corner: Just about everyone felt summoned to the crop art produced by Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services attorney Laura Melnick.

Melnick’s work lays claim to outsider status in at least three ways. She has no formal training of any kind in the arts, and crop art itself is an outside medium more associated with the Soybean Belt than the Warehouse District. And being a lawyer originally from Ohio, Melnick herself is an outsider to the rural culture that spawned the form.

“I’m from Cleveland,” she confessed when we spoke at the opening. “I never saw crop art before I moved here and went to the State Fair.” At this year’s State Fair, Melnick entered a subtle satire titled Curious George Looks for Weapons of Mass Destruction, making use of sixteen varieties of seed to depict America’s favorite monkey checking under the yellow hat for VX. It won a blue ribbon and “first place reserve,” a euphemism that means second place. Last year she also took a prize with an entry titled Goodnight Buffoon, featuring the image of Governor Ventura pondering a bowl full of mush at sleepytime. Both works will hang at Outsiders and Others through November 8, though without the usual accompaniment of crop art by her husband and two children, who also hold ribbons from State Fair competition.

Another crowd pleaser was the first item to sell at the opening: a bronze casting of a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser. It was one in a series of Pez castings that includes Inspector Clouseau and the Pink Panther. Homer went quickly at the attractive price of $55. The Pink Panther, however, was priced at $95. Watercolor painter, landscape designer, bronze artist, and District Court Judge Gary Bastian explained the price difference. “I could make up to three hundred of Homer,” he said. And while the Pink Panther Pez can be had in plastic for pretty much anyone who needs one, Bastian broke the mold for the bronze casting. “It’s one of a kind.”—Joe Pastoor

The other day, we strolled down Hennepin Avenue and ducked into the city’s oldest bar. In a paneled backroom where we might have expected a billiard table, a small group of mystery writers had assembled to tipple and talk shop. Writers are normally solo artists, not given to fraternizing with the enemy. But mystery writers are different. They root for each other, they swap ideas, they reveal their tricks. It reminded us of Penn Jillette’s recent article in the Los Angeles Times. After prompting from political friends, Jillette genially tried to explain how magicians tell a little lie to hide a bigger lie—that’s what misdirection and sleight-of-hand are all about, though he said the ability to apply the lesson to certain current political realities was beyond him.

We only wish there were more magic abroad. Our present impasse lacks deftness in handling. Our public servants have stopped trying to create the illusion of compromise and cooperation. We’re not sure why the National Hubris Reserve has skyrocketed in the years since the Republicans had their revenge on Bill Clinton. But we have noticed that the problem with go-it-alone conservatism is that it’s inherently anti-social. And it seems to be catching. From Washington to Austin, Texas, from Bill O’Reilly to Al Franken, we’re witnessing a breakdown in civility. It’s as if road rage had escaped from the outer-ring suburbs and infiltrated the office, the school, the neighborhood park. Those who excuse these rude times by saying politics is a contact sport can be counted on to despise sympathy, and to debase the proprieties. It’s a shame, because even when our representatives are fighting for just causes in complex times, we’re inclined to pick sides and plug our ears, as if it were a wrestling match or a bodybuilding contest.

The other day, Sen. Norman Coleman indicated that he will vote to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it means more jobs in Northern Minnesota. A coal gasification plant is on the verge of being legislated into existence up on the Range. This is not really a feint to distract us from cronyism, nor from Senator Coleman’s previous opposition to same, though it may be an unpleasant brand of gladhanding. (It does two things that irritate us: It panders to outstate voters, among whom the DFL has long been in decline. And it polishes to a high shine the illusion that Washington is allied with the suburbs and the exurbs against the wicked inner city. )

Senator Coleman is hopeful that ANWR will never come up for a vote, and it probably won’t. It’s much too contentious. But then Alaskans have wanted access to ANWR for decades, to further pad their own wallets. And if padding theirs means padding ours, then why not reconsider?

We remain opposed, on the sneaking suspicion that plundering our national legacy for immediate local gain is not entirely responsible. But we’re even more adamant that what’s needed is a thorough airing of priorities. If this is pocketbook politics, let it be known by its correct name. We’re most opposed to simplemindedness. Republicans have so turned off Democrats that lefties may fight tooth and nail against even the best kinds of legislation, and look for the meanest reason by which to impugn them. Congress might limit the damage the executive branch is doing by maximizing corporate profits under bright-sounding prevarications like the “Clean Energy Act.” If we must be tricked into such mischief, then at least bring back the illusion of consensus. In the meantime, they should permanently concede ANWR to the treehuggers (why, after all, is it called a “refuge”?), and find some other way to send money where it’s needed.

It started with letters in the mail. Then there were the spies. Then one day at an unglamorous neighborhood coffee shop in South Minneapolis, the phone rang. “I’ve been to your café. I know you have a CD player,” said the voice on the phone. Paul knew he was in trouble. It was true; there was a CD player in his café. And if he didn’t do something about it, it could cost him $150,000.

Like most café owners, Paul (last name withheld) doesn’t have $150,000 to throw away. But the caller, a licensing representative with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), has the legal muscle of a half-a-billion-dollar corporation behind him. And Paul’s CD player, though innocent-looking enough, is really a delivery system for the unlicensed performance of copyrighted works that might be registered with ASCAP. Copyright law provides for fines of up to $30,000 per infringement—$150,000 for willful infringement.

Welcome to the world of intellectual property. Pop a CD you paid for into a stereo you paid for in the business you are in hock for. Push play, and check your bed for severed horse heads in the morning.

One might think, for example, that royalties had already been paid when the CD was purchased. True, but that’s called a mechanical royalty, and it’s collected and distributed by the publisher. So why not just play the radio? The stations have already paid the royalties for that, right? Well, get out your tape measure; if your establishment has more than 3,750 square feet (not including parking lot), you need to pay for radio. Got a jukebox? That means you need a “JLO”—a royalty agreement specifically for jukeboxes. What about the bearded, sincere folk guitarist who plays for tips on Saturday nights? Well, he might play a cover of a song copyrighted by someone else, and then you are on the hook, not him.

“Performance rights” are a whole and separate animal from other copyrights, and they are held by only three Performing Rights Organizations (PROs): ASCAP, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), and the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC). They have lately come calling to local coffee shops and bars to get their piece of the action. Ask nearly any coffee-shop owner or operator in the metro area about license fees, and terms like “Cosa Nostra” or “protection racket” are bound to come up.

“Somewhere between the Mafia and the Inquisition,” said Paul, describing ASCAP, the day I visited his café. A St. Paul coffee-shop owner, who requested anonymity, echoed, “They really are the music mafia.” Kate Hepp of Gigi’s in South Minneapolis, who has paid BMI for “protection,” told The Rake, “It’s very intimidating, the letters you get.”

When you’re married, a funny thing happens. You lose your alone time. My pal Brad, proud daddy of two, says it’s much worse when you have kids. He says it’s been months since he had the house to himself. Why would he want the house to himself, you ask? Well, this is going to be a touchy subject, and full of goofy euphemisms, so let’s just jump right in. Married men-and presumably married women, too-need to occasionally release sexual tension. Solo. This is something we don’t normally talk about with each other; you just assume it happens, you respect that tiny bit of alone time your spouse manages to sneak, and that’s that. You wash your hands, you move on, everyone’s happy, no one’s the wiser. Unless you get caught.

Yes, the other day my precious tootled off to the grocery store. Seizing the opportunity to make an efficient end of this tawdry business and move on to more important things, I drew a tub of water and jumped in. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t planned a romantic little interlude for myself. I’ve never bought into the religious poppycock about this particular sin. What point is there in making people feel guilty about something that feels so good and hurts so few? Something that is, in any case, so inevitable? Talk about victimless crimes. Well, the water was rushing, a scented candle, a little bath oil, things were swimming along nicely, I must not have heard the door open, and there was my precious staring in horror at my private moment.

The so-called scientists who “study” this kind of thing say that nine out of ten men go solo on a fairly frequent basis. I count myself among the “infrequent”, since I do it maybe once a week at the most. I think that’s pretty reasonable. Maybe a little too rare, but hey, we lead awfully busy lives. My friend Pete, on the other hand, claims to do it-to need to do it-three times a day. I don’t know if that’s even possible for a man over the age of 18, but Pete’s always been an overachiever.

Don tells me that his doctor actually advised him to do it more. Why? Because, Don claims, men who don’t relieve themselves in this way are more susceptible to prostate problems. What’s more, Don says he works with an ultra-Christian guy who decided to swear off all sexual satisfaction, and it wasn’t three weeks before he was into his clinic for a digital exam, feeling less horny than seriously ill. A prostate infection was the diagnosis, and release was the actual prescription. Now how could a loving God expect a man to give up both sex and health on His behalf? (Obviously, release is possible with one’s spouse. The medical assumption here is that men want and apparently need sex more often than they are likely to get from the women in their lives, or more often than can be arranged. This seems to be a simple and universal fact of life, with notable exceptions that tend to turn into locker-room legends.)

The sex scientists say that only about five in ten women pleasure themselves, which I find kind of depressing. I don’t know whether my precious is one of them, but I like to assume she is, because she can go for what seems like months without any inter-squad scrimmages. I also believe that men and women are more alike than not, so I have to wonder why it’s less common in the fairer sex. Some people (like Colleen over there) say that women can survive just fine without sex; others say it’s strictly an issue of socialization and tradition. Women, perhaps even more than men, have been hammered for so long in the Judeo-Christian moral code that says this is wicked behavior. And men have long harbored a deep fear that women don’t actually need men for satisfaction. My theory is that the skewed numbers are just a “reporting” issue. Everyone does it, but no one admits it-not even anonymously, to some pervert calling himself a sex researcher.

Anyway, only a bloodless Bible banger would begrudge someone his or her alone time, and so my precious turned quickly out of the bathroom without a word. Did I fantasize that she would rip off her clothes and jump in the tub with me and take matters into her own hands? The truth is, I was happy sticking with the plan. Sometimes it’s easier, quicker, and cleaner that way. Does that make it strictly an issue of clearing the pipes, rather than an affirmation of my most intimate personal relationship with my precious? Sure. But married men are like that, sometimes, when it comes to sex.

The thing I miss most about living in the country is the very thing I eventually came to hate about it: the long snake of black tar between one place and another, the empty distances, the endless driving. Oh, my God, how I miss the driving.

I miss going for days and days without leaving the house in winter, little babies, creaky floors, nowhere to go, no one to see. Four walls, big window, bare branches, frozen lake.

I miss stuffing those babies into snowsuits and then stuffing those snowsuits into car seats, clicking them in, and going, going, nowhere, for hours. Sleeping children, warm car, barren county roads. I can’t remember anymore the times it didn’t work. The times the baby boy screamed instead of slept, the times the spirited girl, that untamed horse, pulled his hair or bit him. The one time we skidded on black ice right into the ditch as a storm kicked up on the last afternoon of December. I don’t care about those times anymore now that we’ve survived and nobody kept screaming forever, or biting forever. They stopped those things, and it all turned out okay, and now I miss the driving the way I remember it.

The car I hated the most is the one I now recall so fondly. Big Blue, we named it, because it was a boat, and it was blue. It was handed down from the in-laws for the eighteen hundred dollars it took to replace the transmission. We paid over time for this beast, large and unstylish with that dirty patch of duct tape on the taillight (smashed as it sat innocently in the small-town church parking lot-smashed, it would seem, by a fellow parishioner who drove away from the damage without so much as an apology note, can you imagine?). But I can’t remember the duct tape anymore, or the way driving that car made me feel like a cross between a grandpa and an unwed teenage mother. That’s not the way I remember Big Blue. It’s the heft of it that I recall, the solid slam of the door, the quiet way it hummed at high speeds-no shaking or whining the way these small tin boxes do. Big Blue had a way of rocking gently as it coasted that made me understand and appreciate the likening of large cars to watercraft. It’s a compliment, really, to call a car a boat. I loved Big Blue, even though I was very, very happy when it died.

What I miss most about those country afternoons in Big Blue is the way it came to feel so normal to drive a long, long way to nowhere. Sometimes I took the children to the thrift store at the intersection that still poses as a town called Almelund. I’d carry my son on my hip while chasing my daughter around the store. But the chase was made easier by the woman who owned the shop-her strange appearance entranced my curious little girl. The shopkeeper always wore floor-length skirts with aprons, and frilly blouses with high collars, small buttons, and puffed sleeves. She looked like Ma Ingalls on Sunday. I don’t know why she dressed this way, because I never asked her. But she fit in pretty well with her surroundings. The air in the shop was dense with must, and the place was crammed floor to ceiling with broken antiques and unusual junk. I always, out of politeness, bought some tiny thing, usually a ten-cent plastic toy to keep my hyper mare occupied for the long drive home.

But just as often as we stopped, we kept going, further east into Wisconsin, or north toward Pine City, children sleeping, motor whirring, road unrolling behind us like the world’s longest runner, steel gray and utterly inhospitable, except for its openness. The only choices to be made were trivial ones: Turn left or right? Exit now or later? Turn around or keep on driving?

I miss the driving because I’ll never have it again. The country is behind me, the country with its right-wing politics and greasy-spoon food and frigid lake full of milfoil and disappointment. The country with its endless county roads crisscrossing each other and looping back on themselves, as senseless and difficult to decipher as the lines of an open palm. So many roads, so few destinations.
My children don’t wear snowsuits anymore, or ride in car seats, or remember much about Big Blue. They have places to go with specific routes to appointed stops that leave little room for rumination. The city is full of destinations, but short on empty stretches of tar, of time, of space, where a person can travel hundreds of miles without ever leaving. I don’t ever want to drive that way again, so desperately and without purpose, but still I miss it more than I can say.