The Burly Flow Podcast

That's a wrap! The first season of the Burly Flow Podcast is in the books. But what's on the horizon?

“So, tell me perr-fessor,” Leland Potter said, shifting over to the stool next to mine. “What's the deal with this Hemingway guy?” “Big topic, Hemingway.” “It's a long afternoon.” Leland calls me professor because he's heard I worked at a university. Also, and probably more importantly, I'm not a local, so he presumes that if I'm not actually a professor, I'm at least smart enough to be one. That holds true for every outsider, by the way. Unless they're from Iowa.

Part of our fascination with Nickel Ross' age came from the fact that he was even still around. Nobody crashes an airplane five times over the course of a life. At least nobody who makes it to 83. But that's just what he did. Shot down twice in WWII. Busted a nose wheel in Korea. Clipped a wire during his crop dusting days out west. Then lost an engine on takeoff in the 80s “just to remember what it felt like.” Five crashes. Eighty-three years old.

The rain had fallen most of the night and showed no signs of letting up now that it was morning, leaving us all a rainy Saturday to figure out what to do with. You know the kind of day I'm talking about. For some, it's a movie day. For some, a go back to bed day. For others, it's a clean out the closet and eat ice cream day. For just about everyone, it's a stay at home if you can day … except me.

“I figured the outing would provide a good balance,” Joey said. “A chance for me to take charge as well as be supportive. You know — the full spectrum of Joey Garnavillo in one dark night.” “Can you have a spectrum in the dark?” I asked. “Oh, you absolutely can't,” he replied.

The thing about "the wave," at least around here — you're not going to get one unless you've got Wisconsin plates. You're just not. I think in the end it boils down to reassuring people you're not a Bears fan. I mean, I suppose you could be a Bears fan and have Wisconsin plates, but the chances are pretty slim. At least in public, which is all that matters when it comes to football. Who people cheer for in their own homes is their own business, so long as they keep their curtains closed.

Now that I have Natasha, my Subaru, and can comfortably carry four other people just about anywhere at a moment's notice, I find myself in a place where I can pretty much walk everywhere I need to go. I'm not sure if that's ironic or just par for the course, but whatever it is, it's a far cry from what it was like in Georgia, where a car was required to go just about anywhere — if we're talking summer, even across the street. That made things particularly dicey for me when we had a team lunch at work. At the time, I drove a 12-year-old Dodge Caliber with 218,000 miles on it. 

Joey Garnavillo loves to talk, and he'll happily talk for hours about just about anything … except fishing, the thing he does the most and knows the most about. And for the longest time, that bugged me. “It's a thing I like to do, not talk about,” he'd say, and on one hand, I get it. I've read enough Hemingway-on-writing to know that it's best not to lose the good stuff by talking it away. On the other hand, it was hard for me not to feel he was being selfish, given how many great stories he must have. And while I wasn't going to jeopardize my friendship with Joey by continuing to pester him, that doesn't mean I gave up, either.

As a man in my fifties who doesn't immediately scream midlife crisis, I can get away with bending the rules on occasion, like sneaking a Scotch and Soda down to the river park to watch the sunset every now and then. And though it's usually quiet, there's more to see down there than you might expect.

Paul Branigan is the kind of guy who throws himself at whatever he happens to be interested in. And because he's got the attention span of a fruit fly, that means he's throwing himself at an awful lot of things, pretty much all the time. Puppetry. Bird watching. Model rockets. Charcuterie. “There's just so much to learn,” he told me one day, back from Dubuque with a wood burner and an arm full of boards. “There's just so much to do.”

Burly Flow opened its first kickball field a couple of Saturdays ago, and it was a pretty big deal. Not, like, Governor flies in on his chopper big, more like speeches and brats big, but still — for around here, that qualifies. Though most have fond memories of playing kickball in school and many say that no sound brings them more pure joy than the sound of a proper kickball being kicked, I myself have no such feelings. Like anything that requires athleticism or coordinated effort, I'm not very good at it, which means I tend to avoid it, which means I have no experience with it, which starts a chain reaction that ends with everyone, including teachers who are trained and paid to know better, laughing at me.

No one ever quite understood how Vernon Simms could be so closemouthed about it all. Ever since his six improbable years of marriage to the esteemed (just ask her) Annabeth Chase ended in divorce, the lanky handyman hadn't spoken a peep about it. And believe me — when the town's only power tie-wearing female executive marries, then divorces, its happy-go-lucky handyman, it's news. So when Vernon took to the Wheezer's stage on Open Mic Night, we all held our breath and hoped for a little insight. What we got, amazingly, was the whole enchilada.

If the Southwest Wisconsin Affiliated Paranormal Society (SWWAPS) was after professionalism with their business card, they missed it by at least a mile. Their initials were in a juvenile, spooky font next to an Eye of Sauron-like graphic, and the tagline — GOT HAUNTS? — was predictably in block letters. Who ya gonna call? Not them. The problem was, eventually they called me.

Joey Garnavillo believes in keeping warm, and as the town's house sitter of choice, he has the advantage of having other people pay for that privilege. All he has to do is make it to Thanksgiving, when the first of the snowbirds start heading south, after which he has the pick of the abandoned nests. For those of us without the benefit of someone else's bank account to draw from, winter survival — however you want to define survival — is a messy exercise in controlled misery. Or, maybe a better way to look at it: it's like “Bolero,” but Bo Derek is nowhere in sight.

To the best of my knowledge, no one knows the real story behind Ichabod the Heron, but you know there's got to be one. A town doesn't just get a mascot (or patron saint, depending on who you talk to) without a story. “You realize your Ichabod is a heron, right?” I asked Clancy Chambers one morning as he was stenciling heron tracks onto the park road ahead of the Fall Festival, which had been renamed `BodFest sometime during my absence. “Well, yeah…” he said, holding up the cardboard stencil. “And a heron is not a crane,” I said. He shrugged and started shaking his can of spray paint. “Who said anything about cranes?”

Apparently, the rich haven't just gotten richer, they've gotten softer as well. Or maybe just showier. Because everything that used to be screened in is now glassed in, and there's not a stacking deck chair to be seen. And that kind of breaks my heart, you know? Because for some people, stacking deck chairs were as good as it was ever going to get — and they were absolutely fine with that. Like my mom.

If you're wondering why someone skinny enough to be compared to a drinking bird toy got to be called Bobber, you're missing the joke. The thing is, irony aside, he actually is shaped like a bobber, just not the conventional kind. In fact, there are any number of different shaped bobbers, most with a corresponding body type. In Bobber Lawrence's case, it's a pencil bobber he resembles, which is built thin to give as little resistance as possible when a fish starts to swim away with the bait.

When it comes to holiday hang ups, most people wrap them up and save them for Christmas, don't they? And believe me — I've got plenty of presents to put under that tree. But for me, it's really more about the Fourth of July.

When you move, the best you can hope for is that: (1) you arrive at your new place with aches and pains that aren't too debilitating; (2) you've got everything you planned to have; and (3) the condition of the place you left behind isn't too shameful. That's the best you can hope for. That's victory. But you know what it's not? It's not the end. It's really just the beginning.

If you're new to Burly Flow, this is the place to start.