PART I- THE PAINTED WORD

After the 10 minutes of despair I allow myself daily… it is time to wonder. I
think about the wealth in this country. When I drive by the big homes in
Pacific Heights, I sometimes think, “Indeed. There are wealthy millionaires
here in our country.” But then when I drive by the multi- million dollar homes
in Mill Valley, I think, “Well, there are more wealthy people than I thought.”
But then I go to Corte Madera, or Larkspur, or Kentfield, or Ross, and then to
the Berkeley Hills or Kensington, or Palo Alto, or Los Gatos and realize that
every major city in this country has hundreds of mansions, which house thousands
and even millions of people in this land who have a lot of money. It’s
enlightening. It’s sobering. Amazing.

Then I think back along the general lines of conquest and appropriation of this
land, the wars with Mexicans, with Indians, with the British, the French, and
even a few Prussians out there (or did they fight with us?) to secure 50 states
which are capable of working as one, I see that we’ve been good at what we do.
Amazingly so. And how did that happen? America, in many ways, was a refuge for
those who didn’t fit in Europe. Religious zealots. Escaped criminals. Free
thinkers and visionaries. Contrarians. Crack pots. And here and there… out
and out geniuses who knew how to seize the day, how to organize people, how to
accomplish goals, how to recognize and act upon the difference between
imagination and accomplishment, a rare gift, but seemingly almost commonplace
here. And then there was the almost unbelievable wealth and beauty of this
place, making Haiti, the pearl of the Antilles and (once) a true paradise pale
in comparison.

I would imagine that this thought of mine is commonplace. I don’t think my next
thought is.

It’s a question. How could it be possible that such a wealthy place has allowed
itself to become the Bonneville Salt Flats, the Dugway Proving Ground of such a
gallimaufry of vacuous “artistic” ventures that one would think we were not only
a Lame Confederacy but also a Mighty Federation of Dunces engaged in proving the
truth of Wolfe’s THE PAINTED WORD. There we learn that art in our day is not a
matter of inspired visionaries showing us things we could not have seen without
them, but rather a fire sale of intellectual mummery, most recently headed by a
herd of grateful liberals intent on touting the shallow to the hollow, bum fuck
democracy run amuck, and unique inspiration allowable only if it serves the
numb, the cynical, and those most imminently to be paid.

But thinking again, I remember all those mansions with need for expensive gee
gaws on their walls, or heady “installations” lying inert in the foyers. Enter
the Art Carpetbaggers eager to elucidate the obvious for the oblivious and
simultaneously relieve them of discretionary swag. Tom Wolfe pretty much said
it all in THE PAINTED WORD. No “high concept” Art can exist today without a
scorecard thoughtfully provided by the nearest available docent with an
undergraduate degree as to what and how and if and whether this egregiously dumb
object in front of us is…. Means… or even more importantly SIGNIFIES. People
stoned the David as it was carried through the streets of Florence, but not
because they had no idea what it was. Like all great Art, it was offensive to
conformists, apologists, keepers of the status quo, and most of all, to the
religious orders which have historically caused more trouble than any scallywag
emperor or self proclaimed despot down through history. And add to that the art
moguls who have lined their pockets due to our daily swallow of humbug.

So think again. A society dripping in money. Mansions all over the place. Art
museums and galleries filled with the squalid and the pallid, the nonesuch of
nonsense with nothing for the heart, for the longing, for the fear, for the
empathy, for the “being.” Just rubbish hawked in the temples to dupes. Maybe
it all does fit together. People able to discern with heart and soul the
difference between a urinal and a hymnal might cause trouble. And of course
you can’t sell that inventory of coded signifiers rotting in the backroom if
people know they’re being had. Money follows ignorance and graft in the two
faced world of the painted word. I suggest we all respond with a word of our
own. A short word.

PART II- PRESQUE ISLE

I felt like a salmon urging upstream to spawn. Every street corner, every line
on the sidewalk ripped a memory right out of my chest. I found myself driving
around night after night. Past the house on Oneida where we lived shortly after
I was born. Parking down the street from the Tiffany glass domed Courthouse
floating above green summer. And Karen Holderby’s yellow veranda hard by it
where I hoped to be noticed on evening walk-bys and past Nancy Boyce’s house,
where I found the polka dot bowtie in the snow after another fruitless
perambulatory tribute.

I’d drive over the bridge above the dark, mysterious Pelican River and into Old
Colony, previously a dubious, dangerous place where tough kids might threaten
and sometimes actually commit their childish mayhem. Or I’d wind up the hill
above the paper mill driving past the house on Highview Parkway where I had been
conceived. The last few times I found myself hoping that my Mother had received
me with orgasmic fervor, some compensation for later disappointments.

Maybe it’s because I left when I was barely 14 years old, hormonal furnaces
stoked with impossible longings and fantasies of love mingled with nature in
each exhalation of night breeze and throb of crickets. I remember our earlier
innocence… how we ran behind the DDT wagon which spewed out a cool mist to kill
the mosquitoes. It smelled good and it did its job. Because of that mist of
poison we could sit out with our parents on the cool evening porches, or play
Kick the Can and Eenie, Eenie Eye Over, without the incessant hum and sting of
that billion strong infestation of summer blood lovers. One of the many heady
impulses of the salmon locked onto its satellite receptor sure to the impulse of
home.

15 years ago I decided I was going to make a movie based on memories, fantasies
and surmises about those early days. PRESQUE ISLE, set mostly on the island
our family owned just over the Michigan border, 60 miles from Rhinelander was a
screenplay which arrived almost unbidden, ripped untimely, over flowing like a
teeming river engorged with memory. I first contacted Bob Anderle one of a
group of Tom Sawyer-like boys I had tried to emulate back then. We went to the
same school, same class, were in the same Boy Scout troop, and had various
boyhood adventures including one where, at least in memory, we had turned an
unlocked switch on the main railroad line which would have routed the next train
off onto a short siding… and disaster. We tried to switch it back but weren’t
strong enough. Somehow the train wreck never happened, but even worse, Bob had
no memory of it. In fact, he didn’t remember me at all.

But that didn’t matter. I knew all the kids from back then and so did he. So
we could talk about those days with a fluency which hardly suffered from the
fact that I was the only one who remembered me. Bob’s brother Jay now ran the
Rhinelander Daily News for which, at 13, I had thrown a paper route on the East
Side. Jay ran an article about me and my cinematic dream. Jim Nuthall who ran
the drama department at Nicollet College which had sprung up out on old Highway
G, helped me put together an audition where upwards of 250 people from the area
tried out for roles. Jay also put me in touch with Don Groskopf, a World
Champion Muskie fisherman and guide, who was to become the key man in subsequent
Northwoods filming. Don re-introduced me to the lakes of my childhood, both
dispelling some of the myths I clung to, and opening up a whole new sense of a
land which still held me with an umbilical grasp.

I also took car rides with Mike Skuball whose uncle had once worked with my
father at the Rhinelander Post office. Mike now runs the Rhinelander Logging
Museum in Pioneer Park right across the street from where I grew up. He took me
to his totemic spots and I showed him some of mine as we wandered across the
terrain like cross- roading pool players of old. But instead of hustling marks
we were looking for the moments of recognition which link memory, history and
curiosity. A crumbling farmstead, the rusted carcass of an overturned truck,
the decaying skeleton of a deer in a ditch all parts of the unquenchable
spawning instinct to return and see, return and see.

Mel Davidson, ex head of the paper mill, helped me begin a gallant but largely
fruitless campaign to raise the production money there in the heartland. For
all his valor it was The San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, headed up
by Jeremiah Birnbaum and Stephen Kopels which eventually stepped forward to co-
produce the film and now here I was, with Mickey Freeman, road dog,
cinematographer and visual genius, shooting second unit footage to go with the
principal photography we did in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

We shot on my Grandfather Holmboe’s land, long since donated to the Nature
Conservancy, near the conflux of the Pelican and Wisconsin Rivers. There I
found the rough stone chiseled by my father with which we marked the graves of
my two childhood dogs, Fun and Tinka. We drove 60 miles North through Lake
Tomahawk, Woodruff, and Boulder Junction to the town of Presque Isle right on
the Michigan border, then off the tarmac and onto the dirt road leading to
Gaylord Lake, talismanic spot where I lived my Wordsworthian idyll as a kid in
summertime. Don drove his big truck down the hill, muscling his trailer into
the shallow landing and sliding his boat into the dark tannin water. With this
conveyance we motored out to the island owned by my Grandfather and his son Ted,
and my Uncle Speed and Aunt Joy. They never allowed boats with motors back then
and Don’s was one which quickly trumped the romantic. We knew exactly where we
where with satellite positioning. We knew how deep the water was at every
moment. We could see the fish below as blips on a screen. We could even drop a
small video camera down on a long line and peek at them.

I don’t know how the salmon feel when they return to their ancestral grounds,
but I was breathless. The space age gear had no power to diminish the power
this lake and island still hold for me. Everyone of those who raised me, are
now gone but I felt the need to transform what still remained into a poem to
their presence there, one time, now long ago. Long ago. Could I live long
enough to have a “long ago?” An apocalyptic thought.

We moved slowly, steadily across the water gleaming to the north with those
little glitters when the sun starts to sink. The lily pad beds slid aside for
our passing, there past the dock where years ago I had the dream that a red,
smoking industrial city had grown up on the far side. Mickey waved his wand
across my mystic lake and his pictures are my witness to those who will never
see this film, but are memorialized in its making. Don, whose life has been
spent on waters like these, sat quietly guiding us through. I knew that he, a
lifetime guide, hunter and fisherman in the Northwoods, understood what was
happening. Up there the “old home place” is memorialized in a poem on a brass
plaque in front of the Oneida County Courthouse, now also in the movie. We’re
all salmon, those of us who grew up here, pushing upstream without knowing why…
but sure we must.

-Rob Nilsson