But the roads along the corn fields led to relatives: brothers, nieces, nephews, grand nieces, in-laws...relations defined by genetics, culture, law. The landscape intertwined with kinship. One relative in South Bend lives in an apartment in the former Central High that had been converted into flats. She occupies the space of the former swimming pool, but it is now tiled and carpeted...her studio is in the deep end. A ladder leads through the ceiling into the master bedroom. She, Adrienne Werge, has an installation that recently opened at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport...we stopped there on our trek west. Her meditation of self, Vietnam, the war was moving. And the museum was itself a generous work of space and light, overlooking the Mississippi River whose waters seemed to be riding high.
The museum was almost the last one of this trip (the last was the Danish Museum in Elkhorn where we loaded up on Danish Christmas goods (and some Norwegian fiskeboller). When we arrived back in Fort Collins, we had driven some 4500 miles...it's a far piece, Maryland from Colorado. On the way out I was having problems figuring out why it was going to take so long, but then I had forgotten that you had to cross Ohio in addition to Illinois and Indiana and the rest. But each mile had given us time to observe, to talk, to listen to the radio or i-pod, and just to be...a kind of suspended animation across the eastern broadside of the land.
