1970's-Lisa

Lisa

- Late Springtime -

Busting Out . . . the 20's Decade -- the 1970's

. . . The tree's buds burst forth . . .
. . . the new leaves take on stronger green hues . . .

In Summer 1969, Joy Fellows and I had made plans for our Summer,1970: we planned that right after I finished high school and she finished her 2nd year of college, we were going to go to Europe. Well, we did it. As soon as I finished my last final exam -- and without finding out how I had done on any of them -- she and I took all our saved-up money and went and did it: we headed off for an entire summer on The European Road.

photos of Joy and Me -- Ohio and NYC

By the day of my graduation ceremony back in Ohio, Joy and I were already well underway in joining the great migration of the American-backpackers-in-Europe-scene. One of our retinue, exemplifying the look-and-feel of that scene, even made it onto the cover of one of that summer's issue of Time Magazine.

That whole summer, Joy and I hitched rides and camped out at night wherever we found ourselves when it got dark. For the entire time, we spent a grand total of $15 on lodging - - for the two of us combined. So far beyond the book Europe on $5 A Day were we that we could have written one instead called Europe on $1 A Day.

Both she and I have Norwegian heritage, and one of our adventures was looking up our ancestral farms, and present-day relatives in Norway.

It was really some trip, a great way to spend a first significant amount of time away from home. Ah, the lovely, sweet, fresh smell of waking up at dawn having spent the night in a Norwegian or Swedish or French field. There's nothing like it.

I recently re-found a stack of postcards and letters I wrote home from that trip. Reading over them, I find them to be a wonderful account of my first summer of freedom. I am vowing to transcribe my teeny, nearly indecipherable writing to type, to make them easier to read, easier to enter into my mind and heart of back then. The transcription will be a gesture of homage -- from over three decades years later -- to my 18-year-old self.

*****************************************************************************************

After Summer 1970 in Europe: Following Joy Fellows to Lawrence, Kansas -- and Meeting Duncan there

At the end of Summer 1970 when Joy and I returned from Europe, I followed her to Lawrence, Kansas and lived in the same student rooming house --1603 Louisiana -- where she lived with her fiance, Bob Lominska. I enrolled in KU for one class -- the language of Danish, since I planned on returning to Scandinavia.

Joy and Bob were very apprehensive about Bob's future as he had a high draft number, had just graduated thus losing his student deferment. He was vehemently opposed to war -- the one in Viet Nam and all others -- and was applying for Conscientious Objector status. However, he was in favor of doing service to our country -- just not killing people. For Alternative service they applied to the Peace Corps, and left for the training in mid-November. So my house sharing with them ended

Immediately after Joy and Bob moved out of our 1603 Louisiana student rooming house, a friend of theirs moved into their old rooms. In January 1970 he had returned from spending the Fall 1969 semester at the University of Paris, and had also traveled around Europe for his second time, generally soaking up culture. His name was Duncan, I decided he was just my kind of guy, and we immediately became good buddies.

*****************************************************************************************

Duncan and I got married at Thanksgiving 1971, and in January went to Europe for 5 months. It was so lovely to be back in Europe again, this time with 2000 other young Americans and Europeans taking the training to become TM teachers. Half our time was on the Spanish Island of Mallorca, and half in the Italian hilltown of Fiuggi, in the mountains 50 miles southeast of Rome. Duncan and I jokingly refer to this time as our half-year Mediterranean honeymoon that we went on with 2000 other people.

*****************************************************************************************

Topeka, Kansas. A couple of times in California - - including in 1973 at the Santa Barbara campus of Maharishi International University, where Duncan was in the Masters Degree Program and I worked on staff in the Art Department and at the Maharishi Children's School.

*****************************************************************************************

1974-1984 -- Our decade in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

In January 1974, we moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, right on Lake Michigan, and lived there for a decade. We loved it.

In Milwaukee we did a lot more work teaching TM, and got to know a lot of good people.

Milwaukee was a city of good biking, and in Fall 1974, I got a good 10-speed bike, which became our 2nd car for the next 10 years. When Duncan later got a bike, our favorite recreational activity was to bike together around the city and the Wisconsin countryside.

Duncan attended UW-Milwaukee from 1975-1976, got a Masters degree in Urban Affairs, and worked in local governmental agencies.

*****************************************************************************************

In the Winter of 1976-1977, we took a break from urban living for Duncan's first professional planning position in Portage, a small city in North-Central part of Wisconsin. Went lived for half a year on the outskirts of Briggsville, a one-store hamlet on the shores of the very large Lake Mason. The winter of 1976-77 was very cold, extremely cold, excruciatingly cold, with our part of Wisconsin having below-zero days for the entire month of January. Go outside for anything longer than 10 seconds made our faces hurt. We lived in an enormous white house, our woodstove pumped out heat, and being intentionally TV-less, we listened delightedly to UW-Madison's public radio station's daily book-reading show called "Chapter a Day." When they featured Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, our winter felt even colder.

On our frozen lake in northern Wisconsin that winter, the ice fishermen towed their huts out onto the ice and moved in for the duration, complete with their small pot-bellied stoves. During the week I went out alone every day and skated til I got too cold. On the weekends, Duncan went with me, and sometimes we struck off from near our banks, skating far into the center of the lake, the frozen-down-10-feet-or more lake. Pretty soon, the realization of how far out from shore we were would begin to spook us, so we would turn around and head back, feeling relieved when we finally saw our own banks and our own house. Terra firma in addition to aqua firma.

That winter was so cold over the entire world that National Geographic had a special article about that phenomenonal winter. After that Winter, the gray whales off of Baja California came up to people for the first time in recorded history.

When Spring came to our corner of Wisconsin, the ice on Lake Mason started to thaw, turned black, then "went out" all at once overnight. Interestingly, despite the severity of the winter, the "going out" date was right at the standard yearly time. That year however, rather than the perenniel Spring bulbs taking turns like they usually did, they all bloomed all at once. The usually-early-blooming snowdrops, the middle-time daffodils, and the late-blooming tulips all bloomed triumphantly at the same time in April, saying to each other, "Alright everyone, we've been under this stiff frozen ice for too long, so let's all jump out TOGETHER ! ! YAY ! !"

Such are our mythic memories of a glorious Winter and Spring in northern Wisconsin beside a large, beautiful lake.

*****************************************************************************************

From 1978-1981, I went to UW-Milwaukee's Architecture School -- in Lisa-dharma, see the part about Architecture School and the Children's Environments Project.

Summer 1979

May -- vacation on Washington Island

June -- Architecture research office

July -- party