From the Top by Michael Perry Read Free Book Online

away, and as I went about my chores I figured each of us had been convinced of maybe nothing save the valueof humane exchange. We were staying with each other, working the corners and angles from all sides, trying for education over insinuation. Being reasonable.
    Seems like a fine place to start.

PAST TENTS, PRESENT TENTS
    Sometimes people ask how I get to the Big Top Chautauqua tent every weekend, especially in winter. Truth is, the tent is rolled and stashed in a shed from mid-September through early June; Mount Ashwabay is, after all, a ski hill in northern Wisconsin. And although the music is recorded live, my presence on the radio show is often accomplished via what I call “theater of the mind”—also known as the room above my garage.
    But I do perform in person under the actual canvas several times each year and can conjure the feel of the tent in a trice, with just one line:
    Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin’ …
    Just between you and me, there is more than one lonely little lightbulb back there. But when I’m trying to find the mood, I turn all those other lights off. I thrive in dimness. Draw your own conclusions.
FIRST TIME
    In the book Truck: A Love Story, I wrote about my first visit to Big Top Chautauqua. I trimmed it up and tamped it down and did it like this for the radio show.
    Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin’ …
    I’ve been sitting here quietly during the break, using the solitude to make a little run down memory lane, back to the first time I ever came to the Big Top. Memory lane in this case is State Trunk Highway 13, more specifically the abbreviated terminal dogleg portion that runs east-west along the uppermost rooster-comb of the good state of Wisconsin. I was in my faithful old Chevy Malibu, and there was a woman riding beside me, a woman possessed of various powers, the most pertinent of which to this day she transmits via a pair of blue eyes clear as sky and bright as diamonds. I didn’t know it then, but I was a bachelor on my way to becoming not a bachelor.
    We were driving like we were in love … lazing along, holding hands, breaking eye contact just long enough so I could negotiate the curves and swerve around tourists and turtles. It’s a good drive for lovers, that eastbound stretch of 13. You’ve got the southern shore of Gitche Gumee right there at your driver’s side elbow. Some days the water is incandescent blue and hopeful, other days it looks all steel gray and ship-sinky. On thegray days you’ll want to roll that window down so you can feel the bite of the wind and then—for the full effect—cue up some Gordon Lightfoot. Out of respect, you are not allowed to roll the window back up until “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is fully concluded.
    Port Wing. Herbster. We made our way, the distance between Highway 13 and the Great Lake waxing and waning until we stopped for smoked fish and a used book about Lenny Bruce from a shop in Cornucopia. We ate the fish shoreside, and the wind was a cold scour, but we sat close, and among other things, love is Sterno. In short, I was a goner, and by the time we hit the curl at Red Cliff that drops you down to Bayfield I was prepared to complete the necessary paperwork, and said so.
    The woman in question informed me that we had known each other only three months and she would make her decision only after conducting a performance review at the six-month mark. That, I said at the time, was a rolled-up newspaper to the snoot.
    By sunset, however, we had made our way to Mount Ashwabay, and I shall never forget the sight of this tent, a blue burst against the surrounding green, looking from a distance like a squat storybook caterpillar with its stripes of pearl gray. We got there early enough to sit in the