The Paper Mâché Cathedral

Erin and I left on August 15th and drove to Blind River, Ontario — one of those small highway towns where the motel has a bar next door and the bar has karaoke and that’s the whole nightlife. We had dinner, watched strangers sing, and slept hard.

The next day we made it to Fitzroy Provincial Park and set up camp. The rain came that night — not a drizzle, a soaking — and we eventually gave up on the tent and slept in the car. There’s a particular kind of intimacy in sleeping folded into a car seat with someone you love, listening to rain pound the roof. It’s not comfortable, but it’s something.

In the morning we drove to Montreal. We found our Airbnb, walked up Sherbrooke to the museum, saw some art, wandered the city, and had dinner at a Persian restaurant. The next morning, good coffee, and then south toward Glover, Vermont.

We stopped for breakfast at A Dinner House in Barton — one of those local places where the food is better than it has any right to be and you remember it years later. Then we arrived at Bread and Puppets, early enough to walk the grounds before the circus. Peter Schumann had built shrines to lost friends in the pine forest. We walked among them quietly. We bought some prints.

Then we went into the Paper Mâché Cathedral.

It was a barn. That’s the factual description. But inside, every surface was encrusted with puppets — enormous papier-mâché figures pressed into the walls and rafters and beams, layered on top of each other, decades of accumulated creation filling every inch of the space. A banjo player sat somewhere in the middle, strumming a simple repeating melody, and we walked through it slowly, looking up, turning in circles, trying to take it all in. The word that came to mind was baroque, but that’s not quite right. Baroque implies design. This was accretion — years and years of making, piled up and pressed together until the building itself became the art. I’ve never seen anything like it.

The circus started in an open field. The troupe performed, then led us to another field for a pageant, then to the Museum of Anti Modern Art. Everything was handmade, everything was political, everything was done with the conviction that art should be free and public and slightly unhinged. Schumann has been doing this since the 1960s. The whole operation runs on bread and conviction.

That evening we drove to Parker Pie Company for pizza and beer, then to a campsite Erin had reserved. We sat around the fire and talked about what we’d seen.

The next morning we went to the Museum of Everyday Life, which might have been my favorite thing of the whole trip. The special exhibit was about wheels. Not famous wheels or important wheels — just wheels. The ordinary object, examined until it becomes extraordinary. I understand that impulse deeply. Erin did too. We spent longer there than we expected.

We hiked in the Green Mountains at Waterbury, then drove to Burlington through Montpelier with a stop at Ben & Jerry’s. We got a hotel and had dinner at Farm House Grill and played trivia with locals at a bar. The next morning, an amazing breakfast at August First, eaten on the road while we drove to Lake Geneva in New York through the Adirondacks — Lake Placid, the mountain roads, the long views.

We stayed with Erin’s friend Ellen’s mother, set up our tent in the yard, had Italian dinner at Deluxe. Ellen showed us around her town the next morning. Then we hit the road home with a tourist stop at Niagara Falls and a night at Bay City State Park in Michigan.

It was good to get home. Arthur had spent the time with his grandparents — Manitowoc, Storybook Gardens, a full itinerary of his own. The last day he’d stayed with Wes at our house.

The rest of the summer unwound gently. We did one more camping trip — Sylvania Wilderness, where we found a wooded campsite and a private beach on Clark Lake. I swam while we watched the loons. A group of mergansers toddled along the shore right in front of us, unhurried, as if we weren’t there. Rob and Jody came the next day and we paddled the lake. Erin and I hiked nine miles around it the morning after, then headed home.

And then, on September 3rd, I brought Arthur to his first day of 4-year-old kindergarten. He is the most special thing in my life. The summer of road trips and circuses and papier-mâché cathedrals was wonderful, but that walk into the school — watching him go — that was the moment the summer was really about.