Big Bend Gazette :: Thumbnotes, A Hitchiker’s Journal, part 8: “Cheesehead to Yooperland”

My friends drove me here to Green Bay, Wisconsin from Portage, shuttling me part of the way north towards my intended destination: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore {on the Upper Penninsula of Michigan]. My vision for this adventure is to camp in the woods and make daily expeditions to the wild beaches, climbing 300 foot banks to the Great Sable “raised dunes”, swimming naked in the cold surf of the freshwater ocean.

All of this after one or two days hitch-hiking and gathering new stories for my book.

I must attain the ever elusive First Ride. This challenge gives me chills of anxiety and shivers of excitement outside one of our modern coliseums, where mock battles are beginning to unfold between warring tribes. The current pseudo-conflict is between the Green Bay Packers and the Cleveland Browns.

The Packers got their name from canned meat, which seems to me an appropriate reference to a huge man stuffed into a suit of armor. Curly Lambeau asked the Indian Packing Company for money to buy the first jerseys when he and George Calhoun started a football team together in 1919. Outside Lambeau Field, the football facility where they now clash, I stand before a tower of bras donated by incoming fans to raise breast cancer awareness.

I’m holding a sign inspired by my friend Dan. It reads: “CHEESEHEAD TO YOOPERLAND.”

You see, Illinois sports fans used to disparagingly call the Wisconsin fans “Cheeseheads,” referring to Wisconsin’s fabrication of mass quantities of squeaky cheese curds and other cheese products. The Wisconsinites officially adopted and embraced the name with pride and in 1987 a company even began making huge realistic foam wedges of cheese to be worn on the noggin at Packers games. Now they apparently even make cheese bras. This seems like a good place for a joke about a titmouse.

I see many cheeseheads walking up the bank of steps outside the facility and we exchange whoops of joy at our being connected by the strange word. The other half of my sign, “Yooperland,” is being questioned by passersby, which is a good thing, as I want interaction to spawn some ride possibilities. I know that the people from Yooperland will understand, because they are Yoopers of course, so called because they live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or “the U.P.” Several Yoopers approach me and give me high-fives, prideful of their origins. But all of these Yoopers have moved away, mostly to Milwaukee. In fact, everyone seems to have come to the game from Milwaukee.

Those not from the U.P. have a variety of reactions to my silly signage...laughter, confusion, sideways grins, stares, bogus comprehension, and something approaching anger. Some people, when they can’t understand something, react with anger instead of curiosity. This is the same reaction which leads to racially-motivated violence, species eradication, and other senseless destruction. As I am not inclined to invite my own self to be eradicated by drunken football fans, I avoid prolonged eye contact.

Animosity is stirred up not only by my cryptic message but also the hat I’m wearing. My straw hat with the feathers of different birds I’ve found in the wilds woven into one side. Essentially, it’s a dirt farmer’s hat which has seen better times and is wearing through on top. Although I’ve had several compliments about said hat, I feel an equal dose of malevolence directed towards it. Most Cheeseheads have never seen a hat like mine. Of course, they can wear a wedge of yellow foam on their heads and no one blinks!

Oh, if only I’d had the forethought of making a cheese-shaped sign to wear on my head. It could get me a ride and made for a great photo to boot, though there are quite a few people taking photos of me anyway, just so they can show their friends evidence of the freak they saw at the football game.

The later it gets, the more drunken and belligerent the fanatics entering the game have become. Packer fans are serious tailgaters and have been at it for hours now. I’ve been handed three different free tickets while standing here and I believe it is time for my initiation into the world of live gladiators. I’m going in to witness the spectacle.

The people inside are frothy with excitement and some are yelling at the players, commanding them to “GO! GO! GO!” as if the ball-carriers can actually hear them. Others scream at the referees when they think a warrior from their tribe had been falsely accused of something like “Neutral Zone Infraction” which actually sounds more like a city building code violation, or maybe one of their bulking linemen was charged with something called “Holding”, which, it seems to me, completely emasculates the man, eliminating the need for an actual penalty.

One thing making this all worthwhile is The Wave. I am not referring to the name of a radio station which plays what is called in music industry terms “New Adult Contemporary.” This Wave is a synthesizer of crowds, a beautiful interaction between masses of humanity, a tide of human bodies which is heading my way! One of the most exciting things in life is the feeling that you might be carried forth by a wall of tumbling torsos.

After several waves have passed around the arena, my mind is re-focused on the real waves I crave, those of my inland ocean, my great sea of fresh water: the Great Lake Superior. Off I go to fetch my big backpack from my friend’s car, making myself into a human turtle once again, lumbering slowly but surely towards my destination.

I now have a simplified sign which simply says “NORTH.” Most people are confused, which is okay because it is, once again, leading the passersby to ask questions. Then I must speak, revealing my general sanity, confident tone of voice, and sense of humor—which must remain intact if one is to hitchhike at all.

I have many people saying “South! East! West!” and laughing with their friends. The sheer number of people using the same joke reminds me of The Floppy Show, a staple Midwestern kids show which aired throughout my youth. Rugrats in the audience were allowed to stand up and tell jokes, always recycling the same ones over and over.

Now I’ve hit the streets, where my friend told me traffic would be crawling and I could walk along the lines of cars where surely someone would see me again and offer me a lift. There ARE lines of cars crawling along, all of them heading South! South! South! South to Milwaukee where they all came from!

A colossal flaw in my plan to get out of this city and into the wild land of the Yoopers is that no one is going in that direction. My nerves are beginning to tighten, along with the trapezius muscles straining against my packstraps. This is a place of sweat and blood in the middle of a city. I will now surely be trapped here, forced to live in this foreboding hyperborean burg. Green Bay...the words make chills go up my spine. Green Bay...I’ll surely end up packing meat in some plant in this wasteland, slowly becoming a hunchback and wearing mittens most of the year. Green Bay...*shiver.*

NO! I must walk! I can walk out of the city tonight. Hell, I’ll crawl if I have to. I could at least drag my pack to a clump of trees in some outlying neighborhood where I might throw down my bug hut and crash for the night, only to continue walking in the morning.

If my legs still work in the morning. I admit it, I am out of shape. I’m unprepared for this heavy load. I should have been training – doing push-ups, sit-ups, and walking around with heavy objects strapped to my wiry frame. Instead, I had become deluded with the idea of an easy ride to YOOPERLAND.

Mark Kneeskern is a multimedia artist who lives most of the year in Terlingua and hitchhikes around North America in the summer.