Page 29

By Jack Joseph Smith

Kenai & Witicha in seventy in seventy! the right wheel on hard Up above Sault Saint Marie my Bug was going In April And there above the snow were a gang of guys hanging Volkswagon out in an old dealership five years after a ten year copper mine had gone so it was a sort of dreaming But it was an axle bolt and everybody laughed at five bucks Happy going down from those fellows off their big wooded flat Three Great Lakes below the hunters I crossed the bridge Headed for Oregon across the North Midwest like a sightseer Very cold across Montana grasslands my battery went dead At six o'clock in the morning they were up Indian at the station They laughed at a typewriter and pack in place where there should have been a seat, while they jumped it and I displayed my mother's home made quilts As journey's have gone on with gardens inbetween

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The page recalls a 1970 drive from Sault Saint Marie toward Oregon, with an April breakdown, a former copper-mine dealership, a dead battery, and the speaker's typewriter and quilts.

The scan-checked page reads as an autobiographical travel episode assembled through revision. Cars, bridges, batteries, quilts, and the closing gardens-between-journeys image turn a roadside memory into a record of movement and makeshift continuity.

Claude

Titled 'Kenai & Witicha,' this is the collection's most plainly autobiographical page: a road narrative where 'my Bug was going' 'Up above Sault Saint Marie,' 'a gang of guys' hang around 'an old dealership five years after / a ten year copper mine had gone,' and the breakdown is trivial - 'it was an axle bolt and everybody laughed at five bucks.' The speaker heads 'for Oregon across the North Midwest like a sightseer,' the battery dies 'across Montana grasslands,' and at the station they laugh at his typewriter while he 'displayed my mother's home made quilts.' Source spellings 'Witicha' and 'Volkswagon' are kept. This reading stays close to the stable typed backbone: handwriting is uncertain and unstable station-area marginal phrases were omitted.