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@@ -2,8 +2,15 @@ Great Lakes Book
 
 # Notes
 
+## characters
+A woman plants trees and hemp so that someone of his descendants will be able to build tall ships. 
+
+her great grandaughter: We meet her as she comes out of a lawyer's office in Milwaukee, the cold spring wind is blowing down the street. The lake is still frozen, icy clouds billow in the wind. The snow on the ground is patchy though. She drives out to his land is walking among the young trees and fields cleared for hemp. Oak trees and pigs, he's a pig farmer. Regenerative ag. His farm is growing trees for an ark his descendants will build. Long view. Re-incarnation view.
+
+
+then far enough that there is no lineage: the man with his two daughters. the wife in the village.
+
 
-A woman plants trees and hemp so that someone of his descendants will be able to build tall ships. We meet him as he comes out of a lawyer's office in Milwaukee, the cold spring wind is blowing down the street. The lake is still frozen, icy clouds billow in the wind. The snow on the ground is patchy though. He drives out to his land is walking among the young trees and fields cleared for hemp. Oak trees and pigs, he's a pig farmer. Regenerative ag. His farm is growing trees for an ark his descendants will build. Long view. Re-incarnation view.
 
 # Prologue
 
@@ -67,12 +74,67 @@ It was nearly dark when they turned off the last paved road. The cabin was anoth
 
 This was what she loved about the winter. The absolute silence and stillness that doesn't end,but slowly drifts through the night and into your sleep. She drank another cup of tea on the porch, staring up at the stars and out at the lake, it's stilled edges still locked in ice. It will be breaking soon she thought. She got up and walked down the hill. It was hard walking on the crusted surface of the snow. She slipped and came crashing down on her thigh. She was half surprised there hadn't been a terrible crack of breaking of bone. She rolled on her side and tensed and relaxed muscles and felt around her leg. There was pain, but not so much that she thought anything was broken. All at once the absurdity of it hit her and she laugh back laughing. When she opened her eyes everything was stars. They seemed so impossible close, bright and sharp, yet cold, clear. She shivered. And then she noticed him. Leaning against the tree. He looked different now, more human, less abstracted. He looked somehow polite even. Like a man waiting patiently for the restroom she thought. She thought she even saw him smile at this thought. Here then? She turned her head to the side and looked over a grove a birches. They were young trees, but well established. She turned her head the other way, down the slope toward the lake. She could see the scrawny trunks from here. Grow she thought as she rolled her head back up to the sky. Grow. Like the stars. So many. So many trees. So many stars.
 
-# Chapter One
+# The farmer in milwakee.
+
+Milwaukee drained her. It always had, but it had become worse as she'd aged. The train ran so seldom just getting there was a hassle hardly worth the effort it seemed. she'd waited a week for a southbound engine with spare cars. Then weather had delayed the trip further, an early snow had iced the tracks and she'd spent an extra day in tk town in the middle of Wisconsin. 
+
+That she hadn't minded so much. The quiet cold evening, the lights of the streets flickering in the wind, snowflakes swirling down, it reminded her of a picture she'd found cleaning out her grandmother's house. She discovered it at the bottom of a shoebox full of strange puffy pictures just like it, most faded beyond recognition, but this one she could still make out the image, a night scene, a yellow-white snowy road, snowflakes caught in the glare of the light, an electric light, and a woman she assumed was her grandmother, maybe her great gandmother, probably in her early twenties, stumbling, or running, it was hard to tell, but smiling. 
+
+She sat for hours in the front room of the boarding house alternately staring out the window and listlessly reading an account of tk town before the wars, when the snow and cold were much greater and everything it seemed, had been better. She kept thinking of that picture. It was probably taken after the wars, but not long. Electricity hadn't lasted much more than a year or two after the last war. Unless his grandmother had lived in a city and not told her. But she'd never mentioned it. And it wasn't like one just moved in and out of cities. Not even back then. Had her grandmother really lived through winters where the temperatures routinely dipped below zero? 
+
+She'd lived to 94. She talked of the winters in her youth. When winter meant terrible cold. And darkness. The darkness she understood, it still came. And she didn't like the cold she felt around her as a child, couldn't imagine it being another 30, 40 degrees colder. Freezing was far colder than she liked. She'd left at 18. Joined the Lakeland Volunteer Army to get away from the cold. She'd served in the east, part of the humanitarian mission to New York. She'd seen firsthand the horrors of New York. She shuddered at the memory. Milwaukee was bad, but it wasn't as bad as New York. She'd heard some of the bigger cities had stabilized. She wasn't sure she believed it. It was hard to unsee what you've seen.
+
+When she'd been called back to the cold she hadn't actually minded. The Army had not turned out to be what she'd wanted. She'd already decided not to re-enlist when she got the telegram from his mother. And just like that she'd been back in the cold. Surrounded by the trees. Her life had been lived for the trees from then on. She was in service to them the way some were in service to their gods. It was similarly mysterious, myths of the distant past, obligations, ceremonies, rites and passages. She was the priest. she chuckled at the thought. A fellow guest at the inn looked up at her and smiled. She stirred and forced herself to stand, to get the blood moving through her body. She walked over to the fire and added another log.
+
+
+
+
+The depot was on the edge of town. She stepped off into the cold wind that came off the lake this time of year. There were closed carriages offering to drive her through the checkpoints and into the city without needing to stop, but she marched past them and walked alone across the great expanse of the distancing field. The grass was still frozen, crunching under his boots as she walked. A lifetime serving trees had left her sensitive to the damage one does, just walking through the woods. Not that there was anyway to avoid it, just that one might recognize it and feel, not regret, she did not feel regret, more appreciation. She tried to appreciate where she was in this cycle, that she was the boot, not the grass beneath it and to think always of the grass beneath it and to try to step as lightly as one could. It was the religion of the forest. Step lightly, out of obligation. Out of necessity. Move silent and light lest the prey escape or the predator sense you. 
+
+She showed her card at the window and stepped into the room to the left. She removed her clothes, shivering in the antiseptic cold of the changing room. She put on the strange, almost slippery clothes the city demanded and moved into the exhausting room where she was fumigated and blasted with air designed to remove all the dust and dirt and potential illnesses that might be on her. Illnesses she didn't even know she had. With that completed she donned the thin coat she was offered and stepped out of decontamination chamber into the city. 
+
+It was silent. It was always the silence that got to her in the city. There was no one on the street. Few people left their homes. Few could of course, but even animals had left the cities. Birds did not land in them. There was little life at all. Some trees. More down by the river. Some grass, though it was all white now under a thin coating of icy snow. 
+
+She checked out a bicycle at the stand and road west, toward the lawyer's office. She followed the map he'd included in his letter, but already streets had been renamed. She took a wrong turn down a new Chavez when what she wanted was old Chavez. She had to retrace her steps back to the river. After an hour of riding, several dead ends, she found the white three story house of the lawyer. She knocked on the fourth door in a row of doors and she head the bolt slide back. She waited the usual minute and then entered. The room was small. white, very white, and lit by several lamps, making it nearly as bright as outside. There was a chair, a narrow table and a window that looked into to the house where she could see the lawyer busy at his desk.
+
+---
+
+She's in a small room, with a glass window that looks into a larger room that's the lawyer's office and then there are three other rooms, two are arbitrators and the third has her brother in it. Her brother wants to sell the trees and is suing her for the right to sell them. Them go through the circus of law that has become the custom of the cities. The brother wins. She leaves and goes back to defend her land and her trees.  
+
+This is how another war starts, the final war in which the cities are burned out. No humanitarian effort this time. We follow her daughter through the war. She is the fighter who plays out the laws of combat and leadership that i want to write about. the boat then becomes what happens much further on. The winter camp the boat is headed for is a small village built around a boat building industry that has sprung up around that plot of trees. The great oaks that they don't cut unless they have too and only so many, always planting more when they cut. generations of trees. elborate ceremonies of trees. what is the point of their lives? To be alive and to work on their souls, to figure out what they need to do to move foward in their spiritual journey. Everything is a gift of the creator a love of the creator. 
+
+
+
+Talk about her in the city. the trains, the horses and bycycles. don't mention that there are no cars, but there are no cars. there's not much electricity. Power during the day in the form of solar energy, but no batteries to store it. Candles and fires. wood burning stoves. 
+
+the midwest as the old milkwaukee sense, but then the spanish influence. the southerners coming up, cultural collision. the native tribes still there, still remaining seperate. unbroken lineage for them, they are the keepers of the long history, they will not tell it to just anyone. there is no widespread literacy anymore. no need.
+
+
+# boat intro
+
+The wind was from the North. She sat up. The north. The wind was from the north. "tkname," she yelled into the hatch. "Tell Papa the wind has shifted. Comin' fr'up noth." She laughed imitating the old accent. 
+
+The old man was one deck in a beat, vaulting out of the hold with lightness that belied his age. He had no hair, but for some stubble around the back of his head. His skin was a deep brown, whether by nature or by sun was unclear since he had never been out of the sun. He was of medium height, but had a boxer's lithe build and a sprightly manner of walking that came from years striding ships wood decks. "Noth eh?" 
+
+She smiled at him. He didn't just imitate the old speech, he had grown up in it and while it had faded, certain words brought it out. He glanced up at the tethers atop the mast. They fluttered lightly, but unmistakably to the south. The wind was indeed out of the north. Well then. Nearly time to head down. He glanced at his daughter, then over at the rocky, pine and oak covered shore. You think there's any blueberries left up in that clearing?"
+
+She nodded. 
+
+He stretched his arms and swayed about the waist. You think those old bears left us some? Well then, let's go get em. You eaten?"
+
+"Had some fish."
+
+"Fish? What you eaten fish for at a meat camp?" He laughed. 'Couldn't force a fish down my throat when I'm up here. But you do what you want." He turned back toward the companionway. "I'm going to carve up a slice of something and then we'll head in get some blueberries so we can start some mead for the meeting."
+
 
-The wind was from the North. She sat up suddenly. The north. The wind was from the north. "Mother," she yelled into the hatch. "Tell Papa the wind has shifted. Comin' fr'up noth." She laughed imitating the old accent. 
+The cold is less, but the darkness remains. The light is already faded
 
-The old man was one deck in beat, vaulting out of the hold with lightness that belied his age. He had no hair, but for some stubble around the back of his head. His skin was a deep brown, whether by nature or by sun was unclear since he had never been out of the sun. He was of medium height, but had a boxer's lithe build and a sprightly manner of walking that reminded many of a fighters.
+They're on the north shore, they're headed for teh south shore to winter. There's not much snow left, but it's still cold and dark. It's mid september. wonter comes in October. they have to be south before the shores freeze. And the meet up, the fisher gathers seas gypseys exchange food and news. there they will learn something that propels them on a journey to something. in search of something perhaps. There needs to religious undertones here, local gods godesses, the plot needs to be steered as much by greater then human actors as by human. nudges, stears. the dream of the road leather cloth, finding the round leather cloth and the reaction to the finding, you have been given a great gift. we will stop and you will create this ceremony for yourself. the tantamus spirit the daughter finds it and the daughter goes off and creates the ceremony. 
 
+The father lives with his daughters one one boat, his wife and son live ashore in the southern village. midwife and teacher of herbal lore perhaps. I'm kinda making an ideyllic and boringc culture, what happens, what thing would be most threatening to this culture, where would the sotry e?
 
+Other details: the boats are made of oak. They're sailing fresh waster so they don't have to worry about worms though the do need tar and do go to a tarring camp where everyone pitches in thogether the repair the ships. ships as vesseles of men and gods. viking lore perhaps might help here. 
 
+the man makes portraits of people, darkroom on the ship. 
 
+The woman is his daughter. She's 23, her younger sister is 17. They live with him, their brother lives with their mother on shore.