Hike You!: The Bicycle That Came Out of the River

Some objects become symbols because somebody deliberately makes them symbols. Others just show up.

This bicycle came out of the Rock River.

By the time Ryan Davis photographed it, it was standing in front of the old Rockford Register Star building, looking less like a bicycle somebody might ride than something the river had made. Mud coated the frame. Rust had gotten into it. Whatever ordinary life it had once possessed was over. Someone had pulled it from the water and propped it upright, and there it stood: wrecked, filthy, strangely dignified.

We kept seeing things like this because we kept walking.

That is where Hike You! came from. Ryan and I spent years walking Rockford together, often covering the same streets and paths again and again. The exhibition is about what happened when repetition stopped making those places more familiar and instead made them increasingly strange: two people taking “the same steps in the same town” until ordinary Rockford became “new and mysterious... and magical.”

It wasn't conceived as a documentary project. We weren't compiling an inventory of Rockford landmarks or trying to photograph the city's most photogenic places. We walked. Ryan carried a camera. I carried whatever it is a poet carries around in his head. Things presented themselves.

A rock. A discarded vacuum cleaner. An old theater marquee. Something dragged from the bottom of the river. The eventual subjects of Hike You! could be beautiful, ridiculous, damaged, historic, nearly invisible or all of those things at once. Even magnet fishing at Fordham Dam became part of the vocabulary of the project: “dragging rock bottom / we reel in rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

The bicycle was different.

By then, both Ryan and I were in motion ourselves.

We had previous lives behind us. Versions of ourselves, expectations, habits, destinations. Neither of us was simply walking around Rockford for exercise. Without necessarily announcing it to ourselves at the time, we were walking into new lives. The walks became part of that transition. So did the photographs. So did the poems.

And there, outside the Register Star, was this bicycle that had literally been pulled up from beneath the surface of the city.

It had been somewhere else.

Now it was here.

That was hard to miss.

The haiku that emerged from the photograph was:

a little mud in my
gears won't make me forget my
heart is the motor

I like that the poem doesn't pretend the mud isn't there.

There is mud in the gears. Of course there is.

Transformation is frequently described as though the old life simply falls away and the new one begins cleanly. That wasn't what this bicycle suggested to me, and it wasn't what our lives looked like. You bring things with you. Some damage remains. The gears grind. The frame shows where it has been.

But the heart is still the motor.

The bicycle became one of the pieces that most clearly expressed something I gradually understood about the larger Hike You! project. We thought we were repeatedly walking through Rockford, but Rockford was also providing us with a language for understanding what was happening to us.

The city was full of metaphors we hadn't asked for.

That mattered particularly in this location. Behind the bicycle stands the former Rockford Register Star building, itself a monument to a Rockford that was already changing. In front of it is an object recovered from the Rock River. And somewhere between the old newspaper building, the river mud, the rusted bicycle, Ryan's photograph and my seventeen syllables were two people trying to figure out what came next.

There was no reason to know, when we started walking, that any of this would become an exhibition.

That is one of the things I love most about Hike You!

It emerged.

A walk became another walk. A photograph became a poem. Familiar streets became unfamiliar. Things we'd passed dozens of times suddenly demanded attention. Eventually we had accumulated evidence of something neither of us had quite intended to make.

The project's subjects can appear almost comically insignificant. That's part of its philosophy. The Times Theatre doesn't need a magnificent restored marquee to become worthy of attention; its modest one can resemble “the proud grin of a third child / missing their first tooth.” A dirty bicycle doesn't have to be repaired, polished and returned to the road before it can tell you something about continuing.

Sometimes you get dragged out of the river covered in mud.

Sometimes somebody stands you back up.

And sometimes that is enough to begin again.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026 — Rockford, Illinois

The Midwest Zen of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 Midwest Zen

The Midwest has always suffered from an image problem. It is described as flyover country by people who have flown over it, empty by those who never stopped walking, ordinary by observers who mistake quiet for the absence of depth. I have lived here long enough to know better.

There is a particular kind of stillness that belongs to this region, and it differs from the landscapes that advertise themselves. It lives in long horizons, abandoned rail lines, river fog, weathered barns, neighborhood alleys, floodplains, factory walls overtaken by vines, and conversations where silence often says more than words. If Zen is the practice of paying attention to reality exactly as it is, then the Midwest has been practicing it for generations. No one simply thought to call it that.

My own writing has never tried to escape this geography. If anything, it has spent decades returning to it. Again and again I find myself drawn back to the Rock River, restored prairie, forgotten county roads, industrial edges, Hall Creek cutting through ancient stone, migrating birds, and snow settling onto places where yesterday's arguments no longer matter. Over time I realized I wasn't merely writing about these places. They were shaping the way I looked at the world. The landscape itself had become the discipline.

The haiku arrived naturally because the place was already speaking in brief moments. A bird announcing itself after a diagnosis. Goldenrod reclaiming an abandoned lot without witnesses. Moonlight passing through every knot in an old barn. These moments resist spectacle. They refuse performance. They possess the quiet confidence of things that existed long before anyone thought to photograph them and will remain after we are gone. That, to me, is Midwest Zen.

This has nothing to do with nostalgia, nor is it an attempt to romanticize rural America. The Midwest carries its own burdens: economic decline, forgotten towns, empty storefronts, abandoned factories, difficult winters, and people who quietly continue despite them all. There is a kind of wisdom in that continuation. Not dramatic resilience, but ordinary endurance. It is easy to overlook because it seldom announces itself.

For years my work has moved toward smaller and smaller moments, not because the world became less interesting, but because my attention became more precise. The farther I walked into local landscapes, the less I felt compelled to search for extraordinary experiences somewhere else. The extraordinary had been waiting in familiar places all along. Rockford became enough. Southern Wisconsin became enough. The prairie became enough. A creek became enough. That realization is not provincial. It is liberating.

Much of American literature still assumes significance arrives from somewhere larger, louder, richer, or more famous. Midwest Zen begins from the opposite conviction. If we cannot discover meaning where we actually live, we are unlikely to discover it anywhere else.

Looking back across more than three decades of writing, I can see a pattern that was invisible while I was living it. I have spent much of my life publishing through small presses, documenting overlooked places, writing poems that ask readers to pause instead of accelerating past the ordinary. None of this began as a philosophy. It simply became one through repetition.

The work has always trusted quiet over noise, observation over declaration, presence over performance. Perhaps Midwest Zen is simply the name that pattern has been waiting for—not because I invented it, but because I have spent a lifetime listening for it.

Illustration from Vanished Roads by Tré

Buy Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Four Short Poems By Thomas L. Vaultonburg Written On a Spanish Olivetti Studio 45 Typewriter

My fellow writer David Pedersen let me borrow his Spanish Olivetti Studio 45 typewriter, so I took it to the 317 Art Collective and wrote these poems. 

Return

The onion-skin paper

Disappears into the black

Void of the roller like Persephone,

And re-appears on the other side

Like a blanket of fresh snow

No one has pissed on yet.

Spanish Olivetti Studio 45 Typewriter

Keys

I finger the keys

of my red

Spanish typewriter

until she gushes

forth this poem

Upkeep

Everybody wants to

ride my bicycle,

but no one else knows

how to oil the chain

Leaks

for fifty years my

heart and roof leaked until

Death fixed them both

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F Is For Failure From Atrocious Poems A To Z

Failure is the last poem I finished for Atrocious Poems A To Z, and I got it finished mere days before the deadline we had set for ourselves. The poem itself had certain prerequisites because it had to contain and have explainable paradoxes in it to comply with the standard I was trying to adhere to that the poems needed to have something teachable about them. All except dog poop and urination, of course. 

Taking the lazy way out, I of course tried to retrofit a poem about failure I had written at Jack's Cub Scout meeting a couple of weeks previous, but Jenny wasn't buying it, so she looked up a list of paradoxes and saw a quote by George Carlin which she incorporated into the poem. I wanted to quote the line from George Carlin and use it as an example of paradox, but was overruled. 

This is the only place on the internet I'll post F. Then I think I'll alternate the rest of the letters I haven't done among the other blogs I edit or use as personal blogs.

The book is finished and for sale at Amazon, as well as the gift shop of the Rockford Art Museum. It's also on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum in its entirety as part of an exhibit titled Bittersweet Observations. The rest of the family is on vacation in Rhinelander, and I'm sitting here drinking sparkly water and eating grapes. 

I have decided I will only use the Times font forever after in all my writings. 

If anyone reading this is willing to write a review on Amazon I'll send you the PDF of the book. Just let me know, poets of America. One way you can really help me out.

Poetry By Emily Sipiora

My first impulse is to step back and let these poems speak for themselves, and they do, magnificently, but because promoting voices from my home town of Rockford, Illinois has become important to me, I'd like to add that I did a reading with Emily Sipiora, who was 17 years old at the time, and introduced her as "the best poet of this generation, which is my opinion then and now." That said, I will now stand back and let these poems speak for themself. 

"Taking Xanax at IKEA with your extended family"

A plastic bonsai tree sits next to a real one in a display
wondering if it was really okay
to feel this different than its companion.
Real trees look healthier
& appearance is important!
The bark is clear and rugged,
matured and developed
but that medicated plastic tree
looks slimy and cheap
My body is just as bleak
full of tears, tar, & sleet
It's separated from me
& I'm hundreds of miles away
Underneath, the tree has no deep growth
it sits by itself–
wondering if anyone can tell the difference between itself
& a living, growing being.
Familiar thoughts of disappoint
& self loathing are rooted in me
These roots are strong and deep
& just like your dirty habits:
they will not break
& they won't go away.
I took my medicine with the pretending bonsai in hand
in the yard, it sits with the other trees
waiting for something that won't ever happen.


“Loft Party”

Sometimes, it’s the way you style your hair
or your silhouette in a crowd of people.
It’s a strange parallel
an eerie mirrored front
A smile that breaks my heart
because it reminds me of the start.
Alone in a crowd of people,
I felt salvaged in thinking
that someone so dead
was resembled by living.


“Visitor”

Amorphous and poring
he is plucking strings
and picking through my records.
He is the thoughtful specter of a houseguest.
Always at my window perched
tapping and watching me sleep
I always see him between the trees
and at the corners of gas stations
he looks lost and disheveled
like god dropped him here
without a moment's notice.
He takes the thin, silver cord
that connects my body to this Earth
and frays it over and over
because his is already severed.
He caresses it like a noose
and it puts awful ideas inside of me.
I have wasted years
trying to understand what you say–
frankly, you sounded like a ghost
when you were alive.
Surely, it's better off this way.
There's always a draft in your place
cold empty air where you used to be.
There's a gap that you created
just to torment me.

“Sitting in the back of the classroom by yourself because really– who would
actually want to be your friend?”

I think I'm in a glass box
on Monday mornings, for show
and on Saturday nights to ridicule.
I have nothing more to do
than to bide my time
sleep until supper
and drive back home.
I haven’t been to class in three months
but your sneer through the slip of a curtain
laughing and having fun without me
is just enough.


“Windowsill”
I've been trying to get myself out of my head
nothing seems to work,
I find myself in bed for days instead.
Finding the only comfort
in a little brown cat
that hops on my windowsill
I count the notches on her back.
One two three four
someone's given her a sour score.
Pussy and leaking, her flank lies flat
mewling at my window, a shoulder chipped at.
The window shows a sad little movie
of animal control rolling down the street.
I already know what's about to happen
I pray to the god I'm due to meet.
There is a terrified, inhumane noise.
I want to go back to object permanence
closing my eyes and pretending to sleep.
None of this is worth the shaky hands
and bitter burning in your throat
the little parts of giving up made me weak
just like the bits of viscera on my street.
Everything you touch,
and everyone you miss
kind thoughts and intentions
have always turned to shit.
I'm afraid of redemption,
because it means I'm first incorrect.
I'm bedridden by choice,
hiding, a wreck.
It's precious to love something
but that doesn't protect it.
If you need to ask yourself this question,
you probably should've left it.
it's better not to bother.
-Emily Sipiora

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Addam's Family Pinball Machine

The Addams Family Pinball Machine and an Arcade on Alpine Road

I used to love playing The Addams Family pinball machine.

The mamushka. Hey! Hey!

When I was taking classes at Rockford College, I had a little circuit I would sometimes make afterward. I’d stop at Dollar Video, then head over to a small arcade on Alpine Road and play The Addams Family. I don’t remember what the arcade was called anymore. Maybe somebody else in Rockford does. What I remember is the machine.

It was perfect.

The Addams Family was already exactly the sort of thing I liked: macabre without being particularly threatening, funny without being cheerful, populated entirely by people who seemed to regard normal human behavior as some inexplicable eccentricity. Then somebody turned all of that into a pinball machine.

The machine talked to you. Gomez shouted. Thing appeared. The mansion was full of little mechanisms and surprises. Lights flashed everywhere. The whole table seemed slightly deranged, as if instead of designing a game somebody had somehow trapped the Addams house underneath a sheet of glass.

And, of course:

The Mamushka! Hey! Hey!

Pinball machines were wonderfully physical objects. You didn't merely operate one. You developed a relationship with it. You learned how hard you could hit the flippers, where the ball tended to go, which shots you could make reliably and which ones you were going to attempt anyway. You could even shove the entire machine around a little, provided you understood exactly how much misbehavior it would tolerate before declaring TILT and taking everything away from you.

There was something satisfying about that arrangement.

The machine had rules, but it also allowed negotiation.

I don't remember what classes I was taking on the particular afternoons I went there. I don't remember what videos I rented at Dollar Video. I don't remember what I paid to play or exactly how long I stayed. Thirty-some years later, most of the practical information has disappeared.

But I remember standing in front of that machine on Alpine Road.

That's the strange hierarchy memory eventually imposes on a life. The things that seemed important at the time gradually dissolve, while some completely ordinary afternoon survives intact because there was a particular sound, a particular light, a particular object waiting for you at the end of it.

Someday I think I'm going to buy one of these machines.

Not a reproduction. Not a digital simulation with a hundred pinball tables loaded into it. I want the enormous, ridiculous physical object. I want it in the basement taking up space and requiring maintenance. I want the silver ball and the mechanical noises and Gomez shouting from somewhere inside the cabinet.

Mostly, though, I suppose I'd be buying that little arcade on Alpine Road.

I'd be buying an afternoon after classes at Rockford College.

I'd be buying Dollar Video.

I'd be buying back a few minutes with the person who stood in front of that machine all those years ago, put another quarter in, and still had absolutely no idea where the ball was going next.

The Mamushka!

Hey! Hey!

The mamushka. Hey! Hey!

Why Does Thomas L. Vaultonburg Have a Blog?

Why do I blog? I'm not a real expert on anything. My education maxed out with a useless B.S. degree in psychology, but I'm no more an expert on human cognition, emotion, and behavior than your local meter reader. I write a lot about sports, but my fantasy football teams are all 5-4 or 4-5 after nine weeks so I haven't shown any real proficiency there. I write reviews of movies, but a cursory search of the internet can reveal the same movies have been reviewed just as thoroughly and interestingly by others. Politics? Culture? Seven million bloggers wake up every day and have more to say about it than me. 

So, why blog? 

I suppose if I had to defend my blog my answer would be "Why not?" Cyber space is limitless, and no one is forced to read anything I write or look at anything I create. And for the most part, 99.999% of humanity doesn't. Which means I suppose I have very few people to apologize to if they find my ramblings deficient of meaning or substance. It's rare for me to blog about anything personal or tell the reader what I had for lunch or what I'm wearing or how I feel about almost anything. Largely I consider this a creative blog. Poems. Webcomics. Art. Any day I wake up and have something to eat and can create something anyone else sees that's a good day.

The kicker is I've never even enjoyed writing. I find the process excruciatingly dull and painful. The fact is the new paradigm of the 124 character message aimed at a readership with an attention span that won't allow for much more suits me fine. I don't have the concentration to say more than that, and I don't feel I've earned the right to place more of a demand on the reader. I sincerely admire a writer like Stephen King who wakes up every morning, goes to an office, and writes like a machine. I saw him on C-SPAN one morning addressing a meeting of writers and despite his detractors he's every bit as much a writer as William Faulkner in my opinion.

Mostly what I'm doing is distracting myself from election coverage (to bury the lead horribly). Not that the election results will do much to affect my life directly. I'm in a groove and an orbit I've worked most of my life to achieve and things are solid, strong, and consistent. I'd like to sell more books or know that more people are turned on by my work, but I can live without that. That act of creation is the essential thing and every day I wake up and I make something. Sometimes people say they like what I make or even give me money and that's pretty groovy, but not an essential part of what I do or why I do it.

If being a writer, an artist, or any kind of esteemed content generator were as easy as throwing out whatever were at the top of your head to an audience that was pre-disposed to eat it up like truffles everyone would want to do it. I have over 25 years as a published writer now and virtually no successes to speak of. The muse visits me infrequently and casts her laurels upon others. I'm fine with that, they probably work harder than i do and deserve what they get. I just like knowing once in a while the muse has something for me. A scrap. A trifle. A trinket, and she keeps me in mind.

I think I'll go fire up the television now and watch election results and see what fresh hell awaits us all in the future. 

The poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg imitating the actor Tim Stotz crossing a bridge in a caption only the poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg will understand or care about.

Poem Photos of Rockford, Illinois By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

With the availability of high quality digital cameras at a cheap price, there's no reason everyone can't consider themselves a photographer. But I don't. 

I take lousy pictures. Doesn't matter if I'm using a disposable camera, a Kodak Instamatic, or the most expensive camera in the world, my pictures turn out crummy. Which is why it's fortunate for me I live in Rockford, Illinois. With few exceptions the entire town is gray, forsaken, and decayed. There is a contingent of ruin porn artists in Rockford who seek to romanticize the decay by insisting that from the right angle, with the right lighting, and with a few digital enhancements it all looks very beautiful. And I guess on certain days and if you know the history of what you're looking at it can on occasion, but even that requires a transformative leap of faith.

To me Rockford on my daily walks to the dollar store, the bus station, or Mead's Meat Market always seems to look exactly the way I picture it in my heart: cold, gray, and forsaken. My series of Poem Photos is my attempt to capture how I see my home town through a juxtaposition of words and images. These are actual places and signs with no alterations either editorially or digitally. This is what I think Rockford looks like...

The roof caved in at The Midway Theater this Spring after a deadbeat slumlord of an owner allowed the structure to rot until it was beyond repair. This is what it really looks like. 

Greenwood Cemetery. It was a cold and gray day when we took these picture. Ella, the eight year old noticed that there was an entire section filled with children who all seemed to die in 1918 and I explained to her that the Spanish Flu wiped out 10% of everyone that year. 

The Rockford Chamber of Commerce is always trying to increase tourism and business opportunities for local businesses. After walking under this banner proudly displayed on the State Street bridge I would often wonder why it never seems to work. 

But at Clee's Beauty Supply they seem to have the right idea about how to finally solve Rockford's image problem.