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| It's been ages... and I apologize again. But I've been doing some serious work on the book-in-progress, and thought I'd put a few more chapters up on here. I'm very open to comments/suggestions/encouragement, so feel free to leave me some love. Or some brutality. I'm open to both. Make sure you identify yourself, too, or I just might block you... nothing personal, just Internet life. Here are three new installations...
#1.
IX.
Life in the UP
We parked just across the dirt road from the balloon-adorned mailbox. Mailboxes of this kind in the Northwoods are the local sign for “Party HERE!” and, in early June, “Graduation party HERE!” With countless miles of winding roads and road signs that are often confusing if not missing entirely, if the balloon markers were abolished unfortunate party-goers would no doubt drive around for days. My family walked down the dusty dirt road past the balloons and turned our faces up to the orange sunlight. My sisters and I wore shorts and t-shirts; it was unseasonably warm for June in the U.P., but the sun’s stroke was gentle and kind.
“Have you ever been to Nadia’s house?” Mom asked, putting her arm through my father’s.
“Nope, not once,” he said. The dirt driveway curved slightly, and we couldn’t see the house until we came around the bend. It was a gray ranch, in good repair, with light blue shutters around the paned windows. To the right of the house was a flat, grassy lawn with a couple of soccer balls sitting idly near a patch of red geraniums. To the left of the house was a small, wooden building no wider than its door that faced us as we walked. The building was made of cherry-colored wood with a smart-looking black-shingled roof. It could have been a playhouse or a woodshed, but for the crescent moon carved on the door.
“Whoa,” said Caitlyn softly under her breath. “They have an outhouse.” She paused for a second. I looked over at her and saw her lips moving slightly as they always do when she counts in her head. She grinned. “And six cars on blocks!”
The path leading to the house was paved with brown gravel, and divided evenly on either side of the path were a good number of party guests, cousins, from the look of them, all of them a sandy blonde, all of them already fairly inebriated. The party had started at noon; we arrived at one-thirty. The cousins were playing lawn darts.
Lawn darts, or Jarts, their official brand name in the seventies, were outlawed soon after those who created them actually sat down and thought about what they had done.
“Those Jarts are selling like hotcakes!” said the chief-executive-officer’s-first-assistant.
“Yes, first assistant,” said the chief executive officer, “they were a wonderful idea. I’m glad I thought of them. But, I am a bit concerned.”
“Why ever would you be concerned?” asked the first assistant.
“Well, I’ll tell you, first assistant, I’ve been thinking. Was it really a good idea to put a sharp, pointed end on a heavy, weighted dart that people are supposed to chuck across their yards? Don’t you think that practically screams ‘fatal accident’?”
“Hmm… I see what you mean…”
Nadia’s cousins were each armed with a sloshing plastic cup of beer and between one and three lawn darts. Jarts were never sold in packages more than eight; Nadia’s family must have bought three or four sets. As we watched with an appreciative mixture of car-accident morbid fascination and crime-scene abject horror a member of the team on one side of the path threw a dart at the target lying ridiculously close to the feet of the opposite team. The opposite team lazily watched the deadly missile float through the air, turn nose down, and head for the target. We watched for a couple of minutes, motionless except for swatting the odd horsefly. Usually the Jarts headed for the target. More than once, as we watched in enthrallment and dismay, a team would overshoot the target and the dart would plummet from the sky in a direct beeline for a marked cousin’s eye socket until it was mere inches from the poor soul’s skull before the person would glance up, giggle and take half a step back.
“Whoa, now,” we heard one of them say, “that was a close one.”
“Dad…” Caitlyn whispered, “how do we get inside to the party?” He furrowed his brow for a second, then shrugged.
“Run,” he said. We ran.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, known to the locals as the U.P., is home to a profoundly colorful array of local people. The towns are small, even by Eagle River’s standards, and, as the winters are long and dull, everyone’s nose is continually and happily in everyone else’s business. Every town has a handful of Joe’s and at least one Mac; town life tends to center on the town tavern where the ball game is continually playing and the bar is awash in flannel shirts. There is a grizzled beauty about the locals of the U.P. and their unapologetic way of life. The locals up here are true locals. Most regions in the country don’t have local people anymore. They have people who, for one reason or another, live in the area, but simply living somewhere does not make a person a local. U.P. locals never leave. They never go to college. They get a good percentage of their food from the woods around their houses. They almost never have a full set of teeth. They put broken-down station wagons in their backyards and their front yards. Then they decide that the tires are probably worth something, so they put the car on cement blocks. Then they decide that the car would make an amazing playpen for little Bobby, and they put him in there during most afternoons. Of course, they do roll the windows down.
Eagle River’s locals have largely grown up and moved away or died. Even the man who rode his bike around town every summer in red flannel long underwear hasn’t been seen in a couple of years. I’ve been around for twenty-two years and I’ve only been relatively conscious for perhaps ten of those, but I, too have noticed the change. Perhaps it is because our locals are a thing of the past that I feel such a deep respect for the unabashed localness of the U.P. Michigan’s
These locals are known as “Yoopers,” a term they both embrace and scorn with the kind of pride that exists only in small-town folk who have lived in one place long enough that the virtues and vices of their region have long since blended into the homogenous color of “the way things are.” Northern Wisconsiners use the Yoopers to feel better about themselves, namely more sophisticated and cultured and readier with a witty comeback. They are what the West Virginians are to the Virginians, the northern French are to the Parisians, the Syrians are to the Egyptians. But say what you will, the Yoopers have an undeniable charm that’s all their own.
“Don’t you worry,” Nadia’s father Joe had sidled up to my father and was leaning in conspiratorially, one yellowed hand on Dad’s shoulder, the other holding a splashing plastic cup filled with beer. Joe nodded toward the back yard and whispered, “There’s still another kegger buried out back.” He grinned, revealing a full set of yellowed teeth and faded gums, representing no doubt the pinnacle of U.P. dental prowess. “It’s buried,” he nodded, “so that no one’ll run off with it.” He paused; his eyes narrowed. “Like last time.”
Nadia, the graduate herself, met us by the M*A*S*H tent where her mother Liz was bustling about various crockpots filled with venison and loose turkey. Whatever else may be said about the U.P., its citizens can cook. Liz brought turkey to the hockey arena each year for the annual Eagle River Girl’s Tournament and her sandwiches always sold out long before lunchtime.
“Congratulations!” we said as we reached Nadia, each hugging her in turn.
“Thanks,” she said, displaying the lilting near-Swedish accent found in the mouths of those north of the 46th parallel. “I’ll have talk to you guys later, though. My cousin Scott,” she pointed to one off the guys giddily playing lawn darts, “needs some more chew and he’s really in no condition to drive.”
Because of the Ojibwa Indian reservation just north of the Wisconsin border, a giant casino is allowed to block out the sun on the highway just south of the tiny town of Watersmeet. Outside the casino is the only gas station for dozens of miles, and a couple of years ago it began giving out ten dollars worth of bargaining chips with each gasoline purchase. My mother found this out from a lady at our tiny, stodgy, Northwoods Protestant church.
“Do you know about the chips?” Rachel, in her denim jumper and pale pink cardigan, asked my mother one Sunday morning.
“The chips?” Mom inquired.
“At the casino. The gas station, in Watersmeet. If you fill up your car with gas there—and it’s the cheapest gas anywhere in the Northwoods—you get ten dollars worth of chips!”
“For the casino?”
“Yes! And do you know,” she nodded, smiling gently, “I would never, ever go in there to gamble myself, but since the chips are free…”
“Rachel…you go to the casino?” Mom could more easily picture my football-playing father doing ballet. The casino is dark and smoky, filled with flannel-wearing fishermen and lumberjacks, some of whom still had wood chips dusted on their shoulders. It is staffed by disgruntled-looking Native Americans who looked as if they’d rather be anyplace else. Rachel wore not only cardigans but perpetual cardigans. She was never without a cardigan. She had a page-boy haircut. She was the type of person who didn’t turn her nose up at profanity only because she never heard any. Uttering a curse word in Rachel’s presence was like swearing in front of God.
“Yes!” she said. “And last time,” she said, her eyes sparkling, “I won forty dollars.”
The UP’s north shore butts up against the pristine shores of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes with an expanse of water so pure you can still drink straight from it without fear of later digestional retribution. It is so clear you can see up to 75 feet down. It is the largest, deepest, highest, and coldest of the Great Lakes: 350 miles across,160 miles from north to south, with an average depth of 480 feet. Its largest wave ever recorded was 31 feet high; Lake Superior is no kiddie pool. Lake Superior is so tumultuous during its stormiest months—October and November—that the intensity and ferocity of storms have become standard U.P. legend fodder. The folk band “Whitewater” covers a song about a young man joining the shipping industry on the lake to help support the girl he hopes to marry. It is told by an old-timer familiar with the angry side of the lake, and as the boy sails off into the eye of a storm, the man reflects,
I told that kid a hundred times, don’t take the Lake for granted/She’ll go from calm to a hundred knots so fast she’ll seem enchanted/And tonight some red-eyed Wiretown girl lies staring at the wall/ for her lover’s gone into the White Squall.
Lake Superior holds over 350 shipwrecks within her belly, many of which may never be explored because of the lake’s frigid temperatures and startling depth. During the storm season Lake Superior quickly becomes the Bermuda Triangle of the Midwest. Folks on the coastline of the U.P. are fond of telling foreigners (non-U.P.-ers) in an ominous whisper that if you capsize in this Great Lake “your body will never be found.”
The U.P.’s western border is northern Wisconsin, its eastern border is St. Mary’s River, and its southern border is both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The Mackinac (Mak-ih-naw) Straits separate the U.P. from southern Michigan and in 1957 a bridge was constructed over the 5-mile long narrowest part of the Straits. Prior to that car ferries made the journey a slow one, and because of frigid winter temperatures and the Strait’s irritating tendency to freeze irregularly, often an impossible one. The Mackinac Bridge is something of a wonder in the north, becoming a tourist attraction nobody can fully understand. I mean, it’s a bridge. A very nice, very long bridge, but still. Shops in Mackinac City and on Mackinac Island sell all manner of bridge paraphernalia—t-shirts, hats, shot glasses, paperweights, replica bridge knickknacks—and the stuff sells out.
The U.P., says the ‘Net’s Wikincyclopedia, the only encylopedia I’ve found to contain helpful information laced with a well-wrought sense of irony, is “home to 328,000 people, about 3% of the state’s population. Many consider themselves Yoopers before they consider themselves Michiganders. People living in the Lower Peninsula are commonly called ‘trolls’ by Upper Peninsula residents, as they live ‘below the bridge.’” I’ve never heard the “trolls” accusation, but I have no doubt it’s true. The Yoopers are also characterized by an extreme distrust for outsiders and a belief that the U.P. should really be a separate state. Because most all of their funding and governmental regulations come from the Lower Peninsula this will not happen, but locals dream about it just the same. What, you may ask, would be the name of this new so-called state? Superior.
My father insures many of the good folk of the southern U.P. and he could fill a book with stories of the people he’s met, people so unbelievable there is only one way my mother can be confident he’s telling the truth.
“A guy who still gets confused about whether the black cable is positive or negative when he’s trying to jump-start the car,” she says, “probably couldn’t make these things up.”
The first year of his business Dad drove to the U.P. to inspect the house of a new client. He was met at the door by a gruff, enormous, hairy man in jeans and a white-ish sleeveless shirt. From his position on the sunny front steps the house looked quite dark, but Dad figured his eyes needed a little time to adjust. He stepped into the house and was met with pitch blackness. The man switched on a flashlight.
“Hi,” said the man. “Glad you could come over.” There was a pause. Dad cleared his throat.
“Can you turn on a light?”
“Sorry, no can do,” the man said. “There are no lights,” he smiled jovially. “No lights.” His brow darkened. He sighed. “I can’t have any,” he said. “The power company’s been robbin’ me, you see.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’ve been robbin’ me. They’re probably robbin’ you, too.” The windows were covered with thick, black felt tacked down at the corners. The man shined his flashlight at the ceiling. There was no light bulb in the socket. “I’ve outsmarted them, though,” he continued, towering over my father’s six-foot frame. The man’s face looked jagged and menacing in the light from the waning flashlight that was flickering in a distinctly unsettling manner. “You see, if you unscrew all the bulbs,” the flashlight flitted to several other bare sockets across the length of the living room, “then the circuit isn’t closed and they can’t steal all your money.” From his tone it was clear that he was quite concerned with the fact that my father could very well be bankrupt before he made it home.
“That’s very interesting,” Dad said, calmly and quietly. “Thank you for telling me that.”
“That’s awright,” said the man. “Quite awright.” He patted Dad’s shoulder. “Now, do you need to see the fuse box?” Dad could think of several important things he should be doing at this very moment that did not in any way involve looking at a hulking, unstable man’s fuse box, but being a first-year agent with a pregnant wife he couldn’t risk offending any clients, clinically insane or not.
“Yes…” he said softly.
“She’s in the basement,” the man said.
“Of course she is.”
At the bottom of a rickety staircase the man flipped open the fuse box and rattled the flashlight around inside it.
“I took out the fuses,” he said, gesturing.
“I see that.”
“Because of the power company, you know,” he said.
“Of course. Because otherwise they’ll steal all your money.”
“I’m serious,” the man said. “Don’t think I’m joking about this. I’ve never been more serious about anything in my whole goddamn life. They don’t care about you. Don’t think they care about you. They’ll steal you blind.” He thumped a hand on the wall behind my father’s head. “I’m serious.” Dad nodded enthusiastically.
“I know,” he said, putting what he hoped was a convincing and utterly non-threatening smile on his face. The flashlight went out.
Dad made it back to the office an hour or so later, a bit shaken but unharmed.
“How was the appointment?” his secretary asked as he walked in.
“We don’t go back there,” he said.
“Didn’t go well?” she asked.
“The man’s insane,” he said. “He’s taken all of the light bulbs from their sockets and removed all the fuses because he’s convinced the power company is robbing him. He left me in the basement in the pitch black, pitch black, for ten minutes, ten minutes, while he went upstairs to find new flashlight batteries after his went out.”
“Weren’t there any windows?”
“Black felt over the windows. Over all the windows,” Dad set his briefcase down on his desk and shook his head. He said again, “We don’t go back there.”
But he still does return to the people of the UP, week after week selling them homeowners and renters and auto insurance, and usually his stories are of generous hospitality and countless kind people. And the beauty of the forest-strewn landscape and the lakes and rivers he passes along the way. And the humor of the locals. And the many, many cars on blocks.
#2. A Funeral
“Thirty people this year,” Dad said. “On snowmobiles. Thirty people.”
When I brought my college boyfriend up from Chicago to visit my folks, my father happily launched into one of his favorite pastimes: Northwoods death statistics. Dad knows how people die. He has twenty-six years as an insurance agent under his belt, and every few days he is bombarded with another Northwoods demise. If that wasn’t enough, the company he works for also keeps statistics and regularly mails them to its employees. Not only does he know, but he is absolutely fascinated with the various ways people die in the woods and the small towns around Eagle River. This has always mildly disturbed me, but I’ve grown used to it. Dinner-table death discussions no longer make me queasy, and I’ve found that I can still finish my pork chops while I’m slightly annoyed.
“See that?” he told Daryl as we drove on the highway beside the Land O’ Lakes wood processing plant. “A guy got his sleeve caught in one of the spindles in there. His sleeve. Just his sleeve and pretty soon it sucked both of his arms in.” My father is not a morbid human being. Aside from his uncanny fascination with all things Civil War, he steers clear of the gross and the gory. He is squeamish at the sight and often even the mention of blood and although he tries every year to donate his own to the blood bank he hasn’t survived one visit without passing out cold.
“But he didn’t die right away,” Dad continued about the poor man at the wood plant. “Nope, not right away. It took four hours.” He looked over his shoulder to see the poor guy’s reaction. “Four hours.” I glanced over at Daryl. He was pale.
“Really?” he said mildly, trying to find the correct balance between humoring his new girlfriend’s former football player of a father and being entirely and appropriately appalled at the conversation.
“Yup,” said Dad, his hands resting on the top of the steering wheel. “That stuff happens up here.” He paused, turned up the radio just a touch. He was making the rounds back to his original point. “Thirty people died on snowmobiles in the Northwoods this winter. Thirty.”
“Paul…” my mother began.
“Thirty people.”
Friends of my parents are often surprised at my father’s squeamishness when it comes to blood. MORE HERE
Dad picked me up from high school one spring afternoon my freshman year with a guilty look on his face.
“Courtney,” he asked.
“What?”
“I have something to tell you.” This phrase, coming from a parent’s mouth, is never a good thing. If they have something happy to share, they will say, “Guess what.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His face was blank: also a bad sign.
“What?” I asked again.
“I went to the blood drive today,” he said softly.
“Daaaad…” I said, rolling my eyes. “Why?” Every six months or so, when the Blood Drive is in town they phone our house and ask my father to come back in to donate his rare negative-O blood. And most times he says no. Enough times that my mother is lulled into a false sense of security, he says no. But then, every few years, out of the blue, he develops a diabolical case of selective amnesia and he goes back to the gymnasium at Our Savior Lutheran School where he proceeds to give his rare and sought-after negative-O blood and then pass out cold in front of most of the town.
“I thought I’d be okay this time,” he said.
“Daaaaad…” I was sounding extremely whiny. I didn’t care. “You’re never okay.”
“I know,” he paused. “But…it gets worse.”
“Worse how?” I asked.
“Well…when I passed out the entire high school football team was in the gymnasium giving blood.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“You passed out in front of the entire football team?”
“Yup.”
“Daaaaad…” I sighed. There were a couple seconds of silence.
“But…” he said again, “…it gets worse.” I looked at him with wide eyes. My voice was developing that high-pitched timbre it only gets during moments of intense stress. I was a freshman in high school. I wanted so desperately much to be cool. I was never one of those secure teenagers who just didn’t care about the “in crowd.” I wanted them to like me like I wanted nothing else in my life. My father, I thought reasonably and logically, was very possibly about to explain to me how he had entirely ruined my life.
I asked softly, “How does it get worse?”
“Well…” he said with agonizing slowness, “when I passed out, you know, in front of the whole football team, I passed out really hard.”
“And…?”
“And…I lost control of all of my bodily functions.” I sat for a few seconds, wide-eyed and blinking, until I finally found my voice. I began to shriek.
“We have to move! We have to MOVE!” I was still in hysterics when we pulled into the driveway five minutes later. As he stopped the car in the garage, Dad leaned over to me and grinned.
“Just kidding!” he said, brightly.
Sometimes Caitlyn and I tell him that when he is old and in a nursing home somewhere we will push his wheelchair down the stairs.
One problem with dying in the Northwoods is that you are likely to die in winter. With roughly ten months of winter or winterish weather the likelihood of dying during the summer becomes unfortunately rare. If you die during the winter months, as statistics indicate you probably will, the permafrost freezes so deep in the ground that you simply cannot be buried until spring. Bodies are simply stored, on ice, in the town’s one and only funeral home until the ground thaws out completely in late May. For those who die in winter there is a wake and a funeral right away; the burial is always TBA.
Eagle River’s singular funeral home, the Gaffney-Busha Funeral Home, is a fine and upstanding establishment that looks exactly like the townhouses which surround it. Everybody uses it when the time comes, and if there were other options in town they’d be likely to use it still. The owners are subdued and sympathetic, as all funeral-home directors should be, and they walk around with purposeful strides and speak in hushed voices and make everyone feel very taken care of and very free to be sad. The home is located just off of Main Street in a suburban-looking house with brown wood siding and a modest flower patch in the front yard. When I was nine years old Main Street was under construction and we often had to detour past the Gaffney-Busha. Watching a car turn past the orange cones and pull into the home, my mother checked out the license plate to see if it was anyone she knew.
“I hope that’s nobody we know…” she began.
“Why?” I asked. “Maybe they live there.” Perhaps it’s because it was right across from the grade school that none of the town parents told their children what went on behind those walls nearly every day.
The thing about losing a person, any person, in such a small town is that everyone feels the hole he or she leaves behind. In a big city a thousand people may die in a day and the hole of absence will be spread across the country and the world by extended family and friends. The person in the apartment next door may not even know, and if they do it will probably bring just a passing second of, “Oh… that’s too bad.” People may be mourning in Singapore and Los Angeles, in Raleigh and in Dublin, but the neighbors in the next condo haven’t noticed a thing. In a small town the neighbors know. Your church knows; other churches know. All the kids at school and all the people you pass in the grocery store know. People you’ve never met will look at you with sad eyes and a small nod of the head as if to say,
“We know, too. Wish we could help.”
On one level, this solidarity beautifully comforting, this sharing of the burden of death, of grief and mourning and loss. The cashier at the hardware store rings up your purchases gently, waits as you fumble with a credit card, makes no mention of the long line of customers waiting behind you. Teachers understand why your papers are late without you having to mention a thing. Humans were not meant to grieve in isolation, though the spread of people into unfriendly and anonymous cities has isolated millions in the midst of crowds. Grief, for the first thousands and thousands of years of human existence, was both personal and communal. Today it is largely private. Something deep and important is lost when the weight of grieving becomes a personal yoke to bear. Americans have tricked themselves into believing they can stand on their own. Small-town Americans have no such delusions. They have a good many other delusions, but they don’t have this one.
On another level, in a small town the hurt is everywhere and there is no escape from a person who has, suddenly or not so suddenly, left Eagle River forever. When everybody knows there can be no happy, forgetful night out on the town. The question hangs in the back of everyone’s minds and, whether or not they mention the death, the fact that it stands in the middle of every conversation cannot be escaped.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Kristine’s soft, hot arms press around me. Her black halter-top seems a bit too sexy for a funeral; she is a too bare shouldered and soft-white necked for a funeral. My arms stick to her back and she smells faintly of sweat and strongly of lilacs and as she holds on for a second my tears let loose in a slow leak that will continue until late in the afternoon. People are always holding onto one another at funerals. The tangibility of other people makes the hovering reality of death a small bit less intense, less believable. I’m alive, you’re alive, the hugs say. We’re both here; we’re both okay. We’re alive.
My parents and I are fifteen minutes early and already the church is packed to exploding, people trickling out into the aisles and the wings, some kneeling on the sides of the church, standing near the walls, leaning back on the window ledges. I kneel in the back behind the picture windows looking into the sanctuary. Mom and Dad find a chair and Mom offers me half, but I can’t be that close to anyone. I must sit alone.
Kids from high school, now four years older, whisper and lean and talk, red eyes above black shirts and dresses. We are all wet from the humidity that hangs in the air like a damp layer of spider webs, sticking to our faces and hair and eyes and getting in the way of the words we try to say to one another, making them sound hazy and far away and absolutely meaningless. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you, too. Can’t believe it. Neither can I. It’s so screwed up. I know. I know it is. I just can’t… Me neither. I just don’t understand… I know. Neither do I. I can’t believe he’s gone.
There is a worship band playing at the front of the church, muted guitar and soft voices blending to a picture slideshow of Sam playing basketball, kayaking, hiking, hugging his brothers, his parents, his friends. Onstage a singer’s voice breaks and her last words stick unheard. The funeral begins.
The coffin is loaded into the back of the hearse by six strong men—the father, the brothers, three friends from high school—and everyone is so old, so terribly, terribly old and furrowed and squinting and gasping. They are stunned and bewildered and asleep, they must be asleep and perhaps, maybe, in a few seconds if they pinch themselves or stub their toes or just have a drink of water they can wake up and realize they shouldn’t eat pizza right before bed and that the bad dreams are just and only bad dreams.
The old cool clique from high school is brought together once more, and the immaculate make-up runs in streams down reddened cheeks. Nobody knows where to look, how to stand. The brightness of the sun is harsh, invasive, and the thought that anyone, anywhere in the world could be doing anything else than mourning this life is too much to think about. But I don’t mourn. I never mourn. I tell myself that I am a writer so it is okay to walk outside of myself and watch the others. And I watch.
How much grief should be observed in family and friends? The athletes—must be the soccer team—stand around the church foyer, arms crossed in front, behind, hands in pockets, hands folded in front, behind, hands coming up for a gesture, slamming down again, and words usually found in the mouths of much older people circle among them.
The sky is a mixture of gray and blue, heavy clouds with the sun poking through like a flashlight through a wool blanket, then breaking around the corners of clouds and browbeating the crowd in front of the hearse. The wildflowers around the church are thick with the last weeks of August bringing them both rain and warmth and I rub a few pieces of the tallest grass between my fingers, watching it rub off a yellowy green. The hearse pulls away from under the awning, a tragic parody of the wedding getaway car, and the oldest remaining son breaks down, walks to the church wall to lean. His face writhes. The flat of his palm pounds against the siding and one clear, piercing sob comes out. His mother walks over and puts a hand on his shoulder. The morbid fascination of discovering grief in a friend loses its charm and I turn away. We are not the paparazzi. We are not Channel 12 News. And Sam is so much more than a story.
Everyone pretends to be better friends than they are, to care more than they do, and this helps a little. Touch helps, people being stupid helps. The kid who brought his Frisbee and is tossing out on the church’s back lawn. The girl who keeps fidgeting with her hair, running a hand through it, plucking a piece off of her t-shirt, flipping it back over her neck, running her fingers through it again. Kids help, and they walk around the lawn laughing, pushing one another down the hill, climbing the pine trees near the parking lot, tossing pine cones at one another. We have to be home soon, my parents and me; we will have to skip the burial. Too busy, too much going on for two hours to bury a friend. Things have to keep on, after all. Things have to get done. These things. Important things. Things. In the car there is silence. I pull the comics out of the Sunday paper and look at their colors, their shapes.
“You’re not going back on the river again this year, are you?” Dad asks a few miles from home.
“I need to do the Big Smokey trip once again,” I say. I flipped over in my kayak during a trip I guided for high schoolers earlier in the summer and got stuck in a difficult rapid long enough to scare me and nearly long enough to drown me. The rapid had won; I was angry. I wanted to run the river one more time, to prove to myself I could beat it.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said.
“Do you have to?” asked Mom.
“Yeah, I think I do,” I said. They glanced at each other.
“Sam…could have been you,” he said, finally.
“I know,” I said. “…I know.” Sam died in Lake Superior when his kayak capsized during a storm. He was trapped and hypothermic. The casket was closed.
On the drive home I catalogued. I felt wretched for thinking of anything at all, but I had to do something. I had to do something where I could categorize and list and put everything in neat rows and columns. That’s why people bake and bring food to funerals. We know if we mix three eggs and flour and sugar and chocolate chips we will get cookies. The outcome is certain; it is prescribed. The outcome is definite. We must hold to something. Some people shop, some bring flowers; I catalogue. I wrote Firsts in the margin of the Sports page. Sam’s funeral was a handful of firsts for me. It was the first one I’d been to since Auntie Rie died when I was thirteen. It was the first Northwoods funeral I’d seen, the first high school friend I’d lost, the first time I’d seen many of those people since high school. It was the first funeral I’d attended as an adult and not a child. It was the first time I had to share the small town weight of grief and sorrow in more than a fleeting moment of obituary-induced reflection on how I really should make more time to play the piano at the nursing home. It is heavy to carry even a teaspoon of the weight.
#3.
The Value of Reputation in a Small Town, the Effect of Rumors, and my Father
“When did you last see your husband, ma’am?” the officer asked, sitting in the kitchen next to my mother as she explained to him once more that she was relatively certain my father wasn’t out someplace cheating on her.
“He’s never out this late,” she said. “And it’s snowing out. He might be stuck somewhere.”
“Ma’am…” the officer leaned in over the cup of coffee my mother had given him, “I assure you we are doing all that we can. We’ll start a fuller search in the morning if he still hasn’t…” he paused and took a sip, “…wandered home.”
Three hours earlier and seventeen miles away my father checked in with the forest ranger at the head of the main road at the south entrance to the Nicolet National Forest.
“What’s your business?” the man asked, leaning out of the ranger station and peering into Dad’s tiny yellow Volkswagon Rabbit.
“I’m the new State Farm Insurance agent,” he said. “I’m inspecting a house down Loon Lake Road,” he gestured to a black briefcase on the passenger seat. “I need to take a few pictures of the deck and the garage of the Anderson’s summer cabin for my files.”
“Ah, the Andersons,” said the ranger, stroking his grey mustache. “That’s just a summer home, isn’t it? They won’t be there now.”
“No, but I called their home in Chicago this afternoon and they gave me permission to walk around their property,” he said.
“Alright, then,” said the ranger. “Have a good night, then.”
Dad drove ten more miles down winding forest roads before he reached the cabin, tucked away on the shores of Franklin Lake, a popular camping destination in the summer months but now a desolate, frozen snowscape. It was beginning to get dark, and he snapped a couple of Polaroid photos of the deck and a few of the garage before tossing his camera and briefcase into the backseat of the Rabbit.
He started up the car. It stuttered a few times, but, as always, didn’t complain too much. A light snow was beginning to fall. He gently pressed on the gas and started up the steep hill that led back to the main road and the ranger station. The road was icier than he had noticed on the way down, and about a quarter of the way up the hill the Rabbit’s tires began to spin. He began to slide back down the hill. He tried again a few more times, but with no more luck than the first. He stepped out from the car and dug into the snow with his bare hands until he hit the frozen dirt, pulling hard clots of it out and breaking them between his hands to spread under the tires and over the ice on the hill. He began to shiver.
My father is the self-proclaimed king of fashion. This was a significantly easier title for him to maintain when he lived in the Chicago suburbs, worked in an upscale men’s clothing store, and had no family to support. When he moved north keeping up the trendy façade proved more difficult than he would have first supposed. People who first visit the Wisconsin woods during the summer months are met with hordes of well-meaning tourists dressed much the same as they are. They wear overpriced Eddie Bauer fishing vests and expensive designer jeans and the stylish sneaker of the year. For women last summer it was the tennis skirt and a loosely tied cotton sweater over the shoulders, as if the woman in question was concerned she might catch a chill on the way to her next game. There is one outdoor tennis court in all of Eagle River. I’ve never seen a tourist on it. But I digress.
My father had trouble keeping up with the Chicago trends after he moved north of the 46th parallel. In the Northwoods, he soon discovered, most men believe that fashion is something relegated to anorexic Parisian women and overpriced glossy check-out line magazines. The fact that their own wives possess more than three pairs of shoes is an enigmatic waste of resources, but they try not to quibble. When my parents first moved up from Chicago Dad attempted to maintain his style. Many of the local men would give him the arched-eyebrow homophobic stare in the hardware store or the gas station as he wore his leather shoes or his tan trench coat, but he didn’t care. He knew better fashion-wise, that’s all there was to it.
“It’s almost like people have never seen leather gloves before,” he would tell my mother. She would roll her eyes. She was the only Northwoods wife who owned fewer pairs of shoes than her husband, and she knew it. During a four-day sailboat trip with five other couples one of the other husbands stumbled upon Dad’s luggage in the cargo hold.
“Barb, is this your stuff?” he asked.
“No,” she said, pointing to a suitcase half the size of the overstuffed mammoth bag that belonged to my father. “That one’s mine. The other one’s Paul’s.” Gary began to chuckle.
“Are you serious?” he asked. “Does he think that we might get lost at sea?” He prodded the bag with his toe. “Forever?” Gary got the other couples together and when my father awoke the next morning all ten of them plus my mother were clad in my father’s carefully packed wardrobe. Ten pairs of boxer shorts were flying proudly from the ship’s mast.
The men of the north wear Carhartt jackets, flannel shirts bought six for $20 at Fleet Farm, work boots, and Rider or Wrangler jeans with a square wallet-shaped bump worn into the right back pocket. In the winter they throw parkas over their normal wear and add a camouflage or blaze orange stocking cap and a pair of “clappers”—giant yellowed buckskin mittens named after the sharp, echoing noise they make when they are slapped together. In the summer the men wear white Hanes t-shirts and the same jeans and work boots. Their legs never see the sun. Dressing up for church means wearing jeans without holes in them; the same goes for weddings and funerals. Dad found this absolutely hilarious and took pride in his diverse and intricate wardrobe collected over years of menswear department store service. He was, he thought proudly, usually the best-dressed man in any Northwoods room, unless someone was visiting from a big city, and even then he could give them a run for their money.
The costal/Midwestern trend phenomenon is a fascinating one. Trends generally begin in Europe, New York, and California and take an average of two to three years to trickle in to the middle states. In the Northwoods this lag time is far greater, a truth that is exacerbated by the fact that nobody really cares anyway. For the working men and women dressing up to go out on the town is impractical and unnecessary. The nicest restaurant within 50 miles is a fish fry place where the most expensive entrée is a steep $18. For the high school kids, most of whom at least attempt to keep up with the trends the rest of the country is entrenched in, Abercrombie and Hollister t-shirts represent the epitome of chic. The closest mall is an hour and a half away, giving shopping for trends a difficulty of near-epic proportions. The styles fall to the wayside because keeping up with them is far too much work. The one and only time this changes is prom.
I was shocked in college to discover that many of my peers from more exotic locales like New Jersey had actually rented limos for prom. This thought had never even entered my mind. And this wasn’t because Eagle River didn’t have a limo, either. We had one. It was a gray 1989 Dodge Caravan driven by a grizzled chain-smoking woman hooked by a nasal tube to an oxygen tank. We knew it was a limo because the license plate said “LIMO43.” People from out of town who tried to hire a limo and expected some dignity in their ride were in for a thing or two.
It was difficult to live the prom fairy tale we had all fantasized about since junior high when we were surrounded by wall-mounted Northern Pike and sweaty fishermen. The northerns were bad enough, being just about the ugliest, most primeval fish on the planet, but the fishermen gaped and guffawed and whistled, for God’s sake.
Fashion statements from the ‘70’s, ‘80’s, and early ‘90’s are still shouted loudly in Eagle River. Often people stick to the same pair of giant glasses or the same forehead of fuzzy bangs until the cycle has made its 30-year turn around and they are back in style once again.
The night of his disappearance Dad was wearing his tan trench coat—light, but stylish—a pair of Italian leather shoes, a light non-wool suit and tie, and a pair of light leather gloves. He tried the hill again. No luck. The Rabbit did its best, but the ice was too slick and he was getting too cold to keep digging on the hillside. He went back to the cabin and tried the door. It was locked, as was the back door. He blew on his gloved hands and contemplated his options.
#1. He could walk out. The ranger station was about ten miles away and he had no flashlight. The sky was overcast; there was no moon. He would get hopelessly lost in the National Forest and get eaten by wolves.
#2. He could break into the cabin. Not good insurance business. The family that owned the cabin weren’t particularly friendly and he was just starting out as an agent. The reputation must be preserved.
#3. He could wait for the ranger in his car. The heat would work for a little while, he had nearly a full tank of gas, and as long as he made sure not to freeze to death, the ranger should remember soon enough that he had driven in and not driven out, right? This seemed the best option.
Dad settled into the back seat of the car. He took inventory. He had the clothes on his back, his briefcase, and half a vanilla shake from McDonald’s. He rummaged under the seat. A pillowcase! He had a pillowcase. Remembering, as anyone lost in the woods in the dead of winter would, that the human body loses over 80% of its heat through the head, he wrapped the pillowcase around his head turban-style to ward off the cold. He was set. The ranger should be there soon.
The dawn broke the next morning frigid and still. Dad was curled in the backseat with his pillowcase turban sleeping fitfully when the new day’s ranger, glancing through the log book and realizing Dad had never made it back out of the woods, drove out to the Anderson’s to check up on things. Seeing the car parked in the driveway under a thin layer of snow, he rapped on the windshield with his knuckles. My father sat bolt upright. The ranger cracked open the door.
“You all right, Sir?” he asked. Dad coughed and shook his head to clear the fog.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. A little cold, though.”
“We’ll get your car out of here,” the ranger said as Dad emerged from the car, squinting into the sunlight. The ranger suppressed a giggle.
“What?” asked Dad.
“Nice turban, Sir,” said the ranger.
Dad drove home with happy thoughts of a warm embrace from my mother and a retelling of the long night’s events. He called her from a pay phone in town to let her know he wasn’t dead. She called the police to inform them that he had, in fact, been lost in the woods as she had tried to make them believe. As he pulled into the driveway Mom threw herself out onto the porch and down the stairs, running to the car. He stepped out. Her extended arms suddenly dropped to her sides.
“Paul…” she began softly.
“What?” he asked.
“Have you been wearing that pillowcase all night long?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you remember why that pillowcase is in the car?” He scrunched up his eyes and searched his memory.
“Nooo…” he said.
“It was in the car,” she said, beginning to tremble with the start of what would soon be a raucous chuckle, “because the dog threw up in the car and we…” she couldn’t contain the laugh anymore, “…we had to…clean it up with…the p-p-pillowcase because we were already late for the conference and the pillowcase was all we had!”
The story made our hometown paper’s front-page news. “Insurance Agent Lost in Woods.” The story was well done, the details were accurate, and they didn’t make my father look quite so silly as they could have, what with him going out into the woods poorly dressed in the dead of winter. He believed the embarrassing lost-in-the-woods chapter of his life was closed, until our neighbor Bud went out with a fishing guide one afternoon twenty years later. Bud is a respected gynecologist from the Milwaukee suburbs. My sisters and I grew up with his daughters who were around our age, and we spent every summer afternoon at their house because their parents loved them enough to buy them a swim raft. Bud and his wife Pam spent long evenings with my parents playing Trivial Pursuit, grilling out, and laughing long into the night. Dad and Bud weren’t super-close, as far as men go, but they knew each other well, they respected one another, they shared power tools. Sometimes Bud would drive north from Milwaukee alone and spend the weekend out on our chain of lakes with a hired guide.
This year’s guide, a crusted man in his early fifties, went by the name of Roger. He had a gray-streaked ponytail to compensate for his lack of hair on top, a gold hoop earring, and a very nice boat. He and Bud tooled around the chain early in the morning shooting the breeze, fishing for walleye, and drinking bottled beer. After a few hours the conversation began to run short. They’d been through all of Roger’s marriages and all of Bud’s kids; they’d discussed how the town had grown and how business in Milwaukee was booming. Religion and politics were right out, so the conversation turned to the neighbors.
“You live next door to the Belcher’s, don’t you?” Roger asked, gesturing south toward Yellow Birch Lake.
“Yup,” said Bud. “We’ve been next door to them since the kids were young. Nice people.”
“That they are. Paul’s made quite a business here, hasn’t he?”
“Sure has. Though… you know he hasn’t always been on the up-and-up, don’t you?” Bud raised an eyebrow.
“Really? I hadn’t heard,” he said.
“It’s true,” Roger leaned in, conspiratorially. “A couple years back…must be at least ten or fifteen now, he got ‘lost in the woods overnight.’” He put down his bottle to make quotation mark hand gestures, his yellowed, chipped nails on the ends of deeply tanned fingers bouncing in bunny ears.
“But he wasn’t lost?”
“Nah,” said Roger. “People believed him when he said he was, though. The paper even wrote up a story about it. You know, lost in the woods trying to take insurance pictures, big snowstorm, blah, blah, blah.”
“So what really happened?”
“Well, apparently he was out in his car overnight in the middle of the Nicolet,” said Roger. “That much was true. The park rangers found him asleep in his car the next morning.”
“So…?”
“Well, that’s not the whole story,” said Roger. “When the rangers found him in his car the next morning…” he grinned broadly and took a big swig of beer for another few second’s delay. Fishermen in the Northwoods are, without exception, exceptional storytellers. “When the rangers found him in his car… he was naked.”
It was several years before Bud broached the subject with my father. As the story began to come out Dad sat across the table with his eyes wide. He coughed once. He coughed again. He began to chuckle uncontrollably.
“Bud!” he said finally, between gasps, “why would I have taken my clothes off? It was ten below zero! The only reason I would have taken my clothes off would have been so I could feel warmer when I put them right back on!” Bud watched him with his head tilted a little bit to the side. Dad’s laughter subsided.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Bud searched his face for a moment. Then he nodded slowly.
“Yes…” he said softly, as if explaining treatment options to a crazy person. He stood to go. “Yes,” he said again. “I guess I do.”
| | |
| More writing... Sorry it's been so long in coming... Titles are in quotes since I can't do any funky script on this version of xanga...
"24 Hours in Edinburgh"
Ride the ferris wheel at night
Over the buses moving
On strips of road laid down flat
And bare like black pasta to
Dry in the cold autumn rain.
"Mom, Dad, I’ve Joined the Vikings"
I’d seen some bad hockey in my day, but this beat it all. I had just emerged from the girls’ locker room (where I changed my clothes under a sign exclaiming, “Warning! Asbestos!”) in a collaboration of gear borrowed from various players from the Oxford men’s B-team, most of it so large it had to be held on with rolls of packing tape. A few of the guys were out of their locker room, turning circles on the newly resurfaced ice. One or two of them looked as if they had a pretty good handle on the art of standing upright; one or two others were wearing rented figure skates and mopping up the ice with their backsides. A skinny blonde kid, hair escaping out the back of his battered helmet, was doing an okay job of skating from one end to the other but was missing a key ingredient for the sport of ice hockey—a hockey stick.
“Hey!” I called him over to the boards. “Do you need a stick? I have an extra.” He looked at me for a couple of seconds.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I do.”
“Do you shoot right or left?” I asked. Shooting side is purely a matter of preference and many people who are right handed shoot left and vice versa. He looked at me blankly for another few seconds.
“I have…” he said, finally, “no idea.”
“There’s an ice hockey team in Oxford, you know,” my housemate Doug mentioned casually one afternoon as we both sat immersed in reading—me with Auden’s poetry, him with something deep and philosophical which I couldn’t pronounce. I looked up.
“No way…” I said, trying to picture some of the skinny, stiff-necked academics I’d met in Oxford wearing hockey jerseys and body checking one another. “I’m pretty gullible, but not that gullible.”
“Why do you care so much, anyway?” he asked. “Do you play?”
“Are you kidding? I’d love to play ice hockey again,” I said. “I haven’t played in years. But it doesn’t matter. There isn’t a team.”
“Do you want me to show you?” Doug left the room and came back a moment later with his laptop. “There,” he said, pointing a finger at a digital photo of him in a blue and white jersey, sweaty and smiling, with “OXFORD” emblazoned across his chest in block letters.
“There is a team!” I almost shouted. He rolled his eyes.
“You should play.”
“When are the tryouts?” I asked. He laughed.
“No tryouts. Trust me—you’ll make the team.”
“Seriously?” He held out his hand for a shake. I took it.
“Welcome,” he said, “to the Vikings.”
As I nervously awaited my first practice Doug sat with me above the rink watching the end of the free skating. Junior high kids, girls with uniform black eye liner and boys with multicolored beanies, skated around in circles, falling over, giggling, leaning against the boards. Bad 90’s music pumped from cold, tinny speakers, and spotlights shone on the six disco balls, sending a scattering of snow-colored lights across the dimly lit rink. We pointed as a girl laughed and fell into the arms of a tall boy, letting him catch her premeditated and perfectly timed fall. I was far from my home in Wisconsin, but free skating is the same pre-mating game halfway across the world. We watched for a bit, mildly amused, when a middle-aged Asian man tapped Doug on the shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Doug rose to shake his hand.
“I’m back for the term,” he said. Rowland glanced at me. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Doug stepped aside, “this is Courtney.” I shook his hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, showing the vague lilt of a Canadian accent. “You’re not…” he glanced behind me, “…skating with us, are you?”
“I am,” I said. He raised an eyebrow. I had just come from a church banquet and could tell that my dress pants, makeup, and dangling earrings weren’t making a sporting impression or my skating prowess. He looked at me for a couple seconds, sizing up all 120 pounds. I tried to look big and mean. I silently cursed the earrings.
“I assume…you know what you’re doing?” he asked, skeptically.
“I can skate, if that’s what you mean,” I said, beginning to feel the first real pricks of hesitation. Doug had assured me repeatedly that I would have no problem keeping up with the guys. Aside from skating ability, the girls’ hockey team I had played with in high school was non-contact and I was more than a little bit concerned about how all five feet and five inches of my girl body would hold up to a checking league. I shouldn’t have worried. These guys made the Mighty Ducks look like an All-Star team.
In America, sports are everything. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. If you’re adept at academics you’re a nerd; if you can throw a good spiral you’re worshiped as a deity. Ivy League schools throw ridiculous sums of money to any promising athletes without much of an eye toward their high school academic records. On the Oxford hockey team, oddly enough, schoolwork came first. If people had an important paper due, an exam to study for, reading to finish, they would skip practice and sometimes games. The most dedicated guys came regardless of what was going on in their tutorials, but those who missed were never made to sit the bench because of previous absences. Sports viewed through such a healthy perspective was a new thing for me. It took some getting used to.
“I have to be getting home,” the opposing team’s goalie said after an hour of a two-hour long scrimmage. “I have a paper due tomorrow.”
“We all do, don’t we?” I asked from the bench, frustrated that after only half of the scrimmage the goalie was taking off. Everyone on the ice turned to stare at me, open-mouthed.
“She has work to do,” a winger next to me whispered.
“Oh,” I said carefully, trying to portray the fact that that particular thought had not, as of yet, occurred to me. “Work. Right. Sorry.”
We lost every game we played that term, coming up against impossible teams in the only matches Tim, our twenty-year old team captain, coach, and manager could schedule. The University of Munich annhilated us 24-2, Warwick beat us by 12. Referees showed up rarely, and rather than forfeit we scrambled for someone who could both skate and understand the rules of ice hockey. This was difficult. During one match we used Leon, our back-up goalie, as a referee, dressing him in a Dallas Stars’ jersey turned inside out and a borrowed black helmet. He blew the puck dead twice for what should have been penalties on Nick, our second line’s Scottish center, and stopped the play to explain to Nick that high-sticking and covering the puck inside the goalie’s zone were not allowed.
“What the—” a center from Warwick came over to see what was going on. “Aren’t you going to give him a penalty?”
“He’s only been playing a couple of weeks,” Leon said, shrugging apologetically. “He doesn’t know the rules yet.”
“Oh,” said their player, waving a gloved hand. “That’s fine, then.”
The surreal interactions kept coming.
“Where do you guys get your skates sharpened?” I asked one afternoon after wiping out in a corner due, I told myself, to dull skates. They looked at me curiously.
“Well…” they turned to one another. “London?”
The captains actually changed the rules halfway through games to make them no-check if the players seemed to be getting too rough. Too rough in the world of Brit hockey consisted of a couple of body checks and an accidental trip or two. The zamboni was unpredictable and often threw buckets of water off either side, leaving inch-deep puddles in the four corners of the rink and trapping the puck as we tried to shoot it along the boards. Line changes were disasterous with each guy leaving the box patiently waiting his turn to step on the ice as another player moseyed on off and the opposing team skated down and scored. Our fans, all eight of them, were halfway asleep by the second period and spent most of their time making trips to the automatic fry dispenser that stood next to the Lucozade machine. But for the first time I was playing sports for fun—pure, unadulterated fun—with the full knowledge that this team would never come to anything. We were there to have a good time, to study all day, and to play recreational hockey. Sports were sports; academics were academics. It was crazy.
I’d never met such a mild-mannered, polite, unobtrusive hockey team in my twenty-two years. In stark contrast to the hard-nosed, foul-mouthed guys who made up my hometown men’s league, these guys were gentlemen. Tim, who was good enough to play with the varsity team, regularly gave up his centering spot for rookies during games so they’d have a chance to see some ice time. The new kids, those who’d never been on skates before, were encouraged and welcomed, made to feel an important part of the team from day one. Granted, sometimes I wished Tim would send the kids packing who showed up only for game day and never for practice, but he didn’t care about winning. He just wanted everyone to have a good time.
How strange it was to skate with such a brilliant group of men—D. Phil students, post-doc students, some of the best minds in all of Europe making happy fools of themselves on the ice rink week after week, taking a break from organic chemistry or nuclear physics to hang out with a group of guys who couldn’t skate. The dedication is impressive. In a town where students who own cars are rare carrying a bag full of 30 pounds of hockey kit is no small matter. It’s expensive, too, and five pounds for practice twice a week plus ten pounds for games adds up. Gear is three times as expensive in Britain as in the States because most of it is made in Canada and shipped overseas.
My tiny home town of Eagle River, Wisconsin cannot beat Oxford at much. You could fit nearly all of the town’s I.Q. points into the heads of four or five All Soul’s fellows. Our city’s most prominent architectural feature is a giant strawberry and pistacio ice cream cone on the side of a two-story brick candy store. We can’t grow amazing gardens so far north, the yearly town theater production never rises above the equivalent of “Oklahoma”, our idea of quality dining is a Friday night Fish Fry. The only museum we have besides the Children’s Museum is Carl’s Wood Art Museum where you can learn the history of northwoods logging. Fascinating, but it’s no Ashmolean. I once had to spell “Tolstoy” for a librarian at the only town library. But if my hometown could watch a single Viking’s game they couldn’t help but smile. This was one significant thing in which we had Oxford beat.
During my final game I crowded around the net with familiar faces, Nik, the Scotsman from the Highlands, Fabien, the Frenchman who once asked me why I played hockey since all American girls wanted “to be pretty cheerleaders,” Joe, the kid who showed up the first day without a stick, Asher and Josh who had finally bought real hockey skates, Doug, who invited me in the first place, and smiled. It was time for the ridiculously inappropriate pre-game cheer.
“Who are we?” asked Tim.
“Vikings!” we responded.
“What are we?” he asked. I raised my stick and responded for the final time.
“Bad ass!”
The humid sanctuary sweated
tears and the people’s heads
bowed and sagged above black
shirts, the same words circle the
sanctuary. “I can’t believe it,”
finding their rest in the mouths
of classmates, girlfriends,
family, faces curled in anger.
Everyone sat a little bit
alone, twisted up as
onstage a singer’s
voice broke | | |
|
Oh, the Weather Outside
It is a rare form of joy that is felt watching one’s home team slaughter a team from Dallas or Los Angeles because the game is played in the driving snow or the surging snow or the sleeting snow or sometimes, for a change, the hail. Wisconsin football games are fantastic to watch, and I grew up with a father glued to the television Monday nights laughing all through the winter. Most fathers would curse or cheer or yell while watching football games. My dad would laugh.
“Watch this!” he’d say to Mom or my sisters and I as we’d walk past, and we’d turn to the television just in time for an instant replay of an opposing team’s quarterback wiping out on the ten yard line or one of our players sliding the last six yards through the snow for a touchdown. “Total weather handicap for those southern teams! Ha ha! Did you hear the helmets crashing together? I LOVE that noise!” Dad has never quite gotten over his college football days, and not a day goes by where he neglects to mention the helmet crashing noise. My mother’s theory is that he experienced a few too many of his own.
People from the northern states are intensely proud of the weather conditions they not only endure but thrive in, and after a couple hours talking with the locals in Wisconsin, one walks away with the knowledge that temperature is no longer simply something measured in degrees, it is measured in adjectives. Cold is ubiquitous in the northwoods. It is always cold outside. Nobody comments that it is cold unless they have just moved up from someplace tropical like Ohio or Iowa. Locals use the adjective pretty when it’s getting down around ten or twenty below zero degrees Farenheight.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” they’ll say, shaking ice crystals from their beards and eyebrows. “Wow. Sure is pretty cold.” When temperatures dip under twenty below zero the adjective is darned.
“It’s darned cold,” people will say, running car engines for upwards of three days before attempting to drive the vehicle and throwing dishwater outside to watch it freeze before it hits the ground. It’s only when temperatures are forty below zero or colder that the adjective really is used.
“It’s really cold,” the locals remark, thawing out the dog’s feet with a hairdryer when it comes in from its thirty-second jaunt to use the yard and breaking off frozen strands of drool from its muzzle. While other cities send out emergency warnings to their citizens about record cold snaps and dangerous winter conditions Wisconsinites don’t alter their normal routines one bit. Whether it’s taking the dog for a walk or playing pond hockey or snowmobiling to the bar for a quick beer, the habits continue no matter what the weather. Sure when little Johnny’s ears begin turning black from frostbite during his usual pond hockey escapades Mom and Dad start to think twice about sending him outside in Arctic temperatures, but this is the exception and not the rule.
The thing about having cold weather nearly year-round is that when the temperature actually rises above zero people don’t actually believe it. Wisconsinites, in their happy view of frosty weather, are far more likely to err on the side of believing things are actually colder than they really are, as evidenced by the number of pickup trucks (they’re always pickup trucks) that crash through thin ice each year, many of them towing ice fishing shacks onto ice less than six inches thick. We like to believe it’s terribly cold out, we brag to friends and family in southern states about just how much the temperature has recently dropped. It makes us feel as though we’ve gained something by spending our entire lives in a place nobody in their right mind would enter in the winter months.
“Sure,” we say, “you might live on a beach where hula girls are ready to feed you peeled grapes or on a gorgeous mountain where you can ski out into your sunny backyard for lattes prepared by buxom Swiss baristas, but it was thirty-eight below zero here yesterday. Seventy-one below zero if you count the wind chill.”
How much alcohol is involved in the annual “It’s Cold Enough to Ice Fish” truck-in-the-lake debacles is debatable, and my insurance agent Father has to deal with at least one irate customer each year chewing him out for not paying for their sunken truck.
“Hello, State Farm Insurance, this is Paul,” he’ll answer the phone in his suit and tie, tapping a pen on his desk calendar. “Mm-hmm. Through the ice? Really. Well, that’s not covered, just so you know. Mm-hmm… I’m sorry, but it is October. You might want to wait longer next year before you try and ice fish.”
When you grow up constantly cold, as my younger sisters and I did, you get used to it. It’s like being born deaf or with a few less fingers. You know nothing else so the handicap doesn’t bother you unless somebody else makes a big deal about it. My parents took us to Disney world when we were little and we stayed with some family friends in Tampa Bay. Talking to their daughter Kimmi I was met with the awe-inspiring realization that there were people in the world, and not even in the world but in my very own country who did not own a snowsuit. They didn’t own them because they had no reason to own them. It never even snowed in Florida. This boggled my mind.
“Why don’t we live in Florida?” I asked Dad one afternoon when he came in from shoveling the driveway—again. My question was far more Disney World than temperature-related, but the feeling that we had been somehow geographically gypped remained.
“Ask your Mom,” he said. “This was all her idea.” Mom had chosen to live in the northwoods after a childhood of summer vacations up in a cabin on Lower Kaubeshine Lake. Wisconsin in the summer is gloriously beautiful and brings even the most hardened and bitter locals out blinking into the sunlight. Day-time emperatures remain pleasant—sixties and seventies usually, with a few weeks of eighties every couple of years—and nights are pleasantly cool in the fifties and low sixties. It’s easy to understand why so many people are lulled into a sense of false security. Looking over the lakes and forests of the north during a July afternoon, it is difficult to understand that this is the exception and not the rule, that most of what lies before you is buried under feet of ice and snow for nine months of the year. The summers are fickle as well, and while one summer may be pleasant and beautiful, the next may never get above sixty-five and dump rain like a Mongolian monsoon.
The really warm temperatures—high eighties to nineties—come only sporadically, and sometimes not at all. “If summer falls on a weekend this year,” the common Eagle River saying goes, “we should all have a picnic.” This is always laughed at half-heartedly, as one would laugh at a joke about a jailed uncle or a cousin suffering from mental retardation. It’s only funny because it’s so desperately, sadly true. The northwoods is a fabulous place to vacation to, but make sure you bring your winter gear just in case. My family has celebrated the Fourth of July floating in our motor boat in the middle of Yellow Birch Lake each wrapped in a down sleeping bag with a wool ski hat on, breathing air so cold that when we exhale it leaves frosty vapor clouds. We tried to stay long enough to watch the fireworks go off across the lake that year, but it was just too darned cold out and we settled for listening to the booms from inside our heated living room with mugs of hot chocolate. This was the fourth of July. Imagine what June looked like.
One perk about growing up where it’s so ridiculously cold out is the amazing amount of snow we get each year. Snow is fun. We make snow ice cream, whole snowmen families, snow caves to camp in. High schoolers snowmobile to school, my Mom cross-country skiis across the golf course for exercise, everybody skips school to go snowboarding on blue bird powder days. My sisters and I used to lie in wait for the snowplow to come clear our driveway and then spend the next week building forts and tunnels in the huge drifts, causing Mom to come out and check on us every hour or so to make sure we were still somewhere in the yard under all that snow.
A downside to the cold is that I never got to wear a normal Halloween costume in all my years of trick or treating. Each outfit had to be designed to fit over snowsuits, making me appear a very obese princess or butterfly or fairy queen each year, as the neighborhood kids and I trudged through snowdrifts or frosted grass to the front door of the nearest neighbor’s house a couple blocks away. I would point out fantastic costumes in catalogues—a medieval queen, Tinkerbell, Betty Rubble from the Flintstones, a mermaid—and my mother would shoot them down one after the other.
“Nope,” she’d say. “You’ll freeze. Don’t you remember how cold it was last year? Why don’t you dress up like a teddy bear or a lion? That would keep you warm.” Halloween was depressing for me as a child.
The cold makes people distrustful as well, and most people in the north, while friendly to summer tourists, are downright hostile to the winter ones.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” they ask with their eyes and attitudes. “Don’t you have any idea what the temperature is outside?” The locals assume winter tourists to be either clinically insane or up to no good and sometimes both. This idea is perpetuated by the one or two tourists a year who actually do come up north and do something stupid—crash their snowmobile into a tree, lick a flagpole downtown to see if that thing about tongues sticking to icy metal is really true, rob a gas station, etc. Nobody mentions the fact that a good number of the locals do things like this monthly. The fact that the mishaps are perpetrated by foreigners from out of state makes them, in the eyes of the town populace, far more sinister.
Participation in high school sports in Eagle River is higher than the average American town on account of there being absolutely nothing to do all winter but play hockey or basketball. The other options are to get pregnant, as one girl in six in my graduating class chose to do, or to get heavily into the Eagle River drug scene which, from what I’ve heard, leaves much to be desired. Hockey is big because it allows the town populace the opportunity to leave the confines of their ice-ensconed homes where they have been sitting in the cold and voyage out to the ice-ensconed arena to sit in the cold. Basketball games are at least in heated gymnasiums, but the turnout is always much lower than the hockey games. Like I said, we enjoy being cold.
My Dad loves the temperatures of the northwoods because he’s always, always too warm. He could be in the middle of Antarctica, surrounded by penguins and furry seals and climate ecologists in five-layer down parkas and he would be wearing only a pair of swim trunks and he would make sure to find a place in the shade. Mom, on the other hand, spends most of her life wearing a five-layer down parka and mourning the passing of summer. Family hotel rooms always turn into battlefields. Dad will leave the room and Mom will crank the heat; Mom will leave the room and Dad will turn on the air conditioner and open all the windows. My sisters and I have inherited Mom’s thin blood, and we plead along with her for hotel heat.
“You can always put on another sweater,” he’ll tell my younger sisters and I as we set fire to mattresses and hotel towels and alcohol from the minibar in order to keep warm.
Wisconsin weather is cruel in producing one sizzling weekend each year. The weekend falls unpredictably, sometimes in June, sometimes as late as September, but when it comes the entire town grinds to a halt. Air conditioning is rare—we just don’t need it—and for those two or three days young and old alike stroll the streets of town looking downtrodden, miserable, and entirely sweaty. The heat feels like an injustice, a curse, and nobody understands what we’ve done to deserve it.
Grandma and Grandpa were visiting from Illinois during the heat wave one year, they drove north hoping for cool afternoons and were met with a couple of 90 degree days where the late-afternoon humidity lasted long after the sun went down. Grandma retreated to the basement where temperatures were a few degrees cooler; Grandpa bought an inflatable raft and paddled out into the middle of the lake.
“Grandpa,” I said, swimming out alongside him on the first afternoon, “you should probably stick closer to shore. The jet skiis don’t pay much attention and you’re probably going to get run over.” For a moment I didn’t think he heard me, he floated motionless, looking up at the baked blue sky, his arms dangling down into the green water on either side of the mattress raft.
“Well,” he said finally, slowly enunciating each syllable as to not expend any more energy, “everybody has to go sometime.”
A wedding took place at the northwoods Evangelical Free church on Death Valley weekend a few years ago and the mother of the bride had to replace the meticulous flower arrangement meant to go on the altar with an enormous rotating fan. Even so the groom nearly passed out during the ceremony and the bride showed up in the receiving line looking quite a bit wilted. The groom’s family was from the Czech Republic, a place that has decently warm summers, and they all looked fresh as daisies. The bride’s family looked like soggy toast.
But the hot weather weekend fades away, and soon warm temperatures are nothing but a memory and the cold returns. We get our first snow in early to mid-September, our first real blizzard a few weeks after that. The snows don’t melt completely until May, and even then freak storms dot the radar from time to time, dumping snow on a state ready to see some spring green. It becomes demoralizing about February when Christmas is over, Valentine’s Day has come and gone, hockey season is winding down, and there is nothing left to do but hole up and wait for spring. The outlook on life is bleak and there is always some bizarre small-town murder that is a little bit more understandable because it happened in February. I’m going home this winter, too. And I know that when I do I’ll have to warm up my car forever and when I inhale the inside of my nose will freeze and some days I’ll have to chip inches of ice off the front porch so that when my friends come over they don’t slip and fall. And I know that my hands will get dry and cracked and my skin will pale with endless afternoons inside by the fire, and I’ll have to shovel the driveway and help my grandparents get their car out of snowbanks and the forests around my house will be absolutely beautiful. | | |
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If It’s Tourist Season…
“Excuse me, sweetie, but we don’t need to hear the safety speech again. We’ve already heard it.”
Please God, just let me kill her, I thought, not unkindly. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have to go over this speech every time I bring a new group into the climbing wall. And if you had heard it before, you probably wouldn’t have put your son’s climbing harness on backwards.” She glanced down at little Jimmy and tugged at the front of his harness with a few manicured fingers.
“It’s backwards? Are you sure?” I smiled patiently and fantasized briefly about telling her I didn’t care at all if he climbed with an unsafe harness, it would just mean one less child I had to listen to whine and one less set of parents I had to listen to ask me to hoist their kid up higher on the wall so it looked like he hadn’t chickened out three feet up, but instead I pulled up on the back of his harness and watched the front buckles come completely undone. “Oh,” she said, glaring at me. “You should have explained it better.”
“Do you have a Band-aid?” a man asked me after a river trip I had guided down the Wolf River in north central Wisconsin. I glanced at his shin. It was spurting blood.
“Are you sure you don’t need a tourniquet?” I asked, opening the first aid kit. “What happened? Are you alright?” He grinned sheepishly and looked over at his wife.
“Well,” he said, “well, I was just… I mean… I guess when you tell us not to stand up in the rapids you really mean it, huh?” He laughed jovially.
“Sir,” I said quietly, “we tell you that so that you don’t die. Do you realize you could have gotten your foot stuck and been held underwater indefinitely?”
“Ah, you would have seen me,” he said. “That’s what the guides are for, right?” I poured Betadine iodine on his shin and made small talk as I bandaged up his bleeding leg.
“So where are you from, anyway?” I asked.
“Chicago,” he said. I should have known.
The primary industry of northern Wisconsin is tourism. Drawn to the north by promises of pristine wilderness, untold miles of snowmobile trails, and the best hunting and fishing this side of Canada, tourists flock to Eagle River each summer and autumn by the thousands. In recent years things like rock climbing walls, whitewater kayaking and rafting, and family camps have been added to the plethora of outdoor offerings based in the north, drawing even more flatlanders to the woods for a good time. Although the area’s citizens depend on these city sojourners for their very survival, the relationship between host and visitor is tenuous at best. My friend Ian has a bumper sticker on his car that says, “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?” We happily take their money while wishing the entire time that they would pack up and move back south before they rub off any of their ubiquitous and sarcastic southern charm on the local kids.
Sometimes the unthinkable happens and the tourists fall so deeply in love with northern Wisconsin that they buy a cottage and set up house spending months each year pestering the locals with their very presence. Most big-city folk have more than enough money to buy whatever they want in the frugally priced northwoods where jobs are difficult to find, and they waltz in with little regard for the delicate balance the locals have created to try and maintain a sense of community through seasons where the town goes from its usual population of 1400 to over 50,000 with tourists and back again. The complete disregard for local culture tends to infuriate small-town business owners who spend decades saving up to buy their dream cottage only to have it snatched from under their noses by a wealthy big-city businessman who only wants to add to his collection of toys.
I should try and be fair here. Not all people from big cities are bad. In fact, some of them move up from the cities for good, like my parents did 24 years ago, and do their best to adapt to and embrace local culture in such a way that you would never know they were former flatlanders. This, unfortunately, is the exception and not the rule, as the vast majority spend their time driving too fast on country roads, complaining about the lack of choice in movies playing downtown, and buying cheap t-shirts that say ridiculously witty things like, “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t reach my bear!”
George, a good friend of my father’s, built a cabin on the quaint and quiet little St. Germain Lake ten years ago. He and his wife Sue had spent decades amassing a fortune in Florida through George’s expert salesmanship and could have purchased nearly all of St. Germain had they wanted to. They were exactly the type of people I would have hated were they not so darned nice and sensible. They purchased a nice but modest cabin in the b ack woods to escape the strip-mall craze of Florida for a few months each year. They loved the stillness, the solitude, the relaxed attitude of the locals who, when confronted with a problem would respond with a concerned expression and a quiet, “Really now. Well then, we’ll hafta do something aboot that, won’t we?” Their cabin was their refuge for years. And then the Loud family moved in.
The Loud family consisted of Mr. And Mrs. Loud, toupeed and bottle-blonde respectively, and the three Loud boys, who were big and dumb and presumably named big and dumb names like Butch and Moose and Hammer. They bought the cabin right next door to George and Sue and developed the maddening habit of arriving in the middle of the night and unloading their giant black Sports Utility Vehicle without any regard to neighborly social graces.
“Do you want the fishing tackle inside, Dad?” Moose would yell up the gravel driveway.
“Yeah!” Mr. Loud would respond, bellowing back down from the house. “Bring it in!” An SUV door would slam, and then another.
“What about the beer, Dad?” Butch would scream in a slightly slurred way signaling to the entire neighborhood that there was no longer as much beer in the vehicle as there had previously been.
“Bring the beer in!” Mrs. Loud would shriek. “We can’t let the beer get cold, stupid! Bring it in!” More doors would slam.
“What about the lawn chairs?” Slam. Slam. Slam. George and Sue would finally drift off to sleep, serenaded by the chorus of SUV doors and the slurred screaming from next door, cursing the day they had decided to buy a cabin in the tranquil northwoods. George fantasized about doing terrible things to Mr. Loud for years before the opportunity walked right out behind his house one day.
George has always been an avid ice fisherman. He doesn’t catch much and he doesn’t care much that he never does, he just likes to sit out in his shack with a friend or two and some chicken soup in a thermos and shoot the breeze while Sue putters around the house arranging things or talking to their three grown daughters on the phone. He enjoyed the winters on Little St. Germain far more than the summers, both because of the immense change in weather from Florida’s winter humidity and because the Louds never came up in the winter, preferring instead to irritate their Chicago neighbors during the colder months. The tranquil winters didn’t last, however, for Mr. Loud dragged the family north just after Christmas one year.
“What’s that?” George’s friend Mark asked, pointing through the crack in the ice fishing shed door to a huge black SUV that had parked just up the hill from George and Sue’s cabin.
“Oh no,” George said, leaning his head back against the wooden wall. “It’s the Louds.” Mr. Loud stalked out from the car and stood in the driveway, looking down at Little St. Germain Lake and the tidy ice fishing shed just off George’s pier. The Loud boys had begun unloading, yelling the usual questions to their father who stood motionless and unanswering at the top of the hill. He cleared his throat. He scratched the back of his head. Then he spun around on his black Italian shoes and got back into the enormous black monster, squealing his tires on the way out of the driveway and leaving his boys holding coolers and lawn chairs, openmouthed in the driveway.
“You know that guy?” Mark asked. “Are you sure? He looks like he might have just dropped those kids off.”
“Oh no,” said George. “He’ll be back. Just wait.”
An hour or so later Mr. Loud came back and unloaded more high-tech ice fishing gear than either Mark or George had seen in their lives. An insulated shed was first, towed down to the lake by a new snowmobile, and followed by a battery-powered ice auger, a shiny tackle box rattling with lines and lures, several fiberglass fishing poles, a space heater with 500 yards of extension cord, and a battery-powered coffee pot. The entire setup was hauled down to the frozen lake in short order, and Mr. Loud took to assembling it with glee, glancing over every now and again with a smirk at George and Mark in their dilapidated but functional ice fishing shack.
“I hope he catches pneumonia,” Mark said under his breath. George nodded. The Loud boys were nowhere to be seen, presumably having gone inside to play video games and drink beer, much as they did during their summer visits. Mr. Loud, having successfully constructed several thousands of dollars worth of ice fishing gear, stowed the poles and tackle box inside the shed, cranked up the heater, and powered up the ice auger to drill a hole in the thick ice to begin the actual fishing that no doubt interested him far less than dropping a ridiculous amount of money at a local business in the blink of an eye. The auger roared to life and he set it against the ice and leaned over it. It skittered instead of biting, and led him on a mad scramble around the ice trying to get control of what looked more and more like a possessed jackhammer and less like an ice drill. Not to be deterred he continued trying to lean on the auger, each time rewarded with another skirmish and a dozen feet of erratically tracked snow. By the time he turned the machine off and collapsed in a snowbank, George and Mark were in hysterics.
“Should—we—” gasped Mark, “should—we—tell—him?”
“No,” said George, bent double and panting for breath, “this is way too much fun.”
Mr. Loud wiped his brow, took off his brand new North Face Gore-Tex jacket, and strode purposefully to the auger once again. He gave it a stern look and picked it up, his face set in chiseled lines of anger and hatred. He put the bit to the ice again. Again it skittered. Again he chased it, sending up showers of fine-grain snow from the ground as the auger bumped and bounced across the white surface followed by a sweaty, swearing man in expensive shoes and a rapidly loosening toupee. The second time he collapsed in a snowbank with the auger still whirring at his side, George stood lazily up from his ice shed and moseyed over to the distraught man.
“Do you want to know what’s wrong?” he asked, standing over the red-faced Chicagoan, absorbing every conceivable ounce of joy from the man’s frustration and pain.
“With the auger?” Mr. Loud squeaked, sweat drifting down his face and falling to the snow, melting round holes through it to the ice.
“Yeah,” said George, picking up the shiny device and flipping open the electronic panel. “It’s battery operated, right?” he asked, poking a gloved finger into the battery panel.
“Yes,” Mr. Loud struggled to sit up.
“The batteries are in backwards,” he said, popping them out, turning them over, and reinserting them with a smile. “It should work now,” he handed the apparatus to the silence Mr. Loud who stood there with an open mouth, steam rising from the front of his bald head. He cleared his throat and snatched the machine from George, who walked back over to his own ice shack, snickering happily all the while. Mr. Loud fired up the auger and promptly drilled himself a tidy hole.
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Cold
Shaking ice-crystals
From eyebrows and beards men
Stagger hastily indoors
The air does not nip
It tears skin like tissue paper
Freezing bones to stillness
Trees bend and hover
The weight of flakes
Pressing down green boughs
A blue-mittened child
Blows crystalline bubbles
Stacks them like snowballs
Creatures hibernate
Sitting out winter in caves
Fat bodies content
No such luxury
For us, as we walk the same Crackled footsteps on. | | |
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