F2101-1 Great Uncle Jake

     You know, I'm kind of happy to know that my family has its roots in the Holy Land (Note: not that Holy Land.  This one’s in Fond du Lac County Wisconsin).  I've always felt some ill-defined attraction for that place and never knew quite why.  It goes deeper than the memories of spending that summer at Albert and Florence’s farm, or the fish dinners on Friday nights at Steffes' Tavern in St. Peter.  It's  almost as if the land itself had some metaphysical allure that went beyond the shallow experience of merely driving through it's winding roads and admiring the rugged scenery.  Rather, to me, the red till on the backs of the rolling drumlins seems to say that they have been shaped by that scrappy horde of my ancestors who felled the trees and cleared the land so long ago.  And I suppose that Great-Uncle Jake got his incredible toughness from that effort at defining the land and not from long hours spent dreaming about a better life as he dozed on the wicker chair on his front porch.
     And believe me, Jake was tough!  I remember that cold day in January, 1964, when a storm blew through Fond du Lac and walloped the city with 16" of snow.  Nothing was moving that day.  The streets were too deep in snow to permit anyone but the really foolish or the really hardy to venture out of their homes.  And yet, as I trudged those four blocks to the tavern to tend bar that day, I kept thinking how utterly useless it was to leave the comfort of the house to go to a tavern that surely would have no customers.  I had to walk down the middle of Main Street to get there, knee-deep in snow, and if it wasn't for the fact that a stiff and snarly wind was blowing straight out of the north, I would have turned and walked back home.  And I wouldn't have felt guilty at all.
     A few minutes after 8:00 o'clock in the morning Uncle Jake was beating on the door of the tavern and demanding to know why I hadn't unlocked the door.  He had walked some eight blocks from over on North Park Avenue to the tavern.  He was the only pedestrian on the streets that day.  His face was fiery red from the biting wind.  But he was his usual impish self - that special impishness that only Uncle Jake could display.  "Where the heck is everybody, Billy?" he asked.  "They aren't nuts like you and me, Uncle Jake," I said.  "They're home standing on the register instead of flopping around in the snow like a bunch of clowns."  He was about eighty-six years old at that time.  Toughest man I ever knew!
     He had a full head of dark hair and he used to challenge people to grab a hold of his hair.  "Hang on tight," he'd say.  And he would pull you over the bar if you hung on long enough.  He was one foxy sheepshead player and used to embarrass a lot of wannabe players who mistook him for a doddering old man.  "Kid can't play," he'd say.  "Guess the old man showed him how, didn't I, Billy?"  Ah, yes, that he did!
     He had a reverential way of talking about his wife Annie.  You could tell at once that he deeply loved her.  He told me once, "I rode the rails from Iron Mountain, Michigan and then I married Annie." I pretended to appear stupid, "You just got off the train and then you married her?  Didn't you court her first?"  "Of course I did, you darned fool," he'd say.  And then he would tell you about his wonderful bride.  "Oh, what a woman my Annie was!"

B1035-1 Vacation

It is very difficult to go to Wisconsin on vacation. There’s that awful, 12-hour drive to get there. Half of the drive seems to occur on the barricaded and devastated roads through Chicago, bumper-to-bumper, motionless, still. If one had to find a metaphor for busted-up streets, Chicago would force itself upon the mind like some burly construction worker elbowing his way up to the bar. It seems as if the roads there were always in a state of disrepair. Chicago, unhappily, is caught in an unending state of reconstruction. All of the bulldozers that Caterpillar and John Deere have sold in the last twenty years now seem to be located on that thin finger of land - that virtual Hiroshima of destruction - between the concrete barriers along Interstate-294. I was tempted at first to blame the construction companies for the enormous holes on both sides of the highway at Granite City, Illinois, until I remembered that the limestone quarries there preceded the concrete-busters by several years. They were, after all, Silurian limestone reefs, formed ages ago when the highway work had hardly begun. Surely, it was an easy mistake to make. Everything is busted-up, gouged and wrecked in Chicago.

Then, too, it is very difficult to go to Wisconsin on vacation for another reason. Beyond the near impossibility of even getting there in the first place, one has to participate in the endless fantasies of others once the actual arrival takes place. One is carried along on the winds of another’s fantasy like seeds from a dandelion. You will find that, although you may call it “Your Vacation,” it really belongs entirely to someone else. Wisconsin is a place where you always dance to the tune of others.

The last time we went was no different. There was the usual mandatory trip to Salchert’s Meat Market in St. Cloud. And, yes, we went to Vern’s Cheese in Chilton as well. A trip to Wisconsin would not be complete without those two trips. Somehow we missed going to Widmer’s Cheese in Theresa. I don’t know how that could have happened. After all, her cheese shelf in the refrigerator was empty when we left on vacation.

We went to relatives’ houses and found that we had to visit several times before we began to pall upon one another like the wilt on a Mother’s Day bouquet two weeks after Mom had first clasped it tenderly to her bosom.

Foolishly, I had planned to watch the breeze that came in off the lake to see how it played tickle with the trees. But others wanted to pull me from my chair and make me stare at pictures taken in a different time, and guess who might be whom in the sepia corduroys of yesteryear. I just wanted to sit and watch the wind. I wanted to watch the clouds clambering up the face of God. I wanted to walk along the road and study the plants and trees - and the blue-flower chicory - that he had planted there. They, however, wanted me to run to the Piggly Wiggly and the Pick-n-Save. And you should have heard how they raved about the watermelon cluttering the aisles there. I was surprised at the things that brought wonder to their eyes. Wonder? You want wonder? Look across the lake at night, when the stars and the lights dust the shore with magic, and speak to me no more of grocery stores. Verily, rutabagas do not populate the Milky Way.

Of course, we had to look at the things that weren’t there anymore. We do that every year. It’s a kind of game to figure out what’s been leveled flat and what’s just risen from some farmer’s field. Last year our attention was focused upon the hospital. Half-bulldozed and half brand-new, the things inside the hospital made you shake your head and ask, “What were they thinking?”

I looked at the lobby that was a day’s journey away from the gift shop by telephone, and thought about the infirm who would shuffle down those twenty-foot aisles like hapless victims at Auschwitz. It would take them a month to get to the other end, passing through two time zones, and again as many cultures. What fool would build a structure that big, that useless, that expensive? I’m surely glad that I’m not paying their heating bills.

And that chapel! An atrium at the Holiday Inn wouldn’t look very much different from that. You’d have to search pretty hard to find God in a place like that. Yet, I seemed to be the only one who found that architecture odd and out of place, much like a mathematician’s nightmare, filled and zigzagged with permutations and summations. They, however, professed to like it. But they couldn’t explain - exactly - what attracted their admiration. I suspect that they may have been pretending.

Then, one morning we got up early and drove away before anyone could notice that we had stirred from our beds. We left a note to say that we were going "to look at things." But we were really going to smell the countryside. Of course, if you didn't grow up in Wisconsin - if you have never lived around a dairy farm - you probably cannot understand this fascination with “smelling the countryside.” Cow manure has the most wonderful smell in the entire world, you see. Oh, I know you won't agree with that. But, as we drove through the Holy Land (that's really what they call it), we saw herds of cows standing next to the barn, stomachs full and udders empty, swishing their tails in the early morning sun. They had just been milked and turned out into the corral next to the barn. They were deliriously happy at the prospect of spending the day under the hickory trees along the highway.

For a moment - lost in the strong whiff of this bucolic scene - I had forgotten all about the Piggly Wiggly and the Pick-n-Save. Hey, I was on vacation, man.