Crunching Gravel (11 page)

Whenever I wrote poems, I wrote in his manner. At six I had attempted verses and short stories based on cute animals—raccoons, possums, skunks, frogs, crows, and robin redbreasts. My first public recognition came when the superintendent of schools saw one of my Rocky Raccoon stories, written in a pencil tablet. When the teacher singled me out, the superintendent patted my head and told me to keep writing. That spring I wrote poems, hoping to enter one in the county fair. The teacher selected a narrative piece and drew a picture to go with it. That fall I realized she had written an entirely new poem, “The Teacher with a Bully in His Class,” and entered it in my name. She had printed it in Gothic script and affixed a drawing of an old-fashioned schoolmaster berating a hulking, obstreperous boy standing by, waiting to be birched. The poem received first prize, a new dollar bill. When I questioned the ethics—the work after all, was hers—she laughed and said that I had tried so hard to write she wanted to “assist” me. After that, I kept my verses private, limiting myself to an occasional story and keeping elaborate notes on meetings of our “literary club.” Among the few books constituting our school library was Guest's famous volume
The House by the Side of the Road
.

I took every opportunity to watch Guest tee up and drive his ball down the fairway. He was an indifferent golfer, but because of his fame he was assigned our most experienced caddy, Mike Tomlanovich. On Friday, the last day of the tournament, I screwed up my courage and asked him to autograph a golf card, which I then prized for years. The paradox of a True Poet (as I regarded him then) arranging home mortgages, a form of usury, never struck me. He certainly was a departure from my naive image of the poet as a romantic loner in lace cuffs, seated at an open casement window at dusk, plume in hand, seized by Inspiration.

The golf course was my first real involvement with the world outside home and school. This, a real job, differed from selling arbutus, peeling logs, and picking potato bugs—jobs I had done for my dad. For the first time, I sensed real possibilities in the larger world.

A closed community of Finns inhabited Phelps, a lumber town north of Eagle River. Importing cooperative ideals from Europe, these people found a locale of hills, firs, lakes, and swamps resembling the homeland. They established a cooperative sawmill, grocery and hardware stores, a school, a health service, and a cow fund. If any of their group lost cows from disease, calving, or drowning, the fund replaced the animal. They believed in free and universal education from grade school through university. Their ideals, like those of other immigrant Scandinavians settling in Wisconsin and Minnesota, influenced the culture at large. The Progressive party, led by Senator Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, set a national tone that incorporated Scandinavian social values.

A conspicuous Finnish effort at community outreach was the erection of a hall for meetings, festivals, and dances. These events supported the cow and family funds. The hall, built of pine logs, was located a half mile from Sundsteen School. Across the road was a grove of virgin evergreens, a spot I always feared. The deep recesses might easily conceal bear or a leech-covered wild man of the woods. One winter morning I found blood all over the snow and decided a man had been killed there. My quieter mind said that it was a deer. A fetid odor of death emerged from the sunless earth below the gigantic cedars.

The Finnish overseers scheduled Saturday night dances, charging half a dollar for each male attending. They imported a trio of semiprofessional musicians from Watersmeet, Michigan, who played both traditional and popular music. My cousin Frenchy attended every dance, drank, and got into fights. To many young men, the pursuit of violence was more important than the pursuit of women.

No other place in the immediate area so appealed to young bucks for acting out mating rituals, turf defenses, and ego pecking orders. To my cousin, cut lips and black eyes were badges of honor. Occasionally, Everett and I walked to the hall to listen to the music. Once, in the parking lot, we witnessed a vicious fight between Frenchy and another husky youth. The excitement was palpable. When Frenchy was getting the worst of it, his brother Jim jumped in. Shortly, the fight turned into a melee. Officials tried to stop it but couldn't. My brother and I, fearful, left before the fight ended. The next day Frenchy and Jim boasted they had smeared the gravel with their attackers, men from Michigan looking for trouble. When the hall was finally closed to dances, the young stags moved to other venues to work their macho imperatives.

Picking blueberries was a way of life. Families with knowledge of fertile patches were secretive. Farmers were alert to trespassers and threatened pickers found on their land. Berries were particularly lavish on burned-over state land near Buckotoban, twenty miles north. Such first crops on burned land were always prolific.

On the last Saturday of July, we packed bologna sandwiches, lemonade, cookies, and coffee, threw a galvanized washtub and an assortment of lard pails into the car, and drove to Buckotoban. When we arrived, cars were already parked, the pickers getting an early start. Dad drove down the circuitous dirt road until he came to a depression as large as a lake. Tall dead firs, still blackened from fire, stood at intervals. On the far bank, large hazelnuts flourished. We could find shelter there from the sun. A narrow stream we could drink from ran through the blueberry patch.

The shrubs were loaded, and there were huckleberries, darker than the blueberries and larger. Dad took his pail and went off alone, leaving the rest of us to stay within sight of the car. We tied pails to our waists with rope. Nell and Everett quickly tired and spent most of their time eating all they picked or napping. Mom was a fast picker, as I was. We were proud of how clean our berries were, with minimal leaf and twig chaff.

I worried when Dad was out of sight. What if he were lost? What if a grizzly loomed over us?

The most fecund shrubs flourished around the trunks of burned trees. The berries were so thick you simply cupped a branch with your hand, palm up, and raked your fingers through. Once a pail bottom was covered, filling the pail seemed easy. Each pail dumped into the washtub was another guarantee against winter's hunger.

By 5
P.M.
we were within inches of filling the tub. We had picked nearly half the patch. Since we had concentrated near the road, Dad felt we'd find berries there next week. Cars looking for productive spots would stop, see the stripped bushes, and drive on. We reached home tired, ate cold chicken and tinned beef and went to bed.

In the morning we cleaned the berries by passing them from one hand to the other, and blowing on them to dislodge light debris and withered fruit. In the steam processing, all green fruit would soften and absorb color. Once we'd filled a kettle, we floated the berries in water to wash off dust, scooping out any defective fruit. We filled sterilized quart jars and processed them in our wash boiler. By evening we had canned over fifty quarts.

The following Saturday we returned to Buckotoban, an outing as successful as the earlier one. After that we limited our picking to patches near the farm. One fertile spot was a bog on Kula's land. We had to be quiet there, for Kula, pitchfork in hand, chased trespassers. We ate this fruit raw in milk and sugar or cooked in thick pies smothered with homemade ice cream.

We also harvested raspberries, wild pincherries (for a delicious jelly), and blackberries. Raspberries grew on old brush heaps or stone piles. Garter snakes darted from hiding. We killed every snake we could, not realizing they were harmless and, in fact, controlled vermin. We whacked snakes in half with hoes or sticks, watching the halves squirm. We draped dead snakes on barbed-wire fences, a warning, we thought, to other snakes. I recall digging up a writhing nest, shoving the snakes into a tin can, clamping on a cover, and presenting them as a “present” to Margie. She closed her eyes and then opened them to find her hands filled with the writhing creatures. She ran screaming to the house.

None of us cared much for blackberries, although they made a superb jam. For several years, juneberries flourished. Then, suddenly, mysteriously, there were no more juneberries. All of the trees were dead.

 

The first week of September brought the first hard frost. Maple tree sap ebbed along myriad capillary streams, finally reaching the roots, where it remained all winter. It was the sap withdrawing that stained leaves with the persimmon, scarlet, and saffron tints that made those autumnal forests wondrous. Nights grew short, and the icily resplendent tones of aurora borealis formations covered the skies. In elaborate, noisy patterns, wild geese migrated south. Eagerly awaited parcels of school clothes arrived from Sears, Roebuck. My various summer jobs—caddying, stripping timber, selling arbutus, picking potato bugs—paid for the new clothes, with fifteen dollars left over. I had helped my family I looked forward to the county fair, where we would exhibit livestock and produce, and the carnival preceding it. The cataclysms that continued to swirl through Europe seemed unreal. Our political sentiments were staunchly “America First.”

 

The carnival took place in a field at the junction of Sundsteen Road and Highway 17. I walked there before opening day to help erect tents and booths. Brightly painted vans were arranged in a row at the back of the field. Barred wagons, badly in need of paint, held a lion and a gorilla. Some booths were already up. There would be a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. The carnies looked rough, most of them unshaven, some stripped to the waist. The women among them dressed like men.

A large tent was splayed over the dirt, ready for hoisting. Half a dozen men were driving stakes into the ground and tying guy ropes. “Don't just stand there!” a voice shouted. “Get to work.” The man, in his mid-twenties, wore red trunks and was tanned a savage brown. His biceps were huge and flexed as he stood before me. His accent was strange. “He'p get this tent up and you'll earn a silver dollar.”

I held the guy wires taut while he secured them to stakes. The crew raised the tent, working a large center pole upright. We erected shorter poles. The pungent odor of crushed grass blended with the snake-like smell of canvas.

We set up platforms for a trapeze and surrounded an area of painted boxes and hoops with a circle of wire, where the lion and gorilla would perform. I hustled, working twice as hard as I normally would, knowing I was being watched, craving approval from these exotic men. Near the center pole stood an ornate calliope, which received power from a noisy generator being tested to make sure that the ride would move efficiently. I helped position some of the battered, paint-chipped wooden horses, holding them erect until they were bolted to the floor.

When we broke for lunch, the carnival man, Brik, invited me to his wagon. The latter was generic gypsy, with gilt paint, small barred windows with perforated shutters trimmed with wild roses. To enter you climbed a set of steps attached to the vehicle by straps for easy raising and lowering.

Brik said he was from Georgia. He traveled with the show for half the year, moving north during the warm season and moving south when it got cold. He bossed a pair of older men, carnies, it seemed, down on their luck, who looked like boozers.

The interior of his wagon was set up like a living room, complete with small sofa and an emboridered, brightly colored pillow saying “I LUV U MOM.” A small dinette contained a couple of chairs and an icebox, and a mattress and blankets were on the floor. “Like liver-wurst?” he asked. “Sure,” I said, sitting at the table. He brought out milk and pop. “Milk keeps my muscles big,'' he said. “I suppose you noticed.”

“I want to look like you,” I said, feeling stupid as soon as my words were out. I must have sounded giddy, like a pimply boy asking a girl he revered to go to a school dance.

“You've got height, lad. Here, stand with your back against mine. You'll see.”

His buttocks flared against mine. He tightened the muscles of his back. I could easily have reached back and touched his biceps.

“I was right. You're taller.” He faced me. His chest was covered with curly black hair. “You'll have hair, and it'll be as black as mine.” He laughed. “And you'll get muscles.” He had grown up on a farm. “I like ramblin',” he said. “I could never be like my dad, married to some woman, with kids tying me down. In some ways, I wish I was a kid again, like you.”

He smeared liverwurst on slabs of soft A & P white bread, piling the sandwiches on a paper plate. “Two's fine,” I said.

Later, I went to his wagon to collect my pay, a new silver dollar. “Don't see many of these around,” he said. “Plenty in Colorado, though. Say, if you come back and help take down tents tomorrow night, you'll earn another dollar, and I'll give you a free pass for the show.”

That evening I plastered my hair with brilliantine and regaled Margie with descriptions of the tiger (actually a defanged beast) and the gorilla. I wanted her company on the long walk home in the dark. She could use my show pass; I'd sneak in under the tent.

The Big Show was exciting, particularly the aerialists, billed as “The Flying Goedickes from Poland.” Spangles barely concealed the runs and tears in their tights. Glimpes of peach-colored flesh glowed whenever the woman balanced on her head and spread her legs and the trapeze turned.

The aerialist doubled as lion-tamer, while his partner put the gorilla through hoops and loops. A scrawny elephant, tuskless, performed listlessly with a girl dressed as a ballerina with glittering tiara sitting on his head. A pair of clowns pretended to throw pails of water at the audience; the water was feathers. During the show, Brik circulated, supervising the erection and removal of props.

I treated Margie to cotton candy and a sideshow featuring a fat woman with a second head growing from her side, a midget missing all fingers except for his thumbs, and a mummy, reputedly the body of John Wilkes Booth, stolen from its grave. Most fascinating of all was a lady geek. Once a night, so the hype went, she required a feast of hen's blood, Black Orpington, to be precise. We paid our fifteen cents and crowded close, A nervous hen was tied by its leg to a stake in the ground. Harsh recorded music, in scratchy violins, heralded I-Zelda's appearance. She undulated forth, painted like a gypsy and dressed in a gaudy skirt and layers of beads. “A good fat hen holds one pint of hot blood,” a tout exclaimed. “For your admission you will observe I-Zelda, Princess of Turkey, bite this here black hen's throat. It will cost you another fifteen cents to see her suck out the life, killing the chicken dead!” He motioned us closer. “Anybody with a bad heart, leave now. What you are about to witness ain't for the squeamish!” No one left. Margie looked puzzled, then horrified.