Population 485 (29 page)

“So. Yer a writer.”

“Well, yeah, I mean…”

“You do poetry?”

“Well, I’m not much of a…”

“I do some poetry.”

“I, uh…”

“Good shit.”

He walked back to his car. We never spoke again.

You cannot foresee the ways a community will make you feel welcome. I was in my second month of residence when the sewer line backed up. If the sewer line plugs between your house and the main, clearing it is your responsibility. But in New Auburn, the responsibility comes with a perk: Anyone living within the village limits is allowed access to the community sewer rod. You need only walk over to the village shop and ask for it. Matt or Mark will lug it down from the storage rack. Before they unhand it, they’ll give you a brief overview of fundamentals and technique, outfit you with a pair of rubber-coated gloves, and quite reasonably request that you hose the thing off before you return it, but other than that, you’re free to go.

The sewer rod isn’t a rod at all. It’s a one-hundred-foot chunk of spring steel tipped with an elongated wire bulb. The spring steel is an inch wide and a quarter inch thick, all coiled in a steel bracket. The coil forms a circle three feet in diameter, and the whole works weighs more than twenty-five pounds. Theoretically, it is a straightforward operation: One simply descends to the basement, uncaps the sewer pipe, and feeds in the rod until it reaches and dislodges the offending mass. I unscrewed the sewer cap with a minimum of difficulty. In fact, apart from the resumption of sewage flow, this was the high point of the entire endeavor, as I was able to wield my big red monkey wrench, only recently purchased from Farm & Fleet. Successful monkey-wrench moments are so few and far between in the writing business, and I admit to affecting a certain plumberish saunter as I crossed the bespotted basement floor with the cast-iron tool dangling from one hand. I spun the knurled adjuster ring with one thumb, fitted the jaws to the cap screw, and expertly twirled the cap free. The glory of this moment was muted by the fact that the cap was plastic and, as it turned out, only hand-tight.

I wrassled the monstrous coil into place, placing the tip in alignment with the portal. To advance the tip, a length of strap had to be unfurled from the X-shaped bracket and the entire spool rotated in a reverse manner. This worked for a quarter rotation, at which point certain stored ferrous energies exceeded critical mass, causing the spool to unleash acrobatics of the sort normally reserved for objects animated by paranormal possession. The liberated length of strap iron lashed against my shins like an epileptic black mamba. Consequently, the remaining forty-seven pounds of coil chop-blocked the washing machine, ricocheted off the dryer, and fell flat. The mamba loosed a final spasm, executed a triple rattamacue death dance down my anterior tibial ridge, then went still. Deeply organic words were spoken. I gathered the whole works up again. It was like trying to embrace the spinning beaters of a foul, oversized electric mixer. The tip breached the portal, and the operation recommenced. Bit by bit, the sewer rod disappeared down the pipe. Progress was inconstant, and frequently disrupted by desperate lunging and rants referencing chop saws, scrap yards, and cruel, cruel fate. Tools, I am ashamed to say, were thrown. At one point, I resolved to initiate the permitting process required for the installation of an old-fashioned outdoor biffy. Still, my secret weapon has always been being too dumb to quit, and with less than five feet of the rod remaining, I punched through to daylight, if you will allow the analogy. The residual contents of the pipe gurgled merrily downstream, and I rejoined the ranks of the modernly convenienced.

In the interest of ink, paper, and time, I will leave to your imagination the contortions and vituperations required to re-roll the soiled sewer rod and stow it in its holder. When I presented the neatly swabbed and furled apparatus to Matt, there remained only a slight wild-eyed whiffiness about my person to suggest the Herculean efforts and stevedorean oratory invoked during the repackaging process. And yet, as I walked back to my flushable house, peace ebbed back through my heart, ushered therein by the thought that I had successfully navigated a communal rite of passage. Never mind your cartoony Chamber of Commerce tourist maps. Don’t talk to me about city charters or mission statements or public transit or municipal pools. Spare me your block parties and welcome wagons. You want to make me feel at home?

Give me a town that shares its sewer rod.

I didn’t assume I’d be happy back here. I had been essentially absent for more than a decade, and knew the whole prodigal returned thing was fraught with the potential for disappointment. It helped, I guess, that I didn’t expect to pick up where I left off. I figured I’d have to ease my way back in, and that seems to have worked itself out. The fire department has been the indispensable catalyst.

There are three maps in our humble little fire hall. One is a three-color CAD printout. One is a photocopied enlargement of a plat book page. The largest looks like a giant mimeograph, three feet by eight feet. They’re tacked to one wall, and I’ve already mentioned the rule: When the siren on the water tower goes off, when you come charging in to the hall, all fired up and raring to go, eyes wide, heart charging, you do not,
do not,
leave headquarters without first locating your destination on one of the maps. It does no good to go bugling off like salvation’s cavalry if your horses are pointed in the wrong direction. And so more than 100 times each year, some one of us comes huffing through the door, crosses to the maps, and with an extended finger, traces a path from the hall to a fire number somewhere out in the 127 square miles of real estate we cover. If, at the end of every year, those tracings were made visible, you’d see a dense, benevolent web spun one frantic zigzag at a time.

In the summer, when the weather warnings reach a certain level of direness, the chief has us paged and then sends us out in the trucks to watch for funnel clouds. One evening at six
P.M
., I am at my desk when the windows go dark so suddenly that I am pulled downstairs and out the door. The air is charged and thick. The leading edge of a weather front is passing over, and it has drawn a lowering cover across the town. The clouds are squid-ink black, inverting and churning, a river of pulsing bruises. The thunder begins. When the pager goes off, I’m expecting it. I run for the hall.

I wind up on the overpass, in the brush rig with Jack Most. From up here, we can see it all coming. We are at the center of a giant swirl. South of town, the clouds are twisting to the northeast. North of town, they are twisting to the southwest. We all check in on the radio. One of the tankers is out on Five Mile Road. Lieutenant Pam is out on Highway M with the rescue van. It comes slapping in now, the wind rocking the cab, the first raindrops smacking the window. The traffic slows beneath the overpass. Some of the cars pull to the shoulder. An RV lumbers up the off-ramp, searching for a building to hide behind. Then the rain begins dropping in slabs, and the last thing we see for the next five minutes are hazard lights flashing up and down the interstate.

It goes on for five minutes, pretty much zero visibility. Some hail. The truck is pummeled. Then the rain slacks off and the air lightens. We drive back into town, check for downed power lines and fallen trees. The streets are dark and wet. Green clumps of stripped leaves are flung all around, but the damage has been superficial. We are back at the hall when the pager goes off again. A wire down, draped over the roof of a cabin, arcing. I grab Tanker One. By the time we get there, the power has been cut, and there is no sign of fire. We have a look, check it out, and head back home. We are right at the village limits when the storm comes roaring back. The pumper ahead of me disappears in the rain. I make it to the fire hall. Across the street, the wind is bending Durlin Baker’s big spruce trees into semi-circles. This is serious. I can’t see to back the tanker into the hall, and I don’t think it’s safe to make a run for it, so I turn the tanker around, face the big stainless steel rear end into the wind, and settle in. I figure with the weight of the water and the smooth round profile of the tank, it’ll be pretty tough for the storm to get a grip and knock us around. Every time the wind whips a space in the rain, though, and I catch a glimpse of Durlin’s trees doing toe-touchers, I wonder. I’m respecting nature pretty good when once again the rain slackens and the light returns. We pair off and make a second run of the streets and alleys. This time we find downed power lines, and I hear the chief on Channel Two, calling for a chainsaw over on Columbia Street. We crisscross the village. Between us, we know most of the houses, and stop to check on widows and elderly couples. Over on Pine Street, I knock at the door of a small white house, and at first nothing happens. Then I see a wavering light, and a little old lady approaches through the kitchen. She raises a candle to the door. “I’m OK,” she says. We move on. Here in the green half-light of the aftermath, checking on our neighbors, I can’t imagine any sweeter place to be.

I am happy here, but my gravitation to place has always been balanced by my need to move. I crave a contrapuntal mix of shiftlessness and stability. In bed at night, I can hear the trucks out on the highway. Sometimes a driver drifts across the white line, and when the tires hit the rumble strip, the rubbery howl makes me want to drive away in the night, fills me with the urge to go west, makes me think the finest sort of freedom is found at sunrise in a South Dakota rest stop. Contentment, it turns out, can be a matter of global positioning.

My grandpa died in the farm yard he was raised in, but during the interceding eight decades he left tracks in every quarter of the globe. “All you need is an apple and a newspaper to sleep under,” he’d say, harking back to the days when he saved hotel money by bunking on park benches in Washington, D.C. When I was still a smooth-faced kid, he picked me up at the farm and took me to the city to catch my first Greyhound. When that big bus heaved out of the lot and rolled out of town it seemed I was playing hooky from everything. I talked to a cowboy-booted wino in the backseat and his gentle lies about a fresh start planted a wandering seed in my head. The window glass was cool on my cheek, and Wisconsin slipped away in swipes of white and brown. Motion wed itself to freedom, and from that day forward, I incubated a stray-dog jones for the road. It is a quasi-spiritual thing, in which the pilgrimage is the religion, and movement is the purest form of worship. The altars are harbored in truck stops and train stations, the sacraments are served in foam cups, and heaven glows on the horizon. You will desire hymns performed by the prophets Waylon Jennings, Junior Brown, and Steve Earle.

Grandpa got me started, and to this day my two favorite things in the world are solitude and motion. I’ve found them in the next county, in a semi crossing the Nevada state line, on a Hungarian train, and on a bus approaching the Guatemalan border. In times of trouble, motion is my morphine. But as much as I love to run, I love even more to come home. At every latitude, my compass swivels to point back here, to little old New Auburn. This place is my true north. A stray dog running, as it turns out, is just circling the rug.

I think I might move, one more time. Out near the home farm, like the original plan. But I am in no hurry. I am deeply grateful for the deep bite of life I’ve been allowed. The travel, the experiences, the accumulation of miles and places and acquaintance. And yet lately—a slow dawning, perhaps, but nonetheless—I am becoming fixed on the idea of what it means to live deeply in a place, to move about in it, as opposed to pass through it. I have felt the pull of history and place in a hundred places around the globe, and I don’t doubt I could have lived a happy life in any one of them. But chance put me here, in a ragtag little village in northwestern Wisconsin, and while I am hardly prepared to mothball the backpack, I find myself more and more content to immerse myself in this place. It is occurring to me that to truly
live
in a place, you must give your
life
to that place. It is a dynamic commitment, but it is also a manifestation of stillness.

The paw print in Jack Most’s rock, the detritus under my yard, the metaphysical artifacts, all the things we find when we dig, they fascinate us because they have become imbued with a stillness in time. In one form or another, they have achieved stillness by abandoning themselves to the earth. Is twining yourself into a place so different? “I think heaven is perfect stasis/poised over the realms of desire,” writes the poet Mark Doty in the poem “Tiara,” and every once in a while I offer a little prayer that this might be true. I am getting hints—yes, even here in this spavined place—that if we work at it, we can learn to achieve stasis in the moment, even as time ripsaws by. We can live in the sweet green half-light of the aftermath, even as the storm drops its thunder all around us.

S
ARAH

I
T WASN’T INTENDED
as a coming-out party, but when my brother Jed walked into the annual fire department banquet with a blond farm girl on his arm the night of February 3, 2001, every head in the Sundial Supper Club turned to look. He didn’t say much, he never does, just went to his seat and started in on his chicken, but the New Auburn Area Fire Department—the only social circle in which he travels with any regularity—had just received their official introduction to Sarah Ann Posey.

The fire department banquet puts a ribbon on the year. We drag out our uniform shirts, put on our pins and name tags, and meet up the road at the Sundial. We eat buffet-style, queueing at the steam tables for chicken and ham and green beans and a slug of mashed potatoes drowned in fluorescent yellow gravy sold in tin cans the size of your head. It’s heavy food. Filling, the way you crave it here in Wisconsin when the dirt is frozen two feet down and you saw your last local green leaf sometime back in September.

We eat, and then we have a little awards ceremony. The chief hands out service pins in five-year increments. Last year I got my five-year pin. This year Bob the One-Eyed Beagle gets his twenty-five-year pin. Amazing to think of him answering the siren, the phone and the pager twenty-four hours a day for a quarter century. Several of us receive a certificate and embroidered patch for having completed wildfire suppression class. Funny to think of brush fires tonight, with the dead leaves buried under a foot of snow and the chimney smoke laying flat in air that ices up your nose hair with every inhalation. And yet I have stood outside this very supper club, shoulder to shoulder with these dumpling-scarfing yahoos, fighting like mad to turn a brush fire north.