Population 485 (6 page)

I’m a teetotal non-dancer, but I have come to love the nights under the Jamboree Days beer tent. All the happy sweaty faces, all the goofing after midnight, all the loud shooting of the breeze over yesterday’s favorites and today’s greatest hits. Every year I recognize more faces. I’ll sit in my lawn chair with my radio by my ear so I can hear if we get a call, and I’ll be seized by how glorious it is in this tumultuous world to be so simply free and happy. A softball toss from the beer tent, there is a little rise, and atop the rise is a little cemetery. It was surveyed and platted in 1882 by David W. Cartwright, the man who founded this town. His grave is up there. The tombstone is a simple rectangle. Cartwright was a strict Seventh-Day Baptist who took his name off this town when the council approved its first liquor license, so I figure he wouldn’t be too happy about the drinking, but it’s nice to think of his bones up there, maybe catching a little vibration from all the dancing feet that followed him to this town. I think he’d be glad to see us happy here. Cartwright’s presence gives me a sense of history, reminds me that even Saturday nights in a beer tent take their place in the course of human events.

The lady down at the Gas-N-Go let me look through her collection of old pictures and newspaper clippings last year, and I came across an article in the Thursday, June 17, 1976, issue of the
Chetek Alert
recognizing a firefighter named Ivan Boldon for fifty years of service to the New Auburn Area Fire Department. The article said when Ivan joined the department in 1926, they were still using the old chemical pumper. The tanks were mounted on a trailer cart hitched to a Model T Ford. There were several pictures, including a group photo of the department members. The Beagle is right up there in the front row. He had just joined up, right out of high school. I like the idea that this chain—me knowing the Beagle, the Beagle knowing Ivan Boldon, Ivan Boldon having used the old chemical pumper—puts us in almost tangible contact with the very first days of the department. The Beagle wouldn’t put it in these terms, but he knows that out here, rescue is less about throwing ropes or stanching blood or running into burning buildings than it is about assuming a role in a quirky narrative that weaves itself through generations. The events arrange themselves along a communal timeline. The community is the constant. Volunteer firefighters come and go. The old-timers hand down equipment and stories, show up occasionally when we’re shorthanded, but most of all they help us recognize that time—
our time
—is transient.

Whenever we finish up a call, the officer in charge fills out a run report. The report includes a roster, arranged in order of seniority. If you pull a report from a run the Beagle and I have been on, you will find a check beside Beagle’s Christian name, right up there at the top, and down near the bottom, working its way up, a check beside mine. Proof in ink that we were present at the making of history, no matter how small the event. A little detail within the brief parentheses that is our existence.

The Beagle says he’ll keep answering the pager until he can’t make it down here anymore. Gonna get himself a wheelchair with flashing lights on it, he says. In the picture from the
Chetek Alert
, he is long-haired and slim, clean-shaven except for a set of muttonchop sideburns. He’s looking straight ahead, with both eyes.

Maybe you could meet the Beagle someday. He knows his eye can make a person uncomfortable, and so he has this story he’ll tell to break the ice. We’ve all seen it several times. A newcomer will be looking up, down, sideways, anything so as not to seem to be staring. The Beagle smiles, says, “You probably noticed my eye.”

The person might shrug, or demur, but the Beagle continues, matter-of-fact.

“Deal is, I was born without an eyelid.”

Now he has their attention.

“Yah, strangest thing. No eyelid on that eye. Doc said he’d never seen nothin’ like it. He told my parents it was a long shot, but there was one thing they could try.”

By now the person is usually leaning right in.

“What they did is, when they circumcised me, they took the extra skin and they made an eyelid from it.”

The listener usually gulps, but is invariably staring hard at the crossed eye.

“Yep,” says the Beagle, “been cockeyed ever since!”

T
RICKY

N
EW
A
UBURN DRAWS
its name from an eighteenth-century elegiac pastorale. This might not be your first thought if you come to town, say, on a November Saturday evening when all the pickup trucks are lined up at the Gas-N-Go with dead deer hanging over the tailgate, or if you exit the highway behind a spreader truck full of turkey manure. If you approach from the north, past Slinger Joe’s automobile graveyard, past the Packer green and gold of Pat’s Pub, past the abandoned laundromat—still half-toppled and wrapped in yellow crime-scene tape since the rainy evening a year ago when Tricky Jackson sideswiped it running seventy in a thirty-five—if you notice there are four defunct service stations and a desolate train siding, you may strain at the relevance of lyric verse. But the name on our old silver water tower originated from the Oliver Goldsmith poem “The Deserted Village,” written in 1770 and opening with the line, “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain…” More than a century after it was coined, we took that name for our own. It didn’t take easily. Frankly, it was the fourth choice.

Even the staunchest civic booster would have to admit that the bloom is off the rose here in New Auburn. Our eleven streets are tree-lined and peaceful. There are a number of trim houses on neat lawns. But rust and desperation are never more than a backyard away. The family next door to me is hard to sort. Many children, several women, two men. The fighting frequently spills out into the yard, which has steadily disappeared under a welter of absurd possessions: a tangle of thirty unworkable bicycles; a mossy camper; a selection of detached automobile seats; an inoperative ride-on lawn mower wrapped—Christo-like—in a blue tarp; a huge rotting speedboat. The village board sent someone around to recite nuisance ordinances chapter and verse, but beyond rearranging the bikes and aligning the camper with the speedboat—feng shui
primitif
—nothing has changed. You take what you can get in this life. Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to keep your trash. You understand it is only a matter of distinctions: yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash, solid citizens with their secret trash. In a yard just outside town, a spray-painted piece of frayed plywood leans against a tree. It reads Trans Ams: 2 for $2000. It has been there for two years.

The old man and his adult son tinker on the speedboat now and then. They pop the cowling, poke around with wrenches, stare, cuss. The old man stands inside the hull and yanks on the pull rope, and the huge motor rumbles and smokes, then dies with a dry cough. The speedboat has never left the yard. The slipcover is mildewed and undone, and the deck is layered with decaying leaves. Out on the street, the summer traffic is rarely more than desultory, but it does pick up a little on the weekends, with people cutting through town on their way to summer cottages and lake properties to the north. Many of them are towing beautiful boats. The man and son talk as they work, and if I am doing dishes at the sink, I catch fragments through the screen, but it is their persistence and glances toward the road that speak most clearly, and the message is, life is a box o’ shit, but by God we’ve got a speedboat, and one of these days we’ll get that son of a tatcher runnin’, and we’ll go out some Sunday fuckin’ afternoon and we’ll blow them Ill-
annoy
tourist bastards right outta the water. They work awhile, the old man and the kid, then disappear into the house for days.

Four tries it took, to name this village. In 1875, a man named David W. Cartwright located a clearing in the great pines and put up a sawmill. With the first boards off the saw deck, he enclosed the mill. Then he built a house. Then his employees built their own houses around the mill, forming a settlement that became known as Cartwright Mills. In 1882, for the convenience of the postal service, the name was shortened to Cartwright. In 1902, a saloon keeper approached the village board and requested a liquor license. Cartwright—a devout Seventh-Day Baptist—declared that as long as the town bore his name, liquor licenses were out of the question. The board voted to change the name to Auburn. Unfortunately, the adjacent township was already named Auburn, and so in 1904, pleading confusion, the Chicago Railroad requested that the town change its name once more. The board tacked on “New,” and so it is we became New Auburn.

David W. Cartwright was a late arrival. Glaciers were the original visitors, ebbing and flowing throughout the Pleistocene epoch. The ice made its last big push 25,000 years ago, advancing until two-thirds of the land now known as the state of Wisconsin were blanketed. My backyard was a mile deep in ice. When the glacier finally withdrew, it did so reluctantly, and 10,000 years ago, on the cusp of the Holocene epoch, the Chippewa Lobe of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet made one last charge south, stopping just short of New Auburn before retreating for good. In its wake, we were left a raw, poetic topography of kettles and moraines, kames and eskers, and drumlins.

Wildlife thrived in the post-glacial period, and humans followed. A copper lance point found outside town in the late 1900s suggests that Paleo-Indian hunters were in the area 6,000 years ago. At some point, Sioux Indians arrived. Later, Ojibwa Indians filtered down from the north. By the 1760s, the two tribes were warring over the territory. After many battles—one of which took place on the shores of a local lake now studded with summer homes—the Ojibwa drove out the Sioux for good.

White men first appeared in the form of fur-trading Frenchmen. In 1767, Jonathan Carver, a captain in the New England militia, passed through on his way to Lake Superior. He would later report that because of his “deep friendship” with the Indian chiefs of the area, they had deeded him a vast tract of land comprising a very large part of what is now northwestern Wisconsin—including what is now Chippewa (from Ojibwa) County, in which New Auburn resides. Carver’s claim was ultimately denied by both the British and post-revolutionary American governments, but the white incursion had begun. By the time the lumberjacks swept through in the mid to late 1800s, settlement of the area was well under way, fueled by the usual mincemeat of destiny and deception. Save for a few stragglers, the Indians were gone, leaving behind arrowheads and wild rice beds. Today, when I see the cornfields sprouting duplexes and hear my neighbors mourning the loss of the family farm—a decimation which began in the 1980s and is now virtually complete—my gut sympathies lie foursquare with the displaced farmers, but I can’t help but think that this land has been lost before.

The night Tricky Jackson wiped out the laundromat, I was six miles out of town and on my way home when the pager went off, so I just kicked the accelerator a little. It was raining, and the ruts on the old county highway were brimming with water. I straddled the ruts to avoid hydroplaning. I switched my handheld radio over to scan mode and heard the fire department respond, as well as the Bloomer ambulance.

Just north of the village limits, the county highway and Five Mile Road converge at a narrow angle. About a quarter mile out, I looked east across the fields to Five Mile Road, and there’s my mom, hammer down in her big old Lincoln, bearing through the rain like a mini-destroyer. We are on intersecting vectors. I figure it’s Mom behind the wheel, because it’s unusual to see the Lincoln operating at these speeds. Usually Dad is driving, and it is a rare thing for him to redline the old car. He drives farmer-style: middle of the road, attention focused sideways on the state of the crops, all day to get there. He frequently chauffeurs Mom to calls, napping in the car until the carnage is cleared. But tonight he has stayed home to baby-sit one of the legion foster children they care for (nearly 60, my mother hasn’t stopped changing diapers since she had me, her firstborn), and when the Lincoln pulls in front of me at the intersection, sure enough, there’s Mom’s gray hair, up in a bun, just visible over the head rest. They got the Lincoln well worn from some traveling salesman—it’s a square, non-aerodynamic barge, missing a few hubcaps. I believe Dad’s theory is to surround the woman he loves with a lot of steel. It’s a far cry from the days when he toted the variable baker’s half dozen of us (our family, while always large, fluctuated constantly) around in a VW bus.

So there I am, flying in formation behind my mother, on our way to another accident. My mother, my brother John, and I all took the EMT course together back in 1988. I was left with an abiding image when I looked across the vocational college shop floor during our extrication training to see my mother—she is a petite five foot three, given to pinning her hair up and wearing modest skirts, and I have never known her to utter even the slightest off-color comment—clad in a hard hat and goggles, armed with the Jaws of Life, ripping the door off a Gremlin. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. The toughness was always there. She used to wear construction boots under her maxi skirts.

The wreck is right on the main drag, and it looks as if most of the town has turned out to have a look. Normally I get righteously cranky about gawkers—what if it was you or your mother lying there?—but tonight I really can’t blame them. It’s quite a scene. Tricky’s car is crosswise on the centerline, facing backward. The laundromat—an apartment, actually, but it was a laundromat when I was a kid, and so it is forever more—looks as if someone rolled a one-ton bowling ball along the street-side wall. The pale yellow siding is smeared and folded inward, and the eave teeters precariously over the sidewalk. The interior is visible through gaps in the wall. The man who rents the place is outside, telling anyone who will listen that he was lying on the couch, “and all of a sudden, the wall started coming at me.” He’s glad he put the couch where he did.