Last week I left at dusk to pick my youngest boy up at the archery club out in the western hills of our county. It's slated to be paved over with a "pork barrel" new terrain highway--the brain child of a few deep (and gold-filled) pockets and our Ayn Rand-ian Governer. But that's a sorrow for another story.
My journey this early spring evening was abruptly and dramatically blocked . The street's entry--including the gravel area around the defunct grocery--was completely cut off by about 5 different varieties of emergency vehicles. Misgiving and dread arose in my heart. My plans for the night--domestic and even a bit mundane--were interrupted.
There's a perversely marvelous book (and movie that I've not yet viewed) called Wisconsin Death Trip.* The book tells a haunting story through its gothic black & white photos of everyday settler life and portraiture. The story is one that doesn't really know an era: People suffer from their minds, times get hard and people suffer even more, someone murders someone else, babies die, debts take people down, someone commits suicide.
I live in a place called Sanders. It's not a got a post office to preserve its status as a community, so someday it will not be known as its own place but rather, a northern end of the nearby (and equally tiny but possessing a post office) Smithville or a southern 'burb of Bloomington. Yet, this place was once a stop on the limestone railway--with a full working quarry and the tiny clapboard dwellings clumped around housing the quarry's bosses and maybe some of the more prosperous workers. At the end of my street is a genuine historical building--a sweet little grocery/gas station that still has the pumps out front. Derelict and serving as a storage shed for the house across the way, it also served as the shelter for my kids and many others on this 1/2 mile long dead end road as they waited for the bus to pick them up to drive them nearly 10 miles south to the public school.
Just 60 yards up the road is an elegant limestone building carved with the words "Sanders Elementary School" and just 2 miles down the road the still post-officed town of Smithville strives to preserve from near ruination the larger building that once housed Smithville Elementary. We once educated our children within walking distance here in the "sticks." But progress, like that soon-to-be highway, rolls along.
I often joke that the entire side of the street across from me is related to each other but it's not really hyperbole; of the 11 houses on the north side--8 of them house people somehow related to the ones next door. I once was able to trace this genealogical "tree" but, having lived here for nearly 17 years, generational migrations have obscured the lines of relationship. I do get misty-eyed seeing the toddlers across the way who are the babies of children I remember as kindergartners.
But there is a certain heartache beneath the smile. The uncle to those toddlers was put in jail by his own grandmother for stealing from her--a desperate move on her part to interrupt his involvement with drugs (methamphetamine ala Winter's Bone, is my guess). He returned from his time away tattooed with Aryan Brotherhood symbols; yet I still see the boy who played Mario Brothers on the game system with my own boy. It's wrenching....and mundane.
So last Wednesday night I exited the car, slowly walking toward the mill of Carhart-clad firefighters and men in blue with apprehension. A young teen girl ran up to me in recognition. I've watched this girl grow from a night-gowned toddler gazing out into the dawn as I took my morning walk. The boy I was thwarted from fetching today was then just a bulge in my belly, slowing my steps. Tonight, she was breathless, a bit manic, "My daddy has hanged himself" she said and stood in front of me, an arm's length away. Like a trapped bird, the ache in my chest rose to my throat and all I could do was place my hands upon her shoulders and hold her eyes, just for the briefest of moments and say "Oh I'm sorry. I'm so so so sorry." She leaned into me then and sobbed dryly for just a moment. I asked if she'd found him and she said yes. The bird beat it's wings helplessly behind my eyes and she then ran off, to a new neighbor, a new shoulder.
Only 3 months earlier, her mother had climbed into family's bathtub, let the safety off the shotgun and taken herself out of this world. The children--this girl and her slightly younger brother--were in the next room. As a result, each day as I drive past their house (literally the gateway to our street) I think how pathetic, yet oddly kind, it was that she placed her demise in that easy to wash-down room. And in a tub--once a luxury on this street--that tidily drained her blood into the septic stretched under the earth behind the house.
Wisconsin Death Trip shows us that the lone prairie was lone-r than we'd like to fully remember...and that hard times have always produced tragedy for the regular folk. The mists of time seem to allow us to sentimentalize the past, rendering even tragedy somehow romantic. Is it the clothing? The black and whiteness of our imagery? Or some desire we have to render tragedy then as qualitatively different from tragedy now? The notion of progress obscures and diminishes our own present day heartbreak. Other-ing the past, to paraphrase Santayana and Burke, may, in part, doom us to repeat it. And in that othering we disown/disavow even our own present.
The lone hills and valleys of Sanders were too lonely, too sad for this lost couple to bear. Rumors of drug use do not explain away the tragedy just as they do not explain away the boy across the street. The tragedy existed in Wisconsin Death Trip when laudanum was a luxury and alcohol a debatable agent of medicine.
I can't help but remember each and every day as I pass the now-empty house, Rosie's eyes, only briefly, so very briefly meeting mine when I said "sorry, so so sorry." You see, the girl's grandfather, the patriarch who bought the grocery when it couldn't run any more, whose house she grew up in, that man--long gone--but the heritage of this small place whose name will soon be forgotten--he was the last principal of Sanders Elementary School.
Sorry. So. So. Sorry.
* From Wikipedia
Wisconsin Death Trip is a non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, first published in 1973. It has been adapted into a film.
The book is based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin photographer Charles Van Schaick, mostly in the city of Black River Falls, and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.
The film, which was directed by James Marsh and starred Marcus Monroe, was released in 2000. In a docudrama style, and shot entirely in black-and-white (except for contrasting sequences of modern life in the area, in color), it combined re-enactments of some of the events described in the book with a voice-over narration by Ian Holm. Its visual style was intended to carry the content of the film - as Marsh said:
