Ridge Stories Read online

  I was the first to be bathed in what was anything but a luxurious bath, only a puddle of water and the feel of galvanized tin ridges on my bare bottom. I suspect a rubber ducky would have grounded!

  After finishing the milking, my father bathed next, in the same water but with a fresh teakettle of hot water added, and then at last, my mother, with yet more hot water and, for modesty’s sake, the overhead kitchen light turned off.

  On warm summer days, the galvanized washtub doubled as an above-ground pool for me. Early in the morning, my mother put the tub in a spot on the lawn that remained sunny throughout the day, filled it halfway with cold well water, and then let solar power do its work. By midafternoon, the water was a suitable temperature for my play, and with the unaccustomed luxury of several inches of water, I had sufficient depth to float a rubber ducky.

  When an English major in college, I read George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, a story now better known through the spin-off musical My Fair Lady. When the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle commented on how much easier it was to keep clean in an upper-class bathroom than in her tenement room, I found myself nodding silently in agreement. We ridge folk lived close to the earth and to animals, and despite our best intentions, tended to keep both the residue and the scent with us, sometimes even when we emerged from the galvanized washtub, drying ourselves with an everyday bath towel, the ridges of the tub’s floor still wetly engraved on our shivering bottoms.

  Edna

  “I leave the tin can for the hunters,” she said, pointing to the one that was hanging on a nail driven into a tree. Many people on the ridge peeled the paper off a tin can, washed it with the supper dishes, and set it near the pump outside as a vessel for a drink of cold well water on a hot summer day. This cup would not shatter like glass.

  Edna had taken me on a walk down the valley from her house. We followed the old packed-dirt logging road that had been cut along the side of the hill until we reached the spring that bubbled out of the ground at the base of Steeple Rock. We both drank from the spring, a novelty for me. As a five-year-old boy who lived on a ridge farm, the only water I saw was pumped from deep in the ground. The water tank in the milk house that cooled cans of fresh milk and the stock tank filled by its overflow were the closest things to ponds on our section of Pleasant Ridge, but I wasn’t allowed to play in them.

  Barefoot and dressed in bib overalls, I looked like a Norman Rockwell kid on a Saturday Evening Post cover. Edna, with her wispy brown hair and delicate frame draped in a soft house dress, reminds me now of the famous poet of the same name and era, one that I came to know as an English major in college.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared frail in photographs, with a mysterious vulnerability, even though her work revealed her as a woman who “burned her candle at both ends” and lamented “whose lips my lips have kissed I have forgot.” My Edna, even when she smiled, seemed to carry that same burden of secret pain.

  At the spring we gathered watercress that we put in a plastic bread wrapper for the journey back up the road and picked a nosegay of delicate mayflowers with their slender stems and pinkish pastel blooms. Through the trees directly up the steep bank behind the spring, Edna pointed out the stone spires of Steeple Rock, five sandstone outcroppings that were thought by locals to look like rustic church steeples. “When you are bigger,” she told me, “we’ll climb up there and explore them.”

  She took my hand as we walked up the woodland lane on the return to her house. The hike was tiring for a little boy, but we took breaks to spot chattering squirrels high in the trees and to think of appropriate names for the shapes of other stone outcroppings: turtle, hat, beach ball. After our wanderings, we returned to Edna’s house.

  When I read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in college, I pictured Edna’s house, every bit as stark and hardscrabble as its fictional equivalent, no running water, peeling paint on the exterior, few softening touches inside. She put the bouquet we had picked in a water glass and set it on the table. Then she made a watercress sandwich and cut it in two, putting a half for each of us on plates, with a side of sugar cookies. She poured me a glass of milk and invited me to sit and eat.

  Just as we were finishing, and Edna was telling me about a fawn she had seen on one of her walks in the woods, we heard my mother’s footsteps on the porch and I knew my visit was over. Mother had walked me through the cornfield from our house to spend the afternoon with Edna, and now she would take my hand and walk me home, back to the land of the ordinary.

  Edna’s life was anything but ordinary, I learned when I grew older, around the same time I came to some harsh realizations about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Her marriage was plagued by a number of problems, the farm by economic worries, and her health by serious concerns. The more famous Edna wrote a poem, “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.” Such was my experience with my Edna, and now as an adult looking back, I recognize these grim realities.

  When I was still a child, Edna became ill and was taken to the hospital, and I heard it whispered among the grownups that she had cancer. My mother donated blood because Edna needed transfusions and they shared a blood type. But Edna’s health did not improve.

  After Edna passed away, her husband sold the farm. At the auction my father bought a box of miscellaneous items to get a tool that he wanted, and we found in it a set of very old wooden-handled tin silverware. I asked if I could have it, and my parents said yes. That was more than sixty years ago, and I still keep it in a box of mementos.

  Edna never had children of her own but seemed to share an empathy with mothers. In retrospect, I have realized that when she took me on walks into the woods, she was also providing my mother with a respite. Mother, I realized as I got older, loved her children but was nervous by nature. As a child I had thought it normal for mothers to cry when they were upset, when a child had been naughty, when a beef roast was ruined, when a husband was late returning from threshing.

  She might have also noticed that I, a lonely child who found refuge in books, benefited from that time away from home too.

  Edna hung a tin can on a tree for hunters who happened to be hiking through her woods, perhaps knowing intuitively that they might be thirsting for more than water, that sometimes, by chance, unlikely lonely people come together and form friendships.

  Boyhood Games

  As a child I was fascinated by anything “Indian.” I made bows from springy willow branches and discarded binder twine. I rubbed two sticks together in the vain hope of producing fire. I marveled at the old arrowheads that my neighbor Barney turned up with his plow. And I amused myself running bareback through the woods, pretending to be a warrior.

  Gramp Jones once told me that that the Grays, my maternal grandmother’s people, had been Indians. As a child I was excited by the discovery that not all of my ancestors were pallid Europeans, all Bibled and buttoned up, but as I grew older, I realized that Gramp’s characterization was meant to be pejorative rather than anthropological. The Grays were every bit as WASPy as the Joneses, and my grandfather simply did not care for them.

  Sometimes, Gramp Jones would tell stories of Indians camping under the elms down on Rose’s flats or cooking a rabbit— skinned but not gutted—in a boiling pot of water. Enthralled by the tales, I’d beg him for more details. He’d stumble through the mists of his boyhood memory, supplying no doubt as many illustrations from his imagination as from his experience.

  When I was very young and went to Western movies with my parents, I was terrified each time the soundtrack pulsed with tomtoms and one by one horse-mounted Indians in eagle feathers appeared on a distant hill, scalping knives ready, peering down at the purportedly innocent white settlers in a wagon train. In school and in books, the Indians I learned about were less villainized but strangely generic—not accounting for the variety of cultures and experiences contained under the American Indian umbrella.

  Not until I was in graduate school did I take a class in the history of Wis
consin and learn that the Fox, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Potawatomi tribes were the primary early inhabitants of Richland County. All Native-held lands, of course, had been ceded to the government long before my grandparents were born. In fact, as the national seizure of Native lands took place, Black Hawk and his followers had crossed my county in retreat, passing through the towns of Buena Vista, Bloom, Ithaca (where I went to high school), and Rockbridge (where my farmland is located). Twelve hundred Sauk and Fox warriors, women, old men, and children were reduced to a scant 150 survivors in four months.

  As a boy who had yet to learn these realities, I wanted to believe in a romanticized ideal, somewhat akin to literature’s notion of the noble savage, a trope I would later encounter in my studies. This image lent itself to some typical childhood pursuits—running free in the woods, playing in the mud, improvising weapons for play, and building forts. And while I could not claim any American Indian heritage, I wanted desperately to throw myself into that fantasy. The imagined connection helped to ease how displaced I felt on our farm, having taken no interest in the agrarian career Gramp had envisioned for his grandson.

  I would cut a willow branch and string it with baler twine to make a bow that would loft sticks that I used as improvised arrows. My father told me that Indians shaped their arrowheads by heating flint rock in a campfire and then dropping cold water on the hot stone to chip off pieces (a myth commonly repeated at the time). I experimented without success using the wood furnace in our basement to heat rocks, but I remained undaunted in my pursuit of all things Indian.

  Our heavy clay soil on Pleasant Ridge may not have been ideal for farming, but the pockets of pure clay that were exposed along the banks of eroded ditches were perfect for a boy who wanted to play at being a Native potter. I had read that tribes made clay pots without a wheel by rolling ropes of clay, coiling them into the rough shapes of pots, and then smoothing the inner and outer walls of the vessels. I dried my pots in the sun, and in lieu of a glaze, I used tempera paints to create designs.

  Baler twine from the hay we fed our cows spilled from our barn windows during the winter. With visions of Indian blankets in mind, I fashioned a loom by nailing four boards into a rectangle and pounding rows of nails along the top and bottom pieces, inspired by the small metal potholder loom I had received as a birthday gift. I strung my loom with twine to make my warp and then proceeded to weave. Because I didn’t use dyes, my textiles were the uniform golden yellow of hemp twine, but in my imagination, the design was colorfully intricate.

  My father found talk of Indians less entertaining than I did, but he humored me as I chattered on about my interest while we milked the cows. And then one cold winter day as I returned from the milk house with a pail that I had just dumped, he asked me, “How would you like to make a teepee next summer?”

  Unaware that a wigwam or longhouse would have been more appropriate to Wisconsin, I leapt at the chance to embark on such a project with my father. Nothing could be more wonderful!

  Finally, another of Wisconsin’s cold, uncertain springs ended. School was out, the crops in, and summer a reality. On a June morning, Paw announced that he had time to make the shelter.

  With his ax in hand, my father climbed onto the little gray Ford-Ferguson tractor. I clung to the fender as we drove down to the valley and into the woods. Paw selected ironwood saplings that he lopped off with his ax and reduced to lodge poles. He tied them to the tractor and we dragged them over the moss and ferns in the woods, past the bull thistles and milkweeds in the pasture, back up onto the ridge and into the dooryard.

  Next, we chose burlap bags from those stacked in the barn window casements. Outside we shook the gunnysacks to remove as much as possible of the dusty feed that clung to the coarse fabric.

  On the front lawn, under the four old pines, we took the bags apart and spread them on the grass. Paw erected the tent poles and tied them at the top with twine. Then he borrowed string from my mother’s hoarded supply in a kitchen drawer and made off with her largest embroidery needle.

  Sitting tailor style in the shade, he stitched the pieces of burlap together to make the covering. His clumsy work-thickened fingers were more accustomed to the steering wheel of a tractor or the handle of a shovel than to the finer instrument of a needle, but as a nine-year-old child, I found his handiwork magical.

  Finally, it was finished. Solemnly, the teepee stood between the four ancient pine trees. The tent had an awe-inspiring dignity to it, and in my imagination, hollow tom-toms were already pulsing in the background. Campfires sent wisps of smoke up to the heavens. No doubt a hunting party would soon be assembling before the door of my lodge, asking me to join them.

  Ma came out to admire Paw’s handicraft and agreed that it was indeed a wonderful teepee. I ran in and out through the door, showing her how well the tent flap worked. Ma and Paw then walked off arm in arm, each to waiting chores, leaving me to my tent and to my fantasies, where grain-infused burlap smelled remarkably like buckskin.

  As an old man, I am still fascinated by American Indian culture, but after visiting reservations and casinos, reading history and novels, and watching documentaries and fact-based dramas, my feelings have grown more complicated than the simple enjoyment I felt playing in the woods as a boy. I feel guilt for the conduct of my ancestors, admiration for the ability of our indigenous peoples to endure, and humility for that which I still don’t know about what it means to be “Indian.”

  Pleasant Ridge School

  The photograph of the Pleasant Ridge one-room school’s student body of 1952 included ten children and their teacher, Mr. Darold Fairbrother. The first person in the front row of the photograph, which appeared in an article clipped from the Richland Center Republican Observer, wore bib overalls, looking like an extra for a television episode of Little House on the Prairie. That was me as a second grader.

  The earliest Pleasant Ridge School was built of logs in District 10 in 1858, located in the northern part of the district in Willow Township. Because no public transportation was provided, the community voted in 1879 on whether to move the school to the middle of the district, but the motion failed.

  Mysteriously, the school burned to the ground the same evening the vote failed. Classes resumed in David Wildermuth’s hop house, until the following year when a new frame school was built closer to the middle of the district at a cost of $750. That was the school that not only I attended, but my father and uncle before me. My mother even taught there for a while, one year having my uncle as her student.

  My mother started me in first grade when I was five; kindergarten was not an option during those rural days. After I had been in school for a few weeks, Ma asked how my reading was going. “That’s the problem,” I told her. “The teacher puts a whole bunch of words on the blackboard, and I don’t know any of them!”

  She had a moment of panic, but as she had been a teacher, she remembered the look-say words that I needed to know and sat down to tutor me at my easel blackboard. Her panic turned out to be unfounded, as obviously I did learn to read, ultimately earning a PhD in English and becoming a teacher myself.

  In 1952, the story of the Pleasant Ridge School was about to change. The next year, the Pleasant Ridge and Wheat Hollow school districts merged, with the original intention of alternating years between the two buildings in an attempt to keep the parents in both districts happy; no rural community wanted its school to close.

  Subsequently, I attended third grade at Wheat Hollow and fourth at Pleasant Ridge. And then, because voters ultimately decided that the Wheat Hollow schoolhouse was the better building, the Pleasant Ridge School was closed in 1955, and I finished my elementary education at Wheat Hollow. The unused building was moved down the valley to become a living museum of one-room schools, the project of two elderly widowed sisters who reminded me of the Baldwin sisters on the television series The Waltons.

  One-room grade schools were an efficient way to bring elementary education to sparsely populated rural areas.
Teachers completed a one-year course of study at a county normal school and often taught not far from where they lived. Students generally lived a walking distance from their school. The student body was like a family of siblings in their relationships with one another, the older children both looking after and picking on the younger.

  From an academic perspective, the school was nurturing and safe, but at the same time, it offered a curriculum limited both in scope and depth. For example, art instruction was a Let's Draw program on the radio. We all learned reading and writing and arithmetic, but for the most part we struggled to catch up and keep up when later we competed with classmates who had received an urban education.

  While it may have lacked in academic rigor, our one-room school provided more than book-learning. Our forefathers may have seen a need to separate church and state, but on the ridge, the two institutions got along just fine. When Mrs. Myra Reagles taught at my one-room school, she was also the Sunday school teacher. It made sense, everyone thought, to recycle some of the same material in both the school and church programs, as Mrs. Reagles had her hands full with us. If Santa Claus came down the chimney at the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church, or Jesus was born in the cloakroom at Pleasant Ridge School, no one minded. After all, people came to see cute kids say their pieces and sing songs, not to deal with philosophical treatises and theological doctrine.

  Unless you had an accident that required stitches or were having a baby, a family took care of their own health and injury concerns. Subsequently, a part of the teacher’s in loco parentis role included serving as school nurse.

  If we injured ourselves on the playground, we not only had a Band-Aid applied, but first a swipe of Mercurochrome over the wound, a wonderful antiseptic that not only didn’t sting, but sympathetically painted the skin a pretty orangish color. (No one worried about the poisonous traces of mercury the medication contained.)