Population: 485

by Michael Perry

  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.

  Witnesses said the car came howling down the wet pavement, hydroplaned, got backward, hit the laundromat, ricocheted into a parked car, and slid to where it sat. Tricky denies all this, says he was northbound, not southbound, that the parked car wasn’t parked at all, but rather pulled out in front of him, and that the driver fled immediately after the crash. Even the most perfunctory review of the evidence on scene—from the skid marks to the debris trail—establishes this as utter hogwash, but Tricky is adamant, and keeps running through the crowd, exhorting everyone to “find the son of a bitch that was driving that other car.”

  Three people piled out of the car when it came to a stop, and two remained in the backseat. Out and about are Tricky and his friends, Bill and Elmo. Still in the car are Travis and Shirley. Travis is badly injured and semiconscious. Shirley is shaking Travis, and slapping his face. Somewhere along the line, Tricky says, “He was unconscious when we put him in the car.”

  It might seem obvious, but what Tricky Jackson has done here is, he has created a scene. And in the parlance of rescue, what we’re trying to do now is establish scene control. Entire emergency-service seminars are devoted to the topic. It begins with the scene size-up, which in this case probably began the moment the chief rounded the corner and thought, “Aw, geez.” The size-up is critical. It’s that moment you take to look for hazards—downed electrical lines, leaking boxcars, spilled gasoline, sad or crazy mopes with guns. It will be drummed into your head from your first EMT class to your most recent firefighting lecture: Do not go in until you are certain the scene is secure. “Dead heroes cannot save lives,” writes Nancy L. Caroline in the third edition of Emergency Care in the Streets. We are especially careful when called to domestic disputes, and never enter the house without a police officer first clearing the way. Rushing in too quickly can get you into trouble. The most benign-looking delivery truck may be leaking invisible killer gases, and suddenly your fender-bender is a hazardous-materials scene. We are taught to hang back, uphill and upwind, until we know what we’re dealing with. Still, you get wound up and forget. Cops forget, too, and because they are often first on scene, you judge how close to get by where the first cop is lying. At a recent haz-mat course, the instructor called this phenomenon the “cop-o-meter.”

  In this case, there are no downed power lines or leaking chemical tanks, but it looks like Tricky’s gas tank might be leaking, so the chief sends the attack pumper in to charge a line so we have water at the ready, just a nozzle-flip away. The next most obvious hazard will be traffic, since Tricky is right in the middle of the old highway. To this end, the chief dispatches firemen with traffic wands to either end of town, to reroute traffic a few blocks over. Cross-street access is blocked off by the main pumper. The next step is to identify and assess the victims. Not so easy in this case, as three out of the five are out of the car, mixing in with the onlookers.

  Scene control is an amorphous art. You have to adapt your control to the scene. In this case, we’ve got onlookers who might wander into harm’s way, we’ve got belligerent patients, we’ve got seriously injured patients, we’ve got noise and confusion. We’ve also got lots of help, which is essential, but can lead to trouble if there isn’t some sort of coordinated command and control. We need to find a focus. So we fan out. Some are preparing the cutting tools. Some are tending to Travis. Our concerns are over the severity of his injury and his altered level of consciousness, or LOC. He’s drifting in and out, and he looks pale in the backseat. He’s clutching his deformed leg. We manage to convince Shirley that slapping Travis won’t help, and she has exited the vehicle. Beagle reaches through the broken window and takes C-spine traction on Travis, holding his head in line with his spine. Someone else cuts away his pant leg to expose the injured thigh. The foot on that leg is wedged under the driver’s seat, holding it at an absurd angle.
The car is a two-door, and in order to safely remove him, we’ll have to cut the roof away. I am not dressed for this. If I had responded with the fire trucks, I would have my protective turnout gear on. As it is, I’m running around in baggy shorts. The rain has stopped. That helps.

  The chief has sent fire trucks up one block either way to reroute traffic. The ambulance is idling behind the wrecked car, the engine that runs the cutting tools is wide open and sounds like a frantic rototiller. The size of the crowd that has gathered suggests that over half the town has turned out. With the exception of Travis, trapped in the car, our so-called patients are milling about. At one point, my mother tracks down Tricky and Elmo. She kneels in the wet grass and attempts to interview them, and find out if they are injured. Tricky is motherfucker this and motherfucker that, and finally I kneel down in front of him, get right in his face, and bark, “Hey!” He blinks. “This is my mom. She doesn’t have to listen to that kind of talk.” I’m pissed, I’ll admit. But it works, for a little while. Tricky apologizes, and she is able to check out the cut on his nose and ask a few more questions. Then he is off and running again, rushing over to his car—rusty and crumpled fore-and-aft—to berate the firefighters peeling the roof. As the jaws bite into the window posts, Tricky rushes to intervene. “What the hell!” he yells. “Don’t wreck my fuckin’ car!” Tricky is irony-proof.

  Irony is in part a matter of perspective. Observing a village fallen into decay, Oliver Goldsmith was moved to compose an elegiac pastorale. Seeing his ravaged clunker under attack, Tricky Jackson uttered his own sort of elegiac. Rearranging the detritus covering their lawn, my neighbors become curators of found sculpture. Because I am rooted in this place, it does not strike me as absurd to love the junk. Things look different from a distance. Even your own backyards. Not so long ago, the St. Paul Pioneer Press sought the opinion of expert gardener-writer C. Colston Burrell on the subject of lawn ornaments. Mr. Burrell declared that it is time to “lighten up and fret less about being tasteful.” Grab yourself a Pabst and pack of string cheese, Mr. Burrell, and welcome to our garden party. That’s our dust you’re tasting as you round the cultural curve. We threw off the chains of tasteful restraint the day they invented plywood. The wooden tulip, the plastic sunflower, the begonia-filled toilet? The duck with the windmill wings? Bear cubs in particle board silhouette? LP tanks as trompe-l’oeil corncobs? The miniature Green Bay Packer on a rope swing? Armed with jigsaws and leftover house paint, we have been expanding the boundaries—and plumbing the depths—of yard ornamentation for decades.

  Mr. Burrell’s quote appeared in a gardening column devoted to Garden Whimsy, a book celebrating the renaissance of lawn art in the new millennium. Garden whimsy, the article says, has been raised to new levels of fun and fancy, and has the gardening community “abuzz.” In resounding agreement, the Garden Writers Association of America have awarded Garden Whimsy the coveted Quill and Trowel Award.

  Good people of the Quill and Trowel, where have you been? Have you been blinded by your gazing balls? Did you miss the Golden Age of the Bent-Over Grandma? The plywood grandmas have dwindled now, but they are still to be found around these parts, their paint flaking, their plywood delaminating in the sun and rain, Grandma’s exposed polka-dot bloomers leached of color.

  When they first appeared on the scene, the plywood grandmas were culturally divisive. Some social critics declared them trashy and demeaning, others found them a real knee-slapper. Whatever the take, they proliferated, and soon some joker designed a companion piece: a rearview of a grandpa in overalls, a red handkerchief out his back pocket and his hand planted firmly on grandma’s ample rear. Eventually, a third-generation piece appeared—a little plywood boy, taking a pee on a tree. We had achieved thematic apogee.

  In New Auburn, as in any place, lawn art is a form of public display as simultaneously trite and revealing as bumper stickers and nose rings. Between the porch and the road, iconography sprouts: the bathtub Madonna, the milk-cow windmill, giant mushrooms carved from stumps, yellow Norwegian Crossing traffic signs—these images speak to who we are.

  They do not always speak clearly. The most ubiquitous element of garden whimsy in western Wisconsin is the concrete deer lawn ornament. Why, in a state teeming with whitetails—in the autumn, their mangled and abraded bodies line the roads like organic brown speed bumps—we choose to buy three-quarter-sized concrete replicas by the herd and stick them in the front lawn to mow around, I do not know. I used to wonder the same thing about the proliferation of fiberglass lawn cows, but now that California has stolen our Dairyland thunder and family farms are rapidly becoming a historical footnote, the fake Holsteins have taken on a commemorative air. But the fake deer are a constant source of cultural cognitive dissonance. During hunting season, many of them are gussied up in blaze orange bunting. Real deer are not so blessed.

  I admit the Pioneer Press piece left me dyspeptic. In celebrating garden whimsy in the form of giant steel dragonflies, gaggles of bronze crows, and faux ruins, the Quill and Trowel crowd are giving their cultural imprimatur to yard art of a gentrified sort. The inference is that our plywood and wrapped lawn mowers are tacky, but I have yet to see a teddy bear topiary in Chippewa County. Ditto “a scarecrow dressed up in bohemian duds including shawl and beret.” Faux ruins? Who needs ’em, when your backyard is arranged around two rusty Pintos and a washing machine sprouting crabgrass? Lyric beauty goes only so far. I could do without whirling plastic sunflowers, but more than that, I want to be in a place I understand. Fake deer and Packer ornaments, goofy mailboxes, they tell me I am in a place where—for better or worse—I know the code. Let me be the first to say “Grandma Bending Over” is no “Nude Descending a Staircase.” But when Garden Whimsy the book celebrates a formal Grecian statue dressed as a prom queen in tulle and chiffon, methinks a sight gag is a sight gag, marble and brass notwithstanding.

  Truth be told, it was the subheadline that really hung me up: “At Last, Fertile Imaginations Are Appreciating a Little Whimsy in the Garden.” Implied: Fertile imaginations are only fertile if they work in brass and marble and eschew the coarse belly laugh. It’s tough to stick up for the worst of our lawn art—cartoony plastic Wal-Mart Garden Center frogs, for instance, although Garden Whimsy gives its seal of approval to giant frogs playing the cello (bronze frogs, natch)—but something about the plywood cutouts kept ringing a little bell. There was vindication in there somewhere. Then, reading the encyclopedia one day, I hit on it. The most popular tourist attraction in Belgium is a sculpture dating back to the fourteenth century. It is a bronze statuette of…a little boy peeing.

  At first, Travis is completely unresponsive. Then he begins reacting to loud verbal stimuli. That is to say, he rouses when we yell his name. It is a diminished response, however, and he is disoriented. On the initial assessment, in which we scan the patient from head to toe, we find two lacerations on his head. After determining that they are superficial, with no underlying crepitus or depression to indicate an obvious cranial fracture, we control the bleeding by applying simple gauze squares. In the meantime, the rest of the assessment reveals no other obvious injuries. We give Travis high-flow oxygen through a non-rebreather mask, which has a little bag attached to concentrate the oxygen. Because of the severity of his injuries and his deteriorated mental status, we have already ordered the chopper. In the time it takes us to cut him free of the car, we take his vital signs three times. When we get his foot free, we take traction on his leg, holding it straight and checking for a pedal pulse to make sure blood is still being circulated throughout the length of the leg. His upper thigh looks swollen in comparison to his uninjured side, and this is a concern, as a femoral fracture can cause tremendous “invisible” bleeding in which the blood infiltrates the spaces between the muscles of the thigh. By the time we get Travis on the board and free of the car, the helicopter has arrived and landed on Pine Street, right in front of the old lumber yard. We give report to the flight nurse, help load Travis into the chopper, a
nd away he goes.

  By this time, Tricky has been handcuffed twice and released twice. He alternates between demanding treatment and refusing it. He asks us to produce a release form, then refuses to sign it. At one point Tricky puts his wrists in my face and demands that I document the red marks from the cuffs. I track down Bill, the quietest patient. He is sitting in the back of a pickup. His knee has several puncture wounds. We splint the knee, put Bill on a back board, and load him in the ambulance. On to Elmo.

  Elmo has a small laceration on his chin, and my mother notices during her assessment that his left eye won’t close and the pupil is non-reactive. “I was in an accident before,” says Elmo. “This whole side of my body has been rebuilt. It’s titanium.” We urge Elmo to get checked out at the hospital, but he refuses. When we hand him a release form, he holds it but will not sign it. We summon a deputy, and with her as witness, urge Elmo several times to accept treatment or sign the release. He refuses to do either. Eventually, after the helicopter is gone and the ground ambulance is leaving with Bill, Elmo says he will sign the release. The release forms are all in the departed ambulance. The deputy chief and I write out a release on a notepad, and Elmo signs it. We begin cleaning up the accident scene and Elmo interferes. When a sheriff’s deputy tells him to leave the scene, Elmo says he now wants medical attention. We radio the ambulance, and they head back to the scene. Before Elmo can change his mind, I place him in a seated position on the ground, put him in a c-collar, wrap him in a rescue blanket, and tell him not to move. I then give him a thorough head-to-toe assessment, hampered greatly by the fact that Elmo is shivering and waving his arms around. The ambulance arrives. “I’m not going to the hospital if my wife isn’t here,” says Elmo. The EMTs and I exchange glances—we are being pushed to the limits of professionalism. We lift Elmo to the cot. “I don’t need this, guys, I don’t need this.” In the end, Elmo allows himself to be transported.