by Jerry Apps
“You could read when you were in second grade?”
“You damn betcha I could, and I remembered stuff too.” Fred touched the side of his head as he spoke.
“So where do you come down on the idea of a big hog farmer comin’ into our valley?”
“Ain’t thought about it much.”
“Why not?” asked Oscar.
“Why not what?”
“Why haven’t you thought about it?”
“Other things to think about. Lots of other things to consider,” said Fred.
“Like what?”
“Well, my arthritis has been kicking up lately. Been thinkin’ about that. Been thinkin’ about getting old—been thinkin’ about that a lot.”
“Good God, Fred, you gotta get your mind away from arthritis and worrying about gettin’ old. You should think about something else. Something important.”
“Arthritis and gettin’ old are pretty damn important to me.”
Oscar sipped his coffee and didn’t say anything for a half minute or so.
Fred broke the silence. “So you agree with me that I got other things more important to think about than a bunch of smelly hogs comin’ into the valley.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Oscar, picking up his coffee cup.
“So what are sayin’, then? Just what are you sayin’?” Fred raised his voice a little.
“You don’t have to yell. I ain’t deaf,” Oscar said quietly.
“I ain’t yellin’, I’m just wondering what you’re drivin’ at.”
Oscar put down his coffee cup and looked Fred straight in the eye. “Are you for or against this big hog operation comin’ into our valley?”
“I figure it ain’t none of my business,” said Fred.
“None of your business?” Now Oscar raised his voice.
“That’s what I said. Now if I was to stand up and say what I think, people are gonna call me and write to me and put my name in the paper. I don’t need that kind of attention, I just wanna live what I got left of my life by myself, without anybody botherin’ me. I don’t want anybody messin’ in my business, and I figure I shouldn’t be messin’ in anybody else’s.”
“So you don’t care that when you wake up in the morning all you can smell is pig manure? You don’t care about that, huh?”
“I don’t wanna smell pig manure when I wake up in the morning.”
“So, you do have an opinion on the matter.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sounded like you said that.”
“Well I didn’t.”
“Know what, Fred?” Oscar hesitated for a moment before he continued. He didn’t want to criticize his friend, but then he thought, Why not, and he continued.
“Do you know that you are a middle-of-the-roader?” said Oscar.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you sit right in the middle of road, trying not to take on a position on either side.”
“Expect that’s right.”
“Know what happens to middle-of-the-roaders?”
“What?” asked Fred. He took another sip of coffee.
“They get run over by traffic goin’ in both directions.”
Fred laughed. “I ain’t been run over yet.”
“Know what else?”
“What else?”
“People who don’t stand up and say their piece when decisions are being made have no right to shoot off their mouths when they don’t like what happens.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause they didn’t have guts enough to stand up and say what they thought when the idea was bein’ discussed.”
Fred drained the last drop from his coffee cup, stood up, and put on his John Deere cap.
“I gotta be goin’,” he said. “See you around.” He walked toward the door of Christo’s, leaving Oscar alone with a half cup of cold coffee.
21. Yes or No to Factory Farms
Josh Wittmore was working at his office computer when Bert Schmid stuck his head through the open door. He carried a copy of the latest issue of their paper, which had the Nathan West informational meeting story on the front page.
“Looks like we got ourselves an issue,” said Bert.
“You bet we do—and we should make the most of it,” said Josh as he turned from his computer to face his boss.
“This story will give our paper a chance to tell folks what’s going on in agriculture and at the same time let them know a little more about this quiet river valley here in Ames County,” said Bert.
“Sure wasn’t quiet the other night,” said Josh, smiling.
“What’s next?” Bert asked.
“Well, I’d like to visit one of Nathan West’s farms over in Iowa, see firsthand how they operate. Check on the smell. Talk with some of the locals to see what they think about having a big hog farm in their midst.”
“That’s a good idea. You want me to set up something? I’ll call their head office in Dubuque.”
“Appreciate it,” Josh said. A half hour later Bert was back in Josh’s office.
“What a bunch of cautious people. They’re scared to death of animal rights activists. I had to convince them that you weren’t gonna do a hatchet job on them.”
“Well, did you convince them enough so I can visit?”
“After three phone calls, I talked with one of their vice presidents, who finally agreed you could visit.”
“So, when do I go?”
“Not until March. The veep’s gonna set up a visit with what they call their 435 unit—they give each location a number. It’s near Decker, Iowa. By the way, Josh, here’s what we’ve gotten so far in our request for community contributions. I haven’t opened anything yet.”
Josh returned to his office, sat down, and slit open the envelopes Bert had just handed him. The first contained several handwritten pages, a story titled “Horses I Have Known” by Clyde Emersol, with a Waupaca return address. Josh began reading:
I grew up driving horses on the home farm back in the years of the Great Depression. The first team my pa had, he named Joe and George, Percheron horses they were. They were big horses, nearly a ton apiece. Pa often said they was the best team we’d ever had on the farm. Of course they was Pa’s horses. They didn’t like me much. Old Joe would try to bite me every chance he got. Mean horse, he was. And George was just plain lazy. Nothing worse than a lazy horse, to my way of thinking. But when I’d say that to Pa, he wouldn’t listen. He kept bragging up that pair of horses to everyone who’d listen.
Josh chuckled occasionally as he continued reading, enjoying Emersol’s down-home way of writing. When he finished the piece, he decided to recommend they publish it—just the way it was, no editing, no correcting of grammatical errors.
The next envelope he opened had no return address; the postmark was Link Lake. He found two neatly typed sheets of paper with a poem written on each of them. At the bottom of each were the initials “M.D.” He’d tried to think of someone around Link Lake with those initials and came up blank. But he’d been away for a decade, and he knew several new families had moved into the community, maybe one of them had the initials M.D. He’d have to check the phone book.
He read the first poem:
Farms and Factories
Factories make things.
Ships and stoves and automobiles.
Tables and chairs
And fancy gadgets.
Farms grow things.
Vegetables and grains.
Milk and pork.
Lumber and beef steaks.
Farms are not factories.
They never were.
They never will be.
They never can be.
Farms are of the land.
The land that feeds us all.
Factories produce the extras,
Beyond what’s necessary for life.
M.D.
Josh read the poem a second time, then put the paper down and sat back.
I�
�m not much of a poet, he thought, but there’s something here that might cause people to think a little more about the big hog farm that’s headed for the Tamarack River Valley. M.D. surely has a point of view. I wonder if M.D. lives in the Tamarack River Valley and not near Link Lake? Who in the valley might write like this? He couldn’t come up with a name. He tried to recall some of the people who had spoken up at the meeting back in January; he wondered if it could be one of them. This writer surely was on the side of small farms and the river.
Josh took the story and poem into Bert’s office. “Well, anything worth running in the paper?” Bert asked when he looked up from the ledger in front of him.
“I think so,” said Josh. “Got a nice nostalgic piece about horses that I think many of our readers will like. Also got a poem, maybe not a poem, but just ideas strung together to look like a poem.”
“Here, let me have a look.”
He read through the poem, then read it a second time.
“Who is this M.D.?” he asked when he looked up, still holding the poem in his hand.
“I have no idea. No return address, but a Link Lake postmark.”
“Person has a point of view,” said Bert. “Definite point of view. I think we’ll run it. Might tick some people off, might get some others thinking. Poem fits right in with the discussion about the big new hog farm in the Tamarack River Valley. Wish we had some more material from M.D. Need a little controversy; might gain us a few more subscribers. Might lose us a few too,” he said with a chuckle.
22. Winter Festival
The Tamarack River Winter Festival began in 1910 when several farmers in the area who worked in the logging camps during the winter months gathered to show off their lumbering skills and tell tall tales of life in the winter woods. Those early festivals mostly consisted of competitions between teams of woodcutters and individual contests, such as what team of two could saw a log fastest, who could shinny up a pine tree quickest, who could toss an axe and hit the center of a target, that sort of thing. Considerable drinking and partying went on into the dark winter nights of the first weekend in February. The festival was always held on that same weekend, no matter what—even if it was a fierce blizzard or thirty below zero. The competitions took place on the banks of the Tamarack River—in the old days, all out in the open. Today, the local organizers erected a big tent, fully enclosed and even partially heated, in Tamarack River Park. The old timers scoffed at the tent, especially the heaters. “Don’t know about this present generation. Gotten pretty soft,” one old timer was heard to say.
Everyone looked forward to the event with more than a passing interest; the festival had long ago become a tradition. The locals seemed to understand, although few people put it in words, that traditions are what make a community, tie people together, give them a common purpose. The festival attracted people from throughout Ames County and the neighboring counties, but people also came from Madison, Milwaukee, and the Fox River Valley, and even a few snowmobilers from Chicago came to participate in the races held on the frozen river on Sunday afternoon.
Josh planned to attend both days of the event and had asked Natalie to accompany him.
“I can’t go on Saturday, but I can on Sunday,” Natalie had said.
Wanting to get a broader picture of the Tamarack River Valley and its various activities, Josh drove alone to the festival on Saturday, but he was thinking about Sunday, when Natalie would be with him, which would be more fun.
Saturday dawned partly cloudy and not especially cold. Thermometers in the valley read twenty-five degrees above zero, mild for early February, which was the heart of a northern winter, when the temperatures usually reached their lowest levels. One longtime resident recalled a year—he was a little fuzzy on whether it was 1939 or 1942—that the temperature dropped to thirty below on the opening day of the festival.
“Went right ahead with it,” he said. “People in those days didn’t let a little cold weather get in the way of a good time.”
Earlier in the week, it had snowed nearly a foot, but county crews had done a good job clearing the parking lot at the park and removing the snow from the place where the tent went each year. Volunteers had put up the tent, which held about a hundred people, on Wednesday, pounding the metal tent pegs into frozen ground, laying out the canvas and ropes, and then pulling the structure into place.
The Saturday-morning sun struggled to break through the smoky gray clouds as people, Josh included, found chairs in the heated tent. They came prepared. Almost all wore down-filled parkas of some kind, and most wore heavy felt-lined boots. The opener for the festival, scheduled to start at ten, featured “An Ode to the Tamarack River Ghost,” recited by Oscar Anderson. Oscar had recited the piece every year for more than twenty. With a new haircut and wearing freshly washed overalls and a red-and-black-checked shirt, he stood when this year’s festival chair, Alexis Christo, introduced him. Oscar, using his cane, walked slowly to the podium as people clapped—a rather strange, subdued “whomp, whomp” sound, as everyone wore either thick gloves or down mittens.
“An Ode to the Tamarack River Ghost,” Oscar said quietly.
“Louder,” came a voice from the back of the tent.
Oscar began once more, this time louder: “An Ode to the Tamarack River Ghost.” He paused briefly, then continued.
When the wind is down and the moon is up, we sometimes hear him. We hear his song, and we hear the clear sound of his dog’s little bell. We are reminded of the story of the Tamarack River Ghost, the ghost that haunts this valley, the ghost of Mortimer Dunn. We are reminded of that day in April during the year nineteen aught aught, the day that Mortimer Dunn met his fate. The day that Mortimer Dunn drowned in the river. Drowned in the Tamarack River, the river we all know so well.
Mortimer Dunn was a log driver, but more than that, Mortimer Dunn knew logjams, understood them, studied them, pondered their creation, and learned how to spot the key log and pull it loose. Learned how to take apart a jam so the logs would once more flow free on their journey down the Tamarack River on their way to the sawmills in Oshkosh and Fond du Lac.
Mortimer Dunn was also a family man with a wife and children, a storyteller, and a woodcarver. He carved many things, but his specialty was whistles. Little wooden whistles that he made from green willow branches. He carried one of these in his pocket and used it to call his big dog, Prince.
It was a beautiful day in April. The logs floated free, and the log drivers were singing:
Ho Ho, Ho Hay, keep the logs a-going.
Keep ’em rolling and twisting.
Keep ’em moving, keep ’em straight.
On the way to the lake called Poygan.
Ho Ho, Ho Hay,
What a day, what a day.
But then what often happens when things are going well, when progress is being made, when celebration is in order—a turn of fate. An unexpected logjam develops, the river is plugged, the logs are stopped. A day that started with beauty and hope becomes one filled with agony and sorrow. So today, and every year on this weekend, we celebrate the life of Mortimer Dunn, who died in this river. All that was found of him was his little wooden whistle, with the initials M.D. carved on it. The whistle washed up right here at Tamarack River Park. You can see it on display at the Trading Post in Tamarack Corners.
On this day we celebrate the Tamarack River Ghost, for Mortimer Dunn’s grave on the banks of this river stands empty. When the wind is down and the moon is up, his ghost is searching, searching, constantly searching for his empty grave. In the still of a moonlit night, we sometimes hear him; we hear his song. And we remember. We remember the Tamarack River Ghost.
Oscar made a slight bow, smiled, and returned to his seat. Everyone stood and clapped. Although he was eighty-six years old, Oscar Anderson’s voice was powerful and his presentation exemplary.
M.D., thought Josh. He immediately thought of the poem the paper had received. M.D. stands for Mortimer Dunn. Is someone pretending to be th
e ghost of Mortimer Dunn? Why would anyone do that? But maybe there really is a ghost contacting the paper from the great beyond; wouldn’t that be something? Josh shuddered a bit at the thought.
The members of the Willow River High School Band found their places on the little makeshift stage at the end of the tent. As they were doing so, people in the audience turned to each other, visited, commented on Oscar’s presentation, and waited for the band to get itself in order. There was no impatience, no sense of urgency. Winter was a time for slowing down, for doing things deliberately. People living in the valley knew this and appreciated it, for they, like rural and small-town people everywhere, were tuned to the cycle of the seasons. The band could take as long as it needed. It finally led off with a rousing rendition of “Old Man River” and followed with a series of river songs, another festival tradition: “Rolling Down the River,” “Cry Me a River,” “Down by the Riverside” (everyone in the audience joined in the clapping), a fun rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” with various instruments taking turns playing the lead, and ending with “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”
After the final piece, the audience clapped loudly, for the Willow River High School Band was in good form, giving its best performance people could remember. Just outside the big festival tent, bratwurst and chicken cooked on a long, charcoal-fired grill, and just beyond that, in a small three-sided tent, two men, bundled in long gray parkas with fur-edged hoods, served beer on a portable bar that stretched across the front of the tent. They also offered soft drinks, coffee, and hot chocolate.
When the concert finished, people filed out of the tent. Some walked around, looking at the various ice sculptures in progress. A half dozen artists chipped away at what were once fifty-pound hunks of clear ice, fashioning bears, penguins, eagles, pine trees, and other wintry creations. A small crowd gathered around Brittani Martin, including Ben Wesley, who had not seen any of his office manager’s creations before now. Brittani had been taking sculpting lessons at the university in Stevens Point and discovered she had a talent for making something out of something else— of making art, as her instructor had told her. For the past several weeks, after work and on weekends, she had practiced ice sculpting in preparation for the festival. Now, somewhat nervous with people watching, she slowly chipped away at the big block of ice in front of her. When they asked, she did not tell people what she was making.