by Dave Crehore
That evening, Dad leafed through the Yellow Pages in search of
well drillers and septic tank installers. He found the trades dominated by tribes of closely related Dutchmen. At lunchtime the next day, he started calling them.
The well driller was the first to show up. “Shallow wells in this clay aren’t any good,” he said. “To get good water you gotta go down through the clay to the limestone, enso? You oughta get good water there. But if you don’t, then you gotta go down through the shale to the sandstone. One way or the other, we can get you water here, no trouble. But the important thing is to put the well as far as we can from the septic tank, enso?”
The septic tank man agreed with his cousin the well driller. “We gotta find the old tank before we can do anything,” he said. “It looks like your drain goes out by the northeast corner of the house, so we got to dig a pit and find the pipe. Then we can figger out where the tank is. Can’t start the well ’til we know.”
In a few days the pit was dug. The septic tank man stood in the
pit with a compass and straddled the pipe. “OK, she goes due northeast like we thought,” he said. “So the tank is on a line someplace between here and the gully over there. Once the well is in I’ll dig some holes with the auger until we find the old tank. Then we can pull it out and put a new one in the same hole. ’Course we’ll have to put in a new drain field too, enso?”
“Enso,” Dad said.
The well driller returned for his second visit the next day. “Now we’re getting someplace,” he said. “We know the septic tank will be going in over there, more or less, so we can put the new well right here,” he said, poking a stake with a red flag on it into the lawn close to the house. “This’ll be a good place—it’s a long way from the septic 122
The Celebrated Water Witch of Door County
tank and my brother won’t have no trouble getting the drilling rig in here. He can start next Monday.”
On the Sunday morning before the well driller was due, Dad had
to work at the shipyard. Mom and I dropped him off on our way to church and arranged to pick him up again about noon.
Clifford was at loose ends that morning. Dad had told him about
the well and septic tank projects, so he decided to drive out to our place and see how they were getting along. He opened the front door of the house—we never locked it—and hollered for Dad. Finding
no one home but our beagles, he decided to have a look around anyway. He got the dowsing rod from his car and headed for the stake with the red flag on it.
“This must be where they want to put in the well let’s just see if those guys have any idea how to find water,” he said to himself. Clifford grasped the forked end of the dowsing rod and began to walk slowly in a circle around the stake. Nothing. The rod hung lifeless in his hands. He spiraled out in wider circles. Still nothing.
“Ya ya that’s just what I expected there ain’t no water here the trouble with them damn Dutchmen is they got a lotta machinery
and no inspiration,” he muttered.
Clifford started walking toward the deep ravine that ran along
the east side of our yard. As he approached the edge the dowsing rod suddenly came alive. First it trembled slightly. Then it began to vibrate visibly, and finally it plunged downward as though it were playing a fish.
“I knew it I knew it I knew it!” Clifford exulted. He laid the rod on the ground to mark the spot, pulled up the stake with the red flag, and drove it into the grass at the new location the dowsing rod had found.
The next morning, Dad got a phone call at his office.
“Mr. Crehore, this is Fred the well driller—Jim’s brother,” he
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said. “We got started drilling about an hour ago and I guess we got good news and bad news.”
“Better give me the bad news first,” Dad said.
“Well, the bad news is that we got to move the drilling rig, and that’ll cost an extra fifty bucks, but the good news is that we found the old septic tank. We started drilling and punched right through the top of the damn thing. Can’t imagine why that flag was there.
Made no sense at all. Anyway, Jim came over and told me where the well’s supposed to be. We’re movin’ the rig right now and we’ll get started again this afternoon.”
“Fine,” Dad said.
At lunch that day, Dad gave Clifford a stern look.
“Were you out at our place Sunday morning?” he asked. “And
did you move a stake with a red flag on it?”
“Well dammit Dave as a matter of fact I did I walked around
with my willow stick and damn if I didn’t find a lot of water over by the gully so I just thought I’d do you a favor and . . .”
It was hard to interrupt Clifford but Dad managed it.
“Well, your favor cost me fifty bucks, Cliff,” Dad said. “What
you found was the old septic tank.”
Clifford pulled his wallet from the pocket of his leather welding apron. “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” he counted. “But dammit Dave the thing was full of water, wasn’t it?”
W hen Dad retired in the summer of 1974 the shipyard gang threw a party for him. Clifford was a prominent guest.
“Dammit Dave now you’re footloose you gotta come up to my
place in Door County for a weekend sometime and bring the missus it’s always so nice and cool up there.” Clifford said.
“You mean to tell me you built a house on that little strip of land you bought?” Dad asked.
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“No no I got a two-acre lot with lots of trees just north of
Ephraim with a little cabin on it I swapped it for my land along the bay,” Clifford said.
“But Cliff, that land was worthless,” Dad said.
“Well, dammit it was and it wasn’t,” Clifford said. “You remember all them little trees that was growing on it back in 1956 well they just kept on growing for eighteen years and then Sligh he decided to build a bunch of cottages right across the road from my land on the bay.
“Only trouble was you couldn’t see the bay from them cottages
because of my trees and the customers said they wouldn’t buy unless they could watch the sunset from their front porch so Sligh he come to me and we worked out a little trade and he got my land and I got the Ephraim place,” Clifford explained. “Dammit Dave it’s just like Old Lady Grun told me, just have faith and things will work out
OK, enso?”
“Enso,” Dad said.
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l
Lucky Thirteen
I nto each life the thirteenth year must fall.
It’s a year of change. At thirteen, kids plunge headfirst into the whirlpool of adolescence and their parents are demoted from demi-gods to ordinary people. With so much going on, the potential for family melodrama is high.
But in my memory, at least, I got through my thirteenth year
in pretty good shape. I don’t recall battling my parents very much, or embarrassing them, or being embarrassed by them. Most of my
peers shunned the company of their parents at that age, but I don’t remember feeling that way. I suppose that was because my parents were capable people who did interesting things.
Mom, for instance, had a B.A. in English literature and took
advantage of it, as a teacher and a book reviewer. She was also the only parent I knew of who still practiced the piano at the age of forty-three, 126
Lucky Thirteen
working her way through a thick book of Mozart sonatas, pieces that sound angelically simple but are fiendishly difficult to play. Hearing them, you can imagine Mozart dipping his quill pen in the inkwell, scratching down a few bars, playing them on his klavier, and grinning an evil Austrian grin.
Anyway, Mom accepted the challenge. Her struggle with the Mo-
<
br /> zart sonatas became a kind of wrestling match that went on for years, best two falls out of three, Charlotte vs. Wolfgang the Destroyer. I remember coming home from school one September afternoon and
hearing Mom at the piano as she took apart and reassembled the
Allegro movement of one of the sonatas, like a mechanic working
under the hood of a car. I waited on the porch and listened through the screen door, not wanting to interrupt as she practiced a particularly nasty passage. It involved sweeping arpeggios that required a cross-handed, left over right technique.
Mom sailed into it, full speed ahead, and thundered successfully through the first page or so until she reached the culminating measures, which were like a musical barbed-wire fence. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, glared at her fingers, and strummed the mighty chord, tripping over the final notes. She stopped, rested her hands on the keys, and then started over, half speed at first, and then accelerating as she approached the fence. She stumbled again and
slammed the lid down on the keys of the Chickering.
“You bastard!” she exclaimed, as though Mozart were in the
room. Out on the porch, I laughed.
Mom spun around on the piano stool, saw me for the first time,
and blushed. “I’m sorry, Davy—I lost my temper,” she said. “I
made a cherry pie for supper. Why don’t you cut a piece and make sure it’s OK?” And five minutes later she and Mozart were back in the ring.
Who could rebel against a parent as exquisitely human as that?
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And who made excellent pies to boot? There are worse things than coming home to Mozart and cherry pie.
Dad loved music, and every now and then he would get out his
clarinet and play a few scales. But his job required most of his time.
Dad was a marine surveyor for the American Bureau of Shipping.
In shipyard talk, “surveying” is the art and science of inspecting the condition and seaworthiness of a ship, and the bureau was a non-governmental agency that set standards for the repair and construction of ships. In the ’50s, the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company
was building one big Great Lakes freighter after another, and it was Dad’s job to certify every nut, bolt, weld, and rivet.
One Saturday afternoon in May 1956, I went with Dad to the
shipyard and watched while he inspected some welds that joined
sheets of steel plating. He examined them inch by inch, and after a half hour or so he found a flaw in a seam that went around a curve.
Dad marked the flaw with a fat stick of chalk and called the welding foreman over.
“You’ll have to burn this one apart and try it again,” Dad said.
“When you see pits like that there may be a void underneath.”
“Bullshit!” said the foreman. “I had my best man on this and
those pits don’t mean a thing.”
“Maybe not,” Dad said, calmly, “but it’s got to be done over.”
“I’d like to see you do it any better!” the foreman yelled.
Apparently the foreman thought that if he shouted loud enough,
Dad would wipe off the chalk mark. I waited to see what would
happen next.
Dad spoke even more quietly. “All right,” he said, “let me borrow a helmet.”
A few feet away lay two similar pieces of steel that had to be
welded in the same way, curve and all. Dad put on a welder’s helmet 128
Lucky Thirteen
and apron, started up the generator, and began to weld. The foreman and I stared at the ground to avoid looking at the blue-white arc.
After a couple of minutes Dad shut off the generator and tipped the welding helmet back on his head. He had laid an even, flowing bead around the curve.
“See,” Dad said, “you have to time it. If you go too fast you lose your heat and you get those pits.”
He removed the helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
The foreman was bent over Dad’s weld, studying it closely. Then he turned and stood looking away from us for a full minute. When he faced us again he shook his head from side to side and pursed his lips, trying to stifle a smile. Then he reached out and punched Dad gently in the shoulder.
“You son-of-a-gun,” he said. “You son-of-a-gun. OK, we’ll burn
the bad one out and do it over.”
Dad smiled. “See you Monday,” he said. “C’mon, Davy, it’s time
for supper.”
On the way home, I mulled over what I had seen and heard. I al-
ready knew that Dad was a jack-of-all-trades, so the fact that he could operate a welding outfit didn’t surprise me. But I wondered why he had kept lowering his voice when the foreman started shouting.
“That guy was way out of line. You should’ve read him the riot
act,” I said.
“No,” Dad replied. “I’ve got to work with him every day. Now he
knows that I can weld a little, and that I won’t back down, and that I won’t run to his boss every time there’s a problem. My job will be easy from now on.”
I had found out a lot that afternoon; Dad’s methods were slowly
making sense to me, clicking into place in my head. But there was one problem.
“Dad?” I said, as the Studebaker bumped over the old Snow Flake
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Lucky Thirteen
railroad spur on Michigan Avenue. “What would have happened if
your welding—well, if it didn’t go right?”
“Let’s not even think about that,” Dad said. “I haven’t done any welding since 1948. I wasn’t even sure I could run a new outfit like that. Thank God that welding apron was cut kind of long, because my knees were shaking so bad I could hardly stand up!”
From Mom, I learned the value of pie and persistence, and that
from time to time the healthy thing is to swear and start over. From Dad I learned that a still voice turns away wrath, providing you know what you are talking about. And that was pretty good for just one year.
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How Now, Frau Blau?
I don’t believe it!” Dad exclaimed.
I followed him around the corner of the old farmhouse to see
what was up.
“Look at the privy back there,” Dad said. “Mrs. Blau is in it.
Sousa doesn’t know it, but he’s got her trapped. He’s going to sell the damn thing right out from under her!”
I was only thirteen, but I could see that the curtain was going up on some sort of farce featuring two classic Wisconsin characters of the middle 1950s—Colonel Sousa and his nemesis Frau Blau—in
and around an outhouse near Menchalville in Manitowoc County.
Sousa was the local nickname for an auctioneer who flourished in eastern Wisconsin in those days, selling off the old pioneer farms.
He was a short, waddling man, ringed with rolls of fat like the coils of a tuba. But money stuck to him, and he had the other essential 131
How Now, Frau Blau?
tools of a successful country auctioneer: he knew the second-hand price of everything from a Wedgwood teacup to a silo filler, and he had a voice that could carry across two plowed fields and a woodlot.
As did many auctioneers in those days, he called himself “Colonel,”
affected a cane and cowboy boots, and wore a big white Stetson.
I knew a little about Mrs. Blau already, from other auctions I’d gone to with Dad. She was a small-time antique dealer, about seventy and skinny as a rail. She was refreshingly honest and expected everyone she dealt with to be the same, including auctioneers. Dad was stocking our big old house with furniture that had been brought to Wisconsin by the first settlers, and what he couldn’t buy at auction, he bought from Mrs. Blau.
As a sideline, he also bid on the old Ithaca, Fox, Lefever, L. C
.
Smith, and Parker side-by-side shotguns that occasionally turned up in basements and attics. He cleaned them up and resold them,
squirreling the profits away for the day when one of the high-grade Lefevers called an “Uncle Dan” would show up on the auction
block. As far as Dad was concerned, the Uncle Dan Lefever was the ultimate shotgun, and he wanted one so bad he could taste it.
As we watched, Sousa and a crowd of farmers moved closer to the
outhouse. It stood in a clump of overgrown lilacs in the backyard, surrounded by elderly farm machines parked there to be sold. At the moment, Sousa was only twenty feet away from the outhouse, trying to unload a rusty little Farmall Cub tractor.
“Come on, boys,” Sousa said, impatiently. “I can’t let this machine go for three fifty. They don’t make ’em like this anymore!”
“Good thing, too, enso?” said one of the farmers. Sousa ignored
this sally. “Three fifty I got, who’ll give me four hundred?”
“Three seventy-five,” offered the current high bidder, a rangy
Norwegian with a cheek full of Copenhagen. Sousa shook his head.
“Thank you, Nils, but we’re going fifty dollars a throw today, just 132
How Now, Frau Blau?
like the big city. And besides, you’re bidding against yourself. Who’ll go four hundred?”
Sousa kicked the Farmall’s left front tire, spun around, and
pointed his cane at a man of about eighty in a snap-brim straw hat.
“OK, Romy!” he boomed. “Don’t go playing deaf on me now. I
know you can hear me and I know you’re interested, so let’s get off the pot, here. It’s four hundred to you.”
“But will it start?” Romy asked. “I’ll have to drive it home.”
“Will it start? Of course it’ll start. It started the last time it ran!”
shouted Sousa.
A titter of laughter trickled through the crowd of onlookers, but Romy couldn’t hear it.
“Well . . . ,” Romy said, tentatively.
“Sold!” said Sousa. He slammed his cane down on the tractor’s
worn leather seat, which split open at the blow and sent shreds of horsehair padding drifting away on the summer breeze.