Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  For a good quarter of an hour, we go round and round. The average eavesdropper might never guess we were in disagreement, as both of us are speaking in tones normally reserved for the anteroom of a funeral parlor. It’s a quintessentially midwestern tug-of-war in which either side tries to win by ever so tentatively pushing the rope. I do manage to tell the commissioner I am not happy about the decision. I go through the same list of concerns I presented at the meeting and the commissioner bats them back, one by one. He keeps circling back to safety, and continually refers to the intersection “improvements” (at this point I am no longer able to hear the word without twitching). Once again he encourages me to call the township and ask that we be placed on a priority plowing list. At another point he actually suggests that we’d have a better shot if we switched out our current vehicles for four-wheel-drive models. At this, I eye the log splitter, thinking what sweet relief it would be to lay my head on the rail and trip the lever. Instead, I sputter, “But-but, but up to now we’ve been making the hill with our two-wheel drives!” And then, just because I am in danger of aspirating on my own froth, I get officious: “Would you agree there is an inherent irony in us having a discussion in which you keep giving me suggestions on how to overcome these improvements?”

  “Well, yes,” he says, quietly. But we are fifteen minutes into the conversation and it is clear his position is staked. “We can revisit this in the spring,” he says, for the third or fourth time. I pace in circles, toeing the wood chips and holding the phone so tight to my head it reddens my ear. My adrenaline surges when I realize that essentially he is saying he doesn’t believe me.

  “Yes, but what do we do this winter, when we can’t get up the hill?”

  “Well, I hope that’s not the case.”

  “It’s not a matter of if, but when.”

  “Well, like I said, we can revisit it in the spring.”

  I am beginning to taste the smoke of my own molars.

  “And,” he says, “we can make sure the plows get out there early . . .”

  I thank him for his time and close the phone.

  For a while I just stand there, feeling shaky and weak, my bones humming with unspent epinephrine. I’ve been known to do some flinging and stomping in my time, especially when I think no one is watching, but right now I just don’t have it in me. There is the sensation that I just burned fifteen minutes of my life kickboxing a giant marshmallow.

  It feels incumbent at this point that I calibrate my carping in order to distinguish disputation from self-pity (that most pernicious of pursuits). There are times when I get going and I suddenly realize my voice has assumed the same pitch as Dennis the Peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “I’m bein’ repressed!” my tone implies, when in fact I’m being inconvenienced. The highway commissioner is responsible for the maintenance and construction of over 1,400 “lane miles” of road, including the interstate that passes through Tom’s farm. Every Tupperware-sized pothole, every befuddling roundabout, every bit of paint and signage designed to keep us from turning each other into roadkill, right down to the reflective sparkles in the centerline paint. His days and nights are filled with people telling him how to do his job. While waiting to give my testimony I personally observed as he dealt with complaints ranging from the long-term environmental impact of road salt to a person demanding that the county buy him a new muffler after his fell off when his car hit a bump in the road. Thus (and we’re not even factoring in the world situation here), one understands the relevance and scale of one’s grump list and does not wish to contribute to the so-called culture of complaint. And yet, one can polite oneself right out of contention. It would be disingenuous to wrap everything in shucks and roses—I am frankly peeved, and I suspect the commissioner has scrubbed me from his Christmas list as well.

  Perhaps the secret lies somewhere in the idea of allowing oneself to be cranky but not vindictive. I can empathize with the fact that the man is just doing his job—although for the foreseeable future this empathy will function as an intellectual rather than an emotional construct. No one’s going to have to call the sheriff on me, but for better or worse, once I sink my teeth into something I tend to gnaw it to bits. Backstage prior to the show the other night I was ranting about the commissioner’s phone message before some poor cornered soul whose expression was that of someone who has accidentally wandered into the path of a haranguing street evangelist. When I paused to suck air, another man who was listening introduced himself as a lawyer and said he’d be willing to compose a letter to the highway commissioner on my behalf, pro bono. For all my frustration, I had never considered engaging an attorney, and I demurred. As grumptious as I’m feeling about the whole deal I do want to keep a sense of scale, and I also know that pro bono or not, I’d be triggering a whole new level of involvement extending over years. I believe the commissioner is being stubborn in the face of facts, and I also acknowledge that at this stage of the game I have not been entirely successful at keeping this from feeling personal. Every time another old-timer asks me what the heck the county is thinking over there on Starkey Road, I think of how easily the commissioner dismissed this available knowledge and my systolic spikes. But I’m not looking to lawyer up. Pro bono does not mean “without cost.”

  Back when Tom was fighting the interstate, he did get himself a lawyer. A stout fellow by the name of D. W. Barnes. “Dee-dubya,” Tom called him.

  I am in the Hartwigs’ dining room. On the table before Tom is a sheaf of large-format black-and-white photographs. Aerial shots, taken prior to and during the construction of the interstate. “When you file suit, you gotta be prepared for anything they throw at ya,” Tom says. “They even asked me on the stand what kind of foundations were under my buildings. The idea is to try and rattle ya. That’s why we had these taken.”

  After all of Tom’s stories about life on the farm before the interstate, it’s fascinating to see the place as it was. He holds up the first photograph and points out three dark splotches. “Turtle ponds. This one here was quite long. My brother and I used to build a lot of sailboats, and when the wind was blowing north or south we’d let’em go in that long pond and when they got to the other end we’d pick’em up and run back and start’em all over again. As a kid I always wished I had a cannon so you could shoot at your boat!”

  The pictures were taken in autumn. I can see shocked corn in one field, and a tree-lined cow path where the westbound lane of the interstate now lies. Tom spins another photo around so I can see it properly. Now the bulldozers have been at work. Twin white scars cut across the countryside in a broad parallel arc, and I can see where the 360-foot culvert has been laid. The turtle ponds have become mud spots. “When they put that roadbed through they changed the whole drainage pattern,” says Tom. “They have no ear for these things. It’s sterile on wildlife down there now. Those ponds, you always had frogs and turtles in’em, and when you had the frogs and turtles you also had herons and bitterns and kingfishers . . .” He stops and waves one hand in the general direction of where the ponds used to be.

  “Now there’s nothin’.”

  Out the window, I can see the traffic humming along.

  “I’d go down there to the state highway office sometimes, and they wouldn’t see me,” he says. “So I’d go downtown and see D.W. I’d say, ‘I was just up at the state highway office, and they were giving me the ol’ Mickey Mouse. The runaround.’ And D.W. would get his hat and coat and say, ‘C’mon.’ So we’d go back. I’m puppy-doggin’ in behind him—he was a big beefy guy—and he says ‘I’m D. W. Barnes, Attorney at Law! I wanna see so-and-so.’ And then it was all ‘Oh, yessir, yessir,’ and in we went.”

  When the state made its initial offer for his land, Tom felt it was much too low. “Where they git ya is they come through and appraise yer place assuming that you got a willing buyer and a willing seller. But what you’ve got is a willing buyer for a very unwilling seller. They also appraise your place as if today it’s worth x number
of dollars, and after the highway is through it’s still going to be worth x number of dollars. Well a’course it isn’t. And also, you can’t sue for aesthetic values.”

  I’m thinking it’s odd to hear Tom use the word aesthetic, and perhaps he takes my silence for confusion, because he adds, “Noise, and stink, and all that stuff.”

  So he and D.W. challenged the offer in court. The court sided with Tom, and he submitted a number he thought was fair. The state countered with yet another lowball offer. “I told D.W., ‘Tell’em to go to hell. We beat’em the first time, we’ll beat’em again.’”

  And they did. Tom is always closemouthed and slightly conspiratorial about the specifics of the settlement (“They paid us what we wanted . . . I settled out of court so it ain’t on the public record, and they can never come after me for capital gains”), but about his opinion of the parties involved, he is crystal clear: “Weasels!”

  He lets that sink in a minute, then explains. “When we won our case they had sixty days to pay up or appeal. They knew very well they weren’t going to appeal, but they made us stew, then on the fifty-ninth day, they paid . . . minus interest!

  “I’ll tell anybody who’ll listen: The state of Wisconsin is the crookedest outfit I ever dealt with.”

  You can’t blame a guy, I guess, for taking his pound of flesh. And maybe a little more. Tom shuffles back to the photo of the early construction, the one with the white scars. Points to where they put that culvert in. After it was set, they buried it beneath a gigantic sand berm intended to elevate the roadway above the breadth of the creek bottom. Shortly after the berm was finished and seeded, a torrential rainstorm flushed the whole works into Tom’s cornfield, leaving approximately two acres of cultivated bottomland covered in a foot of infertile sand.

  “I told those state boys, if they’d give me a thousand bucks, I’d call it even,” says Tom. The state refused, and instead hired a contractor to remove the sand.

  “So the state sends Sweeney Brothers out here with a bulldozer and one of these earthmovers. And a’course they’re billin’ everything to the state. And I went down there with them and they said, ‘We can scoop that sand up but where are we gonna put it?’” As he did with the dog story, Tom tells the tale in two voices, playing the roles of both himself and the contractor.

  “I says, ‘Well you can’t put it by the crick, the Department of Natural Resources won’t allow that. But I got a washout up there on the hill, can you get it up there?’

  “‘Oh yah, but we’ll have to make a road up there first.’

  “‘Well. You do what you gotta do.’

  “So they hauled it all, then he comes to me and says, ‘Now I think we should sod it.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh, ab-so-lutely.’

  “So they scraped sod from one of my fields and packed it up there on that side hill. Then he comes to me and he says, ‘Down there where we scalped that sod, I think we should reseed that.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh, ab-so-lutely.’ And normally you sow grass seed at a rate of ten or twelve pounds to the acre. They put it on eighty pounds to the acre.

  “So when it was all over, they paid this contractor tens of thousands, when they coulda just paid me one. And I wound up with great pasture, a patched washout, and all that free sand.”

  Now he pulls a smaller snapshot from the stack. You can tell the photograph was taken from some elevation, but much closer to the earth. Close enough that a white Leghorn chicken is visible on the ground, its shadow cast against the dirt. “This one’s from the top of the silo,” Tom says, and I realize that after years of hearing the story of the battle of the silo, I’m looking at actual documentation.

  “We needed plenty of room to get the silage wagons in there. You can see the tracks—that’s why we took the picture. To document it. If they had gone with the fence the way they originally planned, they’d have knocked the silo down and cut off a corner of the barn. And even when we got’em to leave the barn and silo alone, they still tried to cut that road so close there was no way to get through there with the equipment.” After seeing where the surveyor’s stakes were set, Tom and D.W. raised a ruckus, and the state promised to send out the condemnation committee. Before the group arrived, Tom set up the blower (a wheeled machine that transfers silage from the wagon and blows it up a tube and into the silo) and hooked a silage wagon to one of his Farmalls. “There was two farmers on that committee, and they were looking it over with the state’s appraiser. Then I said, ‘Okay, now whoever thinks he can back that wagon up to that blower without knockin’ over a stake, do it.’

  “Well, they couldn’t.”

  For a long time, nothing changes at the bottom of Starkey Road. Apart from some spray-painted outlines, the intersection remains undisturbed. I hold the hope—futile though I know it is—that out of the blue the commissioner will call to say he’s thought it over, that my concerns make eminent sense, and that the road will remain undisturbed. Instead the day arrives when I come around the corner and find the road crew peeling up the old blacktop and excavating a dip—a shallow moat of sorts—that blocks the straight approach to Starkey and will force vehicles to slow down and deviate into the new J-shaped approach. The next time the crews come through they have with them a paving machine, and when they depart the changes are sealed in asphalt.

  That day after the commissioner called, I set the choke on the log splitter and then, before yanking the pull cord, I just stood there a minute. From across the valley came the sound of the interstate. Sometimes the atmosphere works like an audio equalizer, emphasizing certain tones over others. On that day I could hear no engine noises, only the sound of rubber lugs thrumming concrete. Each vehicle was playing its own hollow note, and although I could distinguish between them as they rose and fell, fading and shading between keys, the sound itself never broke the sustain. I thought of that sound running day and night for all these years now, and I thought of how worked up I’d gotten over a few square feet of blacktop, and I wondered, when those first dozers rattled the dishes and scared the cows, what prevented Tom from fetching a rifle.

  One doesn’t wish to be overdramatic. I am not about to wrap myself in the Gadsden flag and charge the Senate dining room (although this deserves regular consideration). And Tom has told me that he believes the interstate has saved lives and helped the country. But whether it is a letter putting a solicitous spin on septic tank fees, a phone call demanding the redundant confiscation of a dog, or the aiming of bulldozers by bureaucrats, the issue isn’t that we are being made to take our medicine; the issue is that it is being prescribed from a distance under the assumption that wisdom distilled on high will remain wisdom when mixed with dirt. That the intersection that is better in theory will be better in reality. Once on a country morning I carried a bag of feed through a gauntlet of five rude-snouted hogs, then drove away to the city, where in the learned evening a decidedly nonagricultural gentleman assured me that pigs are acutely intelligent and naturally clean. Yes, I said, but they would also love to get you down in the mud and eat your foot.

  There is some anodyne, you see, to having your say in person. I can pretty much draw you a chart on how this whole intersection redesign is gonna pan out. I have lost, the commissioner isn’t going to change it back, and we are going to spend some time hiking in the snow. But at least in my quixotic tilting I have the right and the opportunity to meet with the commissioner face-to-face and phone-to-phone. To—and this is small of me, but true—make him a little uncomfortable.

  Today if you look quickly as you pass Tom Hartwig’s farm, you’ll note a slight jog in the interstate fence. Just enough room to allow passage of a silage wagon. I don’t know what meant more to Tom: pushing that fence back, or making the state come and stand there beside him while he did it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The photographers have asked Tom to walk toward his silo, and he is doing that now, a little bowlegged from behind, stumping along as if it were just another thousandth trip to to
ss down silage for the cows. The wind has kicked up, and the shin-deep quack grass is waving all around him. The silo is painted white. Top to bottom, roof, chute, vent cap, the whole works, everything white but the four-pane window that used to overlook the path to Cotter Creek.

  The silo is iconic to Tom’s history, because it was the lever he used to pry the interstate southward. Only a few tens of yards, but a victory nonetheless.

  You can see the silo is ringed with thirteen hoops. The hoops were added in 1988, twenty-one years after the interstate opened. It was the big trucks, Tom says. I’d be up there when it was freshly filled, and when two or three semis went by together, that whole thing shook. One morning about a week after we put up the silage I was bringing the cows in and I looked up, and, holy shit, that thing had opened up. I could stick my hand in. All winter it was like a sundial in there . . . you could mark the time by where the sunshine was hitting opposite the crack. In the spring, after we got the silage out, the silo company came. That boom truck would reach seventy feet. They didn’t even unfold the elbow. They put them hoops on, a hunnerd bucks apiece. But they pulled that silo back together.

  The female photographer stands just out of frame, watching the oncoming interstate traffic. Tom stands with his back to the camera, ready to walk. The success of this photograph will depend on timing. The photographers are trying to convey the proximity of the silo to the interstate by capturing Tom, the silo, and a semi rolling at highway speeds. Okay, Tom, go, she says, and he begins walking. An instant later a blue semi tractor pulling a tanker trailer zooms through. The other photographer tries to anticipate the truck, tries to thumb the plunger at just the right instant. In this the photographers do not have the digital privilege of instant review. You shoot, you hope.