Visiting Tom

by Michael Perry

  So sometimes you just have to dive in, eh, Tom?

  Yep. You can read all the books you want about how to ride a bicycle . . .

  The photographers are positioning him so that the sawdust pile will appear over his shoulder.

  When I had a hired man, we used to go out with the mill. The whole thing is portable. Takes about an hour or two to set it up, then another hour to get it level. You have to get it level. In the spring of 1982, we sawed 25,000 board feet in one sitting. In April of that year we went up by Allen with the mill and sawed another 15,000. But I never sawed very fast. I had a guy one time, he said, there’s other sawyers a lot faster than you. We had a big ol’ tree on the mill at the time. I told him, it took that tree a hundred years to grow to that size, I figure I can take my time to get the most out of it.

  I don’t saw much now. Just little piddly jobs. It’s dropped way off because you’ve got a lot of these little band-saw mills. The other thing that cut down on a lot of this home lumber sawing was pole sheds. Guys used to saw lumber and make a shed. Now it’s just poles and tin.

  WHEN THE FIRE CALL CAME in last night the fog lay thick as wool batts over the land, and despite the sound of sirens behind the radio chatter I was forced to drive at a crawl; even on low beam the headlights fixed themselves as pillars of haze just four feet off the bumper. I was on scene until 3 a.m., where with other first responders I helped treat and monitor worn-out firefighters before releasing them back to active duty. Now, after what seemed the briefest sort of nap, I am back on the road. It’s just after 6 a.m., a fact verified not only by the dash clock but by the late Kate Smith, who is currently belting out the first verse of “God Bless America” on Moose Country 106.7. As long as Jay Moore is in the chair, every day begins with Kate. Then you get a Mac Wiseman song. After that, a country music single likely once available on an eight-track, and then your day is under way.

  Visibility has improved, but the air is still heavily saturated with a headlight-blunting mist that hangs a halo around the neighbor’s yard light. Although the temperature is above freezing, I’m driving in cold-weather posture, hunched inward and shivering, holding the bottom of the steering wheel in an underhanded grip, forearms pressed against my thighs, elbows pulled tight into my sides, all in an attempt to consolidate body heat until the car heater kicks in. The shivering is due partly to the cold seat and partly the lack of sleep, but above all it is nerves: I am driving through the predawn darkness to make another appearance before the highway committee. In short, I am feeling underpowered.

  The road along this stretch meanders a ridge for several miles. Just before the turnoff that drops to lower altitudes, I round a curve and the horizon flares up in a great fog-fuzzed dome illuminated from below by acres and acres of parking lot lights. The lights stand on several square miles of blacktop covering land that used to be a farm belonging to Tom Hartwig’s grandmother. When the interstate came curving through, the writing was on the wall and the developers were knocking on the door. “We debated hangin’ on to it,” Tom told me once, “but by the time you woulda paid for the improvements and the roads they woulda had to build there . . . and you woulda got the tar taxed outta ya because it woulda been taxed on potential value. Plus we were pretty sour on trustin’ anybody because of the dealings we had with the state, so in 1967 we sold it. Grandma died that year.”

  And so the farm became streets and subdivisions, apartments and office buildings, and—eventually—the site of a shopping mall. Up until very recently, the development stayed on the north side of the interstate. Then they installed a roundabout and put up a Gander Mountain on the south side. And now this year earthmoving equipment showed up in the farm field beside the Equity Livestock sale barn at the end of Cotter Creek Road and set to transforming the field into a maze of fresh blacktop cul-de-sacs, two-story apartments, and an illuminated waterfall installation anchored by a sign denoting the new development as “Prairie Park,” continuing a time-honored tradition of naming things after what has been displaced. This is not an original observation, and in fact I have elsewhere noted that I grew up in Chippewa County, named after the Ojibwe tribe long ago sent packing, but I do think it would be a lovely kick to just once drive past a faux gold-leaf wood-carved sign welcoming you to Pulverized Pastures, Obliterated Pines, or Dozered Clover Drive. Now that the livestock sale barn stands adjacent to “Luxury Town Homes,” I have to assume its life expectancy will depend evermore on cattle futures and the persistence of prevailing winds. None of this is a surprise—the land has been for sale for some time now—and because the location is less than a mile from the intersection of an interstate and a four-lane state highway, it’s frankly more surprising it has taken this long.

  As I turn off the ridge road and descend into thickening fog, Mac Wiseman goes chopping off into “Rovin’ Gambler,” meaning the highway committee meeting begins in less than five minutes. The car is warming up but I’m still shivering.

  I wish I had better known Tom Hartwig’s mother. Her name was Olga, and I met her once, just before she died after breaking her pelvis at the age of 101. Anneliese had taken me up to Olga’s little cottage behind the farmhouse and we visited briefly, Olga wearing sunglasses as impenetrably dark as the lens in a welding helmet. Later I learned she had a degenerative eye condition and wore the glasses inside and outside, and that the eye trouble was dispiriting for her as she was a retired schoolteacher (all of those years spent in a one-room schoolhouse) with an everlasting hunger for knowledge, and reading was her greatest source of comfort. When her eyes failed, Tom and Arlene set her up with an account for recorded books. “She wore out a half a dozen tape players,” Tom told me once. “She never listened to fiction. One of her favorites was Stephen Hawking. And I remember her being very intrigued with an autobiography of Winston Churchill.”

  It is difficult to overstate Olga’s determination for intellectual self-improvement. In 1926, wanting to study European history at the source, she saved enough money to make her way from the Wisconsin farm to New York City and, after a ten-and-a-half-day third-class sea voyage (in her journal she described how her quarters pitched and tossed and smelled of creosote), she arrived in Oslo and began a three-month journey that would take her to Switzerland, Pompeii, and the ruins of the Roman Forum, where—again, according to her journal—she boosted a piece of marble. When filling out her official travel papers she described herself as having a long face and a Roman nose, and from our one visit I do recall that she and her son shared the same sharp features. I also spoke with her just long enough to get a sense of her responsibility—both genetic and instructive—for the omnivorous inquisitiveness so prevalent in Tom. Once when Tom was showing me a little distillery secret in a back room, he reached into the corner and pulled out a large telescope. “My ma bought this when she became interested in astronomy,” he said. “She’d take us out and set it up and teach us the stars. We could see the craters on the moon, and some of the moons of Jupiter.” Then, in a classic Tom coda, he chuckled and admitted that he also used it to spy on the neighbor’s cattle: “Course, in the telescope, the cows were all upside down.” (Tom’s political ambiguity can also be traced to Olga, who so despised FDR that she taped his photo to the underside of the outhouse toilet seat but also once named a voluble rooster Ronnie not only because his shiny black tail reminded her of Reagan’s pomaded hair, but mainly, she said, because “he crows all day and says nothin’!”)

  Tom tells me that when his mother was a young girl, she used to climb the ridge out behind where the OfficeMax is now and pick trailing arbutus. Over time the ridge has been shaved away a section at a time to make room for a Best Buy, a Michaels, another parking lot, another road, and a Buffalo Wild Wings, until now not much remains but a brushy knob overlooking the Borders turned Books-A-Million. The trailing arbutus is a flower that thrives in the presence of oak trees. I think of this whenever I see the exit sign for the Oakwood Mall.

  When I enter the highway department meeting room
I slide directly to my right and position myself behind the commissioner in the very chair I occupied while waiting to testify the first time. It’s a small thing, but occupying the same seat provides me a measure of psychological orientation. In pursuit of comfort we operate from habit at the earliest opportunity.

  There is the standard call to order, the approval of previous minutes, and the review and auditing of bills. There is some discussion of how economic woes have affected sales tax revenues and possible negative effects on the department budget. There are doughnuts. And now the clerk is indicating it’s my turn to speak.

  In what could be a case of bringing a sledgehammer to a xylophone recital, I have prepared several copies of a neatly stapled seven-page report including a section titled SUMMARY OF PREVIOUS CONCERNS, a three-column table of INCIDENT DESCRIPTIONS (arranged in chronological order and including time stamp and relevant meteorological data), and a series of eight full-color photographs with explanatory captions appended. For the moment, however, I keep the reports in hand, on the hunch that if I pass them around everyone will be shuffling through the pages and not listening to me. With only five minutes to make my case, I figure an undiluted verbal tsunami is my best option. And so, after brief pleasantries, I try to ignore the hummingbirds in my chest, suck a deep breath, and—using one copy of the report for reference—dive straight in.

  “In the last decade there were zero times that we couldn’t make it up the hill. The number of known incidents that we’ve had on that hill in the five months since the road was changed is over fourteen. The minimum number of vehicles that we’ve had involved in the known incidents is nine. I included that so you know I’m not talking about one vehicle with bad tires or something.”

  I am already starting to suck wind, and so consider it a favor when a committee member breaks in. “So it’s not just your wife having problems?”

  “No, but that’s why I’m here. This is not about me. I could walk up that hill. It would do me some good. But I’m on the road eighty, a hundred days a year and my wife is stuck there alone.”

  I check the clock: over a minute gone already. Now I really get going, speaking almost without punctuation, trying to cram as much into my five minutes as possible. I’m not speaking rapidly, but steadily. I’ve also adopted a flat monotone in a conscious effort to keep things in the lower register and quaver-free—no Dennis the Peasant. Running one finger down the report, I begin ticking off specific incidents, first describing the babysitter situation way back in October, then recounting the night our friends Lori and Buffalo were stranded at the bottom of the hill, then relating how my sister-in-law wound up in the snowbank, and on down the line. Now I am talking faster, and through the combination of speed and nervousness I occasionally skip or swallow a word. My mouth feels as if it is filled with spackle. I press the report flat against the table so it won’t vibrate in my hands like a leaf trapped against an air conditioner intake. At one point I make a little joke about the loss of county sales tax as a result of a customer not being able to make it up the hill to buy one of my books and how this might affect the bridge-building budget, but it drops with all the reverberation of a ball of putty. Checking the clock on the wall and realizing I need to reserve time for the photographs, I go shorthand: “February 2nd carpooler woman came up, slid out, had to Y-turn, go back home . . . February 5th same deal . . . February 8th she just called from the base of the hill said I can’t make it up the hill just come down . . . February 9th, carpooler, again, halfway up the hill Y-turn, slidin’ down . . .” When I notice I’m nearing six minutes I cut myself off mid-sentence and switch to the visuals.

  Above all I try to use the photos to drive home the point that the snow is only an inch to two inches deep when the road becomes impassable and snowplowing is not the problem. To illustrate this I supply pictures of my fingers stuck in the snow beside the spin-out marks. In one photo the snow is no deeper than my first knuckle; in another it falls just short of my wedding ring.

  I close with the two shots taken early on a Sunday afternoon. We were returning from church when the van spun out halfway up the hill and slid sideways into the opposing lane. In the first photo, Anneliese is visible through the windshield, walking up the hill, Amy just ahead of her and Jane in her puffy snow jacket, clinging to Mom’s hand. The final photo is of my boot, shot from above to illustrate the fact that the slush was no more than half an inch in accumulation. To the right of my foot the spun-out tire tracks are visible. To the left, the much tinier footprints left by Jane as she hiked off uphill. I hold the photo up and address the commission as a whole: “The bottom line is, we can talk about safety, but that’s my two-year-old, walkin’ up the snow-covered slippery hill after church with who knows what comin’ down the hill . . .”

  I admit I’m probably—as my friend Frank often tells me—peggin’ the ol’ wank-o-meter. Really, all that’s missing is a big-eyed kitten playing a blue violin. But if you’ve got an ace combo (a toddling child . . . tiny footprints in the snow . . . after church) well, shoot, you gotta flop those cards, especially in light of the commissioner’s contention that the hill is regularly terrorized by tearaway racers.

  I conclude by raising an issue that should have occurred to me long ago but hadn’t struck me until I was slowpoking my way through the fog last night: What happens if we need an ambulance—or a sheriff’s deputy, or a fire truck—on a snowy night and they can’t make the hill? And then finally, as if disembodied, I hear myself say, “Those are my concerns, respectfully submitted.”

  Sitting there lightheaded and still trembling, my one coherent thought is: Seriously, son . . . did you just say “respectfully submitted”? It just kinda blurted out on the order of some guy who appears on Judge Judy to sue his ex for back rent and a set of speakers and drops a non sequitur legal term in an attempt to convey gravity.

  The discussion that follows is wide-ranging. Much of it is consumed by the commissioner and me reexplaining our positions and logistics, especially for those members who haven’t actually been to the intersection. The commissioner reiterates that the main reason for changing the intersection is to prevent people from coming down the hill and entering the intersection at reckless speeds. I counter by saying that if your primary concern is people speeding down the hill, then you don’t want also to create a situation where people are regularly hung up or walking in the middle of that hill.

  “Right,” says one of the committee members. “But if there’s only two families up there, then there aren’t that many people coming down the hill.”

  Under pressure of extreme cognitive dissonance, my left eyeball nearly uncorks itself.

  Another committee member—this one with a pronounced farmer tan—speaks. “It sounds like one of those cases where you look in the book and it tells you how to do it, but maybe the book is not exactly right because of the situation involved.” I want badly to dive over the table and hug him but that tan line suggests otherwise.

  “Were there any accidents at that intersection before we changed it?” asks another member.

  “I don’t believe so,” says the commissioner. Then once again he reiterates that the concern was people coming down the hill and not stopping.

  I bring up the yield sign and suggest it be replaced with a stop sign. “If someone doesn’t stop at that point,” I say, “then they’re just breakin’ the law.”

  “Well a sign is a sign,” says the commissioner. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a yield or a stop, they’re gonna treat it the same usually.”

  This narrows my eyes some, and I feel the snappishness coming on. “Well, I would argue then, why do you bother putting up controlled intersections at any point?”

  The commissioner pounces, in the tone of A-ha! “That’s a very good question, because there have been some studies that found they are more safe without the sign.”

  I just stare at him, but inside my head Dennis the Peasant channels Jim Carrey: “Re-hee-hee-heeaally!”

  In the
commissioner’s defense, I recently read an article posted on the website of the Atlantic magazine reporting that after traffic engineers in the Netherlands experimented with removing the traffic lights, signs, curbs, and lane markings from certain urban intersections, safety and efficiency (between drivers, bikers, and pedestrians) actually improved. The commissioner is quite understandably trying to establish the fact that Hey, I know something about this stuff. It’s not all as obvious as you think. And in this he has my sympathy. Anyone who operates at some level of esoteric knowledge—be it a nurse, a diesel mechanic, or a dancer—will recognize his frustration, which is triggered by a variation on the theme of mocking what we do not understand. Why do you send all those fire trucks to a one-car accident? say the bystanders, not realizing that several of the trucks are there to act as safety barriers for the vulnerable rescuers. I can’t believe you charge that much for a cup of coffee, say uninitiated customers to my friend who owns a groovy coffee shop, not understanding he’s not charging for coffee, he’s charging for groovy. I don’t know why you shave your legs, people used to tell me when I raced bicycles, there’s no way it helps you go that much faster, not understanding that the shaving had nothing to do with speed and everything to do with the fact that after you hit the asphalt at 45 miles an hour, it’s easier to clean and dress a wound that isn’t matted with leg hair (it also had a tiny bit to do with how shaving helped your chiseled calves catch the sunlight, but let’s not lose our focus . . .).

  Still: The Dutch traffic idea has been tested mainly in cozy plazas and village squares—it’s hard to conceive of its application on American highways and byways resulting in anything less than a charnel-fest on wheels. I suspect the commissioner’s response is less a reflection of his forward-looking commitment to contemporary traffic management philosophy than his peevish belief that I am a persistently irritating human speed bump, and fair enough. For my part, I half form a retort suggesting that he put his money where his theory is and start yanking every stoplight in Eau Claire County, but I recognize this as testosterone-driven thinking powered by blood pressure and settle for pursing my lips like a skeptical three-year-old.