Standing there with my toothless chain, I thought of the poor guy who insisted Tom saw his booby-trapped log, and felt we might form a small hangdog club. Some are called to carry forward the wisdom of the ages; some are called to reinforce the wisdom of the ages.
You take your entertainment where you can get it, so today we’ve packed up the kids and are headed north to watch my brother burn down his house.
For a decade or so now, my brother Jed has lived in the old Carlson farmhouse, where we used to visit the bachelors Art and Clarence. The house is an old beauty, square and solid—of the type writer Justin Isherwood so perfectly describes as a “white lady.” It is also impossibly drafty, uninsulated, inconsistently remodeled, fitted with a basement reminiscent of a medieval dungeon, and generally in need of a major overhaul. So this year Jed and his wife have built a new house just across the yard, and now that they’re all moved in, they’ve invited the local fire department—on which my brothers, my mother, my sister-in-law, and I have all served—to use the house for firefighting exercises that will end only when it is reduced to embers.
Leaving our farm, we make our way down the county road to where the new apartments have gone up and turn north. In short order we navigate the roundabout, pass over the interstate and past the exit for Oakwood Mall, where if you cast your eyes to the right you will see a large maple tree marooned in a tiny clump of land just off the Menards parking lot and within view of Sam’s Club and Super Target. In a drawer in a cupboard in Tom and Arlene Hartwig’s living room there is a photo of that tree taken in 1916, when it would have been suitable for a fishing pole and the factory smoke from the shores of the Eau Claire River six miles distant was the only hint of change to come. I set the cruise control now, a tad over the limit but—one hopes—not beyond the scope of grace. Barring the unexpected, we will maintain this speed uninterrupted until we make the New Auburn exit in thirty-five minutes. Until recently the trip used to run through eight sets of stoplights and take up to twenty minutes longer, depending on how many reds you caught, but now we can skip that and run a new four-lane bypass.
I was living up north during the years the bypass was under its final mapping and construction and so I was only vaguely aware of the specifics of its route. I was surprised then, the first time we ran the new concrete, to pass through a massive cut that left towering sandstone cliffs on either side of the roadway and then suddenly find we were paralleling Peterson Avenue—the county road named after my great-grandfather. I glanced to my left and sure enough, through a cluster of pine trees and newer houses I spied Great-Grandpa’s barn. Now my memory compass swung into place, and it hit me that we were tooling along at 68 miles per hour over the very corner of the field where my cousin Wade and I would sneak off from the family Fourth of July reunion to ram around in a sand pit with Grandpa’s three-wheeler. Just over there, behind two new prefabs and a garage, were the remnants of the apple orchard where cousin Markie and I played with our dump trucks. As we passed into another sandstone gap the size of a federal office building, I realized it was blasted from a ridge we used to call Blueberry Bluff. I remember climbing up there with Wade when we were tots and telling him the bears were gonna get him.
In light of my usual maudlin inefficiencies and squishy antipathies, here’s what caught me off guard that day: I wasn’t that bothered. True enough, I had never known my great-grandfather. Had never seen the barn in use for anything other than storage. And by the time I had memories of the place there were already a few houses popping up here and there. In later years someone built a trailer court across the road from the farm, and by the time I was stopping to visit Grandma after Grandpa died, the original farmhouse was gone, replaced by two new houses, including the one Grandma lived in. But Blueberry Bluff had still stood as a bulwark against the city lights, and the old sand-burred field where Wade and I played had still been a sand-burred field. So I felt a pang of recognition, but it didn’t even rise to the level of pang I felt when the town trimmed our trees, and it utterly failed to register in comparison to what I felt the day I saw the markers outlining the changes to Starkey Road.
I can only imagine the knots I would have tied in myself had I actually grown up on Grandpa’s farm, or were I one of the folks still living along the new bypass route. What I would have felt had I been watching out my kitchen window as crews carved a gigantic missing tooth from Blueberry Bluff, or how I might feel were I standing next to cows in the little red barn while watching the traffic blasting back and forth. And yet today I am the traffic. And tonight on our return trip I’ll take the bypass gladly, happy to get the family home twenty minutes faster. I find myself oddly detached about the whole thing, despite my memories tied to the transected property. I suppose the intimations here speak directly to the idea of having skin in the game. I stand beside Tom’s barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way.
On the face of it, this is a glorious day—blue sky, bright sun—but the air is cool and cast even cooler by a pushy wind. Windy enough, in fact, that in light of this dry-bone spring the fire department will not be allowed to set the first flames before 6 p.m., when the air traditionally falls still. Nonetheless the trucks arrived at three in the afternoon, and when we show up at 5 p.m., the crews have been training for several hours, rehearsing with everything but the fire and water. They hoist ladders and practice cutting vent holes in the roof, patching the squares with plywood when they’re finished. Packed up in full gear, they play serious hide-and-seek, locating each other using the thermal imager that reveals the human body as a blob of heat. They practice search and rescue, knee-crawling and finding their way to the hidden dummy in full turnout gear. The dummy weighs only 165 pounds and the newbies are flabbergasted at how tough it is to drag the dead weight, and after struggling to do so, they stand in the yard and regard one another’s beer guts in a whole different light. Good luck with that, as we like to say.
Over in Jed’s old shop, a buffet is set up on sheets of plywood laid across sawhorses. Stacks of paper plates and disposable silverware, coolers of ice and pop, and on the other set of sawhorses, tubs of potato salad and coleslaw, bags of buns, and Nesco roasters brimming with beans and barbecue. There are also several sheets of bars—you simply do not hold a social event around these parts without bars—the clackety plastic clamshells of store-bought sugar cookies, and a pan of brownies. When the crews break for dinner, I take a final walk through the house, snapping photos as I go. I have the usual melancholy, although it is a degree or two removed from what it would be if this had been the house of my childhood.
Stripped clean, the kitchen is a cube of hollow stillness. The emptiness charges the air with ghostly atmospherics. I imagine myself on my father’s knee, the Carlson brothers at the table, the stories of that day’s plowing or rainfall or corn prices registering and then disappearing into the folds of memory, only to resurface forty years later when I stepped across the Hartwig threshold.
Through the living room then, and to the foot of the stairs, marked by a banister post the head of which has been modestly adorned by a series of bevels. The geometrics are softened by layers and layers of paint, but there is just enough uncovered roughness and imperfection to suggest that the design was carved by someone using a standard handsaw. Having passed all the way through the house now, I step out to the front porch and immediately startle at the sight of a firefighter lying facedown with limbs twisted. My heart is already pounding in the split second it takes me to realize it’s the training dummy, and I have a chuckle at my own expense. Recovering my pulse, I think of an object Jed saved for me from an upstairs closet in this house: a large framed photograph taken in the days when this house was proud. In the black-and-white image, Emma and Gustav (parents of Art and Clarence, they were long passed by the time I arrived) are standing before this very porch. The visible trees are spindly a
nd the lilac bushes right now towering beside the porch are two small puffs of shrub. Every window in the house is dressed—even the attic dormers are hung with lace. Gustav has his arms crossed over the bib of his overalls and Emma has her hands on her hips. They look less house-proud than just happy to be there, as I imagine they were after shipping over from Norway into the scrub-brush uncertainty of this place. From where they are standing they would have been looking down the driveway toward the dirt track that brought them here by buckboard, and I imagine Emma wiping her hands on her apron and following pint-sized Art and Clarence to the porch as they rushed out to see the first automobile the day it clattered past.
Of all my recurrent emotional afflictions the powerful longing for times irretrievably passed (along the lines of the Portuguese notion of saudade) is the most simultaneously delicious, devastating, and useless. Standing on the porch today, I can hear the easy ebb and flow of the firefighters in conversation around the corner and out of sight, and in the white pine boughs above, the sifted hush of wind through green needles. For whatever reason, the thing that floats over me through the stillness is this vague sense of what life can be if we just have health and solitude. And by solitude, I mean, leave each other alone. Do no harm. At the very least, stop it with all the yelling. World peace is a concept far beyond my ken, but two minutes spent on a doomed farmhouse porch in silence renews my every scorched fuse.
I head back inside, take a few more photos. Many of the interior doors are missing. Jed invited me to pull them out of here several months ago and now they’re leaned in a corner of my pole barn. They’re the old heavy-style doors with see-through keyholes and knobs that rattle. I imagine putting them in a house of my own one day, when in fact they’ll likely just clog the inevitable auction. With the doors gone, I can see into the room where my brother returned to bed alone after losing his wife of seven weeks in a car accident to which he was the first responder. I can also see the spot over near the chimney where he used to sit in the recliner after a long day of fieldwork or logging and cradle the son he had with his second wife only to lose the boy in a drowning. My saudade is an indulgence; for my brother and his wife it is a chilled steel blade to the heart. In the corner by the phone jack there is a pile of straw and kindling. Beside it lies a charged fire hose, the nozzle hissing with pent-up pressure. It is time to burn this house.
The first smoke emerges flat and listless from the upper edge of the topmost window before curling up around the shingles and into the sky. At the first sign of it the children point and squeal. Then a radio squawks, followed by the voice of a lieutenant somewhere inside the structure. “It’s gonna be a little bit, because it’s gotta build.” Soon you have the odd sight of a procession of fully clad firefighters trooping into the house with armfuls of wood and old feed sacks to stoke the fire.
Once the fire takes, those of us not involved in the exercise back off and settle in to watch the show. The first thing I notice is the roofline of the house, dead straight against the blue sky. Like someone just struck it off with a level, not like it’s been standing there through every sort of everything since 1895. My unbidden, unedited thought is, the house did a good job.
Now the flames are audible, snapping within. Flat strands of smoke seep out through the shingles, and the tar begins to loosen, melt, and run. Shortly thereafter comes the more vicious snap of hungrier, bigger flames, and then the firefighters arrange themselves along the hose, make an interior attack, and shut it all down. The cycle is repeated, again and again, even as the countryside eases into a dusky half-light. No longer diluted by sunlight, the flames appear deeper orange, and fuller. All along the second story, pencil-sized flames send tendrils out the nail holes of the wooden siding, and before long, the fire infiltrates the structure to the point that it is no longer safe. There is more radio chatter, and firefighters begin spilling back out onto the yard. Then a voice over the radio: “Be advised, everybody’s out.” And now all that remains is to sit and watch the house burn to the ground.
The entire roof is steaming, and a hypnotizing 3-D whorl of flame is blowtorching out the vent hole cut several hours earlier. Along the upper eaves, soffits are falling, trailing smoke like downed fighter planes as they wing-wing to the ground like failed boomerangs. All around the yard I see firefighters and bystanders standing with cell-phone cameras raised before them, and naturally I think of the photo of Gustav and Emma, and what a stretch between those bookend images. Ten minutes pass, and the roof begins to fold in on itself. The firefighters have turned all their attention to protecting the surrounding trees and structures at this point, spraying everything down with fire-retardant foam. The scene is oddly wintry, the large white pines draped and dripping thick white bubbles and the ground covered as if we’d had a shaving cream blizzard. In the living room area where Jed used to rock his son beside the woodstove, the main chimney—held in place by nothing but gravity—is still standing slim, tall, and soldier straight, a black line against the illumined billows of gray smoke that roil into the sky and drift with the wind over my parents’ farm to the south, fading into the distance and darkness. On the porch the smoke is gathering in a layer next to the ceiling, pushing and thickening down, down, down. Fifteen years ago my brothers constructed a walk-in meat locker on the porch. The locker walls were made of pine boards sandwiched around foam insulation. They are snapping and popping with flames now, as I recall the finger-numbing trips in from the shop with venison haunches in those pre-deer-skinner days when we were still peeling the frozen hides by brute strength. The blazing cooler is creating a vortex of heat that sucks the descending layer of smoke out of the kitchen and into the devil’s own slipstream, and now the whole works are roaring, the kitchen and all its history of visits vanishing in a blast furnace exorcism.
From my vantage point on the ground beside Amy and Jane and the other tots, my final view of the kitchen interior fire is framed by the front door I passed through for more than forty years. Earlier, when I stepped out the front after taking photos, I was caught by the sight of the wooden threshold, which had matching indentations worn on either side by a sesquicentennial of footfalls. For an irrational moment I wanted to peel it out with a crowbar, but I settled for two snapshots and headed for the shop, where I stacked my paper plate with barbecue. I wish now I’d crowbarred that worn hunk of wood loose, taken it home, leaned it somewhere never to be used, if only because some of the sand that wore it down came in on my little green barn boots during one of those visits with Dad.
So much damage and yet the house is still in principle standing. The main walls won’t fall even when the firefighters rock them with their pike poles, and that main chimney is still placidly anchoring the center of everything. It’s late, though. Fully dark, and the kids are running laps and jabbering giddily, which any seasoned parent knows is not a sign of wakefulness but rather a predictor of trouble at 2 a.m. So we start loading up. I bid good-bye to some of my old firefighting pals, and to my mother, and to my brother, and we prepare for the drive home. Just as I am about to duck inside the car, I pause with a hand on the roof and, one final time, take in the scene: all the orange-glow faces, the firefighter silhouettes, the smoke ascending thinly into darkness. And then, at the periphery, a flicker catches my eye: the waning fire of the old house, reflected in the sliding glass door of the new house, the flames dimly wavering, as if from within.
Coming to terms with my sentimentality is a long-term project of mine. There is this constant temptation to approach life as a preservation project, an understandable but largely futile notion. I’d sell the whole damn works and set on my ass, Tom said when the salesman tried to gull him into buying insurance to preserve things as they were, and I think I believe him, although sometimes when I see him happy at his lathe, I wonder. Dad tore the silos down because he didn’t want to pay to roof them, but he also tore them down as part of a general decommissioning process. Nearing his seventies, Dad still logs in the winter and raises organic crops in the summ
er, but he has over the past several years been unwinding his farming operation. The milk cows were gone a long time ago, the sheep more recently (he kept a flock for forty-two years), and last year he held an auction and sold off a lot of his equipment. I appreciate the way he’s done it, neither leaving his children to sort it out in his wake nor clearing everything out in one abrupt dump. As the sentimentalist of the family, this has afforded me the luxury of adjusting over time. Still, I wanted to be at his equipment auction pretty badly. As it turned out, I was scheduled to speak at a national convention of college English honor students that same day and could not be present to bid. In fact this was fortunate, as there is no way my checking account could have kept pace with my heart. I did, however, arrange with my brother-in-law Mark beforehand to serve as my proxy bidder on one particular item: the running gear from one of Dad’s legendary Oscar Knipfer hay wagons.
I was in touch with Mark by phone throughout the day. By utter coincidence, bidding on the running gear commenced just as I was being introduced before some one thousand or so bright faces in a very large conference hall attached to a Hyatt Regency in Minneapolis. And so, dear members of Sigma Tau Delta, it is with thanks and apologies that I explain: The reason I hunkered down behind the riser and clapped my phone to my ear immediately after concluding remarks on the state of rural literature in a postmodern age was to ask Mark, “Did we get it? Did we get it?”
“Yep,” he said, and with a light heart, off I went to sign books.
Visiting Tom Page 17