I have nothing else to do on Father’s Day but reminisce. I am not only fortunate to have had good fathers in my life, but have still have photos and their accompanying stories to remind me of the tremendous role that a father plays. I flip through the photos I have in iPhoto, and am amazed at the power of photos taken decades ago can still have, even when viewed through such a cool medium well into the 21st century.
I can look at photos of my Dad (1924-2008), who loved to share jokes and listen to music. A guy who loved the old ways of doing things, who berated me for “running out and buying a solution” when your hands could do the job. A grown man who would drop to the floor to play among his grandkids. A man who rarely showed anger, who without complaint took care of my ailing mother so that she could live out the rest of her life in her home, and die in her own bed. A hard-working, determined man who was born at dinnertime, he said, and was thus always hungry.
I can look at photos of his dad, Frederick (1886-1974), whose mother called him Ted. He ran a team of horses in a logging camp before opening a store along the highway in Lemington, Wisconsin. Tall and thin, I can still picture him sitting in his chair by the window, reading the paper. As I sat quietly in their house while the adults talked (back when kids were required to do that), he’d fold up the paper and take me into the store and let me choose candy from the glass-partitioned case — chunks of bulk candy that were impossible to choose between. He was famous for his soft side too, known to walk the floor for hours coaxing a crying baby to sleep.
I get my looks from his father, Frederick (1858-1938), whom I never met but my Dad admiringly remembered as a “big, fat German.” Dad remembered helping lace up his boots while my great-grandfather sang “Ach du Lieber Augustin.” Frederick worked for years for the Knapp-Stout Lumber Company, which cleared much of the northern Wisconsin forest, where he could look at a stand of timber and estimate the board feet of lumber it would produce. My dad recalled an old-timer telling him, “there’s no one I’d rather have in the woods with me than Fred Scharlau.”
My paternal grandmother told us about her father, James (1865-1928), who was born in New York but moved with his family to Wisconsin and established my branch of the family there. He was working at the Rice Lake gravel pit when he died, at age 62. I have a tintype of him, poised and handsome in a studio, that is one of my favorite photos.
His father, Luther (1834-1876), was as far back as my grandmother could remember, but she could remember his red hair. Luther fought for the Union at Fredericksburg and elsewhere. My Dad and I were happy and surprised upon finding his grave a few years ago in a little cemetery off the road in Royalton, Wisconsin. Even though this veteran died more than 125 years ago, someone had thought to decorate his grave with a flag.
On my mother’s side, I never got to meet my Grandpa Charles Carlson (1890-1949), but feel close to him, possibly because I can visit his grave in nearby Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Charles was the first of his brothers to emigrate to the United States from Sweden in 1901, and though a citizen for only three years, enlisted to fight in the Great War. His company fought at Meuse-Argonne in 1918, and he was the victim of a mustard-gas attack, which weakened him for the rest of his life and led to an early death. My Dad knew him, and said he loved to talk and enjoyed going to Masonic lodge meetings, where he would allow himself a beer.
I need to learn more about my mother’s grandfather, Andrew Elias Steel (1846-1922), who emigrated from Sweden to Lake City, Minnesota, where he worked as a blacksmith, until moving the family to St. Paul in the 1880s. I have a photo of him, standing proudly with several of his seven daughters.
I wish I could spend today with any of these men, to learn more about their lives, and to thank them for mine. I know their struggles were greater than mine, and I am grateful for their work and their sacrifices. The best I could do was acknowledge them and remember them a bit on Father’s Day.
It’s just before Thanksgiving and with any luck, we’ll get enough snow to help the deer hunters track their prey, but not so much that it makes walking in the woods difficult. I’m not a deer hunter, which isn’t a significant distinction in much of the country, but is one of two possible states of being when you’re from the upper Midwest. I was a deer hunter at one time, however.
Deer hunting was phenomenally popular with my friends when I was growing up. Even those who mocked the standard greeting of “Got your deer?” felt the pressure of getting their deer before the season ended, staying in the fields until dusk or getting up at ungodly hours to increase their chances of placing their tag on a deer and driving it around to show off. I’m not sure how they would have felt to have tried but failed to fill that tag. I couldn’t imagine feeling failure over that, and that led me to lose interest in the yearly ritual.
What drove me to pin a compass to my jacket and stuff rifle shells in my pocket — we didn’t wear blaze orange or camouflage when I hunted — was spending time with my Dad, who clearly loved going out in the woods and, I could tell, wanted his son to shoot a deer and be proud of it. Before I was old enough to carry a rifle, Dad would hunt with his buddies, who would all return in the early afternoon to smoke and review the morning strategy. My dad would usually go to work at that time, going on his fuel delivery route, which must have been exhausting. Then, if there was time when he returned, they’d head off for a quick drive before sunset.
Whenever the guys pulled in the yard, it was customary for my mom to step out onto the porch and say, with some degree of sarcasm, “Clean your deer for ya?” From the porch, you could see whether there was a carcass in the back of the pickup, so you could adjust your sarcasm accordingly. After I went through the required gun-safety course, my Dad would take me out and put me “on stand,” giving me every chance possible to shoot a deer. I’d stand there in the cold and pray to God that I wouldn’t have to.
I’d killed rabbits and partridge, and didn’t have a problem with killing, per se. But I was a bad shot, and what I usually shot was no longer fit for eating, which is the only reason I could think of for hunting. I didn’t want to shoot a deer and have to endure the gutting in the field, cutting open the stomach from the windpipe all the way back to (oh God) the genitals, pulling out the entrails and getting blood all over my hands. I would’ve rather be at home, memorizing the batting averages on the back of my gum-stained baseball cards. Besides, I preferred hamburgers and frozen pizza to the often stringy and gamy venison.
But Dad kept at it with me, shaking me by the shoulder at 4 in the morning, with a whispered call of “Daylight in the swamps!” We’d eat oatmeal, brew some coffee, and head out in the cold, the edges of the sky just turning pink and orange. We’d drive down some gravel road and park, and he’d position me on some hillside, my back at the trees, with a long view of a field where the deer were likely to cross. He would double back and walk through the woods, trying to startle a few deer into running out into the open, where I and my fuzzy eyesight and shivering aim would shoot them just behind the shoulderblade from 500 yards away.
Walking through the woods sounded like fun. Being on stand was cold and nervewracking. Every noise, every crackle of leaves sounded like a 24-pointer charging through the still silence. I feared shooting at another person. It happened in northern Wisconsin every year, it seemed, often with fatal results. It was usually blamed on “buck fever.” I was going to make sure that what was cracking through the brush had four legs and wasn’t smoking a pipe. Eventually, my dad would emerge from the woods, and we’d discuss the tracks nearby or a thick group of trees where he thought for sure a few deer had bedded down. We’d walk back out to the road, and I would secretly wish that he would give up for the morning and head home.
We would unwrap our olive-loaf sandwiches and crack open the thermos of coffee. We’d pour out a swallow at a time and share the red thermos capful. I’ve never had better coffee than that — brewed hours before and mellowed and cooled a bit before we drank it. We continued discussing strategy, the weather, whatever had led us to fail in bringing down a trophy buck on that particular cold morning. At some point, he’d say, “Well, let’s try that other field.” I’d go along, because it was my dad, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
Here’s a photo I have of him as a young man, standing in the snow in front of a 1940s-era car with a deer hanging over the big shiny front grill. Dad’s has a look on his face that says, “This son of a bitch? Yeah, I shot him.” I knew this was the feeling he wanted me to experience, but I doubted I would. If I’d shot a deer, I might have shown off my kill to friends, but would be haunted by the glassy eyes and the lolling tongue on the head hanging off the truck.
Once we’d tried a new field or another approach, we would drive home, still discussing the conditions of the hunt. My dad would then begin his workday, way behind schedule, often not finishing until after dark. By the end of hunting season, we both had lost our drive, and I could sleep in on those frosty mornings, and he could get caught up on work.
Years later, we were reliving those cold mornings, and I had to confess to him that I never enjoyed getting up and going out into the cold, and that I dreaded the thought of shooting a deer with all the bloody dismembering that would follow. I told him the only reason I did it was because he loved it so much. He wasn’t surprised as much as confused — it wasn’t his idea to be dragged out into the woods early every morning. In fact, it was always hard to get his work done during hunting season because he had to take me. He was doing it only for me. We both agreed, looking back, that we’d rather have stayed in our warm beds, eaten a leisurely breakfast, and done something else with our day.
That lack of communication is typical between fathers and sons, but I hope that the motivation behind those early morning awakenings are familiar to everyone. Sometimes you have to get up and do something, not necessarily because you want to, but because looking back, you’ll be glad you did.
On my birthday this year, a slightly older lady referred to me as a “young pup,” which proves that everything is relative. However young a pup I might be, I fight the urge every day to proclaim that the best days are behind us. It seems that the effort and time required by nearly everything in the past has taken on a golden glow as I look back through the filter of 48 years. All that’s keeping me from geezerhood is the lack of someone who’ll listen to my observations. That’s, in part, why I blog.
The NYT has an article on people who are choosing to eschew air conditioning in these days of living simply and not being able to afford basic utilities. And I feel vindication by its publication. For years, when I’ve mentioned that my apartment — on the top floor of a concrete block building in which the heat rises floor by floor throughout the summer day — tends to get a bit balmy, the response is always, “Don’t you have air conditioning?” And I have to admit that I do, but don’t always use it, which marks me as someone who can’t tell his ass from his elbow. But the AC isn’t much of a solution. It cools only the immediate area around it, and the cool air it creates surrenders to the hot air immediately when it’s turned off. I prefer to let the hot air out the window and camp in front of a fan or two. The AC is expensive to run all day and evening, and when my neighbors all think alike, we tend to knock out the power in the building, and then there’s no fans or AC for anyone.
This summer has been one of the best I’ve ever weathered. The air conditioner pouts in the corner window, unused and no doubt building up extra mildew to serve chilled next year. The humidity is down too, and nearly every day this summer has reminded me of my favorite September afternoons when the breeze comes blowing through the windows to distract me from whatever football game is on.
The folks in the NYT article have discovered the secrets of keeping cool without the relatively recent necessity of air conditioning — drinking a lot of liquids, shades during the sunny hours, not using the stove or oven — all things hard-wired into my brain from life in a house built before central air. But if I think back, there was another solution for hot, humid Wisconsin afternoons when there was no relief.
I remembered this one morning while walking around Lake Harriet. Maybe it was a random sniff of dead fish floating by on the breeze, or the symphonic clanging of metal connectors on the sailboat masts or hearing the far-off chatter of kids climbing into a car, but something took me back to any of a hundred miserable afternoons when, as my bike and I were about roast in the shimmering air of the driveway, my Mom would emerge from the house with a towel and say, “See if anyone wants to go to Summit Lake.” I was off, rounding up those friends lucky enough to be home and free to leave for a few hours.
Summit Lake didn’t have one of those manicured beaches where you could stretch out a towel. There were quite a few broken bottles lying around and the garbage cans were stuffed with 12-pack containers and crushed cans, which meant that there was always a swirl of yellowjackets when you got too close. A raft made of 55-gallon barrels floated 50 yards offshore, which was used by every adult as a quick visual reference that the kids were swimming too far out. Swimming to and climbing onto those weathered planks was a milestone in my early days, although I’d like to forget the day I swam under it and emerged between barrels to see the creepy lifeforms that clung to the bottom.
We swam until we were pruney and the sun had lost nearly all its dominion over us. My Mom took one quick dunk under the water, then called us all in, stuffed us into the back of the pickup, and headed home. The breeze and the smell of the lake on your skin was intoxicating, and you now knew that life could feel at least this good, at least for a moment. When the heat of summer was gone, we missed it. On those rides home from Summit Lake, it was like your soul was refreshed. And air conditioning is a poor substitute for that.