apples on the trees and Sebago Salmon in our lake. This particular
salmon is a landlocked fish, generally weighing between five and six
pounds and very handsome. His skin is covered with silver crosses, he
has a short, hooked mouth, and his flesh is orange. He is caught by
trolling.
A few miles from our house are rivers and streams seldom discovered by
tourists. Hence we can catch rainbows weighing four and five pounds and
browns often weighing more. We have lakes where we can catch northerners
weighing twenty, thirty, forty pounds, and walleyes by droves. We can
take you to a lake where you can catch a fish in one minute—not very
big, but a variety of pan fish seldom seen or caught anywhere else. We
can take you to a trout stream where you can fish today, come back next
week, and find your footprints still in the sand, utterly unmolested.
It is a land of beauty and plenty, but nature is not soft. Sometimes a
Northeaster will blow for five days at a time. Then you can stand at the
window and watch the lake turn into something of monumental ferocity,
driving all human endeavor from the scene. Trees are uprooted, windows
are smashed, telephone wires and power lines are downed. Lightning
slashes, the rumbling of thunder is cataclysmic, and the rain comes.
Often Waino would call and warn of an impending storm and the necessity
of securing the boat with heavy rope. But sometimes it was too late, and
we would have to go out in the teeth of the early storm to do battle,
rushing down the beach in our heavy boots, heads covered with oilskins,
beating against the rising wind whose force took the breath out of you.
But the roaring surf, the lashing rain, the wind tearing at every step,
are tonic to the blood!
One night while standing at the window watching the hard rain falling on
the Bay, I was suddenly alerted to action by the sight of water rushing
over the embankment which we had just planted with juniper. The torrent
of water washing away the earth was obviously going to carry the young
juniper plants along with it. There was only one thing to do and it had
to be done at once: cut a canal in the path of the onrushing water to
channel the flood in a different direction.
Hope was napping. I awoke her, and armed with shovels, we pitted
ourselves against the storm. At once we were up to our ankles in mud.
Hope’s boots stuck and, being heavy with child, she was unable to
extricate herself. My tugging only made matters worse and, with shouts
of anguish, we both toppled over into the mud. But no damage was done
and, muddy from head to foot, wallowing in a slough of muck, laughing
and gesturing and shouting commands at each other, we got on with
cutting the canal. It was mean work, but there was something
exhilarating about it all and, when the challenge was successfully met
and we were in by the fire, quietly drinking hot chocolate, a kind of
grave satisfaction in knowing that this was in the nature of things up
here and that we had responded to it as we should.
Bark Point is a good place for growing children as well as for tired
adults. It is good for children to spend some time in a place where a
phrase such as “know the score” is never heard, where nobody is out to
win first prize, where nobody is being urged continually to do something
and do it better, and where the environment is not a constant assault
upon quietness of the spirit. Children as well as adults need to spend
periods in a non-communicative and non-competitive atmosphere. I am
opposed to all those camps and summer resorts set up to keep the child
engaged in a continuous round of play activities, give the body all it
wants, and pretend that an inner life doesn’t exist.
At Bark Point, our children can learn something first hand about the
earth, the sky, the water. They plant and watch things grow, build and
watch things form. There is no schedule and no routine, but every day is
a busy day, filled with natural activities that spring from inward
urgings, and the play they engage in is something indigenous to
themselves.
Before the lamprey eels decimated the Lake trout, most of the men in the
Bark Point area fished for a living. Years ago, I was told, Bark Point
boasted a school, a town hall, a general store, even a post office. But
now commercial fishing is almost at an end—the fine Lake Superior trout
and whitefish are too scarce. So the bustle of the once thriving fishing
village is gone, along with the anxious watch by those on shore when a
storm comes up. No need for concern now. Let it blow. No one is fishing.
Almost no one. But the few remain—marvelous, jolly fellows, rich with
earthy humor, strong, dependable, completely individualistic. Every
other morning they take their boats far out in the lake and lift the Pon
Nets. It is dangerous work, and thrilling, too, when from two to three
hundred pounds of whitefish and trout are caught in one haul.
Nearly everyone is related and most of the children have the same blue
eyes and straw hair. But the children grow up and discover there is
nothing for them to do. Fishing is finished, and about all that is left
is to cut pulp in the woods or become a handy man around one of the
towns. Farming is difficult. The season is so very short and
considerable capital is required to go into farming on any large scale.
Nobody has this kind of money.
Then, too, the old folk were beginning to hear for the first time a new
theme: the work is too hard. For a time, this filled them with
consternation. But they recognized the sign of the times and even came
to accept it. The young people no longer were interested in working
fifteen and sixteen hours a day as their fathers had. They left their
homes and went to Superior or Duluth or St. Paul or much farther. The
few that remained stayed out of sheer bullheadedness or innate wisdom.
It was an almost deserted place when I found it, and it has remained so
all these years.
Those who stayed became my friends and their world is one I am proud and
grateful to have entered. I have played cribbage and horseshoes with
them, gone with them on picnics and outings, fished all day and
sometimes late at night. We have eaten, played, and worked together, but
most important to me has been listening to them talk. Their conversation
is direct, searching, and terribly honest. Many of their questions bring
pain, they strike so keenly upon the wrongs in our world. I am used to
answering complicated questions—theirs possess the simplicity that comes
directly from the heart. Those are the unanswerable questions.
I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six
men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a
bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But
this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone
spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness
or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they
said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car
or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring
season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this
year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or
a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs
help in bringing in his hay.
In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the
direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to
worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where
to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk
usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the
giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing
seventy, steelheads by the droves. And behind all of this lies the
constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled
with, never taken for granted.
The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-song
voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want
immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely
furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was
certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and
assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee
and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of
jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the
clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the
household, too, including the fine boats.
Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen
hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure
loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.
The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets,
automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first,
the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning
existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They
have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their
lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the
world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors
said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”
When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is
more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential
areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate
the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves.
Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.
The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named
Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is,
“I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem,
work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built
entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool
exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is
amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess
at Bark Point.
A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and
secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the
boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay.
There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log.
“Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is
good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And
so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and
with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.
When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie
the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked
easy, but it required an almost occult knowledge of weights and forces
to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would
not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat.
Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the
most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human
back.
The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the
world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and
loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too
stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his
thought to fit the situation.
Matt is slight of build and the eyes behind his spectacles are sparkling
blue. When he first got the glasses, they were not fitted to his
satisfaction, so he improved them by grinding the lenses himself. He
reminds me in many ways of my own father, who had a bit of Matt’s genius
and versatility. When I see Matt work, I seem to see my father again ...
building, planning, dreaming, trying to make something out of nothing.
Ervin owns the general store in Herbster. Every week he drives his truck
to Duluth for supplies, carrying with him a frayed, pocket-sized
notebook in which he has written down everything people have asked for.
Once I had a chance to look through this notebook which Ervin treasures
with his life. Only Ervin could possibly know what was written in it.
Ervin’s capacity for eating is marvelous to behold. While the children
stare at him in petrified wonder, he will put together a sandwich of
cheese, sausage, fish, butter, meat balls, even strips of raw meat. His
capacity for work is equally limitless. He is a powerful man and can
wrestle with bags of cement all day long. But he cannot catch fish! At
least that is his story and his claim to fame in the area: never to have
caught a fish that amounted to anything. I don’t believe a word of it.
Ervin fights many of the same business battles I have fought with no
capital and extended credit. He worries about it, but the odds are a
challenge to him. You cannot long endure at Bark Point unless you are
capable of meeting challenges.
In addition to his appalling eating habits, Ervin chews tobacco and is a
horrifying master of the art. He showed our boys the full range of
techniques employed for spitting out of a fast-moving truck, and they
thought it was wonderful. But he has also taught them all about the
bears and deer and foxes and wolves and other wild life that abound in
our forest. He helped me with the plans for our house, with the boat,
with the art of reading a compass, and with the geography of the myriad
lakes and streams hidden throughout the area. Ervin knows everything and
says very little. He is easy to be with, and a solid friendship based
upon mutual respect has grown between us.
When spring begins to come, something that has been kept buried in our
winter hearts can no longer be suppressed. The children start saying,
“We’ll be leaving for Bark Point soon, won’t we?” One spring day when
the children were on vacation from school, I packed the boys into the
car and we set out for an early visit to our spiritual home. The day of
our arrival was clear and beautiful. The ice had gone out of the Bay and
clumps of snow remained only here and there. New grass was coming up
from the steaming earth. There were pink-flecked clouds in the sky and a
glorious smell everywhere that filled us both with peace and
exhilaration.
But early the next morning it began to snow, coming down so thick and
fast it was a sight to behold. My exclusively summer experience of the
North Country warned me of nothing. We delighted in the snowy wonderland
seen from the snugness of the house, and bundled up in heavy clothes and
boots to go out and revel in it.
It snowed all through the night. On the following morning, it seemed to
be coming on stronger than ever. I phoned Ervin—fortunately the
telephone lines were still working. He thought the snow might stop by
evening.
“How are your supplies?” he said.
“Still o.k.,” I said.
“What about fuel?”
“Waino gave me a supply of wood and brickettes for the stove yesterday.”
“Have you got enough?”
“Yes—so far.”
“Good. As soon as it stops, I’ll be up with the truck.”
But the snow did not stop. The following day it lay ten feet high and
was still coming.
Ervin called again. “The roads are closed,” he said. “I can’t get to
you. Can you hold out?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m starting to cut up the furniture for the stove
and I’m worried about the children.”
“I’ll come up the minute I can get there,” he said, “but I can’t do
nothing about it yet.”
It snowed for three days and three nights without a letup. I tried to
keep awake, dozing in a chair, never daring to let the fire go out. We
had long since run out of fuel oil, but luckily we had the wood-burning
cook stove. I broke up two tables, all the chairs, and was ruefully
contemplating the wooden dresser. The phone had gone dead and we were
completely isolated.
It was night, the snow was up to the windows and it was still coming
on—a dark world shot with white flecks dancing and swirling. The whole
thing seemed completely impossible. But it was happening and there was
nothing to do but wait it out.
We had no milk, but there was water and a small supply of tea and
coffee. There was flour, too, and we made bread ... bread without yeast
or salt. It tasted terrible, but we ate it and laughed about it. I read
or played cribbage with the boys. They played with their fishing reels,
oiled them, took them apart, put them back together, took them apart
again. We waited.
The morning the snow stopped we were greeted by bright sunlight hot on
the window panes. Everyone jumped up and down and yelled, “Yay!”
But how to get out of the house? We were snowed in completely.
About noon, Ervin called. The lines were fixed and Bill Lloma was
working like crazy with his tractor opening the Bark Bay Road. Everyone
had been alerted to our plight and help would be on the way.
Several more hours passed. We were without food or fuel, and I still
hated the idea of chopping up that dresser. Then all at once our savior
was in sight: Ervin in his truck, way down the main road and still
unable to get anywhere near our driveway.
There was no restraining the children in their excitement. The yelling
and shouting was enough to waken the dead. I found myself laughing and
yelling, too, and waving madly to Ervin. We were all behaving as though
we were going to a picnic instead of getting out of a frightful jam.
Finally Bill came lumbering up the road with his snow plow and in
fifteen minutes cut a huge pathway to the house. We came out and danced
around Ervin’s truck as it backed slowly into the driveway.
“Where’s your car?” Ervin asked.
We had to look around—it was completely buried. I had even forgotten I
had it. Working together, we cleared the snow away. I tried starting the
motor, but nothing happened. Ervin attached a chain to the car and
pulled it up the road. This time the motor turned over, but so suddenly
(and my reflexes were so slow) that, before I knew it, the car had
swerved off the wet road into a ditch. I was fit to be tied.
Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour.
Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a
feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never
likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming
them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say
something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the
edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best
party I ever had.
When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early
hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two
Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station
wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.
At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit
quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety.
David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper
and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on
Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and
David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to
sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy,
Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan,
the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds
and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage
carrier.
But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter,
also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our
spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing
pressures drop farther and farther behind us.
Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the
inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this
crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is
truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big
cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are
only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and
their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and
havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each
year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point
could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he
says, he’ll move to Canada.
Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more
outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that
still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let
the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation,
away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is
all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never
surrender.
10
Hope and I
It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters
from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the
personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is
not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get
curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person
in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become
ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more
about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality
is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of
those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.
Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I
was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A
surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have
exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would
like to know all about them.
My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. We lived at 1639
South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good
back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it,
not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so
lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read
several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered
greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those
who did not.
Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now
in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this
country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the
human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring
than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me
since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom
concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding
Spinoza.
It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin,
although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our
street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly
baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of
explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is
necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident
expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss.
Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long.
Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your
penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer the pitch is tacky, so
this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat,
knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick
in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss
it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as
the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the
point.
But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the
corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front
porches. Talk ... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times
at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his
sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day
experiences at work.