Biography: On the River

 When I was around eight, my family’s standard of living shot upward dramatically. John Todd, a senior partner in my father’s law firm, settled a case involving a person who became a paraplegic as the result of an auto accident. The liability in the case was clear, so the only question was ‘how much.’ My father used his portion of the substantial settlement for the mortgage on a house on the banks of the St. Croix river in Prescott Wisconsin, which is approximately half hour drive from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That house was by far the most beautiful house I have ever lived in, and perhaps the most beautiful house I have ever set foot into.

The house had two balconies (upper and lower) running its entire length each looking out over the beautiful St. Croix river. All the rooms facing the river had floor to ceiling windows whose view was filled by the surrounding water and trees. Most of the rooms in the house had a door leading directly onto one of the balconies. In the morning we all woke up to the river lazily flowing just outside our windows. At night we sat outside on the balcony just to feel the breeze coming off of the water. When there was a thunderstorm, the darkness would roll in over the river, and we would sit out on the balcony to watch it, counting off the seconds between lightning and thunder. 

Predictably, us children developed a dangerous game called ‘scaling the balcony’, which involved climbing the bricks along the side of the house in order to hoist ourselves up onto the balconies. We could climb onto either the lower or the upper balcony, without passing through the doors of the house. We could have easily fallen and cracked our necks playing such a foolish game, but we loved it.

The living room, piano room, kitchen, dining area, master bedroom and two bathrooms were upstairs. Downstairs were my room, my sisters’ room, the laundry room, the sauna, a bathroom just for us children, and the pool room. The pool room contained my father’s library, and a large expensive pool table, covered with green cloth. There were always plenty of cue sticks and chalk to get a game started. From third grade to sixth grade, I probably played a game of pool every day of my life, sometimes spending the whole afternoon playing pool. The result is that I have always been pretty good at pool. Later on in college, whenever I got a chance to play pool, I would always blow the bewildered competition out of the water. They would look at me with surprised faces and say “Where did you learn how to play pool? Chris.”

In our house, there was a professionally designed sauna in the basement, with smooth sanded wooden benches, and special rocks in a heater. When the rocks got hot, we would poor water onto them to get the steam going, making the sauna extra hot. The alternation of dry heat and hot steam, made us sweat profusely. Sometimes in the late fall just as it was getting cold, we would all take a long sauna. When we had been sweating long enough, and the sweat was dripping off our bodies, we all ran outside and jumped directly into the cold river. The sensation was unique and unexpected. I have never experienced anything like it since. It felt like bubbles were swirling around my whole body, massaging me. It did not feel at all shocking or unpleasant, as you might expect because of the cold, but rather deeply relaxing. I can still remember the feeling until this day. After Prescott I have never had the opportunity to repeat the experience.

The St. Croix itself was over a mile wide in front of our house and emptied into the mighty Mississippi just south downriver. On the other side of the river from our house (in Minnesota) there were no houses or construction of any kind, just dense green trees for miles in either direction. In the depths of the St. Croix river, there lives a fish called the sturgeon, a prehistoric fish which measures up to two meters long. We knew that it stayed in the depths, but we were not afraid of it. We happily shared the river with our ancient friends, our real life equivalent of the phony Loch Ness monster in Scottland. An old-fashioned steamboat, called the Delta Queen, used to bring tourists up and down the river. When they passed our house, we rang a giant maritime bell found on our property to salute the passing ship. In return, they would honk their horn at us. Why we had a large bell on our property is a mystery to me.

A small rocky beach stretched out about five meters from the base of the house to the river, lining the entire length of our property. During storms the water would cover the beach, and rise a couple of meters up the front wall of the house. I used to sing Johnny Cash’s “How High is the Water Momma?” to myself and hope the water would not get to the lower balcony where the children’s bedrooms were located. On several occasions the water level got very close, even to within a few feet of entering the house, but it never quite reached there. In front of the house, we had a floating orange wooden dock which we would use to dock our motorboat in the summer. I spent hours at a time on that dock just sitting around and fishing for bass and trout.

The neighborhood beach was less than a five-minute walk down the street. This is where we took swimming lessons, and all the kids in town came to swim. I was famous amongst the children for being able to hold my breath and stay under water longer than anybody else. I remember jumping off the doc at the public beach (about 10 meters from shore) and swimming to the bottom to bring up muddy sand. When I poured it onto the dock from my hand, nobody believed me, because none of them had ever swum to the bottom before.

From third grade to sixth grade, most of my time during the summer was spent in the river or next to the river or on the river: wading, swimming, jumping from the dock, diving, skinny dipping, water skiing, scuba diving with my snorkel and mask, skating in the winter, looking for mussels and crayfish, collecting agates and shells and driftwood (a source of endless fascination for me), fishing for bass and trout, playing on the beach, skipping rocks, exploring, camping, hunting. I was definitely more at home in the dark flowing water of the river than I was in a clear chlorine filled swimming pool, something that I found to be foreign and sterile.

As an adult, one of my recurring dreams is that I am being pursued through the streets at night by malevolent forces. I run as fast as I can, but cannot get away. My legs move in slow motion. I seem to power my way forward by pushing the air with my arms, like I am swimming through the air. Finally, I make my way to the river bank and dive in. I swim as far as I can underwater and resurface, easily losing the pursuers. For me, even after all these years, the river and its dark water is my friend and helper, not a source of fear. Perhaps my worst nightmare, which recurs regularly nowadays, is that I am visiting Prescott, looking down onto the river from our old property, and I realize that the river is polluted and dried up. I can see the dried polluted sand exposed. This nightmare always fills me with a sense of dread.

Our house was at the northern edge of Prescott, on a cul-de-sac. So we were completely isolated, with no traffic of any kind. Upriver from our house, on the Wisconsin side, there were no further houses (that I can recall). There was just a pristine wooded area stretching miles and miles. I think it was a state park. We would sometimes camp on the beach areas just around our house, lighting a campfire to make hotdogs and smores, and spending the night in sleeping bags. As a country boy, I had a BB gun and a cool slingshot made of aluminum piping wrapped with rubber that slid onto my arm. I would roam this wooded area endlessly, alone or with friends, using the surrounding trees, rocks, birds and squirrels for target practice. One day I went hunting and shot a chipmunk in the head with by BB gun. My aim was extremely accurate in those days. After the pellet hit its head, a column of pink brain tissue popped out from its skull, and the chipmunk toppled over. After that incident, I was less enthusiastic about going out hunting. On another occasion, I shot my BB gun into a wall near our house, where it ricocheted off and hit my sister. My father was livid, and chased me around the street, screaming “She could have lost an eye.” I probably got a beating for that one. But I don’t remember my BB gun being taken away.

On a typical Saturday when my father was at home, we got into the motorboat and headed up the river, taking turns at water skiing. There were five of us (two parents and three kids), and everybody got a turn. We all ended up being highly skilled water skiers since we spent so much time on the river. By late afternoon, we arrived at Afton, Minnesota, around 15 miles upriver from Prescott on the St. Croix. Once there, we would dock our boat, and walk over to Lerk’s, a run-down local burger shack which was famous in the region. At Lerk’s you could get greasy burgers, which came with chips and a pickle and nothing else. There were no other entries on the menu. Only hamburgers, and they all came with chips and a pickle. So we just found our table and ordered five Lerk burgers, one for each member of the family. Despite the lack of choice, the burgers were delicious. We all loved them. To me the standard for a hamburger my entire life has been Lerk burgers, although I have not eaten one since I was eleven years old. After eating at Lerk’s, we strolled down the street and got ice cream. I always got a banana split sundae, which was a sundae surrounding by the two halves of a banana topped with walnuts and hot fudge sauce. As evening set in, we bundled into the boat wrapped in our damp towels for a chilly ride back home to Prescott, often arriving after dark.

During the winter, the entire river froze over. Crusty old village men drove their pickup trucks to the middle of the river and set up little wooden shacks for ice fishing. I used to go out to their fishing holes and watch them catch fish all day. My resourceful mother would spray water from the garden hose onto the river and create an instant skating rink for us. Every winter day, we went outside to play hockey and other games on the ice. After playing outside for hours, we would all tumbled in, removing skates, winter coats, hats, gloves, long underwear and wet socks, and then drink hot chocolate with marshmallows and watch TV together for the rest of the evening. Near the end of the winter, when the ice started to melt, I would walk as far as I could out onto it, until I heard great cracking sounds echo up and down the river. From those cracking sounds, I knew it was dangerous to walk any further.

In those days (late 60s to early 70s) there were only five channels on TV, but there were classic shows like Sonny and Cher, the Smother’s Brothers, the Carol Burnett Show, the Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, The Wild Wild West, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, Sunday morning cartoons. I did not watch that much television as a child, but we would often watch it together as a family, and we all enjoyed it.

We possessed two large snowmobiles. Together with my father’s friends, we would launch expeditions into the surrounding rural wilderness on the coldest days of the winter. I would ride with my father, and my older sister Tracey would ride with my mother. We each had a purple Viking snowsuit (provided by my Norwegian grandfather), covering our whole body so that there were no gaps where wind or snow could touch our skin. We also had long underwear, warm snow boots, thick mittens and goggles. Sometimes I would get a chance to drive the snowmobile for a few miles if the path was clear and the conditions favorable. We drove the snowmobiles into the surrounding wooded area for the entire day and usually ended up at some small bar and grill in a nearby village, where we would all order hamburgers and fries and play pool well into the night. 

On weekends during the winter, we often drove a few miles up-river to go downhill skiing at Afton Alps. Because our family had money, we all had fancy new skis, boots, poles, gloves and goggles. We would arrive at Afton Alps early in the afternoon and ski all day long into the night. Up the hill on a chair lift floating over the hillside, followed by the adrenaline rush of skiing down. People die while downhill skiing. They hit a tree, and become paralyzed. But we loved it. Between slopes, we could always run into the “chalet” to warm up, getting a hot chocolate and a glazed donut and sitting in front of a fire with the other skiiers. When we returned to school on Monday, the lift ticket (attached by wire in bunches to the zipper on our jackets) was a badge of honor. We did not think anything about all this, but in retrospect, a day of skiing for the whole family was expensive (hundreds of dollars). And that price was dwarfed by all the equipment you needed just to get out onto the slopes (because we as a family never ever rented a single piece of equipment during the entire time). As with water skiing, everybody in the family became highly proficient at downhill skiing. 

On hot summer nights, we often drove to the drive-in theater on the edge of town. One of our cars was a station wagon, which was the 70s equivalent of a mini-van. There were front seats for the parents, but then the back seat could be folded down to form a flat area where the children could all lay down in our sleeping bags, watch the movie and eat popcorn. The sound for the movie came from a portable speaker that was hung from the car window. The speaker was in turn attached by cable to a post outside the car. Although the movie sound was scratchy and distorted, the experience was magical. After I had my own children, I was eager to take them to a drive-in, and have them experience what I did. But by that time, drive-ins had mostly closed down in throughout the United States for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. 

In Prescott, my parents entertained frequently. That was a key part of my father’s dream, enjoying and showing off his wealth. Mostly the guests were business associates of my father, or friends that he made through his work. As I said before, all of our friends were white. In the fashion of a party in the Great Gatsby, they all drove down from the Twin Cities with their expensive cars into rural Wisconsin for the party. When guests entered the house, they saw the surrounding river through the floor to ceiling windows, and gasped. The house would fill with guests, liquor would flow and hors d’oeuvres would be served. The stereo played easy listening music from the 70s, artists like Jim Croce, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Carol King, Kris Kristofferson, Elton John, Don McClean, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens and Barbara Streisand. To this day, the songs of these artists are my favorites. Some of the guests danced in the living room, some relaxed on the balcony, some went and stood on the dock on the river, and some of them were downstairs in the pool room with beers and cigarettes playing a game of pool. My best friend and I had the important job of directing the arriving guests toward available parking up the road, a job which always provided us with a bulging pocket of tips by the end of the evening. Each of us had our roles at the party, which would always continue on well after we grew drowsy and fell asleep.

My father rarely payed money for services in the way other people did. Rather, he traded for legal work. When I was around 9, my friend swung a coat with a radio in its pocket, and took out my front tooth. I needed emergency root canal surgery (something that has plagued me my whole life). We took it to Dr. Vogel after business hours, and got it fixed up jiffy quick, no hassles. As I understood it, no money passed hands. Dr. Vogel fixed my teeth, and my father did legal work for him. Our snowmobiles and cars came through various clients as well. Deals were worked out trading for legal services. Since no money was passing between hands, I imagine that quite a bit of money on both sides of the transaction was saved on income taxes.

It is hard to describe the freedom I had in those years. As a parent, my father was basically absent most of the time, showing up on the weekends to enjoy the outdoors with us, and take us on expeditions in the great outdoors. We never saw him otherwise, since he got home late at night from work. I am certain that he never read a book to us, or helped us with homework in his entire life. Why would he? My mother was much more accessible, because she was around all the time and she was not particularly strict or demanding. We each had an allowance of 5$ week (over 30$ per week in today’s money), but we had few if any chores. Other than mowing the lawn and half-heartedly cleaning my room, I don’t remember doing any chores at all. During the summers, I would tumble out of bed, eat breakfast, and leave the house. Only when I got hungry would I come back home. I could easily call up my mother at the end of the day and say I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and she would agree, no questions asked.

Hello?

Hey Mom, I am at John’s house. Can I sleepover?

Is it OK with his mother?

Yeah. Thanks Mom.

The town, including the river, belonged to me. There were no activities planned for me by my parents, and no expectations for what I should or should not do. There were no summer camps. No music lessons. No summer schools. There were no limits on where I should or should not go. I was truly a later day Tom Sawyer, living by the river and having daily adventures of my own making. For a headstrong and energetic child like I was, it was the best of possible worlds. I loved the freedom. I loved to explore the St. Croix river valley. I was an explorer. It is hard to imagine today’s parents letting their children run around like that with such complete freedom.

One night, two of my friends slept over. This was the age of “The Streak”, which was actually a song on the radio (Ray Stevens, 1974). We waited until everybody was asleep, and at around two in the morning we took off all of our clothes except our shoes and headed off onto the streets, exploring the town. We weaved in and out of the side streets, our little penises bobbing up and down. We avoided streetlights and lurked in the shadows of the buildings downtown. We reveled in the strange eeriness of empty streets and total silence, doing something we were not supposed to be doing. On the way back, just before coming to our house at the end of the street, there was a bright flash which lit up the night, exposing our foolishness. Somebody had been sitting on their lawn waiting for us to return. When we passed they took a flash picture. We screamed in horror and ran naked through the night all the way home. Luckily, the mysterious photographer, whoever it was, was not vindictive and they did not tell our parents. We never did get to see the photo that they took. We were never really sure who took the picture.

It is not as if the river was safe. It was extremely dangerous. Every year, a story about another child drowning would circulate. A boy from our neighborhood just a few houses from us drown one summer at the public beach where there was a lifeguard working at the time. I am sure his family was devasted. On another occasion, my father had guests over and they brought along their young daughter who was maybe 10 years old. The adults were in the house talking, and the kids were swimming in the river. In the blink of an eye, the daughter was in trouble, panicking. Maybe she was not used to swimming in a river. Like the rest of us, who were far more used to the river, she was not wearing a life jacket. When my father heard the commotion, he ran down from the house, tripping over a rope attached to the dock. I remember vividly that his whole body smacked down belly first onto the concrete, and when he bounced back up his skin was a painful bright red. But he managed to jump into the river and save the girl from drowning.

The problem is that the St. Croix is a mighty river pouring directly into the even mightier Mississippi, and perhaps as a consequence there is a powerful undertow. If you went too far down, you just got sucked away. All of us children knew about this and we were afraid of it to some extent. I remember trying to swim down and find the undertow. I wanted to see how powerful it really was. I got down near the bottom where I could start to feel the current shift, and I would stick my hand around trying to find the undertow. But it did not seem to make any difference to my life, and the kinds of things I was allowed to do. Nobody ever told me not to go swimming. There was no requirement that I be supervised while swimming or that I always have a friend with me when I swam. There was no buddy system for me. As I recall, there were no rules at all.

Added to this general level of economic opulence and personal freedom was the unobtrusive but essential presence of my beautiful and talented mother. As far as I know, she had no monetary job from the time my older sister Tracey was born (1961) to the time of my parent’s divorce (1974). Rather, her job was to take care of my father and the children, including cleaning the house, buying groceries, taking us to the doctor and the dentist when needed, washing and ironing clothes, patching up clothes, sewing dresses and costumes, packing our lunches for school, reminding us to do homework, helping us with our homework, buying all the clothes and supplies we needed for school, making sure we had educational materials at home, including a wonderful set of encyclopedias that I was obsessed with (a bit like a version of today’s internet). Although we certainly had enough money, we never had a maid or anybody to help with the housework and cleaning. My mother had a college education, and would read chapter books to us regularly. I remember once asking her how paper was made, and the next day, she had sketched out the whole process with thin tipped brown and green markers on yellow construction paper, which was always available around the house. She had ingeniously illustrated all the various steps in different picture frames on the construction paper. In retrospect, she was always there to make sure I could pursue my imagination wherever it went, and I definitely took that for granted.

As I described earlier, my mother was an accomplished singer. She tried hard to get me to take up an instrument. We arrived on the trombone, maybe because I had good lung capacity. The school band teacher was Mr. Janeke. My friends and I called him ‘soup face’ at school because of some acne scars that he had. When my report card arrived for the year, it showed I had an F in band. My mother went to talk to Mr. Janeke and asked why I had received an F. Mr. Janeke said that I had quit band and stopped coming to practice without telling anybody. Later, my mother found me a funky River Falls student (a young lady) to give me trombone lessons. She called the trombone “the slush pump”. And her personality was cool and funny, as opposed to the sour Mr. Janeke. But that creative maneuver did not work either. I was unable to take the trombone seriously, despite these valiant attempts by my mother. Nor was I able to learn the piano in another one of my mother’s initiatives. Ultimately, I didn’t have the patience to learn these instruments. Nor was I particularly captivated by the music, or by sitting in a room for hours to practice a song. My older sister Tracey took piano lessons during the entire time we lived in Prescott, and I clearly remember her anguishing over the notes, screaming and crying in anguish over not being able to do something (even though I am certain that my mother would have never put any pressure on her to succeed). This kind of thing was not for me, especially when the great outdoors were calling me.

Although I had a rocky beginning with reading in first grade, by third grade I had caught up. I loved reading. As I said earlier, my mother read chapter books to us when we were young, Then in elementary school, I started with comic books, spending most of my allowance money on them, and following the activities all the superheroes: Iron Man, Spider Man, Super Man, Batman, the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, the Incredible Hulk, etc. In those days, there was no internet, and so we got most of our general information about the world from huge encyclopedia sets. I remember spending hours pouring over the articles, reading as much as I could. In second and third grade, there were easy readers Encyclopedia Brown that I brought home from school, but I forget the names of those books now. Although I may be delusional, I clearly remember that I read Melville’s Moby Dick in the fourth grade. By sixth grade I was obsessed with Greek mythology, and was reading the Iliad and Odyssey and anything else I could get my hands on. Later in junior high and high school, I started reading fantasy and science fiction, absorbing any books I could find such as those by Isaac Asimov, Herbert Clarke, Roald Dahl, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Madeleine L’Engle, Robert A. Heinlein, J.R.R. Tolkein. There always seemed to be National Geographic magazines around the house, and in high school I started to buy Scientific American, spending hours reading each edition. Without doubt, the most important thing my parents did for me in my whole life was to introduce me to reading.

The house in Prescott was a key part of my father’s dream. He found it through one of his law partners, and acted quickly to buy it, using the proceeds from a windfall settlement. We were part of that dream: work hard, make money, marry a beautiful Scandinavian wife, have three healthy children, buy an opulent house on a scenic river, share it with friends, and above all, spend time enjoying the great outdoors. We were basically living in a fantasy world which was my father’s dream world. We knew no other life.

The effects, both positive and negative, of the old-fashioned arrangement between my parents were made clear to me a few years later when my parents got divorced. My mother had basically traded her independence and career advancement for financial security and her social role in the family (homebody caregiver to my workaholic father who was the money maker). It was a kind of social contract, not the legal marriage certificate but the implicit expectations that the husband and wife had for each other, and that society had for them. But that flimsy social contract dissolved with the shifting dreams of my father. Then my mother was left with nothing and was completely stranded, as we all were.

What were we all supposed to do when we no longer had a place in our father’s dream world?