Posts Tagged ‘new auburn’ | Next Page ⇒  

In the process of researching the history of my hometown (New Auburn, Wisconsin) (now Population: 562) (urban sprawl!) for the book Population 485, I discovered that the town’s founder David Cartwright had written a bestselling book in 1875.  I tracked down an actual copy of the book, but it took some doing.  This morning a reader sent me a Tweet with a link showing me that along with everything else in the world the book has now been scanned into Google and you can read it here.

Here’s a portion of how I described the book in Population 485:

I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of Western Wild Animals is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.”  He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder.  In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man.  A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade.  What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ‘round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then.  All well and good.  But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute.  Back to the title page.  Western Wild Animals, etc, and etc.  By David W. Cartwright.  In much smaller print: Written by Mary F. Bailey.  Turns out David W. had a ghostwriter.

Thanks to nanaze for the note.

Snuck up to Jamboree Days Sunday.  It was good to see folks.  My wife and I and our two little ones wandered around through the carnival, ate charcoal chicken and homemade hot dogs, sat on the sidewalk and caught candy during the parade, and watched some softball.  I got to see many of my Nobbern firefighting pals.  Always so good to visit.  The photo above is of me and my friend, neighbor and fellow firefighter Bob the One-Eyed Beagle.  Not only is Bob a good guy, he is a master at turning our pigs into neat little packages of smoky delight…

If you don’t know the story of how Bob got his nickname, it’s in here.

P.S. It used to be the beer tent, but now it’s the beer barn.  They’ve done quite a job of tuning up the park there in Nobbern.  I remember when I moved back in 1995, there was a falling down softball backstop and some old horseshoe pits.  Now it’s a going concern.  Tip of the cap to all the volunteers sung and unsung.

Drove up to New Auburn with the kids yesterday, to a get-together on one of the lakes.  Right through town, out Highway M, “Jabowski’s” corner, Highway 40, into the lakeshore area where you meet a lot of Minnesota and Illinois plates heading home Sunday afternoon.  So lush there, it’s that thick green time of year, and man, it was saudade like sixty.  One memory after another.  The joy of being in a pocket of country that is like a pocket of my heart, mixed with the longing to spin the odometer backward 30 years just so I could have one more childhood afternoon, see the place when it was mostly farms few and far between and everyone was some sort of grownup hero character.  And yet I love the place in the present as well, tattered trailers, new driveways, the abandoned or repurposed buildings, signs of wear, old overgrown patches, changed, sure, but a living, evolving picture growing layer on layer over the place it always was.

I always feel vaguely embarrassed discussing saudade.  There are all the questions of what happens when reminiscence and sentimentality mingle.  Harmless enough now and then, the occasional lazy dog-paddle through it all is peaceful enough, but in the end one attempts to be firm with oneself and return to the shores of the present, where there is work to be done (more to the point: diapers to be changed).  It is also impossible, when drifting along this way, to think of the blind privilege these memories represent.  In a word: freedom.

My favorite view of the day: Halfway through  Jabowski’s corner, looking north out across the big swamp, the tamarack tips more blue than green in the haze, the great primordial breadth of it giving you just a hint of what this place was before anybody two-footed showed up.

In 2008, after twelve years as a resident of New Auburn, Wisconsin, I wound up moving to a new place with my little family.  We were headed to a farm in some beautiful country, but as I wrote on my old website at the time, it wasn’t easy to leave that old house on Main Street:

A couple of bittersweet days.  We’ve been moving the last of our things out of the house in New Auburn.  It’s been for sale since we moved to the farm, and the nice news is, a young family is about to move in.  I like to think of those rooms giving someone else a whole new set of stories.  But I’ll miss the place, too.  So much changed for me when I moved there.  I was privileged to serve a dozen years with the New Auburn Area Fire Department – easily the most important and meaningful “job” I’ve ever held.  I sat in a little bedroom overlooking Main Street and wrote this book.  I wore a path across my backyard that led to the fire hall one way and the Post Office the other.  I dug in the garden with the little girl who would become my daughter.  On and on, more than I can say.  When the last room was empty and swept, I took one last walk through, listening to the walls.  But I didn’t stay too long because I’m working on this idea that to the extent it serves honor and reflection, elegy is essential — but if the elegy exceeds a certain length it serves only to cheat the possibility of the present.

One warm evening in June shortly before moving day, my friends Billy, Chuck, John and Justin (and my brother John) (all past or present members of the Long Beds) came over to help me bottle some of the spirit I felt within those beloved walls.  I’ve just come across some photos we took that day.

Click on the photos for the story.

Listen to one of the songs we recorded that day: 01-sweet-edge-of-time-new-auburn-fa1

WQOW Interview

This is the uncut version.