Sounds of a Distant Train (eBook)

Chapter 2

Spring 1967

It was a time when school children practiced tornado drills, fire drills, and nuclear attack drills. When the signal was sounded, we marched in military fashion to the places our schools had deemed safe from high winds or outside to escape the imaginary fire. Strangely, when we performed the civil defense drills—the ones preparing for nuclear attack—we merely slid from our varnished maple seats and huddled under the desks as instructed.

Our teachers surely realized this did nothing for our actual safety from an atomic bomb blast or the deadly unseen fallout we feared most. But like their students, they dutifully acted out their parts because it was expected of them.

We had all been through many bad summer storms and the accompanying damage caused by the unforgiving force of wind or a random lightning strike. Unfortunately, some also had real-life experiences to remind us why we diligently performed the fire drills.

But nobody really understood what a nuclear attack would be like. Radiation was the unknown and unseen enemy. Many of us had seen flickering images of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki mushroom clouds on television or on a newsreel in a movie theater, but thankfully this was as close as any of us had come to this extremely complex and frightening reality. Still, even in our little town, a few houses were equipped with fallout shelters in the basements.

My father’s name was Marion, but he went almost exclusively by Brick. Dad was an imposing, barrel-chested man whose biceps and forearms were built over a lifetime of hard work. His nickname came from his years as a bricklayer. Though he hadn’t done any major contracting for several years, he still picked up enough work to stay busy with smaller projects or whatever odd jobs were available. In a small town like Bay City, people tended to take on whatever job would pay, with little regard to whether they had ever done it before.

His black hair and paintbrush mustache were beginning to show streaks of gray, and deeply etched lines framed the corners of his eyes. Not all of them were caused by smiling.

My mother was Rachel, a full-blooded Swede who wore her light brown hair in long braids wound in a tight circle around the back of her head. A kind and hard-working mother and wife, she was the center of our family’s universe.

They were in their late thirties when they married. By the standard of the day, they were already old.

My brother Jack is two years older than me. When he was a toddler, he contracted a bad case of asthma, which seemed to stick with him for several years. Now in his teens, he was still too slim to look completely healthy.

Jack was the intellectual superior of virtually all his peers and many grown-ups. It made him something of a curiosity when he was a little boy. He even auditioned for an early TV game show called Giant Step starring a budding actor named Burt Parks. Precocious children answered difficult questions designed to show off their intelligence and how cute they were.

When we were still living in Red Wing, Minnesota, a couple of well-dressed execs from WCCO-TV in Minneapolis came to our humble house to interview him. It turned out Jack was much too smart to be very cute, even at an early age. He didn’t make the cut.

Eventually, his intelligence began to set him apart from the other kids. Especially in social situations, it was increasingly more of an obstacle than a gift. Early in life, being different is often a source of ridicule, regardless of what that difference is. His world became defined primarily by his precious books, which he read voraciously. In turn, they fueled his insatiable search for knowledge. And so it went. The more he learned, the less like his peers he became. Unfortunately, that applied to me, as well.

I understood Jack as much as he would allow. We shared a bedroom in our tiny home, and a thousand experiences only brothers could share, even if we were somewhat mismatched. While Jack was painfully introverted, I was generally outgoing and got along with most kids and adults alike, competing or cooperating as the situation demanded.

I occasionally found myself defending him from the meanness of other kids. I wasn’t afraid to step into a confrontation on his behalf, even if it meant taking on an older boy. I’d been told how smart Jack was so many times that I just accepted I was never going to live up to that standard. So, I learned how to fight instead.

This role reversal generally worked against both of us, causing Jack the humiliation of my childish defense in addition to whatever started the ruckus to begin with. It also caused me to receive at least one nasty black eye. As brothers, Jack and I struggled to find common interests. Still, in some ways I suppose I idolized him. Perhaps I still do. Yet I think he resented me because I had friends while he had books.

+ + +

Bay City is located at the head of Lake Pepin on a wide, flat, twenty-one-mile stretch of the Mississippi River. For thousands of years the area was home to Indigenous people whose rich culture was derived from hunting and fishing along the lake and the surrounding bluffs.

Lake Pepin was “discovered” in 1680 by European explorer Father Louis Hennepin. At that time, he called it Lac de Pleurs, or Lake of Tears, because he had observed some Dakota Sioux people crying over the death of their chief’s son. The name Lake Pepin first appeared on a map drawn in 1703.

In 1851 Congress created the Indian Appropriations Act, which began a process designed to force Native people to move onto reservations to free up land for new settlers. One such community was established on Prairie Island near the place where Red Wing, Minnesota, would be settled. The village of Bay City was originally known as Saratoga but was renamed in 1886.

The lake increased to its current size in 1938 when the Army Corps of Engineers built a series of locks and dams to control flooding. Ironically, Lock and Dam Number 3 near Red Wing caused significant permanent flooding of acreage within the Prairie Island Indian Reservation, and thus reduced the usable land from 534 acres down to approximately 300. Several Native burial mounds were lost to the waters.

Except for this utterly unconscionable outcome, the mitigation strategy worked well until the spring of 1967 when the Mississippi swelled beyond anyone’s imagination. Like many others, our house was flooded with a couple feet of dark and unforgiving water. As it overtook the safe boundaries of our world, a series of events began that would alter the course of our lives for many years to come and define our family in ways we only partially understood at the time.

This was the year a lot of things seemed to start coming into focus for me. It was a time of questions and experimentation. It would also prove to be a time of new feelings, responsibilities, and commitments. In other words, I was a teenager.

Unlike a flash flood after a summer rainstorm, the flood of 1967 was caused by a rapid spring thaw after an extremely snowy winter. The weather became unusually warm in early March, causing the hills and gullies to run wild with the torrential flow that eventually reached Lake Pepin. We watched the flood waters rise slowly and relentlessly for several days before Dad and Mom finally decided we had to move out.

I remember standing together on the street in front of our house with all our belongings on a neighbor’s trailer and a borrowed pickup truck. The pavement was just a couple of feet above the water level in our fully engulfed front yard.

My folks held each other closely and silently grieved as the first water lapped at the threshold and then painfully spilled over onto the living room floor. Jack and I didn’t really know how to act. It was all so serious and yet we had nothing to compare it to. The hundred-year flood was something nobody thought would ever happen, but it did. We stood off to the side and behind them. I purposely leaned into him, causing him to lose his balance. He punched me on the shoulder. We didn’t say a thing.

We had lived in our current home since moving from Red Wing in 1959 when Highway 61 was blasted through the solid limestone hillside along Barn Bluff. Several neighborhoods, including ours on Green Street, would eventually be swallowed up by the highway construction. The state had condemned all the properties they needed to build on, and Dad and Mom were paid what ours was deemed to be worth. Back taxes were owed, so there wasn’t much left after the debts were settled. By the time we left Red Wing, we didn’t have a lot of choices.

Ours was one of the last dozen or so houses standing before the wrecking ball finished its thankless work. The few other remaining ones would be moved to available vacant lots around the city. At first, Dad had refused to move us out because I had been sick with pertussis, or whooping cough. Eventually his resistance was met with an ultimatum, and we left the only home Jack and I had known until then.

In the time leading up to our departure, Dad had managed to assemble a crew and move a small, detached garage over the Eisenhower bridge and across the remaining eight-mile stretch to Bay City. He had snatched the garage just ahead of the demolition crews. No permission was asked or granted. He just helped himself to it, and nobody cared. The garage building would form the structure of our new home.

He also had squirreled away many other building...