Castle Rock
History, ownership, and chipmunks
The lake exists due to a dam on the Wisconsin River. Two dams, I guess. As I uselessly flail my hands at mosquitoes, watching the flecks of light bouncing between moving-yet-static points of water, the significance of the damming part of the story is not lost on me. The water—the Wisconsin water, the Wisconsin River—stops here, at least for a time. Wisconsin stoppage and damming provide me with my history, my connection to this place whose people have betrayed me once or twice and whose people I have betrayed once or twice. My identity, to be trite about it.
Two towns lived below the water. Some of the wood from their houses continues life in buildings in the adjacent, still-existing communities, but the towns are down there. I feel them. I watch the water moving while not moving, wondering if a stray window from the 1940s might surface and float by. I wish it would, so I could, for a moment, imagine gazing through it to see its displaced owners.
No window floats by, but I still think about those towns and windows. And Power. And where the neighborhood bar was before the power company tore it down and flooded the land.
There were people before the towns, of course. So, displacement, violence, and power are doubly present in this place. This place that means more to me than any other place. Me.
Displacement, violence, power, stoppage, and damming are integral to the place where I’ve struggled to sleep for nearly half a century, where I read with chipmunks when I’m left alone and where I panic when I’m not.
My dad’s art populates this place. He is a woodcarver, and a very good one. I don’t like some of the things he carves, pieces carefully crafted from small chunks of wood and pieces carefully chainsawed from giant trees whose roots still cling to the soil and will be there until rot or a lightning bolt remove them. I like many of them. But I don’t have to. His art lives here, just as my journals do. His life is here too.
Grandpa’s weird, fossilized, not-infested (thank you very much) wasps’ nests hanging in the living room disturb my guests. That’s fine. They didn’t stare at those bizarre decorations as a 10-year-old wondering why the monstrosities would be inside a house, not in a museum or a dump and, much more importantly, wondering if they were dangerous. The guests don’t love them like I do.
Grandpa is why.
The 10-year-old’s 10-ness was required for reconciling camp with concern. The 44-year-old forgets the dead nests are there but is glad they are. It’s not the guests’ fault that they don’t get it. It’s odd. It’s me.
They also don’t understand the value of the sticky ickiness that overwhelms a person in this place. They don’t know why it’s important to have algae slime on your foot while the mayflies adhere to your arms from the sweat and the heat and the physicality of standing by the water where there used to be two towns that existed only because of the displacement, violence, power, stoppage, and damming of the Ho-Chunk people who were here first.
The developers are coming for us. They’ve failed, but I know they will always be coming for us, aiming to enact a third displacement to make this grimy place fancy, not realizing it’s already fancy.
Their error is that they do not know my mother. My mother knows about algae on your foot and mayflies on your arms. She knows why Grandpa’s weird things are all over the house and Dad’s carvings dot the landscape. She also knows how laws and courts work, and therefore, the developers stopped (or were stopped), frozen by the audacity of yokel locals with education and knowledge and lawyers. They are still coming, though. They will keep failing.
Grandma is why. With her charmingly illogical furniture placement and kitchen paraphernalia from the 1950s, Grandma is why they will fail.
I am why, as well.
The water stops only for a little while and only because people built structures to make it stop, after tearing down the structures that had already been there, structures that had let the water flow. This is a place of human-made stopping, and it is where my memory can sink into the briefly-present water before it drifts further downstream. Chipmunks and I read while the water waits to move again.
