The Highway between The Lake and Town is lined with billboards. They are affixed to land surrounding old houses where families have lived for generations. Many of the people in those houses are more economically disadvantaged than their grandparents.
I’ve been on this road hundreds of times because it is the road between the two houses my grandparents owned, one in Town and one on The Lake.
I noticed a change in the Realty Company’s marketing. The Company is almost as old as I am and its marketing font is seared into my retinas. A billboard with a map of The Lake is accompanied by an updated logo. The logo is an improvement, in my non-marketer’s opinion. The rest of the giant, flat surface is unintentional subtext.
The Billboard reads, “We don’t just know this area, we’ve sold it.”
It’s true. The map is saturated with dots showing properties whose deeds had passed through the charming log cabin office in Town. One doesn’t transfer ownership without somehow interacting with the Realty Company.
Because they don’t just know the area. They have sold the area.
In 1827, near the portage of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, Red Bird approached US troops intending to be executed. White settlers had tapped maple trees on Ho-Chunk land, and the stewards of the land killed them. Red Bird knew, according to tradition, his life was the cost of the murders.
Soldiers heard music as Red Bird approached, the voices of Ho-Chunk singers whose song accompanied what was meant to be a death march.
The Soldiers took him captive, rather than executing him, robbing Red Bird of his worldview along with the maple trees.
Thomas McKenney was there. Red Bird made quite the impression:
. . . for all the Indians I ever saw he was, without exception, the most perfect in form, in face, and gesture [ . . . ] His proportions were those of the most exact symmetry, and these embraced the entire man, from his head to his feet. His very fingers were models of beauty — I never beheld a face that was so full of all the ennobling and at the same time the most winning expression . . .1
How’s that for subtext? It continues. His clothes, his hair, his posture, his shape generally, and his shape in particular, specific description. The color of his skin and the makeup on his face. Assessment of his accessories.
McKenney’s description of Red Bird—a man presenting himself for death—reads like gay erotica or an ad for a sports car.
I drove back to The Lake. Going that direction, I can only see the reverse side of the Realty Company’s billboard. They want people to see the message when they are coming from The Lake, not going toward it.
The Company’s prospective clients have already seen The Lake and are traveling to where commerce happens. The log cabin office is right on the road. They’ll see it once they get around the curve in the bluff. Maybe prospective clients will stop in to say “hi” to the Realtors.
Prospective clients have seen the symmetry of the maple trees and now need to buy the beauty. Claim it before it dies. Own it.
I try to imagine the song Red Bird brought with him to the River, on which there are now dams providing me with The Lake on which my Grandfather bought property in the 1950s. I push the button on the steering wheel and speak: “Play ‘Hello’ by Lionel Richie.”
For about two years when I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep unless I heard Lionel Richie’s voice. I don’t know why. I was an extremely anxious child.
The video for “Hello” is famously ridiculous. Richie plays an acting professor in love with his student. She is blind. She is also taking a shocking number of fine arts credits this semester. She’s a dancer and an actor and a musician and, most importantly, a sculptor.
Richie is a straight-up stalker in the video. Even tenure wouldn’t protect his behavior, skulking around the hallways, staring at his student as she pliés. Her sculpture class project is a bust of him, which he loves of course, but it also implies that she’s been feeling his face all along. Her sculpture doesn’t look like him, but that’s not the point. Her disability has given her the gift of detail. She knows his face by touch and therefore knows it intimately, differently.
She attends to the specifics, like McKenney describing Red Bird.
Castle Rock Realty was founded in 1984, the year “Hello” was released as a single. The song spent a few weeks as #1 in the various Billboard charts deemed appropriate for a pop song by a Black man in those days.
I was five years old and didn’t yet have my Can’t Slow Down tape. I was and continue to be an insomniac, a condition usually worsened when I sleep at The Lake.
I slept pretty well last night, though. I have spent the last few days wandering the community in which my mother worked and recreated when she was young, the community where my grandfather knew every business owner and my grandmother brought groceries to the employees he laid off. I’ve spoken to people and watched the River carry tourists through prehistoric rock formations. I’ve listened to music and witnessed bigotry.
Last night I passed a group of men in rainbow tie-dyed t-shirts printed with phrases like “I’m not gay but my boyfriend is.” I waved and smiled as one man shouted “cheers, queers!”
And then I remembered details and gave the bartender a 75% tip.
The polymathic student (played by Laura Carrington) in Richie’s video sculpts an approximation of his face, not very accurate, but what she imagines him to look like. Close, but not quite.
The properties around my family’s Lake House sell for millions of dollars. The developers advertise “lake front” property, even as the properties are not on The Lake. I would give them an A for effort if they hadn’t tried to bully my family off of the actual lakefront land my grandfather cared for long before I was born.
I notice detail. I know I’m close, but not quite. From where I am sitting, I can see the precise place where I stubbed my toe on the stone path that no longer exists. I was bleeding all over the soil. Grandpa grabbed me and carried me and ran me to the house where Grandma poured hydrogen peroxide on my foot.
The Company will not sell that dirt where I bled 40 years ago. I know too much detail.
Dells Country Historical Society, Others Before You . . . The History of Wisconsin Dells Country. Dells Country Historical Society and New Past Press, 1995, p. 14.