No one called me today, my birthday. That’s actually as it should be because I spent it on my own terms, alone but with others.
I’ve been working on some projects involving Wisconsin Dells, a place that has been central to my self-understanding for all of my 46 years. It’s central to my self-understanding, but it has always been mitigated. By family, history, friends, expectations, something. Never my own terms.
I’m staying at the Lake, in the house my grandparents built, about 20 minutes down the road. During every summer of my childhood and well into my adulthood, my family would go from the Lake to the Dells to watch people, eat fudge and saltwater taffy, and if I was really lucky, play minigolf. Once I even talked my elders into going to Robot World (RIP).
I spent several hours this afternoon wandering. I went down the Riverwalk, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before (it’s beautiful and some of the markers are surprisingly culturally responsible given that it’s on sacred land). I talked to bartenders, channelling my ethnomusicology days. I took notes and went to the visitors’ center and asked people who their grandparents were and if they remember Storybook Gardens (RIP).
I spent an afternoon in the Dells on my own terms, realizing with a jolt that I have never approached the Dells on my own terms.
I had a conversation with a woman who grew up in the area. Her family has businesses I know and have visited. She talked about life in the Dells. Her life. Not the collective mass life, kept at a bit of a distance by my upbringing, but her life.
I wouldn’t have had that conversation, which gave me more insight into the community than 46 years of staring and observing ever could, if I hadn’t been there on my own. Of my own volition. Going places I wanted to go, not places that were permitted. Places I felt I didn’t need to apologize for or justify to friends for whom the town is a foreign vacation destination and not just a part of reality.
It was a weird feeling. But driving back to the Lake, I was flooded with the realization that I do belong here. I do have a right to call this bizarre, intricate place home. It took me four and half decades to understand I can walk the streets of the Dells not as an outsider, but as a neighbor. I just have to do it on my terms, not those of my genealogy. So happy birthday to me.