Ben Franklin was fond of promoting a list of thirteen virtues. Temperance, moderation, and chastity among them. Historical records and assorted offspring suggest he knocked holes in the list on a regular basis, perhaps leading him to write, “A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.” Your top-grade aphorist covers all the angles. Truly, though, what you’re hearing there is equanimity again. I crave equanimity. I have more than I did as a young man, and am beginning to suspect—rather hopefully—it is a product of age. Equanimity is the only thing that will save you from this world, and it doesn’t come easy. Or cheap. And you can’t fake it for long. Guys like Ben and the Beagle, they do not succumb to false hope, but neither do they cave in to absolute despair. Don’t expect much, but don’t give up. “People ask me,” says the Beagle, “they say, ‘You must be upset about the divorce.’ I say, ‘Nope. It’s over. That simple.’” I ask the Beagle why he stays on the fire department. “I do it because I enjoy it,” he says. Matter-of-fact. “Same reason I’ve been cutting meat for twenty-five years—I enjoy it.” A little pause. “Course when I’m an old man, my hands will be so bent up I won’t be able to scratch my ass.” A big laugh. “Who is rich?” wrote Franklin. “He that rejoices in his Portion.”
We get paged at two in the morning. A semi full of bananas has rolled over on the interstate. The dispatcher says the truck is north of the overpass, in the median. I won the race to the hall, so I’m driving the van, and the Beagle is riding shotgun. I hammer down the on-ramp and slide over to run in the passing lane so that we can scan the median. We’re cruising at about seventy when this pickup roars up the right side of us. The driver is gesticulating and pointing back down the road. The Beagle has his sleepy face to the window, peering, trying to figure out what the guy wants. The brim of his helmet keeps bumping the glass. After some charades, we realize the driver is trying to tell us the accident is south of the overpass. The dispatcher sent us the wrong way. We hit the crossover and backtrack, and sure enough, we find the semi, and the tumbled mound of bananas. The semi is destroyed but the driver is OK. I’m just wishing I could hear the conversation in that northbound pickup truck. What they must have thought—first all those bananas, then the wrong-way rescuers, speeding directly away from the scene, and then this drowsy cross-eyed guy goggling at them from beneath his slantways fire helmet. The Beagle and I are not always able to support the image of Ace Rescuers.
You try. You do feel a responsibility. You are, after all, working on behalf of the community, using equipment the community helped pay for. It’s fun to play at this, to give each other the needle and treat the whole thing like fun with cool toys, but there’s a seriousness at the base of it all.
When polls are conducted asking people who they most trust and admire, firefighters consistently finish at the top. It’s nice to piggyback to that, even as a citizen volunteer, but the blessing isn’t a given. A single misstep and you break a trust that can take decades to repair. Every year there are reports of volunteer firefighters starting fires so that they can go out on calls. This being related to human nature, it is nothing new. In Fire and Civilization, Johan Goudsblom mentions historical instances of firefighters committing arson recorded as far back as A.D. 64. He cites motives including looting, self-aggrandizement, and pyromania. You want to be a hero bad enough, you make your own disasters. There have been cases of firefighters starting fires so they could earn extra money. You’d have to burn down a lot of stuff around here to make it financially viable. You’re on call twenty-four hours a day for free. You get ten dollars an hour for fighting a fire or making a medical call. You get seven dollars for attending the monthly meeting, and seven dollars an hour for training, with the training not to exceed two hours. The average New Auburn firefighter took home around $400 last year; the largest check was for $1,561. I’ll get some justifiable argument from professional firefighters, but in our situation, I prefer low pay. Weeds people out. Keeps your motivations pure. If you get big enough to where you need full-time professionals, pay them accordingly. In our case, I prefer to believe that my neighbors are showing up simply to help, not to pad their Christmas fund.
The Roman Marcus Crassus, who operated until 53 B.C., used to show up at fires with a corps of five hundred slaves trained as builders. With his men standing by, Crassus would find the owners of the burning buildings and those adjacent and make an offer to buy the structures at a ridiculously low price. Once the owners agreed, Crassus would order his men to put the fire out. As soon as the smoke cleared, Crassus would set his crews to rebuilding. He then resold the properties at a grand profit. I told the chief maybe we wanted to think about some sort of similar program. Our motto would be, First You Pay, Then We Spray.
Rusty, one of the firefighters who keeps our trucks tuned, just donated a kidney to his son-in-law. He and the Beagle have something in common now, although Rusty’s eyes still track. Twenty-four firefighters on our roster, and two have given away kidneys. I wonder how that stacks up against the general population. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s easy to look at the Beagle simply as a character—in the “he’s quite a character” sense—and he comes well armed. But when his first ex-wife’s new husband got serious facial and inhalation burns from an exploding heater, it was the Beagle who separated from the responding crew and knelt at the guy’s head, giving him the best care he knew how. Down there on his knees, his cud working, his eye shooting off south, doing the neighborly thing. I would trust the Beagle with my life. Not would, do. He’ll be goofy, but he’ll be there.
Selflessness has its drawbacks, and the Beagle will point them out. We get dispatched to a forest fire after midnight. One of the decisions you make when calls come in at that time of night is whether or not to stop and pee. Tonight nobody did. The forest fire turns out to be a small brush fire, and after an hour on scene, we’re on our way back to the hall. There are four of us jammed in the cab. “Jeez, I gotta take a leak,” says Matt Jeffski.
“How ya think I feel?” pipes up the Beagle. “I only got one kidney!”
The Beagle has other problems. Both his ex-wives work at the only gas station and convenience store in town. So he’s gotten to where he avoids the Gas-N-Go. Drives to Bloomer for his gas and morning coffee. Sometimes he’ll send his new girlfriend in to get him a can of chew. The ex’s have been known to give her the evil eye, and sometimes they slap the Kodiak down a little sharply. “They don’t like it,” says the Beagle, “but they know my brand!” Big guffaw.
The year has cycled around, and it’s Jamboree Days again. It’s Saturday night, late. We’ve got a nice little husband/wife band in, they do country and rock covers, old and new, and under the big white tent, the dance floor is jammed. The Beagle had his twenty-five-year class reunion today. He has just arrived from the party and, frankly, he’s happily loaded. He’s got his girlfriend with him. She’s a stout girl with smiling eyes, looks like she could toss some hay bales. The Beagle has his groove on. He dances song after song, twisting and shucking and jiving and doing this move where he twiddles his butt and pops his knees up and down in sequence, like a beefy marionette. Every now and then he gives his sweetie a little belly bump. Me and the Chief, we’re not drinking. We’re sitting in lawn chairs in the grass on the outskirts, and the dancing Beagle has us cracked up. We reckon it’s like watching some sort of courtship ritual on Animal Planet or the Discovery channel. When he finally leaves us, it is with a grin and a salute, and someone to keep him company. Monday morning he’ll be hoisting sides of beef before the sun comes up, but tonight he is a dancer and a lover, and he is tripping the Beagle light fantastic.
I’m a teetotal non-dancer, but I have come to love the nights under the Jamboree Days beer tent. All the happy sweaty faces, all the goofing after midnight, all the loud shooting of the breeze over yesterday’s favorites and today’s greatest hits. Every year I recognize more faces. I’ll sit in my lawn chair with my radio by my ear so I can hear if we
get a call, and I’ll be seized by how glorious it is in this tumultuous world to be so simply free and happy. A softball toss from the beer tent, there is a little rise, and atop the rise is a little cemetery. It was surveyed and platted in 1882 by David W. Cartwright, the man who founded this town. His grave is up there. The tombstone is a simple rectangle. Cartwright was a strict Seventh-Day Baptist who took his name off this town when the council approved its first liquor license, so I figure he wouldn’t be too happy about the drinking, but it’s nice to think of his bones up there, maybe catching a little vibration from all the dancing feet that followed him to this town. I think he’d be glad to see us happy here. Cartwright’s presence gives me a sense of history, reminds me that even Saturday nights in a beer tent take their place in the course of human events.
The lady down at the Gas-N-Go let me look through her collection of old pictures and newspaper clippings last year, and I came across an article in the Thursday, June 17, 1976, issue of the Chetek Alert recognizing a firefighter named Ivan Boldon for fifty years of service to the New Auburn Area Fire Department. The article said when Ivan joined the department in 1926, they were still using the old chemical pumper. The tanks were mounted on a trailer cart hitched to a Model T Ford. There were several pictures, including a group photo of the department members. The Beagle is right up there in the front row. He had just joined up, right out of high school. I like the idea that this chain—me knowing the Beagle, the Beagle knowing Ivan Boldon, Ivan Boldon having used the old chemical pumper—puts us in almost tangible contact with the very first days of the department. The Beagle wouldn’t put it in these terms, but he knows that out here, rescue is less about throwing ropes or stanching blood or running into burning buildings than it is about assuming a role in a quirky narrative that weaves itself through generations. The events arrange themselves along a communal timeline. The community is the constant. Volunteer firefighters come and go. The old-timers hand down equipment and stories, show up occasionally when we’re shorthanded, but most of all they help us recognize that time—our time—is transient.
Whenever we finish up a call, the officer in charge fills out a run report. The report includes a roster, arranged in order of seniority. If you pull a report from a run the Beagle and I have been on, you will find a check beside Beagle’s Christian name, right up there at the top, and down near the bottom, working its way up, a check beside mine. Proof in ink that we were present at the making of history, no matter how small the event. A little detail within the brief parentheses that is our existence.
The Beagle says he’ll keep answering the pager until he can’t make it down here anymore. Gonna get himself a wheelchair with flashing lights on it, he says. In the picture from the Chetek Alert, he is long-haired and slim, clean-shaven except for a set of muttonchop sideburns. He’s looking straight ahead, with both eyes.
Maybe you could meet the Beagle someday. He knows his eye can make a person uncomfortable, and so he has this story he’ll tell to break the ice. We’ve all seen it several times. A newcomer will be looking up, down, sideways, anything so as not to seem to be staring. The Beagle smiles, says, “You probably noticed my eye.”
The person might shrug, or demur, but the Beagle continues, matter-of-fact.
“Deal is, I was born without an eyelid.”
Now he has their attention.
“Yah, strangest thing. No eyelid on that eye. Doc said he’d never seen nothin’ like it. He told my parents it was a long shot, but there was one thing they could try.”
By now the person is usually leaning right in.
“What they did is, when they circumcised me, they took the extra skin and they made an eyelid from it.”
The listener usually gulps, but is invariably staring hard at the crossed eye.
“Yep,” says the Beagle, “been cockeyed ever since!”
3
TRICKY
NEW AUBURN DRAWS its name from an eighteenth-century elegiac pastorale. This might not be your first thought if you come to town, say, on a November Saturday evening when all the pickup trucks are lined up at the Gas-N-Go with dead deer hanging over the tailgate, or if you exit the highway behind a spreader truck full of turkey manure. If you approach from the north, past Slinger Joe’s automobile graveyard, past the Packer green and gold of Pat’s Pub, past the abandoned laundromat—still half-toppled and wrapped in yellow crime-scene tape since the rainy evening a year ago when Tricky Jackson sideswiped it running seventy in a thirty-five—if you notice there are four defunct service stations and a desolate train siding, you may strain at the relevance of lyric verse. But the name on our old silver water tower originated from the Oliver Goldsmith poem “The Deserted Village,” written in 1770 and opening with the line, “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain…” More than a century after it was coined, we took that name for our own. It didn’t take easily. Frankly, it was the fourth choice.
Even the staunchest civic booster would have to admit that the bloom is off the rose here in New Auburn. Our eleven streets are tree-lined and peaceful. There are a number of trim houses on neat lawns. But rust and desperation are never more than a backyard away. The family next door to me is hard to sort. Many children, several women, two men. The fighting frequently spills out into the yard, which has steadily disappeared under a welter of absurd possessions: a tangle of thirty unworkable bicycles; a mossy camper; a selection of detached automobile seats; an inoperative ride-on lawn mower wrapped—Christo-like—in a blue tarp; a huge rotting speedboat. The village board sent someone around to recite nuisance ordinances chapter and verse, but beyond rearranging the bikes and aligning the camper with the speedboat—feng shui primitif—nothing has changed. You take what you can get in this life. Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to keep your trash. You understand it is only a matter of distinctions: yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash, solid citizens with their secret trash. In a yard just outside town, a spray-painted piece of frayed plywood leans against a tree. It reads Trans Ams: 2 for $2000. It has been there for two years.
The old man and his adult son tinker on the speedboat now and then. They pop the cowling, poke around with wrenches, stare, cuss. The old man stands inside the hull and yanks on the pull rope, and the huge motor rumbles and smokes, then dies with a dry cough. The speedboat has never left the yard. The slipcover is mildewed and undone, and the deck is layered with decaying leaves. Out on the street, the summer traffic is rarely more than desultory, but it does pick up a little on the weekends, with people cutting through town on their way to summer cottages and lake properties to the north. Many of them are towing beautiful boats. The man and son talk as they work, and if I am doing dishes at the sink, I catch fragments through the screen, but it is their persistence and glances toward the road that speak most clearly, and the message is, life is a box o’ shit, but by God we’ve got a speedboat, and one of these days we’ll get that son of a tatcher runnin’, and we’ll go out some Sunday fuckin’ afternoon and we’ll blow them Ill-annoy tourist bastards right outta the water. They work awhile, the old man and the kid, then disappear into the house for days.
Four tries it took, to name this village. In 1875, a man named David W. Cartwright located a clearing in the great pines and put up a sawmill. With the first boards off the saw deck, he enclosed the mill. Then he built a house. Then his employees built their own houses around the mill, forming a settlement that became known as Cartwright Mills. In 1882, for the convenience of the postal service, the name was shortened to Cartwright. In 1902, a saloon keeper approached the village board and requested a liquor license. Cartwright—a devout Seventh-Day Baptist—declared that as long as the town bore his name, liquor licenses were out of the question. The board voted to change the name to Auburn. Unfortunately, the adjacent township was already named Auburn, and so in 1904, pleading confusion, the Chicago Railroad requested that the town change its name once more. The board tacked on “New
,” and so it is we became New Auburn.
David W. Cartwright was a late arrival. Glaciers were the original visitors, ebbing and flowing throughout the Pleistocene epoch. The ice made its last big push 25,000 years ago, advancing until two-thirds of the land now known as the state of Wisconsin were blanketed. My backyard was a mile deep in ice. When the glacier finally withdrew, it did so reluctantly, and 10,000 years ago, on the cusp of the Holocene epoch, the Chippewa Lobe of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet made one last charge south, stopping just short of New Auburn before retreating for good. In its wake, we were left a raw, poetic topography of kettles and moraines, kames and eskers, and drumlins.
Wildlife thrived in the post-glacial period, and humans followed. A copper lance point found outside town in the late 1900s suggests that Paleo-Indian hunters were in the area 6,000 years ago. At some point, Sioux Indians arrived. Later, Ojibwa Indians filtered down from the north. By the 1760s, the two tribes were warring over the territory. After many battles—one of which took place on the shores of a local lake now studded with summer homes—the Ojibwa drove out the Sioux for good.
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