Mama was a Wisconsin girl from Superior. Her family resided in a three story clapboard house right next to the Allouez Bay Iron Ore Docks. There was a constant clanging sound, the soundtrack to her childhood, as rail cars coming down from the Range would bring in tons and tons of ore to the docks where it was loaded onto the barges and spirited away to the ironworks on the other side of the Great Lakes. Mama had a best friend who lived on the other side of the docks and the only way to get over there was to climb up onto the elevated rail bridge, cross the tracks and climb down the other side.
To Mama and her friends in Allouez, they called the place they lived “all the way” bay, and there were certain hidden spots nestled down at the foot of the docks by the lakeshore, places you could go at night if you wanted to go all the way. Nobody that she knew ever did, except for a couple of girls from the Catholic School and their boyfriends. The spots were visually hidden, but the docks worked all night long so up above you could still hear the sounds of the men yelling and the clanging trains moving back and forth, dumping tons of rock into the ship holds down below. Magical for a couple teenagers making out down below.
During the winter months, there was a different sound, the deep moaning of ice floes being pressed by the currents and northerly gales into the footings and lattices of the docks. But the docks were built strong and no major damage was ever done by the ice. But oh, what a sound. The old folks had many ways to describe that sound and they loved to tell the young ones about it, as if they never heard it even though they listened to it every night in deep winter while they lay in bed. Also, when old people talk about how they used to walk ten miles to school in two feet of snow, and school was never cancelled etc. etc., for Mama and them, that was still really the case. She had to pull her little brother on a sled which made it an even more arduous trek for her. She had two sisters and two brothers, and they would trod off every morning down Moccasin Mike Road, Mama pulling the little one in the sled.
Mama grew up to be an attractive young lady with big dark eyes and a thin finely sculpted face. This being about 1960, everyone dressed nice. You didn’t ned a lot of money to get yourself a few nice outfits and a sharp wool overcoat, and nobody would think of going outside looking like they do nowadays. One rare sunny day, she found herself on Superior Street in Duluth, window shopping. There was a terrible racket as the air raid sirens were going off and fighter jets flew low above the city. Another drill to keep folks at the Air Force base prepared in case of nuclear attack by the Russians. The iron ore docks were a potential military target and it made everyone in town feel important and patriotic. There on the street, shouting above the din of the jet engines and squealing sirens, a man with a slight Texas drawl was trying to get her attention to pay her a compliment.
This man, Mr. Titus, was based in Duluth at the air base and he got Mama to go out on a date a few times. Mama fell for his charm, and Titus fell for Mama’s good looks and Lutheran outlook. Before long, they had a tidy two bedroom apartment halfway up the bluff and then soon after, two little children running around in it. He had wooed her by taking her to the polka dances, bowling at the alley, a movie downtown, going out for a hamburger every now and then and walks along the lakeshore when the weather was nice. She felt good being with him and he felt proud to have found himself a fine midwestern girl. But there was something sad about him, a melancholy that never seemed to go away.
At times, Titus was barely aware of this feeling but other times it grew stronger and it bothered him. When the kids came, he was excited at first, but then the monotony of domestic life was not as thrilling as he had perhaps hoped it would be. For mama, she herself didn’t feel attractive anymore, after having the kids, and her husband’s aloofness made her feel even worse about herself, but at least she had us children all day and she loved us a lot.
After a few more years, it all came to a head, although Mama wasn’t completely aware of it happening at the time. He went out to the store and never came back. I know it sounds cliché but that’s how it often ends with men of that type. After a few days, Mama resigned herself to what had happened and tried to figure out just what the hell to do with herself and us kids. She got another job, her sister came to help take care of us, and that was the way things moved forward. If you had asked us if we missed our Daddie, the answer I guess would be yes, but when you’re young and things happen, you just adapt and deal with it.
Mama wasn’t necessarily looking for a new man. After all, she thought, who would want a single mother with two kids in the early 1960’s? But it happened. She found a new man. David Isaacs was a young volunteer with the Merchant Marines and him and Mama started talking one day at the department store where she worked. They went out a couple times and I guess they got along pretty well, because after a little while, that was that. They got married and he came to live with us.
Now what would make this David Isaacs from West Virginia via Salem, Ohio, come and want to marry Mama and take her two kids on and want to be with us? At church one Sunday, I asked the preacher that and he told me that the Lord moves in mysterious ways and I had no idea what that meant. But I pretended to understand and I accepted it, and whenever anyone of my friends asked me what had brought this new Daddy into my life, that’s what I said, that the Lord moves in mysterious ways.
Soon thereafter, there was another baby and I suddenly had a little sister. And then David Isaacs received orders that he had been transferred and we all moved to Nome, Alaska. We were all sad to leave our friends and we hoped that maybe we were moving somewhere nicer. But then when we got there we realized we moved somewhere even darker and colder, as if that were possible. We were mad and that put a lot more stress on Mama and our new Daddy.
In Alaska, it’s all about the seasons, and when the spring comes and the rivers and creeks start to run, then there’s a wild glory to life and everyone comes alive, even the old folks. Summer is a like a slow and pleasant dream, although one that comes to an end way too early. And then we lower our heads and scrunch up our shoulders into the long slog of winter. Luckily, after a few years of this, Daddy (as we called David now) got his release papers one Friday afternoon and we spent the weekend together talking about what lie next. By Sunday evening, it was decided that we would all move to Salem, Ohio. For Daddy, it was moving back home, but for the rest of us, we didn’t know dirt about a place called Salem, Ohio.
For Mama it was like she was finally getting on one of those ore boats that used to dock up right next door to her house in Superior, Wisconsin morning, noon and night. They would load up with the ore that had come down on the trains from the Range and then begin their journey East through the Great Lakes and to their destination of Cleveland or Pittsburgh where the ironworks and stellmills were. They backed out of that dock in Allouez Bay and headed northeast across Lake Superior, then down to Lake Michigan, Huron and then Lake Erie. And now Mama was kind of making that same journey with us along for the ride, but in a station wagon and not on an ore ship.
At that time, all through Ohio and Pennsylvania, things were buzzing. There was a lot of industry and the steel mills employed a lot of people. There was also oil, tires, paint, you name it, it was made there. It wasn’t easy work but it was enough to lead a comfortable life. And for some lucky ones, it led to a whole lot more than just a comfortable life, for people that got in at the right time. John Rockefeller, for instance, had started by selling meat and grain to the military. Then he started drilling for oil and became the richest man in the world so they say. Also fueling the boom and getting rich were the steamship companies, the steel mills, and who do you think made it a law to require that all the schoolbuses be colored a certain shade of yellow? Why, the Shermin Williams paint company of course.
It all lasted a good while, but soon enough the heyday had come and gone. After that, things went south, literally. Nowadays, they call it the Rust Belt and the only people leading a comfortable life here are the drug pushers, them that’s legal and them that’s illegal.
Way back when, Daddy’s family had moved up to Salem from the hills of West Virginia, stubborn and steely, God-fearing Scots-Irish folks who, nevertheless, had a charming sense of humor, despite their complete disinterest in anything that might lie just outside the circle of their narrow little vision of life on Earth. Shortly upon us moving back to Ohio, Daddy got a job with the water company and Momma got a job at a tool and die shop. She ended up working there almost forty years. We got enrolled in school and quickly met new friends, after our fear and anxiety had eventually worn away.
Adolescence naturally makes kids push away from their parents, and for Mama and me, it seemed like we were butting heads every day. But overall it was a good life in Salem, Ohio and that’s right where we stayed for the rest of our lives. We grew up, graduated high school, got jobs ourselves, married, had kids, and then grandkids, and we’re still working, trying to keep the bills paid and trying to figure out if and when we will ever get to retire.
The only thing that changed was that Momma and Daddy eventually got divorced. Daddy remarried but Momma never did. It didn’t change our lives that much at all. Despite our struggles, everything was just fine until Daddy got cancer and died quite quickly, and then a few years later, Momma took ill herself and passed away too. That’s when you know that the past is gone, long gone. You aint got no Mom and Dad anymore and the kids don’t have their grandparents. Now you’re the old one.
Now we just look back on the memories. Some years before Momma had passed away, something special happened that brought us closer together. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, Mama had hinted about wanting to go visit her sister. Once we figured out that she was serious, it came as a bit of a shock since mama had not much even mentioned her siblings, let alone expressed an interest in going to see them. Ever since she had left Superior, she hadn’t had much contact with any one of them, but on the passing of her parents, it appears that she had had a hankering to visit her sister who she hadn’t seen in thirty years or so. Mary was, in fact, her lone living relative and turns out she lived on a cattle ranch in McCluskey, ND. So we decided to go pay her a visit, Momma, me her Daughter and her granddaughter. One early summer day, after school had let out for the year, we booked a flight from Akron to Bismarck, rented a car and headed north across the prairie.
Economic development usually happens on the routes where all the stuff people buy and sell is being moved…railroads and ports, mostly; especially before there were interstate highways. Iron ore from Duluth/Superior to Cleveland, wheat from the midwest prairie to Minneapolis, to be milled and then sent on down the Mississippi River. And western expansion followed the cart roads and eventually the railroad lines that were being constructed across the Great Plains, laying the way for the wagon trains to bring settlers out west. Once they were out there, they, too, needed goods brought in so they could buy them, and also a way to take away stuff they wanted to sell to markets back east. The railroad barons had been given all the land they wanted from the government and soon the iron horses were crossing across the prairie, causing the impoverishment and ultimate demise of the Great Sioux Nation and other plains tribes.
The town of McCluskey itself is remote but not hard to find. We flew into Bismarck and drove north about 50 miles to Highway 200, then turned East across the Missouri. The prairie, or what used to be prairie, is completely flat and stretches out to the horizon in all directions. Driving along the road gives one the sense that you are in the midst of a giant industrial agricultural zone. Not very romantic at all. Cornfields followed by wheat fields and soybeans, and then cattle and oil derricks and more corn, on and on and on. Each “town” is ten to twenty miles apart and we pulled into the little intersection that is the center of McClusky, population 380. The sign said that it is the county seat of Sheridan County, so that gave us an idea of the lay of the land, so to speak. We got out of the car and walked into a bar located there at the intersection.
There was only three or four people in there, including the staff. At the bar, sat a man dressed all in black including a big black cowboy hat. He had one leg. Him and the waitress turned around to look at us when we came in and I guess it was impossible to try and blend in so we didn’t even try. I asked them if they knew my aunt and how do we get to her ranch. The one-legged man shouted that of course he know her, and why don’t we come in and sit down and have a beer first. “What brings you out here in the first place?”, he asked. We’re nice people and we weren’t in a rush necessarily, so we accepted the offer and told the man our story. He had already had a few, apparently, but was nice enough, and told us a little bit about himself, too. But, apparently, he left out a few parts. The waitress spilled the beans, telling us that the man had just got out of jail that morning, so he was in the bar celebrating his freedom. Turns out he had killed, or tried to kill, his wife’s lover.
In front of the man, on the bar, sat a good-sized pink, porcelain piggy bank. It was the old traditional kind, in the shape of a real pig. On the side was written Saving for a Rainy Day, in child like cursive writing. Around the piggy bank on the bar sat a lot of coins of various denominations. When it came time to go, we tried to settle up with the waitress, but the man insisted on buying our beers and he reached for the piggy bank and misread the distance, knocking it to to the floor, where it broke and all the change spilled out all over the floor of the bar. We all converged kneeling down on the floor, scooping up all the coins we could reach. The one-legged man in black didn’t get off his stool, but was quite embarrassed, so he started cursing all of us and the bar staff and the State of South Dakota and even Jesus. We just collected all the coins we could and stacked them up there on the bar. We thanked the man and the waitress and left as quick as we could.
We drove on down the road a bit, in the direction they had told us to go, and when we finally got to the ranch, it wasn’t the tranquil, serene setting that I had imagined it would be. My aunt and her husband were pleasant enough and glad to see us. Of course, they knew that we were coming. It had been about thirty years since Mama and her sister had seen each other, so, in their reunion, one could feel both the love and longing of being apart for so long, but also the awkwardness of not having been in each other’s company in quite some time. The sun was setting as we sat finishing our coffee, and, although Auntie and her husband looked dead tired, they were anxious to get back to work. Running a farm is no nine to five affair, and there was still plenty to do, especially since apparently it was calving season, and with them having a couple hundred head of cattle on their ranch, there was a lot to do.
They employed a couple of young men to help them out, Guatemalans I believe, but those fellows had already gone to bed after working a very long day, and there was plenty of midwifing still to be done, not to mention the other routine daily tasks of milking, feeding, cleaning, etc. So, as the coffee cups emptied, Auntie’s eyes implored us to let them get back to work, which of course we did, feeling helpless and useless ourselves since there wasn’t much we could do to help except wash the dishes and maybe start to put a meal together for later on.
Outside the farmhouse kitchen, back in the barn and in the fields, it seemed like calves were popping out everywhere. We could hear the commotion as they yelled instructions and reports to each other above the din of the loudly mooing cattle. Presently, some headlights appeared in the driveway as the vet had come from some other far off town to help with all the birthing. As the vet entered the barn, a loud crack was heard and then Auntie crying out, “Oh my God!”.
We all run out to the barn to see that Uncle Bill had been kicked in the forehead, right above his left eye, by a cow, while he was trying to get her through the gate into the pen. So he is bleeding all over the place from a big wound in his forehead, and now no one can tend to the calving because they have to take care of Uncle Bill. Auntie runs into the bathroom to the medicine chest and throws things around for a while before emerging looking very despondent and nervous. “I can’t believe this but we are out off butterfly sutures. He needs to get that wound healed up now.” She put some gauze pads on his head but the blood was still coming and oozing out of the dressing.
Turns out that he was on blood thinners which was making a really bad problem a lot worse. This was an emergency. But they were still worried about the cows and their babies, even though the blood was still pouring out and Uncle Bill was liable to collapse at any time. Finally the vet decided that the cows would have to wait and that he would go to the city with Uncle Bill,which was over 50 miles away, to get some medical attention. The only thing we could now was help Auntie out somehow and wait for them to get back. We had the good intentions of helping out with the midwifing, but after going out into the barn and shuffling around for a few minutes, it was obvious that we had no idea what on earth to do.
There we were just awkward as heck, sitting in the kitchen. Finally, auntie came inn from the barn and plopped down exhausted. It seemed that the sisters were searching their minds for what to say. What about Titus?, Auntie finally blurted out. Well, that was about the last thing anybody expected. Except that Momma seemed non plussed and said something I had never heard before, probably because we had never ever talked about Titus. But, it turns out, Momma had found out and some point that he had moved back to his family in Lubbock, TX.
Uncle Bill and the vet came back later that night as we were turning in. His head was bandaged up and he was ready to get back to work, even though it was almost midnight. all three of them disappeared into the barn. We left the next day, as it was clear that we were in the way and of no use. We flew back to Ohio and never talked to them again, even though they did send a card.
Mama died a few years later in Salem. We had calling hours at Starks Funeral Home, where our family goes. Russ, the founder, still tried to run things even though he had turned over the reins to his son and daughter-in-law long ago. At the viewing, he was in his scooter and got stuck in the snow, and we had to push him out. After calling hours, everybody gathered at the AmVets. We bought fried chicken from Walmart and Giant Eagle, and pizzas from Little Caesars. There was some homemade Buffalo chicken dip, beer and drinks, cold cuts, macaroni salad and potato salad.
Later, we went for more drinks at the Slovak Club and the Salem Club where grandma used to work decades earlier, before she got a job at the Salem News as a proofreader. Daddy’s wife was tending bar over at the Italian Club, but we didn’t go in there. I thought we would see her at calling hours but she didn’t come. After too many drinks, we went back home. There was no funeral since Momma was being cremated. Russ had told us that hardly anyone gets buried anymore.
The next morning I had an idea and we started making travel plans again. We were going to Lubbock, Texas to visit our biological dad’s family. We contacted them and they were real excited about it and were really looking forward to meeting us all. A few months later, the same time of year when school got out, we were on our way to Lubbock. We followed the road outside of town and found the place, and I must confess, my heart sank a little bit when we pulled onto the dirt road, right up to another cattle ranch.
THE MOSSY BOG 