Homecoming

There are, it’s true, places where the past is always present. It flickers only in shadow and memory, but it’s there - if you take a moment and listen for it. Of course that can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances. In my life there’s a place that’s always been good to me, so I like to feel the past whenever I’m there. In fact I welcome it.

I go there when I can, which is to say not that often, maybe two times a year if I’m lucky.  The place I speak of is a relatively small town, a noticeable but not overwhelming dot on the state map. Yet the older I get the more the more important it is to me. When I go to visit, I always come back feeling a little more sure of myself and a lot more sure of my heritage and my good fortune. Does that make it – dare I say - a sacred place for me?

We’ll get back to that.

            Black River Falls is located in the west central part of Wisconsin. For the record, it serves as the county seat of Jackson County and tallied an official population of 3,622 according to the 2010 census. While there are two other rivers named Black flowing elsewhere in the United States, there isn’t another town called Black River Falls anywhere else in the country, or in the world for that matter. So that makes it a unique place in its own right.

Originally named “La Riviere Noire” or “The Black River” by French explorers in 1659, the body of cold, dark water gave rise to an outpost that was eventually incorporated into a village in 1866. By 1883 the tiny hamlet grew to become a city of sawmills sending lumber downstream for a growing country.  But with prosperity came peril, and in October day of 1911, following days of uncommonly torrential rains, the river rose up and went on a rampage that nearly wiped out the town. Black Friday they called it.
On a lighter note, according to the official town website the list of notable people to have come from Black River Falls since that time include major league baseball players Ernie Rudolph and Phil Haugstad (Rudolph pitched in seven games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and Haugstad pitched sparingly for the Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds from 1947 to 1952). There were legitimate heroes, too, like United States Marine and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Red Cloud Jr., who died in action in Korea in 1950.

            Not that any of that brief history lesson has a damn thing to do with my story, except for the fact that my mother, Carol Stolt (Nee Thompson), was born on a small farm on the outskirts of Black River Falls in June of 1922. As for me, I was born and raised in Milwaukee some years later, so I never once called Black River Falls home. Yet for as long as I can remember, the times spent up there with aunts, uncles and cousins, the many days and nights spent swimming, fishing, playing cards, anything that lent itself to sharing a good laugh, those are among the best memories I will ever have.

            So really this is more about family than it is about the town itself, though in my mind the two always seemed to fit so well together. The heritage of my mother’s family, and the majority of the townsfolk, is Norwegian - hardy people who are steady-working, slow to anger and quick to laugh at themselves.

I like that.
 

            I think back on all the times we, as an extended family, have shared in Black River Falls over the years. Too many to count.  There were weddings, vacations, picnics and holidays. Of course a few funerals too. For instance, I think of Christmas Eves long ago when I was a kid and we gathered in the cramped but cozy quarters of my grandmother’s house on Fillmore Street in the middle of town. For a few years in the mid-1960s all us cousins put on our own little Nativity play for the grown-ups, complete with homemade costumes, painfully bright lights for the home movies, and even a bale of fresh straw for the manger. All that my cousins and I wanted to do was get this over with so we could tear into the presents under the tree, but somehow we made it through the production and played out our parts as best we could. (Mine was a non-speaking role where I was a youthful shepherd come to see the birth of the Christ child – for that part a doll was used.)

            But like it or not time moves on, and nowadays any trip to Black River Falls requires my stopping out at the cemetery grounds of Little Norway Lutheran Church where my mother was laid to rest in 2011. As the name might suggest, Little Norway lies at a quaint crossroads surrounded by farmland and a stretch of woods a few miles west of town. The whitewashed building with its grand steeple was built in 1873, and in the yard are cracked and badly weathered tombstones from that era to prove it. I like to go out there by myself and walk around, listening to everything and nothing at all as a summer breeze blows through the same trees it did years ago. Stillness. Quiet. The perfect place, I find, to walk around and take stock of things, do a little self-inventory of past and present. In the spirit of Thoreau and his Walden Pond, Twain and his Mighty Mississippi, I have here my own Little Norway to draw from. 

 

To be clear, Black River Falls means more to me than just a trip to the cemetery. Everything about this town is still a source of pride and great memories and I trust it will be again the next time I return.
The dictionary definition of the word “sacred” includes the phrases “highly valued and important” and “entitled to reverence and respect.” Well, when it comes to the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I guess that word covers it just fine for me. 

 

 

           

 

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