Living Together

Keeping your Place

KEEPING YOUR PLACE Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system and the systems to one another and to a whole, that by stepping aside for a moment, man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. N A T H A N I E L H A W T H O R N E , wakef iel d Anne pushed open the door and away went a mouse, leaving the cabin sadly empty. The welcoming familiarity of everything was a reproach, for she had agreed to tear down the family cabin for the government’s better purposes. She waded into the receding tides of accumulated life. This was her last visit to the cabin, and Anne Hennert was there to carry away the remnants. She felt in all its accumulated years the cabin’s authority and wondered who would watch over the family when it was gone. On her drive up to northern Wisconsin from Chicago, the car radio talked to her of nothing but Nixon’s resignation. The president would be in the White House packing his clothes, or would Pat see to that? The government was taking his house, too. Not far from the cabin she had come upon a bulldozer like a large yellow toy. Over a hundred miles of the La Croix had been declared a National Wild and Scenic River. The cabins that bordered the river were being destroyed for the greater good. The cabin built by her father after his return from WWI was marked for extinction. For years the river had appeared a complaisant friend to her family, while all the while it lay waiting, and now it was going to have its way while the family would be bereft. Her stay at the cabin would be a lonely one, for her children were scattered. But when have children in one way or another not 1 7 1 returned home? She carried provisions into the cabin, as she had done hundreds of times, and put them on known shelves. The kitchen had both an electric and a wood stove, so you were free to choose your era. There were beer and wine ads on the assorted glasses, as if the family had spent the last half-century carousing. Stuck on the wall, a Land of Lakes butter carton with its Indian maiden seen against an idyllic land of water and trees served as a miniature landscape. The bookshelves displayed years of summer reading: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Pollyanna Grows Up, When Knighthood was in Flower, romantic books that in their persistent innocence, accused. A lean-to was built onto the kitchen and was home to fishing poles, nets, wading boots, and tackle boxes. It had a sink and wooden board for gutting fish and scraping scales. A faint whiff of fish lingered over it all, as if some returning fisherman had just slapped down the day’s catch. The freezer was in the garage. For many summers a milk snake had crawled into the space beneath the freezer and, rubbing against it, left behind a transparent ribbon of discarded skin. There was a cardboard box on one of the garage shelves where in the winter a dozen flying squirrels holed up in a tangle of tails. While you stood there looking at it, the box wiggled as the napping squirrels changed position. When the time came, not only people would be displaced. In the living room of the cabin was a photograph of Anne’s parents , Charles and Carol Hennert, taken shortly after her father built the cabin. The photograph had presence and permanence, qualities missing in recent family photographs. The chairs in the photo on which the Hennerts sat could still be found on one of the porches. 1 7 2 Upstairs the bedrooms were named: Mom and Dad’s Room where her mother and father had slept, and then it was Anne and Kent’s. Tonight Anne would sleep there alone. Her daughter Laura’s room had not been used since Laura’s marriage. Anne’s youngest daughter, Sheila, preferred the screened sleeping porch. At twenty-two Sheila was in the Peace Corps in Mali. Her letters were full of virtuous intent. Sheila planned to bring a school to the girls of Mali, who spent hours pounding millet for porridge. She sent requests asking for money...