I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes

Chapter Two: Biosphere

t w o Biosphere where i grew up, the mississippi river divides minneapolis from St. Paul; lower down in Lake City, where my great-great-grandfather Patrick and his wife Nora are buried, the river separates Minnesota from Wisconsin; on a map, it cuts the whole country in two. The Mississippi takesitsrisefromLakeItascainnorthernMinnesota,anunpromisingbeginning , and then broadens and winds its way to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In imagination and memory, it just keeps rolling along. Patrick and Nora left Ennis in County Clare, Ireland, in either 1844 or 1845 and settled for some twenty years near Perth, Ontario, before descending to Lake City, where they are located by the U.S. Census of 1870. My great-grandfather Austin Joseph also lived in Lake City following his marriage to Mary Connell in Louisville, but the family moved on to Minneapolis after a spell of farming near De Graff, Minnesota, one of the communities founded by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul in order to get the Irish out of the wicked cities and back to the land where they belong . (I owe this genealogical lore to my brother Steve.) Maurice Patrick, my grandfather on my father’s side, was successful in both business and politics in Minneapolis. My mother said of him that he was the nicest man she ever knew. He died the year I was born. My 5 6 Biosphere father, another Austin—certain names recur in the family with the occasional antic departure like my own—married Vivian Rush in 1926. Nine of their children survived, and indeed all are still living as I write. During World War II, my father built tankers in Chaska with Cargill Corporation and once traveled on a completed vessel down the river to NewOrleans.WhenIenlistedintheMarineCorpsin1946,itwasatossup whether one was sent to San Diego or Parris Island for boot camp. My brother Ray had been sent to North Carolina. I was sent to San Diego. The Twin Cities are both east and west of the river, and the Marine Corps vacillated on considering recruits from there western or eastern. Wherever I have gone, wherever I have lived, the Mississippi has dominated the country of my mind. Whenever I reread Huckleberry Finn, which is almost every year, it is like going home, although Huck’s is the only raft I have ever been on. The evocation of the antebellum river is only part of the attraction. Life on the Mississippi is far more evocative of those times. Mark Twain lived most of his life away from his town of origin, and when he did return to Hannibal , Missouri, late in life, he seemed ill at ease in a present that obscured the past. When I saw that little town on the western bank of the Mississippi for the first time, on my way to a stint as visiting professor at Truman State in Missouri, I could understand why Mark Twain went back there only once, with ambiguous results. Maybe it was more than merely the passage of time, but the river inhabits the innocence of childhood and can seem to mock tragic old age. Twain had lost his wife and daughter and seemed unable to stave off the despair that not even suits of ice-cream white could diminish. When I was a boy, the Mississippi at first seemed a tributary of Minnehaha Creek, which starts in Lake Minnetonka and runs through Minneapolistothefamousfallsandontotheriver .Lakeof theIsles,LakeCalhoun , Lake Harriet, Lake Nokomis, Lake Hiawatha, and others are linked by the creek, making a vast park of half of Minneapolis. My grandfather had been an alderman when the great system of parks was formed and Minnehaha Creek conceded eminent domain. Just below our street, the creek flowed through what seemed like a vast meadow, though we lived in the heart of the city. There were tennis courts, and in the evening my father practiced iron shots along the creek. My brother Maurice fell off the footbridge when he was only a toddler and floated hundreds of yards, as blissful as Ophelia, before he was fished out. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook. . . . ” I already had an image for those words when I first read them, as if Hamlet’s beloved had drifted down Minnehaha Creek. A replica of Longfellow’s house, a branch of the public library, overlooked a skating rink just above the falls. It has been said that you...