Mississippi memories

Mississippi memories
There’s no place like home
by Ann Morrison

I remember it as if it were yesterday: July, 1971, and Mom reaches out the back door, pulls the mail out of the black tin mailbox, and says, “You’ve got a postcard, Ann.”

At nine years old, this was a big deal. I never got mail, except from an Arizona cousin I corresponded regularly with, and she never sent postcards. I took the card from my mother’s hand and stared at a picture of Mt. Rushmore, where my neighbor Jody York was—out West, camping with her family.

When I turned the card over and read, my stomach roiled with pea-green envy. How I wanted to go somewhere “out West.” How I wanted to go “camping,” a thing other families always seemed to do, but ours never got to.

But at that time, my family, along with the Hank and Elaine Hendrickson family, owned a cottage on the Mississippi, about a mile north of Ferryville, so I already knew the tri-fold automatic response to begging for a camping vacation like all the “nice” families seemed go on—the kind of families who drove station wagons, never swore, smoked or drank, and were members of an actual church.

The tri-fold answer was thus: A. “We have the cottage. We don’t need to go on a vacation. People come from all over the world just to get a look at the Mississippi River.” That answer I didn’t quite buy. But answers B and C were irrefutable. Answer B came from my father: “I spent five years of my life in a tent in the Pacific during World War II, and I’ll be damned if I do it again for a vacation.” Yeah, I could see that point. And then answer C came from my mom: “You can’t even make it down to the river (Mississippi) without having to get out of the car to vomit, so how do you think you’ll make it the whole way to North Dakota?”

This was true as well—for good reason. My father worked as a rural mail carrier every summer, taking over his friend Gordon Bishop’s rural route. Gordon was the lieutenant colonel in charge of summer military training at what was at that time called Camp McCoy, in Tomah. Our car’s seats were always upholstered with slick vinyl, because the ink the Broadcaster paper used at the time rubbed off on anything it touched. The car always held an odor of newspaper ink, despite the fact that my father was borderline obsessive-compulsive in his attempts to Windex it off. In addition to this my mother sported a very tall bouffant hairdo, which required quarts of Aqua-net hairspray to stay put, and smoked Winston cigarettes. With four kids in our family, the big kids, or “long-legged hounds,” as my mother called them, were wedged in the back seat. I was relegated to the spot between Mom and Dad, in the middle of the front bench seat. I was small and couldn’t see out the windshield. The very thought almost makes me ill to this day: Winding down County Trunk C to Ferryville, sticking to the vinyl, smelling the ink, the hairspray, the Winstons, and one very smelly old cheese factory that was then located on C, and must have just dumped their whey in the creek. We used to call it “Stink Valley.”

But despite the odiferous trip to the river—the almost 20 miles was quite a long ways to us—we never failed to have fun once we arrived at the cottage. It had no phone and the grownups insisted there would be no television set, as the wraparound, screened- in porch offered a look onto real life, the Mississippi River. There was a “swing” radio station located in Waukon, Iowa, that played background music for the grownups..

Although we were only allowed to climb the bluff behind the cottage during the month of May, before the rattlesnakes came out, many discoveries were made on that hill: an old foundation of a settlers’ cottage; several old gravestones; columbine (honeysuckle) that, if you bit it, tasted like honey; jack in the pulpits; trillium; and of course the magnificent view. The climb was steep, but we were young, fit and fearless; we were up for it. We were also allowed to go down to the shore of the river, across Highway 35 and the three lines of railroad tracks. My father and Hank had nabbed an enormous wooden staircase from the old red brick school building when they tore it down (formerly located on the northwest corner of what is now the Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School playground), and had somehow hauled it to the river to set upon the riprap leading down to the wooden dock they had built and floated upon air-filled oil drums. A floating dock, unlike a fixed dock, goes up and down with the depth of the river.

“Do we own this land, Dad?” I once asked him. His answer was, “Everybody owns the Mississippi River.” I don’t think such views hold today. All the houseboats seem to have been wiped out, and a homemade dock would surely get some government official’s nose out of joint.

We ran freely, though, along the river and the tracks, and our parents never heard about the time my brother Mark dove from a parked boxcar and swooped me (age 5) from the path of an approaching train, just in the nick of time.

“Don’t tell Mom or Dad,” he said, and I wasn’t about to. Confessing to such foolishness would never lead to anything good—a view I hold unto this day! Every Sunday we’d hop in the car to Battle Island, between Victory and De Soto, with the turquoise and white Alumacraft boat with its Mercury 55-horsepower outboard motor in tow. My father’s cousin Myrtle Axeland and her husband, Blaine, ran the concession stand at Battle Island next to the dock where we launched our boat. Mary Hendrickson and I bought onion and garlic potato chips and a Mr. Freeze there every Sunday. We even had two dolls, one named Onion and the other Garlic. They spoke with low gruff voices and never did anything good.

The trip across the water was always to the “Viroqua” beach, as it was known then. You know, all of us Viroqua people can’t stand not to be in each other’s company for more than a day, so the whole group would gather at that one beach each Sunday and have a blast. I taught a lot of my friends how to water-ski over the years, and I can still ski, albeit on two skis, not just one anymore. No performing in any Tommy Bartlett shows in my future, even if they do fix Lake Delton.

One of my fondest cottage memories, though, and there are many, is of the Friday when my sisters Kay and Sara, my friend Amy (Jeffery) Kolden, and I rode our bicycles the entire 20 miles to the cottage. That was back when the country stores were still in operation so we had targeted resting points along the way. The first stop was the Liberty Pole store. We had taken the back roads there, as we didn’t want to dodge traffic on Highway 14 or 27. My mother had a bit of a phobia about us getting run over—also about hanging an arm out the window of a car: “Your arm will get ripped off by a mailbox!” Maybe when she was growing up, but by our time, the mailboxes were yards away from ripping-off distance. Our second stop was at the Fargo store, the third at Rising Sun. By then we were getting a little pooped out and I remember singing songs and drinking orange pop on the Finley Store’s front step. After Rising Sun came the long haul to Ferryville. Kay and Sara had 10-speed bikes, but Amy and I were still on little-kid banana-seat, butterfly-handlebar bikes. But it was mostly downhill from there. In one valley, however, Amy, riding shotgun, passed all three of us, legs pedaling so fast they were a blur, up a knoll with a snapping farm dog at her heels. I never saw anyone ride a bike so fast in my life!

But we made to Ferryville in one piece and stopped at the Johnston Grocery store, drank some more pop, rode the last mile to the cottage, and laughed ’til our sides hurt, playing the thrills and spills game of Scrabble. We were all pretty much study geeks, to tell the truth, and were good at the game. Sara almost blew the cottage up trying to light the kerosene stove, which thank goodness didn’t light. But other than that, as they used to say in the Broadcaster’s village columns, a good time was had by all. The bikes were hauled back to Viroqua in the boat, so we got to ride home in the car.

My parents are gone now, but when I ran into Elaine Hendrickson the other day, she remarked, “Those were some of the most fun times of our lives.” And I’d have to agree. Who needed Mount Rushmore?

Ann works as a long-term crisis counselor for Lutheran Social Services and has a landscaping business, Designscapes.