I just didn’t mention to my mother that visits to Hoeschler’s cottage inevitably involved ripping across the river in a jet boat filled with teenagers screaming at the driver to go faster. One New Year’s Eve, I did stop at home shortly before midnight to ask my mother if I could go skating on the lagoon. She passed the responsibility for this decision to my father who had just worried out loud about my whereabouts and declared that I should be home. He told me to have a good time: he had grown up in La Crosse, too. Three high school classmates lost their contests with the river. No longer able to stand working on their senior research papers in the public library on one of the first warm spring evenings, they took a skiff out into one of the Mississippi’s many swamps. The search for their bodies went on endlessly. During that time, Mr. Wheelock, my social studies teacher, insisted on chronicling the events as they unfolded. “Well, they found a boot today,” he would say and I would try to avoid thinking about the empty chair right behind me where one of the missing boys, Bill Kreutz, had sat. I believed the rumor going around school that none of the boys knew how to swim even though it made no sense: our high school required everyone to take swimming classes once a week. And I resented Mr. Wheelock’s making me so uncomfortable by hovering over these deaths. I barely knew Bill Kreutz and I had never questioned my ability to handle the Mississippi; I refused to start at the cusp of my graduation from Central High. I found the people along the Mississippi’s banks much more frightening. The social hierarchies that the Campus School tried to exclude defined La Crosse’s social life both inside and outside the high school. In the town itself, a family signaled its rise by buying a house that once belonged to a family important enough to have its name permanently attached to the building, like the storied Funk house with its pool, unused since someone drowned in it, and its playhouse with running water and electric lights. Because of her history as a Chicagoan, my mother found these unspoken social mores bewildering. She repeatedly confused a grocery store clerk with a woman from La Crosse’s elite and would ask one about the wellbeing of people related to the other. Mrs. Schams, who cleaned for us, told how when she served at a party my mother attended, as she arrived with her tray at my mother’s side, my mother put her arm around her and said, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Hilda Schams” and introduced her to those gathered around her, forcing them to stop eating and drinking long enough to acknowledge Mrs. Schams’ importance. My mother’s faux pas did not bother my father, a relaxed La Crosse native. Indeed, my family frequently spent Sunday mornings sitting around the breakfast table laughing as someone read aloud pretentious claims made about local people in The La Crosse Tribune. At Central High, I was on my own. I did have the company of the same friends I’d known and loved since grade school and, at the time, considered myself comfortable with my status as a nerd. Despite my illusions of self-assurance, I must have felt deeply uneasy. I slouched to make myself shorter, I squinted so I could pretend I didn’t need glasses and when reporting my SAT scores, I lowered them. Graduation Day, I asked my mother if I could skip the ceremony because I worried about tripping as I made my way up the steps and across the stage in my new high heels. She not only insisted that I attend, afterwards, she said that she felt ashamed of me as she watched a boy in my class with an uncooperative leg
struggle up the steps. And when I returned to my 10th high school reunion, I realized that if I had stayed in La Crosse, I never would have had the confidence to do anything simply because whatever talents I had bore so little resemblance to what the people there valued. So, the social structure along the banks of the river could kill more mercilessly than the Mississippi. But my friends all did just fine. At the end of the summer after high school graduation, we held hands and sang “For Auld Lane Syne” while standing around a bonfire on the lawn at Ann’s cabin with that unacknowledged Mississippi water pushing against the shore. And then we went off to explore and settle into a multitude of places and situations. One flew B-52s in Vietnam; one taught school in Alaska; some people traveled to Africa in the Peace Corps; one became a dentist in Hong Kong; another lived in both Brussels and Tokyo; another went to Japan and fell so in love with Japanese tea huts that she filled her Ohio yard with them. After all, we could all handle the Mississippi; how could anything else stop us? Last summer I returned to La Crosse for my high school reunion. The first evening a fellow Campus School alum had a grade school reunion at his house; we all had a terrific time catching on decades of living. But the next day the high school portion of the reunion began. I went to a picnic searching for a friend and found only former cheerleaders, athletes, their buddies and admirers; we conversed with all the enthusiasm of someone encountering a bill collector. It took me ten minutes to realize that Patti would never appear at the picnic and twenty-two minutes to flee. The cool kids clearly still dominated our class, even though a couple have spent time in the penitentiary. At the dinner that night, when people circulated, I sat with a friend’s husband whose Parkinson’s made it hard for him to participate. I left the banquet as soon as the cheers and speeches stopped. The next day I had signed up for a brunch on a boat that would travel down the river: the thought of being trapped somewhere surrounded by condescending cool kids terrified me. My friend Patti, the only person from “my group” who would also attend, insisted on picking me up for fear that I simply wouldn’t show. We wound up at a table with kind and genuine classmates we hadn’t hung out with in high school. And we had real conversations. One told about the terror of arriving at a home leveled by a tornado and finding his wife holding only one of this two children and then of his relief at learning that the other child, whom he called, “my Annie,” was safe at a neighbor’s. A couple told of how lucky they felt to find each other and complained of people’s insensitivity to the trials of isolation. And the fellow my mother had admired at our graduation talked animatedly about how he loved living in Washington, D.C. When the talk slowed, I noticed cheerleaders and athletes settled at a nearby table. But I escaped. I followed my mother’s hero up the steps to the boat deck, where he looked around at the Mississippi, held out his arms and said, “What could be more beautiful than this?” The rest of our table trailed him, too, and Patti called out, “Here we are Mark!” to a friend making a video so that he’d take pictures of us laughing against the backdrop of the river and bluffs. Mark threatened to put the results on YouTube and we all laughed hard again. All the while, we moved forward on the Mississippi, past bluff after bluff after bluff thick with trees, savoring the kindness, courage and loveliness that would continue to nourish us, whether or not we realized it. 33