TOMAHAWK: SUMMER 1984
A few months after my visit to the apartment over the hardware store, it was a hot and humid Midwestern summer, and my two siblings and I were at a cabin on a lake in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, with Mom and Don, who had started hanging around a lot more.1 It was much cooler up there in the woods of Northern Wisconsin, and it rained almost the whole time we were there. I remember constantly having to go inside the warm little lamp-lit cabin to dry off. After fishing, after walking in the woods, after sitting out on the crooked old pier that stuck out into the lake like an arthritic finger—we always found ourselves back inside, drying off with the stiff, bleach-scented cabin towels and changing clothes and drinking hot chocolate. I recall having a blast with it all—probably annoying the hell out of everyone with that exuberant energy that now gets all bottled up inside and contributes to my ever-escalating adult psychoses. I also recall, however, that Jeni was miserable, whining at Mom about every last thing that happened.
Jeni would have been around thirteen years old then, and I feel like I can only know the teenaged Jeni from the few old pictures I have: her shoulder-length, reddish blonde hair and bangs framing her round, pretty face and smiling eyes; the frilly, button-down shirts and high-waisted blue jeans pulled up over her big teenaged butt; always white sneakers. She had lots of freckles, too, just like Jim, who was two years younger than her. Jim was a small boy. Skinny. He usually wore t-shirts that were too big for him—often bright gold Green Bay Packers t-shirts, or those classic stripy ‘70s t-shirts—and he tucked them into his flared blue jeans with his big brown belt. He had an adorable buck-toothed smile, too. And he had a reddish-brown bowl cut, the bangs of which came down to rest on the top of his thick, plastic-framed glasses.
I also had thick, plastic-framed glasses, and they looked even more ridiculous on me because of how young I was. I was seven years younger than Jim, and I was often mistaken for what people would rather insensitively refer to as a “slow child.” I was pretty damned adorable, but I think that “slow child” comment was in reference to my huge head, my open-mouthed smile, and the fact that my eyes kind of pointed in different directions for a while. (I had surgery to correct my crossed-eyes right after I was born, but it really took ‘em a while to straighten out completely).
Anyway, I’m not just pulling those images from memory, I’m actually sitting here looking at a picture of the three of us at that cabin on that very same trip that I’m talking about. And we all look happy enough in the picture—Jeni’s standing between Jim and I, and her arms are draped over our shoulders, and we’re all smiling stupidly and looking off in different directions. But those smiles aside, I remember very clearly that Jeni was really pitching a fit in the cabin up in Tomahawk for those couple of weeks, and Jim soon grew pretty cranky, as well, but he wasn’t being vocal about it like Jeni was—he was quietly pacing around the grounds and looking genuinely sad.
I also remember finding it really strange that instead of just telling them both to be quiet and behave, Mom was getting really emotional about their little tantrums. Soon she started crying, as well, and then one night when we were all crying and complaining and really getting into the spirit of the whole thing, Don came storming in from the rain with his fishing pole in his hand, yelling at us all to shut our mouths and respect our mother—we were supposed to be on vacation, after all. None of us had ever seen him yell before, and it was pretty strange.
I had no idea what was going on.
Late that same night, I was lying on the bumpy fold-out couch bed between Jim and Jeni, listening to the bugs chatter in the dark woods outside and trying to fall asleep, when Don came creeping out of the bedroom in his Fruit of the Loom briefs and his bathrobe, and he knelt next to the bed.
“Jim,” he whispered. Jim stirred and woke, turning away from me, towards Don. I rolled over and pressed my head against his warm back as Don put his big hand on his shoulder. “Hey buddy. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Jim’s little voice said, “Okay,” in the dark night air. Then Don whispered, “Okay. See you tomorrow,” and he patted Jim on the back, then went back into the bedroom and closed the door.
It wasn’t long after that trip to the cabin on the lake when Don became the newest member of our family. Jackie Duffy was now Jackie Jevne, and the Duffy kids all of a sudden had new grandparents that lived right there in town—Grandpa and Grandma Jevne, right there on Maple Avenue—and we moved into a big hundred year-old stucco-sided house only about six blocks away from our old house that Don moved all of our furniture into and immediately started fixing up, pretty much all on his own.
The reason Jeni had pitched a fit at the cabin was because Don had taken Mom out on a row boat with him, out on the lake in the rain, and asked for her hand in marriage. It was all very romantic, and the two of them were most definitely in love, but Jack Duffy was still up there in Wisconsin somewhere, and that pissed my sister off.
Tomahawk occupies an interesting place in my memory. That trip was the first of many that we took up to that little northern Wisconsin town, planted right up there in the middle of the state on the Wisconsin River. We rented a cabin up there every summer for a while. What I remember more than anything isn’t the town itself—the town is nothing to sniff at; just a drab little Midwestern town with a Main Street, a post office, a city hall/police station, and a high school. If you look at any history of the place, chance are it will say that the area was an uninhabited wilderness until the loggers moved in in the late 1800s. But the whole area is surrounded by water—the Wisconsin River splits and runs west out into the Spirit River Flowage and north into Lake Mohawksin, which runs east out to Lake Alice and north up around Halfmoon Lake and Clear Lake to Lake Nokomis. The water is what I remember—the feeling I would get as a little kid, exploring all that water in a rowboat with Don, the creaking of the oars as we floated through the reeds, looking for a good place to catch a fish for dinner. You can take a boat to pretty much any one of those spots that you want to, and you know that the Ojibwa people who lived there for hundreds of years before the loggers moved in probably had quite a civilization built along the shoreline. Nowadays, a lot of upper middle class folks have big, garish cabins along the same shoreline, with speedboats and jet skis tethered to piers just outside their back doors. There are plenty of lower middle-class people up there, too, though—real classic American working stiffs—and a lot of them own several dingy, quaint little cabins along the shore that they rent out in the summer to make ends meet. You can get a pretty good deal on those cabins, and those cabins are where we always stayed. ↩︎
