Mineral Point (Part 5)

When we came to farm we'd stay in the Barn, which has a misleading name. It looked like a barn but the lower floor was essentially a large garage with concrete floor, room for four cars and a work bench at the back. There was a closet, always locked and with the light on underneath the stairs that lead to the upper level that I think Susan and my dad used to grow pot, but I could never get into that space to know for sure what went on in there. In practical terms the lower floor was a space for the tractor, tools, and shelves of things that might have a use one day. The upper floor was where we would stay, which was a huge open space with bathroom walled off in one corner. It had a full kitchen, a little living room area, and three beds. All of it in the same open space with a vaulted, exposed wood ceiling. 

Late Spring, 2001. The barn in full sunshine, the dark blue Ford Ranger that I drove to Seattle and then back to Wisconsin and then eventually back to Seattle and then Portland and then to the East coast, to Providence for graduate school, where I sold it to my Brother-in-Law's brother and didn't own a vehicle for nearly ten years after that. The light blue truck on the right side of the photo was a manual four-gear GMC that we used as a 'farm truck,' an old beat up machine to drive around the farm without needing to worry about if we hit something or drove into a ditch. Not that that happened. 

About a year before my dad was officially diagnosed with dementia, one weekend, during my sophomore year of college I got a ride back to Madison to visit friends and my mom and on the way back I got dropped off to visit my dad in Mineral Point, about a two hour drive from the small town in Iowa where my college was. It was getting to be late afternoon on Sunday and I needed to get back. My dad had said earlier that he'd drive me back to my campus. When I asked him, reminded him that we needed to get going, he seemed to not entirely remember that he agreed to do this, or maybe he remembered but decided that he didn't want to do the drive, or who knows what he was thinking. In retrospect there are many instances like this, blurry lines between my dad being selfish or reneging on promises and what we'd come to learn was certifiable cognitive decline. That there is a fine line between one's personality and one's mind/body complex, a personality something we are responsible for and the latter, something out of our control, at least according to modern divisions of the material world and our subject position. After acknowledging that I needed to get back, my dad said, well, why don't you take the truck. I said that I didn't know how to drive a stick shift. He said I'd figure it out, gave me a brief lesson, and then I got in the truck and drove, a stressful two hour drive on highway 151 through South-West Wisconsin, across the Mississippi through Dubuque, and down into Iowa.

My point is not so much to paint of picture of me figuring out the stick shift (which I guess wasn't all that hard but was stressful, especially the massive hills that ascend out of Mississippi river valley on the Iowa side, the stop lights on these steep hills and to release of the break while simultaneously engaging the clutch fast enough such that I didn't crash into the cars behind me), but my image of my dad was that of someone who wouldn't just cast someone out to fend on their own. That image is probably not entirely true, even when my dad was in good health, but upon reflection it's hard not to wonder if his odd behavior that afternoon was something of the dementia, something causing him to not 'be himself.' He was not the kind of dad, at least as I knew him, to teach his kids 'tough' lessons, the sink or swim kind of lessons. That wasn't really how he conducted his dad business. He made us work, and I'm grateful for that, but he didn't ever do so in ways where we'd struggle to the point of failure. He'd push us to do things we weren't comfortable doing. And we'd whine about tree planting or whatever farm or building project he enlisted us into, complain about to church or not wanting to go yet again to Farm & Fleet, but there was always a choice it seemed. If something was too much then it was okay not to do it. His behavior that afternoon was odd and distancing. 

My father standing in front of a burn pile of brush and wooden junk. Myself, standing just down the hill from the burn pile, circa 2001. That is not to say that my father was a deep well of compassion at all times. He had a terrible temper at times and raged suddenly if my brother and I weren't listening to him or doing what he asked. This kept us on good behavior for the most part when we were around him. Whether or not our 'good behavior' could have been achieved without a fear of him whacking us on the butt or punishing us with some forced labor task is not something that we could ever know. I can think of three times when his patience ran out, the first when we were young on our way back from a trip to Kentucky to see family. We were close to home, past Chicago, and my brother and I were horsing round in the back of the van. He warned us a couple times and then he pulled over. He went to back of the van where I was laying on top of my brother, doing what I don't know, and he smacked us in the butt. We sat in our seats the rest of the way. Or another time, probably middle school, when my brother and I were out cutting brush with him, he with a chain saw and the two of us tasked with moving the wood bits into piles. It was a bit boring and cold, and we were repeatedly riffing on commercial jingle for a kids game named 'Thin Ice' we had heard on television. The only verse that I can remember us singing, going something like, "If you're sitting in the tub and you need a belly rub / you're on thin ice / you're on thin ice." After about fifteen minutes of our variations and laughing at them to the point that we were neglecting the work, my dad snapped at us, telling us to shut up, that it wasn't funny, to do the work, etc. At that point we were a bit too big to be whapped on the butt but we listened to him and did what he asked. 

The time that I remember most vividly, however, in terms of getting into trouble with my dad was when we were tasked with painting a little shed that he built next to the original farm house, a shed to keep a lawnmower in and other garden tools, something a little closer to the house than the machine shed. We were painting it white with a roller and brush, my brother and I, in the summer, it was hot and sunny. I might have been eight, my brother ten. Bored with the monotony of painting (though ironically, or maybe fittingly, later in my life I would come to like painting and did it as my primary income source for a number of years after college and then after graduate school), bored with the monotony of painting I was goofing around and rolled some paint onto the low hanging roof of the shed which I though was funny at the time, an eight year old sense of humor. My dad had come out to see how we were doing and he saw the paint on the roof and became furious. I remember him saying to me, asking me, "Do you think this is funny? Do you think this is a joke?" I guess those were rhetorical questions but I remember him yelling something about not taking the work seriously which was something that I thought about a lot when I was a kid, how mad he got in that particular instance. The idea that I was not someone to depend on, to rely on for a serious task. Regardless, I think eight years old is too young to paint things, where painting is partly about making a judgment on and an investment in what looks good and I did not care about how that shed looked when I was eight year old. He removed me from the task and I think my brother finished it on his own.