A couple of
weeks ago, I attended a sesquicentennial meeting and the question arose: what is quintessentially “Thomson?” Well, the term “quintessentially” did
not actually arise, but “What does Thomson mean to you?” evoked a variety of
responses. For some, it was watermelons or the old red brick high school. To
others it meant the Depot, or sandburrs, maybe McGinnis’ produce stand. Or the river.
I grew up
in the West End, before Potter’s Road became a causeway, before the road was
paved and a guard shack stood sentinel.
Potter’s drew us like a magnet to the wonders of the sloughs, the
waterlily choked ponds, the old dump.
No one went
down there much except the Potters:
Bess, Frank and Ora, Hick and Glen; and Don Hall, whose cabin sailed off
for the Gulf of Mexico in the Flood of ‘65. A few local fishermen were regulars. Beano and Billy Groharing, my Mom and
Mary Simpson were down there nearly every day.
We rode our
fat-tired bicycles down past Mr. Dimmick’s house, and it was a hard ride in
that sand; sometimes we had to get off and walk. Catalpas, mulberry trees and black locusts canopied the
road, and wild grapevines were entwined from treetop to treetop. We ate all the
raspberries we could find, and the air was filled with apple blossoms and the acrid
odor of hedge apples from the osage trees.
For a time
we had a leaky rowboat, and we rode down to Potter’s with the big oars across
our handlebars to spend the day drifting around the backwaters. My great pal in neighborhood adventures
was Billy Groharing. His dad,
Beano, was the school custodian, and his dog Sandy was a fixture on the
playground. Sandy always came with
us and had a high old time chasing rats at the dump. I dreaded seeing rats, but Sandy found them great
sport. We’d be down there all day,
poking around, hunting arrowheads and pottery, maybe fishing or trying to spear
frogs. Be home when the
streetlights came on, that was the rule.
My Uncle Harry Diehl had convinced Billy that the red lights across the
river were the eyes of giant muskrats that populated the sloughs. So Billy didn’t really want to stay
down there too late anyway.
We fished
off the road, my folks, Grandpa Bristol and us kids, for crappies and perch and
bluegills. Mary Jo and I used cane
poles with no reels, and those old red and white bobbers. My Dad would go over to Gus
Roggendorf’s for a pail of minnies scooped out of a big galvanized tub. We dug
our own worms, mostly. We’d install Grandpa in a lawn chair, safari hat pulled
down over his eyes. My sister and
I jumped around on the logs and generally disturbed the fish. The ones we did
manage to catch were strung on a stringer and left in the shallow water to
languish, their golden underbellies and jeweled scales flashing under the water
like treasure.
As we got
older, my Mom and Roberta Sikkema sponsored a bird-watching 4-H club, the
Driftwoods, and we spent a lot of time down at Potter’s on bird watching
expeditions. Marilyn Dittmar and Edith Cate helped herd us girls around for
picnics. The Upper Mississippi
Flyway was a bird-watcher’s dream all the year round. I learned to drive on Potter’s Road, taking my Mom out at
dawn to watch birds. We drank coffee out of a thermos, with binoculars at the
ready. Back then you could drive
east past Frank & Ora Potter’s place and come out by the railroad tracks.
I drive
down there now and look out over the riprap, the ancient Woodland mounds
exposed, roads paved and camping spots carved out of the undergrowth. If it’s dusk and I look real hard, I
can still see Hick and Glen’s place, the ghost buildings shadows in the fading
light and the wood smoke of the campfires. Not so many mosquitoes now, lots of
folks I don’t know; folks who won’t ever realize they are camped on Shear’s
Point, where we used to sit with our mulberry-stained feet in the sand, never
imagining it would be any different.
No comments:
Post a Comment