Leave Those Feet at the Door
Washington Island has always been the keeper of all things precious for me. The Island has remained virtually unchanged in its appearance since I was a child, but the feelings it has always evoked in me have spanned my entire range of emotions. I have felt serenity, anger, peace and a sense of coming home on the seven square mile block of land.
My first memories of the Island began when I was just a small child. While I was born on the Island in Orville Wylie’s home, we moved away when I was just a baby. However, my grandparents remained in their Island home and my mother would ship her brood back up to the Island each summer when she was ready to pop out another one of my brothers (each of the three were born in July). This was no hardship for any of us kids; we loved the Island.
My grandma, Nanny, was the keeper of order. She fed us, clothed us and warned us with the direst warning, to never come into the house “with those feet”. Those feet had spent the day outdoors barefoot wandering the woods that surrounded their house. When a day’s worth of dust and maple sap had collected onto the bottom of our feet, she’d greet us in the front yard with a large metal washtub and begin the nightly ritual of washing our feet. The woman had no mercy. She would torture each one of us with a bar of soap and a firm hand over and over our ankles, arches and “filthy” toes. If you wiggled and giggled, she’d give you an extra dose of torture before finally releasing you to the waiting towel.
While my grandma was the keeper of order, my grandpa, Papa, was the commander of fun. My grandpa had the bluest of eyes and they would dance and twinkle as he sang and regaled us with stories and bits of knowledge he had collected over the years. He built us a small log cabin in the woods behind the house and we would stuff leaves between the logs to keep out the cold and wild creatures. My sisters and I played house for hours in our log cabin in the woods while Papa would occasionally drop by to encourage us to listen to the whistle of this bird or that.
Papa would take us for walks in the woods and would quiz us on which tree would produce the small pointy leaf and which had the yellow leaf with a green spine. We’d walk over and around large tree trunks that had fallen during some great storm and would sometimes gracefully tiptoe on top of it like a gymnast’s balance beam. He’d would tell us about berries and mushrooms and would at times “hush” us and whisper, “Listen, girls, just listen.” We would strain our little ears and look at our Papa with such adoration until he shared with us what it was that we were listening to.
After a hard day of play, we’d return to the house for supper. My grandma cooked on a wood stove up until I was in high school and she could cook like no other. Our dinners would often consist of the day’s catch of lake perch, bread right from the oven and sauce. My mouth waters to this day when I think of Nanny’s “sauce”. We’d have our choice between cherry or raspberry sauce.
My memories are tinged with my grandparent’s crank phone with three shorts and a long designating an incoming call for the Jepsen’s. I think of rides to the dump in my grandpa’s telephone truck (he was “the” telephone guy on the Island) where we would walk on top of piles of discarded furniture, toys and other treasures until we found the needle in the haystack that would made our day. Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, Bill Anderson – all great country artists that would sing out their heartache into my grandparent’s yard through the large outdoor speakers Papa mounted on the front of the house. Maple syrup production, archery lessons, Papa tap dancing, a wringer washing machine and clothes hung on the line – all lessons taught by those professors of life – Nanny and Papa.
My youngest brother was born in 1965 when I was eleven. My guess is that may have been one of the last years that we spent any great amount of our summer time on the Island. Years to follow were filled with dread of days on the Island when my busy teenager life craved to be home partying with my friends rather than listening to that godawful country music or taking time to “hush” to listen to whatever it was making noise in the woods. The Island magic that was my childhood did not have a place in my hormone-filled adolescence.
My Papa was diagnosed with Alzeimer’s when I was in my early 20’s and he was in his mid-60’s. He could still regale us with the stories of his Coast Guard days and tap out a dance with a twinkle in his eyes, but he could not recognize me. My Nanny, bless her soul, lived until the ripe old age of 89 and then just closed her eyes one night and left us without making a fuss or a bother. Uff dah, Nanny, we thought you’d live forever.
A few years ago, I forced my husband to join me on a trip to the Island. We departed the ferry boat and made our way toward Gasoline Town Road. My husband looked at me and earnestly said, “I don’t get it. Why do you love this place? What do you see here that I don’t see?” My eyes teared up and I said, “I see the Three Bears House in the woods. I see a metal washtub waiting for a good foot washing. I see Nanny and Papa waltzing on their front yard to Skeeter Davis. I see my roots.”
My life has been richer for those summers I spent on Washington Island.
Her Hands
Her hands were veined like a rooted forest.
They held a young Coast Guard man’s hand in marriage in 1937. They held four babies. They wiped her own tears over the losses of an infant son, her husband of 50 plus years, and two more adult children taken before her. They held grandbabies and great grandbabies.
They held a cookbook, measuring spoons, buttermilk and a spatula with which to flip her infamous pancakes. They held countless numbers of cribbage hands.
They held our hearts.
Her hands were veined like a rooted forest and when you looked up from them you could see the blue sky in her eyes.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
I was 14, going on 15 during the summer of 1971. I had been through, what I estimated, was enough over the last two years and I was planning to enjoy that summer hanging with my friends at the beach and the Youth Club.
My mom had married my new “dad” two years earlier and had displaced our entire family from a medium-sized town to a very small town. I left all my friends and my social status behind to go to this new town where I was sure no one even liked me the first year as I went from middle school in my former city back to grade school in this new one. Shy and angry, I had no friends for those final months of “grade school” and throughout the summer. I had no friends until I got to high school when I finally found myself surrounded by a misfit group of girls from both the Lutheran and Catholic grade schools merged now into public high school. My clan now numbered seven strong including me and we were going to be a force to be reckoned with.
That was until the big announcement. My parents summonsed my two sisters and three brothers into the living room to declare that we would be building a “summer” home on a piece of property on Washington Island and would be spending a good part of our summer living in a tent on the property. My brothers, aged 6-11, whooped and hollered and jumped up and down like the best thing ever was about to occur. My sisters and I, aged 12-16, stared holes into our parents’ foreheads right before we all turned on the water works.
“This is our summer, too,” Debbie declared. “I’m not going!
“I’m not going if Debbie doesn’t have to go,” I sobbed.
“Me neither,” pouted Tammy.
“Girls,” my mother warned. “You love the Island and you’ll love his great family adventure!”
Her eyes bored into ours just begging us to go with the flow. But we couldn’t. We were teenagers being displaced and forced into a labor camp for what seemed like the rest of our lives. We cried. We whined. We even tried to negotiate better terms of the deal with time off for good behavior (which we were definitely not displaying), but my stepdad laid down the law and told us to pack as the bus was pulling out of the station bright and early the next morning.
The day of doom began shortly after the sun rose as Wally and Donna loaded their construction team into the family Ford station wagon. My parents, along with my 10-month old baby sister took the front seat while the three moping teens grabbed the back seat – both older girls claiming a window which left the middle for Tammy. My 11-year old brother Jerry stood in front of her and leaned over the front seat from the back while the two younger boys were stuffed into the way back with the luggage and tools. We were off.
The hour and a half drive flew by in an icy silence broken only by an occasional coo from the baby or a sock and a howl from one of the boys in the back of the car. My stepdad only had to threaten to stop the car a handful of times to get to the bottom of the hitting and howling in the back before the boys just dozed off a couple of miles outside of Fish Creek and woke when we hit the ferry dock.
We boarded the ferry and while us kids headed up to the deck, my mom stayed in the car with my little sister while my stepdad walked into the pilot house with the traditional six pack of beer. The ride over was smooth as we passed the Plum Island Coast Guard station, and we soon saw the big white buoy which welcomed all visitors traversing the Island via the Washington Island Ferry Line.
While the sisters were still in a mood, we all began to wave out the window when we saw my grandpa waiting for us with his old telephone truck as we got off the boat. My grandpa was the best thing about Washington Island and the fact that he met us at the boat was a bonus. My stepdad pulled the car over and we all piled out of the car and threw ourselves at my grandpa.
“Whoa Nellie,” my grandpa laughed. “One grandkid at a time! It seems I might have a little passenger room here in the truck if anyone wants to pile in.”
We all piled in the back of the truck and sat on the floor next to the old glass telephone insulators and rolls of wires which were carefully tucked here and there in the truck. Those bit and pieces of telephone supplies had been obsolete for several years now along with my grandpa’s services, but he continued to use the truck and have his supplies ready “just in case”. We laughed as we swayed back and forth as Papa drove the curvy road from the ferry to town. Papa would wave at everyone who passed by him and occasionally would honk the horn as he passed a hay wagon or tractor on the road.
Ten minutes later we pulled into a dirt driveway just through a field past my grandparents’ home. My parents had already pulled in and my dad was unloading a large tent from the top of the station wagon. He threw it down and dragged it to a flat spot a short distance away from a basement foundation.
“Let’s get this up so we can unload the car,” my stepdad hollered.
“This is it?” I asked my mom. “This is where I have to live for the rest of this summer?”
My mom just looked at me and put her finger in front of her lips.
“Not another word,” she whispered as she handed me my little sister.
The grownups proceeded to assemble a double long tent that was apparently going to house nine of us for the better part of the summer. Once up, we were invited in with our sleeping bags and told where we were to roll our bags out. The left side of the tent was my parents’ “room”. They would get the entire left side along with my little sister, Dawn. The three boys were instructed to unroll their bags just inside the door while my sisters and I unrolled our bags under the screen window on the right side of the tent. Debbie and I each took a wall while Tammy got the middle. A laundry basket of clean clothes was placed near each group’s sleeping space with a garbage bag alongside for the dirty laundry. Home, sweet home.
My stepdad then lined up his construction team and handed each of us a nail apron and a hammer. Today’s mission was to put sheets of subfloor on top of the foundation and floor joists and nail it all down. He and my grandpa oversaw placing the boards down. Our job was to nail. The two men split the team into two groups – girls vs. boys – and showed us how to use a hammer without hurting ourselves. My stepdad was foreman of the boys. My grandpa took the girls.
They placed and we hammered until my grandma stopped by with a big pitcher of lemonade and a pile of cookies. We slid our hammers into the hammer pockets in our aprons and jumped off the foundation toward our reward. While we guzzled lemonade, we compared throbbing fingers from hammering gone wrong. We picked at slivers that were embedded in our fingertips and the sides of our hands. We looked for blisters – there had to be blisters – after all that abuse to our hands. And, we looked at each other’s hot and flushed faces and wondered when this day was going to end.
My stepdad reconvened his troops and set to address us.
“You’ve got a choice for the rest of the day. You can stay here with me and continue to hammer the nails, or you can hop in Papa’s truck and head down to Schoolhouse Beach until supper! Who’s with me?”
We barely heard him finish his orders as we ran toward Papa’s truck.
An hour of swimming and we once again piled into Papa’s truck to return. Rather than take us to the construction site, Papa drove right by and took us to his house. My mom and grandma were waiting for us in the yard with a pile of towels and clean clothes. Supper was on the stove and we sat around in webbed lawn chairs until it was time to eat. Day one was nearly in the books. Tomorrow promised to be even more exciting as we were going to start putting up walls.
If the days seemed long, the nights seemed even longer. It was summer in Wisconsin which meant heat and humidity. Our bodies stuck to one another as we flipped and flopped during the night. We are all crammed into that tent along with a barrage of flies and mosquitoes. My brothers, being brothers, had nightly farting contests much to our dismay. My stepdad, after a much-needed belly full of beer after dealing all day with a construction crew of six kids, snored like a lumberjack. It was as close to Nirvana as a teenage girl could get.
Our routine was set. We would get up each morning and walk the path over to Nanny and Papa’s for breakfast. As soon as our bellies were filled, we trounced through the field and woods back to the construction site, put on our nail belts and waited for the day’s orders. We worked until late morning and then made the journey to my grandma’s for lunch. We would head back to the project and work until my grandpa declared it quitting time and loaded us in the telephone truck to go for a swim. Swimming, supper, snoring and then back at it.
We stopped complaining about being on the Island because it would do no good, but we dreamed about the fun our friends were having without us.
My stepdad’s vacation was coming to an end and after two weeks of Island time, we were heading home. The ride home seemed to take days, and once there, my sister and I raced into the house to get to the phone first. It was a summer Sunday night and something had to be happening!
I went to the Youth Club and Debbie went God knows where. She was a bit more on the wild side so our social circles didn’t clash much. I spent the night complaining about the last two weeks and catching up who was dating whom and who was grounded and for what. Ah, home.
We made the most of that week knowing that come Friday afternoon, we were headed back to Alcatrez to do hard time. My stepdad worked until noon and by 1:00 we were back on the road. Some weekends we whined, complained and cried about how unfair it was. It didn’t matter. We were just the cogs in the construction wheel. We would get up there, put on our nail aprons and hammer our troubles away.
One weekend, a friend of my grandpa’s dropped off about 50 ears of corn right from the field. My mom put it all in tubs of salted water and said that we were having a corn on the cob supper that night. After a day of putting up the walls on the second floor, my stepdad called it quits a little early and filled the Weber up with a belly full of charcoal. We all sat at the picnic table stomping our feet and chanting, “Corn, corn, corn!”
With the first batch quickly grabbed, peeled and buttered, we went at it chomping and slurping those sweet kernels into our mouths, moaning in delight.
Suddenly, my stepdad hollers over, “CONTEST – who can eat the most corn!”
Challenge on. Anyone who’s from a large family knows that competition is the name of the game. Most of us were on our fourth, maybe fifth cob of corn when we started to get to that point of no return.
My sister, Tammy, 2 1/2 years younger than me, whispers to me, “I can beat you!”
“No, you can’t,” I tersely whispered back.
“Yes, I can!”
“No, you can’t!”
It was on. Tammy and I were the only two still eating and the family had gathered to jeer and cheer us on. Six, seven, eight cobs of corn and the look in our eyes said that I got room for more. I quit at eleven. Tammy bested me by eating twelve. She beat me fair and square and I begrudgingly congratulated her. We wiped the butter off our faces and sucked our teeth until the last of the kernels let go. We headed off to our sleeping bags that night bulging bellies.
Sometime after the snoring started, my belly began to gurgle. It seemed the corn was not happy and wanted out. Because the construction site did not have a three-piece bathroom suite attached, my only option was that long, lonely walk to the two-hole latrine in the woods. As I made my way down the path of shame by flashlight, I heard the slam of a door. Tammy was leaving the outhouse.
The two of us made multiple trips that night – some of them together. It seems that pride is not a factor when you are paying the price for a competition gone wrong.
That summer held other adventures, but none quite as memorable as the corn competition. It’s been nearly 50 years since that summer, yet most of our family gatherings still include a gut-wrenching, hysterical retelling of the corn contest. Some claim to have been in the competition until the end, but Tammy and I, still mentally butt-branded from sitting side-by-side on the two hol-er, know that it was our night to shine.
We worked on the house into the fall. Sometime during the end of August, we took the tent down and moved our sleeping bags into the unfinished house. There were mice running through the rooms. My stepdad ran a propane heater at night and we’d wake up every morning with black rimmed nostrils. We always wondered if he was trying to weed the troops out, but by then we were just tough kids. Survival of the fittest, baby.
I’m sure I thought for a long time that the summer of ‘71 was the worst summer of my life. Looking back, it was probably the last time we all spent days on end together. It was the last time my sisters and brothers and I ran together barefoot down the stone beach and belly flopped into the water to clean off our construction grit and grime and splashed each other with joy and laughter. It’s probably the last time we all were on the Island together before my grandpa was diagnosed with Alzheimers. It was a summer that looking back now, stands still in time.
My parents moved up to the Island a couple of years after I graduated from high school. They moved into “our” house – the house that love, fun and six Hutton kids built.
simpler days 