The Cabin by Toby Wendtland

Grandma and Grandpa Wendtland purchased the cabin in Crivitz, Wisconsin in the fall of 1954. The cabin is small, much smaller on the outside, and contains four room. There is a kitchen and a living room in the front of the cabin and two bedrooms make up the back. The next spring they dug a pit for the outhouse behind the cabin, back by the tree line. There is no running water. The soil that the cabin sits on is sandy and drains very well. Ant hills dominate the yard. Lichens grow over all of the pine trees, the same pine trees which are dying of some disease that fells dozens of them every summer and each year the backyard gets just a little bit bigger. When the nights are cold, there is a propane furnace which must be lit, it is old and reliable and I live in constant fear that I have left if on long after I am home. Out back behind the cabin is an old stump where my brother and I brush our teeth every morning and we spit onto the anthills and watch them run for cover.
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The town of Crivitz is located just over an hour north of Green Bay and is just south of Iron Mountain, right next to the border of the upper peninsula. There is one grocery store in the town, a Piggly Wiggly, that until I was ten used to be a Red Owl. Pops is the most popular of all the north woods resorts and from there you can buy live bait, lures, bobbers, rent a boat, pet their three legged dog or their one eyed cat, or perhaps you’d rather rent a canoe and if you are could they interest you in also renting a motor? Pops is the only bait shop within twenty miles. The Sportsman Café is just up the road from Pops and we eat here every first night we are in town. They serve 10 point burgers and my brother and I beg my father to buy us pull tabs, cherry, cherry, lemon. There is another bar, but we do not eat there. A cutout of Paul Bunyan stands outside the bar and he is holding a keg of beer from which Babe is drinking. This cutout is the sign to turn left, you are almost at the cabin. There is an Ace hardware in town, along with numerous antique shops and a tremendous Sunday flee market that everyone attends in the Saint Paul’s parking lot. Garage sales are omnipresent.
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The ice cream shop has always been there and it has had many names. There is an arcade, quarters please! and a gift shop which feature the kind of tourist fare you would expect from a small town in northern Wisconsin. They have thirty flavors here, may I suggest the Blue Moon or Butter Pecan, try it in a waffle cone!
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The high falls flowage is a dam that created the town of Crivitz. The lake is monstrous. My father leads us up to the dam by way of a deer trail and when we get home we will have to strip naked and check for ticks. We fish right on the dam and the water is very deep. Over fifty feet deep where we fish and two hundred feet deep behind the center of the dam. My father turns on his old yellow sportsman radio and finds the Brewers game. We hook minnow through the tail and fish near the surface for crappies. My father has one pole rigged for walleye who hide in the rocks near the bottom of the dam. In the morning below the dam, before they release the water, we will be back to fish for bluegills.
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The cabin in on the edge of town and is reached by a gravel road called Archer Lane. The other roads are made of sand. If you follow them and veer always to your left, in about a mile you will come across an old pier and here my brother and I fish for panfish, bass and catch snails, always hoping that the owner is not home.
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The population of Crivitz is pine snakes, rattle snakes, milk snakes, grass snakes, frogs, toads, owls, turkey, hummingbirds, robins, eagles, doves, crawfish, painted turtles, deer, black bears, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, snails, grasshoppers, musky, northern pike, sunfish, bass, perch, crappie, walleye, ticks, lime disease, butterflies, hawks, tourists, people and ticks.
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The Rock Shop is north of the cabin in Iron Mountain. I do not know where it is. Crivitz is wooden arrows on posts telling you where to go. There are too many to read before you pass them and I trust that my parents can find their way. Every summer my brother and I plead with my parents to take us. All the rocks are of a peculiarly large size. Quartz, Agate, Amethyst, I want to live inside of them, but I cannot afford to. Next year I swear that I will buy one of them.
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Our neighbors come on different schedules over the summer and we rarely ever meet.
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Down the gravel road from the cabin if you take a left is Wilson’s Electronic Store. It is not a store. It is Mr. Wilson’s house, but he likes to tinker and twice we have brought him our tv. His son Derrick is mentally retarded and shows my brother and me how to hold a bumblebee so that it won’t bite you. I get bit, Derrick doesn’t.
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Beneath the dam is a labyrinth of rocks and pools that are full of crawfish. My brother and I catch them and boil them into a pot back at the cabin. Try the tails with ketchup mixed with horseradish.
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Two of my uncles purchased the cabin from my grandparents when they got too old to visit it anymore. Gone is the old couch, the old tv, the old brown carpet. In is running water, a new tv, hardwood floors and a new couch that I no longer fight my brother for the right to sleep on. The cabin is much nicer now and I hardly recognize it. In fact, I hate it.