Wisconsin by Toby Wendtland

While my grandfather lay krausening in his mother’s belly, she knew nothing of the dangers of alcohol and kept herself three sheets to the wind during the final five months of the pregnancy and the fact that my grandfather demanded the bottle over his mother’s tit was attested to by the drunken afterbirth that stumbled out behind him into the midwife’s arms and leered at her before throwing up on her smock. But I’m getting ahead of myself and a story should be told in the proper order. When the Lord God looked down on his creation and saw how wicked they had become, He unstitched the unseen sutures that held up the water canopy above the earth and unsluiced the Deluge that would cover the world for forty days and nights, irrevocably changing the topography and climate of the earth for in the days of Peleg the continent of the earth was divided into many and all borders were changed, the Flood receded and Noah set down on Ararat. Meanwhile, it has been told that the glaciers came and ground up the new continents, shaping them as we know them to be today, but this is not true. For though ice certainly formed as the Flood waters receded, they did little but to cool the lands for a brief time and quickly were gone and dissolved into clouds. The tumult and upheaval of the Flood itself reshaped a great many things and nowhere was this destruction more terrible than in the so called glaciated regions of the world where the old was scraped away and the earth made new once again. But whereas much of northern America was resettled, one area remained untouched; the driftless area. Located in southwest Wisconsin, the driftless area is the last remainder of the Paleozoic Plateau, a holdover from the Pleistocene epoch where once the mammoth and the dinosaur roamed in the tropical paradise that is now called Wisconsin. For the rivers that flowed there and flow there now, flowed in the time of Adam, spilling their banks during God’s righteous wrath and returning to their proper size when the Lord’s hot head had cooled, leaving behind a small reminder of what Eden surely must have looked like. And here is where my story now returns to my grandfather, in the year 1913, the year of his birth. My grandfather, Erwin Arthur Wendtland, was born in La Forge, Wisconsin, on the banks of the Mississippi River, the unwitting witness to the great riverboat fire of the Julia Swain.
La Forge, long the home to the Sauk tribe until they were driven into the western frontier, was first settled by the lumber barons who swept the forests clear off the lands with the help of Paul Bunyon’s axe and the sweat of Babe’s hocks. When the lumber barons had run down to but a few trees, these they felled themselves and built grandiose houses in the center of town, retiring into a quiet life of politics and scandal. Like metal filings to the magnet, farmers were drawn into La Forge for its ample open spaces, and thanks to Babe, fertile soil. My grandfather was born on such a farm. The farm was located at the base of Grandad’s Bluff and had been settled by my great grandfather Carl Fred A. Wendtland who had immigrated to these lands from Prussia in order to escape religious persecution, but seeing as the Lutheran Church was just as strict in Wisconsin about the evils of alcohol as it had been in Prussia, in this way my great grandfather never really escaped persecution. My great grandfather arrived in New York, stumbling from the passenger ship and swearing the local officials up and down in German. When he sobered up he found himself on a westbound train, sharing a boxcar with a group of Holsteins and two Guernsey’s who would have nothing to do with the rest of the cattle and used my grandfather as a kind of barrier between the two classes. In payment my great grandfather drank from their swollen teats.
When the train pulled into station in Milwaukee, the railroad officials found my great grandfather spitting buttermilk over the side of the railcar while he masticated butter to be stored up in his cheeks for what he expected would be a lean winter. The railway officials expelled him from the railcar and my great grandfather cashed in his winter stores early at the local grocery for a pint of their cheapest. It was at this moment that he met my great grandmother, a buxomy young lass of sixteen who wore two girdles sewn together to reign her in to modest proportions and was having trouble carrying her groceries to her horse drawn carriage. The omnipresent opportunist that my great grandfather was, he imposed himself upon her to help with the groceries. My grandfather was conceived not an half hour later, before even the double girdle had been undone, for you see, we Wendtlands are famous for fast beginnings and unfulfilled endeavors. So it was for my great grandfather’s farm, for word had reached him of cheap land out west by the Mississippi and in two weeks they were married and Laura Wendt took on a husband and lengthened her last name by forty acres.