Songs I Heard My Mother Sing

"Opus 1

Prelude in a Minor Key

The bitter cold of it! Someone said that in Verviers he’d seen rats sticking to the sidewalk. But we shouldn’t worry much about them, he said—so were the cats. There were maybe a dozen of us that morning, all 2nd Louies fresh from the States, blowing on our frigid hands and stomping the frozen earth with frozen feet. Standing there beside a six-by-six army truck, and waiting for something—it doesn’t matter what. Looking hopefully up and down that dirt road the way country dogs used to do eighty years ago when I was a boy.

When did we first become aware of them? Well, retrospection doesn’t say, but most likely we heard their thrumming first—the incantatory throbbing of their motors as they mumbled their way toward us out of the west. Then we would have seen them, there in the sky, to the northwest and not flying high either, because my memory clearly has them at only two or three thousand feet, and heading toward the river Rhine, lying just there at the horizon to the east. Those planes, they were not swarming in a ball as bees do but came in a long, thin line stretched out across the sky, patiently following one another in the dutiful way that passenger pigeons were once wont to do. That’s what I was told when I was a boy—told by old men who’d themselves seen those pigeons passing in the long trains of their enormous numbers.

We wouldn’t have paid them much mind, not at first. Just a few flights of transports, maybe sent to drop supplies? No, I think not. But what we saw at first was only their beginning. A forlorn hope like those sent out before ancient armies to engage the enemy in those lonely, single combats which were once the necessary preludes to the grand melee and battle royal.

But as I watched them flying north of us across the sky, first for long minutes,  but then, as it seemed to me, for hours, coming in their never ending numbers, I slowly waked to the fact that I was witnessing something highly extraordinary, some military operation of enormous, unprecedented magnitude and consequence."

That's how this book begins. Not until the end do you hear the rest of that story. But along the way you'll find a long and eventful life laid out for you, as well as lots of lyric passages such as this one about northwestern Wisconsin seventy-five years ago when the writer was a boy.

 "That’s the way the Chippewa River looked around 1890, when my great uncle, Joseph Hall, was drowned in it. And oh my God! but that picture takes me back! That’s how I grew up, floating those rivers in a canoe. And not only the Chippewa but the Flambeau, too. Both forks of it. Not to mention the St. Croix. And certainly most often of all, the Red Cedar. Fishing and drifting—fishing and drifting my way through the long, slick-sliding pools, only to pitch over the edge and pour pell-mell down a long stretch of brawling rapids, thence to emerge, through the froth and the spew at the foot of it, out onto the buttery bosom at the head of yet another long reach of any one of those beautiful rivers! Oh, my God!

 That’s the way those rivers ran—south and west to the
Mississippi, alternately flowing gently like Afton, or tumbling their way downhill through the tall pines that rose up on either side. That’s right. When I was a boy, the Flambeau still ran through tall stands of Norway pine, broken now and again by the canoe birches, both yellow and white. As recently as seventy years ago, on the South Fork of the Flambeau, on your left as you fished your way downstream, there was one small tract still left untouched. It held not only a stand of virgin timber but a spring of sweet, fresh water. That’s right, that timber had never been cut! Never! At least, that’s what the Hervis brothers said, and the three of them were Finns, so they would know."

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