Heartland Portrait

Heartland Portrait: Stories From the Rural Midwest is a self-portrait drawn from eighteen years of Free River Press writing workshops with farm families, small town and village residents, commercial fishermen, towboat captains and others living in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. It is a record of the transformation of rural America, an ensemble of personal stories that document not only loss in rapidly changing times but success in adapting and preserving a way of life.

To read Dave Rasdal's column on Heartland Portrait in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, click here.

To read the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier article by Melody Parker, click here.

Advance Praise for Heartland Portrait:

“When we were closer to land and place, when we sensed of our surroundings more acutely, and when we felt more deeply the spirit and joy of life, even in tough times, [this] is what we renew from Heartland Portrait: Stories from the Rural Midwest. Heartland Portrait is more than a narrative; in many ways it is the conscience that we need to remember, cherish and perhaps restore, that makes us a human community.”

—Dave Warren, Former Deputy Director, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution

“Robert Wolf has not only gathered a chorus of unique and powerful voices in these pages, he has enabled them to sing in a plainspoken poetry that breaks your heart one minute and makes it soar the next. This book is filled with stories about people and places most of us barely know and about ways of life that seem to be vanishing before our eyes. But they come at us with such forceful pride that we do get to know them and we share their lives. This is a book of tremendous energy and passion. In these pages, you can hear America sing.”

—Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune/WGN Radio

“A collection of moving, at times poignant, stories from the land. If rural America can be saved, it will be in part through giving voice to its people in just the way this splendid book does.”

—Jonathan Andelson, professor and Director of the Center for Prairie Studies, Grinnell College

Heartland Portrait includes sixty-eight stories and six essays by fifty-six writers. Sample stories include:

Excerpts from Heartland Portrait

KHAKI NELSON

Khaki Nelson’s given name is Gladys. She and her husband, William, farmed and sold Pioneer seed in the Clermont area for fifty years.

SATURDAY NIGHTS IN CLERMONT

The sound of water pumping and the smell of a kerosene stove heating up. A large copper boiler is filled with water and put to heat on the stove. Mom and Dad lift the heated water into a round, galvanized tub. I stand back, watch and wonder how soon before I’m stripped of clothing and dunked in the tub. Lowered into the water, I shut my eyes tight as soap suds trickle over my head, down my face and body. I take a deep breath, hoping it’s store soap and not homemade lye soap. I’m scrubbed to a shine, big sis is next. I scamper into my clothes—a pretty, starched print dress and patent leather shoes.

I shake my blond hair to get it dry, thinking, “I wish I was a teenager like my sis, with dark hair and beautiful.” Mom and Dad are pretty fancy in their Saturday night attire. A change from Dad’s bib overalls and Mom’s feed sack dress and apron. I hop up and down singing, “Let’s go to Clermont, I want to go to Clermont!”

The family scampers into the car and sighs with relief as the car starts and the four tires are full of air, at that moment there’s a rumble of thunder and a big black cloud appears in the west. “Wait,” my dad says, “if it’s going to storm we can’t start out. We have five miles to go and the road may get muddy.” We file out of the car with heads hanging low, put our good clothes away, and wait for next Saturday night.

A week passes, same routine, a beautiful night, stars shining. We bounce down the road in the old car, anxious to see friends in town. The dolls, Shirley and Alice, are seated beside me, they will enjoy a night in town.

The lights show up distinctly as we near town and drive over the rumbly, rattly bridge. Clermont is alive and buzzing. Cars are everywhere, and streets are lined with people. What a sight! Oh, so exciting!

Dad says, “Hope we can find a place to park.” The band is playing a peppy tune, and we immediately begin keeping time with our hands and feet to the beat of the drums and the wonderful brass horns. The aroma of freshly popped corn floats through the air from Nora Halverson’s popcorn stand. Five cents for a nice, big sack with plenty of real melted butter.

The stores are all open for business, three grocery stores to choose from. Tonight we get the week’s supplies. We enter the grocery store, which seems so large and well stocked. I trail along behind my mom, hoping the storekeeper will notice me. Sometimes they give candy treats to the kids. Mom has a list of things she needs, tells the clerk, and proceeds to run here and there to gather up the things and bring them to the counter.

She seems to know where everything is, and in a few minutes has it all together and sacked. We have sugar, yeast, oatmeal, raisins, flour (a very large sack), and wieners (they are hooked together and look like a chain of beads). The money received from selling the eggs down the street at the produce store will more than cover the bill. We are lucky we don’t have to buy meat, milk, butter, lard, canned vegetables, or fruit. We have those things on the farm. We take the groceries to the car, and Mom meets with other ladies in front of Lubke’s (five and dime). They visit about the week’s happenings, upcoming marriages, and new babies born. With several aunts, cousins, and other relatives there it seems like a weekly family reunion.

The men congregate down the street at Pringle’s, Gerner’s, or the John Deere shop. The talk gets pretty lively, and sometimes heated about politics, crops, and prices. There is a barber shop near the John Deere shop with a neat red and white barber pole. The fellows think Saturday a good time for a haircut and some good conversation.

Meanwhile we kids gather around the water fountain on the corner by the grocery store. The boys get pretty wild with the water and splash it at us. We giggle, laugh, and shout at the boys, “We’ll tell on you.” We enjoy strolling up and down the street. On one side the band is playing, across from the telephone office and Crowe’s Drug Store. There is also romance in the air for the teenagers. A boy that’s sweet on my sister brings her a box of cherry centers almost every Saturday night. I tease her, but she still shares those yummy chocolates with me. A free movie is held several times during the summer. This is a very special treat, for we rarely go to a movie theater. It is set up outdoors between the old bank building and Gerner’s. We sit on planks held up on nail kegs. My favorite movie is “The Little Rascals” with Spanky and Alfalfa.

After a great evening, Mom and Dad say, “It’s time to go home. Tomorrow is Sunday, and we will be coming back to Clermont for church.” Before going home sometimes we go to Peck’s Ice Cream parlor for a treat, or better still, we take home a quart of ice cream and eat it before it melts.

Sleep comes over me driving home, but as we make the turn into the driveway our trusty watch dog barks and wakes me with a start. Sleepy as I am I won’t miss out on eating that great tasting ice cream.

CLARA LEPPERT

Note: Clara Leppert’s Simple Times, written in 1993, a record of what rural life was once like, and a reminder of how it might be rebuilt, not so much with technical know-how as with benevolence and the qualities which make a man or woman a full human being. When she read one of her pieces for a National Public Radio feature, people called from across the country, wanting to know how they could get the book that contained the story "Wolves." It was a delight knowing this wonderful neighbor who died in 1996 at age eighty-six.—RW

excerpt from SIMPLE TIMES

Home a Hotel?

Sometimes my home seemed like a hotel.

There were two homeless men who came often and would stay sometimes two or three weeks at a time. They would finally leave to go some other place for a little while but would soon be back again.

We were looking at pictures one night, when one of the men was here. Ruth, our daughter, was a beautiful young girl. We didn’t know until a long time later that Myron put one of her pictures in his pocket and told people everywhere he went that she was his girlfriend.

We had a lot of agents [salesmen] who managed to come about noon. Every time I saw one was outside talking to the men, I put another plate on the table. It was easy to have one more, and we always had a nice visit.

One time Andrew Waukon was with us at dinner time; he emptied the horseradish jar. We thought he didn’t know what he had, it was like a nice mound of mashed potatoes. He enjoyed it a lot it seemed, until the last mouthful.

The telephone repairmen asked if they could eat here. I would have five or six men three days in succession for the noon meal for several years. They would pay 75 cents a plate. I saved the money and bought a used piano that I still have.

Sometimes fishermen would stop in the morning, and ask if they could have a noon meal. They were always nice men; they wanted to pay a dollar each.

One time a bus full of prisoners worked down at the creek making hiding places for the trout. One or two men would stop in every morning for drinking water. They were all nice looking young men and I wondered why they were prisoners at Luster Heights. I felt sorry for them and each day gave them a three pound coffee tin of homemade cookies. Later a neighbor asked, “Did you let them in the house?” I didn’t have any fear about it.

A couple of years later a man and a pretty girl came to the house. I recognized him at once as being one of the prisoners. He said, “This is my wife, I want you to meet her. I want you to know we appreciated all those cookies you gave us, and I want my wife to see where we made hiding places for the trout. Your neighbors were so good to us, they always waved when we went by. We worked near Decorah later, and they treated us just like prisoners.”

I said, “Won’t you tell us your name and where you live? I’d like to hear from you sometimes.” He said, “We will stop on our way back from the creek.” I said, “I will have lunch ready for you.” The lunch waited and waited but they didn’t stop.

I don’t know how long three ex-soldiers stayed here when they got back from the service, Art Swenson, John Fritz and Ronnie Haas. They needed good meals, and to think of other things than war.

I had young folks stopping in for meals a lot when my sons, Howard and Bob, were teenagers. One day it was supper time and three or four extra lads came to eat. One of them said, “I caught a turtle down at the creek, you can fix it for supper.” I said, “I don’t know how to cook a turtle.” He said, “I’ll tell you.” I ate a little bit, just so I could say I’d eaten turtle.

A German came to the neighborhood, we felt he had escaped prison. He was almost always angry. He would be here a month or more at a time, cutting wood. After he got up in the morning he would walk around the house five or six times screaming. I asked him what was the matter; he said in German, “God in Heaven, the devil for us all. I tell the whole world.”

When he would be in the woods working, all of the neighbors could hear his sermons. I didn’t feel it was safe to have him in the house, but Clarence felt it was all right, and we needed a lot of wood.

Wolves

There were many wolves in the 1930s. We heard them often in the night. Two or three could make so much noise howling, we wouldn’t know whether or not it was a pack of wolves.

One day Clarence was plowing with a team of horses. A wolf followed all day about the length of a car behind him. He felt sure there were baby wolves close by, so he and a neighbor looked in the woods as it was getting dark. They found five baby wolves in a hollow tree. I feel sure they were cute, but the wolves were killing baby calves, so they felt forced to kill them. Clarence said the wolf clawed at the tree and howled the whole night.

ORVAL H. AMDAHL

Orval Amdahl was a Marine Corps captain during World War Two. For forty years after the war, Orval was Filmore County Court Recorder at Preston. He and his wife, Marie, have four children, ten grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren. In his younger days Orval bowled, golfed, and played baseball and basketball with the Filmore and Houston County Independent League. He is now involved with American Legion and the Lanesboro Park Board.

A FEW OF THE ANTICS OF CLENARD “CYCLONE” JOHNSON, WHO WAS RAISED ON A FARM EAST OF LANESBORO

One day in grade school Clenard was moving his mouth over to his shirt pocket. His teacher caught him and asked him to share with the rest of the class what he had in his pocket, so he pulled out a flat tin can that he was spitting his tobacco juice in.

Cyclone did almost any job. A farmer south of town had him paint his barn. The one side was very high. Lunch time was near so Cyclone figured the farmer would be coming. When the farmer arrived, there was Cyclone flat on his back on the manure pile. Paint had been spilled and the ladder lay over the manure carrier cable. The farmer became awe-struck, called the doctor, who came out. The doctor saw the painter laying on the manure pile, but there was no indentation; the ladder had been taken apart and set over the cable. The doctor took out a saw and the longest syringe and told the farmer that he was cutting off Cyclone’s arm. As the doctor took the arm Cyclone opened one eye and said, “Doc, I think it has gone far enough.”

Cyclone worked at the roller rink and the music machine stopped. With his skates on, he walked up the steps to the balcony. His sidekick yelled for him to get down to put on their show. The machine fixed, Clenard vaulted over the balcony railing and landed on the floor on his skates, about twelve feet below.

[Ed. note: Don Ward’s version has it that Cyclone didn’t jump but skated down a twelve-inch by sixteen-foot plank. Don notes that Johnson could turn hand springs on his skates, that, in fact, he was so limber that he could do almost anything that a professional ice skater could do.]

At a local ski tournament he was going to do a somersault off the jump. He fortified himself for a while at the top of the hill and when it was his time to go he took off, but missed the jump and landed in the crowd.

One evening a group gathered in the main street by Ladalle Station (now Bike & Boat Rentals). They had a high wheeled truck pulled next to the loading chute. Cyclone settled himself inside of a trunk tire. Two men gave him a shove and down the ramp he went and ended up past the old Community Hill.

Once there was a plane barnstorming on the next farm next to Clenard’s place. During the action there was a loud roar and a cloud of dust coming from the Johnson building. There was Clenard and his brother, each in a car, racing down the dirt road, broadsiding each other to see who was going to have the road and make it through the gate first. With some violent bounces his brother hit the huge oak post. There was a crunch, a cloud of dust, and steam. When the group got down to the car, there was his brother forced up against the top of the Model A Ford. The motor had been driven right under the seat.

ROBERT TEFF

Robert Teff lives in Lansing, Iowa, where he married into one of the local commercial fishing families. Robert worked thirty-three years at the Interstate Power Plant before retiring in 1998. He is now active in the Knights of Columbus, the American Legion, and a local cemetery board. In addition, he makes homemade jam, sauerkraut, and wine. Robert has eight children, twenty-one grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

excerpt from: NIGHT SEINING

. . . With dark approaching, my wife, Pat, and I get the kids in bed and pack a little lunch. I kiss Pat goodnight and head to the shanty. If the fish are working a bank during the day and not disturbed they will lay there all night. Unc and the Old Man had told me that on their way down Big Slough, after raising wing nets that afternoon, they had seen the mud boils along the bank, where the fish were stirred up. They cut their engines and drifted by so they wouldn’t spook them. We are gambling that they are still there. We will be riding in the big launch, a twenty-six foot homemade redwood boat powered by a V-8 inboard Ford engine and towing the flatboat with the seine. It is tricky, winding our way up the sometimes narrow slough in the dark, because when we turn the launch, we want the flatboat to follow us and not go straight ahead.

The night is dark as thunderheads roll and tumble over each other, letting the moon out once in a while. The lightning is flashing from the bluffs to the west, reminding me of blinkers on a car. We are in for a good one. Here’s hoping we get to the fish and corral them before the fury hits. The fish will be restless and can spook and run at any time. The talk is scant; we would have a hard time hearing, anyway. We peer into the dark, reaching out with flashlights in search of snags and trees that have lost their battle with nature and are clinging to the banks with exposed roots and limbs playing in the water.

. . . We ease into the bank, tie the launch well below the haul (the fish we’re after) and transfer ourselves into the flatboat and maneuver into position. At each end of the net is the brail, which is usually a three-foot long limb about three inches in diameter with a short piece of pipe at each end. Two small rings are fitted onto each end of the brail. A rope leads from one ring to the lead line; another rope leads from a ring on the other end to the cork line. Securing the brail on the bank, staking the lead line down, we ride out into the slough and lay out the seine as we go. Halfway across we angle up toward the other bank, closing off the slough. Having staked the other brail on the other bank, it is time to drive the fish.

. . . Now they are headed upstream to stir up the drive. They start up about a thousand feet. (In winter we drive the same haul for three quarters of a mile.) We have what is called a “driver,” which consists of a long wooden pole and a funnel shaped object on the end. The driver is plunged with the funnel end into the water and shoved to the bottom. It enters the water with a huge kerplunk and carries a bubble of air to the bottom and releases a lot of other bubbles and stirs up the mud, which moves the fish to the net.

Now here I stand, holding the rope, up to my crotch in water and my knees in mud. The storm is boiling in and the mosquitoes are fighting for space under my hood and winning. It’s so black out I can’t see my hand in front of my face, except when the lightning flashes. The rain hits and I have nowhere to hide. The lightning flashes now are like neon rainbows and the thunder is deafening. The air is charged and with each flash the tree limbs seem to get closer and my mind goes to work and I know they are going to grab me. WHAT WAS THAT? You damn fool, get hold of yourself. You’re thirty years old and it isn’t Halloween. Then I hear the kerplunk . . . kerplunk and then the old man rattles the oars in the oarlocks. They are getting close as the drumming and rattling increase.

“Are there any fish?” I wonder. “I hope we don’t get skunked. What’s that?” The line comes alive in my hands as the carp hit the net. They hit at the cork line and roll to the lead line. The splashing is music to my ears. The mud must really be rolling and drifting down the slough. Someone hollers, “Where you at?” as the bow almost runs me down. Throwing in the rope, I clamber aboard and shove off. We pull the upstream end of the lead line across the slough, plunging as it goes, to trap the fish. We use the motor to pull it across and it is quite a struggle as the lead line drags in the mud. On reaching the other bank, and with the fish trapped, we catch our breath and prepare for the real work. The rain is pelting us big time, so we won’t even have a cup of coffee. This job will need all three of us. For some reason the old man always inherits the cork line, which only needs to be handled slowly as it’s piled up. It is very important because if the cork line gets either too far ahead or too far behind it can roll the net and we will lose all the fish.

Unc gets out into the water a few feet and stands on one foot, leaning on a pole and riding the lead line under his other foot to keep it on the bottom. So that leaves me to get down on my haunches to pull the seine in with the lead line. As we pull the seine, we have to keep sliding down the bank because the seine needs to be piled up as the circle gets smaller. Somewhere along here the storm breaks and the moon pops out, but we are as wet under the gear as out because the sweat is really pouring now.

It seems like an eternity when the old man hollers, “We’re at the bag.”

Uncle says, “Yeah, the splice just went by my foot.”

It is time to stake down the upstream end and work in the downstream end. The downstream end now is the weak link, as it is just held by a couple of stakes and could be pulled off the bank easy. We stake the upstream end down real good on the lead line and hang the cork line on a taller stake. Resting for a minute and stretching out the kinks, the old man checks the surface with a flashlight, but there’s not too much action yet. But we will soon stir them up. The old man frees up the lower end and gets into position on the cork line and Unc says, “I’ll pull and you can ride the lead line.”

I think to myself, “Thanks, Unc.” But that doesn’t last long, as I think I’ve been had. The circle is so small now that I spend more time moving both feet as it tightens and trying to keep my waders on as they stick in the mud. The fish are boiling now, water splashing everywhere. The carp are hitting my legs as they search for freedom. The lead line is almost to the bank now and the old man says, “We better get some of the fish now.”

We stake everything down good and with a pile of net on both ends it isn’t going to go anywhere. We retrieve the launch and slide it along the outside of the net. Pulling the cork line over the edge of the boat, we hold it down with our feet and start to dip fish in it with a big dip net. We have rigged up a light by clamping a board on the side of the boat and clamping a light to it and hooking the light to a car battery. It is like dipping out of a bathtub. The old man dips and I catch the hoop of the dip net and help lift and dump and Unc sorts and fills the bin. We have a board we can put between the ribs of the boat and make an extra bin. We soon have that filled.

This was a good catch. It will prove to be about 4,000 pounds. It is a big haul for this time of the year as the fish are scattered. In winter when they seine under the ice, the fish are bunched and the same haul could produce 20,000 to 60,000 pounds in one pull. The old man and I get out to pull the seine a little tighter and to further bunch the fish, as Unc takes the launch to tie it off and bring the flatboat alongside. The seine board is put on the bank out of the way and we proceed to load the flatboat.

We have about 2,000 pounds in the launch and another 1,000 in the flatboat. The rest will be left until tomorrow. From the light on the boat we can see to get the lead line out on the bank and pin it down with stakes and use longer poles to hold the cork line up out of the water. Then we just stand there, looking at each other, having smirky smiles on our faces. The fish are not as calm, as they churn and splash; water and fish slime are running down our faces and the old man laughs and says, “Let’s go home.”