SALT / SALT WATER TALKS
Logue, John J.
A DIFFERENT ENERGY CRISIS abigadl McCarthy It is a long time ago since it came in its yellow envelope but I remember the telegram I received from the friends in my college dormitory during...
...We made forts of the piles in the lumberyard aware of what shifting lumber could do, and climbed to the rafters of the woolhouse to jump into the bins of wool, knowing that someone alone might smother there...
...In winter we would climb for an hour to hurtle down in an ever(Continued on page 94) 3 February 1978: 72...
...Whitby waiting Wabasha whopper," it read—a reminder that I had made something of a reputation with tales of my home town...
...On the river side of the point was the boatworks where each year a new steamboat was built and finally launched with a satisfying rolling splash...
...We ranged the hills fall and spring thinking nothing of walking seventeen miles and finding our way back through the woods and creek beds...
...We read prodigiously, as much for the pleasure of going to the library as for the reading itself...
...It was hard to convey the reality then...
...We had been, although we did not know it, members of the last free generation of children with a sprawling town to roam, a whole river valley to wander, free to probe and experiment and dare...
...Grandma Anderson lived across the street from her hotel, and the MoLaughlins watched over the lumberyard from a gray Victorian house with many porches...
...Even to my contemporaries life there seemed the stuff of fiction and hardly to be believed...
...Will Peters, sometimes called "Captain" out of courtesy, lived next to the family boatyard with his sister Emma and they kept Lady, the horse who turned the launching capstans, in a nice red barn next door...
...We were just ourselves...
...We were Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, took Red Cross swimming lessons, and belonged, somewhat desultorily, to church groups...
...There were tennis lessons and music lessons, choirs and bands...
...We grew more and more expert at swimming out just short of the undertow created by the big boats and cutting in behind them to bob gloriously up and down in the wake...
...It sounds Mark Twain-like," said one of my teachers...
...We swam across the river often, having gained a sure knowledge of the current and the effort necessary to fight so as not to be swept below town on the way back...
...We were chased off, of course, and yelled at, and that was part of the zest of the thing...
...it is more difficult now when society has changed so much...
...Where the Point began stood the old red brick hotel complete with cupola and portecochere...
...We were not feared, nor were we particularly feared for...
...The Point was at once playground and testing ground...
...We chased after the icewagon in the summer, the cabbagewagons in the fall, and jumped on to the runners of farmer's bobsleds in the winter...
...we were not watched...
...A DIFFERENT ENERGY CRISIS abigadl McCarthy It is a long time ago since it came in its yellow envelope but I remember the telegram I received from the friends in my college dormitory during our first winter vacation as if it were yesterday...
...Dill lived in the big white house near his elevator and office building...
...We were always the first to run along the shore at the sound of a steamboat whistle at the pontoon bridge upstream, intent on swimming out to meet it and "get the waves" created by the churning paddle wheels...
...As we grew older the river bluffs and the river itself filled our need for escape, adventure and the thrill of facing and besting danger...
...It was if we lived in an interstice of history—after the narrow proprieties, castes and class of small town America had faded away and before a special generation between childhood and adulthood had been invented and defined...
...When people ask me now why I have written so little about life in the little town on the Mississippi where I grew up, as my parents and grandparents had before me, I think of that telegram...
...It isn't that we were completely without organization...
...Residences lined the two main streets but we had nearby on the Slough side a lumberyard and what I can only describe as a commodity business with a grain elevator, a wool shed, warehouses and a great cavernous icehouse...
...Hungry Point was an end of town where a backwater called 'The Slough" met the main river...
...But all that took so little of our bursting energy...
...We sneaked into the icehouse where huge blocks of ice harvested from the frozen river were stored in sawdust...
...Most of our houses had large yards with a clutter of outbuildings, grape arbors and gardens...
...What I remember most vividly now is life outside the organized groups —my neighborhood life on Hungry Point...
...The crews used to wave at first, then shake their fists helplessly at us, enraged at the chances we took...
...We had part-time jobs and home chores...
...We weren't youth or teen-agers or adolescents...
...Telegrams were rare events in those days and seldom sent just for fun...
...The river was wide, deep and swift...
...But, except that we shared that marvelous river, our town was not like Twain's at all...
...We Hungry Pointers were proud to be called "river rats" and gloried in forsaking the beach and lifeguards to swim anywhere...
...All these things were part of our neighborhood-T^belonged to us—because there was no division between residential and industrial in old towns like ours...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 3
