Far From the Front, They Hunker Down

Growing up on a farm near here, Michael Perry learned from his father the everyday stoicism that is as essential to rural life as baling wire and WD-40 -- something to hold together the broken pieces, and to push things forward when all seems hopelessly stuck.

“My father had a saying,” the 38-year-old Wisconsin native remembered the other day, sitting at a hand-built table in his house on Main Street. “Whenever something would happen, when we’d have a bit of a setback of some kind, he’d say, ‘Well, that’s farmin’.’ My brother and I don’t farm, but when something goes wrong we still say, that’s farmin’.”

It’s an outlook, Perry suggested, that comes with the territory: “A lot of people around here, they tend to be able to weather things. There’s this core of citizens, and they just hunker down. ‘Hunker down,’ that’s another one you hear around here a lot.”

That’s farmin’.

Hunker down.

Rallying cries, perhaps, for this American moment.

*

There are something like 80,000 dots flung across the national map, from St. David, Maine, to San Diego, from Birch Bay, Wash., to Miami Beach to, yes, New Auburn -- big cities, suburban satellites, coastal hamlets, farm towns. Each dot represents a community with its own history, characters and municipal boasts, each with its own sense of place in the wider world.

Driving north from Eau Claire, one passes Tilden -- “half way between the Equator and the North Pole,” a road sign announces. Next comes Bloomer, self-proclaimed “Rope Jumping Capital of the World.”

A billboard near the exit for New Auburn touts something called “The Village Advantage.” And what sort of town is it?

The description is best left to Perry, a freelance essayist who also serves in the volunteer fire department and moonlights for an ambulance service in nearby Chetek (“The City of Lakes”). Perry has put down his reflections about small-town living in a remarkable new book, sometimes comic, sometimes painfully sad, titled “Population: 485, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time” (HarperCollins).

“I do my writing,” he begins, “in a tiny bedroom overlooking Main Street in the village of New Auburn, Wisconsin. Population: 485. Eleven streets. One four-legged silver water tower. Seasons here are extreme. We complain about the heat and brag about the cold. Summer is for stock cars and softball. Winter is for Friday-night fish fries. And snowmobiles....

“In the surrounding countryside, farmsteads with little red barns have been pretty much kicked in the head, replaced with monster dairies, turkey sheds, and vinyl-sided prefabs. The farmers who came to town to grind feed and grumble in the cafe have faded away. The grand old buildings are gone....

“Every day the village dogs howl at the train that rumbles through town, and I like to think they are echoing their ancestors, howling at that first train when it stopped here in 1883. Maybe that’s all you need to know about this town -- the train doesn’t stop here anymore.”

In truth, there’s a lot more to know, and Perry goes at it with aplomb. In between tales from the emergency-response blotter, Perry reflects often on the cultural rub that comes from living in a flyover country farm town in a satellite dish world:

“We are not just a bunch of jolly Norwegians bowling, yah hey. The local boys cruise up and down Main Street as you might expect, in their pick-ups with their gun racks and hot rod decals and their lips slugged with chew, but they are wearing skater pants, suckling Mountain Dew, and booming hip-hop out the windows. Loafing around the Gas-N-Go, they affect gangsta poses.”

And so then, I came here to ask Perry, how was this one small dot on the map making out in these uncertain days? Do the folks he meets one siren at a time feel connected to a nation looking toward war and its uncertain consequences on the home front, or do they see themselves as safely out of harm’s way? Certainly that four-legged water tower cannot be high on the terrorists’ list of iconic targets. Quaint, yes. The Golden Gate Bridge, no.

“I think one of the duties of folks like us out here,” Perry said, taking care to note that he spoke as only one of 485 New Auburnites, “is to just keep working. Go to work. Farm. Keep things running. Answer the fire siren. Pull hose. We’re not all going to be on the front lines, and not just on the front lines militarily speaking -- the people in New York were on the front lines too. We’re not.”

Asked his thoughts about a possible invasion of Iraq, Perry gave what seems to be one of the most common answers in circulation these days: “I honestly do not know what we should do. Issues like this are tricky. You realize at times like this that we are all very, very powerless. And I am speaking here to both sides of the issue. The world spins beyond our control. The vast majority of people in the world are just along for the ride. I’m not talking about apathy. I’m talking about reality.”

Isolation, of course, does have its virtues. He recalled coming home from the firehouse late one night this winter, crossing under a bright moon across his backyard: “I stopped to realize just how calm it was, and I thought, ‘How many millions of people in the world crave just this, just being able to walk through their backyard in calm and peace?’ ”

Even here, though, precautions have been taken. A government bulletin warned that terrorists might want to steal firetrucks -- “so we double-checked the lock on the door.” And there has been training in how to respond to weapons of mass destruction. Perry recalled how at one session the fire volunteers were warned that contact with a certain nerve agent would leave them helpless, with only 24 hours to live.

“Well, then,” one of his colleagues grimly weighed in, “we are going to get in a good 24 hours of ass-kicking.”

That, Perry said with a sly grin, “is our security plan.”

New Auburn’s connections to the new realities don’t end there. A few blocks away, the principal of New Auburn School recalled how, after Sept. 11, the students created a giant chain with red, white and blue construction paper, hung it through the hallways and lovingly kept it intact for an entire school year.

At the village office, the public works superintendent, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, pointed out that Minneapolis was only a couple of hours west -- and, he added, the winds do tend to blow hard from that direction.

Not far from Perry’s house, a little star flag could be seen in the window of a tidy bungalow, an indication that this was a soldier’s home. Inside, Roxanne Nelson fingered the letters her 21-year-old son, Michael, an Army paratrooper, had sent her from a firebase somewhere in the mountains that separate Afghanistan and Pakistan -- cave-clearing country. Was she worried?

“I guess I am not,” Nelson said. “I think I’d be more worried if he was, but he’s not. He said, ‘Mom, this is what I signed up to do.’ ”

And so she waits nights for his sporadic calls, and follows the news of the world more closely, and keeps her son’s letters stacked neatly on the living room table. What else can she do, the soldier’s mother asks, but hunker down and wait? That’s farmin’.