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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781681340685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Minnesota Historical Society Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A NORTHERN FRONT
new and selected essays
By JOHN HILDEBRAND
BOREALIS BOOKS
Copyright © 2005
John Hildebrand
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87351-528-3
Chapter One Coming Home
The view from Five Mile Bluff on the west bank of the Chippewa River in Wisconsin extends beyond five miles, so that looking down the gun sights of the valley, one sees across a vast canopy of swamp white oak, soft maple, basswood, and river birch to where tangled bottomland forest gives way to open hayfields and prim white farmhouses with matching barns and the tall Harvestore silos known as "big blues." It is a vista of the kind that kept landscape artists of the nineteenth century busy illustrating such themes as the marriage of wilderness and cultivation or, on a loftier level, a young nation's limitless possibilities. Above its mouth, the Chippewa River splits into two unequal channels: the main channel skirts the bluffs, braiding itself like a glacial stream around sandbars and wooded islands, while Beef Slough, the lesser channel, runs a parallel course to the east before unraveling altogether. Between the channels lies a wedge-shaped floodplain twelve miles long by two and a half miles wide. From ground level-that is, to anyone slogging across it on foot-the Tiffany Wildlife Area is a dire swamp, a Mesopotamia of deadwater sloughs and pothole lakes interconnected with beaver canals, islands within islands, where the most pressing possibility is the possibility of getting lost. Every year, hunters manage to lose themselves in this pocket wilderness, some more permanently than others.
On an Indian summer day in October 1970, a thirteen-year-old from nearby Durand became lost while duck hunting with his father and older brother. It was the boy's first hunt, a rite of passage in these parts, and he had wandered off in a light jacket and tennis shoes. By evening the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the search for the missing boy intensified. Being lost is usually a temporary setback, more a loss of equilibrium than self, since it's not you that's been misplaced, only the sense of terra firma that comes from knowing where you are in the world. On the other hand, to remain lost for long is to court more drastic synonyms: defeated ... abandoned ... departed ... dead.
"The best thing, of course, is not to get lost," the Boy Scout manual advises in its avuncular way. "But there may come a time when you are temporarily 'bumfuzzled' and don't know where camp is. Here are a few things to do. Sit down on a rock, or under a tree, and think the whole thing over. In fact it's a good time to think of a few funny stories. In other words calm down, and don't be afraid. If you let your imagination run away, you will run away, and probably run in a circle and come right back to where you started."
Did the lost boy sit down on a rock and tell himself a funny story? More likely he let his imagination run away and then gave frantic chase, because three weeks later the boy's body would be discovered lodged against a marker buoy in the navigation channel of the Mississippi River. He must have fallen into a slough and the current carried him away, swept him miles downstream, far from home and all that he would ever know of this world; it swept off his tennis shoes, but a handful of shotgun shells would be found in his jacket pocket. In the painful interim, the search escalated, drawing more and more searchers into the swamp. At one point, more than five hundred volunteers spread out at arm's length to form a human chain and walked the length of the bottoms from channel to channel, bushwhacking through thickets and scaring up deer and a few massasauga rattlesnakes but no lost boy. Sentiment began to turn against the tangled landscape itself. An editorial in the Durand Courier-Wedge accused the state of maintaining the Tiffany Wildlife Area as "a private jungle," a metaphor wrong on both counts, though it must have seemed timely, especially when one of the searchers told the newspaper, "I never realized we had a Vietnam so close to home."
These woods have a long memory. Twenty-two years later, Kia Xue Lor, a Hmong immigrant from Laos, lost his way in a blizzard while deer hunting in the Tiffany with his son and a friend. Ten inches of snow had fallen the night before, and the three hunters, none standing much over five feet tall, waded through drifts up to their knees. Occasionally they'd cut a deer trail in the snow, always headed in another direction, but there was no sign of other hunters. About noon, the younger men decided to hunt elsewhere and agreed to meet Lor in the same spot a few hours later. Lor hiked east through a monotonous winter landscape of windfalls and prickly ash until he came to a frozen pond. Circling the pond, Lor assumed he would intersect his own tracks and follow them back, but they eluded him. By four o'clock, the winter sky was darker than the snow-covered ground, and Lor frequently stopped to listen for traffic on Highway 25 to the east. He could see bluffs above the tree line, though he was so turned around now that he had no idea what side of the river they were on or if he'd passed them earlier that morning.
Thoroughly "bumfuzzled," Lor scraped away snow beneath a large tree and sat down to wait for his son to find him. He had no food. His hunting outfit consisted of three pairs of pants, a nylon jacket, and a pair of moon boots. Heaping brush together to form a windbreak, he made a fire and then lay beside it, alternately roasting and freezing. In Laos, he had slept alone in the jungle many times during the protracted war with the North Vietnamese and the Communist Pathet Lao, sometimes drinking a potion made from the bladders of wild pig and deer that enabled the sleeper to awaken at the slightest sound. He had a great fear of waking to loud noises.
The next morning, he followed an airplane and ran into two local hunters, who called the Department of Natural Resources to pick him up. As other members of the search party drifted back to the landing, one ran into a Hmong who said he'd just been threatened in the woods. A local hunter had promised to cut the Hmong man's dick off if he ever caught him hunting in the area again.
"But to return to our back settlers," J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote in 1782, "I must tell you that there is something in the proximity of the woods which is very singular. It is with men as it is with the plants and animals that grow and live in the forests; they are entirely different from those that live in the plains.... [T]his is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial; a hunter wants no neighbor; he rather hates them because he dreads the competition. ... Thus our bad people are those who are half cultivators and half hunters; and the worst of them are those who have degenerated altogether into the hunting state."
Crèvecoeur, the agrarian optimist, was describing an America newly wrestled from the wilderness. What could he possibly have made of Buffalo County, Wisconsin, at the twilight of the twentieth century, where the plow is finishing a poor second to the chase? Ever since outdoor magazines began listing it as the top county in the nation for trophy white-tailed deer, farmers have been selling off their hilly woodlots to outsiders for more than the cultivated fields are worth. Working farms are a vanishing act even as blood sport occupies their former occupants. Crowded into public hunting grounds such as the Tiffany Bottoms, the landless locals face increased competition from newcomers like the Hmong and grow ever more "ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial."
On the opening day of hunting season, I saw no deer in the river bottoms but plenty of small men in makeshift tree stands calling to one another in a language as high-pitched and fluty as birdsong. Hmong hunters are easy to pick out: anyone standing five feet tall or so, carrying a single-shot shotgun, and wearing sneakers. Obviously they were seeing deer because there was no end to the gunfire. In the late afternoon, sun low in the trees, I ran into a local hunter climbing down from his metal tree stand after a pointless day. Shrugging off his bad luck, he began to praise, rather elaborately I thought, a Hmong tree stand he'd found in the woods.
"Oh, it was beautiful. Like something out of Swiss Family Robinson. Bent limbs for railings going up the sides. A seat fashioned out of a log." He shook his head and winked. "Big wind blew it down." The wink was conspiratorial, because he'd played the role of the wind.
On the way home, I stopped in Durand to chat with a man who had grown up on the last farm in the Tiffany before the state bought up the land and let it revert to swamp. A skilled woodsman, he'd trapped and hunted there all his life, but not anymore.
"My boys and I used to hunt the bottoms the week before Thanksgiving. Got some big bucks out of there. Now I don't even bother. You see them at the Ella boat landing in pickup trucks and boats that we paid for!"
A grin flickered at the corners of his mouth when he spoke of the path the DNR had recently cut through the Tiffany. He called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Not wanting to be one of Crèvecoeur's "bad people" who hates his neighbor because he dreads the competition, I drove out to see Kia Xue Lor, the man who'd been lost in the blizzard. He lives in a public-housing complex off a cul-de-sac on the north side of Eau Claire. The decor of these apartments is interchangeable: a few pieces of furniture, school pictures of the immigrant's children, and a black-and-white photograph of a young man, usually deceased, in the slightly operatic uniform of the Royal Lao Army. Lor is a wiry, intense man in his early fifties with slicked-back hair and a few gold teeth. We sat on his living room couch, an interpreter between us, while Lor poured out the past. He had been a soldier all his life, his career following the fortunes of the Armée Clandestine. At fifteen he joined the army, and he fought the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese for the next fifteen years until the Americans pulled out of the war and left him behind. He knew the Communists would kill him for collaborating with the CIA, so he moved his family into the jungle and for five years fought with a local resistance group before fleeing across the Mekong River. A photograph on the wall showed Lor and his family a month after their arrival at Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, donated clothes hanging in folds around them. After eight years in the camp, Lor came to this country through the aid of a church group, but without English and somewhat disabled by war wounds, he couldn't find work.
A steady stream of kids had flowed into the living room until a dozen or so sat cross-legged on the floor watching a video of Disney's The Lion King. Lor whispered something in Hmong to one of the little girls, who announced to the others, in English, "Shut up." I'd considered asking Lor if we could hunt together sometime, but it struck me that a person who must address his children's friends through a translator remains, in many vital respects, lost.
The six-hundred-year-old Kingdom of a Million Elephants and One Parasol did not enter the American imagination until a civil war between Laotian government troops and the Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies turned into a test of the Kennedy administration's Cold War resolve. After the Geneva Accord of 1962 guaranteed Laos's neutrality, operations there became strictly covert, fought largely by a Hmong army of the CIA's own devising, supplied from Air America bases in Thailand, and overseen by case officers with such jaunty noms de guerre as "Bag" or "Mr. Clean" or "Mr. Hog" or "Kayak." It was the agency's largest operation, a secret conflict, a campaign of surrogates that maintained the fiction of neutrality. Former CIA director William Colby called it a "non-attributable war."
In late 1965, a small plane carrying Colby, then chief of the CIA's Far East Division, bumped down on the dirt airstrip at Long Chieng, a remote valley in northern Laos. It was an otherworldly place, surrounded by mountains and weird limestone outcroppings, a thatched-roofed village at one side of the airstrip and a complex of corrugated metal buildings at the other. Colby had come to visit General Vang Pao, leader of the Armée Clandestine. Vang Pao had risen from a thirteen-year-old jungle runner to the highest-ranking Hmong officer in the Royal Lao Army. His hill tribes engaged the North Vietnamese in exactly the kind of guerrilla war that they themselves waged so successfully across the border. During summer monsoons, his army took full advantage of the landscape, attacking enemy operations mired down in the mud on the Plain of Jars, an expanse littered for three thousand years with eleven-foot stone vessels of debatable origin; in the dry season, the Hmong disappeared into the surrounding mountains. Colby, who had parachuted behind enemy lines in Europe with the oss, understood the value of an irregular force engaged in a limited campaign on their own territory. For him, Laos was a people's war against a foreign aggressor, and in Washington he argued to increase support for Vang Pao. Yet the nature of the war would soon change. "Some immutable principle," Colby wrote in his memoir, "provides that a barefoot guerrilla force must inevitably grow to become a conventional army."
The "immutable" in this case was Vietnam. At its height, Vang Pao's guerrilla army grew to thirty thousand men, with so many CIA advisers that Long Chieng became known as "Spook Haven." The purposes for which they fought were increasingly dictated not out of concern for a "neutral" Laos but to support an expanded American presence across the border. Vang Pao's army tied down North Vietnamese divisions that otherwise would have faced American forces in South Vietnam. Hmong soldiers guarded a secret radar installation, which, until it was overwhelmed, allowed the all-weather bombing of North Vietnam. Hmong road-watch teams attacked the labyrinth of supply lines running along the Annamese Cordillera between Laos and Vietnam known collectively as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. To these ends, Vang Pao's army sustained enormous losses and became increasingly dependent upon American air power and massive bombing. Still, one could argue that the Armée Clandestine was an unbelievable bargain. The CIA spent in a year (Hmong soldiers earned about three dollars a month) what the military spent in a day in Vietnam, and no American boys were being drafted to die in the misty mountains of Laos.
The Chippewa stretches a quarter of a mile across at the Ella boat landing unless the river is cottoned in predawn fog, in which case it seems as wide as an ocean. A dozen of us stood at the landing on an early September morning, poking flashlight beams into the mist and waiting for a boat to ferry us across. In the distance, a cow bawled like a foghorn. While the others joked among themselves in high-pitched monosyllables, I felt myself lost in a dense cloud of language that would part unexpectedly when, for instance, someone boomed into the darkness, "Where are you, Grampa?"
The Eau Claire telephone directory lists forty-nine entries under X, all of them Xiongs. Two generations were represented at the landing, and a third was lost somewhere in the fog. Joe Bee Xiong had invited me squirrel hunting with his family, and it was his father who was missing. When an hour passed and the boat still hadn't appeared, we launched my canoe to look for him. Joe Bee held a flashlight in the bow, illuminating snags and sandbars recently emerged from the river, as we drifted downstream. Ahead, through tatters of fog, we spotted a skiff dead in the water, its sole occupant straining against an oar. Northern States Power, which operates a series of hydroelectric dams upriver, had cut the flow of water on the weekend to save for peak power demands and, in the process, had stranded Joe Bee's father on a sandbar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A NORTHERN FRONT by JOHN HILDEBRAND
Copyright © 2005 by John Hildebrand. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents Preface....................ixComing Home....................3
A Northern Front....................22
The Appraisal....................43
Wading the Big Two-Hearted....................64
Snow on the Mountains....................75
Touching Bottom....................83
Beyond Whales....................91
Fables....................103
Fences....................116
Exile's Song....................133
Dogs Playing Poker....................143
Deer in the Tree....................161
Wolf at the Door....................174
Wolf edux....................183
Looking for Home....................188
On Being Lost....................192
In a Far Country....................200
Acknowledgments....................207