The Soo Line

Sometimes things come back to me that are so distant, I don’t trust my mind. This is one of those distant, somewhat foggy, yet crystalline memories lodged deep within.

My parents Martha and Walter Conrad's home sat on a hill three blocks above the Soo railroad line cutting diagonally across Stearns County Minnesota. Seems I read someplace it was built to facilitate hauling grain from western Minnesota to the mills in St Paul, probably General Mills.

My sister Marion told me the conductor would stop the train one half-mile east of Rockville, five miles from our home in Cold Spring, to let us children off at my brother Wally's apartment when we went to visit him and his wife Irene. Of this I have no memory.

I do clearly remember going to the depot to pick up the big crate containing my balloon tire Columbia bicycle, red and white, complete with electric horn and headlight, sent for by my brother Tom and I, with money we earned delivering to St Paul Pioneer Press on Sunday mornings.

The Soo Line was vital to our small town life in the 40s and 50s.

But what I remember dimly and at the same time most clearly at the same time, deep within my mind, in bed on the second floor, snug and warm, covered with blankets, on a cold and crystalline Minnesota morning,

WAS THE DEEP POWERFUL RUMBLE, the sound was overwhelming.

The Soo Line went from coal and steam to oil-powered diesel.

The power still lingers in the furthest depth on my memory.

Cold Spring Depot

4 Point

I remember still,

The Catholic priest Father Vernon, assistant superintendent of St Boniface, telling me that he would give me a credit for religion class so I could graduate, and that it would be best if I went to work at the granite sheds as a hook man because I wasn’t very smart.

A navy test result ,

dimly suggested to me I might be all right later, but I didn’t it take very seriously.

I labored under this vail of self-doubt for the next ten years.

Then at 29, by chance, out of work, with family, no place to turn, I drove by a Portland Community College, and thought to myself: I am a Vet, maybe I can be trained for something, a welder or something.

A veterans counselor made himself available to me. He said, Joe, why don’t you take a introductory program, same as all college students.

I remember still,

taking my 1^st grade point 15 credit report card 4.00 to Mr. Macy, the man I worked for part time, for he was the only one I knew that would care.

I was so proud I NEVER LOOKED BACK.

Arriving in Portland

I remember still:

Fred’s 1962 pickup, loaded with two suitcases and four extra tires.

Two twenty-seven-year-old fathers driving up Interstate 5, leaving behind a community of four hundred in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Heading north to the big city in 1968, hoping to get on in a paper mill or aluminum factory.

Fred the father of five, dirt floors in his home,

Me father of two, Stearns County Minnesota boy, long way from home.

When we entered the edge of the city

     THE TRAFFIC

        THE BUILDINGS

           THE SIGNAGE

We froze and kept right on the freeway, across the Columbia river bridge, eyes straight ahead watching the road and traffic.

Ending up in Camas, Washington, in a small motel outside town, to calm down and absorb the experience.

This little motel still sits on a hill there, probably harboring other new immigrants to the big city, across the river.

Travel

As I age I find I want to back home

     However

It is said you can never go home

     Because

Travel continually alters one until they are no longer themselves.

Meriwether Lewis was so changed by travel he lost his identity, never completed his book, and slept on the ground in buckskins upon returning home.

     However

It's only by taking chances and exploring the unknown that one can expand consciousness.

I believe routine and familiarity closes minds and stifles creativity so they are more dangerous than fear of the unknown, which stops most exploration.

     But

I do not believe travel is the only path, nor that it expands everyone. It also requires an open mind able to make observations and a curiosity to see about.

Some people would argue only through the heart can one expand the mind. I do know from my personal experiences I have found well-traveled people the most interesting.  

Paul's Words

Paul surprised me at our evening fire pit discussion.

Paul being the kindest soft spoken art professor, a most respected fixture at our stone sculpture retreat, for many years donating his time to help us be better artists.

We, all mature men and women stone sculptors, listening to Paul in the dark as he spoke.

He started, “When I first became a professor at the university there were 23 men and 1 woman on the staff. Later the women left. When I retired there were 18 women and 4 men on the art staff.”

He raised his voice slightly, “Hang on and be true to your stone sculpture, you are working in something that is real. It's something you can touch and get a hold on.”

"Today's students and teachers will someday come around. All this pretentious fluff, this attitude that art needs to look like it dropped from the sky, with no human connection."

“So many years of nonsense still taught at a university level.”

“What is art, if not a human effort to create beauty and stimulate emotions and the imagination.”

“So you see change is slow, hang on, these teachers too in time will have enough confidence in their new role, and feel secure enough, to be honest.”

I held baited breath thinking this provocative statement wound stir the emotions of some of the sculptors. Nothing came forth from the darkness around the camp fire.

I was proud that Paul spoke words he felt, and remembered what Steiner told me after speaking my mind at a gathering in Mexico were many people left the dinner party in disagreement: "YOU CAN GET ALONG ANY PLACE IN THE WORLD, JOSEPH, AS LONG AS YOU DON'T SAY WHAT YOU THINK.”  

My Mom the Rose Gardener

I live in Portland, Oregon, the Rose City. I find it hard to kill rose bushes in Portland. I am not a rose bush person, seems it took me several years to kill off a couple climbing roses in my yard. Roses grow like wild blackberries in this temperate climate.

My mom grew roses where it was a challenge and probably shouldn’t bother, that was Minnesota, land of devastating winter kill, good for lilacs and many species that like a good long dormancy, but that didn’t deter my mom, the rose gardener.

Each February, she would start paging thru the Jackson and Perkins rose catalog to select new roses, and to vote as member of the selection panel for best new rose of the year, probably dreaming of spring.

When the ice broke up, a sure sign of early spring, we would all head to the lake five miles north of town, on the gravel road in dads Lafayette four-door sedan. My mom the rose Gardener would help dad build a fire in the great wood oven from wood brought in from a pile next to the outhouse.

Then a wonderful thing happened, she would put loves of bread dough in those different size buttered tins she used once a week all her life, and the smell of her home made bread filled the still chilled cabin air.

Then she headed to her asparagus patch next to the wood pile and picked the first and best of the year, and had them boiling on top of the stove, she then snapped the red-and-white checked table cloth over the heavy oak table, and we sat down to a treat never forgotten by me, her homemade bread, and asparagus buttered to perfection and served in a now heated knotty pine cabin, built by my dad.

Next she would head to the garden, a sandy patch of ground, surrounded the her tall lilac bushes, where strange looking burlap and soil totems stood shoulder to shoulder guarding spindly branches within, where she slowly unwrapped each one, looking for survivors of the Minnesota winter.

My mom, the spindly red headed rose Gardner, never gave up trying to do the impossible, grow roses in Minnesota. I think that’s where I got my perseverance to continue being a stone fabricator all those years when there was no stone fabrication work to do in Portland, Oregon. Thank you Mom.

Times Are Changing

                                                   TIMES ARE CHANGING

My Navy friend Marcelo and I had ample time to talk, logging 100,000 miles, crossing the Pacific 12 times as lowly seamen on a troop transport USS MITCHELL TAP 114. I sometime still call my military ID when asked for my social security number. The troops we transported that wore strange green berets, were let of in the Philippine Islands for some sort of training, we didn’t much understand back in 1961 and 62. He took me to his favorite bar in Yokohama, and when in Okinawa he treated me to pork fried rice and a sailors' paradise, Nomanue.

Marcelo made a great companion for a shy Stearns County boy, for he knew his way around the Pacific.

He would take me to St Judes hall, where Native Americans gathered to dance, and to his two sisters' apartments to eat and rest when we docked in our home port of San Francisco.

San Francisco was probably a good place to get to if you were a Tlingit, raised in Juneau, Alaska, in the 50s, where the signs on business said no dogs or Indians allowed.

Marcelo confided in me, while we were on those long ocean trips, that his mother would not allow him or his three sisters and two brothers to give up, even though 23 out of 25 of his first grade classmates in their Catholic grade school quit school by the 8^th grade.

At our annual breakfast together in Portland, my home, Marcelo joyfully announced to me that he was now the elder in his family, and that his nephews and nieces consulted with him regarding all major decisions in there lives.

While his sister Rita, a nationally famous Anthropologist, and his sister Renee, who has her art in the Smithsonian, looked at me, his sister Ramona, the Oakland A's baseball fan smiled and announced, “Only because we will not admit our age”.

Nevertheless, even though my friend Marcelo is elder by default, I told him I would brew the coffee and prepare the sandwiches if he wanted me to accompany him on the ocean voyage from Seattle to Juneau, if he decided to buy his new sport fishing boat on the mainland because, even though Marcelo may be elder by default, I KNOW THIS TLINGIT IS ONE VERY GOOD SEAMAN.

Postscript

Even though I often times complain that my stone sculpture is not much accepted in this land where totem poles and masks is the accepted high art form, I was shocked when Marcelo's two nieces told me several years ago, that they would never travel south of Eugene, Oregon, because they felt unsafe there, in still redneck country.

Grandpa

My memory of Grandpa Conrad is short and intense.

I have heard stories about this German carpenter.

Father of eight

Intense drinker he must have been, sending his children

to the tavern for buckets of beer.

Probably in part, due to Grandma, found dead in the house by Dad's sister Anita much before child rearing was complete.

Five boys and three girls. Grace took the youngest Earl east, to New York. Connie also went east.

Anita, Walter, my dad, Ted, Richard, and Larry stayed in Stearns County, my birthplace, for the most part.

The one time I saw my Grandpa Jacob Conrad happened when dad took me to St Cloud,18 miles east, his birthplace, in our family car, for shopping.

We walked to a hotel building on St Germain street and stepped into a dark cavernous room and slowly walked along the long bar counter, lined with the backs of its Saturday afternoon patrons.

Dad patted the back of a small man hunched over his beer at the end of the bar.

As an eight-year-old boy standing in a dark bar room filled with shadowy forms,

I became terrified as Grandpa Jacob slowly turned, his one glass eye pointing outward, asked my dad

WHO ARE YOU?

Dad replied, I am your son Walt, and put a silver dollar on the bar as we turned and left.

This was my one and only meeting with my Grandpa, however I assume I viewed him in his casket at the Daniel funeral home, for I do remember my uncles, dark complected men with jet black hair in dark suits, talking together. I know little about them as well.

I want my grand baby to have different memories.

Postscript

There may well be more information about Dad and Grandpa for I know my sister Marion has a collection of letters Dad wrote around 1920 which I have never seen.

Dearest Mona

My sister Ramona, what a beautiful name,

she was thin and beautiful to match.

Married so young, desperate probably to get away from home,

to Dave, a neighbor, a good and honest man.

Six children came fast in those years, living in a basement house Dave built, including an underground garage, where Dave repaired everything, from cars to TV Sets.

Laundry hung on on outstretched lines strung all about the house, so many diapers,

BUT WOW, how good the northeastern corner of the basement smelled, with table loads of homemade bread, and her famous sticky buns which my brother Tom and I loved.

Later walls arose as Dave built above, Ramona went to work evenings. I don’t know why, no one does, at the Main Street Cafe leaving six children at home with Dave.

I almost cried, coming home from the Navy, seeing Mona peeling potatoes and chopping fries, the old fashioned way in the back kitchen of the cafe, serving schooners of beer at the counter, and cooking the greatest hamburger and fries in history most every evening, until at 40 years old,

she had a stroke and was left paralyzed for the rest of her life.

SO QUICK TO CRY, SO FAST TO LAUGH , SO SAD FOR ME TO SEE

BEAUTIFUL RAMONA CUT DOWN BY HEREDITY SO SOON.

I was in a Montana snow storm when I got the news: Mona gone, final heart failure took this big-hearted woman.

My son and his wife have a quilt she made in the nursing home with her one good arm.

I was glad to see the stone her children put on her grave labeled

ROMANA LUND

MOTHER OF

JOSEPH DEBRA ROBERT PAUL NANCY AND JOHN SCHMITT

in Stearns County Minnesota when I go home.