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Strange trip it is, to journey through the Badger State, digging for the story bones of our collective past and sampling the beverages of diverse establishments. The curious always want to know how I come to mix this strange cocktail of ghost stories, tall tales, and conspiracy
whisperings with the seasoning of Wisconsin's tavern topography.
It just happened that way. I stumbled into that blended world more than thirty years ago during vocational meanderings for the now defunct Milwaukee Road. It was a dying world, a world of testy conductors and wheezing roundhouse mechanics who told stories in dim bars adjacent to grimy rail depots. Their narrative fare possessed the musk of antiquity, even when the matter expounded be yesterday's derailment.
It was a mythic world, filled with remembrance of men with the muscle to heft steel rail and the grit to tame mechanical beasts which dwarfed those presumptuous enough to take the reins. It was a world populated with the ghosts of those who had gone before, an industrial age facsimile of Paleolithic council fires. A world in which the tavern itself was the clan lodge and where beer and brandy served as the lubricant of the consciousness-altering condition precedent to telling of a clan's sacred stories.
It was in such a place that I first heard of the House of Spirits. The oracle of said message was a wizened freight carman who had seen service in that greasy trade since the heels of the Great
Depression. His audience comfortably chewed the cud of a long interval of silence in the low neon of the Party House Bar next to the Portage depot and yard. He began his story thusly, "One time, after a big derailment of a ballast train, I found a tavern called the 'House of Spirits'"…
Being of rail breed, the story made much reference to equipage gone asunder in the wreck and to grievances of human flesh endured in its remedy. The old freight carman weaved a fine tale
which incorporated much craft knowledge and which paid homage to his long-gone mentors. But the story was really about the House of Spirits and how that place informed his sense of the method by which the past exerts its hold on the present.
The old freight carman related the scene within the House of Spirits in lucid terms. Its coolers produced local brews that he thought long trampled under the predatory marketing of Milwaukee beer barons. Its characters seemed plucked out of various Wisconsin eras, attired still in homespun and swaths of fur. Therein language was colorful and the discussion betrayed an independence of mind characteristic of the old yeoman republic of yore. He felt quite at home
in these confines and left on a heady ether of congeniality, promising to himself to return at his earliest opportunity.
Augustus, yes, that was his name now that I think about it, took a break from his tale. He was content to relight his pipe and puff smoke until the entire Party House had a layer of nicotine stratus at bar level. He did not presume to go further with the tale. He waited, inviting entreaty after interval sufficient to allow re-supply of beverage and resolution of personal relief issues.
When all were resettled at the bar, it fell to the youngest present, a wiry section hand, to ask the inevitable. "Did you ever make it back?", crackled a voice not far removed from puberty. Augustus took eyeful measure of the young worker, assessed his questioner's hands sufficiently calloused, and withdrew pipe from mouth.
"I never could find it again", he conceded, half-embarrassed. "Never could find anyone who could even give directions that made sense. Though I met some who said that they had one visit themselves and couldn't find it again. Plus a few others who laughed and told me the place in question had burned down over a hundred years ago."
Thus began my search for the taverns on the margins and in the shadows. In the first thousand I found tarpaper shacks and timber-framed adaptations of trading posts. In the second thousand
I found roadhouses haunted by music and blue-collar bars still populated with the spirit of labor's struggle. By the third thousand I learned to let instinct take over, to cruise the fringe places and
cranky zones outside the dominant paradigm, come what may.
I found my sense of place during this endeavor, found that you can find magic and insight in the transition spots. We have an area in Wisconsin where sand country, driftless region, river valley, and pothole lakes are all in proximity to one another. It's an area where farm fields, jack pine, hardwood forest, and tamarack swamp all bump up against each other. I've cruised it for over thirty years and visited dozens of taverns within it. I thought I knew every structure within its rough bounds.
The long light of summer solstice taught me otherwise. A detour sent me roundabout and soon I was in terra incognito. The road dipped and curved and marsh gave way to oak grove. There, astride a gurgling spring, sat the House of Spirits.
I'm not sure that I can explain what I heard and saw after I entered this tavern. How do you explain something that the rational side of the brain dismisses as dream or a trick played on the mind? How indeed when the experience leaves you feeling more connected than "real" life? Tricky things, these matters of spirit. But I guess I can offer that I saw someone resembling Augustus sitting at the bar. And I readily confess that I enjoyed my first Potosi beer in over thirty years in that hallowed spot.
I haven't bothered to try to go back to the House of Spirits. I'm pretty sure I'll get there in due time.
Copyright, Dennis Boyer 2002
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It was a mythic world, filled with remembrance of men with the muscle to heft steel rail and the grit to tame mechanical beasts which dwarfed those presumptuous enough to take the reins. It was a world populated with the ghosts of those who had gone before, an industrial age facsimile of Paleolithic council fires.
Thus began my search for the taverns on the margins and in the shadows. In the first thousand I found tarpaper shacks and timber-framed adaptations of trading posts. In the second thousand
I found roadhouses haunted by music and blue-collar bars still populated with the spirit of labor's
struggle
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