The next day we packed up camp and set off to find more waterfalls. Our first goal was Spring Camp Falls. The Wisconsin Gazetteer showed a little red line, Camp 7 Road, heading west off of Highway 51. It connected to East Branch Road, which led right to Spring Camp Falls. The book “Wisconsin Waterfalls: A Touring Guide” gave different directions, but they would take us further out of our way. The Gazetteer had never led us astray. Well, maybe sometimes, but it still was more reliable than Mapquest.

Camp 7 Road began as any other gravel road through the woods. But it quickly deteriorated. The tract went straight through a swamp, so when the road was first laid it was a corduroy road. In case you have never heard that term, a corduroy road is made by laying logs across the roadway, especially over wet, lowland terrain. The idea was so that the road was dry, but it made it incredibly rough, and the roughness only got worse over time.

In 1996, this particular road was simply heinous. By the time the logs were coming up under Pat’s Blazer, the lane had become a path, barely wide enough to fit through, branches hanging in front of us and tree trunks encroaching on both sides.

Judy and I got out and started walking the track in order to help Pat drive through. We continually stopped to access the situation, but since it was obvious we couldn’t turn around and backing up was out of the question, we kept slowing crawling forward. We checked the cell phones. Yes, we still had coverage.

“And if we called for someone to get us out of here, how exactly do you think they would do that?” Pat asked logically. She had a point. And we were at a point of no return.

Finally the road, not even an ATV trail by this time, approached a slight incline, at the top of which was dry land and a grassy opening big enough to turn around. Now the question was, do we turn around?

We knew what we had just slogged through, but was it better or worse up ahead? As tired and frustrated as we were, I thought we should leave the Blazer and at least walk the road for a little ways to see if it improved. Pat hated to be pessimistic, but she feared that the trail would get worse, or even suddenly dead end and then we couldn’t even turn around. And Judy? Well, hey, she will have to post a comment, won’t she?

The Waterfalls We Did Find

Gile Falls
Sandstone Falls

In June of 1996, Pat was feeling well enough that she decided it was high time we went on another camping trip and that we should take our other sister Judy along.

The first night we stayed at Lake of the Falls just outside of Mercer. It is a cute little county park along the Turtle Flambeau Flowage. For some reason Pat and Judy went up earlier to set up camp, and I followed after work. Pat told me where they were and I thought I understood her directions. But when I got to the county park, which is not very big, I drove around it several times, but couldn’t find them. Luckily we were not so far from civilization that Pat couldn’t call me on the cell phone.

“Hello? Where are you?”

“Where are you? I’ve been driving around the campground and you’re not here.” I stopped the car along the water’s edge and got out.

“Well,” my sarcastic sister replied, “Now I know where you are. Just look straight across the water.”

I looked across the lake and there they both were waving at me. What were they doing there?
There were a couple more camping sites on the other side of the dam, and they had found an absolutely gorgeous spot. We left the vehicles in the parking lot and hauled our stuff maybe fifty yards onto a small peninsula. It was almost like being on an island.

Go to Google maps and type in “Lake of the Falls County Park Mercer WI”. We were on that little appendage off of the county park road, the one practically surrounded by water. Way cool.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 19:14 NKJV

My son was seven the year his dad moved out and his grandpa died. Sweet innocent Nicholas was left without a male role model. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I found out about the Kinship program in Rhinelander and signed him up.

Then, as now, there are always more kids waiting for mentors than there are caring individuals willing to spend a few hours a week with a boy or girl who just needs a friend. After several months, there were no men willing to drive from Rhinelander to Tomahawk to mentor my boy.

Luckily that fall, Nick came home with information on joining the Cub Scout pack. He seemed pretty enthused, so I signed him up and off he went in his blue Scout shirt. What a difference it made in his life. He had friends, he had goals, he had activities to keep him busy. And most important he had positive male role models in his life.

Who would have thought that 17 years later, I would sign up to be a mentor through the Kinship program here in town. My kinskid, my mentee – what a doll. I care about her as if she were one of my own. I’ve heard it said that the mentors get as much out of the program as the kids do. I believe that is true.

The point is kids need positive adult figures in their lives. Even the best of parents just cannot do it by themselves. There needs to be grandparents, aunts, uncles, somebody else they can turn to, they can count on.

I look at the youth of today and it just makes me want to cry. So many lost kids, so many kids who could do so much if only they had the support, someone believing in them.

Jesus knew the importance of our children and the importance of putting them first in our lives. His followers wanted to run the children off, they thought the urchins were bothering their teacher. But Jesus said, no, that children were as important as anyone and that no one was to prevent them from joining him.

Have you been that kind of a champion in the life of a child? Can you be? If you need a place to start check out http://www.kinshipinc.org/ or http://kinshiptomahawk.org/

At the campground in Jordan, Minnesota

Jousting at the Renaissance Festival

After months of chemo and radiation, my sister’s hair started to grow back, she gained back a little weight and the only ill effect she still had was that her digestive tract, from the radiation, couldn’t tolerate raw vegetables. The bad memories of the trip to Minnesota the year before had faded, replaced by the good. We decided to try it again, taking Nick and Val with us. We even went for five days, camping in the KOA at Jordan, Minnesota.

There are a lot of things to do in that part of the Gopher state. We went to the Zoo one day and the Science Museum the next. Our friend Phyllis came up from Belle Plaine to visit us. It was all a lot of fun, but you must get tired of the boring details, so let me just jump right into the hurricane.

Hurricane in Minnesota? You are probably thinking. Darn right.

Friday night, Nick, Val and I were all cozy in our tent. Right next to us, Pat was snoozing in hers. It started raining, no big deal. Then the wind started. Then the horizontal rain started.
My tent was leaking. Nick woke up and I chased him into Pat’s Blazer. Val, however, just kept sleeping, and every time I pulled her sleeping bag out of the puddle of water in the center of the tent, she rolled herself right back into it.

Pat hollered from next door, “Are you guys ok?”

“Fine, just wet.”

“Ha, ha, ha. I am totally dry sitting on my air mattress. I told you you should get one.”

“Who knew that its tsunami season in Scott County Minnesota.”

The rain continued, pelting the side of the tents unrelentingly. Pat, floating on her air mattress, finally dozed off. Nick, high and dry in the SUV, surely was sound asleep. I spent the rest of the night wide awake, continuing to pull Val to high ground as best I could. I don’t know why I bothered; she obviously could sleep through anything.

In the morning, the sun greeted us as we crawled out of our hovels to view the devastation of the campground. Branches and small trees lay scattered like fall leaves, water covered the ground.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked Pat, who was still gloating over her dry bed.

“It looks like a beautiful day. Let’s hang everything up that we can and go to the Renaissance Festival.” And that’s exactly what we did.

Copper Falls at Copper Falls State Park, Mellen, Wisconsin, October 1, 1994

Lake Superior at Saxon Harbor, October 1, 1994

We have had an unusually warm October this year. In 1994 the weather was a bit more typical. The first of October was overcast and the temperature was just comfortable – sweatshirt weather you might say.

Pat and I took a ride up north. Not an overnight trip, just a day trip, but those eight hours are burned into my head. Visions that haunt me still.

My sister had been the one who always had the long hair. Even when it hung just above her shoulders, it was longer than mine, all one length, while mine was short all over. For one year in high school, Pat had it cut in some kind of style of the time, but it didn’t take long before her tresses ran down her back again, often in a single thick braid.

When we got home from the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in August, her husband drove Pat straight to the hospital. The Vicodin were no longer touching the pain and the ride home had been torture.

The following week she had surgery to remove an abdominal tumor and started chemo shortly after that. Trying to accept the reality that the chemo would cause her hair to all fall out, she had her long locks cut.

When I picked her up that Saturday morning, to just go for a ride up north, she wore a bandana. It had only been a couple days since I had seen her, but her skin had turned sallow and thin.

“Everything ok?” I asked.

“Yup.” Her jaw was set; the same stubbornness would get her through a lot in the coming years.

“I’m not eating much, yucky stomach, but other than that, I’m ok.”

“All right.” I was skeptical.

We headed to Lake Superior. We saw some waterfalls, I took the usual ton of pictures, and we had some laughs. Finally, though, as we stood at a wayside on a hill overlooking the orange and red leafed trees, she asked if I would mind if she took off her bandana.

“Well, sure, why would I care?” It was only a head of hair, wasn’t it?

If I would’ve wanted to, I probably could have counted the golden hairs left on her scalp. She ran her hand over her head and more precious strands came out and she released them to the wind. I wanted to catch them and save them; maybe somehow we could figure out a way to attach them to her head again. She couldn’t just let them go.

But there it went, foot-long strand after strand, into the meadow, onto the dry stalks of straw that littered the field where we stood.

“It’s better here than in the shower.” She described the wad of hair she took out of the drain every night.

Things had changed; we had changed. And nothing was ever going to be the same again.

First Trip to the Renaissance Festival

How many incidences have occurred in your life which you look back on now and just laugh? At the time, however, you were either so angry or embarrassed or scared, that you saw absolutely nothing funny. You never thought you would ever see the humor in it. And today when you try to tell someone else the story, you can hardly get the words out for laughing.

Have you ever had the opposite happen? As you lived the event you were in hysterics, tears ran down your face, your sides ached from laughing. Today, you can smile nostalgically when you share the story, but any tears that bubble up in your eyes are not brought on by joy.

It was August 1994. My sister and I had talked for several years about going to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, just north of where her college friend Phyllis lived. We finally made the arrangements and a friend of Pat’s from work, Angie, came along and drove. We were going to stay for free in Phyllis’s basement apartment and just have a fun all-girls weekend.

One problem. Pat had been diagnosed with cancer the year before. The specialists all had hoped that the hysterectomy had gotten all the cancer and didn’t see any reason for further treatment. A year later, though, the terrible pain returned in her abdomen. The doctor set her up for some tests the following week, gave her some pain pills and told her to have a good weekend.

I don’t know how other people function on Vicodin, but it quickly became obvious that my sister could not. Luckily, Angie and I were able to find Belle Plaine, Minnesota, without Pat’s help. But when we tried to find Phyllis’s, we were useless and turns out so was Pat.

We hadn’t even brought along the address because Pat kept swearing she knew exactly where she lived, right across from the school. With my sister in her own little narcotic world in the back seat, we thought, it would still be ok, Belle Plaine was a small town and we should be able to find the school. Wrong.

In the dark, we must have driven up and down every one of the twelve or so streets in town without success. About the time we pulled into a convenience store to ask for directions, Pat’s head popped up in the back seat. As Angie went inside and asked where the school was, Pat, watching through the window, began to heckle the gas station attendant as her arms swung to and fro pointing out the streets we had to take.

“She isn’t even pointing to where the school is.”

“Pat,” I answered as best I could through my giggles. “You don’t even know what state we are in.”

“Oh, you silly, I know we are in Minnesota.”

“Are you sure?” I had to tease.

“Umm, I think so. Unless you guys got us lost.”

Angie got back in the SUV and immediately joined our laughter without even asking what was so funny. Somehow we found the school, and the house where Phyllis lived. We were still in hysterics as we stumbled down her stairs and she just thought we were nuts.

Green Bay in 1994

The summer after my divorce was final, I packed the kids, the tent and too much food into my Honda Civic and headed to Green Bay. Nick was eight and a half and Val was just four. And actually the kids both remember this trip, so I was finally doing something right.

We camped at the Cedar Valley Campground in Kewaunee, about a half hour due east of Green Bay. The first night we were the only ones out in the field in our tent. The other campers, in campers, were parked in the trees where they had electricity and water. We, however, were roughing it. No, not really, since the campground had a swimming pool we splashed in every night.

Our first full day of vacation, we played at Bay Beach Amusement Park. The Park is an old-fashioned family-centered spot, which charged no admission and the rides were all amazingly cheap – between ten and thirty cents each. Sure the rides were pretty basic, but what kid still does not just love the Ferris Wheel, Merry-Go-Round, and Tilt-A-Whirl. The only disappointment was the giant slide. Nick was too short to ride it alone and Val was too small to ride it at all.

The second day we visited the National Railroad Museum. Nick, if I remember right, thought that it was absolutely awesome. I believe he was still in that fireman-railroad worker-helicopter pilot phase. His glory was finding the MT&W locomotive which had come straight out of our home town paper mill. Built in 1938, it served the Tomahawk mill for years before coming to the railroad museum in 1973.

When we got back to the campground that afternoon, we thought we finally had neighbors. Until I realized it was our tent that had rolled three or four campsites over. Thinking that the inside would air out, I had pulled up the stakes that morning. During the day, the wind had taken it for a little walk. We retrieved it before anyone came along and staked it down.