Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin

By Kassie Jo Baron

Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.

But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.  

About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”

By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.

It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).

Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.

Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.

These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.

Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”

Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.

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Belle Isle
Waawiiyaatanong

By Daniel A. Lockhart

I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south sliding quilt of the lakes above us. The air is thick with fog, giving the world an evenness of white and grey. Punctuated by the restless patterns of geese and swans rejoicing over the return of open water. Across from where I stand, separated by the Fleming Channel of the Detroit River, is the jewel of an urban park, Belle Isle. I reminded of the island and the city across the water from us nearly hourly, as the clarion tower sings out its song across the water and the city streets between. What is before me in this moment is that spirit made real. A near translucent moment of a city in the clouds, an island at its heart.   

To think, this is the same restless river in which, in his poem “Belle Isle, 1949,” Levine and his Polish high school girl were baptized “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” The river of industrial stove making, the river before the monumental decline of the great Horatio Algerian city, the river that is hardly visible past the row of phantom trees that make up the horizon that used to be, and still is, the island anchor of Levine’s poem.  Today, even the vision of the opposite bank is gone and the river is a nexus of dull light. Sharp edges of fluorescent modern Detroit, and Windsor for that matter, are absent. I have loved the constellation of skyscraper lights that dominate us here. Even in daylight they are gone. But here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.

Is this the perfect calm of the water between city and island? “Turning at last to see no island at all / but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight.”  Before me, that darkness chased away and the river sheened as if it had never known of the Griffon, a burning Rouge River, the gore of Bloody Run. This river is a different river than Levine’s. More ancient, freed from ore haulers, the shadow of stoves, the traffic of Jefferson. At least, temporarily, between shipping seasons. Across the river there are certainly drums. A passing car on the island’s ring road, hidden in the dense fog bank hovering above shore. There is no possibility of touching the river beyond. Signs warn of its threat on the metal fence that separates us. Alone. There is no woman, there is no warmth of another in all of this.          The river is changed. And it is light now. And I find myself lost in thoughts of the warmth of a lover’s breath upon my skin. Taken by the heavy cold in the air around me, I understand that each time is of itself. The spirit lives on. But the impermanence of the world allows at best for anchors in our memories. We no longer build stoves. Few of us swim in the river. The water is undisturbed as it passes before me, its surface defiant and purposeful like sturgeon skin. And the world is the white of an elder’s hair; wèlathakèt returned. And the quiet, while the river slides by in her earliest stages of waking in this the earliest hours of spring. Moving us, in silence, “back where we came from.”

D.A. Lockhart is the author of Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill), Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House), and Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce). His work has been shortlisted for Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and First Nations Community READS Award. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

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4831 S. Vincennes Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Joseph S. Pete

Powell’s Books used to have a few locations in Chicago, none anywhere near as large as the fabled city block full of books in Portland. Now only its venerable Hyde Park bookstore remains, but I fondly remember the Lincoln Park Powell’s with its distinguished rows of dark-wood bookshelves soaring up to the ceiling, the rarefied upper shelves reachable only by sliding ladder. It had the hallowed airs of some centuries-old university library. It’s where, as a pock-faced and perpetually despondent teenager, I first obtained a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which swiftly became one of my favorite and most re-read books.

Fran Lebowitz said at a recent talk at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago that literature should be a window and not a mirror. I found Wright’s Native Son to be both. It was a mirror in that I hailed from the heavily industrialized and culturally similar Northwest Indiana just outside the familiar South Side landscapes he described. As a troubled youth, I could also relate strongly to Bigger Thomas’s alienation and desperate sense of doomed hopelessness. And Mary Dalton’s rebellious dalliance with communism spoke to my burgeoning political consciousness. I was delving deeper and deeper into reading serious literature and Native Son had more recognizable touchstones than the 19th-century British and Russian classics I was devouring around that time. It just clicked for me.

But it was also a window into the African American experience I could never fully know, and that intrigued me. I had started to see the white flight, abandonment, and segregation that split greater Chicagoland asunder as the great defining original sin that corrupted the area. Highways came to divide white and minority neighborhoods in both Chicago and the Calumet Region. I went to high school about a block south of Gary when it was still the murder capital of the United States, where as many as 13,000 vacant buildings have rotted in shameful testament to people’s unwillingness to live next door to people who look differently. The sins of our forefathers scarred the landscape with blight, boarded-up storefronts, and rubble-strewn buildings with collapsed roofs. Native Son explores racial discrimination that sadly remains just as relevant as ever. A recent HBO adaptation, instead of putting Bigger through a show trial, modernized his plight by having Bigger gunned down extrajudicially by trigger-happy police.

Wright grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and moved as a young adult to Chicago’s South Side, his family following the Great Migration from the South to the more prosperous industrialized cities of the North. He spent the most time in one place on the second story of a row house in Bronzeville, a largely residential neighborhood flanking Grand Boulevard (now called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive). He lived with family in a two-story building with a cream-colored brick façade, bay windows, a tiny patch of lawn, and an entrance with stone stairs and relatively unembellished Greek pillars, the most modest home in a strip of taller and more architecturally extravagant houses. Today, the home is privately owned, and no tours are offered, but you can admire the solid masonry of the stone-and-brick exterior and enduring handiwork of craftsmen from 1893, when it was built.

Wright lived on that densely populated stretch of S. Vincennes Ave. in his early 20s, working as a postal clerk until the Great Depression cost him that position. He went on to bounce around the city, working a series of unskilled jobs, but spent that formative period in the Black Metropolis that produced many intellectuals, artists, and musicians, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Ida B. Wells and Sam Cooke.

During his downtime, Wright studied great authors and started to pursue his literary ambitions. He contributed to the area’s vibrant culture, founding the South Side Writers Group and the literary journal Left Front as he started to publish his own poetry. He also began his first novel, Lawd Today!, which he finished in 1935 but wasn’t published until after his death decades later.

There’s not much to see now on the quiet residential street other than a plaque designating the house as a Chicago Landmark, but the modestness of the abode that helped nurture Wright to greatness is the point. Ninety years after he lived and started writing there, the neighborhood continues to hum with culture. There’s the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the Southside Community Art Center, Room 43, the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour, and the Bronzeville Walk of Fame, among many other points of interest.

Though just south of the glittering skyscrapers of the Loop, the majority-black Bronzeville often gets as overlooked as it was when Wright lived there from 1929 to 1932. In Native Son, Mary Dalton tells Bigger, “I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other.” Even today, many suburbanites and recent Big Ten grads transplanted to the North Side have never set foot in the rather genteel neighborhood. I frequently attend White Sox games just across the highway, but it feels a world away. The divisions that doom young men like Bigger Thomas still stand today in great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.

The descendent of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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Grand Kankakee Marsh
Porter County, Indiana

By Matthew A. Werner

Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River. It was his respite. Then, in the name of progress, men obliterated the marsh and ruined the river.

Of the Kankakee, Wallace wrote, “Never in all my world travels have I seen a more perfect spot, nor a more tantalizing river.” He grew up near the Wabash River. During the Mexican War, Wallace swam the Rio Grande. As a Civil War general, he met the Mississippi. While U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, he saw the Rhine, Danube, and Nile. As New Mexico Territory Governor, he crossed the Pecos and Sante Fe. The man had seen some rivers.

The Kankakee River meandered 250 miles through 2,000 oxbows from South Bend, Indiana, to Momence, Illinois. North and south of this stretch lay one million acres of marsh land — half of which flooded permanently and half with the changing seasons. Sand dunes that served as islands interspersed the flat, peaty marsh. The landscape included tall grass, cattails, oak trees, and giant sycamores. Wild apple trees, walnut trees, wild rice, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries grew in abundance.

The wildlife habitat had few peers — beaver, mink, otters, opossums, cougars, wolves, bison, elk, and fox lived there. Folklore claimed you could walk across the marsh hopping from muskrat den to muskrat den. The bottom was full of mussels. Lunker bass, walleye, and pike thrived. Bees stuffed hollow trees with honey; bats made homes in others. It was a bird paradise — purple martens, Carolina parakeets, loons, trumpeter swans, egrets, and whooping cranes nested in the marsh. Bird populations were so great that visitors described flocks that darkened the sky.

Local Potawatomi people lived with the marsh, using its abundance of mammals, birds, fish, and plants to provide food and medicine. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was a natural food pantry.

The United States government forced out the Potawatomi in the 1830s. As a result of the Swamp Land Act of 1850, Indiana carved the marsh into squares and sold it to speculators and settlers. It was said that the marsh was “the only place you could buy land by the gallon.” Many men sought to conquer the marsh and drain its water. Others, like Lew Wallace, enjoyed the marsh’s magnificence.

By the time Wallace arrived in the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1858, it was a hunter, trapper, and sportsman’s destination. Gun and hunt clubs that catered to wealthy men flourished on the sand islands and banks of the Kankakee River.

Wallace returned again and again over 43 years. He bought a lumber barge and converted it to a houseboat aptly named The Thing. It moored 100 yards south of Collier Lodge at Baum’s Bridge. With his friend, Ira Brainard, Wallace modified the vessel and created fixtures from neighbors’ unwanted furniture. The floating cabin was 10 feet by 37 feet in dimension. It had three sections (sleeping quarter, kitchen, and living room) and was topped with a framework of iron pipe and canvas. Early Porter County historian Hubert Skinner said, “There have been many boats on the Kankakee, but none ever attracted more attention than the queer barge he devised.” From the living room, Wallace likely wrote parts of Ben-Hur, The Prince of India, and his autobiography.

During his visits, Wallace fished, tinkered with his boat, and visited with the people of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He stopped at various lodges and hunting clubs along the river. “River rats, trappers, guides, pushers, and just ordinary home folks accepted him for his friendliness and his interest in the Kankakee,” wrote Skinner.

For a brief period of time during the Civil War, General Wallace was shelved. With no soldiers to lead, he retreated to the Kankakee to fish, think, and write before he was called back to battle and served through the end of the war.

Viewed as a land of financial opportunity, profiteers plundered the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Railroad box cars carted away the marsh’s splendors. Businessmen killed swans for down, egrets for fancy hats, muskrats and mink for fur, cattails for furniture stuffing, and mussels for pearls and buttons. Frog legs and waterfowl were killed by the thousands and served in Chicago and New York City restaurants.

To drain the water, men dug ditch upon ditch, but the marsh remained. Then men blasted a mile of limestone ledge on the river bottom in Illinois. The marsh retreated, but only a little. In 1902, steam dredges began straightening the bends and curves of the Kankakee River and doomed the marsh.

Wallace last visited the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1904. He died in 1905. In 1922, dredges bypassed the final bend of the Kankakee, turning its 250 miles of meandering river into a 90-mile-long ditch. Ninety-nine percent of the marsh drained away. Finally, the Grand Kankakee succumbed to its killers.

Loggers removed trees for lumber. In its wake, men planted rows of corn. The United States migratory bird population declined by one-fifth. No more duck, geese, cattails or frog legs shipped out. The hunt clubs vacated. The Kankakee River no longer flowed where Wallace moored The Thing.

Today, you cannot jump from muskrat den to muskrat den. Fox dens have been plowed. You won’t find mussels. There is no wild rice to harvest. Loons do not come here. Flocks of birds do not darken the sky. The marsh tries to reclaim its territory when heavy rains flood the corn fields, but the water stubbornly drains.

It would be kind to say the men who drained the Grand Kankakee Marsh did not know what they were doing. They knew. They called it progress. Men murdered that perfect spot, that tantalizing river that Lew Wallace loved. Had Wallace lived to see its death, he would have died of a broken heart.

Matt Werner is a story-teller and jack of all trades. He grew up on a farm in Union Mills, Indiana — land that once was the outer reaches of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He has authored three books — Season of Upsets, How Sweet It Is, and A White Sox Life — and numerous articles on history and interesting people. You can learn more about him at www.matthewawerner.com.

To learn more about Lew Wallace and the Grand Kankakee Marsh, watch Everglades of the North and visit the Kankakee Valley Historical Society and the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum.

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Cow Creek Crossing
Pittsburg, Kansas

By Leslie VonHolten

Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The Government Lake,” a trip to the toy store ends with a discomfiting acceptance of violence. Or the reader of “Awkward Silence,” on her porch, annoyed by helicopters mating overhead. Or how about those late-in-life lovers, mugged by musicians in “The Hostile Philharmonic Orchestra”?

If you think these are strange set-ups, how about this: Tate, a surrealist, absurdist Midwestern poet won the Pulitzer Prize (1992) and the National Book Award (1994) for his odd dreamscapes. What a world.

Tate lived many places that rightfully claim him, but it was as a student in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he learned that he was a poet. This landscape of disturbed prairie, coyote howls, and broad days opened the deep attention he needed to see the absurd in everyday life.

I’m all for the magic carpet ride Tate gives us, but it is “Manna” from his first collection that grounds me. A little sentimental, yes, but its alignment of solitude and connection under the night sky hits me square in the sternum. It is my all-time favorite poem set in Kansas.

Train tracks in Pittsburg have changed since Tate wrote those lines in 1967. Many spurs have been pulled out or paved over, and the depot is now an event center. But you can still find slow, flat and open crossings on the quieter edges of town. Tate’s miraculous provision of the poem likely happened as he walked home along West Hudson Street. Poets and other bohemians were known to drink on the trestle bridge spanning nearby Cow Creek, the setting of another poem in the collection.

Rural Kansas is rarely seen as a gateway to surrealist thought, but look closer and consider. Pittsburg is surrounded by the land-scars of mining, small pits and hills that undulate throughout the county. In the early 20th century, immigrants from all over the world came to southeast Kansas to work in the “gopher hole,” strip, and shaft mines. Many were from Eastern Europe, and the area became known as the Little Balkans. It’s a heritage that echoes still: until the pandemic, you could polka dance at Barto’s Idle Hour in neighboring Frontenac on Saturday nights. Artist-painted fiberglass replicas of coal buckets honor the town’s mining past.

This is also a land of gorillas. They are everywhere. The Pittsburg State University mascot is the proud town identifier — even the trash bins in front of each house are gold and red, and cement silverbacks decorate yards in every neighborhood.

The historical juxtaposition exposes the absurdity: Pitt State students selected the gorilla in 1925, while just three years earlier, the town made international news when 6,000 women and children marched for three days to protest poor labor conditions in the mines. The Kansas National Guard was deployed to establish order; a New York Times reporter dubbed the women the “Amazon Army.” They were lauded as heroes in the mine camps.

It’s a surreal mix, these legacies of college rah-rah comingling with a socialist labor movement. “I sure miss that country; I am really beginning to feel or see the roots I have there,” Tate wrote to his instructor Eugene DeGrusen in 1966. “It takes time and distance I guess to see that kind of thing, but I see it now and I’m proud of it. Not that I write bucolic verse or even use much naturalistic imagery, but I am primitive in a contemporary way, if such a phrase can be allowed.”

… but I am primitive in a contemporary way … Fiberglass coal buckets, Saturday night polka music, and gorillas on the prairie. Seeing a place better after you have left. Hello absurdist poet — we know you well.

Leslie VonHolten writes about the connections between land and culture. A 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow, her art writing has been published in Pitch, Lawrence.com, and Ceramics Art + Perception. Sometimes she also curates a show or makes a zine. She lives in Kansas, where she mostly grew up. Leslie thanks poet Al Ortolani for the Pittsburg map and memory conversations.

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