8 After Neillsville
Neillsville was a forgettable footnote to my life, I said to myself for many years after I had left. A birthplace is accidental, I thought, but we can choose where to spend our lives. And I chose California.
College was everything I’d hoped: packed with interesting people and experiences I couldn’t have imagined in Neillsville. The California weather reminded me each winter why I had left, and why I had no desire to return.
In fact I didn’t return. The year after I left, my parents left too, with my sister to Dad’s new job in New Orleans. Gary stayed for a while, but in time he grew lonely for family and he joined them there. During college I found interesting and well-paid computer work that kept me in California over the summers. I visited my parents, now in New Orleans, no more than once or twice a year.
My dream of learning a foreign language came true upon graduation, when somehow I landed a job in Tokyo Japan. I lived there for three years, and returned to the US for graduate school in Philadelphia. By then my parents and sister had returned to the midwest, this time to Michigan. My Sprague grandparents, who still had their farm, were my only connection to Wisconsin. It had been almost ten years before my grandfather’s funeral brought me back to Neillsville. And then I was off to Japan again after I had my masters degree.
I worked in Japan for Apple Computer, which though it was not yet nearly the giant tech company that it later became, gave me a front row seat to the birth of the computing products we now take for granted. Eventually they brought me back to California where I married a woman I’d met at business school.
Soon we were raising a family in Silicon Valley. A new job with Microsoft brought us to Seattle, to the suburban community of Mercer Island. My kids grew up there, with technological amenities that would have been inconceivable to me when I was their age.
When the kids hit middle school, we moved to Beijing China for three years, exposing them to a whole different set of experiences that, to them, were as normal as anything I witnessed in Neillsville.
They grew up in a community where every classmate was the child of a professional – doctors, lawyers, engineers. Virtually everyone they know is the child of two college graduates; most of them are the grandchildren of professionals as well. They don’t know anyone who is associated with the military, or for that matter with any occupation that doesn’t require a college degree.
Sometimes I think about those iconic photos of a lone camel herder riding in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. I wonder if, while going about his daily chores, does the camel rider ever think about how those giant stone monuments came to be? Is he curious about who could have built such a massive structure? Does he consider the thousands and thousands of laborers, architects, engineers, and managers it must have required to do such a project? And then does he reflect on how all those skills came to be lost, to the point that now in their wildest imaginations his community couldn’t possibly repeat a feat that his distant ancestors took for granted.
I grew up in a community run by people who had personally experienced the horrors – and victory – of World War II. Against what at the time had been improbable odds, they were integral participants of a country that defeated the Nazis, and the Imperial Japanese. The farmers, teachers, and businessmen of Neillsville were part of a culture that, within living memory, had invented electrification, the telephone, automobiles, the airplane, antibiotics – and on and on.
On my infrequent trips back to Neillsville I marvel at the many huge, well-built houses, many of them constructed in the late 1800s during its heyday as a logging center. Somebody built those houses with manual tools, laid the foundations with horse-drawn labor, calculated the materials and costs using pencil and paper. They did this in the cruel Wisconsin winters, long before electricity and outdoor plumbing. And of course they had to feed and clothe themselves and their families.
I left Neillsville as soon as I could, for what seemed at the time like obviously better opportunities. No doubt I made the right decision. On any measure, my children’s lives are vastly better than anything my childhood self could have imagined.
But sometimes, like that Egyptian camel rider, I wonder at the monuments of this urban world. Could we build them again, from scratch? If faced with a mortal enemy, like my grandparents faced in the last World War, would we rise to the challenge?
Now that I’m much older, having seen a world of other cultures, I realize that much of America’s success was embedded in the unspoken values we took for granted in the many small towns like Neillsville. Although we couldn’t always articulate – or in my case at the time, appreciate – the wisdom that surrounded us, there is much to remember. I don’t want us to forget.
That’s what I learned in Neillsville.