Beverly Hart, my mother-in-law, died about six weeks shy of her 91st birthday. To me, she was a paradox: an irrational optimist who was simultaneously one of the most worried people that I ever knew. When I first met her, thirty-five years ago, she seemed to specialize in worry – she fretted about her children and grandchildren and imagined all sorts of hazards and lurking dangers. (Some of these worries arose from the way sex roles were defined in her family – she seems to have considered men, particularly younger ones, as irresponsibly reckless; there were a lot of snowmobiles and motorcycles in her family circle, machines that could be driven at high speeds over rough terrain.) Her inclination to view the world as dangerous, however, was at war with her fundamental optimism. When she was very old, she nagged her daughters to take her on excursions for which she was manifestly too weak and frail. A trip to Duluth when she was ninety led to her being hospitalized in intensive care after sightseeing for two days. And, yet, the next year, she again importuned her daughters to repeat the trip. On her death bed, she was planning meals and gifts for Christmas. This was at a time when her caregivers didn’t expect her to survive until Thanksgiving. It sometimes seemed to me that Bev’s fears didn’t detract from her fundamental optimism, but, even, somehow fueled her tendencies to overestimate her vitality. The more helpless she became, the more she imagined a future full of fresh hopes and adventures. Most likely, Bev thought that her resources were more than sufficient to vanquish any misfortunes that she encountered.
Life, of course, presents challenges whether we imagine them in our future or not. In Bev’s case, she had plenty of hard luck to guide her grim assessment of the peril lurking all around her. Her mother was deserted by her father when she was a very small child and she grew up in household of independent and fierce women. As far I understand, her father abandoned his family at the height of the Depression, in the “dirty thirties” as they were called. None of this would have made any sense to a little girl, raised without a father, by a hardworking farm girl. Her mother, Leota, packed potatoes harvested in the dense black earth near Hollandale where some shallow lakes had been drained. It was hard work and she had a finger ripped off in a potato processing plant. (When I first came to Austin in 1979, those mucky lake bottoms smelled of onions grown in the black slime and there were huge half-buried warehouses for onions and potatoes in Maple Island, a little village occupying a oak savanna hilltop that had once poked its head above the surrounding shallow waters and their concentric rings of marsh and wetland. In those days, migrant workers from Mexico lived in squalid barracks at the end of gravel roads running like causeways through the swamps.) My mother-in-law lived on a farm with her own mother and grandmother, a place with a haggard-looking two-story white clapboard house, stiff as an antique celluloid collar, a privy and no running water except what you could pump out of the well. No doubt, she was poor although the neighborhood was full of uncles and cousins and, of course, as is the manner with peasant farming families, everyone had plenty to eat. At Bev’s funeral, a nephew told me about the meals that they had eaten at the farm, six courses of hot food for “a little lunch.” with baked pastry made with lard. For these people, meals were more memorable than love affairs or motorcycle accidents.
The way off the farm was through school and Beverly went to a teacher’s college and received her license as an educator. Her older sister, Nellie Mae, worked as a legal secretary and was the family’s glamor girl, although if truth be told, Bev was more attractive. Nell was aggressive and outgoing and ended up marrying a tunneling contractor who started his work-life with a shovel in his hand but ended as CEO of a multi-million dollar business. Nell had several homes and divided her time between the west suburbs in Minneapolis and California – her family had a house near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada. After teaching for a semester or two in Nevada, Bev returned to Minnesota and spent the rest of her life raising her family in Albert Lea within about thirty miles of the farm where she had been raised. Bev’s suspicions that life was perilous and unpredictable were borne out in 1966. At that time, Bev’s husband, Dick, was teaching earth sciences (geology as it was then called) in the Junior High School in Albert Lea and, because he was handy and ingenious – his father had been a carpenter – he had built a large two-story home for his family on the edge of the town. (In those days, teachers didn’t work in the Summer at school, but shingled roofs and painted houses, and male instructors all coached athletic teams and could teach Shop in a pinch if so assigned and, so, it was very common for these men to serve as their own contractors and build their own homes mostly with their own labor and the help of friends.) No sooner was the house completed, then, a tornado swept off the prairie and the big white house burst like a balloon – it was shattered into ten-thousand pieces of timber and lathe with nothing remaining but the cellar.
Fortunately, no one was injured in the calamity although there were casualties elsewhere in town. The family retreated to a yellow house on a hilltop where they had lived when their new home was under construction. At Bev’s funeral, relatives disputed the location of this home, long since demolished. Dick rebuilt and, after many hardships, moved his family back to the new house on the site where the previous structure had been uprooted and smashed by the tornado. Later, Dick acquired land on Graves Lake, a place north of Grand Rapids, Minnesota and, at first, there was a rustic cabin on the property. In those days, black bear roamed the north woods, raiding garbage dumps and trash bins. The lake cabin was another source of worry for Bev. One of her granddaughters said that the girls weren’t allowed to visit the outhouse after dark for fear of being accosted by bears – they had to pee in a coffee can. The cabin on the lake was remodeled into a nice house but, of course, it was dangerous: a fisherman might fall off his boat and get entangled in the outboard motor and drowned; people drove around recklessly on golf carts and utility vehicles (there was an impressive Polaris garaged at the cabin); the lake’s shallows were shrouded in duck-weed that could grab you by the ankles and suck you under the water. According to legend, the lake was named for several lumberjacks who perished in the frigid depths in winter when the ice broke open under a team of horses dragging some huge pine trees over the frozen track. On an island in the middle of the lake, safe from bears, a hermit lived – he knew that people were unpredictable and prone to betrayal and, therefore, best avoided.
Every attachment, of course, is first a source of pleasure and, ultimately, a well of grief. What we love, we must learn to lose. Men fell off ladders, gored themselves with chainsaws, snowmobiles rolled into icy ravines, and kids left pennants of flesh on asphalt when their motorcycles went sprawling down the highway, skidding into ditches full of rusty barb wire and broken bottles. It was no better for girls: young women got pregnant and there were hasty marriages to unsuitable men. Other girls married handsome buccaneers who turned out to be junkies or abusive alcoholics or just good-for-nothings. At every wedding, there were brawls and the success of such festivities was measured by the number of police squad cars required to quell the riot.
Families rarely achieve parity between the sexes – some families are male-dominated; others are governed by women. In Bev’s family, there was a myth that women served the men – for instance, at family gatherings, everyone recalled a time in the not-so-distant past when “the menfolk ate before the women were served.” But no one could remember exactly when this custom prevailed and, in fact, the women and girls ate alongside the men and boys that the females in the house bossed. There was no doubt that Bev, and her sister, Nell, controlled things at home. Males were relegated to the edges of the family circle – they were too unpredictable, potentially violent, and emotionally illiterate. The men, at least, when they were younger, liked to kill things – they spent weekends hunting and fishing and there were always old black Labradors in the back yard, imprisoned in wire-mesh pens and baying at squirrels and the moon. Bev kept dachshunds (she called them wiener dogs) and they lived in the house, lithe reddish-brown and bad-tempered beast-emperors jealously guarding their little territories of couch and easy chair. As if in tacit reproach to the great hunters, Bev set out feeders for birds and squirrels and didn’t decline fodder to an occasional mendicant raccoon. She built a pond in her backyard, aerated it with a little pump, and, in a stone basin, beneath a little trickling waterfall, she kept goldfish. There was a fish for each grandchild, beautiful elegant creatures that wandered like colorful clouds through the artificial lagoon.
Bev raised a couple of her grandchildren and, at least, the girls, whose interests she understood, spent many weekends at home, playing with Barbie dolls and watching videos on the TV. (The boys were less in evidence: they couldn’t be trusted to not harass wildlife or get into other mischief.) At sleepovers, Bev was tolerant – she didn’t care how long the girls stayed-up and fed them junk-food until they were stuffed. No one went to church – Bev understood that praying didn’t help anything and that, in fact, petitions for succor merely amplified worry. Lots of things could go wrong and, in fact, were pretty certain to go off the rails and, in that case, the only thing on which you could rely was yourself. And, as far as Bev was concerned, this strain of pioneer self-reliance was, more or less, salubrious – she continued to grub and dig in her flower garden until she was 88, an elderly widow mowing her own lawn and mulching her own plants, feeding wild birds, and caring for her dogs. Her mind never failed – until the last couple days, she was making plans for Christmas and writing out instructions for the disposition of her property if something might, perhaps, happen to her. I saw her a couple days before she died and she spoke in a low voice, seemingly several sentences that no one doubted were meaningful, although we couldn’t understand her words.
In the end, of course, all eulogies are fraudulent and all obituaries incomplete. You can’t summarize someone’s life in a four paragraphs or four or five pages. My impressions of Beverly Hart will likely ring untrue with those who knew her better. And, everyone acts against the grain of their own existence as well and people are unpredictable, often enigmas even to themselves – this is one of God’s dangers. I’ve alway been puzzled by the fact that my mother-in-law left the lush river valley at Winona where she attended teacher’s college and where, in fact, she later taught (my wife’s first superintendent in Houston, Minnesota recalled Bevy Ann who had worked in his district many years before), departing this familiar country for the empty desert wilderness in Nevada. Bev taught sixth-grade in Lovelock, Nevada, a remote place in the high desert at the center of Pershing County, 6500 square miles of barren terrain in which that village is the sole incorporated town. There is a Paiute Indian reservation on the edge of the village and, when she lived in Lovelock, the town had only been in existence for 40 years. No doubt, it was bitterly cold in the Winter with the winds blowing across the mountains and high elevations of the Black Rock Desert (the bacchanal of Burning Man takes place near here) and, of course, searing in the Summer. In the early fifties, the empty land was a firing range for the army and artillery roared in the wasteland night and day so that if you strayed off the road you might find yourself bombarded and there were Basque ranchers who didn’t speak English and, probably, no air-conditioning during the scorching heat in the Summer. No doubt there was some reason she went to that place, if only for a year, but no one has ever told me the reason for her sojourn in Pershing County and, I guess, this pleases me to the extent that I don’t intend to make further inquiries – it’s best to leave some things mysterious. The dead keep their secrets well and, perhaps, this is mostly for the best. In any event, there’s a risk to summarizing someone’s life. My son, Jack, offended his mother by saying that Bev’s life was “small and uneventful”. This was thoughtless and callow. Uneventful? Compared to whom: Hitler, Alexander the Great, Emily Bronte, John Keats? And, of course, most “eventful” lives are full of misery either self-inflicted or inflicted on others. No one, in their right mind, should desire an “eventful” life. And, in any event, Bev gave birth to four children, each experience of that sort akin, I’m afraid to a mortal duel or combat, and, then, she raised her children, ran a household, bossed her kids and grandchildren and, finally, greatgrandchildren, and, up to the end of her life, steadfastly demanded that her wishes be fulfilled – she wanted to die in her own home, not a nursing facility or assisted care, with her children and dog within the range of her voice and, against all odds, achieved this. It was a final battle in which she prevailed. There isn’t anything small about a life that lasts more than ninety years.
The year before she died, Bev demanded that she be taken to a beach on the North Shore near Duluth. I think the place is called Brighton Beach (Kitchi Gamma park) and it is famous for Lake Superior agates. Although Bev couldn’t walk to forage among the stones washed up on shore, she asked her daughters to look for agates polished by the ceaseless surge of the waves. These stones would make good souvenirs for great-grandchildren and, of course, collecting rocks was a kind of tribute to Bev’s husband, Dick, who had taught Earth Sciences at the Southwest Middle School in Albert Lea. The day was clear and the shining waters of the lake were serene, although, of course, Superior’s depths are full of shipwrecks and drowned sailors. The park is beneath Hawk Ridge, a height on the bluffs east of Duluth, where migrating eagles form great swirling kettles 900 feet overhead in the beginning of autumn. Lake Superior agates were formed in catastrophe, lava flows effervescent with water vapor and hematite (iron ore) makes blood-red bands in the stones. I don’t know whether any agates were collected on that visit to the beach. Further, up the coast, rivers foaming the color of root beer plunged over cliffs. The sun shone on the rust-colored cliffs and bays filled with smooth red stones.
The family selected the song “Somewhere over the Rainbow” for the funeral. The Wizard of Oz was one of Bev’s favorite movies – she had first seen the film when she was eight or nine years old. In the song, Judy Garland yearns for a paradise beyond the stormy skies, up over the rainbow. In the imagination, the song seems huge, but, in fact, its very short. Judy Garland sings just before a tornado sweeps across the Kansas prairie, uprooting her house and dropping it into a technicolor meadow onto a wicked witch.
