Minocqua is our home where we live in a highway removal metal garage. Randy has stayed the course and is now returned with his reward; heart surgery done in Marshfield WI. He tells me that he has 'friends' that have reserved a room for him to recover in. I imagine a cosy snug area at the Pines Motel and instead am flummoxed to see the 'reserved' room inaccessable due to a plowed up drift of snow 4 foot high. Unable to confront this slap due to my post hypno Randy and I climb this Everest of illness to enter the room. I get his meals from the hospital and after a week Randy wants to return to 8783 Frank Drive and we do. Even sleeping with the dog in his bed, he recovers from the surgery without any infection. The Pines Motel rapidly disappeared in name and signage.
The infection in Minocqua is deeper and years later Gov J Doyle enacts legislation that allows people sold unbuildable lots to build on them. This requires that the Governor give up his career goal in the DNR of preserving lake frontages in the natural state. I have decided that life is so much harder than we are told.
Gone is his 55 birthday celebration. What are we celebrating but the victory of greed over truth. Randy returns from the bowling alley in Minocqua crushed in spirit. For this 6 years he has endured the kind of cruelty that we are told is only displayed in war but here in Minocqua it is everyday handed out to the man who loves his children and will not leave his 25 year wife. This deep-hearted man has befriended a group whose shallowness is matched only by rain falling on sand. Jack Haug his best friend who almost from the first returning day in 1991 told him he does not believe in hiring friends as it would damage their friendship. This to us with no home and a fractured family. After years of pretend obligation of fishing and hunting openers, he commits to a scene I would never have believed possible: he talks over, past, beyond and in every way makes clear to the man whose birthday they are celebrating that he is not there for friendship, he is being ignored in one final blast of hurtful spite. Randy tells me when he is sitting on the bunk he built, his hands, strong for his family, lie helplessly in his lap. He never cries and tears run down his cheeks. I know I am the cause of this because I will not shut up about our stolen home. He knows too but has never said this to me until now. He does and shrugs off my arm. How he must hurt. Our 35 years togerther survive this contaigon spread in the hope it breeds domestic disturbance 911 calls so the cops can build on my involentary commitment and create a record that will usher us out of town and keep us from coming back. The way it seems a property confiscation ala Oneida county has long been handled.
We are it seems this generations' Wolfs. They lived in a concrect block house built on the small rise of ground edging Trails End before it drops in the bog surround it. Before we came to live in Rhinelander, we knen nothing about the history. Since becoming friends with Jack and Sue Haug there is more to know. Sue tells me one day giving me a ride home that the Wolfs' were careless with their children, so much so they were responsible for letting one of their children be run over in front of their house. Since they were responsible, Sue is carefully choosing words here, there was no recognition of damage to the family. It dawns on me later that Sue is informing me of the status of this situation as it is part of the myth of Oneida county. Required reading for the soon-to-be elites.
Years later this becomes obvious and the way all injuries not noted or recompensed at the time are dealt with. The original party deprived of an asset, be it real estate or monetary compensation, is shunted aside and ignored. The children are allowed participation only if they do not become lawyers and take up their parents cause. But the grandchildren are the targets of reciprocity. Such an enormous miscarriage of justice doled out as timely response. This is why when you go into Rhinelander you see over the restaurant ( it used to be another name) a neon sign 30 foot high announcing Wolf's. Now I see the fob-off obligation satisfaction everywhere. Take an asset or deny compensation, it amounts to the same thing, and then pretend to make fair to the grandchildren. They of course, are not a part to the original injury which in all likelyhood would have allowed them to exist in a completely different frame of social status than the ground floor from which they are picked up 3 generations later. To them it seems like a boon. A favor. Assistance from the community which unrecognized by them is salving its conscience.
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