Aren't we nearly there?

So it was in the summer of 1966 that we arrived in Whitewater, Wisconsin. The summer had started, no doubt, with yet another bout of sorting through everything and packing it into a moving van; then a drive from Binghamton through the southern tier of New York State (Oleanna? Erie?) to Ohio, possible overnight stop in Akron with old academic friends from OU, Holiday Inns across country, until we could stay with kinfolk in Oklahoma, although exactly which iteration of this experience was that year is now vanishing into the proverbial mists of memory. But finally north, possibly through Iowa City it occurs to me, where my parents had other friends from university. And thus to Wisconsin.

As one drives north out of the flat prairie, Wisconsin becomes all green rolling hills, with neat farmsteads, barns and cornfields, and cows, for the most part black and white. Many cows, and at that time not so much of other types of livestock -- occasional pigs or sheep or horses. But mostly cows. Holsteins. The highway curves through a continuous panorama of picturesque pastoral scenic beauty. And all the time we were getting closer to where we would soon be living. At midsummer the corn is tall and green.

We stayed overnight, several I think, at a Holiday Inn in Janesville, about twenty miles from Whitewater. My parents went on to scout the situation and find housing. The roads of this area would later become familiar to me, but the ten miles off the interstate, north to Milton, turn right, and another ten miles to Whitewater, took a breathtakingly long time to travel. My brother with me in the back seat of the gray VW was just three, and I was eleven.

The Whitewater we arrived in had a Main Street lined with yellowy cream brick Victorian homes, and a campus in part just as old, with the oldest building Old Main standing at the top of a hill up a dignified drive off of Main Street. It was an old land-grant college, and in the mid-sixties was just getting a lot of brand-new boxy international-style buildings to accommodate the growing student body. The first offices my parents were given were in the basement of Old Main, which did not bode well for the respect the English Department was held in; but before the school year had started, they had moved to the fourth floor of brand-new Heide Hall. Both of them were working in the English Department, my mother specializing in Victorian Literature and my dad in Medieval Literature and Linguistics. The chair of the department, who had hired them, was Jack Heide, who died within weeks of our arrival in a housefire in his home, and thus had the new humanities building named after him. But I had met him only briefly on our arrival.

The other connection we had in town was with a family that lived out in the burgeoning suburb of new ranch houses on the west side of town, who my parents had also known in graduate school in English at OU. We visited their house for a cook-out, and admired the massive strawberry planting that took up most of their back yard. This was a vision of the possible middle-class splendor: a suburban ranch house, and tenure-track positions.

The wife of that family was a musician, a cellist, who gave my parents a reference to a violin teacher for me in town. By this time I had my own violin, a $20 student violin purchased in a second-hand store in Ann Arbor. The new teacher was even more bohemian than I might have expected, the wife of an art professor at the university, who tied back her long hair with athletic socks. She was appalled at my lack of knowledge of scales or keys, or vibrato technique, and set about diagnosing what I could play. It was grueling for me to be such a disappointment to her. The violin as I practiced began to sound to me like a sick cat, and I gave up entirely after a couple of lessons. Eventually the cellist was given the violin to sell.

The apartment we moved into was a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a large new red brick building on Tratt Street, a couple of blocks from the campus. At some point my half-brother Chris joined us, for most of the year I was in sixth grade, and he and I roomed together, with bunk beds, Chris on the upper. On the wall above his bed we had a poster of the famous castle in Germany built by the mad king. My little brother had an end of my parents' room, divided off with metal bookcases. It was a building of standard design, with a galley kitchen off the entry way, bathroom, two bedrooms, and both the hallway and kitchen opening onto a large living-dining room, with linoleum flooring on the kitchen end and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting in the rest.