Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour. Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best party I ever had.
When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.
At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety. David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy, Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan, the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage carrier.
But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter, also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing pressures drop farther and farther behind us.
Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he says, he’ll move to Canada.
Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation, away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never surrender.
10
Hope and I
It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.
Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would like to know all about them.
My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. We[We] lived at 1639 South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it, not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those who did not.