For the next month or so, True Stories Well Told will feature writers I have met through First Monday, First Person, my “salon” for memoir writers held at the Pinney Branch Library in Madison.

By Renee Lajcak

Like many Wisconsinites growing up in the 1960s, I spent weekends at our family cottage, which was known to our family and better described as “the shack”.  My WWII veteran parents had grown up in tiny immigrant cabins in the woods of far northern Wisconsin.  They treasured the parts of their childhoods spent climbing the hills, fishing and foraging.  As adults living in a city, I think they built the shack as a way to return to and pass on those childhood joys, and also to find some peace after the war.

After buying a small lot on the Pine River in central Wisconsin for 100 bucks in the early 50s, my father built the one room shack nearly all by himself.  My mother helped by holding the ends of 2x4s but was also busy taking care of two toddlers and a baby in the “brambles and thorns” as she said. In those hard times, the lumber came from a torn-down church steeple, and my parents furnished the shack with other people’s cast-offs, some even found in the local dump.     The shack later had electricity but no running water, so we brought drinking water from home.  And, of course, there was an outhouse.  We dipped buckets from the river for general washing up, but when we kids were really sticky with summer sweat and dirt, we inner tubed down the icy cold spring-fed river.  

There was a woodstove and a wooden table with a bench for the kids and a big window overlooking Pine River.  Whereas now I watch the comings and goings on the city street in front of my house, in the shack the sparkling river drew our focus with its constant human-like gurgle and babble, trout fishermen wading by, swooping birds, and even a mink sliding into the dark water.  And instead of a TV, there was a campfire nearly every night.  Hypnotized by the flames, we kids listened to family stories, off-color jokes and my mother’s songs that ranged from cowboy tunes to the Marines’ Hymn.  

The shack was full of Dad’s sense of humor.  He installed an old tube radio in the kitchen ceiling. Well, technically, the radio was in the attic and the knobs and speaker stuck down through the ceiling.  As he intended, we could reach up turn on the radio from the kitchen below.    Outside, four car tires hung way up high on several trees.  This was the result of a terrible auto accident his story went.     My father envisioned the shack as a rough and rustic sportsman’s escape with antlers and beer signs hanging on the walls, but though it hosted a few friends during hunting season, it was mostly a family escape from our hot, non-air-conditioned city house.  As our family grew, a second room was added.  Mom painted the second room PINK, much to Dad’s dismay.

The sandy land was poor for farmers, but rich for us.  We picked wild grapes and hazelnuts, searched for puffball mushrooms and wild onions, climbed up onto huge glacial granite boulders, watched meteors and caught fish. In the early days even a bear and a bobcat wandered by.  My older siblings filled jars with lightning bugs, and my father took me out in the night to wonder at phosphorescent mushrooms glowing in the dark. 

Of course, not everything was perfect.  There was poison ivy everywhere at first and plenty of mosquitoes, sometimes too much beer and teenage boredom.  And though the river still runs, the shack is long gone. But the shack served its purpose.  I think my parents gained some peace there in the woods. And their children gained things that we can’t even articulate.  I now appreciate that it was a true treasure to have my childhood framed by those weekends in the Wisconsin woods.

Great!

©2023 Renee Lajcak

Renee is a newly retired English language teacher who has taught in several Asian countries but now enjoys her woodsy backyard the best.  She loves the connections made through storytelling and teaching conversational English, but writing about memories allows her to go inward to contemplate the good, the bad and the ugly.  But mostly the good.