When my fears about the future took over, and my imagination plagued me with fires, floods, earthquakes, and suffocating heat waves, I did my research.
I suppose it’s time to give you a few pointers about Roverton. There was a post office here early on, 1840s or even further back, no one seems to know for sure. But it was William Rover who set it up. There are no other claimants because neither the Ojibwe Indians nor the French-Canadian fur trappers used the postal service. William Rover planted the seed of Anglo-Saxondom here, in the inviting loamy Great Lakes soil.
Are there any safe places left in today’s world? That question haunts Fred Traubert, a disillusioned former professor of Germanic languages. Fred has relocated to a small town in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan, hoping to not only make a fresh start, but also survive whatever apocalypse is sure to be on the horizon. But his life in picturesque Roverton turns out to be far from ideal…
In its early days, it was one of those towns that thought it was going to grow into something important. Other states had such places too; it was a phenomenon of the time, of the booming post-Civil War economy. The people of Port Townsend, Washington, fully expected their town to grow into one of the major West Coast port cities. In Oregon, further south along the coast, immigrants flooded into Astoria at about the same time for the same reasons. The confidence of the local commercial elites that these coastal settlements were destined for a great future had endowed them with an impressive architectural legacy: spacious Victorian houses, imposing public buildings in various shades of brick and stone, schools and libraries and entertainment venues. But in the end, the rail lines went elsewhere, the upstart port cities like Seattle and Portland and Milwaukee grabbed the lion’s share of trade, and the great future never arrived.
Just like me, the younger version of Roverton believed in a great future for itself that turned out to be an illusion. Maybe that’s one reason why I liked the town. Maybe its nascent revival was another reason: if it could happen to this place, could it happen to me as well?
From that hopeful time, a lot remained. The village green that was also the town square, with its gazebo in the middle and the shops and restaurants on all four sides. The modest, stout, ruddy harbor light, out in the lake at the end of the pier. All those buildings made of some color of brick and bearing a name and a date up at the top. In my early walks through the town, I liked to take note of them, like a birdwatcher or train spotter. I even thought of creating a written catalogue, in my academic way, but laziness prevented me from doing so. Quinn 1897, red brick. Schneider 1888, brown brick. Lewis & Graham 1903, built of the soft golden yellow brick known as Milwaukee Cream City. There was an opera house that wasn’t big enough to stage an actual opera, built in 1890. You’d find these places all over the Great Lakes states, in the more prosperous towns, fixtures of an optimistic and expansive age. Even if they couldn’t stage an opera, there would be a singer accompanied by a piano, or a brass ensemble, or the local women’s choir belting out hymns or folk songs.
As was typical of these Upper Midwest towns, it was the Germans who dominated. They were all over town, they set their cultural stamp on things, but they got real quiet when war was declared, in 1917. Best not to stick out. There were incidents. They’ve been covered up, people agreed not to talk about them too loudly, but you can find the stories if you look hard enough. Carl Braun, or maybe it was Carl Wagner (you hear both names but it’s the same person), was a local doctor, but someone took a dislike to him because of his national origins. Maybe they were jealous about something, and Carl being a German was merely the excuse. There’s often something personal about these mob actions. Anyway, a few hotly patriotic local fellows kidnapped Carl Braun or Wagner one winter night, gagged him, threw him into a large sack, and took him to the woods. As the story goes, they were planning to tie Carl to a tree and let him get frostbitten until his hands and feet were permanently crippled, or even let him freeze to death, depending on how long they decided to leave him there (one version of the story has them tying a sign to him with the word “traitor” painted on it in Gothic script). One of the kidnappers joked that, since Carl was a doctor, he should be able to cure himself of whatever ailments they caused him. To which one of the other kidnappers—a more sober-minded fellow—said they should rethink their plan, because Roverton could hardly afford the loss of a doctor. To which a third member of the gang said: Wait a minute, I thought we were supposed to kidnap Carl Somebody-Else, the kraut who runs the grocery store; now you’re telling me we abducted the town doctor? Carl got lucky: due to all the confusion and second thoughts, they let him go.
The Carl Braun/Wagner incident was one data point in the death of German America. This vast cultural realm that had once stretched from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas eventually vanished and left only certain of its artifacts behind. You can still get a big mug of beer in venues with names like Heidelberger Fass and Zum Deutschen Eck, but good luck finding a large-circulation German newspaper a la the Chicago Abendpost. It’s also no easy thing to locate a still functioning gymnastic Turnverein, but they used to be in every major city and plenty of minor ones as well. In short, the sort of establishments that make up a thriving community have been reduced to a socially insignificant level. But that’s the way it goes in this country. No cultural or ethnic or religious establishment is solid. It falls under influences, be they peaceful or violent, attractive or repulsive, which massage and hammer it into a form that fits the generality of the place. You can lament the loss of distinctiveness and the things that went with it. But there’s not much you can do about it, except build a museum or a theme restaurant, hold a concert or lead a tour, something to memorialize that loss.
The war made everyone in Roverton an American, by reason or force. The dreams of a bustling future died; perched on its lakeside fastness, the town continued its placid course. It froze into the status of a Classic American Small Town, but I doubt the inhabitants thought they lived in some archetype, or that they had to embody some image of what the town should be. They lived their lives, and Roverton had its ups and downs, good times and bad times, over the decades.
When my fears about the future took over, and my imagination plagued me with fires, floods, earthquakes, and suffocating heat waves, I did my research. I might have previously noticed Roverton on some map or other, but I’d never given serious thought to the place. Yet now it demanded my attention. One night, discussing the situation with Ethan, I realized that it had all the elements I needed.
“It’s on a Great Lake,” I said. “You know what the climatologists are saying. As the Earth continues to heat up and the whole string of environmental disasters hits us, the Great Lakes region will be the best, most stable place to live. It’s a traditional small town that’s managed to preserve a lot of its old architecture and atmosphere. It’s not some anonymous suburb full of big-box stores and it’s not some clapped-out ghost town. It’s got that Germanic history, all those Germans and Scandinavians left their mark, so it’s culturally compatible with me, the scholar of Germanic languages. It’ll be a good place to escape to. Not to escape: to start over.”
“I’ve done some research, too,” said Ethan. “I’ve decided that Roverton needs a new brewpub. They have some traditional bars that serve craft beers. What they don’t have is a pure brewpub, where all the beer is brewed right there on the premises. That’s a gap waiting to be filled.” Ethan was right, but I already thought along different lines. Bearing in mind what I told the eccentric students in my Icelandic literature class, that such a tiny country had produced so much lasting literature, I thought it was time to give Roverton a second chance to make a name for itself. As the world deteriorated, a few of us strivers would keep civilization going, far from the cities and other centers of decay. Roverton could be our early medieval monastery, where we hid from the barbarians and the plagues, to cultivate things of lasting value.
Hugh MacDiarmid, kick-starting a modern Scots-language poetry early in the last century, “kent that Ecclefechan stood / As pairt o’ an eternal mood.” I knew nothing about Ecclefechan, so I looked it up. This village in the south of Scotland was the hometown of Thomas Carlyle—who, whatever one might think of his writings and ideas, was a man of some weight and influence. Robert Burns, known all over the world, once composed a song about a lass from Eccelefechan. According to its Wikipedia entry, fewer than a thousand people lived in the village. Roverton was a metropolis by comparison. Could Roverton be our Ecclefechan? Could it be “pairt o’ an eternal mood?” If so, we might one day have things to boast about.
Scott Spires is a writer, a translator, and a nomad at heart. Born in India, he has since enjoyed a transatlantic life, living in the United States, Argentina, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, and Russia. A devout language and geography nerd, he poured his passion for these subjects into Social Distancing. As a writer he has an extensive publication record, which includes academic articles on linguistics, as well as articles on such diverse subjects as the Czech beer industry, the New Urbanist movement in America, minority languages in Russia, and many others. His literary side is manifested in numerous book reviews and short stories. His first novel, Abandon All Hope, was published by Auctus Publishers in 2021. Social Distancing, published by Alternative Book Press in 2024, is his second novel. Currently he lives just north of Chicago in charming and bucolic Lake Bluff, a few minutes’ walk from Lake Michigan.
Read more fiction by Scott Spires appearing in Terrain.org: “Everest,” a finalist in the 7th Annual Terrain.org Fiction Contest, and “Lux Aeterna.”
Header photo of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, courtesy Pixabay.
