Juncos and Ghosts

The Juncos showed up yesterday with the snow. Michael and I saw about two dozen out around the feeder mid-morning. We'll be seeing them now, most every day, until Spring.

Juncos are "snowbirds", spending the summer in northern Canada and heading to the warmer climes of Wisconsin and the rest of the northern United States during the Winter.

I like seeing them every winter. Juncos are plump little things, feeding on the ground, lively and as cute as buttons.

Juncos are not spectacular, colorful or dramatic in any way. But I admire their pluck. You have to be more than a little nuts to think of that Winter in Wisconsin is a warm refuge.

I spent yesterday doing nothing much -- shoveling, snow blowing, getting a prescription at Walgreens, talking on the phone, ordering a holiday gift online, making dinner, reading and watching a little television.

Today will be more active. I'm heading over to the railroad to join a work crew to clear the tracks for the weekend and haul away debris still left from the June 9 storm.

Like much of the area, the railroad is still dealing with the aftereffects of the storm. We had over thirty trees down across the track the night of the storm. We got the tracks cleared quickly, but are still cutting and hauling wood out of the the right of way. We probably won't finish up until sometime next summer.

While I was out yesterday, I took the opportunity to drive through the newly reopened stretch of County A, just north of River's Edge.

I drove through last Wednesday night, on my way back from the Wellness Center, but I hadn't seen the newly opened stretch in the daylight. It isn't pretty, to be blunt -- County A now sits atop a fill, as we call it at the railroad, cutting across a clear channel from lake to river. The road is open, but it straddles an ugly gash. I guess that the lake will come up to the road's edge on the west, and the gash to the east will eventually grow over.

Lake Delton remains a weedbed, now covered by a thin blanket of white. I understand that the repair work on the dam is completed, and the lake will start refilling this week. If all goes well, the lake will be back to normal levels by late Spring.

The rebirth of Lake Delton will be a the end of a difficult journey for many, particularly those with lake-dependent businesses and those who live along the lake.

But the Dells area, for all the hoopla last Spring and the $5 million spent repairing Lake Delton, didn't suffer nearly as much from the storms as other communities in the area.

Rock Springs lost its brand new library. North Freedom suffered extensive damage. Reedsburg lost its cinema and quite a number of houses to the storm, and none will be rebuilt. Farmers along the Baraboo River watershed lost fields, and several will not make it back.

The Dells made the national news because the Dells story was dramatic -- the footage of entire houses floating away was almost Biblical. The damage to other areas of Sauk County, undramatic, did not make the news.

That's life, I guess. Television news has a bias towards the immediate and the visual.

It is worth remembering, I think, that although the damage to the Dells area was dramatic and became something of a tourist attraction -- a quick Google image search for Lake Delton will give you an idea of the thousands of pictures shot of the lake this summer -- the price we paid was temporary, the area's political muscle brought emergency repair funds into play, and the damage was quickly repaired. The price paid by Rock Springs, North Freedom, Reedsburg and other areas of Sauk County, while less dramatic, was higher and more permanent.

Lake Delton, both the lake and the Village, has an odd, "invented" feel to it. I think that's been the case since the day the lake was envisioned in the 1920's.

Lake Delton is an artificial lake. The lake was built by a Chicago developer, William Newman, to attract the Chicago summer crowd with the Dell View Hotel, billed as a state-of-the-art tourist destination, and summer cottages along the lake, increasing tourism in the Dells. Newman's vision was successful, and the Dell View Hotel and golf course lasted well into my early adulthood.

Before the lake was built, the area was an unincorporated crossroad community in the Town of Delton, boasting a few stores serving the farm community, a couple of tiny churches, a mill, a honky-tonk bar where farm families gathered for Saturday night entertainment, and a few homes, all clustered around what is now the intersection of Highways 12 and 23. The town center, such as it was, was anchored by Marshall Hall, then as now the town hall of the Town of Delton.

The lake was filled in 1927, and by the time I was a kid Lake Delton was surrounded by lake cottages, used as summer homes by folks from Chicago who came to golf at Dell View, a half dozen beach resorts, and, of course, Dell View Hotel. The lake, in those days, still had the feel of a lake to it, indistinguishable from hundreds of other lakes around Wisconsin, dark and quiet -- and oddly romantic -- on a summer night.

During the 1950's the area around Lake Delton slowly grew. Tommy Bartlett brought his water ski show north from Florida during the summer, the "Ducks" started plying the lake, and a few tourist attractions -- Storybrook Garden and The Wonder Spot, both now defunct, come to mind -- developed along the periphery.

The Village of Lake Delton was incorporated in 1954. A consolidated grade school was built, bringing in the kids from the one-room school houses in the farm areas, and the population of the village grew into the hundreds.

The town had a small airport then, located across the road from Dell View. It didn't amount to much, and the only time I was ever out there was to pick up my brother, who flew in from college with a friend who was a pilot.

Despite the development, Lake Delton was, though, still a spot on the map during most of the 1950's, the kind of town where a kid could wander around unhindered by stop lights or much in the way of supervision.

All of that changed in the 1980's and 1990's, when large-scale development came to Lake Delton. Lake Delton is now part of "the strip", a stretch of large, self-contained resorts, outlet malls, chain-store and franchised food operations, Chicago knock-off pizzerias and faux-northwoods "dining experiences".

Nothing of Lake Delton of my childhood remains, really, except for the consolidated grade school, Marshall Hall and some of the older houses along Munro Street.


The airport is gone. The businesses along Munro Street are gone. The Timm mill, which was the reason the Mirror Lake dam was built in the first place, is gone. Lake Delton no longer has an in-town grocery store. Both churches are now tourist traps offering "great Chicago style taste". The Wonder Spot gave way a couple of years ago to road improvements. Dell View is demolished and the golf course was been engulfed by the Wilderness, one of a half dozen large condominium resort developments that are now redefining Lake Delton as a condominium wall.

A few of the small, older resorts remain along the lake, but their days are numbered, I suspect. The summer cottages along the lake itself are mostly gone, too, replaced by the condominiums and new, large, four-season houses. The few lake cottages that remain, scattered here and there on small lots, are tear downs, and it won't be long before they disappear, too.

Lake Delton, in the sense of a place, no longer exists. It has been absorbed into the Dells and is indistinguishable, now, from a commercial strip in half the suburbs surrounding Chicago, except that resorts substitute for shopping malls. I don't have a problem with that, because all of us are most comfortable with what we are used to having around us, and visitors to our area are no exception to the rule.

I have no argument with this latest chapter of Lake Delton's life. While I do not want to see the Wisconsin River become a condominium wall, I don't have a problem with Lake Delton's becoming one. The river is a natural scenic wonder, in contrast to Lake Delton. Lake Delton is a human contrivance created by a Chicago developer for Chicagoans, and this latest transformation of Lake Delton into Lake Geneva, is but the latest twist in creating the ongoing illusion that Chicagoans who come to Lake Delton are "getting away" while remaining at home.

Progress -- in the sense of change, for better or worse -- is inevitable. But progress does have a price, and the price for Lake Delton's transformation is that Lake Delton is no longer a community -- there is no there there, as Gertrude Stein observed about her own childhood town -- in the sense that it once was.

I'm not sure that it makes much difference, but I'm old enough to sense the ghosts of the former community, the community that once existed, as I drive to the post office to send a package or to Marshall Hall to check in with Debbie Kowalke about something or other. I can name the families who lived in many of the surviving houses of that era, and I know where most of the members of those families, at least those family members of my parents' and grandparents' generations, are buried.

I wonder if the current crop of summer-home Chicagoans sense the ghosts, as well, lying under all the upscale resorts, condominiums and Chicago-style bric-a-brac.

I doubt it, but that's okay, too. The ghosts I sense are not their ghosts.