John Phelan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper is motivated by his daily view of the flow of students to the high school across the street to, once and for all, clear the record as to his own history of attending the country school up on the edge of the woods in Barron County.
It was a mile and one-half straight shot into a continuously blowing west wind, and of course it was uphill both ways, with dissection of Peterson’s swamp, where the keeper once saved his younger sister from an attacking muskrat that had been innocently crossing the road until the keeper taunted it with a willow stick.
There are memories of the road being clogged with tall, concrete-like snow drifts; and the image of the bulldozer operator that came to clear them stopping his huge clanking machine to wave at the keeper and his sister endures like a treasured work of art, as do the images of the blizzardy afternoon when the keeper’s father showed up with horses and bobsled to provide a ride home.
Now on this snowy Saturday morning, all students appreciate that there is no school and a cozy sleep-in is called for; except for the oldest “student” among them: the keeper has been up since before daybreak, and he has made the frigid into-the-west-wind trek to “Lafollette Jt. Dist. 6” several times, seeing the clanking bulldozer again, and hearing the jingle of heel chains behind his father’s trotting horses.
