Silver linings

"Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown, out there on the edge of the prairie." Garrison Keillor's standard opening to his weekly monologue when he used to host “A Prairie Home Companion” on Saturday nights.

What Keillor regularly said of his home town could very well be regularly said of ours – except for the last two weeks. Between the EF3 tornado that rolled through the Towns of Prairie Lake and Chetek the week after Mother's Day and the tragic, untimely death of Owen Knutson the week after that – it's almost too much for our little town to bear. So much loss, so many tears. For those immediately affected by storm and accident things won't be back to normal any time soon. Grief, be it the loss of a home or, even more so, the loss of a son, is processed and relinquished personally in its in own, queer way. “This too will pass,” the old ones say and it certainly will. But in its own time. Which means in the mean time we must be patient and be nice to ourselves and to each other while grief works its way through.

Without trying to be trite and pollyanish about any of these things, the silver lining of the storm clouds that have hung over our area recently is that neighbors and strangers have been given ample opportunity to love each other. And have. According to Chetek Chamber of Commerce Event Coordinator (and for all intents and purposes local storm relief coordinator for those living on the east side of Ojaski and Prairie Lakes), approximately 900 volunteers came through our Visitor's Center on their way to roll up their sleeves and pitch in. (This is to say nothing of all those who were shuttled through St. Peter's in Cameron to help with the clean-up at Prairie Lake Estates.) The day after the storm the school shut-down for educational purposes but opened up for a place where workers could get a shower and a meal and teachers were dispersed to help out where they could.

Much beloved Coach Bill “Knicker” Knickerbocker's home and property on the east side of Prairie Lake received heavy damage on account of the tornado. A few days later his wife, Judy, stopped in at the bank where my wife, Linda, works as a teller. When asked how she was holding up, Judy responded that like everybody else in their neighborhood they were doing the best they could but what a blessing it was “when just the other day 40 angels showed up to help (Owen among them).” The ranks of the volunteers were made up of people of faith and people who professed no faith whatsoever, from near and far. The Amish showed up in their buggies and the Mennonites from Barron in their vehicles. Wendy Newman from Luther Park told me that her neighbor from up the road told her that the four-part harmony that the Mennonites sang as they worked was like a song from heaven.

One of the work crews from school

About a month or so ago, I was a guest lecturer in one of Mark Conrad's political science courses at UW-Barron County. There were about twenty-five students in his class none of which I had the opportunity to visit with afterward. The Sunday after the storm I was in Barron for a ministerial meeting in the building that adjoins the Somali tea shop on LaSalle Street. As I left the meeting and made my way to my van, I had to pass through a group of Somali men who were standing outside the tea shop conversing with each other. Suddenly one of them began to shout and point at me, “Mayor of Chetek! Mayor of Chetek!” (apparently he had been a student in Mark's class that day.) When I paused to say hello, they approached me with a handful of money and said, “We want to help. We are Barron County residents too.” As we would say, they had passed the hat and wanted to know where they could donate the funds they had collected. It's moments like these that remind me that despite all the bad news we hear about and all the bad things that happen in our world there remain a whole lot of good people out there who when storms happen put their life on pause for a bit to do what they can to help their neighbor out.

I wasn't here for Owen's funeral on account that our daughter, Emma, graduated from Bethel University in Saint Paul on that very same day. But by all accounts I have heard what a remarkable job the administration and staff of our High School and Middle School did to pull off perhaps one of the largest gatherings ever held at the school. To accommodate an estimated 1,500 individuals for Owen's memorial service, feed them and then set up again for graduation that evening is truly commendable and Mark, Larry, Koll and their staff deserve our gratitude for doing their part to help ease the pain of the Knutson family and the entire student body.

Thanks, Ron, for helping make this moment happen

The day after the storm, I was out at Prairie Lake Estates in the capacity of a pastor. The Department of Health and Human Services wanted clergy present when residents began to return to their homes. We paired up and spent the afternoon walking around, engaging in conversation with various residents, sharing hugs and, in a few cases, helping pick up literal pieces of their possessions. A lot of important notables were on-site including Governor Walker and his entourage, walking around and assessing the devastation. But in my mind the best moment of that day happened out of the spot light when Interim Chetek Police Chief Ron Ambrozaitis pulled a rabbit not out of his hat but from under a mound of debris that he had climbed under. “Racer” is C-WMS student Mary's pet rabbit. She had rode out the storm with her grandma inside their trailer and lost everything. What's more, Mary's grandpa was seriously injured and hospitalized in Saint Paul. But that moment that Ron placed Racer in Mary's and her mother, Deanne's, hands reminded me that despite all their trouble, God's eye, like the old song goes, was not only on the sparrow but on their rabbit, too.

The clean-up will be going on, no doubt, for some time but the worst may yet to come. After the buzz of the chain saws cease and after the funeral is over, the pause we have felt as a community discontinues. People go back to work and life, for the most part, gets back to normal. Except for those most dearly affected. That's when they may feel their loss the most. They'll need our company and our hugs then, too. Given what I've seen from this community in the last few weeks, I'm pretty sure they'll find that and then some.