FENCEROWS...The Ceded Driveway
By John Luthens
Treaties and court cases have never really been my thing. I grew up in the heart of Wisconsin’s Ceded Territory without even knowing it. So when the recent controversy came to light (darkness, really-being that it involves the Chippewa people’s contention that they should be able to legally hunt deer over bait at night), I trekked to the library to do some research.
What I found was an array of legal documents and opinions that made a daunting pile in front of me on a corner table: Treaties signed in the 1800s between the Ojibwe tribes and the United States, giving up land in return for money and trade goods, while retaining tribal hunting and gathering rights in the top third of our state.
The means of conservation and regulation were bantered about through the 1900s. It got technical on the issues of what private land meant, and if harvesting timber was akin to harvesting wild rice, by what methods (modern or primitive) should it be allowable to harvest in the Ceded Territory, and what tribal or state-run organizations were responsible for overseeing the future of Wisconsin’s game management.
Into the 1990s, the ordeal was fought in every level of our judicial system, with rulings passed and rulings overturned, until the only one who could possibly understand the finer points of the whole thing were the lawyers and judges-who might have been the real winners in the matter. Now it seems the night hunting issue is headed into those very same courtrooms.
It was dark outside the windows of the Oshkosh Public Library before I even made a dent in the pile of treaty documents. There was a spattering of snow blowing across the asphalt parking lot below. It wouldn’t be real snow yet. Not downstate, outside of the Ceded Territories.
My eyes glazed over. I made a few paper airplanes and gnawed on my pencil. My mind wandered as I watched the first snow flurries of the year slowly tail into nothing. Libraries have treated my patience badly ever since I was younger; ever since I was a kid growing up in the northern reaches of Barron County.
We had real snow then. I spent a lot of years shoveling it on a sharecropper’s basis with my brother. We also walked uphill both ways, back and forth to school-but that’s a different issue altogether.
The books and documents went untouched for the rest of the night. I stared out the window, daydreaming far-flung thoughts and pondering the resentment and the anger that lies at the heart of the Ojibwe treaty disputes.
While it adheres to the facts that I really was in the library doing my research, and my brother and I really did shovel a lot of snow growing up in Barron County, with the football games being quite real also-I must say, that characters and events of the following are a product of the author’s imagination, not to mention an addiction to really bad coffee, so any resemblance to actual events is entirely coincidental.
Growing up, my brother and I shoveled snow the old fashioned way. We would have gladly ceded our whole driveway over to anyone who had a snow blower.
The driveway was long, the snow came often, and the white and heavy workload piled up deep. We also had a sidewalk in front of the house which was used as shoveling warm-up exercises before the real business of the driveway got underway.
The only saving grace of the matter was that we could play tackle football in the driveway when it was cleared. The mounds of snow were soft, and flying face-first into a cold pile of fluff never caused any bodily harm to either of us, cold packed snow down the back of our necks notwithstanding.
Across the road, there lived another set of brothers who also played football in their driveway after it was cleared. They got to spend a lot more time playing due to the fact that they were technologically light-years ahead of us; they had a snow blower. In fact, their snow banks were usually packed down and gravel strewn from their rousing game before our driveway was half done.
This went on for a better part of the winter, and on a regular basis, because in the ceded territories, back in the golden days of my youth, it snowed a darn site more than it does now.
The driveway across the road was cleared quickly, but the banks created by a funneled machine were necessarily thrown further back with each passing snow, while our hand shoveled snow was placed daily with sweat and aching backs-not to mention pin point precision at just the right places along the driveway game field.
One day the two brothers from across the road approached us while we were still shoveling out from last night’s winter offering. They pushed the snow blower across the road and offered to clear the playing field for us. In return, we could all play football together in our pristine driveway.
It should be mentioned that the two boys from across the way held the advantage of about three feet and 100 pounds combined over my brother and I. The sun glittered off the snow and into our new friends’ cold and covetous eyes. The offering of the snow blower came with unsaid implications that they were going to come and play football in our driveway whether we wanted them to or not.
So we invited them into our driveway, with their snow blower, and truthfully it worked out pretty good for a while: There was way more game time than before, two-on-two football is far better than one-on-one, and we even showed them how to use shovels to mound the blown snow into soft and fluffy end zone markers. There were spectacular catches and touchdown dives.
We still shoveled the sidewalk in front of the house, partly because we didn’t want to lose our shoveling instinct altogether, and partly because, within a few days, the neighbor kids invited all their older friends over to the driveway. The games got more exciting, more like real football, but the more kids that got involved, the wider the range of tempers and dispositions.
We were still welcome to play in our driveway, but sometimes it got a little rough. Shoveling the sidewalk gave us a place to silently retreat when we got bumped around too much in the big games.
The situation might have gone on in this compromised stalemate indefinitely, except for the fact that the moon got full once a month. The soft light was beautiful in the winter, sparkling on the snow like a thousand diamonds. You could see your breath frosting in the night air. It was glorious and it was the greatest of spectacles when the night games commenced. We all started playing football in prime time.
In fact, it was so much fun that we got carried away. The moon was beautiful, the games exhilarating, but it was not a true substitute for full-blown daylight. An errant Hail Mary pass missed its mark in the moon shadows, bounced off the picture window of our house, and sent a small spidery crack running down the glass pane.
It caused a stir of controversy that makes the debacle of the NFL replacement officials earlier this year look like a minor misunderstanding. My parents angrily and vocally suspended the night football games indefinitely.
Over the course of a few more winters, the driveway football games went on during the day, but moonlit nights were reserved for silent speculation and wonder on the night beauties of the snow banked driveway. My brother took it one step further and didn’t go outside during the night at all, prudently deciding that watching television was much safer, not to mention a lot warmer.
I think my parents eventually felt guilty about shutting down the night games and depriving us of all that fresh and invigorating night air burning in our lungs. My brother was watching way too much television, and I had gotten into the shows myself. We started fighting over what we wanted to watch, so probably my parents just wanted us out of the house.
Whatever the reason, they decided to let us play baseball in the driveway at night. I guess they thought that a baseball would make a much smaller hole in the picture window than a football would. The neighbor kids were all for it. I think their parents wanted them out of the house too.
My brother never did join in the night baseball games. He’d stand on the freshly shoveled sidewalk and silently hold a football in his hands. I think he really missed the night football games.
But I was never quite sure whether he wanted to have it like it used to be, before we ceded over the driveway. Just me and him shoveling and playing football by ourselves. Or maybe he just wanted to go back inside and watch television.
He was my brother, but I never did understand him.