The following nonfiction literary composition is excerpted from the book “Leftovers from the Feast”; the piece was authored by Dorothy (Blahnik) Denisen and extensively edited by Fred Blahnik.
Beyond the Eerie Darkness
By Dorothy (Blahnik) Denisen
“Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money.”
—Anonymous
Lightning flashes outside, thunder crashes menacingly, a screeching wind beats hard against the windowpanes, and–oh, shit……the damned power just went out!! Everyone around you suddenly descends into an uncontrolled panic because there is no electricity!
What are we going to do now?! How can this be?!?! I’m scared of the dark!!! EGADS……HOW LONG IS THIS NIGHTMARE GOING TO LAST?!?!?!
Now, Reader..…imagine for just a second if this desperate situation was the norm for your household all the time…….
Well, as a child I never had to worry about this scenario happening, due to the fact we had no electricity throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s in the ancient house I grew up in back by Austin, Minnesota.
Oh, sure, I know you’re probably snickering among yourselves and whispering right now that that was an awfully long time ago and, well, let’s face the brutal facts here, Dorothy, you’re a grandma many times over and not a fresh-faced ingénue anymore–but it isn’t like our family went out foraging for food from the Ice Age landscape while competing against hostile bands of nomadic Neanderthals, or that we older Blahnik kids were forced to evade hungry saber-toothed cats when we were gathered back behind the communal cave inventing the wheel and, no, Fred Flintstone actually wasn’t one of my close playmates during recess from the primitive school where we were some of the first fortunate few to use abacuses for learning arithmetic. Fire had already been discovered for a handful of years before I was born, and–just to set the record straight once and for all–I wasn’t one of those intrepid souls who migrated across the frozen Bering Strait to first colonize a virgin North America.
You see, in all honesty, almost all of our close neighbors and nearly everyone else in southeastern Minnesota already possessed the omnipotent “luxury” of electricity when I was a girl. But secondary to my dad’s monumental bout with polio in late 1950 and the sobering fact our megatherian Blahnik family was nearly destitute following that cataclysm and could scarcely afford the proverbial “pot to piss in”, no electric wires were ever strung to our isolated farm while we lived there.
We had no streetlights, yardlights, or electronic lights back in those antediluvian days, so when the sun went down in the evening the moon and stars were all we had available to combat the overbearing darkness. My family did own a kerosene lantern which we hung in the barn to provide light for doing our livestock chores and for milking the cows. We also possessed an array of battery-powered flashlights to help us do our farm-related tasks and to find our way around outdoors in the nocturnal world.
Inside our preposterously crowded house, a lone Aladdin lamp sat on the kitchen table to provide lighting for our Blahnik family in the evenings. Obviously we went to bed much earlier than kids do nowadays, because there were not a lot of things to do in the weak light issued by just one solitary Aladdin lamp. Sometimes we played games of cards; we also listened to a wealth of ballgames and a surfeit of old-time music on our beloved battery-operated radio.
With a quarter mile driveway extending off the gravel road we Blahniks lived on and an imposing grove of trees literally surrounding its patchwork of buildings, our farm site was exceptionally remote and pitch black at night. Owing to this fact, prowlers were often attracted to our yard. I do not know if it was purely curiosity or whether they had some different, more sinister motive in mind, but the scoundrels never seemed to vandalize anything and nothing obvious was ever discovered missing from our rural property. In fact, it seems strange intruders would choose our place as a chief target, because we really owned very little of value that was worth stealing.
Yet—And I’m not kidding one bit here either!!!–there were still sundry occasions when my parents would see or hear these unwanted visitors in our farmyard. One evening Dad stepped outside our front door around 10:30 to void his bladder. It was a beautiful moonlit night and as our Blahnik patriarch looked casually in the direction of the nearby granary, he witnessed a person saunter out from behind the building. Obviously, when the trespasser saw Dad staring directly at him he reacted like a scalded Siamese cat and quickly disappeared back into the black void wherest he came. The next morning when it was light out we urchins immediately checked behind the granary for signs of malfeasance, but nothing was damaged and no items were missing as far as we could tell.
Another time my older siblings Joe and Darlene were in the midst of making a crude fence in our grassless farmyard. The pair took some binder twine—this farm-friendly stuff’s original purpose was/is to tightly secure dried alfalfa for our dairy cattle to eat over the wintertime into medium-sized rectangles of compacted roughage that were easy to handle, otherwise known as bales of hay–and tied a bunch of those lengths together, followed by stringing this new skinny rope they had created from tree to tree. Don’t ask me now why the two Blahnik progeny did it (Bored to death farm kids, I would imagine!), but the exuberant duo got so lost in their work that when evening ultimately came, they forgot to take down their temporary yard “fence”.
Well…..our mother was unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the succeeding night when she heard someone cursing and cussing up a storm outside her bedroom window. Mom peered outside that window and, lo and behold, there were several people sneaking around our yard in the inky darkness and the scurrilous recreants had gotten entangled in Joe’s and Darlene’s temporary “fence” and apparently were none too happy about it.
Deserved the trespassing shysters right, I would say!!
As Mom continued to stare out the window, she subsequently saw the flicker of a flashlight as the noisy intruders struggled to figure out exactly what was going on and, by the way: Who the hell were the devious fools who had capriciously strung a rope between some random trees at just the proper height to trip them up and send them sprawling on their faces in this nocturnal hillbilly wasteland?!
Those trespassing knaves had probably “visited” our place in the past and were wholly unprepared for the new obstacle they encountered on this particular occasion. But once again, we Blahnik children could not find any vandalism or evidence of missing items upon investigating the “crime scene” the next morning.
Another time a handsome golden retriever showed up at our secluded hacienda totally “out of the blue”. He was a gentle, loving dog and my little brother Donnie fell head-over-heels in love with the fabulous creature. Our Blahnik family named the dog Sandy and gave him a good home, until one night he mysteriously disappeared from our premises without a clue. As you might expect, Donnie was devastated by this strange turn of events, but then a couple days later the dog returned every as bit as inscrutably as he had previously departed.
We Blahniks were uniformly thrilled to have Sandy back with us again, naturally, but one night shortly thereafter, Mom–while lying in bed unable to sleep–heard loud footsteps come running right up to the front door of our house. You the reader have probably guessed the ending to this sad story by now: The next morning we discovered Sandy missing from our property once more…..and tragically this time the sightly cur never returned to grace our presence…..
Donnie was devastated all over again, only this time the pain and sorrow was slow to heal and lasted a long, looooong time.
Once I reached the benchmark age of fourteen years (This benchmark was set by my strict but fair parents), I babysat around our Blahnik neighborhood almost every weekend. For the most part I enjoyed babysitting, even if it meant I oftentimes did not arrive home until two o’clock or three o’clock in the morning. When the weather was temperate during the spring, summer, and fall seasons, I was chauffeured right up to the front door of our rickety old “mansion” out in the country when my services were no longer needed, which obviously was very nice and copacetic.
But winter……yes, when winter came……well, THAT, my friends, was another story altogether!!!
Winter was a true, spirit-sapping bitch!!!!!
Since our Blahnik driveway back by Austin was so long and my parents could not afford the necessary equipment to adequately remove or push aside snow that would accumulate, we would just allow the proximal portion of the driveway to drift shut and then park our family car halfway down the driveway by the northwest corner of our grove of trees. This copse of varied species hardwoods constituted a mixed blessing for our backwoods clan: It thankfully served as a gigantic windbreak and buffered our house and barn from the flagitious northwest winds of wintertime, yet it also stood as the principal reason why our yard would get hopelessly snowbound in the first place.
In any case, this situation meant that after a night of babysitting and then being dropped off on our Blahnik property–in the wee, wee, wee hours of the morning–I would have to make my way alone and chart a path through the deep snow and that malevolent grove of trees in the general direction of our house. But the worst was yet to come. That occurred when I finally reached the “security” of our ancient monolith sitting portentously in the pitch blackness.
Please allow me to explain the trepidation I felt: We of the Blahnik lineage had a little entry room to our house that we called “the shanty”. The shanty had no actual external door attached to it, but it did possess a doorway to the outside world which “opened” to the west, and the antechamber itself was small, spooky, and VERY dark. Having to traverse this dungeon-like room before entering our house was inveterately a hair-raising experience. And knowing in advance there were sometimes documented prowlers and n’er-do-wells lurking in the dark shadows of our yard did not make the spine-tingling foray into our Blahnik house any easier, let me assure you!
As the reader has probably already surmised by now, reaching the inner safety of the jet-black sanctuary we called a house was always a huge relief as well as a Jupiterian irony.
Our Blahnik farmyard was occasionally home to another form of visitor too. The Great Western and Milwaukee Railroad tracks cut a narrow swath right next to our Lilliputian ranch. The time in question wasn’t that long after the Great Depression unofficially ended, and homeless men called bums would still frequently hitch fare-free rides on trains throughout the United States and would then sometimes jump off the railcars near our property. These unfortunate individuals never really caused any harm, but on not infrequent occasions they would cast about looking for a warm place to spend the night, especially during the chilly late autumn and winter months.
On one such instance, my uncle Fred Blahnik (who was also a close neighbor) pulled up a bale of hay in his hay mow that he intended to feed to his cows, only to discover a bum sleeping contentedly beneath the thing. I imagine Dear Ol’ Fred probably very nearly shit his pants when he spied the benign intruder leering back at him with a drunken grin!
Another time Mom and Dad heard this perverted fellow scolding our pet male sheep, Woolly, down by the barn; he wanted Woolly to move closer to him so he could sleep next to the friendly ram and stay warm. I believe Woolly demurred on the creep’s generous offer……and who could rightfully blame the self-respecting ram for protecting his dignity in the face of a filthy lecher!!
Y’know, to this day I often wonder what the secret attraction was that drew all those unwanted visitors to our unpretentious place in the country back by Austin. I guess you could say we were fortunate in that they never seemed to cause any trouble; the biggest damage they did was psychological, and that was by putting the holy fear of perdition into the minds of us sheltered, impressionable Blahnik kids. That said, I am amazed at how brave and stout-hearted I am as an adult when one considers the bizarre and disconcerting environment in which I grew up as a penniless farm urchin.
Fred's Soapbox 