The Wequiock Years
The bus came first and left last.
We were the first picked up in the morning and the last dropped off in the afternoon — an hour each way for a four-mile distance, the route winding through farms and gravel roads, collecting every kid in the township one driveway at a time. Don VanLanen drove. There was a kid at the extreme end of the route we had to go way out for, and he rarely rode. VanLanen would honk, and the kid wouldn’t come out, and I’d sit there every time wishing we could just skip that part and get home fifteen minutes earlier. We never did.
The bus was its own world, with its own social order. The back seats were the top of the food chain — older kids in jean jackets, boom boxes balanced on their laps blaring Joan Jett or Motley Crue. Spitballs launched into the hairsprayed updos of girls two rows ahead. All the gossip was learned there. Sex education, though nobody called it that — just older kids talking about things younger kids weren’t supposed to hear but absolutely did. Comic book trading. A full curriculum in everything the school wasn’t teaching, delivered daily in a moving classroom with vinyl seats and no supervision. If my mom had known what went on during that bus ride, she would not have let me ride it.
I loved it when she’d let us sleep in and drive us instead. Those mornings were rare and precious — we got to watch Inspector Gadget before leaving, which felt like stolen time, a bonus morning carved from the routine. But most days it was the bus, and the bus was where you learned your place.
Wequiock Elementary was a single-floor red brick building, not new and not old, the kind of school that looked like it had been there exactly as long as it needed to be. The boys’ bathroom was pink. The girls’ was blue. Back then that mattered, or at least we thought it did — a source of endless commentary and confusion that no teacher ever explained.
The building smelled like vomit more often than you’d want. Someone was always sick, and Tom the janitor would appear with his bucket and that powder — the sawdust-looking stuff that covered the mess and turned it into something you could sweep. I knew that was not the favorite part of his job. The smell would linger through the afternoon, a low institutional hum underneath the chalk dust and floor wax.
But the windows were something. The Niagara Escarpment and the Bay of Green Bay were right there, visible from the classroom, the geological drama of the region laid out like a textbook illustration you could actually look at while the teacher talked about geology. I didn’t have to imagine landforms. I could just turn my head.
I liked the way the teachers themed the classrooms for holidays and seasons — the construction-paper turkeys in November, the snowflakes in December, the hearts in February. The Valentine’s Day post office station, where you made cards for everyone in the class and deposited them in a decorated cardboard box, and a designated mail carrier delivered them to each desk. Making cards for girls was awkward in a way that felt enormous at five, the dread of someone reading too much into a Snoopy valentine with “Be Mine” pre-printed on it. You didn’t choose the message. Hallmark chose it. But you chose who got which card, and that choice carried weight you weren’t ready for.
Miss Sheffey was my kindergarten teacher. She was sweet, and she felt old to me — older than my parents — though to a five-year-old every adult over thirty looks ancient. She was probably normal age. She didn’t have to yell, which I noticed because some teachers did. The room had big brick-shaped blocks, the hollow cardboard kind you could stack into walls and towers, and the Valentine station, and the routines that made school feel safe even when it was strange.
I remember the first day. Mom had made my book bag — sewn it herself, because that’s what you did when you couldn’t buy one or when buying one didn’t occur to you. I remember learning to read, which felt like a door opening. The first standardized tests, filling in bubbles with a number two pencil, the seriousness of the room when the tests came out — the first time school felt like it was measuring you rather than teaching you.
My first crush was Sara. Kindergarten. I never acted on it — never said a word, never passed a note, never did anything that would have required courage or risked embarrassment. But it changed my behavior. It made me want to fit in, to be noticed for the right reasons, to not be the weird farm kid with the homemade book bag. Sara was the first external force that made me aware of how I appeared to other people. The crush lasted the entire time I was at Wequiock, a background hum that colored everything without ever becoming a song.
Kindergarten graduation was in the gym. They tied a piece of blue yarn around your right index finger so you’d know which hand to extend when the principal handed you your diploma. I think about that sometimes — the school solving the problem of five-year-olds not knowing left from right by giving them a physical anchor. The yarn stayed on all day. Some kids chewed theirs off before the ceremony.
Ms. Bugni had second grade, and she gave me room to move.
If we finished an assignment early, she’d let us grab a sheet of manila paper, and that was when the real work happened — the secret military bases in cross-section, the volcano lairs and submarine entrances. But she also let me write and perform plays, which I did with the seriousness of a Broadway producer and the resources of a second-grader. I’d commandeer friends to play the parts, cast them based on nothing resembling audition protocol, and build costumes from whatever I could find — construction paper, tape, found objects from the supply closet. One production was about a hangman, complete with a noose fashioned from yarn. Another was King Arthur. Not my most amazing work. Pretty derivative. But the impulse was real: the desire to make a thing, organize people into it, and perform it in front of others. Directing without knowing the word.
I would also convince Ms. Bugni to hold geography quizzes, because I was heavily into geography that year. Knew all the states and capitals. Could draw the map of the USA freehand, and even the world, though some parts of Asia’s contours would elude me — the way Thailand narrows into the Malay Peninsula, the precise shape of the Caspian Sea. The geography obsession was another version of the same impulse: learn a system, map it, master it, test yourself against it. States and capitals were just another world to build, except this one already existed and you could be graded on how well you knew it.
Jon Deprey was a friend in second and third grade, and he changed the way I played.
He came over to the farm one day and within minutes had us clinging to the front grill of the tractor, then dragging behind it, then climbing above the cab and smashing through the imagined front windshield. A full action sequence — a chase, a fight, a rescue — performed on stationary farm machinery with absolute commitment. I thought he had an astonishing imagination. Later that summer I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and realized he’d been reenacting the truck convoy scene beat for beat. He’d taught me the movie through play before I’d ever seen a frame of it. I learned Indiana Jones the way you learn a folk song: from someone who already knew it, performed live, with variations.
But Jon did have an amazing imagination, separate from what he’d absorbed. He had a boat in his garage — just sitting there, dry-docked, going nowhere — and we’d climb in and pretend to drive it. He did a scene once like the Venice canal chase, but The Last Crusade hadn’t come out yet. He was inventing sequences that Spielberg would film years later. He was very expressive — mouth explosions, full-body stunts, the sound effects and physical commitment that turn a backyard into a set. I learned that from him. The performance of play. The idea that you don’t just narrate what’s happening, you become it, sound effects and all.
It was Jon who left his Baroness action figure at my house one day. Then I was a convert. The GI Joe gateway, opened by a borrowed toy that never got returned.
At school, Jon played Han Solo on the Web. I played Luke — I was blonde, so the casting was obvious. The Web was a large rope climbing net strung between four posts, the back two taller than the front, and it seemed enormously tall to a first- or second-grader. The big kids would get to the top and perch on the posts and look down on us with bully disdain. On good days, when the older kids were busy with kickball, the Web was ours, and it became whatever we needed: Cloud City, Dagobah, the surface of an unnamed planet. Star Wars played out on a rope net in a Wisconsin schoolyard, two kids shouting dialogue they half-remembered, the ground below them as distant as any galaxy.
Chris Williams became a friend in second grade. He was new to the area, showed up on the bus one morning with that uncertain look new kids have, and I offered to let him sit by me. Like a scene from an eighties movie — the kid nobody knows, the kid who slides over and makes room. We were fast friends from that day. He stayed in the story until Mom made me keep my distance after he got busted smoking. The approved-friends list had strict criteria, and tobacco was a disqualifier.
The snow fort wars were a years-long institution at Wequiock, running as long as there was snow on the ground and escalating each winter.
JJ Langevin was the boss of the dominant faction. He had a natural strategic advantage: he’d claimed the wooden playground platform with the wide slide, which meant he only had to fill in the triangle openings on the side to have a complete fort while the rest of us were building from scratch in the open field. He had a mini bike. He was cool. Everyone followed him.
My plan was to outdo him — build a rival faction, a better fort, draw followers away from his army. Jason Horkman came along as my ally. We never attracted enough builders or constructed anything that threatened JJ’s supremacy. The forts themselves were secondary to the social architecture: the mafioso structure, the prestige of leading a crew, the size of your army mattering as much as the size of your walls. There were snowball fights, but the real war was political. Construction and territory. Alliances and betrayals. Who sat with whom at the fort during recess, and what that seating arrangement meant.
When I transferred to Green Bay Christian School, I brought the snow fort tradition with me. Was able to dominate there. Had the edge since I’d started it and knew JJ’s tricks — his strategies, his use of existing structures, his recruitment tactics. Playground intelligence, transferred across school districts. The first skill I ever exported.
Recess was survival as much as play. The cool kids mostly played kickball, and kickball was real trauma for the younger nerds. They had it out for us — would aim for our heads to get us out, the red rubber ball finding your face with a sting that lasted through the next class. I was always the fastest kid in my grade, maybe even the grade above me, but speed didn’t help when the game was rigged toward humiliation. I avoided kickball when I could. The Web, the snow forts, the edges of the field where you could disappear into your own games — those were the safe zones.
The gym was where everything happened that wasn’t classroom-bound. It seemed huge — cathedral-scaled to a six-year-old, the ceiling impossibly high, the floor glossy and echoing.
There was the rope climb, a thick braided rope hanging from the rafters, and you were supposed to climb to the top and touch the ceiling, which looked dangerous and probably was. I never made it to the top. I liked the tumbling exercises better — the big blue mats rolled out, the gymnastics unit where a couple of the girls were really good, better than any of the boys, moving through handsprings and cartwheels with a precision that made it look easy and made you realize it wasn’t.
The gym class parachute was its own event. The whole class holding the edges, billowing it up, running underneath while the silk caught air and made a dome of color above you. For thirty seconds you were inside something beautiful and temporary, and then it collapsed, and someone got tangled, and the teacher blew the whistle.
Everything non-classroom funneled through that gym. The school concerts — mandatory choir, the whole school singing together under the fluorescent lights. One year it was “Apples and Bananas.” Another year, “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, with playing cards as props. I remember the moment after the song ended — the kids just threw the cards in the air, all of them, an impromptu explosion of fifty-two-card pickup that nobody had planned and everyone joined. I felt bad. I got down and tried to pick them all up while everyone else celebrated. That impulse — the party’s over, someone should clean this up, and that someone is apparently me — has not changed in forty years.
Guest speakers would come through: drug education talks, a child singer-songwriter, a raptor educator with a hawk on a leather glove. The kindergarten graduation. All of it in the gym, the school’s one room big enough to hold everyone and everything that mattered.
Tom the janitor was beloved.
Big broom. Red mustache. Balding. He’d wait for our late group to finish lunch so he could fold up the long cafeteria tables, and that waiting became a friendship — us dawdling over our trays, him leaning on his broom, patient, in no hurry to rush us. I think we liked that we could talk to Tom differently than we talked to teachers. The teachers seemed like ideal stereotypes — pressed and professional, existing only inside the school building, as if they powered down at 3:30 and stood in a closet until morning. We didn’t know they had lives. Tom seemed more real. He was one of us, or close enough. Like he would cover for us if he had to. He sprinkled the powder on the vomit and swept the hallways and folded the lunch tables, and none of it was glamorous, and all of it held the school together. The kids knew that even if nobody said it.
In the spring, the classroom aquarium came alive.
It was a big tank — four feet wide, maybe two feet deep — and we built a whole ecosystem in it. The assignment was to bring in specimens: tadpoles, frogs, whatever you could catch. I contributed the most, because my grandma lived by the swamp where Helen and I played often, and catching tadpoles and frogs was something I did for fun, not homework. I could handle them with ease — scoop a frog from the mud, hold it without squeezing, carry it to school in a jar. The other kids thought this was impressive. I was proud of it. The farm kid who was embarrassed by his homemade book bag was the same kid who could reach into a swamp and come back with something alive. Different currencies, different markets.
There were class trips to the school woods behind the building to study nature — the same escarpment geology I could see from the window, now experienced at ground level, turning over rocks and identifying plants and doing the fieldwork version of what the classroom had been abstracting all year.
And there was the day my class came to our farm. A field trip to the Krumpos place. I felt embarrassed and liked the attention at the same time — the tension of wanting to be seen and wanting to hide, wanting my classmates to think the farm was interesting and terrified they’d step in manure or notice how different my life was from their suburban ones. But Mom ran the tour, radiant and sure, and I already knew how to churn butter, and when my classmates couldn’t figure it out, I helped them learn. For an hour I was the expert in my own world, which was both the best and the most exposed I’d felt all year.
I was at Wequiock from kindergarten through fourth grade. Five years in a red brick building with pink bathrooms and a view of the escarpment and a janitor who felt more real than any teacher. Five years of bus rides that taught me more about the social order than any classroom did, and a playground where Star Wars happened on a rope net and empires rose and fell in the snow. I was the fastest kid in my class. I was the kid who could catch frogs. I was the kid who wrote plays about hangmen and King Arthur and quizzed his classmates on state capitals and avoided kickball and tried to pick up the cards after everyone else had already moved on.
I didn’t know yet that I was building a pattern — the kid who makes things, who organizes people into his projects, who maps the world and tests himself against it, who cleans up when the song is over. All of that started here, in a school that smelled like vomit and floor wax and chalk dust, with the Bay glinting through the windows and the bus waiting outside to take me on the long ride home.