Iskigamizige-Giizis (April) Maple Sugar Moon niishtana-shi-naanwaginzo (Twenty-fifth day of the month)

                                     

Delmer and Curtis: Friends to The End

From where he was buried on Saturday April 11th, 1992, the tin roofs of his buildings could be seen  through the trees. Across the fence, at the foot of his grave, were the fields he farmed. Between them, Mikinaak Creek--so much a part of Delmer Roseen’s life and sadly, his death--still winds through willow slough, over beaver dams below the Palmville Cemetery, and past what was his door, to the South Fork of the Roseau River, only a few yards to the southeast.
 

Delmer lived northeast of us in Palmville Township. If I looked just right, I could see his mercury vapor yard light through the woods between his place and mine. Either of us could hear the soft ‘clung’ of the rope and pulley against the flag pole in the cemetery, at the corner of our two farms. Red willows, popple islands, and slough grass; green mossy fence posts, the often submerged patchwork of woven wire, and the depth of water in the creek vaguely separated us.

Delmer had lived there since 1936, when he and his folks moved from north of Roseau. Since the deaths of his parents, he had lived alone beneath the towering spruce trees he helped his father plant more than fifty years earlier. He kept a neat place. In the spring, the lawn and grass around the silver-weathered buildings seemed blue-green and lush in his little hollow home along Mikinaak Creek.
Delmer lived simply. He used older equipment to farm the small fields cut from irregular patterns along the creek basin as water levels allowed. He helped his neighbors: Frank Cwikla, Curtis and Elmer Johnson, Arnie Beito and others, and they, in turn, helped him.

Through the years, I watched Delmer on his swather cutting hay and grain; and during harvest time watched him combine in a veil of dust and chaff. Only a few weeks ago I admired his smooth seeded field as it emerged from beneath the melting snow. I never thought I wouldn’t see him harvest it.
Delmer always welcomed us warmly in what seems now the few times my wife and I visited his place. He and I would meet on the roads as neighbors do and stop to visit. We’d talk about the weather and the crops and the trees, but our conversations would often turn to Mikinaak Creek which wound north past our door and his.

We talked about the deer we had seen or the coyotes we heard howling out east on Frank’s. We’d talk about the return of ducks and Canadian geese in the spring or the beaver dams below the cemetery. Delmer told me about building fence for his cattle across the creek basin and how they had to use horses because tractors were useless down there. He told me about quicksand and spring flood waters, and about the time, because of its high clearance, he had to use his M Farmall to feed hay to his cattle at the barn.

Delmer was in pretty good shape for a man of his age, as I recall. One time, he and I helped chase the neighbor's cattle back south a half mile from their escape through the fence east of Mikinaak Creek. He was probably in his early sixties, and I was maybe, forty. The small herd had almost got to Co. Rd. 8 at its intersection with Co. Rd. 33, when we, running almost all the way in our knee-high rubber boots, flanked the herd and finally halted them there. They milled about, all nervous and wild-eyed, just as other neighbors arrived in pickups to block their way too. A big Angus bull was with the cattle, which made me concerned, but Delmer said he was nothing to worry about. Pointing out a serious-looking white-face cow amid the others, Delmer, breathing hard, said "She's the leader, not him. We get her to turn back, the others will follow her. Should I go get my pony?" Though I was much winded too, I said no, we could probably turn them ourselves now, but it amazed me he was willing to hurry home and get his horse! I'll never forget that.

Until this area was ditched, the original source of Mikinaak Creek drained the Palmville bog and flowed east northeast through the switchbacks and sloughs that slowed the water. Dredges, huge backhoe-type machines that were used to drain swamps and create farm fields and road systems in the early 1900s, created straight deep ditches that rerouted the flow. In the spring, the ditches carried tremendous volumes of water downstream and often washed out roads and fields along the way.

Culverts carried the roads and field crossings across these huge ditches, often filled to the brim with water. During the spring runoff these culverts created bottlenecks and whirlpools immediately upstream, that across Minnesota have claimed many lives, just as one did on April 3, 1992, here in Palmville Township. Perhaps just another statistic elsewhere, Delmer’s death touched us all in this community. It visibly reiterated to our children, as well as ourselves, how extremely dangerous these vortexes of spring flood waters actually are.

These pictures of Delmer Roseen and Curtis Johnson from the Roseau County Atlas, I think epitomize the close relationship of those two men and their intimacy with the outdoors. They worked together, for one another, and saw each other on almost a daily basis. They took rides together in the evenings along the back roads, looking for wild game. They visited with neighbors and friends they’d meet there, and were always friendly and humorous with people.

 Their names were often said together, so naturally it was just indicative of how much the two bachelors were together. To mourn for one, one could mourn for the other, for there were no goodbyes that Friday night, no plans to meet for coffee tomorrow, no familiar sound of his old blue Ford pickup driving away down the road. In the turn of a head, all that remained was Delmer’s orange cap floating against the ice, the cold blustery wind and the roar of the water.

Utter disbelief and desperation--a rush to the crossing where Delmer had been only seconds before. A frantic look downstream along the ditch bank. Slip-sliding into the cold water below the culverts himself, Curtis searched for Delmer. Curtis, who in that interminable drive to his brother Elmer’s to call 911, may well have wanted to die himself.

Silhouettes and shadows against the glare of spotlights along the water’s edge. Loud voices. The scratchy squawk of a police radio. Gleaming chrome and flashing red lights atop the cars created a scene of near hallucination, where, only a few gut-wrenching moments earlier was nothing more than closing darkness.

It was impossible to find Delmer's body for almost a week. There were many people searching the ditch downstream; a cadaver dog was used, and an airplane too. Someone of authority decided to dynamite the ice jam above the culvert thinking Delmer's body was stuck in the culvert, but the sheer power, volume and speed of the flood water was under-estimated, and Delmer's body was swept a half-mile downstream. He was found in some tree roots protruding from the bank on Jerry Solom's stretch of Mikinaak Creek ...

Although we as neighbors and friends mourn the loss of one life, in grim reality there was the loss of two. Curtis Johnson lost his life too that night. Whereas death swiftly ended Delmer’s trauma, it bore Curtis’s and floated it downstream entangled in the heavy debris of ‘If only ...’

Curtis lived by himself in a small trailer house, surrounded by trees, with old cars, trucks, and tractors parked throughout. He had a big garden that he worked in the early mornings when it was cool. When I drove by his place on my way into town, I would sound the horn at him when he was out there working; I could see his wavy white hair and Col. Sanders-like goatee plainly visible under the bill of his cap. He’d stand up and wave back as I sped by.

Sometimes I would stop and visit with him just for a few minutes between his nicely weeded rows of carrots, beans, corn and potatoes. One year he planted trees along the north side of his road and protected the young seedlings from the wind by putting coffee cans, with the ends cut out, around each one.

I used my tractor-mounted snowblower to clean his narrow farm lane of snow, a few times, one winter. I never accepted payment more than a cup or two of coffee in the little old mobile home he lived in. My visits were always ‘just for a few minutes’. In retrospect, I realize I never stopped often enough to take the time to really get to know the man.

Curtis had lived as a fun-loving bachelor most all of his life. He had several brothers in the township: Elmer. Leonard, Lloyd and Earl with whom he farmed over the years. He was highly mobile. He drove his two-toned blue truck everywhere. In fact, just a couple years ago, he was riding his motorcycle quite a lot. Curtis seemed to have his health for he was strong enough to split wood for his pump and smoke house house, last winter. He looked in on his older brother, Elmer, twice a day, who lived a mile or so down the road. He worked his large garden and worked on old tractors. He had even bought a house recently in Greenbush, to live in during the winters. He had friends, a large loving family living close by. He loved animals and always had a dog or two for companions.

One of his longtime companions was a little yellow dog named Luke. Curtis and I shared many a conversation over a can or two of warm beer, summer or winter. I came to learn that a warm beer fresh from a dusty car trunk or bed of the pickup is just as wet as a cold one; you just have to get used to it. Friend Joe McDonnell and I call warm beer, any brand or octane, “Cwikla beer” in honor of Frank Cwikla, Delmer Roseen, Arne Beito, and the Johnson Boys: Elmer, Leonard, Lloyd, and Curtis whose fondness for car trunk beer is legend.

Curtis was a good neighbor. He was always willing to help someone else, always had a kind word to say that was accompanied by his sly smile and sparkle in his eyes that I thought was rather boyish for a man of his 70-plus years.

My aunt Irene Palm Davidson Reese, who used to own my farm, was a long time neighbor and friend of all of Curtis’s family. She remembered Curtis as a very handsome young man; I saw photos of him to attest to his youthful wild spirit. Curtis seemed to carry a glimmer of this special characteristic right up to his last days. He lived on his folk's homeplace: Fred Johnson, immediately west of the Palmville Cemetery road on Roseau County Road 8. There is no trace of the farm there now.

In 1992, Curtis lost his closest friend and neighbor, Delmer Roseen, in a tragic drowning incident. The two of them were together as they drove around the township enjoying a warm spring day in late April, as Curtis took pictures with his camera. Delmer posed for a photograph on a field-crossing culvert over flooded Ditch 63, at the east end of the Wilson Road, where immediately below the lip of the eight-foot diameter culvert was a huge boiling whirlpool. Curtis snapped the photo and turned away to put the camera into the truck, and when he looked back Delmore was gone.

Some friends speculated Delmer may have suffered a seizure that caused him to fall into the culvert; he had been experiencing seizures the last couple years of his life,
Curtis was never quite the same after that. Delmer’s death took a lot out of him. Sadly, he committed suicide on April 23, 1999.