More Than a Place: Eagle River

It's hard to say what suddenly made me feel nostalgic about Eagle River, Wisconsin. Maybe it's the suddenly tolerable summer temperatures that reminded me of the north woods. It could have been the fresh raspberries I just sampled, tasting very much like the berries I'd pick at my grandparents' secluded property.

Growing up in Buffalo, New York, we spent every summer visiting my grandparents, who like so many other Chicagoans, had retired to one of the northernmost towns in Wisconsin, Eagle River. Their home sat amid thirty-six acres which included a dizzying valley view, densely forested borders, and a serene lakefront area reached by a small, sandy path. It was truly idyllic. I'd wander down gravel trails alone, imagining I ruled this forested kingdom; or, that I was inside a giant's greenhouse; or, that I was on a secret mission. I imagined a world.

When I was twelve and living in Washington, D.C., my parents went through a difficult, painful divorce. Like wounded animals, my mother, sister, and I numbly left what had been home and moved in with my grandparents. Eagle River, The Idyllic, had become a retreat in which to heal, to hunker down, and to breathe again.

Eagle River is where I came of age. Never an easy process. It was where I first fell in love and where I felt the sting of it fading unaccountably away. It was a time of uncertainty. There was a kind of wild joy mixed with mistakes, teen arrogance tempered by occasional insight. Each day seemed to contain a lifetime.

I like to imagine that, sometime, I will go to Eagle River again. It would have to be in the summer, when my friends and I would spend hours in a boat on a lake, unaware of the time until the sun started to set. The memory reminds me of a stock image you'd find in one of the souvenir shops there. But, I could never fit my thoughts about Eagle River on the back of a postcard.