Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I had a hard time falling asleep last night.

I had a hard time getting a story out of my mind that I first heard 70 years ago. (Has it really been that long ago? Hard to imagine.)

I was fortunate to have grown up in a family of storytellers. I had grandparents and great-grandparents who lived a short bike ride away just down the street in a small northwoods town where I grew up and where everybody had lived there for generations.

At family gatherings, where grandmothers gabbed while preparing the feast in the kitchen, grandfathers told stories about when they were young to grandchildren sitting on the living room couch — Grandpa “Babe’s” stories about when he roared around town on an Indian motorcycle in the 20s delivering bottles of home brewed liquor during Prohibition; shooting deer out of season when the family needed the meat during the Depression; sending their children off to their war — our parents, who then came back with stories of their own.

Of all the stories I heard around the kitchen table or up at the camp during hunting season, one in particular remains the clearest in my mind, the one that sometimes makes sleep illusive at night.

It was my Grandpa Walstrom’s story about the wolves and the night his father died.

Grandpa Walstrom was my mother’s father. His wife, my mother’s mother, the one grandmother I never knew, died just about the time I was born and he lived with us all the years I was growing up. I remember the night my mother called me to tell me Grandpa Walstrom had “passed away.” I was in college, the late 60s, in my dorm room studying for a test.

Grandpa Walstrom was born in Sweden, the youngest of five boys. In the late 1890s, the family emigrated to America to homestead a section of heavily forested land in the frozen tundra of northern Wisconsin. It reminded the family of Sweden, he always said.

With little more than a two-man crosscut saw, an axe and some wedges, they transformed towering virgin pine into a sturdy one-room sheltering house with a shed out back, just in time to face their first winter.

Grandpa Walstrom was five years old when a big storm came down out of Canada, the night his father died in the house from pneumonia. The nearest town where the father could be buried was seven miles away and the horses would never be able to make it through the towering drifts of snow. The older boys helped their stoic Lutheran mother carry the dead father to the shed out back, where he would lie, frozen, until they could get him into town.

No matter how many times I replay it in my mind, Grandpa Walstrom’s story always ends the same way: a widowed mother and her five boys all huddled around the black cast iron wood stove, a kerosene lamp their only light, listening to the sounds of their own breathing and the northern wind and the wild primitive howling of a pack of hungry wolves, circling and gnashing at the wood of the shed out back, trying to get at what remained of the father. The sound return, night after night, for weeks, driving the family half-crazy waiting for a thaw.

The five Walstrom boys all turned out to be successful in the area. The original homesteaded land was expanded over the years and became Walstrom Dairy, the largest dairy farm and processor in the area. A glass bottle of Walstrom Dairy milk was delivered to our house in town every day, except on Sundays.

The youngest of the five boys, my mother’s father, Grandpa Walstrom, created and ran one of the largest logging operations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula when the U.P. was still mostly all virgin pine. Railroads were built to spread the harvest throughout America. To this day, there’s probably homes in Denver built out of trees my Grandpa Walstrom cut.

The Walstrom boys transformed nature to meet their neighbors’ needs — homes for families and bottles of milk. They never missed a day of work in the forest or in the fields. They became active in local town councils, regulars at Lutheran events, respected elders marching at the head of Main Street parades.

But they never forgot the sound of hungry wolves and passed the story on down to their grandchildren, sitting next to them on the living room couch.

By the decade of the 70s and Vietnam — as I was becoming more aware of a larger world — I began to hear them too, the wolves, metaphors for dangers lurking around in dark alleys, just barely out of sight.

I still hear them sometimes. Sometimes they keep me awake at night… restless, trying not to disturb Culley Jane or the cats. It’s going to happen, any day now, for sure, a big storm's coming down off the Rockies ­— down off the Great Divide.

I slow down my breathing to remind myself that it’s only a story and that we’re the ones who write the plot. I remind myself that we’ve got plenty of all that we need — plenty of firewood chopped and split, chicken thawing in a pot.

It’s going to be another busy day tomorrow.

Better get some sleep.

We never miss a day of work. So many things to do… passwords, the internet, appointments, a trip to the store... litter boxes, autumn leaves to rake...  hours at my littered desk where I work on my book Benny, The Legend of Benny, an old school newspaper reporter taught by guys who’d known Capone. Benny, older now, but an ace back in the day, chasing after the biggest story in the world, a Pulitzer Prize, maybe get on the Johnny Carson Show.

So many things to do.

Better get some sleep.

Gotta make it into work on time.

Good night moon...

--30--

Dr. Jerry Gilbert

Clinical Psychologist

Denver, Colorado

Dr. Gilbert

Dear Editor:

The main issue in last week’s “Our Story” column (11/13/25 in Archives) is about the role of a reporter. I have no experience with reporting, editing, or working on newspapers. But I have opinions. I think there is more than one kind of reporter. There are those who write like Jack Webb and report a story just as a photograph or video records events (of course, photographers & videographers choose what to film), and just like people on TV who report the news as written.

There are also reporters, perhaps investigative journalists, who are expected to report facts and add an interpretation. Then there are those who write on the opinion page who are primarily concerned with interpretation, with some facts thrown in. I agree that editors decide the responsibility of each kind of reporter…

Although Plato’s allegory of the cave was intended to give metaphorical perspective to the main issue, the nature of reality is a separate issue. I think that shadows are a reality, a separate reality. They are experienced by the senses and can be filmed. Most moviegoers know that the characters in a film are not people in the common sense of people we have daily contact with. But if they are emotionally engaged, the separation becomes blurred. Fans of actors base their reactions on the roles the actors play. A good actor who typically plays “bad guy” characters probably doesn’t achieve the same fandom. But my point is that a movie is real and the actors are real and the characters feel real. Therefore, the portrayals are forms of reality (even our feelings are a form of reality). Besides, we assume that while we are seeing a story being portrayed, we believe that the characters are based on a collection of real people and incidents.

We become used to thinking there is only one type of reality (except for those who believe in the supernatural). I think there are many types of reality which we put into separate categories and call them unreal (illusions, dreams, delusions, hallucinations, films, drug-induced states, meditative states, etc.). If we ask a group of people to describe an event, we will find multiple descriptions. If the event was filmed, we can compare the group’s versions with an accepted objective version. Does that mean that all those who reported an incorrect version did not experience a reality? Each species shares its own reality, and within an advanced species like humans, each person experiences their own reality with much overlap.

Whether you agree or not, our opinions are real.