Love at Goon Park Read Online Free Page A

the term “pioneer” sounds too transient—began transforming the land in the early nineteenth century. The little town of Fairfield, where Harry was born many years later, was chartered in 1836, neatly laid out around a traditional town square. For decades, it retained a frontier quality. Until the 1870s, hogs were allowed to run through the square. When the mayor finally insisted that livestock be penned, pig owners angrily protested this affront to liberty. People paid their bills with what they could grow or raise. The town doctors accepted everything from chickens to tomatoes. The pharmacies on the square sold Indian remedies to their customers, tidily packed cloth bags with chamomile flowers for measles and slippery-elm bark for pneumonia.
    Science was something distant, not quite real and not all that important. “Few knew or cared that the world was filled with innumerable fascinating creatures or that the history of the earth was written in the rocks beneath their feet,” wrote the Fairfield historian Susan Fulton Welty in a loving tale of her hometown. In the late nineteenth century, some Fairfield high school students formed a science club. They were enthusiastic, but they found the subject mysterious at best. One of the first meetings raised the question “Is a Bat a Bird?” The members were mostly nature collectors. They packed their clubhouse with pinned insects, dried flowers, the brittle remains of ferns and mosses, and assorted bones. At one point, club members assembled almost the entire skeleton of a horse, built from bleached bones found tumbled in a nearby pasture.
    By the time Harry Israel was born, the frontier had been tidied away. The town square was neatly paved. The Sac and the Fox had mostly vanished, pushed to the west. The herbal remedies had been replaced by a red-brick hospital and more European-style medicine. The woodlands and feathery fields were plowed, tilled, and rotated into submission. Even the science enthusiasts had given up bone hunting. The local high school now taught the study of nature, “with
especial attention to the highest of vertebrates, Man himself.” Harry would have preferred it just a little less, well, predictable. Years later, he would confess that completely orderly science bored him. He could never quite accept rules as absolute. He was never really convinced that “Man himself” was an example of evolutionary perfection. A work in progress, maybe. He would have been happy to argue the point—if it had been open for debate in Fairfield. His family would have said that Harry was born to argue. So would his peers. When he graduated from high school, this quote appeared under his yearbook picture: “Though rather small, we know most well, in argument, he doth excel.”
    He was born on a Halloween evening, October 31, 1905, at his family home in Fairfield. “Within thirty minutes I had precipitated a violent family quarrel,” Harry once wrote. His Aunt Nell had come all the way from Portland, Oregon, and wanted to hold the baby first. But his two older brothers begged her to take them on a quick trickor-treat outing. When the three of them returned, baby Harry was lying cozily in his Aunt Harriet’s lap. “This was a situation in which better late than never did not pertain,” Harry would joke later. Harriet lived just around the corner in Fairfield. Nell had traveled hundreds of miles. And the ungrateful baby’s parents had named the child Harry. In family lore, the story of his birth always resounded with the ensuing thunder.
    â€œAnother memory which I do not have happened when I was three,” Harry wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. The entry was typical of the way he recounted his childhood—always flippant about growing up in Iowa. As he told the story, when he was a little boy, he owned a porcelain child’s potty, which he loved. He would carry it around the house