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The Roaring Waters of the Rend Lake Spillway and My Grandpa's Stories of World War II

With so much snow on the ground, my thoughts turn to summer sometimes. The fountain at the pond in the park where I do chin-ups in Mahwah, New Jersey constantly roars in the summer. It reminds me of the roar of the spillway dam overflow at Rend Lake in Southern Illinois where my grandfather used to take me to catch shad for bait and then fish a little farther down the river. We mostly fished in quiet waters where he could talk, but closer to the spillway the roar kept conversation at a minimum. My grandpa was a storyteller, but he could not tell stories above the roar of the spillway. Fishing by a waterfall is not able to support conversation. Fishing requires you to keep some distance from the next fisherman anyway and requires personal space to cast the line, to listen, to watch the movements of the line. This is at odds with storytelling, which requires intimacy.

My grandpa loved to tell stories, so we mostly fished in the quiet of lakes or creeks. He could tell about the characters in his World War II ambulance division. He only told humor stories; he never told gory stories of what ambulance drivers really saw in World War II. This is what the men of the Greatest Generation did: they buried the pain of the war in the far off lands to return home again in silence. My grandpa did that too, but only partly. He could not resist telling me about the funny things that happened to him in the Army during the war.

But when the waters roared, he was silent, maybe thinking of far off lands.
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