My wife and I recently spent a few days in southeastern Wisconsin. We were supposed to enjoy this trip with a friend of ours visiting from the west coast. He typically comes once a year and we show him a good time in and around the Chippewa Valley.
This year, we thought it would be a nice change of pace to present him a different part of our wonderful state. We really looked forward to showing off our beautiful fall colors, the awe-inspiring state capitol, and area attractions.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck his family. His elderly mother had fallen, and it was soon discovered that she had suffered a stroke. He would not be able to make the trip.
We were crestfallen, of course, but completely understood and wished him the best as he and his family deals with a difficult time.
So what had been a well-planned guided tour of southeastern Wisconsin with our friend instead became a casual meander for the two of us around fond, familiar ground.
We stayed in Sun Prairie, just twenty minutes from the heart of Madison, and enjoyed their charming little downtown. We drove an hour to Blue Mound and imagined being spelunkers as we strolled 75 feet under the earth through the cavernous beauty of Cave of the Mounds. In Madison, we enjoyed the variety of animals housed at the free Henry Vilas Zoo and browsed the shops, restaurants and bars of State Street. Other than overlooking a critically important sign in red warning that our car would be in a tow-away zone after 4pm and having to recover our vehicle three blocks away with a sizeable ticket under the wiper, it was a pleasant, relaxing mini-vacation.
On the last day of our trip, we toured Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate, homestead, and architectural school and studio. Although we have toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s work before, we had never been to the almost mythical Taliesin.
We had a knowledgeable and passionate tour guide by the name of Will. He just recently joined the Taliesin Preservation team in between his full-time gig as a conservationist working half-way across the world in China. As someone so passionate and devoted to nature, Will was a perfect guide to introduce us to Taliesin’s integration within its natural surroundings.
Wright built Taliesin upon the brow of the hill. In fact, Taliesin is a Welsh word that means ‘radiant brow.” Taliesin was also the name of a 6th Century Welsh bard, so its designation perfectly describes both its position on the hill and its poetic architecture. Wright realized the top of the hill was the best part of it, so instead of doing what any other builder would have done and erected the building there, he left the hilltop untouched, yet made it an integral part of the property.
Wright believed that a building, be it institution or home, should conform to and reflect its function or inhabitants. True to form, Taliesin is a physical representation of Wright—his heart, his soul, and one must admit, his ego. But it is an ego well-deserved. Every room, rather than walling out the outdoors, instead draws it in. Wright’s love of nature, its asymmetry and three-dimensional beauty, is echoed throughout every window and door, ceiling and floor, and even the furniture, as well as his love of Asian art and aesthetic.
Underneath the beauty and serenity of Taliesin, however, are the scars of unfathomable tragedy.
On August 15th, 1914, when much of the world clashed in war, 47-year-old Wright was in Chicago on business, leaving his lover Martha Cheney and her two children at Taliesin along with apprentices and staff. Julian Carlton, a handyman for the estate, took hatchet in hand and murdered Martha and her children, poured gasoline all around the porch and dining area and set the home on fire. As Wright’s apprenticed draftsmen fled, Carlton attacked them with his hatchet. In all, seven people died that day and a large section of Taliesin had been destroyed.
After receiving one of the most horrible phone calls in his life, Wright rushed home to return that evening to the smoldering ruin of his home and the lifeless bodies of those he loved, lived and worked with. He himself would dig Martha’s grave and lay her to rest:
“I have buried her in the little Chapel burying ground of my people…and while the place where she lived with me is a charred and blackened ruin, the little things of our daily life gone, I shall replace it all little by little as nearly as it may be done. I shall set it all up again for the spirit of the mortals that lived in it and loved it—will live in it still. My home will still be there.” ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
He rebuilt the structure of his life using many of the scorched stones of his tragedy. He integrated bricks of sandstone now crimson from the heat of flame. He recovered fragments of statues blacked from the inferno and incorporated them into the rebuilt masonry. Wright seemed to recognize that, like nature, the tragedy of that day could not be separated from the home—it had to be part of it.
It resonated deeply in me how Taliesin’s original beauty had been born of inspiration that represented one man’s genius and his love for its wondrous natural surroundings. Within a year of that horrific day, its structure now reflects the scars of that tragedy and is no less beautiful, but now somehow even more soulful. Personal. Natural.
Walking out onto the porch, Will pointed up to a section of soffit where a small frame of glass has been inlaid to reveal the structural framework of the home. Looking up, I saw the deeply charred and burned skeletal trusses, braced with additional two-by-fours. It was as if I were looking directly into the very depths of Wright’s trauma.
With the tour over, we headed for home. However, instead of turning left, on a whim we decided to backtrack and investigate something we had passed while on the road winding through the autumnal woods on our way to the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor’s Center. The iron archway had just barely caught our attention—a gateway to a mysterious dirt road leading up the hill between the trees.
Coming back upon it, especially being only a few weeks before Halloween, the words wrought into the iron archway were a macabre, but irresistible temptation: Old Helena Cemetery.
I slowly crept the Crosstrek up the rough, rutted road. I felt the tires slip at least once as I tried to avoid the deepest washouts from runoff.
“I hope we aren’t making a big mistake,” I say.
“Oscar will make it,” my wife reassures. She named the Subaru after the crotchety father of the main character from our favorite Canadian sitcom, Corner Gas.
Both our seats and our nerves were jostled as we ascended the nondescript, almost hidden short back road. At the top of the hill, we came upon a small clearing populated with forty or so tombstones. The cemetery gave every impression of it being very old.
We slowly walked the grounds, reading each tombstone—so many of them with the same family name. Buried in that secluded little clearing within the wilds of nature are veterans of the Civil War, of World War I and II, and of the Vietnam War. Eternally at rest are wives and husbands and—shockingly—far, far too many young children. We stopped counting the number of graves displaying children only two years old, one year old, months old, days old.
So many. In one case, parents laid to rest three children, none of whom made it past two years old.
Flowers and flags and other trinkets indicated that these lives have not been forgotten. There are even several new tombstones of recent burials, and other stones that look like they have replaced older ones.
These stones suggest tragedies and loss at a level I personally have never experienced and likely will never be able to fully comprehend.
And yet, standing in the small, secluded grove, a gentle breeze blowing through the yellows and reds of fall color, I couldn’t help but see beauty as well—in each stone, in the not-quite forgotten memories of lives once lived. Lives wounded by tragedy, but now monuments standing against the erosion of time.
I think now about my friend and his step father, experiencing the tragedy of a mother and wife who they may soon lose, and my heart breaks for them. As I get older, however, I am also growing to realize that, to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of nature, you must accept the storms that devastate and destroy. To truly appreciate the beauty and miracle of life, you must accept the tragedies that can burn and ruin, but from that rubble, become the bricks to rebuild, and the headstones to mark our moment in time.
Learn more about Taliesin: https://www.taliesinpreservation.org/
Learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frank-Lloyd-Wright
Learn more about Old Helena Cemetery: https://nomadicnewfies.blogspot.com/2019/01/shot-tower-and-helena-cemetery.html
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