In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I enjoy scrolling through photos from the previous 51 weeks to sharpen memories already blurring and fading from view.
Photos often trigger one of two thoughts: “That was this year? Seems longer.” Or, “That was this year? Seems like last week.”
Those time warps are especially understandable during the year's final week. Each day between Christmas and the new year feels like a Saturday or Sunday, given how vacations, holidays and disjointed work schedules jumble our routines.
The photos also remind me of stories within stories, some vital and some trivial; some worth sharing and some not. At least not yet. What follows are a few safe tellings.
Patrick Durkin outfitted his cedar-strip rowboat with a new pair of oars he built in winter 2024. — Patrick Durkin photos
You might recall that when my friend Tom Heberlein died Jan. 4, 2024, a few of us scurried to bury him a week later before a blizzard blocked us from his gravesite in the forests near Mellen. Using texts and quick phone calls, we improvised the graveside service and hand-shoveled burial.
We couldn’t leave him in an unmarked grave, of course, so before driving northward from Eau Claire and into the storm, I retrieved a simple Christian cross I had pieced together in my backyard workshop the previous weekend.
Its wood came from the shop’s scrap/kindling bin. A treated 2-by-4 became the cross’ upright and a ¾-inch redwood plank became its crosspiece. After free-handing the professor’s name into the redwood with a router, I decided the cross needed more specifics. So, I cut a 3-inch chunk from an aluminum bar, filed its edges round, hand-stamped Heberlein’s birthday and final day into the soft metal, and nailed the plate onto the 2-by-4 below his name.
Satisfied, Penny and I drove north, helped bury Heberlein and planted the cross at the head of his grave.
In late April, a few weeks after the snow melted and the ground thawed, I returned to groom the gravesite with a rake and shovel. Heberlein’s cross had tilted in the loose soil, so I righted it in the red clay and stacked rocks around its base.
A “Leopold bench” welcomes visitors to Tom Heberlein’s gravesite in the forests southwest of Mellen.
But the cross’ upright was too short and it would surely tilt again, so I addressed its design flaw in late July during a fishing trip with my friend Dave Burgess. We brought along an 18-inch extension for the cross, and carried it to the gravesite while flicking ticks and swatting mosquitoes. Burgess dug the hole deeper while I attached the extension, and then we reseated the cross, packed down the clay and restacked the rocks.
Why all the bother for a cross that’s only a temporary marker? Because Heberlein was a fussy man who liked his lines straight. Sometime in 2025, his wife, Betty Thomson, will choose one of the property’s large red-granite rocks, send it off for chiseling, and place it where the cross now stands to forever mark the grave of Thomas Addison Heberlein.
Visitors, meanwhile, have a place to sit. Rich Stedman, Heberlein’s longtime friend and heir to his shack and 40 acres, took time out from an October grouse hunt to drag a Leopold bench to the gravesite and place it along Heberlein’s left side.
Heberlein would appreciate such details. Twenty-some years ago, while helping his friend Leon Heinz retrace his World War II battle trail through Italy, Heberlein wrote of the solemn beauty of the American military cemetery at Florence:
“The acres of grass here are not mowed. They are manicured. Perhaps with a tweezers. Not a brown blade in this dry climate. Not a stray blade can be found around any of the headstones of white Lasa marble. No American touring the Old World should be allowed to return home before honoring our heroes buried across Europe.”
American military cemeteries, like Belleau Wood in France, hold thousands of heroes who died in World War I and II.
Penny and I kept Heberlein in mind when visiting France in June. While walking among the thousands of marble crosses and Stars of David standing in long, arcing rows in two American cemeteries, we paused to read countless names. These included Wisconsinites like Marine Corps private Clarence Edward Inden at the WWI cemetery at Belleau Wood, and Army private Raymond R. Skaleski at the WWII cemetery above Normandy’s Omaha Beach. Hundreds of other gravestones at both cemeteries simply read, “Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known but to God.”
Nearly three months later our family interred another loved when my mom died at 93. A day after her funeral Mass and visitation, Winifred Anne Frank Durkin’s children, grandchildren, spouses and great-grandchildren buried her ashes beside my father’s on Lake Poygan's southern shoreline. After paying tribute, our family took turns shoveling dirt to cover her boxed ashes.
The great-grandchildren’s solemnity proved stunning. The adults viewed their turns with the shovel or trowel symbolically, stepping aside after pouring soil into the hole. But the great-grandkids, ages 4 through 10, returned to end of the line and silently took another turn. And then another. And another, until filling their great-grandmothers’ rose-encircled resting place.
Great-grandchildren of Winifred Anne Frank Durkin helped bury her ashes in August.
Most of my photos, thankfully, bring happier thoughts, whether it’s icefishing for crappies in January with longtime friend Jim Heffelfinger, watching a mature gobbler strutting down our neighbor’s driveway in April, row-trolling for muskies with lifelong friend Mike Foy in July, or catching jumbo perch with Chris Weber on Idaho’s Lake Cascade during MeatEater’s “1-Minute Challenge” in September.
Still other photos remind me of goals set in 2023 and somehow met, like building a pair of oars for Foy’s rowing station in my cedar-strip rowboat. Foy rightfully complained about the old, too-short oars with cracked blades that I forced him to use during the 2023 Bob Ellis Classic muskie tournament. Foy, who rowed on a University of Wisconsin-Madison crew during college, envied the long, powerful spoon-billed oars I used in the stern. By the time we returned to shore that day, I promised Foy that my first workshop project in January 2024 would be spoon-billed oars custom-fit for the forward rowing station.
Did the freshly minted oars impress Foy when he seated their leather sheaths into the oarlocks and rowed us onto Vilas County’s Big Lake? Not instantly. Although he complimented their looks, he needed time adjusting to their longer, overlapping pull. But his complaints were brief, possibly fearing a spiteful return to my truck and starting over with the stubbier, cracked-blade oars.
What events and projects will make 2025’s most memorable photos? We won’t know until we’ve finished our next lap around the sun.
A gobbler struts down a driveway in an Eau Claire neighborhood in April.
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