Life in the Bottoms
It was a cold, windy afternoon last Saturday, and a group of us sought shelter in St. Ann's new annex down in Raddle. And as we shielded ourselves from the cutting wind, we were all thankful for a decision made a little more than a year ago.
That's when they decided to build.
"We really enjoyed this building this morning," Gene Korando said. "That wind was really something coming across the fields."
Korando and a group of cohorts were up early, before dawn, preparing the ducks for St. Ann's annual Duck Booya festival. Booya, or duck soup, is slow-cooked all morning, following an Old World recipe that's been handed down for generations. The soup is cooked in two great kettles, and served with fried chicken and a tray full of homemade fixin's in the afternoon. Hundreds of people come and they all leave fed and satisfied, some carrying quart jars of booya home with them.
Korando is the man with the recipe. It's his booya. At 75 years old, he can talk all day about the land he loves, the Bottoms, that rich land down along the banks of the Mississippi River in Jackson County. He traces his roots back to the original settlers of this region, to Mr. Raddle himself. Thomas Raddle came from the Old Country, from Bohemia, and when he first saw this region he knew he'd arrived.
And he decided to build.
Raddle is the oldest community in the Bottoms, and not much of it remains. If not for St. Ann's Catholic Church, the community would not exist.
Like most parishes in America, St. Ann's, which celebrated its first Mass 125 years ago, has gone through periods of growth and contraction. The community's first church was built in 1888, and the present structure went up in 1912. But numbers are down these days, and in many ways what's happening to the parish is exactly what's happening throughout the Bottoms.
The flood of 1993 served as a cruel reminder that the river can decide a lot of matters without pausing to get input from man. Other factors - the changing nature of farming, the closing of schools, the flight of the young, the government-imposed floodplain restrictions - combine to paint a stark portrait of the region today.
Those factors contributed to the demise of the community center in the neighboring town of Jacob a few years ago. With the loss of that facility, the region lost one of its anchors. A gathering place no more. It seemed like a big blow to the Bottoms.
But the Jacob Community Center had some assets available, and as it disbanded it split those assets between two churches in the region - Christ Lutheran Church in Neunert and St. Ann's in Raddle. A gift of a few thousand dollars can be a windfall for a small parish like St. Ann's, and the parishioners met to decide whether to use that money to help build on to the cramped old parish hall.
Not everyone liked the idea.
"Look around you," one man said. "How many young faces do you see? How long will this parish last?"
He was speaking the painful truth. Most of those at the meeting were over 40. And a good third were over 60. The question he was wisely making everyone face was whether they would be throwing good money down the drain. Who would use the building? Reality isn't always pretty. Then someone else rose. He asked: If we decided to not build, wouldn't we be deciding to lie down and die? Wouldn't we be resigning ourselves to a slow death? Isn't it the obligation of the living to go on living, to build for the future?
On the basis of those arguments, the parishioners made their decision. They decided to build.
The annex, a large pole building with three garage doors and a concrete floor, had its grand opening last weekend for the booya festival.
Yes, the nature of the Bottoms community is changing. Some will say it's dying. But if you were in Raddle last weekend, you might have had a different opinion. There's sweat of St. Ann parishioners soaked into these frame walls. And up there in the rafters, where the sound of parish hammers still rings, you can hear the song of tomorrow.
Father Leo Hayes' sermon touched on this matter. He said a celebration like Duck Booya Saturday binds a group of people, it can weave together the various and multi-hued components of a community. It can serve as a welcome mat for those who had left and wish to return.
A dying parish? Perhaps. But floods haven't killed the spirit of the people of the Bottoms. St. Ann's stands as testament to that. The decision to build by the parishioners of St. Ann's displays the undaunted spirit of the people who live here, those who are not bowed by the threat and the ravages of flood. The waters rise and the people remain.
The cold winds rip across those fields, but there is shelter. When the winds of age come sweeping in from the West, the parish will be there as a reminder of our obligation, the obligation of the living. It is the obligation of the living to go on living, to build.
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Collected written works | Gary Marx
