It’s a spectacular autumn afternoon in Park Falls, Wisconsin, and I am sitting around a rock garden, talking about Simon & Garfunkel with a group of millennials who have come to the United States seeking religious freedom. From Canada. It is a conversation that also touches on language, current movies, and their affection for Donald Trump. Altogether, it is a nice way to pass a fall afternoon.
Also, they let me drive their Bobcat.
How we all got to that plot of land requires some explanation. Me first. When I’m not writing occasional magazine stories, I produce and co-host a public radio show. In that role, I get a lot of phone calls, out of the blue, from people pitching interview guests. Most of these calls are from public relations assistants in New York, and I’m simply the latest name on a list of radio show producers they’re tasked with calling, hoping one of us will bite on an interview with their client – maybe a psychiatrist who can explain the “10 Ways Instagram is Ruining Our Children’s Lives”; or the former Ambassador to Suriname, who has the inside scoop on Hillary Clinton’s secret email server.
So when a colleague transferred a call to me on a winter day in late 2014, I considered letting it go to voicemail. But I noticed the area code on the caller ID: 701. North Dakota. I don’t get very many calls from North Dakota, and sometimes that’s all it takes.
And then there was the accent.
The woman on the other end of the line said a lot in a very short time in a brogue I was positive was Scottish. I learned her name was Sheryl Waldner, and that she was a “former Hutterite,” and that she and a group of other former Hutterites had written books about their experiences and that they were in the process of moving to northern Wisconsin and that they were coming down to the Milwaukee area to do a couple of book signings, and would I be interested in interviewing some of them on the radio show?
“Um, sure,” I said, before hanging up and immediately Googling “Hutterites.”
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Read the rest of this story in the August issue of Milwaukee Magazine. Find a copy on newsstands beginning Monday, Aug. 1, buy a copy online at milwaukeemag.com/shop, or read it now using Member Pass.
‘Breaking Away’ appears in the August issue of Milwaukee Magazine.
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