Back-Channel

This article began as an edited transcription of Episode 1, "Boathouse 101” and Episode 2, “The Gospel According to John” from Back Channel Radio’s first season, “A Wolf Spider Island.” This season chronicles the legal battles waged by a group of river rats to keep their small boathouse community on the Mississippi River afloat.

A ‘back-channel’ is an unofficial communication channel, a place for making informal or subversive negotiations. It's a term you often hear in political contexts to describe a line of communiqué with a backdoor entrance. Ultimately, it's a conduit, a stream that connects ideas. Geographically speaking, the back channel is the smaller of two channels in a river that diverge to form an island. The main channel, or mainstream, hosts the immense barge traffic. But on the back channel, we’re more underground, and thereby potentially under threat.

Since 2013, I’ve been living in a boathouse along the Mississippi River in a community of other boathouses. Wolf Spider, where I live, is a smaller island below the main island known as Latsch. It sits on the back channel of the Mississippi River across from the town of Winona, Minnesota, near the Wisconsin border. I live on the waters of the back channel in a boathouse. Not a houseboat. There are a few houseboats here, but mostly just boathouses or, more accurately, floating homes.

Imagine a mosaic of small, floating dwellings. Hundreds of turtles climb out of the muck to sun themselves on black logs slick with neon green duckweed. Gar spawn in the shallows between them, their lurching mating dance virtually unchanged for eons. When seen from above, the boathouses present a multi-hued variegated quilt, at once rugged and quaint. Each boathouse is unique; each shape specifically dictated by necessity, resources, and the vision of the builder. Most are small; picture a shack with one or two rooms built upon an undercarriage made of floating, blue plastic barrels. These structures are tied to the shore, and most have a little walkway.

29 Wolf Spider Island.

Latsch Island is a special place. That it is the home of this boathouse community and a beloved landmark for local Winonans makes it all the more so. (Tyra: “Where the water meets the land is a blessed and sacred spot.”). People come here to find themselves, some to heal, some to hide from the world. The foundation for the outsider boating community that still makes up Latsch Island was born in the 1970s. Then, the boathousers were a diverse group of people––inventors, writers, UFO enthusiasts, bird watchers, hippies, and river rats––all of whom wanted to get more in touch with themselves and nature by living off the grid on the water. They were mostly elders in those days. Folks who had been here, living off the grid since the community’s inception in the mid-1970s, some of whom have since moved on to other places, physical and otherwise.

The island gets its name from John Latsch. Born in 1860, he’s remembered as a philanthropist who preferred his little canoe as his modus operandi (over the then more fashionable automobile). By the end of his life, he had donated nearly 20,000 acres of land to the public in Minnesota and Wisconsin. He intended that the acres were, in his own words, “to be left in their wild state so that game and birds would have an unmolested home, and so that the public would be assured of having permanent recreation grounds.” Today, his lavish endowment includes land in Latsch State Park, Perrot State Park, Prairie Island, Aghaming Park; the list goes on and on. Latsch Island was known then as Island 72, a small scrubby plot of land that was only accessible by boat for many years and, interestingly, was not part of Latsch’s original donation. In response to the many drowning deaths of children swimming unsupervised in the town, Latsch commissioned the building of a Public Bathhouse on Island 72 which has since been known as Latsch Island. The bathhouse existed for almost seventy years, until its eventual demolition in 1974.

Everybody mentions Latsch when they talk about the Island, its boathouse community, and history. But there’s also a deep indigenous history here that, though obscure, is covered extensively in Myron A. Nilles' book: A History of Wapasha’s Prairie. It contains a rare account of an early structure being built on Latsch Island: a cabin built by a missionary who was trying to convert the Dakota people to Christianity. The area where the town of Winona sits was originally known as Wapasha’s Prairie, after Chief Wapasha of the Dakota people. Eventually, it came to be called Winona. There used to be mounds in Winona. Some were burial sites; some were not; but they have all since been destroyed. One of the mounds that was desecrated was the burial site of Chief Wapasha’s children. It’s actually near where the current-day County Historical Society stands. Beyond what can be surmised through archeological evidence, much of what happened in this area prior to roughly 1750 is unrecorded.

Wolf Spider Island’s Really Big Party poster, 1984.

What we do know is that at some point, probably not too long after Native peoples were violently displaced, other people, mostly poorer people, started building shacks along the river near what would become Latsch Island, in fact, down the entire length of the Mississippi. The floating community off Latsch Island is the only one with full-time residents still left standing… or ‘floating’. Reggie McLeod, a local journalist and creator of Big River magazine, recalls:

It was a tradition on the river, though. Every town along the river had a boathouse community, and they were called [a] shanty—shanty, you know, uh, or shantyboats, because sometimes people would pull them down the river. So, before the lock-and-dam system was built, a lot of the river during the dry summer would only be a few feet deep.

This area is part of what’s known as the “Driftless Region.” It encompasses parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. Driftless refers to the lack of drift materials––dirt, rocks, and sand––left behind by the melting of the glaciers. The result is a landscape that looks very different from the rest of the Upper Midwest. It’s covered in high hills and rocky bluffs, but there’s still water. Everywhere.

When I first started living here, there was a period of adjustment, to put it mildly. I had lived off-grid before. I had stayed in tents for long stretches of time. I lived in a school bus I used to have that I converted to run on used vegetable grease. I was no stranger to roughing it. But roughing it on land and roughing it on water are two different beasts.

Our boathouse, The Dome, as it’s called, is one of the largest ones here: forty-two feet by forty-two feet by twenty-one feet high. Originally built in 1973, it was once a true geodesic dome, but now just pieces of the triangulated roof remain. The sides of the dome, sodden and half-sunk, have since been replaced with eleven angled walls. It floats on one hundred blue plastic pressurized barrels. They used to be metal barrels, and before that, they were logs, or sometimes telephone poles.

But in the past thirty to forty years, plastic barrels began to become more plentiful. They’re easier to maintain than the metal ones, and you do have to maintain them. Occasionally, one will need to be replaced, with the aid of a tool called a “barrel popper,” which you have to use to “pop” the new barrel under your place. It’s hard, and sometimes a little scary. We live on the lower end of the island, so you can’t drive up to it unless the river is frozen solid. (It’s always surreal to me to be driving over the ice.) Naturally, all your water and fuel have to be hauled in constantly.

Without knowing the boating lifestyle, so prevalent here in the land of 10,000 lakes divided by the Mississippi River, it's hard to get the whole picture. Not much exists online, and while this has started to change, most popular media, when picturing Latsch Island, still veer into sensationalism. By and large, the majority of photographers, TV crews, and writers who visit this place often miss the most important parts and ask all the same trite questions. Like, how do you get your power, and where do you go to the bathroom? (Newsclip: “Today we’re going to take a closer look at these funky houses and meet some of Winona’s most unique individuals”). Nowadays, images of these floating homes are employed to promote the town of Winona, pictured in brochures and souvenirs. There are even guided boat tours that float by our homes during the months the river is solvent.

Flood charts from John’s archive.

The best way to tell the story of Latch is to talk to people who actually live here. The germ of the idea for this project started as I got to know my neighbors, most of them older people who’ve been living here since the genesis of the island community. Their lives revolved around weather and changes with the river, cycles of flooding, daily practices of maintenance, and hauling water, fuel, and food. Though many reporters and photographers have visited the island, no one has ever taken the time to fully explore the complete story of how this community came to be in the first place, or so I thought.

Then I found my neighbor John Rupkey’s archives in a tiny, floating shack at the end of a dock. There, I discovered binders and binders full of documentation that contained the real meat of the story of this place. I asked myself, why isn’t this in a museum? And that was the spark that ignited this entire endeavor: hundreds of documents––collected from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s––carefully bound in chronological order. One particularly compelling binder read “Wolf Spider History” in gold letters on the front, with “Now is the time!” written below––and on the inside cover, in red marker, “Remember the past, influence your future!”

There were notes from city council meetings, early typed drafts of negotiations, and proposals about the boathouses, handwritten poems, and observations. Countless clipped newspaper articles started to crumble in the damp environment, despite the obvious care that was taken in their presentation. John had left them there on the shelf inside a dilapidated shack, so that the information, the journey of this community, could be accessed by anyone who cared to read it. But you had to know it was there, or be lucky enough to stumble upon it as I did.

It was around this time that my role in this story began. With John’s permission, I first started to digitize several decades’ worth of paper material to be housed in the records at the Winona County Historical Society. Then, it grew to interviewing John, twenty-two separate times, spread out over the course of a couple of years. Spending so much time interviewing one person left me with more questions; so, I started asking others to fill in the gaps. But then I realized that these stories deserve a wider audience. Of course, I didn’t interview every person or record every story, but I’m hoping that what I did get will convey a picture of what this place is like, what it feels like, and what happened. And maybe where it’s going.

The Gospel According to John Rupkey

John, who’s 87, has been living here on the back channel of the Mississippi River in his floating home for over four decades. For the past three years, I’ve been getting to know him, learning about his life and the island over many sprawling afternoons.

Johnny Star Lover of Earth.

First, John refers to his floating home as the temple. It's one of the few floating homes on the island that used to be a true boathouse, meaning it housed the boat and was not originally designed as a living space. It's one room with a tiny loft above where he climbs a steep ladder every night to go to bed. There are photos in frames hung on the beams of several pets, long gone, and the layout suggests this person lives alone but not unhappily so. Outside, eagles are chirping and screeching (John: “That’s a family of nine.), and also, the ever-present drama of ducks (John: “There’s also a family of six that just came by earlier.”).

**Angry voicemail plays of a man yelling at John**
GF: Yeah, he called me a dumb son of a bitch three times.
JR: Yeah, I know that hurt. Okay, I understand that, but well…
GF: He’s very upset with you.

For as long as John’s been on the island, he’s been writing letters to the local Winona newspaper. He doesn’t stand out too much: he’s an old man with glasses and fantastic posture, and usually in a Minnesota Vikings baseball cap. So, at first glance, he doesn't come off as a practicing upstart whose preferred medium of choice is letters-to-the-editor.

John first started writing letters to the paper back in 1979 when he was moved to respond to a derogatory letter penned by a local conservative. The man condemned the existence of gay people, saying homosexuals were tearing at the fabric of moral families. John’s been writing letters to the editor ever since, a commitment he’s maintained with unwavering fortitude. He once told me that he used to feel more like a “lone voice in the wilderness” when it came to his opinions. But, in more recent years, it seems like the culture has caught up to his once radical notions like equality. The unofficial, community historian, John, is an intellectual: a Doctor of the Psychology of Human Learning with a degree in Math and double masters in English and Religion. He uses logic and reason to make a case for the issues he’s passionate about and maintains the ability to understand why someone with an opposing viewpoint could become so irate over things like the economy and inflation. He doesn't seem to take the sometimes-negative responses directed towards his writing personally; on the surface, at least.

John is the most senior of the remaining original boathouse occupants––the ones who founded the community in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Nowadays, most of the people from that generation have passed on or moved off the island out of necessity. But few boathousers of the current generation realize what an intrinsic role John played in helping to secure the rights of their community, or really anything about how this place came to be. John is well known for other reasons, like his letter-writing reputation in Winona and stance on Gay liberation, but it wasn't always like that.

Born in 1935, he grew up in Chicago in a nice house with two loving parents and several brothers. They were religious. He went to a good school and has happy memories of early childhood; but from an early age, he knew he was gay: “I can't erase the fact that when I was little, when I was a child, I was being taught to reject myself by the Catholic Church, which I soaked up a hundred percent. I mean, you can move beyond it, but you can't erase what happened.” When John was in high school, there was no one else around him who was openly gay. There also was no one in popular media who he could look to. It was a taboo, even dangerous topic, that wasn't openly discussed.

I never made a decision not to come out of the closet; it was just the way you lived when you were a teenager in the ‘50s. I remember when I was a teenager, one day standing in front of the mirror and saying––well, I guess you're a homosexual––saying it to myself and going on from there. Because not only was I a homosexual, but I was the only one in the world.

This sentiment sums up perfectly how it feels as a young person to know you’re an outsider, living beyond the realm of “normal society,” and the isolation that can come with that, especially in the days before the internet, before there was a window into a vast world of information. The ‘50s really were a different era; it was a time when the Lavender Scare was in full swing.

JR: … there were rumors that in the washrooms, there were these homosexuals that hung out and did weird things.
GF: And that made you want to go to the washroom?
JR: No! It made me want to stay away as far as I could. I remember I was a sophomore in high school and a really cute guy moved in two houses down from me. I was totally taken up with how he was: how he presented himself, what he looked like. So, I totally avoided him. I was afraid that if I went over and was friendly to him, that it would be an indication that I was gay. If I came out of the closet when I was a teenager, I could have been separated from my family and put in a mental hospital or into some kind of reprogramming; I know that happened to people who were my age or even younger.

John remembers the day that he was approached by some young Christian Brothers at his school. It wasn't uncommon for young gay people to join a religious order rather than face the aftermath of coming out during a time of such intense oppression and violence. He recalls the Brothers recognized him as one of their own and suggested he might want to go to the Glencoe seminary in Missouri, where he could prepare to join the clergy.

JR: When I was a freshman in high school, the Brothers spotted me right away. Come on, and be a Brother; join the Brothers… I was like, yeah. So, here I am, a freshman in high school, and I said to my parents, I wanna go to Glencoe and be a Brother. These brothers were young; they were in their twenties. I’m fourteen, not that. But yeah, you know.
GF: So, it made it seem cool?
JR: Oh! I mean, they were cute; they were friendly. I just went on through high school, and then when I graduated from high school was [either] to go to Korea and kill people or go to college and get a deferment. And like, that was a no-brainer.

Around the time John graduated from college, the U.S. was still entangled in the Korean War; and up to this point, he had been studying math but hadn’t put much thought into a career. He thought of the seminary and how joining the Brothers could be an answer to his problems. Some scholars have suggested that preventing priests from marrying altered the makeup of the priesthood over time, unintentionally providing shelter for some devout gay men to hide their sexual orientation. The actual number would be hard to quantify, not surprisingly because of reporting discrepancies. But this isn’t news to the church. During the time of the extreme repression that John is referencing; expansive, new buildings actually had to be built in a short amount of time to accommodate the boom of new initiates.

Gina and John.

JR: I don’t know if I said it out loud to somebody, but it was like, wow, there’s a lot of people in here who were the exact people that I ignore, God, would stay away from. In fact, there were a couple who were there referring to each other by feminine pronouns. Now they’re in this enclosed environment, and if they met their own kind in there, you know, these were people who weren’t hiding their gender like I was. They were more out in the open. The whole set of rules was designed to keep you from falling in love with the guys that you were with. You cannot have particular friendships.
GF: Can you explain a bit more what those are about? Because that was fascinating to me.
JR: Particular friendship… That was why the rules of modesty were enforced to keep you from getting a particular friend, because particular friendship was the big no-no. The rules of modesty included not being allowed to look into each other’s eyes or to touch one another. The way they put it was something like: well, this is somebody who you’re too closely attached to, and it inhibits your ability to be in love with everybody.

John ultimately served as a Brother for twenty-four years. He did so quietly, until the nation witnessed a massive cultural shift in the 1960s and ‘70s. There was a growing gay liberation movement in the US, which slowly emboldened him to make the needed change in his own life to come out. He recounted to me a memory from when he was still living in the friary with his fellow Brothers, all of them gathered around one room watching television. The breaking news that night was Stonewall.

The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 was huge in my mind. It was like coming out of the closet and leaving the Brothers were like two sides of the same coin. The saying with the Brothers was that if you serve until 40, you’ve gotta stay. You live the life of poverty [after being] in the Brothers, but you live a life of luxury. You don't worry about a job; you have gardeners, cooks, everything is taken care of. But, if you leave the Brothers, that's when you experience poverty. So that’s how they keep you in. One of the older Brothers––I taught with him on the West Side of Chicago––he said to me, if I were younger, I’d leave the Brothers; but I’m too old now to leave. That hit me really hard, just like if you wait and wait and wait beyond a certain point, you’re trapped. He was trapped.

In 1980, at the age of 44, John took a standard leave of absence from the Brotherhood; and, soon after that, he officially left and bought a boathouse on Latsch Island. Leaving a religion as an older person, one is faced with a lot of special challenges: there’s no 401(k), no stipend. You’ve been trained in various specific areas like theology. John was a highly qualified teacher, overly qualified even; but during his initial leave of absence from the friary, during which he served as Graduate Dean at the University, he was blacklisted from any decent teaching positions at the local schools after knowledge of his sexuality was made public. With very little money and no prospects to speak of, he set about finding a new way of life for himself.

Well, somebody had a boathouse for sale for about $400, and they said, well, we got this one here. This is the winner. You can have that for $400. We’re not sure that it’ll float; and I said, I’ll take my chances.

It was here on the back-channel, in his barely-floating, one-room home, where John began to build a new community. He was finally able to explore who he truly was.

I was pretty much a radical when I came out. I had a jacket. I might have a picture of it somewhere. And, on the back, it says Johnny Star Lover of the Earth. That's who I became. I became Johnny Star Lover of the Earth… I gave myself that name, and I had a pink triangle on the jacket, which is the symbol of gay people who were required to wear pink by the Nazis.

Aside from being remarkably spry for someone of his age, John's appearance doesn't really stand out, so it caught me off guard when he pulled out an old photo of himself.

JR: Well, here, this is my boathouse; this is my jacket. Johnny Star.
GF: That's bitchin’.

Well, then he takes out an album containing photos from the pivotal era in his life when he first joined the burgeoning counterculture on the island, which had no problem accepting his being gay.

GF: Do you think you ended up in the counterculture mostly because you were gay? Or do you think you would have kind of ended up here anyway?
JR: Well, that's a good question. I certainly wasn't in the counterculture when I was a Brother. So, okay, that's 44 years [ago], and living in monasteries, teaching in conservative catholic schools it was. But when I left and came into the boathouse, my being gay was not a problem in the counterculture, which was, wow, that was a huge thing.

Within the fringe, John was able to redefine his life on his own terms. He was able to start over as his true self. He was able to date men.

GF: Was that Norm, your partner?
JR: Yeah, that’s Norm. He was in Leslie’s boathouse before.

John tells the story of the night he first met Norm. John had been working at a group home for at-risk kids in town, and his coworkers had thrown a Halloween party at one of the local bars.

We had a Halloween party there. I was dressed as the devil, and this guy walked in without any costume: he was dressed as “The Uninvited Guest.” So, I walked over to him and said, I wanna be yours. That's how I met him. We ended up at this house and talked all night.

Norm would become the love of John’s life.

We were both born gay. We were both raised Catholic; you know, I became a teacher of homophobia when I became a Brother. He was a mining engineer. So, he ran uranium mines in New Mexico and came to Kerr-McGee [Corporation], the ones who murdered Karen Silkwood.

Karen Silkwood was a labor activist who led an exposé and went on to sue the Kerr-McGee uranium mine over charges of radiation contamination of herself and her coworkers. She died under mysterious conditions.

As Norm started to realize the reality [of the radiation contamination], he quit; and I had quit the Brothers. So, in some ways, our paths were similar; and when he met me, and we came down to the boathouses, his reaction was I’m looking for a new way to live. I introduced him to this new way of living, which he was really ready for.

It was here on the Island, alongside other outsiders searching for their place in the world, that John was able to explore his new identity in an environment of acceptance. Living so closely with nature in a boathouse aligned with his spiritual beliefs that were developing outside of the more rigid religious order of his past. John has a degree in religious education, among other things. He expounds on the subject in great detail and at length; he tells of how Constantine and his army took Rome and how they rejected the teachings of Jesus; how once Constantine was declared emperor, the Council of Nicaea was convened, establishing Romanized Christianity.

Jesus was the most radical pacifist who ever lived, I suppose. My belief is all in the teachings of Jesus, especially in the two writings written by the young man. He loved the Gospel of John and the Epistles of John: that's my spirituality. What better idea can you get on what Jesus was all about than from the writings of [John,] the young man he loved?

At the time of this recording, John was still earning his living touring with the Midwest Renaissance Festival, which was a great way for some Islanders to make money seasonally and under circumstances that fit their unconventional lifestyle. While John was working at the Ren Faire down in Texas, he got some troubling news. John’s partner Norm was HIV-positive. In 1985, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, there were so many unknowns. It would be another year before Ronald Reagan would even mention the illness in public on television.

It was a scary time, because not much was known about HIV. I remember he was reluctant to pee in the river. Is that going to contaminate [it]? I remember him thinking about it.

I never met Norm, but I got the impression from talking to those who knew him that he was charming. He was handsome, and he helped found the celestial circus with John, which was a pop-up planetarium that traveled with the Renaissance fair to teach kids about astronomy. Within a few years of his diagnosis, his health had changed dramatically.

Evolution of the Political Situation of the Community of Boathouse Residents from John’s archive.

Norm had to eventually move out of his boathouse and into an apartment in town where he had help from friends and family.

It was a long, painful process; as time went on, things got worse and worse, and so, when he died, it was a relief for me: that he was no longer in a process of continuing downhill suffering. By the time he died, he was like an old, blind man, [at age] thirty-nine.

Thousands of people died during that time, many of them young and previously healthy.

JR: It was not a fun time. It was difficult.
GF: I appreciate you sharing that.
JR: Yeah, but I didn't drag that with me; that's what I also wanted to say. I didn't dwell on, oh, what would have happened if Nor[m] didn’t…. Of course, it would have been very, very different. I would have a different life; but I went with what evolved after.

John’s been living on the river now for more than forty years and, at the time of writing this, is still completely independent. In his own words, though it could have been different; he has gone with what evolves, continuing a life that he otherwise may have shared with Norm. And living here is incredibly labor-intensive. You have to haul in all your water and fuel. You can't just drive up to your place. It's a regular occurrence for me to look out the window and see him walking the trail. He has a distinct gait. It's not easy living, by any means, but he doesn't want to live anywhere else.

For some reason, water always drew me. When I was a Brother, I had a connection with a priest who had a very strong connection with the Hindu religion; he integrated Hinduism with Christianity. He talked to me about how there were three manifestations of God, and one was the river: the Ganges River. That spirituality, where the river is a manifestation of God, was also part of my thinking [and] believing before I came here. For the Hindus, the Ganges is the holy river. Some people wanna go to the Himalayas, the holy mountains, [or] the Ganges, the holy River, for Hindu thinking. But if you have Hindu thinking, you don’t go to another continent to find the holy river or to find the holy mountain. The Hindus did not say the holy river was some river over in Africa; it's the river right here that we’re living next to. They didn't say it's the mountain over in North America; it's the mountain right here. So, if you want to get involved in the spirituality of the Hindus, you don't go to the Ganges or the Himalayas; you go to the mountains near you, or the river that's near you. For me, it was integrated into my spirituality.

A lot of us spend years traveling and searching, trying to find the places and experiences that give our lives meaning, that help shape and define us along the way. As I get older, I notice that I carry these experiences within me. I can see something ordinary growing out of the sidewalk and be just as moved as I was long ago seeing something new and unfamiliar on the other side of the globe. It gets easier to find the mystical in the mundane.

After more than four decades of living on the island, John is settled into a routine. Each season is distinct. Some months you can walk the path; some months you can only wait, or boat in, because of the flood; and all of this is meticulously noted in the logs on his bookshelves.

In the deep winter months, you can walk out on the ice road that forms when the back-channel freezes over. Even with all these variations, there’s a rhythm that repeats. John hauls in his food, water, and fuel. He writes letters to the paper, and until very recently, his main source of income came from working at the Renaissance Festival.

John has passed away since the airing of this episode. Gina provided him with end-of-life care; and though she no longer lives on Latsch Island, she has recently built a boathouse structure in the Winona County History Center in line with the mission of Back Channel Radio.