Sub Terra Chronicle #22—A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground, Part I—Introduction

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

October 26, 2015

Chronicle #22—A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground, Part I—Introduction

sub terra vita, “underground life,” like any homespun tale, starts the legend at home. The story possesses, like the life of an individual person, many highs, some lows, successes and failures, and far too many of the latter to leave out. Amid uncountable laughs, and some of the bitter sadness, the creative biography (not a history) of the Valley's underground takes the good and bad parts, to resolve lessons, and to live well in the memory of all before, and all today, as we live gratefully with experienced courage to our future.

This story uses a triumph of the saga, its context, for a relevance of today. As with saga, it serves its own end, as a piece of the puzzle, of “what happened here, and why?”

The underground in the St. Croix Valley carries parts of the past, some more distant times, some of them ruins and lore, in many harmless stories of childhood adventure, with some harsher stories of adults from different eras. It all happens among hidden relics, from youthful playgrounds to the playing fields of the ageless and aged. Some of the story may occur on the literal surface plane of the world, the street-level and farm-field, or forested-, hill views. It all, on the other hand, relates to sub terra, below the viewpoint of the average living world.

Some underground locations only remain temples in memories, for they do not or may not exist anymore. For some tunnels, cellars, alleyways, holes, crevices, crags, caves, etc., etc., and other places, no location can exist except in the telling of these stories of Valley living. One rule, though, must remain: names, proper and placed in perfect remembrance otherwise, must remain runic and undecipherable, to the code, without the key to decipher, if necessary and proper to do so.

A final requirement of the underground carries into its biography, or even in some cases its creative story, as part-history/part-fiction: That the simple, good story does always end well, whether or not guilty of good cheer, fellowship, and camaraderie. Furthermore, even if it ends in some thing less than completely happy, the stories might carry enough true of the form, of something we can learn. Like all life in context, we aim to make a positive and optimistic outcome, a whole-better good of the result, prevailing to success in later living, in some important way.

The spirit of the story, the intent of this brief, creative-biography, finds the triumph that derives of sharing good meaning, for the alive and the awake. Hopefully, these tales, these acts of life, can show themselves as the things worthwhile telling, sharing somethings about ourselves, about Our Valley, that make it more interesting than we realized. And, hopefully, readers will judge this sub-series of chronicles worthwhile reading and recalling, someday much later.

And where does one begin this story of the Underground in our Valley? Properly, it must begin at the start. . . at the house where I grew up, by the railroad tracks, in our St. Croix Valley town of Osceola. From very young, to now, in several different houses, many different communities, and after traveling a fair stretch of America, I find my life and my experiences in many ways have connected to things and structures below the ground-eye level. In much of my youth, and in adulthood, I find a theme of sorts, and much of that theme sub terra.Unlike Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a great work by a great author, my living in the theme might seem mundane, but with interesting highlights. Still, it all goes back to the house where I grew up on Third Avenue, in Osceola, many decades ago. . . .