From a July 2024 sermon.
This is how the Rapidan Dam area used to look (photo above)… A few weeks ago, after a six-inch rain south of Mankato, the already flooded Blue Earth River increased to 36 times its average flow. The news was that the Rapidan Dam might fail. And though the dam did not collapse, the force of the water cut a huge path around the dam, eroding a large amount of land. The Rapidan Dam made national news as the erosion increased, swallowing up a house and a community park, forcing the destruction of the Dam Store, and ruining a wonderful recreation area downstream. It was devastating.
Our family lived in Rapidan for six years in the 1980’s. The Dam Store was the local place to meet for morning coffee, the hangout where the old guys would play cards in the afternoon, and, the place to take the family out for a burger, fries, and a piece of pie in the evening. Jim and Linda Hruska owned it then, and they had two little kids that were always running around. Linda has since died, Jim is retired, and those two kids, David and Jenni, now have, (or had), the store. They are the ones you saw on TV. They are a wonderful family.
I was the pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church, in their second building, now in town. The original church was just across the river from the Dam Store, and up the hill from the dam; so you can probably guess what the nickname of that church was. The cemetery is still there. This year, the congregation is celebrating its 150th Anniversary, and they have invited all the previous pastors to preach on a Sunday in the summer. I preached on June 23rd, the day after the big rain, and the day before the dam collapsed.
A couple weeks before that, Nancy and I drove to Rapidan. I wanted to drive through the town, and then I wanted to walk around the cemetery before I preached; because I had some ideas for my sermon that I wanted to ponder upon there among so many members of my former congregation. We then ate at the Dam Store, and got caught up on the local news with David after he fried our hamburgers.
In the cemetery I was reminded of a story I would like to tell you. As our friend Rob used to say, “This story is true– only the facts have been changed to make it more interesting.” Actually, the story is true, and the facts have not been exaggerated, but I did change the names. Not that it would matter. I won’t be telling any secrets. Everybody knew everything about everybody else in that little village of 150.
Anyway, walking through the cemetery brought back a million memories of those people who were our church family for over six years. On one of the stones was the name Oscar Haugen, 1892-1984. Oscar was a quiet old bachelor who, in 1910 and 1911 helped build the Rapidan dam; not with bulldozers, gravel trucks, and cranes, but with horses, shovels, pick-axes, and wheelbarrows. Oscar was a healthy 90-year-old when we moved to Rapidan in 1982, so he would have been 18 in 1910, and he was a strong, “full-blooded Norwegian,” which is what he told everyone. Full-blooded Norwegian, he would always say, not a mixture like so many people today. He was a wonderful old man, and a full-blooded Norwegian, and he would not let you forget it.
Oscar was in good health until age 92, “never one day in the hospital,” he would tell me, and hardly ever to the doctor; and, able to be in church every Sunday. Then Oscar got sick. He was tired all the time, and when he finally went to the doctor, he learned he had leukemia. The doctors told him they could maybe keep him going for a little while with blood transfusions, but his best days were behind him. As he began to decline, I visited him often in his home.
One day, I could tell that Oscar was upset about something. He told me that Harold, (the village clown), asked him about his blood transfusions. Harold asked Oscar if all that blood he was getting always came from full-blooded Norwegians. Oscar said he never thought about it, and didn’t know. Harold then told him it probably wasn’t, because in the hospital, they go by blood type, not by nationality. Harold said it in fun, but it bothered Oscar to his dying day. He brought it up often, telling me sadly that no longer was he a full-blooded Norwegian.
The other thing I remember about those visits, and the reason I am telling you all this, is what Oscar said after he found out he had leukemia. Here is a guy who was never in the hospital until now, hardly sick a day in his life, and then, at age 92 he gets sick. And what does Oscar say? He says, “Why is this happening to me?” I said, “Oscar, you are 92 years old. Most people your age are dead, and the rest are all dealing with something by now.” Oscar was a wonderful man, but along with his leukemia, he had a condition called ignorality. You may not be familiar with that condition, because ignorality is not an official word, but I think it should be. (continued…)
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