From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn, unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blank-faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind it's filmy picture window, a few other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water mark left behind by the floor of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street. Where Chase rises above the floor line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agin-court Theater, the Taproom Bar and Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Sutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing, Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electron equipment, magazines and greeting cards, toys and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, The Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall Road, and the buildings seperate and shrink one-story wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7-Eleven, the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership known locally as Golt'z another hundrer feet into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, couless, blunted hills furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level until you have come upon them, meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields and little towns - one of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93. Directly below, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of the night. No one moves along the sidewalk or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the stop fronts along Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and twos, then in mannery little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick buildings of two stories each house, in west-east order, the French Landing public library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, MD, the local general practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son Funeral Home, now owned by the a vast, funereal empire centered in St Louis; and the French Landing Post Office.
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