Looking out from Mel’s little plane, struggling to get my bearings in a corresponding remoteness, I questioned my significance again and once again came up short. I concentrated on the view: more water than land, lakes connected by rills and rivers, many originating in Minnesota but narrowing to a close in Ontario, glittering threads that baste the two countries together, American waters flowing north above the Laurentian Divide to feed over five hundred lakes of Quetico Provincial Park. The Boundary Waters has two thousand lakes, and Mel pointed to some, ticking off the names of a few, which left me puzzling over how they ended up being called Ash Dick, Swollen Ankle, Squirm, Calamity, or Meat. Earlier, Mel had tapped over a map, showing me Sarah Lake, crowing, “There, there’s your own. If that one don’t suit you, there’s another somewhere west of here but without the h.”
I imagine the thrill my father would have had to see this from the air. In the thirties, he’d canoed and portaged these lakes as a wilderness guide. While guiding is no easy job now with Kevlar canoes and freeze-dried meals, back then it had to have been a back-breaking hump. The canoes were wood and canvas and dreaded for their weight. Dad was five foot seven and a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, yet he would have toted heavy canvas tents, food preserved in steel cans, and oak folding cots. He and his mates would have dragged it all overland on rough paths that make current-day portages seem like light rail. Somewhere in the family archives is a photo of him posing next to waist-high tonnage of camp gear, tan faced and bright eyed, with khakis tucked into knee-high, Mountie-style boots. He is smiling at something beyond the camera, looking happy, at home, and utterly exhausted.
Dad had flown during WWII as an officer in the army air force, a navigator on bombing missions with targets in the Asian Pacific. I know very little about his war years except that he was based in New Guinea, where his unit hired local aboriginals, paying them nickels a day to clean and cook and do their laundry, a brief stint of luxury Dad often fondly recalled when folding his boxers on our dining room table. He didn’t talk about the war, and I don’t think he ever flew again afterward; whether intentionally or not, I can’t know. Looking down over the green wilds he once paddled, I imagined he might have made an exception to see his old stomping grounds from the air.
Mel banked the plane toward the area where the storm blew down old-growth pine over 140,000 acres. I took photographs as we skimmed islands and broad hillsides of flattened timber, tinder for potential firestorms. As far as we could squint, the landscape looked like sculpted shag strewn with toothpicks. For the first time during our flight, Mel had nothing to say. The devastation made me think of bombed cathedrals.
After we swept back over spared portions of forest, Mel’s mood lightened, and he began rattling off regional lore in his singsong Minnesota accent, saying “yaaa” for yes and “dose” for those, dialog from Fargo at double speed. A favorite anecdote concerned the 1968 Olympic hockey team, comprised of Minnesota and Massachusetts boys who could barely understand one another for their conflicting accents. A few were confused enough to ask why, if this was the U.S. team, did they have teammates from foreign countries?
Then he told the story about the bear that broke into his house, ate a pack of cigarettes, and drank most of a twelve-pack of Pabst. When Mel’s wife came home from book club, she heard snoring and Leno in the living room as usual and went to bed. After she and Mel were both roused by a clatter, they interrupted the bear just as he was finishing up a pound of ARCO coffee. Looking around at the mess, Mel’s wife picked up the closest thing, a Dustbuster, and turned it on the bear, yelling, “I already have a husband!” The coffee and the fright were enough to loosen the bear’s considerable bowels so that, as it fled, it left a wake of rank stew textured with undigested Parliament filters.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“Bears are afraid of Dustbusters? Goddamn right they are.”
With exaggeration thick as pine pitch, Mel told more stories, and I skeptically jotted down his “facts.” Later, when I double-checked, I found him fairly accurate, although the leading cause of death among the fur-trading voyageurs was not constipation, as he insisted.
Mel said something about swans, but my life vest had ridden up to dislodge my headset. I nodded, thinking he would show me some. He added something else, but each word was wrapped in static. Mel gave me a thumbs-up and we banked heavenward, a slow roller coaster climb, steep enough to press my belly button spineward. I idly examined the underside of a single low cloud, wondering if that was our destination, if the swans were above it, though surely we were too high for birds? Once I fumbled my headset back into place, I pressed my microphone button to ask, but the plane suddenly roared. We swooped in a sudden but graceful arc. The sky disappeared as we tipped below the horizon, and I was jolted forward, my armpits creased by harness straps. Mel didn’t mean swans; he meant swan dive, though our trajectory wasn’t very swanlike, more like a hawk aiming for the world’s last mouse. I clamped my mouth and squinted, trying to keep my eyes and Cheerios in place. As we sped toward jagged rock and pine, I understood that the little plane would barely make a pinprick on the earth after the crash, barely a ripple should we hit water. The earth heals quickly here; brush grows over charred soil, swamps suck debris deep, dark waters draw wet curtains over whatever fuselages sink.
Our remains might never be found. I looked to Mel, who would share my fate as fish food or spruce mulch, but he only grinned. I reminded myself he was very much in control of his plane, a man who, while a risk taker of his own boasting, would never, ever endanger a passenger, though he might set out to scare the crap out of one.
I tried to cross my arms over the bulk of my vest, suspecting I wasn’t the first passenger to be hazed in such a manner. Alert with adrenaline, everything was sharp-edged and clear. Not all that far below, I thought I could make out a loon’s floating nest.
Gavia Immer, the common loon, Minnesota’s mascot plastered on everything from mugs to garage door murals, embroidered on oven mitts, stuffed as plush toys, and printed on millions of lottery tickets like the one in my pocket, sure to be a winner once I’d splatted to my death. No one ever points out that the loon is possibly the most vicious state bird in the nation. It cannibalizes other waterfowl by spearing upward from the depths, its favored prey being a kabob of baby mallard. In spite of its maniacal laugh and Redrum-eyed, razor-beaked, devil-duck appearance, the loon is loved.
The plane lost altitude as if greased, falling toward a copse of spruce poised to perforate small aircraft. Just when I was able to make out cones among the boughs, the plane suddenly scooped up like a fishhook, like an amusement park ride, and once again we faced seamless blue sky.
The aerial map I’d been holding was a sweaty bouquet. I counted my breaths. Mel seemed a little disappointed I hadn’t screamed or fainted, but it did take a moment before I could gather the spit to say, “Let’s do it again!”
He sighed and soberly reminded me we’d been airborne for more than our allotted time and were now low on fuel.
“Low?” I asked.
Mel grinned. “Not low-low, just low.”
With a wing-tip salute to all below, the plane veered south and away.
The finale of our flight was a swing over the land. The Lake looked like a miniature version of all the other lakes: another shiny claw mark, this one barely a scratch. From above, our acreage was a bumpy collection of poplar and pine. The small clearing near the shore could have been a rag dropped next to a puddle.
From the air it was nothing special. When Mel asked if I wanted to circle it again, I shook my head. We flew west over the big populated lakes, shorelines densely dotted with cabins, some modest, but an alarming number were log mansions with chemically treated lawns spilling down to water’s edge. Over Vermilion we dipped to circle the island that belonged to my grandfather. The house was just visible through the trees. The island belongs to others now, though it still carries our family name.
Things here are slow to change
.
We approached landing. Reflected sun under the wings made it seem we were held aloft by light. Nearing the dock where Mel won his famous bet, we disturbed a swimming beaver, hesitant to abandon the length of birch it was towing.
“Damn rodents.” Mel leaned on a control that made the plane roar, scaring the beaver into diving under. He grinned and growled, “Take that, ya little bastard!”
Our flight was over.
Three
Sam was born in 1987, just as the Internet was launching, a digital-age baby who has never dialed a rotary telephone or tuned a radio with a knob. Arching a brow in my teenage son’s direction, I realized that he likely could not climb a tree. He’s tech-savvy and result driven, with good hand-eye coordination thanks to the Nintendo I was never, ever going to allow him to have. He squints when outdoors and sneezes through hay-fever season. My own childhood was spent seemingly doing nothing yet doing quite a lot, usually involving a mud puddle or a captive insect, inventing a hundred ways to beat boredom. At Sam’s age, I was outside peeling birch bark to separate it into tissue-thin sheaves, or examining our dog’s scalp to discover that the skin under the dark fur was dark, too, and wondering if I could get away with shaving it. I spent hours dismantling a fish spine or painting my hand with Elmer’s and holding it sunward to dry, the reward being a molted skin of fingerprints and lifelines, a creepy glove to leave hanging on the neighboring cabin’s doorknob.
I grew up in slow motion, with time to focus on small, inconsequential details and do small, inconsequential things: turn a rubber doll’s head inside out to give it a haircut at the source, track the growth of a mold in a pine-paneled corner of the cabin, raid a gull’s nest, intending to raise the chicks and train them as pets, only to find by the time I’d rowed back to shore that the eggs had smashed in the pocket of my windbreaker.
Sam’s world was a far cry from mine and fanned open before him on the computer or wide-screen TV. Of course he needed more outdoor time to saunter or kick sticks; we all did. Did he know that just two hundred miles north lived actual bears and cougars? His knowledge of animals was limited to the Discovery Channel and our house pets: geriatric Bald Walter and Sam’s own cat, Eyegore, often likened to a well-groomed stoner. Was it too late to make an outdoor kid of him, after twelve years spent mostly indoors? Probably. His gene pool was hardly aswim with athletes or outdoorsy types. His dad wasn’t the ball-tossing, camping type. He was more likely to take Sam out for sushi or to a film fest than fishing or a baseball game. The closest Sam and his dad came to “sport” was stalking each other with increasingly larger Nerf guns—inside. We sent him to canoe camp and fly-fishing camp rather than teach him to paddle or cast ourselves. Withering to think now I was that sort of parent.
I secretly cheered Sam’s sports apathy, grateful that I’d never be a hockey mom, that I’d have someone to hang out with at the library or coffee shop, that he would come of age with his own teeth.
As a mom, I hadn’t listed fun and adventure high on my agenda. I’d only been hell-bent on Sam having what I hadn’t had as a child: darling pajamas and stability. I mistook staying with his father for stability, right up until the day Sam asked, “Why be married if it isn’t any fun?” It became apparent that holding the family together wasn’t working. As parents, we were hardly setting any great example. From where Sam sat, marriage might be two people who reside in the same house when they are both in town, rarely fighting, rarely connecting, merely attempting to stuff the cracks where happiness might be.
After the divorce, the land took on more significance in our lives. I hoped Sam would at least like it, and though it was still just raw acreage, it was a tangible, certain something in uncertain times. It would become a haven, eventually a place Sam might bond to and maybe even take his own kids to one day. I had to remind myself that this land was an investment in his future, because at twelve, Sam wasn’t eager to retreat to the woods where there were no comforts of home: no computer games, no toilet, not much of anything except a whole lot of nature.
When life has a tendency to crest high and crash down as it did through the first years of single motherhood, what helped more than the antidepressants and therapy was time spent here, where each stick of firewood burned took a little tension with it, each footfall on moss softened the worrisome edges. The yammering of birds drowned out abrasive thoughts. I became more absorbed by the place, saving me from becoming too self-absorbed. In small and not-so-small ways, the land allowed me to envision possibilities, independence, and maybe even happiness. The rhythm here, a metronome of natural sound, regulated me, kept the tempo of normal for me.
I reread the accounts of northern life that had influenced me as a girl, wanting to compare the observations in those books to see if their stories struck any new chords. Dad’s old copies of Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover books were long gone, so I tracked them down secondhand. I’d remembered reading Justine Kerfoot’s quick little columns, which I was able to find conveniently bound into a single volume. I’d related to Helen Hoover’s observatory style in A Place in the Woods, writing about the outdoors from inside, on the comfortable side of the window, which would be my preference. I could picture Helen’s messy desk: coffee cup and ashtray and piles of books within reach, the author deep in thought until her husband came in to break the trance, bringing supplies and smelling of wood smoke and cold. I remember thinking that was the most romantic entrance ever. Reading Hoover’s books as an adult, I caught more subtle underlayments. When the Hoovers had settled into their wilderness lives, Helen had been middle aged, like me. Childless, she eventually grew critter-happy, establishing a sort of soup kitchen for the wild, feeding every creature she could entice, not just with precious feed paid for with scant dollars and carried in to their remote site but as often with their own food. This maternal sacrifice for whatever baby-faced animals came romping to her door made me wonder if she wasn’t a bit soft for the brutal realities of the north. I found I related better to her early books, when settling in and acclimating to the north was the challenge, when she seemed less barmy.
Justine Kerfoot seemed to me a fearless doer, a woman of more action than words. There are no frills to Kerfoot’s writing, just portrayals of the nuts and bolts of wilderness life: her own adventures, those of others, and the amicable, necessary bonds between fellow northerners who are in it together. She wrote it more or less as it was, with few adjectives, but in a gossipy, friendly way, leaving the musing and poetry to others.
In the beginning of The Voyageur’s Highway, Grace Lee Nute gifts the reader with a description of the north wearing some very nice outfits: “Her flowing garments are forever green, the rich velvet verdure of pine needles. In autumn she pricks out the green background with embroidery of gold here and scarlet there. Winter adds a regal touch, with gleaming diamonds in her hair and ermine billowing from her shoulders.” Nute likens the north to a siren, suggesting that, sure, the place is beautiful, but it can be perilous, a poetic reminder to take care, and wear those life jackets lest the kayaks or canoes be dashed on the rocks.
Sigurd Olson’s works seemed more purposeful and male, as if he needed to decode and translate the nature of nature in the way a man in love might try to figure out a woman. Reading his biography, I was not surprised to learn he had a dark side, that the wilderness was often a salve to the bruises of his depressive periods. I was surprised to learn how he’d struggled, and I felt a kinship, though his relationship to the land seemed a true and utterly serious one, as if he heard its very voice in his head, like some spruce whisperer.
In those first stages of ownership, I was turning to dead writers to try to make sense of where I fit in. Some days it felt like nostalgia had trumped sense to land me here. I had a deed bearing my signature on it and a debt in an amount I could have lived on for several years.
And while the hunt for land had been long, once I’d found myself half owner in a truly beautiful place, it all felt very sudden. For a while I merely owned it. Sinc
e I couldn’t afford to build anything, it was mostly a place to visit and explore. I thought about camping, though my camping experience is nil and my outdoor skills are lacking, which seems to surprise many, the assumption being that growing up in northern Minnesota entails snowshoeing to school or skijoring through the bush to the trading post. I was never a girl scout, don’t own a buck knife, and cannot fashion a tourniquet. What I’m really best at in the woods is sitting.
To build a serious campsite would have involved trekking in with axes, saws, shovels, and rakes to clear and level an area that would have required many, many buckets of gravel, also hauled overland. The place was mostly a day-trip site, a place to muck around and picnic on and explore when conditions were right. We’d bought the land having barely stepped a foot on it, only squinting northward from across the lake at the few piney acres fronting the shore, and those had been covered in snow at the time. The bulk of the land might have been wasteland as far as we knew, and indeed some of it proved nearly inaccessible, cut off by ridges, chasms, or bog. The more remote acres revealed their charms slowly as we were able to explore them.
Shelter Page 2
