Shelter

by Sarah Stonich

  The shoreline is the real draw. The little almost-island is a rather complete place on its own, like the Little Prince’s asteroid. And just like his asteroid, the island is also the size of a house: a rough granite house about thirty feet across, a jam-packed hump that can take half a day to explore if you nose into the leprechaun ecosystem underfoot. One end of the island is domed and loaf-like, split in vertical fissures on one end, slices of rock fanning open like granite rye. The dark wedges of space between the stone are home to the island snake, beetles, worms, bugs with too many legs, and shudder-worthy blind albino whatnots.

  Unprotected and windblown, many of the island trees are stunted or twisted, like the contortionist tree that twines down from its rock-bound roots before arching back upward again in tight elbow curves. Its needles are somewhat shorter than average, an adaptation to its nutrient-deprived roots and raw exposure, an example of evolution in action.

  We swim and bathe off the east side of the island from a flat shelf of stone that drops off quite quickly. The underwater shelf is always slick with green fairy hair. Getting in is easy—just slip or jump. The coward’s option is to scooch inch by inch down the slope until it drops off, when you sort of slide in like a Jello shot. Jumping or diving is preferable, the lungs seizing only for a moment, a longer moment in autumn or spring.

  Getting out is another thing, mostly accomplished by belly-squirming back up over the slimy moss that’s a veritable nursery for infant leeches—harmless, but leeches nonetheless. I bought a heavy, rubber-backed commercial rug like those found in building entrances and rigged it toboggan-fashion around the base of a tree so that, when rolled out over the stone and into the water, it offers some purchase and a leech-free exit. The rug rolls up neatly when not in use, tucked behind the tree it’s tethered to.

  For its size, the island has a surprising variety of North American trees, most standing in pairs, as if invited by Noah to a timber mixer: poplar, red pine, white pine, birch, balsam, black spruce, cedar, oak, Juneberry, and a single, tenacious little maple. This is not toothsome soil, yet somehow flora abounds. The dwarfed ferns root themselves into soil-free cracks to live on rainwater; the lichen and mosses survive on dew. Every living thing on the island seems to struggle in the climate and has grown slightly distorted from the constant tug of the two directions of scarce nutrients: sun and water.

  The jewel of the island is easy to miss and small enough to step on: a natural, perfect, white pine bonsai, only six inches tall, though it’s maybe ten, fifty, or a hundred years old. When the Japanese cultivate bonsai by root stunting, contortion, bondage, and routine amputation, they’re simply replicating the environment of our island. Even the needles of the little pine are truncated to a third their normal length. This Gidget tree might be my favorite of all on the land, although I’m very fond of its towering uncle a quarter mile away, a hundred-plus-foot white pine that centers the lakeside acres.

  Between the island and the shore is a swath of reeds and mud and water, its depth dependent on the lake level, which depends on how clogged the culvert at the west end of the lake is, which depends on how busy the beavers have been. You can walk between the island and shore in rubber boots, but there are a few surprise spots where you’d regret not having hip waders.

  From the piney plateau above, the whole of the island isn’t entirely visible through the foliage. Now and then I’ll catch glimpses of the blue kayak or Sam sitting on the island with his feet in the water and a book in hand, moments surpassing my best, most hopeful visions for this place.

  Paralleling our shoreline midway between building sites is another piney area, steep edged and tough to reach, cut off from approach by a cliff, which is too bad, for with its canopy pine, ledge rock, and view it would be an ideal building site. Below the site hammocks a valley of poplar and birch, a favorite of the beavers, with many chewed tree trunks strewn helter-skelter in their wakes.

  Beaver are not beloved here, with most people considering them for what they are, America’s largest rodent. Besides man, beavers are the only mammal able to significantly alter their environment and are just as careless and wasteful as we are. A single beaver can shear up to seventeen hundred trees a year—tens of thousands of board feet of lumber—consuming only the leaves and smallest twigs, abandoning the trunks to rot where they fall. Beavers also mess with lake levels. It’s not exactly legal to eradicate beaver, making us yearn for the days of the fur trade, when trap-happy voyageurs could rid an entire lake of them tout de suite. According to the DNR, trapping fishers, pine marten, and fox all have seasons in Minnesota. You can kill a bobcat, even bag a badger if you can find one, as if there are extra. You can trap a beaver, but it is widely known that you cannot shoot a beaver, and it is widely ignored when they are shot. To the mirth of the local DNR staff, one of our more sympathetic neighbors (who will never live it down) called to inquire if there might be a beaver relocation project.

  After the spring snowmelt and the winning date of the ice-out contest passed, we waited for the mud to crust over, finally able to tromp areas beyond the old logging road that cuts diagonally through our acres, roughly separating them into sections: the lake side, comprising about a fifth of the total land, and the back forty, lovely but rugged. Over the steep ridge from the beavered-out valley is a moody cedar bog, a place I find darkly handsome, not quite sinister, but mysterious like Colin Farrell or Don on Mad Men. The cedar bog was once home to the only human resident we know of. Bog Man lived here during the Elvis era by our best estimation, but by the time we arrived, his shack was long gone, his possessions hauled away or sunk under the cover of moss. Left behind were his bedsprings, scraps of metal, parts of an old stove, and more bottles than an off sale. Bog Man’s choice of building site—dank, dark, and spongy—didn’t make much sense until our resident geologist mentioned there was likely a spring nearby. And though we can’t locate it, we know it’s there, for even during the warmest, driest weeks of summer, the water between the cedar roots has movement and is clear and cool. We don’t know who Bog Man was, or whether he’d owned the land or just squatted, whether his shack was a year-round home or just his seasonal pied-à-terre.

  We were a family drawn to bogs. During Sam’s phase of being obsessed with all things medieval, he inhabited an imaginary kingdom that included a bog called Fetid Stew. Sir Sam and the Knights of the Formica Table all had one enemy in common: problems of the sort only a six-year-old could think up. Someone in the kingdom had been bequeathed a wish, and since the recipient wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver, that adult had wished the river running through the Kingdom of Barns be transformated from water into chocolate malt! Great—until everyone had their fill, got tummy aches, and came down from their sugar highs only to realize that the fish would snuffocate because malt can’t translate through gills, horses couldn’t be watered, and crops couldn’t be irritated. Sam, along with Sir Batty (stuffed bat and sleeping companion, tragically kidnapped during a car trip a few years later), was one of the bravest knights, unafraid of the dark. Sam and Sir Batty put their noggins together and came up with a plan. They would divert the river into the bog! And so the bog became a repository for All Bad Things, where the evil troll lived, and since bog = stinky, wet, and yucky, it was where one was sent for punishment. Bandits who stole Princess Jennifer’s wand were banished to Fetid Stew, a plague of rogue pterodactyls were captured and sunk in it, and so on. Bogs in general got an undeserved bad rap until we began visiting a nature preserve that had a real bog. The good bog had marsh birds with chopstick legs, bog rosemary, and spongy peat under an undulating shag of billiard green moss. There was a boardwalk on which to lay and watch the pitcher plants drink. We changed our tune then about the lowly bog, Sam admitting bravely, “I could do a time-out here.”

  And here we had our very own bog. Nothing as grand, but mossy just the same. The bog partially wraps the base of the cliff backing the plateau, where stones covered in nappy moss have tumbled down into the shade, making nav
igation a slippery endeavor, where hybrid rubber boots with golf cleats would be the ticket. From the bog, there are three directions to go: west, north, and south. South is a low spit of land and one of the few places on the lake where it’s easy to land a canoe because the water is shallow with a gravelly bottom. The little promontory there has a fire pit, much used over the decades by trespassing beer lovers leaving all vintages of cans, many with old-country names like Schlitz, Blatz, and Pabst and one rusted, barely legible Old Bohemian.

  These days the promontory has two melon-colored Adirondack chairs and a red canoe and could be a page from a tourism brochure. The path from the promontory leads to a steep hill of deciduous hardwoods, black spruce, and balsam. The path levels out at the hill’s rocky apex, where Terry and Susan had chosen their building site, high above the westernmost shore. Facing straight east, they have the long view, making The Lake seem larger than it is.

  Conditions aren’t often ideal for exploring. Winter’s not really an option since snow restricts any movement beyond the plowed logging road. While someone more adventuresome might strap on snowshoes, there are steep slopes and random blast holes left in the wake of early mining exploration, varying in size from trough to tanker, and often deep enough to break a leg should you fall in, or give you a good soaking since many fill with water after a hard rain. Having no idea how numerous or random the pits were, I played it safe in winter, sticking to the road and trails.

  Early spring is too soggy for exploring, and late spring is too buggy. In summer, the thick brush turns any jaunt into a trail blazing, best embarked on with gloves, loppers, and plenty of DEET. Autumn is the best time, though in any season there’s a good chance of getting lost. The iron content in the rocks is so high that compasses fail, only sometimes hinting at north in cattywampus stabs of the needle. So sans compass or GPS, I would venture out, noting where the sun was when there was sun. I soon discovered tree moss cannot be counted on to indicate north; those with any on their trunks wear it twirled in dervish skirts as if every direction might be north. When going very far, I don’t go alone.

  We owned the land for almost a year before discovering its best feature, one we didn’t so much stumble onto as stumble up. Paralleling the logging road along our rear acreage is a high ridge of Precambrian rock well curtained by trees and obscured from the road below. Finding reasonable access to it is difficult. I’ve approached from several angles and found only one route that slopes rather than climbs, but I didn’t have neon marking tape with me and haven’t been able to locate the route since. The most direct and difficult way is straight up from the lowest point on the road via a very narrow path lined with aspens to hoist yourself along. The path ends at a short cliff the height of a bus, with a switchback zagging the rest of the way. Once on the zenith—usually with heart still a-thump—you’ll see the climb was worth the effort. Spreading southward is a forest of ridges, with the Laurentian Divide just six miles away. On a clear day, you can see ten or fifteen miles. In summer, the view is an even-toned green canopy, but in autumn, drifts of tamarack make long mustard streaks and oaks pop like rust spots among the yellow aspen. Maples here turn not quite the usual red orange but a paler peach version, like a bare, bitten lip. The stands of pine are best delineated after their deciduous neighbors swap out their green for harvest moon colors. What you can see of The Lake beyond the poplar skirt belting the ridge looks narrow as a run of foil. Only after the aspen quake themselves naked is the full breadth of The Lake visible.

  The ridge is shaped roughly like a parade of brontosauruses lumbering nose to tail through the canopy. It is perhaps a thousand feet long, running alongside a second, shorter ridge directly north, which I only know of for having been lost between the two, pinballing between them like a bug in a gutter until finally the sun broke out to show where west was.

  It would be great to watch a storm from this height, and an idiot just might, but I have a healthy fear of lightning, and every pine on the ridge is a potential target. Weather travels straight west to east here, thumbing in on a stiff breeze that’s brisk and consistent enough to make us dream of wind turbines. A turbine could provide enough electricity for us to fire up the holy grail of all appliances: a refrigerator. A gray-water pump system runs a close second on our wish list, usually while stumbling from the car with five-gallon jugs pulling our arms ape long. A pump would pull water up the hill for dishwashing and showers. It’s hard to disguise envy when visiting the plumbed and electrified cabins of friends who are on the electrical grid, awed as they run taps and blithely flip switches to power up such trifles as toasters, coffee grinders, and even hair dryers. If anything makes one energy conscious, it’s having none.

  We’ve not clocked our wind speed on the ridge yet, but the power is there. Reality kicks in only when considering not just the expense of a turbine but how. Short of stabbing one straight down from midair, the logistics of erecting one on the ridge appear impossible. But if it were possible, the crest would be the perfect site for a hermitage, a room with a view, a crow’s nest, or a tree house (as long as they are topped by lightning rods).

  Near Tower, there is an auburn-dark spur of road that leads through sentinel pines to the former site of the fire tower, the one we called “the Tower-tower.” As a child, I climbed the tower many times with my father, and I still remember the stomach-churning thrill of bursting up past the tops of pines into clear sky, always windier and warmer than below in summer and always windier and cooler in spring or fall.

  My particular vertigo is more physical than mental, my insides gathering into a weird, buzzy clench. I suspect this is genetic since Sam has it, too; on cliffs and bridges he would cling, reporting, “Mommy, my testicles tingle.”

  Dad pulled me up the tower once to meet the ranger, who must have been a very patient fellow to allow a child into his tiny space, at least patient enough not to toss one over the side. I was obsessed by the tower and afraid of it—it swayed. Still, I desperately wanted to live in it. After it was decommissioned, we continued visiting as trespassers, warned by the ominous squeal of rusted bolts.

  Forest rangers are rarely if ever set up in metal aeries these days; there are better methods of fire spotting, such as satellite-harvested digital imagery systems like MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, of course). DNR planes continue to run observation flights a few times a day when fire danger is high. The local fleet is a trio of vintage de Havilland Beavers built in the late 1950s, painted bobber red and white. When not airborne, they are kept perfectly maintained like thoroughbreds in watery corrals on Shagawa Lake, with new engines installed every so many thousands of flight hours. Occasionally one will skim overhead, making its giant-dragonfly hum, a wing dipped like a nod, reassuring us that even when we are not here, this place is being looked after.

  Four

  When bonding with a scrap of land, it helps to blaze paths, plant trees, and bury loved ones on it. When Bald Walter finally wore out, he was twenty-three, roughly one hundred and sixty in cat years. He’d just gone blind, and his kidneys were sputtering. On the kitchen scale, he weighed less than four pounds. It was time, and thankfully Sam was either at his dad’s or on some overnight. I took Walt to the vet, planning to say good-bye and get it over with in a painless narcotic nod-off to the finish. But the obtuse intern on call wanted to do some tests and keep Walter for observation, certain that with some invasive and expensive medical intervention, he might last another month or so. I blinked at the stupid man, wondering what it was he didn’t understand. Unfortunately, it was a Friday night, and our regular vet wouldn’t be back until Monday. I took Walt home and made a little nest for him on my bed, then ground up what I thought would be enough valium to kill a large dog and mixed it with cod liver oil and juice from a can of tuna. I fed this Kevorkian cocktail to Walter with a dropper through his chipped, tea-colored teeth while playing old Cat Stevens tunes. In his final hour, Walter’s breathing smoothed, and he looked so peaceful, I took one of the left
over valium myself and we both drifted off. In the morning, I drifted back, damp-mopped Walter’s little corpse, and fluffed him with the blow dryer, drying the wet spots I’d bawled onto his fur.

  Sam and I laid Walt out in his picnic basket casket just like a real wake, and a few friends came by to pay respects, milling and toasting until they were, as the Irish say, quite full. I wanted to bury Walter on the land and honor his tenacity by planting a tree on top of him, but April in Minnesota is no time to plant anyone. This I’d learned from Dad’s sisters, the Aunts, after the last of their five brothers died, inconveniently, in the off-season. The Aunts arranged for Uncle Teddy to be kept in the mortuary cooler until July so that his burial could coincide with their annual vacation to Ely. Ted had not been quite right since coming home from Korea with a metal buckle holding his skull shut, and while he’d been a bit jittery, he was a nice enough fellow. If cold storage was good enough for Uncle Teddy, it was good enough for Walt. I wedged his basket-casket into the freezer under the Skinny Cows and waited for the north to thaw.

  In the meantime, I shopped for a tree. What sort would best honor a steadfast, bantamweight runt? In all our years together, Walter never destroyed a piece of upholstery with his fishhook claws, didn’t hock up hairballs, and was an adroit bat catcher, saving me the trouble. Even toward the end, he’d made valiant stabs at reaching the litter box, which alone deserved some tribute. And he loved me, meaning he understood that only I could operate the can opener.