Shelter

by Sarah Stonich

  I searched local nurseries for a native tree that could tolerate thin, rocky soil and a tundra-like climate. Tamarack seemed most appropriate but was unavailable at Bachman’s, so I settled on the next most logical choice, an expensive but lush white pine.

  After the thaw, I packed Walt into the car along with a spade, a gallon of water, and the tree, shivering on its side. I slid a cassette of Barber’s Agnus Dei in the stereo because Walter loved a good dirge, and we hit the road. Four hours later we bounced up the logging road, the front seat full of wet little balls of tissue, Walt still frozen stiff.

  I’d chosen a building site in the high pines at the eastern edge of the land overlooking the little island. At that time, the meandering trail to it was nearly a thousand-foot trek, thick with eye-thwacking alder and difficult enough when empty-handed, but I was carrying a basket of cat, a jug, a spade, and the heavy tree. Barely into the brush, I stopped to rearrange, pulling the still-frozen curlicue of Walter from his basket and fitting him over my forearm like a fur bangle. A spade over one shoulder, a gallon of water in one hand, and the tree perched on my hip, thrashing like a toddler, I tromped over the trail. When I finally breached the clearing with my portable funeral, I shaded my eyes to scope out a decent burial spot. That’s when I noticed: if there was one small white pine gracing the vista, there were a hundred.

  When “digging” here, one learns quickly not to jab a spade any old place, or the shock will travel arms to shoulders, rattling the skeleton like a cartoon x-ray. Here on the rocky, petered-out end of the Canadian Shield, there’s only the slightest lacing of soil, a mere hankie of dirt dropped by the glacier. Terry came over to help. He was on the patch again and tense. About twice a month, he would make the motions to quit smoking but never got farther than wearing the patch until he wanted a cigarette, when he simply tore it off. After much scraping and cursing, there was finally a hole just big enough for a stiff little cat and a few strands of white pine root.

  I made a mental note to add “Please cremate” to my half-completed, unregistered will somewhere in the folder labeled DEAD.

  Even with no portable funeral to carry, just getting to my site was a hump. Having chosen the most remote plateau at the far eastern edge of the property, I had effectively rendered myself end-of-the-road inaccessible. I’d have my privacy but I would need a long driveway, a real road. I invited three excavators out to bid.

  After years of renovating houses and dealing daily with contractors, one learns what signs to watch for. The first guy showed up with manicured hands clean enough to excavate teeth with. His truck was waxed and undented, his feet shod in shoes, not boots. He obviously didn’t do any of the work himself and advertised his business as the only environment-friendly road builder in the area, yet when asked what that meant, he only mumbled. Perhaps assuming because I was female and therefore possibly gullible and maybe, hopefully gouge-able because of my 612 area code, he came in with a bid that was double the average.

  The lowest bid was from a man who barely looked at the site as he walked along next to me, extolling the quality of his work with such a tone of desperation I wondered when he’d start tugging my sleeve. When he insisted he could start the next day, I figured there was some reason he was so wildly available and so cheap.

  The middle bid came from a guy I’ll call Chim, who already had more work than he could handle and had only come out reluctantly. Breaking through brush alongside him, I was impressed by his grousing. He pointed out various obstacles, a particularly large tree, the difficulty, how he would have to approach this dip or that curve or move an immovable boulder. When we had walked the length, I asked if he wanted to measure the distance on the way back.

  “Already have,” he replied. “Seven-hundred seventy-five feet, give or take a few.” The whole time we’d been talking and tromping, he’d been counting his steps in a measured stride. I already knew he was busy and didn’t need the work, and his truck was filthy, so I wanted him. My only advantage was that I was in no hurry. I asked if he might pencil me in as his very last job of the season. That way he’d have no next job making him rush through mine. My road wouldn’t be something he was squeezing in.

  There are as many ways to build a road as there are roads. When milestone birthdays for me and my sister Mary rolled around, she treated me to a vacation in Peru, where we learned that real road construction is not for wimps. The Inca Trail system is the road to end all roads, the difficulty factor eclipsing anything the pantywaist Romans ever built. Most everyone has seen images of Machu Picchu or the walls of Cuzco or Ollantaytambo, just a few examples of stonework the Incas are famous for. To see them up close is something, but what you cannot see is that the impossibly large blocks, sized from shipping crate to small room, are carved on the five set sides with precisely engineered Legolike indentations and protrusions, one interlocking perfectly with the next. Designed to be earthquake proof, they have remained in place for centuries. In severe quakes, the stones will rattle and dance, only to settle back down just as they were, so tight that a knife blade cannot breach the spaces between. And since the examples of stone walls are so amazing, it’s no wonder visitors are too busy looking up to much notice what’s underfoot. The roads made a great impression even before I’d learned the Inca didn’t yet have the wheel at the peak of their building. Until they built roads, there was no place level or flat enough to roll anything. Nor did they have draft animals; horses didn’t arrive until the Spaniards imported them along with disease and priests. To build their roads, the Incas were equipped with cleverness, levers, brute strength, and the balance of mountain goats. Theories, equations, and scale models have been constructed in hopes of figuring how they actually did it (besides a whole lot of hernia-popping heave-ho-ing), but those theories mostly fall short and leave modern-day engineers still scratching their heads. Only when the intangible is factored in does it seem possible. An amazing collective of ingenuity, engineering, craftsmanship, and labor would have been nothing without the one factor nonexistent in modern-day construction, patience.

  For practical purposes and ease of maintenance, Chim usually builds his roads wide, straight, and level from points A to B. I was more inclined to allow the landscape to determine the course of my road and let it wind, since every charming road I’d ever traveled seemed to do just that. Besides, we wouldn’t be having the road plowed. This plan was just fine with Chim since it meant less gravel to haul, and it allowed him to avoid difficult boulders and large trees. Curving around them would mean less labor.

  In the autumn, when Chim and the boys came, I made sure to be around as a visible presence, even if I was just a distant figure clearing brush. Best the boys see I had a face and wasn’t just The Wallet. In town one evening, I recognized a number of their pickups outside the Portage. I went in to meet the young men I’d only waved at and, not above ingratiating myself, bought a round of drinks none of them needed.

  Years ago, while renovating a house during a heat wave, I needed to motivate a crew of stoned, over-warm house painters. I thought about what I would want if stuck on a scaffold for the month of July. I doled out popsicles at regular intervals and tuned the radio to an eighties rock station, cranking the volume. I ran the sprinkler during their many breaks. In the end, their paint job was excellent. A few years later, I read of a study wherein subjects were given simple tasks to do while under the influence of separate substances: alcohol, coffee, a placebo, and marijuana. One task, in fact, was painting. The group given alcohol was slow and downright sloppy; the caffeine group was jittery and sloppy. But the stoned group was the most focused and the neatest, outperforming even the placebo group under the influence of nothing. The spring after the house was painted, a souvenir cropped up in the shape of a bushy cannabis plant growing just where the scaffolding had been.

  Chim’s boys were hard workers and needed little more encouragement than a thumbs-up and wave when I passed by. The road took shape, rocks were piled, the layers of gravel spread and tam
ped. True to the promise they’d made after a third round at the Portage, they did a damn good job, even taking extra care to clear every bit of the debris and smooth out any ruts. They even raked so that I hesitated on my first steps down the road, as if not wanting to sully a Zen garden.

  I walked the length of the road five times, all slopes and curves, narrow and shaded. A real cabin road. Still, it had a tenuous feel. This smooth ribbon of earth, if left untrammeled for a decade or two, would easily close back in on itself, with trees falling, saplings sprouting, and brush growing quick as kudzu—nature prevailing.

  I can no longer locate Walter’s grave. The little funeral pine died shortly after being planted, perhaps an example that transplants might think twice before just showing up here.

  Of course, there are plenty of other trees. One reason I’d been drawn to my building site was that it was shaded by one of the few majestic trees edging the bluff, a giant white pine casting a generous canopy of shelter, its straight arms reaching so far they would shield the roof of the cabin I hoped to build thirty or so feet from its trunk.

  After a storm during the second spring, I got word from our neighbor to the east: bad news—my tree of trees had been struck by lightning and had toppled. It had been so tall, the tip of it had crashed over the property line onto the neighbors’ land so that, in addition to the loss of that tree and the several it took in its path, I suffered the sting of paying several hundred dollars for a logger to saw up the trunk and clear the mess.

  Another giant pine centers our acres, shouldering above the forest. I keep intending to measure it one of these days with the old logger’s trick of comparing the length of a tree’s shadow to the shadow of the person measuring. First, on a sunny day, stand next to the trunk, then measure the length of your shadow from tip of shoes to top of head (best accomplished with assistance or a metal retractable tape). Walk the length of the tree’s shadow from base to tip, measuring as you go. Ideally, the tree you are measuring is the only one growing from the middle of a surface that is soccer-field smooth and perfectly level. Multiply the length of the tree’s shadow by your height, and then divide the resulting number by the length of your shadow. Got that? So if you’re five feet tall, your shadow is eight feet long, and the tree’s shadow is one hundred feet long, the height of the tree is (100 x 5) / 8 = 62.5 feet. In the meantime, I’ll just claim the white pine is, like, super tall.

  We explored, poking around in mossy low spots and climbing slopes that left us panting. Deciding on sites for our respective cabins was a leisurely process since neither Terry, Susan, nor I had means to build anything in the beginning. Eventually we settled on two sites that by chance lie on opposite boundaries of the parcels. Both are high and set back, just far enough to comply with the requisite building codes. Between us are the beaver valley, the piney plateau, and the bog; you cannot see one site from the other. The terrain is so rugged, so up and down and pocked with old blast holes, depressions, and sheer drops that if our acres were ironed flat, we reckon we’d have a hundred.

  It seemed little had happened on the land—not much evidence anyone besides Bog Man had ever inhabited the place, or even much roamed it, though we can assume fur traders, Dakota, and Ojibwe had passed through or even camped here. A trail of pin oaks suggests they had, so we have every hope of one day finding a real arrowhead. In the meantime, I’ve considered buying and planting a few so that one day when I’m dotty and I’ve forgotten, I might have the thrill of discovering one.

  For centuries, the area was dominated by white pine, which were logged out so long ago even stumps of the original forest have rotted or burned away. Almost no old-growth pine survived logging, save a stand northeast of town on Hegman Lake and, much farther west, a legendary forest called the Lost Forty near Big Falls. The Lost Forty is technically the Lost One Hundred Forty, a sort of primeval wonderland that only stands today because a clerical gaffe botched the sale of its stumpage (timber parcels were called “stumpage” even before they were logged, in a descriptive preview of the end result).

  Along our shore, the white pines are now counted in the hundreds rather than thousands. The few old-growth survivors are stunning and obvious in the landscape, breaking out above the forest canopy here and there with the fanfare of a stripper bursting from a cake. Many of the bases of these old dames are scarred by fire, and with their wide-reaching arms, they make broad targets for lightning. The tops are often sheared, leaving their upper branches curved skyward like cupped hands, as if waiting patiently to be handed back their missing crowns or to accept a spot of rain. There is plentiful red pine, less majestic, most sixty to eighty or so years old, foot soldiers risen in the ranks after the tail end of the logging. The red pine jockey for space with the poplar and thick alder that make most of our acreage impassable. Two hundred years ago, this was a primeval temple of pine corridors lit by beams sifting between the sturdy fretwork of limbs, the sky only glitter above the forest canopy. Living among such sentinel trees as the natives and early settlers did must have imbued a sense of awe and security, or claustrophobia. John Muir wrote, “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world,” a whimsical musing, and one I think of when transplanting fledgling pines or heading out with a saw or loppers to encourage the existing young by clearing space around them. There are countless clusters of three or four young pines growing too close together for success, so I cut the stragglers that the hardiest might thrive. Cutting pine saplings feels a little like mowing down kindergartners, but I have less hesitation when whacking a birch or poplar crowding a pine. Bloodlust takes over when I’m confronted with American green alder, the vermin tree that exists solely to spite me. As random and disorganized as my micro–forest management is, it may one day result in a bit more piney shade and needle orange ground for Sam’s kids and grandkids to play on; at least that’s what I tell myself while sweating and chopping and sawing and lopping.

  Since Walter’s burial, two more cats have found their final resting places here, Nutty and Lazzie, longtime companions to Terry and Susan. Those pets also had trees planted for them, but both were cremated, their nuggety bits of bone strewn like cat seeds.

  Five

  Once the road was finished, I could drive to my site and sit rather than break trail to my site and sit. The plateau is situated high on the north side of the lake, a span of needle orange ground with round outcroppings of granite fringe spilling over its rim like beer foam. I balanced a garden bench on a ledge where a front porch might one day be and admired the view.

  But one can only sit for so long.

  The site was looking untidy. There was nowhere to put the pickaxes and pry bars and loppers, so I bought a heavy Rubbermaid coffin that would at least keep a few things dry and keep blades from rusting. Each trip from home, I brought a few more items so that the clearing slowly filled with birdhouses, hammocks, trash barrels, benches, lawn chairs, crates, water jugs, bird feeders, shovels, rakes, hoes, saws, tarps, everything but the yard gnome. When the clearing began to resemble a yard sale, I saw I could no longer put off building or buying a shed.

  I’d noticed an ad in the local paper for sheds and playhouses. An older man, Rory, answered the phone. Rory eagerly talked up the unusual little structures he’d advertised without actually telling me how or what they were made of, just that they were very handsome sheds and “not for everyone,” so I probably wouldn’t even want one, but maybe I’d like to come out and look anyway. A lot of people, apparently, went out to look. He claimed these were “some of the sturdiest little sheds ever built; you just don’t see ‘em built like this anymore.” Rory added that his son could build anything, and only then did I ascertain that the son, Lars, was the man I needed to talk to. Rory said Lars also built small cabins that were, again, probably not for everyone, leaving me to wonder what the hell was wrong with them. Were they geodesic domes? A-frames? Made of pressboard? Yurts?

  “Oh, no,” Rory assured me. “These here are built like brick shithouses.”
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br />   “They’re brick?”

  “Ha! No.”

  “So,” I ventured, “then they must be sh—?”

  “Ha! Good one.” Rory’s guffaw was a little like Goofy’s. I finally pried it out of him that they were timber, “not timber-frame timber, but timber log, but not round log, more like square, and not like those little sheds for sale on roadsides with the fake log siding from Menards, either, but the real thing.” It took fifteen more minutes to ascertain that Rory’s son could indeed make me a shed but wasn’t able to come to the phone just then because he was “probly out dragging timber.”

  I’d learned from the boys at the Portage that there are up-north euphemisms for nearly every bodily function, sexual pastime, and anatomical feature, from “wedding tackle” for male genitalia to “mud badger” for homosexual. When Rory said “dragging timber,” disturbing images from masturbation to nose-picking flitted through my mind, but Rory assured me Lars was literally dragging timber. It turned out he had a permit to pull blowdown trees from the Boundary Waters, eighty-foot red and white pine toppled in the ‘99 storm that were now curing where they fell, threatening to become tinder for the mother of all forest fires. Because of the fire threat, temporary exceptions were made to the ban on motorized traffic within the park, and logging equipment was allowed in the few places that could be breached. These logs weren’t just fallen trees; these were prime old-growth timber, a hundred-plus years old, the sort of log that would give a logger a woody.

  Rory explained Lars had his own sawmill, that he cut his own timber, milled it, and built his square-log structures from it, reviving the traditional method of dovetailed cornering. He did it all the old way.

  “Finnish style?” I asked, suddenly intrigued.

  “Swedish, Finnish, whatever you want.”