I said I’d come look, though I probably couldn’t afford what he was describing. The buildings sounded like the type of structures that my father and I had sometimes encountered on our tromps through the countryside while hunting for insulators. Lars’s buildings sounded like old homesteads my father called Finlander farms.
Dad retired when I was a teen and, either bored or just not that imaginative, took to his new hobby like a man possessed, collecting old glass and ceramic insulators from decommissioned electrical poles. Insulators, if you’ve never seen one, are made in a variety of shapes and colors and are utterly useless beyond their original function—too round-bottomed to be flipped and used as ashtrays or pencil holders, and not heavy enough to be bookends or doorstops. Mostly they were just clutter lining the windowsills, sending colored rays across every surface so that on sunny mornings we sat down to blue and green cornflakes. As an object they’re pretty lame, but then the object wasn’t the object, I eventually realized. The hunt for the object and what it entailed held all the appeal—a perfect excuse for Dad to meander the countryside, scavenging ditches and defunct rail beds, sticking his head into abandoned places along washboard dirt roads winding through rural nowhere. I went along for no other reason than that I was learning to drive and could do the least amount of damage on back roads. At worst I might startle a deer while tearing along at fifteen miles per hour.
These areas were so remote I couldn’t fathom why there were even telephone poles in the first place. The answer came in the shells of deserted clapboard houses and barns stove in as if stomped, rock farms where a successful crop of potatoes would have been considered a triumph. Most farms were eventually abandoned because even a bumper crop of Minnesota potatoes wasn’t enough to support a family, and the soil wasn’t fit for much else. Most homesteaders had given in by the forties, done in by the Depression, the climate, futility, or all three. We rarely bothered going into these clapboard houses, for all held the same contents: reeking mattresses, porn, broken glass, and beer cans from every vintage representing every high school class between ‘38 and ‘73, the year sometimes smeared onto the wall in senior feces.
More remote jaunts brought us to the Finnish farms, when Dad would grow suddenly alert the way he would whenever Joan Embery from the San Diego Zoo was on The Tonight Show with some terrified primate stuck to her thigh or clutching her khaki boobs. To me, these homesteads were just more crappy old buildings in high grass mined with glass, boards riddled with nails, and potential for more tetanus shots. Most of the buildings had never been painted and had weathered in shades of gray from driftwood to charcoal. Some still had cedar-shake roofs, usually with saplings or moss growing on them. Others stood like open boxes. We climbed and crawled around in lofts of old barns and houses stripped of everything but their heavy sinks or rusty stoves with birds nesting in the flues. We ducked into windowless sauna buildings with blackened interiors as inviting as any in The Count of Monte Cristo. Saunas, Dad informed me, were where most Finn women went to have their babies. Right, I thought, looking around at the hard benches and charred walls, as if you’d leave your bed in a house to come here to do that. He told me entire families would often sauna together, slapping each other with birch whips, rinsing each other with buckets of melted snow. The thought of naked brothers or even sisters was enough to send Tab rushing back up my throat, but a father—naked?
Since Dad spoke so little, I tended to listen when he bothered, and he did go on about the construction of these spare old buildings, pointing out the intricately dovetailed corners, describing how they were cut and fit. Most were made of pine, but a few were cedar. Once we found a small shed that looked dainty for its 4 x 4-inch timbers, but Dad determined it was tamarack and said it was dense as hell, assuring me the little building would still be standing long after he and I had rotted in the ground.
He showed me the difference between simple log joinery—full lap and half lap and dovetail notches, or Finnish notches. Simple joinery would suffice, but dovetail or Finnish notches kept the logs from twisting, providing the tensile qualities of full lap, the flush corners of half lap, and the strength of both. To me it all seemed like just more labor in an already laborious process, but Dad explained that certain cultures at certain latitudes, like the Finns, have a dearth of sunlight and not a whole lot to do all winter except drink or find more ways to make work for themselves.
I mentioned to Rory that I might stop by Lars’s sawmill next time I was in his neighborhood—seventy miles away—to check out his sheds and meet him. I waited twenty-four hours so as not to seem overeager.
The sawmill sat a few miles inland from Lake Superior. Scattered across the lot were sawn planks stacked to dry, a smattering of buildings, and a fence of old cars sunk into the weeds. A big-toothed lab sprouted from nowhere to snarl and slobber on my window, barking until a man came out from a building, also barking, woofing and clapping with sawdust rising from his shoulders with each gesture. I only hoped he was calling the dog.
Lars didn’t look much like a logger. For starters he was a little guy, one of those dark Scandinavians with slightly impish, elfish features, like Bjork. As if to compensate, his gravelly voice was a broad, pitch-perfect match to that of Canadian hip-hopper Buck 65, whose songs portray life at the rural fringes with lyrics that are so much more excellent than his titles “Sick Stew,” “Jaws of Life,” or “Cat Piss.” Lars spoke in the local vernacular of double negatives with a thrift that truncated what few words he spoke. He gave me a tour of the little buildings. There were several outhouses and saunas, solid and hobbity looking, a few with whimsical details and all almost comically overbuilt with eight-and ten-inch-square logs. The joinery was dovetail, with Lars’s signature flair of a two-inch bump-out and his added finishing touch: a bevel on each facet edge of each log, including the dovetail. In fact, the edges of every piece of wood or fascia board on Lars’s buildings were beveled, which meant that for each single log or board milled, Lars made twelve additional bevel cuts. The same was true for every trim board, doorjamb, or shutter, which would have kept Lars busy all winter, surely too busy to become a raging drunk. I asked after the outhouses, which he admitted might be for sale, as if he wasn’t sure and would have to check with himself.
There were two larger old homestead buildings Lars had salvaged and reconstructed, each log numbered and marked. These Swede houses, as Lars called them, would have been bulldozed had he not spotted and nabbed them. Apparently many such buildings across the region have been lost over time, many probably never even identified but covered over in siding or, worse, razed and used for garden beds or firewood.
Lars showed me his white pine logs waiting to be milled into 8 x 8-inch and 10 x 10-inch beams, densely grained, with ends revealing almost no space between the growth rings, indicating just how long it took them to reach such great heights. I thought of my flight with Mel, seeing the swaths of these downed giants, most fallen in places far too remote to ever salvage. What Lars and others had gleaned was pitiful in comparison, a handful of matchsticks from a barrel. The notion of something new, something useful arising from the result of devastation, appealed to me. What might have been a natural event for the forest was tragic for canoeists and campers, but in these buildings, the loss would at least come to something—outhouses or saunas that would stand for longer than it takes to grow another eighty-foot pine. While it would take a few tense years and several forest fires before the all-clear could be sounded in the Boundary Waters, it will take a century for the lost pines to come back.
I’d gone to the sawmill to poke around in sheds I probably couldn’t afford but was surprised when Lars finally named a price for the smallest, plainest structure. They were reasonable, he explained, because there was no middleman. He was the logger, sawyer, architect, and builder. I could practically feel Dad’s breath in my ear. “Now we’re talkin', Sally.”
“Architect” was a stretch, but I was sold, if only to stop Dad from swinging on my earlobe with
his tinny mantra of “Do it!” Did it matter that this whole project was beginning to feel steered by desires not quite my own? I do not believe in an afterlife from which the dead harass or heckle us, but I did embark on my quest with my father plainly in mind, spurred by memory, hoping to bridge the missed connection between him and Sam, grandfather and grandson, a generation skipped like a very long pause between heartbeats. Though I was alone in it, I’d set about obtaining a place for us all, and I went to work with a vision of the kind of place that my father would have loved and that Sam would hopefully come to love and bond with, a place that would one day be his legacy, whether he wanted it or not.
Several years before, I’d walked around Tower with Sam, showing him the cemetery, the building where my grandfather’s tailor shop once was, and the white house by the creek where Dad and his brothers and sisters were raised. We climbed the steep hill leading away from town on a wooded trail. Sam scooted ahead of me to walk backwards uphill. “Tell me another story about Grandpa.”
I was already hoarse from telling and out of breath. “One more.” I told him about Margaret, the cat I brought home a year or so before Dad died.
Dad took one look at her and said, “No. No way. No cats.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. Margaret was long-haired and gray with a distinct half-white face and white paws. “I’ll bring her back to the animal shelter on the weekend.”
The next day when I got home from my shift at the hardware store, Dad was on the floor, having woven a six-foot sling of rubber bands with a heavy knot of hemp rope attached to its middle, the whole contraption suspended from the arch separating the living room from the dining room. “Watch this.” He rolled to his back and launched the knot to the next room where teeny Margaret was perched on a chair, waiting. When the knot came at her like a wrecking ball, she pounced and dug her needle claws in. Since she weighed only ounces, the bungee action zinged her into the living room and back again—living room, dining room, living room, dining room—clinging as if to a comet hurtling through space. Dad was beside himself.
“Don’t worry,” I reminded him. “I’ll have her out of here by Saturday.”
By Thursday, he was hand-feeding her thawed tidbits from his stash of frozen walleye cheeks. He shook a little bag of what looked to me like weed. “It’s true about catnip,” he informed me. “Look at her. She’s completely, what do you call it … baked?“
I leaned on the door frame. “She is?”
My plan was working nicely. Dad fell asleep to Johnny Carson’s closing theme with Margaret buttoned into his sweater vest. On Friday, I came home to him stapling carpet remnants around the posts of a Realtor’s for-sale sign with its bottom still muddy, building a hideous scratching post. “Don’t get too attached,” I reminded him. But when I got up on Saturday, he’d already spirited Margaret away on his weekend rounds to rummage sales and to my sister’s house for coffee.
Margaret loved the car as a dog does, especially the back window, becoming Dad’s own furry mascot. He started taking her to the cabin. They slept together.
“Did Grandpa hate cats?” Sam asked.
“Mostly,” I said. Just then a large rabbit jumped onto the path ahead, and we froze in our tracks. It didn’t move. We inched closer. It wasn’t a jackrabbit or ratty wood rabbit but a big, glossy Alice in Wonderland rabbit. It stood on its back legs and stared at us as if it had been waiting. I half expected it to take out a pocket watch.
Sam looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked at him. Sam petted the rabbit and looked at me in awe, whispering, “Maybe it’s Grandpa?” Lately he’d been puzzling over the mysteries of life and seemed to come home every day with a new question about being or not being and what makes alive alive and dead dead. He had a cardboard contraption he’d made called the Death Machine in which he placed stuffed animals he had “made dead,” but then, after a lot of sound effects and fiddling with buttons magic markered onto the box, they miraculously came back to life—Sam at the helm, of course. He was frequently babysat by a family who were Bible-thumping fundamentalists, and while I’d asked that any reading there be limited to Dr. Seuss and Sam’s Fun with Science! books, who knew what tales of resurrections and afterlife he was regaled with over cookies and milk?
“Grandpa?” I could guess where he might be going with this, and indeed the rabbit wasn’t your Average Rabbit. He was tended and tame and probably someone’s escaped or abandoned pet. Circling the rabbit, I looked for a tag or collar (collar, on a rabbit?). Just as I reached out for him, he bounded away, saving me from trying to figure out how to capture it and what to do with it.
“Well, wouldn’t it be neat if it was Grandpa?” I shrugged. “But …” We had a four-hour car ride ahead of us, plenty of time to go over the final finality of life. I’d been raised in a faith that dangled the carrot of an afterlife while at the same time instilling such fear for this one that, at Sam’s age, I’d assumed guardian angels were snitches and that I was doomed to fry. Early on in motherhood, I’d determined he’d have a secular upbringing with “just the facts.” I’d already watched my mother, at the end of a life not well lived, grasp for a last straw by suddenly re-embracing the church that had excommunicated her to ask for the Last Rites, hoping for a bus ticket to somewhere beyond the end of the line.
And as great as it would be to imagine my son and father meeting up to go fishing on some everlasting lake, I could provide something tangible by giving Sam some place his grandfather would have liked to provide himself: a cabin in the woods, however modest, a real place set in the actual kingdom of nature.
Between our scratchings on a yellow legal pad, Lars and I worked up a few designs, one for an outhouse similar to one in the lumberyard and another for a small “starter” cabin of just 10 x 12 feet with a sleeping loft. Tiny, but enough for the moment, and hopefully down the road I would be able to afford to have Lars build something larger, when the small cabin could become my studio. I wrote a check for a deposit.
Once back at the site, I looked around at the clutter of water jugs and folded lawn chairs and realized: I still didn’t have a shed.
Six
We owned the land three years before Lars went to work on the starter cabin. Until then, I’d somehow shrugged off consequences of being so far off the grid. “Pristine, undeveloped” is how the mining company had listed it, and during the heady time of finding and buying (as if medicated), that description had an almost whimsical ring to it, like a Disneyesque glade populated by Bambi and fairies on pink toadstools and affectionate wolves. Had one been rational at that time, one might have looked into just what “undeveloped” meant in the way of expenses down the road. “Road” being just one. The driveway had already chomped off far more than its allotted share of what I casually called the “budget,” which in reality was my retirement.
No road access, water, septic, or electricity. Just how much I’d bitten off became clear when I called around to price getting hooked up. Power from the grid a mile and a half away required erecting poles every three hundred feet, and since it’s impossible to plant poles in the ground here, much drilling into ledge rock is necessary to hold them upright by way of angle irons, raising the cost to sixteen hundred dollars per pole in addition to the ten dollars per foot for the line itself, adding up to over $40k, which explained why the clerk at the power company had been so sympathetic. Solar was the only option. And since sun is not an everyday occurrence around here, panels would need to be supplemented with a generator or wind turbine should we ever want to power more than lights.
Drilling wells here is hysterically expensive, which should have come as no surprise given the terrain: all bedrock, often requiring hydrofracking, a technique borrowed from iron mining to augment traditional drilling. If no water is forthcoming at a depth of, say, five hundred or more feet of drilling, the hole is blasted with enough water pressure to break into horizontal aquifers or cracks harboring water. A someday flush toilet would require mounded septic, costing yet another s
mall fortune. Pumps for such things as wells and septic need electricity, so you can’t really have one without the other. Necessities turned out to be luxuries beyond reach
Ironically, high-speed wireless Internet is available, with a tower so near we can see its lights blinking just over the ridge. Great, should I ever want to surf Facebook by lantern light during my ever-dwindling laptop battery hours.
I stopped by the sawmill to see progress on the cabin. The square logs had been notched and the walls built up to armpit height. The freshly milled wood was the color of September hay, and the structure stood in its own little yard of drifted, wonderful-smelling sawdust. I climbed over a wall and stood inside and realized I had made a grave mistake.
Even with no roof, it seemed claustrophobic, no larger than a Finnish henhouse. Lars assured me it only felt small because there were no windows yet and it was empty. I’d asked for small, hadn’t I?
I could do without power or water, I realized, if only there was just enough space. At least room enough so no one goes mad after a few days of rain. Space for a couch and a comfy chair for reading, a wall for bookshelves, a room with a door to close for naps and privacy, a porch with a table just for cribbage and jigsaw puzzles that needn’t be cleared each mealtime. What I really should have had Lars build was a little cabin, a modest six to eight hundred square feet. What I’d commissioned was a playhouse.
Or maybe I should have just started with the most important room of any cabin and built the screened porch first in hopes of tacking on a cabin later. I once lived in the countryside outside of Duluth on a road that sported two “starter homes”: basements that had been topped and capped with tarpaper, with enclosed staircases reaching up from below as if groping for rooms that weren’t there. For as long as I lived on that road, neither basement ever sprouted a house. The subterranean families continued to live like earthworms with only glass-block chunks of daylight. The mailbox outside of one was lettered “The Glooms.” If whole families of Glooms could live in basements, I could make do in a porch.
Shelter Page 5
