Small is good; it’s sustainable. Small is smart, but tiny is more of a challenge.
The bungalow generation of architects seemed to get it most right about how we live in our spaces, not least by acknowledging the duck-and-cover instinct humans have, designing smallish rooms to host an occupant without dwarfing them, acknowledging that, as bipeds, we move side to side but do not shoot up into the air, a fact lost on 1980s builders so fond of great rooms with soaring ceilings. After renovation of the old Victorian that Sam was raised in, his bedroom had fresh white walls, gleaming woodwork, and windows flooding light over the newly varnished floor—an airy, generous space. Yet come bedtime, Sam would pad down the hall to the tiny guest room, a cozy box with thick carpet and walls tinted a rusty mauve that on a paint chip might have been called “womb.”
Big cabins are just wrong, and big-big cabins are crimes upon the landscape, but we would need a little more than the log box I was standing in. I sat with Lars, and we designed a second building to be used for storage. It would be slightly smaller at 8 x 11 and timber-frame, so less expensive. It could be built more quickly. In fact, Lars said he could put it up within a few months. I decided on a spot just east of the driveway.
The timbers went up fast, and once the bones of the building were erect, I realized it was far too nice for storage. As living space, it would have just enough room for a bed and a chamber pot to slide under it. Lars’s dad, Rory, was recruited to finish the building. Since there was no money for much more than the basics, I was informed I had to decide between a roof and windows. I gave up windows and opted for screens all around, with a three-foot-high skirting of cedar shake around the bottom, making it a sort of sleeping porch.
Once built, it looked exactly like a fish house, so the name stuck. Since it was conceived only as a storage shed, it wasn’t the tightest building, with countless thoroughfares in and out for the mice and bugs of all orders. During its first years of use, I was constantly plugging cracks with spray foam, steel wool, and logger’s caulk, sometimes with odd results. When the hard-to-control spray foam shot right through a gap to the outside, I went out to check under the eaves to find a perfectly scaled male member hardened in foam, pointing west.
Still, mice owned the place, sprinting maniacally across the framework of beams as if it were a Habitrail custom built for them. Eventually, I would give in and drape mosquito netting over the bed, at least to keep mouse turds from falling directly onto sleeping heads and wolf spiders from crawling into bed. With netting, one snoring with mouth agape would only inhale the tiniest of moths, and insects crawling into ears would be of the petite variety. Most everyone here knows the trick for getting a bug out of an ear, but every now and again a tourist will be spotted whacking his head like a swimmer or unmedicated schizophrenic, at least until someone takes pity and drags them into some dark toilet to use their cell phone light to coax the thing out.
Considering what little amount of living space we would have, one of my mother’s axioms came back to me: “There is a place for everything, and everything has its place.” We would have to take care to put things away, keep tables clear, keep shoes and boots off the floor, and have nothing inside that doesn’t belong or have some vital function. Maybe I also suffer her “see chaos, feel chaos” aversion that prevents me from feeling good in any place cluttered. There really wouldn’t be any place to store things since, once again, we didn’t have a shed.
Out of sight but not out of mind is my cabin hope chest, a former Mayflower moving van parked in a lot near Ely where it sits chockablock among a hundred others, all retired and repurposed and rented as storage. With its crisp grass and gravel alleys, the place has a desultory air, an abandoned place of abandoned things. Situated as it is next to the college, it’s the perfect choice for a hazing or a kegger. Driving in, I skirt a few pole barns and sheds and a trailer Jed Clampett might have dragged behind his jalopy, its wooden sides weighted with a dozen vintage outboard motors like sailors clamped to a raft. When a breeze kicks up, a few propellers turn, and I step on it, imagining the old Johnsons and Neptunes all coughing to life at once to propel themselves after me into the maze of trailers.
At the end of the lane is an odd brick building worthy of a double take, its architecture slightly Gothic with a round stained-glass window in its peak, an old Masonic Temple or Odd Fellows Hall (men used to be odder). The building was impressive once, but isolated as it is and misplaced in the middle of storageland, it is doubly creepy. I wonder what’s inside yet don’t really want to know. Number 90 is my trailer, and I’ve never found it on the first try, usually twining a few times down lanes of cabless trailers with faded logos for Gateway or Monson. If the tires weren’t all flat, I’d swear the owner moves them around for fun. Number 90 is plain white, its sides painted over. All that stands between potential thieves and the treasures inside is a padlock the size found on diaries, weak enough to be bitten through.
By “treasure,” I mean the old crap people’s parents had the sense to get rid of when they could afford better: former rumpus-room rejects that have become the furnishings of our future summers, all carefully collected over decades and chosen to evoke an era when cabins were cabins.
I don’t know much about how other fathers and daughters bonded, but Dad and I got solid at rummage sales and junk shops. We developed a code and were often in collusion, able to remain calm and stony faced when chancing upon the rare sale or item priced to reveal that the seller was clueless. I once found a pair of deco garnet earrings set in gold amid the chain-snarl junk of a jewelry box marked twenty-five cents. In the car, Dad gave me high fives for not grinning like an idiot while paying for them. We would hold things up for each other to scrutinize across tables cluttered with castoffs, and a slight nod or a frown meant you either had a prize or you didn’t. I picked up a pair of petite metal dumbbells and pondered aloud, “Steel dumbbells?” to Dad’s droll response, “Leave here.”
What’s in the trailer is just stuff, but it somehow represents possibility because once these items are finally in place, they will mark the end of many years of pining for a cabin. It’s easy to forget what’s there, so that a trip down the thirty-two-foot aisle can feel like Christmas. Plastic tubs hold old linens and woolen striped blankets layered with cedar shakes to thwart moths. Juice glasses with painted stripes or 1960s cartoon characters are stacked next to a box of money-colored souvenir plates from thirty different states (in case that many happen to drop by for dinner). Against one wall is a massive cast-iron kitchen sink with a high apron and two deep basins and drain boards, salvaged from a Cass Gilbert house in St. Paul, a steal at “free for the taking!” until I realized the taking would take four men. Another old sink from a house I renovated awaits some future bathroom, along with a set of wooden medicine chests.
There are minnow buckets with leaping-fish logos, a 1920s camp stove, railroad spikes, thick Tuco puzzles of seascapes and hunting scenes, cribbage boards, old playing cards with scenes of pointer dogs and mallards, Chinese checkers, Scrabble, and heavy poker chips in a rotating caddy. Several boxes hold framed paint-by-number wildlifes and woodland vistas, sometimes signed. Grandpa-tools and oil cans, orange crates, a humidor, and a collection of table lamps not lit since the Korean War. The trailer is packed with thirty years’ worth of haunting alleys, thrift shops, rummage sales, and flea markets. Along the way were many “ah hahs!", or “You’re throwing that out?", or “Would you take three dollars?” There are enough pots and pans, canisters, melamine dishware, Fire-King bowls, and spattered enamelware to stock two kitchens, plus full sets of cutlery and utensils in Bakelite and a carving set with antler handles. The heaviest boxes are on the bottom, holding cast-iron skillets I may be too old and weak to lift by the time there is a kitchen to hang them in. Chairs and occasional tables painted in glossy yesteryear colors of dull mustard, forest service green, and robin’s egg blue. Cowboy bedspreads, Indian blankets, a seven-piece suite of rattan rumpus-room furniture, and a box of Ed Sul
livan–era bark-cloth drapes to reupholster the cushions with. Part of the rattan ensemble was scored in my St. Paul alley one morning on my way to an important interview. I was already late when I saw the near-perfect set but certain that if I didn’t act, it would be gone in an hour. Mincing along in high heels, I dragged each piece down the icy ruts to my garage.
I wasn’t the only dumpster diver in my neighborhood. Regular pickers in ratty trucks and vans cruised the alleys, some on bikes pulling little trailers piled high with aluminum cans. A few came on foot. A fellow diver, Paul Wellstone, lived just a few streets over. I’d encountered him a number of times in his red running shorts (a convenient ruse), usually in the evenings. Our neighborhood had great potential for found treasure since there seemed always to be a house or two in the throes of renovation, with big rolloff dumpsters in their driveways that by end of day were often loaded. Clutching a garish lamp or carrying a plywood magazine rack or light fixture salvaged from the trash, the Senator and I would greet each other shyly and go our separate ways, dragging our prizes.
A box marked “Wooden Things” is loaded with mass-produced tourist kitsch once sold in dime stores and gas stations across America, specific to the place only by the cheap ink stampings that read “Niagara Falls” or “Mount Hood.” Wall plaques, little boxes, salt and pepper shakers, etc., all in varnished cedar or diamond willow. A few Wooden Things are actually homemade, no doubt by dead grandfathers or shop class juniors, for who else would make an agate-crusted tissue box cover, a trivet with a wood-burned portrait of a pug named Ruffian, or amateurish Bambi bookends with glued-on googly eyes? Many of the items have bits of history tacked on, and pawing through, I sometimes daydream little vignettes. The set of never-used embroidered tea towels might have been a gift to some sturdy blond bride, but Inga or Astrid would’ve been too practical to ever use something so nice, stowing them to be saved for “good.” Either good never came or they were forgotten because come time for the nursing home, closets were emptied, and now the towels are mine. I can imagine a mod mom in pedal pushers filling the old plaid pitcher thermos with Kool-Aid, her hair teased and her pastel aluminum juice glass jazzed with vodka. Or a crew-cut Dad in a madras plaid shirt at the tiki bar ashing his Parliament onto the ceramic stomach of an ashtray shaped like a hula dancer with big ones.
Some things have real stories and meaning, like my Grandmother Julia’s rocking chair, which I stripped of paint with toxic goo and dental tools to reveal intricate carved irises. I also have a vintage White sewing machine from Grandpa Joe’s tailor shop. I’m not sure how these items landed with me, but I suspect the Aunts were grateful for the time I stayed in Ely for half a February with Grandma Julia after she’d broken her wrist, no matter that I did barely anything but prepare her little mouse meals, button her housedresses, and sweep now and then. Since there was little to do in Ely that time of year besides visit the library—or, as Julia suggested, “Go stand in the wind and get the stink blown off you”—I got a mountain of reading done, the month more like a long visit than caretaking.
From the maternal side of the family, I inherited Grandmother Emily’s wicker table and chair. The wicker is bonded with decades of paint—a chip revealing at least six colors, currently a glossy gray green—and waiting for the next porch it will live in should there ever be one.
And things of Dad’s. Not much—mostly books, a few bits of furniture, his tape measure, and one of those folding padded seats to cushion his skinny butt from the aluminum bench of his fishing boat. Just stuff I’ve hung onto, stuff he probably bought at Salvation Army.
Seven
Sometimes the draw feels like the tug of a compass needle, an unseen force. Maybe the north is imprinted genetically, or perhaps it’s been one of the few constants in life. Friends, lovers, relatives weave in and out, come and go, die. Marriages fail, life tumbles, a promising career arches, then plummets. My son grows up, leaves home, leaves the country. Interests wane, directions shift. One thing doesn’t change; it just hunkers a couple hundred miles away. Whether life is being gently rocked or swamped, the land is just there.
Having been in and out of thrall with the north so long, I still don’t know when it began, but I can think of one moment when I was too young to be able to describe it with words, being only seven or eight and not owning the vocabulary. I was barefoot and tripping from the cabin to the shore. Mist still skirted the surface of the lake, and I registered that the mist made a corresponding line to the dew, dragging the hem of my nightie. The wet grass felt oddly distinct underfoot, and I imagined each blade of it, the textures of shiny side/dull side. I could smell it and knew what it would taste like. I was all in chlorophylly tune with the grass, imagining the woof and warp of roots even as my own toes were digging in. Some other eye in my brain opened to map how the roots dipped into the soil for nourishment, weaving turf below while blades above pulled light from the sun to make itself grow, to be, to make itself grass.
In this oddly comforting moment came the realization that I could feel safe outside the tight spaces of childhood, that I could belong in the world beyond my current situation, which could be a frightening one. The natural world at last made sense. It was all utterly connected, one thing essential to the other. The trees needed the water needed the air needed the wind needed the sun, and the clouds needed all and vice versa and so on. All somehow pitched in with time to make now, and I knew even with my dearth of words that I was most alive at that moment and that one either is or isn’t. The piece of driftwood knocking itself in the surf wasn’t. The living tree next to me was. I was.
For a long time, I connected that moment of buoyancy as being specific to the north, though I know now it can happen anywhere because it has: on a rainy street of yellow taxis reflecting their drunken twins over wet pavement, once during a frost while walking furrows in a southern field, and again staring out an airplane at the glow of a city a mile below. Mostly the clarity visits when alone, when the mind is so empty it drops its tether to consciousness, which springs up to bite the present.
I curse such instances and am grateful for them. Did one dewy morning when I was momentarily possessed by my surroundings land me back here?
Places look better from far away. Except they aren’t, and I’m not the only person drawn by the perceived romance of this place, taken in by it, thrilled by it, disillusioned by it, or even spat out by it. It’s tough here.
It’s not for everyone, but every year a few hundred thousand canoeists from across the planet apply a year in advance for a BWCAW permit and the chance to cast themselves into a true wilderness. They arrive having dreamt of the trip, planned, and anticipated. Maybe they’ve subscribed to Outside, read the Sigurd Olson books, mooned over the Brandenburg photographs. They’ve shopped REI or Patagonia for clothing made of engineered feather-light fabrics that if sold by weight would cost seven hundred dollars a pound. Their canoes are translucent Kevlar or cedar strip with custom paddles. The cameras are high-def digital SLRs with waterproof sleeves. They hope the trip will be soul-crackingly beautiful, that they will be one with nature.
Then there are the seasoned regulars who put in with their aluminum canoes and slapdash gear, less intent on the paddling and scenery than on getting to their favorite fishing holes. They’re going to land a lunker and get some fresh air. The pretty vistas are a nice bonus.
Several friends are frequent visitors to the Boundary Waters. When given a second glass of something, they often relay accounts that exaggerate the bests and the worsts of a trip. As they tell it (roughly), a typical day begins at dawn, when: You start by wriggling from the cocoon of a sleeping bag that is separated from the hardest stone on earth by a half-inch sleeping pad. First order of the day is beating your limbs to get blood circulating. The sudden exposure to cold air prompts the next immediacy—to pee. Puppet-leg it into the boreal dim to the camp pit toilet and bare your nether bits in the same brush where carnivorous mammals are eager for their own breakfasts, where deer ticks are co
cked and aimed.
That chanced and accomplished, you must build a fire so that vacuum-packed shards of food can be reconstituted with water that hopefully has had the parasitic Giardia boiled or filtered out of it. Coffee is essential, so much so that you may have scrimped on a few other essentials while packing, like extra socks and batteries, in favor of the 2.5-pound Tomiko K2 espresso kit.
Perched on a picturesque rock in morning light, you might enjoy an espresso better than any from the cafés of Montmartre or Florence. It hardly matters that the creamer is a powdered by-product or that the cup is lip-scorching aluminum alloy; you very well might, in the lull before the insects du jour converge, experience a true coffee moment. A fellow camper might capture such a moment in a photograph of the sort seen on glossy ads for anything from the aforementioned Tomiko K2 espresso maker to emergency bee sting kits or quick-dry underpants. Such satisfying moments invariably lead to other less romantic post-coffee moments that involve trekking back to the latrine with scant squares of toilet paper, muttering a prayer for brevity.
After calamine lotion is applied and ticks tweezed and DEET sprayed, every item in camp is tediously repacked and loaded into canoes, and the adventure begins. The paddle in your yet-unblistered hand feels light. You set off under either a soft sun with calm waters or a punishing sun, or eerie fog, or rain, or a wind that either blasts, gusts, or blows from whatever direction makes it a headwind. Snow in May is more common than you might think. This is real paddling, and it will be the reason that by end of day your shoulders and forearms will howl. The first day may be easy with a single portage, during which you pry provisions and packs from canoes and haul them overland from one put-in to another before trudging back for more. When strapping on the pack over sunburnt shoulders, you might experience some regret over the espresso maker and its carrying case; surely the 1.5-pound model would have sufficed.
Shelter Page 6
