The youngest Stonich daughter, Mardi, married a local boy, Lew, described in the oxymoronic as a jovial Finn. Though he’d married in, Lew was the uncle we saw the most. Dad would haul me along to visit him out on Johnson Lake, where Lew’s old mobile home was parked but never plumbed or improved, kept rustic to discourage females. He and my Dad would have a bump and a beer, a bump being three fingers of whiskey, neat, enough to paste my lightweight father into his lawn chair.
Most blood uncles are only murky memories. All seemed so old, and most had gone off to become businessmen, returning only sporadically for visits or funerals. Dad’s sisters drifted off to marry men from elsewhere. Aunt Mary’s first husband was such a long-harbored secret that I was in my thirties before I learned of him, a dashing, high-rolling architect from California who was either abusive or alcoholic and probably both. They’d lived unmoored and fast, had dined at Hearst Castle and spent a few tumultuous years traveling before divorcing. Divorce was relegated to the family closet of Unmentioned Things; it simply wasn’t done by Catholics. Another aunt’s husband was murdered by his mistress, an event that was vehemently never spoken of.
All five of our aunts returned home each summer. I recall them best during the 1960s, when they filled the large pine-paneled cabin on White Iron Lake. The kitchen was loud as a chicken run with everyone trying to get their points and arguments across, along with jokes, gossip from town, discussions of best sellers, and cries over bad hands of bridge. Back when they could put it away, there were gin and vodka cocktails and always a lot of lemons. There was the occasional guiltily puffed cigarette on the porch, though never when Grandma Julia was around. Arguments about politics were often started by Dad and ended by his going fishing. The Aunts might not have agreed on everything, but they all got very nonpartisan when recalling poor, dear Jack Kennedy, growing gin maudlin until they were sidetracked with the details of Jackie’s new wardrobe or her antics in Greece.
The Aunts wore pedal pushers, Keds slip-ons, and cat-wing RayBans. All were eager to see what Aunt Mary would wear. She was worldly, spoke French, and never talked about her wealth, though behind her back everyone else did. Each year she sent our mother a care package. Opening it was an event. I remember a sheath dress covered in gold spangles that my size-ten mother could never have squeezed into no matter how many star jumps with Jack LaLanne. Things like nice soaps came in the box, interesting costume jewelry, a cloisonné candy dish, a cut-glass bowl, evening dresses. A blouse covered in tiny silk bows and a snakeskin belt. Expensive things, never anything practical.
When swimming, the Aunts wore bathing caps with straps and posed on the dock for the requisite beauty-legs photo like a line of petite, squinting Rockettes (the tallest was five foot two). They first outlived all their brothers, then began outliving their husbands, and now have sadly and inevitably begun to outlive each other. When I bought the land, four of the five were alive, now only one. Not all of their endings have been easy. Three became addled by Alzheimer’s, and another lived trapped in her own shell for a dozen years after a stroke left her wheelchair bound and maddeningly unable to speak. Our surviving aunt, Helen, still has her marbles and remembers when they were their younger, witty, vibrant selves. In Ely, the Stonich girls are remembered, though more recall my grandmother, who was more or less a fixture in town.
I once did a reading at an Ely bookstore, where I arrived to a surprisingly full house. Not quite my typical audience, the median age looked to be over seventy, and at least one attendee had a walker. After the reading, the usual Q-and-A began, but no one seemed at all curious about the book. Instead they offered comments and little stories about my family, mostly about my grandparents. One stout, blue-haired lady piped up, “Your grandmother made me a wool skirt in 1940, and now it’s braided into a rug in my mud room.” A shy miner stepped forward: “I was in Korea with your Uncle Teddy,” prompting several men to nod knowingly. A chipper, very old mason offered, “I tuck-pointed Joe Stonich’s chimney and poured him a sidewalk in barter for the suit I got married in.” He tugged at the equally ancient woman at his side as if to corroborate his story.
As people were filing past to say good-bye, a shaky woman took my elbow, her voice low. She told me that one day during the worst of the Depression, she’d been outside the butcher shop with her mother, who was counting the coins in her palm, comparing what she had to the prices in the window. “Then Julia Stonich came by, and without a blink, your grandmother opened her purse and slipped two dollar bills into my mother’s hand.” The woman shook her head. “It was probably all she had to feed her own with.”
That geriatric audience telling me such stories was easily the most gratifying event I’d ever done. Not a book was sold.
My family, once so much a part of this place, has physically vanished, and when they fade from memory, it will be almost as if they never were. I’m the only one of my sisters who has kept the Stonich name, which I’ve now dragged back north to plant like a flag. If we take root here, if it works, in another hundred years maybe some curious great-grandchild will be peering back into this time to look at now, just as I am looking back to then.
Twelve
I was beginning to relish single life, having lived with one man or another with little or no breathing room between since my early twenties. For the first time, I was independent and had no intention of becoming the sort of woman who cannot be truly happy until she mutters the barfable “You complete me.” Single felt as good as trading shoes for flip-flops on the first warm day. Still, there were times when I looked around my lovely building site and felt a little bereft, like when you’re watching a good movie or a sunset and it seems a shame there’s no one to elbow. Yes, single was definitely the best route, and I determined that if I had to grow old alone, I would at least do so gracefully, without too many regrets or cats.
I’d be manless but happy—or at least content.
For a few weeks, I was childless as well. Sam and Terry were away on the big trip they’d been planning for years. Sam had wanted to go to Japan ever since I brought home an illustrated guide called Today’s Japan and a stuffed sumo wrestler doll when he was little. He got very interested in anime and read novelty books of weird Japanese inventions. He went around imitating the accents in Kurosawa films, repeating most-useful phrases for tourists from Japanese Made Easy, sounding just like an angry samurai warrior would when asking directions to the nearest train station or karaoke bar. On special occasions, he didn’t want steak, he wanted sushi.
Sam and Terry had been buddies since he was eight, when we’d become neighbors in St. Paul. By eighteen, Sam was wild to visit Japan and took off for Tokyo under Terry’s wing, though by this time he was taller by a head.
I took the opportunity to spend time in Ely in a leisurely way. The tourists were gone, and the place had settled back to normal. I hung around the library and the history center, looking up old records and reading. I spent the rest of my time just nosing around town and eavesdropping in the coffee shop, laundromat, or Dee’s if it wasn’t too busy, when I could talk the pull-tab lady into playing cribbage.
Lars had put roof trusses atop the main cabin. His construction leftovers included a pile of short four-foot scraps of 8 x 8-inch-square pine timbers. He made use of them and designed a footbridge to span the swampy area between the shoreline and the granite island, throwing it in as a sort of gift-with-purchase, like a Lincoln Log kit. There were enough dovetailed lengths for three cribs to anchor the bridge. Cribs are interlocking timber corrals filled with large stones to keep them anchored, typically used in much larger projects to support bridges or boathouses, but in this case to support a footbridge and a 125-pound woman.
It was my last trip north before winter. Out at the land, the structures were taking shape. The log walls and roof beams had grayed to a soft driftwood. We’d decided to leave the roof off for the winter so the interior walls and trusses could gray as well. On the day I was leaving, I stopped by to find that Lars had cut open
ings for the windows and door. He’d also built a heavy hand-hewn picnic table and placed it at the crest of the rocky slope to the lake.
I had a meal sitting at the new table. It didn’t matter that I was alone or that it was just a meat pasty eaten straight from its wrapper and dabbed at a torn-open packet of ketchup; I was dining alfresco at my very own place in the woods. Autumn was full on. The bugs were gone, and the fallen leaves were dry underfoot and loud as Doritos. Those still on the trees were thrumming loose from branches to join the eastward curtain of wind, slowly opening the view to the lake across the wooded slope. On the floor of the roofless cabin, eddies of fallen birch leaves swirled like schools of guppies and sawdust lapped at the walls. I suddenly didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay and see it through until the last leaf was down, but it was time.
Back in the city, I settled in to await our urban autumn, to watch another round of leaves fall, this time from my office window.
Just as the rhythm of days fell into a pattern, I found myself connecting with a neighbor I’d been friendly with for years. His son and Sam had attended the same day camp together. It turned out Butch had recently become single himself and didn’t have any pending warrants, so we went out. By Christmas we’d advanced a step, and I kept a pair of earplugs at his weekend house. Butch ran a busy company and didn’t have loads of leisure, but no matter, since my own winter was taken up with work. Butch’s schedule was difficult to keep track of. He was often flying off here and there, and when he was around, his inner clock was cockeyed from international travel. Much of the time, he functioned with cell phone glued to his ear, telecommuting between offices in two separate towns. He also lived in a trio of houses, each roughly an hour from the next, which meant I rarely knew where he was, and he never knew where his favorite sweater was. We saw each other when we could.
Winter came and went. While fall comes early up north, spring comes maddeningly late, dragging two weeks or more behind southern Minnesota. It would be late mud season before I was able to get to the land again. Lars, with a more rugged vehicle, was able to get there sooner.
He found the cabin not quite as he’d left it. The whole building was leaning. We had assumed that the site we’d chosen was packed dirt over ledge rock, and since the building sits not on a traditional foundation but on skids, there’d been no digging or drilling down that might have revealed there was indeed no ledge rock.
For having such a small footprint, the cabin is a petite monster weight-wise, its walls overbuilt by any standard, with heavy square timbers and subflooring two inches thick. Lars had come to install windows, but when he found soil beginning to give way under the weight of one of the skids and trickle down the slope, he immediately went to work building a log retaining wall five feet east of the cabin. Then he began the arduous task of filling it in with loads of gravel. I didn’t realize he’d done so much extra work until much later since he’d never mentioned it, nor had he charged any extra, which seemed very un-contractor-like. I already doubted that he would break even on the project, and this extra work confirmed my suspicion.
I couldn’t get up to see it myself as I was driving my way through eastern states on a grueling, unsuccessful work-related trip, during which I sprained my ankle and contracted a nasty bronchial infection. While on the road, Butch’s phone calls grew erratic and constrained, making me wonder if he was overworked or just jet lagged. The guy was spread awfully thin, I reasoned. Or maybe it was me. I was anxious about work and realized I was going to have to sell my house. My stomach got up to its old tricks, and I went back to my old habits of Rolaids and ginger ale.
Plans to meet Butch’s mother kept falling through, and when we tried to schedule a trip north, one business trip or another kept pushing it back. Then, just as things were looking a little brighter, we were driving somewhere one morning when his cell phone rang. After a lot of shifting in his seat and mumbling, Butch said, as if I were not sitting a foot away, “Yes, I’m alone.”
Seems he had fallen back into an ongoing love-hate snarl with a woman who will remain his first cousin, though being blood relatives was “no biggie,” Butch insisted, since she was past child-bearing age. Date over.
As it turned out, Sam was a far better judge of the men I dated than I was. Of those few that were around long enough for him to meet, he had them silently pegged: Egotistical and Weird, Charity Case, and Awkward to the Core. I might have saved myself wasted time by merely asking what descriptions he’d settled on.
I was doubly motivated to move off the same city block where both a former husband and a cheating former boyfriend resided. I’d lived on our street nineteen years in three different houses, and it was clearly time to go, though I would see less of Sam, who lived half time with his dad next door in the house he grew up in, coming and going freely around the fence that cordoned off one parent from the other, an arrangement that had been great for Sam though not quite the optimal distance for divorced parents.
I spit-shined my house and put it on the market. In the meantime, I could at least get out of town. Because of spring rains, there were a few cancellations at Rustic Resort, and I was able to get a last-minute, low-season deal on a cabin for the week. And while the land didn’t yet have a habitable building to stay in, it seemed that north really was becoming a retreat.
Hauling a few tools to the land, I was surprised to find the outhouse had been re-erected on-site. At least something was going right. The inspector, aptly named John, had been out and left his stamped certificate from the county and a note that it was all “good to go.” On a little round of pine, I wood-burned the word “Bog,” which is what my Scottish friends charmingly call the toilet, and nailed it to the door. Now we had two bogs. I found a lidded, mouse-proof grain bucket to store toilet paper in, stocked a can of Raid and a flyswatter, and dug a magazine rack from storage along with vintage copies of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. I settled in for my first indoor read.
The place was transforming. No longer a parcel or just a building site, no longer raw land, it was beginning to feel downright homey.
My house sold unexpectedly fast in a good-news/bad-news scenario with the buyer wanting quick possession, which left me furiously house hunting for a stressful month. With only two weeks to spare, I found a great old duplex: more good/bad news in that it had only half the storage of the old place. I quickly had to gather and pack the rest of my hoarded cabin things and hire a truck to take it all north to the Mayflower trailer.
I wanted to get everything settled so that I could enjoy a long-anticipated trip at the end of the summer, a yoga retreat in California with a good friend. Lars promised the cabin would be finished soon after my return, maybe even by September. The bit of straw Butch had knocked out of me was slowly beginning to fill back in, and I’d eased up some on kicking myself over my bad choices.
I began unpacking and putting my new home in order. It was a hot summer in St. Paul, and the whole of July felt thick, something to survive. I starting working in the air-conditioned public library downtown, joining the ranks of homeless. I was supposed to be reading about pro–sport fishing for a project I was researching but kept getting distracted in the history stacks, drawn to books on the Iron Range. I’d never been much interested in history; I liked it informal and coated in glossy entertainment, preferring the story part. Movies are good; cartoons are better. Do I need to know more about the Civil War than is in Gone with the Wind, more about the Napoleonic high seas than can be gleaned from Master and Commander, or anything about life in the north that Rocky or Bullwinkle cannot impart? I loved historical novels for their descriptions of rooms and furniture and clothes, accurate or not. When curious about the actual factual past, I prefer books with titles like The Very Bloody History of Britain without the Boring Bits, The Wordy Shipmates, or Four Score … and More! Minnesota history held little thrall for me until I become steward of a tiny chunk of it. Until then, I was happy enough with Paul Bunyan digging out Lake Superior as
a watering hole for Babe the Blue Ox, creating lakes with his size-104 boots, and leveling forests just by tromping about and the Ojibwe warrior hero Nanabozho (Naniboujou), who saved the remaining trees from Paul’s clodhoppers by fighting with him for forty days and forty nights, finally killing him with a big fish and a pancake. Right?
There’s tons of fakelore in northern Minnesota. Leif Erickson rowing over to Duluth from Norway in the year ad 1000? The Kensington Runestone is widely known as a hoax, but a sports team named the Vikings does sound much more menacing than the Voyageurs, which only conjures up a vision of swarthy guys eating pâté or singing “Alouette.” If the Viking lore hadn’t proliferated, Monday night cheers would be led by a little guy with a paddle wearing a tasseled cap instead of horns. Surely the voyageurs were tougher than they looked. By any account, voyageuring was dangerous and backbreaking; a job posting might have read, “Guys built like bulldogs: become a human pack mule and paddle slave.”
I was more interested in the later years, the time of my grandfather’s arrival, when big men with names like Weyerhaeuser, Hill, and Backus oozed in from the big cities with their handlebar mustaches and homburg hats. When they saw the timber to be logged, the lumber barons grew nearly animated, mustaches a-twitch, and snapped to action. The first order of the day was to lay railways so they could then cut down Minnesota, haul it out, and sell it, which they did between 1830 and 1930, when around 70 percent of the state was shorn bald (today only two percent of Minnesota forest is considered old growth) and the timber was either floated downriver or trundled off by train, mostly to eastern states. Aerial photos from the 1920s show the Lake Vermilion area, tens of thousands of acres, reduced to pathetic stumpage, our land included. What is now the Boundary Waters wasn’t spared either, save a few islands too inconveniently located to mow over. Did these lumber corporations use proper logging practices? No. Nor did they employ any reforestation programs. Nary a tree was planted in their wake, but even worse, loggers took only the tree trunks, leaving mountains of branches called “slash” to dry, and the slash become tinder over the vast clearings where there were no longer any trees to divert or slow spreading fires or the winds they rode in on. Fledgling hamlets and towns across the Iron Range burned to the ground. In 1908, Chisholm was incinerated. The city of Virginia burned twice. Looking at the pictures, I can only wonder how the industrialists got away with so many crimes against nature, and I puzzle over how one comes to possess such boundless temerity. “Because they were raging shitheads” is how Juri put it.
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