Drawn to the finer details of finishing work, we took pains with the final stages of our wall, polishing the faces of drying mortar with bent butter knives to make it neater and more water resistant. The men may have been able to build faster, but we could get it done nicer.
Our second project was more complex, everyone joining up to build a bread oven like those found in wood-fired pizza restaurants. We began by pouring a concrete base, which, after curing overnight, was topped with a skirt of boulders, then filled with gravel. Constructing a dome got interesting, with all of us offering up ideas and nine approaches to one challenge, but we got it done and took the requisite photos of us all with cement dust in our hair clustered around the finished oven.
We were instructed in only “wet” wall building with mortar and rounded rocks, when Jon and I had been hoping to learn some dry-stacking techniques for fissured and faceted rock like greenstone. Back at the land, that’s what we have, an endless supply of really excellent, clean-edged, lead-heavy rock underfoot and at every turn, tumbled over every slope. If we are ever inspired to construct a fortress with parapets and ramparts, all the bits and pieces are here. If nothing else, we are rich in stone. Now that we’ve discovered that stone building isn’t so complicated or difficult, we may be able to learn dry stacking on our own by trial and error. The basics are very basic, and in many ways, the endeavor is a matter of instinct and patience, and a lot like parenting in that if you can forget yourself and let the stone figure out where it best fits without forcing it, you’re on the right track.
My goal is a staircase that would look as if the glacier had just happened to drop stones in a natural, serendipitous cascade. Or maybe some ancient-looking wall. Making anything look natural or effortless is always far from it, and when it is achieved, it’s often not noticed (which is the point, I suppose). The most natural-looking Japanese gardens are engineered with major fuss to make them look spontaneous when indeed there is plenty of artifice, with each tree and reed and boulder placed to look as if it sprouted there but actually positioned to disguise plumbing or fixtures or to encourage drainage.
Missing Sam, I sit in the Como Park tea garden, only the merest whiff of Asia, but a geisha-sized mincing step closer to my son at least in spirit. I sit wondering, as I always do, if he’s getting enough fresh air.
He and Leah have moved from the hot apartment with the deadly railing and Disney stickers on the toilet to one with air conditioning. They still share a refrigerator with another tenant and so must go to another unit when they need milk. They have a travel blog to keep us all informed and entertained, and since time-wise we are fourteen hours in their past, they call it Hello Yesterday. They post photos and chronicle adjusting to life as resident aliens, reporting some of the many skit-like instances they live each day, such as trying to communicate to the pharmacy clerk in halting Japanese and pantomiming the need for medication for a yeast infection. I watch for each fresh post, eager to know what they’ve done, had a laugh over, seen, or eaten.
The highway project still prowls the edges, like hounds at bay. Rumor has it that Mn/DOT plans to mitigate the sulfide issue, and as a local insider to state agencies gently broke it to me, “If Mn/DOT does not want the DNR to find evidence of high sulfide contaminants or environmental threats, they won’t.” I try to follow Jon’s example of Captain Practical and just calmly “wait and see,” but I’m more prone to pessimism and the same stomachachy anxiety I had as a child when confronted with a math problem or an adult. The investigation I requested involving two tax-funded entities colluding to scratch each other’s backs was deemed to have no solid evidence, but since the investigation took place within the agency, I expect that that was the only possible outcome, facts aside. We do not have the funds to pursue legal avenues, so another door shuts. Our next and last hope is that the DNR will hold Mn/DOT to the same rigorous environmental standards that mines must now comply with.
So now, again, we wait.
When I came here ten years ago, I had ideas for carving out a place in the woods with nostalgic, Polaroid-yellow notions of times that no longer exist, people who are gone, and a moving van full of cabin kitsch meant to invoke languid summers of the past. As Jon points out (in the kindliest manner, of course), while vintage stuff is cool, it isn’t always best, citing the plaid thermos that leaks and the cowboy lamp with frayed cord that could burn the place down.
And while we’ve nearly succeeded in creating a home in the woods, the highway and lack of cash are simply delaying that dream. I will not say it won’t happen, since as I’ve learned, there’s no predicting the future. In the end, I can say (without being able to fully articulate this) that I arrived set to dwell here in a particular way but have settled on a way that might just be better. I’ve gotten to know this place as it is now as well as then.
Every year around Christmas, DJs on WELY read letters from local kids to Santa. Desired items have included “some disinfectant for my mom,” a thirty-aught-six deer rifle, fifteen gallons of diesel, and a fan belt. This says just about everything there is to know about the character of northern St. Louis County.
We want for our kids to have everything that we did and more. In Sam’s case, I wanted to somehow give him the north. All he has of his grandfather are a few stories, his war medals, and a photograph of him on a tropical airstrip wearing a bomber jacket and goggles—not quite the man Sam would have met. Dad was a little guy with a gray comb-over that stood straight up in a wind, always sucking butterscotch Life Savers. Summer and winter, he dressed in layers of conflicting plaid and quilted jacket liners, continuously hitching his pants or rattling his car keys. Dad would have dragged Sam down to the pier to feed seagulls or to collect scrap metal, taken him to haunt thrift stores, or brought him down to his basement shop, where, unlike most grandfathers, he wasn’t really all that inspired and his fixes and repairs usually involved more epoxy glue than skill. He’d have taught Sam poker and cribbage and of course would have taken him fishing.
Sam asks me what sort of man his grandfather was, and I scrabble around for something he hasn’t heard among the dust motes of the vault of stories I’ve begun to forget.
Well, there was the time he attended the funeral of a man he barely knew. After the service, Dad found himself in the receiving line at the church, dry eyed and fast approaching the family with nothing to say, unable even to remember the name of the deceased. When he couldn’t rustle up any words of condolence or shuffle any more slowly, he yanked hairs out of his nose to at least come up with a few tears for the widow.
He was that sort of man, I tell Sam.
Autumn is here, finally, with the peak of rock hunting just around the corner, when the woods are navigable, when visibility is best and stones reveal themselves against the slopes of fallen leaves. We’ve begun a collection of boxy greenstone for a modest beginner’s project, a low retaining wall to edge the gravel patch where we pitch the screenhouse. The next pile we gather will be for an outdoor fireplace and bread oven.
Walking in the woods, I see evidence of time passing. The deer bones from an old wolf kill have gone chalky with age. The wounds of a tree struck by lightning a few years ago have now softened to gray, as its strewn limbs knit themselves sleeves of moss. On our dirt road, a glassy puddle reflects yellow aspens rattling in cerulean sky so blue it looks phony. October is definitely, positively the best time to be here.
In a dawning that has come to me with glacial slowness but with the clarity of my long-ago barefoot moment on the grassy shoreline, I’ve realized that while living wedged between the memories of a life and an uncertain future, perhaps the best place to be standing is here. Now.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Anderson Center; Cornucopia Art Center; the International Writers Programme at Hawthornden, Scotland; the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; the Ernest Oberholtzer Foundation; and Ragdale Foundation. All provided generous support, time, and space.
Gratitude to the residents of
The Lake: Gary, for putting out that fire, and Matt, who helped fight the good fight, and Susan and Terry, steadfast friends and intrepid partners in a sometimes gnarly endeavor. The residents of Ely, Minnesota, provided much inspiration and have my respect and admiration. Earl and Juri (you know who you are)—resident diplomats, Welcome Wagon, and stand-up guys—were very helpful.
Thanks to Ann Regan of Borealis Books, who took on this book and just let me write it.
I’m grateful to my family, especially my sisters, and those sisters who came before us, The Aunts. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to Jon, for everything and then some. And then some more.
Thanks, Sam, for being exactly who you are. This land is your land.
Shelter is set in the Centaur typeface family.
Book design and typesetting by
BNTypographics West Ltd., Victoria, B.C. Canada.
Printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Shelter Page 18
