“Want to go out in the woods and help me tap the sugar maple trees?” Stacy suggests after breakfast. For days he’s been sitting near the cookstove, whittling spouts from white ash tree limbs. Mica plays in the shavings at his feet.
“OK.”
All morning, we wander through the forest, searching for maple trees that are at least eight inches across. Here and there, new shoots of life, the tips of pale skunk cabbage and fiddlehead fern, reach for the sun. Stacy whistles while he works. ’Tis a gift to be simple . . . ’Tis a gift to be free . . .
As the sun sails over the tops of the trees, we hike back to the cabin. Our shoulders bump and we don’t pull away. When Mica finally takes his nap, Stacy sits down on the bed beside me and unbraids my hair. He combs it out with his fingers. I reach for him and feel warmth rush through my body, like sap rising in the maple trees . . .
Company
“They let me out for good behavior,” Colin laughs. “Really they just wanted to get rid of me.” His blue eyes twinkle and his shoulder-length golden hair is tied back in a ponytail. Brilliant, beautiful, and unattached, our old comrade Colin, from the Committee for Non-Violent Action in Connecticut, has just been released from Chicago’s Cook County jail. It’s been months since we’ve seen him. I’d just sent a letter to the prison, and now he’s here.
“Come here, Baby Bear. How are you and Mama and Papa Bear doing in this little cabin in the woods?” He reaches affectionately for his favorite baby, now two years old. Mica pulls Colin’s soft golden beard.
After breakfast, the three of us work next to the cabin in comfortable silence, setting up a maple sugar evaporating pan that Barney lent us. We carry big rocks from the river to support the metal container and then level the pan one foot above the earth for the fire that will burn underneath it.
Snow languishes in patches under the dark balsam and spruce, but otherwise it’s mud everywhere. We squish across the saturated earth. Down the hill, the Lester rises over its banks, carrying white foam and loose branches down to the lake.
“Did you hear that the North Vietnamese began a new offensive?” Colin catches us up on the news at dinner. We haven’t been to town, so we listen attentively. “More than twenty thousand troops crossed the border into South Vietnam, forcing the South Vietnamese army into retreat. Nixon responded with heavy bombing and by mining Haiphong Harbor. This weekend there’ll be demonstrations all over the country. That’s why I want to get down to the Twin Cities. Do you want to come?”
I look hopefully at Stacy.
“Can’t,” Stacy answers. “Once we start maple sugaring we’ve got to keep going.”
Colin cuts off a huge chunk of cornbread and slathers it with apple butter. It’s clear he’s disappointed.
At dawn, Colin dresses and pulls on his backpack. He just got here but he’s already leaving. We hike with him, through the mist, across the Jacobsen’s wet eighty acres, to the Jean Duluth Road, where he’ll hitch into Duluth, catch Highway 35, and hopefully be in the Twin Cities by noon.
At the blacktop, the three of us, with little Mica on Stacy’s back, stand in a circle with our arms around each other. “Be safe,” I whisper, knowing my request will fall on deaf ears. Colin will continue to live without thoughts of his own mortality, like a boulder rolling along the rim of a cliff. I would ask him to stay at the homestead, but I know he won’t; he must keep moving, a general of a nonviolent army urging on his troops.
Whenever someone leaves us, I worry that he or she will stick out their thumb, get into a vehicle, and never be seen again. I throw my arms around our good friend, hold on tight, and he doesn’t pull away. I know he misses us, as we miss him.
When the first vehicle comes into view, Colin waves his arms above his head like he knows the driver. Stacy and I, to improve his chances, disappear like Chippewa Indians into the mist. Then we hurry home, hand in hand, across Jacobsen’s foggy field.
Though patches of snow still litter the ground, pale green willows are poised to unfold. Five bufflehead ducks, with their bold black-and-white feathers, rise from the ponds.
Heron
The Lester River now roars with chunks of ice past our cabin, spilling over its banks, dragging debris and fallen trees to Lake Superior. Since our house is on a rise, there’s no danger of flooding, but on the other side, in the lowlands, among the cedar and black ash, the water spreads in lesser tributaries everywhere. The power of the rushing river takes my breath away, makes me feel small.
In Duluth today, there’s a local demonstration against war taxes at the IRS building and a women’s meeting at the university, but we can’t go. Even if we could find a safe way to get across the water, we must always be cutting and chopping wood.
I find myself reliving Jody’s birth all the time, the smells and the sights and the sound of Hawk’s first cry. One moment I’m high from that memory and the teeming life all around me, the lift in the spring air, the new buds on the trees, and the next I’m slouching on our bed, staring down through the window at the snarling river and wondering what the hell I’m doing here. I feel like crying all the time, but can’t think of a good enough reason. Our isolation bears down on me all the more since Colin hitched away on the Jean Duluth Road.
Day in and day out it’s just Stacy, Mica, and me. I sew on my patchwork quilt. I write in my journal. I make beaded necklaces to sell at the co-op. I work on my outline for my childbirth classes some more and contemplate how I could do a regular series like the ones Stacy and I attended in Minneapolis. I could charge a small fee. The difficulty would be, as always, the weather, our lack of transportation, and my responsibilities at the farm.
On my way to the outhouse, thinking these thoughts, I’m startled by the harsh, metallic cries of three great blue herons rising up from the river. As the huge birds fly over, only ten feet above my head, I can make out the delicate lines on their feathers, see their yellow legs dangling, and feel the rush of air under their six-foot wingspan. An ancient Ojibwa saying captures my feelings: Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I’m being carried by a great wind across the sky.
CHAPTER 9
Drowning
Spring is on a roll and there’s so much to do in the garden, but we’re almost out of money, down to our last twenty-two dollars and fifty cents. This time, when we go into Duluth, we feel like guests at Chester Creek House. In the kitchen I can’t find the tea. There’s a new Van Gogh print of sunflowers over the mantel. Someone has been storing boxes on our bed.
Stacy strikes out looking for work at the docks and, discouraged, takes Mica back to the homestead early, but I stay to help Jim put together this month’s issue of The Wild Currents. In the big, nearly empty storefront where we produce our alternative rag, the bare oak boards creak under our feet and the windows are dirty, but the room is warm and soon we bend low over the recycled library tables.
I am at home here and realize how much I miss our political life. For years we were in the thick of things, living at the Draft Information Center, picketing the IRS, handing out antiwar leaflets downtown, helping start the food co-op and the women’s support group. As we pursue our dream of subsistence living, our ability to be involved in the revolution fades. It’s not that we don’t want to, or that our goals have changed, it’s just so hard to do both.
Jim types a story about Nixon’s law-and-order policies and I finish my article on feminism and the natural-childbirth revolution. I paste down the banner for the newspaper headlines: “Half of All U.S. Citizens Now Oppose War in Vietnam.” A political cartoon that Johan Sorensen, my old lover, has drawn goes under the article. I touch the caricature of the president with the tips of my fingers. The action has nothing to do with Nixon; it’s Johan I’m reaching for.
Three hours later, I stand on the side of the road, hitchhiking alone. I know it’s dangerous, but a woman can’t let that get in her
way. Car after car passes as I watch dark clouds come in from the west, and I’m getting discouraged when finally Mr. Tollefson stops. I toss my canvas knapsack into the bed of his battered blue pickup and jump in.
“Aren’t you afraid to hitchhike alone? There’s some weird people out here,” Tollefson says, shifting his gaze from the road to me. The fleshy growth under his eye quivers. I try not to look at the mole of Lake Superior and answer coolly, “No.”
It’s a lie. Of course I’m scared, but we have to learn to trust people if we want to make a better world, and besides, I have no other way to get home.
Halfway along, Mr. Tollefson stretches his right arm along the back of the seat, flexing his shoulder, and I respond by sliding closer to the passenger door. Snow flies now, great gobs of it, just as I feared. Thirty minutes of the slap, slap of the window wipers peeling back slush and I point to where I want to be dropped. The wet white already covers the ground. “There by the oak tree.”
Tollefson pulls onto the narrow gravel berm. “Your old man at home?”
“He’s probably coming across the field to meet me right now,” I fib, hoping the old guy will think Stacy’s nearby.
“Just wondered,” Mr. Tollefson mumbles. “It’s getting dark. You shouldn’t be out here alone. Don’t forget your purse.”
I’m hurrying now, more afraid of Mr. Tollefson than I am of the night. As I tromp across the pasture through two inches of slush, the wind scours my face and the wet soaks my hair. I pull my bare hands up into my coat sleeves.
To get to the cabin, I have to hike for two miles across the windswept fields and then cross the roaring Lester. When I come to the bank, it’s already dusk and I see something bobbing along in the river, churning through the current along with whole small trees. I’m astonished to make out, in the fading light, a deer with a full rack of antlers. The stag struggles to keep its head above water. It flounders and spins. I run along by its side, helpless to do anything. Where the river curves away through the trees, across the floodplain, the deer is swept under a logjam. The animal turns to me, eyes white with terror, and then he is gone.
I stand staring at the tangled pile of small and large trees where the deer disappeared and then move homeward. At our crossing place, I find the old elm bridge torn away, so, with no other choice, I wade through the shallows in icy water up to my knees. The current is swift and the bottom rocky. Twice I almost fall. Then I crawl up the bank and trod toward the clearing.
“Stacy!” I call. “Stacy.” I’m so exhausted and cold, when he finally runs out of the cabin, I burst into sobs. He gathers me in and, when we’re inside the cabin, unties my boots. It’s only later, as we’re getting into bed, that he asks, “What’s wrong with you, Patsy? Don’t you want to live here? You don’t have to, you know. No one’s forcing you.”
Pulling my pink flannel nightgown over my head, I yearn to tell him how hard it was to get home, hitching alone, riding with creepy Mr. Tollefson, hiking across the windy pasture and wading through the icy Lester, but I pinch my mouth shut.
I should be stronger. Shouldn’t be such a baby.
As Stacy blows out the kerosene lamp and pulls up the covers, I remember, for the first time, the canvas satchel full of groceries I’d tossed in the back of Mr. Tollefson’s pickup. I’d been so anxious to get away from him; I’d forgotten the bag until now. All our precious provisions from the food co-op, gone!
Tears wet my pillow. Our quart money jar is empty and we have no funds to replace the lost food. I should reach for Stacy, should ask him to hold me, but that’s my trouble; I’m never strong enough . . . . and I’m always trying to be stronger than I am.
I remember the buck being swept down the Lester, unable to get its footing, drowning in water only four feet deep. Its wide eyes roll back as it’s pulled under the logjam.
Gift
For three days we hike to the mailbox, hoping the shipment of honeybees Stacy ordered from the Dadant beekeeping catalog last February will be here. The maples are budding now, small red flowers at the tips of each twig. Trillium, shy, white forest trumpets, are heralding spring, and there’s a change in the air, a lift in the light.
Each afternoon, we return from the mailbox empty-handed. We do get a check from the Lakewood Township for $32.45 for overpayment of our land taxes, money we badly need and that cheers us considerably after the loss of our provisions, but still no bees.
Today it’s my turn to walk out to the turnaround at the end of Dahl Road, and I don’t expect to come home with anything, but Barney calls me over to his front porch. “Little critters finally came. The mailman gave ’em to me. I put them in Ila’s work shed.” He’s dressed in worn, clean coveralls, with a white dress shirt torn at the sleeve.
“Here they are.” Barney indicates four containers sitting on the floor by a loom in the neat lean-to attached to the cottage. The boxes have screened sides, and in each buzzing package, a knot of winged insects clusters around another smaller screened box that contains a queen. I stand peering down at them.
“Know what you’re gonna do with them?” he asks. “My grandpap kept bees, but he captured the wild ones.”
“Stacy learned beekeeping from reading books. He’s set up some used hives he bought last summer at the top of the clearing near our little orchard.”
Barney reaches for a white cloth flour sack that hangs over the side of the deep concrete sink, and with his big rough farmer hands holds it open. I pick up the four one-pound boxes and place them gingerly in the bag. The hum of the bees goes up a notch. Though they’re safe in their screened containers, I handle them with care.
“Oh, and don’t forget this.” Barney turns. On a hook on the back of the door is my lost canvas satchel. He hands it down. “Lawrence Tollefson left it here yesterday. It’s yours isn’t it?” I smile, take the bag, and peek in. Everything’s there, the pinto beans and cornmeal, the buckwheat flour and precious jar of peanut butter!
“They came! They finally made it.” I hold out the cloth bag of bees as I enter the cabin and lay my satchel on the kitchen counter. Stacy doesn’t notice the return of our food supplies, he’s so excited about his bees. He jumps up from where he sits on the floor, sharpening the six-foot two-man crosscut saw.
“Are they OK? Do they seem all right?” My lover fusses over them, excited as a boy on Christmas. He extracts each screened box and holds it up to the light.
“They look healthy to me,” I answer. “Pretty vigorous . . . though I don’t know much about bees.”
My companion doesn’t know much either. This will only be his second year as a beekeeper. Last summer, on his first attempt, all his bees mysteriously flew off.
As soon as Stacy has safely established the insects, setting the screened cages into the white wooden boxes and opening the tiny doors so the workers can come out, we go up to the garden to turn over new soil. Though we’d had the brief snow flurry a week ago, the temperature’s now above seventy.
The alder and willow down by the river have opened their yellow blossoms in the warm morning air. Stacy steps out of his cutoffs and pulls off his T-shirt.
When he strips down, I see that over winter he’s lost weight. Sweat beads on his trim, muscular frame. With head down, he slices through the sod while I lean on my hoe and admire his body. Chop. Chop. Chop. He never looks up, just keeps on, like a tireless machine. This is work that he loves and I love it, too, but more moderately.
Inspired, I pull off my jeans and sweater and then take off Mica’s clothes as well. Our little boy runs around naked, a natural nudist, with his hands raised wide, yelling, “Yay! Yippee!” as frisky as a newborn lamb. It looks like so much fun, I join him, skipping and leaping into the air. Winter is over; dark is forgotten.
Summer
CHAPTER 10
Wreckage
Dark night. A sliver of moon in and
out of the clouds, and I’m nervously singing with gusto all the way home through the woods.
Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah! Michael row the boat ashore.
The white blackberry blossoms glow in the low light where I cross through the swamp. Stacy is in St. Paul at a War Resisters meeting, so it’s just Mica and me. We caught a ride home with Rob after I repeated my childbirth class.
This time there were five couples and two single women. Word is getting around and I tried something new. I asked each person to write down on a slip of paper what he or she was most afraid of. This was a radical innovation. Most childbirth teachers ignore discussing pain, fear, or anything negative, figuring women hear enough of that from their mothers and sisters-in-law. I think differently. It’s important to shine a bright light on what haunts us. Shadows are always scarier in the dark.
The fears the participants wrote down were mostly predictable. “I’m afraid of tearing.” “I’m afraid I’ll let my wife down and won’t be a good coach.” “I’m afraid of the sight of blood.” “I’m afraid I can’t take the pain.” “What if there’s a cord around the neck?” “What if the doctors and nurses get mad at me?” I was able to address the concerns, in a matter-of-fact way, one at a time.
The most difficult fear was, “I worry that I won’t be a good parent.” There was no way to tell if the handwriting on the little slip of folded paper was a woman’s or a man’s. I guess we’re all afraid of that. You read books by Dr. Spock or A. S. Neill and you think you have a clue, but do we? Do we really?
Michael row the boat ashore, hal . . . le . . . lu . . . jah!
Ever since seeing the big animal tracks down by the river, I’ve been uneasy in the woods at night. The song gives me courage and warns all porcupine, skunk, bobcat, and bear that I’m passing through the woods and they’d better be wary.
Arms Wide Open Page 6
