Shelter (16 page)

The battery-operated chain saw is a purchase I may never live down, now nicknamed “Lady Schick.” If I use all my weight and
an additional backup battery, Lady and I can chaw through a young poplar trunk in six to ten minutes. By the time I squeak
timber!,
my neighbors with their smoking Husqvarnas and Stihls have already cut copses of trees as if mowing stalks of celery.

Looking around at all that needed doing and weighing the difficulties ahead, it’s no wonder I contracted a case of dwindling confidence. I was able to clean up, stain logs, do finishing work—and that was about it.

The rustic, wide, rough plank floors in either building weren’t adequate. They were rustic, all right, with uneven cracks of light that indicated, yes indeed, that’s how all the battalions of bugs and bats were getting in. I cleared both buildings and had Rory come out to install plywood subfloors and four-inch smooth floorboards of tightly grained tamarack, which would, Rory insisted, outlast us all, sounding remarkably like my father. It seemed I was constantly being reminded of the enduring sturdiness of everything in our little compound as it related to the mortality of our weak, flesh-clad frames. It made me wish for a mobile home delivered complete, down to the knobs and cushions, the sort of structure I would live to see crumble.

Rory did a beautiful job, and when it came time to sand and finish, he took off, dragging his generator behind him. Forgetting my own credo that only a fool would tackle their own floor-finishing, I gathered sanding blocks and papers of varying grits, tack cloths, brushes, stain, polyurethane, and a sleeping bag. For two days, I hand sanded on my knees while pine chaff floated in through the screens, a green grit that mingled with the fine wood dust, gunking up the sandpaper and my face mask, effective as a
doily so that I blew Kermit-colored snot. Wishing for a roaring Shop-Vac, I ineffectually skidded my battery-operated Dustbuster around (no wonder bears hate them), resorting to a child’s broom, which only raised more dust.

I slept in the back of the station wagon, which would have been uncomfortable even if my bones weren’t already grousing from crouching and kneeling all day. I spent the third morning staining and varnishing, with only the radio to talk to.

WELY, run by the local Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, airs a Slovene language show, Native news programming, Twins baseball games (sounding identical to those aired in the 1960s), a call-in message board for campers in the BWCA, lost-and-found announcements, want ads, and music programming with everything from bluegrass to waltz to punk. Recorded ads for local businesses are reminiscent of old AM radio spots, often with
da up nort’
accent exaggerated. The
Polka Pal Don
show had aired every Saturday morning since I’d learned to walk, and after Don died, it was revived as the
Old Town Polka Show,
with the same Frankie Yankovic tunes like “Beavers Polka,” dedicated to such folks as Otto and Elsa celebrating their thirty-fifth or for Arno at the nursing home turning ninety-five years young. The only other static-free stations were the CBC and a French-language news station from Ontario, but only WELY sounded like an open phone line from yesteryear, as if someone in the 1960s forgot to put the receiver back on the hook.

I sanded and tacked the floor between coats, bobbing along to mazurkas in the morning and seventies rock in the afternoon, happily unaware of the fumes until I had finished singing
a rousing off-key rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of my lungs and could feel the headache coming like a fist. On my to-buy list I wrote “respirator” and on my wish list added “generator.”

I gained new respect for Rory and Lars for being able to work tirelessly in adverse outdoor conditions, seemingly immune to the heat, mosquitoes, black flies, frostbite, and fatigue. They were tough up-north versions of Norwegian bachelor farmers, sort of lone-wolf bachelor loggers. Their homes are on a large, femalefree chunk of land that’s been in the family for generations, where they can do what they want without anybody breathing down their necks, without the government telling them what they can or cannot do.

Such isolated living seemed sometimes to affect their communication skills. Rory’s hearing was fine; he was only listening impaired when it came to vital instructions regarding specific tasks. Or maybe he was just too busy talking to listen. One day while he was working on the fish house, Terry dropped by, and upon being introduced, Rory launched into long soliloquies, including details of a part-by-part car restoration he was working on, a diatribe on why the economy was tanking (liberals), and a protracted story of a recent malady in which his testicles swelled to the size of cantaloupes.

We spoke at length about a design for the solar shed, which would open from one side to access the batteries and controls, with a covered open space on the opposite side to stack wood. Rory constructed it at the sawmill, and when it was delivered to the site and plunked down, I could only stare, speechless. It was completely ass-backwards, bearing no resemblance to the
plan. It was a 2 x 4-foot closet with a useless porch and door on the wrong side, with nowhere to store wood. I’d requested 6 x 6, which indeed were the dimensions
of the roof.
Along with my new closet, I got an expensive lesson in learning to be explicit, Rory got a check, and I still didn’t have a shed.

Rory had been deeply impressed by a documentary called
Alone in the Wilderness,
by Dick Proenneke, a city fellow who went rogue during his fifties, leaving civilization and the lower forty-eight states for the Alaskan wilds to live far off the grid and, as the title suggests, very much alone. Proenneke’s survival depended largely on being clever, and fortunately he had nothing but time to think stuff up. The trek on foot into his valley was many rugged miles, so he didn’t transport much in the way of weight, maybe an ax blade or a hammerhead, for which he would whittle handles from nearby trees. In fact, he made whatever he could from what wood was standing around, so when it came time to install door latches and hinges on his log cabin, he devised an ingenious hinge mechanism with every part down to the dowel pins carved from heartwood.

Rory was so taken by Dick’s ingenuity he embarked on carving a set of hinges for the fish house door, with an offer to do the same for the outhouse. Once the door was up and swinging, the hinges looked so impressive, Rory boasted up his handiwork with a lifetime guarantee.

Unfortunately, Rory hadn’t noticed that in the film, the hinges were carved from blocks cut against the grain. The hinges held up until one day when I was standing just outside chatting with a neighbor. They split, and the heavy door came off and banged itself forward. I caught most of the weight on my wrists, where
the skin was shorn so that afterward my dually bandaged wrists prompted meaningful looks from strangers who wouldn’t have believed me anyway had I explained that a door walked into me.

Not that I would have held Rory to his guarantee; in the end, Jon and I thought it best to replace the hinges with wrought iron. The scars on my wrist are faded now, a bit like old cancellation stamps over a warranty.

I’d had in mind a quiet refuge in which to work, but the structure meant to be my studio quickly morphed into a kitchen. I do not have a room here but the woodland equivalent, a stump of one’s own, where I’ve penned outhouse instructions and sappy potty haikus for its walls:

Not that anyone spends more time in the outhouse than it takes to read three lines, since wolf spiders are great motivators to make haste, looking more like a wolf than a spider, burly, with hairy legs that can span a beer coaster. I confess I’m not very
Buddhist about the ones found in our sleeping quarters, and their aftermath is rather ghastly.

Each trip here requires the preparation of a camping trip. A few days before heading north, I’ll fill square gallon jugs with water and set them in the freezer. Unlike blocks, bottled ice won’t swamp the food as it melts, and once thawed, the bottles provide additional clean drinking water. Meals are planned in advance, a few cooked and frozen at home—usually soup, chili, or stew—to be eaten on whatever day it thaws. Fish or chicken for the grill is purchased frozen. Various batteries are plugged in to recharge. Duffels are packed with cabin clothes (extra socks, always). The ever-shuttling box of sheets and towels and bags of dry food are packed. Come departure day, the mail is stopped, the water turned off, electronics unplugged, plants doused. The car is jigsaw-jammed with coolers, water jugs, groceries, tools, guitar case, clean bedding, books, laptop, etc. On the road, there are the usual stops: Cloquet for gas and beer and a burger at Gordy’s, Tower for bait and whatever additional groceries are needed. At this point, even the passenger’s footwell is crowded with six-packs, food, or clear plastic bags delicately propped upright between feet, the minnows swimming in a silver funnel formation between ankles.

Upon arrival, we unpack the car, open the buildings, turn on the propane, carry water, dispose of vermin, shoo mouse turds from kitchen surfaces, wash counters, sweep dead moths and bugs from the floors, pitch the screen house, chant a blessing over the solar inverter, liberate bats, brush cobwebs and leaves from the outdoor kitchen, shake the spiders from the vinyl grill cover, then check to see if any have webbed over the gas jets (a potential
propane tragedy), get a few casts in before dinner, hang the hammock, set up the camp chairs, gather wood, cook dinner, eat, boil water, wash dishes, break up kindling, build a fire, crack a beer, make the bed, fall into it.

More often than not, we’re greeted with some unexpected challenge requiring a fix or solution, or two, or three. Last June, appropriately, every tall Juneberry bush along the road was pulled down by bears, making it impassable. In July, we found the exterior of the cabin riddled with splintered holes as if blasted by an M-80. Our first thoughts were vandals or nearsighted hunters. We squinted into the holes, stuck our fingers in, and examined the damage until a distant hammering sent palms to temples. A woodpecker, of course! It had been attacking the small worm-holes in the timbers to get at the ants camped within. So an infestation as well, just our luck and the sort of dual setback that can devour days, requiring multiple trips to the hardware store. First there’s chemical warfare waged against the pesky ants, then the wait for them to succumb, then filling the pecker-hole-ant-tombs with wood putty, then waiting for the putty to dry, then sanding, and finally staining the repaired holes to match the wood (not quite). Weekend kaput.

We’ve had more woodpecker damage over the years. After mulling over such deterrents as razor wire or steel siding, we discovered that things which flutter in the breeze will also keep the buggers from clinging and drilling. As a temporary solution, we tacked lengths of neon marking tape to the eaves like kite tails, and I made a mental list of things to find or make: beaded curtains, paper chains, grass skirts, Tyvek fringe, tinsel, bunting, feathers, Tibetan prayer flags, spoon chimes … Then I remembered the
roll of yellow crime scene tape, much more appropriate. Yes, I finally admitted to Jon, renting
would
be easier and cheaper.

This is a potential workaholic’s paradise. The toil can be all absorbing, which makes it doubly important to set aside time for leisure. And we do, to float aimlessly in the kayak, reading in the hammock strung between giant white pines at water’s edge, sitting in the lounger cocked skyward to stare at the clouds, as good as blank pages.

P
eople build in the middle of the woods for the peace and quiet. Here there is sometimes peace, but never quiet. In fact, the singular most surprising characteristic is the unceasing soundtrack that makes me think there really should be a name, like onomatopoeia, for a
place
that sounds like what it is.

The background choruses change by the hour, day, and season. Spring is a din of every bird auditioning at once. One mid-April dawn at the beginning of the avian mating frenzy, Jon and I were jolted upright in bed by a woodpecker announcing its territory, drumming the metal roof over our heads, loud as a Gatling gun.

There is usually a brief lowering of volume in April before the influx of summer birds when, as in
This Is Spinal Tap,
it goes up to eleven. Migrating species spotted at the feeders and birdbath out my office window in Minneapolis will usually arrive in the north about two weeks later. By June, the volume ramps so that you can barely hear the hummingbirds pip-thwitting overhead while trying to bat each other off the feeders. We’d hopefully hung red syrup feeders in the pines, unsure if this was too far north, but once filled, barely an hour passed before a squadron of ruby-throats blasted in as if shot from a cannon. Voracious, they were intent on draining every drop from the feeders, trying
to guzzle their own weight—and rubies are good sized, as far as hummingbirds go. Once when Sam and I were in a nature preserve in Guatemala a tiny hummingbird took a liking to the bright band on my straw hat, and thinking it was an obscenely large bee, I swatted at it with the fervor of one about to be stung. An appalled onlooker caught my flippering hands and pointed out the creature was a
zunzuncito,
a little
buzz-buzz,
also known as the bee hummingbird; darling, once you know what they are. Their hardier northern cousins are twice their size and twice as bold. We watched from our lawn chairs as they dive-bombed the feeder, and Jon set his video camera on a tripod. We later slowed the speed to watch the comic action. With all their color and dash, the hummingbirds formed an airborne roller derby of Tinkerbells.

People are nearly reverent about the quiet here, the silence I have never heard. On summer nights, belchy frogs complain over the retorts of owls, owls are continuously interrupted by the bat-shitcrazy loons, and beavers applaud the loons with the sparest, most singular, and loud
claps
to the lake surface, reminding me of pre-lobotomy Jack Nicholson cheering on his bedlam of lunatics in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.