Shelter (19 page)

In one day, we had survived all the tests two people can when traveling in lockstep through all manner of exotic discomfort. And we were laughing about it. If we could make it through an afternoon like that, I figured we could face just about anything together. I thought back through my previous relationships—good and bad, long and short, happy and miserable—and through all the advice and warnings and commiserations friends and female relatives had offered in the years spanning my first bra to my first gray hair. Finally, for once, I no longer needed advice.

I nudged Jon. “Want to get married?”

Along with happiness comes the rest of life—sometimes as a shit sandwich and sometimes in letter form.

The rest of the letter, bureaucratic glossolalia worded to sound benign, translated roughly to “a road directly through the middle of the highest elevation of your most beautiful acres, which we will be seizing, blasting, bulldozing, and realigning, effectively destroying the market value of your land as well as any sentimental value it might have to you or your loved ones.”

Each word felt like a punch. This was our first official communication from Mn/DOT, even though they and the local task force had been planning this reroute for nearly a decade—close to the number of years I’d been toiling to build and improve our little haven, all the while clueless that the work and time and investment could amount to nothing. The letter closed by saying that come spring, a bulldozer and drilling rig would arrive to crisscross the property to gather mineral samples and tear up the terrain.

At first, no one believed the proposed plan would actually go forward because a child could see it was too illogical. The $22 million budget was intended to improve all fifty miles between Highway 53 and Winton, a few miles east of Ely. But according to this plan, they would blow their entire wad on four miles. I kept asking the question “Who would reroute a four-mile stretch that is statistically less dangerous than the other forty-six?” I kept getting the same answer—
a state agency.

When I asked Mn/DOT why we hadn’t been contacted sooner, I was told by the project manager that the agency is under no legal obligation to notify or enlighten affected homeowners beyond posting a small notice in the local paper. You’ve seen these notices, usually at the bottom of the classifieds, in infinitesimal type requiring Mr. Magoo goggles to read.

I’d spent years finding the place, and for eight more I’d worked like an illegal to make the raw land habitable and navigable, building what shelters I could. I’d been lucky enough to find a willing partner to share a future with, and just as we had begun to entertain visions of spending our retirement here, our golden years, we discovered the state had other plans for us, that they have the right of eminent domain and we have jack.

The current highway as it sits is two-thirds of a mile away from the cabin as the crow flies and on the opposite side of a steep ridge of state land that abuts ours. Between here and there are two more high ridges and valleys that muffle highway noise as effectively as waffle foam. To actually
see
the road, one must hike a rough half hour over our back acres. The line drawn for the new highway cuts close to the cabin, smack on top of the nearest ridge, the very beautiful ridge we would like someday to build a hermitage on, perfect for its isolation and amazing view. The road would bisect the ridge, cutting us off from an undetermined number of our acres. Worst of all, we’d experience wave after wave of noise from traffic that could even be close enough for us to
see.

Dreams of sitting on our lovely ridge at sunset morphed into nightmares of a paved speedway with trucks barreling over, growling to downshift. It became impossible to lie in bed without anticipating a future throbbing with the roar of a murder of Harleys and diesel-powered semis. My overwrought imagination conjured the din of a truck pull.

Cabin life suddenly became less than: less than enjoyable, less than hopeful. It was difficult to rouse enthusiasm for the future or find motivation to keep improving the place. Should we cut our losses and sell?

When I broached the subject with Sam, he balked without a tic of hesitation. “No!”

We found out what we could: what avenues we might take, what recourse we might have, what the odds might be. Mostly we sit in stasis, writing editorials, sending letter after letter to state officials and environmental groups, local politicians, and any organization that, like us, might want better answers from Mn/DOT.

It’s long been the local convention that anything bringing money and jobs to the area is sacrosanct, and anyone who questions the means is the enemy. Even locals who think the reroute is ill planned shrug and relent, the general attitude being that you cannot fight what Mn/DOT has wrought, in the same way you cannot take on big mines or big industry. Things have always been this way, and anyone naïve enough to think otherwise is in for a load of heartache.

Some days it seems easier to give it all up rather than go through the anxiety, to just let the ax fall and bulldozers bull. Jon, more rational, suggests we might wait to see just how bad it will be. But I
know
how bad it will be, and I’ll prepare for battle with everything I have: nothing. It seems inconceivable that our land might become a long ditch, our buildings sold or hauled away, that our picnic site will become a gravel pit. Such possibilities go down like swallowing burrs. Still, we must start considering the worst, that our time here might come to a premature end. And delving deeper into that possibility and getting a little existential, I have to admit that we don’t matter to the land in the way the land matters to us, despite our feelings of stewardship or how long we are here. Whether it’s ten years or sixty, we are only passing through.

During the last four years of this ever-looming threat, there have been brighter moments in life. A year after we met, Jon and I returned to the courtyard restaurant where I’d first gazed upon his dimples. This time with fifty or so friends and relatives, I looked up at my groom.

If I had to compare, I’d say he is a cross between Dudley Do-Right and Jon Stewart, loyal and steadfast, smart and irreverent. Like Stewart, Jon is funny enough to make me nearly pee my pants and handsome enough to make me want to take them off. Like Dudley, he leads with a brave chin and is largely unaware of his own charms. I know that if I were lashed to railroad tracks, he’d be to the rescue in a flash, offering to tie me up someplace more comfortable.

“I
do,”
I said. Then shouted it just to make sure he could hear me.

F
URNISHED LAKESHORE CABIN. THREE ACRES ON GOOD WALLEYE LAKE. NINETY-NINE YEAR LEASE AND BOAT INCLUDED (LEAKS). TWO-SEATER OUTHOUSE. $1,000.00

In 1963, a thousand dollars could buy a cabin. Still, it was a major expense given Dad’s income, but maybe he overextended himself knowing it would vex our mother, who visited the cabin just once, all the while complaining about the bugginess, the dampness, and the outhouse, mincing around as if there might be teeth in the grass. The rest of the time, she sat in the sun with a beer and the transistor radio, an ashtray balanced on the middle stripe of her swimsuit. When bored, she tempted us closer to her lawn chair with peanuts, then clamped us between her knees and riffled our scalps looking for ticks, drawing hard on her cigarette when she found one, searing them with the lit end so that while we were tick free, we stank of burnt hair and sometimes had little oozing blisters where she’d missed.

After the divorce, Dad rented a mobile home in a creepy trailer park in town. It had a plaid banquette that folded out into a lumpy bed where we slept when visiting, but with the cabin, he had a real place to bring us on weekends. Despite its lack of electricity and running water, it was a huge improvement over the trailer.

Mother never came to the cabin again, and on ensuing Friday nights, while she was sausaging herself into a girdle and applying orange lipstick before heading down the street to Big Stan’s Tavern, we waited on the porch for Dad’s honk. Before the Rambler rolled to a stop, we had its doors open and were piling in with our grocery bags of clothes and pillows.

Fifteen miles out of town, we stopped at the bait shop, where we cruised the rows of aerated tanks full of crappie minnows, fatheads, shiners, chubs, and spottails. The tubs hissed and bubbled, and the minnows swam circles like vortexes of beer can tabs. I stared at the chubs, imagining what sort of monster could swallow one. Surely a fish large enough to eat a chub could be tempted by a swimming child’s toe.

Once the frantic minnows were scooped into the holey metal bucket-within-a-bucket, Dad wedged it behind the driver’s seat to stay upright so that for the duration of the drive it sloshed a fishy smell and splashed our shins at the worst bumps. The styrofoam containers of leeches and worms were so repulsive we didn’t even toy with their potential since dangling one at a sibling would mean touching one. The leech carton went on the shelf behind the backseat, where we could keep an eye on it now and then during the long ride.

If nobody had vomited by the midway point, we stopped for ice cream. Just past the drive-in, there was a lake with a bridge where people fished standing or from folding chairs, having no boats or cabins of their own. Dad never failed to “ho-ho” every time we passed them, with a smug “Guess we know where the poor people are fishing tonight!”

Not like our place was all that. No cars passed by on our narrow dirt road, but if they did, the drivers would probably smirk, “Guess we know where the people with crappy cabins are sleeping tonight!”

Cramped and damp as it was, the cabin was in a lovely setting, on a deep, non-weedy lake, with few neighbors. It was dark and smelled like mice, but we didn’t spend that much time inside, anyway. Mostly we were in the boat, on the dock, in the water, or on the spit of land that stuck out like a tongue as if the opposite shore were a sister. On the spit was a fire ring and circle of lawn chairs that made a safe zone of firelight when the night crept up from behind.

Friday night at The Lake was pizza night. As soon as we arrived, Dad mixed up the dough from a Chef Boyardee box and set it to rise. While it was still light outside, he’d go hang the motor on the boat, turn on the propane, mow the few tufts of grass, or dispose of dead vermin. We cut little rounds of hot dog for pizza topping and battled over who would open the can of sauce, who would pour the sauce over the dough, who would arrange the hot dog rounds, nearly coming to blows over who would open and sprinkle the cheese packet.

With pizza, we each got a little glass of beer. At home, we even had our own tiny steins from our dead grandmother’s china cabinet. My stein was long gone, broken after I’d been refused service. Over my limit of four ounces and incensed, I’m told I’d hurled my empty stein at the wall opposite my high chair. At the cabin, we drank from little Grain Belt glasses with red diamond logos.

We were taught to light the propane lamps with caution so as not to blow up the cabin or ourselves and warned not to poke matches up into the expensive mantles. The mantles were silk, burned to white ash and delicate as lace, making it nearly impossible
not
to poke at them, just to see what would happen. The wooden match had to be lit and ready at the precise second the gas knob was turned and hissing. Any delay and too much gas made a loud
ploop
and a mini explosion inside the glass globe. A match held too close to a mantle without enough gas would scorch it. Always there was the scary
puh puh puh
of pulsing gas and the threat of singed eyebrows. We stood on the table to light the big double globe as night turned the cabin windows into black mirrors. Only when all the mantles were lit and settled like blazing moon drops could we relax.

After supper, frogs cranked to compete with the radio and the staticky stations from Ontario. We played poker on the heavy dining table with the linoleum top, its ornate varnished knees banging ours. Dad dealt cards while lying to us, insisting that he knew Sheriff Matt Dillon and that we were part Indian, making us shrug at each other’s pale towheadedness.