Shelter (2 page)

On a bitter February day, we drove four hours north and set out on foot over an unplowed road with a photocopied map. We searched for the little lake, close enough to Tower that Dad would have fished it as a boy. The man from the land office had instructed us to follow the road until the lake was visible and to watch for the low shore and the one tree among thousands that had a blue ring and a lot number spray-painted on it. Easier said.

After an hour of walking in single-digit temperatures on legs like pilings, we found the low spot. I took up my binoculars and squinted across the lake to a parcel of rock and pine and not much else. The blue-ringed tree marked a steep hill fronting a forty-some-acre parcel of boreal forest and scrub. Some of the land, according to the map, was under the frozen lake. Just offshore, as if it had tumbled there, was an almost-island with stunted trees, stitched to the land by an area of dry reeds frozen in the sort of sluice mosquitoes prize. This rocky, bleak familiarity was enough to stir the specter of my father, who perched on my shoulder, his hands forming a megaphone to whoop through my woolen earflap as if I were the deaf one, “Heads up, Sally!”

There was the land, exactly as I’d imagined—remote, piney, and on a lake too small for motorboats. It had no driveway, no well, no septic, no power, no
anything
—it was offered
as is.
Raw land. The cost of making it habitable or even accessible would
pile on top of a price that was already more than I’d budgeted for. Somehow I hadn’t thought of such details, of reality.

There wasn’t even a navigable path to it. Even Cabin! had paths.

What had I been thinking? It was clearly too remote, too rugged, and given the climate would be isolated for most months of the year. My instinct was to flee, but as I looked across the ice, I felt gnomish bootheels digging into my clavicle. In the same tone he’d used when claiming that my teeth would eventually straighten themselves out or that in certain countries I might be considered pretty, my father’s voice insisted,
It’s perfect.

I made myself look up the scraggly hill of pine once more and, in a voice not quite my own, muttered, “Sold.”

O
n a dare, bush pilot Mel Toumela once landed his floatplane blindfolded and hung over on a ninety-degree Sunday morning. After gliding to a stop ten feet from his water slip, he jumped out onto the float to accept the stakes: one bent Camel Straight and the last warm Bud from his best friend’s cooler.

Mel passed on this anecdote as if to reassure me, despite my just telling him about my fear of small aircraft. Maybe he was kidding. As he boasted of more derring-do, I wondered when he’d start doing what pilots do pre-flight, like inspect the switches and buttons that run the engine, make sure there’s enough fuel, or check that the bolts bolting the little aircraft together were really bolted.

But we took off with no such precautions, just groundless faith we would return. After all, Mel has flown since he was a teenager, first ferrying passengers to and from remote fishing camps, then, after actually getting his pilot’s license, joining up with search-and-rescue missions. Later he trained to drop chemicals onto wildfires. Mel bought his first plane in his early twenties and now, in semi-retirement, says he only flies when he wants with what passengers he chooses. He nodded at me in such a way
that I should be aware that a ride in his plane was the highest compliment he dished out.

Mel has strayed from the border lakes area only a few times, first to fly for an airline based in Minneapolis, a job he endured for either six months or six weeks—he claims he can’t remember. He says he’d rather skim this northern swath every day than fly across the continent. This is a land he considers more or less
his,
proudly claiming to know the terrain better than he knows his own wife’s backside.

The plan was to fly over the newly purchased acres on a lake too tiny for Mel to land on, just east and south of Lake Vermilion and twenty miles as the crow flies from Ontario. I also wanted to see the blowdown from the 1999 storm that took down whole forests within the park. As we rose far above Mel’s lake, I began to take in the scope and mass of the forest below. Mel has real and historical ties to this land. I have familial ties but share none of his sense of ownership. He’s lived here all his life and earned his wings around the time I was a toddler. As a child, I spent summers here, oblivious to anything beyond my sticky reach. My teenaged visits were spent belly-up on a swimming raft, sunglasses smudged with Coppertone and headphones thumping Fleetwood Mac or the Boss to drown out any natural sound. But on the day of my flight with Mel, I
needed
to become connected, suffering a case of buyer’s remorse after signing a loan agreement for a tract of remote, roadless land when I’d only intended to buy a little cabin. The previous year had been intense and exhausting. I was facing a divorce and single parenthood, and somehow during all that, I decided to throw myself at a long-term project requiring more money than I had
and perhaps more energy than I could spare. The land was going to be a labor of love, except suddenly I wasn’t feeling the love. As we gained altitude, I needed every assurance I’d done the right thing, was landing in the right place.

As if reading my thoughts, Mel, a font of malapropisms, piped up, “You know that saying, you can’t see the forest for the timber? It’s the truest thing; you can’t see a place proper ‘til you’re far enough away from it. And I don’t mean just from a height.” He shook his head. “After I saw what I did of the world, I realized it don’t get any better than this right here.” Mel winked. “Hell, I’d be happy to die in this plane right now with my cap on.”

I inhaled most of the air in the small compartment. Surely he hadn’t intended to use the words
die
and
plane
in the same sentence?

As we skirted the no-fly zone, I could make out the pattern of the terrain and the gouges left by great glaciers: clawed wounds that wept to their brims to form countless lakes and ponds; silky scars of creeks wedged diagonally between ledges of granite, pale tamarack bogs and pine. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area was so named in 1958, an improvement over its dull designation as a National Roadless Primitive Area. In 1978, the Wilderness Act established regulations much as they are today, making the Boundary Waters almost completely free of motorized boats, land vehicles, and man-made structures. The recent addition of a second
W
makes it BWCAW—
W
for “wilderness,” in case it’s not obvious. Most just call it “the Boundary Waters.” From the vantage point of over a thousand feet, it comprises a piney, million-acre forest spreading in all directions, at
one glance primeval, awe-inspiring, and a little terrifying. As we flew, I recalled another instance of awe from a great height. Years ago, on the windy observation deck of a Manhattan skyscraper I clung to the railing while being lashed by my own hair and took in the endless stain of urban America, the best and worst of civilization: man and machine, commerce and power, all churning in the grids of chockablock architecture on streets of unceasing movement. To a midwesterner, the density was choking. Noise pummeled from every direction, constant enough to seem part of the air. Suddenly I was merely a dot of humanity, just one of hundreds of thousands like those below in the streets, just another nano-particle with arms and legs suddenly needing to vomit.

Looking out from Mel’s little plane, struggling to get my bearings in a corresponding remoteness, I questioned my significance again and once again came up short. I concentrated on the view: more water than land, lakes connected by rills and rivers, many originating in Minnesota but narrowing to a close in Ontario, glittering threads that baste the two countries together, American waters flowing north above the Laurentian Divide to feed over five hundred lakes of Quetico Provincial Park. The Boundary Waters has two thousand lakes, and Mel pointed to some, ticking off the names of a few, which left me puzzling over how they ended up being called Ash Dick, Swollen Ankle, Squirm, Calamity, or Meat. Earlier, Mel had tapped over a map, showing me Sarah Lake, crowing, “There, there’s your own. If that one don’t suit you, there’s another somewhere west of here but without the
h.”

I imagine the thrill my father would have had to see this from the air. In the thirties, he’d canoed and portaged these lakes as a
wilderness guide. While guiding is no easy job now with Kevlar canoes and freeze-dried meals, back then it had to have been a back-breaking hump. The canoes were wood and canvas and dreaded for their weight. Dad was five foot seven and a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, yet he would have toted heavy canvas tents, food preserved in steel cans, and oak folding cots. He and his mates would have dragged it all overland on rough paths that make current-day portages seem like light rail. Somewhere in the family archives is a photo of him posing next to waist-high tonnage of camp gear, tan faced and bright eyed, with khakis tucked into knee-high, Mountie-style boots. He is smiling at something beyond the camera, looking happy, at home, and utterly exhausted.

Dad had flown during WWII as an officer in the army air force, a navigator on bombing missions with targets in the Asian Pacific. I know very little about his war years except that he was based in New Guinea, where his unit hired local aboriginals, paying them nickels a day to clean and cook and do their laundry, a brief stint of luxury Dad often fondly recalled when folding his boxers on our dining room table. He didn’t talk about the war, and I don’t think he ever flew again afterward; whether intentionally or not, I can’t know. Looking down over the green wilds he once paddled, I imagined he might have made an exception to see his old stomping grounds from the air.

Mel banked the plane toward the area where the storm blew down old-growth pine over 140,000 acres. I took photographs as we skimmed islands and broad hillsides of flattened timber, tinder for potential firestorms. As far as we could squint, the landscape looked like sculpted shag strewn with toothpicks. For
the first time during our flight, Mel had nothing to say. The devastation made me think of bombed cathedrals.

After we swept back over spared portions of forest, Mel’s mood lightened, and he began rattling off regional lore in his singsong Minnesota accent, saying “yaaa” for yes and “dose” for those, dialog from
Fargo
at double speed. A favorite anecdote concerned the 1968 Olympic hockey team, comprised of Minnesota and Massachusetts boys who could barely understand one another for their conflicting accents. A few were confused enough to ask why, if this was the U.S. team, did they have teammates from foreign countries?

Then he told the story about the bear that broke into his house, ate a pack of cigarettes, and drank most of a twelve-pack of Pabst. When Mel’s wife came home from book club, she heard snoring and Leno in the living room as usual and went to bed. After she and Mel were both roused by a clatter, they interrupted the bear just as he was finishing up a pound of ARCO coffee. Looking around at the mess, Mel’s wife picked up the closest thing, a Dustbuster, and turned it on the bear, yelling, “I already have a husband!” The coffee and the fright were enough to loosen the bear’s considerable bowels so that, as it fled, it left a wake of rank stew textured with undigested Parliament filters.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“Bears are afraid of Dustbusters? Goddamn right they are.”

With exaggeration thick as pine pitch, Mel told more stories, and I skeptically jotted down his “facts.” Later, when I double-checked, I found him fairly accurate, although the leading cause of death among the fur-trading voyageurs was
not
constipation, as he insisted.

Mel said something about swans, but my life vest had ridden up to dislodge my headset. I nodded, thinking he would show me some. He added something else, but each word was wrapped in static. Mel gave me a thumbs-up and we banked heavenward, a slow roller coaster climb, steep enough to press my belly button spineward. I idly examined the underside of a single low cloud, wondering if that was our destination, if the swans were above it, though surely we were too high for birds? Once I fumbled my headset back into place, I pressed my microphone button to ask, but the plane suddenly roared. We swooped in a sudden but graceful arc. The sky disappeared as we tipped below the horizon, and I was jolted forward, my armpits creased by harness straps. Mel didn’t mean swans; he meant
swan dive,
though our trajectory wasn’t very swanlike, more like a hawk aiming for the world’s last mouse. I clamped my mouth and squinted, trying to keep my eyes and Cheerios in place. As we sped toward jagged rock and pine, I understood that the little plane would barely make a pinprick on the earth after the crash, barely a ripple should we hit water. The earth heals quickly here; brush grows over charred soil, swamps suck debris deep, dark waters draw wet curtains over whatever fuselages sink.

Our remains might never be found. I looked to Mel, who would share my fate as fish food or spruce mulch, but he only grinned. I reminded myself he was very much in control of his plane, a man who, while a risk taker of his own boasting, would never, ever endanger a passenger, though he might set out to scare the crap out of one.

I tried to cross my arms over the bulk of my vest, suspecting I wasn’t the first passenger to be hazed in such a manner. Alert
with adrenaline, everything was sharp-edged and clear. Not all that far below, I thought I could make out a loon’s floating nest.

Gavia Immer,
the common loon, Minnesota’s mascot plastered on everything from mugs to garage door murals, embroidered on oven mitts, stuffed as plush toys, and printed on millions of lottery tickets like the one in my pocket, sure to be a winner once I’d splatted to my death. No one ever points out that the loon is possibly the most vicious state bird in the nation. It cannibalizes other waterfowl by spearing upward from the depths, its favored prey being a kabob of baby mallard. In spite of its maniacal laugh and
Redrum
-eyed, razor-beaked, devil-duck appearance, the loon is loved.