Shelter (21 page)

I vividly recalled being about seven or eight and sitting at the dinner table while she drank coffee from her deep china saucer. At some point during dessert, I made some wrong move, and my plate back flipped into my lap. I immediately burst into tears, sure I would be punished. The only shorts I had with me were ruined, splotched purple—and worse, I’d lost my dessert to the linoleum. But Dad and Grandma acted like it was nothing. They merely righted me, dabbed my tears, and gave me a fresh dish of blueberry cobbler. This had been a safe house, where being a child was forgivable.

I stepped outside to the kitchen garden, where Julia had grown what few vegetables thrive here: lettuce, stunted carrots, and green onions. Along the fence, the grapevines Joe once harvested for wine had shriveled. There were still a few volunteer clumps of chives and horseradish creeping to take over, the edges frilled with weeds. I wanted badly to kneel and pull them, knowing Julia
wouldn’t have liked the untidiness, but I feared I wouldn’t be able to hoist myself back to standing. So I pulled what I could, supporting myself on the pickets as I went, needing to do this one last thing.

After I wedged in behind the wheel and began driving away, scenes escorted me out of town. I recalled watching television with Grandma when I was a teen and an ad for feminine deodorant came on. She threw her hands in the air, croaking, “Jesus God in Heaven, what’ll be next, nut spray?!” In the early seventies, when I showed up with my blond hair chemically sprung into an Afro, she barely looked up from the crossword, her one dry comment being, “So, you’re a Negro now?”

One day when I was about seventeen, Dad and I were turning over her garden, and seeing that we were working up thirsts, Julia went out to buy beer. Not wanting to be recognized going into the liquor store at high noon, she’d put on a head scarf and sunglasses—forget that she’d lived in Ely fifty years and every soul knew her pigeon-toed shuffle at fifty yards.

Not long after that, when I was too busy to go along with him to visit Grandma or go to the cabin, Dad began complaining, which wasn’t like him. At first I thought he was just annoyed because he wanted a driver, great road-napper that he was. He’d wanted to take my little niece north one weekend when I wasn’t available, having promised to help a friend move out of town. He canceled the trip altogether, getting huffy.

“What?” I asked, to no response. I was eighteen, had a job, friends, a social life. What did he expect? On the Saturday morning after helping my friend, I woke up confused, halfway across
the state on a strange couch. Suddenly, inexplicably, I needed desperately to go home. I drove as fast as I could.

The house was empty, and when someone with a key came in, I assumed it was Dad, but it was one of my sisters with the news. I sat down hard and Margaret jumped in my lap. She was very much Dad’s pet by then and spoiled rotten despite his alleged disdain for the species.

I kneaded Margaret’s ruff a little too hard as my sister explained (as if one can), but after the first sentence with the unfathomable words in it, I didn’t take in much more and just watched her mouth make shapes. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. My father wasn’t supposed to die at a rummage sale while buying a boat (though much later I would think, well, he
did
enjoy a good rummage sale and was awfully fond of boats).

He’d known he wasn’t well. His heart problem was the same genetic glitch he’d already lost three brothers to, a valve malfunction that these days could be diagnosed in a routine doctor’s visit and fixed using things from a sewing kit.

Indeed, he had flaws beyond the physical. He’d been a bit of a cheapskate, which was forgivable since he’d lived through the Depression and never had a really well-paying job. He had some racist notions that he’d kept to himself until confronting me once for having danced with a black boy, when I got the “not with my daughter” speech. And it was probably best he never much drank because he couldn’t hold his liquor, one example being a Christmas several years after the divorce. Mother was bent over, clearing the post-gift-opening frenzy of wrapping paper and packaging. Dad was seated just behind her, perfectly situated,
and, being in his cups, was unable to resist planting a foot on his ex-wife’s bottom and toppling her headlong into the Christmas mess.

He
was
awfully good to his mother, though.

I still wonder what it must have been like for my grandmother to see four of her five sons die. I couldn’t imagine it, and perhaps my aunts couldn’t either, so to protect her, they kept the news of Dad’s death from her for as long as they could, none eager to be the one to tell her that Matt was gone.

Now they were both gone. Just outside of town, I pulled over to blot my eyes. When I finally looked up, I realized I’d stopped in front of the Mad Pruner’s house. The low yellow ranch house was the landmark that let us know we were almost there, almost to Ely. The house was nearly swallowed from behind by boreal forest, but the front yard was a half acre of manicured lawn with evergreens trimmed into tight topiary, neat as trees glued in a model railroad landscape. The conical spruce and balsams were clipped with precision and stood like sentinels, as if to keep the wilderness at bay, a civilized front daring the wilderness to encroach any further, daring time to march on.

But it does, and the name Stonich has grown scarce. The family history is here, but no family. I was reminded of Edward Gorey’s book
The Dwindling Party,
in which members of a Victorian picnic wander off one by one to go wading, hiking, and bird-watching, and one by one they do not return (drowned, plucked up by birds, conked).
We
dwindle, our name cropping up more often on headstones than in phone books. Across the Range are only a few uncles twice removed and murky third and fourth cousins unknown. As I drove away from Ely, it occurred
to me that a whole branch of the family tree had just snapped. Julia had been the youngest of her siblings, the very last of her line. Her children had either trickled away or died. Driving south, I wasn’t certain
I
would ever be back. At the conclusion of
The Dwindling Party,
the one dazed survivor walks off on the last page. Just like that.

I
f we walk a mile in any direction from the cabin, we know every neighbor we encounter. That’s only about a dozen or so people, but on our city block in Minneapolis, I know maybe two souls, and Jon, who’s lived here twenty years longer, knows only a few more. At The Lake, we are more involved neighbors by choice. We’re all in it together, mostly.

The Allens had the whole lake to themselves until a dozen years ago, when surrounding land was sectioned into parcels by U.S. Steel and sold, and new landowners (us) converged. They’ve taken the intrusion quite graciously. If The Lake had a mayor, Larry would be it: steady on and unflappable, definitely unmovable, and, being here the longest, the most knowledgeable about the place. If Larry doesn’t have the answer to some question, he knows someone who does. We met the day Terry and Susan and I first trudged The Lake looking for the land, a freezing February afternoon spent veering on and off the snowy road searching for the property, getting loster and colder by the minute. We finally found the shore; identified our parcel; declared, “Yup, this will do"; and turned back to tromp to the car a mile away on feet that felt like anvils. We barely got going when we strayed down a spur, thinking it would lead us to the main road. We
knew we were lost again when we came across a cabin, a truck, and Larry.

Larry apparently assumed we were all female. Terry wore his wavy hair long in those days, and between looking coiffed and his stature, he was often mistaken for a homely ma’am. Susan is so petite my former brother-in-law pronounced her the “god-damndest smallest full-growed woman” he’d ever seen and also cautioned the couple against wearing blue or they’d be mistaken for a pair of Smurfs.

Jacketless in the single-digit weather, Larry was taking a beer break from whatever chore he’d been at when we interrupted. He was about the goddamnedest biggest full-growed man
we’d
ever seen, particularly when planted next to Susan. Holding up his can of Bud (the size of a cork in his mitt), he offered us girls a beer, which we only declined because it wasn’t hot. Gathered into his windbreak, we pummeled Larry with questions about The Lake, the area, other neighbors. We were a bit overexcited about the land and jittery with cold, and Terry was coming down with some flu, so we were grateful for Larry’s offer to drive us back to our car. Dropping us off and backing away, he waved, probably relieved, maybe hoping he’d seen the last of us.

He hadn’t. Not long after the snow melted and we finally had the deed to the land and were bona fide neighbors, I was driving the muddy road and got stuck after swerving from one bad dip into a worse one. My cell had no reception to call AAA. When I stopped cursing and whimpering, I could hear a far telltale buzzing, either a chain saw or a wood chipper, someone nearby either stocking their woodpile or getting rid of evidence. I honked
a distress honk, and soon Larry pulled up with his son, Garth, who is even bigger, each arm the size of a toddler.

Larry and Garth gingerly hooked up my bumper, sturdy as a pie tin, and blinked in stony amusement at my headlights, each with its own mini wiper. They had the car unstuck in a minute, and once the chains were dropped and the car was rolling, Larry called out, “Don’t stop,” by which he likely meant, “Please, God, don’t let her stop.”

A few summers later on a hot, windy day, Larry was driving with Garth on the old logging road and for no good reason turned down our driveway, which was odd since Larry’s not the drop-in-on-a-whim sort. At the end of the drive, he could see the cabin was nearly built, and nearly set to burn down. Either Rory or Lars had failed to extinguish a fire in the pit, and it had smoldered its way underground along the roots of a small pine growing smack next to the cabin deck. Larry and Garth commenced putting out the fire with what was available: scraps of slab wood, the heels of their Paul Bunyan boots, and a five-gallon bucket of logger’s caulk. Larry left a note on the only thing around to write on, the back of a
flammable
! sign, scrawling a sooty “Watch your fires!” It was months before we discovered it had been Larry who’d saved the cabin. He hadn’t signed his note, almost as if he didn’t want word of his favor getting back to us.

Directly across the lake are Derek and Amy. Both lived in major cities before moving here, where they now dedicate themselves to a north woods aesthetic with the keenness of reenactors. When not crafting birch-bark canoes, Derek builds small, charming timber-frame cabins called WeeCabins. His outhouse model is listed in the brochure as the WeeWee. Several of these structures
have been commissioned by neighbors so that his alpiney chalets dot the lake like so many cuckoo clocks and cuckoo crappers. On high occasions, Derek dresses like a voyageur in blouse and sash with his long braid beribboned. For weekday casual, he dons a sort of Depression-era twee of henley shirts, red suspenders, and high lace boots, looking just like a CCC recruitment poster.

Some neighbors we see only a few times a season. The Blaines are from out of state, a plastic surgeon–poet and his southern belle wife. As owners of one of only two wells on the lake, they are generous with their water, leaving their hose out for us dry beggars.

Paulie and Lana are the resident foodies. Paulie’s a New York Italian who likes nothing more than to fuss and feed people, and Lana is his intrepid
sous-chef/bottle
washer. They regularly manage multiple-course feasts with no running water, a dorm fridge, and a gas stove the size of an Easy-Bake oven. Every autumn when Paulie cooks for a group of hunters, I like to assume he wears a blaze-orange apron.

Mac and Lu might be called the Sensibles. Mac is a bespectacled geologist seemingly in a constant state of rumination. He built their log cabin himself, no easy feat given the size of the logs, and when we scratch our heads trying to figure out
how,
we all take on Mac’s look of concentration. Lu, a nurse who’s seen it all, seems calmly at the ready to catch something in midair or stitch someone up. Mac’s current mission is to prove our ridge is too environmentally precarious to handle the proposed highway reroute. To that end, he roams the woods with a pickax, trying not to fall into the mining test pits. He’s not the first geologist to crawl around the ridge. Over the decades, visiting professors and students have
done field studies and published their findings in reports that would be downright arousing to other geologists but are an effective sleep aid to the rest of us. The ridge that the highway would cut through is a geological anomaly, created (roughly) when magma came roiling to the surface to meet an ancient underwater sea, where it pillowed into Ely Greenstone, folding itself like egg whites into a soufflé of granite and jasper and a dozen other classifications of rocks and minerals. When the seawater hit the lava and cooled it, narrow drifts of iron leached out, and
voilà,
our ridges.

From Mac we also learn that The Lake already has the highest concentration of copper sediment in the state and that the sulfide runoff from road construction could bring it even higher, as well as possibly tainting the nearby Vermilion watershed.

Because The Lake is designated a natural lake by the DNR, building codes assure that no cabin or structure can be built too close to the shore. When paddling around, one sees only a few docks; to make out cabins, you have to squint inland. Most neighbors have built modest rustic cottages. Our own is modest-modest, smaller than Thoreau’s. I think of him with envy, banging around in his 10 x 15 cabin, dreaming about what I could cram into thirty extra square feet: a reading chair or a chest of drawers, a kitchen sink! And since The Lake is smaller than Walden Pond, no one much noticed it during the nineties and the era of McMansion summer homes, so only one behemoth was built here, The Lodge. The original owners had planned their dream home together, but as such projects go, each phase required more money and time than budgeted, becoming more stressful and out of control so that
before floors were laid, The Lodge had become an albatross and the marriage disintegrated, a sad lesson in excessive square-foot ostentatia.