Shelter (23 page)

When my sisters and I were kids, our mother had the famous Kahlil Gibran poem tacked to the kitchen wall so long, it eventually faded and curled.

And while I suspect my mother might have interpreted these lines as a sort of disclaimer, I read them differently, preferring the notion of parents being “the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

When people ask if I’m worried or if I miss Sam, I say, “No,” and “Terribly.” I’m glad he’s taken this big step of moving, even if it’s to live in one of the more difficult places in the world for a foreigner to acclimate to. He isn’t so cool he can’t ask for directions or even help, and he has a knack with people and languages. The important thing is that he’s
living,
intensely. He reports they have already made several friends and taken a few trips with them, to go river rafting, to music festivals, or just
out,
which is often an adventure itself, it seems.

And as much as I miss him, I don’t want him to come back anytime soon, though when he does, maybe I’ll finally shake off
the annoying lyrics of “I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.”

I await a response to my letter to the Mn/DOT Ombudsman. As far as the heat, relief will eventually come in September. Slivered between dying summers and looming winters here are the gemlike, fleeting autumns, the ideal weeks when the bugs are dead but the leaves aren’t quite, and it is
cool.
I intend to enjoy the coming months at the cabin, even if they are our last.

T
he physical labor around the cabin never seems much like work. In his trilogy
Into Their Labours,
John Berger chronicles the lives of French peasant families who herd and tend their sheep and cows and pigs, grow their feed, milk them, process the milk into cheese, force-feed the geese, etc., wholly occupied from sunrise until dusk, only to get up and do it again with little variation day to day save the seasons changing. To hear Berger tell it, his neighbors didn’t consider such endeavors as labor but as
life,
one inextricable from the other, each chore simply the next thing to be done after finishing the one before it. The future was the next harvest.

I haven’t a fraction of that sort of wherewithal and no insight into what it might actually be like to live in a truly close relationship to the land, but sometimes after a long day of collecting stones or building stairs, I’m exhausted in a good way, sore, dirty, and pleased by tangible results. It’s not work; it’s accomplishment. And it’s not done for
me,
but for this place. Maybe that’s the difference between labor and a labor of love.

Things around here continue to change, sometimes slowly, sometimes less slowly. Ely was recently voted the “Coolest Small Town in America,” and reactions in town are mixed. Most foresee
a bump in the influx of summer visitors over the next few seasons, with a few more T-shirts and postcards being sold, but that’s about it. Others worry over the prospect of more outsiders moving in, paying high prices for land and cabins, which only causes everyone’s taxes to leap. This one thing, taxes, seems to be the major unifier among all cabin owners, local and not. Our common gripe.

The Ely of the present and that of my youth are forty years apart, and in between there’s been nothing
but
change. Every year, the place is a little less folksy and Range-y. There are more Subarus than pickups on the streets, more Tevas than steel-toe boots, more Filson than Carhartt. These are markers of a place evolving, a place that has tapped out its resources of timber and metals and minerals and now finally shifts focus to acknowledge the surrounding wilderness to be the most valuable and sustainable thing it has going for it, the most natural resource it will ever have.

A new 2,500-acre state park is now in the works for the eastern shore of Lake Vermilion, but only by a close call, barely making it beyond gnashings over the bargaining table between state government and U.S. Steel, who planned to develop it. With Bear Head Lake State Park just down the road, some think we don’t need another park and would rather have the revenue from property taxes that would result from development. But while Bear Head is the RV-friendly type of park with amenities like electric hookups and camper cabins, Lake Vermilion will be more “rustic,” attracting backpackers and campers who want something nearer to a Boundary Waters experience without the hassles of permits and portaging.

Down the road, the town of Tower, which has steadily lost population since the sixties and admittedly suffers a dearth of
charm, is hoping for a comeback with a master plan to revive the town with a condo-retail-restaurant-marina complex. At Dee’s Lounge in Ely, Juri gives me the skinny. “Yuppie-fying the place,” he says, “the whole nine yards aimed at rich 612ers.”

Earl nods in agreement. “It’s a lotta eggs in one basket.”

They both make predictions of what they believe will be the region’s fate. More local kids like their own will go off to college, get too big for their britches, and move on to bigger and better things in larger cities. Ironically, some of them will be replaced with folks who
have
bigger and better things they are willing to give up to move here.

Juri says, “And don’t forget the new wave of those telecommuters—the freelance types who can live just anywhere like here and work there in cyberspace.”

“And retirees. The boomers are coming.” Earl holds up his wristwatch as if they’re on their way. He doesn’t see such trends slackening, the outcome being that in a few years, Ely “will look just like Aspen.”

Those forecasts might be extreme (Aspen it isn’t), but smalltown populations here may well go the way Berger’s French farmers did, with the youth growing up and away from rural life, leaving the old ways and the old people behind in favor of the cities and vastly different new lives. I can relate to those farmers as I can relate to Juri and Earl—we are all losing sons and daughters.

And we have lost old ways as well. Despite my heritage, I for one cannot tailor a dress, make wine or soap, knit a mitten, paint a portrait, or craft much of anything useful. But I have developed an itch to learn stone building. I’d always been charmed by the stone foundations and hearths of the old cabins and resort
cottages we’ve stayed in, and frankly, just being around so much rock, I reason that since it’s what we have the most of, why not do something with it? After wrestling stone into a crooked staircase over the course of several summers, I wanted some real instruction, and after years of threatening to take a stone-building class, I finally scraped up the tuition. Jon, sport that he is, signed on, too.

Besides, the activity would take my mind off the road. “Do something!” was Dad’s mantra when he’d see me sulking, which was wildly annoying at the time but not such bad advice. True enough, the stone-building Incas probably didn’t sit around fretting over how long they would get to hang out in Machu Picchu. They just got up and pushed rocks around, knowing that any minute they could get brained or maybe fall off the green edge and into the jungle below. Supposedly, for every three feet of the Great Wall built one Chinese laborer was killed (or “having tea with the ancestors”). Pious Pilgrims left their legacy of hundreds of miles of rock walls in New England. One look and you can imagine the Puritans in their goofy collars and buckle shoes, harvesting spring crops of rocks they believed were heaved up by God’s frosty wrath.

Point being that in our impermanent and mortal state here on Earth, about the only thing of certainty is stone. To prepare for class, I read manuals on dry stacking along with masonry books as thrilling as their titles, learning a few intriguing terms in the process: “Cheap seducer” is a stone that appears just right for the job, but no matter how many times you pick it up and try, it doesn’t cut it. “Granite kiss” is the mashing of fingertips between stones. “Boulder holder” is not what you think, but a sling allowing two or more people to lift a really heavy rock, a
curious belted contraption of nylon strapping with four handles and hard to imagine in action, like Mormon underwear.

Not drawn to toil by nature, I’ve surprised myself by opting for such physical tasks, to pry up stone to wrangle and lug and stack and hove it and then, maybe, make something of it. I’m fit for my age but not buff, and I’ve never aspired to become stronger until recently, now that terms like “bone density” and “muscle mass” creep into my middle-aged vernacular. If nothing else, stonework might combat the flabby wings where my triceps used to be, what Sam used to refer to as “lunch-lady arm” and tug from behind, knowing it made me insane.

The course took place at a builders’ school in the next county, about halfway between Ely and Lake Superior. Our fellow “stoners” turned out to be lovely people, which was good, since we’d be spending a week together over the course of classes. As soon as work commenced, we split into gender camps as if at a real school. We
shes
skirted around men bent on getting it done or lifting the biggest rock. And while the men worked like men, the women formed more of a collective, with continuous chatter woven around each step of our wall project, learning something of each other’s lives in the process. As my father had observed, women, complex by nature (difficult), have strict criteria that must be met before committing to any relationship, no matter how casual or temporary, and men need only to both own fishing poles. We women also chose to mix our mortar by hand rather than in the grumbling cement mixer. The act was quiet and rhythmic, a bit like stirring giant batches of oatmeal. We experimented using differing measures of water, lime, and mortar until it reached a consistency perfect for mudslinging, the best
way to apply mortar. When mortar is thrown, the impact dissipates air bubbles and helps it get a better suck to the stone. We took great satisfaction in applying our mortar, flinging it by the handfuls.

Drawn to the finer details of finishing work, we took pains with the final stages of our wall, polishing the faces of drying mortar with bent butter knives to make it neater and more water resistant. The men may have been able to build faster, but we could get it done
nicer.

Our second project was more complex, everyone joining up to build a bread oven like those found in wood-fired pizza restaurants. We began by pouring a concrete base, which, after curing overnight, was topped with a skirt of boulders, then filled with gravel. Constructing a dome got interesting, with all of us offering up ideas and nine approaches to one challenge, but we got it done and took the requisite photos of us all with cement dust in our hair clustered around the finished oven.

We were instructed in only “wet” wall building with mortar and rounded rocks, when Jon and I had been hoping to learn some dry-stacking techniques for fissured and faceted rock like greenstone. Back at the land, that’s what we have, an endless supply of really excellent, clean-edged, lead-heavy rock underfoot and at every turn, tumbled over every slope. If we are ever inspired to construct a fortress with parapets and ramparts, all the bits and pieces are here. If nothing else, we are rich in stone. Now that we’ve discovered that stone building isn’t so complicated or difficult, we may be able to learn dry stacking on our own by trial and error. The basics are
very
basic, and in many ways, the endeavor is a matter of instinct and patience, and a lot like parenting in
that if you can forget yourself and let the stone figure out where it best fits without forcing it, you’re on the right track.

My goal is a staircase that would look as if the glacier had just happened to drop stones in a natural, serendipitous cascade. Or maybe some ancient-looking wall. Making anything look natural or effortless is always far from it, and when it is achieved, it’s often not noticed (which is the point, I suppose). The most natural-looking Japanese gardens are engineered with major fuss to make them look spontaneous when indeed there is plenty of artifice, with each tree and reed and boulder placed to look as if it sprouted there but actually positioned to disguise plumbing or fixtures or to encourage drainage.

Missing Sam, I sit in the Como Park tea garden, only the merest whiff of Asia, but a geisha-sized mincing step closer to my son at least in spirit. I sit wondering, as I always do, if he’s getting enough fresh air.

He and Leah have moved from the hot apartment with the deadly railing and Disney stickers on the toilet to one with air conditioning. They still share a refrigerator with another tenant and so must go to another unit when they need milk. They have a travel blog to keep us all informed and entertained, and since time-wise we are fourteen hours in their past, they call it
Hello Yesterday.
They post photos and chronicle adjusting to life as resident aliens, reporting some of the many skit-like instances they live each day, such as trying to communicate to the pharmacy clerk in halting Japanese and pantomiming the need for medication for a yeast infection. I watch for each fresh post, eager to know what they’ve done, had a laugh over, seen, or eaten.