Shelter (3 page)

The plane lost altitude as if greased, falling toward a copse of spruce poised to perforate small aircraft. Just when I was able to make out cones among the boughs, the plane suddenly scooped up like a fishhook, like an amusement park ride, and once again we faced seamless blue sky.

The aerial map I’d been holding was a sweaty bouquet. I counted my breaths. Mel seemed a little disappointed I hadn’t screamed or fainted, but it did take a moment before I could gather the spit to say, “Let’s do it again!”

He sighed and soberly reminded me we’d been airborne for more than our allotted time and were now low on fuel.

“Low?”
I asked.

Mel grinned. “Not
low
-low, just low.”

With a wing-tip salute to all below, the plane veered south and away.

The finale of our flight was a swing over the land. The Lake looked like a miniature version of all the other lakes: another
shiny claw mark, this one barely a scratch. From above, our acreage was a bumpy collection of poplar and pine. The small clearing near the shore could have been a rag dropped next to a puddle.

From the air it was nothing special. When Mel asked if I wanted to circle it again, I shook my head. We flew west over the big populated lakes, shorelines densely dotted with cabins, some modest, but an alarming number were log mansions with chemically treated lawns spilling down to water’s edge. Over Vermilion we dipped to circle the island that belonged to my grandfather. The house was just visible through the trees. The island belongs to others now, though it still carries our family name.

Things here are slow to change.

We approached landing. Reflected sun under the wings made it seem we were held aloft by light. Nearing the dock where Mel won his famous bet, we disturbed a swimming beaver, hesitant to abandon the length of birch it was towing.

“Damn rodents.” Mel leaned on a control that made the plane roar, scaring the beaver into diving under. He grinned and growled, “Take
that,
ya little bastard!”

Our flight was over.

S
am was born in 1987, just as the Internet was launching, a digital-age baby who has never dialed a rotary telephone or tuned a radio with a knob. Arching a brow in my teenage son’s direction, I realized that he likely could not climb a tree. He’s tech-savvy and result driven, with good hand-eye coordination thanks to the Nintendo I was never, ever going to allow him to have. He squints when outdoors and sneezes through hay-fever season. My own childhood was spent seemingly doing nothing yet doing quite a lot, usually involving a mud puddle or a captive insect, inventing a hundred ways to beat boredom. At Sam’s age, I was outside peeling birch bark to separate it into tissue-thin sheaves, or examining our dog’s scalp to discover that the skin under the dark fur was dark, too, and wondering if I could get away with shaving it. I spent hours dismantling a fish spine or painting my hand with Elmer’s and holding it sunward to dry, the reward being a molted skin of fingerprints and lifelines, a creepy glove to leave hanging on the neighboring cabin’s doorknob.

I grew up in slow motion, with time to focus on small, inconsequential details and do small, inconsequential things: turn a rubber doll’s head inside out to give it a haircut at the source,
track the growth of a mold in a pine-paneled corner of the cabin, raid a gull’s nest, intending to raise the chicks and train them as pets, only to find by the time I’d rowed back to shore that the eggs had smashed in the pocket of my windbreaker.

Sam’s world was a far cry from mine and fanned open before him on the computer or wide-screen TV. Of course he needed more outdoor time to saunter or kick sticks; we all did. Did he know that just two hundred miles north lived actual bears and cougars? His knowledge of animals was limited to the Discovery Channel and our house pets: geriatric Bald Walter and Sam’s own cat, Eyegore, often likened to a well-groomed stoner. Was it too late to make an outdoor kid of him, after twelve years spent mostly indoors? Probably. His gene pool was hardly aswim with athletes or outdoorsy types. His dad wasn’t the ball-tossing, camping type. He was more likely to take Sam out for sushi or to a film fest than fishing or a baseball game. The closest Sam and his dad came to “sport” was stalking each other with increasingly larger Nerf guns—inside. We sent him to canoe camp and fly-fishing camp rather than teach him to paddle or cast ourselves. Withering to think now I was
that
sort of parent.

I secretly cheered Sam’s sports apathy, grateful that I’d never be a hockey mom, that I’d have someone to hang out with at the library or coffee shop, that he would come of age with his own teeth.

As a mom, I hadn’t listed fun and adventure high on my agenda. I’d only been hell-bent on Sam having what I hadn’t had as a child: darling pajamas and stability. I mistook staying with his father for stability, right up until the day Sam asked, “Why be married if it isn’t any fun?” It became apparent that holding
the family together wasn’t working. As parents, we were hardly setting any great example. From where Sam sat, marriage might be two people who reside in the same house when they are both in town, rarely fighting, rarely connecting, merely attempting to stuff the cracks where happiness might be.

After the divorce, the land took on more significance in our lives. I hoped Sam would at least
like
it, and though it was still just raw acreage, it was a tangible, certain something in uncertain times. It would become a haven, eventually a place Sam might bond to and maybe even take his own kids to one day. I had to remind myself that this land was an investment in his
future,
because at twelve, Sam wasn’t eager to retreat to the woods where there were no comforts of home: no computer games, no toilet, not much of anything except a whole lot of nature.

When life has a tendency to crest high and crash down as it did through the first years of single motherhood, what helped more than the antidepressants and therapy was time spent here, where each stick of firewood burned took a little tension with it, each footfall on moss softened the worrisome edges. The yammering of birds drowned out abrasive thoughts. I became more absorbed by the place, saving me from becoming too self-absorbed. In small and not-so-small ways, the land allowed me to envision possibilities, independence, and maybe even happiness. The rhythm here, a metronome of natural sound, regulated me, kept the tempo of
normal
for me.

I reread the accounts of northern life that had influenced me as a girl, wanting to compare the observations in those books to see if their stories struck any new chords. Dad’s old copies of Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover books were long gone, so I
tracked them down secondhand. I’d remembered reading Justine Kerfoot’s quick little columns, which I was able to find conveniently bound into a single volume. I’d related to Helen Hoover’s observatory style in
A Place in the Woods,
writing about the outdoors from inside, on the comfortable side of the window, which would be my preference. I could picture Helen’s messy desk: coffee cup and ashtray and piles of books within reach, the author deep in thought until her husband came in to break the trance, bringing supplies and smelling of wood smoke and cold. I remember thinking that was the most romantic entrance ever. Reading Hoover’s books as an adult, I caught more subtle underlayments. When the Hoovers had settled into their wilderness lives, Helen had been middle aged, like me. Childless, she eventually grew critter-happy, establishing a sort of soup kitchen for the wild, feeding every creature she could entice, not just with precious feed paid for with scant dollars and carried in to their remote site but as often with their own food. This maternal sacrifice for whatever baby-faced animals came romping to her door made me wonder if she wasn’t a bit soft for the brutal realities of the north. I found I related better to her early books, when settling in and acclimating to the north was the challenge, when she seemed less barmy.

Justine Kerfoot seemed to me a fearless doer, a woman of more action than words. There are no frills to Kerfoot’s writing, just portrayals of the nuts and bolts of wilderness life: her own adventures, those of others, and the amicable, necessary bonds between fellow northerners who are in it together. She wrote it more or less as it was, with few adjectives, but in a gossipy, friendly way, leaving the musing and poetry to others.

In the beginning of
The Voyageur’s Highway,
Grace Lee Nute gifts the reader with a description of the north wearing some very nice outfits: “Her flowing garments are forever green, the rich velvet verdure of pine needles. In autumn she pricks out the green background with embroidery of gold here and scarlet there. Winter adds a regal touch, with gleaming diamonds in her hair and ermine billowing from her shoulders.” Nute likens the north to a siren, suggesting that, sure, the place is beautiful, but it can be perilous, a poetic reminder to take care, and wear those life jackets lest the kayaks or canoes be dashed on the rocks.

Sigurd Olson’s works seemed more purposeful and
male,
as if he needed to decode and translate the nature of nature in the way a man in love might try to figure out a woman. Reading his biography, I was not surprised to learn he had a dark side, that the wilderness was often a salve to the bruises of his depressive periods. I was surprised to learn how he’d struggled, and I felt a kinship, though his relationship to the land seemed a true and utterly serious one, as if he heard its very voice in his head, like some spruce whisperer.

In those first stages of ownership, I was turning to dead writers to try to make sense of where I fit in. Some days it felt like nostalgia had trumped sense to land me here. I had a deed bearing my signature on it and a debt in an amount I could have lived on for several years.

And while the hunt for land had been long, once I’d found myself half owner in a truly beautiful place, it all felt very sudden. For a while I merely
owned
it. Since I couldn’t afford to build anything, it was mostly a place to visit and explore. I thought
about camping, though my camping experience is nil and my outdoor skills are lacking, which seems to surprise many, the assumption being that growing up in northern Minnesota entails snowshoeing to school or skijoring through the bush to the trading post. I was never a girl scout, don’t own a buck knife, and cannot fashion a tourniquet. What I’m really best at in the woods is
sitting.

To build a serious campsite would have involved trekking in with axes, saws, shovels, and rakes to clear and level an area that would have required many, many buckets of gravel, also hauled overland. The place was mostly a day-trip site, a place to muck around and picnic on and explore when conditions were right. We’d bought the land having barely stepped a foot on it, only squinting northward from across the lake at the few piney acres fronting the shore, and those had been covered in snow at the time. The bulk of the land might have been wasteland as far as we knew, and indeed some of it proved nearly inaccessible, cut off by ridges, chasms, or bog. The more remote acres revealed their charms slowly as we were able to explore them.

The shoreline is the real draw. The little almost-island is a rather complete place on its own, like the Little Prince’s asteroid. And just like his asteroid, the island is also the size of a house: a rough granite house about thirty feet across, a jam-packed hump that can take half a day to explore if you nose into the leprechaun ecosystem underfoot. One end of the island is domed and loaf-like, split in vertical fissures on one end, slices of rock fanning open like granite rye. The dark wedges of space between the stone are home to the island snake, beetles, worms, bugs with too many legs, and shudder-worthy blind albino whatnots.

Unprotected and windblown, many of the island trees are stunted or twisted, like the contortionist tree that twines down from its rock-bound roots before arching back upward again in tight elbow curves. Its needles are somewhat shorter than average, an adaptation to its nutrient-deprived roots and raw exposure, an example of evolution in action.

We swim and bathe off the east side of the island from a flat shelf of stone that drops off quite quickly. The underwater shelf is always slick with green fairy hair. Getting in is easy—just slip or jump. The coward’s option is to scooch inch by inch down the slope until it drops off, when you sort of slide in like a Jello shot. Jumping or diving is preferable, the lungs seizing only for a moment, a longer moment in autumn or spring.

Getting out is another thing, mostly accomplished by belly-squirming back up over the slimy moss that’s a veritable nursery for infant leeches—harmless, but leeches nonetheless. I bought a heavy, rubber-backed commercial rug like those found in building entrances and rigged it toboggan-fashion around the base of a tree so that, when rolled out over the stone and into the water, it offers some purchase and a leech-free exit. The rug rolls up neatly when not in use, tucked behind the tree it’s tethered to.

For its size, the island has a surprising variety of North American trees, most standing in pairs, as if invited by Noah to a timber mixer: poplar, red pine, white pine, birch, balsam, black spruce, cedar, oak, Juneberry, and a single, tenacious little maple. This is not toothsome soil, yet somehow flora abounds. The dwarfed ferns root themselves into soil-free cracks to live on rainwater; the lichen and mosses survive on dew. Every living
thing on the island seems to struggle in the climate and has grown slightly distorted from the constant tug of the two directions of scarce nutrients: sun and water.

The jewel of the island is easy to miss and small enough to step on: a natural, perfect, white pine bonsai, only six inches tall, though it’s maybe ten, fifty, or a hundred years old. When the Japanese cultivate bonsai by root stunting, contortion, bondage, and routine amputation, they’re simply replicating the environment of our island. Even the needles of the little pine are truncated to a third their normal length. This Gidget tree might be my favorite of all on the land, although I’m very fond of its towering uncle a quarter mile away, a hundred-plus-foot white pine that centers the lakeside acres.