Shelter (6 page)

Since Walter’s burial, two more cats have found their final resting places here, Nutty and Lazzie, longtime companions to Terry and Susan. Those pets also had trees planted for them, but both were cremated, their nuggety bits of bone strewn like cat seeds.

O
nce the road was finished, I could drive to my site and sit rather than break trail to my site and sit. The plateau is situated high on the north side of the lake, a span of needle orange ground with round outcroppings of granite fringe spilling over its rim like beer foam. I balanced a garden bench on a ledge where a front porch might one day be and admired the view.

But one can only sit for so long.

The site was looking untidy. There was nowhere to put the pickaxes and pry bars and loppers, so I bought a heavy Rubbermaid coffin that would at least keep a few things dry and keep blades from rusting. Each trip from home, I brought a few more items so that the clearing slowly filled with birdhouses, hammocks, trash barrels, benches, lawn chairs, crates, water jugs, bird feeders, shovels, rakes, hoes, saws, tarps, everything but the yard gnome. When the clearing began to resemble a yard sale, I saw I could no longer put off building or buying a shed.

I’d noticed an ad in the local paper for sheds and playhouses. An older man, Rory, answered the phone. Rory eagerly talked up the unusual little structures he’d advertised without actually telling me how or what they were made of, just that they were very handsome sheds and “not for everyone,” so I probably wouldn’t
even want one, but maybe I’d like to come out and look anyway. A lot of people, apparently, went out to look. He claimed these were “some of the sturdiest little sheds ever built; you just don’t see ‘em
built
like this anymore.” Rory added that his son could build anything, and only then did I ascertain that the son, Lars, was the man I needed to talk to. Rory said Lars also built small cabins that were, again, probably not for everyone, leaving me to wonder what the hell was wrong with them. Were they geodesic domes? A-frames? Made of pressboard? Yurts?

“Oh, no,” Rory assured me. “These here are built like brick shithouses.”

“They’re brick?”

“Ha! No.”

“So,” I ventured, “then they must be sh—?”

“Ha! Good one.” Rory’s guffaw was a little like Goofy’s. I finally pried it out of him that they were timber, “not timber-frame timber, but timber
log,
but not round log, more like square, and not like those little sheds for sale on roadsides with the fake log siding from Menards, either, but the
real thing.”
It took fifteen more minutes to ascertain that Rory’s son could indeed make me a shed but wasn’t able to come to the phone just then because he was “probly out dragging timber.”

I’d learned from the boys at the Portage that there are up-north euphemisms for nearly every bodily function, sexual pastime, and anatomical feature, from “wedding tackle” for male genitalia to “mud badger” for homosexual. When Rory said “dragging timber,” disturbing images from masturbation to nose-picking flitted through my mind, but Rory assured me Lars was literally dragging timber. It turned out he had a permit to pull
blowdown trees from the Boundary Waters, eighty-foot red and white pine toppled in the ‘99 storm that were now curing where they fell, threatening to become tinder for the mother of all forest fires. Because of the fire threat, temporary exceptions were made to the ban on motorized traffic within the park, and logging equipment was allowed in the few places that could be breached. These logs weren’t just fallen trees; these were prime old-growth timber, a hundred-plus years old, the sort of log that would give a logger a woody.

Rory explained Lars had his own sawmill, that he cut his own timber, milled it, and built his square-log structures from it, reviving the traditional method of dovetailed cornering. He did it all the old way.

“Finnish style?” I asked, suddenly intrigued.

“Swedish, Finnish, whatever you want.”

I said I’d come look, though I probably couldn’t afford what he was describing. The buildings sounded like the type of structures that my father and I had sometimes encountered on our tromps through the countryside while hunting for insulators. Lars’s buildings sounded like old homesteads my father called Finlander farms.

Dad retired when I was a teen and, either bored or just not that imaginative, took to his new hobby like a man possessed, collecting old glass and ceramic insulators from decommissioned electrical poles. Insulators, if you’ve never seen one, are made in a variety of shapes and colors and are utterly useless beyond their original function—too round-bottomed to be flipped and used as ashtrays or pencil holders, and not heavy enough to be bookends or doorstops. Mostly they were just clutter lining the
windowsills, sending colored rays across every surface so that on sunny mornings we sat down to blue and green cornflakes. As an object they’re pretty lame, but then the object wasn’t the object, I eventually realized. The
hunt
for the object and what it entailed held all the appeal—a perfect excuse for Dad to meander the countryside, scavenging ditches and defunct rail beds, sticking his head into abandoned places along washboard dirt roads winding through rural nowhere. I went along for no other reason than that I was learning to drive and could do the least amount of damage on back roads. At worst I might startle a deer while tearing along at fifteen miles per hour.

These areas were so remote I couldn’t fathom why there were even telephone poles in the first place. The answer came in the shells of deserted clapboard houses and barns stove in as if stomped, rock farms where a successful crop of potatoes would have been considered a triumph. Most farms were eventually abandoned because even a bumper crop of Minnesota potatoes wasn’t enough to support a family, and the soil wasn’t fit for much else. Most homesteaders had given in by the forties, done in by the Depression, the climate, futility, or all three. We rarely bothered going into these clapboard houses, for all held the same contents: reeking mattresses, porn, broken glass, and beer cans from every vintage representing every high school class between ‘38 and ‘73, the year sometimes smeared onto the wall in senior feces.

More remote jaunts brought us to the Finnish farms, when Dad would grow suddenly alert the way he would whenever Joan Embery from the San Diego Zoo was on
The Tonight Show
with some terrified primate stuck to her thigh or clutching her khaki boobs. To me, these homesteads were just more crappy old
buildings in high grass mined with glass, boards riddled with nails, and potential for more tetanus shots. Most of the buildings had never been painted and had weathered in shades of gray from driftwood to charcoal. Some still had cedar-shake roofs, usually with saplings or moss growing on them. Others stood like open boxes. We climbed and crawled around in lofts of old barns and houses stripped of everything but their heavy sinks or rusty stoves with birds nesting in the flues. We ducked into windowless sauna buildings with blackened interiors as inviting as any in
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Saunas, Dad informed me, were where most Finn women went to have their babies. Right, I thought, looking around at the hard benches and charred walls, as if you’d leave your bed in a house to come
here
to do
that.
He told me entire families would often sauna together, slapping each other with birch whips, rinsing each other with buckets of melted snow. The thought of naked brothers or even sisters was enough to send Tab rushing back up my throat, but a father—
naked?

Since Dad spoke so little, I tended to listen when he bothered, and he did go on about the construction of these spare old buildings, pointing out the intricately dovetailed corners, describing how they were cut and fit. Most were made of pine, but a few were cedar. Once we found a small shed that looked dainty for its 4 x 4-inch timbers, but Dad determined it was tamarack and said it was dense as hell, assuring me the little building would still be standing long after he and I had rotted in the ground.

He showed me the difference between simple log joinery—full lap and half lap and dovetail notches, or Finnish notches. Simple joinery would suffice, but dovetail or Finnish notches kept the logs from twisting, providing the tensile qualities of full
lap, the flush corners of half lap, and the strength of both. To me it all seemed like just more labor in an already laborious process, but Dad explained that certain cultures at certain latitudes, like the Finns, have a dearth of sunlight and not a whole lot to do all winter except drink or find more ways to make work for themselves.

I mentioned to Rory that I might stop by Lars’s sawmill next time I was in his neighborhood—seventy miles away—to check out his sheds and meet him. I waited twenty-four hours so as not to seem overeager.

The sawmill sat a few miles inland from Lake Superior. Scattered across the lot were sawn planks stacked to dry, a smattering of buildings, and a fence of old cars sunk into the weeds. A big-toothed lab sprouted from nowhere to snarl and slobber on my window, barking until a man came out from a building, also barking, woofing and clapping with sawdust rising from his shoulders with each gesture. I only hoped he was calling the dog.

Lars didn’t look much like a logger. For starters he was a little guy, one of those dark Scandinavians with slightly impish, elfish features, like Bjork. As if to compensate, his gravelly voice was a broad, pitch-perfect match to that of Canadian hip-hopper Buck 65, whose songs portray life at the rural fringes with lyrics that are so much more excellent than his titles “Sick Stew,” “Jaws of Life,” or “Cat Piss.” Lars spoke in the local vernacular of double negatives with a thrift that truncated what few words he spoke. He gave me a tour of the little buildings. There were several outhouses and saunas, solid and hobbity looking, a few with whimsical details and all almost comically overbuilt with eight-and ten-inch-square logs. The joinery was dovetail, with Lars’s
signature flair of a two-inch bump-out and his added finishing touch: a bevel on each facet edge of each log, including the dovetail. In fact, the edges of every piece of wood or fascia board on Lars’s buildings were beveled, which meant that for each single log or board milled, Lars made
twelve additional
bevel cuts. The same was true for every trim board, doorjamb, or shutter, which would have kept Lars busy all winter, surely too busy to become a raging drunk. I asked after the outhouses, which he admitted
might
be for sale, as if he wasn’t sure and would have to check with himself.

There were two larger old homestead buildings Lars had salvaged and reconstructed, each log numbered and marked. These Swede houses, as Lars called them, would have been bulldozed had he not spotted and nabbed them. Apparently many such buildings across the region have been lost over time, many probably never even identified but covered over in siding or, worse, razed and used for garden beds or firewood.

Lars showed me his white pine logs waiting to be milled into 8 x 8-inch and 10 x 10-inch beams, densely grained, with ends revealing almost no space between the growth rings, indicating just how long it took them to reach such great heights. I thought of my flight with Mel, seeing the swaths of these downed giants, most fallen in places far too remote to ever salvage. What Lars and others had gleaned was pitiful in comparison, a handful of matchsticks from a barrel. The notion of something new, something useful arising from the result of devastation, appealed to me. What might have been a natural event for the forest was tragic for canoeists and campers, but in these buildings, the loss would at least come to something—outhouses or saunas that would
stand for longer than it takes to grow another eighty-foot pine. While it would take a few tense years and several forest fires before the all-clear could be sounded in the Boundary Waters, it will take a century for the lost pines to come back.

I’d gone to the sawmill to poke around in sheds I probably couldn’t afford but was surprised when Lars finally named a price for the smallest, plainest structure. They were reasonable, he explained, because there was no middleman. He was the logger, sawyer, architect, and builder. I could practically feel Dad’s breath in my ear. “Now we’re talkin', Sally.”

“Architect” was a stretch, but I was sold, if only to stop Dad from swinging on my earlobe with his tinny mantra of “Do it!” Did it matter that this whole project was beginning to feel steered by desires not quite my own? I do not believe in an afterlife from which the dead harass or heckle us, but I did embark on my quest with my father plainly in mind, spurred by memory, hoping to bridge the missed connection between him and Sam, grandfather and grandson, a generation skipped like a very long pause between heartbeats. Though I was alone in it, I’d set about obtaining a place for us
all,
and I went to work with a vision of the kind of place that my father would have loved and that Sam would hopefully come to love and bond with, a place that would one day be his legacy, whether he wanted it or not.

Several years before, I’d walked around Tower with Sam, showing him the cemetery, the building where my grandfather’s tailor shop once was, and the white house by the creek where Dad and his brothers and sisters were raised. We climbed the steep hill leading away from town on a wooded trail. Sam scooted ahead of me to walk backwards uphill. “Tell me another story about Grandpa.”

I was already hoarse from telling and out of breath. “One more.” I told him about Margaret, the cat I brought home a year or so before Dad died.

Dad took one look at her and said, “No. No way. No cats.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. Margaret was long-haired and gray with a distinct half-white face and white paws. “I’ll bring her back to the animal shelter on the weekend.”

The next day when I got home from my shift at the hardware store, Dad was on the floor, having woven a six-foot sling of rubber bands with a heavy knot of hemp rope attached to its middle, the whole contraption suspended from the arch separating the living room from the dining room. “Watch this.” He rolled to his back and launched the knot to the next room where teeny Margaret was perched on a chair, waiting. When the knot came at her like a wrecking ball, she pounced and dug her needle claws in. Since she weighed only ounces, the bungee action zinged her into the living room and back again—living room, dining room, living room, dining room—clinging as if to a comet hurtling through space. Dad was beside himself.