Back on Earth, my budget was two hundred dollars. I trolled Craigslist again, and patience eventually paid off when I came across a petite, freestanding, 1930s-era three-burner range that had sat rusting in a South Minneapolis basement since Prohibition. It was filthy but adorable on its little bowed legs, with an oven door that opened with a Bakelite knob. The top was a single molded piece of cast iron with simple star-shaped openings for burners. It was only 22 x 17 inches, and under the grime, the enamel was intact, a sort of pinky beige with cream and black accents. It would fit, was perfect, and I could afford it.
While researching how to remove rust and ancient grease, I discovered an old cook’s trick for cleaning skillets. After gussying up in a respirator, goggles, and rubber gloves, I wrapped all the cast-iron parts in ammonia-soaked towels and stowed them in heavy plastic in a lidded galvanized trash can. Overnight, decades of baked-on gunk blistered and molted off like burnt skin. It worked swell on the burner top and dismantled innards, and a wire brush and steel wool got the rest. I rubbed stove blacking onto the cast-iron and gas tubes until they gleamed like licorice. A guy who fixed RV appliances swapped out the natural gas jets with brass propane versions and connections. With heat-resistant glossy enamel, I painted the squat little feet. All the while, women’s names from the thirties sifted through my head. I wouldn’t have consciously anthropomorphized a kitchen appliance and begun to think of her as “Mabel,” but by then we had spent an awful lot of time together.
Mabel fits perfectly into the cabin but has proved a bit temperamental. She cooks awfully hot and might have been more aptly named Amber or Scarlett. Lighting a burner takes some finesse, but I’ve finally nailed the technique of whispering over her gas jets, ever so gently, blowing, “Please light, please, please light.” If her cooktop is touchy, her oven is downright bitchy, and there’s no telling what revenge Mabel might take on a batch of tater tots. The oven knob is on-off, with no temperature indicators or control. The lowest setting—meaning just enough flame so she doesn’t sputter out and kill us by asphyxiation—averages around four hundred degrees. To bake anything all the way through requires rotating and shifting the pan from the top rack to the bottom rack halfway through and cracking the door a few times to lower the temp. Mabel has her good points, acting as an incidental furnace so that baking a coffee cake can heat the cabin for hours. Now we plan on charring cinnamon rolls or biscuits on cold mornings, scorching casseroles on chilly evenings, and baking nothing on warm summer days.
As my Aunt Mary used to insist, and as I try to convince Jon, charcoal in the diet is good for digestion.
Seventeen
If you’re ever wondering if your guy is the guy, save yourself the gnashing and girlfriend advice and kill several birds with one stone and two plane tickets. Travel is the ultimate relationship hazing. You’ll know within hours of landing whether he’s finicky or easy, a control freak or able to roll with it, a wiener or a stand-up guy. If he pines for a burger when served an aromatic tagine or uses the phrase “these people” when referring to locals standing two feet away, ditch him in Fez. A man’s travel persona is more revealing than his truck; only an autopsy says more. A trip is often the deal breaker.
Six months after we met, Jon and I embarked on the ultimate test and found cheap seats for the Bird Flu Tour of Southeast Asia, with an itinerary taking us to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bali, timed to coincide with a record heat wave and the impending avian flu pandemic.
Bangkok was shrill and hot. At each intersection was a belching rally of tuk-tuks, mopeds, and motorcycles with drivers yammering into cell phones and revving their engines, waiting for the green lights as if for checkered flags. The round window in our hotel room ran with condensation so that our view of the city was through a steamy porthole. Options for tourists were shopping, sex shows, or temples.
Hong Kong was gray, crowded, and fascinating. Singapore, just as hot as Bangkok, had an ash white sky and was oddly sterile and quiet—no surprise given that shouting, gum chewing, littering, begging, or public urination can land you in jail or get you publicly caned. Even the food in Singapore seemed timid, as if on its best behavior. In hundred-degree heat, we slogged along a sleepy, scorching beach and stumbled upon the start and endpoint of a triathlon. We watched as swimmers got out of the water to begin the run, the saltwater rivulets on their backs immediately turning to sweat. It was far too hot even to stand in the sun, let alone put one foot solidly ahead of the other.
Not the trip we’d dreamed of but awfully interesting, and by sheer luck, none of our eclectic group of tour mates was unbearable. We were looking forward to the last leg, a long stay in Bali on our own with no tour guide.
Normally just sweltering, Bali was so grossly humid even the locals were complaining and zombie-like. This was the heat of a prison laundry, surreal for anyone coming from a Minnesota February. Our pace was as fast as one can go while wading through knee-high porridge, our brains lightly simmering in our skulls. We lagged just behind ennui and lassitude, not even up for a debate on the precise differences between such words. We communicated like reptiles, blinking slowly at each other with about all the energy we could muster.
Curtains of humidity obscured the views from our beach hotel so that we never did see the much-touted vista of neighboring islands, or even much of the sea. It was too hot to wander anywhere on foot, so one day we hired a driver to take us up into the mountains, at least a few degrees cooler and where there were terraced rice paddies looking vaguely like those in the brochures, just visible through the murk. We got a slice of local culture when we came across a Balinese funeral cortège, no doubt for a victim of the heat.
Only our mornings had any form, and those could have occurred anywhere in Asia in any tourist hotel. We would linger over breakfast on a shaded veranda, bringing books and newspapers along to stretch out the meal, loath to leave a place with crushed ice and overhead fans, knowing that whatever was on our itinerary meant going outside, which meant a mixture of sunscreen and perspiration dripping into our eyes. Bali was a blur of various Holy and Important Sites, but we could hardly say we’d experienced the real Bali. Determined, we set out on our own with no plan, taking a taxi to nowhere with the idea of walking back. We lost track of where “back” was. The streets were so empty under the noonday sun that I realized the poem about mad dogs and Englishmen was a jab at all fools. Anyone sane was home napping. We eventually grew hungry but had spent our last rupiah on the taxi and couldn’t find any cash machines because we were lost outside the tourist grid. We aimed and missed and aimed again in directions we hoped would lead us to our hotel. By then the heat oddly no longer warranted any mention, since 105 degrees and 96 percent humidity defied description, and complaining just took energy. We needed water. The only bright spot was that we didn’t have to pee—didn’t much need to anymore, all bodily fluids just sort of juiced out, wrung from our spongy limbs and places we did not know could sweat, like thumbs and elbows.
Bali is a spiritual place, and the kindly faces of its people reflect their Buddhist leanings and serene dispositions. So when we tried to take a shortcut through an outdoor market, we were shocked to discover that Balinese souvenir hawkers are maybe the most aggressive in touristdom. Deceptively delicate-looking females, aged prepubescent to crone, converged to shrilly and relentlessly badger us to buy pretty this for missy and pretty that for mister, following us and poking useless Chinese-made knickknacks into our personal spaces.
We eventually escaped, made it back to our hotel, and collapsed.
I’d already planned for the evening to be special and made a reservation at a restaurant down the beach. After the day we’d just survived, we deserved it. Once the sun was safely down, I inched into my best dress, pinned up my limp hair, and poked on a pair of earrings. We snailed over to the restaurant for a romantic dinner with tables set out on the sand. Tiki torches lightly flickered in the breeze, waves lapped. Best of all, it was mercifully dark.
The mil
d breeze during wine and appetizers was welcome relief but turned less mild during salad and gained momentum over the main course, stilting conversation when gusts blew napkins or sand into our mouths. Waiters scurried, shoring things up and battening things down and apologizing as if the weather were their fault. Halfway through the seafood, the squall kicked up and fat raindrops drummed the table, prompting a hasty retreat to the dining palapa, though not quick enough to dodge the rain. Dinner had not been the romantic interlude I’d planned. When the rain let up, we bolted through the garden paths, Jon urging me onward through the downpour while the dots on my silk dress dissolved into a pattern resembling sperm. I urged him to slow down since hurrying wasn’t going to get us there any drier, but just as I was about to ask him something important, he bolted again, digging for the room key.
After we dried off and fell into bed to wait for the AC to kick in, I could finally pose the question I’d been rehearsing during the long hours we’d been lost in the heat, the question bumping against my teeth throughout the clunky dinner, the one I’d nearly managed to gurgle out in the garden.
In one day, we had survived all the tests two people can when traveling in lockstep through all manner of exotic discomfort. And we were laughing about it. If we could make it through an afternoon like that, I figured we could face just about anything together. I thought back through my previous relationships—good and bad, long and short, happy and miserable—and through all the advice and warnings and commiserations friends and female relatives had offered in the years spanning my first bra to my first gray hair. Finally, for once, I no longer needed advice.
I nudged Jon. “Want to get married?”
Along with happiness comes the rest of life—sometimes as a shit sandwich and sometimes in letter form.
Dear Ms. Stonich,
As you are likely aware, Minnesota Department of Transportation is in the process of developing a major road project that may result in realigning and reconstructing Highway 169 between S_____ Road and C____Road …
The rest of the letter, bureaucratic glossolalia worded to sound benign, translated roughly to “a road directly through the middle of the highest elevation of your most beautiful acres, which we will be seizing, blasting, bulldozing, and realigning, effectively destroying the market value of your land as well as any sentimental value it might have to you or your loved ones.”
Each word felt like a punch. This was our first official communication from Mn/DOT, even though they and the local task force had been planning this reroute for nearly a decade—close to the number of years I’d been toiling to build and improve our little haven, all the while clueless that the work and time and investment could amount to nothing. The letter closed by saying that come spring, a bulldozer and drilling rig would arrive to crisscross the property to gather mineral samples and tear up the terrain.
At first, no one believed the proposed plan would actually go forward because a child could see it was too illogical. The $22 million budget was intended to improve all fifty miles between Highway 53 and Winton, a few miles east of Ely. But according to this plan, they would blow their entire wad on four miles. I kept asking the question “Who would reroute a four-mile stretch that is statistically less dangerous than the other forty-six?” I kept getting the same answer—a state agency.
When I asked Mn/DOT why we hadn’t been contacted sooner, I was told by the project manager that the agency is under no legal obligation to notify or enlighten affected homeowners beyond posting a small notice in the local paper. You’ve seen these notices, usually at the bottom of the classifieds, in infinitesimal type requiring Mr. Magoo goggles to read.
I’d spent years finding the place, and for eight more I’d worked like an illegal to make the raw land habitable and navigable, building what shelters I could. I’d been lucky enough to find a willing partner to share a future with, and just as we had begun to entertain visions of spending our retirement here, our golden years, we discovered the state had other plans for us, that they have the right of eminent domain and we have jack.
The current highway as it sits is two-thirds of a mile away from the cabin as the crow flies and on the opposite side of a steep ridge of state land that abuts ours. Between here and there are two more high ridges and valleys that muffle highway noise as effectively as waffle foam. To actually see the road, one must hike a rough half hour over our back acres. The line drawn for the new highway cuts close to the cabin, smack on top of the nearest ridge, the very beautiful ridge we would like someday to build a hermitage on, perfect for its isolation and amazing view. The road would bisect the ridge, cutting us off from an undetermined number of our acres. Worst of all, we’d experience wave after wave of noise from traffic that could even be close enough for us to see.
Dreams of sitting on our lovely ridge at sunset morphed into nightmares of a paved speedway with trucks barreling over, growling to downshift. It became impossible to lie in bed without anticipating a future throbbing with the roar of a murder of Harleys and diesel-powered semis. My overwrought imagination conjured the din of a truck pull.
Cabin life suddenly became less than: less than enjoyable, less than hopeful. It was difficult to rouse enthusiasm for the future or find motivation to keep improving the place. Should we cut our losses and sell?
When I broached the subject with Sam, he balked without a tic of hesitation. “No!”
We found out what we could: what avenues we might take, what recourse we might have, what the odds might be. Mostly we sit in stasis, writing editorials, sending letter after letter to state officials and environmental groups, local politicians, and any organization that, like us, might want better answers from Mn/DOT.
It’s long been the local convention that anything bringing money and jobs to the area is sacrosanct, and anyone who questions the means is the enemy. Even locals who think the reroute is ill planned shrug and relent, the general attitude being that you cannot fight what Mn/DOT has wrought, in the same way you cannot take on big mines or big industry. Things have always been this way, and anyone naïve enough to think otherwise is in for a load of heartache.
Some days it seems easier to give it all up rather than go through the anxiety, to just let the ax fall and bulldozers bull. Jon, more rational, suggests we might wait to see just how bad it will be. But I know how bad it will be, and I’ll prepare for battle with everything I have: nothing. It seems inconceivable that our land might become a long ditch, our buildings sold or hauled away, that our picnic site will become a gravel pit. Such possibilities go down like swallowing burrs. Still, we must start considering the worst, that our time here might come to a premature end. And delving deeper into that possibility and getting a little existential, I have to admit that we don’t matter to the land in the way the land matters to us, despite our feelings of stewardship or how long we are here. Whether it’s ten years or sixty, we are only passing through.
During the last four years of this ever-looming threat, there have been brighter moments in life. A year after we met, Jon and I returned to the courtyard restaurant where I’d first gazed upon his dimples. This time with fifty or so friends and relatives, I looked up at my groom.
If I had to compare, I’d say he is a cross between Dudley Do-Right and Jon Stewart, loyal and steadfast, smart and irreverent. Like Stewart, Jon is funny enough to make me nearly pee my pants and handsome enough to make me want to take them off. Like Dudley, he leads with a brave chin and is largely unaware of his own charms. I know that if I were lashed to railroad tracks, he’d be to the rescue in a flash, offering to tie me up someplace more comfortable.
“I do,” I said. Then shouted it just to make sure he could hear me.
Eighteen
FURNISHED LAKESHORE CABIN. THREE ACRES ON GOOD WALLEYE LAKE. NINETY-NINE YEAR LEASE AND BOAT INCLUDED (LEAKS). TWO-SEATER OUTHOUSE. $1,000.00
In 1963, a thousand dollars could buy a cabin. Still, it was a major expense given Dad’s income, but maybe he overextended himself know
ing it would vex our mother, who visited the cabin just once, all the while complaining about the bugginess, the dampness, and the outhouse, mincing around as if there might be teeth in the grass. The rest of the time, she sat in the sun with a beer and the transistor radio, an ashtray balanced on the middle stripe of her swimsuit. When bored, she tempted us closer to her lawn chair with peanuts, then clamped us between her knees and riffled our scalps looking for ticks, drawing hard on her cigarette when she found one, searing them with the lit end so that while we were tick free, we stank of burnt hair and sometimes had little oozing blisters where she’d missed.
After the divorce, Dad rented a mobile home in a creepy trailer park in town. It had a plaid banquette that folded out into a lumpy bed where we slept when visiting, but with the cabin, he had a real place to bring us on weekends. Despite its lack of electricity and running water, it was a huge improvement over the trailer.
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