Shelter

by Sarah Stonich

  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.

  Twenty

  If 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.

  Stepping in to take the property off the couple’s hands were the Legals, a partnership of lawyer and real estate developer that by definition terrifies those of us protective of our isolation, especially since the Legals already owned multiple parcels and half the shoreline. Should the highway come through to make the current private road directly accessible from highway spurs, it would be eligible for an upgrade to county road, making our parcels then legally subdividable. So far, the Legals don’t appear to be planning any development, only Christian retreat weekends, a sort of “Where would Jesus camp?” camp, replete with revival tents, porta-potties, and baptisms in the weedy shallows.

  Circumstances for some of us have changed. During the dozen years of their marriage, Terry and Susan had worked overtime to maintain balance, but in spite of their regard for each other, things slowly tipped and they are now separated, trying to find a new relationship that works, aiming for friendship. For now, they still share their cabin and hope to find a way for each to stay connected to the place.

  Time has proven that as neighbors we all get on, liberals and Smurfs happily coexisting next to Republicans, and Christians next to atheists. It was only as we’d all gotten to know each other and settled into a community that we’d discovered the Mn/DOT plan, and now we have more than proximity in common, for everyone on The Lake will suffer if the road goes through, if not by confiscation or devaluation of lands, then at least by the noise and increased traffic. Some of us are in rather a tizzy over it while others remain calm, doing the wait-and-see thing.

  I force myself to imagine leaving here, reminding myself of the four things I dislike about the place: two species of insects, one of arachnid, and the climate. I never asked myself if this latitude was best, having sort of forgotten that there are only two seasons, and both can kill you. Spring is merely an extension of winter; summers are jungly green, intense, and muggy; and autumn is entirely too brief, truncated by the long, long subarctic winters that swing in hard and fast with temps that can freeze-dry nostrils in the time it takes to cram on a knitted nose cozy. The record high is 114 degrees and the low is minus 60, a swing of 174 degrees, brutal by any standard but more so when banked against my own optimal range for well-being and sanity: a twenty-five-degree variable between 35 and 60, same as for cut flowers.

  Every few years, a camera crew arrives to wring another story out of the weather, most recently for a CBS Sunday Morning segment called “Cold Wars,” in which the correspondent exaggerates the competition between the triumvirate of towns vying for the title of “Coldest in the Nation”: Embarrass, International Falls, and Tower. Tower holds the official record at -60, recorded in 1996, when Embarrass citizens got robbed after their regulation thermometer broke in mid-plummet at only -52. Readings on their unofficial thermometers went as low as -66. Most Tower citizens would concede or even root for Embarrass because everyone knows it really is colder there, and it wouldn’t be Minnesota nice not to admit it. But to hear the folks in both Embarrass and Tower tell it, International Falls isn’t even a contender and is only referred to as “Ice Box of the Nation” because it owns the legal trademark, and it doesn’t hurt that they’ve got Rocky and Bullwinkle to back them up.

  Anyone would have to wonder, why willingly choose to live in a place where simply going outside can leave a trail of fingertips? And now, during the sloggy end of August, The Lake
grows a green skin and the temps hover in dog-days numbers. My inner barometer fluctuates, and I lose my desire to do or be much of anything, waiting for the break that must surely be coming in some thunderstorm or front roiling in from Saskatchewan.

  Could I leave here? The road has begun to look unstoppable, looming like more bad weather. I’ve already lurched through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief: 1) Denial—There’s no way these people are stupid enough to go through with this!; 2) Anger—Fantasizing freak accidents in which Mn/DOT project managers are tragically diced or julienned; 3) Bargaining—Maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe we’ll get used to the noise, and Mn/DOT will compensate us with enough of a settlement to build a small cabin?; 4) Depression—Can no one see how upsetting this has all been, that I’ve invested blood into this place?; and finally 5) Acceptance—The minute pigs fly.

  My crusade against the road has dragged on to the point that it takes a large file box to house all the documents, maps, letters, address lists, studies, e-mails, editorials, etc. When I open the lid little puffs of defeat waft out. Sometimes we simply allow ourselves to believe that common sense will kick in, that a state agency will have an epiphany on its own (this being the punch line). In the local paper, we’ve been referred to as NIMBYs, an acronym I wasn’t familiar with until I read it in connection with us, and I admit, yes, indeed, Not In My Back Yard when it comes to wrongfully planned $22 million highway reroutes. Should we be asked for easements for wind turbines or a bike trail, I’d offer to break ground with my teeth.

  Through the battle, we have highlighted the environmental impact, the inordinate amount of sulfides in the surface rock of our ridge that, if blasted or ground up to make roadbed, would cause significant runoff. Mn/DOT geologists didn’t seem to find much, and rumor has it they plan to mitigate the issue. Transportation agencies in other states facing this problem have had to go back after completing such road projects and clean up sulfide messes in operations that cost several times the roads themselves. Mn/DOT responded to this information with something akin to shrugs.