We’ve investigated the cultural significance of the land. Plenty of anecdotal evidence indicates it was once a section of a Native trade route. The narrow line of pin oaks that crosses our property is standing evidence of Native travel, the result of acorns discarded or strewn by Dakota or Anishinaabe moving along the Birch Lake portage trail. The archaeological study that the state contracted was deemed sufficient, though it was nothing more than a random “shovel test,” which entails digging no deeper than a shovel head (good luck). While we know this is an old trade route, we cannot find concrete examples on old survey maps because not all tribal records were meticulously kept.
We’ve pointed out that highway accident statistics don’t quite match up with claims, as if they have been creatively presented to justify the reroute. The push behind the reroute was safety, yet crashes have been more prevalent on other stretches of the road. In the last two years, there have been three fatal crashes, none anywhere nearby.
Bill, the real estate broker who’d pointed me to our land, was critically injured in a crash ten miles down the road. Tragically, the young man who had caused the accident was killed instantly, and a few weeks later, on a very sad and quiet day for Ely, Bill died, too. Reading some of the many tributes and public condolences, I was not surprised to learn just how much goodwill Bill had left in his wake, accrued over decades of indiscriminately imposing habitual kindness and corny jokes on the hundreds who will miss him.
I embarked on a last-ditch effort, playing Harriet the Spy, digging around where I shouldn’t, looking for some key as to why the project was moving forward against reason. I called certain individuals, posing as someone not caring much about the highway but about projects closely aligned to it and dependent on the road going through as planned. It took no great sleuthing. It was just there, practically lying right on the road. In about an hour, I found the connection—two projects entwined and enmeshed with political motivations fueled by the sort of good-old-boy cronyism so typical of rural enclaves. I dug some more, just to make sure I had my facts straight.
It was quite possible that my findings could throw a wrench in a long-planned, long-fraught project already years behind schedule. I was alone in my discovery, and no matter the outcome, just bringing it up would doubtless make enemies of a certain few locals. For years I’d been trying to be part of this place, but what I was about to do could easily sabotage all my efforts and backfire so that, in the end, some might take great pleasure in invoking their eminent domain.
I held on to my information for several months, and only when I was notified that heavy equipment would be dispatched to drill for mineral samples did I put my final attempt into letter form. I started and tossed several drafts. For the first time since the beginning of the battle, a letter went out with my name alone on it. I couldn’t recruit any neighbors, and by this stage, half of them had grown seemingly resigned or even indifferent.
I posted the letter, and now there’s really nothing to do but wait it out along with the rest of summer, with its heat index hovering around ninety most days.
It’s worse in Japan, where a record heat wave has killed over a hundred people since Sam moved there. His dream of living in Tokyo has finally come true. To meet his language requirement at the U of M, he’d honed his Japanese and learned his kanji by flipping flash cards. He worked two jobs in order to save enough money to go, got his TEFL certificate to Teach English as a Foreign Language, and was off.
He and his girlfriend, Leah, have settled on the edge of the city in an apartment that is measured by the number of tatami mats it will hold—six—smaller than the cheapest room at a Motel 6. It has no air conditioning. I’ve seen the place via a Skype tour with Sam as guide, sweat dripping off the end of his nose like a spigot while he showed me the rusted, wobbly balcony rail that their landlord had instructed them Never To Touch. Sam admitted the reason they got the place so cheap was that the building is slated to be torn down. When the tour reached the water heater that may or may not explode, he insisted I shouldn’t worry.
And I don’t want him to worry about the road and the land, so I say very little. When I tell him we’re going north he says, “That sounds awesome,” with real longing in his voice. The place has gotten under his skin. Now that he’s in Japan, he’s come to consider the land a part of “home,” and perhaps on some noisy, frenetic street corner of Shinjuku, it’s occurred to him that the places like our little cabin are sometimes necessary, that time spent in nature can tuck in the frayed ends of the soul.
I occasionally tune in to NHK World TV to see what’s going on in Japan. Many of the Japanese newscasters speak flawless mid-western English with no hint of accent, as if educated in Iowa. You never know what you’ll find on NHK: news, cultural and travel programs, a sumo match, wildly silly talk shows, a cooking demonstration, or total weirdness, such as a game show in which contestants are given potent laxatives, and the one who holds out the longest before dashing to the door of his designated neon toilet cubicle wins a fantastic prize, like a mobile clothes-drying rack to attach to a bike or an eight-foot-high stuffed animal to occupy space in a miniscule apartment.
A few times a week, we e-mail-chat, and Sam reports adventures he and Leah are having, big and small, like going to the Lost in Translation bar in the Tokyo Park Hyatt and blowing their food budget for a day on one shot of Jameson and one non-alcoholic cocktail, just to see the view, just to have been there.
Like any mother I sometimes have to stop myself from advising, not wanting to be too much of a “smother,” which Sam used to call me whenever I got on him about school or his room. He writes to say an informal version of “mother” in Japanese is haha.
Haha. Motherhood has been sort of a laugh in hindsight. In the beginning, I took to it not quite like a duck to water, pregnancy being quite a shock and not something I’d willingly repeat. Sam wasn’t the easiest fetus, and by the time he’d finished growing elbows to work his way out with, we were both a little stunned and weary. Not one female friend or relative had warned me, making me wonder if all mothers instinctively get tight lipped about pregnancy and its grisly climax because if women really knew what they were in for, the species would doubtless screech to a halt. Men may have their secret societies and strange initiations in the basements of the Knights of Columbus, but they’ve got nothing on the cult of Motherhood. No hazing ritual or overweight Shriner squeezing his way out of a toy car has anything on labor and delivery.
Maybe some hormone deficiency had rendered me less maternal than most, and during that first year, not knowing how to act like other mothers, I was probably giving some wrong cues, which Sam responded to by not acting much like other babies, which was good because I hadn’t really expected a baby, somehow. I thought I would give birth to someone to talk to, and while other mothers cooed and baby-talked through the milky haze of breast-feeding, Sam and I were tentative latcher and latchee. Hardly blissed out on any maternal plane, I would shake my head and ask Sam, as if he were twenty, “How weird is this?,” then pick up where I’d left off reading. Sam loved “Shouts & Murmurs” in The New Yorker, I think because my torso so often jiggled with laughter.
He did eventually talk, and not a minute too soon. I’d been feeding him grapes, having at least enough instinct to mash them like bloated ticks so he wouldn’t choke. Each time I gave him one, I repeated, “Grape.” When I picked up the last one in the bowl, Sam grabbed it with an emphatic “Grape!” feeling the shape of the word in his mouth at the same time as the sweetness. A look I hadn’t seen before passed over his features, as if some new gadget in his head powered up at that moment. He said it again, more thoughtfully: “Grape.” He got it. If I say the name of the thing, the one with breasts will give it to me! And from then on he was able to connect a word to a person, place, or thing, and we both sighed a sigh of relief: babyhood was behind us.
When my sisters and I were kids, our mother had the famous Kahlil Gibran poem tacked to the kitchen wall so long, it eventuall
y faded and curled.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
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.
Twenty-one
The 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 s
urprised 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.
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