by Amy Thielen
Adding to that, my boyfriend of four or five months was breaking up with me. Or, rather, he wasn’t even bothering with that, but just openly starting to date another girl. (“You’re going to Minnehaha Falls with Kristina? Can I come, too?” I’d asked.)
Having never been so thoroughly dumped before, I was clearly confused, and dramatically heartbroken, for about a week. My pain was more theatrical than real.
The heat didn’t lessen from day to night that summer. Compared to northern lake country, city nights feel strangely indistinguishable from the days. Up north, after the sun dives behind the trees, the wind and the temperature both drop and the waves on the lake flatten to reflective glass. I missed the lake. I missed nights spent sitting on the dock, talking with my friends in low voices because we knew that the water before us would amplify our every sound wave. I missed the Park Rapids sign that announced our population: 2,961. I missed our double-wide Main Street; I missed the sight of the dumb potato plant belching fryer steam, my friends, and even my dad’s dorky announcements of love. I just wanted to drive north and go jump in a lake. It was all I could think of to do.
Mom’s lake cabin had been the first pawn to go in the game that was the divorce—first point, Dad—so I couldn’t go there. Our house in town, where my dad still lived, looked exactly as it had after my mom’s final garage sale. At the end of that day her face had taken on a weird clownlike glee as she watched the effects of their years together march out the door in the hands of new owners. As the house emptied and she began to feel the reality of her fresh start, she grew bolder, ordering my brothers to run back into the house and grab paintings, doodads, all of her seasonal fake-flower arrangements, whatever, and slap a dollar tab of tape on each one of them. My brothers, bouncing to the beat of the adrenaline in this, sprinted in and cheerfully obliged. By the time it was over, she’d sold most of the house’s decorative aspects. She’d basically sucked the woman out of it, leaving him with—not kidding—light squares on the walls where the photos had been and bare mattresses in the rooms, which he’d truly had no idea how to cover. When we came to visit him, you could almost hear him thinking: Where does she keep the part that goes under the sheets, the pad thingy? I was welcome to stay in his forlorn, air-conditioned house in town, but it would be no jump in the lake.
Two weeks in advance of a high school friend’s wedding, I called up my friend Sarah Spangler to ask for an extended visit. Sarah was in the wedding, too, and if I could think of a house that better fit my nostalgic ideal of life in Park Rapids, hers was it. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spangler place was so close to Fish Hook Lake it nearly squatted on its shores. More bookish and environmental and Scandinavian-outdoorsy than my parents, hers filled their house with plants, piles of New Yorker magazines, and a constant soundtrack of classical music. Also unlike my house, theirs lacked a glorious supply of leftovers, and her dad’s environmentalism extended to the furnace, causing Sarah and me to walk around on Saturdays after sleepovers in afghan capes. But still, their house felt like a lakeside refuge. I’d stayed there for a week while we were moving, and maybe they’d let me bunk there again.
I called their house three, four times but couldn’t reach Sarah, who was working two jobs. Each time my call was answered by her older brother, Aaron, and each time our conversation lasted an abnormally long time, especially as I couldn’t recall a single verbal exchange between the two of us. He was four years older; if he knew me at all, it was as one of the cheerleaders he’d cautioned his sister not to hang out with in high school.
Now he was back in town himself. He caught me up on all its changes in the past four years while we’d both been away, both of us digging our hometown with a strange expatriate enthusiasm. Over the phone line I fell hard for Aaron’s conversational prowess. In his orbit the most mundane details, such as the renovation of the town’s Dairy Queen, felt worthy of discussion.
“We got a second traffic light,” he said.
“Over by the Holiday stationstore?”
“No, for some reason they put it by the Pamida.”
This is so weird, I thought. But oddly comfortable.
The fourth time I called, he asked, “Can I ask—why do you keep calling?” I explained my plight, that I wanted to come home but didn’t have any place to stay. “Oh, just come up,” he said.
“Really? You don’t think Sarah would mind? Or your mom?”
“Nah, it’s fine.” In those days teenage friends of the Spangler kids—Matt, Aaron, and Sarah—would often show up at the sliding glass door, knock, and walk right into their ’70s-era gold-and-orange kitchen. That summer I was one of them.
If there was someone I had assumed would never, ever come back to live in Park Rapids, it would have been Aaron. Easily voted “most likely to get out of town” in his senior year, he was one of a handful of local kids who had been turned on to punk music. He lent Sarah mixed tapes of pounding music we’d never heard before: Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Motörhead. He fronted his own band. He studied both the hardcore ethic and its aesthetic—the casual, open-flung shirts, the ratty, gnarled flop of long hair, the loose Converse Chucks—and practiced them devoutly. He didn’t jibe at all with the sonic and cultural testosterone of the Top Gun 1980s, or the conservative town for that matter, and so he sought out his own symbols, a lot earlier than most of us did.
I hold on to a vivid memory from childhood that contains the both of us, an illicit meet between the rebel and the cheerleader if you will, although he still refuses to confirm it.
I was in the ninth grade, co-captain of the boys’ basketball cheerleading squad, sitting for my biannual perm at the Family Hair Affair—a tradition that began for me in kindergarten and mercifully ended my senior year of high school (save that single backslide during college). The stench of the solution was a perfect blend of rot and ammonia and it needled at my eyes. Aaron sat in a chair behind me, in my mirror’s purview. The salon’s owner, Mavis Davis (her glorious married name), and her constant cohort, a six-foot ice blonde with a Brigitte Nielsen crop, stood over Aaron. These ladies loved—they absolutely lived, as my mother would say—to cut it short. Mavis roughly lifted up hunks of Aaron’s heavy dark hair and loudly discussed how they might remove the enormous rat’s nest that was knotted at the back of his neck. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong and they were holding up his hair and talking about how they could remove the image of a spider that had been shaved into his head beneath his long flop of top hair. It’s all a little hazy now, and Aaron swears that he never set foot in the Hair Affair after middle school, but I know without a doubt that I sat in that white vinyl beauty-salon chair suffocating in a stinging cloud of perm-fumes and spied on my future punk husband while he was in consultation with Mavis Davis.
—
After college Aaron went to art school and exited with the intention of being a full-time artist. (“That’s different,” the hometown murmurs.) A few of his sculptures sat in the Spangler yard: One was a small wooden chair surrounded on three sides by wooden-framed windows. I tried out the chair when I first got there. The old wavy glass threw the woods into a squirmy, surreal abstraction, instantly defamiliarizing the landscape. On their porch hung another of his pieces, a large relief carved out of wood, with a glossy blue river flowing through a rough, tar-covered townscape. It was not-pretty in a foreign, intriguing way.
He’d been living in Minneapolis for years, and yet here he was back in town, by day working at a local sawmill, by evening building a house out on his parents’ land by Two Inlets and reposing nightly on the Spangler back porch playing country songs on his guitar. Sarah and I joined him after dinner, curled up in sweatshirts against the cool summer night, drinking spiced tea. Eventually Sarah, a morning person, went to bed, giving us two night owls the tree perch to ourselves.
“So what’s your house like?” I asked.
“It’s just one room, and tall. Kind of like a warehouse live-work space, but in the woods. Full of scavenged wood
and windows I’ve been collecting. I’m still putting up the logs on the inside, straight-cut slabs I bring home from the sawmill.” He smiled. “I don’t really know how to build a house, you know. I’m just making it up as I go.”
It seemed a little doubtful to me that he’d actually moved back to Park Rapids to make art like a hermit, and I told him so.
“It’s Two Inlets! Not the Park Rapids we grew up in.” He crossed his legs into a triangle and lit the ivory bowl of his pipe. “George, the sawyer at the mill, has so much vernacular knowledge. He’s cutting logs on this old saw from 1910 and he judges how to cut a log by how it sounds on the first cut. I’m learning so much basic stuff there, things I feel like I should already know.”
He pulled up his guitar from his feet and all of a sudden tipped his head back and started singing. No tentative porch sing was this. It was more like a solo in a musical, a song woven right into the conversational fabric. I was a little taken aback, not yet accustomed to the way Aaron naturally just breaks into song.
“Last winter I bought a tractor-powered saw-mill…I wanted to make my living cutting boards to sell…but she don’t want to live in the town I grewed up in…so I’ll just take my tractor back…to the auction barn…”
“ ‘Grewed up’! Who sings this song?”
“It’s mine. Old country songs have bad grammar.” He kept the rhythm on his guitar and popped right back in.
“We fellll in love, I bought her a ring, but she found out…that all I had to offer her…was this piece of ground. She says we woooon’t be married now…”
“Shallow lady!” I interrupted.
“I have nothing to call my ooooown…and I…just lost…my tractor to…the auc-tion barn…”
“Oh no, not the girl and the tractor!”
“Listen to the song, you’re like a heckler in a bar,” he said.
“All alone, allllll alone…living on…my daddy’s land…”
And then he tipped his head back so far his eyes shut, and he fell into a soft yodel that grew louder, longer, and ever more woeful.
“Yodeleyheeee-hooo…yodeleyheeeee-hoooooo…yodeleyheeeeeeeee…yodeleyheeeee—EHEEEE-hoooo…”
His voice filled the entire porch, all the way to the corners. It was a vulnerable howl, and I wanted to cry. How could she turn her back on the romance of the guy and his tractor-powered sawmill?
When I slipped into bed beside Sarah that night in her old bedroom, she rolled over and sleepily groaned, “Oh boy, were you up all this time talking to my brother?”
—
Around the time I arrived at the Spangler house, a stray dog started showing up. This surprised no one because odd dogs often came for the summer to join the pack of them that ran the beach, tore around in the woods, and rolled in the dead fish on the shore; they’d gotten three of their dogs that way. I nicknamed this one Schnoz for his outsize lab nose and quipped that directions to their place must be written on the hobo dogs’ bathroom wall. During the day I read books by the shore, my hands buried in Schnoz’s woolly head.
When it came time for me and Sarah to go to our friend’s wedding, Aaron decided to crash it, and he arrived in style. When he stepped out of his low, old-man Buick in cowboy boots and a tight parchment-colored vintage three-piece suit, his shadowy blue eyes found mine and the round gears of his jaw shifted under his suntanned skin. I had never before been so curious about a person.
Within weeks, he was back down in Minneapolis. He and his friend Rob were planning to pilot Rob’s houseboat all the way down the Mississippi, from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Rob’s boat on the river looked more like a little log cabin with a woodstove in the center than a river rider. As at Aaron’s house, its walls were nearly choked with paintings and found objects, and the two of them spent their free time tweaking the interior for their trip. In the meantime, Aaron picked up day work with a stone mason and dated me. After going to art openings and museums and rock shows and his favorite diners, we’d sit on the steps outside my college apartment and talk for hours. One night, after he left, my roommate, the theologian, said, “Holy shit, when the two of you get together you take on this really strong accent.”
The cadence of the talk I grew up with, which I didn’t realize had faded, was coming back.
Aaron and Rob had spent all their time perfecting their houseboat abode and none working on the engine, so when it failed to start up, their Mississippi trip was called off. I was secretly glad. Aaron was staying most nights at my place, anyway. He had been sleeping on a pallet of blankets in his cement-floored warehouse studio space, so giving him a proper bed felt like the most practical thing to do.
The first night we spent together we stayed up in bed until the wee hours, watching the light of dawn creep up the window shades as I lay there in his arms, trading memories of Park Rapids school lunch. We recalled the windowless dungeon that was the middle school’s basement cafeteria and the route there that took us through the dark boiler room, pitted with surprise puddles of water that soaked our white Keds. We joked about the way the gruff lunch ladies, in their housedresses and hairnets, clocked out perfect balls of mashed potatoes onto our plates, the synthetic potato-bud mash as smooth as nylons. These shared fruit-cocktail and hamburger-gravy memories were amusing to him, but the fact that we had grown up eating the same crappy lunches absolutely slayed me. I howled and curled into a fetal position, doubled up with recognition.
In the mornings, we listened to the radio in my bedroom—K1400 AM, an oldies station for seniors that played “The Music of Your Life.” I started wearing a robe. In the mornings, we’d get up, eat basted eggs, and then I’d send him off to work with a tub of bean soup stuffed with three kinds of smoked meat from the family meat market: country sausage, bacon, and the pink bits whittled from a long-simmered hock. He’d look at it with a smile—“This should get me through!”—accustomed as he was to lean turkey sandwiches with sprouts. This gave me a charge, as I was already hanging part of my self-esteem on my cooking, well on my way to becoming a feeder.
I felt timeless with him and blurted this out one day, immediately wishing I could take it back. Shit, I thought. I don’t even know what that means. Mercifully, Aaron understood. He said he felt the same.
—
That Christmas, when I was back in Park Rapids to see my dad, Aaron introduced me to his house. Located four hours from Minneapolis, twenty-five minutes from our hometown, five minutes from the nearest gas station, and a mile down a snaking dirt path, Aaron’s house was so lodged in the woods that it felt like we were traveling back in time.
It was so rough and so wild, even the road was homemade. To make it, Aaron had followed the faint stamped-down line of a deer trail all the way through the eighty-acre piece. After cutting the trees with a chain saw, the small brush with a gas-powered brush cutter, and the high grass with a machete, he was able to heave and bounce down the road in his four-wheel-drive Ford.
But now, when we came to the driveway, he stopped. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Snow’s too deep. We have to walk in.”
“Too deep for the four-wheel-drive?”
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t wearing decent winter boots. City living had made me soft, my footwear unfit for anything but a shoveled sidewalk. I felt hopelessly un-local. The snow swooped across the driveway in an even wave, broken only by the fine string of oval hoof holes left by deer delicately plucking their way across the road. We were doing the same, but indelicately, me tromping in rapidly soaking leather boots, Aaron in proper winter mucks.
“It’s just another half mile,” he said. Halfway there, the cold wind invaded my lungs and I realized I was having an asthma attack.
After stopping three times along the way, we arrived at the end of the road. There, on a hill above a wide, frozen waterway, stood his house. It looked old, like it had been there a long time. He explained how he’d built it, over the course of two years, without any electric power. He’d dug the foundation with a sh
ovel and then started raising the sides: four large log poles on each side, spaced eight feet apart. It was basically a pole shed. He planned the ceiling to be fourteen feet high, so that it would feel lofty inside, even though the footprint was only twenty-four by fourteen feet.
The padlock on the front door was unhitched. Aaron turned the latch and pushed open the nine-foot-tall door, a giant’s entrance into a tiny house. We walked in and were met with the spicy aroma of fresh wood. It was like walking into the inside of a barrel and smelled exactly like the woolen work shirts he wore to the sawmill.
To the left there was a shipman’s alcove kitchen, its shelves holding a few colorful spice jars, boxes of tea, and metal canisters of sugar, flour, and cornmeal. Taking up most of the kitchen was a huge vintage white stove with four wide burners and a lake of shiny white enamel between them, with two identical oval rust holes burned out on each side. A large speckled black kettle sat squarely on one of the burners and on the other, a wire cone-shaped contraption.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That’s my toaster.”
I’d seen this artifact, along with the water kettle, in antiques stores before, but never in action. Here, they made sense. The ceiling in the kitchen was a network of rough beams he’d cut with a hand saw, with open joints and wedges shimmed in the corners to make them as level as he could. Freshly constructed in 1995, the place looked like it could have been built in 1895.
To the right of the entrance, a homemade wooden ladder descended into the room. It led up to a small bedroom, anchored with a rusty metal bed (“pulled from my grandpa’s chicken barn,” Aaron boasted) covered with a patchwork quilt. Beneath the loft sat a vanity, with a shadowy mirror and a chipped enameled washbasin on top. I guessed that that was the bathroom.