by Amy Thielen
Sitting in our lawn chairs, I noticed something diving in and out of the corner of my eye. A rabbit. It sat on drummie haunches at the edge of the woods, perfectly still but for a slow tic in its nose, the luxury of its silky gray fur standing out like a foreign object against the brittle underbrush. I was getting good at spotting incongruent textures amid the foliage—the moist skin of the wild mushrooms, the velvety fur of this rabbit. Proudly, without saying a word to Aaron, I squinted, lifted a stiff arm, pointed straight at the rabbit, and froze, as if I were a pointer dog.
He crept to get his shotgun, came back, and shot the rabbit in the gut. It screamed. He shot it twice more. Three times in total before its chest stopped swelling.
I was accustomed to Aaron taking out the garden marauders—the brazen woodchucks that mercilessly mowed our bean rows at dusk, the porcupines we’d find by the light of the flashlight gnawing flat-faced into the wooden siding of the shed—and didn’t feel any shame about it. They were so guilty. Just a few days previously Aaron had woken me up in the middle of the night and hissed at me to come down from the loft. I stumbled down the ladder in the dark, put on the sweater hanging by the door, and took his outstretched flashlight.
Before we’d officially cleared out a place in it, the forest fluttered dangerously close to the edges of the house. It quivered with creature movement. Our woods didn’t have the stately self-assurance of a graybeard old-growth forest, but instead the scrappy, taunting nature of the truly wild. Skinny poplars swayed perilously in the wind. Branchy, bent-up jack pines leaned on one another for support like old drunks, sometimes for years, before eventually crashing to the dirty forest floor. Our night yard was not necessarily inhospitable to us, but indifferent. I shivered, not from cold, but from ruffled nerves. I felt more unprotected than I ever had. When I shone my light beam onto the compost pile I saw them: two surprised raccoons, their bright eyes glowing in the moonlit food dump, looking as if they’d just been caught shagging. Being half-asleep didn’t make killing raccoons any less disturbing, but I forced myself to buck up. Everyone said that raccoons would find a way into your house if you let them. They had wiggled into our friend Bob’s remote writer’s hermitage while he was away and partied there for months, snacking through his pantry and pissing on every piece of paper and every book they could balance on. Protecting our house and garden like true pioneers was what I thought we were supposed to do.
But now, face-to-face with a rabbit by the light of day, what was supposed to be a simpler task—bagging dinner—was anything but.
“Did you get him?” I whispered.
“I should think so.” We walked over to where the rabbit was lying. It looked so much scrawnier without its twitch. Aaron opened his buck knife. I visualized peeling its fur off at the ankles, as I would turn a sock inside out, and reached out to tug at the fringed tufts near the top of its paws. The toe bones were like hard marbles in a plush case. I recoiled my hand and watched the first of what would be many complications to my throwback fantasy blow away with the breeze.
As we stood there looking at the rabbit’s downy belly hair, I knew I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t skin and gut this creature. The truth felt heavy and inevitable. I was going to waste it. I know what Grandma Dion, and her mom, Great-Grandma Hesch, would have done: They would have jerked the rabbit’s fur down past its furry little head, slit it to reveal its soft innards, let them tumble out and flop onto the ground at the edge of the woods, and cooked the damn thing.
I knew what my brother Marc would say. “Jesus Christ!” he’d blow incredulously. “A venison backstrap, I’d like that, but a jackrabbit? Hang it a day or two for me at least!” Marc, whose palate was as discriminating as mine, wasn’t wrong. Even if I’d had the balls to properly finish the rabbit off, cooking it fresh wouldn’t have been doing it justice.
My experiment in taking my place in a long line of fearless Midwestern women cooks who were possessed of sharp knives, sprawling cut-flower gardens, and big opinions about food was to be a little harder than just knocking off a rabbit. I had the flowers and the big opinions down but hadn’t quite mastered the knife.
13
IF YOU DON’T LOOK YOU DON’T SEE
A thing about Aaron: When he walks into a room, he will choose a hard-backed chair over a cushy upholstered one. He prefers scratchy wool over cotton, even in a robe. He’d take 30 below over 90 degrees above, any day. When he dreams of places he’d like to visit, he doesn’t think of sandy beaches, a hot book, and a cold cerveza with lime. No—even though he lives in rural Minnesota, in the coldest place in the continental United States—he wants to go north. Karelia, Finland. The Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. Northern Canada.
In the summer of 1997, the state of Minnesota gave Aaron an artist’s travel grant for three thousand dollars and the encouragement to indulge in his uncommon kinship with severe northern places. So that August we took off on a road trip straight up into the arterial passageways of rural Saskatchewan. His stated purpose was to take photographs for his carvings and “to drive as far north as was possible.” Mine, less official, was to catalog the local food. Still fascinated with American pioneer women’s diaries, I wondered what regional holdouts I’d find from Canada’s rural immigrant and native groups. We packed a sketchbook each, two suitcases, Aaron’s guitar, and a cooler for road food into his tiny gas-efficient Subaru Justy and drove for hours through what seemed to be the same landscape: the endless plains, flat as a bath mat. During the first two days, I’m afraid I didn’t share his fascination. Trying to disguise my boredom, I stared at the huge map on my lap, studiously doing my job to keep us on course. In about seventy-five miles, I figured, we’d have to make a turn.
“Look out the window!” Aaron pleaded, frustrated that I wasn’t sharing his excitement for the emptiness. “If you don’t look, you won’t see anything.”
As we drove, the pine trees, shaped at first like perfect cones, gradually grew thinner until they were sharpened to bare twigs with round, wiry tufts on top, until they looked like skinny bottle brushes—fancy ones, for the narrowest of glassware. As the trees narrowed, so did the roads.
According to Aaron’s plan, we took roads along the old railroad routes, hitting every little pinprick of a town. Following the main street to the grain elevator to the river, he’d scan the banks for old factory buildings, looking for evidence of the main economic thrust of the place. “See—there are a bunch of town lots there, you can see their square shapes all the way to the end of the block,” he’d say, his finger tracing a sidewalk until the end frayed into a heaved-up pile of bent earth and cement, like a crooked string of teeth after a lifetime of chewing.
Turning the car off the main road toward an abandoned railroad station, he’d clutch the wheel and sit up straighter. “And there’s the mill. Oh, man, at one point this was a big town…Any one of these towns could have become the dominant town, the county seat,” he said, stretching up to see over the bridge we were passing, like a beaver popping its head high out of the water to scout downstream. Then, looking crushed, he said, “They didn’t all make it.”
In addition to invisible lots, old buildings really stoked him up. Crumbling town halls. Main Street storefronts with false facades. Houses with curious additions. Stone-stacked fire halls that had since morphed into cafés. Mason halls, Odd Fellows halls, and Rebekah, the female Odd Fellows halls. These towns looked just like the ones in his carvings, like they’d been booming until some cataclysmic event caused the entire society to take off in an instant, leaving garage doors stuck halfway open and pots of stew steaming on stovetops. It dawned on me that the diluted dream was what he was looking for.
When we passed rare newly built Lions Clubs halls, housed in long khaki-colored sheet-metal buildings with tiny windowless doors, they weren’t beautifully decrepit like the rest, but somehow their bleakness won us over, too. With all that stoic we-don’t-give-a-shit siding (surely lined with git-r-done drywall), they reminded us of the sheet-metal explo
sion in our own town. Even here, on the prairie that rode up into Canada, we found our unsentimental Midwest. Looking through Aaron’s staunchly optimistic, contrarian viewfinder, I found myself falling deeply in love with what he saw: the grandiose, the downtrodden, and the cheaply built alike.
Like in the rural Midwest, pickings were slim for food in the public sphere. Most of it was indistinguishable from what we ate in the Sysco-fed restaurants back home. We found multiple Chinese restaurants, though, and cafés devoted to Native American food, and Ukrainian restaurants. When I peered down into my shallow bowl of pelmeni, shiny and full-bellied and bobbing in butter, they looked like little clams and tasted just as slippery and sweet.
After each town, we reentered the rural countryside. Soon enough, there weren’t two people to rub together, but we talked to nearly everyone we met. The first was Rene Doucette. We were driving into a gray area on the map called the Carrot Valley, and when I looked up, the color in the air was the same as the shading on the map: cement-gray and foggy, even at midmorning. A man was standing next to a horse at his front fence when we pulled up. Only halfway lost, Aaron stuck an arm out of his window.
“Are we on the road to Flin Flon?”
Within minutes of trading weather and geographical banter with Rene, Aaron was exiting the car and following him to his enormous garden. The size of a city lot, Rene’s garden seemed to me to contain a lot more food than a single guy could ever eat. In late August, even with a summer with more daylight hours than ours, his tomato plants were starting to wilt, as if they’d already been threatened with real frost. It looked like he’d already dug all of his potatoes. Rene asked us, “You guys ready for a beer?”
What the hell. We were on vacation (weren’t we?) and also curious to see the interior of one of these houses we were forever passing. So it was that we found ourselves at 10:30 in the morning sitting at Rene Doucette’s kitchen table, drinking tall, watery cans of Canadian beer. It was what skinny, lonely guys like him call their morning coffee.
Hanging above the phone was a shop-equipment-sponsored nudie calendar. The girl’s shiny ass pointed straight into the room, providing its only decoration and giving me the feeling that Rene’s bachelordom had been a longtime situation. He’d originally raised hundreds of heads of cattle, he told us, and the crops to feed them there in the Carrot Valley, the northernmost farming area in all of Saskatchewan. Past that, the taiga—the northern frozen bog, its soil too acidic to grow anything—began in earnest. Rene shrugged as he revealed the real reason for his many rows of vegetables: his was a free community garden. All summer, anyone who wanted to come out could pick. He sent bags of beans and potatoes and squash back with low-income families who drove out from The Pas.
“Those kids do a good job picking those vegetables,” he said, tipping back his can.
Suddenly the phone jangled at top volume, a big black shop model hanging right in front of us on the wall. He looked at us, wide-eyed, and then grabbed it, shouting, “Hello!” He listened for less than two seconds before yelling, “Wrong guy!” and slamming the phone back onto its metal stirrup. It whimpered a final feeble jingle.
“No one ever calls me!” he said, as if it were a threat rather than a statement of fact. Clearly, his solitude had been disturbed. As if he was waking up from a dream in which he’d invited two strangers into his house for a morning beer, he looked at us blankly. I was instantly grateful for having been given the chance to hop into his story. And so our peaceful morning coffee with the crabby, kindhearted, dirty-minded bachelor farmer ended. With handshakes and a salute to him from the car, we were back on the road.
—
We’d just passed a sign for a town called Love, in northwestern Saskatchewan, when the Justy stopped making its usual car noises. It took about a mile for it to wind down like a toy. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Aaron said. “We’re losing power.” He steered it to the side of the road, and we sat for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Aaron got out and lifted the hood, but there was no smoke, no smell, no indication of trouble. The engine, which we’d discover later was fitted with an experimental “brush transmission” of the kind used in motorcycles, suddenly looked very tiny.
We could see a town on the horizon, so we walked the half mile to its main street and found an open café. It was midafternoon and we ordered pie and coffee. I chose raisin. Not the sour cream raisin pie I knew so well, the custard the color of a muddy river floating with cinnamon, this was just plain raisin. When it came, the filling was bruisy-purple, suspended in tart, shiny juice. The toffee-colored crust was stamped with dime-size holes, revealing blistered raisin skins bobbing to the surface. As I ate, pastry flakes fell onto the plate. I paused our current distress to momentarily take note: real pie.
Two weeks into our trip, this full stop was jarring, especially since we had been considering not stopping at all. Our return route had morphed into a vague plan to keep driving to the west into Alberta, and if we made good time, maybe even all the way to San Francisco, just in time for a friend’s wedding. We had a mutual creeping feeling that our cash reserve was dwindling but—as would become a hallmark of our romantic-financial partnership—neither of us could force ourselves to look at the balance.
We batted around the idea of calling our parents but doubted any of them would drive 776 miles up into Saskatchewan to fetch us and then drive the same distance back.
No, we were going to have to try to fix it. We trudged back. The Justy was parked next to a mailbox, and when we reached it, we saw a compact lady with a head of metallic curls standing in her driveway, holding a pitchfork.
“You folks need some help?” she asked, looking at us with a mixture of warmth and reserve.
We stammered out our story, about the car inexplicably dying and how we’d driven from Minnesota up to Flin Flon. We didn’t tell her the reason for our trip through the filament-thin roads of northern Saskatchewan, afraid that an artist’s grant wouldn’t seem very solid to her. An explanation turned out not to be necessary.
“Can we camp here?” asked Aaron, touching the cigar in his pocket, imagining relaxing around our hobo campfire.
She handed me her pitchfork and said, “You two can sleep in the house if you want to help us get this hay back in the barn,” then turned around and started trucking back to the barnyard. The farm’s pettibone had dropped a bale, spilling hay all over the yard, and over the noise of the machinery she pointed to where Aaron could find another pitchfork. With that, we had a place for the night—and, it turned out, for the next ten days.
Ruth Ivanenko (not her real name) operated a three-thousand-acre grain farm, the biggest one run by a woman in all of Saskatchewan. We would soon learn that the minute and a half that she stopped to question us was about as long as she could stand in one spot. She speed-walked all over the farmyard as if motorized, tossing out orders to her hired man, Lee, and to her son, Richard. If we were willing to work, our timing suited her. It was the height of harvest time, when their combine tractors combed the fields all day long and into the night.
That night at the dinner table she cheerfully announced, “The last person who broke down here was Red Skelton, and that was almost twenty years ago! He was just as funny in person.” She said this casually, as if she were about due for a new lonesome traveler.
Good news or bad news—Ruth didn’t linger long on either. Her fork worked her plate with a steady rhythm, and she didn’t look up from it. Her Velcro work shoes, which she briskly ripped off before entering her house, were indicative of her high personal RPM. Over the course of dinner we learned the reason for her efficiency: She’d been running this place for years. Not a month after she and her husband had bought the farm, they learned that her husband had MS.
“He walked across these fields only once, just that first time. After that, he was in a wheelchair. Every morning, until he got too sick, we lifted him into the hay wagon so he could come with us.” Her eyes flashed, shiny, while she smil
ed flatly at me and passed me the bowl of potatoes. After he passed away, Ruth began to buy more land, until she’d expanded to farm all the way to the horizon, and then way beyond.
Her son and Lee were essential to her, of course, but I swallowed thickly to think of the sheer volume, the height of the mountain of work, that she had amassed behind her. On the way inside, I’d noticed the vines of scarlet runner beans contorting around the railings of her porch—a variety known more for being decorative than edible. I pictured her as a younger woman, keeping the garden, raising their kids, doing all the canning, all the cooking, all the farming, and still managing to keep a cut-flower garden and plant decorative beans, just for eye candy. It was a reminder that daily beauty is part of what a farm yields. I felt suddenly lazy, guilty for all the times I slept late in our loft bedroom back home, not inspired enough by the chirping of birds going about the main thrust of their day to get up and begin my own.
By supper’s end Ruth and Lee decided that they’d load the Justy onto a trailer and hook it up to their new work truck, and in the morning Aaron and I would drive it into Prince Albert, forty miles away, to the nearest repair shop. We protested, reluctant to accept that level of generosity. Our hesitation introduced an element of mistrust, and felt more rude than polite, but they understood. It was decided that Aaron and Lee would ride together into Prince Albert in the morning, and Ruth laid out the rest of the terms: We would sleep in her guest bedroom. I would cook the meals while I was there, and when Aaron got back, he would help Richard and a tall Swedish guy named Dean insulate their new potato barn.