Читать книгу Shelter - Sarah Stonich - Страница 10

Sam was born in 1987, just as the Internet was launching, a digital-age baby who has never dialed a rotary telephone or tuned a radio with a knob. Arching a brow in my teenage son’s direction, I realized that he likely could not climb a tree. He’s tech-savvy and result driven, with good hand-eye coordination thanks to the Nintendo I was never, ever going to allow him to have. He squints when outdoors and sneezes through hay-fever season. My own childhood was spent seemingly doing nothing yet doing quite a lot, usually involving a mud puddle or a captive insect, inventing a hundred ways to beat boredom. At Sam’s age, I was outside peeling birch bark to separate it into tissue-thin sheaves, or examining our dog’s scalp to discover that the skin under the dark fur was dark, too, and wondering if I could get away with shaving it. I spent hours dismantling a fish spine or painting my hand with Elmer’s and holding it sunward to dry, the reward being a molted skin of fingerprints and lifelines, a creepy glove to leave hanging on the neighboring cabin’s doorknob.

I grew up in slow motion, with time to focus on small, inconsequential details and do small, inconsequential things: turn a rubber doll’s head inside out to give it a haircut at the source, track the growth of a mold in a pine-paneled corner of the cabin, raid a gull’s nest, intending to raise the chicks and train them as pets, only to find by the time I’d rowed back to shore that the eggs had smashed in the pocket of my windbreaker.

Sam’s world was a far cry from mine and fanned open before him on the computer or wide-screen TV. Of course he needed more outdoor time to saunter or kick sticks; we all did. Did he know that just two hundred miles north lived actual bears and cougars? His knowledge of animals was limited to the Discovery Channel and our house pets: geriatric Bald Walter and Sam’s own cat, Eyegore, often likened to a well-groomed stoner. Was it too late to make an outdoor kid of him, after twelve years spent mostly indoors? Probably. His gene pool was hardly aswim with athletes or outdoorsy types. His dad wasn’t the ball-tossing, camping type. He was more likely to take Sam out for sushi or to a film fest than fishing or a baseball game. The closest Sam and his dad came to “sport” was stalking each other with increasingly larger Nerf guns—inside. We sent him to canoe camp and fly-fishing camp rather than teach him to paddle or cast ourselves. Withering to think now I was that sort of parent.

I secretly cheered Sam’s sports apathy, grateful that I’d never be a hockey mom, that I’d have someone to hang out with at the library or coffee shop, that he would come of age with his own teeth.

As a mom, I hadn’t listed fun and adventure high on my agenda. I’d only been hell-bent on Sam having what I hadn’t had as a child: darling pajamas and stability. I mistook staying with his father for stability, right up until the day Sam asked, “Why be married if it isn’t any fun?” It became apparent that holding the family together wasn’t working. As parents, we were hardly setting any great example. From where Sam sat, marriage might be two people who reside in the same house when they are both in town, rarely fighting, rarely connecting, merely attempting to stuff the cracks where happiness might be.

After the divorce, the land took on more significance in our lives. I hoped Sam would at least like it, and though it was still just raw acreage, it was a tangible, certain something in uncertain times. It would become a haven, eventually a place Sam might bond to and maybe even take his own kids to one day. I had to remind myself that this land was an investment in his future, because at twelve, Sam wasn’t eager to retreat to the woods where there were no comforts of home: no computer games, no toilet, not much of anything except a whole lot of nature.

When life has a tendency to crest high and crash down as it did through the first years of single motherhood, what helped more than the antidepressants and therapy was time spent here, where each stick of firewood burned took a little tension with it, each footfall on moss softened the worrisome edges. The yammering of birds drowned out abrasive thoughts. I became more absorbed by the place, saving me from becoming too self-absorbed. In small and not-so-small ways, the land allowed me to envision possibilities, independence, and maybe even happiness. The rhythm here, a metronome of natural sound, regulated me, kept the tempo of normal for me.

I reread the accounts of northern life that had influenced me as a girl, wanting to compare the observations in those books to see if their stories struck any new chords. Dad’s old copies of Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover books were long gone, so I tracked them down secondhand. I’d remembered reading Justine Kerfoot’s quick little columns, which I was able to find conveniently bound into a single volume. I’d related to Helen Hoover’s observatory style in A Place in the Woods, writing about the outdoors from inside, on the comfortable side of the window, which would be my preference. I could picture Helen’s messy desk: coffee cup and ashtray and piles of books within reach, the author deep in thought until her husband came in to break the trance, bringing supplies and smelling of wood smoke and cold. I remember thinking that was the most romantic entrance ever. Reading Hoover’s books as an adult, I caught more subtle underlayments. When the Hoovers had settled into their wilderness lives, Helen had been middle aged, like me. Childless, she eventually grew critter-happy, establishing a sort of soup kitchen for the wild, feeding every creature she could entice, not just with precious feed paid for with scant dollars and carried in to their remote site but as often with their own food. This maternal sacrifice for whatever baby-faced animals came romping to her door made me wonder if she wasn’t a bit soft for the brutal realities of the north. I found I related better to her early books, when settling in and acclimating to the north was the challenge, when she seemed less barmy.

Justine Kerfoot seemed to me a fearless doer, a woman of more action than words. There are no frills to Kerfoot’s writing, just portrayals of the nuts and bolts of wilderness life: her own adventures, those of others, and the amicable, necessary bonds between fellow northerners who are in it together. She wrote it more or less as it was, with few adjectives, but in a gossipy, friendly way, leaving the musing and poetry to others.

In the beginning of The Voyageur’s Highway, Grace Lee Nute gifts the reader with a description of the north wearing some very nice outfits: “Her flowing garments are forever green, the rich velvet verdure of pine needles. In autumn she pricks out the green background with embroidery of gold here and scarlet there. Winter adds a regal touch, with gleaming diamonds in her hair and ermine billowing from her shoulders.” Nute likens the north to a siren, suggesting that, sure, the place is beautiful, but it can be perilous, a poetic reminder to take care, and wear those life jackets lest the kayaks or canoes be dashed on the rocks.

Sigurd Olson’s works seemed more purposeful and male, as if he needed to decode and translate the nature of nature in the way a man in love might try to figure out a woman. Reading his biography, I was not surprised to learn he had a dark side, that the wilderness was often a salve to the bruises of his depressive periods. I was surprised to learn how he’d struggled, and I felt a kinship, though his relationship to the land seemed a true and utterly serious one, as if he heard its very voice in his head, like some spruce whisperer.

In those first stages of ownership, I was turning to dead writers to try to make sense of where I fit in. Some days it felt like nostalgia had trumped sense to land me here. I had a deed bearing my signature on it and a debt in an amount I could have lived on for several years.

And while the hunt for land had been long, once I’d found myself half owner in a truly beautiful place, it all felt very sudden. For a while I merely owned it. Since I couldn’t afford to build anything, it was mostly a place to visit and explore. I thought about camping, though my camping experience is nil and my outdoor skills are lacking, which seems to surprise many, the assumption being that growing up in northern Minnesota entails snowshoeing to school or skijoring through the bush to the trading post. I was never a girl scout, don’t own a buck knife, and cannot fashion a tourniquet. What I’m really best at in the woods is sitting.

To build a serious campsite would have involved trekking in with axes, saws, shovels, and rakes to clear and level an area that would have required many, many buckets of gravel, also hauled overland. The place was mostly a day-trip site, a place to muck around and picnic on and explore when conditions were right. We’d bought the land having barely stepped a foot on it, only squinting northward from across the lake at the few piney acres fronting the shore, and those had been covered in snow at the time. The bulk of the land might have been wasteland as far as we knew, and indeed some of it proved nearly inaccessible, cut off by ridges, chasms, or bog. The more remote acres revealed their charms slowly as we were able to explore them.

The shoreline is the real draw. The little almost-island is a rather complete place on its own, like the Little Prince’s asteroid. And just like his asteroid, the island is also the size of a house: a rough granite house about thirty feet across, a jam-packed hump that can take half a day to explore if you nose into the leprechaun ecosystem underfoot. One end of the island is domed and loaf-like, split in vertical fissures on one end, slices of rock fanning open like granite rye. The dark wedges of space between the stone are home to the island snake, beetles, worms, bugs with too many legs, and shudder-worthy blind albino whatnots.

Unprotected and windblown, many of the island trees are stunted or twisted, like the contortionist tree that twines down from its rock-bound roots before arching back upward again in tight elbow curves. Its needles are somewhat shorter than average, an adaptation to its nutrient-deprived roots and raw exposure, an example of evolution in action.

We swim and bathe off the east side of the island from a flat shelf of stone that drops off quite quickly. The underwater shelf is always slick with green fairy hair. Getting in is easy—just slip or jump. The coward’s option is to scooch inch by inch down the slope until it drops off, when you sort of slide in like a Jello shot. Jumping or diving is preferable, the lungs seizing only for a moment, a longer moment in autumn or spring.

Getting out is another thing, mostly accomplished by belly-squirming back up over the slimy moss that’s a veritable nursery for infant leeches—harmless, but leeches nonetheless. I bought a heavy, rubber-backed commercial rug like those found in building entrances and rigged it toboggan-fashion around the base of a tree so that, when rolled out over the stone and into the water, it offers some purchase and a leech-free exit. The rug rolls up neatly when not in use, tucked behind the tree it’s tethered to.

For its size, the island has a surprising variety of North American trees, most standing in pairs, as if invited by Noah to a timber mixer: poplar, red pine, white pine, birch, balsam, black spruce, cedar, oak, Juneberry, and a single, tenacious little maple. This is not toothsome soil, yet somehow flora abounds. The dwarfed ferns root themselves into soil-free cracks to live on rainwater; the lichen and mosses survive on dew. Every living thing on the island seems to struggle in the climate and has grown slightly distorted from the constant tug of the two directions of scarce nutrients: sun and water.

The jewel of the island is easy to miss and small enough to step on: a natural, perfect, white pine bonsai, only six inches tall, though it’s maybe ten, fifty, or a hundred years old. When the Japanese cultivate bonsai by root stunting, contortion, bondage, and routine amputation, they’re simply replicating the environment of our island. Even the needles of the little pine are truncated to a third their normal length. This Gidget tree might be my favorite of all on the land, although I’m very fond of its towering uncle a quarter mile away, a hundred-plus-foot white pine that centers the lakeside acres.

Between the island and the shore is a swath of reeds and mud and water, its depth dependent on the lake level, which depends on how clogged the culvert at the west end of the lake is, which depends on how busy the beavers have been. You can walk between the island and shore in rubber boots, but there are a few surprise spots where you’d regret not having hip waders.

From the piney plateau above, the whole of the island isn’t entirely visible through the foliage. Now and then I’ll catch glimpses of the blue kayak or Sam sitting on the island with his feet in the water and a book in hand, moments surpassing my best, most hopeful visions for this place.

Paralleling our shoreline midway between building sites is another piney area, steep edged and tough to reach, cut off from approach by a cliff, which is too bad, for with its canopy pine, ledge rock, and view it would be an ideal building site. Below the site hammocks a valley of poplar and birch, a favorite of the beavers, with many chewed tree trunks strewn helter-skelter in their wakes.

Beaver are not beloved here, with most people considering them for what they are, America’s largest rodent. Besides man, beavers are the only mammal able to significantly alter their environment and are just as careless and wasteful as we are. A single beaver can shear up to seventeen hundred trees a year—tens of thousands of board feet of lumber—consuming only the leaves and smallest twigs, abandoning the trunks to rot where they fall. Beavers also mess with lake levels. It’s not exactly legal to eradicate beaver, making us yearn for the days of the fur trade, when trap-happy voyageurs could rid an entire lake of them tout de suite. According to the DNR, trapping fishers, pine marten, and fox all have seasons in Minnesota. You can kill a bobcat, even bag a badger if you can find one, as if there are extra. You can trap a beaver, but it is widely known that you cannot shoot a beaver, and it is widely ignored when they are shot. To the mirth of the local DNR staff, one of our more sympathetic neighbors (who will never live it down) called to inquire if there might be a beaver relocation project.

After the spring snowmelt and the winning date of the ice-out contest passed, we waited for the mud to crust over, finally able to tromp areas beyond the old logging road that cuts diagonally through our acres, roughly separating them into sections: the lake side, comprising about a fifth of the total land, and the back forty, lovely but rugged. Over the steep ridge from the beavered-out valley is a moody cedar bog, a place I find darkly handsome, not quite sinister, but mysterious like Colin Farrell or Don on Mad Men. The cedar bog was once home to the only human resident we know of. Bog Man lived here during the Elvis era by our best estimation, but by the time we arrived, his shack was long gone, his possessions hauled away or sunk under the cover of moss. Left behind were his bedsprings, scraps of metal, parts of an old stove, and more bottles than an off sale. Bog Man’s choice of building site—dank, dark, and spongy—didn’t make much sense until our resident geologist mentioned there was likely a spring nearby. And though we can’t locate it, we know it’s there, for even during the warmest, driest weeks of summer, the water between the cedar roots has movement and is clear and cool. We don’t know who Bog Man was, or whether he’d owned the land or just squatted, whether his shack was a year-round home or just his seasonal pied-à-terre.

We were a family drawn to bogs. During Sam’s phase of being obsessed with all things medieval, he inhabited an imaginary kingdom that included a bog called Fetid Stew. Sir Sam and the Knights of the Formica Table all had one enemy in common: problems of the sort only a six-year-old could think up. Someone in the kingdom had been bequeathed a wish, and since the recipient wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver, that adult had wished the river running through the Kingdom of Barns be transformated from water into chocolate malt! Great—until everyone had their fill, got tummy aches, and came down from their sugar highs only to realize that the fish would snuffocate because malt can’t translate through gills, horses couldn’t be watered, and crops couldn’t be irritated. Sam, along with Sir Batty (stuffed bat and sleeping companion, tragically kidnapped during a car trip a few years later), was one of the bravest knights, unafraid of the dark. Sam and Sir Batty put their noggins together and came up with a plan. They would divert the river into the bog! And so the bog became a repository for All Bad Things, where the evil troll lived, and since bog = stinky, wet, and yucky, it was where one was sent for punishment. Bandits who stole Princess Jennifer’s wand were banished to Fetid Stew, a plague of rogue pterodactyls were captured and sunk in it, and so on. Bogs in general got an undeserved bad rap until we began visiting a nature preserve that had a real bog. The good bog had marsh birds with chopstick legs, bog rosemary, and spongy peat under an undulating shag of billiard green moss. There was a boardwalk on which to lay and watch the pitcher plants drink. We changed our tune then about the lowly bog, Sam admitting bravely, “I could do a time-out here.”

And here we had our very own bog. Nothing as grand, but mossy just the same. The bog partially wraps the base of the cliff backing the plateau, where stones covered in nappy moss have tumbled down into the shade, making navigation a slippery endeavor, where hybrid rubber boots with golf cleats would be the ticket. From the bog, there are three directions to go: west, north, and south. South is a low spit of land and one of the few places on the lake where it’s easy to land a canoe because the water is shallow with a gravelly bottom. The little promontory there has a fire pit, much used over the decades by trespassing beer lovers leaving all vintages of cans, many with old-country names like Schlitz, Blatz, and Pabst and one rusted, barely legible Old Bohemian.

These days the promontory has two melon-colored Adirondack chairs and a red canoe and could be a page from a tourism brochure. The path from the promontory leads to a steep hill of deciduous hardwoods, black spruce, and balsam. The path levels out at the hill’s rocky apex, where Terry and Susan had chosen their building site, high above the westernmost shore. Facing straight east, they have the long view, making The Lake seem larger than it is.

Conditions aren’t often ideal for exploring. Winter’s not really an option since snow restricts any movement beyond the plowed logging road. While someone more adventuresome might strap on snowshoes, there are steep slopes and random blast holes left in the wake of early mining exploration, varying in size from trough to tanker, and often deep enough to break a leg should you fall in, or give you a good soaking since many fill with water after a hard rain. Having no idea how numerous or random the pits were, I played it safe in winter, sticking to the road and trails.

Early spring is too soggy for exploring, and late spring is too buggy. In summer, the thick brush turns any jaunt into a trail blazing, best embarked on with gloves, loppers, and plenty of DEET. Autumn is the best time, though in any season there’s a good chance of getting lost. The iron content in the rocks is so high that compasses fail, only sometimes hinting at north in cattywampus stabs of the needle. So sans compass or GPS, I would venture out, noting where the sun was when there was sun. I soon discovered tree moss cannot be counted on to indicate north; those with any on their trunks wear it twirled in dervish skirts as if every direction might be north. When going very far, I don’t go alone.

We owned the land for almost a year before discovering its best feature, one we didn’t so much stumble onto as stumble up. Paralleling the logging road along our rear acreage is a high ridge of Precambrian rock well curtained by trees and obscured from the road below. Finding reasonable access to it is difficult. I’ve approached from several angles and found only one route that slopes rather than climbs, but I didn’t have neon marking tape with me and haven’t been able to locate the route since. The most direct and difficult way is straight up from the lowest point on the road via a very narrow path lined with aspens to hoist yourself along. The path ends at a short cliff the height of a bus, with a switchback zagging the rest of the way. Once on the zenith—usually with heart still a-thump—you’ll see the climb was worth the effort. Spreading southward is a forest of ridges, with the Laurentian Divide just six miles away. On a clear day, you can see ten or fifteen miles. In summer, the view is an even-toned green canopy, but in autumn, drifts of tamarack make long mustard streaks and oaks pop like rust spots among the yellow aspen. Maples here turn not quite the usual red orange but a paler peach version, like a bare, bitten lip. The stands of pine are best delineated after their deciduous neighbors swap out their green for harvest moon colors. What you can see of The Lake beyond the poplar skirt belting the ridge looks narrow as a run of foil. Only after the aspen quake themselves naked is the full breadth of The Lake visible.

The ridge is shaped roughly like a parade of brontosauruses lumbering nose to tail through the canopy. It is perhaps a thousand feet long, running alongside a second, shorter ridge directly north, which I only know of for having been lost between the two, pinballing between them like a bug in a gutter until finally the sun broke out to show where west was.

It would be great to watch a storm from this height, and an idiot just might, but I have a healthy fear of lightning, and every pine on the ridge is a potential target. Weather travels straight west to east here, thumbing in on a stiff breeze that’s brisk and consistent enough to make us dream of wind turbines. A turbine could provide enough electricity for us to fire up the holy grail of all appliances: a refrigerator. A gray-water pump system runs a close second on our wish list, usually while stumbling from the car with five-gallon jugs pulling our arms ape long. A pump would pull water up the hill for dishwashing and showers. It’s hard to disguise envy when visiting the plumbed and electrified cabins of friends who are on the electrical grid, awed as they run taps and blithely flip switches to power up such trifles as toasters, coffee grinders, and even hair dryers. If anything makes one energy conscious, it’s having none.

We’ve not clocked our wind speed on the ridge yet, but the power is there. Reality kicks in only when considering not just the expense of a turbine but how. Short of stabbing one straight down from midair, the logistics of erecting one on the ridge appear impossible. But if it were possible, the crest would be the perfect site for a hermitage, a room with a view, a crow’s nest, or a tree house (as long as they are topped by lightning rods).

Near Tower, there is an auburn-dark spur of road that leads through sentinel pines to the former site of the fire tower, the one we called “the Tower-tower.” As a child, I climbed the tower many times with my father, and I still remember the stomach-churning thrill of bursting up past the tops of pines into clear sky, always windier and warmer than below in summer and always windier and cooler in spring or fall.

My particular vertigo is more physical than mental, my insides gathering into a weird, buzzy clench. I suspect this is genetic since Sam has it, too; on cliffs and bridges he would cling, reporting, “Mommy, my testicles tingle.”

Dad pulled me up the tower once to meet the ranger, who must have been a very patient fellow to allow a child into his tiny space, at least patient enough not to toss one over the side. I was obsessed by the tower and afraid of it—it swayed. Still, I desperately wanted to live in it. After it was decommissioned, we continued visiting as trespassers, warned by the ominous squeal of rusted bolts.

Forest rangers are rarely if ever set up in metal aeries these days; there are better methods of fire spotting, such as satellite-harvested digital imagery systems like MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, of course). DNR planes continue to run observation flights a few times a day when fire danger is high. The local fleet is a trio of vintage de Havilland Beavers built in the late 1950s, painted bobber red and white. When not airborne, they are kept perfectly maintained like thoroughbreds in watery corrals on Shagawa Lake, with new engines installed every so many thousands of flight hours. Occasionally one will skim overhead, making its giant-dragonfly hum, a wing dipped like a nod, reassuring us that even when we are not here, this place is being looked after.