Shelter

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©2011 by Sarah Stonich. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

International Standard Book Number ISBN: 978-0-87351-775-1 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-87351-800-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

Stonich, Sarah, 1958—

Shelter/Sarah Stonich.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-87351-775-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-87351-800-0 (e-book)

1. Stonich, Sarah, 1958— 2. Stonich, Sarah, 1958- —Family.

3. Ely Region (Minn.)—Biography. 4. Ely Region (Minn.)—Social life and customs. 5. Wilderness areas—Minnesota—Ely Region. 6. Country life— Minnesota—Ely Region. 7. Log cabins—Minnesota—Ely Region.

8. Writers’ retreats—Minnesota—Ely Region. 9. Single women— Minnesota—Ely Region—Biography. 10. Women authors, American—

Biography. I. Title. F614.E4S76 2011 977.6’77—dc22

2010042911

FOR DAD

Old fishermen never die, they only smell that way.

—Plaque on the cabin wall

Oma tupa, oma lupa. One’s own cabin, one’s own freedom.

—Finnish adage

O
ne midnight when I was about sixteen and watching the late movie with Dad, I started to nod off. He rocked my shoulder. “Listenup” he said, pointing to the screen. I propped up to peer past the bowl of old maids to see Mr. O’Hara, redder than usual, lecturing his daughter.

“Scarlett, do you mean to tell me that Tara—that
land—
doesn’t mean anything to you? Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth
dying
for, because land is the only thing that lasts!”

I could guess where Dad was going with this. To him, land meant the butt end of the Canadian Shield, north of north in the border country where he was born in 1910 and raised with his nine brothers and sisters. To me it was a boring place at the end of a tedious drive that led to the ledgerock lakes and the house where our grandmother who could cook lived. Getting there meant hours of driving over flat, non-scenic highway, with the worst stretch cutting through a vast bog that evoked the word
gulag.

Besides our small yard in town, Dad didn’t actually own any land. The lakeside acres our cabin perched on were leased from the power company. The cabin was tiny, painted the color of a
BandAid, with damp floors and a scary propane smell, though the outhouse, Dad would boast, was a two-seater. Of course a working plantation like Tara has value, but the stony crust that passes for land in our wedge of Minnesota had never struck me as worth working for. But
dying
for? I returned his nudge with a kick and flipped my back to the screen. I couldn’t have cared less about land, let alone a neurotic cocktease who dressed in curtains.

Dad died just a few years later. A dozen years after that, my son was born. Even when he was a toddler, it was obvious what genes had jumped a generation to splash in Sam’s gene pool. He had my father’s disposition and steady stare, and once again I found myself living with a short, territorial homebody with quick wit and hairy legs.

As can happen after a person has a child, one’s take on the world expands to include the notion of a future beyond one’s own. As I watched my son grow, Dad’s long-ago nudge began to fester. I reconsidered Scarlett O’Hara, struck by that last scene when she has the revelation about place and permanence and independence that nearly transforms her from a Miss into a Ms. I didn’t quite buy Scarlett’s hammy swooning, but I was beginning to get the bit about land. My son missed out on having a grandfather, and he deserved to inherit something besides the gene for pattern baldness. What better legacy to unite one wispy-headed generation to another than land?

I began to revisit Dad’s neck of the woods to search out some scrap to call our own, setting out with romantic visions and unrealistic expectations, meager funds and terrible timing. All I wanted was a sizable, private, pine-studded lot on a quiet lake, cheap, maybe with a funky old cabin on it, and I happened to
want it just when land was fetching all-time high prices thanks to the demand of dot.comers with dot.incomes. I looked at dozens of properties in all ranges, from a hunting shack in the brush to an island lodge. Realtors put up with me. Two summers went by, then five. The hunt grew wearisome as prices peaked, or when we thought they’d peaked, since it was inconceivable that they could get any higher, yet they peaked and peaked again. I was edging toward a certain age and still didn’t have a cabin when even my little sister did. I was the only one left knotty pining.

At home in St. Paul, Sam and I often made do by playing a game we called Cabin! Tucking in on cold nights, we’d tent under the covers, and off we’d go. It was always winter in Cabin! And we were usually lost and cold, tromping, sometimes limping through the woods in bad weather. We were often hungry since wolves always got the rabbit before we could and there were no convenience stores for miles. All was harsh and dark, but eventually, from a distance, tics of warm light from a vacant cabin would beckon through the trees to guide us, though we never questioned a warm beacon in a remote, off-the-grid wilderness. The cabin door was usually a bit of a challenge, and we sometimes had to break and enter, but we got in, got dry, and eventually got warm by rubbing sticks together to build a fire. There was nesting to do: wood to gather, beds to make. Miraculously there was always food, and if there wasn’t water, we made it from snow. After fire-building and survival were out of the way, we’d settle in for the night, getting down to the business of doing exactly what we were doing when we commenced playing Cabin!, huddling under the covers with animal crackers, picture books, and juice boxes.

The closest I could come to giving Sam a real cabin experience was to take him to a rustic old resort not far from Ely, a string of small stone and log cottages with outhouses, cold-water kitchens, and a cement-block shower house near the lodge with flush toilets for the delicate. The cabins were a hundred years old, with bubbly window glass and checkered curtains. The squeaky floors had rodent holes, and porches doubled as bedrooms. It was inexpensive and entirely too inconvenient and folksy for the types we wanted to avoid: jet skiers, ATVers, and bass boaters. Visitors to Rustic Resort were a Birkenstocks-with-socks crowd of quiet librarians, musicians, and professors with old Volvos plastered with left-of-left bumper stickers. These guests were likely to be found reading, humming, birding along the paths, or draped on the rock ledge staring out at the lake, smelling vaguely like weed. Their teenagers babysat toddlers who careened diaperless in the sand, sticky with fruit leather and chocolate kefir.

One morning on the dock, Sam and I discovered a cocoon attached to a supporting beam. Whatever was inside was just beginning to wriggle its way out. We hung our heads over the end of the dock, rapt. For two hours we lay in wait, hoping for a butterfly but ready to settle for a moth. Eventually a bug-eyed, ugly worm emerged with two crusty black humps where wings should have been. Soon it started unrolling itself and pumping fluid from its body to the humps, which had softened to look more like scrunched-up hair. Like twin nets, the wings ever so slowly began to unfurl, each section filling with a clear sheen, erecting themselves into patterned scaffolds, the spaces within taking on the look of leaded glass as the fluid dried, hardening to opalescence. We’d been rewarded for our patience with a dragonfly!

Sam clapped. “Play it again!”

That cinched it. Sam understood operating systems and could program the VCR but knew nothing of weather or seasons, didn’t know east from west, and surely had never sat through a sunset. He wasn’t getting enough vitamin D. It was no longer just a desire—we
needed
a cabin.

We returned to Rustic Resort for a number of years. Our favorite cabin had once been a schoolhouse, actually one of the less charming buildings, but it reminded me of a cabin Dad took us to before we had our own, where he once dressed up like a deep-sea diver to tackle a hornets’ nest and where my sister Valerie made herself cry after throwing her allowance into the fire rather than the chicken bones she’d meant to.

The cabin at Rustic Resort wasn’t insulated, and late one June I arrived to find ice in the sink and had to get a fire going before I could take off my jacket—the indoor thermometer read 33 degrees. I’d brought a swimsuit but neglected to pack mittens, and I ended up wearing socks on my hands while attempting to type. I had often thought this was exactly the sort of cabin I would want, but after that weekend I revised my dream to include hot running water and a bathtub.

When Dad was young, his family of twelve somehow managed to own an island on Lake Vermilion while living on a tailor’s income. It had a stand of tall pine and a sturdy little house pulled over the ice by oxen. After the Depression, it fell into tax forfeiture—tragic at the time, but doubly so was our discovery in the nineties that it could have been reclaimed for the small sum of delinquent taxes. Dad never quite recovered from once having had land and losing it. Maybe the notion of land and its permanence
holds more appeal as I age—perhaps drawn closer to the soil since that’s where I’m headed anyway.

I drove back roads with real estate agents so often I knew what they took in their coffee. We walked logging trails and looked at little plots with shore-hugging cabins and trailer homes with views. Nothing they showed me was quite right. Not private enough, not rocky enough, not piney enough. I imagined their eyes rolling when my voice spilled from their answering machines: “I’ll be up this week!” My favorite agent was Bill, who seemed to know every property and the attributes of every acre in the northern half of the county. During our trips, he’d talk and I’d listen. He’d known my family a little, so it was like going for drives with a distant uncle. I learned something new from Bill each visit, such as the Finnish dimensions for a traditional sauna or that the nasty, biting black fly actually has a function besides driving us insane: to pollinate blueberries. On one of our last outings, we spotted a moose just off the narrow dirt road, its nose to the ground, chewing. As its head popped up at our approach, it thwacked its rack on a tree limb. “Moose,” Bill informed me, “eat moss and have shitty eyesight.”

We watched lakeshore prices reach the point where I had to throw in the towel and say good-bye to my dream. Simply, I didn’t have the money. Bill, either feeling sorry for me or tired of hauling me around, scraped up one final option and told me about relatively cheap acreage that wasn’t listed, mineral rights land being sold by a local mining company. The land was on a tiny lake near the town where my grandparents raised their ten children and lived out their long lives. The parcels were being sold in large chunks, and since it was more land than I wanted
or could afford, I recruited my friends Terry and Susan, who’d also been looking for lake property. We figured there would be advantages to co-ownership, like splitting the cost of property taxes and road improvements, pitching in on projects. We’d been good neighbors in the past; we’d gladly do it again.