Shelter. Sarah Stonich
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.
On a bitter February day, we drove four hours north and set out on foot over an unplowed road with a photocopied map. We searched for the little lake, close enough to Tower that Dad would have fished it as a boy. The man from the land office had instructed us to follow the road until the lake was visible and to watch for the low shore and the one tree among thousands that had a blue ring and a lot number spray-painted on it. Easier said.
After an hour of walking in single-digit temperatures on legs like pilings, we found the low spot. I took up my binoculars and squinted across the lake to a parcel of rock and pine and not much else. The blue-ringed tree marked a steep hill fronting a forty-some-acre parcel of boreal forest and scrub. Some of the land, according to the map, was under the frozen lake. Just offshore, as if it had tumbled there, was an almost-island with stunted trees, stitched to the land by an area of dry reeds frozen in the sort of sluice mosquitoes prize. This rocky, bleak familiarity was enough to stir the specter of my father, who perched on my shoulder, his hands forming a megaphone to whoop through my woolen earflap as if I were the deaf one, “Heads up, Sally!”
There was the land, exactly as I’d imagined—remote, piney, and on a lake too small for motorboats. It had no driveway, no well, no septic, no power, no anything—it was offered as is. Raw land. The cost of making it habitable or even accessible would pile on top of a price that was already more than I’d budgeted for. Somehow I hadn’t thought of such details, of reality.
There wasn’t even a navigable path to it. Even Cabin! had paths.
What had I been thinking? It was clearly too remote, too rugged, and given the climate would be isolated for most months of the year. My instinct was to flee, but as I looked across the ice, I felt gnomish bootheels digging into my clavicle. In the same tone he’d used when claiming that my teeth would eventually straighten themselves out or that in certain countries I might be considered pretty, my father’s voice insisted, It’s perfect.
I made myself look up the scraggly hill of pine once more and, in a voice not quite my own, muttered, “Sold.”
Two
On a dare, bush pilot Mel Toumela once landed his floatplane blindfolded and hung over on a ninety-degree Sunday morning. After gliding to a stop ten feet from his water slip, he jumped out onto the float to accept the stakes: one bent Camel Straight and the last warm Bud from his best friend’s cooler.
Mel passed on this anecdote as if to reassure me, despite my just telling him about my fear of small aircraft. Maybe he was kidding. As he boasted of more derring-do, I wondered when he’d start doing what pilots do pre-flight, like inspect the switches and buttons that run the engine, make sure there’s enough fuel, or check that the bolts bolting the little aircraft together were really bolted.
But we took off with no such precautions, just groundless faith we would return. After all, Mel has flown since he was a teenager, first ferrying passengers to and from remote fishing camps, then, after actually getting his pilot’s license, joining up with search-and-rescue missions. Later he trained to drop chemicals onto wildfires. Mel bought his first plane in his early twenties and now, in semi-retirement, says he only flies when he wants with what passengers he chooses. He nodded at me in such a way that I should be aware that a ride in his plane was the highest compliment he dished out.
Mel has strayed from the border lakes area only a few times, first to fly for an airline based in Minneapolis, a job he endured for either six months or six weeks—he claims he can’t remember. He says he’d rather skim this northern swath every day than fly across the continent. This is a land he considers more or less his, proudly claiming to know the terrain better than he knows his own wife’s backside.
The plan was to fly over the newly purchased acres on a lake too tiny for Mel to land on, just east and south of Lake Vermilion and twenty miles as the crow flies from Ontario. I also wanted to see the blowdown from the 1999 storm that took down whole forests within the park. As we rose far above Mel’s lake, I began to take in the scope and mass of the forest below. Mel has real and historical ties to this land. I have familial ties but share none of his sense of ownership. He’s lived here all his life and earned his wings around the time I was a toddler. As a child, I spent summers here, oblivious to anything beyond my sticky reach. My teenaged visits were spent belly-up