Shelter. Sarah Stonich
and clear. Not all that far below, I thought I could make out a loon’s floating nest.
Gavia Immer, the common loon, Minnesota’s mascot plastered on everything from mugs to garage door murals, embroidered on oven mitts, stuffed as plush toys, and printed on millions of lottery tickets like the one in my pocket, sure to be a winner once I’d splatted to my death. No one ever points out that the loon is possibly the most vicious state bird in the nation. It cannibalizes other waterfowl by spearing upward from the depths, its favored prey being a kabob of baby mallard. In spite of its maniacal laugh and Redrum-eyed, razor-beaked, devil-duck appearance, the loon is loved.
The plane lost altitude as if greased, falling toward a copse of spruce poised to perforate small aircraft. Just when I was able to make out cones among the boughs, the plane suddenly scooped up like a fishhook, like an amusement park ride, and once again we faced seamless blue sky.
The aerial map I’d been holding was a sweaty bouquet. I counted my breaths. Mel seemed a little disappointed I hadn’t screamed or fainted, but it did take a moment before I could gather the spit to say, “Let’s do it again!”
He sighed and soberly reminded me we’d been airborne for more than our allotted time and were now low on fuel.
“Low?” I asked.
Mel grinned. “Not low-low, just low.”
With a wing-tip salute to all below, the plane veered south and away.
The finale of our flight was a swing over the land. The Lake looked like a miniature version of all the other lakes: another shiny claw mark, this one barely a scratch. From above, our acreage was a bumpy collection of poplar and pine. The small clearing near the shore could have been a rag dropped next to a puddle.
From the air it was nothing special. When Mel asked if I wanted to circle it again, I shook my head. We flew west over the big populated lakes, shorelines densely dotted with cabins, some modest, but an alarming number were log mansions with chemically treated lawns spilling down to water’s edge. Over Vermilion we dipped to circle the island that belonged to my grandfather. The house was just visible through the trees. The island belongs to others now, though it still carries our family name.
Things here are slow to change.
We approached landing. Reflected sun under the wings made it seem we were held aloft by light. Nearing the dock where Mel won his famous bet, we disturbed a swimming beaver, hesitant to abandon the length of birch it was towing.
“Damn rodents.” Mel leaned on a control that made the plane roar, scaring the beaver into diving under. He grinned and growled, “Take that, ya little bastard!”
Our flight was over.
Three
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