Shelter. Sarah Stonich
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,