Introduction Ñ
Disagreeable and Fatal
Dad sought solitude. So he brought along road maps and aerial maps and county plat books and a yearning to find escape from the melee of residential humanity that unceasingly trafficked in dual-tone horns and loud blasting fraud, squeezed tightly by parrots bawling orders and commerce closing in, out-shouting the quiet he harbored inside.
He hedged our house with shrubbery and trees. Lilacs grew thick along the north fence and shut out our view--but not the din of the Dairy Queen next door, or a carhop drive-in across the street called The Corral that dealt fetid hazes of burnt rubber and overworked grease. Our front yard was aesthetically planted with deciduous and evergreen trees to block the view of West Broadway, a busy main artery whisking cars and trucks in a hurry. Along the south lot line, where another house crowded ten feet proximate and the west, where the alley delivered milk men and young boys on tricycles and old ladies in swaying new Buicks, he planted barriers of juniper and low cedar trees. He left an access gap toward the house next door, an act of circumspect neighborliness, for evening coffee breaks back and forth. The fortifications heightened year after year, increasing the sense of privacy. But rather than seclusion they raised Dad's sense of interment. And it just wouldn't do.
He took along his 6-year old boy on cold late autumn Saturdays, driving the '49 Dodge hard out of safety into bleak empty regions pockmarked by rocks and gray leafless trees and thin razor ice lacing black water swamps. The car was warm and spacious, and with a pile of pillows I could see out the windshield and feel more consequential. He looked at lands far north from the city, and from a young boy's point of view--who's known nothing but appropriately serene city living and lights on next door, they appeared disagreeable and fatal. We returned to the comfort of urban lights well after dark, listening to Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel on the car radio. Dad murmuring "home again home again, jiggedy-jog," the car would be silent and the magical transport of sleep-travel finished.
New tax-forfeited tracts were explored, and by early December only a couple of parcels remained. One forty-acre plot was far from home more than a hundred miles. We aimed east out of Sandstone and entered gruesome God-forsaken countryside, which isn't a fair word to use since "country" conjures sweet images of warm sunshine and bees humming and Twain-ish type boys in frayed cuffs skipping barefoot, carrying fishing poles and sagged stringers of picturesque fresh trout. "Side" suggests nearby and friendly and somehow useful.
Rocky and barren and scrubby, the worst so far. Gravel rumbled below and, because it had little else to do since traffic was so scarce, threw rocks up at our floorboards and "pinged" from the tires. Miles and miles of dead land. An occasional shabby frozen creek, sided by thick tangled brush, but at least there was no snow--though in hindsight it at least would have obscured the ugly and lessened my loathing. My father was resolutely driving us deeper into a despicable void. A lone power line rhythmically rose and fell on my right. I heard its cadence: "n-yah n-yah you're coming to stay, you'll never go home; n-yah n-yah there is no escape, you'll never go home."
Dad was lost in thought and did not talk a lot. The only sound he emitted for miles was a "haaawwwwk" and a "ptooo" out the side window. A tower appeared at a hill, a small outpost atop gangly steel legs with a ladder running up the side. "A fire tower," Dad said. That was all. And I did not want to know more.
A crossroads appeared at the base of a hill. A store was there too, with beer signs on its roof: "Hamms" and "Grainbelt." A propeller rotated listlessly at the top of a tower; a wind generator it was, and it held its ground for the next thirty-nine years until a tornado escorted it away in 1997. (The twister missed a Store clerk named Dolly who wasn't ready to go and clung to the P-trap under the sink.)
Dad looked at a map and made a left turn. Up a rise, we flattened straight out past a herd of Brown Swiss cows. Driving slowly, watchful. The road began a slight uphill slant. A row of ripe pine trees on the right leaned thirty-degrees toward the north, tilted hurtfully by Paul Bunyan's hand. We turned onto a miserable gray trail and chugged up a hill. Infinity leered all around and coaxed Dad onward, away from anything life-sustaining, like warm broth and Mom.
The road stopped. So did the motor. He looked out the window. So did I, weeping silently.
Dad unwrapped himself a cigar and dug out a consolation lollipop for me. We walked to the river and looked over rotted old bridge wood, then pushed on through cackling witch-hungry woods. Dad's excitement increased. As did my abhorrence.
Ralph and Hattie lived a quarter mile up the road in a forest ranger station house. Before the cabin was built they accommodated our sleep in their cellar. Outfitted bunkhouse style, the wide-open basement was outfitted with a dozen beds which, for a modest fee, hunters got suitable sleeping quarters during deer season. We never stayed during hunting season, and since we were frequently a complete family with a Mom and two kids, they welcomed us as friends and put us up down there for free. Crickets kept busy squeaking us to sleep, and Hattie kept busy sending us off on cool mornings with portions of warm pie and fresh sandwiches and measures of good wishes.
Dad built the cabin out of salvaged goods, eighteen-inch city sidewalk blocks for the floor and discarded wood-framed storm windows to put up as walls, all of it at low or no cost. I remember him taking me along during a dark Saturday night to clinch a deal with a contractor named Nick. Loud music echoing inside a suburban bungalow loudened when the door was flung open to active roistering inside. Dad was greeted by a woman wearing a nurse's cap. Then he waited. A loud man came to the door with two drinks and offered Dad one. A woman in a polka-dot dress leaned into the deal and clinked a glass against each of Nick's two, then screamed with laughter and stuck her tongue in Dad's ear. My father was not a partier, nor a drinker, and had great difficulty socializing with any, especially those two who were. Some sort of deal was struck or it all went bad; Dad's swearing when he got back in the car was enough to shut me up and avoid asking dumb questions.
Materials were brought to The Woods in the utility trailer which, when
the cabin was finished, doubled as a sleeping shelter for Merilee. A peaked
storm-window roof covered with plastic tablecloths.
Dad built and suspended a narrow sleeping refuge between trees two feet above
the ground for me. The floor was plywood, the sides were storm windows, a
rolled roofing roof above kept out the rain. Thirty-six wide and six feet
long it was airy and light, like sleeping outside. Nicknamed "Lenin's
Tomb," it is now gone. But the crunch of broken glass can still be felt
when I walk on spongy ground where it once was.
Dad fabricated a food and utensil storage cabinet. He covered it with a sheet-metal top and painted the exterior black and named it "chuck wagon." It opened along one plywood side on a full-length piano hinge which, when down, provided a handy food preparation counter. It was situated atop two oak log chunks adjacent to the fire, convenient access for Mom. A makeshift cook stove was also constructed from a discarded filing cabinet laid on its side with a hole punched into its top, and an aluminum vent pipe fixed over the aperture as chimney. During its inaugural firing the chimney melted and toppled onto Mom's leg, inducing her high shrill "Goddamnit!" and a few other swearwords roundly disfavoring Jesus Christ and other simple pleasures.
August and July were miserably glorious months. Mosquitoes pestered endlessly despite oily smearings of 6-12 insect repellent, which mixed with our own oily sweat when temperatures heated into the 90's and dense trees prevented air from stirring. Shirts were shed when the heat became intolerable; Mom too, stripped to her bra. Yellow jackets hovered at mealtime like unruly dogs, settling down on our plates of wieners and Franco American spaghetti. They especially liked to hide on forkfuls of beans a moment before being stuck in the mouth. We learned to inspect each portion for yellow stripes before taking each bite.
The cabin, built mostly of glass (I was taught to never again throw things inside) was put up during our second summer, on weekends and vacation weeks. Sand for the foundation was hauled from a township pit several miles away, then shoveled out and wheelbarrow-ed to the site. Construction was assisted by another family, good friends who enjoyed the crude comforts and fit in well. It quickly became clear, with table and refrigerator and stove and a large kitchen base cabinet inside, that the cabin was too small for more than one person or two small children.
Dad added on the following summer, more than doubling the first cabin's size. He hinged large 3x8 panels on three sides and covered the openings with screen. They opened fully to let in the outdoors, but filter out the bugs. He added a second-hand metal-springed bed-frame and an acceptably clean double mattress to the new living space. Shelves and a countertop were installed. So was a bastardly huge woodstove, idiotically designed to look like a grand freestanding brick fireplace with tiny translucent mica squares in its door for, I guess, high-level ambiance or to explore for life inside its miniature firebox. It was nearly five feet tall and three feet wide and expended more than its share of space smoking too much and doing a poor job of heating. It was tolerated more than 35-years before being bum-rushed out the door in heavy pried-apart parts, and carried as far as two men could manage ... about 50-feet north where it hunkers even now and will be escorted away someday when all nine planets meet for tea. A cast iron stove one-fifth the size is now in place, doing a fine job blotting out hateful memories of bad woodstove behavior.
Red's Shed, the sleeper, was built soon after the main cabin and its
addition was completed.
A 1966 career move for Dad put The Woods a hundred miles farther. The Woods seemed to be a thing of the past. Trips were less frequent. I entered high school and was mostly disinterested in the place, unless a friend came along, so we could hang out with Leon who knew an Indian to buy us some beer to get drunk for the first time. Dad went alone to The Woods once in a while. But if The Woods had any future, the first chapters were finished. A friend drove us over in his Studebaker Hawk one winter night; we were kept awake chewing our lips by doses of Dexedrine, which was easy to obtain in 1968, especially by refilling a mother's prescription. We had to park on the county road and walk the half-mile through crusty moonlit snow. Nobody lived along the Woods road back then and it wasn't plowed.
I returned again in the summer of 1970. A friend came along in the rusty pink '57 Chevy grandma had surrendered to me at graduation. I sped through Sandstone's dark residential streets loutishly jeering, "let's see if there's a cop in this rinky-dink town." (There still isn't.)
Merilee married in June 1970. She and Chuck honeymooned there and pinned up a birch bark memoir: "Portnoy's Complaint was good, but connubial bliss is better."
I married in 1971 before the days of legal abortion, two teenagers naively thinking they could imitate real grownups, and be parents too, inside a series of rented trailer houses.
The Woods was raped by intruders in the early 1970's. They jimmied a back door (vestigially secured by only a storm door latch) and took dishes and flatware and bedding and carted away a whole lot of third-world fourth-hand Goodwill and Salvation Army store furnishings. Mom, handicapped by polio in 1952, had cheerfully good-sported herself to go there at all. But the combination of invasion of privacy and gone goods was enough to quench her glad participation.
I made only a few trips to The Woods during the early '70's, one to witness a Minneapolis Tribune photographer work up a visual depiction of Markville's Fair in August each year. I'd written and alerted the newspaper to the festivity since I was interested in photojournalism, and wanted to show myself to a hero. I slept little my first night alone in the wild woods, laying stiff in the center of the mattress and speculating how to break a wolf's neck with two hands and a shoe.
A real marriage for me in 1977 and a honeymoon spent there. A new job put new wife and I within 90 minutes of The Woods. At 9 p.m. on Saturday nights she'd pick me up from work in the bursting-to-rupture orange Civic. Away we'd go, Honda working its best to extract us from Duluth's depths. One summer day I lost a sure bet to a visiting friend during a card game, and had to "streak" (remember streaking from the '70's, running bare-naked through a public place?) down the woods road and back. Fortunately the friend was male and my wife wasn't.
During the next few years there were infrequent gatherings, all of us converging from wide points on the compass. I'd moved to northeastern Wisconsin and was further away geographically and had a new business and a family to spend time with.
Dad and I erupted brief but passionate words across the cabin's kitchen
table in the late 1970's. Estrangement followed. He lost interest and acquired
other acreage closer to home and put The Woods up for sale in the early 1980's.
Merilee and Chuck bought it last minute from an earnest money offer, made
a day earlier.
A teen-aged friend of the family and I made a trip over just before the New Year 1985. We each had five days free and came bundled in brand-new insulated lumberjack shirts and ski-bibs and full measures of fortitude that shattered to shards and hung in the air between the car and the cabin within five minutes of arriving. After an hour of feeble fire in the old stove, outside temperature: 26 below; inside temperature: 7 below. We stood around and pretended to be cool in spite of the cold. Out onto the road to explode a load of illegal fireworks I'd ordered from Florida. They rocketed high and burst open with none of the colorful glamour the catalog pictures had indicated they would. Then we went back inside and huddled at the card table beside the stove and drank Dr. Pepper and began to remark that it was a tad cold tonight.
We shivered under blankets inside sleeping bags and pretty much stayed cold in the night. In the morning the thermometer read minus 32 degrees, but neither of us wanted to wimp out and return home and admit faint-hearted defeat. So we wimped out and drove to Duluth instead. Rented a hotel room for three nights, and a VCR and five movies for starters--including Silent Night, Deadly Night which, my being a full-fundamental Christian at the time, he too, (including being the son of our preacher) was degenerate fun. Although out of a sense of Christian responsibility I kept one eye on him when the script called for bare breasts, but I always missed muting the sound when this actress or that screamed the "F" word. We became infidels. Intractable derelicts lounging in long underwear through three days and 27 macho movies. Potato chip boxes and doughnut containers and empty Dr. Pepper cans and Rich 'n Chip cookie trays all kept cool on the floor, halfway to the door, where they landed when hurled during high-action movie scenes. The outdoors stayed sub-zero and never rose above 10 below.
Dad and I reconciled and resumed our tradition of not being very good friends. We warily met to cut wood once in a while.
By the end of the '80's the sidewalk-block floor had endured too many winter frosts and was buckling badly. Chuck, with the aid of hydraulic jacks and a lot of long leverage and larkish measures of ambitious determination, jacked the cabin up and re-settled it onto submerged posts. He installed floor joists and a proper plywood floor. All with the help of his kids and Merilee, and a bit from Dad and me.
They moved to Connecticut in 1990, and the Woods was largely on its own.
My 20-year marriage passed its expiration date and disintegrated, along with a 17-year business.
I received a photocopied letter from Dad, postmarked February 19, '97: "There seems no softer way to put this: Les has cancer."
