Shelter (14 page)

I began unpacking and putting my new home in order. It was a hot summer in St. Paul, and the whole of July felt thick, something to survive. I starting working in the air-conditioned public library downtown, joining the ranks of homeless. I was supposed to be reading about pro–sport fishing for a project I was researching but kept getting distracted in the history stacks, drawn to books on the Iron Range. I’d never been much interested in history; I liked it informal and coated in glossy entertainment, preferring the
story
part. Movies are good; cartoons are better. Do I need to know more about the Civil War than is in
Gone with the Wind,
more about the Napoleonic high seas than can be gleaned from
Master and Commander,
or anything about life in the north that Rocky or Bullwinkle cannot impart? I loved historical novels for their descriptions of rooms and furniture and clothes, accurate or not. When curious about the actual factual past, I prefer books with titles like
The Very Bloody History of Britain without the Boring Bits, The Wordy Shipmates,
or
Four Score … and More!
Minnesota history held little thrall for me until I become steward of a tiny chunk of it. Until then, I was happy enough with Paul Bunyan digging out Lake Superior as a watering hole for Babe the Blue Ox, creating lakes with his size-104 boots, and leveling forests just by tromping about and the Ojibwe warrior
hero Nanabozho (Naniboujou), who saved the remaining trees from Paul’s clodhoppers by fighting with him for forty days and forty nights, finally killing him with a big fish and a pancake. Right?

There’s tons of fakelore in northern Minnesota. Leif Erickson rowing over to Duluth from Norway in the year
ad
1000? The Kensington Runestone is widely known as a hoax, but a sports team named the Vikings does sound much more menacing than the Voyageurs, which only conjures up a vision of swarthy guys eating pâté or singing “Alouette.” If the Viking lore hadn’t proliferated, Monday night cheers would be led by a little guy with a paddle wearing a tasseled cap instead of horns. Surely the voyageurs were tougher than they looked. By any account, voyageuring was dangerous and backbreaking; a job posting might have read, “Guys built like bulldogs: become a human pack mule and paddle slave.”

I was more interested in the later years, the time of my grandfather’s arrival, when big men with names like Weyerhaeuser, Hill, and Backus oozed in from the big cities with their handlebar mustaches and homburg hats. When they saw the timber to be logged, the lumber barons grew nearly animated, mustaches a-twitch, and snapped to action. The first order of the day was to lay railways so they could then cut down Minnesota, haul it out, and sell it, which they did between 1830 and 1930, when around 70 percent of the state was shorn bald (today only two percent of Minnesota forest is considered old growth) and the timber was either floated downriver or trundled off by train, mostly to eastern states. Aerial photos from the 1920s show the Lake Vermilion area, tens of thousands of acres, reduced to pathetic stumpage,
our land included. What is now the Boundary Waters wasn’t spared either, save a few islands too inconveniently located to mow over. Did these lumber corporations use proper logging practices? No. Nor did they employ any reforestation programs. Nary a tree was planted in their wake, but even worse, loggers took only the tree trunks, leaving mountains of branches called “slash” to dry, and the slash become tinder over the vast clearings where there were no longer any trees to divert or slow spreading fires or the winds they rode in on. Fledgling hamlets and towns across the Iron Range burned to the ground. In 1908, Chisholm was incinerated. The city of Virginia burned
twice.
Looking at the pictures, I can only wonder how the industrialists got away with so many crimes against nature, and I puzzle over how one comes to possess such boundless temerity. “Because they were raging shitheads” is how Juri put it.

It’s hard to envision the desiccated lands and towns or imagine the impact on the Ojibwe who lived there—losing their livelihoods, their woodland existence, their hunting and ricing grounds, and their fishing waters, powerless while watching their environment ravaged for profit and slowly raked away and into the white men’s coffers.

Precious minerals had already been explored by prospectors all over northern St. Louis County. The original gold diggers came and found jack and left. Some, considered fools, stayed on, and being patient and looking stupid paid off for them in 1893 when gold was finally discovered on Rainy Lake and the Little American Mine was established. Meanwhile other mineral hunters who’d failed to find precious metals did discover something else:
a tsunami of ore deposits drifting just under the three iron ranges. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Another wave of big men barreled in to start up the mines, managerial types with lackeys trailing behind at a safe distance, gingerly lugging a
lot
of dynamite. They landgrabbed the most viable mining land plus anything else they could get their hands on—swamp, bog, lake, you name it. From afar, the bosses sat counting the seconds on their gold pocket watches between explosions. Since the land had been conveniently scalped by logging and fires, mining exploration went off with few hitches and to great success. Our own land is an example, pitted with blasted test sites, dozens of depressions the size of barnyard troughs or larger.

An immigrant’s first view upon arriving, depending on the season, would have been either of stumps and mud, stumps and dust, stumps and frozen mud, or stumps and snow. These newcomers wore yet another set of hats, the shabby haberdashery of the working class: Welsh tweed caps and battered Italian fedoras and whatever mad headgear the Finns and Bohunks had donned when embarking from the old country. Most came to escape the oppression and poverty back home, where there were ugly wars and plenty of tyranny. Finland, as it was ruled by the Swedes, was no picnic, particularly for laborers or free thinkers, which included a good portion of the population. Here in the land of free speech, they could air their communist leanings and get all atheist without being too offensive or getting murdered for it. Hope for a better life drove them here to about the only other place in the world just as cold as Finland but with arguably better jobs. These immigrants, along with legions from other small
European countries like Montenegro, formed labor forces that would not labor for too many years in bad conditions before realizing there was oppression here, too, in the great nation of America. Some began revolting, forming unions, rabble-rousing, and making general nuisances of themselves to the guys in the fanciest hats, the investors and industrialists. From a distance, it’s easy to see why communism looked so good to so many at that time. In theory it still does, especially while watching
Reds
on a digital flat screen costing well over the annual income of an early miner.

The past on the Iron Range is harsh and full of villains and heroes, good guys and bad, but mostly just a lot of plain folks looking to get by. If you were a Native during the heaviest of the mass immigration between the 1870s and 1920s, life was not good. Several unfair treaties were signed in exchange that the Ojibwe might retain their least-valuable lands, and the rest was purloined. Government schools were hastily built with the overall goal to culturally reeducate, their credo being, and this actually written down, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man!” Knock some white into them was the idea. The schools were notorious for abuse and wretched conditions, though the Indian school near Tower, built for the Nett Lake and Bois Forte bands on the eastern shore of Lake Vermilion, was allegedly somewhat less awful if only because the Vermilion school was staffed by Native teachers who allowed children to speak their native language in the dormitories and who tended not to punish them when they slipped in the classroom. They also had access to the Ojibwe grapevine that connected teachers to the children’s parents and relatives, meaning most kids were not completely cut off from news of home and
thus were a little less isolated and many of the students and teachers were even related. In 1910, the year my father was born, the population of the school peaked at over a hundred students.

Julia visited the school a few times to show the Native domestics teacher how to operate a sewing machine. I tried getting her to describe the place once, but she claimed she didn’t remember much, just that it was like any run-down school, though the name of a particular girl had stuck with her always: Louisa Blue Sky.

Though my grandmother lived to ninety-nine and was a fixture in my life until I was nearly thirty, I knew little about her family history, only that her parents were caterers and that she was born in Mottling, Austria, and immigrated as a toddler to America with her father, Franc Tancig; mother, Marija Mak; and several siblings. Julia learned English at school and spoke Slovene and German at home, often translating for her mother and older siblings.

At home, I stuck close to the one air conditioner in my back-bedroom office. After ten hours in front of a computer each day, ennui began seeping in. I found myself listlessly surfing the ‘Net. I should have been content, but I’d run out of pathetic Internet dating stories to entertain married friends with and make them feel grateful for not being me, so I tentatively prepared for another round of online dating, though this time would be different. My bar was raised. I changed my profile to reflect what I felt I deserved, not what I’d settle for. If a date was awful, I would walk—no excuses, no Minnesota nice.

Just
one
more go, then I’d unplug. I leisurely checked the site for a few weeks, but nobody piqued my interest, no one seemed
compelling. Then, just as I was about to close up shop, a profile I hadn’t seen before popped up. This new guy looked fresh and seemed as genuine as one can in a few assigned paragraphs and answers to canned questions. He could construct a sentence and liked junk shopping. Of course, what he
wasn’t
was equally important: born-again, Republican, or short. He didn’t talk himself up much. In fact, his profile was completely devoid of that underlying “the wonder of me” tone that colors so many of them. Even his online moniker was modest: Bonhomie. There was the photo to consider; he definitely had a chin, and his eyes and mouth were set in roughly the right places. He had
dimples!
And if it turned out he had hair under that cap, all the better.

I’d learned not to bother with any pre-date e-mail chitchat wherein guys blather on with Googled quips, trying to brand themselves as Really Something before the date, as if not foreseeing that they would actually be expected to converse, or what they might consider improv. But the reality is there’s no way to glean character or any detail over the Internet unless the person is performing a striptease on Skype. The new rules included “no time wasted.” If he doesn’t have potential, get out fast, mercenary, efficient.

I examined the fresh guy’s profile one more time. In regard to the question of politics, he’d mused, “How do Carville and Matalin do it?” Ah, I thought. I’m
not
the only one puzzling. Under “What celebrity do you most resemble?” he responded, “I’m told I look like one of the guys in the Lipitor commercial. I hope I’m the one with low cholesterol.” I made the date.

L
ipitor Guy showed up at the restaurant on time, getting points for that (what dating had come to) and extra points for being terribly handsome. And he had all his own hair, which was perfectly silvered at the temples, as if he might run for office after cocktails. He was wearing shoes, not trainers, and a dark gray uber-fabric T-shirt that clung over a good chest and a fit set of arms. We shook hands. Jon, Sarah.

“Huh.”

“Hmm.”

Ever wary on first dates, especially after previous calamities, I took a while to relax. He seemed ever-so-slightly wary himself and for some reason insisted on sitting to my right, which required some chair wrangling and disruption. Was he
that
fussy about where he sat? Did he have some obsessive-compulsive disorder that prevented him from sitting on
anyone’s
left, ever? Why did the good-looking ones always come with some glitch? He certainly smelled right enough, and I was soon leaning into his explanation of the musical chairs. Simply, a tumor and the bones of his inner ear had been removed years before in a procedure he described briefly in nonmedical terms. He was able to make light of losing an eardrum, which must have been a heavy loss for a
musician. While I was taking a good look at the dimples, he joked about his surgery so that, looking back much later, I would think, “He had me at melon baller.”