Shelter (15 page)

Being one drum short of a bongo set was nothing. From all indications, he lived up to his profile alias, Bonhomie—a good guy. I deemed him not to be dangerous and, after our drink, let him walk me home, where we sat on my front porch and discussed the etymology of a single word for a half hour, and when I had to break out the laptop to Wiki other esoteric things we were equally curious about, we knew there would be a second date.

Appropriately, our second date involved a game of Scrabble, this time on his front porch. We were a little too preoccupied to play very well. I let him win, and he let me kiss him. This one definitely had potential.

A casual third date was followed by a hiatus during which I was away on my long-anticipated yoga week at a retreat center on the California coast in Big Sur, the original seat of hippiedom and New Age plinkyness. While I was there, a volley of e-mails revealed Jon could write an entertaining paragraph and was a stickler for grammar, which only made my knees weaker.

As soon as my yoga mates shut their eyes during meditation session, I’d slip away, unable to concentrate, and compulsively check my e-mail, an activity definitely frowned upon by the docents. But what if Jon had left me a message during the Om chants or Pranayama breathing?

Whenever I heard the one man in class referred to as a “yogi,” I fought to keep a straight face, expecting Boo-Boo to come swinging through with his pic-a-nic basket as we down-dogged
or balanced in tree pose. I could barely keep from falling out of headstand when we women were called “yoginis.”

Many guests were from big cities, and like me, they just needed a break and some quiet. Others were diehards, like the radical beyond-vegan parents in the line to get our dinner trays. They were consuming only raw fruits, vegetables, juices, and nuts during their stay at the center. Their two little boys, adorable but zipper-thin, made me want to slip them cheese dogs and Snickers.

Many guests kept to strict agendas that wrung every drop of spirituality out of each moment, intent on blissing out 24/7. The lawns were flocked with people doing tai chi, quietly chanting, fingering talismans, or just standing around on their heads. One day I was hula-hooping near the pool and reading a book when a woman wearing a wreath edged up to inquire, “What are you doing?”

“Hula-hooping,” I replied, “and reading a book?”

“Yes, but what are you
doing?
“

I thought of Jon with his deep admiration of facts. His e-mails were inquisitive and charming. His down-to-earth perspective made me think of lactose-tolerant midwesterners who ate deep-fried food on sticks.

Returning from my retreat, relaxed from all the yoga and limp from the mineral baths, I forgot to be guarded and skeptical and impulsively invited Jon up for the Labor Day weekend, when the cabin was slated to be finished. Lars had reported that the doors were hung, the windows were in, and finishing touches were being made.

I’d never spent the night at the cabin myself, not even camping, and now I was going with a relative stranger with whom I’d spent
a total of twelve hours on four dates. What was I thinking? For one thing, I hadn’t seen him with his shirt off, and for another, The Lake was
my
place, my haven, my sanctuary, but beyond that, it had come to embody my independence after too many years of none. This Labor Day was meant to be my maiden voyage, a sort of christening: “I am mistress of all I survey,”
ad nauseam.

Hadn’t I
just
given up on men? I hardly knew Jon; he wasn’t exactly an open book. He was taciturn, as Julia would describe anyone hesitant to reveal himself, a trait she admired. Jon didn’t hang out his prizes or try to impress, but then neither did he hang out his dirty laundry or flash any warnings. What had been revealed so far had been pleasant, but might pleasantness mask some major character flaw? As far as I knew,
Bonhomie
could have been a sociopath or NASCAR fan. My first visits to his house had left me vaguely uneasy until I pinpointed what was wrong—no books! When I finally asked, he explained they’d been in storage since he’d remodeled. Okay, so his books were only out of sight—but
what
books?

Soon enough I’d know plenty. I’d be alone in the woods with this guy for four days and four very dark nights. Recalling all the sage dating advice from relatives, I remembered “Get him good and drunk” and bought two bottles of wine and invited him over on a school night. For three hours, we yakked about anything and nothing and never opened the second bottle. I’d forgotten about the whole exercise until he left. He passed the getting drunk test with flying colors by not getting drunk.

Then there was: “Tackle a project together.” I already knew Jon was handy enough to wield a Sawzall and do minor plumbing but was prudent enough to hire someone else for floor refinishing
(only a fool would tackle his own), but it was too soon to recruit him for any sort of domestic task, so I asked for help regarding a computer problem, of which I have legion. His points accrued when he didn’t lose patience with me like the IT guy or bump me aside like Sam (who, to be fair, has also been known to roll my office chair away gently, as if sending an elder out on an ice floe). Jon straightened out a few of my file gaffes, then offered to set me up on a better e-mail system, plugging me into the one he used, in the process becoming privy to my password, which I took to mean we were going steady.

We packed up the wagon, strapped a futon on top, and I drove north with crossed fingers. Halfway there, we passed a gleaming milk truck and were startled by its reflection of a giant balloon quivering atop the car. Wind had breached the plastic-zipper futon bag and filled it to bursting with air. For the remainder of the trip, we listened to the bag flutter and flap and tried not to think of its effect on the gas mileage, amusing ourselves by watching the expressions of other drivers puzzling over our odd topside spectacle.

From the main road, there are two approaches to the land, both unpaved and rugged. One is a trail once called the Tower-Ely Road, though it’s barely pickup passable and now (of course) called something else. Rusted bits of metal along the ditches could be vintage oil pans or mufflers sheared off by the hump with grass that camouflages jutting bits of stone. Our neighbor Mac had had two tires punctured during a single journey of just over a mile. The other route, longer but less harrowing, begins on a county road named for a respected local man who had tromped or canoed every township and section in the northern half of
the county during the forties and fifties, a forest ranger, land broker, and sometimes amateur historian and ethnographer. His notations of various historic Native sites and points of interest are on many survey maps of the region. I was thrilled to discover that copies of the maps could be acquired through the Minnesota History Center library. His son Bill was the avuncular real estate broker who’d showed me so many places for sale and finally gave me the tip regarding our mine-owned parcels. That county road is a well-tended wide gravel ribbon that rises and falls from ridges of high pine down to the water level of roadside ponds. The turnoff to Lake Road is no wider than a driveway, down a sloping blind hill you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking. The maximum speed limit is twenty miles per hour; much faster will undo a front-end alignment. The mile-plus drive from the county road to our driveway can take fifteen minutes even if nothing has fallen across the road.

Jon was likely wondering just how far into the boonies I was dragging him, but eventually we turned at the dead pine and the wooden sign onto the cabin drive. We pulled up to the slight rise overlooking the piney plateau. We had arrived. From the car, the little clutch of buildings looked like a pioneer homestead, as if the historical society had been by and clicked their heels three times. It was finished! Phase one of my dream was complete, and completely charming. The cabin had doors and windows, the outhouse had a metal roof to match the cabin, and the ribs of the timber-frame shed stood like an ark-in-progress. Everything was swept and tidy, no sign of construction mess.

On the long drive up, I’d wondered if I hadn’t overhyped the place to Jon. For weeks I’d teased him with “The lichen is
amazing,” or “Just wait till you see the crapper,” and a dozen other come-ons. Jon might have been expecting the moon. Looking around as if through his eyes—as if I’d just been dropped there not knowing what to expect—I saw then, and might even have said aloud, “It’s beautiful.”

It really was, and more than I’d hoped for.

Once we examined every corner, wall, and window, we christened the place with a beer, and I stopped jumping up and down long enough to commence playing Cabin! for real. We eased the futon from its giant deflated condom on top of the car, carried it flopping over our heads, and jammed it up into the loft. There was a bed—with a roof over it!

We outfitted the place with stuff from the Mayflower, where the stash could furnish the little cabin and a few others. Over the long holiday weekend, we fished, played cribbage, swam, hiked, paddled around, and sat in front of smoky campfires until our kisses tasted like Slim Jims. In one
shades-of-The-African-Queen
moment after an evening skinny dip, Jon pulled little leeches off me, and we fell in love.

Wonderful. Really great, in fact. But would Jon take to the land as he took to me, or would he come to see the place as a weekend maintenance albatross? I couldn’t expect him to feel as welded onto the place as I was. Would he share some sort of stewardship along with me, or at least humor me in my endeavor? I can’t say that if I were in his shoes I’d have been totally thrilled if my new love came glued to a lifelong, high-maintenance project with soaring property taxes. Everywhere you looked, something needed doing or fixing: brush burned, stumps grubbed, paths cleared,
trees cut, etc. I saw how it could be overwhelming. A future with me must’ve looked like a lot of work, weekends spent in work boots and flannel shirts, predetermined and predictable. Would this place wind up being fifty acres of ball and chain?

The building project we eventually tackled together was to design and construct windows for the little fish house, which we decided should become a sleeping cabin, so much more comfortable than climbing in and out of the tiny loft in the main cabin, where just making the bed involved a whacked funny bone at best and a contusion at worst.

Making custom windows was no easy task given that every opening Rory had framed was slightly off (like him), each measuring a markedly different size from the next. The project became a challenge of patience and math skills, traits I do not possess. I bought panels of a polycarbonate channeled plastic, the kind newer greenhouses are clad in, much lighter weight than glass, unbreakable, and, as it turns out, bear proof. The downside, which I now see as an upside, is that while light comes through, sharp details don’t, just shapes and colors, an impressionist’s view.

In my landlord’s well-lit, dry basement back home, we fired up the table saw, and over the course of several weekends, Jon chewed a pencil and measured and cut, humming while I held things or tidied up. Even in the city, I was guilty of recruiting my boyfriend like a Habitat volunteer when we might have gone to a gallery opening or to hear a band or maybe lazed around Sunday mornings with the crossword and coffee. I swept sawdust and plastic dust and nodded encouragement. When one of the plastic panels skidded over the running table-saw blade and was badly scratched, we laughed it off, joking that at least there
would be one visible flaw in our otherwise perfect collaboration. With the help of excessive weather stripping, the finished windows fit well enough, opening outward and up to hook to the eaves to save precious room inside. They also act as broad awnings, so if one is left open in rain, there’s no worry. The outside mount also protects the screens from falling branches and curious squirrels.

The scratch made by the table saw is only noticeable when you’re prone in bed, a reminder that Jon and I get on swell even while toiling in a dirty basement, where blame for what goes wrong is not assigned to the nearest person but to the sonofa-bitching table saw. As it turned out, Jon didn’t seem to mind all the cabin maintenance. As long as he got to fish, nothing seemed to puncture his good humor. This could work, I thought.

T
he buildings were up, but there was still plenty to do around the place. I know which end of the hammer to hold and can do a little finish carpentry, though my framing skills are limited to picture framing. I’m not Rosie the Riveter, but I wanted to contribute. We soon realized that working off the grid has specific limitations, bearing little relation to projects taken on in the plumbed and wired world of civilization. Working outdoors with no electricity or work surfaces and a half-hour drive to the nearest hardware store can turn the simplest do-it-yourself project into a make-do-it-yourself challenge.

Woefully ill equipped, I didn’t realize that all my existing tools would be rendered null. I owned lightweight plug-in girly tools: a silly drill, a weak sander, a sissy saw. My toolbox of screwdrivers, hammers, and wrenches might as well be labeled Fisher-Price. I needed new cordless, heavier versions of everything. In the aisles of Fleet Farm, I looked at gas-operated generators, brush cutters, and chain saws, lifting and dropping price tags and flinching in advance at the idea of running power tools with hand-yanked ignitions, blue smoke, and whirring blades.