Shelter (17 page)

I’m a failure as a birder. I can look up a species five times in the field guides and by the next season forget which is what, who’s who, or even that I’d seen a brown thrasher a dozen times before. I cannot keep bobwhite and bobolink straight, and while I know exactly what a white-throated sparrow sounds like, I could not pick one out if it landed on me. When we were children our mother could never keep our names straight, running through the entire roster of Mary-Valerie-Julianne before hitting
Sally!
My
own memory is no better as I stand squinting skyward with arms akimbo, wondering, grosbeak? purple finch? redpoll?
house wren!

In autumn, things settle. Seasonal birds haul south. Gray jays, also known as whiskey jacks, saunter down from the provinces to take over as the bad boys of winter. Here is the far southern border of the jacks’ wintering range.
Here,
as far as whiskey jacks are concerned, is the equivalent of spring break at Daytona Beach with passes for free beer. Unlike their blue cousins, a jack’s bullying actually exhibits some wit and trickery so that you can’t help but like them.

Just passing through in October, rafts of cedar waxwings are often diverted from their migration to hang around awhile, even if just to clean up what shriveled Juneberries and chokecherries the bears didn’t get. The waxwing is my favorite bird, its quiet trill as soothing as New Age flutes. The males and females have only slight variations in their plumage, androgynous in their Zorro masks and bodies feathered so finely they appear to be wearing teeny seal pelts. After I came across a freshly dead but seemingly uninjured male on the ground, I brought it inside and laid it out on a paper napkin. It weighed only about sixteen grams, the equivalent of two dark chocolate Dove Promises (the only available measure). I set the waxwing on the table and through the afternoon kept coming back to it to turn in it my palm, admiring and stroking the minute feathers, wishing for a magnifying glass and wondering how it had died. It was so perfect, not a scratch, with plumage a glistening caramel color like a licked Slo Poke. Its tiny bright yellow and bright red markings were mere ink dabs on its wingtips and tail feathers. I didn’t want to give up the little corpse but then remembered the smell of perishable
prizes I couldn’t part with as a child—the rank shoebox holding a fish skeleton, a set of dead baby mice, the plaid cloth doll with the plastic mouth I force-fed with real milk.

After years of observing the bird feeder society, I’ve grown most partial to the underdogs, the little guys—wrens, finches, sparrows—and have concluded that of all avian society, robins are trailer trash: ungainly, creepy eyed, dimwitted, unwilling to share, too awkward to mingle. And homely—not even juvenile robins are cute. Oddly, our resident robin seem frightened of a little male goldfinch a fifth its size but bright as a Playtex glove, making me wonder if robins can detect alarming colors with their beady blank black eyes.

A rhythmic sewing machine sound led me through the woods to a tree with unmistakable markings: a sapsucker’s signature holes, punch card neat and uniform as if made by machine, but by a bird that just sounds like one. In mid-October, most birds have flown off, just as whiskey jacks build their nests and settle in to harass and mimic the smallest mammals, doing a near-perfect chipmunk or squirrel, nattering right back at them even while stealing their stores. Balking crows fill in where the white-throated sparrow’s song is memory, their call we were taught to remember by its mnemonic
kick your ass hee-hee, hee-hee.
To many, this bird’s song is one that embodies north like no other. The few birds hardy enough to winter over here are tenacious: the crow, jay, and scrappy little chickadee, though they all clam up and listen when a hawk or eagle wheels overhead screaming for lunch.

What lulls exist—not silences,
never
silences—are welcome, especially in summer. I’m grateful for what is
not
heard—no traffic, no neighbor’s too-loud
Best of ABBA
set on repeat, no lawn mowers
or leaf blowers, no farting garbage trucks. Back in the city, such constant noises are layered against the freeway and air traffic, all topped by the drone of cicadas, which only gets louder as the days grow hotter, so electric sounding that as a child I assumed their angry buzz was the sound made by utility poles marked “Danger.” After learning they were mere insects, I still thought of them as somehow dangerous; the only more awful-sounding bug would be a fly skidding around on its back in a skillet. The cicadas herald the dog days, the sweaty droop of summer and my least favorite time of year. It may well be that the
lack
of cicadas in the north is another lure that keeps me coming back.

In one of the camp recliners, perfect for stargazing or cloud watching, I can close my eyes and sounds surface: warm wind filtering through pine needles on scented huffs, a beaver tree groaning before its branches crash lakeward.

Water carries the minute noises so that while swaying in the shore-side hammock, I can make out the tiniest laps of water, a fish jumping, minnows going nuts in the bucket, curses of a neighbor across the lake trying to fix something.

When I think of summer, I hear it before I see it: breeze singing through metal porch screens, the clanking contents of a tackle box, a distant chain saw, a child cannonballing, the flap of a cribbage hand set down, thwacks of rolled magazines and the hiss of Raid, the
puhpuhpuh
of propane before ignition, tires on gravel, bedsprings whining, pee zizzing into an enamel chamber pot, the
fup
of a cap pried from a beer bottle, the five-horse death rattle of an Evinrude.

In winter, all sounds seem to contract so that you walk in a closed yoke of your own sounds: breath confined by parka hood,
the fat
shish
of winter outer garments, the squeal of snow underfoot rising to castrato pitch as temperatures drop. Corn snow meeting window glass sounds like hurled grit, and chickadees that are only third-tier in summer become the nasal soloists of winter. On a deathly quiet night, you might hear a kill by a distant wolf pack, disturbed to discover that a deer can sound eerily human at the end. The
thuew-thuew
of lake ice cracking has an unearthly resonance that can be frightening when it occurs underfoot, signaling a change in temperature that actually strengthens the ice. Winter is a cold corridor of sounds.

Jon hears very little of the seasons. Since the surgery he’d had in his twenties to extract a tumor and the bat bones of his ruined eardrum, he’s relied on his “good ear,” which isn’t all that good. More often I find myself refraining from asking, “Did you hear that?” I notice his increasing non-reaction to noises too high or thin to land in his range. Some decline seems inevitable and exhibits itself in small ways, like when he holds his guitar ever closer when tuning it.

I’d quietly subscribed to Internet sites that provide the latest information regarding advances in digital hearing aids, though getting Jon to wear his is like cajoling an overheated child into a snowsuit. I researched cochlear implants only to find they are roughly the price of real estate.

If anything good at all comes of his hearing loss, it’s our routine of taking breaks twice a day to talk, face to face, either on the fish house bed or the loungers in the screen house with no distractions or radio. We catch up on the day, natter, make plans, joke around, debate, Jon reading more lip than he’ll admit. This deliberate communication is our chance to give and get complete
and focused attention, however brief. I would recommend such “sessions” to any couple, no impairment necessary.

He has already lost birdsong and whispers. I fear music and voices may be next, and there is no adapting for that. For Jon, it really
is
quiet here.

T
he same isolation that can render a community out of touch can also preserve its ethnic identities, not least those in the kitchen. Early on, even the smallest Range towns had established ethnic neighborhoods in which Italian, Finnish, Scandinavian, and Eastern European immigrants segregated themselves, bound among their own initially by language, later by choice, and often by food.

Though my family was Slovene, I’d heard older relatives refer to themselves as “Bohunks,” and I grew up thinking we were Austrian, which was how many immigration ledgers listed incoming Europeans of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For second- and third-generation Minnesotans, cultural differences and language barriers have long ago dissolved, but today people here still relate to their ethnicities and exhibit great pride in their heritages and can get very clannish about what goes into their sausages.

Food is the great unifier here, and culinary traditions run deep, often trumping taste. Booya and pierogi dinners are events, and Welsh pasty day means a run on the few bakeries left that make them. An entire diaspora of nostalgic Scandinavian Americans shares an inexplicable hankering for cod that’s been salted, dried, and reconstituted by soaking in lye. Thankfully, lutefisk is only
a seasonal Christmas staple, its yuck factor rivaling only Scottish haggis. In Norway, lutefisk is an export, has never been considered a delicacy, and is rarely, if ever, consumed. It might have been a necessary evil in the years before refrigeration, but no contemporary Norwegian chef would dry a perfectly good fish to the consistency of a salt lick and marinate it in dumpster juice.

Our Finnish Uncle Lew introduced us to
kalamojakka
—fish soup.
Mojakka
simply means stew, which, like “chowder,” implies myriad variations. The proper pronunciation is “moy-uh-ka,” though as kids we twisted it to “more-yukka.” It can be delicious when made with salmon, cream, allspice, and chardonnay, but the version we knew was a thin soup of starchy potatoes and onions boiled in milk with northern pike, a fish considered too inferior and bony to eat as a filet. We ate with trepidation, lining up the translucent bones on the edges of our melamine bowls. A friend whose family eats mojakka at holidays reports that whichever of her siblings gets the fish head is still awarded a shiny quarter as compensation, though they are all over fifty.

Food is one topic on which most Rangers agree. I agree, for instance, that strudel is
good,
while head cheese is just a terrible lie. For one thing, there’s no
cheese
involved; that’s a diversion to trick you into eating it. And since there’s no cheese, we are left to deduce that head cheese minus cheese equals … what? Imagine the contents of the slop bucket under a hog butcher’s table: brains and cheeks, bits of snout, sinuses. Now imagine all that simmered and artfully arranged in a mold and then suspended in aspic (cook’s decoupage), the result looking very much like a slice from the Body Worlds display at the science museum. I like
to think those who actually serve the stuff shroud it with lettuce, actual cheese, and shields of bread to spare the victims. Blood sausage at least admits what it is.

A lot of this northern fare is home-cookin’ comfort food but hardly healthy. Cholesterol-chocked dishes are staunchly defended as cultural badges, like Italian porchetta, the spiciest dish west of Wisconsin and east of the Dakotas and great on the grill, but off the calorie charts. Delicious locally made sausages and salamis are sodium torpedoes aimed at arteries. We loved Grandma Julia’s pasties, malformed by her considerably quaking hands and made with pure lard pastry and generous pats of butter in the meat filling. When anything is “just like Grandma used to make it,” the recipes should require a subheading by the Surgeon General. Everything Julia cooked got a chunk of butter tossed in at the beginning, the middle, and the end. Her walnut potica was mined with it, and heavenly. Julia would defend her butter habit as perfectly healthy, insisting it never killed anyone as vehemently as NRA supporters insist guns don’t kill people. I’d watched her put butter in soup, and I’ve kept an eye on the kitchen sponge lest she butter that. Perhaps butter didn’t do
her
any harm. She was never ill, and nearing a hundred, she was still trim with a heart like a Timex. I never saw anything like canned goods or mixes in her cupboards, and her kitchen garden was organic before the term implied righteousness. Everything was cooked from scratch, or
scratch
-scratch, as my friend Catherine calls any cake made with ingredients measured from canisters, while
single
-scratch is made from a box mix that you add eggs and oil to and bake, as opposed to the kind you add only water to before microwaving, which is just homemade.

Grandma’s Parkinson’s-like tremors prohibited her from drinking coffee from a cup. Instead she slurped from a saucer clamped in her quaking, translucent hands. A toddler in her lap might be in for a ride, but it could be disconcerting to walk into her kitchen when she was armed with so much as a paring knife or came swinging by like a bobblehead of herself carrying a saucepan of hot gravy.

For many years, I could not smell brewing coffee without thinking of waking up in Julia’s house, nor could I pass a bakery without thinking of her cardamom braid, which was best either just out of the oven or six days later when it was rock hard and dipped in hot milk for breakfast—
buttered
hot milk.

Not everything around here is bad for you. An eat-locally gourmand might dream up a north woods feast that would include local fresh fish (a trout or sunny broiled up with sautéed morels), a wild watercress salad, and a blueberry tart on filbert crust—a meal that won’t harm you. Alas, if you want fresh, you have to catch it yourself. The tourist favorite at restaurants is the walleye, caught in Canada, of course.

Here, a heart-smart meal might include local game, which is low in fat but particularly wild tasting since most mammals here survive on bark, twigs, moss, and what edible needles can be found. There’s a reason hunters from downstate brag about bagging a corn-fed deer: the meat
is
better. The scraggly boreal diet of northern deer comes through in the venison, which tends to be waxy and tough, palatable only after long baths in red wine and many olive oil and garlic massages. Because of difficult logistics, deer are most often improperly dressed at the kill site—underdressed, actually. Ideally the animal should be immediately
bled and skinned, then all fat cut away on-site. But more often, the carcass spends an hour or more thumping around in the back of a truck, which only infuses the skin oils and furry taste deeper into the meat. Once butchered, venison should be aged several days in cold water, rinsed countless times with fresh water, and plied with alcohol before a long simmer in some savory gravy.