Shelter (22 page)

Stepping in to take the property off the couple’s hands were the Legals, a partnership of lawyer and real estate developer that by definition terrifies those of us protective of our isolation, especially since the Legals already owned multiple parcels and half the shoreline. Should the highway come through to make the current private road directly accessible from highway spurs, it would be eligible for an upgrade to county road, making our parcels then legally subdividable. So far, the Legals don’t appear to be planning any development, only Christian retreat weekends, a sort of “Where would Jesus camp?” camp, replete with revival tents, porta-potties, and baptisms in the weedy shallows.

Circumstances for some of us have changed. During the dozen years of their marriage, Terry and Susan had worked overtime to maintain balance, but in spite of their regard for each other, things slowly tipped and they are now separated, trying to find a new relationship that works, aiming for friendship. For now, they still share their cabin and hope to find a way for each to stay connected to the place.

Time has proven that as neighbors we all get on, liberals and Smurfs happily coexisting next to Republicans, and Christians next to atheists. It was only as we’d all gotten to know each other and settled into a community that we’d discovered the Mn/DOT plan, and now we have more than proximity in common, for everyone on The Lake will suffer if the road goes through, if not by confiscation or devaluation of lands, then at least by the noise
and increased traffic. Some of us are in rather a tizzy over it while others remain calm, doing the wait-and-see thing.

I force myself to imagine leaving here, reminding myself of the four things I dislike about the place: two species of insects, one of arachnid, and the climate. I never asked myself if this latitude was best, having sort of forgotten that there are only two seasons, and both can kill you. Spring is merely an extension of winter; summers are jungly green, intense, and muggy; and autumn is entirely too brief, truncated by the long, long subarctic winters that swing in hard and fast with temps that can freeze-dry nostrils in the time it takes to cram on a knitted nose cozy. The record high is 114 degrees and the low is minus 60, a swing of 174 degrees, brutal by any standard but more so when banked against my own optimal range for well-being and sanity: a twenty-five-degree variable between 35 and 60, same as for cut flowers.

Every few years, a camera crew arrives to wring another story out of the weather, most recently for a
CBS Sunday Morning
segment called “Cold Wars,” in which the correspondent exaggerates the competition between the triumvirate of towns vying for the title of “Coldest in the Nation”: Embarrass, International Falls, and Tower. Tower holds the official record at -60, recorded in 1996, when Embarrass citizens got robbed after their regulation thermometer broke in mid-plummet at only -52. Readings on their unofficial thermometers went as low as -66. Most Tower citizens would concede or even root for Embarrass because everyone knows it really
is
colder there, and it wouldn’t be Minnesota nice not to admit it. But to hear the folks in both Embarrass and Tower tell it, International Falls isn’t even a contender and is only referred to as “Ice Box of the Nation” because it owns the legal
trademark, and it doesn’t hurt that they’ve got Rocky and Bullwinkle to back them up.

Anyone would have to wonder, why willingly choose to live in a place where simply going outside can leave a trail of fingertips? And now, during the sloggy end of August, The Lake grows a green skin and the temps hover in dog-days numbers. My inner barometer fluctuates, and I lose my desire to do or
be
much of anything, waiting for the break that must surely be coming in some thunderstorm or front roiling in from Saskatchewan.

Could
I leave here? The road has begun to look unstoppable, looming like more bad weather. I’ve already lurched through Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief: 1)
Denial
—There’s no
way
these people are stupid enough to go through with this!; 2)
Anger—
Fantasizing freak accidents in which Mn/DOT project managers are tragically diced or julienned; 3)
Bargaining
—Maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe we’ll get used to the noise, and Mn/DOT will compensate us with enough of a settlement to build a small cabin?; 4)
Depression
—Can no one
see
how upsetting this has all been, that I’ve invested blood into this place?; and finally 5)
Acceptance
—The minute pigs fly.

My crusade against the road has dragged on to the point that it takes a large file box to house all the documents, maps, letters, address lists, studies, e-mails, editorials, etc. When I open the lid little puffs of defeat waft out. Sometimes we simply allow ourselves to believe that common sense will kick in, that a state agency will have an epiphany on its own (this being the punch line). In the local paper, we’ve been referred to as NIMBYs, an acronym I wasn’t familiar with until I read it in connection with us, and I admit, yes,
indeed, Not
In My Back Yard when it comes
to wrongfully planned $22 million highway reroutes. Should we be asked for easements for wind turbines or a bike trail, I’d offer to break ground with my teeth.

Through the battle, we have highlighted the environmental impact, the inordinate amount of sulfides in the surface rock of our ridge that, if blasted or ground up to make roadbed, would cause significant runoff. Mn/DOT geologists didn’t seem to find much, and rumor has it they plan to mitigate the issue. Transportation agencies in other states facing this problem have had to go back after completing such road projects and clean up sulfide messes in operations that cost several times the roads themselves. Mn/DOT responded to this information with something akin to shrugs.

We’ve investigated the cultural significance of the land. Plenty of anecdotal evidence indicates it was once a section of a Native trade route. The narrow line of pin oaks that crosses our property is standing evidence of Native travel, the result of acorns discarded or strewn by Dakota or Anishinaabe moving along the Birch Lake portage trail. The archaeological study that the state contracted was deemed sufficient, though it was nothing more than a random “shovel test,” which entails digging no deeper than a shovel head (good luck). While we know this is an old trade route, we cannot find concrete examples on old survey maps because not all tribal records were meticulously kept.

We’ve pointed out that highway accident statistics don’t quite match up with claims, as if they have been creatively presented to justify the reroute. The push behind the reroute was safety, yet crashes have been more prevalent on other stretches of the road. In the last two years, there have been three fatal crashes, none anywhere nearby.

Bill, the real estate broker who’d pointed me to our land, was critically injured in a crash ten miles down the road. Tragically, the young man who had caused the accident was killed instantly, and a few weeks later, on a very sad and quiet day for Ely, Bill died, too. Reading some of the many tributes and public condolences, I was not surprised to learn just how much goodwill Bill had left in his wake, accrued over decades of indiscriminately imposing habitual kindness and corny jokes on the hundreds who will miss him.

I embarked on a last-ditch effort, playing Harriet the Spy, digging around where I shouldn’t, looking for some key as to why the project was moving forward against reason. I called certain individuals, posing as someone not caring much about the highway but about projects closely aligned to it and dependent on the road going through as planned. It took no great sleuthing. It was just
there,
practically lying right on the road. In about an hour, I found the connection—two projects entwined and enmeshed with political motivations fueled by the sort of good-old-boy cronyism so typical of rural enclaves. I dug some more, just to make sure I had my facts straight.

It was quite possible that my findings could throw a wrench in a long-planned, long-fraught project already years behind schedule. I was alone in my discovery, and no matter the outcome, just bringing it up would doubtless make enemies of a certain few locals. For years I’d been trying to be part of this place, but what I was about to do could easily sabotage all my efforts and backfire so that, in the end, some might take great pleasure in invoking their eminent domain.

I held on to my information for several months, and only when I was notified that heavy equipment would be dispatched to drill
for mineral samples did I put my final attempt into letter form. I started and tossed several drafts. For the first time since the beginning of the battle, a letter went out with my name alone on it. I couldn’t recruit any neighbors, and by this stage, half of them had grown seemingly resigned or even indifferent.

I posted the letter, and now there’s really nothing to do but wait it out along with the rest of summer, with its heat index hovering around ninety most days.

It’s worse in Japan, where a record heat wave has killed over a hundred people since Sam moved there. His dream of living in Tokyo has finally come true. To meet his language requirement at the U of M, he’d honed his Japanese and learned his
kanji
by flipping flash cards. He worked two jobs in order to save enough money to go, got his TEFL certificate to Teach English as a Foreign Language, and was off.

He and his girlfriend, Leah, have settled on the edge of the city in an apartment that is measured by the number of
tatami
mats it will hold—six—smaller than the cheapest room at a Motel 6. It has no air conditioning. I’ve seen the place via a Skype tour with Sam as guide, sweat dripping off the end of his nose like a spigot while he showed me the rusted, wobbly balcony rail that their landlord had instructed them Never To Touch. Sam admitted the reason they got the place so cheap was that the building is slated to be torn down. When the tour reached the water heater that may or may not explode, he insisted I shouldn’t worry.

And I don’t want him to worry about the road and the land, so I say very little. When I tell him we’re going north he says, “That sounds awesome,” with real longing in his voice. The place
has
gotten under his skin. Now that he’s in Japan, he’s come to
consider the land a part of “home,” and perhaps on some noisy, frenetic street corner of Shinjuku, it’s occurred to him that the places like our little cabin are sometimes necessary, that time spent in nature can tuck in the frayed ends of the soul.

I occasionally tune in to NHK World TV to see what’s going on in Japan. Many of the Japanese newscasters speak flawless mid-western English with no hint of accent, as if educated in Iowa. You never know what you’ll find on NHK: news, cultural and travel programs, a sumo match, wildly silly talk shows, a cooking demonstration, or total weirdness, such as a game show in which contestants are given potent laxatives, and the one who holds out the longest before dashing to the door of his designated neon toilet cubicle wins a fantastic prize, like a mobile clothes-drying rack to attach to a bike or an eight-foot-high stuffed animal to occupy space in a miniscule apartment.

A few times a week, we e-mail-chat, and Sam reports adventures he and Leah are having, big and small, like going to the
Lost in Translation
bar in the Tokyo Park Hyatt and blowing their food budget for a day on one shot of Jameson and one non-alcoholic cocktail, just to see the view, just to have
been there.

Like any mother I sometimes have to stop myself from advising, not wanting to be too much of a “smother,” which Sam used to call me whenever I got on him about school or his room. He writes to say an informal version of “mother” in Japanese is
haha.

Haha. Motherhood has been sort of a laugh in hindsight. In the beginning, I took to it not quite like a duck to water, pregnancy being quite a shock and not something I’d willingly repeat. Sam wasn’t the easiest fetus, and by the time he’d finished growing
elbows to work his way out with, we were both a little stunned and weary. Not one female friend or relative had warned me, making me wonder if all mothers instinctively get tight lipped about pregnancy and its grisly climax because if women really knew what they were in for, the species would doubtless screech to a halt. Men may have their secret societies and strange initiations in the basements of the Knights of Columbus, but they’ve got nothing on the cult of Motherhood. No hazing ritual or overweight Shriner squeezing his way out of a toy car has anything on labor and delivery.

Maybe some hormone deficiency had rendered me less maternal than most, and during that first year, not knowing how to act like other mothers, I was probably giving some wrong cues, which Sam responded to by not acting much like other babies, which was good because I hadn’t really expected a
baby,
somehow. I thought I would give birth to someone to
talk
to, and while other mothers cooed and baby-talked through the milky haze of breast-feeding, Sam and I were tentative latcher and latchee. Hardly blissed out on any maternal plane, I would shake my head and ask Sam, as if he were twenty, “How weird is this?,” then pick up where I’d left off reading. Sam loved “Shouts & Murmurs” in
The New Yorker,
I think because my torso so often jiggled with laughter.

He did eventually talk, and not a minute too soon. I’d been feeding him grapes, having at least enough instinct to mash them like bloated ticks so he wouldn’t choke. Each time I gave him one, I repeated, “Grape.” When I picked up the last one in the bowl, Sam grabbed it with an emphatic “Grape!” feeling the shape of the word in his mouth at the same time as the sweetness. A look I hadn’t seen before passed over his features, as if some new gadget
in his head powered up at that moment. He said it again, more thoughtfully: “Grape.” He
got
it.
If I say the name of the thing, the one with breasts will give it to me!
And from then on he was able to connect a word to a person, place, or thing, and we both sighed a sigh of relief: babyhood was behind us.