Shelter (7 page)

“Don’t worry,” I reminded him. “I’ll have her out of here by Saturday.”

By Thursday, he was hand-feeding her thawed tidbits from his stash of frozen walleye cheeks. He shook a little bag of what looked to me like weed. “It’s true about catnip,” he informed me. “Look at her. She’s completely, what do you call it …
baked?
“

I leaned on the door frame. “She is?”

My plan was working nicely. Dad fell asleep to Johnny Carson’s closing theme with Margaret buttoned into his sweater vest. On Friday, I came home to him stapling carpet remnants around
the posts of a Realtor’s for-sale sign with its bottom still muddy, building a hideous scratching post. “Don’t get too attached,” I reminded him. But when I got up on Saturday, he’d already spirited Margaret away on his weekend rounds to rummage sales and to my sister’s house for coffee.

Margaret loved the car as a dog does, especially the back window, becoming Dad’s own furry mascot. He started taking her to the cabin. They slept together.

“Did Grandpa hate cats?” Sam asked.

“Mostly,” I said. Just then a large rabbit jumped onto the path ahead, and we froze in our tracks. It didn’t move. We inched closer. It wasn’t a jackrabbit or ratty wood rabbit but a big, glossy Alice in Wonderland rabbit. It stood on its back legs and stared at us as if it had been waiting. I half expected it to take out a pocket watch.

Sam looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked at him. Sam petted the rabbit and looked at me in awe, whispering, “Maybe it’s Grandpa?” Lately he’d been puzzling over the mysteries of life and seemed to come home every day with a new question about being or not being and what makes alive alive and dead dead. He had a cardboard contraption he’d made called the Death Machine in which he placed stuffed animals he had “made dead,” but then, after a lot of sound effects and fiddling with buttons magic markered onto the box, they miraculously came back to life—Sam at the helm, of course. He was frequently babysat by a family who were Bible-thumping fundamentalists, and while I’d asked that any reading there be limited to Dr. Seuss and Sam’s
Fun with Science!
books, who knew what tales of resurrections and afterlife he was regaled with over cookies and milk?

“Grandpa?” I could guess where he might be going with this, and indeed the rabbit wasn’t your Average Rabbit. He was tended and tame and probably someone’s escaped or abandoned pet. Circling the rabbit, I looked for a tag or collar (collar, on a rabbit?). Just as I reached out for him, he bounded away, saving me from trying to figure out how to capture it
and
what to do with it.

“Well, wouldn’t it be neat if it
was
Grandpa?” I shrugged.
“But …”
We had a four-hour car ride ahead of us, plenty of time to go over the final finality of life. I’d been raised in a faith that dangled the carrot of an afterlife while at the same time instilling such fear for this one that, at Sam’s age, I’d assumed guardian angels were snitches and that I was doomed to fry. Early on in motherhood, I’d determined he’d have a secular upbringing with “just the facts.” I’d already watched my mother, at the end of a life not well lived, grasp for a last straw by suddenly re-embracing the church that had excommunicated her to ask for the Last Rites, hoping for a bus ticket to somewhere beyond the end of the line.

And as great as it would be to imagine my son and father meeting up to go fishing on some everlasting lake, I could provide something tangible by giving Sam some place his grandfather would have liked to provide himself: a cabin in the woods, however modest, a real place set in the actual kingdom of nature.

Between our scratchings on a yellow legal pad, Lars and I worked up a few designs, one for an outhouse similar to one in the lumberyard and another for a small “starter” cabin of just 10 x 12 feet with a sleeping loft. Tiny, but enough for the moment, and
hopefully down the road I would be able to afford to have Lars build something larger, when the small cabin could become my studio. I wrote a check for a deposit.

Once back at the site, I looked around at the clutter of water jugs and folded lawn chairs and realized: I still didn’t have a shed.

W
e owned the land three years before Lars went to work on the starter cabin. Until then, I’d somehow shrugged off consequences of being so far off the grid. “Pristine, undeveloped” is how the mining company had listed it, and during the heady time of finding and buying (as if medicated), that description had an almost whimsical ring to it, like a Disneyesque glade populated by Bambi and fairies on pink toadstools and affectionate wolves. Had one been rational at that time, one might have looked into just what “undeveloped” meant in the way of expenses down the road. “Road” being just one. The driveway had already chomped off far more than its allotted share of what I casually called the “budget,” which in reality was my retirement.

No road access, water, septic, or electricity. Just how much I’d bitten off became clear when I called around to price getting hooked up. Power from the grid a mile and a half away required erecting poles every three hundred feet, and since it’s impossible to plant poles
in
the ground here, much drilling into ledge rock is necessary to hold them upright by way of angle irons, raising the cost to sixteen hundred dollars per pole in addition to the ten dollars per foot for the line itself, adding up to over $40k, which explained why the clerk at the power company had been
so sympathetic. Solar was the only option. And since sun is not an everyday occurrence around here, panels would need to be supplemented with a generator or wind turbine should we ever want to power more than lights.

Drilling wells here is hysterically expensive, which should have come as no surprise given the terrain: all bedrock, often requiring hydrofracking, a technique borrowed from iron mining to augment traditional drilling. If no water is forthcoming at a depth of, say, five hundred or more feet of drilling, the hole is blasted with enough water pressure to break into horizontal aquifers or cracks harboring water. A someday flush toilet would require mounded septic, costing yet another small fortune. Pumps for such things as wells and septic need electricity, so you can’t really have one without the other. Necessities turned out to be luxuries beyond reach

Ironically, high-speed wireless Internet
is
available, with a tower so near we can see its lights blinking just over the ridge. Great, should I ever want to surf Facebook by lantern light during my ever-dwindling laptop battery hours.

I stopped by the sawmill to see progress on the cabin. The square logs had been notched and the walls built up to armpit height. The freshly milled wood was the color of September hay, and the structure stood in its own little yard of drifted, wonderful-smelling sawdust. I climbed over a wall and stood inside and realized I had made a grave mistake.

Even with no roof, it seemed claustrophobic, no larger than a Finnish henhouse. Lars assured me it only
felt
small because there were no windows yet and it was empty. I’d asked for small, hadn’t I?

I could do without power or water, I realized, if only there was just enough
space.
At least room enough so no one goes mad after a few days of rain. Space for a couch and a comfy chair for reading, a wall for bookshelves, a room with a door to close for naps and privacy, a porch with a table just for cribbage and jigsaw puzzles that needn’t be cleared each mealtime. What I really should have had Lars build was a little cabin, a modest six to eight hundred square feet. What I’d commissioned was a playhouse.

Or maybe I should have just started with the most important room of any cabin and built the screened porch first in hopes of tacking on a cabin later. I once lived in the countryside outside of Duluth on a road that sported two “starter homes”: basements that had been topped and capped with tarpaper, with enclosed staircases reaching up from below as if groping for rooms that weren’t there. For as long as I lived on that road, neither basement ever sprouted a house. The subterranean families continued to live like earthworms with only glass-block chunks of daylight. The mailbox outside of one was lettered “The Glooms.” If whole families of Glooms could live in basements, I could make do in a porch.

Small is good; it’s sustainable. Small is smart, but tiny is more of a challenge.

The bungalow generation of architects seemed to get it most right about how we live in our spaces, not least by acknowledging the duck-and-cover instinct humans have, designing smallish rooms to host an occupant without dwarfing them, acknowledging that, as bipeds, we move side to side but do not shoot up into the air, a fact lost on 1980s builders so fond of great rooms with soaring ceilings. After renovation of the old Victorian that
Sam was raised in, his bedroom had fresh white walls, gleaming woodwork, and windows flooding light over the newly varnished floor—an airy, generous space. Yet come bedtime, Sam would pad down the hall to the tiny guest room, a cozy box with thick carpet and walls tinted a rusty mauve that on a paint chip might have been called “womb.”

Big cabins are just wrong, and big-big cabins are crimes upon the landscape, but we would need a
little
more than the log box I was standing in. I sat with Lars, and we designed a second building to be used for storage. It would be slightly smaller at 8 x 11 and timber-frame, so less expensive. It could be built more quickly. In fact, Lars said he could put it up within a few months. I decided on a spot just east of the driveway.

The timbers went up fast, and once the bones of the building were erect, I realized it was far too nice for storage. As living space, it would have just enough room for a bed and a chamber pot to slide under it. Lars’s dad, Rory, was recruited to finish the building. Since there was no money for much more than the basics, I was informed I had to decide between a roof and windows. I gave up windows and opted for screens all around, with a three-foot-high skirting of cedar shake around the bottom, making it a sort of sleeping porch.

Once built, it looked exactly like a fish house, so the name stuck. Since it was conceived only as a storage shed, it wasn’t the tightest building, with countless thoroughfares in and out for the mice and bugs of all orders. During its first years of use, I was constantly plugging cracks with spray foam, steel wool, and logger’s caulk, sometimes with odd results. When the hard-to-control spray foam shot right through a gap to the outside, I went out
to check under the eaves to find a perfectly scaled male member hardened in foam, pointing west.

Still, mice owned the place, sprinting maniacally across the framework of beams as if it were a Habitrail custom built for them. Eventually, I would give in and drape mosquito netting over the bed, at least to keep mouse turds from falling directly onto sleeping heads and wolf spiders from crawling into bed. With netting, one snoring with mouth agape would only inhale the tiniest of moths, and insects crawling into ears would be of the petite variety. Most everyone here knows the trick for getting a bug out of an ear, but every now and again a tourist will be spotted whacking his head like a swimmer or unmedicated schizophrenic, at least until someone takes pity and drags them into some dark toilet to use their cell phone light to coax the thing out.

Considering what little amount of living space we would have, one of my mother’s axioms came back to me: “There is a place for everything, and everything has its place.” We would have to take care to put things away, keep tables clear, keep shoes and boots off the floor, and have nothing inside that doesn’t belong or have some vital function. Maybe I also suffer her “see chaos, feel chaos” aversion that prevents me from feeling good in any place cluttered. There really wouldn’t be any place to store things since, once again, we didn’t have a shed.

Out of sight but not out of mind is my cabin hope chest, a former Mayflower moving van parked in a lot near Ely where it sits chockablock among a hundred others, all retired and repurposed and rented as storage. With its crisp grass and gravel alleys, the place has a desultory air, an abandoned place of abandoned
things. Situated as it is next to the college, it’s the perfect choice for a hazing or a kegger. Driving in, I skirt a few pole barns and sheds and a trailer Jed Clampett might have dragged behind his jalopy, its wooden sides weighted with a dozen vintage outboard motors like sailors clamped to a raft. When a breeze kicks up, a few propellers turn, and I step on it, imagining the old Johnsons and Neptunes all coughing to life at once to propel themselves after me into the maze of trailers.

At the end of the lane is an odd brick building worthy of a double take, its architecture slightly Gothic with a round stained-glass window in its peak, an old Masonic Temple or Odd Fellows Hall (men used to be odder). The building was impressive once, but isolated as it is and misplaced in the middle of storageland, it is doubly creepy. I wonder what’s inside yet don’t really want to know. Number 90 is my trailer, and I’ve never found it on the first try, usually twining a few times down lanes of cabless trailers with faded logos for Gateway or Monson. If the tires weren’t all flat, I’d swear the owner moves them around for fun. Number 90 is plain white, its sides painted over. All that stands between potential thieves and the treasures inside is a padlock the size found on diaries, weak enough to be bitten through.