Shelter (10 page)

A few outhouses around the lake employ a chemical liquid method with plastic barrels sunk as deep as possible into the ground, topped with an elevated structure, the end result much like a taller, more attractive porta-potty. After a season, the local honey wagon—in this case, Royal Flush—comes and pumps out the barrels, same as pumping a septic system. In theory this is the best option, but to get anywhere near these toilets is to realize either the chemical ratio or the ventilation isn’t right because rather than masking the odor of waste, it’s somehow enhanced, an acrid stench that makes hand-turned composting a bed of roses in comparison.

With some hired help, Lars dug the hole, but just when they hit bedrock, his back gave out. He could have called in Boulder Busters, the local rock eradication service, but that might have seemed akin to giving in. I couldn’t help but think a dynamite
charge like those used to blast Lumbering Bear might be the ticket. The hole didn’t look like it was going to get any deeper, and Lars went in for back surgery.

Apparently we’d have the standard, old-fashioned outhouse I grew up with—a hole in the ground with a building squatting over it. Once planted, the outhouse wouldn’t be going anywhere; there would be no second hole. I could only hope that the shallow dent would suffice until we had an indoor bathroom, when the outhouse could become optional, or a shed, since we still didn’t have one.

A conventional outhouse is actually fairly environmentally sound and doesn’t stink when treated properly. A percentage of the waste seeps away, and the rest breaks down with the aid of time and lime (calcium oxide). Lime is nasty stuff. When Henry III was defending English shores, his army defeated the marauding French by hurling lime into their eyes and blinding them. In the battle on stink, lime is sprinkled down the outhouse hole after one’s efforts. Though it’s a natural substance, lime, if inhaled, can scar or destroy a septum as efficiently as a hill of cocaine. It can also sear skin, and applying water or ice only raises its temp to 150 degrees. This is one of the few instances where leaving the toilet seat
down
is the offense; any lime left on a seat can blister a painful ring on delicate flesh. If only “flush” were an option.

A girl can dream.

“S
tonich is an Ely name. You otta put a sign out there at your driveway: that way your place won’t get vandalized.”

“Even the meth heads know enough to not trash a local’s cabin.”

“Sometimes you gotta do a little name dropping.”

“Even if it’s just your own.”

This sound advice comes from two fellows in Dee’s Lounge on Ely’s main street. One had been in the mines with my Uncle Ted. They told me that if I was just asking questions, their names were Juri and Earl, but if I was planning on writing anything that their wives might read, revealing they’d been in Dee’s all afternoon with some female, then they were Mutt and Jeff. They howled over their joke and took it further by correcting anyone who came in and addressed one of them, “He mighta been Juri this morning, but he’s Mutt now!” Earl (Jeff ) slapped his knee.

Though I was over forty, I was still introduced as “the Stonich girl that made up that book about here.”

There was a lot of subdued chatter in the bar. Just out was the news that a bunch of young local men and a juvenile had been arrested for accosting a group of campers within the Boundary Waters, threatening them both verbally and with weapons. Shots
had been fired. Both Juri and Earl knew most of the boys charged. Both used “we” and “us” when talking about their community. Most everyone in Dee’s knew at least one of the accused.

Juri smacked the bar. “Tourists’re gonna think we’re a bunch of backwater hicks, like in that movie …”

“Deliverance,”
Earl finished for him. “These boys are all charged with terroristic threats.”

“More like
asshole-istic,
if you ask me. ‘Terroristic’ makes us sound like a bunch of towelheads.”

“Right, but whatever you call what they did, it leaves us twisting in the wind to make things right.” Earl swept an arm to indicate everyone in the bar.

“Like we got time to be goodwill ambassadors on top of everything else.”

“They shouldn’t ‘a been in there with motorboats anyway.”

“Well, that’s another issue altogether.”

Attitudes here are as mild as the weather. Most residents have wildly differing opinions on issues from declassifying wolves off the endangered species list to potential copper mining or the use of motorized vehicles in restricted areas. Political arguments are heated. Moral attitudes are more private, though often evidenced in the plastering of bumper stickers, some indicating that the drivers are both pro-life
and
pro-war, or letting us know what their personal Jesus would Do, Say, Buy, or Bomb. My favorite sticker says as much about the place as the people, applied to the back of a rusted Land Rover: SHIT HAPPENS.

Ely made national news when its city council officially denounced the invasion of Iraq, then made the news again the following week when they revoked that denunciation after a vivid
dispute between council members who were split on the issue, members of the antiwar coalition, the then mayor, and veterans who interpreted the vote as anti-troop and anti-American. There is little neutral ground here—radios are tuned to public radio, AM conservative talk shows, or eighties rock.

If isolation fosters extremism, northern Minnesota is a potential incubator for nutcases on either end. A fanatic, as my father defined one, is anybody with his head so far up his own ass he can’t smell anyone else’s. I guessed that meant a zealot was somebody who feared and distrusted anyone who didn’t understand or smell the world in the same way he did. On the road north, you’re welcomed to the region by an array of signs planted next to Highway 53 near Cotton, where for decades a landowner has been posting hand-painted billboards that change as his beefs do. Sometimes the signs are illustrated with primitive drawings, as if painted by a sort of Curmudgeon Moses. At the height of the anti-French sentiment that swept Real America a number of years ago, the curmudgeon painted the UN flag being urinated on by a poodle, with the words “Piss on the Poodles, and Kofi Annan too!” Curmudgeon also seems to harbor great disdain for the Postmaster General and pretty much whoever is in power. His most recent billboard rant depicts President Obama as a half-naked spearchucker with a wide grin. I want badly to interview this man, but the fact that his compound is surrounded by ten-foot fencing made of scrap metal with a sign that warns “No Trespassing, Injury Very Likely” would dissuade most anyone from approaching his bunker, or spaceship-in-progress, or whatever it is he lives in behind the scary fence.

When I Googled an Ely topic, the first hit was an article published in a small Punjabi newspaper written by an Indian reporter. Ely might seem an odd place for the World Press Institute to send its fellows, but it’s done just that for years, hosting an annual gathering of international journalists, with locals opening their homes to the visiting foreigners. At the latest forum, when the issue of gun control arose, most of the journalists offered that in their own countries, guns are highly restricted. Then the mayor weighed in that in Ely there is this saying: “My wife, yes; my dog, maybe; my gun,
never.”
This is the sort of
Deliverance
response that Earl and Juri cringe over, knowing it will only color perceptions of the place. They are trying to earn a living and well understand that tourism depends on outsiders. More recently, the same mayor was charged with theft and illegally entering the BWCA, an offense he’s been cited for numerous times since 1978, despite federal regulations that designate it as wilderness.

“Which,
hello,
is exactly what brings tourists and their money here.” Juri rolls his eyes.

Earl insists folks here do read more than just the local paper, most are law-abiding and can properly interpret the Constitution, and they
do
welcome diversity and more awareness of the world beyond. Of course, as in any small town, there are also those who want nothing of the world, and Earl says it’s sometimes hard to tell one from another. It’s senseless to judge an old-timer holding up the bar at Zaverl’s when he says things like “That Negro fella is doing a pretty good job so far” because it’s possible the geezer was out hunting during the decades of political correctness and missed the phases of rephrasing and probably thinks GLBT is
some new sandwich down at the café. A few are intentionally up front in their prejudices, like the Foghorn Leghorn store clerk from the South who crows his own brand of intolerance within earshot of anyone buying a bag of finishing nails, claiming he isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade and that one of the reasons he moved this far north was “'cause they ain’t none.”

Historically the Range has remained a predominantly Democratic, pro-union, and labor stronghold, but most people keep views to themselves or limit them to their fishing buddies or coffee klatches, aware that this is indeed a small place and that we do all have to live together. One thing everyone agrees on is that Ely is an interesting place, not an easy place, to live. City limits are only a concept here, and the community nets out to include anybody for whom Ely is the hub. We’re all neighbors, whether separated by blocks or miles, rivers or bays. “Town” is where we go to get groceries, check e-mail, trawl the farmer’s market, do laundry, get food we can’t have at The Lake like pizza or ice cream, or just hang around the coffee shop and listen to voices that aren’t radio. Ely is much changed since my childhood in the sixties, when I cannot recall there being a stoplight.

My grandmother Julia died in 1987, just when change for the better was finally coming after years of the Iron Range holding itself close against a long recession, mine closures, and flagging tourism. She would be impressed to see the town now, thriving as a vacation destination, though she might shake her head at the touristy “shoppes.” She would have laughed off the concept of
new
furniture for a cabin or special clothes for fishing.

It would have pleased my father that fifty thousand additional acres were added to the protected BWCA after his death,
that the place remains pristine and has been kept from the fate of other vacation regions across the state, where shores are pocked with over-development as if Woodbury or Eagan had been dragged north and dropped lakeside.

Dad had a particular gripe over use and abuse of snowmobiles and ATVs. When the first three-wheelers were just appearing in the mid-seventies, he derisively called them “trikes,” shaking his head and exclaiming, “Grown men driving them!”

We are the lucky few to be near places of true wilderness, where the land is preserved in a triumvirate of amazing parks: the Boundary Waters, Quetico, and Voyageurs. It’s easy to take for granted that such places are here for us, but their preservation didn’t come easily, and the battle to save this jewel box of wilderness was long and fraught. Many are familiar with the writings and voice of Sigurd Olson, but only some know the work of conservationists like Ernest Oberholtzer, who lobbied and toiled tirelessly in spite of financial hardship and even personal threats. Dozens of people worked for decades to stave off industry, to warn the government of the bleakness of a future without wilderness, and to educate the citizens. Individuals behind the various battles included some familiar names, like Frank Hubachek of the Wilderness Research Center, Bob Marshall of the Forest Service, Aldo Leopold
(before
he was Aldo Leopold), Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, Harvey Broome, Bernard Frank, Harold Anderson, and others. Presidential examples set by both Roosevelts encouraged such men to fight when opposed by the until then omnipotent industrialists. Preserving wilderness might be one of FDR’s greatest achievements along with his job programs like the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps, both
directly benefiting our park systems. Perhaps the most important message the conservationists finally got across to the American people was that wild places are
necessary.
If they didn’t exist, how could we possibly know now what the untouched, unsullied wild actually looks like, feels like, smells like? To lose it would be to lose
natural
history. Maybe equally important is the growing relevance of gauging our own impacts on the planet by comparing them to these rare unimpacted environments.

Here, most of the drama is external. The glaciers that raked and carved the land made it both beautiful and difficult. Life
is
harder here, and the hardship is often credited as building character. Maybe it bulks up a certain tenacity, but it sometimes seems life here can constrict character—the isolation, the months of workdays begun and ended in darkness, with no time for leisurely chat outdoors because your nose hairs are iced, your face is numb, and your dog will freeze to the sidewalk if you don’t keep pace. There is a taciturnity that prevails here. People are not terribly outgoing, but they are far from unkind. They are not always talkative, but they do have stories. Some can be suspicious of outsiders, or just tolerant. This isn’t the South; stories are told quickly with little embellishment. Time matters: sunlight is limited, and there’s wood to chop, diesel to pump, sidewalks to clear, hotdish to bake, batteries to jump. Life is short.

S
ince I was building here, was going to
be
here, shouldn’t I be interacting more with the locals, be less an observer, more of a citizen? Maybe have some fun, get to know somebody—perhaps even Biblically. It had been a long time since I’d dated, but the idea grew on me once I looked around and realized there were plenty of outdoorsy, handsome guys on the streets of Ely.

Alas, there are woefully few venues for singles to meet besides the VFW and the few local bars like Dee’s Polka Lounge, the Portage, Zaverl’s, and establishments I’d never gotten around to, like the Kwazy Wabbit, with its sign hung upside down. In Dee’s I met an interesting man I would have considered desirable if he hadn’t stood up to become less so by not being able to stay upright unaided. Less shit-faced was what I was hoping for.