Remembering Mother Nature’s best friend ~ November 2, 1989

David Heiller

The porch at Bob Eikum’s house in Moose Lake always seemed special to me. It had no lights, no heater, no glass to cover the screens and keep the cold out. Bob and his wife, Boots, had planned it that way. The better to view Mother Nature, to let her come into your life.

Bob Eikum, Mother Nature
and David's friend.

Mother Nature came into that porch a lot, sometimes with a house full of people at an Eikum potluck, sometimes alone. Even at the end, cold and raw in September, she came to settle on Bob as he sat in a wheelchair one last time, soaking it up on his porch.

Nature was Bob Eikum’s life, from the time he grew up in Mankato, while he studied forestry at the University of Minnesota, when he worked as a forester in Alabama and Florida and Tennessee, as a Boy Scout leader, every job he worked, he worked with nature.

When he retired and moved to Moose Lake with Boots in 1978, he worked with nature as a photographer and as what he called an environmental consultant. He could just as well have called himself an environmental protector, but that would have been too grand for Bob. He never talked about his accomplishments. I was surprised one day to see his office wall covered with awards from past jobs. He was too busy working on something new to brag about the past.

Many awards came from conservation groups in Florida, where he had fought with developers in wealthy Volusia County. That’s where the ground opens up every so often and swallows someone’s Ferrari. I remember one time, eating breakfast with Bob at Chef’s Cafe in Moose Lake, how his eyes shined when he saw a picture in the paper of a car sticking out of a Florida sink hole. He thought it was poetic justice. He didn’t have to say, “I told you so,” because he HAD told them so.

Bob found a few different kinds of sink holes in Minnesota too, or maybe they found him. Like in 1980 when people were interested in mining uranium in Carlton County, Bob helped organize FORE, Folks Organized for Responsible Energy, a grass-roots group that turned into the Minnesota Coalition on Uranium. He helped people see the nonsense in uranium mining around here.

Bob could smell nonsense from a good distance, like the plan to subdivide the Log Drive Creek area west of Askov. Bob joined with other people to testify against this would-be atrocity. He researched it, wrote about it in newspaper columns, spoke out about it, made phone calls. He didn’t stop it single-handedly, but he was always there, someone you could call day or night someone who could answer your questions, someone who would defend you, if you were defending nature.

Boots was his partner in these things, though they took different approaches. Bob would attack a problem in a soft-spoken, academic way. Boots showed more fire. I remember one time after a public hearing in Hinckley, we were sitting around a table at Tobies. I asked Boots what she thought of the land developer’s arguments. “I wanted to slap his face,” Boots replied in her Alabama drawl. I smiled and thought, “If the developer could hear her, he would save himself a lot of time and trash his stupid plans on the spot.” How could he win against a one-two punch like Bob and Boots?

Not all his causes were popular. The fight over pine trees in the Moose Lake School parking lot seemed frivolous to a lot of people, but not Bob. Cutting down one tree needlessly, especially a 100-year-old Norway, was pretty serious. And I remember how mad he became when National Wildlife Federation President Jay Hare met with President Ronald Reagan, who Bob thought hurt the environment tremendously. That was like meeting with the enemy. There was little room for compromise in such matters with Bob. I always took heart in his stubbornness, even when I disagreed. He was someone you could count on, a constant in a world of vacillators.

Bob wrote a column for the Askov American called Minnesota Outdoors. I don’t think writing came easy for him, and he sure didn’t write for the money, because we could never afford to pay him a dime. I suspect he did it because it was one more way for him to share nature, to tell about wild flowers, or the North Shore, or edible plants, or recycling. His pictures were marvelous. The newspaper could never capture their color and beauty.

A bitter person might say that Nature played a trick on Bob, because he suffered from poor health, especially in his later years when he should have been enjoying life. Diabetes literally knocked him flat, until he was bound to a wheel chair, until he asked to leave his beloved porch and go into a nursing home.

Yes, maybe Bob should have lived longer than his 68 years. Maybe he should have died on his porch, or on his bog east of Moose Lake under the stars of a cold winter night, like Sigurd Olson. But when you think of what Bob left behind, you realize he lived at least long enough to teach us all a lesson or two, some through his words and pictures, the rest through his best friends, the pines and rocks, the water and earth, his Minnesota Outdoors.