Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Cindy and I and our two children went to see President Bill Clinton on Friday, Nov. 4, in Duluth. It was an interesting experience, not only seeing the president, but seeing all the side shows. Secret Service agents were everywhere. One man in a brown suit stood on the lawn outside Romano Gym talking into his sleeve. Hopefully he had a radio in there. Secret Service guy. Another guy in the balcony where we sat had a radio transmitter in his left ear. He was a young guy with a thick neck, like a football player. He walked back and forth, always looking at the crowd. I tried not to make eye contact. You wouldn’t want to tangle with him. We had to walk through metal detectors to get into the gym. Police looked in my camera bag and Cindy’s purse. Some people were being frisked with hand-held metal detectors. I wondered why. Maybe they had forgotten to remove their car keys. Or maybe they were assassins. You’re imagination runs wild with the President ar...

David Heiller You can straddle the fence on a lot of subjects, but one thing which everyone has an opinion about is woodticks. One person may rejoice in torturing them, the next wouldn’t live in the same state as one. Woodticks are no laughing matter to many people, including my mother-in-law and her dog, Muffin. Muffin, as the name implies, is a poodle mix. She measures about 15 inches long, weighs maybe eight pounds after a haircut. In other words, she’s only slightly bigger than some of the well-fed woodticks of northern Minnesota. Muffin came for a visit last weekend, along with a bunch of other family members. She sprang from the car warily, her gray fur cut short, and a pink ribbon tied in a bow on top of her head. Binti, our dog, (followed her around as she staked her territory at several spots in the yard, as dogs (even poodles) are wont to do. From the very beginning; Muffin seemed to keep ‘one eye on the house at all times while she explored outside: She may have...

 David Heiller We were having a hard time keeping a straight face as we trudged up the portage from Moose Lake to Splash Lake. Everyone except Paul, that is. Paul’s face was set, straight and hard. Hard as a rock, you might say. He was carrying a Duluth Pack front and back, full of camping gear for five days in the lake country east of Ely. What he didn’t know what that I had slipped a 10-pound rock into his pack while we loaded the canoes. There’s something perversely funny, watching a man carry a 10-pound rock in a pack. It’s like watching someone fall down on a patch of ice. You try not to laugh, but you just can’t help it. Especially someone like Paul, someone who has canoed every lake, who has pulled in 25-pound northerns, who has done if all. All except carry 10-pound rocks around on his back. After the portage, we faced a small rapids. Dave and Jim clawed up it in their canoe ahead of us, paddling furiously. Paul and I followed, and Paul put his back into it. Tha...

David Heiller I don’t know Dennis Hansen well, but I know him better now, after he fixed my guitar. I bought the guitar for $3 in 1979, at a garage sale in Belgrade, Minnesota. It was a smaller size than normal. Someone told me it was a parlor guit a r, made for women around the turn of the, century. David playing a different old guitar, his beloved Gibson J45. (Alas, I cannot find a photo of him with the parlor guitar.) The original bridge was missing. That’s the part that the strings are attached to at the bottom of the guitar. Someone had replaced it with a metal bridge, screwed into the tail end of the guitar. The face for front side) of the guitar was cracked. Some of the support pieces had come unglued on the inside. Slight depressions had been worn into the fret board, from people playing the same chords over and over. That appealed to me. The guitar had been played a lot. It was well-loved. I wondered who had played it. Maybe some farmer sitting in his ...