Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The house is quiet tonight, for the first time in three weeks. Twenty-three days, to be exact. That’s because Tyson and Brooks are gone. Their parents retrieved them this afternoon, af­ter a long vacation. Brooks, Queen Ida, Noah and Tyson. We’d been talking about today for a week or so, about when Mom and Dad would come. Mostly I did the talking, out of some sense of duty that the boys should be missing their parents more. I told them my “Mommy-Daddy Tomorrow” story.  http://davidheiller.blogspot.com/2011/04/mommy-daddy-tomorrow-february-3-1983.html That’s what this one kid at Camp Courage (back in 1972 would say, countless times every day, “Mommy-Daddy tomorrow?” He really missed his parents, but he drove us counselors nuts, for 10 days straight. We couldn’t wait for the day when he would say “Mommy- Daddy tomorrow?” and we could shout, “Yes, Jimmy, Mommy-Daddy are coming tomorrow!” When that morning finally arrived, we crowded around his bed. But Jim...

David Heiller So how was your weekend alone? my brother-in-law asked on Sunday. You could almost hear his eyebrows going up and down like Groucho Marx at the other end of the phone line. “It was fine.” I answered. “Just fine?” he asked with surprise. He has two kids of his own. If he ever shipped them both off for a weekend, you can darn well bet he’d do better than fine. So I’ll explain the fine weekend without rais­ing too many eyebrows. We had dinner at the best restaurant in Duluth, Taste of Saigon. We bought candy at a candy store, and went to a movie, The Paper . It was the late show, but there were no kids at home so we didn’t worry about that. It was a carefree night with Cindy. But it was strange going home to an empty house, not having to bring the babysitter home. The next morning, it was strange not hearing Noah’s radio. He usually forgets to turn it off at night. And no cartoons on Saturday morning—very strange. I’d like to say we forgot about the kids,...

David Heiller Cindy and I went to the woods on Sunday evening, April 28, with the intention of pulling our 53 maple taps. I carried a hammer along for the purpose. We figured this late in the season, the buds must be full of sap. When that happens, the sap turns a tannish color and becomes “bud sap.” That means it’s time to pull the taps, because bud sap is bitter and makes poor syrup. But when we got to the woods, the buckets were full of clear sap, and instead pulling 53 taps, we gathered about 53 gallons of sap. Those cold nights we had last week, the ones that everyone was complaining about, kept the maples pumping sap. Every cloud has a silver lining. David understood the sweetness of life. Part of my territory in the sugar bush is located near a spring, and that spring was full of frogs on Sunday night. Peepers, and they were living up to their name. They were so loud it almost hurt my ears. But it was a glorious sound to hear, especially when I thought of that ...

David Heiller Ice piled up against the Kettle River Bridge on County Road 46 a week ago, and when it let go, it was a sight to behold. A crowd of people gathered for the event on Thursday evening, April 3. My wife, Cindy, and son, Noah, and I were lucky to be among them. Ice is fascinating. I had seen the people on my way home from work at 5:30. They were standing on the bridge, pointing at the river, which I thought was pretty unusual. Being a reporter, I wanted to stop and see what was going on. But I didn’t. None of my business, I thought. Then at supper, Noah told me that the river was filled with ice, and it was really something. He had seen it from his school bus window. He’s always noticing things from the bus, like dead animals and lost lumber. Things he knows I’d like to investigate. “That’s what the people were looking at,” I said. So we cleaned off the table and went back to the bridge and joined them. About a dozen people were there. The bridge pilings h...

David Heiller People in our neck of the woods woke up Easter morning to about five inches of we t snow. It clung to pine tree branches like plaster, and coated the grassy church parking lot like lard. Folks who normally have to be pushed into going to church had to be pushed away from church, wheels a-spinning. Folks like us. Malika and Mama hauling the sap, bucket at a time. The snow came at a lucky time for our family. We had just finished boiling our last gallon of maple syrup on Saturday. That was about the time the tractor quit working too. I had hauled in the last 40 gallons of sap on Friday evening, and it quit Saturday morning, right in the mid­dle of an idle. I guess it wasn’t an idle threat. With no tractor, and with five inches of sloppy snow, I don’t know how we would have brought in the last batch of sap. We were lucky, or maybe more. Sometimes you wonder. We ended up boiling down about 360 gallons of sap for our nine gallons of syrup. That’s just right ...

David Heiller When Tom Leustek heard the crackle over his fire pager that a fire was burning south of Willow River last Thursday, he felt a premonition of disaster. “In my head, I heard, ‘This is it.’ I had pedaled my bicycle to school, and I pedaled against that wind, and I knew it was tinder dry. I work in the woods,” Leustek said. Tom Leustek had built his house in the center of a dense pine forest in Willow River in 1980. He loves trees. “I built there one reason—for the timber,” he explained. “A fool can see how pretty it is.” Tom Leustek, holding a poster that  commemorates May as Arbor Month,  a time to plant trees. So when Tom heard the fire call, and felt the south wind, and, saw the dense smoke, he knew. When Tom got to the fire hall, he jumped into a fire truck with Bill Kenyon and Bruce Bohaty. They raced south to the Eva Marcus farm, but the fire was past it already, and into the pine forest, heading north, straight toward Leustek’s home. ...

David Heiller Sunday was one of those perfect days. Temperatures in the sixties. Bright sun. Melting snow. After weeks of below normal, cloudy weather, it was the kind of day that would get you pulling a Roger Jensen and running from chore to chore. Everyone you talked to, at church, at work, in the coffee shop, said the same thing. It’s time for spring. Enough of the bland weather. Bring on Rutabaga Falls. Bring on the big melt. I walked out to the woods that afternoon to check on the sap buckets. Just the day before it had been a frozen landscape. Frozen snow. Frozen taps. Frozen ice in the buckets. Our sap boiling set up. But not Sunday. Sunday was so warm that I was working in a vest and T-shirt. I gathered 25 gallons of sap from the 50 taps in the few short hours that it ran. Combined with 20 gallons we had collected about a month ago, that was enough to start a boil. I lit a fire in the barrel stove that has been converted to a sap boiler. The sap pan was fill...

by David Heiller Everybody knows Murphy’s Law, either directly or indirectly: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Murphy's children were probably cute too, it is how they survived. Murphy was probably some hapless Irishman who wouldn’t know a f our-leafed clover if he found one in his salad. But we can all share his motto. I could last week, when I transposed two paragraphs of an editorial piece by Steve Bonkoski. If you read the article, you caught it in this sentence: “I decided to continue the charade of the computer by telling them I had people are there in the world?” Murphy loved it, of course. Steve writes about one major article a year and I lay it out wrong. My son, who is nearly three, loved it too. He thrives on illogical words and ideas. Me : Noah, why did you just cut that cassette tape with the scissors? One of Malika's expensive toys: the broom. Noah : Because the snow is gone. Me : Noah, why aren’t you sleeping? Noah : Becaus...

By David Heiller You have to have a lot of patience this time of year. Spring takes its merry time in arriving. The calling cards that winter leaves aren’t the kind you can put in your shirt pocket. They are emerging from the snow now. A green mitten off a snowman. A puddle full of dead minnows from an unsuccessful ice fishing trip. A bolt from the tractor (maybe that’s why the tractor quit running). A jack-o-lantern that now looks like it could use a whole lot of Preparation H. Pop cans. A dead rabbit carcass. A bucket of compost that didn’t quite make it to the pile. A winter’s worth of ashes dumped behind the outhouse. And don’t forget the dog, who leaves the worst calling card of all. Noah, mud, and spring. A skidder accidently ran over a flower bed a month ago, the one surrounded with my rock collection. Now the yard looks like a glacial deposit of rocks and wood. There’s an occasional treasure though. Last week I found a rusty padlock by the garage. It had be...

David Heiller The turkeys arrived on March 29 at our house. That was the morning the valley turned into an amphitheater of gobble-gobble. Their calls bounced off the trees and hills like a bunch of Romans watching Daniel fend off the lions. It was a glorious roar, although lacking the distinctive voice of T. Rex. T. Rex is short for Turkey Rex. He is a big bird, although I haven’t seen him. But I have heard him. He must have a special spot in front of a cave filled with just the right qualities. Either that or he picked up a megaphone from Uncle Donny’s old junk pile. Immediately following the big event. When T. Rex gobbles — it’s more like a roar, I guess — it shoots up the valley and explodes through the air. You can almost see the coffee in your cup get those little ripples like in Jurassic Park. The turkeys made me realize with a smile of relief that spring is actually here. It’s been a bleak winter for some reason, and it seemed like the grass and goldfin...