Where is fall going? ~ September 30, 1999

David Heiller

Cindy called me at 4:30 last Wednesday afternoon, September 22. “Let’s go for a walk at Banning,” she said.

It had been a busy day at work for us, and a busy night was planned, with one of us to pick up our son from football practice and the other to attend a confirmation meeting with our daughter.

But we needed that walk at Banning State Park. We only had an hour to spare. How could we not afford to spare it on a fall walk?

A walk in the woods is ALWAYS a good plan.

“Sounds great,” I told Cindy, and in half an hour we were there, Cindy and Mollie and me, on the familiar trail heading toward the Kettle River.

The air had that fall hue to it, of sunlight filtered through red and orange and yellow. A couple of hard frosts had knocked back the bugs. A few leaves lay on the trail, but not so thick that we kicked them up. The trees hadn’t dropped a lot of leaves. That’s happening right now.

We walked hand in hand in hand, three abreast, on the wide trail. Mollie jabbered about school and friends and TV shows. Cindy duti­fully answered. I mostly kept quiet, enjoying the silence of the woods that lay just beyond our words.

Eventually Mollie’s talking dwindled. We settled into hiking conversation. People talk differently on a walk. Words don’t fall so fast or so loud. Periods of silence don’t feel awkward.

We came to the river and watched the water flow swiftly past. “This is the same water that goes under the Kettle River bridge by our house,” I said, trying to impress the ladies. They nodded politely.

We walked past a big kettle, which is a hole in the rocks worn by water and stones. “My Headstart kids used to play in that kettle,” Cindy said.

A walk in the woods.

Banning Park is full of memories like that, of walks and picnics with people come and gone.

We walked almost to Hell’s Gate. The trail rose and fell sharply. Mollie went ahead of us, a sure-footed teenager. I offered a hand to Cindy, and she took it gratefully.

I checked my watch. Time to turn around. All three of us had appointments to keep.

We met two other parties on the trail back, a man and woman, and a group of women. We all said hello. Their smiles said that they were enjoying the later afternoon walk as much as we were.

When we got to the parking lot, Mollie headed to the car to sit and listen to her favorite radio station. Cindy and I had 10 more min­utes, so we walked on a bit, just the two of us, like the old days. It was very nice.

Our walk in the park ended too soon. But we were lucky to have done it. It hadn’t been planned. That made it even more fun.

Fall is a good time to be in the woods, to be outside period, hunting, fishing, working in the garden. The sad part is that it goes by so fast. Where is this fall going? October starts on Friday!

I wish time could stand still. It doesn’t, so we have to take advantage of those little cracks in our day when we can escape to Banning or Mud Lake or the road outside our house.

I’m sure a walk in the woods will feel differently this week. Colors are at their peak. Leaves are raining down. Guess I’ll have to find out.

Keep your school bus window closed ~ September 7, 1989

David Heiller

School starts this week, and along with all the advice parents will be giving their children, I’d like to add this: If you ride on a school bus, keep your windows up.

Let me repeat that in a different way so that you understand clearly.

The narrator of this cautionary tale.

Don’t open your windows on the school bus, kids, unless it’s an emergency.

I know, there’s no rule that says you shouldn’t open school bus windows. And on a nice September morning with the smell of dew and apples drifting by, you may think I’m nuts. After all, my son is going to ride on a school bus 80 minutes a day, which works out to six and a half hours each week, or 10 days out of the year keeping Dave Nyrud company. Shouldn’t he be able to smell the burning leaves along the way?

Keep your window closed, Noah.

Take it from someone who rode a bus to high school for five years, and who has never forgotten that one morning, lo these 20 years ago...

My cousin, Jeff, was sitting in the fourth seat back, on the left side, like he always did. But I noticed how pale he looked the minute I swung past him and sat down next to the window that fine fall morning.

(I kept the window closed, although the Cool Kids at the back of the bus had theirs open. They had their windows open almost every day of the year, even in the dark of winter. I think it had something to do with the cigarettes they smoked.)

“I don’t feel so good,” Jeff admitted right away. “I threw up twice before getting on the bus this morning.”

“Why the heck are you going to school?” I asked.

“I feel pretty good now,” he swallowed. Jeff liked school, you might say.

But as the bus started up the hill toward Caledonia, Jeff seemed to grow even paler. His white face changed to an off-green with each pot hole we hit. He wasn’t talking either, which was unusual for Jeff, who usually boasted about his muskrat line or fishing or, lately, his girlfriends. His eyes fixed on the back of the head in front of us, but they didn’t see it, seeing instead something inside himself, something awful and lurking.

Even Dale, our bus driver, noticed it. He scanned us through the mirror on his windshield visor as we neared the top of the hill. “You okay?” he called back to us. Jeff had told him earlier, somewhat proudly, about his upset stomach. Dale was concerned for his passengers, but he was concerned about his bus too. He had to clean it.

Jeff swallowed again, twice in rapid succession. A weak “Yeah” was all we heard, as he nodded at Dale.

Everything was fine for the next minute. Then suddenly I felt a furious tapping on my left shoulder, as Jeff scrambled to his feet. I looked up at him; his cheeks were bulging, his face puffed out like a bull frog. He was gesturing frantically at the window.

Remember, it was closed. But not for long. I sprang up and pulled out the two side locks and slid the window down in an unofficial Guiness Book of World Record time of opening a school bus window, .079 seconds.

Cousins, a number of years 
and a number of tales later.

Jeff jammed his head out the narrow window, and his stomach contents came flying forth in a grand finale of what was once oatmeal and corn flakes.

If you’ve ever tried to spit out an open car window going 50 miles an hour, you know what happened next. The windows behind us were instantly coated, all the way back to where the Cool Kids sat, by their open windows. A fireman with a hose couldn’t have done a better job.

I won’t describe what was said next from the back of the bus. (I’ve already crossed the fine line between humor and good taste in this column.) But I’ll never forget Bobby Blair standing up in his seat back there, and taking off his glasses and cleaning off the oatmeal on his shirt tail.

So take it from Jeff, and me, and the Cool Kids: Don’t open your bus window, unless you have no other choice.

The tale of the garage/shop/clubhouse ~ September 12, 1996

David Heiller

It had to end this way, I thought as I drove into the yard last Friday night. My daughter and her two friends stood in the yard, holding sleeping bags and heading toward the garage.

The “garage” never, ever held a vehicle. It
 wasn’t useful that way, it was an old shed that 
someone decades earlier had built to house a car, 

but they really didn’t know what they were doing.

Or is it the shop? The building is going through an identity crisis.

This story started about six months ago with a home improvement project.

First we had our kitchen redone, complete with new cupboards. The old cupboards would work great in the garage, I thought. We’ve never had a car in the garage anyway. I could make a shop out of the garage.

Pulling cupboards out of the kitchen to make way 
for new ones meant that David would be able to 
use them to organize a shop!
Or did it?

A shop. Two words that can make a middle-aged man happy for life.

Maybe a shop like Frank Magdziarz’s, which is clean and orderly. Maybe a shop like Red Hansen’s, where every square inch is filled with tools and gadgets.

But like all projects, this one had a “first things first” clause. First I had to repair the sills of the garage, which were rotten.

I thought that would be an easy job. Bruce Lourey of Moose Lake made it sound like it would be a breeze. It probably would be for him, being a carpenter and all. It wasn’t for me.

Two weeks later I put in the cupboards. Then I moved things from my old work space in the upstairs of the garage to the new work space downstairs. It’s funny, but the new cupboards and counters and walls instantly became a clut­tered mess just like the old space.

As long as I was reorganizing things, I thought I might as well clean out the rest of the upstairs of the garage.

This was no small job. I had thrown a lot of junk up there.

Everything that had outgrown its usefulness in the house had been put in the upstairs of the garage. Fifteen years worth.

Old kitchen dishes. Clothes the kids had out-grown. Clothes their father had outgrown. Three pair of rubber boots with holes in the left foot. (Why did only the left-footed boots have holes? What are the odds of that?)

You have to be firm when you clean a garage. I used the “Test of Time.” I kept asking myself, “Have I used this in the past two years?” If the answer was no, then out it went.

Some of the stuff was trash. It became part of a truckload of junk that I dumped at the Carlton County transfer station for $27.17.

Some of the stuff was too good to throw away. So I called Wilma Krogstad of Askov and asked if the Bruno Thrift Store could use it. She said yes. A load of used clothes and toys and kitchen utensils and books and you-name-it went to Bruno.

Except for a few things. Actually quite a few. I couldn’t throw away the old high chair that I had used when I was a baby, and that our two kids had used. A lot of sentimental value there.

Two old hats, they’d make part of a great cos­tume. My old down jacket. The wheel weights to the walk-behind tractor, I couldn’t throw them out, even though I had never used them. An old grind stone. And so on.

Still, the top of the garage got cleaned out pretty well. I even swept off the threadbare carpet on the floor. It gave me a good feeling, seeing a space so cluttered that you couldn’t even walk through it become open and clean again.

And then my daughter found it.

The daughter with designs on Daddy's space.

I knew she would. She always does. She sen­sed it the way a thirsty horse senses water, and she stampeded for it with her two friends, sleep­ing bags in hand, and I caught them in the glare of my head lights where they stood shaking in fear and excitement.

They had been going to sleep in Mollie’s “other” clubhouse, but it has woodchips for a floor, and no door, and Mollie remembered that I had been cleaning the garage, even though I hadn’t said anything to her, and they found it and it was so nice and they even swept the carpet and washed some of the shelves and couldn’t they sleep there, pleeeese? I knew it would end this way.

I said yes. Show me the dad that would have said no.

Later I looked in on them. They were snug­gled in their bags, laughing and talking, and the upstairs looked like it was made just for them, and I wished for a minute that I was 11 again.

I guess no garage or shop would be complete without a clubhouse upstairs.