The field was wet and muddy ~ November 24, 1994

David Heiller

David loved working with his tractors!
(And he wasn't afraid of getting stuck, either.)

 

The field was wet and muddy

But I trusted to my luck,

And with a load of firewood

I got my tractor stuck.

My darling wife had warned me

Not to take the tractor out

To the woods on Saturday.

“You’ll get it stuck, no doubt,

Like you did the last time.”

Yes, I remembered well,

Hauling in a load of ash.

It made me mad as heck.

But part of making firewood

Involves a little luck

Hoping that you don’t get hurt

Or that you don’t get stuck.

I knew that it was a risky

But that’s what makes it fun

When you take a chance at work

And when that work gets done.

So I hung my muddy pants

On the clothesline outside.

And came in wearing boxers

And a grin of manly pride,

And I told my darling Cindy,

And I took the “Told-you-so’s,”

And hoped by Sunday morning

That the soft would be froze.

We had a low lying field that had to be crossed to
 get to our woods. It made an adventure out of wood
making and sap gathering!

No luck on that end either,

So I called on my friend Steve.

He brought the Sunday paper

And I wouldn’t let him leave,

Until he walked out to the field

And cranked upon a winch.

While I sat on the tractor

And it came out, inch by inch.

There’s nothing worse than the feeling

When you know your tractor’s stuck,

When you see the wheels start spinning

And sink down into the muck.

But then there’s nothing finer

Than the steady, purring sound

Of your ancient, faithful tractor

When she’s back on solid ground.

And it’s a fine, fine feeling

When the house heats up at night

With firewood you brought in

That put up a little fight.

The cheerful flames and fire

Tell a story as you burn it,

Tell how it wasn’t easy work

And how you had to earn it.

So when you hear me cussing

And my pants are black with goo,

Come help pull out my tractor

It’s good for me, and you.

How do you cope with good behavior? ~ November 9, 1989

David Heiller

The best laid plans of Day Care and Babysitter …

We thought we had The Plan this time. Malika, our four-year-old daughter (sometimes known as Mollie the Hun), had finally reached her limit.

Malika (a.k.a. Mollie) and her magic wand.
Maybe it was magic that made her behave?

Three weeks of not brushing her teeth, of not going potty at the right time or in the right place. Three weeks of throwing her brother’s mouse stamp in the wood stove, of writing with a magic marker on her forehead and on a living room pillow, of doing laps around Marilyn Edin and Becky Lourey in the Oak Lake Church basement.

Three weeks of sending her to bed, of yelling. Three weeks of Cindy and I wondering out loud: “What are we going to do with her?”

We brainstormed ideas. The Rack. Drawing and quartering. Taking her to Joint Powers Board meetings. Making her empty the chamber pot. Nothing clicked. Finally Sunday night, when Mollie ran from one last outstretched toothbrush, Cindy cracked.

“That does it. I’m calling Sarah.”

Mollie knew at once that Cindy was not idling her threats. She started crying, real tears. “No, no, don’t call Sarah.”

Cindy called Sarah.

Sarah was a year or two younger in this photo, 
but she had Mollie's number when she came
that day and that is ALL that mattered.

No, Sarah is not a snaggle-toothed hag from a B-movie clutching a chair in one hand and a whip in the other. She’s something much worse in the eyes of a four-year-old who loves her Day Care; she is a Babysitter. And a good one at that. Above railroading. Street-wise, school-smart, 13 going on 20, like all teenagers these days, yet young enough to remember the tricks of an imposter like Mollie.

So Noah went to Day Care on Monday, and Mollie stayed home with Sarah.

Mollie met us at the door when we came home. Her first words: “Can Sarah stay a little longer?”

“What?” her startled father asked.

“Can Sarah stay a little longer?”

Sarah and Mollie, it turned out, had become best buddies. They had played Maple Town. Read books. Cleaned the play room and her bedroom. Brought in firewood. Eaten ice cream.

“How’d it go?” I asked Sarah, peering close, looking for bruise marks, trembling hands.

“Fine. She took a nap from 12:30 to 3,” Sarah replied cheerfully. Mollie hasn’t taken a nap in at least a year.

So much for that experiment, I thought. Cindy had a different perception: Mollie had fun with Sarah, yes, but she was good because she wanted to go to Day Care. She took a nap because she knew that was the only way she could cope with being so good.

(How do YOU cope with being good? There’s a pleasant dilemma. Maybe we should all take more naps.)

Cindy may be right. Just now, Mollie has come downstairs to demand that we rub her back, a nightly ritual before she falls asleep.

Reading and back-rubs, all part of the deal at bedtime.

“If you don’t come and rub my back, you know what will happen? You will rub my back forever!” she hollers.

If ever there was a living Hell...

“We’re going to need a babysitter tomorrow?” Cindy asks her.

“No!”

“Then get to bed now.”

Mollie runs upstairs, bangs her feet on her window. “Tell Daddy to rub my back,” she resumes.

“Go rub her back,” Cindy tells me.

“Why don’t you?” I ask, not looking up from the computer.

“Because when I put her to bed, I said, ‘I’m going to rub your back now,’ and she didn’t want me to, so I said, ‘If I don’t rub your back now, I’m not going to rub it,’ and she said fine. You didn’t make that deal with her.”

Life with Mollie is a life of deal making. “Rub my back, Dad.”

There’s a lesson in all this, somewhere. I was just going to state it profoundly. But it can wait. Right now, I’d better go rub Mollie’s back.

A game of cribbage. Anyone? ~ November 14, 1996

David Heiller

“Fifteen-two,15-4,15-8, and a double run of 10 is 16.”

Grandma spoke those words and in a slow and steady hand, moved her peg 16 holes down the cribbage board.

Grandma Schnick in her living room.

There they lay in front of me, those darn cards, 6-7-7-8-9. I counted them for myself, just to make sure she didn’t miss any points. If she did, I’d claim them for my own.

But Grandma never missed points, and I didn’t either, because she would do the same to me.

Grandma and I played cribbage at the card table that was always set up in her living room. She lived upstairs in our house, and she always had the cribbage board out on the table, or on the buffet that held old photographs and a magnifying glass and paper and pencils and other grandma stuff.

The cribbage board was always waiting, just like she was, for a game of cribbage.

I played a lot of cribbage with Grandma when I was growing up. She always won a few more than I did. She was a little better, a little luckier. She taught me to lead with a four. She taught me to keep an ace handy for pegging. When I was first learning, she told me what to keep and what to discard.

On cold winter nights, she would turn up her oil stove and the room would boil. Grandma never seemed to get too hot though. I thought that it was always too hot or too cold in her house. But it was always just right for Grandma. She didn’t complain.

I loved playing cribbage with Grandma. It was a way to escape from the chaos of a big family downstairs. Grandma and the cribbage games were a refuge from that.

I think those games also formed a bond between Grandma and me that we couldn’t have obtained any other way. We didn’t have to talk much about current events or how our days went. We just played cribbage, and for some simple yet unexplainable reason, it made us a lot closer.

At times like that, I couldn’t imagine that Grandma would ever be gone. She was like a lighthouse. But of course that changed. I went away to college, then to the Peace Corps, then to marriage and a family of my own, and the cribbage games dwindled and died.

Grandma followed suit in 1989. (Pardon the pun, Grandma!)

Cribbage is passed from parent or grandparent to child. Here's my brother Randy playing with his daughter, Grace. They are using the nice board I gave to David on an early Father's Day.

Lately I’ve been thinking about those games and Grandma again, because we are on a cribbage kick in our house.

We play with a beautiful cribbage board that Cindy gave me about 10 years ago. She bought it at a Swayed Pines Fiddle Fest in Collegeville, Minnesota. It is hand carved out of cherry wood, with a duck flying in the middle.

Cindy and I will go for months without playing, then we’ll take down the board from a shelf in the laundry room, and go on a tear, and play every day for a while. Then we’ll quit again.

The nicest thing about this latest surge is that our 11-year-old daughter, Malika, has joined us. We play three handed. It’s fun watching Mollie learn the game. It reminds me of my games with Grandma. We have to be patient with Malika, and it makes me think Grandma must have been patient with me. But I never noticed it.

It makes me wish Mollie had a Grandma Schnick living upstairs where she could go for a game of cribbage. In the meantime, we’ll keep playing.

“Fifteen-8 and 8 is sixteen,” I told Grandma triumphantly. I laid down the cards: five of hearts, ten of diamonds, jack of clubs, jack of hearts, queen of spades, and the card she had cut, the six of hearts. I looked over the cards to make sure I hadn’t missed any points, and marched my peg toward the finish line.

“You forgot Nobs,” Grandma said, and took the last point.

“Grandma!” I said with a laugh. Then we played another game.

A lot for which to live ~ November 7, 1991

David Heiller

The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest last Friday afternoon, carrying snow like little bullets against our faces. Already, about 16 inches of snow lay on the ground.

Malika and I were playing in it, after nearly going crazy with cabin fever for much of the day. First I made a snow angel, which Mollie promptly trudged through with a wild, cabin fever laugh. Then I dove through the air and landed on my back in a big drift.

Noah

Mollie went off to make more snow angels. I lay there, out of the wind, feeling the snow tickle my face, feeling the soft bed of snow underneath, feeling quite comfortable.

Then a memory flashed into my mind. No, something more powerful than a memory, a sensation that made my face quiver first with fear, then with anger.

It had happened in November of 1973. I had been backpacking in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. A blizzard had caught me there, unprepared and alone, 20-plus miles from park headquarters.

The storm lasted all day Saturday and Sunday. The wind blasted my pup tent, even in the pine trees where I had set up. Snow pressed in on the sides like a torture chamber from an Edgar Allen Poe story. My dire predicament stared at me like an ugly sore. I was cold, stranded, alone, and no one knew where I was. What little sleep I got was filled with nightmares. I thought constantly of family, friends, Camp Courage. And I was scared, very scared.

The storm ended Monday morning. I crawled from my tent into a new world. The ground had been bare on Saturday. Now snow lay everywhere, lots of snow. But that wouldn't stop me! I hastily packed everything, threw the 50-pound pack on my back, and started hiking.

Malika

As I left the protection of the pines, every step got deeper. Finally I hit a hole that sucked me up to my waist. I could barely move. I struggled for a few seconds, then relaxed. The snow was comfortable, like a water bed. The weight of the pack was gone.

For a few moments, I felt like staying right there. I was cold and numb, yet strangely at rest.

I felt like falling asleep. It would be so easy. That would get me out of this fix. But something stopped me. Something made me pull myself from the snow drift and trudge back to the pines, and set the tent up, and struggle for the next 17 days to make my way back to civilization.

What was that something? I don't know, but I saw it in that snowbank. It wasn't a vision of death, or a single revelation. It was more a mixture: of fear of death, of loved ones, of anger because I did not want to give up. In that instant I realized that I had too much to live for.

I haven't thought about all this for about 18 years, but lying in the snow last Friday, with my mind relaxed, the experience returned.

Then Mollie came plowing on top of me, and reality returned and the memories were gone, maybe for another 18 years.

A lot has happened in that time span, mostly good, some bad, mostly happy, some sad. But looking at my daughter's smiling face in the falling snow last Friday, I realized, for the umpteenth time, that I do indeed have a lot for which to live.

The first snowfall of the season ~ November 5, 1992

David Heiller

There’s something in the first snowfall of the season that brings out joy and wonder. You hear about it on the radio, and even the announcer’s voice is urgent, excited. You step outside and feel the wet, chilly air, see the low clouds, and you smile inside.

Then snow fills the air, and you know it’s going to last, and you want to curl up in a quilt, maybe grab a book and a cup of coffee, maybe grab a nap. Bears are thinking the same thing in the woods, with the first snowfall.

As snow coats the ground, the house fills up with a special light, soft and bright at the same time from all that whiteness outside reflecting in. Thoughts from childhood come back like they do every year. The excitement of snow. The anticipation of sledding, of making snowmen, of missing school, of seeing Mother Nature change her clothes before your very eyes.

You notice the dog lying in front of the woodstove, her coat thick and glossy, and with the snow falling outside, you are happy to see the dog there. She belongs in that spot.

Noah and Dan and a rousing game of Monopoly.

You break out the Monopoly game at the kitchen table, and play with the kids. Monopoly was meant to be played on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

You go outside to bring in wood for the woodstove. The wood feels good in your arms. You realize for the first time that all of the cuttίng and splitting and stacking has paid off. Oh, that white oak feels good when you carry it in! It will feel even better when it heats the house.

Outside, your senses are sharpened as snowflakes fly like sparks off a grinding wheel. You notice that the wind is from the northeast. You turn your collar against it, and hunch your shoulders. You turn your eyes to the dull skies and wonder if this storm will bring three inches or 33 inches. You never know about the first snow fall, and that makes it all the more exciting. Out in the woods, the coyotes and deer are doing the same thing, lifting their faces to the clouds, wondering at it all with animal instincts that we can’t understand except for this one.

Night falls. The cat crawls up on the couch and lies on the socks you are folding. That’s O.K. You smile, like she seems to smile, because the first snow is falling outside.

Wintery days

You go to bed and hear the creaking of the branches as they coat with snow. They scratch the house like bony fingers. The kettle of water on the woodstove boils over a drop. It hits with a hiss, and you look up at this unfamiliar sound.

In the morning, the snow is still falling. Four inches lie on the ground, heavy and wet like the first snowfall often is. The kids eat and dress and throw on their snowsuits for the first time in seven months. They rush outside, forgetting to wash their faces and brush their teeth. They quickly roll a big ball of snow, heavier than they are, and then another, and fetch their dad to lift it onto the bottom one, which he does with a groan and a smile. Those old childhood memories come back again.

THE FIRST SNOWFALL will soon pass. So will all these notions. Then the soft white light won’t be so special. The wood will feel heavy in your arms, and you’ll notice the mess it leaves around the woodbox. You’ll get used to the hissing woodstove, and won’t hear the trees outside at night. Your eyes won’t turn to the sky with the same sense of wonder, and you might even cuss a spell when the roads pile up with more wet, slippery snow.

But not yet, not until you welcome with joy the first snowfall.

Single parenting: a learning experience ~ November 9, 1995

David Heiller

I’m a single dad these days. My wife, Cindy, has gone away to help her mom recover from cancer surgery.

Her absence makes me appreciate many things.

David and I were partners, which made my many weeks away from my family so very
hard. Funny, there are really no photos from that fall. 
We all survived with lots of love and understanding. Well, maybe not the house!

When I think about how hard it is being a single parent, I think back to my own childhood. My dad died four months before I was born, so Mom raised us eight kids by herself and with the help of her mother, who lived upstairs.

I can’t get Mom to reminisce about those good old days much, maybe because they weren’t so good. But when she does, she always mentions how Grandma was there to help, how she couldn’t have done it without her.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Cindy in the similar manner. I couldn’t do this single parent thing very well.

Our family life has evolved into certain patterns, and those patterns are all askew now. For example, Cindy supervises the kids’ homework, and now I’m doing that. It’s a lot of work, but I like it.

It’s a good time to sit face to face with the kids and go over any problems they are having in math, or to help them review social studies for a test. We often talk about other things at that time too.

Cindy makes them practice their instruments, and I’m doing that. Well, some of the time. I don’t always remind them to practice, and they don’t remind me to remind them, although Noah did remind me to remind Mollie to prac­tice her piano. Funny, he didn’t remind me to remind him to practice his trombone.

I’m now in charge of rousting them up in the morning at 6:15, and making breakfast and seeing that their teeth and hair are brushed, their faces washed (and is Mollie’s hair dirty?), and making sure their school bags are packed without any forgotten gloves or books, and making them cold lunch if they want it, and getting them on the bus at 7:15. Whew. It’s tiring just thinking about it.

I’m in charge of cleaning, which has suffered the most. I’m getting a glimpse of what our house would look like if I wasn’t married. It isn’t pretty. I call it the Norwegian Bachelor Farmer look. Everything appears all right, if you aren’t wearing your glasses. On closer look… Well, don’t take a closer look.

I’m in charge of supper, of which I can prepare one meal: eggs and potatoes and onions all mixed together in a frying pan with a pound of butter. I raided the garden one night for brussel sprouts. That was a big improvement. Yeah right, Dad.

Fortunately for the kids, and for me, people have sensed my dire cooking straits and sent home some fabulous food, like soup and spaghetti and tapioca pudding and meatloaf and bread and rolls and coffee cake and banana bread and cookies.

You see a lot of kindness in emergencies like ours. One friend even sent a note from her winter home in Arizona. “If I were home, I’d have cooked some fattening thing for Dave to take home for supper,” she wrote. “Thank you for sharing your sad news, giving people like me (us) an opportunity to pass on some of the kind­ness shown us in the past.”

That kindness is much appreciated.

Family photo.

The kids have taken on more responsibility in Cindy’s absence. Chores that Cindy and I might have done before, like washing dishes or vacuuming or folding laundry, they are now being asked to do, and they aren’t complaining about it. They know there are only 24 hours in a day, and that I can’t do it all. They know their grandma is sick, and that their mother is gone, because they miss her very much.

As do I. Cindy and I call each other two or three times a day, just to check in. I’m not much of a phone talker. The silences that come in a normal conversation don’t translate well for me over the phone. But it’s different talking to Cindy.

We tell each other about our days, about something the kids said, some incident from work, or how the tractor worked in the woods. It’s idle conversation that we might normally have over a game of Scrabble, or while riding to work together. But now nothing is normal, so we chat on the phone.

I’ve got a hunch that things will return to their old routines soon enough. Cindy will be heading home this week, I hope. In the meantime, it’s been a learning experience for everyone, and a time to appreciate what we often take for granted.

When Tooth Fairies call ~ November 8, 1990

David Heiller

The Tooth Fairy has been visiting our house lately, and the kids are laughing all the way to the piggy bank.

Malika and Noah are all grown up now and
they carved these two pumpkins.
 But gosh, they do LOOK familiar!

Their smiles have enough gaps to serve as models for pumpkin carvers, but they don’t care about that. They’re getting richer by the tooth.

I heard one mother telling about her son a while back that he wanted to pretend to put a tooth under the pillow every night, so their family could have lots of money. She had to laugh and explain in child language that life isn’t that easy.

At first Noah and Mollie looked at a loose tooth as a red badge of courage. They would work them for days, sometimes weeks, like they were playing an eight pound lake trout in the Boundary Waters. They would twist and wiggle, push and pull at the tooth, until nothing but a thread seemed to be holding it.

Then Mom and Dad would be invited to try. That’s a rare privilege, when you think about it: Would YOU let someone put his fingers in your mouth to wiggle a tooth?

Noah asked me for help on his first loose tooth a few months ago, while Cindy was napping in the bedroom. My approach had shades of the Dark Ages, or at least the depths of the 1950s. I took some thread from the junk drawer, intending to tie one end to the tooth, and the other to a doorknob. My brother Glenn worked this on me successfully when I was about six. I could never figure out why he laughed so gleefully as he slammed the door shut and my tooth came shooting out of my mouth. I didn’t laugh, but I did trust my big brother.

Luckily for Noah, I couldn’t get a good knot on his tooth. So I got the Vice Grips out of the tool drawer. “Are you SURE that will work?” Noah asked, a worried look on his face. His trust was wavering. “Sure,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound so sure. But Glenn had used pliers on me; surely a Vice Grips was a step forward.

Luckily again for Noah, Cindy heard this conversation, and sensed with mother instinct that Dad was in over his head. So she called him in to the bed, and after about 10 minutes of wiggling, had a tiny tooth to show for her patience.

Since then, both Noah and Mollie have learned how to pull a tooth out on their own. It’s no big deal any more. We’ll be sitting around the living room, and all of a sudden, Mollie will give a happy yell and, bloody but unbowed, show us a little tooth.

Then there’s question of payment. Some of you old-timers will no doubt remember when you got a penny for a lost tooth from the Tooth Fairy. But when Noah’s friend, Joey, informed Noah that he got a DOLLAR for his tooth, I couldn’t help but give his dad a dirty look.

I got a dime for my last lost tooth, way back when. I was thinking maybe a quarter now, what with cost-of-dental increases and all. But with Joey’s free-spending-liberal Tooth Fairy looming, ours had to come up at least another quarter. So we settled on 50 cents.

I shouldn’t complain, because once all the permanent teeth are in, you don’t get a second chance. The next time they come out, it’s against our will. They stay out. And we pay the Tooth Fairy back in spades with every trip to the dentist. Fifty cents seems like a real bargain in comparison.

And those four-bit sojourns on tip-toe to the bedroom aren’t so bad. You reach under the pillow, find a Kleenex folded carefully around a tiny bit of tooth, so small you almost lose it. Then you slip a couple coins in the Kleenex and put it back under the pillow. You can’t help but smile and gaze for a moment at the sleeping beauty, no-teeth-and-all, having complete trust in some one as ephemeral as the Tooth Fairy.

Yeah, it’s just the Tooth Fairy. But when was the last time you had complete trust in anything? Probably back about that age. And in the morning, to see their glee at finding the money, just like they knew they would...

Come to think of it, that Tooth Fairy is worth every penny.

~After David died, the little container of little teeth was in his top dresser drawer.~chg

A closed-mouthed, largemouth tale ~ October 12, 1989

David Heiller

Every year about this time, Bob Dutcher comes to the American office and says “I’ve got some fish I’d like to show you, Dave.”

Then I grab my camera and follow him outside, where he and a fishing partner hold up chain of fish.

David, on a later, more successful trip.

That’s when I go blubbery and make a fool of myself. I cannot look at a five pound largemouth without weeping.

So last Friday Bob came into the office and said, “I’ve got some fish I’d like to show you, Dave.” Sure enough, he and his friend, Mike Anderson, held up a chain of fish. This time he had TWO five-pound bass on it, along with an assortment of other fish. (You don’t notice other fish when you are in the company of five pound bass.) I can’t describe a five pound bass. If they were people, they would be weight lifters or pro football players. They are almost grotesque; they are so huge and fat.

I held up well as I took the pictures, asked all the right questions, how they caught them, the bait they used. But I didn’t ask WHERE they caught the fish, because I knew what Bob would say, with his fish-eating smile:

“A local lake.”

Back in the office, after I had quit crying, I decided to try my luck at the elusive five-pound bass. The next morning, Noah and I headed out with a bucket of sucker minnows to a local lake. I had decided on Sand Lake, like Harley Sylves­ter had recommended at the bait shop. But at the last minute I changed my mind to Smith Lake.

As we sat in the front seat of the car, Noah as­ked me a question. “If you saw that guy from Askov going fishing right now, would you fol­low him?” He had this crooked smile on his face. I looked at him in shock.

A six-year-old poses a moral question.

I had been thinking just that same thing all morning. And to have a six-year-old pose such an unthinkable, moral question, one that hit at the very root of honesty and fair play.

I answered with a crooked smile of my own in one-half second: “YES!”

At Smith Lake, we parked our car behind a pick-up truck, unloaded our boat, and pushed off. Another boat drifted ahead of us, but I couldn’t see how they were doing. The wind blew us coldly across the lake behind them, along the lily pads. Noah had forgotten his stocking cap and a mitten in the car. He started complaining about the weather almost im­mediately.

Noah caught a small northern, maybe a pound, and threw it back. I pulled in a three pound northern. That was it. No bass, no other strikes.

After two hours, we headed in, shivering both from cruel cold and bulging bladders. There^’s nothing quite as painful as sitting in a boat with a kid who has to go to the bathroom on a cold day, unless you have to go yourself.

As we floated near the boat landing, the other boat on the lake, the one we had been drifting exactly behind, passed us by. There sat Bob Dutcher and Mike Anderson! I waved and yelled at Bob. He stopped. “I staked out your house last night and followed you here!” I said with a laugh. Bob didn’t smile.

“Catch any?” he asked. I held up my measly northern.

“How about you,” I returned. Mike held up a chain of fish. At the top was another five-pound bass! Now Bob smiled.

We returned to Smith Lake that evening, and caught a few more northerns. But the bass? That’s Bob Dutcher’s domain. I’ll keep trying though. At least I know the lake. Smith Lake. Or was it Jones Lake. I can’t seem to remember…

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.