Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller If Miss Emma could talk, she might tell you that fall is just around the corner. Other famous female weather watchers like Helen Feldt, Dutch Jones, and Sue Thue can put their noses to the air and sense that fall is close by. Miss Emma was a good hunter, but her only opportunity for bird hunting was from the picture window. Dutch knows it when her bear friends out east of Bruno stop making amorous advances and head for a warm winter bed. Helen knows it when the temperatures in the Cloverton area drop below 40 degrees and threaten tomato crops. Sue knows it when she starts daydreaming about the smell of her wild rice parching west of Sandstone. But Miss Emma knows it’s fall when the mice start to move into the house. Miss Emma, you see, is our cat. Miss Emma, like all cats, is fat, lazy and ar­rogant. But she can catch mice. She doesn’t eat them. Instead, she lays them out for us to see, like trophies. In the late fall, she will sometimes have three mic...

David Heiller The Kettle River showed off for us two Sundays ago, mixing beauty and power like a rose in full bloom and a Juggernaut on a winning streak. Between County Roads 46 and 52 in northern Pine County, the river sprinkles a set of rapids every quarter mile or so. Not dangerous rapids, not Blueberry Slide or Dragon’s Tooth or those other killers at Banning State Park. Up north 20 miles, the rapids laugh WITH you, not AT you, gurgling and foaming, flexing their muscles a wee bit, letting you bump over hidden rocks just fast enough to make butterflies rise up in stomachs, just fast enough to make the kids duck their heads and close their eyes as the water bubbles by. Our Aussie Shep., Kenzie, was  David's canoe  partner  for several years. After this trip, it was quite  a while  before the kids got into a canoe  on the Kettle River  with their father. “I’ve got to admit you made a good choice,” Cindy said as we hit a quiet stretch ...

David Heiller I’ll never forget the day. Jake, a friend of our son’s, came to visit and with a certain gleam in his eye, dumped a bag full of plastic dead flies on the kitchen floor. I stared in disbelief. I mean, my jaw dropped. We have approximately 1,493 REAL dead flies on our bedroom window sill upstairs on any given morning, and Jake brings in a pile of fake ones!?! Noah and Jake with a wooden lizard;  one of many in a play menagerie “Why dead plastic flies?” you may ask. I puzzled over that for quite some time too. Until Jake brought along his plastic tarantula. Hold on. This is no ordinary plastic tarantula. Not like the weak pretenders of my youth. Those were brittle, cheap pieces of Japanese junk. Jake’s tarantula is supple and subtle. Delicate and deadly. Black, with a hint of orange around the eyes, and white rings on the leg joints and the fangs. The kind of spider that crawls toward sleeping women in late-night jungle movie moonlight. It looks ...

David Heiller Winter waited for us at Grand Portage last weekend, like a patient mother calling her kids to supper. We could hear the calling, all right, a gang of two families, five kids, four adults, nine friends mostly, except for some titanic clashes of young wills. All headed 200 miles north as Old Lady Winter called to us across the melting snow. Dave Landwehr, Noah Landwehr, Kyle Landwehr, Matt  Landwehr,  and David  throwing snowballs into Canada. SHE CALLED SATURDAY morning. Was it a coincidence that I stepped out of the hotel room the same time as our friends’ son, Noah? “I’m going for a hike,” I said to him. “Can I come?” Noah asked. He knew he could. Adults don’t invite themselves along when someone is headed for a dawn hike. They wait politely, sometimes too politely. Not 11-year-old boys, which is fine with me. So off we went, along a trail from the lodge. The snow was hard packed from skiers. It was easy going, like walking on har...

David Heiller Christmas is a time of giving. Sometimes the gifts are worth money. Sometimes they are worth much more. Take the gift of a phone call home. I called my mother last week, without really planning to. I’d just received a letter from her, and had written recently too. But I needed to talk to her. I didn’t have much to say. Our Christmas plans, when we could meet in Minneapolis. She talked about the weather in Brownsville, the big snowstorm they had. Noah took the phone, and told her about his deer antler quest, how Grandma Marge at school had promised to bring him one. Then I took the phone again, lingering on small talk, until we said good bye. After I hung up, I felt better. That calm old voice from home carried with it some inner strength that I needed. Now I realize that phone call was an unknowing gift from Mom. How about the gift of a walk in the woods? We tramped down an abandoned township road on Saturday afternoon. Binti lead the way, sniffing for squir...

David Heiller Christmas is a season, all right, and it’s here now. It wasn’t here last week, but it’s here now. Don’t ask me to define the difference that a few days can make. Maybe flipping the calendar over to “December” made the difference. It shouldn’t, but on Saturday, December 1, I felt   THAT FEELING for the first time in 11 months, the feeling that the Christmas season had arrived. It comes with a certain slant to the daylight, the soft light of short days with the sun hanging low in the south, and six inches of fresh snow underfoot. Malika, Noah, Joey and Queen Ida Christmas tree hunting. It’s a light that’s great for walks down back roads with a seven-year-old boy who has deer-antler fever and thinks maybe we’ll find a set that some hunter forgot. It’s a great excuse for a hike, and we do find a lot of deer tracks in the snow. We find a glassy patch of ice in the culvert and watch bugs crawling through the water just a few inches from our noses. We...

David Heiller The woodstove is finally earning its keep at our house, and so are Noah and I. On Sunday, we stacked about four cords of wood. I did most of the work, but Noah kept a steady pace too for four hours. We stacked wood and listened to the Vikings beat Chicago 41-13, and even took a hot chocolate-peanut butter cookie break. Is there a better way to spend a sunny November afternoon? Afterward, Noah had to take off his shirt and make me feel his arm muscles. Yup, I said, they feel a little harder, and they did. The wood stove was, for much of the year,  central to our house and family. (Why  don't I have  any photos of it?)  Anyway, this  is more  or less how we  heated our home for many, many years. (I must confess that he was also motivated by the dollar I promised if he helped stack the whole pile, and he got his buck.) We’ve had fires in our Fisher wood stove since September, mostly burning up old elm that feels and heats l...

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 pri...