‘Kind of neat’ to see the President ~ October 10, 1994

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 around.

In the back of the gym was a big platform, loaded with about a dozen television cameras and many photographers. Two men operated a fancy looking sound system.

Before the President arrived, a man in a red tie walked onto the stage and poured a glass of water from a flask he kept in his suit coat. I think it was water. I hope it was water.

Another man put a presidential seal on the front of the podium. He didn’t do this before the mayor or the college president or the political hopefuls spoke. Only before the President and Ann Wynia, the person he was trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate. And it came down right after he left the stage.

Right before the President came out; about a dozen photographers scurried onto another platform to the left of the stage. Their cameras had giant telephoto lenses.

All this set the stage for the President’s entrance. A special song played from that fancy sound system. A man announced him in a deep voice with “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” No Hoobert Hervers at this rally.

We cheered loud and long, 45 seconds, I read in the Duluth paper. Everybody kept standing during the whole speech, which didn’t go over two well with our two kids. They were tired of standing, and tired of hearing how honored everybody was that the President was in Duluth. I probably would have felt the same way at age 11 or nine.

So our kids sat down during the President’s speech. I felt guilty about that, like I do in church if they sit down during the Lord’s Prayer. We don’t let them do that in church, I thought. Why should we let them now?

But this is America, where we try to separate Church and State. So instead of yelling at them, I leaned over and told the nine year old, “Malika, I’m 41 years old and this is the first President I’ve ever seen. That’s why I’m standing.” And she stood up.

The family in 1994.

I can’t remember most of the speech. President Clinton talked about how our economy is improving, and what a great person Ann Wynia is, and what an ominous person her opponent, Rod Grams, is.

He had some jokes too that were actually funny. Sen. Paul Wellstone had given a warm-up speech that was down-right rousing. The kind only Wellstone can give, a spine-tingler.

Then the President said, “Too bad Paul doesn’t have any energy and enthusiasm. Never know where he stands.”

The quote that stuck with me the most was about Ann Wynia, who doesn’t have the speaking skills of Wellstone. President Clinton picked up on that in a gentle way. There are a lot of people in Washington who are good talkers. We need people in Washington who are good dο-ers, not just good talkers, the President said. That applies to all people in all trades, not just politics.

PEOPLE took home different things from their trip to see the President. There was unbridled enthusiasm. I saw Christine Carlson of Net Lake waving to the president like he was an old friend that she hadn’t seen for long time.

There was disappointment from people with tickets who stood for hours outside the gym, and saw the doors close in front of them. They couldn’t get in because the fire marshal or Secret Service or the head custodian wouldn’t let any more people inside. I read later that 5,000 tickets were printed, but the gym only holds 3,800.

The situation was made a little better after the rally, when the President went out and shook many hands there as he could.

On Sunday night I asked Malika what she thought of the trip. “It was too hot and I was really sweaty and all we did mostly was stand, and shouting and clapping.”

Cindy heard those comments and asked Mοllie if there wasn’t something she liked. “I liked going to the restaurant,” Mollie said. We went out to eat after the rally. (It really was good food… Taste of Saigon.)

President Clinton in Duluth, Minnesota.

I then asked Noah what he thought. “It was fun. I liked yelling a lot. Any more questions?” He knew what I was looking for.

Jake and Andrew Lourey had an unforgettable experience. After the rally, President Clinton shook hands with people in the front of the gym as he was leaving. Jake and Andrew came running down from their balcony seats vaulted a railing, slid under a rope, and shook the President’s hand. Some kid told Jake not be so pushy, so Jake, age 11, moved to the side, and shook the President’s hand again. That kid’s got a future in politics.

“Kind of neat” he told me later. And that about sums it up.

Like ‘em or not, woodticks are sticking with us ~ June 13, 1985

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 remembered the day two years ago when we were walking up the road past the neighbors, and their shepherd/husky mistook her for a large gray squirrel or rabbit. Muffin emerged from that mismatch with a punctured lung and some broken ribs. She didn’t leave the yard this last visit.

In fact, she didn’t leave the house much. But still, the omni-present woodtick radared in on her. Sunday morning, despite an aerosol spray with anti-tick stuff, she had a woodtick on her nose. It was so small, we couldn^’t get it out with our fingers and had to use a tweezers. Lorely, my wife’s mother, wouldn’t even attempt it with her fingers. That prompted a dinner table recollection from Cindy.

“Remember that time I had a woodtick right in the middle of my back?” she said. “I couldn’t reach it, any way I tried. Then I asked you to take it out.” She nodded at her mother. “And you wouldn’t take it out.

“That’s not true, I did too take it out,” Lorely said firmly.

“Yes, but you used a tweezers,” Cindy answered.

“Well I still took it out,” Lorely said in a dignified voice, as if to say, “I may not like ticks, but I wouldn’t leave them sticking in my daughter.”

On the other end of the spectrum, some people like to do battle with woodticks. I visited a friend two weeks ago who has a handful of kids. My dog came with, and nosed up to eight-year-old Josh. Josh began petting Binti, and immediately began pulling ticks off her back. It came as natural as a handshake. “What’s the matter, don’t you take the ticks off your dog;” Josh scolded me as he tossed them aside. I had to admit it was a losing battle.

But nothing tops the time a friend came to visit from Texas. “We hadn’t seen each other for some time, so he started telling me about how things were different in the Lone Star State. I picked up a basketball, and the more buckets we shot, the more he bragged.

“Corn grows so fast down there,” he said, shooting the ball “we have to harvest it with an ax, and even then we have a hard time, because it’s hard to hit the same spot twice, it shoots up so quick.

“And we have to strap old roller skates on the bottom of watermelons so that they don’t tear up the yard when they’re growing on the vine.

“The Mosquitoes, why we just expanded Dulles International Airport to accommodate their landings and take-offs.”

He started to continue, but I cut him off. “What about woodticks?”

He stared at me. “Yeah, what about them?”

I held up the basketball. “You know this thing you thought was a basketball...”

I did t get to finish the sentence. My friend was already halfway out the driveway. I haven’t heard from him since, except for a form-letter Christmas card.

Like I said, most everybody has a story about woodticks. Not all of them are entirely true.

Lake trout and rocks go a long way ~ May 24, 1990

 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. That’s saying a lot. Paul has a big back, 6-foot-4, 275 pounds worth. It’s broad. You could show home movies off his back.

Suddenly, in the midst of the rapids, with white water on all sides, a sharp crack sounded, and we careened sideways and backwards, and Paul swore as only a man who has just broken the shaft of a Misukanis paddle can swear.

Bo Jackson can break a baseball bat over his knee, and Paul Dwyer can break a paddle on a rapids. A broad back. We ended up hopping out and pulling the canoe through the rapids.

Paul and Dave L.

Later that day, when we pitched camp, Paul picked up his pack by its trump-line, and the trump-line broke, and Paul swore again. Then he opened his pack and saw the 10-pound rock. Jim and Dave smiled, and I finally let out my laugh, and Paul swore and laughed too, like we knew he would. Don’t try this trick otherwise.

The Rock became a theme for our five days in the Boundary Waters. (Newspaper editors make themes out of anything, even canoe trips.) When conversation lagged, Paul would get a twinkle in his eye and you could see what he was thinking. “Revenge is sweetest which lasteth longest,” he smiled. “How do firecrackers sound? Or dynamite?”

The Rock became a scapegoat, too. Paul immediately blamed it for breaking his paddle and his trump-line. When the weather brought sheets of wind and rain, it was The Rock’s fault. When we ran low on a certain blood-warming beverage, The Rock felt the brunt of our words.

Jim even composed the first line of an epic poem. “But for The Rock,” he said as we shivered under a tarp on Thursday evening, taking another sip of Blood-Warmer. That was as far as he got.

But we forgot about The Rock on Saturday. We had paddled up three portages and across two lakes to a trout hole that Dave had heard about. It sat on top of the world to us, spring-fed, ice-cold, blue-green. Throw in a blue sky and a warm spot in the sun, and it was as close to heaven as you can travel.

An otter slid off the bank and crossed over our lines. “That’s a sign of good luck,” Paul said. About a minute later, Jim had a strike and a fight on his hands.

“It’s a big one, guys,” Jim said. “Look at him run. Oops, got to keep my rod tip up. That’s right, you can run with it.” Jim is the Howard Cosell of fishermen. He gives the play-by-play of every fish he catches.

He finally landed a nice-sized lake trout, maybe two pounds, a foot-and-a-half long.

We hadn’t settled back down more than five minutes when my eight-pound line started to peel out. I picked up the rod and watched for several seconds as my line disappeared into the lake. Dave and I looked at each other as if to say, “What the heck is that?” Then I set the hook.

It was a snag. Nothing moved. I felt like an idiot.

Then the snag started swimming away.

Dave and Jim reeled in their lines. They each grabbed a net. Four men who were portaging their canoes nearby stopped and watched. My drag whirred. Jim started his broadcast, and Paul and Dave served as color men. “Keep the rod tip up. Don’t let the reel drag like that. Let the rod do the work. Tip the rod down, then reel it in. DON’T GIVE IT SLACK. Here he comes. Don’t scare him. If he wants to run, let him run!”

David, Jim, Paul, and Dave L: ready for whatever each trip brought them.

And I listened to all their words, because I’d never had a fish like this on the end of a line before. Twice it came to the surface, a brown-speckled swirl. I worked it to shore, but it saw Jim and the net and ran back to deep water.

Finally, after 10 minutes, it tired, and Jim got it in the net. It barely fit. What a beauty! It almost hurt to look at it, 30 inches long, eight pounds of heaving, ice-cold lake trout. We all admired it, because we all had caught it in a sense. And I felt proud. I always tell people that fishing is just my excuse to get away for five days with some good friends, and that’s true. But what an excuse, when you hold up an eight-pound lake trout as long as your leg!

That was the last fish we caught on our trip, too. We tried for more, but the lake seemed to say, “That was your thrill, boys. Take it or leave it.” We took it, and cleaned it, and fried it in oil and butter and ate it with rice and morel mushrooms that Dave spied on the way back, and though I felt a bit sad at the trout’s death, it gave our group something. Something we get every year about this time, with our canoe trip, something that keeps us returning, year after year.

Rocks and all.

A new song from an old guitar ~ March 2, 1995

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 guitar, 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 kitchen on a cold winter morning, singing to his wife. Maybe a mother singing to her kids at bed time. I thought if the guitar could talk, it would have some good stories to tell.

But then it had been set aside and forgotten, and eventually ended up at a garage sale in a broken down condition.

That happens with old things, from guitars to people. So I bought it, and put nylon strings on it, and played it. It sounded good, a soft, clear, simple sound.

I bought a steel string guitar in 1980, and the old guitar ended up in my garage. But I never forgot about it. Three months ago I dug it out. I thought maybe my son or daughter could play it. It’s just the right size for a starter. But it was in worse shape than ever. The face was split in several places, and many of the support pieces inside were loose.

So I took it to Askov to see if my favorite handyman, Red Hansen, could fix it. He and I and Dennis Hansen of Sandstone were playing music for our open house, and when I asked Red if he wanted to fix it, Dennis stepped forward and said he’d give it a try.

Dennis brought it back last Tuesday, February 21. It’s hard to describe the job he did. He took the cracked face off, and made a new one out of basswood. He planed and sanded it all by hand, until it was smooth as paper, and glued it perfectly into place, so that it looks better than the old one ever did.

He glued support pieces inside. He made a new walnut nut, which is the little wooden piece that the strings cross over just before they are fastened to the tuning pegs. He stripped off the old varnish, and revealed beautifully-grained rosewood on the sides and back. He scrounged a wooden bridge and three bridge pins from a friend, and carved three other bridge pins by hand.

He made a bridge piece out of a plastic brown rain gutter. They say necessity is the mother invention. He adjusted it so the action οn the strings is just right. He even put new strings the guitar.

Dennis didn’t brag about all this. He’s not a man of many words. I had to ask him about everything he did, and then he told me a smile that is almost always present on his bearded face. There was a hint of pride too. He knew he had done a good job, like you do in any true labor of love.

He wouldn’t have had to work that hard. It wasn’t even his guitar, and he sure wasn’t doing it for the money. I think he saw the beauty in the old guitar, and wanted to bring it out for others like me to see and hear.

Now when I look at it and play it, I think of the beauty of Dennis Hansen. Α part of him will always be in the guitar. It’s another story the guitar will tell every time it is played, and one I’m proud to pass along.

The guitar now sits in the corner of our living room. It’s alive again, and it has a place in our lives again. I like to play it in the morning, old ballads and love songs, especially if my wife is listening. It sounds as soft and clear as ever.

I hear my daughter strumming it right now. That’s a good end to this column, along with, “Thank you, Dennis.”