If woodpiles could talk ~ February 11, 1988

David Heiller

I sold insurance for a time, in between teaching and newspapering. My district manager taught me a lot of sales tricks, though he called them “techniques.” That’s kind of like calling that place at rest stops where dogs go the “pet exercise area.” We all know what they really do there.

We all called on farmers. One of my boss’s tricks was to size up the place as he drove up. He would look at the outbuildings and judge whether the man or woman was the leader of the house. Sturdy barns with a fresh coat of paint, or a well-fenced pasture, told him the man was in charge, and he would address his sales pitch to the man.

If the house looked shabby, or the buildings were leaning, but the kitchen looked like it belonged in ladies Home-Journal, he would direct his comments more to the woman.

His theory didn’t always work. It was too simplistic. I have to tell myself that when I look at my woodpile and woodshed, or else admit abject slavery to Cindy, something I’m not prepared to do in the black and white of a newspaper we jointly own.

Woodpiles have a way of reflecting their owner. At this time of year, mine reflects the image of a Sunday morning bathroom mirror after a long night at the Sidetrack Tap.

We have two woodpiles. The one I’m using now is next to the garage, under a woodshed which doesn’t complement it at all. I made it from two-by-fours that are half a foot higher on the east than the west. The idea was to have the water run off to the west, which it does, right into the garage. (I call it a garage, but we’ve never had our car in it.) The pitch of the roof is even more severe because the twο-by-fours have shifted and sagged to the west. The whole thing is held up by a post hastily pounded in a year ago.

Not all the water runs off though. The tin roof, which I scrounged from Dan Flom, has many nail holes in it. It’s held in place with chunks of wood. Water finds the old nail holes and drips onto the woodpile during rain storms or the long spring thaw.

With the recent cold weather, the woodpile is looking pretty long in the tooth. There’s about a week of elm and oak left, before I hit the birch and popple [which in east central Minnesota is poplar] which neighbor Harvey Williams gave me a year and a half ago. Harvey is a fine neighbor, but he doesn’t give away good wood. He may be surprised to read that I’m about to burn it now. Harvey has 150 cords of wood in his north field, which is for sale, so he’s probably happy to hear about that birch and popple.

But before I visit Harvey, I can turn to my other pile of wood, which is buried under a snowdrift on the west side of the house. It’s good wood, the remains of a 100-year-old elm that came down in October. Once I get it uncovered, and split, and dried, we should be all right.

The old elm tree remnants.
Splitting elm is miserable work, 
who could blame him for keeping it till last?

I admire people with nice woodpiles, and people who make a lot of wood. People like Denny Molgaard, Bruno. I remember asking him about his woodpile last fall, as he filled my car at Bruno Deep Rock. “Yeah, I’ve just about got it all put up,” he said.

“So you’ll make it through this winter?” I asked.

He looked at me out of the side of his eyes. “That’s next year’s supply,” he said.

Like I said a woodpile says a lot about a man. Just how much, I’m afraid to admit.

Customer satisfaction for a jackknife lover ~ February 13, 1997

David Heiller

Here’s a tale of customer satisfaction.

About a month ago I was at Stanton Lumber. I stopped to admire their Schrade knife case. Every good hardware store has a display of jackknives. And Schrade (which rhymes with spade) is as good as they come.

I pulled out a Schrade jackknife that I often carry. The knife used to belong to my wife’s father, Gordon Olson. We found it in his belongings after he died in 1993.

The knife has been used a lot. You can tell because the main blade is thin and curved from many a sharpening. One of the three blades is broken.

David loved his jackknives, and was never without 
one. He is posing here with his booty from
 a Christmas laden with jackknives.

I like this knife. It’s very good quality. The blade holds an edge, which means it is good steel. It is small. I can keep it in the pocket of my dress pants without it being noticeable.

Some of the people at work don’t like the knife. They know I use it on everything. They cringe when I cut one of Hazel’s cakes with it. “Where has that knife been?” Lynn will ask like clockwork.

There’s another reason I like this particular knife. It’s a connection to Cindy’s dad. He was not an easy man to get to know, but at least we had a love of jackknives in common.

I imagine this knife was a favorite of Gordy’s. I sometimes wonder how he broke the blade. I wonder where he got the knife, and what it meant to him. Did he admire its balance, its keen edge?

Did he open the blades and like the feel of them snapping shut? Did it come in handy the way jackknives always seem to do, cutting fishing line, or opening a letter, or prying on something that—oops—broke the blade?

I showed the knife to Del Delaney, who owns Stanton Lumber. He noticed the broken blade, and said I should send it to Schrade, because they have a lifetime warranty. They might send me a new one, he said, as he gave me the address.

I wrote to Imperial Schrade Corporation in Ellenville, New York, and sent the knife. I hated to part with it. I didn’t know if I would ever see it again.

A couple weeks later, I received a package from Schrade. I eagerly opened it. Inside were two jackknives, the one I sent them, and a brand new one.

They sent a cover letter that explained, “Although the knife model which you had sent is not available at our factory, because it is either out of stock or discontinued, we have taken the liberty of substituting a knife of equal value and usefulness in order to fulfill the terms of our Limited Lifetime Warranty.”

Wow. Now that is customer satisfaction. The knife I sent them, which they said was a model 580Τ, must be 30 or 40 years old. Who knows how long it has been broken. They sent a very nice knife, a model 340Τ, as a replacement.

I showed the new knife to Del. He pointed it out in his display case. It sells for $23.95.

It occurred to me that Del might have lost a sale by telling me to send in the old knife. Del doesn’t care about things like that. I’m sure he likes to make a buck like the next guy, but not at the expense of showing customers other options which is what he did for me.

The next time I buy a knife, it will be a Schrade. And I’ll buy it at Stanton Lumber.

‘Streets of London’ has a good message ~ February 6, 1997

David Heiller

Music was a big part of my life when I was in the Peace Corps in Morocco from 1977 to 1979.

Roger and David making music in Morocco.

I played the banjo a lot to pass the time. When I’d get together with American friends, we’d always play music.

One of my most memorable musical moments in Morocco came at a workshop that the volunteers were having in Tangiers. I don’t know how much work we got done at this workshop. I do know it was a good time to visit with friends, compare war stories, and play music.

We were sitting around in a hotel lobby, playing music, when an English gentleman joined us. He brought out his guitar, and the rest of us soon put ours away.

He was good. Very good. The kind of performer you’d pay music to see at a college coffeehouse. He played song after song. Wow, it was nice listening to him. We fell under his spell.

And he came up with a classic line that night, one I still remember. One of the volunteers asked him, with a dreamy look in her eyes, if he knew “Streets of London.”

He smiled, and paused, and said in his British accent, “Know it? I know the bloke that wrote it.”

I’ll never forget those words, spoken with just the right amount of understated pride. Know it? I know the bloke that wrote it.

He told about singing it with Ralph McTell, who was the bloke that wrote it. Then he proceeded to sing the song, and it instantly became one of my favorites.

I had known the song before and liked it plenty, but this guy brought it to life.

Steve and David in Morocco

The song has a message I still fervently believe. I think about it every time I think life is rough.

Look at people like Laurel Hultgren and Randy Hjelmberg, who are featured on this week’s front page. They have health problems galore, but they look on the sunny side of life.

I worked at Camp Courage for five summers. Every camper had some type of physical handicap. Some were on their last legs. Some didn’t have legs. Pick a physical handicap, it was at Camp Courage. It’s hard to lump them all together, but I honestly can’t remember any camper ever complaining about anything. The happiest times of their lives were at camp. Maybe that’s selective memory on my part. But it seemed to me the camp was aptly named. The campers had a lot of courage.

I saw a lot of courage and dignity in Morocco too. Morocco has a very simple system of welfare. It’s called begging. If you ever think you have it bad, think about standing on a lonely street in Fez, on a clammy winter night, holding a child in one arm and an upturned palm in the other. That takes courage and dignity. Thinking of scenes like that, which I saw plenty, my little problems didn’t seem so insurmountable. They still don’t.

“Streets of London” sums up this message as well as any song I know. “Don’t complain. You don’t have it so bad. Look around you, and count your blessings, because life could be a whole lot worse.”

Streets of London by Ralph McTell

Thank you for reminding me of that Ralph McTell and thank you, Mr. Nameless British Musician in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1978.

Streets of London

Ralph McTell

Have you seen the old man 
In the closed-down market 
Kicking up the paper, 
with his worn out shoes? 
In his eyes you see no pride 
Hand held loosely at his side
Yesterday’s paper telling yesterday’s news 

So how can you tell me you’re lonely, 
And say for you that the sun don’t shine? 
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London 
I’ll show you something to make you change your mind 

Have you seen the old girl 
Who walks the streets of London 
Dirt in her hair and her clothes in rags? 
She’s no time for talking, 
She just keeps right on walking 
Carrying her home in two carrier bags. 

Chorus

In the all night cafe
At a quarter past eleven, 
Same old man is sitting there on his own 
Looking at the world 
Over the rim of his tea-cup, 
Each tea last an hour 
Then he wanders home alone 

Chorus

And have you seen the old man 
Outside the seaman’s mission 
Memory fading with 
The medal ribbons that he wears. 
In our winter city, 
The rain cries a little pity 
For one more forgotten hero 
And a world that doesn’t care 

Chorus

Hitting deer was sobering experience ~ February 26, 1998

David Heiller

Cindy and I drove home from book club on Monday night, February 9, just like we always do. Cruising along at about 55 miles an hour. Talking a little, listening to the radio.

Just after we crossed the Kettle River Bridge on County Road 46, a deer ran in front of the car. One second the road was clear, and the next our headlights were full of a frightened, wild animal.

Cindy screamed. I hollered. I swerved to the right. All in a split second. The deer’s head hit the left headlight of the car. Its body smashed into the left front side of the car, and spun away into the night.

I fought for control of the car. We were in snow on the shoulder of the road. For a second I thought we’d go in the ditch, but I was able to pull the Taurus back onto the road.

I stopped the car. Cindy and I both sat there in a state of shock. But we were OK. No one was hurt.

‘I took the flashlight out of the glove compartment and got out of the car. I checked it over. The headlight was broken. The side had a big dent. The windshield was cracked.

I walked back where we had hit the deer. It was a big doe. She lay in the other lane, her eyes still bright, but the life gone from her body. She must have died instantly.

I dragged the deer onto the shoulder of the road. We drove home. Cindy called DNR game warden Curt Rossow in Willow River, and left a message on his answering machine.

I woke up my 14-year-old son, Noah, and told him what had happened. I needed his help with the deer.

After Noah dressed, we drove back to the deer in my truck. Twο teenagers pulled up as we were getting ready to lift the deer into the back of the truck. I recognized them as Joe Gibson and Matt Peterson.

Joe said he had stopped to see if we needed help. He thought the truck might have been damaged. I told them we had hit it with the car, I felt like a criminal, standing next to the deer late at night. I was worried that someone might think we had poached it.

We took the deer home. Since we hadn’t heard from Curt, I decided to go ahead and gut and skin the deer. I didn’t want to waste the meat. We hung it in the pole barn from the same hook that Noah’s deer had hung from two months earlier during hunting season. It seemed strange having another one there in the middle of February.

Sometimes road-killed deer are badly bruised, and a lot of the meat is unusable. But this one seemed to have barely a bad spot on it. It must have died from a broken neck.

The next day we drove the car to Alberg Auto Body in Sturgeon Lake. I called the insurance company. They received an estimate of $2,300 from Alberg to fix the car.

On Tuesday night, I saw Curt Rossow at the Willow River School Board meeting. I asked him about the deer. He told me I could have it, and that I did the right thing by going ahead and using it. He said he would send me a permit for it.

On Wednesday, February 11, the insurance company gave the go-ahead to me to  fix the car. Luckily the car had collision insurance, so we would only have to pay the deductible. If we had hit it with either other two vehicles, we would have had to pay for all of the repairs.

I was busy with work and a fishing trip the deer hung for a week in the pole barn. It was perfect weather for that, with temperatures in the 20s and 30s.

When I got home from the fishing trip, I quartered the deer with a saw, then Cindy and I cut it up. Cindy canned 17 ½ pints of meat. The rest went into the freezer as steaks, grind meat.

If we hit another deer, we are going to give it to Curt, who can give it to someone else. It’s a lot of work processing a deer. We do not need any more deer meat, especially if it means hitting one with a car.

We picked up the car at Alberg’s on February 20. They had it fixed in nine days. It smells of fresh paint, and looked brand new

I feel bad that the deer was killed. It’s a sickening feeling, hitting an animal, large or small, with a car.

Someone told me once that sometimes it’s unavoidable hitting a deer. I won’t argue that. I’ve had a lot of close calls with deer over the years. We do a lot of driving. But there was no way I could have missed that deer on February 9.

We were lucky. The accident could have been much worse. If we had hit it head on the car would have been badly damaged. We could have been hurt too.