‘Tis the season for basketball ~ March 27, 1997

David Heiller

The sounds of basketball cut through the chilly air two nights ago. Α slightly deflated ball dribbled on the dirt court, which also doubles as our driveway.

The ball banged on the rim. Α yell of satisfaction from one boy cut the air as the ball eased over it and through the net. The other boy grumbled a response, took the ball and dribbled and shouted and shot.

Basketball in March in Minnesota has its own season, just like spring, summer, fall, and winter. It’s a lot shorter, but it is still a power to be reckoned with. Especially this year. This year is special.

I watched my son and his friend for a few minutes on Sunday night, playing in the light of the pole barn. Α full moon was rising to add a touch of class. There was even a comet in the northwest riding shotgun over the scene.

“Life will never get better than that,” I thought to myself. You’re 13. Well, that’s not so easy. But with a basketball in your hand and a week’s worth of Easter vacation beckoning like a fast break, you can’t complain.

So you pretend you’re Sam Jacobson, and the clock is winding down against Kentucky, and you get the pass, and you go up for a jump shot and let the ball go with no time on the clock, and it swishes.

David had a unique version of one-on-one that they played nearly everyday.

Oops. It clanked off the rim. It didn’t go in. No problem. You were fouled! Two shots, and you’re down by one point. In goes the first one. It’s all tied up, folks. In goes the second. The Gophers win the national title! Α few sound effects are in order now. Listen to that crowd roar!

I don’t know if that’s what goes through my son’s mind as he plays outside on these March days and nights. But I’ve got a hunch it is, if he’s like his old man and about three million other guys.

When I was his age, we had a basketball season that always seemed to coincide with the high school tournament. It wasn’t organized. We didn’t have coaches, or crazy practice schedules, or 100-mile bus rides. A bunch of kids from town would gather and we’d find a cement driveway that had a basket against the garage, and we’d play.

We weren’t very good. I’m sure a big city team would have cleaned our clocks. But we thought we were good, and that was what mattered. We played fair. We called our own fouls, and were basically honest.

The night games at the school ground with my brother Danny were the most fun for me. The ground under the two baskets was bare, due to the fact that the two baskets represented first base and third base during the baseball season. Baseball in Brownsville far exceeded basketball’s comet-like moment in the sun.

In March, that ground would turn pretty muddy. It was like playing on a dirty sponge. We’d come home with dirt ground into our hands and arms and sleeves and jeans. Mom never complained.

David in about '66

But at night the ground would harden up. Then it was like a real court, although not always very smooth. That didn’t matter. We could dribble on it, and it evened up the odds a bit, since Danny was three years older and could outplay me on cement.

Playing alone was fun too. You could make up your own scenario, be any star you wanted to be. Someone from Edina or Duluth East, whoever was strarring in that year’s state tournament. Or even a Minnesota Gopher. And you always won. I never lost one game at the school grounds when I played by myself.

One night, playing with my brother, my foot curled over when I stepped on a clump of frozen mud. A needle of pain went through my foot, and I screamed and fell down. Danny, being a true big brother, stole the ball and made the basket while I lay on the ground in agony.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I think I did both. Then he helped me home. Mom took me to the doctor the next day, and an X-ray showed a broken bone right where I knew it would. Thus ended the 1966 basketball season.

David's alma mater, the Minnesota Gophers

Basketball season is special because of memories like that, and because I get to watch history repeat itself these days when my son plays outside on March nights.

This year it is special also because of the Minnesota Gophers. I don’t know if they will win the national tale this Saturday and Monday. But listening to them on the radio all year, and watching them in the NCAA tournament, has been a real treat. It has brought excitement to our family much like the Twins did in 1987 and 1991.

Go Gophers. Win or lose, we owe you a big thank you.

The sweet mysteries of spring ~ March 23, 1995

by David Heiller

The mystery of spring has struck, and all the explanations in the world won’t stop me from gawking.

Sweet, sweet mystery of Spring!

Take those maple trees. We drilled 43 holes and hammered in aluminum taps on March 11, right at the start of a warm spell.

Eighteen inches of snow carpeted the woods that Saturday, and three days later, the carpet was threadbare.

That in itself mystified a lot of people. It was the talk of the town. “What happened to the snow? How could so much snow disappear so fast?”

But maple trees offer a bigger mystery. You’d think when the warm weather hit, the sap would have flowed fast and filled our buckets. That didn’t happen. The sap didn’t run at all during that warm spell, when it was 60 during the day and 40 at night.

Jim Sales, a friend from Askov who used to tend the maple trees at Audubon Center of the North Woods in Sandstone, told me why: the trees need cold nights to go with the warm days.

The cold nights tell the maple trees to pull their sap into their roots to protect themselves. Then during the warm days, the sap rises, and if you have a tap in the tree, some of it drips out into a bucket.

I had read about Jim’s explanation before. I knew the “what,” that nights below freezing and days above freezing meant that sap flowed well. But I didn’t know the “why,” and I will try to forget it as soon as possible. The simple mystery of flowing sap is enough to make me marvel at life returning to the North Country.

I marvel even more as 40 gallons of sap are boiled down into one utterly delicious gallon of syrup. That’s another mystery of nature. How is this possible? Who the heck discovered it? How did they stumble upon such a lucky find?

Planting the year before.
 Good parsnips take almost a year!

PARSNIPS offer another mystery to me. We planted a bed of them last spring, and weeded and thinned them, then left them in the garden over the winter. Alvin Jensen of Askov says this gives them a sweeter taste.

I dug half a dozen out on Sunday, washed and peeled them, sliced them in a pan and fried them in butter. They were delicious. My wife said they tasted good enough to eat like breakfast cereal, with milk in a bowl. Some people like to sprinkle brown sugar on them, to make them even sweeter.

But why hadn’t they frozen, like everything else in the garden? They weren’t even mulched. And why are they better in the spring than they are in the fall?

HONEYBEES offer another mystery to me. They are flying in this warm weather, looking for food, cleaning out their hives. They survived 30-below-zero nights by huddling in a ball 20,000 strong. At the center of the ball is a queen, who mated one time and has 200,000 eggs to show for it.

She lays those eggs, they develop into larva, the larva turn into bees, the bees collect nectar and ingest it and expel it and fan their wings and the next thing you know, there’s a hive full of honey. Something that mankind, for all his explanations and knowledge, cannot make.

Don’t answer the whys in this column. Sometimes its better just to marvel at nature. Be thankful for the sweet things in life, like maple syrup and parsnips and honey bees.

Spring is definitely on its way ~ March 11, 1993

David Heiller

“Oh, you’re writing about mud,” Cindy said when I told her what this column was about.

Spring. That’s what this column is about, and maybe it IS too early to think about it. You meet Art Christensen out for his morning walk in Askov, and he^’ll warn you that there’s more snow and cold coming. But you can tell by the swagger in his step that he knows: spring is coming.

The signs are subtle. Grass is showing through in spots in the yard, but it’s not really grass, it’s more of a soggy brown washcloth than grass.

Patches of ice form on the driveway when we get up, but by 10 a.m. they are patches of water and mud. It’s time to put away the Sorels and put on the knee-high rubber boots, the mud boots.

The muck puts sleepy animals on the move. Their cozy dens are now swimming pools. Maybe it was time to get up anyway.

You see skunks everywhere. A young one sat in our driveway on Tuesday afternoon, March 2, calmly eating a rotting deer skin that I had been planning to tan. Luckily the dog was in the house.

The skunk looked cute from a distance. Then Thursday night, the air filled with the smell of skunk spray, stinking to high Heaven. Some songs are true: on Saturday we took a walk and found the small skunk dead at the side of the road.

In Askov on March 8, a muskrat had built a home in a snow bank a stone’s throw from our office building. He thinks that big puddle of water is a lake. He’s thinking spring.

Signs of spring in the woods

Out in the woods, there’s still a foot of snow, but you can almost see it shrinking before your eyes. It’s not the same fine stuff that fell back in December. The snow today has the consistency of cracked corn. It falls into little pieces when you pick it up in the afternoon. In the morning, it has a crust that ALMOST holds you up. Just when you think you can walk on top, UGGH, your foot goes plunging through, jarring your knee. Sore knees: another sign of spring.

It’s good snow for dogs and bad snow for deer. The dogs stay on top, the deer don’t. The two don’t mix very well. A neighbor jumped a deer that was badly cut up in the woods on Saturday, March 6. The snow, stained with big patches of blood, was torn with the struggle of deer and dog.

The birds know spring is near. The chickadees are trying to out-sing each other every morning; the blue jays are honking for a last meal. Crows are moving about, and owls hoot at night, Coyotes are howling too, which means they are mating, according to a friend, and isn’t that sign of spring?

The sap is running

The sap is running too. I tapped our maple trees on March 3. Ideal tapping weather is when temperatures get above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. That’s a sign of spring.

You hear the plunk-plunk of sap dripping into plastic buckets, and it’s a good sound. They are giving more than half gallon a day, except for the ash tree that I tapped. That bucket is bone dry. I tap an ash every year, just to make sure that God hasn’t changed his mind.

He hasn’t, so I moved the tap to a healthy maple, and the sap was flowing out of the 9/16 inch hole before I could pound the tap in.

The kids like to drink sap right from the buckets. I do too. You can taste the sugar in it. It’s cold and sweet, and it tastes like spring.

And when the air fills with the smell of boiling sap, you can smell spring. There^’s no other smell quite like it.

So maybe the marsh marigolds aren’t blooming. Eng. Maybe the frost boils haven’t hit the back roads, and maybe the frogs aren’t peeping. Maybe we’ll even get a “tournament blizzard”

Maybe the calendar doesn’t say March 20 yet. But spring is coming. It’s definitely coming.

Sweating it out on a March walk ~ March 12, 1987

David Heiller

As we headed outside for a walk on Saturday afternoon, I glanced at the indoor-outdoor thermometer. I looked again, more closely.

Nah, it couldn’t be. I started to say something but stopped. My eyes were playing tricks on me. Seventy-two degrees?

As I sat outside putting on my boots, Cindy and the kids came rushing past. “It’s 72 degrees!” Cindy said.

Oh Spring!

“It can’t be 72 degrees,” I said, even though I had just looked at the thermometer myself. “Are you sure it wasn’t 62 degrees?”

“No, it’s 72 degrees,” she repeated.

We started on our second walk of the day. This time we had a menagerie, Steve Bonkoski and his four children, plus Cindy and me with our two. As we straggled out onto the gravel road heading south, Cindy pointed down the road. A 30 foot stretch of road was covered with flowing water. On our first walk that morning, the road had been bare.

Seventy twο degree March days will do that to Pine County roads.

Not many minutes passed before we realized just what a 72-degree March day means to Minnesotans. I was wearing a tee shirt and long sleeved work shirt, while Cindy had on a heavy sweater, and Steve wore a wool shirt plus a seven month old sleeping boy on his back. We wore lined boots on our feet. The children all had their winter coats on, too.

To make matters worse, I had offered to pull the wagon, So twο of the kids took me upon that. Try pulling a wagon of kids on muddy roads wearing lined boots and a heavy shirt in 72-degree heat.

Olympic Triathlon winners don’t train that hard.

Still we trudged on, saying nothing to each other.

It’s sacrilegious to complain about such weather in March. Yοu do that, and an Armistice Day blizzard is likely to sweep you off your feet in a hurry.

The kids didn’t seem to mind nearly so much. They had spied the water on the road, and their pace picked up accordingly. They splashed through the deepest part. Even Malika, the youngest walker at 20 months, dismounted from the wagon to wade through the water, which nearly poured over the top of her boots.

We passed the lake, keeping a steady pace, except for Steve’s son, Brooks, who was enjoying the water more than anybody. We moved ahead, giving an occasional holler at the two-year-old. Finally Brooks hollered back. He was leaning crazily to one side, like a human Tower of Pisa. We gaped at him, and yelled for him tο come. He called back in a tiny voice, “Stuck.”

The mud on the shoulder of the road held him like a tar baby. He couldn’t move, only lean in our general direction.

Steve ran back and rescued his son, and the walk proceeded to the top of the hill a quarter mile away. Then we turned around and headed hack. By this time, half an hour into the walk, sweat poured off our faces. Even the kids knew we had goofed, dressing like Eskimos on a day like this. Finally Solee, who is nine and reads a lot of books, broached the subject. “This is crazy, why are we dressed like this?” she demanded.

I tried to find an adult answer. “Because it’s March, see, and we are used to March weather, so psychologically, we dressed for colder weather.” I thought if I used the word “psychologically,” she would be satisfied.

“What difference does it make if it’s March?” she persisted. “We wouldn’t be dressed like this if it was May.”

“Yes, but the weather can change in a hurry,” I answered, thinking of that Armistice Day blizzard again. Solee didn’t remember that November 11, 1940, storm when the temperature was 60 degrees in the morning and howling, snowy cold at two that afternoon. Of course, I didn’t remember it either.

“You’re crazy,” she said, with a steady look.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I admitted.

When we got home, we took off our shirts and sweaters and boots and babies. We had overheated like stubborn Norwegian bachelor farmers, unwilling to take off their long-underwear before June first. But no one complained.

You don’t complain about 72-degree March days. You never know when that blizzard will come.