The adventure, ardor, and abuse of skating ~ January 5, 1989

David Heiller

Andy Rote was having the hardest time at the skating rink in Askov last Friday. He would skate about two feet before his own two feet would fly into the air, and he would land on his keester, as Ronald Reagan would call it.

But Andy, like most seven-year-olds, didn’t seem to mind the falls. For one thing, he had six layers of clothes on. His mother, Anne, who grinned from the sidelines, had made sure of that. He didn’t mind that his 10-year-old sister, Elaine didn’t fall down once, or that Tara Loew, at age 14, looked like another Katarina Witt as she circled the rink.

Andy just kept getting up, and falling down, and getting up again.

Noah and Joe skating,
Kevin is doing his very best with Mollie.

There’s something about skating that brings back memories for a lot of us. Watching Andy skate last Friday, and skating with my family on Saturday and Sunday, brought back some flashes. Someone always received a new pair of skates for Christmas in my family of eight brothers and sisters when I was a boy. The skates smelled of new leather, and the proud owner would try them on in the living room, wobbling from rug to rug while Mom reminded us not to walk on the linoleum.

"Keep pushing me, Kevin, this is FUN!"

Then down to the harbor we’d go, new skates or old. I’ll never forget the shock one winter on the first day of ice skating. I unlaced my skates from the previous year, and tried pulling them on, but they wouldn’t fit. I took off the extra pair of socks. Still not close. I cried and went home, and Mom explained that my feet had grown so much that the skates were too small. She dug into the basement stairway, grabbed another pair from a nail for me. There were always half a dozen extra pairs of skates hanging from nails in the stairway, one of the many advantages of a large family. These were about three sizes too big. We stuffed tissue paper into the toe, and they fit fine. I was back on the harbor in an hour.

There was adventure on the ice. Skating on the river, you had to watch your feet pretty close. My brother, Danny, hit a hole one night and bounced off the ace with a hard crack. He came up holding a mouth full of blood and a big piece of front tooth.

Another time, I was skating on the river bottoms, lost in thought with a full head of steam. I glanced down at my feet, and instantly felt a knot in my gut. Black water was rushing silently below ice that was maybe one inch thick. I made a quick but gentle turn. Any sudden movement would have cracked that egg shell ice. I made it back to safe ground, but not before I saw myself plunging into that fast current with a heavy pair of skates to pull me down. Very scary.

And romance. I’d like to tell about the times I stood around a bonfire on the ice, holding hand with a dark-eyed beauty, but it wouldn’t be true. (I never write anything that isn’t true in this column.) I did have a say in the romance of others, though. I remember once when Norman Cram and Joan Goetzinger were courting. Norman was about 16, and thought a lot of Joan, and even more of himself, because he wore figure skates, and not hockey skates, a suspicious choice in the eyes of a 10-year-old kid. There was a song out at the time titled “Norman.” It had a sugary chorus that went, “Norman, woo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo, Norman, woo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-oοo-ooo-ooo, Norman, Norman my love.” When I saw Norman Cram holding hands with Joan Goetzinger at the skating rink one night, the temptation was too great. I waited until he had started walking up the wooden steps from the harbor with his skates on. ‘Norman, woo-oοo-ooo-ooo- ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo,” I started singing in as sweet and as loud a voice as possible. Norman let go of Joan’s hand and came after me on the fly, thumping down the steps and flying headfirst when his figure skates hit the ice. But I had learned to skate pretty well by that time, and Norman never did catch me.

Now I skate around man-made rinks. There’s romance when I hold the hands of a dark-eyed beauty (actually, they’re blue). There’s adventure when I pull Noah and Mollie on the plastic sled so fast that the front end comes off the ice and they are suspended in air like a ride at the county fair. Ι fall down too, landing on elbows that don’t give like they used to. Then I lie on the ice and laugh at myself. Funny, every year our dedicated firemen flood the rinks around here, they make the ice a little harder.

Thank goodness for kids like Andy Rote, who can fall down and pull themselves up again. They’ve got a lot to look forward to.

Snowshoes make winter easier to take ~ January 16, 1997

David Heiller

While filing out of church last Sunday, I ran into Bill Hall of Moose Lake.

Bill and his wife, Lou, used to own Moose Lake Florists. They sold it last year. They are retired. So I figured they must be going to head south soon.

I asked Bill about that as we slowly walked out of church. He answered that he hasn’t had enough of winter yet to head south.

Not enough winter? Some people would disagree.

I sensed that the notion of going south for the winter didn’t appeal to Bill. He explained it to me. There’s a reason people who live in the north live longer than people from the south, he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Going through four seasons is good for a person, he answered. There’s something about those extreme seasonal changes that is healthy.

That’s especially true if you are active, I said. If you snowshoe or ski or split wood in the winter, it should make you a healthier person.

My snowshoes, on Malika's feet.
~ Thanks to Malika for the photo.

We shook the pastor’s hand and went our separate ways. But Bill’s brief comment got me to thinking.

You can sit in your house and watch TV all winter, but you’re missing the point if you do that, if you don’t experience the change of seasons. If you don’t experience the season.

Oh-oh. I’m feeling preachy. I feel the Sermon of the Snowshoe comin’ on. Brothers and sisters! Listen and be saved from the dreary wintah! You don’t need a trailer park in Arizonah when you have a state park in Minnesotah!

“Yah sure,” you say. “Throw another log in the woodstove, Gladys, it’s chilly in this old farm house. And listen to what that crazy Heiller is writing about now. He LIKES winter.”

So call me crazy. Add my wife to the list too, and about 400,000 other people.

An Autumn view of our woods from across the field.

Snowshoes help. This is turning out to be the perfect winter for snowshoeing. Cindy and I have been doing a lot of it on our property this winter.

The snow is so deep that you need snowshoes to go anywhere besides the outhouse. And who wants to go there in the winter? I’m not that crazy.

We take a loppers and a folding camp saw with us and cut the branches and brush that try to tangle us up. Now we have all kinds of trails through the woods.

At first it was hard making the trails. Even with snowshoes, we’d sink in a foot. That’s tough walking. When you’re breaking trail, you have an extra five pounds on each foot.

But the wind has packed the snow down. Now it is much easier. And once the trails are made, you don’t sink at all. It’s like having little highways in the woods.

Even when it’s way below zero, snowshoeing has been fun. You just have to keep moving. And I always take a bottle of water with me. Α cold drink of water in the woods is really refreshing. It gives me a lift.

Snowshoes give me a fresh perspective on our woods. I can go places that are too wet and buggy the rest of the year. It’s interesting to look at the trees. I’ve seen them in the fall and spring but they look different now. A few are bent and broken. Most stand strong and silent. They all seem to take the worst Mother Nature can offer without a shrug. It’s their lot in life. They can’t head south. Maybe Bill Hall knows something that the trees know.

Cindy and I look at animal tracks. Some are easy to identify, like rabbits and squirrels and mice. But some are a mystery.

We went out on Sunday afternoon, January 6, after about 18 inches of new snow had fallen. We came upon fresh tracks, maybe two hours old, of a very big animal walking through our woods.

In some places, it walked through the deep snow. In other places, it took three-foot-long leaps. It veered off in one spot to sniff under some branches. Cindy and I both think it was a timber wolf. (There was no belly drag, despite of how deep the prints went.~chg) We saw two near our house about six years ago, so it’s not out of the question.

Those tracks have added to the wonder of our woods. I’d be honored to have a timber wolf as a neighbor, honored and a little nervous.

Winter has a lot of things like that to offer. Snowshoes make it easier for me to accept that offer, and even give a word of thanks.

A good snow ~ January 19, 1995

David Heiller

It was a good snow, the five inches of snow that fell on January 10. It fell when the temperature was about 30 degrees, so it was wet and stuck to everything.

Usually this kind of snow falls in March, and it stays for a few hours. Then the sun shines and the wind blows and the snow drops in big globs, and by noon it’s back to normal.

But after last week’s snow, the temperature dropped, and wind stayed away, and the snow stuck like frosting onto every twig and branch for four days. It looked like God had reached down with a big can of whipped cream, and got a little carried away. This snow belonged on a Christmas card by Currier and Ives.

The snow brought snowmobilers to life. You could tell they had been waiting for it for two months. They zipped by on the trails and along the roads. They filled the parking lot of the Embassy Bar and the cash registers of Sturgeon Lake One Stop.

The snow also brought my son and me out to the woods for a 2-1/2 hour hike on Saturday morning. We strapped on snowshoes, and plodded over trails for half a mile.

We saw some interesting things. Noah spotted deer a quarter mile off. Some canine tracks crossed our trail. They looked like a dog, only much bigger. I figured they were from a lone timber wolf.

At one point the tracks came together into short leaps, and intersected with rabbit tracks. The rabbit must have taken refuge in the hollow of a tree; which was littered with its droppings. There was no sign of fur or blood, so the rabbit must have won.

Our snowy road. Another nice 
snowy walk from the house.

You can piece together lots of animal encounters from tracks in snow. We startled up a ruffed grouse on our way home. Actually, it startled us. I crouched and squirmed through the underbrush to see where the grouse had been. I saw its tracks, and followed them for 15 feet. Then it dawned on me that the grouse hadn’t been in this spot at all. Whatever was making these new tracks must still be nearby. I looked up just in time to see another grouse thunder off.

We didn’t need to see a lot of wildlife though. Mostly we marveled at the beauty of the woods, and the snow that clung to everything.

ON SATURDAY NIGHT the waxing moon was two days from full. There was a thin layer of clouds over it, but the snow on the big spruce trees still looked too pretty for words. It reminded me of those glass globes that you shake and snow falls and settles perfectly on the trees and animals inside.

Noah and Malika,
 Miss Emma and David

It was so pretty that I called the kids down from their bedrooms, and asked if they wanted to take a walk. A walk at 9:30 p.m. is a rare occurrence in our house. They said yes.

We went down the road to the culvert. Noah decided it was too spooky and headed home, thinking we would follow. But Mollie held my hand, and we kept walking, and soon Noah rejoined us. Going home alone was spookier than walking with us.

It’s a great sensation, talking and walking on a warm winter night, with a bright sky and snow all around.

As we neared our home, we stopped to admire our old apple tree. Some of its limbs have been sawed off. Others are dead. But every spring it blooms, feeding the honey bees with nectar and feeding our family with a fragrant smell and sight. Every fall it bears many apples.

And on Saturday night, it showed us another beautiful side. Its gnarled branches and fine twigs were black and nearly invisible, but each held a coat of snow. It looked like a work of art done in charcoal and chalk. Only much better The kind you get with a good snow.

Barbie teaches Dad a lesson ~ January 7, 1993

David Heiller

Last Friday Mollie and I sorted through her doll clothes as preparation for an exciting time of “Playing Dolls.”

Don’t ask how my daughter conned me into playing dolls with her. Suffice it to say I made a promise and she held me to it, as seven-year-old girls are wont to do.

Mollie brought out a five gallon bucket full of doll clothes. I allowed as we couldn’t play dolls without sorting through the clothes. So we found another five gallon bucket, and separated the doll clothes into Barbie and non-Barbie piles.

The non-Barbie clothes had a lot of character. Blouses, dresses, caps. Some of them could have fit an infant. Many were home-made by a thoughtful grandma. I liked them. But they were cast aside by Mollie without a glance.

Five Barbies and poor head-less Ken.

We’re into Barbies at our house.

The newer Barbie clothes were just the opposite. They seemed like little more than tiny pieces of cloth with a button here and a fastener there. And I mean tiny. They don’t cover much of Barbie, and there’s a lot of her to cover, if you know what I mean.

All right guys, do I need to spell it out?

Mollie set aside a small Barbie blouse. “That’s Grandma Heiller’s,” she insisted. Don’t ask me how she knew that. It’s the same genetic ability that my wife displays when she tells me what dress she wore to a New Year’s Eve party three years ago.

The underwear on another Barbie, Mollie went on, belonged to Jennifer. Don’t ask me how they got on Mollie’s Barbie. We don’t print that kind of thing in the Askov American.

We found Barbie shoes too, little things that I confess I have vacuumed up a few times. We set them carefully into shoe holders in a plastic Barbie wardrobe. The wardrobe doesn’t stand straight, because it has three broken legs. Mollie told me that it was Mom’s when she was a girl. I didn’t know that.

Mixed in with the newer Barbie clothes were older things, gowns and dresses, yellow with age and use, a bit tattered and torn. Mollie informed me that those were Mom’s when she was a girl. I didn’t know that either. I’d seen them in Mollie’s room, but I’d never really looked at them, held them up close, like a seven-year-old does, like we did last Friday morning. It was kind of fun. I could picture Cindy doing that 28 years ago.

Back then, I wouldn’t give Barbie the time of day, or any other girl for that matter, including Cindy. Things are different now.

Grandma Olson working with Malika on paper dolls.
She had fun with Grandma,
but paper dolls were NOT Barbie.

I’m NOT a big Barbie fan. We’ve never even bought Mollie one. That too-perfect figure and beautiful hair get on my nerves just like a grown woman with a too-perfect figure and beautiful hair makes me a bit uncomfortable. I equate them both with vanity and materialism and other qualities that I can’t express but know I don’t like.

Cindy feels the same way. Yet she had Barbies and wardrobes and doll houses as a kid, and she turned out all right. So I watch Mollie play for hours with her Barbies, and I guess it’s OK. As if that matters.

AFTER WE WERE DONE sorting the clothes, the phone rang. I was saved by the bell. Mollie was invited to Kate’s house, and I wiggled out of my doll-playing promise.

When we were safely in the car, I asked Mollie how many Barbies she had. Six, she said. There’s the short Barbie, and the bald Barbie, and the one with dog bites on her stomach, and the one wearing Jennifer’s underwear, and Ken, whose head has come off. Poor Ken. The schmuck always gets lumped in with the women. I bet he doesn’t go ice fishing either.

Kate's fav!

“What about the roller blade Barbie?” I asked. She had just received it as a gift from her babysitter.

“Seven!” Mollie said happily. “I’m on a roll.”

When we arrived at our destination, Mollie and her friend started playing with a table full of ponies, purple with pink manes, or pink with purple tails.

I couldn’t get Barbie out of my mind, so I asked Kate how many Barbies she had.

“Three,” she said.

“Is that all?” I asked thoughtlessly. Kate gave me a forgiving look.

“But I’ve got 37 ponies,” she said proudly. That’s a story for another time.

‘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 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

The unforgettable Bath Night ~ January 10, 1985

by David Heiller

What comes to mind when you think of Saturday night as a child? For many people, it’s bath night. Or maybe that should be capitalized. Bath Night, an American institution.

David (left) and his older brothers, 
presumably AFTER Bath Night
the previous eve.

As a child Bath Night for our family had a certain ritual. I had seven brothers and sisters. The girls got the upstairs bathroom usually, while my two brothers and I splashed downstairs. Glenn, nine years older, would usually bathe first, because he had places to go and people (usually of the opposite gender) to meet.

Danny and I followed. Three years my senior, Danny was expert at taking baths. He convinced me that no soap was necessary. There were little germs in the water, and these germs drove tiny bulldozers that scraped dirt away. Mom ended that theory, possibly after finding no ring in the tub one too many times.

After the bath, it was into pajamas and onto the living room floor in front of the TV. At 8:30 Palladin—Have Gun, Will Travel. Next: Gunsmoke, everybody’s favorite. How many squeaky kids watched Matt Dillon square off against the man in the black hat every Saturday night at nine? Matt always fired a second late, but his aim hit its mark. An important lesson for us clean kids.

A hamam in Chaouen, Morocco.
(Daughter Malika took this lovely photo on her stay in Morocco.)

Perhaps my most memorable Bath Night came in 1978, when I lived in Morocco, teaching with the Peace Corps. Moroccans know how to do up Bath Night right. They all converge on the “hamam” or public bathhouse. There, they strip down to shorts, grab a couple of buckets and scrub themselves clean while catching upon the latest news with their neighbors.

I usually went to the hamam early in the morning. Fewer people, less hassle. But one blustery night in January, I grabbed a towel and went to the local bath house. I paid my 50 cents in the front room, put my clothes in a basket under a bench, and walked into the hot room.

All eyes turned on me, a six-foot-one, white American bulk in a sea of brown bodies. The room was packed, men and boys, dads and sons, washing their hair, scrubbing their legs, sitting, talking, enjoying their Bath Night, and enjoying watching me.

I looked for a place to sit down, then spotted a vacant chamber off to one side. I asked a man who I recognized if the room was taken. He glanced in surprise, then said “La, sir illa bghiti.” Go ahead, if you want to.

As I sat in the room, a small man entered, shook my hand, introduced himself.

“La bes. N-atai-ek kulshi?” Hello, You want the works?

It then flashed that I had entered the domain of the hamam’s masseuse. Before I could say anything, he poured water on me, and started washing my hair. He scrubbed my back, my front, my legs. He used a pumice stone and a pad that made Brillo seem like baby lotion. As a topper, he threw on a few wrestling holds on me and stretched me out. My muscles cracked and popped. I never felt so good.

As I left the room, the Moroccans made way for me like Moses in the Red Sea. Their faces showed a new respect for the Americani. A few of my students shook my hand. They’d never seen anything like that in their hamam, and I would guess, haven’t since.

That was my most memorable Bath Night. I’ll never forget it, and I don’t regret it. But I think I’ll stick to Gunsmoke.