Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Minnesotans are a humble folk. We aren’t known for our decisiveness, our positive thinking. Ask someone how they’re doing, and they’ll likely reply, “Not too bad,” or “I can’t complain,” “Pretty good, I guess.” Even my three-year-old son realizes his humble fate. He thinks we live in Maybe-Soda, and Grandma Olson lives in Maybe-Applis. It’s a state-wide shyness flowing from Lake Wobegon to Lake City, from Worthington to Warroad. Steve Cannon of WCCO is perhaps the only person in the state with relative humility, and that’s just during the weather report.  Noah  thinks we live in Maybe-Soda,  and Grandma Olson lives in Maybe-Applis. I had some personal insight into al this on Sunday. Last week’s weather had broken all kinds of records. Duluth had 86 degrees on May 28, International Falls: 91. We were somewhere in between. The warm weather held through Friday, as we got our garden ready for spring planting. I even took a day off for the ritual. ...

David Heiller I have a secret weapon that could probably be sold to the highest bidder and used in the torture chambers of totalitarian regimes throughout the world. This weapon doesn’t cost millions of dollars, wasn’t developed by the military, and isn’t even illegal. But under controlled situations it will force the stiffest of upper lips into jelly, and melt nerves of steel into lead. I discovered the weapons Sunday morning, at 5 a.m. My wife and I had celebrated our fifth anniversary the previous night, with dinner and a Greg Brown concert in Duluth. We had finally got the babysitter home, and settled ourselves into bed by 2 a.m. That made the weapon even more potent three hours later. Small cute boy? Not really, more like a diabolical  weapon on the morning here described. Cindy heard it first, and deserves much of the blame. Thump. The sound of bare feet sliding out of bed in the next room. Pad-pad-pad-pad. Those tiny feet approaching with both stealth and fi...

  David Heiller Jim and I were paddling across the east end of Vera Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area last Friday when Jim let out a holler. “There’s a bear in our camp!” We were about a quarter mile away. You don’t realize how slowly a canoe travels until you paddle toward a campsite that contains your food pack and a bear in the same tree. We bore down on the camp. “Paddle Dave, paddle!” Jim said. I wasn’t exactly dozing in the sun. We started yelling. The bear must have heard us. It dropped out of the tree and scampered happily into the woods. We had hung the food pack in a tree, like we always do on our annual trip into lake country. We knew a bear would come calling. The day before, it had left teeth marks on a few dry food items by our fire grate. Things in plastic bottles that we don’t usually hang, like rice and salt. It struck pay dirt on that first visit too: we had accidentally left out a quart of Heiller’s Pure Maple Syrup. It bit through bag and bott...