Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Last week my mother sent me an obituary of Doris Margaret Spinner of New Albin, Iowa who died on June 8, 1995, at age 81. She was known as Mrs. Spinner by most of the kids in Brownsville, where I grew up. She taught grades five and six there for 20 years. Malika, Brooke (Jeanne's daughter), and Noah playing school in one the Brownsville classrooms, turned local history room.  My sister, Jeanne, remembered Mrs. Spinner well. “To me she was a wonderful teacher,” Jeanne said on June 23 from her home in Klamath Falls, Oregon. “She explained things real well. She put a lot of her own wisdom into her teaching. She had a lot of patience. You could tell she was a mother and a teacher. She would mention her own children and experiences. She had that caring side. “We never had a substitute. In those days she was always there. I just felt she was a warm, caring person.” “She didn’t have any favorites. She was fair. She just had all the qualities you have...

David Heiller “David, be careful with that poison ivy!” Mom scolded. “Use a hoe.” Mom had asked me to remove a patch of poison ivy from her backyard on July 4. So I donned a pair of rubber gloves and started pulling it up. Fern's backyard was famously and beautifully WILD. Poison Ivy was an issue. “You don’t use a hoe on poison ivy,” I scoffed, ignoring her rare exclamation point. Mom had reason to worry about P.I. She had battled a rash on her arms a couple months ago. It could have been used in a textbook on bad cases of poison ivy. She had a huge, boiling, oozing red rash. I worked carefully, grabbing the plants by the roots, pulling them up, and piling them in the yard. Some of the branches had berries. The woody stalks were half an inch in diameter. They reminded me of a camp-out I had made with some friends when I was a teenager. We were fishing for bullheads in the Reno Bottoms, seven miles south of Brownsville. We went out to gather wood, careful to avoid ...

David Heiller “Come on, Dad, I know you can do it. I know you’re up to the challenge.” My son, Noah, spoke those words to me. I had to smile. He sounded like a football coach. But at age 15, he has become my superior in more than a few things, one of them being mountain climbing. That’s what we were about to do last week in Rocky Mountain National Park. All day we had talked about climbing Flattop Mountain, elevation 12,324 feet. Most of the time it seemed like too daunting of a task. We had carried big backpacks up steep trails. The thin air had us gasping for breath. Even bending down to tie my shoes made me wheeze like I had emphysema. Noah We had walked over snow fields so bright that they hurt our eyes, even with sunglasses on. Sleet and rain pelted us. We put on rain gear, then the weather warmed up and the rain suits turned into sauna suits, so we took them off again. Flattop Mountain didn’t seem possible then. We made camp at a site called Sourdough, ele...

David Heiller   Cindy and I and our kids when to a cabin last weekend to see her mother and sister and brother and his family. We've been going to The Cabin so long that it really is a proper noun, like Heaven. A lot of good things have happened there. Sometimes I write about them in a specific way, like taking the small-fry fishing. But the broader picture of The Cabin can't be sketched out in a cute anecdote. It's about many things. Noah, mid leap, at The Cabin It's a place to relax, to take a nap without feeling guilty, to play a rigorous game of bocce ball in the morning and a tough game of cards at night. It’s a place to eat fantastic salads made by Cindy, and fantastic shish-kabobs grilled by her brother, Randy. It’s a neutral place where family battles and personality clashes are put aside, for the most part. It’s a place to fish and to teach kids how to fish. That always awakens the kid inside me. I’ve taught my two kids how to fish there, and altho...

David Heiller Mollie’s room wasn’t pretty. Three friends had just left from a sleep-over. Clothes and books and toys lay everywhere. Everywhere except where they should be. It was time, I decided, to Clean The Room . If the room is too messy for Monopoly, that is not a problem, just go to the living room. Clean The Room time is capitalized because it is like an adventure movie. You never know what you’ll find: the Ark of the Covenant, a few mummies. There’s no one place to start when you clean a room like Mollie’s. You could almost grab a grain shovel and start digging. We began at The Bookshelf, one of many main characters in this movie. It was sagging with books and barrettes and other odds and ends that people set there late at night when they are too tired to put them where they belong. We made a pile of Noah’s books, a pile Mollie wanted to keep, a pile she wanted to give to cousin Grace, even a pile for Mrs. Ribich, her teacher from last year (yes, we found two sch...

David Heiller News reports I would like to see... HINCKLEY (AP) — An unknown number of masked robbers broke into the personal belongings of two families at a campground east of Hinckley last week. The unidentified assailants damaged property at St. Croix State Park, made personal threats, and carted off a quantity of food on Wednesday, June 13, before the campers could stop them. Joey and Nora Shields and Noah  and  Malika  Heiller:  before the invasion. The campers then withstood several more attacks by the group during a long and sleepless night. No one was hurt, although two seven-year-old boys were visibly shaken when they had to abandon their pup tent to sleep with one set of parents. Camper Cindy Heiller also had one attacker come at her for a short distance after she attempted to chase it away in the late afternoon. The incident came after the Shields and Heiller families returned from a bicycle trip in the park. While the ...

David Heiller The Sauna Equilibrium Ratio is high these days. It’s not a statistic that you hear from Collin Ventrella during the 10 o’clock news, but it’s a good barometer at our house. Here’s how it works: You take a sauna until you are too hot to stand it anymore. Then you go outside until you are too cold to stand it anymore. That is your Sauna Equilibrium Ratio. What was the Sauna Equilibrium Ratio  on this day? I still miss my sauna. For example, if you take a 45 minute sauna, then stand outside for five minutes, the Sauna Equilibrium Ratio is 45:5 (or 9:1). In mid-winter, with the temperature below zero and a west wind, the Sauna Equilibrium Ratio is 45:0. Some evenings, when the temperature is mild and the bugs have gone to bed, you can have an infinite Sauna Equilibrium Ratio. It’s one of life’s simple pleasures if you live in the country. I still vividly remember one evening earlier this year. I had just taken a sauna, and was lying on the picn...