Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

by David Heiller Malika and Laura at play ! It was a modern miracle. It happened Saturday. I didn’t know a Saturday could start that way. My daughter and her friend got up early to play. And that’s what the two girls did all day. First they played Monopoly. They counted out the money, And didn’t get sore like when I lose to my honey. They sat in the living room and shook the dice, And laughed at Chance, thought Boardwalk was nice. Laura played Yahtzee and she beat us bad, Me and my honey, but we didn’t get mad. We looked at each other, and whispered secretly, “I can’t believe they’re not watching TV.” Next came the Barbies. I thought it was great. Though I couldn’t follow much because I’m not eight. They scolded and folded their dolls and dresses. I could just picture the upstairs messes. Kids and mud and water. But I do remember what Laura said to me: “Hey, we haven’t watch...

David Heiller One of the sounds of spring that has been absent so far this year is the hooting of owls. They usually make quite a racket in our woods in March and April. I like the wild sound of owls. I like seeing them too. It’s a lucky day when you see one gliding silently through the woods like a cargo plane. Or when you come upon one sitting in a tree. But this year the woods have been quiet. I’ve only heard a few hoots. Ron Goetzinger, who works for the DNR in Moose Lake, explained why. “It’s been a pretty tough winter for owls,” Ron told me on April 15. “Normally they feed on mice and stuff like that under the snow, and the snow is so deep that they never could get down in there to get their feed so they just starved to death.” The lack of food has made them bolder too. We had a barred owl at our bird feeder two weeks ago. It must have been looking for an easy meal of red squirrel or sparrow. The dogs chased it away, but not before it flew up into a maple tree next...

David Heiller Tom declared war on the trout at about 11:30 Sunday morning, February 18. We were camped on an island on Thomas Lake, 12 miles into the boundary waters. We had caught only two trout since pulling in the day before, and that just wasn’t cutting it for Tom. “It’s time to get serious about fishing, I’ll tell you that,” he said as he toasted a bagel with jam over the campfire. Tom was always toasting something good. Tom doing some serious ice chopping. “I thought we were serious,” I said. We had four lines in the water at various depths, in a tried and true spot—one that Tom picked out, I might add. We checked the flags on the tip-ups every few minutes. We chopped open the frozen holes every half hour or so. That’s not serious? “That’s not serious,” Tom replied, as if he could read my mind. “I mean serious. We’re going to go after them. Drill new holes. Move around. Start jigging.” I felt like doing 20 push-ups on the spot. Tom stalked onto the ice to che...

David Heiller The painting [below] of our dog, Ida, always makes me smile, because it really captures her personality. Shy, friendly, humble. Very lovable. All those human qualities that we throw on our pets. I smile as I write this on March 26, three days after Ida died. Just thinking of her brings a smile. She lived to be 12 years old, until some idiot ran over her with a car. We got her as a puppy from Harold and Gladys Overland in August of 1988, on the same day that we were going to see Queen Ida in concert. So the puppy got the name of Queen Ida. It was quickly shortened to Ida. Ida and her first friend and doggie-mentor, Binti. The reason we got Ida was that our other dog, Binti was getting old. We thought it would be good for Binti to have a companion. Ida was a good choice. She was half Collie and half mutt. It was a good mix. She never took advantage of the older dog. When Binti started losing her sight and hearing, Ida would tell her important things, like...

David Heiller The smell in the air last Wednesday, March 11 took me back 15 years, to Tamarack, Minnesota, to Cecil Booker, to a grove of maple trees and a big pan boiling with maple sap. The smell is sweet like maple syrup, but not as strong. It’s a smell that you want to cling to your clothes, so you can carry it with you all day. Like smoke from a campfire in an old shirt that reminds you, in the dead of winter, of a warm canoe trip. A nice smell. Cecil Booker lived down the road that spring of 1977 . I would help him with chores. He saw that I had a broad enough back to help him make maple syrup. He provided the taps and pan and buckets and brains. I provided the back We tapped about 80 trees. My job was to empty the buckets each morning, fill the big flat pan that rested on cement blocks nearby, build a rip-snorting fire, and boil sap all day. As it boiled, I would add more and more sap and wood, then watch the liquid turn brown and bubbly and foamy and thick. That’...

David Heiller My wife, Cindy brought the idea to words, although it had been rattling around my head before then. She asked Pat Ring if he would make us a stained glass window. She wanted it done in honor of her mother, who died in October of 1998. I quickly agreed with the idea. I like honoring loved ones with something of lasting beauty. When my Grandma Schnick died, we had a friend make a hutch as a tribute to her. That was 11 years ago, and I still think of Grandma every so often when I look at the hutch. It’s a beautiful piece of furniture, and very well used, which Grandma would appreciate. Plus it was made by a good friend. That makes it even more special. Therese and Rosemary are visiting in front Pat's work  of art  in in our Brownsville home.  It now resides in Malika's lovely home.  If you look carefully, you can see Pat's honeybees. Now hanging in the window next to the hutch is another beautiful thing, a stained glass window by anothe...

David Heiller I wrote a column on March 11 about the imminent return of spring. I drew on crack observations like owls hooting, skunks spraying, sap running. Then on March 13, the temperature dropped to 14 below zero. The next night, the temperature fell to 10 below zero. And on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, it was 12 below. We wrote it on the calendar. Winter gets long...  lap sitting and getting away can help! In fact since that brilliant column two weeks ago, the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing. However, the temperature today (Saturday, March 20) is supposed to rise above freezing, and by next week, it’s going to hit 50, so the weather man says. Therefore, to avoid another Heiller Jinx, I am going on record: spring is a good two months away. We are going to have three more blizzards before May 1. Your pipes are going to freeze, and your car won’t start. The owls will fly back to Capistrano, the skunks will return to their dank dens, and the only sap you’...

David Heiller Collin and I headed for the woods late on Saturday afternoon. A fogbank had lifted from my throbbing head. The beauty of the day was suddenly revealed. Mid-March. Temperature forty degrees. Sun shining. Duh. It’s time to tap trees. I couldn’t quite muster an exclamation point behind that last sentence, thanks to a nasty cold and the thought of all the work that lay ahead. I don’t have a spring in my step when I tap maple trees anymore. Collin and David with Rosie, 2003 or 4 . But I did have a helper at least, a nephew, age eight, who is always on the prowl for projects like this. Usually they involve building things like forts, scooters, or the Taj Mahal. Tapping maple trees would do just fine for him, and that was just fine with me. Why is it that a mundane job is so much more enjoyable with a kid around? I carried a hammer and bucket and one tap. Collin carried the brace and bit. Our dog, MacKenzie, went along. We walked single file on the snowshoe...

David Heiller Winter waited for us at Grand Portage last weekend, like a patient mother calling her kids to supper. We could hear the calling, all right, a gang of two families, five kids, four adults, nine friends mostly, except for some titanic clashes of young wills. All headed 200 miles north as Old Lady Winter called to us across the melting snow. Dave Landwehr, Noah Landwehr, Kyle Landwehr, Matt  Landwehr,  and David  throwing snowballs into Canada. SHE CALLED SATURDAY morning. Was it a coincidence that I stepped out of the hotel room the same time as our friends’ son, Noah? “I’m going for a hike,” I said to him. “Can I come?” Noah asked. He knew he could. Adults don’t invite themselves along when someone is headed for a dawn hike. They wait politely, sometimes too politely. Not 11-year-old boys, which is fine with me. So off we went, along a trail from the lodge. The snow was hard packed from skiers. It was easy going, like walking on har...