Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The empty feeling settled over me on Monday morning, August 27. I had been waiting for it to come, and when it hadn’t, I felt a bit puzzled and relieved. Bad feelings have a way of sneaking up on people. Malika on her first day of  kindergarten at Willow River. I was lying in bed, trying to pry myself awake, when it finally hit, and I remembered that Mollie wasn’t upstairs. She wasn’t upstairs this morning, and she wouldn’t be upstairs tomorrow morning or the next. We had taken her to Golden Valley the day before, in a car packed with boxes and bins, to her new home, a high school dormitory. We were excited to see her room, to help her unpack, to meet her roommate, to look at the other kids filtering in. They all seemed to be equally excited and scared. I still remember those feelings from 30 years ago when I went away to college. The parents looked the same way. Trying hard to be happy. Telling themselves, This is the right thing to do.  We'...

David Heiller The Great Debate is never far from the surface at our house. It’s a consequence of having two children two years apart. Throw in the fact that they are of different gender and opposite personalities, and some powerful dramas can ensue. Oh, those kids! Negotiation is one aspect of The Great Debate. A typical Negotiation played out last Sunday afternoon in the kitchen. “Noah, I’d like you to clean the porches,” I told my son, age 18. Just then my daughter walked into the house. I had to think fast. You can’t give one kid a job while the other looks on. “Mollie, can you empty the dishwasher?” I asked my daughter, Malika, age 16. It wasn’t really a question, and she knew it. Mollie started an immediate, barely audible protest. Noah’s radar went up. “Mollie do you want to switch with me?” he asked her. “OK,” Mollie replied, and the deal was done. Mollie whipped through the two porches, straightening shoes, sweeping the floor, giving the rugs the ...

David Heiller I hadn’t seen Roger for 22 years, since we left the Peace Corps and went our separate ways. We had served together in Morocco from 1977 to 1979, teaching English as a foreign language. Roger and David making music in Morocco, 1979 We were good friends there, even though we grew up in very different ways. Roger was raised in suburban New Jersey, me in rural Minnesota. But we had a lot in common. In fact, our differences may have brought us together. I was fascinated with his Italian background and big city connections. He seemed the same way about me and my roots in “Minn-Ah-SO-Dah.” (We talk funny to people in New Jersey.) But our main connection was our love of music. We shared ballads and blues, traditional tunes and new songs, and some that we had written. When we got together, we wouldn’t even need to talk. We would just play and sing for hours, sometimes all night. That doesn’t happen too often. Roger was a gifted guitar player. He could weave notes an...

by David Heiller Noah came out of the house on Sunday eve ning carrying a baseball and two gloves, and I was reminded once again why spring is my favorite season. David and the kids. I got up from weeding the garden and walked over. He tossed me my glove. It was flat and soft and to my vivid imagination, almost eager for my touch. We walked to our favorite spot for playing catch, he at one end of the driveway and me at the other. We tossed the ball back and forth. I said to keep it high so I could see it against the sky. My right eye is still healing from a cornea transplant, and I can’t see very well from it yet. We talked about a lot of things, both trivial and profound. It’s funny how doing a familiar activity like playing catch can unplug the conversational sink. It isn’t always that easy getting a 17-year-old boy — or a 47-year-old man — to do that. But give a guy a ball and glove and he will sing like a canary. She's just his daughter . And on all kinds...

David Heiller Cindy and I stood on the observation platform of Lock and Dam Number 10 last Wednesday, April 18. Locks and dams on the upper Mississippi. The Mississippi River was high. It was almost flowing over the top of the lock. A lock is like a long cement chute with a gate on either end. The locks are used to move boats past the dams. In normal weather they tower over the boats, except for towboats. But the river had swallowed up the locks. We talked about the houses we had just seen upstream in Guttenburg, Iowa. Dozens of them were flooded. The road ran between them had been replaced by the main channel of the river. It was a strange sight. I struck up a conversation with another guy on the platform. “Did you see those houses under water up there?” I asked. “Yeah, we live in one of them,” he answered. He and his family had one of the few houses that wasn’t yet flooded on the island. He had come to town in a boat, going very slowly and carefully. You would not w...

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 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 Tom pointed out the bare hills bordering Moose Lake shortly after we started skiing down it on Saturday, February 23. They looked black and stony, as if a fire had burned them, but the deforestation actually came from a wind storm. The real magnitude of that famous July 4, 1999 storm hit us a little later, as we skied on a portage into Rice Lake. Three years ago, the portage was right out of a Boundary Waters postcard. Big, beautiful birches and poplars lined the ski trail. But not now. About 90 percent of the trees were on the ground, or snapped off at right angles 15 feet above the ground. They all lay in the same direction, as if a volcano had erupted to the west. David cooking on Little Puffer . “Look at all the new growth,” Tom said when we st opped in the midst of the mess. He was right; you couldn’t put your arm out without hitting a small tree. Fickle old Mother Nature was fast at work, undoing the damage she had wrought. And once we got to...

by David Heiller “D id you get a good cornea?” I asked Dr. Skorich. I was lying in the pre-operational room at Miller Dwan Medical Center on Wednesday morning, February 28. Dr. Daniel Skorich answered that yes, the numbers looked good. “It came from Florida,” he said. David in pirate-mode on his banjo. He had three cornea transplants.  (One didn't do so well.)   Each one was a time of gratitude and hopefulness. “So you’re going to have a sunny disposition,” the anesthetist joked as he wheeled me into the operating room. By this time I had a very sunny outlook on life. It had a lot to do with whatever it was he had injected into my intravenous tube. I didn’t have a care in the world. I wasn’t worried at all about having my old cornea cut off and a new one—from Florida!—sewn on. That’s what happened over the next hour. I could see out of my left eye, which was draped with a cloth. My right eye was open, but I couldn’t see out of it. That was the result ...