Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller For the first few days my eye   hurt, and the vision was cloudy. It was like looking through a dirty window. But now, wow. It’s hard to convey what is happening. I woke up the other morning and looked out the window and saw a squirrel on a tree branch outside the window. Without putting my glasses on. That hasn’t happened since we bought this house in 1981. This was probably a good nightcrawler day, but not maybe the best nightcrawler spot. So at 6:30 a.m., when the darkness left the sky enough for me to see the ground well, I slipped on a cap and jacket and headed out. A light rain was still falling, and I knew I would get soaked, but that was just fine on a Sunday morning. No rush to get to work, no deadlines. Just a walk down the road. And it was a good one. The driveway and township road were covered with worms. You couldn’t lay down without touching one. Not that I tried that — I don’t like them that much. But they were everywhere. Not all the worm...

David Heiller Editor's note: This column was written after he presented the readers of the Caledonia Argus the long article he wrote for Backpacker Magazine. I’m back to the present and the land of the living, after a four-week hiatus down memory lane. A lot of people commented on my adventure in the mountains 33 years ago, which I reprint ed in this space. Some final thoughts: I was having lunch last week with a couple of colleagues. One man asked me how I could not have known about the possibility of bad weath er, a snow storm. David and the kids on our 1998 backpacking trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. I stammered a  bit; and the other man, a back packer himself, said it simply: “We’re flatlanders.” That was part of it. It’s one thing to be in a snowstorm in Houston County . Granted, it’s not flat here by North Dakota definitions. But there aren’t many snow storms in which a healthy 2 0 -year-old man could not wade and tromp through to get help in r...

David Heiller Red. You don’t need any more than that to know who I mean. No first name, no last name, no Arol, no Hansen, just Red. David and Red at the Askov American. Our friendship formed over the last 20 years of Red’s life, which ended on February 21. I had known about him from a distance, admired his involvement in the community and his love for all things Danish. Then music slowly brought us into a closeness that doesn’t happen often. Red had music in his blood. He was a happy Dane and it came pouring out in his piano accordion. He knew hun­dreds of songs, and he played them with grace and power and creativity, sometimes changing keys, throwing in little tricks that marked the songs as his own and nobody else’s. I’m not good at hiding my enthusiasm, and he saw that, and allowed me into his musical world with my banjo. We took our show to Pine County’s finest venues: the commercial club banquet, the Danish Sisterhood dinner, the nursing homes in Sandstone and...

David Heiller Α couple images will stay with me for a while from last Saturday. The first clicked at about 4:30 p.m. We were walking across Duane’s field, the five of us, when the sun dropped below its skirt of clouds. The soft light of late afternoon instantly spread a golden glow on everything, the grass, the plowed field, the faces of the four people walking over them. It didn’t hurt that those humans were walking with a purpose. There was a glint of adventure in their eyes. Alex and Laura, Malika and David, and I hiked cross-country to  Freeburg  to hear Bob and Gail perform at Little Miami. It was a fine little adventure. It wasn’t a huge adventure, mind you. We were hiking from our house to Freeburg, a whopping four miles at best. Little Miami awaited us there, good food, good music, perhaps a cheering crowd. Well, two out of three at least. But it put a spring in our step. The sun left us about the time we hit the state land and its plantations o...

David Heiller It’s kind of fun to process a deer, and this year was even more enjoyable, thanks to Rosie the dachshund. Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for cutting up deer. I asked Nathan Hahn how he liked it, because I knew he had shot a deer. His proud mother, fill, had announced it to her coworkers at the Caledonia Argus. Even Rosie couldn't handle  this hunk of venison Nathan replied, rather forcefully, that cutting up deer is not his favorite activity. That came as no surprise. I was 16 years old once.  It's not a chore that most young folks relish. In fact, Jill chimed in, her family was giving the deer away. The weather was warm, and they didn't know when they would get to it, and they had so much meat already, being Hahns and all. And that led to me getting a deer that cost me nothing more than a sincere thank you. It was an even better way to acquire a deer than last year, which came at the expense of the bumper of my Honda Civic. So I took half...

David Heiller We weren’t the only ones with an idea for a Saturday evening walk on the spillway. There were the fishermen who met us on the way to their cars. Three different groups, and they all had a contented look that said the fishing was good. The first guy said the bass were biting. Another man gave me a rundown on a big carp — it must have been 10 pounds, he said with a laugh. The third guy mumbled that he caught a few, which translates in fishing language to fantastic fishing, although I’ve yet to hear the latter statement, ever. Bob and Gail with me and two of the dogs on a fall spillway walk.  The river is a good place to go and reconnect yourself. Then there was that family fishing by the spillway, the kids all lined up oldest to youngest, and the little guy’s pole bending with a bluegill. That was almost too pretty for words. A father and son pedaled past us on their way to the unspoiled waters of the second spillway. You could almost feel their ener...

David Heiller The turkeys arrived on March 29 at our house. That was the morning the valley turned into an amphitheater of gobble-gobble. Their calls bounced off the trees and hills like a bunch of Romans watching Daniel fend off the lions. It was a glorious roar, although lacking the distinctive voice of T. Rex. T. Rex is short for Turkey Rex. He is a big bird, although I haven’t seen him. But I have heard him. He must have a special spot in front of a cave filled with just the right qualities. Either that or he picked up a megaphone from Uncle Donny’s old junk pile. Immediately following the big event. When T. Rex gobbles — it’s more like a roar, I guess — it shoots up the valley and explodes through the air. You can almost see the coffee in your cup get those little ripples like in Jurassic Park. The turkeys made me realize with a smile of relief that spring is actually here. It’s been a bleak winter for some reason, and it seemed like the grass and goldfin...

David Heiller I had the camera with me, but it was one of those assignments that really wasn’t work. Any excuse to take a walk at Beaver Creek Valley State Park will do, thank you, and Saturday night’s was special indeed. Α nighttime walk at Beaver is a bit unusual, but that night it wasn’t hard to do at all. Α group of volunteers had lit hundreds of candles and placed them inside white plastic containers. The containers were spaced about 30 feet apart on two different trails. I wanted to get a photo, but I could see it would not be easy. The candles didn’t cast much light, and I didn’t want to use a flash. So I just walked, carrying my camera and tripod, and hoped for inspiration. But the inspiration was not in a photograph that night. It was in the walk. First carefully, over the twin planks that line one edge of the road over which East Beaver Creek faithfully flows. Then past a crackling fire, manned by volunteer Todd Krueger. Then the trail and the candles, along the...

David Heiller We hadn’t been on the water more than five minutes when Tom pointed out the flock of geese. They were on the Minnesota side of the river, and heading south in a hurry. Then another flock, and another. Tom remarked on what a great sight that was, how lucky we were to see it. Tom Roster, my brother-in-law, teaches about shooting and ballistics, particularly non-toxic shot. He’s famous, in fact. He makes his living with ducks and geese. Tom Roster and the sheepshead. Yet there he was on the Mississippi River last week, getting excited seeing all those geese heading to the deep south of Illinois and Indi­ana. We can thank global warming for their shorter and shorter migrations. Tom made that point, and I agreed. It didn’t take much longer until we had settled over a wing dam. Tom found it with a depth finder. He said a fisherman is blind without one, but I had the feeling Tom could have found it with his eyes closed and in his sleep. He discovered it about 5...

David Heiller I read an interesting book recently called They Called Me Teacher , by Tom Melchior. It contains stories of Minnesota country school teachers and students from 1913 to 1960. Those stories run the gamut of human interaction, but one that has to do with bad teaching sticks in my mind. Corrine Lesteberg Johnson, who attended District 40 East near Murdock in Swift County, from 1931-1938, wrote it. “We all knew that our second-grade teacher had never lived in the country. So we had a feeling that she thought she was better than the rest of us. I started at Christmas time making valentines. We had a long Christmas vacation, six weeks off, so what was there to do during that time but make valentines. I loved that kind of creative stuff. “I used foil from the Christmas cards and the laced doilies that my mother had bought. I made the cards so they were three-dimensional, you could open them up. Oh, I really worked on those cards. On Valentine’s Day I passed out al...