Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The bat flew through the cabin last week as only a bat can fly, dodging and darting like a furry whiffle ball, Everybody screamed and yelled and cleared out of the room except my daughter Malika and me. The question popped into my head: Do I kill this bat? I quickly answered no. A bat, the kind that startles us, and freaks so many of us out, and eats multitudes of pesky insects. I doubt that I will ever kill a bat again after reading an article about them in National Geographic a few years ago. The article talked about how bats consume astounding numbers of bugs. Any critter that kills bugs gets a reprieve from me. (My compassion ends when it comes to killing bugs.) First I took off my T-shirt and tried to trap the bat against a ceiling or wall. But he always seemed to flutter away at the last moment. And I thought they were blind. I had him trapped behind a picture frame once, and called Malika over to hold the frame while I slipped the shirt ov...

David Heiller Alex Westberg is my nephew, and he’s got a couple good traits, as this photo shows. Alex from the newspaper photo: Cig and sucker... One, he’s a good fisherman. He caught this white sucker on the fiver a couple weeks ago. It weighed about seven pounds. Turns out the state record is 9 pounds, one ounce. We didn’t realize that at the time or we might have kept it. But Alex let it go. He likes to do that. He’s got a good heart, at least of the figurative sense. I’m not so sure about the physical one. Alex is a smoker as this photo also shows, and that’s his other good trait that I’ll mention here. I never used to think that smoking was a good thing, but in encouraging it every chance I get, and I thanked Alex every time he lit up a coffin nail. Smokers are funding our schools in good old Minnesota, and they are helping pay for the Minnesota Care health insurance program. Don’t try to figure out the logic behind this. Our governor proposed a 75 tent ‘fe...

David Heiller Last week was a special one for me. I’d like to share it with you, in hopes of having you attend something similar. Last week I took a two-day banjo workshop. It was offered by the Minnesota Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association (MBOTMA), as a kickoff to their annual music festival. The lessons were held at Camp In the Woods, which is near Zimmerman, Minnesota. That is where the MBOTMA festival is held every year. Music was a huge part of David's life. He was never shy about getting in and trying.  He is playing here with Bob Bovee and Gail Heil, and Sara Lubinski.   I am the music appreciator in the group! It had been about 25 years since I had taken any banjo lessons. I’ve played the instrument for all those years, but it seemed like I never really got better. That didn’t bother me. I like to play music for fun, with friends. I’m not a professional, and probably never will be. Still, it’s nice to make improvements in whatever you ...

David Heiller It was a weekend to remember, what with the Twins and the Turtle. FIRST THE TWINS: I’ve got a hunch that any Twins fan who was listening to last Saturday’s game will remember it for years and years. It will be one of those baseball memories that gets etched firmly into a certain time and place, where you’ll remember who you were with, what you were doing. I can still remember a dramatic Harmon Killebrew home run against the hated Yankees in 1965. A bunch of us kids were playing on the rocks in downtown Brownsville, and someone had a transistor radio going. The Killer was up with two outs, two on, and the Twins down by two. It was almost like Casey at the Bat, only this time it was Killebrew, Mr. Clutch, who clouted a three run homer to win the game. Someone started yelling, “The Twins won, the Twins won!” It seemed like the whole town exploded. We jumped off the rocks and danced and yelled all the way home. I can still remember that. Saturday was like...

David Heiller “Boy, Peter is what you’d call fanatical about fishing,” I commented to Cindy as we rode home from a family gathering Sunday evening. “Kind of like when you were 17, huh?” Cindy asked in more of a statement than a question. “No, I was never like that,” I said firmly. Peter and Noah fishing But Cindy’s question got me thinking to when I was Pete’s age, between my junior and senior year of high school, growing up on the Mississippi River. Almost every summer morning, my cousin Kevin and I would take his flat-bottomed boat and head to the backwaters on the Wisconsin side of the main channel. We would stump-hop, fishing the roots of dead trees. Every tree would yield a rock bass or two. By 10 o’clock, we would have a stringer of fish, which we would split. I would fry mine for lunch. Most evenings, I would go fishing in the Reno Bottoms, first for bass in the fast spillway water, then for panfish in the slough, and finally, as yellow light dimmed to dusk, fo...

David Heiller If six-year-old bodies could talk, they would have plenty to say about vacations. Take Malika’s nose. The freckles are finally starting to show through the scab there. For a while, it looked as if someone had peeled it like a banana. Swingset gymnastics at the old Brownsville school. Mollie had been performing stunts on the swings at the school grounds. She would grab the ropes and lift herself out of the swing, then rotate backwards until she was facing the ground, like a gymnast. Disaster came one afternoon when she let go while in this position. I could hear her crying a block away, where I was cutting weeds in the backyard. Her face looked like someone had hit it with a mud pie: a coat of dirt ran in a circle from forehead to chin. Her nose wasn’t broken, but oh, what a scab. Yet she was back at the park the next day. Playgrounds have a way of making you forget about a few scabs. If bodies could talk, you’d hear grumbling from Mollie’s shoulder...

David Heiller Two years ago I went to the Metrodome to do an interview with Kent Hrbek. His parents are from Willow River, and his grandmother, Evelyn Kiminski, still lives west of Rutledge. The local angle looked good for a write-up in the American. But Kent had other things on his mind as he sat in the dugout before that 1985 game. He grunted at me, in Clan of the Cave Bear dialogue. I didn’t understand it, but wrote it up anyway. So I tried again last Sunday, with the help of a press pass from the Twins. My brother, Glenn, came along to take pictures. We arrived about an hour before game time, so we would have plenty of time for an interview and pictures. First we went into the press box, where I said hello to Charlie Crepeau, an old Twins fan from Finlayson who I interviewed last year. “Hello Charlie, remember me, I’m David Heiller, Askov American .” “Who?” He looked at me blankly. “David Heiller, Askov American. I did a story on you last year.” “You did?” “Yea...