Rex Green

A joy of a medical practice is the opportunity to know people so well. After my life career in medicine, a few individuals shine brightly across intervening years, defiant of memory’s decay. My friend Rex was one of these.

Ninety can be a variable yardstick of vitality. Twenty years in a grave? A mumbling hulk in a nursing-home bed? Skinny little women reach ninety often enough that such might be considered the norm. Macho masculinity must be a liability, for men achieve it less frequently.

Consider the man Rex Green. He was ninety years old and counting that day.

Rex had been a civil engineer. He first arrived in the North Shore area during the 1950s, at a time when state highway planners were considering a major construction project through land included in the Grand Portage Chippewa Reservation. The existing road, a narrow strip of bumpy Macadam leading northward to Ontario, Canada, wound a sinuous and hilly path through forests, around great rocks bequeathed by some long-melted glacier, across abrupt little streams teeming with brook trout. It became Rex’s job to find a route consistent with high-speed travel, no matter what rocky ridge might stand in the way.

At the time, my Ojibwe father-in-law held office as reservation Federal Indian Agent. He and Rex spent many an hour tramping about the “Rez,” planning, planning, choosing.

Rex returned to our area after he retired. He lived alone, whether as a widower or a bachelor I cannot recall. He was no more than six feet tall, but a straight back and lean toughness made him seem taller. His face bore ingrained smile lines and his eyes gleamed with that glint we call a twinkle. His skin was etched by a lifetime of exposure to wind and cold and sun. He was cheery without being vacuous, serene without doltishness, confident in that quiet way of someone who knows his priorities.

His passion was fishing the tumultuous streams that drain myriad bogs and lakes atop our county’s highlands, before cascading down clefts in the rocky headlands that confine the Big Lake. It was because of this enthusiasm that he appeared at my medical office one summer day.

I greeted my old friend warmly. “What brings you here today?” I asked.

“I’m not sick, Doc. I understand you’re the coroner.”

Oh, oh.

“I was fishing out along Mistletoe Creek,” he said. “Found some bones, pretty sure they’re from a person.”

“I’ll need to call the sheriff.”

“Did. He said he’d meet us here when you’re free.”

I sighed, a requiem for the day’s abruptly shattered appointment schedule.

I rode with the sheriff in his unit, he following Rex’s beat-up Chevrolet truck. We went for twenty-three miles before turning off onto an old logging trail. It earned designation as a road solely because no trees grew between its ruts. Bounce and swerve, up, sidewise, plop into mud. At a clearing, an old logger’s landing, Rex stopped and slid out of his truck. Mistletoe Creek chuckled quietly from twenty feet away.

“Now we have to walk,” Rex said.

“How far?” I asked.

“Only a short... well, maybe half a mile.”

I was glad I had taken time to put on my favorite Red Wing boots.

Half a mile can present itself as a stroll along six or seven city blocks or, depending on one’s skill and accuracy with a club, nine holes on a golf course... or as a grueling safari, floundering upstream beside a rocky, burbling creek in the wildest portion of our county.

When you see the sport of trout fishing portrayed on TV, you are presented with a broad expanse of gently-rippling water, surrounded either by placid meadows or trees respectfully restrained along regimented banks. A fisherman whips a twenty-foot loop of line out, back, and out again. An artificial fly lights gracefully on the surface of the stream, where a large trout promptly inhales it. The ballet between man and prey weaves upstream and down before the fish comes to a dip net. A demonstration, nature securely leashed.

Shift gears. Mistletoe Creek ranged in width from six to eight feet. Occasionally it poured through a crack in a ledge of rock, which narrowed it to two or three feet of frantically scurrying water. It rushed past piano-sized boulders or a fallen tree, around a curve chewed into a wall of ancient volcanic basalt, across a brief sandbar, beneath willows and tag alders and cedars in fragrant tangles, all leaning far out over the water, beseechers of sunlight.

On shore we scrambled between upright trees. Others had fallen into random piles like jackstraws from a childhood game, daunting as tiger traps. Scattered about lay ankle-threatening boulders: the size of a soft ball, a bowling ball, lunkers three or four feet across. They resembled pictures I had seen of Mayan ruins, covered densely as they were by the moss of that humid place. Climb, skid, ease past or under a great fallen pine, sprawl when a lurch conspires with gravity.

Northern Minnesota is renowned for its crisp climate—its forty below, macho weather. What most outsiders do not realize is that along about the middle of August we can do hot better than a Finnish sauna. Then, there are the bugs. Mosquitoes are infamous enough that we need not advertise their prowess. Not everyone knows about our other pest, a midge we call a black fly. They breed in rapidly-flowing streams, and swarms of them hover in anticipation of any passing mammal. We H. sapiens, bearing as we do such skimpy fur, make mealtime easy for them.

The sheriff and I followed our ninety-year-old guide into this brooding jungle. At the time I was in my mid-forties. I was not a conditioned athlete, unless you accept the track race demanded by a busy practice as a workout. Still... And the sheriff was a rugged man a few years older than I, but a local boy who had lived in the area all his life. He was in certifiably robust condition.

We set out to walk Rex’s “half mile.”

At first I managed to keep up, squirming under or across fallen trees, sliding down mossy banks, wading when the stream bed offered the only passageway. At the ten-mile point—all right, probably a few hundred yards by a dang measuring tape. It’s hard to tell when forward progress is as much up and down or round about as forward. I hollered at Rex, out of sight somewhere ahead, suggesting that he take a rest. (In conscience, as a medic, I needed to be concerned about the man. After all, at ninety... )

Rex reemerged from the jungle ahead. His eye-rolling grimace told me that I hadn’t fooled him. We pressed onward. I was gasping by the third rest stop and, as minor balm to my ego, even our sheriff leaned unobtrusively against a tree. I recall thinking, “These bones had better not turn out to be from a dang dead deer.”

The bones were human.

They had nearly disappeared beneath loam and moss; only the top of a calvarium protruded. The officer set to work with a trail shovel, while I sat on a branch of a cooperative cedar tree, dangling my feet inches above the crystal water of that lovely creek. I swatted black flies and considered the philosophical wonder of the man Rex Green, present in this remote spot for the second time in half a day. Twice my age, and in infinitely better shape to confront real nature in her realm.

The sheriff unearthed most of the bones of a complete, adult human skeleton. Many had been gnawed by forest rodents, nature’s way, recycled resources. We found no shreds of clothing.

Putting a name on Rex’s skeleton proved problematic. The sheriff finally concluded, after searching records from decades before, that the remains were most likely those of a lumberjack who had been in a logging camp six or eight miles away, located on the opposite side of a ridge. The man had been reported missing one wintry night when delirium tremens had caught him up. He had run out into a blizzard and disappeared.

My county is still wild and unforgiving once one leaves its few maintained roads. During my tenure as coroner, there had been a time in the 1960s when a total of seven people had vanished into our woods. Over a period of twenty years, three bodies were eventually discovered, by chance. The remaining four lie somewhere out there, awaiting Rex, or someone like him.

Or, are there others like my friend Rex Green?