Mistakes are the dues you pay for living a full life.
— Sophia Loren
We revel in our nearly completed haven. On the “How Did You Like Building Your Cabin?” questionnaire we check the “Exceeded expectations” box. But all is not — nor does it stay — perfect. The elements, utility companies, wildlife, and bonehead moves all conspire to remind us the cabin is situated in the real world.
We enter the cabin after a three-week hiatus and sense something is wrong — the sound of sloshing water and the ninety-five percent humidity provide the first clues. As we lift the trapdoor to the crawl space, our eyes behold a surreal sight: the plastic case for Kat’s palm sander is floating lazily below us. As are tubes of caulk, gallons of paint, packets of sandpaper, and foam pipe insulation. As our eyes adjust we see a circular saw, drill, ten-pound box of grass seed, Sorrel boots, wood window grills, nail guns, fans, and dozens of other items submerged. The power has gone out, rendering the sump pump useless. We spend a glorious spring weekend — one we’d set aside for playing — ingloriously hauling waterlogged items out of the crawl space, setting them in the sun to dry, then hauling the fatally wounded off to the local landfill. Note to self: Buy sump pump with battery backup.
We’ve rearranged a lot of dirt since we bought the place. Mother Nature has had her say, too. Wind-blown sheets of ice off the lake — ice chunks that, according to Dick, have piled up as high as a three-story building — have already clawed away at the land during winter gales. This is erosion no human invention can amend or thwart.
There’s also the cumulative impact of billions of raindrops, hailstones, and snowflakes hitting the earth, forming rivulets, and eating away the land, granule by granule. This is a type of erosion you can at least try to deal with. You deal with it by getting living, growing plants to grab hold of the soil. The upper leaves or blades soften the impact of the rain and hail, and the roots help knit the soil into a more stable mass.
Severe erosion on steep hills is not easy to contend with. You can’t lay sod on a 60-degree incline. Grass seed doesn’t stay put. Even weeds have trouble taking root because eroding land is self-cleaning; it keeps sloughing off layers of soil like eggs off Teflon.
So we decide to hydroseed the land; a process that involves mixing seed, fertilizer, straw, fish emulsion, water, green dye, and some secret ingredients together in a huge tank, then spraying the mixture in a blanket across the terrain. Definitely not a DIY project. Capillary action delivers water to the seeds and keeps them moist. The process gives each little grass seed a little fertilizer to gnaw on, water to nourish it, and straw to limit evaporation and help “knit” it onto the surface. The secret ingredients help the mixture stick to the land. It’s like creating the world’s largest Chia Pet. A two-thousand-dollar Chia Pet.
Selecting the hydroseeder is easy; there’s only one in the area, and they’re sixty miles south in Duluth. The most cost-effective approach is to bring in an entire tankful of the mix and spread it until it’s gone. We’re looking for the toughest damn ground cover we can find, so we decide on a mixture nicknamed MN DOT 500 — the mix road crews use to stabilize the soil after road construction. It needs no maintenance, grows fast, and is tough. The one big unknown is the weather. Hydroseed can withstand a light rain, but get a gully washer and you wind up with two thousand dollars’ worth of seed on the shore of Lake Superior. We’re watching the sky and rubbing the rabbit’s foot.
Three workers with a trailer and blending tank the size of a small moving van arrive. Step A is to broadcast twenty-five pounds of grass seed across the bare soil to supplement the seed in the tank. Step B is to unreel 200 feet of firefighting-size hose and drag the end as far downhill as possible. Step C is to turn the pump on and scramble like hell. The worker manning the nozzle is part fireman, part alligator wrestler, and part spray-paint artist. He sprays the cliffs, the hills, and a few upturned tree stumps for good measure. The land looks like it’s been papier-mâchéd.
We all help drag the hose uphill as work progresses. When the hose stops spraying, the nozzle man shouts “kink,” and everyone scrambles to find the bend. There’s enough hydroseed to cover the big cliff, swatches along both sides of the cabin, and another hill along the driveway. We pray for sprinkles — light sprinkles — and wait for the seed to germinate. Mother Nature is kind, providing cool weather and many light rains. The hydroseed grows into a lush, thick meadow. It’s a lawn that will never be mowed, never feel the click of a croquet ball, never be the envy of any neighbors — except those who have erosion problems. This is grass with a job to do. This is blue-collar bluegrass.
All is good. But we wake one morning after arriving late, look out the loft window, and realize something is missing. Part of the hill. A massive clump of five birch trees perched near the top has busted loose and snowplowed tons of dirt — hydroseeded land and all — down to the shoreline. The trees come to rest on the beach. To add insult the clump winds up in a position so it looks like a gigantic hand flipping us the bird. Our hard-fought battle with erosion is lost.
We get Bradley to come in and yank out any other trees perched along the edge of the hill that might perform similar feats of destruction. We bring in truckloads of riprap — sharp-edged, dynamited rock that can bite into a hill — to stabilize the earth. We reseed the hill, this time by hand, and put down 6-by-50-foot rolls of erosion mat. This summer being at the cabin is the antithesis of what being at the cabin should be about. We have erosion on the brain. We plot ways to stop it. We agonize over the havoc we’ve wreaked on the land. Everything had been fine for 10,000 years, and then we showed up. It’s only when the hill has been stabilized for a few years, but our bank account eroded, that we can relax again.
A few years later Mother Nature kicks us in the arse again. I’ve built steps down to the lake. It requires building five landings out of landscape timbers, and five sets of zigzagging staircases. Eighty steps in all. Everything is hauled by hand — my hand. I arrive on opening day of spring and head down the stairs to see how the canoe and kayak have fared over the winter. Halfway down I see the bottom half of the stairway in shambles — busted stair jacks, treads flung everywhere, landings demolished. WTF? First I imagine strong winds have blown ice floes into the stairs, smashing them like a hydraulic car crusher. But the lowest section is undamaged. It can’t be hail or wind. Maybe it’s been hit by an engine cowl from a jet. It happens. No cowl. Vandals? Nah. The only thing I can figure out is that a bear or moose, either chasing or being chased, has scrambled up the steps, demolishing them in the process.
I cringe as I walk up the surviving stairs to the cabin; another week of work has appeared out of nowhere. As I reach the top of the stairs I again notice something missing: a ten-ton boulder that had once sat behind — but now I’m thinking had been held in place by — a small birch. It’s not missing, it’s relocated. I follow its trajectory along one set of stairs, through another set, into the landing, past the kayak — and there it is, snickering down on the shoreline. Mostly what I think is, “Damn, that woulda been cool to see.”
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A rolling stone may gather no moss, but it wreaked havoc on the stairs leading to the lake. The kayak survived a near-death experience.
Winter also decides to pitch in. One frigid January day, Kat heads north with four “Women on the Edge,” her dogsledding and sailing friends. No one has been to the cabin in a month. As they near Oma Tupa in complete darkness, Kat prepares her weekend mates for the worst-case scenario.
Three things could put a wee bit of a damper on their weekend. One, there’s a chance Bradley hasn’t plowed the driveway, which means they’ll need to carry all their stuff — including a sheik’s ransom in wine — down the hill. No problem. Two, the wind may have blown out the wall furnace pilot light and there would be no heat; a situation easily remedied by firing up the woodstove. No problem. Three, the pipes could be frozen and five women could be without water or plumbing for the weekend. Problem.
They arrive to find the driveway 2 feet deep in snow. After trudging down the hill, they find the cabin a Siberian 25 degrees. The pipes are frozen. They get a fire cranking to warm the place up, and lo and behold, they hear the sweet flow of water — flowing through a busted pipe under the kitchen sink.
They find a plumber who miraculously agrees to come out on a Friday evening. There is a God. The plumber has to trudge all his equipment, tools, and pipe down the pitch-black hill. He phones me from underneath the crawl space to ask a question about how the pipes are routed. I hear the stomping of five very possibly inebriated women dancing to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” on the floor above. He needs one little part to finish the job, so he trudges back up the hill, drives back to his shop, then hits a deer with his van on the way back. He borrows a car from a guy near the scene of the accident and returns to finish the job. By the time he gets back and calls me with one final question, Kat and company are lip-synching into hairbrushes to the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing.
I can’t wait for this bill to come: overtime on a Friday night, totaled van, four trips by foot up and down our avalanche of a driveway, combat pay for working in the dwarf-height crawl space. And for good measure, throw in a sexual harassment lawsuit for all the pipe jokes they’ve shouted down to him. Might as well just hand over the keys to the place and call it even.
But crazy-dancing to Bon Jovi with four friends until two in the morning on a cold winter night with heat and water? Priceless.
The northern winds and power company also conspire to make us miserable. When the power goes out, the wall furnace fan — thus the wall furnace — won’t work. If strong winds blow out the pilot light — a common occurrence — same thing.
After the third case of furnace malfunction and broken pipes we install a freeze alarm. We find one that automatically calls three phone numbers, every hour, when the cabin temperature drops below 45 degrees. After reading the instruction manual equivalent of War and Peace, I figure out how to program the thing. We head home, with renewed peace of mind — until an hour down the road my cell phone rings, and I note on caller ID someone is calling us from the cabin. Strange. “There is an alert at your monitored location.” We know there’s not an alert — we’ve just been there and the cabin was 70 degrees. But the alarm — gone anthropomorphic like the Plymouth Fury in Stephen King’s Christine — continues to call and call and call. We arrive home to find six long-distance messages from the alarm on our landline.
I’ve forgotten the code number that will allow us to turn the damn thing off at the cabin. Like a monkey trying to type the Constitution, I start punching in possible code numbers, I finally figure out the code — but only after “Christine” has placed fourteen long-distance calls.
And then there are things that bug you. In most states people plan outdoor events based on the weather; in Minnesota, events are planned according to insects.
“We were considering a backyard August wedding, until we realized Sherry couldn’t fit the mosquito netting over her veil.”
“We moved Harold’s bar mitzvah to May so we wouldn’t have to fish so many box elder bugs out of the punch bowl.” And so on.
We had encountered our share of bugs while building — a hornet nest in the rafters here, a squadron of mosquitoes there — but the bug world isn’t able to truly organize itself into pestilent squadrons until the cabin is finished. They come in three waves.
Wave #1: Tent caterpillars. The small white moths that crash insanely into your outdoor lights and windows at night don’t start life as incredibly annoying moths, they start life as incredibly annoying caterpillars. In Wallenda-like moves they lower themselves via mucous strings onto your head, into your salad, or, if you’re about to capture the specter of a bald eagle rising out of the lake with a trout in its talons, on your camera lens. They feast on birch and poplar leaves with such abandon that they can – and do – denude entire forests. They don’t smell that great when you step on them. And the crowning glory of these creatures of God comes when they finally disappear. They disappear by weaving sticky cotton ball masses positioned in places that, according to the International Tent Moth Building Code, must be “slightly beyond the reach of a standard broom” and be positioned so as to add “maximum ugliness to a structure.” Even on a dwelling as small as Oma Tupa, they number in the thousands.
Wave #2: Asian beetles. For starters they look like ladybugs in drag with bad makeup. The cuteness of the nursery rhyme “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire and your children will burn” becomes a passionate desire to set fire to the things after you’ve used the Dust Buster to suck up the four thousandth one. When vacuumed they emit a “yellow, foul-smelling substance” as a defense. Their favorite prank is sneaking into unattended cans of Coke. And when cornered, the little thugs bite.
Wave #3: Cluster flies. As fall approaches they seek a warm place to hibernate and are drawn to the crevices around the windows of the cabin. Somehow they squeeze through the labyrinth of siding, trim, Tyvek, caulk, plywood, insulation, drywall, and interior trim. To celebrate their arrival they break dance on their backs until they die. Upon entering the cabin after a long absence, it is not unusual to find hordes of them. They are a midlevel annoyance; irritating on the same level as cotton balls stuffed into the necks of aspirin bottles and your niece who puts tomato knives pointy end up in the dishwasher rack.
Bugs aren’t the only squatters in this tenement. We enter one day and notice the afghan that was left flung over the back of the couch has started mysteriously unraveling. We’re awakened that night by the obsessive-compulsive crumpling of insulation paper backing within the walls. Then we discover a bag of marshmallows is missing. Finally, we encounter the artifact that would instill fear into the heart of even Genghis Khan — the dreaded mouse turd. On further investigation we discover this rodent has consumed unfathomable quantities of food. This is a mouse with an eating disorder of great magnitude: a bag of gorp, a pack of saltines, a pound of elbow macaroni, my beloved Krusteaz waffle mix – all ransacked with only a cache of the rice-size turds left as a thank-you.
Kat spends the weekend Tupperware-izing every morsel in sight. We break out the expanding foam and fill gaps and crevices; lay out d-CON, mousetraps and any other weapons of mass mouse destruction we can find at Julie’s Hardware. We win the battle and, thus far, the war.
Even the virtuous trees screw with us. Six large dead birches start aiming kamikaze branch attacks toward the cabin during high winds. It’s them or us. I break out the chain saw and warm up by taking out the harmless ones — ones that could fall in any direction without endangering person, place, or thing.
I cut a notch in the trunk on the side I want the tree to fall, then cut downward at an angle from the opposite side so the tree is hinged and “swings” in the direction of the notch. I’m a respectable seventy-five percent accurate with my practice trees, so I go after the one closest to the cabin. It’s leaning away from the cabin, but even so I tell Kat to watch from the corner of the deck, so she’s out of harm’s way.
I notch the tree so it will fall away from the cabin, then make the angled back cut. I react with the swiftness of an arthritic clam as the tree falls — without hesitation — directly toward the cabin. Instinctively I give the plummeting trunk one gigantic shoulder block — enough to direct it away from the cabin directly toward the deck and Kat. Kat vaults to safety, but the furniture isn’t as quick. The tree hits a kidney-shaped teak table as if laser guided. Seeing the cartoon way the table expires is almost worth the two hundred bucks we’re out as the tree hits and eighty table parts explode upward in a Wile E. Coyote shower of kindling. Not one surviving glue joint. No semblance of tableness whatsoever. Clearly at least a second-place finish on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
But there’s more arboreal mischief. My sister Patty and husband Ray head to the cabin for a much-needed weekend away. Two hours after their projected arrival, I get a phone call.
“Aaah — we’re stuck in the driveway.”
This is technically impossible; it’s June, they have an SUV, and they’re headed downhill.
“Aaah — when we left a few days ago it was fine,” I blather, not so much sarcastically as accusingly.
“Yah, but I bet when you left a few days ago there wasn’t a big friggin’ tree lying across the driveway.”
They’d gotten halfway down the driveway, belatedly spotted a massive pine the wind had toppled, then spun their wheels, hopelessly trying to back up the hill in the loose gravel. They could go neither to nor fro.
“You got a chain saw somewhere around here? Ray’s been trying to chop through this thing with some kind of weird-looking hatchet for the last hour.”
I explain to Patty they can find the chain saw in the crawl space. But curiosity has the best of me. “Could you text a photo of what’s going on?”
A minute later the photo arrives. I zoom in on Ray’s progress. The divot he’s chopped in the trunk looks like the work of a carpenter ant with severe attention deficit disorder. I zoom in on Ray’s weapon of choice and see he’s selected a terminally dull five-pound splitting maul. I’m so giggle-shook I can’t return the text for five minutes. The following Christmas Ray presents me with a varnished disc of wood sliced from the offending tree.
But while there’s plenty of trouble in paradise, ninety percent of the time Oma Tupa is paradise.