Soon after, he got a girl to live back there with him, and that girl was me.
My decision to move to a rustic one-room house way out in the middle of the yawning forest was a puzzlement to my parents, my friends, and initially even to myself. Aaron’s house lay only a precarious twenty miles away from Park Rapids, the hometown to which I’d never expected my postcollege self to return. As I drove past the green Park Rapids sign POPULATION, 2,961, I saw my former isolation with clear eyes. My two-stoplight hometown was deep in lake country, four hours north of Minneapolis–St. Paul, and hours away from any town that might be considered a city. It was flush with nostalgia and pine trees but pretty short on great restaurants, bookstores, or cultural events—everything I’d come to love during my college years in Minneapolis. It wasn’t exactly where I envisioned myself settling. I can track this trajectory shift back to a single moment, the coda to my Park Rapids childhood: When I turned sixteen, the winter my parents split up, I learned how to properly whip my car into a doughnut (what we called a “shitty”) on the icy tundra of the empty nighttime grocery-store parking lot. My friends and I were good girls and didn’t usually do such things, but we assiduously practiced our car twirls—speeding, whipping the wheel, and spinning wildly out of control—feeling the circadian swoop low in our bellies, as if by mastering it we could conquer our fears of moving out and moving on. When my family split and we left a few months later, it was as though I’d been interrupted midspin, leaving me for years afterward with an irrational surplus of feeling for my hometown. It was like a dumb phantom limb that wouldn’t stop tingling.
Going almost home, to Aaron’s house twenty miles north, felt close, but reassuringly out-of-bounds. It wasn’t exactly a homecoming, but a do-over.
At the time I pinned my attraction to the place—in addition to the romance of shacking up with my new boyfriend in the woods—on our large garden and the chance to grow all our own food. As was typical of a late-1990s liberal-arts college graduate, especially one who had spent her senior year combing through farm women’s journals for her thesis on outsider American lit, I was burning with desire to cook like the pioneers.
As I drove past my childhood split-level house in Park Rapids, the obsession felt incongruous. I’d grown up with a mother whose cooking was so outsized that she could have almost cut a window in her back door and gone commercial. She was a shopper, not a gardener, a woman who beat a five-block path to the Red Owl grocery store once a day and sometimes twice. Her caramels, her bacon-fried rice, and her Caesar salad (trademarked with a burning amount of garlic) made her a minor star in our neighborhood circle, and in our lives. But it was the area’s rustic woodstove history, mixed with my grandma’s memories of her farmhouse childhood, that gave me daydreams. Homemade sausage patties preserved under a thick frosting of white lard, horseradish-grinding sessions that drove everyone from the house in tears, long canning days that fogged the windows until they wept with steam, soaring homemade potato bread baked in twelve-loaf batches, four at a time. Installed now on a rough-board porch in the woods shelling a basket of peas from the garden, I had effectively driven myself two generations back in time to find the only things that my buttery, voluptuous, well-fed Midwestern childhood had lacked: baby greens and deprivation.
I wanted to cook like my Midwestern great-grandma had, with the feeling of scantness at my back. I wanted to pick a bowl of peas in the afternoon and bathe them in butter a few hours later to fully capture their fleeting sweetness. If I had refrigerated them (if I’d had refrigeration), their sugars would begin to turn to starch, like any old grocery-store pea. My cooking bug, which had begun innocently enough as a way to stave off the agony of writing papers throughout my college years, was growing into a serious habit. Or as Aaron described his own art practice: It was becoming an affliction.
In our kitchen, my turn-of-the-century farmhouse dream was distressingly accurate. At just four feet by six, it was my foxhole. Its compactness made it oddly convenient. A massive propane-powered 1940s Roper stove sat in the middle, its four burners set wide in an expanse of milky-white porcelain. Standing at the stove, I didn’t have to move my feet to reach the sink or the shelves, and a quick pivot squared me to the large butcher-block counter to my left. The stove’s two identical rust holes burned out on either side were the telltale signs of a lifetime spent firing double-wide boiling water-bath canners, so it had good genetics—but bad mechanics. To light the tiny oven, I had to turn on the gas, shove a lit match into the pilot peephole, lean back, and wait for the loud whoof of the burner plate erupting into flames.
Water was our daily preoccupation. Every morning Aaron heaved a full five-gallon spigoted water container onto the high counter over the double sink, under which we had positioned two five-gallon buckets. When I turned the spigot, the water ran into the sink and then down into a plastic bucket. When the bucket was empty, the echo of the water sounded loose and floppy; the echo sounded tighter—more nervous—when the water neared the top, as if to warn me that it was getting full. (Certain mistakes you make only once, and letting one of those drain buckets overflow is one of them.) To do the dishes, I filled a three-gallon kettle, heated it on the stove, poured the boiling water into the sink, and tempered it with the cold until I could submerge my hands, red and ringing, long enough to wash a pot. I liked it hot.
By my estimation, on a normal day, we used about three and a half gallons of water, and about five gallons when we had people over. I was surprised when visitors looked at this jury-rigged setup with lopsided grins because it seemed to me like a perfectly good system. With it in place I cooked everything we ate—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.