“Nah, it’s fine.” In those days teenage friends of the Spangler kids—Matt, Aaron, and Sarah—would often show up at the sliding glass door, knock, and walk right into their ’70s-era gold-and-orange kitchen. That summer I was one of them.
If there was someone I had assumed would never, ever come back to live in Park Rapids, it would have been Aaron. Easily voted “most likely to get out of town” in his senior year, he was one of a handful of local kids who had been turned on to punk music. He lent Sarah mixed tapes of pounding music we’d never heard before: Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Mot?rhead. He fronted his own band. He studied both the hardcore ethic and its aesthetic—the casual, open-flung shirts, the ratty, gnarled flop of long hair, the loose Converse Chucks—and practiced them devoutly. He didn’t jibe at all with the sonic and cultural testosterone of the Top Gun 1980s, or the conservative town for that matter, and so he sought out his own symbols, a lot earlier than most of us did.
I hold on to a vivid memory from childhood that contains the both of us, an illicit meet between the rebel and the cheerleader if you will, although he still refuses to confirm it.
I was in the ninth grade, co-captain of the boys’ basketball cheerleading squad, sitting for my biannual perm at the Family Hair Affair—a tradition that began for me in kindergarten and mercifully ended my senior year of high school (save that single backslide during college). The stench of the solution was a perfect blend of rot and ammonia and it needled at my eyes. Aaron sat in a chair behind me, in my mirror’s purview. The salon’s owner, Mavis Davis (her glorious married name), and her constant cohort, a six-foot ice blonde with a Brigitte Nielsen crop, stood over Aaron. These ladies loved—they absolutely lived, as my mother would say—to cut it short. Mavis roughly lifted up hunks of Aaron’s heavy dark hair and loudly discussed how they might remove the enormous rat’s nest that was knotted at the back of his neck. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong and they were holding up his hair and talking about how they could remove the image of a spider that had been shaved into his head beneath his long flop of top hair. It’s all a little hazy now, and Aaron swears that he never set foot in the Hair Affair after middle school, but I know without a doubt that I sat in that white vinyl beauty-salon chair suffocating in a stinging cloud of perm-fumes and spied on my future punk husband while he was in consultation with Mavis Davis.
—
After college Aaron went to art school and exited with the intention of being a full-time artist. (“That’s different,” the hometown murmurs.) A few of his sculptures sat in the Spangler yard: One was a small wooden chair surrounded on three sides by wooden-framed windows. I tried out the chair when I first got there. The old wavy glass threw the woods into a squirmy, surreal abstraction, instantly defamiliarizing the landscape. On their porch hung another of his pieces, a large relief carved out of wood, with a glossy blue river flowing through a rough, tar-covered townscape. It was not-pretty in a foreign, intriguing way.
He’d been living in Minneapolis for years, and yet here he was back in town, by day working at a local sawmill, by evening building a house out on his parents’ land by Two Inlets and reposing nightly on the Spangler back porch playing country songs on his guitar. Sarah and I joined him after dinner, curled up in sweatshirts against the cool summer night, drinking spiced tea. Eventually Sarah, a morning person, went to bed, giving us two night owls the tree perch to ourselves.
“So what’s your house like?” I asked.
“It’s just one room, and tall. Kind of like a warehouse live-work space, but in the woods. Full of scavenged wood and windows I’ve been collecting. I’m still putting up the logs on the inside, straight-cut slabs I bring home from the sawmill.” He smiled. “I don’t really know how to build a house, you know. I’m just making it up as I go.”
It seemed a little doubtful to me that he’d actually moved back to Park Rapids to make art like a hermit, and I told him so.
“It’s Two Inlets! Not the Park Rapids we grew up in.” He crossed his legs into a triangle and lit the ivory bowl of his pipe. “George, the sawyer at the mill, has so much vernacular knowledge. He’s cutting logs on this old saw from 1910 and he judges how to cut a log by how it sounds on the first cut. I’m learning so much basic stuff there, things I feel like I should already know.”
He pulled up his guitar from his feet and all of a sudden tipped his head back and started singing. No tentative porch sing was this. It was more like a solo in a musical, a song woven right into the conversational fabric. I was a little taken aback, not yet accustomed to the way Aaron naturally just breaks into song.
“Last winter I bought a tractor-powered sawmill…I wanted to make my living cutting boards to sell…but she don’t want to live in the town I grewed up in…so I’ll just take my tractor back…to the auction barn…”
“?‘Grewed up’! Who sings this song?”
“It’s mine. Old country songs have bad grammar.” He kept the rhythm on his guitar and popped right back in.
“We fellll in love, I bought her a ring, but she found out…that all I had to offer her…was this piece of ground. She says we woooon’t be married now…”
“Shallow lady!” I interrupted.
“I have nothing to call my ooooown…and I…just lost…my tractor to…the auction barn…”
“Oh no, not the girl and the tractor!”
“Listen to the song, you’re like a heckler in a bar,” he said.
“All alone, allllll alone…living on…my daddy’s land…”
And then he tipped his head back so far his eyes shut, and he fell into a soft yodel that grew louder, longer, and ever more woeful.
“Yodeleyheeee-hooo…yodeleyheeeee-hoooooo…yodeleyheeeeeeeee…yodeleyheeeee—EHEEEE-hoooo…”
His voice filled the entire porch, all the way to the corners. It was a vulnerable howl, and I wanted to cry. How could she turn her back on the romance of the guy and his tractor-powered sawmill?
When I slipped into bed beside Sarah that night in her old bedroom, she rolled over and sleepily groaned, “Oh boy, were you up all this time talking to my brother?”
—
Around the time I arrived at the Spangler house, a stray dog started showing up. This surprised no one because odd dogs often came for the summer to join the pack of them that ran the beach, tore around in the woods, and rolled in the dead fish on the shore; they’d gotten three of their dogs that way. I nicknamed this one Schnoz for his outsize lab nose and quipped that directions to their place must be written on the hobo dogs’ bathroom wall. During the day I read books by the shore, my hands buried in Schnoz’s woolly head.