That summer, I packed up my life in Minneapolis and moved with Aaron up to Two Inlets for the gardening season.
We took Highway 10 north, chasing and racing trains the whole way. Driving the 1973 Buick Centurion, we were soap sliding in a bathtub and felt like we owned the road—two clichés that rightly describe how those old boats make you feel. Both wide and long, the Centurion had aerodynamics designed for road tripping in the pre-air-conditioned era. Even with all the windows down, the wind just gently sniffed at the very ends of my hair but otherwise left me alone. In a car like that, dignity rides on the open air. We could smell the muggy musk of the corn in the fields the whole way up.
By the time we arrived at the little house out in the forest, the sun had just sunk, taking with it all possible light. Without any electricity, the night sky covered us like a heavy black quilt, and wouldn’t pull back its cover until dawn.
Twenty-five minutes from Park Rapids, our hometown, the place was, as they said locally, “out there.” The bark of the nearest neighbor’s dog was just a muffled bok in the dark; the moans of the wolves sounded closer. The clucking of the wood frogs out working on the creek, a concertina of mallets knocking on hollow logs, was deafening.
Parking in front of the house and leaving the car lights on so that we could see, Aaron and I made our way down the hill to check on the small fenced-in garden that we’d planted over a weekend a couple of months back. Maybe it was beginner’s luck, or the pent-up minerals in the freshly turned dirt, or a gracious pattern of summer storms and heat, but the plants towered over the fence. The tomatoes were unrecognizable from the baby starts we’d planted. Aaron lit a kerosene lantern and leaned it into the mass of vegetation. The tomato foliage had grown into itself, working its limbs into knots. It smelled like a pungent mix of green grass clippings and wet locker-room floor, like nothing I’d ever encountered before. Miraculously, shiny green tomatoes hung heavy on the vines. The cucumber plants had fuzzy, pointed leaves, skinny limbs with prickly caterpillarlike fuzz on them, and, cooler yet, fully grown cucumbers. Pickle-size. I reached for one, surprised by the sharpness of the short quills covering the fruit. The pepper plants hung with pepper lanterns. The beets sported crowns of greens. The peas had pods on them. And on and on.
At a time when everyone wonders what a young college graduate will make of her life, I moved to the woods without any amenities. This was not the bucolic woods of the East Coast corridor, managed for generations and planted with cows, but the ten-acres-and-a-trailer backwoods that surrounds my gritty northern hometown…This was like hitting a big fat pause button. There was to be no big-city career in my near future, no immediate upwardly social movement.
My mom and most of my friends considered my move to the woods to be a phase, as they’d never known me to willingly take a walk on any kind of dirt path, beaten or not. It was pretty much the most unexpected move I could make—and I knew it. That was the part that thrilled me. Walking to the outhouse under the cover of a night sky so tarry that the white roll of toilet paper actually glowed only heightened the audacity of it. I felt as if I’d just made a tremendously exciting wrong turn, onto a tiny road, in the pitch-black dark.
We lugged Adirondack chairs inside the fence, each cracked a beer, and surveyed our little kingdom. For all of the vegetable eating I’d done growing up, we’d never grown any ourselves. My lack of knowledge in this area was thrilling. I was twenty-one years old. We might not have had any power—no lights or running water, not even a phone line—but I remember it as an electric time, when all connections were firing. The road ahead, cooking out of the garden, stretched out long in front of me.
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The mosquitoes were our alarm clock; humming at a high pitch, they dove into our ears and then teased us at close range, hovering close enough to reveal their hairy legs and garters. This was before we rigged up an army-issue mosquito netting over our bed, as both princess tent and impenetrable bug-free zone.
When Aaron and I now talk about this era we tend to list everything that we lacked, in context with everything we eventually acquired. Our life at the house was the real-life definition of the timeless feeling I felt we had together, and the changes we made to it over the seasons compressed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like a paper fan. I can describe it in many mini-eras.
This was the oil-lamp era, before we got the used solar panel from Aaron’s buddy Dave and the old car battery and inverter from Bruce and were able to rig them to power the laptop and two electric lights (though not both at the same time). This was before we pounded the sand point well, when we were still hauling water back to the house in five-gallon plastic containers, which we filled at our neighbor Marie’s spigot or at the faucet on the outside of my dad’s car dealership in town—inconspicuously, after hours. This was before the porch and its beneficent mosquito screens. This was before Aaron built the new outhouse, when we still used the old spider-filled one Aaron had pulled off an abandoned farm.
This was before we had a phone. That first summer we’d stop at Tiny’s Meats, the small meat market that sat alone on a treeless patch of ground a few miles down the road, to pick up some ham steak and any phone messages, if applicable—until Barney, the owner, shook his head and told me he couldn’t take any more of my messages. My mother’s reminder call, to “tell Amy to bring Grandma Rose’s pink glass platter when she comes to the city on Saturday,” might have pushed him over the edge.
To ease off Barney, we made most of our outgoing calls at the pay phone attached to the Two Inlets Country Store, four miles down the road. The small store and bar (selling weak 3.2-percent beer, per Minnesota law) was, and remains, one of the three public points in this small community, an unincorporated burg populated largely by descendants of the original homesteaders and native families. The other two landmarks are the Spanish-style Catholic church, complete with a fieldstone altar built to mimic the grotto of Lourdes in France, and the Two Inlets Mill, a bustling, old-school sawmill. By the time we arrived, Aaron had already worked a winter at the mill, throwing slabs in the planing shed. The cozy store was where we bought our gas, eggs, cream, sugar, and other dry goods and occasionally did some drinking around the horseshoe bar.