The Corridor

What happened?  How did it come to pass that one place so attracts me?  So engages me?  So calls to me?  And I’m not talking about The Land, though she, too, fits the description.  For her, the question is so much easier to answer, especially here, under the lean-to, as I gaze out upon the red hem of her dawn while her crickets and morning birds literally call to me: “Yes!  Yes!  Yes to life!” I’m talking about The Corridor.  OK, I said it, The Corridor.  I know it might sound strange, perhaps mystical, or just plain crazy to feel so consumed by such.  But there it is.  I’m outed:  The Corridor has compelled me to enter her, walk her pathway---or at least peer down between her Fences, and wonder--- for the last 7 years, and even now as Tom Fort the Builder aligns the first wood walls of new home.

It began at the Gunflint Pines Lodge.  Mugs of hot chocolate steaming upon her rustic log table, Sherry and Sheryl, our northwoods friends, pried me for details about the novel I’d been writing for half a year.  “OK, so there’s this Fence,” I finally offered reluctantly; perhaps she’d slipped something other than chocolate into my milk.  “Two Fences actually, ten feet high topped with razor wire, enclosing a narrow land, a mile wide perhaps, winding from present day Beaver Creek State Park to Pickerel Lake outside Albert Lea and beyond.  The people within live there by choice, and by a covenant, seven rules and only seven rules.”  For some reason, they stared at me, mesmerized; maybe it was the ice melting, dripping, off my beard into my mug.  “It’s just a story,” I shrugged.  “You know, adventure, murder, teenage love.  But now I get to discover, by following these characters, how truly different---and perhaps remarkably more engaging---life could be.

“What’s the title?” asked Sherry, leaping as many do to the hopeful day of publication.  I mumbled something about a working title and that publication is far, far off and who knows what the publishers will want it to be.

“The Corridor!” Sherry announced, with far greater certainty than any I’d ever felt about the title.  And I must say, I resisted a bit.  It’s my story isn’t it?  But she was right, damn it.  And though the working title has changed, each year, each rev, Sherry’s title, The Corridor, mythical though it be, has carried me and my characters (Emo, Amelan, Skye) forward, between her Fences, always toward Dego’s Village upon Pickerel Lake, each morning for the last seven years.

While The Corridor may have began as story, when Linda and I began seeking a chunk of land, some power greater than me breathed down the windpipe of The Corridor, started her heart beating.  We’d looked at some nice parcels, beautiful actually, but they were all surrounded by farms: an island of wood and grass within a sea of corn, silos and soybeans.  Then came The Land.

“It’s way too expensive!” I told Linda, trying to dim the thrill in her eyes.  Of course, she’d fallen in love even as we drove up the winding and wooded Calico Hill Rd and finally out, her heart free to roam, gallop even, like some wild horse upon the snowy fields of The Land. 

“How’s it different than the others?” I countered, my fear of financial failure rising to choke me.   I needed something a little more solid than ghost riders. 

“Look what this land borders,” she said, masterfully playing the get-what-you-want-game.  “The WWMA.”  Indeed the Whitewater Wildlife Management Area: 20 plus contiguous miles---grassy ridge tops, steep wooded hillsides, creek carved valleys----shouldering the Whitewater River from Whitewater State Park north until emptying into the wide Mississippi.   And The Land’s 62 acres, bordered by this refuge on the north and east, could become part of it, enhance it, become the quintessential prairie. 

“The Corridor!” Linda announced, sealing the deal.  “We’d have so much more impact here than on one of those islands.”  Here the wildlife could roam nearly forever.  So, too, our hearts and imagination.   The rest is history.  Now two Corridors drew me in, pulled me forward, engaged my entire being.   How many more Corridors could one man walk?

At least one.  And the third Corridor, if not the most powerful, is undoubtedly the strangest. 

Two years ago, Paul---the Locus Architecture principle that we’d hired to design our dream home on The Land---flashed his first tentative concepts up on his big screen.  To date, we’d told him nothing about what the house should actually look like.  No square footage.  No style.  No budget even.  We’d ask him to design a home not only upon the Land but upon our land-based values:  a home that breathes life into our values.  Through metaphor and Mary Oliver poems, we’d bared our souls to Paul.  “Enable the Connection,” we essentially told him.  “Design a house which enables the connection to our neighbors, our friends, The Land, and the divine, if you can.  That’s all.”   Not only did it seem impossible, but what greater risk than sharing what really, really matters?   But, in one short and defining moment, Paul made all my fears vanish.

“See here, where you enter the house,” he pointed by wiggling his Mac’s  mouse.  “The west entry flows right down a hallway where your guest’s attention is immediately drawn to, and out, the all glass east door, to the porch and The Land.”

“OK,” we nodded.  We’d seen a few things like this already.  But Paul’s hallway wasn’t just another design element.

“It’s the Corridor,” he announced.

It might have been a year later when we finally told Paul what he’d accomplished with those two words.  But that day, that moment, as my eyes met Linda’s, expressing our shared joy and wonder better than any words, The Corridor jumped off the screen and into our lives.  Again. 

So last week, when the concrete guys finished pouring the floor of new home, Linda expressed her dismay to Tom the Builder.  “Only half The Corridor is concrete.  What’s the other half?”

“Marmoleum?” he shrugged, meaning the earth-fiber laminate we’d chosen for the kitchen floor. 

While Linda’s reply was gentle and appropriate, I could see her mind sorting out the big nails prior to delivery.  “The Corridor has to be all one material,” she said, as if proclaiming an obvious life principle.  Changing from Marmoleum to concrete half-way down would halt the flow, veer your attention, disable the Connection.  I took Tom aside, and we brainstormed a way to pour concrete over the first half of the Corridor, what is now the gaping hole of basement.  “Beams, different trusses, we can do it.” Tom assured me, even if he wasn’t delighted.

So compelling is our new home’s Corridor that I sweated for three days this week---cutting, hacking, sawing, burning---creating a path through the Land’s far east hedgerow, strangled with buckthorn. 

 So on the day that you first enter our new home and are pulled down the Corridor and out into the Land, you will then see that the Corridor does not end there.  A quarter-mile away, where the prairie rolls up to the forest, you will see a little gap, a sunny opening onto a meadow beyond.  Then perhaps your feet---and heart and soul and imagination---can roam, gallop even, like wild horses down The Corridor, with me, if you please. 

And together we can wonder at the glorious mystery of Fences---real as steel or mere lines on a map---and the space between, The Corridor, compelling us toward our better selves.

Rah-dur!

Child's Eye

“To an amazingly successful weekend!” 

Melting into our cozy chairs (the only two in our little cabin) Linda and I raised our glasses---sidecars bursting with the juice of black cherries, planted by God and fresh-picked from the Land---then let sip after luscious sip send us down memory lane. 

My dear friends, Heather and Kim, had now driven away with their families;  ten in all, including their 5 children (Mackenzie, Kiley and Nolan on Kim’s side along with Riley and Ryan on Heather’s).  Before they’d arrived for their Labor Day weekend of Land camping, my biggest fear was that the kids would be bored.  “What are we supposed to do?” I feared hearing from them.  After all, there’s nothing here but the Land, just us and the bugs, berries and birds.   Together with Kim and Heather, we’d posited and planned several possibilities.  But then came the rains---one day of steady, soaking rain followed by a second, turning gullies into rivers as it shook the shed where we huddled---washing away all plans for adventure hiking, fort building and sumac-ade.  I looked into the Mackenzie’s eyes, trying to pierce her thoughts, probing for the dreaded 13 year old “can we go home now?”

Who would have thought that later, after another cherry sidecar sip, I’d ask Linda, “What was your favorite part of the weekend?” to which she’d reply, “The kids and their mud mountain!”

See, to my eyes, the rains only brought a mucky mess.  The shed, where we huddled, looked across the driveway, over the new home construction site to the mountains of excavated dirt.   

“What are we going to do with all this dirt?” I asked the excavator two weeks ago. 

“You could pay to haul it all away,” he replied.  “Or we can find some place on your land to spread it.”

And now, these waste piles were crumbling under the relentless rains.  If you wanted to create a miniature for a movie featuring a village-swallowing mudslide, you couldn’t have done better.    We adults tried to put on our best faces. 

But thanks to the genius of creation, a child’s eye sees what mine cannot.

Mackenzie, eldest of all the children, ventured forth, shovel in hand.  Barefoot, she followed the trail--- blazed earlier by the dogs, Scout and Happy---through ankle-deep muck oozing against the foundation, to the dirt piles, now converted to twelve foot high hills of mud.  Up she climbed to the very pinnacle and there stood, the proud and mud-streaked queen of the hill.  

And soon, the younger four, her loyal and inspired subjects---each first begging me for, and receiving, their own scepter (rake, cultivator, post-hole-digger)---mucked their way up to her kingdom.  Now I cannot describe to you just what it was they did there on the hill.  My eyes have apparently become blinded to the nature of such unabashed joys.  But they could still see the child’s joy itself.  What could be purer?  What could be holier? 

Riley, eldest of the boys, must have perceived my befuddlement and decided to translate their joy. 

“Do you know what Disney World is?” he asked.

“I’ve heard of it,” I shrugged.

“Well, if Disney World is a 9, then this is a 9 and a half.”

“What’s a 9 and a half?”

“Mud Mountain!”

So there it is:  Mud Mountain, a waste pile to my eyes, almost perfect to Riley’s, to the child’s eye.  I have so much yet to learn about life.   And perhaps I already know most of it.   Perhaps all I need do is learn to see again, through the eyes of little Mike.

“What was your favorite part of the weekend?” Linda asked me after more than a few black cherry sips.

I replied without hesitation, “The look on Lia’s face as she drove Little Blue.”

Lia was a guest of Kim’s at our Land camp.  Newly arrived from Spain, she taught at their kid’s Spanish immersion school.  Earlier in the day, she’d told me she could never live here (on the Land).  Too lonely.  I understood.  I really miss my Minneapolis next-door neighbors.  Later, as the sun set at the end of our long driveway, she came to understand why I’d endure such loneliness, an understanding that may well change Lia’s heart forever.

For the first time in her life, she sat upon the seat of a tractor, our Little Blue, our 48hp New Holland TC45D.  With delight (and a little fear in her eyes) she steered west toward the sunset.  Now, it wouldn’t be fair to call her a child.   After all, she just graduated from the University of Barcelona and was now a teacher.  Yet, as I stood next to her on tractor step, jostling up and down as we rumbled down the headlight-lit driveway, I recognized a thrilled twinkle in her eyes:  a lingering child’s light, unclouded by the certainties of adulthood. 

“Is it always like this here?” she asked.  She struggled to communicate what she perceived.  Not only the power coursing up through the steering wheel, but the red upon purple glory of the western sky, the vastness of the sea of grass as we rolled by, and this precious moment that she and I were sharing together. 

All I could do is nod “yes”.

Then---and I’ll never forget it as long as I live--she touches her hand to her heart and proclaims, “This is life.”  I nodded again, understanding completely.  I could see it in her eye, her child’s eye:  pure joy.  And yet we were also communicating, connecting as knowing adults, that we’d just shared something that few ever do:  a sliver of a moment in heaven, the heaven that is right here on earth, everywhere actually, but often so much easier to see and hear and feel here on the Land. 

So I want to express my gratitude, to you who yet see through a child’s eye.  From the top of Mud Mountain I shout “thank-you!”

Rah-dur!

A Place of Our Own

Oh to be hiding in the burrow weeds.  Just me and my brother, like mice snuggling in our cozy grass tunnel out here in the field. 

“Mike-y!  Steve-y!” 

“Shhh!  That’s mom again.  She’ll never find us.  And besides, we don’t want to go in.”

So long ago.  Yet I can still smell that comforting grass.  And see Steve, his adorable smile illuminating our burrow.  Now, fifty years later---just when I needed it---I found such a place of my own again.  Like our burrow weeds, how you get there matters as much as the place itself.

When stars yet beckoned, I rolled out of bed.   Ah, I love to look upon Linda’s sleeping face:  so peaceful  Not easy to keep it that way in our one room cabin.  Mouse-silent, I open the refrigerator and find my prune juice (I am 55).  

Cradling my tea thermos, laptop on my back, I click the door behind me and float beneath the shadowy trees to my dew streaked Prius.  Headlights lead me down the hill, past Sandy Dietz (I know she’s drinking her coffee in her breakfast window) to our driveway.  Even before I turn, I feel the thrill.  Misty dawn streaking red upon the valleys.  With something near reverence, I approach the barnwood clad shed. 

I push open the side door and peer inside.  Just enough light leaking through the little windows to see my way across the gravel floor without tripping over the tractor’s 3pt hitch.   Fortunately, my feet know the way up the wooden stairs, each step darker.  Last step.  My right hand probes the rough, unfinished wall.  There it is:  thin, cold steel.  Snap!  Snap!  Down come the locks.  Creak!  I swing the window open.  Ah, the moist breeze upon my face.  And light!  Golden dawn, fresh from the fields, now entering. 

Turning around, I can see it:  my chair, a welcoming on the other end of the room.  

But wait, the ritual is not yet complete.  The best remains.  I squeeze between my chair and the boxes lining the short walls and find again the thin, cold steel.  Snap!  Snap!  I hold my breath as I swing the big hayloft door wide. 

Ho!  My!  Gosh!  The Land!  Fog blankets the distant pond.  Leaves of grass, gray yet in their beds, shiver with the promise of day.  The promise of life!  Hope, sometimes stifled by the night, now rekindled in all its glory.  And here I stand, looking out upon it all from this, this hayloft door, this place of our own.

Like the burrow weeds, the hayloft gives me so much.

Especially solitude.  Unlike Superman’s, my place is not a fortress.  Rather it welcomes.  Not only me in the morning but the Land, dawn, the bluebirds, and you on that glad day you arrive.  For all indeed are welcomed, welcomed into solitude if so desired.  For with solitude comes so much. 

Perspective for one.  “My house is made of sand, isn’t it, Steve?” The excavator, just getting used to my off-the-beaten-path talk,  looked at me crossed eyed.  “I’ve been watching from the hayloft, truckload after truckload of sand dumped and tamped into the foundation of our house. 

Last week, I thought my house would be made of concrete.  But if we were to pour all this sand on one pan of some gigantic scale and  all the concrete on the other, which way would the balance tilt?”

“Never thought about it before,” said Steve.  I could see the wheels turning.  Admit it or not, he enjoyed this perspective.  “Let me see.  Last week we poured 9 loads of concrete, at 9 yards a load.  Today we backfilled 24 loads of sand at 12 to 14 yards per load.  Concrete weighs a little more:  3000 pounds a yard.  Sand is 2700.”  Smoke rolled out of Steve’s ears.    “Figure 500,000 pounds of sand.  Way heavier.  Put that in your blog.”

I don’t know why for sure, but this place of my own also brings courage.  Courage to be as me as I can be.  To write this blog.  To pursue my calling---my novel, a vision of hope---illuminating the veiled wall that separates humanity from divine destiny and  inspiring a generation to tear it down.  To let words, guiding images, take shape. To dare to not only discover but to bring the vision forth.  Absolutely crazy?  Yes!  Absolutely engaging?  Yes!

So beware if ever you come to the hayloft, or discover a place of your own. You never know where that cozy tunnel of solitude might take you.

“Mike-y!  Steve-y!”

I wonder who’s calling us now?

Rah-dur!

Goodbye Sweet Girl

Savannah!  Savannah!  Savannah!   Aww, look at you, you smile-faced girl.  Uh-oh! onto the back already?  Well, why wouldn’t I rub your belly?  After all, you’re the Wonder Dog and you’ve been wondering where we’ve been.  Haven’t you sweet girl?

And now, for the first time, I’m wondering where you are.  It’s been two long and lonely days now since you crossed over, finally escaping the ravages of the cancer.  And I’m still no closer to answering my big question:  how do I approach the Land without you, without Savannah the Wonder Dog?

I mean, you came seven years ago, the first time we camped, just down the hill, across the road and up again from your house. And why not, we were on your land after all.  That piece of paper that said we now own it didn’t mean much to you.

Last night, on that very campsite, Linda and I built our little cooking fire in front of your mounded grave, where you always curled in the tall grass at the lip of the hill overlooking the pond.  We recalled how, as night floated up the valley, we could barely see your black body, more like imagining you’re there.  But now it’s like that all the time and it’s more than my heart can bear. 

Yet, if I learned one thing from you in your final days, it’s keep on living.  Here you were, tumor pushing out your front teeth and still you’d do what really mattered.  And maybe that was your secret.  Only do what’s important and stop doing everything else.  So you made it quite clear what we shouldn’t do and what we should do.

Savannah the Wonder Dog’s rules for a good life:

Love.  Always and completely, with abandon and without condition.  Whimper in ecstasy.  Belly rubs are a pretty good way to express it.

Walk.  Couple times a day at least.  Don’t talk.  Engage the Land.  Get off the main path.  Put your nose down and follow little trails.  Flush turkeys, then prance proudly.

Eat.  Lots of good food.  Turn your nose away from crap (well, actually you might eat that, too).  Clean your plate.  Seek opportunities to get more good food.

Sleep.  As close as you can to those you love.  Who you sleep with is far more important than what you sleep on.

Protect.  Those you love against grave threats.  Especially at night.  Look (and sound) ferocious.  Even if outnumbered. Be willing to die for them. 

Be loyal.  Be there for family, always, always, always.  Make sure they always know where you are and never doubt you.  Persevere no matter what and don’t complain, not a hint, about how hard it is to remain loyal. 

Be.  When all else is done (love, walk, eat, sleep, protect, be loyal).  Don’t add another thing to the list.  Don’t fill the space with activity and chatter.  Discover the joy of sitting in silence not far from those you love.

So my sweet girl, I guess I do know how to approach the Land without you.  Your rules are simple to remember, if not challenging to perform like you did.  And I know what you’d tell me about my broken heart, about enduring the pain without you at my side.    Love.  Walk.  Eat.  Sleep. Protect.  Be Loyal.  Be.

As my friend Randy said, you got me to the Land.  Finally.  Now it’s my job to live it. 

So I guess this isn’t good-bye.  It’s just getting to know you in a different way, my fingers no longer rubbing your warm, black belly.  I’ll do my best to not let you down.  Oh Savannah!  Oh sweet girl!  Oh Wonder Dog!

Rah-dur!

Roots

If only dear old dad were sitting next to me, gazing out the hayloft door at the riveting scene below:  men pouring footings---not only the foundation but the first material---for our House the Land Built.

The earthy smell of a deep, straight-sided hole. 

The suction of mud underfoot.  Straight lines of bright string.  The wooden thud of hammers on forms.  The sparks and burnt-steel smell of sawing rebar.  And of course, the slosh, swoosh and intoxicatingly fresh smell of concrete.

Granted things are different now than in Rosy Larsen’s proud block-laying days:  pumped concrete, poured walls, cell phones strapped to the hip.  

Still, it’s men at work.  Cigarette smoking, f-en-heimer slinging, Popeye armed men.    Not that they all work as hard as dad, but then he was the owner-builder-paycheck writer. 

 “Huh Mike,” dad would say if we could stand---boot toes hanging over the sheer lip---and peer down at my just poured footings, “whaduya think huh Mike?”  

“It doesn’t seem real,” I’d say.  “It all happened so fast.  Linda and I worked so hard for so long planning all this and now hey presto! here it is.  The cement guys show up in the morning and by three in the afternoon we’ve got footings.  No changing the footprint now.  Cast in concrete as they say.”

“It’s gonna be real nice,” dad would assure me with a smile. 

Then, when bluebirds began swooping into the great pit of our house, we’d forget all about footings and muddy trowels and we’d walk down the hill a little ways and light a fire in the pit.  There we’d share tales about what really matters:  the howl of the coyote, the smell of bread baking in the cardboard oven, the smoke, swirling, hmmm better shift the wind screen just a tad. 

Of course none of this ever happened.  Dad, ill as he was his final years, never made it to the Land.  Never sat upon the John Deere.  Never gazed down the long sloping prairie to the hazy Whitewater Valley and beyond to the silos on the far ridge.  Sad as I am, I also know that he’s here.  Right now. 

Thank you, dear old dad, for roots.  Not only the roots of my new house and the roots of my love of the Land but the roots of my ‘ruthless prioritization’, never forgetting to focus on what really matters.  And right now, at this very moment, what matters is the wren flicking his tail upon the concrete guy’s trailer and the swallow, mouth open, banking hard along the excavated dirt mountains and, of course, the bluebird, perched atop the rebar showing off his beautiful late afternoon feathers.

Rah-dur!

Crossing

I’ve crossed over.    

Last Monday, after a final heart-wrenching garden tour, we locked the back door, click! and left the old house for the last time.  Black clouds thundered as we exchanged hugs and best wishes with Mark and Kari, the young buyers.  We also exchanged a house and a check. 

While Linda tried out her new “work-digs” (a couple upstairs rooms with our dear friends Doug and Monica in NE Minneapolis), I moved into our two (temporary) homes:  cabin and shed.  The one room 20’x20’ cabin rests between the landlord’s (Kim, Troy and their 3 daughters) house and a cornfield. 

Here we eat and sleep with Kirby cat---whose learning not to spend all his time under our bed---and when we can, Kim and Troy’s Savannah the Wonder Dog, now likely in her final weeks if not days. 

The shed---a ¾ mile gravel drive or a ½ mile prairie-pasture-woodland walk---stores most of our old house.  Fortunately we’d donated, sold or trashed much of it. 

I thrilled to the task of building a scrap lumber readily accessible shed-kitchen (crock pot, Fiesta ware, canned tomatoes…).  I reluctantly rebuilt the “mouse-proof” storage (furniture, winter wear, blankets) after spying mouse droppings littered over all like black pepper.  The urine-reeking tarp covers squealed as I dumped their scurrying contents onto the driveway, now their final resting place.  Mouse-proof now?  Perhaps.  But upstairs in the hayloft, quiet and order calm me as do the well-stacked boxes, wicker chair seating and of course the amazing sawdust toilet, odor free as ever. 

And Friday it began:  the new house.  Stakes and string and a lot of imagination. 

Tom the builder says Steve will start excavating this Wednesday with concrete poured the following week.  Perhaps.

I’m engaging new life.  Making space for stacks of heating wood (fallen boxelder, willow, elm, oak, apple). Buckthorn met its end through chain saw and the blue dabs of Roundup death.  My sweat-soaked shirt tore down the back as I peeled it off, giving the biting flies quite an opportunity as I muled the spiny buckthorn to a combination brush pile / snow fence.  No more buckthorn on the homesite’s 300’ hedgerow.  I look forward to removing this invasive from the remaining mile and a half of Land hedgerow, unleashing the long-suffocated woodland wildflowers.  

And oh the wildflowers, our prairie, I can’t tell you how I delight in its emergence.  We identified and welcomed three new flowering forbs to our prairie family: rosin weed, downy sunflower and starry campion.  Four years since we planted their birthing seeds, they awe me with their patience.

And here I am, maintaining what matters.  Blog.  E-mail.  Text.  Phone.  Digitally shrunk distance.

The bridge of crossing is long.  Yet, right now, as I gaze over the bed out the window where the corn is but the floor of the sky, I can’t imagine feeling more blessed.  Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. 

Rah-dur!

Ready or Not...

Indeed I'm ready. 

Ready to leave old job.  Last check came from Medtronic yesterday:  the big severance payout buying me 17 weeks off the merry-go-round. 

Ready to leave old house.  De-stagers came Friday, carried away all the rented furniture.   Naked floor and walls.  This sunroom echoes like a tunnel.  Can’t wait to close the sale on Monday, 1 Aug, 1pm.

Ready to enter new house.  Itching to break ground, scrape dirt under my nails, get the House the Land Built built.  Tom, our builder, called with great news:  downsizing chopped $35K off the price, enabling us to be debt free when all is said and done.    And zero debt means less time “earning bread”  and more time engaging new life.

Ready to engage new life.  I can’t wait to step out my cabin front door, rub Savannah the Wonder Dog’s belly, walk down the hill, across Calico Hill Road and do land work.  Chainsaw and stack deadfall for winter splitting.  Girdle boxelder saplings.  Build a shelter where I can settle down and finish my book.

Ready to maintain what matters.  My friend, Missy, asked another good question, “How are you going to keep in touch with me?”  Decided to schedule a monthly Mike in Minneapolis day.   Maybe take my friendships to a new level:  make homebrew, turn wood bowls, play pinochle, watch Lord of the Rings until 2:30 AM.

In whatever way you pray or lend energy or send good thoughts and wishes, I ask for such now as I leap off the cliff. 

Rah-dur!