Camelot
When I was two years old, my father (a university professor) was paging through the classifieds one Sunday morning, and came upon an ad: Island for sale. Five acres, one cabin with contents, fishing boat. Borden Lake, Garrison, Minnesota. He rang his friend Rollin. "Turn to page 23 of the classifieds -- do you see it? Island for sale."
Mr Clarke was a soldier in World War One, the Great War, the War to End All Wars. He served his time and returned home to Depression, hunger, want. His army time taught him some practical skills, though, and he was one of the lucky ones, finding a job working for the railroads, who owned most of the prime timber land in northern Minnesota. Although he didn't go to Washington with the Bonus Army, veterans fighting for their bonus payments, he voted for Roosevelt to oust that self-satisfied prat Hoover. In time, the veterans' protests paid off, and in 1936 he got his bonus check, a tidy little sum.
As the first growth pine forests were lumbered off, the railroad began selling its land in central and northern Minnesota. Though having advanced into a desk job down in the Cities in the intervening years, Mr Clarke remembered how beautiful some of the land was up north -- maple and birch succeeding the logged pine over clean, loon-guarded lakes teeming with crappie and walleye. He took his Bonus money and bought himself five acres of paradise, an Island shaped like a sleeping dragon in the middle of spring-fed water. He and his friends, his little boys helping out carrying nails and cool beers, built a little cabin with honey-pine trunk beams. Glacial granite dragged from the other end of the Island served for the chimney, and sleeping platforms with catwalk grew from the roof. Mrs Clarke insisted on the pine-post-and-hemp-rope handholds -- the boys were monkeys, but it was a good 8-foot drop.
They called it Sunob, which is Bonus spelled backwards, and it was a place of sunshine and love. As the boys grew and outgrew their clothes, Mrs Clark made crazy quilts of the worn out scraps, and sewed sailboats and fish onto muslin curtains. Bright Fiestaware dishes adorned the pine picnic table alongside the vase of black-eyed susans. They added a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom with pine bunkbeds so they could put the boys to bed and stay up to play pinochle and swap fish tales into the night.
The boys grew, and then grew up, and then grew apart; Joe moving to Iowa for 3M and Steve ending up in Tennessee after leaving the army. They came back for the funeral, of course, but afterwards rarely returned, preferring to send Mrs Clarke the Christmas ticket (first train and later airplane) to come to each of them, alternate years. After a while, Mrs Clarke realized even with the help of that nice Mr Allen who ran the resort on the mainland, she couldn't keep up with Sunob. Besides, the place breathed her old man; visiting became if anything harder as time went on and his presence in the rest of her life faded.
Island for sale. No going back now, she decided to sell the lot -- Island, cabin, boat, bunkbeds, crazy quilts and Fiestaware -- the whole of it. Island for sale.
Less than a year after JFK was shot, the October wind was crisp, crackling like the leaves underfoot, as we clambered out of the fishing boat onto the shore. My brother Kennedy was four weeks old, his first-ever road trip coming up highway 69 from Anoka through a nursery rhyme journey: Zimmerman, Princeton, Pease, Milaca, Onamia, Garrison. The names rumbled like cobblestones under the old Ford's tires as we made our way north. Clare and Teresa Allen had met us at Allen's resort and drove us over to see the place. It had stormed earlier, but the sun was out now glowing on the water, the trees sparkling with autumn colour and leftover rain. Climbing out of the boat, we just knew. Just knew.
Rollin and my Dad talked to their banks, arranged the second mortgages, made an offer. Talking to Clare, he let slip about the Other Visitor, the doctor from Rochester, who had been asking Clare about the resort business, sounding him out as to whether clearing the trees and selling small cabin plots on the Island would be a go-er. "Break it up into plots? Tear down the cabin? Cut down the trees? He can't; he mustn't!"
My father called on Mrs Clarke, and listened while she talked about Sunob, about her husband, her boys, about the Island and what it meant. He looked at her and she understood that he understood. "We won't change it. We will love it and let it fill us and us fill it with more lore and magic and memories. It will become more what it is, not less, if you sell it to us" are what his eyes seemed to say.
"Oh well, what's five thousand more anyway. I'm old; my boys don't need the money. Yes, Mr Wright, Mr Norris, the Island is yours. Keep her well."
And that is how we came to have the Island. But of course, my father and Rollin being who they were, and it being 1964, she was Sunob no more.
Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for happily-ever-aftering. We called her Camelot.
Mr Clarke was a soldier in World War One, the Great War, the War to End All Wars. He served his time and returned home to Depression, hunger, want. His army time taught him some practical skills, though, and he was one of the lucky ones, finding a job working for the railroads, who owned most of the prime timber land in northern Minnesota. Although he didn't go to Washington with the Bonus Army, veterans fighting for their bonus payments, he voted for Roosevelt to oust that self-satisfied prat Hoover. In time, the veterans' protests paid off, and in 1936 he got his bonus check, a tidy little sum.
As the first growth pine forests were lumbered off, the railroad began selling its land in central and northern Minnesota. Though having advanced into a desk job down in the Cities in the intervening years, Mr Clarke remembered how beautiful some of the land was up north -- maple and birch succeeding the logged pine over clean, loon-guarded lakes teeming with crappie and walleye. He took his Bonus money and bought himself five acres of paradise, an Island shaped like a sleeping dragon in the middle of spring-fed water. He and his friends, his little boys helping out carrying nails and cool beers, built a little cabin with honey-pine trunk beams. Glacial granite dragged from the other end of the Island served for the chimney, and sleeping platforms with catwalk grew from the roof. Mrs Clarke insisted on the pine-post-and-hemp-rope handholds -- the boys were monkeys, but it was a good 8-foot drop.
They called it Sunob, which is Bonus spelled backwards, and it was a place of sunshine and love. As the boys grew and outgrew their clothes, Mrs Clark made crazy quilts of the worn out scraps, and sewed sailboats and fish onto muslin curtains. Bright Fiestaware dishes adorned the pine picnic table alongside the vase of black-eyed susans. They added a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom with pine bunkbeds so they could put the boys to bed and stay up to play pinochle and swap fish tales into the night.
The boys grew, and then grew up, and then grew apart; Joe moving to Iowa for 3M and Steve ending up in Tennessee after leaving the army. They came back for the funeral, of course, but afterwards rarely returned, preferring to send Mrs Clarke the Christmas ticket (first train and later airplane) to come to each of them, alternate years. After a while, Mrs Clarke realized even with the help of that nice Mr Allen who ran the resort on the mainland, she couldn't keep up with Sunob. Besides, the place breathed her old man; visiting became if anything harder as time went on and his presence in the rest of her life faded.
Island for sale. No going back now, she decided to sell the lot -- Island, cabin, boat, bunkbeds, crazy quilts and Fiestaware -- the whole of it. Island for sale.
Less than a year after JFK was shot, the October wind was crisp, crackling like the leaves underfoot, as we clambered out of the fishing boat onto the shore. My brother Kennedy was four weeks old, his first-ever road trip coming up highway 69 from Anoka through a nursery rhyme journey: Zimmerman, Princeton, Pease, Milaca, Onamia, Garrison. The names rumbled like cobblestones under the old Ford's tires as we made our way north. Clare and Teresa Allen had met us at Allen's resort and drove us over to see the place. It had stormed earlier, but the sun was out now glowing on the water, the trees sparkling with autumn colour and leftover rain. Climbing out of the boat, we just knew. Just knew.
Rollin and my Dad talked to their banks, arranged the second mortgages, made an offer. Talking to Clare, he let slip about the Other Visitor, the doctor from Rochester, who had been asking Clare about the resort business, sounding him out as to whether clearing the trees and selling small cabin plots on the Island would be a go-er. "Break it up into plots? Tear down the cabin? Cut down the trees? He can't; he mustn't!"
My father called on Mrs Clarke, and listened while she talked about Sunob, about her husband, her boys, about the Island and what it meant. He looked at her and she understood that he understood. "We won't change it. We will love it and let it fill us and us fill it with more lore and magic and memories. It will become more what it is, not less, if you sell it to us" are what his eyes seemed to say.
"Oh well, what's five thousand more anyway. I'm old; my boys don't need the money. Yes, Mr Wright, Mr Norris, the Island is yours. Keep her well."
And that is how we came to have the Island. But of course, my father and Rollin being who they were, and it being 1964, she was Sunob no more.
Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for happily-ever-aftering. We called her Camelot.