Shelter Read Free Page A

exhausted.
    Dad had flown during WWII as an officer in the army air force, a navigator on bombing missions with targets in the Asian Pacific. I know very little about his war years except that he was based in New Guinea, where his unit hired local aboriginals, paying them nickels a day to clean and cook and do their laundry, a brief stint of luxury Dad often fondly recalled when folding his boxers on our dining room table. He didn’t talk about the war, and I don’t think he ever flew again afterward; whether intentionally or not, I can’t know. Looking down over the green wilds he once paddled, I imagined he might have made an exception to see his old stomping grounds from the air.
    Mel banked the plane toward the area where the storm blew down old-growth pine over 140,000 acres. I took photographs as we skimmed islands and broad hillsides of flattened timber, tinder for potential firestorms. As far as we could squint, the landscape looked like sculpted shag strewn with toothpicks. Forthe first time during our flight, Mel had nothing to say. The devastation made me think of bombed cathedrals.
    After we swept back over spared portions of forest, Mel’s mood lightened, and he began rattling off regional lore in his singsong Minnesota accent, saying “yaaa” for yes and “dose” for those, dialog from
Fargo
at double speed. A favorite anecdote concerned the 1968 Olympic hockey team, comprised of Minnesota and Massachusetts boys who could barely understand one another for their conflicting accents. A few were confused enough to ask why, if this was the U.S. team, did they have teammates from foreign countries?
    Then he told the story about the bear that broke into his house, ate a pack of cigarettes, and drank most of a twelve-pack of Pabst. When Mel’s wife came home from book club, she heard snoring and Leno in the living room as usual and went to bed. After she and Mel were both roused by a clatter, they interrupted the bear just as he was finishing up a pound of ARCO coffee. Looking around at the mess, Mel’s wife picked up the closest thing, a Dustbuster, and turned it on the bear, yelling, “I already have a husband!” The coffee and the fright were enough to loosen the bear’s considerable bowels so that, as it fled, it left a wake of rank stew textured with undigested Parliament filters.
    “Is that true?” I asked.
    “Bears are afraid of Dustbusters? Goddamn right they are.”
    With exaggeration thick as pine pitch, Mel told more stories, and I skeptically jotted down his “facts.” Later, when I double-checked, I found him fairly accurate, although the leading cause of death among the fur-trading voyageurs was
not
constipation, as he insisted.
    Mel said something about swans, but my life vest had ridden up to dislodge my headset. I nodded, thinking he would show me some. He added something else, but each word was wrapped in static. Mel gave me a thumbs-up and we banked heavenward, a slow roller coaster climb, steep enough to press my belly button spineward. I idly examined the underside of a single low cloud, wondering if that was our destination, if the swans were above it, though surely we were too high for birds? Once I fumbled my headset back into place, I pressed my microphone button to ask, but the plane suddenly roared. We swooped in a sudden but graceful arc. The sky disappeared as we tipped below the horizon, and I was jolted forward, my armpits creased by harness straps. Mel didn’t mean swans; he meant
swan dive,
though our trajectory wasn’t very swanlike, more like a hawk aiming for the world’s last mouse. I clamped my mouth and squinted, trying to keep my eyes and Cheerios in place. As we sped toward jagged rock and pine, I understood that the little plane would barely make a pinprick on the earth after the crash, barely a ripple should we hit water. The earth heals quickly here; brush grows over charred soil, swamps suck debris deep, dark waters draw wet curtains over whatever