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A BOY’S MAGIC

I considered the fact that it was probably unnatural—not without risk or a price.  Perhaps, too, it was a desecration—a soiling of memories which were all that were left of those times to me now.  The bunk bed crouched in the small room of the cabin like a tubular artifact—naked and without bedding.  It was there as it was in 1937 when my Grandpa, laughing at the Devil of the Great Depression, bought the cabin and a 19-foot, wood lathe, Alexandria boat from the Mohagen’s in Elbow Lake—all for $200.  My dad slept in the top bunk as a boy—his brother, my uncle Bill, on the bottom bunk.  Decades later, I slept on the top bunk and my brother on the bottom—over seventy years of dreams in that bunk bed—boy dreams.

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t go to our cabin in Minnesota.  As a young boy, I always slept in the top bunk in the cabin, over my older brother.  The open window would usher in the smells and sounds of . . . magic.  Balsam and birch—the smell of the lake—loons, lonely in the middle of the night, crying—their grief carried over the water—spring peepers shrilling in the voyageur’s night.

The cabin was a comfortable outpost in a land of true magic—a boy’s magic.  At the cabin, everything was set right in a boy’s life.  There was no anxiety, no fear, no embarrassment—not notes from teachers and no screwing up of the instrumental duet with your brother at the church Christmas celebration—there was nothing but . . . magic.  So, sleepy-eyed and tired from catching frogs and garter snakes—trapping chipmunks, finding treasures of glacial rock and catching huge flat bluegills on a line-wrapped stick held over the gunwale of the boat, I would go to sleep the sleep of a boy—an innocent sleep made magic from the sounds and smells of the forest, fields and lake.

The peace and wonderment of sleeping at the cabin was only bettered by waking up.  I remember the soft clunking and rustling sounds that tickled and soothed—coffee being made, popping bacon fat in the skillet.  I didn’t come awake at the cabin—I soothingly glided toward wakefulness.  Waking up in the cabin, I was smiling before opening my eyes.  This was a blessed place and the boy received fully of those blessings.  The quilts were warm as I would snuggle into them against the cool breeze that filtered into the cabin through the open window.  The crows cawed in a distant field.  Loons claimed their nesting areas in the early morning.  Sweet smells of bushes and wildflowers hung in the morning air.

Forty-eight years after my last repose and visit to the nighttime land of cabin magic, I looked at the bunk bed, considering whether it was right for me to sleep there again at my age.  After the insanity of my college years and the years spent in impossibly wild places doing impossibly wild things, I had renewed my pilgrimages to the cabin.  However, I had given up the bunk bed—as a man, I had put away childish things.  I slept in a tent pitched beside the cabin—in the beds of SUV’s and even in a metal storage shed we humorously referred to as my cabin.  Most often I slept in my bag in the open air—looking at the stars—no confinement as my nightmares would fail to . . . trap me. 

My father never understood.  My brother who had never been burned raw by the real world, never quit going to the cabin—never quit sleeping in the bunk bed—down below—the top bunk empty as a shrine.

I studied the top bunk and its all-too-familiar surroundings.  The pull-chain light bulb—the wooden hamper that was used not for clothing and laundry, but for a step up onto the top bunk.  I studied the room and bunk and was uneasy at its lure and apparent benign comfort.

For years now the Gabelhouse men came in May to open the cabin and back again in September to close it.  The advent of my father’s aging prompted us to put this annual ceremony in place, as he was unable to complete some of the heavy lifting—putting in, taking out the dock—securing furniture—lifting and toting.  There were six of us Gabelhouse men, at first—my grandpa, my uncle, my dad, my brother, nephew and I. 

My grandpa died a decade ago, just after one last visit to the cabin.  From beside the cabin, and as a talisman of sorts, I had gathered an egg-sized, rounded piece of glacial granite, smoothed by water and ice.  Grandpa had taught me the fine craft of rock hunting, and I thought it fitting he should carry a rock from the cabin with him to the grave.  I remember going to the coffin and slipping the rock past the skirting and releasing it, thinking it would land softly on the silk bedding.  The soft and silky material of a coffin is only for show and I learned there’s little below the skirting on the box, as the rock loudly dropped onto the metal floor of the sarcophagus.  Only a few startled glares were sent my way as I innocently walked away from grandpa—mission accomplished.

My Uncle Bill had died next.  He had a favorite fishing hole about two hundred yards from the cabin—off from the clearing and a triumvirate clump of birch.  He said that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and his ashes dumped into his fishing hole.  My father was having a private conversation with his brother as he dumped the ashes into the water on Stalker Lake.  I had driven the funeral barge of a pontoon and anchored the craft.  With a tape of Uncle Bill’s favorite singer, Gene Autry singing Happy Trails, I guided the pontoon boat back to the dock with tears streaming down my face.  A loon announced the dedication of a life . . . to life.

Now, as a middle aged man, I contemplated the properness of invading—reentering a land of magic—a boy’s magic—rudely lugging with me the chains of adulthood into a place of purity.

“Go ahead, your brother isn’t going to be here for a couple more days.  Sleep here—don’t sleep outside in that goddamned tent,” said my dad, sensibly.

I lamely complained about not wanting to put new bedding on the mattress, and not wishing to disturb him with my night terrors.

“Just put your sleeping bag up there.  I couldn’t hear you screamin’ anyway, when I’m out there on the front porch.  Just sleep there,” coaxed my dad.

I submitted with trepidation, throwing my down sleeping bag over the bare mattress.  I had hauled my ass up on the top bunk and lay there, studying the dark, aged beams above me.  I reached down and pulled up the window, propping it open with the same piece of broom handle that I had fifty years ago.  I lay there not sure of what I was waiting for.

The lilac blooming upwind of the outhouse wafted scent into the room—mixed with that sweet-gum smell of birch and northern hardwoods.  There was little wind as my eyes grew heavy.  A loon provided its bitter-sweet lullaby and I fell asleep in the top bunk of my youth.  I slept soundly without even the hint of a nightmare.  I slept like a young boy, free from the weight of life.

I had a smile on my face before I opened my eyes.  I heard the cacophony of wild bird songs ringing in the open window—wrens, orioles, the chitter of nut hatches and downy wood peckers.  I skimmed on that thin, liquid layer between sleep and wakefulness.  I skimmed, glided, and magically I could discern no relativity of . . .  age.  Since I was laying still, comfortably within the down bag, the sounds of magic softly entering my ears—I had no sense of . . . age—none whatsoever.  There is no other way to put it.  I was unsure and uncaring if I was really ten or just remembering what it was like to be ten.  I didn’t know—didn’t care.

The part of me that wasn’t ten made a note to remember this, and I did, though poorly.  I heard the same soft morning sounds of my youth as my dad made coffee and started to fry the bacon.  I luxuriated in this escape into a . . . boy’s magic.  Again, I was invincible, unfettered by a lifetime of victories and defeats.  I lived those moments innocently and was again, a ten year old boy who was in his place of true magic—old magic.

As soon as I began to lower myself off the top bunk, I knew that I was not ten years old.  I felt every one of my fifty-five winters—knees burning, shoulders and elbows aching.  Yet, despite that, and even now, as I write this down at the cabin’s dinner table, I hear, and even feel the echo of a strong magic—a boy’s magic.

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