Four or Four Hundred
By Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad
We had a few hours inside the evacuation zone after our escort in by the Sheriff’s department. We weren’t going to save our log cabin near the Boundary Waters. We were going to decide what parts of it we could save.
Since buying the cabin in 2020, we'd watched drought dry the forest and spruce budworm kill thousands of balsams, leaving gray trunks standing like matchsticks. When lightning ignited several fires after the July 6 storm, the Camp Fire, among others, exploded across that waiting fuel. “The Fernberg,” as the locals referred to the road, is the only way in and out, and it was closed.
Rose and Ray Thielbar, the couple who built our cabin and lived there for thirty years before us, wrote a memoir called Rooted in Rocky Soil. When we bought the cabin in 2020, someone called it our little "slice of heaven." I don't think any of us imagined that one day we'd have to decide what part of that heaven we could carry away.
My husband and son were evacuated, as were all people on the Fernberg the morning after the Camp Fire raged through the forest toward our wilderness retreat.
Since the evacuation, we’ve been in St. Paul, glued to all the information sources we can find regarding the “lightning fires.”
We didn’t have to explain why we were going back when we learned of the opportunity to be escorted to our place for just a couple of hours. Not sure if we could have. There were practical reasons—important papers, a few meaningful handmade items— but none of them justified the urgency we felt.
We drove four hours back to Ely, MN, and were escorted through the checkpoint closed to everyone else.
It was a beautiful day, clear skies, and a light breeze. If it weren’t for the hint of smoke in the air and the planes carrying water overhead, it would be hard to believe that just north of us the fires were violently taking the land. As we crossed Garden Park Bridge, the officer turned on his emergency lights to indicate that we were allowed to pass.
Once up the road and into our cabin, we stood, having to decide what to carry out should the cabin not carry on. Four items or four hundred. How do you choose when all the parts seem to make up the whole? For several moments I sat in the armchair my husband and I carried together down the street in St. Paul from an estate sale specifically for this spot. It felt like taking anything was surrendering to the fire, even inviting it. Fire, I realize, does not wait to be invited. Also, nothing about leaving everything behind proved our love of the place.
In canoe country, every portage teaches a lesson akin to grief: you can’t carry everything. You distinguish what is essential, what will allow you to carry on. Standing in our cabin, the lesson became larger than canoe packs. We couldn’t carry the handmade rug we loved, the chair from the estate sale, the newly enlarged windows that framed the lake and its surrounding aspen, birch, and pines. We couldn’t carry the wild animals, the lazy afternoons on the porch, or the moments snuggling on the couch. We could only carry what fit in our arms and in our truck.
Rooted in Rocky Soil. I used to think that Rose and Ray Thielbar’s book title described the cabin built on ledge rock and the people who built it. Now I think it belongs to all of us who have temporarily inhabited the wilderness and were transformed by it.
The fire might consume what is above ground, but roots of all sorts will hold on to the rocks and grow again whether I carry away four or four hundred.