dam dunhills

One summer, about twenty years ago, my brother and I drove down to Florida from West Virginia in my white VW Beetle. I was too young to have my driver's license at the time, so he did all of the driving. We bought a carton of Dunhill cigarettes in North Carolina on the way down. Cigarettes were cheap in North Carolina, and we liked Dunhills. Neither of us smoked habitually, it was more like a hobby to us. It seemed pretty cool to pull out the distinctive red and gold flat box of Dunhills when we wanted to have a cigarette at a party or club. A carton of cigarettes was contraband in our house, so we had to keep them hidden. The carton lasted a long time.
In fact, we still had a pack or two left around Thanksgiving when I flew up to Wisconsin to go hunting with my grandad, so I took a pack with me. I flew into Milwaukee, and grandad picked me up and took me to his house. We packed his car and left early in the morning to drive to the cabin. It was almost exactly 300 miles from my grandad's house to the hunting cabin so it took about six hours to get there. There were already a few hunters who were friends of my grandad at the cabin when we arrived.
There was a lot of cooking, bringing in firewood, fetching water from a hole chopped in the ice on the lake, and even hunting going on, so I kind of forgot about the cigarettes, and hadn't had much opportunity to smoke them anyway. With six or eight people in a small cabin in the woods, there was always someone around.
My grandad and I ended up staying a few days longer than the rest, so after they left, I had a bit more time to myself. I remembered the cigarettes, but there wouldn't have been much time to smoke them, so I didn't open the pack. I thought of something better to do with them. My friend Brent and I always talked about going up to the cabin one summer, and I figured I could hide the cigarettes and we could smoke them when we came up in the summer. While I was at it, I figured I could hide some alcohol too. There was a bottle of Kahlua that one of the hunters had left behind, but it wasn't the most appealing thing to me and I wasn't sure how well it would stand up to the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer. My grandad had brought a couple of bottles of vodka, and there had already been some there when we got there, so one of the bottles was still unopened. I figured he wasn't keeping careful track of the booze, so I took the unopened bottle and set it aside. If he said anything, I could "look for it" and "find" it later, but he didn't seem to notice. I thought carefully about where to hide it. There was a bunch of junk under the beds, but some things like the boat's oars were stored there, so it seemed likely someone might find something hidden there while looking for something else. Pretty much every storage area was like that. We had rummaged around in the attic to find the gasoline lanterns, and looked through the space under the kitchen sink to find containers for water. I didn't think anywhere outside would work because of the weather and animals.
There was an old gas refrigerator in the kitchen. It hadn't worked in years, but people would sometimes put ice in it and keep food in it to keep it from the mice. I noticed there was an access panel on the bottom of it, and when the access panel was opened, there was a small area with another panel, up and towards the back. There was just enough space next to the refrigerator parts to accommodate one bottle of vodka and one pack of Dunhill cigarettes. Actually, I could have probably fit two more packs of Dunhills in there, but all I had was one. So when grandad was taking one of his many naps, I put the bottle of vodka and the pack of Dunhills in that space under the refrigerator. I was kind of nervous when we were getting ready to leave that grandad would ask where his other bottle of vodka was, but if he noticed, he didn't say anything.
It turns out that Brent and I did not go up to the cabin that next summer. In fact, we didn't go the summer after that either, or any summer after that, or ever. So we never had a chance to sit at the table in the shack late at night knocking back vodka shots and smoking fancy (if somewhat stale) english cigarettes while listening to some distant AM radio station.
About six years after I had put the contraband under the refrigerator, I graduated from college. Right after graduating, Jörg, Paul and I drove up to the cabin for a bit of rustic recreation. When I went into the kitchen after we arrived, I saw the refrigerator and remembered what I had put there years earlier. The bottom panel of the refrigerator wasn't completely closed, and when I opened the interior panel, to my surprise, the bottle of vodka was gone. The pack of cigarettes was still there, along with what looked like the remnants of a mouse nest. It was a mystery to me how someone found that vodka. Well, maybe not so much of a mystery. But it was a mystery why they didn't take the cigarettes too. Well, maybe that's not too much of a mystery either, maybe they didn't smoke. So maybe instead of it being a mystery, I was just curious as to who found the vodka and why they found it, and why they left the cigarettes. But it didn't really matter.
Jörg and Paul liked the story and we decided we would ritually smoke some of the cigarettes in Brent's honor, even though none of us really smoked. The next day, it was pretty cold, even though it was May. We lit a fire in the wood stove and it made the cabin nice and warm. Towards midday, we decided we'd go out on the lake and smoke. We dressed up warmly and got in the boat and rowed out onto the lake. I told them how somewhere up the creek at the head of the lake, there was usually a beaver dam. Jörg had never seen a beaver in the wild and was quite interested, so we rowed up to the head of the lake, and started following the creek as it wound through the swamp. We finally got to the first beaver dam, beyond which the creek widened into a fairly large beaver pond, but we didn't see any beavers. Jörg wanted to continue further upstream. I didn't really want to, but he seemed kind of excited about it, and volunteered to pull the boat over the dam.
We brought the boat alongside the dam, and Paul and Jörg held it steady while I stepped onto the dam. It was pretty solid, but the water was trickling over parts of it, so my feet got a bit wet as I stood on the dam waiting for Jörg and Paul to pull the boat up over the dam into the pond. They got it over, and we got back in the boat. We rowed to the head of the beaver pond, and as we started going further up the creek, a misty rain started to fall. We all had damp feet, and were starting to feel pretty cold, so we decided to turn around and head back. When we got to the middle of the beaver pond, the light rain had stopped, and we decided to break out the Dunhills. It felt almost ceremonial as I tore open the plastic, lifted the lid and pulled out the gold foil that covers the cigarettes. We each took a cigarette. Everything was pretty damp from the misting we had received, so it was very difficult to get a match lit. It seemed like we might run out of matches and have no way to light our cigarettes, which would have made it a bit of an anticlimax, but with just a few matches left, we finally got one of the Dunhills lit. We lit the others from that one, and as we smoked, the light rain started again. That made it feel even colder, and we were all starting to shiver as we finished our cigarettes. It was really nice to be floating on a beaver pond in the middle of the north woods with a couple of good friends smoking cigarettes, but then the light rain turned into light snow. We could barely believe it, snow in May. But it was the NORTH woods.
We agreed it would be wise to head back immediately. We rowed to the beaver damn. Jörg said he and Paul could drag the boat over without me having to get out. We were all cold, so they were trying to get the boat over the dam as quickly as possible. Jörg was on the front of the damn, and started pulling the front of the boat, and Paul was pushing the back and it started sliding over, but it must have caught on a stick or something and stopped moving. After some concerted pulling and pushing as I supervised and made suggestions while I tried to maintain my balance, Jörg took a step into the lake for better leverage, and started really pulling. It seemed pretty rash to me for him to step into the water and fully submerge his foot. I thought maybe I should have gotten out of the boat so it would be easier to get it over the damn, but he said, no, don't worry about it, and then he really leaned out to pull with all his strength. Suddenly whatever it was that had caught on the boat broke or slipped free, and the boat plunged forward. I barely kept from falling over with the sudden lurch, and Jörg was in front of the boat pulling it towards himself. He managed to step backwards, to keep from being pushed under the boat, but he was stepping backwards into very cold waist high water.
There was a moment of stunned silence as we took in the situation. Paul was standing on the beaver dam, I was sitting in the boat, and Jörg was standing in the lake. One of us asked if Jörg was okay. I don't remember his response but it indicated that he wasn't injured and we should get going, posthaste. He pushed the boat against the dam as Paul got in, and then we steadied it as he clambered back onto the dam and stepped into the boat. He announced that he was going to row back because the activity would help him stay warm, so he took the middle seat and started rowing. He was rowing a bit too fast for the winding creek, so we kept brushing up against the vegetation on the side, but eventually we made it to open water. There, we could see the cabin off in the distance through the falling snow. A wispy plume of smoke was still coming out of the stove pipe chimney. This was a heartening sight, and Jörg began to row like an olympic rower.
He didn't slow down as we approached the shore, so the boat slide halfway onto the bank. We jumped out and pulled the boat a bit further up and made for the cabin with alacrity. It was such a wonderful feeling to be enveloped by the warm cozy atmosphere of the cabin after the cold of the springtime snow flurry, not to mention the wet feet, or in Jörg's case, the wet lower half of the body. I put a few logs on the fire and opened the flue as Jörg was stripping off his soaking shoes and clothes. Paul and I also took our shoes off and we hung everything around the stove to dry off. For a while we became avid acolytes of the great northern religion of wood stove worship. The falling snow seemed even more beautiful from inside the warm cabin.