Here's me playing with a tomahawk at age 11, not long after my parents moved our family from the city to a more rural setting. As this picture suggests, I was a somewhat wild kid. I climbed up cliffs and jumped off of them into the St. Croix River. I hunted animals and cooked them over campfires. I quit school after grade 8 to teach myself. When I was 15, I went to live in a lean-to on a little island in the river.
Towards the end of May, I told my parents I was going camping and just never came back. Working at a canoe rental called Merrill's Landing in Taylors Falls, MN, I had access to a canoe whenever I wanted one. Loading one of these aluminum canoes with supplies, I paddled up the river to a wooded island that was maybe the size of a football field. There, I made a shelter by stringing a tarp up between trees.
I slept on this island until September, paddling into town most days to clean Coffee Talk, the local coffee shop, or to serve customers at Merrill's Landing. Most nights were spent drinking wine and eating crayfish I caught in the river. Usually, I was alone, but not always.
On several occasions, other kids from town would find a boat and join me on the island. Sometimes, they camped out and we all got drunk together. Other times, my island guests were local bullies who trashed the place and beat me up. And for three weeks, a mentally ill homeless man came and stayed on the island. He was super weird and probably dangerous, but he was always nice to me, even if he didn't know how to bury his poop like a civilized person.
There was also a gang of meth heads from the city that showed up and left garbage everywhere at the end of the summer. Small towns being what they are, I got blamed for this. To this day, there are probably townsfolk who still think that I was responsible for the trash. They were idiots then and time rarely improves that condition.
My most vivid memories of this era are of little things. The island was covered with tiny toads that liked to hop around after dark. There was a beaver who would get ornery whenever I got too close to its house. The river was often blanketed in thick fog. Oftentimes, I'd go out into the middle of the river in the middle of the night and just sit there, being brushed by passing bats. Once, during a severe thunderstorm, I sat, dry in my lean-to, watching a houseboat sink on the other side of the river.
When the weather turned that year, I moved into a studio apartment instead of returning to my parents' house. My life was a dumpster fire for the next several years, but it helped that I could look back at my time on the island and recall the tenuous serenity I had found there. Later in life, I'd spend months at a stretch camped out in some place or another. But I have yet to find as sweet a setup as I had on that little island so many years ago.
Read my novels:
Check out the comic I wrote:
