Better than a microwaved gas station sandwich

Every summer, it’s as if the Fourth of July arrives earlier and earlier. It always seems to be such a harried time as I continue to make long lists of summer projects, which don’t get done as fast as I expect, or at all, in some cases. A new garden over here, some fresh paint over there, and so on. Maybe this all translates into the fact that I am getting older and slowing down. Well, I rebuke that thought! I like to push myself, I guess.

This year I really complicated my holiday week when I decided to have a garage sale on Friday, July 3rd. I was up late for days getting ready for the sale. Something’s gotta give right? Well, it was the potato salad, because I broke down and got some in a plastic tub from the grocery store, doctoring it with fresh herbs from my garden. My traditional Fourth menu was bound to suffer with this cumbersome undertaking hastening into view. The afternoon before the sale, my teenage son, Keaton and his girlfriend Ashley, exclaimed to me in horror when they came through the front door, “Mom, what gives, its almost July Fourth and the porch isn’t bunted yet?” I could have snapped, “Bunt it yourself,” but I am the bunter, and always will be. To have gotten so far into the holiday week without a dash of red, white and blue to be seen was out of the ordinary they said. I knew it was true, and for me it’s important to appease most of these expectations for them, and for myself, even when I am not 100 percent gung ho. I abruptly bunted. I set down my garage sale price stickies and accomplished this fundamental task!

So, with post-bunt satisfaction, I tackled the sale. Ah, success it was!  A combination of very social, some nice extra cash and that well purged feeling that comes from trimming the load. I retired that night with sore feet and plans for July Fourth still up in the air. My companion Dennis and I had sort of planned to just take off in the car and go here and there. It was a need to break from the usual holiday structure. We headed down to Virginia for breakfast and discovered Kunnari’s restaurant wasn’t open. I wasn’t surprised about that, so we headed west with no destination yet in mind. I considered heading to Side Lake to see my friend Mona riding in the parade as this year’s Grand Marshal. I wanted calm, as I reaffirmed to myself, no parade. So I told Dennis we should turn around and go east, to Brimson! He said, “I was thinking Brimson myself!” So we spun the car, and headed east, still looking for a restaurant.

In Gilbert, the streets were quiet except for a few candy wrappers drifting here and there in the gutters from the parade the night before. The cafes, I think, numbering two, were closed, so we checked out Biwabik, and sadly, they don’t even have a cafe operating anymore. In Aurora, the main street was still blocked off from all the festivities the night before. I grimaced and said, “Is a gas station sandwich our destiny?” We laughed and headed to Hoyt Lakes and to our amazement, Vaughn’s restaurant was open, so we went in and sat down. It was very busy with one waitress trying to handle the workload. We sat and noticed nobody had been served food yet, a bad sign if you want to do something besides sit on a vinyl chair all day, so we opted to head to the grocery store to avoid gas station sandwiches. We bought some basic items, cheese sticks, turkey slices, fruit and that was just fine. On to Brimson.

I always like traveling the backroads, anywhere, but since I had grown up in Hoyt Lakes I just like to get down there on those particular area roads, from time to time. We ended up taking Highway 110 east out of Hoyt Lakes, to County Road 15. It was a clear, calm day and the daisies and hawkweed were bright along the roadsides. We stayed the course, heading east, with no parades, super soakers or Tootsie Rolls in sight, and then I spotted the old Toimi School on the right-hand side of the road. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and I had forgotten about this charming old white schoolhouse, with its brick chimney, double gabled front entrances and paned glass windows lining the walls.

On this day, even in rural Toimi, the American flag was waving against the blue sky, and the front entrance doors were wide open to welcome visitors. An open house sign was posted in the front yard near the white fence which surrounds the grassy lawn. Dragonflies bobbed along in the warm sun. There were a few other curious people who had discovered the school that day and had been lured inside like we were. They were talking to a volunteer standing by an information table. I thought it was wonderful for this man to have given up his Fourth of July, possibly his potato salad as well, in order to be at this place, so that I could go inside.

I immediately glanced around the tin-tile-sided room with its high ceiling and hard wood floor. There were plenty of old items from bygone days on display, the old wood desks, an open wall cupboard with children’s drinking cups on hooks, a teacher’s desk, and the chalkboard staple. All the things were as you’d imagine you’d find in an old schoolhouse and more. In an adjoining room a wood map case hung on the wall and there were old lesson books on shelves and even a large floor abacus. I carefully studied the items and was so happy to have come across them on this particular day. In the far corner was the teacher’s apartment. It was simply a room containing modest furnishings including a single bed, travel trunk and a wood cook stove.

Because I have lived a rustic lifestyle in past years, I began to imagine what it would have been like to be a school teacher in Toimi. It most likely would have been a lone woman. Days would have been long for sure, particularly in the winter. She would have risen during the night to feed the stove to keep the heat steady. Then she’d need to shovel walkways to the outhouse and clear entryways for the children who would be arriving in the morning. Water would have been hauled from a pump for cooking and washing, I imagined. Hard work with plenty of discipline and responsibility, but very rewarding too. 

We learned that the school had been built in 1913 to serve grades K-8. To continue one’s education beyond grade 8 meant traveling all the way to Two Harbors. Prior to the construction of the school, children were taught in the homes of local families. As attendance grew to as many as 100 children, an addition was added.  Then in 1942, with a continued decline in enrollment, the school closed its doors. Following its closure, the building served other functions until 1991 when the non-profit Toimi School Community Center Committee thoughtfully took over restoring the structure to its original state, with the help of grant monies from the IRRRB and other sources.

After looking at the old photographs on display and feeling satisfied with what we had learned about the school, we decided to move on. We headed south on County Road 151 toward historic Hugo’s Bar in Brimson, another classic old business with plenty of stories of its own. We arrived at Hugo’s just in time to discover Market Day was in progress. It’s a weekly mid-summer Saturday morning event here, this cheery gathering of local vendors in a small field, selling products or displaying talents. A boy was standing in the center playing his fiddle and providing a very rural Fourth of July atmosphere. We shared a small pizza and visited with the locals in Hugo’s while enjoying a cold one. When we finished we got back in the car to head back to Ely up Highway 2.

It was, for the most part, a day of non-traditional celebration, but by ten o’clock p.m. I was seated on the porch of the Ely Bowling Center with friends, watching the brilliant display of fireworks and greatly appreciating the freedom I have to be able to come and go as I please, to be able to jump in a car and drive to a place like Toimi to visit an old schoolhouse, and then end up safely back home, watching fireworks with friends.

Lynn O’Hara can be reached at scarlet@frontiernet.net.