The Fantastic True Story of Mrs Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam

Spearing Suckers

Dear Mattie, Nathaniel and Jacob, 

“Amen, brother Ben, shot a rooster, got a hen.” When he came home from Vietnam this priceless adage came with him. He expanded the world for me through his stories from the other side of the world.  “Your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower,”  he would say, quoting some drill sergeant. At nine years old, I was the beneficiary of an education few were privileged to have. Roger had spent one year in South East Asia as a soldier, in a country as unlike Mille Lacs County as anywhere could possibly be. It was a sad time when Roger left for Vietnam but his return was life changing and my ass was never mowed.

When he left we knew enough about war and Vietnam to know that a happy homecoming was not guaranteed. In 1968, our telephone was by our front door in a room with knotty pine walls on all sides. One night it rang when your aunt Charlotte was there to answer. She was told he was on his way home. We nearly danced. 

Jacket purchased in Southeast Asia and given to the author as a gift from his brother after the latter returned home from Vietnam.

He might still have the pictures and slides he showed us after he was home for awhile. My uncles and aunts gathered in our living room to see them. His standing as a war veteran enhanced his status as he spoke of enormous planes, B-52’s, the trucks he drove,  Carl Burris, other people he met, turkey blood soup, and blazing hot weather. For a few months he lived with us again, sheltered by the same roof under which he was raised. My siblings and I were lighter when he returned; Our step had more spring. 

One mile to the west, south of county road 13, Mike Mathison left for Vietnam not long after Roger came home. When his body returned in the summer of 1969, no one had a spring in their step. Mike never saw a happy homecoming or his 19th birthday. Nearly 50 years later while in DC with a group of my Civics students, I found his name on the Vietnam War Memorial. Staring at it with students nearly the same age as Mike when he was killed by small arms fire, I wanted to swear and spit. I kept my thoughts silent. I prayed instead. The average American GI in Vietnam was very young.

Roger’s absence was everywhere on our farm during his year at war. He was not with us when we ate supper around the table, the one we now keep in our farmhouse. Mealtime prayers reminded us one was missing. My dad asked God to bless our food, send rain, forgive our many sins and heal whoever because, as he phrased it, “Thou alone art the good and great physician”. He added requests for Roger’s protection nearly every night. If for a couple of weeks a letter from him was not in our mailbox, fear wedged into dad’s voice during prayer. My mother read the bible and we prayed again - a prayer of thanks for whatever version of meat and potatoes we had for supper. 

For about two hours after supper we milked cows, fed them, and fed their calves. Midwestern dairy barns, with few exceptions, had two levels. Cows stood, held in place by stanchions that fit behind their large ears preventing them from pulling their heads out. The two rows of cows faced opposite directions; Each row had a concrete manger in front of the stanchions from which the cows ate. Behind them was a gutter for manure and urine. Above them was the haybarn - some called it a hay loft. Ours held several tons of baled hay, stored there to feed the cattle through winter. You can see what this looks like if you sneak a peek into Clarence Steeves’ old barn just off County road 13. 

Sometime in 1967, the light bulb in our haybarn burned out.  On winter nights, our haybarn was an 80 foot black chasm. While my siblings and dad milked cows below, it was my job to roll bales of hay I could barely lift, and push through two holes in the floor to the cows below. We called it, “throwing down hay.”  The darkness of the huge space terrified me. Pulling on the twine strings of each bale I was scared senseless of the men in my mind who had crept up the night before and hid there, ready to break my neck or slit my throat to prevent me from exposing their hiding place. 

The light socket holding the impotent lightbulb was attached to the underside of the barn roof about twenty five feet from the floor of the haybarn. A conveyor for moving hay bales from the west end of the haybarn to the east end, made of long, thin, round metal pipes, rested on the large cross planks of the rafters near the peak. None of us could do what Roger did. He could crawl across the barn on the conveyor to a point nearest the socket. Wedging his left foot under one of the metal pipes and stretching his torso and right arm several feet, he could reach the socket. When he returned from VietNam, the dead bulb was waiting for him, a visible symbol that we were waiting for him. His dad was waiting for him. His mother and his siblings were waiting for him. He unscrewed the old bulb, dropped it onto the soft bales below, and replaced it with a new one. The haybarn lit up.

It was about a year later that he took your uncle Kevin and me, late at night, well after dark, to what was then a remote area of the West Branch of the Rum river. On the north side of the 120 acres dad had bought from the Stolsens, not far from where it entered Fred Witte’s pasture, we looked for Suckers. It’s easy to remember it was springtime. One only spears sucker fish in the springtime. 

In the diary my dad kept during World War II, he mentions spearing suckers. Several times. The entries are nearly all from 1940 to 1945 during the month of April in those years. South of the Foley Road and just across the road from his mother’s farm, the West Branch curves to the east and flows over short runs of shallow rapids, great for sucker fish. Sucker fish, like Carp and Red Horse, are commonly called rough fish because they are less desirable for eating than Walleye or Perch or pan fish like Crappie and BlueGill. Rough Fish, especially Suckers, eat whatever lies on the bottom of the river including fecal matter. Suckers have large oval-shaped mouths, well formed for slurping up whatever lies on the riverbed. Rough fish are tolerated; not sought after. 

Peter was a member of one of my Canadian congregations and a lawyer. A medium sized man with above average intensity. Together for breakfast one morning, he borrowed from the low reputation of rough fish to entertain me while waiting for others to join us.. “Arlan,” he said, “what’s the difference between a lawyer and a carp?”  As I looked up from my menu with a blank stare, he served the punchline. “One’s a scum-sucking bottom dweller, the other’s a fish.” His eyes were lit by the satisfaction of a self-assured soul enjoying self-deprecating humor. Canadians eat peameal bacon - a boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal. I decided on it with eggs and french toast before I remembered a seminary professor who once remarked that the ability to poke fun at oneself might be a sign of maturity.

There was a small town barber who gave haircuts to the local Catholic Priest, the Baptist Church Pastor, and a Dutch Calvinist Minister all on the same day. He refused to accept payment from any of them because, as he said, “They were doing the Lord’s work”. The following morning while unlocking his barbershop to open for business, he found a bottle of wine with a thank you note attached from the Priest. Alongside that was a cherry pie, fresh baked by the Baptist pastor’s wife, and another thank you note. On the other side of the front door stood seven more Dutch Calvinist Pastors waiting for a haircut. 

I accepted Peter’s offer to pay for my breakfast.

On April 20, 1943, dad wrote in his diary, “John, Albert, Wayne, Herman and I got 27 fish.” I’m pretty sure the fish were Suckers. Suckers run as soon as the ice is out; Red Horse a little later.

Spearing depends on knowing when the suckers are spawning or “running” as most said; likewise for other rough fish.

Dad’s brother, uncle Albert, was known to stand beside a creek or small river, pause and listen. “I can hear the fish in the water,” he told Roger. Uncle Albert lived near the West Branch of the Rum nearly all his life. His ears told him there were fish in the river; the trees showed him what species of fish he heard. “The Red Horse run when the plum trees are blossoming,” he would say. White blossoms on a small thicket of trees indicated a fish with a reddish-orange tail and fins was spawning. His generation in Mille lacs County knew that. 

Oak trees on the river’s bank give them away too. Your uncle Leroy claimed the World War II generation said, “The Red Horse run when oak leaves are the size of squirrels ears.”

Roger carried the lantern as we walked against the very cold current. That spearing Suckers with artificial light has been illegal in Minnesota for a long time only intensified the experience of seeing their form in the clear springtime water against the river-bottom late at night, easily one of the most memorable experiences of my entire life. 

When dad went spearing in the late 40’s, he occasionally took his oldest daughter, your aunt Fran. “I can remember throwing the lantern into the woods and running when a car stopped on the bridge. The neighbors sure got a kick out of it when we came out and found it was them and not the game warden.”  Nearly 82 years old, her recall made it sound like it happened last week. “More than once we dipped our lantern into the river to put out the fire. The lantern immediately exploded. But we were never caught,” she said. 

Moving upstream, Roger told us what to do if a game warden should show up as we walked a sandy-muddy riverbed about 30 feet wide next to a field lined by oaks an hour north of Minneapolis looking for a fish almost no one really wanted. Though barely nine years old but able to drive a tractor, I sensed I was being taught a skill for the fun of it and not because it was badly needed.. “If a Game Warden comes, drop the lamp in the river. Head for the brush, lay down and don't move. They will never find you if you don’t move. They see movement. Laying still in the dark you are really hard to find.” My younger brother instincts told me these insights were not learned from our farming, Dutch Calvinist dad, but in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in army basic training then refined on the other side of the planet. 

Hanging on the wall of his garage, your uncle Richard has a spear he made in a high school welding class. Spear-making was removed from the high school curriculum when I taught. Four or five tines, needle-sharp at the tips, are held together as one assembly on a five foot long handle. There was a slight flare jutting out just before the metal tip to keep the flailing fish from slipping off the spear when lifted from the cold water. Roger told us to, “Put the tips of the spears about an inch into the water before you jam the spear through the sucker’s head. That way you can see better where to thrust the spear. You want to get it about a half inch behind its eyes.” It mostly worked. Kevin speared two fish that night, both of them through their heads. I speared only one, and about an inch in front of the tail, far from its eyes, the tips of the spear through the fish and two inches into the riverbottom. Roger helped me by sticking his hands into the cold water he grabbed the fish to keep it from wiggling off the spear. “Ok, lift the spear,” he said. He held onto the fish as I lifted it from the river. Before that it never occurred to me I would actually get one. My sense of accomplishment was higher than the Foshay Tower.

On a spring night in 1969, just before the Plum trees blossomed, where the West Branch of the Rum River flowed alongside my dad’s field and entered into Fred Witte’s pasture, an important part of my soul was shaped while walking against the cold river current. The oak leaves were not yet the size of squirrels ears when my Vietnam veteran brother held a lantern so he could help his younger brothers spot scum sucking bottom dwellers and spear them. Life does not get better than that and it doesn’t have to.

The Fantastic True Story of Mrs Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam (Part 2)

Dear Mattie, Nathaniel and Jacob,

Each of you had me as a Civics teacher, Bible teacher, and History teacher. I feel like I should apologize to you for that. I also taught those three subjects in Canada when you were very young. Standing in front of a class of grade 12 students in Ontario, I was trying to explain the modern nation of Germany did not exist, at least as a unified nation until nearly the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Germany as it is today, was brought together by the shenanigans of a powerful person who deviously orchestrated a war with France for the hidden purpose of uniting Germany under one government. His name was Otto Von-Bismarck. Mid-lecture my brain popped: Old Neb had named his dog Bismarck

The bank in Long Siding circa 1900.

Old Neb, Fred Witte, the Heinks, the Wilhelms, the Winkelmans, Weslohs, all lived very near us and close to Mille Lacs County Road 13, all had German names except Clarence Steeves. I don’t know his origins. He had a really nice barn but too often planted his corn late. Some were Lutheran. Some were Catholic. The Winkelmans were Catholic and were allowed to go trick or treating. Even my Dutch Calvinist dad was half German, but Old Neb was the real deal, the most German of them all.

Our long driveway lay north and south, and it's still there. The south end of it emptied onto County road 13. On that corner, where our driveway and County road 13, connected, stood a white A-frame house. And it’s still there. Old Neb lived in that house for the first eleven years of my life. I know it’s odd to identify him as the old man who lived at the end of our driveway. He had a name: Julius Neb. For the time that I knew him, he was called by me, my parents, my siblings,  “Old Neb”. Old Neb was the man who lived in the house at the end of our driveway. We didn’t know him well but in our defense I don’t think he wanted to be known. He lived alone like he wanted to be alone. He lived alone with Bismarck, a barking beagle that came with him when he walked up our driveway. In my early years I was amused that this somewhat solitary old man had a dog with the same name as the jelly donuts at Frank Weisbrod’s bakery in Princeton. Weisbrod is German for white bread. After Old Neb moved away for better care, Weisbrod’s donuts were still three for a quarter and really good.

Fall, winter, spring, he lived alone. During the summers his grandson David, came to live with him. Ann, his mother, took him there when David was not in school. Your uncles and aunts remember Ann and her daughter Sharon, but not very well. 

“David! David!” He would stand on the west side of his house and yell north, up our driveway. He had to call his grandson to come home for supper. The words seemed to exit his nose. When I was learning to read I thought Old Neb pronounced “David” as if the “D” were silent. I liked having David around. It was somebody else to play with.

He came up our gravel driveway often to buy raw milk from us. We were typically milking cows in the early evening when he showed up with a pitcher for the milk and coins to pay my dad. Walking to the barn he would reach into his pocket and pull out a miniature O’Henry candy barin its brown and yellow wrapper. For five decades I have never eaten an O’Henry candy bar without being reminded of Old Neb. In my memory, I was the only one to whom he gave an O’Henry candy bar when he came for milk. After kneeling down and placing his pitcher under the spout of the stainless steel tank, having it filled in two seconds, he would stand up, talk with my dad for a few minutes, and then walk back down the driveway with Bismarck and his pitcher of milk.                    

I assume someone along County Road 13, knew him well. I wonder if the patrons of the Long Siding Bar knew him well. He often walked the one mile to Long Siding. Red Sanford the bar owner and bartender might have known him a little. When the beer in his belly got into his blood and reached his tongue, maybe he let Red get to know him. It’s interesting to picture Old Neb sitting in a bar in a tiny village off Highway 169, that no longer had a post office. I wonder if he liked the deep-fried chicken basket with french fries that Red had on the menu. In the 1960’s Long Siding was a village fading from it’s former function like Old Neb from his.The bank building still stands next to the bar but has not been a bank at any time I can remember. Percy Clemens had a sawmill there and Junior Steinbrecher had a two-pump gas station and auto repair shop. I rarely gave any attention to the gas station until Junior started selling Moto Ski Snowmobiles there in the early 70’s. My parents made me take accordion lessons from Mrs. Mushrush, a resident of Long Siding. My dad said she was a Blackstocking. I could sense he was not referring to what she wore on her feet but I didn't know what a Blackstocking was and I’m not sure I do now. George Steinbrecher (German for stone breaker) and Virgil Schmatz (German for smacking kiss or smacker) each had a farm bordering Long Siding. I don’t think they knew Old Neb well. 

A certain compassion and sadness for old Neb causes me to think it would have been a nice gesture if, in that area with all those families from German origins, for a period of time, we would have re-named Long Siding, “Kleine Berlin'',  and the Long Siding Bar, “The Frolicking Fraulein.'' There could have been a set of beer steins called “Den Schmatzen”, a nod to both Virgil and the fraulein.  Would have been a fun way of bringing a little lightness to the step of the aging German-American widower who lived at the end of our driveway. 

The one mile walk back from the Long Siding Bar to his house at the end of our driveway took more effort. On the way he would pass Wilhelm’s farm where all the buildings were yellow. The tractors and other implements were exclusively green. My dad commonly bought the red, International Harvester/Farmall equipment. In 1968, he bought a new, International Harvester red, hay baler. It was standing on our yard when Tim Wilhelm drove his pickup up our driveway and, with his usual calm smile said, “If they painted cow manure red, the Koppendrayers would buy it”. My brother Kevin reminded him the natural color of cow shit was green. More than a half century later Kevin owns one of those very expensive, cow-shit-colored-combines, Tim owns a beige-colored tractor large enough to pull Long Siding, and Long Siding is experiencing a minor renaissance at the center of which is the bar.   

The best Wilhelm was Tim’s dad, Bernard. During WWII, he served on a destroyer in the Pacific. About a decade after he returned from the war, Bernard and his brother Alvin bought the Odegard-Thompson farm, a large complex of houses and farm buildings, dominated on the west side by an immense yellow dairy barn, 120 feet long. Easily one of the most impressive in Minnesota at the time.

Living just across the river from each other we got to know the Wilhelm’s pretty well. One night our cows broke through the fences and grazed in Wilhelm's corn field. They helped us get them back to our side of the river. Tim and Mark once tried to cross the river with their green utility tractor, a 2020 I think, the tractor sank in the mud and water nearly up to the engine. I was pitching calf manure into our manure spreader when they asked if I could pull them out. After unhooking our 656 International Harvester tractor, I drove the short distance down to the river on the south edge of county road 13 where they had another, less impressive, yellow barn. Putting the 656 in low gear was unnecessary but I was 13 and nervous. It worked

Your grandma and Tim’s mother Orene, were quite good friends who still met for coffee weekly at the K-Bob cafe in Princeton. Tim’s brother Mark was a really good football player for Princeton High School until he graduated in 1973. Mark and your uncle Kevin were in the same grade. My dad allowed Kevin to play football for just one year so Kevin and Mark played together their senior year. The next year, the fall of ‘73, Mark gave me his spikes to wear when I played JV football. More than 60 years after buying their farm, the Wilhelms and Koppendrayers are still neighbors living just across the West Branch of the Rum river from one another. They have attended the weddings and funerals of each other’s family members for decades. I think you met Tim’s daughter by our stand at the Maple Grove Farmers Market.

Old Neb was good at drinking beer, but not a frat-party kind of good. After World War I, for reasons unknown to me, he left Germany and went to work for a brewery in Milwaukee where he was able to become a professional beer taster and avoid the pressure to become a Nazi. Your Uncle Roger said that Old Neb told him he drank eight quarts of beer per day to make sure the beer tasted right.  Eight quarts. Two gallons! One wonders how, after even a half of a gallon, he could taste anything.

If Old Neb could not make it to the house at the end of the driveway, one of the Wilhelms  gave him a ride. We joked that he might fall in the river if they didn’t. If Bernard ever gave him a ride, I wonder if they talked about the wars in which they fought. Old Neb for Germany in 1914, Bernhard for the US twenty years later. I wonder if Old Neb ever told Bernard what he told my brother, Leroy. I was a child. I could not have understood the story of the man who gave me O’Henry candy bars when he bought milk from us. As a German Soldier in1914, Old Neb participated in one of history’s most interesting stories, the Christmas Truce. Four days before my dad’s birth, Germans on one side, the Allies on the other, came out of their trenches, stopped shooting each other, and celebrated Christmas together. Some say it was as many as 100,000 soldiers. Apparently they sang Christmas Carols. Some even exchanged gifts. Old Neb was there. 

They went back to killing each other on December 26, and for the next four years after that. Old Neb never told me what he saw and I was too young to hear it. The death toll was atrocious. Industry, technology, and depravity coalesced on European battlefields to produce some of the most tragic years in human history and Old Neb was there. Muck-filled trenches, bombs, bullets, gas, the first widespread use of the “Machine Gun”, whatever memories Old Neb carried with him, he did not share the details with us. We didn't know him that well.

Thinking about him one Saturday I sent text messages to my ten older siblings to see what they remembered of Old Neb. Wanting to evoke memory I asked: “Who was Bismarck?” Your Uncle Kevin immediately answered: “Julius Neb’s dog”. Somehow Old Neb received his name back after he died. Your Aunt Betsy texted that Bismarck was the name of an enormous German battleship in World War II. Then came a texting frenzy about their old Johnny Horton albums and his song celebrating the sinking of the Bismarck. Later that morning your Aunt Patty played her albums again for the first time in decades. 

Talking about Johnny Horton albums, watching him on Youtube, I had some great laughs. I just wish we knew Julius Neb better.

The Fantastic True Story of Mrs. Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam (Part 1)

Dear Mattie, Nathaniel, and Jacob, 

A story saved my life. Soon after I met your mother, she and I visited Mrs. Patterson, an elderly woman with a house on Lake Chautauqua in New York. We cherish her memory. She made a practice of welcoming twenty-somethings to her lake home as much as possible. Your mom and I were working in campus ministry and we took students to her home several times. Your mother remembers her playing the album from Chariots of Fire, “over and over again”. I remember thinking she must buy her make-up in bulk. She drove an old cream colored Cadillac and told stories about her deceased husband who, while living, became a Presbyterian pastor and then became a Christian. 

Jacob on the Rum 48 years later

I can't remember why she told us the story about going sailing on her own. She had a little sailboat, a one-sail outfit, called a Sunfish that nearly fit in her Cadillac. She had two of them. Given the size of Lake Chautauqua, her age, and the simplicity of her sailboats, the mental picture of Mrs. Patterson sailing a Sunfish on Lake Chautauqua was only a little less astonishing than Jesus walking on the sea of Galilee, and more funny. 

I wanted to learn that Sunfish. I wanted to know how to sail it on my own. Your Papu, owned a 36-foot sailboat he named Kairos and as you know, your mom sailed with him a lot. I knew how to drive a tractor in front of a hay-baler around a field. Your mother knew how to sail a 36 foot yacht around Cape Cod. When we were dating we sailed together on the Kairos. It was hard to relax with my future father-in-law around, given that I knew nothing about sailing. But I was impressed with your mother. Young, beautiful, dark tan skin, said by many to look exactly like Jackie Kennedy Onasis, she knew what to do on the water and in it. She captained that massive sailboat and loved doing so. Therefore I liked sailing. 

Sometimes Boston Harbor, sometimes along the coast of Maine or down to Newport, Rhode Island, always on the Kairos, doing what humanity has done for thousands of years in a myriad of ways, navigating water. For my dad it was a big step forward when he bought a seven horsepower Evinrude boat motor to propel his rented rowboats over Mille Lacs Lake. Neither he nor his children who he took with him had to row anymore. When my father-in-law bought his yacht, my dad still owned his Evinrude.

It was 1972, when three of my friends and I paddled south on the Rum River to mark our graduation from 8th grade. The small Christian School we attended only had eight grades. Public high school was the only option after that. We talked about canoeing all the way from Mille Lacs Lake to Princeton, an enormous distance. There would be four of us and two canoes. None of us was more than 14 years old, I was 13. We would be entirely alone on a shallow but long, winding river that cut through the pastures, fields, brush, oak and maple trees of East Central Minnesota. Our dad’s were not happy with our idea. They discussed it after church one Sunday and agreed to let us go. Helicopter parents had not yet come to rural Minnesota. They warned us about the dam in Milaca and the brown water that foamed and boiled fast over the dam as if angry that humans had tried to control the river. Capsizing in a canoe was likely, everything and everyone would be sucked under water. We promised at church that we would avoid the dam but an early adolescent urge to be omnipotent drove us to revisit the idea when, days later, we paddled near it. Fear and swirling water forced us to shore where we carried our gear around it.

The second day on the river we became more curious. We paddled through little rivulets that flowed to the side of the river. Along the banks we frequently encountered little islands, patches of land around which the river’s current carved small channels. And because our duck-boat canoes had flat bottoms and did not sink deep into the water we could typically paddle around the patches of brush, dirt, and grass, we called islands. The shore would be on one side, a small island on the other, the main river beyond that. 

Dennis and I were paddling on the east side of the river when we entered a rivulet and saw that a farmer had strung barbed wire across the stream. Much of the area along the Rum, had once been pasture land. Dennis said “get down”. I laid back on the boat and impulsively lifted my feet to catch the wire, thinking I could stop our canoe and prevent it from going under the fence. 

My dad had a phrase he used to describe a decision or action by people who demonstrated an impulsive lack of good judgement. If a woman fell for a man to form a bad relationship, she went, in my dad’s phrase, “ass over tea-kettle” for him. The phrase had an elastic genius that allowed it to be applied to movements physical or emotional. With my feet against the barbed wire, momentum and river current combined to force me to perform the best “ass-over-tea-kettle” ever witnessed on the Rum River. My backward somersault into the water was arrested when my arm caught the side of the canoe enabling me to keep my head out of the river and cling to the boat. Behind me, dry and in the canoe, Dennis had just seen the funniest moment in his thirteen years of life. Laughing and yelling at me, he grabbed my collar and yanked me out of the Rum and back into the canoe. 

For three nights and four days, four boys and two vessels paddled through a sliver of east-central Minnesota on the Rum River. Through farmers’ pastures and passed their fields, we paddled our home-made canoes. The place we came ashore is now where our amish neighbor, Jacob Borntroegger pastures his huge draft horses. We never made it to Princeton.

A decade later when I ventured out on Lake Chautauqua on Mrs Patterson’s Sunfish I had some awareness of how to angle the sail to the wind to propel the boat along the water. Keeping the breeze to my side made me faster than having it behind me. Watching my girlfriend and her father had taught me a little. Near the middle of the lake I wanted to turn, to tack, I pulled the sail closer to me increasing its resistance to the wind. The combination of wind, speed, and momentum, surprised me. I lost my grip on the line, the sail swung out with force, the Sunfish overturned, I went in the water. 

When I raised my head above the surface the hull was directly in front of me. I think I prayed but I am not sure.I did remember Mrs. Patterson’s story about the time she was sailing alone and her Sunfish capsized. To bring her sailboat right side up, she said she put her body over the hull, gripped the far edge with her hands and planted her feet under the water against the mast. Her body in a kind of u-shape, all she had to do was throw her weight back and push her feet forward on the mast. I capsized twice that day but made it back to the shore of that large lake. That’s how a story saved my life.