"The Shack"

(continued)

Sigurd and Elizabeth's house was about 60 feet to the north of the shack. The main entrance at the back of the patio led into a three-season, paneled porch that was built in 1954, twenty years after the Olsons had moved into this house on the south side of Ely. It was in the porch room or on the patio that Sigurd and Elizabeth entertained the many visitors who often arrived unannounced in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sigurd emphasized function, not beauty, in the shack. The shelf running along each wall above the windows was simply a board, propped up with two-by-fours. There was pine siding, a wood floor with a throw rug, one hanging light, and a wood stove for heat. The desk with Sigurd's manual Royal typewriter faced the house. The desk on the right was covered with rocks that he'd picked up here and there across the North; in that desk's drawers were dozens of pipes, many of them broken but never thrown away. The two white stacks on the far table consisted of essays that Sigurd wrote in the last year or two of his life, many of them intended for a book of boyhood memories that he never completed. The filing cabinets were jammed with letters and photos and other documents, including about half of his journals, all quite disorganized. (The first six years of his journals, covering 1930-1936, were discovered in 1993 in a cardboard box in an old refrigerator in Sigurd's basement.) Sigurd was a saver--to a fault--but not an organizer.