So when we headed up north, we weren't really on the run, but we knew that our neighbors may have been. My problem with Davy seemed to have been completely forgotten but was not. It was simply put onto the back burner like many other problems in our lives only to reappear later. But the distractions we encountered in the city were somehow worse in the country. For one thing we were older and much more desperate for love than we were in the city as youngsters. And for another, we had fewer friends and places to go - sometimes with many miles of travel between them - so the gravity of our encounters was urgent.
We moved to an area just south of our old Scout campgrounds in Stacy where the Sunrise River took a tortuous path to the southwest to find Elk River and eventually the Mississippi. So we actually did end up going 'up the river'. Not to a facility like real criminals, but to a place 'out of the way', in an area where I was less likely to do damage. My friend Steve, who had two sisters, lived upstream from the pond by Sand Lake on Hay Lake, and a spring fed Sand lake that ran into the creek by our house and west to the pond, and from the pond northwest to Hay Lake.
What's happened
The inevitability, or morbid history of our retreat made the move very difficult.
So when another one of my friendsSteve's dad poured lead from his furnace into a crucible, I realized that we hadn't really solved the problem we left behind at all. As a matter of fact, by being removed from the location where they began, it seems that the true nature of the crime we lived with was placing in a laundry basket next to a furnace to warn us of the severity of the problem. Admittedly, by that time, I had learned how to accomplish a leak of that kind all by myself, so the fear of discovery was not lost upon me. Both Steve and his dad were as calm and cool as ever, but I was finally realizing that the demands upon my time were real, despite the provisions I had provided and relief we accomplished on my own.
We only thought we had a new network to work with by changing the people and the places where we lived, but lessons we fail to learn, keep returning until we pay close enough attention to the problems that need tending and resolve the conflicts that keep returning. Even if we continue to ignore the significance of a name associated with a specific problem, or a similar manifestation of an old problem, like the need to clean carpets in my case, marketing Carpet Protectors in Stillwater wouldn't have been meaningful work to me at all.
