A Fierce Woman

Hello and welcome to a somber Saturday, here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is March 21st.

This week, our fellow Wannaskan Almanac writer-in-crime, Catherine Stenzel, aka Jack Pine Savage, passed away. In honor of her life, today's post is an article that Gretchen Mehmel and I wrote about our dear friend, Catherine, in 2016. 

Fierce Women of Northwest Minnesota Interview – Part 4 – Catherine Stenzel

By Kim Hruba and Gretchen Mehmel

              For the last installment of the Fierce Women series, we introduce Catherine Stenzel, the author and inquisitor behind the great question: What is a fierce woman?  “I'm not the last one; there are plenty more out there,” Catherine is quick to point out, “I might even write a book about fierce women in the future.”

              With such a rare opportunity to interview the interviewer, the first thing we wanted to know was how she saw herself fitting into her own definition of a fierce woman.

              “Well, the definition started fairly narrowly, but with every single woman I interviewed, the definition broadened, which is interesting in itself,” Catherine began. “But for me, going in, my characterization of the qualities that make a fierce woman were that she is self-sufficient, fervent, relentless, and brave beyond the common. She can always get along by herself, but she's not averse to relationships, especially intimate, family relationships.  She likes the interdependency of genuine partnerships, but she can certainly get along by herself.”

              We nod, understanding how well this definition fits our friend. Living in the bush of Beltrami Island State Forest takes a certain amount of gumption in its own right, not to mention moving here from the big city in the first place, not knowing anyone other than her beloved husband, Joe.

              While Catherine agrees today, that she, too, falls into the company of fierce women, this wasn’t always the case. “When I first moved up here fifteen years ago, being fierce wasn't something I thought of about myself.  I really hadn't even considered it.  But the more women I met up here, the more impressed I was with their qualities – their strengths – and it seemed to me that they were much more other-oriented people rather than inward and self-centered. The people I knew in the cities were pretty self-absorbed, rather than outward focused.  ‘Oh, I've got this problem with my boyfriend, or I have this issue with my kids.’ Many were narcissists, always dwelling on their problems, even to the point of going to a counselor. Not that counselors are bad; but there can be too much focus on self.”

              So, when she reached the northland, Catherine came into contact with a whole different cadre of people. “I thought to myself, these are different women, in a good way, she says.  “And I wanted to celebrate them. Continuing with my definition, fierce women are unafraid to live outside the norm. In fact, they don't even see their lives as not normal.  Living in a very small town in a remote area, or in the forest, is not something that they look at as special or out of the ordinary; it's just the way they choose to live.  And a commonality that I did see in all the women, and I hope I can include myself, is that they are not complainers. They just get on with the business of life. They have clear, consistent principles that guide them – not all the same principles of course. They don’t blame or point fingers. If there's a problem to be solved, they get on with it. Those are the highlights of my definition of a fierce woman.”

              By now we are completely sure that this exactly describes Catherine. Additionally, one look at her life journey and many accomplishments provide more than enough evidence to indicate that fierceness has always been an inherent part of this woman’s being, whether or not she has always been aware of it.

 

Precociously Fierce

              Precocious children tend to get a bad rap, being perceived as naughty in their boldness. But Catherine’s parents encouraged her independence from an early age. Her father was a pilot and her parents had a business running fixed base operations at rural airports in Wisconsin which involved flight instruction, taking care of transient aircraft, fueling them, and doing maintenance work on planes.

              Growing up in this environment, Catherine and her younger brother, Paul, had mostly an isolated childhood, but, also, an entire world that was theirs alone to explore.  “There was all this wonderful open space with a lot of wooded areas off to the west, and my love of nature evolved there.  I loved nothing more than wandering around those fields.”

              “My parents were always working,” she continues, “so I had a lot of freedom.  They could see me out in the fields, so they didn't care what I did.  ‘Just stay off of the runways.  Don't get run over by an airplane.’” As a result of these surroundings, Catherine started flying when she was 11 years old and flew solo in a single engine airplane (Cessna 172) on her sixteenth birthday.

              “Flying was the only way I got to see my dad,” she explains, “because if I wanted to be with my dad, it had to be in the air.  As a World War II Army Air Corps veteran, he was incredibly passionate about his work and about aviation. Eventually, he was inducted into the Oshkosh Aviation Hall of Fame for his contributions to aviation.”

              If her father was the impassioned one, her mother was the antithesis. “The first five years of my life I was not allowed to see other children because I was born in 1950, and there was a polio epidemic at that time. My mother thought that I was going to get polio if I hung out with other kids. So I never played with people my own age until I was in first grade. Before I was 18, my mother would never give me permission to go off to science or other academic camps, which I wanted to do.  Even staying overnight at a friend's house was a big deal.  She was very possessive and very frightened about everything. I was the opposite. I wanted to explore everything and experience as much as I could.”

              “I have this picture that I keep,” Catherine tells us, “I'm sitting in a kiddy car with one arm up on the edge of the enclosure and I have this fierce look, and I was less than two years old.  So as far as I remember, my sense is that independence and adventurousness were always there.”

              So, it comes as no surprise that this exceptionally fierce, inquisitive, and bright child went on to excel academically, explore globally and pioneer professionally as a young woman.

 

Externally Fierce

              Without looking back, she left her rural airport home to attend a small college in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she received her undergraduate degree in English. From there she went on to earn an MST - Masters of Science in Teaching – in English from the University of Wisconsin, an MBA from the University of San Diego and a CPA certification. The two Masters degrees were earned while she was working full-time.

              “I taught high school English for seven or eight years right out of college. I was only a few years older than those high school students. I was green as grass.  And what I discovered were two things: One, you can't ever let them know your weak spots, because they will use them, just like any crowd. But more importantly, I think success in that job came because I had such a passion for the subject area and because I really loved those students.  I frequently wanted to physically put my arms around the classroom.”

              Catherine’s first husband was a police officer whose own salary didn’t match his taste for the finer things in life, so when they moved to San Diego enabling him to pursue a career in law enforcement, she set out to be the breadwinner for their household. She knew the best way to make money was in business, specifically marketing or finance. She chose finance.

              “The first fairly large company I worked for was Buck Knives in San Diego.  That was a good organization to work for.  I was the accounting manager for them, sort of upper middle management, just below Vice President. The Buck family were all good people.  They had a Christian ethic and they were good to their employees.  But it was a male-dominated environment and the males in the Buck family called women ‘honey’, but they didn’t realize how derogatory it sounded.” 

“There was a constant proving of one's self, showing that a woman, too, had value to bring. If you didn't toot your own horn, they would never notice.  But when I left, they gave me a party and they gave me a number of very nice things – a custom-made knife, a rock with a prehistoric painting on it, and a mastodon ivory letter opener with scrimshaw.  So, I left with a really good feeling.”

              Meanwhile, her husband’s shift-work schedule and lifestyle caused the couple to grow apart. Eventually, both the marriage and living in San Diego became untenable for Catherine.  She moved back to the Midwest – Minneapolis – and began working for ONAN Corporation as a controller and then on to Price Waterhouse, an international consulting company, where she traveled throughout North America on projects within manufacturing organizations.

              “Price Waterhouse was a very, very good experience because I learned so much. We were making systems better for companies in a very leading-edge fashion. My expertise was accounting - and in particular cost accounting – figuring out how much it cost to make products or provide services.   It's not as easy as it sounds.  We would work with client teams to design the systems to help the company run more efficiently, to see clearly what their costs were – that sort of thing. I was hardly ever in Minneapolis because I was traveling so much,” she says with a laugh.

              However, even though she enjoyed the innovative work and extensive travel, after a couple of years, Catherine hit a professional speedbump. “When it came time for promotions to partner, instead of being promoted, I received surprisingly poor reviews. I knew that the clients loved me!  I knew I was doing a good job because the clients told me so.  But, my superiors gave me bad reviews so they didn't have to promote me.  I wasn't the only one; I wasn't singled out in any way.  There were dozens of people in the same position that I was. I really couldn’t stay under those conditions.”

              “I was getting wiser. I was really getting to know the lay of the corporate landscape, and how it worked and what was possible within it. I don't think younger women today realize just how biased that atmosphere was at that time, and how rare it was for a woman to be promoted to the top-most levels. So I left when I saw I wasn't going to be promoted and I went to work for one of the clients, which a lot of the people do out of the big consulting companies.”

              Once again, she became a controller, working and traveling across the U.S. and Canada, until she landed her dream job - Chief Financial Officer for the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. “I have to say that, of all the jobs I have had, that one came closest to being a healthy organization.” As part of the adjunct faculty, she also taught MBA students in the accounting department, including helping to develop and to teach in the MBA program several times at the Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, Poland.

              Lest anyone think that Catherine was all work and no play, it should be noted that during these years, and after, she made her first of many S.C.U.B.A. dives on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, she acquired two Harley Davidson motorcycles and began the annual ride to the big rally in Sturgis, North Dakota, and she traveled frequently to Europe and Asia. But perhaps most notably, she began a serious study of two martial arts in 1993 that continues to this day: Aikido, and a Japanese sword-form called Iaido. In the ensuing years, she attained her second-degree black belt and became an Aikido instructor with her own dojo.

              It was during this time that she met her current husband. “Joe was an intensive care pediatrician at the Hennepin County Medical Center, which is a teaching hospital. I met him at my martial arts dojo. He walked into the dojo one day and it was love at first sight.  I had just sworn off men, because I had had some unpleasant relationships and I decided I didn't need to have a man in my life. You know, having men as friends would be fine, but no significant other. And then Joe walked into the dojo.  It took me a long time to trust him, and to believe that he was, and is, the kind of person that he is: trustworthy, generous, deep, loving, compassionate and empathetic.  I could go on and on.  He's just one of the most incredible people I have ever met, whether he's my husband or not.”

              With Joe, Catherine found a true partnership and unwavering support. He committed himself early on in their relationship, before they were even married, to spend the rest of his life supporting Catherine in whatever she wanted to be or do. “There’s a little bit of a burden and a responsibility in that kind of commitment,” she says. “So, I asked myself, what is it that I want to do?”

              Together, what they decided was to leave their respective jobs and join forces. Catherine left the Carlson School and Joe left medicine.

 “Our relationship and time together meant that much to us,” Catherine explains.  “It was easier for Joe to come my way to the business side than for me to go into medicine. And so we started our own business, and took consulting jobs with various companies in what's called performance management. We went from company to company working together and we loved it. We were also developing curriculum for a national accounting organization and teaching all over the country. Once Joe got involved with the business side, we would go out and speak together.  We lectured and taught at the Mayo Clinic, at large conventions, and dozens of other places.”

              Even though Catherine and Joe bought their little log cabin in the woods in 1999, they weren’t ready to transition to northwestern Minnesota just then. With clients in the Twin Cities to attend to, a house in Minneapolis to sell, and still needing to figure out just how they were going to support themselves in the northland, it would be five years before they would make the move to Roseau County in far northwestern Minnesota.

              “I was the first one to make a turn away from what we had been doing in the business sector, and I took a position as the Director of Victim Services for Roseau County dealing with domestic violence and sexual assault cases.  Through that we got to know people in the courthouse and both of us took training as mediators.  And we still do that together - civil and family mediation, a lot of divorces, a lot of custody situations.  Joe developed a practice as a children's advocate in the justice system.  He wears a number of different hats.  And that brings us up to the present day from a work point of view.”

 

Internally Fierce

              In 2005, after many years of severe pain, Catherine experienced a failed back surgery that led to permanent disability.  “I wouldn't lay down and I continued to work,” she explains.  “Eventually, I had to leave the victim services job.  The pain was too bad sitting or standing all day, and I had to lie down a lot of the time to feel anything that was close to normal. When you're going down to the basement of the courthouse to find a corner to cry in, it's time to do something different.” In later 2007, her career, in the capacity and caliber in which she had long grown accustomed, was over.

              Instead of retreating into her loss and surrendering to the physical pain, Catherine found new ways to embrace her fierceness by shifting from worldly pursuits to inner ones. While she still worked with Joe on some projects, she created a new and very different kind of to-do list. That long-ago English major emerged, and she began writing a biography of her martial arts instructor, "The 21st Century Samurai," and her own epic poem, “The One.” (She had previously published three books in the field of business with John Wiley & Sons.) She wrote for the Roseau Times-Region and started volunteer work, part-time, with high school students, teaching and tutoring. She never gave up her yoga and even began teaching it. Today, she also swims three times a week, and continues her Buddhist studies and spiritual practices.

              “I was trying to create a new normal for myself with activities that were meaningful. I wasn't looking to make any money, and it was also a way for me to try to find out how to spend the rest of my life – or at least the next foreseeable period.”

              Her disability, paradoxically, became a sort of blessing in disguise.  “It has definitely made me fiercer,” she says, “because there is nothing quite like facing physical limitations and with that one's own mortality.  I had a few years after that failed back surgery where I really didn't know how I was going to go forward with the pain I was having.”

              But go forward, she did.

              “One of the first things I decided to do was train my own service dog. Dogs have almost always been an important part of my personal life, but upon becoming disabled, they took on a whole new meaning as companions. First, I acquired a German shepherd, but although she is a sweetheart, she turned out to be too self-absorbed for service. Then along came Bob, a Shetland Sheepdog, whose size was much greater than standard. Bob and I were inseparable. Planes, boats, and trains – we did it all, traveling together from coast to coast. When he died this last June, I was devastated, but I knew the only way to deal with the grief was to jump right back into another canine relationship, which I’ve just done. I’m starting to need a larger dog, so I purchased another German Shepherd, my fifth, and we’re heavy into training now.”

              In 2008, Catherine was able to get an implanted pump, which delivers pain medication in small but effective doses directly to the spinal area affected. While it doesn’t eliminate the pain completely, the pump does offer substantial relief. The pump coupled with yoga, martial arts, and swimming makes up her pain management program, allowing her to have a lifestyle that, while perhaps at a slower pace than what she was accustomed to, gives her satisfaction and peace.

 

Peacefully Fierce

              With such a drastic shift in her existence post-disability, it’s a true wonderment and testament to Catherine’s fierceness that she has the most life satisfaction right now.

               “I am very definitely content, at peace.  Peace is a better word than content. With our little cabin in the woods, surrounded by this magnificent forest, and perhaps because of my lack of socialization as a kid, I have no trouble being alone. I don't think I'd live out here if Joe wasn't in the picture. There is just too much physically to be done. But other than that, the simplicity of it is just… it really matches our value system.”

              “Joe is a model for me. He is the exemplar of equanimity.  He softens my hard edges.  I tend to be a little assertive at sometimes.  Not so much anymore, because I've learned from him, but I've seen from him that there is a way to be empathetic and compassionate in the world rather than assertive. So he's been a good teacher as well.”

              Today, her relationship with Joe, her dogs, and her Buddhist path are what make life worth living and are what fulfill her the most. Her joy of “the finer things in life” are simple, namely, her rock and lichen gardens that fair well through the winter. In her friendships, she enjoys substantive conversations about the more important questions of life, and she values people who “are always moving forward” and who are able to share that journey.

              “My life before Beltrami Island Forest, fifteen years ago, was working in what you would call high-powered jobs, and so the fierceness that I had then manifested in navigating my way through, well, anything from unethical behavior to sabotage,” Catherine said.

              When asked what wisdom she would pass along to other people, Catherine says, “A person can create a life in whatever way is desired.  There's a Native American medicine man, named Fool’s Crow, who said, ‘Anyone can be the person I am, if they are willing to do the things I've done.’  And that's one of my favorite maxims.  You can be whatever you want, but are you willing to do what it takes to be that person?”

              “People sometimes hear my life story and say, ‘Wow you've done a lot of different things,’ and ‘Gosh! I wish I could have had the experiences you’ve had.’  I've heard women in particular say, ‘Oh, if I'd never had kids, and if I had had your education, and if I had what you have, then I could be like you.’ They just made choices – that’s all. It's just choices.  They could be; they just chose other paths. It's not good or bad; it's just different. And for most things, there’s still time to change.”

              Coming full circle with our interview, when we suggest that fierce women also have no regrets, Catherine says with absolute certainty, “That’s right. No regrets.”

 

 June 2016