The Tao of Snow Removal

Here's an essay running in the March issue of Traverse magazine.

Technically, it is spring. It has been for several weeks. But what I’m watching from the living room window at 5 a.m. is not spring. It’s a montage of all-out weather warfare choreographed in cinematic fashion by the flashing of the motion lights on the garage.

Darkness: Growling wind and the house creaks.
Floodlight: Lilacs doubled over, writhing.
Darkness: The staccato spit of sleet on the windows.
Floodlight: The propane tank has vanished under a drift. The picnic table too. Casualties.

My wife is still upstairs, dreaming of warm, exotic places to the south—like Escanaba. But I’m thinking ahead to daylight and what in this white world I’m going to do with over a foot of sloppy slush.

The garage is 150 feet south of the house. The house is 300 feet south of our gravel township road. It’s all quite private, and a major reason we were drawn to this old farmstead. But after a spring blizzard, that distance feels more like a privation than privacy.

Many old homesteads nearby are built close to the road. Some have buildings only a few feet off the pavement, too close for today’s codes. When we were house hunting, we’d frowned on those places, waving to the folks in the yard, but thinking how tiring it must get to have to wave to everyone, everyday. What if you didn’t feel like waving one day? Would your neighbors talk?

We now realize that those goofy outbuildings so close to the road weren’t built there by accident. They were the garages and carriage houses of yesteryear, allowing our snow-savvy neighbors easy access to the plowed or packed roads. On a day like today, they look like a nice option, waving or no waving.

Two snow blowers are in the garage. One is old, normally quite reliable and a rider, but completely dead after narrowly defeating what we thought was the last storm of the season, last week. The other is even older, and is only still around because it is so useless it rarely sees any action. It’s what I like to a call a push-blower, and little more than a very heavy, gas (and oil) burning shovel. In spring I’ve been tempted to fire it up just to smother swarms of mosquitoes and black flies with its blue cloud. Today, it’s my only weapon.

I ease it out into the white wasteland. It hiccups, bogs, comes back up to speed and begins to puke a stream of slush to the side. About a foot to the side. I look across the expanse of yard that needs clearing and try and calculate how long it would take to move the snow one foot per pass. I’m already sweating under the ski goggles, and I can’t tell if it’s from crunching exponential math or pushing a snow blower through a foot of slush.

The machine is too light. It climbs up the slush, compacting it, then spins helplessly. Gelded. I lift the handles up and angle the whirling auger back down towards the ground, pushing it into the mess. Then push down on the handles, see-sawing the wheezing geezer into the compacted slop below.

That’s when the shear pins break. They are the sacrificial bolts that give out first before real drivetrain damage is done. I can measure winter by my reserve of shear pins in an old pickle jar in the garage. There are no more shear pins, and thus winter should be done. It’s not, but this snow blower is.

A lady who was raised on this farm told me that when she was a child the township contracted with residents to clear their driveways. Before that, it seems folks resigned themselves to the snow and parked their cars in favor of sleds, sleighs and real horsepower. There’s a monument to those days on the highway at the edge of town. A giant snow-roller, a tube six feet high and ten feet wide pulled by horses to pack the snow rather than push it.

That’s it! Why didn’t I think of it before? Don’t fight the snow with shovels, plows and throwers; simply pack it down. It’s the Tao of snow removal: use your enemy’s wet, sloppy strength against it.

The old 4x4 rumbles to life even though it’s been drifted in for nearly six months. I drop it into four-low and it crawls out from behind the garage, dragging its belly over drifts in streaks of rust red and grease gray. I drive back and forth, north and south, for the next hour, squishing every last rut down into a brown mush—not the packed white sheet I’d envisioned. My wife nicknames it Lake Snow-Be-Gone. For the next week I wade to the garage every morning in rubber boots to bring her car to the house door.

Would I do it again? Probably not. But it was the last snow, the last straw and the last shear pin.

Takin' What They're Givin'...

Whoa, over a month since the last post. Yikes. Rest assured, I'm not lazin' away in the hammock. Okay, maybe a little bit. Here's the deal: Three features, two essays, three photo packages, daily photo requests, etc. Biz-E! The "E" is for enigma, as in, it's a mystery how I'm able to make a living doing this---but so far so good. Anyway, here's a fresh essay regarding the topic of work and balance (more like lack of) that's running right now in Northern Home & Cottage, a sister publication of Traverse Magazine. Now, back to work! For me at least...


I saw what was going to happen the moment the angular split of white birch launched from my hand, a chalky flap of bark following like a contrail. The birch bomb smacked the dog's speckled rump, exploding in an impossibly sharp "yiiipe" that pierced the stifling afternoon heat.

Gus, one of our emotionally fragile and frenetic border collie mutts, bolted from the woodshed and dove under the trailer where I was standing. I’d been moving the woodpile in a work-induced trance of pick-up-wood, toss-wood. He’d been sneaking bits of bark to neurotically gnaw, and got caught in the friendly fire.

"What did you do to the dog," demanded my wife, Kristen, poking her head out from inside the shed where she'd been stacking the wood I was tossing.

Things hadn't been going well that day, and it apparently wasn't going to get better. Maybe it was the still air, thick as bathwater. Or maybe it was because from the moment we saw bare ground in late April, she and I had been raking, wrenching, digging and painting our old farmstead back into shape. Over winter we'd happily filled page after page of a legal pad with projects we fully believed would be accomplished this summer.

Here’s the thing: we like work. Or, perhaps it’s not that we like it, but we know it, understand it and draw animal comfort from it, like Gus gnawing piles of bark into splinters. A friend has diagnosed us with “pointy butt syndrome,” the inability to sit still. But everyone has their limits, and now in mid-July and only about ten items into our list, we could already taste murder in the back of our throats.

She scrambled over the pile and out of the shed, sleeves rolled. Her forearms were bruised and cut, it was 90 degrees and humid, she had sawdust in places I’m not supposed to write about...and now I was beating her dog. There was going to be a reckoning. A wood-chopping woman from the U.P. was about to remind me of all the things I already knew about myself, but tried to forget in between moments like this. This was going to involve genetics, and nicknames and intimacies I definitely won't write about. This was going to hurt.

But then she stopped. She was looking over my shoulder, where the south side of the white farmhouse rippled in the heat.

"Look at that," she said, pointing. "There, on the clothesline."

It was a female ruby-throated hummingbird, sitting like a plump long-beaked Buddha, perfectly still on the clothesline in the middle of the yard. We'd seen several hummingbirds since spring, fighting around the feeder or buried eyes-deep in the pink sweet-pea blossoms climbing up the pumphouse. They are pure energy, feathered electrons zipping through flower gardens from Panama to Canada and back within the year. Still, here she is just sitting, an emerald splash of Zen on our clothesline in the mid-summer heat.

If a walnut-sized bird that's going to cross the Gulf of Mexico in the next few months can take a break, well, maybe we can too. It's not like we hadn't earned it. Already this year we'd hand dug a trench 20 feet long for a new water line. We'd painted the house and outbuildings. We'd hacked, burned and hauled away the collapsed barn and tackled dozens of necessary projects we’d already forgotten. For months we'd been throwing ourselves at the all-consuming, bent-back-and-bleeding-fingers work that doesn't hurt until you stop at dusk.

The ability to work blindly is our inheritance, perhaps the only we'll see. It's how our people kept their heads above water, mostly, even while it planted them in the soil before their time. It's how a girl becomes the first in her family to go to college, works two jobs and doesn't stop until they tell her there aren't any degrees left to obtain. It's how we were able to buy this place, but it's not why we bought it. We bought it for the shot gun blasts of chaotic flowers in the yard and the two fat maples where the hammock ought to go, but hasn't yet. We repotted our lives to this place because there are spots like the clothesline, where, if your feet are small enough and you have a belly full of nectar, you can relax—when you make the time.

We sat down in the wide woodshed door, and leaned back against the sun-bleached hardwood splits to watch the hummingbird for what seemed like an eternity. It would blink, cock its head a bit, but otherwise was still. Humless. But I felt this whole green-and-blue globe purring along beneath us, with a couple of people, dogs and a weird little bird perfectly still at the axis.

Eventually Gus nudged me, a wet nose saying all was forgiven--if he could have another stick from the shed. The bird was gone. I started to get up, but Kristen put her gloved hand on my knee. We lingered a while longer, rolling our eyes and shrugging over it all. Sometimes not working, takes more effort than the jobs that need doing. It's one thing to pile wood or dig a trench, but another to bury your instincts.

Love in the Air

Well, love is in the air and it's time to hit the road for a family wedding down in the steamy southern realm of Northern Wisconsin. Back to our roots. Bowling alleys and dairy farms. German beer and Polish sausage. So, in the spirit of the season, here's an essay published in 2007 regarding my passion for the farm.

If it were possible to make love to a house, I’d be a cheatin’ man.

For over a year I’ve been engaged in a headlong 100-mph affair with a very mature, white-clapboarded beauty. I’m infatuated with her build, layout and 40-acre dowry, but I think she just digs my toolbelt.

Now, I’m no stranger to romantic notions. As a woodsy type with a gooey center, I end up gaga over something almost weekly. But it’s only been this strong once before, when, nearly twelve years ago, it was a girl wearing a blue and white swimsuit at a county park picnic. It was two weeks after graduation, and I remember a spinning sensation, shortness of breath and that watery, flowery smell of June when spring ripens to summer. Everything was changing and I’d found someone totally familiar, yet tantalizingly unknown, to relearn life with.

Love is dangerous stuff, and that little fling led to marriage. These days my wife and I are as mad about each other as ever, but since finding this old farm, I’ve been rolling head-over-heels down a white-picketed path of debauchery.

I used to read books with plots and characters. Now I just pore over how-tos and house porn—you know, those photo books of scantily clad Tuscan interiors and Normandy knockouts. I’ve spent hours trying to pick out which baby blue French country costume best suits my new mistress.

My family and friends are ashamed. I know what they’re all thinking, “She’s got to be 80 years older than him.” I feel myself changing too, taking on her mature tastes. The weather has suddenly become very important. My favorite magazine has changed from National Geographic Adventure to Mother Earth News. Now, taking a year off and sailing the world doesn’t sound nearly as important as growing fields of basil and really, really big tomatoes.

The most scandalous part, is that my wife totally supports us. This summer the neighbors caught the three of us on the front lawn. The house was semi-nude, with portions of siding and trim laying on the ground where it had dropped during our…project. A car rattling up our gravel road suddenly slowed, as voyeuristic neighbors, drawn by our passionate hammering and the house’s plaintiff groans and squeaks, gawked from the end of the driveway. We simply waved, unabashed at our “household of three.” A nervous hand fluttered back as they sped away.

Some might think this is a midlife crisis, but that means I’ll be dead by 60 so I hope not. Perhaps it’s a quarter-life crisis. Whatever it is, the affair has helped me recapture my manhood, boosted my confidence and helped me open up to trying new things. It’s fair to say my wife is impressed with my new skills as well.

I’m no Casanova, and the house has never said anything, but I get the feeling it’s been good for her too. It had been over ten years since anyone touched her the way I do, and I imagine she is starting to feel young again with all this attention. When I met the house, she was like a centerfold in a snowmobile suit. Underneath the electric blue wallpaper and peach-colored plasterboard was a lady of hewn, dovetailed logs. Since we’ve been together I’ve given her new wiring, windows, paint and lots of other little things a lady her age needs.

Of course it hasn’t all been rosy. The house doesn’t have a central heating system, which can be a problem in a region with a six-month heating season. Plus it makes a lot of strange noises when it’s windy, and then there’s the whole issue of the damp crawlspace. Let’s not go there. I admit, when things get rough I walk out on her, but a stroll through the woods to think things over always leads me back to the corner of the yard, where I can catch a flirtatious glimpse of her backside. There, standing in the berry patch where a rutted tractor path meets the old orchard, I trace the sinuous line of a blonde woodpile and watch her through a frilly tease of apple blossoms. It’s a view that leaves me red-faced and smiling, shuffling my feet and staring at the ground, like that gangly high school grad blinded by a blue bikini.

Lately my wife and I have been talking about the future, and where this affair is headed. I want wrap-around porches and an addition for the house. She agrees, and even supports the purchase of new power tools. But there’s a catch. Now that we’re settled here, she’d like an addition too. An addition to the family. Maybe even three or four of them.

Time to get my toolbelt, and get back to work.

Moving In

Still crazy busy here--deadlines, deadlines, deadlines--so here's another previously published essay about when we first moved into the farm in 2006.

The moving van lumbers up the rough dirt road and hesitates at the end of the driveway where the faded handmade sign declares this property “For Sale.” With a nervous glance at each other, we rumble forward over the gravel curb and scrape through the tunnel of overgrown cedars and apple trees into the secluded yard.

The sign is lying. This place, a 40-acre Upper Peninsula farmstead in western Alger County, is not for sale. It had been yesterday, and for several years before that, but today it’s home. This is the place my wife, Kristen, and I have been dreaming of, a place to raise chickens and children. A place to live and love while our hair gets as white as the lake effect snows the area is famous for.

A few swings of the hammer and the sign flies loose. If we have our wish it’ll never show its face again.

Like us and our blue-collared ancestors—Poles, Germans and Swedes—the buildings are sturdy and straight, but a little rough around the edges. Shingles missing here, siding sagging there, and paint but a memory in spots. The big white farmhouse, part of it made of hand-hewn logs, is surrounded by a sprinkling of tidy red outbuildings. There’s a root cellar, a shed, a garage, the old milk barn, sauna building and woodshed. At the edge of the field squats the remains of the original log cow barn.

But at the center of it all is a familiarity that we can’t explain. A sense of belonging, like a family reunion where you might not know everyone’s name but it doesn’t matter because you share the same laugh, chubby cheeks or hair color.

This farm was built by people with winter in their blood. Swedes came first, around 1900, and hewed the forest into fields and a home. Then Finlanders took over in the 1930s and didn’t let go until the last one passed on in the mid 1990s. Since then an absentee owner has let it fall into disrepair, and only rodents and coyotes have spent winters here.

A convoy of friends roll into the driveway behind us with pickups and trailers heavy with our possessions. Boxes in the house. Tools to the garage. Garden stuff to the shed and root cellar. Skis to the barn.

“Do you know you’ve got, like, ten friggin pairs of skis?” my friend Cameron is asking from somewhere behind his armload of poles and boots.

I’m aware of how many pairs we have, though I don’t really have a justification for it other than that we live for winter. That’s why we moved to this area, a well-known snowbelt that routinely closes schools and highways. Also, with that many skis you need a place that has a barn to hold them all. We needed a ski stable.

The skinny ones are for racing, their flashy blue and white zigzag graphics leave no doubt. They are iced lightning that must be operated only during daylight hours by those in bright shades of Spandex. I have a tendency to miss turns at the bottom of steep hills at excessive speeds when on them; and Spandex doesn’t soften the cold kiss of mature timber. These snow stallions are kept stabled in all but the finest conditions and fed only the purest waxes.

The workhorses are found deeper in the pile. They are wide, with steel edges and heavy three-pin bindings. Mated with equally heavy leather boots these planks pull loaded sleds and packs into the hills for camping. These are Rosignols, but they may as well be called Carhartt or Craftsman. They are rugged tools, but once camp is established they become powder queens, linking telemark turns through knee-deep lake effect pow pow. Kneeling, turning, kneeling, turning like a powder-powered piston through snow of a religious magnitude. These backcountry boards are winter worship at its best and our new home is only blocks from the cathedral.

Of course we have 10 pairs of skis. Everyone who lives in a place where snow flies from October through May should have a solid winter arsenal or they’ll go stir crazy watching the flakes fly.

Cameron is waving from the door of the shed and babbling incoherently. He’s holding a grey and weather-checked board with a familiar shape.

“Skis. You’ve got skis…there are skis in here!” he stammers, pointing up into the exposed rafters where he’s been stowing our stuff. But there, alongside our modern gear and next to an old white door with fraying paint, is a peculiar-looking board that matches the one in his hand.

They are flat on the bottom, tapered from thin at the tips and rising to level in the center. The front tips are pointed, but not curved up. These are handmade, but unfinished, wooden skis.

“I take it back, you’ve got eleven friggin pairs of skis!” Cam stammers.

But this was more than Pair Eleven. It was the passing of two wooden, Nordic batons, and it was the best housewarming gift imaginable.

Trespasses

Well, I was all ready to write about spring, but another late season storm whacked us this week. So, here's a wintery essay originally published in Traverse Magazine.

I don’t know who owns the humble log structure, but I sure know I enjoy pretending it’s me from time to time. And I know there are dozens of others who feel the same way.

It’s a cabin on a bedrock bald overlooking a frozen lake in the highlands of the central Upper Peninsula. And we’re an interloping band of roving cabin poachers. Good people, mostly, I think, but not afraid to bend the rules occasionally, now and again, from time to time and over and over. We hold fast to the belief, often found in areas with high unemployment and low wages, that it’s a damn shame when certain things go unused or underappreciated. Oak saw logs that didn’t make it onto the logger’s truck become our firewood. Fender-tenderized venison fills our freezers. Abandoned, or, um, lightly used camps and cottages fill our weekends.

Now, if you’re still reading, and not dialing the authorities, you’ll be happy to know that while what we do is technically…probably…okay, most likely breaking and entering, there has never been any breaking. In fact, there’s often fixing. I don’t know what the sentence for entering and repairing would be, but up here common law and common sense seem more common place, and I’m willing to bet that a judge in Ishpeming or Eagle River would go easy on us.

I’ve heard that the owners are in Texas, or was it Florida? Anyway, they’re someplace warm and far away. I guess they own several hundred acres enrolled as commercial forestland, and probably managed as part of an investment portfolio. I wonder if they’ve ever even seen this rugged pocket of lakes and hills, a good hike in off a dirt road that only connects to another dirt road? What are the odds that they’ve pushed through blowdowns, mucked around impromptu beaver ponds and scaled the massive rock up to the shack?

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say they did make it this far, scrubbed a little circle in the frosty window pane, and peeked in at the generations of candles on the table, wood stacked along the back wall and a collection of red and white canned goods on the shelf. Would they be upset that their abandoned cabin, was being well cared for? In disbelief, would they reach out for the padlock on the front door and realize, like we had, that it was indeed locked, but not actually attached to the door?

If they stepped in they’d find fishing poles in the corner from the cabin’s trout-seeking summer friends. Winter guests, like us, have jammed cracks and crevices with insulation, while steel cables in the rafters keep the sagging old walls from splaying out under a staggering snowload. Tar dabs patch the ceiling like inky stars.

I’d be proud to take credit for all the improvements, but most of them appear to have been made by our anonymous poaching compatriots over several decades. The truth is, my friends and I have only known about the place for a few years. It started when a friend heard a rumor, about a rumor, about a cabin back in the hills. Another friend had a government job combing aerial photos day-in and day-out, mapping soils or looking for boogey men or something. We soon convinced him to put his technical skills to work surfing for our hobo realestate.

Since then our eye-in-the-sky guy has constantly been on the hunt for new prospects. He starts with public lands, or at least lands with public access, then looks for structures, or even just those familiar squares of cleared homesteads that hint a building might still remain. If the access roads are overgrown, it’s a good bet that nobody owns it, or at least nobody will care if we pretend we do. Then it’s into the bush for some old-fashioned map and compass work.

Most of his finds have just been piles of rotting logs framing the hulk of a stove or tangle of an old bed spring. Some were obviously private, and we moved on…after a little peek. One was obviously private, but a guest book made it clear that strangers were welcome. Few are locked.

The ornery old pot-bellied stove is purring now, finally roused from its January slumber. We shed wool and down, watching waves of lake effect snow wash across the valley. It would be quaint to think of this as a charming weekend in a sparkling snow globe. But this is the highlands, where Lake Superior storms tear their bellies open on forested slopes, spilling snow in amounts only quantifiable with body parts: knee, hip, and chest deep. If we’re in a snowglobe, then it’s one that’s been duct taped to a runaway snowshoe hare.

At the cabin, talk often turns to pooling our scraped-up resources for a little piece of land somewhere way back, far in and high up. Maybe we’d clear a rough trail to get supplies in, but once the place was built, we all agree the road should be abandoned in favor of a foot trail. We call it a snowshoe cabin. Just a place to get warm and dry. A winter basecamp, like the one we’re in now—but actually ours. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but if it does, you can bet the shelves will be stocked, firewood cut, and the door open.