Sunburned & Smilin'

Phew, just got back from assignments shooting historic downtowns, posh bed & breakfasts (yum!) and hi-octane outdoor recreation for Travel Michigan again. Gorgeous weather with fresh snow and blue skies helped create a nice batch of images for Michigan's official tourism campaign.



But it also meant I got a jump start on my summer tan after a thorough baking (more like burning!) at Indianhead Mountain. A summer sunburn is painful and annoying, but in March in the Upper Peninsula, it's a more like a promise of good things to come.

Oh yeah, and Elvis was out on the slopes too!

Personal Grooming

Since we're talking ski trail grooming, I thought I'd share a bit about how I pack and level our massive depths of snow for our own personal loops at the farm.

This is a little embarrassing since my last post featured what has to be the coolest ski groomer ever. Ours is decidedly non-cool.

We drag a bed spring behind an old Polaris snowmobile. Round and round we drive the sled, packing the powder, and then round and round again with the bed spring to level it all out. Simple, practical, and even effective sometimes. It's an okay way to groom trails, and a really good way to mess up a bed spring.

It has been a long winter.

How we roll, eh

I found this gem at Valley Spur Ski Trails in the Hiawatha National Forest, just down the road from our homestead. It's a Chevy Blazer outfitted with tracks and used to pull cross-country ski trail grooming equipment. I love it. I wish I had two, so I could make them fight. It would be like our own little neighborhood Transformers episode.

Simmer Down

I need a time-out. Quiet time. A nap perhaps? Summer in the Upper Peninsula is short and furious, and we do everything we can to take advantage of the long, lingering daylight of the north. This summer has been no exception, except, that we haven't actually been home much to enjoy the short season. We've been on the road since early July with assignments, so it's good to be home now. It's time to simmer down. There's lots to do on the old place, and I'm looking forward to harvesting the garden (if the frost doesn't get it first) and getting the house ready for fall and winter.

A Scythe of Relief

My new lawnmower cuts a ten-foot swath and runs on organic vegetables, fair-trade Java and a massive quantity of dairy products.

Let me introduce you to my new hobby: mowing. Hand mowing, that is, with a scythe. Since this spring I've been filleting the weeds and grass on our 40 acres with what has to be one of the most beautiful hand tools ever.

Now this isn't the old heavy, curved-shaft contraption with the mass-produced stamped steel blade that broke the spirit and back of your grandfather. No sir, this comes from the mountain valleys of Austria, where folks hand hammer layers of steel into a finely curved blade as delicate and light as pastry crust and as sharp as a carving knife.

Then, good people in Maine pair them with ash handles (called snaths) that are custom fit to customer's dimensions. The whole kit, with a whet stone, holder, instructions (who needs em!) etc. comes in the mail. You assemble it, and then you're a mowing machine.

Well, not exactly. Seems those instructions are useful after all. But after a while you begin to find the rhythm of the scythe. It's often described as dancing, as the mower weights one leg, then rocks to the other leg as the blade sings in an arc, finally laying the mowed grass to one side as the process repeats.

It's a beautiful, meditative thing. It provides exercise and hay to use as mulch in the garden (I've snuffed all the weeds and fought off two frosts already this summer) and does it all in peace and quiet.

Plus, it gives me yet another wacky thing to write about!

Fielding Questions

The last of the snow melt has revealed what a long winter had hidden from us: hope.

Hope in the greening meadow grass needling through the brown blanket of last year's growth. Hope in the garlic, that planted last fall with shrugs and doubts, now slices through the straw. Hope in the rhubarb's red alien facing blinking out from warming soil. Hope in the wild leeks, those crazy edible garlic-onion clusters that cover the maple woods floor with a scent somewhere between wet feet and wet farts. Hope in the trout lilly, the song sparrows and the horny lunatic calls of a hundred different critters at dusk.

Besides hope, we've also discovered an impossible amount of dog poop. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, it's simple arithmetic, really: 2 Dogs + 1 Long Winter= 3 Times as Much Poop as Anyone Could Imagine in One Place at One Time. Spring cleaning has a whole new meaning.

But let's focus on hope, shall we? This weekend was the Alger County Conservation District's annual tree sale pickup. We nabbed 250 red pines and four apple trees for the homestead. The apple trees will join the two dozen wizened warriors that came with the farm to add some fresh faces to the old orchard. The pines, however, will go to a windbreak and Phase 1 of a reforestation plan on three acres of pasture.

It struck me today, looking back at our progress of new pines waving like little green flags, that the folks who ripped this farm from the forest 100 years ago are probably spinning in their graves right now. Clearing these fields must have broke the backs and spirits of generations before us, and here we are wiping away their history with a single planting bar and a sack of pines. Green spikes driven in an old Finlander's coffin.

The homesteaders aren't planted very far from this field either, just a mile away at the end of our road in the township cemetery. The possibility of a haunting has crossed my mind. Their tired, calloused ghosts may have understood us if perhaps we'd planted the trees for agricultural profit. "Treeeeeee faaarrrrrmmmm?" they'd inquire.

But I'm afraid not. We just thought there was too much field. Needs more woods, we said. More wildlife habitat for birds and stuff. They're not even planted in rows, just here and there, some single, some in clumps.

Looking across our red pine field my eyes lingered on the stone piles at the field's edge. There's was a season to pick rock, ours is one to plant pines. But it's not like we don't appreciate our fields. We do, and we're keeping the majority of them open for grazing sometime down the road. I appreciate the food our fields give us, but I could feast on a forest forever.

Our Trees Runneth Over

Hank Hughes, 82, is wreathed in a sweet-smelling cloud of steam as he dips, pours, measures, then drains off and adds sap to a roaring evaporator.

We step outside the billowing sugar shack on the dairy farm in Flat Rock, Michigan where he’s lived his entire life. He points down the road to the house he was born in, sweeping his arm past the houses of his and his wife Ilene’s children and grandchildren nearby. Holy Family Catholic Church is over there on the hill. Across a field of corn stubble lies the maple woods his family has tapped for as long as he can remember.

Now, among those maples the staccato pinging of sap splashing into pails is accompanied by the chug of a diesel tractor, the clank of silver pails and the voices of the Hughes’ grandchildren as they race against darkness to collect from the 2,400 tapped trees. It’s a Thursday evening and they just got home from work and school, but the sap doesn’t wait for anybody’s schedule. Cell phones ring and ATVs whine as cousins come and go, lending a hand for as long as they can.

When Hank was their age the sounds were of draft horses huffing as they pulled a sleigh of barrels through the spring snow, and a crackling wood fire under the evaporator. But there has always been the ringing of sap-on-tin, a sound that fixes these laborers to this place and this time with roots that would even make the maples jealous.

The last pail is emptied just as twilight rolls across the fields. The last tractor emerges from the darkening woods, a farm dog nipping at the tires in a game only it knows the rules to.

Opening the door to the shack, warm light and steam roll out to reveal a crowd gathered for the night’s work. Sons, cousins, brothers, sisters, great-grandkids, grandparents—they’re all here and ready to work. A big pot of chili has appeared along with a moist maple syrup cake.

Bottles and cans, caps and seals are all brought out of storage from last season and then the finishing begins. Small batches are brought to the perfect consistency and filtered, then bottled one-by-one and handed down an assembly line--son, to brother, to nephew to mother. Friends and neighbors stop by and samples of fresh, hot syrup are sipped out of small cups.

Hank and Ilene sit near each other at the center of the hubbub. This is the first day of the season, but by the end of spring the family will have produced between 300 and 400 gallons of syrup.

Not to mention a few more memories.

Early Birds

A robin joined us a few days ago. She was a cheery splash of orange in a still, monochromatic landscape. Unfortunately, we had little to offer in the way of robin amenities.

Warmth? Sorry.
Leaves? Nope.
Bare ground? Just one spot, over the septic tank, I'm afraid.
Worms? Good luck.

It's tempting to think of the first robin sighting as the turning point in the seasons, but I've noticed that the real signs of spring are the scavengers.

Behold, spring comes on the wings of crows.

Though crows spend most of the winter with us, their numbers seem to slip south as we get deeper into winter. During a melt in mid-March, I noticed their numbers seeming to swell. They follow the pulsing interstates north, necking down to state highways, county trunks and finally slushy township and village roads. With each exit ramp the south fades from them like the tans that those of us who stayed behind lost in November.

They are migrant workers harvesting the season's first crop: roadkill. Fender-tenderized whitetails emerge from snowbanks alongside rabbit-ala-road. Four months of plowing has arranged a steady stack of carrion blooming in the ditches, as the warming temps throw open the door on the north's roadside meat locker. The crows eat their way home on this, bumper crop.

There's been no sign of our robin guest since the blizzard. Gambling on spring is risky business in the north, so sometimes, when the early birds can't catch their worms, they're caught by the weather.

And then by the crows.

Fools for Spring

We're celebrating the twin holidays of the Vernal Equinox and April Fools Day here in the Upper Peninsula. It seems a "late winter" storm is rolling into the region today, nearly two weeks after Spring officially sprung in our hemisphere.

A blizzard warning has been issued from the National Weather Service, with up to 20 inches of snow and high winds forecast. A fitting joke for the first day of April, but cruel reality on the 13th day of spring.

Our spring, is decidedly unsprung. I fear the green season's coils have been irreparably rusted red; smothered somewhere neath the four feet of snow that still carpets the land. Perhaps tomorrow it'll be five feet.

Happy Spring...and April Fools!