Bugs!

It's the first day of summer, so time to say goodbye to the season of mud and bugs (in theory) and welcome in sunny beach bliss.

I recently experienced the worst mosquitoes I've ever encountered. No, not Canada. Not even the Everglades, but right here in the good old U.P. while working on a story at Craig Lake State Park. We got off the water at dusk and couldn't even draw a breath. Now, I grew up in a swamp and have a fairly high tolerance for skeeters, but this was unreal.

Here's a photo salute to some past encounters of the insect kind.

Craig Lake State Park

Fishing the Escanaba River

Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

Isle Royale National Park

Back on the Escanaba River

Lupines are Blooming!

Well, maple syrup season is long over but I still feel like a big dumb old tree with a sweet gooey center. Here’s to my wonderful wife on our 10th wedding anniversary.

Fifteen years ago a couple of kids hopped in a car and headed north in the rain for no reason other than to just be alone together for a day. They drove north as far as they could go in a day and ended up at Black River Harbor. Along the way they picked lupines growing wild in a ditch in front of an abandoned farmstead outside of Bessemer.

Ten years ago they joined each other for life in marriage and moved north to the Upper Peninsula to find themselves like they did those flowers a few years earlier.

Five years ago they found this old abandoned homestead near Chatham with lupines again growing wild in the old pastures. 

Lupines flower in their second season, and are all the more precious for it. Of all the stories I’ve been blessed to be a part of, this is still my favorite.

Oh Canada!

Just got back from two weeks shooting in Northern Ontario, working on a couple paddling-related assignments with writer Conor Mihell. Now, it has been rumored that my absence from the USA during the demise of Mr. Bin Laden is no coincidence, but I assure you I am not a secret Navy SEAL. Though parts of this recent trip did resemble SEAL training at times...

First we ran the Agawa River, in Lake Superior Provincial Park, a beautiful whitewater river running through a deep canyon and only accessible by train. Rails to rapids sort of thing. We were the first to run it this season so water was high and the snow was still deep in parts of the woods. Great river and a great time. We worked on this for the travel section of a major Canadian newspaper.

Loading boats on the train in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

The train drops into the Agawa Canyon where it meets the river.

Portaging down the tracks.

A nice bit of Class II rapids.

Agawa Falls in flood. The 75-foot falls isn't listed on maps and must be portaged.

Next we headed east to the Temagami region, an untamed land of deep lakes, rugged hills and rich native culture. Our goal was to reach a lake named for Conor's family, Mihell Lake, and celebrate his 30th birthday. Ice out was a bit late this year, so we had to do a little "hard-water" paddling. Vanilla Ice drummed in our heads through long days of smashing through, and dragging over ice. It was a unique experience for sure, and made for some great images. All in all, it was a good trip, but not one that any of us imagined it would be. I can't say too much about the trip, but you can get all the details in an upcoming issue of Canoe & Kayak magazine.

Dragging across a frozen lake with wingman Jim Leaf.

Fire was our friend this early in the season.

Beautiful but brutal--paddling through brash ice.

Sunset on icy Smoothwater Lake.

Conor on open water.

Our goal for the trip: Mihell Lake.

A twilight portage.

The novelty of paddling in the ice quickly wore off.

Thanks to these great companies for supplying equipment for this and future stories:

Wenonah Canoe

Frost River packs

Alps Mountaineering

Vasque footwear

And a special thanks to my wonderful wife and the grandmas for holding down the fort while I was "working."

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.

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.

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.

Spinter, er, Wring?

It's 60 degrees, but there are still several feet of snow on the ground. Birds of every variety have arrived on a stiff south wind, but squirrels are at the feeder like there's a January storm coming.

Welcome to Spinter. Warmer than winter, but you still need a shovel to take a walk.

Several patches of ground are visible again since the last storms. Big brown circles of dry grass and needles under the red pines on our south-facing hill are simmering in the sun. Over lunch I put on the knee-high rubber boots and thought I'd slop around a bit by the apple trees. Too much snow there, so the dogs and I crawled up under the pines and sat in the sun for a bit. Before long the two black-and-white border collie mutts were panting after soaking up the heat. Lucky dogs. The wind, though out of the south, still has a sting--so no panting for me.

Besides sting, the wind brought us our first raptors today. One appeared to be a rough legged hawk, a shaggy and bedraggled splotch of gray and white wheeling quickly over the yard. Two male flickers are having words over the 10x30 patch of driveway that's visible. Easy boys, more real estate is on its way, day by day.

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.

White Fang

The blizzard came last night, burying its white fangs in the back of our skulls. It was an attack from behind as we slept, dreaming of warm, far off places--like Wisconsin.

At 3 a.m. I woke to the pacing of nervous dogs, and was able to watch the assault in cinematic fashion, a montage of violence choreographed with the flashing of the motion lights on the garage.

Darkness and growling wind. Floodlight and lilacs doubled over, writhing. Darkness and the staccato kiss of sleet. Floodlight and the propane tank has vanished. The picnic table too. Casualties.

All schools are closed, in mourning I suppose. The state police have issued bulletins to keep everyone off the roads while plows and graders grapple with the beast.

Within a few days it will be subdued, pushed back in banks, scraped into ditches and thrown twenty feet from our driveways. Cut by steel plow and churning auger, the blizzard's flesh will break, spilling into puddles and overflowing the banks on Slapneck Creek down the hill.

We'll overcome this April onslaught, but not before it claims a shovelful of swear words and the last of our shear pins and sanity.

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!