Of Woods and Words

Like any recent college grad worth their share of student loans in a floundering economy, I spend a fair amount of time at my parents’ place.  Coincidentally, I often pop around near suppertime. Sometimes I sit on their couch and pilfer for spare change. But that’s beside the point. . . .

The point is, that by spending time around my parents’ house, I’ve been able to watch an epic battle unfold over the past year. It’s the classic battle of gardener versus wildlife where my mother takes on the woodchuck family that set up residency in her backyard last spring. The battle of mother versus Mother Nature, if you will.

Remember the old tongue twister: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? Last summer, my family finally got an answer to that age old question. Apparently woodchucks don’t give a fig about chucking wood, but boy can they make a mess out of a garden.

Last year, my mother would walk up the driveway after work with trepidation in each step, fearful to see what the woodchuck had gotten into in her absence. The herbs on the deck quickly got nipped off. Soon, the flower baskets had been pillaged through. To make matters worse, it seemed that Mama Woodchuck had had babies and before we knew it, there was a whole herd of woodchucks swinging by for lunch at the all-you-can-eat salad bar on a daily basis. Then one day, the woodchucks burrowed beneath the deer fence around the main garden and made a muddle of the salad greens and broccoli.

Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” In Cook County, we don’t have a lot of fences, but despite that fact, we still have some pretty great neighbors. After years of struggling to keep deer and wascally wabbits out of her garden, my mother put up a deer fence a few years back. The fence did its job well enough, but last summer, it failed to prove impervious to woodchucks. It wasn’t a good fence and indeed, the woodchucks were not proving to be good neighbors.

So this spring, a fence building project has taken place in my parents’ backyard that seems comparable to the construction of the Great Wall of China. A 12-inch deep trench was dug around the garden and fencing was buried to barricade the garden from burrowing critters like the woodchucks. Above the ground, the fence stretches up 8 feet to prevent deer from leaping over it.

My mother seems confident that her battle with the woodchuck is coming to a close. I hope the fence proves effective and that the woodchuck clan wanders off before summer’s end.
 
Up here at the cabin, the kitchen table has been covered with seedlings for the last few weeks. It’s the first year we’re attempting a garden and not only do we not really know what we’re doing, we have no fence up to protect against marauding wildlife. Who’s to say what will happen to these seedlings when we turn them loose to the big scary world?

But, no matter the fences we build or other precautions we take, at its heart gardening in northern Minnesota has always been a practice in what another famous poet, John Keats, called “negative capability.” Keats wrote that negative capability “is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

In her poem entitled “Negative Capability,” northland poet Lezlie Oachs describes the apprehension that fills so many of us as we look forward to the summer’s gardens.

She writes this:
The miracle –
real and right and raw –
is welcoming the Mystery,
living it.

This morning
I’m sowing uncertainty,
watering doubt,
waiting without reaching.

Someday something green
will sprout in this place.
Something small and moist and soft,
open to the sky.

Airdate: May 14, 2010

I’m not sure why I expected to get a decent amount of sleep when I spent a week in New York City this past month. Turns out, there’s a reason they call New York “the city that never sleeps.” And there is probably no place in the Big Apple where that restless nickname is more applicable than the international youth hostel in upper Manhattan where I stayed with two friends.

Each night, we found our sleep punctuated by any variety of noises. At all hours of the night, people came and went from the room we shared with five other girls. One night, a group of middle school boys held what can only be presumed to have been a bowling party in the room above ours. Another night, a telephone began to ring intermittently at three in the morning. Even in the rare moments when the hostel itself was still, the noise of the city still drifted up through the window. We heard fragments of conversations from passersby in the street below, the whoosh of taxis, the bleating and blaring of sirens. 

Every morning, the three of us stumbled out of the hostel with eyes that felt as though they’d been rubbed raw with sandpaper. Every morning I resolved to pick up a pair of ear plugs. Every day the flurry of sightseeing distracted me from the sleep I hadn’t gotten and every night I returned to the hostel to realize I hadn’t bought ear plugs and that more than likely, another largely sleepless night was in store.

I couldn’t figure out how anyone got any sleep in the city.  It seemed New York City nights were filled with nothing but thumps and bumps that threatened insomnia. Then I realized that what I considered “thumps in the night” in New York could just be white noise to native New Yorkers. They probably didn’t even hear the nearly constant scream of sirens and street noise that left me tossing and turning.

Yet, some people find their own insomnia in the quieter noises of a northwoods night. The vast sense of perceived solitude up here can be uncomfortable to people used to being surrounded by more activity. The thought that there are fairly large creatures out in the woods causing thumps in the night isn’t always the most comforting notion. 

So, it seems how we respond to a thump in the night is influenced by what we’ve come to accept as an everyday occurrence.
 
I sleep soundly to the sound of squirrels scampering on the deck or the groan of ice in the bay. I don’t worry when the howling wind causes the house to creak and rattle. I know the grumble and scrape of the snow plow truck as it passes by in the middle of the night. Even the discomfiting whirring of a Lifeflight helicopter making its way to the hospital is familiar. 

After I got back from the New York trip, my significant other sat bolt upright in bed one night. “Oh no,” he gasped.  “There’s a bag of garbage in the back of my truck.” The night before we’d seen a black bear lumbering around within a mile of the cabin. It didn’t seem worth leaving the bag of garbage delicacies outside where they might tempt a bear to pay a visit.

“Well, you should probably go get it,” I said, not even bothering to open my eyes.

Andy made the dreaded pajama-clad dash outside to bring the trash into the cabin and, that night, bears lurked both in my subconscious and the woods outside the cabin. If I strained my ear as I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the lake softly lapping at the shore outside. No sirens sounded and, that night, I slept better than I had in an entire week in Manhattan.

Airdate: April 30, 2010

The other day I was in Duluth at one of the outdoor gear and apparel stores, poking through the selection of discounted wool socks when I overheard the conversation taking place at the checkout counter. As the clerk extolled the virtues of the article of winter clothing a woman had just purchased, the woman admitted she’d just moved to Minnesota from southern California. She seemed a little nervous about the whole thing.

“Get snow tires,” advised the clerk. “Wear layers.” The clerk paused for dramatic effect. “And,” she said. “Take up knitting.”

Over in the sock department, I nodded to myself. It sounded like good advice.

But the more the clerk talked with the woman at the counter, the more knitting started to sound like a coping mechanism. To hear the clerk tell it, knitting up scarves and mittens could be the maker or breaker of a Minnesota winter. The clerk kept using phrases like “that’s what gets us through,” and “it’s keeps us together.”

Oh dear, I thought to myself: what if the thread that keeps Minnesotans sane is as breakable as a strand of wool yarn?

In recent years the hip-ness of knitting has risen decidedly. As a young Minnesotan, I feel it’s safe to say that nearly all of my peers have some familiarity with either knitting or crocheting. I’d always assumed the high frequency of knitters among my friends was a reflection on the general nerdiness of the company I keep. As I listened to the clerk talk, I recognized knitting for what it truly was: a placebo to ward off feelings of insecurity and helplessness that would surely otherwise ensue in this northern climate.

All joking aside, Minnesotans are a pretty hardy bunch. I’m positive there’s something beyond knitting that keeps us in one piece all year. But as I consider the high ratio of knitters in our particular population, it seems there could be something instinctive about the fiber arts in these parts.

All knitters must begin knitting because something sparked their interest in it. My mother taught me to knit years ago and as time passed, knitting has become a significant hobby for me. Knitting may not be an inherent skill, but with a little nurture, knitting can start to feel like nature.

But what is it that makes us a region of ferocious knitters? From the time the leaves start to turn colors in the fall until the leaves bud out again in spring, knitting needles clack across the county. There seems to be an impulse to make warm things for ourselves and our loved ones. As our projects progress, there’s a satisfaction that comes from having something tangible growing in our hands, regardless of the season.

As the seasons shift towards summer, many people stick their knitting needles in a ball of yarn and tuck away their knitting basket until next fall. Vows are made to finish that sweater . . . next winter. But just because the days grow longer, I’m not sure that the knitting instinct goes away. Instead, I think it gets channeled into other things, like flower beds.

Because at its heart, I think the key to the knitting conundrum may be more than a desire to create warm garments in a cold climate. I think the root of our fascination with knitting could stem from a desire to turn something unremarkable, like a ball of yarn, into something spectacular, like a sweater. And it has something to do with watching patterns, designs and beauty unfold in our hands.

Regardless of whether or not you knit, you might share in the impulse that makes knitting nature for so many others. I think the impulse is transferable to other aspects of life. It could be why we knit and garden and farm and write and volunteer for community radio stations. Because even in the deepest snow or muckiest muck, Minnesotan sanity often hangs in helping things to grow.

When I was growing up, the Christmas tree went up shortly after Thanksgiving and didn’t come down until well into January. The outside Christmas lights stayed up even longer.

“I guess they’re Valentine’s Day lights,” I told someone on an early February evening as we drove past the lights on the rosebushes that lined our driveway. I was a teenager and slightly embarrassed by my family’s lack of togetherness when it came to seasonal decorations. After all, Christmas was months ago. What possible need could there be for cheery little lights? Well, maybe just the fact that for months after Christmas comes and goes, the world remains dark and cold.

Like most young adults setting off in the world, I was determined to do things differently from what I’d known as child.  At least when it came to Christmas decorations. Also like most young adults setting off in the world, I discovered that the habits I was so determined to break away from were in fact, unshakeable. Still, this December, I wrapped the curtain-less curtain rods above my windows with tinsel and hung ornaments from and I vowed then and there that those decorations would be down by Epiphany.

On the morning of January 6th – Epiphany – I pulled out the big plastic bin I keep all my seasonal decorations in and began to systematically put away all the decorations hanging from windows and strewn about the little cabin. But I balked when I reached the kitchen window.  Six snowflakes in a rainbow of colors hung in the bows of red tinsel from the window’s curtain rod. Drawn to their bright colors, I couldn’t resist the three-dimensional ornaments when I spied them in the Victoria and Albert Museum gift shop in London two years before. Now, as they hung in the window, brightening the dark corner of the cabin with color and memories, I felt my strict “decorations down on Epiphany rule” bending.

Snowflakes weren’t really Christmas decorations anyway. More like winter decorations. Heck, I decided, those snowflake ornaments could stay up until the snow melted.

It wasn’t until I reached into my plastic bin to grab the St. Patrick’s Day decorations that I realized the snow outside was dripping off rooftops and turning to slush outside. The snowflake ornaments still hung in the kitchen. For the first time in the four months since I’d hung them up, the snowflakes had started to look a little silly. 

That’s not to say that the snowflakes came down right then and there. Oh no. They hung around until the Easter decorations were overdue for display. My impulse to decorate my minimal living space with somewhat corny seasonal decorates seems to correlate vaguely with the period of time when we are not on daylight savings time. As the light returns and the snow fades away, the need for “self-brightening” diminishes. Once these Easter decorations come down, the Shack will be decoration free until Halloween. And by the time the first wildflowers are popping up, I’ll be swearing that next year I’ll get my act together and take down the Christmas decorations in a timely manner.

But more often than not in northern Minnesota winters, our inherent needs win out over our best-laid plans. In the dark period between fall and spring equinoxes, we learn to make our own brightness. When brightness comes as easily as unseasonal Christmas lights and misplaced snowflakes, we know that at the heart of life, there can’t be much to complain about.  
 
Airdate: April 2, 2010

When I drove home from work a few weeks ago, the thermometer in my car read 6 below. When I opened the door of my humble little home, I discovered the display on the off-peak electric heater in the corner read 42 degrees. While the heater has kept our home cozy all winter, when the seasons start to change, sometimes it gets confused. With longer, warmer days, the heater doesn’t always anticipate that the night could be much colder than the day. That evening I ran around in a down vest and jacket, turning on space heaters and plugging up the gap under the door. When I was satisfied that I had done everything possible to warm up the cabin, I crawled under several layers of down and flannel and went to sleep.

This fall someone asked what kind of heat we have. When I told her about our somewhat reliable off-peak electric heater, she sniffed.

“Oh,” she said. “I suppose you have running water too.”

I live in a teeny building with electric heat and running water that we call ‘the Shack.’ It’s a term of endearment, but also a descriptive term. The Shack is approximately 12 by 20. Realtors would be hard-pressed with their description of the Shack, but they might call it ‘cozy’ or a ‘fixer-upper.’ An accordion folding door separates the bathroom from the rest of the downstairs living area. Although the shower is accessed through the bathroom, the outer walls of the shower sit in the kitchen next to the oven. We all know about the heater’s tendency to malfunction and I have hit my head on the slanted roof of the loft too many times to recall.

The Shack is so small and tippy in stature that the building is actually chained to the cliff it is nestled next to. I suspect it is chained to the cliff because it once tipped over. I find this thought so discomfiting that I try not to think about it too much.

I don’t want to spin the Shack in either a negative or romantic light. That’s because life in the Shack feels a bit like a rite of passage.

Around here, you don’t have to explain why you shove old towels and that Snuggie you got for Christmas around the doorway to prevent a miniature snow drift from forming in your living room. Tell that story and suddenly you’ll be the one listening to stories of hauling water for five years before the running water got hooked up. Of having to wake up in the middle of the night to stoke the fire. Of frozen pipes and septic alarms. Of not having enough outlets to support both the space heaters and a normal lifestyle so that every morning there was a horrible chilly 15 minutes when your wife had to unplug a space heater so she could blow dry her hair. We all seem to have some memory of compromised living, usually involving a teeny house where plastic and insulation stick out from unfinished window frames.

People almost always end their stories by saying: “That’s what we had when we were starting out.” Someday soon stories about the Shack will end that way too.

For now, well, a 12 by 20 Shack is pretty cushy compared to some living arrangements I’ve heard of. At the end of the day, even when it’s 6 below outside and 42 degrees inside, it’s home.

Airdate: March 18, 2010

While my grandfather made his living plowing the roads of Cook County, I am the second generation of reluctant drivers in my family. My mother does not care for winter driving, at all, and I clung so steadfastly to a belief in the absurdity of 90-degree backups that I didn’t bother getting my driver’s license until I turned 21. When I announced this fall that I’d be spending my first winter in six years back in Cook County in a teeny shack halfway up the Gunflint Trail, friends expressed some concern that they’d never see me again. At least not until every last bit of ice had melted off the Gunflint in the spring. Even I had visions of gnawing on a moldering crust of bread in the Shack as I ate through everything in my pantry, too terrified of the snow-packed Gunflint Trail to actually drive the 30 miles to a grocery store.

Because I hadn’t wintered in Cook County since I was 18, my winter driving experience was limited and my confidence in my little car’s winter abilities were low. Early this December, I drove home from a long weekend in the Cities to find the Gunflint Trail wearing its winter coat of ice and snow pack. As I poked along at 30 miles per hour, I cast an eye to the backseat where five bags of groceries sat. For all I knew, those might be the last groceries I saw until April.

But when you spend a winter on the Gunflint Trail, you soon become adept at driving on ice. For one thing, five bags of groceries only last about two weeks at my house.

This winter I have learned the tug of my car as it follows the zigzagging truck ruts I’m at the mercy of on early morning treks to work when I must beat the plows to the Gunflint. I have learned to scan the ditches carefully after dark for the shadowy forms of moose and other wildlife. I have learned the treacherous curves and hills. I have learned to avoid the jarring buzz of my antilock brakes kicking in.

On days when I must go to town, I wait for the plows, trusting that they will clear the roads to the best of their ability and that if I go slow, I’ll be all right. The most important thing winter driving on the Gunflint teaches you is to find a steady pace, to avoid sudden applications of the brake, and not to worry too much about how long the trip’s going to take. Failure to do so results in one of those funny, car-shaped imprints that started to pop up all along the Gunflint ditches during the last week of January. Sometimes I get to town in 35 minutes. Sometimes it takes closer to an hour. But unless we’re in the midst of a massive dumping of snow, if I need to go somewhere, I go. After all, a secluded life in the woods needn’t go hand in hand with an isolated life in the woods.

While I have become comfortable this winter driving the icy Gunflint Trail, I still whisper prayers to various deities whenever I merge onto 35W past Forest Lake. It just doesn’t seem that potentially life-altering decisions, like merges, should take place at 70 miles per hour. Rush hour eludes me. And that’s probably a big part of why I, and so many others up here, have chosen to live a life that requires us to drive on ice for approximately four months out of every year. When given our druthers, we’d rather go slowly and get there when we get there.

Air date: March 6, 2010