Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  Long after nothing persists and the people are dead, Proust said, after things are broken and scattered, the smells and the tastes stay poised, every drop holding the vast structure of recollection. It feels like my head is about to explode. What amazes me even more than details of the events are the jolts of old appetites: pestering my parents to stop so we can walk down some twisted, overgrown fire road through the jack pine; hurrying out of the car at every gas station to collect more road maps, and then sitting in the backseat with them, figuring out how long it would take—and exactly how much money—to ride my bicycle the four hundred miles from home back to these woods. Then, back in South Bend, rushing down to the River Park Library for a copy of The Long-Shadowed Forest or A Place in the Woods or some other book by Helen Hoover, an author who in 1954 left Chicago to take up summer residence in a tiny cabin near the north shore of Lake Superior. Each volume with a splash of pen-and-ink drawings of deer and birch trees, and canoes skittering across some rockbound lake.

  More and more I’m beginning to think the first half of life is like a beautiful piece of pottery that seems destined to either shatter under tragedy or crumble under the weight of worry and fear. Maybe the second half is about scouring the landscape for those lost pieces, those chips of spirit, combing them out of the grass with your fingers, figuring out a way to piece them together, make something beautiful again.

  Well north of Duluth, in a toss of conifers and old Finnish homesteads, I turn onto a half-mile-long two-track, coast through a tunnel of white spruce, aspen, balsam and birch, come to rest at a place called Winter Moon. There’s a long line of dog pens at the edge of the yard bursting with huskies, twenty-eight in all. A few offer halfhearted barks, but for the most part they pay little attention to me, preferring to lie low, splayed out like piles of laundry, panting through the ninety-degree heat. From the far end of a small yard cradling an old Finnish log cabin, a woman with auburn hair is approaching, smiling and calling out a hello, calming the one or two anxious dogs with a voice like that of a mother to her children. She’s Kathleen Anderson—dog-sled musher, carpenter, outfitter for a variety of all-women adventures from sled-dog treks to sea kayaking. She offers a firm, callused hand, and the smile on her tan, slightly freckled face is relaxed, as if she just this minute got up from a long nap. I’d guess she’s around forty, but in truth she’s one of those outdoor women whose age may have somehow been blurred by having been so long in nature, whose walk and wave of hand hold a kind of youthful grace, an effortlessness, as if her body had picked up the movements of the things around her—quiet water, rustling leaves, deep snow.

  The friend in Duluth who told me about Kathleen said that of all the people he knows, she’s the one with the most unabashed love for the North Woods. So I called her up, told her I was trying to meet people tied to the woods, as many as I could, people who know things the rest of us have forgotten about living with the land. We make our way to a patch of shade in the middle of the yard, she hands me two ceramic coffee mugs, goes a few rounds on an old hand pump while I hold the cups under the spout. She says she’s been thinking about what I said on the phone and that she’s still not sure what I’m looking for. I say I’m not sure either, but that at this point I’ve been on the road long enough to hope to recognize it when it comes along. Or that maybe now it’s just a matter of believing I’ll find something special, and so I do. She smiles, nods her head.

  We finish off our second mug of well water, she asks if I’d like a tour. We begin just off the yard on the far side of a loose patch of woods, at a sauna house she just finished building, then move on to the bunkhouse where her guests stay—a solid, comfy-looking bungalow filled with single beds, built years ago with her ex-husband, Jim. In the yard itself there’s a fine rock garden, and beside it a jack pine she planted for shade seventeen years ago, all grown up now into something almost stately. And then the house. A beautiful little saltbox cabin of tamarack and spruce, the logs hand-cut with dovetailed corners, Finnish style, the outer walls turned gray as granite by some seventy winters, softened around the foundation by lines of flowers. The inside is plain, restful; in the kitchen there’s a pine table, and open shelves filled with canned goods. A bed with an end table. Books. Candles. A boom box.

  “It was trashed when we came here. Every window broken out, nothing but a hunting shack, really. We jacked the whole house up and replaced the bottom logs, put in a new foundation, floor joists, sandblasted all the interior walls, sanded the beams. Put in a new floor. A new roof.” I notice there are no power lines.

  “I just got solar!” she says, eyebrows raised, flashing a big grin. “For lights and electric. I put in this thousand-watt inverter. In winter, I sometimes have to charge the batteries once in a while with my little generator, the sun is so low, but in summer, there’s plenty to spare. I lived here sixteen years without any power. I have to say I like it.” She points out a small television and VCR, used mostly for showing how-to sled-dog videos to the women on her mushing trips, and maybe for an occasional nature program. “And ‘Northern Exposure,’” she adds. “I always thought that was one of the better shows.”

  When Kathleen Anderson got out of college some eighteen years ago, she kicked off her life not by heading for the woods, but for Chicago, working in a VISTA rehab center for the chronically mentally ill. Later, accompanied by a good friend whom she would eventually marry, she made her way north back to her home state, to Minneapolis, where she and Jim set up house in a group home for delinquent teenagers. “Basically, I was twenty-two years old and I had ten kids. And that was when we bought this place. We thought it would make a perfect getaway for the boys.” Several years later, when she and Jim began to feel burned out at the group home, they turned in their notices, though a little reluctantly, and came up here to this old cabin in the woods for a vacation. For a time-out. That was seventeen years ago. Jim is long gone to Duluth, squeezed out by the isolation of the place, drawn by the need for a career. Two other partners have come and gone as well.

  But by all appearances, Kathleen is thriving. She reminds me of women I knew out in Idaho who were working the fire towers, women who’d come down those steel staircases for the last time in the fall and shake their heads, say in a sad voice how the time always went so fast for them, talk about the books they didn’t get to read, all the letters they meant to write but never found the time for.

  “This was never a fad for me,” Kathleen says. “You stay in the woods for the long haul only if it’s something you value deeply. You have to want it. There’ve been a lot people move in since I’ve been here, and all but a small core group are gone. There’s the daily chores, the trudging to the outhouse. Every time you want to wash the dishes, clean up, you pump water and then heat it with wood you’ve cut. Things break down and you don’t always have the money to fix them, and even if you do, it’s thirty miles to town for parts. But this has always been my first priority. To live here. To not need a lot of things.”

  It occurs to me that maybe what made so many of the people who came here twenty years ago pack up and leave wasn’t the amount of work per se, but the way you have to pour yourself into the smallest inconveniences, giving no thought as to whether or not they stretch into all-day affairs. Kathleen says it’s really just a matter of perspective, of what drives your life. “It’s one thing if your car breaks down and you’re on the freeway and you have to get to work. But it’s something else entirely if it breaks down on a peaceful country roadside and a neighbor comes along and says, ‘Can I help? Do you need a lift home? Do you need a job?’” That’s the payoff, she says. Time enough to need your place in the community. Space enough for making small adjustments, year by year, on your own behalf. Enough quiet so as to not be easily distracted.

  The guests range in age from fourteen to almost seventy. From all over the country, some returning year after year, telling one friend and then another. Women who are not in any sense adrift or wondering what to do with their lives, but dyna
mic people, mostly professionals, who feel the need to get back to present time, who know the value of breaking routine, of once in a while taking a big hammer and shattering the predictability of their lives. Feed and water and harness the dogs, drive the sled, build the fires. Get up in the middle of the night at twenty below, make tea and call the neighbors, help one another up onto the roof to watch the northern lights flashing in the winter sky.

  I’ve decided to tramp these woods by water, alone in a canoe through the Boundary Waters, maybe find a patch or two of big pines that somehow escaped the lumberman’s saw. It’s been raining like some kind of punishment. Shortly after dawn this morning a massive thunderstorm roared through, toppling trees all over Ely, killing two canoeists, gunning them down with a single bolt of lightning while they were struggling to keep their camp from blowing away. As for me, I’m waiting it out twenty-some miles up the Echo Trail, parked next to a pot of coffee in the home of sled-dog outfitters Charlie and Connie Cowden. They’ve been showing off their latest home improvement—a massive wooden tower beside the house, a huge cistern on top, fed by the rain gutters, holding water that’s then forced down by gravity into the kitchen faucets.

  “Our first running water,” Connie says proudly. “Just for washing, though, and of course not in the winter.” In winter, water still comes from mile-long round-trips by dog sled to the spring. With no electricity, propane works fine to cook with and to run the newly acquired refrigerator, and oil lamps provide reasonable light. It’s a beautiful home, a two-story, hand-built medley of pine, the walls hung with moose and deer antlers and marten and beaver pelts. The kitchen is spacious and full of green light, and the shelves are heavy with bags of wild rice harvested last summer, and rows and rows of canning jars filled with everything from beaver to blueberries. As much as anyone I’ve met, Charlie and Connie draw their livelihood from the woods: food from wild game and various other kinds of native harvests; cash from running trap lines and outfitting sled-dog trips, mostly for people from Minneapolis and Chicago.

  Surprisingly, what to me seems like an amazing degree of self-sufficiency, Charlie, at least today, makes out to be a tepid compromise. At thirty-five he’s devoted most of his life to realizing a childhood obsession for living off the land, and now the battle seems half lost, a casualty of civilization creeping farther and farther into the woods. It’s outrageous to him that the government should dictate when he can take a moose to feed his family and when he can’t. Who would know more about the population of moose or any other native animal, he asks indignantly—when it’s okay to hunt or trap certain species and when to back off, whether to take a moose calf this year or a cow—than someone who spends all his time in the woods? (Charlie also has a degree in Wildlife Science, though he never mentions it.)

  “Let me give you an example,” he says. “Over the years I’ve found the number of beaver I can trap and still keep the population level healthy—about a hundred over a hundred and fifty square miles, and only two from a single lodge. Some lodges I’ve trapped for eight years at those numbers and the populations have stayed exactly the same. Don’t forget, somebody who knows what they’re doing can look at the size of a lodge, the size of the food cache, and tell you about how many animals there are. I’ve always managed for the long term. The guys you have to worry about are the ones who get into it only when the prices are high, just stop off the roads and wipe out an entire lodge.

  “The wilderness thing, it would’ve been possible even thirty or forty years ago,” he says. “In the early sixties there were still some people who just took up their packs, some rudimentary tools, and walked off into the wilderness and built a cabin on some unnamed lake. To me, that was the ideal—to be free in a land that was plentiful. But the white man is so damn greedy. And now we have all these regulations. I hate the rules, they drive me nuts. But I also know that without them all of this would be gone—the woods clear-cut, the game hunted out. In this society there’s no balance. We grab at everything. Here you either win big or end up a loser.”

  I meet a lot of people who say they were born too late. Charlie really was.

  The three of us huddle around the kitchen table and peruse a couple of family photo albums. There are pictures of curtains of pelts hanging from the porch at the end of trapping season, right before bundling and shipping them off to market; of little kids smiling under balsam trees; of sled-dog trips to Loon Lake, where Charlie and Connie are helping a burly looking man named Freddy cut out two hundred blocks of ice from the lake and pack them away for the summer tourist trade. “The only place that goes through twenty thousand pounds of ice for whiskey,” Freddy likes to say. Pictures of old guys and old women with faces chiseled by a long string of long winters. Some are gone, and that makes the photos more precious still.

  As we peruse the albums I keep making comparisons between Charlie Cowden and Kathleen Anderson, the founder of Winter Moon. Though each has a strong love of mushing, as well as an uncanny knack for finding comfort in long days spent at grueling physical labor, at first glance it might seem they couldn’t be more different—she with her quiet rituals of celebration, out in a sea kayak with a handful of women singing up the full moon, he in a wall tent with a bunch of guys from Chicago, frying up beaver, telling dirty jokes. But the striking thing they have in common is this drive to keep rooting themselves deeper into the land by weaving relationships with neighbors—especially old neighbors, many of whom see the world far differently than they do.

  I used to hear people in the outback talk about their fondness for their neighbors and think yeah, right. I mean, what choice do you really have? The guy next door could be an ax murderer and if you end up deathly sick, it’s still his door you’re going to find yourself knocking on. The mere thought of it can seem suffocating to those who learned that you meet kindred souls by moving around, joining the right clubs, getting your kids into this school or that one. There are of course people out here who qualify as honest-to-goodness hermits. But in general, the more you appreciate the land, the more you’re likely to get to know the old folks around you, because knowing them lets you more fully understand the environment. It’s a sense of place sprouted from a slow, patient understanding of the tracks that nature made in people’s lives, and both Charlie and Kathleen have it. Kind of like learning to sail so you can better understand the wind. Each has spent countless long hours around this woodstove or that one listening to stories, refusing to separate humans from the woods, sensing the folly of trying to ever become truly rooted if you embrace nothing but snow and stars and wolves howling in the night. Around here, memories get traded like recipes across the cold winter nights. And in time, that turns strangers into something that looks a lot like family.

  The sky finally brightens a bit, and it’s long past time for me to go. “Keep your food up,” Charlie says when we reach the entry point and start unloading my equipment. “Plenty of black bears.” And then he offers a bizarre story to prove it. “Quite a few years ago, it was. Couple of instructors just dropped off this Outward Bound student for his solo, were paddling away when they heard him screaming like hell. Turned back and saw this black bear had him by the neck, was trying to drag him into the lake and drown him—so they raced over, jumped ashore and beat it off with paddles. A week later this bear does the same thing to some other guy—tries to drown him like before. Anyway, they hunted it down and it was just skin and bones. Opened it up and found the gut lined with plastic—camp trash. Poor guy couldn’t digest anything. He was starving to death.”

  The outbound river takes its sweet time, swaying back and forth like someone dancing to old jazz records, all neck and hips. The edges are framed by arrowhead pickerelweed, and long runs of pink-and-white bullhead and tuberous lilies, the latter with blooms opening and closing at each rise and fall of the sun.

  Between the put-in and the Pauness lakes is an amazing cross section of people: young families with sunburned thighs, dads with potbellies grunting under their rental ca
noes; boys in their late teens carrying enormous backpacks and even full-sized coolers, looking strong and heroic for their girlfriends, a number of whom, remarkably, are still wearing makeup and earrings. And of course Scout troops, which, depending on the leader, can look like short marines or a gaggle of misfits. But after several portages the population shifts. Except for the ubiquitous Scout troops, the groups get smaller, calmer. A father and son, the occasional couple in their thirties wrapped in Gore-Tex, one or two lone paddlers.

  My last conversation of the day comes mid-afternoon, with a big, friendly guy around fifty in canvas pants and an army T-shirt—a blue-collar fisherman, you could say, lived in Ely all his life. He very much approves of the fact that I’m not really sure of my plans (unlike a couple of troop leaders I met, who seemed to think me either lazy or foolhardy, treating my lack of planning as a kind of offhanded slap against the Scout motto). “Take your time,” this lone paddler advises. “Get in too much of a hurry and you’ll turn it into work. And there’s already too much of that.” He goes on to tell me of how America is becoming nothing but a giant labor camp—people working eighty hours a week. “And for what?” he asks, pausing to cock his head, like I might really have an answer. “I’m telling you, no other country lives like that.” He proceeds to give me the skinny on a few choice fishing holes—the surest way to slow down is to sit around waiting for the fish, he assures me—then tosses a worn, dry bag into the bow of his canoe and readies to push off for home.