Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  A heron arrives at the same time I do, gliding out of a sky half the shade of her charcoal feathers to settle on the pond off Koher Road, landing behind a screen of cattails before I can scramble out of the van for a better look. There’s the old familiar mix of sparrow song and the buzz of red-winged blackbirds, the sharp scent of willow and the muck of the marsh. The bluebird boxes and wood-duck platforms are still up. I walk over to a squat, disheveled tree and pluck a wild apple, bite into it, think it tastes a lot like the last one I tried somewhere near here twenty-five years ago.

  Somehow, I thought it would all be gone. Turned into landfills or traded off by the counties for some right-of-way or other trinket, leveled and sold into slavery as a shopping mall. It’s the way I’ve come to expect things will go. Probably since Mrs. Hammaker unveiled to my third-grade class the great seal of Indiana: a drawing of a settler felling trees, and in the background, the butt end of a startled bison making a mad dash to get the hell out of the way.

  I don’t know if the refuge permits it, but I’ve already decided I need to sleep here tonight—not so much for the pleasure of the night itself, but for the waking up. I’m hauling out a lawn chair, setting up to eat a little dinner, when a guy from Elkhart named Rick walks out of the woods with his rod and reel in hand, just out from bass-fishing some hidden pond a half-mile away that few people know about. We strike up a conversation and I pull out the other lawn chair for him. He’s in his early thirties, tells me he’s been coming to this place for ten years, that this little pond has some of the best bass-fishing anywhere, that I probably shouldn’t write about it by name.

  Three months ago, Rick gave up a decent factory job in Elkhart at $9.50 an hour to work as a seasonal trail boss at Chain of Lakes State Park, for $5.50. He hopes to one day parlay it into a full-time job with state or county parks, though that may take a long time. He tells me all his friends think he’s out of his mind, but then I could have guessed as much. I left the state thinking Hoosiers were genetically predisposed to taking the best job as defined by the highest pay, and that they don’t cotton to those who stick their noses up at the status quo. It’s the old fairy-tale motif incarnate: the villagers warning about how you should never, ever leave the trodden path for the dark of the forest. I mean, it’s one thing to try some harebrained scheme like Rick’s when you’re in your twenties—“Get it out of your system,” is how they put it. But here’s a guy with a wife and a little girl. A guy with responsibilities. And besides, there’s always the small, but enormously irritating possibility that he’ll go out and do this and actually end up happy.

  I offer him a drink of my prized moonshine, kind of a celebration of his striking out on his own. It’s dark and the air gets wet and the woods fill up with lightning bugs, and still we’re talking about this new life of his. “I used to hate to wake up in the morning. And now I can’t wait to get out of bed and start the day. How much an hour is that worth?” He tells me about the work. Says the people who come to the park love the idea of camping, but at the same time, most of them are a little afraid of it. “I think that’s why people around here camp with ball games on, or the mini-TV, or some rock-and-roll station that drives their neighbors nuts. The noise is familiar—it takes the edge off all that quiet.” Apparently the uneasiness grows after dark, because the campers won’t walk anywhere without their flashlights. One day at dusk last week a worried-looking woman came up to Rick, wanted to know whether the rangers penned all the wild animals at night. “But at least people are coming,” he says.

  I have one more stop to make, this one in the heart of South Bend, my old hometown. I knock on the front door of a small white house nearly unchanged in forty years, hear some rustling-about going on inside through the open panes of glass on the porch windows, finally see the inside door open and a beautiful old woman, ninety-three, standing there on her cane, smiling, welcoming me in with a sweep of her big brown arm.

  “I’m washing my walls,” she tells me, maybe in response to the doubtful look she sees on my face at spotting a ladder standing in the arch between her tiny living room and kitchen. I insist on helping her but she’ll hear none of it, tells me that if she doesn’t keep active, she’ll never be able to get going again. I shake my head, we take a seat out on the porch, where we can look down on the old street where I grew up. She tells me that tomorrow she’s driving up to Michigan to help her niece can some fifty quarts of tomatoes. Pearl was next-door neighbor to my family for thirty-five years. Maybe because she and her husband didn’t have children of their own, she took my brother and me on with a love that I suspect even blood relations rarely see—unconditional, a bottomless well. Sitting here, I’m thinking of how she’d have me over to help make cookies and how the flour and sugar would fly all over the place, just like the grease did when she fixed her famous fried potatoes in a big black-iron skillet, as if food was somehow less of a celebration if there wasn’t some kind of mess left in its wake. For that alone I loved her. “You and Jim was always good boys,” she told us, tells me again today, and she believes it so completely, says it with so much heart, that even though I know better, I can’t help but think it might be true.

  Pearl grew up just to the north, in Buchanan, Michigan, in hard, hard times, so in love with the outdoors that by the time she was nine she was repeatedly running away from home with her cane pole, making for her favorite lake so she could forget the world and just fish. No matter the punishment, it was never enough to keep her away for long. Besides regular hunting trips, while in her forties she and Merle bought a tiny cottage on Lake Wawasee, and from then on every summer morning they’d climb into their respective boats and motor off to spend several hours fishing. For a few years my brother and I would go stay with them for a week, Jim going out every day at 5:30 a.m. with Merle, and me with Pearl, and though I didn’t even like to fish all that much I loved to fish with her.

  Maybe it was payment from God for her good heart, or some kind of compensation for the hard life she’d lived on the farm, but Pearl had the astonishing privilege of reeling in fish with a kind of success virtually unknown outside biblical miracle tales. She was a big woman even then, and the sight of her in her torn, worm-smudged cotton dress jumping up in that tiny boat to wrestle some big bass or bluegill or perch from one or more of the three poles she kept going at all times, a frenzy of baiting and casting and landing—well, for a ten-year-old it was like sitting at the feet of a shaman, watching him gyrate for rain, and always getting it. To this day it remains among the most amazing, illogical things I’ve ever witnessed. Sometimes people in other boats would edge as close to us as they thought proper, sit there for an hour or two and get absolutely nothing, then motor away in a huff. One time a little boy about ten was in a boat nearby, having no luck himself, but at the same time having to suffer watching one of Pearl’s incredible harvests going on less than two hundred feet away. Finally he looked up to see one of her fish breaking the line before she could land it. “Good!” he yelled, which made Pearl laugh until she couldn’t sit up straight.

  “Them was the happiest times of my life,” she says.

  I tell Pearl about my journey, about the birch-bark wigwam and wild man Joe Knowles, about the big trees and the moose, and even about the moonshine. I tell her that from here I’ll be going north to places that she used to go on hunting trips, that I’ll be following some of the same roads she took, roads my parents followed too on those precious vacations to the North Woods. Most of all, I tell her I wish she could climb in the van and go with me. So she could show me the fields where she picked strawberries at fifty cents a day, or point out the woods behind her brother’s place where she used to mushroom. That maybe we could find that lake she kept running away to as a kid, or another one not far away, where she says she used to sit on a log at the shore with her sister-in-law, just to listen to the singing of the birds.

  Before I leave, she heads into the basement, comes up fifteen minutes later with a box full of homemade relish, gra
pe jam, canned beets and butter beans, a package of pork chops from her niece Margaret, four boxes of vanilla-pudding mix, and a half-bag of strawberry Newtons. Provisioning me for the trip north. “Now listen,” she says over my objections, sounding stern, “I’ve got more than I can ever eat down there. You just take this. You’ll need it.”

  Pearl was never religious in the traditional sense, preferring to do her visiting with the Creator while babysitting bobbers in the middle of Lake Wawasee. But she always lived by the notion that a person gets a lot more pleasure from what they give than from what they receive. I’m a hundred miles north of South Bend and still I’m looking back at Pearl’s box of food sitting on the floor, wishing that I could just pull over in some patch of woods and cook up this big meal for her like she used to do for me, that I could turn the burner on the camp stove up real high and toss in the pork chops and just let the grease fly.

  One minute the road is lined with cornstalks rising out of black dirt, the next with bracken, wintergreen, sarsaparilla, and plantations of red pine, the latter planted much like the corn was, feet standing in soil sandy as a cat box. How is it that the same miles that seemed to take such a big bite out of life when I was a kid making for the North Woods could today be flying by so fast? As eager as I am to make it across the Mackinac Bridge and roll onto Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, into the land of Kirkland’s warblers and the Two-Hearted River, I force myself to slow down well short of all that, pull in for a stroll around Loda Lake. It’s a small, precious wildlife sanctuary in the Huron-Manistee National Forest, a high-school biology teacher’s dream, and one of the last places left for miles around with anything close to the mix of plants that would have grown here a hundred and fifty years ago—in part, no doubt, because in that same period, over half of Michigan’s wetlands have been filled or drained. Remarkably, there’s not a soul around, just me and the beaver and muskrat, all of us wrapped in a weave of plants I haven’t had a good honest visit with for fifteen years. There’s jack-in-the-pulpit and swamp rose, spring beauty and trillium, sarsaparilla and squirrel corn, cinnamon fern and dewberry and fragrant water lilies. White violets and Carolina rose.

  Hiding in the shade are the thick, shiny leaves of periwinkle, though their perfect lavender flowers are at least a month gone. Like a lot of exotics, periwinkle was carried here from Europe—not by accident but on purpose, by the sackful even, toted across the Atlantic by immigrants who cherished it as a medicinal to stop bleeding, to regulate blood pressure, and as a better-than-average treatment for nervous disorders. Acknowledging one of its Old World names, Violet of the Sorcerers, many of those same newcomers also hung it above their doors to ward off bad magic, just as they hid pennies under windowsills to bring good luck.

  Here too in fair abundance is a native plant wearing purplish blooms, each in the shape of a visored military helmet known to the New England colonists as a “skullcap”—the name the flower still bears today. It was skullcap they found Indian tribes using as a sedative, a practice they took to in short order. Herbalists continue to prescribe it not only for that—some, because it contains an antispasmodic, suggest it as a means of controlling epileptic seizures.

  Being that I’m here during midday, there are fresh drops of sap beaded on the hairs of dish-shaped leaves at the base of the sundew plants. I lie on the ground beside one and wait, and sure enough, in a matter of minutes an unsuspecting insect comes along, can’t resist what looks like the sparkle of something good to eat, crawls in for a taste. The hairs curl over it, more sap is released—really a digestive protein—and it’s the plant that ends up getting the meal. A good strategy for getting by, especially when you live in nutrient-poor soils. Sundew too has been a highly valued medicinal for at least seven hundred years; it was used widely throughout England to treat the violent coughing jags that come with tuberculosis, and is still used today to soothe whooping cough.

  At some invisible line south of Baldwin, trees suddenly grip the road, and tourist and sportsmen’s shops explode out across the landscape. Signs advertise trout-fishing ponds and canoe trips and cabins, and rooms to rent at places like The Wonderland Motel and the Pine Tree Lodge, with laminated color-photo placemats on the desks and real drinking glasses wrapped in stiff white paper sitting on the back of porcelain sinks; churches that offer campfire services every weekend of the summer; hunting clubs; bars with huge, gaping-mouthed fish hanging from the walls; bait shops with buckets of minnows for those after muskie and pike. Even the convenience stores have outdoorsy names: the Whitetail Quick Mart, the Lakeland Stop and Go.

  And then that glorious bridge across the straits of the Mackinac, hoisting you up over a great blue sweep of water and then setting you down in the Upper Peninsula. Once across, you see that the forests along the road grow older, forty or fifty years from the saw, more wild and ragged-looking, more frequently dotted with bogs and blueberries and twisted, tea-colored rivers, thick with the smell of pine and tamarack and peat. There’s no mistaking the fact that from this point on, westward all the way across northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, this was and is logging country. Maine was king of the timber heap until about 1850, after which the industry pulled up stakes and moved the bulk of its operations to New York, where it stayed through the 1850s; then on to Pennsylvania through the 1860s, and finally to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, which ruled the roost from 1870 until about 1900. (Both southern Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest remained small players until well after 1900.)

  In 1847, Dan Stanchfield, a timber cruiser working along the Rum River, climbed the highest tree and felt his jaw drop. The pine along fifty miles of the main watercourse, he said, reached from the shore on each side as far as the eye could see. “I had seen pine that seventy mills could not cut in as many years, although I had seen but a small part of it.” Even today, as likely as not you’ll take breakfast at a diner called The Lumberjack, buy your hardware at Timber John’s, and fill up the tank at Stump Junction; drink a couple of rounds on Friday night, eat a pasty, dance on a pinewood floor at the Deadfall Lounge.

  Though the big trees are long gone, it doesn’t take much to imagine these dark conifer woods filled with them again. For that matter, filled with ten to fifteen thousand lumberjacks, strong and burly, working in hundreds of camps scattered throughout these northern woods. Some of them had come willingly, others had fallen for the smooth talk and bright promises of a “man stealer,” a guy with a wad of timber company cash who went to cities like Milwaukee and Duluth, plied young men with drinks, loaded them on trains and took them off to the winter woods.

  It never was a job for the fainthearted. You slept in an open room two to a bunk, wrapped in a pair of wool blankets they gave you the day you signed in. Mornings began with two distinct jolts, the first being the sound of the bull cook screaming out, “Daylight in the swamp, boys!” and the next when you trudged out through forty-below weather to the cook shack to stuff yourself with breakfast. And while it’s true that morning and night you could eat all you wanted, the bad news was that you were given only fifteen minutes to do it. Nor could you warm yourself with a little friendly conversation, since talking meant that the guy holding his plate over his head yelling for more “sweat pads” (pancakes, in lumberjack lingo) might not get heard by the cookie stationed up front who was supposed to be shoveling out seconds and thirds. Get caught talking and the head cook might throw you out, and he could do it, because the cook was king.

  After breakfast, it was off to the woods through the cold, murky light of dawn, four to a team: an undercutter to notch the tree to show what direction to fell it, a pair of sawyers to cut it down, a swamper to take off the limbs and mark the trunk every sixteen feet, the sawyers then back again to cut it into lengths. The logs were placed on sleighs in loads that weighed twenty-five tons, pulled out over frozen road ruts by a single pair of horses. Even the roads in logging country—some seven or more miles of them in a typical six-hundred-acre camp—were a kind of work of art, carefully re-ice
d during the night with barrels of water from the river to keep them smooth and flat and fast.

  So it went six days a week. On Sunday, you could sleep in a little, even take a bath of sorts if you chose to, though not many did, using a tub of hot water from what the bull cook was boiling up to wash the linens. Some Sundays you might even get a visit from that famous sky-pilot preacher Frank Higgins, who slid into camps all over this country on his tiny sleigh pulled by two Saint Bernards. Stood there straight and tall on a stump in his plaid wool shirt and logging pants, set about saving the souls of some of the roughest characters America has ever known.

  Chapter Nine

  WHAT I NEVER EXPECTED, WHAT leaves me stumbling for balance, are the echoes from the past held in the smell of the Minnesota forest. This perfect blend of balsam and spruce and jack pine and aspen, picking the locks on some long-forgotten door to memory, flooding me with thoughts of being in the North Woods twenty-five years ago. Fourteen, at that piney rental cabin with the steel-spring chairs on the porch where you can sit and look over the tops of the conifers to the piers on Sand Lake. Early morning with my dad and brother in a small green fishing boat, the Johnson motor singing through its nose, trailing thin lines of blue smoke. Fish and potatoes frying in a skillet half the size of the electric range, eating from unmatched plates on a red Formica table. Out on the porch after dinner, after dark, a yellow lightbulb burning against streams of lightning bugs—my mother’s pale legs poking out of her navy-blue shorts, her hand over her mouth, laughing.