The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  “I can’t wait to bring him out to the cabin,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to get him some little camo,” he said.

  “We can build him a tree fort out in the woods there, so he has a place to play.”

  “Yep,” Dad said through tears.

  We walked around the block with Dad holding Spenser. Finally he said, “Well, we probably don’t want a tree fort messing up one of the trees, but he can sit with me in the blind and we’ll see how he does. All you kids were pretty quiet.”

  Mom was astonished. “Well, Bruce, Dean always had a tree fort at the Nienhuises, don’t you remember? What do you have there, one hundred acres? Surely there’s one tree where he can have a treehouse.”

  Dad was smiling. He was outraged that Nancy would refer to his deer camp using the same mouth that said “I want a divorce.”

  “Well, it’s not that kind of place,” Dad said. “We don’t do that there.”

  “We can build a tree fort out at our place, then,” she said. “We only have that one big tree in the field, but he can have it.”

  “Good! Perfect! That would be great,” he said.

  Ten

  First Plantings

  I was over at Mr. Carter’s place and we were sitting on the front porch with his son, Andrew, talking about the fence line we shared and what neighbors had come and gone. Joe and Andrew farmed over three hundred acres, and, like a lot of things at their place, the house was no fancier than necessary.

  “Well, this house here was built in the 1870s, early 1870s. And they said they brought a sawmill in,” Joe said. “You go upstairs, I got white pine boards up there that big, don’t we, Andrew?” He spread his hands to indicate huge boards.

  Joe’s house was originally built as a stagecoach stop on the line from Hesperia to Hart, and it was radically overbuilt with heartwood framing double the size used today, which is probably why it’s still standing. There’s a stairway going up the front that was for the women, and another going up the back for the men. Joe and his wife, Marilyn, moved in there in the 1970s when there was still a wall upstairs dividing the sexes, but Joe knocked it out and made it all into one big room.

  “They brought in a sawmill and set it up,” Joe said again. That meant the original builders milled the lumber from big white pines on this land.

  “When you’re out on the state land out there, you can look at those stumps that are still around that have been burned inside when the forest fires come through,” said Andrew. “There’s still a lot of that.”

  Joe Carter’s story about his house confirmed for me that our section once stood in old-growth white pine. It was of immense interest to me because they’d never grown back. Surveyors conducting the General Land Office surveys of 1816–1856 had dragged their sixty-six-foot measuring chains from south to north across these acres, and their beautifully hand-transcribed notes for our section and those surrounding it indicate mostly white pine, hemlock, cedar, beech, and hard maple. They laid out the section line between us and Carter, at eighty chains to a statute mile, and every so often they’d record a representative tree that stood on the line, often at the section corner or the forty-chain midpoint, to give some landmarks and some idea of the vegetation. That particular line went right through the beaver bog, and the surveyor wrote: “Enter Spruce swamp … Hemlock 30 in diam … Leave swamp.” As they walked north, the elevation came up a few feet, the ground dried out, and by the time they entered the western edge of what would be our spread, they walked under some big trees.

  Like the giant Douglas fir or ponderosa pines of the West, virgin eastern white pine forests in Michigan could stand 140–160 feet tall and 3–4 feet in diameter at breast height. The old-growth red pines and hemlock were nearly as singular. The white pines did get even bigger: the tallest recorded by an early colonist on the East Coast was 250 feet. We don’t even know what it feels like to live under that canopy, with the life up above more in communication with the air than with the ground. I grew up under second- or third-growth oak and maple topping out at roughly fifty or sixty feet, with the occasional yellow birch or hickory or a big ash maybe reaching seventy feet tall. That’s what there is today east of the Mississippi.

  A fellow named Valentine Carpenter homesteaded our property in the 1860s, and he had the whole north quarter of the section, 160 acres that included our property and also the 80 to the east now occupied by our neighbor Randy. By the time he paid his 1870 taxes, the first assessment on this property, he’d cleared at least the 25 acres required under the Homestead Act to take possession of the land. Maybe the big trees were already gone by then, from pirate logging. Maybe he was a logger himself, one of the steady stream of working men pouring into Michigan with crosscut saws in hand after the white pine forests in the East were cut over.

  Carpenter fought for the North in the Civil War and then returned to the East Coast and married the former Mrs. Martha (James) Warner. Martha already had a young son named Fred, and her father, Daniel Sharp, lived with her. All four of them followed Valentine’s father, Rufus J. Carpenter, to Oceana County in 1866 looking either for trees or for the farming that came after the trees. Farming was going to be a challenge. A climate tension zone stretches across Michigan from roughly Muskegon to the deep inset of Saginaw Bay, dividing the state into warm and cold. Below the line, it was deciduous broadleaf trees and good loam for farming. Above, gargantuan pines and sand. We are just north.

  As Carpenter moved in, half the land in the township that was deemed arable—meaning it was above water—was held by speculators selling off the timber, many of them later simply abandoning the land for back taxes after logging it. With an interior drained by scores of floatable rivers that could bring logs out to the Great Lakes, Michigan became the logging capital of North America between 1870 and 1890. Timber barons took every big pine tree in the state, and sometimes simply every tree. Photos at the Hartwick Pines Logging Museum taken from the banks of the Manistee and the Au Sable rivers show men standing on log rafts in the water and not one standing tree for miles. Just ravaged landscapes of bald dirt. The logging camps cut and moved; more big trees waited in Wisconsin and Minnesota just across Lake Michigan to the west. Valentine witnessed the peak of this activity as sleighs piled fifteen feet high with logs groaned along the wagon trail in front of his cabin in the winter, headed to mill.

  We only really know what our place might have originally felt like because of one small stand of remnant old-growth timber expressly conserved as Hartwick Pines State Park, which is a couple of hours north of us. After blowdowns and fires, it still holds forty-nine acres of indigenous glory. You are different there. You are incredibly small. As in a big redwood grove, the overstory is another tier of knowledge, an upper room, a life of birds and insects and epiphytes that most humans never see. The mystery up there belongs to itself and floats from tree to tree on the fur of flying squirrels. These soft, aromatic trees breathe the kind of air that humans can’t help but think of as rare and even sacred.

  Carpenter’s farm became part of the new Leavitt Township in 1866, separating from Elbridge, which was then mostly Native Americans in the Ottawa Indian Reservation, and at the very first township meeting, Valentine was elected clerk. His father, Rufus, was a carpenter both by name and by trade, and he built a good-sized general store a mile south of Walkerville, which had an upstairs meeting hall for public business. It also housed the Bird Post Office and he became the postmaster.

  By 1870 Valentine and Martha’s household included baby Arthur and their farm comprised one horse, one milk cow, three swine, and crops of Indian corn and rice worth $125 and $20, respectively. For tax purposes, his crops and livestock were valued at $200. They were hemmed in by water. South of his acreage, the surveyor’s notes for the section line in the General Land Office survey book read: “Land Mostly Swamp.”

  They say that it takes a thousand years for undisturbed forest to create an inch of humus, so the uplands there c
ould have accumulated as much as a foot since the withdrawal of the ice sheet, give or take. Once Carpenter opened it up, that humus deteriorated fast. Beneath it was pure sand.

  White pines are easy to grow, but they also don’t seem to mind waiting. Michigan is marked with large and distinctive stump plains or stump prairies well known in the literature of silviculture such as Kingston Plains and Deward Pine Stump Preserve. These are fields of elephantine white pine stumps cut more than a century ago and still sitting there like it was yesterday, as if in protest, where nothing other than grass savannah will grow. Most of these stump prairies were burned in epic and repeated slash fires, consuming what was left of the humus and cooking the already xeric sand. Whether it’s a matter of infertile sand or lack of seed stock, no forest has yet returned, not even scrubby sumac or sassafras. Intensively logged oak-maple-beech forests did tend to regenerate in swampy tracts like ours, but the large white pines that once stood in them did not. By now, 140 or 150 years after they were cut off our place, they’d be well on their way to maturity again, and towering above the forest. But they aren’t.

  Our place was exhausted and turned into a sand dune.

  The Carpenter farm folded in some kind of abrupt ending. The homestead patent was granted in 1872, but it went to Martha, who within a few years took young Arthur and her baby daughter, Lillie, and moved west, ending up in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s easy to imagine that the poor soil was one cause. Valentine stuck around Oceana County and was a member of the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, the society for vets of the Civil War. Martha sold the homestead piecemeal over a couple of years and from that point on, the land we occupy changed hands in rapid succession, sometimes yearly, as speculators looked for new profits.

  Chief among them was the Ludington timber baron Horace Butters, who invented a steam skidder that could drag timber out of the woods without battalions of men and horses. Butters laid in his narrow-gauge Mason & Oceana train lines—known locally as the “Mean & Ornery”—spreading out spiderlike to glean what was left of the trees up through the early 1900s. A forty-acre parcel abutting ours, now part of the USA, was once owned by Butters, as were many tracts around us. The beavers across the road are still using the raised M&O railroad beds as dams.

  A fellow named James Askins bought the seventy-five (then still an eighty) in the 1930s and built a house up by the road. His son told me they milled all the lumber themselves from beech and oak growing on the land, and like Carter’s place they made them double-thick, so the studs are mostly four-by-fours. The place is indestructible. The land was crap, though, and in 1951 he put in strip pine plantations to control the blow-sand. He planted five acres of Scots pines in the middle of the place and more Scots along the property line to the west, reclaiming an old dirt lane that lead from a schoolhouse up on the road right down the section line to a long-gone house at the edge of the bog. Though it’s full of trees now, that lane is easy to trace through the forest to where it hit the bog and may have connected to a dirt road on the other side. Askins put in a long stripe of red and Austrian pines ten trees wide and eighty trees long to the southwest and the slash of red pine six trees wide and fifty trees long that now shades the cabin. They all show signs of being trimmed and thinned. He owned the piece for almost fifty years and when he died, his wife sold off the house and the five acres around it, which is why we own a seventy-five and not an eighty.

  Most significantly, Askins put in a small stand of white pines over to the southeast, which grew so slowly it was almost imperceptible. The land did not go racing into secondary succession in a bid to return to the stability and energy efficiency of its so-called climax white pine forest. Instead, for over 140 years it had remained what the great plant ecologist Frederic Clements called a “disclimax” community: a stable ecological community that had stopped in succession somewhere short of its former end-state because of human disturbance.

  By the time Vern’s childhood friend Ike Huizenga got hold of the land around 1980, it was just waiting. If it was working through succession again, it was moving at a pace not discernible on a scale of human lives. It was a quiet sand field covered in lichens with the occasional deer and a gang of resident porcupines.

  “The guy who owned it didn’t do anything with it, it wasn’t farmed or anything, it was just sitting there and I guess he just wanted to get rid of it,” says Ike’s son, Iran Huizenga. He’s the same age as my brother Joe and a partner in Huizenga Land & Livestock Corp. Across the street they ran fifteen thousand hogs, but they never put hogs on our place because it was too few acres for their operation.

  “The only thing you could put in there was asparagus, and we weren’t too into asparagus at the time, we only did hogs. It was just sand. And that’s all it was, just sand with a couple little sticks that stuck out of it that looked like grass, but nothing would grow there.”

  Out in Buck One, I could smell the difference between the white pines and the spruces Vern planted, or the hemlocks in the black muck. Unlike the other conifers, the white pines have a peppery edge, like biting into an orange peel. Aunt Sally named that blind Buck One after she shot the first deer out of it. Askins’s little planting of white pines stands between it and the cabin. Those trees gushed resin as though their interiors were overwrought with bigness, like a teenager who was destined to play center for the basketball team. But they had not grown tall; they were fat but not tall. What were they waiting for?

  Dad and Diane came out to Venice during the summer of 2000 to play with Spenser. Dad doted on his new grandson and liked taking care of Meg. As we dragged Spenser around the block in his Radio Flyer wagon to get him down for a nap, Dad acknowledged that he wanted his grandson to love the ocean, to love the nighttime air in Venice, to love the good rivers and herds of elk in the Rockies, to love Michigan. He was eager to have Spenser and Meg come out to the cabin, but he recognized right away that the deer camp was no good for a baby in the summer: it was too buggy, too hot, no lake or river close enough to give it a cooling breeze. Instead, we spent a lot of time together on Venice Beach, and Bruce tried to be around enough to take part in the little milestones in Spenser’s life, such as buying Spenser’s first pair of shoes at Harry Harris in Brentwood.

  In the fall of 2000 Brett enrolled in a Master Woodland Management program through the Michigan State University Extension in Grand Rapids, wisely figuring that a credential would give him better standing to argue for changes on the deer camp. Dad was excited when he told me about it, though he doubted any of this total horseshit Brett was reading was going to grow any more grouse or turkeys or whatnot. He just wanted Brett to feel encouraged. Dad was pretty sure we couldn’t really affect the natural cycles of wild game. You just had to leave things alone. He believed in Man’s Dominion, that the planet and everything on it was ours to eat up, and even though he wasn’t thrilled to be sharing that destiny with other human beings, he thought it inevitable. I think he was actually depressed by the thought of it, because he also held romantic ideas about the purity of wilderness. He had always told us that true wilderness could not have people in it. One hiker toting a bag of Doritos ruined it for him. I suspect he felt the same way about heaven: the other people there were going to really screw it up.

  Brett was well aware of Dad’s skepticism, and he made a move that probably changed our lives more than anything else we would ever try with Dad, including estrangement or tear-splattered letters or figurative murder: he brought his class texts over to Dad’s house so he could read them himself.

  People who don’t want to change their minds about difficult subjects like global warming or evolution simply avoid reading the science. Dad had never read anything about game management. Brett was compiling a thick binder of management protocols for individual species from songbirds to moose, and he was only a few weeks into his class when he recognized that it was a powerful tool.

  Managing Michigan forests for wildlife mostly meant growing ruffed grouse, as their food so
urces and habitat were also generally great for woodcock, bears, whitetail deer, and a whole raft of other game and nongame creatures. Brett had reams of publications from the Ruffed Grouse Society, and most of them talked about growing and cutting aspen, as grouse depend on the tender flower buds, catkins, and leaf buds of aspen as their primary food source. Secondary sources would be hazels, birches, and ironwoods, which were also abundant in our woods, and then the flower buds of cherries, apples, and a few other fruit trees. Bruce thought he was going to be reading about what berry bushes he should be planting, but most of Brett’s pamphlets and texts were about trees.

  On the first page of Gordon Gullion’s standard text, Managing Northern Forests for Wildlife, he was confronted by this: “Also to be considered is the widely held concept that a forest undisturbed by fire or timber harvesting is best for wildlife. In many circumstances this is a false notion and the prevalence of this concept has led to marked declines of some wildlife over large regions of North America.”

  He took this like a punch to the gut and kept reading. Of course, Brett had been saying these things for a decade, but Dad worshipped expertise and these were the experts.

  Like everyone else in the Kuipers family, Dad had always been taught that popple (a slang version of poplar or Populus, the family that includes aspens) was a kind of weed tree and needed to be eliminated. Compared with oak or pine, aspen had very little value as lumber and was used mostly for pulpwood or to make pallets or oriented strand board (OSB). When I had sold firewood years earlier, I guaranteed my customers that it would contain none of that punky aspen, because the mature wood didn’t burn well and no one wanted it.