by Dean Kuipers
But Gullion’s book was mostly about growing and caring for aspen.
Ongoing intensive research is showing that ruffed grouse is only one of many species of forest wildlife closely associated with this [aspen] ecosystem (Flack 1976). Among the game and furbearing species fully as dependent upon this system are beaver, woodcock, snowshoe or varying hare, and moose. Research in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin has identified the aspen ecosystem as the key to successful white-tailed deer management. In Minnesota, at least, black bears make much use of aspen as a food resource and the fruit-bearing plants that are a component of this forest ecosystem are essential to bears and important to many other forms of wildlife.
Another study cited in the book found that aspen cuts attracted at least seventeen species of songbirds. Dad was sentimental about what he called “tweety birds,” and he knew Diane liked them, too. He read about the predators that would follow, from badgers to bobcats to wolves, and as he read on through the hunting season and into Christmas 2000, the experts slowly began to emulsify the old man’s defenses.
He and Brett were at the cabin in early spring, with some snow here and there on the ground, looking at the fields. Dad was still processing. These things just take a long time.
“So Michigan was the first state to have a game warden,” he said to Brett, sitting at the table and peering over his glasses. He had been reading. “They had to bring in a warden to stop the market hunters from mowing down all the wildlife to feed the logging crews.”
“Right, but it was the logging crews that created a lot of the wildlife,” said Brett, sitting down with his coffee.
“See, I mean, that’s just backward to me,” said Dad. “I always thought the market hunting happened first, as they logged, and then nothing came back until the trees matured.”
“Nope, it’s the opposite. They’d log off an area and for about ten years the wildlife would be stampeding through there. ’Cause they like to eat all that new browse. Michigan probably didn’t have that many deer until they started logging.”
Bruce looked at him. “I’ll be damned,” he said and went back to his pamphlets.
“It’s disturbance that makes the birthrates surge,” said Brett. “Just like if you introduce a predator, too. Letting a coyote hang around probably makes more deer.”
That spring, the forester teaching Brett’s class, Tom Nederveld, was giving a talk about game management in Newaygo, and Brett convinced Dad to go. Nederveld, it turned out, was not only Dutch but from Byron Center, only a couple of miles from where Dad had grown up on the Kasslander Place. Dad was so relieved to be in direct touch with someone who was like him, and who was an honest-to-God state-certified authority, that he was overtaken by fervor. He convinced Nederveld to drive with them straight out to the cabin that same afternoon. All three of them walked the ninety-five acres together, and within a few weeks, Nederveld sent them a rough, page-and-a-half typewritten plan to improve the habitat. Dad was almost giddy with newfound faith. He envisioned giant whitetails pronging belly-deep through lush fields of alfalfa and clover and fat grouse exploding from a series of new berry brakes. The heart of Nederveld’s plan was to take out the five-acre Scots pine plantation and a couple of acres of aspens, but Dad just glossed over these ravages. He wasn’t about to do anything like that. But berries! He was all about grass and berries, and that was all the start that Brett needed.
Ayron packed some sand around a hazelnut seedling six inches tall and watched Dad slosh toward her with a five-gallon bucket of swamp water, banging it against his legs as he heaved it along. Joe was leaning on a steel planting bar, his face white and clammy with the heat. It was May 2001, the first hot weekend of the year at the cabin, and the oaks hung heavy with catkins. Cottonwood down stuck in everyone’s hair. Joe lurched like he’d passed out and dropped to his knees and then lay on his back and looked at the sky.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dad barked. He loved mindless hard labor, believing it had value no matter what the objective, and he felt close to the kids as they labored under the blistering fusion of the sun. He was especially impressed with Ayron, who didn’t have to be out there but who worked extra hard to demonstrate her support for Brett’s restoration plan.
“I’m fat!” Joe shouted from where he lay. Bruce made no motion to help him.
“It’s not that hot out here,” Dad said.
“Bruce, everybody brings something different to the team,” said Ayron. “Brett’s got the plan, you are providing the means to buy all these seedlings and the muscle to carry the water—”
“And I’m bringing the fat!” Joe added.
Dad was skeptical. “You guys have been smoking that wacky tobacky again,” he said. “I know you.”
“Bruce, I swear to you that that is not what’s happening here,” said Ayron, half-laughing. “Joe is just big. He can’t take this heat.”
Joe moved to the shade for a bit and then kept planting, swatting deerflies away from his head. They had a lot of work to do: Dad and Brett had gone all-in on their first planting at the camp, trailering in six hundred seedlings in pots and trays and burlapped root balls—Autumn olive, multiflora rose, Washington hawthorn, arrowwood, nannyberry, blueberries, and hazelnuts. They were all quite small, maybe six to eight inches tall, but they’d bought as many as they thought they could plant in two days. Brett had welded up some steel dibble bars at the foundry that you could stomp into the ground and make just enough room for a seedling, and the four of them wedged plants into the sun-scorched sand in forest openings all over the seventy-five, starting on the mostly treeless rise full of dust and prickers between us and the hunting camp of Mr. Landheer to the southeast. Bruce took it on himself to water them by dipping buckets out of the blackwater swamp.
Ayron nursed the conversation along to keep Joe’s mind off retching. “Oh, you missed this one, Joe, I think it happened after you left the group home, but there was that one dude who was always talking about Kent County? ‘Kentcounty, baby, kentcounty.’ I guess that must be where he was from or something, because he was always talking about getting back there.”
“Yeah, I remember that guy,” said Joe, bent over at the waist and hanging on his planting bar.
“Anyway, he said one week he wanted to go to church, so we found some liberal church downtown that we could go to and one of the staff took him down there and the minister was taking prayer requests, you know, polling the congregation for stuff that people wanted to pray about. This dude jumps up and he says, ‘Yeah, I really need some PUSSY, man!’”
“Ha ha!” yelled Joe. “Yeah!”
“‘Yeah, I really need some PUSSY, man!’” yelled Brett, who already knew the story.
Dad stumbled with his bucket, laughing despite himself. Ayron was encouraged; you never knew which way that would go with him.
“And so, the minister, he doesn’t even miss a beat, he says, ‘And we pray that this man may find a special friend!’”
“HAW haw! No!” said Dad, laughing.
“Yep, a ‘special friend.’”
“Oh Lord!”
“I’m going to say that in church next time,” said Joe. “‘Yeah, I really need some PUSSY, man!’”
“You guys are definitely smoking that wacky tobacky,” Dad said again.
Joe had graduated with his master’s in psychology, magna cum laude, only a few weeks before, and I didn’t even know. Dad, Diane, Mom, Tom, Brett, and Ayron all saw him walk, but I actually didn’t know anything about it until years later, when he mentioned it during a conversation. I said, “Wait, you have a master’s degree?” “Yep,” he said. I answered, “Really? In what?” I never knew what Brett studied in school, either (sociology). We were close as could be, yet we knew almost nothing about each other.
Joe and Ayron were careful about their client’s private lives, and they never used their names or identifying characteristics if they talked about them, but a lot of these people became part of their lives. Ayron often found them
jobs or would take them to doctor’s appointments or to Social Security and things like that when she was off the clock. You had to laugh at the stuff that went on in the group homes because otherwise you’d go mad knowing these clients were going to linger in these facilities a long time, or maybe their whole lives.
“There was one guy you’d love, Dad, he was so sweet,” said Joe. “A guy who loved cars and he had traumatic brain injury as the result of a car crash. He talked nonstop and he called everyone ‘Sir.’ He would sit in the back of the activities van and yell, ‘Red-line it!’ The house wasn’t locked, it wasn’t that kind of facility, but on two different occasions this guy decided he was going to run away and instead of walking out the front door, he leaped from the second-floor window and both times landed on the air conditioning unit below. One time he broke his leg.”
“Anyway,” Ayron picked it up, “one time me and Joe took the whole house to the movies. Just the two of us.”
“We’re in the middle of the movie and the jump-out-the-window guy started hissing behind us, ‘Sir! I gotta go to the bathroom!’” said Joe. “I turned around and told him he couldn’t go, because this guy loved to talk and he would just go out in the lobby so he could chat up the people out there. So he starts getting excited: ‘Sir!’”
“Joe was holding out.”
“I just shook my head and said no,” Joe continued, “and he got more and more excited and finally, right during a quiet part of the movie, he just hollered out, ‘SIR! I’M GONNA SHIT MY PANTS!’”
“HAW HAW!” yelled Dad, tears streaming down his face. “Oh, I just don’t know how you do it.”
“It’s hard work, but look at you, Bruce,” said Ayron. “You’re not afraid of hard work.”
“Yeah, but I’d want the patients to get better. Are they getting better?”
“Sometimes you see a glimmer of hope,” said Joe.
“That’s hard to take, isn’t it? Isn’t it demoralizing?”
“Sometimes it really is, but like everything else you have good days and bad days,” Ayron said. “It’s satisfying to know that once in a while they really have fun.”
Joe had switched companies and his new job was overseeing five group homes across the street from the State Hospital, plus managing a bunch of other “independent living sites,” meaning apartments, and handling about sixty-five patients and around one hundred staff. That earned him fourteen dollars an hour and the privilege of being on call 24-7.
Ayron was still working on her master’s in social work, but Joe had managed a BS and an MS in psychology, with a final GPA somewhere north of 3.8, in three and a half years. His original plan was to start a private therapy practice, but once he grasped how long it would take to build a client base, the idea faded. He was increasingly disenchanted with the whole mental health field. Technically, he was required to be available on his company cell phone at all times, but there was no cell coverage at the cabin. It was one of the reasons we all liked to be there. Every puff of hot wind made the aspens hurrah.
“I wish we could bring some of our clients out here,” Joe said. “It would do them a world of good to plant a shrub. They never get to do anything like this. Don’t you think, Brett?”
“I do, but oh God, can you imagine?”
“‘Sir! Sir! I am gonna SHIT MY PANTS!’” yelled Joe.
“‘Yeah, I really need some PUSSY, man!’”
“Oh Lord! Haw HAW!” roared Dad.
“Bruce, it’s fun working out here with you,” said Ayron. “You’re loosening up.”
“Oh, we always have fun here.”
“And it’s not just because I’m fuckin’ selfish and I want more game birds,” said Brett.
Ayron burst out laughing. “It’s all about you, Brett! You and those damn birds!”
“Selfish fucker!” yelled Joe.
Dad doused a little blueberry bush with swamp water. “I thought so at first.”
“I know you did,” said Brett, “and to your credit and everyone else’s, there is some truth to that. I want to do what I want to do up here. But it just so happens that if we make it better for game birds we make it better for everything.”
“Listen to you all, pretending to like each other,” Joe said, his head soaked in sweat. Then he lay down again on the sand.
They sat at the picnic table at dusk and drank coffee and were hushed every few minutes by a ruffed grouse drumming on his log in the deep swamp to the east. The thumping slowly built to a buzz roll like the bird was somewhere inside your own chest. The heat died away in the spring twilight.
Flights of geese passed overhead, conversing not with the casual traveling honks of fall but the urgent, hungry cries of the nesting season. All four of the people present jabbered away with hearts inflated by hope, talking about where they were going to plant the several hundred seedlings that remained. Brett and Ayron threatened to bring not only their hunting dog, Gertie, and their Lhasa apso, Jimmy, but also their cats, Mooker and Little.
“You’re just going to freak out, Bruce!” Ayron cackled. “Oh my God! A cat!”
“Don’t tell Vern or Jack. It’s sacrilege,” said Joe.
When Brett was in the shower, Dad said to Ayron: “You and Brett are really great together. You laugh together. That’s so important.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, Bruce. You know if Brett’s laughing that he feels good.”
“He’s like a totally different guy. He’s really relaxed today. Usually he’s so absolutely rigid.”
“But it’s not acting out. You know that, right? He’s not just being an ass, there’s intention behind it. It’s like we were talking about earlier: he wants to make this place into something he really enjoys, so it feels like him, and then he knows he’s going to feel better and you’ll all have a better time together. The bottom line is that he wants to have a better relationship with you.”
“He doesn’t say it as nicely as you do,” said Dad, fastidiously scrubbing a dish over and over.
“No, I know it. He can be harsh. But the harshness has the best of intention behind it.”
“Well, he’s sure lucky to have you, even to interpret things like that. I see that the two of you are really friends.”
I wasn’t there that day, but from the way all of them described the planting to me a few days later, the feeling had changed. The land was no longer an abstract; it had seared their brains with its absorbed solar heat and stabbed them with hawthorn and Autumn olive thorns and gone under their nails and shot itself through them. They weren’t just walking the land; they had opened it up. As a family and as a project, we were now in its very guts. Working shoulder to shoulder had scrubbed most of the charge out of the air between them; it was as though everyone in the planting crew had just had a massively satisfying conversation, though really the banter hadn’t been much more than group home yucks and whether someone should see if Joe was okay. Dad didn’t know if anything good would come of this planting, but he went with it. Trust is effective in truly microscopic amounts. The dirtier they got, the happier they got. They walked around the kitchen in their work boots and Ayron watched Dad, looking for anxiety, but the old man seemed simply pleased to have them all working there. The outside came in.
They were out on the porch again at daybreak downing an outfitter’s breakfast of coffee and Ibuprofen and listening to the drummer. Dad was the first out in the field to plant for a second long day. If he could have, he would have worked all night.
The more they planted, the more they were all irritated by the sunbaked sand in Cabin Field and First Field. They didn’t put bushes in those fields because they were just too dry and exposed, but the new plantings increased the barren effrontery of those dunes covered in gray dust. Their emptiness stood out like an open sore. Dad pitted himself against them. Soil tests Brett had sent to MSU showed those fields had almost zero organic matter and the acidic pH of the swamp. Their weekend plan hadn’t included working on those fields, but they had opened the s
oil now and the berry bushes didn’t even seem as important. Before they left on Sunday night, they agreed they had to get into those fields and plant buckwheat as soon as possible. The place was making its own agenda.
The first planting really had me itching to get my hands in that dirt, but I had an infant son and a partner who weren’t going to go on a working vacation, so I got as close as I could. Michigan had filled my consciousness—even if we didn’t actually go to the camp, I wanted to be immersed in those trees and the smell of sand and lake water. Dad understood so he rented a house for us in Saugatuck, about two hours south of the cabin, in the shade of huge sugar maples high on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.
Dad was conflicted about that fancy cottage. He worried that we’d stop going to the deer camp and start doing this instead, lying around in the dreamy shade. Vern’s new place was right at the mouth of the Manistee, where the grandkids could play in Lake Michigan, and Jack’s cabin was on the nice kayaking waters of the Sable. Dad, however, just wasn’t cut out for that kind of leisure. If he couldn’t hunt, or fish, or ski, or hike, he was a little lost. I don’t remember us ever going kayaking or canoeing together. Saugatuck is at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, and he asked if I wanted to go on a guided trout trip; he and Brett went out that summer with Fred Lee from the shop Fishing Memories in Portage, and the river was right there. I declined, but Dad did take Meg and me out on Lake Michigan in his Lund boat with its big Mercury motor and Bimini top, and we fished a little, but the lake was rough and we cut it short.
Finally we just played with the baby. Mom and Tom had a great time with Spenser, leaping from bed to bed with him as he giggled like mad. His eyes would light up when Tom would say, “Spense, let’s wrassle!” Spenser was walking and we’d all mob down the steep trail of exposed roots to the cool of the sugar-sand beach. Lake Michigan is a wide inland sea, but the tiny green waves sloshed without the detonation and rocky gargle of the ocean. Meg and I bought a kiddie pool and Spense slapped at that water in the shady yard as Grandma Gertrude, Uncle Mike and his second wife, Barb, and some of my college friends came by to talk and eat and have coffee. At night, big thunderstorms rolled in like the shards of lightning were spokes on a wheel pulling the clouds across the lake and the big maples slapped their branches on the ground. The mornings broke clear and the mosquitoes gathered in the shade, and it was strange to be in a cabin where there weren’t berry bushes to plant or shooting lanes to clear.