rope trick

Jörg, Paul and I resolved to leave the cabin with more firewood than we found it with. Since we'd already had a few fires in the wood stove, we decided to look for a fairly big tree to cut down. As luck would have it, just beyond the clearing in front of the cabin, there was a thick birch which was mostly trunk. I'm not sure if it had been struck by lightning, had most of its branches blown off in a wind storm or was just oddly sparse of branches.
We found a dull axe and a couple of bow saws in the cabin, and I had a little bow saw in the car that could be used for cutting off the few branches that were on the tree. There were also some splitting wedges and a coil of rope. One of the bow saws was big and symmetrical enough so two people could use it, one on either end.
There were a lot of small trees and brush around the base of this birch, so we had to hack it away to make room to work. We chopped at the base of the trunk for a while, but that was slow going, so we used the bow saw and made better progress. We cut about a third of the way through on one side, then cut a wedge out of the other side. The tree seemed to lean a little bit to one side, so we thought it would fall that way, but we weren't sure. Jörg said he'd climb up and tie the rope around the tree so we could pull it over. It seemed like a reasonable idea, but I didn't know how he was going to climb up high enough since there were no branches. He didn't have much trouble though. He grabbed the trunk and shimmied up to just below the first branch. He started tying the rope, but he was tying the middle of the rope to the tree. I didn't think the rope was long enough to be tied like that, so I suggested he untie the knot he was making and tie the end of the rope to the tree so it could be pulled from further away. He tried to explain to me that we needed to have the ends available to pull on. I told him that every piece of rope has two ends, and he could tie one to the tree and two people could pull the other end. He made a comment about what a good job I was doing supervising while he was up in the tree doing the work, and he continued with his middle of the rope knot.
I went and got my camera to try to take a picture at the moment the tree fell. I stood a safe distance away and focused on the tree and watched as he and Paul each got an end of the rope and started pulling. I'm not sure what the idea was exactly, maybe that the tree would fall fairly slowly and they'd be able to move backwards out of the way, or it would fall right between them since they were pulling from slightly different directions. When it started to fall, it looked like it twisted a little and I snapped a picture just as Jörg was leaping over some brush out of the way of the falling trunk. There was a thud that shook the ground even where I was standing. As I lowered the camera, Jörg was standing in the clearing, just beyond the fallen tree, but Paul had disappeared. There was that moment of stunned silence again, seeming even more silent after the crash of the falling tree. If Paul had been under that tree when it fell, he could easily be broken in many places, or dead. Jörg said, "Paul?" There was a rustling in the brush, and Paul was extricating himself from the bushes which had grabbed him as he tried to get out of the way, and the branches of the small tree which had been knocked down next to him by the big tree. He was unharmed but for a few scrapes and scratches.
We used the car to drag the trunk over close to the cabin and started sawing away. It took a hell of a long time to cut the tree into wood stove appropriate lengths with the bow saws. It seemed like an especially long time to me since I was used to chain saw speed. We were still working on that when it started to get dark. As the sun went down, the frogs started chirping. And the chirping was extremely loud. I went inside to fix some food while Paul and Jörg were still outside cutting wood. Then I heard Jörg yelling.

dam dunhills

One summer, about twenty years ago, my brother and I drove down to Florida from West Virginia in my white VW Beetle. I was too young to have my driver's license at the time, so he did all of the driving. We bought a carton of Dunhill cigarettes in North Carolina on the way down. Cigarettes were cheap in North Carolina, and we liked Dunhills. Neither of us smoked habitually, it was more like a hobby to us. It seemed pretty cool to pull out the distinctive red and gold flat box of Dunhills when we wanted to have a cigarette at a party or club. A carton of cigarettes was contraband in our house, so we had to keep them hidden. The carton lasted a long time.
In fact, we still had a pack or two left around Thanksgiving when I flew up to Wisconsin to go hunting with my grandad, so I took a pack with me. I flew into Milwaukee, and grandad picked me up and took me to his house. We packed his car and left early in the morning to drive to the cabin. It was almost exactly 300 miles from my grandad's house to the hunting cabin so it took about six hours to get there. There were already a few hunters who were friends of my grandad at the cabin when we arrived.
There was a lot of cooking, bringing in firewood, fetching water from a hole chopped in the ice on the lake, and even hunting going on, so I kind of forgot about the cigarettes, and hadn't had much opportunity to smoke them anyway. With six or eight people in a small cabin in the woods, there was always someone around.
My grandad and I ended up staying a few days longer than the rest, so after they left, I had a bit more time to myself. I remembered the cigarettes, but there wouldn't have been much time to smoke them, so I didn't open the pack. I thought of something better to do with them. My friend Brent and I always talked about going up to the cabin one summer, and I figured I could hide the cigarettes and we could smoke them when we came up in the summer. While I was at it, I figured I could hide some alcohol too. There was a bottle of Kahlua that one of the hunters had left behind, but it wasn't the most appealing thing to me and I wasn't sure how well it would stand up to the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer. My grandad had brought a couple of bottles of vodka, and there had already been some there when we got there, so one of the bottles was still unopened. I figured he wasn't keeping careful track of the booze, so I took the unopened bottle and set it aside. If he said anything, I could "look for it" and "find" it later, but he didn't seem to notice. I thought carefully about where to hide it. There was a bunch of junk under the beds, but some things like the boat's oars were stored there, so it seemed likely someone might find something hidden there while looking for something else. Pretty much every storage area was like that. We had rummaged around in the attic to find the gasoline lanterns, and looked through the space under the kitchen sink to find containers for water. I didn't think anywhere outside would work because of the weather and animals.
There was an old gas refrigerator in the kitchen. It hadn't worked in years, but people would sometimes put ice in it and keep food in it to keep it from the mice. I noticed there was an access panel on the bottom of it, and when the access panel was opened, there was a small area with another panel, up and towards the back. There was just enough space next to the refrigerator parts to accommodate one bottle of vodka and one pack of Dunhill cigarettes. Actually, I could have probably fit two more packs of Dunhills in there, but all I had was one. So when grandad was taking one of his many naps, I put the bottle of vodka and the pack of Dunhills in that space under the refrigerator. I was kind of nervous when we were getting ready to leave that grandad would ask where his other bottle of vodka was, but if he noticed, he didn't say anything.
It turns out that Brent and I did not go up to the cabin that next summer. In fact, we didn't go the summer after that either, or any summer after that, or ever. So we never had a chance to sit at the table in the shack late at night knocking back vodka shots and smoking fancy (if somewhat stale) english cigarettes while listening to some distant AM radio station.
About six years after I had put the contraband under the refrigerator, I graduated from college. Right after graduating, Jörg, Paul and I drove up to the cabin for a bit of rustic recreation. When I went into the kitchen after we arrived, I saw the refrigerator and remembered what I had put there years earlier. The bottom panel of the refrigerator wasn't completely closed, and when I opened the interior panel, to my surprise, the bottle of vodka was gone. The pack of cigarettes was still there, along with what looked like the remnants of a mouse nest. It was a mystery to me how someone found that vodka. Well, maybe not so much of a mystery. But it was a mystery why they didn't take the cigarettes too. Well, maybe that's not too much of a mystery either, maybe they didn't smoke. So maybe instead of it being a mystery, I was just curious as to who found the vodka and why they found it, and why they left the cigarettes. But it didn't really matter.
Jörg and Paul liked the story and we decided we would ritually smoke some of the cigarettes in Brent's honor, even though none of us really smoked. The next day, it was pretty cold, even though it was May. We lit a fire in the wood stove and it made the cabin nice and warm. Towards midday, we decided we'd go out on the lake and smoke. We dressed up warmly and got in the boat and rowed out onto the lake. I told them how somewhere up the creek at the head of the lake, there was usually a beaver dam. Jörg had never seen a beaver in the wild and was quite interested, so we rowed up to the head of the lake, and started following the creek as it wound through the swamp. We finally got to the first beaver dam, beyond which the creek widened into a fairly large beaver pond, but we didn't see any beavers. Jörg wanted to continue further upstream. I didn't really want to, but he seemed kind of excited about it, and volunteered to pull the boat over the dam.
We brought the boat alongside the dam, and Paul and Jörg held it steady while I stepped onto the dam. It was pretty solid, but the water was trickling over parts of it, so my feet got a bit wet as I stood on the dam waiting for Jörg and Paul to pull the boat up over the dam into the pond. They got it over, and we got back in the boat. We rowed to the head of the beaver pond, and as we started going further up the creek, a misty rain started to fall. We all had damp feet, and were starting to feel pretty cold, so we decided to turn around and head back. When we got to the middle of the beaver pond, the light rain had stopped, and we decided to break out the Dunhills. It felt almost ceremonial as I tore open the plastic, lifted the lid and pulled out the gold foil that covers the cigarettes. We each took a cigarette. Everything was pretty damp from the misting we had received, so it was very difficult to get a match lit. It seemed like we might run out of matches and have no way to light our cigarettes, which would have made it a bit of an anticlimax, but with just a few matches left, we finally got one of the Dunhills lit. We lit the others from that one, and as we smoked, the light rain started again. That made it feel even colder, and we were all starting to shiver as we finished our cigarettes. It was really nice to be floating on a beaver pond in the middle of the north woods with a couple of good friends smoking cigarettes, but then the light rain turned into light snow. We could barely believe it, snow in May. But it was the NORTH woods.
We agreed it would be wise to head back immediately. We rowed to the beaver damn. Jörg said he and Paul could drag the boat over without me having to get out. We were all cold, so they were trying to get the boat over the dam as quickly as possible. Jörg was on the front of the damn, and started pulling the front of the boat, and Paul was pushing the back and it started sliding over, but it must have caught on a stick or something and stopped moving. After some concerted pulling and pushing as I supervised and made suggestions while I tried to maintain my balance, Jörg took a step into the lake for better leverage, and started really pulling. It seemed pretty rash to me for him to step into the water and fully submerge his foot. I thought maybe I should have gotten out of the boat so it would be easier to get it over the damn, but he said, no, don't worry about it, and then he really leaned out to pull with all his strength. Suddenly whatever it was that had caught on the boat broke or slipped free, and the boat plunged forward. I barely kept from falling over with the sudden lurch, and Jörg was in front of the boat pulling it towards himself. He managed to step backwards, to keep from being pushed under the boat, but he was stepping backwards into very cold waist high water.
There was a moment of stunned silence as we took in the situation. Paul was standing on the beaver dam, I was sitting in the boat, and Jörg was standing in the lake. One of us asked if Jörg was okay. I don't remember his response but it indicated that he wasn't injured and we should get going, posthaste. He pushed the boat against the dam as Paul got in, and then we steadied it as he clambered back onto the dam and stepped into the boat. He announced that he was going to row back because the activity would help him stay warm, so he took the middle seat and started rowing. He was rowing a bit too fast for the winding creek, so we kept brushing up against the vegetation on the side, but eventually we made it to open water. There, we could see the cabin off in the distance through the falling snow. A wispy plume of smoke was still coming out of the stove pipe chimney. This was a heartening sight, and Jörg began to row like an olympic rower.
He didn't slow down as we approached the shore, so the boat slide halfway onto the bank. We jumped out and pulled the boat a bit further up and made for the cabin with alacrity. It was such a wonderful feeling to be enveloped by the warm cozy atmosphere of the cabin after the cold of the springtime snow flurry, not to mention the wet feet, or in Jörg's case, the wet lower half of the body. I put a few logs on the fire and opened the flue as Jörg was stripping off his soaking shoes and clothes. Paul and I also took our shoes off and we hung everything around the stove to dry off. For a while we became avid acolytes of the great northern religion of wood stove worship. The falling snow seemed even more beautiful from inside the warm cabin.

going once, going twice

Carl and I saw a notice for an estate auction one weekend. Farm implements and tools were advertised, so we figured we might get a garden rake for not much money, and auctions are kind of intriguing anyway. It's an interesting way to see what the people are like in a given area. Auctions are also a great illustration of capitalism at its best and worst. You can get fantastic deals at an auction, or you can end up paying a lot for something worthless. You can see people go from anticipation to excitement to jubilation to regret to buyer's remorse, and back.
My goal was to get a garden rake for our little garden patch, so I registered a number and looked around until I found a bunch of shovels, hoes, scythes and rakes in a barrel. I figured out which rake I was going to bid on, and went looking around for other interesting things. It seemed like it might have been a combined sale, because it looked like too much stuff to be one person's or even one family's estate. The auctioneer was moving down a giant row of items placed on the edge of a yard. Some of the items were on a flatbed trailer, and I was kind of surprised when all the items were sold from the trailer, the trailer itself went up for auction.
A little further down, I saw some thick foam pads in plastic bags. These were single mattress sized foam pads which were three or four inches thick, and they looked like they would have made very comfortable beds. Since we were sleeping on old World War I surplus bunk beds with ancient limp mattresses to match, it seemed like these would be a good thing to have. I was thinking about the value of the mattresses and what they might go for when suddenly, the auctioneer's assistant picked them up and the bidding started. I thought I'd bid maybe two dollars to start, and possibly go up to five. Or maybe six. Or maybe they'd be worth ten; they would probably be pretty comfortable. But they were used, so maybe they weren't really worth that much. So I decided I'd go up to eight dollars. And that's when I heard the auctioneer say "Sold! to the lady in yellow, number thirty six! Three dollars." I turned and saw a short heavyset middle aged woman with a yellow sweater trundling up to the auctioneer's assistant to get her new foam pads.
I was angry at myself, and somehow also at the woman who had won the auction. I normally liked to take my time and consider purchases to make sure I wasn't wasting money on something frivolous. This auction was going so fast, I'd lost out on who knows how many comfortable nights of sleep because of my measured consideration. I imagined myself carrying away those foam pads for only three dollars. But then I realized I would have paid at least four dollars for them, and who knows, maybe the woman really wanted them and was prepared to go up to fifteen. But still, I felt like she'd taken something from me.
I didn't want that to happen again, so I resolved to pay attention and be ready to act when the rake came up. There were a few other tempting items between the foam pads and the rakes, but I had to keep reminding myself that we were living in a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water, and I'd be traveling after that, so it wasn't practical to buy anything that wasn't useful and easily left behind. A couple of shovels went up for auction from the barrel and they went for anywhere from two to twelve dollars. Then my rake was up and I bid a dollar right away. Some guy bid right after me, and we had a quick bidding battle and I ended up winning the rake for eight dollars. I was now a successful bidder and I felt pretty good to get the item I wanted. Then a scythe and a couple more shovels went on the block, and the shovels went for one dollar each, and I thought it would be nice to have an extra shovel, so I thought maybe I'd bid on one if another one came up. But I guess the auctioneer decided that all of the single garden tool people had been satisfied and he didn't want to bother with ten more one dollar tools, so the next item up was the rest of the tools in the barrel, and the barrel. The barrel and its contents went for six dollars. I felt like I had been cheated. I could have had a couple of shovels, a rake, a couple of hoes, a scythe and a barrel for two dollars less than I paid for a single rake. I tried to console myself that all I really needed was a rake, and I had gotten a good rake for less than a new one would have cost, but it still felt wrong. If you went into a store and had to chose between a rake for eight dollars, and a bunch of tools including a rake and a barrel for six, of course the barrel full of tools would be the rational choice, but I had no way of knowing how it would turn out when I was bidding on my eight dollar rake.

Carl was a winning bidder too. I think he paid sixteen dollars for an antique ratchet set. They were pretty cool, and they were in a great wooden box, but I didn't really understand why he got them. He also bought a folbot folding boat. He had showed it to me earlier and it was pretty cool too, but we already had a boat at the lake, so I wasn't sure about the utility of that purchase either. But then again, he was going to leave after a while, and travel around here and there, so having a folded boat on top of his old VW Beetle could come in handy. I don't remember how much he paid for it, maybe sixty dollars, which seemed like a lot to me when we were running low on money, but he was sure they were worth a lot more than that.
After the auction, Carl strapped the folbot to the top of the VW and we drove back towards the shack. We decided to stop for a beer at the country bar which is a couple of miles down the road from the shack. I think it used to be called Frogs. We were surprised to find they had Leinenkugel on tap for 50 cents a mug. When beer is so cheap, it's easy to drink a few, and that's what we did. We had mentally left the auction behind by then, so it was quite a surprise when a guy at the bar asked Carl how he'd gotten the boat back in his small car. It seemed like a Twilight Zone moment, until we realized that probably half the population of the county had been at the auction.
We chatted a bit with the bar patrons about the auction and they all described what they had won or almost won. Then we left, and I felt pretty buzzed, but Carl assured me he was okay to drive, and we weren't likely to meet any traffic anyway, so off we went. If I hadn't had those beers, I probably would have been a bit apprehensive as we sped down the gravel road at what seemed to be a comfortable margin over the safe speed, as usual.
When we got to the cabin, the sun was getting pretty low in the sky, but Carl wanted to try out the folbot. We sprayed on copious amounts of mosquito repellant, and after some trial and error, we got it assembled just as it was getting dark. I thought maybe we should wait until the next day to try it out in case it had a leak, but Carl was convinced it was in good condition, so we launched into the lake. It seemed a bit unstable at first, but I think it was just a different feel than the flat bottomed aluminum boat we were used to. The remarkable thing about it was how quiet it was. The aluminum boat would creak, water would slap against it and the metal pins of the oars would clatter and scrape. But the folbot came with a paddle, which could be quietly dipped into the water, and the tight fabric skin seemed to glide along the surface of the lake. We paddled up to the end of the lake as the sky got darker and darker. It was almost mystical. There seemed to be a slight mist rising from the lake and we heard no human sounds except our own breathing. It wasn't exactly quiet, there were frogs chirping in the background, and occasional small splashes as some fish or frog did whatever they do to make a splash.
The stars started to reveal themselves in the darkening sky, and the moon provided just a little bit of light. Suddenly, a loud yapping bark and howl cut into the seemingly peaceful night. It seemed pretty far away, but then it was answered by another which seemed a lot closer. It sent shivers down my spine. We hadn't said anything to each other in a while because we were enjoying the silence, but I whispered quietly, "Coyotes." The howling and yapping went on for a few minutes, then died down. I knew it wasn't anything to worry about, but the sound bursting into the relative quiet of the misty night made me wonder if maybe I shouldn't worry just a little bit.
We were at the head of the lake, and we started paddling up the creek that feeds it. It's a very swampy area, and the stream is kind of wide for a while, then it gets fairly narrow and snakes around in the swamp for few hundred yards until there is a beaver dam. We went almost all the way up to the beaver dam. There was barely enough room to turn the boat around, but by pushing into some reeds at the edge of the stream we were able to swing it around. A few yards from where we turned around, we noticed there was a little patch of grassy almost solid looking ground. We went over to have a look at it and see if maybe we could get out there and if the ground was solid enough, have a walk around. As the boat slid up to the grassy area, we could see the ground was pretty wet and muddy. Then I noticed in the mud at the waters edge, there were a bunch of animal tracks, which looked like large dog tracks. There were also a few tufts of fur. This looked like a place where coyotes came to drink water from the creek. And who knows what torn up animal the tufts of fur were from.
Suddenly a boat made out of fabric seemed like a fragile thing to be in, and I suggested it might be a good time to paddle back down the creek and back to the cabin. Carl agreed, and we quietly glided down the creek, out into the lake and back to the cabin.
It was a great experience to be out on the lake and see the stars, and hear the coyotes howl. But it also felt nice to get back into the cabin, shut the door, and light a few kerosene lamps.

pike

Carl and I tried fishing in the lake by the shack, but we didn't have much luck. I wasn't surprised because during previous visits, we didn't catch any fish in the lake at all. There were a bunch of small fish in the pond below the lake, and they were eager to eat anything remotely edible thrown into the pond, whether it had a hook in it or not. It was a bit disappointing because we didn't have much money for food, and a few fresh fish would have made a nice change from canned soups and beans and rice that we had been eating. Also, fishing can be a decent way to pass the time on a warm sunny day in the north woods. At least it can if you catch a fish or two, or even almost catch a fish or two.
It seemed especially disappointing because of the legendary stories of fish caught in the lake in the early seventies when our family visited the cabin. Some big northern pike had been caught in the lake. My mother caught a twenty six inch pike. When it was cleaned and gutted, there was a mouse in its stomach. We imagined some poor little mouse getting a drink of water from the edge of the lake, and a giant prehistoric looking fish lunging out of the lake to grab it. After that we were a little reluctant to dangle our feet over the edge of the boat into the water, even on really hot days. If it would eat a mouse, maybe it would also enjoy a toe or two.
So it seemed a letdown to fish for a few hours and catch nothing but some mosquito and horsefly bites. There seemed to be some kind of fish around, because we'd occasionally see them snap at insects on the surface of the lake, but nothing seemed interested in our hooks or lures.
Carl and I eventually caught a few very small fish, and although it barely seemed worth it, we gutted them and hung them out in the sun to dry. We figured we'd chop them up and make some kind of fish soup from them. We tried, and it was pretty horrible, so we didn't try again.

mosquitos

Every night I would cook some rice and some kind of beans, or split peas, or lentils on the gas stove. I had gotten a mantle for the old gas light above the doorway to the kitchen, but I think it was the wrong kind and it didn't shed as much light as I thought it should. Sometimes I would light that, and sometimes I would just use a kerosene lantern or two. If I felt especially gloomy I might light a coleman gasoline lantern which was very bright and cheery and made a hissing noise which I grew to like.
By the time the rice and beans had finished cooking, the mosquitos had invaded the cabin in droves. I had tried to plug as many of the cracks and holes to keep them from coming in, but they seemed to find their way in without much trouble. I would eat with long sleeve shirt on and its collar up even though it was much too hot. That way I'd only have to slap the mosquitos from my face and hands. One evening I wrote a postcard to Carl after dinner and killed about thirty mosquitos while writing it. Fortunately we had purchased some army surplus mosquito nets which we set up on the bunk beds, and that made sleep possible. I could still hear the buzzing outside the net, but they rarely found their way into the protected area.
One night, after I had spent most of the day rechinking the logs in the kitchen and repainting the walls, I was too tired to cook dinner. I made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat down to eat. I was quite hungry, so they seemed extra delicious. As I finished the sandwiches, I felt a mosquito on my arm and realized I had forgotten to put my long sleeve shirt on. As I slapped the mosquito, I realized that there was something very strange about this mosquito. The strange thing was that this was the only mosquito I had killed all evening. I thought for a moment that maybe the rechinking or the painting had sealed some major holes the mosquitos had been coming in, but that seemed ridiculous since there were holes and cracks everywhere, not just the kitchen. I wondered if it had suddenly gotten too cold for them, but that wasn't the case. When I went outside it was still warm, and mosquitos started attacking almost immediately.
The only different thing I could think of was dinner. Instead of cooking rice and beans for half an hour or more, I had made some sandwiches. I remembered that I had read that mosquitos were attracted primarily to three things, heat, moisture and carbon dioxide. When I was cooking on the gas stove, all three were produced in large amounts, creating a giant mosquito beacon. As the warm, moist, carbon dioxide laden air rose from the stove and wafted out the many cracks and holes, all the mosquitos had to do was follow it back to its source. Perhaps they expected to find some giant beast or a huge crowd of warm blooded animals waiting to donate their blood to the mosquito horde. All they found was some rice and beans and an exposed pair of hands and a face, but they made the best of it.
From then on, I did not cook in the evenings and I only had to slap away a few enterprising mosquitos who had the luck (or misfortune) to find their way in. I would sometimes cook during the day and eat the rice and beans at room temperature during the evening. Sometimes I'd make peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Occasionally I would eat a can of unheated soup or pork and beans, or whatever else was sitting on the shelf.

the unfinished vw

Carl rebuilt the engine for his VW Beetle right before we drove it, via a very indirect route, from Florida to Wisconsin. We visited various friends, relatives and places in Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin.
My legs were already pretty weak, and a Beetle's seats are very upright so operating the pedals required the ability to lift a bent leg from one pedal to the other. I couldn't really do that without using my arm to help lift my leg which made it very unsafe for me to drive, so I only drove maybe a quarter of the time. We ended up using a rubber band or something to put together some blocks of wood with a sock covering part of it on the gas pedal so I could pivot my foot back and forth from accelerator to brake without having to lift my whole leg. That was a significant improvement so long as the contraption didn't slip off and get behind the brake pedal, which it didn't, at least not at any time when I needed to use the brake quickly.
I was writing in a travel diary I picked up at a second hand store in Florida, so I'm sure I have a bunch more written about the trip. It's written in tiny messy handwriting though, perhaps barely legible to me when I wrote it. Maybe some day I'll try to read it, and even transcribe some of it if it seems worthwhile.

olds

When Bruce came up to the shack in Phillips to visit while I was there, he drove his mother's Oldsmobile. I think she was probably nervous about letting him take her car on such a long trip. She made him promise not to drive too fast and to be very careful. I think Bruce was a little bit amused by that, but he seemed to be conscientiously keeping his promise, in fact, a little too conscientiously. We'd be driving down some gravel road at 20 miles per hour and it seemed we were just crawling along. I would get impatient and encourage him to speed up, but he would remind me that it was his mother's car and he'd promised to be careful. I had gotten used to driving the same roads much too fast in Carl's VW Beetle, sliding around on the gravel, seeming to barely stay on the road, but getting to our destination in the shortest amount of time possible.
I suspected Bruce enjoyed my impatience because he could act like there was nothing he could do about it, though we both knew he could if he wanted. It was a small matter. We had a good time visiting the logging museum and seeing the world's largest muskie in Hayward. We stopped in at Back Roads Coffee & Tea and enjoyed a cup of coffee (roasted on the premises). Fred Smith's concrete park in Phillips was a nice diversion, and an opportunity for a few silly photographs. We did a little bit of mycological research and found an Amanita Muscaria or two.
All in all, it was a good visit. Then it was time for him to leave. I helped him get ready to go and stood out in front of the shack as he pulled away. He pulled away fast. Very fast. Dangerously fast. I chuckled as I watched the Oldsmobile speed down the dirt track, bouncing, swerving and slapping the overhanging tree branches.