alone

Part of the beauty of a cabin out in the middle of the north woods is the isolation. If you're there alone, it can seem like you are the only person in the world. And if you really were, there's not necessarily any way you would know it. That's usually a pretty good feeling, for me at least, but sometimes it can get to feeling a little spooky. Especially if you're sitting inside the cabin late at night and a shovel you left propped up against the wall outside suddenly falls over with a loud clang. It was probably just a skunk or something sniffing around. It probably wasn't a bear. A bear which had lost its fear of humans and liked to break doors off their hinges and ransack kitchens full of food. Probably just a skunk.
But usually it was just a nice feeling. A sort of master of all you survey feeling. A kind of you can do whatever you want feeling. If you want to take your clothes off and take a crude shower with a couple of buckets of water out in front of the cabin, there's no reason why you shouldn't. If you want to sit out in the sun naked, why not?
I took lots of walks, usually down the logging roads, but sometimes I'd find a trail that led off into the forest and follow it. I looked for edible plants and mushrooms, and just enjoyed the scenery, if not the horseflies and mosquitos which would sometimes accompany me. Sometimes I'd drive over to the field on the other side of the lake which was known as the lumber camp. As legend has it, the field once had a lumber camp on it, hence the name. I liked driving on the old logging roads, bouncing along on the uneven earth, with grass and weeds scraping along the bottom of the car. On a hot day, sometimes there would be flies and insects of all description buzzing around the car as I drove slowly down the dirt track. Big horseflies would make tiny audible thuds as they flew into the window glass.
One day I thought I'd walk over to the lumber camp. I could still walk pretty far then, but I would get tired pretty easily and have to take lots of little breaks. It took me a while to walk there, and there are a few little steep hills where the logging road goes down to near swamp level, then back up onto a rise. Those hills were somewhat difficult for me. I was pretty tired when I got to the lumber camp, but I decided I'd walk around the edge of it, and maybe part way down the slope on the other side, and into the pine grove further along the edge of the field. I think my dad and his brothers planted those pines in the fifties. There used to be a tree stand in one of the pines, so I thought I'd see if it was still there. The tree stand was still there. There wasn't much to it to begin with, and what there was of it was pretty dilapidated, so I didn't bother to try to climb it. I realized that I probably wouldn't have been able to climb it even if it had been in good repair.
I was already tired and there was the long walk back to the cabin still, so I decided to head back. When I got to the edge of the pine grove, I saw something which surprised me. Someone had constructed a sort of lean-to structure under one of the pine trees. It was covered in branches that had been broken from the surrounding trees, and it was pretty well camouflaged, so it wouldn't be easy to see from the lumber camp side. There was a little fire pit in front of the lean-to, and it looked like someone had been using it for a while. There was some charcoal from an old fire in the fire pit. None of the broken branches were green, so the lean-to had been made a while ago, but I couldn't tell when it had last been used. It seemed like it could have been a few months ago, or even a few days ago that there had last been a fire in the fire pit.
Suddenly the free and easy feeling of being alone was replaced by a nervous feeling of wondering if I was being watched. I abruptly felt pretty vulnerable. A bunch of things went through my mind, like the loaded shotgun sitting in the corner of the shack and my car sitting in front of the shack with the keys in it. I thought of the night that the shovel had fallen over. I started wondering who in the hell would construct a lean-to by the lumber camp, when the shack was just across the lake. It looked like it was done by someone who knew what they were doing. Was it someone who just really wanted to get back to nature, or was it someone who was trying to hide? Had they left a couple of months ago, or were they watching me right now? I wasn't able to run, and all I had with me was a walking stick, so I felt kind of defenseless.
Walking to the lumber camp now seemed like not such a great idea, and I sort of wished I had driven over. I felt like I should hurry back to the shack, but I was too tired to hurry much, and I figured it probably didn't matter much anyway. I felt a bit apprehensive while walking back, and looked around and listened every time I stopped to take a break. I didn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary, which was good, but not terribly reassuring. As I walked up to the shack, I imagined some grizzly bearded escaped convict sitting in the chair I usually sat in, with my shotgun and car keys on the table in front of him.
He wasn't there though, and everything seemed just as I had left it. Everything except me.
From then on, I slept with the shotgun right next to my bed, and sometimes I took it along if I went on a walk. And if I left it behind, I unloaded it, and hid the shells. I also kept my car keys in my pocket instead of leaving them in the car.

arrival

It was a pretty long trip for Paul, Jörg and I to drive up to the cabin. We stopped at grandad's house in Racine. Jörg wore his Desert Storm baseball cap with the American flag on it to make a good impression. Then we drove the three hundred miles (almost exactly) from grandad's house to the cabin. We were driving my 1982 Honda Civic sedan. It was a five speed and got really great mileage, around 40 miles per gallon with premium gas on the highway if it was driven at around 55 mile per hour. Jörg didn't like to drive slow though, in fact, he seemed incapable of it. I would remind him to slow down, and he would. But minutes later I'd start to feel the rumbling and vibration of higher speed and look at the speedometer and we'd be doing seventy. I'd remind him again, he'd slow down for a few minutes, and the cycle would continue.
I liked having the four door sedan. It was nice not having to open the door and lean forward to lift the seat to let someone into the back seat. It didn't really have that much more room than the two door, but as car owner, I usually exempted myself from sitting in the back seat anyway.
The radio didn't have a tape player, so I put in an old tape player that I'd salvaged from a previous car. I wired it so the tape player would play whether the car was on or not, so I always had to remember to turn it off, or it could drain the battery. It had an auto reverse, so if you left a tape in it, it would keep playing indefinitely. Sometimes I wouldn't be paying attention and I'd suddenly realized a tape was on it's third time playing through.
We each brought along a few tapes to listen to. One of our favorites was a tape with the new REM album Out of Time on one side, and one side of an older REM album on the other side. It was a 90 minute tape, and the Out of Time album barely fit on one side but there was a big blank space on the other side because it was only one side of the other album.
As it happened, that was the last tape we listened to as we approached the cabin. Coincidentally, the whole Out of Time album played, then the tape flipped, and played the one side of the old album, which ended just as we arrived at the cable across the dirt track which acted as the gate to the shack, so it was like it had been the soundtrack for the trip. The key we had didn't work in the padlock for some reason, so I thought we'd have to walk from there to the shack. There was a lot of play in the cable though, and when Jörg and Paul held it up in the air, there was room enough for me to drive the car under it.
It had always seemed like a welcoming sound to me to hear the long weeds and grass scraping against the underside of the car as we drove down the dirt track. It was so nice to round the final bend and see the cabin there, still standing. I always had a fear in the back of my mind that one day I would arrive at the cabin to see it collapsed upon itself. But not this time. I turned the car off, and there was the sudden quiet of the north woods. After five hours of road noise, talking, music playing and wind from open windows, the silence was refreshing. It can even make you feel like you're the only people in the world.
The key to the padlock on the cabin door was in its usual place and we opened up the door to let the place air out as we started unpacking the car. The trunk and all the car doors were open and we were carrying things into the cabin. At one point, Jörg was getting something out of the trunk, I was getting something out of the front passenger side, and Paul was getting something out of the driver's side back seat.
Suddenly, a loud voice said, "Hey, I can't find nothing on the radio."
And then someone else said, "Yo! turn to that station."
All three of us froze, quite startled that there was someone else at the cabin, even though it had been so quiet up until then. Thoughts like, who the hell is here, how did they sneak up on us, have they been watching us this whole time were just starting to form in my mind as the music to the song "Radio Song" started playing.
The blank part of the tape had been playing for the last twenty minutes or so and the auto reverse had just flipped the tape to the Out of Time side, and that's one of the few songs in the world that begins with two people saying something in pretty normal voices without music.
I exclaimed, "Damn, that scared the shit out of me!" and similar declarations followed from Paul and Jörg, followed further by much laughter.

fire

By the time I started flying up to Wisconsin during Thanksgiving break to go deer hunting with my grandad, he was already getting pretty old. He had been hunting for decades, but by then he wasn't exactly the most committed hunter. He seemed to be the backbone of the group of men who went up to the cabin to hunt, but I would sometimes hear them making jokes about how late grandad would get started, or how long it would be before he would come back in when it was cold. They called him The Judge. They called him that because he was a judge. There was one thing he would do that seemed to provide the most amusement to the other hunters.
"If you're out in the woods and you smell smoke, you know The Judge got cold."
Or bored. Grandad loved to light fires. And he used to tell me that if I was ever lost in the woods, and needed to make a fire, I should look for an old pine stump. The whole area had been logged in the late eighteen hundreds, and the stumps of the huge pine trees were mostly decayed, but there were plenty of parts of stumps left. They were usually just the sides of the stumps, bleached grey by time and weather, and completely dried out, but with just enough pine pitch left in them to burn really well. So when he was out hunting, he would get cold or bored, and walk around to find an old stump, and light a fire. Partially to keep warm, and I'm convinced, partially just to watch it burn. And of course you're not likely to see a deer while you're warming your hands in front of a crackling fire.
So one day, grandad and I went out and drove down the logging road to a spot he thought would be pretty good. We walked into the woods a ways, and he pointed out a fallen log that he thought would be a good spot for me to sit, and told me he was going to go a little further into the woods and up a ways where he thought he might be able to see any deer which came up from the swamp, and if he missed, they'd probably run my way. He had his thirty aught six, and he had given me an old sixteen gauge shotgun. It had three slugs in it, and he had given me a few shells with bird shot in case I saw a grouse and wanted to take a shot at it. I wasn't completely sure that deer season and grouse season overlapped, but I figured if grandad thought it was okay, it probably was.
I sat on the log and watched him walk slowly and noisily towards his chosen spot. The woods were pretty thick there, so he was out of sight within about twenty yards, and a few minutes later, I couldn't hear him either. I sat on the log and waited for something to happen. The wind occasionally made some rustling sounds that made me listen more intently, and there were some chickadees which would occasionally flit by. I could hear some squirrels in the distance, but other than that, it was pretty quiet, at least for the first hour.
Then I started hearing something off in the distance toward where grandad had gone. I thought maybe he had scared a deer up from the swamp and it was coming my way. It gradually got louder, and it was coming my way. I had always thought of deer as being pretty stealthy, but the other hunters told me they can really make a lot of noise, especially if it's a big buck in a hurry. It sounded like it could be a big buck moving through the brush, but it didn't really seem to be in hurry. I started to wonder if it might be a bear. I slowly pushed the safety off, and positioned the shotgun in my lap so it would be easy to raise to my shoulder.
The noise stopped. I thought maybe it had heard the tiny click of the safety, but that didn't seem possible, I had barely heard it myself. After a minute or two, the noise started again, but it was different. It seemed like more of a sporadic rustling and cracking instead of something pushing through the brush, and there was a sort of snorting and coughing sound. Then I smelled smoke.
It made sense now, a slowly progressing noise coming from the direction grandad had gone, was of course, grandad returning. He must have found a nice pine stump and started a fire. I sat for a few minutes more and then figured there wasn't much point because if I smelled smoke, the deer would too, and wouldn't be coming around any time soon. I turned the safety back on, at least I'm pretty sure I did, then started walking in the direction of where I thought grandad was. As I was walking, I realized he might be wondering what the noise approaching him was, so I started whistling.
I came into a little clearing and there was grandad at the edge. His rifle was propped up against a tree, and there was a surprisingly large flame rising from a stump next to him. He explained that he hadn't seen anything so he figured he'd make his way in my direction to see if he could drive any deer towards me. I told him nothing had come my way, and came over to the burning stump to warm my hands. He asked me to gather up some sticks so we could make the fire last longer because the stump was already starting to burn away.
I went over to the tree where his rifle was, and I leaned the shotgun up next to it, then as I turned to go gather some wood, I stepped on a stick under the leaves which pushed against the bottom of the shotgun just enough to make it start to slide from its position on the tree. I turned to grab it, but I think the stick must have hit it again, because it fell onto the ground and when it hit, it went off, blowing a cloud of dirt and leaves into the air. My ears were ringing from the noise, and I just stared at the little trough of raw dirt the slug had left. I couldn't believe what had just happened.
I turned to grandad, and he was staring at the ground too. He said a few choice words and asked me why the hell I didn't have the safety on. I told him I did have the safety on. I think he was a bit sceptical, and then so was I. I thought I had switched the safety back on, but then I began to wonder. Maybe I just hadn't pushed it all the way over. But then, it was on old gun, so maybe falling over was enough to release the safety and pull the trigger. Or maybe it had hit a stick on the ground when it had fallen.
Grandad pointed out that we were lucky, either one of us could have been killed or injured, or maybe both of us. A sixteen gauge slug at point blank range could easily rip through a couple of humans. I agreed with him and resolved to be very sure about the safety from then on.

spring

Once when I was up at the cabin hunting with my grandad, we were walking across the dam heading back to the cabin. He pointed down to the edge of the swamp below the lake and said there was a spring there. He said they used to get water from the spring. Everything was frozen by the time deer hunting season came around, so it wasn't much use then, but when they came to the cabin in the spring and summer, it used to provide nice clean water. He said they'd even put some barrels in the ground to collect the water to make it easier fill buckets and jugs, but he didn't know if the barrels were still there.
A couple of years later when I was there by myself in the summer, I remembered him telling me about the spring. I had been going out in the boat to get lake water, which looks black when you're in the boat looking down, and yellow when you put it in a jug or pot. My grandad had told me the color was from the roots of the tamarack trees in the swamp that Hoffman creek ran through. After drinking the yellowish lake water, which had a slightly "organic" taste, the thought of fresh clean clear spring water was pretty appealing.
I decided I'd see if I could find it. It was slow going because the swampy area was so overgrown with alder and other brush that was hard make my way through. I also wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, and I found more than a few especially wet areas that I thought might lead to the spring, but didn't really lead anywhere. Then I got to the edge of the really swampy part and the ground started to rise and I noticed a small trickle of water coming from a little higher up. I followed it, and it lead to the spring. I cleared away some leaves and brush and there were two metal barrels set into the ground. It didn't really seem like much of a spring though. I was used to springs like in Berkeley Springs, where water gushed out of the ground. It seemed more like the water was seeping out of the ground in lots of different places. Still I thought it would be worth a try to clean out the barrels and see if they filled up with spring water.
One of the barrels seemed to have a little trickle of water coming out of it, and I started scooping out the leaves and debris. After the first couple of handfuls, I saw that there were two dead frogs floating in the barrel. That was pretty unappealing and didn't make the spring water seem very fresh or clean. But I used a stick to flick them out of the barrel and continued cleaning out debris until I got down to some sandy soil at the bottom which the water seemed to be rising up through to slowly fill the barrel up. The water seemed kind of rusty and not completely clear. I wasn't sure if it was just because of all the stuff I had just removed, or if the water coming up was like that.
I cleaned out the other barrel, which didn't seem to have as much water coming up into it and cleared away all of the leaves and sticks which were around the barrels. As I was pushing away some of the mud from around the barrels, I noticed they had green paint on the outside, and some kind of lettering. I thought maybe they were old civil defense water containers. I pushed away some more dirt to see if I could see what was written on them. In capital letters, with skull and cross bones below was written POTASSIUM CYANIDE.
Of course I knew the barrels would have been well cleaned before being used to collect spring water, but still, after seeing the dead frogs, skull and cross bones, and the word cyanide, it just didn't seem like a string of good omens. I waited for the water to refill the barrel anyway. I was sure the frogs had just hopped into the barrel and then couldn't get out because of the steep sides. The water was still looking a bit rusty and cloudy, so I cleaned out some more of the dirt at the bottom, and sloshed out as much of the water as I could and waited for it to refill. This time, after the remaining dirt settled, the water seemed less cloudy, but still kind of rusty, and there seemed to be some kind of thin almost oily film forming on the surface of the water.
My grandad had said they used to use this spring water for drinking, but that was probably twenty years ago, maybe more. I couldn't think of anything in the immediate area that would have contaminated a spring, but the rustiness and the film didn't inspire confidence. Neither did the dead frogs or the word cyanide.
I figured I'd stick with the lake water.

bookstore

Although we only had a limited amount of money, Carl bought an antique ratchet set at the estate auction we went to. I think he paid sixteen dollars for it, and though it was pretty cool, I didn't really understand why he was using some of our last monetary resources on an antique ratchet and sockets in a wooden box. He already had the requisite tools for a long trip in a Beetle with a recently rebuilt engine. But it was his portion of our pooled resources, so I couldn't complain, much.
A while after the auction, we went up Bayfield to check it out. I had a vague memory of Bayfield from a visit in the early seventies when I was very young. I remembered standing with some other people waiting for the Madeline Island ferry. I wanted to go to the place where the ferry left from and see if it seemed familiar. We figured we could find a campground in the area and stick around for a day or two and explore the area.
On the way up to Bayfield, we stopped in Washburn, which was an appealing little town. We stopped at a bookstore there. It was run by a pretty cool guy with a beard. I remember seeing a book having to do with Paavo Nurmi, and that may have been where I bought a coffee stained first edition of Gore Vidal's Duluth, which I later sent to Jörg.
We were talking with the owner about our stay in northern Wisconsin, and Carl got around to talking about the auction we had attended and what we had bought. Mr. Bookstore seemed quite interested when the antique ratchet set was mentioned. Carl asked if he wanted to see it because it was probably still out in the car. Mr. Bookstore did want to see it, so Carl went out to the car, and found it was indeed still in the car, and brought it in to the bookstore. Mr. Bookstore was very impressed, and looked at it for a long time. He put a socket on the ratchet and spun it around.
He asked, "How much did you pay for it?"
Carl told him, and Mr. Bookstore said, "I'll give you thirty for it."
Carl said, "I'll give it to you for forty."
Mr. Bookstore replied, "Okay."
Carl's sixteen dollar auction investment had turned to forty dollars. After leaving the bookstore, we went to a restaurant near the shore of Lake Superior and had some imported beer.
When we got to Bayfield, we went to the place where the ferrry left from, but it didn't seem familiar. I realized I might have been remembering waiting for the ferry on the Madeline Island side. Or the ferry landing may have been moved, or changed significantly in the two decades since I had been there.

where's the picture?

The roll of film upon which I had taken the picture of the falling tree and leaping Jörg went undeveloped for a long time. I finally developed it when I was living in a large closet in a house in Roser Park in Saint Petersburg. I developed the film in the kitchen sink with a little plastic film developing tank and some chemicals I had left over from school. But I had neither an enlarger, nor the money to buy one. I found a slide projector for cheap at a second hand store. I had a few plastic slide mounts also from school, so I cut up the negatives and mounted a few so I could put them in the slide projector. I found a couple of glass baking dishes big enough for an eight by ten, which I could use for developer and fixer. I cleaned out an old plastic kitty litter pan for the stop bath. I filled the bathtub up part way for rinsing. I set up the makeshift trays along one wall, and did some experiments to figure out how far away from the the adjacent wall I'd have to put the slide projector for an eight by ten print. It wasn't too far away, but the bulb was far too bright to make a decent enlarger. Also, I think the fan in the projector caused it to vibrate slightly, which wouldn't help the sharpness. It was pretty hot and I had everything closed off in my closet room and no proper ventilation, so it became pretty miserable in there pretty fast. I set up the projector with the negative in the slide mount, turned it on, and put push pins on the wall where the corners of the image were. Then, since I didn't have a red light, I'd turn off the projector and the other light, and pin the unexposed paper to the wall in complete darkness, using the previous pins as guides, and turn on the slide projector for about half a second to expose the paper. I'd take the paper down and feel for the developer tray and just guess how long it should develop, move it to the stop bath, then on to the fixer. Only then could I turn the light on to see if my guesses at exposure and development time had been close. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. I ended up with a few semi-decent prints after a few hours of sweating in the stifling chemical laden air. I got a pretty bad headache from it, and the prints weren't that great, so I ended up not doing it again. But one of the prints was a slightly blurry, sort of washed out version of the falling tree and leaping Jörg picture. I kept the negatives and the print for a while, and when I started working at a place with a flatbed scanner, I scanned it and printed out some not very good laser printer copies of it which I sent to Jörg and Paul. When I was getting ready to go visit Jörg in France, I had the print and the negatives with me in my luggage to bring along. My luggage was stolen from my car in Greenwich Village before I even got to the airport, so the negatives and print were lost to me. Somewhere, there might be a low quality scan of the image, on a floppy disk or a backup tape, but I don't know where. There might be an old laser printer copy somewhere too. I suppose it's even possible that I might have kept one of the reject prints I made, but if that's the case, I don't know where I would have put it. Maybe some day I'll see that picture again, but I doubt it. For now it has to be just part of a story. Like the picture of Jörg and Paul drying off in the freezing cold after swimming in the lake behind Greta Binford's place.

twenty gauge

I was inside making some food, and I heard Jörg yelling loud enough to be heard inside. I went outside, and it was fairly dark, so I didn't see where he was at first, but Paul was bringing an armload of wood to the woodpile. Paul said something, but I didn't hear what he said at first because of the din of the chirping frogs. He spoke louder and said Jörg was over by the clearing cutting wood, and he said something about getting the gun.
Then I heard Jörg yell, "Get the gun! Get the gun!"
I felt a sinking feeling and then a sudden rush of adrenaline. All sorts of scenarios started going through my mind. Was it a bear? Coyotes? Wolves? Some drunken woodsman with a handgun? So I rushed back inside and grabbed the shotgun and put some extra shells in my pocket. The cabin was pretty dark because the only lit kerosene lamp was in the kitchen, and I stumbled over some shoes or something on the floor and nearly fell down. My heart was beating pretty fast as I stepped off the porch and loaded the shotgun.
I yelled to Jörg, asking what was going on, and he said to bring the gun. Paul and I walked cautiously and quickly over to where he was standing with the saw in his hand, staring out into the clearing. I was looking around for something dangerous that I might have to shoot.
He said, "These fucking frogs!"
Admittedly, the frogs were very loud, and they seemed to especially loud near the clearing where Jörg was cutting wood, but I was more than a little annoyed. I asked him what the hell was he thinking. I told him I had thought he was in some real danger, and I could've tripped in the dark while rushing over with the gun and accidently shot myself, or him, or Paul. He didn't seem overly concerned about that and just wanted me to shut those frogs up. Along with being annoyed, I was relieved that there wasn't really any big problem, and it started to seem pretty funny to me. So I said, okay, and I aimed the shotgun in the direction where the frogs seemed the loudest, and fired. Even with the ringing in my ears, I could tell that the frogs had completely ignored the gun's retort and hadn't stopped chirping for a moment.
We started laughing and decided the rest of the wood cutting could wait until morning.