a nice supper

While grandad's cooking style did no favors for a fried egg breakfast, it seemed well suited to a hearty north woods supper. I think every time I went hunting with him, he would pick out a big corned beef brisket at the IGA grocery store during a trip to town for supplies. He'd put it in a large oval enamelware roaster in the morning, add some water, put the lid on and leave it on the wood stove in the kitchen to simmer all day.
When we would come in from hunting after sunset, which was usually around five in the evening, he'd get me to light the gas oven and set it to about 350. He would cut up some potatoes, carrots, turnips and an onion or two and put them in the roaster next to the corned beef, add salt, pepper and some more water and put it in the oven. He might pour a can of green beans or peas into a pot and set it on the wood stove to warm up while the oven did its work.
The activities of the day, which might have included bringing in water from a hole in the ice on the lake, bringing in firewood from the stack outside and walking around in the snowy woods, would usually cause a substantial appetite to be built up. I was usually hungry by the time I got back to the cabin, becoming more so with each passing minute, as delicious smells wafted from the oven. I would have my fork at the ready as grandad finally brought in a platter with a large corned beef brisket surrounded by baked root vegetables, and a dish of some green vegetable. Sure, maybe the bottom of the brisket might be burned a little, or one side of the potatoes might be blackened from a little too much oven time, but it mattered little.
Every time we had this meal, I remember eating serving after serving, sometimes surprising myself at the amount of food I put away. It always seemed to be the most delicious thing imaginable, maybe partially because I was so hungry, and it was in front of me, but mostly because it was most delicious. The corned beef, having slowly cooked all day, would be tender and juicy, and the potatoes and carrots would be flavored by the onion and the corned beef.
I had no great love for turnips, so I would try to avoid them, but when you're eating by the light of a kerosene lamp, sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between a piece of carrot and a piece of potato, so they were at times unavoidable. But another slice of corned beef would easily erase the taste of turnip from my palate.
Sometimes I'd eat enough to feel quite full, and have just one more small serving. Then I'd be feeling a little bit over full, but I'd still be thinking, "Just one more small serving."
I'd have to remind myself that someone was going to have to clear the table and wash the dishes after dinner, and that would probably be me, so I should stop having just one more small serving before I was completely immobilized from overconsumption.

a nice breakfast

The first few mornings I was at the shack with grandad during hunting season, he made breakfast. His cooking style was what one might call rough and ready. It sometimes seemed less than appetizing to me. He would usually make fried eggs, and those eggs were really fried. They tended to be somewhat crispy on the edges, kind of rubbery all around and cooked solid through and through. I did my best to get them down though, with the help of toast and hot chocolate, coffee or tea. If there was bacon, sometimes it was limp and chewy, other times blackened to a crisp, and occasionally limp at one end and blackened at the other. The toast also might be partially limp and partially burnt.
While struggling to finish a particularly rubbery portion of egg, I told grandad that I was good at cooking breakfast, particularly fried eggs, and I volunteered to show him the very next day. I think he had forgotten my offer, or hadn't taken it seriously because he was getting ready to cook breakfast when I came into the kitchen and reminded him that I was going to cook. Once he realized I was serious, he was happy to go sit at the table and enjoy his coffee while I prepared the meal.
I cooked some bacon, taking care to cook it evenly until it turned crispy all over. I put the bacon on a plate with some old newspaper to soak up excess grease and poured most of the bacon grease remaining in the pan into an old coffee can. I left enough to fry the eggs, which I carefully cracked and emptied into the pan making sure not to break the yolks. I had the burner set on a medium heat so I could closely monitor the state of the eggs. When the whites had solidified enough, I flipped the eggs, again taking care not to break the yolks. I used the spatula to cut small holes in the whites around the yolk, so when I flipped them over again, even the whites right next to the yolk would be fully cooked, while the yolks themselves would not harden.
While the eggs were cooking, I started some bread toasting on the little metal toaster device that went on a gas burner. I kept turning the slices of bread to make sure they were evenly toasted but not burned. They finished before the eggs were ready, so I moved them to the wood stove to keep warm.
When the eggs were done, I put them on plates, with the crisp bacon laid out next to them. I buttered the bread, spreading the butter evenly from edge to edge, and put the toast on the edge of the plate ninety degrees from the bacon strips.
I was proud of the breakfast I had created. Instead of a haphazardly placed mass of rubberized egg with dark and crispy parts, and simultaneously undercooked and overcooked bacon and toast, my plates had two round white nearly perfectly cooked eggs, crisp bacon and generously buttered golden brown toast. It probably took me a little bit longer to make this than it took grandad to make breakfast. I think that, combined with the fact that he wasn't the one who was doing it, made grandad a little bit impatient.
I brought the plates out to the table, and as I set the plate down in front of him, he immediately set to eating it. I enjoyed my breakfast quite a lot, and I kept looking at grandad to see if I could see any sign of appreciation on his face. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary though. But surely the nice texture of completely cooked egg whites, with a somewhat liquid yolk, crisp, non-burned bacon and golden brown toast must have been more enjoyable than what he was used to.
When we were done, with a little bit of anticipation, I asked him what he thought of breakfast, quite ready for some small amount of praise.
Grandad said, "What? Oh, it was okay."
From then on, I cooked breakfast every day.

a nice leisurely breakfast

Grandad always had a good plan for the morning when I went hunting with him at the cabin. He would say something like, "We'll get up at five, have a cup of coffee, and head out to the woods. We'll be able to get in position and be ready before sunrise. We can stay out for a few hours, then come back in around eight thirty or nine and have a nice leisurely breakfast."
He'd get me to wind up the alarm clock and set it for five before we went to bed. I'd put a big log or two in the wood stove and close the flue before going to bed. It was so nice to blow out the kerosene lamp and crawl into the sleeping bag in a bunk next to a warm wood stove, conscious of the ice, snow and wind outside. I'd usually be very tired after a day of hunting, fetching water, bringing in firewood and whatever else needed to be done around the cabin. I'd fall asleep quickly and sleep soundly.
At five in the morning, the dreadful ring of the wind up alarm clock would sound off the beginning of another day of serious hunting. I think it would usually ring for about a minute and a half before it wound down, and I'd remain still in my sleeping bag, hoping. Usually, grandad would turn in his bunk, maybe cough a few times, then fall back asleep, if he had ever waken up in the first place, and my hopes would be fulfilled. I'd wait a few minutes and then quietly get out of my sleeping bag, and carefully get another log from the pile of wood below the window. I'd slowly open the flue and try to silently place the log in the wood stove, then close the flue again and creep back into my sleeping bag for another hour or two of delicious sleep.
It was usually getting light outside by the time one of us would actually get up. Occasionally he would ask me if the alarm had gone off, and I'd say it had, but I thought he'd decided to get a little more sleep. He never seemed to notice that someone had added a log to the wood stove, which was fine with me. He'd say something like, "Well, okay, let's have a cup of coffee and get out there."
I'd go boil the water, and make a couple of cups of instant coffee. I often added a packet of Swiss Miss instant cocoa to my cup of coffee for additional flavor. We'd drink our hot beverages and by the time we finished, the sun would be up and it would be getting on to seven or seven thirty. We'd be awake enough to be feeling hungry by then, and I would start hoping anew. My hopes were usually fulfilled again when grandad would say something like, "It's probably not worth going out now before breakfast, so we might as well eat, then we can go out and get a few good hours before lunch."
So then we'd have our nice leisurely breakfast without having to venture out into the dark and cold of the pre-sunrise forest.

rodentia

I was staying at the cabin alone for a while after Carl left. Sleeping became more difficult after he left. The mice in the cabin became much more active at night, scurrying around in the attic, up and down the walls and across the floor. There were rustling and gnawing noises that started soon after I went to bed. When there were two of us, I don't remember hearing so much activity at night. I suppose if the mice heard creaking bunks, breathing and occasional shifting from two different places, they weren't exactly sure where danger might come from. But when there was only one human, and any noises only came from one location, they felt bold enough to carry on their normal activities without trying to be too quiet. Perhaps they would just keep themselves ready to run away from the corner of the cabin I was in, instead of having to worry about two different threats in two different locations.
Sometimes I'd get frustrated and yell at the mice, shake the bunk bed or hit the wall (but never too hard, for fear of causing structural damage). That would quiet them down for a few minutes, and I'd hope to get to sleep before too much rustling and scurrying started again.
Early one morning, after a night of fitful sleep, there was a horrible scratching sound in my dream. It seemed to be coming from right next to my head, and I woke with a start when I realized the sound was real. I looked over on the wall next to me, but there was nothing, and since I made some noise when I sat up, the sound stopped. I was about to lie back down, hopefully to drift back to sleep when the noise started again. I quietly got out of bed and I could tell that the sound was coming from the porch, which was on the other side of the wall. I carefully picked up the shotgun and walked to the door. I opened it quickly and a little red squirrel jumped from somewhere and ran out the porch door.
I went out onto the porch and looked around. There were fresh scratch marks on the wooden table on the porch. It looked like the squirrel had been scratching and gnawing at the wood in a particular place on the edge of the table. The table was pushed up against the wall so the sound was transferred from the wood of the table to the wood of the wall. That's why it sounded like it was right next to my head, because it was. I moved the table out an inch or two from the wall and went back to bed. That squirrel had really leapt when I opened the door. It must have gotten quite a fright, so it wouldn't be coming back any time soon.
The mice had mostly ceased their nocturnal noisemaking activities by that time of the morning, so it was pretty quiet and I started to drift back into restful sleep. I was quite annoyed by the scratching noise that started up again just as I had fallen asleep. Since the table was no longer pressed against the wall, it wasn't quite as loud, but still loud enough. I knocked on the wall and heard the squirrel scamper away. I was going to go back to sleep, but I kept expecting the noise to start again, so I couldn't really relax and gave up after a few minutes and got up. I figured it would be good to get up and get an early start anyway. After all, who needs a few extra hours of wonderful restful sleep.
I had a pretty good day, but by that night I was especially tired. Before I went to bed, I made sure the porch door was completely closed and I put a metal tray over the part of the table that the squirrel was gnawing on, so it wouldn't be able to scratch there and wake me in the morning. I was tired enough to sleep through most of the mouse activity that night, but very early in the morning, I again awoke to a horrible scratching sound. I got out of bed as quickly as I could and yelled and stomped as I opened the door. The squirrel leapt from the table and went for the porch door, which was closed. I stomped towards it, and it ran really fast to the corner of the porch, up the wall, and out through a hole up near the ceiling. This time I really scared it, and surely it wouldn't come back. I went outside to yell at it in case it had other ideas. It had run up into a pine tree. When I yelled and threw a rock at it, it started chattering at me. I thought that might not be a good sign. It seemed more angry at me than afraid of me. I went back on the porch and the metal tray was still in place, but I saw little bits of wood on the floor. I looked under the table, and there were tooth marks on the underside of the table. The squirrel must have hung there almost upside down to do that. Something must have been really appealing about that part of the table. I wondered if there had been something salty there, or if someone had cleaned fish or cut meat there or something. I sniffed it, but it just smelled like old wood to me.
After a few minutes, the squirrel had stopped chattering and I went out and yelled at it some more, but I didn't see it anywhere. I went back inside and sat down on the bunk bed. I was about to lie down, but I thought that squirrel might be back, so I got up, cocked the shotgun and put it by the door before lying down. It took me a while after the sudden activity, but I eventually fell asleep.
I'm not sure how much later it was that a scratching noise woke me up, but I got up slowly and quietly and made my way to the door. The audacity of that damn squirrel made me really angry. I picked up the shotgun, and opened the door quickly. The squirrel made straight for its getaway hole near the ceiling and I went out the porch door to see if I could get a clear shot. The squirrel was just running up the pine tree, and it was going pretty fast so I didn't think I had much chance of hitting it, but I took a shot. As the quiet morning was shattered by the shotgun blast, I saw the squirrel leap off the pine tree into the next tree, down a long branch of that tree, and off into the jumble of small trees and bushes next to the shack. I don't think I hit anywhere near it, but my ears were ringing, and I hoped the squirrels ears were ringing too. I didn't bother trying to go back to sleep that morning.
I never woke up to that horrible scratching sound again.

what the

When Carl and I came to the cabin, we intended to stay for a while, and we didn't have much money, so we bought some cheap bulk food, like oatmeal, rice and beans. We also tried to grow a little garden, and find as much wild food as possible. I think we had a guide book for edible plants, or maybe we just took some notes from one in the library. Not only was finding food in the forest appealing because it would save money, but also because the idea of "living off the land" seemed pretty cool. We never really got too much food from the wilderness though, compared to what we had brought with us. But it was fun and educational to make the effort.
Grandad once told me about fiddle heads, which were the tops of ferns which were just coming up, so named because of their resemblance to the top of a fiddle. I thought we might have some of those, but when I was reading through some book, it mentioned that some species of ferns were poisonous, and I wasn't sure if the ferns around the cabin were the non-poisonous variety or not. We didn't eat many fiddle heads, not only because they might have been poisonous, but also because they tasted awful.
There were dandelions around, so we harvested the leaves of some of those, but most of them were too old, and were very bitter. Somewhere we read that the roots of dandelions could be harvested and roasted like chicory to make a coffee substitute. We tried that, and the roots of the dandelions around the cabin were rather small and inconsequential, and when roasted and brewed like coffee, made a most vile tasting liquid.
We didn't bother trying to make a kind of flour out of the inner bark of pine trees, which allegedly kept people from starving during some stretch of hard times. We didn't see too many mushrooms, and didn't know them well enough to be confident about which were edible.
One minor success we had with forest products was pine pitch. It's not edible, but at least it was something we had heard about, tried, and it worked. We collected sticky chunks of dried pine sap from the many pine trees near the shack. We filled some cans with the chunks of sap and heated them for a long time. The sap melted and eventually turned a dark color. When it was warm, it was sticky, and easily spread, and when it cooled, it hardened, and was a bit tacky, but not really sticky. We didn't really have much to use it for, but it was satisfying to have tried to make something and succeeded to some extent.
Eventually I started trying to think of possible uses for the pine pitch. I finally came up with one that seemed practical and reasonable. The north and west sides of the outside of the cabin were covered with tar paper which was held on by strips of wood. Grandad told me that before that tar paper was added, the wind from the north would blow through all the cracks between the logs, and the cabin was much colder and draftier on windy winter days. There were lots of little to medium sized holes in the tar paper, and I figured if I patched them, maybe the inside mosquito population would be reduced.
I unrolled some tar paper from a roll that was on the porch, heated some pitch in a can, and went out with the step ladder to start patching. I cut patches of tar paper big enough to cover each hole as I got to it, spread some pine pitch on the edges, and pressed it against the wall over the hole. It seemed to be working pretty good. The pine pitch adhered really well as it cooled, as long as i put enough on the patch. I had to stop and reheat the pine pitch can a couple of times as it cooled and hardened.
I had worked my way around past the west window, and had patched what I could reach from that position, so I got down from the ladder, and moved it about 3 feet, then climbed up again. My head was almost as high as the top of the tar paper. There was a little puffed out section of tar paper, and I pushed against it to see if it was brittle, or if I could flatten it out. Just as I pushed against it, a tiny black face appeared over the top edge of the tar paper. I was startled, and stopped moving. I was face to face with a small bat. I think it had been sleeping, and its eyes were closed when it appeared, and they slowly opened. It started to slowly close its eyes again, and lower behind the tar paper when it abruptly did a classic comedy double take. Its eyes sprang open and it popped back up, as if it suddenly realized something wasn't as it should be. It actually had a startled look on its face. After a moment of staring at me, it popped back down behind the tar paper. I was startled at first too, but then I started laughing to myself at the behavior of this tiny creature. I figured I had done enough patching for the day. I quietly climbed down the stepladder and left so the little bat could get back to sleep.

birdhouse

During our summer visit to the cabin in the early eighties with uncle Bill and grandad, my brother and I each had a little project. At least I think we did, because I had a little project, and I remember my brother doing something else while I was working on mine, but I don't remember what his project was. My project was building a birdhouse.
There were a few scraps of plywood next to the wood pile, a few jars of nails and a few cans of paint on the porch. I used an old bow saw and hand saw to cut the plywood. I didn't think too carefully about the design and ended up going for a simple box, instead of something with a sloped roof. There was no tool to bore a large hole in the plywood, so I cut the front piece of plywood in half, then cut out two triangles. I used an old file to file the triangle shapes into approximate semicircles, then used two small pieces of wood to attach the two halves back together so the semicircles met and formed a reasonable hole.
I painted the inside of the bird box black. The paint didn't seem to dry completely, even after hours, so maybe it was too old, or maybe I didn't stir it enough. I painted the outside of the box yellow (the choice of colors being limited to what had been left on the porch of the cabin). I slathered on a lot of paint on the seams of the box, hoping to seal them, but without too much success, since my hand sawing didn't result in the straightest of cuts.
When it was done, and the paint was dry enough for me to handle it, I nailed it to a spruce tree behind the cabin. I was pretty proud of it, and took a picture of it with my Kodak disc camera.
When I was nailing it together, it seemed a little bit rickety, and I wasn't sure how long it would hold together. I also wasn't sure if I'd made a useful birdhouse, because I remembered something about how the hole in a birdhouse should be a certain size, related to the size of the house and how far from the bottom it was. I thought maybe no birds would be interested in it, and it would just fall apart anyway. But it didn't fall apart, at least not for the decade or so I visited the cabin after that. And when I looked in the hole during a visit a few years later, it had some kind of nest in it, so something must have found it useful.

of course

There were already some rolls of roofing felt and asphalt at the cabin when Carl and I got there, but it didn't look like it would be enough to do the most pressing roofing work. We bought some additional roofing materials at the hardware store in town.
Carl did the actual roof work, while I handed things up to him, and cleared away debris that fell down. It looked like there were three or four layers of rolled roofing in place, in various states of deterioration. They had probably been applied on top of each other over intervals of twenty years or so. Carl scraped off the top layer or two, to try to get a relatively even surface to work on. The asphalt roll that was already at the cabin was a different color than the one we bought, so we ended up with a part green, part white roof, which I thought was kind of appealing.
There was a little bit of asphalt roll left over, so I decided to do the outhouse roof. When I was removing the old roofing, there was a small strip of newspaper between the roofing material and the wood of the roof. It was from the fifties. It must have gotten stuck to the tar paper accidentally when it was put on, and had been sitting there for forty years or so. But then I thought maybe whoever did the roofing in the fifties had put it there on purpose, just so I could see a little bit of their time.
It reminded me of the shelves in the kitchen. I had decided to clean them off, so I threw away all the ruptured and bulging canned goods. I moved all the good cans, unmolested boxes, the old sugar jar and other things worth keeping over to the kitchen counter area and the table in the other room. Someone had covered the shelves with newspaper, and the newspaper was stuck to the shelves in places where cans had leaked. There were remnants of a mouse nest in one corner of the shelf, with a few dried skeletons of some baby mice who must not have made it through some winter. There were plenty of mouse droppings, collected over who knows how many years. As I pulled the paper up, I saw that it was from the early seventies. It was fun to see the old news and the old advertisements with old prices. I realized the dates probably coincided with time our family visited the cabin when my brother and I were very young. I imagined that my mother or father had put that newspaper down almost two decades earlier. I wondered if they had pulled up newspaper from the forties or the fifties before they put down the fresh seventies papers.
After I cleaned off the bare wood, I started putting some brand new nineties newspaper down. Then I thought I might leave another little bit of cryptic information for some future shelf cleaner. I found the cleanest portion of the old paper I had removed from the shelf and tore a section from it, being sure to include the date, and put it under the new paper.
I wiped off all of the old cans and jars and put them back on the newly newspapered shelves. I felt a real sense of accomplishment looking upon the clean, orderly, freshly newspapered shelves, and I thought maybe I had left some small item of interest for a possible future.
So when I found the strip of fifties newspaper on the roof of the outhouse, I tried to save it. Some of it was stuck and ripped when I tried to pull it free, but I got enough to show it was from mid-century. When I was ready to put new felt down, I got a strip of nineties newspaper to put next to the old fifties newspaper. Then I felt ambitious and added a dollar bill and a few coins, and nailed the felt down, then covered it with asphalt roll. I figured it was likely that those items would never be seen again by human eyes, but it was a small investment. The payoff, if it ever happened, might be in the distant future, and not to me, but I know I would have been fascinated to find a little money and two strips of newspaper from forty years apart.
While I was working on the roof of the outhouse, an occasional smell wafted up to me. It wasn't really bad, but it was enough to remind me I wasn't working in a flower garden. If an outhouse is constructed and vented properly, it doesn't really smell too bad. Grandad told me to dump some slaked lime in the outhouse occasionally, which was supposed to help with odor and decomposition.
I think either grandad or uncle Bill told me a story about an old country bar which had an outhouse. The old outhouse was in pretty poor condition, and one of the patrons of the bar was complaining about it to his friend. The bar owner said he agreed, and that he was going to start looking for someone to build a new outhouse. The friend of the patron said he was a builder and would be happy to take on the job. The bar owner was happy to have found someone so quickly. The builder and the owner went out to survey the situation, and the builder suggested that he could build the new outhouse a lot closer to the bar. The owner asked if he was sure that wouldn't be a problem. The builder told him it wouldn't be a problem at all. They agreed on a price, and the builder said he would get started the next day.
The builder finished the outhouse in a single day, much to the owner's satisfaction. He paid the agreed upon price, and told the builder he could drink for free that night, and the builder enjoyed the end of his day of work.
The next day, the bar patrons complimented the owner on the nice new outhouse, but later that night, after coming back from using the outhouse, a few patrons complained that it was starting to smell. The owner thought the patrons probably just weren't used to the new outhouse.
On the second day, some patrons were complaining about the smell of the outhouse even though they hadn't used it. The owner went outside, and he could smell it as soon as he stepped out the door. When he went back inside, he asked the builder's friend if he knew where the builder was, and if he could go get him because the outhouse had a bad smell. The friend said the builder was probably at home, and that he would go get him.
A while later, the builder and his friend arrived back at the bar. The owner told the builder that the outhouse seemed well constructed and looked really nice, but it smelled really bad, so there must be some kind of problem with it. They went outside, followed by most of the patrons of the bar. The builder went up to the outside of the outhouse, and said he could smell it too. He looked all around the base of it, and knocked on the walls, and they sounded solid. He went into the outhouse, and in a few moments came back out with a horrified look on his face. He exclaimed, "Of course it stinks! Somebody shit in it!"