Tuscarora Lodge & Canoe Outfitters

We really could use the spring sun today to shine a bright side for us. We’ve been blizzarded again!
Innitially, this was another grand adventure. Andy wasn’t home. Daniel and I were great and powerful snow movers. The green truck threatened to get stuck and slid in the mud beneath the heavy snow, but I was the master.
Eventually I grew a little overconfident, planning to just clean up a spot I hadn’t been before, and I hung up the plow unit on a pile of crusted snow right outside the outfitting door. So I shoveled, blew and chiseled snow, I piled sand under the tires. I rocked it, but mostly I spun until I buried the tires in the soft mud.

Finally as Denali and I sat down to study the thing, I began to imagine climate change in reverse. What if we already had our little taste of spring? What if we just jumped right back into November? Don’t misunderstand me—I love winter. Yet this thought made my heart sink. I know it isn’t true, but November is starting to feel just over the horizon… I am so very ready to rake and shlep the Kevlar canoes back to their spots, and wash windows until very late in the day. I was planning for the spring season and somebody shook the snow globe up on me again!
I remember when my kids were really little and we learned to gentle transitions by warning them well ahead of time what was coming. If I thought it would do any good, I might have thrown a tantrum right on the spot. The dog witnessed all the cursing I had within me, until I finally had to scold myself—ENOUGH ALREADY. And left the plow until morning—when Andy could join me to chip out the wheels from the (now frozen) mud—really the biggest bonus of being an outfitter is that there is always another truck to hook up and pop out the stuck vehicles.

I’m waching Casper the pine martin at the bird feeder. I’m no expert on these things, but it might be time to change her name to Casperilla. She definitely looks thicker in the middle, and maybe she is pregnant. Maybe this is why she comes knocking
—trying to push in every door, popping all the garbage can lids when the feeder runs empty. This may be the proof of spring that I need to go tackle the day.

Tally, Denali’s powder puff cousin, doesn’t CARE if it is April!!!! Snow is snow.

April 6th Task #1, The trusty big blue truck helps me to pull Annette the schoolbus driver out of the road onto the Gunflint Trail….she just needed a little extra tug. Task #2: Denali and I returned home at a good clip because the truck was bottoming out in the snow. The plow hasn’t come through again yet. We’ve had somewhere between 1 and 2 feet in the last 36 hours…and it is still snowing.

Andy is returning from the Mpls sports show today—yesterday Denali and I practiced the tricky business of plowing over the spring muddiness without getting stuck. And I had a chance to spend some quality time shoveling with Gary the county plow driver—the mud in the turnaround by the Trading Post tried to swallow his monster wheels.

The truth is—as the kids first eagerly helped me blow snow and then played in it, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of that same November excitement –the world is covered in that clean white blanket. Is that instinct? This snow is the last thing I wanted to deal with, but it certainly is lovely. It is an honor to see the world from my kids’ perspective—a place to play–a place that always has a game hidden somewhere in it, if you look hard enough.

Last week we spent a couple of days in central Minnesota making maple syrup. As we drove on a rural road toward my folks’ cabin, I noticed many junky yards that spring was revealing. When we approached my folks’ cabin, I was going to say that even the woods are rather ugly before green up….then Daniel remarked about the blue bulging bags hanging from the maple trees—the sap was running!!! This is all he noticed. Every season has its own magic, if you can see it from the right angle.

This last week I had a parenting experience, really a big slap on the forehead reminder. A huge job for us is to constantly share our positive perspective of our kids, with our kids. As adults, we realize that we are all full of dichotomies — the potential to be lazy/motivated, to be confident/ insecure, honest/ dishonest. Our kids are in the process of building their image of who they really are. It could be our most important challenge to remind them (and us!) of the best possible versions of themselves. With that vision in mind, maybe they will tend toward the choices that reflect that image. Or so we can hope! And sigh, and try again.

This week, as we slide back into mud season, I’m going to remember what Daniel said one day on the way home from the bus. “Mom, I can’t wait to get home and dig the trenches to get the water to flow right into the culverts. This is the BEST time of the year!!!”

It really is a matter of perspective. It makes ALL the difference.

Today our hearts go out to Forrest Parsons and the folks at Hungry Jack Lodge.

The EDGE: Dirt from the Yurt and other Chatter from the Edge of the Boundary Waters: Hungry Jack Lodge Destroyed by Fire

The History of Hungry Jack Lodge

Last night I had a dream about my favorite childhood place—the home where my grandpa (Pop) lived on Genesee Lake in Wisconsin. My mom and her sisters’ childhood home was near the Owens farm in Dousman where Pop spent the bulk of his farming career.
Playing in the lake with my cousins was the best part, but it was also fun to accompany Pop to the farm—to learn about cultivation, germination, soil irrigation systems…. Occasionally we visited neighboring farms. I can remember running the cornfield rows of the Pabst farms with my cousins. The last time I visited the area in 2006, The Pabst Farms was a development—complete with suburban neighborhoods, a business center, a YMCA. What a funny foreign weirdness that gave me.

I don’t blame the Pabst family for selling, or the development company either really. I just miss the ways that Pop used those fields to explain cross pollination. He was a guy that I didn’t think I could live without. I also will have to live without the Pabst Farms— no chance for that land to return to the fields that I remember.
Fast forward 30 years to where my kids play. I’m counting on the BWCA playground to be preserved for their children. I’m grateful for the places that the government protects in that way. My mind wanders to stewardship of the land—especially how it works around here.
During last years’ first annual Gunflint Green Up we were grateful for the people that came to replant donated pines and give the forest recovery a jump start in the places where the Ham Lake fire nicked us. Although many trees were planted on private land here and up the trail, we couldn’t plant any trees on US Forest Service property. We didn’t even bother to ask; we knew better than to attempt something like that on the fly. It can be annoying really, the official procedure it takes to do anything on USFS property, even though I’m pretty sure that we care about it as much as any of the other US citizens that share ownership with us.
I’m realizing more and more how touchy this local vs. federal ownership issue has historically been around here. As irritating as it can be, it seems to me that the ongoing conversation between all the stakeholders has the most potential to be an effective way to tend the land . It is possible that it takes a bureaucracy to bring the broad and narrow angles together. You can bet that I wouldn’t have initiated any prescribed burns on the properties near us—but I was mighty thankful in 2006 that somebody did.
My angle last spring didn’t actually take into account that the USFS must ensure that we aren’t planting white pines from seed sources in places like South Carolina—which technically makes them non-native species. This year, the pines are coming from tree farm seedlings planted in abandoned mine pits in central Minnesota. Citizens and business owners on the Gunflint Trail have been working closely with the USFS to raise funds and bring volunteers to plant 75000 trees on May 3rd—to fill in the patches left by the Ham Lake fire. Apparently, this time the right people are coming together to make the system click. .
As we sit at the dinner table and discuss government and politics with the kids, there are plenty of times that it is tough to justify the systems that we are part of. This is one time where we can feel proud of those systems. And that is a good thing.
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