Aligning With Nature

Dressed from head to foot in tattered shards of browns, grays and here-and-there greens I might resemble a military sniper. That is what I am: an assassin. My target is a male turkey, hopefully a mature gobbler.

Turkeys have exceptional eyesight and hearing. They can detect the slightest of movements. Caution is always front and center. If they feel uneasy, they can display an amazing speed in their escape.

During spring turkey hunting I leave the house in the frosty darkness. I find a hefty tree, usually an oak, that I can sit against in the vicinity of roosting turkeys. I pull a piece of dark green, one and a half inch thick foam from my pack to sit on. I use my turkey call sparingly to imitate a hen. My goal is to entice a gobbler to come and investigate. 

The longer I sit stoically against the tree the more attuned I am to the knobs, crags, and ridges that make up my back rest. Some would call it uncomfortable. Others would grumble that the hunt is an ordeal. I call it a privilege.

Sitting unmoving, I try to become a sort of burl to the tree. One with the tree.

One of the advantages of hunting in the spring is that the outing coincides with the spring bird migration. I have always taken pride in my ability to identify birds by their vocalizations. My mind drifts back to when I was a student at the University of Minnesota. I had the privilege of attending the University’s Biological Station up on Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. One of the classes I took that spring was Ornithology and it was that experience that really turned me on to birds. 

One of the projects I worked on was noting which bird species were using a thirty acre study plot in a mixed deciduous/coniferous forest.  As spring progressed and the trees’ foliage exploded, it became difficult to see the birds and necessary to listen and learn the multitude of bird songs. My bird identification skills accelerated. 

Part of our final exam was strolling on a fine May morning with our class Teacher’s Assistant out on Bear Paw Point where he would point in the direction of a singing bird. Each student carried  a clipboard and pad of paper to record our guesses of the mystery bird song. I was one of two students to correctly identify 100% of the singing birds. 

These days the free app Merlin helps people identify bird songs. I have to say it’s pretty accurate but if there are several birds singing or the vocalization is too distant it can make mistakes. Overall, Merlin is spot on 80-90% of the time. 

That bird song quiz on the shore of Lake Itasca was over fifty years ago and now I wear hearing aids to help me pick up the higher frequencies. 

On the first morning of my hunt the sun climbed into the sky gradually spilling its light across the corn stubble. Nearby birds starting singing and vocalizing. With no obvious turkey nearby, I dared to slip my phone out of my pocket to list the bird species I could hear over a fifteen-minute timeframe.  

Besides the distant gobble of wild turkeys, I heard a red-bellied woodpecker, Canada geese, sandhill cranes, ring-necked pheasants, a robin, a cardinal, crows, white-throated sparrow (migrants heading north), and a northern flicker. Nearby an eastern towhee trilled its lovely pneumonic invitation to “drink-your-teeeea.” And across the field in a line of red oaks I smiled with the song of the brown thrasher repeating itself. 

I decided to see what Merlin could pick up that perhaps I wasn’t hearing. While the app is a great tool I am hesitant to use it as I like to test my skills. On this morning, it didn’t add any species and it could not hear the distant thrasher repeating itself. I felt a moment of smugness in having identified more bird songs than the computer.

Over the next couple of days, gobbling turkeys came closer but not close enough. It seems these amorous males must be in the company of live hens. Consequently they are not about to seek out the hen siren calls that I was delivering.

My body was aching from my daily efforts in trying to merge with a tree. One afternoon, I remained still for four and a half hours as I half laid and half sat against a large old windfall limb. Both the limb and I were clearly weathered but I dared not move as there were feeding turkey hens strolling all around me. But no gobblers.

The following morning, my aching body resumed its position with the knob of the tree jabbing my lower back and broken stub poking my hip. At dawn I watched two gobblers fly out of the oaks that they had roosted in and glide to the ground a hundred yards in front of me. Soon two more gobblers and a half dozen hens joined the gathering.  Even though they were out of range, it was fun to watch the flock. Any movements I made were slower than an emerging shadow. 

Finally one of the mature toms broke off from the turkey huddle and edged my way. I gave a couple soft yelps and clucks out of my mouth call and glacially readied myself. The bird paused and stared in my direction. Then he made what was to be his death march directly towards me. 

Last night we had a big salad that included smoked turkey breast. And again, I repeated, “Thank you turkey.”

NOTE: It turns out that somewhere in that zigzagging half mile hike back to our house, with the turkey slung over my shoulder, my right hearing aid fell out. I filed an insurance claim, talked to an adjuster and today I pick up my new one. And no, that doesn’t mean for the last ten days I’ve heard only half the birds.

The postcard postmarked Sept. 30, 1914 is graced with a penny stamp bearing the head of George Washington. The front image of the card is a photograph of my hometown, North Branch, when all the streets were dirt.

The cursive message on the opposite side was penned by my grandfather Irving Anderson. He writes: Dear Mother, How are you? I am feeling fine and hope you are the same. I sleep good nights. I suppose you are in full swing with the potato digging now. Greet papa.

From Irving

When I read that card I am reminded of the sacrifice that my grandfather’s parents (my great grandparents) made for him. He was an only child which in itself is odd for a farming family at the turn of the twentieth century.  His parents insisted he complete twelve years of education. Most of his schooling took place in a country school less than three miles from their farm. He walked to and from school most days. I used to hear that when conditions were really cold, his father might harness a horse to a cutter sleigh, heat some irons on the woodburning stove and then put them under a horsehide blanket for warmth and transport his son to school. But mostly it was walking to and from school.

To secure a high school diploma he would have to go to the North Branch School seven miles away. So instead of walking fourteen miles every day, he boarded closer to the school during the week and then walked seven miles home on Fridays and then made the same trek on Sundays back to his lodging in North Branch.  Perhaps he didn’t go home every weekend but I suspect he missed few as they could use his help on the farm. Being alone, away from the home place he could more easily concentrate on his studies. It paid off. He was the valedictorian of the Class of 1917.

I suspect on those walks from home to town and back, he went over his classwork, new ideas, memorization and so on.

During my grandfather’s high school years, his father hired Milton Peterson to help on the farm. When Milton was in his nineties he shared a story with me that  involved leading a roped cow for over a dozen miles to deliver it to a farm up near Rush City. After dropping off the cow he turned around and walked those miles back home for supper. He shared the tale without any sense of gloating. It was just another day of work. 

Today, if anyone walks 24 miles in a day it has to be posted on social media. It seems what used to be the ordinary is now a loud proclamation of “Hey look at what I did!”  

A century ago walking was no big deal. No one had apps encouraging them to “get their steps in.” Now it seems almost newsworthy if you are able to get your 10,000 steps in every day. I confess, I’m not immune to such utterances as shown in these blog entries.

For most of our long history as a species, we have been walkers. We didn’t live in one place. The template of “Home Sweet Home” is only a recent practice among our species. (“Recent” in this case means since the Agricultural Revolution some 14,000 years ago, which is very recent in the map of our existence.)

 Until we poked seeds in the ground and domesticated animals we were always on the move. We paused at seasonal camps if there was an abundance of food, such as a run of salmon, a herd of bison, a patch of berries or a shallow lake covered with thick stands of wild rice. Or we might have had seasonal camps to better cope with the extremes of heat and cold. 

Eventually, less than 20,000 years ago, we domesticated the horse to carry or pull us. But even then, we two-leggeds mostly walked. 

Only in the past one hundred plus years have we divorced ourselves from the natural elements and transported ourselves in trains, autos and airplanes. 

Walking has even been pulled away from our children’s lives. Very few children walk to school even if they live less than a mile from the school. A walk would be beneficial to their health.

I suspect it is fear that keeps parents from letting the kids walk home. There seems to be a subliminal message that children will be abducted..

The reality is that various studies have shown that child abductions are far less than they were in the 1960s and 70s. In recent years most abductions are statistically more likely to perpetrated by a relative of the child. Sadly our actions only make it more likely that the child will grow up with the same fears.  

Recently, while babysitting our granddaughter in the Bay Area of California, Nancy and I drove over to Berkley to spend some time at the infamous Moe’s Books. After parking we began walking the mile or so to the bookstore. At one intersection we paused, waiting for the green “walk” sign. There was a disheveled man talking to another street person. The tenor of their conversation was friendly. As they parted, the disheveled guy gave a wave and said, “Good luck with your locomotion!”

I wish the same for you dear reader. Good luck with your locomotion.

Two summers ago surprise winds pushed over stout oak and cherry trees on three sides of our house. Since then, over the winters, I have been rendering them into firewood. This is known colloquially as “putting up wood.” 

First you cut all the limbs from the tree and saw them into proper lengths to easily feed into the woodburning stoves. We have two stoves in the house, in the basement and the kitchen, and a third in a small log cabin. 

When the limbs are removed and the slash piled, I begin the slower job of cutting the tree trunk into rounds. The world becomes quiet when I turn the chainsaw off and reach for my six-pound splitting maul or the Swedish Gränsfors maul with its hand-forged three-pound head. I pile the split pieces to await their next trip to one of our three wood sheds. 

Now that it is warmer, some of the oak and cherry don’t split so easily. Then I head to the garage to grab some steel wedges from an old galvanized bucket.  

When faced with a stubborn block of wood, I lean over it, scrutinizing its cut surface. I read the grain, inspecting where any branches might have grown out from the trunk (junctions of limb to trunk are difficult to split) and look for telltale wood checking or fissures that will help determine where I should aim my swinging maul. 

Once I determine what looks to be the weakest point of the block, I walk a few blows of the maul across the wood’s cut surface in as straight a line as possible. Many winters of doing this has made me fairly accurate. Using the back of the maul head I tap a wedge into one of the initial maul bites. I gradually pound that wedge deeper into the oak. If the block is especially stubborn, I align a second wedge in another of the original maul bites. On the rare occasion I add a third or fourth to complete the job.

Four generations of my family have been pounding on these wedges. The countless blows have rendered the steel into ragged-edged mushrooms. Over a hundred winters have seen my great grandfather, grandfather, father and now me partner with these old steel artifacts. Such familial knowledge makes the job more like a team effort and for that I am most grateful.

Just over fifty years ago I was helping my Grandpa Anderson put up wood in the same woods that I continue to cut firewood.  Grandpa had recruited his cousin, Gordie Peterson, to help. Gordie drove his unstyled John Deer B a mile and a half to join us. The tractor was equipped with a 30-inch buzz saw mounted on the front of the tractor.

We set 6-8 foot oak limbs on the saw bed and then Gordie would grasp the handle and pull the whining saw blade down on the wood, like a giant electric meat cutter. 

At one point a piece of oak fractured as it was cut and it sent a sharp shard at Gordie’s pulling hand. It left a nasty cut. Gordie casually looked at his hand and without taking his pipe out of his mouth, reached into his pocket, pulled out a bandana, wrapped it tightly around his bleeding wound and resumed sawing.

During a break I asked Grandpa, “How many cords of wood does it take to heat your house?” (It’s a big farmhouse built early in the 20th century.)

“Oh, we usually figure it takes about ten cords to get us through fall, winter and early spring.” 

Now bear in mind this was when winters were colder and a temp of minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit did not send folks into a tizzy. Even at -30 schools were not cancelled.

Wide-eyed, I wondered, “How did you have time to cut all that wood?”

 He looked at me quizzically and answered matter-of-factly, “Well it was our job.”

I suspect the ancestral lineage of wood splitters and wedge carriers will end with my death. The wedges might be passed on as hefty paperweights but in an increasingly digital world who needs to weigh down loose papers.

If these wedges are to continue their divisive work in the decades to come, I may have to forgo the idea of these being family heirlooms and simply pass them on to any wood cutter. 

I feel good about the three cords of wood I’ve put up in in the last month and a half. It’s given me healthy doses of fresh air, a great core workout (proper splitting engages the core more than the arms) and the reward of accumulated wealth.

Every winter I can count on wearing out a pair of leather work gloves. Now, with March upon us, I can optimistically go to the hardware store and pick up a supple new pair for next winter.

Nothing lasts forever. Change is the only constant.

A month ago we stood across the bay from San Francisco on what is known as the Albany Bulb, an artificially made 31-acre spit of land. Its bulb-shaped geology began when truckloads of concrete chunks and twisted rebar were landfilled here for scores of years.

The dumping stopped in 1984. Within a few years local artists began creating art among the mounds of concrete, tangled metal, washed up trash and driftwood. Like our long-ago forebears, they see a hard surface as a canvas for art.

It was ironic that as we strolled on the crude paths meandering through the eruptions of art, that only recently it had been reported that a recent discovery of “new” cave art in Indonesia had been found. The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old and are now considered the oldest art known to archaeology. These etchings predate the famous paintings in the French Lascaux cave painting by at least 5,000 years.

Who knows how much earlier humans showed a capacity for creative thought and story telling through images.

Now, more than 40 years later, the art continues and the natural world is slowly reclaiming this once devastated site. Today walking trails radiate in all directions. Among the massive broken blocks of concrete there are sinuous green tangles of vine, bushes, grasses and flowers. Along this maze of trails a multitude of critters reside. Insects, birds, small lizards, mice, ground squirrels, rabbits and the occasional coyote and owl flourish here.  (Over 150 species of flora and fauna have been documented here. I suspect that the real number is substantially greater.) 

Wandering through the sinuous trails I wondered about the concept of “waste.” It occurred to me that there is no waste in the natural world; waste is a human construct and one born only in recent centuries by western cultures. Prior to contact with European settlement, North American indigenous peoples had no name for “waste.” Their shelters were made from organic materials such as animal hides, rock, mud, tree limbs or bark. The natural world would simply take these materials back when the humans were finished with them.

The indigenous understood that even their defecations were food for something else. And given that people were nomadic, there was never a foul  accumulation of feces.

We tend to refer to human feces as “waste.” However for most of the approximately 14,000 years that humans have practiced agriculture we used our feces as well as that of our domesticated animals (cattle, horse, pigs, fowl, etc) as a valuable input for our crops. 

Using chemistry, modern humans have created synthetic materials such as plastics, fiberglass, glass and more to create materials that are stubbornly resistant to natural decay. Consequently we have piled trash on acres and acres of good ground. Cities, towns and villages have departments that deal with the accumulation of our garbage. Fleets of giant garbage trucks move in and out of the thousands of acres that house our accumulated trash. We hide it behind berms and fences thereby pretending it isn’t there. 

Even a tossed cigarette butt can linger for ten years. And plastics are even worse. Plastic islands in the ocean are measured in acres. And since these are so far out in the ocean, out of sight, they are out of our minds. So who cares that sea turtles are eating filmy single use plastic bags thinking they are jellyfish?

Many of the paintings and sculptures on the Albany Bulb stopped me in my tracks. Curved pieces of driftwood melded with twisted rebar bejeweled with old loops of beads, battered phones, or even a typewriter splashed in paint made me smile, wonder, and loudly exclaim. Some were provocative and put me at unease. But that’s what good art is supposed to do. 

Here on the Bulb, the seasonal cycling of birth, death and decomposition is at work. The buildup of organic material will eventually erase all vestiges of the human landfill.  

The Bulb has become a destination for creativity where humans and the processes of the natural world pair together to transform a landscape of ruin into a softer world. A landfill evolving towards rewilding.

Three days after the killing I found a second victim. I had no reason to perform the autopsy I was planning to do on the first death.

I  discovered the first body as I carried a pail of wood ashes from our kitchen woodburning stove to the compost pile out near the garden. I was surprised by the curled body of a red squirrel. I scanned the snow for marks of a scuffle or blood. None. 

I picked up the rigid rodent and inspected it on all sides for telltale marks of a violent death. None. Had it been sick and just died here? Not likely. My plan was to thaw and skin it to see if I could figure out the cause of death.

Then yesterday morning, less than ten feet from where the squirrel had been found, Nancy reported a headless cottontail rabbit. I knew immediately who the killer was. I booted up and went out to retrieve the dead cottontail. I lifted it out of the slightly melted cradle of snow and given it was not frozen stiff surmised that it had been dead only a few hours.

The head was nowhere to be seen. The thin spine in the neck protruded like a textured straw with no flesh remaining on it. The lower front left leg had been torn and there was some blood smeared on the shoulders.

I carried the cottontail corpse to our basement to thaw. Later, I skinned the soft fur from the body and discovered slashes and bruises on the shoulder and upper back muscles. Clear evidence of gripping talons. 

Now I was able to reconstruct the murder scene. Directly above it stretches a dead limb from  a big red oak. This was the likely perch that the owl flew up to after it killed both animals. Given that we often see or hear barred owls in our woods, I’m deducing that that was the assassin.  

The red squirrel was probably nabbed near our woodshed where they often cavort.  The owl flew up to the snag with its prize and in the act of changing its grip to better decapitate its prey, the owl dropped the squirrel on the path below. Why the owl didn’t retrieve it, I don’t know. But they can be skittish. Perhaps Nancy or I had gone out to our porch, less than 20 steps away from the killed prey, for an armload of firewood to feed the stove for the night and had scared the owl away. 

I have come across decapitated mammals in the past. Once while canoeing I found a headless muskrat on top of a beaver lodge. Another time, I was snowshoeing and spotted a squirrel tail hanging from high in the leafless canopy of the woods. A close look with my binoculars showed it was headless.

In Minnesota, fuel is critical, especially during the winter. Some critters, like amphibians, reptiles, ground squirrels, woodchucks and some insects escape the need to gather calories by hibernating. Others, like raccoons, become dormant. 

The most calorie-rich food is fat. The heads of squirrels and rabbits are not chubby. Instead it is the brain itself that is a powerhouse of fats. Fifty nine percent of the brain is made up of fat and 30% is protein. It also contains necessary Vitamin A and calcium.

Hawks and owls can fairly easily remove the head by grasping the neck and making a quick twist to sever the spine. Then they peck with their sharp, curved tip of the beak to open up the thin-walled skull to access the treasure trove of fat.

There is evidence that humans eat the brains of their quarry or livestock for the same energetic demands. Even today, some Arctic Inuit will remove and eat the brains from harvested seals. 

I admit that I will sometimes turn to sugar, like a donut, for a blast of energy. I cannot remember the source, but it has been said that the consumption of brains is the equivalent of eating a cheesecake and a box of donuts!

Two days later I discovered another headless rabbit behind my little log cabin. Nancy is going to be tickled! Every summer she curses the garden-eating rabbits who whittle away our produce potential.

This corpse provided more clues. Laying next to its hind foot was a regurgitated owl pellet. The tight ovoid-shaped package of undigested bones, feathers and fur was 5/8 of an inch wide and two inches long. 

White and black splashes of guano stained the snow. Perhaps a crow or two visited the corpse before I found it. Or was it the owl? Two feet from where the rabbit head should have been was a lovely print in the snow of the owl’s splayed flight feathers.

Tonight we will give thanks to the owl that provided us the flesh of the rabbits, in a hearty African Rabbit Curry. There are more bunnies around. For the time being they still have their heads on.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. -Statue of Liberty

It was -26F when I got up. But it was clear and the sunrise was lovely. I figured after breakfast and a cup of coffee it would be a perfect day to grab my splitting maul and head into the woods.

This wasn’t spontaneous, I had planned it the day before when the cold first settled in. There is no better weather for splitting some forbidding looking rounds of oak and cherry. Moisture within the wood is already creating tension in the chunk, so the descending six-pound maul head makes it easy to split. 

Tiny chunks of ice were forming on my eyelashes as my exhalations steamed up from my open mouth. I paused and took a seat on a lovely round of clear oak to wipe the tiny ice balls impeding my vision. 

I glanced back towards the house, the same house built by my Swedish immigrant ancestors in the 19th century.  I wondered if they were hassled much upon entering a new country. It was then that I decided I need to go for a walk down in Minneapolis to practice what the late US congressman, John Lewis called “good trouble.” 

I’m not comfortable with what I’ve been seeing. And I hardly recognize my own country anymore. Cutting wood turned out to be a warm up for my afternoon walk with 50,000 other hardy souls as we joined in solidarity in downtown Minneapolis in protest of the terror tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who had descended upon the city. Their actions included abducting thousands of US citizens and peaceful observers, and shooting Renee Good, a mother and US citizen. 

So why would I go down to the cities on such a cold day and subject myself to bitter windchill temps and the possibility of getting mixed up in something potentially dangerous? 

From our rural home out at the edge of a woods life can be quite serene. 

I try to stay current on news and I can no longer just depend on one source of news to be a critical thinker. The recent news of masked agents breaking down doors, grabbing US citizens for simply having an accent or for their skin color had me reflecting on the Brown Shirts in Germany in the 1930s who used the same tactics. 

I went to the house to change from wood splitting clothes to winter camping clothes and headed to the cities. I didn’t even have a sign. I just wanted to show my support. Selfishly I was hoping my support would be an antidote for my feeling helpless through such chaotic times.

I felt a warmth and pride as a Minnesotan as the crowd of demonstrators huddled like a giant mass of penguins. I was stunned after an hour of standing at the size of the gathering joining to practice our right to peacefully protest. There were people of all ages from elders to youngsters. This was a crowd that exemplified the color of America’s diverse melting pot of citizens. Surprisingly I saw zero policeman at any time during the entire march.  And I was relieved to see no masked ICE agents.

Even with this huge stream of people, there was no vandalism or violence of any nature. On the contrary I witnessed folks taking care of each other. Volunteers passed out free hot coffee, water, and hand and toe warmers. When someone slipped, a host of hands offered help. 

Most of the protester signs demanded that ICE leave Minnesota.  I cracked a smile at the sign that said, “Leave Minnesota A-Loon.” Some signs displayed bible verses and others reminded us that we all at one time were immigrants. It pleased me to even see some signs showing support for the Minneapolis Police Department who incidentally are mightily strained from the chaos inspired by the ICE agents.

Our immigration system has been broken for decades, and needs fixing. But when over 70,000 folks across our country have been detained over the past year with no criminal record, well that is just plain wrong. And the tactics used are equally monstrous and cowardly. Even the Minneapolis Chief of Police questioned the so-called training of ICE.

To use terror as a tool makes the agents terrorists themselves.

With the sun setting I was driving back north to home again. I reflected on the day and felt good about my days work. 

The next morning I was back in the woods to take advantage of the cold and easy splitting. I returned to the house to warm up and then learned of another shooting death, of Alex Pretti. Watching the videos and hearing some of the witness accounts of this shooting paints it more like an execution. And of course the government’s messaging leaped out claiming the dead nurse’s intent to inflict “maximum damage.” And yet images indicate Alex Pretti never touched his gun for which he has a permit to conceal and carry. 

This is happening an hour south of my growing woodpile. It can happen anywhere and apparently with the blessing of our own government. It saddens me to realize that America is no longer the custodian of democracy in the world.

I returned to the sanctuary of my woodpile and needed fresh air.  A pair of ravens passed overhead, almost tumbling in the cold wind. I picked up the maul and resumed work. Even though the air temps were still below zero, the methodical swinging of my maul soon had me sweating. I paused to wipe my brow and suddenly found myself wiping my cheeks. I learned that salty tears don’t freeze on the face.

A root canal performed many years ago had likely gone bad. Consequently jaw bone issues arose beneath the roots of the upper molars  #13 and #14. And now tipped back in a dental chair, I was at the brink of losing those teeth as I faced the friendly oral surgeon. The surgical team’s banter relaxed me. I recall asking, “I suppose this might hamper my Christmas Eve dining.” The surgeon replied, “It might mean no peanut brittle but. . . .”  And just like that I slipped away to slumberland without hearing him finish the sentence.

Later, as my wife Nancy chauffeured my groggy self  back home she thought aloud of possible meals I could handle for supper.  I had forgone breakfast and coffee so fresh dental caverns be damned I was looking forward to some food.

“Hmmm maybe a bowl of hot soup?”  With a smile she added, “There’s always jello.” Luckily we have none in the house. 

But wait! “How about we pull that frozen lutefisk out of the freezer?” Now she had my full attention. Not only was this going to be an early Christmas but it would be a delicate meal on my tender mouth!

My relationship with the sacred cod goes back a long ways. My grandmother used to make it every Christmas Eve. I recall entering their big steamy farmhouse kitchen and feeling the ordinance of odor hit me. Luckily I knew beyond the kitchen was a bedecked Christmas tree with a berm of presents propping it up. So it’s no surprise that to this day the smell of lutefisk pleasantly carries me to past yuletides. 

In my boyhood, I might have put a meager forkful of the fish on my white sauce covered potatoes, but that was it. Luckily protein was abundant in the form of Swedish meatballs and sausage. Mostly it was the meal-concluding rice pudding that carried smiles from the table to the Christmas tree. 

It was somewhere in my mid-teens that my traditional fork full of fish grew to a plural nature and then there was the leap to where I relished the reconstituted cod.

After being netted in the cold water sea, cod are shipped to shore and  hung on wooden racks to dry. Fully dried they resemble leather or a piece of cardboard that has been soaked and then dried. Somewhere along the line, early Scandinavians learned that water alone cannot soften the flesh. Lye, in the form of ashes, had to be added to the water. A number of rinses were required to wash away any vestiges of lye.

These days modern techniques that include large drying kilns make the process far less smelly for the consumers. 

Far too many jokes are made of lutefisk. Most dwell on the smell of preparing it and others grimace at the gelatinous texture of the cooked fish.  As a self-proclaimed expert, I am here to tell you that if your fish becomes of that sloppy, wriggly nature, you have overcooked it. There is no greater compliment made to a church or cafe that serves lutefisk than to nod and say, “You do good fish.”

Lutefisk in the old country of Norway and Sweden was considered a simple dish, almost a survival food, and hence it was accessible to lower income folks. Recently, I saw a package of lutefisk at the grocery store selling for $18. That is a far cry from its inexpensive origins. 

Over a hundred years ago cod fisheries were abundant in the Barents Sea off the Arctic coast of Norway and in the Outer Banks off of New England and the Maritime provinces. Severe overfishing has threatened cod populations in all of their birth waters. Warming oceans are also hampering their reproduction. 

In 2007, I had the opportunity to boat among the Lofoten Islands in Norway.  We saw harvested cod split and draped to air dry on long wooden racks. But there were many empty racks.

We spoke with some residents of a small island community about the cod. They told us that the fishing industry has shifted its focus to king crab, a species which has only in recent decades established itself in these northern waters.

A 2024 story in National Fisherman reported that in 2019 Fisheries and Oceans Canada issued a warning that the cod’s extinction in the St. Lawrence was probable. “Federal Fisheries and Oceans biologist Daniel Richard claims that between 60% and 70% of cod in the southern Gulf do not survive past the age of five and are likely eaten by vast herds of gray seals in the region.”

CBC Canada reported that in the past, “when cod were abundant, large numbers of seals were not a problem. Overfishing from humans has put existing cod stocks more at risk from seal predation and preventing the recovery.”

Another threat to Barents Sea cod fisheries has been the introduction of the non-native red king crab. Introduced from Pacific waters in the 1960s by Russia, these large crabs have made their way westward to the Barents Sea. Native populations of cod began to decline as the crab populations skyrocketed. The crustaceans threaten cod fisheries by competing with cod for bottom dwelling food such as clams and worms. 

Besides competing with native species the crab’s large size can wreak havoc on fishing gill nets. 

I carefully removed the gauze compress from the tooth extraction site and sat down with my less-than-full smile and uttered a quiet, “Tack så mycket.”  (Thank you very much.)

In 1940, two shacks came to the forefront. The first came to us in the newly released movie Grapes of Wrath. Henry Fonda played Tom Joad, the father of the down-and-out Joad family. With the depression and the Dust Bowl wreaking havoc on many families, the Joads leave their shack of a home in Oklahoma and head to the promise of California. 

In early July of  that same year, the bones of a new shack were driven north on a truck from east central Minnesota to the vast logged-over forest near Lake Superior. 

Some of the trucked lumber was salvaged from an old potato warehouse in Stacy, Minnesota. The rest of the building materials were purchased for $29 and some odd cents from a nearby lumberyard. 

After leaving the recently paved Highway 61 and heading inland a few miles on a gravel road the truck finally stopped. 

On July 4th the handful of workers including the family matriarch, Miranda Nelson, two of her sons, Everett and Warren and Raymond Peterson completed building a small shack that was intended to house a half a dozen or so deer hunters. Miranda’s husband Fred stayed back on their farm near North Branch, Minnesota to tend to milking and haying.

Eighty five years later four of us, three Nelsons and an Anderson made the trip up to honor the beloved deer shack’s anniversary.  Unlike the fictional Joad family retreating from their dismal shack we are drawn to the gifts of this Minnesota shanty each fall. 

Every November we relish pushing the unlocked door open and spying the same setting that the 1940 hunters saw. We crave the solitude that comes with no electricity, no plumbing and for that matter no insulation. We find comfort in using the same crude table, benches and bunks that were built 85 years ago.There is satisfaction in pulling out some of the original cookware and water kettles that were used in the shack’s first years. 

We still fetch water in buckets from the river that flows just down the hill. A doorless outhouse sits behind the shack and continues its trouble-free operation. 

In recent years, mobile phones have tarnished the experience of simplicity. Thankfully coverage is very spotty. We haven’t heard the hiss of a Coleman lantern for a few years. Now battery packs power a small nest of LED lights that hangs over the table.

There has never been a lock on the door. In the late 40’s some loggers used the shack for a while and remnants of newspaper clipping featuring Betty Grable withers away on the wall by the upper bunk.But the loggers were always out of the shack when November rolled around.

I made my first trip to the shack in the mid-1960s when I was invited by my buddy John Nelson (Nels) to join him, his dad Clifford (Tip) and his uncle Ev. We went up in mid-October to hunt grouse and the men could check out the state of the shack for the upcoming deer hunting season.  

After parking the car six miles from the shack, we stowed our gear in a small open trailer as Ev hooked up the battery to an old Model A equipped with four oversized tires.  The buggy came to be called the “Hopper.”  Stories continue to be fondly told of this unlikely chariot. 

It was my first trip this far north in Minnesota and I had never seen such wild country.  The Hopper with its oversized tires rumbled, skittered and sloshed those half dozen miles of gravel, logging roads and trails. I felt I was on the edge of a grand adventure. 

Ev was the pilot and the top mechanic of the Hopper. He wore a long red trench coat and goggles to keep the mud off of him as we traversed swamps and even forded the river. As the water rose to nearly the bed of the trailer I recall feeling quite nervous. After what seemed like a very long bouncy ride, the Hopper pulled up to the shack.

Less than ten years ago we replaced its metal roof with a new one but it  basically looks like the same shack I recall as a young teen.

I was honored to be invited to join the annual deer hunting clan in the mid 1980s and am honored to be one of the regulars since then. 

Like other old shacks, the walls of this shelter are darkened with the patina of cigarette smoke that was such a part of the 50s and even the 60s. But the real hidden treasures are the infused stories of big mythical bucks. The walls echo with tales of bears, moose, wolves, lynx, fishers, pine martens, ermine, wolverine, ravens, blizzards and hordes of shack dwelling mice. We chuckle when we reflect on especially memorable stories. 

One year, one of our non-hunting gang members painted half the ceiling white. There was some grumbling as hunters returned after sunset. Change doesn’t come easily but over time we all agreed that the candle and lantern light did reflect off the ceiling better, making it easier for cooking, performing tasks and card playing. An unintended consequence was that the white ceiling began to attract notes and signatures from folks we didn’t know.

In the 1990s, over the mid-October school break, my friend Nels was visiting the shack with his oldest daughter Emily and her friend. The girls were using a spiral bound notebook for keeping score of card games, playing Hangman and creative doodling. When they left the shack for home, the notebook was left behind.  Soon it became a guest book/journal of sorts.

We were amazed to find how many folks stumbled upon the shack or had been using it for years. It’s not easy to get to the shack. The nearest public road today is two miles distant, but there are hiking trails nearby and old logging roads.

When that first notebook was filled, I brought in a second one that included a brief introduction on the history of the shack and a request to treat it with care and carry out all garbage.  We are now on the third shack journal. 

Here is a sampling of entries:

Feb. 26, 2005

Back at the Deer shack!

Skied up the river yesterday late afternoon as snowflakes started falling and the light ebbed. Skied by once, backtracked and found it waiting dark and cold. But what a welcome sight!

Coffee is drunk, have brownies eaten, and we’re heading out.

Rick and Jane

Duluth

March 20, 2005

First day of spring! Though I am coming to learn the seasons are a bit different up here in Minnesota. Highs in the low-30’s and lows in the mid-10’s all week. Heck back down in North Carolina the college girls are all wearing their sundresses by now.

What an awesome place this is!  I am hiking sea to sea. Having started from Gaspe, Quebec last August. And this is a great treat. I wish every night I had a place to hole up in, out of the weather and off the ground. I suppose that because I do not have such places I am very appreciative of this one. 

Andy Skurka

Sea-to-Sea Route 2004-05

www.AndrewSkurka.com

A week later more visitors

22-24  de Marzo, ’05

What a magical place! We skied by moonlight on the river. I imagine we’ll be the last to do that this season as the ice is melting and open holes are getting larger – quite an adventure. 

I could hardly believe that such a shack existed and being here feels dreamlike. I’m so grateful it exists and that it is shared with all who are adventurous enough to find it. 

Kristin and Cam Dhooge

Brooklyn, IA via Spain, Chile, Brazil, Suriname, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Vermont and Duluth, MN

And this brief entry perhaps sums it up best: “Just like the good old days. Long live this shack!”

It’s clear part of the love and attraction to the shack is that time seems to stand still here. Life is simpler here without all the static and noise of civilized living.

The shack has outlived all of the original builders and those first generations of Nelsons. And we are all very aware that not all of us current shackites will be around to celebrate the century mark of 100 years. There is no guarantee that a shack will physically exist but its silent stature will remain strong in our minds and of those strangers who called it home for a even a single night. It is clear that this four-walled, tin-roofed shelter is way more than a deer shack. It is a “dear” shack.

In 1940, two shacks came to the forefront. The first came to us in the newly released movie Grapes of Wrath. Henry Fonda played Tom Joad, the father of the down-and-out Joad family. With the depression and the Dust Bowl wreaking havoc on many families, the Joads leave their shack of a home in Oklahoma and head to the promise of California. 

In early July of  that same year, the bones of a new shack were driven north on a truck from east central Minnesota to the vast logged-over forest near Lake Superior. 

Some of the trucked lumber was salvaged from an old potato warehouse in Stacy, Minnesota. The rest of the building materials were purchased for $29 and some odd cents from a nearby lumberyard. 

After leaving the recently paved Highway 61 and heading inland a few miles on a gravel road the truck finally stopped. 

On July 4th the handful of workers including the family matriarch, Miranda Nelson, two of her sons, Everett and Warren and Raymond Peterson completed building a small shack that was intended to house a half a dozen or so deer hunters. Miranda’s husband Fred stayed back on their farm near North Branch, Minnesota to tend to milking and haying.

Eighty five years later four of us, three Nelsons and an Anderson made the trip up to honor the beloved deer shack’s anniversary.  Unlike the fictional Joad family retreating from their dismal shack we are drawn to the gifts of this Minnesota shanty each fall. 

Every November we relish pushing the unlocked door open and spying the same setting that the 1940 hunters saw. We crave the solitude that comes with no electricity, no plumbing and for that matter no insulation. We find comfort in using the same crude table, benches and bunks that were built 85 years ago.There is satisfaction in pulling out some of the original cookware and water kettles that were used in the shack’s first years. 

We still fetch water in buckets from the river that flows just down the hill. A doorless outhouse sits behind the shack and continues its trouble-free operation. 

In recent years, mobile phones have tarnished the experience of simplicity. Thankfully coverage is very spotty. We haven’t heard the hiss of a Coleman lantern for a few years. Now battery packs power a small nest of LED lights that hangs over the table.

There has never been a lock on the door. In the late 40’s some loggers used the shack for a while and remnants of newspaper clipping featuring Betty Grable withers away on the wall by the upper bunk.But the loggers were always out of the shack when November rolled around.

I made my first trip to the shack in the mid-1960s when I was invited by my buddy John Nelson (Nels) to join him, his dad Clifford (Tip) and his uncle Ev. We went up in mid-October to hunt grouse and the men could check out the state of the shack for the upcoming deer hunting season.  

After parking the car six miles from the shack, we stowed our gear in a small open trailer as Ev hooked up the battery to an old Model A equipped with four oversized tires.  The buggy came to be called the “Hopper.”  Stories continue to be fondly told of this unlikely chariot. 

It was my first trip this far north in Minnesota and I had never seen such wild country.  The Hopper with its oversized tires rumbled, skittered and sloshed those half dozen miles of gravel, logging roads and trails. I felt I was on the edge of a grand adventure. 

Ev was the pilot and the top mechanic of the Hopper. He wore a long red trench coat and goggles to keep the mud off of him as we traversed swamps and even forded the river. As the water rose to nearly the bed of the trailer I recall feeling quite nervous. After what seemed like a very long bouncy ride, the Hopper pulled up to the shack.

Less than ten years ago we replaced its metal roof with a new one but it  basically looks like the same shack I recall as a young teen.

I was honored to be invited to join the annual deer hunting clan in the mid 1980s and am honored to be one of the regulars since then. 

Like other old shacks, the walls of this shelter are darkened with the patina of cigarette smoke that was such a part of the 50s and even the 60s. But the real hidden treasures are the infused stories of big mythical bucks. The walls echo with tales of bears, moose, wolves, lynx, fishers, pine martens, ermine, wolverine, ravens, blizzards and hordes of shack dwelling mice. We chuckle when we reflect on especially memorable stories. 

One year, one of our non-hunting gang members painted half the ceiling white. There was some grumbling as hunters returned after sunset. Change doesn’t come easily but over time we all agreed that the candle and lantern light did reflect off the ceiling better, making it easier for cooking, performing tasks and card playing. An unintended consequence was that the white ceiling began to attract notes and signatures from folks we didn’t know.

In the 1990s, over the mid-October school break, my friend Nels was visiting the shack with his oldest daughter Emily and her friend. The girls were using a spiral bound notebook for keeping score of card games, playing Hangman and creative doodling. When they left the shack for home, the notebook was left behind.  Soon it became a guest book/journal of sorts.

We were amazed to find how many folks stumbled upon the shack or had been using it for years. It’s not easy to get to the shack. The nearest public road today is two miles distant, but there are hiking trails nearby and old logging roads.

When that first notebook was filled, I brought in a second one that included a brief introduction on the history of the shack and a request to treat it with care and carry out all garbage.  We are now on the third shack journal. 

Here is a sampling of entries:

Feb. 26, 2005

Back at the Deer shack!

Skied up the river yesterday late afternoon as snowflakes started falling and the light ebbed. Skied by once, backtracked and found it waiting dark and cold. But what a welcome sight!

Coffee is drunk, have brownies eaten, and we’re heading out.

Rick and Jane

Duluth

March 20, 2005

First day of spring! Though I am coming to learn the seasons are a bit different up here in Minnesota. Highs in the low-30’s and lows in the mid-10’s all week. Heck back down in North Carolina the college girls are all wearing their sundresses by now.

What an awesome place this is!  I am hiking sea to sea. Having started from Gaspe, Quebec last August. And this is a great treat. I wish every night I had a place to hole up in, out of the weather and off the ground. I suppose that because I do not have such places I am very appreciative of this one. 

Andy Skurka

Sea-to-Sea Route 2004-05

www.AndrewSkurka.com

A week later more visitors

22-24  de Marzo, ’05

What a magical place! We skied by moonlight on the river. I imagine we’ll be the last to do that this season as the ice is melting and open holes are getting larger – quite an adventure. 

I could hardly believe that such a shack existed and being here feels dreamlike. I’m so grateful it exists and that it is shared with all who are adventurous enough to find it. 

Kristin and Cam Dhooge

Brooklyn, IA via Spain, Chile, Brazil, Suriname, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Vermont and Duluth, MN

And this brief entry perhaps sums it up best: “Just like the good old days. Long live this shack!”

It’s clear part of the love and attraction to the shack is that time seems to stand still here. Life is simpler here without all the static and noise of civilized living.

The shack has outlived all of the original builders and those first generations of Nelsons. And we are all very aware that not all of us current shackites will be around to celebrate the century mark of 100 years. There is no guarantee that a shack will physically exist but its silent stature will remain strong in our minds and of those strangers who called it home for a even a single night. It is clear that this four-walled, tin-roofed shelter is way more than a deer shack. It is a “dear” shack.

Going to primal places helps me sort things out. Such as it was this past summer when six of us joined a remote Yukon river for quietude and a geology lesson. At our very first campsite we learned that the river too had sorted out things on its own. 

In looking for campsites over the sixteen days of paddling, we couldn’t be that choosy as the river banks were steep, heavily forested or stalwart cliffs. Consequently we ended up camping mostly on top of riverine rocks known as cobble. These are rocks rounded by millennia of water surging, flowing, pushing and trickling. They ranged from golf ball-shaped to almost volleyball in size. We were glad that we could push or toss enough aside to to make a reasonable tent pad. And gladder yet that we each had a fairly cushy sleeping pad to lay over the lumpy ground to serve as a bed.

In the first few days the cobble seemed almost an irritant but then as we learned to live with it we became more cognizant of the workings of a river. It is mesmerizing to think that the countless cobble we paddled over and slept on were once part of the bones of the ancient mountains surrounding high above us.

The tireless, clear river, powered by gravity combined with a continual gradient, shot our canoes over the blurry mosaic of rocks. We marveled at the speed of the current. My bowman, Mike, used his phone to determine speed and more than once he would call out, “Eight klicks!  No, ten klicks!!” (A klick is a kilometer and ten klicks converts to six miles per hour.) For the record, a recreational, flatwater paddler paddling at a fast cadence is lucky to maintain 5 mph for an extended period of time. 

We wondered about the power of spring breakup and the ensuing rush of meltwater. It would be enough to tumble these rounded boulders and rocks further and further downstream. As spring matures, the current slows and the heavier rocks would pause first. Then the lesser rocks would settle and finally the gravel and sand would settle out at the downstream end of the rocky shoals.

Surrounded by a discombobulated library of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, Mike and I regretted our geological ignorance. As if that visible strewn puzzle wasn’t enough, we couldn’t fathom what was being blended below the crust of the earth in the tireless, roiling, mixing of minerals combined with heat and pressure. 

Paddling by massive rock walls formed by geological folding and faulting had us asking more questions. 

Mike particularly grew fond of stones that resembled hard mudballs made up of small, marble and pea-sized stones cemented together. Only later, after some geologic investigating did I learn that these are glacial relics called diamictites.

The collection of various stones found in the conglomeration were diverse in their own origin. At one point in their history, they had been scraped up and carried for a slow ride on a glacier. Finally, after perhaps centuries of moving, the climate warmed and the glacier began to recede. At the melting terminus of the ice lobe there is usually an ocean or a large body of glacial meltwater. 

Imagine a piece of that glacier, falling into the water where it floats as an iceberg pitted with the small stones. Eventually the floating ice melts and the stone cargo sinks to the muddy bottom. Centuries pass and the plopped stones are now congealed in mudstone.  Another ice age descends and the massive moving sheet of ice breaks up the mudstone with its cemented small rocks into chunks of various sizes.

From one campsite, we were seduced by a distant peak. Several of us donned day packs with stowed lunches, water bottles and rain gear and headed uphill.

We eventually left the rocky wash and began to zigzag up through the park-like spruce anchored to the steep slope. Halfway up, a small flock of boreal chickadees flitted next to me. Their hoarse steady calls almost seemed to encourage me to keep climbing. 

Finally three of us broke through the treeline into the alpine. Higher up we walked among limestone shards. Near the top we paused under the slight lean of a house-sized limestone outcropping. Dark clouds and distant thunder urged us to don our rain jackets and tuck in close to lime behemoth to avoid becoming lightening rods. We pulled up our hoods to fend off being pelted by tiny hail, called graupel.

Soon the winds carried the surly clouds away. The sunshine returned to us as we marveled at the irony of standing among the remains of ancient seabeds perched on top of this mountain peak.

After our high altitude beach combing, we began the long and slow descent back to our riverside cobbled camp.

With a deliberate descent, carefully watching each step, I would occasionally pause and look up at the landscape ravaged by water, wind and time. We purposefully avoided walking single file so as not to endanger those downhill of a runaway rock. Occasionally a step would loosen a rock and send it bouncing and clacking downhill. It is very likely that the dislodged rock would someday feel the flow of water as it begins the long slow saga of whittling a mountain to rounded cobble and eventually grains. 

Perhaps future paddlers might contemplate one of the rocks we accidentally loosened from the mountain top and sent to join a gathering of waters. Who knows, maybe that once-leaping rock just might settle along the river and uncomfortably poke a sleepy camper’s hip.

Note: Thanks to author/geologist Marcia Bjornerud for introducing me to diamictites in her fine memoir Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.