Rarin' To Go
Trippin' in Yooper Land
To you, this might look like just another ordinary clump of trees, but to me, this is inspiration because I am one of those people who needs such a lil’ corner of Nature to move forward, to motivate. Trees and fresh air jump-start me, and after a three-month-long winter of disgusting couch-potato-ism, I am about to hit the woods again, with a recreational vengeance!
Only one week ago there had been shin-high snow in this very spot, and after the morning sun climbed high in the sky, the crusty surface would soften and you would sink in, making backwoods travel nearly impossible. Yes. We still have our snowshoes, but by this time of very late winter, it becomes extremely depressing to use them.
Today, on the official first day of spring, March 20th, not only is the snow in retreat, but already there are signs of the greening up of the world. Emerald shoots of various small ground plants and grasses are already peeking through the soil in the open, south-facing areas. Emerging buds on the aspen and pussy willows form a pink and golden haze against the evergreens in the distance, and a flock of chickadees whisk through the trees stopping for just a moment: “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!” In general, there is simply an overall ambiance of freshness in the air, that, and warmth, as the sun works its magic.
Encrusted along their edges yet with snow and ice, the creeks and rivers are now open, and in some ways, as the last vestiges of frozen water slowly fade away, the prism-like sparkles generated by the sunlight add a rainbow of lively color to an otherwise drab forest floor.
As it is still quite cold at night, when you step down into a low area around a creek, immediately you realize where the night air has settled. It’s like stepping into a walk-in cooler, and instantly, you can see your breath. On the positive side, where the slightly warmer water moves from sun to shadow, especially by small waterfalls, small areas of fog arise, and as the late afternoon sun grows long golden rays, these shafts of light burn through the fog to make spectacular light shows.
To me small creeks such as McCauly, the McCauslin and Snowfalls Creek in northern Oconto County tend to be overlooked by hikers most of the time, especially where you have to step off the road and trail into the woods to find them at their wild best. Creeks are incredibly interesting places, especially in spring. Beyond the physical beauty of these locales, which I could easily spend hundreds of words describing, they are a circus of biological activity, and at the same time, are one of the most peaceful and soul-fulfilling places a person can sit and observe for a couple of hours. Never be in a hurry when meandering along one of our beautiful wilderness creeks, because if you are patient, adventure will find you!
While meandering by McCauly Creek, I stumbled upon the carcass of a male wood duck. It had obviously been there since mid-winter, as it was half covered by snow and was partly decomposed yet, because of its beautiful and brightly colored feathers, it immediately caught my eye. In this remote location, it was unlikely that it had fallen to a hunter, and it was my guess that its decision not to migrate this winter had cost it its life.
Many woodies wintered here this year due to the warm January. I considered taking a few of the feathers, but decided to leave it alone, whereupon I proceeded up the trail a few yards to sit down on a stump, to become “invisible” still, quiet and observe spring bust open before my eyes.
The chuckling sound of water rolling over stone soothes the senses, but on this morning, softening shards of ice were falling off logs that crossed the creek, making a slight tinkling sound, like breaking glass, as they calved into the rushing creek like mini-glaciers, the crystals catching the light as they floated by me in the current, around the rocks and over the white sand bottom, taking my imagination with them.
While the creek was holding my attention, about a million other things were unfolding all around me, like chirping pine siskin, scooting water beetles, and the enthusiastic drumming of grouse. Then, a movement caught my eye, and as I slowly turned, I saw a red fox tugging on the deceased duck, trying to free it from the ice.
It was funny because it was fully aware I was sitting there watching, pausing several times in its work, to glare right at me, to estimate what I might do, and if I were a threat. Time and time again I have been impressed by a fox’s intelligence, as they often show such presence of mind, while going about their business. This critter looked at me as if she wanted me to know that she already had hungry kits to feed, and I better not mess with her. She was determined, and after about fifteen minutes of tugging and pulling and working on that poor dead duck, she finally managed to free about 90% of it, the best part of the show was her retreat back up the hillside away from the creek bed, head held high, prancing, extremely proud of her accomplishment.
After it was all over, I realized I had my camera in my pocket…
All this nature talk is just the precurser to the real thing: overnight out in the woods.
Besides the day hikes forest-side, and in spite of the many trips to the camping store to wander around and look at all the latest gear, inhaling the sweet bur-bone aroma of canvas, polypropylene, Gore-Tex and nylon, I have been spending hours rummaging like a groundhog through my closet at home, in preparation for the first night out camping. I spend many hours arranging and sorting the gear in my pack, and as many of you may know, the learning curve over years of back-packing is in the discovery of what you don’t need or use enough to justify carrying it.
Let’s see, out go the calume’ light sticks. Neat idea, but I never used them. Out goes the nice steel shovel for a much lighter plastic one. Out goes MRE’s dated 1994; from now on it’s freeze dried only. Out goes the little Sterno stove, if I can’t get my MSR Whisperlite to make a cup of coffee, or if I can’t warm it around a campfire, I’m out of luck! 3 sources of heat are too redundant for a 51-year-old to carry. Let’s see, hmmmm… a lighter Gore-Tex poncho, one good knife instead of three, one knife sharpener instead of two, fewer batteries for the LED light in which batteries seem to last forever, a lighter pack cover, and on and on, arranging and re-arranging everything half a dozen times.
Refining the gear to near perfection, and keeping that 50 pound limit in mind.
Here, my beloved friend the “Rat Pack” rests comfortably in its chair meditating like the Buddha with heavy lidded flaps, rarin’ to go and ready for conversation.
“Well,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I be talkin’ to your back and shoulders pretty damn soon!” It quipped. Packs are nothing if not an irreverent burden.
As I live 15 minutes away from Michigan’s famous Upper Peninsula aka, The You-Pee, one must remember I see and deal with Yoopers nearly every day, so therefore after five years living above the frozen tundra, I somewhat take their zaniness for granted.
Yes, some of them really do use the expression “Holy Wah!” and it is often heard around the gas pumps as Yooper’s comprehend the latest rise in gas prices:
“Holy wah, it would be cheaper burnin’ Jim Beam in my pickup, yah know?”
The lanes of Highway 41 between Oconto and Peshtigo have got to be one of the most dangerous stretches of roadway in Wisconsin. In fact, it has been designated by the state as a “special hazard zone” and is marked as such, with gaudy billboards that request all drivers run with their headlights on at all times, “as a reminder” for safer, more attentive driving, and if that isn’t enough, the numerous roadside memorials to the victims of some of the gruesome head-ons we’ve had up here should do the trick, but, you guessed it, nearly every time I travel the road up to Marinette, or the U.P. the vehicles that are passing in the no passing zones, driving like a bat out of hell, exceeding the speed limit, especially at night, during ice storms and blizzards, almost always have the solid blue Michigan plates on them. It’s a given.
I have personally been passed on a curve on 41 by a Yooper who literally had a mega cup of coffee clenched between thumb, forefinger and steering wheel in one hand while leaning forward in the seat scratching his back with a bamboo back scratcher in the other hand. Don’t even get me going on cell phones.
You see, up in the U.P. they don’t have any traffic.
You can literally go 50 miles above Marinette to Escanaba and not see another car at times. Anyway, my friend Dennis owns a place in the U.P. and often has Yooper stories to tell, true Yooper stories, and though as I said, they don’t surprise me, they may mildly amuse you, and in the Yooper universe life comes in only two distinct categories: mildly amusing, or total pain in the butt.
As Dennis came into Republic, a little north-of-the-border Yooper town last week, he decided to catch a burger and bowl of chili at a local bar. Now, the town has two bars on Main Street that sandwich a greasy-spoon diner in between them. Since both bars had impressive signs that said Bar and Grill, and since Dennis is a serious connoisseur of bar food all over the North Country, and he ate at the bar & grill on the left last time he was there snowmobiling, which had pretty good chow, and because he decided the greasy-spoon diner in the middle, which still had dead flies in the picture window from last summer, looked a bit too dingy for his taste, he decided to try out the bar & grill on the right this trip.
Are you with me?
Dennis is a 6’ 2” lanky, blue-eyed, blond Norwegian so typical of this area who fits right in up there, so as he enters the right hand bar & grill he passes two extremely elderly gentlemen already downing their “grog” at 11:30 in the morning and Dennis overhears them having a conversation about World War One.Yes, that’s WW-1 not WW-2. He sits on a bar stool next to them and asks them “Hey there, what do you guys do up here this time of year?”
One of the old geezers speaks up, “We’re tying flies while we wait breathlessly for the grass to grow!”
Sure ‘nuff as the one elderly gent backed away, he revealed a fly-tying jig mounted on the bar, surrounded by small boxes of wire, nylon string, various fuzz, feathers, hooks and sniveling incantations. In Dennis’s opinion, after a couple of grogs, none of the flies they were attempting to craft seemed to be wrapped any tighter than the old men were, and really, they didn’t look all that good.
Snip, snip, and the toothless old geezer holds up the fly: “Hey dare, this here’s like one of the flies I used to tie for Papa.”
Dennis shrugged. It looked like a multi-colored “bird’s nest” from an overloaded Shimano open-bail reel.
Well, whatever preserves a smidgen of sanity this late in winter.
[There are two proven facts regarding the U.P. that few other Americans are aware of: ONE: is that Scandinavian immigrants who homesteaded the U.P. live extremely long lives, just like they do in Northern Europe. Yoopers never really die, they just wear out, so meeting a pair of WW1 vets in their 90s in a bar is not that unusual up there. In fact, somewhere in the backcountry there might be a Civil War veteran out there somewhere still splitting firewood, not even realizing that he should have died by now. You never know. Though Wisconsin’s last WW1 vet recently passed, “Too much cheese,” being his last words, the largest living population of WW1 vets in America still reside in the U.P. TWO: that Cuba and the U.P. have one strange thing in common: that every single citizen alive in those two disparate locales at one time or another claims to have personally met Papa Hemingway and either cleaned his fish for him, tied a fly for him, or sold him a roll of toilet paper.]
So Dennis asks for a menu from the pretty, blond, blue-eyed Finnish waitress and immediately, he begins to feel some sort of Deja-vu karmic thing going on, giving him that weird feeling so common in a place that has the world-famous “Mystery Spot” on the highway nearby, and more UFO sightings than AREA 51, and it was like he had seen this menu, before, and being in the printing biz like me, certain little style flags began to appear in his mind as he looked over the food offerings.
He called the waitress over.
“Hey there, you know I ate at the other bar & grill down the street last week and, I think this is the same menu!”
She smiled, now, if Dennis had been old and ugly like me, she would have given in to the near-irresistible urge to give him crap, but because he is a total winner in the manhood department and because she was a fallen angel with second thoughts, she reined in her Yooper sarcasm and gave it to him straight up: “Well of course it is, honey. Just because you see pasties for sale all over town doesn’t mean they’re all cooked on location. Both bars just phone their orders in next door to the diner and Toivo delivers them carryout!”
Well that may not be the best U.P. story ever told, but it is true, and so typical of the zaniness that a nine-month winter and 400 inches of snow will inflict on you. Yoopers are just like us, only with a slightly skewed version of reality from our own.
I told my pack the same story as it sat there by the fireplace slowly rocking in its chair.
“Them Yoopers are a crazy bunch, ain’t they?’ I said.
“Crazy.” Rat Pack replied.
My writing desk becomes more littered with outdoor gear as spring draws closer. This is a common affliction for outdoor writers who have become painfully aware that God did not endow them with as much talent at writing as he did at wandering around the North Country with a pack on their back. It is a comical state of affairs really, a good-natured blessing that allows a person like me to get away so easily, and head into the woods at the drop of a Kromer hat, simply because the word processor is not as good a friend to me as the Rat Pack is. A good friend.
I have come to accept the fact that no matter how many different ways I try and explain my happy relationship with the woods to you, that most of you will never come to truly understand it, any more than you will understand how a pack can be a friend. This is where my miserable failure as a communicator comes in, and because of this failure to persuade you to utilize the outdoors more for recreation, the richness of your life may be the less.
All this, as I walk daily among some Up North folks who ironically complain about boredom, loneliness, restlessness and being stuck in a rut just as much as city folks do. Of course, it does take some personal gumption to get off your ass and motivate. This is entirely true and pathetic, but in the more gentle sense of the term pathos, that even folks who live in the midst of some of the greatest recreational possibilities on the planet do not all embrace the adventure just outside their doorstep. If only they knew that by taking those first steps outward bound, their lives would tie the extremes of their old ways and new into a fascinating dance of unexpected, unpredictable wonders.
This is a minority of people, but they are real.
When I meet local people like this I ask, “Well if you are so darn bored living up north here why don’t you just move to the city? What keeps you here?”
They then get a painful look on their faces and confess, “It’s the Lutheran Potato pancake breakfast man, only 40 days away!”
In the end, North Country life is like a poker deck loaded by fate because the only time the really great things happen outdoors, I mean, the really great things, inevitably they will occur when I have no guest hikers along, and the amour fatal of the moment sweeps over my emotions like a flood, telling me in no uncertain terms that this is the way the Creator of the Universe meant it to be. No outdoorsman is at his best or will experience one of those great life-changing, vivifying, exhilarating, epiphany moments in Nature, unless there is nobody but a red squirrel or chickadee around watching it happen.
When the timber wolf ahead of you on the trail looks you dead in the eye, and smiles, the chickadees flit happily away, and all the red squirrel does is bitch.
If that’s not life, I don’t know what is!
All the descriptions afterward are just lame.
“Hey Rat Pack, I’m rarin’ to go. Bet we run into a damn moose this year, hey?”
Till next time, George E. Wamser
Rarin' To Go: Trippin' in Yooperland
by George E. Wamser
About:
Turning 50, George E. Wamser feels as though he "... has turned the corner towards fall in life, but is not ready for the fox farm yet!" His weekly online electronic column North Country E-Tales, appeared, by subscription four years ago, and concerned the pleasures, the adventure, the humor and the drama.subjects big and small, essential to a lifestyle in the north woods, and carried a tiny but loyal readership all that time. It was an experiment in journalism over the new internet media, and it grew and changed as the net did, adding photos and wonderful illustrations by artist Alex Yang as time went on. The primary value in this was in keeping Wisconsin ex-patriots all over America, hungry for a taste of the place they know and loved, in touch with what was going on there now. George suspended writing the column earlier this year to concentrate more on creating outdoor fiction, like the piece represented here. 
He has had a small number of various non-fiction articles published in newspapers and magazines over the years, but is not well known.
George wants you to know that other than living full or part time in Oconto County all of his life, that he has no particular qualification to write anything for anybody, and that he is just a regular blue collar worker, a printer, who is extremely interested in nature, recreation, conservation and how stressed-out post modern Wisconsinites interact with this states great North Country. He is keenly aware of the great changes going on there over the last 40 years, and is very concerned about what will remain of the resource for future generations. He expresses this concern, along with reflecting upon some of the great individual stories that make the area unique.
He lives in Oconto, Wisconsin with his Native American wife, Wanda, built his own cabin The Good Medicine Lodge on beautiful Sunrise Lake near Mountain Wisconsin 18 years ago, has one daughter, Trina, who is grownup, and gone with a family of her own.
He also wants you to know, that the door of the GML is always open, and the campfire is always ready at his place in the woods for good conversation, feedback, including tall tales, and the he makes coffee strong enough to float a horseshoe as an incentive for self expression. He encourages hearing what you. have to say about the North Country.
Finally, he is a person who takes full advantage of all of the recreational possibilities the North Country has to offer, including back packing the most remote places of the Nicolet National Forest he can find, and that, he shares a love for the lakes country that is equal to that of his affection for his family, and simply said:
" One lifetime up here ... isn't enough!"
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