Do They Snarl and Bare Their Teeth?

 

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on August 14 in The Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

      Even though I rented a splitter a couple of months go and stacked what I thought was enough birch to last me through the winter, the wood is half gone.  Some summer we’ve had. Had a fire going in the fireplace most nights since the Fourth of July to keep the electric heat bill to a minimum.

      Over coffee, I told Sally that we’d have to order wood after all.

      “Why don’t you hike along the trail every day and pick up a little fallen timber on the way back?” she asked. “You need the exercise and we don’t have the money right now.”

      “That’s my line.”

      “After a month we’ll have plenty of wood.”

      “A month?”

      “Yup. Walk a mile south and a mile back. When you get close to home, pick up an armful. It’s all over the place. Every day for a month.”

      “You don’t think I can do it, do you?”

      “Yes I do. And you don’t have a choice. We need wood. Your last two job interviews didn’t go anywhere.”

      An hour later, dressed in my heavy old jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt, and with leather work gloves sticking out of my hip pocket, I started down the North Central State Trail that passes right behind our place on Mullett Lake. My clothes meant I was serious about doing this; exercise then hard labor. I was prepared, I figured, for anything that could stand in the way of success on my thirty day mission of getting in shape and laying in wood for the winter. Not mosquitoes or sand flies. Neither poison oak nor poison ivy. Not scratches or cuts or bruises.

      First, the exercise. I began with a pretty good stride, enjoying the rise of an orange red sun over the still waters of the lake. Crows were cawing, surprised to find me on the old Gaylord to Cheboygan route.  After a half mile, I started dragging my feet along the crushed limestone. Sally was absolutely right. I needed to do this more for my health than the fuel. I picked up the pace even though I was starting to sweat profusely. It had to be the hottest day of summer. Really humid. This was a real test.

      When I reached Long Point, I turned around and began my return hike, walking with half the steam of the outward mile. ‘Don’t push it’, my smarter inner voice said. It was not the one I usually listened to.

      I’d never used the trail much. Slowing down let me gaze down the tunnel of overhanging poplar, birch, and bent cedars. Sunlight like tiny stars sprinkled the path. This is an incredibly beautiful trail, I whispered. I’d read about the conversion of the old Michigan Central Railroad lines into one of the finest summer hiking and biking trails on the planet and one of best snowmobile runs in the state. 

      A breeze from the south picked up and pushed at my lazy back side. My confident, easy stride returned.

      Near the Grand Resort not far from home base, I began sizing up the right pieces of dead and dry hardwoods to carry the rest of the way. I planned on being very selective. I put on my gloves and stepped off the trail a few feet. ‘Here’s one.’ I carried it another fifty yards. ‘Here’s another.’ Not bad so far.

      The day was getting hotter by the second. I heard myself breathing heavily for the first time. Then I heard the sound of something following me deeper off the path. When I took a step, a creature was moving with me. When I stopped abruptly, so did my stalking companion. Peering into a dreamlike sea of green branches where I sensed it was, I waited for movement. I suddenly wished I could see like I could when I was a lot younger. ‘What does a wolverine look like?’ I thought. ‘Are they aggressive? Do they slink along when seeking their prey? Have they ever attacked a two legged adversary? Do they growl, snarl, or bare their teeth before they strike. I need to know a lot more about my new home state.’

      A giant black squirrel abruptly stood up on his hind legs. I dropped my three trophy logs onto the trail, just missing my right big toe. The squirrel didn’t move. He or she seemed to be smiling at me, ready to spit out his mouth full of pine nuts and unleash a real belly laugh.

      I gathered my logs and grabbed a couple of other more imperfect ones and started for the cottage. Back at the leaning tower of garages I call my wood shed, I put them where they belonged.

      Sally walked out the kitchen door waving big thumbs up.

      “All right! You made it!” She cheered. “It took you a long time to go two miles. God, you’re drenched.”

      “Good exercise,” I said walking past her on the way to the shower upstairs. “Good wood.” 

My Top Ten Reasons for Moving Up North

 

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on August 7, 2009 in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

      The other day my friend Chip from Columbus, Ohio called me. He wanted to know how we were doing since we moved to Cheboygan in March. Like every one of the old cadre from down south, whenever they check in with us there’s the inevitable “I don’t know how you’re going to make it through the winter in northern Michigan” sympathy talk, and I heard it from him, too, as though everyone in the world thinks there’s no way a city boy like me has a chance to make it through the winter up here. The blizzards, the ice, the long dark nights… my survival skills. I always respond that I grew up in Duluth, but I can sense a disbelieving shaking of heads anyway. They know me too well.

     It got me thinking about David Letterman’s Top Ten Reasons shtick that’s helped make his show so popular over the years. He starts from the number ten and reads his list from ten back to number one, with a drum roll, for ridiculous comic effect. The call made me want to do the same. Apologies to the master. My Top Ten Reasons for Moving Up North:

     10. I took out a huge mortgage on the lake cottage based on house values in 2005 to buy out my relatives. Everybody on the planet knows the math in 2009 on that one! Dumped the down state mortgage in the process. Now it’s one place, one payment. Better odds.

     9. I haven’t had to wait in traffic since we moved except for a very short older lady in a 1989 Pontiac on the two lane blacktop of the North Straits Highway. She had her left blinker on for a good mile as she puttered along towards Wal-Mart at about twenty miles an hour. The blinker was comforting, not aggravating.

     8. A good breakfast here is religion, not some recommendation from the National Institute of Health. And it’s not granola and vitamins. Eggs, potatoes and a little meat. Stack of toast.

     7. The customer service difference between “I don’t know, maybe” and “you betcha.”

     6. Snow banks come in Brilliant White, not Exhaust Pipe Dirt or  Road Salt Grey.

     5. A heat wave means a day in the eighties Fahrenheit, not weeks in the nineties or the hundreds (though since the summer solstice this year we’ve had exactly zero heat waves).

     4. The nasty biting, whining-in-your-ear mosquito season lasts about a month. With a little rain in Ohio, five months.

     3. New cars up north look just like my two old ones (almost 500,000 odometer miles between them) when a little gravel road dust is thrown on them.

     2. If the refrigerator looks empty you can grab a fishing rod, shotgun or rifle depending on the season. Of course you have to know how to use them.

     1. My wife is deliriously happy.

“The Birds” on Mullett Lake

 

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on July 31, 2009 in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

     And I thought carpenter ants were the scourge of my summer. Wrong. Now, each morning when I plant my feet on the floor beside my bed and rub the sleep from my eyes, I look down towards the lake and there they are. A crowd of herring seagulls huddling tight together on top of our Shore Station like emperor penguins. Every morning I run down the dock waving my arms as though I’m a giant bird of prey taking flight and they disperse lazily out into the water fifty yards away to wait for my retreat.

     For years, a clan of twenty to thirty determined gulls has been big trouble for my neighbor John, his white metal dock just perfect for them. Cool to their webbed feet. Warm in the sun. Free of stanchions. Shallows teeming with small crawfish. A restaurant and day spa all in one.

     Every summer John dutifully washes his dock after he chases them off, swearing as he scrubs at the mess one section at a time. He claims to have tried everything in the seagull fighting handbook. Owl dummies with flapping wings, screeching eagle noise makers, grape based misters, whirligigs of all kinds.  But as fate would have it, almost four times as many birds arrived last month while he was gone. Right after a painstaking new paint job and with just weeks to go before hosting his only daughter’s big fat lakeside wedding.

     My wife and I tried scaring them off by driving our little boat at them over and over, circling madly around the end deck, but to no avail. They’d just hop in the water and look at us like we were crazy people with a broken rudder. The big ones, the great granddaddies of all the rest, didn’t move. When John and his family returned, his dock was not the least bit white anymore.

     After two days of slave labor with giant brushes and bleach, John and his wife Frankie had their dock looking like new again. He put two chaises out on the end deck, but unfortunately the gulls seemed to appreciate the new furnishings and came back with a vengeance. Then he stood guard all afternoon with a long broom and swung it over his head whenever they swooped in. In a last ditch effort, he took all his heavy lawn furniture to the farthest out sections, turned the chairs upside down, and tightened string around the feet in an enormous Bohemian cobweb. Much to everyone’s surprise, it worked.

     That’s when my troubles started.

     First, it was just the big boys. They arrived last week the morning after John erected his masterpiece. Four of them. They were testing out my plastic cover tarp as Roosting Heaven Two. I calmly walked down my dock and barked a shrill “hey’ and they took off like they knew I meant business. So much for those guys.

     With a persistent rainy day settling in, I took to the keyboard to catch up on work and didn’t check on things out on the lake for hours. On my way to the kitchen, I saw them. The same huge flock that had been plaguing John’s little pier were perched on my cover. I recognized the biggest one. Grey and confident. John calls him George. One of the advance guard from earlier in the day. There had to be a hundred of his colleagues having a crawfish picnic and talking about how much they like their new place. Better view, too.

      I ran down the dock waving a canoe paddle over my head and they reluctantly took to the sky. But the way George soared in great loops above me said they’d be back as soon as I returned to shore.

     This was going to be a war and I’d have to wage it quickly and effectively. Shock and awe if necessary. These birds were settling in like my nightmares after watching Hitchcock’s “The Birds” when I was a kid.     

     I thought about enlisting John’s help but one look at the menacing menagerie at the end of his dock told me to go elsewhere for the right strategy.

     A little research on the internet threw a bunch of options at me as did my other neighbors though I sensed their worry that they’d be next if I was successful. I stuck to the digital references. One blog website is devoted to the subject. A company called Seagull Control Systems sells all kinds of things: netting, spikes, birdwire, sticky gel, ropes with bright colored pennants like car dealerships use, and even the funny smelling misters. There was an article about the great success of a duck club in Utah (the seagull is their state bird) that released two weaner pigs on their property.

     None of these products got a passing grade from my wife, especially the weaner pigs.

     I went to the Summer Store in Indian River and bought a loon windmill. I put it up and George and company immediately landed in mass in a strong wind, the whirling waterfowl nothing but a curiosity. I cleaned the entire dock and tarp, fresh as a daisy. More seagulls. They seemed to appreciate the housekeeping.

     Tomorrow I plan on staying out there all day in a clown suit if I have to. With the canoe paddle.   

One Nice Walleye

 

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on July 24, 2009 in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

     When Max, our twenty four year old son, arrived at our cottage last Saturday afternoon, he uttered words I’d never heard before.

     “Hey Dad, can we go fishing? I bought a license on the way up.”

     “Sure,” I responded with confidence though I have none when it comes to fishing.

     For some reason, even with growing up in Minnesota and spending parts of the last twenty summers on the western shore of Mullett Lake, I never found myself comfortable around a tackle box. I bought one when the kids were little, stuffed it full of monofilament line, Lindy lures, needle nose pliers, sinkers, nail clippers, and everything else I could remember from my brother’s box when he used to drag me out on the lake back home when we were young. I put it in a closet in the back cabin with the old spinning rods I inherited when we bought our place. My two boys never inquired about it, never once asked to go fishing. They had been interested in boats and skis and inner tubes and even the crawfish worming their way under the dock. But never fish. I figured it was natural cause neither was I.

     The lake was dark grey like the sky with a stiff northeast breeze kicking into gear. I told Max to throw his things in his room and tell his mom we were going out. As he sauntered out on the dock, I noticed a man’s cut to his shoulders and back, a different look than how I remembered him. He lowered our little Lyman skiff from the hoist and pulled it alongside the end deck and secured it. As I passed the kitchen window with a pole rigged up in one hand and my cobwebbed tackle box in the other, my wife smiled encouragement. There was worry on her face though. I knew the look.

     Near the side of the cottage, I turned over the round granite rocks lining our flower bed and found three nice nightcrawlers. A good luck sign.

     Puttering past the buoy, I handed Max the rod and we trolled for an hour. Through choppy waves, we worked our way along the drop off, checking our bait every ten minutes or so. Our life jackets straps were pennants in the wind, slapping against us, and the spray from small white caps drenched our faces. Not a nibble. Not a bite. Had I rigged it right? Was I using the right spinner? Was the nightcrawler too hapless and thin? I had absolutely no idea.

     “Maybe they’re just not interested,” I said.

     “Can we try something else?”

     “Something else?”

     “You know. From your tackle box.”

     I opened it up and placed it on the bench seat between us. It was like staring at a map when you can’t read. Little packages of hooks and lures, lures, lures. Flourescent yellows and greens. When I held up a slip bobber, Max nodded his head.

     “It’s simple. I’ll rig it up for you?”

     “I’ll do it, Dad. Don’t we need an anchor if we’re using a bobber?”

     “Technically, yes. But I’ll troll into the wind and hold us in place for a while. You seem to know a lot about fishing.”

     He let the bobber and a newly hooked worm over the side and we drifted back from it. I gave the old four horse Evinrude a little more gas and we stayed in one place long enough to get completely soaked, the bow rising and slapping the water to the rhythm of the bobber.

     “This isn’t going to work, Max. We’ll try in the morning. Tomorrow’s supposed to be nice and sunny. I’ll go to the Mullett Lake Country Store and get some big Canadian Crawlers.”

     “Just another minute.”

    “Sure.”

    “The bobber’s gone, Dad.”

    “Did it come loose?”

    “I don’t see it.”

    The rod tip bent slightly. Then it wiggled and pulled. Then it bent to the water with Max reeling steadily. The little net was too small. It was for trout. The fish moved under the boat with purpose, but that gave me a chance to grab the line and pull it in. It was a good sized walleye. It flopped and began to fight more than it did in the water. I got the hook out easily enough and then realized I didn’t have a stringer in the tackle box.

     I pinned the fish to the wood planks with both feet after pricking my forefinger on the back fin.  I turned the motor and started for shore.

    “You O.K., Dad?”

    “You better believe it. This is one nice walleye.”