Posts Tagged ‘up north’
Anecdotal Evidence
Before I launch into today’s thoughts and opinions of *This* John W. Hays, let me just report that the re-installation of a battery in our generator was accomplished without difficulty. It went back in a lot easier than it came out. We are once again prepared for any calamity that might knock out power at home.
Today, however, we are not at home.
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Can you say, “Lake place?” My favoritest of places (away from home)?
Cyndie and I listened to a podcast about brains, neuroplasticity, and autonomic nervous systems on the drive up, making the trip go by in a blink. We stopped in Cumberland for an ice cream treat and met another couple from the Twin Cities heading to their cabin. They pressed hard to sell us (maybe successfully) on attending the annual Rutabaga Festival in August.
The lake place provided some anecdotal evidence of the changing climate. First, the mosquitos have made an early appearance with an intensity that is much more reminiscent of mid-summer. Second, the trillium blossoms that are usually at their glorious best on Memorial weekend look a little past peak already. Having cleared tree branches last November (when we were up here and Cyndie shattered her ankle) there is a new visibility of trillium on the slope below the house.
Third, the poison ivy that could frequently be found on that slope is making visible gains in both directions, toward the lake below and into the mowed areas above. This expansion mirrors what is happening at home. The growing season is a little longer with the warmup in spring happening earlier and the hard freeze in fall happening later. Poison ivy seems to be thriving with these changes.
We left Asher at home this weekend with a sitter who will tend to the horses as well. Before we left, Cyndie wrote a detailed essay on how to care for Asher so the sitter would know exactly what the pup needs and when. Some of them were simple, like bedtime.
An hour and fifty minutes beyond that time last night, Cyndie got a text with a photo of Asher seated nicely beside the sitter by the fire pit out back of the house. I told her that the dog is going to love it when we go away and leave him with the sitter because all those dang rules the parents have get loosened.
Today is work day and we will probably focus on cleaning the beach. I haven’t checked the temperature of the water yet but if it looks so much like summer around here, maybe it will be warm enough for a swim when chores are done.
The evidence is yet to be revealed.
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Lake Trees
Because we can, we are up at the lake in the middle of the week to witness some tree trimming and/or removal by professionals planned for today. We came up yesterday afternoon with Cyndie’s mom and brought Delilah with us so we only needed to find someone to feed the horses while we are away.
The water level of the lake is much lower than usual, clearly reflecting how dry we have it at home 125 miles to the south. It’s no less gorgeous, thank goodness.
We quickly found evidence that some trees have already been removed around the Wildwood property.
This hollow beast was close to the area Cyndie and I created a small labyrinth in the woods on the edge of the driveway. Whatever machine they used during the job tracked over a portion of the rustic path we had tried to create. It is likely they never noticed because the ground is blanketed with leaves and the circuitous route was entirely hidden.
We had barely placed enough rocks to define the pathway and some of those appear to have rolled out of position so reclaiming the original circles of travel out from under the cover of leaves was an exercise in approximation.
Close enough for now.
I just hope there are no more trees in that section of woods they need to deal with. Cyndie said they took down some trees which they were able to cut from the ground and today we expect them to show up with a bucket truck. There is one tree in particular over our driveway between several cabins that needs to go.
I’m looking forward to watching the process as if it were a spectator sporting event. It will be easier to enjoy this show than when I watch crews work on our property at home because up here, I won’t be responsible for cleaning up everything they cut down.
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Edges Covered
With little in the way of fanfare, yesterday we raked up gravel over the last of the exposed asphalt edges of our new driveway. By that point in the exercise, I had lost much of my ability to care about the level of perfection we were achieving compared to when we first started. It’s going to be good enough for all intents and purposes.
The next phase of the driveway finishing project involves backfilling some of the steeper edges with dirt or composted manure but that detail is not as essential. It won’t worry me if we don’t get that all done prior to the arrival of the snow season.
We did make a point of celebrating the accomplishment a little later in the day with a leisurely game of CrossCrib out on our deck. A nod to the vacation-mode feeling of being up at the lake, it occurred to me we have the same game board at home and a deck that offers everything except a view of a lake. We can play at home just as well as up at Wildwood.
We tend to forget sometimes, what with all the landscape and animals vying for our time and attention. A card game in the middle of a beautiful afternoon can be a healthy diversion.
Since today is the Friday of a holiday weekend, we will be traveling north to the lake place again, leaving the dog behind to be cared for by our house and animal sitter, Grace.
This is a routine that has served us well this summer. Labor Day weekend is traditionally the last gasp of summer activities up at the lake. That doesn’t mean we will stop making the trek up there, though. A few trees were already showing signs of fall color on the drive home last weekend. That spectacle provides plenty of incentive to get back up to the lake after Labor Day.
First things first. We have a long weekend to enjoy some very promising-looking weather predicted for the northland.
It will be even nicer knowing the edges of the new asphalt driveway at home are now completely covered with a gravel shoulder.
Huzzah!
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Not Kidding
I wasn’t kidding around when I described the drama of my getting stung on Tuesday. Whatever it was, there is a chunk of flesh missing from the middle of the large inflamed area on my back.
This is how it looked last night, over 24 hours after the bugger got me:
I should probably have been researching anti-venom or something. On the other hand, maybe it will give me a super power. I mean, a new super power, different than the other ones I already had.
Cyndie suspects it could have been a horsefly bite. I’ve already been bitten on the back by a horse and that didn’t give me any new senses. I’ve never experienced this reaction from a horsefly before and now I’m thinking I don’t ever want to experience it again.
As luck would have it, I can soak my back in the lake for a few days again, starting this afternoon. Due to Cyndie’s good sense to plan well in advance, she locked in multiple weekends with our house/farm sitter throughout the summer that have us up north two weekends in a row this month.
Actually, I will be enjoying three weekends in a row because I plan to join two of Cyndie’s brothers and a bunch of their golfing pals in Hayward the following weekend. I will be biking with anyone who chooses to skip one of the rounds of golf, most likely in the woods on my mountain bike. No battery to save me on that machine.
That would be a good time for the insect bite to give me a super dose of extra stamina and climbing ability. On one hand, I hope the residual effects of the wound are long gone by that time, but on the other hand, I could use all the help I can get when pedaling the off-road bike on the hilly trails in the Chequamegon National Forest.
This weekend we are driving up with Cyndie’s mom and will meet our friends, Mike and Barb Wilkus for a few days of water worship and good eats.
Further progress on the driveway shoulders will have to wait.
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Lake Living
One of the special charms of being up at the lake is the communing with family and friends. Staying in the same place with folks for days at a time expands the connection so much more than just an afternoon visit to one another’s homes for occasional events. As great as it is to have the lake home filled with people and activity, that is exactly what we are enjoying not having this week.
It has been just Cyndie, me & Delilah up here this week and we have been loving it. There are a few people from other families up at their places, but they have mostly been keeping to themselves as much as we have to ourselves.
Yesterday was quieter than the day before (when there was some passing lightning and thunder that triggered Delilah into barking fits) and even the dog seemed to settle nicely into the chill lake-life atmosphere we were cultivating.
I got in a mellow bike ride on quiet roads through wooded marshes that had me curious about the level of bear activity that may have been happening lately. Something about the scenery just looked like there should be a bear ambling by at any minute. Thoughts like this are probably triggered by the one time I did spot a bear loping along in a field up here, just to my right as I pedaled along the road. When it finally noticed me rolling along it just altered course to slant away from parallel to me so that disappearing into the nearby trees happened sooner than later.
It was somewhat comical how nonchalant we both were about the brief sighting.
After my cycling and a whopping sandwich lunch, Cyndie and I took Delilah for some water sports and we all enjoyed being alone on the beach. Delilah doesn’t choose to swim but happily tromps in up to her belly. We all did a fair amount of rock hunting and a little bit of water splashing.
It was a luxuriously slow day with some card playing on the deck, a little Tour de France watching, a grilled chicken dinner, and some streaming suspenseful tv drama after dark.
I could get used to this life if it weren’t for our other life waiting for us to return to Wintervale.
Of course, living most of our days at home serve well to keep our visits to the lake up north all the more enticing.
The reality is that we are just temporarily “lake living.” We head back home tomorrow morning where I will quickly change gears and dive into cutting grass. I’m pretty sure I will do so with visions of the scene in the photo above playing in my mind all the while.
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Cold Start
In the purest definition of my life memories of what “up north” during a Minnesota winter entails, we have been enjoying gorgeous deep snow scenes and seriously cold temperatures. It stays below zero all day long for days at a time and there is no sign anywhere of the fallen snow melting on the ground. No slush on the rural roads. Just hard-packed snow with occasional areas of sand dropped at higher traffic intersections.
The first day of January offered clear skies and plenty of sun, the common denominator for extremely cold temperatures. With no cloud cover to hold a little of the earth’s heat, the air feels like it is aligning with the temperatures of deep space above.
Delilah’s thick fur coat keeps her comfortable all but the bottoms of her paws. She isn’t a big fan of standing around in the cold. In fact, even if we are walking along with her, she wants to pick up the pace and hustle to get wherever the heck it is we intend on going.
After multiple snowshoeing adventures this weekend, I think she has figured out that the initial extra time she is made to wait at the beginning while we are strapping on the odd contraptions to our boots, comes with a payoff of opportunities to romp in the deep stuff shortly after.
We bushwhacked right from the driveway into the wooded contours of the southern edge of the Chippewa National Forest yesterday and I guided Delilah to select a navigable route atop a ridge, every so often aligned with the tracks revealing deer had already done the same.
It is a treat to watch the glee of Delilah’s leaping through the deep snow. She has no choice but to leap, actually, since it is deeper than her legs are long.
The only setback she experiences is the need to pause once in a while to chew away the snow that balls up between her toes. I can imagine that feels just as annoying as the snow that collects under the cleat of my snowshoes in certain conditions. We didn’t have that problem with the cold powder snow this weekend.
It was a cold start of the year 2022, but a grand one for us. Here’s hoping it proves to be a hint of greater times to come.
It was truly precious to kick off the new year in such a special place with our even more special friends and hosts, Barb and Mike Wilkus.
We will spend the rest of today on the road, heading home to see how the horses are doing in this coldest weather since they arrived with us last April. Having dreamt about horses this morning, I’m feeling a heightened urge to get home to see ours.
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Early Start
Like a couple of young newlyweds, Cyndie and I got an early start to the holiday weekend and hustled north to the lake by ourselves a day before the massive crowds that will follow. A stop at Coop’s Pizza for our favorite choice in Hayward, then some authentic ice cream decadence at West’s Dairy for dessert, and we were in full lake-place weekend mode before ever reaching the “cabin.”
For the record, I splurged with one scoop each of Coconut Magic Bar and Chunky Musky.
There was some reminiscing about dining at Coop’s on our honeymoon almost 40-years ago, back when it was located in a former gas station on Highway 63. Cyndie burned her lip so bad when hot cheese pulled off the crust that she blistered.
After we unloaded the car, we topped off our night with access to satellite television Tour de France coverage rerunning the stage of day 6 and another Mark Cavendish sprint to the stage victory. We were happy as clams.
It has been longer than I can recall that we have been up at the lake two weekends in a row. This could get to be a habit. Thank goodness we have found a willing animal sitter in Anna, a student at UW River Falls.
It feels particularly summery, which is just as it should now that we are into July. Obviously, we don’t live in the southern hemisphere.
Watching the professional cyclists racing after having just spent some extended time on my bike tour along the Mississippi River in Minnesota provides a valuable perspective. Their accomplishments are so much more amazing than they make them appear.
I hope they get to have ice cream at the end of their daily races.
I visited a couple of Dairy Queens after my days of biking.
It was an early start to foiling my goals of eating less sugar than my addiction longs for. I can attest that doing so wreaks havoc on my attempts to control the brain’s tendency to crave sweetness full time.
Good thing my healthy routine will be able to resume as soon as this weekend is over. My summer brain is starting to think I should have ice cream every day.
I’m afraid the rest of my body takes exception to that kind of thinking.
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Co-Favorite Place
For all of my adult life, Cyndie’s family vacation home on Round Lake near Hayward, Wisconsin has been my favorite place. As I wrote yesterday, my affections are now split between our paradise of Wintervale Ranch in Beldenville and Wildwood Lodge Club up north.
I now have co-favorite places.
It is wonderful to be up at the lake again.
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As always, the special feature of the lodge club is communing with the other families and we received an early dose of camaraderie when the next door Whitlock clan showed up just after Cyndie and I arrived. Much love ensued.
There is a lot to do around the property to make it look less neglected as the ravages of winter appear to have wreaked havoc on anything left out in the elements.
Case in point: The front steps to the Friswold “cabin” for which I was so proud to have repaired a single paver block last summer are now failing en masse as the foundation underneath appears to be giving out.
Entire rows are tipping forward. I suppose it’s unfair to blame one winter for this, but it sure seemed fine last year.
I can’t blame the extreme state of the smoke clouded doors of the living room fireplace on anything but neglect to tend to the task of cleaning them in a timely manner. When Marie asked me to build a fire, I figured it wouldn’t add much to the ambience if we couldn’t see the flames. It took a lot of ash-soaked newspaper to rub off the insanely thick baked-on accumulation of smoke on those glass doors.
At least I had the joy of trying to ignite unseasoned firewood that had been supplied for our fire-building pleasure. No wonder there was so much gunk on the glass of the doors.
Maybe, if I love this place as much as I do home, I need to more equally split my attention to maintenance chores. Is the building of a lake-place woodshed in my future?
I would sure appreciate the luxury of selecting dry wood for our fires. So would the chimney flue.
The more immediate concern will be cleaning the beach today. The lake ice pushed a new berm of sandy leaves about a foot high along the full length of our beach shoreline.
What a wonderful location for putting in a day’s work.
My co-favorite place, in fact.
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Not Suffering
Just a little rain up here at the lake yesterday afternoon, but we are living the life of luxury, regardless.
Breakfast on the deck.
But earning it by taking care of that too-long neglected task of tending to the gutters on the backside of the house. Out of sight, out of mind, you know.
After I dug for long enough, I actually found a gutter underneath all that mess.
More family arrived yesterday afternoon and we dined like royalty and stayed up too late playing cards.
It’s another classic summer weekend ‘at the lake.’
Aahhhhh.
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Long Time
It has been a long time since I did a jigsaw puzzle at home. After visiting Judy’s and Mary’s houses over the holidays and seeing their puzzles in progress, I felt a renewed motivation to get out one of my own again. Luckily, I had a very special new puzzle in my queue.
For the first time ever, I’m building a puzzle of a picture that I took. Elysa had this made for me as a gift after I mentioned that I thought the image would make a great jigsaw puzzle.
I’ve only spent a little time on this so far, but already I can sense the difference of studying pieces of an image that I captured. The location is a northern Minnesota forest on land owned by our friends, Mike and Barb Wilkus. We were hiking through the woods on a beautiful fall day and I stopped to snap a shot of the small lake surrounded by trees.
I’m going to love working on assembling this puzzle.
It will become a battle of wanting to make quick progress even though I also don’t want the project to end soon.
I suspect this will be a puzzle I have no problem assembling over and over again, although I feel it also deserves a turn or two up at the Wilkus cabin. Hopefully, both scenarios can be achieved over time.
That part of my brain that loves jigsaw puzzling is very happy indeed, especially because it’s been a long time since I’ve built one.
Maybe even more so, because I stood in this very spot.
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Relative Something 