Thunderheads over Steep Rock

Another guest entry from Ranger Tim, who keeps the bunnies coming back for more.

This time next week I’ll be watching dragonflies and drinking martinis with him. And peeing off the porch.

Another guest entry from Ranger Tim:

Luke, a South African living in Toronto, sends pictures from his great photo journal, Tripping:
    “Like Tim, the Toronto http://tripping.seeto.com/images/200403/20040328_windsurfer.jpg”>water http://tripping.seeto.com/images/200403/20040328_windsurfer2.jpg”>fanatics aren’t allowing less than heatwave temperatures to keep them out of the water.”

Are they all mad up there? It may explain why I like them so. I have home broadband internet access for the first time ever, which means streaming audio of the stately CBC radio, a daily fix of Canada that only rounds out Brooklyn’s charm. Though Tim is in many ways more of a New York nut than I am, he is homesick. A jobless recovery doesn’t welcome back a technology manager who most recently managed bears and wolves and campers. So he has gone back to Canada for a spring canoe trip with some other Toronto water fanatics, and to give thought to moving back to Lake Superior.

The mighty Gowanus ain’t the same without him.

This is the Gargantua road at Lake Superior Provincial Park, wearing her winter coat. When I hiked the Coastal Trail in August, the hedgerow was thick with blueberries and mushrooms. Ranger Tim, who has a Voyageur’s heart and is slightly nuts, camped here this week and sent the photo as my Christmas card. It arrived with the greeting: “May Santa bring you the clarity of spirit to behold your blessings, and rejoice in them.”

I pass that wish on to you. I don’t find Christmas an easy time, which puts me squarely in the majority of over-sixes. So I’m grateful for this snowy reminder that today was the solstice, and it gets brighter from here.

It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s better than bad, it’s good.Everyone wants a log,
You’re gonna love it, log
Come on and get your log,
Everyone needs a log.

—Ren and Stimpy

Ranger Rick is a hero of mine, the Soo’s own Renaissance man. Here is how to make a Canadian Renaissance man, in case you’re wondering:

1. Plant him in a home-built cabin eight miles up a dirt road.
2. Give him ten brothers and sisters to knock the corners off him, and a mother and father who teach him not to be scared of anything.
3. Keep him away from school until he is old enough to resist indoctrination. Let him regularly stash his hated city shoes at the gate, “borrow” a boat, and wave to the foxed truant officer standing on the bank.
4. Marry him off to a fine and formidable co-conspirator at the ripe old age of nineteen.
5. Endow him with a quick mind, a boxer’s speed, a seanchaí’† art, an aesthete’s eye, and a woodsman’s soul.

On the phone, Rick coaches me on woodchopping. When he worked at a ski-lodge as a young man, he was given the job of splitting wood one whole day a week. Since he could split enough in eight hours to keep the entire resort going for the week, it was pointless letting anyone else do it. He spent his solitary chopping marathons inventing jokes for his large collection, and new material would be demanded by the other grunts as soon as he finished.
“Now, you’re stacking the logs end in?” he enquires. I have no idea. He explains that if I’m loading logs against the cabin, the fat end goes against the wall (or was it the other way around?). Of course, I tell him, as I realise this is why my drunken woodpiles need to be braced. Wood warms you five times, he says. Chopping the tree, splitting the logs, stacking the pile, carrying it in, and finally burning it.

This summer I was given a gift of an Annie Dillard book, On Writing. I haven’t read her famous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I suspect she is too exquisite for my taste. Prepaid phone cards. This guidebook is a series of metaphors comparing the act of writing to various kinds of hard physical labour. For God’s sake, woman, I wanted to tell her, writing isn’t tin-mining. Tin-mining is tin-mining. Ask the Bolivians which they’d rather do.

But she has a chapter on log-splitting that stuck in my mind. Every morning she had to split her firewood to heat her draughty writer’s cabin on some island on the Pacific Northwest. The epiphany eventually ambles in: aim for the chopping block, not the log.

This is absolutely true. I forget how Annie Dillard ties it to writing, but it applies to Rick’s ski-lodge punchlines, too. Log-splitting is a satisfaction that ranks far above popping bubblewrap and just below squashing mosquitos. These days I live to see two quarters of basswood fall away from the blade like flakes of cod. I’m hampered by poor coordination (will I hit the log?) and a weakling physique (will I be able to swing a maul without braining myself?), but splitting wood requires technique more than strength. My technique so far is focused on not whacking myself in the coccyx when I drop the axe behind me, and on hitting the log with the sharp edge when possible. The really big logs have bested me and my maul, but I have the aching shoulders to prove I’ve tried.

Woodfires are luxuries in Ireland. Our native forests were cut down centuries ago, now replaced by dreary ranks of non-native Christmas trees. We burn turf (peat) or more usually, coal. I love these Canadian trees that turn colour and drop leaves just like storybook trees. I love that this cabin is built of logs still wrapped in silver bark. But lordy, after splintering birch into toothpicks all day long, I can hardly grind the pepper on my dinner.

† Seanchaí is an Irish term for a storyteller or yarnspinner. It was a dedicated role in the community, and taken very seriously.

The spell of beautiful weather in Ottawa has been broken. We got several inches of rain yesterday and were saved some lumberjacking by the wind. The gales put me in the mood for chinking. Chinking is the kind of primitive house project I can really get behind. To chink, you mix concrete according to whatever crackpot formula Google invents, and daub it on the gaps between the logs. In my case, I slop it on, admiring how my lumpy mix matches the silver cedar logs, dropping huge gobs on the leaves until it occurs to me to put down a plywood blob-catcher. The process is satisfyingly close to clay-and-wattle daub, in which we would all still be shivering if progress relied on people like me.

I am reading The Walls Around Us, by David Owen. The subtitle is “The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works.” He’s a New Yorker kind of guy, so it’s heavier on the deeper meaning of gypsum than on practical application. (Did you know that Benjamin Franklin brought gypsum to America from France?) Because he’s tweedy, I trust him more on his descriptions of what his contractors did in his eighteenth-century Connecticut house than on his own excursions into DIY. But if you can tolerate the smirkiness of a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon, it’s interesting. And now I get to parrot nonsense about the history of lime as I make concrete in an old wheelbarrow with a garden trowel.

Six parts sand, four parts lime, one part Portland cement and a bucket of dirty river water. I couldn’t find the hog bristles that the traditional log chinking formulas require, and Tim refused to humour me by shaving into the mix. I’m also hindered by my inability to mix more than Lilliputian amounts of concrete at a time. A sofa-cushion-sized bag of sand weighs more than half my weight. Though I’m a crack baker who doesn’t own an electric mixer, my pastry arm is still too puny to stir more than a few teaspoons of this stuff.

The winter lodge is still at the, uh, drafting stage. My sister has blessed me with a crop of new Canuck in-laws who are kindred spirits. When they left college, Kim and George moved into an old building on forty acres at far side of Ottawa. It’s off the grid, and they didn’t have the money to get the power lines extended. Undaunted, they built an extraordinary modern house around it over several years. Their best stuff is salvaged: the mortuary-refrigerator doors into the garage, the hospital cabinets, the mid-century modern furniture rescued from the roadside. It’s elegant enough to have been in Architectural Digest, and completely solar and wind-powered. My first Canadian Thanksgiving was spent oohing and ahing at this marvel while the kids ran as wild as my ideas.

George was glad to help enthusiastic building newbies. Tim’s cabin has plenty of room for one or two people, but you can’t insulate an old log cabin properly without destroying the essence that makes it cool. “Why don’t you insulate it temporarily?” George said, “Wrap it in Tyvek and stack haybales outside it. That’ll get you through a winter while you plan something really good. And you can practice on a small structure in the meantime.”

So that’s what we’re doing. Chinking. Roof insulation, covered by painter’s drop cloths. Tyvek and straw bales for that Three Little Pigs appeal. That hairdryer-plastic stuff on the windows. Preparing ground. Taking out wobbly and/or inconvenient trees. Figuring out a year-round water supply. Planning a little practice building, just for fun—a Japanese bathhouse (pattern #144) maybe. And after all that I can go to Ireland for the winter, morally secure that Tim will not freeze due to my dereliction.

Tim assigns my chores in the morning. After I moved the latest pile of green logs to the woodpile and helped to jack up the sagging cabin, I was to sweep the pine needles off the roof. “Are you okay with heights?” he asked. Fine, I lied.

I managed to get up the ladder. Then I stopped. The pine needles were slippery. I sat on the ridge and pushed the broom six inches, then yelped as the duff slid off. Tim took pity on my scaredy-cat antics and followed me up. It was fine, he showed me, not pitched steeply at all, and once I cleared a path through the pine needles, the roof-tiles were nicely grippy. Then he stepped back onto the extensible ladder, which slid right to the edge of the slick deck. He hung on to the roof with one hand and held a corner of the ladder in the other. I had to wiggle off my safe perch to reach out and retrieve the ladder. He got down safely, and the shock treatment had me fatalistically strolling across the roof for the rest of the afternoon.

I have come up with a plan that Adam Stein deems “sufficiently asinine” to meet his approval. This verdict is from a man who bussed across China during the SARS epidemic, so I am proud.

Ranger Tim owns a log cabin on Kedey Island in the Ottawa River. It’s a beautiful cottage, built by a retired cop from Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the ex-Mountie didn’t manage to get the logs to fit as perfectly as the Finns who built the Beaver Rock camp in the 1920s, and so this cabin is not exactly winterproof. In fact, Tim clocked it at 26 below in the kitchen last February, with the small woodstove going full blast. I would start weeping and shedding extremities at those temperatures, but then, I am not Canadian.

So I am going to help him to build a small winter cabin before the Ottawa freezes, which should be any minute now. I’m considering it a second autumn. He doesn’t have a job. I don’t have a job. We have copies of A Pattern Language, The Timeless Way of Building, and several worrying titles along the lines of Fun Projects With Your Chainsaw. He just bought an outboard motor, a secondhand chainsaw, and several boxes of woodscrews. I bought steel-toed safety boots. I am all set for Cabin Girl: The Sequel.

Kedey Island is almost civilisation. Just across the river is a village that could be in rural Connecticut, and the bright lights of Arnprior are just six miles away. The Pilates-and-Pinot-Noir yummy mummies of Ottawa’s Glebe are forty-five minutes away. But when you can only leave the island by boat, it feels closer to Laos than London. Water comes from the river. You chop wood to stay warm. You “flush” the toilet with ash from the fire.

When I arrived from Ottawa yesterday morning, I paddled the groceries across by canoe and then helped prime the pump to squirt Ottawa River water into the washhouse. No more sweet Lake Superior water; this stuff runs brown and silty. The well stinks, so we ferry drinking and cooking water across from a kind neighbour’s house. My tasks so far, other than bringing order to chaos, evicting hundreds of spiders, and making large pots of soup, are mysterious. I will be “chinking”. I will be digging a trench to sink the waterline. I will be splitting wood. I will be…um, sitting on the sofa playing hooky with my laptop while Tim goes to Canadian Tire.

Parked the car outside the power plant. Arranged innocent “who, me, officer?” expressions. Slipped into the forest to bushwhack down a steep, boggy slope. Climbed past humped, rusted wrecks. Jumped at the ghostly creaking of a truck-door in the wind. Cursed at blackberry brambles and sticklebacks. Slid over wet logs onto the rocks to examine the Montreal River at the base of the huge hydro dam. Whooped, and with a shuffling, one-footed Riverdance, pumped up the inflatable kayak. It was Ranger Tim’s day off, and we were exploring.

The Montreal River was once one of the finest fast-water rivers in North America before it was dammed in the Thirties to bring light to this benighted land. There are six dams in all; three in the six or seven miles between our put-in spot and the river’s escape into Lake Superior. This famous canoeing river is now inaccessible to all but the eccentric. There’s no way to get a hard-shell boat down to the water, and most people are too sensible to trespass and bushwhack with an inflatable kayak. It’s a great shame.

The mighty Montreal is now stately and plump. I confess that this is fine by me: I like my whitewater on the distinctly blue side, with the kind of gentle rapids that save paddling but don’t trouble the heart-rate. Unlike a canoe, where you kneel like a galley-slave, the inflatable is like a blow-up La-Z-Boy, the aluminium paddle as light as a mixing-spoon. It was all very restful. This brave red kayak has seen far worse: it has been buffeted by ferries while circumnavigating Manhattan, and once it bounced off a startled hippo on the Zambezi.

The pent-up flow of the river drowned much of the surrounding forest when the dams were built seventy years ago. The effect is unearthly. Great stumps poke out of the water fifty feet from the bank, and here and there single-tree islands survive. Looking down at the underwater forest floor, you expect to see sodden hares and squirrels running between the branches. The forest seems untroubled by its loss. The bank is lined with drooping cedars, bright maples, and magnificent white pines that would have made fine masts for a British man o’war. Pink alders and aspens gave the river the festive air of a royal barge party. Saved by its inaccessibility, the area has not been logged for a long time.

The journey was bittersweet for Ranger Tim, who had once turned down the opportunity to buy the two thousand acres of this township for pocket change when the Algoma Central Railway was divesting its assets. Instead it was bought by an American—boo, hiss—subdivided into lots, and flipped for an unholy profit. As we wandered down the river, he mourned each of ‘his’ trees.

A murder of ravens, two dozen, emerged river-right. They cawed and played on the updrafts in great high spirits. A moose must have died for such a party, since they don’t usually congregate in large groups. They wheeled and swooped, dressed inky-black as a SoHo brunch. I lay back in the boat to watch them, and wanted desperately to fly.

There was a neat take-out point just before the second dam, and we climbed up the hill to investigate. A power station thrummed below the bridge, and at the bottom of the gravel road there was a single red truck in the yard. “We stay together, stay quiet, and walk fast,” said Tim, who knows how to do these things. We retrieved the kayak, dry-bags, and paddles, then solemnly scuttled down the hill, camouflaged by a large red blow-up boat like a particularly foolish beetle. Nobody stopped us as we stumbled through the trees, so we put in again and paddled off down the river.
The river was wider and slightly less sluggish on this stretch, and we stopped paddling altogther except to steer around the bends. At a few points we shrieked as we were drenched in chutes of fast water, but it didn’t matter much on yet another day of warm sunshine instead of the expected late-September frost and snow. (By the end of the day my milk-bottle legs had burned pink.)

Two miles down we came to yet another power station. The river had originally split here, and was dammed on both forks. At the wide mouth of the left dam we could see a sign on a small beach, which drew us like a casino billboard even though we knew it probably said mean things.

KEEP AWAY
Dangerous waterway ahead.
Levels rise and fall
without warning.
No swimming or boating.

Parroted in French. But the little beach was connected by a small strip of land to the power station above the dam, and we were naturally curious. A bulldozer dozed near a gigantic pile of sticks, logs, and driftwood, like some bird with a slovenly nest. There was no one around. The station was fenced off, but by scrambling up the rockface we found a passage around the fence, which acted as a useful handrail on the way down. I sashayed across the grand mesh catwalk over the dam, pretending to be Kate Moss modelling life-jackets. We admired the huge chains that raised and lowered the gates like canal locks. Windows flapped in the abandoned storage buildings. We poked our noses where they didn’t belong until we grew bored by these feats of engineering and headed back.

We paddled back across the estuary to the far bank of the river. This was the end of our trip, since from here the river headed to its final dam through a canyon. Tim deflated the boat while I packed the bags, a little deflated ourselves. Then I noticed a Great Lakes Power truck parked just in front of the forbidding sign opposite. Two security guards stood, hands on hips, clearly puzzled, watching us pack up our gear. Our industrial jaunt had tripped an alarm system and they had sped to investigate. The rubber kayak left no landing marks on the gravel beach, though our footprints would have been clear, and with no sign of a boat they couldn’t figure out how we had got over there. Nor could they catch us, and with a good girl’s terror of authority, I was relieved. Instead we slogged an hour and a half up the highway back to the dull, law-abiding world of motorized transportation.

Autumn graciously hung back and allowed summer to run a last blue-sky Labour Day weekend. The summer people have headed south. Yesterday the highway was clogged with camper vans; today there are only the familiar trucks. Beth and the maintenance crew are scrubbing down the primly-named “comfort stations” for winter storage, clearing out the fire-pits, chaining the gates to the campsite. The contract naturalists have packed up their slides and unclipped their nametags. The rest of the staff, freed from preparing endless talks and nature hikes, have time to play.

In the afternoon I tried to find the old Frater trail with Ranger Tim and Chris, another naturalist. Earl Devlin, who settled this little Beaver Rock cove in the twenties, had cut this trail himself. It ran four miles uphill to the train station at Frater Junction so the family could collect supplies on foot. It’s so long out of use we never knew if we’d found it or not as we bushwhacked and followed old logging tracks, stepping over bear scat and mounds of moose droppings. Fresh moose dung looks just like chocolate-covered almonds, a thought which had tormented me on the Coastal Trail some weeks ago. Bear scat looks like small cowpats.
   “Is that because of all the berries?” I asked.
   “No, bears shit soft no matter what they eat,” said Tim authoritatively. I was glad I’d had the foresight to pack two naturalists.

We pushed through stands of balsam fir and crossed a gravel pit and then a creek, picking the last of the raspberries. Up on the ridge stood massive yellow birch, somehow missed or left by the loggers in this new-growth area. From the rotten stump of one giant grew three saplings: a maple, a white pine, and a red pine. The white pine had been cropped by a beaver.

Tim gave me jewel-weed tubes to chew, each tiny, saffron-like thread pinched off the end of a red-orange flower that looked like an orchid. The drop of nectar sweetened my tongue. Hummingbirds love them. Then he gave me small twigs of yellow birch to chew: wintergreen again. Manufacturers used to extract it from wintergreen leaves, then from yellow birch (it’s synthesized now). Snowberries have that exact flavour, too. Why is it so common in nature?

Chris caught a tiny spring-peeper tree frog, bleached as a sand-crab, with suckers on each exaggerated finger. I popped a puffball to see the spores rise in a dusty cloud. We picked some morel-like fungus with an intense mushroomy scent to identify later, not realising we’d be too drunk and lazy to pull the books out. Tim wrung a cup of water out of a clump of spagnum moss, a naturalist’s party trick after five dry days. They confirmed each other’s species-identification in a comfortable shorthand while I lagged behind twenty-year-old Chris, as unsure of this jargon as if he were discussing his favourite PlayStation games. The blackflies chewed at the tops of my ears while I swatted uselessly and shouted “Feck off! You should be dead! It’s September.”

We turned back after a few hours being happily lost. A defrosted chicken and a glass of wine called, along with the promise of a fine beach sunset to drop the curtain on the summer. It was warm enough to be still giggling there after dark, a demolished bottle of Viognier and some beers stuck neck-down in the sand, while the chicken managed alone in the barbecue. A yellow crescent moon hung dead-centre in the lake and lit a tempting canoe trail to the horizon. Stars shot towards the water. My warmly-lit log cabin sent a homesteader’s welcome from the little hill.

I’ve always loved September, a month studded with more new-year possibilities than dreary January. I love every megabyte of the first-day-at-school pictures my teary friends send of their kids. I am fizzing with ideas for the next few months—a visit from Leelila? from Adam? October in Ottawa with Claire? A roadtrip down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego? Winter in Ireland? Or in a cottage in Spain? A book proposal?

Oh, lordy, it is great to be poor, and free, and rich in friends.