Maybe I Don't Get It

We got rain today. A lot of rain. The good soaking kind that forces me to drive to work and which in turn drives people to a museum in droves. For most people the rain was a mild inconvenience. For others, the precipitation came as a relief. “We need the rain so badly,” the latter group said all day. “The fire danger was so high!”

Maybe I don’t get it. And knowing me, that’s probably the case, so let me preface this by saying that I don't mean to be insensitive. I just sometimes wonder what all the worry's about.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dry around here. The water level in the lake is worryingly low. And frankly the wildfires of 2007 just weren’t quite long enough ago for most people around here.

I didn’t experience the Ham Lake Fire of 2007 first hand. I wasn’t evacuated from my home for 12 days. Although I have plenty of fire memories, I haven’t had any personally traumatic fire experiences.

When it’s dry outside, I notice, kind of like noticing that it’s raining or that the sky is blue. But it’s rare that the dryness of the environment seems truly ominous to me. In fact, the last time the world seems poised for wildfire was the spring of 2007, when my walks through the woods behind my college campus seemed reminiscent of walking through a tinder box. Low and behold, less than a week after a rather creepily crackly and dry walk through woods, the Ham Lake Fire started 100 miles away from where I’d hiked.

When I was in college, I interviewed Senator Mark Dayton (yes, the very same Senator Dayton running for Minnesota Governor) for an article in weekly student newspaper. I asked him the typical college newspaper questions: what did he think about job prospects, health insurance, etc. To one my questions, he responded, “Plan for your future, but don’t worry about it.”

Up here in the woods, we all have sprinkler systems installed on our property and cabins. We try to be environmentally responsible. We hope people will heed the words of Smokey Bear and do their best to prevent wildfires.

And that’s pretty much all we can do. Worrying about the rain won’t make it rain. We simply have to be ready for what could happen, but we can’t devote all of today to worrying about what might happen.

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The Great Blueberry Quest

Here in northern Minnesota we often joke that the year is divided into three seasons: winter, mud season, and a week of summer. In truth, I’ve never found a corner of the earth so fundamentally tied to the seasons – Western Europe’s half-assed winters always left me feeling confused – and there are plenty in sub-seasons in this neck of the woods. In spring we have mud season, then the springtime of the first blossoms. While summer may be a season almost entirely devoted to blueberries, it too has its own set of sub-seasons: scouting for blueberries, picking blueberries, and eating blueberries.

After the Ham Lake Fire burned through the area in 2007, blueberry picking has been phenomenal. Everyone has their own “secret” picking spot. Of course, some “secret” spots are more popular than others. We’re lucky enough to have a small blueberry patch right behind the cabin, but whenever we’re out in the woods, we’re looking for an even better berry patch that’s truly secret.

We look for a place where the soil’s sandy, where the sunlight’s a bit filtered to allow berries plenty of sunshine and just enough shade to grow nice and plump. People are often dismayed when they return to a patch they remember doing well a few years back and finding slim pickings, to say the least. Blueberry patches are often found where jack pines thrive and as a result the patches can cycle out fairly quickly when the baby jack pines grow taller and start to cast too much shade over the berry bushes. It always pay to keep your eyes peeled for a new patch, because there's no guarantee that the same spot that offered great picking this year will be as marvelous in the years to come. Last fall when we were out grouse hunting, Andy and I spotted a spot that we thought might offer plenty of good pickin’s this summer, so yesterday we hopped in the truck to go check it out.

We turn off the main road onto an old, bumpy, skinny, rocky, logging road. After stopping once to push aside some blown down sticks, we parked in front of a fallen tree.

After scrambling through the tree, we forded the river.

We walked a little more. And were warmly rewarded with a scene of blueberry fields forever.

Last night in the patch behind the house, I picked about a cup of berries. But the majority of berries, especially at the patch we scouted yesterday, won’t be ready for a couple weeks yet. I’m excited!

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Greening Up the Gunflint

For the past four years (three years in an official capacity), the local community has set aside a weekend each May to focus on forest regeneration. Originally, the reforestation began because of the people of the community was hungry for some solidarity. After the 2007 Ham Lake Fire experience, people wanted to plant trees, not just to replace the trees that had been lost in the fire but also to regain a sense that life and the forest were both returning to a more normal, familiar pace of things. In the May 2007, a group of neighbors gathered to plant trees in the areas burnt over by the Ham Lake Fire. And they kept planting little white seedlings during the two Mays that followed, only this time they invited others to join them and dubbed the event “Gunflint Green Up.” It was quite the success. In 2008, 500 people gathered that May weekend to plant trees along the Gunflint Trail.

I have always been on the edges of this fire and subsequent events. I was finishing up my degree when the actual fire burnt and for the last two years work has kept me an arm’s length away from the Green Up events. So somehow, this past weekend ended up being my first Green Up. We didn’t plant trees. Instead we “released” them.

(One of the things I’m most excited about with my new summer job is that I think it’ll be much less likely that I’ll be called “Ranger Ada” this summer. That doesn’t mean I don’t mind acting like “Ranger Ada” every once in a while.)


That’s right, we poked around the burnt areas looking for trees that had already been planted and then we trimmed brush and undergrowth away from them. The organizers warned us yesterday that finding the little white pine seedlings might be a little like an Easter egg hunt. The area we were assigned to clear out was pretty brushy and it was hard to tell if past year’s planters had actually ventured through the heavy undergrowth to plant trees. Andy and I spent a lot of time smashing our shins against fallen, charcoal tree trunks and picking twigs out of our hats. At one point we thought we heard a moose splashing around in a nearby bay, so I spent a good ten minutes crashing through the woods to find, you guessed it, a now very moose free bay.

We did find some little seedlings and clipped away undergrowth to let the sunshine in. We pulled bindweed away and nipped a raspberry, dogwood, alder and aspen that could crowd out the white pine seedlings and rob them of nutrients.

When we got back to the cabin, we planted some white spruce trees around the property.

It’s hard to know if the little seedlings we found yesterday will someday grow to be the towering trees with their cloudlike branches of needles that (along with the moose) have become somewhat iconic symbols of the region. It’s unlikely that all six of the white spruce trees we planted yesterday will really take off. But we gave some trees a little better chance to survive what Mother Nature might have in store for them and if they do, this corner of the world will be just a little bit greener.

Last but not least, Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! We love you, so much.

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