Dianne and I bought a place Up North. This is not what I had in mind. What I had in mind was a little bit of hunting land, maybe with a good trout stream meandering through it, in southwest Wisconsin. On this land I envisioned a cabin in the true sense of what a cabin should be. “Rustic” not as in driftwood table lamps and deer antler chandeliers, but as in no electricity or running water. Heated only by a wood stove. A place, as the label reads on a bottle of Yukon Jack, where “lonely men struggle to keep their fires lit and their cabins warm.”
Dianne humored me last year as we looked at places much like that, which I loved and which she did not. Then she suggested we look at lake places. I scoffed. We’d never be able to afford a lake place. But apparently the real estate bubble has not yet reinflated on lake property, and, sure enough, some places were within our reach.
We found one on a lake we knew well just across the border in the Upper Peninsula. Then we did what any couple does in a good, long marriage like ours. We laid out our positions rationally, mine in favor of a simple hunting cabin, hers in support of a much nicer place on a lake and with running water and electricity. We discussed it and compromised, settling on exactly what she wanted.
We moved in on a cold, snowy day right before New Year’s and we’ve made a half dozen five-hour trips up there so far this year. This last trip over Memorial Day weekend will be forever etched in my mind as the Weekend of the Mosquito. There were swarms, clouds of them. It rained and then it rained mosquitoes.
But applying lots of what will no doubt someday be discovered to be cancerous chemicals on my skin helped, and I was able to putter around doing carpentry projects between the frequent rain showers. And I visited the famous Middle Branch of the Ontonagon River with my fly rod and my new waders. The fish were not impressed, but I had a good time.
If the English language came with gender indicators like German, it would be der cabin (masculine) and die cottage (feminine). I like to insist on calling our place a cabin, but it is definitely a cottage. There, much like here, I answer to management. I’m not paid to think.
But I’ve been building my small library in the U.P. with Upper Peninsula literature, which has to include the late Jim Harrison. In his novel True North, I read this:
“If I hid in the woods it was because the woods fit my character. The U.P. was a virtual hotbed of cranky hermits to whom the public culture was unacceptable and unendurable. I had met one in my wanderings who had cut and stacked three hundred cords of wood. He was at least 15 years ahead on the heat supply for his shack, somewhat like a nuthatch who stores up more than a dozen times its required food supply for each year. ‘I like to split wood,’ he said.”
I’ve written in other places that my goal for late middle age is to be a shut-in. But that’s kind of an urban occupation. Cranky hermit suits me better when I’m Up North. I will steadfastly cling to my “cabin” that I know it is really a cottage. And I will buy a wood splitter and get to work.
