What a nice thing it is to have a rural post office in the great North woods. To have a key for one little PO Box, and your own strange ZIP Code, with the window and neighborly teller. Where out front there is a great American flag on a strong flagpole, and when the cold winds come the line bangs... READ MORE >
Fall is here. A birch is turning yellow. As will the wild sarsaparilla in the woods. The woods honeysuckle will turn early too. Summer is over. It’s time for us to get back to schooling. Months and months of play and loose reins make the pups errant. Autumn, from mid-September to the early part of winter, is a more serious... READ MORE >
She drives down, or up, North Road, which is County Road 69, and over bridges on the Flute Reed River, newer bridges, although they’ve been there 100 and more years, and the Flute Reed is no river, but a quiet creek hidden in the lush green of summer, under the moose maples and speckled alders and paper birch and wending... READ MORE >
It may be too late in the summer to speak of dandelions. But they linger, if you look. In a vegetable garden at the nursery we had kohlrabi which was planted late and has been growing late, and each night the bunnies – big year for rabbits this year – came in and took a leaf, then another leaf another... READ MORE >
In the late afternoon – too early, in fact, for my conventional fishing wisdom – I waded out in my chest waders and wading boots into the lake on the rocks and pebbles and occasional boulders up to my crotch. The sun was at 5:30 on the horizon and I had to turn just away from the glare on the... READ MORE >
It seems to me there are three types of cabin-goers. Allow me some latitude here. This is an essay, and like our old essays in school, it follows a pattern. Remember ‘compare and contrast,’ or ‘descriptive,’ or ‘rhetorical,’ or ‘satirical’? Here I’ll do a typology, a categorization. So, to repeat the thesis, it seems to me there are three types... READ MORE >
The old black Mitchell 300 is a classic, introduced in the late 40s. Like our old Kluge ice auger, which was a blue-green in color though always chipped or faded, and which was heavy screwed together at the top of the shaft. There was the two pieces, the long spiral auger and then the beast’s head of a fat gasoline... READ MORE >
I read the following sentence in an Economist article titled “How rotten is Russia’s army?” “Mr. Putin is rational, in that he wants his regime to survive.” I read that sentence and stopped. Something caught my attention: the reasoning behind the assertion. Writers can say such silly things. I’m atavistic. A hairless Neanderthal. With regards to survival, I see no... READ MORE >
If one combined the traits of ham-fistedness with clumsiness, you might come up with something like Kubrick’s ape in «2001.» Unable to stand upright, throwing his arms around, just getting used to the grip. Maybe that›s more heavy-handed. Maybe a better image is a bear at the trashcan. Not that I’m hairy, or apish, or dumb necessarily (my brother says... READ MORE >
The cabin was on a good slope and the slope fell down to the wild mint growing this side of the rocks at the lake shore. Down at the lake, though, it rarely smelled of mint but smelled of huge dead and bloated carp that would wash up here and there throughout the summer, and as my childhood progressed there... READ MORE >
