My Winter in the Woods

I

THERE are ten thousand lakes in Minnesota, and at each of them in the winter of 1932-1933 was an author, driven from his usual job by the depression, but determined, now that he could not earn any money respectably, to see what he could do with his pen. I was one of these authors and my lake was Burntside, near Ely and the Border.

At first I supposed I was unique, living alone in a cedar cabin in that lonesome country, and intending to write. But presently I learned that at Crab Lake, the next one to the west, there was an author who was going to write a book. Later I saw something of this author. He was a young fellow of considerable egotism, who never reread what he wrote, but just sent it in, and so it would be published. This made me very envious, for as a rule I am the only person who ever reads what I write.

Shortly after, I learned of another author, at Lake Shagawa, which was the next lake to the east. I never met this author. An occasion was arranged when we were supposed to meet, but just before it, startled by a rap on her cabin door, she backed into her stove while drying after a bath in the washtub: this made it impossible for her to sit down, and so she could not think of going to a party. However, I got a note from her in a handwriting so bold and sweeping that I realized at once that she must certainly be a real author.

After learning, thus, that each of the nearer lakes boasted its own author, I saw that I was not unique at all, but merely a symptom of a great general movement which somehow had escaped notice in the papers. This was discouraging. It was only too easy to imagine how ten thousand manuscripts would be sent simultaneously to the Atlantic in the spring, all entitled ‘My Winter in the Woods,’and each from a different lake. I thought some of organizing a Ten Thousand Authors of Minnesota League, so that the financial return on the one essay that was accepted could be distributed justly among us all. But the Crab Lake member was not interested, for he got everything published anyhow; and the Lake Shagawa member was too busy applying Unguentine to her blisters to think about committees or by-laws. Thus the scheme fell through.

The astonishing thing to consider, however, is that many months have elapsed and still no essay entitled ‘My Winter in the Woods’ has been published in the Atlantic! Can it be that all of the ten thousand authors grew as lazy as I did, and never wrote their essays? For the comfort of their several souls I hope they were sidetracked as I was, thanks to being too busy enjoying their winter in the woods to write about it. Love poems, so I rationalized, are not composed while the lovers are in the rapture of an embrace, but when they are parted. The literary expression of their rapture would seem a tasteless impertinence at the time; and for a like reason, or so I rationalized, my essay did not get written.

Besides, to reënforce my excuse with more practical considerations, there was so much else to do.

II

Authors are notoriously a soft lot. When the faucets in their apartments for some reason yield no water, or the lights do not turn on, they are likely to lose faith in providence, and to take to a desperate kind of writing to express the trouble that haunts their lives. But I had not been at Burntside ten minutes before I knew that I was destined to be the sole creator of my own comfort.

For water I had either to walk a quarter of a mile to a spring, or to chop a hole in the lake ice, or to melt snow on the stove. Anybody who has tried melting snow for water knows that many many bushels of the former are required to produce a very very few pints of the latter, and it takes all day. I tried it once. Chopping a hole in the ice sounds easy, but actually it is a labor, especially when the wind is blowing and the temperature is twenty below. But to climb drifts to get to a spring is really not a bad chore, and the water you bring back a quarter of a mile over hill and dale takes on a value and deliciousness unknown to that which flows at a touch glibly from a faucet.

The light of a kerosene lamp, too, has a value that mere electricity cannot equal. It is more elemental. The oil for which you have already paid is, before your very eyes, turned into the radiance that makes night cheerful. There is a pleasure in this not to be found in turning switches and paying a bill at the end of the month to some impersonal corporation.

My warmth, too, I owed to my own efforts. I was not only fireman, but wood sawyer. And the wood was cut down across the bay, and hauled back over the ice by this same person, all of which made me value very highly the warmth my fire gave me. Radiators, moreover, are certainly deficient in soul, whereas a good air-tight stove that you can open up and pop corn in, and that provides space on top for a broadbottomed teakettle, is a friend and a companion.

As for food, I had to cook it or go hungry. There was nobody to do the washing but me, nor the mending, nor the sweeping, nor the dishwashing, nor the bed making. And all of these things, as I soon learned, require to be done very often. It was all good experience for an author, though it kept him from his writing.

Then there was a great deal of talking to do. You will perhaps wonder at this, when I lived in such a lonesome country. But I hope you will not think the romantic isolation of my winter in the woods spoiled entirely when I tell you how many friends I had. The Crab Lake author was not one of them. He was too successful for me to enjoy very much, and after two or three visits he saw his welcome was not very hearty, and so he stopped coming.

Of course I had a dog all the time, named Terry, who was a great comfort. But my chief friend was the Captain, who came after a while and lived with me. Though he was not an author, he did not mind sharing a cabin with one, and we certainly got along very well together. The Crab Lake author he cared for no more than I did, and when this visitor said our dog looked like ‘ an overgrown wildcat’ he threatened to brain him with the pancake griddle. I have sometimes thought that this was perhaps why the Crab Lake author never came back. No, the Captain was not an author and did not intend to try to be one, but the depression was making life tiresome for him in what he called the Mazda Canyons, and so he came to live with me in the woods. We certainly got along very well together, and there was always a great deal to talk about. And then we spent a good deal of time laughing at things and at one another. In the woods you can lead a very regular life and be very healthy, and never have a cold, and this was how we lived, and so we were very healthy and never had colds, and this led naturally to our doing a great deal of laughing.

Then next door lived a timber cruiser who was very picturesque and handsome, and with him lived his wife, and both of them were great talkers. They did not care for cards, and between housework and talking they always chose the latter. Thus their cabin was a maze of newspapers, jelly glasses not put away, and laundry bundles burst open, but they always had plenty of time for talking. Even if Mrs. Harris was upstairs she would join in the talk, and through the ceiling would come ‘Not five miles, Van, nearly seven,’ or ‘His father was an alderman,’ like a voice from heaven. With these people lived a nephew who went to school and a mother-in-law who was very old and pretty and wore little lace caps, but, though they were pleasant, they did not talk much.

III

The timber cruiser, our landlord, was a grand man, and he had a certain chair in our cabin where he would sit and talk for hours at a stretch. This was hard on an author who itched to do some writing, but since he never repeated his stories, except by request, we gradually learned a great deal.

We learned from him the character of the moose and the brush wolf, and the tracks the fisher made, and the scandals of the lumbering business. Then he was very eloquent talking about the geology of that lonesome country, and would tell us that the hills about us were the oldest mountains in America and that they were already old and mossy when the Appalachians were young and jagged and the Rockies were still under water. He was very proud of this. Then he would talk about the glaciers, and tell how the shores of Lake Superior were tipping, the north shore tipping up, which makes it precipitous and full of waterfalls, and the south shore tipping down, which makes it a series of estuaries where the lake water is gradually creeping back into the river valleys. This was all very interesting. Then he told many stories of the early days.

One of the stories he told was about the jamboree to which the Hudson Bay fur traders used to treat the Indians on a certain island in the lake. It was an annual event, and came in blueberry time. A large cask was filled with blueberries, and over the blueberries whiskey was poured until the cask was too full to hold a drop more, when the refreshments were ready. The squaws, when they saw these preparations being made, as a measure of prudence would steal their braves’ guns and hide them in the woods, for by the time the braves came to after the jamboree, and realized at what prices they had sold their furs to the traders, the traders were gone. At such a time it is a salve to outraged vanity to shoot some neighbor or kinsman as if he were to blame, and until the danger of this was over the squaws did not return the guns. The island on which the traders entertained the braves is known as Blueberry Island to this day.

Then he had many stories about the early days on the Range to the south of us. One of these stories was about Oneeyed Pete, who exchanged a piece of hill property he had for a cedar swamp, for he saw a good chance to make some money selling ties to the railroad, which was surveyed to come that way. And he did make some money at it, but on the hill property iron ore was discovered in great abundance, — in fact, one of the great Eveleth mines was dug there, — and so he missed having a fortune. The rest of his life he spent in the saloons, telling his story, and crying out of his one eye.

Then our timber cruiser had a very good story about opening the mine at Biwabik. Biwabik was in the woods, and there was no road to it; it was just a tract of ground being stripped by hand labor to open up a mine. There were plenty of men there, however, who had come through the woods looking for work. And there was work for them, all right, and they were paid for it and were ready to spend their money, and still the road builders were nowhere near Biwabik. So some enterprising merchant sent up a carload of barrel beer to a bridge on the Ely line, and there the beer was unloaded and rolled into the river; and a crew of log drivers floated it down to Wynne Lake, which is very large, and rafted it across, and down the river to Biwabik. And so it got to the mining camp before the road did and sold at a glorious profit, for the men were ready to spend their money and thought beer a first-class investment at any price.

These are some of the stories of the early days that our timber cruiser told us, sitting behind our stove with his hat on and snapping his suspenders.

He was also the good friend of Chief Boshay, who lived on an island in the lake and was a great medicine man and prophet. From this noble Chippewa he brought us translated prophecies which gave our life a kind of Old Testament splendor. A warning came from him one day to prepare for a plague of eagles. It was an unusual problem to know how to prepare for a thing of this kind, but we kept Terry in, for he seemed the likeliest victim among us. However, no eagles came, though we heard tales of the Lac la Croix papooses being carried off; we saw no birds larger than the ruffed grouse that flocked nightly in the birch boughs over our cabin, or the Arctic golden-eyed ducks that swam all winter in the open rapids of the Kawishiwi River.

The old chief’s wife fell sick one day, and powerful Indian medicine was tried to keep the evil spirits off the island. For one thing, a gun was shot off every ten minutes; I heard these shots at night, standing in the dark on a hill that looked toward the island, and it was very sad and awful. Nor was this medicine successful, for his wife died soon after. She was a very old Chippewa woman, and, having lived long enough to see her people ruined, probably did not much mind dying. Though I met their daughter, Mrs. Columbus, and another daughter and some grandchildren, I never saw the old chief, who was an inaccessible demigod strangely left behind by a grander age; but our timber cruiser told us a good deal about him, for he much admired him. Indeed, they had this in common, that they both had that large and durable character that makes men isolated, memorable, and mythological even while they are still alive.

You see there was a great deal to talk about without ever stirring from camp.

IV

As if this were not enough to keep us busy talking, there was a farm a half mile away where lived a family of Finns named Knuutti. The younger generation had dropped one “ from this odd-looking name, and I told them that by and by they would get it down to plain ‘Nutty,’ which struck them as very droll. Indeed, I early got among them the reputation of being witty, and, as everybody knows, it is very easy to be witty when the reputation has once been established. So there was a great deal of talking and laughing at the Knuuttis’.

Either the Captain or I would go there every night for the milk, and the Knuutti milk was most unusually rich and good, for the Finns are the one people who know how to farm the narrow, marshy, winding valleys of that cold, rocky, lonesome country; somehow they convert muskeg into milk. But of course the country north of the Range is much like Finland, so they have ages of experience behind them to help them to live in comfort and prosperity in it, though most farmers would starve there.

The walk over for the milk was always a treat, through the deep pine woods where there was no wind. And for a destination there was the Knuutti kitchen, unmercifully scrubbed, with the butcher knives and popcorn ears hung on the wall, and a great cookstove with three teakettles steaming on it, and a line overhead of wool socks drying. Sometimes this brightly lit room was empty and quiet; even if it was full of people it was sometimes still, when the soft breathy voices of two of the grandchildren could be heard singing ‘Jingle Bells’ while they wiped the dishes. There was always a box of books in the corner from the state loan library, and the National Geographic, which was a favorite, and several tattered detective-story magazines; and these were a contributing factor in the quiet. But more often the room was full of talk and laughter, for everybody was good-humored, and natural politeness and sociability were the law of that household.

Though it was in the woods, the farm was a kind of crossroads in the life of a large family. The old mother, who was very strong and quiet, wore a red bandanna tied over her hair, and when the weather was coldest she put her feet in the oven to show her authority. The sons and daughters, if they lived elsewhere, came home often, and several of them were married. There were a great many grandchildren, who lived on skis outdoors, and indoors committed poetry to memory for the Christmas programme.

You will not believe me when I tell you that instead of being ‘ buffaloed,’ wheedled, or lambasted into taking part in a Christmas programme, as children are in the best society, the young Finns and Indians of that lonesome country got up the programme themselves, with some help from their elders. I felt that the world had rolled absolutely upside down when I heard them energetically but peacefully choosing among themselves what poetry they’d learn, and which part each would play. Young Reino, as blond as a snowdrift, would be a redskin chief, and so on. And when somebody asked what part should be given me, the whole crowd, as if touched off by a button, shrilled, ‘Santy Claus!\’‘—and I nearly suffocated with surprise, pride, and pleasure.

Among those children everybody was good-humored and polite, and thus in the Knuutti kitchen there was always plenty of talking and laughing.

V

The great occasion was bath night, on Saturday of each week, when the whole family assembled, together with many of their friends. The bathhouse was new and fine, tightly built of logs, and in it the boys bathed first; then some friends who came several miles and had the privileges of the place; and then the women got their bath. Afterward everybody went back to the kitchen to ‘play whist and the fiddle,’ when sometimes hot lemonade or even something stronger would be served, with glasses for the guests and preserve bottles with screw tops for the relatives, especially the younger ones. This was never a quiet time in that kitchen; there was always a great deal of talking and laughing, all mixed up together in one big jovial family noise, until the whist game got really serious, when things would be quieter.

As for the bath itself, it deserves a description.

Architecturally the Knuuttis’ log bathhouse had very little in common with the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, but what went on inside the two of them had a good deal in common. In both of them a bath was treated as a social affair, and not as some shameful thing calling for solitary confinement. The bathhouse was divided in two. The first room was a dressing room, and there we stripped and hung our clothes on pegs on the log walls, and then we went into the hot room. In the hot room was a furnace which had been stoked with pitchy pine for several hours, over which, and between two low brick walls, were piled a great many stones of egg size. On the level top of this pile of hot stones were laid wet white-cedar switches, to heat, made of twigs chosen for their softness. Connected with the furnace was a tank, and, since the water in it was boiling, it emitted ominous banging noises. Beside the tank was a tub of icy well water. Along the wall was an ascending rack of three tiers, each tier a plank wide enough to sit or lie on. Now you have a description of a Finnish bathhouse.

We climbed on the rack to the topmost tier, for there the heat was greatest, and somebody would begin to pour boiling water by dippersful slowly on the hot stones. The room was already at a temperature too high to allow the steam which then rose from the stones to condense enough to be seen, but we could feel it coming. If, for a prank, somebody flung a dipperful of water at the base of the chimney, where the rocks were hottest, the effect was indescribable, and drove all but the toughest from the top tier down to one less scalding. During such an ordeal you seem to melt into water. It is hard to believe that the yellow moisture which drains away from your fingertips is your own sweat, or that you will live to tell the tale.

Then commenced the switching, with cedar switches plunged into buckets of hot water, when the room filled with a spicy evergreen perfume. Each man switched himself roundly from head to toe, for this seems to drive the heat in, which the Finns think very healthful. They live in a cold, lonesome country, and believe in getting together and heating themselves through and through.

The weaker members of the party then would retire awhile to the dressing room, sitting silently on the benches till their heads whirled back to stability on their shoulders. Then back to the hot room for a soaping, which was generally coöperative: You soap me and I’ll soap you. Then a rinsing in warm water mixed from the hot and the cold. And then, if you could stand it, a bucketful of ice water poured over your head.

After such a bath, and even if the cold water was poured over you breathtakingly at last, there was need of cooling down many degrees before you could dress. But it was easy to manage this: we ran out naked into the night, when January and forty below felt like balmy June; and under the hot weight of our bodies the soft snow in which we rolled grew hard and granular.

Then there came a very peaceful time in the dressing room, everybody with all his joints softened and relaxed; smoking, and talking, and laughing, and feeling very peaceful together. And presently the fresh long-legged underwear would be unfolded, and legs thrust into it lazily, and so to the wool socks, the pacs, and all the comfortable catalogue of clothes proper to winter in the woods; and this is the end of my description of a Finnish bath. It makes a man very limber, and God knows he is clean after it.

VI

I was very regular in my Saturday baths with the Knuutti boys, and grateful to them for taking me in, who was no Finn at all, for I deeply enjoyed the talking and laughing, and the soaping and the rinsing and rolling in the snow and the peaceful loose-in-the-joints feeling afterward. But the Captain, who is careful of his health, never would go, for he said such changes in temperature were fatal, and he could not understand at all why they did not kill me. So, in spite of a great deal of talking about it, he never went, but took his bath alone in a washtub, over the rim of which his long legs folded comically. He enjoyed his baths well enough, however, and would sing songs while he drew the washcloth across his chest so as not to splash too much; and Terry the dog, who kept him company, would look on with a solemn expression.

His first bath, by the way, he did not enjoy as much as the others, because after he had heated his water and poured it in the tub, and undressed, the water was too hot and he had no cold in the house with which to temper it. It did not make him feel any better to notice that he had smoked up the dishpans and buckets, heating all this fine bath water. But the question was: Should he dress again and go to the spring for cold water, or should he wait for the hot water to cool of itself? He decided to wait, and he was still waiting, wandering around with not a stitch on like a lost spirit, when I got home from my bath at the Knuuttis’. So I got him his cold water, and then went skiing in the moonlight, for the cabin was full of steam, and one steam bath in an evening was enough for me. After that he was more careful, for it had been a legitimate, not to say perfectly splendid, occasion for laughter at his expense, and we avoid this if we can.

Just the same, we did a great deal of laughing at one another all the time, and there were always things that demanded talking to be done about them, so there was always a great deal of laughing and talking. For instance, there was a cabin to be talked about that we were planning to build on an island the timber cruiser owned and would sell us for two hundred dollars. Now of course wo could n’t buy the island, and we never bought it. Still, two hundred dollars is a very reasonable price for an island, and, since the bargain was so great, our dreams for a cabin we should like to build on our island were very vivid. We lay awake nights quarreling over what sort of mattress we should use in our bunks; and then we would start to laugh, and cuff one another, and then we would feel very affectionate and not care what kind of mattress we’d have, and go to sleep. In such ways as this we got plenty of talking and laughing done without my ever doing any writing.

Then there was always the housework. Even with the two of us to divide the duties, they took a great deal of time. Neither of us ever, I think, will take for granted the housework that goes on about us, for we have learned that it takes both thought and time.

We cooked alternately, the Captain one day and I the next. He was fond of eating, but was not much interested in cooking; thus at noon or six o’clock on his days he would start up with a jerk and fry something. On the other hand, I liked both eating and cooking, and had learned early that frying is an elementary part of the art, and that most of the fun and triumph lies beyond. So I baked things, with cheese. Even on his days I would find myself making custards or Scotch oatcake. This was fun, but took a great deal of time.

Dishwashing was easy. We put on our hats and did it in the little glazed porch our cabin had, and the steam from the hot water made frost flowers a half inch deep on the windows, till the porch looked like a greenhouse of colorless plants. Still, it took some time, though it was easy enough.

The mending was more of a problem. The Captain had a sailmaker’s needle which he used for all purposes, and the sight of the two of us bent up over our mending never failed to amuse our visitors.

Wash day was the week’s chief tussle, for there were always a suit of woolen underwear and a heavy flannel shirt apiece, not to mention other problems, such as fetching the water from the spring and heating it in dishpans, and wringing out our clothes without a wringer, and then living in their moist company while they dried. And after the washing, which invariably took a full morning, came the sweeping and the mopping and cleaning the stove. It was a strenuous day.

And while speaking of household problems let me mention one that was uncommon: the Captain’s sweetheart was a grocer’s daughter, and since she was very fond of him, and could not. believe that he lived anything but a life of hardship in that lonesome country, she very often sent very large boxes full of things to cat. In many ways this was an excellent arrangement, and when I spend another winter in the woods I shall certainly have a sweetheart who is a grocer’s daughter, or take along a friend who has one. However, her rich boxes kept us very busy eating things up, which, together with the laughing and the talking and all the housework, kept me from writing my essay.

VII

You will say that a winter in the woods would be a perfect time for reading, and this was my thought, too, so I took with me Taine’s History of English Literature, which would be proper meat for an author to chew on, and a great many other good things such as Shakespeare, Xenophon, The Oregon Trail, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Mutiny on the Bounty, and as many of the Chinese poets as I could get in one suitcase. And indeed I did get some of these read. But an old battered schoolbook that the Captain brought was our chief cultural prop, for it contained all the dear old poems that you never really get sick of. The Captain would snatch it out of my hand and glue his eyes rapturously on the much-loved pages, and read out ‘Wee slcekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie’ or ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,’ in a happy loud voice. But Taine, in four very bulky volumes crammed full of thought suitable to the inspiration of an author, never did get finished.

And then, most important distraction of all, there were the woods themselves. Obviously, it would be as foolish to spend a winter in the woods without really enjoying them as to spend a winter in the city without going to any concerts or prize fights, and since we saw this truth plainly we went hiking very often.

It was a rugged, rocky country of ups and downs, raggedly grown up in birch and pine, with cedar or spruce swamps or cranberry bogs in the hollows, and all very lonesome. The lake was large and sprawled out, with a hundred islands in it richly wooded, including the island we were going to buy for two hundred dollars, and the famous Blueberry Island, and the one on which Chief Boshay lived, as well as a great many that were beautiful in spite of being nameless or unhistoric. With skis, travel over the snowy ice was easy for me; I am short-legged. The Captain, who has long legs, preferred snowshoes. Since we had only one pair of each, these dissimilar preferences were very fortunate. We went many miles on our skis and snowshoes, while sundogs and bewilderingly complicated haloes followed the sun across the sky; and looked at our two-hundred-dollar island, and ate our lunch in corners out of the wind. Then there were trips to Ely, six and a half miles away, for the provisions the Captain’s sweetheart had not thought to send. All this was great fun and very healthful, and we learned a great deal. For one thing, we learned to love that big, rough, lonesome country very deeply, and on moonlight nights, when we would stop and look about us, it seemed that our hearts must break with the deep joy that came pouring into them.

However, all these fine excursions, together with the poetry we read, and the eating we had to do to keep up with the generosity of the Captain’s sweetheart, and the cooking and dishwashing and mending and laundry work, and the Finnish baths, not to mention some hunting (even a little poaching) and fishing through the ice, and chopping wood, and feeding the chickadees, and taking pictures, and packing greens for Christmas presents, and repairing the snowshoes, and thanking the grocer’s daughter in many letters for the many boxes she sent, and especially all the talking and laughing we did, filled up the time from morning to night, and for this reason the Burntside member of the Ten Thousand Authors of Minnesota League never got around to writing his essay on ‘My Winter in the Woods.’

But things are better now. I have a job, which is a blessing. I work as many hours a day as the code will let me, at somebody else’s business. I am in a world again where faucets and electric switches make providence seem near and real. My baths I take privately in a bathtub. I scan the papers avidly for the details of the latest cure for colds. And often when I am called away from the table for a long time by some kind friend on the telephone, or listen silently while Ed Wynn on the radio does both my talking and laughing for me when I am out to call, I think how wonderful it is that we are on the road of recovery, and leaving the depression behind. And one of the minor delights of the new day is that now I have time again to do a little writing.