cedar bog, a place I find darkly handsome, not quite sinister, but mysterious like Colin Farrell or Don on Mad Men. The cedar bog was once home to the only human resident we know of. Bog Man lived here during the Elvis era by our best estimation, but by the time we arrived, his shack was long gone, his possessions hauled away or sunk under the cover of moss. Left behind were his bedsprings, scraps of metal, parts of an old stove, and more bottles than an off sale. Bog Man’s choice of building site—dank, dark, and spongy—didn’t make much sense until our resident geologist mentioned there was likely a spring nearby. And though we can’t locate it, we know it’s there, for even during the warmest, driest weeks of summer, the water between the cedar roots has movement and is clear and cool. We don’t know who Bog Man was, or whether he’d owned the land or just squatted, whether his shack was a year-round home or just his seasonal pied-à-terre.
We were a family drawn to bogs. During Sam’s phase of being obsessed with all things medieval, he inhabited an imaginary kingdom that included a bog called Fetid Stew. Sir Sam and the Knights of the Formica Table all had one enemy in common: problems of the sort only a six-year-old could think up. Someone in the kingdom had been bequeathed a wish, and since the recipient wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver, that adult had wished the river running through the Kingdom of Barns be transformated from water into chocolate malt! Great—until everyone had their fill, got tummy aches, and came down from their sugar highs only to realize that the fish would snuffocate because malt can’t translate through gills, horses couldn’t be watered, and crops couldn’t be irritated. Sam, along with Sir Batty (stuffed bat and sleeping companion, tragically kidnapped during a car trip a few years later), was one of the bravest knights, unafraid of the dark. Sam and Sir Batty put their noggins together and came up with a plan. They would divert the river into the bog! And so the bog became a repository for All Bad Things, where the evil troll lived, and since bog = stinky, wet, and yucky, it was where one was sent for punishment. Bandits who stole Princess Jennifer’s wand were banished to Fetid Stew, a plague of rogue pterodactyls were captured and sunk in it, and so on. Bogs in general got an undeserved bad rap until we began visiting a nature preserve that had a real bog. The good bog had marsh birds with chopstick legs, bog rosemary, and spongy peat under an undulating shag of billiard green moss. There was a boardwalk on which to lay and watch the pitcher plants drink. We changed our tune then about the lowly bog, Sam admitting bravely, “I could do a time-out here.”
And here we had our very own bog. Nothing as grand, but mossy just the same. The bog partially wraps the base of the cliff backing the plateau, where stones covered in nappy moss have tumbled down into the shade, making navigation a slippery endeavor, where hybrid rubber boots with golf cleats would be the ticket. From the bog, there are three directions to go: west, north, and south. South is a low spit of land and one of the few places on the lake where it’s easy to land a canoe because the water is shallow with a gravelly bottom. The little promontory there has a fire pit, much used over the decades by trespassing beer lovers leaving all vintages of cans, many with old-country names like Schlitz, Blatz, and Pabst and one rusted, barely legible Old Bohemian.
These days the promontory has two melon-colored Adirondack chairs and a red canoe and could be a page from a tourism brochure. The path from the promontory leads to a steep hill of deciduous hardwoods, black spruce, and balsam. The path levels out at the hill’s rocky apex, where Terry and Susan had chosen their building site, high above the westernmost shore. Facing straight east, they have the long view, making The Lake seem larger than it is.
Conditions aren’t often ideal for exploring. Winter’s not really an option since snow restricts any movement beyond the plowed logging road. While someone more adventuresome might strap on snowshoes, there are steep slopes and random blast holes left in the wake of early mining exploration, varying in size from trough to tanker, and often deep enough to break a leg should you fall in, or give you a good soaking since many fill with water after a hard rain. Having no idea how numerous or random the pits were, I played it safe in winter, sticking to the road and trails.
Early spring is too soggy for exploring, and late spring is too buggy. In summer, the thick brush turns any jaunt into a trail blazing, best embarked on with gloves, loppers, and plenty of DEET. Autumn is the best time, though in any season there’s a good chance of getting lost. The iron content in the rocks is so high that compasses fail, only sometimes hinting at north in cattywampus stabs of the needle. So sans compass or GPS, I would venture out, noting where the sun was when there was sun. I soon discovered tree moss cannot be counted on to indicate north; those with any on their trunks wear it twirled in dervish skirts as if every direction might be north. When going very far, I don’t go alone.
We owned the land for almost a year before discovering its best feature, one we didn’t so much stumble onto as stumble up. Paralleling the logging road along our rear acreage is a high ridge of Precambrian rock well curtained by trees and obscured from the road below. Finding reasonable access to it is difficult. I’ve approached from several angles and found only one route that slopes rather than climbs, but I didn’t have neon marking tape with me and haven’t been able to locate the route since. The most direct and difficult way is straight up from the lowest point on the road via a very narrow path lined with aspens to hoist yourself along. The path ends at a short cliff the height of a bus, with a switchback zagging the rest of the way. Once on the zenith—usually with heart still a-thump—you’ll see the climb was worth the effort. Spreading southward is a forest of ridges, with the Laurentian Divide just six miles away. On a clear day, you can see ten or fifteen miles. In summer, the view is an even-toned green canopy, but in autumn, drifts of tamarack make long mustard streaks and oaks pop like rust spots among the yellow aspen. Maples here turn not quite the usual red orange but a paler peach version, like a bare, bitten lip. The stands of pine are best delineated after their deciduous neighbors swap out their green for harvest moon colors. What you can see of The Lake beyond the poplar skirt belting the ridge looks narrow as a run of foil. Only after the aspen quake themselves naked is the full breadth of The Lake visible.
The ridge is shaped roughly like a parade of brontosauruses lumbering nose to tail through the canopy. It is perhaps a thousand feet long, running alongside a second, shorter ridge directly north, which I only know of for having been lost between the two, pinballing between them like a bug in a gutter until finally the sun broke out to show where west was.
It would be great to watch a storm from this height, and an idiot just might, but I have a healthy fear of lightning, and every pine on the ridge is a potential target. Weather travels straight west to east here, thumbing in on a stiff breeze that’s brisk and consistent enough to make us dream of wind turbines. A turbine could provide enough electricity for us to fire up the holy grail of all appliances: a refrigerator. A gray-water pump system runs a close second on our wish list, usually while stumbling from the car with five-gallon jugs pulling our arms ape long. A pump would pull water up the hill for dishwashing and showers. It’s hard to disguise envy when visiting the plumbed and electrified cabins of friends who are on the electrical grid, awed as they run taps and blithely flip switches to power up such trifles as toasters, coffee grinders, and even hair dryers. If anything makes one energy conscious, it’s having none.
We’ve not clocked our wind speed on the ridge yet, but the power is there. Reality kicks in only when considering not just the expense of a turbine but how. Short of stabbing one straight down from midair, the logistics of erecting one on the ridge appear impossible. But if it were possible, the crest would be the perfect site for a hermitage, a room with a view, a crow’s nest, or a tree house (as long as they are topped by lightning rods).
Near Tower, there is an auburn-dark spur of road that leads through sentinel pines to the former site of the fire tower, the one we called “the Tower-tower.” As a child, I climbed the tower many times with my father, and I still remember the stomach-churning thrill of bursting up past the tops of pines into clear sky, always windier and warmer than below in summer and always windier and cooler in spring or fall.
My particular vertigo is more physical than mental, my insides gathering into a weird, buzzy clench. I suspect this is genetic since Sam has it, too; on cliffs and bridges he would cling, reporting, “Mommy, my testicles tingle.”
Dad