small room, are carved on the five set sides with precisely engineered Legolike indentations and protrusions, one interlocking perfectly with the next. Designed to be earthquake proof, they have remained in place for centuries. In severe quakes, the stones will rattle and dance, only to settle back down just as they were, so tight that a knife blade cannot breach the spaces between. And since the examples of stone walls are so amazing, it’s no wonder visitors are too busy looking up to much notice what’s underfoot. The roads made a great impression even before I’d learned the Inca didn’t yet have the wheel at the peak of their building. Until they built roads, there was no place level or flat enough to roll anything. Nor did they have draft animals; horses didn’t arrive until the Spaniards imported them along with disease and priests. To build their roads, the Incas were equipped with cleverness, levers, brute strength, and the balance of mountain goats. Theories, equations, and scale models have been constructed in hopes of figuring how they actually did it (besides a whole lot of hernia-popping heave-ho-ing), but those theories mostly fall short and leave modern-day engineers still scratching their heads. Only when the intangible is factored in does it seem possible. An amazing collective of ingenuity, engineering, craftsmanship, and labor would have been nothing without the one factor nonexistent in modern-day construction, patience.
For practical purposes and ease of maintenance, Chim usually builds his roads wide, straight, and level from points A to B. I was more inclined to allow the landscape to determine the course of my road and let it wind, since every charming road I’d ever traveled seemed to do just that. Besides, we wouldn’t be having the road plowed. This plan was just fine with Chim since it meant less gravel to haul, and it allowed him to avoid difficult boulders and large trees. Curving around them would mean less labor.
In the autumn, when Chim and the boys came, I made sure to be around as a visible presence, even if I was just a distant figure clearing brush. Best the boys see I had a face and wasn’t just The Wallet. In town one evening, I recognized a number of their pickups outside the Portage. I went in to meet the young men I’d only waved at and, not above ingratiating myself, bought a round of drinks none of them needed.
Years ago, while renovating a house during a heat wave, I needed to motivate a crew of stoned, over-warm house painters. I thought about what I would want if stuck on a scaffold for the month of July. I doled out popsicles at regular intervals and tuned the radio to an eighties rock station, cranking the volume. I ran the sprinkler during their many breaks. In the end, their paint job was excellent. A few years later, I read of a study wherein subjects were given simple tasks to do while under the influence of separate substances: alcohol, coffee, a placebo, and marijuana. One task, in fact, was painting. The group given alcohol was slow and downright sloppy; the caffeine group was jittery and sloppy. But the stoned group was the most focused and the neatest, outperforming even the placebo group under the influence of nothing. The spring after the house was painted, a souvenir cropped up in the shape of a bushy cannabis plant growing just where the scaffolding had been.
Chim’s boys were hard workers and needed little more encouragement than a thumbs-up and wave when I passed by. The road took shape, rocks were piled, the layers of gravel spread and tamped. True to the promise they’d made after a third round at the Portage, they did a damn good job, even taking extra care to clear every bit of the debris and smooth out any ruts. They even raked so that I hesitated on my first steps down the road, as if not wanting to sully a Zen garden.
I walked the length of the road five times, all slopes and curves, narrow and shaded. A real cabin road. Still, it had a tenuous feel. This smooth ribbon of earth, if left untrammeled for a decade or two, would easily close back in on itself, with trees falling, saplings sprouting, and brush growing quick as kudzu—nature prevailing.
I can no longer locate Walter’s grave. The little funeral pine died shortly after being planted, perhaps an example that transplants might think twice before just showing up here.
Of course, there are plenty of other trees. One reason I’d been drawn to my building site was that it was shaded by one of the few majestic trees edging the bluff, a giant white pine casting a generous canopy of shelter, its straight arms reaching so far they would shield the roof of the cabin I hoped to build thirty or so feet from its trunk.
After a storm during the second spring, I got word from our neighbor to the east: bad news—my tree of trees had been struck by lightning and had toppled. It had been so tall, the tip of it had crashed over the property line onto the neighbors’ land so that, in addition to the loss of that tree and the several it took in its path, I suffered the sting of paying several hundred dollars for a logger to saw up the trunk and clear the mess.
Another giant pine centers our acres, shouldering above the forest. I keep intending to measure it one of these days with the old logger’s trick of comparing the length of a tree’s shadow to the shadow of the person measuring. First, on a sunny day, stand next to the trunk, then measure the length of your shadow from tip of shoes to top of head (best accomplished with assistance or a metal retractable tape). Walk the length of the tree’s shadow from base to tip, measuring as you go. Ideally, the tree you are measuring is the only one growing from the middle of a surface that is soccer-field smooth and perfectly level. Multiply the length of the tree’s shadow by your height, and then divide the resulting number by the length of your shadow. Got that? So if you’re five feet tall, your shadow is eight feet long, and the tree’s shadow is one hundred feet long, the height of the tree is (100 x 5) / 8 = 62.5 feet. In the meantime, I’ll just claim the white pine is, like, super tall.
We explored, poking around in mossy low spots and climbing slopes that left us panting. Deciding on sites for our respective cabins was a leisurely process since neither Terry, Susan, nor I had means to build anything in the beginning. Eventually we settled on two sites that by chance lie on opposite boundaries of the parcels. Both are high and set back, just far enough to comply with the requisite building codes. Between us are the beaver valley, the piney plateau, and the bog; you cannot see one site from the other. The terrain is so rugged, so up and down and pocked with old blast holes, depressions, and sheer drops that if our acres were ironed flat, we reckon we’d have a hundred.
It seemed little had happened on the land—not much evidence anyone besides Bog Man had ever inhabited the place, or even much roamed it, though we can assume fur traders, Dakota, and Ojibwe had passed through or even camped here. A trail of pin oaks suggests they had, so we have every hope of one day finding a real arrowhead. In the meantime, I’ve considered buying and planting a few so that one day when I’m dotty and I’ve forgotten, I might have the thrill of discovering one.
For centuries, the area was dominated by white pine, which were logged out so long ago even stumps of the original forest have rotted or burned away. Almost no old-growth pine survived logging, save a stand northeast of town on Hegman Lake and, much farther west, a legendary forest called the Lost Forty near Big Falls. The Lost Forty is technically the Lost One Hundred Forty, a sort of primeval wonderland that only stands today because a clerical gaffe botched the sale of its stumpage (timber parcels were called “stumpage” even before they were logged, in a descriptive preview of the end result).
Along our shore, the white pines are now counted in the hundreds rather than thousands. The few old-growth survivors are stunning and obvious in the landscape, breaking out above the forest canopy here and there with the fanfare of a stripper bursting from a cake. Many of the bases of these old dames are scarred by fire, and with their wide-reaching arms, they make broad targets for lightning. The tops are often sheared, leaving their upper branches curved skyward like cupped hands, as if waiting patiently to be handed back their missing crowns or to accept a spot of rain. There is plentiful red pine, less majestic, most sixty to eighty or so years old, foot soldiers risen in the ranks after the tail end of the logging. The red pine jockey for space with the poplar and thick alder that make most of our acreage impassable. Two hundred years ago, this was a primeval temple of pine corridors lit by beams sifting between the sturdy fretwork of limbs, the sky only glitter above the forest canopy. Living among such sentinel trees as the natives and early settlers did must have imbued a sense of awe and security, or claustrophobia. John Muir wrote, “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world,” a whimsical musing, and one I think of when transplanting fledgling pines or heading out with