The Big Two Hearted Timber
Running into Hemingway's Shadow
My first Saturday with the route, it was time to collect for the paper. I took the comics, circulars and the TV Guide in my wagon, and trudged through the December snow, from house to house. At a two story red brick home on Drexel I waited through two knocks. Finally a very old woman appeared in the window. She struggled to open the door and then move out of the way. She waved me in with a slight smile. I closed the front door behind me and followed her through a sliding wood door into a living room. There was an old man in a rocking chair. He rocked three times, gaining motion each time and then stood up.
He was still bent over. He looked up at me a bit sideways and said his name was Norman, his wife was Ginny.
“I’m Tom.”
All the wood in their house was dark. And the mantle was dark too, and carved. He saw me looking at it.
“Do you know who that is?” he asked.
His wife took a photograph from the top of the mantle and handed it to me. I looked it over, the frame was bronze and heavy, and the photo was three people kneeling around a deer, two men and a woman. The deer was dead and it had antlers. The man in the middle was smiling. He had a beard.
“That’s Hemingway,” Norman said. “We used to hunt up north with Earnest Hemingway.”
I was 11 years old then.
I handed the photo back to the woman Ginny and said “I’m collecting for the paper, a dollar five cents.”
The acreage was nearly a perfect square. It rose twenty feet from the road through a large meadow to the edge of a hardwood forest that marked the rough halfway point. From there it descended, gradually at first and then more rapidly, to a planting of red pine the government put in during the 50’s to prevent erosion on abandoned farms. Some of the red pines were large, twenty inches in diameter. They were planted in straight lines, up and down the little rolls on the backside of the ridge. Walking back up to the ridge, the hardwoods were a mix of sugar maple, birch, beech and dead and dying northern ash. It was a good property, a good find. I felt good about it.
The day started with long drive north from the city. The sky was blue and there was a noticeable north wind and big white clouds overhead. It rained the day before. It was only that morning I saw a property come up for tax lien auction in the northwest corner of the state. I had only five hours to make it to the property and then race to the auction to put in a bid.
The drive on I-75 was easy, fast. I took the Grayling exit and then the trip slowed down, going across country on two lane roads to Kalkaska and then on to Traverse City. In Traverse there were stoplights, and more traffic. I was anxious that I wouldn’t have time to get to the site and then make my way back to Traverse to bid. The auction was scheduled for 1:00 PM. I made my way through Traverse and caught M-22 to travel north along Grand Traverse Bay into Leelanau County. Time was getting a little tight, but I was ok. If I could find the property without too much trouble, it would be ok. But I had to get to the other side of the peninsula, the Big Lake side, and that would take extra time.
I crawled through the first town I came to, and then took a left on M-204, that would take me to the West side of the peninsula. It’s always further than you expect. Finally I made the last turn, the property was only 10 minutes away, time to spare.
I came around a bend in the road and there was the sign I was looking for, but it was blue. They had not mentioned it was a private road, and road was too generous. It was an overgrown one lane, muddy track into a more overgrown field of young trees and weeds. I wondered whether I should risk driving into a soaked dirt road, getting stuck here meant a whole day getting help and getting unstuck. After a few minutes I gathered my nerve and pressed on, driving slowly. About a half mile in I finally saw the yellow placard announcing a tax lien on the property. I stopped and let out all the tension of the trip in some ripe language. The property was a huge disappointment.
It was on a steep hill, heavily forested with hardwoods. I walked about halfway up and tripped over some barbed wire hidden inside of two maple trees. My leg was bleeding. Up ahead I saw the building site they had photographed for the sale, still steep but a little less so. I took another long look over the property and could see no place I wanted to build. It was the side of a steep hill. It was lousy. I walked back down to the truck. My leg was still bleeding. I managed to get the truck turned around and I drove the dirt track back to M-22.
At a loss for what to do next I went right, backtracking felt too much like defeat. Suddenly there was another road, it was another dirt road but wider, better kept. Why not? I turned and drove uphill. There was hardwood forest on the left, and a cherry orchard on the right. The little road came to an end at another paved road. OK, back to the city I thought, with a different route. I turned right. In a few hundred yards I saw the real estate sign, tilting over in the long meadow grass. That looks alright I thought. Let’s take a look.
On the south side of the property there was a culver and a track that resembled a driveway. There’s been some traffic, at some point. I drove in, uphill again. At the top of the property I parked and started to walk, I could see the lot marker on the north side of the property and the boundary with the neighbor’s property. It looked like a square, maybe ten acres. The large meadow along the road and a hardwood forest. My spirits were up.
Back in the truck, I drove to the nearest town of Suttons Bay. There was a real estate office on the right. I parked and walked over. There was one man there, older, with white hair. I explained what I saw and how I’d found it and the man looked over a map and then through the listings. We talked a little.
“Interested in a winery?”
“Not at all.”
He finally found the listing, and printed it. I was right, it was a square, almost 11 acres. It had been on the market on and off for 2 years. I read the listing closely.
“No interest in a winery, huh?”
“No sir.”
I told the man that I would put in an offer. I took several other similar listings to compare, dropped them into a folder and left. That was Friday. I made an offer on Monday. It was early October. We closed November 2nd.
“What do you need a chainsaw for again?”
“There’s enough good pine on the property for a house, but they need to come down first.”
“So you’re going to build a house?”
“Yes.”
The new saw hadn’t been cheap, over $500 bucks. But it was necessary. I’d just spent seventy thousand on the property, so a saw didn’t seem unreasonable.
Little by little I put together the plan and the materials for my first visit to the property as its owner.
I took a small room at at little motel south of the property. It was already dark when I arrived, a Friday night in early November. I was the only guest at the motel. I found some ham sandwiches my wife packed in the cooler, and a poured a glass of milk. It was late. I ate and went to bed.
When I woke it was still dark. I was eager to get started but there was no point in trying to make it to the property this early, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I grabbed a book that I brought and read a few pages, but my mind kept wandering back to the property and the work I wanted to do that day. How many trees could I fell in a day? I had never dropped a large tree before. I was game for the challenge, but not blind to the risk. Take your time, settle down and think it through, no sudden moves. I gave and took the advice, and it soon became a nervous ping pong game in my head. Finally I forced myself back into the book and after twenty pages or so I dozed off again. When I woke I could make out some trees in front of the motel. Time to get started.
I went through my typical morning routine, got dressed and put all my gear back into the truck. It was light out now. I stopped at the office of the motel and took two donuts and a cup of coffee. I pulled out of the motel onto M-22. The adventure was just before me, after much anticipation, yet I found myself driving carefully through the hills and rolling turns of the empty two lane peninsula roads.
The property was different from what I’d remembered. The hardwoods had lost their leaves, and there was a few inches of snow now on the meadow. I tried to get the truck up the small incline on the south end of the property but the wheels started to spin and there was no reason to push it. I parked and unloaded my gear into a large plastic sled that I’d brought. I had the saw, gas and chain lube, an axe and some large wooden wedges I’d made the day before. I wrapped the rope from the sled across my chest and trudged uphill to the edge of the forest at the center of the property. In front of the hardwoods there were hundreds of feral red pines, all thin twenty or thirty footers. In fact there was so many that it was hard to walk between them, and their branches were full of snow. These would have to come down first. It was a blunt realization. All the work that I imagined, cutting down the largest red pines, would have to wait until I did some basic maintenance.
The saw started up fairly easily and with a new chain it cut through the pines like butter. Soon I had ten down. The next thing was moving them into a pile. They were heavier than you would think. Dragging them around was exhausting. Before long my windbreaker was off. Another ten. I took off my sweatshirt. It was cold out and there was a breeze but I was drenched. Another ten, or maybe it was twenty or thirty. I lost count. My hat fell off as a falling branch got a little too close, so I left it off and carried on. After an hour or so I had cleared a path 40 feet deep and 20 feet wide up to the edge of the hardwood forest where the real trees where, the ones I wanted to fell for the house. I turned around then and realized that there were another 600 or so of these small, useless feral pines that need to be cleared. I needed to take a break and think about my next move. Just there at the edge of the clearing there was a large beech tree, at least 20 inches in diameter. A big tree, but it had grown at almost a 45 degree angle, so it hung out over the property. I needed a place to sit so I cut a wedge out of the front and then I guided the saw through it as level as I could get it from the back to the front wedge. Its lean made it an easy tree to cut, there was no question how it would fall. As the cut approached the wedge the tree snapped and popped up, heaving forward several feet as the tension was released. I was lucky that it hadn’t kicked back into the saw. It’s fifty feet of bolt and branches hit the ground violently, popping some of the piled red pines into the air. I could feel the tremor through the ground into my legs. Finally, I cut down a big tree. That was more than I bargained for.
I sat down on the beech stump and ate a few handfuls of the fresh white snow. The sun poked out. Behind me there was blue skies and flying white clouds coming off the big lake, and the big red pines, the ones I wanted for the house, some 60 to 80 feet tall. Giant trees that stood straight up. How would they fall? I couldn’t tell just by looking, but most would follow the incline of the ground, at least you would expect them to fall downhill. Did they always?
In front of me were hundreds of small red pines that needed to be cleared, one way or the other. I took off my flannel shirt and t-shirt. They were both wet now. I put the sweatshirt back on. Today I would work on the small pines. The sun was out now, a full blue sky, and the air was moving, quick and clean. It was a beautiful day. The big pines could wait for another day. A better day for cutting big timbers.
I was 55 years old then. I first met Hemingway at 11, and again when I went to college at 18 and read The Sun Also Rises for a class. That summer I read most of what he’d written, including his first collection of short stories In Our Time. He’s the only writer I know who can make you ache and fill you with wonder in the same story. One of the stories is about a man who goes on a fishing trip in northern Michigan. He fishes for trout in the Big Two Hearted River, but when he comes to a bend in the river that will take him into dark, forested and unknown waters where the big fish hide in the afternoon sun, he turns back. That bend of the river can wait for another day, another trip.
And the timbers? Well it took me several trips to work up to it, but I eventually cut down the biggest of the red pines. In the spring a man from Cadillac brought his sawmill to the property and we milled the logs into squared timbers over the course of two weekends. We live in a house I built with these timbers.
And Hemingway? Well, he was present at three major wars of the 20th century, though I cannot say if he ever fished in the deep, dark waters around the bend of the Big Two Hearted River.