9 Bark Point
Whenever I travel, one thing is certain: that I will get lost. Perhaps if I could remember which is my right hand and which is my left, or tell north from south, I should be able to follow directions more successfully. But it probably wouldn’t help. I have an unfailing knack for choosing the wrong turn and a constitutional incapacity for noticing important signs.
It was therefore not surprising that, on a summer twelve years ago, while making my way toward Canada, I turned up Bark Bay Road thinking I had found a short-cut and very nearly drove off a cliff overhanging Lake Superior. Berating myself as usual, I looked around and observed a man working in a field not far from the road. He wore a battered felt hat, a shirt open at the neck, heavy black trousers supported by suspenders, and strong boots. His eyes were sky blue and his weathered skin, brown as a nut, was creased in a myriad wrinkles on the neck and about the eyes. When I approached and asked him how to get to Canada, he replied in an accent that I could not place. His speech was rapid and somewhat harsh in tonality, but his manner was cheerful and friendly, so I paused to chat with him. He said he was preparing his strawberry field for next year.
“This is beautiful country,” I said.
“Ya, it is that,” he said.
“I wish I owned some of it,” I said. “I think I could live here for the rest of my life.”
“Well, this land belongs to me. I might sell you an acre, if you like.”
As we walked across the field toward the bay, he said, “Are you a son of Abraham?”
I had never been called anything that sounded quite so beautiful. “Yes, I am a son of Abraham,” I said proudly.
“My name is Waino,” he said. “I am a fisherman. But I own this land.”
Trees, grass, and water... there was nothing else to be seen, except a small house covered with flowers and vines a quarter mile across a clover field. “Who lives there?” I said.
“My brother-in-law, Mike Mattson. He might sell you his house,” Waino said.
I met the Mattsons. Mike looked kindly. His eyes were grey rather than blue, but his skin was as deeply brown as Waino’s, with as many crinkles about the eyes. Waino’s sister, Fanny, wore a kerchief about her head, tied with a small knot beneath her chin. She spoke little English and our business transaction was often interrupted while Mike translated for her in Finnish.
I bought the house and an acre of ground. The house had only two small rooms, no running water, no toilet. This didn’t matter. Like the room that originally housed the Seven Stairs, I wanted it. I had the identical feeling: no matter what the cost, or how great the effort and sacrifice that might be entailed, this place must be mine. My soul stirred with nameless wonder. I felt lifted into the air, my life charged with new purpose and meaning. I put down one hundred dollars as earnest money, arranged a contract for monthly payments, and became a part of Bark Point.
Bark Point is located at the northernmost corner of Wisconsin. At this writing, exactly five people live there the year around. In summer, the Brents arrive, and our neighbors, Clay Dana, Victor Markkulla, Robert McElroy, Waino Wilson and the Mike Mattsons, swelling the total population to as many as fifteen adults and children. The nearest town, Herbster, is six miles away. Farther south is the town of Cornucopia, and to the north, Port Wing. Thirty-five miles off the coast of Lake Superior stand the Apostle Islands, and beyond, Canada. It is about as far from Michigan Avenue as you can get.
This new habitat which I grasped so impulsively provided a kind of spiritual nourishment which the city did not offer. And later when I married Hope, she responded as eagerly as I had to the benign sustenance of this isolated sanctuary.
It is not only the natural beauty and quiet remoteness of the locale, but also the strength that we find in association with our neighbors, whose simplicity stems not from lack of sophistication, but from the directness of their relations with the forces of life and nature.
There is John Roman, who lives in Cornucopia, the tall, thin, master fisherman of the Northern world. He is gentle, shy, and rather sensitive, with the courage of one who has been in constant battle against nature, and the wisdom given only to those who have endured the privations and troubles and disappointments of life completely on their own. Now well into his seventies, he fishes a little for pleasure, cuts pulp to make a few dollars, and spends much of his time listening to foreign news reports on his short wave radio.
When he stops by for his glass of tea, he never comes empty handed. There is always something wrapped in a newspaper to be presented to you in an off-hand manner, as though to say, Please don’t make a fuss about this... just put them in your freezer until you are ready to eat them. The package, of course, contains trout. When no one else can catch trout, John Roman can. He knows every lake and river and brook and he uses nothing but worms to bait his handmade fishing rod and gear. So far as John is concerned, there isn’t a fish swimming that won’t take a worm. He has caught trout that weighed fifty pounds, and once he tangled with a sturgeon that wanted to carry him to the bottom of the lake—and could have.
The sturgeon encounter occurred about eight miles from our house on a lake called Siskwit that is filled with walleyes, bass, some smaller pan fish, and sturgeon. One morning while fishing alone in his boat, John thought his hook had caught on a sunken log or rock. He edged the boat forward slowly, dragging the hook, but nothing gave. He moved the boat backward. Still no give. Finally John had a feeling that he could reel up. He could, but only very slowly. Then all at once, the sturgeon came straight up from the water, looked at John, then dove straight down, and the boat began to tip and go down, too. John promptly cut the line. He is a regular Old Man of the Sea, but he found no point, he said, in trying to land a fish weighing perhaps two hundred pounds. The thing to do when you are outmatched is cut the line.
John has met the problems of his own life, but the reports of the world concern him. The danger of Fascists appearing in the guise of saviors of democracy worries him. He senses that men are losing their grip on values and are in for a hard time. But what he cannot understand are the reasons for moral apathy. If an “ignorant” man in the North woods can see trouble at hand, is it possible, he wonders, that others do not?
Bill Roman is one of John’s sons and the husband of Waino’s only daughter, Lila. Bill used to run the filling station in Cornucopia. Now he builds houses. But his real genius lies in his understanding of boats and the water. He would advise me: “Look at the barometer every morning before you go out and believe it. If you’re caught in a sudden squall, slow the motor and head for the nearest shore. Don’t go against the wind. Stay in the wake of the waves. Don’t buck the rollers and don’t be proud. Keep calm and get into shore no matter where it might be.” Bill is known for fabulous skill in getting out of tight squeezes, and his advice is good enough for me.
He is also the only man I have known who could properly be described as innocent. His philosophy of life is built upon an utter incapacity to be moved by greed or ambition. “Just live,” he keeps saying. “Just live. Don’t fight it. Don’t compete. If you don’t like what you are doing, change. Don’t be afraid to change. Live in harmony with what you are and what you’ve got. Don’t fight your abilities. Use them. I like living and I like to see others live.”
Bill tries to get on, so far as possible, without money—and with Bill that is pretty far. “I try to never think about money,” he says. “When you start thinking about money, you get upset. It hurts you. That’s why I like Bark Point, where we can live simply. I got my health, my wife, my boy. I got my life. I don’t believe in success or failure. I believe in life. I build for others and do the best I know how. I listen to music on the radio. I go fishing. Every day I learn something. Books are hard to come by here, but I have re-read everything we’ve got. And I love the winters here better than the summers. In the winter we can see more of our friends and sit and talk.
“But money is evil. Money and ambition. Money always worries me. I’m glad I’m without it. I have enough without it. What I want, I can have. But the secret is to know what to want.”
Over the years, we built additions to the house until there were enough bedrooms for all of us, a sitting room with a magnificent fireplace, and even a Finnish bathhouse, called a sauna. We enjoy taking steam baths and have discovered the children do, too.
Raspberries and blueberries grow by the carload in our field, there are apples on the trees and Sebago Salmon in our lake. This particular salmon is a landlocked fish, generally weighing between five and six pounds and very handsome. His skin is covered with silver crosses, he has a short, hooked mouth, and his flesh is orange. He is caught by trolling.
A few miles from our house are rivers and streams seldom discovered by tourists. Hence we can catch rainbows weighing four and five pounds and browns often weighing more. We have lakes where we can catch northerners weighing twenty, thirty, forty pounds, and walleyes by droves. We can take you to a lake where you can catch a fish in one minute—not very big, but a variety of pan fish seldom seen or caught anywhere else. We can take you to a trout stream where you can fish today, come back next week, and find your footprints still in the sand, utterly unmolested.
It is a land of beauty and plenty, but nature is not soft. Sometimes a Northeaster will blow for five days at a time. Then you can stand at the window and watch the lake turn into something of monumental ferocity, driving all human endeavor from the scene. Trees are uprooted, windows are smashed, telephone wires and power lines are downed. Lightning slashes, the rumbling of thunder is cataclysmic, and the rain comes. Often Waino would call and warn of an impending storm and the necessity of securing the boat with heavy rope. But sometimes it was too late, and we would have to go out in the teeth of the early storm to do battle, rushing down the beach in our heavy boots, heads covered with oilskins, beating against the rising wind whose force took the breath out of you. But the roaring surf, the lashing rain, the wind tearing at every step, are tonic to the blood!
One night while standing at the window watching the hard rain falling on the Bay, I was suddenly alerted to action by the sight of water rushing over the embankment which we had just planted with juniper. The torrent of water washing away the earth was obviously going to carry the young juniper plants along with it. There was only one thing to do and it had to be done at once: cut a canal in the path of the onrushing water to channel the flood in a different direction.
Hope was napping. I awoke her, and armed with shovels, we pitted ourselves against the storm. At once we were up to our ankles in mud. Hope’s boots stuck and, being heavy with child, she was unable to extricate herself. My tugging only made matters worse and, with shouts of anguish, we both toppled over into the mud. But no damage was done and, muddy from head to foot, wallowing in a slough of muck, laughing and gesturing and shouting commands at each other, we got on with cutting the canal. It was mean work, but there was something exhilarating about it all and, when the challenge was successfully met and we were in by the fire, quietly drinking hot chocolate, a kind of grave satisfaction in knowing that this was in the nature of things up here and that we had responded to it as we should.
Bark Point is a good place for growing children as well as for tired adults. It is good for children to spend some time in a place where a phrase such as “know the score” is never heard, where nobody is out to win first prize, where nobody is being urged continually to do something and do it better, and where the environment is not a constant assault upon quietness of the spirit. Children as well as adults need to spend periods in a non-communicative and non-competitive atmosphere. I am opposed to all those camps and summer resorts set up to keep the child engaged in a continuous round of play activities, give the body all it wants, and pretend that an inner life doesn’t exist.
At Bark Point, our children can learn something first hand about the earth, the sky, the water. They plant and watch things grow, build and watch things form. There is no schedule and no routine, but every day is a busy day, filled with natural activities that spring from inward urgings, and the play they engage in is something indigenous to themselves.
Before the lamprey eels decimated the Lake trout, most of the men in the Bark Point area fished for a living. Years ago, I was told, Bark Point boasted a school, a town hall, a general store, even a post office. But now commercial fishing is almost at an end—the fine Lake Superior trout and whitefish are too scarce. So the bustle of the once thriving fishing village is gone, along with the anxious watch by those on shore when a storm comes up. No need for concern now. Let it blow. No one is fishing.
Almost no one. But the few remain—marvelous, jolly fellows, rich with earthy humor, strong, dependable, completely individualistic. Every other morning they take their boats far out in the lake and lift the Pon Nets. It is dangerous work, and thrilling, too, when from two to three hundred pounds of whitefish and trout are caught in one haul.
Nearly everyone is related and most of the children have the same blue eyes and straw hair. But the children grow up and discover there is nothing for them to do. Fishing is finished, and about all that is left is to cut pulp in the woods or become a handy man around one of the towns. Farming is difficult. The season is so very short and considerable capital is required to go into farming on any large scale. Nobody has this kind of money.
Then, too, the old folk were beginning to hear for the first time a new theme: the work is too hard. For a time, this filled them with consternation. But they recognized the sign of the times and even came to accept it. The young people no longer were interested in working fifteen and sixteen hours a day as their fathers had. They left their homes and went to Superior or Duluth or St. Paul or much farther. The few that remained stayed out of sheer bullheadedness or innate wisdom. It was an almost deserted place when I found it, and it has remained so all these years.
Those who stayed became my friends and their world is one I am proud and grateful to have entered. I have played cribbage and horseshoes with them, gone with them on picnics and outings, fished all day and sometimes late at night. We have eaten, played, and worked together, but most important to me has been listening to them talk. Their conversation is direct, searching, and terribly honest. Many of their questions bring pain, they strike so keenly upon the wrongs in our world. I am used to answering complicated questions—theirs possess the simplicity that comes directly from the heart. Those are the unanswerable questions.
I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs help in bringing in his hay.
In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing seventy, steelheads by the droves. And behind all of this lies the constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled with, never taken for granted.
The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-song voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the household, too, including the fine boats.
Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.
The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets, automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first, the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”
When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves. Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.
The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is, “I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem, work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess at Bark Point.
A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay. There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log. “Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.
When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked easy, but it required an almost occult knowledge of weights and forces to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat. Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human back.
The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his thought to fit the situation.
Matt is slight of build and the eyes behind his spectacles are sparkling blue. When he first got the glasses, they were not fitted to his satisfaction, so he improved them by grinding the lenses himself. He reminds me in many ways of my own father, who had a bit of Matt’s genius and versatility. When I see Matt work, I seem to see my father again... building, planning, dreaming, trying to make something out of nothing.
Ervin owns the general store in Herbster. Every week he drives his truck to Duluth for supplies, carrying with him a frayed, pocket-sized notebook in which he has written down everything people have asked for. Once I had a chance to look through this notebook which Ervin treasures with his life. Only Ervin could possibly know what was written in it.
Ervin’s capacity for eating is marvelous to behold. While the children stare at him in petrified wonder, he will put together a sandwich of cheese, sausage, fish, butter, meat balls, even strips of raw meat. His capacity for work is equally limitless. He is a powerful man and can wrestle with bags of cement all day long. But he cannot catch fish! At least that is his story and his claim to fame in the area: never to have caught a fish that amounted to anything. I don’t believe a word of it.
Ervin fights many of the same business battles I have fought with no capital and extended credit. He worries about it, but the odds are a challenge to him. You cannot long endure at Bark Point unless you are capable of meeting challenges.
In addition to his appalling eating habits, Ervin chews tobacco and is a horrifying master of the art. He showed our boys the full range of techniques employed for spitting out of a fast-moving truck, and they thought it was wonderful. But he has also taught them all about the bears and deer and foxes and wolves and other wild life that abound in our forest. He helped me with the plans for our house, with the boat, with the art of reading a compass, and with the geography of the myriad lakes and streams hidden throughout the area. Ervin knows everything and says very little. He is easy to be with, and a solid friendship based upon mutual respect has grown between us.
When spring begins to come, something that has been kept buried in our winter hearts can no longer be suppressed. The children start saying, “We’ll be leaving for Bark Point soon, won’t we?” One spring day when the children were on vacation from school, I packed the boys into the car and we set out for an early visit to our spiritual home. The day of our arrival was clear and beautiful. The ice had gone out of the Bay and clumps of snow remained only here and there. New grass was coming up from the steaming earth. There were pink-flecked clouds in the sky and a glorious smell everywhere that filled us both with peace and exhilaration.
But early the next morning it began to snow, coming down so thick and fast it was a sight to behold. My exclusively summer experience of the North Country warned me of nothing. We delighted in the snowy wonderland seen from the snugness of the house, and bundled up in heavy clothes and boots to go out and revel in it.
It snowed all through the night. On the following morning, it seemed to be coming on stronger than ever. I phoned Ervin—fortunately the telephone lines were still working. He thought the snow might stop by evening.
“How are your supplies?” he said.
“Still o.k.,” I said.
“What about fuel?”
“Waino gave me a supply of wood and brickettes for the stove yesterday.”
“Have you got enough?”
“Yes—so far.”
“Good. As soon as it stops, I’ll be up with the truck.”
But the snow did not stop. The following day it lay ten feet high and was still coming.
Ervin called again. “The roads are closed,” he said. “I can’t get to you. Can you hold out?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m starting to cut up the furniture for the stove and I’m worried about the children.”
“I’ll come up the minute I can get there,” he said, “but I can’t do nothing about it yet.”
It snowed for three days and three nights without a letup. I tried to keep awake, dozing in a chair, never daring to let the fire go out. We had long since run out of fuel oil, but luckily we had the wood-burning cook stove. I broke up two tables, all the chairs, and was ruefully contemplating the wooden dresser. The phone had gone dead and we were completely isolated.
It was night, the snow was up to the windows and it was still coming on—a dark world shot with white flecks dancing and swirling. The whole thing seemed completely impossible. But it was happening and there was nothing to do but wait it out.
We had no milk, but there was water and a small supply of tea and coffee. There was flour, too, and we made bread... bread without yeast or salt. It tasted terrible, but we ate it and laughed about it. I read or played cribbage with the boys. They played with their fishing reels, oiled them, took them apart, put them back together, took them apart again. We waited.
The morning the snow stopped we were greeted by bright sunlight hot on the window panes. Everyone jumped up and down and yelled, “Yay!”
But how to get out of the house? We were snowed in completely.
About noon, Ervin called. The lines were fixed and Bill Lloma was working like crazy with his tractor opening the Bark Bay Road. Everyone had been alerted to our plight and help would be on the way.
Several more hours passed. We were without food or fuel, and I still hated the idea of chopping up that dresser. Then all at once our savior was in sight: Ervin in his truck, way down the main road and still unable to get anywhere near our driveway.
There was no restraining the children in their excitement. The yelling and shouting was enough to waken the dead. I found myself laughing and yelling, too, and waving madly to Ervin. We were all behaving as though we were going to a picnic instead of getting out of a frightful jam.
Finally Bill came lumbering up the road with his snow plow and in fifteen minutes cut a huge pathway to the house. We came out and danced around Ervin’s truck as it backed slowly into the driveway.
“Where’s your car?” Ervin asked.
We had to look around—it was completely buried. I had even forgotten I had it. Working together, we cleared the snow away. I tried starting the motor, but nothing happened. Ervin attached a chain to the car and pulled it up the road. This time the motor turned over, but so suddenly (and my reflexes were so slow) that, before I knew it, the car had swerved off the wet road into a ditch. I was fit to be tied.
Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour. Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best party I ever had.
When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.
At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety. David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy, Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan, the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage carrier.
But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter, also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing pressures drop farther and farther behind us.
Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he says, he’ll move to Canada.
Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation, away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never surrender.