JUNE 29, 2024 – This weekend my wife and I are preparing the Red Cabin and yard for a boatload of company next weekend. Our goal for the grounds is modest, however: when our guests pull up after their journey’s last leg—a long, winding, two-track dirt drive through a veritable jungle—we don’t want them to think they’re on a build-your-own-lean-to wilderness camping trip.
Fed by abnormal amounts of rainfall in this neck of the woods, the vegetation this season has flourished. All the rain has been great for the thousands of Norway and white pine in the “tree garden,” but when it comes to a semi-tidy yard, the abundant moisture has worked against such a concept. Yard and gardens have been overwhelmed by over-enthusiastic weeds, ferns, vines, day lilies, and whole villages of wild daisies. Unless we had engaged in hand-to-hand combat against this green invasion, our guests would need scythes and machetes to find their way from car to cabin.
As we applied sweat and strain to our project, I felt like an earnest Lilliputian giving an unwilling Brobdingnag a haircut. Yank, grab, snip, cut, clip . . . With a vengeance and a battery of tools, we went after the overgrowth. After a long break we raked, gathered, and transported the green intrusion across the border between yard and woods. There was nothing kind, gentle, or refined about our methods. We used the lawnmower, an old weed-whacker, rachet-clippers, tough gloves, a rake, a shovel, and a banged-up wheelbarrow.
We could apply plenty of tough love, because the “look” of our cabin yard has always been—“rakishly bucolic,” let’s say. There’s enough “country grass” to mow, but it would never be confused with a sod farm or golf green. In the first place, the area itself is modest. That’s because the surrounding woods, like a vast dense encampment of Roman legionaries, are within a few feet of either side of the cabin and a few meters behind. The lakeshore, guarded by several generals and their retinue, is only 75 feet in front of our dwelling. Second, from the inception of the Red Cabin (1995), we wanted to foster a rustic appearance. To our way of thinking, manicured shrubs and a dense green fertilized lawn are wholly out of place in the Northwoods and antithetical to our regard for the environment. Besides, what is the point of escaping the city if you take it with you?
As I worked against nature so that before day’s end I could enjoy nature, I pondered humankind’s love-hate relationship with the natural world. Ever since we dropped out of the trees, we’ve wanted to chop them down and pillage the earth. Our conquest has been so successful, we’ve managed to alter the planet’s (natural) cycle of climate change and alienate ourselves from the very things that sustain us.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love nature. If the giant redwoods are my Vatican, the woods of Björnholm adjacent to the Red Cabin are my local parish, where I worship regularly among long familiar trees, young and old; where I celebrate the latest arrivals and mourn the ones departed; where the choir of the birds makes me smile and the loon’s tremolo makes my day; where celestial lights remind me that I’m part of something bigger than what my species can ever know or imagine.
But today as I grappled with nature, yanking, grabbing, pulling, cutting, clipping, hauling, and tossing, I felt surges of contempt. Damn vine, whose subsurface insidious crawl runs unnoticed between a place of hiding to a place of dominance—you’re like the snake of Eden, except . . . What’s this? Another . . . and another? Oh, no! You’re the Hydra of the garden!
And you lilies! You think you’re favored with your fresh orange faces, but no! Once you start to propagate you know no limits, and unlike the cooperative weeds with their shallow roots, you lilies anchor yourselves to the bedrock. What’s with that? Off with your heads!
Only the wild daisies won exemption from my slashing, cutting, mowing. I pretended they were parks and preserves, to be forever safe from the bulldozers and excavators (and lawnmowers) of human progress.
By the time our yard and gardens were looking trim and tidy, I felt the twinge of worry. In witnessing my frenetic behavior did my friends, the trees of my church, now question my love for them?
I need not have worried. Nature would get me back, and I’m convinced that it was the trees who passed on the message. But in “fixing my wagon,” my arboreal friends revealed their sense of humor. It went down this way . . .
For a change of pace I attended to another project, a whimsical one: posting a rustic sign—an extra I’d made several years ago to post at an entrance to the tree garden. Earlier I’d thought of making a new sign, “PORT OF BJÖRNHOLM” and posting it on the bank by our pontoon boat landing. When I came across the ready-made sign, “BJÖRNHOLM TRÄGÅRD,”[1] I decided to save myself the trouble of making the “PORT” sign.
Gathering tools and materials, I whistled my way the short distance down the path to the site. A few minutes into the project, I had to put down my tape measure, hammer, and gloves. The most convenient place was on the bow deck of the pontoon, raised up on its lift. I was aware of the periodic gusts and how one might catch my gloves and blow them into the drink. My brain told me to weight them down with the hammer and tape measure. Smart brain, I thought . . . JUST AS a gust caught the back of my cap-with-sun-flaps and blew it into the drink.
The water, taking its cue from the prankish wind, floated the cap quickly along the stony shore and beyond reach of the dock. My brain—feeling a bit sheepish for having thought about my gloves but not my cap—suggested that I quick lower the pontoon, not to use the vessel to retrieve the cap, but to gain access to the paddle on board. Not such a smart brain: by now another gust had pushed the cap too far for the paddle to be of any use. I told my brain I’d figure out something smarter: the long stick by the tree at the top of the stairs.
I rushed up the staircase, grabbed the stick, then stepped onto the steep bank next to the staircase to gain access to the water. “Not so fast,” said a branch of a tree, as it slapped me on the forehead and snickered (I’m sure I heard it do so). I tried again, ducking under the branch, but a poplar sprig caught a fold in my nylon pants and threatened to rip them. I stepped away, then tested the footing just above a stone sticking out of the bank. A frame into the future showed me sliding all the way down to the lake. I quickly retreated—but the branch that had struck me on my forehead, now poked me in the butt. I maneuvered more, now to see where the cap had gone, but it was nowhere to be seen.
I pulled myself to the top of the bank and descended the stairs to the dock for a better view of the shore—and my cap. Soaked and shining in the sun, it had washed up on a large stone likewise wet, glistening, and exactly the same shade of grey as the cap. But the “cap-stone” was nearly inaccessible from the bank.
I was down to two options: 1. Remove my shoes and pants (or not), get into the water, and slip and slide over several meters of wave washed stones to retrieve the cap; or 2. Get a long pole with a narrow end to work the cap off the stone and recover the headwear.
By this time, I could hear roaring laughter among the crowd on the bank—an oak, an ash, a birch, a Norway, a crowd of white pine, the poplar sprig, carpets of moss, colonies of lichen, a medley of plants and grasses holding onto the slope—not to mention the stones, the wind and the water. The laughter traveled in both directions along the shore and far back into the woods. All of nature, it seemed, was enjoying a riot of hilarity at my expense.
Just then my brain kicked in and asked, “Remember the 16-foot pole you used as a measurement rod when you installed the dock?” I was nearly as quick as my brain. Not only did I remember having used the pole, but I remembered exactly where I’d left it—resting on the lower branches of the pines not far from the top of the staircase. I pulled it out, then scrambled down among the laughing vegetation. This time they allowed me to pass without incident. Their point had been made—in the end, nature rules; always—and though they’d seen fit to play a joke, they saw no need to punish. After all, hadn’t I been an otherwise honorable and contributing member of their congregation?
But just in case swimmer’s itch hadn’t gotten the memo—that the cap mishap was to be a harmless prank—I decided to let the cap dry before restoring it to my pate.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
