Wannaskan Almanac

Chapter 5:  The Cleansing The realization hit Elias with the force of a physical blow. Humans had messed it all up. The altered world was a testament to that fact, a stark and undeniable truth written in the absence of concrete and steel. The vibrant wilderness that had reclaimed Maine was beautiful, yes, but it was also a graveyard of human ambition. The more Elias explored, the more evidence he found of humanity's destructive touch. He walked through forests that had once been scarred by logging, the trees now standing tall and proud, their roots entwined in the earth where factories had once stood. He saw rivers that flowed clear and clean, no longer choked with the runoff of farms and cities. He found meadows teeming with life, where shopping malls and parking lots had once sprawled. Everywhere he looked, he saw the scars of a world that had been wounded, poisoned, and ultimately, transformed. And with every step, the conviction grew stronger within him: he had to use the song....

Hats off to Chairman Joe for building his 12-by-8-foot Cabinet in the woods 347 steps away from it all. Let's hear it for deliberation! I was on a ride with my siblings the other day in eastern Massachusetts, and on our way to Concord to visit our parents' grave, we drove past Walden Pond. It was early afternoon, and rangers were directing visitors to move on because the park had reached capacity for the day. How ironic, I thought to myself. Thoreau's solitary horizon, bounded by woods all to [himself], has become a mecca for mankind's games and amusements . The board and baton nobility of Joe's place - all set off to the side of life's creek - appeals to that part of me that loves respites from life's noise and distractions. Don't we all crave a little alone time?  Although Thoreau had one chair for solitude in his house, he also hosted what he described as a three-chaired society and entertained up to thirty souls at a time at Walden (albeit all standi...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Number 30 Man Gets Scare at Beauty Shop Joe McDonnell, 78 and residing in Palmville Twp, Minnesota, thought his beautician was putting down her scissors for good. “It’s taken me years to find a beautician who makes me look good and who also appears to be interested in my blather,” McDonnell tells the press. “A few months ago my beautician won a large amount of money at the casino and I was worried she wouldn’t need to work anymore. It’s been six months now and she’s still at work. When I hinted about her big win she said she used her winnings to take a trip with her husband, throw a party for her friends, and then divided the rest between her kids and Uncle Sam.” Man Gets New Spider Tool Joe McDonnell, 78 and a fan of spiders, recently removed the card that said “Please lift handle after flushing”, from the top of the toilet after the installation of a new toilet. “The card was redundant,” McDonnell tells reporters, "but I was able to recycle it as p...

Hello and welcome to a peaceful, pretty content Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is August 23rd. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.  She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.  As summer winds down to Ordinary Time (what I call the season from September to May), the oldest kids have all landed at our house on a brief layover before life resumes. "How did we manage to fit eight 10-year-old boys into our living room for a sleepover?" I mused aloud last night, as our family of seven gathered in the exact same space. "Because they were small boy bodies," the Oldest answered. And she's right. With the growing up of the first group of progeny we call Kids 1.0, comes their full adult-size bodies. And not just their bodies, but their thoughts and feelings, which all seem so much larger than when they were home living under our roof.  And the living room feels small. 1 - 2- 3 easy chairs, I count around the room. The 1 -2 - 3 spaces o...

     Doors can be tricky I've heard. Carpenters often buy doors already framed and trimmed and they just pop them into an opening and use shims to get everything square. A good carpenter is practiced at covering up his mistakes. That's why you see so much trim in the average house.   Our cabin in the woods is ready for a door. We call the cabin the Cabinet because it's only 12' by 8', about two thirds the size of Thoreau's cabin. Thoreau built his cabin in the woods near Concord, Mass. and stayed there for two years in order to live deliberately. People are always building little hermitages away from it all for similar purposes. The poet Yeats built a cabin where peace comes dropping slow among the beans and the bees.    I could certainly figure out how to hang the old door we had in the opening on the east side of the cabin. But it would take much trial and error and a return to the lumber yard after I cut things the wrong way. Our friend Joe Stenzel has h...

    I'm among the smallest acreage landowners in Palmville. Our quarter of land is given over to trees, meadows, and wetlands as are about 17, 538 other acres scattered throughout the township, a majority of it being State Land or Red Lake Tribal land. The balance of 5500 or so other acres are open farm fields. The big land tracts are maintained using big equipment. The little land tracts are maintained using tractors, smaller than my little 53.8 hp Massey-Ferguson 180 Diesel, that would even include rider mowers and equipment pulled by ATVs.  A neighbor called our tractor 'a pony' compared to the hundreds of horses under the hood of any one of his big tractors he and his family use for their farm work.      Gone are the DIY tractor-fixing days for the big landowners. If their tractor or equipment breaks down they have to call in a factory representative to fix even the smallest of problems excluding the driver's need for lunch at mid-day when like...