The Wannaskan Almanac for Thor’s Day, July 12, 2018 By Wannaskawriter

My wife and I just returned from a road trip to Wisconsin. Don’t hold that against me. We were just visiting family.

I have to admit that Wisconsin, at least the part we were in, is relatively beautiful. That being said, there are also a good many more people across the landscape there even if you can’t see them, versus our less inhabited part of NW Minnesota, a fact overlooked by those people who tend to compare the two states and prefer Wisconsin (for reasons that defy rational explanation), but I get it, sort of.

These are people who can’t live without that constant interplay of other people on a daily basis, which, sort of, underlines the difference between me and all my other wives, who tended to like those exact same things. It’s not like I’m a hermit, been there, done that. For instance, “The Last Alaskans” shows that have been on TV as of late, are but versions of me in a previous life.

One guy lamented the loss of his ability to fly a plane into the bush because he had to accept he had gotten too old and made mistakes--while flying--when he shouldn’t have. It’s exactly why I didn’t learn to fly at all, except as a passenger, because knowing myself as I do, if I’d been a pilot, I would’ve clipped the wrong tree once too often, saw the face of a mountain just a little too late, been a little too low to the ground to pull up in time more than once.

Being a bush pilot would’ve been my demise, for sure. I was a lot safer on the ground. So far, I’ve survived my occasional errors, (Knock on wood.) and lived to tell the tale. (Don’t get me started.) I just know I wouldn’t have been so lucky in the air.

Just tonight, the wife and I were talking about her boys liking to hunt deer up here, and what they might or might not do, after I die. 

She thought they might just hunt nearer where they live: Saint Cloud, Albertville, and NW Wisconsin instead of driving all the way to the middle of nowhere in Roseau County. And I get that. It’s a long way up here. It’s a road trip of between seven and five hours for any one of them, but it brings to mind, a story my cousin Gene, told me just a couple weeks ago, about when he decided to stop hunting in the beautiful wooded country of Aurora, Minnesota, on the Iron Range.

He said he used to travel a good distance away from Aurora, and that he’d hike into his deer range, on foot, a mile or so off the road, and that he’d scout out a particular area and find where the deer were moving. He said he put a deer stand up in a tree. That he used ropes and had made himself an excellent hidey spot that he could sit in comfortably all day long, high among the boughs.

So come opening morning, he had left the house ‘way before dawn when it was still dark, and he had walked into the bush there and climbed into his tree stand and had settled down where he knew he ought to be--and as daylight came on, he could begin to make out spots of florescent orange all around him, those of other hunters sitting in their deer stands.

He climbed down, totally depressed, and walked back to his truck. He never hunted near Aurora again. He came home to Wannaska to hunt.

I think the boys will run into similar circumstances as the cities of  Saint Cloud, Albertville, and those in NW Wisconsin expand. They work and live there now, but so do thousands of other people, other hunters, other campers, and tourists, and very soon the competition for land usage will be intense.

I think, for as long as they enjoy hunting together, or alone, one of them will hunt here. It’s all about being on the land, doing what they’ve done all their lives. It’s not about bagging the biggest buck, but moreso about making memories that they can savor long into their old age. It’s about ‘writing forever stories’ that are repeated.

I hate, even now, the sounds of traffic on the county road that runs past our place a half mile away. During deer season, especially opening weekend, it sounds like we’re hunting in a city park. It’s so annoying! But most of the time, it’s quiet, with only the wind through the trees--and an occasional ‘shot’ in the distance. 

Hunting ‘way up here, in the middle of nowhere, where there aren’t a lot of people, is about telling me or gramma today, that they ate the last vension tenderloin for breakfast they had yesterday morning, and how good it tasted in Saint Cloud, Albertville, or NW Wisconsin.

It’s worth the drive. Any time of year.
You want socialization? Go camping. Go to a resort.
You wanna get away from it all?
Drive north to the woods.
Don’t fly.