A little snow at times, accumulating a coating to an inch
Chance for more than 3 inches: 17%
Chance for less than 1 inches: 29%
Winds from the
SSW 7 mph
Gusts: 10 mph
Max UV Index: 0 (Low)
Thunderstorms: 0%
Precipitation: 0.06 in
Rain: 0 in
Snow: 0.8 in
Ice: 0 in
Hours of Precipitation: 7 hrs
Hours of Rain: 0 hrs
An assortment of data on or about November 29:
1803 - U.S.A. -- The Louisiana Purchase
Louisiana which was much larger than just Louisiana and included all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, plus part of what are now Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana. It was bought from France in 1803 for a total cost of 15 million dollars. Native people receive endless grief.
1963 - UK -- The Beatles "I Want to Hold Your Hand,"
The Beatles release "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which knocked the other Beatles hit ( "She Loves You" ) off the number one slot giving The Beatles the Number One and Number Two on the UK Yoko Charts. Unknown to many, this inspires John and Yoko Ono’s hit, “Satire of Prejudice.”
“Bagism is a satire of prejudice, where by living in a bag a person could not be judged on their bodily appearance. Bagism was created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono as part of their extensive peace campaign in the late 1960s.
The intent of bagism was to satirize prejudice and stereotyping. Bagism involved literally wearing a bag over one's entire body. According to John and Yoko, by living in a bag, a person could not be judged by others on the basis of skin colour, gender, hair length, attire, age, or any other such attributes. It was presented as a form of total communication: instead of focusing on outward appearance, the listener would hear only the bagist's message.”
1973 - U.S.A. -- Chrysler Closes Plants
Chrysler joins other US car makers in closing a number of plants affecting 38,000 workers and announced it was changing the focus to manufacturing smaller more efficient cars to combat the Japanese imports. General Motors had made similar cuts 1 week before, planning on further plant closures later in 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gm-layoffs-and-plant-shutdowns-suggest-us-economy-may-be-starting-to-slow--and-dent-trumps-claim-of-an-industrial-renaissance/2018/11/26/39533566-f1ba-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bf751c7264e8
2007 - European Union: stricter rules for gun ownership
The European Parliament has voted to tighten laws on obtaining and possessing firearms. The age at which a firearm can be bought or owned will be raised to 18, unless it is for hunting or target shooting under adult supervision. This is a severe blow to underage mass murderers and budding serial killers, limiting their weapon choices to just knives and clubs. Law enforcement agencies anticipate an uptick of those weapons purchases in light of the new law.
2010- European Union: stricter rules for knife and clubs
The European Parliament has voted to tighten laws on obtaining and possessing knives and clubs. The age at which a knife or club can be bought or owned will be raised to 21, unless it is for hunting small bunnies, squirrels or rats under strict adult supervision. This is a severe blow to underage mass murderers and budding serial killers, limiting their weapon choices now to just barehands and shoeless feet. Law enforcement agencies anticipate an uptick of martial arts businesses.
2011-Norway: Killer Anders Behring Breivik Declared Insane
Anders Breivik, the mass killer who killed 77 people and injured another 151 on July 22nd, was diagnosed as insane by psychiatrists. They stated that he had been suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia during his attacks in Norway. The diagnosis means that he will likely be placed in a psychiatric care facility rather than prison when his is tried in April. He was found guilty of murdering 77 people and is sentenced to 21 years in a Norwegian ‘prison’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
Born November 29:
C. S. Lewis
Died: November 22nd, 1963 Oxford, England
Known For :
A well known writer who amongst other books wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia" . He was also a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien who wrote the "The Lord of the Rings". In his early years he was a great reader of anything Norse, Greek and Irish mythology which does come out in the "The Chronicles of Narnia" books. In his early years he was an atheist who converted back to Christianity, in the seven fantasy novels which make up "The Chronicles of Narnia" for children his faith and Christian ideas are presented in a way that is entertaining as well as showcasing his faith. Although he is primarly known as a writer he was also a member of the English Faculty and a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge.
Jacques Chirac
Born: 29th November 1932 Paris, France
Known For : Jacques Chirac former French President who served France as president for 12 years from 1995 - 2007. He is also a former Prime Minister of France who served from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988. He is 6’ 2”.
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| The truck we take to 'The Big woods' |
We arrange a meeting time at the meeting place, often just before dark, in a big woods so dense and spooky that ancient old trees so completely block out the stars in places that the denizens of the forest floor have adapted fireflies to guide them along unseen paths to light.
In the winter, snow covered animal trails illuminated by the moon resemble veins through magnetic sesonance angiograms, so we prefer to use the road method through the place than stumble around in the dark where cellphone or GPS are useless and no amount of calling for help, groaning, screaming in terror, or whimpering will aid your natural shortcomings as an unprepared human being traversing ‘the big woods’--unless of course you know where you are going, live there, or have a well-drawn map and in addition recognize the landmarks called out on it such as: “Big tree struck by lightning in 1908”, “High water mark of Great Flood 2002”, “Big buck shot here in 1978”, “Rock”, “Ernie’s Urine Spot” and so on.
A state road map is absolutely no good in The Big Woods except as a fire starter, (birch bark [See above] being the best--even when wet) in the spot where you should stay, (keeping it burning the whole night through), so search parties can locate you. If you’re lost already, don’t make things worse by trying to find your way out. Just stay put. Keep active by gathering firewood, always keeping your firelight in sight.
Another thing, FYI, if you're lost and walking around, don’t remove your warmer clothes in the fall of the year, it gets colder there at night. Nor should you remove your clothes anytime in ‘The Big Woods’ -- because 1.) In the fall, you’re not as warm as you think you are (you might be in shock) and 2.) in the spring/summer months, voracious biting insects will drive you literally mad/crazy, so it’s imperative that you should keep as much of your skin covered as possible.
Yet, despite our combined, innate woodsmen-lore knowing stuff, (having lived up here in True North Minnesota for as long as we have), we’ve begun missing the turn-off to this deer shack the first trip through the forest, having never been as old as we are now, before. Had we been used to being old, we would accept our shortcomings, and slow down even slower so we don’t end up in Warroad again, as we have a time or two, realizing only then that was Bemis Hill Campground we had passed and not just some ATV trail to D & G Service! ARGH! So maybe it’s best if we begin driving only during daylight hours to find this place.
Maybe starting next year.
Warroad looked the same. I used the toilet at the new Cenex Station there. Nice place, but it has those jet-engine-powered hand-dryers that will blow your wedding ring off your hand if you’re not careful--or one of your fingers--just ask Joe. Besides, who has time to wait for all that nonsense? I just wipe my hands off on my jeans and out the door I go. This standing around with both my arms stuck out to get the skin peeled off my hands is just plain stupid. Geesus man, there’s fish to catch and deer camps to find ... er, visit.
“Yah, I t’ink dat is da road, eh?” I said, lookin’ at Joe and him lookin’ back at me, almost asleep because of the sometimes exhaust leak. “Mebbe I shud back da truck up an’ we take dat trail ...”
Not waitin’ for him to decide, I backed the truck up, then made the turn down the steep old single-lane cow path with all its crankety ups and downs and half-buried logs across its face, the bright headlights careening at angles ‘way up into the pines and down into the moss all around the cut tree stumps just a leering at us as we eased past. The truck’s wornout ball joints make gawking/ wheeching noises like they haven’t been used for fifty years, then are forced to move under great duress.
A big pile of fresh-cut firewood in a clearing, stared at us as though pleading for rescue, and we knew in an instant it wasn’t the right deer camp for nary a character of our camp would ever belabor themselves so during deer season. It just wasn’t done. Deer season is leisure season, a nice quiet time in the big woods with your longtime hunting buddies, not doing backbreaking labor with a tractor-powered buzz saw and a wedge and splitting maul.
With all the snow around it packed down and sawdust ground-in, quite obviously it was the wrong place Joe agreed, his face a great orange bearded pumpkin under the domelight. So I backed the truck and all its complaint back to the forest road and pointed the truck downstream toward where we might ought to go.
“Nay man, we’ve been dat way oncet,” said Joe, awakening from his stupor. A natural navigator, a man born of the sea in a faraway place, the saltwater all but coursing through his loins, Joe is just as at home in impassable, closed, barricaded, clogged, inaccessible, blocked, blockaded, obstructed, impenetrable, dammed, depthless, impervious, insurmountable, impossible, impregnable, invincible, unattainable, inconquerable, unseaworthy, shallow, unpassable, congested, jammed, plugged, stopped, stuffed, unnegotiable, unassailable, -- or choked waters as he is in the big woods, a lighthouse beacon in a desert of trees.
“Go back,” he motioned groggily toward the gnarly gauntlet we had just traversed. “It must be the right road ... for there is no other. Go beyond the woodpile, Grasshopper. Seek and ye shall find. And if we don’t, we’ll get the hell outa there. We have beer.”
Well, it was true. We couldn’t have watered a dogsled team but we had just enough beverage between us to please ourselves for the time it might take to find this deer camp and upon our arrival, if our luck held, they’d be willing to part with a can or two of their supply so we could see ourselves home by morning. If our way to the camp is vague, our way home is indelibly marked and/or arranged in either of our heads, that, even if it should occur roundabout, we’d get there, one or the other, before either of our wives has called the authorities to report us missing. Ah, that’d be tragic.
We may be “long overdue” for shure, but not missing. In this flat land country, delays between places aren’t uncommon, and are viewed with little concern until it’s reported that many ravens or crows circle one spot in particular. Then it is, they’d look for visages of smoke before they all run off willy nilly thinking something has gone wrong, for it’d just be one or the other of us awaiting a search party, don’t you know, and just cooking up some coffee in an old tin can from under the seat.
So I backs up past the same road again, and pulls in like I did before, easing my front wheels down the face of the ditch til they began climbing the other side, and my back wheels descending, slowly, the rusted old body twisting ‘tween cab and bed, one wheel angled over an obstruction, then another, then the next, the fourth following. Beer bottles tinkling, tools clattering, extra gasoline and antifreeze jugs sloshing beside two chainsaws secured in their short stalls against possible blowdowns somewhere deep in the big woods embrace.
Again we see the handsome woodpile, snow free and new atop a shallow mantle of snow, then farther ahead, a shack built of some real humility appears and we both smile in recognition and relief that we wouldn’t be shot at and have dogs sic’t on us --again-- for drivin’ into the wrong camp and disturbing some ritualistic ceremony or something equally private or confidential as happens innocently enough all too often back in the big woods after dark.
Used to be, a deep ditch like the one we had to drive into, especially water-filled in the spring of the year or filled with drifted snow, was enough to keep the riff-raff out, but now, thanks to the availability of ATVs, some deer camps have resorted to sophisticated security systems, high and low, year-around. Others implement logs with huge spikes protruding from them that swing from the tops of trees to slam and impale a trespasser’s vehicle making it unusable, until security forces or local law enforcement arrives, so we understandably breathe a great sigh of relief when we arrive at the right place all in one piece, the both of us.
Joe had gone into the shack and closed the door behind him, presumably to greet his relative’s relative. Or he could’ve just needed the exercise and fresh air after our one and a half hour foray looking for the place, just a short dozen miles from our homes. Carbon Monoxide’ll do that to you. The passenger side window doesn’t crank down very easily and getting it back up takes two people, so he tends to just pray we get where we’re going quickly, even though I burned out that gear from the transmission years ago.
That night, he was in long-play prayer mode every minute more it took to get where we were going. I told him I wouldn’t let him sleep too long, in case I'd see him slumping too far down on the seat. He’s such a joker sometimes, it’s hard to know if he just a funnin’ with me or not, but as I’ve come to learn, it’s hard to fake blue-lips.
One of the hunters was outdoors, scraping a deer hide with the hair down, the pink fleshy side up. He was taking all the inside fatty bits off with his edge of his skinning knife and tossing them over his shoulder into the woods for the birds and other critters to eat. Then he folded the outside edges inward to the middle, as though he was folding a tee-shirt on a laundry table, and then rolled it all up into a nice soft package which he carried to his truck.
I hadn’t seen this man for many years and wasn’t sure if he recognized me as he didn’t acknowledge us when we drove in, probably thinking we were lost and just stopped in to ask for directions, but I ventured a conversation, just to be friendly-like. Still, I hated to pry.
“You going to trade your hide in for gloves or a knife?” I queried, looking at him from over the bed of his truck. He didn’t answer immediately, then offered a “Huh?” in reply, as he closed the tailgate.
“You going to trade your hide in for gloves or a knife?” I repeated, speaking louder, thinking maybe I garbled my speech.
“Where would I do that? Trade this hide for gloves or a knife?” he answered, looking at me then as if he was trying to put a name to my face.
“At the Riverfront, “ I said, stepping away from his truck, and out of the shadows. “You can give them your deer hide and they’ll give you either a knife or a pair of deer hide gloves. It’s a “Hides for Habitat” thing.”
“The Riverfront?” he said. “ ... Where’s the Riverfront?”
“In Wannaska,” I said, unsure he wasn’t pulling my leg now. I recognized him as a local man who I hadn’t seen for many years. Maybe it’d had been a while since he’d been home.
“Wannaska? The Riverfront ... in Wannaska ...” he said, as though he was trying to recall it there. “How big does the hide have to be? Can I leave the head on?”
“Well, legal size, I’d think,” I answered, feeling more comfortable about our conversation. “And likely, they’d prefer the head removed, but ... just tell ‘em, you left a hide and had heard about the ‘gloves or knife thing. And if they still do it, take your pick--and if they don’t, well you still get rid of your hide.”
I went into the shack. The man followed a few minutes later.
Uffda, the place was too warm in just a few minutes, because I was dressed for the outdoors. All three of the boys were there, although they weren’t real boys in that sense. Most of them hovered closer to sixty than twenty, but all were younger than were are, so the quip was just friendly, not derogatory. One had been retired for a couple years. One, the relative of a relative of Joe’s, was exploring the possibility. One had worked at a place for forty years but wasn’t ready yet, age-wise. Heritage-wise, one was an Irishman, the others of Swede-Norwegian ancestry, as were we. We opened our first beer.
If just for the tradition of our yearly visit, they were all readers of the now-defunct locally published magazine titled THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History & Humor Journal, that Joe and I wrote and published for 24 years. The Irishman asked if we were still writing and Joe told him about the weekly Wannaskan Almanac with six writers in its stable, which led to a roundabout introduction of the five others, the sixth and seventh for Friday and Sunday, being Joe himself.
“Vell, vun is married to a Czech man and has dozens of children ... She wears red shoes and rides elevators all the way to the top, she says,” Joe said. “And she’s an author.”
“And anudder is Jerry Solom’s son-in-law, a school teacher there in Dodge City, Kansas--a real honest to goodness Jayhawker with a Canadian accent, I guess, ‘“eh?’” And he’s an author.”
“Den dere’s da people who live ... ‘’ hereabouts’, I’m thinkin’, “ Joe said, cranin’ his hairy gray neck in the approximate direction he thought those people might live, if he knew exactly where he was in the scheme of things in the shack. The transient man tipped his head to designate the direction Joe was meaning. “And both of dem are authors.”
The Irishman asked if Joe and I weren’t both authors, given our long time years behind the keyboard and such, conducting interviews and editing texts, so Joe presumed we are. We felt pretty good about that, so we had another beer.
Now I don’t want to be casting aspersions toward any of our associates there, especially Joe, my traveling companion a time or two over these past many years, so when I write, “So we had another beer,” I’m using ‘we’ as an identifier for ‘me’, as to say “ I had another beer.” In no way am I suggesting, Joe ever consumed an alcoholic beverage here-to-which may, or may not, have been beer. His consumption is not mine to publicize and I do well to state that distinction in a public venue such as this almanac. Or, I could be just a funnin’ you too. Who knows, who knows ...?
We ended up staying a bit longer than we intended, but did manage to wolf down some fresh tenderloin hot from the skillet, upon invitation. I ate a wonderfully good plate of spaghetti and meatballs too. Joe graciously declined, intending to get home in time to cook supper for his wife. ‘I’ had another beer to end the evening before we headed for home, far from The Big Woods.
The Big Woods is much more complex and harrowing than a Bottle Run.
ReplyDeleteA Bottle Run has its complexities. Harrows, too.
ReplyDeleteDose two yahoos in "Vaitin' fer Godot,"
ReplyDeleteDey vaited und dey vaited, but da yahoo never showed.
But me und Sven, ve tracked da bastard to his lair.
But sadly, o so sadly, da bastard vas not dere.