Thursday, September 19, 2019 by WannaskaWriter

 

I’ve been driving tractor for the neighbor who lives south of me. Our families are old friends, dating back to 1897, just after Roseau County became a Minnesota county in 1895; this, after its split from Kittson County, which was established in 1878.
 
The neighbor is eight years younger than I am; I knew his parents and his grandparents. It was his great-grandparents who homesteaded here in 1897, as it was my great grandparents who homesteaded here in 1895 and for whom Palmville township is named. 

Coincidentally, the neighbor's brother-in-law's great grandmother homesteaded land in Palmville too. Here is an image of her family's steam engine set up to cut firewood.

 
 The neighbor had been told many stories about our township, some of which I am familiar too, and so it was he told me of a road or trail that ran along the field edge above Mikinaak Creek where we were standing, indicating where there had been little bridges across coolies or bends in the creek basin, pointing north to my farm, as he did.
 
“Grandpa showed me where the bridge was; I looked for remnants of it a few years ago, but it’s all rotted away. There’s a culvert in the ditch off your road, have you seen it? There was probably a bridge there too, but I don’t know.”
 
“I know of it. I think the road went straight north from here, sort of up our farm lane to where there’s a cutout in swale there, down through a low place; although I never heard tell of a bridge being there; then it went up toward the cemetery, along its west side and continued north from there along the east side of fence line, north across what is now County Road 8, and east of where Arnie Beito used to live, angling toward Wannaska,” I said.
 
The neighbor told of how beaver hundreds of years earlier, as he was told, had dams along the creeks and low places that flooded “as far as the county road there,” he said, pointing west of where we stood. 

“Grandpa told of old ancient dams eight feet tall. The beaver would build and build until they ran out of trees, then they’d move out and come back after 15 years or so.”
 
“And so they’re still doing it,” I said, referring to the high water in the creek below us, a matter of less importance now than when the neighbor used to pasture the creek basin and high water impacted its availability to his cattle. “I’ve wondered what our ancestors would think if they knew, little had really changed along the creek and river here after 124 years.”
 

A few days earlier when I was in a four-wheel-drive tractor that sat high on eight wheels, I had the opportunity to see my farm from a different southerly perspective. It intrigued me to see the place, that I’ve photographed so regularly throughout every season, from a new view, common to what the neighbors had been viewing for all of their lives. It was beautiful.
 

It was beautiful if only because of the trees we’ve planted the last 45 years--and yes, I know I’ve written about them before, but they are forever interesting to me--if no one else, for they are like my children, each a marvel in their own right, no matter their height, weight, girth or posture; I praise them all for their efforts to survive my ignorance as my planting experience improved over time. As with all matters of life, some live, some die; and others reproduce when others don’t; they’re all beautiful to me.
 
The neighbor’s son offered an explanation to my question as to why some other neighbors don’t care for me much (other than me being butt-ugly) and said it was because I chose not to farm it or plant it to crops such as small grains; that I instead planted it to trees and a varied lot of them to boot.
 
But I had heard that before over the past 48 years that the farm has been in my name; and I thought of those people who had been set on purchasing it before I did in the very early 1970s, when farming here was great; one who said he would’ve cleared the land of every tree, fenceline and building all the way to the creek; and I think my uncle suspicioned that, knowing I would not, knowing how I felt about his farm since I was very young.
 
Is it lake front property? 
‘No,’ but according to Google maps it is.
 
Is it wilderness? 
‘Not as much as I would like, but close enough.’
 
Can we see wild Minnesota animals of many shapes and descriptions? 
‘Oh yeah, day and night.’
 
Like I wrote above, the neighbor’s field offered me a different perspective, and that being a quarter section of timbered land gloved by tall deciduous and white spruce trees on three sides, with a little one-room schoolhouse in one corner and a cemetery in the diagonally opposite corner. Some of the trees in the middle look small in comparison, but change the lay of the land perceptibly, especially at ground level when I walk among them. There are places, even in these young stages, that they grow together as in a maze and alter my sense of direction (although I conceive I’m old now and it’s likely to happen)
 

It’s perfect habitat for predator and prey alike; and birds like sharptail and ruffed grouse--and in time, turkeys too, I reckon. There have been pheasants every few years when the neighbors who raise them, release them. I’ve been seeing wolf and bear tracks of late. I never know what I’ll see, especially if I pay attention to the direction of my scent on the wind.
 
So when yet other neighbors commend me for my tree planting efforts,
“I wish I would’ve planted trees like you have done, instead of renting my land out for pasture or hay these many years,” I’ve heard the older ones say, I feel vindicated, even when it didn’t make me popular with everybody.
 
One more thing before, I sign off for the week, and it’s the adage that it’s disrespectful to another’s memory, for example your grand or great grandparents who labored so hard to open the land to farm it, when much of northwestern Minnesota land wasn’t fit for farming to begin with and was better suited to grow trees unless a great deal of money was utilized to drain swamps and ditching to provide roads into land holdings.  A lot of opened land was ‘open’ because the government had laid waste to its natural resources after exploiting it for all its furs, wildlife, and in some cases, minerals or aggregates, with no regard for its resupplement or renewal; and later on even put into the Soil Bank program (or CRP, as it was first introduced in 1954) to take it out of production and allowed to grow back into trees.
 
Grandma and grandpa fought a losing battle, getting old fast, and dying prematurely from struggling against the hardships of Minnesota winters and seasonal challenges. In many cases; the children all moved away anyway to get jobs and live

in a city someplace far from the farm. No one wanted to work so hard anymore for so little in return. So why would planting trees when you’re young, be such a bad thing to do, if the land could be enjoyed as a living breathing legacy to them--and yourself?
 
Don’t listen to the naysayers, stick some trees in the ground before the year is out.
 
Do it today for tomorrow and enjoy them into your old age.