Thursday, June 4, 2020

                                            Soul Detergent
 
     My wife (and one other bold commenter) were somewhat appalled that I would air my dirty ‘laundry’ for the world to see; my laundry being the big mess I cleaned up during the months of April and May this year. I included several images of the before and after of my long-overdue clean-up project, a feat that involved ten trips to our county’s landfill, fifty-three miles away round-trip. See my blog post for last Thursday, May 28, 2020: http://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2020/05/thursday-may-28-2020.html.
 
     The other area I cleaned up wasn’t shown in the blog post. It lay along a dirt path leading out from the yard past three early 20th century agricultural relics: a steam-powered threshing machine, a horse-drawn haystacker, and a 1950s-era pull-type combine that are parked along an old fence line paralleling the path. Between the path and the fence line a second junk pile accumulation developed over time as tangled forms of rolled wire fencing that had deeply embedded itself into the ground, grown into tree trunks, and tree roots; as well as several old metal doors, a few windows, rumpled furnace ducts, etc, and a few black plastic garbage bags of stuff. The handyman jack was ‘handy’ for doing that job; as was the reciprocating saw, long-handled bolt cutters, and a shovel. 

     I could’ve continued to ignore it all the rest of my days. It wasn’t impacting me physically. It didn’t cost me anything financially, but it had affected me morally for I didn’t want my family, or anyone else to have to clean up my slovenly mess after I died; it just wasn’t acceptable to me anymore. (Now to start on my stuff inside the house.)
 
     There are few things we can accomplish in our lives as seeing a big project through to the end and enjoying the benefit of our labor for as long as we live. Living here, along Mikinaak Creek, has been one of my great life achievements. I hope I have moreso added to its environment than detracted from it; removing my dirty laundry from its surface this year being but one tiny part of the story, insurance toward our family's enjoyment and appreciation of this tiny corner of the hemisphere, paramount to my success.
 
     I had turned twenty in the summer of 1971. I had fifteen hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket after I learned I wasn't to be drafted. Feeling I had a new lease on life at that point, when I learned my aunt and uncle's farm up here was up for sale, despite knowing little about farming, I jumped at the opportunity to buy it. 

1971 view of the farm lane and adjoining field. View is toward the east, the road curving to the north. Oak trees are on east side of lane; Mikinaak Creek is unseen below.

Farm lane of 2020

     The farm was rented out the first sixteen years. A neighboring farmer grew oats, wheat and barley on its hundred acres of open ground. The remainder was wooded land with two creeks at diagonal corners and old pasture left to grow up into stands of red willow, poplar and baumagilead. The fence lines were removed from around small acre fields to create bigger fields, then rolled-up and set in the woods to serendipitously serve as bird nests and rabbit warrens.

The 1974 planting: "We awaken to their beauty every morning."

     In 1974, with Iowa friend Jeff Barker’s help, we under planted 1500 white spruce trees in a poplar woods, by hand, across Mikinaak Creek which now in 2020, we awaken to their beauty every morning. In 1981, my  friend, the late Mike Tuura of Middle River, and I planted 3800 white spruce, hybrid poplar trees and honeysuckle bushes in three rows that follow the contours of our farm lane and the bank of the Mikinaak from our road to the Palmville cemetery. The trees we planted on its west side, shelter the cemetery from the cold harsh winds during graveside services. The trees that line our driveway create a circuitous beauty there unknown before their planting.

The planting of trees in 1981 now shelter the cemetery during graveside services.

      In 1988, I learned about CRP, the Conservation Reserve Program, which paid farmers not to farm highly erodible/poorer soil lands for ten years. It would pay me two and a half times more per acre as I would be getting for land rent, so I enrolled the farm into it. It was through CRP that I started planting trees in a big way. From 1988 to 2012 , we planted about 65,000 trees, involving various crews including family, friends, and neighbors, and neighbor kids -- and, during a particularly wet spring, a five-man tree planting crew from Arkansas. 

In 2011, we planted cover crops including Native grasses and legumes

     
     We planted cover crops including Native grasses and legumes; and we planted trees and shrubs. The latter proving to be particularly problematic because of deer depredation. One quarter-mile long plantation of red dosier dogwood, red splendor crab and honeysuckle were planted by hand, twice; a bittersweet memory savored by my wife, Jackie, and my daughter, Bonny, and I, as all our work was for naught. It’s just a fact that some live and some die, despite your best efforts. You do what you can and what you can afford. Fencing it off was not an option.
 
     Jackie gathered tamarack, and white cedar seeds from the parent trees that once grew on the north side of the Palmville cemetery road; garbage bags full of maple seeds from her mother’s yard in Shoreview, Minnesota, and many bushels of green ash seeds from those in our yard over several years, broadcasting tens of thousands of seeds by hand on her long daily walks in the spring.

We've created islands of trees, altering the landscape.

     Each tree plantation age varies. The types of trees planted here, are somewhat typical of a natural occurring woodland, differentiating our planting from plantations often seen planted to just one tree species. Rows echo westward following the course of the creek, each row mirroring the row next to it, so that long straight rows rarely exist across its nearly half-mile wide expanse.  

 

     Planting trees appeared irrational to some people in farming country. My decision to plant trees instead of grow cash crops generated subtle criticism. Others expressed envy when they wondered aloud what their hayfields may have looked like now if planted to trees those many years ago as they had once considered. 

     I do know, for these many years since, I can walk silently through a soft needle-strewn carpet under a cathedral of red pines, weave myself into a closure of white spruce planted so dense that very little daylight reaches its floor on the brightest of days; and stand north of the one-room schoolhouse to watch the skies unfold, at sunset, over a tree nursery of their offspring a half mile in all directions.

      How could I accept knowing, hidden away on that land somewhere, was garbage and junk that I had put there just as purposely as when we planted those trees? It just couldn’t remain.