Thursday July 28, 2022: Tanker blant bringebær

Tanker blant bringebær

'Thoughts Among Raspberries'

The little woodlot thick with raspberry bushes.

    “Wild raspberries don’t taste the way they used to,” I said aloud to myself, plucking tiny fingernail-sized fruit from spindly vines behind where the barn used to stand in 1970; then again, my memory isn’t what it used to be either. There were other raspberry bushes with more berries on them deeper in the woods, but it had rained earlier that evening and I didn’t relish getting my pants soaked wading to get them. Maybe deer, raccoon and bear had eaten the ones closer to the trail, the tossers ...

    I had cleaned the little woods the year before of old farm debris: rusty barbed wire, bullet-hole laced and dented water troughs, broken blue-green canning jars, a wringer-washer tub among other things. I had cut down dead and fallen trees, and had let two different neighbors in to cut some firewood thus opening the woodlot canopy a little to let more sunshine in. The bounty of raspberry bushes and thousands of slender poplar and baumigilead saplings growing in their stead proved my labors weren’t for nothing.

    I live on a family farm that I was familiar with in my childhood and can still recall what it used to look like even though all the physical structures are gone. The house was moved to Roseau in the late 1960s and still resides at 910 Center Street E.; its no longer pink with white trim as it was when I was growing up. In its upstairs was a nice whitetail buck full-head mount that amazed me that my uncle Martin Davidson had shot, hanging on a wall in the hallway. It was the first taxidermist mount like that I had ever seen. I enjoyed petting its neck as a little boy and thinking about its ‘glory,’ never dreaming that I’d shoot several similar to it as I got older.

    Behind the barn is a earthen trail that I think was built up by years of barn-cleanings using a ‘slip’ pulled by horses. It closes off a waterway. I think this because I had to dig into that trail years ago for some reason that escapes me now, and discovered layers of compacted straw there still yellow as the day it was dumped there. The waterway is a beaver dam spillway that during high water events like we had this spring of 2022, overflows the creek and follows the contour of the land and consequently the beaver-dug channel across our yard to where it's stalled against the trail and backed up, beyond which it would circuitously rejoin the creek, via a wetland farther downstream.

The captive wetland; its main inlet blocked by a trail from the barn.

    The big old red barn that isn't there anymore was moved off the farm in 1971 just before I purchased the place from my aunt and uncle; where it rotted away on the blocking it was set on in Skime, west of Ell-Kay’s Skime Store. I didn’t know my aunt and uncle had sold the barn; only that whoever purchased it wouldn’t sell it back.
 
    Fieldstones peer through the grass to the surface in places. They’re roughly the same distance apart in four-place patterns and bring to mind where the old pig pens and hog houses of sixty-five years ago stood;  I can see them if I think about them, and almost smell their inhabitants. 

    I tore down the red chicken coop, which I sorely regret. Its foundation shows through the grass where I mow. I’ve thought to build a small building back upon it, but never followed through.

    I learned how much horrific heat even a small building generates when I stupidly burned a two-room granary too near a stately old bur oak tree that still lives. And I say this with a great deal of humility. I felt so bad about that completely thoughtless act that left it disfigured along one side that I profusely apologized to it. I felt so ashamed. Forty-five years later, it is now as tall as its sister oak tree to its side and still produces acorns. I nod to it as I pass by.

    There was a two-car garage I used a couple years as a camp before I moved to Minnesota in 1979. I cleaned it out and used one side as a bunkhouse; the other side, I left room for a car. One year I opened the garage door to find a huge hornet nest adhered to one corner. Having traveled 600 miles to get there and having no other place to stay, I hauled several buckets of water from the creek to use as fire extinguishers when I torched the nest one evening and miraculously didn’t burn down the garage in the process. The trees near it were very concerned knowing my nasty reputation.

    In 1992, using my tractor and fence posts as rollers, I moved the garage from its foundation to another area of the yard, then had house movers set our house from Humboldt, Minnesota 75 miles way, onto its near-exact footprint. Damaged in a storm, the garage is no longer exists either.

   About the only things left from years ago are three pieces of ‘farm ruins,’ as my daughter calls them; a steam-powered threshing machine; a  horse-drawn haystacker, and a pull-type combine. Of course there are many trees I didn’t torch, like two handsome old paper birches, two tall and beautiful white cedars, and several spruce trees in the yard and windbreaks that the Davidsons planted. One sixty-foot tall white spruce, I estimate was planted in the center of the yard at the close of World War II in 1945, as I saw its picture in an old photograph of my cousin Karen's birthday taken in 1955. 

    Trails through the woods and field edges as well as several large boulders and ‘plantings’ of large rocks here and there during their land clearing efforts; piles deposited in the early days using horses,  chains, dynamite, leverage, and raw human strength were pushed into piles using bulldozers and tractors. 

    I can imagine Martin coming back out to the farm on evenings like this to mow the yard where the house once sat, his children were born and raised. I'll bet he talked to the trees he planted too.

 

New trees replace the old trees. An ancient poplar tree from my childhood memories stands riddled with woodpecker holes and rotted trunk along a mowed trail. I expect to find it fallen one day soon.

Noxious weeds to some, medicines to others like the Ojibwe. This site makes the point: https://www.youtube.com/c/TrilliumWildEdibles