The Yooper Schooner (Part 9)

Karen and I aren't completely dull workaholics, we take some time off from work for some so-called leisurely activites.

Chapter 17: An Addition to the Family

 

A baby brings renewed serenity and joy to a family. Well, that’s usually true.

 

We had moved out of our Little Room in the Polebarn that spring of the fourth year. The house was by no means close to finished anywhere we looked, even our downstairs bedroom had bare drywall with the first spackling smears covering the nails and seams. We covered the bed with plastic everyday to protect it from the airborne dust, but at least we could now say we lived in the house. And with the one royal toilet, we no longer needed to use the outhouse! We were slowly becoming civilized again. In some ways, the room was more civilized, but we said good-bye to life in the single room as we hauled our essentials to the multi-room house. In the respect of living space, the house did seem huge.

I haven’t mentioned our little four-wheeler except when we unloaded our household goods, which, by the way, was still stacked up in the pole barn. I sometimes took the four-wheeler around our trails in the woods, but we also used it to haul things on the little trailer. One item we hauled was the refrigerator. We bought the refrigerator way back when we moved into the polebarn. At first, it stayed outside the room in the main part of the barn, but during the first winter, it froze and stopped running when the temperature dropped to zero. Panic! After that, it stayed inside the room crowding us and bugging us with its noise.

Karen and I struggled with the refrigerator to load it on the four-wheeler trailer. Driving the refrigerator over to the house was a sight to see with it sticking straight up high above our heads while riding the little four-wheeler down the road. We wrestled it off the trailer, bumped it through the patio door and into the house. We then snuck it onto the wheelie boards and pushed it to the back of the kitchen. Wiggling it down to the floor in the northeast corner of the kitchen, we put it into place where it stayed forever.

That summer, we had our first major diversion. Karen and I had made friends with the Smythe family during the logging they did for us, and we admired their rambunctious Australian Cattle Dogs (ACD) previously known as Blue Heelers. They announced in early summer that they had a new litter of puppies. The litter mother’s name was “KW” for Ken Worth, the semi-tractor truck, because she grew up in the cab of a truck when Dan Smythe drove cross-country truck. The father of the litter was their own family junkyard dog, a mean-tempered ACD.  

Some background information on ACDs. A muscular, middle-sized dog, they are a mixture of Australian Dingo (wild dog), Blue Merle (sheep dog), and Dalmatian (black and white spotted firedog). ACDs are sprinters and maneuvering experts not long-distance runners, and they acquire their relatives’ genetic characteristics in various degrees such as aggression, herding, and over-activity, respectively. These dogs are extremely loyal, but they have tendencies to herd everything and anything that moves including children and in special cases, adults.

Karen went to see the puppies, and I explicitly instructed her not to bring one home. When she came home, she didn’t have a puppy, but I asked her what our puppy looked like. Well, she told me once she saw the adorably fuzzy, rectangular-profiled, speckled puppies it was all over. They didn’t have their eyes open and were just a fuzzy pile of tails, legs, and little black noses. She told me all giddy-like how she had sat on the floor to chat, and a faint blue-speckled puppy with a big black spot on her butt staggered over, cuddled in, and fell asleep. I knew something along those lines would occur.

I visited the puppy litter two weeks later and scooped up cute little Bonnie and held her up in front of my face. In return, she bit me on the nose with those needle sharp teeth! Hmmm, I’m not too bright for getting the four-legged buzz-saw close to my face. Karen and I hadn’t moved into the house specifically so we could have a dog, but in July, Bonnie came home and promptly took over.

Karen brought her in and set her down on the bare concrete floor. She didn’t even look around. She went to the bed we had prepared in the sunny spot under the lip of the spiral stair base, and she fell fast asleep. I guess she was completely satisfied with the living arrangements away from her rambunctious and wild littermates. Life has not been normal for her present littermates since.

Bonnie was a spastic puppy, acting normal one minute sleeping or eating and then becoming a full-wild Dingo the next, yipping, running back and forth, barking and growling at us, biting at our ankles until she collapsed back into sleep. Dyna and Cleo cats stayed upstairs out of sight for a real long time. I always thought Bonnie got more than her share of Dingo traits, but on the other hand, she proved a breeze to house train. Whenever she needed to go outside, she would simply come over and bite us with those needle-sharp teeth, how cute, but it took her awhile to train us. I couldn’t quite understand why she bit the heck out of my hands and wrists until I took her outside. Duh!

 I indicated in the previous part something else to discuss about the outside stonework. Well, Bonnie loved cultured stone too; literally, she loved to eat it. While we were putting the stone up, sometimes we’d chip corners off with a hatchet to make them fit right. Well, Bonnie would run away with the chips. We couldn’t get them away from her and chewed on them so long she wore her teeth flat. After that, we had to pen her up in a chicken wire playpen whenever we had the rock out.

We tried to socialize her as much as we could during her puppyhood. Walking her on the leash didn’t work out so well, so I ended up carrying her a lot. I’d tuck her in the crook of my arm and let her stand stiff legged on my other hand. To say the least, she grew out being carried in this fashion very quickly. One of our outings with little puppy Bonnie Blue was a trip to the County Fair in Chatham. This fair was a smaller, more low-key fair than Marquette County Fair, so proved a good place to try Bonnie out in public. In fact, she was as good as gold. She behaved herself while perched on my arm and attracted a lot of attention. The only time she made a peep was when I set her down at the horse show. The owner of one of her littermates came over, and the two puppies got into it a little bit�"more than a peep, actually!  

Obedience training Bonnie seemed impossible even with the help of friend Sue, a semi-professional dog trainer. After some months’ experience trying to train Bonnie, Sue told us we were the most patient people in the world to put up with Bonnie. Just consider the project I’m writing about now; we were a very patient couple.

However, Bonnie instinctly knew how to herd. With Bonnie on the loose to run around the yard, you often seen me struggle to walk as I dragged her along with her firmly attached to my heel. The Asics running shoes I wore soon had the backs tore out because of Bonnie biting at my heels to herd me up. What really made Bonnie’s day was when she was loose and the farmer’s heifers broke out, crossed the street, and came running through the yard. Bonnie was in her element. She’d run full speed into the seething bovine mix yipping and nipping at their heels. If she made contact with a heifer’s hoof, she’d know to flatten out like a pancake for the hoof flying back at her head. Instantly recovering, she’d be on the attack again until another kick came. She loved it. The only problem was that without proper training, she’d scatter the heifers everywhere making it even more difficult to chase them out of the yard. At least she had some fun.

 When Bonnie grew a little, Karen and I foolishly decided to try Bonnie in a nearby dog-training group’s agility course. It didn’t start out very well. The woman in charge thought Bonnie was an adorable puppy and reached down to pet Bonnie. Bonnie promptly bit her hand. Number one rule: Don’t reach for Bonnie. On the course, she acted brave on the teeter-totter and the hill climb. She didn’t have much patience for the in and out zig zag, and on her own, she decided enough was enough. When we told her to go through the plastic tunnel, she went in but didn’t come out. She thought it was a good place to take a snooze. I crawled in the other end to coax her out of there. Even with a big helping of dog treats, when I tried to drag her out by the collar, she bit the hell out of hand.

Sad to say, we think that none of her littermates made it to adult dog age because everyone loved the adorable puppies, but no one had the patience to put up with their aggressive, single-minded ways. We put up with Bonnie’s quirks and bites, loving her dearly and she’s right beside me here as I type. I still have all my fingers and only a few bite scars�"her worn down teeth helped there!

           

Chapter 18 Diversionary Life

 

Even the most focused industrious persons need some leisure activities.

 

This year, the fourth, even more diversions seemed to divert our attentions from the empirical house-building project. Even though the Yooper Schooner still needed much more work to be called finished, I backed off on my already lackadaisical work ethic because I had other things I felt like doing. Bonnie took up a lot of time this summer, growing faster and stronger, at times a good family dog and other times she became the Wild Dingo Puppy. She and I loved walking the woods trail network that I continued working on from back when we had first purchased the land in 1986. The trail was rough by any hiker’s standards despite my working on it hours and hours over the years.   

Starting with one diversion I didn’t include up to this point was attending church on Sunday mornings. Two years before, we started going to churches off and on, church hopping, while trying to find one that fit us. Selfishly, I thought we needed all the help we could get while building our house. As you read in this account, sometimes it seemed we did have some extra assistance. We searched out churches in the area and usually attended a service or two at each one sampling the minister, congregation, and the atmosphere in general. We finally found a church we liked in Saint Luke Lutheran Church in Skandia. It was a small church with a small congregation and a rich history; the family-tied membership goes back generations.

 I am going to pass along a parable of sorts from St. Luke’s Pastor Paul, but first I’ll provide some background. Pastor Paul was a Yooper, born and raised, a heavy sort of guy with a warm heart and nervous sermons. The sad part was that some relatively new members railroaded him out of the church without most of us knowing about it until it was too late when he announced that he was leaving. His parable I relate is a sweet, down-home tale with a Yooper twist.

Paul was one among three God-fearing brothers growing up in the UP, though God-fearing in different degrees. He told us that his Younger brother was a bit slow, and the Older brother called him retard, but in Paul, as we saw in his daily manners and words would accept the good and bad without judgment. The Older always laughed and made fun of the Younger because of his simpleton ways, and the fact Younger prayed for everything, good weather, good health, good milk, and generally praying for anything and everything. As all good Yoopers go, the boys were loggers, whether fulltime or part-time doesn’t matter because to be a Yooper you logged and burned wood for heat.

One day, the Older headed out to the current logging site and spotted Younger’s truck parked in the area they were working. With Younger nowhere in sight, Older expected the worse like legs crushed under a log, a chainsaw accident, or the absolute worse. As Older spun nearer, he saw that Younger was fine but next to his truck down on his knees praying.

Older began scoffing even before he opened the door of his truck. When Older approached, Younger got up to greet him in own sweetheart, simple way. Older asked him what had happened, why he was praying, Younger said simply that he prayed for some help to load the pile of logs into his truck. Older called him a simpleton for praying for such a silly thing as he bent over to pick up the first log.

            Not exactly a miracle or anything, but you get the message. I’m not an overly religious type, and I went to church primarily for the fellowship and membership in the community, not to mention after the service there were always coffee, cake, and cookies! We were upset when Paul left because the church went cold and uncaring. The new pastor openly said that some of the stories from the Bible were fiction like Noah’s Ark! From childhood, little Lutherans everywhere were taught about Noah and all the animal pairs, and for a pastor not to believe in that? Sacrilege! To say the least, the diversion of church going quickly went out of our lives.

            Doing a three-sixty of sorts in our diversionary tale was another cool distraction: driving our custom Datsun 260Z. We drove it more on Sundays after the church going tapered off, and occasionally, we took it to display at car shows. To get out to the main road, we had to drive four miles of the roughest road in the county, not a nice occasion with stiff competition suspension on a car that sat four inches off the road. We drove about twenty miles an hour in a car I built to do one-fifty. To describe the road as rough doesn’t do the situation justice, so how about this: It is the only road I ever saw where the deer drank spring water out of the potholes! Only in the UP!  

An overview of our cool car: Porsche red, it had twin, wide white stripes from front spoiler to rear splash pan with a hand-rubbed clear coat, air dams front and rear, racing tires, and aluminum-slotted wheels. I had removed the bumpers and replaced them with pipe nerf bars. The interior was business only with no creature comforts. Staring at me as I sat in my racing fiberglass seat with a five-point harness was a duo of tachometer and speedometer with two clusters of racing gauges replacing the originals. Nicely hand-machined aluminum plates covered over the slots for the heater, A-C, and radio because they were all removed. The car had a roll cage and a fuel cell that got us strange looks while I seemingly pumped gas into the trunk. What was under the hood? A brand-new 350 Chevy V-8 with numerous modifications producing about 335 horsepower that made this baby really go! And it sounded like it, because literally, it had no exhaust.

One of our favorite trips in the 260Z was a round trip to Munising. We drive along the Lake Superior Lakeshore often stopping at Au Train Beach for a stroll in the sand or at Christmas Beach for a little slag hunting at the old iron smelting furnace. Slag was always a treat to find, left over from the UP’s iron days. The glassy slag we found came in various colors from dark to light blue, grays, blacks and pinks, all quite beautiful in fact. After beach strolling or combing, we’d end up in our desired ultimate destination, the Munising Dairy Queen. We’d buy our number one decadent treats, Blizzards and enjoy. I would get a Butterfinger, and Karen would get a chocolate covered cherry, mmmmm, yum.

 If the hard starting hot car actually started, we’d fill up with gas and would circle back around to home making a nice day away from house building and such. I remember one especially fast ride home when a couple young guys in a sports car wanted to play cat and mouse. Passing us first, we’d then pass them, and switch positions over and over recklessly over hill and through dale, cutting around sharp curves while exceeding a hundred miles an hour, what a rush! Surprisingly, we never got a speeding ticket on our excursions because I couldn’t stay off the accelerator. The car always turned heads wherever we drove.

The 260Z was loud, fast, thrilling, and painful. It was hot, noisy, and often overheated, but most often and annoying, it would not start when it was hot. It ate a lot of gas and not just premium gas; I pumped in premium gas, 93 octane, and then added a can of octane boost. Driving it was fun, exhilarating, but tiresome. As time went on, we often just didn’t feel like going for a ride anymore. Maybe we were tired, getting old, or realized the UP just wasn’t the right place for such a car. We realized we were hicks hand-building a house and no longer Air Force yuppies. We drove the cool car less and less.

Another diversion, perhaps not even considered a diversion, but more of an educational endeavor, I began attending Northern Michigan University. I had an Associates Degree in Meteorology from the Community College of the Air Force, but I had the old GI Bill educational benefits that ran out at the ten-year point after retirement. I had plenty of time, but sooner was better, and I began taking the required courses toward a degree, even though I hadn’t decided on a degreed course of study. Therefore, during this time, I was working part time, going to school part time and thereby leaving less of my remaining part time left for the house project. Indeed, our empirical home project was far from finished; in fact, it barely met the criteria of being habitable.  

It didn’t help that we unpacked our television from our household stash. We began watching the NBC Today Show in our house’s austere bedroom and caught the news every morning with breakfast in bed. Bonnie cuddled up on top of the sheets too, especially when food was involved.

That summer, Donna and Carol mentioned that they wanted to paint their barns. The old part of the barn that needed painting wasn’t all that huge and along with this, they had two turn-out pens for the Alpacas and their three ill-mannered horses. Karen is a horse person, but she said their three horses were downright dangerous because they hadn’t been ridden or trained in any way for several years. When we farm sat, we had to be very careful around the horses because they were unpredictable if anything. Anyway, Donna said they had called a couple painter contractors to do the barn painting and afterwards had their doubts about the paint job because the contractor bids were so high. Well, they didn’t call The Suckers, Karen and me.

We volunteered to do the barn painting, after all the buildings weren’t that huge. We gave them a bid that must have been really low in comparison because they jumped on it like Mexican Jumping Beans. After a couple days of giving the paint store hell, they decided what color to paint the barns, and it turned out a kind of bluish gray, which we thought was weird, but who are we to say. After they bugged us for a couple days, we started in on the first day I had off from school and work.

Painting for them wasn’t fun at all. Even though we were friends of them in an off-hand, hired-hands sort of way, they treated us like highly paid contractors. They wanted the paint perfect despite these barns not seeing paint for probably thirty years. No runs, no thin spots�"wait, you need to replace these boards or wire brush these other boards before you paint them and so on and so forth. The job took Karen and me about ten days total of working off and on around my other scheduled things even though Karen continued painting even when I couldn’t. In the end, the money wasn’t worth the effort we put into the task. We went home tired and paint splotchy. 

             Planting seedling trees annually began a tradition shortly after we purchased our property, so this year in catching up with the tradition, we bought some pine trees and snowball bushes from the Marquette County Conservation tree sale. Planting trees on our wooded property might sound absurd, but the UP was once entirely a thick stand of white pine forest, so we thought it was our duty to bring the white pines back�"maybe in a hundred years! Karen and I, despite our logging and building a house in the woods, were tree huggers and nature lovers; one of the reasons we bought the land in the first place.

Bonnie and I walked our trails twice a day year round, unless the weather was terribly inclement. We’d look for animal tracks, listen to birdsong, and hope for a special wildlife sighting. We’d see white-breasted nuthatches hopping down tree trunks beak down or see perched black-capped chickadees that were so docile I could almost reach out to touch them. The UP had beautiful winged spring and summertime visitors like rose-breasted and evening grosbeaks, goldfinches, indigo buntings, and an occasional pilated woodpecker that we dubbed, because of their primordial calls, the UP Jungle Bird. Do you know they’re the only woodpeckers that make square holes in trees?

We seen pilateds only occasionally until we were treated to regular close viewings when a pair built a nest near our polebarn. Weeks later when the four fledglings began hopping about the branches, we had to laugh at their awkward appearance. The fledging tree drillers sported punk-style, orange-spiked head feathers, how bizarre!     

In an effort to bring the winged friends closer, I built an over-engineered authentic looking log cabin birdfeeder with a glass seed-level window because I never did anything easy. We kept it full of sunflower seeds. I did battle to keep the red, gray, and black squirrels out, but a few unidentified nocturnal critters were welcome. After other methods failed like greasing the pole, I installed a pizza pan below the feeder to deflect the squirrels from climbing up.

One night, “Bang!” the pizza pan sounded. Bonnie went into a barking frenzy, but we never let her out the door in case of lurking skunks, porcupines, and bears, which any of which could destroy a bird feeder and cause Bonnie big problems. I shone the flashlight out at the feeder and saw a strange small gray mammal with huge buggy eyes sitting in the feeder eating our seeds. I had no idea what it was until I stepped out and witnessed another flying squirrel gliding out of a tree twenty feet away to land on the roof of the feeder, whump! Cutest things you’d ever want to see. Their gliding webs along their legs and belly wrapped around like a roll of flabby fat until they jumped off, stretching out into elegant flying-gliding animals. Quite the sight!  

Another major diversion from house building that summer was maintenance on our old Dodge Dakota. It was getting tired hauling that big trailer to Menards so many times, and the clutch gave out, or so I thought. I have a mechanical background and putting in a clutch shouldn’t have been a problem, and that’s the key word�"shouldn’t. I bought a service manual, put reinforcement beams in the open part of the polebarn to lift and hold heavy things and commenced to work on the truck.

The service manual said to replace the clutch, the transmission and transfer case could be dropped�"a formidable and heavy task, but I was capable. After working two days, it turned out that the transfer case and transmission could not be dropped out, and so all that work was unnecessary. I had to pull the engine instead. Turned out the clutch wasn’t bad, the clutch linkage had a partially broken pivot that wouldn’t allow the clutch to operate correctly. I still had to pull it apart to fix it, but only for a small, cheap faulty part and not wear and tear on the clutch. You know, I never get a break.

            Another diversion that only meant more hard labor, Karen had hoped to have a horse on our property despite the fact that the only open land we had was that two-acre meadow next to the polebarn. To prepare for said future horse, we decided to fence the meadow for the future pasture. We purchased 500 feet of two by four-wire fencing and a pile of cedar fence posts from the Symthes, who at the time were logging a cedar grove somewhere. Karen and I dug one hundred and thirty-eight holes by hand, placed the posts, and stapled on the wire. A nice enclosure, but we didn’t have animals to go inside to graze except Bonnie the blue dog.

            Bonnie was coming into her own by this time and maturing with her hard fought training taking hold. One thing that helped her training was the fact she was and still is a major mooch�"she loved her treats and our food. She learned to sit and lay with the help of beau coup treats. When sitting on command, she learned to look you in the eye until you had her full attention�"a stare down, in fact. Her coat darkened up, black with silver highlights, she had a black mask and her almond shaped eyes were separated by a sliver of white blaze that split into a wishbone between her perked black, bat-like ears. Her tail began to wag more often, a spotted, bushy white-tipped flag that flew high, curling over her back when excited.

Bonnie’s nemeses were chipmunks and squirrels, and she chased them with glee to the trees when we walked in the woods. She never caught one. She learned early on not to chase the deer, particularly that doe that frequented our woods and had a fawn on our property every spring. Bonnie loved and still loves the snow, to romp and roll in the snow to make doggie angels on her back. She especially wanted us to kick snow up for her to bite. She developed the devilish look of peering out of the corners of her eyes and smiling while poised to attack, and the weird maneuver we called butt herding.

At the most inopportune times such as when we had our hands full, Bonnie would push on our legs with her butt when she wanted to go somewhere, most often inside the house. Once, she butt herded me on the edge of a steep ravine tripping me up and making me tumble down the slope until I self-arrested myself against a tree. Man, I was mad at her. She waited until I climbed back up to her, and there she stood wagging her tail a mile a minute wearing her big smile. Who can be mad at that cute, devilish look? Oh yeah, she inherited the ability to smile from her Dalmatian side of the family. Bonnie acquired the affectionate name “stinkweed” because she sought out privacy in the brush and weeds when going potty. Enough about our leisure activities, we’d better get back to work on that Yooper Schooner.   

 

Reviews

[wondering]

Thanks for the laughs, the car, the blizzards and the trip thru nature. Makes me believe that retiring at an warly age can be fun.