WannaskaWriter

    Two True Stories 1990-1993 " We didn’t make her fearful, we made her brave."     Bag O' Bonny           Turning in at Bemis Hill, in Roseau County, Minnesota, I snapped a few images of the nicely maintained CCC-era log cabin and its immediate sledding hill. Leaving, I turned west on the road I came in on, then a half mile or so, took the Bemis Hill Forest Road north along the bottom of the Hill when my daughter Bonny called from Ankeny, Iowa, where she lived then, several hundreds of miles away.     I always thought how amazing it was to be in the middle of nowhere and get a phone call. I was  leaning against my car along a remote northwest Minnesota forest road in Beltrami Island State Forest with the steep legendary sledding hill behind me and a 700,000 acre forest around me, possibly making me its sole human occupant for five square miles, conservatively speaking, the thought of which is just aw...

     "OH MY GOD! SVEN IS DEAD!" the new neighbor Jack Krag said, running from his car to the swing set in Sven's yard where Sven Guyson laid prone on the ground, one foot still afloat in the seat of the swing, his face against the sod, his cap ajar.      "SVEN! SVEN!" Krag repeated plaintively, gently turning Sven over onto his back; the imprint of grass and dirt stuck to Sven's open-eye slobbery face.      " HE'S JUST A'FOOLIN' YOU, bon ami! " shouted Monique, Sven's wife of two years and some months from the porch. "He's just workin' up to his expiration date and wants his death to be just a part of our normal routine. He doesn't want to surprise anyone by dyin' unexpectedly. You know what a shock a death can be. He's just tryin' to ease us all into it, one act at a time.       "WHAT??" Krag fairly hollered in disbelief, looking at Monique, then back st Sven, and back to Monique...

My 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser   A life changing event. I've had asthma all my life and it limited me somewhat until 1972, when after an event on a remote Canadian lake I was rushed to Dryden Area Hospital for emergency treatment of a pneumothorax /lung collapse. Early one morning, my dad and I left Des Moines, Iowa on 1530 mile round trip fishing expedition to Stormy Lake, Ontario; stopping in Roseau, Minnesota to join six family members: My uncle  Martin and aunt Irene Davidson of Roseau, their son Jack Davidson and his 8-yr old son, Jeffrey, of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, and Jack's older brother Dean Davidson, and his 11-yr old son, Larry, of Clive, Iowa in addition to their two two vehicles, one with a boat atop it. We were pulling a one-wheeled trailer behind my brand new 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser to handle extra gear. Leaving Roseau as the last vehicle in the three car caravan, we headed off toward the...

    An old Liberty trailer house began a new life as a family deer camp.     In 1993, after moving our house in from Humboldt, up towards St. Vincent in Kittson County, I sold my trailer home to a family member who wanted it as a family deer camp. It was only four miles away, so we were able to visit it and relive its past glories over the next probably 20 years. By that time, it didn't smell too bad.     During its previous days as a semi-vacant tin-covered box, it had served as my artist 'loft' three feet off the ground where, often an easel or two with an unfinished canvas stood in its north light and the odor of oil paint and wet canvas and brushes over-shadowed any unacceptable fragrances.     It had been a 24/7 writer's nook where I had written thousands of pages of wild random thought, often in alcohol-induced euphoria--and darkness--and where, in the mid-1980s, thanks to my wife, Jackie Helms, my poetry began to...

  On the night of June 18, 2024 Mikinaak Creek received between 3 and 4 inches of rain. We slept through it. Then at daybreak awoke to the   MIKINAAKIPPI   It’d be great if we could hold water this big all year long. But this isn’t as high as it got in 2002, for there’d be no grass showing at all in that case. I have a high water mark up by the house.  The bird feeder post marks the 2002 high water mark Still, it's nice to be able to load the jon boat in the truck ... drive the truck up our road Unload the boat, drag it down the steep wooded bank to the water's edge and push off for a quick but wonderfully pleasant ride back home. Life is good.

  A portion of the White Spruce trees we planted in 1974.    Fifty years ago this month, with the help of a friend, I started hand-planting trees in a fifteen acre poplar woods in Roseau County bordered on the west by Mikinaak Creek (the Ojibwe spelling for snapping turtle and not what is written in English on the maps), and a neighbor’s fenced quarter section on its east, where just the summer before, the farmer had bulldozed all the trees and windrowed their debris like a hay field prior to baling.  I was thunderstruck by their destruction, for that dense woodland lent the creek bottom and my quaint homestead the beauty and privacy I desired, having lived in a city all my life to that point. Its horrific loss underscored to me that I could do nothing about what my neighbors did on their land, and if I wanted such an environment, I would have to plant it myself. And so I have with the help of family and friends, as planting trees became the best decision I have ever...