A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Writer Ann Markusen admires a large aspen tree recently felled by ambitious beavers.
Hoping, dear readers, that you are finding it a kind of strange gift to be shut out of most social events and gathering holes. At first, I discovered the joys of just staying home, cleaning out the corners of our home where detritus had piled up and whittling down the pile of deferred correspondence.
But, watching the birds avidly dining at our feeders, I got restless. "Why don't we get out on our snowshoes?" I suggested to my husband Rod. So far we've gone four days in a row.
We started by travelling our ski trail through the woods behind our home, down to the beaver dam and its lovely ice rink it offers us in the late fall. To our delight, we discovered that beavers have already been hard at it, grinding those enormous teeth into a rather large aspen. On the way back, Rod gave me a tour of his ancient dump truck, still out back and full of wood that he cut last spring, awaiting transfer to the sauna stove.
The snow, rather grainy in these fluctuating temperatures, is pliable. We don't sink in very far, enjoying the soft landing of each step. A good workout. For three days, we varied our 80-acre routes, sometimes plodding off-trail through still-frozen marshes. One day, we made it down to Flour Lake, a marshy stretch where the Tamarack River meanders its way west to the Prairie and then Mississippi rivers. There we flushed a largish flock of Canada geese, honking their disapproval.
Yesterday, we drove to Rod's family land straddling South Finn Road, parking just north of the small Schoolhouse Lake across from the home and farm where he and his eight brothers and sisters grew up. We were delighted to see a couple of anglers ice-fishing there, sitting on upended buckets. We clomped - good shin-bone strengthening - our way through mixed aspen and hardwood forests, black spruce swamps and hay fields, passing by several creatively constructed deer stands.
On the way home, we spotted a bald eagle pair sitting companionably high up in the trees along Highway 210.
Today? Not sure ... we're thinking about shoeing west from the old Finnish Lakeside cemetery toward some swampland.
Seize the opportunity, find your own nearby virus-free galloping grounds.
Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.
