Swamp rat makes Christmas bank

Not too many locals can say they make most of their yearly income from Christmas sales. I make mine harvesting and selling spruce tips from the swamps here in Carlton and other surrounding counties. It's hard work, and it's changed over the years, but I love it.

I am - like others who go into the swamps - a "swamp rat."

When I was a kid in the 1950s, there were truckloads of black swamp spruce Christmas trees shipped to the South. My uncle, Ray Koivisto, hired men from the Automba area and 10,000 spruce trees were loaded on a semi truck and hauled to Oklahoma.

Since it was a so-called dry swamp, they used either a bulldozer or a team of horses to pull a long sleigh and haul the trees out. Ray was paid in quarters and the trees delivered brought 25 cents a tree. It was the talk of Kettle River when Ray paid the local help with bags of quarters. A tap beer was 5- and 10 cents at the time.

In the 1950s and '60s, Roy Halverson of Duluth had developed and promoted Bombardier track machines for work in wet areas. He hired big crews to cut black spruce, tabletop trees by the thousands, put them in a small watered stand, then painted them - mostly white - to hold the needles in place. This was the start of flocked trees. Halverson trees were shipped all over the world at one time, before slowly being replaced by artificial trees.

Locally, a lot of balsam trees were cut for Midwest markets and Christmas tree farms were starting to harvest a better-quality balsam tree sheared by hand to make a fuller product. Church trees and large trees for public places brought a good income.

Today, hardly a large tree is sold anymore. The area has transitioned into planted and sheared home trees, mostly balsam, for cut-your-own operations.

I have tried many different ideas for producing a salable product that pays a living wage. Boughs are too labor-intensive. Wreaths and garland are too dependent on lots of equipment and investment, and contracts to make it worth it and are held by just a few large operations. Tree lots and tree farms have strong competition.

Some 44 years ago I got interested in spruce tips and found a market in the Twin Cities area. A rusty pickup and a rubber-tired International TC-5 crawler with metal tracks and a metal scow were my equipment. I was quite a worker those days and could cut most of the bundles. Friends and my family helped out and we had a lot of fun working shoulder to shoulder. At the end of the season I was asked by my buyer if I wanted to cut the cards, double or nothing, on what I had made. Instead I smiled and said the family needed the money.

On the business end, cutting and selling the spruce tops has been good to me over the years. Experience teaches you what markets to work with and whom to trust. I remember asking my Uncle Ray who bought cattle from farmers all over the region. Crippled in his later years, he had me drive a herd of herefords by him in a Lakeview Township pasture. He leaned against the barn wall and scribbled numbers on a card, glancing up and down as they went by. He gave the farmer a price before he left the yard and the farmer agreed. I asked him how he could do that and make money. He laughed and said, "You have to go broke at least once and then you get real good."

The process of cutting, gathering, skidding and hauling spruce tops needs a lot of hand work. In the early days of spruce tip harvesting, cutting was done with a bow saw, the bottom branches trimmed, and bundles tied in bunches of 10 or five, depending on the length.

The bow saw fell out of favor and next came the pole saw, run by hand of course, clipping off trees as high as 12 feet. Branches were left on the cut stump so that the tree would grow again. The remaining branches curve to the heavens the next summer and sometimes would create as many as four trees on top. Almost all evergreens have this ability. Cutting a swamp to encourage regrowth will increase the number of trees harvested in six to 12 years, depending on the type of swamp cut.

Heavy growth of moss tends to restrict the rapid regrowth, but the process of cutting spruce tips has workers walking throughout the swamp. Their footsteps churn the top layer of moss, encouraging trapped spruce seeds to sprout and creating new growth of plants such as blueberries and low bush cranberries. I have seen cranberries, much like you buy in the store, covering the swamp moss humps, glistening like rubies. Habitat for birds and animals is created in the process. Food for grouse and sharptails in the swamps from frosted, wine-like cranberries causes drunken flight when the birds are flushed.

Many of my neighbors and relatives worked for subcontractors such as Red Lindholm from the Swede Lake area in Cromwell.

Trees were cut with a bow saw, cleaned and tied by hand, and skidded with a track machine with a metal scow (like a big boat) to high ground for loading. There were many adventures on the spruce bog with only inches of floating roots and moss keeping you afloat above the water of a long-since grown-over lake.

I worked with Red Lindholm over the last 40 years. We often laugh about some of the troubles working the swamps. He once dropped his Bombardier track machine in a Lawler swamp hole when the root bed gave out - by the time it quit sinking, only the cab was showing. A subzero cold front was approaching. Most of that day and into the night, using the surrounding large tamarack trees for a tripod, block and tackle, they finally raised the machine just above the water. "You know ... it looked like a wet sock hanging there," he always says.

Through the years I've gone to Red's North Star Tree Farm in Eagle Township to cut and buy some trees for personal use. Coffee in the kitchen ("kaffe aika" in Finnglish) is a must. Red is in his mid-80s now, and I enjoy every visit.

I have cut swamps in our region in Carlton, Aitkin and St. Louis counties in rotating years. In this way we "farm" the swamps: encouraging maximum growth and planning our swamp trails to not damage much. After a number of years we return to an area and I am amazed at what little impact we have made. It truly seems like we were never there.

We use new types of swamp machines to skid the cut product out. Polaris ATV track machines have been the easiest to keep and have low impact on the swamp. Argo track machines also have low per-square-inch weight on the areas traveled.

Some of the counties - including Carlton - have our tips certified. Strict guidelines are followed during the harvesting season to fulfill the "Sustainable Forest" guidelines. We have had their staff come out and see our job sites. As the forest regenerates so nicely, it has always made me feel good about living one with nature, without seeing her as an adversary.

Being of Finnish descent with a love of the campfire and ancestral memories of wandering the steppes of the European northland, I always loved the swamplands of northern Minnesota. It has been a place where the spirits of the Old Ones feel forever present. For me it has always been a spiritual experience and has kept me always grounded.

At almost 72 years old, I have little to do these days with the production end of the process. Because I have been active many years in the tip business, my job is to provide the market - people I know and trust. My other job is to tell "old man" stories of days long since gone to whoever will listen.

Dan Reed is also a freelance writer and local historian who lives in Automba Township, where both sides of his family settled 130 years ago.