Cabin and Camp is No More

Thanks for visiting.  I love that you're here and looking around, so feel free to read what's here.  Take your time.

You may have noticed that I haven't written anything here for a while.  I really loved writing this blog but I've moved on to another more general blog called Constant Commoner.

I live in a cabin so that won't change but I write about all kinds of things over there that have nothing to do with where I live.  It's about living a life, about writing, about food, about creativity, about anything else that comes up while I'm still breathing.

These posts will still be here, archived now, but any new ones will be at Constant Commoner.

See you there!

Mona Grigg

Snow in June -- It happens every year

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Every year around this time the trees we commonly refer to as Cottonwoods (but are, in fact, their close cousin Balm of Gilead, according to my "Trees of Michigan" book) send warnings of a cotton storm a'brewing by wafting tiny cotton flakes into the air.

For days we see the cotton building up on the upper branches, knowing that one day when the sun warms the branches enough and the Gods are in their places the "snow" will begin to fly.

This year it started three days ago but then the rains came, stalling the cotton storm for at least a little while.  I would say that's a good thing, but it really just prolongs the inevitable.  Those cotton bombs are growing bigger and bigger up there and either tomorrow or the next day our side yard is once again going to look like this:

This is a close-up of the cotton ball once it has "exploded":

Early in the spring the "cotton" seeds form and start to fall.  They're covered with an incredibly sticky resin and manage to stick to everything, especially the bottoms of our shoes.  They end up inside the house, where we have to literally scrape them up off the floor.  What a nuisance!

But I've been doing a little research, and it turns out those sticky little buggers are good for something.  They can be made into a salve.  A balm.  A Balm of Gilead.  The people who are onto this balm claim it has magical, out-of-this-world qualities.  It is a pain reliever, an antibiotic, an anti-itch, anti-inflammatory miracle worker, and, if some others are to be believed, a sure-fire cure for cancer called "black salve".

I found this recipe  and this one online, and I can't wait to try making it when it gets cold again and I can gather up those little sticky slivers.  Olive oil and beeswax are the main ingredients, and it looks simple enough for even me.

The tree is also called "balsam poplar".  They talk about the pleasant aroma, but I can't say I've actually noticed.  I'll have to pay attention.

(Oh, by the way, I started this blog yesterday, and today was the day.  Our yard looks just like the picture above.  I almost took another picture, but you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.  One snowy yard in June looks like any other.)

When all the barns Have finally gone

For years now I've been watching the barns disappear.

Red Barns faded pink and then weathered gray.

The side boards rotted and fell away.

Roof shingles blew off.  Moss carpeted what was left.

Open spaces appeared where doors and windows had once been.

Swaybacks marked the countryside.

As the barns went, so went the homesteads.

Rusted relics where life had flourished.

And at the end of the day, nobody cared.

But me.

The Dance of the Cranes

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"High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun in the crane marsh. . .

. . .Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. the quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. . .

. . .The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their having once harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history."

Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin - A Sand County Almanac

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In mid-April, when the ice was just leaving, we were out walking our road and heard strange noises coming from the marshy place around the bend.

Through the bare branches, we saw two sandhill cranes--a rare sight around here.


For once, I had my camera with me and as I started to take pictures, the male of the pair began doing a mating dance. (The pictures are grainy because I was carrying my smaller, less weighty camera with the shorter lens, but I was afraid to get too close and scare them away.)



There is something so primitive about these birds--still so wild and not yet dependent on humans, as the Canada Geese have become. They're rare enough not to be nuisances yet--though in an earlier blog, I posted pictures of hundreds of them in a farmer's field.


That was two years ago, and we haven't seen anything like that again. Now and then we hear their incredibly loud calls and see them flying overhead during the spring fly-0ver, but we are just a stop along the way to a more permanent summer home.

I think I like it that way. I want to be able to be surprised by their calls and to be astonished at their size. I want their numbers to be small enough here so that we humans don't feel the need to try and feed them to keep them around, so that, ultimately, hunters won't feel the need to treat them as nuisances and have an excuse to kill them.

There are elements of wildness that have nothing to do with us--that can survive very well, often better, without us--but that we crave, possibly because something in our primal, primordial past cries out to us. I think it's why so many of us choose to either live in or keep places that are inconvenient at best and crudely inadequate at worst. We crave the quiet and the tranquility of the boondocks, the wildness of nature surrounding us, and we take it where we're able to find it.

Times are desperate here in my sad, beautiful Michigan. State unemployment rates are in the double digits, and I heard a report just this morning that jobless numbers in Detroit are over 24%. Even from this distance--350 miles away and on a separate peninsula--my heart is with those people.


The fear is palpable in the city. Foreclosure notices, red flags on those unfortunate doors, dot every working-class neighborhood and there isn't a person who isn't touched in some way by the current mushrooming joblessness. In Michigan, auto-workers and other blue-collars have always headed north out of the cities to their own little patches of land. You don't have to go far in Michigan to get to where the wild things are, and finding your own quiet breathing space is not a luxury for a factory worker, it's a necessity.

For every lonely hermit who goes quietly mad, a thousand city dwellers--not just in our cities here, but in every city--rage loudly, fiercely, dangerously into insanity. The wilderness, the quiet places, are there to quell that rage, to soothe their fears, to give them respite, even for a few hours or days.

There are people in power who don't understand this need, and I might feel sorry for them if not for the fact that their being clueless often means a surrender of our wild places to corporate interests. Any of us who value these quiet places of inordinate beauty, these sanctuaries for the human soul, cannot let that happen.

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste."
— Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, 1962 and subsequently in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)

Places I'll show you if you'll promise not to go there

There are some places we happen upon that are so pristine and so special, we hope no one else ever finds them. Selfish, I know, but that's what makes them so special. . .not many people have discovered them. No campfires, no beer cans, no human-borne flotsam to spoil their incredible beauty.



I call this "Mossy Glade". It is a place here on our island, not far from a park trail, but you have to be looking for it in order to find it. I like to pretend that I discovered it, but of course I didn't.



This is a scene not unlike any you might have seen somewhere else, but from this vantage point it's a one-of-a-kind. This is a place where we can watch Northern Lights. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to photograph them, so for now I'll just treasure every fleeting moment of them.




This is a swimming hole on a river that flows into Lake Superior. It is one of those places that generations of people know about and come back to, but its location is guarded against outsiders. If you were truly observant you would see that the side of the road has been carved into a pull-off, and that every now and then a car is parked there, but nothing about it would make you curious enough to stop and check it out. Nothing to see here. Move along.


This is a boardwalk and beach at the mouth of the St. Mary's River. It is early spring and there are still ice floes on the water. Nobody else was there. Guess who was happy about that?



This is what is left of an old cemetery in the Keweenaw Peninsula. It is near what was once a thriving turn-of-the-century mining community. The ground is almost totally covered with myrtle and thimbleberry bushes, and the narrow, winding path seems eons old. The few headstones still visible are for people who came to this place from western Europe and the British Isles to start a new life during the copper mining boom. There is a small sign at the edge of the road, but most people drive right by. That suits those of us who make the pilgrimage nearly every year. It appears untouched and mystical and if we talk at all, we talk in whispers.