Reduced to striking imagery, one might call Superior's northwoods a winter wonderland and get away with it.
Except images, no less so than words, lie.
It's certainly true that there's wonder found in the stark season.
And I've always loved how in the depths of winter the northwoods stand revealed like no other time.
But wonderland is for tourists and does a disservice to those who live along Superior.
Mostly, they endure.
Too often, not.
In Superior's northwoods, the margin between the two is always slender. Never more so than during the long, hard winter.
Maybe you're running low on wood. Or the propane budget's exhausted, so you steal from Peter to pay Paul and sink further in debt. Perhaps you require medical treatment in February and must risk uncertain roads to get it. Or the tractor breaks down after the 4th run that day at making the driveway passable so to keep the world beyond your dangerously snow burdened roof at least vaguely at hand.
In any event, you want this to be the winter you didn't die.
So when viewing Superior's winter by proxy, if we call it a 'winter wonderland', we'd not be completely wrong.
But we'd be a long cold universe away from anything like right, too.
Love this winter images, Frank! Proof that winter can be both beautiful, and harsh.
ReplyDeleteLate teens, maybe early 20's, I'm talking with/at Mr. Albert Sailey, who was three years older than dirt and an authentic character in the U.P. tradition. As I extolled the virtues of the place and expressed my desire to relocate, Mr. Sailey stood patient. I paused, looking for assurance. "Yep, pretty nice up here," the old man said. Focusing his watery, glaucoma-blue eyes straight at me, he added: "Winter's kinda lonnngg, though." In the end it's economics kept me from living on ancestral land. But northwoods winter's always given me pause. I know the season's burden on friends can still hear old Mr. Albert Sailey in my head. He was right.
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