Five Days in the Woods

Castle Haven. How many years have we been coming up here on New Years, as a Christmas present to ourselves ? I don't know, but we could measure it in decades. Today most of the cabins here are modern, but they're still knotty-pine woodsy. The quilts on the wall were stitched by the owner's mother, I think. And the small painting of the big lake hanging by the bathroom door, to judge from the initials on the bottom, was done by the current owner herself.

On the North Shore, your "cabin in the woods" is likely to be only nominally in the woods. At best, the scene is dominated by the vast openness of the lake: the sky, the clouds, the infinite variety of waves—or ripples— on the water's surface.

Our cabin is only a few feet from the shore of the lake. We come here to ski, to cook, to eat, and to read.

The forecast was for cloudy weather, but we had blue skies and tremendous stars at night.

Everything was coated with frost on the way north, starting with the swampy country in Lino Lakes, just north of Minneapolis. A luminescent morning. The white glow on the branches varied as the cloud cover changed, as if someone had spun the dial of a celestial rheostat back and forth.

We stopped at a wayside rest near Mora, vacant except for seven hunters in camouflage, none of them wearing masks. It's hard to figure what they were hunting this time of year. Squirrels? 

I've always been intrigued by the Cloquet Cutoff. Though the term seems to be going out of style, I heard it many times as an adolescent. It refers to Highway 33, which branches off of I-35 at the Black Bear Casino (a recent addition to the landscape) and takes you to Cloquet rather than Duluth, and on to Virginia, Lake Vermilion, Ely, and even International Falls.

Along the way you pass such lesser outposts as Canyon, Cotton, Aurora, Cook, and the turnoff to the Shangri-La of Meadowlands. When I was young, we almost always went that way to my mom's home town of Virginia or to the family cabin on Lake Vermilion. Nowadays we almost always head for Duluth and on to either a North Shore destination or the BWCA.

But on our recent trip we decided to veer left on the "cutoff" past Cloquet to the Sax-Zim Bog, just north of Meadowlands. It's long-since become an international birding "hotspot," though I can assure prospective visitors that if you want to spend a few hours driving down totally deserted snow-covered gravel roads in the dead of winter, this place is for you.

Hilary and I are supporters. I even carried my "certified Bog Buddy" card in my wallet, in case someone wonders why I wasn't dropping a "Jackson" into the tip jar at the visitors' center. I "gave" at the office.

But all this is entirely beside the point. On our way to Meadowlands we came suddenly upon five vehicles on the shoulder—trucks and SUVs—and we pulled over, too.

"What  are you looking at?" I whispered to the young woman with binoculars wearing an immaculate white stocking cap.

"Great Gray Owl," she replied tersely, without looking my way. I was tempted to ask her, "Where is he?" But to judge from the parallax of the camera-scopes set up on the shoulder nearby he couldn't have been more than forty feet away. Finally I saw him, right in front of me, just beyond the highway ditch, but very well camouflaged.

It's more fun if you spot him yourself, but it's an impressive bird all the same.

Evening grosbeaks

I won't detail our other adventures—grosbeaks, redpolls, Canada jays, etc. We visited several black spruce bog walks and looked at hundreds of chickadees intently without ever seeing a "boreal" version. More than once we heard, "There was one here 15 minutes ago."   

We swooped into Duluth from the north on highway 53 past the metropolis of Twig, down, down, down the hills past four or five iterations of Sammy's Pizza, various health clinics and snow-mobile trailer outlets, an airport, a county jail, and a federal detention center. Churches. Liquor stores. None beautiful, all resting firmly on the billion-year-old Duluth complex. I Think.

A short detour on Woodlawn Avenue to the Mont Royale supermarket for fresh fish. And ketchup. (For the pasties.)

The sun was low and at our backs as we continued up the shore, no frost here on the trees, but blue water, and a single ore boat silhouetted out on the lake near the canal.

Here at our cabin, we "ignite" the gas fireplace, pour ourselves a glass of wine, fry the fresh whitefish we picked up in Duluth, boil the potatoes, and look around for the pepper and salt. What? No salt?    

At dinner we listen to some blowsy ballads by Archie Shepp and Mal Waldron, followed by Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon singing duets from La Boheme.  We're enjoying the true taste of whitefish and Yukon gold. Lots of butter. (Tomorrow we'll drive up to Beaver Bay and buy some salt.)