Have I Lost My Sisu?

It's been hard to find a good place the ski this winter. Or maybe I just haven't been trying hard enough. Looking out the windows at dormant grass and dead leaves spreading out in every direction is sort of pleasant, but it also engenders a listless sense of stasis, of waiting. But let's be honest: the recent string of mostly sunny days has been mostly magnificent.

A few days ago the Star Tribune ran a story identifying Minnesota as the "epicenter of a sauna revival in the United States." Well, we'll grasp at any excuse to feel "special," and I'm sure many snow-birds in Texas, Florida, and Arizona are now green with envy. I must confess, however, that I don't enjoy saunas as much as I once did. You get hot, then you want to go out but you don't. No one else is going out, and you don't want to be a sissy. Finally you do go out, coaxing someone to go with you, but as often as not there's no lake nearby to jump into.

The first sauna I ever took was in the mid-1960s, on the shores of Wake-Um-Up Bay on Lake Vermilion, near the cabin where my mom had spent her childhood summers. She still had friends in the neighborhood, and they had a sauna right next to the lake. During one visit my brother and I were introduced to that old backwoods institution. I was ten years old, and I didn't quite see the point. It was too hot for me. I was more impressed with the two-gallon galvanized kettle sitting in a shed nearby, filled almost to the brim with blueberries that our hosts had picked in the scrubby open country along a gravel road up beyond Elbow Lake. That was a lot of blueberries.

During the years I worked at a canoe camp a few miles from the Canadian border the sauna became a regular part of the routine. We'd stoke it for hours—the record temperature was 230 degrees, as I recall—then sit around inside, sweating like mad, before running out to jump in the lake, which was only a few feet away. I can remember one moonless night, swimming out into the lake under a starry sky and spraying water into the air, which would catch the light from the sauna on shore behind me and explode into silent clouds of mist against a black sky filled with stars.

The best part of any sauna is the tingle you get as your overheated body adjusts to the frigid  lake water. Is it actually good for you? I have no idea. In any case, these days a motel hot-tub suits me just fine.

Last winter the snow was so deep that rabbits gnawed all the bark off several newly planted shrubs in our backyard. I bought some green fencing and a few white plastic sleeves to protect the ones that survived, and it's nice to see them here and there in the yard, differentiated somewhat from the generally weedy things that show up every year.

I'm especially excited about a pair of volunteer chokecherry trees that I discovered last summer just inside the neighbor's new fence. All winter long I have had it in mind to remove a twenty-foot elm tree that's crowding their space. "It's only four inches in diameter," I would say to myself. "I could cut it down with an ax. And winter's the time to do it." The other day, with the temperatures in the fifties, I decided it was now or never. I got some rope, an axe, a little aluminum hand saw, and my long-handled pruning saw from the garage and set to work.

I tied the rope (not a very good rope) from the spindly elm to a nearby spruce tree with a taught-line hitch (not a very well tied knot.) I thought I might lop off some of the upper branches that were overhanging the power-line, but they were too high to reach with my extensions, and I was unsure of the wisdom of waving a long metal pole in that particular direction. When it starts to go, I said to myself, I'll tighten the rope and direct the tree out away from the wires.

I hacked at the base of the tree with the ax for a while, then decided it would be better to saw it off four feet up, so that it would weigh less when it fell. I made the lower cut in the direction I wanted the little tree to fall, but that didn't matter much. It was leaning in the opposite direction, out over the wires, and the minute I began to break through the trunk, it dropped down onto them. Not a crash, but a weighty and definitive movement that I knew immediately would be impossible to undue or counteract with the tools I had. That was not the way I'd imagined it.

Then I went inside and called the power company.

A jolly man not far from retirement age arrived two days later in a white pick-up truck. I met him at the door.

"A tree fell on the wires?" he said.

"It didn't fall; I cut it down. I guess I got in a little over my head."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "It happens all the time."

We went around back and he took a look around. "You stopped at a good time," he said.

His method for removing the tree was the same as mine, but he had much better tools, and a half-century of experience under his belt. He had a beautiful hank of supple pale blue rope at least an inch in diameter and a pole much longer than mine with an attachment on the end that he used to string the rope fifteen feet higher on a different tree nearby. "This pole doesn't conduct electricity," he said. "I think yours might."

Once he'd secured the rope he took my little saw from where I'd left it on the edge of the deck—I almost laughed out loud—and completed the cut. When he broke through the trunk it swung down away from the wires like a pendulum and came to rest against my neighbor's fence in the midst of a buckthorn thicket. What a relief.

He was having a slow day and we spent a few minutes talking about trees and birds. He owns a few acres up in Ramsey. When his kids were little he had a clock in the kitchen with birds instead of numerals on the face: robin, goldfinch, blue jay. Rather than chiming on the hour it would produce the appropriate bird call. "Imagine how thrilled my kids were when they heard a real mourning dove cooing in the back yard," he said. "And knew what it was!"

On quiet days I can now stare out the dining room window at a section of the yard that suddenly looks healthy, prim, and full of potential—the way I've been envisioning it for several years. In part, this is because I had to clear out several large buckthorns (which I should have done anyway) to get at the tree I wanted to remove. But now a new section of the sky has been exposed, too, and all summer we'll enjoy the extra sunlight shining down on our otherwise mostly shady garden.