The vivid blue sky formed a beautiful backdrop to the frosty tree branches lining the back road to camp. Stopping to shoot some pictures along the way, I was in no hurry. Perhaps I was too in the moment; the moment didn’t include paying attention to my driving. My truck slid into a ditch on an icy, but straight, stretch of roadway. A soft and snowy ditch greeted me, which meant no damage to my vintage Ford truck. But it was a steep ditch, and one from which I couldn’t remove my truck.
What I thought would be the five-mile walk to a friend’s farm ended quickly when a thirty-something woman driving a small SUV pulled over. Even though she was a former local girl, she wasn’t judgmental about my driving, offering that it was a bad road and she had gone in the ditch there herself. Given what had happened, I thought she was being a little harsh towards the road. She didn’t normally pick up hitchhikers, but I could get in. Since I wasn’t hitchhiking, I said she wouldn’t be violating a sensible rule.
She knew a farmer who lived nearby, and soon parked in his driveway. I followed several steps behind her and entered the shed. She knocked on the door. He soon came out and she explained my plight.
The farmer bore the weathered face of one accustomed to hard outdoor work. His dairy farm was large, and judging by the equipment and buildings, prosperous—not at all like my long-deceased Finnish grandfather’s hardscrabble forty-acre dairy farm in Liminga, west of Houghton.
These Delta County Belgian dairy and potato farmers clearly were better off than Copper Country Finns, who farmed land carved out of woods and swamps with sandy, rocky soils, and a short growing season. On such land, one could grow older, colder and fatter, but never prosperous. No part of the U.P., I suppose, would be mistaken for the land of milk and honey.
I said thank you to my rescuer and followed the farmer to his barn. He explained that he had a very bad back, but didn’t think much manual labor would be necessary. He seemed pleased to help and I climbed the ladder to the cab of his gigantic tractor, which would have dwarfed the only farm tractor I ever drove, my grandfather’s 1930 model with about forty horsepower. I rode on the platform just outside of the cab on this sunny morning.
With the aid of a nylon tow strap attached to the front of the tractor and the other end hooked to my truck, my vehicle was soon on high ground.
The farmer, a VanDamme, said he used to fish the river in front of my cabin, but now the fourteen-hour days of farming were about all his troublesome back could take, so he hadn’t fished in years. I promised I’d call him someday and see if a spring hatch of mayflies could coax him off of his couch.
The harmony of that day—the joy of living where strangers help one another—caused me to consider the origins of my enduring habit of getting stuck in Upper Peninsula backwoods and not being very troubled when it happens. Some have even suggested I enjoy it.
I recalled an offer made long ago, a simple and generous offer: if I could access the two-track road system of western Marquette County without traveling on any public highways, I would have use of my dad’s 1946 Willy’s Jeep. It was June, 1965 and I was fifteen, a year shy of legal driving age. Undoubtedly, my father’s generosity was motivated partly by the notion that teenage boys belonged in the woods, away from alluring teenage girls. His motives didn’t concern me.
My only thought was freedom. Freedom’s obstacle was the hundred yards of black ooze that lay between where the Jeep was parked and the nearest solid-bottomed, non-public road. To realize my dream, I had to make it through a swamp.
I enlisted the help of my thirteen-year-old brother Tom and we awoke early the following day with the idea of building a land bridge across the abyss. I don’t recall a planning session.
We simply gathered planks, logs, shovels and an axe. Incipient road builders, just like our father. There was a spot of high ground in the middle of the swamp. We would construct to that point and then rebuild, using the same materials for the remaining span.
By noon, having laid planks over logs, we were ready to cross our bridge triumphantly. When tested by foot, the structure seemed firm. We reasoned that it was simply a question of keeping all four wheels of the Jeep on the planks.
Assuming speed was our ally, my brother urged me to hit it, and so I did. Within a car length, the Jeep slipped off the sinking, now muddied span, and dropped into the bottomless pit. Before I got out, water had reached the floorboards.
The thought that the Jeep might disappear entirely into the swamp was not mere youthful fear, but a distinct possibility. It wasn’t that the Jeep was valuable or had never been abused. It would, however, be a serious setback to an adolescent’s self-esteem—his worth in his father’s eyes—to blow this opportunity, which had grown to seem like a rite of passage. As the black ooze percolated upward, it was clear we were in grave danger that the Jeep’s downward motion would exceed its forward progress. It was clear that we needed help.
I grew up in a neighborhood west of Ishpeming where there lived a dozen males approximately my age. We played a lot of sports, hunted, fished and ski-jumped. We generally made our own fun. It was a time and place bereft of organized travel teams and adult control.
Many of my friends had learned mechanical skills from fathers and grandfathers by hanging around garages and camps. Although these were nonprofit garages, they were full service, with torches, welding equipment and every tool imaginable. By inclination and experience, my friends were generally more mechanically skilled than I.
My brother summoned them and they mustered the essential tools of the seriously stranded—a farmer’s jack, a substantial chain and the optimistically named come-a-long winch. On this day, the equipment proved to be useless, and soon all were covered with muck from baseball caps to Converse sneakers.
Hearing the commotion of the laboring engine, several men from nearby arrived and reminded us that making noise and spinning tires were not signs of progress. Eventually, we saved the Jeep, helped immeasurably by a gym-hardened, thirty-year-old who, when all else had not quite succeeded, lifted the rear end of the Jeep out of the mud, while everyone else, except me (who was in the cockpit) pushed or lifted from the front. Before my father was home, the Jeep was cleaned up and little evidence remained of our adventure.
I don’t recall my father ever asking me what had happened that day, and why we hadn’t taken him up on his offer. He may have known, but spared me the embarrassment. Or, perhaps he didn’t, since burying a Jeep wasn’t unusual among males who passionately tried to reach otherwise-inaccessible areas of the woods. While there were various lessons that one could draw from this humbling experience, I enjoyed the camaraderie, realized the value of having friends and soon forgot about the freedom that only a day or two before had seemed so important to me.
We begin life with a bag filled with good luck and a second bag empty of experience, and the trick is to fill the second bag before the first runs out. I have not avoided risk in my outdoor adventures, but some of my missteps have revealed that not everyone shares my optimism that a combination of attitude, hard work and experience will triumph over adversity.
Opening day of trout season, a decade ago, found me and an older friend (I’ll call him “Jack”) camped on the West Branch of the Fox River. It was a ridiculously delayed spring and it was pointless to be trout fishing, but for ritualistic necessity and the fact that Jack tells good stories of the “women” and “trout” varieties.
Jack was a smoker and not in shape; he snores at a felonious level. After a dinner cooked over a campfire, we pitched my tent fifty feet away from the F-150. I would sleep in the open box of the truck, on a cot, while Jack slept in the tent. It was a clear night and very cold. Sound traveled well, and the roar from the tent kept me awake. After hours of frustration, I moved the truck a quarter mile away.
By that time, I was so cold I had no choice but to heat the cab and try to get comfortable sleeping on the bench seat. I am just tall enough to make this an uncomfortable fit. No sooner had I fallen asleep than I was awakened by a pounding on the window. It was Jack, peering in, looking as if he thought I had left him when I moved the truck. The clock read 4:30 a.m.
“Steve, I left my cigarettes in the truck.” Before I could respond, I heard, “I’m up for the day. It’s cold in the tent. Can I get in? Can we start the engine?”
It was twenty degrees. I was wide awake and it was long before dawn on the last Saturday in April. I knew, from years of experience, that until June, the trout slept ’til noon.
We caught no fish, but budding trees and fresh shoots of grass was further evidence that it really was spring. By early evening, it was in the mid-’50s.
We headed north on a two-track road to the Adams trail, a road often rougher than a two-track. Coming too quickly over a small hill, I saw trouble below. A sheet of compacted snow lay ahead, covering the entire road.
Going too fast to stop, but too slow to make it through 200 yards of melting snow—and making allowances for the sensibilities of my cautious friend—I did not floor it or hit the brakes. We made it halfway across this evil remnant of winter before my oversized truck hung up on the partially melted snow, over an impenetrable icepack.
Brutally hard work with no expectation of success lay ahead. To make matters worse, I was stunned to hear, “I can’t help. I’m not mechanical and I’ve seen people get hurt doing things like this.”
“Can you walk twelve miles? No, you can’t.” I fairly cursed as I answered my own harsh question and then added, “But I can. And that’s what I’m going to do. You can’t stay here in the truck. The exhaust system is embedded in snow and ice, and you’ll die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
This had the intended effect and my assistant performed his share of the labor, which was as hard as I expected. After hours of sweating from jacking the truck off the mass of snow and ice—so much winching that my hands were raw—we were on our way.
Near Munising, Jack said he didn’t know whether he’d fish again in back country. He also didn’t think it was true that getting there was half the fun. He thought that might be more true about getting home. Exhausted, he wasn’t joking.
I sensed Jack’s alienation from nature; he was not raised to revel in romping through northern forests and swamps, and he enjoyed being a highway fisherman. The closer the proximity of the river to pavement, the more comfortable he was. Nevertheless, he was a superb and knowledgeable fly-fisher and a willing teacher. As for my passion for the deep woods, I admit to a Puritan’s sense of having to earn my joy. I find satisfaction in believing I could survive in these woods, under most circumstances, if I had to.
Despite our differences, I couldn’t help but think that we had enjoyed most of our time together, regardless of whether we were on his turf or mine. Jack wasn’t the first person who told me he was not a candidate for a follow-up back country adventure. Sometimes that hurt. But more often than not, I rationalize there could be something about my adventures—if not my company—that give lasting satisfaction.
—Steve Pence

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