Read an Excerpt
Pigeon River Country
A Michigan Forest
By Dale Clarke Franz The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2007 Dale Clarke Franz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03164-1
CHAPTER 1
North Woods
It lingers here yet: the smell of glaciers, mingled now with the sweetness of north country plants. Movement and change are the great forces of life. Elements like iron that were formed in the turbulence of stars now merge and shift in arrangements as complicated as human beings. One of our most deeply felt symbols of life force is a river system, particularly the clear-running rivers of the north.
Even the most peaceful forest is alive with the movement of water. In a scarcely understood arrangement between water and tree, water moves out of the ground and up the trunk just beneath the bark, bringing star stuff from the soil to feed the tree. Then the water departs through the leaves to continue its movement from air to earth and back again.
Put your hand in a stream and you touch the sky, the leaves, the tree, the roots, the earth. They say the water that dinosaurs drank is with us still, endlessly freezing, melting, and flowing. The bonding of two parts hydrogen with one part oxygen carries our past into our present.
If we stand by a river, it seems to come from some mechanical source, like a pump that is draining a reservoir — our long experience of getting water at a tap. If we stay by the river awhile, we get the sense of water on the move from all around. On a wooden footbridge over the Pigeon River after a night of rain, we see water over the banks, bending the grasses into long needles pointing the water on its way to the sea. It flows north to Mullett Lake, then into Lake Huron and on down the steps of the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic.
In the collection of ancient Eastern writing called "The Way of Life," there is a thought about water translated as follows.
The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room
Not only is it the nature of water to shape without having a shape of its own. It takes on shapes that are infinite in their variety, those of snow crystals. Arctic natives are said to have 100 compound words to express different varieties and conditions of snow. Farley Mowat writes that "snow is crystalline dust ... but on earth it is, in yet another guise, the Master Titan. Glaciers are born while the snow falls; fragile, soft and almost disembodied ... but falling steadily without a thawing time. Years pass, decades, centuries and the snow falls." Michael Delp, a poet living in northern Michigan, writes in "Walking Over Black Ice":
First you are struck
by the very transparency of it,
the darkness,
the blackness of water below you.
Then, you notice the slightest apparition
of reflection
Its own weight depresses a glacier into black ice. The glaciers of the Pleistocene were two miles thick. They are not gone. Glaciers over Greenland toward the end of the twentieth century were two miles thick. Geologists say the Ice Age has just begun. Glaciers in North America have come and gone a dozen times, and there are about 50 more cycles to go. An average cycle lasts 100,000 years, meaning that we might have about 90,000 years to go before the snow again begins to accumulate summer and winter. A drop of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the average north woods temperature would start a glacier, with snow packing down, recrystallizing, turning to ice. When the glacier gets big enough, it shears into horizontal bands and slides on itself, moving toward the equator. It can start in any place cold enough; those that over the last two million years reached New York City and nearly to Tennessee formed in many places and spread in all directions. It is not hard to imagine on a winter evening that a glacier might start in the neighborhood of the Pigeon River Country, perhaps within the city limits of Gaylord, which calls itself the Alpine Village because of its moderate elevation and not so moderate snowfall.
Glaciers are so frigid that they put enormous cold air masses into circulation, the kind that, on encountering humid air to the south, once turned Nevada into a string of lakes dotted with islands. The islands are now mountain ranges. When glaciers reach places that are warm enough, the melting equals the rate of movement. The glacier appears stationary at its edge even though it continues to move from the center. As a result, all the debris scrubbed from the earth drops or washes out, leaving hills of boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, silt, and clay.
Imagine ourselves very small, walking among piles of sand and twigs during the early spring melt in the north woods. The patterns of debris we find are much like the landscape itself. Walking up and down the hills of the Pigeon River Country, we rumble over an enormous spring thaw, kicking into pebbles, sliding through pieces of earth that were scraped up from far away, scrubbed, packed in ice, and brought here inch by inch to be left in enormous heaps. It's as if the glacier just left. Lakes freeze each season like residual glacial puddles, and men peer through holes cut in the ice looking into the dark water for fish.
And now the Michigan mitten rises, inch by inch, year by year, rebounding from the weight of the glaciers, rising, in fact, faster than mountains do. The last big glacier to crush Michigan melted away some 13,000 years ago into Saginaw Bay, leaving a series of moraines, including the base for Gaylord's Alpine Village. A birch, spruce, and fir forest grew in the warm interval that followed. Finally, another glacier, thinner than most, developed in the Superior basin, advanced across this forest — burying bison, mammoth, caribou, musk ox, and moose — flowed across the Upper Peninsula onto northern lower Michigan, and stopped at the Pigeon River Country against the old moraine where Gaylord now stands. It left iron-rich red drift where it passed, and when we in this century drink water from our wells in the north woods, we sip remnants of the 10,000-year-old Valders glacier and clean its stain from our wash basins.
When the Valders retreated 10,000 years ago, it left a high ridge that runs northwest to southeast through Otsego County. It is the highest elevation in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. From the Otsego high ridge flow five river systems, the Sturgeon, Pigeon, and Black to the north and the Au Sable and Manistee to the south.
Most visitors arrive in the vicinity of the Pigeon River Country by way of I-75. It is about a four-hour drive north from Detroit. Along the way, they pass Saginaw Bay, out of sight to their right, the space between the mitten and the thumb. The immediate area around I-75 near the bay is flat, open farmland. It is a glacial lake plain that continues for 61 miles from milepost 130 to milepost 191. There I-75 begins to climb the Port Huron moraine and enter an ecological zone different from most of the United States. The moraine is part of the most prominent morainic system of all, stretching from Minnesota to New York, formed 13,000 years ago by the Saginaw ice lobe. It was against this moraine that the last advancing glacier, the Valders, stopped, forming the headwaters of the Pigeon.
As visitors drive out of the Saginaw glacial lake plain into the rolling hills, they enter a transition forest. This forest contains both the broad-leaved trees of the south and the evergreen conifers of the north. In the transition zone, beech and sugar maple from the southern forest grow side by side with spruce and balsam fir from the north. They grow alongside red pine, white pine, and stray remnants of hemlock — whose ranges are centered in this transition zone. The forest is unlike those found anywhere else. It is known as the north woods. Even at 70 miles per hour, the vista changes slowly. One notices fewer signs of human habitation, fewer hickories, sycamores, and dogwoods, more hemlocks, white pines, and jack pines. And when the driver finally stops, the fragrance and the sounds are unmistakably different.
Woods are an incredible experience for people accustomed to cities. You look out over ferns, bushes, trunks, and all that can be seen along the horizon are trees. We are accustomed to looking quickly, then moving on. It's easy to look quickly at the Pigeon River forest. All those thick, vertical lines standing quietly. As far away as you can see, there are trees and growing things. It's a look into infinity.
Trees creak. The sound of openness rustles all around. Only timidly does one listen without filtering the sound as we do in the city. We might say that birds touch us from far-off trees with notes in our hearing range below 20,000 vibrations per second. The liquor of plant secrets rushes in on every breath.
Changes in the forest may seem imperceptible to us. Such things depend on our sense of pacing. To our dogs and cats, we humans are eternal creatures who live four or five times longer than they do. A white pine is not considered mature until it is 300 years old. It is an act of incredible haste to cut one down in minutes. Yet even the virgin forests that remain in the north woods are young by earth's standards. The oldest villages in the Middle East are older than the virgin forests of the Great Lakes. Water is the most visible sign of youth here. The lakes and wetlands are signs of a young drainage system that in fact leaves much of the land undrained.
Some 20,000 of the 105,000 acres in the Pigeon River Country Management Unit are water or wetlands, where the groundwater table is at or near the surface all year. The United States in the 1970s was losing nearly half a million acres of wetlands each year; now it loses about 290,000 acres every year, or nearly 800 acres a day. The losses now are being offset, federal officials say, by people restoring and creating new wetlands. A federal inventory shows 108 million acres remaining, including coastal salt marshes. In the contiguous 48 states, we have half the wetlands we had 200 years ago. Wetlands sustain, acre for acre, many times the fish and wildlife of most other habitats. They are highly efficient filters that clean our groundwater.
It may be a fiction to say that there are four seasons; season watchers can detect changes every day. Yet there does seem to occur a flurry of activity in the transition time as one traditional season ends and another begins. As winter turns to spring, for instance, tree buds blossom almost overnight and leaves appear almost simultaneously. In fact, many leaves do appear simultaneously, one of the wonders of the incredible aspen. Almost universally known in the north woods as popple, after its scientific name Populus, the quaking aspen grows sprouts along its root system. The many stems are clones of one plant and identical genetically; they are the same color, the same shape, and they flower, grow their leaves, change to fall colors, and drop their leaves at exactly the same time all along the root system. Most clones in the north woods cover less than a fifth of an acre, but some older ones occupy up to four acres. Popple, which is denigrated locally because its wood is inappropriate for lumber or long-burning firewood, is actually quite a dashing figure among trees. It is a pioneer, what A Sierra Club Naturalist's Guide calls a specialist in catastrophe. Aspens spring up on the most infertile of soils after everything else has been swept away by people or natural phenomena. All they really need is some moisture and lots of direct sunlight. Aspen seedlings grow two feet tall (and clones about four feet) their first year, then up to three feet per year for the next ten years. In remote areas, aspen sometimes grow to a height of 80 feet and live up to 200 years. But most mature at 30 feet and live about 50 years. They are a one-generation forest, providing protection in their lifetime as the next generation of more enduring forest types emerges. Clones continue to pop up and quickly die out without full sun, yet the root system will live on for 100 years ready to spring forth after the next disaster. Aspen are the most common trees in the second-growth north woods, with most of them dating from the 1930s or later.
In this zone of change and diversity, the seasons of spring, summer, and fall have their own particular charms and attributes. but winter is the unmistakable edge against which humans can measure their place in the scheme of things. The southern part of Michigan gets, on average, 30 inches of snow in a season. In the Pigeon River Country, the average accumulation is more than 130 inches. When it begins to snow, often in October, it may snow for several days before stopping. Even in a mild winter, the warmest days of early spring may suddenly end with a snowstorm of several days' duration. And the warmest days of summer give way to cool nights in which sweaters or jackets may feel comfortable. The smell of glaciers lingers in the morning mists.
The coldest temperature in Michigan was recorded at Pigeon River Country headquarters on February 9, 1934, when the mercury registered 51 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Temperatures in most winters reach 20 or 30 and sometimes 40 below. The thermometer is likely to fall below freezing in the Pigeon River Country twelve months out of the year. In one recent year, the only month without frost was September.
When people slip boots into bindings and move on snowshoes into Pigeon River hardwoods, they're likely to be walking through air that gathered in a mass over the coldest reaches of the globe and moved south, pushing warmer, wetter air out of the way. Air tends toward the same temperature and humidity over thousands of square miles in systems known as air masses. While the sun sends the air over the equator into a warm, rapid hum, areas such as northern Canada turn terribly cold in winter.
Air is a physical presence, a thin skin around the earth. It shifts and rolls like an ocean, heated unevenly by the sun and stirred by the spin of the globe and its trajectory through space. What we call air is actually swirling with clay, silt, sand, dust, smoke, ashes, salts, water, and other particles, most of them so small that if we could line a thousand of them up in a row the thickness of one human hair might hide it. These particles float in gases composed of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, some carbon dioxide, and traces of several others with names like krypton and xenon.
The cleanest air is above the remotest parts of the oceans, the polar regions, and the upper reaches above the globe. In bright sunlight, this clean air looks blue and lends color to water. The sky looks blue because violet and blue waves, which are shortest among visible light waves, bounce around among the molecules of air while the longer light waves slip through, like short and tall soldiers marching through a field of boulders. The shorter soldiers, in blue uniforms, stumble and sprawl across the boulders while the taller soldiers, in red, march right over them.
Blue is a glimpse of the electromagnetic spectrum, which moves in waves. If you sit on the edge of Hardwood Lake, it looks like waves are moving ashore, which is an illusion. Actually, the wind moves across the water and the water heaves up and down in roughly the same place as the wind passes. The electromagnetic spectrum is as mysterious as the wind. Whatever it is, it makes waves. Some, like radio waves, can be as far apart as the width of Lake Michigan or even the distance between New York City and Detroit. Blue and the other colors we see make such small waves that we would have to cut the thickness of a dime into 1,000 slices to understand the dimensions. One of these dime slices, which is as thick as soap bubble film, is now sliced into 100 even thinner dimes. Hold 40 of these thinner dimes between your fingers and you have the wavelength of violet light. Add two more to the stack and you have the wavelength of blue light. A stack of 49 is green light, 57 yellow, 58 orange, and 64 red. Fewer than 40 or more than 71 are outside the range of what the human eye can see.
The shortest visible light waves careen through a glacier for the same reasons they color the sky. In one sense, these dimensions explain the blue color of glacial ice. Yet we take the measure of things in many ways. The hotter the springs in Yellowstone National Park the redder the algae. Blue is that more peaceful place, where activity slows down, turns silent like an evening snowfall. Ice may be clear, but deeper cold, silent cold, is blue. Blue lurks in a haze almost invisible behind the glare of sun on snow. It is the cold that creeps against your nose and through trousers along the front of your legs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pigeon River Country by Dale Clarke Franz. Copyright © 2007 Dale Clarke Franz. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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