Weather: The snow is gone from most places, but cold mornings returned on Friday. The ground still gets a little soft in the afternoon, but it refreezes at night. When I tried to dig someplace I could only penetrate half an inch.
Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 8 degrees F. Week’s high: 68 degrees F in the shade.
What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon; cheat grass up
What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves
What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters
What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows
Animal sightings: Saw footprints of the cat in soft mud before the cold returned. It sank a good quarter inch.
Weekly update: People who comment on the Peshtigo fire often dismiss it as caused by human carelessness. That judgement reflects the indoctrination we got as children from Smokey the Bear. It doesn’t comprehend the realities of living with wood as a fuel and gale force winds.
When I went to summer camp in Barry County, Michigan, in the 1950s we had few fires, and everything we did was hedged with restrictions. Once a week we broke into groups of 20 or 30 and went to designated areas to cook our dinners.
The cook areas were rimmed with rocks, and everything was cleared around the areas. We had to gather dead wood from the area for cooking. By the end of the summer, when five groups had scrounged for dead wood every Wednesday for eight weeks, there wasn’t much left.
We also had a ceremonial fire once a week that was even smaller. A teepee of kindling was built inside a small square of logs set on one another like a log cabin. In the early years it was set on the sandy beach. In later years it was moved to the pine area where a square brick fireplace a few feet high had been built. It also was used for cook fires by groups coming from town for the overnights required by the Camp Fire Girls’ program.
We never had simple camp fires when we would sit around and sing, like all the films show. I remember talking to someone who had gone to a day camp in New Jersey where they had huge bon fires. I assume the camp bought the wood.
We didn’t have that luxury. At the camp I attended sponsored by the Camp Fire Girls, our leaders were more parsimonious. The director had lived through the depression and World War II shortages. The only reason we had cook outs was the cooks were given one day off each week, and on Wednesday we had to fend for ourselves: cold cereal for breakfast, left overs for lunch, the cook outs for supper.
Every other camp I attended in the area had the same rules about fires: rim it with stones and gather dead wood from the ground. I remember a woman at the local day camp being especially adamant about fire, because the peat in swamps in an area north of town would burn for weeks if it got ignited. [1]
The Barry County camp was built on hills around a lake. It wasn’t good farm land, and so wasn’t cleared until 1901 when the Grand Rapids Bookcase Company began producing mission style furniture in the county seat of Hastings.
The land probably had only just begun to recover when it was sold to the camp in the 1930s. By the time I was there the trees were medium size hardwoods on the hills, and pines in the distance. The only tree I actually remember by species was a sassafras by the side entrance to the main lodge.
The area in front of the lodge was cleared of brush and small trees because that was where we gathered before meals. The area on the opposite side included the cemented area outside the kitchen where food deliveries were made. The rest of the land was covered with leaves. Dense shade suppressed the growth of young trees or wild plants. Flowers only were found in openings.
It’s one of the ironies of life that fire is what destroyed the camp. Lightening struck the main lodge in the spring of 1974. It must have been during a rain storm, and I think it probably burned itself out before any fire fighters arrived.
I only saw the results in August, after the debris had been cleared. Only the lodge burned. The surrounding trees were singed, but all that clearing, those habits of living in the woods, had saved them.
The camp was abandoned, and reverted again to wood lot. When a group was trying to sell it as a recreation property in 2011 they posted pictures that showed it had returned to state I knew in the 1950s.
Notes on photographs:
1. The lake with new trees growing where the beach used to be, 14 March 2011.
2. Clearing in pine woods area with Queen Anne’s lace blooming, 14 March 2011.
4. Camp lodge, postcard from the early 1950s.
5. Remains of the camp lodge after a spring fire, August 1974.
6. The woods as I remember them outside a sleeping cabin, 14 March 2011.
End notes:
1. Wolcott Bigelow Williams. Past and Present of Eaton County, Michigan. Lansing: Michigan Historical Pub. Assoc, 1906?. He wrote "In a very hot summer the peat became so dry in the tamarack swamps that it burned readily several inches deep, exposing the roots of the trees so that they fell over, and in the next hot summer the fire consumed them. The fire would smoulder in those peat beds for several weeks, and through several hard rains. Thus the tamarack swamps were transformed into wet prairies." (page 7)
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