“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.” — Pete Seeger

Rolling through the bucolic countryside on some forgotten copper-claim byway I glanced over my shoulder as I crested a small hill.

When I saw what I saw I pulled the car into the crunching gravel at the side of the road. I turned around and headed back, parking on the dusty shoulder.

Just beyond a shallow ditch was a house set back off the road. There was an old leafless apple tree off to the side of the front yard. The gnarled, gray fingers and upturned arms of this matriarch reached wide to protect a sublime treasure lying beneath.

Around the sides of a big knobby tractor tire were dozens and dozens of blooming crocuses, white, purple and even a handful colored yellow, bright and bold like buttercups.

I had never seen so many crocuses in one place — it was like a sea of purple and white, moving slowly with bursts of wind that blew across the brown grass of the yard.

I wanted to take some close-up photographs of this wonderful spray of heaven. I turned to approach the house and knock on the door to ask permission.

When I did, I stood shocked to see that not only was no one at home, but the house was dark, broken and abandoned.

The house was a green, metal put-together kind of structure with white pines left standing tall in a row behind. An old car was left in the back.

Some animal had chewed through the screens that covered the doors. The concrete foundation had big holes in it. The roof line was busted uneven and the steps were gone from under a sliding glass door that sat about midway down the length of the house.

No sidewalk, pathway or trail through the grass was discernable.

All kinds of questions were swirling around in my head, basically amounting to, “What happened here?” By the look of things, this house had once indeed been a home.

There had been someone here to drive the old car, to likely walk out to the mailbox on a warm summer’s day and sit underneath the pines on a cool autumn evening.

And there was someone here who obviously admired the simple and profound magic produced by mixing sunlight, rich earth, a little bit of rain and a few flowering plants.

I wondered whether this unknown gardener was here long enough to witness for themselves the exquisite crocus garden beneath the twisted branches of the apple tree.

Did someone die, lose a job, divorce, go to jail or endure some other hardship? I saw no toys or swings or other signs of children around the place.

I was reminded of what Bob Dylan wrote, “I see the screws breaking loose, I see the devil pounding on tin, I see a house in the country being torn apart from within.”

Did these people maybe just leave to be gone for good? Gone from the hardscrabble living a lot more than a few people find within these remnant locations across the region – scatterings of bleak houses, situated between rusted railroad tracks, broken-down, left-behind schools, country stores and the cracked pavement off blacktopped county roads that inevitably lead to nowhere special?

There was no way to know, at least not from where I was standing.

Musician John Fogerty wrote, “Looking out across this town, kinda makes me wonder how all the things that made us great got left so far behind. This used to be a peaceful place, decent folks, hard-working ways.”

That day I was like most people, I suspect.

I was on my way to another thing in another place with my watch running slow and the relentless crushing demands of this dizzying world and its nagging where-are-you technology tugging at the corner of my jacket.

It felt like someone had ahold of my arm leading me away from this lonesome and quiet place where I could have sat all afternoon, just wondering.

Before I left, I did take several photos of the dazzling spring crocuses.

That’s what the picture is all about. I wanted to bring a little bit of that garden out from under the shadows of that apple tree and whatever happened to those people in the green-metal house.

I wanted to shine for these people a little bit of the light they’d left behind in their presumed misfortune – that magnificent blanket of flowers. And so, I share this story and photo to try and spread around the beauty left off the side of the road.

Of course, I could have this whole thing wrong.

Maybe these folks found a big payday somehow.

“Kinfolk said, ‘Jed, move away from there.'”

I want to hope that’s what happened – swimming pools, movie stars — however unlikely, or at least, that they made out alright someplace else, in another state, country or atmosphere.

Bob Dylan also said, “Every new messenger bringing evil report about armies on the march and time that is short and famines and earthquakes and plane wrecks and the tearing down of the walls.”

Maybe right now, there’s a lady on her knees in the green, spring grass, with a garden spade, digging a hole in the ground. In the distance, there’s an old man approaching.

He’s taking a good long time to get there because he’s trying to roll a big knobby truck tire in a straight line. He’s going to roll that wheel until it falls over on its side next to the lady, under the shade of an aging apple tree.

In the skies above, swallows tip and turn, the breezes are warm and light.

Back up on their new porch, with the green-metal roof, the couple will later sit and sip something sweet while the sun falls behind the pines.

Cool air descends, bringing down the purple night.

Those tough times they might have had trying to make a life living in the Michigan north woods exist now only in their dreams and memories, a long time gone.

Meanwhile, that old house, with the torn screens and sagging frame, sits alongside the road with the howling elements of nature pounding a little harder on the walls each year – sensing weakness in the structure, the inevitable decay and demise.

But under that tree, a delight for the eyes and the soul — a promise of renewal, regeneration and revival — the purple and white crocuses.

No more than a few inches tall, they have the unlikely power to stop a passing car whirring along the roadside, to make a man get out to wonder and to think.

Editor’s note: John Pepin is the deputy public information officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.