John Pepin, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Journal columnist

“Here I am just waiting for a sign, asking questions, learning all the time.” — Kerry Livgren

There’s a sharp corner on a two-lane, blacktopped road that sticks out in my mind on occasion and usually triggers a memory or two when I drive past it.

What makes this place, and another not far up the road, memorable is that when I was a kid, I used to ride in the back seat of my parents’ car here headed to a trailer camp my grandmother had.

At this spot in the road, someone had used white paint to make a set of big footprints on the blacktop. It appeared some big animal had crossed the road here. The tracks looked like what people would today call bigfoot tracks.

This was back around the time bigfoot became well-known in pop culture via the famous Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967.

My dad would point these tracks out when we would go by them. As a very young boy, I enjoyed seeing the tracks and wondered how they got there. The artist had captured my imagination.

Back in those days of the mid-to-late 1960s, there was another set of tracks painted on the road in much the same fashion, but both sets have disappeared over the years having likely been paved and chip-sealed over more than once.

The blacktopped road is still there and splits into two routes not far from the place the tracks were laid.

Heading to the left, we would go toward my grandmother’s camp. The road to the right was never traveled much by my folks, if at all.

It leads down past numerous attractive cottages that are set out in prime fashion along the banks of a creek that widens into a stream that widens into a basin.

As we’d head to the trailer, we’d cross a small bridge where my folks used to spend time fishing for trout when I was a kid. My baby book says the first time I went fishing I was 3 years old.

I do have some clear recollections of stopping at the creek with my parents. I remember where they parked the car in the tall grass, not far off the road. I also recall one of the fishing holes they would lead me to that was down through the tag alders, at the end of a makeshift path – a pool gathered at an elbow of the creek.

I remember my dad catching a “redhorse” or two here and seeing that variety of suckers gathered under the bridge. They would slowly move from side to side, facing upstream as they spawned on the river gravel.

Our family didn’t eat suckers, but my mom would take them home and bury them in her garden as fertilizer. I remember being in grade school learning that American Indians would do the same thing.

The bridge over this little creek had a rusty steel rail and wooden decking that would rumble when our car drove over it. I know my grandmother’s trailer wasn’t parked far from here, down another road to the right, but I don’t know where.

I have no recollection of how to get there. My memory loses the trace after the turn-off, where the road is flanked by twisting jack pine trees, reindeer moss, bracken ferns and plenty of blueberries in late summertime.

I can’t remember what the inside of the trailer looked like either. The one thing that does remain in the back of my mind from that place was a groundhog that lived around a big pile of scrapped wood outside the trailer.

When you’re a kid, a lot of animals are most often first introduced to you as pets, so they have names. If you see a new animal, you typically ask what its name is. If it doesn’t have one, you give it one.

I don’t know who named this groundhog, but its name was “Woody,” or more formally, “Woody the Woodchuck.” He was fed daily by my grandmother a diet of white bread and raw carrots.

For some reason, when I was a kid, a common thing to feed to animals was white bread. It was put out for birds, used to bait minnow and chipmunk traps, and fed to this woodchuck.

In what I presumed was a remnant from his days growing up young in the Great Depression, my dad had come to enjoy white bread that had been ripped up into pieces, put into a bowl and eaten with milk, like cereal.

I tried it a few times and I didn’t mind it. I tried it again a few years ago and it had lost all its appeal.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate to have spent a good deal of time in the woods or driving through the woods heading someplace else. I have noticed the fall color of the leaves has already faded and mostly disappeared from several areas.

In some parts of the region, however, this is the time when a more subtle, but no less beautiful, time of the season is occurring. The leaves of the aspen trees are now at their brightest yellows.

Placed against the blue sky on a sunny day, the sight is extraordinary. There is one grove of trees that often beckons me to stop to soak up the sight. I see the white tree trunks, seemingly stained in places with black tar, and the shimmering leaves and I often want to get out to take photos.

If it’s like yesterday, I pass by on the road telling myself I have already taken pictures of this place on several occasions in the past. I had someplace else to be on a deadline or I would have likely stopped again.

I know that much like Lake Superior is famously never the same on any day, neither is this place grandly displaying itself just off the shoulder of the highway. There would always be something new to see, hear, smell, taste or touch at this or any other place in nature.

I continue to see a more than usual number of ruffed grouse in my travels, along with wild turkeys, which seem to be increasingly abundant just about anywhere I go.

The doe and three fawns I have been watching in my yard continue to come by to see me. Yesterday, one of the three younger deer was either hiding in the trees or missing from the group.

One night this past week, I stepped outside in the quiet darkness and could hear something munching leaves and stems or grass. I also heard apples dropping and hitting the ground with a thud.

I lit up the back part of the yard with my flashlight to find one of the fawns looking back at me, seemingly asking: “What?”

After realizing that there were no apple trees just off the yard where I’d heard the thud sound, I deduced that the doe must have been close by instead dropping road apples.

I caught a Coho salmon this week, surprisingly it was still shining like chrome when I first saw its side in the water as I reeled it in. It was delicious.

I spent some time at one of our local lakes this week too. The Queen of Shebis and I had gone out there to take some pictures. She likes the driftwood that has accumulated in great amount in one of the corners of the lake.

It was another extraordinary autumn day. On our way home, we drove along the blacktopped road I used to travel with my parents all those years ago.

I thought to myself that she had never been down the fork in the road where the cottages stand along the river. I took that road as a brief side trip.

It was evening and the sun was sinking over the water. There were tall, pines growing all around, shading many of the cabins and homes situated there.

The scene was so vivid, it left me almost smelling the sunshine and the soft breezes of a summer day and feeling the warm glow of what it must feel like to sit on a deck or porch in a rocking chair to watch the water all day.

At one point in the drive, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in the road ahead. From one side of the shoulder of this blacktopped road to the other led a trace of footprints, white footprints painted on the road like the ones I remember from my kid days.

Evidently, someone else saw the work of the unidentified artist of my youth. Someone else’s imagination had been captured.

Like me, someone else had been inspired.

Editor’s note: 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.