John Pepin, Michigan Department of Natural Resources

I got to the dirt road not long after the rain had stopped falling.

The air was still warm though the skies were full of low-hanging gray-white clouds that socked the scene in with near foggy conditions.

I opened the car door and stuck my boots into the wet gravel and began walking. I could see that my tracks joined others along the side of the road made recently by a white-tailed deer and a day or so ago by a young moose.

I hadn’t been out this way since summertime, when the trees were covered in green leaves and full of twittering birds. Today, the tree branches were bare, and the woods were almost silent.

At this time of year, the tapping of woodpeckers and nuthatches is a common sound, along with the scolding of blue jays that seemingly need to tell every living thing for at least a couple of miles that someone has entered the woods.

With the leaves down off the trees, I could see a good distance off to my right where the topography sloped upwards. A path had been beaten through the underbrush by deer and moose.

Like humans, these animals like to follow a path of least resistance whenever possible. They like to walk roads like this one that are not heavily traveled by humans in their noise-making trucks, cars, motorbikes and off-road vehicles.

This road is mainly used by a handful of residents who live scattered among the higher reaches of the surrounding hills, overlooking the lakes and the blacktopped county road.

One of the lakes, home to good summer catches of crappie, is off to my left as I walk. There are no autumn ducks on the water today. No trumpeter swans and the common loons have long since migrated south.

The surface of the water is flat, reflective and peaceful. Just looking at the water has a calming effect on my spirit, which tends to lean toward restless on the regular.

Deer tracks continue along the graveled shoulder of the road.

I come to a place where the road has been repaired.

The last time I saw this crossing of a small creek through a culvert under the road, a good portion of the embankments leading down to the water on each side of the gravel road had been eaten away by then-recent torrential rains.

I round a bend in the road listening to the nothingness around me.

My appearance interrupts a convention of turkeys at the edge of the road.

Apparently, their conversation involved safe routes out of town before Thanksgiving arrives. Like bank robbers plotting at the edge of town, these birds began to strut for a hiding place as soon as they saw me.

There were 10 in all, bobbing their heads and moving their necks around as they moved for the understory and some thick spruce trees that were mixed in with the northern hardwoods.

They made soft clucking type sounds as they went.

The deer tracks on the road made a short circle here before they continued onward. Perhaps the deer too had encountered the turkeys on its walk along the road.

I stopped to look to my left in a place where a pond used to stand thanks to a plugged culvert under the road. In the springtime, mallards nested here among the cattails and rushes, blending in to almost invisibility amid the dried and dead foliage.

Painted turtles used the numerous downed and decayed trees to sun and loaf on the lazy, longer days of summertime. Behind the pond, a small hill rises that is green with grass much of the time with a brown-dirt deer path cut through it.

A project to replace the culvert a few years back left the pond drained all but dry for good. Now, the cattails shoot up out of the dampened mud, but there’s no longer any depth or flow to the water.

On the opposite side of the road, however, a small creek meanders between cedars, balsam firs and maples, where dead leaves cover the forest floor.

The topography rises higher on this side of the road, with more moose and deer paths cut through the trees, leading up the hill.

I take a few minutes to try calling for moose and I await a response, but no moose moves to within view. Other than that persistent blue jay and the slow trickling sound of the creek, I hear nothing.

I keep walking and reach a crossroads. I take the road to the right, which almost immediately crosses over the creek. Just upstream, the water ponds behind a series of two or three beaver dams.

The biggest of these dams holds a couple of acres worth of water back, providing a home for ducks, muskrats, geese and of course, beavers. There are at least two beaver lodges on this pond.

As I approach, I notice the water of the pond has been disturbed near the shoreline where I appeared. By the pattern of the disturbance atop the water, I guess that it was made by either a beaver or the flushing of some puddle ducks that took off quickly.

Beyond this disturbance in the water, the pond and surrounding woodlands is quiet.

The sky remains gray, but the outline of the sun is visible through the curtain of clouds.

This is about the time I decide to turn around to walk back. Today I hadn’t intended to take a long walk, but a necessary one.

Sometimes there is nothing at all that can unravel kinks in my hose or the tightness in my mind and heart except getting outside in the woods, even for just five minutes.

I notice a wake along the face of the largest of the beaver dams, where cattails are growing tall. My eyes follow the disturbance in the water and find a medium-sized beaver moving silently along his way.

I watch the beaver disappear around some bushes. I admire the engineering work of he and his ancestors with the beaver dams here creating terraced pools of varying heights, like Japanese rice fields.

I stop where the creek passes under the road to listen to the sound of the water trickling. I see more dated moose tracks in the gravel. I try some more moose calling, but again, nothing emerges from the woods.

I try to summon a barred owl with similar results.

As I follow the paved county road toward home, there are no ducks on the lakes. Quiet and still gray waters stretch out before me.

No music on my radio. I just want to extend the quiet time I’ve had as much as possible.

Later, after midnight, I clicked open the front door in time to see a zigzag of a lightning bolt buzzing in the northwestern sky. The brilliant flash was followed shortly after by the pounding of thunder.

Another oddity for the times, thunderstorms in mid-November. A torrential rain arrived in short order. I listened intently and tried to soak the sound into the entire breadth of my being.

Sleeping always seems to come easier during a thunderstorm or a blizzard, which encourages a person to wrap up tighter in the cozy comforts of home, like dry clothes, warm blankets and a heated house.

I remember a makeshift fort we had built in our backyard when I was a kid. It was made from all kinds of scrap wood, windows and cuts from carpet that we fashioned into someplace we enjoyed playing in.

I was in the fort one time in the rain. The sound I heard was like water dripping on a cardboard box or on the inside of a plaster ceiling just before it collapses.

The fort was not waterproofed, an obvious error in our construction.

Soon after the rainstorm I recall us being told to dismantle the fort. I remember pulling out a soaking wet carpet remnant and breaking in the roof.

Today my dreams are of moose tracks and flying birds, big fish and quiet times in shady places. Oh, yes and of world wars that might materialize just any day now.

The world has always seemed like a strange place to me, but it keeps getting stranger than it ever was every single day.

Bob Dylan said: “Well, time has passed and now it seems, everybody’s having them dreams. Everybody sees their self, walkin’ around with no one else.”

I’ll keep my boots in the gravel, dirt under my fingernails and my eyes on the stars, thinking and hoping and dreaming and moving forward, always forward.

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.