John Pepin, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Journal columnist

“Her eyes shone bright like the pretty lights that shine in the night out of Yerington town,” — Steve Gillette/Tom Campbell

Stepping out to the wet street that morning, the capitol was covered in a feathery veil of snowflakes, the lights shining in a yellowish glow up high around the dome, the colorful flags folding and unfolding in the wind.

At the Ottawa corner, the pines and other trees decorating the stately white lawn were flocked in nature’s first touches of winter.

There seemed to be a lot of visitors in town, like me. I asked one young woman for directions and she said she could only guess. Turns out, she guessed right.

A couple minutes later, a man stopped in his car and rolled down the window. He asked me — the guy pulling a travel suitcase behind me, with a laptop bag and a camera on my shoulders — if I knew how to access the visitor parking area.

I apologized that I didn’t know and kept walking.

The news floating south that morning talked about big snows coming up north. I wondered whether I’d be able to catch my flight home or would spend the holiday weekend in the capital city.

A few meetings, a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke later, I was relieved to feel the small plane lifting off the runway, heading across Lake Michigan to the snow-covered backroads, forests and winding rivers of this wide and fair peninsula.

We had left an hour earlier than scheduled, and as we landed, I felt we had ducked under the weather, just missing a heavy dump of fluff and winds stirred up by the gods having another pillow fight.

It felt damned good to be home. I had only been gone a week, but it felt like a month. Pulling around those icy corners down the road to the house, I felt like I was running for a touchdown without anyone within 40 yards of me.

I glided into the driveway and hauled my junk into the house.

All the signs showed nature was about to bring a storm my way. The birds were mobbing the feeders, quickly grabbing chunks of suet or picking up a sunflower seed or two, flying off and returning just as quickly for more. The skies were grumbling, and the air felt heavy.

Inside the house, I was so happy to just sit in any of the chairs — the hard, wooden table chairs or the soft cushioned loungers tucked into several of the rooms, it didn’t matter.

With night falling, I ducked out into the yard for a few minutes.

There were deer moving like ghosts between the trunks of the bare trees off the edge of the lawn. They would soon venture hesitantly into the yard.

Among them was a doe with two fawns, one of which was hobbled by an injury of some kind on the joint of its right back leg. This deer had been here many times before and whatever the cause of the injury, it appeared to be slowly mending.

Another doe, a larger one, picked up a corn cob out of the snow. I stood in the falling snow listening. It sounded like the deer was chewing rocks, the crunching sound was so loud it almost hurt to listen.

I tossed her an apple and she picked it up between her teeth, looking like a grinning Mr. Ed. She crunched the apple too, the juices running down her chin, dripping.

Night had fallen now, but the silhouettes of the deer remained visible in the yard.

The fawns chased each other. Their mother used her front leg to push one of the fawns away from the corn cob she was holding against the ground.

In the skies, it was cold enough to see some of the stars, but the snow was covering much of the celestial wonders. These nights, cold and snowy, remind me of when I was a young kid.

We’d play outside until we were soaking wet, games like King of the Hill on the castle-like snowbanks plowed up at the street corners by the city’s snow plows.

We were also fond of playing football on the snow and ice-covered street in front of my house, under the wilting arms of a gigantic silver maple. There were also epic snowball battles and snow fort building.

On other nights, we’d slide plastic toboggans down through the fresh snow in the backyard. We’d also ride sleds down the streets and icy sidewalks.

Ironically, some of the best times I remember from those early winters were not playing outside. Instead, they were shoveling out the car for my dad, after the plow had gone by, piling up the thickest, hardest snow.

My folks had divorced when I was 13. I had stayed behind while my mom and siblings moved north across the Canadian border. There was an unspoken sense between the two of us remaining of wanting to succeed despite the deficit.

I remember nights so cold and black out there I thought winter would never end. I also remember pushing the snow in a metal snow scoop along the side of the house, under the shadow of thick, deadly icicles that hung two stories above me off the edge of the roof.

The old mining-era house, with its plaster and lathe, square nails and rock-walled basement stood drafty, but warm against those long winter nights. In those days, we’d switched from a coal furnace to heating oil.

Under the twinkling stars, pushing a snow scoop or digging with a shovel, the time would disappear. I can still sense the feeling of accomplishment I had once back inside the house, pulling off my cold, wet clothes.

On this night, across the yard, I watched as one of the fawns moved under the doe to nurse. In a platform feeder, that hung from a maple tree in the front yard, a flying squirrel sat atop the sunflower seeds, eating.

The big dark eyes of this docile creature were shining back gold in the pale light that met them, cast from the living room windows. Within a few minutes, I was back inside the house.

All the lights were out now. I sat on the couch soaking up the blue shadows drifting in from outside. The dark forms of the deer could still be seen moving between the trees.

Occasionally, a car would pass by on the road, but the night felt good and satisfyingly lonely. It felt so good to be home and to have this blessed peaceful quiet.

The next morning, despite several inches of new snow on the ground, there were deer and bird tracks crisscrossing the yard underneath the apple and chokecherry trees. There were canine tracks out there too, pushed inside the deer tracks and wandering back and forth along the concrete walkway.

The deer wouldn’t return to the yard until much later in the day, after I’d taken a good while to run the snowblower down the driveway and under the pines and birches.

The air was ice cold and the wind stiff, pushing across my face. Like the bundled-up kid from those days gone by, I was happy to be out there shoveling the snow off the steps.

Though it seemed to be early in November for this kind of cold and this kind of snow, my heart and my mind were open to winter’s grand entrance — the snow queen returning to her throne, adorned in crystal bobbles and exquisite diamonds, wrapped in a trailing blue gown with a heart of solid ice.

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. Send correspondence to pepinj@michigan.gov or 1990 U.S. 41 South, Marquette, MI 49855.