JOHN PEPIN

“Well, I grew up wild and free, walking these fields in my bare feet. There wasn’t no place I couldn’t go with a .22 rifle and a fishing pole,” – Bob McDill

Growing up in an iron-ore mining town put us kids in close contact with some of the coolest things, especially for boys.

I think of my little grandson who is now fascinated with toy cars and trucks and soon it will likely be trains. I was the same way. I think most young boys are.

In those days, I was delighted most with vehicles that did some kind of work, like bulldozers that pushed dirt and fuel, fire and dump trucks.

If I looked out the back window of our house, past the green grass and flower gardens, the huge maple tree in the neighbor’s yard and a copse of lilac bushes, I could see the old fire hall and the city garage right there between two houses that back ended our property.

When we heard the fire siren, we kids would rush down to the corner to watch the firemen arrive in a dash, don their firefighting gear and pull the big trucks out into the street and off to the fire.

The city garage was where a lot of the vehicles for municipal projects were stored, along with the orange barricades that blocked roads and the round, black road flares that looked like cartoon bombs.

In between the fire hall and the street off that back side of our house were sets of railroad tracks that regularly brought the Soo Line engines and box cars right up close for viewing.

A look out the other kitchen window would give me a view of a metal viaduct that we used to walk the railroad tracks to. We’d climb it in later kid years and watch the trains pass underneath us.

The trains used the viaduct too for passing over the main street that came from downtown and headed out past a little store and the flooring mill whose whistle blew at lunchtime every day – easily heard from our house.

Outside the front door, I could see steam shovels and gigantic dump trucks working behind the chain-link fence and gates of one of the mines then still operating.

Sometimes, the city work crews would be digging up a busted water main along our street or the one that crossed between our house and the mine. In those times, as little kids, we’d have a front row seat to watch the big machines at work.

I know we spent hours watching, maybe even days.

All of this made it easy to understand why one of our favorite pastimes was playing in an old horseshoe court turned sandbox in the backyard. There we were able to dig red mud and sometimes rocks out of the ground, like the mine crews were doing.

As we played in the sandbox, we were within earshot of the work going on at the mine. Our sandbox also had things in it the mine didn’t have, like toy cows, chickens and even a gray, plastic moa.

In the house, it was Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. I also had an old train set I wish I had today that had incredibly heavy, black engines and wide-gauged railroad tracks.

I also had the miniature trains with the various boxcars, flatcars, engines and cabooses that were painted and fashioned to look like the real thing. Wow. I still am excited just to think about it.

In addition to all this, we had a small lake located about two blocks from our house where we would go to see ducks and geese, painted turtles, bright green leopard frogs and garter snakes.

We used to wade into the shallowest waters, amid the reeds and cattails where the squawking blackbirds nested, to try to catch the frogs and turtles.

If all this wasn’t enough, there was a river with an old creosote-soaked railroad bridge we used to play on and walk across. The old mine shafts were capped with tremendous obelisks, patterned after the structures of ancient Egypt.

Our old house, built at the turn of the 20th century, stood in the shadow of one of those towering shafts. We used to play football on the lawn of the mining company’s land office, until we’d get kicked off by one of the mine cops.

Three blocks down the street from our house, we had a kids library packed with fascinating books on Vikings and Byzantines, explorers like Lewis and Clark and those Hardy Boys and especially Nancy Drew mysteries.

The firemen would practice for their summer competitions in front of the station, and we’d sit along the curb of the street watching them try to set the fastest times performing various firefighter functions, like assembling hoses to spray at a metal keg to knock it over or move it across a line suspended over the street.

Eventually, when we kids were old enough to travel on bikes, this whole world exploded around us with even more possibilities. Those days were filled with climbing bluffs, fishing for trout in local creeks at each end of town and the standby activity of waving to railroad engineers.

We had all kinds of “secret passages” and short cuts to walk and ride to get from here to there. We were close enough to easily walk or ride our bikes downtown where there was a great newsstand store where we could get comic books and candy.

A dime store had a counter where you could buy a cheeseburger or a malt, and a drug store that still has the same flooring today as it did then.

When we’d travel places with our parents, we kids learned even more about our town and those not far away from us. So much to see and do, the world around us seemed so big and yet small and familiar – especially compared to today.

A few days ago, I had a very strange and unexpected thing happen to me.

It was a typical Tuesday afternoon of working and going here and there running errands on my way home. One of those errands took me to a neighboring town, off on a side street I hadn’t been down for at least 40 years.

When I turned onto the snow-covered road, it was like time stopped and cracked open and I fell backward into that world of my youth.

I remembered this old street now so clearly. It used to be the main road before they built a parallel blacktopped road where vehicles travel at highway speeds.

I hadn’t thought about this road since those old days we used to travel it to and from my grandma’s house. Suddenly, it came rushing back and enveloped me with a satisfied feeling.

This was once mining company grounds too.

Off to my left, there were old houses crowded along short, dead-end side streets that were much like railroad sidings. On the other side of the road, there was an old basketball court that’s still being used today. It even had new nets.

The new road sits below this street. I now recalled when it was being built, which had to be sometime in the 1960s. I remember the first time we drove on it.

Drowning in this flood of memories I can’t believe I had never thought of this street even once in more than four decades, maybe even five.

I felt a warmth being here now, like an old emotional wound of some kind was being stitched up, like pulling a shoelace through metal eyelets.

To look around in all these old places today, it’s sad to see the rusted ruin of so many things standing with broken glassed windows, broken beams or torn down altogether.

Even the railroad tracks and the old viaduct are gone. The house I grew up in is still standing, but it was flipped after my dad died and today is unrecognizable, except for its silhouette.

But some of the same neighbors still live there in the same places they did way back when. They must have found something there that made them want to stay. For me, there was something there that made me want to come back.

If I close my eyes, I can feel what it was like to sit on the swings or the glider in the backyard on a warm summer afternoon, or to be outside in the 5 o’clock p.m. darkness of a late December afternoon, lying in the snow looking up at the sky for the early stars.

For at least a couple of winters, a snowy owl used to perch on a lighted cross atop the mine shaft obelisk closest to our house. From where he sat, I could see him every day when I walked home from school.

He could see me too.

I imagine it might have looked to him like what I see when I’m watching an ant hole, with tiny moms and dads and even smaller kids like me walking around from here to there, going in and out of our homes.

I could never have understood a perspective like that back then. I was wrapped warmly in my little snowsuit, playing outside in my seemingly idyllic snow-globe existence of a mining town.

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.