PEPIN

“The wind it was howlin’ and the snow was outrageous; we chopped through the night, and we chopped through the dawn,” – Bob Dylan

The persistent and deepening snow and cold of late has signaled primal feelings of survival within me.

Just walking to the mailbox and back is an adventure through bitter and slicing winds, dizzying snow and temperatures sharp enough to cut the gizzard right out of me.

It’s still early to predict, but this appears to be one of those old-time winters from the old-time days, when the heavy snows collapse garage roofs and cause significant flooding when they finally melt in the springtime.

Looking at my own garage rooftop, I’d say it’s time to get some of that deep snow off there. Looking at the calendar, I try to wrap my mind around the fact that in a mere 59 days, we will be able to step outside and hear the welcome songs of male spring robins.

Trying to hold those two truths in my head at the same time makes my balance quiver, like I’m trying to walk on a cable between two skyscrapers.

Earlier today, I read an Indigenous story that explained that winter listens as you pass through it. The way to survive it is to make yourself small, stay low to the ground and take cover under fir boughs — like a rabbit or a hare does.

Do not travel boasting or singing loudly.

It makes clear sense to me.

It seems to kind of be the essence of experiencing nature to be quiet and reverent, observing, absorbing, learning, enjoying and moving forward or sitting still in peace and harmony with your surroundings.

Take shelter from storms until they pass, like the birds and animals of the wild country do. Eat well before they arrive, find a warm place to shelter and prepare to wait patiently, observing from safe seclusion the wild and snarling power of the storm.

Connected to this line of thinking somehow are a series of recurring dreams I have been having of late about houses where I have lived in the past.

For some reason though, the dreams only include the Upper Peninsula house I grew up in and the house I lived in when I came back to Michigan from California in the mid-1990s.

I’ve had no recent dreams of the house I now live in or any of the places I lived in way out west or down south.

Right away that’s a glaring oddity to me, albeit one that’s likely easily explained as the two residences I have consistently felt the greatest attachment to.

The house I grew up in — located in the shadow of the Egyptian Revival-style head frames of the old hematite mine — was where I lived from when I was born until after I graduated high school and attended a year or so of college.

It was where I lived with my mom and dad, my brother and two sisters until my parents divorced. I continued to live there with my dad after my mom and siblings relocated to Canada.

Decades later, when my dad moved to a local veteran’s home before his death in 2008, the home was sold to a house flipper who remodeled it in an unflattering style and resold it for someone new to live in.

In my recent dreams, my dad has just died, and I have purchased the house to remodel, update and live in myself. I thought about doing this in real life but decided ultimately not to go through with it.

In the dreams, I work through plans for reinforcing the structure, adding modern insulation and other features to make the house new again.

I sit in the backyard grass and smell the perennial flowers that still bloom in the gardens I helped my mom plant when I was a young boy.

Most of the neighbors’ faces and the names have changed, but all the old houses are still there that were there in those old-timey days of the big snowstorms, the endless freezing nights and temperatures so cold the wintry air itself turned blue.

In the summertime, us kids used the steel clothes pole arms as goal posts for backyard football games and the metal flashing on the back roof as a home run marker for whiffle ball.

We spent years playing in the sand box in the backyard.

My dad had dug a pit, probably 8-10 feet square and a couple of feet deep into that red iron-ore sand, tossing out the rocks and replacing the dirt with beach sands he hauled home from local borrow pits.

With the working mine situated across the neighbor’s yard, past one street and a chain-link fence patrolled by “mine cops,” our scenes we created in the sand box almost always depicted dump trucks, bull dozers, clam-shell bucket dirt loaders, railroad engines and ore-hauling cars.

However, we did sometimes introduce seemingly unrelated items to the scene, including green plastic Army men and toy dinosaurs.

Benefitting from the knowledge of modern times, maybe we were prophetic kids, seeing then that the future would include America’s armies securing minerals across the globe and the planet one day returning to the realm of dinosaurs now extinct.

The dreams of the second house are similar in that I am either repurchasing the property or remodeling the homestead having recently bought the property.

There is also a third occurrence in the dreams of this second house.

I am haunting the property at night, watching over the place of new owners from the seclusion of the surrounding trees — compelled to return to the house and grounds along the rugged and rocky Lake Superior shore, like some old gray ghost hanging around a dead man’s grave.

I lived there for about seven years before a divorce forced me to sell the property.

It was a very sad time in my life. The property suited me very well. I had logged more than 100 species of birds on my yard list, loved watching the big ore carriers pass by on the lake, the northern lights in the wintertime and the dark, quiet and starry skies overhead year-round.

We had sightings and tracks of wolves, gray foxes, bobcats, bears and more. I built a tool shed, woodshed and horseshoe courts with the help of my dad.

There was even a small pond on the property full of spring peepers, leopard frogs, wood frogs, and on rainy summer nights, tree frogs would stick themselves to the back windows and walls of the house.

We also had countless species of moths that we attracted with a black light to a white sheet attached to the screened in back porch.

The access road to the place included a circular section that ran between the houses located nearby and the highway. I loved walking that road day or night, with or without a flashlight.

After I had to leave the property for the final time, I kept a set of house keys in the console of my pickup truck for several years. When I sold the pickup truck, I moved the keys to a drawer in my home office desk.

They are still there more than two decades later.

I am not sure what to make of the dreams I’ve had recently or why they keep recurring, especially at this specific point in my life.

I think it’s clear that they are tied to memories of places I associate with times when I felt connected tightly to my surroundings and the happenings going on — time when my dad was still alive, my family was together, or I was growing up or reconnecting with the place I call home.

There’s also a sense of wanting to realign with those things on one or more levels. It’s almost like I am wanting to go back to those times to remake them or otherwise improve them, maybe so they don’t ultimately fall apart, but instead, last forever.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, including this planet, galaxy, universe or other existence. It’s as though we’re obsolete or past tense almost before we’re born.

It’s always been a tough pill for me to swallow that places, people, times and other things are easily wiped away, built over, demolished, washed aside or otherwise removed from memory or experience.

I am going to hunker down for a while to try to let the winter pass over me, like a storm. Maybe in a few weeks, by the time the robins return for springtime, these dreams will have run their course.

Until then, I will keep walking and thinking and living and breathing, hoping and doing what I can to help anybody up I find struggling along the way.

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.