Wondering about one's ancestry

We get a lot of requests at the museum for genealogy research. Every so often I'll end up talking with someone who's gone one step farther than just building family trees and spent money on DNA testing. One of my acquaintances, a sort of cousin, did that and ever since has bored the rest of us with her wondering out loud how she happened to end up with a high percentage of Azkhenazi Jewish genes when she thought the family tree was packed solid with Finnish Lutherans. I don't get the point of obsessing about it, unless she's planning to try to persuade the country of Israel that she's entitled to the right of return, but then I don't understand the simpler obsession with ancestry either. In any case, I figure that if I ever were foolish enough to spend money on DNA testing, this is the type of result I'd get.

Except mine would come back with a significant percentage of border collie instead of beagle.

What's new at the museum, you ask?

Our hose cart is done.

The fire hose cart. It came from the Ford company town of Alberta. We've got about 40 feet of hose on the cart; I'd like to have more.

Regular readers (all two of you) may recall that last summer I vowed that the fire hose cart would be repaired and repainted before it went back into the storage building for the winter.

The cart was designed to be pulled by the firemen but at some point was modified so it could be towed by vehicle.

I lied. I did get some Bondo (aka wood putty) on to it and one wheel looking moderately less sad, but that was as far as I got. Then this spring we placed an ad a Facebook page, Baraga County Stuff for Sale (No Clothes), seeking a handyman willing to finish staining the new siding on the museum. A fellow answered the ad who said he'd worked for a local company that does painting but had had to stop working for awhile when his mother became ill. He seemed to know what he was talking about when it came to paint, so we contracted with him. We settled on a lump sum for the job, and he went to work.

Even before it was done, we were thinking, wow, this guy really does know what he's doing. Among other things, he was the neatest painter I'd ever seen. There were no splatters on the ground, no paint on his clothes. It was amazing. So I asked him to look over the fire hose cart and see if he felt comfortable rehabbing it. He looked it over. He said yes. Because it was obviously a lot harder to estimate how long it would take to do the hose cart, we opted for a contract that's based on hours worked and not a lump sum.

Our Railway Express cart. It came from the L'Anse depot and was in really sad shape before Dave started working on it.

The hose cart is now done. It looks great. He's moved on to rehabbing our Railway Express freight cart. I have no doubt it's going to look great, too. I have to confess I find myself casting about trying to figure out other painting/rehabbing projects for Dave to tackle, but unfortunately can't think of any. Which is probably good for the museum's budget, but, still. . . when he's being doing such a great job, I hate to see him leave.

The freight cart is going to stay on jack stands after it's done so there's no weight on the wheels. We should put the hose cart on a stand, too, but it's trickier because the axle is lot higher.

Confession time. Cops scare me.

And if a 68-year-old white woman views the boys in blue with a fair amount of trepidation, is it any surprise minorities aren't too thrilled with them? I've always been a bit skeptical regarding the police, having witnessed a few too many examples of power-tripping sociopaths ending up wearing a badge, but have become even more so in recent years. I'm not sure why I remain skeptical. After all, I have friends who work in law enforcement (or are now retired from it) and they're decent people. I also know that the majority of cops went into law enforcement for the right reasons . . . but I guess I worry that even if 99 out of 100 are upright, ethical people who'd never ever abuse their position, my encounter will be with the 1 percenter who's a flaming asshat just waiting for someone powerless to abuse.

You know the ones I mean. The traffic cop who ignores the Porsche doing 100 in a 35 mph zone but is all over the poor sap driving a beater of a '92 Impala with a burnt-out tail light. The cop who gets off on ticketing college students for being drunk in public when they're walking home from a party and happen to stumble or weave a little. The cop who shoots your dog instead of just reminding you about local leash laws. The cop who tells teenage girls he won't arrest them for being minors in possession if they'll just give him an occasional blow job. Or the cop who's been harboring fantasies of going all Rambo and emptying a clip into someone for years. Because those guys (and gals; not all power-tripping asshats are men) are out there. They've been out there for years and they're going to stay out there because as a profession law enforcement has done a piss poor job of policing itself.

Don't believe me? Suggest to almost anyone who's currently in law enforcement that some of their brother officers might be better off in a different career and they'll freak out as they go into full-blown denial mode.With a few rare exceptions they'll swear up and down that every single LEO they have ever known was a fine, decent human being who never took advantage of wearing a badge. The same people who may have confided to non-law enforcement friends that they didn't think the latest addition to the force should have been hired -- "She's got a real cowboy mentality, seems to get off on civilians being afraid of her" -- will close ranks in a New York minute if a non-LEO says something negative.

In any case, what I have noticed in recent years is the way law enforcement seems to have slid from being part of the community, any community, to being at war with the rest of the world. There's a distinct Us (the Police) versus Them (the general public) attitude that's becoming more and more noticeable. And I'm not the only one noticing. It's been coming up as a theme in various articles I've read (both op-ed pieces and in scholarly research) and I've heard it a lot in the past few days on different talk shows on NPR and Sirius XM. And most of the people saying it are law enforcement professionals, men and women who have been wearing a badge for decades.

I saw an intriguing meme on Facebook the other day, one that I wish I had downloaded at the time, that used a dead canary in a coal mine analogy. In the past few years, there's been more and more focus on the racial bias apparent in the excessive use of force by the police -- blacks comprise a disproportionate number of persons killed annually by the police in the United States. But they're not the only ones being killed. They're "only" 26 percent of the victims. So who makes up the other 74%? Mostly white people, because whites are still the majority population in this country. We hear about the white guys who get treated with the proverbial kid gloves: mass murderer Dylann Roof being treated to takeout from Burger King or an armed white supremacist schmoozing cheerfully with the police. We don't hear about the ones who aren't that lucky. Which is another way of saying that the black victims of police violence are the canaries in the coal mine, the most visible evidence that something is wrong.

Maybe, just maybe, it would behoove all of us, including the racist asshats who assume that any time someone black ends up dead he or she deserved it, to take a long hard look at just what's going on in police departments that leads to them shooting over 1,000 people (on average) annually. Especially when the studies that have been done indicate that at least 20 percent of the persons shot were unarmed. You got it. Unarmed. No weapons of any sort, no gun, no knife, nada. Lots and lots of cops falling back on the old "I thought the suspect was reaching for a gun" line.

Once again, there is a strong racial bias -- blacks are a lot more likely to get shot while unarmed -- but whites do get shot, too. Police brutality may not be equal opportunity, but it can hit anyone anywhere regardless of race, gender, or even age. The cops have killed some remarkably old people -- unless a geezer is armed with an Uzi, how much of a threat can an octogenarian be? Apparently a serious one because the police haven't hesitated to use lethal force on the elderly. (Side note: while we were living in Atlanta, the cops shot and killed a lady who was in her 90s. Turned out they were at the wrong address because of a bad tip from an informant, didn't clearly identify themselves, and the old lady tried to defend herself from what she thought was a home invasion. Maybe she did have an Uzi. Or maybe someone in the Atlanta PD should have done a little more research before kicking in her front door.)

At the same time, we're seeing an increasing militarization of the police: more heavy weapons, armored vehicles, the use of SWAT to respond to calls that used to involve maybe one pair of police officers (e.g., noise complaints). Any time you have a heavy handed response to what used to be a minor issue, you're doing two things: you're increasing the likelihood of something going wrong and you're training the populace to see the police as the enemy. Toss in police recruiting ads designed to attract warrior personalities and active recruitment of military veterans and what do you have? Individual law enforcement officers who view every civilian as a potential threat -- we're not citizens; we're potential enemy combatants -- and police departments that behave like occupying armies. A recent issue of the VFW magazine lauded veterans who work in law enforcement. I'm not sure that's such a good thing.

Why? Most of those veterans going into law enforcement now have spent time in combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have done multiple tours of duty. Well, if you've spent a couple of years being conditioned to view every person you see who isn't in a U.S. military uniform as a potential threat, how fast are you going to shed that mentality when you get home? Good question. Maybe never.

So, yes, cops scare me and they'll keep on scaring me as long as it looks like they're getting away with murder. When I start reading more news reports about LEOs being disciplined for kicking in the wrong doors or shooting the wrong people, my skepticism may wane. And by disciplined, I mean actual punishment, not just a few weeks or months of desk duty and then back out in the streets to repeat whatever stupid thing they did to begin with. Until then? I don't think so.

Effigy Mounds National Monument

I realized the other day that I never got around to posting anything about our visit two months ago to Effigy Mounds National Monument. Effigy Mounds was the main reason we spent a couple days in southwest Wisconsin on our way home in May.

Sign reminding park visitors to be respectful and to not indulge in looting.

The park is actually located in Iowa just north of the town of Marquette, but is directly across the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. It's an interesting place. Native American peoples inhabited the river valley for thousands of years. Over the centuries, they constructed multiple mounds on the top of the bluffs that overlook the river.

Looking downriver toward Marquette, Iowa.

It really had me wondering what the area between the Iowa and Wisconsin sides was like before the Corps of Engineers began messing with the river. Thanks to the string of locks and dams that have channelized the Mississippi, in the area near Prairie du Chien there isn't much land between the water and the high ground. That wouldn't have been true when the mound building cultures were at their peak. How much archeological evidence was lost when the dams went in, how many village sites wound up under water? We'll never know.

The trail has multiple switchbacks similar to this one. It takes awhile to get to the top.

The Wisconsin side is lower than the Iowa side, so a person does wonder just what motivated the mound builders to locate their burial mounds where they did: at the top of the bluffs. There had to have been a religious reason; it couldn't have just been that they didn't want to waste the river bottoms, the level ground good for growing corn and squash, on cemetery space. For sure they put some thought into it because the hike up from the river level isn't fast or easy. The bluffs are steep; in places it's a sheer drop-off.

The S.O. ignoring a sign reminding people they're at danger of falling a long, long way if they're not careful.

You do a lot of walking, switch-backing up the side of a pretty steep hill for quite a ways, before you get to the top and the level where the most impressive mounds are located.

People can't read. There were social trails made by people who had decided they didn't have the patience for switchbacks either on the way up or, more likely, the way down.

It is, of course, really hard to photograph mounds when you're standing next to them. You can tell it's a mound when you're right there staring at it, but you don't get much of a sense of what it's like when you look at a ground-level photo later.

The mound to the left of the trail is roughly circular in shape. It's one of a line of circular mounds.

Effigy Mounds gets its name from the fact that not only does it have a lot of mounds, quite a few of them are in distinct shapes, primarily bears. Or at least quadrupeds that look an awful lot like bears. There are a lot of small bear mounds, one medium size bear mound, and one humongous bear mound. Are they actually representations of bears? Good question, but they look more like bears than anything else so it seems like an appropriate label.

It really does look like a bear when you're standing next to it.

The park's visitor center has a small museum and provides quite a bit of information about the history of the site and what's known about it. The mounds did experience the usual looting that most of the highly visible (and mounds are pretty noticeable) sites have been subjected to, some of which was actually fairly recent. There was a bizarre scandal in 2015 when a former park superintendent who had been retired for almost 20 years decided to return a box containing human remains. He'd had it stashed in his garage. I'd love to know how he got the bones in the first place (stole them from the park's collections rather than comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act when it was passed a couple decades ago?), but who knows? Definitely an odd story, but not relevant to current park management or the typical visitor experience.

One of the overlooks along the trail.

In any case, I thought the exhibits were nicely done considering it's not a very large space. I suffered my usual plexiglass envy -- every time I visit a museum that enjoys a better budget or has benefited from professional design services I find myself fantasizing about ways to keep visitors from being able to touch the stuff in the Baraga County Historical Museum -- as well as admiring the curation. I'm always blown away by the way museum professionals can take a minimal amount of material, set it up in a pretty small display area, and make it interesting.

I can see making a return trip to Effigy Mounds if we're ever in the area. We only walked one trail so did not see everything -- and even if we had, it's a nice peaceful place to pause for a few hours or even a full day. If you do the longest loop, you end up walking about 7 miles. The trails are wide and well maintained. If it wasn't for the hill climb, I'd describe them as easy, almost accessible, but the steepness of the grade might push them into the moderate category.

A problem of generations

As noted in the previous post, this past weekend I attended the Upper Peninsula History Conference in Munising. It's one of three meetings sponsored annually by the Michigan Historical Society; the other two are held in the Downer Peninsula. It was a good meeting, I learned some interesting stuff, and I enjoyed chatting with people from other organizations. There was just one problem.

Demographics. When I looked around at the people who, like me, were representing various volunteer associations -- local museums and historical societies -- once again I was one of the youngest and healthiest people in attendance. That shouldn't be true. I'm a fat, out of shape 68-year-old geezer. But most of the other attendees were in their 70s and 80s. I felt downright youthful in comparison. One lady got up when we did brief reports on what was happening with our groups to brag -- brag!! -- about the fact the four officers for her group ranged in age from 78 to 94 but they were still doing more than the younger people.

Holy wah. Bragging about the fact your officers are all teetering on the edge of the grave doesn't strike me as being much of a positive. I know involvement in historical societies does tend to be something that people dive deeper into when they retire, but even so. . . no one lives forever. You shouldn't have a group where a majority of the members are using canes or dragging little oxygen canisters around. Yes, it's great to stay active as long as possible, but there has to be a younger generation involved, too. Multiple younger generations, in fact. People across a wide age range, not just old folks who can wax nostalgic about the first time they saw Elvis (Presley, not Costello) on tv or how much they loved watching Crusader Rabbit.

The Big Question is, of course, how do you recruit them? Sometimes there are structural reasons for an organization having a membership cohort that all falls within the same fairly narrow demographic window.  The Baraga County Historical Society is a classic example of an organization that screwed up back in the 1960s when it didn't build a requirement for turnover among its officers into its constitution. Anytime an organization allows the same person to serve as president indefinitely, that organization has basically signed its own death warrant. It just doesn't know it. No turnover in leadership equals stagnation; stagnation is a slow death.

Then when you add in the fact that way too often and hand in hand with the no turnover at the top, there's active discouragement of new ideas it's easy to see why organizations have aging memberships. That is, all  too often younger generations have been chased away by older members who can be more tenacious about clinging to the illusion of power or control than a banana republic dictator denying the existence of the mob howling outside the palace doors. The group's elders shoot down proposals ("We can't do that. We tried that once, and it didn't work"), resist new ways of doing things ("Facebook? We don't need to be on Facebook"), and occasionally have a bad habit of talking loudly about how their particular organization wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for their own heroic efforts. You want to turn prospective members off fast? Be a martyr. (This is advice I need to follow myself; it's a real easy pattern to fall into.)

I heard examples of all three Kiss of Death behaviors at the conference: the president of one historical society pooh-poohing the efforts of younger members to establish a presence in social media, a director for another complaining about newer members who want to hold events or collaborate with other groups that she knows will fail because they tried it once 20 years ago and it didn't go well, and a whole bunch of people doing the "I'm indispensable" speech. Christ on a crutch, ladies. No one is indispensable. If you were abducted by aliens tomorrow, you'd be missed, but life would go on. If you really cared, instead of nattering on and on about how the organization would curl up and die if you weren't there you should be making sure that when you do get hit by a bus no one gets stuck wondering what the password is for the computer or where to find the key to the post office box.

So how do you get organizations to change that have trapped themselves in a death spiral by failing to recruit younger members? Good question. We're slowly rebuilding our local historical society -- we have significantly more members now than we did when I joined in 2012, our profile is creeping back up locally -- but we still don't have nearly enough younger, active members. We are on Facebook, but really should be doing Instagram, too, and our website needs to be rebuilt. We need more bodies, and we need more people who are able and willing to take on leadership roles. And for sure we need to revise our constitution to make sure that once we have more members, we have more turnover. No matter how nice, talented, or enthusiastic a person is, no one should  end up being the Society's president for more than two decades ever again.   

Bay Furnace Campground, Christmas, Michigan

After purchasing the Guppy a couple years ago we discovered the battery charger didn't work right. It didn't seem to know how to shut itself off so would keep trying to charge the RV battery even after the battery was fully charged. End result? An overheated battery and way too much voltage going to the lights and other devices that run on direct current. Also as a side effect, because things weren't charging right if we did have to rely on the battery, like when we boondocked in a Walmart parking lot, it went flat fast.

The S.O. replaced the charger, but we hadn't had an occasion to test it to see just how much of a difference the new charger made until this past weekend. The Historical Society of Michigan's annual Upper Peninsula History Conference was scheduled for Munising, a city that is technically within easy driving distance (less than 100 miles), but nonetheless struck me as being a good excuse to use the Guppy. Besides, although the bulk of the conference took place on Saturday, there was a workshop on fund-raising scheduled for Friday morning. Ergo, we had to plan to be at a campground for at least 4 nights: arrive on Thursday, do conference-related stuff on Friday and Saturday, play tourist in the Munising area on Sunday, amble home Monday. So I went online and reserved the last available space at the Bay Furnace Campground.

Bay Furnace is in the Hiawatha National Forest, which means it's managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Sort of. It's one of the campgrounds the Forest Service uses a concessioner on, Recreation Resource Management. RRM pays people to serve as campground hosts or area managers; camping fees get paid straight to the corporation, not to the Forest Service. I have no idea just how the mechanics of the deal works other than people who do it get some financial compensation in exchange for having a place to camp for the summer. I do know the Forest Service wound up semi-privatizing public campgrounds because the agency's budget for recreation, the people who maintain campgrounds, trails, and other facilities, kept shrinking. Given a choice between closing campgrounds because there was no money and no staff to maintain them or bringing in a concessioner, in many locations the Forest Service opted for the latter.

It's an arrangement that annoys many people, going by some of the discussions I've seen in various forums, because it means someone is going to be right there asking you to pay a fee. One of the favorite gripes is that "camping used to be free." Nope. With some exceptions, it wasn't free. It was on an honor system: you put your money in an envelope and dropped it into a piece of pipe that might not get emptied until several days after you'd been there. Any time it's on the honor system, you know there are going to be people who go, "Oh, good. Free camping" instead of actually paying. But, as usual, I digress.

If Bay Furnace is a good example of RRM in action, they do a decent job. In addition to the area manager at the entrance to one loop of the campground, there was a campground host in the other. The campground was neat, all the sites were mowed, the privies were clean, and in general everything you'd expect to be done was being done.

The campground is in Christmas, Michigan. It's on the site of an iron-smelting town, Onota; the only structure left from its ore processing days is the Bay Furnace ruin, the remnants of a blast furnace. It's an impressive ruin. The Forest Service stabilized it and did some reconstruction about 20 years ago, and, to be blunt, probably hasn't touched it since. There is interpretive signage saying the plantings around the base of the furnace are "native" and providing illustrations of numerous different types of flowers. Well, it's solid goldenrod now. There may have been a couple dozen types of flowers in there originally, but one type obviously won the war when it came to which one was going to dominate. I don't think it's particularly good for a ruin to have trees taking root between the rocks either, but I could be wrong.

Rock dove in a semi-natural environment.

It is a rustic campground -- no hookups -- but there are multiple potable water taps so a person doesn't have to walk far to refill a water jug. And, unlike some Forest Service campgrounds, Bay Furnace actually has a dump station for the convenience of people with RVs. Because it is a rustic campground, there were a fair number of people who were tent camping or just had pop-up campers. Most of the spaces are back-ins; we wound up with the only pull-through and that was by accident, not design. It was the only space left when I did the on-line reservation. After we got to the campground, I figured out why: the online map indicated it was located between the privy and the dumpster, which turned out to not be true. That same map also failed to convey just how large each site is. There was a pretty good buffer zone between us and the facilities, such as they were. All the sites are decent size and spaced so that you'd never feel crowded; most have enough vegetation (trees and bushes) between them to give you a lot of privacy. The only way to tell just how many sites were occupied was to drive around the loop -- you couldn't tell by just looking in the general direction of where the other sites were.

If you look closely, you can see tiny trees (the orange flagging) that will eventually form a visual barrier between the campsite and the privy.

Although the campground is managed by RRM, the Forest Service does do interpretive programs (aka ranger talks, campfire programs). According to a schedule on the bulletin board, there's a live raptor program every Saturday evening during the height of the camping season. We missed the one held while we were there, but did go to a talk about owls in Michigan on Sunday evening. In the case of the owl talk, the guy giving the talk (a seasonal intern) walked around the campground telling everyone he saw that there was going to be a program because it wasn't posted on the board. It was pretty interesting; I found out there are owls in Michigan I didn't know existed. I wasn't sure if the kids who were there were listening or not, but when the talk ended and they had a chance to open some owl pellets themselves, they were pretty eager to do so. (Who knew there are companies that will take the stuff owls puke up and sterilize it so it can be used in science classes and ranger talks?)

The campground is right on the shore of Lake Superior and has a lovely sand beach. Depending on where a person is in the campground, the beach is a pretty short walk away. The only negative thing that I noticed at was traffic noise -- M-28 is really close so you do hear traffic out on the highway. It is a popular campground. It was 100% full on Saturday, and I imagine it'll be close to full during the week once it gets a little later in the summer. Overall, we thought it was a pretty nice place and may camp there again -- it's far enough away from home to feel like a real break from the normal routine, but close enough that the Guppy can get there and back again on one tank of gas.

As for how much of a difference the new charger made, the answer is A Lot. We figured out, more or less, how long we can behave as though we have a limitless supply of power (e.g., not worrying about playing the radio for several hours at a stretch) before things might start to go dim, and it's a dramatic improvement. And we did figure out that our cordless toaster actually works.

Hartwick Pines State Park

A switch from the usual rock with a plaque

I'd been curious about Hartwick Pines State Park for several years. Once or twice a summer a fellow who said he volunteered at the park would stop by the Baraga County Historical Museum to see if we'd unearthed any new material on the Thomas Nester Lumber Company. He said he'd been researching Nester for a number of years. Nester had a huge logging operation in the Upper Peninsula but got his start down around Muskegon or Saginaw. We weren't able to be particularly helpful -- our Nester files are remarkably thin despite Nester being a huge presence locally for several decades -- but we tried.

In return, the fellow gave me pep talks about restoring our logging high wheels. He said Hartwick Pines had a set they'd restored and it wasn't that hard, just time-consuming. He kept telling me that as long as we have all the iron, we can do it. He even sent the museum a copy of a DVD Hartwick Pines sells that shows the process a fellow went through in restoring a set of high wheels near Traverse City. Hearing Hartwick Pines had a set in good condition definitely piqued my curiosity. I've seen two sets of high wheels in addition to the collapsed mess the museum has, and in both cases the wheels were close to needing restoration work again (both sets have a pretty good lean, which means they're at risk of doing what ours did -- fall over and shattering).

In any case, as long as we were in the Downer Peninsula and had to go right by the park -- it's right next to I-75 just north of the city of Grayling -- I figured we might as well check it out. We stopped in Grayling for lunch at a Big Boy. I keep seeing that franchise mentioned on Facebook as a "remember when?" as though all Big Boys everywhere had ceased to exist, which has me wondering about people who seem to think that just because they haven't seen something for awhile it's gone forever, but that's a digression. Our ultimate goal in Grayling was Hartwick Pines, not strawberry pie, so that's where we headed, more or less. The main street through Grayling is currently under construction so getting out of town turned out to be a tad more challenging than driving in had been.

Why are the CCC guys in bronze always depicted as shirtless? Or, better question, just how many copies of this particular statue have been cast? Trees for Tomorrow in Eagle River, Wisconsin, has one, too. Is this the official CCC guy, the exemplar for everyone who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps?

I had been thinking about the park primarily in terms of its logging museum, which was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, so didn't realize just how huge the place is. It's over 9,000 acres and has a big campground (about 100 spaces total, 36 with full hookups), miles and miles of trails, and a couple of lakes.On paper it sounds like a great place to spend some time. In our case, however, we knew perrfectly well we're never going to subject the Guppy to the indignities of spending time in the Downer Peninsula. No need to check out a campground we have no interest in ever using no matter how attractive the brochure makes it sound. We went straight to the Visitor Center and then ambled over to the logging museum.

The logging museum consists of two long one-story log buildings erected by the CCC in the 1930s. One log building has a blacksmith's shop on one end and displays of logging tools throughout; the other log building has a kitchen, bunks, dining area, and company store. There's also a belt-driven sawmill powered by a humongous steam tractor. The sawmill is in a pavilion that's enclosed with chain link fencing: you can see in, but you can't walk through.

Various pieces of horse-drawn equipment, like the swing-boom jammer shown above, are on static display. I noticed Hartwick Pines was having the same issues with outdoor storage of wooden equipment that everyone does -- things were beginning to look a little shabby, rot was starting to creep in, although nothing was looking too run-down yet. And their high wheels look great.

They actually have two sets. One pair is set up in the logging museum area; the other pair is right at the main entrance to the park. The set in the museum area is about the same size as the one we have in Baraga -- or about the size our set would be if it was actually intact instead of being piled in pieces on the ground, about 12 feet in diameter.

I thought they did a nice job with the displays of logging tools and other artifacts, too. Seeing their ax display definitely gave me a few ideas for the museum in Baraga, and for sure I suffered intense brand envy when I saw this:

We've got a few log branding hammers at our museum, but no where close to this many. We do have a nice collection of branded log ends, though, and one of these days should figure out a better way to display them.

The park does have quite a few miles of hiking trail, including some short loops right around the Visitor Center. You have to walk a bit to get from the VC to the logging museum; you can also do a loop around through some remnant old growth forest. The trails around the Visitor Center are paved and accessible so I'm not sure walking them counts as "hiking." It's more like doing some gentle ambling. Very nice, of course, but not particularly challenging. The park is popular with birders -- we encountered several people who were armed with cameras with telephoto lenses that could probably zoom in on a mosquito's eyelash from a mile away -- although the only wildlife I saw was a squirrel.  I'd recommend a stop at Hartwick Pines as a travel break for anyone stuck having to drive down (or up) I-75. It's close to the Interstate but far enough away to be an actual break. There is a day use fee (all Michigan State Parks charge entrance fees), but when the annual pass is only $11 for state residents, it only takes two trips to a state park and the pass is paid for. 

You get what you pay for

The S.O. and I made a quick trip to the Downer Peninsula this week. The Humanities Council had a mandatory meeting in Lansing for recipients of the Heritage Grants they're awarding; I got to go as the Baraga County Historical Society's representative. I wasn't really keen on attending -- Lansing is a long, long way from either Baraga (where the museum is located) or Herman (where I live). It is so far from where we live, in fact, that if I were to take the same number of miles and just head west I'd end up several states away, probably somewhere 20 or 30 miles west of Fargo, North Dakota. Here in Michigan, it's almost as bad as living in Texas. A person can drive for over 500 miles and never leave the state.

Not that we had to drive 500 miles. That's what a woman from Hancock got to do. The S.O. and I drove a mere 464 miles one way before arriving in Michigan's capitol city. We were not impressed. On the positive side, I'm no longer annoyed at politicians sucking money out of the U.P. and spending it in the Downer Peninsula. I'm not sure just where that money goes, but it's not going into infrastructure any place close to Lansing. To describe the roads, both the Interstate and surface streets, as "bad" is to indulge in understatement. Granted, they weren't as bad as the roads I recall from a brief visit to Detroit a decade or so ago (the pavement there was so full of potholes you'd swear they'd been subject to mortar rounds; the city definitely resembled something out of a post-apocalyptic movie [or maybe a news clip from Baghdad]-- and that was before the bankruptcy), but they were bad. Lansing overall seemed remarkably seedy, very reminiscent of the Third World nation (aka DeKalb County, Georgia) we'd moved from a few years ago. I really hope the Humanities Council figures out that technology exists (Live Meeting, Go To Meeting, etc.) that would save us Yoopers from having to go slumming again any time soon.

Then again, my impressions of Lansing may have been colored just a wee bit by the bargain hotel I'd found on-line. It is part of a national chain, one that is known for being on the more basic end of the spectrum (e.g., rooms with televisions that are still the huge old analog sets, decor that's trapped in the 80s or earlier, no breakfast bar in the lobby), but as long as the rooms are clean and the beds are reasonably comfortable, the fact the drapes are 40 years old shouldn't matter.

On the other hand. . . when you have trouble finding the hotel because the current management hasn't gotten the old Days Inn signs totally obliterated yet and the new ones are one step above being done on poster board with Magic Marker this is not a particularly good sign. Neither is seeing a notice in the hotel lobby warning that any guest bringing a shopping cart (yes, like the ones you find in Kroger parking lots) into the hotel will be asked to leave. There are bargains. . . and then there are hotels that are leasing blocks of rooms to an organization that provides temporary housing to the homeless. Guess which one we found.

I shouldn't complain. The hotel itself actually wasn't bad. The fact there were notices for counseling services, free lunches, and access to clothing donations was not typical for a hotel, but as long as no one tried talking us into going to a church service on-site I didn't really care what flyers were taped up in the elevator. I was actually a little disappointed there were no Bibles on the table in the lobby -- there was note up telling people to take one if they needed one; apparently enough people felt the need that the supply was temporarily exhausted. I actually thought it was kind of cool that homeless families had a place to stay that was reasonably safe and not a total slum.

As for our experience, the room was clean, the bed was comfortable, and, despite the hotel having an  overall air of having seen better days, the room included one of the best televisions we've encountered in a hotel room in a long time. The fact it had a fairly limited number of channels wasn't a big deal; it was more of a positive than not considering there was no remote so we got to change channels the old-fashioned way: getting up and hitting an up (or down) button until we got to what we were looking for.

The amenities in the room were actually a little strange -- there was no clock radio, but there was that good tv. No coffee pot, no ice bucket, no waste baskets (I had to request one at the front desk), but  there was still a blow dryer in the bathroom. No luggage rack to set the suitcase on, but really good quality coat hangers. No plastic water glasses, but top quality shampoo and body wash. I will concede the peel and stick tile (or half of one) covering the hole in the wall where the tissue dispenser used to be was a little odd, but I've seen stranger. We were also easy walking distance from multiple good restaurants, and while I was at the meeting the S.O. found a Menard's a couple blocks away. In the end, overall it wasn't a bad experience, at least not for me. The S.O. may have a different take on it.

So, if I have to go to Lansing for a meeting again will I stay at this particular bargain hostelry again? Probably not. Being spitting distance from a great Greek restaurant is definitely a plus, but I am lazy enough that if I'm watching tv I want to be able to point and click.

I am, of course, hoping that I never have to go to Lansing again. Now that I know why all those trolls are desperate to vacation here in God's country, I don't need to repeat the experience.

The Chipmunk Wars have begun

I managed to finish planting the vegetable garden yesterday. For a change, I'd calculated things close to perfectly -- no wasted space and no seed packets left sitting there unopened. So what's the first thing I see after I stand up to look around? A chipmunk. He was sitting on the pump house roof, no doubt scouting the garden and figuring out where to dig first.

The little furry bastards did a number on the garden last year. They dug seeds up before they could sprout, they started harvesting potatoes long before we could, and in general had me thinking dark thoughts about importing weasels. This year I'm firing the first volley -- I invested in a canister of something called Critter Ridder, a mix of various natural ingredients that will supposedly discourage varmints from eating anything that's been dusted with it. As far as I can tell, it's basically a mix of hot peppers. It felt like I was seasoning the soil as I wandered up and down the rows liberally dusting everything with a hot pepper mix. Now the only question is whether or not it will work.

I am moderately hopeful that the chipmunks won't be as much of a nuisance this year. I'm not seeing as many around so maybe weasels did wipe out a bunch over the winter. I hope so. Last summer was the first year they'd ever been a problem. In fact, until last summer I'd never noticed any in the garden at all. They'd always seemed perfectly happy subsisting on stuff that fell outside the fence, like spruce cones and chokecherries. Somehow I'd never pictured them as being interested in potatoes. Live and learn.

I have a vague sense of being slightly late on finishing up planting stuff, but considering that we had a late frost it's just as well that the beans didn't go into the ground until yesterday. Our growing season is so short even in a good year that just about everything that goes into the garden now comes in seed packets that promise less than 2 months from planting to harvest. Either that, or it's a root vegetable like carrots and parsnips. I do have tomato plants in the garden, but I also know that when it gets to be late summer I'm going to end up picking most of them green and letting them ripen in the house. It actually amazes me that people (myself included) are willing to put so much time and effort into gardening, both vegetables and flowers, when we're lucky if we get to enjoy three full months of stuff growing and blooming.