My Neighborhood

My Neighborhood

 

It’s time for a giant ‘selfie’ of my neighborhood. The last time I covered this topic, Big-breasted Bertha and Bicycle Bill were the principal characters, but they are gone now, each having died within a few months of the other from liver disorders caused by their fondness for the frothy brew. Here is an update on the remaining characters and critters who call my neighborhood home.

In case you don’t recall, I live on a lonely road in the north woods. The road is ¾ of a mile long, paved most of the way to my house and in celebration of that fact, it has two names instead of one. The first name, Maple Valley Road, covers the straight portion of the road and then, just as the road makes a curve from its north/south direction to become an east/west road, its name changes. Isn’t that special! My part of the road has much less prestige than Maple Valley since it is less than a ¼ mile long and is paved only for the first 150 feet of its length. The end of the pavement occurs just before my driveway, thus I live on the coarser end of the two-name pathway. My part doesn’t even have the privilege of being called a road; it is a trail, named after a former physician who practiced in Roscommon, Dr. Curnalia, hence my address is Curnalia Trail.

Let’s start our inspection of my neighborhood at the tony end of Maple Valley where it intersects with the state highway, M 18. Here lives one of my coffee-drinking buddies, ol’ one-armed Marty. His house, a trailer really, is just now under siege as result of the recent rainstorm. The sharp point of a falling oak tree has perforated his front porch roof. The tree is now looks about his immaculate lawn from its upright position in his porch. Behind his trailer is another oak that is leaning precariously over his trailer roof. Marty called his insurance adjustor for a look. The insurance man told Marty that he, Marty, should pay for the porch repair and the removal of the leaning tree. “After that we can talk about how your insurance can help you.” I told Marty it would be risky to bend over while the insurance man was around.

Next to Marty is another coffee-drinking buddy, Jerry Boone, he who counts Daniel Boone as his ancestor. Jerry is a long-time north woods man devoted to fishing and all manner of do-it-yourself  projects. He lives alone, a self-sufficient man who is proud to shun computers, mobile phones, and most everything else invented in the last 40 years. Jerry says he does just fine without those irritations, thank you very much, and besides, they are no more than passing fads.

Moving south and across the street from Jerry is Butch and Kathy, an odd couple who are also products of the north woods. Kathy is the 70’s-something mom, Butch is her 50-something son and the pair seem to get on well in their small cottage that I walk by on most mornings. I suspect Kathy is hard of hearing; she doesn’t speak to me as I walk by, rather she shouts even if I am no more than a few steps distant. It was probably a result of all those years spent operating a chain saw along with her husband and sons who were wood-cutters. It shows. Kathy and Butch use firewood for heating and Kathy has her stove going much of the year. The pair use a small mountain of wood each year, and they have been accumulating their wood pile over the last several weeks for this winter’s use. Here it is.

South from Butch and Kathy on either side of the road are several cottages owned by trunk slammers – those absentee owners who arrive on the odd weekend to clean their guns or fire up their snowmobiles or whatever. We are always alerted when one of our trunk-slammer neighbors arrives because he spends most of the weekend firing an automatic weapon. Bam! Bam! Brrrrrretttt bam. Most times we don’t hear the bullets fly by so I assume he points his weapons towards the forests. I’ve been watching the woods between him and me to make sure that he doesn’t knock down so many trees that the bullets have a free flight in my direction. Of course, I can’t complain since firing a gun whose caliber is anything smaller than a tank is considered acceptable in our neck of the woods.

Some of our trunk slammers seem to be unaware of north woods mores. One new cottage owner’s weekend presence is announced on Monday mornings by a white bag of garbage that he leaves by the roadside before leaving for his downstate home. He assumes that the township will pick up his garbage intact. (He is lucky - the township on his side of the road provides garbage pick-up each Wednesday morning, while the township on the other side of the road doesn’t do garbage.) No one in their right mind in the north woods leaves garbage sitting in a plastic bag unless it is sitting in a container known to be bear-proof, raccoon-proof, crow-proof, squirrel … well, you get the idea. Several times, I have been forced to clean up his scattered garbage on my morning walk. To add insult to injury, last week I saw a car leave his driveway while a crow was attacking a white bag of garbage that some other critter had dragged to the road. It became another clean-up job for me. You can see how animosity between neighbors gets started. Over time, a proper north woods man can become a downright curmudgeon.

Continuing further south, six homes are scattered on either side of our road that contain full-time residents and several dogs. Only one house owned by an older lady is dogless, while three of other five have two dogs each and the other two have one dog. For some reason, our neighborhood is devoid of cute, little fuzzy dogs, tending instead to oversize monsters with exaggerated canines. All except one, that is. Here she is, my lady-friend pooch named Bailey, carrying a turkey feather that she found along the roadside during our morning amble.

Bailey is the only friendly dog in our neighborhood. The others are all large black dogs including two Great Danes and two other large black dogs of no particular pedigree. One of the large black dogs named “Blackie” acts as though he wants to eat me every morning what with his barking and running toward me with teeth barred and his hackles up. Fortunately, he is chained and I enjoy watching him get to the end at full speed. He never learns. “Zoie,” the other mean black dog, also acts out the biting scenario toward me but so far his owners have called him on it as I pass by. “Zoie’s” predecessor at the same house nipped me in the leg last summer before his owners sent him away. I think he gave instructions to Zoie before he left.

So, there you have it. My neighborhood seems a little less colorful today than during the former days of Bertha with the behemoths and Bill with the bike. In fact, you could say things have gone to the dogs.