Cars, plastic and oil

An editorial from the Early May 2014 North Woods Call

     Are we really saving oil and fuel costs—not to mention the planet—by building lighter cars that meet ever-more-strict government standards for gas mileage?  Perhaps, but sometimes we wonder.
     As vehicles get lighter, it seems that more-and-more plastic appears on them—plastic that is made from oil.  Many of these plastic parts routinely break and must be substituted with new ones—which are manufactured using even more fossil fuel.
     Metal parts have also gotten much thinner, which means more costly mechanical and body repairs.  You can no longer turn brake rotors two or three times, for example, before replacing them.  And relatively minor dents in thin metal body parts cannot be easily bumped out like they were in days of old.  Instead—according to one of our local repair shops—entire fenders and quarter panels must be replaced at higher costs.
     And what about those electric and hybrid vehicles?  More likely than not, fossil fuels are used to generate the electricity needed to charge batteries, which then must be treated as hazardous waste for disposal purposes.
     Maybe these are good things, but we do have our doubts.

Science & referendums

An editorial from the Early May 2014 North Woods Call

    All this talk about scientific management of natural resources and voter referendums has us a bit “discombobulated.”
     Some say we should listen to the voice of the people—at least in a representative republic such as ours—while others say the average person doesn’t know enough to make good decisions about wolf hunts and other things better left to the “experts.”
     One can reasonably argue the relative cost and efficiency of referendums—or whether they are proper tools to use—but the voice of the people has generally been sacrosanct in our nation.  As the law currently stands—if the electorate believes that those who have been entrusted to do the will of the public they represent are not doing so—such recourse is allowed.
     Unlike some, we’re not particularly bothered by this.  After all, ignorant and uninformed people vote in every election on issues of consequence and most folks seem to accept this as the price of freedom.  Certainly, few would suggest that such people shouldn’t have the right to vote, even though it’s clear that better decisions could be made if some basic level of civic knowledge and familiarity with the issues were required.
     Should wolf management decisions be any different?

Of brook trout, stewardship & property taxes

By Mike VanBuren
From the Early May 2014 edition of The North Woods Call

     In 1895—during the second presidency of Grover Cleveland—Albert Rosenberg established the Spring Brook Trout Hatchery on nearly five acres of a geologic basin in northern Kalamazoo County surrounded by high hills.
     It was an era when the last of Michigan’s majestic white pines were being toppled and shipped to the region’s sawmills, and conservationists were becoming concerned about man’s negative impact on the land and natural resources.
     Rosenberg’s new hatchery was located in Section 19 of Richland Township, not far from where pioneer settler Benjamin Cummings—purportedly the inventor of the American version of the circular saw—platted the village of Bridgewater in 1837.
   I can’t say for sure whether Rosenberg’s motivations were conservation or capitalism, but he erected a two-story home on the site and cut down tamarack, elm, ash and other trees that were on the land.  He built a 209-foot dam —flooding about three-quarters of an acre—and excavated eight ponds  in the mucky soil, all by hand labor. Ditches were dug to carry water from springs that were uncovered.
    Rosenberg was apparently learning by doing during those early years and consequently suffered numerous setbacks.  He reportedly had varying degrees of success with brook and rainbow trout, but many adjustments had to be made along the way and new ponds dug. (For a more complete accounting of the struggles Rosenberg experienced as a commercial trout hatchery proprietor, see his testimony before the Fourth International Fishery Congress of 1908 on Page 3 of this edition).
     The total history of the Spring Brook Trout Hatchery is somewhat lost to the ages—at least I haven’t discovered much other written documentation yet.  But the facility has been a lifelong curiosity for me, because I grew up virtually next door to the property and often explored it with my neighborhood friends during those halcyon days of our youth.
     My earliest memories are from the late 1950s, when a local business executive named Russell Scott owned maybe 100 acres of the surrounding land.  I don’t recall whether Mr. Scott actually tried to raise fish there, but I do remember an old caretaker living in a small shack at the edge of one of the ponds.  Albert Rosenberg’s wood-framed house—which had already been abandoned by the time my father grew up in the same neighborhood during the 1930s and 1940s—was long gone and few remnants remained.
     My friends and I always referred to the old hatchery as “Scotty’s ponds” and, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, we loved to hike through the woods and along the two-track roads that wound through the trees.  To us, it was “The Big Wild”—several dozen acres of unattended land with an absentee owner, which we could pretty much explore at will.  Every trip to the dormant trout ponds brought fresh, new adventure.
     Wading in the old ponds wasn’t much of a thrill, though, because they were filled with silt, rotting vegetation and assorted creepy objects that passersby over the years had tossed into the water.  You never knew what you were going to step on when you entered the ponds with bare feet that would promptly descend a foot or so into the dark, mucky bottom.
     One of my boyhood chums—the Tom Sawyer to my Huck Finn—purchased the property several years ago and has set about trying to restore the natural habitat, and preserve the wetlands and forest.  A hunter, fisherman and conservationist of the first order, he has worked incessantly on restoring the ponds, managing wildlife and protecting the landscape.  For this privilege, he pays an excessive amount of property taxes each year—not to mention increasingly expensive fees to hunt and fish in the State of Michigan.
     He gets no breaks from the massive bureaucracy that governs such matters, even though he has spent thousands of his own dollars to actively steward the natural resources for which he has assumed responsibility.
      Modern liberal-progressives probably feel this is a just and fair system.  After all, shouldn’t any individual who can afford to own and care for such property in the first place be taxed disproportionately so that his perceived wealth can be redistributed to others who can’t?
     To me, that’s faulty thinking.  Regularly taxing someone for a possession he bought and paid for with his own hard-earned money seems the height of economic injustice.  Does a property owner’s personal vote in millage elections carry more weight than that of those who own no property and thus are not adversely affected by increased taxes on such assets?  No, but it probably should.
     Instead, the property owner—no matter his own economic situation (he may be a retiree on a fixed income)—will quickly lose his investment to the government if the tax man is not satisfied.
     I’m not sure exactly what it would be—perhaps just a flat tax on income—but there needs to be a more fair and equitable way of funding schools, townships and assorted other government expenditures that today rely so heavily on property taxes for continuation.
   Albert Rosenberg’s Spring Brook Trout Hatchery was located along the former C, K & S (Chicago, Kalamazoo & Saginaw) railroad line, which once carried visitors out from town to visit the facility and have picnics on the grounds.
     Over the years, some have referred to the railroad as the “Cuss, Kick & Swear.”  And that’s precisely how many Michigan land and home owners react when they receive their ever-increasing tax-assessment notices each summer and winter.
     Wouldn’t it be better if our public tax system was less punitive, and did more to encourage the ownership and active conservation of private land?

A faithful shelter from the storm: My life in tents

By Mike VanBuren
From the Early April 2014 edition of The North Woods Call

     In a fractured nation and topsy-turvy world, many of us are searching for some kind of shelter from the storm.
    Which—for some weird reason—makes me think about tents.
     I was first introduced to collapsible cloth structures as a toddler, when I threw a blanket over the backs of two kitchen chairs and crawled inside.  Later, as my world expanded, I took the chairs and blanket into the back yard and reclined underneath on the cool, green grass.
     From there, I graduated to the family cabin tent—made from heavy, weather-treated canvas—and a smaller A-shaped version that we called a “pup tent.”  I had  no idea why the little two-person bungalow was called that, or what any of it had to do with dogs, but I may have since discovered why.
     Most of these outings were uneventful—save for some apples dropping on the roof during a noisy rainstorm at Interlochen State Park during the late 1950s and admonitions from my parents to refrain from touching the canvas tent walls, which were sure to leak like a sieve.
     Oh, and there was the snowy, sub-zero camp-out my college roommate and I experienced in the mid-1970s, and the windy lightning storm that blew my modern nylon tent over a Beaver Island bluff a few years later.  (Don’t worry, I   escaped before that happened).
    I began to understand the meaning of “pup tent,” though, one dark night when I was sleeping in southern Michigan’s Allegan State Game Area in my two-person Eureka Timberline model.  I was awakened abruptly by what I thought was a raccoon, or some other wild animal, jumping on the rain fly and trying to push its nose through the zippered door.
     I shoved back a few times, but the aggressive animal kept right on assaulting my woodland bedroom, so I grabbed the large metal flashlight I kept at my side and whacked the intruder hard across the snout.  I heard a single loud yelp, some retreating paw steps and then silence.
     I climbed out of my sleeping bag and scooted outside to survey the area.  To my surprise, the flashlight beam landed on a sheepish and whimpering beagle puppy several yards away—a normally joyful spirit that apparently was only trying to make friends with a paranoid outdoorsman.
     My camp mate and I quickly dubbed him the “Pound Puppy” and I tried to make up for the violence I had visited on him.  Fortunately, he was the forgiving type, graciously licking my hand and hanging around camp until late morning, when we convinced him to return to the home we were sure he had nearby.
     For the past 40 years, that same Timberline tent has accompanied me to many other forests, rivers and lakeshores in Michigan, the Algoma country of northern Ontario, the beaches of Florida, the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana and other locations.
    But I haven’t always been as faithful to it as it has to me.
      Once—on a college-age spring break outing near Florida’s Atlantic coast—we had 28 people from various states in another’s six-person tent, consuming adult beverages, singing folk songs and generally enjoying each others’ company as alligators waddled by on the narrow park road outside.
    Ah, the exuberance of youth.
    When my children were growing up, we camped for many years at campgrounds and bluegrass festivals in a 12- by12-foot nylon umbrella tent covered by a “Stormshield” fly that adequately kept some pretty ferocious rainstorms at bay.  We have since spent a relative handful of nights in a 25-foot Wilderness travel trailer that is less damp and  much warmer than any tent I’ve ever owned.  Better yet, it’s got a queen-sized mattress and indoor plumbing.
     Still, the hassles of getting such a monstrosity out of the barn and putting it away again—not to mention upkeep, maintenance and extra-fuel costs—have kept me attached to my tiny Timberline for most trips to the forests and fields.
    These days, though, I’m finding tent life and sleeping on the ground much less comfortable than I once did.  I still enjoy doing it, but don’t often rest as well as I once did and sometimes have to take a revitalizing nap when I get back home.
    Mostly—especially on road trips—I’m much more inclined to check into a motel than to find a campground and pitch my tent on the cold, hard turf.  There’s always the chance, I guess, that the troubled economy will force me to reverse this trend.
     But I’ve grown accustomed to such change.  After all,  there are plenty of slobbering puppies (and other less-desireable creatures) trying to push their noses into our proverbial tents these days.
     Some of these intrusive forces are beneficial, but many are not.  So it’s good to have a well-manufactured tent to buffet the winds and keep the rain off our heads.
     The quality and effectiveness of most tents has advanced over the years and improved upon the canvas structures of old.
      I’m not sure I can say the same thing about the condition of our nation and world.

Springtime, billboards and roadside vistas

By Mike VanBuren
From the Late March 2014 edition of The North Woods Call

     Now that the strenuous winter of 2013-14 is drawing to an unceremonious close, we’re relieved to see some traditional signs of spring.
     Robins have been spotted scurrying across icy mounds of snow.  Blue skies and bright sunshine have regularly been peeking through the dark, gray clouds that have dominated our local environment for the past four months.  And a season-long collection of sharp icicles has all but disappeared from the eaves of our house.
     Perhaps even more noteworthy,  the spring edition of the Cabela’s catalog has arrived in our mailbox.  Heck, the wildflowers and skunk cabbage should be along any day now—if the still-deep snow ever melts and uncovers the ground.
     There will be rain, of course, and plenty more cool days, but the  rebirth of springtime never fails to bolster my spirit and get me in the mood for warm-weather adventure—and maybe a couple of long-overdue road trips.
     Road trips?
     Sure, spring is a perfect time to break the chains of the homebound and point the automobile down a stretch of blacktop.
    I don’t have to go very far, or use a lot of gasoline.  Just let me go someplace—anyplace—where I can pitch a tent, hike a wooded trail, explore a museum, or visit friends and relatives.  It’s time to thaw the frozen mind and clear the cooped-up senses.
     But don’t force me to look at a lot of outdoor advertising—specifically highway billboards—on the way.
    Not that I have anything against advertising.  In fact, I’d like to attract more of it to The North Woods Call to help ensure a more stable future.
    But there’s something about the landscape-blocking intrusion of giant signs that interferes with my thoughts and interrupts my peace of mind.
     Even Phineas T. Barnum—the so-called “Shakespeare of advertising” and “greatest showman on earth”—apparently had his limits.  Barnum, who is credited with placing the first billboards in New York City, said there is an appropriate time and place for such attention-grabbing salesmanship.
    “No man ought to advertise in the midst of landscapes or scenery in such a way as to destroy or injure their beauty by introducing totally incongruous and relatively vulgar associations,” Barnum said in his 1866 book, “The Humbugs of the World.”  “Too many transactions of the sort have been perpetrated in our own country.”
     Barnum said it is “outrageously selfish to destroy the pleasure of thousands for the sake of additional gain.”
     No less a salesman, albeit in a much different way, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had a similar outlook.
     “There is a part of America which was here long before we arrived and will be here—if we preserve it—long after we depart,” Johnson said when signing the Highway Beautification Act of 1965—probably at the urging of the First Lady.  “The forests and the flowers, the open prairies and the slope of the hills, the tall mountains, the granite, the limestone, the caliche, the unmarked trails, the winding little streams.  This is the America that no amount of science or skill can ever re-create or actually ever duplicate.
    “In recent years, I think America has sadly neglected this part of [its] national heritage.  We have placed a wall of civilization between us and between the beauty of our land, and of our countryside.  In our eagerness to expand and to improve, we have relegated nature to a weekend role and we have banished it from our daily lives.”
     I’m not sure how much of what ol’ LBJ believed that I would agree with today—I was too young in the mid-1960s to have had many public policy ideas myself—but I think I could have gotten on board with these sentiments.
    I’ve had similar thoughts whenever I’ve driven the George Washington Memorial Parkway leading into the nation’s capital—or traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and  the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.   Even the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive through northern Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore reminds me of the stark contrast between most public highways and those where the natural vistas have been carefully preserved.
     It’s probably not practical to think that all roads could be constructed in such a way.  After all, America runs on commerce and creative advertising is key to the nation’s success.   But it would be nice to at least consider these possibilities before we cut thoroughfares through mountains, across prairies and along seashores, then line them with gargantuan consumer messages that assault the natural landscape.
     Not everything should be for sale, especially shared public spaces that would look and feel much better without all the clutter.