The Long Portage Moves. A Little.

A while back I had a look at an unusual and neglected monument.  It marked one end of a long portage that was part of the connection between Lake Superior and the Mississippi River system.  I put a geocache there, and it got a fair number of visitors.  Likely more than this obscure marker had seen in a while.

Well, a few weeks back a geocacher said the entire monument had been demolished.  Nothing left but a pile of stones.  As this would be an unusual degree of industry for most vandals I expressed the hope that the plaque had just been relocated.  

As indeed came to pass.  It's now a couple hundred yards to the East, right on County Road M outside the American Legion Post.  Hence the flags.  The ghostly image of Hank the Dog is just happenstance.

Alas, no good place for a geocache here.

Mystery in the Woods

Deer hunting approaches.  And while the main focus this year will be on our land a ways to the south, the area around our cabin is still public hunting, and I have a tag for it.  So I wander here and there looking for signs of deer, interesting trees, and...what the heck?

It's a well.

And some kind of cellar hole?

And a long stone wall with a flat area on one side.

Something is going on here.  Now it helps to know the local history.  This area was lightly inhabited by Ojibway folks for centuries, but they never built anything like this.  Lumbering came in circa 1870's, but initially it was confined to stands of prime timber near rivers.  This area did not get much attention until around 1890, when railroads were not too far distant.

Once the timber companies clear cut the land it was nearly worthless.  Just stumps with plenty of erosion happening.  Nearly worthless is not the same as totally worthless, so the land was sold off cheaply to anyone who wanted to try farming it. * 

Very few succeeded.  I've run across other remnants in my travels, but nothing quite this elaborate.  So, anything else knowable???

Here is Google Earth of the area.  The blue circle is roughly the location of the structures.  The X is what I suspect is the oldest habitation on the lake, at least my take on the circa 1905 whiskey and soda bottles that turn up there when the water levels are low is any guide.  "Supposedly" there was a log structure there from way back, that later became a lodge for a small mom and pop resort.  Few traces remain.

Period maps of this area are scarce, so the best I can do is this roughly 1906 image.

The odd thing here is that the east west road in the upper image - "Pioneer Road" - no less, does not appear to be present.  Look at where the road right at the number 34 lines up on the west side of the lake.  I assume there was some sort of track that went to the H.H. Fleming place.  I also assume that H.H. liked his whiskey.  Pioneer Road must have been created later.

So it looks as if my dog and I were wandering about - on public land it should be noted - where Peter Larson once tried to farm the miserable cut over land.  The long stone wall I'm seeing might well be a frontage onto the east west road that was then just south of his presumed dwelling.  It's too big for any barn he'd be likely to need.

So what happened?  That's going to be hard to know.  Larson is a common name.  And the story of little hardscrabble farms failing in the Great Depression is even more common.

________

* An old timer told me once that "back in the day" you just had to go to the county extension office and you could sign for as much World War One surplus free dynamite as you wanted!  And you'd want a lot to clear the stumps out that kind of land.

Illogical Measures

There are times when the world seems particularly illogical.  Among the many reasons people give for this, our system of measuring things gets the occasional mention.  Why, if only we used logical metric stuff everywhere!

In large measure the system you use on a daily basis is what you are used to.  When in England I get acclimated, so to speak, and know that a 30 degree day there is sweltering hot, while the same 30 degree day back home (in my usual excavation time of April/May) is dreary and has a nasty chill.  

If used regularly any system works.  Perhaps not for scientific endeavors but just fine for staples of conversation like the weather.  Some of the old measures actually have a basis in our daily lives, or at least the daily lives of our predecessors.

One foot used to be the length of, well, one human foot.  Logical, although people have always had feet of variable sizes.....

Consider the "Big Foot" Roman shoes unearthed at the Magna site recently...

In fairness this specimen is being held close to the camera, in the manner of proud fishermen everywhere, but its pretty darned big.  There's a whole video on these guys....

An inch derives from a foot.  In Roman times an "uncia" was one twelfth of a foot.  Uncia gives us the word inch.  Efforts in later times to standardize it as say, the width of a thumb, encountered obvious difficulties.

If you are having a hard time fathoming these off hand measuring units, well, a fathom is simply the distance of the outstretched arms of a good sized mariner.  That's about six feet.

Early folks were big on measurements that related to their daily lives.  Most of them were farmers.  So an acre - although initially just a term for forest land - evolved into the amount of land a team of oxen could plow in one day.  Distantly the word might have a joint origin with agri as in agriculture.  

And of course we have miles.  As I have documented previously, one Roman mile was one thousand strides of a soldier, or mille pacem.  As measurements go its pretty useful.  As are yards, the rough distance of one such stride.  I'm still using the latter getting ready for deer hunting season where distances to sight in rifles and crossbows are not given in meters.

The meter of course is a French construct.  But lets not let them off the hook entirely.  If you go back to define an acre it once was considered one furlong (660 feet) by four rods (66 feet).  Rods are an almost entirely extinct form of measurement but weirdly portages in the Boundary Waters Canoe area are still given in rods.  Why? Well its a bit obscure, but I blame the French.  That part of the world was explored and mapped by Voyageurs, who were using canoes about one rod (16.5 feet) long.  So a canoe length as a standard of measurement made as much sense as anything else.  Considering that most of these guys were traveling light and not bringing along the marking chains to survey a furlong!

 

 

 

 

Strange Fish - Smallmouth Buffalo

Perhaps because it is the "in between" times where not much is happening, but some of my hobbies might be getting a bit out of hand.  Several years back I picked up Geocaching.  It's harmless enough.  You follow gps coordinates and clues, you find something, you sign your name on a log.  Easy.   

But I decided it was more fun to make custom geocaches.  And series of hides.  Hence the Strange Fish series.  

The latest entry features this guy.  The Smallmouth Buffalo.  

This is actually an impressive fish.  It can get big, the Wisconsin state record is 81 pounds.  They can live a long time, perhaps a hundred years.  And while you've probably never caught one, or if you did thought it was just a carp, they are an important fish commercially and a prized target of bow fishermen.  This combination of growing big and being targeted by both commercial fishing nets and arrows has put their populations into a decline of late.....

So I needed a really good container for this geocache.  I started out with a slab of weathered, broken up railroad tie.  These are full of creosote and therefore pretty water resistant.  Here's the cache....

I think that's sneaky enough to avoid the casual eye..... But to those looking closely.....

These letters are engraved with a Dremel and highlighted with Sharpie.  A bit too evident at the moment but they will "age in" nicely in a month or two.  Oh, and if you open it up...

Hinges are straps of nylon from an old deer hunting harness.  Feet belong to me and to Hank the Dog.  Looking closer....

I've carved out a fish shaped hollow in the lower section to contain the waterproof inner container.  The latter has a laminated, hopefully waterproof picture of a Smallmouth Buffalo.  To help keep it waterproof there are various drain holes drilled into the bottom of the cavity.  The whole thing locks together with a peg that you can't see in this view.  Next time around I think I'll add some sort of locking pins making it a "gadget cache" to be figured out.

Here's the cache designation and coordinates.  Strange Fish #14.

Evil Smurfs

This started as me reading too quickly.  And without my glasses on.  Someone had written a piece about the lackluster summer movie season and among the listed films I saw The Smurfs 28 Years Later.  Of course there was a comma in there that I missed, but the idea of a Smurf Zombie movie intrigued me.  I mean, they already start out a sort of putrid blue color, and frankly zombies capable of biting you on the knee cap is a disquieting thought.

Because we live in times that defy satire I can report that the nasty little critter shown here is not a figment of my imagination.  No, there is a subgenre of Smurf lore in which some of them are not the cheerful little hypoxic Communards they usually try to pass for.

There actually was a Smurf episode called The Purple Smurf in which one of the standard blue Smurfs - Lazy Smurf as it happens - gets bitten by a weird insect and turns into effectively a zombie.

He becomes angry and hostile, hops around saying "Gnap, Gnap, Grnap!" and bites several other Smurfs who also transform.

Papa Smurf of course saves the day.  How?  Don't matter, most Zombie stories are short on logic and actual science.

The Purple Smurf episode aired in 1981, so just a few years after Dawn of the Dead.  The episode is considered by aficionados of Smurfdom to be a bit of a spoof.

But I ask you, is it fair that Smurfs be portrayed as villains?  Darn right, because that's basically what they are and always have been.

The Smurfs were created by a Belgian cartoon artist named Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo.  They first appeared in 1958.  They were a spin off from an earlier (1947) series he did called Johan and Peewit, which was set in Medieval times.  In it the titular characters encountered a little guy with blue skin.

If this sounds a bit, well, derivative its because  it is.  Or if you are being charitable there are only so many sources of inspiration, and Sleeping Beauty dwarves, the Roman era adventures of Asterix, even the Hobbits of the Shire all have common themes.  Asterix btw is roughly contemporary with the Smurfs, while JRR and Uncle Walt's creations were earlier.

The pointy hats, well, those are what are called Phrygian caps.  These are very well known from Roman times, and are sometimes called Liberty Caps.  Here's a coin commemorating the assassination of Julius Caesar....

Some Roman deities also went Smurfy style.  Notably Mithras and his attendants.  Oddly, the goddess Libertas usually did not.

As to the Smurfs being villains, well, sure.  But it was not as pejorative term as you might expect. The late Roman era and the early Medieval times had no sharp demarcation.  Rulers changed. Latin, which was probably not much spoken by the rustics anyway, moved over to the churches.  People mostly still lived in the same places as before, mostly did the same work.  Even Roman villas, the upgraded farmsteads where a gentleman could supervise his peasants then enjoy a hot bath and a bit of culture were not totally abandoned.  They just had new owners with a bit less class.

But the peasants who worked there?  Well for them it was pretty much Same Old.  By the Middle Ages, the period in which Peyo set his early work, the term Villain appeared.  Around 1300 if you want to be specific.  At that point villanus, meaning farm hand, had the connotation of "base, or low born rustic".  From there it was pretty much downhill, as in a few centuries it meant a man capable of any manner of gross wickedness".  Villainy if you prefer.

Well that's a long march from my mistaken - or actually was it? - concept of Smurfs as zombies.  One of the other people commenting on the initial discussion did run the basic idea through Chat GPT, asking for a synopsis for a movie script.  AI of course spat out predictable and unremarkable drivel.  I suspect that's all it will be capable of for many years to come.

Responding to the Bat Signal

In the course of exploring Forgotten Brewery Caves and other underground places I occasionally encounter bats.  This has led to collaboration with the Department of Natural Resources and their "bat people".  With the emergence of White Nose Syndrome and its disastrous impact on hibernating bats I sometimes show them new places where bats exist.  In return they've taken me on the occasional bat counting survey.  So I know my Wisconsin bats pretty well.

I can't say I'm a big fan.  They are still creepy, and if they bite you there is the matter of painful rabies shots.  Also, they have issues with boundaries.  More on that presently.  But I'm appreciative of all the bugs they eat, and on some level I am rooting for the under loved underdog species.

Recently I've gotten acquainted with some Big Brown Bats.  In the last month or so there have been five that have turned up in our house, usually doing frantic circles around our bedroom.  Here's a pleasant face to abruptly wake up to:

Yes, no fun to have that whispering squeak nothings in your ear, even if they are largely out of the range of human hearing.

In an old house this happens, so there's a routine.  I'm alerted to the presence of a bat.  I get out of bed, collect my gear, don additional garments, catch the bat with a fish landing net, then release it to the Great Outdoors.  How exactly they are getting access to our Great Indoors remains a mystery.

The other night I did a nifty mid air interception and brought the captive out to the front porch.  But his wing was pretty tangled up in the netting.  I tried this and that, eventually putting on gloves and snipping some parts of the net free.  Bat hopped, flopped and chittered away.  I hope all is well, there still seemed to be some net stuck to one wing.  I'm only going to do so much for my squeaky pals, not gonna risk rabies shots.  But it was time for an upgrade.

The landing net was now basically useless for fishing purposes.  Guess I'd snipped a few more strands of net than I'd figured.

So I decided to modify it as a dedicated bat catcher.

On the right is an old pillow case.  It almost but not quite fits over the aluminum parts of the net.

I affixed the pillow case to the inner aspect of the net, with the extra ballooning out the now enlarged holes in the net.

This way I can dispense with the trash can I generally bring on bat missions.  With this it should just be net 'em, then flip it over and trap the bat in the long "tail" of the net.

Various things could be used to make the attachment.  I had brown duct tape on hand.  And I figured Big Brown Bats might like it.

And of course, I asked my long suffering but occasionally appreciate wife to take a picture of me kitted out for the next Bat Capture.  Probably this level of preparedness means they'll quit sneaking in.  That would actually be ok.

In the Shadow of the Great Prairie Dog

I have not been traveling much this summer.  But some family members are.  Steeling themselves for the ordeal of long distance vacation driving my son and his family headed Out West.  Somewhere generally around Phillip South Dakota, on the edge of the Bad Lands, they encountered the World's Largest Prairie Dog.  It watches over a sort of gift store.

 

Well, that's not actually one of the pictures they sent me.  I borrowed it from Roadside America.  The latter is a fun site, I've sent them a few curiosities over the years.  Here's their write up on The Ranch Store and its guardian totem. 

The picture I actually was sent was taken as the blistering sun was getting low in the sky.  Still, it was 102 degrees at 5:30 pm.  Yikes.  I think the big guy looks a bit sinister seen from this angle.....

Mooching around in the only available patch of shade are a batch of actual prairie dogs.  They live there, enjoying an indolent existence where there are no predators, but a steady stream of tourists willing to feed them for one dollar a bag of "Dog" chow.

And, ya know, they are pretty cute little buggers.  Unless you happen to know a few things about them.  Like that they have been documented to transmit several diseases to humans.  Monkey Pox would be kind of bad.  And would require a bit of explaining.  But, helpful hint of the day, prairie dogs can transmit bubonic plague!!!  Lookin' a little less cute now???