A Northwoods Almanac for July 7 – 20, 2023
Old Roads
One way to beat the mosquito legions waiting in the woods for hikers is to outrun them. Mary and I have been doing just that by bicycling on sections of the 52-mile-long bike trail – the Heart of Vilas County Bike Trail – that runs from Mercer to St. Germain. The part of the trail we customarily ride starts right out our door in Manitowish and runs south and east into Manitowish Waters and then toward Boulder Junction.
Along the way, the trail briefly utilizes Plunkett Road, which was repaved a few years ago to accommodate bike traffic. When we moved here in 1984, it was quite different. The road was one of our favorites to walk, in large part because it was slowly being reclaimed by nature. Plants were taking over, and the road was destined for eventual reclamation into the woodland it had once been.
I wrote a story about the road in 1993 that was published in the book Harvest Moon: A Wisconsin Outdoor Anthology, edited by Ted Rulseh (Ted now writes a column in the Lakeland Times, “The Lake Where You Live,” which is well worth your time). I’m a believer in the quote “A place is a space with a story.” Every old road, old house, old field, has a story, and each enriches our understanding of all who came before us, and how the Northwoods has become what it is in 2023.
So, for those who bicycle or walk the Heart of Vilas County Bike Trail and traverse Plunkett Road, here is some of its story :
Plunkett Road (1993)
I am drawn to roads that appear to start nowhere and go nowhere, roads whose purpose is remembered only in a few elderly hearts and minds, and then rather dimly. The Northwoods, like any rural place, is home to many of these once vital highways. The value of each may have been as small as providing access to one homesteader's cabin, or as large as carrying traffic to a whole region.
These roads could of course tell stories, if the crumbling asphalt had such an inclination. Part of the pleasure in walking them today is in trying to read the intentions and dreams of those who used them. Once arteries in people’s lives, they have been reduced to the smallest capillaries. But that only serves to intensify the exploratory questions that often arise on a quiet, early morning hike.
Plunkett Road is such a road, just a mile south of our home in the tiny crossroads of Manitowish. The lane that's left today runs just under a mile, a small cutoff segment of what was once Highway 51. Only blackberry pickers and grouse hunters use it now, and then only in season. The old road sprouts alder and willow, and the asphalt is heaved up in hummocks, bursting the roadway in slow, concentrated earthquakes. Here geology comes alive as hard rock and tar evolve into soft green.
Old Highway 51 once carried the trade and tourists of the North along this section, until engineers felt compelled to straighten the curves and increase the speed of entry into the north country. My father-in-law laughs about the first roads he drove on to reach Manitowish where his wife was raised. “The roads followed the contours of the land,” he says, shaking his head. “Never could get over 35 miles per hour.”
In those days, you did not travel north and back in a weekend rush. You came and stayed a while. The roads allowed few other options, respecting land ownership, bowing to nature's eccentric formations of bog and highland, rolling and curving free from the modern slavery to speed.
The Plunkett family homesteaded back off the road before the first asphalt was laid, before the first yellow line drawn. Their life has no remarkable twists to it that I’m aware of, but as with everyone who first struggled to plow ground and find a living in an area where nothing was easy, it is remarkable just in itself. I know only the barest pieces of their story.
Jim Plunkett logged in the area in the late 1800's, probably as a jobber for the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Co. As all loggers did in those times, he had his own log marking hammer. His mark, "YPJ," was registered Feb. 3, 1892.
Mrs. Plunkett moved from Eau Claire to the homestead at the turn of the century and was famous later in her life for requiring visitors to come in and have tea, whether the visitor wished to or not. Her home was the only one along that stretch of road, and there may as well have been a barricade stopping travelers in front of her house. To pass by without stopping for a visit just wasn't neighborly.
Her three boys, Bill, Jim, and Matt, remained at the homestead after she died. Bill and Jim were bachelors, spending their lives on the homestead, and leaving no heirs. The house lacked polish after their mother died in the early thirties. One gentleman has written to me to describe the inside of the house: “The partitions had never been finished to define the various rooms, and the paint to protect it was purchased, but remained in the cans.”
Bill carved out a little farm along the river, had cows and horses and a big garden, and plowed for those who wouldn't or couldn't. He was a small Irishman with a squeaky, high voice that ran too fast. Later in his life a friend described him as having pure white hair and flashing blue eyes, looking as Santa Claus might during his 11-month off-season.
Matt, the third son, bought a cabin on a point of tall pines along the river a few hundred yards from the homestead, and rented it to tourists. Matt eventually married and moved to the town of Manitowish, but had no children.
Today the foundation of Matt's cabin sinks slowly into the sandy soil. Old white pines encircle the remains, and eagles hunt from branches that arch out toward the river. Snakes hide in the rotted wood and rock foundation rubble, while otters enjoy dinners under the pines, their crayfish-impregnated droppings attesting to their presence.
I know precious little else about the Plunketts. Why would they leave such a beautiful spot to no one, and why would no relations arise to take the land and work with it again? That is all part of the intrigue of the road now.
Highway 51, in its present form, was straightened and rerouted in the early 1950's. Today Plunkett Road is roughly a half-circle, entering and exiting directly onto Hwy. 51, with street signs at either end that are impossible for motorists speeding by at 55 mph to read.
A tangled cedar swamp lies between Matt's cabin and another highland of pines, which was recently logged. Rows of scotch pine, planted by the DNR in the 1960's, stand at an even height near the homestead site. A little dirt lane leads into the homestead, and the land is still open, as if the forces of old field succession have held off to honor the spot. The skeleton of a massive old willow rises below the home site, providing pileated woodpeckers the raw material for sculpting future nest cavities. Along the bank of the river are old bottles and cans, the bachelors having deposited their garbage, as was the custom of the time, by throwing it over the hill leading down to the river.
The river too has changed. The main channel once flowed along the length of the homestead, but its course has shifted away from the road. Now a slough calmly rests here, a safe haven for wood ducks and muskrat and painted turtles. A beaver lodge sprawls in the shallows, and the skinned, pale white branches of aspen and alder which once made up the beaver's winter cache, bob along the banks.
Both the road and river are backwaters now; they’ve lost their flow of traffic, but gained other lives in the loss. The process of change has continually reshaped this spot over the thousands of years since the glacier's retreat. In land, for every loss there is gain for some other community of species. The value judgments, good or bad, given to this exchange are a concern only of humans, and then often a matter of hot debate. That this land is reverting to a wild state though is certain, and for me, a gain.
An eagle's nest across river from the slough first drew us here 12 years ago. We have watched the nest every spring since then. Three years ago it was gone, apparently blown down in a winter storm. We searched the big pines up and down the river, and within two weeks found a new nest coarsely woven in a tall pine several hundred yards upriver from the blowdown.
The spring of 1991 was the first that no eagles nested across from the Plunkett homestead. Loggers were back along Matt's point harvesting wood the required 1/4 mile away from the nest. But across the river and the marsh leading to the nest, the sights and sounds surely carried as if they were close by. Possibly the eagles nested elsewhere, but not within our eyesight.
Other wildlife, though, have adopted the area. Kestrels perch on the old phone wires to hunt mice and insects in the roadside ditches and weedy fields. Grouse flush from the young aspen, the new pioneers of the land near Matt's cabin. Red fox excavations are hollowed into the hillside sand rising from the river.
The land is healing. One lane of the road is nearly indistinguishable from the ditch in places, and where the healing is slower, the road is gently breaking up in chunks. In late April, wood frogs and spring peepers chorus from the wetlands along the road, and migrating ducks rest in the slough. By early summer, purple knapweed, mullein, and silvery cinquefoil push up through the broken blacktop, and the road smells curiously of hot asphalt and humus. By early August, blackberry canes laden with fruit lean over the decaying road edge, and the river is often so low that canoeists scrape the sandy bottom as they pass by the homestead.
Walking this road now grants me an understanding of place and order, of time and hope. I see tiny seedlings that withstood years of darkness and crushing weight germinate and gradually burst through the asphalt. Over time, the plants’ powers are imposing, yet, in an instant, their strength can’t be felt against the hand. Physical law would seem to say such small lives could not push through tar and rock, but growth and reclamation go on here every day, without fanfare or machinery or sweat. The inexorable drive, the life force, even in the small mosses, is Herculean.
Each time I walk on Plunkett Road I am inspired. I take home with me the resolve, the prayer to be as strong as the emerging plants and mosses, knowing if I find such strength of will, I too might have breakthroughs in places I thought beyond my reach.
Celestial Events
On 7/11, look in the southeast before dawn for Jupiter about two degrees below the waning crescent moon.
The new moon occurs on 7/17.
The average daytime temperature during the period from July 8 to July 28 is the warmest of the year – 78°.
Quote for the Week
“The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.” – Brian Doyle
Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.
