SECTION THREE
oaks , maples , cedars , and birch . Before I knew their name , I thought of white pines as “ eagle trees ” due to the nest in one on the lake years ago .
Physically , little has changed since I was last here : the same red log cabin , and as any self-respecting Finnish cottage must have , a sauna .
My dad and brother put in a new dock last summer , someone – likely my great-Uncle Bill – built a vestibule over the picnic table . It has indoor plumbing now , though I still insist on using the “ huusika ,”... what you might call a “ two-holer .”
So much else has changed , though ; Uncle Bill and his wife , my Aunt June , passed on a few years ago . Just over a month ago , my Uncle Walt passed away just before his 97th birthday , leaving my Aunt Elaine as the last of the greatest generation that filled this cottage with laughter , intellect , and love for over a half century . stock out in Red Lodge , Montana . One was of the whole family after a day of fishing in the nineteen-teens with my great-great-grandpa John , who emigrated from Finland in 1887 to work as a teamster in lumber camps in Minnesota , Wisconsin , and the U . P . before starting a farm in Iron Belt , Wisconsin .
In 1946 , another Finnish immigrant to the Upper Peninsula – Frank Valin - told folk researcher Richard Dorson why many small farmers and sharecroppers emigrated during that time : “ The food was always miserable ; sour milk thinned with water , potatoes and herring , day in and day out while the tables of the landowners groaned with stews of beef , lamb and pork , and carrots and onions . The lakes were full of fish but we could not fish in them , neither could we hunt game , except by stealth , for the land was owned by our ‘ betters .’ Is it a wonder that we left Finland to come here ?”
The night before , I flipped through the photo albums and scrapbooks that didn ’ t interest me as much as a kid . There are pictures of my great-uncles teaching my younger cousins to clean fish in the years that I was somehow too busy to come up here . Then there ’ s my little brother and me in that boat , and my mom as a teenager with a string of walleye – I never knew she fished ! Uncle Bill with a buck hanging from a pole in front of the cabin , which he sometimes used as a deer camp , too .
But then , there are older photos , much older . My grandma Ruth – who passed when my mom was a teenager – as a baby in 1924 . My great-Grandpa Bill as a young man paddling a canoe , another of him holding a rabbit he ’ d hunted with a revolver fitted with a shoulder
HORIZONS | 25