(An aside: Based on what I've read on a lot of blogs, this is not what comes to peoples' minds when the word beaver is mentioned.)
I loved my work as a school counselor, and even now am proud to say that there was never a Monday morning when I didn’t look forward to arriving at school. I wasn’t prepared to retire from that job in the fall of 1997 when I was contacted about a position as director of the K-12 Michigan School Guidance Counseling Program at Northern Michigan University, my alma mater. I flew to Marquette and had an interview with the Deans of The College of Education and Graduate School as well as a committee of Education School faculty. Shortly thereafter I was offered the position. They liked my unique combination of personal, professional and political experiences, and, much later, one of the Deans who had interviewed me confided that I had “saved their butts” because they had written a description of a program that required someone like me who was somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades (Where have I seen that word before?) professionally, and they had no idea whether or not such a person might exist.
Gwen and I didn’t hesitate about deciding to accept the position at NMU. All four of our children had completed college and were successfully started in their careers. In addition to the professional and personal challenge the move to NMU offered me, it was also an opportunity for Gwen to be near her parents, who were now becoming advanced in age. She would also be near her brother, who lived in Rock, and her sister who lived with her parent in Gaastra.
I accepted the position with NMU with the provision that I be allowed to complete the school year at Huron High School. They agreed, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Well, not exactly, there were some nagging details that would need to be attended to, beginning with the fact that Gwen wouldn’t be able to join me in Marquette until her birthday early in October, when she would be eligible to retire from her nursing position with the UM Hospitals. We had come full circle; whereas early in our relationship it was I who drove 115 miles to be with her on the weekends, it was now she who would drive to be with me on weekends. A major difference, of course, was that it was 420 miles from Ann Arbor to Marquette. She didn’t make that trip alone too often. During the summer one of our children might accompany her, and, during breaks in my schedule I would make the trip to Ann Arbor. No matter how we did it, our reunions after a week apart were always reminiscent of those long days we were apart the year before we married. It seemed that even then, 35 years into our marriage, we continued to take the part about travelling the road of life together quite literally.
As things turned out, our move to the U. P. could not have been better timed as far as Gwen’s relationship with her family was concerned. She had always been very close to her mother, and was now able to visit whenever she felt like driving over to see her. Sadly, shortly thereafter her mother was diagnosed with leukemia. With her nursing background, and with the help of her sister, Gwen was able to be of loving assistance to her mother until she died early in 2004. Her father, Barney, never got over the death of his wife of more than 60 years. He became quite frail and fragile, and, shortly after Gwen and I returned to live in Ann Arbor in 2004, it became necessary to have him placed in a nursing home in Crystal Falls, where he died in 2006.
It was not all sad times with Gwen and her family. Often I would accompany her on visits to Gaastra, and by now Barney and I had become, if not good friends, at least two people who could spend time together alone in a car as I accompanied him on many trips he asked me to take with him. Most of these trips were on “Forestry Roads” in the midst of State and National Forests where he had spent so much of his life hunting, trapping and fishing. I now regret that I didn’t record those conversations as Barney relived his younger years. It is fair to say that his life had certainly not been a boring one.
On one of our visits the subject of trapping again arose when Barney asked me to accompany him as he checked some traps he had set earlier that week. This was early in April, when beaver pelts were prime, whatever that meant, the best time to trap them. I readily agreed to accompany him, seeing this as my chance to finally, 35 years later, redeem myself for my faux pas during our previous trapping misadventure involving my spitting on the trap he had carefully set. We got into his pickup and headed down the road toward Chicagouan Lake. Our first stop was on a side road where a culvert crossed under it. Barney told me that he had set an otter trap there; he rambled off into the underbrush and soon returned with a beautiful otter in his hands.
Our next and last stop was at the spillway of a dam that formed a pond at the cottage he had once owned but since sold to a Coca-Cola salesman from Houghton. Shortly before arriving there we had come across a place where beaver had built a dam in a creek, causing it to flood over the road. The Department of Natural Resources had come in to remove the dam, and a local wag had posted a sign that read Beavers 1, DNR 0.
The beavers were quite a nuisance in this way, and Barney had set a beaver trap, hoping to remove at least one of what were considered to be pests. He carefully made his way down a steep embankment, and I recall feeling saddened by the sight of this once strong man, whom I remembered striding confidently through the woods, now bent over and stiff with age. He was in his early 80s at this time. He managed to get to the stream below the spillway, and then called my name, saying that he would need some help with the beaver in his trap. “It’s at least a blanket,” he said. As I later learned, the beaver’s pelt would be measured both vertically and horizontally at its furthest points, and then those two measurements were added together. It the resultant total was between 60 and 70 inches it was called a “blanket”, if the total were more than 70, it was called a “super blanket.” These terms had greater meaning when beaver trapping was a livelihood for some, and the pelts they had acquired were offered for sale. For today, they meant that Barney had a beaver that was too large for him to carry up the embankment, and he needed my help. I took no pleasure in knowing that things had now come full circle with Barney and me. I scrambled down the bank and grabbed the beaver by its back legs. It was heavy, must have weighed at least 40 pounds, but this was not a time to show weakness. If it were today, I would say that I “manned up” and carried the beaver up the steep embankment as though it were something I did every day.
When we arrived back at the house, after taking a few pictures, Barney placed the beaver on a table he had for this purpose and began removing its pelt. When he had completed that, he laid it on a flat surface and measured its length and width; “63 inches, it’s a blanket,” he announced. He then placed the hide in a refrigerator in the garage and told me he would later that day salt it down and send it to a place in Wisconsin where it would be tanned. We then crossed the back alley into the woods behind the house and cut a couple of willow saplings that were just beginning to show spring buds. Barney cut the sapling into what he judged to be a suitable length and then instructed me to peel them, which I did. He then showed me how to bend the supple wood into a circle, securing the joints by wrapping them with a rawhide shoe lace. The frame was then hung to dry on a nail on the wall of the garage. Eventually, it would serve as a frame for stretching the pelt he had just removed from the beaver.
Late in the summer of that year, on one of our visits to Gaastra, Barney informed me that the beaver hide had been returned from the tannery and was ready to be stretched on the frame we had made. He showed me how to carefully punch holes in the skin at the proper intervals, thread a nylon cord through the holes, and then tie the cord onto the frame, thus stretching and mounting the beaver skin. I succeeded in doing that in a way that met even Barney’s exacting standards, and, although we both knew that I still left much to be desired as far as being a trapper was concerned, I admitted to a sense of pride as I beheld my handiwork, and knew I had moved along on the jack-of-all-trades front. Barney made my day by telling me I could keep it. For several years I proudly displayed that hide on garage wall in Marquette. When we returned to Ann Arbor it remained in storage in the basement until our eldest son moved into a new home with a recreation room with a wall that begged for a beaver skin. My son took a picture of it and sent it to me:
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