Anderson: In Minnesota, gathering firewood and harvesting gardens are autumn rituals for the soul

Lamenting summer’s end and apprehensive about the coming winter, the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote centuries ago in “Song of Autumn,” that “already I hear the dismal sound of firewood/falling with a clatter on the courtyard pavements.”

In Minnesota, just now, in mid-October, firewood still often falls with a clatter, as it has since long before statehood. But not so much with a dismal sound.

Instead, its placement on driveways and lawns and the subsequent whack of axes against birch and popple, maple and oak, punctuate a too-brief period of harvest and renewal that is fundamentally anticipatory of the coming winter, and pleasantly so.

This is true whether wood is gathered, stacked and burned for heat or, as is more often the case, for its palliative effects on the psyche.

A few weeks back, September’s cool days and cooler nights triggered Don and Karla Vogelpohl’s autumn harvest and renewal rituals.

It was then that Don sharpened the chain on his saw, filled its reservoirs with gas and oil, and began cutting, hauling and splitting the four cords of wood needed to heat the home he and Karla share on 80 acres south of New London, in west-central Minnesota.

Sometimes while returning to their home on his tractor with a load of red and white oak, Don would see Karla in their garden, gathering the squash she bakes and freezes for winter suppers.

These efforts, occurring outdoors and requiring physical exertion, focus the senses — quieting, as they do, the information overloading that too often today quickens the pulse.

Such unselfconscious experiences can be pathways to heightened awareness and help people distill what’s important from what’s less so, said the writer David Foster Wallace. Cutting and splitting wood, and harvesting gardens, are examples of these exercises as good as any.

Adam and Neva Maxwell have their own autumn routines.

Living off the Gunflint Trail, along the Minnesota-Ontario border, where this week the forest canopy is aflame with color, and where ruffed grouse are few this year due to early summer rains, Adam and Neva initially hear autumn’s siren song not with the crack of an axe — though they burn multiple cords of wood — but with the onset of ricing season.

Beginning in August, if wild rice is ripe, like nomadic Native Americans, Adam and Neva travel with their canoe and ricing sticks to Aitkin County, where most years the crop flourishes in shallow lakes. Weeks later, after the rice has been cleaned and finished, they’ll angle toward Ely, where they net whitefish, which they pressure cook and store in neat pantry jars for the cold months ahead.

“We fish lake trout in winter, but we don’t keep them,” Adam said. “I think there’s too much pressure on lake trout, and the DNR should protect them more.”

Down the road a piece from Adam and Neva’s place, hard by the shores of Lake Superior, Pete Harris and his wife, Carol, heat their cabin-size home primarily with wood.

As a kid, Pete lived with his family in Cloquet, and in winter, he and his dad snowshoed to a back 40 along the St. Louis River, where they cut and stacked ash for retrieval in spring by boat.

“But I’m 89 now, and in spring, for $650, a friend of ours delivers enough cut, split and dried birch to last us the winter,” Pete said. “In spring, I’ll also salvage a little driftwood along the beach to help out. It burns real good.”

Though Pete and Carol’s garden started slow this summer, they’ll still can 30 or so quarts of tomato juice, which Pete stirs into a seasonal concoction to wash down stews of grouse legs, gizzards and hearts.

“You mix a half glass of our tomato juice with a half can of beer,” he said, “and you got a pretty good bloody mary to go with the grouse.”

Wednesday of this past week, at his home place not far from Akeley, which isn’t far from Walker in northern Minnesota, Dallas Hudson was clearing shooting lanes for the eight deer blinds on his property.

The woods this fall are bone dry, he said, and the last monarch butterfly flew the coop a week ago.

Deer ticks, on the other hand, are plentiful.

“The doc put me on antibiotics again,” he said. “I had another big ol’ red bullseye from a bite and was all achy. We’ll see how it turns out.”

“But right now, there are a lot of deadfalls in the way and I’ve got to get these shooting lanes cleared,” he said. “Already I’ve got enough wood to fire up the stove on the porch of our cabin, which is where we butcher our deer, right there on the porch.

“I love wood heat. In November, when you’re butchering a deer, it feels real good.”