After spending the weekend with friends up at the cabin, trekking through the snow, cutting up fallen trees, playing cards, and participating in all the normal shenanigans that take place on a trip up to the land, I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in quite some time – the urge to write. I was thinking… mostly about my skydiving days and whether or not an 8 pound cat would not only right itself, but survive a fall from 13,500 feet. When I got home tonight, I dusted off the website and proceeded to refamiliarize myself with the keyboard layout. That’s when I realized that so much has changed since I published last. I figured I would catch you up with something I wrote exactly six months ago today. I never published it for some reason… it might have been a little too early. So, before I talk about what a skydiving cat has to do with a weekend in the woods, let’s get you up to speed.
(September 30, 2024) What a whirlwind… It’s hard to put into words the exact feelings I’m experiencing at the moment, but suffice to say, floating near the surface of the cauldron is the feeling of relief. If you haven’t heard the story, I’ll recap, and then update to the latest… for those in the know, feel free to skip ahead a paragraph to two, but before you do, just know the story has a happy ending!
Not long after Katie and I met, we fell in love with the idea of creating a place for people to escape to for a little R&R, with the added benefit of offering classes on our favorite homesteading and craft activities. After searching for a farmstead we could convert into our dream, we realized that financially, things were out of reach for the moment. During our honeymoon in 2016 near Isabella Minnesota, I proposed the idea that we just buy land and build our dream from scratch. So the search began. On St. Patrick’s Day 2017, we closed on forty acres twenty-five minutes north of Two Harbors, nestled in the woods and surrounded on a few sides by Superior National Forest. That was the birth of Rustic Pines, the name we chose for our venture.
The land was situated near the end of an old forest road, tucked back behind Kane Lake, and although it required an easement through our only neighbors property, they were great people, close to our age, and rarely up at their place. Our land was a mix of heavily wooded rolling hills and wetlands, complete with an old growth (120+ years) Tamarac grove smack in the middle of maple, pine, and birch. We knew it was going to be a long haul to make our dream come to life, in fact, of you go back and read our first blog post, that snowy March day started with showing up to closing with a fully loaded truck, ATV in tow, and hearts full of anticipation. Let’s just say that closing and the drive up went great, but as soon as we started cutting a skinny trail down the driveway and clearing our campsite, we knew the work was about to begin.
The following year found a regular routine… packing the truck on Thursday night, racing home from work on Friday, and joining the parade of other city people on highway 35 headed for the North Shore of Lake Superior. During that year, we cleared a space and built a tiny cabin, cut trails through the woods, and even managed to save enough to pay a local contractor to haul in a bulldozer and dump truck loads of gravel to install a proper driveway. Our days were spent working and having fun, and our evenings were spent playing cribbage, reading, and of course, looking up at the brightest stars we’d ever seen.
In the spring of 2018, we received a call from our “up north” neighbors, they had decided to sell their property. The property was twenty acres complete with a beautiful 1200 square foot finished three season cabin. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to afford the purchase, so we politely declined. It was a decision that we would soon come to regret. It wasn’t long before we had a chance to meet the new owners, and lets just say we had disagreement from the start. Having neighbors you don’t agree with can be tough, especially when an easement is involved. It wasn’t long before our trips became infrequent, at one point, I had made only one trek up north in two years. Until this summer, Katie hadn’t visited in three years.
We still had our dreams, and thought by chance we could revive them when we opened the Sunrise Workshop in Sunrise Minnesota. It was a great location to try our hand at what we wanted to accomplish. We made an effort there as well, but ran headlong into bureaucracy… Ooof! So much time passed… Covid happened… Employment changed… It felt like a dead end no matter where we turned.
In June, while we were out to dinner celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary, my cell phone began to ring. Now I’ve been known to risk death in the past… Scuba diving, skydiving, the Iraq war… But there was NO WAY I was going to acknowledge that ringing phone. Oddly, it was Katie who looked at the phone and said “You better answer that!” I picked it up and was greeted with a proposition to buy that twenty acre parcel. I responded by saying that I would discuss it with my wife and get back to him. The rest of dinner was filled with “what if” conversation.
Without getting into too many details, in March, travesty hit our neighbor. It would appear that while he and his family were away, the cabin caught fire and burned. One of his adult children had been watching the cabin when the fire started. His child was not harmed, but It broke our hearts to learn their pets passed in the event… I don’t care who you are, you lose your dogs and it hurts deeply.
It’s an odd feeling… bittersweet describes best what we felt. Both Katie and I were raised not to take joy in other peoples suffering. We may have had our disagreements, but that was their home. We genuinely felt bad for them, but when the call came in, their misfortune opened up a world of opportunity for us. The following months were full of conversations with the owners, the bank, a realtor friend, and finally in August, an offer was made, and an amount agreed upon. The title company had their work cut out for them, but yesterday, we finally pushed, pulled, dragged, and seemingly crawled across the finish line to close on the property.
Here’s where the fun starts! Our property sits adjacent to an old “fire tower” location. The fire tower has long since been torn down, but the old road is still passable. It’s a beautiful ride or walk up the hill under the canopy of old growth trees… especially in fall when the colors are at peak. During the first year on our property, there was a steady flow of ATV traffic from the residents of Kane lake. Our favorite “trespasser” was a couple from the north side of the lake who had a grandson with developmental disabilities. Each day during the summer they would load him up in the side by side and drive up and around Fire Tower Hill. He always had a beautiful smile being out on the trail. That all ended with the installation of our neighbors gate. He had his right to his privacy, but it made us sad to know we wouldn’t see that child’s smile.
After closing, we drove to our cabin, had an excellent dinner, a few celebratory drinks, and hit the rack early. We woke before the sun, brewed coffee, let the dogs out to run, and enjoyed some home made banana bread Katie prepared the day before. We welcomed the rising sun by exploring the new property… and Katie got to check an item off her bucket list! It turns out what we thought would be another wetland, is an actual real life pond! It’s only a few hundred feet long by another hundred or so wide, but it’s a pond!!!!
After we had our little exploratory hike, we had some work to do. Our labor began at the tailgate of the truck, sharpening the purposeful teeth of our chainsaw. We hopped in the truck and began to go up the driveway, but instead of hanging a right to leave, we took a left and pointed ourselves down the old forest road towards Fire Tower Hill. It took a little work to clear six years worth of deadfall from the trail, but we successfully made the loop with the truck. Katie may have opened a bottle of champagne at the top to celebrate.
After dropping the dogs off at the cabin, we headed for the north end of Kane lake, we had an invitation to extend and couldn’t wait to see someone’s special smile once again. As luck would have it, our new friends were home, and we enjoyed some friendly chat. As we backed up to leave, we noticed the running lights on the side by side glowing red, indicating absolutely no time would be wasted. A short while later as I sat on the screen porch to start writing, we heard the distant rumble of a side by side… our best smiles in years were shared.
So what’s next? Many neighbors and friends have asked us what our future plans for the property are, and honestly, we don’t know. For now, we plan to enjoy it with family, friends, and neighbors. In the coming months and years there will be a lot of work to do, clearing overgrown trails, filling in the old foundation, cleaning up the land, a little earth moving, and planning to have utilities brought in… but that’s the long game. For today, we’re basking in the sunshine shown through bright fall colors and life is good.
