John Pepin

“Even though it’s snowing, love is up there growing in the magic tree.”

— Steve Forbert

I remember that late winter day very well.

The night before, a storm packing heavy wet snow had come through the area, weighing down the branches of anything growing with a thick, white glaze.

In our backyard, two brave and weary apple trees – grayed, aged and vulnerable -stood as tall and as best they could.

They had been there for decades, through all kinds of weather.

However, like with people, the older you get, the tougher adversity and challenges can be. A rain you might have danced through when you were young now may threaten to help you contract pneumonia.

So, sometime during the night, within the piled-up softness of that falling snow and the sharpness of a wintry wind bent on turning and twisting, both trees leaned over as far as they could without breaking.

By morning, I had awakened and looked out the bedroom window to see both trees toppled over with split trunks and broken branches.

The snowy, white blanket laid out over the yard near the trees was littered with fragments of dry, gray bark. The curled branches of the trees, partially buried in snow, stuck out reaching toward the sky, like skeleton fingers.

It was a sight I struggled to comprehend for a few seconds when I first looked outside. I was shocked and saddened.

These trees had fed deer and other creatures, provided a welcoming resting place for birds to nest, produced plenty of shade and dazzled us with the May-June gift of beautiful and fragrant, white and pink colored apple blossoms.

At one time, we used to have three apple trees in our backyard until a similar storm took down the first of these trees early one winter.

Now, they were all gone.

Personifying the loss, I remembered the apple trees in “The Wizard of Oz” who protested having their fruit picked by Dorothy and the Scarecrow.

“How would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?”

It must have been horrible for these trees to suffer this crippling end.

Weeks later, my brother and I cut up the trees with a chainsaw and stacked the wood in a pile near our fire pit, just off the grass at the back of our yard.

There it sat for months, drying and seasoning.

This week, I finally began burning it, which caused me to recall all of this.

The pieces of branches and sections of trunks burned easily and ravenously.

Even in its destruction, the tree was still providing benefits by giving us warmth, as the Queen of Shebis and I sat in our camping chairs around the fire with a chilly autumn night falling all around us.

With the skies dark, we watched embers from the burning wood float skyward, some looking like contorted letters of the alphabet, others like orange and yellow incandescent worms.

A pair of great horned owls that had been singing for several nights in a row were silent for some reason on this night.

In the far-off distance, I heard a barred owl. I called back, but we never heard the owl call from any closer. Not interested in communicating with me, I guess.

Though it might have been chilly, it was still decidedly warmer than is typical for an Upper Peninsula night at this time of year. Nature seems to have shifted the time schedules of many things.

The changing color of the leaves has been delayed this year in many areas, likely hampered by a relative lacking those cold autumn nights necessary for the process, teamed with bright sunny days.

I got up to grab a couple more apple tree logs from the wood pile and tossed them on the fire. Sparks rose and the heat temporarily died back.

In a few short minutes, the fire was again throwing off a good deal of heat. The fire made a fine crackling noise that was interesting, calming and soothing.

We sat silently soaking up the warmth, the entrancing dancing motion of the flames and the heavenly smell of the wood smoke that imbued our hair and skin.

The smell of a campfire is one of my favorite things characteristic of being outdoors in these great north woods.

Another is the sight of the night sky.

On this evening, the blackness surrounding the stars and planets grew deeper the longer we sat by the fire.

It was one of the clearest nights we’ve had in a while.

Throughout the next hour or so, we watched several satellites track across the wide expanse above us.

I recalled that when I was a kid, lying in the cold grass at night looking up at the stars, seeing a satellite was an oddity; it’s common these days.

No meteors tonight.

Like the absence of the great horned owls, maybe the heavens didn’t want to outshine the glowing brilliance of the flames from the burning apple trees. Perhaps there was a kind of natural reverence for the demise of these once great growing things.

But I guess those types of pleasant and fanciful thoughts might only exist in my imagination.

Because while all this was happening, a few states away, nature’s floodwaters borne on hurricane winds were ripping through mountain communities, washing one entirely off the map.

There appeared to be no reverence to life there from the power of nature.

This was a harsh and sudden destruction taking with it the lives of more than a hundred people across the southeast, with more than that many still missing or unaccounted for.

I later reflected on the strange juxtaposition of our mourning the loss of two backyard apple trees while unbeknownst to us, thousands of trees were being maliciously uprooted, bent and broken.

People were in a living hell elsewhere while we were enjoying an unseasonably warm autumn evening with time together to sit and talk and relax and enjoy ourselves.

The more I think about the world, the stranger and more ephemeral and ironic it becomes. Shifting sands, rising seas, crashing winds and sunny climes, heavenly mountain range vistas and placid lakes all occurring somewhere at the very same instant.

I lifted the open steel grate on the fire pit and closed it back over the red and orange glowing coals. The heat shriveled and consumed small pieces of grass that clung to the crossbars.

We decided to watch the fire burn down without adding any more wood. I spread the coals to help spur the process. The heat was so intense I could hardly approach the bright orange circle the fire’s burning coals created in the pit.

With a sharp thud, I stuck my fire poker into the ground, and I leaned back into my chair for a few more minutes before again stirring the coals.

The fire’s warmth was reaching my skin through my clothes.

I shut my eyes and breathed in a few more breaths of wood smoke. I turned by head into my shoulder and could smell that the smoke had saturated the flannel shirt I was wearing.

I was pleased, knowing I would wake up tomorrow and still be able to smell tonight’s backyard campfire on my clothes.

That next morning, I got up and again looked out the window.

The sky was cloudy and gray, and it was windy.

Our camp chairs were still positioned where we’d left them around the fire pit. I could see my fire poker still stuck in the ground.

My head was filled with sleep, like a state of intoxication. In my mind, I reached around for remembrances of what had happened the night before.

The events returned to me within a few seconds. I thought back over the warmth of the fire, the good company and conversation and the beauty of the evening.

I immediately had a wish to return to those circumstances to bathe a bit longer in that fiery warm contentment.

It was the kind of moment that reinforced my resolve to light more campfires this fall and more readily enjoy the warmth of our backyard fire pit.

So, here’s to autumn and plans to cook over our apple wood fire, with more of the things the season brings – hot cider, pumpkin spice and warmer clothes.

Though October has just begun, we’re already resting within the shadow of Halloween, perched just around the corner with its black cats, witches and ghoulish good times.

So long, sweet apple trees. My longtime friends.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.