ROAD MAP
We live in a very different world these days. Traveling has little of the mystery that it once had. GPS, CarPlay, OnX, Google Maps, all make getting from Point A to Point B quicker and much less mysterious. I must say, at times with a lot less anxiety – especially when your equipment can route you around bad weather, accidents and road construction and direct you to gas stations, places to eat and points of interest.
I have always liked maps, however. It’s been a mind game of interpreting the lines, symbols and names that appear on map legends. With road maps there was always the challenge of finding the most direct route. How can I find – or stay away from – high population areas? Are there potential backroads that might take me to some interesting places? Can I calculate distances, figure traveling costs based on the mpg of my vehicle or time to get somewhere without the need for electronic gadgetry? We used to do it quite accurately.
And there are the backcountry maps. Along with a compass, figuring out where portages might be, intersecting with hiking trails, or finding the least challenging route by understanding contours, symbols indicating low or swampy ground, flowages and other possible impediments.
You can get lost in a city or on the backroads, but there’s nothing like getting lost in the wilderness!
There is another kind of map that we don’t often think about.
It doesn’t need electronic tools, or paper maps or compass. It is a map cultured strictly in our own mind. It contains pertinent information to many points of interest. Directions, physical markers, geographic anomalies, edges of streams, lakes or swamps.
Moonrise, sunset, prevailing wind direction all can play a part in determining how and when you make it to a destination.
Estimation of distances might be something innate or can be paced off with reasonable accuracy. It can be a personal map to guide you to a hunting stand, a camping spot or a fishing hole that you’ve been to before. It can also be a map you share with others who are familiar with the territory you travel. Let me give you an example.
You want to tell your good friend John where a particular pool lies in your favorite trout stream. Your mind map might go as follows: “Go down the Rangeline Road and park in the pullout at Johnson’s Corner. Walk in to Sarge’s deer stand and then head west to Bramble Brook. Once you hit the alder brush, look to your left and you can see the lone white pine a couple of hundred yards away. Once you get there, it’s only another 50 yards straight west. There’s a deer trail leading down to the pool on Balsam Creek. You can’t miss it!”
I have dozens of these maps in my head. Each year as I get around and explore, I’ll add another route or two. I must admit; these days I do mark a spot I want to get back to with a GPS or app on my phone. The route, however, is imprinted in my brain by landmarks I establish along the way. For some reason, many of these routes have stayed inside me for decades. Maybe because I can assign much history and many of my memories to most of the important “signs” along the way. Back in the 60s when I started deer hunting, there was no other way to find a stand half a mile from my take-off point. Especially before sunrise without a flashlight. Here is one I think about often.
One of my favorite stands while I was in my middle teens was three quarters of a mile from the back door of my house.
To get there before shooting time meant that I had to leave well before sunrise. Much of the route was full of underbrush and a flashlight only reflected nonsense back to me, so I would walk it entirely in the dark.
The first quarter mile was a piece of cake. We burned firewood to keep the house warm in the winter and my dad had established several woods roads that would accommodate our F-12 tractor and a small trailer made of a chopped off pickup frame with cross members and stake pockets in the corners.
The route I took brought me to a small wood lot above a beaver dam that formed a pond on an unnamed creek that flowed into the Prairie River and eventually into the Mississippi River 30 miles away. We did have a stand there as the dam was a favorite crossing for deer. But it was close and easy to find so was left for my mom or younger brother or sister.
When I reached this little opening, I would turn left.
Through about 100 feet of hazel brush there would be a fence corner (complete with hidden barbwire) that used to designate my grandpa’s northwest property line until the pasture was abandoned in the early 1940’s.
From there a slight turn to the left would bring me to the edge of the “Little Swamp”. Following the high ground around to its end – about 100 yards to the west – I would then look to the south. The eastern and southern sky was just starting to lighten with the dawn, and I could barely make out the top of a tall spruce tree in the distance. This was “Bobby’s Stand”. Bobby Ahola was a neighbor whose folks owned the Balsam Store. He had put up a couple of boards as steps to the lowest branches and two more boards further towards the top to act as a seat. Bobby used it until the late 1950s when he moved up to Orr and opened a restaurant.
From the bottom of Bobby’s Stand, I would look directly to the west. The progressing morning would spill some light in this direction, and I could see the top of another tall spruce a couple of hundred yards away.
This was “Big Bill’s Stand” and constructed just as Bobby’s was.
C.W. “Big Bill” Bergquist had immigrated to Balsam from a farm in Illinois in the 1940s.
He played baseball with my dad - Bill as a pitcher and my dad the catcher. His imposing stature was impressive as the ball seemed to leave his fingertips halfway to the plate! Hence the nickname, “Big Bill.”
A deer trail ran under Bill’s Stand and traveled directly north for most of a quarter of a mile. It was well used and easy to follow even in the dark. It skirted the edge of an old gravel pit that Itasca County had used in the 30s and 40s as the need for drivable county roads became more common. Though the deer trail carried on far north of this waypoint, I left it here. Twenty yards to the left of the trail was a small explosion of birch trees where my dad and I built a stand six feet off the ground. I shot a deer from this stand opening morning three years in a row and only abandoned it after Harry Newton was contracted to clearcut this area for Blandin Paper Company. I can recall almost every step along the way. The smell, the chill, the humidity, a slight breeze. As I grow older memories from my younger days seem to frequent my dreams. Mostly in bits and pieces but this “road” through the forest gets traveled from end to end before I awake in the morning. It’s been gone almost 55 years and yet, it remains one of my favorite pathways that I’ve traveled.
