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Hey, it’s Christopher. So, in August, I mentioned that my mother-in-law’s health was not so great. That saw travel to Missouri to help her get better settled into a nursing home and then…I hoped to get the next Not About Lumberjacks story—“Strange Days in Mûn Dell”—out.
Since then, my mother-in-law passed away, which required more travel to Missouri for my wife, Cynthia—with me supporting efforts from home.
Two moms dying in the spread of 13 months hasn’t been the easiest thing, and we’ve been in cover-the-essentials mode this whole time: work, dealing with estate stuff (not that either of them had much at the end), and taking care of ourselves.
So, of course, this update is to say “Strange Days in Mûn Dell is bumped again, until I can give the sound design the attention it deserves.
I’ve shifted my attention to the annual November lumberjacks story and December’s Christmas episode. November’s tale is about a guy working on early lumber ice roads around 1900. It’s called “The Ghost of Boom Lake,” and it begins like this:
Potter Casey’s life in the forest was never to be his future, but every family has a member who decides on a different life rather than the one often settled before their birth. He was born into a world of timber and sawdust, but not one of rough hands and stalwart courage back in the forest; not even bound for the fast pace of all that can go wrong in a sawmill. Instead, Potter Casey was destined to own the industry that ran it all.
From the safety of Chicago, his father owned a majority stake of the Northwoods lumber trade. With operations and mills across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, most men risking their lives in the trees of the upper Midwest collected pay from Jonathan Casey.
On Potter’s 13th birthday, his father took him along on a trip to check on his mills in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It was every bit as busy as Chicago in its own way: men chopping and sawing timber, while others drove logs down rivers and across lakes to the mills. There, the constant din of shouted orders over the screaming of a steam-powered circular saw captivated him.
While his father hoped his only son would take an interest in the finances of his operations, Potter was more interested in the cuts made to topple massive pines; how men could stand on timber rushing down rivers and run across massive booms on still lakes; how someone could look at what was once a tree and know how to get the most planks from each log.
When it was time to head off to college, Potter defied his father’s wishes and went to the Northwoods of Wisconsin instead.
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