@Tponetom and all Yooperlovers
Winter is harsh enough in the Upper Peninsula. Try living through it off the grid, as this U.P. couple does.
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MICHIGAMME HIGHLANDS — That sound in your ears is your heartbeat, and in the silence of the woods it's the loudest thing you hear.
"If you go stand in the snow, it's all sound dead; it's all sound dampening out there in the winter," said John Jungwirth, who calls this isolated place home. "You stop and you can hear your body tick."
He lives in a log cabin in a mountainside forest in the northern wilds of the Upper Peninsula. The nearest road is miles away. The only way to get to the cabin is to hike awhile through the woods.
John and his wife, Victoria, own Ishpeming Birchbark Canoes. They build traditional wood canoes at home by hand the way the Ojibwa Indians of the region did hundreds of years ago, a skill that comes easy because they live the way those tribes did back then, too.
They grow and hunt and fish their food. They get their water from a narrow creek. They forage in the woods for roots and herbs to treat whatever ails them. And their only neighbors are deer and moose, bears and birds, wolves and coyotes.
Winter is already hard in the Upper Peninsula. Imagine going through it while living off the land, off the grid and often stranded by the weather. Imagine doing so for years, and being thankful that you could.
"Imagine living in a dream you've had your whole life, literally and figuratively a dream," John said, smiling, as he sat with his wife inside their warm cabin. "It's really nice to inhabit your dreams."
The two of them have always loved the outdoors.
As a kid growing up on Detroit's east side, John would find ways to play in nature.
"That's all I've ever known," the 56-year-old said. "I used to run around in the city trying to catch bugs, frogs, all that. As soon as you could get out of town you did. You just lived outside back then."
He tolerated city life only until he got out of high school, when he moved to the Thumb to live and work on a farm.
That's where he met Victoria. She came to the farm from England, where she'd been raised in a little town in Suffolk. That country upbringing gave her a sense of self-sufficiency, and this organic farm she'd heard about in the Michigan countryside sounded like a great place to be.
"I grew up in postwar England," said the 59-year-old in a still-thick English accent. "My parents had lived through the war. They just had a kind of do-it-yourself mentality. They grew their own food, my mother made her own bread, she sewed our clothes and knitted our sweaters."
They got married, pulled out a map of the Upper Peninsula, picked the place farthest from the roads, bought land there, found a clearing and set out to build a cabin using only hand tools and the trees around them.
It was a lot more work than they expected.
"You think you're going to build the cabin in one year," John said.
It took three.
They filled the cracks between logs with moss and salvaged discarded windows to put in their walls. While they worked they lived in an old trailer set in a valley. The result of all that effort became a two-story, weatherproof, Scandinavian-style cabin that's withstood 30 years of harsh Upper Peninsula winters and stayed solid.
Victoria Jungwirth works on a miniature birchbark canoe on Feb. 9 as her husband John relaxes. They strive for authenticity in their work.
They raised and homeschooled two sons in that cabin, including one who was blind yet so attuned to his surroundings he could find his way through the woods in the darkness of night easier than everyone else could in the daytime.
"They were naked for probably the first five years of their life," John said. "Just little, brown towheads; just running around, man. Just what you'd love to see."
The kids moved out long ago, first to college to earn degrees, then to nearby Upper Peninsula towns. That has left John and Victoria the way they started — together, all alone, in the wilderness.
"It's not like I could say in all honesty this is how I dreamed of growing up," Victoria said, standing by the stove, heating water for tea. "I didn't even really know this was possible. I imagined myself more as a farming and a homesteading type, but not actually living in the wilderness.
"But now that I'm here, I absolutely love it. I couldn't imagine going anywhere else."
When the Jungwirths got married, they pulled out a map of the Upper Peninsula, picked the place farthest from the roads, bought land there, found a clearing and set out to build a cabin using the trees around them.
This was always Ojibwa land, long before the settlers came. One day John heard of a tribal ceremony taking place nearby. He wandered over to watch.
It wound up changing his life.
"I just kept quiet for the first year or two, until you slowly get in. Then I found out I can hang out with these elders if I learned the language — that was the price of admission. I said, 'Man, I'd learn cake decorating to hang out with these folks.' "
He was fascinated by their lore and their history, and he marveled at their ability to live off the land.
"I just fell in love with this," John said. "I was like, 'Oh my God, this is real culture. This is like a direct oral history all the way to the Stone Age,' and that's really exciting to me, that kind of mind-set that really helps with my whole picture of living the kind of life I like."
They, in turn, admired the austere lifestyle of this cheerful white hippie who suddenly appeared in the woods, living like their ancestors did.
"They would always say, 'Boy, you're more Indian than any of us,' " John said.
They taught him how to conduct himself in the lodge, how to take care of the sacred fire, how they believed the stones and waterfalls were alive. The couple would supply them with herbs and natural medicine for various health ailments.
"It was kind of like, 'When in Rome, do what the Romans do,' " John said. "They were the Romans. That's what we did, so our kids got to grow up hanging out with all those folks. I'm not trying to be an Indian or nothing, but how they lived and those kinds of beliefs, and just the way they look at the world, you can really learn a lot."
Authentic canoes
He learned woodworking from his grandpa and about canoes from the Cub Scouts, and tried building his first Indian-style canoe as a teenager.
"After making a few parts I realized that I was way in over my head, man," he said. "This is a big deal. This is the biggest skill there is on Earth to try to make one of these things."
The boats he and his wife make are narrow bottomed with flaring sides, and they come to a point in front that marks their identity as Lake Superior Ojibwa. The couple strive to be as authentic as possible.
"The end of the boat tells you what band of Indians you're from," John said. "That's kind of a billboard. So when the boat's coming across the water and you step out of your lodge and look, it's either, "Ma, put the kettle on or get the shotgun.' Without that, you don't know if you're at war or if it's Uncle Louie."
As with their cabin, they make the canoes with nothing but hand tools and what they find in the woods around them. They use cedar for the ribs, spruce roots for the lashings, and pitch mixed with charcoal powder and bear fat to keep out the water. He does the woodwork. She does the stitching.
They might make a few thousand dollars from each. And they make only one or two a year.
They also make smaller models that people in the city buy to decorate their fireplace mantles or store in display cases, like modern artifacts of a lost way of life. Those don't bring in a lot of income, either.
But they don't need much money to live the way they want.
What they don't hunt, trap or grow they get by trading with others also living up here in the wild, like vegetables that won't grow in their garden or fat to render for cooking. Victoria sells wilderness herbs to residents who use them when they get sick. And a few other odd jobs get them by.
"Instead of paying a utility bill we get our own water and our own fuel," John said. "All of those things you just take care of yourself. And then we can be rich without having to deal with the money part of it."
The winter sun came faintly in the window after being filtered through the pines outside.
Victoria sat on the fur-wrapped cushions on the floor in the sunshine, lashing the gunnels onto a little boat they were commissioned to make. A wood-fed stove filled the cabin with heat. The two sat in silence, broken only when they spoke.
All around them were signs that the modern world was slowly intruding.
Some ways are by choice. They installed a solar panel alongside the creek out back, which generates just enough power to run a radio for news, charge a phone for their business or light a bulb for reading. Sometimes they'll even watch DVDs on a small monitor.
"I got 30 years of missing out on the culture," John said, laughing. "So this is a way of catching up."
They finally got someone to make and maintain a website for their canoe business, allowing people to contact them other than by word-of-mouth. It's still not very easy.
"We live in the bush without modern conveniences," their website notes. "We go into town every week and can write a good letter. Email is beyond our reach. Please be patient with communications."
Other ways are against their will. Lately there's been a glow on the horizon at night, spoiling the ink-black sky that showed all the stars.
Last year, a new mine opened on the site of an old mill to dig for nickel and copper. Where once there was nothing, there's now bright lights, loud noise and a lot of heavy machinery. And there's a controversial push by the county to create a new road through the woods for all the trucks coming out of there.
"We can see the lights at night," John said. "In a place that never had electricity."
There's little they can do about it. This is home and they're not moving. Nothing's stopping that mine. And that road's probably coming.
But one good thing has come of it, they say. It's made them savor even more the life of solitude they still have and worked so hard to get. And not a single day goes by where they don't appreciate it.
"Every morning, the first time you go outside, I just stand there and try to soak it up so I don't forget that whole feeling of peacefulness, 'cause if there is any commodity on Earth that there's getting less of, that's going to be it," John said.
"You can't buy it. You earn it by living in a place nobody wants to live."
