These efforts, occurring outdoors and requiring physical exertion, focus the senses — quieting, as they do, the information overloading that too often today quickens the pulse.
Such unselfconscious experiences can be pathways to heightened awareness and help people distill what’s important from what’s less so, said the writer David Foster Wallace. Cutting and splitting wood, and harvesting gardens, are examples of these exercises as good as any.
Adam and Neva Maxwell have their own autumn routines.
Living off the Gunflint Trail, along the Minnesota-Ontario border, where this week the forest canopy is aflame with color, and where ruffed grouse are few this year due to early summer rains, Adam and Neva initially hear autumn’s siren song not with the crack of an axe — though they burn multiple cords of wood — but with the onset of ricing season.
Beginning in August, if wild rice is ripe, like nomadic Native Americans, Adam and Neva travel with their canoe and ricing sticks to Aitkin County, where most years the crop flourishes in shallow lakes. Weeks later, after the rice has been cleaned and finished, they’ll angle toward Ely, where they net whitefish, which they pressure cook and store in neat pantry jars for the cold months ahead.
Already, the pair have the five cords of dried and stacked birch and maple they’ll need this winter to heat their home. Now Adam is working on next year’s stash, anticipating as he does the break he’ll take this fall for deer hunting and also for his and Neva’s winter ski trips into the boundary waters.
