The ten-acre orchard was walled by dense vegetation on all sides. The transition zone was distinct. Open terrain filled with knee-high grass collided with walls of spruce, fir, birch, alder, and aspen. Over time, Matt guessed the forest would swallow the orchard, reclaiming it. After all, the orchard was carved out of the forest to begin with. Nature sought what was always hers. That’s how it worked. Maybe she’d reclaim us all in the end, he thought.

As Matt hiked the property, the sun warmed his bones and spirit. A breeze sighed across the valley from the Hurons, rustling alder and chokecherry. He saw the breeze coming a minute before he felt it. That’s how it was here.

The front of the shack faced a huge, dead oak. This truly was one of the monsters of the Northwoods, all silver and weathered. Most of the branches were gone. Thirty feet of trunk remained with remnant branch spears sticking out like a madman raising his arms into the air. Woodpeckers often hammered away on the leviathan in search of insects. Behind the dead oak dipped a steep, grassy bowl—the location of the original farmhouse which was lost to a fire. His father had told him the previous owner fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. Built into the slope on the far side of the bowl was a crumbling wooden structure that once held pigs and chickens. Next to the pen, also embedded into the slope, was a carpentry room that also served as an ice room, the chips and shavings swept into a floor hole to help maintain the ice’s temperature.

Matt had always wondered how the old farm managed to survive. This was not farm country. The methods imparted upon the land were tenuous at best. This was ten acres hammered out of the wilderness, and getting to town took an hour. But the owners didn’t need to go to town. They raised chickens and pigs and grew apples. They procured drinking water from the Black River across Julip Road. They built an honest living out here in the middle of nowhere.

But what a fragile existence, he thought.

This thought was reinforced by the ghost-like structures that lingered, the leaning post, and crumbling logs half-buried in patches of sandy soil in the orchard. He once walked down into the grassy bowl and noticed flexing wood under his boots—remnants of the farmhouse.

He often wondered about living up here, if he could pull it off. The main problem was a lack of jobs. The former tenants of this land didn’t worry about that though, did they? He found their ability to survive out here romantic, if not admirable. He wanted that for himself someday.