I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs help in bringing in his hay.
In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing seventy, steelheads by the droves. And behind all of this lies the constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled with, never taken for granted.
The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-song[sing-song] voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the household, too, including the fine boats.
Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.
The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets, automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first, the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”
When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves. Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.
The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is, “I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem, work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess at Bark Point.
A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay. There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log. “Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.
When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked easy, but it required an almost occult knowledge of weights and forces to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat. Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human back.
The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his thought to fit the situation.