Almost fifty years ago I was a freshman at Michigan Technological University. I did not go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for academic reasons – not interested in philosophy, mathematics, or engineering like almost everyone else. Those years spent way up north – actually on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the heart of an important copper mining region and hence the home of what was begun as the Michigan School of Mining and Technology – were actually a sort of placeholder for my life. There wasn’t much time for studying. The Vietnam War was raging and a lot of the energy that remained after girls and beer was absorbed by our conflicted feelings about the war and a changing society. My career as a college athlete did not last much past the first football season and since I had only enough interest in studying to get by, any extra time I found during that first snowy winter and all the falls and springs to come found me outdoors. In the autumn, my friends and I hiked for ruffed grouse and sat stone still, staring into the yellow, orange, and red treetops for black squirrels. In winter, we snow-shoed and cross-country skied. In the spring we canoed and fished the Sturgeon River. Years later, when I finally read Hemmingway’s famous short story, Big Two-Hearted River, I was convinced that the Sturgeon River was indeed the Big Two-Hearted River that kept the hero of the story, Nick Adams, sane in the face of war. Forty-five lightening years passed before I revisited the Keweenaw Peninsula. I was lured back by local fraternity brothers who, like me, had scattered to all corners of Earth but, in retirement, were filtering back into the Copper Country. Jill came along to see if the college stories had any basis in fact and to see the soggy, forested countryside that had had such a powerful effect on this self-confessed denizen of the treeless, dusty Great Plains. For two days we ate and drank way too much. The stories of glory days gone by were told, edited, and told again. By the morning of the third day I was longing for peace and quiet. I could have sneaked away and re-read those Hemmingway stories or the Upper Peninsula stories of Jim Harrison but had only brought along Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, The Bully Pulpit. It is a great book, but just then, it seemed all wrong. To paraphrase the Cross Canadian Ragweed band – it’s too damned serious and way too long. I needed to get away to the dark, cut-over, white pine forest where there were shady game trails paralleling the Big Two-Hearted River and moss-covered foot paths that might be the very ones that led Brown Dog to the Lake Superior shore. I suppose Jill could see it in my eyes and that is why she came up with a way to get off by ourselves. “We have a Wild Idea customer in Ahmeek.” She said this, seemingly out of context when everyone could hear. “We should go visit them.” Only twenty miles away was the small Keweenaw community of Ahmeek. It looks like it has seen more prosperous days and that the population has dwindled since the era of big copper. But there are signs of the bustling commerce of yesteryear, a burgeoning tourist trade, and, just beyond the old frame houses, is the wild Upper Peninsula that I hoped had survived the commercial onslaught of the last fifty years. Among the faded houses is the historic Ahmeek Streetcar Station, which features Wild Idea Buffalo meat and delicious, locally-made …