Yeah, where your Leinenkugel’s Honey Weiss or Summer Shanty or whatever you prefer is from. Up here.
It’s beautiful, temperate … and the strawberries are amazing (not to mention there’s a huge, beautiful lake named Superior a mile down the road).

I’m up here in Washburn, Wisconsin for part of my summer photography fellowship with the National Network of Forest Practitioners. The bonus is that I meet a lot of great people, cool families, see new places and am learning a lot. I met an inspiring logger today named Emery … he’s 58 but has more energy than some of my peers. To hear the way some people peg him was pretty disheartening. He loves the woods enough to spend a substantial chunk of his life in there, starting at 6 years old … he even prefers to eat lunch in solitude in the woods…. Emery once worked on a job for 72 days in a row. (though he said he could almost cry with happiness at its completion.)

I love trees as much as the next guy, and it sucks to see the big old tree you’ve sat under your whole life get chopped in to firewood … but people don’t realize wood is a renewable resource. Not with the immediacy of your strawberries, but like people, they come and go … it just takes a little longer. With good planning, like a garden, they can grow better, be healthier and heartier. The loggers with the right mentality can actually be helping your forest to be healthier and more productive. Among other bits of wisdom Emery provided for me was the fact that young trees produce a lot more oxygen than the old saps who just stand high and suck up the sunlight.

Kinda like our society and social security right? I kid I kid.