Karen Wils photo
Dad circa 1952 with and bow that he made for deer hunting.
ESCANABA — Let the rain drops nourish it! Let the sunshine kiss it!
Nothing is more precious than a piece of green and growing Upper Peninsula. Today is Earth Day 2022.
Everything I ever learned about “Earth Day,” I learned from my father James Rose.
Books, television, the internet and Al Gore (“An Inconvenient Truth”) have taught much on global warming, climate shift and the welfare of the Earth.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin may well have been the founder of “Earth Day,” but it was Dad who truly taught me how to love, respect and care for the world.
My Dad was not a person of science, but rather a factory worker at Harnischfeger and part time carpenter and all around fix-it man.
He was born in Gladstone in 1927. That meant he lived through the Great Depression and served in the Army.
The 1930s and 1940s was an education in its self.
Dad loved the land and every growing thing on it. As a youth, he hunted on the Gladstone Bluff near Lake Minnewasca before the area was developed. He fished on Little Bay de Noc when it was truly the “walleye capital of the world.”
Grandpa Rose (Dad’s dad) had property up in the wilderness just north of Cornell. This place beneath the big white pines and alongside the white waters of the Escanaba River became young Jim’s stomping grounds. It was a place to deer hunt, trout fish and camp out in an old tent under the stars.
By the mid 1950s, Dad purchased land along the Escanaba and this would be the place that he built his family camp. The spot he selected was perfect on a gentle hill of hardwoods. Close enough to watch the shimmering river through the forest, but not too close to destroy the pristine riverside.
Several creeks flowed through the property and Dad soon discovered the artesian springs to be used for our drinking water. Going to camp was living about as close to the Earth as you could get with wood heat and no electricity.
From the time I was a young girl, I loved to follow Dad on his treks in the woods or on his travels up and down the river fly fishing. He taught me the value of a healthy mixed forest and the value of cool, clean running waters.
Besides creating a camp for our whole family to recreate, relax and enjoy that was so close to nature, Dad also was a fixer, re-user and recycler way before it was cool to do so.
I remember him using newspaper to line the trash cans before you could even buy garbage bags. He made homemade compost bins and re-used tins and cans in his basement workshop.
There was nothing that Dad could not fix or re-purpose. He was thrifty. He went for a walk with the dog every day way up into his eighties. Over the years he planted many trees and some of the trees around camp even had names.
His carbon footprint was gentle. Dad passed April 20, 2020.
I hope that I have taught my family about Earth Day being every day, too.
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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.
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