Timbers

“The Timberdoodle…”

I mumbled out loud in my head. It was a store in De Tour Village, (pronounced dee toor) Michigan, and we were De “Tourists” that summer.

I said the name again out loud to my husband.  “Timberdoodle? That’s cute. Like a picture of a tree doodled on paper made out of trees. Like all the kitschy things we’ll probably find inside.”

“Whelp, let’s go in!”

It was a colorful store of rooms filled with eye candy that made me want to buy a lot of things and also say no to everything my kids brought to show me. “This will make me so happy,” their eyes pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you say afterwards if you just buy me this one thing that I love.” I was trapped in consumerism and eventually in small talk with the owner who looked like her native habitat might have been a store on the corner of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. This place was more than two thousand miles from there, across a bridge even longer (and some say more impressive) than the Golden Gate.

The street in front of the store was open and wide, sloping up to a neat ridge of pine and deciduous trees. As a De Tourist, I could have lingered for hours on the brightly painted porch in front of the Timberdoodle while considering the most pressing issue on this end of town—which of the two restaurants we would choose for dinner (if they were even open). Main street was 3 blocks long and ended at a ship shape marina that was three times that. Getting around was more boat inclined than wheeled here.

The Timberdoodle was a distillation of Michigan’s rugged independence mixed with cottage charm and long maritime history that saturated the Upper Peninsula’s freshwater lakes. The tiny store overlooked the St. Mary’s river where 1,000 foot (“footers”) freighters slipped by practically unheard and unnoticed. Eighty-six million tons of raw materials and 90% of the US’s iron ore glided by the Timberdoodle’s back alley.

No rush.

If a freighter could make it to this narrow water crack between the Eastern UP and the last island before Canada from China at that speed, what could possibly be so important to rush off to?

We had time, so we browsed, and the Timberdoodle’s charm grew on me like a barnacle on one of the footer’s hulls. It had more character than just quaint. There was local art and soap, local jams, local jewelry, and a bulletin board for community events they hosted (pop ups at the farmer’s market, local authors and the like). There were a lot of Melissa and Doug toys for the kids, and Taylor Swift inspired bracelets,of course. A few whispy articles of women’s clothing on a rack that I thought might make me look carefree and slightly hip, along with strings of exotic, but earthy beads on silver chains. A few frog umbrellas, bug catchers, whirligigs, and glasses that compound vision like a fly’s, multiplying every trinket in the store by 1,000. I also found (and bought) a pair of “Safety Sasses.” Thick, oversized, horn rimmed tortoise shell safety glasses for women to wear while constructing things out of wood, perhaps a Timberdoodle, whatever that was.

As I warmed up to the store, I felt my inner critic quiet and my good nature gather courage to speak with the woman behind the counter.

“Hi” and “How are you?” and “The store’s name isn’t anything I’ve heard of before. Is Timberdoodle something you came up with?”

“Oh no,” she said, and smiled at me like a mother explaining the most basic thing to her child. “It’s the name for a game bird you find here. Also called a woodcock.”

“Oh! I’ve never heard of it.”

I googled it.

A bird appeared on my screen: short and pudgy with deep pools of water for eyes and a long plover-like bill not for piercing sand, but for exploring forest duff, for slurping up worms that wriggled beneath the rich decay. Timberdoodles snuffle their lives along the earth’s spongiest floor, but they aren’t bound to it. Every spring, they soar straight up into the early morning and late evening sky to show the world and a lucky Timberdoodle lady their dizzying sky dance, a whirling cyclone drop accompanied by exuberant song.

Imagining this was like suddenly discovering my elderly, teetotaling, tractor-bound Great Uncle Harold could break out the smoothest, mind blowing dance moves if I got up early enough to watch.

“Crrrck! Crrrrck!” The Timberdoodle peents to announce his amorous intentions, hidden at your feet among leaves and old pine needles at the edge of a field or bog. He lifts into the air, higher and higher, and falls in exuberant twirls, like a helicoptering maple seed, and the whole forest pauses to admire the wild, acrobatic feat. Later, when the curtains close on his last performance, he will lift his brown belly and long bill into the air and migrate to New Orleans for the winter, which seems like a fitting place for such a surprisingly talented, unassuming, and exuberant bird.

Had I ever seen one in the sky?

Never.

I suddenly longed to see and feel those feathers the color of mud and soil—a soft, beautiful brown camouflage. Could I sneak up on a Timberdoodle? Lay in wait one early morning? Or was it enough to suddenly and simply know it existed? To know it danced? What would I gain if I saw it? Would witnessing the dance shift my awareness of the world, and for how long? Are tiny shifts enough to move a life in unexpected directions?

Like the fox I have yet to spy, my eyes still haven’t rested on a Timberdoodle in the wild. I knew that to create such a moment meant I needed to make more than a passing, hopeful effort. It meant asking local experts and concocting a certain means of planned patience into existence. But where to make those efforts?

At my high school in Washington State, I was a Timber-wolf.

Incredibly cool, I used to think, but a very different kind of Timber. One of my brief boyfriend’s dad and his friend traveled to Alaska when they were young and spry and shot a Timberwolf to taxidermy for the trophy case in the high school gym. It was still there 25 years later–a dull gray brown, one paw lifted, nose pointed towards home, trapped in a glass box and surrounded by trophies of the achievements of teenage athletes, including our 3^rd in state volleyball team and 4^th in state basketball team. Tennis players and track stars and this wolf, who could have out run us all in speed and distance, who showed her cubs how to howl at a night sky shining with the ancient claw marks of the milky way, who had been removed, cut down like so many timbers around her, and frozen among brief, human victories, herself being one of them.

What is this world where materials are removed along with the animals attached to them like spiders on the end of their glorious silk? Wolf and iron ore, forest and water, fur and metal, feather and foot. We rearrange earth’s body to fit our idea of bodily need until we stumble into a gift shop at the end of the Upper Peninsula and find time to become wild and warm and discover the ancient, flighty, and astonishing; until we slowly layer new awareness of the more-than-human upon our hearts and want to repair our relationship with them, break the glass, preserve the duff, wonder at doodling Timbers.

I stood, stunned, by the Timberdoodle.

In this store named after a beautiful, shy bird, I found strings of pearls and quilt squares, trinkets that, taken time and focused attention, can be gathered and stitched back into each other by gently pulling on threads of old and local knowledge, new and unviersal wonder, humble and uncomfortable conversations. These pieces are what will revive our inner and outer landscapes until wolves run unhindered, doodle dance floors remain intact, and we are beautified and remade to be part of something bigger, a whole reality rather than a split one.

I contacted two local wildlife gurus when we got back home, and they knew exactly where to find Timberdoodles. Not a hundred miles from my house in the wilds of the UP, but a mere 20 miles east of East Lansing. It was astonishing. Who knew they were so close? Upper and lower peninsula realities collided—brushed up against each other like brindled feathers. Like De Tour and San Francisco and New Orleans. Like wolves and doodles.

Timberdoodles.