Ready for worst, expecting the best

That is how I felt, almost flat on my face, my snowshoes nosedived into deep, powdery snow.

I was surrounded by tall, pristine eastern hemlocks, miles from anyone, the world all golden afternoon sunshine, a crisp five below zero. I was snared in my own snowshoe trap.

I had been on one of my daylong treks from a cozy cabin tucked into the drifts along the Little Union River, deep in the back country of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. It was early on in my two-week stay as the first winter artist-in-residence in the "Porkies," wherein I had proposed to explore the parallel ideas of both winter and wilderness solitude.

The tumble - I had misstepped and caught the tail of a snowshoe - came while "bushwhacking" off-trail to a scenic spot called Union Spring. The spring was supposed to be one of the few places in the nearly 90,000-acre park, Michigan's largest, where I might find open-surface water in the deep-freeze of the northern winter. Maybe I could catch sight of one of the northern weasels - a fisher or a marten.

So there I was, listing slightly downhill to starboard, my right arm buried to the armpit. A three-foot trekking pole extended down from my snowbound right hand. I probed around a bit and could not find a compacted bottom. Hmmm. Deep, really, swimmingly, deep.

Such is the solo life in the winter wilderness. You get stuck, you get yourself out. No Big Hand is going to magically reach down and pull you upright. No 911. No calling for Mom. It was the deal I had asked for. So.

After a few minutes of rocking and heaving and twisting - employing a gymnastics routine I did not think I was flexible enough to execute - I was back up on both snowshoes and brushing myself off. It was just a minor thing, I told myself. "Let it be a lesson to you." I said it aloud, obviously to no one in particular save self.

The lesson: Going it alone in the wilderness leaves little room for error and certainly none for foolishness.

But if you go prepared for the worst and expect the best, as I did, the experience is deeply, soulfully rewarding. Not to mention invigorating. Teddy Roosevelt would have loved it -"Bully!" as he said so famously.

I had been met three days earlier in nearby Silver City, jumping-off point for the Porkies, by Sherrie McCabe, coordinator of the artist-in-residence program for the park's hard-working, enthusiastic support group, Friends of the Porkies.

Sherrie, on cross-country skis, showed me, on snowshoes, the way to Dan's Cabin. It was named in memory of Dan Urbanski, an award-winning Silver City photographer and devoted explorer of the Porkies who died several years ago.

The artist-in-residence program had been Dan's dream, and his Friends made it happen, complete with a beautifully crafted post-and-beam cabin made mostly of timber salvaged from the vast, wild park and fashioned by hundreds of hours of loving, sweating, back-straining labor. They used a mule named Willie to haul in the heaviest beams and such.

Carol Huntoon, another Friend, had snowshoed into the cabin on the prior day, completing a healthy 45-minute upgrade hike from the park's ranger station.

Carol's chore had been to warm the cabin for my arrival. "It was 6 degrees in here," she said about the interior on her arrival.

Carol and Sherrie had wrestled until almost 10 p.m. with a balky chimney. The initial fire in the stove had filled the cabin with smoke.

But the resourceful women engineered away the problem. Sherrie had skied back out of the park in the dark, using a headlamp to light the trail, and Carol fed the stove overnight. The cabin was a toasty 75 when I arrived.

The ancient Charm No. 23 cast-iron stove, donated by a passing if generous stranger who admired the Friends' cabin-building, came from an old cabin some miles down the Lake Superior shore.

The ornate old chunk of iron easily could overheat the snug cabin to 85 degrees, as I found out en route to learning its capabilities.

Sherrie and Carol gave me a few minutes to settle my gear, wished me well, and bade me good-bye. I was alone.

The abiding, soul-permeating silence of a wilderness locked in the depths of winter smacks you in the face. You hear - nothing.

Maybe a tick from the wood stove, a periodic creak of a wooden cabin-joint, the latter the wages of the war between heat inside and below-zero cold outside.

Or you hear your own breathing. Or the occasional "thud!" of a clump of snow from the overladen branches of a big hemlock. That's it.

In the middle of the night during the first few pitch-dark sleeps, the thudding of these "snow-bombs" and the ticks and creaks of the cabin's soul are magnified, sleep-startling. But you get used to it; it's like moving into a new house.

"A lot of [summer] artists have commented on how quiet it is at that place," said Bob Wild, the park naturalist, during a visit to the Ranger Station. To them, he added, "it's almost disturbing. They're not used to the quiet."

Only when you venture to the periphery of the wilds, down by the unplowed boundary roads where the hordes of snowmobiles can play, do you hear the see-saw whine and scream of the engines - "like a swarm of angry bees," as Mike Rafferty, one of the rangers, put it.

Much of the wildlife is asleep, denned up by day or hibernating; many of the birds have flown south. I've experience alone in wild places and knew what to expect.

But those first few hours of solitude, coming on the heels of the mindlessly, incessantly noisy world "outside," always give pause.

"Things are pretty hunkered down how because of the cold weather," said the naturalist.

Tuning in to the deep cycling of natural life, reawakening dormant and jaded senses, occurs gradually. Finally the synchronization with the rise and fall of day and night, the ever-changing light, the ever-changing weather occurs. The occasional outbursts of a few chickadees, the hammering of a pileated woodpecker sound clearly. The rhythm of life becomes the natural one, which is slow.

It is an amazing transition, one that many people are afraid to allow themselves. But thus began two weeks of reflections on the solo wilderness experience.

Mind you, it is not as though I saw no one the whole time. My intent was not to become a hermit. I periodically crossed trails with cross-country skiers, met several winter campers man-hauling sleds on snowshoes as I was doing, and of course communed with the kindly staff at the ranger station, where I replenished my water supply and was able to take a couple of showers during my stay. (Frankly, daily bathing is a modern obsession, not a necessity.)

One day I hiked out and drove my sturdy old Jeep Cherokee into Ontonagon, 17 miles east down the lake, to make a presentation at the high school. But it was not unusual to go three, four days without seeing anyone. Plenty of time to ponder wildly.

Nor was I here to play a cable-TV survivalist who by satellite phone is within ready rescue by helicopter if things head too far south. You cannot think deeply about wilderness and nature and our place in it when you are in danger of freezing or starving.

Indeed, our predecessors did all they could to consume and destroy wilderness; it was threat to them, not a treasure as it is to us who have too little of it left. Some of us, anyway, realize at this 11th hour that wilderness has untold intangible values, including deeply spiritual ones that many native cultures past have implicitly understood. We have lost much.

So this experience was about absorbing the lessons of solitude in a winter wilderness, in reasonable comfort and safety, if without power or plumbing. It was about living "off the grid," as they say, "Thoreau light" perhaps.

No cell phone, no e-mail, a minimum 45-minute hike to civilization no matter what.

A small battery-powered radio for weather and a little music for sanity's sake.

It seemed a reasonable plan, relatively benign. As long as I kept myself upright on my snowshoes and didn't try anything stupid.