Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

This past weekend, I had an experience that gives new meaning to the title of this column, The Long Way Home.  It all started Thursday evening while I was at the Firehall table for our board meeting. I started feeling a bit unwell, and my hands and body started shaking uncontrollably. I made a hurried exit, and after 15 minutes, the symptoms passed. I didn’t spend time worrying. There were dogs to walk and a bed to get to. Friday started as a typical day for an unemployed old man. Toast and coffee at breakfast and a writing project all morning. By lunchtime, I didn’t feel hungry, but I felt okay. Then, at the bewitching hour of 2 p.m. I started with the shake/shiver again and severe shortness of breath. I felt like I was losing it, and anxiety took over. The Bohunk convinced me to go to the ER at North Shore Health (NSH). I finally agreed but told her she should drive—no way I could keep the car in a straight line the way my hands were twitching.  In case I suddenly got well during the

Six years ago, I went under the knife at Mayo’s Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. Since the prognosis for my survival wasn’t clear, I stopped at the Colvill firehall that Sunday to spend time with friends and neighbors and say goodbye. The fall weather was fine. The leaves were past peak but still enough to gaze at them in awe, unsure if I’d ever see them again as I drove the County Road 14 loop. The fine surgeons and other specialists at Mayo worked some magic. I survived. Thankfully, our son, Fernie Junior, had moved in to help with the chores of managing a house in the woods, and I could focus on healing, pacing the front porch multiple times each day to build some stamina. Since those days, I’ve been able to function pretty well in the fall. Cutting, splitting, and stacking a half-dozen cords of firewood, usually finishing just before the first snow. Procrastination could be my middle name.  Knowing that I would be employed to the end of September by the local soil and water dist

This week I’m writing about short-term vacation rentals (STR) and their impact on prices in the local housing market. It’ll take a long way home to get there, so bear with me if you can. Try as I might, I could never understand Twitter. It sucked me into a time-stealing scroll through the outrageous and the boring each day, and I never figured out how to “post” anything or gather a “following.” I'm not an influencer. So when it was taken over by one Elon Musk, a highly overrated businessman, and his villainous friends in the private equity world, I closed my account and spent that hour of Twitter each day doing something more productive. Then, another nefarious capitalist, Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta, started “Threads,” an online clone of Twitter. Once again, I struggled to figure it out. Eventually, I garnered 36 followers, quite a few more than I have with this column, yet far from the number of followers the so-called influencers have. Last week I “re-posted” a missive on Threa

My loyal readers, family, and most of my friends know that I am not undecided about how I will cast my vote for president this year.  My decision, already made, is about more than party, believe it or not.  My grandfather, who died before I reached puberty, passed on a valuable message that I’ve carried for more than six decades. He’d say, “No matter what, leave things a little better than when you found them.” That’s why the “leave no trace” ethic of the BWCAW and golf courses appeals to me.  I haven’t been in the BWCAW since the early 1970s, but I have spent a fair number of hours on golf courses. Golfers know that a well-hit ball leaves a divot and a ball landing on the green leaves a mark. The ethic is to repair your divot/mark and at least one other. Leave the course better than you found it.  During and after the most recent presidential “debate,” the media brought together panels of undecided voters for before-and-after consultations. Most of these folks' comments indicate t