Okay. The Keewanaw Peninsular in winter is bloody amaaaazing.

The snow on the trees is like every Christmas card you’ve ever seen, squared. Robert Frost would slit his wrists. Bev Doolittle could hide a whole army of piebald elephants in it. It’s incredible stuff. Birch trees everywhere, looking pale and papery, fir trees covered in great blobs and globules of snow. We drove by Lake Superior, where the water was grey and the sky was grey and the waves rolled against black rocks, with white snow and immense fringes of icicles. The ice that piles up on the rocks is the palest blue-green, the exact color of–well, to eschew romanticism in favor of accuracy, it’s the exact color of Daquiri Ice sherbet from Baskin Robbins. Since it provides the only color in a completely monochromatic landscape (with maybe a hint of deep earth red at places along the shore) it’s a gorgeous effect, as well as giving one a vague craving for ice cream.

We stopped at Lake Bailey, which is frozen solid now and covered in snow, and Tom and I shuffled a few hundred yards through the snow to check out a broken line of coyote tracks. The view of forest and hillside covered in snow was incredible. The silence was incredible. My mother’s attempts to photograph things through the window of the moving car…well, perhaps not so incredible, but we give her points for effort, anyway.

Also, I have eaten a pastie. Most of us probably know pasties as the things used to cover stripper nipples, but in this case, it appears to be a local dish, rather like a dry pot-pie in a thin crust. A kind of Yooper calzone. The crust may be more or less leathery, and the interior contains meat, onion, potato, rutabaga, and so forth. (What this may say about the size and consistency of Yooper stripper nipples–Christ, try saying that five times fast–is open to debate.)