Chapter 3

New Wilderness

The Iron Range, Upper Michigan: 2006

Albert was alone. As he stood on the porch of his cabin that warm spring morning, watching a beaver making a perfect v-line across the lake, it all came flooding back to him.

He’d retired from Howard the previous spring to devote more time to his projects. He still kept an office and lab there, but now was officially emeritus and only returned occasionally, depending on the project underway. His research was more active now. He had projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the Nature Conservancy. All of his work focused on his New Wilderness. He was turning his little corner of Michigan back to the way it was before the Voyageurs came from France and began to alter the landscape. Already, he missed his students.

She started it all. If Esther hadn’t died in that awful mudslide at Arecibo in August 1974, who knows where he’d be or what he’d be doing. His retreat was complete. First, he’d gone home to his roots in Ironwood. And then, he’d thrown himself into his work teaching that fall at Howard. He knew now that he took his anger and frustration out on his students that semester. “What’s with Dr. Repaul?” was a common refrain. He didn’t have a clue, even after the dean took him aside and asked him to “lighten up” on his assignments. It took over a year.

Then, there was that period when he tried to prove himself as an astronomer without a teaching or research post. It got him no post, but it got him tenure and his formulation of the theory of The Kaleiodoscope Effect. Seeing so many of his colleagues caught up in the concept of SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Albert developed his alternate theory, based on the assumption that energy and matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Since intelligence capable of contacting us would probably also be capable of traveling at close to the speed of light, and, given the difficulty of two way communication with such restraints, it would be just as easy for intelligence to come to us as send signals. Besides, they would be far more capable of receiving our messages than we theirs. They also would have no need to fear us, hide from us, or harm us.

This made SETI fruitless. It also made the concept of Star Wars, consuming much of the collective creative mind since the emergence of the first alien beings from the mind of the likes of H.G.Wells--obsolete. While our reptile brains are intrigued and excited by the thought of the diabolical, no alien intelligence would gain by destroying us. It would be like the Calypso coming upon a pod of dolphins for the very first time and having Captain Jacques Cousteau order his men shoot them to get bodies to dissect.

Taking this position got Dr. Repaul on panels at major and minor conferences, and some notoriety. He published in obscure journals and began his biological research in the Howard labs. While visiting his parents during the summer of 1984, he saw this ad in The Mining Journal. “Mine for sale. Played-out copper mine with thirty-acre lake. Heavily wooded. Remote. Suitable for resort. 835 acres. Inquire Reserve Mining and Manufacturing, Duluth, MN. 58111. Phone (218) 722-5000.”

Albert had invested Esther’s life insurance, a sizable sum, to help maintain Esther’s mother in her old age, and, for opportunities like this. He gave Reserve a call. Reserve’s real estate manager, Tom Barclay, was eager to talk about the property and cut a deal. Albert wanted him to hold on until he had time to locate the property. Pulling out some of his father’s topographical maps, Albert soon located the site, about 20 miles off State Route 28 between Nestoria and Ishpeming. It looked ideal, sandwiched between the Copper Country and Escanaba River State Forests. He had to go see it. “When can we meet to see it?” He found himself excitedly asking Tom a few minutes later.

Three days later, they met in Nestoria at 11am. Using Tom’s Jeep 4WD Wagoneer, they wound through state forest and timberlands until, about 12:30, they entered a small valley with a marshy lake. “The lake’s springfed…..” Tom was saying. “….Forms a creek there on one end that eventually ends up in the Escanaba River.” Albert didn’t have to be sold—he was already in love with the place.

They pulled up on some ramshackle mining buildings, falling apart from misuse. Albert noted that the lumber would come in handy for building a cabin. He was already picturing it in his mind. After they walked the site a bit. Albert declared, “I’ll take it. Can I write you an earnest money check?”

Since the property had been up for sale for so long, Reserve was willing to cut a deal: One half down, and the rest in monthly installments at ten percent interest for fifteen years. Banks were unwilling to loan money on land like this with little potential except future timber. Reserve would draw up a land contract. It would be paid for by the time Albert planned to retire. Most of Esther’s insurance money could stay invested, in case Esther’s mother or he needed it.

It was paid for now, and nearly turned back to nature. His only concessions were improving the logging roads a bit with mine tailings and a grader so that he could get in and out in most weather with a four wheel drive vehicle, his solar passive, wood-heated log cabin, set into the woods like it grew there, a couple of sheds for a workshop, equipment and experimental supplies, some cages for the temporary holding of wild animals, a greenhouse, and his solar panels and windmills for power. All in all, it was a pretty cozy setup. “That’s the problem,” he thought. “Now that I’ve got everything working the way I want, I feel empty and unfulfilled.” It was times like this that he wished he’d had children.

The closest he’d come to having children was bringing those interns here from Howard in the summers. Most were city kids--eager to come when he’d talk of it—in for culture shock when they got there. He picked them carefully, but once in a while they freaked out after two weeks without their music, their buddies, the mall, their girlfriend or whatever addiction they were hung up on from living in an urban society. Oh, there was contact with the outside world, especially as satellite TV, cell phones, and the Internet came into use. Albert was one of the first to employ these technologies, not wanting to lose touch with the rest of society during his sojourns there. Those weekly jaunts to Ishpeming or Marquette brought civilization back into perspective, too—small town though it was.

That summer with Jeremy in 1998 was special. His pond project resulted in seminal information leading to solving the problem of the deformed frogs. Jeremy went on to grad school at the University of Minnesota. With his earned doctorate in biological sciences in hand, he had recently been hired by Archer Daniels Midland as a staff biologist. He was working on a project to use frog meat to increase the world’s food supply.

And then, there was his fifteen minutes of fame as a direct descendent of Ötzi, the Iceman of Tyrol. That chance encounter had set a fervor of genealogical interest in his family and led him to conducting DNA related studies in his labs and at New Wilderness. Since retiring, he had traveled to Tyrol, Italy to view the Iceman himself, and to climb the high mountain pass to Innsbruck, to the spot where Ötzi was found. He had stood there in bright sunlight for a long time, trying to imagine what it was like, 5300 years earlier, when Ötzi had died on the mountain.

Certainly, it wasn’t there, where he was found, but further up, several hundred yards, where he’d become part of the glacier that brought him down to the trail and his discovery. Albert had climbed the glacier, scrambling over fissures and watching for crevasses, until he’d reach the spot Ötzi was presumed to have died. To his right was a rocky overhang. “Perhaps that’s where he sought shelter?” Albert thought. It was hard for Albert to tell. He didn’t even know his ancestor’s name. “Was it Repaul, like his?” For now it was Ötzi, after the region the man was supposedly from.

He and Rao Khundi, head of the Geneome Genealogy Project at Johns Hopkins had become good friends and collaborators. Their joint research had been published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Science. Albert had become one of the world’s leading DNA researchers.

That’s what made his loneliness so complete. Albert, by the nature of his research alone, knew how closely related we all were. The difference in race between he and Esther or Jeremy was but a single letter in a sequence that was as long as life itself. Even Jeremy’s frogs possessed 95% of the same DNA as humans. All life, even plants, were closely related. Yet Albert, surrounded by life in his new wilderness, began longing for human companionship.

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