The Mail-Journal, Volume 15, Number 36, Milford, Kosciusko County, 27 September 1978 — Page 18

While waiting for his noonday soup to cool in his favorite bowl, a peach can, Michigan Slim reflects on his 42 years of hermit life in Michigan’s northwoods.

it w H SAM. •..’ Jk ’ ~ ~wß MICHIGAN’S RIP VAN WINKLE

"I’ve got Rip Van Winkle beat all to heck,” said Max Hackel, describing 42 years of hermit life. Better known as "Michigan Slim,” the 86-year-old trapper seated on a log outside his rustic cabin reflected over the outdoor life he finds more tantalizing than the job and wife he left behind. In 1934, Slim moved into the blacksmith shop of a deserted lumber camp on the sand plains north of Big Bay in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He tossed out forgotten tools and a few porcupines and cleared a comer for his bed. Slim hasn’t wandered far from his camp since that day. Back when he led the life of normal men, young Slim married the daughter of

Slim is known as the "Educated Trapper” in the northwoods. He reads "everything once, and most things twice.”

a blacksmith in Flint. In 1918, he joined the Army and spent most of his tour in England and France. He arrived home hM 919 with a couple of thousand dollars won rolling dice and discovered his wife had run away with a stonemason. Slim took a drag from his hand-rolled cigarette and told of gambling throughout the Midwest and Canada. "Sometimes I had a wad — sometimes I didn’t.” But even then his true love was the woods. "I made a few ten spots, then went fishing,” he said. A swing through the Upper Peninsula changed his lifestyle. The gambler married a music teacher from Munising, and attempted domestication again. He settled

Slim still knows how to come home with a creel full of sparkling brook trout.

by Dixie Franklin into a job with an oil company, covering a territory in Michigan and Wisconsin. But there was trout season and bird season and how could he deliver oil during deer season? The school board frowned on married teachers in those days and his wife lost her job. "I couldn’t keep up with what she was used to, so we split up,” said Slim. He headed toward Big Bay and in a quiet hollow at the end of an old railroad spur that once served the lumber camp, he found the blacksmith shop. Sometimes Slim worked in logging camps or on road crews, but he also kept trapping and fishing. He added rooms until his cabin satisfied every need.

deliberate punctuation of • his extensive vocabulary reflects long, lonesome hours on the Grasshopper Ranch in the sole company of his stack of books.

"Grasshopper Ranch,” he called his camp. "Won’t grow anything but grasshoppers in these sand plains.” Slim cut huge spruce and balsam logs from a nearby swamp, squared a kitchen area with a taut fishing line and stacked the timbers shoulder high. He tacked on a tarpaper and glassed in a couple of windows. Winters piled snow up to the roof. After a storm in 1939 smoke rolled into the room when he awoke and lit the stove. The pipe was choked with snow, so coffee and toast had to be forgotten. Slim jerked open the door to a wall of white. "I burrowed a hole in the bank with the heel of my snowshoe, heaved my backpack outside, then crawled out myself,” he

5 Grasshopper Ranch.

said. The woodsman walked to the nearest lumber camp in the biting wind. Since all roads were clogged, he hired out at 50 cents an hour —top price — to clear the Hungry Hollow Road. His eyelashes froze stiff and wind riddled his heavy mackinaw. Relating his one brush with the law, he still grimaces over the counterfeiter who slipped him bogus bills in a crap game over the old A&P store in Marquette. "I had to go all the way to Sault Ste. Marie to straighten that one out.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a hungry bear had charged through the kitchen window. Slim found an overturned molasses bucket and sticky syrup smeared over the