Basel's Tree Trimming

About Basel's Tree Trimming

By four o'clock on a Stannard December afternoon, the light is already fading blue over the hayfields and the next band of lake-effect snow is drifting in from Lake Superior. This is Ontonagon County farm-and-forest country with Finnish roots, where sauna chimneys smoke on cold evenings and winters run long, deep and serious. Basel's Tree Trimming, whose everyday trade is trees, keeps the snow moving here: opening long country drives, shoveling steps and cutting back the drifts that pile up where open fields meet the woods. A drive kept open storm after storm, its banks pushed back neat and wide, is something to be proud of. Out where snowfall is measured by the foot, that open road is everything.