Dear Reader of Roughwighting, you were expecting to see Pam, weren’t you? You were anticipating reading one of her delicious stories, weren’t you?SURPRISE!

We are playing a fun little game today.  It’s called The Great Blogging Switcheroo.

(We made up that name.)

She is blogging over at my site, Lake Superior Spirit.

And I am blogging over here at Roughwighting.

You know, a blogging exchange.  Instead of engaging one another’s services as formal “Guest Bloggers,” we decided to do the big switcheroo, which ultimately accomplishes the same thing.

Ooops, I’ve been rude.  We haven’t been properly introduced.

My name is Kathy and I blog from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  My husband and I dwell in the midst of a very large forest that stretches, well, a couple hundred miles in every direction.  It’s interrupted by a few small towns, but mostly our neighbors are bears, raccoons, bald eagles and lake trout.  (OK, our real neighbors have something like twelve kids, no kidding, so we’re really not as isolated as I like to pretend.)

I call the small house we built about thirty years ago our “Little House in the Big Woods.”  OK, I read too much Laura Wilder Ingalls in childhood.  Strangely enough, I just discovered  that my best childhood friend synchronistically calls her house her “Little House on the Prairie.”  Weird, huh?

My husband and I birthed two children-of-the-woods and they’ve both moved to the Big Cities on opposite ends of the country, one in San Diego and the other in New York City.  They’ve both recently adopted kittens, making us cat grandparents.  We haven’t met the grandkitties yet, although we hear weekly updates.

Over at my blog Pam wrote a really cool story, so I spent all night pondering what really cool story to tell you.  Of course, nothing came to mind.  What kind of cool stories happen in the woods?

Ah ha!  It hit somewhere as the coyotes yipped up the road.

I’ll tell you about the Caveman who used to live on our property.  (OK, let’s not squabble.  The Caveman didn’t actually live on our 23 acres.  But he lived next door on the original 100-acre plot, in the same place where the twelve Catholic children live.)

I had forgotten about the Caveman until last week.  The Tomato Lady (that’s what she calls herself because she once gave us tomatoes from her home in Illinois) vacations on the other side of the twelve children, just up the road, in a modern-day camper.  She emailed my husband at the local newspaper where he works and begged, “Is it really an urban legend?  Did a caveman really live on our property?”

Barry assured her it was a RURAL legend, but she insisted it was an URBAN legend, as she heard it in our town of 1,500 people.

But, lo and behold, it isn’t legend at all.  A modern-day caveman actually lived here during the 1970’s. 

The caveman dug about an 8 X 8 foot hole into the south side of a ravine, and placed a log over the roof. He put wood slabs over the log pole, some plastic and a couple feet of dirt. You crawled in through an igloo-like hole.  You could barely stand up inside the cave. Two rusty bed spring frames provided sleeping quarters.

(We know it’s true.  The remnants of the cave still existed in 1980 when we bought our property. We gawked in amazement.)

He lived in his cave for several years with a woman named Chrissy.   She is a jolly free spirit. I once sold lentils and soybeans with her at the local food co-op.  The caveman was a Navy Veteran who arrived here after service to “live off the land.”  He used to drive an old junk truck to town.  Unfortunately, his vehicle didn’t feature brakes, so he would park it at the top of the hill by the hospital and walk down into town.  He also walked barefoot in summer, so rural legends say.

Thank you, dear reader, for reading this Great Blogging Switcheroo.  Now, do scurry over to my blog (click on the underlined words ‘my blog’ to suddenly appear at http://upwoods.wordpress.com/) where your regularly-scheduled-writer is sitting awaiting your arrival.  If you introduce yourself in the comments here, I would love to shake your virtual hand.

(I stumbled upon Lake Superior Spirit over a year ago and always look forward to Kathy’s insightful, sometimes mystical, always stimulating blog about life out in her neck of the woods. She and I live in such different environments, and yet we find many commonalities in our posts about our “flashes of life.” Thanks for visiting with her here in Roughwighting.)