Features

Seeing red is a good thing

ESCANABA -- Seeing red is a good thing.

It is red plaid season all across the awesome Upper Michigan. This is the first weekend of fall.

We all take a cue from mother nature. The maple trees change their leaves from green to crimson. The frost tints the apples on the branches a nice juicy, pinkish, red.

Sumac leaves become fire-red and there fuzzy berries turn into maroon clusters of seed.

Cranberries, choke cherries, and rosehips blush shades of red and feed a myriad of wildlife.

And U.P. folks don red and black buffalo plaid shirts, vests and jackets as soon as there's a chill in the air.

The red and black checkerboard style of fabric has quite a history in the north woods.

The bold red and black pattern dates back to Scotland's 18th century. Legend has it that Jock McCluskey a Scottish immigrant and descendent of Rob Roy brought the tartan blankets to North America in the 1800's.

The warm red and black blankets were traded with Native Americans often for buffalo pelts and other furs.

By the 1850's the Woolrich Woolen Mills in Pennsylvania started to produce buffalo plaid blankets and shirts and flannel shirts soon followed.

Trappers, hunters and lumberjacks latched on to the warm red woolies and flannels.

Early pioneers in Michigan, especially the men folk worked hard wearing red plaid shirts and jackets and built the homesteads, farms and towns that we still love today.

Besides work clothes, the buffalo plaids soon became the preferred colors worn by sportsmen in the U.P. Before the days of orange blaze every deer hunter in the woods wore red and black.

My Dad had a woolen buffalo plaid shirt that always kept in his hunting closet. It came out as soon as the first frost covered the ground. It was bird season! I wonder how

many miles through balsam, aspen, and maples he traveled wearing that shirt in search of grouse?

On rabbit (hare) hunts with our beagles, I know more than once that shirt was left on the ground for our stubborn beagle to find after the dog refused to quiet and we had to go home.

In November the wool shirt was often worn out to the deer blind.

I can still recall the scratchy feel of the woolen shirt and smell its slightly smokey, slightly woodsy smell.

So let the color show begin! Put away the summer whites and find your comfy flannel shirts. Red caps and black gloves and woolen socks are in style now.

Elmer's County Market employees wear red and black and now tis the season for all of us Yooper outdoors people to wear autumn red too.

Be warm and well in your cozy buffalo plaids and welcome fall.