A chalkboard at The Rivers Eatery in this north woods town lists people who have a free beer — or more — coming because somebody else already bought it. The note “2P4B,” for example, is worth two pizzas and four beers to whoever’s name precedes the cryptic shorthand.
Owner Mick Endersbe calls this the “pay it forward” board, and those pizzas, cooked fast in a stone oven, are named after local rivers. The Namekagon means just pepperoni. On the Amnicon are Canadian bacon, mandarin oranges and pepperoncini. They are eaten on wooden tables that are recycled bowling lanes in a building long abandoned until the Endersbe family saved it in 2007 to give people a reason to linger in Cable.
Other walls hold drawings and paintings from See My Art Inc., a program for the cognitively and physically disabled. Their teachers are professional artists, such as Sara Balbin, who welds steel sculptures and paints portraits of tribal elders at her Dragonfly Studio. Hers is one of four isolated artist households along Blue Moon Road, three miles north.
Tacked near the entryway to The Rivers, which shares quarters with a combined bookstore and organic grocery, are many race bibs of athletes who compete in the “silent sports,” such as cross-country skiing, biking and running.
“They accept our crazy old building,” Endersbe said of the competitive skiers, bikers, runners and locals who have left their mark here. He is a former Minneapolis financial planner who moved to Cable with wife Beth because “skiing and mountain biking on world-class trails are right out your door.”
Stand at the corner of County Highway M and Kavanaugh Road for a relatively complete view of downtown. This rugged community that 825 people call home is on the outskirts of Chequamegon National Forest and in Bayfield County, where 77 percent of the land is held in public trust and 2,000 miles of recreational trails crisscross it.
The area is best known for American Birkebeiner cross-country ski races, which began in 1973 and attract 13,000 competitors who ski up to 55 kilometers at a time. Another 20,000 people show up to watch the events Feb. 19-22. The Fat Bike Birkie on March 7 is the only time bicycles (some with tires 4 inches wide) are allowed on the same snow-covered trail.
New to Cable this year was the International Paralympic Committee Nordic Skiing World Championships, previously in the United States only twice in the competition’s 42-year history.
Profound physical impairments are lifelong challenges for this set of elite athletes. They are missing one or more limbs or are visually impaired. Seven of nine members on the U.S. team were disabled because of military service.
About 150 athletes from 20 countries were competing through Feb. 1, skiing up to 20 kilometers, while a cartoon-like Tim Burr, the event mascot, was a nod to the area’s lumbering history and year-round appreciation of unique efforts.
Then there’s the bizarre: Consider bar-stool races on Feb. 14, an annual fundraiser for a snowmobile club. “If you can sit on it and it will go down the hill, you can race it,” online rules explain. That’s as long as “one-bar stool, mounted on two skis” and 10 other race sled criteria are met.
“People define ‘fun’ in different ways here,” said James Bolen, director of Cable Area Chamber of Commerce.
That also means you can expect the unexpected. For example, Lakewoods Resort doesn’t just rent you a place to stay; it also rents snowmobiles, plus you can have walleye with your eggs for breakfast.
Or there’s the decor at the 1925 Forest Lodge Library, a snug log cabin and public library on the National Register of Historic Places. You’ll find the books stored on log shelves. Though its hours are far more spare than those at the library in winter, the Art Market 63, a nonprofit consortium that sells the work of 16 artists, certainly is worth a visit if you’re there on a Friday or Saturday through April.
“I get a lot of inspiration from living in the woods,” said Diana Randolph, who operates the Once in a Blue Moon Studio. “We have met amazing people here, as inspiring as the nature.”
Kids will like the Cable Natural History Museum, which has a menagerie of local wildlife mounts, complete with snarling bobcat, bugling elk, howling wolves and gliding barred owls.
A 45-minute drive north is the Apostle Island National Lakeshore, where windswept ice caves attracted 120,000 visitors last winter. How close you get depends on Lake Superior’s moodiness.
And if the lake’s mood doesn’t strike, heck, just go back to the Rivers for pizza.
If you go
Cable Area Chamber of Commerce: 800-533-7454, cable4fun.com
American Birkebeiner and Fat Bike Birkie: 715-634-5025, birkie.com
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore: 715-779-3397 (715-779-3398, extension 3, for updated advisories on ice cave access), nps.gov/apis
The Rivers Eatery, 715-798-3123, theidealmarket.com
Art Market 63, 715-413-0927, cablehaywardarts.org/art-mart
