How a Danish Artist's Giant Wooden Troll Found a Home in the U.P.

Germfask — There are those places you pass through but never stop. You might cruise through hundreds of times over the course of a lifetime and not once do you ever think to stop and see what’s there beyond the windows of your SUV.

Germfask is one of those places. Or that’s what it’s traditionally been for me. It’s this little tiny town which is really more a sparse collection of buildings than anything else. It’s plopped down along M-77 in the eastern U.P about 10 miles north of US-2. It’s one of the most boring stretches of road on the way to Keweenaw trailing just behind the Seney Stretch. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. I never once thought to stop, until this summer.

Heading north, just as you are leaving town, there’s a wooden sign that appears on the right side of the road. With a 1970s summer-camp vibe, it looks nicer than it needs to be and is more aesthetically in-tune than you might expect up in these parts.

It reads:

Northland Outfitters

Campground Cabins

Canoe Kayak

Gift Shop - Clothing - Gear

And if you stop at the sign and take a right, the road will take you down by the Manistique River to a gravel parking lot across from a stack of canoes and a bunch of lifejackets hanging on hooks. Walk a little way and you come to a dark wood building with a sign in the shape of a canoe with the words “Northland Outfitters” hung over the entrance. Here you can rent a canoe, stay the night in a cabin, pitch a tent, or pay a small fee to see Benny the Beard Fisher, one of the most captivating statues in the Upper Peninsula.

Benny the Beard Fisher is the creation of Danish artist Thomas Dambo. According to Dambo’s biography, his works “celebrate the intersection of art, nature, storytelling, and recycling.” Most appropriately, he is most well-known for creating larger-than-life trolls made entirely out of recycled wood. His trolls can be found all over the world, though the majority are located in Europe and the U.S. Dambo’s trolls are mostly placed in parks and forests where they blend into the natural surroundings in a strangely organic, dreamy way.

How exactly did Thomas Dambo and Benny the Beard Fisher come to Germfask?

In 2022, Levi and Durea Brady moved from Denver to Gerfmask and bought Northland Outfitters. They had both been big Dambo fans for years and felt the area deserved something like a piece of his. After writing him a few times about commissioning a troll, he agreed to a statue in this little corner of the Brady’s new home. While Levi was out hauling canoes, I asked Durea how many people come to view the statue. She told me that on a good day a few hundred people will come to see Benny the Beard Fisher, though it’s hard to tell exactly because sometimes it’s just a dad who comes and pays for the carload (price: $10 a car) while the kids wait out in the lot.

Dambo’s troll in Germfask is about a 5-minute walk from the camp store. He’s made of golden yellow wood, is 14 feet tall, 30 feet long, and stretched across a dirt path leaning with his long sticky beard stretched down to the Manistique River.

Public art and and outdoor installations are interesting philosophical concepts. Bringing art out of galleries and off walls and into the public space is an ambitious aim. Will this art elevate or denigrate the space? And without walls to close it off or shield it, will this permanent alteration to the outdoor world be a positive or a negative?

Public art doesn’t need to be beautiful to be art, of course. But it does need to elevate, inspire, or complement the space. Much of the public art we see in our cities today is bad to quite bad. More often than not it doesn’t elevate the space or complement the surroundings. It doesn’t inspire the viewer or transform the sense a place takes. It’s just hideous and horrific.

If you are one of those who (rightfully) shudders when you hear the term “public art,” Benny the Beard Fisher might be of interest to you because it is quite good and feels quite right.

Sitting next to the river, off the road, in the deep woods of Schoolcraft County, this huge wooden troll feels more natural and at home than perhaps any other statue or public art one might ever consider to place here. Any other kind of art or statue might easily feel strained, out of place or just plain illogical. Anything else might feel like litter in an otherwise pristine natural habitat.

It feels like Benny the Beard Fisher rises out of the woods just like a bush or a smattering of pine trees might. With just a small wooden plaque on a tree, and no railings or protective fencing keeping you from the troll, you are able to walk around, touch, and relate to the statue in the same way you might any other thing in the woods. He’s just there like the trees, the trail, and the river are. Using organic materials, dreamily transforming the landscape with a feeling of “what if…” this giant troll feels completely at home here.

I don’t think I could imagine any better or more appropriate piece of public art in Germfask—or anywhere in the U.P. for that matter—than Dambo’s Benny the Beard Fisher. Levi and Durea Brady were right. This very rough and wooded area of the U.P. just on the edge of the Seney National Wildlife Reserve did deserve a troll from Dambo.

How do you make art installations in the wilderness that feel organic, in-place, and like an elevation and not a denigration? It’s a question I didn’t have a good answer to until I stopped in a little town I never stop in.