I got a real publisher instead. I am very excited as this book has important things to say to the country i live in about the tragedy of their health care system. Thaks, and good luck however you are published.
Novel Treatments / Pockets of Change: A Memoir Part 1 (Analysis)
Pockets of Change
1. Dad, Woods Owner
One Saturday night when we were already in our pajamas, four children
under eight years old, Mom said she was going out to the garage to
kill herself and not to open the door or the fumes would get us, too.
Nothing like this had ever happened to us before, and we were in
shock. We could hear the engine roar occasionally. Once we opened
the door a crack and the garage was filled with smoke and stink. We
had no idea what to do.
Then the garage door went up. Dad’s car was nosing its way in. Mom
got out yelling at him but we shrunk into the bowels of the house
appeased—she’d been stopped. Later we heard Dad tell Mom that a kid
had called the bar he was at saying that Mommy wouldn’t wake up. No
one knew whose kid it was because it had hung up. Dad went home
because no one answered our phone…
He was always there when we needed him.
Dad taught me something everyone of the 53 years I knew him. I don’t
mean he told me it first; I mean I learned something from him being
here. This year, when he was 86 and I was 53, I noticed how he went
right on living through 3 years of unexplained itching skin and the
red and black holes he’d put there from scratching, and in general,
the ugliness of his arms and legs. He was so into everything else
life offered that he never mentioned itching and bleeding, so I never
thought of them. After he’d have several good laughs at the antics
of my daughter he’d rise to walk us to the door and I’d see the mars
all over him, as he only wore tees and shorts. His calmness about
his” leprosy” gave me a guide as to how to react to and look at the
brown spots forming on my own aging body. If you wanted to enjoy
being alive you gave the less than perfect aspects of your life no
never mind. It was ok to go to 4 or 5 doctors over it but at a point,
you just enjoyed what you didn’t have wrong with you.
Dad told me when I was 18, “I have two arms and two legs and a brain
and as long as I have these, there’s hope.”
He said,”You know what I always tell myself, Deanne?” , first. He was
pacing, snorting, pawing the ground, if not as obviously as a horse or
deer. The words tumbled out of him, charged. I pictured him ejecting
from a fierce red fire scorching his B-24, the red skies of comic books
touting some primordal planet’s birth or death, his shadow a stick
figure with fire glowing through it. Where else would he have ever
picked up and gone on from, besides the war? Nothing else had ever
happened to him.
Except, right then, his daughter had just emerged from a 4-day coma in
Intensive Care after trying to kill herself because some 19-year-old
high school dropout didn’t love her, not thinking of her father’s
pain when she tried and not thinking of his love when she came to
and found he’d driven to downtown Detroit—the thing he hated with the
most passion—four days in a row to see her being unresponsive.
At 86 he taught me, don’t get depressed and obsessed by defects of
aging—be you all the way through. Live. Ignore negatives.
Maybe it was who we had to compare him to. My mother was always
complaining about things we couldn’t even see—”The skin between my
fingers itches”— and often. At our vacation home on Michigan’s Au
Sable River she discovered an unfortunate allergy to ragweed, which
she said was all over the woods. So she blew her nose loud and filled
trash cans with tissues and stayed in the cabin although the windows
had to be open for fresh and cool air. She went out a few times one
year when all her children had left home and she took some classes at
a community college—Chinese cooking, crochet, public speaking and
drawing. The drawing class had them start with trees and she took a
three-legged stool around our property a few times, set up at some
magnificant tree, and picked up her charcoal.
Dad would try to tell her about the tree—show her the galls on the
trunk, or how it had one trunk while the white poplars had several
trunks under one rounded crown. If the tree had pinecones he’d hold a
banana-shaped one beside one that resembled a little wooden rose (the
eastern cottonwood and the tamarack).Or whatever the tree and the
next tree differed in. A sumac might offer up one of those red, hairy,
too smushible to collect “drupes”, or he might have choke-cherry
flowers against the red-spotted flowers of the hawwthorne tree. He
might show her a white oak acorn next to a bur oak acorn with its
fringed cap, or the shaggy bark of the ironwood, lose at the ends,
next to the paper birch bark peeling into long, narrow, horizontal
strips,curled at the ends; or he might freak her by igniting some wet
yellow birch bark after it stopped raining, then having her taste the
wintergreen-tasting twig.
Dad might have handed Mom a sugar maple seed with its U-shaped papery
wings, and the V-shaped winged seed of the box elder, or maybe a cedar
twig and a pine needle, to show the flattened brackets of the cedar,
maybe the 4-sided needles of the black spruce. Maybe he just gave her
a leaf off her tree-a quaking aspen leaf, silvery when the wind blew
and the back showed, a rich green when still. It didn’t matter.
“I’m drawing my tree, you go draw your own,” the lady from Missouri
said.
I’d get prickly but stay mum, because Dad always put on a united
parental front with her. I could only think she was a thoughtless
woman—I didn’t dare say it. This made me as I aged think of the two
of them as “Them”. When I attempted suicide I called Them first,
begging Them to come get me out of the bar I was drunk in. They said
no, angry that I was drinking. But there was a Dad by himself in
there, who I knew well, and loved dearly, and that was who stayed in
the Detroit hospital with me and tried to talk sense into me while Mom
stayed home (she didn’t “do” hospitals, she told me.) And for the
next 8 years my stormy teen years took a backseat to Dad and I
finding our relationship again. I know if we’d had our early
relationship always, I’d never have thought of suicide—it was as much
because I’d lost him through my taking up drinking at 18, as it was
over a boy. Maybe Dad realized this.
I first found my father around 1964 when we added a vacation retreat to our treasure chest. Debbie and I were 9, Tony was 7, and Terry was 5. We’d been staying at a small rental cottage on a lake, and when it was cloudy or we were sunburned we left the lake’s enticements and drove around the woods of northern lower peninnsula Michigan. One gray April day we turned up a driveway after buying pops and snacks at a little store some 20 miles from our cottage. We had to stop the car and Dad got out and moved a horizontal pole that crossed the 2-track drive at the road; he put it on a short vertical pole across the drive with a hook that held it up. After the car went through, he stopped and got out and put the pole back across the driveway.
It was a scenic drive, twisty and long, the snow just melting out of the darker hollows, making the old fallen leaves smell pungently of spring, as earthworms aereated the plant matter and earth. Mostly we smelled pine. We topped a crest and looked down at a red cabin, a yellow cabin, a mowed yard, and, way down a cliff on the cabins other sides, a curving snake of white-sparkle-shooting water glistening like cystals.
It was a narrow waterway and we quickly gave up any pretension of reaching it when Mom and Dad and the man at the door told us to go play—anywhere.
The man hit a thick black iron triangle with an attached rod.”That was our cowbell,” he said. “Come back when you hear that.”
Tony said,”What if we’re too far to hear it?”
I stepped on his shoed foot—now we’d be restricted close.
“You’ll hear it,” the man said.
So we four children ran into the woods and tried to have a go at going downhill to the river. As we crossed the long poles atop stumpy ones that marked the edge of where smart people walked we saw that the cliff had literally tumbled down. It was filled with uptuned trees so old they had moss on them and tiny plants, even cedars, growing in the rich dirt in their crevices.
The rootballs looked like the mouths of caves, and we were sidetracked from getting to the water by the idea of finding a cave you could sleep all night in, Chico our Toy Fox Terrier at the door as lookout.
And every step was a misstep as we ran and lept, and then quickly switched to walking cautiously through the pathless woods sloping toward the steadily gurgling creek below.
I am 53. I’m sitting in Dad’s house, not just visiting, but replacing him. For this I am privvy to all the little things he did and never spoke of (like lifting 25 pounds of rock salt at the supermarket for the water softener every month, draining some of the pool when the daily tropical showers took over, seeing his caller’s name across his football game when he got a telephone call (he had a new reason for saying, “You interrupted my game , it better be good” ) and what it was like to be him here—what he heard, how many kinds of birds were around, what he got out of living in a Florida golf course retirement community, because I would have thought he’d retire in a bird-rich place.
Deep in the night if I go out onto the screened lanai I hear the Au Sable perfectly in the pitch of the pool. It’s the sound of water diverted by a branch, and also of the dam from far away, say, as far as our cabin was. I just don’t hear Dad’s waders as he pushes against the 3-mile an hour current with two or three long steps to come ashore below us in the dark.
Back in his house, every hour, a bird sings. Half are common to the Au Sable. It’s his clock.
On the coffee table lies one book—of hundreds of bird songs you can play instantly.
He has tactile Au Sable all around. In the garage his two fly-fishing creels--maybe his and Tony’s-- hang near his waders and two bamboo nets his father made him. In a trunk in his closet is a monkey that his father carved from a peach pit ,”while talking to you,” Dad said,”then tossed it to you as he left.” The one Grandma gave me--maybe hers--is far prettier—Dad’s is anorexic. He knew, too. He didn’t say a word while admiring mine in his hand, turning it about, just told me the story. I never knew he had one.
There are birds carved of bone, Bear Grease and Young’s Mosquito Dope in small round cans next to Young’s Preen Fly and Line Dressing, reels in leather cases, flies on hooks in all sorts of containers kept in all sorts of places including his service footlocker and a carved-out book.
“Don’t be fishing with any flies in that,” Grandma said when Tony loaded a film cannister with some tinny guys once.”There’s chemicals in film that will come off in the water and kill the fish.”
Tony respected her more than any other relation but thought she was sometimes a little whacked-out.
“Yeah. Ok,”He said, pausing between words.
Grandma had a reason for her aversion to chemicals. Arsenic and other chemicals used in taxidermy in the olden days had destroyed Grandpa’s body. He’d been hospitalized twice for arsenic poisoning. They’d told her some organs were damaged.
Sitting by my Dad’s pool, I can see him being comfortable with daydreams and memories. He had many photographs; everything around him said “Au Sable”: the fat trout pillows, the little owl hanging from a real branch, and the one whose wings are each made of a scallop of turquoise, duck calls of red wood and metal you twisted inside the wood, red and green shotgun shells; everything says “sportsman here”.
In 1987, he stopped fishing and hunting and visiting the Au Sable. And not due to weakness or old age.
But we’re 9 and 7 and 4 now, Dad 42, and he fishes, in boats with us, or, mysteriously, never with us, in waders with a lantern on a strap around his forehead,its battery havy in the vest pocket, with Grandma, dressed the same. (Children, of course, can’t flyfish.)
We’re hearing Big Creek for the first time. We are used to lake beaches and now a small lake for rowboats, swimming, and fishing and exploring every inch of shoreline with the kids from other cabins. We’ve not yet ever left Michigan and never heard a river except for the one that makes Taquamenon Falls, where we heard the waterfall. This river sounds as though it too has a waterfall.
Every fluffy green bed of ferns was false cover for a deep hole between thick, branchy roots. When we wriggled out of the shoe caught between roots we collected it a foot below in black muck and thin springs of clear water running from underground back to underground on their way to livening up the river.
Optimistically we’d wander down another tree “nailed” to the ground by overgrowth and expect a cave at the promising structure sticking out of the tree’s end below us. Each further-away cave looked darker, thus deeper, maybe drier than the one just vacated. Dry ones seemed to hardly tunnel in at all but were flat as haystacks. The wetter ones had deeper root systems loosened by flooding or lightning. The stuff growing over the roots made the cave, and, because we weren’t sure how bears “made” caves, we assumed that several had come upon these and dug them deeper. The man had said there were no bears “anymore” and we figured on getting a nice bear den left behind. We didn’t mind the beetles and spider webs getting on our hoods and hands and thus faces. We weren’t afraid we’d meet wild anilmals like foxes or wolves. We just kept playing in the fallen trees.(Heck, a wolf would be cool.) Once we found one where two people (kid-sized) could crouch in corners, which we did until we tired of being silently scrunched facing opposire directions. Always, though, the darkness we saw from afar turned out to be mud, and when one of us went off to the grass to get back to the house without his feet falling through fake terrain to an underground spring, his shoes came off with steps one and two.
“Get them! Quick!” We yelled, not even thinking of the kid going down. I can only tell you it was one of the boys. He yelped,”I’m sinking in quicksand! Get Dad, quick!”, while he made no move to get out, but leisurely studied how deep he would go so he could brag on it back home.But we others said he’d be sunk by then, and thrust our best walking stick at him. It wasn’t like the adults were a few minutes away, not with what we had to navigate—it just looked as though they were.
He came out with his shoes, disappointed.
“I wonder if I would have sunk up to my eyes.”
“Did you keep sinking?” I asked.
“Not when I didn’t move. When I wasn’t moving I didn’t go any deeper.”
“That’s because it wasn’t any deeper, “I scoffed.
“How do you know? Did you ever see water come out of nowhere before?” The brother pushed.
“When the toilet backs up,” I said, and got a round of jeers. We couldn’t think of a time. One minute, the ground was dry, had been a long ways, was as dry as unbuttered toast. Then, one of your feet still on dry land, a hill broke off and water ran under it, down the mud ravine like a hose left on. Out of a clump of grass, a fissure in the earth, a cold little trickle spilled over some rocks or the ground and then vanished. We gauged the future path of one and found it resurfaced again on its way to the river. We had these little flat metal things called Trip-kups that Dad’s father had made of stainless steel. Two pieces, one shaped like a half-moon and one more like an army helmet, both about 5 inches long and 2.5 inches high, with two rivets on the helmet that fit in slots on the moon, could be pulled into a pyramid that held water inside . Done, you snapped it back flat. It held two ounces and only lost a drop at a time so if you hurried, you got all but a drop. We used them to drink spring water.
Grandpa was 69 and I was 6 when he died but Grandma constantly gave us the things he “meant for us to have”. My stuff came in a shiny silver tackle box and included my ‘Trip-tik” cup. Dad kept his cup, too, I found after his death, and I saw the flaw in his (I hadn’t used mine very much): the rivets rusted. But perhaps Grandpa had figured on that but that 5 years with a flat piece of metal you could fan and bump out into a cup was a lot of hunting and fishing out of one, for just a dollar. Too, some people only had five years, as all the young men were going off to war when he fooled around and invented it.
Our feet were cold and wet, our noses red and numb and our clothes carrying plant hitchhikers when we came to the realization that the “caves” weren’t going to be anything to do, after all, and trekked back toward the mown yard and grown-ups. When we talked, it sounded as if we were on the top of the planet, our voices going through the sky and its dome doing its acoustics on them before they hit our ears. It was enchanting to be in a place where all you heard was birds and wind—no traffic.
“Good Heavens!” Mom said. “Don’t you dare get in my car like that. Don’t you dare!”
The man, chuckling, brought out a bucket of water we washed our feet and calves with, and then we went back to our rented cottage..
The next day Dad had to go to Lovells, a small town closer to that place than the town we were staying in, and then we had to open that gate again, drive the long winding driveway made by four tires.
Dad said “Look as far to your left as you can. Look as far to the right as you can. Look as far up ahead as you can. Now look behind you,” As we pulled over the hill where the cabins were now visible.”As far as you can see is ours.”
The first thing Debbie and I, inveterate readers, did was take the wonderful “Arizona Highways” magazines the previous owners had left and read them in the car on the way to get groceries at the Rose City IGA. We read them the rest of the gloomy afternoon.
The cabin, which smelled like fire and wood, was pine and had a steep angled roof and high beams and a picture window facing the creek way down below. The yard went out about eight feet and ended at a log fence made of many vertical posts the same height and two long horizontal ones we often walked along (and fell off to the ground two feet under us).
There were 2 bird feeders, one five feet up on a pole with a plastic skirt everything ignored, and one on an even line with it but twelve feet up the nearest tree, which was down below the other on the slope. Dad nailed boards to make a ladder so we could fill it with unshelled peanuts. The people we’d just bought it from, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Scott, had owned a bar in Lovells and lived at the cabin year-round, and had hipped us to the facts that they’d been feeding flying squirrels at the feeders for years and that they might starve if we didn’t follow suit.
The rug was worn thin and not at all like soft carpet but we didn’t change it because we were suposedly roughing it. There was a fireplace on the north wall whose mantle was soon peppered with animals my grandfather had taxidermied--a male pheasant, a bobwhite and a ruffed grouse, a raccoon; and the place had come with somebody else’s unwanted two doe heads. And there were two divans, Mom called them--too hard to be called couches. There were two beautiful bedrooms of stained knotty pine. The double bed in each filled the rooms, Mom and Dad’s less so than Grandma’s, which lasted as “Grandma’s” for three or four days before people started slipping and calling it “Debbie’s”—who said she’d sleep on the couch when Grandma came, and so got herself into the master cabin. Our little brothers and I had the bunkhouse. The main cabin’s bathroom had a sink, toilet, shower, and the kitchen had an antique-looking electric lamp that hung from a hook in the high ceiling by a long black chain and had two lamps, one that shone over the big wooden table and one in the kerosene-lamp-looking part that diffused over the whole area, kitchen and couch combined. There was a cupboard filled with 1950’s Fiestaware and, by the dutch door, a gun rack that disappeared behind a yellow and purple curtain with a print of the signing of the Declaration of Independance each time someone opened the door.
The bunkhouse was knotty pine but not, like the cabin’s, burnished in amber, but pale and not laquered. One side had a bedroom and a bathroom and one side of the 2-way gas heater; the other side was one room with bunkbeds and our bikes and whatever Tony was making (a kayak at 13), although just the beds this first day. I had a built-in dresser and mirror, a double bed I loved and slept so well in, a closet filled with winter gear and 2 windows that didn’t open. Outside of them were deep dark woods with tall trees. The bath had only a tub. The bunkhouse was about twelve feet from the cabin, doors facing each other.
Mom brought up her black and white television from her bedroom but it only got one station—luckily the one with Dad’’s baseball games on it. A radio also only got the baseball games except in the middle of the night when it picked up two country and western stations including one from Tennessee.
The first thing Debbie and I found to keep us outdoors for hours was a huge stack of “Playboy” and “True” magazines in the tool shed. Mom caught Tony with a “Playboy” and made Dad burn them in the can he burned debris in. He left the biggest pile of “Playboys” under an ”Arizona Highway” on the other side of a lawn mower.
It wasn’t the last tacit understanding between Dad and kids that Mom was a little too sheltered. 1962 (and before) “Playboy”s only had naked breasts in the cartoons that dotted the pages with writing. We didn’t get a lot of the humor and didn’t bother reading them all. We liked the articles because we liked to read anything; our appetites were huge and we’d read entire cereal boxes over breakfast. An article about the latest cars, an interview with someone we’d never heard of, were better than reading nothing.
After a day or two of reading I went walking, and discovered, just past the aluminum toolshed with its wooden ramp that smelled of motor oil, what looked like a crater on the moon. Dad agreed it was a meteorite site, saying that ordinance from a National Guard training site wouldn’t have made it all the way to here although there was a National Guard training camp 22 miles away. Little grew in the bottom of the crater, but the few pines that tried to grow along the sides lay flat on the sand in their attempts to reach the sun. It was deep enough to be over our heads but small enough to miss if you were a piece from the edge looking over the grass--any person or animal on its other side seemed reachable just by walking straight to them; no hole was visible. It was a good safe place to shoot skeet--4 of us fit down in it and far enough from the target, too.
Dad called the river Big “Crik”. He wasn’t a hick; it was how the locals said it. It was actually a creek, but also a tributary of the Au Sable River, which had a main branch, an east and west and north and a south branch. The Au Sable went halfway across the state and then nearly met another river that went the rest of the way—in the opposite direction.
Dad had been taking us around Michigan since Debbie and I were two years old and saw the Soo Locks at Sault Sainte Marie. When we spent several summers in rental cottages on a lake in Lewiston, Michigan, Dad took us fishing for bluegills and perch. At the age of seven I caught my first fish—a sunfish. No one, surprisingly, was impressed. You threw them back; they weren’t tasty or something. Dad was sometimes too honest, too resistant to faking cheer for a small child. The reaction startled me and I didn’t care for fishing much after that. He seemed to only want to take his sons, too.I had not yet proved I was a boy.
When we stayed in Lewiston we often went to Hartwick Pines,which was both the last stand of virgin white pine in Michigan and a model of a lumberjack camp.( We had two huge white pines on all our 355 acres. Still upright, that is.) We also went to the Trout Hatchery in Grayling and the “Call of the Wild Museum” in Gaylord.(Taxidermied wildlife in natural poses and settings.) We were still too young, some of us, to enjoy the long ride to Mackinac Bridge and Island and the Upper Penninsula’s copper mine, Picture Rock, or the Sleeping Bear Dunes. He had plans for us and apparently long-range ones: when we all passed our tenth birthdays he took us to meet our congressman in Lansing. Ultimately, we also saw every state but 5 with him. (Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Montana.)
But early in our cabin-owning days, we only went north a little ways, to Traverse City or Gaylord. And when we did, the expressway, as we called the interstate then, went through lots of smoke from a burning oil well that couldn’t be put out. We had to pass that fire for at least three years, later managed as a red flame off in a dark field to the west. We made many trips past that burning oil well but many more that never went past our cabin. There was enough to do there.
As a new cabin owner, as the new owner of hundreds of acres of Michigan woods, Dad engaged us with a new Dad. We’d have never guessed he was in there.
Right away Dad had me, the oldest child, (by fifteen minutes, but it was obvious Debbie couldn’t handle it) accompany him to make paths from both sides of our cabin to the edges of our property.
Our cabin was in the middle of the land, which was all waterfront to road, a distance of ten minutes, walking to the road, half an hour, walking along the river. We made a path from the edge of the woodshed--nice, high ground--to the paved road called North Down River Road just above Big Creek Bridge. The only wet part was a ravine to cross at the end, a deep ditch we didn’t want to say to fishermen or especially hunters, “cross here.” We dragged a log over it where it stood on our path on our end but it stuck in the earth halfway up the road’s side of the ditch. Dad ran across it and it wobbled but held and he pulled himself up the bank with tree limbs. Tony usually crossed with a pole-like stick like a highwire acrobat, and I carried a walking stick to put my weight on. Dad put a fat “No Tresspassing ” sign on the fence there a day later, after securing it well. In a lot of places along the road farther from the creek than our hidden path the fence was down, and if we bicycled to the log crossing we could wheel the bikes a few more yards, hidden behind a fat swarth of trees and tall weeds, then emerge on the road. Poeple entering from the road saw no trails , only pricker bushes and the like.
As Dad and I, Pathmakers, worked our way to this road we came across a big wild raspberry patch. Finally getting around it, Dad reported deer trails ending at it and going on down to the “crik”.
I said,”Let’s have berries on both sides of the path.”
Dad scowled. “You’ll be walking through bees,” he said. But he did it--I think he took things into consideration like the thickness of different areas he could chop through--and later he dragged his mower over places that had no sticks to help the path materialize. I told him the cliff was all wet and he said it was filled with underground springs that were always 55 degrees cold and kept the river clean and clear quickly after a storm. “This is one of the five largest ground-spring rivers in the country,” he said. “It’s not that common.”
I knew already, because the lonely little store at the bridge a quarter mile away was called “The North Branch Store”, that the North Branch was the same-sized river near us. Now Dad explained the river system to me, of main stream and the branches and how they all flowed together eventually into Lake Huron.
“Au Sable means ‘of sand’ in French, ” he said.”The bottom is sandier than a lot of rivers.”
I told him we’d biked to the Big Creek bridge the long way and walked up our shore—
“What shore?” He interrupted.
“Well, there were lots of grassy areas patted down by people but we sunk right through the grass into water.”
“People?” Dad said. “Poeple don’t lay out there, Deanne. Deer do.”
“Well how come they don’t fall in?”
“How come?” He mimicked me.” Why they don’t fall in is because they do. You hear the splash. But when they spread their weight out they stay up.”
“Oh, like when they lay down.”
“Let’s go down here..” he said, leading me into the springy area,”I want to check the river out.”
So I was also with him when he made the river better for fishermen, at least, the first time. Always he hacked up trees that had blown across the creek. He also made several little areas for fisherman to climb out of the creek.
“No boat will ever come by here,” he said, returning to me after making one such clearing and then staring at the woods across the creek a minute, wiping his brow.”You’d never make it to the dam. And you sure can’t paddle upstream.”
The next day he pounded on the exterior wall of my bedroom. “Come on and give me a hand,” he said. “We’re going to go to the other end of the place, make sure the water’s fishable there, too.”
When we made this path leading downriver from the bunkhouse I discovered the Blondie Dam. Our new big outdoors, what I’d seen of it, was rather dismal --no one in the world could hear us play or yell for one another although our voices carried far, and the caves made me think of dinosaur days. But on this side of our cabins the land gradually approached the river. Trees were tall and thick. Everything was dry. The sun was everywhere. And, I thought, everything coming to the river from the north came through there. There were no people--no cabins—for 2 or 3 miles that way. Miles of cloak for deer, raccoons, skunks, snowshow hares, porcupines, chipmunks, wild cats; even bear were possible. They slithered or walked through the crickets’ chirps and knew they were alone in a huge world and safe and a part of the woods that concealed them. I thought I could think like them and be a part of night like they were.
We kept eye-heighth in mind as we hacked at things to make this path, and Dad made two more outs for fishermen, one just before they’d have to swim to keep from going over submerged chunks of cement bridge and road. The Blondie Dam had once been a dam or bridge, Dad wasn’t sure, but he said a storm had destroyed it. There was a perceptible two-track road leading straight north of it.
We had our complete privacy in that area because one family owned the land on the other side of the creek from the road to the dam, just like us, but they were never up there. Their cabin was right above the dam thus nowhere near ours. The Peases were grandparents and had their grandkids up a total of three times in the 25 years we were there. Past the Peases, like past us, nobody visited the woods. The man who owned the woods on the other side of the dam, our side of the river, told Dad to treat it like his own. This was a big chunk of woods, and beyond it were federal lands and a firelane with the utility poles we all used running down it, big poles with many arms of metal at the top. No one was across the river from our cabin until you got to fishermen who drove to the North Branch to fish, a quarter-mile and father from us.
I carried the “Private Property-No Tresspassing—tresspassers will be prosecuted” signs that we stuck on the fence encircling our land. We really owned half the dam path but the fence ran alongside it from the days that it really was a dam and bridge. No one was supposed to come down the trails Dad and I made for our family so when people did one day it stuck like a fable in our minds. But that’s a little later.
Once we’d been swimming at the dam and walked home down our path, we were all hooked. Except for Debbie, who’d stopped “playing” outside, which was tantamount to going outside. That first day in the caves, we’d all tried to cross the water by walking across a fallen tree, but Debbie insisted on scooting along it on her butt. There was so many brambles and branches that she had to keep extricating herself from stuck positions while Tony yelled crossly at her that we didn’t have all day and we were going to leave her there. Debbie had been hearing all her life how smart she was and didn’t tend to try things that might reveal she was not so smart or lacked common sense. So she didn’t come outside with us again. She did puzzles and read while Mom crocheted or snoozed or cooked or played solitaire. Debbie wouldn’t even walk over to the stove to see the 2 woodcocks Tony shot and was frying, four years after we got there. “Come see my two bites of chicken,” he pushed her, but she wouldn’t budge.
“Why would I want to see dead things?” She said haughtily. Up until then she’d planned to be a veterinarian. Maybe the blood got to her. Maybe she didn’t trust Dad to be able to protect us. The rest of us couldn’t help trusting Dad. Sure, everything goes wrong the first year you learn to care for a place that big. Dad never left the pump on throughout the winter again, and the pipes never burst when we turned the water on in the spring, consequently, again.But we also had a natural curiousity he was all for us satisfying—like what woodcock looked like without feathers, and what the fuss was all about (taste)?
My little brothers and I were in Heaven. Dad knew everything, probably everything in the world. But he sure knew any bird, plant, snake, or footprint, and a lot of opportunities arose, up there, to naturally engage us with our environment. He’d look over his dime store readers at us with his hawk-like eyes and you knew you were talking stupid. And you kind of knew it was going to be wrong to keep the baby bird you had in your shoebox.
“Put it back where you found it,” he’d say.
“It will die!” Terry or I would protest.
“Why?” He looked like Gregory Peck being Atticus Finch with Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason eyes.
I’d say,”The wind blew him out of his nest.”
Dad would rejoin,”He’s a fledgling—he’s learning to fly.”
“What’s a fledgling?”
”A bird learning to fly.” His voice would chuckle.
“What kind of bird is it?”
“I don’t know--some kind of warbler. “He’d look closer. “Maybe a black and white.” Then, the lesson on birds. “They do this. The mother sometimes even pushes them from the nest to get them to try to fly. She’s watching from nearby. She had it under control until you stepped in. Don’t touch it--if she smells you on it, she might refuse to take it back. Go on; put the box where you found the bird.”
“With the lid off,dummy,” Tony would add to Terry.
“A hawk could swoop down”—
“And grab it from the box?” Dad smiled.
(Years later my husband told me that he and his mother had raised an injured baby owl and when it recovered, let it go—and as it flew up into the sky for the first time since they’d found it, in front of a group of children from the school next door, a hawk swooped in and made off with it.)
“Why can’t we keep it?” Terry whined.”There’s plenty of wild ones.”
“Where did you ever hear of a pet warbler?” Dad said.
“Petula Clark?” I said, and got kicked.
“You haven’t,” Dad said, “because they don’t make good pets—they make dead birds. Wild birds don’t survive in captivity. The mother shows it what, where, and how to eat and other things you can’t possibly teach it.”
“But it would be in a cage being fed worms!” Terry said irritably.
“Who says they eat worms?”
“Cartoons,” I admitted.
“I never saw a cartoon about a black and white warbler.”
“Don’t all birds eat the same thing?” I said.
”No.”Not by a long shot.”
Dad would be sitting on the couch coloring. He had two binders filled with identical Michigan maps with only the counties mapped, and a different species of bird named at the top of each paper in type, Mom’s typewriter type. (I’m sure he typed these. Mom was never into what Dad was, not enough to stand still for five minutes and learn something.) With red magic marker he’d color in the counties he saw the named bird in (American Redstart in every county, a Green-Tailed Towhee in one). To be “with” him, I’d sit beside him and color birds with crayons in some coloring book or paint-by -numbers bird scene, teaching myself a few birds. Then Dad would tell me my book was filled with inaccuracies. It wasn’t easy to buy him bird gifts. A Canadian Geese throw, a refrigerator magnet of a loon--he’d say,”That’s not any duck I’ve ever seen”. “Every five-year-old recognizes a mallard because of the green—”
When we were little Dad did not use that gooey baby talk nor did he call us his little princesses or anything “sappy” for his kind of man he was. If we wanted “mook and cereal” at age 4 he said “Mook? Never heard of it.” Going off to work :”Am I going to wook? No. I’m going to work.” We had some sort of lazy tongue—kids my age were always flabbergasted that I could understand my little brothers. They couldn’t. Dad himself mumbled. We probably all inherited something, maybe a shortened tongue muscle. My siblings and I were amazed at the first people we met who could curl their tongues. When we told others about these fantastic people, the others would curl their tongues, too. We saw that almost everybody could roll their tongues up sideways and we felt gypped. But our speech pas faux wasn’t all tongue. The neighbor kids mocked us for calling cement “see’ment” and depot “dep’-o.” Perhaps something we got from our Missourian mother.
“You’re gonna git?” Dad said to his 8-year-old. “How come?” to someone who had just used the two words to say “why”.
“He goes, she goes, he goes,” he’d interrupt a 12-year-old trying to explain something important. “Don’t you know any words?” Dad himself used words we were unfamiliar with without giving it a thought. Words like “capitulate” and “hypebole” we could gather their meanings from the context. But he’d even drop words like “amorterization.” he seemed to think we’d gain larger vocabularies if we heard real words instead of speech trimmed to our age group. Yet he didn’t push reading or buy us books. It was good speech habits he approved of. And, for sure, he didn’t look up the answers to our questions and read them to us. He knew how far away the sun was, how many people were in the world, why a rocks had two colors. All our lives we asked him such things and rarely got silence or an I don’t know. Even talking with other adults he explained things, frowned, and tried to explain better but could not evade the specialized words the person probably didn’t know (something as simple as stamen or pistal). he wasn’t conceited—he truly wanted everyone who wanted to to understand as much as he did.
One day Dad took us to a cabin where we played in a lovely yard while he yakked with a man in a wheelchair. It was a splendid piece of property on the Main Stream Au Sable, with a little point that was all grassy, beautifully grassy, tickle-your barefeet grassy. When we left Dad said the man had dived into shallow water and broke his neck. He emphasized that we should never jump or dive into a body of water without knowledge of how deep it was. After we went back south to our year-round home, we took an end-of-school-for-the-summer visit to our uncle Al’s lake in Bloomfield Hills to swim. Dad and the other adults were sitting on the dock drinking iced tea while the boys and I swam to the raft on oil drums in the lake and played on it. When Tony went off the other side he began to flounder--he hadn’t expected to be in over his head and thought he was going to drown. I went in to pull him back on the raft but he was so panicked, he clutched my neck, making me go under again and again. I couldn’t get him to loosen his grip or grab anywhere else--he was practically sitting on my head (the only part of me that kept cropping up above surface). Finally Terry began to cry for Dad and I got out a “Dad! Help!”
Dad stood up and dived in and swam to us and saved us. Later back on land he was muttering about a finger he’d jammed when he’d dived into what had turned out to be pretty shallow water. I was so surprised. Dad? “You’re the one who told us never to dive into water we didn’t know ,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, but…” he grinned foolishly.
“Remember your friend,” Tony offered.
“Were you with him when he broke his neck?” Terry said, always ready for the exciting stories.
“No; I didn’t know him then. He bought our cabin from my folks.”
“Was that your cabin we were at?” I asked wondrously. He shook his head yes.” I never knew you had a cabin! Was it yours when you were our age?”
“We had several. We had one all my life,” Dad said.
“Why didn’t you get that cabin?” Tony demanded.
“It wasn’t for sale. ”
“Why didn’t you get one on that river?”
“It’s too busy there. I like ours because I can teach you to fly-fish without you kids hooking someone in a canoe.”
Ours certainly wasn’t busy—we only saw a handful of fishermen in 25 years, maybe 2 a year. Grandma had a cabin on the South Branch that she’d bought after Grandpa died; canoes went past it in droves, and fishermen were standing all over in it. She stayed there for the caddis hatch in May and the brown drakes and the broadwing rise in the summer and left for a warmer part of Michigan in September. The giant Michigan mayfly hatches in late June in huge numbers, which creates a “rise” in the river.In July and August the broadwing hatch takes place daily, covering most of the water from mid-day on. Both times are fishing frenzies. Grandma and Grandpa had always had a cabin on the main stream, but she got this last one on the South Branch, the main branch too popular by then. She’d come by and talk or go fishing with Dad on the North Branch; Dad went to her cabin and they fished side by side on the South. So Dad had his mother around a lot, and we were all very close.
We had two driveways. We had the snaking drive with tiny woods between the tracks and a straight, much shorter one with a very sandy track ending at a sandy dirt road, that second next to the barred road to the dam.
To bar it, entire young trees with sticks where they’d had canopies were piled in the way. If a car of drunk teens could get down it, they could ostensibly sail over the remaining part of the bridge and down to the chunks of it below in the creek. A stand of pines was also planted further down to discourage cars, and it got out of hand, the pines being legion and way too close together--before I left, they went from my knees as a child to taller than me as a 5”9’woman. You could not fit between them, and at a younger age they’d made perfect Christmas trees. Should have been used thus, perhaps--adult, they were scraggly with short sick-looking “thalidomide” branches. No one could drive the old dirt road there, that was for sure, as the trails man and deer made ran left and right of the impenetrable hillside of tight firs. You could see the track on our side, aleways--the firs had started between the tracks--and down the hill you could walk around the impenetrable forest and find the path again, two tire tracks going on to the dam. Down that hill was where I found all my partridge and woodcock, right by the path.
That short drive was surrounded by blueberry bushes and they also grew in the middle of it, with very sweet wild berries, and while their tiny size made it difficult to fill all the big popcorn pans and pitchers Mom gave us,we tried, and had many breakfasts cooked for us by the ladies where the crown achievement was the delicious blueberry pancakes.
Dad taught Tony before he was ten how to close down and reopen the place, shut down the pump in the well, what wasu nder the trapdoor in the hall floor.(They climbed down there with flashlights while Terry and I pretended we weren’t jealous.)
Next we knew, Tony had waders and a vest, a headlamp and his own fly collection. Dad gave him a flat grass creel with a large aluminum leader case
of the old style with felt leaves that was his father’s. And Tony told us that
Dad always had 4 or 5 candy bars in his fishing vest but didn’t tell us about
it because they wouldn’t be there when he needed one after fishing for hours.
Dad wasn’t as exclusionary about hunting skills—he got a bale of hay and
bows and arrows for the three of us, forgetting I was left-handed but I proved
I could aim well with a right-handed one: in summer camp a few years later
I won the highest prizes in archery and reached the top designation. Eventually
though--probably after one summer--the hay kept its tattered target but had a
salt lick in front of it, and we were shooting skeet with shotguns elsewhere. Each boy
had recieved one and their .22s became mine, one a bolt-action tube-fed .22
long rifle, the other a leaver-action single shot taking short or long rifle bullets. I was 13. Tony, 10, had a Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun and Terry got
a 16-gauge shotgun at age 9. No one used the B.B gun anymore and we offered
it to Debbie but she smirked. We didn’t like leaving her out of everything.
It wasn’t like you could go to a friends’ house, or the movies. It was a
9-mile drive for the day’s paper if the North branch Store wasn’t open,
and it wasn’t always.
My brothers may have been going to get the shotguns earlier—Dad had a thirty
ought six at 12—but they had shot at bottles and cans on the posts at the
edge of the cliff to the river, which Dad had not particularly liked, as
bullets could go on for a mile. So they went walking and shot up the only
street sign they found, the one informing drivers they were entering
Crawford County on one side and Oscoda on the other, about 1/3rd of a mile
from the dam.
Dad saw it while out walking and hit us with it. “I’ve seen that sign for
32 years and it didn’t have a bullet hole in it once until you two get a couple
of .22s!”
“How’d you see it for 32 years?” Tony said skeptically. Like Dad, he spoke
his mind, lacked tact, was a little rough around the edges. If your story
sounded like balogna to his limited mind he was certain it was.
“I’ve been here. I’ve had cabins here.”
“Not here,” Tony said. “You said on Mainstream Au Sable.”
“There isn’t much up here, Tony—you ‘ll soon know it all.”
When that incident was long over Dad told us that it was open season
on cowbirds, squirrels(except fox), and groundhogs.Any time. He basically
asked us, requested our assistance. And offered us a fun pastime at the
same time.
Cowbirds particularly irritated him. They laid their eggs in the nests of
other, smaller breeds of birds, like the rare Kirtlands Warbler, which
lived only in the Au Sable area and the Bahamas. When the babies hatched,
the cowbirds were born earlier, got bigger faster, and pushed the legit
babies out of the nest in their quest to hog all the nourishment the
parents brought. The duped parents raised only the cowbird, and another
breeding season was wasted .
Grandma hated squirrels getting all the food she left to atttract birds
to her feeders and she shot them with her .22 from her balcony in Traverse
Cit yeven when she was in her 80’s. Dad spent some money trying to rid his
feeders of them, and got at least one t-shirt with a commando squirrel
on it, as a gift,but by his 80’s he ignored them running along his roof
and onto the screened top of his lanai …maybe he felt that he and
them were both lucky to still have life and left it at that.
Groundhogs, or, woodchucks as they are also called, dug holes all over
the yard and garden. The first thing I got was one of them. (Heck, I knew
where the latest holes were—where my strawberry patch had been, Terry’s
carrots, Mom’s rutabaga and Tony’s spearmint.)
The boys confessed to me uncomfortably within a few years of it that their
first kill had been birds; one at the feeder for Tony. Some “little sparrow”
he thought was a cowbird, and then a female robin, and then Tony felt conflicted
and from then on only went after legal game. He could be embarassingly senstive,
too, and he told me that he just didn’t get his “jollies” out of ending “for
them” the life that the birds he’d shot had. He had said he’d thought one was
the sly, demonic cowbird (lazy, birders say), but he knew what they looked
like--differing from crows in that their black bodies had brown hoods--we
had flocks stop around our feeders, and they’d been pointed out many times.
He was perhaps lucky. One day I was crouched on the ground waiting for natural
sounds to resume around me after encroaching that far into nature’s world.
I heard a loud noise like something mechanical going at break-neck but rhythmic
speed. He suddenly left my tree and flew to another, sqawking. He was huge
and had an unusually shaped head or crest or something—my impression was
that this was something unique to our forest. When Dad came upon me he
huffed,”there’s a pileated woodpecker down the other path.”
“I saw one,” I said, and described it, and he agreed it was one. It would
have been nice if he’d explained that we’d likely seen the same one, and
that only one other had been seen in those parts in decades. Something
that outlandish might’ve been irresistable to a boy with a gun. I don’t
think Dad would have taken lightly to Tony returning home with a dead
one or leaving it with a bullet where Dad would undoubtedly discover it.
It’s funny; I recall another rare bird-sighting with Dad in which he forgot
to tell me how rare it was. I was in high school, boarding school in Monroe,
Michigan near Toledo, Ohio in 1972 and Dad came alone to get me for the 3
hour drive home.”I just saw a snowy egret not two blocks from you,” he said
as I got in the car.
I couldn’t imagine why he’d said it. After driving in silence ten minutes
I said,”Do snowy egrets usually migrate out of here by now?”
“More like 1947,” he said.”Only 9 have been spotted in Michigan since then.”
I had to wonder if he’d have even told me if I hadn’t persisted with a question.
He told us so much, so often, perhaps he thought we retained it all—perhaps
he had a photographic memory. But most of what he said we couldn’t hang onto
in our heads, like how the flight pattern told him what the migrating flock
way over our car was.
Terry got a bluejay at the raspberry patch and althought he had a goofy
expression resembling pride on his face, buried it there rather than show
Dad, and then was known for being into trapping critters to make into pets, not killing them. I killed my first thing alone, too, and always felt, along with my sense of being
citizen-ship minded, the pain I imagined a person would have who’d become
carried away with the fact that he had a gun and there was something he bet
he could hit and it was an innocent species not really legal to kill but he
was alone and only God could see. In both my brothers’ cases, that Eye of God
was way more than they could sleep anxiety-free with, and, whether they
understood it or not, the eye of themself was as unyeilding in its
judgements.
I mean, Dad had gotten the somber severity of disrespecting a firearm across
to it.
I don’t recall the coversation(s). I just know that there was one thing Dad
was able to impart to us in a no-uncertain-terms manner,it’s seriousness in
a way that he and we knew we would not ever ignore: the ground rule of having
a gun. Never aim a gun at anybody, even if you’re sure it’s unloaded. When the recalcitrant devils’ advocate “junior Paul” asked why, Dad said “If it’s loaded,
you could kill them. Why even take the chance? The benefits of pointing a gun
thought to be empty don’t outweigh those gained by just not pointing it in
the first place. Ever. Making that your cardinal rule.”
Tony said,”What’s my cardinal rule?”
Dad said,”Don’t play around with guns.”
Something in his manner, the way it was presented, it went way past coming out
of the woods at night to meet him at a campfire light where we filed in with
totem pole necklaces and placed lit torches in holders and silently waited
for his speech. Wherever we were, whatever he said, however gritted his jaw was
and angry his eyes, we got it into our very core beings. Part of that rule
meant knowing exactly what you were aiming at before puling the trigger, and
he’d fold over newspapers to articles about 14-year-old boys in Virginia and
New York who were killed by uncles and friends who aimed at a sound in the
brush, likely aware it was a major infarction and thinking no one would know.
Even bow-and-arrow hunters shot their brothers in the woods.
We were like little Dads marching along behind him on the path to the dam
whenever we all set out. We’d notice (or be told roughly) that he only had
his gun over his shoulder when no one was behind him, and aimed at the ground
before him if no one was in front of him. (Little feet stop abruptly.) I carried
mine easiest in my left arm aimed down ahead of me. When I found it in Dad’s
closet recently, I( who have severe heart failure) couldn’t hold it and look through the cross-hair scope
for more than a few seconds, because it sunk to the floor rather rapidly. I
tried walking with it the way I’d walked with it up to eight hours a day in
Crawford County. Forget it. I was obviously a strong teenager and young woman.
I’ve heard variants or should I say “add-ons” since: never show anyone your
gun unless you’re prepared to use it, never aim a gun at someone unless you
plan to kill them (because if they pull one right back atcha or move toward
grabbing your gun, if you don’t shoot, they’ll shoot you dead)—but when I
have read about, heard on the news, heard in the car I was in or from two
guys a friend of mine stopped to chat with, if I saw any monkey shines with
a gun, there was no possibility of a friendship, or me even being within
60 miles of the crazy and classless perpetrators. The ones who appeared passed
out but when a male friend walked by said his name and pulled a pistol on him,
then cracked grins and said “jus kiddin, bro”, I knew I didn’t ever want to know.
We all had a sincere awe of guns.
So I didn’t do like my brothers, and kill something innocent I might be ashamed
of and wince at and repress all my life. I went groundhog hunting. I was sure
there was nothing to it—we saw them lurking about all the time.
I must have got them all—none ever were spotted on our property again. I got
3 the first day and 1 the next.
Dad took my first one behind some trees away from the driveway and garden plot
and slit it open, seeming to expect me there, so I stood a little ways off,
curious but grossed out.He moved stuff aside with his knife and used the blade
tip to point at things (“liver”, “stomuch contents” “He’d just eaten this, see?
Hadn’t even started to digest it yet.” he showed me a sac, the location crucial,
which, if I cut into it, would taint the whole animal. he explained how some
species of animals, and which, had this and that some had 3 “sacs” you had to
stear clear of or you’d make all the meat the most vile tasting and bad food
and you wouldn’t be able to eat it—no one could stomuch it.
“Otherwise I could eat groundhog,” I said, like a robot reporter.
“You can eat any animal,” he said. “Some are so gamey-tasting or so gristly no
one would bother, but it’s feasible.”
Because I’d rid us of a pest, Dad must have taken my expertise for granted.
Many years later I read Grandma’s diary from when she was 18 to 22 and learned
that at 19 she was going out alone on the Sasketchewan wheat farm she and Grandpa
owned and shooting pesky gophers all day, returning on her horse with 6 or 13
bodies a day, and we all knew that she’d been craftily taking plugs at squirrels
from her twenties through her eighties with B.B guns and .22 s. He probably
saw a little Grandma in me, not bad—he’d been raised as 3 males and his Annie Oakley mom and really had no idea what to do with a girl child. Twin ones, at that. But he was familiar with 3 males and a female and so I had squeezed in, not making his mother any less unique but showing that I’d gotten dominant genetic material from her. He didn’t especially take me aside and train me in specifics of hunting.
But for a moment, a summer perhaps, I wanted to be a good hunter so I could be
in the car with Dad and Tony when they went somewhere duck hunting early in the
morning or pheasant hunting with a cooler of pop. A Pepsi from a cooler was
infinately more attactive than one from a refrigerator. The ice bits on the
sides, the refreshing coldness of it, the “get wet, let the cool dribble
down your shirt,next it’s sand—have fun while you’re young and be uptight
at 100” attitude.
And I always wanted to go with Dad, whenever he went. He had all the fun.
So there I was, totally allowed to hunt on our land, walking in the woods
about the time Tony was bringing his two woodcock home in his jacket pocket.
(Mom would have died, then thrown the jacket out; Tony got the first bird
2 hours before the second but it was obviously not enough bird to eat so he’d
stubbornly stayed afield until he got a second).
Leafy branches shook above me and I spotted a red squirrel in a tree. I got
him on my first shot.
Which was good, because that was the gun I had—the single shot.
Only he didn’t die, just fell 15 feet to a lower branch where he flopped
acrobatically but somehow never fell off.
“Dad…”I said, fist at my mouth in rising terror.”Dad!”
Dad was there as fast as my echo dropped. He was often nearby us in the
woods and we didn’t know.”What’s the matter?”
I pointed at the epileptic squirrel.”I only had one bullet and he didn’t
come all the way down.”
“What can I do?” Dad said, and I realized he had no gun.
“Youv’e got to get it!” I was too young to come up with ideas—not so, Dad.
He picked up a chunk of moist rotted tree bark and leaned back and threw it
at the squirrel’s branch. it sailed just under the squirrel some 12 feet up.
The second thing he threw--a rock--knocked that squirrel to the dead pine
needle carpet we stood on. It tried to pull itself to brush to escape but
went in circles, it’s lower half dragging. Dad picked up a stone and with no
warning to me as I looked in horror at the heavily-breathing, cute little guy
with huge dark eyes and bulging sides, smashed its skull.
He gave it three blows. Then we walked back to the cabin in silence, as if
looking for something. You know, a wild animal.
Neighbors were sparse, we kids learned from walking and biking around
the area freely. There was a cabin driveway opposite ours on the dirt
road, but the cabin was visible from the road, had large windows and no
curtains, and was always empty—no car, no pole open to say “we’re up here.” The
rest of the dirt road was barren and went a mile to an empty cabin in one
direction, where it turned north from the dam, and a half a mile to Morley
Road going East, then a few blocks to the paved North Down River Road, which
was past the North Branch from our cabin and uninhabited for the 22 miles to
Grayling except for a converted one room schoolhouse on a corner where Dad’s
friends Jim Wakeley and Alva Stephan went, which was about 8 miles out of
Grayling.(Because two of the bridges over the river, including one where
fishing is dynamite, were named Wakeley and Stephan’s, I asked
him if they were related. Sure, Dad said; they were the sons of the men for whom
the bridges were named; “there was nobody up here—so we all knew each other.
It was impossible not to.”) At this point, here and there, were federal lands
with roads to natural areas like lakes and ponds, but you had to know they
were there, and there weren’t any cabins. Heading into Grayling came the
cabins, and then the Victorian houses that composed Grayling’s 4-block
residential area. Conversely, if you went north on the paved road, you had
a half-mile walk to the road to “Lovells-9 miles.”
Along here were a handful of two-track driveways with poles across them at the
road and signs like “Suits Us” with a hand of cards sticking out of it,
“Northwoods Nest”, “River Me Timbers”, “Hoppes’ Haven”, “Fishing Rod’s Place”
“In the Pink”, “Gone Fishin”, “Heaven To Betsy (and Carl)”. We wanted to name
ours “Having Fun Young” (me), “Gnats and Brats” (Debbie),’Hidden Treasure”
(Dad), “Private Paradise”(Tony)or “Terry the Great’s Jungle Place”(guess).
We talked, but no sign was ever put up.
At the town’s edge you came upom buinesses run from log cabin homes, like
the elctronics repairman and the man who’ll drive to your cabin monthly
and make sure no tree broke a window. There were few other stores: Caid’s
Grocery, a fish restaurant, a bar with motel rooms over it, two
hardware/general/souvenier stores and an outright souveneir store.
Lovells always looked like farmland left unattended. That’s because it burnt
down before I got there, and took forever to return—if it has. Each time I
visit there are acres of newly charred fields that were woods in my youth.
The gift shops sold plastic fawns and Indian dolls and moccasins, lamps made
of antlers, flyswatters shaped like fishing rods, gag outhouse banks and toilet
paper holders, toilet paper printed in $100 bills,and what I feel is the
dumbest product devised—those blocks of wood that swing open at a hinge after
you read the joke/cartoon on the front, so you can see the riddle, answer,
or dumb fat and happy double entendre printed on the other block. The same gags
would be in the stores in Lewiston, 12 miles away,stamped ..”in Lewiston,
Michigan” that said ”...in Lovells, Michigan” in the Lovells stores. Gags
about the one that got away, fake measuring devices for the fish the old-timer
caught, ropes on wood called weather vanes (if it’s wet, it’s raining ), were
for hunting and fishing lodges, I gathered. The towns shared postcards, mostly
of the Main Branch Au Sable in Grayling. Items became more sophisticated, if you can call junk such, as I
aged and I went from buying little scizzors and Indian dolls to long nighty tees for my children picturing an over-turned canoe and saying “I took a dump in the Au Sable”.
There were several unique aspects to the Au Sable area and the ride to it. First,
the sugar beet trucks that constituted every 4th vehicle on the road and left
large beets on the side of the road, from Bay City’s drawbridge, the edge of civilized
Michigan, on up, even on the interstate right out of Grayling. Second, Mass
at Grayling’s Catholic Church was filled with young and middle-aged men in
camo, and women and girls in slacks, jeans, and snowmobile suits. It would be
years yet before females could wear anything but skirts and dresses ro school
and church but this church recognised the dedication of its congregants and
took them in their unique dress, all but necessary for life up there: there
was never a time that a dress and nylons did a woman any good up there. The
National Guard of four states took turns at the trainig ground there and we’d
pass and be passed by truck after truck of them in the open air or under
rounded covered-wagon-style roofs, lining the benches on both sides of the
back of the trucks. They would be in traffic with us for hours, staring at us, waving, peace signing us.
Dad fished Big Creek at first, going out at sunset and putting on his suspendered waders, dressing his line with Preen, which I knew well enough as a lip-colored, glossy cake in a little round tin can with lid, distinguishable from his mosquito dope (if the paper lids fell off) by the darker color pink and a kind of gritty substance on your hands, with the latter, both of which smelled identically of unscented tallow (and Grandpa had often raised pigs); Preen is a fly and line dressing that Grandpa had made to keep his dry flies floatable. He’d load the car and drive to the bridge, which in winter our red cabin could be seen from amongst the white snow and bare trees, but was as far away as Oz in the spring and summer. He fished downriver to and past our cabin. We took a spruce about 3’ tall out of our woods in 1964 and planted it in beteween the cabin and cliff. By 1984 it was 24’ high and 14’ wide and threatened to ruin the entire wondow view. Alsoin 1964, while we were finishing the school year, Dad had a dock put in at our cabin, beginning just out the picture window, descending the clay cliff there with arm rails and sturdy steps that never required a long leg. Where the land leveled out there was a wide flat dock (this was all fresh, varnished white pine)where lawn chairs could seat two old ladies while 3 boys fished unimpeded off the other end. They could get into the creek there by jumping down 3 feet to sandy dry land and walking in, or go down a set of s1. P
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wise2owls reviewed Version 2 -
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In reading this memoir, it was apparent that you have a very healthy relationship with your father… His interest in birds, flora and fauna of the area that your cabin was in is amazing to me… Your father was a naturalist when it seems there weren`t many… A joy to read, unique in how you were able to bring how you felt about your home and the many experiences that you had as a young girl… I hope that I see your name on the book store shelves soon…
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artofstocks reviewed Version 2 -
Read 32% of the Item
Great read and when you decide to publish it let me know as I am publishing my own book also.
Publishing your own book is more cost effective then going with a publisher. You can use your local UPS store for binding and printing.
Again, I see nothing in this novel that needs replacing.
Congradulations
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