Choosing Well

Wetlands near my home

The pond was smaller than we expected, not much larger than a baseball infield, and could be reached only by climbing over ancient fallen trees around its edges. Hidden as it was, isolated by swamps and inconvenience, it seemed never to have been fished. It seemed to be trembling with quickness. 

 

We maneuvered over the tangled lots until we reached open sunlight at the edge of the water. If we had slipped from the logs we balanced on we would have fallen into bottomless muck. Gray skeletons of trees stood upright around the shore, and lily pads grew in the shallows. Damsel flies hovered delicately. A trio of turtles dropped, in sequence, off a silvered log.

 

-      Jerry Dennis, A Place on the Water

 

That was the book I selected from my home library for bedtime reading on Wednesday, and I could not have made a better choice. As I read the words, I could see turtles plopping, one by one, damselflies hovering, and even hear the whine of mosquitoes (without the “inconvenience” of slapping at insects myself), and after an evening spent pushing a lawnmower and supervising dog play, I was glad of a pillow vacation before sleep. Armchair travel, you know, so why not pillow vacation? Makes sense to me. 

 

Bedtime is cozy time.

Thursday I was up and out early, on a mission to buy more plants, planning to come home from the bookstore later to get them into the ground and into pots. It was a pleasant day in the bookstore. Door open, genial browsers and buyers, good conversations. I put up a new blog post and took delivery of the first half of this week’s new book order, too. 

 

Five o’clock closing and a short stroll down to the parking lot, I was getting in my car when a text came from my sister. “Verdict in. Guilty on all counts.” 

 

My plans for the evening did not change. One group of Americans was all for breaking out champagne and dancing in the streets, while another was donating massively to the former president’s campaign (or so we are told) and swearing revenge, and I imagined that few, if any at all, would be changed by the verdict. Nevertheless, my dianthus needed to get into the ground … bacopa needed to be potted … tomatoes and barely emerging beans needed to be watered … and Sunny Juliet needed (in her opinion) to get outdoors and chase tennis balls and ground squirrels.

 

Morning light

It was late when I cleaned up after an evening of gardening and settled down for the night with my dog and book. Reading of the time Gail, Jerry’s wife, had an experience of fishing euphoria reminded me of a rainy day in the Upper Peninsula, the Artist splashing happily upstream and crying out, “I get it! I get it!” I have always enjoyed casting with a fly rod, but other than that, in general, I am more like the pre-euphoric Gail: Being out on or near the water, appreciating the plant life, and watching fish I can see underwater means more to me than catching fish. One day long ago, on Wolf Lake west of Kalamazoo, I looped the end of a stringer around my toe while the Artist continued to fish. Every now and then his fish on the stringer would tug at my toe, and my consciousness joined with that of the fish, wet and wordless.

Branch of Fox River

The next morning Sunny and I were outdoors just before sunup. There had not been an overnight frost, but to be on the safe side I sprayed my baby tomato plants before the sun’s rays hit them, then went back to this spring’s ongoing brick project, hauling another half-dozen up from the buried pile to the front yard where I’m putting together a path. Preview of the project almost completed, soon I’ll remove the bricks from their temporary placement, carefully level the ground, and put down a layer of sand before replacing bricks in final configuration. 

Vegetable garden at evening

 

Rough draft (explanation in text)

Here's the thing: I had zero celebratory impulse when I heard the verdict. I thought what a sad day it is for our country when a former president is proven a criminal – and I say that while also believing it was a sad day when he was elected president and, before that, a sad day when the once-respectable Republican Party (my parents were Republicans) gave him the nomination. But on top of all that sadness was also the depressing awareness of deep divisions among American citizens, in families, between friends. Those who hate him see his supporters as idiots and psychopaths, while his supporters see the haters as Communists and perverts. That is not judgment but demonization.

 

Friday. Another day. Busy, very social day in the bookstore. Serious, appreciative customers. Then an evening of mowing grass, a job that used to take me two evenings to complete and now takes me three, even though I’m leaving more areas unmowed. Then folderol with dogs. Finally, bedtime – and an essay on Jerry Dennis’s meeting with legendary Michigan author John. Voelker, a.k.a., Robert Traver.

 

I was invited to ride in the fish car with Voelker…. The vehicle was the latest in a succession of fish cars, a Jeep wagon only four years old but which had already logged nearly 170,000 miles. Virtually all those miles were driven in the central Upper Peninsula. All his life Voelker was a prodigious traveler of back roads and timber trails, a trait common in the U.P., where families often spend weekends exploring the seemingly endless network of old two-tracks.

 

My satisfaction with this book is so deep I can barely find words for it. Look at a map of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, locate Sault Ste. Marie, and then follow the shoreline of Lake Superior west to Munishing. Drop south and follow the north shore of Lake Michigan east to the Straits of Mackinac. That is my U.P., territory the Artist and I explored off and on for years, the images as bright in my mind as are my immediate physical surroundings. 

Mackinac Bridge in the rain

But I can also imagine someone unfamiliar with Michigan, maybe someone from Maine or Vermont, reading A Place on the Waterand being transported by the sorcery of the author’s word paintings, as have often been reading of places I've never visited in person. This is what makes a perfect bedtime book, a perfect pillow vacation after a day of work and the day’s background buzzing (like a fly trapped in the window) of political events.

Make no mistake -- I do not advocate ignoring politics or failing to vote. There too it is important for us to judge and choose wisely, not only for our personal peace of mind but for the common good and the future of our country. 

P.S. Food for thought: "Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

And this: "MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 600 points.”

- Heather Cox Richardson, 5/31/2024

Below: Northport on Saturday morning, first day of June 2024 --