Trees, Dogs, Books, Musings

Are the trees really taller above the Mackinac Bridge?

Once more, the North beckoned!

We went up over the Bridge again, Tree Guy and I and Naughty Barker. This time we left on Sunday and stayed until Wednesday, our mission to spend time with TG’s kids and grandkids. It went great! Thanks for asking. 

Notably, Naughty Barker dove right in with Good Dog Behavior! She recognized the place, jumped out of the car without barking, and immediately began racing happily around the yard with her new best friend! If I were able to load a video, you would see what I mean, but here are the two of them, relaxing together between romps.

Sunny and her new best friend, William

I did a lot of relaxing myself. Other than pancakes on Tuesday morning, I didn’t cook at all, and while the young people got canoes in the water, took saunas, played ping-pong and cards, I basically read my books, took long walks, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Oh, and here and there a nap. Truly, it felt like vacation—and there will be a few similar days in the weeks ahead, because, as we all know, the North never ceases to beckon.

The river never pauses....

Books that kept me awake --

When not napping or exploring or entertaining canines, and other than time spent around the table eating and socializing (socializing even after the eating had ceased, not shunning society!), I finished a couple books brought from home. One was a little Robert Louis Stevenson volume that Tree Guy couldn’t wait to get his hands on (pictured above), and the other that John M. Barry book I’ve been reading off and on for such a long time, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Reading books on the Civil War and what led up to it, as well as what followed it—all led me, over time, to conclude that our nation was born divided, and now, having read a single, very detailed book on the history of New England, I am strengthened in that opinion, even as New England complicates the picture, showing me that divisions in American society have never been as simple as North vs. South or Europeans vs. Native Americans. In New England, it was also English vs. Native Americans, Puritans vs. Quakers, freethinkers vs. Quakers, Rhode Island vs. Massachusetts, Plymouth vs. Providence, and on and on and on. There were massacres over control and ownership of land, and there was torture and cruel, disfiguring punishment (ears cut off, holes bored in tongues, etc.), as well as excommunication and banishment, over matters of religion—which makes it sound as if religion and land ownership were separate issues, whereas actually they were hopelessly entangled.

Some 17th-century disagreements seem today nothing short of absurd, e.g., should grace be said before or following a meal? (Thanks is thanks, isn't it?) Others went to the heart of the body politic, with loyalty oaths demanded and then accepted or refused, but the deepest, and one that continues to divide Americans to this day, was over the relation of the church and the government, or religion and the state. 

State religion or a wall of separation? Which was it to be? Which is it to be?

Those who wanted 17th-century government to champion one particular religious view—not only to protect that religion but also, in doing so, to sanctify government—cited a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 49, verse 23, saying “that the state must be 'nursing father and mother' to the church” in order to

…protect and preserve not only the church but to create a moral society. From this … it also followed inevitably that church and state were inextricably linked.

Roger Williams and others disagreed. Williams thought the danger of intermingling church and state was to the church, as it was bound to be corrupted by politics. He took his stand for freedom of conscience, implying freedom of religion, and Rhode Island was founded on the principle of a “wall of separation” between religion and government.

Besides large disagreements of principle, Barry exposes other divisions nascent in the American colonies. The English of the 17th century, he notes, “had relatively little outright racial prejudice against Indians,” acknowledging that they themselves had recently been “‘savage and uncivill and worshipped the divell,’” but when one Englishman went on to compare Native Americans to the Irish, Barry reminds us how the English slaughtered the Irish—men, women, and children—on more than one occasion. English “war” on the Irish was a prequel to American “war” on North American indigenous populations.

All these disagreements, all these divisions! What has held our country together for 250 years? Nothing, I would say, but our love for the land and respect for law. So now, when we see due process and habeas corpus brushed aside by our federal government, I ask, what will hold us together? If not law, what can unify such fractious multitudes?

Solid ground! We need the law as our solid ground!

After Roger Williams, my brain needed a vacation, and I picked up an old Agatha Christie paperback, but it belonged to the cabin and did not come home with me, so I’m now reading a Studs Terkel-like book of oral histories called Chinese Lives. Priced (used) at only $6.50, it sat long on the shelf in my shop, unchosen and passed over, and only now do I realize what a gem my customers have missed! It will return to the shelf in time, giving customers another chance, but only after I have finished it myself. The lives are out-of-date, of course, the book published in 1985, with a preface by Studs Terkel himself, but history, always pregnant with what was to come, makes fascinating reading.

What condition is our condition in?

I don’t know what to say about the state of the union, because if we have ever been a union, we are certainly not one now. Daily episodes of insanity mix with daily episodes of cruelty and are stirred together daily with corruption, grift, and complete disregard for the history and ideals of our nation, as well as contempt for the law under which we all should be living. Destruction of habitat and of national monuments, absurd and childish attempts to rename geography—all demolish not only our physical country and its history but tarnish our world reputation in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to overcome in the future. The present nightmare will not go on forever, but its end is no guarantee of the restoration of the United States of America, a country that was never perfect but a country that aspired to continual improvement. Now? 

…Roger Williams, this devout Puritan, this man of faith who loved God, was willing to risk more than his life [for freedom]. For of all the remarkable things he said, the most remarkable was this: “Having bought Truth deare, we must not sell it cheape, nor the least graine of it for the whole World, so not for the saving of Soules, though our own most precious.” 

How indeed could one save one’s own soul by selling truth? 

For he knew that to believe in freedom and liberty required faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience. And that was soul liberty.

Quoted material above comes from John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (NY: Viking, 2012), a book your Northport bookseller strongly recommends, either for solitary self-enrichment or lively book club discussion.

Anyway, in case you wondered, we in Northport are very patriotic. We love our country! And our post office!

4th of July photograph on post office counter

Coming soon to your bookstore in Northport!

A new book co-created by someone with a well-known family name will soon be at Dog Ears Books. Next week, I hope. For now, that’s all I’m going to say, except that if you have any kind of travel itch, you’ll want to take a look at it and get some brand-new ideas, so watch this site!

❓❓❓❓❓

Another feather in the dog’s cap

Not only more sociable than ever before, she was a really good dog in the car, too! Best ever! Little girl is growing up at last.

Lengthy postscript 8/29/26:

Michigan author Robert Traver (his pen name), otherwise known as lawyer and flyfisherman John D. Voelker (his legal name) served on the Michigan Supreme Court until the success of his novel, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, allowed him to retire from the law and devote himself to fishing and writing. Born in Ishpeming, son of an Ishpeming saloonkeeper, Voelker practiced law first in Chicago, then at home in Ishpeming, before winning his campaign to be the Prosecutor of Marquette County. It was Governor G. Mennen Williams who appointed Voelker to the Supreme Court, but Voelker tried the case on which his novel was based before he served on the court. As Robert Traver, he wrote both novels and books on fishing that continue to be popular today, and the John D. Voelker Foundation continues to do good work in his name.

I was passing a few quiet moments between customers today (Saturday, 8/29/26) when I came across this passage in ANATOMY, lawyer Paul Biegler chiding his client, Lieutenant Manion, for making disparaging remarks about the law:

‘…[F]or all its lurching and shambling imbecilities, the law—and only the law—is what keeps our society from bursting apart at the seams, from becoming a snarling jungle. While the law is not perfect, God knows, no other system has yet been found for governing men except violence. The law is society’s safety valve, its most painless way to achieve social catharsis; any other way lies anarchy.’

Biegler pauses and then goes on:

‘The law is the busy fireman that puts out society’s brush fires; that gives people a nonphysical method to discharge hostile feelings and settle violent differences, that substitutes orderly ritual for the rule of tooth and claw. The very slowness of the law, its massive impersonality, its insistence upon proceeding according to settled and ancient rules—all this tends to cool and bank the fires of passion and violence and replace them with order and reason. That is a tremendous does accomplishment in itself, however a particular case may turn out.’

The lawyer character’s speech soars as he argues with his client that 

‘...all our fine Magna Cartas and constitutions and bills of right and all the rest would be nothing but a lot of archaic and high-flown rhetoric if we could not and did not at all times have the law to buttress them, to interpret them, to breathe meaning and force and life into them. Lofty abstractions about individual liberty and justice do not enforce themselves. These things are reforged by the law, for every jury trial in the land is a small daily miracle of democracy in action.’

- Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1958)

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 --