That Was Then, This Is Now

 A Bit of Bookstore History (Northport)

 

The little shed in the photo above once stood on Waukazoo Street. Long gone now, it was the original Dog Ears Books in 1993. By 2008, the year the photograph was taken, so much vegetation had grown over the entrance that the shed had the air of an enchanted fairy tale hut. Only one pure in heart would know the magic words to utter for the door to swing open! Ah, but the treasure was gone by then, the bookstore at home in a new location, north and around the corner on Nagonaba Street.

 

By now, late 2023, we have been back on Waukazoo Street long enough (since winter of 2005-06) for an entire Northport generation to get born and graduate from high school. Kids whom I remember from their middle school days are running their own businesses now, and only the other day someone reminded me, “You’re hardly a spring chicken!” I’m not? Gee, thanks!

Friends

 

Mortality With Friends, a book of essays by Fleda Brown, speaks to me, because “who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” It is good to have friends! Some of my friends, when they heard that I’m staying in northern Michigan all winter this time around -- for the first time in eight years – asked if I would have the bookstore open. The question amazed me. Yes, of course! I can’t imagine staying home in my old farmhouse week after cold winter week, seeing no one but my dog! The artist next door (in my husband’s former storefront studio), Deborah Ebbers, will be around, too, and I’m thinking the two of us may have to cook up a little snow season merriment now and then because, even with a forecast predicting that Michigan will not be as wet or cold as usual this winter, there are bound to be a few gloomy days, days that will need brightening up, and what better than friends and laughter to do just that?

I had a general thought about friendship the other day. It came as I was musing on something I’ve often heard people say after losing a pet: “Oh, I couldn’t have another one! It’s too hard when they go! I can't go through that again!” Couldn’t someone say the same of friends? 

Having reached the era of life when every week, it seems, brings a loss, we hardly wish not to have had those friendships! One old friend (now “late,” as people say in the Botswana novels of Alexander McCall Smith) used to say he didn’t want to make any new friends, but even that seems short-sighted. There’s no shortcut to a long friendship, it's true, and it's certainly true that old friends can never be replaced, but, as we used to sing in those long-ago Brownie troop days, of old and new friends, “One is silver, and the other gold.” 

 

 

My Neck of the Woods

I live ever so slightly north of the 45^th parallel, a geographical smidgeon closer to the North Pole than to the Equator. The bulk of Leelanau County, however, lies below that imaginary line. At any rate, I make no apologies for the title of a new book on how best to see Northern Lights (which have been spectacular this year), Below the 45^th Parallel: The Beginner’s Guide to Chasing the Aurora in the Great Lakes Region, by Melissa F. Kaelin. As the founder of Michigan Aurora Chasers, this author is well suited to provide advice to the novices among us, whichever side of the line we call home. I suppose one piece of advice she will give, though, involves bundling up and getting outside in the middle of the night. Sigh!

 

On Saturday morning the 45th parallel stopped me alongside Grand Traverse Bay. I didn’t remember seeing the stone announcing the Line on previous occasions when I’d pulled off M-22 to enjoy coffee and views, but the big rock got me out of the car, and I was then able to frame the road curving north.

(Getting out of the car for dog-walking is something we don’t do on the highway, only on back roads.)

 

 

A Swiftly Passing Season

 

Grey skies notwithstanding, fall color was spectacular these past few days -- pretty white birches with happy, quivering yellow leaves, brilliant reds and oranges and golds of maples, blazing scarlet sumac, and the deep blood-red of osiers and chokecherries. Beech leaves in the fall always make me think of buttered toast dripping with honey. Almost every bend in the road gave reason to gasp and pause, même sous un ciel couvert, though we were all, locals and color tourists alike, rather pining for sunshine and blue skies.

We get what we get in this life, though, and what we got was spectacular and isn’t over yet.

Despite the eye-popping, brighter colors of other trees and shrubs, to me nothing speaks the truth of autumn’s poignancy more eloquently than the soft, subtle tones of the ash. Even its name, ash, reminds us that all lives, individual, are destined to end, even as Life, the force, springs renewed after each winter’s sleep. 

Butterscotch to plum

And because the emerald ash borer so devastated Michigan’s adult ash population in recent years, I cannot bring myself to discourage seedling and sapling ashes on land I otherwise want to maintain, loosely, as open meadow. Autumn olive is not welcome there, nor are black walnuts or silver maples (any of those three species would gladly take over the meadow if I let them), but volunteer ash trees and hawthorns are under my protection.

Baby ash tree

Haws (hawthorn fruit)

Farmer-author Gene Logsdon, whom I met once at a book trade show in Dearborn, Michigan, believed that ash trees would make a comeback, with young volunteers gradually maturing to take the place of their late departed elders. I hope he was right. I am rooting for the trees.

 

Hunting Season

 

Bow season is now, to be followed by firearm deer season, muzzle-loading, and then back to bow. Sunny isn’t crazy about her high-visibility costume, but it’s important to me that she doesn’t get mistaken for a deer when we’re outdoors. Please be very careful out there, friends!

Against her will, Sunny Juliet models hunter orange this season.

Doesn’t Everyone Want to be Rich? Adventure in the Mountains

Where did we go? What did we see? Read and find out!

[This adventure took place on 2/18/23, but I've fallen somewhat behind in posting, and the last adventure post (I just looked) was February 14. Sorry! There is another exciting overland adventure "in the can" that I'll try to post before the end of the week. If not then, first thing next week.]

***

My random reading – picking up books without a reading list or syllabus prepared ahead of time -- is good for finding all kinds of interesting information, and I never know when it may apply. For instance, lately at bedtime I’d been reading Anthony Trollope’s North America (reading this book for quite a long time, prolix writer that he was when not crafting fiction), and he kept mentioning “Dives” in passing, as if no one needed that explained. I did, though, so I did a little digging, and it turns out to be a reference to a “certain rich man,” unnamed in the New Testament, the one in the parable who refused to give poor hungry Lazarus so much as a crumb (Luke, 16: 19-31). Although the Bible does not give the rich man a name, readers over time found mistranslation of the Latin handy, and thus poems and songs (e.g., see here and here) came to be written about Lazarus and “Dives,” and as more time went by, “Dives” became a generic name for a rich man.

 

So when my hiking and dog-walking partner here in the ghost town proposed an expedition to the site of the old Dives Mine, only days after I’d learned the background of the name, the coincidence struck me forcibly. My friend had never heard of Dives as the name of the rich man in the parable, either, but I was sure that must be the reason behind the name of the mind: “They all wanted to get rich!” I exclaimed. “Well, of course!” was her response. She was too kind to add, "Duh!" But why else would anyone bother to open a mine?

 

Dos Cabezas as a mining town had a checkered history. The Dives Mine was first opened in 1877, but since it “reopened” between 1911and 1914, clearly it was not in continuous operation through all those decades, and 1942 saw it closed for good. Enormous rocks of white quartz are beautiful, but it was gold that the owners wanted, and the $60,000 worth of gold ore mined between 1882 and 1931 – five decades -- was not enough to make them rich. If you want to read more about mining in Dos Cabezas, see my 2015 blog post, which drew heavily for historical background from Phyllis de la Garza’s The Story of Dos Cabezas.

What to take --

Girls just wanna have fun.

The hike my friend planned for us would not be a deep exploration of mines, however. We visited some old mine structural ruins, but the real payoff was, as it so often is, just getting up into the mountains with our dogs.

dry stone wall

layers of depth

 Look carefully at the scene just above. Can you discern the two deep gullies we will have to negotiate to get to what is, as yet, the hidden site of the old mine? Down and up again, down and up again -- and then --

We approach the site

I don’t need signs or a fence to warn me to stay away from the entrance! But it’s good that the fence was there to keep our dogs out; we let them (as if we could have stopped them) explore water and mud instead. There were no cows there on the Saturday we hiked to the mine, but my friend says they love to gather there in summer, where there is always shade and cool water. No doubt!

Below is a kind of scene I love -- lichen on old ruins, drowsing in sun-dappled shadows.

What I hadn’t realized beforehand was that the mine site and ruins were only the preface to the real hike of the day. Somehow I neglected to photograph the old high road from below, but here is my friend on – does this look like a road to you? Once it really was....

Now look back down (below). Within that black oval is the mine site, where we were, with the trees and water, lichen-overgrown walls, and the old mine entrance guarded by the giant white quartz rock. 

Looking down on the mine site just visited.

And our road above the mine site is still climbing.

I keep looking back down and then up at the rocks ahead, trying to imagine reaching them.

Staggered themselves, staggering sight!

And yet there were buildings up here once!

This foreground rock formation was BLINDING white in the sun.

Ah, a tree! Lovely relief! 

(We have passed the tree now.)

Another mine entrance, this one not fenced off – a direction to discourage dogs from exploring. I breathe easier once we are past it. Bats? Bears? Or just a deadly fall straight down -- ???

We saw no bats or bears, but there were plenty of vegetable souls (pace Aristotle) all around us.

Look closely.

There it is on the ledge: a claret cup cactus.

Beautiful lichens dare the highest peaks.

Another brave old tree beyond the mine tailings. 

Lofty century plant overlooks distant valley.

Now we are bushwhacking. Puppies have youth's boundless energy!

Do I seem to be running low on words? Maybe because I am running out of breath. Legs are protesting, and thorns are mercilessly attacking hands and arms. My hiking partner, had she been with someone younger that day, would have gone farther and higher still, but I had reached my limit -- because, remember, as far as you go in one direction, you have to retrace that same distance returning, and the image below shows you how distant we were from our little ghost town. 

Dos Cabezas is inside the black oval. Beyond is the Sulphur Springs Valley and Dragoon Mountains on the valley's western perimeter.

Many years ago, my son complained aloud one day, “I’m tired of being poor!” The Artist told him, “We’re not poor. We’re just broke. We have a very rich life.” I often feel that way – rich without any kind of ultimate, worldly wealth. The cloud formations above the rocky spine of the mountains were beautiful. I didn’t need to strike gold or copper or encounter bats or bears. It was enough to hear a northern flicker laughing at us as we made our careful way back down what had long ago been a road. Even being exhausted, once back home, an afternoon spent reading and dozing on the couch, with sun coming through the blinds, felt luxurious. 

Dives? No, that's not me. Mine is another kind of rich life: life with a wet, muddy, stinky dog whose coat was so full of weedy prickers she needed an immediate (though very amateur) trimming job. Companionship and outdoor adventure. That's true wealth for me.

Come back soon for an expedition to another exciting, hidden-away corner of Cochise County, Arizona!

Did you ever -- write a letter to a stranger?

Patience on a comforter

 

Good morning! And no, to answer a question about my question, politicians don’t count (although writing to them is always a good idea). I'm thinking of writing to someone geographically distant whose story you read or heard somewhere, and you’ll never run into each other at your local grocery store, but you thought, We have a lot in common. I’d like to know him-or-her-or-them. (There. I’m practicing using they/them as a singular pronoun. I need practice with that, I guess.) Have you ever done that?

 

Occasionally I receive notes in the mail from people I’ve never met or encountered so fleetingly that no memory image remained, because I have had a bookstore in Up North tourist country for 29 years and counting. (Thirty next summer!!!) Because some of my annual visitors keep track of my life on this blog. Or because someone ordered a book or books from me years ago, and we fell into correspondence for a while.

 

But it doesn’t always work out long-term.

 

Once, for example, I had a book order from a Frenchman who was teaching at the time in an agricultural lycée on an island in the Indian Ocean. We were both devotes of the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. He had ordered a Fabre book I had listed online (back when I did that sort of thing) and explained the reason that his mailing address was France: all mail went there first, then came to the end of the island where the airfield was, and eventually worked its way to the other end of the island where the school was. He sent me a little package of vetiver, one of the island’s chief exports. 

 

I sent something back (I don’t remember what), and things were going along swimmingly until I shared an idea I had: When he and his wife returned to France, we should set up agricultural exchange visits! I imagined having my French visitors stay in our old farmhouse and touring them around Leelanau County, introducing them to cherry growing culture and farmer friends in my township and beyond. They would have so many questions and would love northern Michigan, wouldn’t they? Then they could host an agricultural visit in return. We might have several of these from one year to the next -- as I imagined the concept growing.

 

But after sharing my brilliant idea, I never heard from my distant friend again. In retrospect, I think he must have thought I, personally, was angling for a free country place to stay in France with my husband, which wasn’t at all the idea, but I never followed up on whatever misconception or misunderstanding there must have been, and there ended our exchange. 

 

Another correspondence was more successful. My distant customer was a woman who ordered several books of old dog stories, and as it turned out, she was also a writer. When her next book came out, she sent me an early copy. Wonderful writer! That was years ago, and we are still in touch, albeit infrequently. 

 

So now, this morning, I’m kind of on the fence. Does a woman-woman letter-writing connection between strangers work better, especially when the women are roughly the same age? Or is there any chance at all that a young(er) male Scottish bookseller (my son’s age) would welcome hearing from an aged female colleague in the wilds of northern Michigan? He and my son have the same birthday, but surely the fascination of that coincidence is only in my point of view and would mean nothing to him. 

 

Really, don’t I already have enough to do without launching – no, attempting to launch – another pen pal relationship? That was a rhetorical question….

 

Happy Labor Day weekend! And remember to join us at Tuesday evening’s open house at the Leelanau Township Library, where you can have Sarah Shoemaker sign a copy of her new book for you, beginning at 7:30 p.m.