Hills and Woods, Dogs and Caravans

At times I find myself overcome by a kind of emotional paralysis, as, moving still (physically) through the world, I wonder why. Is it really worth the bother? I felt that way on Saturday, in the late afternoon, coming home from my last bookstore day of the season, but I came home to my dog, and Sunny and I went outdoors to ramble through the sun-dappled woods, beech-gold-and-brown now at the end of October, then home to supper, and I was content for the evening, or as content as is possible for me with life as it is now, life without the Artist. The same tired Why? question waits for me in ambush when I first wake in mornings, but my dog’s presence and a comforting mug of hot coffee push it away. Empty journal pages are ready to be filled, pages of whatever book I’m reading ready to be turned, and in time another day’s light will push away the darkness, and the dog Sunny and I will go outdoors once again.

 

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair will be a lifetime book for me, I’m sure, one I will re-read in coming years, either starting at the beginning of the first book, Sunset Song (as I do with Pride and Prejudice or South of Superior or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) or opening anywhere, to any page, to read with pleasure (as I do Proust or Thoreau). For now, with Gibbon, I’m only almost to the end of the second book, Cloud Howe, for the first time, but it’s all there: the ancient land; thousands of years of struggling, striving humans; the cycle of seasons and all the beauties of the year in turn, returning again and again; farming and mining and industry and their hardships (“the Economy”) and workers always up against it; religion and politics and waves of hope and anger sweeping through the land; and always “the speak” -- gossip, that is -- eyes of neighbors on neighbors. All of life, in other words, the universal in the particular (the only place it can abide), and Gibbon seeing and showing both the horrors and the wonders, sadness and joy of it all.

 

Leelanau hills

Always Chris (who began as Chris Guthrie and was then Chris Tavendale and has now become Chris Colquohoun) liked walking up into the hills, and now she and her minister husband sometimes go together:

 

Robert was walking so fast that Chris for a while could hardly keep up with his stride, then she fell into that and found it easy, the Kaimes was past and above it the path opened out through the ragged fringe of the moor that came peering and sniffling down at Segget as a draggled cat at a dish out of doors, all the countryside begirdled with hills  and their companions the moors that crept and slept and yawned in the sun, watching the Howe at its work below. 

 

-      Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe

 

Isn’t that fine, though? The “ragged fringe of the moor” as “a draggled cat,” sniffing, perhaps at a saucer of milk put out on a stoop? And the hills and moors that “crept and slept and yawned in the sun”? Here on my home peninsula, water in every direction but south, my husband the Artist used to say of the islands offshore that they moved around in the night, and it’s true that the islands’ perceived location from any particular viewer depends on where that viewer stands, so that from one beach they are straight ahead, from another to the left or the right of a person standing onshore. In Cochise County, Arizona, landmark mountains similarly shift about through the landscape and perform the same orienting function there as Leelanau County’s lakes here.

Orienting by bodies of water: Suttons Bay

Orienting by bodies of water: Lake Leelanau Narrows

Blue heron hunting

Here. I am here now, and the fields and orchards and woods have taken on their late fall colors, and the apple harvest is in, and all the villages and county roads are lined with campaign signs, Election Day only a little more than a week off. And “the speak” goes ‘round and ‘round, as always, as locals keep track of one another’s doings and sayings. 

A California couple thinking of moving to Michigan visited the bookstore one day and said they felt drawn to Northport. The husband asked me, “And is this a town where everyone gets along and there are no quarrels?” “There’s no place like that,” I told him, not adding, as I could have, "except in fairy tales." People are people, anywhere they live together. It doesn’t make a place bad, only human. 

 

Chris Colquohoun’s pregnancy becomes “the speak” of Segget, many seeing it as shameful for a minister to “show plain to his parish that he did that kind of thing,” but Chris has lived with “the speak” all her life and doesn’t let it upset her.

 

Most of the gossip Chris heard of or knew, and cared little or nothing, folk were like that, she thought if you’d neither books nor God nor music nor love nor hate as stand-bys, no pillar of cloud to lead your feet, you turned as the folk of farm and toun—to telling scandal of your nearest neighbors, making of them devils and heroes and saints, to brighten your days and give you a thrill. And God knew they were welcome to get one from her, she found herself liking them as never before, kindled to new interest in every known face….

 

One of my favorite old sayings, one that applies both to small-town gossip and huge social tumult, goes like this: “The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.” Life moves on. We are all here now but for a brief moment (Gibbon himself died in his 34th year), and beyond campaign signs, autumn leaves turn and fall, and beyond rancorous voices, day brings chirps of chickadee, cries of crow, a bluejay's objections, and in the night coyotes yelp and howl.

Happy November, friends.

 

Haunted By Moose

The area encompassed by Leelanau Township is 227.6 square miles. Isle Royale in Lake Superior has an area of 206.7 square miles. On Isle Royale there are 1500 moose. 

Can those of you who live in or know Leelanau Township imagine it with a moose population of 1500? Where would they all sleep? Okay, that’s just being silly, but the overpopulation problem is real, as the wolf population on the island is now reduced to two, and those two — mother and son are also sister and brother — cannot reproduce. Elderly besides, they are unable, without help from other wolves (presently unavailable), to take down moose and survive instead on a diet of small mammals and the occasional moose that dies of natural causes. 

My TEA guest this week (that's Thursday Evening Authors, the literary series celebrating my bookstore's 25th anniversary), author Loreen Niewenhuis, told us that one devastating cause of wolf die-off was canine parvovirus. A domestic dog infected with the virus was brought to the island, and the infection spread through the two then-resident wolf packs, killing large numbers of animals. Another problem was inbreeding. In colder years, and with fewer humans living on the Lake Superior shore, wolves could cross back and forth from the island to the mainland. Illness, inbreeding, climate change -- all have contributed to killing off wolves on Isle Royale.

Poor wolves, you may be thinking, but the moose have problems of their own. Think of overcrowded human cities and endemic poverty. Also, moose cows commonly produce twins. Without predation by a healthy wolf pack, the moose population is on the rise. (If you missed Loreen Dog Ears Books’ TEA this week, you can read a bit about the problem here.) Moose love balsam fir. The trees don’t get very tall, as the moose browse their tops. What would happen if too many moose “deforested” the island?

Since I’ve been reading Collapse: How Societies Decide To Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (and I wonder if the title was chosen or guided by the publisher, because it hardly seems the Easter Islanders made a conscious decision to starve) and can’t help seeing parallels between human populations and societies and those of our animal relatives. With those thoughts in mind, this morning I was not only haunted by problems of human civilization but also haunted by moose. Maybe I am just haunted in general by the challenges of life on this beautiful, tough, fragile, dearly beloved green and blue planet of ours.

Loreen Niewenhuis has spent the month of May on Isle Royale for four years and will go again in 2019 as part of a 61-year study, the “longest continuous study of any predator-prey system in the world.” The current plan is to introduce new wolves onto the island, in hopes of bringing the wolf-moose system back into some kind of “balance,” although Loreen says that one thing the Isle Royale study shows very clearly is that the idea of “balance” in nature is more fiction than fact. 

I don't know how to wrap up or conclude this post, either. I'm sure the haunting will continue for a long time, maybe for the rest of my life, though I will probably haunt the moose and wolves only in the pages of books and leave the big adventures to people like Loreen.

Going on "Island Time"

The Drummond Island Girls: A Story of Fierce Friendship Beyond Time and Chance,

by Mardi Jo Link

NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2015

Hardcover, $26

Release date: July 14, 2015

Back home I didn’t wear a watch, even though there were things to do and places to be at appointed times. I had a good natural clock inside me, and whether it was my sons’ naps, bedtimes, mealtimes, or my shifts at work—I was never, ever late. When we docked on that island, I felt a mental click, as if a series of invisible gears was grinding to a stop. It was the timepiece in my mind turning itself off. -       Mardi Jo Link, The Drummond Girls: A Story of Fierce Friendship Beyond Time and Chance

You met Mardi Link first as a crime writer. I was so scared by the title of her book, When Evil Came to Good Hart (“an up north Michigan cold case,” promises the cover), that I didn’t dare start it in 2008 when it came out. Only after reading Isadore’s Secret in 2009 and being transported to an earlier century in Leelanau County was I so taken with Link’s writing that I went back to the first book. Yes, very well done, both.

Nonfiction is her specialty, but Link gave us something different with Bootstrapper, a memoir of economic and emotional struggle that also somehow managed to be laugh-out-loud funny again and again. What’s it like to try to survive as a writer in northern Michigan while raising a family as a single parent? Random House released Bootstrapper in 2013, and it was named a Michigan Notable Book for that year, withWicked Takes the Witness Stand: A Tale of Murder and Twisted Deceit in Northern Michigan marking Link’s 2014 return to true crime writing.

I wonder if Mardi has two different fan bases, one for the true crime and a second for her memoir writing. Something tells me most of her readers are like me and will read anything she writes. So now, enter The Drummond Girls....

Jill, Linda, and Andrea had gone to Drummond Island once before on a fall weekend getaway, and Mardi, the newest waitress of the four at Peegeo’s, was thrilled to be asked to join them in 1993. She had only been working at the bar for four months when the invitation came along, and in the car on the way up she felt “provisional.”

If I fit in, I’d be included. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t. On Drummond Island but back home, too.  

I’d still have my waitress job, the four of us would still work together, they’d probably even still be friendly to me, but every woman knows friendly is not the same thing as friends.

Mardi may have felt more “provisional” than another woman in her place, as she was afflicted, in her then-husband’s words, with a “completely useless tendency to overthink everything to death,” but I think she is right about that thing that “every woman knows,” too. Also, because her family had moved around a lot when she was young, she had not had a chance to form close, lasting friendships. And yet, one wild weekend with new friends, away from life’s ordinary responsibilities, turned into an annual event. Over the years the number doubled from four to eight, and readers come to know them all.

Like a book club or writers’ group (for my mother’s era) a bridge club or any group of people getting together regularly over a long period of time, the Drummond Island girls (the author insists on and explains the appellation) develop a strong bond. Their annual getaway is not, however, a time to hash over personal problems, and sometimes only in retrospect does the question arise: Should I have known? Could I have helped? Usually it seems that the simple commitment, “unless dead or pregnant,” to go off once a year together is all the medicine they need, better than soul-searching or consciousness-raising. One year one of the woman begs off the trip, however, leaving a regret that Link still carries:

I wish we would have pushed Mary Lynn a little harder to accept our help. I wish we would had told her how much we needed her along and that she had to go.

The Drummond Girls covers much the same period of the author’s life as Bootstrapper but with a different focus. The earlier memoir was about day-to-day life – Link’s writing career, children, divorce, dating, and everything it took to keep a roof over her family’s head, heat in the house, and food on the table. The new book is all about friendship as it grew and deepened and flourished in a somewhat oddly assorted group of northern Michigan women. Lessons Mardi says she learned about friendship emerged organically over the years and are presented the same way. She does not hammer away at them or set them apart from her narrative in an artificial, didactic fashion. Instead, chapters follow chronologically and simply, one year at a time, and, as with Bootstrapper, when Link writes about her own life, she is honest and direct.

Does Mardi really “overthink everything to death”? Well, no one can accuse her of overwriting anything to death. She tells her stories with a light touch that will elicit hoots of laughter, occasional nervous gasps, and a few surprising shivers of recognition.

What do her friends think about having their escapades recounted for public consumption? It was their idea!

The other day a visitor to my husband’s gallery arrived before the lights had been turned on, before the artist had arrived, but when I apologized he smiled and shook his head. “We’re on vacation,” he said. “We’re on island time.” How refreshing! Sometimes, I’ve noticed, people on vacation forget to forget about time. How great that Mardi and her friends could relax so completely with only a weekend at their disposal!

Although the author and her friends make their annual getaway in the fall, The Drummond Girls is the perfect book to read in summer. It’s perfect for people on vacation and for those of us whose vacations will come later in the year. In fact, while I was reading this book, I was on island time myself.

Vacation on Manitoulin Island (with the Old Dog)

On September 21, 2006, we crossed the bridge from Espanola, Ontario, to the town of Little Current on Manitoulin Island, where we had reserved a cabin (#4) for four days on the shore of Lake Manitou, outside the village of Manitowaning, at an old-fashioned resort called Wee Point. Here are a few selected travel notes from that Canadian vacation seven years ago.

9/12/2006  

Down the road [I explore with my dog], clambering over hills and dips in tree-surrounded, rock-strewn pasture, where lifeless black surfaces break through the earth’s skin blossom with lichens, mosses, grass, wildflowers, and seedlings. From somewhere off in the trees comes a loud “HONK!” low and singular. Cow? Moose? Nikki is excited and wants to run [but must stay on leash because of cattle]. ...  

David puts up with the absence of television. I put up with radio news and music. He misses movies, and I plot to escape current events. I only want Little Current! And cattle. And the heartaching colors of fall. The idea of lynx and moose and bear. 

 .... 

I read to David in bed from Hamlin Garland’s Son of the Middle Border, and the passage of Garland’s first trip “to see the world” (Minnesota and Wisconsin and South Dakota), traveling by train, staying in hotels, and writing letters to friends back home in Iowa, reminds me of myself and my continuing excitement over the myriad small novelties discovered away from home: “A landscape is precisely as great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a traveller at last! – That seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted from each day all the ecstasy it contained.” 

 9/13/2006  

I had to carry Nikki over the cattle guards at the gates, but she was interested in the smells and eager to explore. Out at the main road I went left (north?), and there they were, a long line of them, different ages and different colors (grade cows?), passing through a gate in single file and dispersing into the rocky woods. Along the fence was sumac halfway gone from green to red, dry seedheads of teasel, a volunteer apple seedling amid a riot of fall flowers, mostly asters and goldenrod. Sumac “on fire” warms the soul on a chilly morning. So do lowing cattle in an orderly procession, all on their own with no need to be driven.

Coming back from another dog walk later in the day I met Pat, who owns Wee Point along with her husband, Jim.

As I’d imagined, Jim did paint the resort signs and lawn furniture and shutters on the cabins. Made them, too. From Manitowaning, he sailed the Great Lakes for 17 years, then got a license and ran an auto shop. Pat grew up in Little Current. They married in 1967.  

Pat thinks the cattle are particularly noisy because calves have been taken recently from their mothers, but she also says there was no big annual auction this year in Little Current. [Historically, the economic base of the island has always been feeder cattle and tourism.] The tornado in July (talked of in South Baymouth today when I was buying postcards) damaged the auction buildings too badly, and also the organizer of many years died.
  

A woodpecker landed on a tree behind Pat. She said a recent guest had asked if one woodpecker were a pet, saying, “It seemed to want its picture taken.” A farmer owns the land between the gate at the road and the gate into the resort. ... The painting on the outdoor chairs and tables, as well as a small coffee table inside, is bright and gypsy-like. “Diamond Jim,” he was called, and the shutters (each cottage with its own motif) all have a diamond somewhere in the design.

On 9/14, after a day of exploring to Kagawong and back, I write:

Still here, I anticipate already my future longing for this island. It’s hard to believe that two days [spent here] two years ago produced such an attachment that I felt wrenched away when we reached the swing bridge at Little Current and I had to say a very unwilling good-by. 

 9/15/2006  

“Burnt” bacon for breakfast, per David’s request, fills the cabin with smoke, and we take our plates outside to the lakeside picnic table. On our way out the drive later, going to town on errands, David starts in explaining cross-ventilation to me for the millionth time, and I interrupt to tell him I already know, and we both start laughing so hard he has to stop the car.  

In Manitowaning, what we had taken to be a bank turns out to be the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. We find a Bank of Montreal sharing a building with the post office, and there I change $50 before doing a small shopping at the Fresh-Mart. Because the used bookstore at Burns Harbor doesn’t open until noon, we find ourselves back at the Muskie Widows Tavern for coffee out on the deck, to the accompaniment of a welder roar and rumble from a construction site across the street, where a metal pole barn is being added to a lovely old limestone block building. The welder noise bothers David not at all. “This is perfect,” he says contentedly. “Cooling our heels here, waiting for the bookstore to open.”

Can this be called “travel”? It’s the way we like it – not doing anything special, just hanging out and feeling at home in a place far from home. No plot, no conflict, no suspense.

On our last Manitoulin morning, cattle appeared to bid us farewell.

One beautiful, big, cream-colored cow stretches her neck up gracefully to reach and nibble popple leaves. Her ears hang down sweetly. She walks off into the trees and emerges on the road in front of us, then strolls down the road, free of all concern.

Later, on the mainland, looking north at a low cloudbank that rests over the LaCloche Mountains (the La = the the?), I notice that the mountain rock has the same color range as the cattle we have left behind – white and cream and gold and brick red.

In the sunlight, the same colors as the cattle, the rocks look warm, not cold. Like animals, they invite the human hand.

Sorry for lack of photographs. I searched high and low and found many other files from 2006 but nothing from September.

My search through old photo files did, however, turn up beautiful, sobering images of Up North spring that counter a claim made by one of our friends the other day that we are “halfway through winter.” Here are a couple reminders of winter-spring not long ago. First, here's March of 2012:

Then, late April of 2011:

On the other side of the coin is that four days after the four snowy photographs above were taken, the snow was gone, and I found these little flowers in the woods, Sunday (Easter Sunday), April 24, 2011:

 Now, wouldn't you rather look at those woodland wildflowers than at more pictures of snowdrifts today in my farmyard driveway?

4:15 p.m. Coming back to add a p.s. to say that I have updated my other blogs today, also -- the photography blog, the drawing blog, and the one where I rant about all kinds of miscellaneous stuff. Warning: If you read the last one linked there, it may blow the top off your head!

Want to Visit South Manitou Island Today?

Writing a letter to my sister the other day with pen and paper, I thought I'd transcribe the long pages about my current reading here to the blog, so that's today's topic.

We got outdoors this morning to snow on the ground in Leelanau County. We're on the cusp of winter, David says. Still bits of color in the orchards, while along the roadsides and in the woods predominant color is now brown, the toasty brown of oaks and beeches.

November 10, 2013

Northport, Michigan

Dear sister –

I’ve been reading a little book about life on South Manitou, back when there were still people farming on the island. There were 13 families in residence in 1870, and during 1917-18 there were 30 students enrolled in the school. Besides farm families, some of the Coast Guard men brought their families with them to live on the island. There were also two sawmills in operation in 1913. Timber had been the first reason for white men to stop on the island, as they needed wood to produce steam power for the lake boats.

Life on South Manitou Island around the time of World War I, according to descriptions in Isle of View: A History of South Manitou Island, by Charles M. Anderson, was in many ways very similar to life in remote Siberia today, as shown in that documentary about the trappers I was telling you about, “Happy People” [I had the title wrong before] -- for instance, skis made by hand, in the same manner, both on the island 100 years ago and in Siberia today. The book is really a memoir, not a history, but since the author came to the island with his family from Wisconsin when he was only five years old (1913) and lived there for 13 years, working on the family farm, going to school, exploring the island with his brothers, and finally going out on Lake Michigan with his father, there is a lot of detail about how the islanders lived. The author’s youngest brother was the last child born on South Manitou, in the year 1921. His oldest brother, age 21, died the same year, of diabetes.

Farming was all done with horses. Anderson writes that he could plow only 2 to 2-1/2 acres a day, using three horses, and after the field was plowed it had to be dragged and marked out for planting, which was done by “two people pulling a pole about 24 feet wide with 7 chains attached to the pole 30 inches apart.” The author adds, “The field had to be marked two ways, 30 inches apart, and then it was ready to plant. Pulling or pushing that marker, I believe, was one of the hardest jobs on the farm for a child of twelve years old, as I was at the time.” David liked the bits about the bull with the ring through his nose, led by a long stick attached to the ring. Also attached to the ring was a heavy chain that dragged on the ground. The idea was that if the bull wanted to run someone down, he would step on his own chain and stop himself, but the bull was smart and learned to straddle the chain so he wouldn’t trip on it.

The Anderson family planted corn, rye, and oats, mostly for their livestock, and for themselves they also raised potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, cabbages and apples. Popular orchard varieties on the island were Greening, Northern Spy, and Wagoner apples. Many families made their own maple syrup (as they did on the mainland, as well), but you may be surprised to know that they also made a great quantity of hard cider from those apples. This was during Prohibition, but on the island no one cared about that, except to hide the evidence whenever there was a rumor that the Feds might be coming to look around. (No one ever did.) It sounds like the cider was for local social consumption, not for sale.

Another surprise crop (to me) was ginseng, which also grew wild on the island. When we drive to St. Paul, we see fields of ginseng in Wisconsin, under netting to protect it from the sun, and a lot of South Manitou islanders came from Wisconsin, so maybe that’s part of the explanation. Or maybe there was just a good ginseng market in those days. One farm wife left the farm, divorced her husband but stayed on the island, and opened up a little shop near the Coast Guard station. She sold chewing gum, candy, and wild ginseng, which she hunted herself. A couple times a week she took homemade bread to her former husband, and in return he supplied her with firewood. He had, by the way, a lot of cats, “about ten,” and that might have been all it took to drive his wife away from home. I think five cats would drive me away.

So marriage wasn’t always “forever” in that place and time, and that may be another surprise to some people reading the story today. One of the mail carrier’s sons was married and divorced five times! Another man, 65 years old, came to the island with his third wife to help the author’s father make cement blocks for the foundation of a new barn. When he arrived on the island, he had already fathered 25 children, and his twenty-sixth was born while he and his wife were on the job there. Yes, his wife was helping make the cement blocks, and perhaps the first and second wives had died after so much childbearing and work. The author doesn’t say. The twenty-sixth baby died shortly after birth.

Some islanders never married at all. One man farmed with his brother and died single at the age of 78. When he visited the author’s family in the evening, “he always sat in the same chair. Dad would ask him to sit in a chair near him, but he never would.” Can’t you just see it? Such a little detail makes the old bachelor farmer more than just another name.

Here’s another detail of island life that might not occur to us: they had no toothbrushes! The Anderson family did not even have their own well but had to haul all their water, for all purposes, from either Lake Florence (their source of ice, cut in winter and stored in sawdust to use during the summer) or from a neighbor’s well. If a tooth had to be pulled from man or beast, there was a man on the island to do it, but the author was 21 years old before he had his first toothbrush. I can imagine living without electricity and even without running water, but without a toothbrush?

The Andersons left the island to move to Frankfort when Charles was 18. By then he had already been sailing with his father for two years, carrying various cargos from one Lake Michigan port to another. Loading grapes from Benton Harbor to carry to Sheboygan and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they learned of the House of David community near Benton Harbor. Charles Anderson says the whole family was glad to move to the mainland, but he went back to visit the island year after year and clearly loved it very much. At the close of his book, he laments the overgrowth of old paths and trails since the Park Service purchased the island. My impression is that the neglect he perceived has been remedied in years since.

It seems ridiculous that I lived for years in Leland and never managed to take the ferry over on a day trip and still live close enough to the ferry dock that it would seem a simple voyage to undertake. I always think I’ll do it in the fall. (Don’t want to face mosquitoes in spring or crowds in summer.) But the ferry season is over for another year now, and it’s another year I haven’t made the trip.

Maybe I should make that a priority for fall of 2014?

Anyone interested in reading about South Manitou Island online can find information here. 

Islands Quiz and Mushroom Mystery

It’s a busy, busy week, and while I’m still reading every evening (great stuff, too!), don’t look for any in-depth book reviews from me until Monday at the earliest. My focus is on Saturday--only two days away!--and Dean Robb's appearance at Dog Ears. So what you’re getting today on the blog, while I bite my fingernails down to the first knuckle joint awaiting delivery of the books for Saturday’s event, is a handful of pictures and a couple of questions.

First question: Can you identify the following islands?




Second question: Can you identify this droll little fungus? This is one fungus from two sides.



In the case of the islands, I have the answers. When it comes to the mushroom, I may have to wait for the new book our resident mushroom expert wants me to order. Or maybe if I show these pictures to the expert, he’ll solve the mystery. That’s a thought, too.

Another Day of High Winds

Wednesday was another day of strong winds, another day for freighters on northern Lake Michigan to seek the shelter of the Manitou Passage.


From time to time the sun broke through the clouds, lighting beaches on the offshore islands. Here you're looking northwest toward South Fox Island.


Wind in the corn, wind shaking the cherry boughs, wind whipping up whitecaps on Lake Michigan. I'm hoping the wind will have calmed down by tomorrow. The Mackinac Bridge is exciting enough without high winds!

Major Landscapes, Minor Paths

We had frost this past Sunday morning, none yesterday, and this morning brought heavy frost and ground fogs inland, clear skies out over Lake Michigan.

From Peterson Park, where Sarah and I went for our inaugural adventure of the day, I could see all the way to North Fox Island, while South Fox was so distinct that the morning light made its dunes visible to me from the mainland.



The blue horizon line called, but so did small landscapes near at hand: moss--its green so startling!--and lichen and fossils. As always, there was so much for me to see and for Sarah to smell that we could have stayed outdoors all day, had not duty called us back to town.



Returning also to the urban landscape of Dublin in the wee years of the twentieth century and preparing for our small Ulysses study group, I read again Chapters 9 and 10. The richness of Joyce’s writing is such that every reading brings forth something new, but for some reason today my mind is fixed on a very minor character, Dilly Daedalus, one of Stephen’s sisters, a character who does not seem to represent any larger mythic or political element. Dilly in her “shabby dress” accosts her father on the street to see if he has gotten any money. Their mother recently dead, the family still in morning, they are practically starving at home, but her father only berates her for not standing up straight and tries to deny that he has any money. “Where would I get money?” he protests. But Dilly is persistent, and finally he gives her a shilling. Then for a penny the girl buys a coverless French primer. Luxury! She wants to learn French, probably wants to emulate her brother, Stephen, by fleeing from Dublin to Paris. When Stephen sees his sister’s purchase and, through it, sees her dreams, he thinks, “She will drown me with her.” Then, “Misery! Misery!” He feels he cannot save himself and his sister, too.

I’ve been paying plenty of attention to the symbolic parallels between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, but these Dublin characters are so much more than mere symbols, and this young woman trapped in poverty has quite captured my attention today. What is her fate? To die young, worn out from childbearing or sick with consumption? She is real, and I feel for her.

Literature, like life, presents an infinite number of paths to explore. It pleases me sometimes to take a path few others have bothered to explore, having some small piece of a writer’s greatness for my own treasure.