We Experience Different Worlds!

Saturday was a wild day of cold and wind and snow here in the mountains! Temperature hovered near the freezing mark all day, but the wind gave Willcox a “feels like” of 24 degrees, so you can just imagine how much colder it was here at our elevation. My walk to the mailbox with Sarah was quite an expedition, so when the Artist wanted to drive into town around midday, I almost stayed home. Once we got out on the highway, only a mile or so from the cabin, I was very glad I hadn’t missed the larger day! 

There was sunshine down below but none back in the mountains when we returned to the cabin. We are in another world up here. It may be raining in Willcox, but that can easily be snow in Dos Cabezas and above.

Tough day for LBBs (little brown birds)

Later we drove again to Willcox, through the dark, into swirling snow -- oh, what a day! You may remember that back in February of 2015 we were part of an audience of six people (including the manager) in the Willcox Historic Theatre for a screen viewing of the Opera of the Bastille, from Paris, performing “The Marriage of Figaro,” and how absolutely transported I was by that show. Well, last night we were practically the King and Queen, the only two viewers (in the much smaller Studio 128), given our own private showing of Peter Wright’s 1984 “Nutcracker,” performed by the Royal Ballet in the London Opera House. It was absolutely magnificent! Every moment was stunningly beautiful. What a great Christmas gift, one I will never forget — well, until I forget my own name, anyway.

There had been a large group for the afternoon show, so you should not get the impression that we were the only people in Willcox to see and appreciate the show. There had also been a Friday afternoon show. Maybe everyone who wanted to attend had already been to the show, or maybe the storm gave otherwise eager viewers second thoughts.

But here’s the thing: While I know it would be a thrilling and unforgettable experience to attend the opera in Paris or the ballet in London, there is also something magical and moving about seeing these performances in a little old theatre in a cow town in southern Arizona, being transported to Paris or London and from there into the story of the opera or ballet, and coming out again afterward into the quiet, dark, high desert night. No crowds, no traffic, just dark stillness, except for brightly colored holiday lights in Railroad Park. Both times the whole experience felt so unlikely — and last night, I thought, it felt as unlikely as the “Nutcracker” story itself, as if we ourselves, like the young girl in the ballet, had been transported into a fantasy world.

Then this morning the sun came up over the mountain and lit the snowy ground, flooding the cabin with light. Birds clustered around the suet feeder. Another winter storm is past. Was it “only a dream”?

Where Did the Blue Moon Go?

Already in the past

It seems the moon was full only a couple of days ago, and now it's half-gone already. Where did that full moon go, the second one we had in July? For that matter, where did July itself go? The peak of cherry harvest? One morning, early, I wrote the following lines:

Grunting, snorting, grumbling like  

An angry old sow:  

Harvest machines shaking fruit.

This morning, already, quiet reigned again outside the farmhouse. Strange, hearing quiet....

Another long-awaited event arrived at last: Wednesday evening’s reading and conversation with author Barbara Stark-Nemon, whose novel, Even in Darkness, is based on the true story of her great-aunt in Germany. In the discussion, Barbara directly addressed her decision to write the story as fiction, rather than memoir or biography: “I didn’t want that distance. I wanted readers to be in the story.” 

Her novel certainly succeeds in meeting that objective. One audience member remarked that she stayed up all night, telling herself at the end of each chapter that she would read “just one more” and finding herself unable to stop. Another of my customers (the one who memorably addressed me the day after she bought the novel as “Goddess of Books!” -- a real first for me!) had told me that she had not wanted the book to end at all. 

Barbara Stark-Nemon

It was thrilling for me to have Barbara and her book in my bookstore at last, since I think it was three years ago that she first told me some of her aunt's story. It's wonderful the way her audience has expanded since then -- and continues to expand, as the book reaches more and more hands.

Now on we go, plunging into another day and toward another weekend, this coming Saturday the day of Northport’s (1) annual wine festival at the marina park and (2) the annual dog parade, beginning at 11 a.m. – this year’s theme is “Woofstock,” so think tie-dye and beads – plus (3) Leelanau’s reigning photographer Ken Scott signing copies of The Back Pages at Dog Ears Books, beginning at noon.

Then the very next day, Sunday, from 1 to 3 p.m. we'll have Jerry Dennis and Glenn Wolff here to sign their exciting and beautiful new book (another Big Maple Press Indie Bookstore Edition), A Walk in the Animal Kingdom.

We were very, very lucky here at the north end of the peninsula to be spared the terrible storm last Sunday that hit from Leland south. Glen Arbor got the worst of it, but Leland, Lake Leelanau, Cedar, and Maple City all lost power and had trees down and cars and buildings damaged, as was true in Traverse City, as well. One woodlot owner lost two-thirds of his trees, and photographs I’ve seen remind me of the aftermath of the tornado we lived through in our Kalamazoo neighborhood years ago. Jerry and Gail Dennis, out on Old Mission peninsula, lost several large trees, including one very big maple, but not, everyone will be relieved to know, the Big Maple for which their publishing venture is named. 

Here Up North, we’re used to snow, but not winds up to 100 miles an hour and skies that don’t even look real in the photographs. Many businesses and even Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore were closed on Monday. One of the reasons I heard given for closing the Lakeshore was that no personnel were available for rescuing foolhardy dune-climbers, everyone busy elsewhere with real rather than potential emergencies.

Phew!

So much has happened from full moon to a waning half, it doesn’t seem possible that so little time has elapsed. Sometimes change is gradual, and sometimes it’s sudden and cataclysmic. Many Leelanau and Grand Traverse scenes will never be the same in our lifetime. But the main character of Even in Darkness, like her real-life counterpart, saw more devastating changes and went on to build a new life, and so must we all, whatever befalls us from one moon to the next.

And so our summer life goes on, from storm to author event to author event to dog parade, a very mixed bag indeed. C'est la vie, mes amis. La vie au nord et partout.

Looking for Coffee and Finding Oz

On Interstate highways, I feel my age. By contrast, the old U.S. routes carry me back to the 1950s.

Two-lane roads through small Midwestern farm towns, where the tallest buildings are water towers and grain elevators, surrounded by wide fields stretching to the horizon, remind me of trips back to Ohio every summer to visit grandparents. My mother would pack a meal for us to enjoy somewhere along the way: balogna and cheese sandwiches, fresh fruit, lemonade, a packet of crunchy corn chips (Fritos), and homemade cookies, usually chocolate chip. We would stop at a little roadside rest area and have lunch at a picnic table. I was telling David about this as we drove through Kansas, and he in turn recalled a cross-country trip with his parents one summer, from Michigan to Colorado, when daytime temperatures were so high that dozens of cars would stop to let passengers take refuge in the shade of a single tree. Naturally, from there it was a short step to comparing our childhood cowboy/cowgirl fantasies. What with new sights and old memories, one never runs out of conversation on the road....

Roadside park, somewhere in Kansas

Thursday, I think it was, we left Liberal, Kansas, having driven there the day before from Santa Rosa, New Mexico, cutting off a little corner of Texas and slicing through the panhandle of Oklahoma on the way, making an unusual (for us) four-state day. Liberal bills itself as the Land of Oz, and down the road from our motel was Dorothy’s House and the Coronado Museum, although what the two have in common we did not find out, because, making an uncharacteristically early start east the next morning, we continued on U.S. 54 with my questions about Liberal unanswered. Is it really? That is, liberal? Or is it the Land of Oz?

Business closed along the old road

Eastward lay a series of small towns, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right of the road, occasionally (my favorite) the highway going right down the main street. Plains, KS, had a town hall, post office, library – but no cafe, other than the gas station. Meade’s claim to fame was that the Dalton Gang had hung out there, and Crooked Creek looked pretty. Again, however, no cafe. Unfortunately for us, open cafes were in short supply. So all I was expecting and hoping to find in Greensburg was a town large enough to support a place to get a good cup of coffee. 

Greensburg is that and much more.

The first striking feature is the age of the buildings. It’s like seeing a brand-new business district set down in the middle of farm country or a modern-looking suburb with no adjacent city. Is this, perhaps, the true Kansas Land of Oz?

The obvious explanation is the correct one. In May of 2007, an EF5 tornado hit Greensburg and hit it hard. Every downtown building but one was destroyed. Eleven or twelve people were killed. (Town brochure says 12; online fact sheet says 11.)

Naturally, the community rebuilt, because that’s the American way of things, but what’s different and fascinating about this story is the way they went about it -- by deciding to live up to their name, by going green. Greensburg now leads the world in the number of certified LEED buildings per capita. That’s Leadership in Energy Environmental Design.

We found a cafe with great coffee, and it was almost noon by then, so we shared a big, fabulous Reuben sandwich, too, as good as you'd expect in New York. Then we took a walk down Main Street to check out the single downtown building not destroyed by the tornado. The Robinett Building houses an antique store and is still owned – the building renovated since the storm – by the couple who had it back then. 

Erica Goodman showed us a photograph of the building the day after the tornado (having been through one in Kalamazoo in 1980, we have some idea of the trauma, although Kalamazoo was not practically wiped off the map like Greensburg), and David visited with her while I put together a stack of old books to buy. You can see from these photos the beauty of Erica’s store. She's there behind the counter, too, if you look real hard at the photo below.

Greensburg and its history were an eye-opening surprise along the old road. Ad astra per aspera, the town’s newly adopted motto, is most appropriate, and we vowed to return another time to tour Greensburg in depth, because there is so much to explore in this valiant little community, starting with the Big Well historical museum.

The next day, from Emporia, Kansas, to the Illinois state line, we did a lot of steady turnpike and expressway driving, except for one scenic dodge off the main road onto old U.S. 40. We took this side road because I was worried we wouldn’t see much of the Missouri River from the expressway, and that’s really all I had in mind – seeing the river. As with merely looking for a cafe the day before, however, what we found along the river was much more than anticipated.

Visitor Center

The origin of the name of the “Boonslick” region is not Boon-slick, as I first thought, but Boone’s Lick, from the place name in the old days as the Eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. Boonville is also an important historic railroad town. At one time 50 passenger trains a day coming through? Is that possible? So we were told. 

And did you know this? I’m quoting from a historical marker in front of the visitor center:

Caboose is a nautical term of Dutch origin that means “ship’s galley.” This “galley,” with its makeshift crow’s nest (called a cupola), was an essential part of trains as early as the 1840s. Modern technology began to replace the duties of the brakeman and watchman in the 1980s, and today, cabooses are rarely used for more than exhibitions.

The origin of the term ‘caboose’ was new to me; the disappearance of the caboose, sadly, was not. All winter we saw miles and miles of trains crossing the Southwest, and instead of a caboose on the end, there would be one or two or three extra engines. I’m still not used to that, but my railroad background and thoughts about and images of trains are a story for another day.

Future planned Boonville Historical Museum building

On the advice of a pleasant, very informative woman at the visitor center in the old train depot, we sought out Hartley Park to enjoy beautiful Missouri River vistas and to read the historic markers about Lewis and Clark. (Sarah enjoyed her walk in the park, too.) There were delightful little colonies of mayapples and foot-high chestnut trees on the cleared slope down to the river. Very satisfying! That is what I call seeing the river, not just passing over it in under a minute, with barely a glimpse!

Missouri River and flood plain

The town is interesting in itself, and we saw just enough to realize we did not have time to see anywhere near enough. Like Cincinnati, it features many old German-style brick buildings, everything overall much older than towns in the same region farther from the river. The Missouri, like the Ohio, an old river town, is an American Midwestern “borderland,” neither North nor South but with a character all its own. Small wonder that Smithsonian Magazine chose Boonville as one of its top ten small towns to visit in the whole United States. (Traverse City is on the list this year, too.)

But I’ve saved what is perhaps the biggest surprise for the last: The Boonville area is also home of the Budweiser Clydesdales breeding farm! Need I say more about the town’s attractions? We did not get to see the horses – no time, and tours are booked up way into the future – but just knowing they were there was exciting to me. So, another time! We shall return!

Kansas and Missouri are full of fascinating and beautiful sights, scenes and stories. “What a country!” David had been exclaiming, all the way from Arizona. He commented at one point that it would be so much easier to “hop on a plane" (would that air travel were that simple!) and fly from Chicago to Tucson in a matter of hours, “but then we would have missed all this!” At the same time, we knew we were seeing only bits along one thin west-east corridor and not even that in depth. How much more lies to the north and south of what we saw! Thinking about how much more there is naturally led us to thoughts of reincarnation. Neither of us could imagine any better place to have an “afterlife” than right here on beautiful Earth -- but maybe, we agreed, in the past rather than the future. The past, after all, would not be entirely unfamiliar: from history and art, biography, painting, photography, one would have some handholds on life if transported into the past, while the future could only be full of strangers.

How about you? If you could travel through time, “Back to the Future,” that is, which direction would you take?

Storm Forecasts and Storm Realities

Where is the driveway???

A forecast is one thing: “A winter storm may....” “Accumulation could be up to....” Possible blowing and drifting....” Sometimes predictions are fulfilled, and other times not much happens, after all. Then there are the times that quite a lot happens, such as it did last March. And so we prepare. We fill water containers and check the level on the propane tank. Make sure we have food in the house. Arm ourselves with reading material. Check supply of candles and lamp oil. Matches? Check!

Is there a world out there?

Two nights ago the temperature dropped and the wind rose. By morning the scene was wild. We had a wild ride to Northport and back with groceries and mail. -- No, that sounds all wrong. David drove very attentively and carefully, on the highway and through town. 

Northport on Tuesday morning

Road and driveway, village streets and sidewalks, all had been deep in slush that had now turned to ice. Our pack came home in the early afternoon, seeing no reason to hang around town.

As the afternoon wore on, the wind grew ever wilder. “What do you call this?” I kept asking David, and he’d say, “It’s a blizzard,” but there was another word haunting the edges of my mind. Finally it came to me: tempest! The word is not used as often in English, at least in America, as it is in French (la tempête), but that was the word I wanted. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” That’s King Lear, not Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” but we are hardly on a tropical isle, are we?

Sometimes during a blizzard, if the wind blows hard enough, coming in over Lake Michigan and swooping down on our old farmhouse behind the hill, it will drive a little line of snow under the front porch door. That's a strong wind. This storm? We got a new, cold, white area rug on the cement porch floor. Snow did not fall yesterday, gently or otherwise: no, it was driven horizontal by the wind, and that was in milder moments--the rest of the time it was whirling madly in tornado-like snow devils, with snow devils and waving sheets of snow flying from the top of rapidly rising drifts, like blowing sand from the top of desert dunes in a sandstorm or like spindrift from ocean waves. Sarah and I ventured out a couple of times, but she was not at all reluctant to return to the warm house when I’d had enough of wind and snow and given up on trying to capture reality with my camera.

The barn is no shelter from the wind

It was a good day to be indoors, reading Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, along with a novel I’ll tell you about in a few days. It was a good day to have a chicken braising in the pot, to have soup simmering and cookies baking. It was a marvelous opportunity to do a little trimming on Sarah's shaggy coat. We still had power for an after-dinner movie, and at bedtime David and I read to each other, he to me from Bella Tuscany, I to him from Winter Journal.

The wind howled all night and was still cracking its cheeks at dawn. Will it never be out of breath? It will be good to have lots of snow for Saturday's Winter Carnival in Northport--that's at Braman Hill, 11 to 4--but let's hope the wind takes the day off.

Mice, voles, skunks, bunnies--all snuggled down today

Surviving Up North Blizzard, Chapter 2 (Sunday)

Sunday morning at our house

There may turn out to be only two chapters to this saga, as our power and phone are back on, and as of this evening the driveway has been plowed! The siege is ended! We were pleasantly surprised (thrilled, more accurately) when radio and a lamp suddenly went on in the middle of the morning. Really? Already? We had expected to have to rough it for at least another 24 hours.

Bright sunshine!!!

Remember Friday and Saturday? The situation didn't look much different for us on Sunday morning, except that the sun came out. That was cheery! It was colder, too, but the snow had let up, and the sun urged us outdoors, after a hearty breakfast of buckwheat-blueberry pancakes. (I made extra pancakes so we could have some later like bread, with peanut butter and jam. Good lunch!) It really was beautiful. (And yes, I promised "beautiful" photos for Chapter 2, but decided to save them for my photo blog, "A Shot in the Light." They'll be up sometime soon, i.e., when I get to a high-speed connection and can put them up at full size, undiluted. They deserve that, I think. -- But on with the story.)

We bundled up to "assess the situation," as David called it, taking a good look at the vast Siberian landscape ordinarily designated our driveway. 

Does this look like a driveway?

If you look really hard at the driveway photo, you might be able to see two orange flags, one on the right margin and one a bit in from the left margin. What do you think? David said he "wasn't worried" about getting out. I was dubious. The old husband-wife story, all over again: She doubts, he prevails. Or -- ?

Onward and upward?

Here we go up the hill! 

See farmhouse and one-story end of the barn (where cows used to live) in rear-view window! 

Feel heavy clenched fists on passenger side, heavy determined foot on accelerator on driver's side!

We roar forward in 4WD! 

We climb the hill!

Sarah, left behind in the house, was no doubt straining to hear every sound....

Sarah checks out human progress

But no, in the end it was Sarah who prevailed. She was not left behind, after all! Maybe 4WD would have gotten us had the truck been higher off the ground, but you can see where we got stuck and had to shovel out to back down the hill again. 

Then Sarah came out, and we all went for a walk. The tire tracks made it easier to walk most of the way up the hill. Where the tracks gave out, David and I went in over our knees, and Sarah was up to her belly!

Sarah doesn't mind deep snow

The view from the top of the hill was worth the climb. We were happy!

Looking north from the top of the driveway

Looking west toward M-22 and Lake Michigan

Later in the day, another doggie sortie took me to the top of the hill, and I saw tracks! Some large animal had come in from the highway, angled across the hayfield, and up to the neighbor's drive--oh, I get it. The neighbor had come out from Northport to check on his plumbing pipes. Well, it was exciting there for a moment.

Actually, it's been exciting for three days. We were lucky. We kept warm, kept ourselves fed, and we had light and time for reading and writing. Some people might call it a hardship. For me, at least in part, it had elements of vacation. I'm trying not to feel guilty about that....

Sun looking silver behind small cloud

P.S. I've uploaded more photos of scenes around our house in the past couple of days, which, if you choose, you can see here and here and here.