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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Morning Is Breaking More Gently


This morning I heard robins near the house. Pretty-pretty-pretty, they seem to boast proudly. Sparrows trill in the popple grove, crows call raucously from a distance, the heart-lifting sound of a sandhill crane comes from far overhead, and the woods rings with sounds of the busy cleanup crew, woodpeckers in dead and dying trees. 




Spring’s arrival varies from year to year and can be quite teasing with its advances and retreats. We may yet have another blizzard. But if we do have a big snow in April, as I used to tell the Artist, “It will be a spring blizzard!” And sooner or later the seasonal page will be turned for good, and there will be only memories with which to answer the inevitable Up North spring question, “How was your winter?”






Mornings are easier and more pleasant with less cold wind and more birdsong as Sunny Juliet with her nose, I with my eyes, both of us with our ears explore a morning world that never grows stale. No two mornings –no two moments! -- are ever identical.


Reading her morning newspaper


I’ll keep this short today. One bookish thing on my mind is the idea of a ‘page-turner.’ You know, a book you can’t stop reading until the end. It strikes me now (and I have not taken time to develop this thought) that page-turners are of at least two different sorts. Some are consumables: That kind of page-turner is like a deep tub of popcorn at a movie theatre, a near-mindless reading binge. Such books serve a purpose in our lives. They provide a day’s distraction and relief. Tomorrow we will be ready to face our own life situations again. 



The second kind of page-turner is a life-changer, or at least a mind- or heart-changer, as well as a page-turner. We find ourselves totally immersed in a new world, seeing life through freshly opened eyes. Even familiar elements encountered in such a book evoke a new surge of love from us. We can’t stop reading because we are spellbound, enchanted.

 

Those in the second group are likely to burrow into our lives for good, as precious as old friends of whom we never tire. At least, that’s how I see things this morning on the eve of the Ides of March. How about you? And what's going on in your neck of the woods?



Will there be more? Stay tuned!


For what I learned in a very, very important new film, tap here. For a comforting soup, winter or summer, tap here. Thank you for sharing links with anything you find worth sharing.


Thursday, March 7, 2024

If You Know Me, This Is Not News

Old school, Empire, Michigan

 

“Old School”

 

Yes, I am “Old School,” as the phrase is used nowadays – as an adjective for someone who clings to old ways rather than leaping (blindly, I would say) into every new technology that comes along and leaving the tried-and-true behind. Recently a friend told me about a family whose expensive home is completely “paperless,” and I was, frankly, appalled. Family members read books and magazines but don’t keep them when they have finished reading. Out they go!

 

My first thought was, how terrible that would be for babysitters! 


I was remembering a family I babysat for regularly in my old home neighborhood, a young couple who had only two printed items in their home, the current TV Guide and a tattered Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. The parents stayed out late when they went out, there was only one child, and the parents paid well, but the barrenness of their home environment made the hours heavy going. These days, though, I suppose babysitters are simply glued to their phones after the children go to sleep. It’s a different world….


Three letters went out in the mail to friends this morning.

 

Someone who is “Old School” writes letters on paper, buys stamps for the envelopes, and trusts to the United States Postal Service to deliver. (Thank you, Benjamin Franklin and USPS!) One day last week I hit the jackpot and found four letters from friends waiting in my post office box. Jackpot!!! Letter-writing is not about immediate gratification but about taking time, “spending time” with absent friends, anticipation, and so much more. Follow this link to Leelanau Letter Writers and see if you might want to join a slow movement.



Well-used and well-loved road atlases from my home shelves --


A road taken....


Someone who is “Old School” loves maps – maps on paper! Yes, everyone can access maps on their phones and, in newer model cars, on screens built into the dashboard, but when you zoom in for detail, you lose the big picture, and I want both at once! I also want to make notes on the pages. A 2015 atlas is not “outdated” for me; it is redolent of trips taken and sights seen, possible roads as well as those remembered, because dreaming over maps is also another form of armchair travel. There are places I have never been, except through books and movies and maps. 

 

The ivy isn't plastic, either.

Writing checks is really “Old School,” and I make no apology for paying my bills with checks. How many companies do I want to have access to my bank account to grab what they say I owe? How large a balance do I want on my credit card to pay off every month? Fewer and fewer people bring either cash or checks to my bookstore, and I’ve adjusted to the changing times in that regard (there’s no staying in business without adaptation to change), but I prefer to pay my own business expenses and home bills by check. When told by another business a few days ago that they have “no way to process checks,” I was more than a little annoyed by that flimsy excuse. They had no problem “processing” the cash I handed over, and the “process” is the same: check or cash, deposit it in your business account! I have not stayed in business for over three decades by passing bad checks and do not care for the implied – though carefully disguised – insinuation. 

 

Home library bookshelves reflected on glass of photograph

Finally, being “Old School” means loving books!!! Printed books, bound books, books on paper – the descendants of the 4th century Greek Codex Sinaiticus. Handier than scrolls, much lighter in weight than stone tablets, books properly bound and cared for can outlast the civilizations that produce them. Take a look at the Florentine Codex, a 12-volume work on the Nahua culture in Mexico, before and during colonization by Spain, with a general explanation of what constitutes a codex. A proud tradition of literacy.

 

For me, having my own home library is essential to feeling at home at all. Besides books, I also have many physical albums of photographs. Although more modern people (more modern than I will ever be) are content to store their “books” and “photographs” in a “cloud,” make no mistake about it: A cloud isn’t some physical warehouse in the sky; it’s just someone else’s bigger computer somewhere else, and that’s not good enough for me. I want to know that my photographs will be in my albums every time I open the covers, just as I want to know that the books in my home library will contain the same words, in the same order, every time I open to see and read those pages. No one is going to hack into some distant computer and alter my favorite histories, novels, essays, or poetry books!

 

(I don’t want “virtual nature,” either. I want nature, the real thing. What is the point of living on earth if we have to live as if we’re on a space station?) 

 

As I say, if you know me, none of this is news to you, and if we’ve never met you might guess at some of it because, after all, I have been a bookseller, with an open shop, i.e., a “bricks & mortar” location for over 30 years. Are independent bookstores all disappearing? The people who think so are not regular bookstore customers. Does nobody read any more? The people who ask the question are not readers. 


Other questions people ask: “Where do you get all your books?” and “Have you read every book in here?” The answer to the second question is no. As for the first question, there is no single answer. Some books I buy, some are donated to me, some are brought in by customers for trade credit. I don’t have time to spend running around to auctions and garage sales, but occasionally I’ll be invited to take a look at a private library and make an offer – or simply take off their hands as many books as I think I can use. In the past few weeks, I had a chance to look at three different collections that needed to be downsized or dismantled. Classics, being classics, are always in demand; in a village on the Great Lakes with a maritime history and a beautiful modern marina, boating books are always important for my collection; and philosophy, while hardly a bestselling section, is one of my personal specialties, so I was happy to fill gaps that had appeared on those shelves. 



Aviation had to move over in the bookcase with military history ...


to make room for more boating books, with more in the way.

Philosophy got a complete reorganization ...

from A to Z.


Audiobooks

 

Now, before anyone takes me to task for my old-fashioned ways, let me say that I understand perfectly well that as we age, there can be problems with eyesight or even trouble with hands, either making the holding and reading of physical books difficult -- or maybe you just want to listen to a book while on your stationary bicycle --- so this “Old School” bookseller has jumped on a modern bandwagon with libro.fm for your listening pleasure. Your audiobooks won’t cost you any more on libro.fm than you would pay the online behemoth, you can choose an independent bookstore to support, and naturally I will be happy to have you choose Dog Ears Books. Thank you!!!


Old school, Maple City, Michigan

Friday, March 1, 2024

Feast of St. David; February Books

 

Omena Bay: blue sky, blue water


It was a gorgeous morning! The only problem was, for me, that there were no daffodils to be had, for love nor money, anywhere in northern Leelanau County! You see, March 1 is the Feast Day of St. David, patron saint of Wales. (In Welsh, the Hebrew name David becomes Dafydd; either way, ‘beloved’ is the meaning of the name. Dafydd ap Llywelyn was Prince of Wales from 1240 to 1246, others claiming the title through the years.) And as a day to remember the saint canonized in 1120, and also to honor Wales, the feast day is marked with bright yellow daffodils and green leeks. 


Leeks were twice the price they should have been, but I bought them.

So I'll make do with images of daffodils from old posts, for today I am remembering my late husband, the Artist, David Grath, and also my late friend Annie Pritchard, who was Welsh to the core, both still beloved by many in their absence. 


4/27/2013


Books Read in February 2024


20. Wallace, David Rains. The Turquoise Dragon (fiction). A mystery, the story naturally begins with the discovery of a dead body, and from there complications sprout and multiply. Descriptions of hiking (not for pleasure) in California mountains had me picturing every step, but after all the suspense and hair-raising situations, escalating as the number of pages left diminished, I have to say I was disappointed in the way the book ended – or, rather, stopped. I inspected the binding thoroughly, thinking that final pages must have been left out or removed by a previous reader, but no, apparently not. Many loose ends. Rats! Authors! Denouement, please!*

21. Shoemaker, Jan. Slow Learner: Essays (nonfiction). I met the author when she visited my bookstore with her previous book of essays, Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World, and was very happy to receive this new volume in the mail. I devoured it much faster than I should have, always saying to myself at the end of one essay, “Just one more.” Shoemaker writes beautifully of life in her corner of the world, which of course connects to all other corners in one way or another.

22. Horowitz, Anthony. Magpie Murders (fiction). Something light and entertaining for the weekend, I thought, and it was that, but it was also much more. A murder mystery within a murder mystery, the ‘outer’ story (as it were) is told by the editor of the author of the ‘inner’ story. Horowitz did not make things easy for himself when he concocted this tale, but his skill is equal to the challenge.

23. Westover, Tara. Educated (nonfiction). I couldn’t recall if I’d read this book before but remembered a friend raving about it. About halfway through it began to seem familiar, but by then I couldn’t stop, of course. Kept away from doctors and out of school, with no birth certificate until she was nine years old, Tara’s hunger for learning had enormous obstacles to overcome, but overcome them she did. Now with a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge, what will she do next?

24. Deloria, Vine Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (nonfiction). Basically a history of Western Christianity and comparison of that to Native American religions, the latter being place- and community-specific, the former claiming universality, this is a serious theological treatment and not a book to be skimmed. Well worth reading; highly recommended.

25. Gibbings, Robert. Coming Down the Seine (nonfiction). Any book by this Irish writer and artist is a peaceful escape from all that ails. A solo traveler, he made friends everywhere along his way, and his ways were as various as dreams. The illustrations in his books are his own and as lovely as the writings. 

26. Doyle, Brian. One Long River of Song (nonfiction). Celebratory essays on the wonder of ordinary things, the final volume from this author before his death. Surprises on every page. Sometimes you are caught sideways and laugh out loud when you least expect it.

27. Mosley, Walter. All I Did Was Shoot My Man (fiction). This is one of the author’s Leonid McGill series and, while not among my top favorite Mosley novels, engrossing enough that I couldn’t put it down as McGill seeks to make amends for past sins and finds nothing but more trouble for himself and others.

28. Theroux, Paul. Millroy the Magician (fiction). I kept hoping the narrative meander would develop an arc, but it never did. Lolita without either the sex or the insights. Desperate finale hardly seemed a conclusion. Theroux has written some wonderful books, but this isn’t one of them.*

29. Short, Wayne. This Raw Land (nonfiction). The author brought a bride to Alaska in the mid-1950s, where they began their married life fishing together for salmon. In the winter, Wayne and his brothers camped and trapped far from home base. Eventually, he and his wife and two young sons spent a winter of isolation on Murder Bay, where Wayne had taken on the job of dismantling a canning factory for the lumber to build a larger house for his growing family. Alaska became a state, and change was in the air….

30. Jance, J.A. Paradise Lost (fiction). I am a total sucker for Jance’s Sheriff Joanna Brady series, set in Cochise County, and this one will keep you guessing until the end, as a good mystery should do, but I also love it for the locales: the road to old Fort Bowie was just 8 miles from my beloved ghost town, and the Chiricahua Mountains less than 20 more down the road. Even Onion Saddle gets into the story! I felt right at home. 

31. Merrick, Leonard. A Chair on the Boulevard (fiction). Light, humorous stories featuring a host of impecunious artists (painters and writers) and artistes (performers) in Montmartre in the days before the arrival of the horseless carriage. English dialogue presented as literal word-for-word translation from French exaggerates the comedy.

32. Shaw, Irwin. Paris! Paris! (nonfiction). Wonderfully illustrated by Ronald Searle, in this book Shaw looks at Paris through his own experiences over many years, beginning with the exciting chaos of the Liberation in 1945 and through many changes in the city. Whether you know Paris or simply wish you did, this book will fill you with longing.

33. Proulx, Annie. Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (nonfiction). As a longtime lover of “swamps” (I had no other words as a child for various types of wetlands), I felt called by this title. I was a bit afraid it might be too full of dates and numbers to be readable, but such was not the case. Proulx is a lover of wetlands herself, hence the book. A bibliography would have been helpful.

34. Herman, Mimi. The Kudzu Queen (fiction). Mystery without murder, suspense without gunfire or car chases, this book kept me up way past my bedtime. Fifteen-year-old Mathilda, called Maddie, seems an unlikely candidate for a beauty pageant, but the golden-haired, smooth-talking Kudzu King has turned her head. Where will it all end? Now, is the story 100% believable? Does it have to be? I willingly suspended disbelief. A real page-turner!

35. Dionne, Karen. The Wicked Sister (fiction). Psychological thriller suspense is not exactly my genre (I wouldn’t call this novel a murder mystery), but with a Michigan author and a story set in the U.P., I gave it a shot. As far as mystery goes, it was what a friend would call “a thin bowl of soup” (i.e, not mysterious), and there are loose ends aplenty, but the author has clearly set us up for a sequel down the road.

36. Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians (fiction). If you’re looking for lightweight escape reading, this is not for you, but the beautiful writing of a gradually unfolding brutal parable, which could almost be set at any time, past, present, or future, ensures that once you read this novel, you will never forget it.

37. Gibbings, Robert. Lovely Is the Lee (nonfiction). Thanks to books, we can travel back into the past and faraway visit places in their most lovely and most peaceful times. How did people live in Ireland in the mid-20th century, and what stories did they tell? The author’s illustrations add to the spell.

38. Smith, Alexander McCall. My Italian Motorcycle (fiction). A Scotsman’s plan to finish his book in the Italian countryside takes a surprising turn when no rental cars are available. Pure, gentle delight! For all who love Italy … or think they would … or simply need a break from the harsh edges of the nonfictional world.

39. McGinley, Patrick. Bogmail (fiction). A pub owner in rural Ireland murders his barman and buries him in the bog, then begins receiving blackmail letters. Which of the pub regulars is the “bogmailer”? One of the locals or the Englishman? Lyrical landscape writing, detailed Raskolnikovian account of the murderer’s increasingly unsettled state of mind – and a most unsatisfying finish, with loose ends galore, a fault shared with #20 and #28 in this list.*

40. Van Gulik, Robert. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An) (fiction). Not one to be gentle with those he suspects, Judge Dee lands on the criminal every time. Illustrated. Tortures in the courtroom and grisly varieties of capital punishment but an interesting look into a different historical period and culture.

41. Yu, Charles. Interior Chinatown (fiction). What parts are real life, and how much is acting? When a dream comes true (Generic Asian Man becomes Kung Fu Hero) but fails to fulfill, what then? The author brilliantly plays off Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (nonfiction) to create a dramatic novel whose characters you’ll love. Serious and fun at the same time.

42. Whitehead, Colson. Zone One (fiction). Post-apocalyptic fiction is not usually at the top of my list, and I have never read a book about zombies before, but I couldn’t resist a novel by Colson Whitehead. What an amazing writer! I kept thinking how much David Foster Wallace would have appreciated this masterfully written book. I also wondered whether I should take it as fantasy (in which case, zombies don’t scare me, since they don’t exist) or as an allegory for our times – in which case, it is terrifying! 

43. Leon, Donna. Friends in High Places (fiction). Leon’s are not formulaic murder mysteries. Set in Venice, the stories are presented by the author as realistic episodes in Venetian life, where government is rife with corruption, the Mafia is strong, and murderers are not necessarily brought to justice. The 1960s idealism of Commissario Brunetti and his professora wife, Paola, have taken a beating over the years, but Brunetti holds to what shreds of justice he can find in his police work.


*And now, aspiring novelists and/or readers, if you missed my preceding post, in which I harp about problematic beginnings and endings of novels, you can find it here.

For today, Happy St. David's Day!

Daffodils from May 6, 2014

For David and for Annie, Jane, and Curig --

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Two Very Different Topics: First, A Trend I Despise; Then, Advice to Aspiring Novelists

Tuesday afternoon, 2/27/24, 64 degrees and sunny -- like a day in May!

 

First, online sellers:

 

An increasing common trend on multiple-dealer book sites has to do with the so-called “descriptions” some dealers are attaching to books they offer for sale. For example, for one title I searched, a copy offered was graded as Good, the so-called “description” reading as follows:

 

Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. 

 

I have italicized the words ‘can’ and ‘may’ to indicate my objection: The seller is simply giving a (partial) generic description to accompany the grade “good,” without reference to the particular copy beyond saying that it lacks a dust jacket. I don’t want to buy a book with highlighting! Has someone defaced the pages with highlighting or not? I understand that a book graded as “good” may show wear on the spine ends, but does this copy have worn ends, and if so, how bad are they?

 

By contrast, here is what can truly be called a description:

 

Clean and unmarked anywhere; front gutter cracked but binding firm; lovely engravings by author; unfaded green boards with gilt lettering and ornamentation on red patches well protected by pictorial dj that has chipping at edges, but protected from further wear by Brodart cover. Good in unclipped dj, plus Brodart jacket.

 

Both online dealers offer books for sale, but I would dignify only the second with the title ‘bookseller.’ Notice that both sellers have graded their copies (of the same title) as Good. Which copy would you feel more confident purchasing?


I am very happy with the copy I bought.

 

Here is a general guideline for grading collectible books, with grades ranging from Very Fine (VG) down to Good (G). In general, used books not attractive to collectors but still desirable to readers or other book dealers may be given lower grades than Good, such as Fair; Poor; Binding Copy; or Reading Copy. Guides explain how to assign a grade, but only the seller can provide the specific information to explain how s/he arrived at that grade for a particular copy. Saying a copy “can” or “may” have such and such a flaw is not a description. It is a sign of unprofessionalism and laziness. 

 

I stopped listing books for sale online when the site I listed with was bought by the behemoth and a different format put in place for uploading titles, as my old lists could not simply be transferred to the new format, and there was no one “at the other end” to help. Add to that my reality as a one-person operation, a “Mom&Pop” that was and is (even more so now) just “Mom.” With no second person on-site who could devote fulltime to uploading titles to be sold online, and then factoring in the “race to the bottom” for prices (one dealer would list a book for $15, the next would list the same book for $12, and so on down to $1.99), it wasn’t worth my time.

 

Given that race to the bottom on prices asked, along with the fact that processing an order for a $4 book is less time-consuming than processing an order for a $40 book (listing, delisting, packaging, shipping, and sometimes communicating with the buyer), you can see why sellers without traditional bookman standards would cut corners with their descriptions, but that's not the way I do business, and I prefer to deal with honest-to-goodness booksellers – preferably with open shops – who adhere to my standards. I don’t care to waste my time buying something I’ll be disappointed to receive – and that I wouldn’t want to sell to my own bookstore customers.

 

 

Now, to change the subject. I was going to add the notes below at the end of my February Books Read list, since three different books I read this month prompted these thoughts, but I decided to post them separately today and get it out of the way. Words to the wise!

 

 

Advice to Novelists and Wannabes

 

Beginning the novel: Beginning fiction writers often have a problem with getting their novels started, wanting to include too much backstory on every character. A good editor will tell them, “You need to know all that about your character, but your readers don’t.” A good model for filling in backstory with a sentence here and there is Walter Mosley. He is a master. Most editors coaching an otherwise wonderful novelist will help the writer overcome this problem, because the truth is, you can begin a story anywhere, and wherever you start will be the beginning.


This author is a great model for how to incorporate backstory.


Ending the novel: A different problem is the unsatisfactory finish, because even readers who may persist hopefully through slow initial pages want a story that builds a strong narrative arc, reaches some sort of climax or epiphany or decisive moment – but doesn’t stop there, with the author suddenly slamming the door with a bang, whether or not on a tangle of loose ends! Ouch! Rats! Take the time to give us a metaphorical literary hug and murmur sweet nothings or at least wave goodbye, for heaven’s sake, before sauntering thoughtfully down the road. We don’t want to be dumped unceremoniously at the curb after spending all this time with you! That is very unkind! A comic novel, a tragic novel, a mystery will each have a different kind of denouement, but some kind each must have, if the reader is not to feel cheated.


Wednesday: Be ready for a whiteout without warning! Dress for wind chill!



Thursday, February 22, 2024

It's Travel Time

WHAT month is it???

In northern Michigan there are, besides weekend tourists and short-term vacationers, summer people and “year-round” people. The year-rounders who can afford to make a getaway in late winter or early spring, though, are not shy about doing so, and who can blame them? Some take February or March in Florida or Mexico or the Caribbean. For years, before and between the Florida and Arizona winters, the Artist and I made more modest forays to Lake Huron on early spring weekends when March rolled around, because cabin fever isn’t just about getting to an exotic location. It’s more about seeing different scenery and different people. 

 

“But we didn’t even have winter this year.” 

 

“We had a month of winter (January).” 

 

“No, we had ten days. That’s all!”

 

Okay, and now February, typically the coldest month in northern Michigan, has been bringing us daytime temperatures in the 40s! Along with many others, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this month’s weather. It isn’t right, isn’t normal, it bodes ill for the future – and yet, in the present, it makes life easier and certainly (because of lower fuel bills and no plow bills at all) less expensive, which is hard not to appreciate. And who can complain about blue skies? Besides that, for me (and I know I’m not the only one) this time of year is a minefield of associations. Anniversaries after loss are ambushes along life’s road, in that you know they’re coming – looming inexorably -- but not the moment or hour or the manner they will hit. So with all of the financial and emotional possibilities threatening, I found unseasonable February warmth and sunshine more than helpful.  


While we still had snow --



Blue view --


Thanks to books, I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ireland and Scotland, France and Italy, some of it over a hundred years ago and some in more recent times. Fiction, nonfiction – one is as dreamy as the other, when it comes to exploring mountain villages, river sources, stone ruins, and local stories from local folks in faraway places. When March arrives, I’ll post my “Books Read” list for the month of February, with enough annotation to give an idea of each title’s contents for anyone who might be curious.

 

Leelanau County itself, though, provided me with antidotes to cabin fever. Monday, Presidents Day, was a bank holiday, so I had to go to Traverse City on Tuesday instead to take care of banking errands. By noon, though, I was already zipping out of town when the beautiful sunshine inspired me to detour to Good Harbor Bay, where Sunny and I walked on the beach! As close as I live to Lake Michigan, you would think beach-walking would be a frequent life activity for me, but somehow, unless I have company, time just seems to slip away. Well, not that day! I seized it!


Good Harbor, Tuesday, February 20, 2024


Again, the following day, Wednesday, the Artist’s birthday (he would have been 87, if still living), when I felt the need to do something special, Good Harbor was my choice. I'd first contemplated a stop at the Happy Hour for a beer on the way home, maybe even buying for whoever might happen to be sitting at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, but there was no way to include Sunny Juliet in that plan. And as it had on Tuesday, the sun was shining, the sky blue, so with sunset later and later every day, Sunny J. and I had plenty of time after I closed the bookstore at 3 o’clock to drive down to Good Harbor again, scenes of many memories and associations over the years.


Lake Michigan, Wednesday afternoon

Calm water


This is how I am traveling in February now. Books take me to other countries, and I take mini-vacations close to home with my dog, because, as the Artist loved to say, so often, “We live in a beautiful place,” and whatever the weather, every road of my county is saturated with memories, making it all the more beautiful. Travel time in my home county is any time, and any county drive is also time travel, my present brimming over with the past. 


Thursday morning fog -- beautiful!


 

Today’s postscript:

 

If audiobooks are your thing, please consider signing up to get yours from libro.fm – and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore. Your audiobooks won’t cost any more than they do if you buy from the online behemoth, but you will be supporting a small indie bookstore in northern Michigan. Thank you! And special thanks to those of you already ordering from libro.fm via Dog Ears Books!!!





Sunday, February 18, 2024

Bogged Down

That pond on Alpers Road

 

 …Northwest Indiana’s Kankakee was an extensive swamp-marsh of more than 500,000 acres on a sandy dune outwash plain, in retrospect [emphasis added] called “one of the great freshwater wetland ecosystems of the world….” 

 

      The Kankakee River snaked its 250-mile way through the swamp in two thousand twists and bends, a slow absorbent river punctuated with bayous and edged by riverine forests.

 

-      Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (Scribner, 2022)

 

When I was a girl growing up on the Illinois prairie in the 1950s, the term ‘wetland’ was not part of our Midwestern vocabulary, and my fascination with any ‘swamp’-like area that caught my eye was not generally shared by family or friends, but our postwar neighborhood outside the city limits of Joliet, Illinois, was filling in with houses on every 40-ft. lot, and while I appreciated -- for their expansive views of sunset and thunderstorms -- fields of soybeans or corn (in alternating years) across the road from my parents’ older home on the westernmost street of the subdivision, it was wildness I craved. 


What we called “the slough,” down the street, was semi-wild but also stinky and, sadly, forbidden – though if it hadn’t been stinky, its water except in flood barely moving and topped with scum and patches of iridescent oil, I’m sure the prohibition would not have been nearly as effective. As it was, however, most of my hunger for wild wetlands had to be satisfied with sightings from car and train windows. 


Every autumn our mother would take us along on expeditions to gather cattails, milkweed pods and bittersweet for indoor fall arrangements (cattails, common as they are in my northern Michigan life, still hold dreamlike associations for me), and on a long train ride to Florida one spring, unable to stop gazing out the window at the romantic scenery flowing by, I made up a story, mile by mile, to accompany the moving panorama, peopling every hummock with strange, dangerous characters that my sister told me years later had given her nightmares.

 

A memorable high school biology field trip involved wading in a creek and discovering and collecting caddisfly larvae, but visits to the Kankakee River were an annual occasion for years, with church choir picnics held at the river shack as they called it, belonging to the choir director and his wife. I didn’t know then that the original 250-mile river had once boasted 2,000 “twists and bends” before, beginning in 1902, being dredged and channeled into straight-line segments, such that its length was reduced to 90 miles. I had no idea the Kankakee Marsh, before its trees had been felled and land drained for farmland, had once been called “the Everglades of the North.” Stop and think for a moment: reduced from 250 to 90 miles in length, stripped of its trees (“oaks, walnuts, elms, sycamores”), and natural flood-absorbing marshes filled in to become farm fields.

 

My strongest memory of the river that flowed past the shack was the sucking, silty, clayey mud that had to be slogged through to reach water deep enough for swimming. When we climbed the ladder to the floating raft, our legs were coated up over the knees in that clinging mud. The water was thick and brown, too, and at the time, and given my age then, I never wondered if the river might once have been different. Now, bit by bit, parcel by parcel, efforts are underway to restore at least pieces of the once extensive wildlife area. Read this to learn more.


In Leelanau

“It is, of course, possible to love a swamp,” writes Proulx, recalling a larch swamp in Vermont that she loved in her early years. And while the fen and bog sections of her book have more to do with peatland destruction, it is the section on swamps that whispers more seductively to my personal experience. Swamp is sometimes a transition zone between higher land and fen or bog, the key difference being that swampland supports trees. There are trees in the Everglades and in the waterlogged wilds along the Suwanee River in Florida, and there are wetlands in northern Michigan where the Artist and I found beavers at work, spied cardinal flower in bloom, or hushed to watch a heron stalking fish or a raccoon washing its hands -- or where a friend and I waded slowly, reverently, into a wonderland of sunlight filtering down through the branches of yet-leafless trees where grassy hummocks held blooming lady’s-slippers as far as our wondering eyes could see. 

 

Scandinavia and Canada are rich in bogs. Proulx tells us that the word ‘muskeg’ comes from Algonkian and Ojibway words, ‘maskek’ and ‘mashkig.’

 

Fen peat forms in groundwater locations where reeds, sedges, cattails, rushes and bog beans grow in mineral soils. The plants around the edge and in the water grow, then perish, season after season, gradually filling up the fen with partially decayed vegetable matter that over thousands of years [emphasis added] becomes fen peat. 

 

-      Proulx, ibid

 

In the Yoop

On Saturday evening I pulled a comfort book from the shelf at home (for there are comfort books just as there is comfort food – surely, as a reader, you have favorite comfort books of your own?), Lovely Is the Lee, by the same Robert Gibbings whose Coming Down the Seine I so recently enjoyed, and only a few miles inland from Galway, Gibbings is exploring moorland and bogs, where “Black bullocks munch the heather” and “Wild geese rise from the bog.” The year is 1945, and the old ways are still practiced. Turf, Gibbings tells us, 

 

…is cut with a slane, a narrow spade with an ear at right angles to the blade so that two sides of the sod are cut at the same time from the stepped face of the bog. Each newly cut sod is like a large brick, dark and oily.

 

-      Gibbings, Robert, Lovely Is the Lee (Dutton, 1945

 


An experienced slanesman could cut four tons of raw turf in a single day, which then had to be spread to dry, stacked, and finally thatched with straw “against the weather.” Gibbings, as does Proulx, notes that much material culture of previous ages is uncovered in the cutting of bog turf: bronze and obsidian implements, wooden dishes, canoes and paddles, clothing made from wool, skin, or leather. 

 

The title for today’s post came to me, however, in addition to my reading, by way of a figure of speech. We say we are “bogged down” when we are stuck, as in mire, unable to move forward. The Cambridge dictionary gives examples as examples using the expression “Let’s not get bogged down with individual complaints” and “Try not to get too bogged down in the details.” A related figure of speech is “swamped,” meaning overwhelmed, as if one is flooded. There is also the Slough of Despond, which Proulx mentions, from the classic Pilgrim’s Progress. All felt appropriate in this shortest month of the year.


Because February is a difficult month for me, with day-by-day anniversaries of the Artist’s final weeks of hospitalizations and surgeries, the emotional gamut we ran from confident hope to his final days, his last birthday. Images and sentences and remembered feelings from that time swamp my dreams and solitary hours. I don’t want to say I am permanently bogged down, only that --- what? I don’t want to profane it by trying to put it into words.

 

As you know, though, I have a dog, and there is no crawling into a hole and playing dead when one has a dog. No, the dog has to go outdoors, and so the dog momma has to get dressed and go out, too, and this discipline my companion imposes on me is a life-saver. 

 

"Let's get the day started!"

Following springlike days, we had a heavy, wet snow that quickly became slush, only to harden to cement when the temperature dropped. Then the temperature dropped further, and more snow came overnight Friday, this time the light, fluffy stuff beloved of cross-country skiers. Single-digit wind chill. And Sunny Juliet discovered something new in her Michigan world: ice on our little no-name creek. She tried it, but it was not strong enough to hold her weight. Luckily, the creek is shallow. Only her feet got wet. And the dog momma didn’t want to stay outdoors for an hour in the cold wind, anyway.



Sunny exploring frozen creek...

...where she broke through the ice

And yet we went out again in the afternoon and again the next morning and again the following day, morning and afternoon, because this is our life, and it’s what we do. We wake up and get on our feet and go out into the world.


And now, did I write myself out of the swamp? Or was it my HappyLight that did the trick? The patches of blue sky and beautiful cumulus clouds we had before grey skies returned? Or my lovely little companion, always so happy be outdoors with me, whatever the weather, always full of energy and enthusiasm even when I might be short on both? Maybe all of those contributed to an afternoon happier than the dark morning had been. There is no way we can live two different lives at the same time, in some kind of sci-fi controlled experiment, and know for certain which is preferable or better or more true. One life, each moment of it a gift to do with as we will….


She says, "Be happy! We have each other!"