Tree-Hugger Travels

[Re 'tree-hugger' - Since the term is so often used as an epithet, I've decided to embrace it as part of my identity.]

You’d think I’d have had enough road travel to last a while, having settled back home less than a month ago after another Odyssean cross-country adventure stretched out over nine grueling days. But that was just the trouble: by the time we got to southern Michigan we were feeling the bite of the calendar urging us homeward, with the result that I had nowhere near enough time there with my son and none at all with a couple of my oldest friends.

One of the best things about June, though, is the length of the days, long enough that even someone who on the job until 5 p.m. can set out after work and have hours of daylight driving time. So that’s what I did last Saturday — and had a beautiful, sunny trip over the rivers, through the woods, and across the counties of Michigan from Leelanau to Kalamazoo.

Dark was falling by the time I arrived at the home of the friends who had offered to put me up, and by morning the rain had arrived. My friends’ home is surrounded by woods. The sky was overcast. All day long, therefore, morning, afternoon, and evening, the light was the same, a murky, underwater green, overabundant foliage pressing in like tangles of seaweed or like a jungle intent on devouring everything human. Mayapples were happy, though, and azaleas and peonies in riotous bloom. And it was ideal weather for sleeping late and catching a nap later on still.

When I was fully conscious at last, my son took me out to breakfast downtown at the very hip and trendy Food Dance. It’s a Kalamazoo institution, I’m told, though I’ve been gone so long that it was new to me. After our leisurely breakfast, we left town behind to venture up into Barry County, aiming first for our old farmhouse to see how tall the pine trees had grown. We continued north after that stop and proceeded to lose ourselves for at least half an hour — and maybe a full hour, because we lost track of time, too — on Barry County back roads. We wandered slowly and wonderingly through old forest, past secret, hidden-away lakes and ponds and wetlands, all of it undeveloped land, much of it open to public hunting. At one point a great blue heron swooped low across the road in front of us, followed minutes later by a flash of oriole. The forest was tall and far-reaching, without cabins or paths other than the roads that would around and around and uphill and down dale. It was a magical world, and we were under its spell. 

Before starting back on Monday I visited other friends, and their old country home too was wild with vegetation. Trees I remembered as new plantings had shot up like green and blue-green skyscrapers, the view of the lake across the road had almost vanished behind a thick screen of maple branches, and in the gardens out past the dining room windows, shouts of color brought hummingbirds.

After all my forest visitation, I could not face the high-speed expressway maze through Grand Rapids and chose instead to come back north closer to the Lake Michigan shoreline, from Kalamazoo to Allegan to Holland and north past Grand Haven and Pentwater. Old, familiar paths and names. Beautiful, overflowing rivers. A pair of young steers running and frisking in their pasture. Two horses standing with their rumps to the road, tails swishing flies away. A turtle crossing the pavement between one pond and another. These were paved roads, but they were roads less traveled nonetheless. 

I thought a little bit about the perennial question of where Downstate leaves off and Up North begins. Which is Holland? Which is Muskegon? What about North Muskegon? But quickly my thoughts turned to more general musings, i.e., what a wonderful state Michigan is from north to south and west to east. Prairies, farm fields, pastures, orchards — forests, shorelines, and dunes — lakes, ponds, and wetlands — a lifetime of exploring will never be enough to experience it all. 

Two book recommendations for today, reflecting my recent travel and reflections on the state of Michigan, come to you from your bookseller here in “Treeland” Up North. They are:

The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers with characters whose lives are affected in one way or another by the great trees and forests of the United States;

and 

The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne, a novel set in our own beloved, wooded and wild Upper Peninsula.

A Very Quick Road Trip

What am I showing you?

We drove down to Kalamazoo on Saturday and back home on Sunday. A “flying visit,” David called it. The occasion was the first birthday of our twin great-grandsons, and fortunately we left the rain behind as we drove south, so the indoor-outdoor birthday open house took place on a beautifully sunny, felt-summery day. Those little boys were good as gold, as well as infinitely more precious!

Boys with their parents

With their mom and great-greandparents!

All the warm sun on Saturday and a little overnight rain meant that things were really starting to pop by Sunday morning. All over southwest Michigan, flowering bulbs and spring ephemerals were up and doing their thing, and trees too were starting to burst into bloom.

Trillium! Flowers not open yet, but still!

But of all the growing things I saw along the way down and back, nothing impressed me more than the pine trees I planted with my first husband about 40 years ago in Barry County. They were big the last time I saw them, but now they appear to my eye as giants! My opening photograph shows me showing them to you, but you need to step back to get the full effect:

We planted five hundred little trees back in the Seventies. I'd have to walk three sides of the 10-acre property to see how many survived and thrived, but how can they be so huge, i.e., how can I be so old?

House and barn look good, but I was disappointed to note that installation of new siding lost the old wide board under the roof overhang that served as an architectural clue to the age of the house, indicating that it was built before the Civil War. 

barn and garage

farmhouse

This might be the first trip, road or otherwise, that I’ve ever taken without bringing at least one book along, but I knew the hours away would be more than full and that I would be very tired come bedtime on Saturday. Back home Sunday I finished Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (was close to the end night before travel) and returned to an ARC (The Mapmaker's Daughter, by Katherine Nouri Hughes) I’d barely started before the trip, but my mind is also very full with ideas for our evening on May 9 with Sarah Shoemaker. Big plans are taking shape! Here's a hint: Think about showing up as early as 6 p.m. for the 7-9 book event. What's up? You'll hear all about it very soon!

Ah, spring! Exhausting but wonderful! And a very big season coming up, too.

A tired dog is a good dog!

The Brief Time We Are Here

Back home with snow to shovel

I’ve been meaning to read The Hunger Games but somehow haven’t gotten around to it yet. Thought of taking it on a recent overnight trip...decided to take something else. The occasion for the trip was very sad, and dystopian literature didn’t seem like what I’d want for bedtime reading at the late end of a long, physically and emotional exhausting day. For some unknown reason—most likely its size, the small, slim volume easily tucked into a bag—I took along Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. I know, I know! But I did not open it once during the two days we were away from home.

Branches bearing snow burden

It isn’t easy to be young. YA novels and classic modern poetry both have a point when they put their protagonist in nightmarish scenarios. I was young and anguished once myself (and for longer than I had youth as an excuse) but am glad to say that’s over and given up as a way of life. Nihilism? Not interested. Cynicism? No, thank you. Tragedy and heartache? Life brings quite enough in the natural course of events, but the long view of that same course of events shows a multifaceted reality, with happiness as well as misery, contentment more long-lasting for most of us than boredom or anger.

So the book I opened to read over morning coffee on Friday, far from home, was Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth, and when we were safely home again in our own bed and David asked me to read to him before we went to sleep, it was the Wendell Berry book I opened again.

The Catletts, the Coulters, and the Feltners, Joe and Nettie Banion, Jayber Crow, and all the others in Berry’s fictional Port William, Kentucky, have known each other for a long, long time, as most of them have known the land around their homes for a lifetime. Death and heartache and tragedy come to Port William, as they come everywhere on earth, but here is how Burley Coulter writes to his nephew, Nathan, away fighting in World War II, telling him that Mat and Margaret Feltner and their daughter-in-law, Virgil’s young, pregnant wife, have had word that Virgil is now listed as Missing in Action. Burley is explaining why the preacher’s visit to the Feltners seemed so irrelevant and inappropriate.

I do say that some people’s knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that’s the talent I’m stuck with. For us it’s important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it’s important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don’t forget them after somebody who never knew them has said “Dead in the service of his country” and “Rest in peace.” That’s not the way these accounts are kept. We don’t rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do.

David and I had driven south to Barry County on Thursday, had gone to a funeral home visitation, stayed overnight with friends in Hastings, had breakfast on Friday with friends on their farm out in the country, and we drove back that same Friday. It was a “quick trip” in one sense. In another sense we covered over forty years. We retraced roads traveled many times in former lifetimes, vaguely familiar now though almost forgotten, too. Our path on Thursday had lain through bright fog, out of which frost-painted trees resolved themselves into stark lines and shapes. We gathered with friends in bright rooms that evening as the darkness pressed around outside. Friday morning the sky was blue, sunshine bright, and our friend Michael dug parsnips from his garden for us, and his wife Barbara gave us jars of honey to bring home.

Last summer’s nut-brown oak leaves hung in glossy bunches along the roads and rivers and lakes of Barry County. Crossing the flat Dutch fields around Grand Rapids, we eventually re-entered the North, pines standing in snow, trembling tawny beech leaves so much smaller and lighter than the oak leaves to the south, apple and cherry orchards taking the place of dairy herds.

Looking north to the winter willows

Wendell Berry’s place on earth, also the place of his fictional characters, is south of the Ohio River. Here are some of Mat Feltner’s thoughts as he goes about his farm chores:

Around Mat, the country throbs with the singing of frogs. Too high in the dusk to be seen, a flock of wild geese passes, a kind of conversation muttering among them. They will go on talking and talking that way all night, flying into new daylight far off. That they do not think of him, that they go on, comforts Mat. He thinks of those wild things feeding along lake edges way to the north with a stockman’s pleasure in the feeding of anything, and with something more.

What name can be given to the “something more”? For Mat Feltner, for Wendell Berry, for the reader in tune both with Port William, with the old Barry County days and now solidly home in Leelanau Township, no further naming is necessary. We hold onto our former lives, onto our old friends, onto those who have passed away from us. And when the wild geese fly over, we notice their passing, too. And then we turn to the next job at hand.

Big, heavy snow here on Friday night. Images in today’s post show what the countryside looked like near my home late Saturday afternoon.

Across the orchard, past the pines, to the wooded hills beyond....