Notes on Wildflowers

 

My Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers, Eastern Region, has a copyright date of 1979, and no doubt I purchased it in that year. I know that it came from Leelanau Books in Leland, back when Prudy Meade had the shop she herself had established, and I remember that Prudy died in the summer of 1993, the first year of my bookstore in Northport. She had been very supportive earlier that year when I was starting out in bookselling, and I will never forget her or all the time David and I spent in her Leland shop.

I pulled the wildflower guide from the shelf on Tuesday to refamiliarize myself with the blossoms of baneberry, blooming now in a wild edge off to the side of my mowed yard, in company with false Solomon’s seal and wild ginger. As I have always done with field guides, as I turned the pages I looked at other photographs and wildflower names, not only what I went to the guide looking for. Such a practice often allows me to identify wildflowers (or birds, similarly) for the first time when encountering them outdoors. This time nodding ladies’ tresses caught my eye, and when I turned to the later pages in the book to read a description of this lovely orchid I found my own notation there in ballpoint pen: “Eagle River, Keweenaw Co., 8/20/92.” That would have been my first summer back in Leelanau following the second time the Artist and I married each other (Paris, Illinois, April 14), and obviously we had made an August trip to the U.P.

The description, habitat, and flowering dates for the nodding ladies’ tresses are on page 662 of the 1979 Audubon edition. A few pages back, on page 653, next to the showy lady’s slipper description, I found a notation reading “Lonesome Point, G.M. [Grand Marais], 6/9/92,” which tells me that we had made an earlier trip to the U.P. in June of that same summer, and a memory came back of the Artist improvising on harmonica while driving at the slowest possible pace on an unpaved northwoods road, the two of us hardly able to believe we were together again in the beloved territory of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Fox River, for which Hemingway used the name of another river.

There is a later notation on that same page that reads: “Johnson Rd., 6/24/96,” and on the opposite page, next to yellow lady’s slipper, I see “Between Hessel and Cedarville, 6/11/92.” So I know, as surely as if reading a diary entry, that we went east from the Mackinac Bridge, along the top of Lake Huron, before circling back to the west along Lake Superior. 

Beginning in 1993, we made our annual pilgrimages in September.

What I have always remembered from that summer of 1992 was how cold and rainy it was. I was without paid employment that summer, for the only time between 1965 and today, and there was hardly a beach day all summer. Instead it was jacket weather, my feet were always wet and cold in my shoes, and the Artist and I spent a lot of time in the car, idly cruising, but I still recall vividly that our happiness that summer knew no bounds.

Old notes: earth star found in Kalamazoo, only identified years later

Before We Get Started

Straits of Mackinac -- water, water everywhere --

If a story is told backwards, from the end to the beginning, so that both writer and reader finish where it started, maybe -- this is what I’m thinking – it will remain in reading minds with everything yet to come, anticipated rather than left behind, and that way nothing in the story will end. Because with today July 1, the first official open day of 2020 for Dog Ears Books (very late this year, and with many cautionary measures in place – please see here), I am loathe to say good-by to our little, all-too-short, pre-season road trip to the Upper Peninsula.

My favorite!

Our last stop on the way back south to the Mackinac Bridge was Lehto’s Pasties, where we got one “hot one” to share for lunch and two frozen to take home. No, that wasn’t the very last stop, though, because half a mile or so down the highway is a rest area, and that was where we ate our lunch at a picnic table high over the Straits of Mackinac.

Mary's magical garden

Back up the way apiece, we had stopped at my friend Mary’s country bookshop, First Edition Too on Worth Road, where the Artist enjoyed Mary’s magical garden setting and visited with her husband while I shopped for books (a Frank Waters; a biography of Cochise; another copy of Parnassus on Wheels; and a paperback study of Max Weber), caught up with Mary, and was introduced to her beautiful chickens. I never leave First Edition Too empty-handed but always carry away treasures, and the day could not have been lovelier, the garden pleasanter, the bookshop more inviting, or our peaceful welcome more satisfying.

Entrance to a wonderland

Bookseller behind plexiglass

Chickens behind chickenwire

Handsome master of the harem

Coming down from Lake Superior, as we’d passed through Seney on M-28 before following an assortment of inland roads down to Epoufette, I’d been delighted to see a pair of sandhill cranes by the side of the road. Lovely, rich color they were, the stately birds we have known over the years from southeast Arizona to the southern coast of Ontario. I was also still marveling at the waving sweeps of daisies and islands of orange and yellow hawkweed everywhere, wildflowers I associate with my Leelanau home and never realized were also in the U.P., since our visits there are generally fall getaways or, longer in the past, winter treks to Minnesota. At the motel where we stayed in Grand Marais, I was charmed to note that the management (did John do the mowing, as well as check-in?), when keeping the lawn neatly trimmed, had mowed around the colonies of flowering hawkweed, just as I do at home. And of course the bright, brilliant, floridly perfumed roses – at any time of year, they capture my attention.

At home in Leelanau County, sunrise is over the woods, sunset over Lake Michigan, straight across. In Grand Marais, the sun comes up at one “end,” as it seems, of Lake Superior and sets at the other, never touching the far northern horizon. I slept late, for me, but was up in time to see sunrise and read a while and go for a walk with Sarah before the bank opened and I could take care of the business that had occasioned the trip.

Sunrise, June 29, 2020

To our eyes, unaccustomed to the bustle of summer’s longest days on Lake Superior, the town seemed very full of people. (ATVs, I noted, are the snowmobiles of summer.) More people picnicking this year, naturally, with only one restaurant/bar open (and too packed for us to brave the crowd there). The campground was full to overflowing, and one enterprising entrepreneur has opened a little espresso coffee shop in a beautifully restored VW bus on the same street as the campground entrance. She had just closed up shop for the night when we walked past on our Sunday evening promenade.

Espresso! In Grand Marais!

Our friends at the West Bay Diner are not yet open for the season, still working on figuring out how they will manage this year for COVID-19 safety and without regular help, but Ellen and I had a nice visit on the shady end of the deck Sunday afternoon, where Rick joined us for a while, also. Such hard-working people! Though I’m impatient to have Ellen’s fourth novel in my hands -- to sell it as well as to read it, her books being such a delight to share with my own bookstore public -- I’m glad for her sake that publication has been put off until 2021, as this is a very difficult year for authors with new work coming out.

“Is the town busier than usual this summer?” I asked Ellen. “Are there more people coming north this year?”

No, she said – things are relatively quiet this year. In a normal year, it would be “crazy busy” at this time. This isn't crazy-busy? We didn’t know. In prior years, for over a quarter-century, we have been too busy in Leelanau to take time to drive to the U.P. at the end of June.

But yes, we got a room, where Sarah was welcome, also. Right on the ground floor, with all amenities and comforts, looking right out at the pretty little harbor. 

Looking back from Coast Guard Point to our motel in town

Naubinway

The only other stop we made on our way to Grand Marais had been the quiet fishing harbor at Naubinway. I love a working harbor with serious fishing boats, serious and workmanlike even on their day off, a quiet Sunday. It was good to enjoy that calm oasis before rejoining traffic on U.S. 2.

I’d been concerned all the way up about our chances of getting a room for the night, as vehicular traffic seemed very heavy to us. So many people parked along U.S. 2, families enjoying the beach there at the top of Lake Michigan! Never had we seen so many people there! Just as, earlier, passing through Oden, we had been shocked at the line of vehicles towing and waiting to launch boats, as well as trucks and empty boat trailers lining the highway past the launch site. Not the quiet little lake I’d always thought, apparently. But then, September is a world apart from summer’s longest days.

Not all is hustle and bustle in and on the way to the Upper Peninsula, however. It is still possible to find relative peace and quiet in little lost-time islands along the way, and we are hoping that September 2020 brings us another few such days, as the couple we had passed all too quickly. Too quickly but very, very happily.

Open? I don't think so....

Where Is the "Real World"?

View zoomed from my favorite little house in Grand Marais

I’ve fallen away from Robinson Crusoe, not far from the end. If I were a 14-year-old boy (an extraordinary young teen, that is, one with patience for Defoe’s convoluted sentence structure; this is a challenging book to read aloud, I warn you), I’m sure I would be more excited by the plotting and shooting and killing. But would I, even then, accept Crusoe’s hunger for adventure, his determination to go to sea against parental wishes, as his original sin? Can this character really (let’s pretend, for the sake of the fiction, that he is a real person) have wished he’d stayed home and played it safe, as his father had urged? And to answer a question I’d posed for myself in an earlier post, no, he doesn’t seem to have seen his plantation slave-owning as sinful, and venturing off to sea again to buy slaves for other plantation owners he regrets only for the greed of it, not because of any other aspect of human trafficking. 

I’ll probably skim through the remaining chapters but feel no great pull. These days I'm much more pulled to be outdoors, soaking up September light.

“When we get back to the ‘real world,’” David began, as we stood by the door of the West Bay Diner in Grand Marais, on the point of departure.

“This is the real world,” Ellen interrupted, smiling but firm.

“I stand corrected,” David acknowledged handsomely, without argument.

View from the window of our room at the Superior Hotel

I thought back to a trip we made to Mackinac Island in the fall of 2007 (when we were “between dogs”) and David’s comment then that the island was not the real world. Surely it is, I had argued, for people who live there and work hard seven days a week, showing tourists and summer people a good time! That’s what Ellen and Rick do at the Diner, and it’s what Mary and Rick do a couple blocks away, running the Superior Hotel and getting out the Grand Marais Pilot. And they’re not the only ones.

Leelanau County, a beautiful Lake Michigan peninsula, is called “La-La Land” by some. They see it as a retreat for the wealthy, a land of leisure bristling with trust funds and fat investment portfolios, but that is only one picture from the county album. Other snapshots would show carpenters and waitresses, farmers and orchard workers, clerks, teachers, retirees (some but not all rich), millionaires and yacht owners (yes, a few), but also food pantry volunteers and clients, housekeepers, builders, lawn care workers, cooks, bartenders, plumbers, tech support people, disabled veterans, nonprofit volunteers (and paid directors), caregivers (paid and unpaid), artists and writers, small business owners (who wear multiple hats and perform many jobs), and minimum wage workers of every stripe.

 Beer at Garage Bar & Grill

Visitors who call this “La-La Land” don’t see it as the real world because they are on vacation, as we are when we go to the U.P. Vacationers can sometimes mistake residents' lives as residing in a dream. Well, I’ve said it before, but here it is again: Having a dream is easy. Living a dream takes work.

When I first moved into the little bark-covered building on the corner of Mill and Nagonaba in 1997 (already the third location of my business and currently the home of Nature Gems, an even older local business), I told my new landlord I was in it for the long haul. Visitors who haven’t been to Northport for a while find it hard to believe, as I do myself, that Dog Ears Books has been in its present location for a decade already.

In the real world, time sorts out the dreamers from the workers. No, that’s not quite right. Because if we weren’t dreamers in the first place, we would not have chosen this path! What time reveals is which dreamers are willing to put the work into living their dreams and which are not, which sounds like I’m tooting my own horn -- and in part, obviously, I am -- but fresh back from Grand Marais it’s Ellen and Rick G., Mary and Rick C. that I’m singling out for a special salute today.

View down Nagonaba Street to marina in Northport

A salute to Grand Marais is no snub to Northport! Both villages, the one on Lake Superior and the other here on Lake Michigan, have their share of hard-working dreamers, and that’s only one thing they have in common. Isolated, end-of-the-road locations; seasonal economies; struggling small schools; a shortage of summer workers, with that situation exacerbated by rising real estate prices; friendly locals; and beautiful natural settings are other features shared by the two sister villages.

Is it any wonder I feel so at home in my “home away from home” and can enter so sympathetically into the lives of my friends in that other very real world?

In Arcadia

So yes, we came home, but then almost right away we made a little day trip down the coast south, past Frankfort, through Arcadia and Onekama as far as Manistee, a town that seemed like a city to this pair of country mice. Gorgeous old buildings and a lovely riverfront walk! All along the way, too, we found people working. 

I’d mentioned to Ellen, up in sight of Lake Superior, that all summer long when I was indoors in my bookstore I tried not to envy vacationers running off to hike or swim or simply walk the beach, and then there I was, running off to swim in Sable Lake (once!) while Ellen and Rick slaved away in the Diner. I told her there was something about this in Wind in the Willows and would find the quote for her, so here it is. The Mole has just said to himself, ‘Hang spring cleaning!’ and emerged into a sunlit meadow to go off rambling cross-country.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘Whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.

That is just how it was again yesterday for David and me. Crews were out working on roads, men and women on lawn mowers busy on the grounds of homes and public places, cooks cooking and servers serving, bartenders pulling draft beer from taps – “busy citizens” everywhere, while we two “idle dogs” played hooky for one more day.

Messing about in boat storage yards....

Riverfront view, Manistee

Street scene, Frankfort

 

Back to Frankfort for dinner at Fusion

Appetizers

Soup

Sushi

We two “idle dogs” had a fabulous day, and now we're back at work. 

Also looking ahead to Leelanau UnCaged, a week from tomorrow. Come visit Northport for the big street fair on September 24!

Home Away From Home

Lots of people have a home away from home. For many downstate residents, Northport or some other part of Leelanau County is that place. Since I live in Leelanau Township and run a business in Northport, however, my home away from home is farther north, up on the shore of Lake Superior. There is the general region (the U.P.), the little village (Grand Marais, which is very much like Northport in countless ways but where I have no responsibilities), and specifically the Superior Hotel, where we have been staying for so many years.

Rick and Mary Capogrossa are our host and hostess at the Superior these days, and their "work in progress," as they call the hotel, grows cozier and more welcoming all the time. We are so happy they are there! And that we can continue to get away to the dear place that is so much like home to us!

Then there is breakfast at the West Bay Diner, cooked by Rick and served by Ellen. On our last day we shared a whitefish omelet, agreeing that it was the #1 best omelet either of us had ever had in our lives. I did not impose on Rick and Ellen to pose for pictures, since they are always super-busy in the diner (so busy one rainy morning that Ellen allowed me behind the coffee to pour coffee for thirsty customers while she waited tables in the other room), but here are a few scenes to give an idea to those not (yet) fortunate enough to have visited Grand Marais.

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After so many visits to our little home away from home, it is hardly surprising that my photographs tend to repeat images and themes over the years. Some are grand, sweeping views, and others small, colorful corners. I love them all. Here are – not all of them, but a few more to explain my love. As if any explanation can ever be sufficient to explain love.

Everywhere I look, the scenes are saturated with years of memories, and now these scenes, already, are memories, too.

Sarah: 9 years old!