Wandering Strangers, At Home Wherever We Roam

When we left home for a few days of fall getaway, the dominant plants in blossom in my meadow were still the tall, elegant, little grey-headed coneflowers of August. Not a single aster was yet flowering. I know because I looked specifically for the asters, anticipating that last wave of color but happy that the season’s last act still lay in the future, something to look forward to. 

As we made our way east, however, following the Au Sable* River east of Mio, I began seeing asters in bloom everywhere. It was as if we had fallen ahead of ourselves, skipping a full calendar week. Does the moderating effect of Lake Michigan retard the arrival of fall that much on the western side of the state? What else could account for the difference, since we did not change latitude or elevation by traveling east?

Whatever the explanation, I noticed something similar in and around Tawas City and East Tawas, where stands of cattails in wetlands were still green of leaf on Tuesday but by Wednesday, as we drove from Alpena to Cheboygan, suddenly (or so it seemed) brown and gold. We were stealing a few days “away from it all,” but time’s inexorable march had not slowed one bit. If anything, it seemed to be speeding up at the same time that the two of us were, briefly, slowing the pace of our life.

During four days and three nights away from home, while the Artist gloried in the rare treat (for him) of evening television at bedtime (we have not had TV at home for many years), I put in earplugs and curled up happily with Le Grand Meaulnes, the only novel of Alain-Fournier, a writer who died young and wrote no other books. I have seen this novel translated into English under different names, and since one English title given is The Wanderer, it seemed appropriate reading to accompany our own autumn wanderings. 

Young Auguste Meaulnes, though, does not set out to “wander” at all when he goes off for a little adventure near the beginning of the novel. He has a clear destination and means to reach it and return to school, but a wrong turn quickly delivers him far from anything familiar, and the road diminishes to more of a track. When Meaules seeks temporary refuge in the hut of an old peasant couple, he tries to ask his way in a roundabout manner, not wanting to admit that he is a stranger in those parts, but the old woman sees his confusion and guesses the truth: “C’est que vous n’etes pas du pays?” [Please excuse missing accent mark.] No, he is not “from there.” 

Our September wandering in northern Michigan was more intentional than that of the fictitious French youth. With no fixed goal or end to our little journey, we invented interim destinations from time to time and then chose tertiary roads that occasionally “deteriorated” into what felt occasionally like safari trails, pavement giving way to gravel and dirt, then to softer and deeper sand….

Like Meaulnes, we were not “from” any of the places we visited (although the Artist has historic family connections in the larger general area), but traveling within Michigan with Michigan license plates we roamed with the confidence of residents. (We were very surprised to find, in a restaurant parking lot on the outskirts of one town along Lake Huron, license plates from as far away as Pennsylvania and Texas. Far from home as we were, we were hardly the most unexpected strangers, but it’s clear that everyone is welcome at the Great Lakes Grill in Cheboygan.) And whether we are in Michigan or any other state, the Artist easily falls into conversation. Even when we have traveled together through France, a country whose language he knows only slightly, we did not feel like complete strangers, since an artist is at home wherever he may roam, especially any country with a tradition of art.

Finally, of course, whenever we wander into a bookstore we feel at home. The Book Nook in East Tawas is harder to find than it used to be; however, we followed the website clues, persevered, and received a warm welcome from Heather and Susie (below), leaving eventually with half a dozen new and used books, well satisfied with our visit and ready to roll on north. 

In Cheboygan (I'm skipping a lot here, some of which I'll fill in later with another post) it was Purple Tree Bookstore that made us feel at home, and again we did not leave empty-handed. By next week Purple Tree may have become Blue Roses (new owners are working through a lot of changes), but they will remain in the same location on Main Street, easy to find. The bookstore has a coffee bar, one big table and small ones, and comfortable seating throughout the store. 

I hope that visitors to my bookstore in Northport, regardless of the distance they have traveled from home, feel as comfortable in Dog Ears Books as I feel in other people’s bookstores, all the little literary oases I am so happy to find along life’s byways, where I am warmed by the sight of shelves filled with books and an owner or employee’s smile of welcome.

Naturally, many of the tiny communities we sought out or stumbled onto lacked bookstores of any kind. Some had a post office and a sprinkling of small businesses, while others had only a name and maybe a township hall, if that. Here are a few of the places we saw along the less-traveled roads of the northeast lower peninsula: Curtisville, Hale, Lincoln, Posen, Metz, Topinabee. Do any of my readers know any of these places?

So many sights not recorded by camera or phone! A group of deer feeding in the yard of a remote log cabin. Elsewhere, one group of sheep crowded the doorway of an old barn while another leaning stood shoulder to shoulder against the fence of their pen, all staring off in the same direction. (Looking at what?) Geese in a corral, roused to a squawking chorus of alarm when we slowed down to get a look at them. A dilapidated old lodge resort, slowly but surely falling into ruin, too far gone to be saved.

The larger Lake Huron towns of Alpena and Cheboygan seem to be undergoing a kind of renaissance that has to be beneficial to the entire area, and I’ll have a separate post on those towns soon. We will definitely be revisiting Cheboygan on future trips. There's a town neither of us had seen for years but one with a lot to offer happy, curious wanderers.

And yes, Sarah had a good time, too. She is a great home dog, a great bookstore dog, and a great travelin' dog!

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*I can’t help pronouncing the ‘Au’ in Au Sable as ‘Oh’ though the Artist assures me that ‘Aw’ is the local preference.

TO BE CONTINUED --

Waves on Lake Huron

Mystery! Just Where Is That “Cat-Who” Country?

What's going on out there?

We met a few of the high desert ghost town neighbors the other morning for coffee, cinnamon rolls, and homemade biscotti when one of them at the other end of the table from me leaned forward to ask, “You know the ‘cat-who’ books?” I nodded. I have a bookstore, after all, and I started out selling only used books (though I have carried a pretty good selection of new titles for some time now), and the ‘cat-who’ books are murder mysteries. I always say that if you had a store of used books and sold only history and mystery, you’d have nonfiction and fiction covered for the majority of your customers. It would be a good name for a used book business, too: History and Mystery. 

So, yes, of course. Though at that very moment the author’s name didn’t leap to my mind, naturally I was familiar with the series, having always one or two of the books in my shop at any given time. And my mother had read all of them. But had I ever read one myself? That’s what stopped me in my tracks when the questioner informed me that the stories were set in my Michigan backyard. Really? “Out in Seattle, they call where you live ‘cat-who’ country.” Really? “Are you kidding me?” No, he wasn't.

This is not Michigan, any part of it

Later that same day we stopped at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox, one of our regular stops, and I went directly to the mystery shelves, where there were two paperback books by Lilian Jackson Braun. I selected the slimmer of the volumes and went home with The Cat Who Sniffed Glue, determined to find out if Traverse City — “or, really, Northport,” the Arizona neighbor had said — were indeed the setting for the stories.

I won’t beat around the bush or lead you on. As far as I’m concerned Pickax is not Traverse City, and it isn’t Northport, either. It has features of many different Michigan towns, but it is definitely U.P., that is, the Upper Peninsula. Your clue, sleuthers, is the phrase “Down Below.” 

No one in the Lower Peninsula uses that phrase to indicate they’ve been traveling south, because the Lower Peninsula is “Down Below.” It’s below the Mackinac Bridge, the Mighty Mac, the bridge that spans the Straits of Mackinac and joins the two peninsulas. (And Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw, by the way, even when there’s a ‘c’ rather than a ‘w’ on the end of the word.) On that much I brook no dispute. 

Perhaps, however, another word of explanation is in order for those unfamiliar with Michigan. The neighbor here in southeast Arizona who brought up “cat-who” also loaned us a couple of books set in southern Michigan, and that’s yet another distinction. Northport and Traverse City are in the Lower Peninsula, but they are not “southern” Michigan. To everyone but Yoopers, they qualify as “Up North.” Are we clear now?

As to which is the “big lake” in the Braun books, we could argue it different ways. Where I live, in Leelanau County (i.e., “Down Below”), the “Big Lake” is Lake Michigan, but the Upper Peninsula has Lake Michigan to its south and Lake Superior to its north, so where is Pickax? At one point in the story, someone mentions that Pickax is the “only harbor of refuge” on that side of the lake, but are we to take the statement literally? Is it possible there is only one harbor of refuge on Lake Michigan’s north shore, or only one on Lake Superior’s south shore? That seems unlikely, though of course there are long stretches, especially on Lake Superior, where a sailor is far from a harbor of refuge. And now, checking further, I see that there is not a single federal harbor of refuge in the U.P., and even Northport and Leland, harbors of refuge in Leelanau County, are not federal harbors of refuge. But perhaps this is muddying the waters too much.

Out West -- horses and cows

Anyway, another element that confounds literalism has to do with restaurants. — But wait, let me back up a bit. 

All the mining history in the book points to the Keweenaw (confusingly pronounced KEE-wuh-naw) Peninsula, that rocky, jutting antenna projecting in a graceful curve from U.P. into cold Lake Superior. The number of mansions strengthens the case for the Keweenaw, too, since the kind of fortune brought by mining allowed for mansion-building. So, too, there was an ethnic diversity in the history of the U.P. that would go some way toward explaining the number of interesting restaurants available to characters in the cat-who story, restaurants that would seem wildly out of place in most parts of the U.P. (though perfectly reasonable in the Traverse City region). I mean, come on! No one mentions a single Cornish pasty in the whole book! There are also a lot more farmhouses and barns than I associate with the Upper Peninsula. So where does that leave us?

I guess I could just do an online search and find the answer to my question instantly, but where’s the fun in that? After all, I could have skipped directly to the final chapter of the book to learn the identity of the murderer, too, and not read the story at all, but why? Isn’t it more fun to enter into a story and search for clues? The journey, not the destination….

If you know Michigan and if you’ve read Lilian Jackson Braun’s books, where do you think the stories are set?

One thing is certain. As I was reading The Cat Who Sniffed Glue, my mother was not far from my thoughts but always there, just across the room, smiling at me. Here I was, reading another book I knew she had read and enjoyed. And I was reading it right after reading another book, one sent to me by my sister, a book she had bought and given to my father — so that in reading that book I was constantly reminded of “the Colonel.” Reading is so much more than escape, so much more even than education. A solitary activity, yet it unites us with other human beings, even those who have passed on.

As for my Western images today, several of them represent what is for me a cow country mystery: Can horses round up cows on their own, without cowboys or cowgirls, and take the herd back to the ranch at the end of the day? If not, what was going on in these scenes we witnessed out near the Willcox Playa on Saturday afternoon?

Horses at work?