Traveling Around Home — Any Takers?

They do things a little differently in other places

My sister handed me a book the other day that she thought I might enjoy and/or add to my used inventory at Dog Ears Books. The title is Bucket List Adventures: 10 Incredible Journeys to Experience Before You Die (I always think that’s the best time to do things, don’t you?), and while as I turned pages, I realized that author Annette White’s idea of travel adventures was much more ambitious than my own — Tokyo, Costa Rica, Jordan, etc. — some of her ideas on how to travel struck a chord with me. For instance, this section heading, “Immerse Yourself in the Culture.” 

When many arrive to a foreign destination they make the mistake of visiting without ever really leaving their own world. They choose the route of being a tourist looking from the outside in. … They are spectators…. 

… The deepest travel happens when you integrate into a community by actively participating, opening yourself to interact with the locals, and understanding the way they live. This can be as easy as actively participating in their rituals, eating traditional dishes from the region, or learning the history that makes the city [sic] what it is today. 

White has much more to say on the subject, but that was enough to get me thinking. I thought about eating octopus seviche in the Yucatan, trying cheese on my grits in Savannah, cheering the junior rodeo contestants in Willcox, AZ, and walking in the washes of Dos Cabezas with a ghost town neighbor. If you’ve followed Books in Northport this past winter, you know we made many good friends in Dos Cabezas, but even three years ago, as strangers, we made it a point of to explore the whole of Cochise County and to learn about its history and natural history, as well as attending public events from art shows to rodeos.

Letting down personal barriers, going beyond one’s own cultural comfort zone, meeting strangers on their own ground and on their own terms, listening and learning and looking to understand — it doesn't have to be as big a deal as crossing a swinging rope bridge over a yawning chasm.

Let me address the simple grits with cheese in Savannah. How much simpler can travel get? The outdoor restaurant was busy that late morning, and our server had probably been running ragged for hours. He was formal and attentive but distant, just doing his job. He asked if I wanted cheese on my grits. Automatically I said no, then stopped and said, “Wait! Is it good that way? Do you recommend it?” He said yes, and so I said I’d try my grits with cheese. Such a small "adventure," hardly meriting the name, wouldn’t you say? As it turned out, I did enjoy grits with cheese. But the food was secondary to my happiness when I thanked the waiter for his recommendation and saw his face break into a smile for the first time. We had broken through to each other and, for a moment, connected. Even if I had hated cheese on my grits, I would have be glad to order my breakfast that way for the sake of the waiter’s smile.

During our ghost town winter, we met people who live very differently from the way we live in northern Michigan — those who carry guns on their hips (only one neighbor but a nice man), those who hunt (as do some of our Michigan friends, though we don’t), and those who are happy, for one reason or another, with the political direction our country is taking these days (which we, I admit, are not). I will emphasize that there is no more unanimity among Arizonans than there is among Michiganians. Nevertheless, we were on Arizona turf and not looking for arguments. We were the aliens, the strangers, visiting and trying to get to know another (diverse) culture. 

So now, looking back at the Southwest from the familiar Midwest, I wonder how it would be if more of us approached each other at home as if we were travelers in a new land, listening rather than arguing, trying to understand, extending a hand in goodwill rather than standing back with arms crossed tight against our chests. 

One of my winter projects in Arizona was studying Spanish, and for weeks I made good progress. Then an unexpected, though brief, hospitalization threw a monkey wrench into my routine, and I never did get back into it with the same discipline. No matter. I really did have enough of the language to order my Sonoran hot dog in Spanish. Only timidity held me back. Why? Why so timid, self? I was disappointed in myself. Finally, however, at the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, a nice man stopped to admire Sarah and began speaking to her in Spanish. My opportunity! “Se llama Sarita,” I told him. His daughter’s name was Sarah. I admitted that ‘Sarah’ was my dog’s name, too. 

It was only a moment, like the waiter’s smile, but that moment made my day. Could we do more at home to make each other’s day? I’m going to try to keep that in mind over the season ahead. 

Dare to cross the bridge?

As Our Schooner Rolled Along

We set out  to cross the Illinois prairie on the diagonal. It was a bright, sunny morning on what might turn out to have been the last day of the second January thaw this calendar year as, not for the first time, I noticed differences between my childhood Illinois home and the Michigan I have called home for so many years. 

Flatness is a big part of it. While southwest Michigan has prairie of its own, a gentle, rolling flatness usually broken up and bordered by woods, interior Illinois is planar in the extreme, and its cultivated fields lie pitilessly exposed to the horizon. Looking out on ithis prairie is like looking out over the ocean from a ship, and the exposed earth surface is usually interrupted only by farmsteads that constitute islands to the viewing eye, whether by day or by night, only rarely by a meandering line of trees indicating the presence of a river.

Prairie trees are different, too. If asked to state the difference in a word (and I was asked when I voiced the observation, which is what prompted me to search for a word), I would say they are shrubbier. Shorter than trees in the Upper Midwest, prairie trees are also more compact, with many small branches and a network of twigs. Each tree thus forms a sieve through which the prairie winds are strained. Trees here seldom offer heavy branches as sacrifices to the wind gods, and so they survive -- tough rather than stately.

Along the expressway, stands of phragmites fill ditches and wave in the wind. I do not remember ever seeing phragmites when I was growing up in Illinois, so it must have moved in since my childhood. It has not taken over every inch, however, invasive though it is, for there are also large colonies of teasel, that thistle whose name we love to say. Teasel, teasel. Isn't it fun?

My fellow Midwesterners were not looking very good to me on that relentlessly bright prairie day that left our flaws nowhere to hide -- and I do intend that plural pronoun, for I was very conscious of looking no better than the rest. Dressed with two considerations, comfort and warmth, none of us had considered style for that day's prairie crossing. Covering ground was our big objective. At rest stops along the way, therefore, we all had the simultaneously keyed-up and overtired air of volunteers at the world's largest one-day yard sale. Instead of counting and talking quarters and dollars, conversations I overheard were of nothing but miles and states, everyone recalling epic trips from years past, trips made in younger days. 

Without trying to spot them, I saw eight hawks in the course of the prairie day. Seven were perched, waiting for prey, and one in flight. Backlit smoke, like clouds and backlit grasses, held and magnified the sunlight.

Recommending a Book – Not Always a Piece of Cake

Every once in a while I read and enjoy a book and admire its story and language and style without being able to come up with, easily, the logical and natural audience for it. “I think you might really love this book,” I want to say – but to whom do I say it? I imagine a potential reader questioning me further and what I might say in response.

Is the story set in Michigan?

Well, no, not this one. Southern Indiana, actually. Evansville, mostly, to be precise. You know, down on the Ohio River?

So what’s it about?

Always a tricky question when the book is a contemporary novel! Okay, there’s this guy, the book’s narrator, and the story moves back and forth in time from one part of his life to another. He grows up in Evansville, and he has kind of a wild, wasted youth, even though his father is a math professor, but eventually he gets a B.A. in philosophy, but even with a college degree the only job he can find for years is part-time work counting woodland songbirds for serious university ornithologists--.

So there’s a lot about songbirds? That’s one of the themes?

Well, yah, but it’s not all pretty stuff – you know, the beauty of nature. There’s a lot that’s gruesome or scary, sometimes downright revolting. But mixed in with the beautiful, you know? I mean, there’s shooting of songbirds, drunkenness, reckless driving, drug-dealing, assault--.

So what’s the appeal?

[My imaginary questioner has taken a dubious step backward, and I become somewhat more aggressively defending the book in response.]

Believe it or not, parts of the story are pretty funny, if you can get down off your high horse and refrain from judging the characters for every move they make. And they’re a pretty diverse cast. Maybe you’ve met people like some of them, may not, but they’re very American.

There’s an important coming-of-age aspect. There’s also an authentic Midwestern atmosphere and flavor, the evocation of what East and West Coast types refer to, disdainfully and dismissively, without the slightest awareness of how much their ignorance encompasses, as “flyover country.” The author, in his first-person narrator’s voice, expresses at times a typical young person’s impatience for and rejection of the people around him – in this case, his fellow Hoosiers – but years later he finds that Indiana calls to him like nowhere else in the U.S. No single demographic group or aspect of society escapes criticism, but neither is any completely condemned.

Maybe I need to offer a few passages:

Page 13:  Some people describe the sound of a tornado as akin to a freight train, which is like comparing a wolf to a beagle. I have sat with Lola and a brace of bear, directly beneath rolling trains on the Dogtown trestle bridge over the Ohio River: they’re rhythmic, clattering, dependable, and their sound, though loud, suggests a sort of restrained power. As I clutched my head between those poplar roots what I heard was purely chaotic, an unhinged and unpredictable malevolence, demon song; lightning struck twice nearby and I could not hear the thunderclaps because the whole chorus of hell overwhelmed them. 

Page 53: Wood thrushes were my best informants. Neighboring pairs sing to each other in a chain of call-and-response that occurs in every wood in the Midwest. If one pair fell silent I could place the intruder within fifty or sixty feet of a nest tree. A male indigo bunting will try desperately to get your attention if you stray near its nest—usually, in my experience, by leading you into the thorniest, muddiest, hottest smilax thicket nearby. Warblers are passionate about warbling and any reticence from them was a likely sign. 

Page 73: The reason they make you wear an orange jumpsuit is so you won’t talk back to the judge. When someone says you’re free to go, and you’re wearing handcuffs, you might be inclined to argue. But you’ve just spent the night on a hard narrow cot and you look ridiculous, so you don’t.  

Pages 96-97: Bowfishing, at least as practiced in Southern Indiana, combines hunting and angling while eliminating while eliminating the need for the skills of either. You sit in a rowboat firing arrows at large targets three and four feet away in three feet of water. It’s considered a good date in Jefferson....  

Page 124: Indianapolis is the twelfth-largest city in the United States, but it feels like the country’s largest suburb; it is all sprawl and you spend half of every day in your car. There is nowhere on earth I detest more.  

Page 197: Some people go ga-ga for an owl or an eagle—it’s my job to encourage that now. And it’s a good thing. But privately, I prefer a bird that doesn’t shit in its own nest. I had grown more bitter with every clump of severed tails I threw in the trash can. 

Page 203: Vermont has bears. I like bears. ... Vermont also has moose and mountains and other natural glories, all of which I enjoy. But they don’t—can’t—call my name the way Indiana woodland used to; the Ohio and Wabash rivers have a way with words that our local New England brook can’t match.... Vermont has famous fall foliage, too, but compared to Box County in October, Vermont is a painting Gauguin left out in the rain.

And still, entirely left out of this sampling are the people who pass through the narrator’s life, some briefly, some repeatedly, even constantly over the years -- Gerald, Lola, Shane, Warren, a Vietnam veteran encountered in the woods, an assortment of locals at a roadside diner – each one memorable and occupying a distinct place in the story. It’s worth taking the time to meet and get to know them!

Yes, this is a book worth reading. But really, is there any book that’s “for everyone”? I doubt it very much. Each must find its audience. Here I’ve done a preliminary introduction. Now it’s up to book and reader to come together in the private, intimate space we call reading.

Snapper, by Brian Kimberling

NY: Vintage Contemporaries, 2013

Paper, 210pp, $15

In Which We Go to Paris and Wind Up on Old Route 66 Again

Often during the past few months, when I would exclaim over some little town far from home that appealed to me, David would say, “Well it isn’t exactly Paris!”  So when I saw Paris, Missouri, on the map, he agreed that we couldn’t pass it by. It isn’t a big place, and it’s a mile off the pretty little two-lane highway (U.S. 40) between Columbia and Hannibal (not far from the birthplace of Mark Twain), but we took that side road off the two-lane, and at left you see David clearly asking the camera, “This is Paris? You call this Paris?” (Note: Still in shirtsleeves.)

The Paris Hardware had a display of flowering plants out on the sidewalk. Flowers displayed on the sidewalk? Parisian in my book!

But in Jac’s Restaurant, David’s efforts to speak French didn’t get him very far. Jac’s is a Mexican restaurant, housed in a building that dates from 1873, when it was Jackson Bros. Grocery & Meat Market, specializing in local home-killed and home-cured meat. Judging from the quality of the ham and chicken in my big chef salad, I’d say the present owners are upholding original standards very well. Definitely a cut above average! Pero se habla español, non françesa.

There are at least two other eateries in Paris, Missouri, plus old gravestones in the historic Founders’ Cemetery, an old iron railroad bridge over the middle fork of the Salt River, and a gorgeous courthouse that we hadn’t expected. (We saw many beautiful old courthouses across the country.) And David could not deny that it was, after all, Paris ( -- Missouri).

Crossing the Mississippi River at Hannibal, we continued toward Springfield, Illinois, and a reunion with my sister, short (the reunion, not my sister) but sweet (sister and reunion). Another Route 66 restaurant was the scene of our rendez-vous. Get off the expressways, and nostalgia overfloweth! 

Not sure what that Route 31 sign is doing behind our heads, and wherever all my Route 66 pix from this stop are, they're not where I can get at them this minute....

After Springfield, on the way to visit my mother and the third sister in Joliet, we took time for a short side trip off I-55 to the town of Pontiac. I lived in Illinois from before I was three years to the age of 18 but had never been to Pontiac before. My mother said she doesn’t think she’s ever been to Pontiac.

Well, it’s another county seat town, on the banks of the Vermilion River, and the downtown was lively on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Like so many other towns on our travels this year, it leans on the Route 66 theme, but it doesn’t forget Chief Pontiac, who gave the town its name. If I’d been on foot rather than shooting from a car window, I’d have evidence of that to offer, along with much more in the way of public murals, blooming trees, pretty houses, 1950s cars, and more.

But we were on a mission, Joliet our destination, and getting there by late afternoon kept us right on our admittedly loose “schedule.” The next day, Sunday, driving back to my mother’s house after church, I noticed I was once again (sans camera) on old Route 66. It wasn’t a planned theme for this year’s travel: things just worked out that way.

That was then. 

On Monday, at the state line, Michigan greeted us with rain, and some of that rain was freezing on the car windshield by Tuesday afternoon as we worked our way north. Tuesday night we were snug in our old farmhouse as the temperature went down below freezing. Wednesday the snow flurries were at times quite thick. 

This winter weather reprise serves one purpose for us, taking away any doubt our minds might hold that we were anywhere but home.

Book Review: FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR

Above it all!

Flyover Lives: A Memoir, by Diane Johnson (NY: Penguin, 2014). $26.95

The ladies themselves could have been any old American mélange like the rest of us there listening, except for our French friend, Simone. She was an American citizen, but not very American. Though female lineage is apt to be surrendered with the last name, in confrontations with Americanness, Frenchness somehow prevails, as water puts out fire, fire burns paper, and paper soaks up water, and so Simone had not surrendered Frenchness to her American husband, she’d added Americanness on. Are roots arbitrary after all, or adopted? 

How could I not connect with this book? Besides being a lover of France, I was born in South Dakota and grew up (insofar as I can be said to have done so) in northern Illinois, spending the formative years from almost-three to nearly-nineteen in the Land of Lincoln. Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois, and had the mighty Mississippi River as part of her childhood landscape. Within commuting distance to Chicago, I had mighty Lake Michigan. But I know that feeling she describes as being “marooned in those fields of waving corn, stranded far from any ocean or shore....” Fields of corn, like fields of sugar cane, start out as open prairie but quickly, with jungle speed, grow up to be walls. And behind them? More green walls.

Cornfields across the road from my childhood front porch, though, were also my first association with “the West,” a distant, fabled, romantic land. Across the road and into the sunset I rode imaginary horses, borrowed from stories in library books, far beyond a bucolic horizon that was, in fact, but the last remnant of farmland within walking distance: on the other side of the cornfield lurked new suburbs and, by the time I reached adolescence, a shopping mall. Standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, either Chicago pavement or Indiana Sand Dunes beach, I felt almost literally pulled by the larger world’s magnetic influence out of my ordinary, three-bedroom, one bathroom (all rooms small) family home on the prairie. A boyfriend and I dreamed of New York and Paris, cities that would not, we imagined, go dark at night.

Unlike Diane Johnson, I have never escaped to France for more than two or three months at a time, and it has been over a decade since David and I made our last delicious visit, meandering from Paris to Avignon and back again. Yet the questions and longings Johnson recounts echo in my head with a twinge of recognition: “Was it possible I was only pretending to be comfortable in Europe when I am really an Illinois hayseed whose core of naïveté cannot be effaced?” Had one even been comfortable in Illinois? “A pleasant place,” she admits, “surrounded by cornfields” but one “I had always longed to get out of.”

Stung by the remark of a French friend to the effect that Americans are naive because they are ignorant of history, Johnson begins searching for documentation on her American ancestors. The quest takes her back to 1711, when the ship on which Ranna Cosset, as his name became in America (originally probably René Cossé) came from France, bound for Canada, was captured by an English captain. Ranna is treated to a very easy “imprisonment,” left at large on his own recognizance, cautioned only not to leave Middleton, Connecticut. There is no sign that he chafed at the stricture: when the time came for him to be released and sent to Montreal, his original destination, he flatly refused to go. He stayed and married, and his family flourished in New England, on the boundary between Canada and the new United States. Much of the history Johnson uncovers comes from a memoir written by Ranna’s great-granddaughter. It was she, born in 1800, who made the pioneer journey in 1827 with her new husband, to the Midwest. The family settled first in Ohio, eventually in Illinois.

If “Elsewhere” and new beginnings characterized the first ancestor arrived in North America and the subsequent pioneers who came to the Midwest, however, by the time Diane Johnson begins her family research her relatives have been settled in place for 200 years. No one has immigration stories or tales from the Old World, “only about Bloomfield, or over to Pontiac or Muscatine or faraway Des Moines....” The prairie is both their present and past life. Thanks to World War II, though, her father had been to Venice, Italy, and the name alone was enough to set Diane dreaming.

Big waters mid-continent

A friend and I have mourned the fact that so many foreign visitors visit New York, Miami, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Hollywood, and think that they have seen “America.” Johnson admits, “We were never a tourist destination” (true) but also notes that “Midwesternness” may not be interesting to anyone not from the Midwest. (Would “not interesting” hinge more on the tour guide and the tourists’ expectations than features intrinsic to the place? Hers is the familiar Midwestern opinion that the Midwest lacks regional characteristics, which reminds me of young Midwesterners who think that only people from other parts of the country have “accents,” as well as something I heard only the other day, that Americans of German descent do not believe they have identifiable ethnic personality traits. Is an apple dull and ordinary, a fig or a pineapple exotic?) But she loved her aunts and uncles and enjoyed a thoroughly pleasant, untroubled childhood, and early sections of her book recount childhood and adolescent memories without being sticky or schmaltzy with nostalgia.

Venturing off to London as a young divorced graduate student with four young children seems a very nervy thing for Johnson to have done, given her earlier experience of having been “daunted” by a summer internship in New York when free, childless and not all that much younger. I loved her memories of the happiness she found in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The stories of her film-writing career involve such notables as Jack Nichols Stanley Kubrik, to name only two, and the glimpses she gives us behind the scenes of the film industry make absorbing reading even, or possibly especially, for those of us far from the Coast, still “marooned” here in flyover country.

My only disappointment with Flyover Lives was that there is no trace in these pages of Johnson’s life in Paris. Opening and closing sequences visiting friends overnight in Provence, most of them Americans, are as French as the memoir gets. Yes, I enjoyed the London account (especially that library), but I had expected the story to go back and forth between Illinois and Paris. Not that anyone told me it would. Clearly, I need to explore other books by Diane Johnson. What about that little hut overlooking the Seine, anyway?

One of the many passages I loved, on the other hand, was this description of her childhood reading and adoration of sea adventures:

Girls were never shanghaied, but it took me a long time to understand that this romantic fate wasn't likely to be mine; there was nothing to lend desirable drama to my future. In my gender-neutral imagination, I was the protagonist, in my hammock or on deck when the pirates were spotted on the horizon, or when the rough mate with his eye patch went amok on the bridge. ... The books in childhood are the ones that can point your life toward something, and though, in the case of a puny midwestern girl, becoming a pirate was not a realistic goal, it took a long time for me to relinquish that hope.

 Her question of how much interest non-Midwesterners can muster for the Midwest keeps recurring as I think about this memoir, since what is “flyover country” to others has always been “home” to me, the Great Lakes sweeter than any dangerous ocean, with their treacherous tides, undrinkable water, and horror movie monsters. (As the t-shirt slogan has it, “NO SHARKS NO SALT NO WORRIES.”) Who, that is, will be the audience for this book?

First, I note that there are a whole lot of us here in the middle of the continent. Millions. Secondly, how many people calling themselves New Yorkers and Californians grew up in the Midwest and have childhood memories like Diane Johnson’s, even if maybe without all the Midwest generations? Thirdly, this is the memoir of a novelist and film-writer who has made her adult life in New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco, and who doesn’t wonder about the origins of successful Americans? Now, if a reader in L.A. or Boston or an ex-pat somewhere in Provence needs another reason to read this book, how about approaching it as an anthropologist? The strange customs of American prairie towns! The inbred reticence of a Midwesterner outside the Midwest!

If Johnson’s flyover country is as familiar to you as your own childhood, try approaching it as a sociologist, “making the familiar strange.” And if it is already strange country to you, a place you’ve never given a second thought, Flyover Lives will give you the armchair anthropologist one insider’s view of what we called in Illinois when I was growing up “the heartland.”

Northern Michigan, where I live, has more lakes and beaches and hills and woods than cornfields, but like Illinois it doesn’t have New York City or Hollywood or the Grand Canyon. Sometimes, though, when I’m driving the roads of my rural county, I imagine a French friend (in imagination my friend Hélène is still alive) riding in the car with me on her first visit to the U.S. She hasn’t come simply to be a tourist but to be with us on our home ground, to be part of our life for as long as she’s with us, and as I drive I point out to my absent friend various ordinary aspects of the landscape I love. Diane Johnson recounts her “ordinary” Midwestern growing-up years with both fondness and the distance acquired by a lifetime of having lived Elsewhere.

Flyover country between Detroit and Chicago

Variety is the Spice of My Bookshop

As a bookseller in northern Michigan, offering both new and used titles, with most of my walk-in trade coming in July and August, I naturally give Michigan books and authors my highest level of attention. But ever since I first began to stock new books, as well, I’ve tried to keep my eyes open to titles that go beyond our state, into areas that fascinate me and will, I hope, attract the attention of my bookstore customers. My own interests are eclectic, and I think that helps me connect to customers with different interests.

In that light, below is a very, very abbreviated sample of books I’ve ordered for stock in the last few weeks. As you can see, they range from Buddhist through outdoor, nature, animals, and travel, to parenting and children’s and illustrated books, with a couple modern classics in the list.

BUDDHIST ANIMAL WISDOM STORIES, by Mark W. McGinnis, illustrated by author (oversized hc with jacket - $19.95)

DRAWN TOGETHER, by Aline & R. Crumb (oversized hc with jacket - $49.95)

I LOVE DIRT! 52 ACTIVITIES TO HELP YOU AND YOUR KIDS DISCOVER THE WONDERS OF NATURE, by Jennifer Ward (pb - $14)

IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, by Maurice Sendak, illustrated by author (25^th anniversary addition, hc with jacket, $17.95)

IT’S OKAY NOT TO SHARE...AND OTHER RENEGADE RULES FOR RAISING COMPETENT AND COMPASSIONATE KIDS, by Heather Shumaker (pb - $15.95)

OWLS, by Marianne Taylor (oversized hc with jacket - $35)

THE PLACES THAT SCARE YOU: A GUIDE TO FEARLESSNESS IN DIFFICULT TIMES, by Pema Chodron (pb - $14)

THE SHEEP BOOK: A HANDBOOK FOR THE MODERN SHEPHERD, Revised and Updated, by Ron Parker (pb - $24.95)

TUVA OR BUST! RICHARD FEYNMAN’S LAST JOURNEY, by Ralph Leighton (pb – $17.95)

WHAT MAKES YOU not A BUDDHIST, by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (pb - $15.95)

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, by Maurice Sendak, illustrated by author (hc with jacket, $17.95)

WINTER: FIVE WINDOWS ON THE SEASON, by Adam Gopnik (pb - $19.95)

What do you think of my hand-picked inventory? Which would you pick up for a closer look?

Through the year, in every season, you will also find at Dog Ears Books fiction, poetry, cookbooks, and history. We have a strong science section of used books, and equally strong sections in religion and in philosophy. There are fine bindings and first and signed editions for the collector, but the reader who wants a paperback mystery for bathtub or beach won’t be disappointed, either. What we don’t have in stock, I will happily special-order for you.

One new book I could not resist ordering for the holiday season, a book yet to leave the bookstore to find its first real home, is Fair Culture, by Harold Lee Miller. This oversized paperback volume of photographs captures beautifully the quintessential rural Midwest of my childhood, a world that continues to exist.

In August 2005 Harold Lee Miller, a nationally known photographer with offices in Indianapolis and New York, started a series of photographs of 4-H participants at the poultry and rabbit barns of the Indiana State Fair. Over the past few years, Miller expanded his project to include people and activity from fairs held in Jackson, Elkhart, Dubois, Delaware, Washington, Owen, Monroe, Knox, Jay, and Marion counties. The photographs depict people and their horses, sheep, cows, as well as life on the midway and other activities associated with this Hoosier summer pastime.

Did you grow up in the Midwest? Love the world of the county fair? Do you still? It’s all here in these delightful and evocative pages.