In Northport and Beyond

Do you recognize him? It’s Bruce Viger on the roof of the future Garage Door Bar & Grill, just to the south of Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo Street in Northport. And when we say “future,” I'm sure we’re talking near future. I don’t yet have an opening date from Bruce, but as soon as he gives me the word, I’ll pass it along.

On the national bookselling scene, it took a female David to stand up to the online Goliath bookseller. Governor Nikki Haley said South Carolina wanted a big distribution center but not at the expense of in-state retailers who collect sales tax for the state. “We don’t want to be known as the state that is desperate to grab anybody and anything,” she said, pointing out that it’s important for South Carolina to do right by its home-grown businesses by insisting on a level playing field. You can read the whole recent article from the Charleston Regional Business Journal. Meanwhile Tennessee rolled over for the sake of new jobs, and the hell with the old jobs that will be lost and businesses that will go under because of preferential treatment for the newcomer. Here’s the rest of that story.

Someone in Chicago thinks there should be a federal law regulating the payment of state sales tax by online retailers. I don’t think so. Sales tax is the business of each state—whether or not to have sales tax, what to tax, how much, etc. I’m sure a lot of chief executives and legislators would be happy not to have to make decisions about online sellers, but those decisions are part of their job. As for me, I’m cheering for South Carolina’s governor, because if enough other governors had her guts the behemoth would no longer be able to call the shots.

Businesses selling books in Michigan should be paying Michigan sales tax. I don't have a problem with that; why should the Big Guy? He'll only play if the rest of us are hobbled and he rides free? Readers, please think about where and how you buy your books and how your bookseller does or does not support your community.

This is my Lenten rose, hellebore, still blooming well after Easter. Of course, my forsythia are still holding their buds tightly closed, so there you are.

Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade #2

First, as promised, a couple postcards for Gerry Sell, who wanted to see Spike Horn Meyers of Harrison, Michigan. We are told on the front of one postcard that the man in the photograph is 84 years old. The back of the other card is simply titled “Bear Den.” What is the man feeding that bear cub, and what is the Spike Horn story? Gerry, do you know?

Our second stop on week’s promenade is the “Old Club” on the Ste. Claire [sic] Flats.


Detroiters know all the suburbs beginning with St. Clair (Shores, etc.), but David graduated from high school in the little town of St. Clair, up toward Port Huron, and at least once, on a trip to visit his mother, we explored the Flats, including Harsen’s Island. (Take the tour yourself. You’ll be glad you did.) The St. Clair is a magical, mysterious river, and the architecture of this old shingled building has a lot of romance, to my eye. I remember buildings like this along the river, where now it’s all condos.


Dear little Paw Paw! Down in southeast Michigan, in Van Buren County, this sweet town was the object of many pleasant weekend “country cruises” when we lived in nearby Kalamazoo. From spring through autumn the chief enticements (besides friends who lived there) were a couple of flea markets west of Paw Paw. Once I took my son and a friend of his to the flea market, and we came home with a kitten; luckily for the kitten, the other boy’s mother said he could keep it, and the cat had a happy home for many years. There was always something wonderful waiting at the flea market. Once it was the world's ugliest boat, which turned out to be the most-used boat of our lives--another story for another time. But downtown Paw Paw was interesting, too. The Dyckman House on the left in this photograph was an old hotel featuring an incredibly cheap dining room. How could they serve meals that cheap? Well, yes, it was pretty shabby in those days, too.... A smaller cafe down the street to the west (behind the photographer), went through many incarnations and was briefly called the Gnomes Inn. A friend worked there as a waitress in the Gnomes Inn phase. I seem to remember a “Smiling G” (Goodwill) store, and there was a wonderful, old-style Ben Franklin, back when BF still had all manner of merchandise, not just craft stuff. Paw Paw is memorable for David and me, also, in what no one else can see, either in this postcard or right there in person: it was the home of one of our first imaginary bookstores! Which building would you choose to house a bookstore?

Have you visited Harbor Springs lately? Pretty chichi, isn’t it? No one looking at the present-day marina would picture the waterfront looking like this.


Small, simple boats, an obviously much-used railroad, horse-drawn buggies and carriages, but I don’t see any traffic jams, although judging from the green leaves on the trees, this must be the height of the season.

I’m including the Kellogg postcard below for my Australian friends because--look! On this card the cereal company’s Sydney, Australia, plant is featured front and center! Snap, crackle, pop!


Now back to the “Sunrise Side” (as people on Lake Huron and the St. Clair River call the eastern Michigan shore) to visit Port Huron as shown in four different cards. The first is the oldest, obviously, and I don't know the locale. The other three, from only about half a century ago, judging by the cars, are downtown scenes. View #2 is looking south, views #3 and #4 (see the same large building on the right in both?) looking north. I strain my eyes in that night scene for Diana’s, the fabulous dreamlike sweetshop, on the left-hand side of the street but can’t make it out. Oh, those polished wood booths! The tiled floor! The jukeboxes and the mechanical instruments in glass cases! The hot fudge sundae with gobs of real whipped cream! Can you believe what I'm going to tell you next? Diana’s was bought, disassembled, moved and reassembled in Nashville, Tennessee! “You can still go there,” my informant told me. “You just have to go to Nashville.” Nothing against Nashville, but oh, I wish Diana’s were still in Port Huron! The Eiffel Tower belongs in Paris, and London Bridge belongs in London! Too late, too late!





It’s a little late for Christmas and New Year’s greetings, too, but a winter scene on my last card for today is not inappropriate for February Up North, even though we're having a stretch of warm, sunny days that feel like spring, and snow and ice are melting fast!



Next week, back to Leelanau--and what other surprises might I unearth?

My Own Private Side Trip

There are so many inviting paths, dirt roads, winding creeks and branches and rivers. They teased me all along the road. Finally, while we were stopped at a rest area along I-65 in Tennessee, I took advantage of having to "walk the dog." Sarah was amenable, and David had a guy to talk to about a Jaguar, so I figure we wouldn't be missed for a while.


Across the rest area, past the trucks, to the other side and down a path that led to the bank of the river. Violets were blooming. The river was coursing along. Rock cliffs towered. There were no loud trucks or speeding cars. It was a time to take deep breaths of fresh air.









I didn't have a canoe, but for a few minutes I was there.

Again with the Serendipity!

David and I do not set records when it comes to distance covered in a day’s driving. Today, for example, setting out from Chattanooga in a pouring rain, we missed an exit and found ourselves going in more or less the right direction (north) on the “wrong” road--not the road we’d planned to take, that is. But it wasn’t a bad road, and the traffic was lighter, so we decided we might as well stay on it until we reached I-40 and could backtrack to the west. All was well, and we were almost to the interstate when I suggested cutting back on a connecting road rather than following the narrow wedge farther east than we needed to go.

In the Cumberland region, all major roads and rivers run northeast-southwest, so that cutting across from one to another means climbing and descending the intermediate ridge. We found ourselves climbing a narrow, winding mountain road, rock rising up and out of sight into the mists on our left, plunging steeply down and away and disappearing below on our right. Huge boulders looked as if they might let loose any moment. Then came a little mountain community, a tiny cluster of stores to serve the nearby mountaintop farms. It was 68N from Spring City to Crossville, through Grandview and Grassy Cove. "I would have taken this road intentionally if I'd known about it," said David.

I know I’ve written before about taking an unexpected little road and finding a magical place. It’s happened to us before, and it happened again today, but it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t made a mistake, if everything had gone according to plan. We didn’t stop along the way, so I don’t have pictures of that mountain road. Sometimes the heart and mind must take the only pictures.

The more pervasive theme of the day’s travel, all through Tennessee and into Kentucky, was redbud. It just went on and on and on and on, and we didn’t get tired of it all day long.

Books on the Road: What We Are Reading

I already confessed to two nights with Stephanie Plum in Joliet. My third night away from home (first night truly “on the road”) I took a deep breath and dove into Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande, while David relaxed with television. That reading gave me a lot of physical exercise—grimacing, wincing, recoiling, etc.! The operating room is not a place I want to be, in any capacity; reading about it, though, is fascinating (albeit graphic), not only for the medical details but also for Gawande’s thoughtfulness and candor, and so I wince and read on.

David and I took turns driving south yesterday, and since the beautiful prairie is (it cannot be denied) somewhat monotonous after a while, while one of us drove the other generously read aloud for many miles, David from Andrei Codrescu’s The Disappearance of the Outside and I, from the introduction, Inagua: An Island Sojourn, by Gilbert C. Klingel. From the repression of thought in Stalinist Russia to a storm-battered sailboat on the Atlantic in 1929, we took turns keeping whoever was driving in a state of high alert rather than succumbing to road fatigue.

When the book (whichever it was) was set aside, topics of conversation arose, and since it is now winter and we will soon be in Florida, the only time and place in my life where my sketchbook and pencils really come into their own, I have been thinking about drawing. As we crossed the frozen landscape, I told David that when I am using my camera—or even just thinking about taking photographs--I am concerned with line, color, light and composition, but when I think about drawing the color aspect drops out of consideration, its place taken by the solidity of objects, i.e., volume. How to show all the not-flat things of the world in their reality? David then suggested that the landscape we were traversing was excellent for thinking about perspective. I’ll say! I mentioned the lines of telephone or electric poles and wires angling off across the fields, growing smaller and smaller. Also, he pointed out, the difference between dark trees close to us and those farther away, seemingly lighter in value (is that the correct term?) across the intervening atmosphere. He described to me an exercise set for beginning drawing students. An egg is set on a table, lit from one side by a candle. The candle can be moved around the egg, lighting it from different sides, changing the look of the object to be drawn, and the candle is also burning lower all the time, effecting different changes. I pictured the egg and candle in my mind as he described the setup. Our surroundings, I should add, were far from a single-light-source exercise: cloud-covered sky and snow-covered ground made a kind of light sandwich--light being the pieces of bread, that is, not the sandwich filling. But it was the filling, too, wasn’t it? I need to reflect on this a bit more. Anyway, it's interesting the difference in concerns between photography and drawing. With drawing, one must endeavor to create an illusion rather than simply capturing a scene. With photography, on the other hand, one must be aware of what the camera is "seeing" that the eye could easily overlook, e.g., the phone pole or stop sign that could look to be growing out of a friend's head. What needs to be put in, what needs to be carefully excluded--different problems for different media.

I also read aloud to David the excellent, excellent piece by Jesse Jackson published Tuesday morning and clipped (with her permission) from my mother’s Chicago Sun-Times. Jackson has hit this one right on: it isn’t enough to bail out banks; they need to be reformed. Read the article and see if you don’t agree.


Weather has been very cold in the South this past week, and everywhere we looked in Kentucky we saw a frozen world. Small “waterfalls” we are accustomed to see spilling over limestone cuts were motionless stalactites. Ice-covered lakes and frozen creeks looked more like Michigan than Dixie, and snow on the ground continued, at least in patches, on into Tennessee.

Tonight in Georgia I saw two dandelions in bloom, as well as our first palmetto of the trip, but I’m unable to offer documentary evidence, for my camera batteries had run too low. That will be fixed by tomorrow, and we will be making our way down Hwy. 19 in a leisurely fashion. No more expressway—yea!!!

Oh, I must congratulate myself on an exemplary attitude having to do with that expressway travel business. Before we left home, I had resigned myself to the necessity of covering ground fast, minimizing meals on the road and nights in motels. (Like everyone else, we have our belts cinched tight this winter, which is part of our reason for heading to Florida in the first place.) But David knows how much I love two-lane travel and local food, and when we got off I-75 tonight and got settled in our motel, he found a fresh seafood take-out restaurant, where our catfish and shrimp—also French fries and hush puppies—were cooked while we waited. Now that’s what I call “road food”! The cases with all the different kinds of fish (whole, eyes in, and fillets), shrimp, scallops, alligator meat, etc., with fresh fruits and vegetables in boxes in front of the cases, are another scene I must leave to your imagination this evening.

Third Day Heading Back North

Faces of rock cuts speed past us, prehistoric time slipping by like a galaxy as we are borne, inexorably, out of Tennessee, through Kentucky, on into Indiana. Sometimes the cuts are terraced, and then, along each thin ledge, small redbud trees have found footholds sufficient for life. In bloom against the rock, on a grey day, they are breathtaking.

I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move…

These lines are quoted near the end of John Tillaby’s A Walk Through Europe (1972), which David started reading in Aripeka and which I finished with him in the car today, reading aloud while he piloted us across the Indiana prairie. I searched online this evening and found the full text of Tennyson’s poem, “Ulysses,” from which these lines are taken. Here is some more of it:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known….

David was so close to the end of the book that I only came in for the end of the story, beginning with the account of a memorable meal made for the author by an old granny in the French town of Bonneval. That had me yearning, on a day of expressway driving, for France, for surprise, for adventure, but even Hillaby’s foot-trekking involved what he called “restless, zestless stages.” That, for me, summarizes most days I’ve ever spent on expressway (though I-65 is not the outright torture that characterizes time spent captive on I-75), but sometimes, I must acknowledge, covering territory is the main objective. Never mind that glimpses of winding roads tug at the heartstrings! Banish that lump in the throat as the Ohio River is crossed and the South left behind! We have explored rural Kentucky on other occasions: this time we need to get ourselves back to Michigan. But I love a lot of Indiana, too! Does that make sense? If only we had time to follow every inviting vista beckoning to us! I would be Ulysses and never rest from travel—or…?

I think the answer lies in the fact that my tendency is to enter into whatever country surrounds me, to the extent possible. What is frustrating about expressway is the feeling that one is not in the country but being conveyed through it while being isolated from it.





Enough complaining! After the two near-perfect days we had coming north through Florida and Georgia! Today, too, spent crossing the ocean of prairie dotted with farmstead islands, offered up its own time-island of magic when we stopped in Columbus, Indiana, home of the Four Freshmen but even more famous as a city of outstanding architecture, acknowledged for architectural design by the American Institute of Architects. I’ve made several visits to Columbus, after discovering it, by chance, when traveling between Cincinnati and Champaign-Urbana, but it’s been several years, and there have been a lot of changes.



The mall is being rebuilt, for one thing, and Terry and Susan Whittaker’s Viewpoint Books has moved from the mall to a corner location on Washington Street. The rain held off long enough for us to stroll beneath the flowering pear trees (petals drifting down on us like snow or confetti) to the bookstore, where I bought a book on the architecture of Columbus and we visited with Terry and bookstore employee Melinda. We bookstore people trade combat stories, tales of moving shop and stock. As friends and customers did for Dog Ears Books in Northport, Columbus volunteers turned to schlepp for Viewpoint Books. "Book people are great!" we all agreed.

Next stop was the deli down the street, where I ordered the sandwich called “Double Dilemma,” because—how could I not order a sandwich called “Double Dilemma”??? We were unable to see the Jean Tinguely metamechanical sculpture “Chaos No. 1,” which is currently under wraps, awaiting needed renovation, but did see the new video at the Visitors Center, as well as the Chihuly chandelier in the new addition to that building. Thanks, Judie and Joyce, for your warm welcome and all the information you provided! (Joyce and her husband operate the Ruddick-Nugent House B&B, which occupies an entire historic block. Who wouldn't want to stay there?)

Tonight we learn, to our dismay, that Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where we stayed last night, was struck by a tornado only hours after we left. Of course we are happy to have missed it, but our sympathy goes out to the folks in Murfreesboro, memories of Kalamazoo’s 1980 tornado still very much alive for us.

In closing this evening—our last evening before we re-enter Michigan—and in salute to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, here are the last words of Tennyson’s poem:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

We are tonight in South Bend, Indiana. Tomorrow, Kalamazoo....