What Do You See (in Michigan)? What Do You Imagine (Here and in the Larger World)?

For only a moment --

Now is that precious time of year – newborn, impressionistic, and all too fleeting. Open your eyes and drink it in. Get up before the sun so as not to lose a single moment!

Serendipity pretty much sums up my approach to reading – what comes my way, what catches my eye. No big, overall plan. And so it was that I found myself reading by chance two books set in Michigan -- one nonfiction, one fiction; the essays by an Illinois author, the novel by a Canadian -- without expecting the similar settings to have the synergistic effect on me that they did.

First came Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild, by Tom Montgomery Fate. I’ll admit straight off that I didn’t care for the title or the cover design. How many “Cabin Fever” books and movies are there? In this case, I felt the title short-changed the book terribly, while the cover image of a water-filled ditch through a treeless landscape was no indication whatsoever of either the author’s Michigan cabin or his suburban Illinois home. But friends had read the book, friends whose reading tastes I respect, so I took it home and discovered it to be modern meditations on Thoreau.

Tom Fate reads Thoreau through the lens of his own experience (as all of us generally do read everything that comes our way) and also contemplates and questions his own life through the lens of Thoreau’s writings. As he is determined to take the time to see his surroundings, sometimes it is the smallest things that lift his prose to lyrical heights.

A long, black file [of ants] marches across the soft wood like a sprawling prehistoric sentence. Each jointed body is an unpronounced letter, or an unspoken word, on its way to an idea hidden somewhere deep in the green mind of the woods. I follow the ants with my eyes until they hit their end mark, a dead sweat bee, where they heap up into a writhing mass of legs and mandibles.

Fate’s family cabin is down in the very southwest corner of Michigan’s mitten. In his essay titled “Coyotes at the Mall,” the author muses on the human love-fear relationship for wild things, ending with what an Amtrak line from Chicago to New Buffalo could mean for his family’s “wilderness” cabin.

...I had never thought that Chicago would stretch north around the lake this far. Or that this little cabin we cobbled together here in the woods might someday be part of a Chicago suburb. But I think it’s possible, which is ironic, and depressing, and a bit amusing. Particularly now, as I walk through the woods, watching and wondering when the new neighbors will arrive, when the coyotes will move in.

The larger world encroaches, and time hurries on....

Life is fleeting, as spring itself

Turning next to a novel, Station Eleven, by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel, a National Book Award Finalist, I found myself in post-apocalyptic fictional Michigan, rather than the state I know and love as it moves into the uncertainty always characteristic of time not-yet. Actors, musicians, people in business...jump cuts backward and forward in time...a world pandemic...Shakespeare and fresh-killed venison. A synopsis would hardly convey the magic of Mandel’s story. Did I perhaps read it differently, coming to it from Fate’s essays? Looking in it for Michigan?

Traverse City is mentioned, a place called New Petoskey, but then there are the post-apocalyptic settlements of St. Deborah on the Water and, farther to the south, Severn City, where by Year Fifteen after the collapse of civilization three hundred people are living. It is Severn City airport the Traveling Symphony has set out to reach, hoping to reconnect with two of their former members left behind in earlier years. 

Where precisely are we?

In a fictional world, geographical precision is not required, but we are south of Traverse City and north of Chicago, not far from Lake Michigan (inland is uncharted and dangerous wilderness), so it’s possible to imagine post-apocalyptic Severn City occupying the same region as Tom Fate’s family cabin. Only now there are no state lines, no country borders, and no laws. No electricity and no gasoline. Cars are rusted hulks, coffins for skeletons of people who died in the pandemic. The Traveling Symphony’s caravans are pulled by horses. Whether in settlements or on the road, the protein human beings consume comes from hunting.

And yet, and yet – what comes through most forcefully in this beautiful, lyrical novel is how the author cherishes the world and everything and everyone in it. Details of life and artifact are set forth with equal love. Here is one example:

The signs for the airport led them away from the lake, out of downtown, up into residential streets of wood-frame houses. A few of the roofs had collapsed up here, most under the weight of fallen trees. In the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had sprung up through the gravel of long-overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world.

That passage alone, however, could give you the wrong idea. You might think Emily St. John Mandel despises civilization and technology. But you would be wrong. Here is another passage to set the record straight:

In the en suite bathroom, Kirsten closed her eyes for just a second as she flipped the light switch. Naturally nothing happened, but as always in these moments she found herself straining to remember what it had been like when this motion had worked: walk into a room, flip a switch and the room floods with light. ... She ran her fingertips over a blue-and-white china box on the bathroom counter, admired the rows of Q-tips inside....

And another, from an earlier time, only days after the collapse:

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.

Clouds and cool mornings are beautiful, too

It is so easy to get caught up in all that’s wrong with our world. Easy to fear the future. Easy to resent the swift passage of time, though impossible to make time hold still. What does the future hold for our beloved Michigan, our precious Great Lakes, our still-young country?

“I have walked all my life through this tarnished world,” writes the character Kristen in her graphic novel, Station Eleven, from which the author’s larger novel takes its name. Tarnished but precious, it is the only world we have. Must we not cherish it?

Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of tragedy, death, and destruction paradoxically gives back to us, in this flawless novel, the beauty of the flawed world before our eyes.

Best buds

Of Mice and Men

What’s with me lately? Why are so many of the books I pick up not even from the most recent turn of the century but the one before my parents were born? John Burroughs, born in 1837, began keeping a journal at the age of 17 and continued until his death in 1921 (age 84). In addition, he wrote and 23 books of essays, three of them published posthumously. He lived on a farm in the Hudson River Valley and raised grapes but lived primarily by writing. Burroughs, along with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman (he admired all three), preached a gospel of closeness to nature:

Let me work all day in my garden, the next day ramble in the fields and woods, with a little reading, and the third day I can give myself to literary pursuits with a new freshness and vigor.

- Journals, April 5, 1867

When he is telling of what gives him joy, or when he tells of some small event in a quiet day--such as bringing home in his pocket a cold, motionless mouse, making for it a nest in a bucket and bringing it back to life before releasing it again to the wild—he is at his most charming, but there is another side to Burroughs, the rush to form a hasty opinion and then state it as if it fell from God’s own mouth and he just happened to make the catch.

Religion, he says “is a sentiment, like poetry or art; ...not a universal gift.” I sense a kernel of truth there, but the pontificating expression grates on me. What does it mean to call poetry or art a “sentiment,” anyway? Religion, poetry and art nothing but feelings? Yes, one must have a feeling for poetry to appreciate it, but the feeling alone, though it may be one sort of “gift,” hardly makes a poet. And can Burroughs stop there? No, he must go on to say that what he calls this “sentiment” of religion “belongs to women more than to men, though the finest specimens of it are men, as in every other field... [my emphasis added, as if you couldn’t guess]. Meaningless, maddening, unsupported generalization! Yet one hardly knows where to aim an objection, since B. never made it clear what he was talking about in the first place.

In general, what annoys me most about these journals is a lack of wonder, an overabundance of certainty and the way he fell, time after time, to the temptation of sweeping, general statements, as if pronouncing Truth with a capital T. But there were other things, too. Little, niggling, jarring notes. For example, many writers I know live alone, and some of them live in the country, so when I reached the following passage I began to mark it mentally for an old friend:

I wonder [he wondered! Read on—did he really?] if there is another so-called literary man who spends his time as I do—in the solitude of the country, amid the common people. Here I sit, night after night, year after year, alone in my little Study perched upon a broad slope of the Hudson, my light visible from afar, reading for an hour or two each evening, and then to bed at nine. No callers, no society, no proper family or home life. Not in years has a person dropped in to spend the evening with me.

Well, but then he says that “Julian comes in” from time to time, and instantly I wonder, Who is Julian? He writes that in the morning he, the writer, may “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” and I recall (looking back, to make sure, to the list of important dates in his life that the editor has thoughtfully provided in the front of the book) that Burroughs married in 1857 and that his wife survived until 1917. No society? John Locke would have seen it differently! The shadowy Mrs. Burroughs turns up only on rare occasions, in a sentence or an enigmatic phrase such as when the writer mentions he might “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” but where there’s a wife.... I wonder! And yes, a short search turns up the fact that Julian was, in fact, his son.

“No proper family life” could mean any number of things. The marriage might have been unhappy. Perhaps the writer felt that his wife was not his intellectual equal. If you follow this link and read of the disposition of Burroughs’s estate, you’ll find another surprising revelation about this "solitary" life in the country, a revelation that answers, for me, another question I’d had when, after noting the almost complete absence of the author’s wife and son from his journal, I turned back and saw that his editor had been a woman. I’d wondered what she thought of the author’s pronouncements on women and the invisibility of the wife in the journals. Turns out his female editor was also his “longtime secretary and mistress,” who upon his death received as long as she lived all the income from his writings. The wife, I should note, had predeceased Burroughs, and Julian, the son, inherited all of his father’s not inconsiderable real estate. (The farm remains--at least, as of 2004--in the family.) Perhaps in the unedited journals the wife appears more fully--then again, perhaps not. My point is only that a life with wife, son and secretary-mistress is hardly solitary.

We all know by now that Thoreau’s little cabin was not far from town and that he didn’t live in it very long—two years and two months, by his own account. Still, he did live there alone, and no one has ever questioned that he built the cabin and planted his beans himself.

What put me on the trail of David Grayson? Probably nothing more than that I had Adventures in Contentment on the shelf between Burroughs and Thoreau. Long before the hippies of the Sixties, Grayson wrote (using these very words) of “dropping out” of the race for success:

One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me—the high, airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thought of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me rising still, cool, mysterious....

I remembered that Grayson was a pseudonym but nothing more than that. Beware research and the shattering of illusions! David Grayson was none other than muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker, and the retirement of “David” to the country with sister “Harriet” (as housekeeper, naturally) was a complete fabrication. Like Burroughs, Baker had a wife; unlike Burroughs, he didn't even live in the country. Baker stayed in the rat race, and he and his wife lived first in a Chicago apartment, later in a suburb of Westchester County. In fact, Baker liked the suburbs, admitting to his bride that he had had to revise his opinion of them when they settled in their home. Follow this link to read more about this writer’s relationship to women, how he wrote about women, and how women responded to his writing and speechifying.

Heaven only knows I am not opposed to marriage, and the suburbs are fine for many people who find that way of life congenial. Marriage and suburbs aren’t the problem for me. It’s that the idea of these men building myths of themselves so at odds with the reality of their lives makes me suspect almost every other sentence they wrote. Give me Thoreau! Give me Anne LaBastille! Give me Harlan and Anna Hubbard! Give me Wendell and Tanya Berry! I don’t need rugged, solitary individualism in a man before I can respect his views on nature. I do need honesty.

Here in our old farmhouse, with the winter's first snow lying all around, David comments, "It may be too soon to say anything, but I haven't seen any mouse activity yet." I tell him it is indeed too soon. The temperature is barely below the freezing mark. When the thermometer plummets, those mice will be running for shelter and all the peanut butter and crumbs left on the counter! "Here, mice! Your banquet table has been spread!" David thinks I'm kidding. Here's how our attitudes break down: We both think mice are cute. We don't want them in the house. He is the eternal optimist, thinking that this year they won't come in, while I am on perpetual sentry duty, scolding and banishing crumbs. We live in the country, in company with one another and Sarah. That's enough. The mouse chorus can get cozy under the snow.