Trees, Dogs, Books, Musings

Are the trees really taller above the Mackinac Bridge?

Once more, the North beckoned!

We went up over the Bridge again, Tree Guy and I and Naughty Barker. This time we left on Sunday and stayed until Wednesday, our mission to spend time with TG’s kids and grandkids. It went great! Thanks for asking. 

Notably, Naughty Barker dove right in with Good Dog Behavior! She recognized the place, jumped out of the car without barking, and immediately began racing happily around the yard with her new best friend! If I were able to load a video, you would see what I mean, but here are the two of them, relaxing together between romps.

Sunny and her new best friend, William

I did a lot of relaxing myself. Other than pancakes on Tuesday morning, I didn’t cook at all, and while the young people got canoes in the water, took saunas, played ping-pong and cards, I basically read my books, took long walks, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Oh, and here and there a nap. Truly, it felt like vacation—and there will be a few similar days in the weeks ahead, because, as we all know, the North never ceases to beckon.

The river never pauses....

Books that kept me awake --

When not napping or exploring or entertaining canines, and other than time spent around the table eating and socializing (socializing even after the eating had ceased, not shunning society!), I finished a couple books brought from home. One was a little Robert Louis Stevenson volume that Tree Guy couldn’t wait to get his hands on (pictured above), and the other that John M. Barry book I’ve been reading off and on for such a long time, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Reading books on the Civil War and what led up to it, as well as what followed it—all led me, over time, to conclude that our nation was born divided, and now, having read a single, very detailed book on the history of New England, I am strengthened in that opinion, even as New England complicates the picture, showing me that divisions in American society have never been as simple as North vs. South or Europeans vs. Native Americans. In New England, it was also English vs. Native Americans, Puritans vs. Quakers, freethinkers vs. Quakers, Rhode Island vs. Massachusetts, Plymouth vs. Providence, and on and on and on. There were massacres over control and ownership of land, and there was torture and cruel, disfiguring punishment (ears cut off, holes bored in tongues, etc.), as well as excommunication and banishment, over matters of religion—which makes it sound as if religion and land ownership were separate issues, whereas actually they were hopelessly entangled.

Some 17th-century disagreements seem today nothing short of absurd, e.g., should grace be said before or following a meal? (Thanks is thanks, isn't it?) Others went to the heart of the body politic, with loyalty oaths demanded and then accepted or refused, but the deepest, and one that continues to divide Americans to this day, was over the relation of the church and the government, or religion and the state. 

State religion or a wall of separation? Which was it to be? Which is it to be?

Those who wanted 17th-century government to champion one particular religious view—not only to protect that religion but also, in doing so, to sanctify government—cited a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 49, verse 23, saying “that the state must be 'nursing father and mother' to the church” in order to

…protect and preserve not only the church but to create a moral society. From this … it also followed inevitably that church and state were inextricably linked.

Roger Williams and others disagreed. Williams thought the danger of intermingling church and state was to the church, as it was bound to be corrupted by politics. He took his stand for freedom of conscience, implying freedom of religion, and Rhode Island was founded on the principle of a “wall of separation” between religion and government.

Besides large disagreements of principle, Barry exposes other divisions nascent in the American colonies. The English of the 17th century, he notes, “had relatively little outright racial prejudice against Indians,” acknowledging that they themselves had recently been “‘savage and uncivill and worshipped the divell,’” but when one Englishman went on to compare Native Americans to the Irish, Barry reminds us how the English slaughtered the Irish—men, women, and children—on more than one occasion. English “war” on the Irish was a prequel to American “war” on North American indigenous populations.

All these disagreements, all these divisions! What has held our country together for 250 years? Nothing, I would say, but our love for the land and respect for law. So now, when we see due process and habeas corpus brushed aside by our federal government, I ask, what will hold us together? If not law, what can unify such fractious multitudes?

Solid ground! We need the law as our solid ground!

After Roger Williams, my brain needed a vacation, and I picked up an old Agatha Christie paperback, but it belonged to the cabin and did not come home with me, so I’m now reading a Studs Terkel-like book of oral histories called Chinese Lives. Priced (used) at only $6.50, it sat long on the shelf in my shop, unchosen and passed over, and only now do I realize what a gem my customers have missed! It will return to the shelf in time, giving customers another chance, but only after I have finished it myself. The lives are out-of-date, of course, the book published in 1985, with a preface by Studs Terkel himself, but history, always pregnant with what was to come, makes fascinating reading.

What condition is our condition in?

I don’t know what to say about the state of the union, because if we have ever been a union, we are certainly not one now. Daily episodes of insanity mix with daily episodes of cruelty and are stirred together daily with corruption, grift, and complete disregard for the history and ideals of our nation, as well as contempt for the law under which we all should be living. Destruction of habitat and of national monuments, absurd and childish attempts to rename geography—all demolish not only our physical country and its history but tarnish our world reputation in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to overcome in the future. The present nightmare will not go on forever, but its end is no guarantee of the restoration of the United States of America, a country that was never perfect but a country that aspired to continual improvement. Now? 

…Roger Williams, this devout Puritan, this man of faith who loved God, was willing to risk more than his life [for freedom]. For of all the remarkable things he said, the most remarkable was this: “Having bought Truth deare, we must not sell it cheape, nor the least graine of it for the whole World, so not for the saving of Soules, though our own most precious.” 

How indeed could one save one’s own soul by selling truth? 

For he knew that to believe in freedom and liberty required faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience. And that was soul liberty.

Quoted material above comes from John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (NY: Viking, 2012), a book your Northport bookseller strongly recommends, either for solitary self-enrichment or lively book club discussion.

Anyway, in case you wondered, we in Northport are very patriotic. We love our country! And our post office!

4th of July photograph on post office counter

Coming soon to your bookstore in Northport!

A new book co-created by someone with a well-known family name will soon be at Dog Ears Books. Next week, I hope. For now, that’s all I’m going to say, except that if you have any kind of travel itch, you’ll want to take a look at it and get some brand-new ideas, so watch this site!

❓❓❓❓❓

Another feather in the dog’s cap

Not only more sociable than ever before, she was a really good dog in the car, too! Best ever! Little girl is growing up at last.

Lengthy postscript 8/29/26:

Michigan author Robert Traver (his pen name), otherwise known as lawyer and flyfisherman John D. Voelker (his legal name) served on the Michigan Supreme Court until the success of his novel, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, allowed him to retire from the law and devote himself to fishing and writing. Born in Ishpeming, son of an Ishpeming saloonkeeper, Voelker practiced law first in Chicago, then at home in Ishpeming, before winning his campaign to be the Prosecutor of Marquette County. It was Governor G. Mennen Williams who appointed Voelker to the Supreme Court, but Voelker tried the case on which his novel was based before he served on the court. As Robert Traver, he wrote both novels and books on fishing that continue to be popular today, and the John D. Voelker Foundation continues to do good work in his name.

I was passing a few quiet moments between customers today (Saturday, 8/29/26) when I came across this passage in ANATOMY, lawyer Paul Biegler chiding his client, Lieutenant Manion, for making disparaging remarks about the law:

‘…[F]or all its lurching and shambling imbecilities, the law—and only the law—is what keeps our society from bursting apart at the seams, from becoming a snarling jungle. While the law is not perfect, God knows, no other system has yet been found for governing men except violence. The law is society’s safety valve, its most painless way to achieve social catharsis; any other way lies anarchy.’

Biegler pauses and then goes on:

‘The law is the busy fireman that puts out society’s brush fires; that gives people a nonphysical method to discharge hostile feelings and settle violent differences, that substitutes orderly ritual for the rule of tooth and claw. The very slowness of the law, its massive impersonality, its insistence upon proceeding according to settled and ancient rules—all this tends to cool and bank the fires of passion and violence and replace them with order and reason. That is a tremendous does accomplishment in itself, however a particular case may turn out.’

The lawyer character’s speech soars as he argues with his client that 

‘...all our fine Magna Cartas and constitutions and bills of right and all the rest would be nothing but a lot of archaic and high-flown rhetoric if we could not and did not at all times have the law to buttress them, to interpret them, to breathe meaning and force and life into them. Lofty abstractions about individual liberty and justice do not enforce themselves. These things are reforged by the law, for every jury trial in the land is a small daily miracle of democracy in action.’

- Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1958)

Shifting of the Gold

Goldenrod & bracken have both gone dull.

Although goldenrod’s bright color has already dimmed in Leelanau, I look forward to the near future gold of tamarack. Anomalous among conifers, tamarack trees change from green to gold and then, acting like leafy deciduous trees, shed their feathery needles as winter approaches. By the time the tamarack trees are bare, bracken fern on the ground will have gone from green to yellow to brown, from spring soft to fall stiff to winter brittle. (In hunting season, bracken crunches underfoot.) Some Leelanau bracken has a head start on that seasonal change.

Tamarack in U.P.

I made another quick run up over the Mackinac Bridge on Sunday, rewarded by a porch visit with my dear friend, author Ellen Airgood, who took half an hour away from cookie baking for our chat. Cool U.P. air plus rain called forth my sweatshirt. When last up to see my friends in June, I hadn't taken a warm jacket, which Ellen rightly branded a "rookie mistake." I was better prepared this time around.

Hot cocoa at the Uglyfish Baking Company hit the spot, too.

It was great to catch up with Ellen, talking dogs, books and reading and writing, plans for cozy winter days, and life in general. My drive back south felt longer than the drive north, with pouring rain from Newberry to Traverse City, but the trip was worth it to have time with my friend, and I was safely home in bed by 9 p.m. with book and dog.

My current bedtime reading is a Library of America volume that includes all four of Albert Murray’s semi-autobiographical novels, starting with Train Whistle Guitar. Besides fiction, Murray wrote quite a bit about jazz and blues, and much of his writing has a jazzy quality to it that is simply delightful. This writer won me with his very first paragraph:

 

There was a chinaberry tree in the front yard of that house in those days, and in early spring the showers outside that window always used to become pale green again. Then before long there would be chinaberry blossoms. Then it would be maytime and then junebugtime and no more school bell mornings until next September, and when you came out onto the front porch and it was fair there were chinaberry shadows on the swing and the rocking chair, and chinaberry shade all the way from the steps to the gate. 

 

-      Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar

 

Despite the heavy rain I drove through farther north, I learned the next day (a bright, sunny Monday) that Leelanau had only gotten a fraction of an inch, and the weather app on my phone showed no hope of further rain until next week. But then during the day on Tuesday, the wind shifted, and with that the weather forecast also changed: Rain on Tuesday evening, rain Wednesday, rain Thursday? Dare we hope? I write this on Tuesday evening, waiting for rain…. Hearing coyotes....

Having done a little mowing and raking on Monday, I did more raking Tuesday evening and a little edging around my perennial border, with frequent breaks to launch tennis balls for Sunny Juliet, and after supper we went outdoors again for Frisbee and agility. She is figuring out the weave poles! Her Frisbee catching is improving! She loves any activity that we do together, and while she eagerly accepts little treats for a good performance, sometimes it seems the activity itself is sufficient reward, which of course is the best scenario possible. Do what you love; love what you do.

My reading of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile had me so excited that I signed up to “follow” him on Facebook, but I should have known better, because just as I enjoy conversation more with one or two or three people than in larger groups, I’ve never been a very good follower, either, and by halfway through Taleb’s Skin in the Game I had fallen out of love -- possibly for trivial reasons, but aren’t reasons for falling out of love often trivial? 

For one thing, Taleb seems to think no one could really enjoy Proust but would only carry the books around to impress people. Is that the only reason why people carry around the Wall Street Journal or the Economist or a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Some, I’m sure, but really, is it too much of a stretch to acknowledge that different people have different interests and pleasures? 

Then – and this is really trivial! – in his list of all the ways people he does not admire show themselves to be wimps, he notes that they never curse on social media. Well, if cursing is such a sign of superiority, why does he spell ‘bullshit’ in his book ‘bull***t’? Prithee, why so coy? I don’t often read half a book and quit but probably will with this one. Like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, I’m finding the going repetitive, the repetition self-indulgent. 

My advice: Read Antifragile. It’s worth reading. If you want an introduction to it, you can start with The Black Swan, but Antifragile is meatier, and you can get the black swan idea there. As for Skin in the Game, the book’s basic point is that you shouldn’t take advice from people with nothing to lose. Naturally, there are sub-propositions and logical inferences, but you can read a few chapters at the library. Or, if you want to buy a paperback copy from me, I have two available at the cover price of $20.

(I had a third trivial reason for falling out of love, but who cares?)

Still in love with: Michigan! My life as a bookseller. My dog. Proust. My country life. My friends!

There she is, writer and cookie baker extraordinaire!

THIS SATURDAY: Northport’s annual street fair, LEELANAU UNCAGED!!! 

Get ready. Get set. --

Choosing Well

Wetlands near my home

The pond was smaller than we expected, not much larger than a baseball infield, and could be reached only by climbing over ancient fallen trees around its edges. Hidden as it was, isolated by swamps and inconvenience, it seemed never to have been fished. It seemed to be trembling with quickness. 

 

We maneuvered over the tangled lots until we reached open sunlight at the edge of the water. If we had slipped from the logs we balanced on we would have fallen into bottomless muck. Gray skeletons of trees stood upright around the shore, and lily pads grew in the shallows. Damsel flies hovered delicately. A trio of turtles dropped, in sequence, off a silvered log.

 

-      Jerry Dennis, A Place on the Water

 

That was the book I selected from my home library for bedtime reading on Wednesday, and I could not have made a better choice. As I read the words, I could see turtles plopping, one by one, damselflies hovering, and even hear the whine of mosquitoes (without the “inconvenience” of slapping at insects myself), and after an evening spent pushing a lawnmower and supervising dog play, I was glad of a pillow vacation before sleep. Armchair travel, you know, so why not pillow vacation? Makes sense to me. 

 

Bedtime is cozy time.

Thursday I was up and out early, on a mission to buy more plants, planning to come home from the bookstore later to get them into the ground and into pots. It was a pleasant day in the bookstore. Door open, genial browsers and buyers, good conversations. I put up a new blog post and took delivery of the first half of this week’s new book order, too. 

 

Five o’clock closing and a short stroll down to the parking lot, I was getting in my car when a text came from my sister. “Verdict in. Guilty on all counts.” 

 

My plans for the evening did not change. One group of Americans was all for breaking out champagne and dancing in the streets, while another was donating massively to the former president’s campaign (or so we are told) and swearing revenge, and I imagined that few, if any at all, would be changed by the verdict. Nevertheless, my dianthus needed to get into the ground … bacopa needed to be potted … tomatoes and barely emerging beans needed to be watered … and Sunny Juliet needed (in her opinion) to get outdoors and chase tennis balls and ground squirrels.

 

Morning light

It was late when I cleaned up after an evening of gardening and settled down for the night with my dog and book. Reading of the time Gail, Jerry’s wife, had an experience of fishing euphoria reminded me of a rainy day in the Upper Peninsula, the Artist splashing happily upstream and crying out, “I get it! I get it!” I have always enjoyed casting with a fly rod, but other than that, in general, I am more like the pre-euphoric Gail: Being out on or near the water, appreciating the plant life, and watching fish I can see underwater means more to me than catching fish. One day long ago, on Wolf Lake west of Kalamazoo, I looped the end of a stringer around my toe while the Artist continued to fish. Every now and then his fish on the stringer would tug at my toe, and my consciousness joined with that of the fish, wet and wordless.

Branch of Fox River

The next morning Sunny and I were outdoors just before sunup. There had not been an overnight frost, but to be on the safe side I sprayed my baby tomato plants before the sun’s rays hit them, then went back to this spring’s ongoing brick project, hauling another half-dozen up from the buried pile to the front yard where I’m putting together a path. Preview of the project almost completed, soon I’ll remove the bricks from their temporary placement, carefully level the ground, and put down a layer of sand before replacing bricks in final configuration. 

Vegetable garden at evening

 

Rough draft (explanation in text)

Here's the thing: I had zero celebratory impulse when I heard the verdict. I thought what a sad day it is for our country when a former president is proven a criminal – and I say that while also believing it was a sad day when he was elected president and, before that, a sad day when the once-respectable Republican Party (my parents were Republicans) gave him the nomination. But on top of all that sadness was also the depressing awareness of deep divisions among American citizens, in families, between friends. Those who hate him see his supporters as idiots and psychopaths, while his supporters see the haters as Communists and perverts. That is not judgment but demonization.

 

Friday. Another day. Busy, very social day in the bookstore. Serious, appreciative customers. Then an evening of mowing grass, a job that used to take me two evenings to complete and now takes me three, even though I’m leaving more areas unmowed. Then folderol with dogs. Finally, bedtime – and an essay on Jerry Dennis’s meeting with legendary Michigan author John. Voelker, a.k.a., Robert Traver.

 

I was invited to ride in the fish car with Voelker…. The vehicle was the latest in a succession of fish cars, a Jeep wagon only four years old but which had already logged nearly 170,000 miles. Virtually all those miles were driven in the central Upper Peninsula. All his life Voelker was a prodigious traveler of back roads and timber trails, a trait common in the U.P., where families often spend weekends exploring the seemingly endless network of old two-tracks.

 

My satisfaction with this book is so deep I can barely find words for it. Look at a map of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, locate Sault Ste. Marie, and then follow the shoreline of Lake Superior west to Munishing. Drop south and follow the north shore of Lake Michigan east to the Straits of Mackinac. That is my U.P., territory the Artist and I explored off and on for years, the images as bright in my mind as are my immediate physical surroundings. 

Mackinac Bridge in the rain

But I can also imagine someone unfamiliar with Michigan, maybe someone from Maine or Vermont, reading A Place on the Waterand being transported by the sorcery of the author’s word paintings, as have often been reading of places I've never visited in person. This is what makes a perfect bedtime book, a perfect pillow vacation after a day of work and the day’s background buzzing (like a fly trapped in the window) of political events.

Make no mistake -- I do not advocate ignoring politics or failing to vote. There too it is important for us to judge and choose wisely, not only for our personal peace of mind but for the common good and the future of our country. 

P.S. Food for thought: "Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

And this: "MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 600 points.”

- Heather Cox Richardson, 5/31/2024

Below: Northport on Saturday morning, first day of June 2024 --

 

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

Where did we go? What did we do? Whom did we see?

Do you know where Sunny Juliet was on Monday?

 

First, a little book stuff --

 

My Sunday evening bedtime book was America for Beginners, by Leah Franqui, a fairly light-hearted fictional tale of multicultural America that manages to address some heavy themes in an entertaining manner. It is a make-you-laugh, make-you-cry novel with a road trip as its centerpiecer, and what could be better to read the night before I embarked (“Sunny, stop that barking!”) on an ambitious one-day road trip of my own? I came back to it Monday evening, at home again, and reached the last page Tuesday morning. I loved the book, the characters, and the way they learned about each other almost in spite of themselves.

 

Here's the thing: Unless it is a review that leads me to a book, I don’t read reviews until after reading the book and forming my own opinion. Then sometimes I’m curious and wonder if other people found the same delights or food for thought or glaring faux pas – whatever I found in a particular book – that I did, and that’s when I search out reviews.

 

From Goodreads, I more or less expect mostly personal and subjective responses, although at times there is a deeper take, but whatever different readers have to say, it’s always interesting to see what they liked and disliked, what they found to admire or criticize. If a review is badly written there, I take it with a grain of salt, not having had high expectations.

 

It's different when I look to Kirkus reviews. Kirkus has been around since 1933 and has always had a high reputation. If you look up ‘Kirkus’ on your phone, you’ll see a list of questions “People also ask” about it, one of them “Is Kirkus reputable?” The online answer is “Kirkus is a credible, industry-renowned resource among authors, publishers, the media, booksellers, and readers.” A Kirkus review is a Very Big Deal for an author.

 

Since 2005 Kirkus has been reviewing self-published books but only if paid by the author to do so. Established publishing houses that send books to be reviewed do not pay a fee. Neither the paid nor the unpaid reviews are guaranteed to be positive. Well, sure – they wouldn’t be reviews otherwise.

 

The Kirkus review of this book I found delightful was not itself delightful at all. The reviewer had not been charmed, as I had been by the novel. Fair enough. But why? The reviewer called the book “tolerable, if not utterly original,” certainly deserving some kind of “damning with faint praise” award. -- But was the reviewer saying the book is “utterly original”? I doubt that was the intention, and yet the effect points in that direction, so my suspicions were aroused by the reviewer's misuse of "if not." The author is accused of “road trip-novel cliches.” Such as? An example is given for the criticism that the author over-explains characters’ inner lives. Okay, I guess the reviewer and I simply disagree on that one. 

 

Let me be clear. My big problem with the Kirkus review wasn’t that the reviewer and I disagreed. It was that the review itself seemed amateurishly written, no better than anything any random reader might post on Goodreads and not as good as some to be found there. This is a Kirkus review? I read a few more Kirkus reviews of other books and found all too many of them disappointingly brief and lacking textual support for opinions rendered. 

 

Foreword magazine, published nearby in Traverse City, Michigan, also reviews books, many from small presses, some by self-published authors. Reviewers’ names are attached to the reviews, which are generally longer and, I find, more in-depth than what I’m seeing on Kirkus these days. While applauding Foreword (and yes, I do know the publishers), I have to wonder if anyone else has noticed a decline in the quality of Kirkus reviews. Is something going on there? I asked a published author this morning (Wednesday) what he thought of Kirkus reviews, and his answer was, "Not much." 

 

The foregoing discussion, you will have noted, is more a review of reviews than of the novel that kicked off my musings, but feel free to comment on either. For myself, I am eager to read more of Leah Franqui. 

 

So yes, Sunny Juliet and I went on a road trip.

I hope you recognize this.

 

Somewhere near the approach to the Mackinac Bridge from the south is a big billboard that reads, “Same state. Different state of mind.” Rarely have I driven across the Mackinac Bridge without the Artist, and almost always there was a dog with us. First Nikki, then Sarah, except for that one post-Nikki, pre-Sarah trip when we took the ferry from St. Ignace to Mackinac Island. All of which is only to say that the entire U.P. is as saturated with memories for me as Leelanau County, where I live. 

A MUST stop for me

Sunny's first visit

 

A pause along U.S. 2...

...for sharing time.

The pickle barrel! Grand Marais!

I parked Sunny in the shade in Grand Marais and quickly took care of my town errand, then drove us out to Coast Guard Point, where I let my girl get her paws wet in Lake Superior water while I relived memories of picnics, naps, reading, and conversations in our folding chairs -- days of contentment the Artist and I shared with first-Nikki-then-Sarah at that dear spot. 

Some things in Grand Marais are the same, others different. The Lickety-Split ice cream place is now the Sherpa Shack, but Arbutus is still where it was the last time the Artist walked around it, dreaming boat dreams.

Then it was east on H-58, past the old two-track (entrance now so grown over!) to Jim Harrison’s writing cabin on the Sucker River, past the old fisheries building on the other side of the road, past School Forest, past this, past that…. Reaching the end of the pavement, I was surprised not to encounter washboard. Ellen had told me the road was “pretty good” (my next destination was the Uglyfish Baking Company, latest joint endeavor of author Ellen Airgood and her husband, Rick Guth, both formerly of the West Bay Diner in Grand Marais and before that, for Rick, as the Earl of Sandwich), and indeed the drive had never been so easy, but I wasn’t sure what to make of that. It didn’t feel or look familiar at all. Like the paved portion west to Munising, road long more of a safari track than anything else, this segment to the east now seemed almost – to me – dismayingly civilized.

Can this be H58?

Ah, yes!

THIS is the U.P.!

You can't miss it!

I had no trouble at all spotting Ellen and Rick’s little trailers on the other side of Muskallonge Lake State Park. How wonderful to see these dear people and to catch up on each other’s lives! Other than being much too short (there is never enough time with friends!), our visit was lovely, and I was very glad to have made the quick trip north. It’s good to talk Michigan, talk outdoor life, talk books and business, even to talk ticks with good friends.

Ellen!

Remembering the beginning: the Earl of Sandwich!

Today's kitchen

Me and Rick, photographed by Ellen

My new cap!

Note to readers: If you find yourself north of the bridge and west of Newberry, stop for coffee and a brownie with Ellen and Rick. Visit the gift shop in the smaller of the two trailers (the larger is the Uglyfish kitchen) and buy a mug, t-shirt, billed or knitted cap to take home with a bag of cookies and jar of maple syrup. And Ellen’s books, for sure – for yourself, if you haven’t had the treat of reading them yet, otherwise for someone you love. Ellen will be happy to write a dedication to you or your favorite reader.

Life Up North

Back home in Leelanau well before dark, I was happy to see my little apple trees blossoming. Same state, different state of mind. Two beautiful peninsulas. Michigan! Isn’t it wonderful?

My little blooming apple tree at home