At Home in Michigan, Nonfiction, and Arizona

Spectacular forsythia this year

On Saturday, we had a soft rain in the Leelanau, mostly just sprinkles. Monday morning, after a dog walk in real rain (my grandmother used to say, “I’m not sugar; I won’t melt”), I planted collard and arugula seeds in the garden, having gotten peas and spinach in two days earlier, and the timing worked out well, because half an hour later a downpour commenced. Meanwhile, in the house, lettuce has come up in Jiffy pots (the pots are in trays), and the first tiny, brave tomato seedlings have appeared. My only “greenhouse” is a window, so we’ll see how those things do.

Nothing to see yet

Small, hopeful signs here

Outdoors, spring is popping, and you can follow this link to see a blossoming black cherry, along with the lovely spring ephemerals blooming in the woods last Sunday morning. I want to add “finally,” but the truth is that we are way ahead of the normal spring season. The little plum tree in my yard will be blossoming any minute now. 

Plum blossoms coming soon

It’s funny, but no matter how impatient I am for spring to get underway, when it all does start to happen I am almost sorry, afraid it will be too soon over! There is a certain moment, the soft, fresh, pointillist impressionism of a few brief days when the first leaves are appearing – a moment when I want to hit a pause button and just sit quietly and gaze for hours, but instead the projectionist speeds up the film and rushes into summer. For a moment, though, the soft green is almost like a haze….

Do you see what I see?

 

Here's another question for you: When you see a section in a bookstore labeled “Essays,” do you move toward it or away? 

I have more people than I can count in recent years who ask me if I have a “Nonfiction” section, and I’m always baffled by the question. I have many nonfiction sections! History, travel, philosophy, religion, economics, biography, memoir, sports, hunting & fishing, health, business, cookbooks, natural science, physical science, building, visual arts, performing arts, etc. None of that is fiction; therefore, it is all nonfiction. So when asked the question, I usually ask a question of my own in return, trying to determine what subject area the person hopes to find. 

 

But now, I think maybe they might be looking for what is nowadays called “creative nonfiction,” books I would generally consider kind of memoir essays. I think of them as memoir because they are usually personal stories from someone’s life, but they can and do overlap into travel and/or nature, sometimes psychology, religion, regional Americana, or the arts. If you hear or see the word essays, though, does it put you off? Answer honestly! Does it remind you of your school days and having to write about “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”? or (worse yet) a compare-and-contrast piece on two writers, neither of whom set your soul on fire?

My obsession: hawthorn!

Me, I love essays. I love the form. Tony Judt, Adam Gopnik, nonfiction by our own Leelanau writers Jim Harrison, Anne-Marie Oomen, and Kathleen Stocking – essays range far and wide. They can be humorous or serious but are generally explorations, the writer trying out thoughts and connections. The French verb ‘essayer’ means just that: to try, to attempt, to examine. I think of them as explorations above all, whether of place or thought.

 

A sermon is a sort of essay, usually built on a bit of scripture, and any essay, like a sermon, usually begins with some small kernel. It can be a quotation, a word, something glimpsed or overheard, a nugget of wonder. Then from that initial seed, the writer grows a world, a forest of trees and ferns and flowers, all spun from that small, simple beginning, and in the most satisfying of essays (as is true only in baseball among team sports), we end by coming home, the writer having taken us far away and then having closed a circle. Poet Fleda Brown is a genius at this: thinking and writing about essays led me to pick up again her collection titled Mortality with Friends. An earlier collection, Driving with Dvorak, is another that wins my highest recommendation. 

 

But the book I want to hold out to you today is Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, by Renata Golden. When an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) was offered to me by Columbus State University Press, and I realized that the author had lived and written from, in part, the Chiricahua Mountains of Cochise County, Arizona, I could hardly wait for the book to arrive in my mail. 

 

I climb to the top of the mounds behind the house in Sulphur Canyon where I once lived, more than a decade ago, on and off for three years. … When I return, I hear the mountains speaking to me in a tone I can’t ignore, a voice humming with suggestion.

 

-      Renata Golden, Mountain Time

 

Full disclosure (for those arriving at this post without having followed the blog for years): My husband (the Artist) and I lived several winters in a rental cabin in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, just down the road from the Chiricahua National Monument. Renata Golden lived on the other side of the Chiricahuas, the New Mexico side. I found Sulphur Canyon on my Arizona atlas. It is in the San Simon Valley, east of the Chiricahua range, while our side of the mountains (west) was the Sulphur Springs Valley, but Sulphur Valley and Sulphur Springs Valley, though separated by mountains, are both Cochise County, and it’s all Apacheria, so there was no way I would be able to resist this book. And look: right on the cover is the word ESSAYS in a red-outlined rectangle.

 

How long must we survive in a place before we can say we belong there? How much time passes after we leave a land before it forgets us?

 

Golden begins her examinations of mountain time by remembering Irish great-grandparents she never knew, a generation that managed to survive the Great Famine but were not allowed to own land in County Kerry, so the next generation, Renata’s grandparents, left Ireland and came to Chicago to make a new life in urban America. The author explores in detail the 19^th-century history of the Chiricahua Apaches, an all-too-typical American tale of broken promises and eviction, the latter called “relocation” when applied to Native Americans. (No land in Cochise County has ever been returned to the Apaches, although a tiny reservation in New Mexico was designated “Apache Homelands” in 2011.) She also gives the history of her parents’ purchase of land in New Mexico that they fondly imagined would be their retirement home, a home that was never built, the land so worthless her parents were unable even to sell it.

 

The book, however, is about more than mountains and the people who live and have lived in them. There is an essay on rodents, one on snakes, one on prairie dogs, and (I’m not listing them all) a personal story of panic in a wild cave, where the writer’s reluctance to ask for help is at odds with her fear.

 

The passage of time like the passage of water reforms what was once undeniably solid. The river that carved this cave exploited the vulnerability of its limestone walls. The empty places are oblivious to the rock’s former resistance; the water leaves behind only the memory of what has been diminished.

 

Certain lines brought tears to my eyes – not for the packrat or the rattlesnakes or even the cute little prairie dogs, but for what Golden writes about aging and loss and home. Here is an entry from her “Chiricahua Glossary” –

 

Home. Where the heart is. Where you hang your hat. Where your family lives. Your natal place. A place you leave. A place I’m still looking for.

 

My heart is here in Leelanau County, Michigan, but it was also in Cochise County, Arizona, and part of it remains there. I have hung my hats and caps in both places. My family lives elsewhere, though no one related to me lives any longer in South Dakota, where I was born. South Dakota, Illinois, Arizona were all places I left. Must home be singular? 

Mi cabeza

I have to admit that I missed the high desert ghost town of Dos Cabezas this past winter and early spring: morning hikes with a younger neighbor and our dogs, get-togethers with other dear neighbors (people look out for each other in Dos Cabezas, as they do in Northport), the mountains and birds out my back door, the vast spaces, and Chiricahua only a short drive down the road. I left the ashes of two beloved dogs buried in the wash behind the cabin, and the cabin – so small and so cozy with all our books and other treasures collected over the years – is the last place the Artist and I were at home together on this earth.

Cabin seen from wash in winter

But when our grandson asked if I could imagine myself ever living fulltime in Arizona, I had to answer in the negative. Give up my Michigan home? How could I? And now that trees are beginning to leaf out and blossom, as I drive the familiar roads of my township I slow down to stop at favorite spots and say aloud but with quiet astonishment, “I love it! I love it!” 

The wild nearby

Indoor refuge

I don’t need to look for home. I’m here. Still, that other place felt like home, too. The land forgetting us? Mountains are indifferent to our presence, as are lakes and rivers: the love for them is in us. 

Do we deserve them? I wonder.

It’s About Time: Kathleen Stocking Comes Home

From the Place of the 

Gathering Light:

Leelanau Pieces

by Kathleen Stocking

Even now that I’ve moved to a senior residential community in nearby Traverse City, I’m still from the place that has made me, that has informed my sense of the world, that taught me who I am, who I think I am, that has given me my ideas and my core self. - Kathleen Stocking, From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces

Kathleen Stocking’s first book of essays, Letters from the Leelanau, burst onto the northern Michigan scene in 1990, selling in numbers that took the University of Michigan Press completely by surprise. The first print run was only 500 copies, but then, noticed by and raved in the New York Times, the book quickly went on to become a classic and is still in print. 

When she came to my bookstore in Northport to do a reading from her third book, The Long Arc of the Universe, essays ranging from her Michigan life to experiences teaching in California prisons, a rich kids’ school in San Salvador, and Peace Corps teaching assignments in Thailand and Romania, part of my introduction to the audience assembled was — and I believe this to be true, if not for descendants of the Odawa and Ojibway peoples or third- and fourth-generation locals, surely for those of us who arrived only in the latter decades of the twentieth century — “If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau.” So it is a great gift she gives us with her new book, Gathering Light — another collection of essays focused on the Leelanau but informed by almost thirty additional years of observing nature, participating in community, reading voraciously, traveling bravely, and endlessly pondering life on earth, from our little Up North paradise as it evolved through time to our place in the universe.

Kathleen Stocking’s essays, while personal, are about much more than her own life, rich and overflowingly full as that life always has been and continues to be. Essays in the new book are divided into seasonal sections, and over and over we are reminded that our brief time is but the thinnest of glazes atop the rich layer cake (she uses the image in one section) of geologic time.

Geology is interesting psychologically because to approach it, at least for me, requires examination of the fabric of space-time and the physics of consciousness. 

Thoughts of geology inform her thought as deeply as does her awareness of wildflowers and the history of county families. Following a fragment of quoted conversation by a Suttons Bay geologist about Michigan eight hundred million years ago, for instance, she writes:

The whole mass of quivering geologic time lies in that downhome, tossed-off remark.

Quivering awareness, I say, in her response And yet, presented in nonspecialist, everyday language and images. She writes, the reader sees.

Consciousness of history is also intricately woven into Stocking’s accounts of walks and drives and conversations and memories recalled from childhood, and woven in so gracefully, so naturally, that it never interrupts her narrative. How long, in the sweep of geologic time, have human beings been on earth? In the space of human history, how long have white people been in Michigan? How many of us who call Leelanau home today are aware of early black pioneer families in what is now Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, and how many know that while whites and blacks were buried together in cemeteries around the county, for a long time Natives were buried outside the fences? Why is this knowledge important?

History, like lighthouses, helps position us so we can understand where we are, relative to where we were, and relative to where we might be heading. 

Stocking, like an old-time lighthouse keeper, keeps track of everything at once — boats, storms, lives, mechanical equipment — such that her questions and thoughts infect our own. And thank heaven they do! Whether writing about the relatively youthful movement of local community-supported agriculture, new, start-up wineries, talented young local musicians Ruby John and Jonah Powell, or her own childhood days in the woods with her father, timberman Pierce Stocking, she never lets a reader get so comfortable that the broader worldview is lost. “It’s about imagining the future,” she writes. “It’s about seeing one’s self as another.” The lighthouse keeper in Stocking asks us to navigate between our safe, precious home and places in the world where privilege is unknown, life not safe. 

Years ago another dear friend, a woman who follows sports in a way alien to me but with whom I have many other abiding interests and loves in common, wrote to me something about baseball that I’ve never forgotten. Maybe she was quoting someone else. I don’t remember. Somewhere in a trunk that old letter, carefully saved, awaits re-reading, but for now I can only paraphrase. Baseball, she wrote, is the only game where the object is not about annihilating the opposition but about coming home. 

In some ways, of course, we never leave home. We take it with us wherever we go. And wherever we go, the experiences that we have come back home with us when we return. This is particularly apparent in Kathleen Stocking’s life and work. From Letters from the Leelanau to Lake Country to The Long Arc of the Universe to From the Place of the Gathering Light, we have now the arc of a serious and important contribution to American literature, and while we can take a kind of regional pride in the fact that the contribution grew from Michigan soil, I hope our gratitude to the writer and recognition of her accomplishments will eclipse any credit we may want to give ourselves. Kathleen Stocking is a treasure. We are fortunate to have her among us.

One more note: As was indicated in the title of her previous book, somehow -- with all her knowledge of world history and hands-on experiences in parts of the world where life is truly dismal -- Kathleen Stocking manages to be optimistic about the future of mankind. She thinks we have it in us to work together to expand the realm of human rights and even reverse the ongoing degradation of the environment. Even if our generation (hers and mine) doesn't live to see it, she has faith in a more-than-possible good future for our descendants. So again I say -- what a gift we have in her work!