“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

It’s a question that can freeze the heart of a creative person, but specific questions can get worse. To the writer of a novel about a dysfunctional family: “Were your parents really that crazy?” To the painter of landscapes that blend reality and dream: “Where were you standing when you painted that?” (Or, “Is that painted from a photograph?”) I’m sure sculptors and poets and clothing designers could easily give the typical question that they are asked over and over, but I’m also sure that all creative people must be asked the general question, “Where do you get your ideas?” 

 

Whether an answer is given graciously or irritably or not at all – whether the artist questioned knows where his or her ideas come from or not! – will vary. As a sometime writer of occasional poetry (almost all unpublished), fiction (all unpublished), and nonfiction (some traditionally published, much self-published here), I can only say that for me ideas come, unbidden, in strange, wondrous, and puzzling forms. A stranger glimpsed one day may be a character in my mind when I wake the next morning, or an unforgettable image germinates after weeks or years as the core of a situation. Sometimes the seed is neither character nor image but simply a phrase that won’t leave my thoughts. Jot it down on a paper napkin and carry it around, and maybe it will generate further phrases – and maybe it won’t;

 

I do not give myself as an example because I am some kind of great writer to be worshipped and studied! It’s just that my own process is the only one I know intimately. Other writers have told their stories in their own books and interviews, but probably none of them can tell the whole story, any more than I can. There is a lot of mystery to it. 

 

What turns an idea into a work is the more important question and much easier to answer. As a writer, you sit your butt down in a chair and see where sentences on paper or a screen take you. A painter or sculptor or dress designer gets to work with her or his given tools. Work never gets dreamed into being. That’s why it’s called work. It has to be done.

***

 

Other kinds of ideas and beliefs motivate life choices we make every day. We are not cameras or digital recorders making copies of the world beyond our own skins. Our senses do not simply send copies to our brains to be filed. All our prior personal experience, however limited (and there is no one on earth whose experience is unlimited), comes into play, interpreting what we see and hear and read. I remember sitting in the same room years ago with my then-brother-in-law as we watched a political debate, televised live. Same screen, same faces, same words presented to us both. I actually felt sorry for one of the debaters, who seemed to my mind to make a pitiful showing, but at the end my brother-in-law turned to me and said, “Well, he [the one I felt sorry for] really came out on top, didn’t he?” It was as if we had been in two different rooms, watching two completely different events. 

 

Even on-the-scene eyewitnesses can “see” what isn’t there or miss what is, as many experiments have shown. We see for the most part what we expect to see. We also see what we look for. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can become aware of our prejudices – pre-judgments – and work to develop more accurate perceptions.

 

***

Originally I thought that this post on creative work and perception/misperception involved a leap from one idea (creating) to another (perceiving), but I see now – and there is an example of what we can learn for and from ourselves when we start working, which in this case for me is writing – that both come from the same place: being open to the world. Being open to seeing something new.

 

Today is Inauguration Day, and while I would like to feel celebratory, my feelings can better be described as a mix of anxiety and weariness. Don’t get me wrong: I voted for Biden and Harris and am grateful for a change of course in Washington, D.C. My anxiety comes from the events of January 6, my weariness from conversations with those who see a different America from the one I see. --Which leads me to the questions I was asking people yesterday, questions that I hoped would give me some clarity on their perceptions and opinions (so different from my own), questions that gave me the idea for today’s topic on Books in Northport. The questions did kickstart this blog post, but I gained no clarity on views held by those who disagree with me.

 

Where do you get your news? Over and over for months I have been hearing and reading jeers of “Fake news!” Some monolith identified as “mainstream media” is accused of spreading lies. What I have tried to ask in the past two days is, What news sources do you distrust, and, more to the point, what sources do you trust? Because the people who disagree with me – so vehemently! – are getting their beliefs in reality from somewhere, and if I knew where, if I could look in that direction, maybe it would help me understand why our perspectives are so completely far apart that even a Venn diagram of them hardly yields common ground. But there must be some common ground, and we sure as hell need to find it if we’re going to reunite this country! 

 

Here is one important truth I have managed to uncover recently. It is that across the divide we opponents have many shared values. We don’t share all values, by a long shot, but we share many of the most basic, and that is not trivial. We disagree in many places on translating values into action. Well, ‘twas ever thus, and that’s what makes politics. The much, much larger and deeper and more intransigeant problem is that we disagree on facts, on truth.

 

And that brings me back to my question: Where do you get your news? What sources do you trust?

 

I wish I could report that I received even one concrete answer to that question, but I did not. I was told from more than one person that s/he relied on multiple unnamed sources. “Then I turn it off.” (What do you turn off?) Or, “Honestly, I don’t know what to believe.” Yet the people who "don't know what to believe" have beliefs. Where do they come from?

 

Over seventy percent of Republicans still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election! Where did this come from, and why do they believe it? 

 

County clerks around the country, many of them Republicans, scrupulously distributed ballots and counted votes. State governors, both Democrat and Republican, certified election results from their states. There were recounts. Courts upheld the results and dismissed lawsuits claiming fraud as baseless. “Mainstream media” did not invent these results. The election results come from all across grassroots America.

 

“People have concerns about the legitimacy of the election,” we have heard over and over. Yet all of those concerns, wherever they have been voiced, wherever they have been reported, can be traced to one source, one man: the outgoing president. What must be so painful and difficult for his supporters to acknowledge is that the person to whom they gave their vote and pledged their faith is lying to them. The “concerns” about election fraud come from the same man who started the rumor that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, the man who flogged that falsehood for months and then, finally, after making as much political hay from it as possible, took credit for revealing it as falsehood, as if that made him some kind of saint.

 

I went to my township office and picked up my absentee ballot in person from the township clerk and delivered it back in person. She is someone whose integrity I trust. For me, it really comes down to that. Nor rumors or conspiracies or “alternate facts” or one corporate news source over another but trust. 

 

I can understand feeling disappointed in election results. (I have felt that more than once in my life.) What I cannot understand is taking the word of a compulsive serial liar and his enablers over people whose business is truth. And while I can forgive the misled, I find it hard to forgive the misleaders, who have taken cruel advantage of many good hearts and set brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, parent against child, for nothing but an illusion.

Postscript 1/21/2021: So many dates long awaited have come and gone without banishing my nightmares, but last night at last I slept well and awakened today calm and hopeful. We listened to the inauguration on the radio, and I found it dignified, sincere, meaningful, and moving. There will be so much work yet to do -- and so many Americans yet to convince that the sky has not fallen -- but I find my heart renewed for tasks ahead.

Brought To You By the Letter ‘P’

 

…Dogs are always happy to share their passion about being alive. It’s easy for them to lift our foul moods because dogs bring their joy with them wherever they go.

 

-      Dogs Don’t Bite When a Growl Will Do: What Your Dog Can Teach You About Living a Happy Life, by Matt Weinstein and Luke Barber

 

 

This was a good first entry on my “Books Read 2021” list. With a distinctly Zen Buddhist background philosophy and a generous sprinkling of Western philosophers, this work by two authors writing as one (“I”) is not a book of rules for training (teaching) dogs but one that highlights dogs’ virtues and life lessons we can draw from a canine approach to living. The quote above is from Lesson 15, “Dogs Bring Joy With Them,” something no one who lives with dogs can doubt. 

 

Sarah found the energy to wag her tail more than once on her last day of life. Peasy, now that he’s been sprung from his little concrete-floored prison cell, instead of moping around about how unfair life has been to him until recently, approaches each day with boundless enthusiasm. I get to run in the wash? Chase sticks? You’re giving me another meal? I get to go with you in the car? Life is GREAT!

 

Which brings us to the first item to be covered in today’s blog post:

 

 

Peasy’s Progress

 

The first couple of meals our new dog had under our care, he fell upon like a starving wolf. When I began the process of training him to “Wait!” for permission before attacking his dish, I had to restrain him physically for several days. When at last I got him to “Sit!” on command, even as he could see the desired breakfast or dinner dish in my hand, it was real progress, and now? Now he sees the dish and sits politely without the command. I put the dish on the floor, and even as he quivers with excitement and impatience he keeps his eyes on my face, not on his food, waiting until I tell him “Okay.” 

Here he closed his eyes briefly, perhaps to lessen temptation!

Peasy had his introduction to my walking/hiking partner and her two dogs on Sunday morning. Therese and I had agreed that all three dogs would be on leashes and that she and I would first approach from opposite directions and pass each other without stopping, then walk the dogs in parallel, leash-holding humans on opposite sides of the wide dirt road. The dogs were interested in each other, and Peasy ducked behind my legs briefly when he first caught sight of them, but as the walk proceeded we all moved along in harmony. No growling or lunging or (from Peasy) cringing. Eventually butts were sniffed, and the oldest, calmest dog, Buddy, was allowed off his leash. On our second encounter, we will make the walk a little longer, but we humans are already very pleased with how things worked out the first time around. Sarah had so much fun being a seasonal member of Therese’s pack that I can’t help hoping Peasy will be able to fit in equally well.

 

Mr. Peasy has been pretty good on a leash right from the beginning. He sticks close to my left knee, right where he belongs. Nevertheless, I am adding regular on-leash walks to our morning routine, because our Sarah was good on a leash when young, but then, when she “needed” less and less to be leashed, our discipline fell away. That was my fault and not a mistake I want to repeat with Peasy.

 

He faces a couple of challenges, which is to say that I face a couple of challenges with him. The easier one to cure will be his jumping up on the bed before I get in, so eager is he for our evening pack time. He’s great about getting down after pack time, when we tell him “Go to bed now,” and is, as I’ve already said, very good about waiting for permission to dive into a meal, so teaching him to wait for permission to jump up on the bed shouldn’t take more than one or two lessons. 

 

The second and bigger challenge is chewing things he should not chew. Peasy is a young dog with a lot of nervous energy, and I want to be a good dog mom for him but don’t want to be spending every waking minute in training, so to keep him out of trouble this morning (he kept yielding to the temptation of picking up one of my shoes in his mouth), I put his leash on and draped the leash across my knees while I worked at the table, not paying him any attention at all. Quickly he chose to lie down and wait patiently. So we’ll probably take that route for a while – when he rejects all his own chewing things as “old and boring!” – until he is ready to calm down without the leash. Which may take months, who knows?

 

PJ’s Project

 

Dog training, however, important and time-intensive as it must be, is not my only winter project. One that fell by the wayside over the holidays and with the addition of Peasy to the household is now, albeit in fits and starts, back on track, and that’s the one I call my Silas Project. Originally “His Time and Mine,” I described what I’ve gradually come to call “The Silas Project” this way: 

 

It is a comparison of pre-Civil War American life with our life today in 2020-2021 America, a very personal comparison drawn from both periods, using a young man’s handwritten diary from the 19^th century and my own journals, thoughts and reflections, all of it set in social and political context, historical and contemporary. 

 

David pressed me one day for an “elevator pitch,” and that’s what I’ve came up with. As for genre, that’s a tough one. “Is it biography?” David asked. No, not really, though there is biographical material in it. Frankly, when I think about describing the project to anyone else, I wonder if I’ll be the only one who ever finds it fascinating. But I can’t worry about that now. 

At this stage, the Silas Project is a sprawling, untidy mess, chapters inconsistent in terms of length or voice, the whole of Part One so rough overall that I think I have never written anything in my life more in need of deep, extensive editing – and by someone other than me! But that’s another thing I can’t think too much about right now. Right now the point is to keep pushing through, keep moving forward, from concept to first draft, however big a mess that might be.

 

Partisan Politics

 

I thought of beginning with politics and ending with Peasy, saving the best for last, but then I thought I’d probably lose the majority of you right off the bat if I started with politics. And much as I’d like to have it out of my life, too, on it goes, like the coronavirus….

 

Poor Donald Trump! The voice in his head, his father’s voice, tells him that if loses at anything, he’s a loser, and if he’s a loser, he’s worthless, he’s nobody. So while he lost the November election, he cannot admit it. He cannot bring himself to concede. Perhaps he truly cannot believe he lost. Who the hell knows? 

 

Despite his claim to be a “stable genius,” it’s been clear since his days on the campaign trail that the 45^th president was and is emotionally and mentally unsuited for the job of leading the world’s most powerful country. He has been, in office, what he always was:  a weak, immature, morally stunted individual, unable to accept responsibility or live in truth. Over and over he has disgraced his office with public complaining, whining, threatening and blaming; time and again he has invented alternative fantasy “realities,” denying even his own well-documented and recorded statements; day after day, as each new outrage emanating from the White House disrespected American citizens and insulted reason itself, we said surely we had now heard “the worst” – and yet the outrages, the insults, the disrespect never slowed, let alone stopped.

 

Mental instability is a tragedy, but that of Donald Trump, 45^thpresident of the United States of America, is not his personal tragedy, for he does not recognize it. He does not mourn his errors or lament his shortcomings. Rather, the tragedy of his presidency is suffered by the American people, his supporters no less than his opponents and critics.

 

I understand that there are people so wedded to a particular party that they cannot bring themselves to vote otherwise, regardless of the candidate put forward. I recognize the fact that some Americans are single-issue voters and would sacrifice every other value for the sake of the one issue they hold dearest. I even realize that some voters think “character” should not be taken into account when electing politicians. The last group probably describe themselves as “hard-headed realists.” What has saved us up until recently has been a general faith in our electoral system and a general consensus on facts. 

 

The United States is unique among the world’s democracies in the length of time provided by our Constitution for the transition from the outgoing to the incoming administration. … In the two and one-half months from election to inauguration, the president-elect and his team must choose key White House officials and senior appointees for the cabinet and subcabinet; set a course for foreign policy; develop a domestic agenda and budget; and write an inaugural address summing up all this for the nation and the world. And this is happening when the president-elect and his team, giddy with victory but exhausted from the campaign, are under scrutiny as never before for clues about the new administration. 

 

-      President Carter: The White House Years, by Stuart E. Eizenstat

 

How long has it been, for how much of my life is it that I have found the transition period as nerve-wracking as the months of campaigning that preceded it? And has any American transition of executive power ever been as fraught with anxiety as what we are going through this January 2021?

 

But all responsibility for the present attacks on American democracy cannot be laid at the outgoing president’s door. Republican representatives and senators in Congress have had four years to come to grips with the truth -- that their emperor wears no gorgeous robes, i.e., that he is dangerously delusional. A single naked madman could not bring this country to its knees. The support of a greedy, powerful and yet still power-hungry majority leader in the Senate, however, has tipped the scale, and now other senators, all of whom should know better, are joining the howling mob and saying they will refuse to confirm the results of the Electoral College when those results are presented to them tomorrow. I am furious and ashamed to see that the U.S. Representative from my home district in Michigan is among this crowd of unprincipled rebels. Party of “law and order”? Adherence to the Constitution? Clearly, they’ve thrown all that overboard.

 

The Republican Party’s disdain for democracy is nothing new, but never has it been so shamelessly naked as in their present efforts to overturn election results that even honest officials from their own party, from local and county boards to governors to William Barr, recent Attorney General, have scrutinized repeatedly, finding no evidence whatsoever of the “widespread fraud” that the delusional president continues to argue “cheated” him of victory. Senators who compose the rebellious cabal (can it be a cabal if they are public rather than secret?) say they are responding to “legitimate concerns” about the election results. As an acquaintance of mine points out, the “concerns” largely originate with the man in the White House who lost his bid for re-election and cannot resist feeding the fears of his “base,” those who put him in office four years ago. 

 

Feeding irrational fears, repeating and promoting falsehoods, dividing Americans, trashing our most cherished institutions – if this country and the world survive long enough, history is not going to cut the rebel senators much if any slack for selling their souls in 2020 and 2021. Their leader may be crazy, but what is their excuse? 

 

Snippets From Township and Village -- “in these uncertain times”

It will be August in only one week! Cherry harvest is underway. Nursery stock has begun to go on sale. In the wild, chicory and Queen Anne’s-lace are joined by spotted knapweed, that invader of Leelanau hills and fields that is, however, not despised by bees. No big festivals this year, nor small ones, either. Even the Thursday Evening Author series at Dog Ears Books is not taking place in this strange summer of 2020. We do, thank heaven, have farmers market in Northport on Friday mornings, something to anticipate eagerly all week long.

Northport marina parking lot on Monday morning

Farmers market. on Friday morning

My bookstore is open Tuesdays through Saturdays. “You’re risking your life to sell books,” one local customer friend remarked yesterday in mild tones. Was he chiding me? Expressing gratitude? Did he feel his life was in danger when he came in to buy a local author’s memoir? I don’t know. These days, with all of us concentrating on wearing our masks properly, sanitizing our hands, maintaining correct social distance, and conducting business transactions as expeditiously as possible, I don’t get into many deep discussions in my bookstore.

Bruce Catton: Civil War books

My customers, however, continue to be cooperative and pleasant. They appreciate being allowed again into bookstores and libraries. And we readers are reading a lot these days, more than ever. I’m finally reading one of Bruce Catton’s books on the Civil War. 

…During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices—made the debaters should more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation. - Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

Long a fan of Catton’s memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, and his Michigan: A Bicentennial History, until now I have avoided his multivolume Civil War works, because, open almost any book on the Civil War and you are confronted with more dates and battles than you can shake a bayonet at. Officers are continually changing rank and assignment, troop movements are given in what a friend called, years ago, “penetrating and remorseless detail.” (The friend was talking about something else, but his instantly memorable phrase entered our household memory bank then and there, to be pulled out whenever an occasion calls for it.) History fascinates me, but it’s ideas and politics and journalism and people’s daily lives I want, not military strategies and campaigns. Strictly military history is not for me.

But I should have known that Bruce Catton could not write history that I would find boring! 

Old favorites, highly recommended

American society was in turmoil in 1860. Underlying much of the turmoil were big changes in world economics and technology. Cottage industries were giving way to large-scale manufacturing that threatened the self-sufficiency of small farmers and villagers, and what was for so long a quiet, local American economy was becoming a global web, its threads set vibrating by events faraway and out of sight of workers. Whole populations were on the move. The North viewed immigrants from Europe with suspicion, while the South, clinging to their culture of slavery, saw their region’s dependence on imports spelling out eventual doom. 

And in the midst of all this uneasiness, 1860, like 2020, was an election year. 

The Democrats could not agree on Stephen Douglas as a candidate for the presidency – as Catton put it, “the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South hated him because he liked it too little” – and finally the party split in two, with Northern Democrats running Douglas and Southern Democrats settling for Breckenridge. Everyone in the country, including William H. Seward, viewed Seward as a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, but somehow in the end the nod went to “gawky frontiersman” Abraham Lincoln. A fourth party brought forward yet another presidential candidate. Long before votes were cast, however, Southerners were planning state conventions to decide whether or not the expected election of Lincoln would be sufficient cause for them to secede from the Union.

The Artist likes to quote what he says is an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” My own feeling is that there cannot have been any time on earth when life was not interesting, but I understand that he takes the saying as a reference to times of crisis and catastrophe, fascinating in retrospect but frightening and sometimes life-threatening as one is living through them. The year 2020 has certainly given us “interesting times” already, and it’s doubtful the year will grow any less interesting or anxiety-provoking as November approaches. Again, in our own time -- corporations shipping jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets or replacing workers with robots to boost the bottom line -- as in 1860, immigrants and racial minorities serve as political footballs.

Times of social upheaval, with technological and/or social innovations throwing a market for employment into disarray, have always put human beings at each other’s throats. Choose the particular hill on which you are willing to die, conveniently setting aside other complicated issues, and you have chosen your enemy -- who may well be your next-door neighbor. The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial described attendees at the convention in Charleston as “screaming like panthers and gesticulating like monkeys.” 

Sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, recent rain swelled and split local cherries. Not good. Creeks and lakes rise to destructive levels in many places. The sun shines on a regular basis to bring the annual parade of wildflowers to blossom, each in turn, and as Northern Lights waver tantalizingly overhead the comet Neowise hangs in the evening sky, and the International Space Station circles the earth. Here in the northwest lower peninsula of our state, we view the sky over Lake Michigan. Elsewhere in the country Americans scan for heavenly bodies and activity over fields of wheat or mountains or deserts. 

And as the summer flies past, most of us, at least in Leelanau County, continue to take precautions against COVID-19. The future’s not ours to see. It never has been. But we should probably slow down and think about it a little more dispassionately. Talk less, listen more. Be slower to anger. Register to vote.

How Are Things in Stinking Creek?

Northport Creek does NOT stink!

Election Day — both long anticipated and long dreaded. It will be so good to have the landscape cleared of campaign signs, won’t it? However things turn out, we have all (I trust!) done our civic duty. Not that it’s “over,” by any means. The work goes on. But at least we can put this decisive aspect of it behind us for a while. 

Both the day before and the day of voting, I did what I had to do but also found time to immers myself in other worlds, that of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, seeking some organization for themes and corresponding page numbers before our reading circle gets together on Wednesday, and also re-reading a little sociological treatise (from back when sociology was qualitative, i.e., interesting, rather than quantitative, i.e., boring), namely, Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community in Appalachia, by John Fetterman. Stinking Creek the book (the place is in Kentucky, and it’s a real place) was first published in 1970, the author having copyrighted it in 1967, so descriptions of people and place are outdated, but you know I am hardly averse to slipping the bonds of time, especially in times of mental crisis (see first paragraph of this post).

There were several things I noted in the Appalachia of the 1960s. People had lost jobs in the coal mine already back then — not because coal wasn’t being mined. The locals hadn’t lost their jobs to immigrants providing cheaper labor or to newer alternative energy sources, either. No, it was machinery doing the work previously done by men. Bulldozers, power shovels, augers. “Automation has made the miner jobless.” Lumbering jobs were nearly nonexistent by the 1960s, too, because good timber had all been removed. Living off the land was no longer possible, either, as creeks in which fish had formerly been plentiful were now so polluted by acid from old coal mines that even traditional baptizing holes had been abandoned. With trees gone and soil washing away comes also flooding — yet another hardship for those at the bottom of life’s heap.

To reach the coal seams now, a bulldozer strips the earth from the seam…. Power shovels scoop up the coal that lies exposed. Augers … bore into the mountain to bring out the remainder of the seam….
The resulting tons of waste — earth, slate, and slag — are hurled over the mountainside in an orgy of monstrous ruin. Sulfur, associated with coal-bearing formations, enters the streams, and a solution of sulfuric acid results. This silt washes down the mountainsides to fill the stream beds, and during heavy rains the valleys act as huge funnels, hurling the unchecked waters along to inundate town after town.

Timber, fish, game gone, along with mining jobs and logging jobs — their homes periodically flooded out — nothing was as good as it had been for the earliest settlers. “‘There ain’t even a crawdad around here,’ an old-timer observed.” There were jobs in Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit, but who wanted to leave the freedom and quiet of the mountains for noisy, expensive, hemmed-in city life? Stinking Creek folk much preferred to stay where they were, if they possibly could.

Distrustful of the “govmint” as most of them were, those disabled by accident or illness were happy to “draw” welfare checks and receive free “commodities” — and let’s remember that those free commodities were as much subsidies to overproducing farmers as they were benefit to the hungry poor, something people who rail against “handouts” often forget — while the chance of “project work” gave hope to young men, hope that they could stay on the mountain and get paying work, rather than having either to leave home or stay and “draw” [welfare checks]. 

Farming had never been a path to prosperity in this hard, rocky country of thin, poor soil, but in the 1960s most families still had their own garden plots and raised corn, beans, tomatoes and such for their families, while those who could afford to keep a cow had fresh milk. The boys hanging out at Ellis Messner’s store drank much more “pop” than a dietician would recommend, and boys and girls both took to chewing tobacco at a young age. There was, however, no “opioid crisis” back then. Church attendance might not be regular among all residents of the various hollows, but religion had a hold on many, nonetheless, and even adolescents who quit school before the eighth grade showed respect for their elders, Fetterman observed. Although there was almost nothing in the way of recreation for young people, Fetterman says this of the community where he spent time getting to know the inhabitants one by one and family by family:

On Stinking Creek there are no muggings, robberies, stabbings, rapes. Yet every boy carries a pocket knife — not as a weapon, but as a symbol of responsible manhood. On Stinking Creek you can leave your car unlocked with its load of cameras, typewriter, and personal belongings without fear. Where else can you do this?

This is certainly not the Appalachia one encounters in recent books. It was poor then, too, most families living in two rooms, the young not all that optimistic, and yet —?

What makes the difference between then and now? Not unemployment, my liberal friends, because jobs had already been long lost. Nor welfare, my conservative friends, because they already had that, too. Intrusion from the outside world, however, was still minimal: Television sets were just reaching Stinking Creek but were not in every home, and the one fuzzy channel pulled in would not have brought anything like the mayhem available on cable today. Moonshine could be a tempting danger, but it wasn’t cheap, and international pharmaceutical companies had not yet realized what a lucrative, captive market the poor could be. Degraded popular culture and aggressive marketing? You tell me. 

Thinking now of the dusty road in front of my grandmother’s little house outside Springfield, Ohio — barefoot children, lack of indoor plumbing, but neighborly, with plenty of room and freedom for those barefoot children at play — I realize my grandmother’s neighborhood was a suburban version of Stinking Creek. Some of her neighbors might even have come from those very Kentucky hollows. There was a kind of dignity to poverty in those times, in those places. If such exists yet today, it must be where the poor are fortunate enough not to be victims of addiction or famine or war.

One final note from Stinking Creek in the Sixties, relevant this week when Americans are going to the polls once again: Though many were illiterate and almost no one trusted politicians, residents of Stinking Creek were still eager to vote. On the fourth Tuesday in May, the author tells us, there was no school, because the school building served that day as the polling place for the Sixth Precinct.

The crowds came early. They stood on a rocky point up on the road and looked solemnly down at the ancient school; they gathered in knots in the few shady places down by the creek and stared up at the school…
…Democrats and Republicans alike were determined that the fiasco of four years ago would not be repeated. In that earlier election, Democrats were elected, then unseated after a court battle. It all came about over a Kentucky law that decrees that voters who cannot read and who require assistance to flip the levers of the voting machine must sign an oath that “by inability to read English … he is unable to vote without assistance.”

In that election four years before, half of all Stinking Creek voters had been assisted, and 68 of them had “signed” the oath only with an X. And because their precinct could turn the entire county one way or another, on this fateful Tuesday evryone is watching Stinking Creek. And Stinking Creek people knew they were being watched.

Voter after voter cautiously approached the door, as though fully expecting to be turned away. Every eye was on that door, and each voter came out into the blazing glare of the sun and the more penetrating glare of his fellow citizens. And each voter shielded his own reactions from this intense scrutiny with an expressionless mask he draws over his face at such times.  

The linking of the ability to read and the right to vote is an annoyance of great proportion to the people of Stinking Creek. The ability to read has little to do with a man’s ability to fell a tree, move a stone, or decide whom he wants to dabble in the public funds as his duly elected servant.

Over the past year, 2018, gerrymandering (on the ballot in Michigan) and accusations of voter suppression have been big topics across the United States. What faith even those skeptical, suspicious Appalachian voters had to have to get out and cast their votes! For most of us today it is so easy! Most, that is, not all, and the attempts to make voting more difficult for whole blocks of Americans is nothing short of shameful. But we keep trying to figure out this democratic process, and God forbid we should ever stop trying!

And now, back to The Magic Mountain I go.

P.S. the day after drafting post: Election results are mostly in by now, and the only thing I’ll say here is that in Leelanau County 65% of eligible voters cast votes in this election. Sadly, 65% is considered a “massive” turnout. Too many Americans are still all too prone to take rights and freedoms for granted or think one person can’t possibly make a difference, when the truth is that every election (leaving out presidential races and the Electoral College) is won and lost by an aggregate of individual votes. So whether your preferred candidates won or lost in this midterm, f you voted yesterday — or earlier — you counted.