My Own Personal "'Hamlet' Back-&-Forth"

 “What kind of boat is she?”

 

An embarrassing question; for it was suddenly apparent that this small craft could not be classified. She was neither sailor nor steamer; she was not a trader, still less a yacht. A roof, the width of the beam, had been raised over a black, flat-bottomed hull; small square-paned windows had been cut in, and a short mast raised above. Space had been left in the bow for anchor and ropes; in the stern a tiny deck gave just enough room for the sweep of the tiller.

 

“She’s a—well—she’s a painter’s boat.” 

 

The San Luca, by Cilette Ofaire, book’s title taken from the name of the boat in the travel narrative, was on a bookshelf I was looking through at home. I wondered why it hadn’t been on the shelf with the houseboat books, where I would have found it months ago when moving those books from living room to office. Although the “painter’s boat” was not exactly a houseboat, they did live aboard for years, the husband and wife, both of them painters. (It should really have been called a “painters’ boat,” with the apostrophe indicated plural artists.) In any case, the subject matter moved me to set aside a novel I’d planned to read at bedtime in favor of traveling aboard the ‘San Luca.’ 

 

They begin in Germany, with the plan of giving up cheap apartment hunting and the dreariness of even cheaper hotel rooms in the years following World War I, to take to Europe’s canals, living and working in their waterborne vessel. 

 

Charles had found her in a partly drained canal in the dreary marshes bordering the Elbe between Hamburg and the sea. She made us think of a peddler’s booth abandoned after a fair, or a broken-down circus wagon left by the roadside. On her prow she had carried the carved wooden head of a dragon, set off by daubs of green and yellow, and along the sides of the hull had been painted wings which ended in a sort of tail vanishing into the rudder. We could not help smiling at her absurd, helpless air.

 

Charles and Cilette did not have Harlan and Anna Hubbard’s drifting voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Sometimes they had an opportunity to moor in some lovely pastoral backwater, but just as often they were towed from one city to another in a long “train” of barges, a tugboat the motive engine of the train, past factories and cranes and sad little remnants of pathetic, bare-limbed trees. And in fact, being towed by some other vessel seemed their primary way of moving, from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Holland and beyond, in a world of customs officials, police, required permissions, and rules.

Intermission in Northport

I left my reading at the end of Part I to begin another day, first outdoors with dog and then indoors at bookshop. Part I of the story had ended sadly, with the suspicious disappearance of their little dog in Amsterdam, suspicious because neighbors on hand had complained about the boat being moored on “their” canal, and one had falsely claimed to the police that the quiet, sleeping dog “barked all night.” 

 

After a couple of early customers, the shop settled down to a dead quiet until, one by one, friends trickled in. Even before being introduced to one another (those not already acquainted), lively conversation ensued. Books were purchased and ordered, recommendations made, questions asked, until the talk ranged far and wide from Waukazoo Street, ceasing only a few minutes after closing time. It was a good day in Northport. And the next day, Saturday, would be Independent Bookstore Day! 

 

But first, back home to Sunny. In the rain. A short walk under an umbrella, dinner preparations, and then an hour of relaxation, the momma with her book, Sunny with her bone. 

 

Back to the Boat

What a surprise awaited me at the beginning of Part II. Charles and Cilette sell their boat! Right in the middle of the book! The new owner, a friend of theirs, gives it a new name, and C&C purchase another boat and christen it ‘San Luca’ to continue their voyaging, now through Belgium and on to France. 

Early in the story, we were told that Charles “knew how to create an atmosphere of intimacy out of the barest of materials” and thus transformed the droll, abandoned, dragon-headed boat into a waterborne home and studio to two wandering artists. Charles’s ingenuity is exercised once again on the new boat, a “lamentable figure” when first they see her, “streaked with rust” and further disfigured with “ugly red paint.” As soon as they found her,

 

…Charles began to draw up plans: taking her to pieces, putting her together again, modifying her to fit all our needs and our wishes. 

 

“The entry here,” he said aloud, “will become the living-room.” He shut his eyes and Cilette knew that he was building the wall over in his dream.

 

The Artist's houseboat in Leland, Michigan!

Oh, what memories such passages evoke for me! The Artist whose life I shared was a boat dreamer, also, and could not see an old hull anywhere on land or a smart vessel in harbor without making elaborate mental changes, sometimes even committing plans and sketches to paper, and so whenever we would read aloud to each from books such as this one, he could not bear to rush through descriptions of renovations and would often say, if I were the one with the book in hand, “Wait. Read that last part again. I didn’t quite picture it.” 

 

Daydream material

Sketching a remodel....

Then Back in the Bookstore

On Saturday, April 26, the sun came out in Northport for Independent Bookstore Day!!! More importantly, probably, from a traditional Northport point of view, it was the day of the annual Scott Brow Fishing Derby for families of young children up at the millpond. Some people came for both books and fish, though, and that worked fine.

 

Discussing movies and TV series with a customer-friend from Cedar, I needed to check on the date of the 19^th-century establishment of the town that became the ghost town where the Artist and I spent several contented winters. Imagine my horror, in looking up my own blog post from 2015, to discover that I had mistyped the date for the first Dos Cabezas post office! It was, of course, 1879, not 1979! All this time, and of all the people who had read that post (a popular one because of its subject matter), no one had corrected me! It’s kind of a hassle to make a correction to a post that far back in time, but I persisted until victory was mine.

 

Two dogs visited the bookshop on Saturday, Charlie and, later, another little dog about the same size but held in the owner’s arms. Friend Lucia also stopped by (though she had bought books only the day before) to wish me a Happy Indie Bookstore Day! 

Always good to see Lucia!

My bedtime book on Saturday was, once again, Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, my go-to comfort book, the one that soothes my soul in troubled times and strengthens my resolve.

 

An excerpt from one of my favorite books

 

…It was hard to say who the “real” people were. She didn’t have anything against most of the new people, not the retirees or the summer people or tourists or even the snowmobilers, not on a case-by-case basis, except that they tended to expect too much, to assume too much. But they paid their taxes and kept their lawns mowed and volunteered at the school and spent money in the local stores and had as much right to be here as Gladys did, she realized that. And McAllaster had always been a tourist town, a resort town; her own parents had made a living off that fact. 

 

But things were changing fast now. Too fast. Half a dozen new summer places got built on the beach every year, and no one was content with a regular house, everyone had to have a mansion. At this rate she wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes on the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years….

 

-      Ellen Airgood, South of Superior

  

On the road!

 

Last time I went anywhere farther from home than Benzie or Grand Traverse County? Last fall I ventured all the way to Cadillac, and in late spring of 2024 I made it up to the U.P. once. 

 

My spring road trip 2025 took me to Reed City, the halfway point a friend from Kalamazoo and I had chosen for this season’s rendez-vous. 

Always good to see Laurie!

We did no sight-seeing, and so I have no album of photographs to share, but I did stop to hover a few moments at a little farm village called Chase, where I mailed a postcard to a friend in the U.P. and used my phone to capture a couple of old buildings, the first because it must have been very important at one time in local history, the second because it made me think of how often I have meditated on hiding out in some out-of-the-way place where no one would ever find me. Why such an idea? Don’t you have occasional fantasies of leaving everything behind?

Faded glory

No one would look for me here.

Now, in closing, another excerpt

A somewhat strange book came into my hands. The title is King Noanett, the subtitle A Story of Old Virginia and the Masssachusetts Bay, the author’s name on the title page given as F. J. Stimson, but in parentheses below that J.S. of Dale. The main character is a young man of Devon, who meets a lass and falls in love – an old story, so far. This particular story, however, is set in the time of great conflict in England, and as the young man’s grandfather is a Parliamentarian and the young woman’s grandfather a royalist, the lovers are star-crossed. And here I must reveal that the young man’s unusual name is Bamfyde Moore Carew.

 

Let me here skip ahead in the story. Carew is convicted of giving aid to the royalists and sentenced to “transportation” (i.e., deportation to the colonies) and several years’ servitude (I forget how many), but eventually he and an Irishman who had shared the same transport vessel escape their masters and join an army. Horrors of slaughter and dissipation drive them from that life, also, and they carry away with them a girl whom neither of them wishes to marry (because the Irishman, like the Devon man, is in love with another) but whom they cannot leave to the life of the camp. 

 

Enough of background. Of this convoluted story, I only want to leave you today with a speech the Irishman makes to his friend:

 

“Beauty is given man, the good kind of beauty to enjoy, the bad kind to tempt him and teach him strength. In this way even pleasure hath its place—and a Puritan is but a suicide that thrusts him, like a blubbering child, away from the fires that are to try him! Let monks renounce—a man is here to live, and touch and try the lives of others; to feel his life and use it to the full, and then to give it away—to the first cause, maybe? Men to be brave and true, maids to be brave and gentle—and both their highest duty to be kind.” 

 

“Their highest duty to be kind.” Isn’t that a noble thought for the day? 

Quietly spectacular hellebore

The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

On Sunday morning I finished one nonfiction book I’d been reading and had knocked off the remainder of another in the afternoon after housework, so at bedtime I was thrown back on a volume from Robert Hale’s Regional Series, books written in the mid-20^th century on various parts of England, featuring history, landscape, architecture, and so on. This second one, Exmoor, I’m not finding as charming as Olive Cook’s Breckland (each book in the series has a different author), but I am not reading it carefully for legal-historical detail, simply as escape from the present to another place and time. The “historic” parts that please me most are the most purely local. Here is an example: 

 

"From here we will cross Hoar Oak Hill to Hoar Oak Tree. This celebrated tree was, from 1300 when the Forest was curtailed until 1815 when Simonsbath was colonized, one of the only two trees in the entire Forest. In 1658 it fell from “very age and rottenness,” and four years later a young tree was planted there to take its place, and this newcomer was in turn blown down in 1916."

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

Bits like that I slow down to read and re-read, picturing the scene in my mind. I wonder if the replacement tree was replaced in turn when it fell in 1916. The author doesn’t say. 

 

I didn’t read very far in that book on Sunday evening before falling asleep, however, because before picking it up I read my entire 190-page journal from December 12, 2019, to March 16, 2020, reliving a long trip west (seven days on the road, longer than usual because in New Mexico I was felled by what I considered at the time a migraine attack but have since learned was more probably vertigo), ghost town hikes and social events, a first exploration of Turkey Creek Road, our “Coyote Christmas” (I would link this if I could, but the platform is not cooperating), Sarah’s last full winter with us, the onset of the pandemic, and so much more. A friend and I had been trying to remember when she and her then-partner visited us, first in Willcox and later in Dos Cabezas, and both of those visits I found recorded in this 2019-20 journal, the first of a series that has now reached Vol. XIII and page 2240 (as of this morning), memories important only to me. 

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

The Artist and I made a couple of trips to Tucson that winter and visited bookstores in the “Old Pueblo,” as locals still like to call their city. David loved Speedway Boulevard! I was happy to get back to our quiet ghost town. We both loved the old library in Bisbee. 

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

My son’s father died in the spring, and I spoke with my son by phone almost every day. The Artist and I found again, having become yearlings, the new foals on the edge of Willcox that had captured my heart the winter before. On Monday mornings I volunteered at the Friendly Bookstore and on Wednesdays at Willcox Elementary School. We made new friends in Willcox. I hiked with neighbors on our home ground and a piece of public land down the road. 

 

"Sandhill cranes not far off, heard before seen & sometimes not seen at all, they fly so high. Brief thrill of daily passenger train [speeding through town nonstop], and in the quiet that follows its disappearance, again the distant, purling music of the cranes, now visible overhead, sunlit in their turning."  

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

"A high forest of ocotillo as we climbed & at the peak gave way partway down along a fault line to beargrass at the sedimentary/igneous shift. Northeast slope, shaded, held surprising pockets of tiny ferns & flourishing mosses, & the trail in places was muddy. Moisture no doubt came from snowmelt; springs that high unlikely."

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

We saw the new “Little Women" film in Willcox, and a Stage-to-Cinema showing of “The Nutcracker,” the 1984 production of the Royal London Ballet created by Peter Wright. 

 

"And while a large group, we were told, had formed the afternoon audience, we were the audience at 7 o’clock. A private showing! As if we were the king and queen!

 

"David loved it every bit as much as I did. “Superb! Magnificent!” It was a perfect holiday gift. And before & after the show, there were the magical lights in Railroad Park, their glorious colors reflected in puddles from the day’s storms….

 

"Two years ago we went to Paris at the Willcox Historic Theatre when the show was “Figaro” from the Opera de la Bastille. Now, London. It would be thrilling to attend the opera in Paris, the ballet in London, but having these experiences in a little Arizona cow town & coming outside to the dark of high desert winter has a magic all its own, almost as unlikely as the fantastical “Nutcracker” story itself."

 

      - 1/29/19

Railroad Park, Willcox, AZ, lighted for holidays in 2019

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

"I had two sketchbooks with me yesterday, having taken the second as a mental reminder to get started. [Apparently the second was still empty, the first almost full.] It isn’t that anyone else cares … or that I would “do” anything with [the] drawings, even having made them. It’s that I feel good when drawing. Leave thoughts & self behind. Exist purely in the moment. See fully. And afterwards I can revisit those places & times: by looking at old drawings, I am plunged back into the ‘now’ of ‘then.’"

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

From ‘then’ I return to ‘now,’ as winter weather has returned once more to spring Leelanau, snow deep and heavy and still coming down as Sunny and I ventured out into the morning. Maybe I will not get to Northport today, after all, and that’s all right. There are potatoes and onions and lentils a-plenty in the house—“lentils for the apocalypse,” I found myself thinking, a thought perhaps arising from recollections of the drive the Artist and I made back to Michigan in June 2020, one night staying in a three-story motel in which we seemed to be the only guests, an eerie place I named “the motel of the Apocalypse.”

As always, the present is saturated with the past. We are time beings.

"No dog park today, huh?"

Note: As I say, the platform has turned uncooperative, and one of the several things it will not let me do is format quotations as indented paragraphs. I don't know if this is a temporary or a permanent problem. All I can do is use quotation marks and a different color font.

Do I read too much?

What does SHE think?

That question is instantly joined by another: Why do I read? Then there is, of course, What else could or should I be doing? And right away we can discount Sunny Juliet’s opinion, since hers is a distinctly self-serving perspective. In her point of view (I cannot imagine I’m misreading her on this), all the hours I’m focused on objects held in my hands is robbing her of my attention, and there’s no amusement for her in watching me, either, as what I am “doing” seems so little like doing anything.

 

Oh, my dear, impatient, so patient companion!

 

Even with a beef bone, she hopes for play with momma.

What do I seek in all this reading? That’s the “why” question. One answer is understanding. I want to understand as much as I can of the knottiest, most insoluble human predicaments, problems to which I will never have a full answer as long as I live. That answer surely elicits another “Why?” What is the good of understanding that leads no further?

 

Oh, tree in the garden! What knowledge did its fruit offer? 

 

I see different kinds of hungers for knowledge and understanding in different human beings. The pragmatically scientific want to take things apart, see how they work, and then do things that have not been done before. They are eager to change the world. Why? Sometimes for the betterment of mankind, sometimes just “Because we can.” Around those seekers, always, are hangers-on and parasites with no intrinsic hunger of their own for the knowledge and inventions, who do, however, care very much for the wealth that can be generated, wealth multiplying itself into the future, if only one makes a reservation early enough on the investment bandwagon. Theirs is hunger for accumulation, which is qualitatively different from hunger for knowledge. 

 

And yet, honestly, don't most of us have a certain hunger for accumulation? I look around my life and see art on walls, books on shelves, stacks of photograph albums, dishes of stones and fossils, and physical representations of beautiful living things.

Beauty and memories, memories and beauty. Objects that invite my eyes and my hands, pages that carry me over oceans to inhabit other lives and other times and also let me relive my own past years. Associations carried by these material objects are my real accumulated wealth, the objects themselves only carriers.

Does the quest for understanding life look more to the past than to the future? “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” wrote Kierkegaard. We do seek hope in the possibility of applying our understanding to the future. For example, restricting the question of “how we came to be where we are” to immediate family and acquaintance rather than society as a whole, I can see errors I have made and try to avoid repeating them in what remains of my time on earth. Sadly, human societies, with longer spans than individuals but always peopled by those shorter-lived humans, have difficulty learning from previous generations. Somewhere in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the insatiably curious physicist wrote that we live our lives, see where we’ve gone wrong, and then die. For some reason, the simple truth of that statement, the flat-footed way he phrased it, amuses me no end. That's us, all right! And is that how it will be with our species as a whole? I wonder. They came into existence, succeeded magnificently for a while, then messed it up and went extinct. Maybe. Understanding too late--.

 

Besides understanding, however, there’s no denying the strong element of escape in much of my reading, and often these hungers pull in decidedly opposite directions. When the world is too much with me and I want to drown out the clamor of politicians who have once again invaded my thoughts with one outrageous act or speech after another, my hunger for escape pulls away from my hunger for understanding, and I can only feed them in turn, first one and then the other, these jealous rivals, setting aside Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith for The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes.

Looking for understanding,

the search continues.

Caveat emptor: I’ll stop here for a moment to remind myself and my readers that naming desires, like naming emotions, distorts our inner reality. They are not things and do not occur singly, and my attempts to tease out separate strands from an inchoate stream can be only a partial and misleading picture. All analysis distorts. Keep that in mind, please, and what I write here will not seem, perhaps, quite so absurd!

The open road! Escape!

And now I’m thinking that understanding and escape are very earthbound dimensions of reading hunger, very, very human, and that there is something else, woven tightly into these hungers and yet also very different, and that is our longing to live beyond the limits of our individual life spans, not only longer but also larger. You see instantly how the desire to expand beyond cannot be separated from hunger for understanding or for escape—and yet, do you also see that it cannot be completely expressed by those two hungers? We want something eternal, deathless. No theologian, however, I'll just leave that teasing suggestion right there.

 

I have more to say about the comfort of remembering, which also lets us slip time's constraints. 

 

Through the Looking Glass brings back, for me, the excitement I felt when I ran into the kitchen to tell my mother, “It’s a chessboard!” Lewis Carroll had not stated it so baldly, and my parents had not explained the story to me that way, but all of a sudden, reading it to myself, I had seen the chessboard when the Knight told Alice he could go no farther because he had reached the end of his move, and I had to run and tell my mother, who responded, “You didn’t know that?” No, I didn’t, but the excitement of my discovery was not dampened by her amusement, because I discovered it for myself, as I still remember with pleasure. 

 

If I were to pick up right now, today, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it would carry me back to the Parc Monceau in Paris (as merely thinking of the book carries me back), especially if I had the French paperback. One summer, day after day I went to the Parc Monceau with that book in hand, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’ être, lost in an Eastern European world inside the landscaped French world around me in my dream city far from home. 

 

And Wind in the Willows! I read that book to my son, giving the different animal characters different voices, and we had a wonderful time, which he still remembers. Then when the Artist and I had a layover in the Detroit airport on our way home from France, we read to each other (from a battered paperback copy that is here in my house somewhere, but where?) the chapter “Dolce Domum,” tears streaming down our faces, while all around us business people busily consulted their Blackberries and the contents of their briefcases. 

Are you still with me? Are you as tired as Sunny Juliet of my egghead ruminations? “Momma, get real!”

 

Real is snow in thick flurries and wind that drifts it across roads!

Well, here’s what was real for me on Monday evening as the blizzard swirled and on Tuesday morning when darkness had not as yet retreated: I was reading, for the first time in years, Jim Harrison’s novel, Dalva. First published in 1988, Dalva is written in the first person, the first and third sections in a woman’s voice, and what inspired me to revisit this book in 2025 was the new collection of Jim’s work in French translation that concentrates on his women characters, both in first-person stories and in third-person works with central female characters.

I have to admit that when Dalva first came out, it was hard for me to “hear” the female narrator’s voice, what with Jim’s own gravelly, very masculine speaking voice so familiar to my ear. Reading the book now is a very different experience. For one thing, Jim’s speaking voice has been gone for nine years, and he had been gone from Michigan longer than that, gone to live in Montana and Arizona. But also I am 37 years older than when I first read this novel. Thirty-seven years of varied life experience, shall we say, gives me a much richer perspective, and now Dalva’s voice comes through strong and clear to me, and I am loving this book, truly loving it, and have a much deeper appreciation for what the author accomplished, not only in writing from a woman’s point of view but in speaking so many truths.

 

It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized.

... 

 

Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.

... 

 

The tomatoes looked as if they were suffocating in the glass jars, livid red and suffering.

... 

 

…I had told him that I was without a specific talent, other than that of curiosity, and he saw that as a large item. It is terrible to assume life is one thing, only to discover it is another. A highly mobile curiosity gives you the option of looking into alternatives. 

 

There is also, I must admit (Another admission? Is this post becoming overly confessional?) my love for southeast Arizona (a love that took me by surprise), and the way the mountains and high desert haunt my northern Michigan winter finds solace in Harrison’s descriptions of places not far from my former winter stomping grounds in Cochise County. He was just a couple of mountain ranges west and south. Hackberry trees along dry streambeds, mesquite on overgrazed acreage, eroded gulches, alligator juniper at higher elevations—all that. I came to know such country intimately.

How much poorer my present life would be had I not come back to re-read this novel! How many hungers it satisfies!

 

I would defend my answer to my own original question by noting that I spend no time whatsoever watching television and none drinking in bars, although as a word-addicted, dream-addled, introverted widow I do not hold my priorities up as superior to anyone else’s. All I’m saying is that reading is a priority in my life, and this is where I look for comfort and strength and beauty and understanding.

Also, never fear, Sunny and I manage a lot of dog-and-mom time, indoors and out!