“You May Quote Me”

No peepers peeping yet on Tuesday....

The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faultering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring. In the one case you are about to part with a friend, who is becoming more gentle and agreeable at every step, and such steps can hardly be made too slowly; but in the other you have been shut up with black frost and biting blasts, and where your best consolation was being smoke-dried.

 

-      Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

 

Ah, spring, you are such a tease!

The sun shone in Leelanau on Easter! All day long! We couldn’t call it a warm day, but it was lovely. Even though the daffodils hadn’t opened yet, the little blue squills were cheery in the sunlight.

Monday was a day of rain. Shrug! “April showers”— you know the rest. On that rainy day I drove south of Traverse City on an errand that had been postponed long enough but on the way stopped at a thrift shop to look through music CDs for something to combat the dreariness of the day and give me voices in the car that were not battering me with current events. What I found was the original cast recording of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It more than fulfilled my requirements: I was in another world all afternoon! The mood of the rain … memories along every mile of road … images of the Paris Opera … the lyrics and the music!!! “Wishing I could hear your voice again….” Oh, yes! And, of course, "The Music of the Night"! I was ecstatic and miserable and floating on air and drowned in sorrow. When I got home, I told Sunny, “I’ve been breaking my heart in Paris. It will take me a while to come back to you.”

From the previous century's bulbs 

Tuesday the sun returned, and the “wild” daffodils at my place began to open (the ones that I planted not quite ready but getting close), and with another day of sun in the forecast, I hung towels out on the line. Sunny and I played in the yard, I worked at outdoor tasks, and we made it to the dog park and met with friends there. 

No more snow!!! Airborne puppy!

Mrs. Trollope said it first.

The passage quoted at the beginning of today’s post is the first paragraph of Chapter XIV in Mrs. Trollope’s book (I call her “Mrs. Trollope” because that’s how she was referred to at the time her book made such a sensation), and I used it today because it captures so well the feelings of most of my fellow northern Michigan residents. But naturally, most of the book is given over to subjects other than climate and weather. It was after reading both the Rev. Isaac Fidler’s and James Stuart, Esquire’s accounts of visiting the young United States, comparing them, and musing over the difference in the two gentlemen’s impressions, that I decided the time had come for me to read the famous account, read by both Fidler and Stuart, of American life written by Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose visit began in the last days of 1828 and extended into 1832. 

 

Look again at those dates above. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont made their nine-month visit to “America” (i.e., the United States of) in 1831-32, so their time here would have overlapped with that of Mrs. Trollope, but I can find no evidence that the three ever met. The latter expressly says in the preface to her book (speaking of herself in the first person in the preface but in the first person in the main text):

 

She leaves to abler pens the more ambitious task of commenting on the democratic form of the American government; while, by describing, faithfully, the daily aspect of ordinary life, she has endeavored to shew how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many.

 

In other words, she isn’t going to get into politics, but it’s obvious to her, after over three years in the U.S. that England, with its monarch and aristocracy and established national Church, has the better form of government for all concerned. That, of course, is her opinion. Her observations and the conversations she committed to paper as quickly as possible so as not to lose either the words or the tone—those cannot be as easily dismissed as her opinions, if one does not share or appreciate them. 

 

Fidler and Stuart, men, along with Monsieur de Tocqueville, focusing on politics, had little to say of the life of American women, and Fanny Trollope gives detailed observations on that topic. 

 

In general, she sees the two sexes mixing very rarely. In public gatherings (mostly religious but occasionally a lecture), the norm is for men and women to sit separately. Men do their drinking at night, away from home, in places where women are not welcome (probably not allowed), and even in the home, the midday dinner meal lasts only about ten minutes, with husband and wife separating as soon as they leave the table, while at breakfast the husband reads his newspaper until he leaves for his office or shop. Boarding house meals are similarly silent and rushed.

 

As dancing and theatre-going are mostly out of bounds for 1830s Americans, young people meet at preachings or are introduced in the homes of friends. “Refined” young American ladies in this time period would never dream of allowing so much as an elbow to come into contact with any part of the body of a man or boy at a dinner table or on a staircase! When Fanny proposed a “pic-nic,” she was advised by a very proper young lady that it would be very improper for men and women to sit together on the ground. In cities, there are occasional balls. When refreshments are offered, men and women go to separate rooms. (How, though, I wonder, did they dance without touching?)

 

Mrs. Trollope gives it as her opinion that American manners would be much improved if there were more mixing of ladies and gentlemen. For one thing, she suspects the men would do much less chewing of tobacco and spitting on the floor, which was one of her constant complaints. This spitting occurred even in the House of Representatives, although the Senate, she allowed, was more dignified: its members sat up straight, rather than lounging and putting up their feet, and there was very little spitting. From the gallery, she was unable to hear much of the discussion on the floor.

 

Everywhere in the country, however, she found conversation among men almost exclusively political, while the women, in their limited sphere, gossiped among themselves and spoke of dress. Mrs. Trollope was frequently bored to tears and wondered how the women could stand the tedium of their lives. She hoped to find literary conversation in her American travels, but this hope was dashed again and again. Americans of the merchant class were not conversant even with Shakespeare and could hardly imagine they were missing anything. Their ambition was all financial, getting ahead the focus and aim of their lives.

 

Despite fierce denials met with in the United States, and despite James Stuart’s suspicion that Mrs. Trollope exaggerated or invented much of what she reported, I found her observations quite believable and calmly expressed. As to the narrow American focus on getting ahead financially, this is confirmed in de Tocqueville’s writings. Mrs. Trollope finds confirmation of her impression given by an Englishman she met.

I heard an Englishman … declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffeehouse, or at home, he had never heard Americans conversing [this would be American men] without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.

I have read elsewhere (perhaps in Dickens?) about the constant spitting of chewing tobacco and the haste with which Americans rapidly gulped down meals in silence. Could Mrs. Trollope return today, she would find Americans enjoying more leisurely meals but snacking and sipping and gulping throughout the day, too. She would find conversation of men and women to include lively discussion of professional sports, books, films, and more, along with politics and financial matters. 

 

Our own pictures of American life in that period, whether in the North or the South, in cities or plantations or on the frontier, is generally oversimplified to the point of falsehood. Seeing our country not through history textbooks or hagiographies of famous men but through the eyes of visitors from overseas, making contemporary observations firsthand, makes for eye-opening reading. And if those observers sometimes disagree on specifics, don’t we do the same now, in the present? It’s a reason not to read only one account and think you have gotten a complete picture.

 

***

 

Well! After writing the paragraph above, I picked up the book again to continue my reading, and what did I come upon?

 

While reading and transcribing my notes, I underwent a strict self-examination. I passed in review all I had seen, all I had felt, and scrupulously challenged every expression of disapprobation; the result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things which had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true, might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received.

 

Further along, near the end of her book, she devotes an entire chapter to the American reception of another English visitor’s writings following his visit to the U.S. Travels in North America, by Captain Basil Hall, was met with exactly the kind of angry denial that was to greet Mrs. Trollope’s own work, although when she finally procured her own copy of his Travels, she found that this visitor of goodwill ”earnestly sought out things to admire and commend” in America.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure, and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint….

Both Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope (and the captain had traveled all over the world) found it more difficult to be understood by Americans than by men and women of any other nation, which Mrs. T imputed to the exceedingly thin skin of Americans, who wanted to hear nothing but praise. I do think we have improved in this regard since the 1830s and realize that our way of life is not perfect.

The subject was metaphor, the teacher said.

 

Here is one of those silly, unimportant little issues that turn me unreasonably peevish. I was reading a book review online, and the writer of the review, a teacher of writing, praised the book author’s use of metaphor, proceeding to give half a dozen examples—all of which were similes, not metaphors! This would probably not matter to me at all, except that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on theories of metaphor, and metaphor is a puzzle for those who wrestle with literal meaning. Simile is no problem. Something is like something else. Fill in ‘something’ and ‘something’ with two different things, and you’ve got a simile. A metaphor, on the other hand, says that the first something is the second something. 

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.” Fine.

 

“Juliet is the sun.” A different kettle of fish!

 

Simile, I’m thinking, is a pretty easy case to make, because, at least for a philosopher, any two things are alike in some way or other, however remote. Persuading someone of identity, merely by stating it, requires a skillful writer and a reader who trusts that writer. 

 

At least, so seems to me. Your thoughts?

Blue sky over blue water

REMINDER --

Nothing to Say

 

Memorial Day Saturday and Sunday were busy at the bookstore. Memorial Day itself was rainy, and I stayed home, pretty sure that most weekenders would be getting an early start on returning home themselves. And mine this time was a true day off – no mowing, no weeding, no hauling bricks (for an ongoing project, most mornings six bricks at a time, in two buckets, uphill), and only short walks with Sunny Juliet. Relaxing, writing, reading. When I reached the last page of a classic noir novel, In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, I turned for relief to Harlan Hubbard’s Payne Hollow. 

 

Noir fiction: dark, nihilistic, and violent. My question: Why does art bother to imitate this kind of life, when we have more than enough real-life dark, nihilistic violence? Oh, don’t bother to answer. It’s a challenge trying to get into the mind of compulsive murderers, etc., etc., blah-blah-blah. I’ll take Dostoevsky, thanks.

 

I’m rambling because I truly have nothing to say. My head is full of dark thoughts about the future of the world, and I don’t want to encourage myself in that direction. Better to think about the season’s first blooming buttercups (think: 'little frogs') and the progress I’m making with that brick project at home (think: the brick walk to my grandparents' outhouse, roofed by grape trellis along its length).

Northern Michigan is as lush and green as a jungle these days. (Don’t think of ticks.)

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.

Snippets from My Northern Michigan June World

Hideaway

Backyard Camping

 

Sunday I decided to sleep out in our little backyard Avion. Often, years ago, I did so, and it has functioned as a spare bedroom, too, when we’ve had guests, but somehow one falls out of habits – gradually, without noticing – just as easily as one falls into them, until now I can’t say how long it’s been since I’ve camped out in the trailer. We had overnight company in the house, however, and I was concerned about Peasy with people he didn’t know moving about at night, so he and I were the backyard campers. I went out to get us settled (me with a book, Pea with his water bowl) before dark, eventually falling asleep over The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O'odham Country, by Gary Paul Nabhan -- and in the middle of the night I woke to the sound of rain. Delicious! The second time I woke was to starlight. Finally, in the morning, to a freshly washed world. Sweet and quiet and peaceful and lovely. 

Evening

Morning

(I sure hope my friends in the Southwest have a good summer monsoon season this year!)

  

Peasy Report

Recently I posted a photo of Peasy on Facebook (nothing new: he is very photogenic), and a friend who met him out in Arizona when first he came home with us commented that he seems to have “filled out” a bit, as indeed he has. The poor little scaredy-dog with a coat full of mats and bony, jutting hipbones has become a joyful, handsome guy in his new Michigan home. I knew he had been fully integrated into the family on Friday night when he joined us on the bed for pack time, and the Artist said to him lovingly, “I guess you’re our dog.” Peasy was, I was reminded over and over, my dog for weeks and weeks, so becoming “our” dog is a giant step forward. And the little guy is not nearly as much trouble as I thought he would be. I mean, there is plenty of room for improvement, but a lot of his issues seem to be gradually dimming, as security and routine work their magic.

 

Before I found Peasy, the “dog with issues” and long-time inmate at the Graham County Animal Control facility, the Artist and I had a list of what we were looking for in a dog: a female Aussie or Aussie mix but one with a tail and a dog that would be friendly and gentle with children so as to be able to spend days in the bookstore with me. “You have a lot of requirements,” my son commented. We also wanted no blue eyes in our new dog. Well, and then, as you know, we (or I, as it was then) ended up with Peasy, a skittish boy with only a stub of a tail. (But clear brown eyes!) I bemoaned the absence of a tail but am getting used to the funny look, and as the Artist remarked thoughtfully one evening, “He doesn’t knock things off tables with wagging.” Another point in Peasy’s favor!

 

He is still very nervous and wary with people he doesn’t know. Not at all our old Sarah, who adored company! So the Artist and I were relieved and delighted on Monday morning when our old friend Michael -- who loved to call our Sarah his dog! – said he thought Peasy was going to be a good dog. We had both been very concerned that Michael might not like little Pea at all. “Really?” Michael was astonished. “Oh, yes! Michael’s stamp of approval is everything!” the Artist assured him.

  

Blog Issues! 

What has happened to my “Books Read 2021” list? Why did one title get added at the bottom rather than at the top of the list, and why won’t the list let me add other titles at all? Clearly it is something I am doing wrong or not doing right, but why these oh-so-unsatisfactory changes? For the record, recent books read were the following (with #1 below actually figuring in at #71 since January 1): 

 

1. Latham, Jennifer. DREAMLAND BURNING (fiction – YA)

2. Offill, Jenny. WEATHER (fiction)

3. Perkins, Lynne Rae. THE MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING (juv.)

4. O’Brien, Edna. THE COUNTRY GIRLS trilogy (fiction)

5. Lively, Penelope. PASSING ON (fiction)

6. Mattick, Lindsay. FINDING WINNIE: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS BEAR (nonfiction – juv.)

7. Brown, Austin Channing. I’M STILL HERE: BLACK DIGNITY IN A WORLD MADE FOR WHITENESS (nonfiction)

8. Lively, Penelope. HOW IT ALL BEGAN (fiction)

9. Nabhan, Gary Paul. THE DESERT SMELLS LIKE RAIN: A NATURALIST IN PAPAGO INDIAN COUNTRY (nonfiction)

 

I hate to think I’m going to have to re-do the whole list. Any ideas, other users of Blogspot?

 

 

Waukazoo Street Update

 

You can find my latest bookstore news -- and I urge you to do look for it, especially if you are a fan of audio books – on my dedicated bookstore blog, Northport Bookstore News, but other things are happening on our street, as well. It is lively already, well before the 4^th of July.

 

The Garage Bar & Grill and New Bohemian Café are both open to supply you with everything from morning coffee to late-night beer, along with plenty of good food. The former Tucker’s, down on the site of the former Woody’s Settling Inn, has been reincarnated as Northport Pub & Grille, and across the street from them, the food truck people, Around the Corner, are giving Northport an architecturally appropriate-to-Northport building that will house an intimate minibar.

 

In General

 

We are back, all of Northport as well as Waukazoo Street. The library is having its author season again, Music in the Park is set to happen on Friday nights, and even the dog parade is scheduled again for this August.  

The Challenging Desert Warms My Heart

Invisible mountain morning

…The rain had driven everybody indoors. The stock pens east of town were filled with cattle waiting to be loaded onto trains, so after doing chores, the cowboys had a good excuse to visit the saloons to get out of the lousy weather. The Horseshoe [Saloon] smelled like cigar smoke, beer, whiskey, and cow manure. 

• Phyllis de la Garza, Railroad Avenue

From a temperature of -10 degrees Fahrenheit at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning, Cochise County warmed up into the high 40s for the beginning of the weekend, and after dark on Saturday the rains came. Rain pattering on a metal roof reminds me of summer evenings on our front porch in Michigan, but I won’t be venturing out through wet grass with Sarah-dog here. Instead we’ll meet with mud and grit. The high desert is very gritty. Even when the ground is dry, we are always tracking in dust and tiny, hard, rough-edged stones, and when snow or rain dampen boot soles, a whisk broom at the door and a mat on which to leave shoes is the only solution. 

In the early Sunday morning rain, our little ghost town of Dos Cabezas seemed little more than a scant clearing in the clouds, mountains all around vanished in the mist. The only steady sound outside the cabin was that of the rain and, at long intervals, a truck or camper whooshing by on the high below. Because of the PGS (“partial government shutdown,” but I’m sick to death of hearing that phrase, aren’t you?), Chiricahua National Monument is closed for the duration, and I wonder where all the campers who had planned to stay there will go, since other parks and federal lands that allow camping must also be closed. There are private RV parks in Willcox, so I suppose some will go there, but it isn’t as if vacationers and wandering retirees can just drive to another state. The whole country is affected. 

Rain increases from gentle pattering to a pounding pour. (In Phyllis de la Garza’s novel, set in Willcox and the surrounding area, “rain pounded down like a fist.”) If Dos Cabezas is a clearing in the clouds, a restricted area of visibility, it can also be seen as a little lake of land, with each house and cabin, old miner’s shack and crumbling adobe ruin an island. From our small island here on high ground, I can look back along the wash and across the mesquite scrub to a ranch nestled at the base of the mountains to our north, while south, across the highway, other neighbors’ places are visible, as are the lower slopes of gentler mountains that fade away into the mist maybe fifty yards up. 

Bonnie Landers, the fictional narrator of Railroad Avenue, periodically throughout a tale in which she meets one terrifying situation after another, reminds herself not to whine. It does no good to whine. That’s another way the high desert is gritty. It’s the same, of course, with nature in general, whether the locale is a mountaintop or the middle of the ocean: nature has no sympathy. On the other hand, neither does it bear us any animosity. It just is. And so you either give up in the face of it, and turn, tail between your legs, or you deal the hand you’re dealt. It isn’t “heroic,” simply a matter of accepting and meeting a situation. It's a different kind of grit.

I will say, though, that in our most recent high desert challenge — a couple nights of unusual and unexpected subzero temperatures that froze and cracked plastic fittings to an outside rainwater storage tank, confusing the pump about where to send water — we would not have been able to deal with the situation on our own. 

Willcox Railroad Park cottonwood in frost on cold Thursday morning

One neighbor brought water, and a couple of others brought tools and know-how, and after a few round trips to town for new fittings the situation was resolved. The Artist and a neighbor wrapped the repaired pipes to insulate against any future extreme cold, after which the Artist strategically placed ladders around the nearly ground-level prior problem areas to discourage foot traffic by night-roaming cows (free range) and “pigs” (javelinas). We didn’t whine or cry, but the truth is that we would have been lost without our neighbors.

They had stories, too. One hard freeze a few years back busted up pipes from Safford, up in Graham County, to Sierra Vista down close to the Mexican border, and hardware stores all the way to Tucson ran short of needed supplies. It took a trip all the way to Phoenix to buy enough pipe so that half a dozen houses in Dos Cabezas could once again count on running water from their wells to their homes. One man made the trip to Phoenix for the rest.

I’ve read elsewhere about the myth of “rugged individualism” among pioneers on the frontier and how the real story was more, of necessity, neighbor helping neighbor. Of course, I don’t have first-hand experience to back that up, not having been here a hundred years ago. We are here now, the Artist and I, with electric lights and running water and a gasoline-powered automobile to make the 30-mile round trip to town, and we’re only here for the winter, not for the grueling summer, when heat and scorpions and rattlesnakes threaten the unwary. Still, the warm hearts and casual generosity of our ghost town neighbors have made the difference for us between possible and impossible. “Oh, who would inhabit/this bleak world alone?”

Thursday night, before falling asleep, I finally heard coyotes. We hear them all the time back in northern Michigan, and when we first heard them here, back in the winter of 2015, the sound made me feel right at home in what was then a strange, new place. The place doesn’t feel strange any more, but I am happy to hear the coyotes’ voices. Like the sight of the mountains, that sound makes me smile. 

What the Weather Is Saying To Me

One day last week I had a few hours away from the bookstore. Having Bruce at the helm (i.e., desk and sales counter) gave me a chance to accompany the Artist on a trip down to the landfill south of M-72 — kind of a tradition with us, that trip, though it’s gotten much, much more expensive over the years. Still, we enjoy the drive and a stop in Cedar for ice cream on the way back. Then, since Bruce likes to leave by 4 at the latest to get back to Traverse City by 5, the Artist and I got ourselves up to Northport together to finish out the day. 

The day (it was Friday) had turned cool and cloudy, with a fallish breeze ruffling the goldenrod along the roadside, and I remarked to the Artist, “I don’t mind this kind of weather at all. It seems to say, ‘Slow down. Take it easy.’” He said he felt just the same. And so we slow downed and took the evening easy after a simple supper, big bowls of ramen with spicy pork and vegetables. Overnight it rained at last, and the weather, wordlessly, told me I could take time off from watering the garden and should hold off hanging laundry out on the line, too. The grass doesn’t need mowing, the météo added, again without words. I got the message. Since then, of course, we’ve had more rain, including one really big overnight storm. No, make that two more big storms now.

In the late 1980s, I lived for two years (minus the summers) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and before leaving my apartment to walk to campus each morning, I made a phone call to an automated service that delivered that day’s weather predictions. If the day would be turning cold before my walk home in late afternoon, the forecast warned me, without saying so explicitly, to take a warm jacket. However clear the sky at sunrise, when rain was in the forecast I carried an umbrella. Cincinnati’s hilly terrain and European architecture make for fascinating walks, but all walks are best enjoyed when the walker is prepared for the weather. 

Weather. As people say, we talk about it but do nothing about it. I can't help thinking that's part of our love for weather talk, forecasts, predictions, and after-the-fact reports. In general, we are not called upon to do much about it, and not being called to action for a change can be quite a relief.

As much as I enjoyed slowing down a while (and I’m still “on vacation” from watering, even in Northport, where the rain has done that job for me while the awnings are down for cleaning), it’s time to pick up the pace once again, because this week is our last Thursday Evening Author event of the 25th-year anniversary season. Please join us at 7 p.m. for geology, poetry, and live music from Thomas Hooker of Texas and Cherry Home, Northport. (If there is such a thing as a part-time local, that’s what Tom is.) This is our last TEA! And Labor Day is right around the corner!