Sharing a Few of My Secrets

Lake Michigan from Jelinek Road

 

I see things that aren’t there.

 

The probability that you would spot a great blue heron wading at the corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is low -- not impossible but unlikely. I’ve only seen a heron once at that corner, hunting in an ephemeral pool after a heavy rain, stalking – what? Surely not fish? What year was that? No matter. Whenever I make that turn, I look for the heron and see him in memory.

 

Not much farther up Jelinek Road I see the buck that leapt in front of our van one evening at dusk, missing the windshield by a hair, only missing at all because the Artist had seen it in time to be able to brake. We could not have been closer to the animal unless we’d collided. That spot in the road holds that incident for me.

 

Still on the same long, curving climb is where we pulled over to the side of the road and sat quietly for an hour or more, hoping to see some noteworthy celestial event, the nature of which I have forgotten. Was it a comet? Whatever it was, we never did see it, our view open to the west but not to the north. Still, it was restful and pleasant to be sitting out there by the side of the road on a summer evening, doing absolutely nothing but looking at the sky and talking to each other. And then we did see something: the International Space Station passed overhead! Neither of us had ever seen it before, and I have not seen it since, but I see again in imagination what I saw with the Artist that night in the evening sky.

 

All of these sights – heron, buck, ISS – I see over and over, although they are not there for anyone else to see who travels that road. And I have not even covered a mile on a single road with these examples, so imagine the many invisible (to you) sights I see along every Leelanau County road….

 

 

My life is a setup for coincidence. 

 

When my sisters and I drove down to Good Harbor a week ago Sunday, I pointed out another memory corner of M-22, this one between Leland and Glen Arbor. There in the woods used to be an unusual tourist attraction. It wasn’t exactly stations of the cross, as I recall it, but giant billboard-like paintings from the life of Jesus that one encountered along a winding path. I called them ‘dioramas’ when describing them, but they weren’t really that: as I say, more like billboards. But what was the place called? Not that my sisters cared, but I wanted to remember. One would occasionally come across an old postcard showing one of the scenes….

 

Well, the very next day I was going through a milk crate filled with booklets and ephemera and came across what I thought would be a menu (it was that size) from the Leland Lodge. It wasn’t a menu but did advertise the Lodge as available for large group dinners. What caught my eye, though, was a list of tourist sights near Leland. The dunes were on the list, of course, but so was -- Lund’s Scenic Garden! That was it! 

 

Not everyone is surrounded on a daily basis by old books and papers, which is why I say my life is a setup to invite coincidences.

 

 

Sometimes I DO dog-ear a book!

 

Rarely do I turn down the corner of a page … or underline sentences … or write notes in the margins. But sometimes I do all of those things to a book, though I never, ever use highlighters on book pages.

 

In almost every case, the book I mark up has to be a paperback, it has to be used, and if I’m dog-earing and underlining and writing notes in the margin and sometimes making my own index (if one isn’t provided) or adding to an existing index (if one exists) – if I’m doing all those things, it’s because I’m working with the book, treating it as an assignment I’ve given myself, wanting to make sure I don’t miss important ideas and information.

 

One book I treated that way last month was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which took me a long time to get through, because it was so upsetting (although I highly recommend it) that I couldn’t read all that much at a time. This month, at the shop and between customers, the book I am treating with apparent disrespect but, really, with my highest respect (isn’t it respect when one engages fully with someone’s words?) is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fortunately, Antifragile is not a world-historical horror show but a fascinating and original way of looking at the world in general and human life in particular. Taleb’s runaway bestseller, the book that put him on the map, was The Black Swan, which I have not yet read, and since all his books grow from one central idea and since he has his own somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary that carries through all the books, I am picking up his language piecemeal as I go.…

 

I am an introvert at heart.

 

This is a secret shared by many booksellers and librarians. We grew up with books as friends and had adventures in stories, and thus we are not the greatest of “party animals.” We were often shy as children and have had to work to overcome our shyness. My first summer selling books (yes, in Northport), I began each day with butterflies in my stomach, anticipating the ordeal of facing and talking to strangers! It probably took five years before I realized how shy many other people are. That was a growing-up lesson.

 

When someone comes into my bookstore for the first time (as is true whenever anyone enters a bar or restaurant or retail establishment for the first time), that person is entering “my turf” and trusting that the atmosphere will be welcoming, so it is (my tardy realization here) part of my role to put people at ease, to assuage their shyness rather than to indulge my own. Whether they want to browse without interference or have questions or want suggestions is up to them, and I try to be aware of those differences. There is no single way to treat all potential customers.

 

 

Sometimes I read on the job.

 

For one thing, reading books is part of my job, my sister reassured me years ago, but it’s also a way that my introvert self can stay out of the way of people who need to make their own discoveries and have their own experiences in my bookstore. I do look up and greet everyone who comes in and often ask if they want a particular subject area. If someone is looking lost, I’ll ask if that person has a question. But I don’t follow people around pushing books at them. Who comes into a bookstore for that?

 

 

I make things up as I go along.

 

Bookstore hours are something I’ve tried to keep consistent throughout each season. Last year Sunday was always a day off, Monday a BCOA (by chance or appointment) day. This year those days are sometimes reversed, and Tuesdays in July are different from Tuesdays in June and August, because the FOLTL Summer Writers Series takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Willowbrook Mill, and since I am on hand to sell books at those events, my Tuesday bookstore hours in July are only 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every year I make up my schedule season by season, or even month by month.

Tonight's featured author and book, 7 p.m.

It should be no surprise that I make up prices on my used books. For the more expensive items, I try to stay in the general ballpark of the national market; other times, with inexpensive books, or when I need room, there are bargains to be had! Right now, for instance, I have my rolling cart full of $3, mostly hardcover books, some of them minor classics, such as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelius Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. How many times did I read that book when I was young?

 

 

I love my work!

 

For years I worked at jobs that made me very unhappy. My parents had insisted I take a typing class in high school so I would have “something to fall back on,” and I fell back repeatedly, year after year, going to school for a while and then dropping out to go back to fulltime work I found terribly uncongenial. We natural introverts are, I think, often unhappy when we have bosses, but we don’t like bossing other people, either, which makes having my own one-woman bookstore the perfect work world for me.

 

But I love going home, too. 

 

Much as I love my bookstore, any season of the year I love going home at the end of the day, too. Home to books and dog, home to gardens outdoors and cozy reading chair in the house, home to homey projects, such as making jam or chutney or applesauce, or more professional projects, such as editing work.

 

I still consider myself a lucky woman. 

 

Nothing, of course, is the same or ever will be again since the Artist died in spring of 2022, but I often repeat to my dog words the Artist spoke aloud so many times:

 

“We live in a beautiful place!”

 

“It’s a beautiful day – and we’re alive!”

 

Also, I am rich beyond belief in memories.

 

Original Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo St.

Back Home and Back tto Work

Michigan — lush, verdant, overflowing! Has there ever been a greener spring? To be fair, Missouri and Illinois greeted us with spring vistas on our way home, and earlier, even before leaving the southeast Arizona ghost town cabin where we spent the winter, hadn’t we been thrilled to see the mesquite sprout green leaves and to see — at last —and to smell — a chinaberry tree in bloom, a treat that had been eluding me, teasingly, for years? 

If only you could smell the blossoms, too!

Taking our leave of Willcox, Arizona, we followed Fort Grant Road, one last time, up to Bonita, turning onto that beautiful, beloved mountain road through the Stockton Pass to where it joins the highway to Safford, and to my delight, near the end of the twenty-mile stretch, staghorn cholla were blossoming. I didn’t dare look for wildflowers on the much more challenging mountain road between Globe and Apache Junction, because I was at the wheel, but before the day was over, we had reached Carefree, north of Phoenix, where towering saguaro was in flower. And then somehow, in what seemed no time at all, though we had stayed two nights with my friend in Carefree and cruised slowly and wonderingly through the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, and though we whiled time away pleasantly in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, and McLean, Texas, as if we had nothing but time and would never come to its end — somehow we found ourselves in Oklahoma, with green-leaved trees and choruses of singing birds greeting us at the state line. We have returned more than once to Santa Rosa and now have added to our list of “towns in which to spend more time in on future trips” Globe, Arizona, and Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

From Osage County courthouse steps lead downtown.

Missouri was beautiful. North from Cuba on narrow, winding, charming little state road 19, blossoming tree dogwood and spreading green colonies of mayapples along the way invited us to linger, but dogwood was delicately lovely in Springfield, Illinois, too. We had crossed the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, and now came the Vermilion and the Kankakee as we made our way north through Illinois (staying four nights with family) to southern Michigan, where the dogwood was not fully open but already lovely and redbud clearly queen of the spring. Maybe once before in my life I’ve seen so many spectacular redbuds, but that was long ago. The St. Joseph River, our own little Paw Paw River, the still-beautiful Kalamazoo, despite what it has suffered: our way home to northern Michigan is always marked by rivers, and we cross each bridge as we come to it.

Northern Michigan does not have the dogwood of the southern woods of our state, and redbud trees Up North are few and far between, only one planted as a landscape accent, not clouds of them growing wild, so north of Grand Rapids that role was taken by pin cherry’s flowering branches. Mayapple colonies persisted as far north Newaygo County. As we drove north, it was as if we were traveling back in time to the beginning of spring, finding the season less advanced the nearer we approached home, as if held back for our return. We stopped along the Pine River to stretch our legs and delight in the warm, sunny day, to walk along flowing water — our feet releasing a heady, familiar perfume from pine needles underfoot — and to take deep, happy breaths of Michigan air.

This historical marker is worth reading.

 And finally came, of course, welcome glimpses of trillium in the grass at the edges of second- and third-growth woodland.

Home at last, having imagined knee-high grass in the yard, we were pleasantly surprised to find it not yet terribly out of control … to find daffodils blooming … to realize we had not missed cherry and apple blossom time, after all. One neighbor’s apricot tree, the first to flower on the highway between our place and Northport, held its pretty flowers against the blue sky, but most of the orchards at our northern end of Leelanau County had yet to blossom and are only just now coming into their brief seasonal glory.

The last book we had been reading aloud at bedtime, John Hildebrand’s Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family, had brought us from Arizona back to Michigan: the story ends in springtime, with plans to put in crops for another year. We came home to find the straw bales for the modest garden I’ll have this year ready to be wrestled into place, and I got them positioned the very next day, because even without livestock or field crops, our country life and village businesses make heavy demands on available time and energy, especially as the latter quantity seems to decrease significantly each year. 

But we are home again and back to work after a winter of leisure, and Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner, and there is much to do between now and then — planning, mowing, planning, cleaning. In Northport I’ll be weeding out storage areas and ordering new books for the shop. Expect many announcements in the weeks ahead, the first of which you’ll find here. Just don’t expect a new post every day, because even my to-do list, as I told a friend yesterday, has to-do lists of its own right now, and when it’s too dark to mow grass, I’ll be reading Rachel May’s An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery until my eyes cannot remain open one more minute.

The bookstore will definitely be open Memorial Day weekend. If I can get enough done by this Saturday, I'll put out the OPEN flag. Time will tell....

Where Teddy Bears Are Not Cuddly

Sarah had a bath, at last. She is clean and soft again, but she's never been an especially cuddly dog.

Originally, weeks ago, I began drafting a post I called “Not Barefoot Country,” having to do with the terrain around our winter ghost town cabin. In that draft I listed many reasons, with details, for not going barefoot here: thorns and spines and prickers; sharp stones (especially the little ones); cow pies (especially the fresh ones; sunning snakes; winter cold; dust and dirt; old rusty barbed wire; broken glass; old rusty nails; splinters from odd bits of old lumber; and abandoned well pits. I added the last item not only because there are abandoned well pits nearby but also because I figured that climbing out of one, should one stumble and fall in, would be easier with shoes than without. 

There was nothing particularly wrong with that draft post, and every once in a while I would look back and add or change something — for instance, inspired by cowboy lingo, I changed the tentative title from “Not Barefoot Country” to “Not Tenderfoot Country” — but somehow I kept finding more interesting things to write about for Books in Northport. And now so much has changed that “Not Tenderfoot Country” seems beside the point, like the first chapter of my dissertation, the old one I kept rewriting for two years until I set it aside and moved on to write the rest of the thesis, finally writing an entirely different first chapter when all the rest was done.

Boots on the ground are still a better idea than bare feet on the ground. That hasn’t changed. All the old hazards to unprotected skin remain. It’s just that things just look different to me now. My concerns and responses are different. For one thing, the high desert is now clothed in spring green, its look softened more every day, but even that, I realized the other day, doesn’t explain the deeper difference.

“Soaptree yucca doesn’t make me laugh any more,” I remarked to the Artist as we made our way east on Hwy. 186, home to the ghost town after a morning of exploration from Willcox to Benson to Pomerene and nearly to Cascabel. “It just looks normal to me now.” I hadn’t thought before about this change in my perceptions, but there it was. Three years ago when we first arrived, soaptree yucca brought to my mind the fantastic illustrations of Dr. Seuss, looking to my Michigan eyes more like a product of imagination than of nature. Now it just looks normal.

One book I read this winter, in describing Western plants, labeled the ocotillo as one of the “strangest,” and yes, ocotillo seemed pretty wild, too, when first I saw it. Now it is in bloom, and I see it as stunning and beautiful but not strange. Not at all. 

Soaptree yucca and ocotillo belong here. Strange — étrange — is another way of saying alien, and the plants native to the West are the complete opposite of alien. When the Artist and I were newly arrived, it was we who were the aliens. Now (as is true for me in Michigan, also, though not for him, Detroit-born), though we will never be native to this place, we are feeling a kind of sense of belonging. More attached, more rooted. This has been true for me for a while.

One of my Facebook friends was recently astounded by the way I thrilled to the rodeo. She didn’t know me when I was a girl on the Illinois prairie, looking out over fields of corn and soybeans across the road from my family home, looking west from our front porch, toward the setting sun, and yearning with all my heart to ride my pony (the one I never had, even after joining 4-H, but that’s another story) toward that red evening sky! My parents had bought our first black-and-white television set when I was in first or second grade, and cowboy shows — Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and later the “Spin and Marty” series on the Mickey Mouse Club show — all fueled the dreams of a little girl whose first word for horse, ‘fersie,’ had been uttered in a thrilled shriek of delight whenever, out for drives in South Dakota 

with her parents in the family Oldsmobile, she spotted a horse. Finally the parents had to save their eardrums by threatening not to point out horses to her if the child didn’t stop shrieking. She learned to whisper her excitement: “Fersie!”

As for the Artist —

“You know,” he began thoughtfully the other day at the high school rodeo competitions at Quail Field in Willcox, “if I were young and thinking about starting a family, I’d want to do it here.” Quite a surprising statement, coming from a such a staunch Piscean! I think it was the rodeo that finally won him over. As a boy in Detroit, he haunted a local riding stable and would ride horses in the spring for urban owners who needed the winter cabin fever (stable fever?) hijinks ridden out of their mounts before they dared to ride them. When he was twelve years old, his parents drove cross-country for a ranch vacation, and he rode out every day with the cowboys. “Real cowboys,” he stresses, cowboys working cows. I love stories of that vacation, imagining myself into the scene. I tell him how lucky he was! I would have been in heaven, as he was.

So we were both “horse-crazy” kids, and we both had the West in our blood, one of us by virtue of actual experience, the other only in her dreams.

I say we drove “nearly to Cascabel” the other day. Actually, we drove as far as the Cascabel Road was paved, turning back just past the intersection with Three Links Road, both roads unpaved from there on, which was exactly what I expected we would do, tempering the road to our 20-year-old van. It was for that reason, as Trail Boss, that I had chosen the Pomerene and Cascabel roads in the first place, though the route did not reach all the way to the intriguing hot springs I knew we would never reach them, anyway.

Remote! We were in in the San Pedro River Valley and could see the deeper green to our west, indicating the course of the river, and every few miles the terrain would change rather dramatically, one stretch filled with teddy-bear cholla and varieties of barrel cactus common around Tucson but not in Cochise County, certainly not in our own Sulphur Springs Valley. At the intersection where we reversed direction, I was surprised to turn the pages of the Arizona atlas and realize we were not at all far from Tucson. Not far, and yet a world away: Tucson was on the other side of the mountains to our west, and only rough trails lead across the mountains.

On the way back south to Benson, I had to stop to photograph the teddy-bear cholla. Though excited about being on foot in this very different kind of desert fauna, I thought I was maneuvering carefully around the plants until I felt stabbing pains and found myself limping, trying not to put full weight down on either foot. Well, that is hard to do! Pain did not deter me from my object, and I was pleased with the shots I got; however, when I realized the source of the pain, I was glad Sarah wasn’t out there exploring with me. This particular cholla, you see, so tall and stately in maturity, begins closer to the ground, much less obvious to a walker, and the long spines pierce leather like it’s silk.

Look like spurs? Maybe the inspiration for?

As for pulling out those spines? Thank heaven for the toolbox in the van and especially for the needle-nose pliers! And so, another desert lesson learned. Even shod feet need to be careful where they step. Bottom line, though? It was worth it. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. 

I started this little essay without a tidy conclusion in mind. Maybe, though, it’s that a place doesn’t have to be “cuddly” or even completely welcoming to call forth love. People lived here in the West before they had running water or air conditioning or internal combustion engines. The country is challenging. If you’re going to live here, the country itself sets the terms of engagement. 

Here’s one paragraph from the discarded draft post: 

“So there you have it -- a walk in a high desert ghost town is not a walk on the Lake Michigan beach. But whoever thought it would be? One similarity is the sense of vastness -- the faraway, receding horizon by day, dazzling stars against a black night sky. Both Great Lakes and Southwest high desert offer those marvels. One big difference, other than flora and geology, is the stillness of the desert: there are no waves, and unless the wind is particularly strong there is almost no background sound, only occasional nearby sounds of fluttering, chirping birds or a bawling cow or calf off in the distance.” 

Last night the cattle were very vocal around the cabin, and this morning they are still calling to each other out in the mesquite. Their presence pleases us both, the Artist and me. We like seeing and hearing them and having them for neighbors. (Watching our step seems a small price to pay.) Birds too are vocal this morning, calling and singing all around the cabin and yard and down in the wash. Desert spring symphony, all of it pleasing. 

Yep, I like it fine. I am very happy here.

The Other Side's Gateway

We never did get over to Portal three years ago when we were here, and this year the Artist very much wanted to see it, having heard so many alluring tales of the place. Whichever way you go, unless you’re a hawk, it’s a long way to Portal from Dos Cabezas. The options are to (1) retreat to Willcox, get on I-10, cross the state line into New Mexico, and take a paved road south and back west; (2) head straight for the mountains and then brave a winding unpaved road full of switchbacks to the other side; and (3) drive south to Douglas and then backtrack northeast, eventually entering by the same road west you would have reached in option (1). 

As trail boss, it was my call to make, and I called the New Mexico route. As I said already, it's a long way around. But it's also a beautiful drive, and we had no schedule to keep. 

Other than birding, the main action in Portal is the Portal Cafe and Lodge. We were there in what was still jacket weather in the mountains, but we could see that there would be a lively outdoor scene in weeks ahead, apparently including live music. The Lodge has been around for 90 years, and the setting could not be more lovely, filled with trees and nestled below towering rock faces. 

There isn't a lot more, but we liked what we saw -- in addition to the cafe and lodge and a few houses, a post office, a little library, and even a bookstore! Amazing! Sadly, we were there on a day when neither library nor bookstore was open. 

Contemplating the road leading back by way of the mountains, this sign about mileage gave us pause. Only 36 miles back to our side if we braved the challenging road? Was there still snow that high up? Would we be able to negotiate the road without 4WD? After questioning locals, we decided to return the same way we'd come, but we were encouraged to follow the mountain road for as far as it was paved before turning around for our return: that way we would be able to visit the ranger station, enjoy the views along Cave Creek, and also see parts of the Southwest Research Station, operated by the Museum of Natural History on land formerly owned by Sky Island author Weldon Heald and his wife. I was especially keen to see where the Healds had lived, having read Weldon's book three years ago and again this year.

The road along Cave Creek was magnificent! Mountains were breathtaking at every turn, cool shade refreshing, running water in the creek bed a pure delight! We were smitten! The Artist was particularly smitten, thinking it the most beautiful place he had seen anywhere in Arizona, and he began fantasizing about spending a winter in Portal. Those who know us will not be surprised, realizing that we have a rich fantasy life...

A few days later, I happened to be in line at the grocery store in Willcox behind a woman who had traveled over from Portal to do her food shopping. Did she say it was a 100-mile trip -- one way? I asked about the mountain road, and she said that, while the distance was shorter through the mountains, the time it took was the same as the longer way around via New Mexico and the expressway. I felt vindicated in the decision I'd made as to our route the day we made the trip, and I also wondered how long the Artist could possibly be contented in the isolation of Portal, given that he thinks our ghost town cabin is already in the "middle of nowhere," and here we are only 14 miles from a town with a big grocery store, a movie theatre, and numerous gas stations. Though they do have the charming little cafe and library and post office, there is no gas station anywhere near Portal. No grocery store. It's a one-hundred-mile, one-way trip to doctors' or dentists' offices or pharmacy, too. 

I like living out in the quiet of our ghost town, but even I would be difficult to spend the winter months in Portal's much more extreme isolation, despite the beauty of the area. A more appealing alternative, to my way of thinking, would be to spend a few days in rental accommodations on the Southwest Research Station grounds. Three meals a day are included with housing (so the trail boss wouldn’t have to be cookie, too), and it would be a lark to spend between-meal time hiking along Cave Creek looking for birds, without a care in the world. 

Or, we could simply do again as we did that one time -- go over for a day and come back home again. Really, that worked out just fine, as far as I'm concerned.