Is It Over?

Labor Day is the traditional end of the summer vacation season, the day after which students return to school and tourist town streets turn empty. But this is 2020, the year of COVID-19, and who knows what fall 2020 will bring? Spring and summer were certainly not same-old, same-old!

 

With many students of all ages are taking classes online, and many parents are working from home, online or by phone, will that translate to more late-season vacationers? Or will cool air and grey skies send everyone back into their home bubbles for the duration?

 

This Is Not Social Media

 

I thought of using that subhead as my headline today. It probably isn’t as important to my readers as it is to me; however, it’s something I want to say. Facebook is social media. Twitter is social media. Instagram, I guess, and many other platforms with which I have no firsthand acquaintance are social media. On those platforms, people post (usually briefly), and others comment, and sometimes long threads “go viral,” resulting in (usual brief) fame or notoriety (infamy) for the person who posted and/or commenters.

 

A blog is something different. 

 

Blog posts – amazing the speed of change in our virtual world! – have already become “old-fashioned.” Though they may include links to other sites, they are generally original writings and longer than most social media posts. Moreover, if the blogger sticks with the blog, it can develop over the years a distinctive narrative voice. Or voices, plural. 

 

“Books in Northport” is sometimes casual, often discursive, at times meditative, and once in a while (I try to keep this to a minimum) a bit pugnacious, but it always comes directly from me. A blog, like a diary or journal, is a habit, albeit a publicly offered discipline, one to which the writer -- if no one else! -- returns again and again, essaying, seeking clarity, noting personal milestones, pinning down memories and thoughts. 

 

Here you find news from my bookstore in Northport, Michigan, and mention or sometimes reviews of books I’m reading, but also reports and photographs from my husband’s art world, from our travels (presently nonexistent), from the woods and fields and beaches of Michigan to the mountains and deserts of Arizona. Here are frequent images of our old dog, with now and then images of other people’s horses (since I have none of my own), however tenuous or nonexistent any link between those horses and my Northport book world.

In short, “Books in Northport” goes beyond books and far beyond Northport. It is my world – specific, particular, personal, idiosyncratic. Once in a while someone leaves a comment, and when that happens I try always to respond, but most of the time I’m the only one “speaking” here, and when you come to read my posts, we are not rallying with hundreds or thousands of other people and shouting at each other on some allegedly neutral ground. You are visiting my world -- and I thank you for spending time here with me! I truly appreciate it.

 

And now I’d like to close today with a few words from the journal and letters of Lieutenant James Allen. Allen accompanied Henry Rowe Schoolcraft on an expedition to the source of the Mississippi in 1832, and his writings are included as Appendix C in Schoolcraft’s Expedition to Lake Itasca, published by Michigan State University Press (1958; 1993):

 

June 9 …We passed Twin [Two-Hearted] river, twenty-four miles from Whitefish point. It is a small stream, and its mouth is so much filled with sand that it can only be entered by very light craft, and in smooth water. We have travelled to day forty-five miles.

 

June 10, (Sunday.)—This being the Sabbath, by a rule of Mr. Schoolcraft’s, we do not travel, though the weather is fine. The rule however is convenient in observance, as it gives the men time to wash, bake, etc., which they have but little time to do when travelling. We are lying in a beautiful little bay, called the Grand Marais, from its having once been a marsh, which, within the recollection of some old voyageurs, now present, has been washed away to its present state. It is a safe harbor for boats, and is important for its being the only one between Shelldrake river and Grand island, a distance of near one hundred miles. It is half a mile in depth, opens to the west, and is difficult to enter with a strong west wind and heavy sea, which drive right into it. Traders have met with serious accidents in attempting to run into it under such circumstances….

 

You see, while the Artist and I (and our dog) are not today, as in so many other years the day after Labor Day, on our way to Lake Superior, yet I can travel there in the pages of a book.

Where are you traveling today, on roads or pages or simply in the world of your own mind?

Report from the Tweet Front

Awaiting the big news --

Today’s report is from Saturday, June 25, the first-ever Dog Ears Book tweet fest. Will there be another? I suppose it could happen, but it would be hard to top yesterday’s for thrills.

Logging on....

Treats!

The tweeting occasion took place far from Northport, down in Orlando, Florida, at the national convention of the American Library Association. ForeWord Reviews was there to announce their 2016 Indiefab awards, and Even in Darkness, the novel by Barbara Stark-Nemon of Ann Arbor and Northport, was a nominee in a couple of categories. ForeWord would be tweeting from Orlando, Barbara would receive the tweets and Facebook announcements, and so she proposed re-tweeting results from her favorite bookstore, as a few other nominees around the country were also doing. Being Barbara, she not only brought laptop, iPad, and iPhone but also what my fellow blogger Gerry Sell calls “excellent treats.” My technological role was limited to sharing a Facebook post Barbara tagged me in. I could handle that.

Thrills!

We didn’t have a big crowd, but the moment Barbara logged on and saw her award – right away, no waiting! – she read it aloud, and she, Clare, and I screamed in delight. You should have been here. I’m sorry you missed it. Barbara won the Gold (first prize) in literary fiction, and Bronze (third) in historical fiction! Over the top excitement! 

Sharing the excitement

Our giddy delirium lasted quite a while, and several browsers who wandered in caught the fever and bought copies of Even in Darkness to take home. Then when the decks cleared, Barbara and I went down to Northport Brewing to relax and chat at an outdoor table with a couple of cold pints. That was a first for me, too. Finally!

Relaxing, enjoying....

I Didn’t Guess – I Looked It Up

Lake Leelanau, hidden from sight

The weather. What else? Other conversational topics, one by one, drop by the snowy wayside. We still have a range of topics, don't get me wrong, but it's narrower, if you will. There's how cold it is, how much snow we have, how much propane we've burned, the price of propane, the cost of snow-plowing, how much longer the cold weather is going to last, how much more snow we're going to get, and so on and so forth. 

Driveway

Is anyone else out there old enough (actually, I know some of you are) to remember the slogan of our old grade school “Look It Up Club,” sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia? 

“WE NEVER GUESS – WE LOOK IT UP!”

Back when encyclopedia salesmen (as I recall, they were all men) came to a neighborhood, their first stop was the neighborhood school. Only after the school bought a set or sets of the beautifully bound, colorful volumes, and the pupils had signed pledges never to guess but to look up answers to all their burning questions, did the salesmen fan out to residential homes. My parents plunked down good money for the white binding. Why? I think it was more expensive than blue or red, and the information was the same, regardless of the binding, and my parents were generally very frugal and canny consumers (or shoppers, as we said then). The educational value of so much knowledge must have gotten in the way of the careful calculations they normally made.

Andrei Codrescu didn’t grow up in the U.S., but his wife did, and she was a member of the “Look It Up Club” in her day. Codrescu’s little essay on wasting time online – or, more to the point, having his time wasted online by others – only begins with mention of the Club and then goes on to more current concerns. Worth reading, though. Won’t take you long, either. Then -- your assignment, should you choose to accept it -- let me know what you think about what he says. 

What I set out to look up this morning online, though, wasn’t the old grade school “club” but snow and cold records for northern Michigan. (Dawn got me started.) I remember very clearly my first winter in Traverse City and how one had to enter intersections with the same caution necessary on Illinois farm roads in late summer. Illinois: tall corn. Michigan: tall snow. No visibility around the corner. No visibility until you were in the intersection. That’s how it was on the roads that winter. And the view from indoors? Snowing. Never not snowing.

"Seasonal Road" - love this designation!

Anyone who is dubious or skeptical and/or too young to have been around for the Up North winter of 1970-71 can look it up here, but if you don’t want to bother I’ll save you the trouble: 184 inches. What did I know then? I’d never lived so far north and thought that such a winter must be typical. Streets, sidewalks, and alleys were plowed around the clock, and life went on as usual, as people shoveled their roofs (I’d never seen people shovel snow from roofs before), and icicles grew two stories in length, descending from second-story eaves clear to the ground. There were a lot of “sword fights” among kids in the neighborhood.

My neighborhood is rural now

The coldest day ever in Leelanau County? We stayed overnight with friends one New Year’s Eve, and I swear the outdoor thermometer at their old farmhouse read – 40 F on New Year’s morning, but do you think I can find anything like that online? As I recall from the time (early 1980s?), the official temperature was not as low as their thermometer reading, but the air was definitely cold enough to chill lungs. We walked to the home of neighbors of our friends for New Year’s Day brunch (no way cars were going to start: ignitions just clicked when keys were turned and made no further effort) and were only able to do that because there was no wind whatsoever. No wind chill, but that’s how cold it was, children: The wind had frozen stiff and couldn’t move!

If you are interested in average temperature, snowfall, humidity, heating and A/C costs for Leelanau, you can find all that here, but I’ve looked up enough for one day. Time to read a little poetry. Or I could just close up shop and go ice-fishing. Time to toss a coin....

P.S. Karen has much more dramatic photos of mountains of snow on her photo blog. Check it out.