Miscellany: Poetry in the Mail, Workshop Offering, and Back to the Movies

Mystery Poet Strikes Again – and Again!

When the post office started cracking down on mail addressed incorrectly, I feared I would never again receive a missive from the mystery poet. After all, he (I’m guessing at the gender) always used the street address of the bookstore, rather than the post office box number, and he never uses a return address, so it the mail did not get delivered to me, how would he even know? Well, somehow he figured it out. And I’m guessing he’s a regular reader of “Books in Northport,” too, or how would he have known to send mail in the winter using an old Gadsden Purchase stamp? The friend picking up our mail in Northport got that one to me in southern Arizona. Nice surprise! The second arrived in late May.

These two poems are similar in length and subject matter. Here they are:

Thank you, mystery poet.

Will My Workshop Be a “Go”?

In graduate philosophy classes, we students ran into one philosopher after another who claimed to be going back, for a fresh starting point, to self-evident truths, and we often commented to each other that it wasn’t always evident what was self-evident. This observation extends beyond philosophy. What’s “obvious" to one person isn’t necessarily obvious to another, so when it comes to being “clueless,” about whatever the topic may be, we who are clueless haven’t a clue that we are so. And it’s a cinch that every single one of us has some area of cluelessness. (What’s mine? You tell me!)

Most recently I’ve been mulling over, yet again, the business of self-publishing. It’s so “easy” to do these days. That is, it’s easy to pay someone to print and bind your words and sentences and paragraphs into a book. Then what? My message is this: Self-publishing is publishing. Publishing is a business. The decision to self-publish is a decision to go into business. Are you ready?

Because the decision is not one to make lightly or impulsively or without information, I developed a hands-on, practical workshop, which will be offered for the first time on June 10 through Continuing Education at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. “Is Self-Publishing for You? A Bookseller’s Perspective,” EECO 341, will bring to those who enroll my 20 years of practical experience in the form of short written exercises, class discussion, and Q&A. The workshop will meet for one evening only, from 6 to 9 p.m. – That’s if (and only if) enough people sign up.

The need exists. I have seen it again and again. Tell your friends.

Back to Willcox Once More

I found my little brochure with the map of the historic downtown, so now I can tell you the name of the street at the beginning of the car-train sequence in “Red Rock West.” It’s Stewart Street. Nicholas Cage is driving east (west is at the top of the map) on Stewart Street, and we see his car at the intersection of Stewart Street and Railroad Avenue. He goes straight, toward the tracks. A train is speeding toward the intersection from the south (right end of the map). Cage swerves at the last minute, and his car runs along parallel to the tracks, at last overtaking the train and jumping the tracks in front of the train where Maley Street crosses the tracks. Look quickly at this point of the movie sequence, and you’ll see the sign for the feed store. That’s Maid-Rite Feeds, Willcox, Arizona. Yep, we were there.

Surprisingly, Back in the High Desert

Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in. Just when I think my head and heart have fully returned to Michigan, the Southwest borderland re-exerts its tug.

Last night it was a movie we’d seen before that I watched with new, Western-wise eyes. The opening shot was all it took. It looked like the road through Dos Cabezas to the Chiricahua Mountains – that ribbon of two-lane through golden grassland. The story was set in Wyoming, which set me to musing how many places in the West might look like Cochise County, Arizona. We watched on, caught up in the story, but I continued to eye background mountain ranges carefully.

Then it came – a sequence with Nicolas Cage driving the car, Dennis Hopper in the front passenger seat, and two other actors in the backseat: the luckless, unemployed veteran, the hired killer, the shady sheriff, and the sheriff’s wife. The car approaches a railroad crossing at high speed. Along comes a train. The driver, ordered to keep accelerating by the killer with a gun in his hand, swerves at the last minute, bumping and bouncing along parallel to the tracks and the speeding train before, overtaking it in a burst of speed, catapulting over the tracks in front of the train for a hard landing and getaway.

I come from a railroad family. Railroad safety was the gospel in our house. Scenes like this in movies always trouble me, as I think about impressionable young people seeing only excitement and not their own wrecked bodies. That’s my background.

But this time, watching the sequence, all I could think about was where it was being shot. It looked so much like Willcox, Arizona, that the make-believe of the story was suddenly secondary. There! The depot! But a big semitrailer truck strategically parked on Maley Street hide the WILLCOX sign at the end of the depot (now City Hall) from sight. And too soon the action moved to another location.

At the end of the movie, I wanted to see all the credits. Sure enough! Thanks to Willcox, Arizona! “I knew it!” I exclaimed in triumph. “I knew it was my little cow town!” Patiently, David searched back through the movie for the car-train sequence, and, like a pair of detectives carefully screening film from a surveillance camera, we watched it all again, frame by frame.

There! This scene I photographed after a rainstorm are in the movie! Even more exciting, in two different shots the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas can be clearly seen by anyone familiar with them and looking for them, as I certainly was. And finally, a local sign not hidden from camera view: Maid-Rite Feeds! The wonderful feed store east of the railroad tracks!

“Red Rock West” was made in the 1990s. The sculpture of Rex Allen was not yet in place in Railroad Park, but the park itself was recognizable, with its enormous trees, as was the block of old buildings facing the tracks. “Where’s Rodney’s?” we asked each other and were disappointed that while we could spot the tiny building in an out-of-focus background, the identifying sign was never visible. COMMERCIAL BUILDING on a corner was the only store sign we could see on the strip. But there! The sheriff’s office in the film had used the interior of one of the buildings, Railroad Park and its trees visible through the front windows!

All photographs above are mine, from our winter near Willcox. To take my tour through the ordinary little town (and to see Rodney and his place), click here. Below are some shots from early in the movie.

In the morning we returned once more to the opening sequence, certain now that it was not Wyoming and not WY 487 but my own beloved AZ 186. How could I have doubted for a moment? I took the shots of the opening scenes this morning but did not go all the way through to the car-train sequence. 

Opening shot: "Red Rock West"

Name that road!

Not its real name!

To see all the shots of old historic Willcox, you need to rent the movie, “Red Rock West.” (Roger Ebert loved it.) It will be an action-packed visit to my little cow town! And be sure to watch for the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas in the background.

Dos Cabezas, Willcox, Cochise County -- the movie made me "homesick."