Something Lovely About This

The Mining Journal has an astonishing market penetration in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and a reputation for an abrupt and in your face editorial policy. It is the one daily paper that everyone reads. More than once, I canceled my subscription on the heels of a run of hare brained opinions expressed by the editor. Today's hot letter to the editor expressed some very pointed, left of center, advice to readers. (That, in itself, is worth noting.) The editor, knowing the power of his publication, bothered to avoid any confusion that might cost a local funeral parlor business among its right wing or non ideological patrons. It is a lovely thing, this small town courtesy. The editor took the time to attach this line following a red hot letter:

Editor's note: Gordon C. Peterson is not to
be confused with Marquette resident
Gordon J. "Gordy" Peterson of
the Swanson-Lundquist Funeral Home.

I might have subscribed anew had I still lived in Marquette. Maybe. (IF I had some eggs, I'd have some ham and eggs, IF I had some ham.)

Six Degrees of Familiarity

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

So, here we are. It is Tuesday, an afternoon with mom. This Tuesday, we turned our back on the Riverside Restaurant in Bellevue, hoping for a cullinary change. We drove to Bob Evans Restaurant out by the expressway for a little lunch. I opted for three pancakes and two sausage links. . . the jingo, Bob Evans' farm sausage, just right for a Saturday night. . .rattled around in my head. "You know," Ma said, "Bob Evans came to our house for lunch once." You mean there is a real Bob Evans, I asked myself? Indeed. It was the summer of 1961. Dad and Bob had just finished a round of golf, a sales call round of golf. (Bob was into auto parts along with his farming operation in Rio Grande, Ohio.) Golf and lunch. Mom pulled together a store bought smoked turkey; fixed a salad, a baked potato and dessert to go with the libations. Out on the deck, overlooking the golf course from the heights of Mount Parnassus, sat Pa and Bob talking piston rings the way old guys talk out on the front porch. Ma served them. I do not know what was going on with the kids, but we were not in the picture with Bob Evans that day. Children were still to be seen and not heard in 1961. So that was it. That was Bob's visit to our house for a lunch. I do not know if he signed up for any auto parts. But it hardly matters does it? We could have had a sign on that house, "Bob Evans Ate Here," but we didn't.

There were other celebrities, too. Ma came into contact with some others, person to person. Theodore Geisel was Uncle Palmer's next door neighbor. Everybody knows him as Dr. Seuss but in those days, he wasn't very widely known. Palmer took Patty over to the next door neighbors and invited himself to visit. Dr. Seuss showed them around. "He draws his pictures first, tacks them up on a cork board wall and then he writes the poetry next," Ma said. "He was part Indian, you know."

And then there was Aunt Betty's friend Boris Karloff who received Betty and her family for a brief visit in his dressing room. Boris' wife was from Charlotte, just up the road and the rival school to Hastings High in those days. He was playing in Arsenic and Old Lace in the theater in New York when Aunt Betty took them to visit him.

I wondered if Boris was his real name. Or what about Bob Evans? "I think that was his real name," Ma said. And was Jimmy Dean, the other sausage king, really named Jimmy Dean, like on his birth certificate? Celebrity is a realm in which the sheen of reality is so thin, that one wonders about things like names. So many famous people have names that are like billboards, not necessarily what they have on a driver's license. And once we watched Joe E. Brown eat his lunch on the veranda of the Park Place Hotel in Traverse City from eleven stories up. All we saw was really just a speck at the table. I wonder if Joe E. Brown was his name? I doubt it. Sister Susan jumped into the freezing spring waters of Lake Michigan on that same trip. She swam for what seemed forever. Now that is reality for you. Anyone can eat lunch on the veranda of the Park Place Hotel.

Then, there are all those famous folks nearer to the family, Cousin Martha's daughter, Megan Mulally. "She just turned fifty, you know. They had a big party for her in the mountains," That seems a fitting place for a celebrity birthday party. Uncle Palmer says that he once taught Raquel Welch to waterski. "I suppose your Aunt Janet is a celebrity in some circles," Ma went on. Janet writes books. Yup, there are famous people in our family.

What had been a meaty soup now thins out rather quickly. We rack our brains for any other glimpses behind the gauze of celebrity. . . like the time we saw Presient Eisenhower drive by in his limo on the way back to the White House from the airport. . . in Washington D. C. . . . the same trip when your sister got lost and you all got the mumps. . . like the time I greeted Rahm Emmanuel on the street in Washington. He was distracted by his cell phone ringing. By now, the celebrity soup is nearly all water.

What is behind the gauze curtain of celebrity is so interesting because it turns out to be just like us. Isn't that the way things always are? Just like us, except, well, famous. Where I come from, people really talk about these things.

August Dread

Autumn in the great north shows itself even before the leaves begin to change. One feels it as a tightening in the pit of the stomach. The joke line, "nine months of winter and three months of tough sledding," sets the scene for this August, 2005 journal entry written during one of those heavy overcast and sprinkly summer days.

The Buffalo/Green Bay preseason game drones on as a replay. Green Bay fans are all watching it for the second time! It's August, but it feels like autumn has arrived already. Sigurd Olson's essay "Falling Leaf," from his book Listening Point, captures the dread and awe of autumn in the north. Summer was a nervous guest, coming late and leaving early. We never had a chance to talk before it yielded to the approach of the cold. Falttening like a bulldozer. Heavens, I haven't yet mowed the whole lawn! The aroma of wood smoke drifts into the bedroom window, riding the cold air. Up until yesterday, they were open to relieve the summer heat. We close them now. It is probably the Osborn side of the family that anticipates winter from its first hint. We plan our burials early, too. Still the faintest whiff of winter summons a response deep within us, grief and remorse.

Poem

flock

It has been calculated that
each copy of the Gutenburg Bible
required the skins of 300 sheep.

I can see them
squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed.

All of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible to count them.

And there is no telling which one of them
will carry the news
that the Lord is a Shepherd,
one of the few things
they already know.

- billy collins

Billy Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 through 2003.
He's been the New York State Poet Laureate since January 2004.

Septembers Past

September is a rich month for the journaler. One wonders why that is so. Maybe it is the inner resistance I feel to the slipping away of the summer. Maybe I simply recall its warmth and freedom, while the town routine tightens its grip. Whatever the reason, the effect of September on the journal writer is to bring back with joy the vivid presence of the wild places.

1989

I have an opportunity to reflect on the gifts that come to body, soul and spirit from time spent on the doorstep of the wild places. Sig Olson has reminded me that wild places are not a luxury, but a necessity to human well being.

As long as I can remember, I have been in the woods. That is where we played as children on the banks of Raccoon Creek. We ventured to the great Opossum Mound (locally called Alligator Mound). It was the best entertainment available, full of discovery. Although I complained bitterly about the long trek to school and back, I now recognize that it made me an amateur naturalist. It was better than television, then, as it probably remains.

Dr. Robert Alrutz of the biology department at Dennison University sponsored and guided the so called biology club. It was the first place nature captured my imagination. There, I met the protozoan and the salamander, the moss and the fern, the minnow and the crawdad. After school, I began on a journey of woods-loving that is as alive for me today as it was back then.

Slowly, I came to unserstand myself as one allied with the doings in the outdoors. Each excursion brimmed with a sense of adventure over the next hill, around the next corner.

While visiting Scandinavia, I came to see the variety in nature so different from the forests of oak and maple of my childhood. There were the birch, popple and jack pine forests I saw for the first time. There were the granite slopes so characteristic of the sub arctic north. Some eight years later, my friend Phil Campbell took me to the same flora in northern Minnesota. It was love at first sight. It wasn't about the fishing, although it was fabulous. Nor was I seduced by the glimpses of wildlife. But it was the land itself that spoke to me. It was at once stark, even barren, and yet verdant in its own way. The lichen covered rocks became holy places.

"In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord," is not simply the adaption of the visions of prophets, it is a statement of the joy of being in the thick of it. The wilds are a place of getting ready, of endless possibility. The land and the lakes keep me grounded in their truth. I can set a spiritual compass amid the scent of pine needles and fungi in a way I could never do elsewhere.

And always, there is the quest. There is the bodily challenge, what I have come to call my annual physical exam. There one tests one's limits and stretches to thrive on hard places. It gives a new flexibility and a renewed confidence. There is communion in the quest. One can find moments of sublime harmony with the landscape as to be transported. The chance encounter with a surprised animal in the wild is to recognize one's place as a visitor in this creation. A primitive "animal self" comes to the fore in the wilderness. It is a holy place. There are the relationships of fellow questers, some of the deepest of my experience. There one knows others deeply as one comes to know oneself deeply. There are no boundaries to the curious, the adventurous. The limits are of stamina, planning and supplies.

Incidents: Black bears in the blueberry patch on the bluff over the lake. Pictographs inscribed on rock walls centuries before. A swirl of Northern Pike feeding at the stream's outlet. A herd of deer visible from a lofty campsite. Canadian Jays stopping by for a conversation. Bald eagles soaring high over the trees. Wolves howling in the night. The call of the loons. An otter inspecting the passing canoe at close range. Beavers slapping their tails in a danger call.

Each of these are emblazoned in a deep inner place, the closest I come to having a tattoo. They are as today, nearly twenty years later, as they were when I first saw them. My soul is marked by them.

1992

This day began as I saw seven of the island deer out grazing on Presque Isle. It was to be a wildlife day, part of a week of events in the wild places. On the Big Bay Road, a coyote pranced southbound at the rock cut at Sugar Loaf. Sporting a remarkably ratty and broomlike tail, he was as nervous as a prostitute in church. We were at once the object of his entire attention and of his feigned nonchalance. A red fox darted across the church parking lot, as I pulled in for an evening meeting. Sharon encountered a cougar in the wee hours of the morning, as she drove along the Seney stretch, 50 miles from home. All of this on top of a wolf sighting, of few days ago, just west of Ishpeming along the main road. The huge, low slung animal was trying to blend into the ditch.

By some turn of chance the animal life became visible for just a moment. I have no doubt that these creatures surround us all the time. Sometimes, they show themselves. It is tonic for the imagination.

Look Who is Leaving!

The usual trek out by the wheatfields has seen a dramatic change in the past week. What were the haunts of some 20 Sandhill Cranes are now an empty stage. With the tank filled. they're on their way for the winter. Even the Canada Geese have gotten sparse in these parts. I have not watched these birds for but one season, so I can't say if this is an early departure. I suspect that they do not hang around when the evening temps turn to the 40's. These birds have framed our summer. Now, there is a solitary quality to the hikes along the back roads.

quote, quote

I distrust those who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. -Susan B. Anthony