passing through: Michigan

In the course of my six childhood years in the States (I was here not as an immigrant, but because of my father’s work for the UN), I went to summer camp twice: once at a “private, but what’s unusual about us is that we tolerate children from communists countries” camp near Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts (the camp directors had lefty world peace leanings at a time – in the fifties and early sixties – when this wasn’t so fashionable), and a second time at a YMCA camp in New Jersey.

I don’t know what children are singing in camp these days, but in both camps, as in my UN International School, I learned a lot of ditties about harmony and getting along. And the counselors (and teachers) sang these as if they meant it.

Most of the songs are stuck in my memory (as my daughters will attest – they had to listen to them). One sweet song gave the title to this post – passing through... it was such a favorite! A tribute to all the fleeting moments in life which, in the scheme of things, seem trivial. Except that they’re not. Of course, the song said it all in less fussy words.


As we leave Cross Village, the place where my grandparents lived in the years right after the Second World War, I slowly begin to take in the Michigan that is today’s Michigan. The place of cherries and roadside cherry stands…















…the place of coastal tourism (this is in Charlevoix, where we paused for obvious reasons)…





…and the place of great summer camps.

Oh, now I’m running back in time again. Because we’re passing through the part of Michigan where for five consecutive years I had one, then the other daughter go to summer camp. (Interlochen Center for the Arts.)

The place is open and welcoming to the casual visitor and this time Ed and I are nothing more – just visitors. He’s curious about it (though honestly, Ed is curious about the functioning of pretty much anything – from machines to fisheries to corrupt banking systems to art summer camps) and so I show him the bits and pieces that once defined summer for my daughters – the concert auditorium, the lake, the practice huts, the place where uniformed campers congregate for a song (something more sophisticated than passing through).
















It’s been ten years since a daughter was left here for a month of arts (and isn’t it nice that there is this place that gives balance to the emphasis on sports at most other camps), but it most certainly feels less remote and dusty. Unlike in Cross Village, this past was my past.

It’s after eight. We still have a short drive to the coast. The ranger station at the Sleeping Bear Dunes Park closes at ten. We need a permit to set camp for the night.

Predictably, Ed opts for the backpacking camp sites – the ones that require a hike into the wilderness. Also predictably, these wilderness sites are unclaimed and available (at the same time that the ones clustered around the parking lots are booked solid).

We pay for the permit and set out with our gear along the sandy shores of Lake Michigan.





It’s after 9 and the light is fading. And so is my confidence in our ability to get to the designated area in time – before dark and before the rain comes.





And it is unfortunate that I am right to be worried on both counts. The sky grows dark and the rain comes down. And, to add spice to the mix, the lightening starts just as we are beginning to veer into the forest.

I’m a coward about storms. I knew one might crash down on us this week-end, but Ed went to great lengths to convince me that we would survive and that I would not be burned to a crisp by a bolt striking close by. Indeed, he did a Net search to demonstrate his point: 600 deaths in Wisconsin last year from automobile crashes. 12 deaths in Wisconsin in the last thirteen years from lightening. (And 13 in the last thirteen in Michigan.)

Yes, fine, data on the Net are convincing when you’re studying them on your computer screen in your condo. In the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, they’re random numbers that mean nothing at all. With each crash, I pick up the pace, so that I am running (some would say wildly, frantically), in search of a place where we can pitch a tent.

You wont get hit.
I have a camera, that’s metal. I’m a target!
I’m carrying tent poles, that’s metal. Neither of us is a target.
Last year, I heard….
I told you, you wont get hit.

I didn’t get hit. But the torrents of rain made sure that we would remember the storm. Sleeping in wet clothes is memorable.

But, on the up side, our tent is an ingenious little number that assembles in two minutes flat and stays dry no matter what. Of course, what goes in wet, stays wet. But the sleeping bag is warm, the sound of rain on the tent cover is soothing (just as it was on the roof of my grandparents’ village house in Poland: you can spend a whole night interpreting the comings and goings of rain clouds, basing it on the sound of raindrops on a roof). And, some part of me feels happy that the day ended on a wild note. As if something more had to be added – a calm end to a sentimental search for family would have been too tame, too inconsequential.


Our night at the Dunes is short. We know we have to be up by 6 so that we can hike back to the car and drive up the coast to Leland, where a ferry leaves at 10 (and they don’t wait for no one! – I’m told) most of the days of the week for North Manitou Island.

We’re packed and hiking along the shore by 7. No sign of a storm now. Only the wet sand tells me that heavy rains did pass through here.










We load the gear in the car and head north. It’s a pretty strip of land (the Leelenau Peninsula), but I hardly notice. I’m typing away at my computer, anxious to put something up on Ocean before we board the ferry for North Manitou Island.

The island is currently part of the National Park system. It’s not a large swat of land: maybe 8 miles by 4. What’s unusual about it is that it’s part of the declared American wilderness. I’m told that only 5% of federal lands are wilderness, and half of these are in Alaska. So it’s a rare thing. And a good thing. Because wilderness means that you are permitted to camp anywhere. And there are no motorized vehicles. No commercial enterprises. No pets, no RV’s. Nothing: just you, your tent and nature.

We board the ferry. As the little boat fights the waves of Lake Michigan, I look around me at the mix of passengers. A girl scout group (I’m guessing here).





A dad and his very young son. The dad has been to the island many times but this is a first for the son. The boy is so very shy. But he has plans. He wants to camp near the old cemetery. And swimming: he would like to do that right away. And maybe pick some wild raspberries. If they’re ripe.

I know that the boy is from a split family. I hear it in the way he weaves his mother into the conversation. And I want to pat the dad on the shoulder and say – the boy will be okay. But how do I know. He’s barely six. There’s a huge chunk of life before him.


On the island, we attend a mandatory info session, given by Ranger Hunter.

Three things I care about: your safety, preservation of resources and your fun – he tells us.

The guys loves teaching. You can tell: he wants us to learn.

Here are the rules: camp 300 feet from the shoreline, take out trash, bury your b.m. 6 inches, don’t light fires. I spend the evening and half the night checking for violations. This is federal land. Your land. But it will outlast you. You and I, we’re only passing through.

He reads us a lengthy quote to that effect. I swear, he's choking up on it. Probably from Teddy Roosevelt, Ed whispers.

We pick up our packs and search for a camp site for our two nights here.

finding family: in Michigan

The drive through the Upper Penninsula is always a calm treat. Much of the Lake Michigan coastline is forested (the Hiawatha National Forest) and the peeks at the lake waters are enchanting. Even when the weather is iffy (alternating between rain, fog and a stuffy haze).










Two hours later, we are at the Mackinac Bridge, connecting the UP with the Michigan mit.










And now, it’s only an hour’s trip along a narrow country road to Cross Village.















Cross Village. High up on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. It was once a lumber town. But, a fire destroyed most of it back in 1918. I’m told that only the American Indians stayed.


My grandfather (“Dziadek” in Polish) was born in 1885 in a wee village in southwest Poland (not really Poland then: there was no Poland as such in 1885). My grandmother (“Babcia”) was younger and her family home was further east—in a part of Poland that is now the Ukraine. Following a convoluted history of travels back and forth between Poland and America, his short career in car manufacture and a long career in labor organizing (and hers in cleaning and baking), Dziadek and Babcia came to Cross Village.

An old friend, Stas, had opened up a tavern here (the Legs Inn). I know this about my grandfather: he wasn’t a fan of excessive drinking, card playing or organized religion (all three habits dominated village life and were as Polish as apple szarlotka). What he did love was the world of nature. He and my grandmother practiced organic farming before it had a name attached to it. Cross Village was, in his eyes, serenely beautiful. He chose it for his (first) retirement. [He would go back to labor work and construction work, but in 1945, he thought that this was it: the place to hang it up, while picking up some cash from the Polonia Guest House that he built on the bluff, overlooking Lake Michigan.]

Okay, enough family history. The point is that Cross Village is barely a dot on the Google map. With a population of not even 300, it lacks, well, pretty much everything. It has a post office where you can pick up your mail. On and off it has had a store.

Oh, but now it also has a “destination place.” So tells me the grandnephew of Stas. (I ask Ed -- what’s a destination place? He tells me – oh, you know, like Disneyland.)

But we didn’t start off at the tavern. First on my list of Cross Village places to find is my grandparents’ old Guest House. I have a photo of it – taken when my grandfather finished working on it in 1945. I show it to the first person we run into – a guy who is pushing a mower as his pals sit in the yard cheering him on.

Oh, that must be the bluff house. Sure, I know it. We come up here for vacations, but yeah, it’s down the road there.

Only later do I find out that I have just been speaking to my second cousin (by marriage).

We drive down to the “bluff house.” Yes, it’s the one.





I knock on the door. An older woman answers. Excuse me… my grandfather, he built this place. Can I look around? And maybe take a photo or two?

Mrs. Jessick has lived here since she married Louis the Polish post master, back in 1961. They bought the house shortly after their wedding. Probably from the cook that my grandfather sold it to when he decided to return to Poland in 1951.

Ed and I go inside. We exchange stories and photos and I listen to a more detailed history of Cross Village. She has a binder of information and I have one too (my mother put it all down on paper not too long ago).

As I sit in her living room, I have this infinitely sad sense of the presence of my grandparents. Because I see them here – the knotty pine, favored by my grandfather in all his construction projects; the trim above the doorway, the stairwell – so similar to the one he later built in his subsequent home in Poland, in the village where I was raised by him and my grandmother (for the first few years of my life).





And I see the land where my grandmother grew vegetables and I look out the kitchen window where she surely must have looked out repeatedly as she cooked meals for the guests who came up here from Chicago and Detroit.

There is a skeleton of the outhouse here still and I’m thrown back to the years where in Poland we used an outhouse as well. (And well water. And kerosene for light. And coal for cooking. Sounds basic, I know. Indeed, Cross Village had more amenities when they left than their subsequent house in Poland did, until the electricity was brought to that village.)

Mrs. Jessick may have wanted a longer visit, but I am on a mission. She asks me if I met the person who shares my grandfather’s name. Surprised, I tell her I didn’t know I had relatives here. Oh, but I do. The man with the mower is married to a woman whose father was the son of my grandfather’s brother. I get it – they’re my second cousins! I go back and reintroduce myself. Here he is – Paul, in the house that my grandfather’s brother began building before suddenly, he just gave up.





The day is turning rainy and wet. Ed and I go over to the Legs Inn. What can I say – it is indeed a destination place. Absolutely packed, for those looking for something that’s a cross between Indian folk and Polish memorabilia, with a few cougar and deer heads thrown in.





Ed and I order lunch – bigos and pierogi for me (hunter’s stew with cabbage, mushrooms and sausage, and dumplings filled with cabbage and mushrooms, and with potatoes and cheese).





I’ll admit it: when my grandmother cooked these, I remember being enthralled. I swear hers were fantastic: lighter, healthier too. But I also have to say that hers is the only Polish kitchen that I have ever loved. It could be that my experience with Polish cooking is miserably deficient. My mother never liked to cook and I don’t think she ever even looked at a szarlotka recipe.

Ed and I struggle to finish the heavy foods (he orders smoked whitefish as a nod to our Lake Michigan circuit and vegetable golabki – cabbage stuffed with rice and veggies; normally it also has meat, but hey, the Legs proudly has a vegetarian offering. It aims to please.

So this is it. Cross Village. Logging town, then a nothing place, except not really, because it’s the place of stories so closely tied to Dziadek and Babcia. In the absurdly long winters of Poland, with the help of a kerosene lamp, he told me fables and taught me to read before I ever saw the inside of a nursery school. She fed me zurek and pierogi and salads from her organic garden. I picked through blueberries with her and I watched a bee crawl up his arm as he closed his eyes to the sun and breathed deeply.

Dziadku, you have a bee on your arm.
Yes, I do.
Swat it away! It will bite you!
Why? Don’t you like to watch bees?

When I left for America (for the first time, as a kid), he gave me a book of Polish folk songs. Sing them occasionally – he told me.

I do, but it makes me cry each time.
So emotional, Ed would tell you.



P.S.: We're spending the next two days on an island off the coast of Lake Michigan. I'll resume posting late Monday.

The Drive: to Michigan

Like the adolescent with a hot date after work, I watch the clock, ready to punch out and fly the minute my shop hours are up. We need to get to Escanaba tonight (five hours due north).

I’m out. Run home, Throw down my black work garb, slip on sneakers, toss pack in car. A short drive to pick up Ed at the farmette – and we’re off.





I’m driving and telling stories from the shop floor. For a man who is no longer employed, Ed completely enjoys listening to my work tales. On some days, I wish our roles were revered.

I’m so engrossed in recounting every embellished, drawn out, dramatized detail, that I am unaware of my surroundings.

Why are we in Lake Mills? – Ed asks. He's been mulling this over quietly for a while now and finally, not coming up with any sensible explanation, he poses the question to me. [For those who don’t know our geography, Lake Mills is east of Madison; we’re supposed to be aiming north -- toward Packer territory.]
Aren’t I on 151?
No.

Twenty miles out of Madison and I never noticed that I took the wrong turn.

I make up for my deficiencies by pledging to do the driving for the rest of the day.

If you ever want to do the “around a Great Lake” trip, Lake Michigan is a wonderful choice. But if you live close to it, like we do, then the first leg of the journey – whether you start by going north, or south – is boring. Heading south, you quickly hit Chicago's urban sprawl. Heading north, you can't avoid the endless small cities, b'gosh, of the Fox River Valley.

The night comes quickly.




We bring out a laptop (the car is too old to have a CD player) and listen to books on tape. Ed falls asleep with the first chapter as I push on. Sheets of mist appear in patches as we come closer to the Great Lake. The air is cool. The drive today is mostly in the dark.

We reach Escanaba after midnight. Oh, I remember this town well. We passed through this way last summer – returning from our Lake Huron kayaking trip. Yes, I remember: we had a slight difference of opinion as to whether we should camp or find a bed and shower for the night. So little has changed.

This time, I’m looking for my hard won spot of luxury – the super cheap Super 8 Motel. I’ve learned to stay firm on long days where nothing about pitching a tent sounds attractive.

I’m looking so hard that I barely notice the cop pulling me over. Sigh. In my mind, I run through all the things I could be doing wrong: eating a dinner of bread and cheese while driving, craning my neck in odd ways to find the motel in the dark, moving from one lane to the next in the hope that this will facilitate the search, keeping the car registration stickers in my purse, rather than on the car plates where they belong -- the list is long.

Can I see your drivers’ license and your registration?

Naturally, I can’t find the car registration. I search. Ed wakes up and pokes around, looking very much like he’s searching.

The cop looks up the car plates. He’s a Michigan guy and so he does not really care that my address on the license has not been updated, nor that this year’s stickers are not where they should be.
Your headlight is burned out.
That’s all? I mean – oh no! We do not intend to drive much tonight. Do you know where the Motel 8 is, btw?
The Super 8. Just up the road. Good night, and safe driving.

Ed, do you think I handled that well enough?
You didn’t get a ticket. Well enough.


The motel is completely full. Civilized people, driving through the UP, liking a shower and a warm room. Fellow travelers, moving between Wisconsin and Michigan. Canada too.


A few hours of sleep and it’s morning. This is the big day. Cross Village and my grandparents’ Polonia House is a mere four hours away.

The Plan: Michigan

I’m setting out tonight. Right after work. With a reluctant Ed along.

The man claims his spirit is crushed because The Plan calls for one night (tonight) in a cheap motel. He had hoped for a royal flush of four nights under a tent. But I think he’s apprehensive about the entire itinerary. I’m trampling through sentimental terrain this week-end. Ed would tell you that I’m plenty emotional already. No need to stoke the fire there.

The Plan includes reaching Escanaba, Michigan by midnight (that’s at the western end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for those Ocean readers who think the Midwest includes only Kansas, Chicago and Detroit). Eventually, by the end of the week-end, we’ll have circumnavigated the entire Lake Michigan.

I should have Internet access on all days but Sunday. That’s The Plan.

smoking

Always looking to pick up extra cash, I signed up to participate in a research study. Last night, a research assistant to the study called to prescreen me for it. (Let me not keep you in suspense: at the end of the conversation, I was eliminated for failure to meet the research parameters).

The study is being conducted at the University of Wiscosnin and it is on the genetics of smoking.

This was, to the best of my recollection, our conversation:

Hi, I see you volunteered to be in our study. (She takes time to explain that the study is on families and smoking and it requires some medical tests and one lengthy interview.) To compensate you for your time, if you participate, we will give you a $50 gift card.
To where?
Target or Walmart.
You have my full attention.
But first, we need to see if you fit our criteria. Once you answer in a way that disqualifies you, I will end the interview, okay?
Okay.
So, when did you start smoking?
When I was 15.
Did you ever smoke more than five cigarettes a day, for a period of at least two months?
Yes.
How old where you?
21.
Did you smoke the first cigarette upon waking, before you did anything else?
No. [Let me insert here, for Ocean readers, that I was a light social smoker for a handful of years and that I hated every cigarette I ever smoked, so that it was not hard for me to quit entirely at the age of 22.]
Did you have a cigarette before breakfast?
No.
Did you find you had to rush to have a cigarette even when you were very sick, so that you had to get out of bed to smoke?
I was not very sick in the years that I smoked.
Did you rush to smoke outside the building in times of work, or when you were on smoke free premises?
Let me tell you something: in those days, there were no smoke free premises.
Whaaat? (The interviewer is completely thrown off here)
People smoked inside all buildings.
Really??
Kids smoked in college classes. There were little silver ashtrays on classroom tables.
Are you serious??
People smoked on airplanes. Eventually in the back of the plane, but still, they smoked.
No, you’re joking. On airplanes??
I can’t think of a space where you could not smoke.
Well then, did you rush out to smoke outside anywhere anyway?
I did not rush out to smoke.
Oh, OK. You’re not eligible. We thank you for your time.

$50 to Target, lost, because I did not rush. Weird.

ghosts

Why do I dream so much?

If ever you want to construct a fathomable definition of a ghost you need only tap on my catalogue of nightly visitors: family, in all combinations, coming back to remind me of all that we were (or, in some instances, were not). My (long deceased) grandmother was here last night – we were showing her places she’d never seen. I take her on just one more outing, and now she’s leaving... Where to? Ghosts don’t talk about future destinations.

My sister, mother, my daughters, their dad – alive, all of them and still they visit me at night. Why? What’s my id up to anyway? It’s confusing to sort out. Thanks, superego. No, wait. Freud is so yesterday.

I’ve always had at least one foot stuck in the past. Maybe I run through life too quickly and so I have to replay it in my mind – during daylight hours, but since there aren’t enough of those – at night, too.

Sometimes I wake Ed and tell him loudly the details of the scene that is now fading as I struggle with wakefulness, alternating with drowsiness. He listens and says the ever helpful – go back to sleep. And so often, this puts me right back into the dream I left behind. Even if I don’t like it – I can’t help it. The ghosts need one last parting shot before they scamper off leaving me regretful and, well, lonely without their irksome but interesting presence.

What truly surprises me is how often I am, in my dreams, shepherding my grandma along, even as she refuses to recognize her frailty. I never did that in real life. She had crossed the ocean (returning to Poland from America) just before my birth, to help care for me, but when I became an adult and arguably needed her less, I crossed it right back, leaving her behind. Until eventually, in her very last decades of life, she returned to America. (That’s my family for you: some here, some there, and some in constant motion.)

But let me say this very important thing about my grandparents: there isn’t anyone in my entire family who will not admit that they were saintly. We all have faltered (I have a colorful clan), but they did not. They worked harder than anyone I know (especially my grandma) and they were chock full of optimism, spunk and rock-solid love (my grandma mostly for her family, my grandpa - for the world).

So I write this because of the dreamy misty skies out there. It’s raining, the air is cool, I’m working on my classes and my mind is drifting to the night’s dream and my grandma’s visit. Hi, Babciu (Polish for grandma), meet Ed.

My great longing to reconsider her life is pushing me north this week-end. I don’t know that I’ve mentioned here, on Ocean, that Dziadek, my grandfather, was a labor union organizer in America (the Depression blew his job in auto manufacturing right out the door). He worked hard and suffered ill health as a result. Eventually, chased out by the “anti” forces of his time (anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-labor), he moved back to Poland. But in between his work in New York and Detroit and his (and Babcia’s) journey back to Poland, he built a house (he was skilled in all aspects of construction and engineering) up north, in Cross Village. There, in the healing air of northern Michigan, he and Babcia ran a guest house for Polish workers and their families. My mother tells me they charged $25 per week – room and meals included. It was a hoppin’ place.

So I want to see it – the house that my grandfather built on this side of the ocean. I’m off to Cross Village this week-end.

But in the meantime, I have the wet skies outside my condo and the ghosts inside my bedroom and really, this is one hell of a dreary week.

fruit

If ever you need a break, head out to a farmette where berries and cherries grow. On a day that starts out chilly, but then turns cheerful. (Even as the cherries are wonderfully sour.)





A place of flowers. Big flowers. With bees working harder than us mortals.











And of course, berries.










(The rest of my time was indeed spent on work. I’m hustling with schoolwork, so that I can take the week-end off. Off and away. To where serious quantities of berries and cherries grow. I think.)

sunday

It has come to this: Sundays are my punishment for a heathen life. Lacking a congregation, a place of meditation, a reason to meditate on this day (over, say, Monday), I have punished myself fully by making it a day of work.

On Sunday mornings, I scrub my home clean.

Tired and needing respite, I put away the two sponges, one dust rag and one scouring pad and I take out my pressed black duds so that I can hike over to the shop and hustle some products to meet corporate goals.

I work for a decent place: corporate goals are reasonable, and indeed, today we do more than well by them, but it is unquestionably, without doubt, work.

By evening, I am spent. My legs have not been in their favorite position (reclining, preferably, on my coffee table) since sunrise.

I have one more errand to run and this is indeed the highlight: Ed zips me over on his motorbike to State Street, where, at Steep & Brew (the café), two artists (she photographs and he frames, or the other way around, or in conjunction with one another) are displaying their photos.





Me, I know one member of the pair from the Westside Community Farmers Market (often she helps her mom sell stuff – see previous post). But I’m here because it is so rare that one can feel great fondness for both the art and the artist(s). Not impossible, mind you (commenters, all of you – from Michigan to Massachusetts to Boat of Garten in Scotland, surely you know I’m thinking of you), but so rare.





Ed sits back and enjoys the free cookies and the break from the recent onslaught of my catapulting anxieties about life, work and all things in between.

I buy three beautiful cards, with photos that only people who understood farming from the core could take, and I go home. It’s a good ending to a not the easiest of days. Such good fortune. Wouldn’t it be terrible if the day began in a grand manner and then, after teetering, plummeted to an unforgiving end?

together (at last)

I don’t make my way to many wedding celebrations any more. People my age don’t change their marital status much. They may disengage, but I rarely get to see the re-engage part.

When my colleague, Ann, announced her plan to marry (and soon at that), I put her (and her partner/fiancé) down to being hopelessly romantic. Our planet is short on that category. Most are hopelessly confused. Bravo Ann for avoiding confusion.


Family. You don’t have to tell me it’s formed in many ways. And when it all comes together in one room, you have a chaotic splendidness that's positively enthralling.

Vignettes of family life. I had it there, right before me, at the Westside Community Farmers Market early this morning. Mother daughter, father daughter.















And I had it at a wedding celebration later in the day. Ed’s friends, after many many years together (she wanted a cake with the words: it’s about time, but the bakery refused), formalized their splendid union and threw a party.





Family poured in from far and wide and all I could do is watch and admire.















I thought – if you leap forward because you are romantically inclined and you have the support of friends or family, chances are you’ll do okay.





















But maybe you’re the loner type? The kind that prefers to read the Portable Curmudgeon alone in a café. The kind that perhaps finds all this family and marriage stuff unnecessary?





Oh, sure, sometimes it’s fun to stand alone.





But as for independence over partnership and family? I can’t agree with you. I’m too enthralled with the joys of togetherness. Young and old.