Decoration Day

"It was high summer, and the boy was lying in the corn. He was happy because he had no work to do and the weather was hot. He heard the corn sway from side to side above him, and the noise of the birds who whistled from the branches of the trees that hid the house. Lying flat on his back, he stared up into the unbrokenly blue sky falling over the edge of the corn. The wind, after the warm rain before noon, smelt of rabbits and cattle. He stretched himself like a cat, and put his arms behind his head. Now he was riding on the sea, swimming through the golden corn waves, gliding along the heavens like a bird; in sevenleague boots he was springing over the fields; he was building a nest in the sixth of the seven trees that waved their hands from a bright, green hill. Now he was a boy with tousled hair, rising lazily to his feet, wandering out of the corn to the strip of river by the hillside. He put his fingers in the water, making a mock sea-wave to roll the stones over and shake the weeds."

- Dylan Thomas, "A Prospect of the Sea"

Friday Night

Spent the better part of the sunset hour playing catch with my new friend Jake, a six year old from a neighboring apartment at Tourville. "He's just getting into hockey, he loves watching," his dad told us while grilling steaks on the communal deck. Jake threw spiral passes to me from down below in the cement parking lot, dilligently tallying, out loud, our respective catches and scores; I made running catches from the deck above, which looks out over the Marquette Senior High School football field, endless green trees and jagged Hogsback on the horizon, streaked with the yellows and blues and oranges of a Lake Superior sunset. How did he know that little Jake was a miniature version of me? We talked Vegas, Penguins, Red Wings, and NMU hockey, naming off our favorite Wildcats -- Robby Payne, Philip Beaulieu, Atte Toivanen. It capped a humid, sleep-deprived Friday that dragged at school. But it was the kickoff to Memorial weekend and it felt, symbolically, like the gatway to summer. The spring concert took place at school in the afternoon with an early release for most kids after that. Played catch with my little buddy Wyatt on the playground and supervised foursquare to end the day. Now, midnight approaching, I've got black magic brewing in the Keurig; dry lightning flashes outside my window like a Kodak camera flash over Lake Superior. A big thunderstorm supposedly rolling in from the North.

Sat. morning

LAMBROS BEACH, 10:00 a.m. -- First beach trip of the season this morning feels like boyhood summer. Still quite tired, this morning, from what felt like one of the longer school weeks of the year. Consequently accomplished little writing last night and this morning. The apartment's been getting its summertime stickiness back in the humid heat wave, and no amount of coffee could fuel any productive second wind. It was initially about 10 degrees cooler on the lakefront, but it's getting palpably warmer as the sun crests towards mid-sky, a brilliant, cloudless blue. There's a diminishing veil of fog hovering at water level, beneath the ore dock and amidst the buoys. There are already several beachcombers out on this pristine spring morning. You can hear summer break in the shouts and voices of children; actually just encountered two students on the beach -- "I just found this rainbow-colored rock in the water!" one shouted joyfully. Two little boys in water wings now splashing in the shallows thirty yards down the beach. The shadowy outline of a fishing vessel can faintly be heard sputtering a couple hundred yards out. Sand flies are pestering; along with sand spiders and dragonflies abound in the beach grass, the proverbial birds and bees of spring. Seagulls cawing now from out above their craggy islands.

Sun. Evening

Up near the secret beach on the cliffs looking down on the little glistening bay where kids dive into the water from black rocks as a right of passage every summer. Jackpines, evergreens, and birch trees shield the setting sun, an orange glowing sphere behind the deep green of freshly bloomed trees. There are families taking photographs out on black rocks now; the rocks take on that merlot hue at sundown, the gently breathing lake glistening cerulean. Intended to listen to game 7 of the NBA ECF here, but the batteries on my handheld radio are dead on arrival. "Lebron can wait". The sun is still catching my spot on the cliff, an intermittently craggy, mossy, and pinestrewn overlook in the shade of several pines, but behind me, the woods are getting cooler and darker, haunting even.

A lone kayaker steers around Black Rocks against a dusty rose sunset, the lake deep blue-green in the shadows, placid slate blue in the dying light. The kayaker's turned himself around, now, against the current, pausing momentarily to admire the majesty of the Superior sunset, a mystical prospect in its remote grandeur. Two ducks swoop down over the water in continuity; a girl is snapping photographs of an incrasingly purple sunset from atop a lone rock tower jutting up from the glacial crags of rock. Gitche Gumme ripples effortlessly into the rock walls, its fog having lifted in the cold glow of dusk.

"Do it!" I shouted at a college-aged male wearing nothing but board shorts who had emerged suddenly from the cove. He climbed the rocks towards the designated jumping area, contemplated his decision. He jumped, causing a splash that echoed off the rocks, around the cove, and disappeared somewhere far out over the depths of Lake Superior. "Fuck that!" he shouted when he bobbed up from the icy waters, prompting chuckles from the four or five of us who had witnessed the spectacle from various perspectives. It seemed a fitting send-off; it was getting darker and it was high time to hike back to the car, which was on the other end of the island. Hiking up the road to the eastern side of the island, you could see the moonglow of a nearly-full moon reflecting golden against the lake's vast blue surface. You could hear the blue collar shouts and demands echoing from atop the rails on the ore dock -- they were loading up one of the big ore oats docked there, its bright lights glowing golden like gigantic fireflies against the blood red of the ore dock. 

Sat. May 19, 2018

SKANDIA, MI -- I forget authentic U.P. living exists so close to Marquette -- a short drive south on 41, turn right at the old orange-bricked Lutheran church steeple. There I found sprawling hills, thick, craggy woods, grassy fields of wildflowers, farmland, homesteads, hunting shacks, broken down cars and trailers dot the unkempt backyards. Chickens crossed the two lane highway freely; a red-combed black rooster clucked around some hens.  Also horses, goats, grouse, sheep in fenced-in fields along the countryside. Dean told Harlowe and I a story about buying manure from a reclusive neighbor who had flies coming out of his doors and windows; said the guy possibly spent all winter without heat after his homestead, left to disrepair, burned down.

Dean's house is a nice little wood cabin out in the wilderness there, with a work shed and greenhouse adjoined in the back. A nice little stone pathway walks out to various garden patches and raised vegetable beds. Piles and piles of chopped wood out back beyond that -- homestead-style -- against a backdrop of jack pines. We were driving down, the three of us, to Escanaba for a service project, and there was a chill in the air as morning dawned gray and dreary. Dean told about "Schmidty," an old-fashioned yooper who showed up with a case of beer the previous night on his way out smelt fishing. Intrigued, I learned that smelt spawn in springtime at night, that they make tasty fried treats yooper-style. The fishing is done easily enough for a novice, with buckets dipped into a stream after dusk. Max catch is two and half buckets, if anyone could eat that much smelt. By the end of the night, I had an offer to go smelt fishing with a teacher from school. Skandia and its backroads brought out the inner outdoorsmen in me, the would-be Alaskan homesteader paying homage to Alexander Supertramp.


Coffeed up following a short nap -- plan on writing all night. Working on the Konstantinov chapter. Watched hockey on NBC tonight: Lightning now up 3-2 in a series Washington has characteristically choked away. Listened to the Eastern Conference Finals on ESPN radio while writing, a Lebron victory, then caught the end of the Tigers game from Seattle, featuring another nuclear fallout from the perenially-inept Detroit bullpen. Also listened to several more hours of Hunter S. Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt, including illuminating details on his support for Jimmy Carter and "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," an account of the author's search for friend and accomplice Oscar Acosta, the Chicano lawyer who went missing in Mazatlan in 1974 -- trying to expand my mind and perhaps summon the ghost of Raoul Duke. Typing, listening to Kolton Moore, Kody West, Red Shahan, Read Southall. Is it alt-country or Texas country?

"One last call for midnight

Too early this don't feel right

Common sense done let me down again

One-eyed swervin' in both lanes

Half-hearted wishes for cocaine

Money well-spent for an hour or two at best"

- Red Shahan, "Never Turn Around"

Notes from a Millwood Wedding

It's pouring rain on a mid-Saturday afternoon in Farmington Hills, a bleary spring day fitting for the many First Communion's of the day. The windows are fogged over in the backseat of Bryan's old blue Ford Fusion, the result of car heaters that should have been retired for the season weeks ago; it's the same vehicle we drove to East Lansing, South Bend, and Ann Arbor in the years immediately following college, bouncing around from town to town, bar to bar in between benders. All five of us squeezed in uncomfortably in tight-fitting wedding dress. Scribbling these notes on computer printout paper borrowed from a Farmington gas station, strung out from a long night of travel and a frantic morning, on our way to Kegan's wedding -- the first actual wedding gathering from the original Millwood gang.

We're driving past my old law firm up in the glass Citizen's Bank skyscraper, now. "That was only two years ago," it occurs to me, thinking out loud, "but that was another lifetime." I used to drive 696 to the Coleman A. Young Center downtown, spent many work days digging through records in the dank corridors of the records room in its basement.

The longer I'm away from my hometown and the surrounding suburbs -- perhaps the further I veer from that career course -- the more this place feels like a different universe. It's been storming and thunderstorming on and off since we arrived last night, and actually since about Flint on the seven and a half hour drive south from Marquette. Always a frenetic pace, here, what with the mad soccer moms and pickup truck warriors racing like zombies all over the freeways; utterly stupefying. Narrowly avoided two accidents with the drones since I've been home already, and I don't think either faulty party had any clue of it. Always too much on the agenda for a homebody writer, too -- places to be and people to see.

Back in Millwood this morning we watched the E:60 documentary on Ryan Leaf, whose precipitous fall from Heisman contender to NFL bust and then ravenous pill addict brought up strange memories of the past. In college Leaf had led Washington State to a Rose Bowl birth against my Michigan Wolverines in 1997, the same year he lost the Heisman Trophy to Charles Woodson. Drafted second overall in the 1998 NFL Draft -- behind only Peyton Manning -- Leaf burned bridges in his first year with the Chargers in a meltdown of a rookie season. He bounced around several franchises thereafter, and the downward spiral in his personal life was a topic of close interest to me in law school, specifically, when I started grappling with my own addiction issues in the lonely cubicles of the law stacks. At one point Leaf had been arrested twice in twenty-four hours.

"My first AA meeting I walked in and sat down and said, 'Yep. You guys are all me,'" Leaf recalled in the documentary. The scenes from prison in Montana are terrifying, as an addict. "But not for the grace of god," goes an old Alcoholics Anonymous saying that I've heard many times.

It was a rush thereafter most of the afternoon. F wanted to leave by 2:15, so we showered, had more coffee, fought traffic. Powered up, put in eye drops, piled in Bryan's little Fusion. It's about a ninety minute drive out to the Schwartz Creek/Sterling Heights area, listening to Bryan's mainstream country music on the radio. Saturday traffic in the burbs, hell incarnate.  Had to piss like a racehorse by the time we found the Brookwood Fruit Farm out in the middle of nowhere.

Brookwood is hidden from the highway by means of a line of oak trees and a dirt road. Like most farm areas in Michigan, it is hunting territory; hunting shacks hidden in the woods and no trespassing signs posted everywhere along the dirt road. For the wedding the barn was converted into a reception hall; the ceremony was held out beyond the pastures, in a little clearing among the blossoming apple trees. It turned into a perfect day for a wedding after all. Blue skies materialized from rain clouds almost simultaneously upon arrival, nature's blessing. Hay stacks served as church pews, with a friend strumming the guitar with the birdsongs.

Back at the barn, there's a long winding line to the bar for alcoholic beverages. Spirits and beer were free flowing thereafter, and other kicks were widely available in smoking form in front of the barn -- cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, weed pens, joints. Most of my friends were some level of fucked up by the time dinner tables were called for the buffet. Most of them, too, sported cowboy hats and bolo ties, and I delighted in the discreetness their lack thereof afforded me throughout the night. I like the wallflower view, usually, meandered frequently out to the back of the barn to lay in the grass and stare into the darkening sky.

Minus my own parents, the whole Millwood crowd was there: the Fideler's, Schildberg's, Durocher's, Hodges', all the Millwood boys. In the barn and around the orchards I had several genuine conversations about how interesting it is where we all wound up -- the Millwood boys. Whenever I think about our various trajectories in life I think about "The Kids Aren't Alright" by the Offspring, one of the more popular bands amongst our gang growing up in the nineties and early aughts. In fact I mentioned it to Kegan: "at least none of us are dead or in prison". Steve expecting in Detroit; he's escaped the QL while F is now there. Biebs a part-time pilot, overeducated like me, living alone on Walled Lake. P just bought a house -- "a real straight shooter," he joked to me. B is the same old B. A wins drunkest man at the wedding. That's the crew, now, varying levels of adult boys. Not the one I remember almost daily in my writing, but the one time has wielded. Once upon a time we were innocent little Indians in the woods behind Millwood.

Millwood Wedding

Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be 
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Pirate's Cove

"We visited a swimming hole nicknamed Lake Hepatitis that was the kelly green of putt-putt hazard water."

- Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son