Copper Harbor and Okemos: Michigan Towns

A Little Rime

2011-01-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

Rime ice on cobblestones. Spray
from Superior carried
by a light, iced wind,
coming on obliquely
to the lay of the shore,
during a cold, breezy night.
The early snow has melted
under the low, dimmer sun
of December afternoons,
and more has yet to come.

Thoughts

2010-12-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

I've done little with this blog for quite a while. But I've decided to post a few art photos I like a lot -- and maybe a few family shots, too -- taken now and then during recent years.

Cold night in Chicago.
Flecks of snow
streaming north.
Wet streets, strange lights
in a sky of leaden clouds
drifting over buildings.
People, just a few, walking,
heads down against
the wind among the walls.
Thoughts -- but few deep thoughts.
Where to get warm, where I'm headed.
I will soon be there -- or I won't.

Asters on the Keweenaw

2009-05-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've been totally worthless with this blog for a while. In the months gone by, my daughter Miranda and son-in-law Art, both of whom have made a number of appearances here, had their first child, who is Marsha's and my first grandchild, Aster Davis, born March 15, 2009. She's a sweetheart. We haven't seen her for a couple months now, but we're soon heading north for a summer in Copper Harbor, where we'll see her every day. For Miranda and all, I offer this shot of a bunch of asters on Keweenaw Point late last summer as a way to get myself started again. I told Mir a couple molnths back that I had a number of nice shots of asters, and now I'll be taking lots more, no doubt. I'll work on putting up a photo of the single new Aster soon.

You Have to Learn to Appreciate the Smell of an Empty Can of Tennis Balls

2008-11-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

Miranda's in-laws, the Davises, have a piece of property down on the waterfront just a couple lots away from our Copper Harbor house. Miranda and Art sometimes bring their dogs Capone and Gus down there for a swim and a run in the summertime. It's easy for us to take a short walk down Brockway Avenue to join them while they give the dogs some exercise on those days when they can't find time for a long walk in the woods. This is a shot of Mir some time in August with her dog Capone already in the SUV after the visit to the shore at the Davis' harbor property. Capone loves tennis balls, to chase when thrown by a human and to chew and to push around and chase on his own. I regularly bring him my old tennis balls from downstate, since I am a longtime and avid tennis player of some skill. Capone even likes the smell of a tennis-ball can. Mir is beginning to show a lot from her pregnancy, by the way, as she told me in a recent phone call. When this shot was taken, I don't believe Marsh and I yet knew that we were soon to be grandparents.

A Front Rolls South

2008-10-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

I was golfing at the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge one night in July when a storm started brewing -- or so it seemed. I hustled home in the car and then ran inside the house to get my camera to take a quick look at the storm up on the nose of Brockway Mouintain, just above town. I was hoping for some interesting weather to be coming in. The boys decided to come along, and then Marsha decided to come too. We hustled up the Mountain Drive and then watched the fronts and wind-shift lines rolled past and over Copper Harbor for 15 minutes or so before it started to get too dark and too cold. Here's one shot I took of the family that evening. Funny, but no storm broke loose. We had a little spitting rain and a little wind, but nothing serious or heavy. It was a storm with some scary teeth, but no bark and no bite. I can't say why. This shows you once again how cool the early to middle summer was up north. We shall soon be getting to some photos that actually look like they were taken in the summertime.

A Looming Ship

2008-10-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

A captain always has to be on his toes, even these days. The traffic on Lake Superior is nothing like it was in the days of my youth, back some 35 years ago. The number of big ships on the Great Lakes is down about 90% since the 1970s, and even fewer of the 10% remaining afloat and working are sailing the Big Lake. So we see hundreds fewer ships out on the lake when we are crossing over to Isle Royale on the Isle Royale Queen IV, our family's passenger ferry, than when I was a teenager working on the Queen II out of Copper Harbor. But there are still foggy days on the Big Lake, and there were many more such days this summer than there have been in the previous 10 to 15 summers because of the cooler spring and early summer in 2008. Here's a shot of a freighter appearing in the fog just a half mile from the Queen IV one day when I was captain and ferrying a large load of people across to the national park. My position was about 10 miles northwest of Copper Harbor. I had to "turn down" on the ship as we say. That means I had to alter my course to port to keep out of the ship's way. I stayed a healthy distance away, and finally when I was fully behind the ship and got within a half mile, the ship began to appear in the fog. Within another 5 minutes the Queen IV had emerged completely fom the fog bank that hugged the Kerweenaw coast on that day, but the frieghter kept on going east into the denser fog off Keweenaw Point.

Sharing Motions

2008-09-26T12:52:00.001-07:00

They quickly stand, almost bursting from their seats. They begin cheering. Their cheers become loud -- and then louder. They smile. Their big grins form wrinkles at the corners of their mouths and eyes. Many applaud. Some wave their hands. Some pump a fist in the air. Some wave small flags. I see one woman looks at a certain man standing beside her. They exchange even broader smiles. Their eyes are bright, intent, charged. Another man near me raises his hand high with the palm facing a friend standing beside him. The friend, with hardly a glance, notices that the friend standing beside him (it appears that he is a friend) is holding his hand up and his palm out to him. This man stops applauding and cheering for a moment and raises his own hand in the same manner, palm out. This man then pushes his open palm up and into his friend’s palm. The high-five. They smile more widely yet, so filled with delight that they are almost laughing. Thousands are standing and cheering and applauding now. Some whistle. Some whoop. Dozens of people exchange high-fives. Altogether, the thousands of mixed, loud noises makes up a stirring, thrilling, pulsating roar of elation.

The thousands who make the sounds take them all together. They relish the excitement of the sounds they are making together, so deep, so loud, so widely encompassing. These actions and many others like them -- why bother describing each, if I could describe them all? Almost any ordinary American would recognize and comprehend just about every gesture and every sound made. They are repeated and repeated again at certain times in ceremonies, or performances, or presentations, like this one, whatever we might call this “event.” Thousands of people repeating these motions and making similar sounds, cheering and hooting and hollering and listening to the cumulative, collective roar. They share the motion and the sound. The sharing of it has some meaning. That’s the issue I have been pondering. What is the meaning, not of the presentation, but of the sharing of it?

The cheering at that basketball game is akin, it seems to me, to something called “shared rhythmic motion,” a term I learned as I searched last spring online for writings about a documentary that flabbergasted me, State of Mind. This documentary film centers on two children in North Korea, 10- and 12-year-old girls who are merely two of the tens of thousands (!) of adults and children who danced in one of North Korea’s so-called Mass Games that the defiantly, brutally communist government has been putting on, on an irregular schedule, for the past couple decades. The Mass Games are huge, rigidly and expertly coordinated spectacles of exuberantly hectic dance and gymnastics. The dancers put on their performances, after months of outdoor practice in city squares, in huge outdoor stadiums or large indoor arenas. Each performance involves thousands of dancers, who form great rectangular blocks of equally spaced people who move in astonishingly tight synchronization. Performances in each edition of the Mass Games go on for several days.

The scenes of the specific edition of the Mass Games shown in State of Mind were astounding -– riveting, haunting, thought-provoking. A quick study of a couple articles on ritualized dance led me to scholars who have been studying such matters for a long time. The most famous book on the subject, I learned, is entitled Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, by a scholar named William McNeill. McNeill's personal experiences led him to study and define the concept of “shared rhythmic motion.” As a draftee in 1941 while undergoing basic training in Texas, McNeill came to enjoy the hours spent in close-order drill. In thinking about the pleasure he took in drilling, he wrote a speculative history about human society’s practice of keeping together in time in a ritualized manner, which to him means “moving our muscles rhythmically and giving voice to consolidate group solidarity altering human feelings." Though language is another (and the most important) socially shared system of signs, McNeill believes that the use of fully grammatical language added to but did not displace the social import of shared rhythmic motion.

Ever since I made these various discoveries I have been pondering shared rhythmic motion in my life and my immediate social settings. Sports is one venue where I have witnessed and taken part in shared motion. Cheering for teams appears rather similar in some ways to the North Korean Mass Games. Why do so many Americans cheer in sports (and in certain defined, generally approved ways) not to mention spend our money, a lot of money for many people, to watch skillful athletes take part in sports and cheer their achievements? Why do I and so many others care at all about teams and athletes in the sports I find most attractive? Besides my wife Marsha, who can make no sense of the craze for sports, my boys, Logan and Drew, are noticeably puzzled. For somehow they have never gained much interest in sports at all. (I am as puzzled with them as they are with me on such matters.) Scholars of shared motion seem to think that we create some kind of community, in a broad sense, through corporate dance and many other kinds of shared motions. In my view, cheering for sports teams seems to be some sort of dance like the other shared motions McNeill discusses.

Someone has written that “Even in a culture where recorded performance has become central, people crave the live event, largely for that group joy.” It is puzzling that there should be group joy in watching at a stadium or on a television -- or even in reading about others who shared the group joy in my absence (as I do when I read with delight about the games that "my” teams win). Still, how deeply can the shared motions of sports instill community (whatever that abstraction might be taken to mean). At the most, for example, only half of the people in the U.S. watch the Super Bowl. Thus, only half of the citizenry derive some kind of needed community from watching people cheer the Super Bowl. (Only 10% of the citizenry, it is stunning to realize, as massive as that is [30 million people!], watch the most popular television program, American Idol, which has some of its own shared motions and vocalizations). That is a bewilderingly large number. Yet it is only 50%, which means that some 160 million people in the American citizenry do not share in the motions of cheering or watching the cheering for sports teams and players. What does that mean? The whole subject seems too vast to figure out, as much as its existence insist upon us that it has meaning. We are probably forced to make no more than guesses.

As to the photo: it’s a shot taken at the end of a 2007 MSU basketball game in which MSU defeated the #1 ranked team in the nation at the time, Wisconsin, after which the citizenry of mid-Michigan flooded the basketball floor and celebrated. There was plenty of shared rhythmic motion at the game and in its aftermath. I shared in a lot of it.

Silent Evening

2008-09-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

There was a bit more fog this summer than in summers past. The weather was a bit cooler and cloudier, as I have written, in the first half of the summer, which left Lake Superior much cooler. That, in turn, led to more fog as the days began to warm up in mid-July. There was one day in mid-July that had one of the foggiest summer nights of the past 10 years or so. The visibility was down to about 50 feet. You could see cars until they were within a few feet of you. Here is a shot of my youngest son Drew, still 12, standing on the Isle Royale Queen IV dock and next to the Queen herself on that night. We toured the town, and I took a number of photos of various scenes of Copper Harbor in fog. We wound up my daughter Miranda's place, in the muffled silence that descends over areas covered in fog. I loved the whole scene. Drew seemed a little blase about the occurence, but he put up with my excitement well enough and kept following me around. The fog lifted about 10 PM, which surprised me. I find it quite mysterious how fog comes and goes and how hard it is to predict those comings and goings, as hard as I try to make predictions. Jesus might have been advised to speak of the Spirit as being like fog, for the wind is much easier to predict than fog, though Jesus probably knew little fog, except on the Sea of Galilee, perhaps. I am not conversant with weather in Israel either now or then. My Dad asked for a shot of the finale of the 2008 Fireworks show, and I will get to that soon.

The Night Sky on Just One Night a Year in Copper Harbor

2008-09-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

I realize it has been a long time since I posted on this blog, but I guess I needed a break. So I took one, and now I'm going to try to catch up. Hence, the following dozen posts or so will concern the summertime. I am now back at Michigan State, where I work in the non-summer seasons. It's actually still summer down here in the deep south. Up in Copper Harbor, there have been indications of fall's coming, including much cooler weather. But, for now, I return to summer to catch you and me up on what went on.

I've always wanted to set up my camera and tripod for some shots of the Fourth of July fireworks show in Copper Harbor. It's a great show, and one of the best and best known in the Upper Peninsula. The Copper Harbor Fire Department has been going BIG TIME with the fireworks show of late, with ever more of the bigger cannisters being shot into the sky over the central harbor, directly across from the Queen IV dock. Here's a shot from the Queen dock on that night. The show took everyone's breath away. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

I must admit, though, that I am not an especially big fan of fireworks shows. I don't know why. That might be something to write an excogitation about. In fact, I have been tinkering with a post for some time about "shared rhythmic motion" that might have some bearing on this topic. I'll try to get it finished soon. Fireworks just don't do all that much for me. I do like this photo, nonetheless. That's Porters Island across the harbor from our business (and my parents' home). The boys of the CHFD fan out along the beach facing town on the west end of the state-owned island.

I Am Not Lost Yet

2008-07-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

I'm always dragging my poor children off into some nook in the wild, and poor, trusting Logan is often the child who will follow me farthest into the woods on my adventurous treks. A few days ago, I took Drew and Logan and their cousin Anthony out to the Estivant Pines Sanctuary south of Copper Harbor for the afternoon. After touring the pines, we set off for the Leaning Giant, the massive pine that fell about 20 years ago along the Montreal River. The unmaintained trail to the Giant is considerably rougher this year because of logging south of the sanctuary and the rain, which has made the swamp between the main sanctuary and the Giant much muckier and much more difficult to cross. The trail was especially difficult to find at times out in the middle of the swamp. I dragged Log across it, and then went back back for Drew and Anthony, who sensinbly refused to follow. So I had to go back across the swamp yet another time and guide Logan back. Here's a shot from the return trip across the big swamp just north of the Montreal River and just south of the Estivant Pines. Oh, by the way, I took this shot of Logan on the trail. A little hard to see it, don't you think?

A 1000-Foot Ship Passes the Harbor

2008-07-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

The unusual weather continues. Well, it might not be so unusual. It might be that the spectacularly beautiful summer weather we have had over the past decade has been much more unusual than all the wind, rain, fog, and cool temps that we have had this spring and early summer in the north country. We even had a delay for gale warnings on last Sunday, the first such delay that I recall in the month of July ever in the period that the Kilpela family has owned and operated the run out of Copper Harbor to Isle Royale (since 1971). I was scheduled as the captain for the trip Sunday, and the captain-brothers decided to delay departure 6 hours. The winds settled down quite a bit over that time, but we still had a rough crossing -- much less than it could have been, but rough nonetheless. I went out to look at conditions by eye on the morning of that day, after the winds started to ease slightly. This shot was taken on the shore outside Copper Harbor 3 hours before we departed in the afternoon. That's the 1000-foot ship, the Stewart J. Cort, out on the lake passing by CH about 2 miles off the coast. I could see that the waves were decreasing a bit because the Cort was not taking as much water over his decks as I expected. I knew we would have better conditions for the crossing later in the day, and it all worked out well in the end. What weather, though. It's been hurting business, especially in CH, in addition to the fuel-price problems. We've had to cancel many Sunset Cruises so far. Businesses are all just hanging on, waiting for things to turn around.

Sundown on Sawmill Cove

2008-07-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I've been saying that the weather has been rather iffy in the north country this early summer in 2008. But there have been many nice days as well -- and even a few warm ones. Conditions have been getting better and better. Here's a shot of me, Captain Ben, and my wife Marsha on the Isle Royale Queen IV dock one lovely night less than a week ago. We were watching a beautiful sunset long after the Queen IV had returned from Isle Royale (the boat is in the background). The sun sets close to 10:00 this time of year up in these parts. Hey, what's that gut showing on me? Looks like I've got to cut back on the pork chops, as my Dad likes to say. You get so many gorgeous sunsets up here that you can start to take them for granted. And they can be very localized as well. A couple nights later, there was a truly spectacular sunset visible only up on the golf course at the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, a mile south of town. I didn't have my camera for the event, since I was golfing with my son Drew, but it was a stunner that was only taking place up there because just a few low clouds were drifting through the Brockway Valley near the course and were lighted up shocking shades of pink and orange by the setting sun. Such sunsets have happened to me many times before when I've been golfing late.

A Nice Set of Falls

2008-07-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

I was up at Manganese Falls about a half mile south of Copper Harbor on a recent morning. I road my bike up the side of the ridge. The blackflies were not too bad, though I did have a bug jacket with hood on when I was in the woods, just to be sure. The falls are running with more water, which comes from Lake Manganese a half mile farther south, than they have in recent early summers, which have been rather dry rather quickly in June each year. As you can see in the photo, the trees growng in the canyon walls are getting bigger and bigger and now starting to block the view of these falls from the overlook alongside the road to Lake Manganese, the road that passes Copper Harbor's old bear dump, which has been closed for about 25 years now. Funny that people keep talking about the old dump all summer long so many years later. I'll have to get a shot of it from the old days and the present for this blog some time soon.

On Bounty's Rock

2008-06-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

The boys and I took a bike ride out to the end of US-41, 2 miles east of Copper Harbor, and stopped on the way back at Fort Wilkins State Park, where one of their favorite places in or around town is located. They call it Bounty's Rock, upon which Logan sits in the photo. The reason for the name I haven't learned yet or forgotten (I'll ask them tonight). The Rock is a ridge of bedrock across from the Copper Harbor Lighthouse, which you can see in the photo. The boys are plotting and planning a new movie to be fiolmed on Bounty's Rock. It will include scenes of the entrance of a copper mine on this rock. How Logan will accomplish that I cannot guess. But he's resourceful, indeed. Logan recently posted a new film on YouTube, the address of which I'll chase down at some point. He's quite the filmmaker. It is fascinating that my children have adopted special places in and around the harbor that are different from mine. This ridge of rock meant little to me as a youth, but my boys see as a place of great importance and meaning.

Waves from Far Away Keep Rolling Ashore

2008-06-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

The weather has been very sketchy up in the north country since I got up north for the summer. It's been one of the coolest Junes I remember. We have one fairly decent summer day, but most of the days have been decidedly fall like. There have been a number of rough crossings to Isle Royale on the Queen IV as well, which is quite unusual for June. Here's a shot from a couple nights ago, taken down the coast from Copper Harbor about three miles. The wind was hard out of the southeast, which the north shore of the Keweenaw is well protected from. But the wind was so strong and steady all day long that the waves were curling around Keweenaw Point and traveling some 10 miles to this spot along the coast and pounding in with vigor. The Queen IV, headed for home from the crossing, would pass by about 5 miles off the coast about 15 minutes after I took this shot. And the rain began falling heavily just another 15 minutes after that. I was on my bike and had to ride three miles home in a hard rain. I had no rain gear, but I didn't mind the ride too much. The family is due any day now, my wife and boys. They have had very hot weather downstate. How will they take the sudden change. Conditions are often so different in the north country.

Here Comes the U.P. in All Its Glory

2008-06-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Another Copper Harbor period of this blog begins. The summer has come, and it is time for me to go north to help run the Isle Royale Queen IV out of Copper Harbor. It turned suddenly hot and humid in southern Michigan on the morning of my departure north, and I quickly got the heck out of Okemos without the family and headed for the Upper Peninsula and my second home. On the way north on I-75, a vast mass of storms passed over the Lower Peninsula. It poured. I mean poured. And then when I reached the Straits of Mackinaw, the temperature dropped by about 20 degrees, the wind started coming sharply out of the east, and the weather turned plain raw. Welcome to the U.P.! Just like last year, I was greeted with some raw early spring weather in early summer. Well, here's two shots taken during the crossing of the Makinaw Bridge as I approached the Upper Peninsula. The first shot was taken near the center of the Bridge looking north at the north tower, which was lost in the fog and rain. The second shot is of the north tower emerging from the fog. I'll be posting, of course, some more shots from my arrival in Copper Harbor soon. The weather turned very warm, even humid, even up here in CH, for a couple of days. The blackflies came out in droves, especially with a humid south wind. But then on Sunday, June 8, the the wind turned east, off the cold surface waters of Lake Superior, and the temps dropped 20 degrees again. Only in the 50s today. You just never know what's going to happen up in these parts.

Beavers at Work

2008-06-03T07:44:00.000-07:00

The boys and I went camping near Cadillac on the Memorial Day weekend, as is our longstanding tradition, while Marsha stayed home and did some gardening and worked to reduce her never-ending pile of school papers. We camp on a piece of wilderness property alongside the Manistee National Forest that I have camped at for more than 30 years. The property is owned by my former brother-in-law Glan Van Antwerp and his wife Di, who live in the very small town of Tustin nearby. Glen and Di and Marsh and I have stayed friends down the years, and I have maintained the Mem Day tradition into this next generation. Of course, I still have a connection to the Van family, for my daughter Miranda is Glen's niece. The days were nice, but dry, as is quite uncommon for Memorial weekend in northern Lower Michigan. We have had periods of heavy rain almost every year in the last dozen on this weekend. On Saturday, I took the boys to a spot I have visited a number of time, in spring, fall, and winter, but they have never seen. It's a large beaver dam at the south end of a very large bog in the National Forest about a half mile from the Van property. Beavers constructed the dam at the outlet of the bog, which was drying up, about 15 years ago and have been maintaining it and increasing its dimensions ever since. Their unceasing work has caused the water level of the bog, meantime, to get higher and higher each year. The photo is a shot of the boys on top of this very solid dam. I am standing on the dry side, about four feet down, with another four foot drop behind me into a tangled swamp. Look closely and you will see that right behind the boys' feet is the stagnant water of the beaver pond, the dammed up water of the giant bog that gets a touch more boggy every year. The beavers have been a blessing, all in all, for their efforts have saved this beautiful and rugged blog from drying up, as is the destiny of all bogs. It's going to be very interesting to see how things change in the bog and at the dam as the years go by. I can already give you 30 years of perspective on how conditions have changed. This bog is a favorite place, and a favorite topic of study, of mine. Judging from their reaction, the boys will be joining me in the study as the years trudge slowly on.

A Roof over Our Heads

2008-06-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

We finally got to the point in our home project list that we signed a contract, after five bids, to have our roof and siding redone. This step has been a long time in coming. I replaced all the windows and doors in the house myself over the past couple years. The work on the roof and siding began a couple weeks back. There were delays in siding the house -- is not a delay or two inevitable? But the roof was done almost immediately. Here's a shot of the boys out on the front lawn on Sandhill Road with the new roof nearly finished. You can see the roofers working on details on top of the house. What a beautiful day that was, already two weeks ago. It was the day that we took the boys out of school and went to Flint to join the Thomas family as they interred the ashes of Marsha's mother at a cemetery north of Flint.

Let's Get Moving

2008-05-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

A last couple shots from our spring vacation to Pennsylvania are on tap today. Here are my boys, 12-year-old Drew on the left, 15-year-old Logan on the right, getting ready for a day of exploration and learning in one of our country's famed national landmarks, the Gettysburg Battlefield. Did I say they're getting ready? My mistake.

Drew's eyes are glazed by the syrupy glare of the television. Logan is almost unconscious in his close focus upon his Game Boy. So I did some hollering to get the boys moving, to which they responded with a frustrating lack of the requisite energy, purpose, or enthusiasm. So I increased the volume and intensity of the hollering, a practice from which I derive only momentary pleasures, though one must enjoy the pleasures one can in such circumstances. The greater intensity did get them moving. But the motivation for their movement was for other reasons than I had striven. Logan thought this a chance to grab the camera and get a shot of me in the act. Now before you decide to call the those ever-so-vigilant Texas authorities on me, I must say I was hamming it up a bit for the camera. And that hair? Well, that's what it really looks like on most mornings when I am in need of a cut.

And so we see that our lofty excogitations upon the meaning of the mnost profound human experiences are often mixed with a massive dose of the mundane vagaries of daily life, of getting dressed and brushing the teeth, of having a bite to eat and loading up the car, of getting and keeping the kids moving and trying to keep ourselves chipper and upbeat.

We Meet an Organist

2008-05-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

During the family's vacation trip to Pennsylvania on spring break, we took a walking tour of Society Hill just south of downtown Philadelphia. We stopped in at a dozen churches and graveyards in the district. Saint Mary’s Catholic Church is the oldest Catholic church in this old city (old by American standards, of course), and our visit there was moving. When we went in (this was on a cool, sunny Wednesday morning), the sound of a massive pipe organ filled the sanctuary, though we could hardly hear it right outside the foyer on the street. It turned out that the organist was practicing for that Sunday's Mass. We listened to him play a couple of powerful hymns before I invited myself up to the balcony, where I took this photo of the organist at practice. He was a friendly fellow, but I didn’t get his name. He treated us to a chorus of an old Protestant hymn, being a Protestant himself. He told us he plays Protestant hymns regularly at the church's Catholic services.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I disagreed quite strongly with Catholic theology, which I am fairly well versed in, if you didn’t happen to know. Sometimes a funny feeling can come over people who leave certain belief-systems and convert to new beliefs about what we call ultimate reality. When they return to some particular setting that is strongly associated with their former belief-system, they get the feeling that a very different person held those beliefs a long time ago. However, though I converted away from the Protestant version of the Christian faith some years back, I still feel a strong dislike or disagreement with Catholic theology. Not that I feel Catholics are in some way repulsive, as many Protestant Christians felt in the past and as some still do. No, for me it is a purely intellectual thing. I continue to feel a strong disagreement with Catholic doctrine even though I have little to no stake any longer in the greater and divided religion that is one major venue for Christianity's doctrinal disputes.

The whole idea of a priesthood, of special people of authority who control access to God, is strong in Catholicism and is the source of most of my intellectual objections. But though I once disagreed with Catholic doctrine quite earnestly and, very strangely, still feel discordant toward Catholicism as a belief-system, I never felt much antipathy toward Catholic spirituality. Indeed, I have met and read the writings of many Catholics with whom I felt a deep affinity. I have known and read of many Catholics who appear to have met God through Catholicism as an intellectual and cultural system, even though I once thought that most of their ideas about God are untrue.

And so, long way around, I come back to this photo. The gaudy showiness of Catholic churches, like Saint Mary’s in Philadelphia, can sometimes make me a little queasy. I remain a tried and true, if deconverted, Protestant in this area of thought, having been raised with and still believing provisionally that worship requires austerity and simplicity, the kind found in most Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues, too. But now I see better that Catholic pomposity and finery expresses something different to me than I believe it expresses to the average thoughtful Catholic. I don’t see what Catholics see in their churches, which is always a problem when trying to understand and appreciate the beliefs and practices of others in any area of life. But I keep trying to see and hear as Catholics see and hear in their churches, as well as I am able to understand their sight and their faith. In those churches, I find much worth seeing and much that is moving. I find that something real calls to me in them, even though I discarded a belief-system that, generally, held Catholicism to be a sinful aberration of true Christian faith. What a lot to excogitate upon. I don’t whether I can gather it all up. After all, it is hard to see and fathom one’s own motives and thoughts in such complicated matters.

Tyranny and Oppression and Evil, Oh My!

2008-05-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

My cousin Kev Koski, now in China on his bike trip around the world, doesn’t think war is inevitable, as he wrote in answer to my excogitation entitled “Gettysburg” a couple weeks back. Consequently, I feel inclined to keep excogitating upon this topic, or it may be that I just can’t stop. It is always fun jawing with Kev, though. I agree on a few comments he makes, but not on the matter of war IN GENERAL. War is pretty much inevitable for the reasons I pointed out in my comment that follows the post “Gettysburg.” Kev made no attempt to dispute my reasons, so I don’t see any need to defend them further. But perhaps what bothers Kev and others is that I spoke of only one side of my imaginary Bell Curve of conflict and war-making. On the other side of the curve from total war is the condition of perfect peace. Yes, I believe that peace also, inevitably, prevails at times. Though there will always come times of war, there will also always come times of peace -- and much more and much longer times of peace than of war, as history teaches us. After all, wars can and do come to an end and are comparatively short. Violent conflicts are settled. People form agreements and treaties and contracts. Peace reigns, even a great majority of the time in all of human history.

Pausing in this discussion, I want to point out that the photo is of Cemetery Ridge (the Union position) from Seminary Ridge (the Confederate position) on the Gettysburg battlefield. Logan and I had climbed a tall viewing tower that gave us this view. I have pointed out a couple of the mythical locations on the battlefield in the distance, which I refer to in earlier excogitations. The "Cyclorama" is now closed, though for more than a century it contained a massive and largely mythical mural of the battle. The PA Memorial was much debated at the time it was designed and constructed. I also tried my hand at some photo alteration by plopping Logan’s head in the photo. It was taken from another shot of him on the tower.

Now, back to peace. The average, typical peace is a slightly uneasy, wary, negotiated, carefully guarded social condition. In some few of those cases of guarded peace, it becomes a lasting and strong peace, broadly cherished and sustained. In some few of those cases of lasting peace, way out at the edge of the Bell Curve reaching from war to peace, peace becomes an era of perfect peace, in which people and the groups that they inevitably form develop very stable and friendly associations with other people and groups. Such associations are not easily drawn into conflict. Thus, peace is inevitable, and sometimes perfect peace comes, as it always will come. But this does not imply that war is not inevitable -– once again, because of the nature of grouping. To put this very simply, the forming of groups leads inevitably to conflicts, and some few of those conflicts, inevitably, will escalate into war. It just the way things work.

But let me make this clear. I’m NOT saying that each and every specific war is inevitable. Yes, almost all specific wars can be prevented, weakened, or stopped. (Though, there are, I would venture, some very few specific wars that were and will be inevitable.) But wars will always keep coming along. That’s what I mean by stating that war in general is inevitable. There will never be an end to the possibility or potentiality of war, for the reasons I have outlined. This claim is similar to saying that there will always be car accidents. Almost no specific car accident is inevitable. Yet the car accident is inevitable. It’s just the socioeconomic-physical nature of automobile traffic systems. This analogous situation is almost exactly what I mean by saying war is inevitable. Perhaps the more pertinent issue, which I won’t go into now, is how probable war is. How probable is the car accident? You can quantify that quite easily. War would be a lot harder to pin down on probabilities.

Now, as to Kev’s specific contentions, I agree that if ever more people resisted their governments in specific times of war, particular wars can be prevented or their intensity lessened. In history, many wars have been prevented or weakened, just as many millions of car accidents have been avoided by earnest, intelligent, and caring drivers. We should work toward ending wars at all times, for, obviously, war is a terrible occurrence -- though not always a terrible evil. Sometimes resistance works. But sometimes as well resistance does not work. Sometimes, further, we know that resistance should not work, and people and their governments resist resistance. Sometimes many people believe they know that groups must go to war, that it is good and just to fight, though resisters think they are dupes of their governments. It takes great wisdom to know when it is good to join in war.

Now, is there any danger to thinking as Kev does, that every specific war can and should be prevented or stopped? Some people -- many people, in fact -- have thought all through human history that it is morally wrong and dangerous to oneself and others, to groups, to think that war can be prevented or stopped, because such thinking, to summarize, leads one not to do enough to get ready to fight a specific war successfully, to prevail by organized violence for the sake of a just cause when no other way to prevail presents itself. If one is always thinking peace can be had, so the argument has often gone, one will sometimes accept, or be forced to accept, tyranny or oppression or the defeat of a just cause because one didn’t get ready quickly or well enough to stop the tyrant or the oppressor. I agree to an extent that it CAN, at times, be dangerous to think only of peace. It takes great, Great, GREAT! wisdom to see when peace has no chance and that striving for peace has become morally wrong and dangerous and that one must go to war to prevent or overturn oppression or tyranny or other evils.

Obviously, many millions in the U.S., including many people much better, more thoughtful, and more intelligent than I am (and plenty of others who are stupider than I am as well), believe that we reached that point concerning Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. They think we were wise in going to war against Saddam. I disagree. But the debate goes on. Should we have gone to war to stop Saddam? When is it just to go to war to stop those who oppress or who have gone to war? This is not an idle question. It is a question that haunts the mercilessly bloody 20th century. It is the subject of Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker’s morally disturbing book on the injustice of World War II that was recently published.

I guess the wisest principle of war-making, in my judgment, comes down to this. We must always work for peace as long as peace can be had without permitting or fostering tyranny, oppression, or unjust suffering (however those very complex concepts might be defined -– hoo boy, there’s another tortuous issue). But as war looms, and sometimes war will come, we must prepare, in advance and in ways appropriate to the nature of the threat, to kill and die to keep our families, our cities, our states, our country (in other words, the defined groups we have aligned ourselves with), and even other countries from suffering under tyranny or oppression or other evils (however those might be delineated, an issue so hoary, so thorny, that I can’t bring myself to start excogitating upon it).

One Day, the View Changes and All Your Thoughts Must Change with The Changed View

2008-05-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Before I get too far along that endless road that will lead me into other events in life, I have to return to Gettysburg, which has been on my mind so much of late. I went over to the MSU Library after our visit to the battlefield to see what might be had there for fun reading on the subject. What I found was a book that has changed my thinking about the battle forever, as much as I have studied it, as much as I thought I knew it. This kind of occurence always bothers me. You're tripping merrily along with the illusion that you have things fairly well in hand in some intellectual area, only to discover that you haven't even begun to understand the subject you believe you know so well. Such has happened for me upon reading These Honored Dead, a history of the HISTORY of Gettysburg. That is, the book is a study of how the STORY of Gettysburg developed out of and apart from the much disputed facts of the complex event itself.

The fact that the facts of the battle are much disputed is one circumstance the book made abundantly clear. I had thought that what happened at Gettysburg was pretty well settled long ago. Not so. Another idea the book made clear is that much of what we understand about Gettysburg is myth -- in the good sense of this loaded word -- not facts. It turns out that the battle has been the subject of much myth-making, for good and ill, down through all 150 years since it took place. Among the major myths are the so-called "Copse of Trees" and the so-called "High Water Mark of the Confederacy." These two titles and the mythical historical ideas behind them are the invention, or the inventive interpretation, of one man who became obsessed with Gettysburg soon after the battle took place, John Bachelder. I had never taken the slightest notice of this fellow before (though I had probably run across his name from time to time), as much as I have read about Gettysburg. Bachelder was a painter who wanted to promote the battle as the central moment in the Civil War and, hence, one of the central moments in the nation itself. He created several myths to do so, myths that have become part of, as we say, the national consciousness. I'll be pondering this whole matter for years to come. What is history and what is myth? What is good and bad in myth? What is important and meaningful and truly TRUE in fact and myth, and what isn't? Through the history of the history of this battle can such ideas be endlessly pondered and debated.

Now, for the photo, briefly. It's a shot in the forest on the side of Big Round Top, the large, steep hill at the south end of the battlefield. The hill did not play a prominent part in the battle, neither in fact or in myth. But it is close to a prominent part of the battlefield. Logan and I walked up Big Round Top over these massive boulders. We huffed and puffed in the spring warmth and humidity. We discovered that this hill and the valley at its foot would have been exceedingly difficult to negotiate in battle, especially for soldiers trying to make a charge through the heat of a summer day and smoke and gunfire.

EXCERPTS from "The Skunk Island Ferry"

2008-05-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

This post contains two excerpts from Part 1 of my new comic novel, which is about a teenager growing up on the Great Lakes and working on a ferryboat. The novel is written is an unusual form, as though I am describing what you would see playing on a screen if this were a movie. Set in 1970, the story is about the Halverson family. Gene and Sylvia Halverson have bought a ferry boat and are ferrying passengers to a fictional island in north Lake Michigan I have christened North Skunk Island. His two sons, Will and Hutch (they're 18 and 16), are working as deckhands on the ferry. Because Gene doesn't have a captain's license, he has hired a captain, who has the rather common nickname "Cap." Lots will happen in the summer to come, but I hope these excerpts will give you a taste of what you can look forward to.

Ben Kilpela

+++++++++++++++++++

The scene opens with a shot in the wheelhouse of the Skunk Island Queen. There is still some fog, but it is less dense. Cap keeps looking down into the radar funnel to check the scene. Gene is steering. The Queen sounds as though she is running slower now. Cap suddenly says, “It's just so damn straight, sticking straight out.” He kept his eyes out the windows, looking into the brighter fog of midday.

Gene looks at him and says, “The pier?”

Cap says, “It sticks straight out. The radar has trouble picking it up.”

Gene says, his voice tight, “It hasn’t been a problem before.”

Cap puts his face to the funnel. “I can't see it. Can’t see a thing.”

Gene, “How far out are we?”

Cap, “Half mile.”

Gene takes the throttles and gently eases them back a bit more. The engines slow and he says, “We better slow down some more.”

Cap says, “Does Hutch see the bottom?”

The scene cuts to a shot of Hutch up on the bow again, hunched over the rail, looking straight down into the water. The fog, though thinner, still drifts in strands across the bow.

Up in the wheelhouse, Gene says, “He hasn’t given me any signal.” They both look at Hutch leaning over the rail. Then Hutch abruptly stands straight and turns around.

He puts one finger to his eye and put his hands out palm down. Gene says, “That’s the signal. He sees the bottom.”

Cap says out the window to Hutch, mouthing the words distinctly, “How deep?”
Hutch shrugs, but then puts up all ten fingers, then five more, and he follows that with a shrug to show that he’s not all that certain. Gene says, “Pretty shallow. We must be in closer than we think.”

Cap says, “Well, that's about right. Maybe we ought to turn back north or cut all way off.”

Gene says, “No, I think it's right ahead of us.” Gene leans over to the radar while keeping a hand on the wheel. Cap moves back, and then Gene takes took a brief look into the radar funnel. “Yeah, it’s straight ahead, Cap.”

Cap says, “We got to be careful. We're pretty close and I don’t have it.”

The scene cuts up to Hutch again, and we look down over the bow with him. There, dim and dark beneath the surface is the rippled sand at the bottom of Lake Michigan, passing slowly underneath the Queen. Hutch’s eyes are wide and intense.

Back in the wheelhouse, Gene says, “There's nothing along here, no reefs or anything, right? No sandbars. Right? Just that one directly north of the dock. Right?”

Cap turns away and paces around the wheelhouse once. “I'm not real sure. Dammit.” He looks at Gene as though he were accusing him: “We should've come out here with the boat when it was clear and did some radar practice. Dammit. What was I thinking? Boy, am I an idiot. A greenhorn mistake. I been out in this stuff a thousand times, could find my way around the Islands like I was blindfolded. But that was because I practiced when the weather was clear. I'm telling you, I know better.”

Gene says, “Too late now. But –”

Cap puts on his commanding voice. “We're heading north. We got to.” He reaches to take the wheel from Gene.

Gene grips the wheel slightly more tightly and looks squarely into Cap’s eyes. He speaks with forced calm, “Cap, you’ve got to stop this nonsense. You're getting all confused. Maybe you're just tired.” There was a moment of silence. Cap averts his eyes. Then Gene adds, softly, “I’ll tell you what you gotta do, you gotta stop staying out so late.”

Cap backs away and thunders, “Don't tell me what I’ve have to do and don't have to do.”

Gene says evenly, “You're putting everyone on this boat in danger.”

Cap’s eyes widen and his face begins to flush as he searches for word. Then he thunders again, “Danger?! I'm on top of everything. Everything that happened today, it's –“

Gene interrupts him, but tries to maintain an even keel while looking out into the fog: “Don't start getting yourself all worked up. We'll talk about it later, we're lost in a fog right now.”

Cap paces back and forth across the wheelhouse: “If I want to talk about it now, we pull back the damn throttles and talk about it now.”

Looking out the windows still, Gene rolls his eyes and says boldly, calmly, “Oh, cut the crap. But let me say this: it's more than just not getting enough sleep, Cap. You’re drinking way too much. You keep coming down to the boat in the morning smelling like a goddamn barroom. How late you getting home every night?” There is a slight pause before Gene plunges in: “Were you drunk this morning?”

Cap’s voice lowers into a sharp growl: “I don't have to put up with this crap.” He turns to leaves the wheelhouse, putting his hand on the doorknob, obviously in preparation for a wildcat strike.

Gene coolly takes the throttles and pulls them back. The engines fall quiet and the Queen slows further, now adrift a short distance from North Skunk Island, which is still covered in moderately heavy fog.

The scene cuts to a shot of Hutch looking back at the wheelhouse. He sees Cap standing at the port side door facing Gene, not the lake. Hutch turns and looks down into the water. We see the sandy bottom, rippled. It appears shallower. Hutch looks up and back again. From his view, he sees Gene barking at Cap.

The scene cuts to the wheelhouse, where Gene says sharply, “O perfect. Now you're going to storm out of here and leave us lost in the thickest damn soup we've ever seen.”

Cap scowls: “I’ve seen lots worse than this, Halverson – and I ain't even got any trouble with this stuff. I’m just getting my bearings on a new run. It’s what captains do. Every place is different. Hell, every radar is different. And I wasn't goddamn drunk, dammit. You go around making accusations like that and I'm packing my bags and hitting the trail.”

Gene looks out at Hutch, who quickly looks off into the distance. Hutch is uncertain what is happening. Up in the wheelhouse, Cap continues, “What would you do? Eh? You think you know everything. You don't know crap.”

Gene lets go of the wheel and turns to him, as the Queen drifts in the fog: “All I know is that you can't seem to get the elementary facts straight, all morning long. We're just about to come on that dock, and I think the radar picture is pretty good. But you want us turning north off into some damn place where you think it’s going to be safe. We know there’s a sandbar that way, though. You forget that? You got mixed up about ships that are just a couple miles away and coming straight at us. You think the one on the left is the one on the right… or… or whatever it was. You’re completely confused and you almost turn us right into the side of a ship.”

Cap mumbles, “I would have got it straight.”

Gene says, “The booze is affecting your judgment. Or the lack of sleep. But I think –”

Angrily, Cap says, “All right. All right. That's it. I ain't gonna put up with this. I don't need this. I’m almost retired. Hell, I am retired. I don’t need this kind of aggravation. I was doing you a favor coming to work up here.”

Gene is not moved. He speaks slowly, “You could do me a bigger favor by coming to work rested – and sober.”

Cap’s face flushes red. “You could do me a favor by keeping the mouth of that bitch of yours shut. She's on me every time I set foot in the house. I am goddamn sick of having to defend myself all the time.”

Gene hangs his head. “What's that got to do with what we're talking about, which is that you're coming to work half in the bag? My wife has nothing –”

Cap: “I would never come to work drunk, never!”

Gene: “Then at least liquored up. I can smell it, Cap.”

Cap says stoutly, “I am fully capable of performing my duties, and if you have doubts about me, maybe the time has come, much sooner than I thought, to get on my horse and get on out of town before the shooting starts.”

There is a pause. The Queen sits still in the calm waters near the island. Hutch keeps watching the bottom and now and again turning to look back at the wheelhouse.
Gene relents, “Can we talk about this later? We're standing here, for the third time today, wondering what to do in the fog. Can't we get this boat to the dock without you throwing a fit and going off for a long pout? Can't we? We're just drifting along as if we got all the time in the world. But goddammit, I want to get this boat in safely.”

Cap says, “I want to get my passengers on shore. Get the job done, every day, day in, day out. I’ve never shirked on my duty? I’ve never been in a condition that I couldn’t perform my duties to the fullest. You started this bullshit.”

Gene sighs.

Cap’s face suddenly brightens and he points out the windows. “Hey, Hutch says he's got something. What is it? He says it's the dock, right over there.”

From the wheelhouse, we see Hutch down on the bow motioning with one arm and pointing with the other. We see it a moment later, Peltier’s long wooden pier at North Skunk Island, looming as a very pale shape in the dense fog, no more than a hundred yards away.

+++++++

Now the scene cuts to a shot of Hutch, Will, and the three other boys walking in the dark over a low ridge of sand in the dark. We can barely see that the ridge is covered in dune grass. The boys walk down a short, sandy path cut through the grass. They come through a line of tangled dune bushes and emerge on a narrow beach leading down to Grand Traverse Bay. The dark surface of the water glitters under the stars. Far off, at a great distance, perhaps 20 miles, a few lights twinkle on the coast on the far side of the massive bay. A large group of people is gathered close to shore around a small fire made of burning driftwood.

A boy greets Hutch, “Hey, man. Glad you got here.”

Hutch nods and says, “Yeah.”

Boy 1 says, “This is a perfect night. Man, are there people here. Some I haven’t seen before. Chicks!”

Hutch looks around the crowd of teenagers, looking like faux-hippies mostly. They’re wearing rowdy, tattered dress, the usual stuff, beads and fringes and jeans. He looks over the girls, who are dressed in jeans or shorts, with T-shirts or thin halter tops. Most of them have straight, blonde or light brown hair.

Will strolls up to Hutch. He has a can of beer in his hand already. Holding up his can of Pabst, Will says, “They got a lot of booze down here, man. We shouldn’t have worried.”

We look off to the side of the crowd, and there is a rickety, sagging picnic table with lots of beer and other bottles and boxes on it.

Will takes a long pull from his can of beer, a Stroh’s. Hutch looks at him mild surprise, at the way he’s handling the beer, drinking it so quickly, so at ease with the booze.

Will says, “I gotta get started.”

Hutch chuckles: “Yeah?”

Will says, “Get yourself a beer, man.”

Hutch says, “I will.”

Will wanders away. There are some shouts, joyful outbursts. Someone starts to dance on the beach because the radio station from Traverse City is playing Three Dog Night belting out “Momma Told Me Not to Come” in the tinny sound speakers of the radio.

People start singing to the song with loud cheers and shouts – and then loud laughter at their own antics. Others start dancing along.

That ain’t the way to have fun, son...
That ain’t the way to have fun.
No! No!

Hutch watches the girls move their hips. He just watches, smiling faintly, mesmerized, but trying to keep some kind of cool look on his face.

A boy holds up the radio and says, “Anyone got anything better than this?”

A girl says, “That’s it – all we got.” She takes the large transistor radio from him and fiddles with the dial to get better reception. Another song begins.

It’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” There are groans and laughs. A boy dances foolishly to the lilting song. The girl smiles and keeps it on the station.

But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red,
Crying’s not for me, oh...
I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining,
Because I’m free… Nothing’s worrying me.

The crowd cheers briefly at the boy doing his silly dance. The dancer slows. There are shouts for the girl to turn the station. There are more laughs, and then some of the girls try to join the boy’s silly dance to the silly tune.

Hutch stops watching all that and looks around, lost for a moment, unsure what to do. Then he sees that girl again, and his heart jumps into a pounding rhythm. He has to catch his breath. Her dark blonde hair is loose and long. She is barefoot now, dressed still in those bell bottom jeans, but now a silky green blouse that is tasteful and demur. He actually puts his hand on his chest and turns away. He looks out over the darkened surface of the water. Lights dozens of miles away across Grand Traverse Bay glimmer in a line on the far coast. Bright stars twinkle overhead. He turns back and sees that she’s over by the picnic table, and Hutch watches her amid the hubbub, as she looks over what she wants to drink. She picks up a can, but he can’t see what it is. She wanders toward the dancers, smiling, at her ease, moving her hips a bit to the bouncy beat of the B.J. Thomas song. Hutch is enthralled, as we see.

Hutch says, with a nervous swallow, to a boy standing nearby, “Hey, Randy, who is that chick?” He points her out to Randy.

Randy says, “You know... I can’t remember her name.”

Hutch says with a laugh, “Lotta good you are.”

Randy shrugs, smiles, and says, “Hey, man.”

The silly and famous raindrops song has ended, but still moving to imagined music, the girl is wandering through the crowd and getting closer to Hutch. Then she notices him and looks him right in his eyes. She turns and walks straight toward him with her arms out and a gentle swing of her hips. We see that it’s a can of Coke in her hand.

With a bright lovely smile, the girl says, “It’s you.” She cocks her head to the side.

Hutch tries to look completely at his ease – and succeeds. He hooks a thumb in his pocket and says, “It’s me?”

With an alluringly smile, the girl looks him over as she keeps on swaying slightly to the song that has come on the radio. She says, “You don’t know me?”

Hutch hesitates, obviously thinking about the best – no, the perfect thing to say.

Then he says, trying with all his might to be witty, “Well, if you want to get technical, I don’t.” He resists looking embarrassed.

The girl says, “But you remember me?”

Hutch is suppressing every emotion, trying to be coy and witty and teasing: “Yeah, well, I think I do.”

The girl is at her ease, playing the game: “If you were to be non-technical, what would your answer be?”

Hutch lets out a nervous laugh. Then he says, “I haven't seen you up here yet.” This doesn’t sound quite right. He looks down abruptly and rubs his toe in the sand. He sees her bare feet, her toes half immersed in sand, her toenails painted a shade of red.

The girl says, “I come up a lot, but I haven’t been this year. We just got into town a few days ago. Well, not a lot, but quite a bit.”

Now having something to talk about relaxes Hutch a little: “Who’s we?”

The girl says, “My family. We live out on Neegan Lake. You’re one of the new guys in town, on the new boat, right? Don’t even bother denying it, because I know who you are.”

Hutch says, still trying to be Oh so cool, “You seem pretty up on things despite being here only a few days.”

The girl smiles and sways her head to the dim music: “That’s me.”

It’s just dark enough where they stand for Hutch to look her over intensely for a moment, before he says, “So who are you? Who... I mean, Hi, I'm Hutch.”

The girl says, “Hutch? That is a very fascinating name. I've got to hear the story behind that one.”

Hutch doesn’t take the bait for now, “And yours?”

The girl takes a sip of her Coke and says, “Lois. Lois... Fricker – I know, I know, it's a really weird name. Everybody has to laugh at it, so go ahead and laugh. I don’t mind.” Hutch had appeared about to chuckle, but when she says this, he finds a way to control himself. Lois says, “It's got a story, too.” She seems proud of the name.

Keeping his head about him, Hutch says, “It's not weird, just different.”

Lois says, “Thanks, but I know otherwise. It’s hideous. It sounds like... well, you know what it sounds like. But it’s me, Fricker, Fricker, Fricker, and I’m not what it sounds like. So, come on, tell me the story of ‘Hutch,’ Hutch”

Hutch says, “You mean the name? It isn't much, really. I guess it's kind of funny. When I was a baby my Mom says I wouldn't go to sleep very well, so she tried all kinds of ways to get me to sleep, and for some reason she pulled out the drawer to a hutch in the dining room. You know? A hutch? Where you keep the good dishes.”

Lois says, “Yeah.”

Hutch says, “You get it?”

Lois smiles very coolly, “I think I got it, Hutch. A hutch.”

Hutch is thinking up witty things to say, “You interested in this kind of thing?”
Lois gives him a look with hooded eyes, “Most definitely.” She cocks her hips slightly and takes another sip from the can of soda.

Hutch draws a breath and laughs: “Anyway, it was a big wide drawer, I guess. It's gone now. She put me in there and I went to sleep better than any place else. So I guess for a few weeks she had me sleeping in a hutch. Or something like that. Get it? Someone said I was the ‘baby in the hutch,’ and that got shortened to Hutch, and they started calling me Hutch and it stuck. Been that way ever since.”

Lois says, “That is such a cool story. You still sleep in a hutch?”

Hutch has to think fast to respond to this surprise turn: “Nope, but I wouldn't mind trying if I could find one big enough. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad. Maybe I’d still like it.” Hutch looks pleased with his wit.

Lois says, “Where you from, Hutch?”

Hutch: “Erie... Pennsylvania.”

Lois: “Really. I heard something like that. That doesn’t happen often.”

Hutch: “What?”

Lois: “That a rumor is about right.”

Hutch laughs: “I suppose.”

Lois says, without a hint of embarrassment, “I was just going for a walk down the beach, Hutch. You want to join me?”

Hutch marvels at her and says, “Yeah. I think so.”

Lois: “You think so?”

Hutch laughs again, this time nervously: “Yeah, it’d be cool.”

Lois: “O.K., then.”

As they turn to go, the dancing suddenly gets a little crazy as Tommy James and the Shondells wail “Mony Mony.” A boy spins out of control, stumbles away from the group and into the surf, where he falls in very shallow water.

Here she comes now, say, Mony Mony.
Shoot 'em down, turn around, come on, Mony.
Hey, she give me love and I feel all right now.
You gotta toss and turn in the middle of the night,
And I feel all right.
I say Yeah (Yeah) Yeah (Yeah)…

There are hoots and shouts, whistles and some laughter. The dancing gets wilder, and more kids join in. The scene cuts to Will laughing a little too heartily, almost foolishly. A girl near him moves away a step or two. Will winds up on his knees in the sand pointing at the boy who fell in the shallows, who looks none too happy as he rises to his feet, his clothes dripping with wet sand.

Hutch says, “Things are getting a little crazy.”

Lois says, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

The scene cuts to a short time later as Hutch and Lois walk down the narrowing beach in the darkness away from the fire. There are a couple of other sets of black shapes, couples walking up or down the flat, narrow strand. A breeze tosses strands of Lois’s hair.

As they stroll slowly on in the darkness, close to the barely moving waters of the bay, Hutch says, “Do you know my brother, Will, the one with the blonde hair... bit of a dorky guy?”

Lois says, “I met him.”

Hutch says, “Really! When?”

Lois: “Downtown. He told me about you, actually, and I figured out who you were when you were talking with him. I saw you down on the dock when the Queen came in the first night I was in town.”

Hutch pauses to absorb this. She is watching him as he is watching her: “Where are you from?”

Lois says, “Grand Rapids. Michigan. It’s a big city down south of here. My family comes up to our cabin on Neegan Lake every summer. We spend at least a month here every year.”

Hutch: “That’s cool.”

Lois: “You know the lake?”

Hutch, “Yeah. I know where it is. I’ve heard about it. But I haven’t been out there yet.”

Lois: “It’s not far from town. We've been coming up here since I was a little girl. My Dad bought our place on Neegan Lake and we’ve been coming every summer since. We just got into town on Wednesday. I heard there was supposed to be a big party tonight.”

Hutch: “Seems like it's a regular thing.”

Lois: “Pretty much – when summer starts really cooking.”
Hutch looks back at the party now in the distance behind them, back up the beach, Hutch asks slowly, “You come to these things often?”

Lois is cautious, trying to sense what would be best to say: “Yeah. I guess... Not really. I gotta admit that it isn’t that big a deal. I enjoy it all right every once in a while.”

Hutch slows down and notices that she has nothing in her hand, “You want something more to drink.”

Lois stops and says, “How about you? You don't look like you’ve had anything yet. Your brother, though, he's already had a couple cans of Blue Ribbon firmly in his grasp.”

Hutch turns to head back: “You noticed. But Stroh’s seems to be his thing. Strange as it seems, it looks like he's going to be down here often.”
Lois: “Why strange? He not a real party hound?”

Hutch: “I didn't think so, until this month. Almost until this night. But it looks like he’s really digging it. Never would’ve thought.”

Lois says, “He isn’t the kind?”

Hutch chuckles knowingly: “Not at all.”

The scene cuts to a shot of Will, back near the fire, dancing about, nearly alone, running in and out of the shallow water. He finds the can of beer he left standing in the sand, but as he goes to pick it up, he kicks it over. He laughs and slumps to his knees. A girl nearby turns to look at him kneeling in the sand. She smirks at him behind his back, showing that she thinks him ridiculous. He shakes the can and then tips it up to drink the dregs. A bit of sand sticks to his lip.

Pausing to Write amid the Graves

2008-04-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

Before our visit to Gettysburg and its battlefield, we enjoyed several busy days in Philadelphia, where we took in all the famed historical sites at the center of the old downtown. They were certainly worth seeing -- at times almost thrilling to see. But we also enjoyed just as much our tour of the area called Society Hill just south of the historic district, where there are dozens of church buildings, housing active congreagtions, amid the restored rowhouses that Philly is famous for. Along with all the churches were many adjoining cemeteries, graveyards being of one of our family's common foci during vacations. I have always loved visiting cemeteries, and Logan has become enamored of the practice as well. Even Marsha has long been fascinated by cemeteries. Shown here is a shot of Logan in one of those Philly church cemeteries on Society Hill. He asked us to move on to the next church down Pine Street while he stayed behind and sat on a cement bench. There he took out his notebook and set to work on some piece of writing he had been laboring over during vacation. Upon our return, I found him still there at work. I never found out what he was writing, though. These matters remain pretty private for teenagers, generally speaking.

I have long pondered my interest in cemeteries. Seeing that generations passed on is always of great interest. And seeing a tangible sign of their passing, the sign being the graves, somehow enriches one's understanding of the past, makes it more real, penetrates one's excogitations on history with a striking sense of reality. In this particular cemetery, found in the courtyard of the Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, were located the graves of several Native American leaders who were among the first Natives to sign a treaty with the newly created (by revolutionary war) United States of America.

Gettysburg

2008-04-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

It was our annual vacation last week, spring break for our boys and Marsha. We went to Philadelphia and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was another in our series of history vacations. And enjoyable it was.

What do we seek when we go to a place like Gettysburg? What is important about seeing the place, walking over the terrain? The photo is a shot of my 15-year-old Logan charging, a bit too merrily, up the slope toward the momentous pivot of the Gettysburg battlefield, a place called the Bloody Angle, which is now and was then no more than the edge of a small farm field with a low stone wall that is mostly fallen down. The corner in the wall that came to be called the Bloody Angle, upon which I stood to shoot this photograph, is just a couple hundred yards up a shallow slope from the Emmitsburg Road, on which two cars are passing in the distance behind Logan (that’s Marsha walking behind). Close on the right, out of the photo, is the end of the village of Gettysburg, with its many shops and motels, just 300 yards away. In the distance, about 3/4s of a mile off is the monument to the soldiers of Virginia and General Robert E. Lee, which stands at about the center of the Confederate line of 12,000 soldiers who charged the Union defenses on Cemetery Ridge across the intervening crop fields on July 3, 1863 -- famed Pickett’s Charge. We walked the length of the charge twice, once to, once from the Lee momument.

These are difficult questions, ones that hold thousands of thinkers in thrall. Why do we seek to remember? Even, what do we seek to remember?

First, for me, I seek to know the terrain because Gettysburg is so much discussed. Thinkers have long pondered and written about the war that Gettysburg stands at the center of and the battle itself and lately even more to the short speech that played an early role in the ways our nation remembers this battle, Lincoln’s address at the National Cemetery, which is a just a couple hundreds yards in back of the Bloody Angle. One who is an American and a thinker and reader, practically speaking, wants to know a good deal about such an event, for other thinkers have written and keep writing about it in great detail, seeking its meaning, sensing that there is great meaning to it. Knowing the event pays off, unlike some other much-discussed features of our culture. Further, of course, war and battle are compelling and enlightening in general, and since Gettysburg was the site of our nation’s most famous and most discussed battle, it is almost certain that those who study it will find it compelling and enlightening.

But of course, the act of remembering, of trying to know a past event of this kind, has other higher purposes. Trying to know the battlefield better is for me part of an effort to fathom the meaning of the battle, the war, and their aftermath. I hope that by physically standing on the ground that I know so well in my mind from books and two previous visits will somehow deepen or improve upon what I think of the event and to fathom what others think of it in all that complexity and diversity. I sense it strongly that I can just stand in such a place, I can make better sense of what happened there.

So did my visit, my third to Gettysburg, achieve these purposes? I don’t know yet. I expected to be deeply moved, but I felt little. I expected to witness Marsha or my boys being moved, for none of them had been to Gettysburg before. But they didn’t have much to say about what being on the battlefield meant to them and little in their outward behavior suggested what they were thinking or whether they were feeling something profound. But I continue to ponder these things. I don’t want to create artificial reflections, cook up some profound jibber-jabber because I expect profundity and wisdom of myself. I want to be authentic, to describe what is truly happening in my mind and soul as I ponder what happened at Gettysburg as a result of the visit to the site where the battle took place.

Yet despite my lack of feeling, I remain fascinated with Gettysburg, I suppose, obviously, because it is a pivot of that great war, which makes it a great pivot in our national history, which makes it a pivot in world history, even in the history of humankind, which makes what happened at the Bloody Angle a pivot of almost unfathomable moment. Something vast and terrible and wondrous and great in human history turned at that place on the afternoon of Pickett’s Charge to the stone wall, with the weight of all the events leading to the place and the moment pushing behind all those soldiers on both sides. Not that there weren’t other pivots -- and many have been the pivots proposed. This time around, I learned a new one while skimming a book in a Gettysburg book shop: that the battle for Culp’s Hill on Day Two of the battle, Saturday, July 2, 1863, was probably the greater failure, for the Confederacy that is, than the failure at the Bloody Angle the day after. But it seems to me in all my studies of this event that the assault at the Bloody Angle is the most telling axis of the war. But beyond this, for now, I am empty of deep thought and deep feeling, as I have often been when pondering what happened at Gettysburg.

I’m O.K., You’re O.K. -- Terrorists Are O.K., Too

2008-04-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

Well, isn't this just peachy? I write a couple pieces about how diverse and tangled and difficult the study of terrorism is, and I get back two rather divergent responses (see the comments to my last excogitation on 3/27/08) -- one that suggests that all morals are relative and another that claims that it's a perfect black-and-white no-brainer that Islam is evil. Well there you go. It’s a difficult world out there, full of disagreement to the last degree, as I have studied and written about at great length. At least, I have yet another sign that my excogitating is on the mark.

So, let’s start with you Kev, you sly dog. You’re going to try using my questions to you about morally judging the actions of Pizarro (a discussion from Kev’s blog about his bike trip around the world) to trap me on the subject of terrorism? I feel honored. (The photo, by the way, has nothing to do with anything. Just a shot I like of the Lake Michigan shoreline a couple springs ago.)

But your first big point is a little shaky. Are radical Muslims really so alien in their thinking? Hardly. Think of the British colonial war and later the more pernicious American war against the Native Americans. Think of Sherman’s March to the Sea near the end of the Civil War -- which many scholars think is a momentous event in the history of warfare, the moment when someone bumped the world over some moral line by purposely committing terrorists acts against a civilian population. Think of our dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How many civilians were incinerated? 150,000, give or take. For what purpose? Well, wasn’t it to terrorize the Japanese public and government into surrender? Alien? Hardly.

So I don’t see Islamic terrorists as all that alien. But what about this matter of morals? Well, I will ask you similar questions as in our discussion of Pizarro. If you think all morals are relative, which you hint at, what are you proposing to do about terrorism? Just let it continue? You seem to think that’s the way to go. But can you really believe that? You actually hint that since we have no way to say that terrorists are wrong or bad, there is nothing we are morally permitted to do about terrorists. In fact, there is even a deeper hint in your comments that you might actually think that reason requires us to regard terrorism as good -- that because terrorists regard their terrorist actions as values of good to them, we are required to accept those values as good.

But let’s set those strange hints aside for the moment. You make no guess about what causes terrorism or what might cure it. But let’s imagine that you really do want to stop terrorism, regardless of those hints that you think we’re morally helpless in this situation. If your idea is 1) to blow the hell out of them, and then to hunt them down like dogs and hang them like cats, well, that’s the current course this country is taking in some ways. So you should be happy about how things are going. Let me say that I think that we have the perfect moral right and duty, even the responsibility, to hunt terrorists down and kill every last one of them (with the proviso that the hunting and killing should be performed in moral ways and by moral means). But that’s because I think they’re morally wrong, not because I think they’re morally good or because I think all morals are relative. Or if you’re idea is 2) to just let them go on killing at their leisure, since in your mind everyone’s bad is someone else’s good, well, then I think you’re just a plain ol’ "postmodern" fool. No one is obliged under any moral system to accept the killing of his kith and kin because someone else values the killing of those kith and kin. No one. This is the basic moral right of self-defense, which I believe is one of the very few truly universal moral principles.

So, Kev, I don’t know why you’re bringing up moral relativism. It doesn’t appear to have any bearing on the questions of the causes and cures of terrorism, the subject I’ve been excogitating upon. Look at it this way. If all morals are relative, then we Americans can do whatever we want and destroy terrorists in any way and by any means we wish. Fine. (Let me say, though, that this is why I think moral relativism rather dangerous: it tempts us to think that we can do ANYTHING we wish to get whatever we want.) But if we’re morally good and they’re evil, well, then we Americans also can go ahead and disable or destroy them in any way that is moral and effective. The only problem is if we’re morally evil and they’re good. I’ll have to excogitate on that possibility over the next week.

You’re right about the interpretation of the Bible, of course. But I don’t regard the Bible as the WORD OF GOD or as a sacred set of texts with any authority over me or anyone else, so that point is moot in regard to this issue.

Is There Anything More to Think About Terror?

2008-03-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote last week of terrorism, but just a little thinking can lead to a lot of reading, which then can lead to a lot more thinking, on this topic. Last week, for example, Time magazine put out a list of the greatest recent ideas in various areas. At #4 on this list of so-called revolutionary ideas was the research of a fellow named John Horgan, who has been studying why some terrorists stop performing acts of terrorism in order to cook up new ways to get people to stop committing acts of terror. Sounds like a sensibly promising avenue of study. But the very short article on Horgan’s study of former terrorists didn’t say that Horgan has yet concocted any practical actions or programs for turning terrorists into happy suburbanites. In fact, the article was a bit disheartening because Horgan has discovered that most ex-terrorists haven’t actually come to be any less radical in their thinking. They’ve just given up acting on their radicalism. To me, that finding suggests that when conditions become ripe, these ex-terrorists might see the “good” sense in terrorizing once again. Radicalism doesn’t end; it just goes dormant, or so it seems. Still, I hope Horgan’s study leads to success in ending terror.

And then this week Time had a review of yet another book on how people become terrorists (there have been dozens of such books published before and since 9/11). This one is by a criminal forensic psychiatrist named Marc Sageman (good nickname for a thinker, don’t you think?). The book is entitled Leaderless Jihad. Sageman thinks that terrorists are, generally speaking, not exactly “arseholes,” the view of that British historian I discussed last week, but rather scrupulously morally outraged. To put it bluntly, people who commit acts of terror are pissed off, and justly so, to some extent -- at least in Sageman’s eyes. They’re pissed off about America’s policies toward the various Islamic countries of the Middle East and Africa, before and after 9/11, and before and after the current five-year-long Iraq War. (My accompanying photo is a shot of a display area in the Chicago Merchandise Mart, a cathedral of American consumerism. A teeny part of the society those bomb-happy radicals are so justifiably pissed off about, no doubt.) Sageman thinks America should, as a first step, get EVERY last American soldier out of every Islamic country. He seems to think this would make for a big first step toward the end of radical Islamic terror. Well, there’s another idea to think about.

But then I have started to get more than a little dizzy as I have been uncovering all the discussion and diversity of opinion about terrorism, its causes and its cures. How diverse is it? Well, here’s an indication. I quickly hunted down on the web a massive summary report on the causes of terrorism entitled The Psychology of Terrorism. The report is a straightforward, numbered list of books, essays, research studies, and other reports on the causes and cures of terrorism. It’s just one big long list. One study after another. The report offers a narrative description of each document, most of which were written in the last 20 years. Now, here’s the rub: there are 324 items on the list. 324 separate and detailed and lengthy writings from all sorts of thinkers and researchers about terrorism’s causes and cures. This report can be found at:

http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/208551.pdf

You can draw a rather sobering conclusion about stopping terrorism just by looking at the size and extent of this report: none of these 324 studies, written by thoughtful, earnest, caring men and women of all sorts, has done a damn thing to stop terrorism. Why even bother thinking about it? And yet, I do keep thinking about it. Maybe I will be the hero who will synthesize all this knowledge and hit upon the one cogent and effective social policy that brings an end to terror.

I’m kidding. I’m not that stupid. Or am I? I do keep thinking about this, don’t I?, as though my thinking actually meant something.

Finally, soon to lecture here at MSU is Fawaz A. Gerges, an Oxford University scholar who holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. This learned fellow spent a whole year in 2007 as a Carnegie Scholar living in the Middle East, where he interviewed activists, civic leaders, and mainstream and radical Islamists to figure out what to do about terror. Gerges is writing two books on Arab and Muslim politics, Islamists and the so-called Jihadists. He has written a bunch of books on this subject, such as Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (2007); The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (2005); and America and Political Islam: Clash of Interests or Clash of Cultures? (1999). This learned, brilliant, caring man (presumably) hasn’t yet done a damn thing to stop terrorism that I can see. Boy oh boy, that’s discouraging.

You, my readers -- few, though loyal, as you are -- you know, when you give it just a moment’s thought, that my excogitating will contribute nothing to the understanding of this subject. But such is a life of reflection. Who knows why I feel this mysterious need to write on topics that are so large and complex. But it’s what I’ve been thinking about. And write I must.

If You Miss the Train I'm on

2008-03-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

The boys and I took a walk along the Grand River in Lansing a week or so ago. The River Walk is a nice way to move across town on a sunny day. This is a shot of Andrew, who is 12, standing on a bridge above Pennsylavnia Ave. in Lansing as a train passes on the rail bridge to the north. Drew always has a stick with him, to bust up anything wolrth busting up (as Dad allows). Ice on the Grand is excellent for bashing and breaking. The weather has been cold in mid-Michigan this late winter. We have had only one day in the 50s. That's pretty unusual. I haven't even been golfing yet. This weekend we are supposed to be in the 30s and have considerable snow. Things could be worse, though. Just south of us the floods have been terrible, through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. We just missed out on three powerful storm systems that brought tremendous rains to the Midwest. Some cities got socked with a foot of rainfall, which is, what?, the equivalent of about 72 inches of snow, I think. We avoided the trouble because of a high pressure dome that kept Michigan cold and pushed those storm systems south.

By the way, my Dad, Don, is in a hospital in Lake Worth, Florida, today. He was there last night with a urinary problem. He is in good spirits and doing fine. They were just keeping him to make sure on a couple of tests. His sister Eunice and her hubby Harry are visiting today. They were supposed to go to see the Tigers play in Lakeland, but it looks like that's off for now.

Why Don't You Make That Rage a Double

2008-03-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

I post another shot of Ground Zero from Marsha. The steel post in the foreground is a scaffold support attached to the building she was standing inside of. Her visit to the place have given rise to some reflections on terrorism, which was also sparked by a recent and very widely publicized book on the matter, Blood and Rage, by the British historian Michael Burleigh. Burleigh’s book has been the subject of a number of essays and reviews around the web. It’s an odd one for an academic historian. This history of terrorism, mostly in modern times, describes, of course, the blood (the deeds of the terrorists), but the rage is Burleigh’s own, a rage that he wants all of us to share. He thinks we should all start getting a bit more enraged about terrorism. That’s quite an unusual kind of thesis for a work of academic history.

I have done a lot of thinking about terrorism over the years. Mostly I tend to explore its causes and its justifications. The fine foreign film Paradise Now has been on mind for a couple years. It was about two Palestinian terrorists on the West Bank. It’s implied thesis was that some terrorists, suicide bombers in the case of this film, get in the business (short-term, by definition) because of past personal injustices. But in Burleigh’s opinion nothing quite so high-minded is on the alleged minds of most terrorists. Almost all terrorists are, to Burleigh, to sum it up baldly, assholes. One reviewer describes Burleigh’s conception of these people as:

... the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists -- the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation"...

Happy to spread his scorn to all deserving recipients, Burleigh doesn’t hold back from letting himself feel rage for Westerners who have been terrorists or have sympathized with them, such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. For this guy, terrorists -- whether secular, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise -- they’re all just scumbags. I don’t know. I’ll have to ponder that simple thesis a little more, even though Burleigh tries to drive it home with a sledgehammer.

All that rage that Michael Burleigh wants us to get in touch with reminded me of a book by Bernard Lewis, that famous scholar of Islam who has written dozens of books and hundreds of essays on the West’s relations with Islam in its many manifestations. A recent collection of Lewis’s essays concerned the hate of the terrorists and the rage that that hate fuels. Lewis’s theory is that Islam’s rivalry with the West, which Westerners mostly don’t even pay attention to, has bred this hate. A hate that won’t soon expend the energy with which it produces rage, Lewis believes. And so it goes. Give in to Burleigh’s call for rage, add it to Muslim rage, and we’ll all wind up with a volatile mixture of rages facing off against each other.

It is at this point that I, an ex-Christian, wonder if maybe only some supernatural power, be it Jesus the Christ -- or whatever supernatural power actually exists and can be tapped into -- can rescue us from the armed conflict that this great big ball of tangled rages will almost surely aggravate and escalate. This is the point at which I still see the sense in turning to God or the Gods, the point when neither the scholarly tomes of human beings nor our war-making seem to be getting us anywhere in ending this conflict. Helpless, I feel drawn to prayer, to the hope that “Something More” is listening, cares for us all, and will DO something to stop us before we carry ourselves away in rages from a hundred competing sources.

Slightly Above Ground Zero

2008-03-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Marsha, my wife, and three of her seven sisters gathered in New York City last weekend to celebrate her sister Patty's 50th birthday and to see Patty perform a requiem as part of a Houston-area choir at New York's Carnegie Hall. Here is a shot of (l to r) Marsha, Patty from Houston), and Laurie (from Dallas) at their hotel restaurant in southern Manhattan.

In fact, three of the sisters stayed at a hotel just a block away from Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Center, which was bombed by jetplane in 2001, as probably just about everyone knows. The ladies visited Ground Zero, but there were no good viewing areas of the construction activity along street level. But they found a spot on the mezzanine in a financial center next door to their hotel. This spot has a viewing area from which people can watch what's going on at Ground Zero from a little higher up. Marsh took a number of photos for me, and here is one, probably her most artistic shot (she liked the marble floor shown in the foreground). The steel support in the foreground is part of a scaffold on the side of the financial center. I will pst another shot of Ground Zero in a day or two.

Probably, the End Is Not Near

2008-03-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

The first sentence of a recent Scientific American article “The End of Cosmology?” which was publish in February, deeply caught my attention. It concerns a topic I have been pondering for decades:

One hundred years ago a Scientific American article about the history and large-scale structure of the universe would have been almost completely wrong.

The central question is, Will that continue to be the case, or are we reaching the end of knowledge, at least in cosmology, which concerns the physical properties of the universe? This has been a chief interest of mine. My idea, influenced, it appears, by William James’s ideas on similar matters, has been that the probabilities are against the end of knowing. Everything has kept changing right up to the moment when that SA article was published. Knowledge has kept increasing, sometimes in huge bounds forward or upward or some-ward. The big theories have kept changing in one theoretic revolution after another. Probability suggests that change in fact and theory will continue, since up to this moment fact and theory have kept changing. Further out or up or somewhere out there, there also stands the question of super-nature, super-cosmology -- that is, God or the Gods and his or their dominions. Ideas about that big topic keep changing, too.Should we not expect, on the probabilities, that ideas of nature and super-nature will keep on changing, even that some day people will look back on the ideas that thinkers entertained or adopted in our lifetimes as silly? The probabilities seem strong. Back in 1908 scientists thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy, a lone island in the universe. They thought a void surrounded us. Now we know that this galaxy is one of more than 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. (400 billion?! That’s a fact so hard to get my own mind around, the idea of 400 billion vastly complex objects, that I personally have to take it on faith [which could be the subject of another excogitation].) In 1908, the article says, scientists agreed that the universe was static and eternal. There was no theory of a big bang. They didn’t understand the origin of elements in the first nanoseconds of that humongous blast (not that I understand that; again, I accept such a theory on faith -- and provisionally at that). That space is expanding and curved (I can’t even understand either of those purportedly interlocked ideas, much as I once tried) and that it is buzzing with radiation (evidence of the bang itself) also were not known. That's hardly a knock on the scientists of old. No one had yet designed the modern technologies that would reveal these facts -- which are truly known as facts to only a very small group of people who can understand and demonstrate them. So, big changes have occurred in the last 100 years in how we conceive (most of us by faith) of this now finite universe. The photo, by the way, is a shot of my daughter Miranda and her cat, who has gone to her great reward. Misty was always watching life from the top of those steps in Miranda and Art's Copper Harbor cabin.

My questions are, Will those conceptions change? Will the facts change or be added to? Will the big, overarching theories change? Scientific American thinks that future thinkers might not produce all that much more empirical knowledge or radically different interpretations of it. One of the reasons, the article says, is that the universe might be wiping out the evidence it has left behind of its origins. The recent work of cosmologists suggests, to the writers and editors of Scientific American, that the end of knowledge could very well at hand. Can it be? I wonder. The probabilities are against it, as I say. But probabilities have failed. Exceptions keep occurring. Sometimes the end of some inquiry comes. Perhaps next, we will also meet God or experience super-nature -- or maybe that event will wait for thousands of years if it comes at all. Or maybe it will take place tomorrow, if I die, if God or Gods exist, and if there is an life to come in which human beings encounter God or Gods. All that keeps a fellow excogitating, no?

Yeah, yeah, I know. The scientists at Scientific American don’t mix considerations of nature and super-nature. So what? I’m doing the excogitating here.

God Said Something to Me

2008-03-07T08:01:00.001-08:00

A: You mean to tell me that he doesn’t believe in the Bible?

B: It’s slightly different and worse. He doesn’t believe the Bible is the Word of God. It isn’t a revelation from God. So what he’s saying is not that he doesn’t believe IN the Bible, but that he doesn’t believe the Bible has any special status, any special authority to tell us who or what God is or even what the truth is. The Bible isn’t sacred, set apart, or holy, perfectly pure. It has no more sacredness than the letters of any Joe Schmoe.

A: That’s weird -- really, really weird.

B: Not really. It’s “God without revelation.” That’s the title of an article I was reading about this guy’s latest book. And that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking is closer to what I think is the truth about the Bible. What this Brit means is that there is no way for us to determine to a reasonable level of confidence that the Bible is the one, sole Word of God. It might be, I guess you could say. But we can’t prove it, and, more to the point, it isn’t very likely that it is.

A: “God without revelation.” Fancy words for atheist, if you ask me.

B: No, no. This guy believes in God. Or so he says. But he just doesn’t believe that he or we can know what or who God is, for sure. The Bible gives a bunch of old guesses, inklings, about God. Ancient guesses, actually, thousands of years old. But there is no -- there CAN be no -- final answer. Those old guesses are no better than the guesses of today.

A: Kind of like he’s throwing out the whole Bible, seems to me. But wait. What the heck is up with that photo you put up with this post?

B: It’s a scene from the U.P., a lawn scene. An inflatable Easter Bunny on a lawn as winter finally begins to let go up there. From a couple years back.

A: That got something to do with this topic?

B: Well, I guess it could be some kind of a revelation, in a sense. In the gray drabness of the world of a late U.P. winter comes a sign in the form of a plastic bubble of pink shaped as a bunny.
A: Very funny. So you and this joker want to throw out the Bible?

B: That’s right, in a way. Actually, what we’re doing is lowering its status.

A: To say the least.

B: But the guessing about God that the Bible’s authors did might still have some use, might still be valuable -- as valuable as anything else, I suppose. Their writings just aren’t authoritative revelations from God himself. They can be as useful as theories about God that anybody else has offered then or now or all the thousands of years in between, at any time in human history.

A: O.K., so who is this guy?

B: His name is John Caputo. But he’s not so unusual. I’m making it sound like he’s the first one to come up with this idea. It’s actually old hat. But he’s written a lot about this kind of thing. It all comes down to the belief that we just can’t determine whether God has spoken definitively, unquestionably, once and for all. Which is what so many people believe about the Bible, like you, I’m assuming?

A: You’re right about that. But how does this weirdo think he knows anything about God?

B: Well, it’s guesswork, I guess you could say. But tat’s just like the writers of the Bible. They were guessing, too. The main point is that the Bible is a collection of the guesswork of 66 authors of the ancient past. Though there might have been many more than 66.

A: I’m not into guesswork when it comes to God.

B: But you don’t have any choice in the matter. That’s one of Caputo’s points. Whether the Bible is the one definitive Word of God cannot be rationally demonstrated.

A: So he says. I believe the Bible is God’s Word.

B: There’s no rational reason to believe that. That’s really Caputo’s main point on the Bible. That’s what I started believing some years back.

A: No reason? Come on. That’s what this nut believes?

B: He’s not so unlike lots of folks. They don’t -- we don’t -- see any good reason, really, really good reasons, strongly convincing reasons, to believe that the 66 separate books that make up the collection we call the Bible, which are thousands of years old, are the Word of God, God’s speaking to humankind, once for all.

A: That’s ridiculous. How can you know anything about God without the Bible?

B: Well, Caputo believes we do the best we can. What I think is that there might be a God -- there might even be a pretty good chance that there is a God. The problem is that none of the current candidates for revelation can be shown, rationally, to really be God’s Word, a revelation from on high.

A: What the heck does this joker believe about God, then?

B: You know, that’s where he’s a little thin. It’s mostly love and justice, as I understand him from the bits and pieces I’ve read.

A: Not much different from what the Bible wants people to do.

B: But without all the doctrines.

A: Where’s all this garbage come from?

B: Caputo’s latest book is On Religion. He’s interesting. He writes like a liberal Christian but he doesn’t have ANY doctrinal beliefs. He talks in Christianish God-lingo, but "God" doesn’t signify anything firm or fixed, because nothing really is firm or fixed. He writes a lot about justice and love and being good in this world, that that’s what God wants people to try to do.

A: So what about heaven and hell and all that?

B: He thinks the idea of God has a function: to keep open the future. He even thinks that the idea of God leaves hope for the impossible: "The name of God is the name of the ever open question." That can mean just about anything, obviously. But I think Caputo is saying that there might be an afterlife where justice is served and mercy given. His main point is that we face what he calls “undecidability.” What kind of being or ground of being "God" is no one can rationally decide. He says that, "No one really knows what they love when they love their God."

A: You actually believe crap like that? You got to know that there are hundreds of Christian thinkers who could answer his every objection.

B: Yeah, I know. I read them, too. It’s a never-ending debate. But it’s been on my mind a lot lately because I saw the title of that article on Caputo’s latest book. My big conclusion, for a while, has been that it’s clear -- to me -- that there is no good rationale for believing that the 66 books we call the Bible are God’s Word, hardly any reason at all. Well, not enough of good reasons to think it’s so. So I think it’s unlikely --

A: I really don’t have time for this stuff. It’s just plain weird.

B: I thought so, too, once. But I changed my mind.

A: You should think about changing it back.

B: You know, I do that, too.

A: But you think there’s a chance there might be a God. You just said that.

B: Yeah.

A: You seem to think there might be a small chance that the Bible is His Word, right?

B: Very small, but yeah.

A: Then... should you take the risk that the Bible isn’t His word?

B: Oh, here we go! Off into Pascal’s Wager, into wagering on God in general. That’s a popular defense of belief. But I don’t want to get into that. It’s a subject for another conversation some time. I’ve given betting on God a lot of thought, too, from time to time. We’ll come back to that one.

A Husky Coat

2008-03-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

O.K. Let's go back north to Miranda's hike last week out to the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. My brother Don tells me that conditions have changed substantially from last week, but I'll tell you about that in a moment. First, this photo is of Miranda's husky-shepherd Capone working his way down a rock-cut on Hays Point, right in front of the lighthouse. Capone is made for winter. He loves the snow and the cold. He even seeks out the drafts in the Davis's Copper Harbor log cabin to get every bit of chill that he can. I believe he could simply curl up in a drift and live for days without any trouble. But he has trouble in summer, when the weather is too warm for his thick coat. Now, what about this week. Don tells me that a hard east wind shifted the ice off CH loose. But that wind was quickly followed by a hard west wind. The ice on the open lake simply loosened more and blew east. It's nearly all gone. Don says that the ice limit is no more than a quarter-mile off shore today. That's not far for Lake Superior. It hasn't gotten cold enough to make enough ice on to stop the ice from shifting around on the winds. That's the way it goes some winters. And it's those winters that you get a lot of snow, when the lake is open and its water evaporate into clouds that drop snow. And that's just what they're getting this winter, a lot of snow.

80 Years of Snowshoeing

2008-03-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

Much time has passed since I took Logan snowshoeing a second time in one weekend some weeks back. Here's a shot from that second expedition in the Michigan woods. This is a photo of (l to r) my brother-in-law Tom Valli and his son Anthony (from Okemos) and me. We are standing on a bluff above the Flat River in the Lowell State Game Area. This park in located east of Grand Rapids about 25 miles and north of the city of Lowell, which is west of Okemos some 50 miles. In the photo, I'm giving you a good view of my old-school snowshoes. I bought these snowshoes when I was in college some 30 years ago. Actually, it was my former father-in-law Stan Van Antwerp, who passed away recently, who bought them for me at a garage sale for $5. They are probably a good 80 years old now. They're made of wood and varnished gut with leather bindings. I've been using them all my adult life. They've been excellent tools, and I expect that they will serve me well for the rest of my life, perhaps another 30 years. The modern aluminum-and-plastic snowshoes are certainly very functional, but I love my old-school shoes.

Does Being Colorblind Divide the Colors Rather Than Unite Them?

2008-02-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about the racial policies of America’s various governments lately. [The photo has little to do with the topic [though, as a sometime literary and film critic, I know I could make something up]; it's a shot of balconies on an apartment building in Chicago.) My thinking became more concentrated on this matter -- I’ve always generally kept up with issues of race and society -- because of a thought-provoking essay I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months back by Ian F. Haney López, a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at California-Berkeley. López believes that what he calls “colorblind theory” is strengthening racism as much as preserving or fostering racial inequalities in this country. Colorblind theory is the idea that America’s laws should take NO account of race in setting policies, making laws, or adjudicating legal conflicts. Colorblind theory, lately, has become a set of principles that many courts have started acting upon and various political scientists and legal theorists have defended. For example, some US Supreme Court justices have has been using colorblind theory in cases the court has heard concerning affirmative action. How do we get rid of racism and racial inequalities? legislators, bureaucrats, and judges ask themselves. Stop making decisions in terms of race, has become a more common answer.

López argues, however, that the preservation of “white dominance” is the true, hidden goal of colorblind thinking:

Contemporary colorblindness is a set of understandings -— buttressed by law and the courts, and reinforcing racial patterns of white dominance -— that define how people comprehend, rationalize, and act on race. As applied, however much some people genuinely believe that the best way to get beyond racism is to get beyond race, colorblindness continues to retard racial progress. It does so for a simple reason: It focuses on the surface, on the bare fact of racial classification, rather than looking down into the nature of social practices. It gets racism and racial remediation exactly backward, and insulates new forms of race baiting.

Whew! That’s a strong and challenging view, which caught me by surprise when I first read about it more deeply. I have been pondering such criticisms of colorblind theory and will probably have to ponder them longer before I make up my mind about how to regard it. In general, I would like to see racial issues addressed as practical matters. The ideal of a non-racial society, if it’s even possible, and the principles of anti-racism are not up for discussion with me (though I take it as crucially necessary for a pluralist always to listen to anyone about anything, even about the craziest or cruelest ideas out there [which will have to remain a subject for another excogitation]). What I would like our policy-makers to ask is, How do we best lessen the racial inequalities in our society and how do we best get more and more and yet more people to pay no regard to race? The goals, for me, are not at issue. The goals are less racial inequality and less racism. The issue, for me, it whether it is best to adopt policies that take account of race or to have policies based on colorblind theory, as some learned legal scholars and judges are now doing? For me, that’s a practical question. What will work best? Because I take this approach, I am not prejudiced against attacks on colorblind theory, nor am I in favor of ending colorblind thinking in policy and legal decisions. I long for a colorblind society and a colorblind personal life. How we get there is the issue.

I have sympathies with colorblind theorists, with the notion that the way to get race finally out of the picture is to take it out completely out of the picture right now. But López argues, effectively, counter-intuitively, that this simply leads to racism, perhaps not more of it right away, but to its persistence at current levels. For this reason, López wants to keep race, wherever pertinent, in every decision of law or policy:

To actually move toward a racially egalitarian society, however, requires that we forthrightly respond to racial inequality today. The alternative is the continuation of colorblind white dominance. As Justice Harry Blackmun enjoined in defending affirmative action in Bakke: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

I have not read a more forceful attack on colorblind policies than López’s (though I am almost certain more are out there in cyberspace). I will be thinking more about this criticism of colorblind theory. I want only what’s best, overall. Whatever can put an end to racism and racial inequality quicker is better. (Whatever theory is used to set policy and make law, racism and racial inequalities will surely be hard to defeat, sort or long term.) The problem is that addressing the cause of certain kinds of social inequalities that racism has brought about might do little to correct the social inequalities that racism has so sturdily built up and maintains.

My cousin Bob Orton and I once discussed these issues at length some years back. I have hopes that he’ll weigh in on this latest turn in the debate.

At the Edge of the Drop-Off

2008-02-28T07:44:00.000-08:00

Miranda Davis, my daughter, who lives in Copper Harbor year-round, sent me a great shot from a few days ago of the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. She took her two dogs, Gus and Capone, on a walk out to the light across the harbor, which is now frozen solid. The shot has the perspective of someone standing up high on something, even though it was taken from on the ice of open Lake Superior. Yes, she was standing up on something, the ice piles that form first at the edge of the drop-off in front of Hays Point, which this peninsula is called. It's quite shallow a good two hundred yards from shore here. I'd say that at the spot at the bottom of the photo the depth is only about six feet or so. This shelf, made of solid bedrock (and so advisable for ships to avoid), runs east quite a way east of the point before the bedrock falls steeply off into the channel that forms the shipping entrance to the harbor. Remember when you were a kid and feared the edge of the drop-off in the inland lakes your parents took you to. There was a drop-off on Sylvan Lake, outside Pontiac, MI, where my Kilpela grandparents lived for many decades when I was a child and teenager. It was always pleasurably spooky to swim to the edge and then dive down for a peek in the dark murkiness. At this drop-off there is no murkiness. The water is stunningly crystal clear. But I've got to admit that I don't quite get the same chilling rush when I swim or paddle out here, as I have done often over the years. Drop-offs don't scare me much any longer. For a ship's captain, it's the "come-ups" that give one the chills, naturally. Thanks, Mir, my nickname for her, which has spread. I'll post another shot from her soon.

A Dunking

2008-02-25T07:26:00.000-08:00

I mentioned Logan's escapades along the Red Cedar River in Okemos last week, and here is the evidence. Log is standing on the ice at the edge of the river. Well, he's no longer standing on it. He's standing beneath it, for right at the edge of the river, at the foot of a short but steep embankment, he went through the mushy ice and hit bottom with on of his brand-new snowshoes, the new high-tech kind, made of aluminum and hard plastic and rubber. I was thinking of the incident as a problem (not enough of a problem NOT to takle a photo, of course), for if I had dunked my old wooden snowshoes (which I will show you in a photo coming soon), I might have had to spend a good ten minutes or more knocking all the ice off them, if not abandoning them altogether. But though Log repeatedly dunked one of the snowshoes he was wearing into the muddy river water, trying to get out, when he did get out, all he had to do was give the shoe a couple of stomps and the ice all fell away. How nice. His other snowshoe went through the ice as well but had found support just above the level of the river on a large fallen branch. We continued our hike for another hour or so.

Independence

2008-02-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

I recently stumbled on an odd book at a fine used bookstore in town entitled The South Was Right. This led me to the discovery, on the web, of a longstanding movement to defend the idea that the secession of the southern states and the creation of the Confederate States of America was a just act on the part of those states. Such was at issue, of course, in the U.S. Civil War. I had known, from skimming a book about current southern confederate sympathizers that my wife Marsha recommends highly (Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz) that there are still thousands upon tens of thousands of people who believe that the “South” had a right to secede from the U.S. -- indeed that any state has a right to secede. But I did not know how many web sites and books have been devoted to the topic.

I’ll admit I have long had sympathies with the South. [The photo is a shot of the far north, along some U.P. highway some years ago. What it has to do with the topic at hand is little, except that the fellow who lives on this plot of land seems to have trying to create some kind of idyllic independent kingdom, with his faux windill and his plastic deer.] Any American, I suppose, should feel sympathy for independence. But under what conditions independence is just and good is a matter of endless, raucous, and sometimes underground debate. It turns out that the subject is germane at this very moment. For this past weekend, the state called Kosovo declared itself a nation through independence from Serbia, an act which Serbia, Russian, and China quickly questioned, and quite strongly (Serbia because of its economic stake and the Serbian minority in Kosovo; Russia presumably because of the difficulties it has had with the independence conflict in Chechnya and other regions within its current borders; and China presumably because of Taiwan). So the principles of the right of secession, or independence, remain central in the world of politics and morals.

The authors of the book I ran across, some fanatic fellow named Walter D. Kennedy, has written other books, some with his brother, about better democratic government and so-called “States’ Rights,” which suggests that his view of the right of the South to secede is inspired in part by his larger desire to justify certain forms of government that he approves of and to restrict certain forms of government that he does not approve of (which means the current federal government of the United States). Funny to me, and often astonishing, how history -- or the myths of the past that we create, as the case usually is -- plays such a large role in the present. For example, the intellectual question of the causes and purpose of the Civil War stirs up considerable and often quite heated debate. Did the North make war to end slavery, the South to preserve it? Or did the North make war to preserve union, the South to withdraw from it? Such questions still at times arouse white-hot passions. Many consider it slightly (or strongly) racist and fully idiotic to suggest that the principal cause of the Civil War was NOT slavery. But I have seen good reasons to think it might NOT have been. It’s hard to step back from the debate of specific historical issues and simply consider them as intellectual issues. For as soon as one takes some positions, even tentatively, such as a position perceived to be in favor of the Confederacy, one is suspected of being a racist or even a supporter of slavery. The Kennedy brothers say, take it or leave it, that they do not support or approve slavery, past or present, in any sense.

This broad, woolly subject is nothing new to me. I’ve been my thinking about it for more than 30 years. What I can say now is that it seems rationally possible to defend almost any moral position on Southern secession, regardless of the harshness with which the two sides often dismiss each other. That is, a thinker could well defend by reason that the South had the right to secede; and that a thinker could also reasonably defend that the South had no such right. Further, what follows from the decision on whether the South was right or wrong is also highly variable and complex. I realize that though each of us wants independence for his state, his county, his township, his family, and himself, none of us has much “independence,” all in all. We are all heavily restricted in many, many ways by our federal government, by our state governments, by our counties, townships, cities, even our families and cultures and societies. Life is so complicated that we seem wholly unable to determine how the specific historical question of the South’s right to independence might apply in each segment of the life of each American, of each person who lives anywhere or will come to live.

The recent defenders of the South’s right to independence have been irritated by the hypocritical application of moral and political principles that have expressed by many American thinkers and leaders of the "North," such as the people of New Hampshire at its founding. The men who established NH’s constitution 200 years ago declared that they have the right to “establish a new government” on their own volition: “... whenever the ends of government are perverted, or public redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to, reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” According to the people of New Hampshire in 1792, it seems, not resisting arbitrary power is absurd. That which was true in 1792, defenders of the Confederacy claim, was equally true in 1861 -- and remains true today (what are they proposing?). It is absurd, they reason, to think that a free people would not resist arbitrary power. This seems a good argument and perfectly in tune with American moral, cultural, and political principles. But the current leaders of and thinkers in the State of New Hampshire might argue, quite easily and reasonably, that the men of the NH past didn’t quite mean what the defenders of the South take them to mean by those 200-year-old words. In principle and in the specific application of principle, they would surely argue, the defenders of the South have got it wrong. It usually depends on what one means by the adjective “arbitrary.” For one mans “arbitrary” is another’s “sensible.” One man’s tyranny is another’s justice. One man’s oppression is another’s necessary social order.

The idea of the South’s being right is an oddball belief. Those who hold it are fighting for credibility, but their views appear to be mostly dismissed or denigrated, probably because of fears of what might follow from the principle that the South had the right to secede. What the implications of the issue are -- how much independence the states of the U.S.A. have a right to -- is beyond the scope of the issue, no matter how one might decide the historical issue. The whole issue is moot as well. For regardless of how one views the justice of Southern secession, we all still live with this federal behemoth that controls so much of our lives. Is someone proposing that some state or set of states start a new civil war against federal “tyranny”? I haven’t heard that one yet. Though that oddball belief, too, is probably out there.

The justice of the South’s secession will be on my mind for a long time to come, probably to the end of my life. Perhaps I will offer another excogitation on the matter some time. Meanwhile, the legality, justice, and morality of national independence will be playing a significant role in world politics.

A Turn in the Red Cedar

2008-02-18T07:53:00.000-08:00

Cousin Kev Koski, on a trip around the world by bicycle, asked for more shots of the MSU campus, and I am willing to oblige, bit by bit. First, I should finally put up a link to Kev's wonderful blog, which I encourage all to read:

http://www.kevinkoski.com/blog/

For you Kev, here's a shot I took recently, just a few days ago actually, on campus. Can you believe this scene can be found in the midst of the small city that is Michigan State University. Some 25,000 people live on campus. An additional 12,000 work on campus every week day, and yet another 20,000 students live just off campus in the surrounding city of East Lansing. This is the Red Cedar River, which runs through the middle of MSU and through a couple of very nice natural areas. It mostly follows a straight course, but it does take a couple of dramatic turns in a couple corners of campus. I will give a special prize (what? a big kiss?) to anyone who can identify the location within, say, a couple hundred yards. I know that there are a few readers of this blog who lived on campus at one time or another, some for a long time, though for many it was a long time ago. But that should not be a problem. This location hasn't changed much in 75 years.

Cops & Killers

2008-02-13T07:23:00.000-08:00

I see a lot of films, but rarely at theaters, because such enterprises rarely offer much that I consider worth seeing. Yet I did see No Country for Old Men, that new film directed by the Cohen brothers, at the theater because it has been judged highly by many of the film critics whom I trust the most (which means that I trust them, at best, about half way). However, I found it a weak film for many reasons, even poorly made at many points, despite far too many panting proclamations that it’s a nearly perfect work of cinematic art.

But a critique of No Country is not my objective here. What I have been thinking about is that I have yet to find any lawmen or lawwomen who have objected to the film’s generalized portrayal of police officers. The central “good” character is a rural sheriff named Ed Tom Bell who at the end quits his job because he can’t hunt down or protect people from the film’s killer, a fellow named Chigurh, the main “bad” character. In my experience and studies, cops are seldom so easily defeated (nor were they so in 1980, the year in which the film is set). Even if one cop might get to feeling spiritually bruised by a stone propelled at him from some sling of outrageous fortune, plenty of other doggone determined and devoted cops always take up the mission to catch a killer, especially one of such horrific cruelty as the one this film depicts (he’s so horrific that he’s rather a cartoon, in my judgment).

Why have no cops jumped up to point out the weakness and inaccuracy of this film’s portrayal of police work? (The photo is a shot of the Ship and Shore Motel in Saugatuck, MI, by the way. There were several sinister motels in No Country for Old Men.) Heck, I’m not even much for cops. As a class, I find them a little too law-loving and autocratic for my don’t-tread-on-me inclinations (vestiges of dreams of Sixties-style hippie-dom, no doubt). Yet I find the portrayal of Sheriff Bell so skewed as to be insulting. I am aware that some have said that this film is not intended as realism, but as an allegory of the darkness of life, a mythic delineation of some of the ways in which human beings can lose all control of evil and in which unbridled evil can wreak so much damage in our lives. If so, the allegory is told in an intensely realistic manner and, thus, owes a great deal to accuracy and plausibility. Yet I have found that seldom, if ever, are cops so beaten down about a killer as callous as Chigurh. On the contrary, they get charged up, gung-ho to the point of obsession, to get their “man,” as the saying goes (though women can kill like this, too, as depicted in the true-crime biopic Monster, which concerns an infamous female serial killer in Florida). The film portrays Sheriff Bell as a symbol of exhausted, bewildered dismay in the face of utmost evil, but I think he is a defective symbol because of the film’s inaccurate, almost contemptuous, portrayal of him. His portrayal wholly falsifies the allegory.

I might write more about this film, which so many have extolled. Some critics have pronounced it one of the great artworks of all time, an assessment with which I disagree quite strongly. The specific topic of the portrayal of police work plays only a very small part in my judgment of the film as very weak art. As I was writing this post, as probably most Americans know, another mass shooting occurred in America, this time in Missouri (within a day or two that shooting was out of the headlines, but not off the minds of the cops). It turned out to have been a businessman with a grudge who shot up some city officials with whom he had had squabbles over a contract. At a time like that, no doubt, people were happy to have cops around. Does this film help us fathom such factual occurrences of mayhem? Hardly at all. Which is mostly why I consider inferior cinema. Though such are matters for a separate excogitation.

I don’t know how to classify this excogitation, my first one. The portrayal of Sheriff Bell is just something I’ve been pondering lately. This is the way it’s going to go in this series, for good or ill. And I didn’t come close to keeping it to 250 words. Try, try again.

Red Cedar Snow-Shoeing

2008-02-12T13:29:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back I told you that I was going to take Logan snow-shoeing in the near future, and we did go out a a couple times a couple weekends ago. We've had other opportunities, but, believe it or not, the weather has been downright frigid and dangerously windy. This shot is from a hike we took in Legg Park, which is a Meridian Township park a few miles from our home in Okemos. It's a place I have explored and photographed on dozens of occasions over the years. The boys and I have taken many walks along this river. I even hiked here with Miranda many times in the past. I wonder how much she remembers of those hikes. The Red Cedar River is pictured here. Before going through the MSU campus and meeting up with the Grand River on its way to Lake Michigan, the Red Cedar courses through this park and Riverfront Park next door. Log is standing in his new high-tech snowshoes on a shelf of ice on the river. No need to worry. The ice was pretty thick and the river rather shallow at this location. I will put up a shot of Log's plunge into the river at another location in the very near future.

The Start of EXCOGITATIONS

2008-02-06T12:05:00.001-08:00

I am going to start a new series of posts on this blog about my life. I intend to label these ruminative posts “Excogitations.” I will keep these posts short, only about 250 words. I am a thinking person who has read and still reads a lot, for good or ill. Much of my adult life has been spent reading books and pondering intellectual issues. I have thought about the economics of life a lot recently and down the years (a book on the notion was recently published, entitled The Logic of Life). I realized that if you were to judge how much I value particular activities by how much time I spend doing them, you would conclude that I value reading and thinking above just about all else besides immediate family.

I have no agenda in writing these posts, though I do believe it is possible that an agenda could develop for one reason or another. But, for now, I’m just going to write casually about what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is usually inspired or motivated by what I’m reading (or writing in other areas). Also, I am going to tack on an art photo when I feel moved to do so. The one posted here is a shot of a power pole near some tall pines. I have many intellectual interests, so I can’t say exactly what might come up. Nonetheless, here’s a short list of some general topics that will surely come under consideration, wide regions into which my mind often moseys:

1. God -– I have always wanted to find out whether he/she/it exists, whether she/it/he can be known, and how I can know her/him/it.

2. Religion -- If we can figure out who God is, what he might want of me -- or all of us -- if anything.

3. Film -- I have been tinkering with a book of film criticism for a number of years.

4. Evil (the human variety) -- I have long brooded on its causes and cures.

5. War -- I ponder this, probably, because there are so many war films.

6. History -- I have been a history buff and interested in the philosophical theory of history for decades. Many eras, from the U.S. to ancient Rome, interest me. But my specialties are probably New Testament Palestine, Constantinian Rome, Reformation Europe, and the U.S. Civil War. (Why these four? Well, there's a subject for an excogitation, no?)

7. Human Behavior -- I am always wondering why people do what they do and think what they think -- why I do and think what I do, for that matter.

8. Strange Beliefs -- I have long ruminated on why people adopt oddball beliefs, true or untrue (does oddballness make a belief untrue?).

9. Literature -- I have read a lot, mostly the standard greats that Humanities major tend to favor or really well-written books. But sometimes a well-turned work of literary entertainment can keep me thinking for weeks.

These are areas of thought I regularly visit during my life. The list is not exhaustive, but it gives a good idea about the areas I might jump into in this series of EXCOGITATIONS.

Who am I writing this series for? I don’t know. For I don’t really know who reads this blog. But I have long aspired to be a writer, and so I am using this blog to write about what I am thinking about, which is usually what I want to write about. That hardly needed saying, did it?

The Family

2008-01-25T08:02:00.000-08:00

O.K., let's conclude this recent series of Copper Harbor photos with a shot of my family. That's me on the left, Captain Ben. Then there is Drew, my wife Marsha, Logan, Miranda Davis, holding her dog Capone, the husky-shepherd, Gus, and then Art, my son-in-law. We are posed at the entrance to the Copper Harbor Marina on the west end of town on New Year's Eve. Winter has gone into full swing since we left a couple days after this photo was taken. The snow squalls have been rolling over Copper Harbor day after day after day, and it looks as though skiing and snowmobiling conditions are downright superb. Head on up for a weekend. Motels are open, and the Gaslight General Store, and the Pines Restaurant, the Mariner, and the Tamarack. I hear the store has an excellent wine selection of you want to add a little romance to your evenings. I'm not much for wine, so you'll have to trust second-hand reports. Lots of winter fun to be had. Don't wait. I'm making myself eager to get back up there as I write this. I just bought Logan a new pair of snowshoes. We're gonna take them for a spin down here in southern Lower Michigan this weekend. I'll post some photos of that soon.

A Stillness on the Harbor

2008-01-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Another glorious winter's day in Copper Harbor. This shot was taken on a sunny afternoon, all too close to sunset, on the trail out to Hunters Point. I was standing just about directly across the harbor from the Copper Harbor Marina. That's the East Bluff in the distance on the right hand side of the photo, and Porters Island in the distance on the left. The Copper Harbor Lighthouse, which is about a mile and a half away, is not quite visible, blocked by that point of land on Porters Island. Again, note the dusting of light snow on the very thin ice in the middle distance of the photo. I'm just about to the end of the photos I have selected from our visit to Copper Harbor over the New Year week. Stay tuned for one more shot from that time.

Caged in Ice

2008-01-23T07:25:00.000-08:00

My son-in-law Art Davis was behaving like an animal and caged himself on the Lake Superior shore recently. The roof of the cage was made of an ice cap that overhung a small, shallow cave in the bedrock along the coast. The bars were made of ice formed by the ever pounding waves and ever whistling winds of Superior. My son Drew took on the role of handler trying to subdue the trapped wild beast. But, alas, ice does not make a good cage, and Art was able to break out quite easily. The boys were messing around on a small island outside Copper Harbor. Actually, this outcropping of ancient volcanic rock is now a small peninsula. It was an islet some years back, when lake levels were much higher.

Cold City

2008-01-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

Here's something different for this blog, a shot of downtown Chicago along the Chicago River. The photo was taken from a hotel room on the 24th floor of the Sheraton in downtown Chicago. Miranda and Art Davis and I gathered in Chicago and stayed at the Sheraton last weekend for the annual Chicago Gift Show. We shop the show for some of the items we sell in the Harborside Shop in the offices of the Isle Royale Queen IV during the summer months. It was bitter cold in Chi-town all weekend. The temp at the time this photo was taken was about -10 degrees F. Wind chills were down in the -30s, and they were even worse up north in Green Bay, WI, where the second Ice Bowl football game was played later this same day. We were in Chicago to develop our business, of course, but we look like pretty small fry when considering the massive business ventures of America's big cities, such as the Trump Towers of Donald Trump, which is the glass building under construction up the river in the right center of the photo. Even in the extreme cold, workers were moving about at the top of the new Towers all weekend long. Art and I were pondering how Trump finances these costly ventures. We could only guess. And how much does such a building cost? Though I have been involved in fund-raising for more than 20 buildings at Michigan State University, I really was quite unsure of my guess. Those Towers and all of Chicago, the city with those big shoulders, makes my life seem pretty puny.

Superior Shoreline

2008-01-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

This shot is of an ice cap at the Hunters Point Preserve, on Lake Superior immediately outside Copper Harbor and directly across the harbor from the Isle Royale Queen IV dock. As I've said, the family took several hikes out to Hunters Point during the New Year holiday week. The conditions were perfect for every hike. I see today, however, that conditions are pretty poor for a hike to Hunters, with heavy snow and a sharp wind blowing up in the Keweenaw.

Ice Forming

2008-01-18T07:36:00.000-08:00

My Dad, Captain Don Kilpela, wrote to me from Copper Harbor yesterday to say that he had been watching an amazing sight on Wednesday morning. The winds along the Keweenaw Peninsula were amazingly calm on Wednesday. Don said he was actually seeing the surface of the harbor gradually freeze in the morning stillness. He sent me two photos of the event that he took from the Isle Royale Queen IV dock, the first looking west, the second looking north. You can see that the harbor has not frozen much yet, which is quite unusual over all time, but not so uncommon in recent years.

But my, how things can change. From the copperharbor.org web site I copied this shot of Copper Harbor from the Jamsen's Fishhouse next door to the Queen dock yesterday, Thursday, and look how the weather has turned.

Home Is Where the Blizzard Is

2008-01-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

Marsha, Drew, and I stopped by our Copper Harbor house while up north over the New Year week. The house is all closed up for the winter, of course, but Marsha had a couple of things she needed to pick up. The shot was taken on New Year's Day, when we had one of those Upper Peninsula blizzards that are localized strikes that can occur anywhere in the region. This day, after several days of perfect winter weather, the local blizzard blasted the Keweenaw while the rest of the U.P. had mild weather. (Downstate, we heard later, had gotten socked with 9 inches of snow the night before, New YHear's Eve. We returned home to Okemos two days later to find all 9 inches waiting to be shoveled out of our large driveway.) This picture is of Drew standing near the picture window in the cabin. You can see the blizzard raging on outside. The temp inside was about 25 degrees. No chance of snow melting off your shoulders inside on this day. We have to be careful not to drag too much snow inside on our clothing, for it will all melt in spring.

Ice Caps

2008-01-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

The family took several hikes out to Hunters Point during our stay in Copper Harbor over New Year's week, as you have no doubt surmised from the shots of the Hunters Point Preserve I have already posted this week and last. On one hike we ran across a number of beautiful and fascinating ice formations, such as the one the family is examining in this photo. That's Miranda Davis, my daughter, kneeling on the left, with Drew standing next to her, and then Art, her husband, and Marsha. We were all taking a close look at this ice cap, which Lake Superior had elegantly constructed with its waves and winds. Ice caps are especially nice early in winter. Later in the season, the formations get covered in snow as the lake freezes farther and farther away from shore. In the distance, take note of the last visible point of land. That's not Hunters Point. It's a rocky point in the center of Porters Island, about a half mile from where we stand. Now, here's a close up of some of the icicles hanging from the ice cap pictured above:

Homes

2008-01-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

The trail to Hunters Point, which we walked several times during our week up north over the New Year, has many nice views across Copper Harbor to the waterfront of the village of Copper Harbor. This photo is of my 12-year-old Andrew standing on the shore near the trail. In the distance is the center of the village. On the left the arrow is pointing at the Isle Royale Queen IV dock, where my parents live, Don and Betty Kilpela. Their home is above the offices of the Queen IV. This is where I work every summer with my brothers in operating the ferry service to Isle Royale National Park, as our family has done for 37 years. On the right the arrow is pointing at the location of Ben and Marsha Kilpela's house in Copper Harbor, which is a block away from the waterfront and can't be seen through the trees. Note that the harbor was free of ice at the New Year. Also take note of that thin ice shelf extending out from the south shore of the harbor. The paper-thin ice was lightly dusted with snow from one of those brief snow showers that pass Copper Harbor all season long. Drew was searching for artifacts and good stones along the shore. My son-in-law Art Davis, year-round CH resident, has got him interested in collecting bottles and electrical insulators, in addition to all his other collecting interests.

Hunters Point Preserve

2008-01-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

There was news this fall about the piece of valuable and beautiful property pictured here, the west end of Copper Harbor (next door to the state marina), which has been successfully purchased to become part of Grant Township's Hunters Point Preserve. The Preserve now extends from the point, in the center of the harbor, all the way west around the end of the harbor, south across the highway, and on up the side of Brockway Mountain just west of town. The photo shows the ice forming onje evening on the shallows at the west end of the harbor the day before New Year's Eve. One of the trails out to the point follows this shoreline. I am a bit of a outdoors libertarian and am loath to sound like a preacher, but we must all work together to keep the Hunters Point park as beautiful and pristine as possible. It's getting lots more foot traffic as a result of all the publicity that came with the fund-raising for and purchase of the property to preserve it from development. But this has meant that the park has been getting some rough use at the hands and feet of some visitors. I encourage you to join together in doing our cooperative best to keep this place as beautiful as it has always been. See this web site for more information on the preserve and its fund-raising activities:

http://www.hunters-point.org/

Ice Overhang

2008-01-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

My cousin and good friend Bob Orton is pictured in this shot, standing with my son Drew on the edge of an ice shelf on Sedar Bay, a wide, shallow indentation in the northern coast of the Keweenaw Peninsula about 30 miles southwest of Copper Harbor. My boys and I visited Bob on December 30 at his house on Sedar Bay and took a walk along the lakeshore in the early evening as the sun was going down -- before 5:00! It's was a very nice evening. Not very cold. No wind to speak of. Take note of the way in which the neverending waves of the calmer periods keep undercutting the ice that the lake builds on shore during the colder, windier periods. These ice formations can build far out on the lake in a long cold-snap, and sometimes can be found miles off the coast. But it was only the immediate shore that was encased in ice this night on Lake Superior in early winter. Drew had no fears of the shelf breaking under his weight, for he doesn't add much to the considerable mass of the ice he's standing on. But it is true that the lake will eventually undercut the ice so much that it will break off and fall of its own weight back into the waves. We found many of these large broken blocks being slowly broken apart into even smaller chunks that evening. You can see a couple of these giant blocks that have broken off in the near distance behind Drew.

Snowfall

2008-01-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

Logan, my 15-year-old, served as my gopher when we went on that snowshoeing hike along the southside of Lake Fanny Hooe during the New Year week, which I discussed in one of my previous posts. The principal task I gave him was knocking the snow piled on branches, as on these well-laden cedar trees. Can you see Log amid the clumps of falling snow? I need this done to protect my camera, which has too often gotten wet from snow-clumps dropping onto it when I happen to bump a branch. We were going through these cedars because I was trying to get into position from some good shots of the Manganese River, which was tumbling along on the day of our hike, since the temps were in the mid- to high 20s.

The result of the tasks I gave Logan is illustrated in the second photo, in which Log shows off the snow that has collected on his head and shoulders. He doesn't seem to mind the snow piling up on him. He doesn't even seem to notice much, since he has that shaggy head of hair, of which he is certainly as proud as Samson (as I once was of my shaggy mane in the days of my youth). Good job Logan. I was glad you were on duty. I got some good shots of the river, too, which I might post. That will have to come after some other shots I have ready to go up.

Icicles

2008-01-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

The weather was, indeed, very nice during our stay in Copper Harbor over the New Year this season (highs in the mid-20s and lows in the teens). Here's a shot of my 12-year-old son Andrew snapping icicles hanging from the eaves of the Davis cabin in town. Art and Miranda Davis, daughter and son-in-law to me, live in the oldest still-inhabited building in the village, built in the 1880s, if I recall correctly. (I am sure Art will correct me if I am wrong, so check the comments to this post if you have doubts.) It has always been strange to me that it can snow so hard for so long in the Keweenaw, such as it did for two weeks in mid-December this year, when the area received about three feet of snowfall. And then the snow-machine will stop because of a slight alteration in the continental weather pattern, and there will be no snow for weeks on end. That was the case just before the New Year, despite the comfortable cold. And now, yesterday, January 8, Miranda reported that there was some light rain in Copper Harbor. That has happened much more frequently in midwinter in the past decade. Something is obviously up with the weather, whether it's something for good or ill. I spoke of this last year on this blog, global warming. The consensus seems even more solid that it is occuring. But I have been reading some articles that make the claim that its results will not be all that terrible. The debate goes on.

Rocks and Winter Waves

2008-01-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

Marsha and I took a drive down the Superior lakeshore at the top of Michigan (west of Copper Harbor) just before the New Year. It was a windy day, though relatively warm. We made several stops along the way, but the wind kept us from staying long in any one place. This shot captures one small scene along the shore. It was taken in Esry Park, a Keweenaw County roadside turnout at Agate Harbor, which is about eight miles west of Copper Harbor. The photo fails to capture the sharp, bone-numbing cold we felt on that day. We were bundled tight with the latest high-tech clothing, but still the unusually damp air stabbed at us. As I say, it was even that cold, in the high 20s on that day. It was a fine day to be looking at the ice sculptures that nature creates all winter long.

Snowshoeing

2008-01-07T11:51:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my last post that snowshoeing is on the rise in the Keweenaw, and here's some proof, Miranda Davis and Logan Kilpela on snowshoes on the Kamakazi Trail on the south side of Lake Fanny Hooe just outside Copper Harbor. I never thought I'd see the day when Miranda would be on snowshoes regularly, but she and Art have taken up the envigorating sport with determination. Logan is wearing Art's shoes, by the way, since I didn't bring up my pair for him to wear. It was a beautiful walk along the shores of Fanny Hooe on this day. I didn't make it far myself. I have been hobbling around inside and out because I've had a stress fracture in my left foot that I am trying to heal. But I managed to limp my way along the trail slowly.

Queen IV Dock

2008-01-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

My sister Jo (Jocelyn) of Calumet and my wife Marsha walked with me on a cold morning in the Harbor up to the Tamarack Restaurant on the main drag. This shot was taken on December 30, I believe. We walked from my parents' place on the waterfront, on the dock and above the offices of the Isle Royale Queen IV, which is in the background of the photograph. And now you see that there is plenty of snow up at the tip of the Keweenaw right now. Go on up and enjopy it when you get a chance. There were some snowmobilers in town over the Christmas-New Year week, but not as many as I've seen in the past during this same period. And I hardly saw any cross-country skiers or snowshoers (though snowshoeing has become much more popular in recent years). Good pancakes from Bonnie and Bill at the Tamarack, as always. Good place to get breakfast in the summer before an Isle Royale day trip.

Dusted Shoreline

2008-01-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

The family, Ben, Marsha, Logan, and Drew Kilpela, went north to Copper Harbor for the New Year, so now I can post some shots from the Keweenaw that are more recent than the one in my last post. Here's a shot from Hunters Point again. This is just outside Copper Harbor itself. Though there has been lots of snowfall and though there is almost two feet of snow on the ground in CH right now, the Lake Superior shoreline was mostly clear. The air temperatures haven't been low enough often enough and Lake Superior has not yet become cold enough to form a lot of ice on the open lake, or even in the harbors of the Keweenaw. Copper Harbor was almost completely open just four days ago (there were two cold nights on January 2 and 3, so things might change). Thus, the shore remains open for the most part all along the Keweenaw Coast. It was a windy and cloudy late afternoon on the day I took this shot (I think it was December 29). It shows a dusting of wind-driven snow on the bedrock and stones not touched by the small Superior waves rolling in.

Winters on Hunters Point

2007-12-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

The snow has been heavy from time to times this December up in Copper Harbor, according to Internet reports and reports home from my daughter Miranda Davis, who lives up there year round. But the forecast is calling for some drizzle or even light rain over the next day or two. I haven't been up there since the early fall, but I do have a shot of the Hunters Point Preserve from a couple years ago, taken on a day of fairly wet snow, when the temps were in the high 20s. If the pictures from the coast I've been seeing lately are close to a true indication of conditions right now, this photo is probably fairly close to what things look like up on the Superior coast outside Copper harbor as of now. This is one my favorite pictures of the coast in winter time. It was taken on my old Olympus digital on one of those brooding days, when the skies were dark and the wet snow was spitting and the waves were coming in with only moderate force, the wind having eased up for a day. The days are short, too. If I recall rightly, this was taken about 4:00 in the afternoon, and it was already getting close to sunset and darkness.

Holiday Table Tennis

2007-12-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

The Holidays and ping-pong, a tradition that goes far back for many American families, and the Kilpelas are one family that is trying to keep this tradition alive. Pictured are my nephew Tom Baumgart (in his late 20s) and my son Drew, 12. I've been laid up with a removable cast, the dreaded boot, for four weeks now (stress fracture from too much tennis), but I still had enough mobility and savvy to hand young Tom a quartet of losses on Thanksgiving Day at our house in Okemos. Drew then took on Tom, but I failed to find out the final results. Drew is just learning, but he is a natural athlete and should turn out to be good enough to challenge the Ol' Man some day. I must admit, though, that I am really the only person striving to keep the tradition alive. I'll keep doing my best. My brother Don and I used to embark on some epic table tennis struggles back in our college days, such as when we decided one Christmas season to have a tournament of the best-of-seven matches, each match being contested by the best-of-seven 21-point games. We got close to getting sick of ping pong by the end, but I don't remember us slowing down even after that epic war was over. If I recall, I won it in the 7th game of the 7th match, many days after Christmas. Don probably recalls it differently, and since we fought about ping pong incessantly back in those days so often, it's only fitting that we woiuld continue to dispute every nuance now.

The MSU Campus

2007-12-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

Cousin Kev Koski, from South America, asked for some photos of the beautiful MSU campus. Kev grew up nearby, but has moved on to Miami and points even farther south. He's currently biking around the world. His blog on that can be found by searching at google. I'll try to remember to put up the address some time soon on this blog. So for Kev here is one shot, of the family, minus Miranda, who is really in a new family of her own now. That's Marsha on the left, Drew (12), Logan (15), and me on campus. We are standing beneath Miranda's first dorm room, in East Holmes Hall on the far east side of the MSU campus. The photo was taken in late October. The vapor lights were already on when we were finishing a fall walk through the gorgeous woods of Sanford Natural Area, which is a place I regularly visit on campus and of which I have thousands of photos. I'll try to post some more campus shots. I sell my work concerning MSU for publications and as notecards in a series I call "Natural MSU."

Melville in Hand

2007-11-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

My 52nd birthday passed in October. My boys were very pleased with their gift to me, which I have in hand in the photo, taken in our living room in Okemos. The book is an illustrated edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, my favorite novel (even though it's hardly a novel in the technical sense, which is a subject for a different blog). I own several editions of the work and have read it many times, but I had requested a nice copy. There is nothing like a fine book in one's hands. I read a few passages to the boys. Logan has already read the work, but he has yet to make it his own. Note the stains on the knees. These are work clothes I am wearing, stuff I put on when doing the repairs and maintenance around the house. It was a Saturday night, and I hadn't yet changed out of the work clothes at the end of a day of putzing around the house.

A Lingering Fall

2007-11-20T13:28:00.001-08:00

I haven't been writing much, it's true, but this transition time is always difficult for me. I find it hard to restart my interest in doing posts about my southern Michigan life in the fall and doing the opposite in the spring, writing post about northern Michigan when I go north to Copper Harbor for the summer tourist season. The fall has been strangely (though the condition is certainly welcome) persistent for many weeks down here in Okemos and throughout mid-Michigan. The weather has been average, but the leaves have been hanging on the trees for a long, long time. Several trees in my yard are just now dropping their leaves, about 4 weeks later than usual. Here is a shot on the MSU campus from a couple weeks ago of a thicket of beech trees on the Circle, the center of the MSU campus and the site of its first buildings (it's known in some old books about the college as the Sacred Circle). These trees have been colorful for more than a month now.

A Beating from Your Sister

2007-10-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

The days of summer are long gone, and now the color season has ended as well. Most of the shops in Copper Harbor have closed or are in the process of closing. My son-in-law's parents' place, the Minnetonka Motel and Thunderbird Gift Shop, are still operating, but on a limited schedule. Here's my last shot of summer, 2007, that I will post this year, as many shots as I would like to post. Late in the summer, the whole family got together one night after supper, a night when the Sunset Cruise had to be canceld, at the Tunderbird, on the corner at the blinking light. We all looked around the shop, as we do from time to time during the summer all around town. Miranda and Logan were having a friendly disagreement about something or other that I was not privy, and I caught Mir giving him a working-over to straighten out his attitude and to find out who's boss. Coming up next will be photos of the family down here in Okemos this fall.

Sandstone Shore

2007-10-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

I go back a month and more to a shot of my niece Caroline Thomas (I hope I'm spelling her first name right) standing on the Lake Superior shore one windy day in August. This spot is about two miles west of Copper Harbor. We had taken a bike ride down M-26 to this spot. Caroline and her sister Christine came up from Houston, Texas to visit their aunt, my wife, Aunt Marsha and the rest of the famiy. It was the first time for either to visit Copper Harbor since we came back to our family business and began spending our summers in CH in 1993. It was a long way to come for a short stay of just four days or so. They flew from Houston to Milwaukee and then drove a rented car to CH. They had that experience of just how far everything is from CH on that drive north from southern Wisconsin, which took the better part of a day. We are used to the distances, but when you seldom drive up here, it can seem bewildering and daunting. In this photo, Caroline was getting ready to take a photo of the sweetwater waves tumbling in to show the folks back home in Texas. This is an interesting spot along the shore. It's mostly made of layers of conglomerate, or puddingstone, but there are a few of these bulging layers of sandstone here and there along the way. And that blue sky looks exactly the way the blue sky looks so often along Superior: ravishingly blue. I still have a few more summer shots I want to post, and hundreds I could post.

MSU Hallway

2007-09-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

I am back in my other life, the one lived in Okemos. This is a shot at the end of a day at my workplace, the offices of University Development at Michigan State University. My building is part of Spartan Stadium, a new addition to the stadium's east side. The offices of U.D. are located on the second and third floors of this new building, the top four floors of which (floors 4-7) are various skyboxes riding high above the football field at the bottom of the Spartan Stadium bowl. It's a nice view all the way down this hallway, which runs some 150 yards from south to north. My cubicle is about 25 feet in back of me as I stand at the windows overlooking the MSU track and the I.M. fields near Munn Ice Arena and the Breslin Center, where MSU's basketball games are played. What was I thinking this day? Not much, really. It has become a routine, going back and forth between Okemos and Copper Harbor and my two jobs. It's just the life our family leads, and we don't tend to think much about it day to day. It just something that we keep doing, and it would only feel peculiar or even worthy of notice if we DIDN'T do what we have done for some 15 summers since I returned to the Kilpela family business in CH.

Pokemon Stickers

2007-09-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Before we get too far down the road of time, I want to go back to a shot I took in the late spring and neglected to post. It marks a transition that has been continuing through the year in the life of our family. Logan has gone into high school and Drew into middle school, and they are both off to fairly good starts in their new educational surroundings. This photo is of Logan in May, when I rented a construction dumpster to get rid of all the old windows and doors that I have been removing from the house as I finish replacing old fixtures with new. This window frame with the window pane still intact was from Logan's bedroom. It was just about to get toosed into the dumpster with all the rest when I realized that it was from his room. That wasn't hard to figure out, since the glass was covered with Pokemon stickers that he had pasted on when we was in second grade or so. Pokemon was the rage during Logan's elementary years, but the boys tell me it is making a bit of comeback nowadays, and all their Pokemon cards and trinkets might actually be worth a little bit, if they'd take care of them. But these faded stickers are now at the top of the Grand Ledge landfill, almost surely never to be seen again, just as Logan's childhood is becoming a rapidly more disatant memory.

Working on Miniature Sets

2007-09-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Logan was up to another creative project late in the summer, with Drew's assistance. Logan is a filmmaker, and he was working in August, just before Mom and boys headed home for the opening of school, on some movie whose story involved my canoe. They found a "rocky" hunk of stryofoam in our business's work room down on the Queen IV dock, and Log set to work spray painting it to give it just the right look as a miniature rock cliff for a scene in the movie he has planned and has been working on. Earlier, I found him painting a toy canoe red in order to match the look of my real canoe, with the intention of shooting a scene in which my red canoe burns. I'll be interested to see where all this is heading.

Gotta Love That Junker

2007-09-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

My son-in-law Art Davis loves his heap, that old red Jeep that he bought a couple years back. He seemed, perhaps, more excited about buying it than getting married to my daughter, Miranda, last September -- though I must admit that Miranda seems to love that old heap with a special fondness as well. Here's a shot of Art and Miranda, my sons Logan and Drew in the narrow and rugged back seat, pulling out of the driveway at our Copper Harbor house one late evening in mid-August a good hour after sunset. They use this old clunky vehicle for getting around in the Keweenaw woods on their various berry-picking missions and for hauling their big dogs, pictured elsewhere several times on this blog, to the trailheads they hike out from. I guess it has served a couple of great purposes, that old Jeep. It's always a rural luxury of our unpretentious sort to have a car or truck that you can beat the hell out of. I offered my old green Caravan to Art and Mir this summer, but Art's still happy with this thing, and so I drove my old Caravan home to Okemos and finally sold it to a friend who needed transportation. I'll miss it just because I could beat the hell out of it.

Horseshoe Channel

2007-09-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

The days of summer have ended, and I and the family have returned from Copper Harbor to our life in Okemos. The weather has changed considerably as well. It is cool down here in Okemos on this early September day, in the low 60s, and fall-like up in CH, with a temp in he 50s and a heavy gale brlowing over Lake Superior. But I have many photos of the summer in the queue still planned for this blog, so I will keep with summer for a while longer, if only to keep as much of it as I can in the memory for as long as possible. In mid-August I took my boys out to Horseshore Harbor, the 600-acre preserve of the Nature Conservancy, to enjoy a fine summer day on the Lake Superior shore. We all went swimming in the West Harbor, as I call it, out at the preserve. A west wind was really jumping that day, and there were some sizeable waves crashing in (though the Queen IV had a fairly placid crossing, I was to find out later when she returned from Isle Royale. Here's a shot of the boys, Logan and Drew, swimming up one of the rocky channels in the West Harbor area of Horseshoe. They were pretending something that I was not privy to and having a great time.

Studying the Shallows

2007-08-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

The swimming has been excellent the past few weeks. Ther water warmed up once again to the high 60s in Copper Harbor in August. Even on open Lake Superior, the water has been very, very nice. I went swimming a few times with my boys and my wife Marsha, both in the Harbor and on the open Lake. This is a shot of Andrew, my 11 year old, looking for agates and other pretty stones in the waters along ther Hunters Point shoreline, which is the newly protected park on the north side of Copper Harbor, a favorite beach for many down the years. This vast Lake stretches about 90 miles in the direction I am facing as I took this shot, about north-northeast.

The Queen and the Light

2007-08-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of great Sunset Cruises on the Isle Royale Queen IV lately in Copper Harbor. The Kilpela family, of course, runs the Queen IV, and we run the Sunset Cruise, for the past 35 years. This is a shot of the Queen turning out into the Big Lake as she passes the Copper Harbor Lighthouse on Hays Point at the east end of Copper Harbor. It was my brother Captain John Kilpela who was master on board that night, and I believe my daughter Miranda was on there, too. The weather has been great for all water activities in the harbor for the past four or five weeks. Just one great day after another. The goodness of the weather actually starts to pall -- in a way. We need rain badly. Every front comes through dry.

Wading in Copper Harbor

2007-08-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

My son Drew and I canoed down to the bay in Fort Wilkins State Park where Fanny Hooe Creek outlets into Copper Harbor one night a couple weeks ago. Here's a shot of Drew looking for rocks and objects in the water on that very nice summer evening. The harbor water was still somewhat cool that evening, but now it has warmed up considerably, and we're swimming frequently in the harbor, as we do at this time of year every summer.

Eagle River Beach

2007-08-01T08:21:00.001-07:00

My goodness, have things been hot everywhere in the Midwest, even way up here in Copper Harbor. We might have the coollest weather around these parts, but it's still been far above average. But it's not so unusual, really. We have a spell of heat every year. It just doesn't get quite as hot as anywhere else and the heat doesn't last quite as long. I think we have the best weather in North America right here in the Keweenaw most years. I follow these things, and I can't think of a better place for continual pleasant weather in the main summer period. Lots of people mistakenly think Lake Superior never warms up enough to be swimmable, but such is far from the case. In late July and throughout August, we swim all around the Peninsula, in Copper Harbor, even on the open Lake -- and even out at usually colder Isle Royale. Here's a shot of the boys, Logan and Drew, trying to stop up a creek entering the lake at Eagle River. The lake was a little cool this day, about 10 days ago, but still very swimmable. Superior has gotten even warmer since.

Brockway Without Sunset

2007-07-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

The picture makes it look as though it was darn cold on Brockway this night in early July, a few days after the Fourth. On the left at the edge of the Bockway cliff is my wife Marsha, next to her is her niece Sarah, and on the right is her sister Patty. Patty and family are from Houston, TX. They visited us for a few days during their tour of the northern plains states. It has turned hot here in Copper Harbor after that stretch in early July, when things were cool, at times, and rainy and rather unpredictable. The shot was taken at the top of Brockway Mountain, which is about 5 miles up the ridge from town. We went up there on a very windy evening to see whether the sun might peek out and make one of those superb Brockway-Superior sunsets. It didn't happen. In the distance you see Lake Medora, along US-41 on the way to CH.

A Restful Evening

2007-07-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

The family went to "town," as we say, meaning the city of Houghton (45 miles southwest of Copper Harbor), one day a week or so ago to shop for groceries and to run some other errands. During our roaming to various stores and other locations, my son Drew and I came across this fellow in the parking lot at the Shopko in Houghton. The man was taking a siesta on a piece of plywood in the bed of his pickup, waiting for someone to return from the Shopko aisles. He never woke up to face the nice evening.

Independence Day

2007-07-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

Ah, the Fourth, in Copper Harbor. It's a good day. The long parade. The kids' games at the Community Park. The big fireworks show at 11:00 at night (which was especially nice this year). My first photo of the holiday festivities is of my son Logan jumping over a small firework in the backyard of my brother Don's place on the main drag in Copper Harbor. I must admit I was the adult who was encouraging the kids, the Kilpela grandchildren, to take leaps over the fireworks. Only Logan gave it a try. Perhaps it was a bit foolish of me to offer him the chance, though Log survived my indiscretion.

My second shot is of my brother John with the mannequin that would become the Isle Royale Queen of our parade float. My sister Lisa had the idea for the float and dressed her up in a nice dress and various baubles and beads and attached her, with a salute, on the front bumper of her pickup truck, which was serving as the float foundation. I might put a picture of the final product up some time soon.

Fishin' at Sawmill Cove

2007-07-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

This shot is one one of Copper Harbor resident Jaime Engstrom and my son Andrew fishing on the Isle Royale Queen IV dock one recent glorious evening in Michigan's northernmost town. Jaime has lived during the summers in Copper Harbor for almost all his life, Drew for all his life, and Jaime has been working for the Kilpela family for 10 years on the boat and in other capacities, one of our longest serving employees, if not the longest. I'm not much of a fisherman, but Drew has shown some interest in learning how to fish. Jaime has been talking about taking him out some time soon on the Harbor or on Lake Fanny Hooe nearby. We've had some wonderful weather lately in the Harbor after a long spell of cool, even rainy days in the first two weeks of July. I dub this place "Sawmill Cove" because there was once a sawmill located on what is now now the Queen IV dock. This was back in the 10's and 20's of the twentieth century.

Garden Brook Pathway

2007-07-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

The family, my family -- Ben Kilpela and wife and kids -- went for a walk in the woods just a half mile south and west of Copper Harbor on a recent evening. Included in the group were my daughter Miranda's dogs, Gus and Capone, and Harry, my brother John's dog (see a previous post for a close-up of Harry). This trail, maintained by the Michigan Nature association, runs along the bluff above the Garden Brook, a small stream, which often almost dries up in the summer, running parallel to the backside of Brockway Mountain down the Brockway valley to the flats just south of the village of Copper Harbor. It's a pretty walkway. To get the dogs a drink, we went off trail down the bluff to the Garden Brook itself to find a suitable pool of drinking water. The walk down the side of the bluff was steep and over loose gravel and through dense foliage. We found the edge of the brook well grown over, too. This shot is (l to r) of my son Logan, my wife Marsha, and my daughter Miranda Davis right on the edge of the Garden Brook in amongst the dense, Jurassic-Park-like foliage. Miranda and Logan tried wearing fern-fronds to keep the mosquitos off. I didn't think the bugs were bad at all.

This second shot is of Miranda working with Gus, her German short-haired pointer, on heeling. Gus just wants to move, but sometimes he can move too far too fast into the woods, at his usual breakneck pace, and get himself completely lost. He also will choke himself silly pulling on his leash. In the shot is Harry, my brother John's Jack Russell terrier. I think it's going to take Gus a long time to get the hang of this business.

Sundown at the Top of Michigan

2007-07-11T11:08:00.001-07:00

I took a bike ride down M-26 along the lakeshore on a recent evening and took in the sunset along the Lake Superior coast. This shot was taken very near the northernmost point of the State of Michigan (discounting the island of Isle Royale). It's a place called Dan's Point, just a couple miles west of Copper Harbor. Boy, have we been having the sunsets this summer. I don't know what's going on, but almost every night, even the cloudiest, ends with a wonderful sunset. Of course, the Kilpela Family runs the Sunset Cruise out on the Big Lake most nights during the height of summer, so we get to enjoy one gorgeous sunset after another, which we share with our passengers.

Fog over Copper Harbor

2007-07-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

I went out canoeing on Copper Harbor one evening about a week ago. It was pretty foggy in the late evening -- and had been all day long. This is a shot from the Isle Royale Queen IV dock across the little cove on the central waterfront in town. Three fishermen were out on the public dock doing some fishing there before dark settled in. It's not a bad place to try your luck. There are loons and ducks and geese and merganzers that visit the cove, so there must be a few fish that come in there.

The Keweenaw Forest

2007-07-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

I went on a bike-and-hike journey east of Copper Harbor on a recent June evening. This shot was taken deep in the woods east of town up on a ridge that was within about a half mile of the Lake Superior shore near Horseshoe Harbor, the superb and famed Nature Conservancy Preserve that the Conservancy has made into such a wonderful place to hike and rock-hound. It's rugged, too. Going off-trail can be a challenge.

This next shot is one of me taken on the Horseshoe Harbor Road on the same evening. I got off my bike to explore among the birches near the road as the sun was finally setting (sundown is about 9:45 in mid- to late June). I balanced the camera on my bike seat to get the photo. I was wearing my full bug jacket because the black flies had come out in droves, as they do especially around sunset at this time of year. Blackfly season runs from about mid-May to the Fourth of July, though on certain days they can be no problem. With these bug jackets, you can enjoy a great deal more of the Keweenaw Forest at this time of year. A superb invention. Wouldn't be without one in June. A few years back, a tourist stopped on US-41 in CH to take a p[hoto of Marsha pushing our infant Logan on a walk. She was dressed in the bug jacket and the stroller was wrapped in a similaR bug baffler. The tourist found it amazing, but I guess one does what one must.

Harry

2007-06-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

My younger brother, Captain John Kilpela, has one of the famous dogs of Copper Harbor, a Jack Russell terrier (short breed) who goes by the name of Harry. They live in a cabin in town behind Ragamuffins Clothing and Gifts. One night I was hanging out at John's while Harry was taking his nightly constitutional out in the yard. Harry spends a lot of his time out in the yard waiting for a certain chipmunk to come out of the woodpile behind the house next door, my brother Don's place. This is a shot of Harry studying the woodpile as night comes in. I was a bit jealous of Harry a couple years back, since I would sometimes walk down the street with him and find people running out of their motel rooms to say hello while paying no attention to me at all. Visitors even knew his name, like an old friend, though they had no idea who I was.

Storms

2007-06-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

June is always a time for few thunderstorms to roll over the U.P. Marquette had a huge hail-storm on June 20. A few days before, Copper Harbor saw a few large thunderstorms pass over on the edge of a swiftly moving cold front. This is a shot about 10:30 on that evening -- it stays light a long time in June in CH. The storm has passed east. This was taken on my bike on the main street in town, down near my home and close to my mother's gift shop, Ragamuffins. We've had lots of nice weather this year, some dry spells, some hot spells, some cool weather, a few swarms of black flies, even an early appearance of the stable flies that torment you on the Superior shore. It's always changing up here. My Dad often repeats an old saying that we hear from the locals a lot: Don't like the weather? Stick around five minutes and see it change.

The Minnetonka

2007-06-14T16:24:00.001-07:00

Business has been, as usual, a little quiet this early June in Copper Harbor. This is a photo of Art and Miranda Davis in Art's family's motel in town, the Minnetonka Resort on the main corner, where the blinking light signals the junction of M-26 and US-41. Art was exercised about some business matter and trying to make some important point.

Lake Mango

2007-06-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

I am now in Copper Harbor, northernmost town in Michigan, for the summer business season. I had a very pleasant first day in my northern home town, if conditions were a touch cool (temps only in the 50s, though sunny). Miranda, my daughter, Art Davis, my son-in-law, and I went to Lake Manganese just south of town late in the evening Tuesday last week to let their dogs, Capone and Gus, have a good run to get some exercise -- and wear themselves out for a night of sound sleep. This shot is a great one, don't you think? -- with the dogs standing by the sides of Art and Miranda with looks of worship in their eyes. I really don't think they were expecting anything other than more attention from Art and Mir. They had no treats in their pockets, in case you think this shot might have been faked with the use of dog biscuits. Rather, they took up the worshipful prosition you see without prompting. They are seldom found like this, believe me. The level of Lake Manganese seems no different from years past, though Lake Superior is down considerably.

Crossing the Mackinaw

2007-06-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

So, the fun begins for the summer. My job at MSU has been suspended for 3 months, as usual, and I have moved north to Copper Harbor to run the Isle Royale Queen IV with my brothers, daughter, and parents, while my wife and 2 boys family remains south in Okemos for the end of the school year. It was quite a lousy drive north on Monday,June 4. The rain was coming down in buckets up in the northern Lower Peninusla and in the east half of the Upper Peninusla. Here's a daunting shot from the front window of my old van on the way across the Mackinaw Bridge. That's the landmass of the U.P. coming into view out of the fog and heavy rain, about 2 miles up ahead. I've just passed the north tower of the bridge and am heading down the deck toward the toll booths on the north end of the bridge. Quite a summer welcome to the ol' U.P.

My next shot is of me, Captain Ben, on the shore of Lake Superior several hours later. This was taken at one of the roadside parks along Au Train Bay, one of the spots I almost always stop at along the way north, and the way back south. It was warmer than it might appear. Though it had been pretty darn cold at the Mackinaw Bridge, in the low 50s, if that, here at Au Train the temperature had to be in the mid-60s. Copper Harbor here I come.

Okemos in Spring

2007-05-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

Remember the shot of "Okemos in Winter" from a few months back, that shot of the the blizzard that hit southern Michigan and many points south in March? Well, here's a shot of almost the same exact scene two and a half months later. The field remains unplowed and unplanted, though most of the corn fields have been laid in over the past week or so. This shot was taken along Every Road, about 2 miles west of Okemos Road. Drew and I were on a bike ride on a Sunday evening along the fields and woods near our home south of Okemos proper. It was a mighty chilly night, 50 degrees with a sharp north breeze. We needed, but hadn't worn, gloves. I was actually in a tee shirt, which was a big mistake. But, being the hard-headed soul I am, we kept going for the full ride. It feels strange to be posting these thoughts on a day that it is almost 90 degrees here in Okemos. All that cool spring weather has become a part of the past. Here's the url for the winter shot:

http://copperharbor.blogspot.com/2007/03/winter-day-in-okemos.html

My next shot was taken on the same evening, as Drew and I were headed back toward home after going away from home about four miles. The color in those cheeks is not enhanced. It was so cold that we came back with red faces and very red hands. Drew sometimes wonders whether I am truly sane. He was rather quiet about my decision to proceed with our ride this night. Though he didn't say so, I think he was enjoying himself, despite the chill.

Michigan's State Capitol Building

2007-05-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

It's just about time for me to head north to Copper Harbor for the summer season. But before I leave (Marsha and the boys to follow at the end of school), my sister Jo came down for a visit with her son Griffin, first time in 13 years, she calculated, that she had been down to our place in Okemos. She did a lot of shopping, as is her wont, but she took a little time to take in a few of the local sights, such as the State Capitol Building in downtown Lansing. The evening had turned quite chilly, two weeks back, even for southern Michigan. But we parked the car and walked up the steps to the front doors and tried to stay warm in a harsh northeast breeze. I got this shot of (l to r) Jo, Logan, Marsha, and my daughter Miranda, down from CH for a week to work at a dog breeding place that she likes to spend time at. This was an interesting test for my camera, the Canon Digital Rebel. I used a flash, but I was standing some 50 feet in front of the group. The shot came out almost entirely black, but I used Photoshop to get what I could out of the black photo, and I think the results are at least a decent record of the event, which is the purpose of most family shots.

Frost on Beach Stones

2007-05-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

There is plenty of time left for frost in the Keweenaw Peninsula. In Okemos, in south-central Michigan, the safe date is May 25 or so, but in the far northern reaches of Michigan, there will be plenty of frosty mornings to come well into June. Here's a shot of ice-cold beach stones delicately coated in frost near Hunters Point. The stones are mostly that ever present chert, the fine-grained sedimentary rock that is closely related to flint and jasper. Chert comes in several colors and is red on the beaches of the western U.P. because of traces of iron in the stone. I have read that chert was used for stone tools in prehistoric times, though I don't know how widespread its use was among the Native Americans who inhabited the shores of Lake Superior.

Where the Hell Are Those Dogs?

2007-05-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

My daughter Miranda Davis, Copper Harbor year-round resident, listening for the sound of Gus and Capone (short-haired pointer and husky-shepherd mix). These two make so much noise as they hurtle through the woods that we can safely conclude that they must be far away. A very typical pose, even down to the chuk almost covering the eyes. This shot was taken just south of town up the ridge and near the golf course, on a challenging new mountain biking trail that Sam Raymond of Keweenaw Adventures has cut through the woods.

The Gnomes of the Snowlands

2007-04-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

Before winters disappears entirely, as it has almost done, here's a little reminder of those long, darker days when spring seems to have decided to skip a year or two. This fellow stands serenely at the foot of the front door of Art and Miranda Davis's place in Copper Harbor (Miranda is my daughter). Art enjoys his gnomes, for some reason I cannot fathom, and there are a number of them inside and outside around their CH cabin. I was so pleased to give him a couple more this past Christmas. I insisted on buying them for him, though Marsha couldn't believe what I was doing as we looked them over in a market in East Lansing. This chap is the Davis's Greeter Gnome, nearly buried in the snow a few months ago, but still holding his post.

Concerts and Language

2007-04-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

It's one of those times of year in which there are many school concerts. Drew and Logan were both involved in Okemos's joint-school Spring Concert at the high school recently. Logan is in middle school choir and Drew, in fifth grade, is in first year strings and choir as well. This is a shot of Drew on the risers in the high school auditorium on the night of the big concert. That's him separated from all the kids in this perspective. It was just a chance shot. Being tall, he always stands in the back, so I try to get a shot of him when he's coming on stage. I always enjoy photos like this one, of a crowd of people doing something. I like studying the faces and the gestures of each person and reflecting on how each person experiences a shared event differently. Many stories are being told in this photo, but the stories are almost entirely hidden, as is so much in life -- sometimes even in our own private lives.

Next up we have a shot of Logan on our short trip to the Ohio River and Mammoth Cave National Park over spring break. Logan was sitting in a downtown restaurant in a farm town in central Indiana where we were having burgers for lunch. He's studying his Latin flash cards. Logan loves languages right now and is always working on something to do with learning or even making up languages. Keep up the good work, boy. There is a story or two being told in this photo, too, but they are narrower and more focused stories. Yet there is much in Logan's face to study, and don't we all love to study our children? Marsh and I, when we go out alone, have to work hard to keep from spending all our time alone talking about the kids, as is so common among parents.

Spring Fields

2007-04-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

Just before last week's cold snap and snowfalls, which took the shape of that massive blizzard up in Copper Harbor, down here in Okemos the snow had all melted and the fields, though still a bit muddy, were beginning to dry out. Here's a shot of a soybean field down Sandhill Road west of our house in Okemos. I hopped out of my car on the way to work to get this shot. That's no permanent pond. It's a flooded low spot, which fills up when the snow melts or the spring rains are heavy. The family who owns this field has never been able to keep the spot dry enough to plant in it regularly. Ducks and geese stay in the pond when the water is up, but then quickly move on when the water gets low or stagnant.

The Spring Blizzard of '07

2007-04-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

We've been staying in touch with our daughter, Miranda Davis, all weekend during one of the biggest snowstorms of the past 20 years on the south shore of Lake Superior. I've heard and read differing figures, but it seems that the mining ghost town named Delaware about 11 miles southwest of Copper Harbor got about 40 inches of snow over three days. It was a true blizzard, with north winds blowing at 40 to 50 for lengthy periods. I've been bugging Mir to send me some shots of the action up in CH since we were last there, but she hasn't done so until now. Here's a shot of her standing on a trail somewhere in the woods near town a couple days ago, after the blizzard had let up:

Looks as though it was quite the storm, even for the Keweenaw. Here's another shot from Mir, this one taken outside her and Art's log cabin near the Mariner Restaurant:

The birds will have to look elsewhere for sustenance -- and for warmth. If the forecasts can be trusted, it looks as though this is going to be a long spell of April cold and snow in the Keweenaw and all along the Superior south shore. Notably, my parents, Don and Betty, made their way back to CH through Escanaba on Saturday and found just a trace of snow on the ground on the south side of the Upper Peninsula. Of course, it's cold everywhere east of the Rockies and north of a line about 200 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.

West On Our Road

2007-03-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

I said I wouldn't often be timely on this blog, but I tried to do it today. This shot was taken last evening, a half mile west of our house in Okemos. That's Drew on the left, looking sulky, as instructed, and Logan on the right, carrying books in his fleece jacket, as is his wont (good, good boy). Drew is entering middle school next year. Marsh and I were talking about the school requirement for the kids to run a mile. We didn't think Drew was ready. So we're going to try to get him ready. We started out yesterday with a mile and a half walk down Standhill to a spot I wanted to get a photo of around sundown. The moon had come up behind us in the east during the walk west, and when we turned around, we had some lovely views of the moon sailing over the empty farm fields as we walked home. Marsh didn't join us because this week she has had a touch of the stomach flu that has been going around the whole Midwest lately. Even two Detroit Pistons basketball players went down with this nasty virus recently. Drew was getting a little irritated by this point in the walk, but he made it all the way in good shape. We'll do some more regular walking before starting to run, probably a third mile to start out.

A little later in the walk, just across the street from our house, there was a very dim golden glow lighting one of the droopy power poles along Sandhill, as the very last bit of twilight sifted over anything it could touch before night settled over all the landscape. Here's a shot of that scene.

The Bed of a Pickup

2007-03-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

If I had not put up that title how quickly would you have recognized this photo as a shot across the bed of a pickup truck? This was taken at the Detroit Auto Show some six weeks ago. This is one of those sorts of photos that can be interpreted in probably countless ways. What do you see and think and feel as you look at this composition? It might be the equivalent of an abstract painting. The people might be considered only incidental shapes to bring out the contrast between the red section and the blue section, with their contrasting colors and textures and forms. Or do you see some social statement or some personal vision in this? I find the photo very interesting, and to generate a viewer's interest (my own interest as viewer included) was probably all that was on my conscious mind as I took it. I'm not usually this kind of photographer. I usually most appreciate telling a story through a photo, and the story, to be a story, must somehow be decipherable, cogent, sensible as story. But I also am drawn to striking contrasts in my surroundings and in my life, and this photo also was taken because of my interest in showing one of the many kinds of contrast that I find express something important about my experience. Well, there's enough artsy talk for one day. I'll return to something more customarily story-like next time around. All interpretations welcome.

Glaze Snow

2007-03-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

Before winter has hopped the big train to get to the southern hemisphere for the change of seasons, I still have a cache of winter shots from Copper Harbor that I want to get on the blog. This photo shows what amounts to a frosty morning in the woods up in the Keweenaw. It's not frost, as you might guess, but a sort of rime ice, though it was actually half snow and half ice. But there are word differences that need resolving. What does the phrase "rime ice" apply to? What is shown in the Okemos photo from the previous post, I have read, is called by some "rime ice", though I have always called what is shown there "frost", or "hoar frost". Some say that what I and others call "rime ice", the ice that is driven by wind and forms on trees or buildings, is properly called "glaze ice". I will have to investigate that language issue further. But I like the phrase glaze ice and will put it to use.

This photo was taken very near the shores of Lake Medora, near the boat launch. The lake is about four miles west of CH along US-41. The wind often drives across the lake and slashes into the trees. If it's snowing at all, the wind will build up a thick coating of snow or semi-ice on the side of the trees facing the wind. Along the shore of Lake Superior, when the lake is still mostly open except for shore ice, the wind will drive spray from the lake waves onto the shoreside trees and create rime ice (as it has been often called) or "glaze ice" on the windward side. But the trees in this shot are actually pasted with glaze snow, though upon inspection I found that the wind had so tightly compressed the snow against the bark that it was nearly a fluffy form of ice. As my Dad mentioned in his comment to my previous post, CH does not often get hoar frost like that shown in the post about Okemos, three hundred miles south of CH (as the crow flies; it's 550 miles as the automobile drives). What the CH area almost always gets is glaze snow and glaze ice.

Frost

2007-03-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

It was a very frosty morning in Okemos one day a couple weeks ago. There had been fog over night, but the temperature had dropped, and the fog began adhering to everything it touched. This is our front yard in Okemos, on the west side of our house. I was heading for work and took the the camera just in case there were some good shots to be had along the foggy roads to Michigan State that morning. Beauty often seems to spring at you out of nowhere, no matter the source of the beauty, even when you're writing or reading. I was backing out of the drive, saw the branches of our little crabapple caked in frost, and hopped out of the car to get the shot. Within an hour a warm late-winter sun had melted and evaporated all the frost, and now, two weeks later, there is no hint of this scene in our front yard, since all the snow is gone.