Unnatural habitat

The backyard of Om Shanty on Summit Street in Methodistville was abuzz with biotic activity on an unquiet evening in late July. Not only was amplified music blaring from the Fourth Friday Uptown Commercefest, but birds, bees, squirrels, insects, flowers, vegetables, and other carbon-based lifeforms are out force. I blame it on the weather.

I can't begin to name the species of birds that make this quarter-acre their home and/or feeding ground. Some are flying solo, some with a partner nearby, some in competition with a rival for a partner, and some in a collective wave of mass movement from one tree to another. A squirrel was attacked by a nest of yellowjackets, the unintended consequences of foraging for its own nesting material, and you should have seen him jump sideways when he got stung by those aggressive little beasts. None of your beeswax!

I wouldn't call it a feeding frenzy exactly, but it is the dinner hour after all, the end of a workweek, and the din was frenetic. I did my part, inadvertently helping the houseflies reproduce by watering indoor plants from the rainbarrel, so lots of tiny wiggling larvae were given a sheltered place to incubate and hatch. Now the tolerable outdoor insect population has colonized the back room of the house, where they have become intolerable. I spent hours on Saturday swatting and disposing of the gross little piles of fly carcasses, depositing them in the compost where they could at last fulfill their destiny and do some good.

The flies were especially thick around the night-blooming cereus on the corner table in the den, where the long, curving stem drapes over a lampshade, keeping the leathery leaves from hanging down to the floor. Just this week little tassels began to appear on the tips of three or four leaves as the cereus began to bloom. I was careful not to swat flies too close and ruin everything.

While I stayed home alone for the weekend, Gven and her sister Nyet went to a small family reunion near the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. There had been some years of estrangement in their youth between the sisters and their father, and it has taken the better part of a lifetime to make up for lost time. Some things are still unresolved, unsaid, and unacknowledged. He made some life choices as a relatively young father, and it seems as though others have suffered the consequences. The small, casual weekend gathering with their half-siblings seems to have gone well. With no aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozens to make it into a Big Event, they achieved a comfort level where they could speak and be heard more openly.

Sunday was a long, emotionally exhausting day for Gven. I am grateful that Nyet was there to keep her big sister company, bear witness, and provide support. They got a late start coming home, so it was dark by the time they got to western Pennsylvania and collided with a deer that leaped across two lanes of I-70 in front of the white Honda, bounced off the hood and right-front fender, and fell into the ditch. Gven slowed down and pulled over to the shoulder while other cars steered around the flying deer. A witness stopped and called the police, who did not issue a report because it was an Act of Nature.

No humans were injured, but Gven was pretty upset. The car was drivable, so Nyet drove the rest of the way home to central Swingstate. I was in touch by phone but largely uninvolved. I came home from work the next day and pulled weeds in the side bed along Plum Street that get neglected until it begins to look like nobody lives there. Gven and Nyet spent more quality time together processing their weekend with their half-family, discussing the deer incident and how close they had come to a much worse ending.

What to do about the car would ultimately rest with the insurance claims department, and it was taking State Farm and their friends at Collision One several days to come up with an estimate of the damage, repair costs, and the fate of the Honda. Nyet caught her flight home to Atlanta on Wednesday. Gven returned to her regular work schedule while we traded off the use of one vehicle. Good bicycling weather made that easier.

I took a vacation day on Friday, so I was out in the yard holding a shovel when Gven gave me the news that the Honda was totalled. Okay, if that's what the number crunchers say, then that's what it is. It had been a good, reliable car for a little over five years, and Gven was somewhat attached to it, even more so after it warded off a big deer from crashing through the windshield, punctured a radiator and battery, and still made it home in one piece.

While we pondered our options regarding a new car, I was busy transplanting lamb's ear from a crowded border in back to a bare strip in front, pulled a few weeds, and mowed the little trapezoid of grass. When I bumped a railroad tie between the lawn and the bed with the mower, I disturbed the nest of yellowjackets, and they were on me within seconds. I backed away swatting, but they kept coming, persistent little buggers.

Is it because of the dog days of summer? Later that afternoon I was weeding a bed of daylilies near the house and disturbed another nest of yellowjackets. This time one of them got me good, a direct hit in the meaty part of the base of the thumb, and within minutes my hand was swelling halfway up the wrist in a perfect rectangle of puffy flesh. I wrapped it in a cold pack, took some ibuprofen, and sat down in the rocker for a nap. Weeds or no weeds, it was clearly time to retreat on that front.

campin'

Gven Golly and I have been camping before, so it was a minor challenge to set up the tent after dark in a light rain. We're not "serious" outdoor people, and we haven't done any hard-core wilderness survival training, but in most settings we kind of know what to do. Many factors contributed to our getting a late start on our journey from Methodistville, Ohio, to Mancelona, Michigan. We chose to stop for supper at the little restaurant at the Waters exit off I-75 just as it was getting dark. The hot pork sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy was worth the short delay.

We had breakfast at the nearby golf course restaurant/pro shop/bar by special arrangement, since we had slept late and missed the 11:00 cutoff time. They were happy to waive the restriction when we made it clear we were hoping for a real breakfast, and the ham and cheese omelet hit the spot. The lunchtime clientele was a study in Michigan contrasts: Republican retirees at their laptops complaining about how Obama wants to tax their capital gains and give it to the illegal immigrants; middle-aged biker chicks in leather leggings and plunging necklines blaring music on their iPhones; wholesome young families from Ludington on vacation up north in their school sweatshirts; and us, a couple of immigrants from Ohio figuring out what to do instead of bicycling and canoing when it's 55 and rainy.

The drizzle continued most of the day, so we checked on the property that Grandma and Grandpa Golly gave us, just to see what it looks like in July, and collected a little semi-dry firewood while we were there. We drove over to Lake Lapiz, one of our favorite spots, but it was too cold and damp to swim or canoe, so we bought a few supplies at the little store in Alba and looked for tie-downs at the hardware store in Mancelona to try to upgrade our roped-down canoe-carrying setup, but without success. If ropes is what we've got, then ropes will have to do. They turned out to be perfectly adequate, even though tying and untying repeatedly was a bit of a task - grumble grumble #&@%$!*.

Perhaps the best decision of the day was to go ahead and put the canoe in the water, rain or no rain. As soon as we started to float out the cove past the lily pads onto the lake, I knew it was the right thing to do, even as we paddled against a brisk wind across the lake - why? - to get to the other side, of course. It was instructive to see up close what people have tastefully done - and not done - with their lakefront property to keep it clean and unspoiled. The slow, steady paddling warmed us up and lifted our spirits; there's nothing like floating in a little boat to change your perspective on things.

Thus revived, it was time for dinner, so we got a fire going with a little help from self-starting charcoal - which is cheating, you know, but what the hell, it's raining - and in no time had pasta with pesto, sweet red peppers, cherry tomatoes, Jarlsberg cheese, and red wine. The cooking fire morphed into a long-lasting campfire, which gave us something to poke while listing all the places we have camped over the years.

There was Hillsville, Virginia, 1976; Strawberry Mountain Farm, Georgia, 1977, in the tent that Gven sewed herself. There was Zion, Illinois, 1978; Door County, Wisconsin, and Marquette, Michigan, 1980; Cade's Cove, Tennessee, 1981; Uwharrie National Forest, North Carolina, 1982; Walker County, Georgia, 1983; and Newberry, South Carolina, 1984. Then not so much when the kids were little; Cade's Cove again with the preteens Jessi and Zelda, 1995; John Bryan State Park, Ohio, with Jessi, 1997; then Antrim County, Michigan, 2007, 2008, 2009, and counting.

You'd think we'd have it down by now. You'd think. But no, we're still improvising and experimenting in a long-term quest to find the most difficult way to do the simplest things with the least possible preparation and minimal equipment. Sleeping on cots this year, instead of on the ground, is a major concession to modernity.

The weather broke on Sunday, so after breakfast (campfire oatmeal, fruit, coffee) we decided to go to Traverse City and up the Leelanau Peninsula. I hadn't been there in many years, and Gven was oohing and aahing half the way there, and it's true, it is a picturesque drive up M-22 along the rim of Grand Traverse Bay. There were a few sailboats out on the water, but a lot of people were just lounging on their boats sitting in the harbor and enjoying the sunshine. It's been a cool year so far. We stopped for a picnic lunch in Northport and headed back by way of Sutton's Bay. Since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to find the winery that a couple of high school friends recently bought, but as luck would have it, closing time on Sunday is 5:00 and we got there at 5:02.

I knocked on the door anyway, and who should open it but my friend Heron Sherrick, who remarkably recognized me right away and invited us in to join a wine tasting party already in progress. We met the other workers and sampled a few of the sparkling wines that are their specialty. Heron called her husband Lou Stang, also a Groves Falcon, class of '69, and Lou showed us around the place while we caught up on the last 40 years while sipping their product. It was all an unexpected pleasure, and their hospitality at the end of a long workday was almost an embarrassment of riches.

Heron and Lou recommended Apache Trout Grill, so that was our next stop for dinner. We had a view of the water from our cocktail table by the bar, which beats an hour and a half wait, and the walleye with garlic mashed potatoes was excellent. It was also fun eavesdropping on the conversations of golfers and tourists from Green Bay sharing Packers lore and other lies. We had some time to kill and were in no hurry to get back to camp, so we walked up Front Street and found a decent bookstore with a cafe and, briefly, a piano player.

In spite of our new cots, sleeping was still a challenge, more due to the well-ventilated tent than anything else. It was chilly at night, so we had to wear layers and burrow down into our mummy bags, and this is July! We also had to get an early start Monday morning for the trip home, so we decamped at first light and hit the road - but not before a ritual dip in Lake Lapiz, which was completely refreshing and made the rest of the seven-hour drive bearable. We got home just in time for me to make it to my 6:00 class in the park. Although I looked a little the worse for wear, I felt renewed and invigorated after a couple of days away.

Stuff

In my ongoing quest to amass more material possessions, I have made great strides of late, acquiring a used bike from a guy in Pickerington, a truck cap from a guy in Jersey, a new pair of shoes at a little store near the mall, new glasses from my new optometrist, and a new belt tensioner from Joe's Service in Methodistville. WOO HOO! This is exciting stuff.

Each of these purchases deserves its own unique story, and each narrative of happy economic exchange unfolded in a peculiar, unpredictable way that's beyond my storytelling ability. For a nonshopper like myself, it's a freaking revelation to observe the minute details of seeking and finding just the right item, and I can only begin to sense the adrenaline that must course through the veins of a serious consumer stalking the wild commodity in the great Amerikan marketplace.

There was one day last week when a Vonnegut-esque chronosynclastic infundibulum occurred right on State Street in uptown Methodistville. I had dropped off Hank, my truck, at Joe's Service to have the mechanic fix the annoying whine from the serpentine belt, which had been getting worse for months and I couldn't tolerate anymore, and he diagnosed the problem as a worn-out tensioner just below the nonfunctioning air conditioner. I had put my lovely new dark-green Trek in the back of the truck and rode it the rest of the way to work, already feeling a bit of the materialist magic.

When Joe called me at work and said the truck was ready, I rode le Trek back to the shop, paid the bill, and drove the quiet truck up the street in air-conditioned comfort wearing my brand new German-made, cork-insoled, not-yet-broken-in, Zirkon-encrusted size 45s, feeling like a pretty cool customer let me tell you. To top it all off, due to exquisite timing I had an appointment to pick up my new glasses from my new eye doctor at the corner of Maxtown and State. My new "progressive" lenses were waiting for me, and I picked up a new fake leather case to put them in, just for good measure, dark-green to match the handsome new/used bike.

I'm here today to bear witness to the power of the greatest recreational drug of all, consuming goods in the marketplace. Can I get an amen?

Character development

One of the things I like about getting out once in a while - out of the house, out of the cubicle, out of the everyday rut - is the opportunity to run into characters like Ali. I talked to a guy named Ali - he pronounced it like Ollie - the other day while drinking green tea downtown. He quoted Milan Kundera as saying that the three most important things in life are eating, reproducing, and eliminating. You have to eat to live, so obviously it's worth paying attention to. Most people, for widely different reasons, would agree that maintaining the human species is a high priority; some are more actively engaged in that endeavor than others, while many are deeply involved in either increasing or decreasing the probability that they personally cause the birth rate to rise. What is easily ignored, forgotten, or denied is the excretory imperative, but it causes havoc when it ceases to function, shall we say, smoothly.

I don't recall what prompted this exchange or the ensuing conversation about politics and publishing and what not to believe, but it was an unexpected pleasure. Ali had seen me around, and I had seen him around, but we had never met or had occasion to talk. Now I know a little bit about his literary tastes, his politics, his sense of humor, and even his journalistic standards. He's about my age but has probably been many more places, and he strikes me as nobody's fool. My personal narrative has been increased and enriched by one additional flesh-and-blood character. Besides that, it gives me something to write about.

This in turn provides me with a means to practice what I think of as the Natalie Goldberg-David Martin School of Creative Writing, which can succinctly be summarized as follows: Write something every day. That's it. You don't have to show it to anyone, publish it, polish it, edit, hone, dress it up, or endlessly redraft your precious piece of art. You don't even have to read it yourself (lucky you) or ask your friends to read it (lucky them). It doesn't have to meet your own or anyone else's high critical standards, stylistic preconceptions, or baseless expectations of what constitutes "important" content. Consequently you don't need to have anything to say. You just have to know how to operate a pen, pencil, or keyboard.

What happens in the process - and I'm assuming that something happens - is that writing something - writing anything - changes the writer, regardless of what else happens to the ink stains on the page or pixels on the screen. Let's not even think about changing anyone else's mind, reaching out to our fellow Amerikans, or, pardon the expression, making a difference in the world. Writing as a practice, as opposed to writing strictly to produce a certain outcome, works on the mind of the writer. That's all it is, and that's enough, and that's what makes it a practice rather than a project. It's probably better if you don't know ahead of time what will come of it. Mostly likely nothing much.

fanfare for the common sweat beetle

In the great Amerikan tradition of making work out of play, this Independence Day weekend is an appropriate time to analyze the shit out of another great Amerikan tradition, the proper use of leisure time. And what better, mind-numbingly reductionistic way to weight one's everyday life choices than to make a balance sheet of what's right and what's wrong in my world?

RIGHT

1. The geraniums look glorious in their hanging baskets and window boxes.
2. The weather today is fabulous.
3. My knees don't hurt.

WRONG

1. This Gevalia mail-order coffee is the worst dreck I've ever tasted.
2. Messes in laundry room and kitchen refuse to clean themselves up.

RIGHT

4. My pocket knife got the old beach umbrella on the patio table unstuck, so it will both open and close.
5. Cardinals, chickadees, robins, bluejays, swallows, and crows coexist in this humble but verdant quarter acre. What's wrong with them, don't they have any ideology?

WRONG

3. The weeds I have tolerated, overlooked, or ignored are taking over the flowerbeds.
4. My Michigan vacation pipedream isn't going to happen this year or this lifetime.

RIGHT

6. Isabel the old cat takes a nap on the patio next to an old-fashioned steel lawn chair with spring-like tubular arms and legs.
7. Behold the daylilies of the back bed by the garage, trumpeting their existence in joyous yellow and orange.
8. Tendrils of bean plants have located the poles and know what to do.
9. I can choose which columnist to talk to at the cocktail party that is the Sunday New York Times.

WRONG

5. This peace will be broken tomorrow by well-intentioned crowds, parades, bad music, traffic, explosions, jingoistic rituals and self-congratulatory rhetoric.
6. I screwed up some early measurements of a project I'm working on, so nothing is truly square.
7. In the corners of my consciousness are shadows of problems that I will never solve.

RIGHT

10. I have the good sense to buy new lumber instead of making do with some scraps I had lying around, then I find some cheap little brackets at Home Depot that will secure a 2x6 firmly to a 2x8 at a right angle and save my bacon.
11. A simple flour tortilla, warmed on cast iron, with hummous and cherry tomatoes, with a cool Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald handcrafted porter tastes mighty good at the end of the day.

It's official: Right beats Wrong 11-7. I guess it was a good day.