A Light In August

How Kamala summer came to the Upper Peninsula like a hummingbird to feeder

I finally boosted the bars on cell reception here yesterday by installing a $120 kit which points a modest plastic white flag-antenna mounted on the facia of roofed-over trailer towards the nearest cell tower which i had located via an app to southeast about 20 miles away past Lanse. I watched the Red Sox win in Texas last night sitting out on the bench by the fire-pit drinking a beer and whispering incantations to a gimpy shoulder to heal, get better as it has more physical and necessary projects ahead before the long winter sets in. The re-invigorated hotspot was strong enough it never dropped the signal and in the past few weeks when i had several friends in succession stay in reclaimed shack out back where even i have not slept yet yearning to wake to the sun filtering in, the books on the shelf and with one of them, my friends, intensively fishing for trout with me on rivers where trout seldom see a human shadow and rise for flys cast in almost hypnotic joy, hope.

It had been several weeks since i weighed in on the necessity of Joe Biden to step aside and like most feeling the dead weight of doom settle in after Trump’s Mussolini/ Van Gogh moment had found escape in immersing in that which made me feel alive and when it happened, the inevitable spasm of a democracy twitching to life again Gregg and i had driven the 10 rutted miles up onto Point Abbaye with the dogs. My sisters texted me the news.

I had already directed our marches by day onto a variety of 2-tracks that led to clear streams and wayside watering holes, the places to regroup and especially him from my incessant monologues of women and politics and the state he was born to even if Detroit at beginning. He came up from Empire outside Travers City near where we had bonded and not seen each other since that first meeting 4 years ago on the Boardman my first ever camping in lower portion of Michigan and stepping out of woods in waders behind me not far from campsite in dim evening mellow light and i thought he was a bear and gasped and he laughed and i told him earlier i had seen an unusual treed squirrel thinking it was a black cat lost in the woods. He cast smoothly and patiently with a long tippet and was worldly and appreciative and would come back each day to fish commuting past the cherry orchards and along stretch of Lake Michigan around road detours down the washboard dirt road that rattled into the Forks state campground and we would find secluded tributaries and fool gullible darting brook trout, discussing our shared progressive politics sitting on a grassy overhang, beer cans stashed in cold backwash of a pool shaded by cedars. We had stayed in touch and he had in the intervening years during my own yearly forays up here to secure and renovate my auction- bought place kept me apprised if modestly of his harder challenges, the cancer and the choice he made to have prostate removed, his truck crapping out, getting another. Also the stretches of lonesome winter. Detroit raised he had seen the world a bit as actor, bouncer, security for musicians at shows and met a ton of them, even once kissed Demi Moore and our week of fishing here brought discussions of music with names like Lady Gaga whom he described meeting and so many others and me teasing him about his favorite movie “Forrest Gump” which has always bugged me and i made it a theme to refer to its nonsense sarcastically imitating the voices on our drives down 2-tracks like this where we found an abandoned deer camp next to a glistening remote stream and fairly near my home.

By then it was our last day and we had caught a few trout but i wanted to explore a spot on the West Branch of the Otter river in the Baraga State forest. We had at night gleaned the excitable rise of Kamala and he had even given up the majority of his loyalty for old Joe and i my initial and months long sanguine craving for Whitmer to step in. Before us was an abandoned deer camp and the river carving its way amongst cedar shaded quiet pools and some frothy runs directly astride it. There on the forlorn place was an interesting sign and i took a photo after losing a decent trout on a beaded nymph purchase a day before at “Luckey’s bait shop” in Iron River an iconic place manned by its namesake and she sifting worms from a dirt box and awaiting Gregg who had walked far upriver and came back with a tale of catching 3 decent rainbow he had coaxed with a dry fly finally in a deep quiet bend, near chest deep in water.

I had written alot more here but all that said this is the trickiest part, the winnowing, paring, slimming down of wildly careening streams of thought, wondering how much more i wish to continue in this format which has become stale somehow, not necessarily genuine to my nature. Normally you might not even have to face such a challenge if somehow you didn’t feel the need to communicate, wantonly reach out from solitary and even there is the suspicion like a lacquered taste on tongue in back of throat that proof of life (intimacy?) your personality has always harboured a certain performative nature. I guess i will figure it out and anyways we are all in this together, the part where the only choice we have is staring us straight in the face, whether its a VP choice to win Pa. (and yes this time next week i believe it must be Josh Shapiro if only because of the stern electoral math involved and the lack of luxury we have to second guess EVERY FUCKING UN-WOKE DECISION we make, i have seen enough of the bashing of guys like James Carville old and white like me but close in to the mud-spattered mind-set of rural working people nickle and dimed and taken for granted and now the moderation must begin if just to win this thing) or the calm assurance of a first for women taking the the top leadership position on the planet.

Again there is in just this week a call and response ( and i got this idea from a recent post by

Kimberly Warner

whose creativity, imagination like so many others here sets the bar high) i felt in the first swim this summer in Superior and with the animals, my own child-less tribe now and on a beach where you can see the glacial striated granite of the Huron Islands 3 miles distant. Historically the Huron “Woman’s” island as that indigenous group, tribe, held females region as their vibrant conscience, authority.

Two consecutive days spent out there and it is within that submerged and prisitine underwater quiet sanctuary shaded with grades of blue and green and sand rock ground to tufted sand below over millennium one can feel the anxiety of it all shed like so many skins, bared to the bone now, shaped into a rock limp on the shore and perfect in its solidity of purpose.

Onward. Now we are all levitating. Ha.