UP into Michigan Part III

Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight

“So you found me hard to handle…well i’m easier to hold….so you like my spurs that jingle..And i never leave you cold…”— “I’m no Angel” Gregg Allman Band

For sure i’m no angel. Having only been recently returned to this view, mind-set if you will and for just 2 weeks now and not even unpacked of the myriad physical and social and psychological boxes of assorted clutter and chores in re-assimilation here i have found myself veering in and out of the myriad patterns of behaviour which have contradictorily tormented and blessed an existence which has ever been under the harsh glare of an alternating barrage of sanguine and more often harshly amplified self-critique. As far as falling back into old habits that isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as they are the ones that spread joy and hope within yourself as well as the other living creatures who stumble across your purview. Sometimes events unspool, liquid wraithe-ropes of motion like the 2 dogs chasing and unspooling right now in and out of the frame of the image above and at far edge of the forest through the grass brushed white from night chill. You or others might mow and tend the fields the events occur in but never really control them beyond calling them out by name, holding them close to your heart.

It was never an intention to have “UP into Michigan” resonate as the title of the chronicles which precede or follow and on several levels the meaning may be dispersed playfully i suppose. “UP” can be a stand in for the Upper Peninsula in general or at another level just being high “up” as in stoned, not the terrain. These are after all not the Rocky mountains and in fact just last weekend i guess it was Saturday the day of the party down the road deep in woods at a deer camp promising a spring release and new company as well as live music i had taken the dogs in morning on a jaunt towards the second highest peak in Michigan Mt. Calderwood which doesn’t even reach 2000 feet. As several of our forays down swamped two-tracks lately this ended in a deeper pool of water than i wanted to subject even the little 4x4 Tacoma to, durable and battle-scarred as she is. The ferns were poking up in the woods and always logging trails about and of course the possibility of a bear’s movement as i let the dogs run free clambering over the chewed architecture of beavers and relieved myself in that vast solitude. “You Pee” is certainly a thing up here and i thought ahead to the gathering ahead maybe some girls certainly a few people i had met, an Ojibwa fisherman who sold me fresh lake trout and white fish filets from his modest shop on M-highway outside Lanse, the electrician who worked through my old wiring last year and how i’d missed my guitars still unpacked in the bonus bump-out wood room amidst the scrambling re-entry, confusion. I laughed there in that solitude thinking of how my neighbor Dennis had told me about it and he lives alone at bottom of hill a veteran of all these winters and a joke Sherry told me back in Montpelier with her farm-girl accent exaggerated about how a stranger is invited to a party by a local. He says “There’s goinna be sum drinkin. Some sex! Fighting too.” and the innocent inquires ‘Who all is gonna be there?” The guy smiles slyly and replies “Awwwwww…just you and me!!”

The party unspooled perfectly with no undue acting out and another glimpse beyond the curtain into other’s reality and where a pile of beer cans accumulated in front of a small pit fire where under a tarp the best band around and a long-lived one filled the air with blues, rock around a banner in memorial of host’s wife who had passed away from cancer 20 years ago. I met him and others in shared passions mostly music and not a lot of work talk and former and current band members and even the woman who worked in the post office and recalled my strange name as i had just talked to her about putting in a mailbox. She and her brother had Finnish names and encased in layers of weathered insulated jackets offered me a beer, declining the gummies. Not so the 40-something bartender i had crushed on last summer down in the town getting a break for lunch from the re-modeling and having found a new by-pass skirting the maximum security prison hidden away in the woods a short-cut i use now almost daily and it skirts the shit-ponds of water treatment for village, offering a view of rolling hills beyond the head of the bay. She acknowledged wryly my interest of last summer her arms bared and tattoed all over down to partially revealed cleavage and later she was swaying in front of the band gently and solo and beckoned me out in fire glow but i demurred and new here not wanting to be making a scene in front of this new and thus far more than tolerant crew of onlookers. It was an olive branch of sorts that gesture i guess and not one i expect from say the fiery blue-eyed woman at the sandwich place but she had made clear before in some exchange next to a pick-up truck that there was an ex there she had been semi-obsessed with and i advised her to just have fun.

“Into Michigan” is a theme of exploration and wonder rather than “in” which suggests a more settled state of mind. On that note and veering into the weirdly sexualised way a mind can work in combination with poor eye-site all winter back in Florida i had been shocked if titillated by how a news program could have been named “Inside Jen Psaki” recalling an equally consternating title show “Touched by an Angel” until just a month ago i peered more closely at the heading and finally noticed the keyword “with” after “inside” Yeah phew and also i can be a damn dork even if i come by it honestly enough.

A year ago i could not have imagined this view of the field across the dirt road from my reclaimed roofed-over mobile home or the joyful company of the young domesticated animals i now share it with and gently goad with their energy to keep exploring, keep doing even if the body rebels, the spirit questions.

When i bought the place on auction a year before that i had no idea who owned the field and still have only a vague idea it may be a guy down on Gristmill Road who has it hayed several times a summer. I know that because a month after i moved in last July from the off-grid trailer on Lake Superior there was a low rumbling commotion breaking the resolute silence of a golden hued afternoon the hot sun having dried the swaying grass and a tractor was rolling up behind it in distance large round bales. The quiet here is usually only broken by the eery almost mystical call of the brown sandhill cranes at daybreak or muttering of hens spread out in front of a fanning tom turkey in evening. The deer, coyote move in silence seeping from the forest wraith-legged, silent as lovers slipping back under sheets wary not to wake partners

When i tore walls down last spring the electricity having been brought in the previous fall, the well powered up, ruptured waterlines repaired powering my life with more ease than the off-grid generator at the trailer perched on Lake Superior i commuted daily from and put in the sliding door and added flooring and a shelf for food i could for the first time envision the reality of a space where i could not only live comfortably and simply but take advantage of the natural world which had already been conjured from the streams where trout held shyly and fed aggressively and the people i felt an affinity for. To be accepted at a certain level of competence for being of a naturally independent, self-sustaining nature.

There have been two weeks of re-acclimating and Monday i finally met up with Kimmee from Marquette on the Huron beach overlooking the two islands, the tendril of the Keweenaw Peninsula extended ghostlike in distance out to its tip on far horizon and she was excited to see me and the dogs again and i to have her no-nonsense Wisconsin humor and common sense and anyways we had conversed over the winter enough not to be strangers.

We met a guy camping in the woods and happy to tell us what fish had been running and the sounds the cranes made in the morning also warning of the Apocalypse and the nest of a bald eagle he had detected far up in a pine tree on shoreline. We parted from his gentle company and poignant story to find it. And we did.

Then next day i started into the projects here which are undertaken unlike the writing with a certain procedural authority which is allows for creativity while more sure of steps along the way and less anxiety about deadlines and the winnowing away of bodily functions one paper cut at a time. The old cabin i’d cleaned out last year and put the new floor in and the casement screened habitat windows needed some roof repairs. I have been on it and the dogs lay in the sun patient, fore-bearing, hopeful.

The forest is awakening and i am careful to honor the other living creatures impinged on by my presence in this long abandoned place. Hope is truly a thing of fur and feathers.

Thanks for reading, following, subscribing. I do the same as much as i can. Peace. And yes, the mood music of life, always.