After about three miles, the road goes from paved – crushed stone poured on fresh tar, affectionately known as “tarvee” roads around here – to gravel, but it doesn’t matter all that much. Crews do an adequate job keeping gravel roads level and durable, which is saying something. Winter is seldom gentle here, though always magnificent, and the occasional 50-year rain can heartlessly destroy roads, as it did early last year.
In this slice of the Midwest, you look skyward for hints of the future, good or bad. In one way or another, we all live within the weather’s margins.
I had picked a beautiful day for this spur-of-the-moment urge – a crusade of sorts – to reintroduce myself to the back roads of Western Michigan. It’s not that I had forgotten Michigan. I grew up on and near Lake Michigan, its beaches, and its sand dunes, but 40 years ago I ventured elsewhere for jobs, eventually working in six other states. I returned recently and moved into a small house near Round Lake in Mason County. Here cable remains a tedious analog and the telephone too sluggish for DSL. Cell phones and wireless Internet counter that shift back in time, for which I am daily grateful.
My reintroduction to the back roads does not tell you much. I know the roads. I know this part of Western Michigan fairly well. I spent way too much of my youth prodding and poking the woods, fields, and roads around here, an undaunted boy searching for a mystery to examine or malevolence to fathom. Pure of heart and anything but innocent, he feared only not knowing. That fear guided him the rest of his life.
Today, I am due no purity or innocence, but I cannot help feeling the woods and fields entrap the unpolished purity and knowledge I seek. With that indefinable goal, I drove into the Manistee National Forest no longer guided by fear. One cannot find what I’m after if you are afraid of it before you find it.
Money and no money
Detroit isn’t the only place suffering from unemployment. When the auto industry gets a cold, people all over Michigan start sneezing. You cannot drive 25 miles in this state without passing at least one company, large or small, supplying parts for cars and trucks.
As the auto industry rolls into the abyss, people in all corners of the state discover they were living paycheck to paycheck. That reality finds its way into every restaurant, resort, dry cleaners, hardware store, and hair salon. Grocers close. Gasoline stations turn to gray and rust as grass materializes from cracks in the concrete. Small town pharmacies become junk shops.
This part of Michigan, 250 miles northwest of Detroit, is best known for its almost pristine Lake Michigan beaches, fruit trees, a few dozen inland lakes, and forests. Those benefits do not obstruct financial collapse. As you drive around north of U.S. 10 and east of U.S. 31, you cannot help but see the deepening recession. Near our many lakes, every third cottage nears “shabbiness,” it’s homemade “for sale by owner” sign occasionally obscured by tall grass and weeds. It’s the same for residential homes sprinkled in lush fields along the road. An occasional house-in-progress has been halted with a roofed over basement. This basement “home” is almost a Michigan tradition of hunkering down and taking cover. Foliage covered piles of bull-dozed top soil and scrap wood concrete frames await better times. An increasing number of people offer campfire wood for $3 a bundle on roads used by people who gather their own wood in the backyard.
You can’t spit out here without hitting an inland lake or a taxidermist. Sometimes both. Michigan has more than 11,000 lakes, not including the Great Lakes, and nearly as many rivers and streams. A man becomes very fond of these lakes not because most states do not have them but because we are all drawn to clean water. Our ancestors crawled from it. We were born in it. Our DNA demands it. We cannot live without it. With a little snickering, Michigan natives watch big city tourists flounder in it.
Here, we also play in it. From a very young age this water philosophy becomes imbedded in our psyches. People around here own lots of boats – from canoes to Coho salmon fishing party boats – and talk about water activities so casually it sometimes takes you by surprise. Kayaks today are fashionable, too. Everybody swims, and nearly everyone fishes. You learn to bait a hook before you’re 7. Friday all-you-can-eat fish dinners serve deep-fried Great Lakes catches.
But the tourist business – based mainly on this water – has truly suffered, especially in these back-country areas. Though originally the summer gathering places of the city well-off, these areas have become vacation spots for the working families, people who bear most of the weight of our economic malaise. Thus, the small town café, which expanded five years ago, no longer opens everyday and has not hired help in months. The bait shop stays open only because the owner has no idea what else to do. The corner laundry closed two years ago. After all, some businesses pull the short straw sooner than others. The auto industry has been staggering for years.
People can endure the loss of a part-time job or reverting to an old wardrobe and driving the clunker for another year or so. What truly weigh on people are the vanished dreams. The kids may not go to college. The new house will not be. Doctor visits drop to only emergencies. The economy has robbed them of their visions and replaced them with delusions.
The anger
Change is in the air, and so are fear and anger. Most people around here are hanging on, but many already seek out people and ideas to blame. I hear it often and stay clear for fear of unleashing even more anger and frustration – theirs and mine. You can see it in their sneers and smell it in the clothing fatigue. An old farmer in the produce section of the local grocery told two businessmen global warming is “bullshit,” a story made up to scare people and make them manageable. The international conspirators don’t scare him, though, he said. He says he’s ready for them, and I’ll bet he is.
In the fast food “dining room,” a tall, long-haired late 50s man saw me reading Time magazine and sipping coffee. I had barely sat down. He raised his voice to cover the distance and informed me newspapers have gone into the toilet and news magazines will soon follow. It’s all part of the general demise of America, he told whoever would listen. Two others looked up at him and glanced at me, the target of his salvo. Keep all of us poorly informed, the man declared, and you can do anything in this country. I ignored him, as he started to tell someone passing him with a tray that he was about to eat Argentine beef. American beef is history.
The man’s assessment of newspapers and magazines hits the mark. I agreed with everything, but I did not tell him so. I know more about that than he’ll ever know.
I stopped for breakfast recently at what was then one of my favorite home-style restaurants. About 10 local men in their 50s had three tables end to end and talked brashly about their worries. I listened. They picked at their breakfast remains as one man loudly declared it was all the fault of “those damn niggers” in Washington.
I could not ignore this. I slowly turned around to put a face to the comment. Everyone saw me and grew quiet, as though I’d somehow splashed water over the table or would start a fight. I had his face for memory, and he has mine, too. His face remains familiar just in case it appears over my shoulder or in the grocery line.
I have not been back to that restaurant, and two friends asked why. The food is good and it’s a great location. Why punish the owner? He tolerates that kind of raucous hate and stupidity in the middle of his establishment, I explained. He’s one of them.
The anger comes from fear of change they do not understand and, so far, feels like a threat to their way of life. Right Wing politicians toss gasoline on this fire almost daily. This cultural transformation emerges as un-American, foreign in initiation and content, so it becomes easy to talk about on the street. We would not do this to ourselves, right? We should have seen it coming. By God, we will see it next time, if we survive this.
Much of it seems unfair. I like these people. They work hard. The Protestant Ethic surges through them. Over the years they have worked hard and steady and not gotten rich and endured some pretty harsh winters, but what is their reward? This experience challenges their trust. They have seldom trusted government – the institution constantly meddling in people’s lives – and now they are losing trust in almost everything else.
Survival
Increasingly, it is all about riding out the economy, identifying bogus political ideas, trusting in the Lord, and surviving everything else.
I visited a gun show some weeks ago to see if it is just like evil news media depict. The newest vehicle in visitors’ the parking lot was three or four years old. Most were pickups. A group of five stood smoking just outside the entrance doors and eyed those coming in and noting those leaving. They were friendly, though, suggesting I get a jacket. It was colder inside than out.
They were right. The air conditioning ruled. About 60 people strolled through the largest field of handguns, shotguns, rifles, and ammunition I have seen since the army discharged me. Much of the display was military or pseudo-military. It would only require a smile, some small talk, and a pocket full of cash to buy one or two rifles capable of taking out people from a mile or so.
The customers did not adorn fatigues or camouflage. They looked like people you might meet in the pharmacy. When you talked with them you did not conjure images of skin-heads and the final battle. But you could feel the uneasiness, their sense of an approaching unknown, the mystery that tomorrow always holds but this time may also be holding back its clues. They would not call it fear, but it has made them anxious. When civilization shakes violently, nothing good follows.
“I don’t know how it will happen or how it will start,” one gun shop owner told me. “But you can feel it coming.” These people will be ready, and in being ready, they likely will become part of the problem we all must face. Some of us can peek far enough over the approaching horizon to see some of what they see. It sends a chill through you.
My abode
I have been lucky enough to find a repossessed house the bank wanted off its hands. Isolated and in need of love and work, the house had languished long enough to drop thousands more in value.
Such a house – somewhere between shabby and fragile – requires a learning curve. Today I know how to put up drywall, fix some plumbing, seal concrete, find a septic tank, calk cracks, install 12X12 tiling, and be grateful for clean well water and a rebuilt pump to deliver it. A nifty 300-gallon propane tank rests out my kitchen window, and an ancient, wall-mounted antique gas furnace blasts me regularly with hot air.
Worse, I look forward to finding worn but recoverable book shelves, though I am likely to build my own. Boxes of books, remnants of a career of reporting, writing, professing, and thinking, remain in piles here and there. They will adorn my walls soon enough, I figure, and meanwhile they can hold the Earth in place until the snows come.
A pile of Sunday New York Times and Wall Street Journals also await my attention, as well as a few items a friend sent to me. I am likely the only guy in the neighborhood with such a reading list. An optimist at heart, I hope to find two or three people I can argue philosophy with over plenty of coffee. Only a strange group would welcome a man who can explain “M Theory” well enough that members could point out its flaws. Now that’s a discussion.
I do not see many people out here yet. A school bus passes by on the nearby tarvee road about 4 p.m. The UPS truck thunders down that road shortly after that but the driver seldom glances down my gravel road. Though I already suffer from too much reading, I might get big brown to come down my road if I found yet another book I need.
As it is, three or four cars going by on the gravel road constitutes traffic which may need monitoring. Any more than four vehicles will require a stop light. I then would have to petition Mason County and get my neighbors’ signatures, if I had neighbors.
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