Blue Highways: Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

We're going to go Mediaeval and get Romantic in this post.  While William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) travels through Bad Axe and tries to locate Ivanhoe, Michigan but only finds a church, I will look a little more into the place's namesake and explore Romanticism in general.  It's going to be fun, really!  With a cartoon at the end.  Do an heroic quest for the map to locate Ivanhoe!

Book Quote

"....I was on state 142, just west of the farm town of Bad Axe, and looking for Ivanhoe.  Later when I was - apparently - in Ivanhoe, I had found only a church,..."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Google Earth screen capture of St. Columbkille Church and Rectory in Ivanhoe, Michigan.Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan

After moving through Bad Axe, LHM really makes an effort to find Ivanhoe, Michigan.  I surmise that his interest is based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott.  I don't know if Ivanhoe is named for the novel but I will spend the post on this possibility since the novel touches on some themes that I've already covered in previous posts.

So, what is Ivanhoe?  It was written by Scott and published around 1820 or thereabouts.  I've never read the book, but the author was trashed by one of my favorite writers.  More about that later.

Ivanhoe is a novel based in Romanticism and Mediaevalism.  Romanticism was in many ways a reaction against the ideals and progress of its time.  In Europe, first the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution led to many changes in society.  Rural lifestyles were supplanted by the growth of cities and the rise of new technology.  Social movements formed as well, upending the traditional class systems.  In the midst of this, Romantics looked inward, focused on emotion and feelings, believing in natural law (universal laws derived from nature rather than man-made law) and gazed longingly on a mediaeval past and a simpler, happier time.  In America, Romanticism helped birth some of our greatest literature - James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans is an example - where Native Americans were noble savages helpless to preserve themselves against the industrial and military might, and intrigues, of France and Britain in their attempts to conquer North America.  It also led to the Transcendental Movement associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Romanticism not only fueled literature but also art and music also and had a large effect on politics as well.  In Germany, its ideals not only inspired Richard Wagner's great operas, but also may have culminated in Nazi ideology which was based in large part on a hatred of industrialization and the idea that with enough "living room," Germans could be strong and mighty heroes that would return their country to its traditional pastoral and rural past.

Ivanhoe itself is a novel set in a time of change.  The Normans had conquered England, and the last remaining Saxon families are having to decide their allegiances.  Wilfred of Ivanhoe, son of a Saxon lord, pledges allegiance to the Norman king Richard I (the Lionhearted) and disrupts his father's plans to marry his ward, Lady Rowena, to another powerful Saxon lord and possible claimant to the throne.  In this backdrop of change the winners (Normans) are consolidating their claim to England and marching forward through history while the losers (Saxons) look back longingly and helplessly upon what they have lost.

I've never considered myself a Romantic, but I've struck similar tones at times throughout this blog, particularly about the potential harmful effects of technology.  I have wistfully looked back on times when people spent less time on their cell phones, IPods, IPads and Facebook and actually talked with each other.  I have fondly remembered when a busy signal meant that the person you were trying to reach would not be available for awhile.  I have recalled a time where cable television had only thirteen stations when I grew up.  At times, I have felt like a modern Ivanhoe, caught between a world of yesterday and today.  Like Ivanhoe, I have embraced the present (my Richard I is computers, media at my fingertips, music when and where I want) and yet yearned for the past I've lost (my Lady Rowena is the simpler life that I used to lead without all of these things).

I've already mentioned that one offshoot of the Romantic movement might be Nazism.  Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, lays another fault at the feet of Romanticism, particularly that espoused by Sir Walter Scott.  Twain writes that Sir Walter Scott:

sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish
forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;
with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,
and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any
other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now
outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;
but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.  Not so
forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.
There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth
century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter
Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical,
common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up
with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an
absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.
But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--
or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--
would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed,
and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is.
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major
or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it
was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.
For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also
reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and
contributions of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed
before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had
any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might,
perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition.  The Southerner of
the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War:
but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman.
The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's
influence than to that of any other thing or person.

Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
http://www.online-literature.com/twain/life_mississippi/47/

I'm not sure if it's fair of Twain, as much as I like him, to blame not only the character of the South before the Civil War, slavery, and the Civil War itself on Sir Walter Scott.  Perhaps he was making him the figurehead of the Romantic movement.  In that case, the progressive forces of industrialism and modernity, moving in the Union, won the war.

In fact, LHM is sort of on a Romantic quest in his trip around America and he too laments some of the things that are changing and that are lost.  I believe each one of us will always wrestle with those two sides of our Janus.  The forward looking, modern and ultimately hopeful sides of our characters will always fight, even a little, with the side of our character that looks back and wonders what we've left behind, and whether our progress has really been worth it.

Musical Interlude

Possibly the apex of music of the Romantics, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries is the beginning of the third act of Die Walküre, which is the second opera in his Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle.  You'll recognize the tune from Apocalypse Now.

Of course, Romanticism may have reached it's true apex a few years later, in Warner Brothers' short cartoon What's, Opera Doc!  "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!"

If you want to know more about Bad Axe and Ivanhoe

Bad Axe Chamber of Commerce
History of Bad Axe (YouTube Video)
Huron Daily Tribune (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Bad Axe
Wikipedia: Sheridan Township

Next up: Ubly and Port Huron, Michigan

Blue Highways: Harbor Beach, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

We stop in at the Crow's Nest in Harbor Beach for a beer with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), and watch people dance.  While LHM is a little dismissive of the band and the dancers, it leads me to exhort my male Littourati friends to learn to dance and dance more.  To see where Harbor Beach sits, waltz on over to the map.

Book Quote

"At the Crow's Nest we drank 'America's Only Fire-Brewed Beer,' a brew remarkably interchangeable with any other American beer....

"Two young women drinking Scotch and Coke sat and waited to dance.  The one with deep, dark eye sockets relentlessly worked a stick of chewing gum.  The other, wearing snakeskin knee boots and golden slacks that fit as if gilded to her, was slender and had the eyes of a lynx.  Boys in yellowed shirts took her to the dance floor one after another.  They were stumps.  Dancing out of her pelvis, she swirled around them like smoke, moving across the floor, inching back, sliding away.  The siren went off, and the strobes flashed her into a wispy possibility.  The boys were dying for her, but they got drunk and sat down.  She danced on alone against the amplified drums and moved through the shadows of other dancers.  Six college boys from Ann Arbor came in to drink Heinekens, and one had a few turns with the lynx, but only his shoulders and hands danced.  No one else even tried."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 16

Downtown Harbor Beach, Michigan. Photo hosted at CityData. Click on picture to go to host page.

Harbor Beach, Michigan

Of all the lessons that I've learned in life, there is one that I try to pass on to my younger male friends.  Needless to say, they never listen to me.  So I will throw it out to the Littourati and others in the netiverse...

Men, if you are interested in meeting a lot of women, learn to dance.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be two general laws of human behavior.  The first and almost inviolate law is that American men love The Three Stooges, and American women think they are stupid.  I can count on one hand the number of women that I've met over the years that are Three Stooges fans.  I'm not sure why this law seems so prevalent, but my suspicion is that the Stooges take men down to their monkey brains, whereas women are much more advanced and rarely access that area of the brain.  They are more likely to like the refined and intelligent slapstick of Laurel and Hardy or The Marx Brothers.  Men like them too, but are easily able to just enjoy the pleasure of stupid noises, fingers poking eyes and hammers hitting heads.  Lest you think I'm too much off the mark, then here's some proof for you.  Women are more analytical in approaching jokes, whereas men are not.

The second almost inviolate law, it seems, is that American men don't like to dance, and women do.

This is not a universal law, at least not as universal as The Stooges.  There are men who love to dance, and women who don't.  However, men who love to dance are usually seen as different in some way.  Either they have made dance into a career because of an innate talent, or if they truly, truly love to dance they risk being labeled as "less than a man" or possibly "gay."  Of course, my gay friends embrace the label, but they are adults who've embraced their images, as are the straight men who dance who don't care what people think. 

However, in one's formative years in junior high school or high school, learning anything more than the rudiments of movement to music is perceived as "not cool."  Most men don't know how to dance properly, and dancing is a surefire way to make you look bad.  I remember, before going to my first school dance, my mother asking me if I knew how to dance.  I did a few steps that I thought were interesting, and she laughed at me.  It was not a kindly laugh.  It was a laugh that said I was going to look stupid on the dance floor.  I didn't have many dance moves, and like most men, I couldn't really move certain parts of my body, particularly my hips.  I was tall and gangly and kind of looked like a spastic stork on the dance floor.  In fact, most of the guys who danced in junior high or high school dances I attended moved as little as possible, in order to not look bad.

Girls, on the other hand, just knew, innately, how to move their bodies.  They seemed to be able to disconnect their midsections from the rest of their bodies and make those midsections do things that amazed and astounded me, as well as kindling in me the fires of teenage desire.  Anyone who has seen an attractive and good belly dancer will know what I'm writing about.  Even to this day, I am often struck about how good most women look while dancing AND what joy they take in it, even as the guys they are with look stiff and uncomfortable.

Eventually I learned formal dancing.  In my thirties my wife and I started taking dance lessons.  Waltz, foxtrot, two-step, polka and swing.  I found that in the confines of the rules of formal dancing, I was good.  I could keep time and rhythm, I could guide my wife around the dance floor and it was me, with the combination of moves that I led, that made her look good and because she looked good, I looked good too.  After that, I began to get compliments from women who were slightly envious of my wife about our dancing.  These women wanted to be on the dance floor, but their husbands/boyfriends didn't dance.

In the past couple of years, I learned that you don't even have to formally know how to dance to impress women.  Your willingness to dance will simply suffice.  Some former high school classmates told my wife that at the dances, I always danced with them.  They felt they didn't get much attention from other guys, but I always asked them to dance.  I had forgotten all this, but they remembered it twenty-five years later.

Are you getting the picture, guys?

All you have to do is dance or be willing, and you will be in a much better position to make women notice you.  All that whining about how you can't meet anybody will be past history.  You'll meet lots of women.  You will be in demand because you dance.  Knowing how to actually dance will help you even further.  You may even meet your true love on the dance floor.

Some years ago, after my wife and I learned some formal dancing, we went out to dinner at what used to be a speakeasy and dance club in San Antonio.  The tables were arranged around an oval dance floor, and at one side was a large dais where a big band was set up.  People could get up and dance before, during and after dinner.

One thing we noticed that puzzled us was that there were many couples of mismatched age there - older women in their 60s to 80s dancing with younger men in their 20s.  It seemed too far-fetched to surmise that so many grandsons were taking their grandmothers out dancing.  The men were good, too.  Later, we learned that there was a thriving business where young men who could dance offered their services to older women who wanted a night of dancing.  Either they were now alone, or their husbands didn't want to go dancing.  So they hired young men to accompany them for the evening.

Guys, I don't expect you to learn to dance so you can take older women out dancing for money.  But, I write that story because again, it demonstrates that no matter what age, women love dancing.  You are depriving yourselves if you continue to live in dance ignorance.  If there's one thing I could change about my youth, it would be simply this: I would have learned to dance.  I probably would have had a lot more fun.

Of course, if you are a jerk, no amount of dancing knowledge will help you, besides perhaps fooling some women until they really get to know you.  But, if you have a decent personality and self-awareness and esteem, dancing could be formidable addition to the range of qualities that will make you attractive.

Think about it, men!  I'm just sayin'...

Musical Interlude

Just in case, guys, you need any more proof, James Brown is here to exhort you to Get Up Offa That Thing.  A great dancer, I don't think James had any trouble getting the ladies.  (Here's a secret for you, Littourati.  I love funk music, and whether out or in the privacy of my own home, funk will get me up offa my thing and I WILL dance to it.  Parliament, Funkadelic, James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, you name it.  It's just our little secret, though.)

If you want to know more about Harbor Beach

City of Harbor Beach
Harbor Beach Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Harbor Beach

Next up: Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan

Blue Highways: Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Are you rooted to your place, or are you rootless?  I have felt rootless, but now I have a desire to be rooted for awhile.  Americans, surprisingly, are a pretty rooted people overall.  So while William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) continues his rootless way, we'll pause for a moment and I'll reflect on rootlessness and the desire to settle.  To root yourself in where we are, plant yourself at the map.

Book Quote

"Away from the bay and lake, Thumbland was agricultural land: sugar beets, navy beans, silage; but on the bay from Caseville to Port Austin, the Thumb was an uninterrupted cluttering of vacation homes, tourist cabins, motels, and little businesses selling plastic lawn-ornament flamingoes and used tires cut into planters.  The houses and cabins and businesses pressed in tightly, and in the few places where beach delivered itself to the road were 'no trespassing' signs.

"Whoever called Americans a 'rootless' people never saw the west shore of the Thumb, where houses used eight weeks a year block off the lake every day of the year.  If Americans are truly rootless, why weren't a few lodges and hotels built to leave the shore undeveloped as the 'rooted' Europeans might do it?  As it is, the rootless family drives up from Ypsilanti to spend its allotted time cutting grass, painting the boathouse, and unplugging the septic tank."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Point Aux Barques Lighthouse in Port Austin, Michigan. Photo at Citypictures.org. Click on photo to go to host site.Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

If you've been following me a little, you know that the "rootlessness" concept that LHM references in his quote has been on my mind lately.

For most of my adult life, I think that I've been that stereotype of the rootless American.  I haven't necessarily been a constant nomad, never able to pitch my tent in one place for long before I have to move on.  Rather, I've settled down in one place for a period of years and then moved on.  After growing up in Fort Bragg, California, I lived in Milwaukee for nine years, San Antonio for five years, New Orleans for four years, and Albuquerque for seven years with about ten months in that Albuquerque stay in Lubbock.  Recently, my wife and I have been debating whether to stay in Albuquerque or whether our fortunes should lead us elsewhere.

And at this time, my instinct is telling me to stay, or at least find someplace where I can root myself.

I agree with LHM.  Americans, despite our stereotype driven by our early doctrine of Manifest Destiny and stoked by the images of rootless cowboys and wanderers in the Old West, are a pretty rooted people.  A USA Today report on American's geographic mobility in 2008, citing data from the Pew Research Center, showed that a majority of Americans stay close to home because of family ties.  56% of Americans have never lived outside their home state, and 37% of Americans stay in their home town.  And if I read the recent US Census data correctly, less than 12% of Americans moved away from their traditional home between 2000 and 2010.  Of those who moved, two-thirds stayed within the same county and 83% stayed in the same state.  Only three percent of those who moved chanced living abroad.

In other words, we are a pretty rooted people.

I believe part of the reason is the size of the United States.  In Europe, for example, one can travel in a matter of hours through very distinct countries with different cultures and customs.  Even the European Union experiment has not led to differences in national feelings - in many ways it has enhanced nationalism among ordinary people who take pride in their Germanness or Frenchness or Englishness.  Yet on a higher level, more Europeans, at least to me, appear to be willing to look at relocating to other countries - after all, you're only a train ride or a quick flight from home.  In the U.S., the distances are larger and more daunting, especially in the western half of the country.

Another reason might be economic.  The lure of jobs is powerful, though in the U.S. it doesn't necessarily trump family ties.  It seems to me that in times of economic hardship, Americans tend to rely on family and pull closer together, rather than moving apart.  I'm not sure about this completely, but that is my instinct.  I saw this when I lived in New Orleans.  People who lived there were very close to family and tended to stay there, or if they moved they didn't move for long.  Other factors also played into this, including the uniqueness of the city and its culture.  But family was a huge reason most New Orleanians didn't leave.  The devastation and disruption caused by Hurricane Katrina was incalculable, because so many people were forced to leave their families, friends and the city that they identified as home.

I think a third reason is Americans' attachment to private property.  Again, I'll use Europe as a comparison.  Europeans also have private property, but it seems that they aren't as attached to it as a concept as we are in the U.S.  With so many countries in Europe classified as social democracies, there is a much more expansive concept of community and shared public space.  In other words, there are less Europeans who own property, more who rent and are part of cooperative movements, and therefore less attachment to something that is rooted in one place.

Americans, on the other hand, are rooted precisely because we buy property and own it.  The American dream is to own a house and a little patch of land upon which it sits.  Thus, the ownership roots people into one place.  From there, if we are wealthy enough, we branch out and buy vacation homes or cottages, such as the types that LHM references along the western part of the Thumb of Michigan.  Unfortunately, that rootedness leads exactly to what he describes - houses sitting vacant most of the year except for those few weeks that people come to use it.  Also regrettable is the closing off of potential public space - access to beaches and the like. 

Our attachment to private property has its benefits, but it also has a lot of costs.  The only reason that we have not had to reckon with those costs very much as a society is that there is a lot of property available.  We can go and be our own little islands in the midst of the American cultural sea.  We can become rooted in a very familial way.  In Europe, where private property is at a premium, people have developed a different sense of community and there is a greater openness to mobility.  In poorer countries, where private property is a luxury available only to the very wealthy, we get back to rootedness - people stay with family because there is no other place to go.

For me, after years of wandering, the call to become more rooted has been stronger.  It's not that I want to cut myself off from exploration and understanding.  My years of wandering, however, have meant that my traditional home in California, while always "home," is not really my home anymore.  I haven't had a place that I could really feel is my home and place where I will stay for a while.  I feel like I need that as I move into the second half of life.  I just want a place of my own for a while.

Musical Interlude

I found this song by a group called Thrice.  It's called In Exile and the lyrics capture exactly the sense of rootlessness and wanting a place to find peace that I've been feeling.

If you want to know more about Caseville and Port Austin

Caseville Chamber of Commerce
City of Caseville
Huron Daily Tribune (Bad Axe newspaper covering Caseville and Port Austin)
Port Austin Chamber of Commerce
Village of Port Austin
Wikipedia: Caseville
Wikipedia: Port Austin

Next up: Harbor Beach, Michigan

Blue Highways: Quanicassee, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

I feel like carping on a few things in this post.  Okay, I'm really going to be carping on carp, while also reflecting on my lack of enthusiasm for fishing.  All of this, in context of Blue Highways, takes place near Quanicassee, Michigan.  Drop some bait on the map and see if you can hook Quanicassee's location.

Book Quote

"Near Quanicassee, canals draining the wet land to make farming possible flanked the highway.  In the ditches, mile after mile, violent flashes of polished bronze roiled the murky water.  I stopped to see what it was.  The hot, muddy banks frothed with the courtship of eighteen-inch carp.  Males, flicking Fu Man Chu mustaches, metallic scales glittering like fragments of mirrors, orange tails thrashing, did writhing belly rolls over females as they demonstrated the right of their milt to prevail."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Framework and Chimney. Photo of an abandoned house in Quanicassee, Michigan taken by The Gallopping Geezer and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host site.Quanicassee, Michigan

I was never much of a fisherman.  I remember taking a fishing pole and some fish eggs down to the river at some property we owned in Northern California and sitting and trying to get the fish to bite.  The fish were river trout, and they were small fish.  I remember that when I hooked them, pulling them out of the water was always interesting because they went from a greenish color in the water to gray and silver in the air.  They always seemed to be bigger in the air than in the water too.  I would watch them gasp for breath as I removed the hook and then I'd throw them back because rarely did we get a large trout in the river.

Lately I'm reminded how little interest I really had in fishing, which might seem strange since I have two uncles who were commercial fisherman, another uncle who was a sport fisherman, and a brother-in-law who likes to fish both ocean and fresh water.  I just never got into it, which is funny since I'm a relatively introverted person and fishing is a somewhat solitary pasttime.  It's an activity that encourages an inner-life in some people, and a zen-like calming solitude in others.  But it's never been my thing.

Which again is funny, because I love eating fish.  I think that there's nothing better than fresh fish, especially if the bones are removed and you can really enjoy the meat without picking needle-like bones out of your mouth.  I'm relatively picky about my fish, and my mother even more so.  For her, fish had to be so fresh it had to be almost wiggling on your plate.  Any fish that had a hint of fish taste for her was bad fish.  While I can get by with fish that has been flash frozen, for her that's an extreme no-no.

Nor did I ever get interested in other things about fish.  I never had an aquarium, and never learned much about the types of fish, fresh and saltwater, that live in the world.  I enjoyed looking at fish in aquariums, but never truly considered taking it up as a hobby.

Yet fish are a huge part of our existence.  Our evolution may mean that we are ultimately descended from fish-like creatures that crawled tentatively out onto the sand and ultimately adapted.  Fish have been a staple food source for eons of human diets.  Some of our most compelling stories have been about fish.  Jonah may have been swallowed by a "great fish" or whale depending on how one interprets the text.  Aphrodite and Eros, in escaping the terrible god Typhon, either turned into two fish and swam away or were saved by two fish whose images were immortalized in the constellation Pisces.  Jesus fed a multitude by multiplying loaves and fishes, and exhorted his apostles to be "fishers of men."  In an Indian story, Manu was instructed on how to save himself from the great flood by a fish.  Beautiful mermaids, half woman and half fish, are said to lure men to their watery doom. 

I knew that goldfish and koi, types of carp, are considered to be important symbols in Japanese and Chinese culture.  In Japanese legend the carp was the only fish strong enough to swim to the top of the waterfall where it then became a dragon.  Therefore, in Japanese culture, the carp symbolizes strength, bravery and going against the current as well as the benefits of attaining one's goal.  In Chinese and Japanese culture goldfish and koi, both members of the carp family, are used, either in the form of paintings or with their physical inclusion in environmental surroundings, as elements leading to what the Chinese consider good Feng Shui.  Koi represented in a home symbolizes the desire for more happiness, better success, prosperity, good fortune and energy.

Unfortunately, Asian carp in the United States are now a pest.  Originally imported by Southern farmers to clean their ponds, these invasive species have been multiplying and adversely affecting the environment.  They can be dangerous too.  One species of Asian carp, the silver carp, is easily frightened by boats and leaps high out of the water as they pass by.  It has been known to cause injuries to boaters.  Here's a montage of some people trying to bowhunt Asian Carp as they jump out of the water.  It can be pretty frightening, as you can see, because these flying projectiles can really hurt a person.

It's ironic that in the U.S., carp, a fish that is seen in Asia as lending balance and harmony to life, is such an agent of imbalance in our environment.  It is literally screwing up our national Feng Shui.  Furthermore, it is maintaining its symbolism for strength and meeting goals in the worst possible way.  How did this happen?

It happened like everything else that is besetting the embattled fish populations of our world.  We, humans, are the ones that put everything out of balance.  In the oceans, we are overfishing as sushi has become a must-have food in the United States and elsewhere.  That overfishing has led to entire salmon seasons along the West Coast of the United States to be severely restricted if not canceled some years.  Five of the eight species of tuna are feared to be in danger of extinction.  We have, sometimes with good intentions, introduced non-native species like Asian carp into rivers and streams in an attempt to accomplish some good, but the lack of natural enemies has let those populations explode and crowd out the native species. 

Somehow, humans need to discover that our actions affect the balance, the Feng Shui, of the world for better or for worse.  Is there a way that we can meet our goals and be strong, like the carp that scaled the waterfall and turned into a dragon, but also create balance and harmony, like the koi?

Musical Interlude

The musical interludes in this post are all about my sister Pauline.  She was a big fan of this first song, Fisherman's Blues by The Waterboys.

She is also a very close friend of Chi Cheng, the bassist of The Deftones who seriously injured with traumatic brain injury in a car accident.  Though I've never met Chi, my inclusion of this song, Street Carp, co-written by Chi, is dedicated to him and hopes that he will recover.

If you want to know more about Quanicassee

Wikipedia: Wisner Township

Next up: Caseville and Port Austin, Michigan

Blue Highways: Bay City, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Bay City zips by and is in the rear view mirror, but houses have been on my mind recently.  I'm going to reflect on why I don't own a house, why I possibly should, and what has been stopping me.  You're free to ramble through the rooms and hallways of my thoughts if you would like.  You can get an idea of where the real estate that Bay City sits upon is located by looking at the map.

Book Quote

"...past the Victorian houses in Bay City."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

A Victorian house in Bay City, Michigan. Photo by Yfat Yossifor and hosted at MLive.com. Click on photo to go to host site.Bay City, Michigan

I don't own a house.  I've never owned a house.  And at 48, sometimes I think I should grow out of being a man-child and actually buy one.

After all, it is a good time to buy a house.  The real-estate market is really bad right now.  Houses are going up for sale all around my neighborhood as people try to unload overvalued houses that are rapidly losing value.  It seems like homes put on sale are on the market for a long time, even as their signs advertise another price drop of a few thousand dollars.

All my life I have rented.  My first rental as an adult was in Milwaukee after I left volunteer service.  I rented a Taiwanese woman's apartment along Holton Street near the East Side.  She still considered it her apartment, and would often come in with no warning.  Everything in the apartment belonged to her - I was a simply place holder.  One day I came home to find another person had moved in.  May, the landlord, didn't tell me he was coming.  She just moved him in.  At other times she would leave her dog, a little Shih Tzu named Winston, for me to take care of with little warning.

I moved from there to a community house on the near the west side on 21st Street.  I lived with five other people with as varied backgrounds as you could imagine.  The house was an old coop house that had housed conscientious objectors who made napalm in the basement to burn their draft cards in the late 60s.  It had kept that counter-culture flavor, though by the time I lived there it housed a nun who had fallen on hard times, an older gentleman who was a link to the house's earlier counterculture glory, an artist, a student, a volunteer with the Brethren Volunteer Service, and a woman librarian in her 50s who was trying to find her next calling.  (Aside: I recently heard from the librarian, who lives in Albuquerque where I now reside and who runs an elder care business and loves it.  She was just as surprised to find me in Albuquerque as I was to hear from her.)

After that experience, I moved in with a friend and lived a few years in an upstairs apartment Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood.  It was a neighborhood on the cusp of the inner-city and was somewhat rough.  Gunshots were common, as were the glares of some of the people walking the street when I walked my dog.  Once a guy said as I walked past with Hannibal, whose fur was completely white, "...man, even your dog is white."  While walking in Washington Park one day, a few blocks over from my house, a little kid told me to hand over my dog.  I refused and as I walked away, he yelled out that he was going to shoot me.  I kept walking, and he disappeared.

After my wife and I married, we lived in an upstairs apartment in the Mahncke Park neighborhood of San Antonio.  When we moved to New Orleans, we paid rent to a couple who went to live in Guatemala and lived in Mid-City in a double shotgun, then after a year we moved to Fauborg St. John and lived in a downstairs apartment in what we considered the best neighborhood we've ever lived in.  Currently, we live in a faux adobe in a neighborhood we like, in the Southeast Heights of Albuquerque and close to a nice business district.

Why didn't we ever buy?  Our itinerant lifestyle kept us from buying.  We never knew if we were going to be in one place long enough to make it worth our while.  Perhaps if we'd been more savvy, we would have bought and then rented after we left.  But we didn't and therefore missed out on some great prices.  Now we are left hoping that perhaps the market will come back to us so that we can get a house in a good neighborhood that we like.

Now, I'm 48 and realize that I don't know the first thing about buying a house.  I don't know what to look for.  I grew up in a ranch-style house in California, which was laid out on one floor with a long hallway separating the master bedroom from the living room and kitchen.  In Albuquerque, houses range from Victorian-style houses to ranch houses, from faux adobes to actual adobes.  We know that we don't want to live in a suburban tract pre-fab style house, but would rather live within the city in a house that has some character.

And to tell you the truth, I have become somewhat lazy.  Owning a house means either being willing to pay for repairs oneself, or becoming handy enough to be a do-it-yourselfer.  One of the casualties of my dysfunctional childhood was that my father did not take time to teach me what he knew about carpentry and handyman-ness.  I would like to have those skills, and could probably learn, but having lived in rented places for pretty much all of my adult life, I like that I can call the landlord and get the plumbing fixed, or get a faulty electric outlet replaced.

Yet, there's some things that having a house would allow me to do.  It would allow my wife and I to define our own space in the way we want.  It would allow me to do projects.  I've always wanted a nice garden with all kinds of plants of both the edible and aesthetic variety.  The prospect of designing my own back yard to make it a place of refuge appeals to me very much.  I also feel that because I would be invested in my own house, I would spend more time there which might help me reach a goal of slowing my life down.

The exciting and scary thing about owning my own house, however, is the sense of rootedness I would gain.  My wife and I have been used to just packing up and leaving when the job gets tough or another opportunity presents itself.  However, for the first time in my life, I feel like I need a sense of being rooted to place, and a community to go with it.  It was Easter a couple of days ago, and as I watched homeowners in a local park have a neighborhood Easter egg hunt with their kids and then have a neighborhood soccer game, I realized I want something like that in my life.  However, I would sacrifice that sense of being able to move when and where I want.

Maybe it's time to buy a house.  I don't care if it's Victorian, adobe or whatever.  As long as I feel at home, happy and rooted, I think that at this point in my life, I will be satisfied.

Musical Interlude

Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  This is how I'd like to feel about having a house:

The Talking Heads with Once in a Lifetime.  This how I think I might feel after buying a house and being suddenly rooted to one place..."My God, how did I get here?!!!":

If you want to know more about Bay City

Bay Area Chamber of Commerce
Bay City Fireworks Festival
Bay City Times (newspaper)
Bay County Historical Society
City of Bay City
Wikipedia: Bay City

Next up: Quanicassee, Michigan