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: Somewhere on Hat Creek, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLet's stop for the night with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and in the morning, after a cold swim in a mountain creek, just get our entire purpose laid out for us by a guy with a Pekingese and a nagging wife in his RV.  Sounds really easy, doesn't it?  To see where all this happens, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"'A man's never out of work if he's worth a damn.  It's just sometimes he doesn't get paid.  I've gone unpaid my share and I've pulled my share of pay.  But that's got nothing to do with working.  A man's work is doing what he's supposed to do, and that's why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn't the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man's work....Any man's true work is to get is boots on each morning.  Curiosity gets it done about as well as anything else.'"

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 12

Photo of Hat Creek in California along Highways 44 and 89. Photo by Steve Breth at MyOutdoorBuddy.com. Click on photo to go to site - photo on a spinner so if it doesn't appear, refresh page until it does.Somewhere on Hat Creek, California

A campsite along a cold rushing creek that cascades down from a volcanic mountain peak is a strange place to associate with work, but here we are.  I'll set up the scene.  LHM drove for hours, and finally pulled into this campground on Hat Creek north of Lassen (I have arbitrarily chosen Hat Creek Campground, which is just off the road and right along the stream).  In the morning, he wakes and refreshes himself in the frigid mountain water.  When he comes back to Ghost Dancing, he meets Bill, a Pekingese also known as White Fong, and Mr. Watkins, Bill's owner.  In Watkins' RV is his wife, who seems to watch over Watkins every moment.  LHM and Watkins embark on a discussion and Watkins asks LHM what he does for a living.  LHM replies he doesn't work, and Watkins responds with the quote above.  LHM, in Blue Highways, says that this meeting with these people changes the the journey, which is an astounding thing to say given his whole trip up to this point.

I have tried to put this conversation in context.  It is not LHM's longest conversation with other travelers and people that he meets and recounts in the book.  So, why does it change everything?  I think it has to do with the fact that since LHM arrived in California, he was trying to decide just exactly his journey was doing.  He started on the trip partially because of woman troubles, but by this point he had lost sight of the "cycles and circles."  He was convinced all was humbug.  And, he'd spent a good portion of the night trying to get over and then around Lassen following a map that seemed to lead him down roads to nowhere.  Then he meets The Watkins.  Mr. Watkins tells him that there is purpose in disappointment, but that good men get up and do the work that they are supposed to do regardless of the circumstances.  What drives them?  Curiosity.  After all, this trip was all about what was to become LHMs work.  He would write a book, and then more.  He would explore place and meaning in all of them.  And it became his job to be curious.  He began the trip partly out of curiosity about America.  In essence, Watkins laid LHMs entire purpose in front of him.

I often wish I had someone who could do that for me.  I've wished that in a moment of revelation, someone would lay it all out for me on a silver platter, such as why I've done what I've done and how it connects with what I want to do.  For example, I'm a political scientist with a PhD.  I don't, however, work in a political science department in a university, but instead I work in a medical school.  There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not what I've been trained to do.  I wanted to be a teacher and mold young minds eager to learn about the mysteries of politics.  Now I teach a class every so often in the evenings.  I thought I wanted to be a member of a political science department, but as I began to interview and saw what I might be getting into, such as department infighting, faculty meetings and expectations that take away from teaching, I began to have second thoughts.  So now, I'm torn.  Do I want to be in academia and deal with all of the extra stuff besides teaching, or keep a job as a staff person in a medical school and teach when I want and how I want?  I'm also extremely aware that, as I am writing this post, the economy is in a recession and may get worse.  Unemployment is at 9.2% and probably closer to 16% if you count people who work part time or gave up looking for work.  A job in this economy, any job, is a precious commodity.

My wife is dealing with similar issues.  She is a journalist but her chosen field is shrinking in opportunity.  Newspapers are merging and closing.  Internet journalism is rising, but making a living off the Web is difficult.  She is the kind of person that feels that a job is part of what defines you.  While she would like to work on her own projects, as one of two full-time reporters in at her paper she holds herself to a high level of responsibility and professionalism in keeping her paper at a high quality.  If the paper looks bad, she feels like she looks bad.  Part of the cost of her responsible nature is that she has not been able to explore, as much as she'd like, other opportunities to augment her journalism skills, such as audio, video and the wealth of opportunities on the internet.  To do that, she'd have to cut down her hours, and she's afraid to do that in this economy.

I have a friend who's an orchestra conductor but who's been out of work.  Unlike my wife and I, he KNOWS what he wants to do and is supposed to be doing.  However, the orchestra that he conducted, one that he built up from scratch and which was well-regarded, fell apart in a spasm of infighting and dissolved some years ago.  Now, he's an aging musician in a world where such jobs are extremely hard to come by.  Each day he sends out applications to this orchestra or that symphony.  Each day he faces more disappointment, and it eats at him.  He's battled depression.  Yet, I admire him because not only does he get up each day and do it all over again, but he also has recently put together a proposal to create a new orchestra despite the fact that money is tight and people are not giving to the arts as much as they used to give.

For my wife and I, the prospect of having a Watkins come up to us and lay it all out for us is very tempting.  We'd learn the goal, and we could move toward reaching it.  For my other friend, who knows the goal, the fact that he had it once and lost it, and that now it seems to be floating beyond his grasp, is akin to torture.  So what's best?  I suppose, that when I think about it, I'd rather be where I am.  I have a job, and since it's a public bureaucracy I have a feeling that losing it would take a herculean effort on my part.  My wife is at more risk than I am, but at least if the worst happens to her, one if us is still employed.  And I'd hate to be in my conductor friend's position.

What do other people do in these bad spots?  They go back to school.  They learn new skills.  They find ways to survive.  People are resilient.  But that doesn't mean that facing these downturns is easy.  From somebody in Watkins' position, retired and getting harassed by his wife, such revelations have come after a lifetime of ups and downs.  In retirement, he's in a good position.  He's earned the right to say such things.  And he's mostly right.  But for many of us, especially those who are scrabbling for jobs or trying to live on too little, it's hard to focus on what you want to do for happiness with what you need to do to survive in conditions of uncertainty.  It's easy to tell someone, like my conductor friend, that "a man's never out of work if he's worth a damn" when he is scrambling to get some kind of income on a daily basis.  We should always keep trying, and perhaps we should keep always try to keep smiling, but if you look closely, during times of hardship there's a lot of fear and worry behind those pearly whites.

Musical Interlude

The Godfather of Soul puts another spin on what happens when you don't have a job.  You don't eat.  Enjoy James Brown and Marva Whitney's rendition of You've Got to Have a Job (If You Don't Work, You Can't Eat).

If you want to know more about Hat Creek

There are a lot of articles on fly fishing in Hat Creek, which is evidently one of the premier fly fishing rivers in the United States.  I'll include one of the articles here:

BeTheFly.com: Hat Creek
Wikipedia: Hat Creek (stream)

Next up: Pit River Gorge, California

Blue Highways: Quincy, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapQuincy, California serves as a backdrop for William Least Heat-Moon's reverie on "humbug," on a Sunday where everyone is at church.  I take a look at my own relationship to to my church, and wonder if I could use a dose of "humbug."  To see where Quincy is located, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"Quincy was a clean mountain town, empty and quiet but for a church bell. It was Sunday with a vengeance. Sunday in the churches, yes, but also Sunday in the streets, alleys, fields, even in the heart of the pines. Sunday is the day bells toll, the day funny papers come out - and with good reason. While the citizens sat under arched ceilings and spoke with their various gods and saviors, I scuffled with humbug in the Laundromat."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 11

Photo of Quincy, California by Anne at City-Data.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Quincy, California

I still go to church.

I sometimes wonder why I go to church, but I drag myself out of bed every Sunday morning, get dressed, eat something really light, and drive with my wife down to the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center on the University of New Mexico campus.  We get there around 8:30 a.m. and participate in the choir practice.  Then we sing in the 9:30 mass.

A number of developments in the Catholic Church have really made me question my commitment to the institution.  I'm not really questioning my faith, which is personal.  However, I could easily stop going to Mass and walk away from the institutional Church and probably not miss it.  The Catholic Church and its leadership, some 50 years after Vatican II brought about liberalization within the Catholic Church and made it more accessible to its people, seems to be determined to revert back to a patriarchal hierarchy.  The Church has decided that women, who make up at least half its members, will not be allowed to hold many of its most meaningful positions.  It has decided to put emphasis on certain “sins,” i.e. abortion, gay marriage, and cohabitation, while putting other sins that are responsible for deaths - and I'm thinking especially of wars here - on the back burner.  It has sheltered pedophiles and made excuses about their actions and blamed the victims rather than dealing directly and meaningfully to the horrors it sheltered.  Rather than confronting its problems, it decides to dogmatically ban chalices not made of silver, and choreograph its members to bow at a appropriate times within the Mass.  All the while, it faces a shortage of men willing to fill its needs for priestly functions.  Perhaps worst of all, it has marginalized and drummed out, through silencing and excommunication, many of those who respectfully disagree and present alternative visions of what the Church could be.  My wife compares the churches actions to those in denial, like a man rearranging deck chairs on a sinking Titanic.  Yet, the Church's general attitude, especially to those that question, has been something on the order of “if you don’t like it, feel free to leave.”

And yet, I still go to church.  Maybe it’s because emotionally, and even in official Church documents, I know that MY church stands for something.  I capitalize "MY" because I still claim some little bit of ownership.  MY Church still is able to surprise me and say meaningful and relevant things.  People within it, beleaguered though they may be, still stand up for justice and empowerment of the poor.  It was because of MY Church that I was raised to believe in what is right and good.  I still know good people that have stayed within the Church and still do good works even though the Church seems to not care at best or even try to block them at worst.  The fact that they stay and continue to see and use the Church as a vehicle of hope instills that same sense of hope in me.

LHM seems almost derisive of such people who sit in buildings while bells ring, talking to their "Gods" or "saviors."  He seems to see it as little better than sitting in a Laundromat on a Sunday afternoon and coming to a clear pronouncement of “Humbug.”  Humbug on everything, including your damn religion.

I’m not sure I agree with him.  As I learn to center myself, to know myself better, I have realized that there are many vehicles toward this goal.  Psychotherapy, self-actualization, prayer and worship…they are all avenues to personal reflection on our lives, our relationships and the things that demonstrate both our malice and our love toward ourselves and others.

But sometimes, as I struggle with life’s big questions, and turn my gaze toward a Church that sometimes appears more interested in channeling my thoughts toward obedience rather than toward personal growth and a closer relationship to the spiritual side of the universe, I wish that I too could utter a word and be done with it.  I fantasize that one word could drop all the curtains concealing the truth and give me the freedom to explore without the expectations of an increasingly out-of-touch institution.  It might be too easy of a solution, but I sometimes wish that I could also just say “Humbug.”

Musical Interlude

If going to church was like this - well, I certainly would enjoy it a lot more and may even be able to do backflips down the aisle like Jake in The Blues Brothers.  Just not too early in the morning.  I often wake up on Sunday to gospel music on our local radio station and it can sometimes be too peppy for this decidedly not a morning person.  Enjoy James Brown as he tears up the pulpit!

If you want to know more about Quincy

Feather River College
High Sierra Music Festival
Plumas County Visitors Bureau
Plumas County News (newspaper)
Wikipedia: East Quincy
Wikipedia: Quincy

Next up: Keddie, California